Candy opened the door, and the third bellman wheeled in a laden cart. She looked frantically at Stubb, who waved a reassuring hand.
“Four dinners,” the bellman said. “I’ll put them on the table for you. Fish. Pie. Club. Steak. Fruit. Two coffees. Beer. Scotch. Glass of wine. That everything?”
“I think so,” Stubb said.
“Lady will have to sign for it,” the bellman said. “Unless you’re paying. Say, is she all right?”
The witch relaxed and nodded. “I am fine. I will sign. May I put a tip for you on the bill when I sign it?”
“Yes, Ma‘am. That will be fine, Ma’am. Thank you very much.”
She took the check and his pen. “Your friend—do you know whom I mean? He has not returned with my seventy dollars. If you should see him, will you ask him to do so? I am somewhat inconvenienced.”
“I certainly will, Ma’am. Joe ought to have got back to you with that quite a while ago. I’ll tell him.”
Stubb said, “Maybe he’s off already.”
The bellman shook his head as the witch handed back the check. “He’ll be on the rest of the night. We don’t get off till seven.” He grinned. “That’s very generous of you, Ma’am. Thank you.”
“Think nothing of it.”
“I do think something of it, Ma‘am, and I appreciate what you gave when we carried your bags up, too. Ma’am—maybe I shouldn’t say it, but I know something, something confidential, that maybe I ought to tell you about.”
“Then tell me,” the witch said. She had speared a section of mandarin orange, and she punctuated the words by thrusting it into her mouth.
“It’s confidential.” The third bellman looked around at Stubb, Sandy, Candy, and Barnes. “Maybe you could step into the hall with me for just a moment?”
Barnes said, “You don’t have to do that, Madame Serpentina. We’ll go outside if you want us to.”
Stubb’s smile was wide and nearly genuine. “What is this? Aren’t we all friends here? Listen, if the lady’s in some sort of little embarrassment, I want to know about it so we can help her out.”
“I’m not sure it is her,” the bellman admitted. “I just thought she ought to be told.”
“Enough of mysteries,” the witch said. “I wish to eat my fruit and drink my wine in peace—or at least, in as much as I may have. If you are not even certain I am concerned, out with it. Or let it be, and out with you.”
“Maybe it’s another one of you,” the bellman said. “Or all of you. But you’ve been staked out by the authorities.”
Prophecy … And A Poll
“What the hell,” Stubb said. “What the hell?”
He was the only one who spoke.
“Listen, buddy,” he said to the bellman, “do you mean the house dick? You can see for yourself that there’s nothing going on here. This lady,” he gestured toward Sandy Duck, “came up to interview your guest for her magazine, and the rest of us came to talk business with her over a late snack. What the hell’s wrong with that?”
“Not Mr. Kramer,” the bellman said. “The real authorities.” He did not say that he wished he could say Scotland Yard, but he did. “I told him I wanted to see his credentials, and he showed me his badge. It was the real thing.”
Candy looked toward Stubb. “Jim … ?”
“Yeah. This sounds like my department. Where is he?”
“Three doors down. Seven seventy-one. It’s an empty room.”
“He didn’t rent it?”
The bellman shook his head. “When he opened the door to talk, I saw he’d taped the latch, so he could go out without the door’s locking behind him. If he’d paid at the desk, he’d have a key.”
“Right. He stopped you while you were coming with the cart?”
The bellman nodded.
“And what’d he say?”
“He asked where I was taking it, and I told him. Then he said when I got finished to come back and knock on his door and tell him what I saw in here. He said to keep my eyes open. That’s when I told him I wanted to look at his credentials and he showed me his badge.”
“You’re going to need an excuse for staying in here so long. What do you plan to tell him?”
The bellman thought for a moment. “I could say the lady was foreign, and she asked me a lot of stuff about how to get around the city—where things were.”
“Then he’d say what about the other people—he must have seen all the dishes on your cart—why didn’t she ask them? And he’ll sure as hell want to know where she wanted to go. No, you tell him that we had a bunch of papers spread all over the table. You couldn’t see what they were about. We made you wait until we had shuffled them around some before we put them away so you could serve the food. We didn’t say anything particular while we were doing it. Just, ‘Here, you take this,’ and ‘Are these in order?’ Stuff like that. You got it?”
