It was still moist; a thin streak of blood, glistening like a fresh scratch on the back of my left hand. It was no scratch. I hadn’t cut myself.
“There’s nothing sinister about it,” Lanerd was saying. “It’s all in a spirit of good, clean fun.”
He switched on the video set.
Chapter three:
Missing steak knife
My gang at those Friday night Dealer’s Choice Association gatherings will testify I’m far from psychic. But any dummy in a Fifth Avenue window could have sensed something nokay in that suite.
The blood — and the gun — were plain implications. And no security chief can afford violence in his hotel, however much he may admire it from the ringside at Madison Square. Naturally the front office doesn’t expect me to be wise to all the details every time something illegal or immoral goes on behind one of our twelve hundred locked doors. But the management does have a quaint method of insuring against too frequent trouble; unless the head man of the protection staff is sharp enough to catch the warning of those offbeat incidents which break into the regular rhythm of routine, he hunts for another job, but sudden. Hotels, like cars, ought to run smooth and quiet.
The indications of trouble in Suite 21MM were as plain as red blinkers at a grade crossing. Still, could be the troubles weren’t any of my business. I had to bear that in mind; the management being so skittish about being sued by annoyed guests.
Natural reluctance to run into people while wearing an eye patch might have kept a good-looking gal more or less hidden in her rooms for five days. She could have private reasons for two-ing around with a hard-eyed customer in a misfit dinner jacket. There could even be plausible justification for a guy sleeping in a gal’s hotel suite when they weren’t registered as man and wife.
But the blood on my hand was a tough one to explain. I had to find out about that. Even at the risk of offending the big billboard-and-broadcast man.