The maid rattled off something in Arabic to Tildy. I couldn’t understand it. But I could tell it wasn’t a testimony to my sweet disposition.
“Maybe Miss Narian ran into the living-room, too. Anyhow, Roffis dashed in, was stabbed as he came through the door to the bedroom. Likely the murderer thought he was knifing Lanerd. When he found it was only the guard he’d killed, he slammed the connecting door shut, that’s how blood-prints got on the bedroom door, rifled the guard’s pockets. Took his room key which also unlocked the closets, dragged the body to the closet, threw it in. Went out through the same door by which he’d come in, bumping into Auguste as he did and getting blood on Auguste’s sleeve.
Yaker groaned, “No! No, no!” Then he caught himself. “I don’t remember a thing — but I know I could never have done anything like that!”
I tried to sneer. It’s not my forte, but I did my best. “One door to the Lanerd suite would have been left unlocked, of course, so it was no trouble to get back in there after Auguste had returned to the Millett living-room for the last of the serving-tables. The steak knife went in towel hamper, the blood was scrubbed off guilty hands, the jacket exchanged for the killer’s own coat. Then it was merely a matter of waiting, probably right there in the bathroom, for Dow Lanerd to return to his own suite — take his gun from him, kill him with it, make it look like—”
“Frame-up!” Yaker shouted. “You’re all—”
Schneider commanded, “Shaddup, all ’f yuh!”
“Ask Miss Millett.” I held out a hand to her for confirmation. “She described the man who killed Herb Roffis. Big, tall, husky, florid face—”
“By God!” Yaker howled, “I see it all now! You’re all in it together to get me. I won’t stand—”
Schneider grabbed his elbows from behind, pinned him.
“The clincher,” I had to raise my voice over the scuffling, “was when he gave a key to a kind of glorified madam, so she could send a couple of her hot-pant cuties up to his room. He gave her the wrong key by mistake. The key to 21MM!”