“Ever notice one particular friend of hers?” I described the joe in the oversized tux.
“I know ’m.” He pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger; Zingy’s quite a buster with that sign language; maybe he has Indian blood in him. “I hear he’s been hangin’ around heavy, I saw him there one mornin’ when I was double-dutying, and even then he was dipping into the clear broth of bourbon, but not in his pocket. Lets her put out with all the cash. But,” he held up a palm, traffic-cop style, “I never hear he’s making like love in bloom. You ask me, Mister V.—”
“I’m asking.”
“He’s not her joy friend; he’s strictly for biz. I wouldn’t know what the deal is, but—”
“But from here in, you’ll keep your ears fanned out. Swell. Do so.” I went upstairs to the head housekeeper’s office.
Ada Munster’s a sad-faced, stringy-haired, skinny old gal with an eighteen-carat heart and a full quota of savvy about human nature. She’d have to have the savvy, after being in charge of twelve hundred bedrooms for three hundred and sixty-five nights a year, ten years. Be surprised some of the peculiar things you learn about people, making up bedrooms.
“I didn’t want to bother you.” She hauled a pillow slip out of a paper laundry bag on a chair beside her desk. “It’s not enough, we have to salvage linens after all the lipstick smears and even tallow,” she pointed to a turquoise nylon spread with little dime-sized discs of wax on it, “but oil!”
I smelled. Light machine oil. “You said there was something else?”
She turned the slip over, pointed to fine, sandy hair-clippings about an eighth of an inch long, embedded in the percale. “She has black hair, Mister Vine. Her maid has black, too.”
“Thanks, Ada.” There’s no law against sleeping with a revolver under your pillow, though it puts a guest on the Watch List and keeps him there. But we do have rules about unregistered males in the beds of female guests. Those hairs were from a freshly barbered he. Miss Marino’s sandy-haired escort, down in the lobby, had been well-groomed. “I’ll check on it, Ada. Anything else?”