“A week’s vacation pay’ll come with it, if it does.” I went out of the air-conditioning into the good smells of New York on a summer night — exhaust fumes, flowers in the Park, pigeons, the dejected horses between the shafts of the Victorias across the square.
I asked Ike, our admiral at the Fifth Avenue entrance, about the cream-colored suit. He couldn’t remember anything like that.
When I got my car rolling in the East Side express highway, I batted the whole business around my brain cells without getting any flash of intuitive brilliance.
Tildy Millett might have run out on Hacklin because she was afraid of being murdered by Al Gowriss or someone the killer hired. But Lanerd wasn’t in any danger from that source. Or was he?
Right down at the bottom of it, the thing that didn’t ring right to me was Roffis’s being knifed while Tildy Millett got away scot-free. Yet if Auguste had told it straight, the killer must have been in the suite with her immediately after murdering her guard. Only the maid, Nikky, would have been with her. But why, after having stuck his neck into a noose, hadn’t the man in the cream-colored suit used the steak knife on Tildy, to keep her from testifying regarding Johnny the Grocer’s death?
I was still chewing on that one when I slid over the Whitestone Bridge, along the Parkway bordering the Sound. By the time I slewed off the Shore Drive, between the huge stone gates of Chateau Lanerd, I was no closer to a satisfactory conclusion.
Dow Lanerd had himself fixed up right, out there on Manhasset Bay. A hundred acres, maybe more. All lawns and shrubbery, rose gardens and stables, little groves of blue spruce and winding paths. The house itself, looming against the stars and the sprinkle of moving lights out on the bay, seemed half as big as the hotel.
It was Norman French, massive gray stone with great wide doorways and tall, arch-topped windows. Lamplight showed through a dozen of the first-floor windows.
I parked, marched up broad stone steps, pulled at a knocker. A butler who gave the impression he didn’t care to have dealings with anyone below the rank of viscount said, “Mister Lanerd is not at home, sir. Your name, sir?”
“Gilbert Vine. Mrs. Lanerd in?”