Fifteen steps farther along was the door to the suite’s east bedroom. I got to it, quick and quiet. While I was unlocking it, I called to Elsie, loud enough to cover the click of the latch, “Phone Mister Duman, ask him to hustle up.”
I went in, catfoot. The twins were made up. The spreads weren’t mussed. No men’s clothes around. No male brushes or such on the bureau. Only a trace of parfum de panatella. From a ten-cent cigar, if I’m any judge.
The door to the long living-room was half open. Through it I could see the back of a white linen suit. The man was close to the door of the bedroom on my side. I was only ten feet away when I saw him. His left elbow leaned on the bulgy-eyed television set all those double-letter suites are equipped with. Shielded by the cabinet, his right hand hung down so the automatic he held would be hidden from anyone coming in from the corridor to the living-room.
All I could see was that narrow-shouldered but nicely tailored back, the thick and well-tanned neck. And the gun.
He was concentrating on that door so it was no trick to come up behind, grab his wrist before he heard me.
He didn’t battle. Just used one explosive obscenity, then kept still, vocally and otherwise.
While I was prying the gun out of his paw I started to make a crack about house rules forbidding the brandishing of weapons. But when he twisted around so I got a look at his face — I didn’t bother to finish. I was more astonished than he’d been.
He didn’t recognize me; least he didn’t know who I was; he might have noticed me around the lobby. But the tenseness didn’t go out of those smooth, freshly barbered college-boy features which contrasted so handsomely with the curly white hair. That hair was by way of being his trade-mark, so thick and tight it might have been a wig carved out of marble. It really did have the polished look of marble.
I’d have known him, of course, even if he hadn’t been a spectacularly splurgish patron of the Plaza Royale. Even with his ten-dollar cravat a bit on the bias and his brown-agate eyes squinting with alarm, he could have marched smack off the front cover of that weekly which had run his portrait in color, week or so ago. All he needed was that background the mag had used as a frame for his picture — the horn of plenty spewing out a cornucopian flood of slick convertibles, summer cottages, shiny refrigerators, outboard motors, movie projectors, washing machines, all showered round with coins of the realm. Yair, sure. Dow Lanerd.
I laid the automatic on the coffee table beside a silver bowl with yellow lilies floating on water. “Maid reported a man in this suite, Mister Lanerd.” I knew the sandy hair-clippings hadn’t come from his cranium. He wouldn’t have been smoking cheap stogies in this social-register atmosphere.