Free Bellringer by J. Robert Janes Page A

Caroline Lacy’s and Becky Torrence’s steps, pausing as if for the one to catch up with the other, the forty-watt overhead blinking on and off, the hotel’s wiring still heavily overloaded. ‘Is it that Room 3–54’s door was left open for Mary-Lynn Allan’s return?’ he asked.
    Kohler shrugged. Louis tossed a disparaging hand at a question that should have been asked of the inmates had opportunity allowed, which it hadn’t.
    ‘ Ach, you don’t yet know what they’re like,’ confided Kohler. ‘Just wait until they get you between them!’
    From the top of the far stairs to the elevator’s gate and shaft was but a step or two, but where had her killer been waiting?
    The staircase to the attic? indicated Louis. It was just along the corridor and right at the far end of the wing. Step by step they went up it, silently cursing the single overhead light yet searching, too, for some sign. Anything.
    ‘ Ah, bon, ’ sighed the sûreté, having run a hand under the railing.
    Chewing gum. ‘Dried?’ whispered Kohler. ‘Don’t forget the cold and the dampness.’
    Which would have slowed the drying. ‘Spearmint, and fresh enough, though a week old if left by the killer.’
    With his pocketknife Hermann gently pried it off. ‘Our killer was nervous,’ he said. ‘The gum was to calm herself. Becky Torrence was the most nervous. Really keyed up. Terrified I’d find out something.’
    ‘Even though she stated she was out in the corridor with Caroline Lacy?’
    ‘At first she denied it but then Nora said she’d seen the two of them together.’
    ‘But only after that one had reached their floor.’
    Time. . . Had there been time for Becky to have done something else? ‘Becky did say she and Caroline heard the scream and then the bump.’
    ‘But Caroline Lacy, our second victim, can’t confirm this, can she?’
    ‘And Madame de Vernon, her guardian, could well have left her bed earlier and none of them in that room would have known.’
    They went on up the stairs to the attic only to find its door solidly locked and its rooms closed off for the duration. ‘But here we would have had a problem, Hermann, for it’s a pin tumbler that would, in a hurry, definitely need a key.’
    ‘But did our murderess have one?’
    ‘For the moment we’ll disregard your concluding the sex, but was the killer waiting on this attic staircase for Nora Arnarson and Mary-Lynn Allan to return from that séance in the Hôtel Grand?’
    And after the killing had the killer then departed in the confusion? Kohler knew this was what Louis was asking.
    ‘And was Mary-Lynn really the intended victim, Hermann? That, too, must be asked.’
    ‘Or Nora?’
    ‘Or Caroline Lacy, who claimed she was and has since been taken care of?’
    They went down the staircase to the ground floor and the cellars. Step-by-step, they patiently searched, but even the leavings of spent chewing gum were absent.
    ‘Everyone must need it, Louis, to seal up holes in their shoes and boots. It works, but only for so long.’
    And said like a former prisoner of war.
    The barracks, the luxury thirty-suite Hôtel Continental that had been built in 1899, was just to the other side of the casino, with an entrance on the avenue Bouloumié and not hard to find, given the gates to the camp and the barbed wire.
    Irritably having an after-dinner cigarette and fussing by the moment, Jundt sat stiffly alone at the head of an otherwise abandoned dining room. Towering pseudo–Gallo Roman columns, after the Emperor Caracalla, were behind him. The modernized update of Art Deco urns was incongruous, their two-metre Kentias looking downright thirsty.
    ‘Kohler, did I not tell you eighteen thirty hours?’
    Must everything be auf nazitisch with this one? ‘Colonel, investigating murder doesn’t run on meal times.’
    ‘Cooks do, and from now on you will damn well obey me.’
    Had he dreams of becoming another Caracalla? The roast pork was cold, the sauerkraut, too, and the