Читать книгу The Five-Grand Cross - Alan Ritner Anderson - Страница 4

Mae Cole could pay for her occupancy but she couldn’t afford it. In six weary years of waiting she had built up a nest egg she was now whittling down at a rate that distressed her. But she didn’t dare move to a cheaper hotel, where they might get to her in the dark of night. The Braircliff was too big and important to let a guest be kidnapped or given the third degree by a mob of hoodlums. Her room was the cheapest, an eight-dollar-a-day job on a floor reserved for women. She had discovered how to stretch her food dollar. The roof garden was strictly swank, but just for dinner and supper. Luncheons up there were excellent and cheap. The basement grill, called the Hunt Room, had a sliding scale of prices. Between five and six in the evening you could get a first-rate dinner at a modest cost. But at six and again at seven, new menus came on the floor and the seven o’clock prices were almost three times the five o’clock menu. The main dining room was for soft lights and sweet musk, served food from the grill kitchen at outrageous prices. Not that Mae Cole was ever hungry. But she had to eat.

After breakfast that Wednesday morning, Mae Cole went up to the lobby and sat in an armchair facing a narrow mirror moored to a square pillar. Pasty-face with the yellow teeth was alert but stupid, never realized that she watched him m the mirror. Mae Cole was a tall, lean, big-boned woman of thirty with brassy yellow hair and eyes so dark blue they were indigo when her face was in shadowy light. She looked undernourished and fragile. Actually she was tough, the physical toughness that comes from being raised on a farm powered by human sweat. Suspense built up over ten days of do-nothingness had her teeth on edge. Not too far away a man awaited her in a log cabin beside a babbling brook that hissed and bubbled over a maze of white, round rocks. He was her husband and he had not held her in his arms for six long years—you cannot embrace through the heavy wire screen that separates inmates from visitors at the state penitentiary.

Pasty-face’s reflection loomed in the mirror. He was chewing a toothpick with relish and, as always, his pale eyes centered on the back of Mae Cole’s yellow hair. He took out a racing form and studied it raptly. Mae relaxed. She had worked her hotel life into a pattern. For one hour after each meal she sat in the lobby. If her food had been drugged, they’d carry her up to the office of the hotel physician. She was taking no chances of keeling over in an elevator or in her room from where a husky chambermaid could carry her. They wanted her that bad. She sat watching Pasty-face. Money was an evil thing when the wrong people had it, she thought.