The Shocking Secret by Holly Roth

Author:Holly Roth [Roth, Holly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2018-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Manhattan Island, although preparing to steam, was still comparatively cool at seven-thirty in the morning.

The driver, who was just as happy by light of day but seemed even bigger, refused ten dollars, looking quite hurt, and put me down at the corner of Forty-Second Street and Second Avenue. He explained that if I walked two blocks to the west I would be back at the hotel I named—the one I had briefly stayed at when I landed.

And so, just a couple of days after that landing, I found myself again high above the streets of New York in one of the anonymous rooms of the enormous hotel. By eight-thirty I had done all the things I had not had time for—showered, shaved, sent shirts to be washed and suit to be pressed—and I was sitting in my room over an enormous breakfast.

I think my activity and bustle was a diversionary tactic, an attempt to avoid thinking, to feel physically organized and clear of clutter, because a next step was indicated and I had no least idea of what it should be.

But by eight-thirty breakfast was almost over and my excuses gone. I had to think.

I spent a few minutes looking moodily down on the tiny roofs of the cars below me and thinking fuzzily of the seriocomic street battle of the night before. But the fuzziness wouldn’t pass. I didn’t know who the participants were; I didn’t know what they had wanted. I had got clear. That would have to suffice for the minute.

My next step. What should I do now? Should I go to Binghamton? There was my map with its three crosses. I added the fourth. Binghamton, Natasha had said, was the last stop. What would I find in Binghamton? Another night club, another Mr. Dimitrios—a disappointed one—and what else? Natasha had absolved the night-club owners of any knowledge of what was going on, and I agreed with her.

So going to Binghamton seemed, on the face of it, profitless.

And then my next step arose and stared at me.

I had had no opportunity to follow up the cab driver’s statement that Natasha had stopped at the St. Regis Hotel. But now I was not only nearby, I had, in addition, the further knowledge, from Natasha, that a Stephanie Stetson was somehow involved.

The St. Regis, then. I folded my maps, put them in the bureau drawer, and left the room.

The St. Regis Hotel was perhaps a half-hour walk from my hotel—and a forty-minute cab drive. In the cab I discovered—in the brief time I dared take my eyes off the traffic—that in the business of changing suits I had left all my papers and identification in the bureau drawer. I had a billfold with me, so it didn’t really matter.

The chauffeur, as evidenced by the way in which he drove, was insane. The more clearly so since no amount of steeplechase driving could possibly hurdle the traffic or in any way shorten the time of the trip. I reached the St.

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