Murder a la Richelieu (American Queens of Crime Book 2) by Anita Blackmon

incredulously, but the inspector, who had turned the pin over, sighed.
    “Just so,” he said and handed the pin to me.
    “God love you!” breathed Stephen Lansing and followed the others from the room, once more his smiling and debonair self.
    Alone I stood for a long time, staring at the quaint piece of jewellery which the inspector had found clinging to my princess slip. It had been twenty-five years and ten months since I last saw the pin, almost half my life. A long, long time, I thought, my eyes blurred with tears. I knew then why the Adair girl from the first had tugged at my heart, why something about her had at times given me a spasm of pain.
    “Oh, Laurie, Laurie!” I whispered, remembering the way Kathleen had stared at James Reid in the elevator, as though she would, if she could, have stricken him dead at her feet.

8
    There was a pall over the Richelieu the next morning. People had a strained look about the eyes and a tendency to keep to themselves.
    No one showed an inclination to discuss the affair uppermost in all our thoughts, yet it was impossible to ignore it. To Sophie’s distress, the police had practically moved in upon us in a body. One was apt to run into a uniform in any of the corridors, to say nothing of certain strange individuals who wandered vaguely about, any one of whom might have been a new transient guest in the hotel but was more likely a plain-clothes man, snooping around to find out what he could.
    “This is going to ruin me,” cried Sophie tragically. “I’ve already had a dozen notices from people who intend to move out on the first.”
    I shrugged my shoulders. “After all, one doesn’t exactly court the thought of being murdered in one’s bed, to say nothing of not being able to step for fear of treading on the police force.”
    “The whole’s thing’s ridiculous!” stormed Sophie. “Can we help it if a private detective chooses to get himself put on the spot in our hotel? No doubt he had scores of enemies. From what I can discover, his reputation smelled to heaven. Not for a minute do I believe our regular guests are mixed up in it.”
    “According to the inspector...” I began.
    “Stuff and nonsense!” snorted Sophie. “All the inspector has to go on is that telegram from the agency, and they could have told him anything. How do we know one of Reid’s own crowd didn’t follow him down here and kill him? Personally,” she declared emphatically, “I think that unknown client business is a stall of the police.”
    And then she spoiled everything by adding in a strangled whisper, “It was you, wasn’t it, Adelaide, who hired that fellow to come to the Richelieu?” I stared at her and I imagine my lips curled.
    “No, Sophie,” I said, “it wasn’t I. But it has occurred to me that there are a number of things you must be anxious to know about your husband, including what he was doing slinking around the fourth floor shortly before eight last night.”
    “Adelaide!” protested Sophie in a horrified voice. “You can’t believe I’d set a private detective onto Cyril!”
    “That’s the worst of an affair like this,” I said wearily. “It turns everybody’s hand against everyone else.”
    “Yes,” said Sophie, both her chins quivering, “I suppose we’ll end up by suspecting everyone of something, if not murder.”
    The inspector, in spite of his interrupted night, was on hand bright and early that morning and closeted himself behind closed doors in the parlour. From there he operated after the manner of a spider in a web. That is to say, every so often he extended a long arm in the shape of one of the uniformed policemen and brought in another fly for dissection. Sometimes he detained his victim for only a few minutes, occasionally the unhappy captive was put through a more prolonged grilling, but in every instance the subject came out of the parlour looking as if he had been run through a vacuum cleaner.
    “It makes me sick,” cried Howard