Death After Breakfast (13 page)

“Someone in the hotel that you wouldn’t have wanted here,” Atterbury suggested. He took some file cards out of his pocket. “You haven’t been over the new registrations for the last two mornings, Mr. Chambrun.”

I have mentioned this routine, the daily check on new guests with the special information on them, credit, habits, moral or immoral. And the cards initialed P.C., which meant Chambrun has special facts about them which he kept to himself. Atterbury suggested it could be one of those P.C. guests who didn’t want Chambrun to know he was in the hotel.

“And risk a kidnapping charge just to keep me out of sight while he was here?” Chambrun shook his head. “But let’s look at your cards, Atterbury.”

The cards Chambrun should have seen the morning of his disappearance came first Most of them were people with past records, people who had used the hotel, many of them many times before. There were the movie people. They had checked in the early afternoon of the day before. Their cards wouldn’t have appeared on Chambrun’s desk until the next morning. Chambrun went over the names. There were Janet Parker, Robert Randle, the two stars. The only unusual information on them was the letter G on Randle’s card which indicated certain sexual preferences. There were Clark Herman, Claude Duval, Jacques Bordeau, Chester Cole, and a dozen technicians and cameramen. Chambrun knew all the principals by sight and by reputation.

“Except Jacques Bordeau,” he said. “Who is he?”

“Duval’s secretary,” Atterbury said.

I remembered the mousy little man who had held an ashtray for Duval during my interview with the director. “Young fellow in his middle twenties,” I said. “Mr. Anonymous.”

They all had unlimited credit. It went with the movie company.

“I’d like to have a look at all these people I don’t know,” Chambrun said. “The technicians and cameramen, and this Jacques Bordeau.”

“Not possible,” Atterbury said. “Duval and Bordeau checked out about five o’clock this morning, after the filming in the Trapeze. I understand they have a filming on the coast with other actors besides the stars today. The rest of them have checked out this morning, or are in the process of checking out.”

Chambrun sat frowning at the cards. There was evidently nothing that caught his attention on those first cards or this morning’s batch. He knew who almost all of them were, and the information on the ones he didn’t know was satisfactory.

“There’s still the chance you were gotten out of here so they could change the times for the filming,” Jerry Dodd said. “Your orders were overridden, which is what they wanted.”

“I just can’t buy that,” Chambrun said. “Risk a kidnapping charge just to get a camera on the dance floor? Risk the chance that I might have tangled with my masked friend and brought about a murder—just to get a camera on the dance floor? It doesn’t add up, Jerry. Not to me.”

“It could,” I said, trying to be helpful, “have been just some sort of overdone practical joke. No bomb, really. Man in a ski mask is right out of television melodrama. He could have held you up with a toy gun. If you’d made a grab at him, he’d have torn off his mask and died laughing. Some crazy bastard who gets a kick out of making people look foolish.”

Chambrun gave me a bored look. “That’s nothing short of brilliant, Mark,” he said, “except for one fact. It wasn’t a toy gun. Take my word for it. I forgive you, though. Because my first thought, when that character appeared in the penthouse, was that it was some kind of joke. It was so far out I thought it couldn’t be real. But I know guns. That was a genuine .44. No risks were too great for it to be anything short of vital to someone that I be out of the hotel for a stretch of time.”

“It was so well prepared in advance,” Jerry Dodd said. “He had to get into your penthouse. He had to get into the wall safe. From the way you told it, that drugged pot of coffee in the New Jersey cottage had to have been prepared well in advance. Something that could knock you out for twenty-four hours could have killed you.”

“I’m a tough old bird,” Chambrun said. “Let’s talk about locks and safes.”

“He got into your penthouse, which involves a lock. He got into your safe, not too difficult according to the bomb squad guy. Let’s begin with the lock on the penthouse door. Hotel thieves know how to open locked doors. We face that problem all the time. He didn’t have to steal a passkey from the maid service. If he could open a safe without the combination, he could probably open the lock on the door.”

“A professional,” Chambrun said.

“No doubt about that,” Jerry said. “So having planted his clock in your safe, he probably stayed hidden in the penthouse, waiting for you to arrive, the sound of any manipulating of the door lock covered by the music you were playing on your stereo.”

“And if he stayed hidden in the penthouse, waiting for me, why did he wait a whole hour until I made my goodnight call to the switchboard before he showed himself? If he was hidden there, he must have known I was going to make that call, which would shut me off from the outside.”

“Knew your routines,” Jerry said.

“Who knows them but you, and Mark, and Ruysdale, and the girls on the switchboard?” Chambrun asked.

“It isn’t exactly a state secret,” Jerry said. “Somebody could have mentioned it casually, gossiped about it. People are always curious about you, your eccentricities.”

“I’m not so goddamned eccentric,” Chambrun said.

“Fact of the matter is, though, this guy had to be well prepared in advance. Nothing spur-of-the-moment about it. He has a cottage in New Jersey, advance preparation. He has a drugged pot of coffee, advanced preparation. He knew how to get the door open, knew there was a safe, knew it was old-fashioned and that he could open it. Knew your phone routines. All that took some research. Who was he? Who gave him the facts he needed? And what good did it do him simply to have you absent for thirty hours? They could have asked for a ransom and gotten it, so money wasn’t the object.”

“You haven’t even been up to the penthouse,” I said. “How do we know he didn’t steal something valuable? He needed time to get away with it.”

“He didn’t take anything with him—except me,” Chambrun said. “There’s nothing worth all that preparation and risk to steal except three paintings and a few curios. They were all in place, when we left. I don’t keep money there, I keep it in the bank!”

Ruysdale spoke for the first time. Chambrun’s return had restored her to her cool, efficient self.

“A professional of that caliber suggests a man who could be hired by someone else,” she said. “Maybe that’s what we should be thinking about, the employer not the employee.”

Chambrun gave her a rare smile. “Bless you, Ruysdale, for suggesting an obvious thing which I had overlooked,” he said.

Jerry Dodd had another concern. “How safe are you now?” he asked Chambrun.

“I believe quite safe if you think of the facts,” Chambrun said. “I was drugged and left alone in that Jersey cottage. No restraints on me; a working telephone there for me to use. I was free to go, free to spread any sort of alarms I chose. I was naturally concerned about the bomb which I thought was real. But whatever it was I wasn’t supposed to see or know about has happened. I am, obviously, no longer a threat to them. But I want to tell you, Jerry, I am goddamned curious! What went on here in those thirty hours? What the hell went on here?”

I went up to the penthouse with Chambrun. The three penthouses on the roof of the Beaumont are co-ops, owned by the tenants, but serviced by the hotel. One was Chambrun’s, one belonged to a delightful but slightly dotty old lady who looked like an old-time Helen Hokinson drawing, the third had been recently acquired by the new owners’ group. It was used for special guests, parties, perhaps an overnight stop for one of the owners. Nobody was in permanent residence. I had checked and found that on the night of Chambrun’s abduction that third penthouse had been occupied by a British industrialist named Jonathan Harkness. He had, in fact, been in residence for about a week and was still there. The facts on his registration card were impeccable: unlimited credit, a family man who had not brought his family with him, good connections with his own government and ours. He was a personal friend of Garrity’s, our board chairman.

Only two elevators go to the roof. One of them is reserved strictly for Chambrun. Old Mrs. Victoria Haven and whoever is in Penthouse Three use the other one. Chambrun’s elevator is self-service round the clock, the other is always run by an operator. I want to point out that while Chambrun’s elevator is private, there is nothing to prevent someone who wants to break the rules from using it, if they chose to risk the wrath of God.

Chambrun’s penthouse is the epitome of disorganized elegance. Nothing to steal but three paintings, he’d said, but those three paintings were a Gauguin, a Matisse, and a Degas, probably worth a million bucks in cold cash. Over the years there had been gifts from all sorts of celebrated people for whom Chambrun had done favors. You had the feeling that everything in the place was loved and had a special significance for Chambrun. An interior decorator might have been outraged, but a visitor was instantly entranced by the awareness of a lived-in luxury.

One thing is certain. A professional thief would have found plenty of things worth stealing. Which made it clear that the “professional” in whom we were interested was not a professional thief. After a brief look around Chambrun announced there was nothing whatever missing.

“Things like this,” he said, picking up a little silver snuffbox from a side table. “Given to me by a dethroned king, worth at least five thousand dollars. He could have slipped it in his pocket. He evidently wasn’t interested.”

Jerry Dodd has assured us that the lock on the door hadn’t been forced, but Chambrun examined it himself. Not a scratch, not a mark of any sort

There were the French doors leading out to Chambrun’s private roof garden. I don’t know when he found the time, but he enjoyed messing around with plants. Those French doors are not only fastened by conventional Yale locks, but there are iron bars inside that slide across and make them impenetrable. They were never left open or unlocked except when Chambrun went out to the garden. When he came back in they were relocked and barred. Routine from which he never varied.

“Did you go out to the roof when you came up from the Spartan Bar night before last?” I asked him.

“For a few minutes. It was a beautiful night.”

“He could have slipped in behind you without your noticing,” I said.

“And then, when I came back in and was there, he opened the safe and put his clock in it? No, Mark. That had to be done before I ever came upstairs. It would take a little time, even for an expert, to open that safe.”

“Unless he had the combination.”

“Only Ruysdale and I had the combination,” he said.

That was that.

If the kidnapper had come in earlier and hidden someplace, there was no sign of it.

“There are no hiding places that I didn’t cover, not looking for anything, you understand. I changed clothes. I was wearing a dinner jacket when I went up there. So I went into my clothes closet I went to the john, natural reasons. I went to the kitchen to make myself a drink. He couldn’t have hidden in the broom closet. It’s too small.”

“The spare bedroom?” I asked.

“It just happens that the air-conditioning unit is located in the spare bedroom’s closet,” he said. “Inconvenient, but there it is. It was a warm night. I went in there to turn it on. He wasn’t hiding here, Mark. As Jerry suggested, he must have come in the front door—a second time—any noise he made covered by the music I was playing. A Beethoven symphony.”

“He must have scouted out the territory before he made his move,” I said.

“So let’s see if Victoria Haven or Jonathan Harkness saw anything,” he said.

Victoria Haven is a kind of landmark at the Beaumont. She had bought the first co-op in the hotel nearly thirty years ago, just about the time Chambrun had taken over as manager. She broke all the rules, primarily the rule of keeping animals in the hotel. She had kept several generations of obnoxious little Japanese spaniels in her penthouse, and it would have taken the National Guard to get rid of any of them. Chambrun, who was ironfisted about rules, chose to go along with the old girl’s foibles. She must be eighty now, I thought, which made her twenty-odd years older than Chambrun. A rumor that they had been lovers in the old days seemed unlikely. The staff was always trying to involve Chambrun in unlikely love affairs. Betsy Ruysdale was the only real possibility I was sure. Perhaps Victoria Haven reminded him of another time, another world that he remembered with pleasure, which would explain his relaxing of the rules in her case.

We walked through Chambrun’s garden and across the roof to Penthouse Two. Victoria Haven opened the door almost before we knocked. I suspected she’d been looking out the window.

“Well, Pierre, it’s about time,” she said.

She is something to look at. Tall, straight as a ramrod, her hair, piled on top of her head, a gaudy red that God never invented. She wore a plain black dress, but she was decorated with enough rings and bracelets and necklaces to start a pawnshop.

“Don’t tell me there’s another bomb threat?” she said. Her voice was husky from a little too much liquor and a great many too many cigarettes. She was smoking one in a long holder now. “I will not go down to that goddamned gymnasium again. I’d rather be blown sky high!”

“No bomb threat, Victoria,” Chambrun said. “May we come in? You know Mark Haskell.”

She looked at me, her eyes as bright as the diamonds she was wearing. “I know him,” she said. “How is that beautiful blond girl friend of yours, young man? I hate her, you know.”

“Hate Shirley?”

“She’s so damned beautiful,” the old girl said. “At my age there’s no way to compete. Well, don’t just stand there. Come in.”

I had never been in her penthouse before, and I had never seen anything like the room we entered. It looked like a glorified junk shop. There was twice as much furniture as the room could properly hold, most of it Victorian, as far as I could see. Heavy red velvet curtains blotted out the windows. Bookcases overflowed into stacks and piles of volumes on the floor. Sunday papers from the last six months were scattered about. Memories of the Collier brothers flashed into my mind, except that I saw at once there wasn’t a speck of dust in the place. What appeared to be disorder was obviously order to Victoria Haven. I suspected if asked for it she could put her hand on the editorial page of the
Times
for last Christmas.