Death After Breakfast (14 page)

An asthmatic growl sounded from behind a whatnot loaded with Staffordshire dogs. A Japanese spaniel, luxuriating on a bright scarlet satin cushion, gave me an unfriendly leer.

“You have to get to know Toto before he will welcome you,” Mrs. Haven said. “I was having my midday martini, Pierre. A little early perhaps, but I needed one after my experience in that gymnasium, with all those dumbbells. I’m not talking about people, but those ghastly exercise gadgets. Will you join me?”

Chambrun never drinks in the middle of the day, but, to my surprise, he said he would. I wasn’t sorry. I could stand a drink about then.

She made martinis very expertly, and then, with a fresh cigarette in her holder, she settled comfortably in an over-stuffed armchair.

“Well, Pierre, it’s about time somebody made something clear to me. Obviously they didn’t expect to find a bomb here. They didn’t look. I wouldn’t have let them, by the way. It would have taken a month to overcome the disorder they’d have created.”

He smiled at her, like an indulgent parent smiles at a precocious child. A strange relationship, but obviously a warm one.

“We were warned that there was a bomb in the wall safe in my apartment,” he told her. “It turned out to be a harmless alarm clock, attached to nothing. We believe it was planted there night before last.” He didn’t say anything about masked men, or kidnappings, or country cottages.

“Some kind of practical joke?” the old woman asked.

“Possibly, but we’d like to find the joker,” Chambrun said.

“So would I! A full hour in that gymnasium, I was. Poor Toto, he loathed it.”

Poor Toto, at the mention of his name, made an angry gargling sound.

“We’re not sure how the joker got into my penthouse,” Chambrun said. “I came to see you because I hoped you might have seen someone on the roof who had no business there.”

“No one,” she said promptly. “Of course, there was Tim Gulliver. He looks after my garden in his off hours.”

Tim Gulliver had been a maintenance man at the Beaumont for twenty years. A man to be trusted.

“I’m thinking more of after dark,” Chambrun said.

Victoria Haven took a deep drag on her cigarette and promptly had a coughing fit. She used her martini, not the first, to cure it.

“I don’t go peering around on the roof after dark with a flashlight,” she said. “But night before last? There was one odd thing. At least I thought it was odd.”

“Yes?” he said patiently.

“Lights in your penthouse at about nine fifteen. Stayed on for a good half hour.”

“What’s odd about that?” he asked.

“Oh Pierre, my dear Pierre! I’ve been living with your habits for a good thirty years. I know them as well as if—as if I were married to you!” She whooped with laughter. “You always dine in your office at nine o’clock. I don’t think you’ve varied from that procedure five times since I’ve lived here. Excepting, of course, the winter of 1962 when you had pneumonia. So, night before last, I wondered idly what had changed your routine.”

“That could be very helpful, Victoria,” Chambrun said, “because I was having dinner in my Office at nine o’clock. Could it have been the maids, do you think, turning down my bed?”

“The maids always get to you at ten o’clock,” Mrs. Haven said. “They came that night, about fifteen minutes after those first lights went out. By the way, when are you going to invite me to dinner again? I’ve been dreaming of mussels in that special sauce the chef makes.”

“You could order them for yourself, Victoria.”

She gave him a flirtatious little smile. “That would not be the same as having them with you, old friend.”

“Soon,” he said.

We got up to go. The old woman had one last piece of information. “You asked about prowlers on the roof after dark, Pierre. I did not see anyone, but I can assure you there was no one.”

“How do you know?”

“Toto cannot abide strangers. If he’d heard anything he would have raised holy hell!”

Toto seemed to confirm this by giving us an angry snarl as we walked past his satin cushion.

We hesitated outside Mrs. Haven’s penthouse. It was a warm hazy day, a faint cloud of smog hanging over the city’s towers.

“This was once a safe place to live,” Chambrun said. “It has changed, Mark. There is violence at its core these days. Poverty turns people into animals.”

I was more concerned with Mrs. Haven’s information. “You think she was accurate?” I asked. “That would seem to place our man in your place shortly after nine.”

“She is always accurate,” he said. He smiled. “She has been keeping tabs on me for years.”

We walked across the tar and gravel roof to the garden door of Penthouse Three. Jonathan Harkness, the Britisher, was there, enjoying a late breakfast or brunch served to him by room service. He was gracious, invited us in, offered us coffee, or a drink.

Chambrun told him we’d just had martinis with Mrs. Haven.

“Which is my quota at lunchtime—perhaps for the next year,” he said. “I have never been able to acquire the martinis-for-lunch habit. Perhaps a good thing for a man who has work to do.”

Harkness was a tall, slender, well-muscled man, the classic picture of the British soldier-officer, down to the little tan toothbrush mustache. About fifty, I thought. The inevitable British pipe rested on the table beside him, ready to go.

“In my life,” he said, “the martini at lunch is the prologue to a long nap. What can I do for you, Mr. Chambrun?”

“First, let me apologize for the inconvenience of this morning,” Chambrun said.

“The bomb? I was happy to hear it was a false alarm.”

“But it’s my reason for being here,” Chambrun said. He told Harkness the same story he’d given Mrs. Haven, leaving out his personal adventure. He added Mrs. Haven’s observation about the lights in his penthouse shortly after nine. “Of course, if you weren’t here that evening, Mr. Harkness, you won’t be able to help me.”

Harkness picked up his pipe and lit it. I thought there were faint lines of strain at the corner of his eyes.

“You do know that I was here,” he said.

“How would I know?”

“I suppose room service told you that I had dinner served here that night.”

“I didn’t ask,” Chambrun said.

“It will come out,” Harkness said. “Very frankly, I have been waiting here for the police to appear.”

Chambrun’s eyebrows rose. “The police?”

“I had a lady here for dinner,” Harkness said. “I suppose I should have reported it, but I needed time to think. Scandal is something I must avoid at this particular time in my life. You see, I am here on a diplomatic mission for Her Majesty’s government.”

“What is so scandalous about having a lady for dinner?”

“This particular lady,” Harkness said. “It was Laura Kauffman.”

Chambrun waited in silence.

“She was an old friend of my wife’s and mine in England,” Harkness said. His pipe wasn’t going properly and he fiddled with his lighter for a moment. He was very obviously sparring for time. “I say ‘friend,’ but that implies more than I want it to,” he went on. “She was part of the social swim in London for several seasons. Part of my job is to circulate at parties and balls and other events where people gather.”

“Just what is your job, Mr. Harkness?” Chambrun asked. He sounded a shade less cordial than he’d been a moment ago. “From your registration card we have you down as ‘industrialist,’ what we call in this country “big business.’”

Harkness turned his head, like a man looking for the nearest exit. “I think I must at least hint at the truth because I need your help, Mr. Chambrun. ‘Big business’ is what I believe is called a ‘cover’ for my real job. Oh, I am on the boards of several big corporations, carefully placed there by the people I really work for.”

“Intelligence?” Chambrun asked.

Harkness nodded, biting down hard on the stem of his pipe. One of the things that irritates Chambrun is to find that information on one of his registration cards is inaccurate. It indicates that Atterbury, Jerry Dodd, even Chambrun himself, has not done his job thoroughly.

“You spoke of help, Mr. Harkness,” Chambrun said in a flat, cold voice.

“I would like not to be forced to expose what I have just told you to the police,” Harkness said. “It could leak. That could undo months of difficult and very delicate work.”

“But you have told us,” Chambrun said.

“You have an enviable reputation for being a very decent and discreet man.”

I could have told him that flattery would get him no place, but I let it ride.

“I have to have a reason for exercising discretion,” Chambrun said.

Harkness got up and began to prowl the room, chewing on his pipe, hands jammed down in the pockets of his summer tweed jacket.

“Time is a luxury I don’t have,” Chambrun said.

Harkness faced him. He was, I thought, a strong man, not a frightened schoolboy trying to explain away some minor misdeed. I knew, somehow, that he wasn’t a guilty husband about to tell us of some sexual game playing, even if the notorious Laura Kauffman had been his dinner companion.

“There are certain rules to the game I’m in,” he said. “You don’t let friendship, or women, or any other kind of personal indulgence take you off the main line. If a friend is drowning, you let him drown. To help him might be to reveal your real identity and make yourself useless. That is the rule I’ve broken.”

Chambrun sat still and silent, his bright eyes buried in those deep pouches. He wasn’t going to make it easy for Harkness.

“As you know,” Harkness said, “Mrs. Kauffman had an international reputation as a hostess. She was always at the center of the gayest and biggest parties given wherever she happened to be. She knew everyone who is famous, and rich—in the public eye. She also had a reputation for being, shall I say, very free with her favors.”

‘That matches what I know of her,” Chambrun said. He knew so much more that he wasn’t revealing.

“My wife, Priscilla, and I came to know Laura Kauffman in London. We were both aware of the kind of high stakes game she was playing.”

“Are you suggesting that she was an operator for some government?” Chambrun asked.

“No,” Harkness said. “Her game was personal excitement She collected men like a hunter collects and stuffs the heads of the beasts he kills. She was eager to have everyone know who her conquests had been. Women hated her because their men weren’t safe if Laura got her hooks into them.”

“You were one of them?” Chambrun asked.

Harkness gave us a short, sharp laugh. “Not even close,” he said. “My wife happens to be the perfect partner for me. But there was someone whom I will simply refer to as my closest friend. School friend, college friend, and later in my department in the government. He was much younger than Laura, but that made him all the more desirable. He had no wife, no woman to whom he owed any loyalties. For him, Laura was a fascinating game to be played to the hilt. Somewhere along the way he fell in love with her, knowing all the while what she was. In that span of weakness—well, he talked too much.”

“Secrets about his work?”

“I think—I hope—not secrets about anything specific, but certainly what his work is. That was all she needed.”

“For what?”

“About a year went by and Laura had long since turned away from my friend to hunt in other areas. And then she sent for him. She had her eye on someone very high up in the government. This high-up is a very close friend of my friend. My friend must help her with this intrigue of hers or she would make public what she knew about him. My friend is caught in a bind. He must betray his friend or have his own career wrecked.”

“This threat to your friend happened when?” Chambrun asked.

“Ten days ago,” Harkness said. “Just before I was due to take off for New York.”

“And you were supposed to do what?”

“Try to persuade Laura Kauffman to turn off the heat,” Harkness said.

“You were in trouble, too, weren’t you?” Chambrun asked. “If your friend talked about himself, and then sent you as an emissary, weren’t you in the same position as your friend? She had something on you, too?”

“Yes,” Harkness said.

“So you invited her to dinner. Did she agree to ‘turn off the heat’?”

Harkness’s face was a hard, bitter mask. “She laughed at me,” he said. “She suggested that I might have better luck pleading my case if I would join her in her suite later in the evening.”

“And did you?” Chambrun asked, quietly.

“No, for God sake!” Harkness said.

“Not even to save a drowning friend and yourself?”

“No!”

Chambrun took one of his Egyptian cigarettes from the silver case he always carries and lit it. His eyes were narrowed against the smoke.

“You do need help, Mr. Harkness?” he asked.

Harkness produced a handkerchief and blotted at the little beads of sweat that had appeared on his forehead.

“I don’t quite know why you have told me all this,” Chambrun said. “Laura Kauffman is dead. Your friend is safe. You are safe.”

“Because I cannot account for myself at the time she was murdered,” Harkness said. “The homicide people will keep probing and probing until—” He spread his hands in a helpless gesture.

“We happen to know—” Chambrun hesitated. “We believe Laura Kauffman was alive at eleven o’clock, dead at twenty minutes to one.” His hesitation and rewording must have meant he was wondering about Mayberry’s story. Could she have been dead when Mayberry came out into the hall and found Chambrun there? According to the medical examiner it was possible. “But let’s take it back a little, Mr. Harkness. Where were you, say, between ten o’clock and twenty minutes to one that night?”

“Laura came here to dine at eight o’clock,” Harkness said. “She left about nine-thirty, laughing, and saying she hoped I might decide to join her later. The ‘heat was off’ until I made up my mind about that.”

“And what did you do?”

“The innocent man’s inevitable alibi that won’t check,” Harkness said. “This place smelled of her scent. I had to get away from it. I went out into the park and sat there for God knows how long—hours I think—trying to decide what to do.”