Death After Breakfast (19 page)

“He made a public appearance at the ball, I believe,” Chambrun said. “There were all kinds of photographers in the press gallery. It may have been understood that no pictures of him be released, but for that very reason I’d like to bet someone has one.”

Knowing press people and photographers is part of my job. I tried to remember who I’d seen in the press gallery the night of the ball. That night I’d been dancing with Shirley. For a moment I had that sick feeling, remembering what she’d felt like in my arms, the scent of her gold-blond hair. I pulled myself together and recalled Charlie Price, who takes pictures for International.

I got lucky. Charlie was at his office. I asked him if he’d taken any pictures of Duval at the Cancer Fund Ball.

“That’s a no-no, chum,” Charlie said.

“That doesn’t mean you didn’t take any for your memory book.”

“Why do you want one?”

“My boss wants to see what Duval looks like,” I said. “He’d consider it a favor, and you might be able to use a favor from him someday.”

“It can’t be released, Mark, or used for advertising or publicity,” Charlie said.

“Chambrun just wants to know what he looks like,” I said. “I told him Telly Savalas, but that isn’t good enough.”

“Not so funny you should say that,” Charlie said. “People stop him on the street, thinking he’s Savalas. If people ask him for autographs he signs Savalas’s name. Look, I’ll give you a print, but your boss has got to play by the rules or it’s my neck.”

At a little after two in the afternoon I presented Chambrun with a picture of Duval. It wasn’t a studio shot. He was standing on the platform at the end of the ballroom, tweed jacket, tinted glasses, a beret on his bald head.

“Made a nice little speech of thanks to everyone,” I said.

Chambrun stared at the picture for a long time. I thought he was disappointed. I don’t know what he expected to see, but what was there obviously didn’t forward his game.

Ruysdale appeared at the office door. “It’s Chester Cole on the phone for you, Mark.”

Chambrun switched on the squawk box and I picked up the phone. Someone was breathing hard, like in those horror movies on TV.

“Chester?” I said.

“Mark? For the love of God come up here—now!” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

“Just hurry! And bring your cop friend with you if you can.”

I put down the phone.

“It’s caught up with him,” Chambrun said. “His panic.”

We hurried down the hall to the elevators and went up to the ninth floor. Like the first time, Cole didn’t answer his doorbell or a knock. Chambrun sent me down the hall for the maid’s passkey.

We let ourselves in. Cole wasn’t waiting for us. It was one of our French rooms, and a delicate little Louis XIV straight-backed chair was overturned on the rug. Not broken, just tipped over. Cole wasn’t anywhere. A cigarette was burning in an ashtray on the bureau. We’d missed him by only that much.

There are two ways off any floor in the Beaumont, the elevators and the fire stairs. There are four elevators that come to nine, all with operators at that time of day. One of them remembered bringing Cole up about fifteen minutes ago—just before he’d called me. None of the four operators had seen him leave.

By the time Security had been alerted by Chambrun, Chester Cole had time to go almost anywhere, up, down, or out on the fire stairs. Jerry Dodd took over and came up empty after about an hour. He reported to Chambrun in his office.

“Donovan on elevator number three took him up,” Jerry told us. “Nobody took him down. Fifteen minutes after he went up, you were there. You think he left on his own, or someone made him leave?”

“Who knows,” Chambrun said. “He was scared out of his wits.”

“People came up to nine and left it,” Jerry said. “I could dig up a partial list. But nobody left with Cole—on the elevators. Who are we looking for?”

“I wish I knew,” Chambrun said. “In a nonsensical game I’m playing it could be someone connected with Clark Herman’s film company. Man without a face as far as I’m concerned.”

There was a long and tedious search after that, much like the one that had been set in motion for Chambrun. I won’t try to describe it. It didn’t turn up Chester Cole anywhere.

I remember Chambrun, sitting at his desk, bringing his fist down hard on the polished surface.

“We don’t catch up with them and these people will go on and on and on!” he said. “I want to talk to Duval.”

“He’s in Hollywood, as you know. I can probably dig up a number for him.”

“I don’t want to talk to him on the phone. I want him here.”

“Not much chance of that, I’d think,” I said. “He isn’t likely to accept an invitation from you. What could the cops charge him with, and how could they get him back from California?”

“There has to be a way,” Chambrun said.

When Chambrun says there has to be a way there is a way, but only someone as devious as Chambrun can be could come up with it. The rest of that afternoon I was involved with two projects; trying to find someone who may have seen Chester Cole leave the hotel while at the same time trying to stay within reach of a phone in case Chester might call again; and working in my office with Bernice Braden, Shirley’s badly shaken secretary, calling people she suggested Shirley might have been in touch with in her quest for information about Laura Kauffman. I came up empty in all directions. There was just one thing that I could offer for the pot. The phone company told me that Shirley’s call to Duval in Hollywood had lasted less than two minutes. They had the charges on it. That seemed to back up Duval’s story that she had gotten the answering machine. A conversation with him, even an unfruitful conversation, must have lasted longer than two minutes.

I took this one fragment of information to Chambrun’s office about seven o’clock in the evening. I didn’t get to give it to him just then because he had company. Sitting comfortably in one of the green leather armchairs was Mrs. Victoria Haven, smoking a cigarette in a long jade holder, and cradling that nasty-looking little Japanese spaniel in her ample lap. She had on a black evening dress, a summer fur draped over her shoulders, and was decked out in enough jewelry to sink a tugboat She gave me an amiable smile and Toto growled at me.

The other guest was Henri Latrobe from the French embassy. Latrobe is a dark, handsome young man about my age, with a perpetual smile and laughing dark eyes. He was wearing a dinner jacket with black pearl studs in a very mod, lace-frilled dress shirt He looked pleased with himself.

“You have arrived just in time to be in on a deception, Mark,” Chambrun said.

“I should be clear to you, Mark,” Henri Latrobe said, “that my mother should never know about this. She is a good Catholic.”

Toto growled at me and Mrs. Haven said: “Do shut up, Toto.” Then to me, “I have never objected to lying in a good cause, Mark.”

I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. The red light blinked on Chambrun’s phone. He switched on the squawk box and picked up.

“I have Mr. Duval for you, Mr. Chambrun,” the operator said.

Chambrun nodded to Henri Latrobe. Latrobe winked at me and said: “Claude? Henri Latrobe here. I’m afraid I have some trouble for you.”

“Something wrong with my passport?” Duval asked. He sounded undisturbed. “I’m in the middle of shooting an important sequence, Henri.” I realized it would be about four in the afternoon on the coast.

“Nothing like that,” Henri said. “It’s trouble with the film, though.”

“What kind of trouble?” Duval asked.

“There is an elderly lady who lives here at the Hotel Beaumont,” Henri said.

“What elderly lady?”

“A Mrs. Victoria Haven.”

“I never heard of her,” Duval said.

“I’m afraid you will, Claude,” Henri said. The lady is about to make big trouble for you.”

“How would you like to come to the point?” Duval asked in a flat, cold voice. His British accent made it sound clipped.

“It has to do with the filming here at the Cancer Fund Ball, and later in the Trapeze Bar,” Henri said. “Mrs. Haven was present on both occasions.”

I looked at the old girl, who was smiling happily. I remembered distinctly her telling us she hadn’t been at the ball, and I could swear she hadn’t been in the Trapeze. Shirley and I had been there when the film was being shot with Janet Parker and Robert Randle.

“So she was present,” Duval said. “What of it?”

“She is getting an injunction from a friendly judge to prevent your using any of that footage, Claude. She’s in both sets of film and she will not allow you to use them without her personal permission. Invasion of privacy. I think she’s got you over a barrel, Claude.”

“So get her permission,” Duval said. ‘There are hundreds of thousands of dollars involved.”

“Mrs. Haven is here with me,” Henri said “Perhaps you can persuade her.”

“Put her on,” Duval said.

Mrs. Haven cleared her throat and spoke in her husky, whiskey voice. “I don’t want to discuss matters on the telephone, Mr. Duval,” she said.

“I will have the producer’s lawyer call on you in the morning, madam.”

“I will only talk to you, and in person,” Victoria Haven said.

“That’s quite out of the question,” Duval said. “I am in the middle of a filming here.”

“Then you will be served with an injunction in the morning,” Mrs. Haven said. “Goodnight, Mr. Duval.”

“Latrobe!” Duval shouted.

“Yes, Claude.” Henri was grinning like a cat.

“Can’t you talk some sense into that woman?”

“I think you’re the only one, Claude. Before I called I looked up plane schedules. There’s a flight leaving Los Angeles International in about fifty minutes. Gets you into Kennedy about one o’clock. You could just about make it.”

“One o’clock!” Duval said. “Eight hours! What kind of flight is that?”

“Difference in time, Claude. Five-hour flight.”

“Will that old bitch see me at that time of night?”

“That old bitch, Mr. Duval, is a night person,” Victoria Haven said.

“I’m sorry, madam. I didn’t realize—”

“Realize that this is no laughing matter, Mr. Duval,” she said.

“I wouldn’t waste time, Claude,” Henri said. “I’ll call the airport and arrange a seat for you. Diplomatic pressure. With the time difference you can be back at your studio first thing in the morning.”

“The whole thing is pure idiocy,” Duval said. “But— I’ll make the five o’clock flight.”

The phone went dead.

Chambrun gave Latrobe a thin smile. “You were first rate, Henri,” he said.

“I take particular pleasure in making trouble for that genius,” Henri said. “He’s been demanding outrageous favors from my government for twenty years—ever since he became The Great One in motion pictures.”

“If he stops to look at the rushes of the film they shot here,” Mrs. Haven said, “he’ll know that I am lying in my teeth. I’m obviously not in any of the film they shot because I wasn’t in either place.”

“He can look at the rushes until he’s cross-eyed,” Chambrun said. “He won’t know whether you’re in them or not because he doesn’t know what you look like.”

“How lucky for him,” the old lady said, with a touch of bitterness.

“My dear Victoria, I find you beautiful and irresistible,” Chambrun said.

“I, too, find you that,” Henri said. He reached out—to take her hand, a kissing of the fingers in the offing. Toto snarled at him.

Chambrun leaned back in his desk chair, still smiling. “So we have about six hours to wait,” he said.

“He didn’t seem to resist the idea of coming here,” I said. “Maybe he doesn’t care whether you see him or not.”

“I think he won’t expect me to be here,” Chambrun said.

I didn’t realize until later exactly what he meant by that.

M
AYBE I DIDN’T WANT
to know what he meant. But about ten thirty he made it quite clear to others as well as me. Ruysdale, Jerry Dodd, and Hardy were gathered with him when I answered a summons that reached me out in the “circulating area.”

Chambrun, dinner jacketed, was sitting at his desk when I arrived, sipping at a glass of white wine poured over shaved ice, his usual evening drink. He didn’t look relaxed, though. His eyes were very bright, and he kept turning the wine glass round and round in his fingers.

“The whole thing is based on pure fantasy, made out of something lighter than air,” he said. “It begins on a supposition based on almost nothing. I was abducted from my penthouse, apparently to keep me from seeing someone. It happens that I never saw Claude Duval.”

“Or several hundred other people,” Hardy said, “whom you can’t even name.”

“Humor me, Walter,” Chambrun said. “Poor Shirley Thomas is asking questions about Laura Kauffman. She’s asking those questions on the telephone from her apartment. She isn’t facing anyone with awkward questions, yet somebody comes to her apartment and puts an end to it. It so happens one of the people she talked to was Claude Duval.”

“She talked to a mechanical answering service,” Hardy said.

“Duval says. In my fantasy she talked to him. Now, we have considered the likelihood of an ‘employer’ with a hired professional strong-arm man who is also—an expert at locks. Shirley asks a dangerous question and Duval, who is the ‘employer’ in my dream, gets in touch with his professional who is here in New York, and half an hour later Shirley is dead.”

“If I were to act on this kind of fantasy,” Hardy said, “they’d have my gun and badge and I’d be locked up in a state mental hospital for observation.”

“But I don’t have a gun or a badge to lose, Walter,” Chambrun said, “and I’m not responsible to anyone but myself for my dreams.”

“So dream on,” Hardy said.

“Chester Cole told Mark that Duval didn’t know Laura Kauffman. Laura went to his suite to talk about the ball, Cole was there, and he’s certain they didn’t know each other. I permit myself the luxury of dreaming that they
did
know each other. She was living in Paris in the black days of the Nazi occupation. He is a Frenchman and is old enough to have been living then. In my fantasy, they knew each other but didn’t reveal the fact in Cole’s presence. Later Laura gets in touch with Duval, or he gets in touch with her. He goes to see her. She is a blackmailer and she tries it on for size. Either Duval blows his stack and puts an end to her himself, or he goes away and sends for his professional hit-man to do the job for him.”