Gilded Nightmare (12 page)

Chambrun was silent for a moment and then he shrugged. “You may go,” he said.

The Amazon turned, like someone in a trance, and walked stiffly out of the room.

A sound like a deflating balloon came from Molloy. “What the hell kind of people are these?” he asked no one in particular.

“The monsters who almost pinned us to the mat a generation ago,” Chambrun said. He lifted his demitasse to his lips and put it down abruptly. It was obviously stone-cold. “Any report yet on who left that note for Sam Culver?” he asked.

“Negative,” Jerry Dodd said. “Just one of those things. Along about five o’clock that cultural delegation to the U.N. from Thailand was checking in. There was a lot of confusion—interpreters—God knows what else. When Atterbury finally got them untangled and off to their quarters he noticed that note for Sam lying on the desk by the registration blotter. He hadn’t seen who put it there. It didn’t seem important and he just put it in Sam Culver’s mailbox. You know Atterbury? He says he may be able to dredge it up ‘out of his subconscious’ later, but right now he has no memory of anyone putting the note there. He was surrounded by people jabbering a strange language at him. He was busy.”

“Someone else is getting all the breaks at the moment,” Chambrun said.

“You believe what you told the Baroness—that the note was meant to persuade Culver to refuse the invitation to her party so that she herself could be persuaded to go back to the Island?” Hardy asked.

“Not for a minute,” Chambrun said.

“But why—?”

“I was content to let them all think I believed that,” Chambrun said. He took a deep drag on his cigarette, his eyes narrowed. “We’ve been so concerned with facts—bloodstains, where it all happened, a search for missing weapons, missing clothes—we haven’t come to the point of considering a solid motive for the murder of the girl.”

“None of them can be believed,” Molloy said.

“Take the note at face value,” Chambrun said. “It warns Sam Culver that his life is in danger, particularly if he attends the Baroness’ party. Let’s assume for a moment that Heidi Brunner wrote that note and slipped it onto the desk during the confusion Atterbury described. She could have been killed for having warned Sam and to keep her from telling him exactly what the danger is.”

Hardy’s lips pursed in a soft whistle.

“If the girl confided in anyone it would most likely have been Peter Wynn. They were in love, by all accounts.”

“Who believes what anyone tells you?” Molloy said. “Wynn didn’t mention any such thing when we talked to him. You’d think he would have if he cared about the girl.”

“None of these people, from the Baroness on down the line, places a very high value on human life,” Chambrun said. “Wynn may very well think it’s safer to keep his mouth shut. Where is he?”

“My office in the lobby,” Jerry Dodd said. “He was to stay there till I told him it was all right to go back to his room. I haven’t told him.”

“Get him up here,” Chambrun said. “Meanwhile, I think it’s time we talked to Sam.”

Jerry went to the outer office to phone.

Sam looked old and beaten when he came in from Miss Ruysdale’s office. His hand was unsteady as he held a lighter to his cold pipe.

“I thought you should know about the note while you were talking to the others,” he said to Chambrun.

“You better pour yourself a drink,” Chambrun said, gesturing toward the sideboard.

“I’m past the point where a drink will do me any good,” Sam said. He sat down in the big armchair recently occupied by Charmian. He shook his head slowly. “Even when she’s gone you can smell her perfume,” he said.

“What do you make of the note?” Chambrun asked.

“Kid stuff—except that there is death all around us,” Sam said. “So why not mine, too?”

“Why would one of them want you dead?”

“Search me,” Sam said. “Except that the Zetterstrom people play everything larger than life. Death for stealing an apple, or passing a small insult.”

“You insulted anyone recently?”

“Who knows?” Sam said.

“I think you better tell us what you left out earlier,” Chambrun said.

“Left out?” Sam sounded surprised.

“You came away from the Baroness white-hot. You needed a walk. You needed fresh air. Something happened there, before we interrupted about the dog, to turn you on, Sam. What was it?”

Sam sank deeper into his chair. “The Charmian Brown saga,” he said. “It seems it may never end.” He put his pipe down on Chambrun’s desk as though he were reluctant to part with it. “I was intrigued when you brought me her message, Mark—that she wanted to see me, to apologize for having snubbed me on her arrival, and to invite me to some cockeyed party. I felt a strong impulse—curiosity, whatever—to see Charmian face to face. I wanted to discover what the years had done to her, or perhaps miraculously, what they had not done to her. Deep down in my subconscious I think there’s always been a big black question mark. That moment of love-making with Charmian twenty years ago—had it really been solely to find out the truth about my father, or had I always had an insatiable man-woman hunger for her ever since the days when we played ‘doctor’ under the front porch? Had I punished her, driven her out of Hollywood, not so much to gain justice for my father, but to do something about my own guilt for having so much wanted the woman who’d betrayed the old man and driven him to suicide?” Sam gave Chambrun a crooked little smile. “Subsurface Sam, they call me.”

“I can understand your wondering,” Chambrun said.

Sam went on. “I was rather unpleasantly startled to discover, as I walked down the corridor toward 19-B that my heart was beating faster than normal. The old teen-age excitement.

“This girl Heidi answered the door. I was expected. I was ushered, without delay, into the living room where Charmian sat on that gold-brocaded love seat. You saw her in that yellow shift. Her smile was tentative, as if she were a little afraid of seeing me again. We were alone—I thought. Heidi had evaporated. I had no reason to suspect then that Helwig and Masters might be within earshot.

“I found I couldn’t speak for a moment; my heart was thumping against my ribs. Her wide blue eyes, fixed intently on me, seemed to plead for something. My mouth was cotton-dry.

“ ‘Well, Charmian,’ I heard myself say.

“ ‘Well, Sam?’ It was the low, throaty voice I remembered so well, still young and vibrant.

“I felt myself getting on top of this silly emotional disturbance. But she was unbelievable. You’ve seen, Pierre. I’d been impressed by her appearance during those moments in the lobby, but then she was wearing the sable coat and hat, she had on the black glasses. She’d looked amazingly unchanged by the passing twenty years, but most of what would have been tell-tale exposures were hidden. Now she was without the glasses, and there were no crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes. The shift was scanty in terms of covering her exquisite figure—arms bare, long legs carelessly exposed. There was no flabbiness, no sag, no signs whatever of age.”

“I can vouch for that,” I said.

Sam’s weary eyes turned my way. “Don’t be had by the siren song, Mark,” he said. “Well, anyway, I told her she was a miracle. She said she was glad I thought so, and asked me to sit down in the corner of the love seat opposite her. I did, and was instantly aware of her perfume—just as I was when I sat down in this chair. Not too heavy, deliciously subtle. I remembered it well from that night twenty years ago. I’m sure it’s made specially for her. She invited me to have a drink and I refused.

“ ‘It’s always been my theory,’ she said, ‘that drinking should only be done when all you want of the moment is the experience of being a little tight. It doesn’t go with other sensations or pleasures.’

“She’d said something almost exactly like that on the night I’d found myself lying beside her in her mammoth Hollywood bed.

“ ‘Men are lucky,’ she said. ‘They age so attractively. You’re handsomer and stronger looking, in the sense of character, than you were twenty years ago.’

“I found it difficult to keep this light, conversational ball bouncing. Her youthfulness, her total lack of change, were dazing.

“ ‘It’s too bad you’re so very rich,’ I said.

“ ‘Oh?’

“ ‘You’ll miss the satisfaction of making an enormous fortune on your own. If you could bottle and market the secret of your perpetual youth, Charmian, you’d have the women of the world at your feet.’ It was a first-class inanity.

“ ‘I’m sorry that impresses you so much,’ she said. ‘Presently you’ll begin to think about it—the massage, the lotions, the exercises, the magic of Dr. Malinkov. You’ll stop believing it’s real—which of course it isn’t. Tell me about you, Sam.’

“I told her I’d made a lot of money in Hollywood. It had allowed me to do the kind of writing I really liked. I told her it had been a good life.

“ ‘Women?’ she asked.

“ ‘Here and there.’

“ ‘But no one permanent?’

“ ‘No.’

“She laughed. ‘Vanity is the scourge of womankind,’ she said. ‘I’d like to think it was because you really never got over me, Sam.’

“ ‘Coming down the hall a few minutes ago I wondered about that myself.’

“ ‘How sweet,’ she said.

“Well, I told myself, here we come around to the brass ring again. Twenty years ago I knew her next move would have been to slip out of that yellow nothing, take me by the hand, and lead me to a huge circular bed surrounded by mirrors. Goddamn it, I found myself half hoping! But when it didn’t instantly happen, a new absurdity occurred to me, an absurdity that turned me off but good.
This isn’t Charmian, I thought. This is a stand in, a double.

“As if she’d been reading my mind, she said: ‘I remember everything we said to each other that night, Sam, as if it had been recorded on tape. I wanted you for the man you were, Sam, and also for what you could do for me in Hollywood. Always greedy! Always ready to play both sides of the street was Charmian Brown. I knew you were going to ask me that question about your father, and I was determined not to be cheated out of having you by answering it too soon. Remember? You started to ask me several times and I wouldn’t let you say it’

“I remembered—too damned vividly; her fingers on my lips, that wonderful sensuous body pressed close to me. Oh, I remembered.

“ ‘Then afterwards—so soon afterwards—you asked me,’ Charmian said. ‘You can’t imagine how carefully I debated my answer to that question. If I told you your father was guilty you might run out on me because you couldn’t bear the thought of sharing me with him. If I told you he was innocent you might run away, but you’d get over it and you might come back. I guessed wrong.’

“ ‘Guessed! I couldn’t believe my ears. I felt myself shaking from head to foot. ‘What was the truth?’ I asked her.

“She looked at me and her lips curled downward in an expression of slight disgust. ‘The lecherous old goat was all over me that night, Sam. I screamed for help because I needed help.’

“My God, I thought, this is no double, no stand-in. This is Charmian Brown, who knows all the techniques of turning the knife in the wound until you cry out for mercy. A kaleidoscope of horrors was in front of me: my father hanging from that pipe in the basement; Bruno Wald, reveling in an illicit pleasure and then caught in it like a rat in a trap; and God alone knew how many other faceless victims. Bitch, bitch, bitch! I’d never know the truth about my father now. She’d tell it to me one way today and another way tomorrow. She had me on a string like a yo-yo. What sweet revenge for her. Twenty years ago I’d driven her out of Hollywood, destroyed her chance for a career, and now she’d squared accounts with me. You ask if it can matter after all this time? Well, Goddamn it, it does matter! I heard her asking me, sweetly, if I’d come to her party, and I told myself, ‘I will kill her!.’ I felt better.” Sam drew a deep breath. “And then you and Mark arrived to tell her about the dog.”

“Why didn’t you tell us this part of it when you first told us the story about your father?” Chambrun asked.

“Do you know, Pierre, I really did think about killing her.” Sam laughed. “The impulse was so real I was already planning how to cover myself. I did go for a walk to think it all out. As I cooled out I realized, of course, that I couldn’t kill her—that it wouldn’t satisfy. On my way in through the lobby Nevers beckoned to me from the desk. There was that note. And while I was reading it, not quite believing what I read, a heavy hand rested on my shoulder and it was that Homicide dick named Dolan. I was wanted back up here.”

“We come back to motive,” Chambrun said, after a moment. He’d picked up the little ball of paper Charmian had left crumpled on his desk a couple of hours before. He tossed it up and caught it—tossed it up again. It was irritating to watch. “We have a nice motive for you, Sam, except that Charmian Zetterstrom is still very much alive. But what is the motive behind a possible plan to do you harm at the party?”

“Poison my soup,” Sam said.

I found myself smiling as I thought of Amato’s remarks about kangaroo tail soup.

“But why?” Chambrun said. “What you did happened twenty years ago. She’s had a fabulous life since then—money, power, a free hand to indulge all her peculiarities.”

“She’s like the elephant who never forgets,” Sam said. “I grew up on stories about elephants who killed cruel handlers dozens of years after the fact. You don’t cross Charmian Brown without paying for it.”

“She’s had her revenge, hasn’t she?” Chambrun said, tossing the little ball of paper up and down. “She’s stuck the knife in you a second time about your father. She’s shrewd enough to know what that’s done to you. ‘If you value your life,’ the note says. How far does she have to go to square accounts?”

“Right now I’ve got a murder that’s already happened to bother me,” Hardy said.

“Sam has reason to be concerned about himself,” Chambrun said.

“So stay out of her way, Mr. Culver. You want protection, we’ll give it to you,” Hardy said.

Chambrun tossed the little ball of paper into the ashtray on his desk. He was frowning. “I find myself more concerned with preventing the next move in this game than cleaning up the mess behind us,” he said.