Time of Terror (27 page)

“Then that’s what will be done,” I said. “Obviously he didn’t want the ball interrupted by something that isn’t connected with it.”

“My dear young ass!” Duval said. I suppose, at sixty, I in my thirties must have seemed young to him. “Do you realize what pleasure it will give the guests at the ball to be involved in a Duval spectacular?”

“I have no choice but to follow Chambrun’s orders,” I said.

“You think not?” he said. His eyes were cold as two newly minted dimes. “I have expressed my wishes to Mr. Mayberry and he has graciously agreed to rescind the rules. Mrs. Kauffman and her committee are quite agreeable. If Chambrun were here, he would certainly have to change his mind.”

“But he is not here,” I said. The casual way he’d mentioned Laura Kauffman suggested he didn’t know what had happened in Twenty-one A. Maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference to him if he did.

“God save me from having to deal with people who have no judgments of their own,” Duval said. “Shall I have Mr. Mayberry join this conference, young man?”

“It’s my understanding he’s on the way to the White House for reinforcements,” I said.

There was a slight tick at the corner of Duval’s mouth. I guessed he was curbing an impulse to laugh. He must have known what an overblown phony Mayberry was.

“Your orders will come to you from the owners,” he said. “But I will continue to tell you what they will be. The second stipulation of Mr. Chambrun’s which must be altered is that we may not use the lobby or the Trapeze Bar for filming until after four in the morning. At that time there will be no people in either place but the cleaning force. The place has to look real, as if it were functioning normally, Mr. Haskell. I repeat, no one will object to being involved in a Duval film. I want to begin filming at two thirty
A.M.
Not a moment later. I want to film people leaving the ball. I want to film real customers drinking in the Trapeze Bar.”

“And Chambrun has said ‘no’?”

“He had said ‘no,’ but Mr. Mayberry has said ‘yes.’”

“I can’t help you, Mr. Duval,” I said.

“Then Mr. Mayberry will give the orders,” he said.

“The problem will be to find someone to obey them,” I said.

He stood up. He wasn’t as tall as I’d imagined.

“Damn your impertinence,” he said.

I’d had enough. “I’m sorry, Mr. Duval, but nobody in this hotel takes orders from anyone but Chambrun. If he has left orders, they will be carried out. If he comes back in time and changes his mind, that’s another story. Until that happens I’m afraid you’ll have to play by his rules.”

“You little pipsqueak bastard!” he said.

“The best I can do is try to find Chambrun and give you a chance to persuade him,” I said. “I’d better get to that job now. Good morning, Mr. Duval.”

B
EING SHOUTED AT BY
some self-important jerk like Duval didn’t really bother me if I was sure of my ground. In this instance I hadn’t had to make any decision of my own. Chambrun would be found. He had to be found. Meanwhile his instructions were law.

I went looking for Jerry Dodd. By now he must have come across something in the way of a lead, someone who had seen something or heard something.

His office is on the lobby floor, directly across from the registration desk. There is an intercom system between the security office and the desk clerk and also the cashier’s window. It can be switched on from either end in case the desk clerk or the cashier want Security to overhear a conversation or Security is curious about someone.

I found Jerry Dodd in his office with Miss Kiley, the night chief operator on our switchboard. Miss Kiley had been at that job for twenty years. She had been the last person to speak to Chambrun every night during all that time.

Jerry looked at me with a suggestion of hope. Everyone had that look of hope this morning when they encountered someone they hadn’t seen for a few minutes. Maybe that someone had some sort of news. I had none.

“Virginia tells me there was nothing unusual about the boss’s sign-off last night,” he said

Virginia Kiley is a hard-faced woman whose only pleasure in life, I suspect, is her total efficiency at her job. She is proud of how she handles it and the trust placed in her by Chambrun.

“He says exactly the same thing every night,” Kiley said. “ ‘No more calls, Miss Kiley, unless it’s an emergency.’ It could be a taped message, except it isn’t.”

“What time did he go up to the penthouse last night?” Jerry asked.

Kiley consulted a report sheet she had brought with her. “He checked with us at one fifteen,” she said. “He was in the Spartan Bar. He told me he was on his way to the penthouse. Standard procedure. Seven minutes later he checked from the penthouse to tell me he was there. Nothing after that until the goodnight signal.”

“Fifty-three minutes.” Jerry said. “Were there any calls in or out in that time?”

“No.”

“You could tell us from your chart exactly how he spent his evening?”

“I come on at seven o’clock,” Kiley said. “He was in the penthouse then, according to Mrs. Veach’s chart. He’s almost always there when I come on, dressing for the evening. There were no calls until he checked with me at a quarter to nine. He told me he was on his way to his office for dinner. Six minutes later Miss Ruysdale called to say he was there.”

Betsy Ruysdale’s working hours coincide with Chambrun’s. “Miss Ruysdale monitors his calls when she’s on the job,” Kiley said. “At quarter past nine there was a call from Mr. Mayberry. We listen, you understand, to the first few moments of all calls and then log them—who the caller was and at what time.”

“So he talked to Mayberry at quarter past nine?”

Kiley shook her head. “Miss Ruysdale wouldn’t put Mayberry through. He’d have to call back in an hour when Chambrun finished dinner.” Kiley gave us a tight little smile. “Mayberry blew his stack, but Miss Ruysdale wouldn’t put him through.”

“Go on, Virginia.”

“At precisely ten o’clock Mr. Cardoza called. Miss Ruysdale put him through so the boss evidently had finished dinner.”

Cardoza, the captain in the Blue Lagoon, would know when Chambrun had finished dinner by checking with room service.

“While the boss was talking to Cardoza, Mr. Mayberry called back again. I told him the boss’s line was busy. He told me to cut in and I said I couldn’t He told me he’d see to it that I was fired.”

“I hope you didn’t lose any sleep,” I said. “He’s fired us all at least once today.”

“I wasn’t concerned,” Kiley said. “I’d only have interrupted Mr. Chambrun for a bomb threat.”

“And Mayberry is only a wet firecracker,” I said.

“At twenty minutes past ten Miss Ruysdale called in to say that Mr. Chambrun had gone to Miss Janet Parker’s suite, Twenty-one C.”

Jerry and I looked at each other. Three doors down the hall from Laura Kauffman’s last resting place.

“There weren’t any calls for him. At eleven-oh-three he called in to say he was in the Blue Lagoon. Twenty minutes later he called to say he was ‘making the rounds’ and could be reached in the Spartan Bar in about half an hour. In half an hour he checked in from the Spartan.”

“A few minutes before midnight?”

“Eleven fifty-two. Nothing more until at one-fifteen he called to say he was on his way up to the penthouse.”

“Making the rounds” was a routine which either Chambrun or I carried out every night, I, when he was tied up with something. It meant checking the bars, the restaurants, and any special rooms that were in use for special events, like balls, conventions, private dinners. I have said somewhere that it was like Marshall Dillon putting Dodge City to bed. I had guessed that the hour or more in the Spartan Bar had been spent playing backgammon with Dr. Partridge, the house physician. Doc Partridge is a crotchety old man, one of whose remaining dreams was to win a few bucks from Chambrun at a game he had no chance of winning. Chambrun was a terror at it.

So much for Chambrun’s evening.

Jerry got on to Betsy Ruysdale when Miss Kiley left us. What did she know about Cardoza’s call and Chambrun’s visit to Miss Parker’s suite? It seems they were related. Miss Parker, the star of Duval’s film, had once, some years back, done a nightclub act which had played the Blue Lagoon. She had been a kind of present-day Helen Morgan, singing light, romantic songs. I remembered her when Ruysdale reminded us. The Blue Lagoon is an intimate room and Janet Parker, whose name had been something else at that time, had done very nicely in it. Miss Parker, it seemed, had called Cardoza, remembering him as a friend and a decent guy during the two weeks she’d played the room. She told Cardoza she was being given a hard time by some man in the hotel and what should she do about it.

“Guess who the man is?” Ruysdale suggested.

“No time for guessing Betsy,” Jerry said.

Ruysdale laughed. “Mayberry,” she said.

“Oh, God!” Jerry said.

“Since Mayberry apparently owns the hotel, according to Miss Parker, she didn’t know how to handle the situation,” Ruysdale told us. “Cardoza told her how. He’d have the boss come to see her. He went. That’s all I know, Jerry. I—I haven’t seen him since.”

The telephone log on Chambrun’s comings and goings the night before indicated nothing but a rather ordinary evening. Jerry put in calls for Doc Partridge and Mr. Quiller, the captain in the Spartan Bar. Doc had gone out somewhere and Quiller wasn’t due to report for work until the cocktail hour that afternoon. Mr. Cardoza, the elegant captain in the Blue Lagoon, wasn’t due till seven in the evening and he couldn’t be reached on a home phone they had for him.

The only thing with any substance about the evening was the rather absurd complication of Miss Parker’s troubles with Mayberry whom she believed “owned the hotel.” A complaint about one guest molesting another was usually passed on to Jerry Dodd to handle, but in this instance Chambrun had chosen to take it on himself. Perhaps, I thought, because Cardoza had made a personal plea and Cardoza was one of Chambrun’s special people.

Jerry sat at his desk in the security office, doodling on a scratch pad.

“Time of death in a homicide is a hard thing to be precise about,” he said. “Hardy tells me the Medical Examiner’s man thinks Laura Kauffman had been dead for from ten to twelve hours when they found her. That would place her killer in Twenty-one A between ten o’clock and midnight last night. The floor maid didn’t go in to turn down her bed because there was a
DO NOT DISTURB
sign hung on the doorknob. But Chambrun was on the floor, only three doors away, between ten and eleven. It’s possible he could have said something to the Parker girl, unimportant to her but important to us. I think I’d like to talk to her.”

It was going on toward one o’clock that afternoon that Jerry and I went up to see the young movie star in Twenty-one C. The Beaumont was buzzing with the usual midday business. The governors had broken for lunch, disappointed when I told them Chambrun was still unavailable. Gussie Winterbottom, Claire DeLune to you, was doing a land-office business with her new line of women’s wear. The Cancer Fund Ball committee was in hectic session because of the tragic death of its chairperson—God how I hate that new word. They talked of cancelling the ball out of respect to Laura Kauffman, all the while looking a half million dollars straight in the eye.

“Laura would want us to carry on,” they kept telling themselves. There really was never any doubt about carrying on.

And the Beaumont was swarming with news people. Jerry and I had used the freight elevator up to Twenty-one to avoid them. A couple of Hardy’s men were in the hallway up there, checking on comings and goings. All the guests on the twenty-first floor had been questioned about last night. Who had gone to see Laura Kauffman or tried to see her. The last call to her room that she had answered had been a little before ten o’clock. After that, till well past midnight, there had been a dozen calls she hadn’t answered. No one had been concerned about that. Laura Kauffman could have been, quite legitimately, anywhere.

Show business is a strange world, larded with luck. A young girl named Julia Parkhurst had started out as a singer in small nightclubs across the country. She had charm and not a little skill at the romantic and sentimental songs she sang. She had achieved something like real success when she was engaged to sing in the Blue Lagoon room at the Beaumont. It was there that some Hollywood big shot saw her. He decided, on the spot, that Julia Parkhurst was just the girl he wanted for a small part in a film he was casting. It didn’t involve singing but she had a special quality he wanted. She, of course, accepted the offer.

Why they changed her name to Janet Parker I don’t know. Perhaps they didn’t want her to be connected with a girl singer who had a minor reputation. The part was small but Janet made a big hit in it. She was nominated by the Academy for a best-supporting-actress award. She didn’t get it, but she was now in demand. She had two leads after that which lifted her to the top of the ladder and now she was being starred in Claude Duval’s latest. If it was as big a success as everyone anticipated, she was set for life.

Jerry and I got in to see her because, I guess, she had orders to see anyone who had “public relations” attached to his name. The filming at the Beaumont had gotten a lot of publicity and she was supposed to assist in exploiting it in any way she could.

She received us wearing a simple dark blue housecoat. Dark hair hung down to her shoulders. Her eyes were violet, like Elizabeth’s Taylor’s, but they weren’t sophisticated. They seemed to ask for help, and I, for one, was instantly prepared to give it. That, I think, was her special charm, her special appeal.

She took us into her sitting room. This was a French suite, an exquisite Matisse on the wall over the mantel. All the people in Duval’s company were in French suites.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Haskell? If it’s about the unfortunate Mrs. Kauffman, I’ve already talked to the police. I had nothing to tell them.”

“Mrs. Kauffman isn’t our only problem today, Miss Parker,” I told her. “Mr. Chambrun, our manager, is unaccountably missing. We understand he called on you last night.”