Time of Terror (29 page)

“It would have been decent of her, wouldn’t it? He’d given up his job to toddle around after her.”

“What was between them was none of my business,” Mayberry said.

“Did Mrs. Kauffman mention him to you last night?”

“I don’t recall that she did.”

“Think,” Hardy said. “Did she tell you he was coming to see her. She might, since you were such an old friend.”

“I’m sure she didn’t.” Mayberry’s eyebrows rose. “My God, you’re not suggesting that Jim Kauffman—?”

“I cover every possibility, Mr. Mayberry.”

I suddenly thought about Shirley. I was very late for the lunch I’d promised her. From what she’d told us about Laura Kauffman, and what Janet Parker had told us about Mayberry, I had the feeling he wouldn’t have hung around the lady for fifteen years just to spend a weekend at Acapulco. Hardy was right with me.

“Were you one of Mrs. Kauffman’s lovers?”

Mayberry sat straight up in his chair as though there was an electric charge in it. “That’s none of your goddamned business!” he said.

“All of Mrs. Kauffman’s lovers are my business today,” Hardy said.

Mayberry mopped at his face with his handkerchief. “She was a widow for the first ten years I knew her,” he said. “We—we may have had a few intimate moments, but that was long ago. She was a damned attractive woman.”

“Not any more,” Hardy said, his voice grim. “I’m going to get the man who butchered her, Mr. Mayberry.”

“I certainly hope so.”

“So let’s go back to Chambrun,” Hardy said. “You met him in the hall outside Mrs. Kauffman’s suite. You discussed the camera-at-the-ball situation?”

“I told you. He was unreasonably stubborn about it.”

“What else did you talk about?”

“Nothing, that I can recall.”

Jerry got into the act then. “Mayberry had been offensive to Miss Parker,” he said in a flat voice. “She asked Cardoza for help and Cardoza called the boss. Chambrun went up to Twenty-one C to assure Miss Parker she didn’t have to worry about Mayberry any more. Surely Chambrun must have brought it up. When he saw Mayberry in the hall he told Miss Parker that the fates were doing away with delay.”

“You really must hate his guts,” Hardy said.

“The whole thing is absurd,” Mayberry said. “Actresses like Miss Parker expect to have passes made at them. Disappointed if you don’t. She’s a—”

“—damned attractive woman,” Hardy said.

“All she had to do was say no!” Mayberry said.

“Maybe not,” Jerry said. “She was being pressured by Herman and Duval to be nice to you, at least until after the filming.”

“I don’t need help from anyone!” Mayberry said.

“I have a feeling you may need a hell of a lot of help before we’re through here,” Hardy said.

I went down the hall to my apartment It was nearly three o’clock and I wasn’t surprised to find Shirley gone. There was a note propped up on the mantel.

I’m not mad, luv, [it read] but with big stories all around I just couldn’t sit here. Later I have to get dolled up for the ball so that you won’t be able to look at anyone else. I hope Chambrun will show up with some simple explanation, otherwise I may not be able to seduce you. Love, luv. Shirley.

That one is special. I was just about to leave to make the rounds of the governors and the fashion show and the preparations in the main ballroom when there was a heavy knock on my door. It was Doc Partridge, the house physician. He is a craggy, shaggy old gent, but a friend, particularly a friend of Chambrun’s. He looked shaken.

“What’s this about Pierre?” he asked.

I told him. No word, no sign of Chambrun since his “no” more calls” to Miss Kiley at two fifteen. No message, no demands from potential kidnappers. And now, after hours of grinding search, no trace of him so far anywhere in the Beaumont, nor any response to the all-points bulletin Hardy had put out on him.

“If he had wanted to disappear, he’d be delighted at how perfectly he’d managed it,” I said.

“Of course he didn’t want to disappear! That’s nonsense!” Doc nodded toward a chair. “Mind if I sit down, Mark? I feel a little unsteady.”

“Give you a slug of something?” I asked.

“This is a time to keep your wits about you,” he said.

“I take it you spent some time with Chambrun in the Spartan last night?”

“Midnight till a little after one,” Doc said. “Sonofabitch threw more doubles than you could imagine. Decent people shouldn’t be allowed to play backgammon with him.”

“Was there anything unusual about him last night, Doc? Did he seem tense, or nervous, or distracted?”

“Not so distracted that he couldn’t concentrate on beating my brains out,” Doc said.

The Spartan Bar is one of the last bastions of male chauvinism in the city. Not long ago it had been clearly marked to indicate that women were not admitted. There are no signs these days but there are subtle ways to let ladies know that they aren’t welcome. Its principal patrons are elderly gentlemen who sit around at tables playing chess, backgammon, and gin. And drinking. Doc Partridge, whose practice now is only the emergency care of hotel transients, spends most of his time in the Spartan, mourning with his cronies all the things of elegance and pleasure that had once made up his world and theirs. I wouldn’t for the world have told Doc that Chambrun had discussed a future for the Spartan Bar that would totally change it. Old-timers like Doc couldn’t go on forever. They were already thinning out.

“You don’t hand around the Spartan very much,” Doc said, giving me a hostile look. “Things don’t change very much there.”

“My time will come,” I said.

“When you time comes it will have changed,” Doc said. “Thank God I won’t be here to see it. There is one thing that never changes. Pierre shows up there around midnight every night. Sometimes he stays, sometimes, when he’s needed somewhere else, it’s just to say hello. It reassures us old codgers. Our world is on an even keel as long as Pierre is around. We need to know it.”

“So he came in last night to reassure you,” I said, prodding him gently.

“Nothing different. He was mad as hell about something. That’s par for the course. He’s always mad as hell about something. He’s just finished his rounds, you see, and he’s always found something out of place, someone not doing his job up to Chambrun standards, maybe some finger marks on a bar glass in the Trapeze. ‘You got an instant prescription for high blood pressure?’ he asked me last night. ‘I feel inclined to commit a murder, Doc.’ I asked him who and he said: ‘Oh, to hell with it. Where’s the backgammon board?’”

“That was it? No more talk about what made him angry?” I knew Chambrun had had his encounter with George Mayberry not too long before that. It would have explained his anger.

“While we were setting up the board,” Doc said, “he muttered something about ‘that goddamned film company’ that was going to disrupt things. That’s tonight, isn’t it? And something about ‘the brainless owners.’ Then he grinned at me, handed me a dice cup, and said, ‘Go, sucker!’ That was all. He plays any game—chess, gin, backgammon, billiards—as if his life depended on it. The only thing on his mind for the next hour and a half was skinning me alive. Which he did.”

“A medical question, Doc,” I said. “We’ve been concerned that he might have had a heart attack, a stroke, with nobody around—in some room we haven’t searched yet, some closet or storage space.”

Doc snorted at me. “Pierre? Pierre is fifty-eight years old but he has the heart of a boy of twenty. You should envy his blood pressure. For all his blusterings and displays of anger I’ve never known a man with fewer tensions. He’s in perfect shape for a man much younger than he is.”

“It’s good to hear,” I said, “but it doesn’t cheer me up. It makes the chance of some kind of violence greater.”

“If anyone has harmed him,” Doc growled, “I will end my life by killing the sonofabitch who did it!”

I guess a lot of us felt that way.

It is difficult to describe how that day wore on. Jerry Dodd and his men carried on the slow, grim search of the hotel. They would not have covered all the ground for hours and hours. But as time ticked away those of us who knew what they were searching for were plunged deeper and deeper into a kind of fatalistic despair. They weren’t going to find Chambrun.

Nothing was normal as the day wore on. A lot of us knew about Chambrun but the word hadn’t leaked to the press. However, we had a murder that had leaked, and the place was swarming with reporters and photographers trying to get some kind of newsbreak from Hardy. They had deadlines to meet, and facts were sparse. Laura Kauffman had been stabbed to death in her suite. The police were following rather slender leads. That was all they got.

About four o’clock I met with Ruysdale and Michael Garrity in Chambrun’s office. The big man, who was really the power in the owners’ group, turned out to be reasonable and stubborn at the same time. He thought at first that to throw the Chambrun story into the news hopper might draw attention away from the murder. Ruysdale and I easily persuaded him that to do that would turn the hotel into bedlam. Reporters would instantly hint at two murders. It was finally agreed that I would meet with reporters, representing the hotel. It would be my job to persuade them that Laura Kauffman’s murder had nothing to do with a breakdown of hotel security. She had, in effect, had an office here to handle ball arrangements. People were free to come and go. No one had broken into the room. Whoever it was had been let in by Mrs. Kauffman. There hadn’t been any reason at all to keep the lady under surveillance or guarded. Hotel security was cooperating with the police in every way possible. The theme, then, was that the Beaumont’s management had no reason to feel responsible for what had happened.

Michael Garrity was not so pliable in another area. He expressed himself in rather colorful language on the subject of George Mayberry.

“When the police get through with him,” Garrity said, in his deep rumbling voice, “I’ll see to it that the stupid bastard is kept out of the hotel—from here on in. Which brings us to the ball and the film.”

“Mr. Chambrun had laid out very specific rules and regulations,” Ruysdale said. She was sitting at Chambrun’s desk again, and she looked exhausted, deep dark circles under her eyes.

“I’m aware of that,” Garrity said. “But I think if Chambrun were here, I could persuade him to change his mind about those rules. You see, Miss Ruysdale, the ball will no longer be an elegant charity affair. A thousand people will be jabbering about rape, and murder, and violence. Very damaging to the hotel for months to come. The one thing that might divert them, give them something else to talk about and think about, would be a filming on the dance floor and later in the lobby and the Trapeze Bar while people are still here. Duval is a famous man, like a Bergman or a Fellini. He will put on a show for them, involve them, use them. They will go home talking about him and not the unfortunate Mrs. Kauffman. I think it’s just good sense to permit the diversion, where under normal conditions it might have been as objectionable as Chambrun thought it would be.”

It made some sense, I thought

“If Mr. Chambrun comes back and finds we’ve gone over his head—” Ruysdale said.

“He’s a reasonable man,” Garrity said. “When he understands the reasons for overriding him, he may award us all the order of merit.”

Ruysdale looked at me. For once I thought she was too done in to think clearly for herself.

“I think Mr. Garrity’s made a case,” I said. “I buy it.”

And so it was that Claude Duval got his way. Ruysdale and Garrity would notify him and make whatever arrangements had to be made to suit him. I went off to meet the press, hastily assembled in one of the small dining rooms off the lobby.

I think I made my case, that the hotel was not responsible for what had happened to Laura Kauffman. I had no facts for them because I had no facts. Among those present was that old chicken hash connoisseur, Eliot Stevens. As the session broke up I found him waiting for me in the lobby.

“Quite a day,” he said.

“Quite a day,” I said.

“Did Chambrun ever show up?” he asked.

“With endless apologies for you,” I said, lying as blandly as I could.

He gave me a narrow-eyed smile. “Have it your way,” he said. “I’m willing to sit on that story in the hope of getting a big one from him later. One question, just between us. Is there any connection between the Chambrun disappearance and the Kauffman case?”

“If I could answer that, it would mean I knew what has happened to Chambrun,” I said. “At this moment we haven’t a notion. That’s just between us, Eliot.”

“With the guarantee that I get first crack at the story when it breaks.”

“A deal,” I said.

He looked around the busy lobby. People were crowding into the bars early. It wasn’t business as usual. Everyone was trying to pump the doormen, the bellboys, the bartenders, any other identifiable members of the staff. Who killed her? Why?

“Does it occur to you that you may have a sex maniac running wild in your hotel?” Stevens asked me.

“Eliot, everything has occurred to me but the answer,” I said.

I had, literally, to fight my way across the lobby to the elevators. Regular customers and most of the Beaumont’s guests know me by sight. If anyone could tell them something juicy, I was it. I thought I was going to get my clothes torn off, like some movie star caught out by his fans, before I got to the elevator and the safety of the second floor.

I walked along the second floor corridor, mercifully deserted, to the door of my apartment and let myself in. I had company. Shirley was there, the only other person who had a key, and with her was a man I didn’t know. He was in his middle thirties, I thought, fishbelly pale, sick-looking really. He wore a seedy gray flannel suit that I recognized had cost a lot of money when it was new. Shirley looked very serious.

“Forgive me for barging in, Mark,” she said. “This is Jim Kauffman.”

The dead woman’s husband! I understood the ghostly pallor now, the unsteady hands, the faint tick at the corner of his mouth. This character was in the grip of a monumental hangover. Red-rimmed eyes looked despairingly from me to the little portable bar in the corner of my living room. This one was right on the verge of falling into a thousand pieces. I shook hands with him, and it was like taking hold of something dead.