Gilded Nightmare

by Hugh Pentecost

  “And it will be a pleasure,” Masters said. He sounded hungry.

  “Mr. Chambrun is right, of course,” Helwig said, in a flat, emotionless voice.

  Charmian turned her head to look at him. I had the sudden conviction that this hard-faced, gray-haired man was the boss of the outfit. Charmian looked away from him.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Chambrun,” she said. “I guess I lost my head. Of course it’s your job. But my anger—when you told me—”

  I looked at Masters. His smile was white and fixed. I had the feeling he wasn’t listening.

  “The Baroness will deeply appreciate your efforts to find the person responsible for this piece of villainy,” Helwig said. “It’s hard to believe anyone could behave so viciously toward a small dog. It’s an act that shouldn’t go unpunished—but legally, of course.”

  I saw that Chambrun hadn’t missed the note of cool authority in Helwig’s voice. “I’d like to ask the Baroness a question,” he said, with a touch of irony that suggested he was asking Helwig’s permission.

  Helwig nodded, as though the request were quite normal.

  “You say you didn’t recognize the man who approached you in the lobby this afternoon, Baroness?”

  “Of course not. I’d never seen him before.”

  “Do you remember a man named Bruno Wald?”

  “But of course,” she said. “A charming young film actor who visited us about ten years ago. He was drowned, tragically, in a boating accident.”

  “The man in the lobby didn’t remind you of Bruno Wald?”

  “No. Why should he?” Charmian asked.

  “The man in the lobby, madame, was Bruno Wald’s twin brother,” Helwig said, quietly.

  Charmian’s head swiveled his way again. “Twin?”

  Helwig’s black glasses were directed at Chambrun. “Madame has never been told of Bruno Wald’s return to life, or of the shocking story he told his brother, Stephen Wood. It was, of course, entirely false. It would have been distressing to Madame had she heard it.”

  Charmian’s lips parted. “What story? You all seem to know it but me.”

  “I’ll tell you sometime,” Sam Culver said, speaking for the first time, “if Herr Helwig permits.” He’d caught the curious relationship, too.

  Helwig ignored him. “You ask these questions, Mr. Chambrun, because you think this may have been an act of psychotic revenge on the part of Stephen Wood—murdering Puzzi?”

  “I thought of it,” Chambrun said.

  “Do we know where this Stephen Wood lives?” Masters asked, casually.

  “You will leave this to Mr. Chambrun, John,” Helwig said, and there was steel in his voice.

  Charmian was back at us, still standing very erect. “What have you done with Puzzi’s remains, Mr. Chambrun?”

  “I have them.”

  “I would like to give him a decent burial,” Charmian said. “And now, if you will excuse me—” She turned and literally ran out of the room.

  Helwig watched her go. “She was very fond of the little dog,” he said.

  “And from what I hear, of Bruno Wald,” Sam Culver said.

  Black glasses turned on him. “What you have heard, Mr. Culver, is a complete fairy story,” Helwig said. He smiled, thin and cruel. “Perhaps Mr. Chambrun would be interested in an account of your own relationship with Madame some years ago. He might find the possibility of a revenge motif in that background, too, don’t you think?”

  I had never seen Sam Culver without his lazy smile near the surface before. His face had gone dead-white. …

  “She is beyond belief,” Chambrun said. He was walking restlessly up and down the thick Oriental rug in his office. Sam Culver was at the sideboard, pouring himself a very stiff slug of bourbon on the rocks. I stood near the office door with Ruysdale, wanting to get back to Shelda and Red Shoes. I hadn’t been dismissed.

  I glanced at the chair against the wall. Puzzi’s remains had been removed.

  “Here is a woman,” Chambrun said, talking more to himself than to us, “with an incredible history of self-indulgence, debauchery, and cold-blooded villainy. She hasn’t a line in her face to show for it. She has on a mask of almost childlike innocence. She looks twenty years old, untouched by life.”

  “Conscienceless,” Sam said, the neck of the bourbon decanter chattering against the rim of his glass.

  “The picture of Dorian Grey,” Miss Ruysdale said, surprisingly.

  “Helwig runs the show,” Chambrun said.

  Sam took a long swallow of his drink. “Her legal adviser,” he said. “I understand he was a brilliant criminal lawyer in prewar Germany.”

  Chambrun turned on him. “Do I have to beg you, or do you tell me?”

  “Tell you?”

  “What the bloody hell Helwig was talking about—finding a revenge motif in your past relationship with Charmian Zetterstrom.”

  “Charmian Brown,” Sam said, staring at the brown liquor in his glass. “That was her name when I knew her. Zetterstrom hadn’t been heard of in those days.”

  “So, I beg!” Chambrun said, angrily.

  Sam looked at him, and his gentle eyes were haggard. He looked, suddenly, very tired.

  “Do you believe for an instant, Pierre, that I slaughtered that little dog?”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “Well, that’s something, at any rate,” Sam said. He hesitated, and then went back to the sideboard and filled his glass to the brim again. He came over and dropped down wearily into the high-backed armchair by Chambrun’s desk. The tired eyes turned toward Ruysdale and me as though he wished we weren’t there.

  “I’ll be in the outer office if you need me, Mr. Chambrun,” Ruysdale said.

  “No, don’t go, Miss Ruysdale.” Sam’s smile was wry. “I know whatever I tell Pierre in confidence will be repeated to you and Mark. He has no secrets from you two if the subject relates even remotely to the Beaumont.”

  “And does it?” Chambrun asked.

  “In the sense that Charmian and I are both guests of the hotel.”

  Somehow I wanted to get out of there more than ever before. I didn’t want to hear confessions from Sam. But I had no choice. Ruysdale and I exchanged uncomfortable glances. I could see she felt the same way. Chambrun didn’t acknowledge our presence by so much as an eye-blink. He didn’t offer to send us away, which would have been a courtesy to a friend like Sam. He walked around and sat down behind his desk, his eyes hidden behind the heavy lids. Ruysdale walked over to the sideboard and brought him a demitasse of his Turkish coffee. Then she went to the far end of the paneled room and sat down somewhere in the shadows. Reluctantly I appropriated the chair where Puzzi’s mangled body had recently rested.

  “My father was an ordained Episcopal minister,” Sam said. “Joshua Culver.” The old, lazy smile suddenly reappeared. “The Culver men were all named after Old Testament prophets. My grandfather was Micah; my father, Joshua; I am Samuel; my brother, who was killed in Korea, was Jeremiah. They were not as burdensome as some nonsensical namings. They all contracted nicely—Mike, Josh, Sam, Jerry. But they do suggest the kind of strict moral background of the Culvers.

  “My father gave up the active ministry fairly early in his career to go into teaching at a famous boys’ school in northwest Connecticut, and by the time I was old enough to know what time of day it was he’d become the headmaster. He became a kind of legend in his time, a stern man, but with wit, and enormous sympathy for and understanding of the adolescent male. He was a great man, my father. I thought so then and I think so now.

  “One of the most important trustees of the school was a man named Huntingdon Brown. He lived in the school town, gave a large financial gift to the school annually, and made no bones of the fact that he had left several million dollars to the school in his will. He was a widower with one daughter—Charmian. He was strait-laced as an old-fashioned corset. Quite often he was invited to conduct the services in the school chapel. Charmian was the apple of
his eye and, in his rose-colored perspective, an angel.

  “Even as a little girl she was beautiful—but not an angel. We were the same age, but she was ready to explore the mysteries of sex long before I was. At age eleven she persuaded me to play ‘doctor’ with her under her father’s front porch.” Sam chuckled. “At least I discovered the differences between the male and female bodies. She was always climbing around in older men’s laps, including my father’s. My father was like an uncle to her. Actually, she was brought up to call him Uncle Josh. There were many occasions when old man Brown had to go away on business trips. There was a housekeeper to look after Charmian, but it was dull for her and my mother often suggested that Charmian stay with us when her father was away. I think my mother and father thought of her as sort of an extra child.

  “She was mischievous and full of fun, but she could be cruel. She wouldn’t hesitate to make us kids look bad in a situation if it would help draw attention to herself. She was a fantastic show-off. At age ten she announced that she was going to be the world’s greatest actress, and so far as I know she never changed her mind until Conrad Zetterstrom came along. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  “One summer, when Charmian was sixteen, she came to stay with us during an absence of her father’s. She was something pretty exciting by then—a woman, squirming with eagerness to be fulfilled. At sixteen I was a gawky, fumbling nothing, and my brother Jerry, three years younger, didn’t figure in things at all. I’ve never forgotten that first night of Charmian’s proposed visit. I think you’ll see why.

  “It was a sultry August evening, steaming-hot, with a rumbling threat of thunderstorms in the air. Charmian and I played Ping-pong on the screen-porch, of all things. Half a dozen times as we scrambled after an elusive ball she managed to make bodily contact with me, rubbing her very female figure against my skin and bones. I was too stupid to react with anything but embarrassment.

  “Eventually we all went to bed. I remember waking up in the middle of the night and realizing that the long threatened thunderstorm had hit us. The rain was pouring down, and the wind was whipping at the window curtains. I saw that it was raining in my window and I got up and paddled across a wet floor to close the window. I was just heading back for bed when I heard a wild screaming coming from somewhere down the hall. It sounded as though someone were being murdered in cold blood.

  “I grabbed my bathrobe and ran out into the hall, where the screaming was ear-piercing. I saw my father, in pajamas and bathrobe, coming out of the room where Charmian was supposed to be sleeping. And the screams came from there. It was Charmian who was screaming.

  “My mother, also in dressing gown, came out of her and father’s room.

  “ ‘What is it, Josh?’ she asked.

  “ ‘Damned little idiot,’ my father said.

  “My mother didn’t wait for anything more. She ran down the hall to Charmian’s room and went in, closing the door. The screaming stopped and was replaced by the sounds of hysterical weeping and my mother’s low, urgent voice.

  “My father looked dazed. He became aware of me and came slowly toward me.

  “ ‘What scared her, father?’ I asked him.

  “He shook his head from side to side. ‘It was raining in on that side of the house,’ he said. ‘I went in to close her windows. She was frightened of the storm. I sat down on the edge of her bed to comfort her, as I have done all through her childhood.’ His laugh was harsh. ‘Only a little while ago she used to ask for a story to go to sleep by. When she was reassured I bent down to kiss her good night, as I have a thousand times before, she grabbed hold of me and started to scream.’

  “ ‘Still frightened by the storm,’ I said.

  “My father gave me a bewildered look. His voice was harsh. ‘The miserable little bitch says I tried to molest her,’ he said. ‘That’s what she’s telling your mother now.’

  “It just didn’t make sense to me. I knew my father wasn’t capable of any such monstrous thing. We stood there in the hall, he looking as though someone had slugged him. Then my mother came out of Charmian’s room. She was paper-white. She came straight up to my father.

  “ ‘She’s calling her father in New York,’ my mother said. ‘I couldn’t dissuade her.’

  “My father’s voice shook. ‘Elizabeth, you know—’

  “ ‘Of course I know,’ my mother said. I remember she touched his face with her fingers.”

  Sam drew a deep breath. “It’s a long story and I needn’t bother you with much more of the detail,” he said. “Huntingdon Brown came back that night—or early morning. He listened to Charmian’s story and she convinced him. Charmian, he said, was incapable of lying about such a thing. Nothing my father or mother would say would convince him otherwise. I knew, and my mother and father both knew, that the only thing she was incapable of was the truth—about this or anything else. She was—is—a congenital liar.

  “Late the next afternoon at an emergency meeting of the school’s trustees, my father was forced to resign his post as headmaster. There was no publicity in the press, but the story spread like a grass fire. The whole community assumed that my father was a lecherous old goat, guilty of criminal assault against a minor. Criminal charges weren’t brought because Huntingdon Brown wanted to protect his daughter from public disgrace.

  “The house we lived in belonged to the school, and in the space of a few days we had to move a collection of possessions accumulated over the years. But move to where? It became instantly apparent that my father was to be hounded by Brown; that he could never find himself a job in any school or college, and certainly couldn’t go back to the Church. We had lived all these years on a school teacher’s salary plus the various benefits, like the house, provided by the school. There were now no savings, no house, and no salary of any sort in prospect.

  “An old friend of my father’s who believed him offered him a house, rent-free, in California. We disposed of most of our belongings and took the trip west. The house was near Hollywood. I got a job in one of the studios. My mother did baby-sitting and housekeeping chores for one of the lesser film actresses. There was nothing for my father. Somehow the word had followed us to California. He couldn’t even get a job cutting grass. They were afraid he might molest one of their children, for Godsake! Poor, dear man.

  “One day I came home from work. On the dining-room table there was a note from my mother, saying she was spending the night with the actress’ children and telling what there was for supper for my father and Jeremiah and me. No one else was at home, it seemed. I went up to my room and found a note propped up on my bureau, written in my father’s strong, distinctive hand. It instructed me not to let my mother go down into the cellar. It said he loved me, and that he was sorry, but there was simply no way out for him.

  “I raced down into the cellar and found him hanging by his belt from a furnace pipe. He’d been dead for quite some time.”

  Sam looked at us. I think we were all stone statues. He got up and went over to the sideboard to refill his glass. No one spoke. Finally he came back and sat down again.

  “This is not the time to discuss the morality of suicide,” he said, “but my father was driven to it by that bitch. But do you know, as time went on, I began to be gnawed by doubts. If he was innocent, why? He had the bulwark of his religion. He had the belief and faith in him of his family. It was a hard time, but where had his courage gone? I knew Charmian. I knew she would do it in Macy’s window to attract attention to herself. I began to wonder if perhaps my father hadn’t made love to her. Oh, she’d have relished it from anyone. Then she’d decided to make her own special, murderous capital out of it. It began to grow more certain in my mind that only a secret guilt could have driven my father to kill himself. He had been a hero figure, a God figure, to me. The doubts about him were like a painful growth in my gut.

  “Well, time went on. About four years after my father’s death things had begun to break for me at the studio. I’d got into publ
icity, and then, when I’d just passed my twenty-first birthday, I sold a story to one of the big independent producers. From then on I was economically secure. I was wined and dined by the Hollywood elite as one of the ‘bright young men.’ It was while I was riding that first crest of success that I read in Variety, the show-business bible, that a young actress named Charmian Brown, who’d created a small stir in some off-Broadway production, had been signed to a contract by one of the major studios. She’d always said she’d be the greatest, and evidently she was on her way.”

  Sam took time out to make himself his third drink. His eyes were very bright, but the color had completely drained from his face.

  “The doubts about my father were suddenly very much alive again, very painful,” Sam said, when he’d resettled in his chair. “I told myself that when Charmian got to Hollywood I’d see her and settle my doubts.

  “She was elusive for a while. She’d arrived with considerable fanfare for a nobody, and I heard that she was very rich. Huntingdon Brown had died and left her a very substantial part of his huge fortune. From the very beginning she’s always been able to buy what she wanted, even before Conrad Zetterstrom.” Sam shifted in his chair. “That isn’t quite accurate, because she was never able to buy herself a career as an actress. The trouble was, she just wasn’t very good. But in those first few months that she was in Hollywood that hadn’t yet been revealed. She was beautiful, photogenic, she’d had one set of good notices off-Broadway, and she’d sleep in any bed that might do her career some good.

  “When we first met at a party somewhere she brushed me off in a hurry. I was, she figured, a nobody, a kid she’d grown up with. But after a while she got the message somewhere. I was an important young writer.

  “She called me on the phone one day, and invited me to her apartment for dinner. God, she was so transparent. She’d learned that I might be some use to her. The dinner was an intimate tête à tête by candlelight. She talked gaily about our childhood, the old days, never once coming anywhere near the basic tragedy that lay between us. I bided my time. I thought I knew what was going to happen, and I thought I knew when the right time would come to ask the question I had to ask.