Gilded Nightmare

by Hugh Pentecost

  Nevers reported one empty room on the nineteenth floor. It was all the way around on the south side of the building. It would have required something almost unbelievable in balance and courage for anyone to edge along the ledge, turn the corner of the building, and edge along another thirty yards to that empty room.

  “If you assume she went this way,” Chambrun said when I reported to him, “you have to ask yourself a question. If she got around the corner of the building and into a room, empty or occupied, why didn’t she phone us for help?”

  “If she made it,” Hardy said. He was looking down at the street, his face set.

  “There are no overhangs, no jut-outs,” Chambrun said, matter-of-factly. “If she fell, it would have been straight down to the sidewalk. We’d have heard about it.”

  “So we put the screws on these other freaks,” Hardy said.

  “But carefully,” Chambrun said. “I don’t want them to know she asked for help. I’d like to hear their explanation for what’s happened.”

  We walked through the connecting rooms to what was Charmian’s sitting room. The Zetterstrom forces were gathered there—Helwig, Masters, Clara Brunner, the doctor, and Peter Wynn. You could smell tension.

  “There’s a very small chance she got out into the hall without being seen,” Chambrun said to Helwig. “Very small. The other possibility is that she edged her way along the ledge outside those windows, around the corner of the building, and into a room on the south side.”

  A strange animal noise came from Clara Brunner. Her hands moved in frantic signs.

  “Clara reminds me that the Baroness is terrified of heights,” Helwig said. “She’d never in the world have tried anything so risky.”

  “What interests me most, Herr Helwig, is why she went at all—so secretly,” Chambrun said. “You clearly don’t know where she is. You were all dressed or dressing to start a search for her when we arrived. You haven’t even tried to invent an explanation.”

  “We don’t have an explanation,” Helwig said.

  “How did you discover she was missing?”

  Helwig glanced at his white-gold wrist watch. “A little less than an hour ago,” he said. “We had all gone to bed. It has been an exhausting stretch of time for all of us: the trip from London, and then the series of violences here; your endless questioning. The Baroness was worn down to a thin edge. I’ve never seen her so close to cracking. We were all worried about her. Clara helped her prepare for bed, made sure she had everything she needed.”

  Clara Brunner’s hands spoke again, rapidly.

  “Clara says the Baroness didn’t actually get into bed in her presence,” Helwig interpreted. “She was going to take a hot bath—to relax. About a half an hour later Clara heard a sound—as though something had fallen in the Baroness’ room. It could have been a fall, or a door or window slamming. In any case, she got up out of her own bed, put on her robe, and went into the Baroness’ room. The Baroness wasn’t there—or in the bathroom, or any of the other rooms. Clara woke me and the others and we all searched for her. She was gone.”

  “Clara prepared her for bed, you say. Was she undressed?”

  The Amazon nodded, her hands working.

  “Undressed and wearing a dressing gown,” Helwig said. He hesitated. “But she evidently dressed again. A plain black dress is missing, and a small handbag, and a pair of black shoes.”

  “So she intended to go somewhere?”

  “So it would seem.”

  “Unless she was forced to go against her will,” Chambrun said.

  “By whom?” Helwig asked, his voice sharpened. “None of us has left here. Your man in the hall will tell you that. And yet, somehow, she did get out of these rooms.”

  I’ve listened to a lot of tall stories in my time and I flatter myself I have an ear for them. I could have sworn that Helwig wasn’t acting. He was as puzzled as we were.

  Chambrun tapped a cigarette on the back of his silver case and then lit it. His eyes were narrow slits in their deep pouches.

  “I know it’s futile to ask you, Herr Helwig, why the Baroness should be afraid of you,” he said.

  “Afraid of us?” Helwig said. “You must be dreaming, Mr. Chambrun. We are the people she depends on for everything. Masters is paid to protect her. Each of us handles some part of her very complex affairs. We are the only people she can trust without question.”

  “Then why this secret flight?”

  “It is incredible,” Helwig said. “But she must be found, and found at once. There is a murderer at large whom you haven’t caught. However she was lured away, or persuaded to go, she is obviously in very real danger. Instead of standing here playing guessing games you should have the whole police force searching for her—the hotel staff.”

  “And me,” Masters said. He was smiling, but his eyes were as cold as two newly minted dimes. “I’m not staying penned-up in this place, Lieutenant. I’m going out to find her.”

  “You’ll stay here till I tell you,” Hardy said. He was at the phone. The horse was gone, to coin a cliché, but Hardy was very efficiently closing the barn doors. Police were instructed to cover every exit from the Beaumont, public and private. A floor-to-floor search was ordered, which, I might say, would take a whole day if it was thorough. But we all knew, without putting it into words, that Charmian Zetterstrom could be miles away from the Beaumont by now if that was her purpose. Once she had made it into the public areas of the hotel she could simply have walked out the front door onto Fifth Avenue unnoticed.

  2

  AT FOUR-THIRTY IN THE morning an army of cleaners takes over the public areas of the Beaumont: the lobby, the bars, the restaurants, the ballroom, the public Johns. They are armed with vacuum cleaners, brass- and glass-polishing potions, electrically driven trash wagons, dusters on long poles for cleaning the elaborate chandeliers, buckets and mops. There is nothing so efficient as old-fashioned elbow grease, according to Chambrun.

  At six o’clock this highly efficient army was still at it. They had been at it at the exact time that Charmian Zetterstrom must have vanished from her suite on the nineteenth floor. This crew is made up largely of older women, and women have an instinctive way of noticing other women, particularly attractive ones.

  The man in charge of this army is one Chester Gobillot, and he’s worked at his job for longer than the memory of man. He knows all his workers, their aches and pains, their family problems. They trust him.

  “No one noticed a lady going out at around five o’clock,” Chester told Chambrun.

  We were going back into Chambrun’s office, involved in what might be called a meeting of the General Staff. Nevers, the night clerk, was there, and Mike Maggio, the night bell captain; Jerry Dodd; Mrs. Kiley, the night chief operator; Jacques Fresney, the head chef in the kitchens on that shift; and of course the efficient Miss Ruysdale.

  “No reason they should, particularly,” Chambrun said. “But they might have.”

  Chester grinned. “It’s the people coming in interests them most,” he said. “Some of them are in pretty rough shape after a night on the town. I remember—”

  “Another time, Chester,” Chambrun said. Like Hardy, he was closing the barn doors a little late. But even without advance instructions hotel people have a special gift for noticing things. A chic-looking woman going out at five o’clock in the morning would be noticed, simply because it wasn’t ordinary. The doorman would have noticed; Mike Maggio, if he’d been in the lobby, would have noticed; and so would Karl Nevers. Surely if Charmian had left by any of the nonpublic routes she would have called attention to herself. Monsieur Fresney and his kitchen crew would have remembered if she’d passed through their domain. It was just barely possible she could have left the hotel unnoticed, but it wasn’t probable.

  “I’m guessing that she’s still somewhere in the hotel,” Chambrun said. “If she is, I’m also guessing that she will try to get to me. She may be trying to avoid Hardy’s cops. I want it made easy for he
r to get to me. If any of you spot her, bring her here without involving the police if you can.” He turned to Mrs. Kiley. “I want all phone calls to the Zetterstrom rooms on the nineteenth floor monitored, Mrs. Kiley.”

  “There have been no calls, in or out, since the girl was murdered,” Mrs. Kiley said. “I took it on myself to keep track.”

  “Good woman,” Chambrun said. I knew that eliminated the possibility that someone from outside had called Charmian and persuaded her to slip away.

  Chambrun turned to Mike Maggio. “Two things, Mike,” he said. “Atterbury didn’t notice who left that note for Sam Culver at the desk. It’s possible he didn’t notice because it was someone he wouldn’t notice—someone who might logically be there—a bellboy, a waiter. Was a bellboy ever summoned to 19-B? Was any room service involved? Were any maids on the floor asked to deliver the note?”

  “Check,” Mike said.

  “And the missing clothes of Peter Wynn’s—red pants, blue frock coat. If they were bloodstained I wonder if we aren’t wasting time waiting for the valet to show up. More likely in a trash can or at the bottom of one of the laundry chutes. Follow up.”

  “Will do,” Mike said.

  “I want to talk to you, Jerry. The rest of you get back on the job. This woman’s life may depend on your keeping your eyes peeled.”

  They trooped out, all but Jerry Dodd. “It might improve the state of the world if something bad did happen to the Baroness Zetterstrom,” Jerry said, drily. “Personally I couldn’t care less, except for the bad publicity for the hotel. I can’t forget the stories Sam Culver told us. That woman deserves trouble.”

  “Sam Culver is what I want to talk to you about,” Chambrun said. “That note suggested he would be in some kind of danger at the party the lady was planning. It’s just possible, in view of what’s happened and is happening, that his danger moment may be moved up in time. I’m going to call him and suggest to him that he come down here. He can use my dressing room if he needs to sleep.” Chambrun nodded toward the door of the small room where he keeps extra changes of clothes. There was a comfortable bed there, planned to provide the great man with a place to take forty winks during a busy day, something he had never thought of doing in his entire life.

  Sam Culver was evidently in a deep sleep. It took him some time to answer Chambrun’s call, and even longer to make any sense out of the story of Charmian’s disappearance. He finally agreed to come down to the office.

  When Chambrun replaced the telephone receiver, the little red button on the base of the phone began to blink. There is a conference box on the desk and Chambrun switched it on so that Jerry and I could hear. Lieutenant Hardy’s voice was actually cheerful.

  “Stephen Wood killed the dog,” he said. “He admits it. Right now he denies having attacked the girl, but we ought to have it out of him before long.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Jerry Dodd’s office,” Hardy said. “Care to join the party?”

  “I care,” Chambrun said. …

  Stephen Wood looked like a man burning up with a fever. His eyes were hot coals in their sockets. He was slumped in an armchair in Jerry Dodd’s office back of the lobby desk. He was wearing slacks and a soiled white shirt, necktie loosened at the collar. There was no sign of a coat in the office. I remembered Hardy had mentioned bloodstains on the sleeve. The jacket was probably at the police lab.

  Hardy’s first words to us confirmed that. “Lab checked out the dog’s blood on this character’s coat,” he said. “That cracked him.”

  Sergeant Molloy was standing just back of Wood’s chair. I imagined he and Hardy had been conducting a pretty tough session with Wood.

  Wood’s story, repeated disjointedly for us, wasn’t pleasant to hear. The man had difficulty talking above a whisper. It was probably a combination of fatigue and a bruised larynx from the blow Masters had struck him earlier in the day. He kept moistening his lips, which looked fever-cracked.

  “I killed the dog,” he whispered. “I killed him. But that’s all, before God!”

  “We got all day,” Hardy said, “in which to hear about the dead girl.”

  “I tell you I never laid eyes on her.”

  “About the dog,” Chambrun said, in a faraway voice.

  As he talked, Wood seemed to writhe in his chair, as though he were in some kind of physical pain. It came out of him in little short bursts. Seeing Charmian in the lobby when she’d arrived the day before had acted like an explosion inside him. All his pent-up hatred for everything Zetterstrom had boiled over. It hadn’t been helped by Masters’ brutal attack. Wood was burning up with anger. Complicating his anger was the stubborn conviction that the woman he’d confronted in the lobby was not the Baroness Zetterstrom.

  “She couldn’t be!” he said. “I stood closer to her than I am to any of you in this room. I tell you that woman couldn’t be forty years old! It’s impossible. But that’s not all. She looked straight at me when I called her name and nothing happened. I tell you, nothing! I don’t care how iron her control is, there would have been something—a flicker of her eyelids, a tightening of her mouth. There was absolutely nothing. And I am my brother Bruno’s identical twin!”

  “The police believe that the story your brother told you was some kind of fantasy,” Chambrun said.

  “I know,” Wood said, turning from side to side in his chair. “I know it was the truth, but that doesn’t matter. Suppose she was innocent of any harm done to my brother. Suppose she really believed Bruno died in a boating accident. The sight of his double standing a foot away from her had to produce a reaction. It didn’t. I tell you, that woman who’s posing as the Baroness Zetterstrom never laid eyes on Bruno or she’d have been shocked by the sight of me.”

  Chambrun was silent for a moment, and then he said, patiently: “About the dog, Mr. Wood.”

  Wood seemed to ramble. “After Bruno was murdered—because he was murdered—I spent all my time trying to dig out facts about Zetterstrom Island and this evil woman who’d tortured Bruno. There are almost no photographs in existence of the Island or of the people who live there. It was, I learned, a rule of the house. Guests were not allowed to bring cameras to the Island. The press was never welcome. But some pictures were taken—two years ago, when Bruno’s story was being investigated. They were taken by the Athens police.” Wood waved toward a table in the corner of the office. I saw a scrap-book there. “I got copies of those pictures through a friend of mine who had some political influence in Greece. There is one picture of the Baroness, caught when she wasn’t aware of it. Look at it. I beg you to look at it.”

  The pictures in the scrapbook were mostly of the buildings on the Island. They were hard to believe. The main house was enormous, its architecture a combination of Parthenon-classic and the overblown Hollywood of the thirties. There were pictures of the swimming pools, the tennis courts, the elaborate boathouses. It had all cost more money than my simple mind could imagine.

  And there was a picture of Charmian. I should say there were several pictures of Charmian, but all except one of them were studio stills taken during her brief stay in Hollywood more than twenty years earlier. This woman, posed in various degrees of undress, was certainly the woman I knew. But the one picture taken on the Island was something else again. It was a shock. The photographer had caught her standing on a broad terrace just outside the front door of Zetterstrom’s mansion. She had on black glasses. She was leaning on a cane. The photographer must have been some distance away from his subject but a telescopic lens of some sort had brought the woman’s face into sharp focus. It was a face with lines at the corners of the familiar mouth. She looked haggard. She looked more than forty.

  “That,” Wood said, in a shaking voice, “is the Baroness—not the woman upstairs.”

  I have to admit I was rocked back on my heels.

  Wood told us that on the previous afternoon he’d gone back to his hotel, when we’d released him after Dr. Partridge had checked him ou
t. He’d gone there to get this scrapbook. He’d brought it back to the Beaumont, his purpose being to compare this photograph of the Baroness, taken two years before, with the woman in 19-B. He’d heard rumors of special youth-preserving treatments and operations. He wanted to assure himself by a second look at Charmian that she couldn’t possibly be the Baroness in his picture.

  Wood told us he got back into the hotel without being noticed, so far as he knew. He’d heard Helwig tell Charmian her rooms were on the nineteenth floor, and he went up there, imagining that sooner or later Charmian would make an appearance and he’d have a second chance to look at her closely. He’d waited out in the hallway on nineteen, standing near the door to the service elevator in case he had to beat a hasty retreat.

  “Then suddenly that nasty little poodle was facing me, yipping at me,” Wood said. Sweat was running down his face, “I—I kicked at him to drive him away, to shut him up, and—and he sank his needle-sharp little teeth into the calf of my leg. Look, you can see for yourself.” He pulled up his trouser leg and exposed the mark of the dog’s bite.

  “I—I went completely off my head,” Wood said. “I grabbed the dog by the throat, lifted him up, shook him—cursing at him. He began caterwauling and I was certain someone would hear and come looking for him. I carried him out into the service area. He was still yipping. I smashed his head against the stone floor, over and over, until he was silent. I can’t explain, but I was in a kind of frenzy. There was what looked like a cargo hook hanging there on the wall. They tell me now that it’s used by your people to move big burlap bags of trash onto the service elevator. I took it and I ripped the body of that miserable little beast to pieces. I—I stood there, looking down at what I’d done, and all the rage oozed out of me. I couldn’t believe I could have done such a thing. My legs started to buckle under me. Some instinct made me pick up the bloody remains and jam them down into a metal trash can there in the area. Then—then I literally ran.”

  Wood sat there, breathing hard.