Chambrun’s face was carved out of stone as he sat at his desk, sipping some of his ghastly Turkish coffee. Miss Ruysdale stood behind his chair, waiting for orders. Nobody spoke. It was Chambrun’s ball game.
“I don’t want to scare you to death, Jimmy,” he said after a moment, his bright black eyes narrowed against the smoke from his cigarette. “We have a story from Tony about the closing up of the Health Club last night. I’m convinced he missed something in telling us about it. I’m convinced he was killed to keep him from remembering what he missed and telling us about it.”
“Oh, Jesus!” Jimmy Heath whispered.
“Tony told us you were with him during that final checkout.”
“We always check out together,” Jimmy said. “It saves time.”
“You see why you should be afraid?”
“No, sir. Afraid of what?”
“You may remember what you missed, and before you can tell us you may be the next one on the murderer’s list.”
Jimmy stared at Chambrun, two great tears running down his cheeks. “There—there’s nothing to remember,” he stammered. “It—it was a routine checkout.”
“The body was there this morning. How did it get there?”
“God only knows!” Jimmy said.
“There are only two avenues to explore,” Chambrun said. “The body was either hidden in the club before you closed up and you overlooked it, or—”
“That just couldn’t have happened, Mr. Chambrun,” Jimmy cut in. “No way! We covered every square inch of the place—the pool, the rest rooms, the massage rooms, the steam room, the showers, the gym, the dressing cubicles, the johns, the office. No way that kid’s body could have been there.”
“Then we have to assume it was brought in after you and Tony had closed up and gone home,” Chambrun said.
“It must be that way,” Jimmy said.
“Which means you didn’t lock up properly,” Chambrun said.
“No sir!”
“Go over the routine for me.”
“It’s my job early on to bolt the fire doors,” Jimmy said. “Then at the end, after the place has been cleaned up, the pool drained and refilled, the soiled linen carted out, the fresh linens put on the shelves, the dressing cubicles checked to make sure no customer has left anything behind in them or the johns, Tony and I walk through the joint and he double-checks the fire doors to make sure I haven’t missed one. They were all bolted last night.”
“And then?”
“We check out the kitchen, go to the office, file away the clipboard sheet for the night in the cabinet there, take the front door keys from their hook on the wall—they’re on the big ring with a plastic label—go to the front doors, set the two Yale-type locks on those doors so they’ll lock when they close, go out in the hall and close them. They’re locked. Then we try the doors to make sure the locks have caught.”
“And last night?”
“They were locked, Mr. Chambrun.
“We go down to the lobby with the keys and turn them over to the desk clerk on duty. Last night it was Chuck Dineen.”
“And then?”
“We’re through,” Jimmy said. “Sometimes Tony gives me a ride up to my apartment on the West Side in his Toyota. Sometimes we go our separate ways. Last night we split up. Tony had a date with some chick. I took a bus uptown and across town on 110th Street. I get off at Broadway which is only a block from where I have a room.”
“You know who the chick was Tony was dating?” Chambrun asked.
“I don’t know her last name,” Jimmy said. “Margradel something. She works in a bar down on Madison Avenue. He had real hot pants for her, but she was playing it cool. He had hopes last night was going to be it. That’s why he was in a hurry to get going.”
“Being in a hurry he could have slipped up on something.”
“Not the fire doors, not the main doors,” Jimmy insisted.
Chambrun looked around at the rest of us, as if to invite some kind of a question from one of us.
“Let’s get realistic about this,” Jerry Dodd said. “Hardy hasn’t been able to determine yet where the Sands boy was killed. You’d have to guess it was up in the club. You can’t lug a dead body around this hotel any time of day or night. Customers and guests coming and going from the various bars and the Blue Lagoon until after three in the morning. Then cleaning and maintenance people everywhere. You don’t carry a dead boy in your hip pocket. So let’s say the killer persuaded the boy, somehow, to go up to the fourteenth floor with him. He must have known where he was going to take the boy. He didn’t just find a door that was unlocked—if Jimmy’s right about the close up.”
“Then he had to have keys to the main doors,” Chambrun said. “And if the Sands boy was taken up to the club alive, shot when they were inside, why hasn’t Hardy found any trace of it? The kid must have bled like a stuck pig.”
Jerry’s eyes were narrow slits. He had a theory that made sense. “So the killer gets the boy into the club, takes him to the shower room, and shoots him in one of the shower stalls. He leaves him there to bleed. After a while he carries the body into the pool and dumps it. Then he goes back to the shower stall and washes all the evidence down the drain.”
“The bullet that went through that kid’s head and came out the other side would have left a scar on the shower tiles,” Chambrun said.
“I know,” Jerry said. “I’m going back up there right now to have a look. Hardy’s people could have overlooked a mark on the tiles. The blood was washed away and the killer picked up the slug, but the scar will still be there.”
“If that’s the way it happened,” Chambrun said. “Interesting theory, Jerry. Check it out.”
Jerry took off on a run. Something was itching at me, and I told Chambrun what it was.
“The killer had to have keys if Jimmy’s right about the locking up last night,” I said.
“I tell you it was locked tight,” Jimmy said.
“So, as Jerry suggested, the killer had to know where he was taking the boy and how to get in.”
“There are duplicate keys, aren’t there?” Betsy Ruysdale asked.
“There are duplicate keys to every door in this hotel that has a lock on it,” Chambrun said. “Those duplicates, as you know, thousands of them, are kept in a walk-in safe in the front office. You don’t just ask for them and get them. They’re vital to our security.” Chambrun crushed out his cigarette. “But they exist,” he said.
I knew that key safe. It was a large armor-plated room back of the front desk with a bank-vault door on it which could only be opened if you had the combination.
“Do you remember turning in the keys to Mr. Dineen last night, Jimmy?” Chambrun asked.
“Sure. Tony and I went to the desk, handed the key ring with the two keys on it to Chuck Dineen,” Jimmy said.
“Was he busy at the time? I mean with customers, guests?”
“I don’t remember that he was,” Jimmy said. “No, he wasn’t. Because he made some crack to Tony about how he looked ‘pretty bushy-tailed’ tonight. Tony said he hoped a certain young lady would find him irresistible. Mr. Dineen took the keys and went back inside with them. No, he wasn’t busy with people.”
“It’s an unpleasant thought,” I said, “but if the killer had keys to the Health Club someone on the inside must have sold us out, boss.”
Chambrun looked at me as if I’d told him a tasteless dirty joke. “I don’t buy that,” he said, anger in his tone. “Not now, I hope not ever.”
He trusted his people.
In the next hour I remember thinking that the early stages of a murder investigation—and I’d been in on several of them in my time at the Beaumont—are a little like bowling in some crazy alley where you knock down the pins and they pop right back up into place. Jerry Dodd’s theory that the Sands boy might have been shot in a shower stall in the Health Club and the bloody evidence washed down the drain didn’t prove out, at least not the way he’d hope
d it would. He couldn’t find a scar in any of the shower stalls that might have been made by the expanding bullet that had gone through the boy’s skull.
Jerry, obviously disappointed, reported to Chambrun that there wasn’t a scar, a chipped tile, anything that would support his theory.
“I know that kind of weaponry, boss,” Jerry said. “That bullet would have gone through the boy’s head with such force it would have to leave a mark. Hell, it could have ricocheted clean across the room. No way it wouldn’t leave a mark on the tiles a couple of feet back of where it exited from the boy’s skull.”
“So, it was an interesting idea,” Chambrun said.
The idea didn’t entirely die there, however, because of evidence Hardy brought to the office about five that afternoon, while we were still knocking down pins that kept popping back into place. Hardy had discovered how the killer had gotten into the Health Club, either to murder Eddie Sands or to dispose of his body.
“Duplicate keys,” the lieutenant told us.
“Not possible,” Chambrun said stubbornly. No one could have gotten keys without some kind of betrayal in the front office. Chambrun was prepared to trust his three clerks, each of whom worked an eight-hour shift, right down to the end of the line. Andy Atwater, Chuck Dineen, and Karl Nevers had been trusted people for most of two decades.
“Not your duplicate keys,” Hardy said, aware of the stubborn set to Chambrun’s jaw. “I’ve got a lab report here, Pierre.” He reached down and put a sheet of typed paper down on Chambrun’s desk. “We examined the keys that are used every day, the ones on the large ring with the plastic label.” He glanced at Jimmy Heath. “The keys Camargo and Heath turned into the front office at the end of their shift last night. There are traces of some kind of moulding wax on the key that fits the upper lock. They checked the lock itself and found a speck or two of the same wax in the lock.”
“Someone made an impression of the keys on that ring and made his own duplicates?” Jerry Dodd asked.
Hardy nodded. “So it seems. It is possible the impression was taken sometime during the day, yesterday—on Carl Hulman’s nine-to-five shift, or Camargo’s five-to-ten shift. When Hulman got the keys back from the front desk this morning and opened up, that’s when the specks of wax got in the lock. Unless you and Camargo used the keys when you locked up last night, Heath.”
Jimmy shook his head. “We don’t use the keys to lock up,” he said. “We just set the locks, close the doors, test them from the outside. They lock themselves!”
“Where are the keys kept during the day?” Hardy asked.
“They hang on a hook in the office,” Jimmy said. “Hulman gets them from the front desk when he gets here in the morning. He unlocks those front doors with them, hangs them up in the office, there’s no reason for anyone to use them again until Tony and I take them back down to the front desk at night.”
“They just hang there?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then any number of people in the course of a day could have access to them,” Hardy said. “Can you make a guess as to how many people may have used the Health Club from the time it opened on Friday morning until the time Camargo and Heath closed it up on Friday night?”
“He doesn’t have to guess,” Chambrun said. He knew every detail of every routine in the Beaumont.
“Mr. Chambrun’s right,” Jimmy said. “Every guest or member who uses the club signs in on that clipboard sheet. Or is signed in, I should say. The clipboard sheets for Hulman’s shift on Friday and Tony’s and mine for the late afternoon and evening will tell you exactly how many and who they were. Friday isn’t the busiest day on our shift—people leaving town for the weekend.”
“Your staff signs in, too—the masseurs, the gym men, the squash pro?”
“And the lifeguard for the pool,” Jimmy said. “We all sign in on a separate sheet in the office. That’s filed away, too, and passed on to the business office on Mondays when the paychecks are made out.”
“I want both those sets of records,” Hardy said.
“I can get them for you if you like,” Jimmy said.
It turned out Hulman had sixty-two users of the club on his Friday daytime shift. Camargo had only twenty-six, less than half his usual number on other nights.
“Any one of these people, plus the staff for both shifts, could have gotten to the keys,” Hardy said, glancing down the list of names that could have been a sort of aristocracy of midtown business, plus some pretty fancy out-of-town guests, plus two work shifts of regular employees.
Jimmy Heath, who had brought the list down from the club, shook his head. “There’s always someone in that little office, to check in the members and guests, to man the telephone. Theoretically it’s Hulman during the day shift and Tony in the evening. If Hulman needs to leave the office to solve some kind of problem, or just to go to the john, Babe Triandos, his assistant, sits in for him. If Tony has to leave the office I sit in for him. If anyone was going to fool with those keys, there is no way it could be done without Hulman or Babe or Tony or me knowing it.”
“Did you sit in for Tony at all on Friday night?” Hardy asked.
“No, sir. Friday night, about eight-thirty, Mr. Shuttleworth came in. He’s a regular member and he wanted to play squash. You’ll see his name on the list. The squash pro was already in one of the courts playing with Mr. Fessler, another member,” Jimmy pointed to the list of names. “I can play well enough to give Mr. Shuttleworth a game so I went into the other court with him. We were still playing when the warning bell sounded. I suppose we’d been in the court for forty-five minutes.”
“So you don’t know whether Tony left the office or not?”
Jimmy looked uncomfortable. “No, sir. But now that you bring it up, I guess I should tell you that toward the end of our shift—after a quarter to nine, say—no one ever comes in to go through the routine. It takes about an hour to undress, exercise, shower and get a rubdown, and dress again—even without a rest period or time under the sun lamps. In that last forty-five minutes it wouldn’t be too unusual for the office not to be covered. Tony might be starting to check out some of the closing details.”
“And last night you were in the squash court so you wouldn’t know for sure?”
“I suppose not,” Jimmy said.
“And we can’t ask Camargo,” Hardy said, scowling.
“He had a date,” Chambrun said. “He told us that, you told us that. He could have been in a hurry to get started with the close up.”
“I suppose so,” Jimmy said. “But in a way that was true at the end of our shift any night.”
“So we have a time when someone could have gotten at the keys,” Hardy said. “Can you tell us what members or guests were still in the club when you went into the squash court?”
“There could only have been about six or seven,” Jimmy said. He glanced down the clipboard list. The names, of course, were in the chronological order of arrivals. The last six or seven names were probably the last six or seven users in that last forty-five minutes. The list ended with Tony Camargo’s initials at the bottom—T.C.—indicating that that was that.
“Obviously there are addresses and phone numbers for these last users of the club last night,” Hardy said.
“In a card file in the office,” Jimmy said. “But you don’t think any one of the members could have been at the keys?”
“The members have to go past the office when they’re leaving?” Hardy asked.
“Only way out,” Jimmy said.
“Then any one of the last eight or ten names who left the club may have seen someone in the office. It’s wide open, just a counter on the entrance area.”
“Yes, sir. If you walked by the office you could see anyone who might be in the office.”
“It’s a tedious business, but we’re going to have to check with all the last people to leave the club, plus the staff who might have noticed someone.”
“Tedious and lengthy,” Chambrun
said. He moved restlessly in his chair. “Saturday afternoon, half these people or more will have left town for the weekend.”
“But you keep the club open on Saturday,” Hardy said. “Hulman came in this morning when he found Sands’ body.”
“But we close up at the end of the day shift on Saturday,” Chambrun said. “Camargo and Jimmy and their crew don’t work on Saturdays. You’ll be lucky, Walter, if you can contact all these people before Monday or even Tuesday.”
“Well, it’s got to be done,” Hardy said. “Can you take me up and get those address cards for me, Heath?”
“Yes, sir.”
“As for myself, I don’t choose to sit here and twiddle my thumbs,” Chambrun said.
Hardy, who had started for the door, turned back. He knew Chambrun from the past. “You hatching an egg, Pierre?” he asked.
“I’m unhappily back at square one,” Chambrun said. “What brought Eddie Sands to the Beaumont? Did he arrive here alive or was he brought here dead? This wasn’t just a mugging, Walter, it was planned, planned, planned! Nor do I intend to wait for Mr. Anonymous to throw us another red herring!”
“That sonofabitch calls us again we’ll nail him to the wall,” Hardy said. “If you have a vision, Pierre, let me in on it.”
TWO
CHAMBRUN HADN’T HAD A vision, but he had a plan of action and it involved me. Betsy Ruysdale, Jerry Dodd, and I were left alone with him after Hardy went off with Jimmy to check his list.
“Somewhere down in Greenwich Village, not far from Jane Street, there’s a stickball game going on,” Chambrun said. He glanced at his wrist watch. “Five-thirty. There’ll be three more hours of daylight. If I know kids they’ll be playing as long as it’s light. They are Eddie Sands’ friends. He probably played with them yesterday afternoon. Did he play the usual time? When did he leave? Did he say anything about going to watch Stan Nelson’s telethon? Somewhere there’s a takeoff point.”
“Got you,” Jerry said. “I’m on my way.”
“Not you, Jerry,” Chambrun said. “Send a cop down there and these kids will clam up. Cops are the enemy these days. Send someone who looks like a cop—and that’s you, Jerry—and they’ll still clam up. It has to be Ruysdale or Mark.” He gave the handsome Miss Ruysdale a thin smile. “They might be embarrassed to talk to a chick. So you’re elected, Mark. I think you could pass as an amiable family friend.”
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