Girl Watcher’s Funeral
A Pierre Chambrun Mystery Novel
Hugh Pentecost
A MysteriousPress.com
Open Road Integrated Media
Ebook
Contents
Part One
1
2
3
Part Two
1
2
3
Part Three
1
2
Part One
1
I OFFER YOU A challenge.
You are to sit, relaxed and unperturbed, your legs casually crossed, your trousers neatly pressed, smoking your long, cool cigarette with an air of boredom while two of the most beautiful girls you ever laid eyes on parade before you wearing transparent evening gowns with absolutely nothing underneath the see-through chiffon and with only an ostrich ruffle circling their hips to conceal the complete woman. You are to view this with no more special interest than you would show the counterman who serves you your breakfast coffee and Danish at the corner coffee shop.
Maybe you could make it. I was trying, but I was certain that everyone in the Hotel Beaumont’s Blue Lagoon Room, where the newest Paris designs were being modeled, could see that I was running a temperature.
“He’s doing this because he likes diseases,” a young voice said at my elbow. “He’s very fond of cancer, which is why he’s doing it.”
My head turned away from the two transparent models as though the hinge was rusty. A pale cloud of tobacco smoke swirled upward toward the concealed exhaust fans in the ceiling. A chamber music ensemble played softly on a raised platform at the far end of the room. There was the clink of glasses and subdued mutter of comment on the transparencies. I caught a glimpse of the elegant Mr. Cardoza, maître d’ of the Blue Lagoon Room, watching the waiters who circulated with silver trays of hot and cold hors d’oeuvres dreamed up by Mr. Amato, the Beaumont’s banquet manager, and executed with the artistic genius of Monsieur Pierre Fresney, the Beaumont’s fabulous chef.
“In Paris he was fond of heart attacks,” the young voice said. “That’s why he did it in Paris.”
I focused on the owner of the voice, fighting the urge to take one more look at the transparent models before they turned their backs on me and retreated up the runway. At any other time the owner of the voice would have had my instant, undivided attention. As it was, she managed it very quickly. I stood up and found myself looking levelly into her wide brown eyes. I am five feet eleven inches tall. I noticed she had on flat-heeled pumps—what I think are called clobber heels. She was wearing a beautifully cut black jump suit with kimono sleeves, tied at the waist with a wide, vivid-pink satin ribbon. Her hair was gold, done in a huge pony-tail knot at the nape of her graceful neck.
“Those nudies,” she said, looking past me at the runway, “are by Monsieur X, whom everyone knows is Christian Dior, and they cost five hundred dollars. In Seventh Avenue chiffon they’ll cost about eighty-nine dollars—and who would notice the difference?”
“On those girls,” I said.
“That’s what I mean, of course.” She gave her pink satin ribbon a little flip with silver fingers. “This is a genuine Max Lazar. He gave it to me.”
“Lazar?”
“No, silly. Nikos gave it to me.” Her voice was husky, her smile wide, charming, young.
“Nikos?” I said, looking blank.
“Oh, my, I thought you knew who I was,” she said. She laughed, and I felt a gentle waterfall of pleasure cascade down my spine. “We’d better start at the beginning. You’re Mark Haskell—I hope—public relations director of the hotel. Yes?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m Jan Morse,” she said, “Nikos’s secretary—sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“I mean I don’t type—and things,” she said.
“I can see that would be a waste,” I said. I looked across the room, crowded with New York’s high society, whatever that is, to where a huge man sat in a huge armchair drinking a huge glass of milk and watching the two transparencies disappear backstage. I had been a little slow on the uptake with Miss Morse. There is only one “Nikos”—Nikos Karados. All rich Greeks are said to be in the shipping business, but there weren’t enough ships on all the oceans to account for the Karados fortune. Karados was a very special guest of the Beaumont’s at the moment, and it was part of my job to report to his suite each morning at nine-thirty to find out if he had anything in mind that needed public relations treatment. The “secretary” had never been in evidence on my morning visits.
Karados was monstrous. I mean big, like three hundred and fifty pounds. He was taller than I, but his huge girth made him look short and squat. He dressed in a rather conservative fashion except for gaudy diamond and emerald rings worn on both pudgy hands. His small bright eyes were set in deep pouches wrinkled by years and years of laughter. I imagined he could be a very tough cookie if he was crossed, but I’d never seen him other than bubbling with good humor. He was as bald as a large egg, and when he smiled, which was continuously, there were bright patches of gold. But you treated this semi-comic man with deep respect. He could buy the hotel if he didn’t like the way his eggs were poached. Beyond that he was an old friend of Pierre Chambrun’s. Chambrun is my boss, the—I think it’s safe to say—world-famous resident manager of the Beaumont, New York’s top luxury hotel. Chambrun will take umbrage at that. “The world’s top luxury hotel,” he would tell you, “unique and unsurpassed. Perhaps, in outer space—!” He would shrug at this remote possibility.
“Nikos is very, very fond of cancer,” Jan Morse said, her brown eyes narrowed as she inspected a new model who came out on the runway wearing a delightfully simple-looking evening gown. My program told me it was “of apricot double-faced gabardine; taut bodice with very cutout round arm-holes; high in back with a scooped-out front; enormous full skirt. All bias.” Oh, well!
“You’ve said twice that Karados is very fond of cancer,” I said to Jan Morse. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“You goose,” she said. “Don’t you know that everyone in this room, except the working stiffs like you and me and the waiters, has paid five hundred dollars a ticket to get in to see these creations? And it all goes to the cancer fund because Nikos is very fond of the cancer fund. All the expenses come out of his pocket—the model fees, the food and drink, the rent of the hall—so that every cent people have paid in goes to cancer.”
I did a rapid calculation and guessed that Nikos was about ten thousand bucks out of pocket for the rent of the hall, the liquor and food, the service, the music, the models. I realized that this hurt him about as much as a twenty-cent tip to a shoeshine boy hurt me. I decided he might as well buy me another dry martini, and I signaled to a passing waiter. I guessed there were five hundred paying customers in the room, which meant the cancer fund was doing very well indeed.
A few days from now, I knew, all these people could get in here without paying a cent to see the exclusive showing of Max Lazar’s new spring haute couture. They could get in without paying a cent if—if they had an invitation. Without an invitation God wouldn’t be able to get in. And how would one go about getting an invitation? One would have to apply to Nikos Karados, Max Lazar’s patron and financial backer. It would be unfortunate if it mattered to you to be present for the Lazar showing—and I knew it was vitally important to a great many in society, in the trade—if you had ever made any unflattering comments about the size of Nikos’s tummy, or the flashes of gold in his smile, or the curious collection of friends who enjoyed the hospitality of his yacht. Getting in to see Max Lazar’s collection would have the world of high fashion panting with anxiety.
“Oh, my God, he’s having another one!” Jan Morse cried out and started to run in and out of tables toward the giant fat man in the giant armchair.
Nikos Karados was slumping down in his chair, like a massive landslide, clutching at his chest. A woman screamed. The imperturbable model in the apricot all-bias evening gown picked up her long skirt and galloped back along the runway toward oblivion.
I was right behind Jan and I saw Mr. Cardoza making a sharp signal to waiters to clear the area. I didn’t shout at him to call Dr. Partridge, the house physician. I knew he’d already done it.
Nikos Karados, fear in his little eyes, had slid down to a sitting position on the floor.
“My—my vest pocket,” he muttered in a voice that sounded like a man gargling.
It was Jan’s silver-tipped fingers that produced the little green glass vial from Nikos’s pocket and unscrewed the cap. She emptied a white pill into the palm of her hand.
“Here, darling—quick—it’s going to be all right,” she said. She tilted back his head and I could see her place the pill under his tongue. “There, there,” Jan crooned at him.
For a moment the fat man seemed to relax, and then his panic-filled eyes turned to me. “Dear God,” he whispered. “It doesn’t work!” He rolled over onto his back, his eyes closed, fluttering.
I felt flooded by all the perfumes of Araby as New York’s best-dressed women tried to crowd in. I heard Mr. Cardoza’s voice, cool and commanding.
“Mouth-to-mouth, Mr. Haskell,” he said.
Most of us on the hotel staff have been trained in first aid. But it wasn’t I who got to Karados. Jan Morse, in her beautiful black jump suit, was astride him, her lovely mouth pressed to his, trying to blow life into his lungs—oxygen that would keep the heart from stopping altogether.
“Come on, breathe, you sonofabitch,” I heard myself saying.
The girl fought for him like a tiger. I was kneeling beside her.
“Want me to take over?” I asked
She shook her head.
And then Doc Partridge was there, his clean carbolic smell cutting through the heavy perfumes. He didn’t stop Jan, but he rolled up Karados’s sleeve and jabbed the fat arm with a hypodermic. Then and only then did he touch Jan’s shoulder.
“I think you can stop that now, miss,” he said.
Jan rose up, gasping for breath. Unexpectedly I felt her hand in mine as she tried to steady herself. I looked down at Karados and saw the dark eyelids fluttering. He was still alive. Partridge—old, white, cantankerous—watched, sniffing at a handful of pills from the little green vial.
Then Karados opened his eyes and found himself looking at Doc Partridge. His thick lips moved in a wry smile. “You old quack,” he whispered. “Your medicine didn’t work.”
And then he died, his moon face twisted by a final agony. …
Sudden death is not the rarest of happenings at the Beaumont. The great hotel is like a small city within itself, with its own mayor, its own police force, its own hospital, library, shops, restaurants, bars, convention areas, day nursery school, scores of employees doing dozens and dozens of specialized jobs. There are the hundreds of rooms where people live for short or long periods of time, and on the top floors there are about a dozen co-op apartments and penthouses, actually owned by the tenants but serviced by the hotel. Elderly people and not-so-elderly people die of heart attacks at a ratio that may be slightly higher than that of the average small town. Overdrinking and overeating and overindulgence in sex may be a little more the order of the day at the Beaumont than in your home town. Several times a year I am involved in covering up the fact that some old goat has died in the bedroom of a young woman who was, almost certainly, not his wife.
The death of Nikos Karados would, I knew, provide the news media with a ball. Nikos had been in the public eye for forty years. He was Greek by birth, but I honestly didn’t know what country would claim him as a citizen. His stamping grounds had been Rome and Florence, the French Riviera and Paris, London, New York, Acapulco. His huge fortune, accumulated God knows how, had first been involved with ships, and then with commercial aviation, with films, with the cosmetics industry, and most recently with high fashion. All these ventures seemed to be games to Nikos, not businesses. But whatever motivated Nikos, the results were always the same. Like Midas, whatever he touched multiplied in value, turned to gold. If he supported a charity, it flourished. If he helped a friend with a loan to start a business, that business was bound to succeed, even though Nikos had no direct involvement. Most very rich men have a sort of sinister aura floating in their backgrounds; Nikos had always been a smiling Santa Claus with a never-empty pack on his back.
I knew it had not all been play. Nikos’s friendship with my boss, Pierre Chambrun, dated back to a dark time when Chambrun was fighting in the French Resistance. Nikos, relaxing at his Swiss estate, had actually been pouring money into the Resistance, helping them to buy arms and munitions and explosives. He had, it seemed, a small but highly efficient espionage force at his command that kept Chambrun and his fighters constantly aware of the next Nazi move. Nikos, smiling his golden smile and passing out lollipops to Swiss children, had actually been a grim fighter in the cause of freedom. Chambrun would regret his passing.
The girl who still clung to my hand as the Blue Lagoon Room was cleared of fashion experts and Nikos’s huge body, covered by a sheet, was lifted onto a hospital stretcher from our emergency room and wheeled away, wept unashamedly.
“He was so kind, so generous, so—so very compassionate,” she said.
“Obviously this wasn’t his first attack,” I said.
“Oh, no,” Jan said. “There have been a half dozen others. He knew that someday the pills wouldn’t work. He wasn’t afraid to die.”
Except at the last moment, I thought. I had seen fear in his eyes, and yet his last words had been a wisecrack at Doc Partridge.
“Is there anything I can do for you, Jan?” I asked. “Can I take you up to your room? Because there are many things about this that involve my job. The news people must be notified. And I assume the whole business of Max Lazar’s showing day after tomorrow will have to go down the drain.”
“Oh, no!” Jan said. “Nikos never left anything to chance—the chance that he would die before some project he was interested in was completed. You’ll find that Tim has all the instructions for carrying on.”
“Tim?”
“Tim Gallivan, Nikos’s lawyer. You’ll see, Mark. Money will have been specially set aside to carry out everything.” She had managed to subdue the tears. “I’m all right. You don’t have to worry about me. Except—”
“Except?”
“It’s going to be awfully lonely later on. Perhaps, when you get untangled, you’d like to buy me a drink.”
“It’s a date,” I said. “But it may be quite a while.”
“My room is nineteen hundred seven,” she said.
We started out toward the lobby together. Mr. Cardoza touched my arm.
“You’re wanted in the Great Man’s office,” he said.
Chambrun, it seemed, was already aware of his friend’s passing. …
Pierre Chambrun is a small dark man, stockily built, with heavy pouches under bright black eyes that can freeze the blood in your veins if you’re guilty of some stupidity, or can unexpectedly twinkle with a kind of contagious humor. Born in France, he came to this country as a small child. He has been in the hotel business all his life, beginning as a shoeshine boy in the barbershop of an unpretentious East Side hotel run by an uncle. He has risen to the top of the heap as resident manager of the Beaumont.
I
think Chambrun’s genius as an executive lies in his ability to delegate authority, while at the same time being always close at hand to take full responsibility for touchy decisions. Every employee of the hotel is aware that by some unexplained magic Chambrun knows what’s going on in a hundred different places at the same time. “When I don’t know what’s going on in my own hotel, it will be time for me to retire,” he says. The Beaumont is his world. To him it is more than a highly efficient plant; it is a way of life.
Chambrun’s private office on the second floor is not furnished like an office. The Oriental rug is priceless, a gift from an Indian maharaja who had been extricated from a romantic embarrassment by Chambrun. The flat-topped desk is Florentine, exquisitely carved. The high-backed chairs are also Florentine, beautiful to look at and unexpectedly comfortable. There is a sideboard by a far wall on which rests the paraphernalia of a coffee service and an ornate Turkish coffeemaker. There is a Blue Period Picasso on one wall, and a witty and impudent Chagall, replete with flying cows and a rooftop violinist, on another. There is no sign of office, no files, no visible safe; only the little intercom box on his desk which connects him with his secretary, Miss Ruysdale, in the outer office, and two telephones, one an unlisted private number and the other connected with the hotel switchboard.
Miss Ruysdale, smartly dressed, thirty-fiveish, a fabulous woman about whom a whole book should be written someday, was at her desk when I arrived. She gave me her cool, somewhat distant smile.
“Hold onto your hat,” she said.
“Now what?”
“Did he fall or was he pushed?” Miss Ruysdale said. “I think you’d better go in. I can hear his knuckles tapping the desk.”
I opened the door to the inner sanctum. Chambrun was at his desk, sunk deep in his big armchair, hooded lids narrowing his eyes to two slits. Sitting opposite him, looking his usual cantankerous self, was Dr. Partridge.
Chambrun pointed at a little green bottle sitting on the desk in front of him. “You’ve seen this before, Mark?” he asked.
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