Girl Watcher's Funeral

by Hugh Pentecost

  Chambrun’s dinner is not something you interrupt. He often has a guest or two—some important personage staying at the hotel, a friend from some other part of the world, a Hollywood star who hopes to avoid the autograph scramble that will take place if he appears in one of the public rooms. There are a few old cronies around town whom he knows from other times and other worlds. Sometimes the guest will be a nobody like me. Chambrun can be a delightful companion in this one time of the day which he insists must be relaxed and divorced from business. We who know him and his every whim would sooner be shot than interrupt this dinner hour.

  That night I felt I had no choice. My watch told me that he would be about halfway through dinner when I arrived at his second floor office with Rosey Lewis in tow.

  Unless there is a special reason for her to stay, Miss Ruysdale has gone her own mysterious and private way long before the dinner hour. A French waiter named Jacques serves the great man and stands guard outside the inner office door. The hall door to Miss Ruysdale’s office is kept locked so there can be no casual drop-ins. I have the key to that door, but I used it that night for only the second time in my five years at the Beaumont.

  Jacques, a dark little man, ageless, with long sideburns, was sitting on a straight-backed chair outside the sanctum. Lifted eyebrows showed his surprise at seeing Rosey.

  “Company?” I asked him.

  “He is alone tonight, Monsieur Haskell. He expects you.”

  “Expects me?” I said, startled. He hadn’t told me to report back at any special time.

  “He told me you would come, monsieur.”

  I heard Rosey Lewis giggle. “Sees all, knows all,” she said. “Did he say he was expecting me?”

  “He did not mention you, m’am’selle.”

  Chambrun’s dinner was served on a round table placed under the Chagall on the north wall. The cloth had a lace edge. The silver was exquisitely not the hotel’s regular service. There were candles, which flickered gently in the draught from the door as I opened it and led Rosey in.

  The Great Man was involved in removing the spine from a brook trout with surgical skill. He looked up at me and nodded.

  “Good evening, Miss Lewis,” he said. “Please join me. Will you have wine, or perhaps after those block-busting martinis you would prefer something stronger?”

  “Coffee when it’s available,” Rosey said.

  “Turkish or American?”

  “I once tried to gather the material to do a piece on you, Mr. Chambrun, and about all I was able to gather was that you drink Turkish coffee all day. I’d like to try it.”

  “You’ll regret it,” I said.

  “Mark’s tastes in food and drink are grossly undereducated,” Chambrun said. He gestured to Jacques, who had followed us in, and who now headed for the Turkish coffee-maker on the sideboard. Rosey and I sat down on either side of Chambrun at the round table.

  “You’ll forgive me if I continue to attack this trout while it’s still edible. How was it you were able to gather so little material about me, Miss Lewis?”

  “You wouldn’t see me,” Rosey said.

  Chambrun’s eyes twinkled in their deep pouches. “The curse of having a protective secretary,” he said.

  “She was right, of course,” Rosey said. “I was trying to exploit myself, not you or the hotel.”

  Chambrun nodded. “We should get along,” he said. He looked at me. “Well, Mark?”

  “Jacques says you expected me.”

  He smiled faintly. The trout was deboned and Jacques carried away a side plate with the fish skeleton on it. “You would have to find out something in an hour or so, Mark. The next step would then need discussing.”

  I gave it to him from top to bottom. He ate unhurriedly while I talked. He looked up at Rosey when I’d finished.

  “How did this poison rumor start?” he asked.

  “I tried to trace it,” Rosey said. “Everybody heard it from somebody else. I hadn’t gotten anywhere when I saw Haskell and decided I’d better latch onto him.”

  Chambrun savored a mouthful of trout. “It could be pure coincidence,” he said. “Someone starting something for the excitement of it. The pills didn’t work. Maybe they were poison. Chatter-chatter. It grew from the pills didn’t work to the pills killed him. Somebody hit on a part-truth without knowing it. It must be giving the murderer fits. No one was expected to dream of such a thing.”

  Rosey helped herself to one of the flat Egyptian cigarettes from the silver box on the table. I held my lighter for her.

  “The thing that puzzles me about it,” she said, “is the casualness of it. It could have been months before Nikos had any reason to take the pills. These angina attacks didn’t come on schedule, you know. The person who switched the pills was evidently willing to wait an indefinite time for results.”

  “Long-range capital gain,” Chambrun said. He touched his lips with a white linen napkin. “Someone looking to a future security.”

  “It’s so damn cold-blooded!” Rosey said.

  “And maybe not so casual,” Chambrun said. “I need you out of the way. You have angina. The wrong, but harmless, pills would do the job if you had an attack in time to suit my needs. It would be nice for me if that happened, because it would be almost impossible to pin anything on me. But if it didn’t happen on schedule—well, then I would have to try Plan Two, whatever that may be.” He shrugged. “I need money next month. I have that much time to hope Plan One will work. If it doesn’t, then I will have to go to Plan Two.”

  “It should be fairly simple to narrow the field,” I said. “Get Tim Gallivan to produce a copy of Nikos’s will. Your killer is one of the heirs.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me to find there were a hundred people mentioned in Nikos’s will,” Rosey said. “Including me! And Nikos was constantly changing it—adding new friends, subtracting others who no longer needed his help, or who had displeased him.”

  “Who had displeased him?” Chambrun asked.

  “I couldn’t begin to guess,” Rosey said. “He was surrounded by court jesters, and leeches, and people who stroked his ego for the profit in it. Oh, there are plenty of people he’s walked on in the past. He was a ruthless enemy in the business world. But none of those obvious people have been close enough to him, here at the Beaumont, to get at that pill bottle. That had to be someone close; someone who could take the bottle from the bedside table, empty the nitro pills down the john, replace them with soda mints, and get the bottle back before Nikos missed it. He would miss it very quickly, because his life depended on it. But if someone like Suzie or Jan was modeling one of the new Lazar collection for him, or one of those long-haired rock singers was doing a number for him, or Zach Chambers was in the middle of one of his long shaggy dog stories with a sexy twist—well, Nikos’s attention might be held long enough for the bottle to be taken to the john and brought back.”

  “Or while he slept,” Chambrun said.

  Rosey’s healthy face clouded. “There are only two people who could get to him while he slept,” she said. “Tim Gallivan has a connecting room on one side of his suite. Jan Morse has one on the other.”

  “With the keys on Nikos’s side of the door,” I said.

  “They were unlocked at night,” Rosey said. “For all his apparent calm, Nikos was afraid. If something happened to him, he wanted Tim or Jan to be able to get to him without having to send downstairs for a passkey and the house dick.”

  “They couldn’t hear him if he called for help,” I said. “The rooms are soundproofed.”

  “It was their job to check on him at regular intervals,” Rosey said.

  “You’re really up on the intimate details, Miss Lewis,” Chambrun said.

  Her bright blue eyes looked at him, unflinching. “I traveled with Nikos last spring—Rome, Paris. When Tim was away on a couple of business trips, I took his place in an adjoining room. Jan and I shared the job of checking on Nikos every hour.”

  “So the nigh
t shift could have played games with the pill bottle without too much difficulty,” Chambrun said.

  Rosey nodded slowly. “It was always there on the bedside table within reach of his hand.”

  “What about Gallivan and Miss Morse?” Chambrun asked. “I understand from Gallivan himself they are two who stand to benefit most handsomely from Nikos’s death.”

  “I’m only guessing, but I’d say top of the list,” Rosey said. “Nikos was a realist. There had to be a couple of people he could depend on without question. All Jan and Tim had to do if they wanted something was ask for it and they got it. No questions asked. Nikos didn’t want them waiting for him to die. He had to trust them, so he gave them no reason to be in a hurry.”

  “How did Nikos feel about Jan’s outside sex life?” I asked. “With someone like Mike Faraday, for instance?”

  Rosey gave me a wry smile. “You weren’t wasting your time in there, Haskell.”

  “It’s a thing, isn’t it?” I said, still feeling unaccountably angry about it.

  “It’s a thing, according to the grapevine,” Rosey said.

  “Doesn’t Mrs. Faraday object?” Chambrun asked.

  “Mike Faraday is so rich it would take a lot for Dodo to make trouble. She’s too comfortable the way things are. And,” Rosey said, her smile turning hard, “she’s free to do what she likes with her life.”

  “I find the New World rather indigestible,” Chambrun said. His eyes were almost hidden behind their hooded lids. “It’s been very pleasant talking to you, Miss Lewis, but you haven’t come to the point.”

  “Point?” she said.

  “You obviously want something from me in return for not producing headlines for tomorrow morning’s papers.”

  Rosey threw back her head and laughed. “I wouldn’t like to be married to you, Chambrun,” she said. “I don’t like having my mind read, and I don’t particularly like this Turkish coffee.”

  “You want a hot line to the center of things,” Chambrun said.

  “It seems fair, doesn’t it?”

  “Since they’re all talking about it, the story will surely leak,” Chambrun said.

  “But not what’s being done about it,” Rosey said. “Not the truth about the pills. Your only weapon at this point is that you know what really happened. I’ll hold it back, because I loved Nikos in my fashion, provided I get it in time for a beat when you’re ready to talk.”

  “It seems little enough to offer you for your silence, which we very much need at the moment, Miss Lewis. It’s a deal. But cooperation is a two-way street. You’re going to be a part of the fashion circus for the next two days. Can we count on you to eavesdrop and pass along anything that might leave us a little less paralyzed?”

  “If I think it will help Nikos even his score,” Rosey said.

  Chambrun stood up. “My cautious secretary will be told you are to be passed through to me any time you ask, Miss Lewis. You’re going back to the nineteenth-floor brawl now?”

  “It seems the sensible thing to do.”

  “Mark, take Miss Lewis upstairs, and then come back here, please.”

  Rosey and I went down the corridor to the elevators.

  “Does he always eat dinner in such lonely grandeur?” she asked as we waited.

  “Rarely,” I said. “Tonight he was expecting me—it seems.”

  “How do you stand it—having him one step ahead of you all the time?”

  “Mostly it’s rather comforting,” I said.

  The elevator door opened noiselessly.

  “You don’t have to come up with me, Haskell,” Rosey said. “I’m a big girl, you know. Thanks for not being stuffy.”

  The tawny hair glittered in the light from the car ceiling, and she waved at me as the door closed. I watched the little lighted arrow over the door clicking off the floors toward 19. …

  When I got back to the office, Jacques had cleared away the dinner service and Chambrun was sitting at his desk, slumped down in his chair, his eyes hidden in their deep pouches.

  “You did the right thing, bringing her here, Mark,” he said, exhaling a cloud of pale blue smoke, “but I’m damned if I know whether it’s doing us much good to keep our small secret if everyone suspects there was something fishy about Nikos’s death.”

  “The killer will think we’re looking for evidence of poison, when actually we’re looking for something else,” I said cheerfully.

  “What? What are we looking for, Mark? Five billion soda mint tablets have been sold in New York in the last twenty-four hours. What evidence can we expect to find? No fingerprints—no nothing.”

  “So we stay very close to these fashion kids for the next two days and hope somebody’s foot will slip. They do an awful lot of drinking. Someone might get careless.”

  “And Christmas might come in July,” Chambrun said. “But I don’t know anything better to do but watch and listen.”

  “You want me to go back up to nineteen-A?” I asked.

  “I think so. But first take a quick tour of the hotel, Mark. I’m anchored here waiting for someone from the police commissioner’s office to try to convince me that the Beaumont should be swarming with cops.”

  No matter what was shaking the earth under our feet, the Beaumont’s guests were never to guess that anything threatened the Swiss-watch perfection of the hotel’s routines.

  It was a reasonably quiet night in the Beaumont. All vestiges of the fashion show had disappeared from the Blue Lagoon Room, presided over with his usual magnificent calm by Mr. Cardoza. Soft lights, soft music, and gourmet food were its principal attraction. A particularly noisy comedian of the Don Rickles school would shatter the quiet during the two upcoming floor shows.

  The Spartan Bar, presided over by Mr. Novotny, was cathedral-quiet. This is a no-women-admitted room which is really a sort of club for elegant old gentlemen. Two white heads were bent over a chessboard in the far corner.

  A charity ball for the benefit of a New Jersey PTA occupied the ballroom. The tickets were fifty dollars a head and the place was crowded, but the fashion kids on the 19th floor would have shuddered at the 1935 styles.

  I saved the Trapeze Bar till last because it’s my favorite hangout in the hotel. I’d had no dinner, and I decided before I went back to the blast in 19A, I’d better have a Jack Daniels on the rocks and a steak sandwich to blot out the memory of that devastating martini schedule.

  The Trapeze Bar is suspended in space, like a birdcage, over the foyer to the Grand Ballroom. The walls of the Trapeze are elaborate Florentine grillwork. An artist of the Calder school has decorated it with mobiles of circus performers working on trapezes. They sway slightly in the draught from a concealed air conditioning system, giving you the impression, on your third drink, that the whole place is swinging gently in space. The maître d’ is Mr. Del Greco, who can tell you the exact boiling point of ten thousand of New York’s steady drinkers.

  The Trapeze was crowded, the atmosphere gay yet orderly. Mr. Del Greco saw me and did something complex with his eyebrows that was plainly asking me whether I wanted to stand at the crowded bar or have a table. I didn’t see any empty tables, but I knew one would appear if I asked. I made motions like a man cutting a steak and eating it. And then someone called out my name.

  “Mark!”

  It was Jan Morse. She was sitting alone at a corner table, something that looked like a Bloody Mary in front of her. She’d changed out of the jump suit into a raspberry-colored wool thing, very short in the skirt, very scooped out at the neckline. Sexual weaponry, I thought, remembering Nikos’s phrase by way of Jan. Some of the highest-priced call girls in New York wander in and out of the Trapeze. She looked like luxury goods, I thought, and realized I was still mad at her.

  I didn’t mean to do more than wave, but I found my feet taking me over to her table.

  “I’ve been looking all over for you,” she said.

  Mr. Del Greco was at my elbow. “Will you join Miss Morse, or shall I get you a ta
ble, Mr. Haskell?”

  “You can get me a—”

  “Of course he’ll join me,” Jan interrupted. “We didn’t finish what we were talking about, Mark.”

  I ordered my Jack Daniels and steak sandwich.

  “You were asking me who was thinking of lining up with another team when we were interrupted,” Jan said.

  “Who was thinking of lining up with another team?”

  “I haven’t any idea,” she said.

  “You came looking for me to tell me that?” I sounded angry. In spite of myself I was angry.

  Her brown eyes were wide, but fixed very intently on me. “I came looking for you because I knew I’d hurt your feelings. I don’t like to hurt someone.”

  “What makes you think you hurt my feelings?”

  She reached out and touched my hand. Her fingers were warm. I felt like a seventeen-year-old adolescent out with his first “fast” woman. There were suddenly butterflies in my stomach. I told myself, “React your age, Bud!”

  “You don’t have control over everything, even if you’d like to,” she said. “Mike Faraday sends me, Mark.”

  “I noticed you weren’t wearing those track shoes you mentioned,” I said.

  Her body moved inside the raspberry wool, as though she was in pain. “I can’t help myself with Mike. It’s like I can’t kick it. I want to but I can’t.”

  “Look, Doll,” I said, emphasizing his name for her, “I can’t help you with your little problem. You said Nikos would have been angry if Tim Gallivan made a pass at you. How did he feel about Faraday?”

  The brown eyes were wide, disturbingly honest. “He didn’t know about Mike. Do you know, that was the first time Mike ever touched me in public? That moment in my room? It was because he didn’t have to be afraid anyone would mention it to Nikos.”