Girl Watcher's Funeral

by Hugh Pentecost

  “I knew it very well,” Chambrun said. “I’m sorry to put you through this, Mrs. Faraday, but we’ve got to find your husband.” He turned to me. “Let’s try the Fifth Avenue house.”

  My instant reaction was to plead a previous engagement. I could visualize Faraday taking both Chambrun and me apart without too much difficulty. I wasn’t prepared to face him again just yet. I should have known that Chambrun wasn’t going to play hero.

  We had company on the way uptown in a taxi in the person of Lieutenant Hardy. The big, broad-shouldered Homicide man was a comforting presence. As we squeezed together in the back seat of the taxi, I could feel the hard shape of his gun pressed against my arm.

  “I am charging him with criminal assault for the moment,” Chambrun said. “Among the fingerprints your men have picked up in Jan Morse’s room are going to be Faraday’s. We know he spent some time there late this afternoon. That should be enough to hold him on suspicion of homicide. A man who could run amok as Faraday did in my office could be triggered to toss a woman out a window without giving it a second thought.”

  “I’ll take him in,” Hardy said cheerfully. “He’ll probably produce some expensive legal talent.”

  Chambrun’s face was turned to watch the dark tree shapes in Central Park. “I have a lot of friends in this town in key positions,” he said. “I haven’t spent my life asking them for irritating favors. When I do ask for the key to the jailhouse, I think I’ll get it.”

  I’d seen the house on Fifth Avenue many times without knowing that it belonged to Faraday. It was one of the last of the old mansions that had resisted the assault of new, towering apartment buildings. It was a gray stone affair, about five stories tall. The front door, massive oak, looked as if it had been built for a medieval castle.

  I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t what happened. Hardy rang the front doorbell and started reaching in his pocket for the leather case in which he carries his police badge. The door opened before he got it out. We were confronted by a man in a white house coat.

  “Come in, gentlemen,” he said. “Mr. Faraday is expecting you.”

  We looked at each other, wondering.

  We were led across a great entrance hall, thickly carpeted, gloomy portraits of Faraday’s ancestors peering down at us from the walls—and into a living room that belonged in another world. The furnishings were the most modern of modern—chromium, angles, a white fur rug before a huge white marble fireplace, a dozen garish pop-art paintings on the walls. At the far end of the room was an elaborate bar, stacked with bottles and expensive-looking glass. Faraday was standing by it, a drink in his hand. He was wearing white silk house pajamas, cut in a version of a karate expert’s uniform. There were rope sandals on his feet. His perpetually suntanned skin was handsomely set off by the white silk and the white and silver scheme of the room. He gave us a cordial, almost warm smile.

  “I’ve been expecting you, gentlemen,” he said. “My wife phoned me that you were on the way. How are you, Chambrun?” He frowned sympathetically. “I hope things aren’t too bad with you, Haskell.” The pale eyes moved to Hardy. “I assume this gentleman is from the police.”

  Dodo Faraday was so frightened of him she’d had to warn him.

  “Lieutenant Hardy, Homicide,” our Notre Dame fullback said. “I’m here to arrest you on charges of criminal assault and suspicion of homicide.”

  Faraday’s face clouded. “The secretary?” he asked.

  “My secretary is in the intensive care unit at the hospital,” Chambrun said. “God help you if she doesn’t make it. The homicide charge at the moment relates to Rosemary Lewis.”

  “Oh, come on!” Faraday said. “You think I tossed Rosey out a window? How absurd can you get?”

  “You’re aware of your legal rights,” Hardy said. “You’re entitled to counsel from your attorney. You don’t need to answer questions. But I’m booking you. Would you like to change your clothes before I take you downtown?”

  The Faraday mask was completely amiable and undisturbed. “Before we go formal, can I make you gentlemen a drink?”

  “Is Miss Morse here in the house with you?” Hardy asked. “I want her, too.”

  “Jan? No, she’s not here.”

  “I can get a search warrant in about ten minutes,” Hardy said.

  “My dear fellow, you don’t need a warrant,” Faraday said. “You’re free to look anywhere you like. But I tell you Jan isn’t here.”

  “She left the hotel with you,” Chambrun said.

  “True. But we separated shortly afterwards. We had a drink at some little dump down the street from the Beaumont. Then Jan went back to the hotel and I came home.”

  “She went back to the hotel?”

  “That’s where she said she was going. Isn’t she there?” The pale eyes glittered as he looked at me. “She was worried about you, Haskell. I—I’m sorry about the whole thing. I just blew my stack. And your secretary, Chambrun—I just gave her a little push and she fell and struck her head on the desk. I didn’t think—”

  “That little push broke her jaw,” Chambrun said.

  Faraday shook his head regretfully. “When I get turned on, I sometimes don’t realize that I’m a little too rough. Of course I’ll pay all the lady’s doctor bills, hospital, a reasonable period for recuperation anywhere she’d like to go.”

  “You bet you will,” Chambrun said.

  “As for you, Haskell,” Faraday said, smiling, “put a reasonable price on your wounded feelings and I’ll meet it without argument.”

  “The courts will determine the amount of damages,” Hardy said. “Be good enough to change your clothes, unless you prefer to go downtown as you are.”

  “Let’s try to be a little bit reasonable,” Faraday said. “I’m ready to be completely cooperative, Lieutenant. I might even be a little helpful about the mess at the Beaumont.”

  “You and Miss Morse walked out of the hotel,” Chambrun said, “leaving two people unconscious in my office. You didn’t try to get help for either of them. You just sauntered out and went down the street for a drink.”

  “I realize that must be hard for you to understand,” Faraday said.

  “Impossible,” Chambrun said.

  “I’ve been cursed, ever since I was a small boy, with a violent temper. I—well, when I take off, I have no control over what happens. Jan knows me. She knows how I am. The best thing to do was to get me away from there, and she managed it somehow. She knew if I stayed there I might take off again. So—so she got me out of the hotel, and I managed to cool off, and then she went back to the hotel to help. It was the best thing for her to do—to get me away.”

  “If she came back to the hotel, none of us is aware of it,” Chambrun said.

  “What the hell got into you?” I asked, not able to hold back any longer.

  He looked at me, and I saw a little nerve twitch high up on his brown cheek. “Jan is my girl,” he said. “But I know how she is and how any man will react to her line. When I heard you’d taken her down to Chambrun’s office—well, I saw red.”

  “So you slugged Miss Ruysdale,” Chambrun said.

  “When I’m like that,” Faraday said, “nobody had better get in my way.”

  “The world is crawling with anarchists of one kind or another these days,” Chambrun said. “Your kind, Faraday, ought to be locked up permanently for the sake of community safety. Know that I’m going to have a try at it.”

  “Surely we can work this out reasonably,” Faraday said.

  “So cooperate,” Hardy said. “I’m dealing with two apparent homicides at the Beaumont. What do you know about them?”

  You could almost see the wheels turning behind Faraday’s brown forehead.

  “The world of Nikos Karados,” he said. “You call me an anarchist, Chambrun, because I take a slug at anyone who stands in my way. Your friend Nikos was one on a much bigger scale. He destroyed whole businesses, even governments in his time. Cross him on the sm
allest detail and you were promptly crushed, while he sat in his big armchair drinking milk and grinning at you. Power, used the whole length of the scale, from financing a revolution to upsetting a government that didn’t please him, to stepping on a spider that happened to intrude on his living quarters.” There were little beads of sweat on Faraday’s upper lip, and he blotted at them with a handkerchief he produced from the sleeve of his pajama top. “If I knew that Nikos was going to find out something about me that would displease him, I’d use every resource I had to disappear, to dissolve, to evaporate. I am a rich man. Nikos could buy and sell me twenty times over. Not anyone survived Nikos’s anger. I tell you this because you must be thinking of people who will inherit handsomely now that he’s dead; people like Tim Gallivan, and Monica Strong, and Max Lazar, and Zach Chambers.”

  “And Jan Morse,” Chambrun said.

  “Yes—and Jan. But I tell you the motive could lie somewhere else. Not the anticipation of money, but the fear of Nikos’s revenge.” The pale eyes glittered. “Nikos owned people. Do you think Jan could go to him and say, ‘Good-by, Nikos, baby. I’ve decided to make a life with Mike Faraday’? Do you think she was free to make such a decision? Never, unless by luck he happened to be tired of her and was glad to have her go. But if he wanted to keep her, God help her if she tried to go.”

  “You’re supplying both yourself and Miss Morse with a motive,” Hardy said.

  Faraday’s smile was white and mirthless. “Sure I am, because anyone connected with Nikos had a motive. There were dozens of us. Max Lazar, an independent creative genius, got caught in the trap. Nikos had to approve any design he made. Cross Nikos, and he was dead in the fashion field. Monica Strong has to run her business Nikos’s way, or else. Even the models Zach Chambers supplies—let one of them pose for another client in a way that was distasteful to Nikos, like a nudie picture for Playboy or some kind of commercial underwear schmaltz, and she was done in the field forever—and Zach would feel the great man’s wrath, too. It sounds absurd, but if Nikos was sore at the people who make cornflakes, you better damn well not eat them for breakfast. The woods are full of people who were afraid of the Big Crackdown. Don’t look for impatient heirs. If you were enough of a favorite to be in Nikos’s will, you didn’t have to be impatient. Ask and ye shall receive, was his motto. You didn’t have to be in a hurry.”

  “I’m sick of this picture some of you draw of Nikos as a destructive monster,” Chambrun said, his voice harsh. “I knew him more intimately and under greater pressures than most of you. Yes, he destroyed businesses. So do the big chain groceries destroy the little store owners. Yes, he destroyed governments by withdrawing his aid or attacking their financial structures. So does the United States government. Yes, he stopped feeding friends through a golden funnel when they displeased him or tried to use him. I do the same thing. He was a generous man, a kind man, a man you could count on to the hilt in a pinch. What did you want of him? That he should supply you with handouts to support some project he didn’t believe in or care for? No, Faraday. The person who killed Nikos and then threw Rosemary Lewis out a window is the villain of this piece, not Nikos.” Chambrun turned to Hardy. “I think I’d like this place searched for Jan Morse, Lieutenant. I don’t care for her taste in men, but she can be in real danger and I don’t propose to let something happen to her as a result of our negligence.”

  “With or without a search warrant?” Hardy asked Faraday.

  “Oh, I’ll take you on the guided tour, Lieutenant,” Faraday said, smiling his white smile, “but it will take some time. This is a rather large house, going from wine cellar to attic. I assure you Jan isn’t here, but if my word isn’t good enough—”

  “Your word isn’t worth a damn, Faraday,” Chambrun said. He turned to me. “Go back to the hotel, Mark, and start the wheels turning there. It’s possible she went back to the hotel without being seen. Just barely possible.”

  3

  I FOUND A TAXI WITHOUT too much difficulty and headed back for the Beaumont. I noticed the driver kept glancing at me in his rear-view mirror.

  “You look like you could use a plastic surgeon,” he said finally.

  “I bumped into a door,” I said.

  “He must have been a big sonofabitch,” the driver said.

  “Big and crazy,” I said.

  The driver nodded. “You aren’t the first guy I ever drove away from that house with a thick lip,” he said. “What the hell goes on there? Some kind of masochists’ club?”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “You’re a college professor moonlighting as a cab driver at night.”

  He grinned. “Something like that. I’m an actor. You learn quite a lot about this town driving at night. Places people go—and stay.” He pulled to a stop for a red light. “People as rich as Faraday can buy themselves out of almost anything. I had him on a ride to the airport once. We got talking and he found out I was an actor.” The light changed and we cruised on down the Avenue. “He told me he could put me next to some guy who was making underground films. You know, sex games in the nude for the stag trade. He talked interesting money, but it wasn’t my dish of tea. Every once in a while when the going gets pretty tough I wonder if I made a mistake. I’ve cruised around the house back there, but I never got him for a fare again, and he never told me where I should go to apply for the job.”

  “Who else have you seen beat up?” I said, touching my bruised cheekbone gently.

  “Who knows who? But every once in a while someone comes out of there bloody but unbowed. I figured it was Queer Street. You don’t look the type.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You live at the Beaumont?”

  “I work there.”

  “I just heard on the radio that some dame took a dive out a nineteenth-story window.”

  “That’s how I got hurt,” I said. “Trying to catch her.”

  He was right. The Faradays of this world can get away with almost anything. I paid him off under the canopy and told him if he was ever really thirsty, if he’d ask for me I’d buy him a drink. I walked into the hotel wondering what did go on in Faraday’s house in addition to his women and his sadistic treatment of his wife. Chambrun was on target when he said that kind of anarchist should be permanently put away.

  I got a few crude remarks from Nevers, the night reception clerk, when he saw my face. But he located Jerry Dodd for me. He was with Hardy’s men, who were putting the partygoers on the grill up in 19A. Jerry met me in the corridor outside the suite. He looked angry.

  “Any luck?” I asked him.

  “You never heard such jabbering in your life,” he said. “Everybody loved Karados. Nobody saw anything. Everybody loved Rosey. Nobody saw anything.”

  “Unless you had a reason for keeping tabs on someone, it wasn’t the kind of party where you’d notice comings and goings,” I said. “I couldn’t give you a very clear account of who was where while I was present.”

  “What’s on your mind?” Jerry asked.

  “Jan Morse. She wasn’t with Faraday. At least he says she’s not there, but the boss and Hardy are searching the house. Faraday isn’t objecting, so I assume they won’t find her. Faraday says she came back to the hotel about a half hour after she went out with him. The boss wants her found and stayed by.”

  “She’s not in there or in her room,” Jerry said. “Homicide boys are still in nineteen hundred seven.”

  “You better alert the staff to start looking—all over,” I said.

  “Where will you be?”

  “In my apartment trying to get cleaned up a little,” I said. “Then I’ll start wandering.”

  “Check,” Jerry said. A faint smile moved his mouth. “Was she worth that beating, Mark?”

  “You go to your church and I’ll go to mine,” I said.

  I went down to my apartment on the fourth floor, stripped down, and stood under the shower. It felt good. I had a lot of sore spots that relished the gentle hotness. Jerry’s impuden
t question had started me thinking about Jan in other terms than where was she. She wasn’t the first exposure I’d ever had to an eager dame, and I’m not blowing up my masculine attraction when I say that. In my job I’ve been pushed in the path of an endless stream of innocent-looking nymphos. There are the very young who can’t wait to get started, the middle-aged grass widows who are rather tragically desperate, and the out-and-out sex nuts of all ages. I’m there. My job entails politeness, stretched to the nth degree. I’ve learned all the negative gambits.

  Jan was different than anyone else I could remember. There’d been nothing coy or arch about her. She’d been direct and honest about her particular code. I guess a lot of the kids fifteen years younger than I am are the same way, only they don’t have the money to patronize the Beaumont. They aren’t surrounded by all the clichés that controlled my young life. In my day pre-marital or extra-marital sex provided you with a one-way ticket down the shoot to eternal damnation. The kids today don’t think about it at all in terms of right and wrong. If you want it, you take it, with no more thought than you would give to buying a Coke if you were thirsty. Immoral, amoral—you name it. My generation winks at alcoholism, which destroys more people and more homes than anything else in the country. We wink at the hundreds of thousands of deaths and cripplings caused by lung cancer. We like to smoke, so we ignore the warnings and the facts. But sex, the most natural of all man’s hungers, is surrounded by rigid rules and considered a vice if those rules aren’t obeyed. The new youth may have something, I thought. They cut through a lot of hypocrisy, at any rate.

  I hardly knew Jan Morse, and yet I found myself stirred by her and concerned for her. I’d seen her in crisis, and I hadn’t a doubt in the world she’d really cared for Nikos—not just for his money. I’d seen her fight for his life. She’d been loyal to him in her terms, Faraday or no Faraday. I’d seen the reactions to her, even in her own crowd—Monica Strong, Tim Gallivan, Dodo Faraday. She was a no-good tramp because she was uninhibited about her sex life. But she was loyal, and honest, and direct, which was more then could be said about her critics—and most other people. For those very reasons I had to agree with Chambrun that she was in danger. She was trying to find out who had shifted Nikos’s pills, and we had to believe, because of what had happened to Rosey Lewis, that the boom would be lowered on her if she only got within whiffing distance of the truth. She had to be gotten under Chambrun’s protective wing.