Girl Watcher's Funeral

by Hugh Pentecost

  In clean, fresh clothes I felt better and looked better. The mark on my cheek and the slightly swollen eye above it weren’t too sensationally noticeable, and the swelling on my lower lip had subsided. I was just loading myself with the final necessities—wallet, handkerchief, lighter, cigarettes—when my phone rang. It was Chambrun.

  “As far as we can tell, the girl isn’t at Faraday’s,” he said. “Any news there?”

  “Not yet. Jerry’s working on it. Where are you?”

  “Precinct house. Faraday’s being booked, fingerprinted, the works. Legal help is on the way, and I am about to call on friends to help combat it. But I had an idea, Mark.”

  “Yes?”

  “The photographer. What’s his name?”

  “Stein. Morrie Stein.”

  “He was taking pictures all over the bedroom, you told me. Miles of film shot from all angles. It’s possible that in all that picture-taking he may, quite unintentionally, have caught Miss Lewis going into Jan’s room, and perhaps the person who went in after her. Get hold of him and get him to develop his film and show you what he got.”

  “Right.”

  “And tell Jerry looking for the Morse girl is not just hide-and-seek. I’m worried for her.”

  “Right.”

  I took off for the 19th floor and Nikos’s suite. The door wasn’t on the latch any more and a plainclothes cop answered my ring. Beyond him in the room I saw our man Cameron. I was admitted when Cameron gave the cop a confirming nod. One of Hardy’s boys, a detective sergeant named Jansen, was apparently doing the questioning. He was working on the girl who looked like Julie Christie. He didn’t pay any attention to me.

  I told Joe Cameron what Chambrun wanted.

  “They’re through with Stein,” Joe said. His smile had a bitter twist to it. “Practically had to drag him out of here. I always knew Chambrun had ESP.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everyone else takes off out of this suite on the run when Jansen is through with them,” Joe said. “Not Stein. Ten guesses why he didn’t want to leave.”

  “I give up,” I said.

  “Someone swiped his camera and his film case,” Joe said. “Stein insisted we should forget about murder and turn the mice loose to find his equipment. Maybe there was something on film. He took over three hundred pictures in that bedroom. But they’re gone.”

  Part Three

  1

  IT SEEMED IMPORTANT ENOUGH for Joe Cameron to interrupt Jansen. The sergeant was a tall, thin man with thinning gray hair and opaque gray eyes that told you nothing. He looked mildly irritated when Joe mentioned Stein until he got to the point.

  “The film he used up, which was in the film case, and the roll in the camera could be important,” Joe said. “Maybe we should worry about Stein’s equipment, after all.”

  Jansen nodded. “Chambrun’s right. There could have been a shot of something Stein wouldn’t remember because he was concentrating on something else. He’s been on the grill, you know. Denies he saw the Lewis dame go into the next room—or anyone else. But the camera could have caught something he wasn’t trying to get.”

  “He said he put his stuff down on the bureau in the bedroom while he went to the john,” Joe said. “When he came out, the camera and the film case were gone. He thought someone was teasing him. Apparently he gets to be the butt of a lot of practical joke kidding. You heard him talk, Mark?”

  “No. Just close one eye and click the camera.”

  “He’s on the wild side,” Joe said. “No sense of humor. The In-people enjoy ribbing him. He knows it. He thought someone had moved the camera to provoke him. His word—‘provoke.’ When it didn’t turn up, he began to yell like a stuck pig.”

  “So now we need a witness who saw the camera taken,” I said.

  “Will try,” Jansen said, “but everybody at this goddam party seems to have been educated in the practice of noticing nothing. One’ll get you five Stein hasn’t left the hotel, Mr. Haskell. He isn’t going to leave here till he finds his precious equipment.”

  I found Morrie Stein in the Trapeze Bar. He was sitting on one of the upholstered stools at the bar itself, face buried in his hands, bent over a vodka and tonic. His long dark hair had fallen down over his eyes. He had on a seersucker jacket over his blue turtle-neck sweater. The tight black pants looked ready to split at the seams.

  I paused a few stools down the mahogany counter, and Eddie, the night bar captain, came over to me.

  “Friend of yours?” he asked, seeing my interest in Stein.

  “Part of the trouble on nineteen,” I said.

  “Don’t bump into him,” Eddie said. “He’ll fall off the stool. Last two drinks have been the eyedropper variety. He’s too stoned to notice.”

  “I want to talk to him,” I said. “If I offer to buy him a drink, don’t flinch. And you can bring me a Jack Daniels—”

  “—on the rocks,” Eddie said.

  I moved along and took the stool next to Stein. “I’d like to talk to you, Morrie,” I said.

  He lifted his head and turned it. Through the lock of hair I saw his bloodshot eyes. He had, for God sake, been crying. Tears seemed to come easy in the world of Nikos Karados.

  “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

  “Mark Haskell, public relations director for the hotel. I’m concerned about the loss of your camera. We don’t take thefts in the hotel lightly.”

  “Well, I should hope not!” he said. He tapped his empty glass on the bar. “Fill her up again, man,” he said. “I want to tell you one thing, Haskell. If I don’t get my films back, you’re going to hear about it, but plenty. The camera is bad enough. But it’s insured; it can be replaced. But nobody can replace those pictures I took. Nine and a half rolls, for God sake! Damn near three hundred and thirty pictures.”

  “What kind of a camera was it, Morrie?” I asked.

  “Leica—thirty-five millimeter,” he said. “With all the stuff I had on it—closeup lens, wide-angle lens—it was probably worth a thousand clams. But the film is what can’t be replaced. You couldn’t place a value on it. Why, I may have got something there—something of Suzie, for example—that could be the picture of the year; of the century, even!”

  “I’m interested in that film, too, Morrie,” I said.

  “Interested enough to find it, I hope,” he said. “So help me, if someone is just playing a mean joke on me—”

  “I don’t think it’s that, Morrie,” I said.

  “You don’t know them,” he said. “They’re always cooking up something that’ll start me screaming. Oh, I scream when I get annoyed. I really scream. They think it’s funny, damn them.”

  Eddie brought the drinks, and when Morrie tried to reach for money, I told him it was on the house. “Mind if I ask you a couple of technical questions, Morrie?”

  “Could I stop you?” he said, and took a big swig of his nothing-drink. “I must be bombing out. Can’t taste the liquor any more.”

  “I saw you working in the bedroom of nineteen-A,” I said, “taking shots of Suzie and her boy from all different angles.”

  He smiled dreamily. “Aren’t they beautiful? Two most beautiful kids I ever saw.”

  “Did you use your closeup lens for all of that?” I asked him.

  “Closeup and wide-angle both,” he said. “Wide angle you catch other people in the background. Makes it look not posed, if you see what I mean.”

  I tried to take it easy. “They asked you questions upstairs,” I said. “Like, did you see Rosey Lewis go into Jan’s room, and did you see anyone else follow her in there?”

  “I told them a thousand times I didn’t!” he said, his voice rising. “I was concentrating on Suzie and Tommy. I didn’t give a damn about anything else.”

  “When you used your wide-angle lens, do you know what was in the background?” I asked.

  “Not till I develop the film,” he said.

  “Then it’s just possible that somewhere in those th
ree hundred and thirty pictures you took Rosey Lewis might be in the background and the person who followed her into Jan’s room, too. You wouldn’t know till you developed the film.”

  He stared at me, his red-rimmed eyes widened.

  “It’s possible you took a picture of the murderer without knowing it,” I said. “I think that’s why your camera was taken, Morrie. Not a practical joke.”

  “Oh, my God,” he said, “then I won’t get them back!”

  Rosey didn’t matter. Nothing mattered to him except he’d lost his pictures of those “two most beautiful kids.”

  “If we found the films, Morrie,” I said, “how long would it take you to develop them—so we could look at something?”

  He shrugged. “My dark room assistant could develop and print them on a contact sheet for you in an hour, maybe less. But you’re not going to find them!” His voice rose in a wail that had heads turning. “You’ll never find them!”

  “Now that we know how important they are, we may get a lead,” I said.

  But I knew we weren’t going to find his film. If we were right, the killer had long since exposed them to destructive light.

  Morrie, his face the mask of tragedy, was looking past me toward the entrance. He raised his arm in a limp gesture of greeting. I turned to look and saw a man who would have been an eye-stopper in any room anyplace in the world. He must have been only just a little under seven feet tall. He was no skinny basketball freak. Every inch of his towering frame was muscled. He was wearing a sort of blue uniform, brass buttons on the double-breasted jacket, and carrying a white yachting cap in huge hands. His height wasn’t the only thing about him to attract attention. I rarely find myself impelled to use the word “beautiful” in describing a man, but this was something out of a classic sculpture concept. His hair was black, thick, and curling against the head of a god. His skin was sun- and wind-tanned to a rich mahogany-brown. And his face! It had the perfect symmetry of something carved on a coin—intellectual forehead, aquiline nose, firm jaw, a strong wide mouth. I remembered photographs I’d seen of a young John Barrymore in the role of Hamlet, only this giant yachtsman would have made two of Barrymore in size.

  He was coming across the room toward us.

  “Who’s your friend?” I asked Morrie Stein.

  “Isn’t he something?” Morrie said. “I’ve taken hundreds of pictures of him. He could make a million in the movies with that face and body—and you should hear his voice. But no, he’s stuck to Nikos. Maybe it will pay off.”

  “But who is he?”

  “Gorgeous George, the girls call him,” Morrie said.

  The giant was beside us. “Hello, Mr. Stein,” he said. His voice was deep, rich, musical, faintly accented. “I’ve been trying to find Mr. Gallivan, but his room phone doesn’t answer.”

  Morrie nodded toward me. “This is Haskell. He’s the hotel’s PR man. Maybe he can help you. Oh, God, isn’t everything awful!”

  The giant smiled at me. “I am George Pappas,” he said. “I am the captain of Mr. Karados’s yacht.”

  We shook hands.

  “The police are pretty much in charge upstairs,” I said. “That probably explains why Gallivan’s phone doesn’t answer. I could try to find him for you if it’s important.”

  Pappas looked at Eddie and asked for a straight vodka in a shot glass. No ice. “We only heard the word on the radio a little while ago about Mr. Karados,” he said. “Of course we’ve all known it would happen, sooner or later, but it was a great shock to all of us.” He was talking about death from angina, not murder. “I have been with Mr. Karados since I was a small boy—cabin boy on the Merina, as a matter of fact. My father was captain. Serving Mr. Karados has been my whole life.” He picked up the drink Eddie brought him and swallowed it in one deep-throated gulp. “May he rest in peace. And then we got the word about Miss Lewis. Incredible. She was a guest on the Merina many times. A wonderful woman. It is hard to believe.”

  I turned to Eddie and asked him to call Joe Cameron in 19A and have him tell Gallivan that Captain Pappas was here to see him.

  “I don’t know if the word is on the radio yet that Miss Lewis wasn’t a suicide,” I said to Pappas.

  His eyes darkened. “I could have sworn to that,” he said. “She was too fond of living, too full of life. I would like to get my hands on whoever is responsible.”

  “Nikos didn’t go easily, either,” Morrie Stein said. “The word is he was poisoned, George.”

  Pappas looked at me. I knew then and there I didn’t want him as an enemy. “This is true?” he asked me.

  “He died of a heart attack,” I said. “But it’s not much of a secret any more that someone tampered with his medicine. When he needed it, there was nothing in his little green bottle to help him. Bicarbonate. He was helped along.”

  Pappas brought his huge fist down on the bar and I thought he was going to shatter it. He muttered something under his breath in Greek. It sounded more profane than any familiar Anglo-Saxon expletive.

  “The police are aware?”

  “Naturally.”

  “This cannot be allowed to happen!” Pappas said. “This cannot go unpunished!”

  “That’s the general theory,” I said. “The police and Mr. Chambrun, my boss, are determined.”

  “Mr. Chambrun was Mr. Karados’s great good friend,” Pappas said. “I would like to talk to him.”

  “He’s out of the hotel at the moment,” I said. I looked at this giant and thought he must know of many secrets in Nikos’s private life. The yacht Merina had been a sort of home base for Nikos for many years. The famous and the infamous had been its guests. I thought of Jan, and asked the natural question.

  “We’re concerned about Jan Morse,” I said. “We can’t find her. She hasn’t visited the Merina this evening, has she?”

  “Miss Jan? But no! She has a permanent cabin on the boat; she’s free to come and go. But she hasn’t been aboard for several days. How do you mean, you can’t find her?”

  I told him, briefly, what had happened with Faraday. “He says she came back to the hotel from a little bar where they were drinking. No one here has seen her. Mr. Chambrun is concerned. She could be in danger, as Miss Lewis was.”

  “Faraday!” Pappas said, clenching his huge fists. “I have always dreamed he might explode at me one day. I would have the excuse to take him apart, limb from limb.”

  “You know Jan well?” I asked, wondering if this beautiful male had ever been offered Jan’s gift to mankind.

  “She has been permanently on the Merina for the last two years,” Pappas said. “A wonderful girl, Mr. Haskell. She made Mr. Karados immensely happy. Do you need help in finding her? I have twelve men aboard the Merina. We will take apart the city of New York if you ask it.”

  “It’s a large place to take apart, Captain,” I said. “For the moment I think the most we’ll ask you to do is let us know if she turns up at the Merina. If she does, hang onto her until someone comes to get her. She shouldn’t be running around unprotected.”

  “You can count on it,” Pappas said. “I will call the Merina at once. Ship to shore phone.”

  I gestured to Eddie. “Give the Captain a telephone,” I said.

  The phone appeared on the bar, jacked in. Pappas dialed a number. Presently he began to talk, volubly, in Greek. He finally put down the phone and pushed it away from him.

  “She hasn’t come to the Merina since I came ashore,” he said. “But my men have orders to call you if she does, and to detain her until they have instructions from you.”

  “Many thanks,” I said, not feeling hopeful. The chance that she might have gone to the yacht after leaving Faraday had been a long shot.

  At that moment Tim Gallivan came across the room toward us. I was a little shocked by his appearance. He’d changed out of his mod gear into a plain charcoal-gray suit, with white shirt and black knitted tie. The bounce seemed to have gone out of him. He looked tired and old.

 
“Hello, George,” he said to Pappas. He looked at Morrie Stein with something like distaste. “You better paddle upstairs, Morrie. They’ve found your stuff.”

  “Found it!” Morrie shouted. “How wonderful!”

  “Not so wonderful for you, friend,” Gallivan said. “It was all in the trash can outside the freight elevator on that floor. Miles of film, exposed, destroyed. Your camera looks as if it might still take pictures, but there’s nothing in it.”

  “Oh, God!” Morrie said, and he hurried away, yelping like a wounded animal.

  Gallivan asked Eddie for a Scotch on the rocks. “Black day, George,” he said to Pappas.

  “Hard to believe,” Pappas said.

  The crow’s-feet around Gallivan’s eyes looked as if they’d been etched in with an engraver’s tool. “You haven’t found Jan yet, Mark?” he asked me.

  “Not yet.”

  He ran a hand over his eyes as if they ached. “I try to keep from believing it,” he said. “I keep assuring the police that, next to me, she was Nikos’s most trusted friend. Knowing her, I tell myself it’s impossible.”

  “What’s impossible?”

  Gallivan looked at me steadily with his tired, lifeless eyes. “Sooner or later, however decent his intentions, man is corrupted by his private sickness, whatever it may be—drink, drugs, sexual deviation. Sooner or later his need to satisfy these destructive appetites makes him unreliable. Jan’s sickness—well, it’s no secret, is it, Mark? An insatiable sexual appetite. I believe she was genuinely fond of Nikos; I believe she was completely loyal to him in every way but one. But she was finally corrupted by Faraday. I don’t blame Faraday. We’ve all been offered her golden gift. You, George, it happened to you, too, didn’t it?”