Pappas nodded. “I laughed at her,” he said. “She was Mr. Karados’s property.”
“There it is,” Gallivan said. He took a deep swallow of his Scotch as though he needed it badly. “Her sickness overcame her loyalty. So I say to myself, she had the most easy access to Nikos’s medicine; Rosey was killed and thrown from the window in her room. I have to wonder if that isn’t why she is missing.”
My mouth felt dry. “You mean she’s running away from the police?”
Gallivan shrugged. “It sounds fancy,” he said, “but perhaps she’s running away from herself. She arranged for Nikos to die, because the whispers about her were growing louder. He was bound to get wind of the truth. Would you believe she wanted him to die, not to save herself a fortune, but to keep him from being hurt by the truth? It could be that intricate, Mark. It could be—with her twisted concept of loyalty. Then Rosey stumbled on the truth and Jan had to act on the spur of the moment. Now—now she is living with a horror of herself and what she has done. She has disappeared to think it out.” He finished his drink and put the empty glass down on the bar. “It will not surprise me if, when she is found, she will not have inflicted her own punishment on herself.”
“You are suggesting—?” Pappas began.
“—that we may not find her alive,” Gallivan said. He signaled to Eddie for another Scotch. “How to go about finding her? She can have checked into any one of a thousand hotels in New York to think things out. She’s not here, not on the Merina, the only places where she had belongings.” He shook his head from side to side. “I don’t want to be the one to go to the police with this notion, damn it. I’m fond of the girl. I may be doing her a wild injustice. Nikos would want me to help her, no matter what she’d done. Your Chambrun may be right; she may be hiding out of fear of someone we haven’t even thought of. Will you talk it over with Chambrun, Mark? He’s had more experience with this kind of thing than I have. I—I just don’t want to be the one to point the finger at Jan, but I can’t help the unpleasant certainty that we want her for murder and not to protect her.”
I felt a sick knot at the pit of my stomach. It had never occurred to me for an instant to think of Jan as suspect. She was undisciplined, free of any moral checks, but never a coldblooded killer. Yet the way Gallivan had put it, the shoe might fit. She might have let Nikos die with the perverted notion that she was saving him from a big hurt. Confronted with it by Rosey, she might—but there I just couldn’t go along. I couldn’t imagine her killing Rosey and calmly heaving the body out her window. And there was the business of Morrie Stein’s camera. To the best of my knowledge Jan had never been at the party in 19A. But there was a blank in my knowledge. During the time I’d been in Chambrun’s office with Rosey Lewis Jan could have been in and out of 19A a number of times without my knowing. That I needed to check on, to be certain.
“I’ll talk to Chambrun,” I said to Gallivan.
“Fine. It’ll take the responsibility off my shoulders. If Chambrun wants me to come forward, I will. Meanwhile, George and I have a lot of business details to discuss—what’s to be done with the Merina and its crew; other affairs that Nikos’s death drops in our laps. With the police swarming over our quarters upstairs, is there someplace we can go to talk quietly? Some office somewhere?”
I suggested that little office back of the registration desk in the main lobby, and I took them down there and had Carl Nevers install them there.
“Mrs. Kiley has been trying to reach you,” Nevers told me, as he took Gallivan and Captain Pappas in tow.
Mrs. Kiley is the chief night operator on the hotel switchboard. I got her on one of the house phones.
“I thought you ought to know,” Mrs. Kiley said in her matter-of-fact voice. “It happened just after you and Mr. Chambrun left the hotel.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“An outside call,” Mrs. Kiley said, meaning it hadn’t come from any phone connected with the switchboard. “A lady who didn’t give her name, inquiring about you and Miss Ruysdale.”
“Name?”
“She didn’t give her name,” Mrs. Kiley said. “She didn’t ask to speak to anyone special—just asked her question of the operator, who turned the call over to me. She was concerned about you. She wanted to know what hospital Miss Ruysdale had been taken to. She obviously knew what had happened in Mr. Chambrun’s office.”
“And you told her?”
“That you had left the hotel. That I couldn’t tell her Miss Ruysdale’s whereabouts. Against policy to give addresses to anyone.”
“Husky, kind of young-sounding voice?” I asked.
“I don’t have a romantic ear, Mr. Haskell,” Mrs. Kiley said dryly.
“You sure it was an outside call?”
“You know our system well enough to know there’s no question,” Mrs. Kiley said. “Outside calls came over to one set of operators, house calls to another. I can’t tell you the call wasn’t made in the hotel. There are dozens of private phones and coin boxes in the hotel. But it wasn’t a room phone, or any of the house phones.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Kiley. And if the same woman calls again, try to hang onto her until you can connect me.”
“I’ll try. Are you all right, Mr. Haskell?”
“Bruised but not broken, Mrs. Kiley.”
“Dr. Partridge left a message for Mr. Chambrun,” she said. “It’s not the worst with Miss Ruysdale. No skull fracture.”
“Good news. Thanks again. And hang onto that gal if she calls.”
It had to have been Jan. What other woman knew what had happened in Chambrun’s office and would be concerned? I turned away from the reception desk and saw Chambrun coming through the revolving door from the street. He had a trench coat draped over the shoulders of his dinner jacket. I was damn glad to see him.
“Faraday’s been charged with criminal assault and suspicion of homicide,” he said. “They’ll probably have him out on bail before breakfast, but we’ll keep him occupied in the meanwhile. You find Miss Morse?”
“Not yet. Jerry’s got a search in hand. But—”
“Let’s talk in my office,” Chambrun said.
On the way up I gave him the good news about Miss Ruysdale. I could see some of the tensions in his face relax a little.
In his office he went straight to the sideboard and poured himself a demitasse of Turkish coffee and a snifter of old brandy. He gestured to me to help myself. I felt as if I’d been drinking steadily for hours. I didn’t want anything.
When he’d settled in his desk armchair and got a cigarette going, I gave him the whole package, starting with the disappearance and eventual recovery of Morrie Stein’s equipment, and ending with Gallivan’s unhappy theory about Jan. Chambrun listened, his eyes hidden behind their hooded lids.
“You think Gallivan’s theory holds water?” he asked me when I’d finished.
“I suppose it could,” I said.
“You sound reluctant to accept it.”
“I’ll tell you the truth, sir,” I said. “My judgment about her isn’t very sound. In spite of everything I—I found her attractive, quite candid about her way of life, different, and—and—”
“Disturbing?” he suggested.
“Yes.”
“But she did have access to the pills, it was her room, she could quite easily have removed Stein’s camera and destroyed his film.”
“Yes.”
“But she did call in to find out if you and Ruysdale were all right. So she’s a good scout.”
“Yes,” I said.
“And she did call us to tell us her room was the place from which Miss Lewis had been thrown. A clever way of throwing suspicion off herself, wouldn’t you say?”
“I suppose so.”
“On the other hand, if she was guilty, why didn’t she just remove the piece of cloth from the air conditioner, close the window and keep her mouth shut?”
“Just what are you trying to say, sir?”
He chuckled.
“That you can use one set of facts to prove two different stories,” he said. “If you want to prove your Miss Morse is guilty, you can use the facts to bolster that theory. If you want to think she’s innocent, you can use the same facts to make that stand up. Only one thing holds fast. Guilty or innocent, she’s got to be found, Mark.”
“She’s not at either of the two places where you might say she lives,” I said. “She’s not on the Merina and she’s not here.”
“We don’t know for certain that she’s not here,” Chambrun said. “She’s not in any of the public rooms, or any of the rooms on the nineteenth floor occupied by the Karados party. But there are hundreds of rooms where she could be.”
“Her phone call came from outside somewhere.”
“There are nearly fifty outside lines in the hotel.” He reached for the house phone on his desk. “Find Jerry Dodd and tell him I want to see him in my office.” He leaned back in his chair and lit a fresh cigarette. “Thousands of people with thousands of complex problems have come under our roof here, Mark, in the last twenty years. I’ve listened to all kinds of reasons, motives, explanations for extraordinary behavior in my time. You can write down money and power at the very top of the list—and underline them. We’re a luxury segment of our society. People who are dealing in peanuts don’t stay at the Beaumont. I haven’t seen Nikos’s will, but way at the top of the heap, in terms of stakes, is our friend Gallivan. I listen to what he has to say with a little question mark at the back of my mind. He wants this mess cleared up and cleared up quickly so that he can inherit his fortune in cash and his empire in power. Nikos’s estate will remain frozen until the police come up with his killer. Gallivan wants this to happen in a hurry. He’ll suggest anything that might help to wrap things up.”
“You think he’s trying to pin this on Jan just to hurry things?” I asked.
“He’d pin it on her—or you, or me—anything to speed up the machinery,” Chambrun said. “He’s got his hands on a golden world and he wants to start running it. I’m not eager to buy his solutions. But I’m in a hell of a hurry to find your Jan. Guilty or innocent, she’s in bad trouble.”
There was a tentative knock at the office door. Jerry would have breezed in. Chambrun nodded and I went to see who it was.
Max Lazar stood outside the door. He’d put on a plaid-patterned tweed jacket over his open-necked shirt and his beads. I knew he must have taken on about a gallon of martinis since the beginning of the party in 19A, but he seemed miraculously sober. His dark eyes moved past me to Chambrun.
“I’m glad to find you both here,” he said. “May I come in?”
“Of course,” Chambrun said.
Lazar came in, looking around the room—at the furnishings and the paintings. “Nikos told me you were a man of taste, Chambrun,” he said. “More than that, he said you were a man to whom he’d trust his life. I’m here because I need help, really from both of you.”
“Sit down, Mr. Lazar,” Chambrun said. “Coffee? A drink?”
“I’d be grateful for some coffee,” he said. “I’ve been rather pouring it on all evening.” He sat down in one of the high-backed Florentine chairs. I got him coffee. He sipped. “Turkish. And well made, which is a rarity,” he said.
I was aware for the first time that there was an almost aristocratic bone structure to his face—strong jaw and wide mouth, high cheekbones. The long hair and the fancy costume had made me think him slightly effeminate. Perhaps his profession had bulwarked that notion; the world of male fashion designers has its share of faggoty characters.
“I have a serious decision to make,” Lazar said. “It’s about my showing on Friday.” He put his demitasse down on the little table beside his chair. “Nikos wanted success for me. He believed in my instincts for fashion. But most of all, and having been his friend, I think you’ll know I’m not downgrading him, Chambrun—most of all, he wanted to win a battle. The fashion writers and the trade journals haven’t given me much of a play. Nikos had tried to say please as nicely as he knew how, and they’d ignored him. Now he wanted to make a big splurge; to go over the top by way of their dead bodies, if you see what I mean.”
“He was that kind of fighter,” Chambrun said.
“I don’t mind telling you, without too much personal vanity, the showing is sensational. Monica has arranged to stage it in really brilliant style; poor Rosey was all set to handle the publicity angles. If everything had gone smoothly, I think Nikos would have won his battle and I’d have been launched to—to the moon. Exclusivity; no mass production at least until the next showing. Lazar clothes worn by only a few society names, like Dodo Faraday, and by one or two big stars in the entertainment world. Everyone wanting to buy, only a few able to. By the time we came to my next showing, the whole fashion world would be drooling to get to me. This time, exclusivity; next time, the world.”
“So?” Chambrun said.
“So now it takes on a whole new climate,” Lazar said. “Nikos’s murder will be front-page news in the morning. It will obscure the interest in what I have to show. Idiot women will be gossiping about Nikos, his women, his life. My things will be nothing in the background.”
“You want to call off the showing?”
“I want your advice,” Lazar said, “as Nikos’s friend. You see I know what he has done for me in his will. I can afford to wait, now. I can come up with a new showing in six months, with all the outside sensationalism forgotten. I’ll make it on my own merits. But—”
“Yes, Mr. Lazar?”
“Nikos so much wanted to win this battle with the fashion writers and the rag-trade papers. We’d make it, you see, in a whirl of sensationalism that will really have nothing to do with my clothes. We’ll fill all the fashion columns, but it will be because there is a murder involved and not because my designs are great. Should I go ahead for Nikos’s sake, or should I use my own judgment now that I’m on my own?”
“Nikos would be pleased, I think, that you care about his wishes,” Chambrun said. “He also cared about you as a creative talent, or he wouldn’t have left you five years of security. I can’t make a judgment about your business, Lazar, but I think I knew Nikos well enough to say that he’d leave it to you if he couldn’t be here to run the show himself.”
Lazar nodded slowly. “I’ve been trying to convince myself of that because I wanted to.”
“But I would prefer it if you held back the announcement, publicly and privately, till late tomorrow afternoon—in time for Friday’s morning papers. I don’t want all the people connected with it taking off to the four corners until we’ve had every opportunity to get at the truth.”
Lazar lifted his head. “The whole thing is unbelievable,” he said. “Nikos—I loved him. A few hours ago I’d have said everyone who had dealings with him loved him. All these people, at least.” He hesitated. “I’m worried about Jan. I understand she’s among the missing. Your security people have been asking questions.”
Chambrun’s face went curiously blank.
“Poor Rosey was killed because she somehow hit on the truth about who switched Nikos’s pills,” Lazar went on. “Rosey was reasonably close to Nikos. But Jan was very close. For two years she has been the closest person to him, round the clock. He trusted her. He loved her, like a man and like a father. She must have been the repository for hundreds of secrets. Nikos was no fool, Chambrun. You know that. If there was someone who wanted him dead, it’s a hundred to one Nikos would have caught wind of it. Jan is the person he might have talked to about it. Something Nikos discussed with Jan might suddenly light up the sky for her, and she’d become very dangerous to the killer.”
“An interesting theory,” Chambrun said, as though it was a brand-new idea. “It has been suggested, however, she might have killed Nikos herself to keep him from finding out about Faraday.”
Lazar snorted. “Only an outsider would consider such a notion. You think Nikos didn’t know about Mike?”
“I assume he didn’t. Fr
om what Jan told Mark, she assumed he didn’t.”
“You’re imagining Nikos as a cuckolded old idiot,” Lazar said. He sounded angry. “He was a man who understood the facts of life. The girl had to have some sex, and he couldn’t provide it. She was never missing when he needed her; he trusted her in every other area; so he closed his eyes to Faraday.”
“He told you that?”
“Of course not. But I knew Nikos. He never missed a trick about anything. It had to be that way.”
“It’s possible,” Chambrun said, his eyes hidden under their heavy lids.
“It’s certain,” Lazar said. “You’ve probably heard talk. Everyone’s been jabbering upstairs. They say Jan was available to anyone who asked. That’s not so.”
“How do you know?”
“I asked,” Lazar said, his mouth grim. “Oh, she has a great line about being a free spirit, and all that. But she’s choosy. I must say I don’t care for her choice of Faraday, but who can explain what turns on sexual electricity?”
I thought of Gallivan and Pappas, who had both implied Jan had offered to play games with them. And then I remembered an odd contradiction. She’d talked about Gallivan once; how now, with Nikos dead, she’d have to get out her track shoes.
“Did Jan have many friends outside Nikos’s own little family group?” I heard Chambrun asking.
Lazar shrugged. “For the last two years she’s scarcely been away from Nikos’s side for a minute. Between you and me, I don’t know when she found the time to carry on an affair with Faraday. Wherever Nikos stayed, she had an adjoining bedroom. Her job was to check on him at regular intervals—he was deathly afraid of those heart attacks, poor devil. When he traveled, which was always by train or on the Merina, she was never away from him. She had no time for outside friends. But before she came to Nikos, well, I have no knowledge of that. She was only twenty. I know nothing about her family. She was a model for a while before she joined Nikos, working for Zach Chambers. He might know about her.”
“He was her agent?”
“Yes.”
Girl Watcher's Funeral Page 12