Murder in Luxury

by Hugh Pentecost

  "Being checked."

  "They won't find mine," Valerie said. "I don't own a gun and I've never handled a gun—not ever!"

  "It's more of the same," Andy said. "Elaborate frame-up."

  "Who and why?" I said.

  "My God, Mark, I've said it over and over again," Valerie said. "There's no one I know of who would want to hurt me. It's completely meaningless to me, completely senseless."

  "It's happened. It's happening," I said.

  The rear door to the Carnation Room opened and there was Chambrun, looking dapper in a gray, tropical-worsted summer suit.

  "One of Jerry's men saw you make it the back way, Mark. I thought I'd try it, too," he said.

  He sat down on the edge of the table while I brought him up-to-date, his eyes fixed the whole time on Valerie. She looked like someone in a trance.

  "Mark's right," Chambrun said, when I'd finished. "The gun will turn out to be the murder weapon. There's no other reason to plant it on Mrs. Summers."

  "But it won't hold up in the killing of Polansky," I said. "He was alive after Valerie had gone up to your penthouse. She was under observation every second until he was found."

  "You say Keegan suggests a 'partner in crime'?"

  "Anything to fit his theory," I said.

  Chambrun tapped one of his flat, Egyptian cigarettes on the back of his silver case. * There are some interesting variations in this Polansky case, differences from the other two," he said. He slipped the case back in his pocket and lit the cigarette with his Dun-hill lighter. His eyes were narrowed against the smoke. "Carl Rogers and Willie Bloomfield were out of the same jungle—drugs, sex, pornography. Polansky was a cop with a good record. I've checked. Rogers and Bloomfield had been dead about four hours when they were found. Polansky, thanks to the fact that you saw him at noon, Mark, can't have been dead for more than an hour when he was found, probably less. Mrs. Summers could have been responsible for the first two. There's no way in the world she can have been responsible for Polansky."

  "Except as an accessory," Andy Lukens said.

  "Mr. Lukens, if you think I—" Valerie began.

  "Devil's advocate," he said, smiling at her. "I'm trying to think like Keegan so I'll be ready for him."

  "So what do we have?" Chambrun asked. "Polansky is alive and well at noon, standing guard out in the hall. Not too long after that the wheels begin to turn. The maid was there when you saw him, Mark. He let her in."

  "She'd have her own key," Andy said.

  "He permitted her to go in," Chambrun said. "She finished her job, left, and he was at his post. Now we come to fun and games. There's no back way into that single room like Five A, the suite where Willie Bloomfield got his. There was no way into that room except by going past Polansky.''

  "So he left his post," Andy Lukens said.

  "Possibly not, but I think not in the sense you mean," Chambrun said. "This is a well-trained, responsible policeman. He's up to his eyebrows in a complex murder case. He's supposed to guard a room, he'll guard it. So, he suddenly feels sick? He sees something he thinks he should report to Keegan? I don't think he strolls away somewhere to find a phone or a public bathroom. I think he goes into the room to find the phone—or the plumbing. He's still guarding the room that way. That's what a trained cop would do, I think."

  "But he leaves the hall door open, the killer goes in after him, kills him, plants the gun in Val's bureau, and walks away," Andy Lukens suggested.

  Chambrun stared at the end of his cigarette, scowling. He cupped his left hand and let the ash drop into it. "It could be that way," he said. "It would be careless of Polansky to leave the hall door open, even unlocked. But it could be that way." He slipped down off the table and walked beside the polished surface to an ashtray. He emptied the ash from his hand. His back was to us for a moment, and then he turned. "What happens, Andrew, if the gun turns out to be the weapon used in all three murders?"

  Andy Lukens shrugged. "Keegan will have himself a problem," he said. "He can't prove the gun belongs to Val, because it doesn't. She's absolutely clear in the shooting of Polansky. The only thing he's possibly got is 'accessory to murder.' He can't hold her in jail on that. I'd have her out in half an hour."

  "Maybe it would be better if he could hold her," Chambrun said.

  "Mr Chambrun—" Val began.

  "My dear Mrs. Summers," Chambrun said, "I have the feeling you're in the gravest kind of danger. Someone is taking dead aim at you. How do we keep you safe?"

  "I'd say the Beaumont was as safe as any place she could find," Andy said.

  Chambrun's smile had a bitter twist to it. "That would be a rib-splitting joke if you said it in public. Two men murdered in less than twenty-four hours; the killer, his identity not even guessed at, probably standing on the other side of that door and watching Keegan's whole charade, laughing up his sleeve. Worse than that, he's not finished. If the gun doesn't do Mrs. Summers in, he'll have to make another try."

  Valerie's voice was unsteady. "I—I'd like to just walk away, hide out there, somewhere where people don't know who I am or care who I am."

  "You were hiding in your apartment on Tenth Street and you were found," Chambrun said. "The danger you're facing is complicated if you're telling us the truth, Mrs. Summers. The person who's out to harm you found you on Tenth Street. It was no problem for him to follow you here. It will be no problem for him if you 'just walk away.' You don't know who to hide from, we don't know who to stop. He holds all the cards—unless you can put us on the track."

  "I keep telling you—!"

  "I know what you keep telling us Mrs. Summers. You have no enemies—but you do. There is no one who wants to punish you for something—but there

  "Oh my God," Valerie said, turning her head from side to side. She was very close to cracking up completely, I thought.

  "We're dealing with a sick mind, Valerie," Cham-brun said. "You're looking for some enormous encounter, some vivid clash with someone. You can't think of any so you say you have no enemy, you have not consciously hurt anybody, crossed anybody. You're certain no one has a motive."

  "Money," Andy Lukens said.

  "I don't think so," Chambrun said. "If Valerie is telling us the truth."

  "You keep saying that!" she cried out. "'If I'm telling you the truth. I am! I have been!"

  "No one has tried to blackmail you, get money from you under pressure of some sort?"

  "No, no, no!"

  Chambrun punched out his cigarette in the ashtray on the long table and walked down the room to stand by Valerie's chair. His voice was gentle, compassionate.

  "You're a lovely woman, Valerie," he said. "Men must have been after you all your life. It would be unnatural if they haven't been. You must have had the same choice to make, over and over; to say yes or no. Saying no must have been almost a routine. I can imagine your being kind about it. You were flattered but no thank you. I'll bet you can't count the number of noes. Somewhere along the way—not yesterday, maybe months ago, maybe years ago—you may have said no to someone whose sick pride couldn't take the rejection. You thought it was routine and you've forgotten about it. It was an everyday thing. But that sick mind has let his anger cook and cook until it has boiled over."

  "There's no such person!" Valerie said.

  "You don't know if there is or not," Chambrun said. "You haven't been inside that sick mind. I'm just trying to make you see that this sick mind can have made a motive out of something that you don't even remember. So let's forget a rejected lover for a moment. I understood that over the years you have given money for medical research, to the arts in one form or another. You must have been asked for help many times when you had to say no. You had to use judgment, you had to choose who you would help. If you said yes to everyone you'd soon have been poverty stricken. So, routinely, you said no to someone with a sick mind, and his resentment has cooked and cooked—and he has chosen now for a payoff. We have to dig back in your past, Valerie, for something you haven'
t remembered yet as any kind of crisis."

  Her eyes were wide. "You're talking about psychoanalysis," she said.

  "I'm afraid we don't have time for that technique," he said. "Just talking to a friend, going through the memory book of your mind. You'll find what you're looking for yourself, if you'll take the time to talk and remember."

  "I don't have any friends."

  "Mark is your friend, I am your friend."

  "I am your friend," Andy Lukens said.

  "You, Andrew, are her lawyer," Chambrun said. "Keegan and the district attorney are your business."

  As if it was a stage cue the lobby door was opened. A thunder of voices swept in, reporters shouting questions. Keegan came in, followed by a young man carrying a leather briefcase. The door was shut and the voices silenced.

  "How did you two characters get in here?" Keegan demanded. He was talking to Chambrun and me.

  Chambrun gestured toward the rear door. "No one stopped us so we came," he said.

  "Sonofabitch!" Keegan said. Then he turned to the man with the briefcase. "This is Tom Oldham, Assistant D.A."

  Oldham, sandy-haired, sharp-eyed, nodded to us. Keegan turned back to the lobby door, opened it, and called out, "Moran!" The voices inundated us again as a uniformed cop came in. "We overlooked a rear entrance," Keegan said. "Get someone there."

  Moran went to the rear door, taking the post himself. Keegan turned to Valerie. "So Haskell has had time to tell you what we found upstairs."

  She didn't answer.

  "As I suspected, the gun we found in your bureau drawer was used in all three killings," Keegan said. "Ballistics says there's no question."

  "But it's not her gun," Andy Lukens said.

  "So she says—naturally," Keegan said.

  "And she didn't kill Polansky," I said.

  Keegan was shaking with anger. "You two characters get out of here!" he shouted at us. "We have police business with the lady!"

  Valerie reached out a hand to Chambrun. He took it, held it for a moment. "Just tell the lieutenant what you can," he said. "We'll be standing by."

  We walked past Moran and out into the service area.

  "When he's through with her/' Chambrun said to me, "I'm going to put her up in my penthouse. It's the least accessible place in the hotel. Then you're going to talk to her till she's dumb with fatigue. What we need to know is buried there, somewhere."

  Chambrun had finally got something eating at me. We weren't just trying to solve a problem. There was a killer, nutty as a fruitcake, deadly as a cobra, circulating in our world, and he was watching us! Get in his way as Polansky had done and we could expect violence just as swift and just as deadly. He could be on the next bar stool to me, in the same elevator, circulating in the same public rooms, and there wasn't the remotest clue to who he was or what he looked like. If I started fishing into Valerie's past for an explanation to all this, I could very well find myself becoming a target for this creep. Not a very appetizing thought, or one designed to keep you from looking back over your shoulder.

  Chambrun left me in the service area, taking his private elevator to the roof, presumably to make arrangements for moving Valerie into his penthouse. I went up a flight of stairs to the balcony that circles the lobby at the mezzanine level.

  The lobby looked like the outside of a bank that has failed, with a couple hundred depositors waiting outside of the locked door hoping to get their money out. The locked door was the door to the Carnation Room. On the other side of it was a rich and beautiful lady who might, the rumor was, have killed three men in cold blood. That was money in the bank as far as their avid curiosity was concerned. Sooner or later she would have to come out, and they could reach out to touch her, shout questions at her, take pictures of her, destroy any chance she had for privacy in the next ten years. Someone, I thought, should be giving orders to keep people moving, but the men and women representing newspapers, radio stations, television networks, and scandal magazines wouldn't move unless the police brought in a riot squad and drove them out. I realized that they represented two-thirds of the crowd waiting outside the Carnation Room. I knew most of them by sight, had had dealings with all of them at one time or another over the years. Most of the others were hotel guests and regular patrons of our bars and restaurants. I realized there weren't more than ten or twelve people, four or five of them women, who were total strangers to me. Unfortunately the killer wouldn't have a bright star in the middle of his forehead to help me pick him out. Looking at those few strange faces I had an idea that hadn't struck me before. Except for Keegan and his fixation on Valerie, the rest of us had been thinking of the killer as a man. Why not a woman? That lLtle pearl-handled gun was a woman's weapon. A woman could be nursing a psychotic grudge against Val just as readily as a man. The wife or girlfriend of a man who had left her for Val? In the arts, an actress, singer, dancer, writer, sculptor, asking for help and being turned down? Val might not have known such an applicant personally. In none of the three deaths had there been any sign of physical struggle or encounter of any sort. Each time it appeared the victim had been caught totally by surprise, gunned down before he could lift a finger to protect himself. In Polansky's case that was hard to accept. He had been a trained officer; he had been armed and on guard against any kind of trouble. He'd apparently never reached for his gun, obviously never gotten it out of its holster. A woman might explain how he'd been caught so flatfooted, unprepared.

  I thought, sourly, that Gloria Steinem would applaud me for giving women their equal rights in my thinking. I leaned forward, elbows on the balcony rail, studying those dozen unfamiliar faces in the crowd outside the door of the Carnation Room. I wanted to be sure to remember if one of them turned up in this same frame of reference again. You don't wander into the Beaumont's lobby wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt. Those strangers all looked as though they belonged; conservative but not inexpensive.

  A heavy hand suddenly rested on my shoulder. I jumped a foot and spun around. I wasn't going to be happy for some time about the unexpected. I found myself facing a scowling Tucson cowboy. I wondered if I was about to find myself looking down the barrel of Paul Spector's six-shooter—if he carried one. That's how jumpy I was.

  " What the hell's goin' on down there?" he demanded.

  "You know there's been another killing?" I asked him.

  "Just heard it on the radio in my hotel room. Cop! I came on the run. Is it the one who was out to get Val?"

  "One of his men. They found a gun in Val's room that turns out to have killed all three."

  "Oh, Jesus!" Spector said.

  "But Val couldn't have killed the cop," I said. "She's alibied for every second of the time when it could have happened."

  He took a deep breath and let it out in a sign of relief. "She in that room down there?"

  I nodded.

  "Noonehelpin'her?"

  "She's got a lawyer."

  "Fails?" He spoke the name as though the idea outraged him.

  "Chambrun got her a good criminal lawyer," I said. "You sound like you don't like Gardner Fails."

  "Damned ol' goat!" he said. "Would you believe he used to come visit Jeb in Tucson. Val was floating around, ten, eleven years old. Beautiful kid. That ol' jerk would take every chance he had to give her behind a lovin' pinch! I can hear him now." Spector gave an absurd imitation. " 'Come sit in Uncle Gardner's lap, honey.' And then he'd pinch her bosoms which were just startin' to grow."

  "And when she got to be a woman?"

  "Oh, hell, I guess all men feel kinda hungry when they look at Val. How about you, Haskell? Don't you feel anything?"

  I tried smiling at him. "Hungry may be the word," I said.

  "You an' that fancy boss of yours really tryin' to help her?" he asked.

  "Really. All the way," I said.

  "I feel so damn helpless!" he said. "I'd like to go in and punch that Keegan right in the nose! Doesn't he know he's got hold of the wrong end of this thing?"

  "Pr
ocess of elimination. He'll find out," I said.

  "How long's he goin' to keep her in there?"

  "He's got an assistant D.A. with him. It could be minutes or hours."

  "An'then what?"

  "Chambrun will hide Val away somewhere and try to point Keegan in the right direction."

  "Why hide her away? Why does she have to hide?"

  "Keegan isn't the enemy," I said. "He's just a stubborn cop turning everything that comes his way over and over. Someone else we haven't even guessed at is the enemy." I tried my newest notion out on him for size. "You know any woman who may hate Val?"

  He laughed, not with humor. "Women can't stand women they can't compete with," he said. "For my dough there ain't a woman in the world who can compete with Val, so there must be dozens of 'em who hate her guts. Why?"

  "I've started to smell a woman in this case," I said.

  "There's a big gap in time for me," Spector said.

  "Meaning?"

  "Four years in college, when I just saw her a couple of summers; six years after that, five of marriage and almost a whole year since Dick Summers got his, when I didn't see her except for the few days she spent in Tucson for oP Jeb's funeral."

  There was something wrong about those figures I thought. Val had been advertised to us by Fails as being thirty years old. What Spector was telling me was that she'd been twenty before she went to Vassar. That was late for an obviously bright girl. She had been past twenty, then, when she'd proposed a love affair to Derek Newton, at the same time admitting gravely that it would be a "first" for her if the idea pleased him.

  "From the time she was three till the time she was twenty I saw her almost every day of her life/' Spec-tor was saying. "After that, hardly ever. It wasn't till she went away to Vassar that she had a chance to make enemies."

  "How come?" I asked.

  "You can't imagine what it was like down there in Tucson," Spector said. "For her, I mean. Hundreds of acres of land, a house like a palace, cottages for the help, horses, cars, cattle. But it was like an iron fence was built around the property—although there wasn't any fence. The hands, like me, were really a police force. No stranger could wander into the property without being stopped, questioned, given the third degree. Val was never allowed to leave the grounds without someone with her. She never went to school like an ordinary kid. There was a succession of tutors and teachers. Oh, there were parties, and a lot of high ol' times, but always inside that fence that wasn't there."