"One thing is certain, she didn't 'pop off a policeman," I said. "The rest, I'd say, was unlikely but, so far, not proven either way." I poured a generous slug of Jack Daniels over ice.
Mrs. Haven, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her brightly rouged mouth, was stirring Chambrun's martini. "When you've lived as long as I have, Haskell, you learn that people change, and change, and change over the years. I was born in 1900. In the eighty years since then I have been at least five different women."
"I'd love to have known them all," I said, smiling at her.
"Flattery will get you anything," she said dryly. "The problem is there isn't anything left to get." She looked a little sad, I thought, as she stirred Chambrun's martini in a glass pitcher.
"Charming company," Chambrun said from the doorway. Toto had let him follow me without a single snarl of protest. He and Chambrun were obviously more than nodding acquaintances.
The old lady looked at him. "I have a distant but personal interest in this case, Pierre," she said. She took a frosted glass out of the icebox and poured his drink. He took it, toasted her with a gesture, and sipped.
''Perfect beyond my dreams," he said.
"I've been making them for you for thirty years. I ought to know how," she said. She took a step closer to him. Amongst the jewelry she was wearing was a silver chain around her neck with a magnificent emerald pendant attached. "You remember seeing this before, Pierre?"
"You have so many lovely things," he said. "I don't think..."
"You haven't seen it because I haven't worn it for, would you believe, fifty-nine years? That's thirty years before I knew you, Pierre."
"Dear Victoria," he said, "there is so much churning in this place that needs handling at the moment. Be a love and make it a short story."
She made a snorting noise and poured her own martini over ice. "No good story is ever short," she said. "I heard about your Valerie Summers on television, and I dug this emerald out of an old jewel case. It seemed appropriate."
"Must I tease you to get to the point?" Chambrun asked.
"When I was eighteen I was a show girl, dancing in a nightclub over near Columbus Circle. 'Monique's' it was called. It was in the summer of the last year of World War One."
"I have heard you had legs that would put Betty Grable and Ann Miller to shame," he said, smiling at her.
"They were good! They were damn good," she said. "I... I was just finding out about life in those days, life and love, and all the sensuous pleasures that go with youth. Young men brought me flowers, and jewels, and—and their wonderful maleness. Oh, I played the field, gentlemen."
"That's the one I'd like to have known," I said.
"I don't want to haggle with you, Haskell, but I must tell you the competition would have been pretty fierce. Most of it would have come from the man who gave me this emerald."
"Let's see, the romantic hero of the day was Douglas Fairbanks, Senior," Chambrun said.
"The man who gave me this emerald was Jeb McCandless," Mrs. Haven said.
That was a score! Chambrun stared at her, his eyes narrowed.
"Valerie Summers' father?" he asked.
"You know of some other Jeb McCandless?" the old woman said.
"Well, we seem to have gotten to the point," Chambrun said. "McCandless was eighty-nine years old when he died in 1977. So he was twelve years older than you. Is that important?"
"When you're eighteen a man of thirty is an 'older man,'" she said. "At thirty Jeb already owned half the world. He could buy anything he wanted, and he wanted me. And I could be had. I have been a 'kept woman' all my life, Pierre, in one form or another. That first time it was not for Jeb's money, his power; I was just mad for him as a man, as a partner in bed. For two years there was nothing else in my life, and then I was just simply discarded."
"That's hard to believe," I said.
"Jeb's passion in life was conquest,'' she said. "Outwitting the competition, winning the new game, taking what belonged to someone else. I never saw him again after we parted, except on the Movietone News, and later on television. But I didn't forget him and he didn't forget me. Bring your drinks."
She turned and walked briskly out of the kitchen. The rooms at the back of the penthouse were just as cluttered as the living room. One of the bedrooms was, literally, just a storage space without furniture. There were dozens of cardboard cartons carefully tied shut. Mrs. Haven bent down, untied one of the boxes, and opened the cover. Inside the box were packages of letters, fastened together with faded colored ribbons. The old lady straightened up and faced Chambrun.
"Letters from Jeb McCandless," she said. "Five years after our thing was over, he began to write to me. Once a month for fifty-two years. Can you believe it? Well, you have to because they're here." She gestured at the cartons. "He didn't want me back. He wasn't a man who would try something over again that had once failed. He had already married and been divorced when the letters started to come. He had loved me, he had made an irretrievable mistake in leaving me, there was no use trying again, but he wanted me to know that he was thinking of me always. Fifty-two years, over six hundred letters."
"Why are you telling us this, Victoria?" Chambrun asked. "Just because his daughter, from a late marriage, is involved in a violence across the roof from you? It is a coincidence, but it's unlike you to be open about something so private."
"Those letters, you could say, contain the story of Jeb McCandless's life," Mrs. Haven said. "His triumphs, his rare defeats, his temporary loves, and the one he thought was finally it, cut short by the birth of a daughter who became the only thing on earth that mattered to him. It's all there, Pierre; how he protected her, how he guarded her by setting up a sort of police state of his own, how she tried to kill herself because he had taken all the joy out of her life, how he finally let her go and appeared to have won out in the end."
"I still don't know why you're telling us this, Victoria," Chambrun said.
"My God, Pierre, do you really think there's no connection between Jeb McCandless's ruthless life and what's happening to that girl? Somebody's trying to punish him, even after he's dead, through her."
"I find that farfetched, Victoria," Chambrun said.
"You're the one who talked about 'background,'" I said to him. "We don't need to go to Tucson. We've got it all here."
"Someone Jeb hurt, crushed, destroyed," Mrs. Haven said. "Someone the girl innocently hurt through having the use of Jeb's money." She turned away, her face a strange, painted mask. "I can't bear to go through these again, Pierre. But if you, or Haskell, or Miss Ruysdale—or anyone you trust, wants to have a look at them, they're here. They're yours. It's the least I can do for a man I once loved."
Chambrun stood silent, his drink hardly touched in his hand. Then he looked at me.
"I'll have a go at it," I said, "if you say the word."
He gave me a tight, mirthless smile. 'The last twenty-five years after Valerie was born. That's only three hundred letters, Mark."
A life's work, I thought.
It was that time of day in the Beaumont when people came into the various bars for the first after-work drink of the day. We had other people's regular customers that afternoon. Three murders, possibly committed by a glamorous heiress, attracted customers like moths to a streetlight. It wasn't the charm of our public rooms, the skills of our bartenders, the courtesy of our maitre d's. We stepped out on the mezzanine balcony, Chambrun and I, when we came down from the roof.
" 'Ghouls!" Chambrun said. He resented seeing business improved by something he hadn't planned.
Betsy Ruysdale and Maggie Madison, her stand-in, were in the outer office. Ruysdale was studying the list of messages Maggie had taken.
"Three, I would guess, of some importance," Ruysdale said. "Lieutenant Keegan wants to be notified when you are available." That seemed like a new approach to me. The Black Irishman was asking! "Mike Maggio says it's important to talk to you. Something about Willie Bloomfield, the dead
man in Five A. And Walter Hardy wonders if you'd like to talk." That was a surprise. Hardy is a Homicide cop from our precinct area. He'd probably have been in charge of the murders at Beaumont if they hadn't been linked to Keegan's earlier case on Tenth Street.
"Ill take them in that order," Chambrun said. "You'd better come in, Mark. Keegan will be dishing out instructions."
Keegan had a right to be dead on his feet. He'd been on the go for two nights and days, but he showed no signs of lost energy. He was wearing a pair of tinted glasses, which suggested his eyes might have revealed the extent of his fatigue. Otherwise he was freshly shaved, wearing a just-pressed suit, and not in love with us.
"We've got to get the rules straightened out, Chambrun," he said.
Chambrun was at his desk, toying with a demitasse of his Turkish coffee. "Whose rules, Lieutenant?" he asked, dangerously quiet.
"My rules!" Keegan said. "I don't object to Mrs. Summers being here in the hotel."
"Your options?" Chambrun asked.
I was tempted to tell Keegan to "look out!" He was playing with a rattlesnake who didn't rattle.
"I could, of course, place her in protective custody," Keegan said. "All her lawyers couldn't do a damn thing about that. But I prefer to have her here because I have to be here. She's either a murderess with a partner-in-crime, or she's being framed by someone who intends to get her one way or another."
"You've come a long way, Lieutenant," Chambrun said.
"She didn't kill Polansky," Keegan said. "It could be her gun, handled by her partner. It could be Polansky caught someone trying to frame her. Either way the man we're looking for will be back. He knows where she is, and he'll try to get to her."
"You mentioned rules, Lieutenant."
"Those other two penthouses on the roof."
"One is occupied—and owned cooperatively—by an old lady."
"Mrs. Haven?"
"Right."
"The other, I understand, is leased by the U.N.," Keegan said.
"You're very thorough, Lieutenant. There's nobody in it at the moment and I intend to keep it that way until this particular storm has passed."
"Good. There's just the one elevator that goes all the way to the roof?"
"Yes."
"That's the only way to get there?"
"Fire stairs. They open out onto the roof behind the U.N. penthouse."
"Why wasn't I told about them?"
"I don't know who you asked, Lieutenant. Not anyone connected with the hotel or you'd have been informed."
"I haven't sensed a feeling of happy cooperation from anyone in this joint!" Keegan said.
Chambrun smiled at him. "'Ask and ye shall receive,'" he said.
"Okay. You've got one of your security people running that one elevator that goes to the roof. I want one of my men in the car with him at all times."
"No problem," Chambrun said.
"You tell me the people who get to use that elevator, and, if I approve, my man will have a list and they're the only people who will get to use it."
"I live there," Chambrun said. "I am one of the people who will use the elevator. While Mrs. Summers is there she'll need to see her lawyers, Gardner Fails and Andrew Lukens." Keegan was making a list on the back of an envelope and he nodded. "My secretary, Miss Ruysdale, Haskell here, and Jerry Dodd may need to get to me."
"And that's it?"
"Yes."
"What about the old lady?"
"She must be free to come and go, of course," Chambrun said. "And Toto."
"Who the hell is Toto?"
"Her dog," Chambrun said.
"I suppose she's got a lot of old biddy friends who go up there to gossip and play cribbage and stuff like that?"
"I think you should ask her, Lieutenant."
"You can count on it," Keegan said, quietly boiling. "Now here's the way it is, Mr. Chambrun. My man on the elevator with your man. Two of my men will patrol the roof. You want men of your own up there, so have Dodd identify them. I don't want anyone telling my men he's hotel security and have it turn out to be a phoney. That's what could have happened to Polansky. There'll be two men on the fire stairs. You want men of your own there, have them identified. I know the people on your list. I'll have to be satisfied about any people on Mrs. Haven's list. There aren't going to be any more killings, Chambrun."
"I'm glad to be reassured," Chambrun said.
"You might call Mrs. Haven and tell her I'm on my way up to see her," Keegan said.
"A word of warning, Lieutenant."
Keegan turned back, scowling.
"Toto doesn't like strangers," Chambrun said.
Keegan, it appeared, was doing his job. True, there was something of "the locked barn after the horse is gone" about it, but Valerie was my main concern and, I thought, Chambrun's. No matter what his disposition, there was no way Keegan could have foreseen the first two killings. Polansky, on guard and prepared, had somehow been the victim of a sucker punch. Not Keegan's fault.
Keegan had only just left when the little red light blinked on Chambrun's phone. It was Ruysdale to tell him that Mike Maggio was waiting.
Out of his bell captain's uniform Mike looked a little bizarre: a gaudy plaid shirt, pink slacks, white buckskin shoes, and a navy-blue beach jacket draped over his arm.
"Dressed for a wedding, Mike?" Chambrun asked.
"Dressed for a job, if you give it your okay," Mike said.
"You're on the trail of Willie Bloomfield," Chambrun said.
"Ruysdale told you," Mike said.
"Your clothes told me, Michael. You wouldn't be seen in the locker room here dressed like that if you were coming to work."
"I'm supposed to go to work in an hour," Mike said. "I'd like your permission to be a few hours late. Johnny Thacker, the day captain, has agreed to cover forme."
"Let me have it, Michael." Chambrun was already sounding impatient.
"You keep your eyes shut, Mr. C," Mike said, "but you know as well as I do that some of our most famous and important guests require the services of call girls."
"So?"
"Someone has to see to it that only the best class of flesh peddlers get into our sacred halls. Someone has to screen them."
"You," Chambrun said. The whole subject irritated him. He doesn't like the thought of gentlemen away from home using the Beaumont as a base for fun and games with expensive prostitutes. He also knows that it is a fact of hotel life everywhere. Let a girl on the scene who might have tried to shake down a guest and Mike Maggio would have found himself washing dishes in a spaghetti joint somewhere. Chambrun trusted Mike at a job he wished didn't exist.
"Willie Bloomfield tried to get some of his street tarts on our list a few years back," Mike said. "I made the hotel off limits to him. But here he was last night, got in, got up to Five A, and nobody saw him."
"Not impossible," Chambrun said.
"Not likely, unless we've got a rotten apple in our barrel somewhere. You saw the way he was dressed, Mr. C, strictly Times Square. He couldn't have got into our men's room without being noticed. If he bought somebody on my crew I want to know. Over in Willie's territory the tongues must be wagging like you wouldn't believe. Carl Rogers, the guy who got it the night before on Tenth Street, was part of Willie's world. I thought if I just sat around a few places I might hear something. Buy a few drinks for a few people and who knows what may float to the top— about my rotten apple, if there is one—about this whole mess.'*
"Keegan must have that area crawling with undercover cops and decoys with the same idea/' Cham-brun said.
Mike laughed. "Street people can spot an undercover cop a mile away, especially when they suddenly flood a district. They know me in Willie's world. They know I work here and may be able to add something to what they already know. Trade a little dirt."
"You know some dirt, Michael?'* Chambrun asked.
Mike grinned. "I can write a hell of an interesting script," he said.
Chambrun made a deci
sion. "Take a flier at it, Michael," he said. "But keep one thing in mind. A killer may know who you are and guess why you're there. If you get too close to him remember that this one doesn't wait for discussions."
Lieutenant Walter Hardy, Homicide, was not new to the Beaumont or to Chambrun's office there. I have described him somewhere else as looking like a "slightly confused linebacker" on a professional football team. He has the guts, the strength, the energy, but he can't quite make up his mind where the attack is coming from. It's not really a fair description. I have watched him work side by side with Chambrun in our violent times at the hotel. We have them, like any other small city. Chambrun is mercurial, intuitive, a hunch player whose hunches almost always pay off. Hardy's slow, plodding, endlessly patient in his search for facts. The hare and the tortoise; Chambrun arriving at answers without the proof, Hardy coming slowly along behind and making Chambrun's case stand up. Hardy would chide Chambrun about his "conclusion-jumping," and Chambrun would nag at Hardy for "taking forever," but actually these two were a mutual admiration society, based on an unshakable mutual trust.
"This is not official, Pierre," Hardy said as Ruys-dale ushered him into the office early that evening, "so if you are too busy... ?" He smiled a greeting at me. Big, broad-shouldered, blonde, Chambrun once said of him, "If he's handling a rapier have no fear, but if he's armed with a baseball bat or a length of iron pipe, run for your life!"
"Come in, Walter. Never too busy for you," Chambrun said. "It's nice to see someone who doesn't need explaining."
"You finding Matt Keegan a little hard to get along with?" Hardy asked. He sat down in the green leather armchair beside Chambrun's desk.
"Let's say Keegan and I haven't found the footing for a love affair yet," Chambrun said. "I wish you were on the case, Walter."
"Im concerned with it personally but not officially," Hardy said. "Joe Polansky was a friend of mine."
"I'm sorry," Chambrun said.
"We worked together when I was a detective, first grade," Hardy said. "He wasn't a man to be caught with his pants down. Maybe you can tell me more than I've been able to dig up on the fringes. If I go to Keegan, he'll think I'm trying to get into his act."
Murder in Luxury Page 11