Birthday, Deathday

by Hugh Pentecost

  “But you have been hiding Miss Malone.”

  “I don’t believe ‘hiding’ is quite the proper word for it, Pierre,” Mrs. Haven said “Laura is a friend of Neil Drury’s. I am a friend of his, and was a close friend of his family’s. She asked if she might spend some time here. I told her she could. Period.”

  “You’re aware, Miss Malone, that dozens of men have been searching this hotel from top to bottom, looking for you?” Chambrun asked. “That there is a general alarm for you and the city police are combing the area outside the hotel? That you have driven Mark and your friend Peter Williams into a state of dithering anxiety?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You choose not to talk?”

  “I’m sorry.” It was a broken record, a kind of zombie response.

  Chambrun stared at her for a moment and then walked over to the telephone. He was promptly connected with the switchboard. “Chambrun here,” he said. “Locate Jerry Dodd and ask him to come up to Penthouse L on the double.” He put down the receiver. “I’m not sure, Miss Malone, that it makes much difference whether you talk or not. Nothing you have told us from the beginning has been true. You’ve clearly been in touch with Drury all along. The sad story of his dropping out of your life is an untruth. Whatever his plan is to get at General Chang, you’re part of it. You didn’t have to sense his presence. You’ve always known where he is and how to reach him. You could tell us what he looks like. You could tell us how many other people are involved in the plot. The one thing that puzzles me is why you’ve chosen to blow your cover by disappearing. Of course it didn’t blow your cover until we found you, did it? You were still the helpless, lovable girl in the hands of General Chang’s killers till we found you.” His eyes flicked to Mrs. Haven who was putting quite a dent in the bourbon without any outward effect. “It was careless of you to leave Walter Drury’s picture on the wall, Constance.”

  She laughed, like a little girl playing a parlor game. “Would you believe I’d forgotten it was there, Pierre?” She waved at the portrait gallery. “All old friends. I had actually forgotten Walter Drury’s face was among them.”

  Chambrun looked at her steadily for a moment and then turned back to Laura. “You might as well find yourself a chair, Miss Malone,” he said. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “You have a right to stop her from leaving, Pierre?”

  “I’ve gone quite a way past caring what my rights are, Constance,” he said. He watched Laura move to a chair and lower herself into it. I had the feeling that her legs had become pretty weak under her.

  “Constance, how much do you know about the murder of Li Sung?” Chambrun asked.

  “Nothing. Nothing whatever, Pierre. It’s hard to believe, I know, because I was here in my apartment and Toto didn’t give any sort of alarm. But that’s how it was. What I’ve told the police is the exact truth.”

  “When did Miss Malone get in touch with you and ask to come up here?”

  “A little before midnight. She came right up after that.”

  “How did she get by the man posted in the foyer?”

  Mrs. Haven gave us that little girl giggle. “I told Laura there was a policeman there. She wanted to avoid him. So I invited him in for a cup of coffee and a sandwich. He was here to protect me, so as long as he was with me, in the kitchen—” She spread her bony hands, heavy with rings. “Laura just slipped in and waited for him to go. Rather clever, don’t you think?”

  “You’d waited all evening for the chance to give us the slip,” Chambrun said to Laura. “Am I right in thinking that the purpose was to get us looking for you instead of Drury?”

  She had lowered her head. She didn’t answer.

  “Had Drury told you to expect a call from Miss Malone, Constance?”

  “I told you, Pierre, I haven’t seen or been in touch with Neil.”

  “Do you know a man named Schwartz?”

  “The toy manufacturer?”

  “No, Constance, not the toy manufacturer. Do you know anyone named James Gregory?”

  I thought she hesitated for just a second before she gave Chambrun another ‘No.’

  He turned back to Laura. “How good a chance do you think Drury’s plan has?” he asked.

  No answer.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any point in making any sort of plea to you,” Chambrun said. I sensed his rising anger. “Whatever Drury’s scheme is, it’s going to fail. There are too many people on both sides who are too well-prepared, too efficient. He’s persuaded you, obviously, that it will work. If it did—if he managed to get at Chang, which I doubt—he will never get away with it. Hell be killed on the spot, or he’ll be taken alive by our people and spend the rest of his life in some joy-resort, like Attica. If they find that you have collaborated with him you will face the same kind of punishment. What the hell are you involved in, Miss Malone, a suicide pact? It’s idiocy!”

  She spoke for the first time. “I do what Neil asks me to do,” she said.

  “Then arrange for me to talk to him!” Chambrun said, sharply. “I’ll go anywhere you say. Ill talk to him on a phone that can’t be monitored. Let me tell him exactly how impregnable Chang’s defenses are.”

  “He knows,” she said.

  “And still you’re prepared to help get him killed?”

  “Oh, come, Pierre, have you never been in love?” Mrs. Haven asked, jolly as all hell. “A woman who really loves a man may try to persuade him not to run risks, but if he insists she will go along with him.”

  The doorbell rang.

  Chambrun nodded to me to answer it and I let Jerry Dodd in.

  “What’s cooking?” he asked. Then as he followed me into the room I heard him mutter under his breath: “Holy cow!” I don’t think he’d seen Laura. His comment was on the junk shop. Then, when he did see Laura: “Well, this is a relief.”

  “I hope you continue to think so,” Chambrun said. He gave Jerry a quick sketch of the situation. Jerry’s bright little eyes were filled with disbelief.

  “You must be off your rocker, Miss Malone,” he said.

  She didn’t look at him.

  “So now we’re going to play this my way,” Chambrun said. “I want the two best men you have up here, Jerry, inside the apartment.”

  “Right.”

  “I don’t want you, or them, or anyone else to even whisper that we’ve found Miss Malone.”

  Jerry’s eyebrows rose. “You’ll have to tell Wexler and the cops.”

  “I don’t have to tell anyone,” Chambrun said. “Somebody’s looking over Wexler’s shoulder for Chang. I want Chang to think that we’re still looking for Miss Malone. I want the search to go on. I don’t want anyone to know it’s a phony. I don’t want anyone’s foot to slip because they’ve relaxed, knowing it isn’t for real.”

  “Right.”

  Chambrun walked over to the phone and talked to Mrs. Kiley. “No phone calls in or out of Penthouse L,” he ordered, “unless it’s Jerry Dodd or me. Absolutely no calls.”

  He put down the phone. Mrs. Haven was giving him a wide Cheshire cat smile. He turned and walked into the bedroom area. An asthmatic growl came from under a table loaded with Staffordshire dogs. Toto had been there all this time, luxuriating on a bright scarlet satin cushion without letting us know he’d been eavesdropping. He snuffled his pug nose and went back to sleep. Chambrun came back, carrying a telephone instrument in his hand. The wires had been pulled out from the wall.

  “I remembered that you have a private outside line, Constance,” he said.

  CHAPTER 5

  I TOLD MYSELF MRS. Haven must be right; a woman in love will go along with her man no matter how wrong she may think he is. But Chambrun had laid it on the line to Laura without any ifs, ands, or buts. There wasn’t any way Neil Drury could come out of this with a future. He would either be dead or shut away. And Laura had the same kind of prospects. There had to be some way to get to Drury and talk sense to him. Then I wondered if my mother and
sister had been raped and murdered, and my father mowed down by gunfire, anything but revenge would make sense. You couldn’t approach anything like normal in that kind of climate.

  But we had to try, I told myself. We had to find Drury and try.

  “If the girl couldn’t sell him on the futility of what he’s planning, we can’t hope to have much chance,” Chambrun said.

  We were back in his office and Miss Ruysdale had been let in on the secret.

  “Your old lady friend turned out to be something!” I said. I’d poured myself a drink, but it tasted lousy.

  Chambrun gave me a faint smile. “Constance? A very special old biddy,” he said. “I wonder if you know how special, Mark?”

  “Who would have dreamed you were on a first-name basis with her,” I said. I looked at Miss Ruysdale, expecting her to agree. Evidently it was no surprise to her.

  Chambrun leaned back in his desk chair, his heavy eyelids lowered. “Thirty years ago. Constance Haven was an expatriate living in Paris,” he said. “The Nazi’s held the city at the time. Those were the black days.”

  “You mean she’s eighty years old?” I said, surprised. God knows there was nothing feeble about her.

  “Eighty, eighty-one,” Chambrun said. “I was twenty when I first met her, fighting in the French underground: the Resistance. Constance presided over a salon, all the big shots—the Germans and the collaborators. Patriotic Frenchmen viewed her with contempt and loathing, except those of us in the Resistance. She was one of our best sources of information.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” I said.

  “A strange code of ethics,” Chambrun said. “She tells the truth, but she has a way of playing games with it. But with me—well, we understand each other. Why do you suppose she sent for me in the middle of the night?”

  “She wanted to get rid of the cops so that Laura and Drury could come and go at will,” I said.

  “I think not,” Chambrun said. “She wanted me to see that photograph of Walter Drury.”

  “It was the wildest chance that I saw it,” I said.

  Chambrun’s smile was almost affectionate. “If you hadn’t stumbled on it, I think she’d have found a way to make sure that you did. You see, her loyalties were split. She’s a sentimental slob and she’d been conned into helping the star-crossed lovers. She’s also a hard-boiled realist, and she knew what they were walking into. She’d probably tried to talk Laura out of it—depend on it she hasn’t seen Drury or she’d have admitted it to me. When that didn’t work she turned to me, a friend. She had to do it in her own elliptical way. She couldn’t seem to betray them because I think she still hopes to talk them out of it.” He laughed. “Did you see that little-girl, I-just-swallowed-the-canary smile she gave me when I gave the orders to the switchboard that there were to be no calls in or out? She was reminding me that she had a private outside line. Constance is quite something.”

  “You can count on her to help, then.”

  “I can count on her to help. I can also count on her not telling me anything that she learns in confidence from Laura or Drury.”

  “Anyway they’re safe up there. Cops and Jerry.”

  Chambrun’s smile faded. “I wish I could be certain,” he said. “You went up there; then I went up there; then Jerry Dodd. Chang’s ‘eyes’ must know that. They must be guessing that there is something of special interest about Penthouse L. Li Sung died there.”

  “What about Peter?” I asked. “It seems rough not to let him know that Laura’s turned up.”

  “By all means tell him,” Chambrun said. “We need him to concentrate on finding Drury.”

  The first dawn light was showing through the windows of my bedroom when I flopped down on the bed again, without bothering to take off my clothes. Peter was so sound asleep in the living room that I thought it would be merciful to let him get all he could. There would be no one circulating in the Beaumont now except the house-cleaning crew that would be swabbing down the public rooms for another day.

  My phone woke me. I glanced at my wrist watch as I reached for it. Nine thirty! I’d had almost five hours sleep and I should have been on the job long ago.

  It was Miss Ruysdale on the phone. “I’ve let you have as much as I can, Mark. Mr. Chambrun will want you and Mr. Williams here in about fifteen minutes. You’ve just got time to shave, shower and dress. There’ll be your kind of coffee here.”

  “All quiet on the roof?” I asked.

  “All quiet.”

  My mouth felt like the inside of a birdcage. I went out into the living room and found Peter already up and dressed.

  “I managed to make myself some instant coffee,” he said. “Like some?”

  “Come in the bathroom while I shave,” I said. “I have some good news for you. We found Laura.”

  “Safe?”

  “I also have some bad news for you. She’s been flim-flamming us from the start.” I gave him the whole story while I was lathering up.

  “The fools,” he said. “Don’t they know they can’t win? It’s hard to believe Neil would let her run that kind of risk.”

  “Our problem is to find Drury and talk him out of it,” I said. “Laura’s tried, apparently, and failed. Now she’ll do whatever he wants her to do.”

  “Maybe she’d listen to me,” Peter said. His mouth twitched. “God knows I have reason enough to wish Chang dead; I understand better than anyone how Neil feels.”

  “Try it on Chambrun. We’re meeting him in ten minutes.”

  The Great Man was at his desk when Peter and I walked into his office. So help me, he didn’t look any different than he did any other morning. God knows how much sleep he’d managed.

  “Peter thinks if he talked to Laura—” I began.

  “Sit down,” Chambrun said. “It needs thinking out.”

  Peter, his blackthorn stick hooked over his arm, walked to one of the leather armchairs and sat down. I perched on the arm of the other one.

  “In about an hour,” Chambrun said, “things will begin to get sticky. Chang is about to come out from behind his wall of protection, the twelfth floor. He is going to the United Nations for a conference with some of the delegates. On his way out of the hotel he plans to visit the Grand Ballroom to see if it will do for his birthday party, and to discuss details with me and Mr. Amato, the banquet manager. In other words, he is coming out into the open. He’ll be surrounded by his own men, and by Larch’s men, and by Wexler’s people—and by ours. He’ll be as safe as a man can be except in an hermetically sealed room. And yet, in spite of all the best planning, there are little chinks of daylight somewhere, almost certainly, that could be penetrated.”

  “You think Drury will try to act at once—not wait for a better opportunity?” I asked.

  “He can’t wait,” Chambrun said. “We’re getting to close to him. He has to be sweating over the possibility that Laura may change her mind and turn him in. Not a treachery, you understand, but he must be concerned that we may be able to persuade Laura that, if she loves him, she must help us prevent him from walking into certain death.”

  “I still dream I might persuade her,” Peter said.

  “Tolliver looked at Schwartz. No result, never saw him before,” Chambrun said. “I’ve spent fifteen minutes this morning talking to James Gregory, the sick man in seven twenty-two. Since I haven’t been able to guess why we were hoaxed away from that suite last night, I still thought it might have been to prevent me from talking to Gregory, that there might be something he knew that would help us.”

  “And was there?” I asked.

  Chambrun shook his head. “It is, happily, one of Mr. Gregory’s better days. He was sitting up in a chair having his breakfast. He still hopes to have ‘a night on the town,’ as he puts it. It’s rather difficult to talk to a man who knows he’s going to die. It—it gets in the way. But Gregory is a charming, cultivated, very sophisticated man. He has no illusions about his illness. He’s in a race with the business of dying. All
he wants is one gay evening. We did talk about Drury, however. Gregory knew the story, of course, as anyone does who was reading newspapers five years ago or listening to news broadcasts. He never met any of the Drurys, he told me. He sympathized with Neil Drury, sympathizes with him now. His career as a journalist has not made him a lover of the power boys of this world, like Chang. But he had nothing helpful to offer; has no idea why we might have been called away last night.”

  “Dead end,” Peter muttered.

  “We have almost no time left in which to find Drury,” Chambrun said, “and either talk him out of his plan or sit on his head so that he can’t carry through.”

  “Without Laura’s help you’ll never spot him,” I said.

  Chambrun nodded, slowly. He picked up the phone and pressed the button on the squawk box so we could hear his conversation. The switchboard answered. It was Mrs. Veach, the day supervisor.

  “Yes, Mr. Chambrun?”

  “Connect me with Jerry Dodd in Penthouse L, please.” We could hear the ring sound and after a moment Jerry answered. “Chambrun here, Jerry. I want you to bring Miss Malone down to my office.”

  “If she’ll come,” Jerry said.

  “Tell her we’ve found Drury,” Chambrun said, blandly.

  “No kidding!”

  “Tell her that,” Chambrun said.

  “Oh, I get it. And suppose that doesn’t work?”

  “Drag her down here by the hair of her head,” Chambrun said.

  “That could make trouble, boss.”

  “I’ll face the trouble,” Chambrun said. He hung up the phone.

  “She knows you haven’t got Drury because she obviously knows where he is,” Peter said.

  “Yes, I think she knows,” Chambrun said. He looked at me, his eyes hardly visible between narrowed slits. “You notice anything different about this office this morning, Mark?”

  “Different?” I looked around. There wasn’t anything I could see.

  “A rearrangement of the furniture,” Chambrun said.

  “Oh, yes, I noticed you’d placed the chairs differently,” I said.