Murder Round the Clock

by Hugh Pentecost

  "How very delightful that would be," Conyers said, beaming.

  I was glad the old boy couldn't hear my conversation with

  Zita. Her stage personality is that of a frail helpless child in need of love and help. In reality she is a very tough cookie, whose conversation is larded with earthy words. If she needs help, I imagine the glowering George Ortell supplies it. He is the muscle; she is the breadwinner.

  "Why don't you get your friend one of the fancy call girls who hang out in the Trapeze Bar?" Zita suggested. She was alone in her dressing room.

  "You've got him wrong," I said. "He's a nice old guy having a sort of final spree. You touched him with your rendition of cockles and mussels. His mother used to sing it to him."

  "Hearts and flowers!" Zita said. "Look, really, Mark—"

  "You owe me, friend," I said. I had gotten her out of a jam with the musicians' union some time back. "Give him ten minutes."

  "After that, brother, you will owe me," Zita said.

  I have left out her four-letter embellishments.

  She put on a little mink jacket, and I led her out to the old man's table. He smiled with delight when he saw us coming. He stood, bowed low over her hand when I introduced them, held her chair for her.

  Zita gave me a dirty look when I left them alone after the first pleasantries. In the lobby entrance I ran into Jerry Dodd. He is known as the "security officer"—we don't say "house detective" at the Beaumont. Jerry is a wiry, bright-eyed little man who is tops at his job.

  "Your project seems to be having himself a whale of a time," he said. "How did you persuade Zita?"

  "Slight arm-twist," I said.

  "Odd thing about your old gentleman," Jerry said.

  "Odd?"

  "He's carrying a gun," Jerry said.

  "You're out of your mind!" I said.

  "I kid you not. Shoulder holster. It's my business to spot that kind of thing, Mark."

  "Well, I'll be damned—"

  "Maybe the suicide the boss is afraid of is closer than you think," Jerry said. "I suggest you pass the word on to Cham-brun."

  Chambrun rarely leaves the hotel, but that evening he had gone to a dinner given by the French Ambassador to the United Nations. Long ago Chambrun had been a figure of some importance in the French Resistance movement.

  After the second show in the Blue Lagoon I saw, to my surprise, that Zita had rejoined Mr. Conyers, this time bringing her boy friend, George Ortell, with her. There was a fresh supply of champagne in the ice bucket. The old boy was positively glowing. How hungry he was for companionship, I thought. Maybe he would forget his dark thoughts of self-destruction for a while.

  I didn't bother Chambrun that night with Jerry Dodd's observation about Conyers's gun. I thought of it as simply confirming Chambrun's fear that, when the old man "ran out of gas," he probably planned to do away with himself. There was still plenty of gas left in his tank after only one day, and he had seemed to be having too good a time to be despondent.

  Sunday morning at nine-twenty-two I went into Chambrun's office and found myself confronting "the hanging judge." Chambrun is short, square, with wide, splayed fingers that can play an extraordinary piano. He has a small mustache, and when his lips are compressed it makes a straight black line above his mouth. His eyes were deep in their pouches that morning, glittering. I braced myself.

  "You were right about the Brooklyn Bridge," he said.

  I was lost for a moment.

  "He not only sold it to Ruysdale, he sold it to you and me too. Our Mr. Conyers is a phony."

  "Phony?"

  "I was concerned about him," Chambrun said. "I thought if he had family or friends they should know that he was embarked on a last spree, which would probably be followed by his suicide. I am so clever! I am such a Good Samaritan!"

  "So?" I said.

  "The address on Rittenhouse Square is a phony. There is no Walston Conyers listed in any Philadelphia directory. I got a banker friend of mine out of bed who tells me that Conyers, or whatever his name is, came into the bank, handed over five thousand dollars in cash, and asked for a certified check. He was not a client. No one at the bank had ever seen him before."

  "He's carrying a gun," I said.

  Chambrun sat up very straight in his desk chair. I told him about the previous evening and what Jerry Dodd had noticed.

  "We've been had," Chambrun said, slamming the palm of his hand hard on his desk. "He's here for quite another purpose than he led us to believe."

  He reached for the telephone on his desk and asked for room service. "Henri? Mr. Chambrun here. Have you had a breakfast order from 1412? A Mr. Conyers. . . . Has the waiter brought the tray down yet? . . . Good. Now listen carefully. Was there fruit juice on the order? . . . Fine. Tell the waiter not to touch the juice glass, no matter what. You understand? I'll have Mr. Dodd waiting for it when it comes down. I want to get fingerprints from it. . . . Fingerprints, you idiot! You know what fingerprints are, don't you?"

  Chambrun put down the phone. "There's just a chance we may find out who this old charlatan really is. I want him covered, Mark. I'll talk to Dodd. But I want you to see to it that all phone calls in and out of his room are covered—also, any orders he gives, any communications with anyone."

  I had some answers fairly quickly, none of them helpful. Conyers had made no phone calls from his room except to room service to order his breakfast and to the newsstand in the lobby to ask for a Sunday Times. I looked over the restaurant slips from the Blue Lagoon of last night. Conyers had splurged. He had bought two more bottles of champagne and enough Kentucky sour mash for Otell to float a destroyer. There had been two cold-lobster suppers and a deluxe hamburger with onion, the last item presumably for the sour-mash drinker. Conyers had made friends.

  The day wore on into the afternoon. I ran into Jerry Dodd a couple of times. He had placed one of his men on the fourteenth floor. Conyers had not left his room all day. He had asked for the maid to make up his room, but she'd had to work around him. Shed found him a charming old "gent," and he had signed a tip for her of five dollars. He was spending.

  Just before five o'clock, when I was about to take off for cocktails with my girl who lives a couple of blocks from the hotel and who is my secretary on weekdays, I got a flash to report to the boss's office pronto. I found Jerry Dodd already there.

  "We got lucky," Chambrun told me. "The fingerprints paid off. Our Mr. Conyers's real name is Dr. Morton Wallace—a doctor of philosophy. He's a professor at an upstate college— or was. He had a son who was murdered here in New York about a year ago. The son was found shot to death in an alley behind a Greenwich Village nightclub. Police never came up with an answer."

  "How did our Mr. Conyers happen to have his fingerprints on record?" I asked.

  "War work—long ago."

  Jerry Dodd gave me an odd look. "Would you like to make a guess as to who the entertainer was at that nightclub in the Village?"

  His face told me. I didn't have to guess. "Zita?"

  "Bull's-eye," Jerry said. "Looks like the old man was planning to play the role of avenging angel. I've been trying to reach Zita but she doesn't answer at home."

  "Well, there's no show on Sunday night, so she's safe enough for the moment," I said. "Conyers—Wallace—still hasn't left his room?"

  "It takes a long time to read the whole Sunday Times" Jerry said wryly. "But the old boy was almost certainly setting her up last night—along with Georgie Ortell."

  "Wouldn't she know who he is?" I asked.

  Jerry shrugged. "Not necessarily. She was never implicated in the murder. Claimed she had never seen young Wallace in her life. There was no court hearing. Certainly she wouldn't have gone to the funeral where the old man could be seen."

  Chambrun's phone rang. He picked it up. "Chambrun here. Yes, Charles." There was a long silence as Chambrun listened, and his face turned rock-hard. He put down the phone and stood up.

  "That was Charles. He takes over from Henri in
room service at three o'clock on Sundays. Henri left him written instructions, but he only just found them. It seems that our Mr. Conyers ordered a high tea for three people to be served in his room. He asked Charles if he could suggest anything that Miss Zita might particularly like. Very thin caviar sandwiches was Charles's recommendation. The high tea was taken up to 1412 twenty minutes ago.

  "Let's go!" Jerry Dodd said.

  We raced out to the elevators and got up to the fourteenth floor as quickly as we could. At the door of 1412 we rang the bell. There was no answer. I pounded on the door. You can't hear anything that's going on inside a Beaumont room because they're all soundproofed. Jerry pushed me aside and produced his special passkey.

  Jerry was in first, his gun drawn.

  The tableau inside the room sent the small hairs rising on the back of my neck. The elaborate high tea had not been touched. The three people in the room were standing. Zita was half crouching behind George Ortell. Ortell, poised on the balls of his feet, like an animal ready to spring, was facing Conyers, who was pointing a gun steadily at Ortell's heart.

  As we barged into the room, the old man's voice rose in a kind of despairing wail.

  "You damned interfering idiots!" he cried out. "Oh, damn you!

  And then he turned and tossed the gun onto the bed. In that instant Ortell sprang at him, but somehow Jerry Dodd managed to trip Ortell, and he crashed into the table of food.

  The old man had turned away, and he seemed to crumple. His shoulders shook. He was sobbing.

  "The damned old goat was going to kill us!" Zita said. Her face was the color of ashes.

  Ortell had got himself straightened up, and he looked at Jerry, wondering whether he should go to work on him. I've seen Jerry handle guys three times his size, and I almost wished Ortell would try it.

  While Ortell was wondering, Jerry moved in. He whipped open Ortell's jacket and came away with a gun.

  "You got a license to earn' this, buster?" he asked.

  "What the hell is it to you?" Ortell asked.

  "If you haven't, I'm charging you with violation of the Sullivan Law—carrying concealed weapons."

  "Let's get out of here," Ortell said to Zita.

  "Don't you want to bring charges against Mr. Conyers?— against Dr. Wallace?" Chambrun said.

  "To hell with that," Ortell said. "Just see that he gets locked away in a padded cell where he belongs." He and Zita almost ran out of the room.

  The old man turned very slowly to face us. His voice sounded broken. "How did you get to know my real name?" he asked.

  "Did a little checking," Chambrun said. "I meant to help you, Dr. Wallace. Perhaps I have. Murder would have cut short your last fling."

  "Oh, yes, it would," the old man said, his voice bitter. "There was to have been a murder, and it would have cut short my adventure in high living."

  "Let me guess," Chambrun said gently. "Ortell was about to spring at you. Then you would have managed to let him get the gun, and he would have killed you."

  "And he would have paid for it!" the old man cried out. "The waiter saw him here. Room service knew they were coming.

  He couldn't have escaped the murder charge when my body was found."

  "You think he killed your son?"

  "She killed him. That woman killed him. Oh, she didn't pull the trigger, but she played with him, ruined him, and then had him destroyed."

  "Evidence?"

  "None. The police had nothing. But I knew—from fragments I had from my Johnny—that she was a sickness that was destroying him. I have nothing to live for, Mr. Chambrun— nothing but revenge. But I thought, by dying, I could square accounts for Johnny."

  "How did you get them to come here for tea?"

  "I played the foolish innocent last night. I let them believe they could hook me for a few thousand dollars. They were eager to come today. Oh, God, there is no chance for me to reach him again."

  "We can send him up for a spell on a gun-carrying charge," Jerry said.

  Chambrun put his hand on the old man's shoulder. "Perhaps we can find a way to reopen the case—Mr. Conyers. Meanwhile, please consider yourself my guest. The Beaumont will be proud to serve you." Then he turned to me, all business. "Get busy, Mark. We need someone to replace Zita in the Blue Lagoon."

  Pierre Chambrun Defends Himself

  New York has changed since I first came to work here only a few years ago. Luxury landmarks, great hotels, and famous restaurants like the Stork Club, El Morocco, Toots Shor's, the Colony, and the Cafe Renaissance—all have disappeared from the scene. People are afraid to go out at night; they hear you can be mugged, robbed, cut up just for kicks. But there is one place where luxury is still the theme song and where you can feel safe—the Hotel Beaumont, where I work as public relations genius.

  The Hotel Beaumont is still unmatched anywhere in the world. Its trappings are lavish, its culinary reputation is excellent, its wine cellar unsurpassed. Each room and suite in this great hotel is constructed to shut out the harsh sounds of a raucous world. It is like a small city in itself, run by an extraordinary executive named Pierre Chambrun, a legend in his time.

  The security system is supervised by a wiry, sharp little man named Jerry Dodd. The Hotel Beaumont is safe. I've often come in late at night off the city streets and realized that I was letting out my breath in a long sigh of relief. Once through the revolving doors, the automatic anxieties I'd felt as I'd circulated in the outside world evaporated. I was home— home safe.

  And yet on a spring night of this year a violent and shocking murder took place inside that safety zone. A man was "cut up" for what appeared to be more than kicks. He was stabbed a dozen times by a missing knife—a butcher knife, the police believed. He was mutilated in a way that seemed to suggest that his death was meant to serve as a warning to someone or to some other persons. The killer had obliterated an eye with the knife and cut a diagonal line across the victim's face, obliterated the other eye, and then cut a crossing diagonal line. The result was a bloody X. Someone suggested a gang killing, perhaps a Mafia vengeance.

  The dead man was a West German diplomat, in residence at the Beaumont while he attended the current session of the United Nations. A gang killing didn't seem probable to me. Early evidence indicated that Erich Garber had been entertaining a lady who was someone else's wife. An outraged husband seemed much more likely to me than a gangster contract.

  The Beaumont's staff was thrown a little off balance when the murder was discovered. It so happened that on that particular spring night Pierre Chambrun had made one of his rare excursions outside the hotel. We were, for a short time, a ship without a captain.

  Pierre Chambrun, a short dark little man with the brightest black eyes you have ever seen, lives in the penthouse atop the Beaumont. He sunbathes there in decent weather. He exercises in the hotel's gymnasium. He rarely goes out. If people want to see him, they come to him, usually in his second-floor office, where a Picasso of the "blue period," a personal gift from the artist, is only one item of luxury in a large unofficelike room.

  But on this night Chambrun had gone to a dinner. In what Chambrun referred to as the "black days," the early forties, he had fought in the French Resistance movement. The dinner had been a gathering of old friends and comrades-in-arms from that distant time.

  Chambrun returned from the dinner accompanied by a friend, a French painter named Jacques Furneaux. He had insisted on Furneaux's stopping for a nightcap, a very special brandy reserved for very special occasions. He walked into a kind of organized bedlam. He found me in his office along with Lieutenant Hardy of Homicide, a friend from one or two other violences within the sacred gates.

  I had been going over the dead man's card file with Hardy. We know more about most of our guests than they would care to have us know—their habits, their credit ratings, their past history as guests, how they handle their alcohol, and even their private lives as they are lived inside the hotel.

  Erich Garber was from Wes
t Berlin, an army officer in Hitler's battalions in World War Two; a retread democrat, apparently. He was the vice-president of a large automobile manufacturing company, and his credit was impeccable. He had one of the most expensive suites in the hotel, and that means expensive. He gave small but costly parties. He was polite to employees, a generous tipper, and held his liquor like a gentleman. The one blemish on his record was a predilection for high-priced call girls. As far as the hotel was concerned, he handled this with discretion, too.

  Chambrun, wearing a scarlet-lined cape over his dinner jacket, walked into his office with his friend Furneaux, took one look at Hardy, and his eyes became those of a hanging judge. I should say here that anything that upsets the Swiss-watch efficiency of the hotel's operations is taken by Chambrun as a personal affront.

  "Who?" was all he said.

  "Erich Garber, a West German diplomat," I said.

  "14B," Chambrun said.

  "Yes, sir."

  He threw his cape over the back of a chair, took one of his Egyptian cigarettes from a silver case, and lit it. He muttered introductions to Furneaux. "Mark Haskell, my public relations man, and Lieutenant Hardy, Homicide Division of the

  New York City police." Hardy, who looks like an ex-Notre Dame fullback, blond, a little battered, grunted something. I nodded.

  "How?" Chambrun asked.

  "Knife," Hardy said. "Dozen or more stab wounds—nearly every one of them would have done the job. A big ugly X carved on his face—eye to chin, eye to chin."

  Chambrun looked as if he had turned to stone.

  "Sweet Mother!" Furneaux said under his breath.

  I thought they were overreacting a little. "Most of what we know comes from a room service waiter named Marcel," I said. "It seems he—"

  "Marcel Durant," Chambrun said. He knew every employee's name and history "Where is Marcel?"

  "In the lobby office," I said.

  "It would simplify things if I could hear the story from him instead of listening to it twice, first from you," Chambrun said. He walked over and sat down behind his carved Florentine desk. I called downstairs for Marcel, then walked over to the buffet in the corner and brought Chambrun a cup of the Turkish coffee he drinks from morning to night.