Murder round the clock : Pierre Chambrun's crime file

by Pentecost, Hugh, 1903-

  I felt suddenly that something was wrong. I turned to the freezer, anticipating the chill, and walked in. The first room inside is kept at just below thirty-two degrees. That is where Jacques, wearing a sheepskin-lined coat, does his carving. In the back room Jacques keeps his 300-pound blocks of ice, and the temperature there is kept at five degrees Fahrenheit.

  That's where I found Jacques, frozen rock-solid.

  I took him by the heels and dragged him out, through the first room and out onto the floor beside the melting swan. I think I knew he was dead, but I found myself running around looking for something to cover him. Finally I made sense and called Dr. Partridge, the house physician, Chambrun in his penthouse, and Jerry Dodd. Then I knelt beside the frozen man, rubbing a hand that was a block of ice, hoping inanely that it might do some good.

  Chambrun, Jerry, and the old doctor arrived almost simultaneously, the doctor grumbling over having been dragged away from a backgammon game in the Spartan Bar. Chambrun, his eyes glittering slits in their pouches, Jerry, and I

  watched the doctor make his preliminary examination. Finally the old man stood up, muttering about his arthritic knees.

  "No use," he said. "He's long gone, Pierre."

  Chambrun seemed almost not to be listening. He had picked up the carpenter's yardstick and was idly measuring the swan's delicately curved neck.

  "Terrible thing for a man to get locked in his own freezer," Doc Partridge said.

  "Nonsense!" It was like an explosion from Chambrun. "There are no locks, just to make certain such a thing is impossible. There's no way to get locked in. Could he have had a heart attack and frozen after he died?"

  "It's slippery in there," Jerry said. "He could have fallen, hit his head, and frozen before he came to."

  "I want the answers, Doctor," Chambrun said. "Was it his heart? Was he knocked unconscious by a fall—or by someone?"

  "Have to thaw him out first," Doc said.

  The doctor had called for a stretcher on his way down. It should have arrived by now. We heard someone pounding on the door of the service elevator.

  "This thing is stuck about a foot from floor level," someone shouted to us. "Can't open the door. We'll have to go up a flight and bring the stretcher down the stairs."

  "So move it!" Jerry shouted back.

  A friend could die, a mistress could be clamoring for him, but if something didn't work properly in his beloved hotel, Chambrun stayed with it till he had an answer. He sent for the chief engineer. While Jacques's body was carried upstairs by the stretcher bearers, the engineer worked on the elevator.

  A few minutes later we knew the grim reason why the elevator couldn't get down to the floor level. The horribly mangled body of young Ted Springer lay at the bottom of the shaft.

  Lieutenant Hardy of Manhattan's Homicide Division was an old friend. As in any city, there had been murders before this in the city called Beaumont. Hardy was a big, fair-haired man who looked more like a bewildered Notre Dame fullback than a sharp criminal investigator. Hardy's chief attribute is a kind of dogged stick-to-itiveness. He digs and digs and digs until he finally comes up with something that makes sense. He was on the scene at midnight, an hour after I'd found Jacques's body in the freezer and we'd found what was left of Ted Springer.

  Hardy began at the bottom of the service elevator shaft. Chambrun and I had stayed there from the moment Ted's body was found. Jerry Dodd, a white-hot rage shaking him, had gone in search of Mr. Wilson McVey. Jerry had no doubts about what had happened.

  Ted had confronted McVey outside Mrs. Framingham's room on the fourteenth floor—or in it—had been overpowered by McVey and dropped down the elevator shaft. The service elevator door on the fourteenth floor had been tampered with, Jerry found. McVey, if it was McVey, was an expert with locks and catches. He had sent the elevator up above fourteen, gimmicked the door catch on fourteen, and dropped Ted—alive or dead—down the shaft.

  Hardy, examining Ted's body without moving it, was able to set a time for us. Ted's wristwatch had been smashed at exactly seven minutes after nine.

  Jerry Dodd, cruising about the hotel, came on Mr. Wilson McVey having a drink in the Trapeze Bar, which is located on the mezzanine just over the Beaumont's lobby. That was at half past midnight. McVey was entertaining an attractive lady. He regarded Jerry with a pleasantly insolent smile. Jerry said afterward he could have sworn McVey knew exactly what was coming and was particularly pleased because he knew he had the right answer.

  Jerry got McVey away from his table and the lady and talked to him over by the bar. He identified himself and asked McVey where he had been that evening from eight o'clock on.

  McVey could have refused to answer—Jerry had no legal right to interrogate him.

  "I don't know why you're asking me, Mr. Dodd, or by what right you ask me," McVey said, smiling, "but I have no objection to telling you. I work for an art museum on the West Coast. Tonight I attended an auction of paintings at the Mcln-tyre Gallery on West Fifty-seventh Street. I was there from eight o'clock until about eleven-thirty. The young lady at my table was with me all that time. If her word won't do, the gallery can verify it. I bought several paintings for my museum in the course of the evening."

  It checked out. Like it or not, Wilson McVey had been nowhere near the fourteenth floor at seven minutes after nine. There was too much evidence to prove that the fourteenth floor was the starting point of Ted's fall. Not only had the catch on the elevator door been tampered with, but Hardy found signs that Ted's body had been dragged along the corridor from close by Mrs. Framingham's room to the back-hall area where the service elevator ran. McVey was a blind alley, a dead end.

  "Whoever our man is, Ted moved too fast and showed himself. This kind of operator doesn't turn to violence as a rule." Jerry Dodd was expounding to us in Chambrun's office in short bursts of anger. He had been certain he had cornered a thief and a murderer, and now he was at the beginning of the line again. Chambrun sat at his desk, his eyes almost closed, sipping his Turkish coffee. I'd made myself a double Jack Daniel's on the rocks. I needed it. We were all under the surveillance of the three-cornered face in the blue Picasso original opposite Chambrun's desk.

  "Ted showed himself too soon," Jerry went on. "He shouldn't have shown himself at all. He should have called me. Our thief knew the game was up. Ted could identify him, name him. So he turned to violence, knocked Ted out, and dropped him down the shaft. We'll never know what he hit Ted with or in what other way he overpowered him. Too much damage in the fall."

  Chambrun opened his eyes. "Don't let McVey slip away from you, Jerry. I'm not satisfied."

  "He couldn't have done it," Jerry said.

  "Done what?" Chambrun asked in a strangely vague voice.

  "Whatever was done. He wasn't here."

  "He wasn't here at seven minutes past nine," Chambrun said.

  "Which is when it happened."

  "I wonder," Chambrun said.

  Hardy had come into the room during this conversation. "No doubt about the time," he said. "The watch."

  "You have the watch?" Chambrun asked.

  "Of course."

  "Fingerprints—if they aren't all yours?"

  Hardv's face looked stern. "I don't think we've checked vet. You think— 0 "

  "That's what I think," Chambrun said.

  "I wish I knew what the hell you were talking about," I said.

  Nobody answered me because old Doc Partridge joined us at that point. "I've got a rather surprising answer for you, Pierre," he said.

  "It wasn't his heart," Chambrun said. He was suddenly talking about Jacques Dubois.

  "He was heavily dosed with chloroform," Dr. Partridge said. "Probably held over his face on a cloth or handkerchief. It was enough to have made him unconscious for a long time, and it possibly killed him. The medical examiner isn't certain. The chloroform could have killed him in about thirty minutes. In that five-degree temperature, he couldn't have lasted more than three hours. In any event,
the chloroform is why he didn't get out of the freezer."

  "Is the chloroform easily detectable?" Chambrun asked.

  "Simple."

  Chambrun turned to Hardy. "Have your people check with what's left of young Springer, Lieutenant. It's just possible the same M.O. was used."

  Hardy took off. Chambrun turned to Jerry Dodd. "I think you'd better bring Mr. Wilson McVey up there. I don't want him out of my sight."

  "Suppose he won't come?"

  "Then I'll go to him," Chambrun said.

  Jerry left to find McVey. Chambrun lit one of his flat Egyptian cigarettes and squinted at me through the smoke.

  "If a strange man came up to you in a bar and asked you for an alibi, would you give it to him, Mark?"

  "I'd tell him to drop dead," I said.

  "Unless you very much wanted to provide an alibi for yourself for a certain time," Chambrun said. "You asked me a little while ago what I was talking about. It's not very complicated. Ted Springer's watch was set to seven minutes past nine after he was dead. Because that wasn't the time he died."

  "It could have been set before he was thrown down the shaft," I said.

  "No," Chambrun said. "If it had been, the ambassador would have had his frozen swan to decorate the banquet table. Have you forgotten that my poor friend Jacques was also murdered? I will make you a bet, Mark. I will bet you a new suit of your choice, price no object, that Ted Springer was murdered a few minutes before seven o'clock, and that Jacques was murdered at almost exactly seven o'clock."

  "You got a witness or something?" I asked. I thought I was being funny.

  "I have a witness or something," Chambrun said, quite seriously.

  After that he seemed to go into some kind of trance. I've seen him that way before when he's trying to think something through. I paced around the office, after pouring myself another drink, waiting for some word from Hardy and Jerry on the subject of Mr. Wilson McVey. You could have feathered me down when the office door opened and Jerry appeared with a smiling McVey.

  "I ought to be outraged by whatever is going on here, Mr.

  Chambrun," McVey said. "I am asked for an alibi. I am ordered to come up here to your office. I should have refused both requests, but curiosity has got the better of me. What is it all about?"

  He was as relaxed as a man in church.

  "There have been two murders committed in the hotel tonight, Mr. McVey," Chambrun said.

  "Shocking. But what has that to do with me? I wasn't in your hotel when the crimes were committed."

  "How do you know that?" Chambrun asked.

  McVey's smile was completely disarming. "Because your Mr. Dodd asked me where I was from eight o'clock on. Obviously your murders happened then, or I would have been asked to account for some other time."

  "So I ask you now to account for the time between a quarter to seven and a quarter after seven," Chambrun said.

  I thought for just a flashing second McVey's smile seemed to fade. But he stayed with it.

  "I was dressing to go out for the evening," he said. In your room?"

  "Yes."

  'You can prove it?"

  'How? I was alone. I don't dress in public, Mr. Chambrun." McVey reached in his pocket for a cigarette and lit it with a lighter held in a perfectly steady hand.

  The little red button on Chambrun's desk phone blinked. He answered. Of course we only heard his end of it. "Chambrun here. . . . Ah, yes, Lieutenant. . . . Interesting coincidence, what? . . . Ah, well, life is full of little disappointments. I think you'd better get back here. I've got your man."

  Chambrun put down the phone, and his glittering black eyes fixed on McVey. "The two dead men were friends of mine, McVey—trusted friends. It is going to give me pleasure to nail you to the barn door."

  "Fascinating, if improbable," McVey said, still smiling.

  "You're a clever operator, McVey, but tonight the heat got a little too much for you." Chambrun's mouth moved in a tight smile of his own. "The heat got too hot for you, but I should add it was the cold that did you in."

  "What kind of double-talk is that?" McVey asked.

  "It will save time if I lay it out for you," Chambrun said. "You are a skillful hotel thief, McVey. You've been driving us crazy here for weeks. But tonight we were close to you. We'd begun to think your way, and we guessed you might be planning to rob a certain Mrs. Framingham. A young man on our security force named Springer was waiting for you on the fourteenth floor. We found him at about eleven o'clock at the bottom of the service elevator shaft. His watch had been broken in the fall at seven minutes past nine."

  "Which would seem to let me out," McVey said, still at ease.

  "Lieutenant Hardy has just told me on the phone that Springer had been chloroformed before he fell. I suggest you carry chloroform with you on your little adventures, McVey. You're not a violent man, until you are driven to it. You carry the chloroform in case someone walks in on you, unexpected. You were masked or disguised, I suppose. A whiff of chloroform, and there would be time for you to get away."

  "And have other people been chloroformed in your robberies, Mr. Chambrun?"

  "No, because you had no need to use it until young Springer walked in on you tonight. He recognized you, called you by name, didn't he? You knew he had you, and so you chloroformed him, dragged him to the service elevator, unlocked the door with your special skills, and dropped him down the shaft. That was a few minutes before seven."

  "Prove that it was me. Prove that it was at the time you say." McVey moistened his lips. Strain was beginning to show "You said Springer's watch was set at seven minutes past nine."

  "Exactly the right way to put it," Chambrun said. " 'Was set' at seven minutes past nine. Proof of the time and proof that it was you who did it are coming up, McVey. You must have come as close to panic as you have ever been. You had to be as sure as you could be that Springer had died in the fall. So down you go in the service elevator to the floor above the bottom. You walk the last flight, use your skills to open the basement door to the elevator shaft, and there was Springer— as dead as you could hope. Then you saw the chance to put the icing on the cake. You took Springer's watch off his wrist, set it at seven minutes past nine, then smashed it and strapped it back on his wrist."

  McVey actually laughed. "And you have proof of all this?"

  "Let me go on, McVey," Chambrun said. "Just as you had the watch back on Springer's wrist you heard a sound behind you. You turned and saw Jacques Dubois standing beside his beautiful ice carving of a swan. He had wheeled it out of the freezer while you were concentrating on Springer. You had no choice. You pretended to be explaining while you walked up to him—then a second dose of chloroform. You dragged Jacques into the freezer and left him there to die.

  "As I have said, this was at about seven o'clock. How do I know the time? Because I know about everything that goes on in my hotel, McVey. I know many facts about ice carving from my friend Dubois. For example, I know that when a carving melts, its relative shape is retained because all parts melt in proportion. Ice actually melts at a rate of about half an inch an hour at room temperature." Chambrun turned to me. "Do you remember, Mark, when we first found Jacques I was measuring the swan's neck with that carpenter's yardstick?"

  I remembered.

  "The design on the graph paper showed me that the swan's neck had originally been four inches thick. My measuring showed me, at eleven o'clock, that it was then only two inches thick. So I knew that the swan had been out of the freezer for approximately four hours—half an inch to an hour. That's when poor Jacques was taken back into the freezer by you, McVey—at seven o'clock."

  "So I need an alibi for then."

  "Not really," Chambrun said. "Your fingerprints on the watch—"

  McVey seemed, slowly, to shrivel before our eyes. Like the melting swan, I thought. "Never improvise," he said in a shaken voice. "I always planned everything down to the smallest detail, every eventuality. But as you said, Mr. Chambrun, it all hap
pened too fast—the heat was too hot—one thing on top of the other. I had never killed anyone in my life, and there in the space of twenty minutes—"

  Jerry took McVey away, and Chambrun went over to the sideboard to pour himself a brandy. He looked tired.

  "It's amazing that you could tell time by that swan," I said. "If you hadn't measured it when we first found it—"

  "But I did."

  "Anyway, the fingerprints would have nailed him."

  Chambrun sniffed the aroma of his brandy. "What fingerprints?" he asked.

  "On the watch."

  "The only fingerprints on the watch are Hardy's," Chambrun said. "He told me that on the phone, and I said, 'Ah, well, life is full of little disappointments.'"

  "You let McVey think—"

  "He killed two friends of mine in cold blood," Chambrun said. "Are there Marquis of Queensberry rules for dealing with such a man?"

  It is one of the legends surrounding the Hotel Beaumont, that Pierre Chambrun, its manager (himself a legend in his own lifetime), has a private radar system, probably internally installed. Chambrun is apparently able to foretell anything that may interfere with the Swiss-watch operation of his hotel. The truth is, there is nothing magical about it. No one who works for Chambrun, from Miss Ruysdale, his fabulous secretary, down to the lowest busboy in the room service, would dream of noticing anything remotely out of the ordinary in a day's business without passing the information on to the Great Man. He has an extraordinary capacity for putting two and two together and coming up with the right answer, which may just happen to be five.

  I am Mark Haskell, the public relations man for the Beaumont. I probably know more about things that have happened in the hotel and have never been made public than anyone except Chambrun himself and possibly Betsy Ruysdale. Some of those things are funny, some are tragic. As in every hotel we have to deal with alcoholics, with elegant call girls, with old men who die in the wrong beds, with cheating husbands and cheating wives, with foreign diplomats claiming diplomatic immunity, and on and on. But there have been suicides and murders that cannot be kept hidden.