Murder round the clock : Pierre Chambrun's crime file

by Pentecost, Hugh, 1903-

  No one ever questions anything Chambrun does in the hotel, and when he appeared in the kitchen and took over from the room sevice waiter who was about to take dinner up to Penthouse Three, no one asked a question. Whatever he chose to do in the Beaumont was law.

  I need to explain that there are three ways to reach the roof other than the fire stairs. There are the two elevators in the

  lobby, one of which was out of order, and there is a service elevator at the back that is used by room service and by maids and other personnel at the proper times. The three penthouses are separated at the front by garden space, but they are connected at the rear by a service hallway into which the service elevator opens along with the fire stairs.

  Chambrun, a napkin draped over his arm, went up in the service elevator with the wagon that carried Robert Gaynor's dinner—which included some of Mrs. Horween's State of Washington salmon. At the roof level he ran into a horror that sickened him. Stretched out in the hallway was the body of a girl, brutally beaten around the head—pistol-whipped, he thought. On the room services hall phone he called for Jerry Dodd and the house physician, Dr. Partridge. The girl, a total stranger to Chambrun, was still breathing faintly.

  He waited for help, cursing himself for not having foreseen this possibility. When the girl was in the doctors care, he gave instructions to Jerry Dodd.

  "You're going in there?" Jerry asked, pointing to the back door of Penthouse Three. Chambrun, his face grim, nodded.

  "I'm going with you," Jerry said.

  "Just handle your orders, Jerry," Chambrun said. "Let us hope I'm not too late."

  With a service key, he opened the rear door of Penthouse Three and wheeled in the dinner wagon. He waited in the kitchen area, straining to hear something. He was aware of the scent of an exotic perfume. Then he heard a woman laugh.

  "Thank heaven," he said, under his breath.

  He wheeled the wagon into the living room. Gaynor had said that, when the waiter brought the dinner, he was just to leave it and go away. He was not to see who Gaynor's guest was. Chambrun walked to the door that led to the penthouse's bedrooms.

  "Gaynor, it's necessary that I talk to you," he called out.

  There was no sound from the rooms beyond.

  "You will force me to come looking for you," Chambrun said.

  Gaynor appeared, his face flushed with anger. "I gave strict instructions—" he began. "Mr. Chambrun!"

  "There isn't much time to talk," Chambrun said in a cold voice. This was the hanging judge.

  "Talk about what?" Gaynor asked.

  "What you do with your life, or other people's lives, is your affair," Chambrun said. "But where you do it is mine."

  "Are you taking a moral tone with me, Mr. Chambrun?"

  "I don't give a damn about your morals," Chambrun said. "Already you may be responsible for a death. One of your fans, a child almost, has just been found outside the service door here, severely beaten. The person responsible for that is waiting for the proper moment to attack you and your lady."

  "Why—for God's sake?"

  "Because he has been hired by the lady's husband to eliminate you both. The husband is not one to forgive treachery."

  "You're not making sense!" Gaynor said.

  "I know a good deal about you, Gaynor. It is my business to know everything there is to know about famous guests. Five years ago you had your first big success, an Italian-made Western movie shot in Spain."

  "The Silver Spurs," Gaynor murmured.

  "The leading lady in that film was a ravishingly beautiful Irish girl named Kathleen O'Connor. That was her maiden name. She was actually married to a wealthy Spanish businessman named Manuel Santana. He was one of the backers of the film, which is how Kathleen got the job. There were rumors about you and Kathleen at the time, but there are always rumors about romantic leading men and their leading ladies. Today you told Mark Haskell, my public relations man, that your dinner companion was a married woman who is staying here with her husband."

  "I wanted him to understand why all the secrecy was necessary," Gaynor said.

  "You discreetly didn't mention the lady's name, but there was something you did do, Gaynor. You ordered a cheap Spanish sherry to go with a gourmet dinner."

  "Sentimental reasons," Gaynor said.

  "I understand. It was a wine you drank when you had your first romance. A very bad wine, I may say, but it revealed the lady's identity to me. Married, with a Spanish background. The only lady married to a Spaniard in the Beaumont was Madame Santana, or the former Kathleen O'Connor, your former leading lady. How you got together again, how you arranged this meeting, I do not know But it was slipshod, because Senor Santana became aware of it and set a trap for you."

  A beautiful woman appeared behind Gaynor in the doorway. "That is impossible, Mr. Chambrun," Kathleen Santana said. "My husband is in Washington on diplomatic business."

  "A perfect alibi for him," Chambrun said, "but it will not interfere with the operation of a hired killer who is, I tell you, just waiting for me to leave before doing his job."

  "I can't believe my husband would—" Kathleen said.

  "Believe," Chambrun said. "The trap is set, rather elaborately. Yesterday, posing as a safety inspector, this hired killer put one of the two front elevators that come to the roof out of commission. That left only one elevator to watch, to make certain you were in the trap, Mrs. Santana. It also meant that, if you changed your plans and decided to dine out somewhere, he had only one elevator to cover. He gave instructions to the switchboard that you would accept no phone calls here after seven o'clock. No chance that way that anyone would become concerned by your failure to answer the phone. No one would be sent to check on you at a critical moment."

  "But if what you say is true—"

  "It is true, and there is no time to waste. Something has already gone wrong—that unfortunate girl in the service hall. He may not wait for me to leave. He can't use the service elevator—the way he came—because the place is swarming with security people. He will have to come here, finish his job, and leave by the one working elevator at the front. You will stop for nothing. You will slip out through the kitchen to

  the service area. My man Dodd will get you out of the hotel, take you anywhere you choose to go."

  "But where?" Gaynor asked.

  "Your problem, not mine, Gaynor," Chambrun said. "Now move. There is no time!"

  The frightened couple took off for the kitchen and their one way of escape. Chambrun went back into the living room. He hesitated a moment, then opened the curtains at the French windows that looked onto the roof. He was clearly visible to anyone out there. Like a perfect waiter he began resetting things on the dinner wagon.

  He heard the front door to the penthouse open, but he paid no attention. He kept his back turned. The waiter's napkin was draped over his right hand.

  "Where are they?" a harsh voice asked.

  Chambrun turned and found himself faced by a grotesque figure wearing a black ski mask. A deadly looking handgun was aimed straight at "the waiter." Chambrun give his shoulders a Gallic shrug and nodded toward the bedroom area.

  The man in the ski mask evidently thought a waiter could be handled later. He moved quickly across the room toward the bedroom door, stepped inside for a moment, then returned.

  "Where have they gone, buster?" he demanded. The hand holding the gun stretched out toward Chambrun, who took a step backward and raised his right hand, covered with the napkin, in a defensive gesture. A gunshot blasted the quiet of the room. The man in the ski mask screamed, dropped his gun, and clutched at a shattered elbow.

  "Breaking and entering," Chambrun said in a quiet voice. He dropped the napkin, revealing his own gun. "Assault with a deadly weapon on that poor girl, intent to commit several murders. Senor Santana cannot claim diplomatic immunity for you."

  The man, clutching his arm, his body twisted in agony, cried out, "Who are you?"

  Chambrun's lips moved in a tight smile.
"Under this roof, in this hotel, I am supreme ruler," he said.

  There was a call to the security office. And then the supreme ruler removed the black tie he was wearing and replaced it with the white one he had in his trouser pocket. The Horween ball was the next thing on his agenda.

  those who stayed for both shows, determined to see and hear all there was to see and hear that night.

  I am the public relations man at the Hotel Beaumont. For a month now I had managed to make my rounds so that I could catch each of Marilyn Stark's nightly performances. I would appear behind the red-velvet rope at the entrance, and Mr. Cardoza, the maitre d', would greet me.

  "Good evening, Mr. Haskell," he would say.

  "Good evening, Mr. Cardoza," I would say. # Tve had reason every night of my life for the last ten years to contact this elegant gentleman who looks like a Spanish nobleman. He has never called me by my first name, Mark, and I have never called him Luis. He has a gift for making the formality seem closer than the casual use of first names.

  On this particular morning—at twelve-thirty—I arrived just as Freddie Lukes was beginning "I got a right to sing the blues," and Cardoza gave me his enigmatic smile.

  "Prompt as usual, I see," he said.

  The stage darkened. The spotlight moved slowly away from Freddie Lukes and his flying fingers to the center entrance. You could hear a little whisper of expectancy run through the rich-looking audience. But Marilyn didn't appear.

  The Hotel Beaumont is run with a kind of Swiss-watch precision. No fixed routines ever vary by a hair, not even the entrance on cue of its star chanteuse in its elegant nightclub. I remember Cardoza and I glanced at each other. Marilyn was three bars of music late—unheard of. Freddie Lukes at the piano began to repeat the theme music, this time a louder, stomped-out version, as if he thought that for some reason Marilyn hadn't heard the cue. It could be a number of things, of course: a heel caught in the hem of her skirt at the last moment with Lucy, her dresser, making frantic repairs; a coughing fit because of something swallowed the wrong way.

  I remember wondering if Pierre Chambrun was aware, wherever he might be in the hotel at the moment, of this momentary break in an established routine. We who work with Chambrun are convinced he has some kind of built-in personal radar system that warns him of any deviation in procedure, from the penthouse rooftop to the subbasement. The truth is, of course, that the moment anything goes even slightly wrong there is someone to notify him. I was actually turning toward Cardoza's reservation phone when the spotlight at Marilyn's entrance point went out, and the dimmed houselights came up. There was to be no show, at least not for the moment.

  Cardoza hurried between tables toward the stage. Freddie Lukes ended his theme music on a jangling chord and took off for the backstage area. Then someone backstage let out a blood-curdling scream. It was an announcement of violence that none of us is ever likely to forget.

  Somewhere else I have written that every six months of my life I fall in love. I am, I guess, what you might call a one-woman-at-a-time man. I remember almost all my gals with affection, one or two with both affection and regret, one with love and enormous gratitude. That one is Marilyn Stark.

  It happened eight years ago. I was young, full of enthusiasm for my job at the Beaumont, encountering famous people every day of my life, imagining that I was an incomparably sophisticated man of the world. I told myself that no woman who had an affair with Mark Haskell would ever forget him. I was, I thought, really something. Women were easy to come by in that glamorous setting, so easy that I was actually a little shocked by that fact from time to time. I put it down to my own irresistible charm.

  Then there was Marilyn. Today, onstage, she looks in her late twenties. She is actually in her late forties. She came to fill a six-week engagement at the Blue Lagoon, and I was hopelessly lost to her in the first week. She was the first "older woman" in my life. She taught me tenderness and how to laugh and the skills of lovemaking. I promised her everything; she promised me nothing but the moment at hand. It was six weeks never matched in mv life, before or since. It was she who said goodbye, not me. For me, it was forever. She was moving on to an engagement in Las Vegas.

  "You've made me feel very young again, Mark," she said that last time. "I love you for it."

  A year later she came back for another run at the Blue Lagoon. I rushed in to pick up the old relationship. It wasn't to be.

  "Let's leave it as it is, Mark," she said. "I'd rather remember what we had—just as it was."

  There had, of course, been other women in my life during that year, and there were new men in hers. She was right, I guess, though at the time I didn't think so. It could never be quite the same again.

  And so, each year when she came back to play the Blue Lagoon, would send flowers to her dressing room and a bottle of champagne, and we would chat, like old friends, about nothing in particular. Never about love, or what had been.

  I didn't go to watch each of her shows because I was grieving for her or lost without her. She had known, among other things, how to write "The End" to our story without drawing blood. I went to watch and listen because this woman belonged among the greats of all time. I am too young to have ever heard Nora Bayes or Helen Morgan or Ruth Etting, but I have heard Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan and Lena Home. Marilyn belonged in their class. Those gals begin where the average singer leaves off.

  So that night, like every night, I was there to hear the best there is. I was aware of at least three men in the audience, one of whom might be the man in her life at the moment. They were Richard Loring, a handsome young man-about-town, a wealthy sportsman, bubbling with animal energy; George Canaday, multimillionaire industrialist, much older, but able to buy Marilyn half of the world if she asked for it; and Peter Sebastian, the bearded artist, sought after, admired, obviously mad about Marilyn.

  These three came to hear her almost every night, and they were there the night that ghastly screaming started backstage. They—and the thousands of other people who adored Marilyn as a performer—were never to hear her sing again.

  Death, I imagine, never comes as less than a shock, except perhaps in very old people—I mean, to those still living. Sudden death, without the preface of illness, death as the result of an accident or an act of God, is always shocking. But death that comes as a result of purposeful violence by another human being goes beyond shock.

  Marilyn—lovely, vivacious, tender, joyful Marilyn—lay on the floor of her room, dressed in an evening gown in which she would never perform again. Her head had been beaten unmercifully, and her golden hair was matted with dark blood. She had also been struck time after time across the face, and her beauty had been completely obliterated. For one wild moment I told myself it couldn't be Marilyn. It had to be someone else wearing Marilyns gown. And then I turned away, fighting a terrible nausea.

  For a moment the faces that circled Marilyn were all familiar. There were Cardoza, his elegant composure shattered; Freddie Lukes, who had come running off the stage, his black face streaming sweat; Danny Haines, the stage manager who handled the backstage at the Blue Lagoon. And there was Lucy Morris, who had screamed us all to attention. Lucy is perhaps sixty years old, ugly, gnarled by arthritis, Marilyn's dresser for the past twenty years. Lucy would have put her arm in an electric meat grinder for Marilyn, if Marilyn had asked it.

  Lucy's mouth was open for another scream when she saw me, someone Marilyn had cared for, a friend, and she catapulted herself into my arms, shaking and sobbing.

  Then others were crowding into the room and at the door, including the three men who dreamed of Marilyn—the sportsman, the tycoon, the artist. It was George Canaday, the tycoon, looking old and gray, who said, "Someone call the police!"

  I thought that must be in character. Get someone else to do what must be done.

  Something better than the police arrived at that moment, a dark, wiry, intense little man named Jerry Dodd, who is the Beaumont's security chief.

 
"Out!" he shouted at Canaday, Loring, Sebastian, and the others crowded around them. "Out!" He slammed the dressing room door in their faces and fastened the inside bolt.

  Jerry Dodd knelt and took a close look at Marilyn. I heard him swear under his breath. "Anyone thought to call Doc Partridge?" he asked. "Not that there's anything he can do for her." Doc Partridge is the house physician. Then Jerry looked at me. "You notified Chambrun?"

  "For God's sake, Jerry, I just got here!"

  It was Cardoza who went to the dressing room phone and tried to locate The Man. Old Lucy Morris and I clung to each other, as though to lose one another was to be lost forever.

  People have seen Pierre Chambrun in many kinds of crises over the years at the Beaumont. They would say, I think, that no circumstance, however serious or bizarre, ever changes his outward aspect. He is always well-tailored, wearing exactly the right clothes for the moment. Like a good actor, he seems never to be caught in an awkward gesture or movement. Short, he walks with such a firm stride that he seems taller than he is. A Hollywood producer was once interested in doing a movie about the Beaumont with Chambrun as the central figure. He asked me which actor I would choose to play the role. Unfortunately, the perfect actor is no longer available—the late Claude Rains.

  Those of us who knew Chambrun well could always find a clue to his feelings in his heavy-lidded eyes. Those eyes could be as compassionate as the Good Samaritan's, as curious as a mischievous child's. When he walked into Marilyn's dressing room that night, the hanging judge was in command. You couldn't look at her without feeling an intense and fierce rage at the person who had done this. I remember feeling reassured as he stood there, looking down at what was left of Marilyn. He would nail the person responsible for this if anyone could.

  I look at what I have written, and I have to say that a dinner jacket was not exactly the right dress for a murder. He was dressed for all the various events taking place that evening in the hotel, the events he would cover on his nightly rounds. He was always just a little more elegant than his most elegant customer or guest.