Murder round the clock : Pierre Chambrun's crime file
Page 31
"Lord Ormsby," she told us later. "Willie Belton when I met him just after World War One. Damned near as old as I am. Horrible shape, though. Walks with a stick."
They dined in the Blue Lagoon, our nightclub. Toto is not allowed in the main dining room. The two old people apparently had a lovely time reliving half a century or more. It was nearly eleven when Mrs. Haven and Toto returned to her penthouse.
"Willie offered to escort me up to the roof," Mrs. Haven told us later, "but I told him chivalry didn't have to go that far. Good thing he accepted the idea. The dear old boy might have gotten himself killed!"
So it was that she returned to the roof alone, except, of course, for Toto. The little dog was left in the garden. He had a special "dog door" in and out of the kitchen, which he could manage by himself. Mrs. Haven let herself in at the front door, switched on the lights, and found herself facing Carl Stratton standing in the doorway to the kitchen.
"How did you get in here?" Mrs. Haven asked sharply.
"Fixed the lock on the kitchen door when I was here earlier," Stratton said. "Where do you keep them?"
"Keep what?"
"Your jewels, Victoria. Where do you keep them? I've turned the place upside down—no safe, no strongbox. Where are they?"
Maybe she made some kind of instinctive gesture, because he stepped forward and snatched away her suitcaselike handbag, and backed away, opening it.
"My God!" he said.
"Safest place to keep them is with me," Mrs. Haven said.
"My God!" Stratton said again. "In here—and on you— there must be a million bucks' worth!"
"I should have estimated it a little higher than that," Mrs. Haven said. She dropped down in the big armchair that Chambrun called her throne. "So you've got them, Stratton. Would you mind very much leaving me the privacy to go to bed?"
He moistened his lips. "How old are you, Victoria?" he asked.
"Eighty-one—if it matters," she said.
"It matters," Stratton said, his eyes very bright. "Eighty-one years is quite a lot of living. It makes what I have to do a little less difficult."
"What do you have to do?"
"Well, I can't go off with your million dollars and leave you to tell the police who was responsible." He shifted her bag under one arm, and from inside his coat he produced a switchblade knife. "I'm going to have to silence you rather permanently, Victoria. I'll try to make it as painless as possible."
He took a step toward her and out of the kitchen came Toto, snarling fiercely.
"I'll cut your stinking little head off, buster, if you don't stay away from me!" Stratton shouted.
"Toto!" The old woman's voice was clear and controlled. "Go somewhere and tend to your own business!"
The little dog gave Stratton a parting snarl and headed back for the kitchen. Mrs. Haven leaned back in her chair.
"I suppose you have no choice, Stratton," she said. "Perhaps you would let me have one cigarette before you cut my throat."
Without waiting for Stratton to answer, she began fumbling in the stack of newspapers next to her chair. When she turned to face him again, she was holding a giant handgun, a small cannon, aimed straight at his heart.
"Now, my young idiot," she said, "you will bring me that telephone, and we'll put an end to this. It has a nice long cord on it."
He stared at her, like a bird fascinated by a cobra. "The phone won't work, Victoria. I cut the wires when I first let myself in."
"Then we'll just have to wait, won't we?" Mrs. Haven said.
"Wait for what?"
"Why, for someone to come."
"When will that be?"
"Who knows? I rather doubt there will be anyone before the maid who comes about nine in the morning."
The heavy gun was steady as a rock in Mrs. Haven's hand, her elbow resting on the arm of her chair. Stratton must have been thinking the old woman couldn't keep it steady for too long. He moistened his lips, and there were little beads of sweat on his forehead. The light glittered on the blade of his knife.
"Do you really know how to use that thing, Victoria?" he asked.
"Oh, my, do I know how!" Mrs. Haven said, smiling at him. "One of the first men in my life was a very rich oil man from Texas. He saw me at a nightclub where I was dancing."
"You were a dancer?" The young man was playing for time, trying to judge the distance between himself and the "throne."
"A very good one," Mrs. Haven said. "But my Texas friend was traveling around the world in those days. He wanted me with him, and I wanted to be with him. He was afraid someone might try to get at him through me, so he taught me how to handle a gun. Would you believe I can still hit a fifty-cent piece at fifty paces?"
"Not really," Stratton said.
"You had better believe." Mrs. Haven smiled grimly. "My Texas friend gave me this diamond clasp I'm wearing." She touched the pin on the front of her dress with her free hand. "That was over fifty years ago. I suggest you sit down, young man. It will be a long time until the maid comes."
He sat down, facing her, wondering how long it would be before the gun hand wavered. It couldn't be too long now
"My friend from Texas taught me to shoot with both hands," Mrs. Haven said, almost casually. "I am as good left-handed as I am right-handed." With which she shifted the gun from one hand to the other. That way, Stratton realized, she could hold out for a long, long time.
Could she really handle the gun, he wondered? If he made a quick lunge at her, would she react in time? Something in her cold blue eyes warned him to wait. In time fatigue would overtake this aged crone.
"If you'd care for a little music while we wait," Mrs. Haven said, "you can turn on the hi-fi set over there in the corner."
"You're as crazy as a bedbug, Victoria," Stratton said. "I can last longer than you can last."
"I know what you're hoping for, Stratton," she said. "Don't count on it."
An hour went by, with two people staring at each other, with Death waiting for one of them in the wings. Then Toto reappeared, snarling and whimpering.
"Toto! I told you to go somewhere and tend to your own business!" Mrs. Haven said, a sharp edge to her voice.
The little dog gave her a sullen look and padded back into the kitchen.
A little after midnight I went up to Chambrun's penthouse with him. There was some kind of convention being held in the Beaumont the next day, and Chambrun had a list of names he wanted me to have that he hadn't brought down to his second-floor office. We sat there, having a drink and going over the next day's details, when I heard an unusual sound.
"You got rats in the woodwork?" I asked Chambrun.
"I think not," he said. He walked over to the garden door and opened it. There, looking up at us sullenly, was Toto, Mrs. Haven's Japanese friend.
"I didn't know you and Toto were friends," I said.
"We're not," Chambrun said. "He hates my guts." Even as he spoke, he was picking up the phone. "Get me Jerry Dodd," he said. A moment later he had our head security man on the line. "There's something wrong in Mrs. Haven's penthouse," Chambrun told him. "Get the passkeys, and get up here on the double."
I couldn't believe it. "She's sick, you think? Let's get over there, boss."
"We'll wait for Jerry," he said.
It seemed like forever—I suppose it was less than ten minutes—before Jerry Dodd arrived. We could tell there were lights on in Mrs. Haven's penthouse, but we couldn't see in.
"Damned drapes are always drawn," Chambrun said. "Give me the front door passkey, Jerry. You take the back." He glanced at his watch. "Twelve seventeen. We'll all go in at precisely twenty past."
And we did.
Mrs. Haven sat there, holding her gun on Stratton. When he saw Chambrun, he decided to make a run for it. As he passed the kitchen door, Jerry Dodd knocked him cold with the butt of his gun.
Mrs. Havens pale blue eyelids lowered for a moment as she put her cannon down on the stack of newspapers beside her chair. Then she gave
us a report on what had happened.
"Would you have shot him, Victoria?" Chambrun asked.
"I haven't fired a gun for more than fifty-five years," Mrs. Haven said. "And anyway, I took the bullets out of this thing years ago. I was afraid someone would stumble on it and hurt themselves."
"An empty gun!" I heard Jerry Dodd mutter. He was handcuffing the unconscious Stratton's hands behind his back.
"I always said, Dodd, that I could have been a very good actress," Mrs. Haven said. "That misguided young man seems to have bought my performance. I had to be good, you know. He was going to kill me."
Toto was sniffling on the floor beside her chair.
"Extraordinary that he had the instinct to go for help," I said.
Chambrun gave Mrs. Haven a wry smile. "We'd better show Mark how it works, Victoria," he said, "or we'll have a whole new folklore about animals."
"Go somewhere, Toto, and tend to your own business," she said.
Toto gave her a bored look and went out to the kitchen. I could hear his little dog door open and close. Mrs. Haven went to one of the windows and opened the drape. She beckoned to me, and I could see Toto trotting across the roof to Chambrun's penthouse. We watched him reach the garden door and scratch on it.
"I have trained him to follow that command—'go tend to your own business,"' Mrs. Haven said. "Pierre has always been concerned about my having so much of value here. If Toto ever scratched on his door, he'd know I had more trouble than a stomachache. Tonight I had to send him twice before you came upstairs, Pierre."
So that was how Chambrun got the message.