Gilded Nightmare

by Hugh Pentecost

“You came away from the Baroness white-hot. You needed a walk. You needed fresh air. Something happened there, before we interrupted about the dog, to turn you on, Sam. What was it?”

  Sam sank deeper into his chair. “The Charmian Brown saga,” he said. “It seems it may never end.” He put his pipe down on Chambrun’s desk as though he were reluctant to part with it. “I was intrigued when you brought me her message, Mark—that she wanted to see me, to apologize for having snubbed me on her arrival, and to invite me to some cockeyed party. I felt a strong impulse—curiosity, whatever—to see Charmian face to face. I wanted to discover what the years had done to her, or perhaps miraculously, what they had not done to her. Deep down in my subconscious I think there’s always been a big black question mark. That moment of love-making with Charmian twenty years ago—had it really been solely to find out the truth about my father, or had I always had an insatiable man-woman hunger for her ever since the days when we played ‘doctor’ under the front porch? Had I punished her, driven her out of Hollywood, not so much to gain justice for my father, but to do something about my own guilt for having so much wanted the woman who’d betrayed the old man and driven him to suicide?” Sam gave Chambrun a crooked little smile. “Subsurface Sam, they call me.”

  “I can understand your wondering,” Chambrun said.

  Sam went on. “I was rather unpleasantly startled to discover, as I walked down the corridor toward 19-B that my heart was beating faster than normal. The old teen-age excitement.

  “This girl Heidi answered the door. I was expected. I was ushered, without delay, into the living room where Charmian sat on that gold-brocaded love seat. You saw her in that yellow shift. Her smile was tentative, as if she were a little afraid of seeing me again. We were alone—I thought. Heidi had evaporated. I had no reason to suspect then that Helwig and Masters might be within earshot.

  “I found I couldn’t speak for a moment; my heart was thumping against my ribs. Her wide blue eyes, fixed intently on me, seemed to plead for something. My mouth was cotton-dry.

  “ ‘Well, Charmian,’ I heard myself say.

  “ ‘Well, Sam?’ It was the low, throaty voice I remembered so well, still young and vibrant.

  “I felt myself getting on top of this silly emotional disturbance. But she was unbelievable. You’ve seen, Pierre. I’d been impressed by her appearance during those moments in the lobby, but then she was wearing the sable coat and hat, she had on the black glasses. She’d looked amazingly unchanged by the passing twenty years, but most of what would have been tell-tale exposures were hidden. Now she was without the glasses, and there were no crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes. The shift was scanty in terms of covering her exquisite figure—arms bare, long legs carelessly exposed. There was no flabbiness, no sag, no signs whatever of age.”

  “I can vouch for that,” I said.

  Sam’s weary eyes turned my way. “Don’t be had by the siren song, Mark,” he said. “Well, anyway, I told her she was a miracle. She said she was glad I thought so, and asked me to sit down in the corner of the love seat opposite her. I did, and was instantly aware of her perfume—just as I was when I sat down in this chair. Not too heavy, deliciously subtle. I remembered it well from that night twenty years ago. I’m sure it’s made specially for her. She invited me to have a drink and I refused.

  “ ‘It’s always been my theory,’ she said, ‘that drinking should only be done when all you want of the moment is the experience of being a little tight. It doesn’t go with other sensations or pleasures.’

  “She’d said something almost exactly like that on the night I’d found myself lying beside her in her mammoth Hollywood bed.

  “ ‘Men are lucky,’ she said. ‘They age so attractively. You’re handsomer and stronger looking, in the sense of character, than you were twenty years ago.’

  “I found it difficult to keep this light, conversational ball bouncing. Her youthfulness, her total lack of change, were dazing.

  “ ‘It’s too bad you’re so very rich,’ I said.

  “ ‘Oh?’

  “ ‘You’ll miss the satisfaction of making an enormous fortune on your own. If you could bottle and market the secret of your perpetual youth, Charmian, you’d have the women of the world at your feet.’ It was a first-class inanity.

  “ ‘I’m sorry that impresses you so much,’ she said. ‘Presently you’ll begin to think about it—the massage, the lotions, the exercises, the magic of Dr. Malinkov. You’ll stop believing it’s real—which of course it isn’t. Tell me about you, Sam.’

  “I told her I’d made a lot of money in Hollywood. It had allowed me to do the kind of writing I really liked. I told her it had been a good life.

  “ ‘Women?’ she asked.

  “ ‘Here and there.’

  “ ‘But no one permanent?’

  “ ‘No.’

  “She laughed. ‘Vanity is the scourge of womankind,’ she said. ‘I’d like to think it was because you really never got over me, Sam.’

  “ ‘Coming down the hall a few minutes ago I wondered about that myself.’

  “ ‘How sweet,’ she said.

  “Well, I told myself, here we come around to the brass ring again. Twenty years ago I knew her next move would have been to slip out of that yellow nothing, take me by the hand, and lead me to a huge circular bed surrounded by mirrors. Goddamn it, I found myself half hoping! But when it didn’t instantly happen, a new absurdity occurred to me, an absurdity that turned me off but good. This isn’t Charmian, I thought. This is a stand in, a double.

  “As if she’d been reading my mind, she said: ‘I remember everything we said to each other that night, Sam, as if it had been recorded on tape. I wanted you for the man you were, Sam, and also for what you could do for me in Hollywood. Always greedy! Always ready to play both sides of the street was Charmian Brown. I knew you were going to ask me that question about your father, and I was determined not to be cheated out of having you by answering it too soon. Remember? You started to ask me several times and I wouldn’t let you say it’

  “I remembered—too damned vividly; her fingers on my lips, that wonderful sensuous body pressed close to me. Oh, I remembered.

  “ ‘Then afterwards—so soon afterwards—you asked me,’ Charmian said. ‘You can’t imagine how carefully I debated my answer to that question. If I told you your father was guilty you might run out on me because you couldn’t bear the thought of sharing me with him. If I told you he was innocent you might run away, but you’d get over it and you might come back. I guessed wrong.’

  “ ‘Guessed! I couldn’t believe my ears. I felt myself shaking from head to foot. ‘What was the truth?’ I asked her.

  “She looked at me and her lips curled downward in an expression of slight disgust. ‘The lecherous old goat was all over me that night, Sam. I screamed for help because I needed help.’

  “My God, I thought, this is no double, no stand-in. This is Charmian Brown, who knows all the techniques of turning the knife in the wound until you cry out for mercy. A kaleidoscope of horrors was in front of me: my father hanging from that pipe in the basement; Bruno Wald, reveling in an illicit pleasure and then caught in it like a rat in a trap; and God alone knew how many other faceless victims. Bitch, bitch, bitch! I’d never know the truth about my father now. She’d tell it to me one way today and another way tomorrow. She had me on a string like a yo-yo. What sweet revenge for her. Twenty years ago I’d driven her out of Hollywood, destroyed her chance for a career, and now she’d squared accounts with me. You ask if it can matter after all this time? Well, Goddamn it, it does matter! I heard her asking me, sweetly, if I’d come to her party, and I told myself, ‘I will kill her!.’ I felt better.” Sam drew a deep breath. “And then you and Mark arrived to tell her about the dog.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us this part of it when you first told us the story about your father?” Chambrun asked.

  “Do you know, Pierre, I really did think about killing her.” S
am laughed. “The impulse was so real I was already planning how to cover myself. I did go for a walk to think it all out. As I cooled out I realized, of course, that I couldn’t kill her—that it wouldn’t satisfy. On my way in through the lobby Nevers beckoned to me from the desk. There was that note. And while I was reading it, not quite believing what I read, a heavy hand rested on my shoulder and it was that Homicide dick named Dolan. I was wanted back up here.”

  “We come back to motive,” Chambrun said, after a moment. He’d picked up the little ball of paper Charmian had left crumpled on his desk a couple of hours before. He tossed it up and caught it—tossed it up again. It was irritating to watch. “We have a nice motive for you, Sam, except that Charmian Zetterstrom is still very much alive. But what is the motive behind a possible plan to do you harm at the party?”

  “Poison my soup,” Sam said.

  I found myself smiling as I thought of Amato’s remarks about kangaroo tail soup.

  “But why?” Chambrun said. “What you did happened twenty years ago. She’s had a fabulous life since then—money, power, a free hand to indulge all her peculiarities.”

  “She’s like the elephant who never forgets,” Sam said. “I grew up on stories about elephants who killed cruel handlers dozens of years after the fact. You don’t cross Charmian Brown without paying for it.”

  “She’s had her revenge, hasn’t she?” Chambrun said, tossing the little ball of paper up and down. “She’s stuck the knife in you a second time about your father. She’s shrewd enough to know what that’s done to you. ‘If you value your life,’ the note says. How far does she have to go to square accounts?”

  “Right now I’ve got a murder that’s already happened to bother me,” Hardy said.

  “Sam has reason to be concerned about himself,” Chambrun said.

  “So stay out of her way, Mr. Culver. You want protection, we’ll give it to you,” Hardy said.

  Chambrun tossed the little ball of paper into the ashtray on his desk. He was frowning. “I find myself more concerned with preventing the next move in this game than cleaning up the mess behind us,” he said.

  “I think she may be the most evil woman on the face of the earth,” Sam said, his voice unsteady. “Is there no way to stop her from killing people at will?”

  “We’ll stop her,” Hardy said. “She’s not on her island now.”

  “Let us pray,” Chambrun said. …

  3

  PETER WYNN LOOKED LIKE a man in a trance when he was brought into Chambrun’s office by Jerry Dodd. It was almost four in the morning. Wynn had been sitting in Jerry’s office on the main floor for hours, under the watchful eye of Sergeant Dolan. He was haggard. He needed a shave. All the elegance and youthful bounce that had been his trademark when Shelda and I had talked with him in the Trapeze in the early evening was gone.

  “You know what happened to Heidi?” he asked, looking from Chambrun to Hardy. “That big baboon downstairs wouldn’t tell me a thing. And I’ve run out of cigarettes.”

  Chambrun slid the lacquer box that contained his Egyptian variety across the polished desk top. Wynn took one, lit it, and inhaled hungrily.

  “We hope you can help us,” Chambrun said.

  “How, for Godsake?”

  “The truth would be a useful commodity.”

  “What truth?”

  “When we suggested to you that Masters might be responsible, you reacted hard and shut up like a clam,” Hardy said.

  “Masters is a machine, not a man,” Wynn said. “You press a button, if you are Helwig or Charmian, and Masters goes into action. He’s a gun, not a man. If Masters killed Heidi he did it because somebody pressed a button.”

  “Charmian?” Chambrun asked.

  “Or Marcus,” Wynn said. “He runs our world.”

  “You’re not in your world now,” Hardy said.

  Wynn’s smile was thin. “Persuade Marcus and Charmian of that,” he said.

  “Let me put our cards on the table, Mr. Wynn,” Chambrun said. “What has happened here relates to what you call ‘our world’—the Zetterstrom world, the Island world.”

  “The man in the lobby this afternoon wasn’t from the Island,” Wynn said.

  “His brother was a part of that world. Do you know the story of Bruno Wald?”

  “Naturally. He was drowned in a yachting accident—or so they believed. I understand he turned up ten years later, delirious, out of his head.”

  “You know the story he told?”

  “Yes. Completely out of his head.”

  “That story doesn’t frighten you?”

  “Why should it?”

  “Because aren’t you in exactly the same position he was?” Chambrun asked. “The truth, Mr. Wynn. Weren’t you hired to take care of the Baroness’ sexual whims?”

  “Good Lord, no!”

  “Would you like to tell us how you happened to be on the Island—eighteen months, I understand?”

  Wynn crushed out his cigarette and reached for another. “I’ve never had any money of my own,” he said. “My talents are limited strictly to sports. I’m a good tennis player, a better than fair golfer, I play squash, I swim, I’m good with boats. I got along in my late teens and early twenties by being the ideal house guest. I dance well. I play several musical instruments, including a pretty good jazz piano. I made a business of making myself attractive at parties. I was on a yachting trip with some people from the south of France who got invited to the Island. The Island is something you wouldn’t believe. There’s everything there; fresh- and salt-water swimming pools, the sea itself, squash courts, tennis courts, a nine-hole golf course. Wish for something and it’s there. The Baron didn’t overlook anything to satisfy the slightest whim.

  “The party I went with stayed for a week or ten days. I made myself popular by playing at the different sports. I’m a better than average bridge player. Made myself some pocket money that way. I ingratiated myself by playing tennis with Charmian, and with Heidi.

  “When it came time for my party to leave, Helwig summoned me into his presence. He offered me a job, at an incredible wage. I would stay on the Island as a sort of director of sports, help entertain Charmian’s guests, and act as an escort for her when she needed one.”

  “I thought she never left the Island,” Hardy said.

  “She didn’t. But people came—often. There were endless dinners, and picnics, and balls. I was to be her partner at these wing-dings.”

  “No sex?”

  “I wouldn’t have minded,” Wynn said, “but no sex. It was the cushiest job you can imagine for a man of my temperament and gifts. And Heidi? Well, I fell in love with her. Simple as that.”

  “You knew the Baron was her father?”

  “I knew it—when things got serious.”

  “Serious?”

  “When we talked of marriage,” Wynn said. “That was a few months ago.”

  “Did you find you were a prisoner on the Island?” Chambrun asked.

  Wynn frowned at the end of his cigarette. “You’re thinking about Bruno Wald’s wild story,” he said. “Will you believe it if I tell you I never had reason to find out? I never wanted to leave the Island. I had no family to go back to, no real friends. I was perfectly content to stay there and I never suggested leaving.”

  “Haven’t we had enough of this travelogue?” Hardy said.

  “Let’s get back to Masters,” Chambrun said, ignoring Hardy’s complaint. “When you were here before, I asked you if Masters was interested in Heidi. You did a take and said ‘Oh, my God!’ You left us thinking that he might have been.”

  Wynn didn’t speak for a moment. His face had gone hard. There was a curious ambivalence in this young man. One minute he seemed weak and shallow; the next, there were signs of an unexpected strength.

  “There’s nothing simple about any of us on the Island,” he said slowly. “I’m the easiest to understand, I guess. I’m lazy. I like luxury. I don’t have any particular goal in life exc
ept the next day’s pleasures. I—I’ve sold myself out all my life because it was easier to get what I enjoyed that way. But the others, God! It all goes back to Baron Zetterstrom. He must have been a monster.”

  “In spades,” Chambrun said.

  “Helwig and Clara and Masters all go back to a time when the Baron was some kind of prime sadist in the Nazi picture. None of them has a shred of conscience about those days. Most of what I know about it comes from Masters. He loves to talk about the tortures, the murders, the violence. He comes alive when he talks about the mutilations, like Clara’s. He’s described to me a hundred times what happened to the prisoners who’d worked over Clara.” Wynn shuddered. “You’d have to hear him to believe that he’s like a hungry man describing a gourmet dinner. He’s a classic voyeur.”

  “What the hell is that?” Hardy asked.

  “A peeping tom,” Chambrun said, drily.

  “I think he had my job—Charmian’s escort—before I came to the Island. He—he evidently had responsibilities that I don’t have.”

  “Her love-life?”

  “So he says. He’s told me in detail what she’s like in bed. And yet I could swear that in the eighteen months I’ve been a part of the scene there’s been nothing between them.”

  “He resents you? Does he know that you’re not involved in that aspect of the lady’s life?”

  “He teases me about it. Tells me what I’m missing.”

  “Had he turned to Heidi for his pleasures?”

  “No! Heidi hated him; was afraid of him.” Wynn reached for a fresh cigarette in the lacquer box. He didn’t light it. “Heidi loved Charmian. They were friends, as though there weren’t more than twenty years’ difference in their ages. They were like two schoolgirls together. Heidi was convinced that someday Masters would do Charmian some harm.”

  “Because he’d been shoved out of the lady’s bed?”

  “Perhaps. When you asked me about him before, the thought crossed my mind that Heidi had caught him out in something. He wouldn’t hesitate to kill if someone got in his way.”

  “Had Heidi confided in you what she feared?”