Gilded Nightmare

by Hugh Pentecost

  Malinkov stared at him, his lips trembling, a hand raised vaguely to hide his faltering control. He seemed to shrink inside his clothes.

  “You—you have invented an unreality,” he said. “There is only one Baroness. I do not know what has happened to her, but I pray we find her quickly.”

  “Why did you all leave the Island, where you were safe?”

  “The Baroness had not been away from the Island for more than twenty years. When the Baron died she was free to go where she wanted, do what she wanted. She is a young, attractive woman with a great fortune. She wanted to get back into the world when she had the chance.”

  “But she waited for two years after the Baron died.”

  “That was when the inclination to travel seized her,” Malinkov said.

  “I suggest that it took them nearly two years to school the daughter into taking her mother’s place in public.”

  “No!”

  Chambrun put out his cigarette, suddenly impatient. “I’m not sorry for you, Doctor. You’ve made your own bed and you choose to lie in it. I am sorry for Charmian Zetterstrom, who is obviously in very great danger with no way to help herself. You and the others have brought her here to carry out some scheme. She has balked at it and is running for her life. God help her if we don’t find her first. And God help you, Doctor, if we fail. I shall take a personal pleasure in acting for all the people who want to see you and your friends and Zetterstrom Island wiped off the face of the earth. Take him away, Sergeant.”

  Malinkov seemed incapable of getting up from his chair. Dolan had to take him under the arm and literally drag him to his feet.

  “Would you believe it?” Dolan said, steadying the doctor on his rubbery legs. “Salinger was so sore at your suspecting him he walked off the job.”

  Chambrun’s head jerked up. “Who replaced him?”

  “No one yet,” Dolan said. “I mean—he wasn’t there when I went to get this guy for you. I’ll report to Hardy when I get this one back.”

  “You bloody idiot!” Chambrun said. He was on his feet. “Who did you see in 19-B when you went to get Dr. Malinkov?”

  “The woman, the gigolo, the doctor,” Dolan said. “The other two were somewhere else in the suite, I guess.”

  “You guess!” Chambrun moved so fast we were all caught off guard. I traipsed after him into the outer office. He gave a crisp order to Miss Ruysdale. “Call Hardy. Tell him Salinger isn’t at his post on nineteen. Tell him I think Helwig and Masters are on the loose somewhere. I’m on my way up.”

  “Right,” Ruysdale said, reaching for her phone.

  “And tell Jerry to spread a general alarm for Sam Culver. It can’t have taken Sam this long to get here.”

  3

  THE DAYTIME LIFE OF the hotel was beginning to revolve. Maids were visible in the hallways. Guests were riding the elevators on the way to breakfast in one of the restaurants. Everyday functions were being carried out with their usual efficiency. In another hour, I thought, as I followed Chambrun to the elevators, Shelda would show up at our office, sore at me for not having reported to her during the night about what was going on.

  Chambrun had obviously worked out a portion of the puzzle, but I was way behind him—a little too breathless to do any solid putting together myself. He was as angry as I’d ever seen him as we were whisked up to the nineteenth floor in an elevator that ignored signals from the in-between floors.

  On nineteen everything was quiet. There was no one watching the corridor outside the Zetterstrom rooms. Chambrun put his finger on the bell of 19-B and held it there. It was opened almost at once by Peter Wynn.

  “Oh,” he said. “Come in.” He looked exhausted, yet tense.

  Clara Brunner, sitting bolt upright in a straight-backed chair, was the only other occupant of the sitting room.

  “Where are Helwig and Masters?” Chambrun asked Wynn, who followed us into the room.

  “They went out somewhere,” Wynn said.

  “You don’t know where they were going?”

  “To look for Charmian,” Wynn said.

  “There was a man stationed in the hall to keep them from going anywhere,” Chambrun said. “How did they get past him?”

  “I don’t know,” Wynn said. “They just went out. I suppose they persuaded him they had a right to look for Charmian.”

  “They had no such right. How long ago did they leave?”

  Wynn shrugged. “Forty-five minutes—an hour.”

  “Did they have any idea where to look for the girl?”

  “Girl?”

  “Stop playing games,” Chambrun said harshly. “I know and you know that the missing girl is not the Baroness Zetterstrom.”

  A strange mumbling sound came out of the tongueless hole in Clara Brunner’s bony face. Her hands fluttered helplessly. None of us could read what she was trying to say.

  Wynn ran a hand over his long, red hair. “I saw no harm in it,” he said.

  “In the substitution of daughter for mother?”

  Wynn nodded.

  “When did the Baroness die?”

  Again that ghoulish moaning sound from Clara Brunner. She was protesting to Wynn with her hands.

  “I don’t know what’s going on here,” Wynn said, in a tired voice. He glanced at the Amazon. “I have to think of myself, Clara.”

  The protest from the woman was an animal sound.

  “The Baroness died before my first visit to the Island,” Peter said. “The yachting party I was with—I told you about them—had been invited by the Baroness. But when we arrived, we were told by Helwig that the Baroness was ill, couldn’t see anyone. We stayed for some days, waiting for the Baroness to come out and join the party. She never did. My friends decided to move on, and it was then that Helwig offered me a job. I accepted.

  “As soon as my friends were gone, Helwig told me the truth. The Baroness had died about a week before. I got the impression it had been an incurable cancer. She is buried there on the Island. At least, there is a grave marked with her name. I was then told that my job was to instruct the Baroness’ daughter in sports—teach her tennis, and golf, and squash racquets, games at which the Baroness had been expert.” Wynn smiled. “It was about as pleasant a job as you can imagine. Charmian Zetterstrom—she was named after her mother, I gather—was a charming, effervescent, unspoiled kid. There were two daughters, you understand.”

  “Two daughters of the Baron—but not both by the Baroness,” Chambrun said, glancing at the Amazon. Again there were those horrible, protesting mumbles from the woman.

  Wynn shook his head. “They are—were—both Charmian Brown’s children,” he said. “I got it in bits and pieces from Masters. The girls were born a year apart, right after Charmian Brown married Baron Zetterstrom.”

  Chambrun glanced at the Amazon. “That would explain why Madame Brunner was able to take the murder of Heidi with such stolid fortitude. She wasn’t your daughter, madame.”

  Clara Brunner’s face had gone stone-hard.

  “I gather children didn’t fit into the scheme of things on the Island,” Wynn said. A nerve twitched in his cheek. “If the Bruno Wald story is true—well, it’s understandable. The two girls were shipped off to some sort of convent on the Greek mainland, where they were raised. It’s my understanding neither of them ever came back to the Island until about six months before the Baroness died. They had been taught none of the things that went with the Island life, the sports and all that. That’s why I was hired.”

  “The two girls inherited the Zetterstrom fortune?”

  “It’s my understanding that only Charmian inherited. Heidi was left out for some reason. I was told this when I made it clear I wanted to marry her. Charmian was all for the marriage. She made it clear Heidi and I’d never have to worry about money.”

  “Can we get to Charmian’s impersonation of her mother?”

  “It happened for the first time about six months after I’d been on the job. Some people who had been frie
nds of the Baroness turned up unexpectedly at the Island. They came ashore. Charmian and I were on one of the tennis courts. She had never laid eyes on any of these people. Suddenly they crowded around her, embracing her, kissing her, telling her ‘how wonderful she looked’ and saying what an old genius Malinkov was. They quite obviously took her for the Baroness. Charmian was amused by it. She played it to the hilt without batting an eyelash. When the people went on to the house she laughed and laughed. What fun it would be, she said, to carry it off for as long as possible. I was sent on ahead to warn Helwig and the rest of the household. There didn’t seem any harm in it. It was a big joke so far as I was concerned.

  “There was one man in the group who must have been something more than a casual acquaintance of the Baroness. He obviously hated my guts. He made quite a few snide remarks about Charmian having resorted to ‘robbing the cradle.’ She played it magnificently, pretending to be romantically attached to me. It was still a big joke, and she carried it out down to the last moment when she waved good-bye to them from the dock. We laughed ourselves sick over the whole adventure for days.

  “Then, about a month later, Helwig came to me one day. Some former business associates of the Baron were coming to the Island. It had to do with some complex money matters, he told me. These men who were coming didn’t know that the Baroness had died. Helwig said he had persuaded Charmian to play the part again. The business at hand would be better handled if the men thought they were dealing with the Baroness, a cool, hard-headed operator, rather than with an inexperienced child.”

  “So she carried it off for a second time,” Chambrun said.

  “And a third, and a fourth,” Wynn said. “Somehow, though, it had stopped amusing her. She seemed to change, to become moody. There were long, dark silences. Heidi and I were worried about her, but she never would tell us what was bothering her.

  “Finally, a few weeks ago, we were told by Helwig that we would all make a trip to America. I was delighted. It seemed like the perfect time for Heidi and me to break away from our small little world. Charmian agreed. But she seemed curiously intense and depressed about the trip. I thought I knew why, a few days before we left. We were told by Helwig that Charmian would play the role of the Baroness while we were away from the Island. I assumed it had ceased to be fun for her. I didn’t understand why she’d agreed to do it, but neither she nor anyone else explained it to me. Heidi was in the dark about it, too. We could only guess it had to do with business matters again.” Wynn moistened his lips. “That’s the whole story, Mr. Chambrun. I don’t know what’s going on. I can only guess that Heidi’s murder has something to do with it, and so help me God, when I find out for sure—”

  “You’d better leave it to the police,” Chambrun said. “There’s been no talk about Charmian’s disappearance that could give you any kind of hint as to what’s cooking?”

  Wynn shook his head. “I can only tell you Helwig and Masters and the others are badly upset about it. They don’t know when or how she got out of these rooms. Is there any way I can help?”

  “When this lady reports to them how much you’ve told me you may be safer somewhere else. I’ll have someone take you down to my office and we’ll have a policeman stand guard there.”

  The doorbell rang and Chambrun signaled me to answer it. It was Jerry Dodd.

  “Culver changed his mind,” Jerry told Chambrun.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He decided not to come down to your office. He’s sick of the whole thing, he says. He’s decided to stay in his own place. I’ve got to admit he looks half dead for want of sleep.”

  Chambrun muttered softly under his breath. Then he instructed Jerry to take Wynn down to his office and have a cop placed on guard there. He turned to me. “Go up and talk to Sam,” he said. “Make it clear to him that I think he may be in real danger. I want him to be somewhere he can be watched. My office is the place. We haven’t got enough men to have every room in the hotel guarded.” He turned back to Jerry. “I asked Mike Maggio to get me the file cards on everyone on this nineteenth floor. Would you be good enough to find out what kind of drag-ass he’s playing.”

  Jerry grinned. “If you’d stay in one place for five minutes—”

  I went up to the twenty-fifth floor, where Sam Culver has his cooperative apartment. I was feeling pretty thoroughly pooped-out myself by now. I rang Sam’s doorbell three or four times before he opened the door to the width permitted by the chain-lock and looked out. Jerry was right. He looked like death. But I wondered why a man so anxious for sleep was fully dressed.

  “Go away,” he said.

  “I am the bearer of a very insistent message from the boss,” I said.

  “Tell him to go peddle his papers,” Sam said. “Let me alone, will you, Mark?”

  “You were warned,” I said. “We think it was probably by Charmian. She’s disappeared and her two prize bully boys are loose somewhere. Chambrun thinks you may be a target of some sort. He wants you protected. Incidentally, your instinct was right. It’s not Charmian Brown you’re involved with. There’s no Ponce de Leon mystery. This Charmian is her daughter. Till we can untangle it Chambrun doesn’t think you’re safe.”

  Sam’s face turned stone-hard. He was silent for as long as twenty seconds. Then he said: “You might as well come in.”

  He closed the door enough to unhook the chain, then pulled it open. I walked in, wondering if he had any coffee brewing. The door closed behind me.

  “I’m sorry, Mark,” Sam said. “I tried to get you to go away.”

  I turned. Masters was leaning against the door, smiling at me. He had a gun in his hand. It wasn’t pointed at me but he was caressing it, and I had a feeling he was split-second ready. I heard a movement behind me and turned again. Herr Helwig was standing in the bedroom door across the living room.

  Masters chuckled. “Well, now we have a fourth for a couple of rubbers of bridge,” he said. …

  I guess almost everyone has had a moment in his life when he thinks, Here it is! Death. You step off the curb and see a speeding taxi coming down on you ten feet away; you have a violent cramp when you’re swimming a hundred yards from shore; you’re in a skidding car. These moments last only an instant because you get out of them. If you don’t, you’re dead and you stop worrying.

  I had that sick feeling as I stood there, looking first at Masters and then at Helwig. They were both pretty damned frightening. Nothing, I told myself, would turn the gray man, Helwig, from whatever his course might be. A human life meant nothing to him. He had been trained under Baron Zetterstrom. Masters was even more scary to me. Pulling that trigger would be a kind of sport for him. He would actually enjoy it.

  “Where are the cards?” I said, trying to sound flip and casual.

  “You’d better sit down, Mr. Haskell,” Helwig said.

  “What’s the game—if it isn’t bridge?” I asked. Boy, was I playing the dime-novel hero!

  “For some reason they think Charmian may show up here,” Sam said. He walked over to his desk and took a pipe from the cherry-wood rack. He began to fill it from a porcelain jar.

  “To tell you what they have cooked up for you?” I asked. “Is that it, Helwig?”

  “He’s a clever kid,” Masters said.

  “The situation borders on the absurd,” Helwig said. “The police, bumbling as usual. Your pouter-pigeon Chambrun, imagining himself to be some sort of mastermind detective out of a storybook. Meanwhile, the Baroness is in danger, and we, her trusted friends, are denied the right to look for her or protect her.”

  “You mean the Baroness’ daughter,” I said. “You might as well know Chambrun got the whole pitch from Peter Wynn.”

  “Very well—Charmian Zetterstrom, the Baroness’ daughter,” Helwig said. “She is still our responsibility. She still depends on us.”

  “Then why did she run away from you?” I asked.

  “A question I’m most interested to have answered,” Helwig said. “
It occurred to us that Mr. Culver or the man who calls himself Wood had persuaded her to leave our rooms. We came here to look for her. We think, since she isn’t here, that she will almost certainly come here. Mr. Culver is the only friend, beside ourselves, she has in this part of the world. She wouldn’t run to Stephen Wood. He’s obviously dangerous.”

  “Why don’t you stop playing games with us?” I said. I had nothing to lose that I could see. “You want to find her before the cops do, because she knows one of you killed Heidi and she’s ready to talk.”

  “I told you he was a clever, clever kid,” Masters said.

  “There’s obviously no point in discussing this with you, Mr. Haskell,” Helwig said. “So just sit down and wait.”

  “You got any coffee?” I asked Sam.

  He gestured with his pipestem toward the kitchenette. “Electric percolator,” he said.

  “A cup of coffee against the rules?” I asked Masters. After all, he had the gun.

  “Help yourself,” he said, grinning at me. I had the unpleasant feeling he was like a gourmet looking at a magnificent dinner. I was the dinner.

  I went out into the pantry and poured myself coffee in a white china mug. I knew the floor plan of these apartments well enough to know there was no exit from the kitchenette. I carried the coffee back into the living room. Helwig had disappeared into the bedroom. Masters lolled against the front door, petting his gun, smiling hungrily. Sam was sitting in the chair behind his desk, pipe belching a cloud of blue smoke, staring straight ahead of him at the place where Helwig had been standing.

  “She is the daughter?” he asked, not looking at me.