Walking Dead Man

by Hugh Pentecost

  “You can’t go in there,” he told two plainclothes cops who were trying to push him aside. His cigarette bobbed up and down between his flabby lips.

  “That’s where it’s at!” one of the cops shouted at him.

  “The man in there is my patient,” Dr. Cobb said. “It would be dangerous to his survival for you all to go barging in there. I must forbid it.”

  “Out of the way, dad,” one of the cops said.

  “I think you better think about it,” Chambrun said. There was authority in his voice that made the two plainclothes men turn his way. “I’m Pierre Chambrun, the hotel manager. The doctor is right. Mr. Battle is suffering from shock. He might not survive any more excitement.”

  “You might be guilty of murder,” Dr. Cobb said. He couldn’t say any more because he appeared to be choking to death on cigarette smoke.

  At that point Allerton, wearing a neat, white houseman’s coat, appeared in the door from the kitchen. “Would anyone care for coffee?” he asked.

  I draw the curtain there.

  There is only one elevator that goes all the way up to the penthouse level. The rest stop at the twenty-fourth floor. Jerry Dodd had commandeered the penthouse car so that no one not wanted at the top could get there. The main stairway and the fire stairs were blocked off by Jerry’s men.

  I had sobered up rather abruptly and I wasn’t laughing any more. Jerry’s theory that Chambrun was the real target had helped the sobering process. Jerry and Chambrun would probably be embroiled with cops and the D.A.’s man for the next hour or so and I figured I could get things rolling. I could locate Miss Ruysdale and start checking out on the list of guests to see if there were any suggestive names on it.

  I went down the stairway to the twenty-fourth floor and was let out by Jerry’s men. That’s as far as I got for a while. The corridor I walked into was jammed with people. I recognized several newspapermen who’d, somehow, gotten the word. There were rubberneckers, and some employees, and a little way off I saw Maxie Zorn, Peter Potter, the four-foot Mephisto, and Shelda.

  I had a time fighting my way to them. The reporters were all over me. I tried “no comment” for a while, but I saw I wasn’t going to get out of there alive with that, so I held up my hand for silence and, miraculously, got it.

  “I’m not authorized to make any kind of statement,” I said. “But I can tell you that someone took a shot at George Battle and missed. Battle isn’t physically hurt, but he’s in shock.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Have they got him?”

  “The cops have only just arrived,” I told them.

  “You don’t know who it was, Mark? He got away?”

  “So help me, no answers yet,” I said.

  By then Maxie Zorn had me by the coat lapels. “I’ve got to get to him, Haskell,” he said. “If he’s in any kind of danger, we’ve got to settle our deal.”

  Potter, the dwarf, looked up at me, his brown eyes dancing. “Your money or your life—in that order,” he said. “Someone really shot at him?”

  “Really. Missed by about six inches,” I said. “I’d have bet my best silk shirt he wouldn’t have survived that.”

  “He may not,” I said.

  “Oh, God, I’ve got to get to him,” Zorn said. “Can’t you explain to those creeps on the door that I have to get to him?”

  “Every man is said to have his price,” I said. “You could try.”

  “I think I could be helpful to him,” Shelda said.

  I let myself look at her for the first time. “How were Golden Boy’s etchings?” I asked her.

  “Oh Mark, you idiot!”

  “Sorry, friends, I have work to do,” I said.

  There was no trouble getting to the down-elevator. Everyone and his brother was trying to come up. As I stepped into the car, I realized that Shelda was with me.

  “There’s no point in pretending we’re strangers, Mark,” she said.

  “Who’s pretending?” I said. I felt butterflies in my stomach. I knew I didn’t care who’d been shot at or who was in danger. I wanted her so badly it hurt.

  The car started its noiseless descent. I had pressed the second-floor button. Chambrun’s office and my apartment were both located on two. Shelda stood across the car from me. She was wearing a pale blue dinner dress of some kind of shiny material that seemed to fit her lovely figure like a glove. She was carrying a silver evening bag and there was a gardenia pinned to her shoulder which, I told myself bitterly, must have been put there by Golden Boy. I wasn’t making much sense, you understand, with an attempted murder upstairs and Chambrun in danger. I wanted to hurt her.

  “Did you have to strip down so David-baby could see whether you meet his specifications?” I asked.

  “There doesn’t seem to be much point in trying to talk to you,” she said, her eyes averted.

  “What did you want to talk about?”

  “Among other things I’d wanted to tell you how very glad I am to see you, Mark. Evidently that doesn’t matter to you.”

  Of course it mattered like hell, but I was still involved in playing the jealous adolescent. “It’s a great opportunity for any girl,” I said, “the chance to roll around in the hay with David-baby.”

  “I haven’t said yes,” she said, still not looking at me.

  “I have news for you. Zorn will raise the price to a quarter of a million if you play hard to get.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be much point in trying to talk to you about it,” she said. “Please, tell me what happened upstairs.”

  I told her, winding up with Jerry’s fear that the attack had really been meant for Chambrun. She listened, frowning that intense little frown that always reminded me of a small child puzzling over an arithmetic problem about apples and oranges.

  The car had stopped at the second floor and the doors opened.

  “I think maybe I should talk to you and Mr. Chambrun,” Shelda said, “no matter how distasteful that may be for you.” She walked out of the car and down the corridor toward Chambrun’s office.

  My intention had been to look up Miss Ruysdale’s private, unlisted home phone number, so that she could be gotten to work on our guest list as Jerry had suggested. I should have known better. Miss Ruysdale was at her desk in the outer office when Shelda and I walked in. I’ll never know whether she has some secret organization that alerts her to everything, or whether she is just plain psychic when it comes to Chambrun and his needs. Ruysdale is on the tall side, with dark red hair, thick, cut short, and worn like a duck-tailed cap. She has a straight nose, a high forehead and cheekbones, and a wide mouth. She is almost classically beautiful. She is, I know, all woman but she affects an almost male severity in her dress and manner. Chambrun would want his secretary to be attractive, but not some doll who would have all the male staff salivating over her. I suspect Ruysdale may be the most interesting woman I know, but I’ve never been able to penetrate beyond her efficient, friendly-but-impersonal office manner.

  “Hello, you two,” she said.

  Shelda gave her a quick girl-embrace.

  “Jerry wants you to—” I began.

  “I have the registration cards here,” Ruysdale said. “I’ve started to go through them.”

  Guests at the Beaumont might not be pleased to know how much we really know about them. There is a special card for each guest and there is a code used which tells more than the guest might like. The code letter A means the subject is an alcoholic; W on a man’s card means he is a woman chaser, possibly a customer for the expensive call girls who sometimes are seen in the Trapeze Bar; M on a woman’s card means she’s a manhunter; O means the guest is “over his head,” can’t afford the Beaumont’s prices and shouldn’t be allowed to get in too deep; MX on married man’s card means he’s double-crossing his wife, and WX means the wife is cuckolding the husband. The small letter “d” means diplomatic connections. If there is special information about the guest, it is attached in memo form to the card, and
if that information is not meant to be public knowledge in the front office, the card is marked with Chambrun’s initials, meaning that the boss has special knowledge about the guest in his private file.

  Ruysdale was holding out a card to me.

  “You’re a wonder,” I said as I took the card. “How did you know?”

  “No miracle,” she said. “Karl Nevers phoned me that there was trouble in the penthouse.” Nevers is the night manager on the front desk. “First thing that occurred to me is that it might have been meant for Mr. Chambrun.”

  I glanced at the card. “Richard Cleaves,” I read out loud. “Room 1419. He must be part of Zorn’s group.”

  “He wrote the novel that Zorn’s film is based on,” Shelda said. “A Man’s World. Have either of you read it? It’s really a very good novel.”

  “Especially the nude scenes,” I said. I looked at the card again when I saw Shelda blush. Chambrun’s initials were lettered in the corner. “What’s the scoop on him?” I asked.

  “Only Mr. Chambrun and God know what’s in the private file,” Ruysdale said. She was thumbing through more cards.

  “Is Cleaves blond, crew cut, black glasses?” I asked.

  Shelda nodded. I remembered him coming in at the rear of David Loring’s cavalcade. “And there are no nude scenes in the novel,” Shelda said, unexpectedly sharp. “They’ve been added for the film.”

  I put the card down on Ruysdale’s desk. “I wonder what’s so special about Master Cleaves,” I said.

  “He’s a very interesting but a very cold and distant young man,” Shelda said. “He came to see Mr. Battle in France when discussion of the film came up.”

  “Cold and distant isn’t your type,” I said.

  Miss Ruysdale gave me a bored look. “Why don’t you grow up, Mark?” she said. “If you’re concerned about Mr. Chambrun, why not get to work on some of these cards.”

  She was right, of course. I was behaving badly.

  “The reason I came with you, Mark,” Shelda said, “was that I thought Mr. Chambrun ought to know about Richard Cleaves.”

  “He evidently does know something,” Ruysdale said, fingering the card with Chambrun’s initials on it.

  “It was about three months ago,” Shelda said. “Maxie Zorn made an appointment to see Mr. Battle at his villa in Cannes. I didn’t make the appointment. Gloria, his daytime secretary, made it.”

  “Before you go any further,” I said, “would you mind telling me what the duties of the nighttime secretary are?”

  “Do shut up, Mark,” Ruysdale said.

  Shelda gave me a steady look. “Mr. Battle rarely sleeps more than an hour at a time,” she said. “He catnaps day and night. When he’s awake, his mind is never not working. He has thoughts about business, about a memoire he’s writing, about world affairs. The moment he has an idea, he rings for his secretary, whichever one is on duty, and dictates. Sometimes it is only a sentence or two. Sometimes he’ll go on for a couple of hours. We have a stenotype machine—the kind a court stenographer uses—so he can go on as long as he wants.”

  “And you pop out of bed whenever he has an idea?”

  “I sleep in the daytime,” Shelda said. “May I tell you about Richard Cleaves?”

  “If he opens his mouth again, I’ll send him to his room with bread and water,” Ruysdale said.

  “Gloria made the appointment and it was in his book when I took over that day. It just said ‘Maxwell Zorn.’ But three of them came: Zorn, Peter Potter, and Cleaves. I had to get clearance from Mr. Battle before Cleaves and Potter could be let through the front gate. He seemed not to know who Potter and Cleaves were, but he allowed them to come in. Naturally I was surprised when I saw Potter. He’s a dwarf, you know, but a nice little man, very witty, fun to talk with. Cleaves was the way he always is, handsome but cold, distant, his expression hidden by those black glasses. I don’t recap Gloria’s notes, so I had no idea why they were there, but I knew Maxwell Zorn was in the film business and that Cleaves had written a best-selling novel. Potter seemed like a sort of court jester. I wasn’t asked to sit in on their conference. As soon as they were gone, Mr. Battle sent for me.

  “‘I have agreed, under certain conditions, to finance a film for Maxwell Zorn,’ he said. ‘Make a note of the date and the time. And I want an airmail-special delivery letter sent to Pierre Chambrun in New York.’ Then he gave me the letter. I remember it quite clearly. ‘Pierre: Richard Cleaves, author of A Man’s World, is in reality Richard St. Germaine. You should be warned that he hasn’t forgotten.’ It was marked ‘Personal’ and mailed that afternoon.”

  “Forgotten what?” I asked.

  “You don’t ask Mr. Battle that kind of question,” Shelda said. “I never saw any of them again until just before we left France. Then Peter turned up at the villa.”

  “Peter?”

  “Peter Potter.”

  “So you’re on first-name terms with him?”

  “Careful, Mark,” Ruysdale said.

  “He came to see me,” Shelda said. A faint spot of color appeared in her cheeks. “That was the first time that I heard that Mr. Battle wanted me to—to act in the film. That I was one of the conditions he’d made for putting up the money for the film. Mr. Battle had never mentioned it to me.”

  “That is rather odd, don’t you think?” Ruysdale said. It kept me from some other inanity.

  “Not if you know Mr. Battle,” Shelda said. “Peter came to offer me the part. He said Mr. Zorn and Richard Cleaves had seen me and both felt, at once, that I was the girl they wanted for it. I said no. Then Peter mentioned a sum of money—a very large sum of money. I was startled, but I still said no. Then he told me the truth. It was Mr. Battle who wanted me to take it. It was one of his conditions. ‘I think he meant to do you a favor,’ Peter said. ‘If you tell him you don’t want it, he may drop it as a condition.’ He gave me his charming smile. ‘It’s very important to us.’”

  “Seven million dollars’ worth,” I said.

  “I went to Mr. Battle,” Shelda said. “He was very sweet about it. He told me he had made my getting the part a condition. He hadn’t told me because he’d wanted me to think that Mr. Zorn and the others had chosen me. He saw it as an opportunity for me to make a great deal of money and possibly develop a glamorous career. He had meant it as a gesture of gratitude to me for the year of work I’d given him. He advised me to—to overcome my reluctance to appear in the nude. The—Victorian age was long gone, he said. He urged me not to give a final answer until I’d had a chance to think about it, perhaps talk about it with someone close.”

  “Like maybe David-baby?” I said.

  Shelda looked straight at me for the first time. “He suggested you, Mark—someone who’d once been in love with me and would have my best interests at heart.”

  “So ask me what I think!” I said.

  “I don’t think I could trust you to be disinterested,” she said.

  “I don’t think I can trust either of you to remember we’ve got a would-be assassin running around the hotel and that Mr. Chambrun may be the target,” Ruysdale said.

  “What about this Richard Cleaves who ‘hasn’t forgotten,’ Shelda?”

  “Have you been prying into my private files, Ruysdale?” Chambrun’s voice was cold and so unexpected that we all spun around like guilty children.

  He was standing in the office door, his eyes narrowed slits, his hands jammed into the pockets of his jacket.

  “I—I’m to blame, Mr. Chambrun,” Shelda said. “I took Mr. Battle’s dictation—a note to you. When I heard you were in danger, I remembered and I—I told Mark and Miss Ruysdale.”

  Chambrun drew a deep breath. “What Richard Cleaves hasn’t forgotten,” he said, “is that I gave the order to have his father executed, and that George Battle paid for the rope that hanged him.”

  He walked past us and into his office.

  Three

  THERE HAD BEEN A time in Chambrun’s life, when he was a very
young man, perhaps thirty years ago, which he referred to infrequently as “the dark days.” Born a Frenchman, his parents had brought him to this country when he was a small child. He had started out working as a busboy in some small restaurant on New York’s East Side run by a distant relative. He had decided that the restaurant or hotel business was to be his future and he had studied management under the relative and eventually had gone to Cornell for special training. While he was there, the war had broken out in Europe and France had been overrun by the Nazis. Chambrun was now an American citizen, but some kind of intense fury at what was happening to his French brothers took hold of him. He has never told me how he got back to Europe, but he managed, and made contact with the Resistance. I gather that at age twenty-one or -two he became an inspirational leader in the underground fight against the German conquerors. I know this not from him but from a half dozen French diplomats who have stayed at the Beaumont and who speak of Pierre Chambrun as a kind of legendary hero.

  I knew, as he left us, from the way he spoke, that he was referring to “the dark days.”

  Chambrun’s office is not like an office at all, except for the three telephones on his carved Florentine desk. It is large and airy. The magnificent oriental rug on the floor had been a gift from a Far Eastern prince whom Chambrun had saved at some time from a predatory lady. Facing his desk is a Picasso, the blue period, personally inscribed by the artist. The furniture is substantial, comfortable. On a teakwood sideboard is a Turkish coffeemaker that is constantly in operation. After two cups of Colombian coffee for breakfast, Chambrun drinks that foul Turkish brew the rest of the day and night. There is a portable bar with every liquor and liqueur on it you can imagine. Chambrun drinks very little himself, mostly wine from the Beaumont’s unexcelled cellar, but he is a ready host.

  Ruysdale is rarely uncertain about Chambrun’s moods, but on this occasion she seemed doubtful whether or not to follow him. She picked up the Cleaves card from her desk, frowned at it, and then made up her mind. She walked briskly into the office, and Shelda and I followed her.

  Chambrun was seated at his desk, his eyes squinted against the smoke from his cigarette. He was silent for moments, lost in some kind of private reverie, and then he looked at us.