“We know some of this, boss,” I said. “A ski instructor was the first husband. But Shirley has it that the Hemmerlys hurried back home when France wasn’t safe for them anymore.”
“Shirley has it wrong,” Chambrun said. His voice sounded flat as though it pained him to remember. “Laura Hemmerly did not go back to America with her father. She stayed in Paris, in a little apartment on the Avenue Klebert. That’s where the action was, the greatest action in history. The occupation of the world’s most beautiful city by the bastards of all time.”
He paused a minute, picked up the cold coffee, tasted it and made a wry face. Both Hardy and I realized this wasn’t the moment to press him to go on.
“I was fighting underground for France in those days. I was as American as you are, graduated from Cornell. I was twenty-three. American citizen. But France was in my blood. It was where I had to be at that point in time. In some respects, in spite of the grim realities around me, a city and its people under the heel of a tyrant, I was naive. I thought all Americans could be trusted. I thought all Americans must feel about the Nazis the way I did.” His smile was bitter. “It nearly cost me my life. And that bitch in your morgue, Walter, was responsible. She has denied it always, but I have never had any doubts.” He glanced at Ruysdale. “Could you possibly make me some decent coffee, Betsy?” It was the first time I’d ever heard him call her by her first name.
Ruysdale went to the sideboard. Hardy and I waited for him again. A man was dredging up things that hurt him deeply. You couldn’t rush him.
“In the underground,” he said finally, “we had a target. He was a man named Hugo Perrault. They called him the Butcher of Montmartre. He was a collaborator of the first order. He turned over hundreds, maybe thousands of people to the Gestapo. He headed execution squads himself. He was a monster. They said, when the war was over and the Germans had won it, he would be the tyrant of Paris. He would go on butchering anyone who had sided against the Nazis. We wanted him, wanted him badly. And I, God help me, was so clever!” He drew a deep breath. “There was Laura Hemmerly, eighteen, American, so brave I thought. And so lovely to look at. She had stayed in France, with the French people she loved who were in such dire straights, rather than go safely home with her father. A heroine.” He gave us that twisted, bitter little smile again. “At twenty-three I believed in heroines, and heroes. God knows, there were heroes all around me. And there was Laura Hemmerly who had to be a heroine. You understand, in Paris, in those black days, if you lived out in the open you had to play ball with the conquerors. A rich American girl who had chosen to stay in Paris? Those maniacs assumed she must sympathize with the conquerors. Nazi officers in command of the occupation beat a path to her door, as the saying goes. I, with only one purpose in life, supposed that Laura Hemmerly only played the social game with them because she had to. I supposed that she, a lovely American girl, would do anything she could to strike a blow against them.” Chambrun shook his head. “I was told later—there was a joke in the underground—that she had to have sex every four hours or she developed severe migraine headaches. She couldn’t stand the pain, so—”
“Every four hours!” I heard myself say.
“Probably an exaggeration,” Chambrun said. “More likely every eight hours. But I hadn’t heard that then. I managed to meet her—my little American heroine. I suggested that through her Nazi acquaintances she might be able to find out where Hugo Perrault holed up, where we could find him in an off-guard moment. She was wide-eyed, eager to help the brave Resistance. If I would come to her apartment three nights from then, she might have information for me.
“My friends warned against it. Whatever her sympathies she would be too frightened of her Nazi friends to work against them. Naive, I said I was. She was American. She loved the French people and France, where she had spent so much of her childhood. I kept my appointment with her.
“She received me in her charming little Avenue Klebert apartment. She was wearing some sort of transparent negligee. I know now that she was prepared for lovemaking, but I was not. What had she learned? Where could we find the Butcher of Montmartre? She began to give me some vague bits and pieces. This officer had told her one thing, this one another. This was likely, that was not likely. I should have recognized a stall, a betrayal, but I didn’t. She was a fine, decent American girl. Suddenly the door to the apartment burst open and there, facing me, was Hugo Perrault, the Butcher, armed with a submachine gun. He began screaming at me in French. I wanted to know where he was. Well, here he was! If I had prayers to say I must say them quickly.
“I remember glancing, reproachfully, at Laura. She was standing with her back to the wall, arms spread out, with a look of such intense excitement in her eyes I couldn’t believe it. The prospect of seeing me murdered was providing her with an excitement beyond a sexual climax. She couldn’t wait for it to happen. I swear she was screaming at Perrault, ‘Now! Now!’”
Chambrun reached for the fresh coffee Ruysdale brought him. He took a sip and let his breath out in a little sigh of pleasure.
“I was standing by a little straight-backed chair,” he said. “I wasn’t naive any longer. I threw the chair at Perrault and made a dive at the window. He started firing his gun, but he’d been knocked off balance. I went through the window, glass, frame and all. It was two stories down to the courtyard. My ankle was hurt, my left wrist was broken, but I managed to scramble away. Perrault was firing at me from the smashed window, but by some miracle I got free. Two completely innocent pedestrians were shot to death in the street behind me.” He took another sip of coffee and put down his cup. “I told you I could tell you about early involvements,” he said very quietly. “That was Laura Hemmerly at eighteen—thirty-five years ago.”
Hardy spoke after a moment. “From the looks of her when we found her it could be her butcher friend caught up with her.”
Chambrun shook his head. “Perrault died less than two years after the incident I’ve described. The Allies were entering Paris. Perrault was at the top of their war criminals list. He tried to escape in a small private plane, and it crashed and burned.”
Hardy sighed. “So we are not looking for Hugo Perrault.”
“But you know something about the woman,” Chambrun said. “Treachery, betrayal, violence were like sexual delights to her.”
“She married a German,” I said. “The Baron von Holtzmann.”
“An interesting and very courageous man,” Chambrun said. “I knew him well. He collaborated with the Resistance. He hated Hitler and his people as much as we did. He played both sides of the street, dangerously, skillfully. But he was one of us.”
“He committed suicide after five years of marriage. Why?” I asked.
“I can only guess,” Chambrun said. “I had lost track of him. I was back here, running this hotel, when he blew his brains out. I think he must have learned that the woman in his bed had spent the war frolicking with Nazi pigs. He couldn’t stand the thought of it.” Chambrun lit a fresh cigarette. “Pick up the trail after that suicide, Walter, and it may lead you to your murderer.”
“Something I don’t understand,” I said.
“Yes, Mark?”
“She came here, engaged a suite, chairman of the Cancer Fund Ball committee. You knew all this about her and you didn’t interfere. You let her be here as a guest.”
Chambrun leaned back in his chair, eyelids lowered. “What I’ve told you took place thirty-five years ago. Values, during the occupation, were, to put it mildly, different. You think of me as a civilized, sophisticated, decent sort of human being, no?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, thirty-five years ago I killed men, with a gun, with a knife, with my bare hands. I understand the excesses that all men—and women—may have been driven to in those evil times. Laura Hemmerly—Laura von Holtzman—Laura Kauffman; a whore for the Nazis in one period of her life, the wife of a hero in another, and an international hostess and person of great charm in a t
hird, and then she takes a young lover, James Kauffman, as she approaches middle age, and eventually marries him. She is at the center of important and worthwhile charities. What happens if I bar her from the hotel for what she did to me in hysterical times?”
“Did you meet her here?” Hardy asked. “Did you discuss that past with her?”
Chambrun smiled at him. He touched his face with his finger tips, and then spread his hands over his plumpish midsection. “Do I look like a man who would jump out a second-story window and land on his feet, like a swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks, Senior? I was twenty-three years old then. None of us used our real names in the Resistance. Laura Kauffman came here about the ball. She sat in that chair where you’re sitting, Hardy. We talked for half an hour about the plans for the ball and there wasn’t the slightest gleam of recognition. Either she was a great actress, or so many men have passed in and out of her life that thirty-five years ago was a blur. And, I have changed.”
“You didn’t want to punish her?”
“My dear Mark, if I had lived with hate all these years I would be dead of it.”
“You think she didn’t recognize you?” Hardy asked.
“Unless she was an actress beyond compare,” Chambrun said.
TWO
THE HOTEL LIVED AND functioned at something like normal. People were curious about the murder, of course. Almost no one, except the staff, asked about Chambrun. He made a point of circulating. He had been absent for a day and a half which didn’t seem abnormal to the guests. A man has business to transact that could take him away from his desk.
Below the surface two mysteries had us by the short hairs. The murder was in the competent hands of Lieutenant Hardy. What concerned Chambrun most was the reason for his abduction and the phony bomb. Who and why? Chambrun was intent on finding those answers for himself. Only Frank Lewis, the FBI man, who had gone out to New Jersey to examine the cottage where Chambrun had been held, seemed to be working on that problem.
About lunchtime Chambrun assembled Ruysdale, Jerry Dodd, George Atterbury, the front-desk man, and me in his office.
“The only possible reason for this charade,” he said to us, “was to get me out of the hotel for thirty-odd hours. That has to mean that something went on here that I was not to see or hear about. Something that couldn’t have happened if I’d been here to see and know about.” He looked at us, eyebrows raised in question.
“The murder,” Atterbury said. He is a plump little man with heavy, shell-rimmed glasses. He looks like an accountant, which is really what he is. Credit ratings are his specialty.
“The murder took place while I was still here and circulating,” Chambrun said. “My presence didn’t prevent it. Something else. Something was planned here that I mustn’t see or be aware of. Yet everyone else was on the job. It apparently didn’t matter if they saw what I was not allowed to see.”
“Someone in the hotel that you wouldn’t have wanted here,” Atterbury suggested. He took some file cards out of his pocket. “You haven’t been over the new registrations for the last two mornings, Mr. Chambrun.”
I have mentioned this routine, the daily check on new guests with the special information on them, credit, habits, moral or immoral. And the cards initialed P.C., which meant Chambrun has special facts about them which he kept to himself. Atterbury suggested it could be one of those P.C. guests who didn’t want Chambrun to know he was in the hotel.
“And risk a kidnapping charge just to keep me out of sight while he was here?” Chambrun shook his head. “But let’s look at your cards, Atterbury.”
The cards Chambrun should have seen the morning of his disappearance came first Most of them were people with past records, people who had used the hotel, many of them many times before. There were the movie people. They had checked in the early afternoon of the day before. Their cards wouldn’t have appeared on Chambrun’s desk until the next morning. Chambrun went over the names. There were Janet Parker, Robert Randle, the two stars. The only unusual information on them was the letter G on Randle’s card which indicated certain sexual preferences. There were Clark Herman, Claude Duval, Jacques Bordeau, Chester Cole, and a dozen technicians and cameramen. Chambrun knew all the principals by sight and by reputation.
“Except Jacques Bordeau,” he said. “Who is he?”
“Duval’s secretary,” Atterbury said.
I remembered the mousy little man who had held an ashtray for Duval during my interview with the director. “Young fellow in his middle twenties,” I said. “Mr. Anonymous.”
They all had unlimited credit. It went with the movie company.
“I’d like to have a look at all these people I don’t know,” Chambrun said. “The technicians and cameramen, and this Jacques Bordeau.”
“Not possible,” Atterbury said. “Duval and Bordeau checked out about five o’clock this morning, after the filming in the Trapeze. I understand they have a filming on the coast with other actors besides the stars today. The rest of them have checked out this morning, or are in the process of checking out.”
Chambrun sat frowning at the cards. There was evidently nothing that caught his attention on those first cards or this morning’s batch. He knew who almost all of them were, and the information on the ones he didn’t know was satisfactory.
“There’s still the chance you were gotten out of here so they could change the times for the filming,” Jerry Dodd said. “Your orders were overridden, which is what they wanted.”
“I just can’t buy that,” Chambrun said. “Risk a kidnapping charge just to get a camera on the dance floor? Risk the chance that I might have tangled with my masked friend and brought about a murder—just to get a camera on the dance floor? It doesn’t add up, Jerry. Not to me.”
“It could,” I said, trying to be helpful, “have been just some sort of overdone practical joke. No bomb, really. Man in a ski mask is right out of television melodrama. He could have held you up with a toy gun. If you’d made a grab at him, he’d have torn off his mask and died laughing. Some crazy bastard who gets a kick out of making people look foolish.”
Chambrun gave me a bored look. “That’s nothing short of brilliant, Mark,” he said, “except for one fact. It wasn’t a toy gun. Take my word for it. I forgive you, though. Because my first thought, when that character appeared in the penthouse, was that it was some kind of joke. It was so far out I thought it couldn’t be real. But I know guns. That was a genuine .44. No risks were too great for it to be anything short of vital to someone that I be out of the hotel for a stretch of time.”
“It was so well prepared in advance,” Jerry Dodd said. “He had to get into your penthouse. He had to get into the wall safe. From the way you told it, that drugged pot of coffee in the New Jersey cottage had to have been prepared well in advance. Something that could knock you out for twenty-four hours could have killed you.”
“I’m a tough old bird,” Chambrun said. “Let’s talk about locks and safes.”
“He got into your penthouse, which involves a lock. He got into your safe, not too difficult according to the bomb squad guy. Let’s begin with the lock on the penthouse door. Hotel thieves know how to open locked doors. We face that problem all the time. He didn’t have to steal a passkey from the maid service. If he could open a safe without the combination, he could probably open the lock on the door.”
“A professional,” Chambrun said.
“No doubt about that,” Jerry said. “So having planted his clock in your safe, he probably stayed hidden in the penthouse, waiting for you to arrive, the sound of any manipulating of the door lock covered by the music you were playing on your stereo.”
“And if he stayed hidden in the penthouse, waiting for me, why did he wait a whole hour until I made my goodnight call to the switchboard before he showed himself? If he was hidden there, he must have known I was going to make that call, which would shut me off from the outside.”
“Knew your routines,” Jerry said.
“Who knows them but you, and Mark, and Ruysdale, and the girls on the switchboard?” Chambrun asked.
“It isn’t exactly a state secret,” Jerry said. “Somebody could have mentioned it casually, gossiped about it. People are always curious about you, your eccentricities.”
“I’m not so goddamned eccentric,” Chambrun said.
“Fact of the matter is, though, this guy had to be well prepared in advance. Nothing spur-of-the-moment about it. He has a cottage in New Jersey, advance preparation. He has a drugged pot of coffee, advanced preparation. He knew how to get the door open, knew there was a safe, knew it was old-fashioned and that he could open it. Knew your phone routines. All that took some research. Who was he? Who gave him the facts he needed? And what good did it do him simply to have you absent for thirty hours? They could have asked for a ransom and gotten it, so money wasn’t the object.”
“You haven’t even been up to the penthouse,” I said. “How do we know he didn’t steal something valuable? He needed time to get away with it.”
“He didn’t take anything with him—except me,” Chambrun said. “There’s nothing worth all that preparation and risk to steal except three paintings and a few curios. They were all in place, when we left. I don’t keep money there, I keep it in the bank!”
Ruysdale spoke for the first time. Chambrun’s return had restored her to her cool, efficient self.
“A professional of that caliber suggests a man who could be hired by someone else,” she said. “Maybe that’s what we should be thinking about, the employer not the employee.”
Chambrun gave her a rare smile. “Bless you, Ruysdale, for suggesting an obvious thing which I had overlooked,” he said.
Jerry Dodd had another concern. “How safe are you now?” he asked Chambrun.
“I believe quite safe if you think of the facts,” Chambrun said. “I was drugged and left alone in that Jersey cottage. No restraints on me; a working telephone there for me to use. I was free to go, free to spread any sort of alarms I chose. I was naturally concerned about the bomb which I thought was real. But whatever it was I wasn’t supposed to see or know about has happened. I am, obviously, no longer a threat to them. But I want to tell you, Jerry, I am goddamned curious! What went on here in those thirty hours? What the hell went on here?”
Death After Breakfast Page 10
