I went up to the penthouse with Chambrun. The three penthouses on the roof of the Beaumont are co-ops, owned by the tenants, but serviced by the hotel. One was Chambrun’s, one belonged to a delightful but slightly dotty old lady who looked like an old-time Helen Hokinson drawing, the third had been recently acquired by the new owners’ group. It was used for special guests, parties, perhaps an overnight stop for one of the owners. Nobody was in permanent residence. I had checked and found that on the night of Chambrun’s abduction that third penthouse had been occupied by a British industrialist named Jonathan Harkness. He had, in fact, been in residence for about a week and was still there. The facts on his registration card were impeccable: unlimited credit, a family man who had not brought his family with him, good connections with his own government and ours. He was a personal friend of Garrity’s, our board chairman.
Only two elevators go to the roof. One of them is reserved strictly for Chambrun. Old Mrs. Victoria Haven and whoever is in Penthouse Three use the other one. Chambrun’s elevator is self-service round the clock, the other is always run by an operator. I want to point out that while Chambrun’s elevator is private, there is nothing to prevent someone who wants to break the rules from using it, if they chose to risk the wrath of God.
Chambrun’s penthouse is the epitome of disorganized elegance. Nothing to steal but three paintings, he’d said, but those three paintings were a Gauguin, a Matisse, and a Degas, probably worth a million bucks in cold cash. Over the years there had been gifts from all sorts of celebrated people for whom Chambrun had done favors. You had the feeling that everything in the place was loved and had a special significance for Chambrun. An interior decorator might have been outraged, but a visitor was instantly entranced by the awareness of a lived-in luxury.
One thing is certain. A professional thief would have found plenty of things worth stealing. Which made it clear that the “professional” in whom we were interested was not a professional thief. After a brief look around Chambrun announced there was nothing whatever missing.
“Things like this,” he said, picking up a little silver snuffbox from a side table. “Given to me by a dethroned king, worth at least five thousand dollars. He could have slipped it in his pocket. He evidently wasn’t interested.”
Jerry Dodd has assured us that the lock on the door hadn’t been forced, but Chambrun examined it himself. Not a scratch, not a mark of any sort
There were the French doors leading out to Chambrun’s private roof garden. I don’t know when he found the time, but he enjoyed messing around with plants. Those French doors are not only fastened by conventional Yale locks, but there are iron bars inside that slide across and make them impenetrable. They were never left open or unlocked except when Chambrun went out to the garden. When he came back in they were relocked and barred. Routine from which he never varied.
“Did you go out to the roof when you came up from the Spartan Bar night before last?” I asked him.
“For a few minutes. It was a beautiful night.”
“He could have slipped in behind you without your noticing,” I said.
“And then, when I came back in and was there, he opened the safe and put his clock in it? No, Mark. That had to be done before I ever came upstairs. It would take a little time, even for an expert, to open that safe.”
“Unless he had the combination.”
“Only Ruysdale and I had the combination,” he said.
That was that.
If the kidnapper had come in earlier and hidden someplace, there was no sign of it.
“There are no hiding places that I didn’t cover, not looking for anything, you understand. I changed clothes. I was wearing a dinner jacket when I went up there. So I went into my clothes closet I went to the john, natural reasons. I went to the kitchen to make myself a drink. He couldn’t have hidden in the broom closet. It’s too small.”
“The spare bedroom?” I asked.
“It just happens that the air-conditioning unit is located in the spare bedroom’s closet,” he said. “Inconvenient, but there it is. It was a warm night. I went in there to turn it on. He wasn’t hiding here, Mark. As Jerry suggested, he must have come in the front door—a second time—any noise he made covered by the music I was playing. A Beethoven symphony.”
“He must have scouted out the territory before he made his move,” I said.
“So let’s see if Victoria Haven or Jonathan Harkness saw anything,” he said.
Victoria Haven is a kind of landmark at the Beaumont. She had bought the first co-op in the hotel nearly thirty years ago, just about the time Chambrun had taken over as manager. She broke all the rules, primarily the rule of keeping animals in the hotel. She had kept several generations of obnoxious little Japanese spaniels in her penthouse, and it would have taken the National Guard to get rid of any of them. Chambrun, who was ironfisted about rules, chose to go along with the old girl’s foibles. She must be eighty now, I thought, which made her twenty-odd years older than Chambrun. A rumor that they had been lovers in the old days seemed unlikely. The staff was always trying to involve Chambrun in unlikely love affairs. Betsy Ruysdale was the only real possibility I was sure. Perhaps Victoria Haven reminded him of another time, another world that he remembered with pleasure, which would explain his relaxing of the rules in her case.
We walked through Chambrun’s garden and across the roof to Penthouse Two. Victoria Haven opened the door almost before we knocked. I suspected she’d been looking out the window.
“Well, Pierre, it’s about time,” she said.
She is something to look at. Tall, straight as a ramrod, her hair, piled on top of her head, a gaudy red that God never invented. She wore a plain black dress, but she was decorated with enough rings and bracelets and necklaces to start a pawnshop.
“Don’t tell me there’s another bomb threat?” she said. Her voice was husky from a little too much liquor and a great many too many cigarettes. She was smoking one in a long holder now. “I will not go down to that goddamned gymnasium again. I’d rather be blown sky high!”
“No bomb threat, Victoria,” Chambrun said. “May we come in? You know Mark Haskell.”
She looked at me, her eyes as bright as the diamonds she was wearing. “I know him,” she said. “How is that beautiful blond girl friend of yours, young man? I hate her, you know.”
“Hate Shirley?”
“She’s so damned beautiful,” the old girl said. “At my age there’s no way to compete. Well, don’t just stand there. Come in.”
I had never been in her penthouse before, and I had never seen anything like the room we entered. It looked like a glorified junk shop. There was twice as much furniture as the room could properly hold, most of it Victorian, as far as I could see. Heavy red velvet curtains blotted out the windows. Bookcases overflowed into stacks and piles of volumes on the floor. Sunday papers from the last six months were scattered about. Memories of the Collier brothers flashed into my mind, except that I saw at once there wasn’t a speck of dust in the place. What appeared to be disorder was obviously order to Victoria Haven. I suspected if asked for it she could put her hand on the editorial page of the Times for last Christmas.
An asthmatic growl sounded from behind a whatnot loaded with Staffordshire dogs. A Japanese spaniel, luxuriating on a bright scarlet satin cushion, gave me an unfriendly leer.
“You have to get to know Toto before he will welcome you,” Mrs. Haven said. “I was having my midday martini, Pierre. A little early perhaps, but I needed one after my experience in that gymnasium, with all those dumbbells. I’m not talking about people, but those ghastly exercise gadgets. Will you join me?”
Chambrun never drinks in the middle of the day, but, to my surprise, he said he would. I wasn’t sorry. I could stand a drink about then.
She made martinis very expertly, and then, with a fresh cigarette in her holder, she settled comfortably in an over-stuffed armchair.
“Well, Pierre, it’s about time some
body made something clear to me. Obviously they didn’t expect to find a bomb here. They didn’t look. I wouldn’t have let them, by the way. It would have taken a month to overcome the disorder they’d have created.”
He smiled at her, like an indulgent parent smiles at a precocious child. A strange relationship, but obviously a warm one.
“We were warned that there was a bomb in the wall safe in my apartment,” he told her. “It turned out to be a harmless alarm clock, attached to nothing. We believe it was planted there night before last.” He didn’t say anything about masked men, or kidnappings, or country cottages.
“Some kind of practical joke?” the old woman asked.
“Possibly, but we’d like to find the joker,” Chambrun said.
“So would I! A full hour in that gymnasium, I was. Poor Toto, he loathed it.”
Poor Toto, at the mention of his name, made an angry gargling sound.
“We’re not sure how the joker got into my penthouse,” Chambrun said. “I came to see you because I hoped you might have seen someone on the roof who had no business there.”
“No one,” she said promptly. “Of course, there was Tim Gulliver. He looks after my garden in his off hours.”
Tim Gulliver had been a maintenance man at the Beaumont for twenty years. A man to be trusted.
“I’m thinking more of after dark,” Chambrun said.
Victoria Haven took a deep drag on her cigarette and promptly had a coughing fit. She used her martini, not the first, to cure it.
“I don’t go peering around on the roof after dark with a flashlight,” she said. “But night before last? There was one odd thing. At least I thought it was odd.”
“Yes?” he said patiently.
“Lights in your penthouse at about nine fifteen. Stayed on for a good half hour.”
“What’s odd about that?” he asked.
“Oh Pierre, my dear Pierre! I’ve been living with your habits for a good thirty years. I know them as well as if—as if I were married to you!” She whooped with laughter. “You always dine in your office at nine o’clock. I don’t think you’ve varied from that procedure five times since I’ve lived here. Excepting, of course, the winter of 1962 when you had pneumonia. So, night before last, I wondered idly what had changed your routine.”
“That could be very helpful, Victoria,” Chambrun said, “because I was having dinner in my Office at nine o’clock. Could it have been the maids, do you think, turning down my bed?”
“The maids always get to you at ten o’clock,” Mrs. Haven said. “They came that night, about fifteen minutes after those first lights went out. By the way, when are you going to invite me to dinner again? I’ve been dreaming of mussels in that special sauce the chef makes.”
“You could order them for yourself, Victoria.”
She gave him a flirtatious little smile. “That would not be the same as having them with you, old friend.”
“Soon,” he said.
We got up to go. The old woman had one last piece of information. “You asked about prowlers on the roof after dark, Pierre. I did not see anyone, but I can assure you there was no one.”
“How do you know?”
“Toto cannot abide strangers. If he’d heard anything he would have raised holy hell!”
Toto seemed to confirm this by giving us an angry snarl as we walked past his satin cushion.
We hesitated outside Mrs. Haven’s penthouse. It was a warm hazy day, a faint cloud of smog hanging over the city’s towers.
“This was once a safe place to live,” Chambrun said. “It has changed, Mark. There is violence at its core these days. Poverty turns people into animals.”
I was more concerned with Mrs. Haven’s information. “You think she was accurate?” I asked. “That would seem to place our man in your place shortly after nine.”
“She is always accurate,” he said. He smiled. “She has been keeping tabs on me for years.”
We walked across the tar and gravel roof to the garden door of Penthouse Three. Jonathan Harkness, the Britisher, was there, enjoying a late breakfast or brunch served to him by room service. He was gracious, invited us in, offered us coffee, or a drink.
Chambrun told him we’d just had martinis with Mrs. Haven.
“Which is my quota at lunchtime—perhaps for the next year,” he said. “I have never been able to acquire the martinis-for-lunch habit. Perhaps a good thing for a man who has work to do.”
Harkness was a tall, slender, well-muscled man, the classic picture of the British soldier-officer, down to the little tan toothbrush mustache. About fifty, I thought. The inevitable British pipe rested on the table beside him, ready to go.
“In my life,” he said, “the martini at lunch is the prologue to a long nap. What can I do for you, Mr. Chambrun?”
“First, let me apologize for the inconvenience of this morning,” Chambrun said.
“The bomb? I was happy to hear it was a false alarm.”
“But it’s my reason for being here,” Chambrun said. He told Harkness the same story he’d given Mrs. Haven, leaving out his personal adventure. He added Mrs. Haven’s observation about the lights in his penthouse shortly after nine. “Of course, if you weren’t here that evening, Mr. Harkness, you won’t be able to help me.”
Harkness picked up his pipe and lit it. I thought there were faint lines of strain at the corner of his eyes.
“You do know that I was here,” he said.
“How would I know?”
“I suppose room service told you that I had dinner served here that night.”
“I didn’t ask,” Chambrun said.
“It will come out,” Harkness said. “Very frankly, I have been waiting here for the police to appear.”
Chambrun’s eyebrows rose. “The police?”
“I had a lady here for dinner,” Harkness said. “I suppose I should have reported it, but I needed time to think. Scandal is something I must avoid at this particular time in my life. You see, I am here on a diplomatic mission for Her Majesty’s government.”
“What is so scandalous about having a lady for dinner?”
“This particular lady,” Harkness said. “It was Laura Kauffman.”
Chambrun waited in silence.
“She was an old friend of my wife’s and mine in England,” Harkness said. His pipe wasn’t going properly and he fiddled with his lighter for a moment. He was very obviously sparring for time. “I say ‘friend,’ but that implies more than I want it to,” he went on. “She was part of the social swim in London for several seasons. Part of my job is to circulate at parties and balls and other events where people gather.”
“Just what is your job, Mr. Harkness?” Chambrun asked. He sounded a shade less cordial than he’d been a moment ago. “From your registration card we have you down as ‘industrialist,’ what we call in this country “big business.’”
Harkness turned his head, like a man looking for the nearest exit. “I think I must at least hint at the truth because I need your help, Mr. Chambrun. ‘Big business’ is what I believe is called a ‘cover’ for my real job. Oh, I am on the boards of several big corporations, carefully placed there by the people I really work for.”
“Intelligence?” Chambrun asked.
Harkness nodded, biting down hard on the stem of his pipe. One of the things that irritates Chambrun is to find that information on one of his registration cards is inaccurate. It indicates that Atterbury, Jerry Dodd, even Chambrun himself, has not done his job thoroughly.
“You spoke of help, Mr. Harkness,” Chambrun said in a flat, cold voice.
“I would like not to be forced to expose what I have just told you to the police,” Harkness said. “It could leak. That could undo months of difficult and very delicate work.”
“But you have told us,” Chambrun said.
“You have an enviable reputation for being a very decent and discreet man.”
I could have told him that flattery would get him no pla
ce, but I let it ride.
“I have to have a reason for exercising discretion,” Chambrun said.
Harkness got up and began to prowl the room, chewing on his pipe, hands jammed down in the pockets of his summer tweed jacket.
“Time is a luxury I don’t have,” Chambrun said.
Harkness faced him. He was, I thought, a strong man, not a frightened schoolboy trying to explain away some minor misdeed. I knew, somehow, that he wasn’t a guilty husband about to tell us of some sexual game playing, even if the notorious Laura Kauffman had been his dinner companion.
“There are certain rules to the game I’m in,” he said. “You don’t let friendship, or women, or any other kind of personal indulgence take you off the main line. If a friend is drowning, you let him drown. To help him might be to reveal your real identity and make yourself useless. That is the rule I’ve broken.”
Chambrun sat still and silent, his bright eyes buried in those deep pouches. He wasn’t going to make it easy for Harkness.
“As you know,” Harkness said, “Mrs. Kauffman had an international reputation as a hostess. She was always at the center of the gayest and biggest parties given wherever she happened to be. She knew everyone who is famous, and rich—in the public eye. She also had a reputation for being, shall I say, very free with her favors.”
‘That matches what I know of her,” Chambrun said. He knew so much more that he wasn’t revealing.
“My wife, Priscilla, and I came to know Laura Kauffman in London. We were both aware of the kind of high stakes game she was playing.”
“Are you suggesting that she was an operator for some government?” Chambrun asked.
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