Death After Breakfast

by Hugh Pentecost

  “I don’t know where he puts it,” Eddie said. “Must have drunk two quarts of Irish whiskey. Doesn’t show it, though. Just signals for another double.”

  I walked over to the table. “The bartender says you have a hollow leg,” I said.

  The black glasses looked up at me. “I’m sorry about your girl,” he said. His speech wasn’t thick, just a little overprecise. But he hit me where I was living at that moment.

  “I’d just as soon not talk about it,” I said.

  “Understandable,” he said.

  “You ever do jigsaw puzzles?”

  “When I was four, with my grandmother,” I said.

  “I’ve been doing one for hours,” he said. “Ever since you left me.”

  It didn’t make sense. “Mine was Napoleon at Waterloo,” I said.

  He laughed, as though what I’d said was much funnier than I thought it was. “I guess you could call mine that, too,” he said.

  So two quarts of Irish had done its work, I thought. “I’ve got no place to go,” he said. “I lose this job I’ve got with Herman Productions and the only place to go is down. What do I care about Laura Kauffman, a crazy, sex-mad doll? But I saw you dancing with your girl at the ball. She was something else again.”

  “I just can’t talk about her now, Chester,” I said. I was being buried under one of those waves of self-pity.

  “You seen anyone around lately who reminds you of Napoleon?” he asked.

  The Irish whiskey talking again, I thought.

  His smile was twisted. “I might just decide to bring about his Waterloo—on account of your girl.”

  “Who the hell are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Napoleon,” he said. “Who else got the works at Waterloo?” He drew a deep breath. “Couple of pieces still don’t fit. But don’t get lost, Mark. I may be able to show you the finished product any time now. Your girl deserves it.”

  He was getting to me. “If you know something—”

  “I need time to figure out why I feel like being a hero,” he said. “But I’ll leave you with a question. Who do I know anything about in this cockeyed world of yours?”

  “The film people,” I said, “who are no longer here.”

  “That’s the joker,” he said. “Are they or are they not?”

  He stood up, gave me a stiff, formal little bow and walked, straight as a ramrod, out of the Trapeze.

  I have a lot of pretty good friends who come and go at the Beaumont, but that night, of all nights, none of them seemed to come in. Perhaps it was for the best. It would have meant telling the same unfinished story over and over.

  I went up to Chambrun’s office and found it locked. I checked with Miss Kiley and learned that the “No more calls except in an emergency” rule was in play. The boss had turned in. He hadn’t had any real sleep for a long time. I couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination classify Chester Cole’s crazy talk as an emergency.

  I felt so goddamned lonely! For months now, when the day’s work was over, there had been Shirley to gripe to, to laugh with, to love. No more. Not ever.

  Ruysdale? She could be up in Chambrun’s penthouse with him. I never had known where her private hideout was. There was an emergency unlisted number for her, but no address to go with it. She would have listened with patience and understanding while I went round and round about Shirley. But I wasn’t, or shouldn’t let myself be, an emergency.

  I tried to get Lieutenant Hardy on his home phone but he didn’t answer. It would be legitimate for me to call to ask if there was anything new. He wasn’t at Police Headquarters. The best I could do there was leave a message I’d called. He’d know why.

  In the end I went to my apartment. I had to face it sometime. In the morning I would pack up Shirley’s things and deep-six them somewhere. Having them around would make the pain a little too exquisite.

  I slept on the couch again.

  I woke up about eight o’clock, my usual time. You get so you have a kind of internal alarm clock. It was another day, a hotel to run—a man to find and punish. The impulse to tears was gone, the burning rage. In their place was a kind of cold determination. Everything else in my life, from now on, came second to finding the man who had shot Shirley. Nothing else mattered a damn.

  I made coffee and toast in my kitchenette. I didn’t have an appetite for more. At a few minutes after nine, shaved and dressed for this new day, I went down the hall to the main place. Ruysdale was at her desk as I had found her on hundreds of other mornings. She gave me a look and decided that the time for sweet talk and sympathy was past. She was right.

  The boss was having breakfast of course. Didn’t he always? Ruysdale thought I should go in. Hardy was there.

  Chambrun was working on one of his breakfast favorites, a salmon steak with Bernaise sauce.

  “Glad you came in, Mark,” he said. “Hardy has a question for you.”

  Hardy looked his usual self. The sonsofbitches had all had their normal quota of sleep without nightmares. Hardy was sitting at the table with Chambrun, toying with a cup of coffee. Across the room M. Fresney, the chef, stood expressionless, behind the serving table. He looked disappointed, really, as if Chambrun had passed up some special work of art he’d provided for this morning. He pointed to the coffee service and I nodded that I would.

  ‘The Shirley Thomas case isn’t mine,” Hardy said. He sounded as though he was talking about some distant case in China somewhere. A distant place, a non-person. Perhaps they’d decided that was the way to handle it with me. The Shirley Thomas case! “So it isn’t your case,” I said.

  “But there may be a connection with what is my case,” Hardy said. “You see, I’d asked her to dig up what she could on Laura Kauffman. The husband has given us so many names that it’s worse than none. No place to start. Now, I have no way of knowing what Miss Thomas had in her files, nor who she may have talked to here in the city, in person or on the phone. But the telephone company has provided us with two numbers she called yesterday afternoon, not long after she went home to hunt for me. The first was an overseas call to a Miss Grace Peyron in Paris.”

  “She’s a correspondent for The Paris Herald,” I said. “An old friend. She ran down stories for Shirley abroad.”

  “I know,” Hardy said. “We’ve talked to her. Miss Thomas asked her to dig out anything she could about Laura Hemmerly, Laura von Holtzmann, Laura Kauffman, going all the way back to the war. That was in line with what I’d asked for.”

  The second call is more interesting,” Chambrun said.

  “The second call was to Hollywood, to Claude Duval,” Hardy said. “The call was put through, because her phone was charged for it. I just finished talking to Duval. He didn’t get her call personally. He has one of those automatic answering services attached to his phone. ‘When you hear the buzzer leave your name, your phone number, your message.’ He came home well after midnight, he says, which would have been four, five o’clock our time this morning. Shirley Thomas had called, left her number, and asked him to call collect. He had been planning to do so this morning at a decent hour. He had no idea why she’d called. He was shocked to hear what had happened to her.”

  “Do you have any idea why she called him, Mark?” Chambrun asked.

  I shook my head. Something was bothering me. “We called back Miss Peyron in Paris,” Hardy said. “I thought perhaps she’d suggested Duval as some sort of source for Miss Thomas. She hadn’t. Miss Thomas hadn’t mentioned Duval to her.”

  It clicked. “Napoleon,” I said.

  “Napoleon?”

  I had an absurd impulse to giggle. “Something funny happened on the way to the forum,” I said.

  “Cut it out, Mark,” Chambrun said.

  I told them about my strange conversation with Chester Cole last night. The talk about his jigsaw puzzle which could also be called ‘Napoleon at Waterloo’; about his impulses to be a hero on Shirley’s behalf; about how maybe all the film people hadn’t gone. “‘
That’s the joker,’ he said. ‘Are they or are they not?”’

  Chambrun’s look froze me. “You didn’t think this was worth reporting until now?” he asked.

  “He was drunk! Two quarts of Irish whiskey, Eddie told me. I don’t know how he managed to walk out of the place. It all sounded like drunken idiocy.”

  Chambrun pushed back his chair and stood up. “I think we’d better have a talk with Mr. Cole,” he said.

  The front desk gave us his room number on the ninth floor, and we went in search of Chester Cole. Ringing his doorbell and knocking on the door didn’t produce any results. Chambrun went down the hall to the maids’ pantry and came back with a passkey. We opened the door and found Cole standing just inside it. He could have been waiting there, hoping the trouble, whatever it was, would evaporate. He looked the way he ought to look, I told myself; red-eyed, disheveled. He was a man with a ghastly hangover. He had a seersucker robe pulled around his bony frame. “What the hell is this? Some kind of raid?” he asked. “We have to talk to you, Mr. Cole,” Chambrun said, briskly. “This is Lieutenant Hardy of Homicide. You know Mark.”

  “Do you let yourself in anywhere you choose?” Cole asked. “If I don’t answer my doorbell, it’s because I don’t want to answer it.”

  “A man who thinks about being a hero could be in trouble,” Chambrun said. “I was concerned for your safety, Mr. Cole.”

  Cole backed into his room. From the bureau he picked up his black glasses. He seemed to feel more secure once he was hidden behind them. “I don’t understand any of this,” he said. “Hero?”

  “You had a conversation with Mark last night,” Chambrun said.

  “Ah yes, in the Trapeze, wasn’t it, late in the afternoon?”

  “And again much later at night,” I said, “after you’d taken on a couple of quarts of Irish.”

  His thin mouth moved in a forced smile. “I’m afraid I did rather tie one on,” he said. “I’m afraid I don’t remember our second visit together—if we had one, Mark.”

  “We talked about jigsaw puzzles and Napoleon at Waterloo,” I said.

  “It doesn’t sound very elevating,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mark, but I just don’t remember.”

  “Very convenient for you, Mr. Cole,” Chambrun said. “You don’t remember considering being a hero.”

  “Hero about what?” he asked.

  “You were going to help me—about Shirley,” I said.

  “Shirley?”

  “Shirley Thomas, my girl!” I said. I was suddenly steaming.

  A nerve twitched at the corner of his mouth. “I remember hearing,” he said. “I’m terribly sorry about it, Mark.”

  “You told me you might have answers,” I said. “You told me not to get lost, that you might be able to put it all together. You said Shirley deserved your help! Come on, Chester. You can’t have forgotten all that!”

  “My God, I must have been really stewed,” he said. “Put what together? How could I help?”

  “Put together your jigsaw puzzle. You said you’d been working on it for hours. ‘Napoleon at Waterloo.’ You asked me who you knew here at the Beaumont. The film people, you said. I said they were all gone except you. And you said, ‘That’s the joker. Are they or are they not?’ ”

  “So what movie people are not gone?” Chambrun asked.

  Cole gave a helpless little shrug. “Duval and Herman both went straight to Hollywood. Janet Parker and Bob Randle were supposed to head west sometime yesterday afternoon.”

  “The crew, the camera people?” Chambrun asked.

  “They’re all still on the film, all headed west,” Cole said.

  “So what the hell were you talking about?” I demanded.

  “Just being a drunken bigshot, I guess,” he said.

  “You asked me if I’d seen anyone around who reminded me of Napoleon,” I said. “You said you were thinking of bringing about his Waterloo. Who were you talking about, Chester?”

  He gave me a helpless look.

  “Duval?” Chambrun asked. “I gather he’s a sort of Napoleonic figure in the film world.”

  “We talked about him earlier in the Trapeze,” I said. “You weren’t drunk then, Chester. You remember that?”

  He nodded. “I told you about his summoning Mrs. Kauffman to his suite and behaving like a bastard,” he said. “That’s par for the course for him. He is a bastard.”

  “He knew Mrs. Kauffman?” Hardy asked, joining in for the first time.

  “Not before that meeting, I think,” Cole said. “She was chairman of the ball committee. He wanted her to get some of your rules changed, Mr. Chambrun. He didn’t ‘want,’ he demanded.”

  “How old is Duval?” Hardy asked.

  “Early sixties,” Cole said. “That’s just a guess.”

  “I’m trying to figure out why Miss Thomas called him long distance,” Hardy said. “I’d asked her to go back on Mrs. Kauffman as far as she could—back to the war. A Frenchman Duval’s age could have known her then, when she was Laura Hemmerly. Miss Thomas was on a fishing expedition. It may have cost her her life.”

  “You have a photograph of Duval?” Chambrun asked Cole.

  “There are no photographs of him,” Cole said.

  “A Hollywood bigshot without photographs?”

  “It’s a fetish with him,” Cole said. “No photographs. Everyone connected with him knows that. There have been incidents. He’s smashed news cameras when photographers tried to get a shot of him.”

  “He looks like Telly Savalas the actor,” I said.

  That didn’t seem to ring any bells with Chambrun.

  “Who are you afraid of, Mr. Cole?” he asked.

  “Afraid?”

  “Sober, you’ve decided not to help. That suggests you’re afraid of someone, of what might happen if you did.”

  “I tell you, I was just being a drunken bigshot,” Cole said. “If I said all those things Mark says I said, I was being a phony. Maybe it pleased me to pretend I could do something to help Mark.”

  “Maybe you’re the one who needs help, Mr. Cole,” Chambrun said. “If you do, there’s a way to get it from us.”

  “How?” Cole asked.

  “By telling us the truth,” Chambrun said.

  TWO

  TIME WASN’T ANY LONGER a factor with me. It wasn’t as though Shirley was in danger and I had to do something before it was too late. It was already too late. Unfortunately, I had time to find the facts, to build a case, with or without help. And when I found my man! Stupid. I was no better than Chester Cole, pretending to myself I was superman. Hardy was a professional. Chambrun was a man with a degree in dealing with violence. The best I could hope for, to satisfy my need to get revenge for Shirley, was that they could use me somehow, that I could contribute.

  “When you’ve been around as long as I have,” Chambrun said, “you get so you can smell it.” We were back in his office, and Hardy was on the phone to someone in the Hollywood police department. He wanted a check made on Claude Duval’s whereabouts for the past twenty-four hours. With today’s travel speeds a man could get a call on the West Coast in the early afternoon, fly to New York, and be back west again after midnight their time. There was no way Duval could have had a call from Shirley in the early afternoon and been here two hours later to shoot her and loot her apartment. The point was, had he ever been on the West Coast? Had Shirley got his answering machine in Hollywood and then found a way to reach him here? Chester Cole had suggested that not everyone who was supposed to have headed west had really gone.

  What Chambrun said he could smell was fear. “When a man is as obviously frightened as Cole is,” he said, “there’s no use beating on him. Sooner or later he may get his nerve back, or he’ll get so terrified he has to ask for help. I could see you wanted me to keep at him, Mark. Experience told me that now wasn’t the moment.”

  Hardy came back from the phone to join us. “If Duval has been in Hollywood all day yesterday and today, we should
know in a very few minutes,” he said. “If he was filming, there’ll be dozens of witnesses. If he was there, we can write him off.”

  Chambrun’s eyes narrowed against the smoke from his cigarette. “We had a theory, Walter, early on, that someone had hired a professional to get into my apartment, open my safe, and carry me off to New Jersey. That professional carried the same kind of weapon as was used to murder Shirley Thomas. His employer didn’t have to be anywhere near here. Alibis for that ‘employer,’ whoever he may be, don’t mean a thing.”

  “You suspect Duval?” Hardy asked.

  “So far he’s just a name on a list as long as both our arms,” Chambrun said. “So far as I know he isn’t on any list you have of people who’ve been involved with Laura Kauffman. He didn’t know her, according to Cole.”

  “‘According to Cole’ doesn’t impress me,” Hardy said. “That jerk was running for his life.”

  “I know,” Chambrun said. He leaned back in his desk chair, his eyes almost closed. “Let’s play games, Walter. The man who shot Shirley Thomas had a .44, same as my abductor. So let’s say he is the same man, involved in both happenings. I was carried off to keep me from seeing someone or something. Not Laura Kauffman’s murderer, because I was here, I was circulating when that happened. It was someone or something that came on the scene after that butchering. Now, Shirley Thomas was on the trail of people who might have been connected with Laura Kauffman through most of a lifetime. Aware or not, she must have been headed in the right direction. She had to be stopped. Her records had to be destroyed in case there was something there that would tell us where she was headed. I think we have to assume, Walter, that all three things, two murders and my abduction, involve the same man or men.”

  “I’m willing to assume it,” Hardy said. “What else is there?”

  “What did Shirley know about Laura Kauffman, Mark? Had Laura appeared in her column?” Chambrun asked.

  “I suppose she did,” I said. “International hostess, big party giver, operator in big charity drives. She appeared in all the gossip columns.”