Deadly Joke

by Hugh Pentecost

  “I had no doubts either, Mr. Maxwell,” I said. “I would have sworn this was your blood.” I showed him my shirt cuff.

  Maxwell took a deep swallow of his drink. “I haven’t seen him,” he said, “but it has to be my cousin, Charles Sewall. Poor Charlie. One of his practical jokes finally caught up with him.”

  Chambrun sat down in his high-backed chair. “I think you’d better explain this to us, Douglas, and quickly,” he said. His voice was flat, cold.

  Maxwell’s hands weren’t quite steady as he lit a cigarette. “Charlie and I are—were—look-alikes,” he said. “His mother and mine were twin sisters. They never had twins of their own, but Charlie and I were, in looks, alike as two peas in a pod, to coin a cliché I think we weren’t at all alike as people. But as kids, and as young men, we used to play jokes on people, particularly girls. Charlie would make a date and I would keep it—and vice versa. Charlie was fond of elaborate practical jokes. I lost my taste for them early when I realized they were apt to hurt people. Charlie evidently meant to pull one on me tonight. It appears he arrived just ahead of me—without his pants. No matter how carefully it was explained afterwards, half the country would go on believing that I was the one who had appeared before the television cameras in my shorts. I understand the laughter could have been heard in Chicago.”

  “The fact is, Douglas, that he was murdered by someone who thought he was you,” Chambrun said, in that flat voice. “And in my hotel!”

  I chopped off a laugh. That would be at the forefront of the Great Man’s thinking. His hotel had been desecrated.

  Maxwell missed the humor of it. “We had expected there might be trouble, but not murder,” he said. “Stew Shaw and I talked to your man Dodd in the lobby. They don’t seem to know yet where the shot came from. Nobody they’ve talked to so far saw anyone with a gun. Your Dr. Partridge and a homicide detective are trying to figure out the angle of the shot. Everyone was so concentrated on poor old Charlie’s red and white striped shorts that his killer might as well have been invisible.”

  “Your killer,” Chambrun said. “Don’t forget that for a minute, Douglas. You were meant to die, not your cousin Charlie.”

  “Stew Shaw was with you all the time, Mr. Maxwell?” I asked.

  “Where else? That’s his job,” Maxwell said. “We were being particularly cautious tonight because of those pickets out front and the threats we’ve had from the black militants. We were due here at seven-thirty. We walked into the middle of a madhouse in the lobby. It took us a few minutes in which people stared at me as if I was some kind of a ghost to find out what had happened. Then Stew Shaw whisked me up here.”

  “Where is he now?” Chambrun said.

  “Standing guard outside the door to your suite of offices.”

  “And you’re going on to the dinner?”

  Maxwell gave his shoulders a weary shrug. “What else, Pierre?” His lips moved in a wry smile. “If there were ever any doubts about raising the money we needed, Charlie has fixed that. This attack meant for me will get us twice as much as we hoped for.”

  Chambrun reached for the phone on his desk. “Get me Jerry Dodd,” he told the operator. He put down the phone. “What about the police? Have they questioned you?”

  “The man in charge, a Lieutenant Hardy, told me not to leave the hotel until he talked with me. Right now they’re trying to find where the shot was fired from and someone who may have seen the killer fire it.”

  Maxwell turned as the office door opened. I caught a glimpse of Shaw, the bodyguard, and then he stood aside. Watson Clarke came into the room with a woman leaning heavily on his arm. I recognized her from newspaper pictures as Grace Maxwell. I suppose she is at least fifty. She and Maxwell went to college together thirty years ago. She is still an extraordinarily beautiful woman, if a little weathered. She is slim—and built. The dark red hair is probably not natural, but there is nothing painted or put-on about her. Her bare shoulders, revealed by a pale blue evening gown, are still youthful.

  She took a step toward her husband and away from Clarke. She seemed to sway like a tree in the wind. Shock, I thought.

  “Doug!” she said, in a sort of slurred, husky voice. “Oh, Doug!” She took another uncertain step toward Maxwell.

  Maxwell and Clarke moved simultaneously. Maxwell took her in his arms. The two men exchanged a sort of secret glance and Clarke’s big shoulders moved in a helpless little shrug.

  Grace Maxwell, I realized, was stoned, plastered, drunk.

  Chambrun had risen. “Hello, Grace,” he said. He gestured toward the visitor’s armchair beside his desk. Maxwell eased his wife into it. She took a deep, sobbing breath. Maxwell knelt beside her and took her hands in his.

  “It’s all right, darling,” he said. “It’s all right.”

  She made a tremendous effort to control herself. “You’re not going down there—to the banquet,” she said.

  “I have to, darling.”

  “I can’t go back there,” Grace Maxwell said. “I just can’t go back there, Doug.”

  “You don’t have to, darling. I’m sure they’ll understand.”

  Chambrun came around from behind his desk. “He’s not going anywhere, Grace, without an army to protect him,” he said. “He’ll be quite safe here in the hotel, I promise you. I think the police are going to keep you pretty busy, Doug. I suggest you let me provide you with a suite here, at least for the night. Is there someone at your house who can bring you other clothes and whatever you may need for an overnight stay?”

  Maxwell nodded.

  “We can provide someone to take Grace home if she wishes.”

  “No!” the woman said, her voice shrill. “I couldn’t bear to be alone.”

  “I’ll be glad to stay with Mrs. Maxwell,” a voice said from the doorway. It was Miss Betsy Ruysdale, Chambrun’s incredible secretary. Someday someone will write a book about this woman. She is always where she ought to be—whether or not she ought to be. She had left for the day hours ago, yet here she was. I supposed Mrs. Kiley, the night switchboard chief, had phoned her. Chambrun would need her.

  “Thank you, Ruysdale,” Chambrun said. He turned to me. “Have Nevers prepare the house suite for the Maxwells,” he said. “And find Jerry Dodd. Tell him I want him and a half dozen men to take Douglas down to the Grand Ballroom. And keep me posted on anything and everything.”

  He didn’t need to tell me that.

  The lobby was still bedlam when I got down there. The cops had moved out the TV cameras, but reporters and press photographers still swarmed.

  We were lucky in one respect. The Homicide man in charge was Lieutenant Hardy, an old friend. He’d been involved with us on several occasions. He knew us and we knew him. Hardy looks more like a blond, slightly bewildered Notre Dame line backer than a highly trained crime expert. He’s not inspirational in his approach, but he is thorough almost beyond belief. He doesn’t ruffle, and he has a genuine respect for Chambrun’s gift in crisis.

  We might have been meeting, casually, on a street corner.

  “Hi, Mark,” Hardy said.

  “Hi,” I said.

  We were in the first-aid room. Charlie Sewall’s body was still on the examination table, but covered with a sheet.

  “Damndest thing,” Hardy said. He pulled back the sheet and looked at Charlie Sewall’s dead face. It was the damndest thing. The likeness was just not believable. Charlie’s mouth was less firm than Maxwell’s, but the slackness could have come with death.

  “There were a couple of hundred people in the lobby, but so far we haven’t found a soul who admits to seeing anything. Or hearing anything, for that matter. No one heard the shot.”

  “I was there,” I said. “I didn’t hear anything. He just collapsed. If you get the TV people to play back their tapes, you’ll understand.”

  “I’ve seen and heard the tapes,” Hardy said. “Instant replay. I’ve also impounded every camera in the place. Someone may have gotten a picture he didn�
�t know he was getting. Take some time for films to be developed.” He recovered Charlie Sewall’s face. “Maxwell insists on at least putting in an appearance at his banquet?”

  “Half the guests, no matter what they’ve been told, still probably think Maxwell’s the one who was shot. And there are millions of dollars involved.” I explained that Maxwell and his wife had been given a suite in the hotel.

  “Maxwell’s a friend of the Great Man’s?”

  “Chambrun’s very fond of him,” I said.

  “He’s one of the good guys?”

  “If you go by Chambrun,” I said.

  Hardy took a long, thin cigar out of his breast pocket and lit it as carefully as if it was a scientific problem. “I’d like to know more about him before I talk to him,” he said. “It would help me to make sense.” His eyes turned toward the sheet-covered body. “You were in the lobby when this one arrived?”

  “With Jack Mickly, Maxwell’s PR man.”

  “You saw this one come in from the front entrance? He had two friends with him, I understand.”

  I had forgotten about the two men who had preceded the trouserless Charlie Sewall into the lobby.

  “There were two guys in full evening dress,” I said.

  “You know them?”

  I shook my head. “It all happened so fast,” I said. “They came in very briskly. Then the two men stood aside and we saw the man we thought was Maxwell standing there in his shorts. You wouldn’t believe the laughter. It couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen seconds later that the bullet hit Sewall. I don’t know what happened to his friends.”

  “But you didn’t say to yourself, ‘There’s good old John Smith’ when they came in?”

  “No. I only wondered where Stew Shaw was; Maxwell’s bodyguard.”

  “He wasn’t there because he was with the real Maxwell.”

  “Right.”

  “Could you describe those two friends?”

  I shook my head slowly. “It was all so fast. All men in white ties and tails look something alike. I had no reason to want to identify the two friends. Mickly and I were concerned with getting Maxwell through the crowd to the Grand Ballroom.”

  Hardy knocked the ash off his cigar. “Those two men were in on the joke with Sewall, but neither of them came forward; neither of them tried to help Sewall when he was hit.”

  “Cameras must have got them,” I said.

  “Hopefully. I saw the TV film. One of them was covering his face with an opera hat. The other was turned back, looking at Sewall. One of the press photographers might have gotten them, but we’ll have to wait for that.”

  “I understand from Maxwell that practical jokes were Sewall’s specialty,” I said.

  “So he got paid off by mistake.” Hardy looked at his cigar. Evidently he wasn’t getting pleasure from it. “There’s a balcony running along the west side of the lobby. Your Dr. Partridge thinks the shot was fired from there. Bullet had a downward trajectory. It would account for the fact that no one saw the killer. No one was looking up.”

  “They were all looking at Sewall’s red and white striped shorts,” I said.

  “How do you get onto that balcony?”

  “The door at the north end opens out of the Trapeze Bar. The door at the south end opens onto the mezzanine, directly opposite a bank of elevators. There’s a stairway there, too, going down to the side street entrance.”

  “I should have thought there’d have been a lot of people up on that balcony waiting to see Maxwell arrive.”

  I looked at Hardy, wondering. “It was blocked off,” I said. “Jerry didn’t want people up there. He didn’t want to have to watch two areas. There had been threats, you know—student groups, Black militants.”

  “How was it blocked off?”

  “Doors at both ends locked,” I said.

  “Who has the keys?”

  I shrugged. “There are duplicate sets,” I said. “Jerry Dodd has sets. Security Officer has keys to everything. There’d be a set in Chambrun’s office, one at the main desk, and the housekeeper for that floor. Probably Mr. Del Greco, the captain in the Trapeze Bar, has one.” I kept ticking them off. “Night watchman, cleaning crew. A lot of sets, Hardy.”

  “Thanks,” Hardy said dryly.

  “That balcony isn’t the hotel safe,” I said. “There’s no reason to think of it as a security area. It can be closed off if there’s a reason. Tonight Jerry had a reason. I can’t remember any other time.”

  “If your doctor is right, somebody did get out there,” Hardy said, “and to do that he had to have a key. We’ve looked at the doors. They weren’t forced.”

  “So you check,” I said.

  “That’s my business,” Hardy said. He sounded tired. “Check, and double check, and triple check. Damn these political assassinations! How do you check hundreds of screaming kids and black revolutionaries? All the time it may be some private kook who has no connection with anything, like the Bobby Kennedy case. Or it can be some private vendetta with the political climate being used as a cover-up.”

  “Merry Christmas,” I said.

  The fifteen hundred glittering guests in the Grand Ballroom gave Douglas Maxwell a standing ovation when he appeared, accompanied by Chambrun and surrounded by Jerry Dodd and his men and a half dozen plainclothes cops, with the scowling Stew Shaw at his elbow. It took him a while to make his way to the head table. People seemed to want to touch him, to reassure him. They stamped and clapped and shouted to him.

  When he got to the head table, he stood at his place, his handsome face grave and unsmiling. Once or twice he raised his hands to ask for silence, but it was useless. He stood there, confronting the radio and TV microphones and the one for the PA system in the room. Beside him was the only empty chair in the room. That had been meant for his wife, Grace. On the other side of him Watson Clarke stood, equally grave. He was to be the master of ceremonies.

  After a long time Clarke managed to get himself heard to persuade people to sit down and be quiet. When the room was still, Clarke didn’t speak. He just turned and gestured to Maxwell.

  “I want to thank you for your cordial welcome,” Maxwell said.

  That started it all over again. It was another five minutes before he could resume. Jack Mickly was standing next to me.

  “He could be elected President tonight if he wanted,” he said.

  “We have been confronted with a dreadful tragedy tonight,” Maxwell said. At last they were willing to hear him. “The man who was murdered in the lobby a little while ago was my cousin, Charles Sewall. Poor Charlie was a confirmed practical joker. He chose to make fun of me tonight. It cost him his life. Because there can be no question, ladies and gentlemen, that the assassin’s bullet was meant for me.”

  The room was suddenly dead quiet.

  “Poor Charlie and I looked so very much alike,” Maxwell went on. “Our mothers were twin sisters, and Charlie and I were almost literally twins. Over the years poor Charlie has used this fact to play innumerable jokes. Tonight the result was deadly.” Maxwell took a handkerchief from his breast pocket and touched his lips with it. “It is a pretty shattering experience to realize that someone is lurking in the shadows, waiting to kill you. Oh, I know I have enemies. There are groups of people—young people who are chanting outside this hotel at this very moment. There are revolutionary groups who have threatened all kinds of violence if I proceed along the political path I have chosen. But tonight, somewhere, there was one man, with one gun, bent on killing me. He would have succeeded if Charlie hadn’t chosen this time for a slapstick farce.” Maxwell drew a deep breath. Then he pointed to the empty chair beside him. “My wife is in a state of mild shock and begs to be excused.” There was a murmur of sympathy, and while he waited, Maxwell straightened his shoulders. “But I, ladies and gentlemen, do not beg to be excused! Not from the fight!”

  The roof was raised again. They were all on their feet, cheering and yelling. I’ve got to admit I was impressed wi
th Maxwell as he stood there, erect and unflinching. There was no political smiling or phony self-deprecation. He was a tall, strong, handsome figure. I understood a little better the total devotion of people like Watson Clarke, and Jack Mickly, and Stew Shaw. The cheering broke off on a kind of strangled note. Over the sound of it came the noise of gunshots.

  Pandemonium of another kind began. I saw Shaw, the bodyguard, pull Maxwell down into his chair and literally cover him with his own body. I saw Jerry Dodd’s wiry figure racing between tables toward the entrance to the Ballroom, followed by Chambrun. Some of the elegant guests were down on their hands and knees hiding behind their tables.

  I headed for the entrance, too. It was clear that the trouble, whatever it was, had taken place out in the lobby.

  There was less confusion out there than there was in the Ballroom. A young black man was sitting on the floor opposite the entrance, his face twisted with pain, his back against the wall, clutching at a bleeding shoulder. His bright yellow shirt was bloodstained. Tinted glasses shielded his eyes. Three plainclothes men with drawn guns stood over him.

  Lieutenant Hardy arrived at the same time as Chambrun, Jerry Dodd, and I. One of Hardy’s men reported.

  “The black boy is one of the top leaders for a black militant group,” the man told Hardy. “They’d threatened to blow up the joint, you know, Lieutenant. This guy calls himself Claude Cloud. He managed to slip by the guards on the street and headed into the lobby toward the Ballroom. Sergeant McNeil ordered him to stop. When he didn’t, McNeil fired at him twice. Missed him with the first shot and got him in the shoulder with the second.”

  “Was he carrying a bomb?” Hardy asked.

  “He appears to be clean, Lieutenant. I thought I’d get the hotel doctor to take care of him. We take him out onto the street and we may really start something out there.”

  “Get him to the first-aid room, and quick,” Hardy said. “We’re likely to have a panic inside if you don’t.” He turned to Chambrun. “Can you quiet things down in there?”

  Chambrun’s face was a study in cold fury. I knew what he was thinking. They were turning his beloved hotel into a shooting gallery. He didn’t answer Hardy, but he turned back into the banquet quarters.