Deadly Joke

by Hugh Pentecost

  I stayed in the entrance. I wanted to cover both fronts. I saw Chambrun reach the head table and speak to Stew Shaw. The bodyguard slowly removed himself from his shielding position over Maxwell. Maxwell stood up again, and his voice sounded clear and firm over the crowd noise. Standing beside Maxwell, Chambrun’s square, short figure just about came up to Maxwell’s shoulder. Maxwell was a good six or eight inches taller.

  Maxwell finally got the attention of his audience. “There’s nothing to be alarmed about, ladies and gentlemen. One of my black militant friends tried to get into the meeting. He wasn’t armed. When the police ordered him to stop, he refused and they shot at him. He’s only slightly wounded and in custody.”

  It took a long time for them to quiet down. Drink makings were on all the tables, and they were suddenly getting a big workout. While they waited for silence, Maxwell and Chambrun were engaged in an earnest conversation. Then Chambrun left and came down to the entrance. He stopped by me.

  “When Maxwell finishes, he isn’t going to stay for dinner,” he said. “Wait here and come up with him to the house suite. Jerry and his boys will be with you.” He turned and walked away toward the bank of elevators.

  Out in the hall Mr. Claude Cloud had been removed by Hardy’s men.

  In the Grand Ballroom, Maxwell had his audience again.

  “The agenda of this evening was to begin with a brief speech of welcome by my very dear friend, Watson Clarke. After you have eaten what I know will be a magnificent dinner, there are other good friends who are prepared to talk to you about me.” He smiled very faintly. “Their remarks will be flattering, otherwise they wouldn’t have been invited.” There was a little wave of laughter. “I was to have followed them with a serious statement of my political beliefs, and then you were to be asked to support me—with money.”

  Again laughter, which faded as Maxwell’s face turned stone-hard again.

  “I have lost my taste for political routines tonight,” Maxwell said.

  “Oh, no!” someone shouted, and it became a chorus.

  Maxwell held up his hands for silence. “Don’t misunderstand me, ladies and gentlemen. I didn’t mean to imply that I am withdrawing. I am with you to the end, whether that end be victory or defeat.”

  Applause and wild cheering again.

  Maxwell went on when he could. “I meant there are times when one’s private responsibilities must be met. I have no taste for this banquet this evening, because my wife needs me.” Murmurs of sympathy. “I ask you to let me go to her. If I can come back for the after-dinner speechmaking, I will. Understand, I am not being frightened off by some would-be assassin. But I cannot turn my back on the woman who has stood at my side for nearly thirty years when she needs me. So, if you will excuse me for the moment—”

  He stepped down from the table and headed for the door where I was waiting, Stew Shaw beside him. Everyone in the room stood up and clapped him out.

  Jerry Dodd and his men closed around us as we headed for the elevator. Maxwell turned to me.

  “What’s become of Cloud, Mark?” he asked.

  “They’re holding him here in the hotel,” I said. “They were afraid if they took him out on the street it might start a riot.”

  “He was one of my chief headaches at Barstow,” Maxwell said. “I’d like to talk to him.”

  “That’ll be up to Hardy, sir,” I said.

  “If he wasn’t armed, he just meant to shout me down. They’ll make a big thing out of his being shot.”

  “It’s not serious,” I said.

  “Not the wound, maybe, but the aftermath. I’ll be called a fascist imperialist until I grow deaf from it. Do they think Cloud may have been the one who shot Charlie? He had time to get rid of his weapon.”

  “I don’t know what Hardy thinks, sir. I have the feeling that half an hour ago he’d never heard of Claude Cloud.”

  “He will, after tonight. They have the techniques for turning him into a martyr.”

  “May I say I think you behaved very well in there, sir,” I said. We had reached the elevators.

  He looked at me, and his face twisted into a grimace of pain. “God dammit,” he said, “wouldn’t you think Grace could have stayed off the sauce this one night!”

  3

  MAXWELL COULD NOT HAVE shocked me more by throwing a glass of ice water in my face. I glanced at Jerry Dodd. His face was a mask; if he had heard, he was pretending he hadn’t. I looked at Maxwell. There was a thin film of sweat on his forehead.

  There was no more talk because the elevator door slid open and six of us stepped in and were whisked up to the fourteenth floor.

  The house suite consists of a sitting room, two bedrooms and two baths, along with a small kitchenette. You could wish you had the money to furnish your own apartment as tastefully and expensively. Someone, Chambrun I expect, had seen to it that the décor was of no particular period. It wasn’t Victorian or French or modern. The colors were neither gloomy nor too bright. Everything was comfortable, and there was everything for comfort.

  When we walked in, Chambrun was standing by an open French window that opened onto a terrace overlooking the East River. There was no sign of Mrs. Maxwell or Miss Ruysdale, but the door to the sleeping quarters was closed.

  Jerry Dodd approached the boss. “I can leave a couple of men out in the hall, Mr. Chambrun,” he said, “but I’d like to get back on the job. Hardy and his men are apt to get lost if there isn’t someone around to keep them from falling down a laundry chute.”

  Chambrun turned. He gave Jerry a faint smile. “I’m sorry to have turned you into a bodyguard, Jerry. I was so concerned about Mr. Maxwell I had to have the one person I could really trust looking out for him. You go. Do your job.”

  “I’ve already failed at that,” Jerry said, his voice hard and bitter. “Somebody shot that poor sonofabitch right in front of me. But thanks anyway for the vote of confidence.”

  “I want that killer caught, Jerry.”

  Jerry grinned at him. “And hung from the chandelier in the main lobby as a lesson?”

  “Get out of here,” Chambrun said.

  Shaw and I stayed. Jerry and his men went out. Maxwell had moved over to a small portable bar in the corner of the room and was pouring himself a drink.

  “Thanks for everything, Pierre,” he said. “I’d better see how Grace is.”

  “She’s all right, after a fashion,” Chambrun said. “Ruysdale is with her.”

  Miss Ruysdale is an original, to my way of thinking. She is, I’d guess, in her late thirties, beautifully groomed, leaning a little toward the severe in her office-hour wardrobe. Chambrun doesn’t want some doll in his outer office over whom the male staff will be mooning. Yet Miss Ruysdale is all woman, and you have to guess that hidden away in some corner of her life is a man. There is the rumor that her man might be Chambrun himself. I suppose that’s rumored about every executive and his high-powered secretary. If it is Chambrun, you’d never guess by his manner toward her. Strictly business. He neuters her by calling her Ruysdale, never Betsy or Miss Ruysdale.

  “Poor darling, the evening has been a little too much for her,” Maxwell said.

  “She’s drunk,” Chambrun said. It was brutal, and I saw Maxwell flinch. “She was drunk when she arrived here ahead of you tonight with Clarke, long before there was any violence. If you knew and let her come, you should have your head examined. If you didn’t know, then Clarke is guilty. He must have known.”

  Maxwell drew a deep breath. “This isn’t an ideal time to discuss this, Pierre.”

  “I think it’s a must time,” Chambrun said. “Do you know what you’re about to be faced with, Douglas?”

  “Faced with?”

  “Somebody took a shot at you here tonight. He killed the wrong man. You owe your life to Charles Sewall’s deadly little joke. But you were almost certainly the target. Whoever fired the shot knew exactly what the evening’s plans were; what time you’d arrive, through which door you’d come
.”

  “The whole press corps, the TV and radio people knew that,” Maxwell said. “Your staff, my staff. It was no secret.”

  “Even Charles Sewall knew,” Chambrun said.

  “No problem,” Maxwell said. “He could have called Mark here in your PR office and found out what the arrangements were. The bell captain in the lobby could have told him.”

  “The general plan, yes. But there were details he wouldn’t have been told. He wouldn’t have been told that the balcony over the lobby would be shut off, no people. He wouldn’t have been told where to get a key to let himself out there. I’m talking about the murderer now, not Sewall. He couldn’t have gotten out there by accident. It was carefully planned. He was ready to take dead aim at Sewall’s heart—thinking it was yours. So he wasn’t in on Sewall’s joke.”

  “What has this got to do with Grace’s alcoholism?”

  “So she is an alcoholic.”

  “Listen, Pierre—”

  “You listen,” Chambrun said. “Tonight everybody is running around assuming that the killer was some off-balance revolutionary kid who hates you for your politics and for the way you handled the riots at Barstow College. But there weren’t any kids in the hotel lobby, and there weren’t any kids on that balcony. So tomorrow, or perhaps sooner, because Hardy isn’t a stupid policeman, they’ll begin to wonder whether the killer wasn’t someone closer to you, someone with a much more personal motive. The plans for tonight were made a good three weeks ago. He had plenty of time to get ready, to find himself a key to those balcony doors or get one made for himself. Hardy is going to ask you about your family, your friends, your close associates. About your daughter, for example.”

  “Oh, God!” Maxwell said. He turned back toward the bar, his glass empty.

  I looked at Chambrun. He had that hanging-judge look in his bright black eyes that I’d seen there when someone had made a bad mistake in the hotel. I hadn’t even known that Maxwell had a daughter. I couldn’t remember ever hearing her mentioned. There had certainly never been any plans for her to be present at the banquet.

  “I’m sorry to do this to you, Douglas,” Chambrun said, his voice a little gentler. “Have you forgotten that you talked to me at some length about Diana one night at dinner?”

  Maxwell turned back from the bar, his glass filled. “I had forgotten,” he said. “Other people on and off the political stage have had trouble with their children, Pierre. Drugs, protests, the poor bastard whose kids blew up his house in Greenwich Village where they were making bombs in the cellar. People today aren’t blaming the parents for their children’s behavior. It’s a symptom of the times.”

  “Forgive me if I say I think the parents should be blamed,” Chambrun said.

  “For ‘sparing the rod and spoiling the child’?”

  “For not listening,” Chambrun said. “But I’m not here to defend today’s youth, Douglas. I want to catch a murderer who is probably waiting to take another shot at you, now that he knows he got the wrong man. Diana is your enemy. Those are your words, Douglas, not mine. You used them the night we first discussed this fund-raising dinner of yours. I asked you whether she would be a part of it and you told me she was your enemy.”

  Maxwell sat down in a high-backed armchair. I had the feeling his legs wouldn’t hold him up any longer. He covered his eyes with an unsteady hand for a moment.

  “Not murder, Pierre,” he said in a shaken voice. “Not that.”

  “Hardy will ask. What about her young man—Barry Tennant? You had him put away for possession of narcotics and a gun violation. How long has he been out of jail?”

  “Less than a month.”

  “And Diana is with him?”

  Maxwell nodded. He looked like a man who was suffering agony from a wound, deep and painful.

  “She doesn’t live with you anymore?”

  “She comes to the house from time to time to see Grace. But, no, she doesn’t live with us anymore.”

  “She doesn’t come to see you?”

  “She hasn’t spoken to me, except in anger, for more than a year,” Maxwell said. “The last time I saw her—” He let it drift away.

  “The last time you saw her?”

  “She shouted at me that she would destroy me if I ran for political office.”

  “How could she destroy you?”

  “I don’t know. No one would listen to her own crazy politics.”

  “Does she have something on you?”

  “For God sake, Pierre, what are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know. I’m asking you if she has something on you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “But young Tennant hates you enough to take a shot at you, would you say?”

  Maxwell’s face hardened. “God knows what he would do. He’s a wild man.”

  “I think we’d better have Diana and her young man here for a little chat,” Chambrun said.

  “She won’t come.”

  “Then you can depend on it that Hardy will bring her in.”

  Maxwell turned his head from side to side. “He’ll have to find her first,” he said. “Grace and I don’t have the faintest idea where she—they—live. We’re not privileged.”

  I felt sorry for him. I felt even sorrier when the door to the bedrooms opened and Grace Maxwell appeared. The clothes had evidently been delivered from their home, because she was wearing a long, quilted housecoat in navy blue. She leaned against the door jamb, the wreckage of something once beautiful. Her attention was fixed on her husband. The rest of us might as well not have been there. Just behind her I saw Miss Ruysdale. She gave a little shrug of her shoulders as if to say she hadn’t been able to prevent this.

  “Are you going back down there, Douglas?” Grace Maxwell asked.

  “Back down?”

  “To the banquet.”

  “I’m afraid I must, darling,” he said gently.

  “If you go, I go,” she said. Her words weren’t slurred, but she separated them as if she was taking great care with them.

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible, Grace.”

  “Do you think someone might shoot me?”

  “Of course not, darling.”

  “Do you—do you think I’m drunk?”

  “My dear girl, I’m afraid you are—a little. With all that’s happened, it’s quite understandable.”

  She gave him an almost sly look. “Only you will know,” she said.

  “I’m afraid that’s one of the delusions of the sickness, Grace. People do recognize it. Mr. Chambrun knew.”

  “Screw Mr. Chambrun,” she said, without looking at the boss. “I want to be present at the end, whatever it is.”

  I saw Miss Ruysdale signaling to me. I moved quietly around to the bedroom door and went in. Miss Ruysdale closed it.

  “She’s been eavesdropping,” Miss Ruysdale said.

  I grinned at her. “And you, too?”

  “Of course; it’s my business,” she said briskly. “She wants to talk to you.”

  “Mrs. Maxwell?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why, for God sake?”

  Miss Ruysdale smiled. “Maybe because she thinks you’re cute. Chiefly because I told her you were a good guy who could be trusted.”

  “Trusted with what?”

  Miss Ruysdale’s face clouded. “With her husband’s life, I think.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Betsy?”

  “I’m not sure I know.”

  “She’s stoned,” I said. “Why didn’t you give her something to put her to sleep?”

  “Barbiturates and liquor don’t mix,” Miss Ruysdale said. “You can die of the mixture.”

  “What does she think I can do for her?” I asked. Whatever was in Grace Maxwell’s alcohol-clouded brain wasn’t apt to make much sense.

  Miss Ruysdale ignored my question. “When Maxwell goes down to the banquet, I suggest you come back here.”

  “Oh, come off it, Betsy,” I said.
“This isn’t a night when I want to take time to play nursemaid to a drunk.”

  “Tell Mr. Chambrun I recommend you come back, if you like,” Miss Ruysdale said.

  Back in the living room the scene was about as I’d left it. Grace Maxwell was facing her husband, her hands on his shoulders. Chambrun and Stew Shaw might as well have been pieces of furniture. They weren’t there as far as Grace Maxwell was concerned.

  “Please, please, Doug!” she was pleading.

  He put his arms around her tenderly. That little nerve was twitching high up on his left cheek. “I have to go, darling,” he said. “And I beg you, Grace, try to get yourself pulled together. The police will be coming here when I’ve finished downstairs. They’ll want to ask us both a lot of questions. Get Miss Ruysdale to make you some strong black coffee.”

  “You insist on going?”

  “I’m afraid so, darling. I can’t let anyone think I’m afraid because of what’s happened.”

  “Are you afraid, Douglas?”

  He looked down at her. “Yes, I’m afraid, Grace. But during the war we used to say that if a bullet had your name on it, it would find you, no matter where you hid. If not, not. I don’t think there’s any use hiding.”

  “I haven’t often asked you for anything,” she said. “This time I beg you.”

  “I’m sorry, darling. I have no choice.”

  She looked at him steadily for a moment, then she turned away and walked, with some effort to stay on a straight line, to the bedroom, where she closed the door on herself and Miss Ruysdale.

  Maxwell turned to us. He looked dead-tired. “I’m sorry you had to be involved in that, gentlemen,” he said.

  “Forget it,” Chambrun said.

  “I wish to God I could,” Maxwell said. “I have to live with it almost every day of my life.” He straightened his shoulders. “Shall we rejoin the revelries?”

  Two of Jerry Dodd’s men were stationed in the hall outside the door of 14B. All five of us went to the elevator and down to the lobby. It was all quiet there. Maxwell started for the Grand Ballroom with Shaw beside him, one of Jerry’s men walking ahead of him and another behind him. I touched Chambrun’s arm. He turned to look at me. His bright eyes were sunk deep in their pouches.