Deadly Joke

by Hugh Pentecost

  “Well, Mark?”

  “Mrs. Maxwell wants to talk to me,” I said.

  “What about?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea. Miss Ruysdale said to tell you she recommends I come back.”

  Chambrun took one of his Egyptian cigarettes from a gold case and lit it. His eyes narrowed against the smoke.

  “Ruysdale doesn’t recommend unless she’s convinced,” he said.

  “I’m not needed at the banquet,” I said. “It’s Mickly’s job to handle the press. Why don’t I go back upstairs and see what it’s all about? I’ll let you know what it is.”

  “You may not be permitted to,” Chambrun said.

  “What do you mean? Of course I’ll tell you.”

  “I have a feeling you may be asked not to,” Chambrun said. He took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Too bad I’m not young and handsome. She might have chosen me.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “I have a feeling youth and good looks are essential,” he said.

  “She’s going to try to rape me?”

  Chambrun chuckled. “With Ruysdale present? Go along, Mark. If you’re asked to keep a secret from me, don’t feel disloyal.”

  I swear I think he knew exactly what she was going to talk about, though I hadn’t the faintest idea. He’s not psychic, you understand. He just puts two and two together better than most people.

  I took the elevator back to 14. The door to the house suite opened the instant I touched the door buzzer. Miss Ruysdale let me in.

  “Fix yourself a drink,” she said. “It may be a minute or two before she gets pulled together. You told the boss?”

  “Yes. He seems to know what it’s all about, which I expect you do.”

  She gave me her Mona Lisa smile. “I believe the cliché goes, ‘You have to get up early in the morning—et cetera, et cetera.’”

  She retreated to the bedroom. I poured myself a Scotch on the rocks and waited. This room always fascinated me. One of Joe Pollet’s old world portraits—Mozart, I think—hung on one wall. Opposite it was one of Chagall’s rooftop violinists with a flying cow or two. You could look at what you liked, elegance or sly humor.

  The Scotch tasted good. I hadn’t realized how dry I was. But when the bedroom door opened, I put the glass down quickly on the bar. There was no point in making things any harder for this tortured woman.

  Grace Maxwell had made an effort to re-do her face. Miss Ruysdale’s black coffee had worked some kind of miracle. If I hadn’t known, I’d have said she was perfectly sober.

  “Thank you for coming back, Mr. Haskell,” she said.

  “Glad to if I can be of help,” I said.

  She sat down on the lounge and gestured to a chair facing her. I sat down, feeling uneasy. The wickedly funny Chagall was behind her red head.

  “Can what I have to say to you be considered a secret, Mr. Haskell? A secret from my husband, from Mr. Chambrun, from everyone at all except Miss Ruysdale, who already knows?”

  “If Miss Ruysdale is prepared to keep a secret from Mr. Chambrun, I guess I can promise.”

  “Thank you.” She glanced at the bar and then, quickly, away. “You see, I knew what was going to happen tonight.”

  I felt a cold finger run down my spine. “You knew someone was going to try to kill your husband?”

  “Oh, my God, no!” she said. That seemed to have unsettled her. She went on, her voice unsteady. “I knew that Charlie was going to pull a joke on Douglas. I’ve known for quite a few days that he planned to appear in the lobby—without his trousers.”

  “And you let it happen?

  “Yes.”

  “I simply don’t understand, Mrs. Maxwell.”

  “You have to believe that the shooting was not a part of the joke; not anything anybody ever dreamed would happen.

  “It doesn’t seem likely that Charles Sewall would have planned his own death, Mrs. Maxwell.”

  “Of course he didn’t. Charlie loved life. The point is I knew it was going to happen, and I let it happen.”

  “The ‘why’ is the secret I have to keep?”

  “Part of it.”

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Maxwell. I—”

  “Listen to her,” Miss Ruysdale said.

  I didn’t want to listen. I didn’t want to listen quite a lot. But Miss Ruysdale was Chambrun’s right arm. If she said listen, that was that.

  “I don’t want my husband to run for political office,” Grace Maxwell said. “I would do almost anything to prevent it. I was willing to let him become a laughingstock through Charlie.”

  “Just in passing,” I said, “how would that hurt your husband in his campaign when people found out it was his look-alike cousin?”

  “The joke was never completed,” she said. “Charlie was to have apologized in front of the cameras—as Douglas, you understand—and disappeared to get a pair of pants. Then Douglas would have appeared and it would have been a long time before anyone got the truth. Today’s news story is never really destroyed by tomorrow’s retraction.”

  She wasn’t a fool, it seemed.

  “Why don’t you want your husband to run, Mrs. Maxwell?” I asked. “He’s the kind of man we need in politics; honest, a great reputation for integrity, intelligent, his own man.”

  “He is all those things,” Grace Maxwell said, “but he can be destroyed if he insists on going ahead.”

  “Who can destroy him?”

  She drew a long, quavering breath. “Diana, his daughter,” she said. She looked longingly at the bar.

  “Can I get you some more coffee, Mrs. Maxwell?” Miss Ruysdale asked.

  “Please.”

  Miss Ruysdale disappeared into the kitchenette.

  “Diana can’t destroy him simply because she disagrees with his politics, the way he handled the Barstow riots. Those are the things that will elect him,” I said.

  “Of course,” she said. “Diana won’t use those things.”

  “She wants to hurt him because of what he did to her young man?” I asked. “Barry Tennant, is it?”

  “Yes. And God knows what other deep-down psychic angers,” Grace said.

  “She wouldn’t use your problem.”

  “My drinking?” She laughed shakily. “Take a poll of the political community, Mr. Haskell. You’ll find I’m not unique. No. Diana claims to have live ammunition.”

  “You know what it is?”

  “No,” she said. “But I can guess.” She looked at me steadily. “I want Diana to tell you,” she said. “She might.”

  “Fine, except we don’t know where she is,” I said.

  “I know where she is.”

  “But your husband said—”

  “Douglas doesn’t know that I know.”

  I could feel a little trickle of sweat running down my back. “But I don’t understand why you can’t tell me what you think Diana has on her father?”

  “Because I don’t know if it’s real. If Diana can convince you that it’s real, then perhaps you can persuade Douglas to withdraw. He won’t listen to me anymore—because of my problem. He loves me, but he treats me like an imbecile child.”

  “Why would Diana talk to me?”

  “Because of what’s happened tonight, I hope,” Grace Maxwell said. “I don’t think she wants him murdered. Whoever killed Charlie by mistake can only have political reasons. Douglas has no other kind of enemy.”

  “Except your daughter and her boy friend.”

  “If you can persuade Diana that he may be murdered if he goes on with his plans, she may be willing to show him the cards she holds. He won’t withdraw because someone may shoot him. But he might if he knew his image could be destroyed.”

  Miss Ruysdale brought in a cup of coffee from the kitchen and handed it to Grace Maxwell. The cup rattled in its saucer as the woman put it down on the table in front of her.

  “Will you see Diana?” Grace Maxwell asked me.

  “If you think it will help.”

 
; “And you won’t give her address to the police—or Douglas?”

  “Look, Mrs. Maxwell. Barry Tennant has made all sorts of wild threats against your husband. If it turns out he was the man on the balcony—”

  “It wasn’t Barry.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because Barry knew it was Charlie,” she said. “Charlie was good friends with Diana and Barry. They knew what he was going to do. That’s how I knew.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Charlie told Diana and Diana told me.”

  4

  MY OFFICE IS ON the second floor, down the hall from Chambrun’s. I also have a two-room apartment next to it where I live, officially. I do have a change of clothes and a shaving kit somewhere else, but that’s no part of this story.

  I went down to my apartment and changed out of my evening clothes into something less conspicuous—slacks, a turtle-neck black knit shirt, an old summer-weight sports jacket with leather patches at the elbows.

  I ducked seeing Chambrun. I didn’t want to face him with information I couldn’t give him. I left word with Karl Nevers at the reception desk that I was leaving the hotel for a while.

  “The boss will raise hell,” Nevers said.

  “I have a feeling he knows I’m going,” I said.

  I got a taxi and told the driver to take me to 10th Street and Second Avenue. That was a block away from the address I had in my pocket, scribbled on a piece of paper by Grace Maxwell.

  When the driver let me out, I was in what I guess you’d call a slum area. Garbage was stacked outside old buildings. People sat on front steps, looking at me with hostility, as though I was someone from Mars. Every now and then as I passed an open window there was a blare of rock music from inside. A group of young people on a corner watched my approach and I knew they were speculating about me. As I passed them, I was aware that a couple of the boys had detached themselves from the group and were following me. I felt the short hairs rising on the back of my neck. I’m in reasonably good shape for a guy thirty-five years old, I can slug hell out of a golf ball, but I don’t have a diploma in free-for-all fighting. I was glad when I spotted the number I was looking for. My two tails were still half a block behind me.

  Inside the door I found myself in a dingy entrance lit by a bare electric light bulb. The stair, which went steeply up into darkness, was littered with discarded cigarette and candy wrappers—and dirt. There were no name plates or buzzers in the entryway. “Second Floor” was written on my slip of paper, so I went up. The building consisted of what we used to call “railroad apartments.” Each apartment ran from the front door to the back of the building, room after room down a narrow hallway like a train of cars.

  I knocked on the door on the second floor. As I stood there waiting, I was conscious that the building smelled bad. There was the sour odor of years of cooking and bad plumbing. I knocked again, pounding on the door this time with my fist. I heard voices down below. My two tails had followed me into the building and were evidently discussing their next move.

  The door opened and I knew I’d found the person I’d come to see. Diana Maxwell was a slim, beautifully built blonde, her hair hanging down below her shoulders. She had on a mini-skirted, sleeveless print thing. Her arms and legs looked firm and young. She looked out of place in this dump. Her blue eyes were level and clear.

  “Miss Maxwell?” I said.

  She turned her head and called out. “The fuzz—I think!”

  I heard human scramblings down the hall.

  “I’m not the police, Diana,” I said. “My name is Haskell. I’m a friend of your mother’s. She asked me to come to see you.”

  “Not likely,” she said. Her voice was pleasantly husky. I imagined that years ago Grace Maxwell had been the same vibrant, lovely kind of girl.

  I took the slip of paper out of my pocket. “Perhaps you’ll recognize your mother’s handwriting.” I gave it to her.

  She frowned at it. “So, come in,” she said.

  She led me down an endless hall to a small kitchen. Doors on both sides of the hall were closed. I thought I detected the acrid smell of pot.

  “Eight of us live here,” Diana said when we reached the kitchen, which was unexpectedly immaculate. “The living room is a bedroom, so we receive guests in the kitchen.” She pulled up a high stool beside the wooden center table and perched on it. There was no place for me to sit. “Is something wrong with mother?”

  “You might say so.”

  “Drunk?”

  “But making considerable sense,” I said. “Do you know what happened at the Hotel Beaumont tonight?”

  She smiled at me. “So Charlie pulled it off,” she said. “They’re probably laughing all the way to Ronald Reagan’s swimming pool.”

  “Nobody’s laughing,” I said. “Charlie was shot to death by someone who thought he was your father.”

  Her eyes widened, her lips parted. “Oh, my God!” she said.

  I told her exactly how it happened. She listened, a look of shocked disbelief on her face. When I’d finished, she asked: “Why—why did Mother send you here?”

  “Two reasons, I think. She wanted you warned that the police will be looking for you and your young man. And she wants to persuade your father to give up.”

  “Give up?”

  “Drop the ball, throw in the towel, abandon his political ambitions.”

  “She’s afraid for him?”

  “Aren’t you? The killer made a mistake. He’ll probably try again.”

  “What has it got to do with me?”

  “You and your Mr. Tennant have threatened to destroy your father if he doesn’t give up. Your mother wants you to tell your father what you’ve got on him.”

  “Mother seems to have been doing a lot of talking,” she said.

  “She had to talk to someone,” I said. “I’ve promised her that what she’s said to me, your address, my visit here, will not be passed on to anyone.”

  “Just who are you?” Diana asked.

  “I’m the public relations man for the Hotel Beaumont. Your mother took a chance on me.”

  “She ought to have her head examined. She believed you wouldn’t talk?”

  “She had to chance it.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “Is Barry Tennant here in the apartment?”

  The blue eyes went blank. “I don’t know where he is.”

  “He’s going to rate high on the cops’ list of suspects,” I said. “They don’t know, of course, that he knew that it was Charlie Sewall in the lobby without his pants.”

  “Mother told you that?”

  “That you and Barry knew and that you told her—and that she let it happen.”

  “And Father?”

  “He doesn’t know—yet. Your mother won’t tell him or the police. But your Barry Tennant is going to have to tell them to save his own hide. How come you weren’t there to watch the fun?”

  “I—I didn’t want to watch it.”

  “You mean you have some kind of hidden regard for your father? Didn’t want to see him humiliated?”

  “I didn’t want to go without Barry, and they wouldn’t have let Barry in the hotel.”

  “And you weren’t watching the festivities on television?”

  “We don’t have a television set.”

  “I should think you would have been with the pickets outside the hotel.”

  She shook her head. She was thinking hard.

  “Your mother says that you have some secret weapon that you can use against your father,” I said. “She wants you to show your father what cards you’re holding in the hope that he will withdraw from the race. He won’t run from a killer, but he might back away from whatever the joker is you’re holding.”

  She shook her head from side to side. “I have to think,” she said.

  “So, think.”

  “It’s one thing to hate Father for his politics and to smear him if I could. It’s another thing to j
oin forces with a killer.”

  “I thought violence was all a part of youth’s program.”

  “For God sake, Haskell, he’s my father!”

  “He’ll be glad to know you think of him that way.”

  I was suddenly aware that someone was standing behind me in the kitchen doorway and I turned. It was a tall young man wearing bell-bottom striped pants, a bright orange shirt, and a fringed buckskin vest. I’m not partial to extra-long hair in males, and this one’s black locks hung down to his shoulders. The hair looked clean and combed, however.

  “You heard, Barry?” Diana asked.

  Barry Tennant nodded. “Poor Charlie,” he said. “Poor silly bastard.” He looked at me. “The killer got away in the excitement?”

  “No one saw him. No one even heard the shot,” I said.

  “Charlie was coming here to tell us how it went,” Tennant said. “We were wondering what was keeping him. Poor guy.” His feeling for Charlie Sewall seemed quite genuine.

  “What did Charlie have against your father?” I asked Diana.

  “He didn’t have anything against anyone,” Tennant said, answering for Diana. “He just liked complicated jokes. Oh, they hurt people sometimes, but that wasn’t his purpose. He just wanted to make people laugh.”

  “He succeeded tonight, for about thirty seconds,” I said.

  “The true art of comedy has to involve genuine tragedy, genuine embarrassment, genuine humiliation,” Tennant said. “Look at any Chaplin film. Charlie understood that. He used to say that Groucho Marx said something like ‘An amateur comedian thinks it’s funny to dress a kid up like an old lady and push him down stairs in a wheelchair, but a professional comic only thinks it’s funny if it’s a real old lady.’” He looked at Diana. “Somebody’s going to have to tell Melody.”

  “Who is Melody?” I asked.

  “Melody Marsh,” Tennant said.

  “Am I supposed to know who she is?”

  “Melody was a famous stripper in the days of burlesque. Is that before your time?” I was over thirty!

  “The real thing was,” I said.

  “Melody could revolve her bosoms, one clockwise and one counterclockwise at the same time. She made a big name for herself doing it. It brought down the house. It still does.”