Deadly Joke

by Hugh Pentecost

  “The Shaw story is interesting,” he said.

  “He could have been milling around in the crowds outside the hotel,” I said. “He could quite logically have thought the danger was out there.”

  “It’s interesting that we can’t ask him,” Chambrun said. “For example, we can’t ask him if Maxwell knew about the joke. We can’t ask him if he was sent ahead to deal with Charlie while Maxwell toured around the block under the eyes of a witness. Could be, you know.”

  “And then Maxwell killed Shaw to keep him quiet?” I felt the small hairs rising on the back of my neck.

  “That we know didn’t happen,” Chambrun said. “Maxwell has never been out of sight of Jerry’s men or the cops since he arrived at the hotel at seven-thirty. He was never able to get to Shaw outside his suite—that’s for certain.” He pressed a buzzer on his desk and Miss Ruysdale appeared promptly.

  “Would you care to pour yourself a drink, Ruysdale?” Chambrun asked as he dropped back into his desk chair, balancing the demitasse in the palm of his left hand.

  “I’ve seen about enough alcohol tonight to cure me for good,” Miss Ruysdale said.

  “How much did Grace talk to you, Ruysdale?”

  “Not much that made any sense,” Miss Ruysdale said. She perched on the arm of the chair that Maxwell had just vacated. “She’s a true alcoholic, Mr. Chambrun. She had three or four pint bottles of bourbon hidden around the bedroom. Where she got them, I have no idea. Probably had them in her handbag and in her evening wrap and hid them when she went off alone to the john.”

  “She talk about her husband?”

  “Only how desperately she wants him not to run for office.”

  “She give reasons?”

  “She’s afraid for him; he’s in danger—all kinds of danger. If he is elected, it’s the end of their world, she kept saying. I—I think she knew what was going to happen tonight; I mean the joke. I think she let it happen because she hoped it would put an end to Maxwell’s candidacy. I don’t know how rational she is, Mr. Chambrun, but it’s real to her. She is ridden by terror for her husband.”

  The red light blinked on Chambrun’s phone. Miss Ruysdale picked it up. “Miss Ruysdale here. Yes. Just a minute.” She covered the mouthpiece with her hand. “Diana Maxwell wants to talk to you, Haskell.”

  “She asked me if I’d buy her a drink,” I told Chambrun.

  “You do that,” he said. “See what you can find out about Charles Sewall and his friends.”

  I glanced at my watch. It was just one o’clock. The bars in the hotel would be open for another hour. I took the phone.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Like to try the Blue Lagoon?” I asked. “Low lights, soft music.”

  “I’m not dressed for it,” she said.

  “How about my apartment—if you can trust yourself with a dirty old man of thirty-five?”

  “Where is it?”

  “Second floor. Two A.”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” she said.

  Mine are the only rooms on the second floor used for living purposes. Chambrun has a little room with a couch-bed in it off his office where he can catch forty winks if necessary, but he doesn’t live there. He has one of the rooftop penthouses. I am in the middle of a floor of offices—Chambrun’s, mine, the computer center that handles all the accounts, the banquet department, the head housekeeper’s office, the maintenance manager. At one o’clock in the morning it is a dead byway in the hotel. On this particular morning only Chambrun’s office was open.

  I have two rooms, a bath, and a tiny kitchenette. There’s an icemaker in the icebox. I keep juice, milk, and butter there. I make my own breakfast: juice, one soft-boiled egg, one piece of toast. I have a well-stocked liquor cabinet. There’s nothing very fancy about my furniture. The walls are lined with books that I’m always sure I’ll get around to reading but never do. The Beaumont is a round-the-clock life.

  I broke out some ice and made myself a Scotch on the rocks. I waited. After about twenty minutes I decided that Diana must have lost her way. I hesitated to ring 14B. If the Maxwells could get any rest at all, they should be left alone. One of the troubles with the mechanized world in which we live is that old niceties have been abandoned. There are no longer any elevator operators, even in a plush setting like the Beaumont.

  I called Chambrun’s office. Miss Ruysdale assured me that Diana hadn’t called to cancel our date.

  I got Mike Maggio, the night bell captain, on the phone.

  “You remember Miss Maxwell, Mike? Earlier tonight?”

  “How could I forget,” Mike said.

  “You seen her in the last ten minutes or so?”

  “I’d remember that, too. No, Dad, I haven’t seen her.”

  “You got a spare boy down there you can send up to Fourteen B to ask Jerry’s guards if she’s left the suite?”

  “Sure. What happen? She stand you up?”

  “Just find out if she’s left the suite, will you, Mike? And if you see her down there, tell her I was asking for her. Right?”

  “Right.”

  Another ten minutes went by. Then Mike called me back. “She left the suite twenty—twenty-five minutes ago, Mark. She didn’t say anything to Jerry’s boys about where she was going. They weren’t instructed to watch her.”

  “Keep an eye out for her, Mike.”

  She had called me for the date. I was sure she’d meant to keep it. The Beaumont is like a small city. You walk down a side street and you run into someone you haven’t seen in years. Your plans can get changed. The hotel had been swarming with family friends of the Maxwells’ that night. If Diana had come down from the fourteenth floor in an express elevator, she’d have had to go to the lobby and then come up to the second floor on a local. She could very easily have met someone there. But to keep me waiting for more than half an hour seemed, somehow, a little out of character.

  I called Chambrun’s office again, but this time the switchboard informed me he was closed up. If it was an emergency, he was in a private dining room on the main floor which had been turned over to Lieutenant Hardy as an office.

  “I’m going to take a tour of the joint,” I told the operator. “I’ve been expecting a call. If it comes, tell the lady Mike Maggio will be able to locate me.”

  I went down the inside stairs to the lobby. The cleanup crew had done a marvelous job in the last hour. Unless you walked down the side street alley and saw the boarded-up shop windows, you might not have guessed anything had happened. It was almost a routine with me to take a walk around the hotel to the various bars and the Blue Lagoon before I went to bed at night. My secretary says it reminds her of Marshal Dillon closing up Dodge City. I spotted Mike Maggio, told him I was taking my regular tour, and if he saw Diana to find me in a hurry.

  I tried the Trapeze first. It had thinned out considerably. Eddie, the chief bartender, was beginning to make the little moves of putting some of his back-bar bottles away for the night. Mr. Del Greco assured me he hadn’t seen Diana since our earlier visit.

  The Spartan Bar was deserted except for two old white heads bent over a chessboard and a bartender waiting patiently to make them a final nightcap.

  I crossed the lobby to the velvet rope that blocked the entrance to the Blue Lagoon. This dinner-night club room never thins out until Pat Coogan closes up her piano. We always have a star turn of some sort, but redheaded Pat Coogan is a regular. She plays a real great piano, and she knows all the old show tunes, and the Al Jolson favorites, and the old ragtime hits. She plays a few tunes, and then she takes requests from the audience. She plays what’s asked for and sings the lyrics in a husky, sexy voice. She’s a sort of ageless doll. I thought, as I listened to her doing a version of “He’s Just My Bill,” that she and Melody might have a lot in common if they ever got together. They made the high-priced call girls who hung out in the Trapeze at the cocktail hour look as if they were carved out of ice.

&
nbsp; Mr. Cardoza, the Blue Lagoon’s maître d’, came over to pass the time of day. I asked him if he knew Diana Maxwell by sight.

  “I think I would,” he said. “Her father used to bring her in here when she was a teen-ager. We’ve had quite a night, no?”

  “You haven’t seen Diana in the last half hour or so?”

  Cardoza shook his head. He would be the perfect movie casting for the crown prince of Ruritania—elegant manners, beautiful figure. “But of course we’ve been buzzing in here all night about the shooting.” Cardoza hesitated. “See that fellow sitting at the corner table by himself?”

  It was a sandy-haired man, I guessed in his fifties. He was wearing dark gray slacks and a blue blazer jacket with brass buttons and some kind of a club patch over his breast pocket.

  “He’s been handing out five-dollar bills to Pat for the last forty-five minutes to sing his favorites,” Cardoza said. “He must have absorbed a quart of Jack Daniels for himself. He claims he’s the dead man’s lawyer. Heartbroken, he says. I guess Lieutenant Hardy gave him a bad time. He can’t have his dear friend’s body removed until they’ve done an autopsy.”

  I fished the name up out of somewhere. Richard Hyland. Dicky Hyland, Melody had called him. This just might be the man who could be going to make trouble for Douglas Maxwell. At that moment he spotted me and I saw him beckon to a waiter. It was obvious he thought he knew me, though I’d never laid eyes on him before. The waiter came up to me and informed me that Mr. Hyland would appreciate it if I joined him for a drink. As a member of the hotel staff I didn’t brush off that kind of thing without a kind word, and so I went through the velvet barrier, which Cardoza held open for me, and threaded my way across the room to the table. Pat Coogan was singing “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.” As I reached the table, Hyland reached out and closed strong fingers over my wrist.

  “Please forgive me,” he whispered. “I want to hear this.”

  A pink spot was focused on Pat at the piano. Her husky voice closed out the song.

  “By God, isn’t she marvelous?” Hyland said. I swear there were tears in his slightly bloodshot blue eyes. He waved to the chair facing him. I sat down to a loud applause for Pat Coogan, who was asking for another request.

  “I am Richard Hyland,” Hyland said. “What are you drinking?”

  “To tell you the truth, Mr. Hyland, I’m looking for someone and I—”

  “Bring Mr. Haskell his regular, whatever it is,” Hyland said to the waiter. He turned to me. “I understand you’re the public relations man for the Beaumont, Mr. Haskell. I was Charles Sewall’s attorney. It’s most fortuitous that we should meet. I would have been hunting for you later, in any case.”

  “Later?” It was going on two o’clock.

  “I was actually making inquiries for you when I heard that marvelous woman singing those old-time numbers, Haskell. I—well, I was pretty broken up about Charlie. We were classmates at Barstow years and years ago. Close friends all our adult lives. Poor old Charlie. He needs our help now.”

  “In what way?” I said.

  “‘Just My Bill’ was Charlie’s favorite song,” Hyland said. He wasn’t going to let me lead the conversation. Well, after a quart of Jack Daniels—I looked past him toward the door, hoping I’d catch a glimpse of Diana.

  “I saw you earlier tonight, just as I was arriving at the hotel,” Hyland said. “You were walking down the street with Melody Marsh. Dear Melody. I would have spoken to you then, but I thought you might be a policeman.”

  “You’re allergic to policemen?” I asked.

  “Oh, that’s very good!” Hyland said. I was suddenly aware that his blue eyes, in spite of their bloodshot condition, were very shrewd and not all blurred. I decided he shouldn’t be taken too lightly. He was, I thought, something of an actor.

  “How can we help Charlie?” I asked.

  “Would you believe that I haven’t been allowed to see his body?” Hyland asked.

  “There has to be an autopsy,” I said. “It’s the law.”

  “Nor have I been able to contact Douglas Maxwell.”

  “Why did you want to see Maxwell?”

  Hyland looked surprised. “Why, he’s Charlie’s cousin. Only living family, so far as I know. Arrangements have to be made; for a funeral and all that. Did Melody come here to claim his body, too?”

  “She came here to talk to a very old friend—my boss, Pierre Chambrun,” I said.

  “Ah, yes, the famous Monsieur Chambrun,” Hyland said. “They were in the Resistance movement in France way back when, weren’t they?”

  “It’s no secret, I guess.”

  “I should think not. Melody’s been telling stories about it for the last fifteen years; all the time she’s been living with Charlie. That was no secret either, her attachment to Charlie. I’m not gossiping behind her back, you understand.” He looked directly at me. He had suddenly forgotten about Pat Coogan, who was singing “I Get a Kick Out of You.”

  I ducked. “I guess she didn’t want Charlie left in the hands of complete strangers. Like you, she wasn’t allowed to see him until the Medical Examiner’s office has finished its job.”

  “Dear Melody,” Hyland said. “She really loved Charlie, in spite of his faults.”

  “He had faults?”

  “Don’t we all, my dear Haskell? Charlie was hipped on practical jokes. Tragic payoff, wouldn’t you say?” He lit a cigarette, his hands surprisingly steady. He could really hold his liquor. “I daresay dear Melody made the improbable suggestion that the bullet was meant for Charlie and not Maxwell.” He made it a question by cocking his head slightly.

  “Why should she think that?” I asked, trying to look as innocent as I could.

  Hyland shrugged. “Center stage is where Melody likes to be,” he said. “If the killer was after Charlie, dear Melody would instantly be in the public eye. She is—was—his common-law wife.”

  “I see,” I said. I wasn’t going to let this character guess I’d ever heard of Charlie’s blackmailing business. He would know it had come from Melody, and if he was the one who was holding Charlie’s aces, Melody’s fear that she might become a target wouldn’t be too far-fetched. I had the feeling that Richard Hyland was a cold-blooded opportunist.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Hyland, but I’ll have to leave you. As I told you, I’m looking for someone.”

  “One minute,” he said as I stood up. “The switchboard won’t put calls through to Maxwell’s suite. Will you get word to him that I think it’s urgent that he should talk with me?”

  “About the funeral arrangements?”

  “About the funeral arrangements,” Hyland said blandly.

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said. “It may not be till morning. The man needs rest.”

  “I can imagine,” Hyland said. “Well, thanks for whatever you can do. My number is in the phone book. Maybe Maxwell would call me.”

  I walked out toward the velvet rope. Pat Coogan was singing “All I Do the Whole Day Through Is Dream of You.” At the entrance I looked back. Hyland was listening to her as though she was all that mattered in the world.

  “No sign of Miss Maxwell?” I asked Cardoza.

  He shook his head.

  “I’ll be with Mr. Chambrun if she does show,” I told him. I was mildly concerned. It was almost an hour since she had told me she’d join me in ten minutes.

  3

  THERE ARE HALF A dozen private dining rooms on the main lobby floor of the Beaumont. They range in size from a cozy room for eight or ten people to larger ones that will accommodate twenty or thirty. One of the smaller ones had been set aside for Lieutenant Hardy, and I found Chambrun there with him.

  A large coffee maker had been set up on a side table and there was a platter of cold meats and bread for sandwiches. Chambrun and Hardy were sitting at the main table. To one side was a uniformed cop poised in front of a stenotype machine.

  “Find your girl?” Chambrun asked as I came in.

  “Th
in air,” I said. “She left Fourteen B at the right time, but she never showed. I guess she got hungry for her young man.”

  “I’m hungry for him, too,” Hardy muttered. “I need a rundown on that mob of kids.”

  Chambrun took a sip of coffee and made a face. This wasn’t his favorite Turkish. “You missed the limousine driver,” he said to me. “He backs up Doug Maxwell’s story a hundred percent. They left the Maxwell house at five minutes to seven. He keeps a chart like a taxi driver. Shaw left the car a block from the hotel at three minutes past seven. The driver drove Doug around until twenty-five after when Shaw rejoined them. Doug never left the limousine. So he’s personally clear on all counts. He couldn’t have shot Charles Sewall, and he was being watched by Jerry’s men at the time Shaw was clubbed to death.”

  I knew that was a relief to Chambrun. He was genuinely fond of Douglas Maxwell.

  “I’ve given Hardy the blackmail story,” Chambrun said.

  Hardy nodded, scowling. Thought was painful for him. “But this blows it, doesn’t it?” he asked. “Maxwell was the victim and Maxwell is clean. So don’t we get back to where it started? The killer was after Maxwell and made a mistake.”

  “Maxwell was almost certainly not Charlie Sewall’s only victim,” Chambrun said. “Maxwell admits that he gave Sewall fifteen thousand a year. Melody mentioned that Sewall lived at the rate of about thirty thousand. She presumably knows.”

  “But she didn’t mention anybody but Maxwell,” I said. “It may interest you that I just left Sewall’s lawyer in the Blue Lagoon. He is anxious to get in touch with Maxwell—about the funeral arrangements, he says.”

  “I had incoming calls shut off from Maxwell’s suite without an okay from me,” Hardy said. “The man needs rest.”

  “Mr. Hardy found that out,” I said. “He wants Maxwell to call him in the morning—about the funeral arrangements.”

  “You think this lawyer may how have Sewall’s evidence against Maxwell?” Hardy asked.

  “It’s very likely,” Chambrun said.

  “The people I hate most are blackmailers and poisoners,” Hardy said. “I’d like to break his back. Let’s get him in here.”