“A lot of people do know about it, I hear,” I said.
“If anybody told Nikos, he would have asked me and I would have lied to him.”
“Because you didn’t want to lose a very secure future.”
“Because I wouldn’t have wanted to hurt him,” Jan said.
A waiter brought my Jack Daniels and I took a solid swig of it.
“He used to cry sometimes,” Jan said.
“Who used to cry?”
“Nikos. He used to cry because he wasn’t a man any more. He used to cry because he couldn’t make love to me. Oh, I would have if he’d asked. I really loved him, Mark. I wouldn’t have hurt him for anything. I know what it was like for him, feeling he wasn’t a man any more. That’s why I felt so badly about you.”
“Non sequitur,” I said.
“I made you feel you weren’t a man,” she said. “Suddenly everything was turned on for Mike and you might like not have been there. It was an awful thing to do to you.”
“I’ll live,” I said. “Everyone said she wasn’t terribly bright, but she’d hit the bull’s-eye. That was exactly why I’d been burning for the last hour—because she’d put my masculinity in doubt.
“Some people think you have to have love and respect and all like that with sex,” she said. “To me it’s just something you’ve got, and you give it because it’s all you’ve got to give. So if you feel like giving something to someone, why, you give the only thing you’ve got.”
“Makes it all very simple,” I said. My mouth felt suddenly dry.
“So if it would help you to get over being hurt,” she said, the wide brown eyes leveled at me without a suggestion of coquettishness, “and it would give you any pleasure—”
Someone was tugging at my coat sleeve and I tried to shake it off. Stupid waiter, I thought. Something about the steak sandwich at a moment like this.
“Sorry to interrupt,” a familiar voice said. It was Jerry Dodd, the Beaumont’s security officer. Jerry is a thin, wiry man with a professional smile that does nothing to hide the fact his shrewd eyes aren’t ever missing a trick. “Speak to you alone a moment—?”
“I don’t admire your timing,” I said. I stood up and walked a few steps away from the table with him.
“Boss wants you,” Jerry said. “Someone took a dive from the nineteenth floor.”
“A dive?”
“They’re swabbing down the sidewalk now,” Jerry said.
“Who was it?”
“Some newspaper dame,” Jerry said. “Name of Rosemary Lewis.”
Part Two
1
I REMEMBER THE TRAPEZE started to revolve slowly around me. It was nightmarish. I was acutely aware of the smells of perfume and tobacco and liquor and food. A raspberry blonde stared at me through a kind of fog, puzzled that I was walking away from her in the middle of her best offer. Voices sounded loud and harsh.
I was grateful for Jerry Dodd’s firm grip on my arm. My legs felt like rubber hose.
“I just left her—not forty-five minutes ago,” I heard myself saying to Jerry in a voice that wasn’t mine.
“It only takes seconds to hit the sidewalk from nineteen floors up,” Jerry said. It was callous. It was like cold water being thrown in my face. I realized afterward that was exactly what he meant it to be like.
We managed to cross the Trapeze, in and out of tables, and reach the hall outside opposite a bank of elevators. I was aware that people watched us curiously. They must have thought Jerry was helping a drunk out of the place. I wondered why we didn’t just climb the one flight of stairs to Chambrun’s office.
“He’s in her room,” Jerry told me.
The elevator took us up, my stomach turning over in the swift ascent. I found myself hanging onto the little handrail in the car. I’d known her for less than an hour, but she’d seemed so alive, so competent, so basically decent. “I’m a big girl,” she’d said, so sure of herself. I closed my eyes, fighting nausea, as I thought of that fine, healthy body hurtling through space to be smashed into unrecognizable bits on the cement sidewalk.
“Do you have any idea who did it?” I asked Jerry as we walked along the corridor to 1919, her room.
“Who did what?” he asked in his flat, unemotional voice.
“She didn’t jump!” I said, facing him.
“Who says?”
“I say!” I said, as certain of that as I was of tomorrow’s rising sun.
“Let’s see,” Jerry said. He rang the doorbell outside 1919.
The door was instantly opened by Joe Cameron, Jerry’s top assistant on the security force. Joe is an affable redhead, Brooks Brotherish in clothes, looking more like a young Madison Avenue executive than a special cop. He’d been a modern language major at Columbia and he was valuable at the Beaumont, with all the U.N. people we had and other foreign guests.
Beyond Cameron in the room I saw Chambrun, standing in the center of the rug, chin sunk forward on his chest. The room smelled like woman, the perfume painfully familiar, although I’d known Rosey for less than an hour.
Then I felt myself sucking for breath. On the dressing table just beyond Chambrun was Rosey’s tawny blond messy hair. It was on a little round stand, the shape of her head. Cameron must have sensed my reaction.
“Smart women wear wigs half the time,” he said. “She had a couple more in the closet—one red, for red-haired fanciers, I imagine.”
The room was neat. There were no signs of any hasty clothes-changing; certainly no sign that Rosey had put up any kind of a fight. The two windows were shut tight, and I was aware of the soft purring of the air conditioner fitted into one of them.
I started, trancelike, toward the window. Nineteen stories to the street!
“Don’t touch anything,” Chambrun said sharply. He looked at me and his face was rock-hard. “You brought her up here?”
I shook my head. “I—I left her at the elevator on your floor,” I said. “She said—she said she was a big girl. I—”
“I don’t think she ever came here,” Chambrun said. “There’s no ledge outside the windows on this floor. You can’t stand outside the windows and close them.”
“She never in God’s world jumped!” I said.
“I’m inclined to agree. I don’t think anything at all happened in this room. Wherever she went out, it wasn’t here.”
I turned to Jerry. “You—you had no problem identifying her?” I wanted him to tell me she hadn’t been totally destroyed, I think.
“Room key in her handbag,” Jerry said.
“Then can you be absolutely sure—?”
“Pull yourself together, Mark,” Chambrun said. “It was Miss Lewis.”
“She was going back to the party,” I said.
Chambrun nodded and turned to Joe Cameron. “You wait here, Joe, for the homicide people,” he said. “You two come with me.” He headed briskly for the corridor with Jerry and me at his heels.
Nobody answered our doorbell ring at 19A. Chambrun tried the door and found it on the latch. He opened it and we were blasted by sound. The drummer and guitar player were ear-splitting. Half a dozen people were dancing the frug or what have you in the center, surrounded by a score of others who were stomping and clapping to the rhythm. One of the dancers was Dodo Faraday, in her snowflake decorated brocade. She seemed to have come very much alive. Zach Chambers, the beaded camp agent, was her partner. I saw Max Lazar by the fireplace. I don’t think he’d moved since I’d first come to the party. I wondered if he took his elbows off the mantel if he wouldn’t fall flat on his face. Standing in the center of a stretcher table against the far wall was Morrie Stein, snapping pictures of the dancers. He must have used eight miles of film since I’d seen him last. The red-haired girl with the stay-put lipstick was bearing down on Chambrun. I had an idea she might be in for a surprise.
And then Monica Strong was with us, intercepting the redhead with an impatient gesture.
“Good evening, Mr. Chambrun,” she s
aid in her low, throaty voice. “I’m afraid you’ll never catch up with this mob. Can I start you trying? Martini? Scotch?”
“This isn’t a social call, Miss Strong,” Chambrun said. His narrowed black eyes darted around the room. “Do you know where I can find Timothy Gallivan?”
“By this time I should imagine in his room—with company,” she said dryly.
“Would you have someone get him for me?”
She nodded and turned to the red-haired tootsie. “Will you tell Tim he’s wanted? Urgent, I imagine.”
The redhead giggled. “He won’t like my barging in.”
“So barge, darling,” Monica said. She turned back to Chambrun. “I understood these rooms were soundproofed.”
“They are.”
“Then you’re not here to complain about the noise?”
“I’m not,” Chambrun said. “Have you seen Rosemary Lewis anywhere about?”
“Rosey?” Not a thing about the lovely face suggested any concern. “The last I remember was seeing her leave the party with Mr. Haskell,” she said.
“Since then?”
“I don’t recall. The traffic’s pretty heavy here. She could have come back and gone again. I didn’t notice. She doesn’t seem to be here now. Unless—”
“Unless what, Miss Strong?”
“She might be with Tim,” she said.
“It’s like that?”
“It’s like anyone might be with Tim,” she said dryly.
“She’s not with Gallivan,” Chambrun said. “She’s dead.”
The gray-green eyes widened. “I don’t think I understand.”
“She’s dead,” Chambrun said.
“We scraped her up off the sidewalk,” Jerry Dodd said in his cold, flat voice.
A hand went up to Monica’s lips. “Oh, my God!” she whispered.
“The last we know about her was that she was headed back up here to the party,” Chambrun said. “Half an hour or so later she fell—or something—to the street.”
“How perfectly ghastly!”
“We need to know where and how it happened,” Jerry said.
“Surely not here,” Monica said. “You see how crowded it is. There’d be no chance—I mean, with all these kooks!”
The two-man musical horror was shouting at the top of its lungs. Monica turned toward them as though she intended to stop all the noise.
“Let things go on,” Chambrun said. “I don’t want this news spread until the police get here. There’ll be questions. We can’t have people leaving.”
“Why? Why did she do it?” Monica asked. “Things were so right for her just now. All the things she’d wanted for herself—her career—were just around the corner.”
I was looking around for Jan’s sex king. He didn’t seem to be there to watch his wife cavort.
“Both of them on the same day!” Monica said. “Both so alive, so keen about everything.”
Chambrun faced her. “Who didn’t like Miss Lewis?” he asked.
The gray-green eyes narrowed. “Are you saying she didn’t—it wasn’t suicide, Mr. Chambrun?”
“It could very well not have been,” he said. “I’d swear the thought hadn’t crossed her mind half an hour before it happened. I could be wrong. Some people act out a kind of gaiety till the very last moment.”
“There’s been a lot of crazy talk here all afternoon about Nikos,” Monica said. “That he was poisoned. I laughed it off. You know how people are. But my God, could they both—is it possible they were both—helped along?”
“It’s possible, Miss Strong.” He shuddered as the drummer beat out something on his bongos. “Our problem here is to talk to someone who’s stayed reasonably sober. You may be elected by default. How do they stand that noise?”
“Each generation to its own thing,” Monica said. “My mother was frowned on for doing the Charleston.”
I saw Tim Gallivan emerge from the bedroom. He had on the blue chino slacks and the turtle-neck sweater, but he’d left his brown loafers behind. He was barefoot. He looked a little flushed and annoyed, but when he saw Chambrun, a kind of toothpaste smile moved his Irish face.
“You changed your mind,” he said. “I’m afraid the evening has gone by the point when there’d be any sense in trying to introduce you to these fun-lovers.”
“It’s not a social visit,” Chambrun said. “Where can we talk quietly? Your room?”
Gallivan’s smile turned mischievous. “I regret to say I can’t offer you my personal hospitality at the moment.” He put a hand on Chambrun’s sleeve. “If it’s something important, can’t it wait till morning? I’m neither in the mood nor the right shape for seriousness, Dad. To be honest with you, I’m royally stoned.”
“You can use my room if it will help,” Monica said.
“Oh, goody!” Gallivan said. “I’ve been trying to get into a whole series of rooms belonging to you, Monica, for the last ten years. At last I’m going to make it!”
“It’s nineteen hundred twenty-one,” Monica said. “Right next to—to Rosey’s.”
Gallivan’s grin slowly faded. “It is something serious,” he said.
“You mind walking down the hall in your bare feet?” Chambrun asked.
Gallivan’s grin re-formed as he looked down at his naked toes. “I was caught, you might say, with my shoes off,” he said. “Perhaps I’d better get them and, at the same time, make my apologies. There is a little girl who was about to have a brand-new experience who isn’t going to thank you for this, Dad. Back in a trivet.”
He weaved his way through the dancers and into Nikos’s bedroom, where I assumed Suzie and her law student were still holding court.
The drummer seemed to be beating on some raw, exposed nerves of mine.
“What can I do to help?” I heard Monica asking.
“Keep the party going,” Chambrun said. “The police will be on the scene at any moment now. Then what happens is up to them.”
It was at that moment that the beaded Zach Chambers gave his dancing partner a particularly vigorous twirl and she seemed to lose her balance and I found myself, unexpectedly, holding the famous Dodo Faraday in my arms. She looked up at me, laughing breathlessly, her dark eyes wide and blurred as though she’d just had belladonna drops in them.
“Home safe!” she said.
She clung very tightly to me, warm, her body still moving slightly to the rhythm of the drums, smelling wonderfully like some exotic florist’s shop.
“You’re cute,” she said. “Unfortunately I don’t know you.” She twisted away from me. Zach Chambers had her by the wrist again and pulled her back into the vortex of the dancers.
“Poor Dodo,” Monica said. “There’s no longer any reason for Mike to play it safe with his little blond tart—now that Nikos is gone.”
Gallivan reappeared. He had put on his loafers and had added a loose-fitting corduroy jacket, with a white scarf knotted casually at his neck. There was a smear of lipstick near the corner of his mouth. The lady in the bedroom had evidently not been wearing that special new product from Lazar House.
Monica produced a room key from her bag and we went down the hall to 1921—Jerry and I following Chambrun and Gallivan.
The room was in a rather pleasant state of disorder. There were a pair of panty-stockings and a bra lying on the bed, along with a flimsy white dressing gown of sorts. The dressing table was loaded with little jars and bottles, some of them left carelessly open.
Gallivan walked over to the bed and picked up the bra. He grinned at us. “Fellow rarely gets a chance to get turned loose in a woman’s room. You get to see how much is real and how much is a put-on.” He waved the bra at the dressing table. “Monica has reached the age when an awful lot has to be done to her face and hair. You wonder if she’s wearing a padded bra. I’m happy to report she is not. They are real.” He tossed the bra back on the bed. “Okay, Chambrun, you’ve dragged me away from the delights of the flesh. It better be good.” He looked at Jerr
y. “I don’t think I know you, chum.”
“Mr. Dodd, the hotel’s security officer,” Chambrun said.
“Well, well,” Gallivan said, “has someone stolen the crown jewels? Which reminds me we’re going to need extra help from you on Lazar Day. Suzie will be wearing a quarter of a million in real diamonds, loaned by Larry Winsted, the jeweler. He’ll have his private fuzz on hand to watch over the beads, but the hotel had better have its eyes open, too. If someone snatched them, the publicity would be bad. Well, what’s the big mystery, Chambrun?”
“We are confronted,” Chambrun said quietly, “with two murders.”
Gallivan laughed and sat down on the edge of the bed. He picked up Monica’s dressing gown and sniffed it, like a wine fancier. “Anyone I know?” he asked.
“Quite well,” Chambrun said. “Nikos and Rosemary Lewis.”
Gallivan stared at him, and the dressing gown slipped out of his fingers to the floor. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said.
What happened was rather extraordinary. The half-potted gent interrupted in the middle of a dalliance, grinning and joking, was turned off like a light switch. The blue eyes, fixed on Chambrun, were cold and calculating. He was suddenly Nikos Karados’s lawyer. He listened intently while Chambrun laid it on the line for him—the pills, the terrible plunge to destruction by Rosey.
“If I can put my hands on the sonofabitch who played games with Nikos’s pills, you won’t need the cops,” he said when Chambrun had finished. He took a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. “You don’t know that Rosey didn’t jump of her own free will.”
“Evidence, no,” Chambrun said. “Convictions, yes.”
Gallivan took a deep drag on his cigarette. “I’m inclined to agree,” he said. “Lazar’s success or failure day after tomorrow was to be her success or failure. She had everything going for her right now.” He looked up. “There’s an old-fashioned word for Rosey. Gallant. She’s been in the front-line trenches all her life, bloody but unbowed. And she was about to win the war, for God sake.” He shook his head from side to side. “Maybe she had a terminal cancer; maybe she couldn’t stand the pain. But knowing her, I’d bet a hundred to one she’d have borne anything until after the verdict was in on Friday. My convictions are the same as yours, Chambrun. She didn’t jump.”
Girl Watcher's Funeral Page 6
