Girl Watcher's Funeral

by Hugh Pentecost

  “We don’t know yet where it happened,” Chambrun said. “In a few minutes Homicide will be in charge. There are a hundred people down the hall. Every one of them will be questioned. Every room on this floor—in the whole hotel, if necessary—will be searched. I choose to think, at the moment, that after Miss Lewis left my office, in possession of all the facts about Nikos, she hit on the truth about it. Instead of keeping it to herself and bringing it to me, she faced someone with it in her forthright fashion. It cost her her life.”

  “Possible,” Gallivan said, staring at a pattern in the center of the rug.

  “So my primary concern, Gallivan, and yours is who wanted Nikos dead and why. Sooner or later we’ll find out from which window Miss Lewis was thrown. It may not tell us anything. There’s been time for the killer to cover all traces. Privacy is not the name of the game up here on the nineteenth floor. You’re all in and out of everybody’s rooms. No one is going to remember who was in what room or what bed at any given time. The quickest way for us to get at the core of this is to identify the person who wanted Nikos dead, and you, his closest associate, should be able to provide us with short cuts.”

  Gallivan didn’t answer. He sat, turning his cigarette around in his fingers, staring at the rug pattern.

  “You know all about Nikos’s private plans and projects,” Chambrun said. “You know the contents of his will, as his lawyer. You know who stands to benefit by Nikos’s death.”

  Gallivan lifted his head and his smile was wry. “So let us begin with Timothy Joseph Gallivan,” he said. “When the will is probated, I will come into a cool two and a half million dollars in tax-exempt government bonds. How do you like that for a motive? I will also collect executor’s fees which won’t be hay. I am a director on the boards of a dozen businesses that will continue to operate, and I won’t just get a five-dollar gold piece for attending an annual stockholders’ meeting. I am at this moment, Chambrun, as a result of Nikos’s death, a very rich man with power in a very considerable business empire.”

  Chambrun’s face was a mask. “And were you in a hurry to come into all this wealth and power, Mr. Gallivan?”

  Gallivan laughed. “Would you believe it if I told you that my salary for acting as Nikos’s legal adviser and his stand-in in a score of power complexes amounted to about a half million dollars a year—after taxes? I haven’t figured it out, but the chances are I’ve had more spending money while Nikos was alive than I will have now. Less spending money now, but more power.” He took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Nikos saw himself as a kind of god,” he said. “Aside from substantial gifts to charities—primarily to cancer and heart disease research—he has left money on the basis of what he considered his infallible judgment of people. For example, Jan Morse gets a half million dollars—but in trust. My guess is that she’ll have an income of about thirty thousand a year for life. Motive? Well, it will actually be a comedown for our Jan. Yesterday if she wanted to buy a thirty-thousand-dollar diamond shoe buckle, all she had to do was ask and Nikos would buy it for her. Today she’s going to have to struggle along on thirty G’s a year and no indulgent papa to buy the extra do-dads. Nikos didn’t trust her with the principal. You know why? She’s a big-hearted slob who would have given it all away to her friends before Nikos was cold in his grave. Monica Strong was something else again. She gets her half million outright, to spend how and when she pleases. He considered Monica sensible. Max Lazar gets a hundred thousand a year for five years, and then good night. Nikos felt if Max wasn’t making it on his own by then, he wasn’t worth supporting. There are a hundred others who get all the way from five hundred bucks to a hundred thousand outright. I’d have to go to my records to supply you with a list.”

  “There’s a good chance,” Jerry Dodd said, speaking for the first time, “that one of the smaller inheritors would be in more of a hurry than people like Mr. Gallivan and Miss Morse, who were doing fine the way things were. The little guy who needs a thousand bucks to pay off his bookmaker is the dangerous kind.”

  “Funny you should use that image,” Gallivan said. “The big horse better in our little world is Zach Chambers. He makes his living producing the most beautiful women in the world to model clothes, and he spends it at racetracks all over the country. I don’t think he’s ever seen a horse race in his life—just the odds on his bookmaker’s blackboard.”

  “And he’s an heir?” Jerry asked.

  “A lot of people who come in for something in the will are getting like severance pay. Max Lazar, for example. Five years and out. Nikos felt a lot of these people have given their time and energy and made their business plans on the assumption of his support. They aren’t to be cut off like today. Max has five years to get his business in order. Zach Chambers gets fifty grand a year for three years. That represents what he could expect to make in commissions off model services for Nikos’s enterprises alone. He won’t lose that until he has ample time to turn around.” Gallivan laughed. “Do you know who’s in the will, Chambrun? That elegant Mr. Cardoza who’s the maître d’ in your Blue Lagoon Room, and Mr. Del Greco who has the same job in the Trapeze Bar. Nikos figured he probably went into each of those places ten times a year. Each time he slipped the maître d’ a fifty-dollar bill. ‘They probably count on it for Christmas,’ Nikos told me. Each of them is down for five hundred bucks. The will is full of little items like that. Nikos hasn’t forgotten anyone who ever gave him pleasure or first-class service.”

  “Was anyone he ever knew left out?” Chambrun asked with a kind of impatience.

  “You, Chambrun,” Gallivan said, grinning. “Oh, he talked about you. He thought of you as one of two or three people in his lifetime whose friendship wasn’t based on what they thought they could get out of him. He decided that to leave you money would lead you to think he felt he had to pay you for your friendship.”

  “Is there anyone in the will who risked being cut out of it for some reason?” Chambrun asked.

  Gallivan’s Irish face was screwed up into a kind of rueful grin. “We all did,” he said. “Some people thought Nikos was a man subject to whims. He wasn’t. But he had his own peculiar code, and if any of us violated it, we would get the ax—boom!”

  “What kind of code?”

  “Taste—morality.”

  “Morality!” Jerry exploded. He was thinking of the mob in 19A, I imagine, and Gallivan with his shoes off and his lipstick smear.

  Gallivan’s grin broadened. “Not yours or mine, Dodd. His—very special. Take his attitude toward sex. It was wide-open, free. Have your fun, baby, with anyone any time. But be exhibitionistic about it, and you were dead. If I used what I wanted to excite anybody but the lady involved, I’d be out selling papers on the corner. If I had a thing with another guy’s wife, it was okay with Nikos. But if I made a public sap out of the husband—boom! The public picture was important to him, not the private one. Steal and get away with it and it might amuse him; be caught and publicly exposed and you were from Deadsville. His taste in fashion is a point. It took him a while to get used to the near-nudity that’s part of the pop thing. He could take the see-through evening gowns the ladies wear today, but not outright nudity. He fired one of the best models Zach ever produced because she allowed herself to be photographed in one of Rudi Gernreich’s topless bathing suits for a magazine. People thought she was fired because she’d posed in a rival designer’s thing. Not so. Public nudity was out with Nikos. Oh, yes, violate his idea of good taste and common morality and you’d be cut out of his will so fast—”

  “Has it happened?”

  “A dozen times, I’d guess.”

  “Any of those people around here today?”

  “Look, Chambrun, you’d not only be cut out of Nikos’s will, you’d be cut out of his life.”

  Chambrun made a restless move to the far corner of the room and back. “The thing I can’t get to work for me is the fact that the killer, in Nikos’s case, wasn’t in a hurry. He was prepared to wait for Nik
os to have an attack. So he wasn’t afraid, at least for the moment, that he would be discovered in violation of Nikos’s code—at least not in the near future. He didn’t have a bookmaker standing over him with threats of instant violence. He had time.”

  “Not in the case of Miss Lewis,” Jerry Dodd said. “Instant blackout!”

  Chambrun nodded. “And if we’re right about her, we’re faced with an interesting fact. I’d swear when she left my office she had no idea who had meddled with Nikos’s medicine. A little more than half an hour later she was violently destroyed. In that time she must have stumbled on the truth, the facts. The killer didn’t have time any more. Miss Lewis had caught him out, and he stood to be nailed for a murder. She was on the inside; she evidently developed a quick hunch. It would seem she solved the case in half an hour’s time.”

  “Which means the answer is lying right around here for as to find,” Jerry said.

  “Except that we’re not on the inside as she was,” Chambrun said. His bright black eyes were focused on Gallivan. “Unless you’re prepared to really help us, Gallivan. The time for scuttlebutt is over.”

  “Sure I’ll help,” Gallivan said. “I want to help.” He rubbed a hand over his eyes. “But I—I’m still a little bit in shock, Chambrun. I don’t know where to begin.” …

  My own state of shock had drifted away and left me in a state of slow, burning anger. If I told you that part of that anger was based on the fact that the Beaumont was about to be exposed under the glare of a scandalous spotlight, you’d think it didn’t make sense. The Beaumont is my life. Its reputation is as important to me as—as my mother’s! But that really wasn’t at the core of it. We are living in a time when a kind of senseless violence, man against man, is the theme song of the day. You read about it in the papers and you see it on television and you are intellectually outraged by it, but it doesn’t happen to you. Then, one day, it does happen to you, and a lot of banked fires in you begin to burn red-hot.

  Somewhere, probably within calling distance down the hall, was a man—or a woman—who had calmly planned to kill Nikos Karados for private reasons of gain, and when caught out had instantly struck at Rosey Lewis, who was a decent, straight-shooting gal trying to get at the truth about a monstrous piece of anarchy. I hardly knew Rosey at all, and yet she was me, and Chambrun, and everyone else who believes in an ordered, safe world. Rosey had discovered the truth and paid for it with her life. But I could have stumbled on that same truth and gone out that same window, just as instantly and unhesitatingly as she had.

  Our conversation with Gallivan came to an end when Joe Cameron stuck his head in the door and told us that Lieutenant Hardy and the boys from Homicide had arrived. Hardy is an old friend. He has been involved with us at the Beaumont on several occasions. He is a stocky blond who looks more like a Notre Dame fullback than a cop. His technique is a kind of dogged thoroughness.

  We all went out into the corridor together and Gallivan headed back for the brawl in 19A with instructions not to start a panic. Jerry Dodd and Joe Cameron went next door to Rosey’s room, but Chambrun held back, checking me.

  “What’s happened to your girl friend?” he asked me.

  “What girl friend?”

  “Miss Morse.”

  “I was with her in the Trapeze when Jerry brought me the news. I don’t know where she is now.”

  “Find her and stick with her,” Chambrun said.

  “Why, for God sake? She—”

  “She was the first one to guess that something was wrong with Nikos’s medicine,” he said. “She’s on the inside. She might guess at the truth just as unexpectedly as Miss Lewis did. Till Hardy gets organized, we shouldn’t let her run risks.”

  He was right, of course. We were up against someone who didn’t hesitate to counterpunch.

  “She may be back at the party by now,” I said.

  “Stay with her,” Chambrun said, “and watch your step.”

  I went back down the hall toward 19A, but when I came to the door of Jan’s room, I rang the bell. No answer. So I went on to 19A again.

  The party was still rolling. Nobody seemed to have left. Max Lazar was still propped up at the mantel. The dancing had stopped, but it seemed it was only an opportunity for the dancers to refill their drinks at the bar. Zach Chambers was telling a joke that resulted in hysterical laughter from the little group around him. The tireless musicians were still at it.

  There was no sign of Jan.

  I thought I’d try her room from the connecting door in Nikos’s bedroom.

  The bedroom had quieted. Suzie and her law student were still stretched out on the bed, but the young man appeared to have passed out or gone to sleep. There was a lot of traffic back and forth from the john.

  I went over to the connecting door to Jan’s room. The key was missing from the door. I didn’t know whether to be concerned for Jan or to be annoyed at the possibility that she’d found somebody more attractive than me to give the only thing she had to give. I knocked on the door, hard and insistent.—“You won’t be appreciated,” a slurred voice said behind me. “Locked doors are locked doors.”

  I turned and found Dodo Faraday looking up at me. The fumes of perfume and gin were mingled as she came very close and put her hands up on my shoulders.

  “I still don’t know who you are,” she said, “but you’re still cute. Maybe I don’t care any more that you’re a stranger.”

  She kissed me on the mouth, standing on tiptoe to reach me. I put my hands on her arms to push her away. Her skin was cold and clammy. I thought she must be just on the verge of passing out.

  “They’re in there?” I asked.

  “Who, cutie-pie?”

  “Your husband and Jan?”

  “Who knows who’s with Jan?” she said.

  “I don’t want to be crude,” I said, “but I’ve got to talk to Jan, whoever she’s with.”

  One of the cold hands touched my cheek. “There are other fish in the sea, cutie-pie,” she said.

  I turned away and hammered on the door with my fist.

  “There are some people who will stop to answer the phone in the middle of love-making,” Dodo said, “and I suppose there are others who will get up to answer a knock at the door. But our Jan isn’t either kind. Let’s go have a drink and decide how to wind up the party.”

  At which moment the door opened and was filled by the square-shouldered bulk of Lieutenant Hardy.

  “Oh, it’s you, Haskell,” he said. “Come in if you want. This is where she went from.”

  “What do you mean—where she went from?”

  “The Lewis woman,” Hardy said. “She went out the window in here.” …

  The room was filled with people. Chambrun and Jerry Dodd and Joe Cameron were there, along with two of Hardy’s men, who were at the window, working with tiny vacuum cleaners and a camera. Crouched on a chair in the far corner of the room, looking as though she was trying to press back through the wall, like a cornered animal, was Jan. She saw me come into the room and she looked at me as though I was a stranger she’d never laid eyes on before in her life.

  Joe Cameron was closest to me and I looked my question at him. “Window open,” he said. “Piece of tweed cloth from the Lewis woman’s suit caught on the corner of the air conditioner. The Morse girl called us seconds after you left us to go back to the party. She was trying to reach you, and the switchboard understood you were with us in Miss Strong’s room. We took the call. Not much doubt.”

  “Of what?”

  “This is where the Lewis woman took her dive,” Joe said. “The ripped piece from her clothes; this window is pretty directly above the spot where she hit the pavement.”

  “Can I talk to Jan?”

  Joe shrugged. “Unless Hardy stops you. He hasn’t got to her yet.”

  This room was painfully quiet in contrast to the party. The two technicians at the window talked to each other in low monotones that I couldn’t hear. Chambrun was giving Hardy a run
down on the whole story. They were like people talking in church.

  I went over toward Jan. She tried to pull back from me, but the wall wouldn’t let her. The brown eyes, wide, dilated, were flooded with terror.

  I squatted down beside the chair. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” I said. “Actually I was looking for you.”

  She looked at me as though the words didn’t mean anything.

  “I heard about Rosey in the bar downstairs,” she said in a dull voice, as though it was something she’d learned by rote. “I came up to my room. The window was open, and I never had the window open because of the air conditioner. I went to close it and saw that piece of cloth flapping in the breeze. I recognized it. I called for help.”

  “Who told you about Rosey?”

  “I—I overheard your conversation with the house detective.”

  It was possible. Jerry and I had only moved a few feet away. My own state of shock at the time made it difficult to remember whether we talked loudly, or how we talked.

  “I was looking for you because you may be in trouble,” I said.

  “May be?”

  I looked back over my shoulder and saw that Hardy and Chambrun were both watching us. The official boom was about to be lowered.

  “You can trust Lieutenant Hardy. He’s a good cop, a good guy,” I said. “You can trust everyone in this room, Jan. But no one else. You understand? We think Rosey was killed because somehow she came on the truth about Nikos. You guessed he was deliberately killed. If you’ve come up with any notions about who or why, don’t mention it to anyone except the people here. No one, you understand? Not even your boy friend. If anyone dreams you’re on the track, the same thing could happen to you that happened to Rosey.”

  She reached out and cold fingertips touched my hand. “Mark, I’m so scared! So damn scared!”