I decided if I wanted her to join me I wouldn't call her on the phone. It would be too easy for her to say no. I stopped at the florist in the lobby, bought a single gardenia, went up to Five A and rang the doorbell.
Valerie opened the door after a moment. I handed her the gardenia. "You did say six-fifteen," I said.
"Six-fifteen?"
"For drinks and dinner," I said.
She glanced at the flower and managed a tentative smile. "Oh, Mark, how very nice. But I don't think..."
"You're not supposed to think. Just powder your nose—whatever that means—and we'll hit some high spots." I glanced at one of the hunting prints on the wall. "You can't sit here forever watching that same horseman taking that same hedge. At least let me buy you a drink. If after a drink you have no appetite or you find me too dull, I'll bring you back."
"Oh, Mark, I don't think... I'm the one who'll be dull."
"Your policeman friend, Keegan, poured out his heart to Chambrun and me. Wouldn't you like to know what a suspicious and dangerous character you are?"
"He's been here?"
"Been and gone, at least for now," I said.
"What does he..."
"Over a drink," I said.
It wasn't entirely flattering to me, because I think it was curiosity about Keegan that won the day. She beckoned me in, excused herself and reappeared in a very few minutes. She couldn't have had an extensive wardrobe in that one suitcase, but she was wearing what, in my male ignorance, I would call a dinner dress—not formal yet not for the street—a dark brown silky material that enhanced the bright gold of her hair. In a time when makeup is meant to look like no makeup I can't say what she had done to her face, but there was something new about her. She looked like a kid about to be taken to a party, which was exactly what Fd hoped for.
I offered her the Trapeze Bar, which is on the mezzanine above the lobby.
"It's noisy, crowded, but a place where you'll certainly meet someone you know," I said. I saw her face grow serious and I hurried on. "There's the Queen's Parlor—dim lights, soft whispers, for the romantically minded. Perhaps we should save that for another time? Then there is the Blue Lagoon, where they serve an early dinner for theatergoers, and where, if you like old show tunes, there is a piano player you won't believe."
"I love old show tunes," she said.
It would have been my choice, too. We went down to the lobby level and across the open area to the velvet rope that blocked the entrance to the Blue Lagoon. You don't get in there without a reservation. I have pull with the maitre d Mr. Cardoza looks like an elegant Spanish nobleman—and probably was in his youth. He took us to a table not too close to and not too far from the little bandstand where Jake Floyd presides at the baby grand piano. Television viewers will remember Jake as the man who made music for the Dick Thomas talk show, five days a week for years. Chambrun stole Jake away from Dick Thomas a while back and installed him in the Blue Lagoon. It was a ten-strike as far as business was concerned. People flock there from dinnertime until the early hours of the morning to catch his intervals at the keyboard. Jake says he started out playing a piano in a house of ill repute in New Orleans. The management posted a hundred bucks to be given to anyone who could name a tune Jack couldn't play.
"I had to know," Jake said, "because they didn't have a hundred bucks."
Jake is a wiry little man with a sandy fringe around his bald head. There is always a cigar in his mouth, even in an elegant room like the Blue Lagoon. He never lights it, but keeps rolling it from one corner of his mouth to the other. I think it's his security blanket.
Jake saw Cardoza bringing us to a table, nodded a greeting to me, and switched from what he was playing to "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody."
"You've been noticed," I said to Valerie.
A little flush of pleasure colored her cheeks. "He's marvelous, isn't he?" she said. She turned to Cardoza who was waiting for our drink order. "I'd like a very dry martini with a twist of lemon."
"On the rocks or straight up?" Cardoza asked.
"Straight up," she said. She knew her way around.
"The usual for you, Mr. Haskell?"
"Thanks, Luis." I am a one-drink man; one kind of drink. It is Jack Daniels on the rocks with a splash of plain water.
"It's a charming room," Valerie said, looking around.
"You've never been here before?" I asked.
" 'No. New York has never been a real stomping ground of mine. I was brought up in the Southwest— near Tucson. My father had a thing about New York. He hated it. I guess because I was born here, and by being born cost him my mother. He loved her very much."
"But Vassar was your college. That's just up the river in Poughkeepsie. No gay weekends in the big city?"
"I used to come down for theaters—Saturday matinees. This would have been far too fancy for me in those days."
"Your father could have bought the hotel for you if you'd asked for it," I said, meaning to keep it light. It didn't do what it was supposed to do. Fortunately the waiter brought our drinks and the dinner menu for us to study. I told him we'd order later—with the second drink.
"You'd probably think my father was strange about money," she said. "He'd been very lucky with it. Everything he turned his hand to worked, made him more and more. 'But you never know whether people like you for what you are or what you've got,' he used to say. When I began to grow up he worried about what it would do to me. He was sure every man I met would be after me for what I'd someday inherit, not just because I was... was attractive."
"Didn't he ever look at you?" I asked. "You'd never need money to attract men."
"Thanks, Mark. But I was never sure. My father used to say, 'Nobody is ever sorry for a girl on a yacht.' Would you believe that when I went to Vassar I was entered under my mother's name—Valerie
Hanson? My father convinced me that things wouldn't be normal for me if people knew I was the Mc-Candless heiress."
"You met your husband at Vassar, didn't you?"
I seemed to have a genius for turning the conversation to things that touched tender places. I saw pain in those dark, violet eyes.
She nodded. "Richard's education had been interrupted by Vietnam," she said. "He'd enlisted in the air force. When he got back he needed some extra college credits before going on to law school. He happened to choose Vassar—and later me. He had no idea I was a McCandless. He didn't know till after he'd asked me to marry him."
"It didn't turn him off," I said.
She laughed. "It almost did. But I persuaded him to go out to Tucson with me for the spring holiday, to meet my father. Dad was satisfied Richard wasn't a fortune hunter. They got along fine. Dad gave us advice that we followed. We were married, quietly, by a justice of the peace in Tucson. No publicity, no hoopla. Dad offered to help while Richard was in law school. He said any father-in-law with an ability to help would. Incidentally, before Richard died he'd paid back every penny my father had advanced us. We went to live in Ohio, and none of Richard's friends ever knew that I was a 'poor little rich girl.' Until... until afterward. Some reporter dug it up. I was suddenly a stranger—as though I'd cheated them out of some sort of juicy gossip for five years."
We ordered a second drink and I left the choice of dinner to Mr. Cardoza. Valerie was wound up about herself and I was happy to let her go on. I sensed that she needed to talk.
"I've been very bad luck for people I was close to," she said, *'beginning with my mother whom I never knew or saw. I ... I was bad luck for my father. I cost him the woman he worshipped. I...1 was bad luck for Richard."
"For God's sake, Valerie, you didn't set fire to the hotel."
"I'm bad luck for people I get close to," she said. "There was a girl at Vassar. We were good friends. She disappeared out of my life when I married. One day, after Richard, after Fd come to New York, I ran into her on the street. Her name was Eleanor Payson. I hadn't wanted friends, but I was delighted to find her again. She was in big trouble. She'
d been having an affair with a married man. She'd borne him an illegitimate child, a little son—just two years old when we met again. The man had gone haywire, it seems. He was treating her badly, physically beating up on her. She was afraid for the baby. She had no way to escape. She had no money. She was stuck. It was one time I could use the money I now had to help someone I cared about. I rented a cottage for her out in Tucson; I gave her money to live on for a while till she could get on her own feet. I arranged for her to fly out to Tucson with her child." Valerie looked away from me. "Fm bad luck, Mark. That plane I put her on crashed just a few miles short of Tucson. Everybody on board was killed. It isn't healthy to have me for a friend."
"Nonsense. What about the man?"
"I never knew who he was, what his name was. He never surfaced. There was nothing he could do. He had a marriage he hadn't been willing to give up for Eleanor. It wouldn't have done any good for him to reveal his connection with her then."
"So you didn't set the fire in which your husband died, and you didn't pilot the plane in which your friend died," I said. "You weren't responsible for the physical defects that caused your mother to die when you were born. You didn't know, had never laid eyes on, Carl Rogers, the man who was shot in your apartment last night. That's what you told Keegan, isn't it?"
"Yes. Because it's true."
I grinned at her. "So you see, you've got it upside down. You weren't bad luck for anyone. They've been bad luck for you."
She looked at me for a moment. Those deep, warm eyes. "You're a nice man, Mark," she said. "You've brought me to this charming place to take me away from my world of gloom and doom. So let's stay out of it."
She was right, of course, and so we did. We had our second drink. Mr. Cardoza provided us with a perfect summer dinner: a delicious cold vichyssoise, broiled Maine lobster, a salad out of a dream, a brandy-flavored mousse for dessert. Valerie and I talked about everything but her troubles.
In a break, Jake Floyd came down from the bandstand to our table. He has an eye for a pretty girl. She flattered him for his marvelous music, he flattered her by bemoaning the fact that I had found her first. She mentioned some old Cole Porter tunes she loved, and when he went back to his piano he played them all for her.
At some point the spell was broken for her and she asked me what Keegan had had to say about her.
"Not tonight," I said. "We'll have a 'gloom-and-doom' session the next time around. Keegan will soon be off in another direction. He's not as good an amateur psychiatrist as he thinks he is."
You can stay entertained in the Blue Lagoon for a long time. It was after eleven when I realized, reluctantly, that I had responsibilities.
"About this time every night," I told Valerie, "I take on the role of Marshal Dillon putting Dodge City to bed. It's my job to cover the other bars, restaurants, private parties, to make sure everything is functioning as it should. Care to make the rounds with me?"
"Oh, Mark, I don't think I..."
"There's a lot of night life you haven't seen."
"Do you know that I haven't had a wink of sleep since... since the night before last? It has been so wonderfully relaxing I think I could go out round the clock the minute my head hits the pillow. Perhaps another night?"
"My nights are yours as long as you want," I said. "I'll take you back to your place."
I said goodnight to her at the door of Five A, resisting the impulse toward a goodnight kiss. I threatened to call her before lunch the next morning and she didn't discourage me.
I went down to the mezzanine to visit the Trapeze Bar. It was crowded with after-theater drinkers. The room got its name from some Calder-type mobiles of circus acrobats on trapezes. The air-conditioning system keeps them in motion, like tiny, live people.
There were a couple of dozen characters I knew, and I worked my way slowly down the bar, saying hello, passing the time of night, listening to the latest wise crack from some Broadway wit. Then I saw Eddie, the bartender, signaling to me.
"Lady for you on the telephone, Mark," he said.
Without meaning to sound vain, I have to say it could be any one of a half-dozen ladies.
For a moment the voice on the phone was unrecognizable, strained, shaken.
"Mark?"
"Yes. Who is it?"
"Oh my God, Mark—it's Valerie."
"Val! What is it? You sound—"
"On the floor in my bedroom, Mark. Another one—"
"Another what?"
"A man—shot in the head! Oh my God!"
"Sit tight," I said.
It didn't make the slightest sense, couldn't be true, and yet she'd said it. I turned to Eddie.
"Get Jerry Dodd and Mr. Chambrun," I said. "Emergency in Five A." Jerry Dodd is head of hotel security.
"What do I tell them?" Eddie asked.
"It could be a homicide," I said, and took off.
It took me about three minutes to get to Five A. Valerie was standing just outside the door in the hall. As I reached her she grasped my hands in hers. They were ice cold.
"I—I didn't know what to do but call you," she said. "The switchboard operator said she could find you. I thought she never would."
We went into the suite together. The red-coated huntsman was still taking the same hedge on the same horse. The room was undisturbed, just as I had last seen it. Valerie seemed unwilling to go a step further.
"In the bedroom on the left," she said. She sounded almost strangled. I thought if she let go my hands her legs might just buckle under her. But she grabbed the back of an armchair and stood there, staring down the corridor toward the bedroom.
I told myself she'd cracked under the strain; it was a fantasy; there'd be no one in the bedroom.
But there was.
It was totally incongruous. The room wasn't in any kind of disorder. There were a few toilet articles on the dressing table, a silver-backed hairbrush, a tor-toiseshell comb. The closet door was partly open and I could see a couple of dresses and a negligee hanging there. The bedside lamp was on, and the two lights on either side of the dressing table mirror were on. They worked from a switch at the door. Valerie must have walked down the little hall when I left her, stepped into the bedroom, switched on the lights, and seen what was lying on the throw rug beside the bed.
Dead men with gaping gunshot wounds in their foreheads are not an everyday experience for me. I felt a little wave of nausea sweep over me as I saw the dark pool of blood under his cheek. It was shocking, but, my God, what it must have been for Valerie! The second time in twenty-four hours.
I didn't need to examine the body to know there was no need to try to get medical help. The whole left side of the man's head was blown away. I couldn't tell if I knew him or not. The side of his face that might be recognizable was pressed against the bloodied rug. His suit was a summer gabardine, tan; brown and white sport shoes; a rather gaudy plaid sport shirt. His hair was probably dark, but it was matted with blood on the side I could see.
I didn't move. I just stood there, holding onto the door jamb. Death isn't unusual in the hotel, any more than it is in any other community. But this kind of violence was rare. I looked around for a weapon, a gun, but there was nothing in sight.
I heard voices out in the living room and then footsteps coming my way. Jerry Dodd, our security chief, is a wiry, intense little man, a former FBI agent, a tough cookie, trusted to the very end of the line by Chambrun. He stepped past me into the room.
"Jesus!" I heard him say, under his breath. Then he turned to me. "You touch anything, Mark?"
"Just this doorpost I'm hanging onto," I said.
"The lady tell you her story?"
"Not yet. I spent the evening with her in the Blue Lagoon. I brought her upstairs about twenty past eleven. I went down to the Trapeze and the switchboard found me there. I came straight up—and straight down the hall. You know—?"
"That this same thing happened to her last night? Yes, I know. This is for the cops, Mark, not me. My job i
s to see that nobody messes it up till they get here. You better put in the call from the front room."
"I got word to Chambrun," I said.
"He'll tell you to call the cops, too," Jerry said.
I turned away and went back down the hall to the living room. Valerie was still standing there, gripping the back of the armchair. I told her I had to call the police. She didn't move or speak. She just stood there, staring down the empty hall.
The switchboard got me through to the local precinct and I was still reporting what we had seen when Chambrun walked in from the outer hall. He was wearing a dinner jacket with a red carnation in the lapel. He glanced at me and went over to Valerie.
"Mrs. Summers? I'm Pierre Chambrun."
She might not have heard him. She didn't move or speak. He turned to listen to what I was telling the desk sergeant at the precinct. Without another word he walked down the hall to the bedroom.
I came over from the phone and put my arm around Valerie. "You'd better sit down. This is going to be a long haul," I said.
She let me move her around to the front of the chair and lower her into it. Those wide, violet eyes stared up at me.
"Mark?"
"Yes."
"It is you, isn't it, Mark?"
"Yes."
"It is a dream, isn't it? A nightmare? I've left out going to sleep and dreamed all this?"
"I'm afraid not."
"Oh my God, Mark!"
I left my hand on her shoulder. "You're going to have to pull yourself together, Val," I said. "Chambrun is going to talk to you, and Jerry Dodd, our security man, is going to talk to you. Worse than that, the police are going to talk to you, far into the night."
"Lieutenant Keegan?"
"Since it's you, they'll probably think of it as his case. Can I get you something—a drink, order you some coffee?"
Murder in Luxury Page 3
