Murder in Luxury

by Hugh Pentecost

  "Like the man who was shot in her apartment?"

  "For God's sake, boss, she never laid eyes on him before!"

  He gave me that patient schoolteacher look of his. "There are facts," he said. "And there is the background which may give a totally different coloration to what appear to be facts. I am walking down the street, I say, to get a little fresh air, or to buy an evening paper. But the fact is I am walking away from a bank I've just robbed. I'm walking, because to run would draw attention to me." His eyes narrowed. "If I told you I had cut a man's throat and hung his body from a lamppost on a city street would you find yourself turned off?"

  " 'Your lecture is full of jokes," I said.

  "It's no joke, Mark. I did just that. I cut a man's throat and hung his body from a lamppost. That's murder. Don't you feel impelled to turn me in?"

  "For the sake of argument—if I was a good citizen I would."

  "Ah, but the background," Chambrun said. "It was in the dark days, the occupation of Paris by the Nazis. A Nazi officer raped and then beat to death two young French girls. He set fire to the house where they lived and burned it, the bodies, and any evidence into a pile of gray ash. Go to the law with it? Go to the police with it? Useless. He was the law, he was the police. The Resistance made itself the law and I its agent. So I came at him out of a dark alley. We couldn't risk attracting attention with a gunshot, so I cut his throat. I hung his body from a lamppost because his monster friends needed to be taught a lesson, issued a warning. Have I lost any sleep over that in the last thirty-five years? Not one single blink of an eye, not one single twinge of conscience."

  "Fascinating, but—so what the hell?" I said.

  "The background gives a different coloration to the facts," Chambrun said. "Keegan thinks Valerie Summers may have killed two men. That crazy dame,' he calls her. So, maybe she did kill them, Mark, but we don't know the background so we don't have the means of seeing the true colors. She is the daughter of the late, totally ruthless, industrial giant, Jeb Mc-Candless. The McCandlesses of this world have more enemies than friends. Someone—a group, a * family' in the Mafia sense—wants to collect on an old debt.

  Your Mrs. Summers is the collection point. Her money or her life. She kills—but it's self-defense."

  "Why doesn't she just go to the police?"

  Chambrun shrugged. "Who knows? Without the background, who knows?"

  "Maybe she has a million-dollar diamond," I suggested. "A gang of thieves is out to get it. She's protecting her rightful property. Her old man was rich enough to buy her a million-dollar diamond."

  "So, last night, she catches a thief looking for her diamond, shoots him, and then refuses to tell the police the simple truth? And again tonight?" Chambrun leaned forward in his chair. "You want to believe she's innocent, Mark? Then you have to explain who the man is who kills two different victims in two different places where the lady lives—and why—and within twenty-four hours. Last night, on Tenth Street, there were several logical explanations: a simple robbery attempt and a falling out between thieves, a drug deal, a sex deal. But add tonight to that and it gets far more complex, much harder to just pick something out of the air. What am I getting at, Mark? Keegan is going after facts. I'm interested in background that will explain whatever facts he finds. Those registration cards we look at every morning? We need to fill out one on Mrs. Valerie Summers. We know her credit rating, but that's about it. Is she, in fact, a drug addict? Is she sex crazy? Is she psychotic? Paranoid? Is she a ?crazy dame' who should be locked away from the civilized world? Or is she being given a lesson in terror by someone who may fit any of those labels?"

  "How do we find out?" I asked.

  "You find out," Chambrun said. "You've made friends with her. In or out of balance, she trusts you. Maybe the answer is in Tucson where she grew up. Maybe it's in that small Ohio town where she and her husband lived. Maybe it's downtown in the Village. There can be a medical history somewhere. There can even be a police record somewhere that a very rich young woman could keep hidden."

  "And she can be as clean as the proverbial hound's tooth," I said.

  "Either way it is background that will color facts. Go after it, Mark."

  "You want me to go traveling halfway around the world?"

  "If it comes to that," Chambrun said. "Make that your job for the next stretch of time. We'll cover your regular routines for you."

  The door to the office opened and a girl from the secretarial pool appeared trying to block the way to Lieutenant Keegan. I realized that Ruysdale was up in 1216, waiting for Valerie.

  "I tried to tell this man—" the girl said.

  "It's all right, Miss Madison," Chambrun said. "We can't expect ordinary courtesy from the lieutenant. He's a policeman."

  "Screw your courtesy and your court orders," Keegan almost shouted. The Black Irishman appeared to have flipped his wig.

  Behind the detective in the doorway, giving a pleasant little nod to Maggie Madison, the stand-in secretary, was Andrew Lukens, the lawyer Chambrun had sent for to take care of Valerie. I knew Andy Lukens from an earlier problem. I suppose he's looking at forty from just one side or the other. It was nearly two-thirty in the morning, but Andy didn't look like a man who'd had a long hard day, which was the way I felt. He was wearing gray slacks, a brown summer-tweed jacket, a navy-blue sport shirt without tie. He looked, I thought, like a young Henry Fonda, a gentle humor suggested in his eyes and at the corners of his mouth. He stood there in the doorway, filling a pot-shaped pipe from a plastic pouch, amused by the scene Kee-gan was playing.

  " 'It would be nice if someone in this fancy whorehouse would choose to cooperate with the law!" Kee-gan stormed.

  "Cooperation is our trade name, Lieutenant," Chambrun said.

  "Where are those maids?"

  "Right next door in my dressing room," Chambrun said, pointing toward the far door. "You want them?"

  "I'll talk to them there," Keegan said. "It will be a pleasure to question a witness who isn't being coached by someone!"

  Keegan charged across the office and into the dressing room. I hoped Mrs. Kniffin and Agnes Mueller weren't going to be caught unprepared for a male visitor.

  "Hello, Andy," Chambrun said.

  "Hi, Mr. Chambrun," Lukens sauntered over to us, holding a lighter to his pipe.

  "Thanks for coming so promptly," Chambrun said.

  "Lady in distress—my pleasure," Andy said.

  "What's with him?" Chambrun asked, nodding toward the dressing room door.

  "Frustration," Andy said. "He likes to work over his witnesses before their lawyers appear on the scene. I've defended two other people involved in homicide cases he handled. He doesn't approve of the fact that anyone, guilty or innocent, is entitled to the best possible defense."

  "You'll take Mrs. Summers as a client!"

  Andy gave the Man his charming, boyish grin. "A lady that lovely I'll defend with my life," he said. "The best Keegan can do right now is arrest Mrs. Summers as a material witness in two homicides. I pointed out to him that I could then get her out on bail in something under five minutes."

  "You've heard her story?"

  "I've heard the story she gave Keegan about tonight," Andy said. "She spent the evening with you, Mark." His grin was aimed at me. "Lucky man. From Jerry Dodd I got the story about the 'Do Not Disturb' sign. I take it he'll get the same story from the ladies in the next room?"

  "And I'll bear out the rest of it," I said. "No sign when I got there at six-fifteen. She didn't sneak a sign on the door when we left at six-thirty. No sign on the door when we got back there at eleven-thirty."

  "Keegan thinks she killed her man before you arrived to take her out," Andy said.

  "And who put the sign on the door after we left?" I asked.

  "And why?" Chambrun said.

  "Someone is framing the lady," Andy said.

  "I had a feeling you were the right lawyer for her, Andy," Chambrun said.

  "Right now Mrs. Summers is
goggle-eyed with fatigue and, you might say, double shock," Andy said. "Pve suggested to your Miss Ruysdale, who's up in 1216 with the lady, that she get some sleeping pills from the hotel doctor and that it be 'Katie bar the door' until noon tomorrow—or, rather, today. She's not in shape to make sense to anyone until she's had some solid rest. Two nights, two murders."

  "Will Keegan let her alone that long?" I asked.

  "If he wants a court order I'll get it. And he knows it," Andy said.

  "If the lady's guilty?" Chambrun asked.

  Andy's mouth tightened. "I'll stay with her through the first jury verdict, and the court of appeals decision," he said.

  "Good man," Chambrun said.

  "I have a problem," Andy said. "Facts about my client."

  "Join the club," Chambrun said.

  Which is how I got delegated to find out the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about Valerie McCandless Summers.

  Unfortunately for my weary bones the evening didn't end just then. Keegan had to have his innings with me. I told my story of the evening about four times before he'd let me up. In the middle of that interrogation there was a call from Dr. Partridge, our hotel physician. The old man was in a nasty mood, too, having been gotten out of bed by Betsy Ruysdale. He'd taken some sort of sedatives or sleeping pills up to 1216, only to be refused entrance. Chambrun put his call on the squawk box so we could all hear.

  "Looks like an army up there," Partridge told Chambrun. "Cops, couple of Jerry Dodd's men. I can't just hand over this stuff to someone else to give to a woman I haven't seen."

  Chambrun told him to hang on and turned to Kee-gan. "The hotel doctor was prepared to give Mrs. Summers something that will let her sleep. They won't let him into the room."

  "Too many people trying to help that crazy broad," Keegan said.

  "She isn't going to be any use to you, Lieutenant, until she gets her brains unscrambled," Chambrun said. "She can be too tired to make any sense."

  Andy Lukens gave Keegan his lazy smile. "There's one advantage, Lieutenant. If she's asleep she won't be trying to go somewhere else. She won't be scheming with her friends and her lawyer to make things tough for you."

  Keegan was an angry man but he wasn't entirely brainless. "Tell the doctor to go back there," he said to Chambrun. "I'll give orders."

  "Knock her out for ten, twelve hours," Doc Partridge told Chambrun.

  "Go, friend," Chambrun said.

  Keegan faced the three of us, Chambrun, Andy Lukens, and me. I guess he saw us as the enemy.

  "You know who that sonofabitch is up there?" he asked.

  "What sonofabitch up where?" Chambrun asked.

  "The dead man! One of my cops recognized him. He's a character; a hawker for a massage parlor in the Times Square area."

  "Hawker?"

  "He brings in the customers off the street. 'Hawker*—a circus term. You know the difference between a massage parlor and an old-fashioned whorehouse, Chambrun?"

  "'House of ill-repute/ my father used to call them," Chambrun said.

  "The difference is," Keegan said, "that a massage parlor offers sex for both men and women. This Willie Bloomfield—that's his name—provides the customers with just the kinds of perversions they enjoy. Interesting people who wind up dead in this lady's quarters! A drug peddler, a sex peddler! I've come across some queer ones in my time. What happens? Does she get some kind of sexual climax out of killing people?"

  I saw a little nerve twitch at the corner of Cham-brun's mouth. It was ugly thinking. For my money it wasn't even worth considering.

  "You're suggesting some kind of a monster, Lieutenant," Andy Lukens said, very quietly.

  "What else?" Keegan said.

  "Oh, I agree with you," Andy said. "We're dealing with a monster, but is it the lady or someone out to destroy her?"

  "Too farfetched!" Keegan said.

  "As the old saying has it, Lieutenant," Andy said, " 'you go to your church and I'll go to mine.' There's a hell of a lot more to find out about this than two oddly related corpses. Same gun?"

  "Ballistics will tell us," Keegan said, "but my guess is yes."

  "Where is it?"

  'There are so many places to hide it in this joint it could take us a lifetime to find it," Keegan said. "We could get lucky—I hope."

  "Background," Chambrun said, as if he was talking to himself. He looked at me. I was getting my orders again.

  It's strange what violence can do to the atmosphere of a familiar place. The Beaumont has been my home, my town, my own personal world for about fifteen years. I went to work for Chambrun the summer I graduated from college. I had planned to be a newspaper man. Helping the then P.R: man at the Beaumont was, I thought, just a stopgap for the summer. The whole slightly dizzy world of famous actors, Hollywood glamor queens, foreign diplomats, presidents, prime ministers, corporate tycoons, social bigwigs playing against a community of a hard working, highly efficient staff presided over by Chambrun, who instantly appeared to me to be a genius at what he did, wiped out any dreams Pd have of covering news stories for some hard-nosed managing editor. All the excitement Pd ever wanted was right here, within four walls, and by some miracle I was asked to stay on and be a permanent part of it. I had come to feel about the hotel the way Chambrun does. The murder of a cheap punk like Willie Bloomfield, who didn't belong in our world at all, was a personal affront. I couldn't begin to buy Keegan's theory that Valerie Summers was some kind of sex-crazed maniac. That meant, however, that somewhere, moving through our bars, our restaurants, our shops, and down our hallways and corridors, someone, someone Andy Lukens had called a "monster," was moving undetected, unsuspected, laughing at Keegan for trying to pin his crimes on Valerie. And, I wondered, wasn't that exactly what he wanted? Wasn't Valerie's face in the center of the bull's-eye of this monster's target? It was no coincidence, as Chambrun had said, that two men had been murdered in exactly the same fashion in two different places where Valerie was staying.

  Who and why? The answers must be in Valerie's background if we had the wit to find them.

  The first gray morning light was beginning to seep through the hotel's windows when Keegan was finally through with me. All I had to do, sensibly, was stagger down the second-floor hallway to my apartment and hit the sack. I was exhausted enough to do just that, but I didn't. The Beaumont was under attack, had been invaded and I just had to have a look, make certain that the regular machinery hadn't been jolted off the rails.

  The person I really wanted to see was Mike Mag-gio, the night bell captain. Mike is a bright-eyed, dark-skinned, tough and very shrewd street kid out of Little Italy. Under Chambrun's guidance Mike had learned to say "Yes, sir" and "No, madam" and other polite formulas without their sounding like a foreign language, but he'd never lost his street-smartness at spotting a phoney. He was ideal for the night shift, because it is in the after-theater and early morning hours that there is a lot of transient traffic in our bars, restaurants, and the Blue Lagoon. I used to kid him and say that he was like a good watchdog whose hackles start to rise before the stray cat comes around the corner of the building. He has a feel for mischief even before it begins to unfold. He can sense the approach of someone who isn't a "Beaumont person" even before they come through the revolving doors from the street.

  At quarter to five in the morning the cleanup crews are at work in the lobby and in the closed bars and restaurants. Mike Maggio was waiting out his tour of duty, lounging near the Fifth Avenue entrance, chatting with Waters, the night doorman. He was wearing his dark-blue uniform with the Beaumont seal over the breast pocket. He somehow made that uniform look like a high-style sport jacket.

  "You look like you've been watching TV all night," he said to me.

  "How come?"

  "Redeyes," he said.

  "I'm pooped, friend," I said.

  "But not in jail," he said. "Silver lining to every cloud."

  "Give with the gossip, Mike," I said.

  He shrugged expres
sive shoulders. "You pays your money and you takes your choice," he said. "Even cops talk, you know? They've been sharing the business of searching the lady's original suite on Five, and they're standing guard outside 1216 with Jerry Dodd's boys. Those security boys talk to me. I'm supposed to have an eye for sinister strangers."

  "And?"

  "The cops are convinced that your lady friend is a homicidal screwball. Two in two nights! Jerry's persuaded his people that the lady's being framed. Nobody's got any proof of anything, so far."

  "What about you?" I asked.

  He gave me that sly, street grin of his. "I'm like you," he said. "She charms me out of my socks, so she has to be innocent. There are two things that might interest you, though. First, Willie Bloomfield who got creamed up in Five A, isn't a stranger to some of us. He used to be a pimp for call girls before he went into the massage parlor business. He tried to muscle in on this territory about five years ago. We gave him the bums' rush, after everybody had a good look at him. Willie couldn't be hanging around the Beaumont for five minutes without being spotted and escorted, physically, out into the night. The welcome mat was definitely not out for our Willie. But he got in, got up to Five A, and got himself killed without anyone noticing him."

  "You must have been out of the lobby here from time to time."

  "Sure, but there's always a security man on the job looking out for Willie's kind of undesirable. Elevator men knew him, most of my bellhop crew knew him. It isn't often a character like that gets by us. How did our Willie manage it? That's number one."

  "And number two?"

  "The lady has a friend who just turned up about an hour ago. Looks like the late Gary Cooper; cowboy hat, cowboy boots, skin like saddle leather. He asked for the lady at the desk and was told she was under sedation, guarded by the police till she slept it out. No way he could see her or call her room. He pulled out a roll of bills that would choke a hippopotamus, demanded a room. No luggage, you know? Atterbury, on the desk, told him we had none. He let himself be persuaded to call the Plaza down the Avenue. They were able to provide Mr. Paul Spector with a room."

  "Does Chambrun know this?"