"She doesn't like going public," I said.
"Among the things I said Jeb McCandless owned was communications. Would you believe he'd owned a piece of International, my outfit? I wasn't very far into my research when I was called off."
"By Valerie Summers?"
"No, I don't think she had anything to do with the power aspects of his world. There were boards, and trustees, and God knows who else. The name up front was one of his executors, a lawyer named Gardner Fails. Unless I'm mistaken, he owns a piece of your hotel. Or old Jeb owned it and Fails controls that share now."
I stared at Eliot. "Did you know that Gardner Fails brought Valerie Summers here to the Beaumont yesterday, as a place to keep her safe?"
Eliot stared back. Then he punched out his cigarette in the ashtray and lit a fresh one. "He'd be the logical person for her to turn to in trouble," he said.
"So she did. Fails had the power to stop International from doing the McCandless story?"
"Fails represented the power that had that power," Eliot said. "There was never any story in depth about Jeb McCandless, just elaborate obituaries. What was there to hide? I didn't have the assignment any longer, but I've nosed around a bit ever since. There could be a story on why there mustn't be a story, I told myself."
"And is there? Was there?"
"No man with old Jeb's kind of power and influence is ever snow white," Eliot said. "There are always double crosses, and triple crosses, and maneuverings. When such a man dies there are others left who still will profit from those under-the-table dealings. I haven't been able to put my finger on them or I might have a best seller in the works."
"Is Valerie Summers someone who might be profiting from one of those under-the-table deals?" I asked.
"So strangers are murdered in her bedroom?" Eliot brought his open hand down on the arm of his chair. "You may have something there, Mark! Someone is trying to get her to say yes or no about something. She's refused and they're out to scare the hell out of her!"
"By murdering a couple of cheap punks?"
"And planting them on her," Eliot said.
That was too far out, and I told him so. "Maybe you should go to writing that best seller after all," I said. "With that kind of imagination..."
He leaned back in his chair. "Well, it was fun trying," he said. "So let me point out something to you, chum. Any case that can be as crazy as this one is out front can be even crazier when you dig down below the surface. This one makes no sense at all, Mark."
Sense or not, there were two dead men in the city morgue. Sense or not, bloody violence had invaded the world of the Beaumont. Sense or not, someone was taking dead aim at a harassed Valerie Summers. Maybe I was being naive to suppose that she had no more idea than the rest of us about what was happening. Maybe she was her father's daughter, raised on what Eliot had called the double and triple crosses of the power world. Either way she was in deep trouble. Someone could be warning her, by leaving dead men as calling cards, that this is what would happen to her if she didn't meet certain demands. Keegan could be right, and she could be a monstrous spider woman, tempting the flies into her web, and leaving them there, dead, for her enemies to see and be warned. Next week, The War of the Worlds, I thought. How absurd could you get? Maybe we needed background to explain facts, as Chambrun had suggested, but right now, as far as I was aware, we had no facts to try to explain except two dead men. The music goes round and round and keeps coming out at the same place— nowhere!
When I wasn't certain of my next move—and boy, was I uncertain!—Chambrun had to be my port of call. Should I be on my way out to Ohio to find out what I could about the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Summers? Should I be trying to talk to Valerie again, armed with just a little more than I'd had last night? Should I be hunting down Paul Spector, the Tucson cowboy, and trying to get him to open up with a little more than he'd given us this morning? A trip out into the wilds didn't appeal to me. Somehow I wanted to justify staying close to Valerie, who appeared to need help, and sympathy, and someone to hang onto. It would please me to be that someone.
I wandered down the second floor corridor to Chambrun's office, expecting to find Maggie Madison, the stand-in secretary, in the outer office. Instead, Ruysdale was back on the job, looking fresh as a daisy and twice as pretty.
"The boss has been wondering about you," she said.
"I tried to reach him after I'd seen Derek Newton," I said, "but Maggie told me he was in some kind of meeting with the board of directors."
Ruysdale's smile lacked humor. "They've been telling him how to handle a crisis," she said. "He's not in the best of moods. I think you can go in if you're prepared to be scorched a little."
Well, I may not have done anything right, but I hadn't done anything wrong. I took the chance and went through into the Inner Sanctum.
Chambrun was standing with his back to me, at the windows that look down over the park. He turned, as I was confronted by the hanging judge, eyes as cold as pale marbles.
"It would be a delight," he said, his voice dangerously quiet, "if someone had something sensible to say to me. Would you believe that the board of directors has warned me that murder is not good for the Beaumont's reputation? Idiots!" When I didn't speak he went on. "The unhappy fact is that murder is good for business. Would you believe that we've turned away about three hundred people who decided to have lunch here and listen to the dirt?"
"I don't have much," I said.
"Anything at all is much the way the dice are rolling," he said. He crossed over to his desk and sat down.
"Do you know where Fails and Lukens took Valerie?" I asked him.
"They're in my penthouse on the top of the hotel," he said. "Only place we couM think of they'd be sure of privacy. They have to plan some kind of strategy for Mrs. Summers. Keegan is starting to breathe hard. And you, Mark?"
I told him about my visit with Derek Newton. The only contact he'd had with Valerie since her marriage to Dick Summers five years ago had been a telephone call some three months ago after Eleanor Pay son's plane had crashed and burned outside of Tucson.
"A person can change dramatically in five years," I said. "As Derek knew her, remembers her, it's unthinkable that she could be directly involved with this kind of violence. But Derek asked the question himself: is she still the same girl he knew before her marriage?"
Chambrun didn't comment. He sat staring down at the yellow legal pad in front of him, scratching meaningless little doodles on it with a ballpoint pen. It was a habit of his whenever he's onlyiialf listening. He was, I thought, way up ahead of me on the road, wherever it led.
I told him about my conversation with Eliot Stevens. He gave me a quick, sharp look.
"You promised Stevens a scoop?" he asked.
"Eliot's a friend," I said. "When I've talked to him off the record he's never broken a confidence. Should
I take him up on his offer and go through the stuff he has on Jeb McCandless?"
Chambrun pushed aside his pad and put down the pen. "Gardner Fails is the executor of Jeb Mc-Candless's personal estate," he said. "There were probably dozens of scandals in the old man's life, business and personal. He was married four times. His first three wives may be floating around somewhere. It would be Fails' quite proper desire to let his client rest in peace. If he had the leverage to keep International from running a lurid feature on the old man, he was right to use it."
"But if something from the old man's past is behind what's happening to Valerie?"
"She was left money, not control of her father's business holdings," Chambrun said.
"She could be trying to keep something about her father from being revealed," I said.
Chambrun sounded impatient. "By shooting a couple of street punks in the head?"
"So you've moved over to my side of the street," I said. "You don't believe she can be guilty of killing?"
"There's nothing to take hold of yet to believe," he said. "My one concern at the moment is to
make certain that whatever is going on be stopped now, dead in its tracks. If the lady is guilty, she must be stopped. If someone is out to destroy her, they must be stopped."
"You think there's more to come?"
"I would bet on it," he said.
And, as usual, he was right. The door to the office opened and Jerry Dodd came in. Betsy Ruysdale was just behind him, standing in the doorway. Looking at their faces I didn't have to be told that there was something new.
"Strike three!" Jerry said, his voice harsh.
Chambrun was instantly standing. "Are you saying-?"
"Once more," Jerry said. "We came down from your penthouse, the lady, Fails, Andy Lukens, one of my men and one of Keegan's cops. The lady was covered like a tent from the moment she woke up. When we got back to the twelfth floor the man who was supposed to be stationed in the hall there was missing. We supposed he'd gone for a quick cup of coffee, or to the John, or something. We used Mrs. Summers' key to open the door of 1216 and the cop and I went in with her. There it was. The same scene— the same goddamn scene. Man with a hole in his head lying on the floor beside the bed."
Chambrun muttered something under his breath.
"There's one slight difference in the scenario," Jerry said. "This time we knew immediately who the dead man was. Sergeant Polansky, the missing cop."
"My God, I just talked to him about an hour ago," I said.
"That will entitle you to a box seat at the party," Jerry said. "The whole damned police force is going to be down on our heads. They don't like cop killers."
PART TWO
Any chance in the world that this wouldn't make every headline and every television screen in the country was gone from the start. The lobby was already crowded with reporters when the police began to pour in. There was no possibility of hiding from them that a police sergeant had been murdered, and like the two killings before that, in Valerie Summers' living quarters.
Once more Valerie was swept away from where she was supposed to be living. This time Keegan had commandeered one of the conference rooms on the lobby level as a headquarters for himself. Just as I got to the lobby myself Valerie was herded through the crowd of reporters and gaping guests by a squad of cops. It required physical force to get her past them all and into the conference room. Andy Lukens was with her, I was grateful for that. I don't know if she saw me or not. She was being literally held up and dragged along by Keegan's men. Cameras flashed and I could hear the steady whir of a television camera, located on the mezzanine balcony, I thought.
I fought off the press people and followed after Valerie. I didn't have anything to tell anyone—except Keegan. He wasn't with the cops surrounding Valerie and I wasn't allowed into the conference room. A cop barring the door told me Keegan was still up on the twelfth floor.
Elevators were crowded with reporters and curious people trying to get to where it was at. I went around to the rear of the lobby and took the service elevator up to twelve. The curious hadn't thought of that access yet.
Twelve was a madhouse, the corridor crammed with people. Two uniformed cops were blocking the door to 1216. They told me to go peddle my papers. Just then Keegan stepped out from the room. I could see his crew at work through the open door. Keegan's face was a dark thundercloud.
"I don't need your help, Haskell," he said to me.
"I've got something for you that may be helpful," I said.
"Like what?"
"I was up here about noon. I had a conversation with Polansky."
He reached out, took me by the arm with what felt like an iron claw, and almost dragged me back into the room. Polansky, God help me, was still there, the side of his head blown open. I thought for a minute I was going to throw up.
"I came up here just about twelve o'clock," I told Keegan, "to see whether I could talk to Mrs. Summers. I hadn't called on the phone in case she was still asleep. Polansky was out there in the hall. The maid was in here making up the room."
"What maid?"
"I don't know. Whoever's assigned to this floor."
"You talked to Joe?"
"If that's Polansky's name, yes. He told me Mrs. Summers had gone somewhere with her lawyers, along with some of the men assigned to guard her."
"Chambrun's penthouse. I gave them permission," Keegansaid.
"So she's in the clear," I said. "He was fine when I saw him at twelve o'clock. She was in the penthouse."
"She didn't pull the trigger," Keegan said. "How much in the clear she is we'll find out. Get that maid forme."
The maid was in the housekeeper's room down the hall in a panic. I took her back to 1216 and the cops let us in. She screamed when she saw the medical examiner's man bent over the body. Her story was straightforward enough. The housekeeper had gotten a call from Betsy Ruysdale saying that now would be a good time to make up the room. She'd gone down the hall with her cleaning wagon, been questioned by Polansky, allowed to go in. That was all. She'd done her job and left. Polansky had been at his post when she went back to her quarters.
"How thoroughly did you go over the room?" Keegan asked.
"It's a regular routine," the maid said, keeping her eyes turned away from the bloodied corpse.
"You look in the closet, the bathroom?"
"There's a laundry hamper in the closet," the maid said. "We always look there to see if there are any linens to take out. I cleaned the bathroom, put in fresh towels."
"Nobody could have been hiding in there?"
"Oh my, no!" the maid said. "There's just this room, the bathroom, the closet."
"Under the bed?" Keegan suggested.
"I ran the vacuum under it from both sides," she said.
Keegan told her a cop would take a statement from her in a while, not to go anywhere till that happened. She hurried off, almost running.
"Same goes for you," Keegan said to me. "I'll want your conversation with Polansky, every damn word of it. Don't get lost."
A plainclothes cop who had been searching the bureau drawers while we talked called out to Keegan. "Surprise, Lieutenant!" he said.
Keegan had to walk around the body and the medical examiner's man who was bent over it to get to the bureau.
"Right in among her underclothes," the plainclothes cop said.
Keegan looked, and I heard him mutter something under his breath. He took a ballpoint pen out of his pocket and fished into the drawer with it. He brought it out, poked through the trigger guard of a small pearl-handled gun.
"Maybe we've struck oil at last," Keegan said. "It's the right caliber." He held it up so that he could sniff at the barrel. "Recently fired." He turned to the plainclothes man. "Lift any fingerprints, Dawson, and then rush it down to Ballistics. We can have the little lady wrapped up if it checks out." He passed over the gun, still held by the pen, to Dawson, and turned to the medical examiner's man. "You make a guess as to when, Mac?"
The medical technician stood up, wiping his hands on a handkerchief. "You know we can't be too accurate till we get the body down to the morgue, Lieutenant. Anywhere from a little less than an hour to not more than two hours is my guess ."
I glanced at my watch. It was going on two o'clock. The body had been found by Jerry Dodd almost an hour ago. It had taken that much time for Keegan and his crew to assemble and go through the preliminaries.
"He was alive at twelve o'clock," I said. "I talked to him out there in the hall just a few minutes after twelve. The lady was up in the penthouse then with her lawyers, watched over by two of Jerry Dodd's men and one of yours, Lieutenant. She came back here with Jerry, his men, your man, and they found the body. No way on earth she could have been involved."
"You like to explain the gun?" Keegan asked. "I'll bet you a month's pay it will turn out to be the weapon used to murder three men."
"But not by Valerie Summers this third time," I said. "Noway."
"Maybe she's had a partner all along," Keegan said.
This Black Irishman wasn't a man to let go once he had
his teeth sunk into a victim's throat. I found myself thinking of a remark of Mark Twain's to the effect that "... it's a wonderful sight to watch the calm and confidence of a Christian—who holds four aces!" I thought that pearl-handled gun looked like a fourth ace to Keegan.
I had an advantage over Keegan's army relating to the territory. I know every back corridor and hallway and rear door in the Beaumont. The conference room
where Valerie was being held is entered by the public from a door in the lobby. But, like most public rooms, there is a rear way in used by waiters for serving food, drinks, and other needs of the people using the place. We don't let waiters with trays or food wagons make a traffic stream through the lobby. That particular conference facility is called the Carnation Room. Keegan's cops were barring the lobby door to the press and to a small army of the curious who were waiting and hoping for something to happen.
I went down from 1216 to the service area and the rear door of the Carnation. I was delighted to find no one standing guard there and I let myself in. There was a long table surrounded by chairs for the board of directors. Valerie and Andy Lukens were the only people in the room. She was sitting at the table, head bent forward, face buried in her hands. Andy Lukens, her lawyer, was walking restlessly up and down, chewing on the stem of his unlighted pipe.
"Mark!" he said. "They let you in?"
"Magic trick," I said. "Keegan doesn't know about the back door—yet." Valerie lowered her hands, and those violet eyes were dark with shock and relief. "They found your gun," I said.
The eyes went blank. "What are you talking about, Mark? I don't own a gun!"
"Pearl-handled, the right caliber. It's on the way to Ballistics. I would guess the chances are good it will turn out to be the weapon used to kill three men. If it does, your troubles are going to multiply, Val."
She brought a clenched fist down on the table. "I don't own a gun! I've never owned a gun!"
"It was in your bureau drawer, amongst your undies, according to the cop."
"Fingerprints?" Andy asked.
Murder in Luxury Page 8
