Murder in Luxury

by Hugh Pentecost

  Like Betsy Ruysdale bearing down on us, grinning like a Cheshire cat. "Come with me, Val." And Val turning to me, still clinging to my hand.

  'Til catch up," I said. "I promise."

  Like Chambrun taking my arm and giving me his own brand of victory smile. "This cadis, I think, for a triple Jack Daniels," he said.

  I knew damn well I could use it.

  Somehow we avoided an army of press people and got to his office on the second floor. Chambrun poured me a beer mug full of whiskey on the rocks and plopped me down in the green leather armchair by his desk. I took a long swig of the Jack Daniels and began to congratulate myself, privately, on being alive. Like Val, I hadn't believed we were going to make it.

  "Mrs. Haven?" I heard myself ask the Man.

  "She's on her way down," Chambrun said.

  "Great lady," I said. "She stalled him and stalled him, tried every way you can think of to get Keegan to turn on her. Was Spivak out on the roof?"

  Chambrun nodded. "All she had to do was to get Keegan to take that gun away from Mrs. Summers' head and Spivak would have had him, right between the eyes."

  "Keegan knew that, I think."

  He nodded. "Time was so important. We had to find a way to stop him before he hit the street. My plan took time to organize, and then sell to Carmody and Hardy."

  "Your plan?"

  "The elevator," he said. "That's where I thought we could trap him. But we had to cut a hole in the roof and cover it with a piece of lead foil, so he wouldn't notice if he happened to look up when he first got aboard."

  "Spivak was on top of the car all the time?"

  "My dear Mark, when that elevator goes up to the vestibule outside the penthouse it goes right up to the top of the shaft. If a man was on top he'd have been crushed to death. That's why he had to stop you on the way down."

  "Oh my God," I said, "when the light went out and he started shouting—"

  "It only took a few seconds for Spivak to climb aboard from the thirtieth floor where he was waiting," Chambrun said. "MacKenzie, our engineer, had the exact spot figured out—to the inch." He smiled at me. "Maybe we owe Ethel Merman an assist. I thought if you were locked in a dark closet with her belting out There's No Business Like show Business' you might be distracted for a moment. I owe you, Mark. I felt we had to have somebody along who could give him an explanation when the car stopped and the lights went out, or he might polish off Mrs. Summers then and there.''

  We were suddenly not alone. Lieutenant Hardy was in the doorway, and beside him, pushing his wheelchair toward us, Derek Newton. Behind him was Mike Maggio, our night bell captain, who, I suddenly remembered, had taken the night off to listen to gossip in the world of porno-sex. And then, charging past them all, was Victoria Haven, a hostile Toto tucked under one arm.

  "Not one word till I'm settled and can listen intelligently," she said.

  The pieces went together fairly neatly once you had them all. It was Chambrun, it seemed, who had first suggested to Hardy that Keegan might be the man they were after. To Chambrun, it was the only thing that explained to him the murder of Sergeant Polansky in 1216.

  "Not a careless man," Chambrun said. "He let someone in the room because that someone was his boss. Maybe he just wanted to talk to someone, maybe he remembered something he thought Keegan should know. He left his post in the hall and followed Keegan into 1216—in time to see Keegan planting the revolver in Mrs. Summers' lingerie drawer. He knew, then, that his boss was the killer. He started to make a move, and Keegan, with that little pearl-handled gun in his hand, had to use it."

  "I didn't buy it," Hardy said. "Not for a minute— till Mr. Newton arrived with his picture and his confusion about the caption. The man the photograph identified as Lieutenant Keegan couldn't be Keegan, because Mr. Newton knew he had been Eleanor Pay-son's lover, and was probably responsible for his being in a wheelchair. That was enough, but Keegan was al- ready up in the penthouse. We sent Sergeant Dawson up there to try to get him to come outside but Keegan wasn't buying. The rest you know."

  "When Dawson reported," Chambrun said, "and I knew we were setting up a siege, I called Mrs. Haven and ordered her to leave the roof by way of the fire stairs. It seems," and he smiled, "she didn't buy, either."

  "That girl was Jeb McCandless's daughter," Mrs. Haven said. "You never read my letters, Pierre—and you never will, now!—so you don't know how much he cared for her. I owed Jeb for the best two years of my life."

  "Sixty years ago," Chambrun murmured.

  "And every year after that I was a year older," Victoria Haven said. "That's what life is all about, growing older. It should be the other way around, Pierre. You should spend your life earning youth, not false teeth!"

  "Maggio, here, filled in the missing pieces," Hardy said. "We knew we had our man, but Maggio helped us understand what seemed so senseless."

  "There was talk all over Willie Bloomfield's world," Mike said. "There was no reason for anyone to button up with Willie and Carl Rogers both dead."

  It was no longer a secret that had to be kept in Willie Bloomfield's world. It was already on television that Keegan was holding hostages at the Beaumont, wanted for murder.

  It seemed that a couple of years earlier Carl Rogers, delivering drugs to a customer in the Village, had witnessed the savage beating of a man in an alley between buildings. Rogers recognized the attacker. He was Lieutenant Keegan, son-in-law of Deputy Commissioner Malone, a big shot in the department. Rogers passed what he knew along to his partner, Willie Bloomfield. They watched the papers, saw Newton's story, guessed he could identify his assailant. It was all they needed to turn the heat on Keegan.

  "Not knowing that Keegan was a psycho," Hardy said.

  Keegan had, however, put up with it for a couple of years. Not only did he pay blackmail in money, but he gave them police protection when they needed it. Kee-gan's ambition was so great he would pay to keep things going.

  "It was probably the death of Eleanor Payson and his son that sent him off the deep end," Mrs. Haven said.

  "He saw a way to punish all of his enemies at once," Chambrun said. "He would murder Rogers and Bloomfield and frame Valerie Summers. He would be in charge of the case and it should be simple."

  "Moving Mrs. Summers here made things too complicated for him," Hardy said.

  "One thing I don't understand," I said, "is how he got Rogers to go to VaTs apartment on Tenth Street and Willie Bloomfield to come here. He couldn't drag them by the hair of their heads or at the point of a gun. Rogers to Tenth Street maybe, but not Bloomfield here to the Beaumont."

  "Money," Mike Maggio said. "They'd probably put the screws on him for more bread, and he told them he had a fabulously rich lady they could get to and milk. I wondered, you remember, how Willie could be wandering around the hotel without being spotted by one of my boys? He was with Lieutenant Keegan, the cop in charge of a murder. Willie just didn't look like Willie to them, I guess—in that kind of company."

  "How could Keegan persuade Willie to come here when his partner was already dead?" I asked.

  "The story of the murder on Tenth Street had broken," Hardy said, "but it was twenty-four hours before the dead man was identified. Willie didn't know that Carl Rogers was in the morgue when he came here. The smell of money was strong enough to take him anywhere."

  "Once Keegan had started to roll himself down this mad path he couldn't turn himself off," Chambrun said.

  "What's become of Paul Spector, the Tucson cowboy?" I asked.

  Chambrun laughed. It was possible to laugh now. "He's trying to find a lawyer to sue the police department for keeping him from getting back to the penthouse. It's a good thing. If he'd been up there with you, he'd have tried to play the hero, and that would have been that."

  "How is Valerie?" Derek Newton asked, slumped in his wheelchair.

  "It would be hyperbole to say she is 'fine,'" Mrs. Haven said. "She's been through an ordeal that most people couldn't take. I hope that Mark and I ca
n help her forget and start living some kind of life."

  I smiled at her. "I'm sure as hell going to try, ma'am," I said.

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