Time of Terror

by Hugh Pentecost

  “If we find Chambrun, nobody will be fired,” I said.

  “If we don’t find him, it won’t matter,” Jerry said. “Try to get onto your girl, will you?”

  I called Shirley. She sounded surprised to hear from me so soon again. “You decided to buy someone else lunch,” she said

  “Never,” I said. “But I’ve got trouble you can help me with.”

  “Name it.”

  “What do you know about Laura Kauffman?”

  Shirley laughed. “More than would make her happy to know that I know.”

  “Could you come over here with what you have?”

  “Oh, Mark, I’m trying to finish a column before our lunch date. Won’t it wait?”

  “It won’t wait,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Somebody has been caught dead here,” I said. “It’s important for us to have a dossier on Laura K.”

  “She killed her husband!” Shirley said.

  “You want a scoop, you’ll have to come over here to get it,” I said.

  “Give me a hint.”

  “I don’t trust the phone,” I said.

  “Yours or mine?”

  “Mine. It goes through a switchboard. Lather up the horses, will you, luv?”

  “Mark, if this is a game—”

  “I’ve never been more serious in my whole life,” I said.

  The burly figure of Lieutenant Hardy appeared in the doorway, followed by his crew of homicide specialists, photographers, fingerprint men. His first question was not unexpected.

  “Where is Chambrun?” he asked. When there was big trouble Chambrun was always on hand.

  Jerry told him where Chambrun wasn’t. They had found what was in the next room while searching for him.

  “Want me to put out an APB on him?” Hardy asked.

  Jerry looked suddenly very tired. Dealing with a murder served only to sharpen his investigative wits, but searching for Chambrun, a man he loved, produced an anxiety that had worn him down.

  “I’d be glad of any help,” he said. “Searching the hotel is a routine I can carry out, but every instinct I have tells me we’re not going to find him in the hotel.”

  “Kidnapping?” Hardy suggested.

  “Maybe. But nobody’s made any demands yet.”

  Hardy went to the phone and ordered an all points bulletin set in motion at police headquarters. Then he and Jerry went into the bedroom where Laura Kauffman had been brutalized. I could have gone with them but I didn’t want to see what was there. Jerry’s description had convinced me my stomach wasn’t screwed in tightly enough.

  I called Ruysdale on the phone and told her Hardy had arrived. On her end she’d heard nothing, but she reminded me of a fact that was hard to keep in focus. There was a hotel to run.

  “Claire DeLune has been screaming her head off for Chambrun or you. Things are not the way she wants them in the small ballroom. I guess you’re elected, Mark.”

  “Oh, God, Betsy,” I said. “I don’t give a damn about fashion shows at the moment.”

  “You’re still working for Chambrun,” Ruysdale said very quietly. “He’d want everything covered, Mark.”

  “I know,” I said. “So mine ‘not to reason why—’”

  Claire DeLune was the name a Brooklyn-born girl named Gussie Winterbottom had taken when she entered the field of fashion design. She was a hard-driving, very efficient and talented woman. At forty she could almost have passed for one of her own very beautiful and talented models, except that she had replaced youth with a kind of lacquered finish. She dressed in her own designs and they were pretty sensational.

  “Hi, Gussie,” I said, when I found her in the small ballroom.

  “Keep you scurrilous tongue off me, you bastard,” she said. She didn’t like to be reminded of her real name. “Where is Chambrun?”

  “Tied up,” I said, and almost choked when I said it.

  “I was promised mirrors,” Gussie said. “Six full-length mirrors in the dressing room. How do you expect my girls to get put together if they can’t see what they’re doing?”

  “Six full-length mirrors,” I said, trying to concentrate on where they could be found.

  “So get off your butt and produce them,” Gussie said. Her eyes narrowed. “There’s a rumor around that Chambrun has skipped town.”

  The news was beginning to leak. Too many people were involved in the anxious search.

  “Your models drive him up the wall,” I said. “They remind him of his youth.”

  “Don’t you get any ideas about them, buster,” Gussie said. They’re not here to titillate the male population. They’re here to sell dresses to women. Six full-length mirrors on the double, please. That ‘please’ is a figure of speech!”

  A half-naked girl appeared in the doorway to the dressing room. “Madame DeLune, if you could—”

  I might as well have been wallpaper as far as the nude model was concerned.

  “You see, she needs a mirror!” Gussie said, and charged off.

  In the lobby I got in touch with the supply department and asked for six full-length mirrors on the double. “Her show begins in less than an hour.”

  “I’ll have to steal a few somewhere,” the supply department told me.

  “There’s one on the back of my bathroom door,” I said.

  As I put down the house phone I saw Shirley coming toward me across the lobby from the front entrance. She was carrying a briefcase under her arm.

  I’m not much at rhapsodizing in words. I have thought of other women “forever,” and at the time I thought that, was convinced that each of them was the most beautiful ever. But, whatever my bias at the moment, Shirley was the most. Her blond hair, worn loose and down to her shoulders, was really gold. She was small-boned and she moved with the grace of a ballet dancer. Her wide blue eyes were devoid of any suspicion or cynicism. Beauty, I think, is as much personality as bone structure, skin texture, or measurements. The girl was so open, so apparently uncomplicated, so genuine that she took your breath away in a world of neurotics and psychos, in a world where a Chambrun could be whisked away into oblivion and a woman could be butchered in her bedroom in a civilized hotel. I wanted to take her in my arms as she came up to me, but I restrained myself. Too many people had their eyes on her as she crossed the lobby. I took her by the arm, without speaking, and led her toward a small private office back of the main desk. I guess, when she looked at me, she saw that the situation was real and serious.

  In the small office I kissed her. “Just seeing you lifts loads,” I said. “Mark, what is it?”

  I sat down beside her on a green leather sofa and took her hand. My hand wasn’t steady.

  “Whatever I tell you is strictly off the record,” I said. “Don’t protest, luv. When I tell you, you’ll see why.” She waited, without comment. “Chambrun has disappeared. We suspect some kind of violence, perhaps a kidnapping.”

  “Mark!”

  “In searching for him we have been going from room to room in the hotel. We didn’t find him in Laura Kauffman’s suite, but we found her. She had been assaulted, probably raped, and stabbed about twenty times.”

  “My God!” Her hand tightened in mine.

  “The police need whatever they can find out about Laura. That’s why I asked you to bring what you have.”

  “But, Mark, what I have is just—gossip!”

  “Probably truer than the truth,” I said. “You ready to go up to talk with Hardy? He’s the homicide man.”

  “Do I have to see—?”

  “No, luv.”

  We went up to twenty-one and found Sims back at his post outside the door of Suite A.

  “What happened with Mayberry?” I asked him.

  “First he is going to complain to the mayor, and after that the White House,” Sims said.

  He took us into the suite. The living room was deserted. Sims knocked on the bedroom door and asked for Hardy. The big detective came out of the murder scene aft
er a moment or two.

  He acknowledged my introduction to Shirley with a pleasant smile. She made people smile, even in a situation like this. “I read your column each day it appears, Miss Thomas,” he said. “Sorry to drag you into this mess.”

  “I don’t know how I can help,” she said. “She has a husband, you know, James Kauffman. They’ve been separated for some time, but he should know a great deal more about her than I do.”

  “Among the missing so far,” Hardy said. He gestured Shirley to a chair.

  She started to open her briefcase. “The thing that seems unlikely, from what Mark told me, is rape.”

  “Oh?”

  “Rumor has it that she will say yes to anyone, from the grocer’s delivery boy and the milkman to a complete stranger on the street corner. She wouldn’t have put up a fight to avoid sexual acrobatics with anyone.

  “The woods are full of psychos, Miss Thomas,” Hardy said. “This one probably didn’t stop to ask, assumed resistance, and—didn’t know. Perhaps his pleasure was in the killing and not the sex.”

  “Oh my God,” Shirley said.

  “She must have been a very handsome, very sexy-looking woman,” Hardy said. “Incidentally, the door wasn’t forced. Whoever came in, she let in.”

  “Sounds in character,” I said.

  “Probably someone she knew,” Hardy said.

  “I don’t understand what she was doing with a suite here,” Shirley said. “She has a duplex on Park Avenue, only a few blocks from here.”

  “She was chairman of the Cancer Fund Ball, coming up tonight,” Hardy said. “There were a million details to handle. I suppose she wanted to be on the scene.”

  “So a lot of people must have been coming and going,” I said. “She wouldn’t have hesitated to answer the doorbell without finding out first who it was. She expected traffic.”

  “Makes sense,” Hardy said. He looked at Shirley and smiled his pleasure again. “What can you tell me that are facts about Laura Kauffman, Miss Thomas? We can try the gossip on for size later.”

  Shirley took a couple of sheets of paper out of her briefcase. Laura Kauffman was evidently a big enough “wheel” in the social world for Shirley to have kept a file on her. There hadn’t been time to type up these pages.

  “She was born Laura Hemmerly,” she said, glancing at her notes. “Jason Hemmerly, her father, was big steel. He died a couple of years ago and left Laura a very rich woman. Like a villa in the south of France, duplex on Park Avenue, something fancy in the Virgin Islands.”

  “What you call cosmopolitan,” Hardy said.

  “Good target for a thief,” I said.

  “But a butcher?” Hardy said, his pleasant face hardening. “About her husband, Miss Thomas?”

  Shirley shifted pages. Three of them,” she said. “The first when she was sixteen. I don’t have number one’s name. He was a ski instructor somewhere in the Swiss Alps. This was in 1940, just before the big war.”

  Hardy’s eyebrows rose. “That makes her fifty-three. I’d have thought she was quite a lot younger.”

  “Maybe she’s been rebuilt,” I said.

  Shirley glanced at me. “You don’t have to go to seed in your fifties,” she said.

  “You’ve got a long wait to find out,” I said.

  “The husbands, Miss Thomas,” Hardy said. ‘

  Shirley went back to her notes. “As I say, I don’t have the first one’s name. It was something of a scandal. The usual suggestion that she was pregnant.”

  “But no child? No children ever?”

  “No record of any. There was the war then, right after an annulment Papa bought off the ski instructor, one guesses. Then there was the war and the Hemmerlys left their beloved Europe and came back to New York. Papa was making millions providing steel for tanks and guns and battleships. Laura spent her time, I gather, entertaining the armed forces. I use the word ‘entertain’ in a loose sense.”

  “I get the point,” Hardy said.

  “After the war Laura went hotfooting it back to Papa’s villa in France. That’s when she met and married Baron Siegfried von Holtzmann.”

  “Sounds rather German for the south of France at that time,” Hardy said.

  “Von Holtzmann was an unusual German,” Shirley said. “Very blond, very handsome, with an eyeglass and a dueling scar. German army to the hilt, you’d say. But he spent the war underground, the story goes, dedicated without success to destroying Hitler and his puppets. He did a lot, we are told, to help the French Resistance.”

  “Chambrun would know about him,” I said. Only there was no Chambrun to ask.

  “Von Holtzmann has no connection with this,” Shirley said. “In 1953, after five years of marriage to Laura, he blew his brains out in a hotel room in Paris. He left Laura with his title and apparently no explanation for his self-destruction.”

  “That’s twenty-five years ago!” I said.

  Shirley nodded. “The year I was born,” she said.

  So now I knew—about Shirley.

  “For twenty years after that,” Shirley went on, “Laura became the hostess in the swinging social set. New York, Paris, Florence, Geneva, Acapulco. She has a place there, too. I grew up reading about her in the social columns. My first job as a reporter on a newspaper was covering her third wedding. That was seven years ago.”

  Shirley fumbled in her briefcase and came up with an eight-by-ten photograph. It was of a very lovely woman in a gorgeous wedding gown, attended by the groom, one James Kauffman.

  “My God, she was forty-six,” Hardy said. “She looks thirty.”

  “She had a secret a lot of us hope we have at her age,” Shirley said.

  “That’s Kauffman?” Hardy asked. “He looks her age in the picture.”

  “You mean thirty? That’s about what he was. Sixteen years younger. A stockbroker in Wall Street. He didn’t belong in her set—the social set, I mean. I never did know how and where they met, but he was quickly indoctrinated. Photographs, news items, gossip tidbits. I felt he was more like a faithful watchdog than a romantic husband. He dropped out of sight in Wall Street. Why shouldn’t he, with all her money? No need to work. And then, a couple of years ago, he dropped out of sight everywhere. Laura was seen with other escorts. There was never any official announcement, he just sort of vanished. By then I was a prier, what Mark calls a Peeping Thomas. I blush to tell you that I tried to locate Jim Kauffman.”

  “Any luck?”

  She hesitated. “In my business we are supposed to be ruthless, Lieutenant,” she said. That means utter disregard for privacy. I—I’ve never played it that way, particularly when there is a tragedy below the surface.”

  “There is a tragedy involving Kauffman?” Hardy asked.

  “I suppose you have to find him,” Shirley said.

  “His wife has been murdered, Miss Thomas.”

  Shirley nodded. “Jim Kauffman has become a hopeless alcoholic,” she said. “A skid-row bum.”

  “She left him without money?”

  “Maybe. Maybe he wouldn’t take what she offered. I found him down in the Bowery. He sometimes sleeps and eats in a Salvation Army shelter down there. I—I tried to talk to him but he didn’t make much sense. It was too painful to pursue it, and I don’t use that kind of thing in my column. I felt sorry enough to want to help him, but he just turned his back on me and walked away. Staggered away would be nearer to the fact.”

  “Did he speak with any bitterness about his wife?”

  “He wouldn’t talk about her at all,” Shirley said, “which might be interpreted as a kind of bitterness, I suppose.”

  The phone rang and Hardy answered it.

  “Oh, hello, Miss Ruysdale,” he said. “No, it’s pretty sticky so far. Yes, Jerry told me about the Man. I put out an all-points bulletin on him. Yes, he’s here.” He held out the phone to me.

  “Mark, if you’re not too involved, I could use you,” Ruysdale said.

  “No news of the Man?”

&
nbsp; “None,” she said. She sounded far away.

  “I’m on my way,” I said.

  I left Shirley with Lieutenant Hardy to whom she was giving details about the Salvation Army shelter. I told her I would meet her in my apartment on the second floor when I could. She had a key to my place. After all, she was forever.

  When I reached Ruysdale’s office someone else was sitting at her desk. It was a girl from the secretarial pool named Charlotte something. I somehow couldn’t remember her last name. She is a pretty sensational-looking chick and I once had my eye on her. After ten minutes’ conversation with her over a drink in the Trapeze Bar one afternoon, I had stopped looking. Her measurements were sensational, but I discovered she was something less than half-witted when it came to casual conversation. Ever since then she had looked at me with sad spaniel eyes, as if she was wondering why the pass that had been obviously in the making had never come about.

  “Miss Ruysdale is in Mr. Chambrun’s office,” Charlotte said. “You’re to go straight in.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Mark, is it serious about Mr. Chambrun?”

  “Serious?”

  “I mean, is he going to be fired?” Charlotte asked.

  I was about to laugh at her when I realized she didn’t know what was going on.

  “I mean, with Mr. Garrity here—?”

  “Who is Mr. Garrity?” I asked.

  “Why, Mark, he’s president of the syndicate that owns the hotel.”

  It may sound absurd, but I had never paid any attention to the names of people in the ownership group. Mayberry was the only one I knew by sight—and sound. Chambrun was the only person I paid any attention to at the top. The owners were faceless nonentities to me.

  “I think it’s unlikely Mr. Chambrun will get fired,” I said, and went through the door to the inner sanctum.

  Ruysdale was sitting at Chambrun’s desk. I had never seen anyone but the Man sit there before. It jolted me some, yet if anyone was to stand in for him Ruysdale was it. She knew, I told myself, everything Chambrun knew about the operation of the Beaumont.

  There were three men sitting in leather armchairs facing Ruysdale. Two of them I recognized as part of the film company outfit, though I didn’t have names to go with their faces. The third man, by a process of elimination, had to be Garrity.