“What’s up?” I asked.
“Jerningham,” Jerry Dodd said. “Looks like your friend went to 1019 in the early hours of the morning and shot him very dead. What time did he get in?”
“God knows,” I said. “I was sound asleep.”
Two
MRS. KNIFFEN, THE HOUSEKEEPER whose area of responsibility includes the tenth floor, had made the discovery. One of the tenth-floor maids, name of Flora, came on duty at seven each morning. Usually, she couldn’t get to making up any of the rooms until well after eight, but there was plenty to do. She had to check her fresh linens, her other supplies such as the little soap cakes wrapped in a Beaumont package, toilet tissue, Kleenex for the plastic holders in each bathroom, book matches bearing the Beaumont crest for each ash tray, and many other details. Then the hallways themselves had to be vacuumed, dusted, the brass polished. This, thanks to soundproofing, could be done while the guests slept.
At five minutes past seven, Flora noticed that the door to 1019 was ajar and she could hear the TV set going. She supposed the guest had started out and gone back in for something, possibly to turn off the set. You didn’t leave your door open for ventilation purposes in the Beaumont, not with every room air-cooled. A few minutes later, Flora noticed that the door to 1019 was still open, the TV blaring out the morning news. This time she was conscious that the lights were on in the room, despite the fact of broad daylight. She wondered if by any chance the occupant had gone out, leaving the TV going, the lights, on, and the door not properly shut. She tried knocking. There was no answer from inside. It could, Flora thought, be a man, and he could, she thought, be in the bathroom showering, and he could, she thought, suddenly appear, stark naked, and he could—Flora went quickly in search of Mrs. Kniffen.
Mrs. Kniffen came back with Flora to 1019. She knocked, already convinced that the occupant had gone. People away from home never bother to turn off lights, or television sets, or water faucets. Hotel guests, Mrs. Kniffen knew, are permitted to rebel against all normal behavior patterns.
When there was no answer to her knock, Mrs. Kniffen pushed the door inward. It wouldn’t go very far because there was something heavy against it on the inside. She had had to squeeze through the opening, and then wished she hadn’t. Ivor Jerningham, wearing a pair of gaudy batik pajamas, was lying on the other side of the door. Mrs. Kniffen, in her years at Beaumont, had seen unexpectedly dead people before, but never one shot through the forehead and the heart.
She felt she was going to be sick as she went to the hall phone to summon Jerry Dodd. Someone was turning the Beaumont into a shooting gallery. There had been the man in 9F only yesterday.
What Mrs. Kniffen didn’t know was the connection between the man in 9F and the one in 1019. She didn’t know that they were close friends, chums, members of Doris Standing’s army. She didn’t bother to recognize, if she had had the facts to make recognition possible, the identical pattern in both deaths. Jerningham had opened his door to someone and gotten the full treatment. The same thing could have happened to Slade.
Mrs. Kniffen was about the only one concerned who didn’t see the connection instantly. All of us could see the snowball of trouble rolling down on us, getting larger and larger.
Jerry Dodd went by me into the bedroom to join Hardy. I could hear Craig’s sleepy voice as the detective wakened him. Chambrun still stood outside in the hall, his face a rock-hard mask.
“I went up to my penthouse about three this morning,” he said, as though he was talking to no one in particular. “I assumed Doris Standing was asleep in the guest room. Dr. Partridge had given her some sleeping pills. While I was pouring myself a nightcap, she came in from the outside. She’d felt imprisoned all day, she told me. She’d decided to go out for a walk, just to feel what it was like to be free. We had a pleasant, inconsequential conversation over a scotch and soda, and then she went to bed.”
“She could have walked down to the tenth floor,” I said.
He nodded. “From Hardy’s point of view, it fits—either one or both of them together. You’d better get some good strong hot coffee up here for your friend Craig. He’s going to need it.” He went off down the hall without any further instructions for me.
I put in a call to room service and then walked over to the door of the bedroom. Craig was sitting up in bed, arms locked around his drawn-up knees, staring at Hardy as though the detective was a lunatic. Craig wasn’t a pretty sight. His blond hair was tousled, he needed a shave, his lower lip was badly swollen, and he had a mild shiner under one eye—souvenirs from a dead man.
There is one thing that can turn a reasonable and controlled cop into an angry threshing machine, and that’s to have a crime committed under his nose in an area where he’s already involved. Hardy, I guessed, felt that he’d been maneuvered into walking gently instead of playing things tough and hard, and he’d been repaid by a second murder. At that moment if you’d wetted your finger and touched him, he’d have sizzled.
“It’s simple as ABC, Mr. Craig,” he was saying. “This guy beat you up in public and you waited for your chance, went up to his room, and shot him dead when he opened the door to you.”
“I didn’t,” Craig said. He was quite calm. “I’d like to get on some clothes, if you don’t mind.”
“I’d like to have some answers, if you don’t mind!” Hardy said.
“I don’t have any,” Craig said. He reached out to the bedside table and picked up a pipe. It evidently comforted him to be able to chew on its stem. “You seemed to know what happened last night, Lieutenant. I started a row with Jerningham and his friends. They beat me up. I went for a walk to try to cool off. When I got back here, Haskell was already in bed and asleep. I turned in as quietly as I could and went to sleep myself.”
“What time was that?”
“Late. I don’t really know. I wasn’t concerned with what time it was.”
“He came in from the street about four o’clock,” Jerry Dodd said. “Mr. Nevers, our night receptionist, had an eye out for him. We didn’t want any more trouble. By then, Teague and the others had gone to their rooms. The Blue Lagoon closes at three.”
“So it was four o’clock,” Craig said.
“Did you come straight here, or did you go to 1019 first?” Hardy asked.
“Whatever I did, I’d tell you I came straight here, wouldn’t I?” Craig said, trying a swollen smile.
“Do you own a gun?” Hardy asked.
“No.”
“Do you have a gun that somebody else owns?”
“No.”
Hardy turned on me. “I want to search this place.”
“Help yourself,” I said. “Only why not let him get dressed? I’ve ordered some coffee. He’s had a rough night.”
“Okay, get dressed,” Hardy said. “You stay with him, Jerry. You come with me, Haskell.”
We went out into the sitting room, closing the bedroom door. Hardy was steaming.
“When did you get chummy with this guy?” he asked.
“Yesterday—late afternoon,” I said.
“And on that short acquaintance you offered to share your rooms here with him?”
“There were no vacancies in the hotel. I sympathized with his reason for wanting to be here, so I offered him the other bed.”
“The Standing girl?”
“He wanted to be on hand to help her if he could,” I said. “He’s in love with her.”
“Enough to kill a couple of guys for her?”
“I guess,” I said, trying to make it sound light, “if that was the thing to do.”
“You don’t know what time he came in?”
“Honestly, no. I turned in about two-thirty. I was bushed. He must have been quiet about getting to bed.”
“I ought to have my head examined,” Hardy said. “I ought to turn in my shield. I may be asked to!”
“You couldn’t forsee—”
“Of course I could,” he interrupted. “The idiot millionaire who
owns this dump called the commissioner around six last night. Every courtesy should be shown Mr. Emlyn Teague and his friends. Mr. Teague could be helpful about Slade’s death if we played our cards right. I left a message for Teague, saying I wanted to talk to him as soon as he arrived. He sent word he’d see me in the morning. So I extended ‘every courtesy,’ knowing that neither he nor his party of friends could have been directly involved with Slade’s murder. I allowed myself to be persuaded to turn Doris Standing loose. I set up this second killing by doing nothing—by waiting until morning.”
“No leads?” I asked.
“It was Doris, or Craig, or both of ’em,” Hardy said. “Has to be. I’ve arrested her, and I’m arresting Craig, but it’s too late.”
“Was the same gun used?”
“We’ll have a report from ballistics pretty soon. I’m guessing it was. But we’ll search your place and we’ll search Chambrun’s penthouse, but we won’t find it. There are a million rat holes in this hotel where it can be hidden.”
A room-service waiter bringing coffee knocked on the door. I had him put his tray down on a side table. I’d told him to bring enough for several, and I poured myself a cup. I needed it.
“You knew Craig was going to start trouble with Teague,” Hardy said. “I understand he told you he had it in mind.”
Chambrun was evidently playing it dead straight with Hardy. He was the only person I’d told about Craig’s intention to be present in the Blue Lagoon when Teague arrived.
“I couldn’t guess it would be the kind of trouble it was,” I said.
“You knew the Standing girl was on the fly from them,” Hardy said. “You knew this s.o.b. in the next room had been run off his girl by Teague. What did you expect? Ring-around-a-rosie? Chambrun ought to fire you. Public relations!”
I guess he had a point. But Chambrun hadn’t fired me and he hadn’t ordered me to keep Craig out of the Blue Lagoon last night.
“I can take Craig somewhere else to talk to him,” Hardy said, “or you can get the hell out and I’ll talk to him here. I don’t want sympathetic friends around to let him think he’s anything but up to his neck in trouble.”
I left. The day was going to be a colossal headache. The Beaumont was going to be squarely in the center of a mammoth spotlight. My job was to keep it from being any more garish than we could help. I wanted instructions from Chambrun.
He was having breakfast in his office, forty-five minutes ahead of his regular schedule. And he was doing something he never did, carrying on business while he ate. Miss Ruysdale was ahead of time, too, taking down a list of instructions from him on her steno pad.
I got the picture, standing to one side for my turn to come up. The night crew, relieved two hours ago, was being summoned. Who had seen what? Who had been on the tenth floor in the early hours of the morning? What elevator operators had taken who where, and when? The entire staff on duty this morning was to consider its primary job a search for a murder gun—from the cellars to the penthouse gardens. Trash was to be picked over piece by piece before it went into the incinerators. Garbage in the kitchens was to be given the same treatment. A list of all recorded phone calls was to be on Chambrun’s desk within half an hour. The operators on the second-floor switchboards automatically keep a record of all outgoing calls, for charge purposes. There are no records of incoming calls except when there are messages. There are no records of calls from room to room in the hotel. The night operators were to be brought back to the hotel to search their memories for anything unusual, anything they remembered at all. General instructions to the heads of all departments included a reminder that the hotel must function for its guests as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
Miss Ruysdale was just starting for her office to relay instructions, when the door opened. Emlyn Teague, his face the color of ashes, was there. Behind him, a glassy smile on his lips, was the massive Irishman, Delaney.
“You want me to come back later?” I asked Chambrun.
“Stay put,” he said. “Ruysdale, have this taken away.” He gestured toward his half-finished breakfast. She didn’t wait to summon a waiter. She carried out the tray herself. Teague and Delaney came in.
Teague was wearing a reddish-brown Harris-tweed suit, with a red carnation in the buttonhole. He had taken time to dress in his usual attention-getting style, but he looked badly shaken.
“What kind of a slaughterhouse are you running here, Chambrun?” he asked.
“Sit down, Mr. Teague,” Chambrun said, his voice cold.
“I want to know exactly what happened to Ivor,” Teague said. He sat facing Chambrun in one of the high-backed Florentine chairs. Delaney stood beside him, the smile fixed on his mouth as though it was painted there.
“He was shot to death,” Chambrun said. “Once between the eyes, and once in the heart.”
“And you sit here having breakfast!” Teague said.
“I am neither a mourner nor a policeman, Mr. Teague. I’m a hotel manager. I’m also very jealous of the Beaumont’s reputation, so I’m not happy.”
“Screw your happiness!” Teague said. Chambrun’s eyes were narrowed slits in their dark pouches. I had the feeling that this was a confrontation of two antagonists who, whatever the words spoken, regarded each other as formidable.
“Let’s get very clear about the issues here, Mr. Teague,” Chambrun said. “Neither Mr. Slade nor Mr. Jerningham is dead because of any negligence on the part of the hotel. On the surface, certainly, we have no reason to believe that any member of our staff is a murderer. We cannot, you understand, be sure of that. The techniques employed by you and your friends over the years can obviously have made mortal enemies in strange places. But there are not even the vaguest suspicions that anyone connected with the Beaumont is involved.”
“No?” Teague’s voice had a rasping edge to it. “What about Haskell, here? He’s been harboring Craig in his quarters, hasn’t he? You know what happened in your tawdry little club early this morning?”
“Gary Craig is being questioned by the police at this moment,” Chambrun said. “Miss Standing is under arrest as a material witness in the Slade case. The police are not inactive. Mr. Haskell shared his rooms with Craig, partly because you went over my head in the way of getting accommodations here. There wasn’t a single vacancy in the hotel.”
“You took no steps to protect us from a killer who’s prowling your corridors,” Teague said.
“You asked for no protection, Mr. Teague. And if you had we’d have told you to refer to the police. We protect you against inconvenience, against discomfort, against the maraudings of petty hotel thieves who might make the mistake of trying to operate here. We guarantee you quiet, efficient service, high-caliber cuisine. But we cannot guarantee you safety from someone seeking revenge for past outrages at your hands. I regret what’s happened because it will make a thousand other guests uneasy. If I had any wish at all, it would be that you and your friends leave the hotel.”
“Would you like it, Em, if I drubbed a little politeness into him?” Delaney asked.
Teague ignored the question. “You were my enemy before I got here, Chambrun,” he said. “You played foolish little games with us, like putting us all on separate floors. If we’d been together, Ivor would be alive now. You harbored a man who publically insulted Miss Towers. You left your apologies for that to a menial headwaiter, while your personal representative, Haskell here, coddled the insulter. I have a feeling Georgie Battle will be very interested with all I’ll have to tell him.”
“Perhaps he will,” Chambrun said. “Meanwhile, I have far too much on my hands this morning to devote any more time to reciprocal insults, Mr. Teague. Did you have some other reason for coming here?”
“I want and demand protection for myself and my three surviving friends,” Teague said. “I want it from you and your staff.”
Chambrun picked up the phone on his desk. “Be good enough, Ruysdale, to get me the police commissioner.” He put
down the phone. “Lieutenant Hardy tells me that you’ve already had Mr. Battle intercede for you with the commissioner, Mr. Teague. I’m sure you can persuade him to provide you with an official bodyguard. Anything else?”
“I want to talk to Doris Standing,” Teague said. “I understand that you’re protecting her.”
“She’s under arrest,” Chambrun said. “You will have to make your request to the police.”
Teague reached into his pocket for a gold cigarette case. Delaney held a lighter for him. And then Teague grinned, an utterly disarming grin. Doris had said he had charm. This was the first glimpse I’d had of it.
“You’re a tough old bird, Chambrun,” he said.
“I’m not easily intimidated, even by a man of your talents, Mr. Teague,” Chambrun said. The corner of his mouth twitched in a suppressed smile. “You see, I know exactly what my value is to Georgie Battle.” The smile escaped him. It amused him to refer to the owner as ‘Georgie.’ “In a showdown, he’d have to let me have my way because he couldn’t bear to come home to run his own hotel. It gives me an edge.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret,” Teague said, enjoying himself. “I knew, after the unfortunate Julie Frazer affair, that I’d be politely told there were ‘no rooms at the inn’ if I tried to make reservations. I called Georgie to demand that the Beaumont take care of me. Do you know what he said? He said, ‘I’ll try. But if Chambrun says no, there’s nothing I can do about it.’ ”
“Why did you want to come here?” Chambrun asked.
“Wouldn’t you go to the scene of the crime if a friend of yours was murdered?” Teague asked. “And there was Doris, poor child. She disappeared into thin air two weeks ago. We’ve been frantic, trying to find her.”
“Two weeks?” Chambrun asked. I knew what he was wondering. February twentieth, three weeks ago, was the date from which Doris claimed she could remember nothing.
“She ran away from us once before,” Teague said. “That was when she met our murdering friend, Craig. We were afraid she’d gone to him again, but we discovered he, too, was trying to find her. Her housekeeper in Beverly Hills reported he’d been on the phone. He’d expected her here and she evidently didn’t show up. We were concerned, so Jeremy Slade came east to look out for her, protect her if she needed protection.” He paused to put out his cigarette. “I know you don’t approve of us, Chambrun, but we are a very close little group. Others may not appreciate our humor, our kind of fun, but it has tied us together for a long time. In the space of twenty-four hours, I’ve lost two friends I thought of as brothers.”
Evil That Men Do Page 10
