This Teague was a man of many faces. There had been the sardonic enjoyment I’d seen there while Craig was being beaten in the Blue Lagoon; the look of shock when he’d first come into the office; the flushed anger of the first exchange with Chambrun; the attractive, almost boyish smile of a moment ago. Now his face was marble cold, the eyes very bright, the mouth a thin slit. This, I thought, was the face of real danger.
“All my life,” he said to Chambrun, “I’ve been involved with the law. It’s been a lifelong amusement of mine to scurry through its loopholes. I know the handicaps under which your Lieutenant Hardy is working. He didn’t make an arrest yesterday, because he couldn’t make it stick, legally. He’s harassing Doris because he doesn’t know what else to do. Up to now she’d had no one to protect her but that black paladin!” His nostrils flared with anger. I suddenly sensed a kind of Klan bigotry in the man. He had contempt for T. J. Madison because he was black. “Doris is one of us. I will not have her put through a meat grinder just to satisfy an inept police investigation. I’ve made myself a promise.” His voice lowered. “I’m going to stop them from beating Doris, and if the law fails to deal with Craig, I will not!”
The phone rang on Chambrun’s desk. He picked it up, listened, and put it down again. “The commissioner is somewhere in the morning traffic between his home and his office,” he said. “He should call back in about twenty minutes.”
“Tell him I’ve changed my mind,” Teague said. “Tell him I’ve decided to make this a do-it-yourself project.” He stood up. “If your lieutenant isn’t quick, efficient, and final, Mr. Chambrun, the Beaumont may be the scene of events that will become part of the history of this little Dutch Village. Tally-ho, friend.”
He went out, with the carrot-topped Delaney at his heels. Chambrun picked up the phone again and said: “Ruysdale!”
Miss Ruysdale materialized.
“Call Mrs. Veach,” Chambrun said. Mrs. Veach was the chief telephone operator on the day shift. “I want every phone call, in, out and within the house, from Rooms 1204, 1612, 1421, and 609 monitored. I want an immediate report on all calls, even if it’s an order for ice water.”
“Right,” Ruysdale said.
“I want someone stationed in the hallways outside each of those rooms. I want to know instantly who comes out, who goes in.”
“Right.”
“Get hold of Dodd and tell him I want to know exactly where Teague, Towers, Maxwell, and Delaney are at all times. If they are joined by friends or guests from the outside, I want to know about it—who the friends are if possible.”
“Right.”
“I want these bastards covered every instant they’re in the place.”
“What can they do?” I heard myself ask.
“They could set fire to the place,” Chambrun said, drily, “which would be rather more simple than what we can expect.”
His phone rang again.
“Yes, Atterbury,” he said. Then. “Oh, God, I didn’t expect her so soon. Haskell will be there at once. Eighteen B is ready?” He put down the phone. “Veronica Trask,” he said. “Take care of her, Mark. Tell her I’ll come to pay my respects as soon as I can get free.”
I don’t know what I really expected to find at the reception desk. At the height of her career, thirty years ago, Veronica Trask had been considered one of the two or three most beautiful women in the world. There had been the mystique of Garbo, the curious, irregular beauty of Shearer, the bright, rollicking American warmth of Lombard, and the dark, romantic fires of Veronica Trask. I remembered her on the screen as tall, regal, all woman—the inaccessible one who, in the process of a hundred stories, became, at last, accessible, revealing a humor so delightful, a warmth so tender, a surrender so sweet, that all women seemed to turn pale beside her. She had been my idea of the living end!
She hit the very top in the first five years of the thirties and stayed there for another five years—until the outbreak of the war. Her picture-making career ended abruptly after Pearl Harbor. We saw her on the screen occasionally, in newsreels of her visits to Army camps in this country and, later, just behind the fighting lines in Africa, Italy, and, finally, the Western Front. She gave up everything to help sustain the morale of the American G.I. You still hear veterans talking about her sudden appearance in some bloody field hospital. She lived all the things she had once acted on screen—a genuine heroine.
I almost didn’t want to see her. She had to be, I thought, a good sixty-five. I knew, somehow, that she’d have grown old gracefully, but the prospect of seeing only the shadow of Veronica Trask filled me with a kind of sadness.
I should have saved myself those romantic fancies.
I saw the little entourage around Atterbury’s reception desk as I crossed the lobby from the elevators. Johnny Thacker, the day bell captain, was already in charge of a substantial collection of luggage. I saw the two women, both moderately tall, slim, expensively dressed. The one wearing the large, black glasses must be Veronica Trask. Black glasses are part of the uniform of visiting Hollywood dignitaries. But from ten yards away, I saw that I was mistaken.
Atterbury had already indicated my approach and the two ladies had turned to look at me.
Veronica Trask! No glasses. She hid nothing. And why should she, because it was still pretty glorious. I suppose the camera, even with special makeup, would have told the truth about the years. There would have been telltale lines at the slender neck and throat, at the corners of the wide, cornflower-blue eyes. I suppose Shelda, with those gimlets she uses for eyes when looking at another woman, would have told me that the dark hair was tinted. The remarkable thing was that she wore little or no makeup—just what the average woman wears on the street. Her skin was smooth, suntanned from much outdoors. She seemed to glow with all her old energy and vitality. Her smile, as I approached, made me feel I was hurrying toward an old and very dear friend. I had to remind myself that I’d never seen her before off the screen. She held out her hand to me in a comradely gesture.
“You needn’t have bothered to give us the celebrity treatment, Mr. Haskell,” she said. It was the voice I remembered, low and exciting. Her handshake was firm. The blue eyes danced with some private amusement.
“Mr. Chambrun is bitterly disappointed not to be here to greet you personally,” I said. “We have some problems here this morning. He’ll call on you the moment he can be free.”
A faint cloud passed over the wonderfully expressive face. “We had a rather gaudy account of your problems from the taxi driver who brought us here,” she said. “I’d like you to meet my secretary, Gail Miller.”
I really hadn’t looked at the other woman until then. The black glasses made her face unreadable, but I guessed her to be in her forties. Her figure was good. She gave me a brisk little nod without speaking.
“May I take you up to your suite?” I asked.
“Please do, Mr. Haskell. And tell Pierre not to bother with us until he has time to sit down and talk. I won’t let him go quickly when he does appear.”
I’d never heard anyone call Chambrun by his first name before.
We headed for the elevators, and I realized for the first time that dozens of people were watching us with open interest. Miss Trask could still stir excitement in those who remembered her.
It just happened that I’d never been in Suite 18B. The suites in the Beaumont are not identical. Each one has been individually furnished and decorated. I somehow expected something delicate and very feminine—perhaps French in the royalist period. To my surprise, 18B was supermodern, its colors bright, surrealistic reproductions on the walls. I wondered how this great lady of the past would react to it. She was pleased.
“Tell Pierre he is, as usual, a genius,” she said. “He thinks of me as belonging to today.”
Gail Miller had gone into the bedroom section beyond with the bell boys and the luggage.
Veronica—I call her that because she insisted on it later—looked at me, her eyes still brim
ming with amusement. “I want to thank you for your flattery, Mr. Haskell.”
“Flattery?” I sounded like an oaf.
“The look on your face in the lobby—a look of pleasure, I think—when you saw that I wasn’t a decaying fossil.”
The Miller girl came out of the bedroom quarters with Johnny Thacker and his crew. I could tell the tipping had been highly satisfactory. But Johnny hesitated, looking fussed.
“I wonder if you’d give me your autograph, Miss Trask?” he asked. He’s not a shy kid, but he was just then.
“Love to,” Veronica said.
Johnny looked around and picked up a room-service menu from the little table by the front door. He handed it to Veronica with his pen.
“My mother will be thrilled to get this,” Johnny said.
“I ought to put the slug on you, young man,” Veronica said. She signed the menu and handed it to Johnny, who was blushing scarlet.
“That will be all,” Gail Miller said, in a brisk, cool voice. I think she meant to include me.
“Anything at all I can do—” I said.
“You can come back when you have a free moment and tell us about your excitement,” Veronica said. A faint shadow crossed her face for an instant. “I had my moment with Doris Standing and Emlyn Teague some years ago. I knew both the men who’ve been killed in a casual way. I learned a major lesson about personal vanity from Emlyn Teague.”
“He’s here in the hotel,” I said.
“So I understand,” Veronica said. The shadow passed. “My curiosity is naturally enormous, but Gail and I are in New York for fun, and fun we mean to have, Teague notwithstanding.”
“Be sure to call my office if there’s anything I can do to contribute toward the fun,” I said.
Her smile melted me. “Pierre never makes a mistake about his staff,” she said. “I shall be depending on you—Mark.”
Gail Miller was holding the door open for me. She certainly wanted me to go.
I don’t suppose that by noon that day there was anyone in New York who didn’t know that the Beaumont had supplied the scenery for a drama of violence. Hotel men will always turn green at the thought of scandal, but they take the long-range view. A year from now it was conceivable we’d feel some business repercussions, but on the day after, we were crowded with the curious. The Trapeze, the Spartan Bar, the Grill Room, and the main dining room bulged at the seams. The staff was being driven mildly insane by endless questions. People whose business it was to ask questions—members of the communications media—were nearly trampled to death by those who had no right to ask them. In my office we were prepared for cancellations. There were six private luncheon parties scheduled for the day, plus the weekly lunch party for the buffoons, a club of writers, actors, artists, musicians, architects and what have you. Instead of cancellations we got requests for extra reservations. When the books closed that night we were to have done the biggest single day’s business in the hotel’s history.
An ordinary day is busy. This day was madhouse.
While waiters and busboys and bellhops ran their legs off, and the girls on the telephone switchboard paled with exhaustion, the grim hunt for evidence that would nail down the lid on a murderer’s coffin went on. The homicide crew had come and gone from Jerningham’s room. Hardy and Naylor, the assistant D. A., seemed to be aiming the full load of their ammunition at Gary Craig. They’d taken him out of my quarters, having found no gun or any other clue there, and up to Chambrun’s penthouse. There, I gathered, the heat was on both Craig and Doris Standing. I caught a brief glimpse in the lobby of T. J. Madison heading for the penthouse elevator.
Chambrun was riveted to his office desk. Reports from the switchboard and every other department in the hotel came in a steady stream. We knew that, shortly after Teague left us, a breakfast for four was ordered from room service to be served in Bobby Towers’ room. Teague, Maxwell, and Delaney were reported joining the lady at a few minutes before ten, when the meal was served. Teague made a call from the room at ten-thirty to a well-known New York lawyer with a large criminal practice. The lawyer, one Wallace Harmon, made an appointment to meet Teague at the hotel at eleven o’clock, in Miss Towers’ room.
No gun was found.
No one on the night staff had seen anyone prowling around the tenth floor in the early hours of the morning. There is a night maid on duty, but she usually catnaps in a linen room at the end of the hall, waiting for emergency calls from guests. It isn’t her job to spy on comings and goings. The night elevator men had taken hundreds of people up and down in the hours after midnight. No one remembered anything significant about the tenth floor. They did remember taking Teague and his friends to their rooms. The flurry in the Blue Lagoon accounted for that. One of the penthouse operators remembered taking Doris Standing down, a little after midnight. He also remembered taking her back, a few minutes after Chambrun had gone up for the night. He was very clear that he’d taken her directly from the lobby to the roof—not from the tenth floor.
Karl Nevers, the night reservation clerk, had seen Craig go out after the row—I with him as far as the street door. He’d seen him come back at four. Again, because of the flurry, he was remembered. Another elevator man recalled taking him up to my floor at four. He remembered Craig’s swollen face. Nothing to connect him with the tenth floor and Ivor Jerningham.
On the surface, all this would seem to back up Craig’s and Doris’ stories. The simple fact is that it proved nothing at all. Enclosed fire stairs run from bottom to top of the hotel, which exits at each floor. You could go from floor to floor on foot and never be seen at all. There could be no such thing as an alibi, but there wasn’t a hint of anything to place Doris or Craig on the tenth floor at any time.
At eleven o’clock, Wallace Harmon, a tall, gangling man with iron-gray hair, built along the lines of the late Clarence Darrow, presented himself at Bobby Towers’ room on the sixteenth floor.
About twelve-thirty, Teague, Maxwell, Delaney, and Harmon went down to the Spartan Bar for a drink and lunch.
At twenty minutes to one, a call went through from Miss Powers to Mr. Atterbury on the front desk. She wanted to locate Mr. Madison, Miss Standing’s lawyer. She understood he was somewhere in the hotel. She’d been so informed by his office, she said.
Mr. Atterbury put Miss Towers through to my office. Shelda took the call. She knew that Doris was in Chambrun’s penthouse and she put through a call. Madison was there, along with Lieutenant Hardy, Naylor, the D.A., and the two suspects.
At a quarter to one, Madison called Bobby Towers from the penthouse. She asked if he would come to see her. She thought she had information that might be helpful to Doris.
At about eight minutes to one, Madison knocked on the door of Room 1612 and was admitted by Miss Towers, wearing, the hall maid said, something rather sheer and flimsy.
At one o’clock, all this was a matter of record in Chambrun’s office. At one o’clock, Teague and his friends were on their second cocktail in the Spartan Bar.
At seventeen minutes past one, the door to Room 1612 burst open and Bobby Towers ran out into the hall, screaming. The filmy negligee was torn and ripped off one gleaming shoulder. She clung to the extra maid stationed in the hall by Chambrun. She turned and pointed a shaking finger at the door of her room.
T. J. Madison was there, looking dazed. His face might have been clawed by a tiger.
“That black bastard tried to rape me!” Bobby Towers shouted at the top of her shrill voice.
According to the maid, Madison ran for the fire stairs.
Part 3
One
T. J. MADISON DIDN’T run very far. He appeared in Chambrun’s office, breathless, his face bleeding. He couldn’t know that Miss Ruysdale had already had the report from the sixteenth floor. All he knew was that he was ushered without ceremony into Chambrun’s office.
Chambrun was on the telephone. It must have puzzled Madison to see not the smallest flicker of surprise on Chambrun�
�s face.
Chambrun ended a conversation in midstream and put down the phone. He flicked a switch on the intercom.
“Ruysdale. See if you can locate Mark and tell him to hop it up here.” He flipped off the switch. “You better pour yourself a drink, friend,” he said.
“You know what’s happened?” Madison asked.
“I always know what’s happened in my hotel,” Chambrun said, “down to the smallest untruth.”
“It was a cold-blooded frameup,” Madison said.
“Naturally.”
“You believe me?” Madison sounded stunned.
“Of course I believe you,” Chambrun said. “You better help yourself to that drink.”
“I think I better not,” Madison said. “One whiff of liquor on my breath when the cops come charging in here, and I’ve had it.”
“That Turkish coffee has some body to it,” Chambrun said.
Madison went over to the sideboard. He drank a demitasse of scalding hot coffee down in one, gasping swallow. He turned back to Chambrun, lifting big fingers to his torn face.
“Fingernails like a bird’s claws,” he said.
“You’re in trouble,” Chambrun said.
“Why? That’s what I don’t understand,” Madison said. He sounded desperate. “Why?”
“Vive le sport,” Chambrun said. “You got in with the game players, friend. You and I would find much simpler ways to do things. They want you disconnected from Miss Doris Standing and her problems.”
Evil That Men Do Page 11
