“You say you could have saved him?”
“He came that afternoon,” Veronica said. The little lines at the corners of her eyes showed pain. “I was bedded down with a flu bug. He told Gail he needed to see me, urgently. So I got up and dressed.” She smiled faintly. “At my age, Pierre, it takes a little while for me to ready myself for the outside world. Gail entertained him while he waited, and she says he seemed very distressed about something. When I finally joined him, was alone with him, I was shocked to have him burst into tears. He said he was going away. He wanted to say goodbye. I couldn’t get him to tell me what it was all about. He wanted to thank me for the past, for everything we’d been to each other. The best and the only good thing that had ever happened to him, he said. I was worried; anxious for him. But I never dreamed—” Her voice broke.
The telephone rang and, at a signal from Chambrun, I answered it. It was Mrs. Kiley, the night chief, calling Chambrun. The doctor Chambrun had sent for, had been able to get away sooner than he’d expected. He was waiting downstairs to be taken up to Doris Standing.
Chambrun apologized to Veronica for an abrupt leave-taking. Dr. Martin was told to go direct to the penthouse where we’d meet him.
“Coincidence on coincidence,” Chambrun said, when we were out in the hall together. “Both the critical dates in Doris’s blackout match up with the critical dates in the death of Norman Terry.”
“If you start looking for them, you’d probably find a dozen other sets of coincidences,” I said, without too much conviction.
Dr. Martin got out of one elevator at the penthouse level just as we got out of another. The doctor was a pleasant-looking crew-cut gent about forty. We stood a little distance from the front door to Chambrun’s place, out of earshot of Hardy’s bodyguard, while Chambrun gave the doctor a brief sketch of the problem he’d face inside. Then we went to the door and rang the bell.
There was a long wait.
“Mr. Craig went downstairs about half an hour ago,” the cop said, “but the lawyer’s in there.”
I tried the bell again. Chambrun was already fishing for his key. He unlocked the door and went in. The living room and study to our left was empty.
“Madison!” Chambrun called out, sharply.
There was no answer. Chambrun walked quickly down the corridor toward the bedroom wing. Seconds later he called out to us. The doctor and I hurried after him.
We found ourselves in what I took to be the guest bedroom. An open closet door revealed Doris’ Marinelli wardrobe. The french windows opening out onto Chambrun’s roof garden were open. Chambrun had evidently gone out through them. But the doctor and I were momentarily frozen where we stood.
Stretched out on the floor near the french windows, his head in a pool of blood, was the motionless figure of T. J. Madison.
Four
DR. MARTIN WAS THE first to recover from the shock. He crossed quickly and knelt beside Madison.
“Looks like a gunshot wound,” he said. “He’s still alive, but he’s lost a bucket of blood. Get your house doctor, Haskell. I don’t have anything to work with. I came here to talk! And send for an ambulance.”
I ducked for the phone next to the bed. I relayed the emergency to Mrs. Kiley. We needed Dr. Partridge, an ambulance, and Jerry Dodd. Chambrun’s voice kept me from hanging up. He had reappeared in the french doors.
“Every exit to the hotel is to be blocked off!” he said in a cold, hard voice. He went past us and out to the front door. Hardy’s man came back with him, looking a little stunned.
“I didn’t hear any shot,” he said.
“You wouldn’t,” Chambrun said. “The place is sound-proofed. Did you see anyone come out of the other three penthouse entrances?”
“An old lady with a Pekingese dog,” the cop said.
That would be old Mrs. Haven who lived in the south penthouse. She walked her dog religiously four times a day.
“Have you looked through the rest of the apartment?” the cop asked.
“Waste of time,” Chambrun said. “She’s gone. And it’s my fault. I should have insisted there be a man stationed on the roof. There’s a fire-door exit at the other end of the roof. As sure as God, she was taken that way. Check out on your other men. Make sure Teague’s bunch are all accounted for.”
The cop went off on the run.
Dr. Martin was holding a clean linen handkerchief against the wound in Madison’s head, trying to staunch the flow of blood.
“I’ve been a psychiatrist for so long, I don’t carry a medical bag with me,” he said.
“How bad is it?” Chambrun asked.
“Could be very bad,” Martin said. “Deep, deep crease. Immediate need is transfusion. He’s lost a hell of a lot of blood. Pulse very faint.”
“It’s as clear as if they’d left a note for us,” Chambrun said. “Doris came in here to rest. We’d urged her to do just that. Someone came in through those french windows. Maybe she screamed. Anyway, Madison heard something and came in here and was shot for his pains. Idiot! I should have made sure of the roof. Mark, see if you can locate Craig.”
The details of the next hour are still pretty scrambled in my memory. It added up to a colossal sum in frustration. Dr. Partridge appeared from somewhere, and immediately afterwards the ambulance crew. Any hope that we might get a story from Madison was quickly doused. Critical was the diagnosis, emergency surgery indicated. Possible brain damage.
A preliminary report from Lieutenant Hardy’s men seemed to indicate that Teague and Company were accounted for every minute of time since long before Doris could have been spirited away. The penthouse was the one place—God help us—where the man stationed outside the door didn’t have a complete coverage on comings and goings. The roof was wide open. It seemed as certain as anything could in what seemed like a very uncertain world that none of Teague’s crowd could have gotten up to the roof level.
Craig had been covered with equal thoroughness by the man assigned to him. His story was simple enough. When Doris had obeyed instructions to get some rest, he’d gone back down to my quarters. He’d been routed out of bed early that morning, with no chance to bathe or shave. He’d wanted to take the opportunity to get freshened up. His bodyguard had gone with him, been invited into the suite by Craig, and waited in my living room while Craig showered and shaved. Craig was dressing when the word came down from the penthouse that Doris was missing.
It seemed that all of our nice, tidy suspects were as pure as lambs.
We were face to face with the other half of the coin. The side marked X.
At the end of an hour, it was apparent that the pattern had changed. Slade and Jerningham had been shot and left to lie where they fell. The entire staff of the Beaumont, plus Hardy’s men, had searched the hotel from top to bottom by the time an hour had gone by. They were still searching—but it was now obvious that Doris had not been shot in cold blood like the others and left to be found. X had either found a magic way to hide a body, or he had somehow managed to spirit Doris out of the hotel, hopefully still alive. To die somewhere else?
“She can’t have been carried out of the hotel or dragged out,” Chambrun said. We were in his office with Hardy. Ruysdale was at the telephone, answering the calls that came in every minute or two reporting—always negatively. “If she’s not found in the building, and I begin to think she won’t be, then she had to walk out of here under her own power.”
“Voluntarily?” I asked.
“If that’s what you call it, with a gun in your ribs,” Hardy said.
The ever-surprising Ruysdale looked up from her telephones. “Did anyone check on whether her street coat and hat are missing from the apartment? She checked in, you remember, wearing a trench coat, soft felt hat, black glasses. If she walked out of the hotel, bare-headed and without a coat, she’d have been almost bound to be recognized. She’s as famous as a movie star. But maybe, with the hat, coat, and glasses, she could have gone out without anyone paying any attent
ion.”
“So what, Ruysdale?”
“So someone may remember a girl in a trench coat, soft felt hat, and black glasses. You’ve been asking if anyone saw Doris Standing.”
Hardy’s crew were still up in the penthouse area, going over the apartment and the roof outside, the fire stairs for fingerprints or clues of any sort. Hardly called the apartment and in two minutes had the answer. There was no street coat or hat among Doris’ belongings. No black glasses.
And so a new question was fired at the Beaumont’s staff. Did anyone remember a girl in a trench coat, soft-brimmed hat, and black glasses?
Round and round it went.
Reports filtered in from Hardy’s crew. They’d picked up a dozen different sets of fingerprints in Chambrun’s apartment. It would take time to account for them. They would obviously include Chambrun’s, Madison’s, Doris’, Craig’s, mine, Hardy’s, probably the floor maid’s.
“Oh, we’re very thorough, very scientific,” Hardy said bitterly. He was sitting in one of the high-backed chairs facing Chambrun’s desk. He was chain-smoking. “A few hours ago, Chambrun, you talked me out of considering the Standing girl and Craig as suspects in our little drama. Well, I—”
“I know what you’re thinking,” Chambrun said. “We’ve assumed that X came up the fire stairs, opened the trench windows into my guest bedroom, and confronted Doris. There was some kind of row, and Madison came running and got the works. Then Doris was forced out at gun point. But you’re thinking there needn’t have been any X.”
“Right,” Hardy said. “Go back to what I always thought—that Craig or the girl or both of them together were what we wanted. Maybe Madison heard them talking together—heard the truth. He barges in and one of them shoots him. The girl then goes out on the roof, down the fire stairs and out of the hotel. Craig goes out the front door and picks up his bodyguard, goes down to Haskell’s rooms, and showers. Nobody knows the girl is missing and Madison shot for nearly two hours. Or it can have been the girl alone, without any cooperation from Craig. For my dough, we have to keep them in the picture, Chambrun.”
Ruysdale interrupted. “Long-distance call from California for T. J. Madison,” she said. “It’s some private-detective agency. If Mr. Madison isn’t available, they’d like to talk to Mr. Chambrun.”
Chambrun has one of those telephone talk boxes on his desk, where you can throw a switch and everyone in the room can hear the conversation. The call was switched through it.
“Chambrun, here.”
“I’m Harry Markson of the Markson Detective Agency,” the voice from the box said. “Mr. Madison said if I couldn’t reach him, I was to report to you.”
“That’s correct,” Chambrun said. “Madison isn’t here. You’ve got something?”
“We were to backtrack on Miss Standing’s trail starting February twentieth,” Markson said. “We’ve come on something which maybe you can simplify for us on that end.”
“Yes?”
“On the night of February twentieth, Miss Standing had dinner at a public restaurant here—The Cherub Club—with some friends. There were six men and another woman. The woman was a Miss Barbara Towers of Malibu. The men—I’ll skip the addresses—were an Emlyn Teague, a Jeremy Slade, an Ivor Jerningham, an Oscar Maxwell, a vanDeusen Delaney, and an old-time movie star named Norman Terry.”
The box was silent. So were we.
“You there, Mr. Chambrun?” Markson asked.
“I’m here.”
“You see why I’m calling? Three of these guys are dead. Right? Our check here tells us the rest of them are all registered right there in your hotel.”
“How true,” Chambrun said dryly.
“After dinner on that night—the twentieth—that whole crowd left The Cherub Club together. Private automobiles. We could spend days trying to pick up the trail of where they went. All you have to do is ask one of them there in your place.”
“Well just do that, Mr. Markson,” Chambrun said. “But I don’t promise we’ll be able to cut any corners for you. These people here come under the heading of hostile witnesses. Keep at it.”
“But if they do talk, let me know,” Markson said.
“That I will, Mr. Markson. Thank you—and good night.”
Chambrun switched off the box. He sat like a little dark statue, cigarette smoking between his fingers.
“What’s the surprise?” Hardy asked. “She’s always said she started out to have dinner with Teague and friends that night”
“The surprise,” Chambrun said, very quietly, “is Norman Terry. He committed suicide five days later. On the twenty-fifth. Ring a bell with you, Hardy? He was buried on the twenty-eighth. That was the day Doris called Gary Craig here in New York and said she was in trouble. And by the purest chance we came across Norman Terry’s trail earlier this evening. He paid a call on Veronica Trask the afternoon of the day he killed himself. Miss Trask is at this moment a guest of the hotel. When you have a violent death juxtaposed to a night out with Teague, you have a right to wonder.”
“I think it’s time we had Teague and chums all in one place and put them through the wringer,” Hardy said.
“Bring them up here if you like,” Chambrun said. “And while you’re at it, I think I’d like to have a word with my old friend, Miss Trask.”
He made a little gesture indicating he wanted me to go with him.
Chambrun didn’t speak to me or look at me on the way up to the eighteenth floor. I could tell he dreaded what lay ahead of us. Some pretty wild notions were running through my head. I was toying with the vision of Veronica Trask playing the dramatic role of avenging angel for Norman Terry, her one-time lover.
She didn’t look like an avenging angel when she opened the door to Chambrun’s ring. She had changed out of the cocktail dress into a wine-colored housecoat. She had on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, a new novel was tucked under her arm. A very calm avenging angel, I thought.
“Pierre!” she said. “I thought my social activities for the day were over. But please come in.”
We followed her into the living room.
“Your secretary’s still out?” Chambrun asked.
“I don’t expect her until all hours,” Veronica said. Then her eyes widened. “What’s wrong, Pierre? Has something happened to Gail?”
“It’s nothing like that. I just wanted to be sure we were alone. We’re deeper and deeper in trouble, Veronica.”
She stood very straight and still. “Another killing?”
“Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps more than one.”
We sat down and he told her everything that had happened since we’d left her, up to the point of Markson’s call from Hollywood.
“And Teague and his friends are in the clear?” she asked.
“Beyond question.”
“You didn’t come here to gossip with me, Pierre,” she said.
“No, Veronica.”
And then he told her about Markson’s call; what Markson had been called on to do.
“Norman!” she said. “But I don’t understand the connection, Pierre. What can poor Norman have to do with any of this?”
If it was a performance, it was a great one.
“Every minute we spend beating around the shrubbery, Veronica, may cost Doris Standing her life,” Chambrun said. “I’d like to ask you some questions, and later—later, perhaps, I can give you the reasons for asking them.”
“Ask me, Pierre,” she said, very quietly.
“Was Norman Terry a friend of Teague’s?” he asked.
“Not that I know of,” she said, promptly. “I was surprised when you said he’d had dinner with Teague.”
“Was he a friend of any of the others?”
“I really can’t tell you, Pierre. Even about Teague. I hadn’t seen Norman for nearly a year before that last afternoon of his life.”
“He didn’t mention Teague or any of the others to you that last time?”
“Good Lord, no! I’d reme
mber anything about Teague.”
Chambrun took time to light a cigarette, eyes squinted against the flame of his lighter.
“That day when Terry came to see you,” he said. “He spent some time with Gail Miller while you were dressing. Did she give you the details of that conversation? You must have talked about it when you heard about the suicide.”
“There was nothing specific,” Veronica said. “She said he seemed distressed about something, but he didn’t say anything that gave her a hint of what was troubling him.”
“Veronica, you told us Gail Miller had had a tragic love affair. Who was the man?”
“Why should that interest you, Pierre?”
“Just tell me who he was,” Chambrun said.
“You may not believe it, but I don’t know,” Veronica said. “It had happened before she and I got together. That’s almost twenty years ago, Pierre. It was a private thing. If she’d wanted to tell me, she would have. She never did. I never pressed her for the details.”
Chambrun took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Could it have been Norman Terry?” he asked.
That one seemed to rock Veronica back on her heels. “Norman!”
“Could it?”
She took a long time to answer. She was looking back over a stretch of time. “It seems impossible she could have kept it from me. There are dozens of pictures of Norman in my house. We talked about him from time to time. Now and then, we saw some of the old films on television. Surely there’d have been something to suggest it—some little giveaway.”
“And there wasn’t?”
“Nothing, Pierre.”
“But it could have been,” Chambrun persisted. “They both lived and worked in Hollywood at the time her love life went sour? They could have known each other?”
“They could have,” Veronica said slowly.
Evil That Men Do Page 15
