Chambrun stood up. “Who are the friends she’s with tonight?”
“I don’t know, Pierre. I don’t question her. She said she was going to look up some friends. That’s all.” Veronica reached out a hand to him. “Pierre, you’re thinking—”
“I’m thinking Terry may have told her something that day at your house—the day he killed himself—that could help us. The minute she gets in, I want her to call me. Will you see to it?”
“Of course.”
Chambrun said nothing on the way down to the second floor. I knew what he was thinking. It could be, I told myself.
Ruysdale was in the outer office.
“Hardy has Teague and his friends inside,” she said.
“Anything from the staff?” Chambrun asked.
“Waters, the Fifth Avenue doorman,” Ruysdale said, glancing at her notes. “The only people answering the description we circulated—trench coat, soft hat, black glasses—to leave his way, were the two ladies from 18B. Miss Trask and her secretary. He remembers them, naturally. That’s all.”
Chambrun turned toward the inner office, and then stopped. “When was it he saw them go out?”
“Late this afternoon.”
“Holy God!” Chambrun said. “Put me through to Miss Trask.”
A moment later he was talking to Veronica, asking her when she and Gail Miller had gone out together. I guess I knew the answer without hearing it. Veronica hadn’t been out of the hotel since she’d checked in that morning.
“They’re about the same height, good figures,” Chambrun said.
“What are you talking about?” Ruysdale asked.
“Doris and Veronica,” Chambrun said. “Waters, recognizing the secretary, assumed the other one was Veronica. Get Hardy out here.”
Chambrun was at the telephone directory. He slammed it shut just as Hardy came out of the inner office.
“I haven’t got time to explain it to you now,” Chambrun said, “but I think I know who your killer is and I may just know where Doris has been taken. Let’s just hope I’m right and that it’s not too late.”
Chambrun and Hardy and I took a taxi outside the Beaumont. Chambrun gave the address of an apartment building about ten blocks north on Park Avenue.
Then he laid it on the line for us.
A uniformed doorman at the apartment building asked us politely who we wished to see.
Hardy flashed his shield. “The building superintendent,” he said.
The doorman put in a call on the house phone.
“What floor is Mr. Schramm’s apartment?” Chambrun asked.
“Eleven, sir. But Mr. Schramm’s in Europe.”
“There were two ladies staying there.”
The doorman smiled. “Sure,” he said. “Veronica Trask and her secretary. But they moved out this morning.”
“They haven’t come back?”
“As a matter of fact, they’re up there right now, sir. I guess they forgot some things.”
The building superintendent joined us. He was duly impressed by Hardy.
“Is there more than one way into Mr. Schramm’s apartment?” Hardy asked him.
“Front door, and service door at the rear.”
“You got keys for both of them?”
“Sure, but—”
“Let’s go,” Hardy said. “I want the key to the back door. You’re to let these two gentlemen in the front door.”
“But—”
“Without a sound!” Hardy said. “You make any noise and you may go to bed knowing you’ve killed somebody.”
The four of us went up in the self-service elevator. In the hallway, the superintendent showed Hardy how to get around to the rear entrance.
“Give me two minutes,” Hardy said.
We stood there, Chambrun’s eyes fixed on his wrist watch. In exactly two minutes he signaled to the superintendent to open the door of Schramm’s apartment.
The door was miraculously noiseless.
There was wall-to-wall carpeting in the little foyer inside. Chambrun and I stepped in. From some way off I heard a voice—a woman’s voice.
Chambrun tiptoed down the hallway. He stopped short of a door that opened into what proved to be a living room. I eased up beside him.
“We’re running out of time, Doris,” I heard Gail Miller say.
I could feel my heart jam against my ribs. Perhaps we were lucky at last. Chambrun took a step forward into the room.
“Entirely out of time, Gail,” he said.
It was quite a moment. Doris was seated on a couch in the room. Gail Miller stood directly behind her, a gun held against Doris’ neck. The secretary’s black glasses glittered in the lamplight as she saw us. One deep breath, I thought, and Doris’ head would be blown off. My feet felt as though they were buried in cement. I fought to keep my face deadpan as I saw Hardy appear in a doorway at the rear of the room, behind Gail Miller’s back. He had his gun out. I wanted to yell at him not to shoot. I didn’t know if he could see the weapon pressed against Doris. Even if he made a clean hit, Gail’s finger would squeeze the trigger.
We had a murderer dead to rights, but she’d take Doris before we could take her.
“I was pretty sure you’d have to come here, Gail,” Chambrun said in a conversational tone. “Strange town. You had no place of your own. I rather imagined you’d kept a key when you left here this morning.”
Doris’s face was chalk white, her eyes wide. Her lips were moving. I couldn’t make out if she was trying to say something to us and couldn’t produce sound, or if she was praying.
Hardy had taken one noiseless step forward. I struggled not to betray him by looking at him.
“I think you’d better go out of here quickly, Mr. Chambrun,” Gail Miller said. Her voice was high, tight, with a quality it’s hard to explain—like a violin note played just off key. “There’s a tiny, tiny chance I may let Doris live. But if you interfere—”
“And let the others go scot free?” Chambrun asked, still completely offhand in his manner. God, what an actor he could be!
The black glasses focused steadily on him.
“I don’t know what can be done for you, Gail. Your lawyer will certainly plead insanity for you, and you should have a chance to live again. But without Doris, Teague and the others will go scot free.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked coolly.
“Frankly, I don’t know,” Chambrun said. Quite calmly he took his cigarette case out of his pocket and went through the ritual of lighting one of his flat Egyptians. “I don’t know what Teague did to Norman Terry. Perhaps you’ll tell me. But I do know that when Doris comes out of the dark she can hang the lot of them. They’ve been so desperate to get her away, to silence her themselves. You’re just playing their game for them, Gail. Of course, if we hadn’t found you, you could kill Doris and go on picking off the rest of them, one by one. But that’s over, because we know and we can’t let you go on.”
Hardy had come a yard closer. The inside of my mouth was painfully dry.
“You loved Norman Terry very much, didn’t you, Gail,” Chambrun said.
Her mouth twitched. “Oh, my God!” she said.
“He told you what they did to him, didn’t he? The day he died.” Chambrun’s voice had a curious soothing quality to it. “He didn’t tell you he was going to kill himself, did he? You wouldn’t have let him go. You’d have confessed what you felt about him to Veronica and enlisted her help. But he told you what they’d done to him. It was so bad, you couldn’t tell Veronica. Am I right? But he didn’t hint at suicide. What was it? Did he tell you he was going to get even and then go away?”
“He was going to get even,” Gail said, as if somehow Chambrun had managed to hypnotize her. “They must have laughed at him again—shamed him out of it.”
“What did they do to him in the first place?” Chambrun asked, very softly.
The dark glasses lowered for an instant to look at the top of Doris’ bright-red
head. “These people are not human,” she said. “They don’t deserve to live.”
“But the rest of them will, Gail, unless you think this through.”
Hardy was only a dozen feet away from her now.
“What did they do to him, Gail?” Chambrun asked.
“They shamed him!” Her voice was suddenly shrill. “They used the Towers woman as bait. He—he was weak. He was sixty-five with a glorious life behind him, but he still had to keep proving to himself that he was the great lover. And she led him on, and on, until one night, at her Malibu house, he declared himself—he made love to her with the same old clichés he’d used all his life—and she led him on—in the darkness of her room—and suddenly there was light, and they were all there. And there was a tape recorder—and they’d taken down all his foolish words—his trembling voice. And they shrieked with laughter. And he suddenly knew that tape would reveal him at a hundred private parties—that the whole world would be laughing at him. The great lover—turned into an old goat! That’s what they did to him, Chambrun.”
The room was deathly still for a moment; so still I was sure Gail must hear Hardy breathing only a few feet away.
“He told you all this that afternoon at Veronica’s?”
“Yes, he told me. Once he’d told me everything, and now there was no one but me. He loved Veronica, too, but he couldn’t bear to have her know a thing like this. He was going back, he told me, to have it out with them. He was going to get that tape and destroy it. He would use force if he had to. Then he was going away somewhere—for a long time—to try to pull himself together—to forget.” Gail’s voice broke. “The next morning we heard about his suicide on the radio. I suppose he failed at what he set out to do. Or, even if he didn’t, he couldn’t live with himself any more.”
“Why didn’t you kill Doris back at the hotel?” Chambrun asked. “Why bring her here?”
“I planned to kill them one by one,” Gail said. “But one of them had to talk first. Doris was the only one I could get away from the hotel. I needed time—to persuade—”
“You wanted to know where that tape was, so that you could destroy it,” Chambrun said. “That’s it, isn’t it, Gail? No one must ever hear that tape. But Doris can’t remember about it. She really can’t, you know.”
“She’s got to remember!” Gail said. “I’m sorry about the Negro. I didn’t want to kill him. I wouldn’t like to have to kill you, Mr. Chambrun. But I’ve got to find that tape.”
“Do you know something, Gail?” Chambrun asked, still in that soothing voice. “I think I can guess something else Doris has forgotten. I don’t think your friend, Norman Terry, committed suicide. I think he was murdered and the suicide faked. That’s why Teague has run so many risks to get to Doris. Because she might tell the truth; because she has a conscience. I think your friend Terry went in fighting mad; perhaps threatening them with a gun. I think one of them shot him in self-defense. Then, together, they had to protect themselves. They took him to wherever it was he is supposed to have died. A second shot through the roof of his mouth, which blew off the top of his head, destroyed the evidence of the first shot. They were in the clear, except for one thing. Doris ran. Doris drew a blank. But in the end, Doris could destroy them. And she will—if she lives. But if you kill her, Gail, we’ll only have my guess—and Teague will go free.”
It happened in slow motion. Gail lowered the hand that held the gun, and Hardy took one unhurried step to her—and it was all over.
It was a guess, but a marvelously educated guess, based on solid logistics. Chambrun had felt so certain that after Slade and Jerningham were killed, Teague would never have stayed put, letting himself be a target, unless what Doris knew could cost him his life. It had to be something more than a scandalous escapade.
“It had to be murder,” Chambrun told us much later that night up in his penthouse. I was there with Hardy, and Miss Ruysdale, and Gary Craig. Doris was asleep in the guest room, under a heavy sedative prescribed by Dr. Partridge. “It all came together as Gail talked. It simply had to be that way.”
And it had been that way. The human mind is a strange and wonderful instrument. Doris had blanked out a memory she couldn’t endure. But when Chambrun had put it into words there in Schramm’s apartment, she had, in effect, been forced to remember. There were still blank spots, but not in the critical area of the crime.
Doris had been in on the dreadful evening when Norman Terry had been shamed in Barbara Towers’ house.
Like so many of Teague’s jokes, she hadn’t realized how far it was going. But it had been the end of the line for her. The next morning, she’d taken off in her car, with no particular destination in mind. She wound up in a motel fifty miles up the coast. On the twenty-fifth, she heard the news of Terry’s suicide in a late-news report. She’d headed straight back to Hollywood. She’d gone to Teague’s place and walked in on a council of war. Alibis were being fabricated—just in case. The whole ghastly story had been revealed to her. Terry had come to Teague’s and demanded the tape at gunpoint. When they laughed at him, he had fired at Teague—and missed. It was Slade who had shot him dead. The rest was just as Chambrun had envisioned it.
Doris had listened in a state of shock. She hadn’t been a party to the actual murder of Terry—but she was part of it all—the whole miserable business. She went away again that night to another place—another motel. There she tried to fight it out with herself. What to do? Close her eyes to the whole horror, or come forward and turn them all in, including herself. For three days she wrestled with it. And then she called Craig in New York—and then blankness. Where she had been for the next two weeks she still didn’t remember, but her absence threw Teague and was a very real danger to them. And so, a search; and so, Slade to New York; and so, a closing in on Doris when the word came from Slade that she was at the Beaumont.
But another force was at work—a demented Gail Miller. A Gail Miller secretly determined on a massacre. She hadn’t decided where she would begin or how. She’d come to New York with Veronica and, on the morning of the day Doris had checked in as Dorothy Smith, she’d gone to the Beaumont’s hairdresser. She’d always gone to Monsieur Charles when she was in town. And there, sitting in a booth, she’d heard a couple of Monsieur Charles’s girls gossiping. Doris Standing had just checked in to 9F. And so she decided the time had come. She’d gone to 9F that afternoon, meaning to begin with Doris. But when Slade opened the door to her, he became Number One on her Monte Cristo list.
She got away with it, without a hitch. Now she couldn’t stay away from the hotel. What was happening? Was there still a chance to get at Doris? And, lo and behold, the whole Teague gang walked onto center stage. There was real cunning in the way she operated now. She watched and waited—and saw the encounter in the Blue Lagoon. Jerningham, she decided, would be Number Two. The police would surely concentrate on Gary Craig. And so, in the early hours, she went to the tenth floor, knocked on Jerningham’s door—and that was that.
She’d already persuaded Veronica they should move to the Beaumont. She had to be at the center of the action. But now the going was a little rougher. Hardy was on deck. Teague and Company were carefully guarded. There was one thing she had to accomplish. Before she wiped them all out—and she was quite calmly certain she would succeed in that—she had to find out where that tape was hidden—the tape that would destroy everyone’s memory of Norman Terry. The plan to take Doris out of the hotel and to Schramm’s apartment evolved. Nothing would stand in her way—not T. J. Madison, not God.
“I daresay,” Chambrun said that night, “that she thought far more clearly when she was mad, than when she was completely sane.”
As I write this, there are one or two things that need finalizing. T. J. Madison has recovered. He recovered in time to represent Doris Standing at a grand-jury hearing that handed down indictments against Teague, Maxwell, Delaney, and Barbara Towers for first-degree murder. Doris would be one of the chief witnesses for the pro
secution a month later.
Gail Miller pleaded not guilty to a murder charge, on grounds of insanity. She’s in an institution not far from New York, prognosis for recovery—bad. Veronica Trask has stayed on at the Beaumont to be near a friend she can’t help. When the Teague trial is over, I assume Doris and Gary Craig will try to pick up the pieces together.
And I? Well, there’s Shelda, and the busy world of the Beaumont. And there is Chambrun. Without him, there would be no Beaumont.
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copyright © 1966 by Judson Philips
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