Murder Round the Clock

by Hugh Pentecost

  "We aim to please here at the Beaumont," Chambrun said. "But only so far, Mr. Lucas."

  Chambrun can look like a compassionate father confessor or a hanging judge, depending on his mood. He was midway between those two extremes at that moment, outraged by Mathilda Horween but with some sympathy for Reggie Lucas. "The late Mr. Horween, I take it, was beaten to death," he said mildly.

  "He didn't wait for that eventuality," Reggie said. "An astute mixture of sleeping pills and bonded bourbon whiskey did the job. His last words to me, the night before he indulged in that fatal combination, were to the effect that I might be able to endure her since I wouldn't be expected to make love to her. Imagine what the poor devil must have suffered."

  "It is beyond imagining," Chambrun said.

  "All fangs and razor blades," Reggie said.

  I have indicated that I had two hot potatoes to handle that day. The second one was Robert Gaynor, the movie star and sex symbol. He had no connection whatsoever with the Horween ball. I suspect Madame Horween belonged to a generation when actors and golf professionals were considered second-class citizens instead of national heroes. Gaynor's presence in the hotel's most luxurious accommodations might have convinced her the Beaumont was going to seed. His existence was of no consequence to her, and she didn't read the gossip columns because the gossipers of today cover very little of what Mrs. Horween considered the social aristocracy. That evening, when she saw the crowds in the lobby, she would assume the "bourgeoisie" had come to see the socially elite, when in fact they would be there to catch a glimpse of the glamorous Robert Gaynor.

  They were not due to catch a glimpse of Gaynor that night because he had made plans for something very private. It is necessary to describe his accommodations at the Beaumont. There are three penthouses on the roof of the hotel. Two of them are cooperatively owned—one by Chambrun, and one by a very old lady who lives there with her memories and a particularly obnoxious Japanese spaniel. The third penthouse is reserved by the hotel for very special guests. Robert Gaynor fell into that category.

  Gaynor had stayed at the hotel several times before, but on those occasions he had been eager for public attention. He had been gracious to autograph hunters, endured being swamped in the lobby by screaming females, all part of the promotion of his sensational career. This time it was something else again. His presence in the hotel was to be kept a secret.

  Room service waiters and maids must keep their lips sealed. The famous star would not circulate in the hotel. He would register under a phony name—what we call "a John Smith" in the Beaumont. In case, by some misadventure, his presence became known, he must be put up where no one could get at him. Penthouse Number Three was the answer.

  He arrived the morning of the Horween Ball, was registered in advance, and hurried, unnoticed, up to the roof. I was delegated to make sure everything was to his liking.

  Gaynor wasn't quite real, I thought. You don't ordinarily use the word "beautiful" to describe a man. He had golden blond hair and a profile that could have come off an old Greek coin. He was slim, muscular, and for all the delicate beauty, his face was strong. He was a very, very male man. He was the kind of heroic figure romantic lady authors of another time must have dreamed of at night and written about immediately after breakfast.

  He was relaxed and rather charmingly sardonic when I met him.

  "You may wonder why all the secrecy, Mark," he said, jumping to first names as many people in show business do. Maybe it was a way of indicating he was a "regular fellow."

  "Having seen you swarmed under in the past I can understand it," I said.

  "There's a special reason," he said, "and I'm going to tell you what it is to make certain there's nothing slipshod about my protection."

  "Knowing the reason won't make us any more attentive to your wishes," I said.

  He turned away from me and looked out the windows across the roof. "It's a woman," he said.

  "Am I supposed to be surprised?" I asked him.

  He turned back to me, brooding. "You may wonder why I have chosen such a very public place for such a very private meeting," he said. "Private places are almost impossible for me to find. One glance at my face, and the whole damn city will be hammering on my door. You can save me from that. Another important fact is that the lady is a guest here in the hotel. She can slip up here without attracting attention."

  "Simply arranged," I said.

  "It has to be tonight, Mark, because tonight her husband will be out of town."

  "Oh, brother," I said. We don't like cheating wives or cheating husbands in the Beaumont. They often lead to explosions.

  He must have seen something in the look I gave him. "This isn't a tawdry affair," he said. "She is the only woman I have ever really loved in all my life."

  "So good luck," I said, wondering what Chambrun would think when I told him. I would tell him, of course, because that was routine.

  "I'll be ordering dinner," he said. "When the room service waiter brings it, well be out of sight. He is just to leave the dinner and go."

  "No problem," I said.

  "I could run the risk of your waiter recognizing me, but not recognizing the lady," Gaynor said.

  That was all there was to that conversation with Robert Gaynor. I certainly didn't think of it at the moment as a prelude to violence. Angry or jealous husbands don't react predictably to being cuckolded, but carefully planned murder is not a usual option.

  When I got back to my office, which is down the hall from Chambrun's on the second floor, I found a message summoning me into the Presence. Chambrun was surrounded by hotel personnel. Betsy Ruysdale stood at his elbow, dictation pad ready. Mr. Amato, the banquet manager, was there. So was Jerry Dodd, our chief security officer with his sharp fox-face, and Douglas Muir, our Scots maintenance engineer, chewing on the stem of an unlighted pipe. Mr. Atterbury, the desk clerk, was there, and Claude Lavalle, the head man in the hotel's Grand Ballroom, where Judy Horween was to burst on society as a debutante that night. There was Miss Veach, the chief switchboard operator, and hovering on the fringes of this group was Reggie Lucas, representing the Dowager Duchess of Bilgewater.

  "Mrs. Horween has made more last minute demands on us," Chambrun said. "On some of them we will deliver, others we will not."

  "Oh, my!" Reggie Lucas muttered.

  "To start with, she insists that four elevators in the main bank in the lobby be reserved exclusively for her guests. They will, she insists, run only from the lobby to the ballroom on the nineteenth floor."

  "That will make it very inconvenient for—" Mr. Atterbury began.

  "That will be impossible," Chambrun said. "Too many of our regular guests will have to find different routes to reach their rooms."

  "Oh, dear!" Reggie Lucas said.

  "We will, however, make the elevators in the west wing exclusively available to guests at the ball. The doormen will be instructed to pass this along to people arriving by car or taxi. Jerry," Chambrun went on to Jerry Dodd, "you will have men stationed to guide people, to keep the lobby uncluttered as usual."

  "Mrs. Horween will be very distressed," Reggie Lucas said. "Perhaps I can make it clearer by saying she will blow her stack."

  "Make a note," Chambrun said to Miss Ruysdale, "that Mr. Lucas tried."

  "Thank you, love," Reggie said, smiling at Miss Ruysdale.

  "Speaking of elevators," Douglas Muir, the engineer said, "the number two car going to the roof is out of order." There are only two elevators that go to the penthouses on the roof.

  "What's wrong with it?" Chambrun asked.

  "If I didn't know better, I'd say it was sabotaged," Muir said. He is a big, gray-haired, unsmiling man with a walrus mustache and is enormously efficient.

  Chambrun's eyes narrowed. "But you do know better, Douglas?"

  "No way for anyone to get at it unnoticed," Muir said. "A Stilson wrench fell into the clutch mechanism and ripped it to pieces. Take two days to get new parts shipped in from Detroit
. But there are only three people on the roof, sir. You, old Mrs. Haven and her dog, and the movie star. One elevator should handle your needs without too much discomfort."

  "No strangers in the engine room?" Chambrun asked.

  "Only a safety inspector who checked the whole place out yesterday," Muir said.

  "Man you know?"

  Muir shook his head. "New man, who seemed to know his stuff, however."

  Chambrun nodded and turned to Mr. Lavalle, the ballroom manager. "In the reception room outside the ballroom, Lavalle, there are two bars, one to the right and one to the left as people enter."

  "Correct," Lavalle said.

  "Beyond that the official reception line is to be set up— Mrs. Horween, the girl, a couple of male relatives. Mrs. Hor-ween wants the order reversed. Reception line first, then the two bars."

  "No problem," Lavalle said. "The bars are movable."

  "You are overlooking one stage in the procedure, Mr. Chambrun," Reggie Lucas said. "I come first, checking out the guests at the door—examining their teeth for flaws, their bodies for birthmarks. Just to make sure no one who isn't invited gets in. Actually, I will have a checklist. The reason for the bars beyond the reception line is that Mrs. Horween would like to be sure people are not smashed before they meet the debutante."

  "Not unreasonable," Chambrun said.

  "Supper will be served at precisely one o'clock," Chambrun said. "It was originally scheduled for twelve-thirty. Mrs. Horween wants it moved forward half an hour."

  "Which brings me to an unrelated question, Mr. Chambrun," Amato, the banquet manager, said. "Robert Gaynor, in Penthouse Three, has ordered a dinner for two. He wants fresh salmon with sauce Beaumont. It seems he had it here sometime. Unfortunately there is no fresh salmon on the market except half a ton that Mrs. Horween had flown in from the state of Washington. I doubt if she would miss two servings."

  "Naughty, naughty!" Reggie Lucas giggled. "You will have to be supersweet to me, Chambrun, or I might tell?"

  "On another problem presented by our movie star," Amato said. "He demands a certain brand of Spanish sherry. I can't produce it for him."

  Chambrun raised a disapproving eyebrow. "It is my understanding that there is no wine worth serving that we don't have in our cellar."

  "That's the difficulty. The sherry Gaynor asks for isn't worth serving," Amato said. "It's a cheap cooking sherry no one I can find would consider stocking. But the gentleman insists. This is some kind of anniversary. He and the lady drank this cheap sherry on the occasion they are celebrating. I'm damned if I can find a bottle of it anywhere. I understand they stopped exporting it from Spain about five years ago. No market for it here."

  "Do your best," Chambrun said. He sat frowning for a moment, then he went on with a dozen small demands made by Mrs. Horween. He and the others settled them. As far as I could tell, Mrs. Horween had scored on all her major points except the elevators. I do remember that Reggie Lucas was to have a telephone at his elbow as the guests arrived. Any phone calls from anyone, for anyone at the ball, were to be delivered to him.

  Miss Veach, the night superintendent on the switchboard, had arranged for Reggie's phone. "Robert Gaynor seems to keep coming up," she said. "He has instructed us to put no calls through to him after seven o'clock tonight. He must be planning quite a celebration with his lady."

  The meeting was over, but Chambrun stopped Mr. Atter-bury at the door. "Be good enough to send up our folder on Robert Gaynor," he said.

  Finally Chambrun, Miss Ruysdale, and I were alone. Reggie Lucas had dashed off to report an almost-victory to Mrs. Horween. Everyone else had gone back to work.

  "Speaking of Gaynor," I said. "The lady he's celebrating with tonight is the wife of someone who is a guest in the hotel."

  "How do you know?" Chambrun asked.

  "He told me. Wanted me to understand why there's so much secrecy and hush-hush around his being here."

  "Who is she?" Chambrun asked.

  "No idea. That's something he didn't tell me."

  "I don't like the feel of the whole thing," Chambrun said slowly.

  "She is maybe the five thousandth cheating wife in my time," Ruysdale said. "I know you don't approve, but what's so different about it?"

  Chambrun crushed out his flat Egyptian cigarette in the ashtray on his desk. "I don't know. I wish I did," he said.

  I make it sound as though Chambrun were playing some kind of hunch, having some kind of psychic premonition. If you knew him as I do, you'd know he played no such games with himself. It was hours later before I knew what was bothering him. I found myself too busy to deal with the fragments he never overlooked.

  My problem was that in the late afternoon someone on radio tipped Robert Gaynor's presence. The word got out that he was in town, staying at the Beaumont. Excited young girls seemed to appear out of the woodwork and were obviously prepared to camp out in the lobby, waiting for Gaynor to show.

  The front desk did their best to persuade these sensation seekers that the story was false, Robert Gaynor wasn't registered at the Beaumont. That was the technical truth. He was "a John Smith," registered under a phony name. Extra precautions were taken by Jerry Dodd and his security people to keep these young people from infiltrating to the upper floors to search for their idol. With only one elevator operating to the roof, it was easy enough to keep that car blocked off. I took it upon myself around six o'clock to call Gaynor and tell him that the secret was out and that an army of admirers was flooding the place.

  "Can you keep them off the roof?" he asked.

  "Of course," I said.

  "Then it doesn't matter—I'm not leaving this penthouse," he said.

  "I called you now because I know you're not taking calls after seven o'clock," I said.

  "What are you talking about?" he said sharply.

  "Your orders to the switchboard," I said.

  "I gave no such orders," he said.

  Some kind of confusion by one of the switchboard operators, I thought. "I can have the order canceled," I said.

  He laughed. "Never mind," he said. "Its not a bad idea."

  It didn't occur to him or to me to wonder who could have given the order to the switchboard. We both assumed it was some kind of misunderstanding. Of course, I should have known better. Chambrun's staff doesn't make that kind of mistake.

  It was white tie and tails for me and for Chambrun for the night of the ball. I took time to dress after my conversation with Gaynor and was pleased with the results. I went down the hall to Chambrun's office. The first thing I noticed was that he was wearing a black tie with his full-dress suit.

  "You put on the wrong tie," I said.

  He seemed far away. He glanced at himself in the wall mirror. "So I did," he said.

  "Shall I get you a white tie? I have a spare," I said.

  He reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a white tie. "I'll be ready when the right time comes," he said. "Who wears a black tie with a dress suit, Mark?"

  "A maitre d', a waiter," I said.

  "I am about to become a room service waiter," he said.

  I was not a witness to what happened after that, but when it was all over we got the details from Chambrun. He had put together some of the fragments I've mentioned, and he'd anticipated violence. And he almost prevented it, but not quite.

  No one ever questions anything Chambrun does in the hotel, and when he appeared in the kitchen and took over from the room sevice waiter who was about to take dinner up to Penthouse Three, no one asked a question. Whatever he chose to do in the Beaumont was law.

  I need to explain that there are three ways to reach the roof other than the fire stairs. There are the two elevators in the

  lobby, one of which was out of order, and there is a service elevator at the back that is used by room service and by maids and other personnel at the proper times. The three penthouses are separated at the front by garden space, but they are connected at the rear by a service hallway into which t
he service elevator opens along with the fire stairs.

  Chambrun, a napkin draped over his arm, went up in the service elevator with the wagon that carried Robert Gaynor's dinner—which included some of Mrs. Horween's State of Washington salmon. At the roof level he ran into a horror that sickened him. Stretched out in the hallway was the body of a girl, brutally beaten around the head—pistol-whipped, he thought. On the room services hall phone he called for Jerry Dodd and the house physician, Dr. Partridge. The girl, a total stranger to Chambrun, was still breathing faintly.

  He waited for help, cursing himself for not having foreseen this possibility. When the girl was in the doctors care, he gave instructions to Jerry Dodd.

  "You're going in there?" Jerry asked, pointing to the back door of Penthouse Three. Chambrun, his face grim, nodded.

  "I'm going with you," Jerry said.

  "Just handle your orders, Jerry," Chambrun said. "Let us hope I'm not too late."

  With a service key, he opened the rear door of Penthouse Three and wheeled in the dinner wagon. He waited in the kitchen area, straining to hear something. He was aware of the scent of an exotic perfume. Then he heard a woman laugh.

  "Thank heaven," he said, under his breath.

  He wheeled the wagon into the living room. Gaynor had said that, when the waiter brought the dinner, he was just to leave it and go away. He was not to see who Gaynor's guest was. Chambrun walked to the door that led to the penthouse's bedrooms.

  "Gaynor, it's necessary that I talk to you," he called out.

  There was no sound from the rooms beyond.

  "You will force me to come looking for you," Chambrun said.

  Gaynor appeared, his face flushed with anger. "I gave strict instructions—" he began. "Mr. Chambrun!"

  "There isn't much time to talk," Chambrun said in a cold voice. This was the hanging judge.

  "Talk about what?" Gaynor asked.