The Evil That Men Do

A Pierre Chambrun Mystery

Hugh Pentecost

A MysteriousPress.com

Open Road Integrated Media

Ebook

Contents

Part 1

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Part 2

One

Two

Part 3

One

Two

Three

Four

Part 1

One

IT WAS SHORTLY AFTER five o’clock in the morning when a young woman got out of a taxi in front of the Hotel Beaumont, paid the driver, and walked through the revolving door into the hotel’s lobby.

The Beaumont is New York’s top luxury hotel, but at five in the morning is caught a little off guard, like a glamorous actress discovered in a beauty salon, her face smeared with creams, her hair done up in curlers. At four-thirty in the morning, an army of cleaners bears down on the lobby, the bars, the restaurants, and the ballroom, with vacuum cleaners, brass- and glass-polishing potions, electrically-driven trash wagons, dusters on long poles for cleaning the magnificent chandeliers, old-fashioned buckets and mops, all propelled by old-fashioned elbow grease. The windows of the swank shops off the lobby, displaying jewels, furs, and extravagant women’s clothing, and a costly nonsense of toys and small gifts, are dark. The mink draped mannequins stare out at the wall-to-wall green carpeting in the entrance halls and lobby, now being curried like a million-dollar race horse.

The young woman who had come in from the street walked straight to the reception desk. She had no luggage. Mr. Karl Nevers, night reservation clerk, gave her his pleasant, professional smile as she approached. Her belted trench coat didn’t completely hide a lush and graceful figure. She had come in out of the gray-darkness of dawn, but she wore dark glasses that made her face, with its high cheekbones and wide scarlet mouth, expressionless.

Hollywood, Karl Nevers thought. Then his professional smile broke into a relaxed grin.

“Miss Standing!” he said, cordially.

“Dorothy Smith,” the girl said.

“Whatever you say,” Nevers said.

“As you see, I have no luggage,” Dorothy Smith said, “and I have no reservation.”

Nevers spun a circular card holder, took out a card, and looked pleased. “We can give you your usual suite, Miss er—Smith. It’s open for another week, and if you plan to stay longer, I think we could do some juggling.”

“I—don’t know how long I’ll be here,” the girl said. She was looking past Nevers at a clock on the far wall. The time was five seventeen. Under the face of the clock was a space that showed the day’s date. “This is the fourteenth?” the girl asked.

“Yes, Miss Smith.”

A nerve twitched high up on her cheek. She looked quickly away from Nevers.

“I’ll have the night bell captain take you up to your suite, Miss Smith,” Nevers said. He pressed a button under the desk. There were no clanging bells in the Beaumont.

Mike Maggio, the night bell captain, appeared and his smile, too, was more than professional.

“Nice to see you back, Miss Standing,” he said.

“Miss Smith,” Nevers said.

“Oh—sure,” Maggio said, and looked around for non-existent luggage.

“If you’ll just sign the register, Miss Smith,” Nevers said, turning the leather-framed registration card the girl’s way, pen in place beside it. The girl wrote “Dorothy Smith” quickly.

“Nine F,” Nevers said, as he held out a key to Maggio.

Maggio led the way across the lobby to the elevators. A scrubwoman, down on her knees, gave Miss Dorothy Smith an indignant look. Guests should not intrude on the manicuring of the hotel.

In the elevator Maggio tried conversation. “Weather must be great out your way, Miss Standing.”

“Smith,” the girl said.

“Ooops—sorry,” Maggio said. “Spring doesn’t seem to want to come here.”

“You’re sure this is the fourteenth of March?” the girl asked.

“One month to income-tax day,” Maggio said.

The elevator door slid open noiselessly. There had been almost no sensation of motion as it had risen to the ninth floor. Maggio led the way to 9F, opened the door, and went in. He went through the routine check of the bathroom, bedroom, and sitting room. The girl stood motionless in the center of the sitting room, almost as if she was unaware of Maggio’s presence. He stood opposite her, smiling, waiting for what should come next.

“Anything else I can do, Miss Smith?” he asked.

She turned her head to look at him, startled. Then she opened her bag and looked in it, as if she wasn’t certain what she’d find. She brought out a crumpled collection of bills and handed one to Maggio. It was a five.

Maggio beamed. “Let me know if there’s anything—”

He didn’t finish, because she walked straight past him into the bedroom. She stood looking around her, and then took off the trench coat and dropped it on a chair, along with the soft-brimmed felt hat she’d been wearing. Her hair was a bright natural red.

Then she turned and threw herself, face down, on the bed. Terrible, agonizing sobs shook her. …

In addition to a regular credit file on guests of the Beaumont there is a special file, filled out on the orders of Pierre Chambrun, the hotel’s resident manager, which tells a great deal more than the name, address, and banking references of a customer. The code-letter A inscribed on a card means that the subject is an alcoholic; W on a man’s card means an undue interest in women, possibly the expensive call girls who appear from time to time in the Trapeze Bar; M on a woman’s card means a man-hunter; O arbitrarily stands for “over his head,” meaning that particular guest can’t afford the Beaumont’s prices and shouldn’t be allowed to get in too deep; in the case of a married couple, the letters MX mean that the man is double-crossing his wife with some other woman, and WX means that the wife is cheating. Pierre Chambrun and his staff know a great deal more about their guests than those guests would like them to know.

The card on Miss Doris Standing was unique. On the subject of credit the notation read: “Unlimited. The second-richest girl in the world.” There was a special note in Chambrun’s handwriting, distinguished by his little Greek e’s, which read as follows: “When she registers as Doris Standing, batten down the hatches. You can expect her to be quickly followed by what someone has called Doris’ Standing Army—a collection of irresponsible lunatics. When she registers as Dorothy Smith, you can draw a deep and grateful breath of relief. When the ‘Standing Army’ appears on the scene, they must be dealt with firmly but with courtesy. They could buy the hotel out from under us if the owner chose to sell.”

The owner, Mr. George Battle, lived permanently on the French Riviera, apparently doing nothing more than count his money, which came from oil wells and industrial patents. The Beaumont, which operated at what would have seemed a solid profit under Chambrun’s management, was no more than a plaything to Mr. Battle. He liked it for its elegance and for its preservation of a fast-fading way of life in this age of chain management. It was the home-away-from-home of the most important and distinguished people from all over the world. It is possible that Chambrun would have found some way to discourage Miss Doris Standing’s patronage, except for the fact that when she and her maniacal crew were setting Europe on its collective ears, her base of operations was the luxurious château owned and lived in by Mr. George Battle. Mr. Battle, rarely amused by anyone or anything, found Doris Standing to be an “original.” Escapades, which Mr. Battle would have considered unthinkable involving anyone else, were a source of amusement when invented by Doris Standing. It was Chambrun’s theory that Doris Standing’s outrageous behavior was condoned by George Battle because she managed, skillfully, to remind him of something he chose to forget the rest of the time—that he was a man.

Chambrun conceded that Doris Standing had a gift for making men of all ages acutely aware of their desires. Chambrun had looked at her himself and wondered whether, shed of his responsibilities, his performance could match the stirrings this extraordinary girl could create in him, a hardened cynic about such matters.

Miss Standing, in Chambrun’s book, was dynamite.

In Suite 9F, Doris Standing wept like a helpless child.

If you live or work in the Beaumont you can, if you are observant, learn to tell time without a clock. You would come to know that at precisely six-thirty in the morning the newsstand at the far end of the lobby is opened and a corp of bellboys begin to deliver papers to hundreds of rooms and apartments on the twenty-five floors above them. At precisely seven A.M., Mr. Karl Nevers is relieved at the reception desk by an interim clerk who will be in charge until Mr. Atterbury, the day man, comes on at nine. Nevers, carrying a batch of papers, goes to the fourth floor where there is a lounge and locker room for employees. Also on the fourth floor is the hotel’s public relations office. Nevers stops there and drops a sheet of paper in the wire basket on the receptionist’s desk. It is a list of all the check-ins and -outs since five o’clock the preceding day, when PR office closed.

At precisely eight A.M., the store windows in the corridors leading to the lobby from Fifth Avenue and from the side-street boundaries of the hotel, are lighted, even though the stores themselves will not open for another hour and a half. Any suggestion of gloom is unthinkable at the Beaumont.

Long before this, hundreds of phone calls have been made to awaken guests, to order breakfasts from room service. These activities are hidden from anyone not very much on the inside.

At precisely eight-thirty, the night crew of bellmen is relieved by a morning crew. Mike Maggio, the night captain, usually has some kind of wisecrack for Johnny Thacker, the day captain. On this particular morning Mike said:

“Doris Standing checked in at five o’clock.”

“Oh, God!” Johnny said.

Mike grinned. “As Dorothy Smith.”

“You trying to scare me out of six-months’ growth?” Johnny asked.

At precisely a quarter to nine, Miss Betsy Ruysdale crosses the lobby to the reception desk and waits to be handed a packet of letters by the clerk. Miss Ruysdale is Pierre Chambrun’s secretary and the letters are for her boss. Miss Ruysdale is difficult to describe. Chambrun has many requirements in a personal secretary. She must be efficient. She must be prepared to forget the eight-hour day or any regularity of working hours. She must be chic, but not disturbing. Chambrun doesn’t want to be distracted during his working hours—which are roughly twenty hours a day—nor does he want to be offended by anything unattractive. He doesn’t want any of the male members of his staff mooning over some doll in his outer office. Nor must they be repelled by the lady whose job it is to anticipate his needs a dozen times a day. Miss Ruysdale, by some miracle, met all these specifications. Her clothes were quiet but smart and expensive. Her manner toward the staff was friendly, touched by a nice humor, but she’d managed to draw an invisible line over which no one stepped. She was clearly all woman; yet, if she belonged to some man, his identity was a secret no one had penetrated. It couldn’t be Chambrun. Or could it? He neutered her by calling her “Ruysdale”—never Miss Ruysdale or Betsy.

Miss Ruysdale took her letters and special notes to Chambrun’s office suite on the second floor. She invariably arrived there at five minutes to nine. There was a small dressing room off the outer office that was her private domain. She emerged from it at precisely nine A.M., her dark hair drawn severely back from a high forehead. She had nice bones in her face.

The first thing Miss Ruysdale looked at was a copy of the check-ins and -outs that Karl Nevers had already left in the PR office. On this occasion she picked up a red pencil from her desk, circled the name “Dorothy Smith,” and carried the list into Chambrun’s private office. Chambrun’s office was not furnished like an office. The Oriental rug on the floor was priceless, a gift from an Indian maharaja who had been rescued from an embarrassing involvement with a lady—about whom he’d been mistaken—by the Beaumont’s manager. The desk was Florentine, exquisitely carved. The chairs were of the same period and locale, high-backed, beautiful to look at, and surprisingly comfortable. There was a sideboard by a far wall, on which rested the paraphernalia of a coffee service and a Turkish coffeemaker. There were no signs of office, no files, no visible safe; only the little intercom box on the desk that connected with Ruysdale’s desk, and two telephones, one a private line and one connected to the hotel switchboard.

Miss Ruysdale checked the lacquered box on the desk to make certain there was an ample supply of the Egyptian cigarettes Chambrun chain-smoked all day. Satisfied, she went to the sideboard and prepared the first pot of Turkish coffee, which would be followed by a half-dozen others before the day had ended.

Miss Ruysdale looked around the office, walked to the wall facing the big desk, and straightened the blue-period Picasso which hung there, and then went briskly out to her own domain. She glanced at her wrist watch. Chambrun would be arriving for breakfast in exactly fourteen minutes. She checked an impulse to prod the kitchen. They were never late.

Upstairs in Suite 9F, sunlight streamed through the bedroom windows onto the figure of a girl who slept, fully clothed, on the bed. Her pale face looked exhausted in sleep. …

Pierre Chambrun, resident manager of the Beaumont, was a small, dark man, stocky in build, with heavy pouches under dark eyes that could turn hard as a hanging judge’s, or unexpectedly twinkle with humor. Chambrun had been in the hotel business for thirty-five years and had risen to the top of the field. He ran the hotel without interference from Mr. George Battle, the owner. French by birth, Chambrun had come to this country as a small boy, and now he thought like an American. His training in the hotel business had often taken him back to Europe; he spoke several languages fluently; he could adopt a Continental manner to suit an occasion, but the Beaumont is an American institution and Chambrun kept its atmosphere strictly American.

Chambrun never ate lunch. As resident manager, his busiest time was between the hours of eleven and three—people with complaints, people with special problems, members of the staff confronted by one difficulty or another, outside interests using the hotel for parties, fashion shows, special conferences. The arrivals and departures of celebrities, notables, and the just plain rich required his personal attention. Though there were special departments and department heads for handling the intricacies of travel arrangements, publicity tie-ins, and general bowings and scrapings, Chambrun was always close at hand for the emergencies. He had a gift for delegating authority, but he was always ready to take the full responsibility for touchy decisions. He could make such decisions on the instant, and after thirty-five years in the business he could tell himself, without vanity, that he’d never made a delicate decision he felt later had been an error. A few of them had proved wrong or unworkable, but faced with the same facts again, he would make the same judgement.

Chambrun’s breakfast each morning, served at precisely nine-thirty, consisted of juice or fresh fruit in season, lamb chops or a small steak or brook trout or a Dover sole, toast in large quantities with sweet butter and strawberry preserve. And coffee—coffee which he went on drinking all day; American coffee for breakfast, followed by Turkish coffee, sipped in a demitasse until bedtime. At seven o’clock in the evening he ate an elaborate dinner specially prepared to meet the requirements of a gourmet’s palate.

Chambrun never looked at the mail or memoranda left on his desk by Ruysdale until he came to his second cup of coffee and his first Egyptian cigarette of the day. The memoranda from the night staff usually involved familiar problems requiring tact as well as iron discipline. Despite its reputation as the top luxury hotel in America, the Beaumont was confronted with many of the same problems as lesser establishments. There were always the drunks, the deadbeats, the call girls—the most expensive in New York but nonetheless call girls—the endless cantankerous guests, the suicides, the heart attacks suffered by elderly gentlemen in the rooms of young ladies not their wives, the whims of elderly dowagers with far more money than they could count, the petty thefts committed by amateurs who were almost always caught, and the professional jobs done by experts who were rarely caught once they had been inadvertently admitted to the hotel.

On the particular morning after the luggageless arrival of Doris Standing at the Beaumont, Chambrun sipped his second cup of coffee, inhaled deeply and contentedly on his first cigarette, and glanced at the list of check-ins. His eye caught the red circle surrounding the name of “Dorothy Smith.” He touched the button on his desk and Miss Ruysdale appeared promptly, carrying a stenographic pad and a thin manila folder. Behind her was a room-service waiter who moved silently toward Chambrun’s breakfast things.

“My compliments to Monsieur Fresney and tell him the Dover sole was particularly delicious this morning,” Chambrun said. The waiter grinned and wheeled out the breakfast table noiselessly. “Extraordinary man, Fresney,” Chambrun said, without looking at Miss Ruysdale. “You’d think there’d be a morning when he’d serve me fish when I couldn’t abide the thought of fish. But he’s never wrong. How do you suppose he knew that fish was exactly what I wanted today, particularly a Dover sole?”

“I think you’re attributing psychic powers to Monsieur Fresney which he doesn’t have,” Ruysdale said. “It’s just that he is an artist at his job, and when you take the cover off your breakfast dish, what he has prepared looks so delicious you assume you have been dreaming of it.”

“I employ you for your amazing wisdom, Ruysdale,” Chambrun said. The quick smile he gave her suggested genuine appreciation. “I wonder if you’d bring me the file on Miss Doris Standing.”

“I have it here,” Ruysdale said, and handed him the folder.

“Miraculous woman. Thank you, Ruysdale.”

Miss Ruysdale left him alone with the folder. There was nothing miraculous about her having brought the folder. Chambrun had trained her to anticipate.

And in Suite 9F, Doris Standing opened her gray-green eyes and looked up at the ceiling. Those eyes instantly squinted against the bright sunlight. She reached out, automatically, for the black glasses on the bedside table. After a moment she sat up and reached for the telephone.

“Mr. Atterbury, please,” she said.

Atterbury, the day receptionist, sounded delighted to hear from her. “Good morning, Miss—Smith,” he said. “Happy to have you with us. How can I help you?”

“I don’t know who to ask for what I want,” Doris Standing said.

“Whatever it is, I’m sure we have someone who can serve you, Miss Smith.”

“I want copies of the last three weeks of the Los Angeles Examiner and The New York Times,” Doris Standing said.

Two

ON THAT MORNING OF March fourteenth, I had been in charge of public relations at the Beaumont for a little more than a year. I owed my position to romance and a hunch.

The romance had developed between a wonderfully efficient and attractive girl named Alison Barnwell, who held the PR job, and a young man named John Wills. I had been Alison’s rather green assistant. When Alison gave Chambrun her notice, it seemed logical he’d go outside the office to find an experienced person to take her place. Instead, he offered me the chance.

“You know just enough, Haskell, to keep from making a botch of it,” Chambrun told me, “and not enough to tell me how the job should be done. You have to remember just one thing. The Beaumont is not only a hotel, it is a way of life.”

I was delighted, and scared, and moderately confident. Very shortly I found that Chambrun, by some personal magic, had changed my way of life without asking me to do any such thing. I gave up my apartment and moved into the hotel. At the end of the day’s work I found I didn’t run off into my old private life. There really was no end to the day’s work. After five, when my office closed, I’d have a drink or two in one of the bars, then go to my room to change into a dinner jacket, and spend the evening moving about the hotel, from the various bars, to the Blue Room night club, to the private banquet rooms where special events were in progress. I was a little like an old-time Western marshal checking out the town for the night.

The Beaumont had become my town, with its own mayor, its own police force, its own public services, its cooperatively-owned apartments, its facilities for transients, its night clubs, its cafés, its restaurants, its quality shops opening off the lobby, its telephone switchboards, its complex human relationships. It was my town, and I felt possessive about it and jealous of its reputation. I guess that was exactly the way Chambrun felt, which is why it runs with the smoothness of an expertly engineered Swiss watch. Others felt as I did, I knew. There was Jerry Dodd, the security officer, who could smell trouble before it developed. There were Miss Ruysdale, and Atterbury and Karl Nevers, the reservation clerks, and Mike Maggio and Johnny Thacker, the bell captains, and the army of bartenders, and captains who presided over the various special rooms, and the chief telephone operators, and the housekeepers, and the banquet manager, and on and on. At any time of day or night, Pierre Chambrun could lift the telephone on his desk and have the answer to any question almost before it was out of his mouth. Of course he knew exactly whom to ask.

I’d been in my office for about a half hour that morning, checking out the details of a fashion show that was to be held in the ballroom that afternoon, when the phone on my desk rang. It was Atterbury.

“I take it you know Doris Standing checked in last night,” he said.

“Dorothy Smith,” I said, smiling to myself.

“Let’s hope,” Atterbury said. “She’s just called in, asking for back issues of the Los Angeles Examiner and The New York Times for the last three weeks. Can do?”

“I suppose so,” I said. “The Times is simple. We keep a monthly file. The Examiner may take some digging.”

“Hop to it, dad,” Atterbury said, “before Smith turns into Standing.”

“Yes, master,” I said.

I had only just put down the phone when it rang again. It was Miss Ruysdale.

“Will you drop by at your convenience,” she asked. There was the faintest note of amusement in her voice. She was quoting Chambrun. What he meant was “Now!”

One of the only problems in my job at the Beaumont was my secretary. Shelda Mason had been Alison Barnwell’s secretary and I’d inherited her. She was disconcerting because she was so damned beautiful. She belonged on a magazine cover and not shut away in a fourth-floor office. She had kept me at a distance for a long time, obviously uncertain whether she approved of me or not. I felt I should be dating her and not giving orders. I had the feeling there was some never-seen boy friend in the background who would clobber me if I raised so much as a flirtatious eyebrow. Men attached to girls like Shelda are inclined to be violently possessive. Then, unexpectedly, she had made up her mind about me. Her decision was favorable. It was making it very hard for me to keep my mind on the Beaumont.

Shelda was at her desk in my reception room as I started out in reply to Chambrun’s summons. She gave me one of her special smiles that acted on me like power brakes.

“You know, don’t you, that mine is natural?” she asked.

“Your what is natural?” I asked.

“My hair!” she said. “Hers isn’t.”

“Who her?”

“Doris Standing, dope. You know she checked in this morning, don’t you? Or haven’t you been tending to your knitting.”

“I know.”

“She dyes her hair. International beauty my foot,” Shelda said. “I suppose you’ll be dancing attendance and telling me its part of your job!”

“You’ll do the first dancing, my sweet,” I said. “The lady has already expressed desires.”

“Slut!” Shelda said.

I conveyed the information about the need for back issues of the newspapers. “Your job,” I said. “With all your built-in charm when you deliver. See you!”

“Stinker!” she shouted after me as I went down the hall.

Miss Ruysdale gave me her cool smile and gestured, without speaking, toward Chambrun’s office.

“Trouble?” I asked.

“On the horizon,” she said, “which is the time to tackle it.”

You’ve probably heard the old gag about the banker who was so mean that the only way you could tell the difference between his good eye and his glass eye was that the glass eye had a little more warmth in it. Chambrun could look that cold when there was trouble. This time he seemed relaxed and generally satisfied with the state of his world.

“Morning, Mark,” he said. “ ‘Red in the morning, sailor take warning.’ ”

“What’s up, sir?” I asked.

“The last visitation of what Jerry Dodd calls ‘Doris’ Standing Army’ took place before your association with us, Mark,” he said.

“I’ve already sensed a little tension in the atmosphere,” I said. “But aren’t we safe? She’s here as Dorothy Smith.”

“Had any extensive dealings with chameleons?” Chambrun asked. He reached out and lit one of his thin, flat cigarettes. “She arrived without luggage. Suggest anything to you?”

I shrugged. “Stayed in town for a party and decided not to go home,” I suggested.

“Home is in Beverly Hills, California,” he said.

“Well—,” I said, and let it hang there.

“Sit down while I give you a history lesson,” Chambrun said.

I sat down in one of the big, high-backed Florentine chairs. The Great Man’s pouchy eyes had a faraway look in them, and his smile had lost much of its warmth.

“The stuffed shirt, as a member of society, is a pain in the neck,” Chambrun said. “I think most of us rather enjoy the spectacle of a really Grade-A stuffed shirt taking a good solid pratfall in public. Doris Standing and her army make a crusade of staging public pratfalls for the overstuffed.” Chambrun glanced at me. “I can see you have a tendency to applaud rather than hiss,” he said. “On the surface I would be with you. But there is an extra element to this that you must understand. Doris’ army are like cats after tunafish. They must have it! If there isn’t a genuine Grade-A stuffed shirt handy, they’ll take the next-best thing. They must have their sardonic laughter. They are unconcerned with who else beside the stuffed shirt gets hurt. An idol may have feet of clay and topple over from a good hard push. But it isn’t just the idol which is destroyed; a whole population of worshipers is left rudderless on a stormy sea. These people dig up unpleasant truths and expose them. They aren’t blackmailers. They are so rich that money is meaningless. They do what they do simply for the pleasure of inflicting pain.”

“I’m beginning to feel a little queasy,” I said.

“It began a few years back when a prominent member of a reform party was running for governor of a certain state,” Chambrun said. “Toward the end of his campaign, during which our reformer had blasted all of the crooked politicians, gamblers, bribe-takers and whatnot in his state, a document was circulated to a huge mailing list showing the candidate jumping out a window, carrying his pants in his hand. It turned out to be a perfectly legitimate photograph. The candidate had been staying in a motel somewhere away from home. There had been a fire. He’d gotten out of his unit fast, because the flames were already licking at his door. The implication in the picture, circulated without comment, suggested something far less moral. It seems it had been taken by an amateur photographer, also a guest at the motel, who had no idea who the gentleman without pants was. A bystander bought the film from him. A man was destroyed politically, despite his protests of innocence. His wife of twenty years divorced him some months later. So much for fun and games.”

“Sophomoric,” I said.

“Does it help to know it’s a sophomore who just kicked you in the groin?” Chambrun asked. “They play games like children, Mark, vicious games. They laugh at honest sentiment. But it goes a lot deeper than this. They destroy genuine human relationships. They drive people out of important jobs, out of government posts. The people have to be consequential so that the audience will be large and wide. When they appear on the scene, you can know that someone is about to be burned. They don’t act on impulse. Their plans are elaborate and detailed. They travel the whole world looking for important victims. People laugh when they see them coming, but if they’re sensible they run for the nearest exit.”

“And you think they’re coming here?”

“We have three United Nations delegations housed under our roof,” Chambrun said. “We have a half-dozen top stars in the entertainment world. We have the representatives of great wealth and great power. One of them could be the target for a game—Game spelled with a capital G.” Chambrun’s face was bleak. “Their one venture here had to do with the late Julie Frazer. You remember her?”

“Of course,” I said. “Singer, movie star. The original Cinderella girl.”

Chambrun nodded. “Millions of people loved her from the days of that Cinderella movie. She was a great chanteuse. She packed them in all over this country and abroad. She had her problems—liquor and eventually drugs. She went completely to pieces. But she made a heroic effort to get herself in hand. I was approached to give her a chance for a comeback, here in the Blue Lagoon Room. That,” Chambrun said, and his face went stony, “was when I first met Emlyn Teague.”

“Who is Emlyn Teague?” I asked.

“Doris Standing’s alter ego—her game-twin, you might call him. But I didn’t know, then. He posed as Julie Frazer’s friend. His personal charm sold me completely. He wanted the comeback chance for her, and he would underwrite a two-week contract for her. He didn’t mean just her salary, but what the Beaumont had to take to break even for two weeks in the Blue Lagoon Room. I was magnanimous. I refused the underwriting. I’d take a chance on Julie, I told him.” Chambrun’s lips were a thin, straight line. “Bastard,” he said quietly. I’d never seen him quite so stirred. “It was decided there’d be no hullabaloo about Julie. It was to be staged as something quite casual as far as the public was concerned. We gave a dinner that night for all the columnists. The regular floor show was to go on, and in the middle of it the MC was to spot Julie at a corner table. He would introduce her, beg her to sing. She would hesitate, and then come forward and put on a performance. Teague said he would spread the word, enough to guarantee a full house. He was as good as his word. Julie Frazer sat at her corner table with Emlyn Teague, and Doris Standing, and a young man named Jeremy Slade, and another girl named Barbara Towers. The big moment came, and the MC went into his spiel that would lead into the introduction of Julie. Suddenly, Jeremy Slade projected himself into the middle of the floor. He had a gun in his hand. Women screamed. The MC, who was a cowardly twerp, backed away from him instead of trying to stop him from what he had in mind. Before I could reach him, or Cardoza, the Blue Lagoon’s captain, could reach Slade, he waved for silence. He shouted a jumble of words to the effect that we live in a crazy world, threatened by the atom bomb, our lives in danger in the city’s subways and parks, the air we breath polluted, our water supply dwindling. Every moment of every day we risked death. Well, he wasn’t going to let other people threaten him. He’d create his own risks. Then he spun the cylinder on his gun. ‘I do this every day,’ he shouted, ‘and I thought I’d give you the pleasure of watching a game of Russian roulette.’

“The place was bedlam, women screaming. Cardoza and I were fighting our way toward Slade when he put the gun to his forehead and pulled the trigger. Of course nothing happened but a dull click. We got to him and dragged him away.

“That wasn’t the moment for Julie to appear with her nostalgic, sentimental ballads. Teague professed to be horrified. Slade, he said, was a casual acquaintance. He suggested that we wait until the second show to introduce Julie. And so we waited.”

Chambrun sighed.

“I remember,” I said. “It didn’t come off.”

“It didn’t come off,” Chambrun said, grimly. “When the MC introduced Julie to a delighted audience, she came out onto the floor, dead, staggering drunk. She sang one number—a horrible caricature of herself. We took her away as gently as we could. Teague professed himself to be heartbroken. She had been so shaken by Slade’s performance that she’d needed a drink. She’d been close to fainting, he said. He hadn’t dreamed that a drink or two would have the effect it did have.

“The columnists were as decent about it as you could expect, except for one of the most important ones whose stuff is syndicated all over the world. I’ve since come to know that he was a member of Doris’ Standing Army. He very effectively ended any chance of a comeback for Julie. She gave up trying and really went off the deep end. She wound up in an institution for alcoholics, where her heart stopped beating one cold, rainy day.”

Chambrun got up and went over to the sideboard for a fresh cup of Turkish coffee. He seemed to need a moment to control a long-smoldering anger.

“They made me an accessory to what happened to Julie Frazer. Innocent, but an accessory.” Chambrun walked back to his desk and sat down, balancing his demitasse in the palm of his left hand. “I have a list of names here, Mark.” He shoved a slip of paper across the desktop. I picked it up and read:

Emlyn Teague

Jeremy Slade

Oscar Maxwell

Barbara (“Bobby”) Towers

Van Delaney

Ivor Jerningham

“You might call those people the high command of Doris’ Standing Army,” Chambrun said. “I want them watched for. The reception desk has been alerted. Jerry Dodd in security knows each one of them by sight. I want you and your staff alert around the clock.”

“Right,” I said. I hesitated. “You seemed to place some significance in the fact that La Standing arrived without luggage.”

Chambrun shrugged. “Anything unusual about any of these people suggests trouble in the wind.”

The house phone on Chambrun’s desk rang. He answered and listened. Then he said, “Thank you, Jerry,” and hung up.

“Jerry Dodd reports that Doris Standing has just ordered about three thousand dollars’ worth of clothes from Marinelli’s. Daytime stuff, evening gowns, negligees, lingerie.”

Marinelli’s was the very chic women’s shop in the lobby.

“It would seem she plans to stay,” I said.

Part of my job as public relations man for the Beaumont is to keep society columnists and the Broadway boys posted on arrivals and departures that have any news value. My judgement on what is news is important to the hotel. There’s an old chestnut in the business about one of the first PR men in the trade. He conceived the idea of sending items back to the home-town newspapers of guests: “Mr. and Mrs. Tom Jones of X-ville are spending the weekend at the Waldorf.” This would work for the hotel when other prominent citizens of X-ville came to New York. It did work—for about four days. And then the hotel received an irate call from a lady in X-ville. “I am Mrs. Tom Jones and I am in X-ville. I would like to know who the blankety blank the woman is who’s spending the weekend with my husband in your hotel!”

Doris Standing was news, wherever she went. But since she had registered as Dorothy Smith, I chose to ignore her presence in our midst. The situation wasn’t unique. Dozens of famous movie stars have registered under phoney names, with our full knowledge, to keep autograph hunters and salesmen and other nuts out of their hair. We always check with a famous name before we release any publicity on his presence.

I had routine things to do that morning. Ormanski, the famous couturier, was showing his new spring line of fashions in the ballroom that afternoon. It involved special arrangements for fashion writers, buyers, a select list of prominent ladies on the “best-dressed” lists, television people, models, and God knows what else. These are high-strung people with a tendency toward hysteria. Let one small item in the arrangements go wrong, and the foundations of the hotel would begin to shake. I spent the balance of the morning after my chat with Chambrun, checking out each detail of the arrangements personally.

At a quarter to one, I went up to the Trapeze Bar to keep a prearranged appointment with Ormanski’s business manager. The Trapeze Bar is suspended in space, like a birdcage, over the foyer to the Grand Ballroom. Its walls are an elaborate Florentine grillwork. An artist of the Calder school has decorated it with mobiles of circus performers working on trapezes. They sway slightly in the draft from a concealed air-freshening system. They create the illusion that the whole place sways gently.

I was on time, and Mr. Del Greco, the captain in the Trapeze, led me to a table where the Ormanski party waited. I found myself being treated like an incompetent small boy. I had to report on every detail of the afternoon’s performance and how well we were prepared to cope. I was getting irritated—and thirsty—when I heard a woman scream. The quiet hum of conversation in the Trapeze rose to an excited babble. People were standing, and I had to stand to see what on earth was happening.

A young man with dark hair, cut long, was standing at the bar. He was holding a dry martini in his left hand and a revolver in his right. He was shouting something I couldn’t distinguish over the crowd noise. He waved the gun threateningly at Mr. Del Greco and a small army of waiters who had started to close in on him. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Eddie, the head bartender, talking urgently on the phone behind the bar. Then the young man held the revolver to his head.

The woman screamed again.

I could see the man’s finger squeeze the trigger.

And nothing happened.

The young man threw back his head and began to laugh. Del Greco and his men moved in. Instantly, the young man sprang onto the bar. He ran along it, kicking glasses right and left, sprang past a stunned drinker at the far end, and raced out the door. He didn’t take the stairway to the foyer, but ducked out a fire exit. That way he could go up or down.

I left the Ormanski crowd and joined Eddie behind the bar. Eddie had been trying to locate Jerry Dodd. I called Chambrun’s office.

“We have with us Jeremy Slade,” I told him. …

The Russian-roulette player vanished into thin air. By the time Jerry Dodd reached the Trapeze and organized a search, there was no immediate trail to follow. Slade could have gone up into any one of more than a thousand rooms, or down into the labyrinth of kitchens, laundries, utility spaces, storage areas. There were a good fifty exits that would have taken him to one of the half-dozen ways to the street. No doorman had seen anything suspicious. But there had been no time to alert doormen if Slade had gone directly out to the street.

There was one specific place to go, and Chambrun went there, accompanied by Jerry Dodd and me.

Suite 9F.

I had seen pictures of Doris Standing but never the lady herself. Pictures can be misleading. Except for candid shots, they’re apt to be very much to the advantage of the subject. This was not so in Doris Standing’s case. I knew I could never tell my glamorous secretary what I really thought about Miss Standing. Shelda might be right about the red hair, but if so, the Standing hairdresser was a genius. I was reminded of the breathtaking beauty of the young Maureen O’Hara. The door to Suite 9F had been opened to us by Madame Marinelli from the dress shop. Her intention to give us a haughty “be off” was abruptly changed when she saw Chambrun.

“Miss Standing is trying on clothes,” Marinelli said. “I don’t think—”

“It’s an emergency,” Chambrun said, and walked into the sitting room.

Madame Marinelli, a black-gowned duenna, disappeared into the bedroom and, a few moments later, Doris Standing appeared, wearing a housecoat she’d evidently been trying on. I could see the price tag on its gold, quilted sleeve.

“Hello, Mr. Chambrun,” she said. “Miss Standing.” He gave her a stiff little bow. “Are you and Madame Marinelli the only people in this suite?”

“One of my girls—” Marinelli said from the doorway, indicating the bedroom with a nod. “No one else?” Chambrun asked. “Would that be any of your business, Mr. Chambrun?” Doris asked. She stood very straight, her head held high. The gold housecoat fitted her as if it had been tailored for her. The gray-green eyes were very bright, a little angry, a little amused. Her voice was low, pleasant, but used to giving orders.

“Twenty minutes ago, a friend of yours played his familiar game of Russian roulette in the Trapeze Bar,” Chambrun said. “I want him, because I want him placed under arrest for creating a disturbance.”

Just for an instant her wide scarlet mouth seemed to tighten, and then it relaxed into a completely charming smile.

“Really, Mr. Chambrun, I’m not Jeremy’s keeper,” the girl said. She looked at me. “I know Dodd,” she said, “but this one—?”

“Mr. Haskell, my public relations man.”

“Ah, so you’re going to make a field day out of Jeremy?” Doris Standing said. “The hotel must live, I suppose.”

I think it was the first and only time I ever saw Chambrun dismissed as a management stooge. He’s respected by real kings and tycoons and political powers, by movie stars and great ladies in the social world, and by busboys and washroom attendants and call girls and headwaiters, and by that most temperamental of all human beings—chefs. I had come to understand that his genius lay in his ability to show deference to the important, the famous, and the very rich without being servile, and to be friendly to people in the lower social echelons without being patronizing.

He had broken one of his fundamental rules in the case of this golden girl. He had allowed his own emotions to play a part in the moment. His anger showed and she was prepared to laugh at him. That was her way. Expose some genuine feeling, and Doris’ Standing Army would indulge in derisive mirth.

“I do wish you’d tell me what the reaction was,” Doris said. “In the Trapeze Bar at the height of the lunch hour? Did the ladies scream? That always tickles Jeremy. One good scream is worth the performance.”

“I won’t describe it to you, Miss Standing, because I wasn’t there,” Chambrun said. I gave him a quick look. His voice had changed. Quick footwork, I thought. He’d recognized his mistake as fast as I had. “But I will describe something I did witness. I was with Julie Frazer when she died. It should be the icing on that particular cake for you.”

The smile on that lovely face seemed to freeze. She wasn’t supposed to have feelings about such things, but I could swear Chambrun had drawn blood.

“What is it you really want, Mr. Chambrun?” she asked. “Permission to search my suite?”

“I want your word that Slade isn’t here and that you don’t know where he is,” Chambrun said.

“He is not. I do not,” Doris said.

“Thank you,” Chambrun said. “I’d like to say one thing to you, Miss Standing. A man who allows himself to be twice burned by the same fire is a fool.”

“Meaning?”

“You’ll have to judge for yourself whether or not I’m a fool,” Chambrun said. “Thank you again.”

He turned and walked briskly out of 9F. …

About four o’clock of what seemed a long afternoon, Shelda Mason, my fabulous secretary, and I were sitting in the Grand Ballroom watching Ormanski’s equally fabulous models parade in Ormanski’s fabulous designs for spring. Shelda and I had had a brief and comically heated debate about Doris Standing’s hair; I on the side of God, and she on the side of Clairol. It had left Shelda snappish about Ormanski’s models and Ormanski’s designs.

“It appears women are to be men again next summer,” Shelda muttered, as a collection of beach pajamas and slacks took their place on the runways. “These pansy designers are about to turn the world sexless.”

I said something about designs being unimportant. Women, I told her, were at their best taking off and putting on. She kicked me very solidly in the shins just as Johnny Thacker, the day bell captain, touched me on the shoulder.

“Boss wants you on the run,” he said. “Suite 9F.”

“What’s up?” I asked.

“A suicide,” Johnny said, and was gone.

My gut did a flip-flop. I felt Shelda’s hand close tightly over mine.

“Oh, no!” she whispered.

Whatever Shelda might have said about Doris Standing, when it came to realities she’s very genuine with very uncomplicated emotions. She and I were both thinking the same thing. Doris Standing was so young, so alive, so lovely. A good solid paddling by a good solid man could have put her on the rails toward a life which, with all her assets, offered everything.

I tried to be practical as I headed across the lobby toward the elevators. I knew my job would be to deal with the press and the radio and TV boys the minute this story broke. Doris Standing would make headlines. I’d have to do what I could to soft-pedal the Beaumont’s part in it. There wasn’t going to be much we could do except ask for favors in return for the many we had handed out to the news media in the past.

I asked myself if we shouldn’t have guessed something like this was in the wind. She had arrived without luggage. She’d signed in as Dorothy Smith. And the newspapers! Shelda had gotten the back issues for three weeks of both The Times and the Examiner for Doris, and delivered them in person.

“She looks pretty terrible when she isn’t done up like a circus horse,” Shelda had told me.

But why the new clothes if she meant to kill herself? I had an unpleasant vision of her, stretched out on her bed in that gold housecoat. Poison? Wrists cut?

I commandeered an elevator and was whisked up to the ninth floor. The elevator operator hadn’t heard anything but the simple fact of suicide. The hotel had already begun to buzz.

One of Jerry Dodd’s men was standing outside the door of 9F.

“You’re to go in, Mr. Haskell,” he said. “Only take a good, deep breath. It isn’t pretty.”

I didn’t want to go in, but I went in.

Jerry Dodd was there, and on the floor was a body covered with a sheet. Jerry is a thin, wiry little man in his late forties, with a professional smile that does nothing to hide the fact that his pale eyes are sharp, penetrating, and able to see and read a great deal at a moment’s glance. He is one of a half-dozen people on the staff whom Chambrun trusts and counts on without reservation.

“Where’s the boss?” I asked him, in a funeral-parlor whisper.

He nodded toward the bedroom. “In there with her,” he said.

I felt the small hairs rising on the back of my neck. “Her?” I said.

“Doris Standing,” Jerry said.

“But—?” I pointed at the sheet. “I thought—”

Jerry’s mouth was a grim slit. He bent down and pulled aside one end of the sheet.

“I thought it was an act,” Jerry said, “but it seems there may have been a loaded shell in that gun after all.”

I wouldn’t have recognized Jeremy Slade if I hadn’t been forewarned. The top of his head was blown away.

Three

SOMEDAY, I MAY GET used to sudden death; even violent death. I have said the Beaumont was like a town. In the course of a year, I suppose a quarter of a million people walk its streets. I’ve never really figured, but when you add up the constantly changing population that occupies its more than twelve-hundred-and-fifty rooms, the daily lunch crowds, the cocktail drinkers, the dinner and night-club turnout, the visitors to fashion shows, special banquets, small conventions, perhaps a quarter of a million is a conservative guess. Take any real town of that size and you have a daily quota of small tragedies, accidents, violence, and death. In a well-run town the crime rate is low. In a very special town like the Beaumont, its citizenship made up almost entirely of rich and successful people—except for perhaps a thousand employees—the crime rate can be kept almost at zero. But suicides will match the average rate anywhere else. Perhaps it’s a little higher. Important men have further to fall when they make a mistake; women have more to lose when they are deserted for someone younger, or richer, or more daring. A high percentage of the Beaumont’s steady population are in an upper-age range. Terminal illness is not rare, and more people than we know of take their own lives when they’re faced with unremitting pain, or permanent disability.

There are routines to be followed when sudden death occurs at the Beaumont. Fortunately for my queasiness about death, my part in it usually involves only a discreet release to the news media.

Jeremy Slade was not an admirable person from what I knew of him. He’d been a key figure, according to Chambrun, in what had led to the final destruction of Julie Frazer, a tragic woman. He was a member of a group of vicious sensation hunters. But he was suddenly, violently dead—and he’d been alive a few minutes ago. Another’s sudden death reminds us too vividly of what lies, inevitably, ahead for all of us.

The palms of my hands were sweating as I watched Jerry Dodd cover the bloody, mangled remains of a human head.

“You’re to join the boss,” Jerry said. He was scowling, as though he, too, was unusually disturbed by what lay at his feet.

“What happened?” I asked, out of a dry mouth. “According to our Doris, he tried it once too often,” Jerry said. He fished in his pocket for a cigarette. “The cops may not buy it.”

“How do you mean?” I said. “It’s been a running gag with him. Only this noon—”

“No powder burns,” Jerry said, sharply. “What are you talking about?” I’d only partly taken it in.

“No powder burns,” Jerry said. “The gun wasn’t held close to his head. Catch on, dad?”

“Then—”

“Yeah—then!” Jerry said.

I walked into the middle of something in the next room. Doris Standing was sitting in a chintz-covered armchair, still wearing the gold housecoat. I noticed, irrelevantly, that the price tag was gone from its sleeve. She’d bought it. Her face was ivory white, accentuating the scarlet of her mouth. She was staring straight ahead of her, gripping the arms of the chair, as if she was watching some kind of nightmare movie on an invisible TV set. She wasn’t looking at Chambrun; she didn’t look at me as I came in. It was like a trance.

Chambrun, his eyes hooded, was standing a few feet from the chair, tapping an unlighted cigarette on the back of his hand. He gave me a quick look that told me I was expected to say nothing, ask nothing.

“I would like to make my position quite clear to you, Miss Standing.” Chambrun sounded as if he’d said exactly this before without its penetrating. “This is a police matter. They’ll be here at any moment and the situation will be out of my hands. You’re a special friend of Mr. Battie’s, the Beaumont’s owner. He’d want me to help you in any way I can. Do you have a lawyer here in New York?”

“I have lawyers everywhere,” she said, in a flat voice. “Poor little rich girls have lawyers everywhere, Chambrun—feeding off us!”

“Then I think you should let me call the one who represents you here in New York.”

“Why?” she asked, without looking at him. “Jeremy pulled his act once too often. Why should I need help?”

“It wasn’t a suicide, Miss Standing,” he said quietly.

She turned her head, very slowly, to look at him.

“Come again,” she said.

“It wasn’t a suicide,” Chambrun said. He lit his cigarette and watched her, eyes narrowed against the little cloud of pale, bluish smoke.

“You’re playing a game with me!” she said, her voice not quite steady.

“Games are your forte, Miss Standing,” he said.

A little nerve twitched high up on her cheek. “Let me tell you again exactly what happened,” she said.

“Please do.”

“Marinelli had just left me,” she said. “I bought some clothes, you know. Having arrived without any luggage, I needed a full wardrobe of things.”

“Why was that?” Chambrun asked.

“Why did I need clothes? My dear man, I—”

“Why did you come without luggage?”

She turned her head to look at the bed. For the first time, I saw that it was strewn with newspapers. More papers were scattered around it on the floor.

“I came on the spur of the moment,” she said. She laughed, and it was a bitter little sound. “I have a reputation for acting on impulse.”

“Have it your way,” Chambrun said. “Marinelli had just left you—?”

“She’d only been gone a moment or two when someone knocked. I supposed it was Marinelli who’d forgotten something. I opened the door and—and there was Jeremy.”

“An old friend.”

“Yes.” The scarlet mouth tightened. “He didn’t ask to come in. He just came in. I wasn’t glad to see him—just then.”

“Why?”

“I was sick of Jeremy and his act. I knew from you what he’d done earlier in the day—in the Trapeze. I didn’t want to be involved with him. It would call attention to my presence in the hotel. You know I didn’t want that. I’d registered as ‘Dorothy Smith.’ ”

“He wanted you to hide him?”

Doris shook her head, slowly. “He said he had to talk to me about something important. ‘The time has come, the Walrus said—,’ he said. I didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘Just to get in the mood,’ he said, and pulled out that silly gun. I told him I hoped it would work this time. ‘It won’t,’ he said, ‘until we’ve had a chance to talk things out.’ And then he held it to his head and pulled the trigger. There was the usual click, the usual delighted laughter from him. ‘This,’ I told him, ‘is the essence of Dullsville.’ I turned my back on him and came in here, closing the door behind me. He shouted after me that he could wait all night to talk to me, if necessary. I was angry. I didn’t have anything I wanted to talk to him about. I—I couldn’t think of anything. Well—the things I’d bought from Marinelli were all over the place in boxes, those boxes over there. I unpacked them and hung the dresses in the closet and put the other things away in the bureau. I’d just finished and was stacking the boxes when I heard a shot. I wasn’t startled. It just made me angry. I was supposed to go running out to see what had happened and Jeremy would be there laughing at me. But—but I heard a heavy thud, like someone falling. I waited for him to make his next move—like an exaggerated moan or a cry for help. There wasn’t anything. I—I have to admit I couldn’t resist looking to see what he was up to.” Her lips trembled. “I went to the door—and looked. Then I called you.”

“You didn’t hear anything else—like the outside door closing?” Chambrun asked.

She shook her head.

“If you hold a gun close to your head and fire it, there will be powder burns around the wound,” Chambrun said. “There weren’t any. The shot that killed Slade wasn’t fired at that kind of close range.”

She stared at him.

“Had you given anyone the key to this suite, Miss Standing?”

“No.”

“Where is it?”

“On the bureau—I think.”

It was.

“I’ve been playing around with this, Miss Standing,” Chambrun said, “without using the word that goes with it. Murder. Someone shot and killed Jeremy Slade. Since you were the only person in the suite with him, the police are going to be justifiably interested in you. I think you should let me call your attorney.”

She took a long, deep breath. I could see she was fighting for control. “His name is T.J. Madison,” she said. “You’ll find him in the phone book.”

T.J. Madison. It rang some kind of a bell but I couldn’t place it. I looked at Chambrun but his face was expressionless.

“I’d like to ask you one more question, Miss Standing,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Did you find what you were looking for in the back issues of The Times and the Examiner?”

Her right hand rose quickly to cover her mouth. Her eyes were wide with fright.

“I’m only guessing,” Chambrun said, almost gently. “Am I right in thinking you’ve drawn some kind of a blank, covering the last three weeks?”

Tears welled up into her eyes. “Oh, my God!” she whispered.

“Care to tell me about it?” Chambrun asked. “That’s why you walked out on Slade, isn’t it? Why you didn’t want to talk to him? You were afraid he’d bring up something that for the moment was blanked out for you.”

She began to rock back and forth in the chair, arms crossed over her stomach as if she was fighting pain.

“Since you’ve guessed,” she said. “This morning—I was asleep. Someone was shaking me awake. I opened my eyes and saw a man in a blue uniform looking down at me, smiling. He was the conductor on a railroad train. ‘End of the line, miss,’ he said. ‘Grand Central.’ There I was, sitting on a stopped train. Everyone else had left or was leaving. New York. I had no memory of any train trip, or why I was there. I knew who I was, I knew where I was. But I had no idea why I was there or where I’d come from. I didn’t have any luggage.

“I—I didn’t want to tell all this to the conductor, so I walked out into the station. I—I’ve had hangovers in my time, but I’ve never drawn a complete blank. It was like walking out of a fog. The station was relatively empty at that time of morning. I walked over near the information booth to try to gather my wits. I remembered I’d started out from my home in Beverly Hills to have dinner with a friend. The next thing was the conductor—shaking me—in New York! I wasn’t wearing the clothes I’d started out for dinner in. I had an explanation, but I don’t think you’d understand it.”

“One of Emlyn Teague’s elaborate games?” Chambrun suggested.

She looked at him like a child looks at her first magician.

“Since the Julie Frazer affair, I’ve made something of a study of you and your friends, Miss Standing,” Chambrun said, the gentleness gone from his voice.

“You must have!” she said. “Well, you’re right. It was Emlyn I’d set out to have dinner with. I told myself he must have fed me some kind of knockout drops. Then he’d have flown me East in his own plane, unconscious, and put me on a train somewhere outside New York. The conductor would have been bribed to play along. I—I looked around the station, expecting to see Emlyn and Jeremy and Bobby and Oscar and some of the others come out from somewhere, screaming with laughter. But they didn’t.”

“I—I looked in my handbag. I had quite a little money. So I did the only thing I could think of doing. I took a taxi to the Beaumont and registered. Then—then I saw the calendar behind the desk. March fourteenth, it said. The night I’d started out to have dinner with Emlyn was February twentieth—three weeks ago!”

“It didn’t seem like a very funny joke then,” Chambrun said.

“Oh, my God!” she said, rocking back and forth again. After a moment she went on. “I put in a long-distance call for Emlyn in Beverly Hills. His houseman answered. Out there, it was only a little after two in the morning. Emlyn was out on the town, somewhere. I tried some of the others and finally got Bobby Towers—Barbara Towers ‘Where on earth have you been?’ she wanted to know. ‘We’ve been frantic with anxiety for you. I wanted Emlyn to call the police, but he was against it. He said you wouldn’t like it—in case you were up to something.’

“That’s about it, Chambrun. I remember starting out for dinner in my car and waking up, three weeks later, in Grand Central Station.” She hesitated a moment. “There’s something I didn’t quite tell you all of. When Jeremy came in here a little while ago, he said, ‘ “The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—of cabbages and kings …” and the night of February twenty-fifth.’ That’s when I walked in here and left him. Because I don’t know anything about the night of February twenty-fifth.”

“The papers?” Chambrun asked.

“Nothing. Nothing that tells me anything.”

Chambrun walked over to a little side table and put out his cigarette in the ash tray there. “There’s one difficulty with your way of life, Miss Standing,” he said. “It’s made up of elaborate games, of fancy falsehoods, of traps for the unwary, of cruel jokes. Because of that, I can’t be sure you’ve told us one word of truth. If I believe you, I may find the donkey’s tail pinned squarely on my derriere.”

“Chambrun, I promise you I—”

She was interrupted by Jerry Dodd opening the bedroom door. “Lieutenant Hardy from Homicide,” he said.

Chambrun turned to me. “Games or no games, Miss Standing needs her lawyer, Mark. Have Ruysdale get in touch with Mr. T.J. Madison.”

“Right.”

Hardy and I passed in the doorway. We weren’t strangers. He’d been involved in the Cardew case, about a year ago. He has a kind of pleasant, shaggy-dog look, bewildered and earnest. He’s actually a very shrewd operator. “Happy anniversary,” he said. I took an elevator down to the second floor. There were other people in the car. The elevator man looked as if he was about to burst with questions, but he was too well trained to ask them in front of guests.

Betty Ruysdale was at her desk, cool and unruffled. I gave her a quick rundown on what was cooking and Chambrun’s instructions to get in touch with Doris Standing’s lawyer, one T.J. Madison. When I said the name out loud, it hit me right between the eyes.

“All-American fullback,” I said. “Big star in the National Professional Football League for nearly ten years. T.J. Madison! He’s—”

“Yes, he’s a Negro,” Ruysdale said. “Something wrong with that?”

Four

MURDER IS USUALLY A climax. I think Chambrun was the only one of us who suspected that the murder of Jeremy Slade was just the beginning of a series of events with an unthinkable potential for violence and horror.

The death of Slade was murder; no ifs, ands, or buts. When you broke Slade’s gun and looked at the cylinder, there was the one brass cartridge case visible; the gambling chance for the Russian-roulette player. But an examination of the shell itself showed that it had been fired a long, long time ago, not that afternoon of March fourteenth. It was actually rusted. How long Slade had been frightening the life out of his audiences with a stacked deck, we had no way of knowing. One thing was certain. He had not been killed with his own gun.

And there was no other gun to be found in Suite 9F.

These were facts Lieutenant Hardy passed on to Chambrun a very short time after his arrival.

There were two possibilities. Doris Standing had shot and killed Slade and disposed of the gun in some fashion before she called Chambrun’s office to report the death. Or someone else had let himself into the sitting room, or been admitted by Slade, done the shooting and walked calmly out into space. The windows in the sitting room overlooked Central Park. No one could possibly have fired the shot from outside the suite.

“You pays your money and you takes your choice,” Hardy said in Chambrun’s office. “You are so damned perfectly soundproofed in this joint. The shot could have been fired in the suite and nobody in God’s world outside those rooms would have heard it. Doris Standing could have killed Slade, taken time to dress, gone out with the gun and disposed of it, and come back and phoned you. The medical examiner isn’t going to be able to pinpoint the time of death within an hour. Not to stick in court.”

I knew that while Hardy talked, every trash-disposal unit in the hotel was being searched, plus the areas outside the hotel, where the gun might have been dropped from a window.

“Unless the girl is lying about her key—” Hardy said.

“There are three keys to the suite,” Chambrun said. “There are two for occupants of the suite—in case a couple has registered, and a spare kept by the management for emergencies. All accounted for.”

“And the passkeys used by the maids and the housekeeper,” Hardy said. “You say Doris Standing always took 9F when she came to the Beaumont.”

Chambrun nodded. “If she reserved in advance. It was pure chance that it happened to be available this morning when she arrived without a reservation.”

Hardy was irritated. “It doesn’t matter too much,” he said. “It’s much more likely that, if there is anyone involved except Doris Standing, Slade let him in.”

Chambrun was sitting at his desk, demitasse of Turkish coffee balanced in his left hand, cigarette in his right. His eyes seemed to be buried in their dark pouches. “Games, games, games,” he said. “I can’t get away from the thought of games. This girl is a member of a group that exists and thrives on playing games. The games are always basically dishonest, basically cruel, and designed to have a dramatic outcome. The most dramatic of all outcomes is death. They’ve been involved with death before, but indirectly. The outcome of the game leads to dishonor, shame, and then to suicide or to self-destruction, which is another kind of suicide without the act being overt. We don’t know that they’ve never been directly involved in a killing. If the game was successfully played, they wouldn’t be caught or even suspected. Killing one of their own number would be unexpected, but—” He hesitated, inhaling deeply on his cigarette. “Like dope addicts, the dose has to be stronger and stronger.”

“Then you don’t believe the Standing girl’s story? The amnesia bit? The ‘what happened on the night of February twenty-fifth?’ bit?”

Chambrun shrugged. “I don’t believe or disbelieve anything yet,” he said. “But at this stage of the proceedings, I have to keep telling myself this could all be part of a game. The murder could be what our modern football coaches call a part of ‘the game plan.’ ”

“Look,” Hardy said, his irritation rising, “either she killed him and she’s lying, or someone else killed him and she’s not lying.”

“Or someone else killed him and she knows all about it and hasn’t lied, simply because we haven’t asked her that,” Chambrun said.

“Listening to you, I half-expect the corpse to sit up on the morgue table and start laughing at us!” Hardy said.

“It wouldn’t be out of key,” Chambrun said, quite seriously I thought.

“I can’t afford to make a mistake with her,” Hardy said. “She’s headlines whatever she does. She can hire the most expensive legal talent in the country.”

“Instead of which, she hires a famous football player who’s only just begun to practice law. T.J. Madison,” I said.

“Brother!” Hardy said. “Headlines wherever you turn.”

“You need facts. The gun would be a fact,” Chambrun said.

“And if we don’t find it?”

“If what you call ‘the amnesia bit’ is a part of the game,” Chambrun said, “then you are supposed to look into the night of February twenty-fifth. If that’s how it is, you’ll find something that’ll lead you somewhere else—directly into a sea of red herrings. But if she’s telling the truth—well, the night of February twenty-fifth may have some real significance. It could be a starting point. It could be a hoax.”

“What happened on the night of February twenty-fifth?” Hardy said. “Where? Beverly Hills? New York? Kankakee?”

“If it’s a game, then we are supposed to look through those newspapers and well come up with something. If the girl is on the level and was looking herself and found nothing, then we probably won’t find anything. Finding nothing might lead us to believe her just a little bit.” Chambrun put out his cigarette. “Let’s go through those papers, with different eyes and different points of view. I suggest your secretary, Mark. She’s a woman.”

“And how!” Hardy muttered.

“Ruysdale. You and me and Hardy,” Chambrun said. He stood up. “Meanwhile, the hotel has to run. Oil has to be poured on the waves created by this excitement.” He smiled, faintly. “We have to roll out our best stiff upper lip.”

“And I have to meet the ladies and gentlemen of the press,” I said. “What do I tell ’em?”

“Send ’em to me,” Hardy said, “and I’ll tell ’em nothin’. Games!” …

Focus your attention on one unusual situation in a place like the Beaumont and you suddenly become acutely aware of how much is involved in the daily routines that you handle automatically. It’s like one broken-down car on the West Side Highway, and immediately a thousand cars are stacked up behind it, tooting their horns.

My girl Shelda was up to her ears in routines I should have been attending to, and nearly dead of excited curiosity. There were problems connected with transforming the Grand Ballroom from a show ring for Ormanski’s fashions into a banquet hall for a foreign-policy association. Mr. Amato, our dyspeptic banquet manager, was feeding his ulcer with his own patented brand of anxiety. Ormanski had to be gotten out, tables set up and decorated, place cards and favors put around. Time was running out. Mr. Amato had reminded Shelda of this a half-dozen times in the last hour.

“I’ve got everyone working four-handed,” Shelda said. “So what’s the story on Doris Standing?”

“She did or she didn’t,” I said, scowling at a list of messages. Mr. Cardoza, captain in the Blue Lagoon Room, wanted words with me; a representative of the Conservative Party wanted to engage one of the private dining rooms for a committee meeting two nights away; a big movie company wanted two adjoining suites for writers, producers, and whoever else might be involved in working on a pilot script for a TV show. The show’s star must have a suite on the same floor but not “contiguous”—a television word for “adjoining.” And on and on.

“Will you pay attention to me and tell me what’s cooking!” Shelda demanded.

I kissed her very firmly on the mouth. “That’s what’s cooking,” I said.

“Did she kill him?” Shelda shouted at me, after a decent interval of nonresistance.

“She’s a prime suspect, baby,” I said. “In the area of real facts, Hardy is undernourished.”

I told her she had been elected by the boss to be one of the group to go over the back issues of the newspapers, looking particularly for something significant about February twenty-fifth.

“Of course she did it,” Shelda said.

“Because she dyes her hair?”

“Idiot,” Shelda said. “Because she thinks that none of the rules apply to her.”

“Because she’s rich and you’re jealous of her,” I said. “And because, as somebody has said, nobody is ever sorry for a girl on a yacht.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you don’t wish the rich any good luck,” I said.

“Do you for a minute believe her amnesia story?” Shelda asked, sounding indignant.

I took a beat. “I think I do,” I said.

“I don’t think I’ll marry you,” Shelda said. “You’re too much of a sucker for a pretty face.”

“It was tears that did me in,” I said, grinning at her.

“That’s nice to know,” Shelda said. “I can cry at will.”

“I’ve got to circulate,” I said, “to see if the boat’s leaking anywhere.” I kissed her on the tip of her turned-up nose. “I’ll buy you dinner in the Grill Room, about eight—after you’ve gone through the back issues of The Times and the Examiner.”

“You think I’m available just like that—whenever you say the word?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You—you man, you!” she said.

Mr. Cardoza, the Blue Lagoon Room captain, is tall, and dark, and sleek, and very elegant—and very human when you get to know him. He runs his segment of the Beaumont operation with a smoothness that would have done Chambrun himself proud. There is a floor show twice each night in the Blue Lagoon. The bulk of the customers are not guests of the hotel. It is Cardoza’s job to keep it elegant and at the same time entertaining and nonstuffy.

He has a little office just back of the cloakroom at the entrance to the Blue Lagoon. It was about six in the evening when I got to him. He was not yet wearing his full-dress regalia for the evening. The Blue Lagoon doesn’t open until eight. He was at his desk, smoking a cigarette in a long holder, and looking like a Spanish movie star.

“Thanks for dropping by,” he said.

“Pleasure,” I said.

“Drink?” He indicated a very handsome set of cut-glass decanters on his desk.

“I’m headed for two very dry martinis in the Trapeze,” I said. “Another time.” I knew he would offer me a rare Spanish sherry, which I loathe.

“I tried to reach the boss,” he said, “but I guess he’s suffering from ninth-flooritis. Hell of a mess. Ruysdale suggested I talk to you.”

“Shoot,” I said.

He picked up a clipboard on his desk and turned it around so I could read what was on the top sheet. It was a list of table reservations for that evening in the Blue Lagoon. There was a large checkmark after one name. The name was Emlyn Teague. The number five was circled just after the name with the time notation, eleven A.M.

“He’s supposed to be in California,” I said.

“That’s where the reservation came from—about an hour ago. Teague’s manservant.”

“Then Teague himself can’t be out there,” I said.

“He could be,” Cardoza said. “I checked through our travel bureau. American Airlines has a Boeing Jet that leaves Los Angeles at six our time—right about now—and gets into Kennedy Airport at ten thirty-seven. He could just about make it here by eleven. Modern travel. Quite amazing. He could see our midnight floor show, and be back in Los Angeles for breakfast if he chose.”

I was frowning at the clipboard. The general of “the army” was on his way. I wondered if he’d made a reservation for a room or rooms.

“He’d know better,” Cardoza said. “We have ‘nothing available’ when Mr. Emlyn Teague inquires. Ordinarily, I don’t have a table for him, but with things the way they are, I thought possibly Chambrun might decide it would be advisable to see what he’s up to.”

A table for five. There were five names left on the list Chambrun had shown me that morning, Teague, Oscar Maxwell, Barbara Towers, Van Delaney, and Ivor Jerningham. The sixth name had been attended to in Doris Standing’s suite. Chambrun, as usual, had guessed right when he’d ordered us to be on the alert for Doris’ friends.

An army depends on its communications for survival. It wasn’t impossible that, sometime after four o’clock, someone had got wind of Slade’s death and telephoned Emlyn Teague in California. He would have had an hour and a half or better to make the jet flight to New York. And, I reminded myself, if Teague was on that flight, then left Los Angeles at six o’clock our time, he couldn’t possibly have had a direct personal hand in Slade’s death.

I guess when you’ve worked for Chambrun as long as Cardoza has, you have an instinct for the moment when a standing order should be broken. I managed to get through to Chambrun about ten minutes after I left Cardoza. He’d been closeted with Hardy and another old friend in the city’s legal machinery, Assistant District Attorney John Naylor. Naylor, bald as an egg, was a very tough cookie. Evidently the powers-that-be had decided not to play it sweet and low with Doris. Naylor was reserved for the no-holds-barred approach.

Chambrun indicated he was pleased with Cardoza’s decision to reserve a table for Teague.

“You and I will be on hand as a welcoming committee,” he said.

I learned later that Hardy had ordered a man to Kennedy to check on the arrival of the American Airlines jet at ten thirty-seven—just to make sure that Emlyn Teague actually arrived on it. The lieutenant wasn’t missing the most remote chance of a lead, because the truth was that after two hours he had nothing to go on except his own strong conviction that Doris Standing was a murderess, or at the least an accessory to murder.

I was ready for that martini when I hit the Trapeze Bar about six-thirty. The Trapeze is an experience the first time you hit it at the cocktail hour. Everything is very slick, seemingly unhurried, and yet you don’t wait between drinks. Mr. Del Greco, the captain, and his highly efficient staff see to that. Fumble in your pocket for a lighter, and someone is already holding a flame to your cigarette.

At six-thirty, many of the customers are dressed for the evening. The Trapeze is a way station before passing on to a private party somewhere, or to one of the hotel’s dining areas. On the whole, the customers in the Trapeze are totally unselfconscious. The women are expensively put together, gowned, jeweled. You’ll see many more hair colors than God ever invented. The men, in the uniform of the black tie, reveal very little about themselves. The people in the Trapeze are not displaying themselves to a gawking public. Even the recognizable movie star at a corner table seems relaxed. This is a refuge from autograph hunters and glamour-struck adolescents. The salient impression I think you get is that everyone in the room is too rich to be interested in you.

Eddie, the head bartender, must have seen me at the door, for my dry martini was waiting for me when I stepped up to the bar.

“Drink it and then I’ll give you the bad news,” Eddie said.

“What bad news?”

“Gent wants to talk to you,” Eddie said. He nodded toward a table directly across from us.

The “gent” sitting there was a little out of place in the Trapeze at that time of day. His dark gray flannels were rumpled, his tweed jacket looked slept in. He was smoking a pipe, which isn’t against the rules, but isn’t generally “done” in the Trapeze. He had blond curly hair, worn shaggy, and he was looking at me steadily from under bushy eyebrows. His eyes were a palish blue and unblinking.

“Who is he?” I asked Eddie.

“New one on me,” Eddie said. “He might be new on one of the papers. Boy, have we been swamped with questions. What really did happen in 9F?”

“Somebody shot a man named Slade,” I said.

“Him I know!” Eddie said. “He was here at lunchtime. You may have heard. Poor little rich girl pull an Annie Oakley?”

“I don’t know, Eddie. Honestly. Neither do the cops.”

“Well, here comes your friend,” Eddie said.

I didn’t turn. I was aware of the blond man coming up beside me at the bar.

“Mr. Haskell?” he asked. His voice was low, pleasant, cultivated.

“Yes,” I said.

Close up, he was older than I’d thought—early forties. There were tiny lines at the corners of both his eyes that came from pain or laughter or both.

“My name is Gary Craig,” he said, as though it ought to mean something to me. It didn’t.

“How can I be of service to you?” I asked.

“You can let me buy you your second martini at my table,” he said.

“Look, Mr. Craig, if you’re a reporter—”

“I’m not,” he said. One corner of his mouth drew down in a pleasantly crooked little smile. “I like to think of myself, among other things, as being a friend of Doris Standing’s.”

Warning signals went up. Was this a member of the “army” no one had told me about? “If you hope I can tell you anything about what’s happened this afternoon, Mr. Craig, it’s no go. I’m not at liberty to talk about it—friend or foe.”

“I’d like to talk about it,” he said, quietly. “You can just listen. You can’t lose anything by listening, can you, Mr. Haskell?”

“I’ll buy my own drink,” I said. I grinned at him. “You can’t bribe the employees around here. House rule.”

“It would be refreshing to find a man who doesn’t have a price,” Craig said.

In my business you learn to react to people quickly, to make snap judgments about them. I found I was attracted to this man, and there was nothing to lose by listening to what was on his mind. At the moment none of us could afford to overlook anything that might add to our stock of information about Doris and her army.

A waiter brought my second martini to Craig’s table. Craig’s drink was plain soda water with a twist of lemon in it. I made a note to go easy on the martinis.

Craig knocked out his pipe in the brass ash tray on the table, dropped it in his pocket, and came out with a second one that he proceeded to fill from a plastic pouch. All the while the pale blue eyes seemed to be studying me with a sort of amused detachment.

“My feelings used to be hurt when people didn’t recognize my name,” he said after he’d got his pipe going. “Twenty years ago I was a boy wonder. Ten years ago I was ‘promising.’ Now I’m just a guy who produces a novel once every two years, gets a polite hello from the critics, and is almost totally ignored by the reading public. I have to eat, so occasionally I do a stirring piece of dramaturgy for the idiot box. If you’re one of the very few people who look to see who’s written a television script—”

“I never do,” I said.

The crooked little smile reappeared. “So much for Gary Craig,” he said. The smile vanished. “How is she?”

“Doris Standing?”

He nodded.

“Things are rough,” I said.

“You know her?” he asked.

“Never laid eyes on her until this afternoon,” I said. “But I read the papers.”

“Then you don’t know her,” he said quietly. His teeth clamped down hard on his pipe stem. “Who’s helping her?”

“We’re trying to reach her attorney,” I said.

“Madison?”

“Yes. He hadn’t put in an appearance half an hour ago.”

“Is she under arrest?”

“She’s being questioned. I don’t know if there’s been a formal charge made.” I grinned at him. “You were going to do the talking. I was to listen.”

He sipped his soda water like a man enjoying a rare wine. I had a sudden hunch he was a man who’d had an alcoholic problem in his time. He handled that sparkling water like a man who’d once enjoyed what was in his glass.

“I can guess the question that must be on the top of your list,” he said, slowly. “Am I a member of Doris’ crowd—the ones who make the headlines along with her, from Hollywood to Istanbul? The answer is I’m not.”

“A plus mark for you,” I said.

“I’m a new boy,” he said, “which makes me a target for fun and games.”

“You look as though you could handle yourself,” I said.

“But can I handle Doris?”

“You want to?”

“I’m going to marry her,” he said. “She doesn’t know it, but I am.”

“I don’t know whether to congratulate you or not,” I said.

“I’m going to marry the real Doris if she can be rescued from the public Doris,” he said. He glanced at me again with the odd little smile moving his lips. “You’re thinking about her money and how much easier it would be to write unpopular novels with that kind of dough supporting you.”

“A fact of life,” I said.

“I’ve wondered whether I’ll be stuffy about it, or allow myself to sink down into it like quicksand.” He straightened his shoulders. “But I didn’t want to talk to you about my character—or lack of it. What I want is to make quite clear to you what my position is. I’m not a relative, or a fiancé—yet. I have no way to get to Doris, to help her, at a time when she needs help desperately.”

“She can buy the best help there is,” I said.

“No.” He shook his head. “She can’t buy love, or sympathy, or tenderness. That’s the kind of help she needs.”

“Question,” I said.

“Try,” he said.

“How do you know about what’s happened this afternoon? It hasn’t been released to the press.”

He hesitated for so long that I was sure he was trying to invent something plausible.

“Geography first,” he said, finally. “Doris’ base of operations is Beverly Hills. She has a magnificent house there—infested with rats!”

“Rats?”

“Emlyn Teague,” he said, his voice harsh. “Oscar Maxwell; the glamourous Bobby Towers—Barbara to you; Van Delaney; Ivor Jerningham. And there was Jeremy Slade. And a dozen lesser lights—disciples, adulators. They pop up in Paris, or London, or Rome, or New York, but Beverly Hills is the base. I live here in New York; a small studio apartment on the East Side. But that’s only a base, too. I travel. I light where the typewriter feels loose. I was spending last summer in a little cottage on the Mexican coast. That’s how I met Doris. A story in itself.”

“I’m listening,” I said.

“But I want to answer your question,” he said. “Roughly two weeks ago—it was the twenty-eighth of February, to be exact—I had a long distance call from Doris—here, in New York, in my studio.”

I felt a little tingling along the base of my spine. That was eight days after Doris professed to have drawn a blank. Craig saw he touched some kind of a button.

“That mean something to you?” he asked.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“I don’t know where the call came from,” he said. “It wasn’t person to person so there was no operator involved. She didn’t sound like herself. There’s a kind of brash bravado about her; a surface act. But not this time. She sounded desperate. ‘I’m in very bad trouble,’ she told me. ‘I need your help, Gary.’ So I asked her where she was and said of course I’d come at once. ‘I’m on my way to New York,’ she said. ‘I’ll be there tomorrow morning. Come to the Beaumont for breakfast.’ That was all. I came here, looking for her, the next morning. That was March first. She hadn’t appeared. I asked for her. I asked for ‘Dorothy Smith,’ a name she uses. No dice. About noon I called her home in Beverly Hills. She wasn’t there, and I couldn’t pry anything out of her housekeeper as to where she might be. I waited at home for her to call again. She didn’t. I kept calling here to see if she’d checked in under either name. She hadn’t. That’s been going on for fourteen days! This morning I had an appointment to discuss a script with a TV producer. It was the first morning I didn’t call here. I’d decided the only thing I could do was go on with my own life and wait for her to call me.

“I wound up having lunch with my TV man and I didn’t get back to my apartment till about three-thirty this afternoon. Five minutes after I’d walked in my door, the phone rang. It was Jeremy Slade.”

“You knew him?”

“Sure, I know the whole crowd. I was shown off to them at the end of last summer when I went to visit Doris in Beverly Hills.” He sounded bitter. “Slade told me Doris was at the Beaumont as Dorothy Smith and that she needed me.” He shook his head. “You have to know these people to know that you can’t believe anything they say. I came up here, on guard. If Doris had called me, I’d have gone straight to her. He’d told me Suite 9F. But since the call came from Slade I was prepared for some kind of burlesque joke. I got here a little after four, scouted around a bit, and then went up to the ninth floor without announcing myself. I was just getting out of the elevator when the car in the opposite bank opened up and out came cops, a plainclothesman, a photographer. They went straight to 9F. I pretended to be elevator-waiting. A few seconds after that, you came out of 9F. I followed you, meaning to ask you what was going on. You went to the public relations office on the fourth floor. I could hear you talking to your secretary and I got the whole pitch.”

“Then there’s nothing I can tell you,” I said. I was a little burned with myself. I remembered talking to Shelda in her reception-room office and, I guess, in the excitement, we hadn’t bothered to close the hall door.

“What about this amnesia thing?” Craig asked.

“You heard,” I said.

“They believe her?”

“Do you?”

“I would if she told it to me,” Craig said. He turned his glass round and round in his fingers. The lines at the corners of his mouth had deepened. “The fact that I didn’t hear from her for two weeks, after a cry for help—Oh, hell!” He sat there, chewing on the stem of his cold pipe.

I began to wonder about this tweedy gent. He must have followed me, as he said, or he wouldn’t have known about my conversation with Shelda. But Hardy would certainly be interested in knowing whether that was his first visit to the ninth floor.

“You’re wondering if I could have killed Jeremy Slade,” he said. “God knows I haven’t any love for him or the rest of that rotten crew.” He looked down at his big strong hands. “I might have strangled him, but I don’t own a gun, Haskell.”

“You seem to be a bit of a mind reader,” I said. “If you did hear my conversation with my secretary, you must know the next question I’d like to ask you.”

“About February twenty-fifth? I haven’t the foggiest. I hadn’t heard from Doris for about a month before her call to me on the twenty-eighth. The twenty-fifth was—was just Wednesday.”

“Everywhere,” I said.

He was silent.

“I’m going to tell you something that perhaps I shouldn’t,” I said. “Pierre Chambrun, the resident manager of this palace and my boss, has a very complete book on Doris and her army. The minute she checked in here, at five o’clock this morning, we were all alerted to be on the lookout. Before the murder. Before anything at all. It was Chambrun’s guess we could expect the rest of them to congregate. Well, Slade came. And Emlyn Teague has reserved a table for five in the Blue Lagoon Room tonight. Would you guess they were coming to help Doris, or to hunt down the killer of their chum Slade, or to set off more bombs under our noses?”

“To guess about Teague and Company is to wish a disaster on yourself,” Craig said. “And while I’m being pontifical, remind your friend, Chambrun, that it was Plutarch who said: ‘The pilot cannot mitigate the billows or calm the winds.’ And to mix metaphors, when the plague descends it strikes the rich and the poor, the well and the sick, the innocent and the guilty.”

“What is Teague like?” I asked.

The pale-blue eyes looked at me, narrowed. “He’s not like you, or me, or anyone else on this godforsaken planet,” Craig said. “To look at? Medium height, slender, mouse-brown hair which he wears a little too long but not in the current Beatle style. You might think him soft, unless you decided to test his physical strength. He’s like strung piano wire. His face? A pleasant, smiling mask. It disarms when it should be frightening the hell out of you. His taste in clothes is flamboyant, expensive, with a leaning toward women’s colors. His dinner jackets are like Joseph’s cloak. He wears, at night, an opera cape lined in scarlet satin. He would never be seen in a white shirt or wearing a simple tie. There is always a flower in his buttonhole to suit the time of day, or the particular occasion, or his whim of the moment. You can count on not missing him if he invades your hotel, Haskell. He will never come or go without being noticed. He is never alone, and the people with him make sure that they, too, are noticed, according to their personal tastes. There is a girl named Bobby Towers who goes in for something like public nudity. Let her walk into the Trapeze Bar, Haskell, and you’ll hear a sound from a hundred throats like wind in a cave.”

“Doris herself is something to look at,” I said.

Craig stared at a vision of her in space, objectively critical. “You look at Doris because she is perfection,” he said. “She holds her head high, like a thoroughbred. She has style. She attracts attention with a natural grace, an animal litheness. She’s like a wild horse you see on the plains, undisciplined, untrained, but superb in her naturalness. Every man could wish himself the luck of having a Doris Standing—and taming her.” He paused and his face clouded. “Bobby Towers is the ne plus ultra in evil sophistication. She’s a hothouse flower. She offers everything, and for a price you can have it.”

“Price?”

“Her price is to be amused. Find a way to amuse her and you can have what you want. But I warn you in advance, Haskell, in case you’re tempted; the coin of the realm is degredation and self-disgust.”

“You sound like a writer,” I said.

“So I’ve been told,” he said, dryly. His face clouded. “There is one thing that goes with all of them. Money. Doris is so rich it hurts me to think about it. Emlyn Teague can probably match her in blue-chip holdings. The others don’t need money as long as they’re in favor. Doris and Emlyn keep the clover stand rich and high.”

“Was Jeremy Slade out of favor?”

“He was top favorite two months ago,” Craig said. “He was the tough kid with the golden smile. Lei anyone say anything publicly unpleasant about any of the chums and Slade was the chopper—an athlete, an expert at judo and karate. In short, the club bodyguard. They needed one, because the wounded fight back with a kind of desperation, and there are always the wounded in the area of Teague and Company.”

“Then it wouldn’t be unlikely that one of what you call ‘the wounded’ followed him to 9F this afternoon and shot him dead when he opened the door to a knock.”

“Most likely thing in the world,” Craig said. “But he had better have run if Teague and Company are on the way.”

“Does it prove something that you haven’t run?” I said.

There was mischief in the pale-blue eyes for an instant. “I could be their public relations man, building up your advance expectations,” he said. He laughed, and it was mirthless. “No, Haskell, I didn’t kill Slade, but if I cared a damn for myself I would run. But Doris is in trouble. She said so two weeks ago and she’s in deep now. If someone is fighting back at Teague and Company, Doris is a target as well as the others. A way to punish her would be to frame her for Slade’s murder, wouldn’t it? So I’m not running. I’m going to get her out of this if I can, and then I’m going to amputate her from Emlyn Teague for the rest of time—if I can.”

I looked at my empty martini glass. “What did you really want of me, Craig, when you asked me to join you?”

“It’s not complicated,” he said. “I have no way of reaching Doris to say that I’m here and ready to help in any way I can. You can get to her, or get a message to her. I ask for that.”

“Why not,” I said.

“And perhaps you can get me a room in this gilded cage? I don’t want to be any further from her than I can help.”

“Let’s go down to the reception desk,” I said.

I wasn’t quite sure about Gary Craig. My instinct told me he was a right guy. My professional caution told me I could have been sold a bill of goods. Chambrun had warned me that no one connected with Doris Standing could be trusted.

But I had seen her cry. If they’d turned Naylor, the assistant D.A., loose on her, she was having a bad time right about now. I wondered how T.J. Madison, the fullback, would carry the ball in this league.

Karl Nevers was on the reception desk when I got there. There wasn’t a vacancy in the place except for the house seats—the name we have for a few rooms held open by the management for special emergencies. Only Chambrun could release them and I didn’t feel this was the moment to ask him for favors. There are twin beds in the bedroom of my apartment on the fourth floor. On impulse I asked Craig if he’d like to share the place with me till something opened up.

“I’d be eternally grateful,” he said.

While Craig was signing in so that he’d get any messages or phone calls that might come for him, Nevers slid a reservation card across the desk to me.

“One for you,” he said.

The reservation read: “Miss Veronica Trask and secretary; Suite 18B, March 15.”

“Red carpet,” Nevers said.

Veronica Trask! She’d been the star of the first motion picture I’d ever seen—when I was six years old. Veronica Trask! One of the great ones in the days when Hollywood was Hollywood. Great in the days of the silents, greater at the advent of the talkies. Veronica Trask, who had held her own with Garbo, and Shearer, and the young Crawford; who had played with John Gilbert, and Barrymore, and Leslie Howard and the other great male stars of her day. I had been madly, madly in love with her at the age of ten. I had hated Lewis Stone who had played the suave villain who wanted to marry her in my first movie.

“I thought she was dead,” I said. “I haven’t heard of her for years.”

“She retired about twenty years ago. According to the secretary who made the reservation, this is her first time out of seclusion since 1947.”

“She’ll be mobbed by fans who still love her,” I said. “Including me! I suppose she’ll want to keep her presence here quiet.”

“On the contrary,” Nevers said. “I was told we could notify the press.”

“Veronica Trask!” I said, sounding very juvenile.

“What about her?” Craig asked, at my elbow.

“She arrives tomorrow,” I said.

“Coming here?” he sounded interested. I guessed everybody in New York over thirty would be interested. “A very great lady,” Craig said.

“You know her?”

“No,” he said, “but I’ve always wished I did. We’ve forgotten about her kind of glamor in this a-go-go age.”

Five

I GAVE CRAIG AN extra key to my rooms on the fourth floor. He had no luggage, but he announced he’d go back to his apartment for clothes after I’d gotten his message to Doris Standing. The back issues of The Times and the Examiner had been delivered to my quarters, and I left Craig there, going through them, chewing on his pipe.

It was twenty minutes past seven when I arrived in Chambrun’s office. I knew that his dinner would be served to him in ten minutes and that nothing short of an earthquake would be allowed to interfere with his relaxed enjoyment of it.

Chambrun wasn’t alone. Miss Ruysdale was with him, and a startlingly large Negro who had to be T.J. Madison. The ex-fullback was undeniably eye-catching. I’d guess he was about six feet four, with broad, broad shoulders tapering down to a ballet-dancer’s waist. He was quietly dressed in a charcoal-gray suit, white shirt, and a plain navy-blue tie. One look at him close up and you knew why some linebackers in the pro football league had retired early. They used to say of him that no one man could bring him down when he was carrying the football. They talked of him still as the greatest ever, of his extraordinary balance, speed, and power.

Chambrun introduced us, and he spoke my name in a low pleasant voice without any trace of the South in it. I remembered he’d graduated from one of our top Eastern colleges.

“Mr. Madison has a problem,” Chambrun said. “Lieutenant Hardy and Naylor haven’t brought any formal charge against Miss Standing, but they’ve warned us that if she tries to leave her suite, one will be placed. A plainclothes cop outside her door has a warrant for her arrest, charging her with murder which he’ll serve if she steps out into the hall.”

“They have no right to hold her without charging her,” Madison said, “but in effect they are holding her.”

“She’s certainly better off where she is than locked up in a cell downtown,” I said.

“I’m not sure,” Madison said. “I’m not sure we aren’t playing their game by letting her be a voluntary prisoner. They haven’t got a thing on her except that she was in the next room when Slade was shot.”

“She says she was in the next room,” I said.

Madison’s dark-brown eyes studied me. “You’ve made up your mind about her, Mr. Haskell?”

“Just trying to think the way Hardy thinks,” I said. “Has the fog lifted any?”

“Fog?”

“The blackout. The ‘amnesia bit,’ ” I said.

“Nothing,” Chambrun said. “Ruysdale and I have been through the papers. We draw a blank on February twenty-fifth, or any other day. Neither Doris nor any of her friends made the papers in that three-week span.”

I explained that I hadn’t had a chance to go through the papers myself, which brought me to a brief account of my meeting with Gary Craig. Craig’s name didn’t seem to ring any bell with Madison or Chambrun. Miss Ruysdale had read three of his novels.

“He’s a man with hope, competing with our successful writers who write hopelessly about their unhappy childhoods and their adolescent failures,” Miss Ruysdale said. “He’s one of the few adult novelists of our time. It seems nobody wants to be adult today, which is why he is determinedly overlooked.”

“Is there any reason I can’t get his message to Doris Standing?” I asked.

“Technically, no,” Madison said. “But they’re playing this so high-handedly that they may or may not let you in to see her.”

“She has to eat,” Chambrun said, glancing at his wrist watch. His own dinner was due. “Pick up a menu on your way in. We provide de-luxe service, even to people under house arrest.”

I took Chambrun’s cue and did it up in spades. I had a shaker of martinis made up at the service bar and carried it, with two glasses and a dinner menu to the door of 9F. One of Hardy’s men was sitting outside reading an evening paper. He knew me from a year ago.

“Might as well make the lady comfortable while we can,” I said.

The cop shrugged. “Normal hotel service is permitted,” he said.

“She can see friends?”

“Not without Hardy’s okay,” the cop said.

“Then she is under arrest?”

The cop grinned at me. “You know better than to get nosy, Mr. Haskell. Take the lady her drink. I’ll bet she can use it.” He unlocked the door for me.

I went into the sitting room. Doris was standing by the center table, her eyes blazing with anger. “Am I not even allowed the courtesy of a knock or a bell ring?” she demanded.

She was wearing a dark-green wool street dress. She’d evidently prepared herself to be whisked away on Hardy’s whim.

“Watchdog opened the door,” I said. “I didn’t want to discuss protocol with him in case he changed his mind about letting me in. I hope martinis are your dish.”

She relaxed a little and I saw the dark shadows of exhaustion under her eyes.

“I’m really very grateful,” she said.

I put down the tray, poured her a drink, and handed her the glass.

“Please join me,” she said.

I poured one for myself.

“I really couldn’t eat any dinner,” she said, nodding toward the large menu.

“Camouflage,” I said. “I had to have a reason for coming in.” I offered her a cigarette and she let me light it for her.

“I know Chambrun’s trying to make things as easy for me as he can,” she said. “You know that I’m a prisoner, though I haven’t been arrested?”

“Yes. That’s why the drink and the menu. You’re not denied hotel service. But my real reason for being here is that I have a message for you. Gary Craig is in my quarters on the fourth floor. He wants you to know that he’s here and ready to do anything on earth he can to help you.”

I thought she was going to drop the martini glass. Then she reached out with her free hand to steady herself on the table.

“Is the story out—in the papers and on radio and television?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

“Then how did he know?”

“He’s been waiting here every day for you to show up,” I said. “Ever since you called him two weeks ago.”

She stared at me as though I’d said something in Arabic. “I called him?” she asked. It was almost a whisper.

“The twenty-eighth of February,” I said.

She turned away from me and took an unsteady step toward a chair. She sat down. I could see her shoulders trembling. If it was an act, it was superb.

“You don’t remember calling him?” I asked.

She shook her bright-red head without speaking.

“You asked him to be here the next day—March first—for breakfast. You told him you were in trouble.”

“Oh, God!” she said, softly.

“You honestly don’t remember?”

She turned, abruptly, her gray-green eyes bright with tears that wouldn’t flow. “Can you remotely imagine what it’s like not to remember, Haskell?”

It was hard to imagine.

“What do you want me to tell Craig?” I asked her.

She drew a deep, shuddering breath. “Does he know that—that I can’t remember the last three weeks?”

“He knows.”

“Then tell him that I don’t remember calling him,” she said. “That I don’t remember what the trouble was I said I was in then. That he can’t help me now and that all I want him to do is go away and forget about me.”

“Unless I’m very much mistaken, he won’t,” I said.

“He must!”

“It’s none of my business, but why?” I asked. “He’s your friend—or isn’t he?”

“He—must—not—involve—himself—in—this!” she said, hammering out each word with a beat of her fist on the arm of the chair. “Tell him, Haskell! Tell him to go!”

“He won’t,” I said. I took a sip of my martini and waited.

“What has he told you about me?” she asked.

“That he intends to marry you,” I said, making it sound casual.

She looked at me, and despite the lacquer of sophistication—the Marinelli dress, the skillful coiffeur, the eye makeup, the bright-scarlet mouth, the platinum and diamond clip at the V-line of her dress that probably cost more than my annual salary—she was a wistful little child for a moment. Then her face hardened.

“Tell him for me that he’s an idiot,” she said.

“He mentioned the need to amputate you from your friends,” I said. “By the way, has anyone told you that they, too, are rallying round?”

“What do you mean?”

“Table for five in the Blue Lagoon tonight at eleven—in the name of Teague,” I said.

“But if, as you say, the story isn’t out, it must be a coincidence!” she said, and now she looked frightened.

“I said the story wasn’t in the papers or on the radio,” I said. “I didn’t say it hadn’t leaked. If you didn’t kill Jeremy Slade, Doris, then the person who did is walking around loose and could easily have passed the word to Teague in California. Teague had plenty of time to make a jet flight that will get him here to the hotel by eleven.”

“Is there a little more in that shaker?” she asked, holding out her empty martini glass.

I filled it for her. Two little feverish spots had appeared beside her high cheekbones. I had the sudden feeling that she was trying to see some way out of a trap. You understand, I wasn’t investigating this case, but while she seemed willing to talk a little I thought I should encourage it.

“I’m sure Craig will do anything you ask him—except desert you,” I said, when she didn’t speak.

She stared at me over the rim of her glass, sipping at her drink.

“You seem like a nice guy,” she said, finally. “You want to help.”

“Without breaking too many laws,” I said, hoping a mild crack would loosen her up a litüe.

“Then use your energies to help someone decent,” she said.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning Gary. Get him out of here—away—anywhere! And then stay out of it yourself. You’re the kind who has a nice girl somewhere. Go to her and thank God she isn’t someone like me.”

“Melodrama,” I said.

“I wish it was. Do you know anything about amnesia, Haskell?”

“Mostly what I’ve read in suspense novels,” I said. “It’s usually a plot convenience for the author. It’s a nice way to hide a secret from a reader.”

“That’s exactly what it is,” she said with a touch of impatience, “a way to hide a secret. A mechanism of the mind that helps you to forget something intolerable. That’s what’s happened to me, a reasonably intelligent girl. There’s something I can’t bear to remember.”

“And you really don’t know what it is?”

“I’ve been running for a long time,” she said. “But there was no place to run, so finally the mental machinery has taken over.”

“I still say melodrama.”

She got up from her chair and began to walk restlessly around the room, twisting from side to side as if something hurt her. I suddenly felt like an intruder, an involuntary Peeping Tom. But before I could tell her to-hell-with-it as far as I was concerned, it began to spill out of her.

“Some people are unwillingly involved in situations that are completely unfamiliar to most other people. My situation involves money, Haskell. I was an only child, and I grew up in a world you probably can’t imagine. My grandparents were native Californians. My grandfather ran a modest truck farm not far from where Hollywood is today. I don’t suppose at the end of a year he had a thousand dollars’ profit to show for his work. But somehow he managed to save something, and just before World War I he put what he had saved into something called ‘moving pictures.’ Before you could say Mary Pickford he was suddenly a moderately rich man. He bought some property along the way, and when Hollywood began to grow into a city he owned a handsome piece of it. He was making money hand over fist, but until the day he died he didn’t believe the movies would ‘last.’ Property—land—was the only thing he really believed in. He sent my father looking for interesting buys, and Dad wound up purchasing a chunk of Texas. There turned out to be so much oil on the Texas property that I guess by the time I was born in 1940, Dad couldn’t even guess how rich he was. Just for fun there was the house in Beverly Hills, and a model ranch in Texas, and a kind of hunting lodge in the Adirondacks, and a beautiful house outside Paris that was eventually bombed into rubble during the war, and yachts, and planes, and anything you woke up in the morning with a whim to buy.

“When I was eighteen my mother died. My father went a year later. He couldn’t buy anything to fill up his loneliness, or cure a lung cancer. So there I was, the second-richest girl in the world, perhaps, with houses and cars and boats and horses and God knows what, surrounded by bankers and lawyers, and an army of men, young and old, who told me I was beautiful and desirable, and each time one of them looked at me I could see the dollar signs in their eyes, like the wolf in a Disney cartoon. It’s funny, but nice guys shied away from me because they saw the money as an obstacle. Only the heels danced attendance. They make a joke out of the phrase ‘poor little rich girl.’ Don’t you believe it, Haskell. It’s hell.”

“I told Craig you could buy the best help there is,” I said, when she didn’t go on. “He said you couldn’t buy love, or tenderness, or sympathy.”

“He said that?”

“Sounded like he meant it,” I said.

“You can’t love anyone because they see you in an impossible frame of reference,” she said. “Deep down you know that everyone wants to steal from you: your banker, your lawyer, your estate manager, the people you buy from, the bellboy who holds out his hand for a tip, your friends, who begin to feel that they’re entitled to part of what you have—because they don’t see why you should have it and not them. You can’t ever help anybody—enough! You’re ripe for picking! I’m telling you this miserable sob story, Haskell, so you’ll understand what happened to me.”

“Small dividend?” I asked, holding out the shaker.

She ignored the question. “At a certain level, wealth is relative,” she said. “I suspect I have a great deal more money than Emlyn Teague, but he has so much that you couldn’t tell the difference when it comes to being able to acquire anything on earth you want. I met Emlyn at a party somewhere. He’s not unattractive in a weird way. His story isn’t unlike mine. Like Gary said to you, he was in the position of being able to buy almost anything but love, or tenderness, or sympathy. The first night we met we had a kind of funny, gay time together. I remember he took me home, very early in the morning, from some night spot. On my doorstep—my gold-plated doorstep—he said:

“ ‘Do you feel anything?’

“ ‘Like what?’ I asked him.

“ ‘Like a mad, irresistible desire to make love to me?’

“ ‘I wish I did,’ I told him. ‘It would be nice to make love to someone who wasn’t making a mental appraisal of the value of the silverware.’

“ ‘I wish I did,’ he said, ‘for the same reason. But that being settled, my pet, there’s no reason we can’t join forces in having some fun out of life.’ ”

“So we became friends, Haskell, for the curious reason that we knew neither one of us wanted anything from the other. I thought, at first, that he was a kind of joyful madman. He loved practical jokes. He’d go to endless pains and expense to make them come off. He made me laugh and I needed to laugh. Emlyn’s bosom friends were a little harder to learn to take—Jeremy, and Oscar, and Van, and Ivor. Their notion was that part of the joyful-madness department was a kind of free-love compact. They expected me to be like Bobby Towers, available whenever and wherever. You may not understand why I felt a little guilty that I couldn’t say ‘yes’ to everything. It was part of their way of life, and they were providing me with the first real fun I’d ever had, so I ought to have been willing. But I wasn’t. The result was that I tried to even things up by entering into Emlyn’s pranks and games with all the energy I had. I was the mad, mad, mad one of the lot. I’ve thrown more money away on crazy escapades than most people earn in a lifetime. It’s pretty incredible when you stop to think of it. And pretty soon nothing was quite gay enough or produced quite enough laughs. That’s when the quality of the games began to change—an element of sadism began to be part of them—before I realized it was happening. People were being really hurt; not laughed at, but hurt.”

“Like Julie Frazer,” I said.

She looked at me, her eyes very bright. I’d brought her up short, but I realized she’d been remembering with a kind of excitement. I felt just a little revolted.

“That was when it first began to go sour for me,” she said, her voice very low. “I’m not going into case histories with you, I can’t. But I wanted out. I went to Emlyn one night and told him I had had fun, but I was through. I wasn’t getting kicks out of it anymore. I was beginning to feel like a heel. Mind you, Haskell, I should have long ago, but I hadn’t.

“ ‘You can’t quit, my pet,’ Emlyn told me. ‘You’re one of us. You’re in with us up to your pretty neck.’

“ ‘I’ve had enough,’ I told him.

“ ‘But we need you,’ he said. ‘You’ve become our trademark.’

“I told him I was sorry, but I’d had it.

“Then he laid it on the line to me. I hadn’t stopped to think, but actually we were guilty of crimes—legal crimes. They’d been committed for laughs, but they were nonetheless punishable. No one in the group could quit. It wouldn’t be safe for the rest.

“ ‘You might turn next to religion,’ Emlyn said, with his evil little smile. ‘Where would we be if you took to confession for the good of your immortal soul—if any?’

“He’d kept a kind of log on all our activities for the last five years. He had each one of us hooked. I had to go on until I could find a way out. Presently, Emlyn came up with a new game. It involved—well, never mind what it involved. It topped anything we’d done before in malice. At the last minute I ran out on them. I had a little power boat at Santa Monica, and on a night I was supposed to be meeting the others, I took off in it. They wouldn’t be able to find me out on the ocean.

“When you’re running you don’t take ordinary precautions. I’ve handled small boats all my life. I’m good at it. But that night, in my anxiety to get away, I didn’t stop to check on weather conditions. It was a beautiful, moonlit night, but, actually, small-craft warnings were up. I’d only been out about an hour when I was hit by a violent windstorm. Before I knew it, I was fighting for my life—all through the longest night of my life. It was just daylight when I ran aground on a rock ledge. I hadn’t the faintest idea where I was, but I had to abandon the boat and try to swim for shore which was at least a mile away.

“I don’t remember making it. Oh, not a blackout, Haskell. Simple Exhaustion. I did manage to crawl up onto a stretch of rocky shoreline, and there I passed out.

“When I came to, I was in a bunk somewhere, warmly wrapped in blankets, and I could smell the delicious aroma of fresh coffee. And when I sat up I saw Gary, that inevitable pipe in his mouth, coming toward me with a steaming cup of coffee and a plate of bacon and eggs. It turned out he had rented this little cabin on the beach. He’d gone out for an early morning walk and found me lying unconscious down at the high-tide line on the beach. He’d carried me to his cabin, dried me off, and left me to sleep it out. He introduced himself, and I knew who he was. I’d read his books. I told him I was ‘Dorothy Smith.’

“This was a new kind of man to me, Haskell, and a new kind of situation. ‘Dorothy Smith’ wasn’t the second-richest girl in the world. She was just ‘Dorothy Smith.’ I told Gary there was no one to worry about me. I didn’t have to get in touch with anyone.

“We talked for hours about his work, his philosophy of life, his values. He seemed to need to talk about himself. He’d been working out there in isolation too long. But—well, finally, it came around to my turn to talk about ‘Dorothy Smith.’ There wasn’t anything to tell about her unless I made it up on the spot. I, God knows, needed to talk out my problem. In the end I told him who I really was.”

She was silent for a moment. I glanced at my watch. It was already past eight o’clock and Shelda was probably fuming in the Grill Room. I’d promised her dinner at eight. But I couldn’t leave at that moment.

“I think Gary was a little stunned when he knew who I really was,” Doris said. “Of course he knew about me. Who doesn’t?” She allowed herself a little bitter laugh. “But for the first time somebody seemed to understand my problem. I had the feeling the money made no difference to him. It sounds funny to put it in words, but it didn’t make any difference to him that I was rich. He didn’t like me because of it, nor would he run away from me because of it. I—I can’t go into the detail of it with you, Haskell. That’s mine—my own to share with no one. But I stayed there in the cabin with Gary for three days. I was in love. For the first time in my life I had a relationship with a man that was based on nothing except what I had to give as a woman. Suddenly I felt strong, and sure of myself. We agreed to go back to Beverly Hills together, where I’d sign off with Emlyn and embark on a new and wonderful life.”

“It didn’t happen?” I asked.

“Oh, we went back to my house together. And I gave a party for Emlyn and the crowd. They were to meet Gary, and Gary would have it out with Emlyn. They had to let me go, because if they didn’t, then Gary and I would face them down—we’d agree to leave them untouched if they’d set me free.

“Emlyn, as usual, was one step ahead of me. Gary had gone into town on an errand, and the minute he left my house Emlyn appeared. It seemed to amuse him that the poor little rich girl was in love. And then, coldly and deliberately, he told me what he could do to me, and what he could do to destroy Gary, and, in the end, to make any relationship intolerable. If I went into it with you, you’d understand why I saw that the dream was impossible.

“When Gary came back I put on the act of a lifetime. I told him I’d changed my mind. That the beach cottage had been one thing, but now that I was back at home I realized the only thing I really wanted was to go on with my life as it had been. I remembered the stony look on his face.

“ ‘You’re a liar,’ he said.

“I laughed at him.”

“ ‘They’ve put the screws on you,’ he said. ‘I tell you, if you’ve got the guts we can outfight them.’

“I knew better. I knew that in the end his faith in me and love for me would be carefully destroyed—with surgical skill. And so I sent him away. That was two months ago. To the best of my knowledge I haven’t been in touch with him since. You say I phoned him—”

“He says you phoned him.”

“If I did, it’s part of what’s missing,” she said. “Tell him to go away, Haskell. Emlyn won’t let us win.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Teague threatens you with jail, but he was involved in everything you were involved in. He’d have to go with you. You don’t think he’d do that, do you, just to have his way with you?”

Her face was a white, tragic mask, the corners of the scarlet mouth were drawn down.

“If it simply meant facing punishment—” she said.

“What else?”

“If I told you the things I’ve done, Haskell, you’d walk out of here without giving me another thought. If Gary was told, I don’t think he could bear it either. He might think he could, but when he heard, it would be the beginning of the end. He could never hold me in his arms without remembering what he knew; never look at me across the breakfast table without feeling a slow revulsion. As far as rest of the world is concerned, I’d be a leper with a bell around my neck.”

“Surely it would be just as bad for Teague,” I said.

She shook her head, slowly. “That’s where the basic difference is between Emlyn and me,” she said. “I’m suddenly drowning in a sea of shame and remorse. He glories in it. It’s what makes him attractive to evil people like Jeremy and Oscar and Van and Bobby and Ivor. If I did the revealing, he would have a field day. He’d enjoy his role as the Prince of Darkness. There are always people who’d flock to him. He’d probably avoid legal punishment because he manipulated the rest of us so that we were the actors and he a delighted audience. He doesn’t want things changed, but if they were changed, he’d go on—with a new crew. And listen to me, Haskell. If Gary tries to fight Emlyn, he’ll lose what he’s fighting for. Even the memory of three magic days will be hopelessly tarnished, turned into something loathsome. Persuade him to go away, Haskell. Please, please!”

“Evil” is a kind of Biblical word that I don’t use in my everyday vocabulary. It may mean something precise to some people, like a direct violation of one or all of the ten commandments. To me it means something over-all, something that permeates a situation or a society, an atmosphere. I was reminded of a statement in one of Rebecca West’s articles on modern treason. She said, in effect, that in our highly sophisticated age there is almost no man who doesn’t know the difference between good and evil; that the frightening thing about this is the general preference for evil.

I came out of Suite 9F that evening with the uncomfortable feeling that I’d been walking along the edge of some slimy, contaminated area. I felt pity for Doris Standing, but I was reluctant to reach out to help her for fear I might become infected. If she’d meant to convince me that she couldn’t be rescued from her entanglement with Teague, she’d been pretty successful.

I went to my quarters where Gary Craig was waiting for me. I telephoned down to the grill to tell Shelda I’d be there in about ten minutes. Then, while I was putting studs into a clean dress shirt, I gave Craig a brief rundown on my meeting with Doris. He listened, a cold pipe gripped between his teeth.

“I’m not running out on her,” he said, when I’d finished.

“She desperately wants you to,” I said.

“She’s sick,” Craig said. “You don’t ran out on a sick person even if you can’t stand the smell of festering wounds. Maybe I couldn’t make a life with her if I knew the whole truth. Maybe I’m that weak. But I can pry her loose from Teague, and, by God, that’s what I’m going to do. She won’t see me?”

“No.”

“Can I get by the watchdog outside her door?”

“Not without Hardy’s permission.”

“Where’s Hardy?”

“I don’t know at the moment.”

“I see you’re not really on my side, Haskell. You want me out of here?”

“Hell, no,” I said. “I’m just reporting facts to you.” I glanced at the stack of newspapers I’d left with him. “Find anything in those back issues?”

He shook his head gloomily. Then he seemed to make up his mind about something. “You say Teague has reserved a table in your night club for eleven o’clock?”

“Yes.”

“So I can arrange for a head-on collision,” he said.

“It sounds silly, but you’ll need a dinner jacket and some pull with Cardoza, the captain, to get into the Blue Lagoon.”

“I’m going home now for clothes,” he said. “You can provide the pull with Cardoza, can’t you?”

“I suppose so. But what good will a public brawl do you?”

“Teague will have to start the brawl,” Craig said. “I’ll just supply him with the impulse.”

Part 2

One

MY GIRL, SHELDA, IS a delightfully unpredictable person. When she has complete justification for flipping her wig—like my being forty minutes late for a dinner date—she can be mild as a lamb. If I’m over polite to the eighty-year-old dowager who lives in the south penthouse, she can be as unreasonably jealous as if I’d sneaked a date with Sophia Loren. I expected to be shellacked when I joined her in the grill. Instead, she smiled contentedly at me from a corner table. Mr. Quiller, the new captain in the grill, was bending over her, solicitously. I could see she had a martini and a plate of hors d’oeuvres.

Mr. Quiller gave me an exemplary bow and held my chair for me. Before I could look at the menu, Fred, the waiter at that station, appeared with a martini in a little carafe and a chilled glass.

“Well, did she sell you?” Shelda asked, with a suspicious sweetness, when we were alone. “Ruysdale told me you were visiting her in her bedroom.”

“Her suite,” I said.

Shelda looked very lovely in a low-cut black dinner dress. When I’m close to her, I stop thinking how attractive other women are. There’s no need to think about them; only the need to offer a silent prayer of thanks that I am, at least for now, Shelda’s guy.

“I humble myself with regrets,” I said. “But she got talking and it seemed it might be valuable to listen.”

Mr. Quiller was with us again, bending over Shelda to refill her martini glass.

“He seems very nice,” she said, when Quiller had gone.

“And lucky,” I said. “He’s the only man in the room who can bend over you like that and not have everyone in the room know that he’s looking down the front of your dress.”

“You really think he was?” she said, pretending to be pleased. I mean, I hope she was pretending. At any rate I didn’t bite.

“It’s quite a story if you care to hear it,” I said, “and we seem to be building up to something later this evening. Shall we order? God knows when I may get yanked away again.”

“Don’t you think I should have a second man who would take up the slack when you’re late—or walk out on me in the middle of a date?” Shelda asked.

“Come on, baby!” I said.

So then we ordered dinner. Quiller recommended the roast venison with artichoke hearts in a purée of chestnuts. Shelda ordered it. I ordered a mutton chop, in an effort to keep the captain from being a 100 per cent correct about everything.

Then I gave Shelda condensed versions of Gary Craig’s story and Doris’.

“They make me feel horribly normal,” Shelda said, when I’d finished. Her little frown made her look like a child puzzling over an arithmetic problem. “You sound as though you believe them both, Mark.”

“It would be so elaborate if it wasn’t true,” I said.

“Mr. Chambrun told you they specialize in fancy embroidery,” she said.

“I’d swear those two are in love,” I said, “each trying to protect the other.”

“If the Teagues were threatening to expose Doris, she’d have had a motive for doing away with Slade,” Shelda said. “And so would Craig. How do you know he wasn’t in the hotel today long before he told you he was?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Are you going to tell all this to Lieutenant Hardy?

“Of course. When he gets back from dinner, or wherever he is.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” Shelda said, still frowning.

“Now wait a minute. Whose side are you on? You’ve been measuring Doris for the guillotine up to now.”

“I’m on your side, Mark,” she said. She reached out and touched my hand with cool fingers. “If these people are as monstrous as Doris says they are, you could get into bad trouble taking part in any of it. Why don’t you just do your job and let Chambrun handle the extracurricular department?”

“I’ll do what Chambrun asks, no more, no less,” I said. “Did you get a chance to go through the newspapers?”

She nodded. “There wasn’t anything relating to Doris or Teague or any of the others,” she said.

“Chambrun and Miss Ruysdale didn’t find anything either,” I said. “Doris seems to have been telling the truth about that.”

“There was something unrelated to all this that was interesting, though,” she said. “You got the word that Veronica Trask is arriving tomorrow?”

“Now there’s something for you to worry about,” I said. “I’ve been in love with her for twenty-five years.”

She ignored the joke. “You remember about two weeks ago Norman Terry committed suicide? There was a big Hollywood funeral with everyone who is anyone in pictures there. The Examiner made a special note of the fact that Veronica Trask was present. It was the first time she’d made a public appearance in twenty years. She and Terry played in a lot of pictures together.”

“And the funeral cheered her up, so she decided to make a public trip to New York,” I said. “I didn’t read about it at the time. Why did Norman Terry kill himself? No more work for him?”

“He was only a little older than Cary Grant!” Shelda said. “Sixty-five! He hadn’t made a picture for a couple of years, but according to the paper he was very well fixed. And he was still very attractive.”

“How did he do it?” I asked.

I saw a little shudder move over Shelda. “Put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger,” she said. “He didn’t leave a note or any kind of explanation. You think of cancer or something, but the local authorities said he was apparently in excellent physical condition.”

Mr. Quiller arrived again to oversee the serving of our dinner. I secretly wished I’d ordered the venison when I saw it. He bent low over Shelda again to serve her, and I noticed that, having been alerted, she had the decency to blush a little.

“Now that we’ve covered the general horror scene,” I said, when Quiller had reluctantly removed himself, “could we talk about important things, like how much I love you?”

She seemed not to have heard me. The little frown was still with her. “It’s just a coincidence,” she said, “but Norman Terry shot himself on the twenty-eighth of February.”

“What’s coincidental about it?”

“Wasn’t it on the twenty-eighth of February that Gary Craig says Doris called him and said she was in trouble?”

I stared at her for a second and then I laughed. Too far-fetched. “And by coincidence, on the twenty-eighth of February, I was sweating out the arrival of the March-first bills, and, as I recall it, you were spending the weekend with your aunt in Morristown.”

And then neither of us said anything because it was a coincidence of sorts.

“You get to thinking that if anything had happened on a certain day, the Teagues may be responsible,” Shelda said.

“You sound like a television writer,” I said.

“And then they’re all coming here,” Shelda said. “Teague and his friends, and Veronica Trask who was Norman Terry’s friend. And Doris is already here. And Slade was here. I mean, it is a sort of coincidence, Mark.”

I didn’t enjoy my mutton chop as much as I’d anticipated.

Quiller had just served us brandy and coffee when the waiter brought a telephone to the table and plugged it into the wall jack.

It was Chambrun.

“Will you convey my apologies to Miss Mason for dragging you away, and then come up to my office?” he asked. He sounded coldly formal.

“I’ll meet you in the Blue Lagoon a little before eleven if you can make it,” Shelda said. “I wouldn’t miss Emlyn Teague’s arrival for anything.”

Miss Ruysdale was still in Chambrun’s outer office, wearing the day’s working clothes.

“If your head comes off,” she said, with a tight little smile, “bear in mind that he has troubles.”

I had never seen Chambrun as he was at that moment. He’d changed into a dinner jacket and he was at his usual cup of Turkish coffee, but his eyes were as cold as two newly minted dimes.

“I expected you to report back on your conversation with Miss Standing,” he said. I could almost feel the ice of his anger.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was late for a dinner date. It was a long life story without anything new relating to Slade.”

“Anything she says is of interest. I’d like you not to use your own judgment about what’s important or not important.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, a little sore myself. “It won’t happen again. Would you like a rundown on it now?”

“No!” he said.

“Is there something else?” I said. It was the first time he’d ever been less than pleasantly genial with me.

“Ask Ruysdale to come in here,” he said. “And come back with her.”

I went to the door and beckoned to Miss Ruysdale. She came in and we stood facing Chambrun like two bad children in the headmaster’s office.

Then Chambrun laughed, and the rock-hard contours of his face broke down into something more like their customary good-humored outlines.

“Just before you came in here, Mark, I told Ruysdale she was an incompetent bitch,” he said. “That must give you an idea of how far out in space I am at the moment. I apologize to you both. Can we start over again?”

“Will you have some brandy to go into your coffee?” Miss Ruysdale asked, unruffled.

“No thanks, Ruysdale.” Chambrun took a cigarette from his silver case and lit it. “I’ve worked in this hotel for thirty-five years,” he said. “I have been its resident manager for twenty-five. Due to the owner’s preference for the French Riviera, I have been, in effect, the sole boss of this operation. Not once, in all that time, has Mr. Battle chosen to override a decision of mine. Until tonight. I have just finished tearing up my resignation, which I intended to cable to Mr. Battle. I think I’ve passed that time in life when I’m entitled to be childish.”

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

His good humor began to fade again. The lines at the corners of his mouth deepened. “Mr. Battle has asked me to make accommodations available to Emlyn Teague and four friends of his who are arriving tonight. I brought Mr. Battle up to date on what had happened today. That was, he told me, the reason for it. He holds Doris Standing and Teague in—his phrase was—‘affectionate regard.’ Doris needs her friends to be around her, to comfort and help her. I told him I wouldn’t have Teague in the hotel. ‘I am conveying an order, Chambrun,’ he said. And, believe it or not, he hung up on me. He may be the richest man in the world, but he’s very frugal when it comes to telephone bills.”

To most of us on the staff at the Beaumont, Mr. George Battle was apocryphal. Chambrun was the Beaumont; Battle was a coupon clipper. Suddenly, Ruysdale and I were made aware that there was someone with more power than God.

“I could ignore the order and face the consequences,” Chambrun said, squinting at us through the smoke from his cigarette. “But it occurs to me that I’m suddenly in the center of one of Emlyn Teague’s maneuvers. Teague knows I wouldn’t have him in the hotel, so obviously he made contact with the Great Man. Teague and Company will ride into the Beaumont in triumph, laughing at me. There must be a happy way for me to overturn the conqueror’s chariot and I propose to do so.” He inhaled deeply on his cigarette. “And outside the realm of childishness, we have a murder on our hands, and I have the solid feeling that it is all part of one of Teague’s vicious elaborations. It may actually be to our advantage to have them all under one roof.” He walked over to his desk and picked up a sheet of paper. “I’ve worked this out with Nevers,” he said: “Five single rooms, all on different floors.” He smiled. “I couldn’t do better for them if I wanted to. They will complain, and demand that they all be put together somewhere. That’s where you come in, Mark. You will be at the reception desk when they arrive about eleven. You will be excessively polite—and immovable. We have had to inconvenience other customers in order to accommodate them at all. If they insist on seeing me, which they will, you will tell them I’m closeted with the police in the matter of the death of their friend and I’m not available.”

“Right,” I said.

“And one other thing, Mark, in case I should forget in the morning.”

As if he ever forgot anything of importance to the Beaumont!

“Sometime tomorrow morning, Miss Veronica Trask and her secretary are arriving from the coast for a stay with us.”

“I know,” I said.

Chambrun’s face softened. “In the old days she was a regular guest of the Beaumont’s. She had a very special kind of glamour that we’ve come to miss.”

I grinned. “I just told Shelda that I’ve been in love with her for twenty-five years,” I said.

Chambrun gave me an odd little smile. “I was in love with her,” he said. “If by any chance, because of this other uproar, I’m not able to greet her and Miss Miller, the secretary, myself, I want you on hand, Mark. The treatment should be warm, cordial, and, at the same time, royal.”

It was then I told him about Shelda’s ‘coincidence’—Norman Terry’s suicide on the same day that Doris had called Gary Craig from somewhere to say that she was in bad trouble. Chambrun never brushes anything off without giving it a proper evaluation.

“I know what your Miss Mason felt,” he said. “Whenever tragedy and Teague are even remotely connected, you wonder. Let us say I think it would be a good idea not to push the possibility under the rug. When Veronica gets here, I’ll ask her about Terry. She’ll know more about his death than has appeared in the press. Tell your Miss Mason I bow to her intuitive gifts.”

At five minutes to eleven that night, I was waiting in the main lobby, near the reception desk, for the arrival of the “army.” I’d heard so much about Teague in the last twelve hours that I must confess I felt a kind of excitement as I waited. There had been a telephone call from Kennedy Airport at about twenty minutes to eleven. The jet from Los Angeles had arrived on the button and Emlyn Teague and his four friends had disembarked in full view of Lieutenant Hardy’s watching detective. That seemed to eliminate one possibility. None of them could have been in this part of the world when Jeremy Slade had been shot. That piece of information didn’t do anything to improve Doris Standing’s position.

At two minutes past eleven, five people whom I’ll never forget swept into the lobby, followed by the doorman and two bellboys loaded down with hand baggage. There was no possibility of missing Emlyn Teague, as Craig had told me.

He was wearing a fawn-colored camel’s-hair coat, and an olive-green Alpine hat with a bright-red feather in it. There was a white carnation in the lapel of his coat, and a white silk scarf, worn Ascot fashion, at his throat.

Beside him was a girl—who had to be Barbara Towers—wearing an unbelievable sable coat and a small sable toque on her ash-blond head.

Behind them, like gangsters out of a Warner Brothers’ movie of the thirties, were three men, all in dark coats, dark hats, wearing black shirts with white foulard ties.

Teague walked straight to the desk, and he was smiling. There was a kind of malicious delight in it.

“I am Emlyn Teague,” he said to Karl Nevers. “I believe you have accommodations for me.”

“Of course, Mr. Teague,” Nevers said. He consulted a slip of paper. “You are in 1204. Miss Towers is in 1612. Mr. Maxwell in 609. Mr. Delaney in 1421. Mr. Jerningham in 1019.”

“That, of course, will not do at all,” Teague said. “We want to be all together on the same floor.”

I moved in beside him, wearing my best smile. “We’re glad to have you with us, Mr. Teague,” I said. “Unfortunately these arrangements are the only ones we can make. Your reservations came in so late. Of course, your party can shift around in those rooms anyway you choose.”

“Who are you?” he asked. His eyes were a curious pale-amber color. I kept looking at him in spite of the almost overwhelming erotic perfume that emanated from the girl in waves.

“I’m Mark Haskell, in charge of public relations,” I said.

“I’ll talk to Chambrun, please,” Teague said.

“I’m afraid that’s out of the question,” I said. “Mr. Chambrun is with the police. Perhaps I should express our regret over the tragic death of your friend, Mr. Slade.”

“Where is Doris?” Teague demanded, no vestige of a smile left.

“Under house arrest,” I said.

“I want to see her at once,” Teague said.

“You’ll have to consult with the police officer in charge,” I said.

He seemed to balance easily on the balls of his feet, like a trained fighter or dancer.

“Let him alone, Emlyn,” the girl said. “He’s cute.”

I had to look at Barbara Towers then. She might have been very pretty without the almost exaggerated stage makeup—a scarlet gash of a mouth, heavy blue-black eye shadow, eyelashes that almost certainly had to be false. She was laughing at me silently.

“I’m all too familiar with the stupidities of the police,” Teague said. “We’re here to protect Doris and to see to it that an eye is given up for an eye. We’ll straighten things out with the police in the morning. I want a message sent to Miss Standing.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said. “It’ll have to pass through the police.”

“Tell her I’m here,” Teague said. “To stop worrying; that all our resources, financial and legal, are at her disposal.”

“Ill try to get it to her,” I said.

“I made a reservation in the Blue Lagoon for eleven o’clock. It will take us fifteen minutes to dress. Make certain our table is ready for us.”

“It will be ready.”

The yellowish eyes narrowed. “You may tell Chambrun that I’m displeased with his arrangements and that I know what to do about my displeasure.”

Mike Maggio and a crew of bellhops moved toward the elevators with the baggage. Miss Towers gave me a broad wink as she turned away to follow Teague and the three dark men toward the elevator.

Karl Nevers looked at me gravely, made a pistol out of his right hand, and went “Ah-ah-ah-ah ah-ah.”

It was a good hour before Teague and his friends appeared behind the velvet rope stretched across the entrance to the Blue Lagoon. Cardoza had found a small table in a corner for Shelda and me. To our left, I saw Gary Craig seated at the bar, turning a highball slowly around in his strong hands, a pipe gripped between his teeth. A kind of group sigh had risen over the music being played by a guitarist on the bandstand. It told us all that something unusual had appeared in the door.

“Holy Christmas!” I heard Shelda whisper.

Teague was consulting with an obsequious Cardoza. He was something to look at. His dinner jacket was a chartreuse green. His dress shirt had soft, lacy pleats, and the cuffs, billowing out, were period lace. There was a pale-yellow flower in his buttonhole, the size of a saucer. His dress tie matched the chartreuse jacket, tucked under the tabs of a widespread collar.

Teague was certainly eye-catching, but it was the Towers girl who had brought the soft, gasping sigh from the audience. She had appeared wrapped in a sable cape, little flecks of silver dust in her hair, and dangling earrings studded with diamonds. The eye makeup had been exaggerated so that she looked almost oriental in spite of her blondness. Then, while Teague discussed something with Cardoza, she nonchalantly slipped off the sable cape and draped it over one arm. She had on a strapless black evening gown which fitted like a glove down to her knees and then flared out gracefully. A luscious figure seemed in immediate danger of popping out of the dress, in full view of New York’s most prominent night-life livers.

“Shut your eyes and count to ten!” Shelda hissed at me. “Just bear in mind she’s a circus, not a woman.”

Teague, it developed later, was dissatisfied with the table Cardoza had reserved for him. I suspect this was a continuous act with him. Had Cardoza been willing to change the table, the parade would have been longer and more attention getting.

Have I mentioned the three men who brought up the rear? They were there, dinner-jacketed in the conventional style except for their cummerbunds. These were of the same chartreuse material as Teague’s jacket. This may be the point to distinguish them, because they were to play a big part in the next forty-eight hours of life at the Beaumont. The tall one with the frosting of gray at the temples, the neatly trimmed black mustache, and the elegant manner of man-of-distinction in a liquor ad, was Ivor Jerningham, giving the guests of the Blue Lagoon a supercilious smile. I have a dossier on him on my desk as I write this. On that evening he had just passed his forty-eighth birthday. He was English-born and had been expelled from several good public schools—as they call private schools in England—and just missed being booted out of Cambridge University by enlisting in the Royal Air Force in 1939. The good part of his record came after that You have to be more than lucky to survive six years of combat missions over enemy territory and rise to the rank of colonel. When peace came, Jerningham wasn’t trained for anything in that kind of world. All he knew was flying, and he wasn’t receptive to the rigid disciplines demanded by airline managements. He was charged with the attempted rape of a distinguished diplomat’s wife in Cairo. He got out of that bind with the help of one Emlyn Teague. There were hints of jury-bribing and the general corrupting of Egyptian officials. From there on, Jerningham was inseparably linked with Teague. He was, I learned later, the one who took the big risks.

The one who stood directly behind the astonishing Miss Towers, was a giant of a man, physically, with a shock of carrot-colored hair. This was Van Delaney, said to be an artist, son of a wild Irish poet and a Dutch mother. He was much younger than Teague or Jerningham, about thirty, I judged. His record was a one-way street of brawling and debauchery and simple-minded violence. I was to learn that he was a very dangerous man because he hadn’t enough imagination to understand fear.

The third man would have passed unnoticed in any other company, unless his physical ugliness attracted your attention. He was short, with a hint of deformity in stooped, round shoulders. His hair was black, worn long so that it went down over the back of his collar in an unkempt fringe. He wore black, shell-rimmed glasses, and his nose was large and beaked. His lips were thick and sagged to one side as if he might have suffered a slight stroke at some time. I never saw him without a cigarette drooping from that sagging corner of his mouth. You might get the mistaken impression that he was at death’s door from boredom. This was Oscar Maxwell, court jester, the master planner of Teague’s mischiefs.

When you got over the first visual shock of seeing them all together—the flamboyance of Teague, the erotic sensuousness of Bobby Towers, you felt a little chill of fear. At least I did. It was the kind of fear you feel for uncontrollable mobs—and for madmen.

Shelda’s hand was closed so tightly over mine, her knuckles were chalk white. “Let’s go away from here, Mark!” she whispered.

I was looking at Gary Craig. He hadn’t moved from his bar stool, and he hadn’t taken his eyes off Teague and the others since their arrival. He looked to be smiling, but it was just the baring of teeth as they bit down on his pipe stem. I had a vision of what Doris Standing must have added to that group when she was with them—a kind of high-powered drive, the more frightening because it would have appeared young, exuberant, and healthy. She would have put you off guard, made you relax, and left you wide open to the mortal thrust from the others. They needed her to appear less obviously sinister.

The suave Cardoza was not to be bullied, and eventually Teague and the Towers girl followed him to the table that had all along been reserved for them. They were only just seated and giving their order to a waiter, when the lights began to dim. The guitarist had left the bandstand, finished with his interim job between floor-shows. We were about to hear The Frightwigs, a trio in the Beatle tradition, Mac Williams, a stand-up comic with a wicked ad-lib, topped by the lovely Diane Davis, for my money the best girl singer of the day.

The Teagues were almost blotted out of sight by the darkness, but a spill from one of the spotlights focused on The Frightwigs made the silver dust in Bobby Towers’ hair sparkle like small stars.

“I thought there’d be something funny about them—amusing,” Shelda said. “People always talk about their wild jokes. But—”

“There’s nothing very funny about the last one they pulled here—the deliberate destruction of Julie Frazer.”

“Put me in a cab and send me home, Mark,” she said. “I don’t want them to see me when the lights come up. I don’t want them to know I’m alive.”

“You really are shattered, baby.”

“I thought Doris Standing was pulling your leg. I thought it was an act,” Shelda said. “My God, can you imagine being caught by them against your will?”

“Look, honey, nothing is going to happen here in front of three hundred people,” I said.

Famous last words!

And so Shelda stayed, and she saw what was to come.

I don’t buy The Frightwigs and their a-go-go beat, but Mac Williams is amusing. I’d seen the show a dozen times but his material is strictly topical and it changes every night. Diane Davis bombs me. She’s a thin, almost ethereal-looking girl, with a flame inside that burns white hot. She can sing with a clear, bell-like quality, and she can belt out a torch song that’ll have you on your feet clapping and yelling when she finishes. She can wrap an audience around her little finger, play on them as though they were an instrument she owned, and leave everyone in love with her. No audience ever has enough of her. She’s generous with her time and talent, but she knows enough to leave them hungry for more. The applause for her that night was thunderous and demanding. When she finally left the little stage for the last time and the lights came up, there was a swell of voices, as if everyone in the room had to talk about her at the same time.

“Mark!” Once more Shelda’s hand closed over mine. She was staring at Teague’s table.

I felt my heart give a little thump against my ribs. Sometime during the dimout, Gary Craig had left his place at the bar. He was standing by Teague’s table and you could see he was talking to Teague. Of course, I couldn’t hear any of it, but instinct told me we should get on our horses.

“Excuse me for a minute, honey,” I said to Shelda. I stood up, looking around for Cardoza. He was over by the velvet rope, regretfully telling would-be customers that there was no room in the Blue Lagoon. I edged my way between tables to get to him. Craig was still talking to Emlyn Teague.

I had to turn my back on that scene to get to Cardoza. Just before I reached the captain, I heard a woman scream, and the voices in the room rose in a murmur of excitement. I turned around quickly.

Van Delaney, the wild Irishman, was on his feet and, standing behind Craig, he was twisting the writers arm behind his back. I saw Craig writhe in pain. At the same moment, the elegant Ivor Jerningham stood up, facing Gary. He struck the helpless writer a vicious backhanded blow across the mouth—and then another and another.

“Come on!” Cardoza said at my elbow.

I saw Teague, coolly smiling. I saw Bobby Towers, her lips slightly parted, as if she was watching an exciting movie. Oscar Maxwell was slumped in his chair, cigarette glowing red, the lights turning his spectacles into two shining windowpanes.

Cardoza has some pretty good boys working for him in the Blue Lagoon. Two burly waiters reached the battlefield before Cardoza and I did. Instantly Jerningham stepped back from Craig, and Delaney let go Craig’s arm. Gary’s legs buckled like rubber and he went down on his knees. His face looked like raw hamburger.

“He insulted the lady,” I heard Jerningham say, coolly. The front of his dress shirt was spattered with Craig’s blood.

“I hardly expected to be subjected to a waterfront brawl at the Beaumont,” Teague said, as Cardoza came up to him. “Get this fellow out of here and see that he doesn’t bother us again.”

I was kneeling beside Gary, one arm around him.

“I’m all right,” he muttered thickly. “I asked for it.”

I helped him to his feet. For a moment he stood looking at the Teagues, a façade of blandness, and then he staggered around and started for the door. I went with him, steadying him with a hand under his elbow. With his free hand, he was blotting at his cut mouth with a handkerchief. The so-called sophisticated guests of the Beaumont gawked at him like a Coney Island crowd outside the freak show.

I started to steer Craig toward the elevators, with the idea of getting him up to my quarters, but he wasn’t having any.

“Walk it off,” he muttered.

“Better get cleaned up first,” I said. “There’s blood all over your shirt.”

“Let me alone, will you, Mark? I’ve got to get away from here or I’ll go back in there and kill him!” His voice shook.

“How did it start?” I asked.

“I told him to lay off Doris,” Craig said. “I told him he wasn’t to try to see her. God help me, it was infantile. He said I should go peddle my papers, and didn’t I know when a lady said ‘no,’ she meant ‘no.’ Then, I guess I boiled over. I said if he tried to turn Doris into a public whore like that Powers bitch, I’d cut his heart out.” He shook his head, trying to clear it. “I—I suppose that gave them the right to chop me down.”

“You’ve got to have live ammunition to fight that mob,” I said.

“I need air,” Craig said. “Thanks for standing by.”

I watched him cross the lobby and head out onto Fifth Avenue through the revolving door.

Then I turned back toward the Blue Lagoon and came face to face with Ivor Jerningham, emerging from the trouble area. He gave me an amiable smile.

“Sorry for the uproar,” he said. “Got to get on a clean shirt.” He indicated the bloodstains on his starched front. “He was calling the lady names in a loud voice that could be heard at half a dozen tables. We couldn’t let him get away with that.”

“How are you when somebody isn’t holding the guy you’re hitting?” I asked, feeling reckless.

His dark eyes narrowed, but his smile was fixed. “Is that an invitation to the next waltz?” he asked.

“I think I can assure you that a repetition of that kind of thing and you’ll find yourself out on the sidewalk, George Battle or no George Battle,” I said.

“It would almost be worth it—just to see,” he said. “Friendly warning, Haskell. Don’t over-estimate yourself.”

He gave me an ironic bow and moved off toward the elevators.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Mr. Cardoza uncertain of himself. The Blue Lagoon’s captain was waiting for me by the velvet rope.

“I ought to kick the lot of them out on their ear,” he said, “but your friend did insult the lady in no uncertain terms. People at the next tables back them up. I also understand they have special drag.”

“The situation, to make the understatement of the year, is delicate,” I said.

“I wish you’d report exactly what happened to Mr. Chambrun,” Cardoza said. “I haven’t been able to reach him on the house phone. If he has any special orders—”

“Will do,” I said. “First, I’ve got to get Miss Mason home.”

Shelda lives about ten blocks from the Beaumont, in the East Seventies. Normally, I’d have taken her home, stopped off for a drink and whatever else might be in the cards. Tonight I couldn’t leave the Beaumont. There was no telling what the next turn of the wheel would bring. I did go out onto the street with her to put her into a cab. Standing under the green awning, while Waters, the doorman, whistled us up a taxi, Shelda looked very good to me—normal, healthy, uncomplicated in a complicated way.

“Please be careful, Mark,” she said.

I gave her a somewhat attenuated brotherly kiss on her very unsisterly mouth. “I love you,” I said. “I’m not running any kind of risks that would give you the excuse to look somewhere else.”

“Try to persuade Gary Craig he’s got to be smart, not physical,” she said.

“See you in the morning,” I said, and I gave her behind a little slap as she got into the cab.

Then I went looking for Chambrun. I was puzzled by his failure to appear on the scene before this. The Beaumont’s staff will swear he has a private radar system that keeps him in touch with everything and results in his being suddenly on the spot, wherever crisis exists.

Chambrun’s office was locked, which probably meant Miss Ruysdale had finally gone home after her usual seventeen-hour day. I went to the house phone in the hallway and tried to reach him in his penthouse. There wasn’t any answer. Mrs. Kiley, the night chief operator at the switchboard, usually knows exactly where to reach him.

“He was in the penthouse five minutes ago,” she said. “He hadn’t told me anyplace else to reach him. He’s probably on the prowl. He’ll check in with me when he lights somewhere.”

On an impulse I asked her to connect me with 9F.

“Room’s empty,” Mrs. Kiley said, after a moment’s delay. “Check out.”

“Doris Standing?”

“Dorothy Smith checked out about a half an hour ago,” Mrs. Kiley said.

So Hardy and Naylor had finally preferred charges, I thought.

“When Mr. Chambrun checks in with you, Mrs. Kiley, tell him I’m looking for him, urgently.”

“Sure, Mr. Haskell.”

I hung up the phone and turned down the hall. There was Chambrun, unlocking his office door.

“I’ve been looking for you,” I said.

“Come in, Mark,” he said. He sounded unusually tired.

We walked through Miss Ruysdale’s domain to the private office. Chambrun headed straight for the little Turkish coffee maker on the sideboard. A lifted eyebrow asked me to join him. When I refused, he poured a little in his own cup and topped it with a slug of brandy, a rare procedure for him.

“From what Mrs. Kiley tells me, I take it they’ve arrested Doris,” I said.

“On the contrary, she’s been turned loose,” he said. He sat down wearily in the high-backed armchair behind his desk. “Madison is no dummy. He stood up very solidly to Hardy and Naylor, and they finally threw in the towel. She’s not to leave town, and all that.”

“Where did she go? You know what happened downstairs?”

He nodded.

“The first thing Teague asked when he registered was where he could find Doris,” I said. “I told him the police—”

Chambrun held up a silencing hand, as though it tired him to have me chatter on about things he already knew. “She’s checked out, if Teague asks. But since I don’t have any secrets from you, Mark, she’s in my penthouse—as my guest, not a guest of the hotel.” He paused to light a cigarette. “My thoughts on any given situation are usually pretty clear,” he said. “I can be wrong, but I know what I think. In this case—” He spread his hands in an expressive little shrug.

“The Slade case, you mean?”

“Doris Standing’s connection with it,” he said. “Like you, I’m inclined to believe the blackout story. If I believe that, I suppose I should believe the rest of her tale. She’s afraid of Teague and Company. So she was afraid of Jeremy Slade. She could have shot him in self-defense and be afraid to admit it. That’s one possibility. It’s also possible she was really in touch with your friend Craig. Maybe it was Craig who came to 9F and was admitted by Slade. If Craig killed Slade, Doris would cover for him with the last ounce of strength she has. She’s in love with him. That’s a second possibility.”

“One thing is certain,” I said. “It wasn’t one of the Teagues who killed him. They all arrived on the jet at Kennedy, so they were all in California at the time. Hardy has checked that, hasn’t he?”

“It checks,” Chambrun said. “Where’s your friend Craig now?”

“Out somewhere, walking it off,” I said.

“I think Hardy and Naylor are about to try him on for size,” Chambrun said.

“You don’t suggest a third possibility that would let Doris and Craig off the hook,” I said.

“Theories, theories, theories,” Chambrun said. “Not worth the powder to blow them up. But there is one, of course. Slade made his presence known in the hotel by that grotesque performance in the Trapeze at lunchtime. Now, there must be hundreds of people who have some deep wounds inflicted by one or all of the Teagues. Perhaps one of them saw Slade in the Trapeze, bided his time, followed Slade to 9F, got himself let in, squared accounts, and walked out. That’s a third possibility, Mark.”

“But no leads pointing that way?”

“None whatever.”

“So Hardy has to take turns working on Doris and Craig because he has no place else to go,” I said.

“He has to concentrate on them, Mark. They’re all he’s got. But our Hardy isn’t a fool. Hell keep exploring every other possible avenue.”

“You gave him your third possibility?”

Chambrun smiled. “As a matter of fact he gave that third possibility to me,” he said.

“So what now?” I said.

“I suggest you go to bed and get some rest,” Chambrun said. “Somebody’s got to be fresh and on the ball in the morning. I’m staying here until I get the word that Teague and Company have retired for the night.”

When I got back to my quarters, there was no sign of Gary Craig. He was, presumably, still out somewhere walking it off. I hadn’t realized how tired I was myself until I hit the sack. I’d turned on the bedside lamp beside the other twin bed that Craig would occupy, and I went to sleep with it burning.

My own internal alarm clock woke me about a quarter to eight in the morning. Craig was in the other bed, sleeping heavily. I must really have been tearing it off to have slept through his arrival.

I shaved and showered and dressed, making as little noise as possible. I usually have breakfast brought to my place by room service, but I figured Craig probably needed rest more than I had, and so I decided to have my coffee and eggs in the main dining room.

I was just checking out my pockets—wallet, keys, cigarettes, lighter—when there was a sharp knock on my door. I answered it quickly, not wanting Craig to be wakened. I opened the door, and there was Lieutenant Hardy, and Jerry Dodd, our security man, and Chambrun.

“Craig here?” Hardy asked.

“Asleep,” I said.

Hardy walked past me and straight into the bedroom.

“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.”

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 brimming 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.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know for sure. But you’re about to be pretty thoroughly destroyed unless we come up with the answer. While we have time, you’d better tell me exactly what happened.”

It was just then that I came barging in. I hadn’t gotten Chambrun’s call, but I’d gotten the word from Johnny Thacker in the lobby and came flying for orders.

“You can depend on Mark,” Chambrun said. “Let’s get to the facts before the roof caves in.”

I watched Madison, a giant of a man with a magnificent physique, sink into one of the big armchairs. He seemed to shrivel inside his charcoal-gray suit. I thought if it had been me, they’d make jokes about my yearning for a sexy broad. This one they might try to hang from the nearest lamppost. He was black.

Chambrun tapped the papers on his desk. “I know that she called you in the penthouse and what she said. I have listening ears at work. So begin with what happened when she let you into her room.”

“She might almost as well have been naked,” Madison said. He moistened his lips. “The negligee was next to transparent and she didn’t have anything on under it.” He shook his head. “I should have told her then, I’d come back when she was decent. When you’re a Negro in this world, Chambrun, you don’t take any risks at all. It could have been bad if a bellboy had come in with a lunch tray. The girl, dressed like that, and me what I am. But she’d said on the phone that she had something that would help Doris.” He hesitated. “Do you know how I happened to be Doris’ lawyer?”

“Is it important for me to know? We haven’t much time.”

“God knows what’s important,” Madison said. “You want the facts, quick. They’re simple enough. I went in, a little shocked that she’d receive me with so little on. She offered me a drink. I refused. She made herself about a triple martini. I told her I had to get back to Doris quickly. Right there she got off base, and I should have run. She said something about how lucky Doris was to have such a fine-looking guy for a lawyer. I urged her to tell me what it was she knew that would help Doris. She sat down on the arm of my chair. I began to sweat, Chambrun, but I wasn’t smart enough to hightail it out of there. Instead of telling me anything, she started to ask me how tough the spot was Doris was in; what had Doris told me about Teague and the rest of them; and had Doris told me where she’d been for the last two weeks. I thought she was trying to make up her mind about telling me something she knew, so I answered the best I could. Then all of a sudden she bent down and kissed me right on the mouth, and I could feel her hand inside my shirt. I pushed her away. Then she clawed me. It wasn’t an angry thing. It was quite deliberate. And then she said: ‘Sorry, buster.’ She ran for the door tearing the negligee off her shoulder—and out into the hall, screaming.” His eyelids twitched as they closed over his eyes. “Those are the facts, Chambrun.”

I saw a little trickle of sweat run down his cheek. He was scared, and I didn’t blame him.

“So how do you happen to be Doris Standing’s lawyer?” Chambrun asked, after a moment.

Madison opened his eyes. The pain in them somehow seemed to hurt me. “We just sit here and wait for them to come for me?” he asked.

“But we don’t waste time, while we’re waiting,” Chambrun said. “A kind of pattern is starting to take shape, Mr. Madison, but so far I haven’t been able to make it come clear. What seems unimportant may help. One thing we don’t waste time with are any doubts in your mind that I question a single detail of your story. You were framed, and the reason is pretty clear.”

“Clear?”

“Emlyn Teague wants you removed as Doris’ lawyer and helper. He’s already engaged a man named Wallace Harmon to take your place. They’re waiting for you to be tarred and feathered, and then Harmon will take over as Doris’ legal representative.”

“Why? Miss Standing is satisfied with me,” Madison said.

Chambrun’s eyes squinted against the pale smoke from his Egyptian cigarette. “Think it through, Mr. Madison,” he said. “For the moment, we have to choose to believe someone. I go along with what we’ve learned from Doris and Craig. This is the way it goes. Two months ago Doris Standing ran out on one of Teague’s games. She’d had enough. She wanted to be free of them. Her boat was wrecked in a storm and she was picked up on a beach by Craig. They spent three days together. They fell in love. In the process she made something of a clean breast to Craig. She didn’t tell him the details of all the games she’d played with Teague, but she made it clear to him that they’d been bad. He offered to help her to cut loose and they went back to Beverly Hills to face Teague. Teague played his trump suit. He evidently convinced Doris that she could be prosecuted for criminal acts, but worse than that, from her point of view, he made it clear what he could do to Craig, and what a detailed picture of the past would do to Craig’s love for her. She couldn’t face it. She gave Craig his walking papers.

“Approximately a month went by, and then, on the night of February twentieth, Doris set out from her house to join Teague and Company for dinner. Down drops the blackout curtain. Here’s where it gets sticky. Eight days later, she called Craig in New York to say she was in desperate trouble and needed his help. She was coming to New York and would meet him the next morning, here at the Beaumont, for breakfast. She doesn’t remember making that call. Where was she during those eight days after she set out for dinner until she called Craig? We don’t know. Where has she been for the fourteen days after she made the call? We don’t know. Did she black out, have a moment of lucidity when she called Craig, and then black out again?”

“A psychiatrist could tell us if that’s possible,” Madison said.

“I’ve already discussed that with Dr. Partridge, our house physician, who’s a very wise old bird,” Chambrun said. “He makes this suggestion. There was nothing wrong with Doris from the twentieth to the twenty-eighth of February. She ran somewhere, she hid somewhere, but she knew at the time why and where. Finally, desperately, she called Craig for help. Then came the blackout. The mind chooses to shut out something intolerable. Whatever it was, it happened between the twentieth and the twenty-eighth. It also blotted out the present for her, and for two weeks she wandered around in a fog, coming back to reality in a train at Grand Central yesterday morning. It could be that way.”

“But if it is—”

“Let me finish,” Chambrun said. “As far as Teague is concerned, she’s been missing for three weeks. He was evidently desperate himself to find her. Jeremy Slade was sent to New York in case she should turn up here, a familiar stop off for her. It’s my guess that when Slade found she’d checked in yesterday, he got in touch with Teague. Teague and Company planned to head east. I’m guessing they came after Doris, not because Slade was subsequently murdered. Doris is their reason for being here and they are desperate to get her away. Why?”

“Because she may remember what happened between the twentieth and twenty-eighth of February,” Madison said.

“Right,” Chambrun said. “It must be something they cannot afford to have made public. By the time they got here, you were handling her case. You’d avoided an arrest, but she was inaccessible. When she was released, you advised her to stay on here in my apartment. They have to change her mind about that, and so they have to get rid of you. The way to do that is to totally discredit you and put you up to your neck in your own self-defense—your own problem. Their next move will be to get her away and make sure she never tells anyone what it is she knows and has, for the moment, psychosomatically forgotten.”

Madison’s lips tightened. “She could be their next murder victim,” he said.

“She’s certainly in very great danger,” Chambrun said, “but I’d like to be certain that we’re using the right words. You say ‘their next murder victim.’ By that, you mean Slade was their first victim, Jerningham their second, and Doris may be their third?”

“What else?” Madison asked, spreading his big hands.

“This is all theory,” Chambrun said, “but I can’t make it fit—the notion that Teague is responsible for the murder of two of his closest friends. When Slade was killed, I thought it could be part of a Teague game. But not now. Not two of them. Which brings me to the part of the puzzle for which I have no pieces. I think someone is out to massacre the entire Teague organization.”

“Craig?” Madison asked.

“Possible but improbable,” Chambrun said. “I have the feeling that someone we haven’t even dreamed of is waiting in ambush to knock off Teague or another of his friends.”

“With no connection with Miss Standing’s blackout?”

Chambrun’s eyes narrowed. “I didn’t say that. It could well be connected with what happened between the twentieth and the twenty-eighth of February. According to Doris, Jeremy Slade said he wanted to talk to her about the night of the twenty-fifth.”

“Where does this get us?” I asked, speaking for the first time.

“To some very unpleasant possibilities,” Chambrun said. “Accepting this theory as fact for a moment, we know two things. What Doris has blacked out is something so dangerous to Teague that she must be stopped from remembering and telling it, at any cost. So she is in grave danger from Teague. But bear in mind that Doris has always been one of the most notorious members of Teague’s team. Actually, they have been called Doris’ Standing Army, not Teague’s. So if someone is bent on wiping out the whole miserable company, Doris would be a prime target. The minute she’s set completely free, Teague will be after her, and the murderer will be after her.”

“Hardy’s theory is simpler,” Madison said. “He thinks Doris has blown her stack and is out to annihilate the Teagues, probably with Craig’s help. He doesn’t believe in the blackout for a minute.”

“It would be fine if he’d arrest her and lock her up in a good safe cell, somewhere,” Chambrun said. “But I’d like to bet that Mr. Wallace Harmon, a lawyer with all kinds of political contacts in this man’s town, is going to get her off—and hand her over to Teague. It will be a horse race then, to see who can do her in first; Teague or the person we can only, for the moment, call X.”

“First they have to get rid of me,” Madison said. “I think I could persuade Miss Standing to stay here, under my protection and yours. If—if she doesn’t believe Miss Towers’ story.”

“Will she? You know her,” Chambrun said.

“The longer I hide, the less chance I have of being believed,” Madison said.

Chambrun flipped the switch on his intercom. “Ruysdale? Locate Lieutenant Hardy and tell him Mr. Madison is here with me.”

Chambrun walked over to the sideboard to replenish his demitasse. There was part of his theory that didn’t quite make sense to me. Doris had told me that Teague, himself, wasn’t afraid of exposure. He’d been clever enough to keep himself legally in the clear, and he would actually relish being made a public symbol of evil.

“A good point, Mark,” Chambrun said when I put it to him. “But remember, what Doris told you related to all that had happened before the twentieth of February. If we want to buy my theory, we can tell ourselves that what happened after the twentieth—perhaps on the night of the twenty-fifth, a date Slade mentioned to Doris—has put Teague behind the eight ball. He is not legally in the clear for whatever happened then. Doris doesn’t threaten an exposure of something sinister that would actually give him a kind of twisted pleasure. She threatens his freedom, his safety—the exposure of a criminal act for which he can be punished.”

“It makes sense,” Madison said. “Two of his friends have been killed. He has to know someone is gunning for him. Why stay here and wait for it? With Teague’s money they could take off for the moon, out of reach of any danger. But if Miss Standing represents a danger, too, they can’t take off and leave her behind.”

Chambrun nodded. “That is exactly how I see it,” he said. “As a hotel manager, I say let them all go away from here as quickly as possible. Let them take Doris with them. Let them make their mess on somebody else’s rug. But as a human being—” He shrugged. “Doris Standing troubles me. Repent and ye shall be saved. Somehow she doesn’t fit the essentially vicious picture presented by the others. If I drove her out of here and read about her death in the headlines, I’d feel guilty.”

“And if she stays here,” I said, “the person who’s running berserk in the hotel, may choose her for his next target.”

“We have a chance to protect her here,” Chambrun said, “but who will protect her once she’s out in Teague’s world?”

“You’re right about Miss Standing,” Madison said. He seemed to be staring back into the past. “I grew up in Harlem, Chambrun. I’m not going to deliver you a lecture on Negro ghettos. I suppose kids that grow up there are no different from kids who grow up anywhere else—except for one thing.” His smile was bitter. “When you were a kid, your mother told you that in this great land of ours you had as good a chance as anyone else to grow up to be President. Negro mothers don’t tell their kids that because it just isn’t so. Not if you’re black. Not if you’re second class.

“But to get back to kids. They run in gangs; they always have. Everywhere. They’re basically high-spirited and full of mischief. But the mischief of kids, black or white, has two different kinds of motivation. There are those who go about it for the sheer joy of raising hell, and there are those who operate from bitterness, from a sense of injustice, and from the desire to fight back—to hurt. You’re all part of the same gang, all enjoying the same laughs, you think, and then, in the excitement of some prank a tenement is set on fire, an old lady is burned to death, a kid is crippled.” The big shoulders shuddered. This, I sensed, wasn’t an invention. It had happened.

“You want out,” Madison said, after a moment. “I was lucky. I could run with a football. I got an athletic scholarship to a fine university. I carried a football for four years. I was a big name.” He laughed. “You know why I use the initials ‘T. J.’ instead of a name? Because my family were old-time Negroes who lived in a shadowy world of the past. I was christened ‘Thomas Jefferson.’ Can you imagine what I’d have been subjected to—Thomas Jefferson Madison? Carrying a football got me into big money—bigger money than I’d ever dreamed of. During my professional career as a football player, I was able to study for a law degree in the off season. It took me seven years, but I made it. I’m a good lawyer. But there are only two things anyone ever thinks about me. I was perhaps the best running back in the pro league. And I’m a Negro. But I’m getting away from Miss Standing.”

“She was one of the ones who made mischief for the sheer joy of raising hell,” Chambrun said.

“I think so,” Madison said, nodding slowly. “Teague has contempt for me because I’m black. So do the others. That bitch upstairs thinks of me as second class, too, but she’s real twisted. She had a job to do; to frame me. But I was exciting to her, too. Maybe she’s heard the rumor that a big buck nigger has unusual sexual gifts. Damn her! She hoped I’d make it real—make a pass at her. It didn’t work, so she had to fake it.” He drew a deep breath. “Thank God there are other kinds of people in the world. There’s the rare one, hidden away, to whom color makes no difference at all. They take you for what you are as a human being. But it’s never quite normal. It takes courage for a white girl to marry a Negro, or vice versa. It doesn’t take courage for you to marry one of your own kind, except”—and he smiled—“except the courage it takes to get married at all. But a mixed marriage adds a dimension that has to be faced every day. So it’s never quite normal. Then there are another much larger group of people. Politically, they’re called ‘liberals.’ Morally, we think of them as ‘good people.’ They say, ‘Just because he’s a Negro doesn’t mean he isn’t entitled to everything I’m entitled to.’ They invite you to their homes, they do business with you, they give you a little extra—‘just because you’re a Negro.’ But it’s never quite normal. Never. Doris Standing is one of those—and we’re grateful for them. Don’t think we’re not.

“A couple of years ago, I was in California. I’d been asked to cover the Rose Bowl game for a newspaper syndicate. Years ago I’d had a good day in the Rose Bowl myself. The night before the game there was a big banquet and I was one of the chief speakers. I was the big hero returned to the scene of an early triumph. There was a lot of flag-waving, and an unfortunate introductory speech that went on about how the Negro had come up in the world! And I made my speech. I kept race relations out of it. I just talked about football.

“Afterwards there were dozens of parties that would go on into the night. Everybody slapped me on the back and told me how simply great it was to see me, but on the sidewalk outside the hotel I was suddenly all alone. No one had asked me to any party. I was hailing a cab when someone spoke behind me.

“ ‘Private date, Mr. Madison?’

“I turned around and saw Miss Standing. I knew who she was. Who doesn’t who reads the papers?

“ ‘Very private,’ I said, ‘with myself.’

“ ‘Walk me to the parking lot?’ she asked. ‘I’ve got a car there.’

“My impulse is always to run, and I always fight it, and maybe I shouldn’t. Anyhow, I walked her to her car—a very fancy Ferrari. She stood by the car and looked at me, her head high the way it always is, her eyes very bright.

“ ‘I am basically a stinker, Mr. Madison,’ she said. ‘I tell myself that I’m without any prejudices and I express my outrage when any one else shows any, but I’m not able to do something pleasant at the moment without being acutely aware that you are a Negro.’

“ ‘Then forget it,’ I said.

“ ‘If I saw anyone standing on the street corner after a dinner like that, with no place to go when everyone else was going somewhere, I think my impulse would be to suggest we go have a drink somewhere—especially someone like you, from out of town, who had no local network of friends. But I’m not sure whether my impulse to ask you to do something with me is that simple, or whether I’m building myself up to myself as a great, liberal heroine. Would you take a chance on it? If I find out I’m being a phony, I’ll let you know.’ ”

Madison laughed. “Hell, she’d put it on the line, which is more than most people do. I said I’d take a chance. She suggested her house because there’d be no one there to stare at us and remind her of what a fine, clean-cut, American girl she was trying to be. You know, I wondered then if I was being set up for one of her famous practical jokes. I’d read about them. I wondered if Teague and the others would appear out of the woodwork to make a fool and a chump out of me.

“But they didn’t. Miss Standing and I sat around on the terrace of her house, and had a drink or two, and eventually I was supplied with bathing trunks and we went for a dip in the pool. I—I don’t know to this day what she was thinking about me—if being a Negro really made a big difference to her—if she was secretly afraid, or intrigued, or what. There wasn’t a moment of self-consciousness between us. Then, as it came obviously time for me to go, she surprised me with a question.

“ ‘How would you like to go on a retainer to handle my legal affairs in New York City?’ she asked.

“ ‘I’d like it fine,’ I said, ‘if I’m qualified. But surely you have some old-line firm taking care of you.’

“ ‘They’ve been stealing me blind,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’d steal from me, Madison. Do you know why? It would be bad public relations for the Negro cause.’

“ ‘Maybe you are a stinker,’ I said, not really hurt because she was trying to be honest.

“ ‘It crossed my mind that that’s why I want you to take the job,’ she said. ‘I had to tell you. I hope I want you because I’m impressed with you as a human being.’

“So that’s how I came to be her lawyer,” Madison concluded. “She’s come to New York three or four times in the two years I’ve worked for her. Our relationship has been strictly business, with a pleasant overlay of sociability. I’ve done a good job for her. She’s repaid me by trusting me. Do you know what she said when I walked in on her yesterday afternoon? ‘It was the luckiest day of my life when I hired you, Madison. Now that I’m in a real jam I know that I have someone I can trust to help me! There’s no one else, Madison. No one!’ ”

“That seems to make it clear why Teague is so anxious to get you out of the picture,” Chambrun said. “I think we must make certain that doesn’t happen.”

The Law which descended on us moments later wasn’t represented by Lieutenant Hardy. His job was homicide, and he was up to his neck in it. John Naylor, the assistant D. A., led the charge, along with a captain named Pritchard from the local precinct house, and Mr. Wallace Harmon, Teague’s lawyer friend.

Naylor, as I’ve said, was bald as an egg, with a hard, perpetually angry face, and bright-black little shoebutton eyes. You hated him on sight, but I knew he was a good man at his job. Pritchard was one of those cops who would play it very tough with the helpless, and very cagey with the influential. His paunch suggested he was getting near the retirement age, and I had a feeling he didn’t want to make any mistakes. Harmon was tall, skinny, and perpetually in need of leaning against something. He was, I thought, deceptively genial to everyone.

“This isn’t my job,” Naylor said, in a harsh, impatient voice after he’d introduced Harmon and Pritchard all around. “Miss Towers has preferred rape charges against you, Madison. Captain Pritchard will take you down to the precinct house and book you, and being a lawyer, you’ll know what the next steps are.”

“A question,” Chambrun said, in a cold voice. “What is Mr. Harmon doing here?”

“He’s Miss Towers’ attorney,” Naylor said.

“You got yourself in a peck of trouble, boy,” Harmon said to Madison.

I felt the small hairs rise on the back of my neck. The lawyer spoke with a slow Southern drawl.

“He seems an ideal choice,” Chambrun said. “But before you go any further with this, Naylor, I think you should know exactly where you stand.”

“I don’t stand anywhere,” Naylor said. “My only interest in this is that Miss Standing refuses to cooperate with me and Hardy without advice of counsel. Mr. Madison is her counsel. If he’s unable to act for her, Mr. Harmon assures me that he will be her representative.”

“I don’t see any reason why Madison won’t be able to act for Miss Standing,” Chambrun said. “He’ll be out on bail in a short time.”

“It’ll be high bail, Mr. Chambrun,” Harmon said, his eyes narrowed. “I don’t imagine any ordinary bail bondsman will want to risk it. Black man and white girl.”

“I, personally, will make sure of the bail,” Chambrun said. “Do you care to know why I interest myself in this, Mr. Harmon?”

“It would interest me quite a lot,” Harmon said.

“Because the charge against Madison is a fake and a fraud. We used to call it the badger game in the old days.”

“That’s a pretty serious charge,” Harmon said.

“You bet it is,” Chambrun said, briskly. “In the end, Miss Towers will be faced with charges of false arrest, perjury, and God knows what else. I promise you I’ll press it to the limit because she used my hotel as a base of operations.”

“You have to be kidding,” Harmon said. “You take this colored man’s word against Miss Towers’?”

“Yes, sir,” Chambrun said. “Since eight o’clock this morning, Miss Towers’ phone has been monitored—along with Teague’s, Maxwell’s, and Delaney’s. I know, for instance, exactly when you were called this morning, Harmon. I know exactly what took place on each phone call made to and from Miss Towers’ room.”

The lawyer’s face was suddenly an unreadable mask. “It’s strictly illegal—this monitoring,” he said.

“I think not,” Chambrun said. “There’s a murderer loose in this hotel. Lieutenant Hardy asked for the full cooperation of my staff. It seemed that Miss Towers and her friends were in danger. We had to try to stay one step ahead—to protect them. We hadn’t anticipated they would be found guilty of anything.” He smiled.

“And what do you think you have that proves Miss Towers is lying?” Harmon asked.

“That, Mr. Harmon, you will discover when you bring charges against Mr. Madison.”

Boy, what a bluff! He had absolutely nothing. But Harmon was clearly hooked. You could almost see the wheels going round in his head. He was asking himself what kind of indiscretion Bobby Towers had committed. Had she talked to Teague, or Delaney, or Maxwell about the frameup, on the phone? I knew she hadn’t, but he didn’t.

“I simply don’t believe it,” Harmon said, but it was a mechanical statement. He turned the mask on Captain Pritchard. “Under the circumstances, I think I should have a chat with my client, Captain, before you make the actual arrest. I don’t imagine Mr. Madison can give us the slip. He’s pretty well known.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Madison said. “I’ll be right here, protecting the interests of Miss Standing.”

Harmon gave each of us, except Madison, a courtly little bow, and left. Pritchard, looking relieved, followed him out.

Naylor let out his breath like a whale coming up for air. “I didn’t like the smell of it from the start,” he said. “This Teague bunch are just plain hell.”

Madison was blotting at his face with a handkerchief. “Why didn’t you tell me from the start you had proof?” he asked Chambrun.

“Because I don’t,” Chambrun said cheerfully. “The Towers girl told a small lie on the phone when she said to Atterbury that your office had told her you were here at the hotel. Your office hadn’t told her anything because she hadn’t made an out call. But there was nothing else. Harmon’s faith in his client is rather touching, though, don’t you think?”

For the first time since I’d known him I saw Naylor laugh. It was so nearly uncontrollable that he had to get himself a drink of water to stop it.

Two

THE DAY MOVED ON.

In midafternoon a report from ballistics showed that the same gun had been used to kill Slade and Jerningham. But there was no trace of the gun itself. Hardy was going round in circles. He could work up a motive for Doris. He could work up a motive for Gary Craig. He could place Doris at the scene of Slade’s murder, but that was all. She couldn’t be positively placed on the tenth floor at Jerningham’s door. Craig couldn’t positively be placed on either scene. It was possible for either or both of them to have been at both places, but not provable. Under our system Hardy had to do the proving, not the suspects. Without the gun he had no way of making a charge stick.

Late in the afternoon I know the lieutenant had a long session with Chambrun. He’d been dealing with theories of his own all day without being able to make them check out. I guess he was willing to listen to Chambrun then, without too much protesting. He was stuck for a lead.

The telephones in the rooms of Teague and Company were curiously quiet all afternoon. Harmon had evidently scared the daylights out of them. The lawyer either did or didn’t believe what Bobby Towers told him. She must have sworn she’d said nothing incriminating over the phone. But since they all knew it was a frameup, they must have decided they’d better let the whole matter drop. Madison had unexpected allies.

About cocktail time the lid blew off again. As a result of Lieutenant Hardy’s conversation with Chambrun, five very large men who obviously could never be mistaken for guests of the Beaumont, took up stations outside the rooms of Teague and Company. They were Hardy’s men. Teague was the first to discover the watchdog outside his door. He was told that he was being protected. He didn’t want protection! Well, he had it, whether he wanted it or not. He would complain to the commissioner! That was up to him. Where was Hardy? In Mr. Chambrun’s office.

Teague went down there under a head of steam, followed by his guardian.

Lieutenant Hardy was a very tired man. He’d had little or no sleep in the last twenty-four hours—from the time he’d been called in to investigate Jeremy Slade’s death. He was no closer to a solution than he’d been when he first walked into Suite 9F. Frustration is an exhausting business in itself. He’d been pushed around by the facts and, I suspect, pushed around a little by Chambrun.

He was, in short, not ready to be cordial when Teague burst into Chambrun’s office at a few minutes past five. He was relaxing. Chambrun had gotten some food into him and he was having coffee, accompanied by a rare Biscuit Dubouché.

“You’re the man I want to see!” Teague said in a rasping voice, ignoring Chambrun who was over by the sideboard, replenishing his endless supply of Turkish coffee. The big plainclothesman loomed in the doorway.

Hardy, whose outward manner is usually deceptive—slightly puzzled, a shade deferential—wasn’t in the mood for pretense.

“So you found me,” he said.

“I could go to the commissioner, but I thought I’d try you first,” Teague said.

“So try me,” Hardy said.

“What is the reason for this—this elephant—trailing me around the hotel, standing outside my door? Why are my friends being subjected to the same stupid surveillance?”

“You’re being protected,” Hardy said.

“I haven’t asked you for protection. I don’t want it,” Teague said. “I demand that these goons be taken off our backs now—at once.”

Chambrun told me later there was something very close to hysteria under Teague’s fancy surface.

“I’m not in the mood for demands, Mr. Teague,” Hardy said. “Let me make it quite simple for you. Two of your friends have been murdered. We think perhaps all of you are in danger. While you’re in my jurisdiction, we’re going to see to it that nothing happens to you.”

“There’s going to be hell to pay in this place,” Teague said. The little amber eyes suddenly blazed at Chambrun. “An illegal and unwarranted monitoring of phone calls, and now our freedom curtailed. If it’s the last thing I ever do, you two birds are going to have your feathers plucked, but good!”

“Your freedom hasn’t been curtailed,” Hardy said, sipping his brandy. “You’re free to go anywhere you choose, at any time you choose. You can check out of the Beaumont. You’re your own man, Teague. But while you’re in the city of New York, you’re going to be guarded. Preventing crime is as much a part of the police job as making arrests after the fact. And I suggest you don’t waste time calling the commissioner. He’s already given complete approval of my actions.”

Teague’s eyes narrowed. “Are you telling me that I’m at last free to see my friend, Doris Standing?”

“You can see Miss Standing,” Hardy said. “Of course your bodyguard and hers will be on hand. And I suspect her lawyer will be with her.”

“She’s free to leave the hotel?” Teague asked.

“Carefully guarded—if she chooses. I understand, though, she’s rather annoyed at the snow job you tried to pull on her lawyer. It could be she doesn’t want to see you, and in that case you won’t be able to force yourself on her.”

Teague controlled his voice with difficulty. “I’ve never encountered a situation to equal this,” he said. “You’ve accused Miss Towers of framing Madison. You and your monitored phone calls. You and I both know there weren’t any such calls.”

“Then why hasn’t Madison been arrested and booked?” Chambrun asked.

“Because the frameup is on your side and you know it, Chambrun. Every employee in this hotel will do exactly as he’s told. If you want to present phony calls in defense of Madison, I know there’ll be half a dozen people to testify to them. We’re playing against a stacked deck. Be sure, Chambrun, we’ll take care of you and Madison in our own way and in our own time.”

“You could save yourself and all of us a lot of trouble and inconvenience, Teague,” Chambrun said, “by telling us exactly what happened on the night of February twenty-fifth.”

They said afterwards that Teague’s face turned a yellowish green. He looked like a man who’d been struck a mortal blow. He actually took a step backwards.

“Doris has come out of her trance?” he asked, in a husky voice. “That stupid bitch!”

And then he realized his mistake. Doris couldn’t have talked or they wouldn’t be asking him. He made a super-human effort to get himself under control.

“It was a waste of time coming here,” he said. “I’m a man who holds grudges a long, long time, Chambrun. I’m an expert at squaring accounts. Don’t either of you forget it.”

He turned and walked out of the office, followed by his bodyguard.

Hardy emptied his brandy glass. “You hit a bull’s-eye with that February twenty-fifth crack,” he said.

“The trouble is, the target is in the dark,” Chambrun said. “I don’t know what I hit.”

While all of this was going on, I’d been finishing up the day’s ordinary routines in my office, having a hard time concentrating. I’d sent Shelda home with the promise that I’d call her if anything new happened. When I’d finally finished the paper work, I went down the hall to my quarters, to find one of Hardy’s men parked outside my door.

“What cooks?” I asked him.

“I’m assigned to Gary Craig,” he said. “He’s inside.”

Craig was lying on the twin bed in my bedroom, hands locked behind his head, eyes closed. He looked gray from fatigue.

“You look like you’d had it,” I said.

He drew a deep breath. “I begin to understand why people confess to crimes they haven’t committed,” he said. “No rough stuff, you understand. Just Hardy and Naylor going over and over and over the same ground. One of them could rest while the other had at me. I damn near caved in just to get rid of them. Then, unexpectedly, they gave up. Jesus!”

“You have a bodyguard, I see.”

“I rate along with Teague and Company,” he said. “What’s with the outside world? Doris? Is she alright?”

I brought him up to date on Bobby Towers’ little game with Madison. In the process I tossed in Chambrun’s theory about the dual danger to Doris. Craig sat up on the bed, a little nerve twitching high up on his cheek.

“Is there any reason I can’t see her?” he asked.

“We can try,” I said. I picked up the bedside phone and called Chambrun. Hardy was still there. They held a conference I couldn’t hear. Then Chambrun came on again.

“Craig can go up,” he said. “Madison’s with her. We’ll let them know you’re coming. And Mark?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll give Craig ten minutes with her and then we want to join you. The time has come to make a strenuous effort to lift the fog.”

There are four penthouses on the roof of the Beaumont. They are served by the hotel staff, but they’re not available to transient guests. They’re actually cooperatively owned apartments. Chambrun had invested in one of them. The other three were owned by people who never had any connection with the Teague case.

Chambrun’s apartment is something to see. He has many friends from all over the world and he’s been the recipient of many gifts. There are paintings and sculpture, extraordinary Oriental rugs, ivory carvings from the Far East, medieval masks. It is of no one period nor one taste. But somehow, mixed together, they represent the man. It is a museum, but it has the air of being a home at the same time. I have been in the apartment dozens of times and yet I had the feeling I’d only seen half of what there was to see. That late afternoon there was something else to see beside Chambrun’s treasures. It sounds corny, but it’s a rare thing to watch two people come together who are very much in love and very much in need of each other after a long separation. Such meetings usually take place in private. Privacy wasn’t to be a privilege granted to Doris Standing and Gary Craig just then. I felt like a miserable Peeping-Tom.

Gary and I, accompanied by his bodyguard, went up in the elevator and found another of Hardy’s men stationed outside the door of the penthouse. We rang the doorbell and T. J. Madison answered it. Behind him, across what must have seemed like a great space to Gary, we saw Doris, sitting stiffly erect on a couch by Chambrun’s fireplace. Madison closed the door, leaving the two watchdogs on the outside.

Gary walked slowly toward the girl. She seemed to be frozen where she sat. And then, just before he reached her, she was on her feet and took the few quick steps that carried her into his arms. I turned away. Her hunger for him made me an intruder.

“He may be helpful,” Madison said quietly.

“He wants to be,” I said.

“I’ve been trying to persuade her that she needs psychiatric help,” Madison said. “I’ve put Chambrun’s theory pretty solidly to her. As long as she can’t remember these last three weeks, she’s in serious danger. She doesn’t even have the choice of telling or not telling whatever it is she’s hidden from herself. Meanwhile, Teague has time to make dead sure she is permanently silenced before she does remember.”

“And she won’t get help?”

Madison’s smile was grim. “She’s frightened,” he said. “She’s afraid of the dark, and she’s afraid if she does remember, it may destroy any chance of any kind of future. She’s intelligent enough to know that she’s probably hiding her own guilt with this amnesia.”

“It’s a hell of a situation to be in,” I said.

“I’m convinced of what I tried to tell you and Chambrun,” Madison said. “That this is a fundamentally decent person. She’s been wild, undisciplined, reckless, thoughtless of other people—but not vicious. She’s wanted out for a long time, and found herself in a trap. She’s being eaten alive by remorse. At almost the moment she finds a solution to her life in the person of Craig, she cracks up under pressure from Teague. She can’t choose a course of action because she can’t remember some key fact. She’s tangled up in psychic dangers, plus very real physical danger from two directions.”

“With her money she can go hide anywhere in the world until the fog clears,” I said. “Take Craig with her!”

“And with his money Teague can follow her,” Madison said. “I hope I’m right. I think I’ve convinced her there’s no future in flight. The showdown should be here and now, where she has Craig, and me, and I hope Chambrun and you, to help her. At least we can physically protect her here—from Teague and from the person Chambrun called X.”

Across the room, Doris and Craig were sitting together on the big overstuffed couch, talking earnestly together, her hands held tightly in his. I wondered what I’d be saying to her if she was mine; if I cared for her as much as Craig did. The unknown thing that lay at the center of her blackout must have scared him as much as it did her.

Madison and I wandered into a little study to the left of the front door, intent on giving them as much time together as we could. It seemed pitifully brief when the doorbell rang and Madison opened it to Chambrun and Hardy.

When we joined them, I saw there’d been a change in Craig. His eyes were bright. She’d restored his lost energy and strength, somehow. They sat side by side, her hands in his, but the desperation I’d sensed in both of them before seemed to have evaporated. Together they’d found courage to face whatever it was they had to face.

“I’m in your hands—all your hands,” Doris said. “Madison has convinced me that I should stay where I am and fight. Gary has given me the courage, if that’s what you want me to do. But, oh, God, Mr. Chambrun, it’s not that I’m afraid to face death. I’m afraid to face what I can’t remember. Gary says that no matter what it is, he’ll stand by. But can he? Suppose it’s something—”

“Stop supposing,” Gary said. He lifted her hands and kissed them gently.

“One thing we’re very sure of, Miss Standing,” Chambrun said, “is that the thing you’ve hidden from yourself happened on last February twenty-fifth. We shot that arrow at Teague a few minutes ago and it almost brought him down. I have two suggestions to make to you.”

“Please,” Doris said.

“I think we should call in a first-class psychiatrist. Possibly he could help you to remember. There are drugs, properly administered, that might break down the barrier. Hypnotism has been used to get at things hidden in the subconscious. That’s my first suggestion.”

Doris’s lips trembled. “If you say so.”

“So far as you know, you were in California on the night of February twentieth?”

“Yes. I was at home, in Beverly Hills. I started out for dinner with Emlyn and the others—and that’s where the curtain comes down.”

“Then I suggest you authorize Madison to hire the best private detectives he can find in Los Angeles to pick up your trail on the night of the twentieth and follow it as far as they can. Do you know where you were going that night?”

“To Emlyn’s for cocktails. And then—then I don’t know.”

“I suggest you put both plans into motion at once,” Chambrun said. “We don’t want to wait for one to fail before we try the other. We don’t have time. We can protect you from Teague and his friends, but we’re working, blindfold, against a murderer who may have you high up on his fist.”

“You handle the detective end of it then, will you, T. J.?” she asked.

Madison was already headed out of the room toward the study.

“Will you trust me to find the right medical man for you?” Chambrun asked.

“I have to trust you, Mr. Chambrun.”

“I have connections who will recommend the right man,” Chambrun said. “I don’t know how soon we can get him here, but we’ll whip the horses.” He smiled at her reassuringly.

“One other thing, Miss Standing,” Hardy said. “Stay here, in this place. Don’t be tricked into going anywhere else.”

“Tricked?” she asked, her eyes widening.

“You might get a message that I want to see you somewhere, or Chambrun wants to see you. Know that it’s a trick if you get such a message. If any of us want you for anything, we’ll come here.”

“I understand,” she said in a small voice. Then: “What’s going to happen to T. J.? Is Bobby pressing her charges? What a vile thing to do to him.”

“Nothing is going to happen to him,” Chambrun said. “I think we’ve successfully put a spoke in that wheel. You trust Madison, don’t you?”

“Completely,” Doris said.

“Get some rest if you can,” Chambrun advised. “When the doctor we find gets here, the going may be pretty rough for you.”

Three

I FELT RELAXED. I guess I wanted to think that everything was under control. Teague couldn’t move secretly. He had an army, but it was competently covered by Hardy’s army. Doris was in an inaccessible fortress on the top of a high building, with a cop, and Madison, and Gary to protect her.

I felt it was time for a double martini.

I said something of the kind to Chambrun on the way down in the elevator.

“Care to have it with your lady love?” he asked.

“Shelda’s gone home,” I said, “but if you can spare me for a while—”

“I’m talking about your first and true love,” he said, smiling at me. “Veronica.”

“Why not?” I said.

“Let me make the phone calls necessary to dig up a doctor for Doris and I’ll go with you,” he said. “You might call Veronica and find out if it’s convenient.”

The lady was delighted at the prospect. “Gail’s gone out to spend the evening with some friends. I was beginning to frizzle up with boredom.”

I waited for Chambrun to make a series of calls. It was perhaps a half an hour before he joined me in his outer office.

“I’ve got on to a top man,” he said. “He can’t get here for a couple of hours, but I gather he’s worth waiting for. Veronica say yes?”

“Tickled pink,” I said. “The secretary’s gone out. What is there about her? The name’s vaguely familiar. Gail Miller.”

Chambrun lit a cigarette as we waited for an elevator to take us to the eighteenth floor. “She was what I think was called a ‘starlet’ back in the forties,” Chambrun said. “She had one big moment—some wartime epic with Gary Cooper, I think it was. Second lead, but it attracted attention. Then she faded out. She made some U.S.O. tours with Veronica. I think that’s where they teamed up.”

“She must have been very young when she quit trying to be an actress,” I said, “She can’t be much over forty now.”

“You can’t be sure about women’s ages these days,” Chambrun said. “Only the very young and the aged can’t fool you. If you didn’t know Veronica’s history, what would you take her to be?”

I laughed. “A very well-taken-care-of forty-five,” I said. “Only twenty years off the mark.”

I would have said the same thing five minutes later when she opened the door of her suite to us. She was ageless. She had on a black cocktail dress with a very full skirt that went all the way down to her slippers, a fitted bodice that accented a still-lush figure, and a wide V that went out to the very tips of her still-lovely shoulders. The sleeves were long, with a touch of white lace at the cuffs. At sixty-five she dared to leave her neck and throat bare of any jewelry.

“My very dear Pierre,” she said.

He bent over her hands with a kind of old-world courtesy.

“I know it’s been a bad day for you, Pierre, or you wouldn’t have stayed away from me so long. Please come in, sit down, and take off your shoes if it will make you feel at home. You understand I’m not letting you out of here until you bring me up to date on all your excitement.”

Room service had provided her with one of our traveling bars: ice bucket, glasses, a half a dozen different liquors and a fine sherry, sliced lemon and orange, lemon peel, bitters, sugar, soda and tonic—the works. There were hot canapés in a covered dish, crackers, cheese, nuts.

“Please be bartender, Mark,” she said. “A very mild gin and tonic for me, with a twist of lemon. Pierre?”

“Forgive me if I just have a tonic without the gin,” he said. “The night stretches out far ahead of us. Mark will do the heavy drinking for us. I think he was weaned on martinis.”

It was very pleasant for a while. The room was softly lit. There was a little fire burning on the hearth. I make the best martini I know of for my own taste. I call it an ‘in-and-out.’ You put a little vermouth in the pitcher, swizzle it around, pour it out entirely, and add gin.

Veronica’s conversation was for Chambrun. I didn’t mind. I like to watch and listen to her. Her hands were expressive. Her voice was the low, throaty one that had sent chills up my back at age fifteen. They disposed of mutual friends and a few old memories. Then she gave a little luxurious, catlike stretch.

“I’ve been a fool to stay hidden away so long, Pierre. But I wasn’t really sure of it till I got here today. I used to think I hated being trailed around and gawked at by fans. And yet, in a way, they were my life’s blood. I could be making pictures now if I wanted to, you know. I was a good actress, Pierre, but the image was romantic. When I saw the rushes on my last picture, I knew I was going to have to start playing John Wayne’s mother! I didn’t want that. I didn’t need it. So I just shut the gate to my house and lived inside it—with Gail, poor child.”

“Poor child?” Chambrun raised his heavy lids.

“Twenty-two when she gave up,” Veronica said. “A love affair that went very badly wrong for her. She’s missed a whole life, staying with me. I should have pushed her out, but in a way I needed her, so I was selfish and let her stay.”

“How did you come to spring yourself?” Chambrun asked.

“A tragedy,” Veronica said, her face clouding. “Norman Terry. You remember him? We must have made a dozen pictures together. Suicide. He was one of the last of the great names in my day. I had to see him on his way, Pierre.”

“Of course.”

“So Gail and I came out into the world for that, and suddenly I wanted more. On the spur of the moment, we decided to come to New York—but, oh, so secretly. Eddie Schramm, the producer, offered me his apartment and we came—still hiding, you understand. Ten days of hiding behind black glasses, window-shopping, eating in modest little side-street restaurants where there’d be no chance of being recognized. And then we said, to hell with it! Let’s come out in the open. Let’s have fun! So where else but here, my Pierre! And now I’m going to do the town up brown!”

Chambrun sat staring at the coals on the hearth. “I don’t know,” he said, in a faraway voice, “whether or not I’ll forgive you for being here ten days without letting me know.”

“I had to feel my wings, Pierre. I couldn’t come to the Beaumont and hide! Not this wonderful, glamorous place. But I’ve waited quite long enough to hear about your excitement.”

He gave her a fairly detailed account of the last twenty-four hours at the Beaumont.

“Mark tells me you’ve had a brush with Teague,” he said, when he’d finished.

She’d listened with bright interest and what I thought was growing outrage when he came to the part about Bobby Towers and Madison.

“I got the minor-league treatment, I guess,” she said, but she sounded bitter. “I met Emlyn Teague during the war, when I was overseas doing shows for the troops. He was an amusing creature. You understand, Pierre, I wasn’t Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard when I went into retirement. I saw a few friends; I gave a few parties. I just stayed out of the public eye, and out of reach of the sightseers and the autograph hunters. Emlyn looked me up. He used to drop in occasionally for a drink. I knew his reputation. I allowed myself to believe, however, that I was a friend. He got the idea somewhere along the way that I should give a big party for a lot of the old-timers who’d been around in the old glamour days. An anniversary party—celebrating the making of my first picture. The idea appealed to me. There were a lot of the old stars around, many of them not so well off as I am. Emlyn said he would take over all the details for me—the caterer, the music, the guest list. I had invitations engraved and Emlyn sent them out.” Her face hardened. “The night of the party was a beautiful night. We had tables set up all over the terraces; there was music, and flowers, and champagne, and a full moon. And no one came.”

“What?” Chambrun said sharply.

“No one came, Pierre—except Teague and his friends. And they came—to laugh.”

“And no one else?”

“No one else. I made my big entrance—my big return to life, Pierre—and there was no one there to see it, except the laughing Teagues.”

“But the guest list—the invitations!” I heard myself ask.

“The invitations had gone into a trash can, somewhere,” Veronica said. “Of course, I didn’t know it at the time. It was a long while before I realized I wasn’t forgotten, abandoned by my friends.” She drew a deep breath. “I do not love the Teagues, Pierre. I do not love them at all.”

“Then you really did shut out the world after that?” Chambrun said.

“Until two weeks ago,” she said. “Oh, I knew the truth about my party long before that, but, somehow, I didn’t have the energy or the courage to come out of the hiding I need never have gone into.”

“They are nourished by cruelty,” Chambrun said.

Veronica held out her glass to me. “I’ll have another small gin and tonic, Mark,” she said. And then as I went over to the bar, she went on. “It’s part of a new world that I find very hard to adjust to, Pierre. Everything is so marvelously efficient that there’s no place for individual achievement any more. The whole Northeast was blacked out one night last fall. Why? Because when something went wrong, man wasn’t able to do anything about it. You look around and the great efficiencies are all threatening destruction. So something went wrong with the great machines and our lights went out. Tomorrow something may go wrong with another machine and before anyone can do anything about it, the whole world will be destroyed. There’s no place left for sentiment, or warmth, or traditions, or even good manners. Maybe we have to concede that Emlyn Teague is on the beam. There is nothing left for the individual to do but laugh at his own vanities, his own futile self-importance, his miserable little household gods. No single heroic voice can be heard directing us back on the rails. If one tries, he is shouted down by mobs with signs, or by hate groups who’ve lost track of what to hate, or by an assassin’s bullet—fired by one man who actually represents a faceless, directionless mob. It’s too late for me to become part of that mob, Pierre. I have to fight for meaningless things—like honor, and reason, and genuine friendship. I think of you as fighting for those things, Pierre; for a dead or dying way of life represented by the Beaumont.”

“You’re not making me feel cheerful,” Chambrun said, staring at the red coals in the grate. As he turned his head to look at Veronica from under his hooded lids, I wasn’t sure he’d been listening. “What went wrong with Norman Terry?” he asked. He had remembered our little coincidence. “I understand he was well off, financially; not ill.”

“Poor Norman,” Veronica said. “For forty years he was a romantic hero to the women of the world. And then we moved into the age of the un-hero. The matinee idol is dead. People today must laugh at sick jokes, or sit yogalike, examining their miserable childhoods. The image of the romantic hero has been ground up in the sausage machine that is television. Norman couldn’t take it. He couldn’t bear to be laughed at.”

“His funeral was on the twenty-eighth of February,” Chambrun said. “When did he shoot himself?”

“On the twenty-fifth,” Veronica said, sipping the drink I’d brought her.

Chambrun’s bright eyes flashed my way quickly, but his voice was quite casual as he asked Veronica if there’d been some specific incident that had set Terry off.

“I don’t know, Pierre. If I had, I might have saved him,” she said. “He came to see me on the afternoon of the night he killed himself. I guess it’s no secret that Norman and I had been more than an acting team in the old days. We might have married, but back then, the studios controlled our lives. We were a romantic couple. If we’d married, the studio felt we would have lost our box-office appeal. And also, Norman had a wife, locked away in a mental institution. A divorce would have turned him into a villain in the public mind. So he and I had what we could have in secret. In the end it died a natural death. There was nothing to nourish it. I was growing older. Younger, more exciting women camped on his trail. He was the big romantic figure of the day. We separated without bitterness, but with a continued affection and regard for each other.”

“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 attention.”

“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 remember 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.

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 prosecution 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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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1966 by Judson Philips

cover design by Julianna Lee

978-1-4532-6884-1

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Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Contents

Part 1

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Part 2

One

Two

Part 3

One

Two

Three

Four

Copyright