The Deadly Joke

A Pierre Chambrun Mystery

Hugh Pentecost

A MysteriousPress.com

Open Road Integrated Media

Ebook

Contents

Part One

1

2

3

4

Part Two

1

2

3

Part Three

1

2

3

Part One

1

WHEN DOUGLAS MAXWELL, IMMACULATE in white tie and tails, walked into Chambrun’s office on the second floor of the Hotel Beaumont that evening we, literally, froze. You see, two of us had seen Maxwell shot to death less than half an hour before that moment. Now he faced us, his handsome face grave, a little nerve twitching high up on his left cheek, very much alive. Twenty-five minutes ago I had helped carry him from the Beaumont’s lobby to the little first-aid station back of the reception desk. The bullet had gone straight into his heart, and that white shirt front had been stained a bright scarlet, his face twisted into a last-minute grimace of terror. He had been very dead when Dr. Partridge, the house physician, had examined him. I had come directly to Chambrun’s office to report the tragedy along with Jack Mickly, Maxwell’s public relations genius.

The little red button on Chambrun’s desk phone flashed urgently, but he ignored it. I have never seen Chambrun at a loss before. He had been about to light one of his Egyptian cigarettes when Maxwell made his entrance. His gold lighter remained suspended in space, the flame flickering. His black eyes, buried deep in their pouches, were fixed in a blank stare on Maxwell. Suddenly he stood up, almost upsetting his carved Florentine desk chair.

“What the hell is this?”

Mickly sank down into a green leather armchair, his legs rubberized. Beads of sweat stood out on his pale forehead.

“Sir,” he stammered. “Sir—it is you?”

“Easy, boy,” Maxwell said. “Easy.”

He wasn’t a ghost, it seemed.

I looked down at the cuff of my dress shirt. There was a small stain from Maxwell’s blood on it. Or somebody’s blood.

As a general rule Chambrun hates to have the Beaumont used for political occasions. The Beaumont is New York’s top luxury hotel. Parenthetically, Chambrun insists it is the world’s top luxury hotel. He is its fabulous general manager. I have heard him say that the Beaumont is not a hotel but a way of life. Whatever this great hotel is used for, Chambrun insists that it be done with elegance and taste. Fashion shows, debutante parties, private banquets can all be fitted into that framework.

“There is nothing either elegant or tasteful about modern politics,” Chambrun told me when the Maxwell dinner came up. “Nothing that is totally cynical can have either quality.”

But Douglas Maxwell was a friend. Chambrun would assure you that, when it came to the Beaumont, friendship would not influence his judgments. The truth is that Chambrun can be an intensely loyal friend; he can be counted on to go to extreme limits for someone he likes and respects. Maxwell belonged in that category. I knew that Maxwell had often dined with Chambrun in the privacy of the plush second-floor office. That experience was reserved for the very special. To be invited was to enjoy a gourmet experience. It also meant that you didn’t bore Chambrun, who is easily bored by casual conversation.

Douglas Maxwell is in his early fifties. He started out in life as a lawyer, but turned to higher education as his field. This wasn’t remarkable, since he was the grandson of Brian Barstow, who founded Barstow College in the early years of the century. Barstow has had a fine reputation as a college through the years. In the early 1960s Douglas Maxwell became the college’s president. In 1969 Barstow, like so many other schools, became involved in a wave of violence at the hands of student activists and black militant groups. Maxwell handled the situation with firmness. He managed something that very few other administrators have accomplished. He managed to win the support of the large majority of Barstow’s student body. With this support he was able to deal with the violent groups in an iron-fisted fashion. Extremists among the students hated him with a passion. Conservative elements in the community saw him as a hero. He achieved something of a national reputation because of his firm stand.

When things had quieted down at Barstow, a group of conservative leaders approached Maxwell with the suggestion that he run for the United States Senate. Maxwell was uncertain at first. Politically he was more left of center than a conservative.

“Political theory and the facts of life don’t always jibe,” he told Chambrun at one of their dinners. “You may be against the war in Vietnam, Pierre. You may believe minority groups are being suppressed and exploited. You may feel that the only way to draw attention to today’s problems is through making a public noise. But if someone throws a firebomb into the Trapeze Bar in the Beaumont, you’ll start to swing a big stick.”

“You know it!” Chambrun said.

“I am being pressured by conservative elements with whom I don’t by any means agree in many areas,” Maxwell said, “because I swung a big stick at Barstow. If I agreed and I was successful, I wouldn’t fall in with many of the things they stand for. And yet—”

“You are unique,” Chambrun told him. “You are an honest man, a political rarity. You’re not hungry for power. Run: I’ll vote for you.”

You and I might think of Maxwell as a rich man, but he was not rich in terms of today’s political climate. He had no personal means for financing a campaign that would run into several million dollars. The first step, after he had finally agreed to make himself available, was to raise money. A thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner was the first move, and Maxwell went to his friend Chambrun to ask if the Beaumont could be used for the occasion. The Beaumont, as a location, would add distinction to the affair. Some of the richest and most famous people in New York would attend. The Beaumont was the perfect place for them. Chambrun went along with his friend.

That was when I came into the picture. I was summoned to Chambrun’s office to meet Maxwell and his aides.

“Mark Haskell is my public relations man,” Chambrun told them. “He will deal with your committee on arrangements. He will be your go-between with Mr. Amato, my banquet manager. You will find this a happy arrangement, I think, because Mr. Amato tends to be explosive under pressure. Finally, gentlemen, if Mark says ‘no’ to something you want, don’t come running to me to have him overruled. Mark is in charge.”

Chambrun is a doll. I knew I would get the ground rules from him, but as far as Maxwell and his committee were concerned, I was the boss. That’s one of the reasons why all of us on his staff would give an arm for him just for the asking. When you were put in charge of something, you were in charge. You could always go to him if you were in doubt about a decision and then he would share the responsibility with you. But you never felt his hot breath on your neck.

Fifteen hundred people were expected to attend the dinner, and the million and a half collected for the privilege of attending was only a part of what the committee expected to collect for Maxwell’s fund. Before the evening was over the guests would have their arms twisted for double that amount. The caviar had better be imported, the soup hot, the beef perfection, and the wine out of our dustiest bins. Maxwell, when he rose to address his friends, must be at his very best.

Someday I may write a monograph on the endless details involved in arranging such a swank banquet, but this is not the place for it. I need, however, to identify three of the people from Maxwell’s side of the fence with whom I worked closely during the ten days prior to the big night. First of all there was the chairman of Maxwell’s dinner committee. He was J. Watson Clarke, a multimillionaire Wall Street genius who was billed as Maxwell’s best friend. They had gone to college together, Barstow naturally. They had graduated in the spring of 1941. Maxwell had married his college girl friend and gone to war a few months later, a navy flier in the Pacific. Clarke, a burly man who looked something like the actor Raymond Burr, had missed active service in the war, but he had been involved in Wild Bill Donovan’s undercover melodramatics. He had never married. He had, for several generations of debutantes, been the richest and most eligible bachelor on several continents. He stayed very close through the years to Douglas and Grace Maxwell. I understood he had a permanent little suite of rooms in the Maxwells’ summer home at East Hampton. He was a sportsman who devoted his free time to boats and to elaborate African safaris. He had his own seat on the Stock Exchange, and by some personal magic everything he touched tripled in value both in good times and bad. He could be counted on to shoulder a big part of Maxwell’s campaign needs. I found him a charming fellow, a little old-world in his gracious manners, but with a wonderful gift of being suddenly very modern, both in the areas of colorful language and ideas. Just when you decided, regretfully, that he was a bit of a stuffed shirt, he would give you a shy smile and come out with a string of four-letter words that would curl your hair. My dealings with him consisted largely of warning him that some suggestion for dinner would be rather staggeringly expensive.

“Who the devil has mentioned expense, Mark?” he would say.

His primary job was to okay the costs and to plan the seating arrangements at the tables set up in the Grand Ballroom. He knew just who should and should not be seated together. No one should have a neighbor at dinner who might set up any resistance to the main idea, which was GIVE!

The person I worked closest with in those ten days was Jack Mickly, Maxwell’s personal public relations man. Mickly was one of those ever-youthful-looking blonds. Boyish was the word for him. I suppose he was forty-five. He had been the PR man for Barstow College, and he had resigned his job to join Maxwell in the world of politics. He was a fun guy who drank a little too much at the end of each working day, and who looked on Maxwell as a kind of god. He would have done anything in the world Maxwell asked him to do—in Macy’s window if that was the requirement.

The third man in the picture didn’t come on stage until a couple of days before the dinner. His name was Stewart Shaw. Stew Shaw was also out of the Barstow picture. He had been a small college all-American fullback in the early ’fifties. He was a dark, powerfully built, perpetually scowling guy who gave you the impression that if you said anything unpleasant about Maxwell, you’d find your teeth jammed down your throat. He was another Maxwell worshiper. He had been head of the security force at Barstow. Campus cop, is, I believe, the inelegant title. He had made a small reputation for himself in the violence at the college which had projected Maxwell into the public eye. Like Jack Mickly, he had resigned his college job to become a de luxe bodyguard for the candidate.

There was some concern for Maxwell’s safety the night of the banquet. Student radicals had announced they would picket the Beaumont, and some black militants promised there would be no dinner if they had to blow up the Beaumont to prevent it. City police would take care of the trouble outside the hotel. The job inside was to be handled by Jerry Dodd, the Beaumont’s top security officer. We don’t call him a “house detective.” He and Stew Shaw made arrangements to keep Maxwell thoroughly covered every second of the time. Everything was timed out, down to the smallest detail: the moment Maxwell would arrive, accompanied by a couple of friends, at the Beaumont’s main entrance; his arrival in the lobby where reporters, press photographers, and television cameras would be waiting; the quick trip through this maze to the Grand Ballroom where the guests would provide a standing ovation. I was satisfied, when the evening came, that we hadn’t left a single manhole uncovered.

You never saw so many men in white tie and tails and women who all seemed to have been decorated out of Tiffany’s. The Grand Ballroom began to fill about seven o’clock. Maxwell was due to make his appearance at seven-thirty. Jerry Dodd, Mickly, and I were stationed in the lobby for the arrival. I could spot some rented tails which were obviously being worn by Jerry’s men and a half dozen plainclothes cops from the police. The TV cameras were aimed at the entrance. We receptionists were relaxed because we knew that Maxwell would appear on the dot, not a minute before or a minute after seven-thirty.

That was where the first thing went wrong.

At exactly seven-fifteen a shiny Cadillac drew up at the Fifth Avenue entrance. Two men in full evening regalia got out, followed by Maxwell. I found myself looking for Stew Shaw, the bodyguard, but he wasn’t with them. He had, I thought, made some last-minute change. He was probably in the lobby crowd somewhere. From outside I heard the boos and catcalls from the student pickets.

Maxwell’s two friends walked in ahead of him. I saw Maxwell smiling and waving to the people along his path. Then I was conscious of a sort of gasping sound from people near the front door. The arrival party came toward the TV cameras, partly hiding Maxwell. Then they parted, and Maxwell came forward, bowing and waving graciously. I felt my stomach turn over.

Maxwell had forgotten to put on his trousers!

He stood there, smiling at the cameras and the reporters. His dress coat was beautifully tailored, his white tie perfectly knotted, a diamond stud glittering in his shirt front. Below that was a pair of rather gaudy red and white striped under-drawers, knobby knees, socks with garters, and shiny patent leather shoes.

Shock was replaced by laughter—Gargantuan laughter.

Maxwell seemed completely unperturbed. He smiled and waved graciously. I was standing close to one of the TV cameras and I could hear the news announcer choking on his laughter as he tried to report what the whole country was seeing.

I heard Mickly say: “It’s not possible!” He wasn’t laughing.

And then it happened. Maxwell’s charming smile was replaced by a look of bewildered shock—and then of terror. He clutched at his shirt front, and blood dribbled through his fingers. Then he pitched sideways onto the marble floor.

I know I hadn’t heard a shot. The laughter had been so loud, so unrestrainedly joyous. Yet I knew that he had been shot. I heard a sobbing sound from Mickly.

“Oh, dear God!”

Mickly and I reached Maxwell together with Jerry Dodd and three or four men in rented tails. For just one instant Maxwell’s wide-open eyes met mine. In those eyes was disbelief and a pleading for help. Then they glazed over and went blank.

“God almighty, he’s had it!” Jerry Dodd said. He turned to his men. “Who saw anything?”

It appeared nobody had seen anything. The sound track on that TV broadcast must have been weird. The lobby had been rocking with laughter at a comic mistake, a slapstick joke. Suddenly there were screams and a kind of moaning. “Oh, no! Oh, no!”

“Somebody get a doctor!” Mickly shouted.

Jerry Dodd looked at me, his eyes cold as two newly minted dimes. “Help them get him into the first-aid room, Mark.”

I bent down, half dazed, and started to make an effort to lift Maxwell. That’s when I got the blood on my shirt cuff. Then two of the big men in rented tails pushed me aside and lifted Maxwell between them.

“Show us the way,” one of them said.

The stunned crowd in the lobby opened a path for us. Women were crying openly; men shouted angrily and insisted that somebody “do something!”

I had one disjointed thought as I led the way past the reception desk and opened the door to the first-aid room. Where the hell was Stewart Shaw, who should have been there to protect Maxwell?

The two plainclothes men put Maxwell down on the examination table in the first-aid room. I was at the phone in the corner. I intended to get Dr. Partridge, the house physician. Mrs. Kiley, the night chief on the switchboard, told me in a shaken voice that Jerry Dodd had already located the doctor, who was on his way.

“He’s stone dead,” one of the plainclothes men said. “All a doctor can do is close his eyes.”

Jack Mickly was looking down at his dead employer, tears streaming down his cheeks. One of his hands rested on the dead man’s shoulder, as if to comfort him even now. I mention this because it shows how close Mickly was to the dead man, and he certainly hadn’t a doubt in the world that his patron and friend was lying dead under his hand.

Neither did I. I had seen and talked to Maxwell a dozen times and there wasn’t a shadow of doubt in my mind that the man on the table was Maxwell.

That may explain the total shock I felt twenty minutes later when Maxwell walked into Chambrun’s office, alive and unharmed.

2

“IF YOU DON’T MIND, Pierre, I think I’d like a drink,” Maxwell said.

Chambrun still stood behind his desk, as stunned as Mickly and I were. He waved, vaguely, toward the sideboard. We watched Maxwell go to the small bar and pour himself a heavy slug of Jack Daniels on the rocks.

We say of Chambrun that no matter where he is he will know within thirty seconds if anything of consequence happens in the Beaumont. He has said that when the day comes that he doesn’t know what’s happening in his hotel, when it’s happening, he’ll retire. It’s not any kind of magic, it’s staff training. Karl Nevers, the chief clerk on the reception desk at night, had seen the shooting. At least he had seen the man we all thought was Maxwell fall, clutching at his bloodied shirt front. He might have done a dozen different things, but he was trained. He picked up the desk phone and called Chambrun’s office. Mickly and I didn’t bring Chambrun news.

“I have seen Watty Clarke,” Maxwell said. “The guests in the banquet hall know that the dead man isn’t me, and that I’ll presently join them.”

“But, my God, sir,” Mickly said. “I saw you—him—I—I touched him!”

“And you had no doubt that it was me?”

“None whatever, sir. I simply don’t understand.”

“I had no doubts either, Mr. Maxwell,” I said. “I would have sworn this was your blood.” I showed him my shirt cuff.

Maxwell took a deep swallow of his drink. “I haven’t seen him,” he said, “but it has to be my cousin, Charles Sewall. Poor Charlie. One of his practical jokes finally caught up with him.”

Chambrun sat down in his high-backed chair. “I think you’d better explain this to us, Douglas, and quickly,” he said. His voice was flat, cold.

Maxwell’s hands weren’t quite steady as he lit a cigarette. “Charlie and I are—were—look-alikes,” he said. “His mother and mine were twin sisters. They never had twins of their own, but Charlie and I were, in looks, alike as two peas in a pod, to coin a cliché I think we weren’t at all alike as people. But as kids, and as young men, we used to play jokes on people, particularly girls. Charlie would make a date and I would keep it—and vice versa. Charlie was fond of elaborate practical jokes. I lost my taste for them early when I realized they were apt to hurt people. Charlie evidently meant to pull one on me tonight. It appears he arrived just ahead of me—without his pants. No matter how carefully it was explained afterwards, half the country would go on believing that I was the one who had appeared before the television cameras in my shorts. I understand the laughter could have been heard in Chicago.”

“The fact is, Douglas, that he was murdered by someone who thought he was you,” Chambrun said, in that flat voice. “And in my hotel!”

I chopped off a laugh. That would be at the forefront of the Great Man’s thinking. His hotel had been desecrated.

Maxwell missed the humor of it. “We had expected there might be trouble, but not murder,” he said. “Stew Shaw and I talked to your man Dodd in the lobby. They don’t seem to know yet where the shot came from. Nobody they’ve talked to so far saw anyone with a gun. Your Dr. Partridge and a homicide detective are trying to figure out the angle of the shot. Everyone was so concentrated on poor old Charlie’s red and white striped shorts that his killer might as well have been invisible.”

“Your killer,” Chambrun said. “Don’t forget that for a minute, Douglas. You were meant to die, not your cousin Charlie.”

“Stew Shaw was with you all the time, Mr. Maxwell?” I asked.

“Where else? That’s his job,” Maxwell said. “We were being particularly cautious tonight because of those pickets out front and the threats we’ve had from the black militants. We were due here at seven-thirty. We walked into the middle of a madhouse in the lobby. It took us a few minutes in which people stared at me as if I was some kind of a ghost to find out what had happened. Then Stew Shaw whisked me up here.”

“Where is he now?” Chambrun said.

“Standing guard outside the door to your suite of offices.”

“And you’re going on to the dinner?”

Maxwell gave his shoulders a weary shrug. “What else, Pierre?” His lips moved in a wry smile. “If there were ever any doubts about raising the money we needed, Charlie has fixed that. This attack meant for me will get us twice as much as we hoped for.”

Chambrun reached for the phone on his desk. “Get me Jerry Dodd,” he told the operator. He put down the phone. “What about the police? Have they questioned you?”

“The man in charge, a Lieutenant Hardy, told me not to leave the hotel until he talked with me. Right now they’re trying to find where the shot was fired from and someone who may have seen the killer fire it.”

Maxwell turned as the office door opened. I caught a glimpse of Shaw, the bodyguard, and then he stood aside. Watson Clarke came into the room with a woman leaning heavily on his arm. I recognized her from newspaper pictures as Grace Maxwell. I suppose she is at least fifty. She and Maxwell went to college together thirty years ago. She is still an extraordinarily beautiful woman, if a little weathered. She is slim—and built. The dark red hair is probably not natural, but there is nothing painted or put-on about her. Her bare shoulders, revealed by a pale blue evening gown, are still youthful.

She took a step toward her husband and away from Clarke. She seemed to sway like a tree in the wind. Shock, I thought.

“Doug!” she said, in a sort of slurred, husky voice. “Oh, Doug!” She took another uncertain step toward Maxwell.

Maxwell and Clarke moved simultaneously. Maxwell took her in his arms. The two men exchanged a sort of secret glance and Clarke’s big shoulders moved in a helpless little shrug.

Grace Maxwell, I realized, was stoned, plastered, drunk.

Chambrun had risen. “Hello, Grace,” he said. He gestured toward the visitor’s armchair beside his desk. Maxwell eased his wife into it. She took a deep, sobbing breath. Maxwell knelt beside her and took her hands in his.

“It’s all right, darling,” he said. “It’s all right.”

She made a tremendous effort to control herself. “You’re not going down there—to the banquet,” she said.

“I have to, darling.”

“I can’t go back there,” Grace Maxwell said. “I just can’t go back there, Doug.”

“You don’t have to, darling. I’m sure they’ll understand.”

Chambrun came around from behind his desk. “He’s not going anywhere, Grace, without an army to protect him,” he said. “He’ll be quite safe here in the hotel, I promise you. I think the police are going to keep you pretty busy, Doug. I suggest you let me provide you with a suite here, at least for the night. Is there someone at your house who can bring you other clothes and whatever you may need for an overnight stay?”

Maxwell nodded.

“We can provide someone to take Grace home if she wishes.”

“No!” the woman said, her voice shrill. “I couldn’t bear to be alone.”

“I’ll be glad to stay with Mrs. Maxwell,” a voice said from the doorway. It was Miss Betsy Ruysdale, Chambrun’s incredible secretary. Someday someone will write a book about this woman. She is always where she ought to be—whether or not she ought to be. She had left for the day hours ago, yet here she was. I supposed Mrs. Kiley, the night switchboard chief, had phoned her. Chambrun would need her.

“Thank you, Ruysdale,” Chambrun said. He turned to me. “Have Nevers prepare the house suite for the Maxwells,” he said. “And find Jerry Dodd. Tell him I want him and a half dozen men to take Douglas down to the Grand Ballroom. And keep me posted on anything and everything.”

He didn’t need to tell me that.

The lobby was still bedlam when I got down there. The cops had moved out the TV cameras, but reporters and press photographers still swarmed.

We were lucky in one respect. The Homicide man in charge was Lieutenant Hardy, an old friend. He’d been involved with us on several occasions. He knew us and we knew him. Hardy looks more like a blond, slightly bewildered Notre Dame line backer than a highly trained crime expert. He’s not inspirational in his approach, but he is thorough almost beyond belief. He doesn’t ruffle, and he has a genuine respect for Chambrun’s gift in crisis.

We might have been meeting, casually, on a street corner.

“Hi, Mark,” Hardy said.

“Hi,” I said.

We were in the first-aid room. Charlie Sewall’s body was still on the examination table, but covered with a sheet.

“Damndest thing,” Hardy said. He pulled back the sheet and looked at Charlie Sewall’s dead face. It was the damndest thing. The likeness was just not believable. Charlie’s mouth was less firm than Maxwell’s, but the slackness could have come with death.

“There were a couple of hundred people in the lobby, but so far we haven’t found a soul who admits to seeing anything. Or hearing anything, for that matter. No one heard the shot.”

“I was there,” I said. “I didn’t hear anything. He just collapsed. If you get the TV people to play back their tapes, you’ll understand.”

“I’ve seen and heard the tapes,” Hardy said. “Instant replay. I’ve also impounded every camera in the place. Someone may have gotten a picture he didn’t know he was getting. Take some time for films to be developed.” He recovered Charlie Sewall’s face. “Maxwell insists on at least putting in an appearance at his banquet?”

“Half the guests, no matter what they’ve been told, still probably think Maxwell’s the one who was shot. And there are millions of dollars involved.” I explained that Maxwell and his wife had been given a suite in the hotel.

“Maxwell’s a friend of the Great Man’s?”

“Chambrun’s very fond of him,” I said.

“He’s one of the good guys?”

“If you go by Chambrun,” I said.

Hardy took a long, thin cigar out of his breast pocket and lit it as carefully as if it was a scientific problem. “I’d like to know more about him before I talk to him,” he said. “It would help me to make sense.” His eyes turned toward the sheet-covered body. “You were in the lobby when this one arrived?”

“With Jack Mickly, Maxwell’s PR man.”

“You saw this one come in from the front entrance? He had two friends with him, I understand.”

I had forgotten about the two men who had preceded the trouserless Charlie Sewall into the lobby.

“There were two guys in full evening dress,” I said.

“You know them?”

I shook my head. “It all happened so fast,” I said. “They came in very briskly. Then the two men stood aside and we saw the man we thought was Maxwell standing there in his shorts. You wouldn’t believe the laughter. It couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen seconds later that the bullet hit Sewall. I don’t know what happened to his friends.”

“But you didn’t say to yourself, ‘There’s good old John Smith’ when they came in?”

“No. I only wondered where Stew Shaw was; Maxwell’s bodyguard.”

“He wasn’t there because he was with the real Maxwell.”

“Right.”

“Could you describe those two friends?”

I shook my head slowly. “It was all so fast. All men in white ties and tails look something alike. I had no reason to want to identify the two friends. Mickly and I were concerned with getting Maxwell through the crowd to the Grand Ballroom.”

Hardy knocked the ash off his cigar. “Those two men were in on the joke with Sewall, but neither of them came forward; neither of them tried to help Sewall when he was hit.”

“Cameras must have got them,” I said.

“Hopefully. I saw the TV film. One of them was covering his face with an opera hat. The other was turned back, looking at Sewall. One of the press photographers might have gotten them, but we’ll have to wait for that.”

“I understand from Maxwell that practical jokes were Sewall’s specialty,” I said.

“So he got paid off by mistake.” Hardy looked at his cigar. Evidently he wasn’t getting pleasure from it. “There’s a balcony running along the west side of the lobby. Your Dr. Partridge thinks the shot was fired from there. Bullet had a downward trajectory. It would account for the fact that no one saw the killer. No one was looking up.”

“They were all looking at Sewall’s red and white striped shorts,” I said.

“How do you get onto that balcony?”

“The door at the north end opens out of the Trapeze Bar. The door at the south end opens onto the mezzanine, directly opposite a bank of elevators. There’s a stairway there, too, going down to the side street entrance.”

“I should have thought there’d have been a lot of people up on that balcony waiting to see Maxwell arrive.”

I looked at Hardy, wondering. “It was blocked off,” I said. “Jerry didn’t want people up there. He didn’t want to have to watch two areas. There had been threats, you know—student groups, Black militants.”

“How was it blocked off?”

“Doors at both ends locked,” I said.

“Who has the keys?”

I shrugged. “There are duplicate sets,” I said. “Jerry Dodd has sets. Security Officer has keys to everything. There’d be a set in Chambrun’s office, one at the main desk, and the housekeeper for that floor. Probably Mr. Del Greco, the captain in the Trapeze Bar, has one.” I kept ticking them off. “Night watchman, cleaning crew. A lot of sets, Hardy.”

“Thanks,” Hardy said dryly.

“That balcony isn’t the hotel safe,” I said. “There’s no reason to think of it as a security area. It can be closed off if there’s a reason. Tonight Jerry had a reason. I can’t remember any other time.”

“If your doctor is right, somebody did get out there,” Hardy said, “and to do that he had to have a key. We’ve looked at the doors. They weren’t forced.”

“So you check,” I said.

“That’s my business,” Hardy said. He sounded tired. “Check, and double check, and triple check. Damn these political assassinations! How do you check hundreds of screaming kids and black revolutionaries? All the time it may be some private kook who has no connection with anything, like the Bobby Kennedy case. Or it can be some private vendetta with the political climate being used as a cover-up.”

“Merry Christmas,” I said.

The fifteen hundred glittering guests in the Grand Ballroom gave Douglas Maxwell a standing ovation when he appeared, accompanied by Chambrun and surrounded by Jerry Dodd and his men and a half dozen plainclothes cops, with the scowling Stew Shaw at his elbow. It took him a while to make his way to the head table. People seemed to want to touch him, to reassure him. They stamped and clapped and shouted to him.

When he got to the head table, he stood at his place, his handsome face grave and unsmiling. Once or twice he raised his hands to ask for silence, but it was useless. He stood there, confronting the radio and TV microphones and the one for the PA system in the room. Beside him was the only empty chair in the room. That had been meant for his wife, Grace. On the other side of him Watson Clarke stood, equally grave. He was to be the master of ceremonies.

After a long time Clarke managed to get himself heard to persuade people to sit down and be quiet. When the room was still, Clarke didn’t speak. He just turned and gestured to Maxwell.

“I want to thank you for your cordial welcome,” Maxwell said.

That started it all over again. It was another five minutes before he could resume. Jack Mickly was standing next to me.

“He could be elected President tonight if he wanted,” he said.

“We have been confronted with a dreadful tragedy tonight,” Maxwell said. At last they were willing to hear him. “The man who was murdered in the lobby a little while ago was my cousin, Charles Sewall. Poor Charlie was a confirmed practical joker. He chose to make fun of me tonight. It cost him his life. Because there can be no question, ladies and gentlemen, that the assassin’s bullet was meant for me.”

The room was suddenly dead quiet.

“Poor Charlie and I looked so very much alike,” Maxwell went on. “Our mothers were twin sisters, and Charlie and I were almost literally twins. Over the years poor Charlie has used this fact to play innumerable jokes. Tonight the result was deadly.” Maxwell took a handkerchief from his breast pocket and touched his lips with it. “It is a pretty shattering experience to realize that someone is lurking in the shadows, waiting to kill you. Oh, I know I have enemies. There are groups of people—young people who are chanting outside this hotel at this very moment. There are revolutionary groups who have threatened all kinds of violence if I proceed along the political path I have chosen. But tonight, somewhere, there was one man, with one gun, bent on killing me. He would have succeeded if Charlie hadn’t chosen this time for a slapstick farce.” Maxwell drew a deep breath. Then he pointed to the empty chair beside him. “My wife is in a state of mild shock and begs to be excused.” There was a murmur of sympathy, and while he waited, Maxwell straightened his shoulders. “But I, ladies and gentlemen, do not beg to be excused! Not from the fight!”

The roof was raised again. They were all on their feet, cheering and yelling. I’ve got to admit I was impressed with Maxwell as he stood there, erect and unflinching. There was no political smiling or phony self-deprecation. He was a tall, strong, handsome figure. I understood a little better the total devotion of people like Watson Clarke, and Jack Mickly, and Stew Shaw. The cheering broke off on a kind of strangled note. Over the sound of it came the noise of gunshots.

Pandemonium of another kind began. I saw Shaw, the bodyguard, pull Maxwell down into his chair and literally cover him with his own body. I saw Jerry Dodd’s wiry figure racing between tables toward the entrance to the Ballroom, followed by Chambrun. Some of the elegant guests were down on their hands and knees hiding behind their tables.

I headed for the entrance, too. It was clear that the trouble, whatever it was, had taken place out in the lobby.

There was less confusion out there than there was in the Ballroom. A young black man was sitting on the floor opposite the entrance, his face twisted with pain, his back against the wall, clutching at a bleeding shoulder. His bright yellow shirt was bloodstained. Tinted glasses shielded his eyes. Three plainclothes men with drawn guns stood over him.

Lieutenant Hardy arrived at the same time as Chambrun, Jerry Dodd, and I. One of Hardy’s men reported.

“The black boy is one of the top leaders for a black militant group,” the man told Hardy. “They’d threatened to blow up the joint, you know, Lieutenant. This guy calls himself Claude Cloud. He managed to slip by the guards on the street and headed into the lobby toward the Ballroom. Sergeant McNeil ordered him to stop. When he didn’t, McNeil fired at him twice. Missed him with the first shot and got him in the shoulder with the second.”

“Was he carrying a bomb?” Hardy asked.

“He appears to be clean, Lieutenant. I thought I’d get the hotel doctor to take care of him. We take him out onto the street and we may really start something out there.”

“Get him to the first-aid room, and quick,” Hardy said. “We’re likely to have a panic inside if you don’t.” He turned to Chambrun. “Can you quiet things down in there?”

Chambrun’s face was a study in cold fury. I knew what he was thinking. They were turning his beloved hotel into a shooting gallery. He didn’t answer Hardy, but he turned back into the banquet quarters.

I stayed in the entrance. I wanted to cover both fronts. I saw Chambrun reach the head table and speak to Stew Shaw. The bodyguard slowly removed himself from his shielding position over Maxwell. Maxwell stood up again, and his voice sounded clear and firm over the crowd noise. Standing beside Maxwell, Chambrun’s square, short figure just about came up to Maxwell’s shoulder. Maxwell was a good six or eight inches taller.

Maxwell finally got the attention of his audience. “There’s nothing to be alarmed about, ladies and gentlemen. One of my black militant friends tried to get into the meeting. He wasn’t armed. When the police ordered him to stop, he refused and they shot at him. He’s only slightly wounded and in custody.”

It took a long time for them to quiet down. Drink makings were on all the tables, and they were suddenly getting a big workout. While they waited for silence, Maxwell and Chambrun were engaged in an earnest conversation. Then Chambrun left and came down to the entrance. He stopped by me.

“When Maxwell finishes, he isn’t going to stay for dinner,” he said. “Wait here and come up with him to the house suite. Jerry and his boys will be with you.” He turned and walked away toward the bank of elevators.

Out in the hall Mr. Claude Cloud had been removed by Hardy’s men.

In the Grand Ballroom, Maxwell had his audience again.

“The agenda of this evening was to begin with a brief speech of welcome by my very dear friend, Watson Clarke. After you have eaten what I know will be a magnificent dinner, there are other good friends who are prepared to talk to you about me.” He smiled very faintly. “Their remarks will be flattering, otherwise they wouldn’t have been invited.” There was a little wave of laughter. “I was to have followed them with a serious statement of my political beliefs, and then you were to be asked to support me—with money.”

Again laughter, which faded as Maxwell’s face turned stone-hard again.

“I have lost my taste for political routines tonight,” Maxwell said.

“Oh, no!” someone shouted, and it became a chorus.

Maxwell held up his hands for silence. “Don’t misunderstand me, ladies and gentlemen. I didn’t mean to imply that I am withdrawing. I am with you to the end, whether that end be victory or defeat.”

Applause and wild cheering again.

Maxwell went on when he could. “I meant there are times when one’s private responsibilities must be met. I have no taste for this banquet this evening, because my wife needs me.” Murmurs of sympathy. “I ask you to let me go to her. If I can come back for the after-dinner speechmaking, I will. Understand, I am not being frightened off by some would-be assassin. But I cannot turn my back on the woman who has stood at my side for nearly thirty years when she needs me. So, if you will excuse me for the moment—”

He stepped down from the table and headed for the door where I was waiting, Stew Shaw beside him. Everyone in the room stood up and clapped him out.

Jerry Dodd and his men closed around us as we headed for the elevator. Maxwell turned to me.

“What’s become of Cloud, Mark?” he asked.

“They’re holding him here in the hotel,” I said. “They were afraid if they took him out on the street it might start a riot.”

“He was one of my chief headaches at Barstow,” Maxwell said. “I’d like to talk to him.”

“That’ll be up to Hardy, sir,” I said.

“If he wasn’t armed, he just meant to shout me down. They’ll make a big thing out of his being shot.”

“It’s not serious,” I said.

“Not the wound, maybe, but the aftermath. I’ll be called a fascist imperialist until I grow deaf from it. Do they think Cloud may have been the one who shot Charlie? He had time to get rid of his weapon.”

“I don’t know what Hardy thinks, sir. I have the feeling that half an hour ago he’d never heard of Claude Cloud.”

“He will, after tonight. They have the techniques for turning him into a martyr.”

“May I say I think you behaved very well in there, sir,” I said. We had reached the elevators.

He looked at me, and his face twisted into a grimace of pain. “God dammit,” he said, “wouldn’t you think Grace could have stayed off the sauce this one night!”

3

MAXWELL COULD NOT HAVE shocked me more by throwing a glass of ice water in my face. I glanced at Jerry Dodd. His face was a mask; if he had heard, he was pretending he hadn’t. I looked at Maxwell. There was a thin film of sweat on his forehead.

There was no more talk because the elevator door slid open and six of us stepped in and were whisked up to the fourteenth floor.

The house suite consists of a sitting room, two bedrooms and two baths, along with a small kitchenette. You could wish you had the money to furnish your own apartment as tastefully and expensively. Someone, Chambrun I expect, had seen to it that the décor was of no particular period. It wasn’t Victorian or French or modern. The colors were neither gloomy nor too bright. Everything was comfortable, and there was everything for comfort.

When we walked in, Chambrun was standing by an open French window that opened onto a terrace overlooking the East River. There was no sign of Mrs. Maxwell or Miss Ruysdale, but the door to the sleeping quarters was closed.

Jerry Dodd approached the boss. “I can leave a couple of men out in the hall, Mr. Chambrun,” he said, “but I’d like to get back on the job. Hardy and his men are apt to get lost if there isn’t someone around to keep them from falling down a laundry chute.”

Chambrun turned. He gave Jerry a faint smile. “I’m sorry to have turned you into a bodyguard, Jerry. I was so concerned about Mr. Maxwell I had to have the one person I could really trust looking out for him. You go. Do your job.”

“I’ve already failed at that,” Jerry said, his voice hard and bitter. “Somebody shot that poor sonofabitch right in front of me. But thanks anyway for the vote of confidence.”

“I want that killer caught, Jerry.”

Jerry grinned at him. “And hung from the chandelier in the main lobby as a lesson?”

“Get out of here,” Chambrun said.

Shaw and I stayed. Jerry and his men went out. Maxwell had moved over to a small portable bar in the corner of the room and was pouring himself a drink.

“Thanks for everything, Pierre,” he said. “I’d better see how Grace is.”

“She’s all right, after a fashion,” Chambrun said. “Ruysdale is with her.”

Miss Ruysdale is an original, to my way of thinking. She is, I’d guess, in her late thirties, beautifully groomed, leaning a little toward the severe in her office-hour wardrobe. Chambrun doesn’t want some doll in his outer office over whom the male staff will be mooning. Yet Miss Ruysdale is all woman, and you have to guess that hidden away in some corner of her life is a man. There is the rumor that her man might be Chambrun himself. I suppose that’s rumored about every executive and his high-powered secretary. If it is Chambrun, you’d never guess by his manner toward her. Strictly business. He neuters her by calling her Ruysdale, never Betsy or Miss Ruysdale.

“Poor darling, the evening has been a little too much for her,” Maxwell said.

“She’s drunk,” Chambrun said. It was brutal, and I saw Maxwell flinch. “She was drunk when she arrived here ahead of you tonight with Clarke, long before there was any violence. If you knew and let her come, you should have your head examined. If you didn’t know, then Clarke is guilty. He must have known.”

Maxwell drew a deep breath. “This isn’t an ideal time to discuss this, Pierre.”

“I think it’s a must time,” Chambrun said. “Do you know what you’re about to be faced with, Douglas?”

“Faced with?”

“Somebody took a shot at you here tonight. He killed the wrong man. You owe your life to Charles Sewall’s deadly little joke. But you were almost certainly the target. Whoever fired the shot knew exactly what the evening’s plans were; what time you’d arrive, through which door you’d come.”

“The whole press corps, the TV and radio people knew that,” Maxwell said. “Your staff, my staff. It was no secret.”

“Even Charles Sewall knew,” Chambrun said.

“No problem,” Maxwell said. “He could have called Mark here in your PR office and found out what the arrangements were. The bell captain in the lobby could have told him.”

“The general plan, yes. But there were details he wouldn’t have been told. He wouldn’t have been told that the balcony over the lobby would be shut off, no people. He wouldn’t have been told where to get a key to let himself out there. I’m talking about the murderer now, not Sewall. He couldn’t have gotten out there by accident. It was carefully planned. He was ready to take dead aim at Sewall’s heart—thinking it was yours. So he wasn’t in on Sewall’s joke.”

“What has this got to do with Grace’s alcoholism?”

“So she is an alcoholic.”

“Listen, Pierre—”

“You listen,” Chambrun said. “Tonight everybody is running around assuming that the killer was some off-balance revolutionary kid who hates you for your politics and for the way you handled the riots at Barstow College. But there weren’t any kids in the hotel lobby, and there weren’t any kids on that balcony. So tomorrow, or perhaps sooner, because Hardy isn’t a stupid policeman, they’ll begin to wonder whether the killer wasn’t someone closer to you, someone with a much more personal motive. The plans for tonight were made a good three weeks ago. He had plenty of time to get ready, to find himself a key to those balcony doors or get one made for himself. Hardy is going to ask you about your family, your friends, your close associates. About your daughter, for example.”

“Oh, God!” Maxwell said. He turned back toward the bar, his glass empty.

I looked at Chambrun. He had that hanging-judge look in his bright black eyes that I’d seen there when someone had made a bad mistake in the hotel. I hadn’t even known that Maxwell had a daughter. I couldn’t remember ever hearing her mentioned. There had certainly never been any plans for her to be present at the banquet.

“I’m sorry to do this to you, Douglas,” Chambrun said, his voice a little gentler. “Have you forgotten that you talked to me at some length about Diana one night at dinner?”

Maxwell turned back from the bar, his glass filled. “I had forgotten,” he said. “Other people on and off the political stage have had trouble with their children, Pierre. Drugs, protests, the poor bastard whose kids blew up his house in Greenwich Village where they were making bombs in the cellar. People today aren’t blaming the parents for their children’s behavior. It’s a symptom of the times.”

“Forgive me if I say I think the parents should be blamed,” Chambrun said.

“For ‘sparing the rod and spoiling the child’?”

“For not listening,” Chambrun said. “But I’m not here to defend today’s youth, Douglas. I want to catch a murderer who is probably waiting to take another shot at you, now that he knows he got the wrong man. Diana is your enemy. Those are your words, Douglas, not mine. You used them the night we first discussed this fund-raising dinner of yours. I asked you whether she would be a part of it and you told me she was your enemy.”

Maxwell sat down in a high-backed armchair. I had the feeling his legs wouldn’t hold him up any longer. He covered his eyes with an unsteady hand for a moment.

“Not murder, Pierre,” he said in a shaken voice. “Not that.”

“Hardy will ask. What about her young man—Barry Tennant? You had him put away for possession of narcotics and a gun violation. How long has he been out of jail?”

“Less than a month.”

“And Diana is with him?”

Maxwell nodded. He looked like a man who was suffering agony from a wound, deep and painful.

“She doesn’t live with you anymore?”

“She comes to the house from time to time to see Grace. But, no, she doesn’t live with us anymore.”

“She doesn’t come to see you?”

“She hasn’t spoken to me, except in anger, for more than a year,” Maxwell said. “The last time I saw her—” He let it drift away.

“The last time you saw her?”

“She shouted at me that she would destroy me if I ran for political office.”

“How could she destroy you?”

“I don’t know. No one would listen to her own crazy politics.”

“Does she have something on you?”

“For God sake, Pierre, what are you talking about?”

“I don’t know. I’m asking you if she has something on you?”

“Of course not.”

“But young Tennant hates you enough to take a shot at you, would you say?”

Maxwell’s face hardened. “God knows what he would do. He’s a wild man.”

“I think we’d better have Diana and her young man here for a little chat,” Chambrun said.

“She won’t come.”

“Then you can depend on it that Hardy will bring her in.”

Maxwell turned his head from side to side. “He’ll have to find her first,” he said. “Grace and I don’t have the faintest idea where she—they—live. We’re not privileged.”

I felt sorry for him. I felt even sorrier when the door to the bedrooms opened and Grace Maxwell appeared. The clothes had evidently been delivered from their home, because she was wearing a long, quilted housecoat in navy blue. She leaned against the door jamb, the wreckage of something once beautiful. Her attention was fixed on her husband. The rest of us might as well not have been there. Just behind her I saw Miss Ruysdale. She gave a little shrug of her shoulders as if to say she hadn’t been able to prevent this.

“Are you going back down there, Douglas?” Grace Maxwell asked.

“Back down?”

“To the banquet.”

“I’m afraid I must, darling,” he said gently.

“If you go, I go,” she said. Her words weren’t slurred, but she separated them as if she was taking great care with them.

“I’m afraid that’s impossible, Grace.”

“Do you think someone might shoot me?”

“Of course not, darling.”

“Do you—do you think I’m drunk?”

“My dear girl, I’m afraid you are—a little. With all that’s happened, it’s quite understandable.”

She gave him an almost sly look. “Only you will know,” she said.

“I’m afraid that’s one of the delusions of the sickness, Grace. People do recognize it. Mr. Chambrun knew.”

“Screw Mr. Chambrun,” she said, without looking at the boss. “I want to be present at the end, whatever it is.”

I saw Miss Ruysdale signaling to me. I moved quietly around to the bedroom door and went in. Miss Ruysdale closed it.

“She’s been eavesdropping,” Miss Ruysdale said.

I grinned at her. “And you, too?”

“Of course; it’s my business,” she said briskly. “She wants to talk to you.”

“Mrs. Maxwell?”

“Yes.”

“Why, for God sake?”

Miss Ruysdale smiled. “Maybe because she thinks you’re cute. Chiefly because I told her you were a good guy who could be trusted.”

“Trusted with what?”

Miss Ruysdale’s face clouded. “With her husband’s life, I think.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Betsy?”

“I’m not sure I know.”

“She’s stoned,” I said. “Why didn’t you give her something to put her to sleep?”

“Barbiturates and liquor don’t mix,” Miss Ruysdale said. “You can die of the mixture.”

“What does she think I can do for her?” I asked. Whatever was in Grace Maxwell’s alcohol-clouded brain wasn’t apt to make much sense.

Miss Ruysdale ignored my question. “When Maxwell goes down to the banquet, I suggest you come back here.”

“Oh, come off it, Betsy,” I said. “This isn’t a night when I want to take time to play nursemaid to a drunk.”

“Tell Mr. Chambrun I recommend you come back, if you like,” Miss Ruysdale said.

Back in the living room the scene was about as I’d left it. Grace Maxwell was facing her husband, her hands on his shoulders. Chambrun and Stew Shaw might as well have been pieces of furniture. They weren’t there as far as Grace Maxwell was concerned.

“Please, please, Doug!” she was pleading.

He put his arms around her tenderly. That little nerve was twitching high up on his left cheek. “I have to go, darling,” he said. “And I beg you, Grace, try to get yourself pulled together. The police will be coming here when I’ve finished downstairs. They’ll want to ask us both a lot of questions. Get Miss Ruysdale to make you some strong black coffee.”

“You insist on going?”

“I’m afraid so, darling. I can’t let anyone think I’m afraid because of what’s happened.”

“Are you afraid, Douglas?”

He looked down at her. “Yes, I’m afraid, Grace. But during the war we used to say that if a bullet had your name on it, it would find you, no matter where you hid. If not, not. I don’t think there’s any use hiding.”

“I haven’t often asked you for anything,” she said. “This time I beg you.”

“I’m sorry, darling. I have no choice.”

She looked at him steadily for a moment, then she turned away and walked, with some effort to stay on a straight line, to the bedroom, where she closed the door on herself and Miss Ruysdale.

Maxwell turned to us. He looked dead-tired. “I’m sorry you had to be involved in that, gentlemen,” he said.

“Forget it,” Chambrun said.

“I wish to God I could,” Maxwell said. “I have to live with it almost every day of my life.” He straightened his shoulders. “Shall we rejoin the revelries?”

Two of Jerry Dodd’s men were stationed in the hall outside the door of 14B. All five of us went to the elevator and down to the lobby. It was all quiet there. Maxwell started for the Grand Ballroom with Shaw beside him, one of Jerry’s men walking ahead of him and another behind him. I touched Chambrun’s arm. He turned to look at me. His bright eyes were sunk deep in their pouches.

“Well, Mark?”

“Mrs. Maxwell wants to talk to me,” I said.

“What about?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. Miss Ruysdale said to tell you she recommends I come back.”

Chambrun took one of his Egyptian cigarettes from a gold case and lit it. His eyes narrowed against the smoke.

“Ruysdale doesn’t recommend unless she’s convinced,” he said.

“I’m not needed at the banquet,” I said. “It’s Mickly’s job to handle the press. Why don’t I go back upstairs and see what it’s all about? I’ll let you know what it is.”

“You may not be permitted to,” Chambrun said.

“What do you mean? Of course I’ll tell you.”

“I have a feeling you may be asked not to,” Chambrun said. He took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Too bad I’m not young and handsome. She might have chosen me.”

“Oh, come on!”

“I have a feeling youth and good looks are essential,” he said.

“She’s going to try to rape me?”

Chambrun chuckled. “With Ruysdale present? Go along, Mark. If you’re asked to keep a secret from me, don’t feel disloyal.”

I swear I think he knew exactly what she was going to talk about, though I hadn’t the faintest idea. He’s not psychic, you understand. He just puts two and two together better than most people.

I took the elevator back to 14. The door to the house suite opened the instant I touched the door buzzer. Miss Ruysdale let me in.

“Fix yourself a drink,” she said. “It may be a minute or two before she gets pulled together. You told the boss?”

“Yes. He seems to know what it’s all about, which I expect you do.”

She gave me her Mona Lisa smile. “I believe the cliché goes, ‘You have to get up early in the morning—et cetera, et cetera.’”

She retreated to the bedroom. I poured myself a Scotch on the rocks and waited. This room always fascinated me. One of Joe Pollet’s old world portraits—Mozart, I think—hung on one wall. Opposite it was one of Chagall’s rooftop violinists with a flying cow or two. You could look at what you liked, elegance or sly humor.

The Scotch tasted good. I hadn’t realized how dry I was. But when the bedroom door opened, I put the glass down quickly on the bar. There was no point in making things any harder for this tortured woman.

Grace Maxwell had made an effort to re-do her face. Miss Ruysdale’s black coffee had worked some kind of miracle. If I hadn’t known, I’d have said she was perfectly sober.

“Thank you for coming back, Mr. Haskell,” she said.

“Glad to if I can be of help,” I said.

She sat down on the lounge and gestured to a chair facing her. I sat down, feeling uneasy. The wickedly funny Chagall was behind her red head.

“Can what I have to say to you be considered a secret, Mr. Haskell? A secret from my husband, from Mr. Chambrun, from everyone at all except Miss Ruysdale, who already knows?”

“If Miss Ruysdale is prepared to keep a secret from Mr. Chambrun, I guess I can promise.”

“Thank you.” She glanced at the bar and then, quickly, away. “You see, I knew what was going to happen tonight.”

I felt a cold finger run down my spine. “You knew someone was going to try to kill your husband?”

“Oh, my God, no!” she said. That seemed to have unsettled her. She went on, her voice unsteady. “I knew that Charlie was going to pull a joke on Douglas. I’ve known for quite a few days that he planned to appear in the lobby—without his trousers.”

“And you let it happen?

“Yes.”

“I simply don’t understand, Mrs. Maxwell.”

“You have to believe that the shooting was not a part of the joke; not anything anybody ever dreamed would happen.

“It doesn’t seem likely that Charles Sewall would have planned his own death, Mrs. Maxwell.”

“Of course he didn’t. Charlie loved life. The point is I knew it was going to happen, and I let it happen.”

“The ‘why’ is the secret I have to keep?”

“Part of it.”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Maxwell. I—”

“Listen to her,” Miss Ruysdale said.

I didn’t want to listen. I didn’t want to listen quite a lot. But Miss Ruysdale was Chambrun’s right arm. If she said listen, that was that.

“I don’t want my husband to run for political office,” Grace Maxwell said. “I would do almost anything to prevent it. I was willing to let him become a laughingstock through Charlie.”

“Just in passing,” I said, “how would that hurt your husband in his campaign when people found out it was his look-alike cousin?”

“The joke was never completed,” she said. “Charlie was to have apologized in front of the cameras—as Douglas, you understand—and disappeared to get a pair of pants. Then Douglas would have appeared and it would have been a long time before anyone got the truth. Today’s news story is never really destroyed by tomorrow’s retraction.”

She wasn’t a fool, it seemed.

“Why don’t you want your husband to run, Mrs. Maxwell?” I asked. “He’s the kind of man we need in politics; honest, a great reputation for integrity, intelligent, his own man.”

“He is all those things,” Grace Maxwell said, “but he can be destroyed if he insists on going ahead.”

“Who can destroy him?”

She drew a long, quavering breath. “Diana, his daughter,” she said. She looked longingly at the bar.

“Can I get you some more coffee, Mrs. Maxwell?” Miss Ruysdale asked.

“Please.”

Miss Ruysdale disappeared into the kitchenette.

“Diana can’t destroy him simply because she disagrees with his politics, the way he handled the Barstow riots. Those are the things that will elect him,” I said.

“Of course,” she said. “Diana won’t use those things.”

“She wants to hurt him because of what he did to her young man?” I asked. “Barry Tennant, is it?”

“Yes. And God knows what other deep-down psychic angers,” Grace said.

“She wouldn’t use your problem.”

“My drinking?” She laughed shakily. “Take a poll of the political community, Mr. Haskell. You’ll find I’m not unique. No. Diana claims to have live ammunition.”

“You know what it is?”

“No,” she said. “But I can guess.” She looked at me steadily. “I want Diana to tell you,” she said. “She might.”

“Fine, except we don’t know where she is,” I said.

“I know where she is.”

“But your husband said—”

“Douglas doesn’t know that I know.”

I could feel a little trickle of sweat running down my back. “But I don’t understand why you can’t tell me what you think Diana has on her father?”

“Because I don’t know if it’s real. If Diana can convince you that it’s real, then perhaps you can persuade Douglas to withdraw. He won’t listen to me anymore—because of my problem. He loves me, but he treats me like an imbecile child.”

“Why would Diana talk to me?”

“Because of what’s happened tonight, I hope,” Grace Maxwell said. “I don’t think she wants him murdered. Whoever killed Charlie by mistake can only have political reasons. Douglas has no other kind of enemy.”

“Except your daughter and her boy friend.”

“If you can persuade Diana that he may be murdered if he goes on with his plans, she may be willing to show him the cards she holds. He won’t withdraw because someone may shoot him. But he might if he knew his image could be destroyed.”

Miss Ruysdale brought in a cup of coffee from the kitchen and handed it to Grace Maxwell. The cup rattled in its saucer as the woman put it down on the table in front of her.

“Will you see Diana?” Grace Maxwell asked me.

“If you think it will help.”

“And you won’t give her address to the police—or Douglas?”

“Look, Mrs. Maxwell. Barry Tennant has made all sorts of wild threats against your husband. If it turns out he was the man on the balcony—”

“It wasn’t Barry.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because Barry knew it was Charlie,” she said. “Charlie was good friends with Diana and Barry. They knew what he was going to do. That’s how I knew.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Charlie told Diana and Diana told me.”

4

MY OFFICE IS ON the second floor, down the hall from Chambrun’s. I also have a two-room apartment next to it where I live, officially. I do have a change of clothes and a shaving kit somewhere else, but that’s no part of this story.

I went down to my apartment and changed out of my evening clothes into something less conspicuous—slacks, a turtle-neck black knit shirt, an old summer-weight sports jacket with leather patches at the elbows.

I ducked seeing Chambrun. I didn’t want to face him with information I couldn’t give him. I left word with Karl Nevers at the reception desk that I was leaving the hotel for a while.

“The boss will raise hell,” Nevers said.

“I have a feeling he knows I’m going,” I said.

I got a taxi and told the driver to take me to 10th Street and Second Avenue. That was a block away from the address I had in my pocket, scribbled on a piece of paper by Grace Maxwell.

When the driver let me out, I was in what I guess you’d call a slum area. Garbage was stacked outside old buildings. People sat on front steps, looking at me with hostility, as though I was someone from Mars. Every now and then as I passed an open window there was a blare of rock music from inside. A group of young people on a corner watched my approach and I knew they were speculating about me. As I passed them, I was aware that a couple of the boys had detached themselves from the group and were following me. I felt the short hairs rising on the back of my neck. I’m in reasonably good shape for a guy thirty-five years old, I can slug hell out of a golf ball, but I don’t have a diploma in free-for-all fighting. I was glad when I spotted the number I was looking for. My two tails were still half a block behind me.

Inside the door I found myself in a dingy entrance lit by a bare electric light bulb. The stair, which went steeply up into darkness, was littered with discarded cigarette and candy wrappers—and dirt. There were no name plates or buzzers in the entryway. “Second Floor” was written on my slip of paper, so I went up. The building consisted of what we used to call “railroad apartments.” Each apartment ran from the front door to the back of the building, room after room down a narrow hallway like a train of cars.

I knocked on the door on the second floor. As I stood there waiting, I was conscious that the building smelled bad. There was the sour odor of years of cooking and bad plumbing. I knocked again, pounding on the door this time with my fist. I heard voices down below. My two tails had followed me into the building and were evidently discussing their next move.

The door opened and I knew I’d found the person I’d come to see. Diana Maxwell was a slim, beautifully built blonde, her hair hanging down below her shoulders. She had on a mini-skirted, sleeveless print thing. Her arms and legs looked firm and young. She looked out of place in this dump. Her blue eyes were level and clear.

“Miss Maxwell?” I said.

She turned her head and called out. “The fuzz—I think!”

I heard human scramblings down the hall.

“I’m not the police, Diana,” I said. “My name is Haskell. I’m a friend of your mother’s. She asked me to come to see you.”

“Not likely,” she said. Her voice was pleasantly husky. I imagined that years ago Grace Maxwell had been the same vibrant, lovely kind of girl.

I took the slip of paper out of my pocket. “Perhaps you’ll recognize your mother’s handwriting.” I gave it to her.

She frowned at it. “So, come in,” she said.

She led me down an endless hall to a small kitchen. Doors on both sides of the hall were closed. I thought I detected the acrid smell of pot.

“Eight of us live here,” Diana said when we reached the kitchen, which was unexpectedly immaculate. “The living room is a bedroom, so we receive guests in the kitchen.” She pulled up a high stool beside the wooden center table and perched on it. There was no place for me to sit. “Is something wrong with mother?”

“You might say so.”

“Drunk?”

“But making considerable sense,” I said. “Do you know what happened at the Hotel Beaumont tonight?”

She smiled at me. “So Charlie pulled it off,” she said. “They’re probably laughing all the way to Ronald Reagan’s swimming pool.”

“Nobody’s laughing,” I said. “Charlie was shot to death by someone who thought he was your father.”

Her eyes widened, her lips parted. “Oh, my God!” she said.

I told her exactly how it happened. She listened, a look of shocked disbelief on her face. When I’d finished, she asked: “Why—why did Mother send you here?”

“Two reasons, I think. She wanted you warned that the police will be looking for you and your young man. And she wants to persuade your father to give up.”

“Give up?”

“Drop the ball, throw in the towel, abandon his political ambitions.”

“She’s afraid for him?”

“Aren’t you? The killer made a mistake. He’ll probably try again.”

“What has it got to do with me?”

“You and your Mr. Tennant have threatened to destroy your father if he doesn’t give up. Your mother wants you to tell your father what you’ve got on him.”

“Mother seems to have been doing a lot of talking,” she said.

“She had to talk to someone,” I said. “I’ve promised her that what she’s said to me, your address, my visit here, will not be passed on to anyone.”

“Just who are you?” Diana asked.

“I’m the public relations man for the Hotel Beaumont. Your mother took a chance on me.”

“She ought to have her head examined. She believed you wouldn’t talk?”

“She had to chance it.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“Is Barry Tennant here in the apartment?”

The blue eyes went blank. “I don’t know where he is.”

“He’s going to rate high on the cops’ list of suspects,” I said. “They don’t know, of course, that he knew that it was Charlie Sewall in the lobby without his pants.”

“Mother told you that?”

“That you and Barry knew and that you told her—and that she let it happen.”

“And Father?”

“He doesn’t know—yet. Your mother won’t tell him or the police. But your Barry Tennant is going to have to tell them to save his own hide. How come you weren’t there to watch the fun?”

“I—I didn’t want to watch it.”

“You mean you have some kind of hidden regard for your father? Didn’t want to see him humiliated?”

“I didn’t want to go without Barry, and they wouldn’t have let Barry in the hotel.”

“And you weren’t watching the festivities on television?”

“We don’t have a television set.”

“I should think you would have been with the pickets outside the hotel.”

She shook her head. She was thinking hard.

“Your mother says that you have some secret weapon that you can use against your father,” I said. “She wants you to show your father what cards you’re holding in the hope that he will withdraw from the race. He won’t run from a killer, but he might back away from whatever the joker is you’re holding.”

She shook her head from side to side. “I have to think,” she said.

“So, think.”

“It’s one thing to hate Father for his politics and to smear him if I could. It’s another thing to join forces with a killer.”

“I thought violence was all a part of youth’s program.”

“For God sake, Haskell, he’s my father!”

“He’ll be glad to know you think of him that way.”

I was suddenly aware that someone was standing behind me in the kitchen doorway and I turned. It was a tall young man wearing bell-bottom striped pants, a bright orange shirt, and a fringed buckskin vest. I’m not partial to extra-long hair in males, and this one’s black locks hung down to his shoulders. The hair looked clean and combed, however.

“You heard, Barry?” Diana asked.

Barry Tennant nodded. “Poor Charlie,” he said. “Poor silly bastard.” He looked at me. “The killer got away in the excitement?”

“No one saw him. No one even heard the shot,” I said.

“Charlie was coming here to tell us how it went,” Tennant said. “We were wondering what was keeping him. Poor guy.” His feeling for Charlie Sewall seemed quite genuine.

“What did Charlie have against your father?” I asked Diana.

“He didn’t have anything against anyone,” Tennant said, answering for Diana. “He just liked complicated jokes. Oh, they hurt people sometimes, but that wasn’t his purpose. He just wanted to make people laugh.”

“He succeeded tonight, for about thirty seconds,” I said.

“The true art of comedy has to involve genuine tragedy, genuine embarrassment, genuine humiliation,” Tennant said. “Look at any Chaplin film. Charlie understood that. He used to say that Groucho Marx said something like ‘An amateur comedian thinks it’s funny to dress a kid up like an old lady and push him down stairs in a wheelchair, but a professional comic only thinks it’s funny if it’s a real old lady.’” He looked at Diana. “Somebody’s going to have to tell Melody.”

“Who is Melody?” I asked.

“Melody Marsh,” Tennant said.

“Am I supposed to know who she is?”

“Melody was a famous stripper in the days of burlesque. Is that before your time?” I was over thirty!

“The real thing was,” I said.

“Melody could revolve her bosoms, one clockwise and one counterclockwise at the same time. She made a big name for herself doing it. It brought down the house. It still does.”

“She’s still performing?”

“Just for Charlie’s friends,” Tennant said. “She’s Charlie’s woman.”

I swallowed hard.

“I’ll tell Melody,” Tennant said. “What about you, baby?”

“I think I’ll go home and see Mother,” Diana said. “I want her to make her pitch, not a messenger.”

“She’s not at home,” I said. “She and your father are staying at the Beaumont. It seems safer. And the police will be busy with them.”

“And you’ll tell them where to find us,” Diana said.

“I gave my word,” I said.

She gave a bitter little smile. “When Knighthood Was in Flower,” she said. “Oh, brother!”

“I’ll be you-know-where after I’ve seen Melody,” Tennant said to Diana. “Just in case Haskell is a phony.”

He turned and ran down the long hallway to the front door. I heard the door open and close and his feet on the steep stairway. Diana still sat on the high stool, a little-girl frown of concentration on her lovely face. She looked at me suddenly.

“Are you married, Haskell?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“This doesn’t seem an ideal time for my life story.”

“Why not?” she insisted. “You must be thirty-five—forty?”

“Out of your world? What are you, nineteen—twenty?”

“I’m of age,” she said, “if that’s what’s bothering you.”

“Why should it bother me?”

“You were thinking I would be fun in bed, weren’t you?”

“No such thing!” I protested.

“Why not? Don’t you find me attractive?”

“Now look, Diana—”

“I was just trying to make a point,” she said.

“Oh.” By God, she would be fun in bed, I thought. “What point?”

“Suppose I were to take time out to make love with you now. Barry would guess. He’d know the next time he touched me. He wouldn’t take it out on me. He’d dash off to do Father some harm, because he knows, in spite of everything, I’m fond of Father. Barry would do that to hurt me, but it would also hurt Mother, it would get some other stinking conservative elected to the Senate. The point is you can’t do anything just for yourself. It spreads out and touches people you never even heard of.”

“The House That Jack Built,” I said.

“Like Charlie’s joke,” she said. “He just meant to get a laugh. But he set a murderer in motion, which may get Father elected, which will result in Mother’s living in terror, which has the police force and your hotel moved into action, and which will destroy Melody’s life. It spreads like a forest fire, and it was only supposed to be a belly-laugh.”

This was some kind of a girl, I thought. “You’re thinking what might happen if you use whatever it is you have on your father. You’re thinking it could do much more than just damage him.”

“That’s the point I was trying to make,” she said. “You can’t do anything that just affects yourself.” She slid down off the stool, revealing a disturbing amount of leg. “I think I’d better go see Mother.”

We went down the dirty staircase to the street. Standing by the nearest lamppost were my two tails. I guessed what they were thinking. They’d seen Tennant run off. I was the fuzz taking Diana in. When we reached them, Diana smiled at them.

“Keep your cool, kids,” she said. “He’s a friend.”

One of them waved at her and we went on. I hailed an on-duty cab.

“Those two characters would have jumped me if I’d been a cop, wouldn’t they?” I asked when we were under way.

Diana laughed. “They eat cops for breakfast,” she said.

We rode for a while in silence, the cab cutting east to Park Avenue and heading uptown.

“How is Father taking it?” she asked me suddenly.

“He’s got guts,” I said. “Whatever else you think of him, he’s got guts.”

“He framed Barry,” she said, her young voice hard.

“How?”

“Barry was one of the activist leaders at Barstow,” she said. “Father hated him for that, but he hated him more because I was living with him. So he framed him. When the cops broke into his apartment, they found some pot. There isn’t jail room to take care of all the pot-smokers in New York. But they also found a gun. Would you believe me if I told you that Barry never owned a gun in his life? Father had him framed. Barry spent a year in a lousy jail because of it. Father needs to be paid off for that.”

“If he did it,” I said. “It seems out of character.”

“When you put sex into a situation—Barry’s and my sex in this case—men stop playing by the rules. They turn primitive.”

“Your father?”

“My father!” She was silent for a moment. “If I show him what you call the cards I hold, he’ll really go berserk.”

The Beaumont loomed up ahead of us.

I brought Diana into the hotel through the side street entrance. There is a long corridor lined on each side with small specialty shops: women’s clothes and accessories, jewelry, furs, expensive gifts. Diana didn’t look right or left. I’d have sworn no woman could walk down that alley without a glance at the glittering displays.

The alley opened into the main lobby. We were promptly confronted by two of Jerry Dodd’s men, who recognized me and made the “pass friend” sign. Mike Maggio, the night bell captain, gave me his gamin smile. It said “Nice-looking dame, pal.”

“Banquet over?” I asked him.

“The speeches are over,” he said. “They raised four million bucks, I understand, which ought to buy Maxwell his breakfast Wheaties. But while there’s still liquor being served, nothing ever ends. More than half the people are still there.”

“This is Miss Maxwell,” I told him. “If she needs anything—”

His grin broadened. “Any time, any place, lady,” he said. It sounded insolent, but he meant it as a compliment. She took it that way. “Your old man’s up in his suite, Miss Maxwell.”

We started toward the elevators, but she stopped before we reached them. Her hand reached out and touched mine. It was cool and soft. Damn her and her hypothetical questions.

“I don’t want to face Father,” she said.

“There’s no way to get to your mother without it—not if he’s up in the suite,” I said.

“Do you think—do you think you might buy me a little Dutch courage?” she asked.

“A drink? Of course. Ever been in the Trapeze Bar?”

She shook her head.

The Trapeze Bar is on the mezzanine level, suspended in space like a bird cage 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 draught from a concealed air freshening system. It’s rather a special gathering place because you don’t get to it by accident. No one sees it and walks in off the street. The patrons are people who come over and over again. They think of it, I imagine, as a kind of private club.

Mr. Del Greco, the captain, greeted us with old-world courtesy and led us to a corner table. It seemed to be the only vacancy in the place. I knew Del Greco reserved it for special customers.

“I—I’d like a stinger,” Diana said.

I ordered my usual Scotch on the rocks. Diana leaned back in her chair and looked around, her eyes widened. We were the only people in the Trapeze not elegantly dressed. There’s a quality about the place that’s hard to put a finger on. We’ve all seen the new-rich in action. There was nothing self-conscious about anyone in the Trapeze; expensive clothes, expensive jewelry were everyday with the Trapeze’s patrons. Diana looked down at her simple print dress and then at my turtle-neck shirt.

“We shouldn’t have come here,” she said.

“There’s no rule about dressing here,” I said. “I suspect most of these people were dolled up for your father’s banquet. The customer is always right at the Beaumont. There’s only one rule he has to obey.”

“Oh?”

“He isn’t allowed to throw up on the rug,” I said.

I was trying to relax her and it worked. She giggled—and then seemed to freeze.

“Oh, God!” she said.

I turned my head to follow her look. Watson Clarke, in full dress, was bearing down on us. I noticed the table he’d left. There were three very important corporation executives watching his progress.

“My dear Diana,” Clarke said, towering over us.

“Hello, Watty,” she said, quite casual.

“You’ve seen your parents?” Clarke asked.

“I thought I’d have a drink first,” Diana said.

Clarke’s heavy eyebrows were drawn together. I was obviously in his way. I stood up.

“If you’ll excuse me—” I said.

Diana’s cool hand closed over mine. “Please, Haskell, don’t go,” she said.

I didn’t have any choice and Clarke saw that I didn’t. He gave me a pleasant smile. “Mind if I join you both for a minute?”

Mr. Del Greco was already there with a chair, and a waiter had brought Clarke’s drink from the other table. At the same time a second waiter brought the stinger and my Scotch.

“You two know each other from somewhere?” Clarke asked, when he was sitting.

“From somewhere,” Diana said quickly. “Haskell saw me when I arrived and offered to buy me the drink I needed.” Watson Clarke was not to know how we’d gotten together.

“Your father will be glad you came,” Clarke said.

“I came to see Mother, not Father,” Diana said.

“For God sake, Diana, can’t you forget your feud with him?” Clarke said. “It’s been a dreadful and a frightening night. He needs your sympathy and support.”

“I needed his sympathy and support when I was in trouble and I didn’t get it,” she said.

“My dear child, somebody tried to murder him!”

“It was a kind of murder when he framed Barry and had him sent to jail.”

Clarke looked at me unhappily. He didn’t want to discuss this in front of me. “Your father never framed anyone in his life,” he said. “Your young man lied to you about that gun, Diana. It’s possible he may lie to you about where he was tonight.”

She gave him a bland smile. “He can’t lie to me about that, Watty. You see he was at home—in bed with me.”

The color drained out of Clarke’s face. He stood up. “I’m sorry I barged in on you, Diana,” he said. “You should know by now that you can’t shock me with that kind of deliberate scatology.” He gave me a courteous little bow, turned, and walked back to his table. A waiter with his drink and Mr. Del Greco made it a procession.

Diana drank her stinger thirstily.

“You were rough on him,” I said.

“That old goat!” she said, her eyes blazing. “He can’t keep his hands off me when I’m alone with him!”

“I thought he was your father’s best friend.”

“He’s been pawing me ever since I can remember,” Diana said.

A hundred pairs of eyes watched Diana and me as we left our table and walked out of the Trapeze Bar. These were polite people, so they didn’t gawk. We had created an interest. Watson Clarke’s apparently friendly interim with us indicated that we were not nonentities. Diana was the real object of interest. Quite a few of the regulars undoubtedly recognized me as a member of the hotel staff.

I stopped at the door to ask Mr. Del Greco to phone the house suite and tell whoever answered that Miss Maxwell and I were on the way up. I thought Grace Maxwell might need to be prepared.

Jerry Dodd’s two men were outside the door of 14B. I asked who was inside.

“Most everyone,” one of the men told me. “Jerry, the boss, the Maxwell family, Lieutenant Hardy, the nigger kid.”

“Who?”

“Cloud—whatever his name is.”

Diana looked at me, her eyes wide. “Claude Cloud?” she asked.

“You know him?”

“Of course I know him. He’s my friend. What’s he doing here?”

“I guess I didn’t tell you,” I said. “I didn’t make the connection with you. He tried to break into the banquet and one of the cops shot him. Minor shoulder wound. I heard your father say he wanted to talk to him, so I guess that’s what’s happening.”

Diana’s finger was instantly on the door buzzer. Jerry Dodd opened it.

“Miss Maxwell,” I told him.

He stood aside and let us in. Mrs. Maxwell and Miss Ruysdale were missing. Claude Cloud, his arm in a black silk sling that Dr. Partridge had provided for him, was sitting on the lounge. Maxwell was in the chair facing him. Hardy was standing behind him. Chambrun was over by the windows, looking down at the river. When Maxwell saw his daughter, he stood up. His face was stony. I couldn’t tell if he was pleased or angry.

“I found your daughter in the lobby, Mr. Maxwell,” I said, fast. I wanted to play it Diana’s way. “I brought her up.”

Chambrun had turned and he gave me a faintly amused smile.

Diana ignored her father. “What are you doing here, Claude?” she asked.

Cloud, in his fringed vest and Afro hair-do, was nine million miles out of place in this elegant sitting room.

“I could ask you the same, baby,” he said.

“Are you under arrest?” Diana asked.

“The whole goddamned police force took me, baby,” Cloud said.

“Where’s your lawyer?” Diana asked. “They can’t make you talk without your lawyer.” She looked at Hardy. He might as well have had COP painted on his shirt front.

“Oh, this is just friendly, baby,” Cloud said. “Just friendly.” He gave Maxwell a kind of insolent grin.

“This is not a police questioning, Miss Maxwell,” Hardy said. “Your father wanted to talk to him. Cloud was willing.”

“But you’re holding him?” Diana asked.

“He tried to break into the banquet, Miss Maxwell,” Hardy said patiently. “When he was ordered to stop, he disobeyed. Things were pretty tense downstairs, and one of my men shot at him to make him stop. It’s just a flesh wound.”

“What are you holding him for?”

“Disobeying a police order, trespassing, maybe we can make conspiracy to commit a homicide stick,” Hardy said.

Maxwell tried to take charge. “Mark’s told you what happened here tonight?” he asked Diana.

She looked at me. “Your first name is Mark? You didn’t tell me.”

“We didn’t get that far,” I said.

“Yes, I know what happened to Charlie,” Diana said to her father.

“You know that bullet was meant for me, Kitten?”

“Yes, I know.”

“Do you think we’re not justified in trying to find out who shot at me?”

“What has that got to do with Claude?” Diana asked.

You could see the struggle Maxwell was putting up to keep his angry frustration in control. “Your friend Mr. Cloud has threatened me in public, Kitten; he has threatened me in the middle of the night with obscene phone calls; tonight he broke through police lines in an effort to disrupt a private dinner held on my behalf—and God knows what else he intended to do when he got in. It’s a war, Kitten. Do you blame me for trying to find out what the rules are?”

“Oh, man!” Cloud said. “Rules! That’s all they think about is rules! They make ’em. We don’t.” He laughed. “Poor old Charlie knew how absurd the rules are. Why should there be a rule that says you can’t appear in public without your pants? Anybody could forget his pants—if he was in a hurry, or he was thinking about something else. But Charlie knew the rules. If the great Douglas Maxwell appeared without his pants, he couldn’t get elected to the United States Senate. No matter how good he was, you understand, how honest, how well-equipped. No pants, no Senate.”

“You knew my cousin Charles?” Maxwell said.

“Sure I knew him. A great guy, Charlie.”

“You knew what he planned to do tonight?”

“Sure I knew. Man, he needed an audience ready to laugh.”

“You know the two men who arrived at the hotel with him?” Hardy asked.

Cloud wagged a finger at him. “‘Heah come de fuzz!’” he said. “Remember, Daddio, no lawyer, no questions from the fuzz.”

Maxwell drew a deep breath. “Political warfare is one thing, Cloud. Murder is something else again. We can’t live with anarchy.”

“Man, who says so?” Cloud said, grinning. “Anarchy would be a lot better than living in a world with your no-pants rules. Anyhow, you didn’t get murdered, man. It was Charlie who got it.”

“Meant for me,” Maxwell said. “It was the sheerest luck that I didn’t get it ten minutes later. If Charlie hadn’t—”

“Man, you sound like you were proud it was meant for you,” Cloud interrupted. “Did you ever think it might not have been meant for you at all? Did you ever think it might have all been part of Charlie’s joke? He didn’t have too much to live for. Maybe he thought the biggest joke of all would be for people to think you killed him, or had him killed, for making a joke of you. Was it that way, man? I mean, was it?”

The color drained from Maxwell’s face. The muscles were knotted along his jaw lines. “I don’t think there’s any purpose in continuing this, Lieutenant,” he said.

“I second the motion,” Hardy said. “Come on, Cloud.”

“Sure, man,” Cloud said. “Which way to the Bastille?”

“I’ll call your lawyer for you, Claude,” Diana said.

Cloud waved at her. “I guess maybe the time has come, baby. Thanks.” He started for the door and turned back. “I’m not against murder, Maxwell, if it helps to get rid of pollution. But I’m not, personally, an executioner, man. I’m scared of guns—and firecrackers. Not that that would matter any. Barry Tennant didn’t like guns and he didn’t own one. But you fixed him, man. You know, I was real surprised you didn’t find a bomb in my pocket when you arrested me. The name of the game is frame.”

Maxwell turned away. “Get him out of here,” he said.

When the door closed on Cloud and Hardy, I felt as if a balloon had been deflated. Maxwell went over to the bar and poured himself a drink. He turned back, finally, to Diana, as if the drink had given him strength.

“I know you came to see your mother,” he said. He was dismissing her.

“Where is she?” Diana asked. It was a death struggle between these two, I thought, with Maxwell seeming the more vulnerable.

Maxwell nodded toward the door to the bedrooms and turned away again. It developed that Diana was going to have to walk through, around, or over Chambrun to make it. He stood directly in front of the door, rocking gently on his heels.

“What is this ‘frame-up’ gibberish?” he asked.

“Please, I’d like to go to Mother,” Diana said.

“Let’s not play games, Diana,” Chambrun said. “I’ve known you since you were a baby. I was at your christening. I’ve watched this feud grow between you and your father, and I’ve stayed out of it. None of my business—until tonight. Tonight my hotel has been used as a stage for murder. It has been used as a stage for a bad-taste practical joke. Would you believe that I may be more offended by that than the shooting? Cloud tells us that he knew what Charlie Sewall was planning. Charlie had to have an audience ready to laugh. Cloud was Charlie’s friend and he’s your friend. So I suspect you knew what Charlie was planning for tonight. Am I right?”

Some of the color had drained from Diana’s face, and she faced Chambrun, rigid, her hands curled into small fists.

“Yes, I knew,” she said.

“Oh, God!” Maxwell said, under his breath.

“You went along with it because you wanted your father hurt,” Chambrun said. “Which brings us back to this frame-up talk. I know what it’s about in part. You think your father had drugs and a gun planted in Barry Tennant’s apartment. Why?”

“He hates Barry,” Diana said.

“That’s not good enough,” Chambrun said. “Your father may hate Barry, but he’s a man of character, integrity, honor.”

“Then why were the police sent to pick up Barry?”

“Because he headed an activist group which had threatened your father over the Barstow riots. Other kids were checked out, weren’t they?”

“Yes,” Diana said, still rigid. “But I wasn’t sleeping with other kids.”

“Diana!” It was a whisper from Maxwell.

“Was your father with the police when they raided Tennant’s apartment?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t think he planted the gun personally—and the marijuana?”

“Nobody planted the pot,” Diana said. “Barry never denied that he had experimented with pot. He didn’t go for it, and he simply forgot to get rid of it. But the gun—”

“So your father corrupted the New York City police force?”

“Of course not.”

“That’s the best word I’ve heard for the police in months,” Chambrun said dryly. “So who did plant the gun?”

“The police took Stew Shaw along with them to identify Barry,” Diana said. “He was the college security chief then. He was then, and is now, Father’s boy.”

Chambrun’s narrowed black eyes turned on Maxwell. “What about that, Douglas?”

Maxwell spread his hands. “It simply isn’t true,” he said.

“You mean you never told Shaw to plant a gun on Barry Tennant?”

“Never.”

“But that doesn’t mean Shaw couldn’t have done it, thinking it would please you. He is your boy, as Diana put it.”

Maxwell moistened his lips. “I would bet my life that Stew never did such a thing.”

“Don’t be too free with your bets, Douglas. Your life is already at stake. Someone may be down the corridor now, waiting to take it. Where is Shaw?”

“He went back to the house to get some things I need,” Maxwell said. “It seemed safe enough, with your men and the police to protect me.”

“Can I go in to Mother now?” Diana asked. She hadn’t once looked at her father.

Chambrun shrugged and turned away. I watched Diana go. Maxwell returned to the bar. He was taking on quite a load himself, I thought.

Chambrun and I left the unhappy Maxwell family to themselves, with Miss Ruysdale somewhere in the background. We went down to Chambrun’s office on the second floor. He had been out of touch too long. He had to know what was going on in the private world of the Beaumont. He flipped the switch on the box communicator on his desk so that I could hear what was going on.

Lieutenant Hardy had just called 14B to reach him and was on the way up to the office now.

The Banquet Department reported that the last of the guests had left the Grand Ballroom and the cleaning crew was already on the job.

All quiet in the lobby. The reporters and the camera people had disappeared.

The pickets were still outside the hotel, chanting obscenities, aimed about evenly at Maxwell and the cops.

Business as usual in the Blue Lagoon, which is the hotel’s night club.

The telephone switchboard was swamped with calls of inquiry about Maxwell. Was he dead? Was he hurt?

Finally Chambrun switched off the box and leaned back in his chair. “I think I could do with a brandy, Mark,” he said. I went to the sideboard and brought him a brandy and a cup of Turkish coffee, which is always brewing there. He cupped the brandy glass in both hands for a moment, savoring its aroma. Then he sipped and put it down.

“I believe in Maxwell,” he said. “I don’t believe he framed young Tennant, no matter how much he hated him for what he’s done with Diana. Did you meet Tennant?”

“See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” I said.

“I know you promised Grace,” he said. “But obviously you went to get Diana for her. Which means that she knows where Diana lives and has kept it a secret from her husband. Did you meet Tennant?”

“Let’s say I have met him,” I said.

“Do you think he was here in the hotel tonight?”

“I don’t think either of them were,” I said.

“But they knew what was going to happen—Charlie Sewall’s joke?”

“Diana told you that.”

“Did you bring them news?” he asked.

“How do you mean?”

“Did they know that Sewall had been shot?”

“It seemed to be news,” I said. “They were shocked, I think.”

“If they knew it was Charlie, and Charlie was their friend, then we have to count them out,” Chambrun said. “Unless—” His eyes narrowed.

“Unless what?”

“Unless it was meant to be Charlie,” he said. “Unless it wasn’t a mistake.”

“But Diana and her boy wanted Charlie to pull off his joke,” I said.

“So they say.”

We weren’t able to go on with it because Hardy arrived. He looked beat. He was carrying a manila folder which he put down on Chambrun’s desk.

“May be some help,” he said. He opened the folder. On top of a stack of papers was a photograph. I moved around to get a look at it. It was a picture of Charlie Sewall in the lobby, without his pants, smiling. Flanking him were two men in white tie and tails. One of them was totally obscured by a folding opera hat which he was holding up to his face, obviously to avoid the cameras. The other was turned back to look at Sewall, so that all we had was his profile. It was a youngish face, contorted by laughter.

“Either of you know him?” Hardy asked.

I didn’t.

Chambrun shook his head. “There isn’t enough of the face,” he said. “Only the jaw line, dark hair.”

Hardy pushed the photograph aside. “We have a preliminary report from ballistics,” he said. “The medical examiner got the bullet out of Sewall’s chest. They guess it’s a foreign-made gun, probably a 6.5 millimeter Walthers, German make. Same kind of gun some people think was used to assassinate Bobby Kennedy.”

“Hard to come by?” Chambrun asked.

“No. I could name you a dozen gunshops where they can be bought. It’s a handgun, very accurate if you know how to use it.”

“You need to find the gun before you can match the bullet to it,” Chambrun said.

Hardy made a sour face. “The ability to match a fired bullet to a gun is considerably exaggerated,” he said. “Sometimes you can, sometimes not. More often not—not well enough to have it stand up in court as evidence. It would be happy coincidence if we found the owner of a P-38 Walthers, but we might not make it stick as the one.”

“And it was fired from the mezzanine balcony?”

“No question.”

“Which means the killer had a key to the locked doors.”

“Or a magical lock-pick,” Hardy said.

“Which doesn’t exist,” Chambrun said.

“Right.”

The red light blinked on Chambrun’s phone. He switched on the squawk box again.

“Chambrun here.”

“Karl Nevers here,” a tense voice said. “The pickets have broken through the police lines, sir. Like hundreds of them. They’re tearing the place apart, Mr. Chambrun.”

It was bedlam downstairs. Hundreds of kids, boys and girls, were churning about, screaming and yelling. I could hear glass smashing. It seems that some of them had charged the front entrance and the cops had concentrated there. It was a decoy, because the main force had come in the side entrance, charging down the corridor of shops, breaking glass windows, looting furs and jewelry, and clothes. The cops were caught between the two forces. Frightened guests were in the center of a whirlpool of violence. Some of the kids had clubs and baseball bats. They swung at everything in sight—people, chandeliers, furniture. Here and there a cop, snowed under by the raiders, had been able to draw a gun and was firing wildly into a solidly packed mass of people. Above it all was a chanting.

“We want Maxwell! We want Maxwell!”

As Chambrun, Hardy, and I came out of the elevators into this madhouse, we were almost trampled to death by kids crowding into the car we had vacated. I heard a girl shouting hysterically.

“Fourteen B! It’s Fourteen B!”

They knew where Maxwell was.

We swung around and got into the next car. Hardy blocked a group of charging kids. He swung his fist like a sledge hammer, knocking one boy back into the group and scattering them like ninepins. I got the elevator door closed and we went up. Chambrun’s face was a study in cold rage.

We stumbled out at 14. The hallway was packed with kids, yelling and screaming. But they weren’t moving forward. The situation was a little different here. The space was narrow. There was no way to encircle the people outside the door of 14B. I managed to climb up on a radiator cover to have a look. Jerry Dodd and two of his men were there, guns drawn, and with them was Watson Clarke, his clothes torn, his white shirt front smeared with blood. I saw a kid with a club make a rush at them. It was Clarke, a big man, who stopped him, picked him up in the air, and literally threw him back in the crowd.

Then I heard Jerry Dodd’s voice, clear, and cold. “I’m warning you!” he shouted at the crowd. “Come one step closer and we open fire. There’ll be a dozen of you dead before you can reach us. Add it up!”

And then, unbelievably, straight through the center of that jammed crowd Chambrun, short and square, forced his way. It took both strength and determination. When he reached Jerry, he turned and faced them. He looked carved out of rock.

“Listen!” he said. His voice was so low they had to quiet to hear him. Something about him held them back. “Let us examine the facts. There are three men here, each with six bullets in a gun. There are two of us unarmed who will fight you until we are dead.” He glanced at the bloodied Clarke. “These guns will become clubs when they are empty. So the first two dozen of you will die. Behind you is one armed man, a police lieutenant. In seconds there will be a score more. You’re caught both ways. If you overpower us, you’d need a tank to break down this door. At the far end of the hall is a window. Outside it is a fourteen-story drop to the sidewalk. You can’t get Maxwell and you can’t get away. If you overpower us and kill us—because you will have to overpower us—you will all of you spend the rest of your lives in prison. Those are the facts, my friends.”

A girl just in front of me shouted: “We want Maxwell!” It didn’t sound very bloodthirsty; more like a college cheerleader trying to start a crowd response. I heard elevator doors open behind me. Half a dozen cops with drawn guns piled out. The ball game was over—I hoped.

Somebody shouted: “There’s a fire exit down the hall.”

They turned, as though they were one, and tried to stampede. Three or four of them got by the unprepared cops and I saw them get through the fire door to the inside staircase. Then the cops had the hall blocked.

“Let them go one by one, after you’ve searched them,” Hardy ordered. “Confiscate all weapons, clubs, anything they can use to raise hell.”

The resistance had cracked. I wedged my way to the front and joined the defenders.

“I’m always in the nick of time,” I said.

Chambrun ignored me. I turned to Jerry Dodd. “Would you have fired on them, pal?” I asked.

“Right through the eye sockets,” he said.

“I was never so glad to see anyone in my life,” I heard Clarke say to Chambrun. “I was in the Trapeze Bar when it started. I had to fight off half a dozen of them to get into an elevator and get up here. Damn near tore my clothes off. Can we see how they are inside?”

It was Miss Ruysdale who opened the door to us. She looked as unruffled as if she had just modeled her trim black dress for a fashion show.

“How bad is it?” she asked Chambrun.

“It’s bad,” he said. “They’ve wrecked the main lobby.”

In the living room of the suite Maxwell was standing beside his wife, who was sitting rigidly straight on the lounge. Maxwell’s hand rested gently on her shoulder. She looked in shock. Maxwell looked angry, not scared.

Against the wall near the door to the bedrooms Diana stood. Her hands were spread out against the wall as if she needed its support. I tried to guess what she was thinking. She claimed allegiance to those rioting kids, but I had a feeling she was horrified at how out of hand it had all become. A few more minutes and her family might have been wiped out in front of her eyes.

“What in God’s name happened to you, Watty?” Maxwell asked Clarke.

“I had a little trouble getting here,” Clarke said. He glanced at Diana. “Your friends are on the rough side when they get out of hand, Diana.”

“They’re maniacs!” Maxwell exploded.

“Watson Clarke turned to Chambrun. “I’ve wondered how they knew they’d find Doug in this particular suite,” he said. “I’d assumed they wouldn’t get it from the switchboard. I mean, you were taking special precautions, weren’t you, Mr. Chambrun?”

“We were,” Chambrun said. His voice was almost unrecognizably cold. “Someone on the inside either sold out or was frightened into telling.”

God help whoever it was, I thought.

“Wouldn’t it be advisable to move Doug and Grace somewhere else?” Clarke asked.

“This will be quite safe,” Chambrun said. “I assure you.”

“I think perhaps we owe Pierre an apology,” Maxwell said. “Our dinner party has made a shambles of his hotel.”

Chambrun ignored the apology. He stepped over to Diana.

“You could save us a lot of time if you’d tell us who the leaders of that mob are,” he said.

She looked past him as though he wasn’t there; like someone in a trance.

“You’re not saving anyone, Diana,” Chambrun said. “The police will have taken in dozens of those kids. Not all of them will have your kind of misplaced courage. Somewhere in that crowd may be the person who tried to murder your father earlier tonight. In the state of mind they were in just now that someone may have tried again. Save us time, Diana.”

She turned completely around and pressed her forehead against the wall.

Maxwell whispered her name, pleading. Grace Maxwell didn’t move or speak.

The door buzzer sounded. Miss Ruysdale went to it and moved the little peephole shutter so that she could see who it was. Then she opened the door and Jerry Dodd came in.

“See you outside for a minute?” he asked Chambrun.

Chambrun nodded to me and I went out into the hall with him. Complete order had been restored out there. The two guards stood on either side of the door. The rioters and the cops were gone.

“We’ve had it again,” Jerry said. The skin on his thin face looked stretched tight over the bones.

“More rioting downstairs?” Chambrun asked.

Jerry shook his head. “Murder,” he said. “Somebody beat Stewart Shaw to death and shoved him in the linen closet down the hall.”

Part Two

1

STEWART SHAW WAS A pretty ugly sight. One of the floor maids had gone to the linen closet after the rioters had been cleared away to get some fresh towels for someone. It’s called a closet, but it’s really a small room lined with shelves for sheets, towels, extra blankets. The maid had opened the door and found a man with half a head sitting on the floor facing her. He was tilted against one of the rows of shelves which had kept him from falling over. His skull had been beaten in like an eggshell.

“Girl kept her head,” Jerry said. “Closed the door and called the front desk.”

We were standing just outside the door, looking in. I turned away. I thought I was going to be sick at my stomach. Shaw had been a dark, glowering sort of man. His ugly face was streaked by blood from the awful wounds on his head.

“I’m only guessing, but I don’t think it was those kids,” Jerry said. “They came in a mob and they all headed for Fourteen B. Shaw wasn’t there with us. Also, the blood has already started to dry. Seems like it happened a little while ago, even before the kids broke into the hotel.”

“Where’s Hardy?” Chambrun asked.

“God knows,” Jerry said. “I sent word downstairs. He’s questioning kids somewhere, I imagine.” Jerry took a handkerchief out of his pocket and blotted at the beads of perspiration on his forehead. “I thought I’d better report to you out here, boss. The Maxwells have had about all you could expect them to take for one night. How come Shaw wasn’t in Fourteen B acting like a bodyguard?”

“Maxwell sent him back to his house to get something he says he needed,” Chambrun said.

“He’s sitting on a briefcase,” Jerry said. “I didn’t want to move him till Hardy got here.”

“Weapon?” Chambrun asked. “That wasn’t done with anyone’s fists.”

“Unless he’s sitting on something beside the briefcase, no weapon,” Jerry said. “Odd thing. He’s wearing a shoulder holster with a police special in it. It looks like he never got it out to protect himself.”

“Your men outside Fourteen B didn’t hear anything?” Chambrun asked. “Nothing.”

I should explain the lay of the land. The elevators were at the south end of the building. There were five cars which opened into a sort of foyer on each floor. In the daytime a receptionist sat at a desk on each floor, opposite the elevators. You either turned right or left and then down a corridor. Suite 14B was down the right-hand corridor. This linen room was down the left-hand corridor. Between the two corridors were suites of rooms, back to back, all soundproofed. You couldn’t have heard a bomb go off in one corridor in the other.

“Shaw wasn’t headed for Fourteen B down this corridor,” Chambrun said. “Where do you think it happened, Jerry?”

“He was probably dragged here from somewhere,” Jerry said. “Maybe some distance, maybe just a few feet.” He looked down at the dark green carpeting. “Those damned kids trampled all over everything. Maybe when we get down to it we can find some traces of blood.”

“God knows he bled,” Chambrun said. He turned to me. “See if you can get Watson Clarke out here,” he said. “Somebody’s got to break the news to Maxwell.”

I went back around the corner to 14B. Miss Ruysdale answered my ring and I put in a request for Clarke. I told her what had happened. She went away, her face expressionless. Clarke joined me.

“What’s up?” he asked.

I told him. He looked at me as if I was out of my mind.

“Stew Shaw?” he said.

“In what was once the flesh,” I said.

“My God!” he said. “Do they know who?”

“Not yet,” I said.

We rounded the corner to where Chambrun and Jerry had been joined by Hardy and one of his men. Clarke looked into the closet and his breath whistled through his teeth.

“It is the bodyguard, Mr. Clarke?” Hardy asked.

“No question,” Clarke said. “Doug told me he’d gone up to the Maxwells’ house to get some papers for him. Somebody must have ambushed him when he came back. But why, Lieutenant? There were other guards. Getting rid of Stew wouldn’t leave Doug open to attack. Dodd’s men were there, outside the door, and Dodd himself.”

“I arrived just about when you did, Mr. Clarke,” Jerry said. “After the kids had started to run wild downstairs. My first thought was Maxwell. They were screaming they wanted him.”

Clarke nodded. “We heard that in the Trapeze, which is what brought me up here.” He shook his head. “God almighty.”

“I think you’ll have to take Douglas aside and tell him what’s happened,” Chambrun said. “I don’t know how much more the women can take.”

“Of course.” Clarke touched a darkening bruise on his cheek. “How can you guarantee Douglas’s safety, Lieutenant? Until you locate this lunatic he can be anywhere, waiting to take another shot at Douglas.”

“In all this confusion I suggest he stay put here till sometime tomorrow,” Hardy said. “As long as he stays in his suite here, he’s safe. That I can guarantee. We’ll go through his house on 69th Street tomorrow, make sure we don’t have a stowaway waiting for him there. Then he can go home and we’ll provide him with a police guard until we’ve got the killer locked up.”

Clarke nodded. “I’d like to go to my apartment and get a change of clothes,” he said. “Then, if Mr. Chambrun can find me a room, I’d like to stay here in the hotel as long as the Maxwells do.”

“Go ahead,” Hardy said. “But be as quick as you can about it. I’m going to need you; to go over your list of guests; to find out everything you know about Maxwell’s potential enemies.”

“Doug has no enemies except these crazy kids.”

“Maybe when we go over the list of your dinner guests something may occur to you,” Hardy said.

“I’ll have a room for you,” Chambrun said. “But before you go home, bring Douglas up to date.” He turned to me. “Let’s see how bad it is downstairs, Mark.”

Jerry Dodd walked to the elevators with us. “You want my hide, you can have it, boss,” he said.

“Don’t be absurd,” Chambrun said.

“I’m not talking about the kids,” Jerry said. “I overlooked the danger from the balcony in the lobby. I thought locking the doors was good enough. It wasn’t.”

“You had no reason to expect anyone would try to kill Maxwell,” Chambrun said.

“Sure I did,” Jerry said. “It was my job to protect him against any possibility. I thought of it, but I thought of some kook in the lobby crowd.” He smiled, a tight, bitter smile. “You know who my first suspect was when I knew the shot came from the balcony?”

“You have a suspect?”

Jerry shook his head. “That bullet went straight through Sewall’s heart,” he said. “That’s damn good shooting from that balcony. Who do you know of who’s that good with a gun?”

“Buffalo Bill,” Chambrun said, trying to lighten things.

“That gent we’ve just been talking to,” Jerry said.

“Watson Clarke?”

“Big game hunter,” Jerry said. “Collects guns.”

Chambrun stared at him.

“But I’ve talked to at least ten of our people who swear that Clarke never left the Grand Ballroom from six-thirty on. He was in charge of the seating arrangements. He didn’t even know what had happened in the lobby till somebody came and told him five minutes or so after Sewall was dead. His alibi is perfect.”

“And he’s Maxwell’s best friend,” Chambrun said.

“I don’t go by the labels on the bottle,” Jerry said. “But Clarke is one person who never went out on that balcony. So I’m a detective with bright ideas that don’t work.”

The elevator doors opened and we got in and I pressed the lobby button. We started down.

“What next, Jerry?” Chambrun asked.

“Somebody got hold of the keys to those balcony doors. That’s what’s next,” Jerry said.

Chambrun jiggled the coins in his pocket. “Does Hardy know you wondered about Watson Clarke?” he asked.

“Didn’t bother him,” Jerry said. “Clarke’s alibi is solid.”

“But if he collects guns, he might own a German P-38 Walthers,” Chambrun said. “If he does, it might be interesting to know if it’s where it ought to be—and if it’s been used, like tonight.”

“Some friend of Clarke’s might have borrowed it?”

“Probably far-fetched,” Chambrun said.

I could almost feel Chambrun’s pain when we stepped out into the lobby. The rioters were gone, but the Beaumont was a disaster area. The cleanup crew which normally came on about two in the morning were already at work, and a couple of our maintenance men were boarding up the broken shop windows. One of the great glass chandeliers that hang in the lobby was badly battered. Kids must have thrown their clubs and bats at it.

Chambrun stood staring, as though he couldn’t believe it. From a distance away I could hear the soft string music coming from the Blue Lagoon. Something was going on as usual. Late-returning guests who had been at the theater or meetings looked stunned as they came in from the street.

Mike Maggio, the night bell captain, came over to where we were standing. He had the beginnings of a beautiful shiner and his lower lip was cut and swollen. He tried a grin.

“You oughta see the other guys,” he said.

“Are many of our people hurt?” Chambrun asked.

“Nothing serious,” Mike said. “They didn’t get into the Blue Lagoon or upstairs to the Trapeze. There’s some damage—not much—in the Ballroom. Mostly china and glasses got broke. They didn’t even find the Spartan.”

The Spartan Bar is the last bastion of male exclusivity. No women allowed. Perhaps it’s a symptom of the times that most of the regular customers are over sixty. It was like a game room for them where they could play backgammon or chess and talk about the good old days.

“There’s a lady waiting to see you, Mr. Chambrun,” Mike said.

“Lady?”

“I use the word in the sense of gender, sir, not class.”

Chambrun wasn’t amused. “Who is it, Maggio?”

“A Miss Marsh, sir.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Chambrun, “what a time to choose!” His face had relaxed. He was smiling, almost fondly. “Where is she, Maggio?”

“Your offices are all locked up, sir—nobody there. So I asked her to wait in the little office back of the front desk while I tried to find you.”

Chambrun looked at me. “Old friend—from very old days. I’ll have to explain to her why I can’t talk to her tonight.” He glanced at his gold wrist watch. “Nearly midnight. Strange time for her to call.”

“Melody Marsh?” I asked him.

“You’ve heard of her?”

“Earlier tonight,” I said. “I was told she was Charlie Sewall’s girl. Young Mr. Tennant went to tell her what had happened to Sewall.”

Chambrun’s smile faded. “Bring Miss Marsh up to my office, Maggio. Do you mind if I tell you you’re not a very good judge of class, son? Your best manners, please.”

Chambrun gestured to me to follow him. We went up to his office. He let us in with a key and we walked through Miss Ruysdale’s domain to the inner sanctum. There is indirect lighting in the office that gives it a soft, comfortable feeling after dark. The blue period Picasso on the wall opposite Chambrun’s desk has its own special lighting. It’s really something.

Chambrun went over to the sideboard and checked his pot of Turkish coffee. He seemed concerned that everything should be just so. I’d never seen him that way before.

“Your informants tell you anything about Melody?” he asked.

“That she used to be a stripper,” I said. I risked a grin. “Something about revolving bosoms.”

Chambrun laughed. “Extraordinary. I saw it once. Oh, my God!” Then his face darkened. “The black days, Mark.”

I knew what he was talking about. Chambrun was French by birth. He’d been brought to this country as a small boy and became an American citizen when his parents were naturalized. He’d started out early in the hotel business. When World War II broke out, he went back to France. He enlisted in a French army already on the verge of a disastrous defeat. When defeat came, Chambrun disappeared underground and spent the next four years in the Resistance. He always referred to that time as “the black days.”

“She has to be in her early fifties now,” he said. “In nineteen forty she was in a traveling burlesque show that was playing in Paris. Her—her routine made her a sensation. As an American, the Germans would probably have let her get home; we weren’t in the war yet. Instead she went underground. That’s when I met her—crazy, tough, wonderful girl. She mothered us, and loved us, and made us laugh when all around us was horror. She was magnificent in those days.” He scowled. “Charlie Sewall’s girl, you say? Surprising.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I have the feeling he wasn’t her type. Yet she liked to laugh. That may explain it.”

We heard movement in the outer office and Chambrun went to the door and opened it. The woman who came into the room was not what I’d expected. She was what my father used to call a “peroxide blonde.” She was large and motherly. She hadn’t paid much attention recently to her figure. She had on a wide sort of peasant skirt, down to her ankles, and a bright red blouse with an almost embarrassing cleavage. The famous bosoms were ample. Her eyelashes were false, but the blue eyes were candid, vaguely amused. She exuded a kind of warmth and openness.

“Well, Pierre,” she said.

“My dear Melody.”

“Long time,” she said.

“Long time.”

She looked at me, and Chambrun introduced us.

“Would you like me to leave you two together?” I asked.

“It’s up to Pierre,” she said. It wasn’t coquettish.

“If I’ve guessed why you’re here, Melody, Mark might be helpful.”

“If he won’t be embarrassed, it’s fine with me,” she said.

“The young don’t embarrass easily,” Chambrun said. He took her to the armchair facing his desk. “Scotch on the rocks, as I remember.”

“Boy, do I need it,” Melody said.

I made the lady’s drink for her and brought Chambrun a brandy. He’d moved around to his desk chair.

“You know about me and Charlie?” Margo asked.

Chambrun nodded.

“Poor Charlie,” she said. She sipped her Scotch. “You once said if ever I need help I should come to you, Pierre.”

“It still stands,” he said.

“I saw it all on television,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Melody.”

“I’ve seen men die before. You know that, Pierre.”

“Yes. We saw good friends die—back there.”

“Charlie was a good friend,” she said. She sipped her drink. “He was also something of a sonofabitch, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

Chambrun’s hand shielded his smile. “You’re among friends,” he said.

“Men have all the luck,” Melody said. “When you get older, you get more attractive than when you were young. We gals go to seed. Older man marries young girl, it’s okay. Older woman marries young man, it’s pornography. We’re just as hungry, Pierre, but we don’t have much choice.”

“You like to take care of people,” Chambrun said. “I suspect Charlie Sewall needed care.”

“Poor Charlie,” she said. “I could have gone to the police, but since it happened here, Pierre, I thought—you first.”

“How can I help?” he asked.

She took a deeper swallow of her drink. “All the news reports say the killer meant to get Maxwell,” she said.

“It’s fairly obvious.”

“I don’t think so,” Melody said. “I think it was meant for Charlie.”

Chambrun sat very still, not blinking.

“Oh, Charlie had asked for it for a long time from a lot of people,” she said. “The Sewalls were the poor cousins, you know. The Maxwells were the rich cousins. Charlie hated that. He thought he should have had all the advantages; he thought someone had cheated him by leaving him poor. ‘Who could enjoy money more than me, baby?’ he used to ask. ‘It ought to go to the people who can really enjoy it.’ But he lived pretty well; maybe thirty thousand a year. You wouldn’t call that poverty, would you, Pierre?”

“Not exactly.”

“Would you believe he never inherited a cent of it, never earned a penny of it, never worked a day of his whole life? He would have been fifty-six years old next month.”

“Where did the money come from?” Chambrun asked.

Melody swirled the dregs of her drink around on the ice cubes. I got the message. I took her glass and refilled it. While I was at the bar, she spoke one word.

“Blackmail,” she said.

Chambrun sat quite still, waiting. I brought the lady her refill.

“Charlie was fun,” Melody said. “He made people laugh. He got invited everywhere—the odd man. And he spent his whole life prying into people’s secrets. He used what he found. It kept him comfortable.”

“And you went along with it?”

Melody shrugged her ample shoulders. “He didn’t hurt little people who couldn’t afford. The rich figure they don’t have to obey the rules, Pierre. When they get caught out, they call it bad luck and they pay. It’s easier to pay than to fight.”

“I think you’d better come to tonight, Melody,” Chambrun said.

“Pierre, if I were to make a charge against someone and I couldn’t prove it, I’d wind up in the coop, wouldn’t I?”

“You could.”

“So that’s why I came to you, for your advice. Charlie had tightened the screws on someone, but good.”

“Who?”

She looked at Chambrun steadily. “Douglas Maxwell,” she said.

“Charlie was blackmailing Maxwell?”

“In spades,” Melody said. “It’s been going on for nearly thirty years, so far as I know. It began when they were in college. Maxwell has supplied the backbone of Charlie’s living for all that time.”

“You know what it is Charlie had on Maxwell—or said he had?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever see Maxwell pay Charlie any money?”

“Of course not. If Maxwell knew Charlie had told anyone, he might have balked.”

“But you knew you didn’t do anything about it?”

“What could I do? Charlie had his faults, Pierre, but he was my guy. Probably the last guy I’ll ever have.”

“Nonsense.” It was a politeness. Chambrun took a cigarette from his gold case and lit it. “Douglas Maxwell is an old and good friend of mine,” he said.

“I know, Pierre. That’s why I came to you. I’ll do what you tell me to do. But you see, I’m sure it wasn’t a mistake. I’m sure that bullet was meant for Charlie. Charlie was very tight-mouthed about what he had on people. He had to be, because keeping what he knew a secret was his bread and butter. But he was pretty loose-mouthed about his jokes. He wanted to be sure he had an audience when they came off. He told a lot of people what he planned for tonight. Some of them were there; a lot of them, like me, were watching it on the tube.” Her painted lips twitched. “It was funny while it lasted. Oh, God, it was funny.”

“So people knew it was coming.”

“Sure. A lot of people. It could have got back to someone who saw a way to use it. The cops, and you, and everyone would think it was meant for Maxwell. Everybody would be headed down the wrong street.”

“You think that’s the way it is?”

“Wouldn’t you, if you were me, Pierre?”

Chambrun exhaled a little cloud of blue smoke. “I’m not sure I want to know, but perhaps you’d better tell me, Melody, what it was Charlie had on Maxwell.”

“He stole some money,” Melody said.

“Maxwell?”

“It was while they were in college. Douglas Maxwell hadn’t come into his money then. It was his father’s. He was in some kind of a jam—a bookmaker, I think. He and Charlie loved to bet on the races. Maxwell couldn’t go to his old man. So he stole a few thousand bucks from some college fund. Charlie knew about it, and he used it. He had some kind of proof that put Maxwell over a barrel. When Maxwell came into his old man’s dough, Charlie put the screws on him. When Maxwell decided to run for political office, Charlie really bore down on him.”

“It’s just not believable,” Chambrun said. “Not Doug Maxwell.”

“Why don’t you ask him?” Melody said.

Chambrun stood up and began to prowl restlessly behind his desk. I knew this story had hit him where he lived. We both knew something that Melody didn’t know. Earlier that night, we’d been told, Maxwell had left his house on 69th Street with Stew Shaw to come to the hotel for the banquet, arranging it to arrive at exactly seven-thirty. They had arrived at seven-thirty. Presumably they had been together when Charlie Sewall had been shot. That was Maxwell’s iron-clad alibi. But with Stew Shaw dead, we only had Maxwell’s word for it. Maxwell’s alibi had evaporated.

We knew something else that Melody didn’t know. Charlie’s plan had leaked right into the center of Maxwell’s family. Diana had known and she had told her mother. It wasn’t impossible that Maxwell had known what was in the air.

Chambrun stopped his prowl in front of Melody’s chair. “Most blackmailers protect themselves against violent reactions from their victims,” he said. “If they didn’t they’d be knocked off like flies on a summer day. What was the proof Charlie had that would brand Maxwell a thief?”

“I don’t know, Pierre.”

“Whatever it was he’d keep it somewhere safe, with instructions for it to be turned over to the police if anything happened to him. Did he have a safety deposit box somewhere?”

“I don’t know.”

“Someone is going to come forward with that proof,” Chambrun said.

“Unless they think it was a mistake,” Melody said. “Unless they think it was really meant for Maxwell. The bullet, I mean.”

“Does it occur to you, Melody, that if someone has that proof he may decide, now, to use it for his own profit?”

Her eyes widened. “I suppose that’s possible.”

“So who could it be?”

“Before God, Pierre, I don’t have any idea.”

“It’s not you, Melody? You were Charlie’s woman.”

“Pierre!”

“There were two men who arrived at the hotel with Charlie when the joke was launched. Do you know who they were?”

“No. Charlie said ‘a couple of guys’ were going with him to pose as Maxwell’s friends. He didn’t say who.”

Chambrun turned to his desk and Hardy’s folder, which still lay there. He produced the photograph and showed it to Melody. I thought she took an extra-long time before she shook her head.

“I don’t recognize either of them, Pierre.”

Chambrun stood in front of her, looking down at her. How he kept his eyes off that extraordinary cleavage, I don’t know. “I knew you very well, Melody, in the toughest kind of world,” he said. “I know how loyal you can be to friends. If you’re shielding someone, let me tell you how dangerous it is. Charlie is dead, maybe on purpose, maybe by mistake. Maxwell’s bodyguard had his skull smashed in a little while ago. He’s dead. Someone is running wild, Melody; a killer. If you’re protecting some friend of Charlie’s, you may be sentencing someone else to death.”

She reached out and touched his hand. “So help me God, Pierre,” she said. “I came to you because I didn’t believe Charlie was shot by mistake. I owed Charlie that much.”

He looked at her steadily for a moment, and then he lifted his hand and patted her gently on the shoulder. “All right, Melody. If you say so.” He moved around behind his desk again. “Did Charlie have a lawyer?”

“A fellow named Richard Hyland—Dicky Hyland. They were old college friends. He has an office on Park Avenue somewhere. I guess you could find him in the phone book. He used to come to our—to Charlie’s apartment from time to time. He’s a number-one bottle man.”

“A lush?”

“He’s a fun-and-games boy like Charlie.”

“Could he be the one holding that hat over his face in the picture?” Chambrun showed her the photograph again.

Melody studied it for a while. “I wouldn’t want to say, Pierre. Dicky is about that tall, with a kind of pot belly like that. But there are a million pots like that around; drunks who also eat.” She looked up. “What should I do now, Pierre? Go to the cops?”

“Give me a little time, Melody,” Chambrun said. “I think you know me well enough to be certain I wouldn’t cover up for God if I thought he was guilty. Douglas Maxwell has more troubles at this moment than you would believe. His wife is an alcoholic who doesn’t want him to run for office. His daughter and her boy friend are his enemies, ready to do anything to stop his election. Someone appears to be gunning for him. His bodyguard and loyal friend has been chopped down. Those anarchistic kids are out to get him. If we throw this thing of yours at him without some kind of proof, we could destroy him totally. Maybe he doesn’t deserve it.”

“I’m in your hands, Pierre,” she said.

“Good girl.” He was suddenly businesslike. “I don’t know exactly what your position is. Somebody will have to make what are called ‘the arrangements’ for Sewall—funeral, his financial estate. What about you? Do you want this man Hyland to handle things for you, or would you like me to recommend a lawyer?”

“The apartment is leased in my name,” Melody said, “so no one can boot me out.”

“How are you fixed for money? You won’t be able to touch any of Charlie’s, you know.”

“I’ll get by. I always have, Pierre.”

“You can count on me for help in that direction, Melody.” Chambrun reached for his wallet. “Would a couple of hundred in cash be useful to you right now?”

She raised her eyes, and, so help me, they were brimming with tears. “To tell you the truth, Pierre, I don’t even have taxi fare home. Charlie handed it out to me in nickels and dimes. How did I happen to pass you by thirty years ago?”

He smiled at her, gently, and gave her the money. “I was there,” he said, “but always at the end of the line. Give me till sometime tomorrow, Melody. I’ll get back to you. Mark, will you see Melody to a taxi, and get her address and telephone number from her?”

2

THERE IS USUALLY A line of cabs outside the Beaumont, but on this night there weren’t any. The hackies must have got the word we had a riot on our hands and were giving us a wide berth. I walked Melody over toward Madison Avenue, where I knew we would pick up a cruiser. She slipped her arm through mine. It wasn’t a flirtatious gesture, just the way I guessed she’d approached any man all her life.

“Tell me about Pierre,” she said. “Is he happy?”

“He’s busy, which I guess is happy,” I said.

“Woman—or women?” she asked.

“He’s married to the hotel,” I said.

“But a man that’s all man, like Pierre, must have a woman,” she said.

“If he does, it’s a very private matter,” I said.

“That’s like him,” she said. We walked a little way. “He’d never go for a blowzy old frump like me. I was never really his type; too coarse, too loud, too ready to take my clothes off any time, any place.”

“That was your business,” I said.

“Oh, I did it for free, too,” she said.

“I think he’s very fond of you,” I said.

“I always loved that little guy in the old days,” she said. “You know we were together in the French Resistance? We had a lot of hero types in those days—handsome guys, wild guys. But when it came down to the clutch, that little bastard was the toughest of the lot. I should have never let him get away. I could have made myself into his kind of girl. Oh, well—spilled milk and all that.”

“You can count on him,” I said.

She drew a deep breath. “I think I know that.”

We kept walking. “Tell me about Barry Tennant,” I asked her. “He came to tell you what had happened?”

“I already knew,” she said. “I’d seen it on TV.”

“But it was friendly of him to come, wasn’t it?”

“Sure. But I kicked his rump out of there fast because I wanted to get to Pierre.”

“What’s Tennant like?”

“Oh, he’s a good enough kid. Big talk about revolutions and overthrowing the government by force if it comes to that. They don’t know what they’re talking about, those kids. If they wanted to see a real revolution, they should have seen the Resistance. But Barry liked Charlie. You got to have someone to laugh with, someone to communicate with. He and Charlie never got serious about anything.”

“Do you suppose Charlie ever told Tennant what he had on Maxwell? It would have delighted Tennant.”

“You can bet Charlie never breathed a word of it,” Melody said. “Keeping that a secret was Charlie’s bread and butter.”

At the crossing we hailed a taxi, and I opened the door for her. She turned to me. “You think I might be a target, Mark?”

“Target?”

“If someone knows I pointed a finger at someone—?”

“Who knows?” I said. “Chambrun won’t mention it. Neither will I.”

“If anything should happen to me, tell Pierre I don’t want any funeral wreaths, or lilies, or any of that crap. He once sent me a bunch of wildflowers when I was stripping in a café in Marseilles. Tell him that’s all I want.”

“I’ll tell him. But you aren’t going to be anybody’s target, Melody.”

“Keep your fingers crossed, Buster,” she said.

I watched the taxi tool down Madison. I felt faintly uneasy.

I turned back toward the Beaumont and instantly had the sensation that someone standing in the shadows a few doors down the block had me in his sights. All I needed to top the evening was for some creep to try to mug me. I looked around me for a cop. There had been a hundred of them saturating the area an hour ago. There weren’t any now.

The shadow moved out into the open. “I’ve been waiting for you, Haskell.”

It was Barry Tennant in his orange shirt, striped pants, and buckskin vest. He looked like dozens of other kids I’d seen in the hotel that night. What he was wearing was almost a uniform.

“Did Melody get to see Charlie? I suppose that’s why she came up here—sentimental old trollop. Where’s Diana?”

“She was with her parents,” I said.

“I would have gone looking for her, but I figured it might not be too healthy for me to walk into the Beaumont lobby just now.” His white teeth flashed in the semi-darkness. “I hear the kids pretty well took it apart.”

“They had their moment,” I said.

“I told Diana I’d be somewhere when I’d seen Melody, but I heard Claude Cloud got shot, so I came uptown to see if I could help. Is he badly hurt?”

“No. But he’s under arrest.”

“Bastards,” Tennant said.

“He asked for it,” I said.

“Look, Haskell, can you get a message to Diana?”

“I might—if she’s still in the hotel.”

“Tell her I’ll see her when I see her,” he said. “I won’t be where I said I’d be. The cops have taken in wagonloads of kids. I’ve got to help get them out. I don’t want her to think I stood her up. Will you tell her?”

“I’ll try. We’ve got quite a ball game going here now. Did you know Maxwell’s bodyguard had been slugged to death?”

“Shaw?”

“According to Diana, you weren’t deeply fond of him.”

“The sonofabitch framed me for Maxwell,” Tennant said.

“If you were in that crowd that stormed the hotel, you better start looking for a copper-riveted alibi,” I said.

“I wasn’t with the kids,” Tennant said, scowling.

“You better be ready to prove it,” I said.

“Oh, I know!” His voice was bitter. “If you’re under twenty-five in this world, you’re responsible for all its evils. Maxwell and his kind have made a mess of the whole bloody universe and now they’re trying to blame it on the kids who don’t like what they’ve inherited.” He kicked at the sidewalk. “Why did you tell me about Shaw? Why didn’t you take me in and let them put me through the wringer?”

“I’m damned if I know,” I said. “Maybe because I like your girl. Maybe because it seems too obvious. Maybe because I know they’ll come looking for you anyway and it’s none of my business.”

“Thanks anyway for the tip,” he said. “And double thanks if you’ll get word to Diana.”

“I’ll do my best.”

He slid away down the street toward Madison.

I walked back toward the hotel, not hurrying. I was thinking about my earlier conversation with Diana. “The point is you can’t do anything just for yourself,” she’d said. “It spreads out and touches people you never even heard of—like a forest fire.” The fellow who’d stood on the balcony and fired at Charlie Sewall—maybe thinking it was Maxwell—had started a rip-roaring forest fire. I guess the reason I didn’t try to turn Tennant in was because I didn’t want to help it spread.

Just back of the reception desk in the main lobby of the hotel is a small office. There’s a desk and a couple of chairs and a phone. It isn’t used by anyone. It’s where they take a customer who wants to make a complaint, or arrange for an extra-large check to be cashed, or explain why he doesn’t want to pay his bill. It was where Maggio had left Melody Marsh while he went to hunt for Chambrun. I could still smell the vague scent of gardenias, her perfume.

I got Mrs. Kiley, the night switchboard chief, on the phone.

“I want to talk to Miss Maxwell in Fourteen B,” I told her.

“You know that line’s monitored by the police, Mr. Haskell?”

“I should have guessed.” Hardy wanted to be in on any crank calls or threats that might be headed Maxwell’s way.

“I have Miss Maxwell for you,” Mrs. Kiley said.

“Diana? Mark Haskell,” I said.

“Hi,” she said.

“Are you where you can talk?”

“I’m with Mother,” she said. “Father’s been taken down to Mr. Chambrun’s office.”

“Miss Ruysdale?”

“She’s gone, too.”

“Is your mother all right?”

“Normal,” she said. It sounded a little bitter.

“The police are monitoring your line in case any crank calls come in,” I said. “They may think I’m a crank, so I’ll make it brief. Your friend isn’t going to be where he told you he was going to be. He’ll see you when he can.”

“You’ve talked to him?”

“Yes.”

“Does he know about—about—?”

“He knows everything that’s happened. He’s going to be trying to get some of his friends out of jail. Outgoing calls are monitored on your line, too.”

There was a moment’s silence. Then she said: “Maybe you’ll buy me another drink when Father comes back.”

“Try me. I’ll probably be in Mr. Chambrun’s office.”

I went up to the second floor. Miss Ruysdale was at her desk in the outer office. She looked as though it was an ordinary business day. Jerry’s two men were standing on either side of Chambrun’s door.

“You’re to report inside,” Miss Ruysdale said. “Tell Mr. Chambrun the limousine service is trying to locate the driver. No luck so far.”

“The driver of what?” I asked.

“The limousine that brought Mr. Maxwell and Shaw to the hotel. It seems Mr. Maxwell may need an alibi with Shaw dead. The driver of the limousine may be able to supply it.”

I knocked on Chambrun’s door and went in.

Maxwell was slumped in the armchair opposite Chambrun’s desk, his face covered by his hands. Chambrun made a little gesture to me for silence. I stood just inside the closed door, waiting.

Maxwell lowered his hands. He looked at me. I think he saw me but I might as well not have been there.

“Do you know, Pierre,” he said, “when I walked into the hotel tonight and found out what had happened to Charlie there was a moment when I was glad. I was glad the sonofabitch was dead. It was the first thought I had; not that it had been meant for me. That came later.”

“So it’s true, then?” Chambrun said.

“That Charlie has been blackmailing me for what seems like all my life? Yes, it’s true. I wish I knew how you found out about it.”

Chambrun had evidently not exposed Melody so far.

“The source isn’t important at the moment,” Chambrun said. “It was a friend of Charlie’s who thinks the bullet was meant for Charlie, not you.”

“And that I fired it? Or had someone fire it?”

“That you, at any rate, had a motive,” Chambrun said.

“Lucky for me I have an alibi,” Maxwell said. Then his eyes narrowed. “But I don’t have an alibi, do I? Stew Shaw was my alibi.”

“There’s the driver of the limousine,” Chambrun said. “I’m trying to locate him.”

“Miss Ruysdale is still trying,” I said.

Maxwell shook his head. “You don’t miss much, do you, Pierre?”

“I want to help you, Doug, but I need to know it all to be of much use.”

Maxwell closed his eyes for a moment. He must, I thought, be close to exhaustion after the tensions of the evening. “It’s so long ago it’s almost hard to remember,” he said. “It was thirty years ago, the spring of my senior year at Barstow. Charlie Sewall and I were very close in those days. The look-alike thing made us almost like twins. Charlie was the hell raiser and I was the serious student, but when I had free time for it, I enjoyed a little hell raising myself. We’d had some disciplinary bouts with the college authorities, but that spring we got into real trouble. Not with the college. Charlie liked to play the horses. He didn’t have the money, but I had a generous allowance from my father. I put up the money, but we went into it on a fifty-fifty basis. In the beginning it was just a couple of dollars a day; Charlie studied the charts and the morning line, and he was lucky or smart. We won a few, and then we won a big daily double—more than a thousand dollars. It—it’s the kind of thing that gets in your blood, Pierre. You understand, we didn’t often go to the track. We just figured and bet. There was a sort of poolroom-bowling alley place near the college. The proprietor could get bets down ‘just to accommodate the students.’ It all seemed innocent enough. Charlie and I were riding high. We had more cash to spend than we were used to.

“Charlie made friends with some kind of sharpy who hung out at the poolhall place. He was one of those guys who has ‘inside connections.’ We followed his lead on a few bets, and we cleaned up. We were the real get-rich-quick kids. Then we started to have a run of bad luck. Before you knew it, we’d dropped everything we’d made during the winter, and we were scratching to find some cash so that we could recoup. Charlie had bought himself a car, and the finance company was down on him. It was a tragedy to us. I suppose an outsider would have laughed at us. We owed a few hundred dollars and my father was a very rich man. I didn’t want to go to my father. He’d have disapproved. He’d probably have bailed me out, but he’d have held it over my head like a club; he was a stern disciplinarian.”

Maxwell shook his head, as though it was hard for him to believe even now. “That’s where our sharpy friend came into the picture. He came to us one day, all very secret and hush-hush. There was a horse going that day at long odds. It was, he told us, a fix. The syndicate that owned the horse was controlling the betting. If we wanted to come in for say five thousand bucks, we would be rolling in money. The horse would pay about fifteen dollars for two. It wasn’t too hard for Charlie and me to figure out that we stood to win something over thirty-five thousand dollars. Of course, it was dream-thinking, because we didn’t have five thousand dollars to put up.

“‘Look, fellows,’ our sharpy told us, ‘I’ve been dealing with you long enough to know you’re straight shooters. You want to give me your I O U for five G’s, I’ll place the bet for you.’

“‘And if we lose?’ I remember asking him. I was hooked; I was going to go along with it, but I was going to be prudent to the end. ‘What if we lose?’

“‘This is a certainty,’ our sharpy said. ‘As certain as anything can be. The horse could break his leg—act of God. That’s the kind of risk you run every day just getting into your shower bath in the morning. You could slip and kill yourself. That doesn’t stop you from taking a bath, does it?’

“Would you believe it sounded like logic to Charlie and me?” Maxwell brought his fist down on the arm of his chair. “I still had a moment when I should have backed out. When it came to signing the I O U, he just wanted me on the paper. ‘You’ve got places to get it, Doug,’ our sharpy said. ‘Charlie is a great guy, but he don’t have the sources for that kind of dough.’

“Charlie was leaning on me. We could be out of trouble; we could be rich. And so I signed the damn thing.”

“And the horse is still running,” Chambrun said.

“He quit running long ago,” Maxwell said. “He quit running the minute he came out of the starting gate. He was bumped, our sharpy told us. He was fouled, but the stewards didn’t go for the complaint. Today I suspect the whole thing was aimed at me. There wasn’t any fix. Our money may have been the only money bet on that horse who was not bound to win, but bound to lose. I was a sucker who, under pressure, could get five thousand dollars from my father.”

“But you didn’t,” Chambrun said.

“You never knew my father, Pierre. He was the father-image of all time; he was God; he was grim. Given time to think up some rational reason to borrow five thousand dollars from him and he might have come through. But to pay a horse racing debt? Never. He would think I should take whatever was coming to me. It would be what he liked to call a ‘character builder.’

“What was coming to me began to look pretty grim. Our sharpy turned up with a tough guy who was right out of a Warner Brothers’ movie. They would give me twenty-four hours to come up with the money.

“‘And if I can’t get it you’ll go to my father?’” I asked.

“That wasn’t the answer. They would make an example of me to all the guys in town who imagined they could welsh on a bet. They didn’t say it, but the suggestion was I’d be found in the river with my feet in a barrel of cement. I think they meant it, Pierre. I believed it, at any rate.

“Charlie was sympathetic. He knew my father and how impossible it would be to get help from him. My father would never believe that kind of wild threat—not in time. Then Charlie reminded me that there was a class fund to which I had access. There was eight or nine thousand dollars in it. There wouldn’t be any kind of an audit for a couple of months. By that time I’d have found a way to get five thousand from my father and no one would be any the wiser.

“It was a desperation moment, Pierre. I took the money and paid our sharpy. There was one hitch. Charlie wasn’t prepared to face the music if I was caught. He insisted that I write him a sort of confession that I was solely responsible for the theft. If I was caught, and anybody looked at him, he’d be safe. In the background was the Warner Brothers gangster with his barrel of cement.” Maxwell drew a deep breath. “So I signed the confession. Charlie was my friend, my blood cousin. He wouldn’t use it unless the theft was discovered and someone wondered about him.”

“The theft was discovered?”

“Never,” Maxwell said. “I dreamed up something for my father. I asked him for five thousand dollars so that I could have a year to make up my mind what I wanted to do with my life. He went for it. I replaced the money. I never had to account for the year to my father. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and I was promptly in the navy. My father died before I got out of the service, and I was suddenly a very rich young man.”

“But Charlie Sewall still had the confession?”

Maxwell nodded. “Oh, I asked him for it. He made a joke of it at first. He wanted it for his memory book, he said. In private he would needle me about it, always laughing. I was a modern Jimmy Valentine, he would say. I worried about it, but presently the world was turned upside-down by the war. I was in love with Grace. We were married just before I got my navy pilot’s wings. The time was so crowded, so tense, I forgot about Charlie and his piece of paper. But when I came back, and Grace and I moved into my father’s house and I was wealthy, good old Charlie came onstage. He needed some money. Could I help him?

“I was almost too happy in those days, Pierre. I had come out of the hell of the war without a scratch, I had a wife whom I loved with all my heart, I had no financial worries. I’d been offered a job at Barstow College, a place I loved. I could see a flawless future stretching out in front of me. Sure I would help good old Charlie. How much? A hundred? Two hundred?

“Charlie laughed at me. What he had in mind was something like fifteen thousand a year. He would accept it in quarterly payments. For a minute I thought it was one of Charlie’s endless jokes. He made it quite clear it wasn’t. He reminded me of the confession. How would Grace feel about a public exposure that would let the whole world know she had married a thief? Oh, she might stand by me, he conceded. But what about Barstow College? Would they want a thief on their administrative staff? What about my dream of becoming Barstow’s president, as my father and grandfather had been? Did I want to kiss that good-by?

“I doubted they’d turn on me for a youthful indiscretion.

“‘You want to try it on them for size?’ Charlie asked. ‘I’m willing if you are. I hate to do this to you, Doug, but I have my problems. You can afford it without even feeling it.’

“He was right as far as the money was concerned. I could afford it without changing my way of life. I went a little pompous with him. I told him I was sorry he’d used a threat to get what he wanted. I told him all he’d had to do was ask for what he really needed.

“He laughed at me. ‘That time may come,’ he said.

“So I paid him his first installment. Grace and I didn’t see him anymore socially. That would have been too much. But every three months Charlie would turn up at my office to get his quarterly slice of my hide. Always laughing, always joking, but always collecting.” Maxwell raised a hand to his eyes for a moment. His voice was rough with fatigue. “Year after year it’s gone on, Pierre. He never threatened, he never asked for more, he never mentioned the incriminating document he had. He just collected. Would you believe that after a while I almost forgot that he represented any kind of danger to me? He was just a kind of family pensioner. He was part of my life’s routine. Then—then this political thing came into my life a few months back. Charlie came to see me when it was announced. I had been paying him, automatically, for twenty-three years! Would you believe that?

“‘If you’re going to become a bigger public figure on a bigger stage, Doug,’ Charlie said, ‘I think the insurance premiums will have to go up.’

“‘How much?’ I asked him.

“‘You’d think I was being greedy if I asked for double?’

“I told him that was impossible.

“‘It’s up to you,’ he told me. ‘You could pull out now, of course. That would be that. But if you go ahead, get in deeper and deeper, you can count on me to choose the perfect time to knock you off your phony pedestal.’”

“And you gave in?” Chambrun asked.

“Not then,” Maxwell said. “I seriously considered throwing in the towel. I don’t need to be a Senator, Pierre; not to satisfy my own ego or any personal ambitions. Do I sound like a pompous ass if I say that other people need me to run; that perhaps my country needs me to run?”

“How much damage would Charlie’s revelation do you?” Chambrun said.

“It’s hard to say. Once elected, I think it would be meaningless. I was a damn fool twenty-six years ago. My war record, my life since then, is without a blemish. There are other men in public office with more serious indiscretions on their records. But before election, used by the opposition as it would be, it could make the difference between winning and losing.”

“So how did you handle it?”

“I told Charlie I would make a decision after tonight. If this fund-raising dinner came off as we hoped—if we had enough money for the campaign to justify optimism—I would talk to him. I think he knew what I meant. You see, Pierre, the whole thing is unpredictable. Charlie could show that I had been a thief long, long ago. It might destroy me. But people are funny. That kind of a charge by someone with Charlie’s reputation might just boomerang against him. People just might flock to support me.”

“Not at all improbable,” Chambrun said.

“I think that’s why he chose tonight for that insane joke. He wanted to remind me that he was waiting for an answer. And there would be people who would never hear the explanation. It wasn’t I who appeared without my trousers on, but many people would never hear the explanation. A thief who would appear in public without his pants would have a lot of trouble persuading a lot of voters that he was stable enough to sit in the United States Senate.”

“Did you have any reason to suspect he would pull some kind of joke tonight?”

“God, no!”

Chambrun glanced at me. Grace Maxwell had known. Diana had known. For some reason I believed Maxwell. He hadn’t known.

Maxwell leaned forward in his chair. “There is a woman who has lived with Charlie for a number of years. Some kind of a chorus girl or actress, I believe. Is she the one who tipped you to this blackmail story, Pierre?”

“The lady is a very old friend of mine, Doug. She came to me and not the police,” Chambrun said.

I was sorry he’d admitted it. I had a picture of Melody calling out to me from the cab. “Keep your fingers crossed, Buster.”

Maxwell’s face was grim. “So the blackmailing will go on just the same,” he said.

“It may,” Chambrun said. “But not by the lady. I promise you that.” He paused to light a cigarette. “The blackmailer’s method of operation is pretty standard, Doug. That confession of yours is in somebody’s hands—not the lady’s. It could be a banker who has access to the safety deposit box; it could be a lawyer; it could be some friend. There will be instructions to make the confession public if Charlie suffers a violence. If the person who holds it is an honest banker or an honest lawyer, he will go to the police with it. If he is a friend of Charlie’s, one of Charlie’s kind, he may suggest that your quarterly payments now go to him.”

“Oh, God!” Maxwell said.

“The most important thing, Doug, is to establish the fact that you couldn’t have been on that balcony with a handgun, waiting to shoot Charlie down. We can’t destroy your motive if this story becomes public, but I hope we can make it clear that, motive or not, you couldn’t have been the killer.”

“The itinerary was simple enough, Pierre. Watty Clarke made the arrangements. Because of parking problems he engaged Limousine Service to have a car at my house shortly before seven. Watty had stopped to pick up Grace and take her on ahead. I was to make my entrance after everyone had arrived. Poor Stew Shaw must have been psychic. He was worried about trouble from the kids—violent trouble. He persuaded me to leave the house about seven, which was a good fifteen minutes too early.

“‘I want to look over the scene before you go in, Mr. Maxwell,’ Stew said. ‘A block from the hotel I’ll get out and go have a look-see. The driver’ll take you around the block and pick me up again. I’d feel safer if I saw just how things are arranged.’

“It seemed supercautious to me,” Maxwell said, “but I let him have his way. We left the house about five minutes of seven. We came to the corner of Madison Avenue and Stew got out. ‘Give me fifteen minutes,’ he said to the driver. He headed for the hotel, and the driver took me over to Park and down a few blocks and then back up Madison. Stew hadn’t come back when we got to the corner, so we did another loop around the block. Stew was there when we came to the appointed place a second time. He got in. We came into the lobby and found that all hell had broken loose.”

Chambrun’s eyes were narrowed. “Could you say what time it was Shaw rejoined you?”

Maxwell nodded. “We were just a block from the hotel. I remember looking at my watch and seeing that it was twenty-five after seven. The timing was perfect. We were supposed to make our entrance at exactly seven-thirty.”

“Shaw left you about five after seven and went to the hotel. You drove around for a while. Shaw rejoined you at seven-twenty-five. Give him three minutes to walk to the hotel and he’d have gotten here about eight minutes after seven. Three minutes to walk from the hotel to Madison again. That would mean he left here about twenty-two minutes after seven.”

“I suppose.”

Chambrun leaned back in his chair. “Weren’t you pretty disturbed about going on to the hotel when you knew there’d been a shooting?” he said.

“We didn’t know till we got there,” Maxwell said.

Chambrun’s eyes seemed to glitter in their pouches. “Charles Sewall was shot at exactly seven-fifteen. Presumably Shaw was in the hotel taking a ‘look-see.’ He didn’t tell you what had happened?”

Maxwell raised his head. “He must not have known or he would certainly have told me.”

“Where was he, do you suppose?”

“I don’t know, Pierre! Maybe he was outside looking over the pickets and the black militants.”

“So he missed the action.”

“He must have.”

Chambrun was silent for a moment and then he stood up abruptly. “We’ll come up with that limousine driver before too long, Doug,” he said. “He should put you in the clear. I suggest you go back to your quarters and get as much rest as you can. When Lieutenant Hardy comes down on you, it’s going to be a long, hard session.”

Maxwell pushed himself up out of his chair. “There are two questions I’d like to ask you, Pierre. Do you think the assassin was after Charlie and not me?”

“It’s possible,” Chambrun said. “A blackmailer generally has more than one enemy. From the little I’ve heard, I’d guess Charles Sewall wasn’t limiting his bloodsucking to you, Doug. Second question?”

“Does this—must this blackmailing story be made public?”

“Public in terms of a statement to the press, certainly not. When your limousine driver has cleared you, as I’m sure he will, I may have to tell Hardy what I know. I can’t stand by and watch him search for someone who meant to kill you if it turns out he should be looking for someone who meant to kill Charlie.”

“Whatever you can do—”

“I can ask you a question,” Chambrun said. “Watson Clarke is one of your oldest friends. He managed a dinner for you tonight. It’s rumored he will manage your campaign. Have you ever told him about Charlie’s blackmail routine?”

Maxwell nodded slowly. “I had to tell Watty,” he said. “I couldn’t let him go out on a limb for me and then get hit in the face with Charlie’s story.” His eyes widened. “You’re not suggesting—”

“Clarke didn’t shoot Charlie Sewall,” Chambrun said. “We know exactly where he was when it happened.”

“Thank God for that,” Maxwell said.

Chambrun went to the door with his friend and turned him over to the two guards who were waiting in Miss Ruysdale’s office. He came slowly back into the office, scowling. He went over to the sideboard and poured himself a demitasse of Turkish coffee.

“The Shaw story is interesting,” he said.

“He could have been milling around in the crowds outside the hotel,” I said. “He could quite logically have thought the danger was out there.”

“It’s interesting that we can’t ask him,” Chambrun said. “For example, we can’t ask him if Maxwell knew about the joke. We can’t ask him if he was sent ahead to deal with Charlie while Maxwell toured around the block under the eyes of a witness. Could be, you know.”

“And then Maxwell killed Shaw to keep him quiet?” I felt the small hairs rising on the back of my neck.

“That we know didn’t happen,” Chambrun said. “Maxwell has never been out of sight of Jerry’s men or the cops since he arrived at the hotel at seven-thirty. He was never able to get to Shaw outside his suite—that’s for certain.” He pressed a buzzer on his desk and Miss Ruysdale appeared promptly.

“Would you care to pour yourself a drink, Ruysdale?” Chambrun asked as he dropped back into his desk chair, balancing the demitasse in the palm of his left hand.

“I’ve seen about enough alcohol tonight to cure me for good,” Miss Ruysdale said.

“How much did Grace talk to you, Ruysdale?”

“Not much that made any sense,” Miss Ruysdale said. She perched on the arm of the chair that Maxwell had just vacated. “She’s a true alcoholic, Mr. Chambrun. She had three or four pint bottles of bourbon hidden around the bedroom. Where she got them, I have no idea. Probably had them in her handbag and in her evening wrap and hid them when she went off alone to the john.”

“She talk about her husband?”

“Only how desperately she wants him not to run for office.”

“She give reasons?”

“She’s afraid for him; he’s in danger—all kinds of danger. If he is elected, it’s the end of their world, she kept saying. I—I think she knew what was going to happen tonight; I mean the joke. I think she let it happen because she hoped it would put an end to Maxwell’s candidacy. I don’t know how rational she is, Mr. Chambrun, but it’s real to her. She is ridden by terror for her husband.”

The red light blinked on Chambrun’s phone. Miss Ruysdale picked it up. “Miss Ruysdale here. Yes. Just a minute.” She covered the mouthpiece with her hand. “Diana Maxwell wants to talk to you, Haskell.”

“She asked me if I’d buy her a drink,” I told Chambrun.

“You do that,” he said. “See what you can find out about Charles Sewall and his friends.”

I glanced at my watch. It was just one o’clock. The bars in the hotel would be open for another hour. I took the phone.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” she said.

“Like to try the Blue Lagoon?” I asked. “Low lights, soft music.”

“I’m not dressed for it,” she said.

“How about my apartment—if you can trust yourself with a dirty old man of thirty-five?”

“Where is it?”

“Second floor. Two A.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” she said.

Mine are the only rooms on the second floor used for living purposes. Chambrun has a little room with a couch-bed in it off his office where he can catch forty winks if necessary, but he doesn’t live there. He has one of the rooftop penthouses. I am in the middle of a floor of offices—Chambrun’s, mine, the computer center that handles all the accounts, the banquet department, the head housekeeper’s office, the maintenance manager. At one o’clock in the morning it is a dead byway in the hotel. On this particular morning only Chambrun’s office was open.

I have two rooms, a bath, and a tiny kitchenette. There’s an icemaker in the icebox. I keep juice, milk, and butter there. I make my own breakfast: juice, one soft-boiled egg, one piece of toast. I have a well-stocked liquor cabinet. There’s nothing very fancy about my furniture. The walls are lined with books that I’m always sure I’ll get around to reading but never do. The Beaumont is a round-the-clock life.

I broke out some ice and made myself a Scotch on the rocks. I waited. After about twenty minutes I decided that Diana must have lost her way. I hesitated to ring 14B. If the Maxwells could get any rest at all, they should be left alone. One of the troubles with the mechanized world in which we live is that old niceties have been abandoned. There are no longer any elevator operators, even in a plush setting like the Beaumont.

I called Chambrun’s office. Miss Ruysdale assured me that Diana hadn’t called to cancel our date.

I got Mike Maggio, the night bell captain, on the phone.

“You remember Miss Maxwell, Mike? Earlier tonight?”

“How could I forget,” Mike said.

“You seen her in the last ten minutes or so?”

“I’d remember that, too. No, Dad, I haven’t seen her.”

“You got a spare boy down there you can send up to Fourteen B to ask Jerry’s guards if she’s left the suite?”

“Sure. What happen? She stand you up?”

“Just find out if she’s left the suite, will you, Mike? And if you see her down there, tell her I was asking for her. Right?”

“Right.”

Another ten minutes went by. Then Mike called me back. “She left the suite twenty—twenty-five minutes ago, Mark. She didn’t say anything to Jerry’s boys about where she was going. They weren’t instructed to watch her.”

“Keep an eye out for her, Mike.”

She had called me for the date. I was sure she’d meant to keep it. The Beaumont is like a small city. You walk down a side street and you run into someone you haven’t seen in years. Your plans can get changed. The hotel had been swarming with family friends of the Maxwells’ that night. If Diana had come down from the fourteenth floor in an express elevator, she’d have had to go to the lobby and then come up to the second floor on a local. She could very easily have met someone there. But to keep me waiting for more than half an hour seemed, somehow, a little out of character.

I called Chambrun’s office again, but this time the switchboard informed me he was closed up. If it was an emergency, he was in a private dining room on the main floor which had been turned over to Lieutenant Hardy as an office.

“I’m going to take a tour of the joint,” I told the operator. “I’ve been expecting a call. If it comes, tell the lady Mike Maggio will be able to locate me.”

I went down the inside stairs to the lobby. The cleanup crew had done a marvelous job in the last hour. Unless you walked down the side street alley and saw the boarded-up shop windows, you might not have guessed anything had happened. It was almost a routine with me to take a walk around the hotel to the various bars and the Blue Lagoon before I went to bed at night. My secretary says it reminds her of Marshal Dillon closing up Dodge City. I spotted Mike Maggio, told him I was taking my regular tour, and if he saw Diana to find me in a hurry.

I tried the Trapeze first. It had thinned out considerably. Eddie, the chief bartender, was beginning to make the little moves of putting some of his back-bar bottles away for the night. Mr. Del Greco assured me he hadn’t seen Diana since our earlier visit.

The Spartan Bar was deserted except for two old white heads bent over a chessboard and a bartender waiting patiently to make them a final nightcap.

I crossed the lobby to the velvet rope that blocked the entrance to the Blue Lagoon. This dinner-night club room never thins out until Pat Coogan closes up her piano. We always have a star turn of some sort, but redheaded Pat Coogan is a regular. She plays a real great piano, and she knows all the old show tunes, and the Al Jolson favorites, and the old ragtime hits. She plays a few tunes, and then she takes requests from the audience. She plays what’s asked for and sings the lyrics in a husky, sexy voice. She’s a sort of ageless doll. I thought, as I listened to her doing a version of “He’s Just My Bill,” that she and Melody might have a lot in common if they ever got together. They made the high-priced call girls who hung out in the Trapeze at the cocktail hour look as if they were carved out of ice.

Mr. Cardoza, the Blue Lagoon’s maître d’, came over to pass the time of day. I asked him if he knew Diana Maxwell by sight.

“I think I would,” he said. “Her father used to bring her in here when she was a teen-ager. We’ve had quite a night, no?”

“You haven’t seen Diana in the last half hour or so?”

Cardoza shook his head. He would be the perfect movie casting for the crown prince of Ruritania—elegant manners, beautiful figure. “But of course we’ve been buzzing in here all night about the shooting.” Cardoza hesitated. “See that fellow sitting at the corner table by himself?”

It was a sandy-haired man, I guessed in his fifties. He was wearing dark gray slacks and a blue blazer jacket with brass buttons and some kind of a club patch over his breast pocket.

“He’s been handing out five-dollar bills to Pat for the last forty-five minutes to sing his favorites,” Cardoza said. “He must have absorbed a quart of Jack Daniels for himself. He claims he’s the dead man’s lawyer. Heartbroken, he says. I guess Lieutenant Hardy gave him a bad time. He can’t have his dear friend’s body removed until they’ve done an autopsy.”

I fished the name up out of somewhere. Richard Hyland. Dicky Hyland, Melody had called him. This just might be the man who could be going to make trouble for Douglas Maxwell. At that moment he spotted me and I saw him beckon to a waiter. It was obvious he thought he knew me, though I’d never laid eyes on him before. The waiter came up to me and informed me that Mr. Hyland would appreciate it if I joined him for a drink. As a member of the hotel staff I didn’t brush off that kind of thing without a kind word, and so I went through the velvet barrier, which Cardoza held open for me, and threaded my way across the room to the table. Pat Coogan was singing “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.” As I reached the table, Hyland reached out and closed strong fingers over my wrist.

“Please forgive me,” he whispered. “I want to hear this.”

A pink spot was focused on Pat at the piano. Her husky voice closed out the song.

“By God, isn’t she marvelous?” Hyland said. I swear there were tears in his slightly bloodshot blue eyes. He waved to the chair facing him. I sat down to a loud applause for Pat Coogan, who was asking for another request.

“I am Richard Hyland,” Hyland said. “What are you drinking?”

“To tell you the truth, Mr. Hyland, I’m looking for someone and I—”

“Bring Mr. Haskell his regular, whatever it is,” Hyland said to the waiter. He turned to me. “I understand you’re the public relations man for the Beaumont, Mr. Haskell. I was Charles Sewall’s attorney. It’s most fortuitous that we should meet. I would have been hunting for you later, in any case.”

“Later?” It was going on two o’clock.

“I was actually making inquiries for you when I heard that marvelous woman singing those old-time numbers, Haskell. I—well, I was pretty broken up about Charlie. We were classmates at Barstow years and years ago. Close friends all our adult lives. Poor old Charlie. He needs our help now.”

“In what way?” I said.

“‘Just My Bill’ was Charlie’s favorite song,” Hyland said. He wasn’t going to let me lead the conversation. Well, after a quart of Jack Daniels—I looked past him toward the door, hoping I’d catch a glimpse of Diana.

“I saw you earlier tonight, just as I was arriving at the hotel,” Hyland said. “You were walking down the street with Melody Marsh. Dear Melody. I would have spoken to you then, but I thought you might be a policeman.”

“You’re allergic to policemen?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s very good!” Hyland said. I was suddenly aware that his blue eyes, in spite of their bloodshot condition, were very shrewd and not all blurred. I decided he shouldn’t be taken too lightly. He was, I thought, something of an actor.

“How can we help Charlie?” I asked.

“Would you believe that I haven’t been allowed to see his body?” Hyland asked.

“There has to be an autopsy,” I said. “It’s the law.”

“Nor have I been able to contact Douglas Maxwell.”

“Why did you want to see Maxwell?”

Hyland looked surprised. “Why, he’s Charlie’s cousin. Only living family, so far as I know. Arrangements have to be made; for a funeral and all that. Did Melody come here to claim his body, too?”

“She came here to talk to a very old friend—my boss, Pierre Chambrun,” I said.

“Ah, yes, the famous Monsieur Chambrun,” Hyland said. “They were in the Resistance movement in France way back when, weren’t they?”

“It’s no secret, I guess.”

“I should think not. Melody’s been telling stories about it for the last fifteen years; all the time she’s been living with Charlie. That was no secret either, her attachment to Charlie. I’m not gossiping behind her back, you understand.” He looked directly at me. He had suddenly forgotten about Pat Coogan, who was singing “I Get a Kick Out of You.”

I ducked. “I guess she didn’t want Charlie left in the hands of complete strangers. Like you, she wasn’t allowed to see him until the Medical Examiner’s office has finished its job.”

“Dear Melody,” Hyland said. “She really loved Charlie, in spite of his faults.”

“He had faults?”

“Don’t we all, my dear Haskell? Charlie was hipped on practical jokes. Tragic payoff, wouldn’t you say?” He lit a cigarette, his hands surprisingly steady. He could really hold his liquor. “I daresay dear Melody made the improbable suggestion that the bullet was meant for Charlie and not Maxwell.” He made it a question by cocking his head slightly.

“Why should she think that?” I asked, trying to look as innocent as I could.

Hyland shrugged. “Center stage is where Melody likes to be,” he said. “If the killer was after Charlie, dear Melody would instantly be in the public eye. She is—was—his common-law wife.”

“I see,” I said. I wasn’t going to let this character guess I’d ever heard of Charlie’s blackmailing business. He would know it had come from Melody, and if he was the one who was holding Charlie’s aces, Melody’s fear that she might become a target wouldn’t be too far-fetched. I had the feeling that Richard Hyland was a cold-blooded opportunist.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Hyland, but I’ll have to leave you. As I told you, I’m looking for someone.”

“One minute,” he said as I stood up. “The switchboard won’t put calls through to Maxwell’s suite. Will you get word to him that I think it’s urgent that he should talk with me?”

“About the funeral arrangements?”

“About the funeral arrangements,” Hyland said blandly.

“I’ll do what I can,” I said. “It may not be till morning. The man needs rest.”

“I can imagine,” Hyland said. “Well, thanks for whatever you can do. My number is in the phone book. Maybe Maxwell would call me.”

I walked out toward the velvet rope. Pat Coogan was singing “All I Do the Whole Day Through Is Dream of You.” At the entrance I looked back. Hyland was listening to her as though she was all that mattered in the world.

“No sign of Miss Maxwell?” I asked Cardoza.

He shook his head.

“I’ll be with Mr. Chambrun if she does show,” I told him. I was mildly concerned. It was almost an hour since she had told me she’d join me in ten minutes.

3

THERE ARE HALF A dozen private dining rooms on the main lobby floor of the Beaumont. They range in size from a cozy room for eight or ten people to larger ones that will accommodate twenty or thirty. One of the smaller ones had been set aside for Lieutenant Hardy, and I found Chambrun there with him.

A large coffee maker had been set up on a side table and there was a platter of cold meats and bread for sandwiches. Chambrun and Hardy were sitting at the main table. To one side was a uniformed cop poised in front of a stenotype machine.

“Find your girl?” Chambrun asked as I came in.

“Thin air,” I said. “She left Fourteen B at the right time, but she never showed. I guess she got hungry for her young man.”

“I’m hungry for him, too,” Hardy muttered. “I need a rundown on that mob of kids.”

Chambrun took a sip of coffee and made a face. This wasn’t his favorite Turkish. “You missed the limousine driver,” he said to me. “He backs up Doug Maxwell’s story a hundred percent. They left the Maxwell house at five minutes to seven. He keeps a chart like a taxi driver. Shaw left the car a block from the hotel at three minutes past seven. The driver drove Doug around until twenty-five after when Shaw rejoined them. Doug never left the limousine. So he’s personally clear on all counts. He couldn’t have shot Charles Sewall, and he was being watched by Jerry’s men at the time Shaw was clubbed to death.”

I knew that was a relief to Chambrun. He was genuinely fond of Douglas Maxwell.

“I’ve given Hardy the blackmail story,” Chambrun said.

Hardy nodded, scowling. Thought was painful for him. “But this blows it, doesn’t it?” he asked. “Maxwell was the victim and Maxwell is clean. So don’t we get back to where it started? The killer was after Maxwell and made a mistake.”

“Maxwell was almost certainly not Charlie Sewall’s only victim,” Chambrun said. “Maxwell admits that he gave Sewall fifteen thousand a year. Melody mentioned that Sewall lived at the rate of about thirty thousand. She presumably knows.”

“But she didn’t mention anybody but Maxwell,” I said. “It may interest you that I just left Sewall’s lawyer in the Blue Lagoon. He is anxious to get in touch with Maxwell—about the funeral arrangements, he says.”

“I had incoming calls shut off from Maxwell’s suite without an okay from me,” Hardy said. “The man needs rest.”

“Mr. Hardy found that out,” I said. “He wants Maxwell to call him in the morning—about the funeral arrangements.”

“You think this lawyer may how have Sewall’s evidence against Maxwell?” Hardy asked.

“It’s very likely,” Chambrun said.

“The people I hate most are blackmailers and poisoners,” Hardy said. “I’d like to break his back. Let’s get him in here.”

“I suggest you wait till he makes his move and we’re sure,” Chambrun said. “I think you can count on Maxwell to tell us if it happens. If you show your hand, he’ll just wait, and we’ll have to wait, too. Let him think he’s in the clear and he’ll make his move as soon as he can get to Maxwell.”

“I feel like a goddam juggler,” Hardy said. “Two balls in the air. I’m looking for someone who hated Maxwell and I’m looking for someone who hated Sewall. I’m looking for someone who didn’t know that Sewall had planned a joke, and someone who did. You and your goddam theories, Chambrun!”

“I’m looking for someone who got himself a key to those balcony doors,” Chambrun said. “It’s as simple as that.”

“And maybe we’ll come up with that answer next Christmas,” Hardy said. “There are a handful of those lousy keys, none of them hidden away. The plans for the dinner have been public property for a week or ten days. Whoever it was had plenty of time to snitch one of those keys and get a copy made for himself. I suppose I could check out the thousands of keymakers there are in New York.”

The door to the little dining room opened and one of Hardy’s plainclothes men came in. Behind him was Watson Clarke. Clarke had obviously gotten to his apartment for a change of clothes. He was wearing a russet-brown tweed suit with a pale pink shirt and a brown knitted tie; very Brooks Brothers. I was struck again by his resemblance to Raymond Burr. He was Ironside without the wheelchair. He impressed with his physical strength and fitness for a man in his mid-fifties. I thought he was somebody I’d like to have on my team in a tight corner. He gave us a kind of tired smile.

“I understand I’m a murder suspect,” he said.

The plainclothes man was whispering to Hardy.

“Not really, Mr. Clarke,” Chambrun said. “Jerry Dodd, my security officer, thought of you when they determined the kind of gun that had been used. But we know you weren’t on the balcony when Sewall was killed.”

“That’s rather fortunate,” Clarke said. “Because, you see, I do own a 6.5 millimeter P-38 Walthers, German-made handgun.” He reached in his pocket and produced a brown shell briar pipe, rugged enough to go with his square-jawed face. He began to fill it from an oilskin pouch.

“My man says it doesn’t appear to have been fired,” Hardy said. “Not recently.”

“Not in my memory,” Clarke said. “I collect guns. I showed your man what I had that isn’t in storage. The Walthers isn’t a gun I’d use on safari, which is the only shooting I’ve done in recent years. I’m afraid my Walthers is a rather unpleasant coincidence.”

Hardy looked up. “Is it the kind of gun you’d have chosen to use if you had meant to shoot someone from that balcony, Mr. Clarke?”

Clarke held a lighter to his pipe. There wasn’t a nerve in his body, I thought.

“I have about thirty guns in my apartment,” Clarke said. “If I had been planning to gun someone down from that balcony, the Walthers is exactly what I’d have chosen. It’s light, deadly accurate if you know how to handle it. It would have been the perfect weapon.”

“Who else do you know who owns one?” Hardy asked.

Clarke’s laugh was easy. “My friend, there are hundreds of them around. It’s not a rarity.”

“But you have one in your collection.”

“My collection, Lieutenant, is not a collection of rare weapons or antiques, as your man will tell you. I collect the best modern guns of their type. The Walthers is such a gun.”

Hardy sighed. “I’m going to tell you something that may make you feel better, Mr. Clarke. The bullet they dug out of Sewall’s body was so scratched and damaged in the process that our ballistics man tells me we’ll never be able to match it to a gun.”

“I don’t feel any better than I did, Lieutenant. It wasn’t my gun that was used. It’s where it belonged, not recently fired.”

“At least recently cleaned,” Hardy said. “Mr. Maxwell is probably familiar with your collection, isn’t he?”

Clarke’s heavy eyebrows rose. “Doug? Sure he’s familiar with it. Are you suggesting he borrowed my gun so he could shoot himself? I mean, from the balcony—when he was in the lobby.”

“It was Sewall who was in the lobby,” Hardy said.

“But—”

“Doug has told us about Sewall’s blackmailing habits, Mr. Clarke,” Chambrun said.

“Oh, God!”

“Doug is also completely in the clear,” Chambrun said. “We know exactly where he was when Sewall was shot, and where he was when Shaw was beaten to death.”

Clarke’s pipe had gone out. He relit it. “Well, thank the Lord for that!” he said. “But are you suggesting the killer was after Sewall and not Doug? I’d like to think so, but it doesn’t seem very likely. The killer would have to have known what Sewall was planning for the evening.”

“A lot of people knew,” Chambrun said, “including Diana Maxwell.”

“You have to be kidding!” Clarke said.

“Diana and her young man were good friends of Charlie Sewall’s,” Chambrun said.

Clarke bit down hard on his pipe stem. “And would have been delighted to have him make Doug look foolish.”

“Politics have always been a no-holds-barred brawl,” Chambrun said. “In the old days the brawling took place in a corner saloon or down a back alley. Today—the age of television, radio, computers—the brawling takes place in public. Everybody sees it happen while it’s happening. Ask the mayor of Chicago about it. Tell me, Mr. Clarke, what was your reaction when Maxwell came to you with his blackmail story?”

Clarke shook his head. “You have to understand that I grew up with Doug and Charlie,” he said. “We were kids together. We went to college together. I must have seen and been the butt of dozens of Charlie’s jokes. Sometimes they made me mad; sometimes I had to laugh at them even if the egg was on my face. Frankly, my first reaction was that Doug had been had by Charlie; that Charlie would never really use that confession against Doug. It couldn’t do Doug any harm. But as I thought about it, I realized that twenty-odd years ago it could have hurt Doug. The college would probably have fired Doug if Charlie had made a big smear of it. The more I thought about it, the angrier it made me.”

“But in relation to the present political picture?”

“It’s hard to judge how much it would hurt Doug right now,” Clarke said. “It might even help him, but that would be a big gamble to take. My suggestion was that he pay Charlie whatever he asked for until after the election. Then, win or lose, he should tell Charlie to drop dead—do his worst.”

“Has it occurred to you, Mr. Clarke, that somebody else now has that confession? That the ball game may not be over?” Chambrun asked.

For the first time I thought Clarke looked a little shaken. “That is the blackmailer’s M.O., isn’t it?” he said. “If I die of anything but natural causes, turn this over to the police.”

“Or use it for your own purposes,” Chambrun said.

“Does Doug have any ideas—?”

“Sewall has a girl friend who knows,” Hardy said. “He also has a lawyer named Hyland.”

“Dicky Hyland?” Clarke said. He laughed. “Dicky went to college with all of us. He’s a third-rate lawyer, making a thin living out of divorce case scandals. He is also a first-rate lush. He would love to try to control someone like Doug. The total failure ruling the destiny of the distinguished success. A miserable louse, Dicky Hyland. He’s just the kind of guy Charlie would use for his fun and games.”

“He’s already been in the hotel tonight looking for Maxwell,” Hardy said. “I thought of grabbing him, but Chambrun advises we wait until he makes his move. Right now he says he wants to see Maxwell about funeral arrangements. We can’t nail him for that.”

A muscle rippled along Clarke’s jaw line. “I’d like the chance to deal with that miserable little creep myself,” he said.

Chambrun had gotten up from his chair and was walking restlessly up and down behind the table. He was snapping his gold cigarette case open and shut without taking a cigarette from it. Finally he stopped his pacing and faced Clarke.

“If I were the strategist for the opposition political party and this story broke—the story of Doug Maxwell’s theft from the college twenty-three years ago—I’d ask some questions. Nobody could do anything to me for asking questions, could they? No matter what the questions implied?”

“What questions?” Clarke asked. He had abandoned his pipe and slipped it back in his pocket.

“If I were the opposition, I would consider some facts,” Chambrun said. “Charlie Sewall had it in his power to damage Doug Maxwell, perhaps beyond repair. Maxwell and his adviser, you Mr. Clarke, might have decided that Sewall had to be eliminated. Had you learned, since many people knew about it, that Sewall planned to appear without his pants in the lobby last night? If you did, you knew he would be a perfect target, and that everyone would assume the murder bullet was meant for Maxwell. Now it turns out that Maxwell has a perfect alibi, and that you have a perfect alibi.”

“Which should put an end to the questions,” Clarke said.

“On the contrary. The questions just begin. How handy that you and Doug are both in the clear. My question number one would, therefore, be: Did Maxwell and Clarke hire someone to do away with Charles Sewall? You can buy a gunman for chicken feed these days. My second question would be: Did Maxwell and Clarke provide the killer with the murder weapon? Isn’t it a remarkable coincidence that Clarke owns a Walthers P-38, the unusual kind of gun used by the killer? My third question: Did Stewart Shaw get a glimpse of the killer on the balcony? Shaw was in the hotel then. Did Shaw recognize him, realize that his beloved boss must be involved, wait for a moment when he could confront the killer, and got himself killed for his pains?”

Clarke drew a deep breath. “Are those all your questions?” He was, I saw, close to an angry explosion.

Chambrun gave him a thin smile. “I’m not saying I believe any of those things, Mr. Clarke, but if I were the strategist for the opposition, I would ask them. If the voting public gets to know that Doug Maxwell once stole some money, and then these questions are asked, I don’t think he would have the remotest chance of being elected, no matter how angrily you deny the implications contained in those questions.”

Clarke controlled himself. “Well, thank God you aren’t the strategist for the opposition.”

“Whoever is may not be a complete fool,” Chambrun said. “I’ve painted this picture for you to make it clear that Dicky Hyland, or whoever else may hold Maxwell’s confession of theft, must be handled with kid gloves if you have any wish to have Maxwell elected.”

“Have you put this to Doug?” Clarke asked.

“No.”

“I think I should, then,” Clarke said. “If Dicky Hyland gets to him, Doug might blow his stack if he isn’t aware of the possibilities.”

“He’s supposed to be resting,” Chambrun said.

“I think his rest should be interrupted,” Clarke said. “Have you any objection, Lieutenant?”

“No,” Hardy said, “but Mr. Chambrun’s questions are interesting, you know. I’d like to ask a couple of my own.”

“Shoot,” Clarke said, an edge of impatience in his voice.

“Tell me what you can about Stewart Shaw.”

“Stew?” Clarke seemed to make an effort to bring himself away from what was on his mind. “Some of this is sketchy, Lieutenant. Doug has talked about him, but I wasn’t particularly interested in Shaw at the time. He was a navy man. Long after Doug’s service in World War II, you understand. I suppose Shaw was thirty-five, twenty years younger than Doug. Shaw had served quite a number of years; enlisted, not drafted. He finally decided not to re-enlist. Someone Doug knew—the son of a friend, I think—was Shaw’s commanding officer. This officer sent Shaw to Doug at Barstow College with a letter asking Doug to do what he could about finding some kind of a job for Shaw. Doug interviewed him, liked him, hired him as part of the campus police force at Barstow.

“Shaw was grateful. He made a point of trying to do special services, outside his regular routine, for Doug. Doug came to count on him, eventually put him in charge of campus security. When the campus riots erupted last year, Shaw was in the middle of the action. Doug was in the middle of it, too. He didn’t hide away from it as many college administrators have. He walked the campus, took the insults and the obscenities, faced the activists, laid down the law, and eventually won over the majority of the student body. It was a dangerous time for Doug, and Shaw never left his side. Somebody wrote an article about Doug and Stew Shaw for one of the big national magazines. They both got a measure of fame out of it. It was what led to Doug’s being asked to run for the Senate. When he decided to resign from Barstow and make the run, Stew Shaw also quit and became Doug’s batman and bodyguard. Jack Mickly, the PR man, and a couple of secretaries also left Barstow to become part of Doug’s team. That’s about it, I think, Lieutenant.”

“Shaw was really devoted to Maxwell?” Hardy said.

“That’s putting it mildly, Lieutenant.”

“So if Maxwell was in bad trouble, Shaw would go to any lengths for him?”

“I’d say so.”

“Like shooting Sewall to keep him from unloading on Maxwell?”

“Oh, come off it, Lieutenant.”

“Why?” Hardy asked, a stubborn look on his face. “He was in the hotel when the shot was fired. He knew all about the arrangements, the locked balcony, the works. He had access to a Walthers P-38.”

“How?”

“Do you examine your gun collection every day, Mr. Clarke?”

“Of course not.”

“Maxwell and Shaw were in and out of your apartment fairly often during the planning of tonight’s dinner, weren’t they?”

“Well, yes, they were.”

“It’s possible, then, that Shaw managed to slip that gun out of your house, isn’t it?”

“And how did he get it back there after the shooting?” Clarke asked.

“Your apartment is just around the corner from Maxwell’s house, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Hardy spread his hands. “You may remember that Shaw was sent to the house earlier this evening to ‘get some things’ Maxwell needed? He could have hidden the gun after the shooting, retrieved it when he had a moment, and taken it, cleaned, back to your apartment.”

“How did he get into my apartment?” Clarke asked.

Hardy shrugged. “How did he get into the balcony in the lobby? He was some kind of key genius.”

“And who killed him and why?” Clarke asked. He was angry again. “Not Doug. You had him covered. Not me. A dozen people know I was in the Trapeze Bar when the riot started. Haskell here knows that. Who, then?”

“A friend of Charlie Sewall’s?” Hardy was asking himself the question. “There are two men who came into the hotel with Sewall who haven’t yet been identified. Maybe the man who now holds the evidence against Maxwell?”

Clarke laughed. “Dicky Hyland? Shaw could have broken him in half with one arm tied behind him.” He shook his massive head. “You don’t seriously believe Doug and Stew Shaw planned to murder Charlie, do you?”

“It’s a question Mr. Chambrun’s opposition genius might ask,” Hardy said. He looked satisfied with himself.

Clarke’s early affability had left him. “Can you give instructions to the hotel switchboard, Lieutenant, so that I can get through to Maxwell? I think he should know how rough the going may be.”

Hardy picked up the jacked-in phone on the table beside him and asked to be put through to 14B. He handed the phone to Clarke. Maxwell himself evidently answered.

“It’s Watty, Doug,” Clarke said. “I’m afraid I woke you up…No, I can imagine…I’m with your friend Chambrun and the police lieutenant. They’ve made some rather extraordinary suggestions to me that I think you should hear…Yes, now…Sure. I’ll come right up.” Clarke put down the phone. “He wasn’t sleeping, which isn’t strange.”

Hardy turned to his plainclothes man. “Take Mr. Clarke up to Fourteen B,” he said.

“You think I need protection, Lieutenant?” Clarke asked.

“I don’t want anything to happen to you, Mr. Clarke, until we’ve gone through the business of checking tonight’s guest list name by name. I’ll be ready for you in half an hour. I hope you’ll be through with Maxwell by then.”

Hardy watched Clarke and the cop leave the room. He reached in his pocket for one of his long, thin cigars. He put it in his mouth but he didn’t light it.

“You think there might be anything to my theory about Shaw, Chambrun? That he could have done the job for Maxwell? Oh, I know Maxwell’s your friend. But it could be. And Shaw could have been done for by one of Sewall’s two friends. We have no way of knowing that they ever left the hotel. One of them might have seen Shaw on the balcony and waited to get him.”

“It’s a neat little package,” Chambrun said, “but aren’t you just juggling one ball now, Lieutenant? There’s still the very logical possibility that the man with the gun thought he was killing Maxwell. I have a hunch the District Attorney’s office is going to ask you why you aren’t looking for someone who meant to get Maxwell.”

“You won me over to the other side,” Hardy said.

“Find the man who managed to get a key to that balcony and you’ll know which side of the street to play,” Chambrun said. “Jerry Dodd’s working on that now. I’m going to check with him.”

Chambrun gestured to me to go with him. We walked out into the deserted lobby together. We saw Jerry Dodd talking to Karl Nevers, the night reception clerk at the front desk, and Chambrun headed for him. I looked at the clock over the desk. It was going on three o’clock. All the bars and the Blue Lagoon were closed. The cleaning crews were at work everywhere.

“It’s a dead end,” Jerry said, his shrewd face twisted by frustration. “To start with, we’ve been trying to check to see whether anyone saw a bloodstained man taking a powder. You couldn’t do the kind of butcher-boy job that was done on Shaw without getting splattered by his blood. But tonight there were dozens of bloodstained people running around while those kids were wrecking the joint. It almost wasn’t noticeable, there were so many of them. No lead there.”

“The keys,” Chambrun said.

“Yeah, the keys,” Jerry said. “Karl here has keys, but they’re kept locked in the office safe. Del Greco up in the Trapeze has a key to the balcony. He keeps it on a ring that he carries in his pocket, along with his personal house keys and others. It never leaves him. It hasn’t left him. Mrs. Kniffin, the housekeeper, has a key to the balcony. It’s kept on a wire ring attached to a chain she wears around her neck. It never leaves her while she’s working. She never lends her keys to anyone. If someone wants something unlocked, she unlocks it for them herself. She never locked or unlocked the balcony doors. My keys are on a key board in my office. That board is on the inside of a closet door. The closet door is kept locked and I carry that key in my pocket. No one else has one. That door hasn’t been forced. The maintenance crew chief has a key to the balcony. He keeps his keys in his office in the basement. He can’t remember ever using the balcony key because those doors are never locked. The key is there now. For someone to borrow it, they’d have had to pry open a metal box where he keeps his keys. The box hasn’t been jimmied. So much for the key department.” Jerry made an impatient gesture. “We already know the locks on the balcony door weren’t picked.”

“There’s an answer, of course,” Chambrun said. “The balcony doors were supposed to be locked but they weren’t—or one of them wasn’t.”

Jerry’s mouth was a thin slit. “I locked them myself. It seemed important to me, so I didn’t trust the locking up to anyone else.”

“Did anyone ever talk to you about the balcony and the locked doors, Jerry?” Chambrun asked.

Jerry frowned. “As a matter of fact the only person I ever discussed it with was Maxwell himself.”

I saw Chambrun’s face tighten.

“It was about a week ago,” Jerry said. “He and Mr. Clarke and some others came here to look over the ballroom and the banquet arrangements. They came out here to the lobby and they were discussing whether Maxwell should make his entrance through the front door or the side. They went off to look over the setup and kind of grinned at me. ‘If somebody wanted to drop a flowerpot on my head that would be just the place to do it from,’ he said. I told him we could lock it off. ‘Maybe that would be a good idea,’ he said. That’s actually when the idea to lock the doors came up.”

“You didn’t discuss with him where the keys were kept?”

Jerry looked outraged. “For God sake, Mr. Chambrun, why should I?”

“No reason, Jerry. So just keep at it,” Chambrun said.

Chambrun and I walked away toward the elevators. The lobby has an almost cathedral quality for me at this deserted time of night.

“Maxwell could have mentioned the balcony to almost anyone,” I said.

Chambrun stopped and looked up at the balcony. “Somebody had to know all of the details about keys that we’ve just heard,” he said. “What’s bothering you, Mark?”

I remembered Jerry saying once that Chambrun had X-ray eyes; that he could look at you and read the maker’s name on the inside of your shirt collar.

“I’m slightly worried about a couple of gals,” I said.

“Diana?”

“Some. I didn’t expect her to stand me up without letting me know. Maybe I guessed wrong about her. I think I’m more worried about your friend Melody Marsh.” I told him about our parting, the business about the wildflowers in case something happened to her. “That guy Hyland seemed very interested in her and what she wanted here,” I went on. “He saw us walking down the street toward Madison Avenue together. Naturally I didn’t tell him why she’d come to see you. Just that she felt a responsibility to Sewall. I think he was trying to find out what she knew.”

“So you think he’s the one who’s inherited Maxwell’s confession?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” I said. “And I’d hate to think he might try to keep Melody quiet. He’s a mean bastard, from what I saw of him.”

“Perhaps we should warn her,” Chambrun said, frowning. “You have her address and telephone number?”

I took the slip of paper out of my wallet and handed it to him. He went into one of the lobby phone booths and dialed the number. After a moment or two I saw him re-dial it. Then he came out.

“No answer,” he said. He looked at his watch. “She could have stopped off at a friend’s. It’s a bad night for her. She’d need company.”

“If she’s with friends, then she’s okay,” I said.

Chambrun looked dissatisfied. “Would you feel squeamish about checking out?” he asked. “If she’s at home, I’d like to know why she doesn’t answer. If she isn’t, we can assume friends.”

“I don’t mind,” I said.

“Call me when you’ve checked,” he said.

He cared.

I took the address from him and went out into the Avenue. The cabs had returned to their usual hack stands.

Melody’s address was on Irving Place, just around the corner from the Players Club, an old stamping ground of mine. There was little or no traffic at that time of night and it took less than ten minutes for us to get there. I paid off the driver and walked into the vestibule of the building, an old brownstone that had been converted into apartments.

It was so dark in the vestibule I had to use my lighter to read the names in the brass card holder. I saw “Sewall—21.” I pressed the button alongside the name. Nothing happened.

I assumed “21” would be on the second floor. After a moment or two I pressed another button at random. After a moment or two there was a clicking sound in the front door and I pushed the door open and went in. The hallway and staircase were dimly lit. I climbed the stairs, and just as I reached the second floor landing, I heard a door open on the third floor and an angry woman’s voice called down the stairwell.

“Who is it?”

“Melody?” I asked.

“No, it’s not Melody! You looking for Sewall?”

“Yes.”

“What the hell did you ring my bell for?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s terribly dark in the vestibule.”

“They’re Twenty-one—rear apartment,” the woman said. I couldn’t see her. “You tell ’em if there’s any more noise, so help me God I’ll call the cops.”

“Noise?”

“Oh, they’ve been tearing the joint apart as usual. You tell Charlie Sewall I’ve had a bellyfull.”

A door slammed.

I went to the door of 21 and rang the bell. I could hear it ringing inside quite plainly. Nobody came to the door, and then I noticed it was standing open an inch or two. I went inside. Past the dark entryway I could see there was a light burning.

“Melody!” I called out.

She didn’t answer, so I went into what was a living room. It was a shambles—chairs overturned, some broken glass on the floor, the strong smell of whiskey. The light came from a lamp that had been knocked onto the floor. A painted glass shade had been smashed and two light bulbs burned nakedly bright. On the table a cigarette was still smoking in a tray. The ash was long. I took a quick look in the two bedrooms, the bath, and the kitchenette.

There was no one in the apartment, dead or alive.

Part Three

1

I HAD NOTICED A telephone in one of the bedrooms. I went back there, dialed the Beaumont, and asked the switchboard to locate Chambrun. It was urgent, I told her.

As I waited, I looked around the room. It was obviously Melody’s. The scent of gardenias was strong. The walls, the curtains, the spread on the king-sized double bed, were pale pastel pinks and yellows. The dressing table had a frilly lace cover and was loaded down with cosmetic equipment, jars and bottles, and cologne sprays, and mascara tins. From where I stood, I could see a box of false eyelashes. It was, however, the pictures on the walls that had my jaw sagging slightly. They were all photographs of Melody in varying degrees of undress down to complete nudity. Most of them had been taken long ago when she had been queen of the strippers. She had been a very lush, very damn beautiful hunk of flesh. There was, curiously, nothing lewd or pornographic about the pictures. Nothing suggestive. They were just pictures of a woman glorying in her extra-special equipment.

“Chambrun here.” The boss’s voice jolted me back to the present.

“Things look bad,” I said. I told him what I’d found, “They couldn’t have been gone long. There was a cigarette still burning in an ash tray.”

Chambrun’s voice was crisp. “Hardy will have someone there in a hurry,” he said. “Stay there till they come, Mark. You might talk to the woman upstairs. She may have seen or heard something unusual. Hyland told you he was in the phone book?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll take care of that department,” Chambrun said.

I went out through the torn-apart living room, being careful not to touch anything, and climbed the stairs to the third floor. I had the impression that the door my angry friend had slammed had been for the rear apartment, directly over Sewall’s.

I knocked. The door opened and I saw that she was really angry. She was, I guessed, in her early thirties, not bad-looking. Red hair that had come out of a bottle was tightly done up in rollers. She had on a floor-length linen robe, dark blue, and she was smoking a cigarette.

“Now what the hell?” she said, blocking the way.

I suspected a good part of her anger came from being caught looking as she did by a man.

“I’m afraid there’s bad trouble downstairs,” I said. I told her my name and who I was. The mention of the Beaumont didn’t register anything with her. “You haven’t been listening to the news on radio or television?”

“What news?” she asked. “Agnew invented some new name for somebody?”

“Charles Sewall was shot to death in the lobby of the Beaumont early last evening,” I told her.

“You’ve got to be kidding!” she said. “I heard him raising hell downstairs not half an hour ago. I told you I was about to call the cops. My name is Shelly Davis, by the way. You want to come in?”

“I’d better keep an eye on the hallway,” I said. “But I would like to ask you what you heard or saw downstairs.”

“I didn’t see anything,” Miss Davis said. “But I heard plenty. The Sewall apartment is right under mine. He and Melody were always raising hell late at night. I guess it was after they both got pretty well boozed up. Has something happened to her, too?”

“I don’t know. There’s nobody in the apartment, but the place is wrecked. You know Melody?”

“Sure I know her. She’s a nice old girl when she isn’t involved with Charlie. He’s a prick, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

“Well, he’s dead of it,” I said. “When did the row start tonight?”

“Maybe a half—three quarters of an hour ago. It couldn’t have been Charlie, could it? I mean if he was dead—”

“It couldn’t have been Charlie,” I said.

“Well, I thought it was, of course.” Shelly took a drag on her cigarette. “Some women like to be manhandled—beat up—by their guys. I guess Melody is one of them. Masochistic. If she didn’t like it, she wouldn’t have put up with it all these years. From what she told me, she’s been with Charlie fifteen, sixteen years. So when she started to yell a little while ago, and I could hear thuds, like he’d knocked her down, and stuff breaking, I supposed it was the same old tune. But three o’clock in the morning is pretty damn late to wake up the neighbors. I beat on the radiator pipe with an iron frying pan a couple of times and then it stopped. I couldn’t go to sleep, so I made myself a drink and had a cigarette. That was when you rang my buzzer.”

“You didn’t hear anyone leave the apartment?”

“No. Melody left with whoever it was?”

“She’s not there now,” I said. “I’ve sent for the police. We think somebody may be out to hurt her. That’s how I happen to be here. When she didn’t answer her phone, I came down to find out if she was safe. I wasn’t much too late. There was a cigarette still burning in an ash tray.”

“Melody didn’t smoke,” Shelly said.

“You ever know any of their friends?” I asked. “For instance, a fellow named Hyland?”

Shelly made a snorting noise. “That jerk!” she said. “Melody asked me to go out with them one night. There was an extra man. It turned out to be this clown, Hyland. I’ve still got the bruises to show for it.”

“That was recently?”

“The bruises are figurative,” Shelly said.

“Would you recognize his voice if you heard it?” I asked her. “Could it have been Hyland you heard down there tonight with Melody?”

“You can’t hear voices that clearly through the floor,” she said. “It was a man, all right. But I wouldn’t have been able to tell who. I just took it for granted it was Charlie. Who killed him?”

“That honor is still up for grabs,” I said. “He was pulling one of his jokes on his cousin, Douglas Maxwell, who’s running for the Senate.”

“It’s crazy how much they look alike,” Shelly said. “I’ve never seen Maxwell, but his pictures! You’d swear it was Charlie.”

“So right now it may have been someone who meant to kill Maxwell,” I said. “You can read about it in your morning paper.”

“He didn’t really do it, did he?” Shelly asked, her eyes widening.

“Do what?”

“Appear without his pants.”

“So you knew about it.”

“Melody told me—about a week ago. It was a funny idea, but I didn’t really think he’d do it,” Shelly said.

“Well, he did it. It turned out not to be very funny.”

Shelly dropped her cigarette on the hall floor and stepped on it. “Look, Mr. Haskell, I’m not going to be able to sleep after this. Let me get dressed, and then if there’s anything I can do to help—”

“You wouldn’t know where Hyland lives, would you?”

She laughed. “I refused the marvelous opportunity to find out,” she said. “He’s probably in the phone book.”

I left Shelly Davis to get rid of her hair curlers and went back downstairs to the Sewall apartment. I managed to keep my eyes off the pictures of the young Melody long enough to look in the phone book for Richard Hyland. His office was listed, but no home phone. There was only a Manhattan directory. He could live in Brooklyn, or Queens, or one of the other boroughs.

The door buzzer sounded and I went out into the entry-way and clicked the release. A plainclothes cop who introduced himself as Sergeant Nelson and two uniformed cops came up the stairs.

“You touch anything in here, Mr. Haskell?” Nelson asked, when I took him into the living room.

“Nothing,” I said. “I did handle the phone and the phone book in the bedroom. Nothing was upset back there. The only thing that’s different from when I found it is that there was a cigarette burning in that ash tray. It’s burned out now.”

“You just missed the fun,” Nelson said. He looked at the long gray ash. “No filter.”

“Miss Marsh didn’t smoke, for what it’s worth,” I said. I told him about my conversation with Shelly Davis.

“So maybe nothing serious has happened,” Nelson said. “She took the beating she apparently enjoyed and then went off somewhere to make love with the guy.”

“Look, Sergeant, the man she loved and had lived with for fifteen years was murdered tonight. She isn’t likely to have taken off with some other guy just for fun and games. If you knew her, you’d know she wouldn’t.”

One of the cops who had wandered into the back of the apartment appeared in the doorway. His eyes were popping. “You oughta have a look, Sergeant!” he said.

He’d found the picture gallery.

“Tell your man to stop drooling, Sergeant,” I said. “Those pictures were taken twenty-five years ago.”

There wasn’t anything I could do to help Nelson. He’d responded to a call from Hardy at the nearest precinct house. He’d come at once, not knowing what to expect. He phoned for a fingerprint man.

“I’ll talk to your Miss Davis while I’m waiting,” he said.

“Any reason for me to hang around?” I asked.

“Nope. You can make a statement later if it turns out there’s real trouble.”

I walked down the steps and out into the street. It had been deserted when I came in. Now there was a small crowd gathered around the parked patrol car. There was a faint grayish light in the west. Daylight was coming up.

I had a helpless feeling as I walked slowly away from the Irving Place house. I didn’t think anything serious had happened. Whatever Melody’s sex deviations might be, I could swear they hadn’t been a part of the brawl that had wrecked her living room. She had been afraid of something, and it had come. It was easy enough to guess that it might be Richard Hyland who was responsible. It was the only guess I could make. The simple fact of the matter was that it could be somebody I’d never heard of—one or both of Charlie’s friends who’d gone to the Beaumont with him and disappeared. It could be someone who hadn’t crossed our horizon at all. Where to look? What to do? I guessed Chambrun was trying to put his hands on Hyland. At his end he could probably find the man’s address. I decided the best thing for me to do was to go back to the hotel.

And then I realized that I was only a few blocks away from the apartment that Diana and Barry Tennant shared. They might not appreciate a visit, but I’d feel better if I knew Diana wasn’t in some kind of jam. Also, having been friends of Charlie Sewall’s, they might also know Hyland and where he lived.

There were no cabs in sight, and so I walked east to Second Avenue and then downtown. A few trucks were on the move, but not much else. The street corner groups that had been there earlier had broken up and gone home. About the only signs of life were a couple of rats working over a paper bag of garbage outside a closed Bar & Grill. But there were people alive, unless they slept to music. I felt almost as if I was in a movie with a musical score. Rock singers and guitar music were a part of the atmosphere.

I came to the building. I looked up and down the street. At that moment there wasn’t a soul in sight, not a single vehicle moving on the Avenue. I went into the dark vestibule and started up the trash-strewn stairway. As the street door closed behind me, the musical score came to an end. From up above I heard a muffled outbreak of laughter. I got to the second floor and knocked hard on the door of Diana’s apartment. I was sure I could hear voices inside, probably coming from the far end of the apartment’s long hallway.

Then the door opened and I found myself facing a very tall black man with a wide bright smile. He was wearing the uniform: striped bell bottoms, a scarlet shirt covered by a leather vest, a string of beads hung around his neck, and a leather headband worn around his forehead, and his Afro hair-do. He seemed amiable enough.

“Help you, Dad?” he asked.

I told him I was looking for Diana or Barry.

“Say, man, this is cool!” he said. “I know you from somewhere, don’t I?” He snapped his fingers. “You were with the fuzz outside Maxwell’s rooms at the Beaumont! You were standing on a radiator.”

“A spectator, not an actor,” I said, smiling back at him.

“Yeah, sure, man,” he said. “You friends with Diana and Barry?”

“I like to think so.”

“So, come on in, the water’s fine,” he said.

I walked in and he closed the door behind me. Then he had hold of my arm and he twisted it around behind me so sharply that I thought it would break.

“What’s the idea?” I said, to keep from crying out.

“Just to make sure, man,” he said. He had shoved me against the wall and was frisking me. “So you’re clean, which is lucky for you. So march down the hall.”

He pushed me ahead of him. I almost stumbled and fell.

“What’s up, Joe?” a voice called from the kitchen.

“I think I got me a fuzzy man,” Joe said. I was projected forward into the kitchen.

The small room was crowded with kids—the kind of kids who had been at the hotel earlier. A girl was at the stove, stirring something in a big iron pot. It smelled like chili.

“This gent, disguised as a member of the establishment, claims to be a friend of Diana’s and Barry’s,” Joe said. “I say it’s a likely story. He was at the Beaumont earlier tonight. He was one of the fuzz.”

“Do I get a chance to tell you who I am?” I asked. I want to tell you I was scared. I could feel a cold river of sweat running down my back. They were about fifty-fifty boys and girls. There were six or seven blacks in addition to Joe. There wasn’t a friendly look in the whole place. Then I saw a face I recognized. It was one of the two boys who’d tailed me earlier that evening when I’d first come here. I pointed at him.

“You remember me?” I asked him.

“Yeah, I remember you,” he said.

“Diana gave you the all-clear on me, didn’t she?”

“Yeah, she did,” the boy said. “That was before the fuzz started shooting at us in the hotel; before they slugged a couple of dozen of our friends and carted them off to jail, man. Before that she gave you the all-clear. After that you were there, man. You were one of them. I saw you there.”

“So how shall we serve him up?” Joe asked. “Fried, or broiled, or shall we eat him raw?”

There was laughter.

“Tell us, little man, what the hell are you doing here?” Joe asked.

“I’m not a cop,” I said. “I’m the public relations man at the Beaumont. I came here earlier tonight to get Diana because her mother needed her. She went with me of her own accord. No pressure. Ask him!” I pointed to my ex-tail.

He stayed stone-faced.

“I don’t know how much you all know about what’s happened at the hotel tonight. I guess you all know that Charlie Sewall was shot. But do you know that Maxwell’s bodyguard was beaten to death in the hallway where some of you tried to get into Maxwell’s suite? So that’s two strikes against your friends in jail unless you come up with the right answers.”

“So they’re going to try to pin that on us, too!” an angry voice said. There was a general murmur of outrage.

“Listen to me,” I said. “I’ve been close to the police tonight. They don’t think you are responsible for either of those killings. But you haven’t heard it all. Some of you may know Melody Marsh.”

I saw that they knew who she was, at least.

“She came to the hotel tonight because she thinks Charlie Sewall wasn’t shot by mistake. I can’t tell you any more than that. But we were worried about her. When her phone didn’t answer, my boss sent me down to Irving Place to check on her. I’ve just come from there. Somebody has beaten her up and taken her away from her apartment.”

Again there was an angry, throaty sound from them.

“That isn’t all,” I said. “I saw Barry uptown. He asked me to get a message to Diana. I did. Later she called me and asked me to buy her a drink. I suspected she wanted me to get some word back to Barry. But she never showed up. She left her parent’s suite, but she didn’t show. I was worried about her. When I left the cops at Melody’s apartment trying to figure out what really happened there, I decided to come down here to make sure Diana is all right. I hoped she might have decided to come direct to Barry instead of getting me to carry a message for her.”

“The cops have probably got her,” a girl said.

“The cops aren’t interested in her,” I said.

“Oh, man, the cops are interested in anybody under twenty-five,” Joe said.

“I don’t want to argue politics or sociology with you,” I said. “Tell me if Diana is okay. That’s all I want.”

There was a window at the back of the kitchen with a drape pulled over it. I suspected it opened out onto a fire escape. The curtain was pushed aside and Barry Tennant stepped into the room.

“I think this guy is on the up-and-up,” he said. He looked strained and tired. “Diana hasn’t come here, Haskell; or sent a message. You talked to her after you saw me?”

“On the phone,” I said. “The line to the Maxwells’ suite is monitored by the police, but I got your message across without mentioning names. She said then, would I buy her a drink later. Then about one o’clock she called me where I told her I would be. She said she’d meet me in ten minutes for a drink. When she was ten minutes or more late, I checked. The guards outside her parents’ suite said she left it. They weren’t supposed to watch her. Nobody saw her in the lobby. Nobody saw her, period. There’s a garage under the hotel. She might have gone down and out that way without being seen. But that’s two hours ago, Barry.”

“So we hang on to Mr. Fuzz, here, till they give us back Diana,” Joe said. He had my arm again and was starting to twist it back.

“Let him alone, Joe,” Barry said. He looked at me and I smiled at him, mostly because the pressure had been taken off my arm. “Why does Melody think the gunning was meant for Charlie?” he asked me.

“It’s her story,” I said. “Maybe you people will have better luck finding her than we’ve had. Any of you know a lawyer named Hyland—Richard Hyland?”

There was a hoot of laughter from the group. “Man, do we know Dicky Hyland!” Joe said.

“Hyland was my alleged legal counsel when Maxwell’s frame-up sent me to jail,” Barry said. “Charlie—good old Charlie—recommended him. I’ve come to think he was less than expert.”

“What we really come to think, man,” Joe said, “is that Maxwell paid him to fumble the ball.”

“Do you know where Hyland lives?” I asked Barry.

“Sure, I know where he lives.”

Joe edged forward into my line of vision. “Now you ease up, man,” he said to Barry. “Me. Fuzz, here, came to get, not to give. He wants something, let him pay for it.”

“I’m trying to find two gals who are presumably your friends. What do I have to pay to get your help?”

Joe towered over me. He was a pretty scary young man. “They’ve got twenty-six of us, beat up, locked up,” he said. “That’s not counting Diana. You can bet some club-happy cop picked her up and she hasn’t had a chance to say she’s the great Maxwell’s daughter—or maybe she wouldn’t say because she’s not proud of it. So that’s what you pay, Mr. Fuzz. You get our friends loose, maybe we help you some.”

There was a murmur of approval. The little kitchen seemed to be suddenly oppressively hot. I took my handkerchief out of my hip pocket and blotted at my face with it. It was a ploy of the times, all over the world; hostages taken by one side to command the release of hostages held by the other. It was happening in jails, on hijacked airliners. People were being kidnaped in Canada, in South America, in the Middle East, and held with threats of murder if friends of the kidnapers weren’t instantly released by the opposition. It could happen here on Second Avenue in New York City, I thought.

“I wish anybody cared enough to make me valuable to you, Joe,” I said. “I have no drag with the police. It would take hours, maybe days, for the higher-ups to decide to meet your demands—if they would ever make that decision. Meanwhile you’ll hang around here while Diana and Melody Marsh may be in the worst kind of danger. If they don’t matter to you, then God help us all.”

“Let him speak his piece, Joe,” somebody said.

“Your friends are in jail for breaking into the hotel,” I said. “They aren’t charged with killing Charlie Sewall or Shaw. If you’ve got any kind of decent lawyer, he’ll get them out when they’re arraigned tomorrow. You make threats and demands and maybe someone will get stubborn. In my opinion you were used tonight.”

“How used, man?” Joe asked.

“Your picketing and your public threats against Maxwell,” I said. “They were a perfect backdrop for someone who planned a murder. You made the climate, Joe. Somebody gets killed and a million people instantly say, ‘It was those bomb-throwing vandals.’”

“You watch your mouth, man!” Joe warned.

“I’m not calling you names, Joe,” I said. “I’m telling you what other people are saying. The man who shot Charlie Sewall—whether he meant to get Charlie or Maxwell—knew exactly what the first thoughts would be. The cops would start chasing you kids and the murder had an easy thing of walking away in the confusion. Same thing with Shaw. He was murdered in the hallway where a couple of dozen of you were crowded in, yelling threats, waving clubs. It’s no secret that Barry thinks Shaw framed him a year ago. So what happens? The cops are looking for Barry; they arrest all his friends they can lay hands on. And once again the murderer walks away without anyone paying the slightest attention to him. You were used, Joe. You are Patsys for a killer. And he’s still loose, and Diana and Melody are missing.

“What does he want with them?” Joe asked. I thought he looked a little uncertain for the first time.

“If we knew that,” I said, “we could walk in and grab him. If you choose to fritter away time making threats and speeches of outrage against the establishment, we may lose whatever chance we have. I don’t know what anyone wants with Diana. Maybe you have that answer, and maybe it ties in to Melody in some fashion. I do know that Melody has information that might get in the killer’s way.” I hesitated. “Hyland, the lawyer, was close to Charlie Sewall, too. If the killer really meant to get Charlie, then Hyland could be the one with answers.”

“What are you advising us?” Barry Tennant asked.

“You all know Diana,” I said. “She knew, from the message you sent her, Barry, that you might not be available. Find her if you can. So far the police aren’t concerned about her. They won’t cross trails with you. Then you can tell me where to find Hyland. We can’t afford to wait until his office opens in the morning. Finally, if you’re clean in the Shaw killing, Barry, I suggest you go to the police and tell them so.”

“That’s a laugh, man,” Joe said.

“If you’re clean,” I said, “it will take a couple of detectives off your back and put them to doing something useful.”

There was an uneasy silence.

“Your threats, and screamings, and riotings have everybody looking the wrong way. Maybe you don’t care about murder. But you can get the cops off your backs if you’ll help turn up the real killer.”

Barry drew a deep breath. “Hyland lives on Beekman Place,” he said. “He’s got an unlisted phone. I’ll give it to you.”

2

IT WAS DAYLIGHT WHEN Chambrun and Sergeant Nelson met me on Beekman Place in the Fifties. Melody was Nelson’s case.

“We may have a hatful of nothing,” Nelson told Chambrun. “Miss Davis, where Melody Marsh lives, says that kind of roughhousing was standard practice in the Sewalls’ apartment.”

“Not last night,” Chambrun said.

The apartment building where Hyland lived didn’t suggest a hand-to-mouth existence. There was a night man on duty in the rather plush lobby. He was not for letting us up to Hyland’s floor without announcing us in advance. He was finally convinced by Nelson’s shield and some reasonably tough talk.

“And you’ll give us a guided tour,” Nelson said. “I don’t want you warning him the minute the elevator door closes on us.”

The man had no choice. He muttered something about what a nice gent Hyland was; never any trouble. He suggested he would probably lose his job. Nelson appeared to be totally deaf.

Tenth floor, apartment C. Nelson rang the bell. There was only a brief delay before the door opened and Hyland looked out. He was wearing a gray silk dressing gown, and there was a deep scratch on his cheek which he was touching, gently, with a handkerchief. He recognized me and said: “Well!”

Nelson showed his shield. “This is Mr. Chambrun, the resident manager of the Beaumont Hotel.”

“Don’t tell me I stole an ash tray from the Blue Lagoon room,” Hyland said. His bland smile seemed to be pasted on his face.

“Where is Melody?” Chambrun said—Chambrun the hanging judge.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Hyland,” the night man whimpered. “The cop didn’t give me any choice.”

“Not your fault, Dave,” Hyland said. He looked at Chambrun, still smiling. “I guess there’s no use denying that I have a lady guest, Chambrun. You’ll insist on looking whether I like it or not.”

“We will,” Chambrun said.

“Of course I know my legal rights,” Hyland said. “After all, I am a lawyer. But why make a fuss, gentlemen?” He turned and called out. “We have guests, baby, who seem to be looking for you.” He stood aside for us to go in.

It wasn’t quite believable. Melody was sitting on an overstuffed couch. On a coffee table in front of her was a drink. She was wearing the same blouse and peasant skirt I’d seen earlier. She didn’t look roughed-up or hurt in any way. Her face, though, was a curious white mask.

“Hello, Pierre,” she said in a dead voice.

Hyland made for a drink that was resting on the mantel. The smile was still there, but there was something nasty about it. “Perhaps you’d like to tell me, Sergeant, what the hell business it is of yours that I have a lady guest.”

Chambrun answered. He spoke to Melody, not Hyland. “I was concerned about you, Melody,” he said. “Your phone didn’t answer so I sent Mark to check out on you. He found your apartment ripped apart and you gone. A Miss Davis, who lives above you, told Mark there’d been some kind of a riot a few minutes before. Mark called the police—and me.”

“And what brought you here?” Hyland asked.

Chambrun looked at him. “Guess,” he said.

Hyland’s smile faded. “I don’t have to guess,” he said. “You have to tell me.”

“Are you all right, Melody?” Chambrun asked, ignoring him.

“I’m fine, Pierre,” she said in that dead voice.

“Will you tell us what happened in your apartment?”

She just sat there, frozen.

“Are you here against your will, Miss Marsh?” Nelson asked.

“No.”

“Your apartment is wrecked,” Nelson said. “What happened?”

“Look here, Sergeant,” Hyland said. “I went to call on Melody because I thought she might need help—sympathy. I persuaded her to come back here with me. After all, her apartment is full of memories of Charlie. Not a good idea for her to stay there alone, I thought.”

“So you broke up the furniture, smashed glasses and lamps, and then brought her here,” Nelson said.

Hyland’s smile returned, twisted a little. “Why don’t you ask Melody if she has any complaint to make against me?”

“I do ask you, Miss Marsh,” Nelson said.

She shook her head slowly. I thought she was like a Zombie. She wouldn’t look at Chambrun for help or to respond to him.

He tried. “Melody, we need some rational explanation of what happened. There was some kind of a struggle. You obviously clawed Hyland’s face. Now you sit here and let us think there was nothing unusual about it.”

“Unusual for you may not be unusual for someone else,” Hyland said. “Some people’s amorous techniques are different from others.”

“You sonofabitch,” Chambrun said without emotion.

Hyland giggled. It was an unpleasant sound.

“If Miss Marsh has no complaint to make, there’s nothing I can do, Mr. Chambrun,” Nelson said.

“Will you come back to the hotel with me, Melody?” Chambrun asked.

“I—I’m tired, Pierre. Exhausted,” she said.

“Perhaps, then, you can get some rest while Mr. Hyland goes back to the hotel with us,” Chambrun said.

“I don’t think I’m going anywhere with you, Chambrun,” Hyland said.

Chambrun shrugged. “Voluntarily or not,” he said. “You can do that, Nelson. Lieutenant Hardy wants this man for questioning in connection with the murder of his client.”

Hyland’s bloodshot eyes narrowed. He was a man playing his cards very close to the vest. “That being the case,” he said, “shall we, for the record, say ‘voluntarily’? Excuse me, gentlemen, while I get on a tie and a jacket.”

He disappeared into the corridor of the apartment.

“Shall I keep an eye on him?” Nelson asked.

“I don’t think it’s running time yet,” Chambrun said. He moved so that he was standing directly in front of Melody. She didn’t look up at him. “What’s happened to you?” he asked. “Have you stopped trusting me, Melody? What is Hyland holding on you?”

Slowly, she raised her head and two large tears rolled down her cheeks. “I’m sorry, Pierre. Oh, God, I’m so very sorry.” She reached out to him. “You know what he said—about amorous techniques—you know that isn’t—”

“Of course I know,” Chambrun said. “And you know that I’ll go all the way with you. Tell me what’s happened to you.”

“I—I’m sorry, Pierre.”

Hyland came back from his room, knotting a very gay red necktie. “As long as it’s going to be a party, Melody, perhaps you’d better come along with us. The great Chambrun might feel safer about you, knowing where you are.”

She reached for a small handbag in the corner of the couch and stood up mechanically. It was as if Hyland had some kind of hypnotic control over her.

Chambrun and I rode uptown in a taxi with Melody and Hyland. Nelson went back to his precinct house. Since Hyland was coming “voluntarily,” Nelson’s presence wasn’t required. It was a strange, brief journey. Hyland did all the talking: about the beauty of the city in the early-morning sunshine; about his peculiar fondness for smoked salmon and creamed cheese for breakfast, this brought on by the display in a delicatessen window; about his inability to break the cigarette habit; about God knows what else.

Melody sat in a corner, staring out the car window as if she was in a strange city.

At the Beaumont we went directly up to Chambrun’s office. I wasn’t surprised to find Miss Ruysdale at her desk. She had found time to change for the day. She looked as fresh as if she’d had a good night’s sleep, which none of us had.

“Try to locate Lieutenant Hardy,” Chambrun instructed her. “And ask Mr. Maxwell if he will join us.”

“Poor Doug has had kind of a rough night,” Hyland said cheerfully.

“I think we could all use some coffee,” Chambrun said. “Perhaps a bite to eat to go with it.”

“If you could stir up some smoked salmon and creamed cheese?” Hyland said to Miss Rusydale. “My favorite breakfast.”

Chambrun led the way into his office. The curtains had been drawn, the ash trays cleaned, the Turkish coffee maker bubbling. Ruysdale had been on the job. Chambrun picked up his phone and asked the switchboard to locate Jerry Dodd. Jerry did most of the talking, which I couldn’t hear. Chambrun’s face told me that there was nothing new of any importance.

Miss Ruysdale reported. “Lieutenant Hardy is going over last night’s guest list with Mr. Clarke. It’ll take him a little while longer. Mr. Maxwell is on his way down. He wasn’t sleeping.”

Chambrun leaned back in his desk chair, his eyes hooded, facing Melody, who had appropriated a chair in the far corner of the room. I could see he was deeply puzzled by her. Hyland was examining the Blue Picasso, making little clucking sounds of appreciation. He never stopped acting, I thought. But I could tell that the silence in the room, the waiting, was eating at him. He turned, finally, from the painting.

“There isn’t very much I can tell you about Charlie’s affairs,” he said. “Whatever is left after his rather substantial debts are paid goes to Melody.”

Chambrun didn’t speak.

“I, of course, have instructions about funeral arrangements and all that,” Hyland said. “Just how else I’m supposed to be able to help you, I can’t imagine.”

Chambrun opened a folder on his desk and looked down at it. It was the folder Hardy had left with him much earlier. Hyland blotted at his scratched cheek. Then he shrugged.

“So it’s to be the silent treatment,” he said. He turned back to the painting.

Miss Ruysdale opened the office door and Douglas Maxwell came in. I saw the two guards behind him.

“Bring in the coffee when it comes, Ruysdale,” Chambrun said. “I’m sorry to bring you down here, Doug. You know Hyland.”

“Hello, Dicky,” Maxwell said without enthusiasm.

“Hi, Doug.”

“And Miss Marsh,” Chambrun said.

Melody didn’t even look at Maxwell. He took the armchair by Chambrun’s desk. “I know that Miss Marsh was very close to Charlie,” he said. “What’s this all about, Pierre?”

“I suspect that Mr. Hyland will insist that I spell it out, although I’m certain he’s aware of all the facts,” Chambrun said. “It’s about blackmail, Doug.”

“Blackmail!” Hyland said. “That’s an interesting word to be tossing around so lightly.”

For the first time Melody turned her head to look at Chambrun. There was panic in her wide eyes. I couldn’t tell whether he noticed or not. He went on, a rasping edge to his voice.

“You are Charlie Sewall’s lawyer, Hyland. You drew up his will. You know about his debts. You would also know if he has a safety deposit box somewhere, and presumably, what’s in it.”

“He didn’t have a safety deposit box,” Hyland said.

“Then I assume he left in your care special instructions in case he came to a violent end.”

Hyland laughed. “Poor Charlie, why on earth should he expect to come to a violent end?”

“Because he was a blackmailer,” Chambrun said. “Because he lived on the proceeds of blackmail.”

“Somebody’s filled you full of malarky,” Hyland said. “Charlie was a joker, but he never really hurt anyone in his life.”

“He was a blackmailer,” Chambrun said. “A solid part of his income came from Douglas. Blackmail.”

Hyland was really good. His eyebrows went up in an expression of amused surprise. “Blackmailing you, Doug? The Great White Father of Barstow College?”

“I think the evidence that Charles Sewall used against Douglas is in your hands, Mr. Hyland,” Chambrun said.

Hyland laughed, as though it was all too absurd to be discussed. “I simply can’t believe that Charlie ever—”

“Believe it, Dicky,” Maxwell said, his voice hard. “For twenty-three endless years I’ve been buying silence from Charlie. I think what Pierre is trying to tell you is that I don’t expect to start paying you, now that you have the evidence.”

“My dear Doug, I don’t have any evidence,” Hyland said. There was mischief in his eyes. “Boy, I’d like to know what it was Charlie had on you, Doug! The irreproachable Douglas Maxwell! Was it a dame, Doug? Was that it? It must have tickled Charlie pink to have something on you. Oh, I knew Charlie wasn’t close to you, like in the old days. I knew that when he told me about the joke tonight.”

Chambrun’s heavy lids lifted. “He told you about the joke?”

“Sure. He told lots of people. I’d have given my eyeteeth to have seen it.”

“He should have cherished Douglas’s good will, not played jokes on him. He could have been killing the goose that laid his golden eggs,” Chambrun said.

“Golden eggs?”

“By my figuring,” Chambrun said, “fifteen thousand a year for twenty-three years comes to three hundred and forty-five thousand dollars. That must have made your mouth water, Hyland. Douglas can easily expect to live another fifteen or twenty years. If you could get on the gravy train now, your worries would be over.”

“I think I’m beginning to resent your implications, Chambrun,” Hyland said, his smile evaporating. He looked at Maxwell. “I’d be careful about going along with Chambrun’s fantasy, Doug. A suit for slander wouldn’t do your political career much good. You make any kind of public charge against me and I promise I’ll sue you for every cent you have in the world.”

“The safest thing for you to do, Hyland, is to turn over the evidence that you have against Doug, or burn it up in front of his eyes,” Chambrun said.

“I think I will go home, gentlemen,” Hyland said, “unless you want to bring a charge against me. I almost wish you would. What I could do to you would be like shooting fish in a barrel.”

At that moment the office door opened and Miss Ruysdale came in, followed by a waiter with a room service wagon. I saw coffee, rolls, jam, some sliced ham, and a plate hidden by a silver cover. Behind the waiter was a heavy-eyed Lieutenant Hardy.

The waiter fidgeted with his wagon and then, getting no instructions from Chambrun, left.

Hardy moved around beside Chambrun. He looked beaten. Chambrun looked up at him and pointed to the open folder on his desk. Hardy frowned down at it.

“Whatever else I may think of you, Hyland,” Chambrun said, “I admire your taste in art. Would you mind taking a close look at that Picasso and telling me what you think the date on it is?”

“What’s the gag?” Hyland asked.

“No gag,” Chambrun said. “Lieutenant Hardy and I have had an endless debate over whether the last number on the date under the signature is a seven or a nine.”

Hardy looked bewildered. Almost certainly he’d never had such a discussion with Chambrun. He didn’t get it. Neither did I. Neither did Hyland, but he shrugged and walked over to the Picasso. His back was to me. The angle from where Chambrun and Hardy were was slightly different.

The photograph of Charlie Sewall’s pantless entrance to the Beaumont lobby was in Chambrun’s hand, and he pointed to it. Hardy looked at it, and then at Hyland. The Lieutenant looked as though he was suddenly coming alive.

Hyland turned back to us, smiling. “It’s obviously a seven,” he said. “Who wins?”

“Both the Lieutenant and I win,” Chambrun said. “We’ve just identified the man in this picture. Care to look, Hyland?”

Hyland walked around behind the desk. As he looked at the picture, his face seemed to crumple.

“The face in profile was impossible to identify,” Chambrun said, “until you stood over there earlier by the picture. The angle from here was almost exactly the same angle the camera had on you when this picture was taken. You’d given your eyeteeth to have witnessed Charlie’s joke? You were two feet away from him when he was murdered.”

“You ran out!” Hardy said. “We’ve been looking for you and your friend with the opera hat all night. Who is he?”

“I don’t think I’m required to tell you that,” Hyland said. He was shaken. He reached up with his finger tips and touched the scratch on his face. He tried a sickly smile. “What am I charged with, Lieutenant? Leaving the scene of an accident?”

“Don’t play games with me, Counselor,” Hardy said. “I don’t have to explain the law to you. You’re a material witness to a homicide. You chose to conceal the fact. Shall I read you what it says in my rule book about your right to silence?”

“Not necessary,” Hyland said. He was thinking hard, and breathing hard. “It—it was a bad moment, Lieutenant. My friend was lying there on the floor, dead. I panicked. I took off.”

“Along with your friend in the opera hat?”

“I can’t answer for him.”

“But you were both in on Sewall’s joke from the start?”

“Yes! Yes, I was in on it. Charlie couldn’t have strolled in alone—without his trousers. The joke would have been over before it started. He had to have a couple of us cover him until he was well inside the lobby. He had to get to the cameras, you understand. So it was a bad joke, and it turned into a tragedy. But there’s no crime involved. I mean, how could we have dreamed that somebody was waiting to kill Douglas Maxwell?”

“If somebody was,” Chambrun said.

“What do you mean, if somebody was? For God sake, man—”

“I mean somebody may have been waiting to kill Charles Sewall,” Chambrun said. “A lot of people were in on the joke. You said so yourself. And you, Mr. Hyland, and your opera-hatted friend could have moved Charles Sewall onto an exact spot that suited the killer—if you happened to be in on it.”

“You have to, for God sake, be out of your mind,” Hyland said. “Why should I want to have Charlie killed? He was my friend.”

“Maybe you were greedy to take over his blackmail business,” Chambrun said.

“Now look!” Hyland said. “Now look!”

“You look, Counselor,” Hardy said. “I want to know who the man behind that opera hat is. I want to know every detail of your evening—before the shooting and after. I want to know the names of all the people you can think of who knew the joke was planned.”

Hyland looked dazed. “You really think the killer meant to get Charlie?”

“I think it’s possible.”

Very slowly Hyland turned his head so that he was looking at Douglas Maxwell. It was quite clear what he was thinking, wondering.

“I’ll save you some speculation,” Hardy said. “Mr. Maxwell has perfect alibis for both of tonight’s murders. Now, are you willing to help, Counselor, or do we go about this the hard way? I can hold you as a material witness. You know that.”

Hyland drew a deep breath. “I don’t want to name names, Lieutenant, without some thought. But I’ll tell you this. The guy with the opera hat is an actor. He’s a friend of Charlie’s. He was chosen simply because he happened to own a full-dress suit. That’s the only reason he was chosen. When the shooting happened, I grabbed him and told him to get out of there. It wouldn’t help his career to be involved. There wasn’t anything he could do to help Charlie or the police.”

“And you took off for the same reason?”

“Yes.”

“You took off, changed out of your own dress clothes, and came back.

“You know I came back?”

“You were in the Blue Lagoon room with Haskell,” Hardy said, impatient.

“Ah, yes.” You could almost see the wheels going round in Hyland’s head.

“So tell me how the evening was planned?” Hardy said.

“Could I—could I have a cup of coffee?” Hyland asked.

“Help yourself.”

“If you look under that covered dish, Hyland, I suspect you may find some smoked salmon and cheese,” Chambrun said. “You may need some strengthening.”

We watched Hyland as he poured himself a cup of coffee with hands that shook. He took the cover off the dish and wolfed down a mouthful or two of his request breakfast. He gulped some coffee, wiped his mouth with his handkerchief which had little bloodstains on it from his scratched cheek, and turned back to us.

“The joke,” he said. “The joke started a couple of weeks back when Charlie saw the item in the paper about a fund-raising dinner for Doug Maxwell. We were some of us having some drinks at Charlie’s place. Melody will remember. You remember, don’t you, Melody?”

She looked at him, her face blank. She was as far gone from him as she had been from Chambrun.

“I remember Charlie said, ‘Can you imagine raising a few million bucks in one night for that pompous ass?’ He meant Doug. He was wondering how to make Doug look foolish. Like one of us should dress up as a waiter and go up to Doug during the banquet and throw a cream pie in his face. That would get a laugh, of course, but it wouldn’t do Doug any harm. It might do him some good. The first things we thought of were all like that. They’d get a laugh, but they’d outrage people into supporting Doug even more. ‘If we could only trick Doug into doing something absurd,’ I remember saying. Charlie gave me a funny look. ‘Did you ever think that I am Doug—if I want to be?’ he said. That’s when we thought along the lines of Charlie pretending to be Doug.” Hyland fumbled for a cigarette.

“It wasn’t until several nights later,” he said, exhaling a lungful of smoke, “that Charlie came up with it. We’d arrive in the lobby a few minutes later. Two of us, in full dress, would walk right in front of him. He’d be there, but without his pants. When we got him right in front of the cameras and the news people, we’d step aside and let them see him. He would look down, be surprised to see that he didn’t have on his pants, and we’d hustle him out. We’d take a powder, and a few moments later Doug would appear and walk into the middle of hysterical laughter. He would have a hell of a time explaining it, and half the world would never believe his explanation. That’s all there was to the joke. It worked to perfection until—until Charlie went down with a bullet in his heart. I saw he was dead. I ran, dragging the actor guy along with me.”

“How did you know he was dead?” Hardy asked.

Hyland wiped some beads of sweat from his face. “I fought in a war once, Lieutenant.”

“So then what did you do?” Hardy asked.

“Outside the hotel the kids were yelling and screaming. They didn’t know what had happened yet. The actor and me, because of our dress clothes, were the enemy. They yelled at us and threw garbage at us. I thought I wasn’t going to get away, but I did. I got a cab home as fast as I could. I turned on my TV set and got the word. They’d just discovered that it wasn’t Doug who’d been shot; that it was his look-alike cousin, Charlie Sewall. I got out of my dress clothes and changed into something less fancy. I went back to the hotel. It was a natural thing for me to do. I am Charlie’s lawyer. You wouldn’t let me see the body. I couldn’t get to Doug, who was Charlie’s only family.” This part began to sound memorized. “I waited around for a better moment. That’s when I ran into Haskell in the Blue Lagoon.”

“You’ve left out something,” Hardy said.

“So help me, Lieutenant.”

“You’ve left out the fact that you saw Haskell and Miss Marsh walking down the block toward Madison. You told Haskell you didn’t want to talk to Miss Marsh because you thought he was the police.”

Hyland moistened his lips. “That’s true,” he said. “I didn’t want to be stopped and questioned until—until I found out just how things were.”

“And how were things, Mr. Hyland?” Chambrun asked.

“The dinner was going on, just as though nothing had happened.” He sounded bitter. “Nobody cared about poor Charlie. All that mattered was raising a few million bucks for Doug.”

“And you were in the Blue Lagoon, tossing five-dollar bills at Pat Coogan and listening to your favorite songs—as though nothing had happened,” Chambrun said.

“I was waiting till I was told I could see Doug,” Hyland said. “What was I supposed to do, sit in the lobby and twiddle my thumbs?”

“So that’s the early part of your evening,” Hardy said. “Let’s go back to the joke. You and your actor brought Sewall into the lobby. You stepped aside and let the reporters and the cameramen see him without his trousers. Then—?”

Hyland blotted at his face. “Then Charlie grabbed at his chest, and there was blood, and he went down.”

“You heard the shot?”

“No, I didn’t hear the shot. If you’d been there, you’d know why. A couple of hundred people were screaming with laughter.”

I could vouch for that.

“But you knew he’d been shot,” Hardy said.

“I’ve seen too many men die in battle not to know,” Hyland said.

“Did you look around for somebody with a gun?”

“I suppose I did—in a way.”

“In a way?”

“I thought if it was somebody close by, he might try to shoot his way out,” Hyland said.

“And you wanted to be sure not to be in the line of fire,” Chambrun said.

“Wouldn’t you?” Hyland said.

“You didn’t see anyone with a gun?” Hardy asked.

“No.”

“You didn’t see anyone running away who might have had a gun?”

“Lieutenant, the place was a madhouse—some crowding in toward Charlie, some trying to get the hell out of there. People were crying and screaming. They thought, of course, it was Doug. Whoever shot Charlie could just have walked away in that milling around.” He hesitated, his face clouding. “You’d think whoever was standing next to the killer would have heard the shot, seen something.” He seemed honestly puzzled by that fact.

No one mentioned the balcony to him.

“So let’s go on to the last part of your evening,” Hardy said. “You came back here, you couldn’t get to Mr. Maxwell, and my men wouldn’t let you see the body. You went into the Blue Lagoon and listened to the music, talked with Haskell. You were curious as to what Miss Marsh was doing here.”

“Only vaguely curious,” Hyland said. “I knew she was an old friend of Chambrun’s. I supposed she’d come to see Charlie, to try to make arrangements, wanted help. She’d naturally go to her old friend who was on the inside.”

“So you stayed here, drinking and listening to the entertainer until the Blue Lagoon closed.”

“Yes. I tried once more to get through to Doug. No luck. Then I thought I would check in with Melody. I knew she must be feeling pretty low.”

“How thoughtful,” Chambrun muttered.

“So I went to her place,” Hyland said. “I persuaded her it wasn’t good for her to stay in her apartment where she could almost—almost still smell Charlie. I offered her my spare room, and she went to my apartment with me.”

Hardy glanced at Melody. Her face was turned away. She was looking blankly at the corner of the room.

“Will you describe in detail how you ‘persuaded’ Miss Marsh?” Hardy asked.

“I—I just talked her into it,” Hyland said.

“Punctuating your conversation by overturning the furniture, breaking glasses and lamps, and getting your face scratched,” Chambrun said.

Hyland’s narrowed eyes were fixed on Melody. He moistened his lips. “Melody was in a hysterical state,” he said. “You have to realize that her world had come to an end. Charlie was her world. When we started to—to talk about it, she blew her stack. She started to throw stuff around, yelling and screaming. I—I tried to stop her. She—she fought with me. That’s how I got my face scratched. The poor darling had gone off her rocker. I—I finally got her quieted down and she came away with me. That apartment was no place for her to stay.”

There was a moment of silence and then Hardy said: “Is that the way it was, Miss Marsh?”

Very slowly Melody turned to look at him. She looked dazed. Then she nodded her head.

“Oh, for God sake,” Chambrun said. He sounded disgusted.

Hyland’s smile had returned. He was suddenly relaxed. He had gotten away with it, I thought. “I think Melody and I have been as cooperative with you as you could expect, Lieutenant,” he said. “None of us has had any sleep. Unless there is something else—?”

“I think Miss Marsh should have medical attention,” Chambrun said. “She’s obviously in a state of shock.”

“I’ll arrange for it,” Hyland said.

“I’ll arrange for it,” Chambrun said. He pressed a button on his desk. Miss Ruysdale made an instant appearance. “Will you take Miss Marsh to the guest room in my apartment, Ruysdale, and have Dr. Partridge attend to her. She’s in shock.”

Melody looked from Chambrun to Hyland. There was terror in that look. Hyland broke the log jam.

“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t stay here, Melody,” he said. “Chambrun is better equipped to take care of you than I would be—for the present.” There was something threatening about those last three words.

“I don’t want you out of touch, Hyland,” Hardy said.

“My dear Lieutenant, are you suggesting that I have some reason to run out on you? I’ll be very much in touch. I am, after all, Charlie Sewall’s lawyer.”

Miss Ruysdale had gone over to Melody and the two women walked out of the office together. Melody never looked at one of us.

“Good luck, Lieutenant,” Hyland said, when they were gone. He was suddenly feeling very chipper. “I guess you have my unlisted phone number.”

“I have it,” I said.

“Then I’ll see you around,” Hyland said. He walked, quite jaunty, out of the office.

“Jerk!” Hardy said, when the door had closed.

“I was surprised you mentioned the blackmail thing in his presence, Pierre,” Maxwell said.

“It will hold him off for a while, now that he knows he has more people to deal with than you.”

Maxwell pushed himself up out of his chair. It took effort. “I’ve really got to get some rest, Pierre. I’ll have my whole political committee down on me in a couple of hours. Thanks for trying to help.”

Maxwell’s escort of Jerry’s two men were waiting in Ruysdale’s office to convoy him upstairs. Chambrun went over to the breakfast wagon, buttered a roll, and took it with a cup of coffee back to his desk.

“The Marsh woman is really in shock,” Hardy said.

“Shock my foot!” Chambrun said. “Hyland has frightened her into silence. If she admits to knowing about the blackmail, he’s probably convinced her he could bring charges of conspiracy, extortion, God knows what else against her. She’d spend the rest of her life in jail. If we can get the district attorney to promise her immunity if she’ll testify, she’ll get well very quickly. First I’ll try to persuade her myself. I don’t want to bring this blackmail thing into the open unless I have to.”

“One thing’s certain,” Hardy said. “Hyland isn’t our killer. That photograph gets him off the hook. He was standing right next to Sewall when the shot was fired from the balcony.”

“He’s not a killer,” Chambrun said. “He’s a bloodsucker.”

The little red button blinked on Chambrun’s phone. He answered.

“Chambrun here…Yes, Jerry.” Chambrun’s face went rock-hard. “Hardy’s with me. Yes, we’ll come at once.” He put down the phone. His little black eyes were blazing slits. “Jack MacDonald, our maintenance crew chief, has been beaten to death in his office in the basement,” he said. He stood up. “MacDonald was one of the people with a key to the balcony.”

3

THERE IS A GARAGE for guests of the Beaumont a floor below street level. At the same level are furnace rooms, air-conditioning equipment, and other maintenance machinery. MacDonald’s office opened off a concrete tunnel leading from the elevators to the garage. Office was a fancy name for it. It was a square, windowless room with a couple of air-circulating vents at the floor level and near the ceiling. There was a metal filing cabinet where MacDonald kept his worksheets and assignments. There was a table against one wall where MacDonald had a coffee percolator, and a cot against the opposite wall where he could snooze during inactive hours.

Jerry Dodd and one of the maintenance crew were waiting for us outside the door to MacDonald’s cubicle. Jerry’s face was drawn and white.

“It’s not pretty,” he said. “We’ve got some kind of a maniac running loose in the hotel, Mr. Chambrun. Same kind of wild violence as in the case of Shaw. Somebody went on beating him long after he was dead.”

“Weapon?” Hardy asked.

“I didn’t want to touch anything till you got here,” Jerry said. “But no weapon I could see.”

Chambrun and Hardy went into the room with Jerry. I stayed out in the hall with the crew man. Shaw had been enough for my stomach for one night.

“My name is Edwards, Mr. Haskell,” the crew man said.

“Sure, I know,” I said. I’d seen him around for years. He was one of the regulars.

“Jack was supposed to show up to inspect the new plate-glass windows they’ve put in the lobby shops,” he said. “When he didn’t come or answer his phone, I came down to look for him.”

“Nobody saw or heard anything?” I asked him.

“Nobody’s come forward,” Edwards said.

Chambrun and Jerry reappeared fairly quickly.

“Senseless, brutal slaughter,” Chambrun said. “Jerry’s right. We’re dealing with some kind of a madman.” They headed for the elevators and I tagged along. “Maxwell can’t be allowed to leave his suite, even with guards, until we’ve nailed this creature.”

We went up to the fourteenth floor. Jerry’s two men were at their posts outside the door.

“The Maxwells alone?” Chambrun asked.

“His friend is in there with him,” one of the men said. “Mr. Clarke.”

Chambrun put his finger on the doorbell and held it there. The door was promptly opened by Watson Clarke. His big face looked haggard.

“Oh, Mr. Chambrun,” he said.

“We’d like to talk to you and Douglas,” Chambrun said.

Clarke drew a deep breath. “Of course. But—we’ve got troubles.”

“So have we,” Chambrun said. He walked past Clarke into the suite’s living room. I thought he looked relieved to see Maxwell sitting on the couch with a drink in his hand. Maxwell looked like some dreadful cartoon of himself; I could have sworn that he was fighting tears.

“Oh, God!” he said. “Oh, God, Pierre.”

I was surprised, but Chambrun seemed not to notice the state Maxwell was in. “I have to tell you, Douglas, that we’ve had another killing,” he said. “A man named MacDonald who was my maintenance crew chief. He was beaten to death, just like Shaw. It’s pretty clear that we’re dealing with some kind of psychopath who won’t stop at anything. Until we find him, you’re not to leave this suite, even under guard.”

“What did this MacDonald have to do with all this?” Clarke asked.

“I can only guess,” Chambrun said. “He had a key to the balcony. The key is in his office now, but he may have loaned it to someone, not realizing what it meant. Or he may have been bribed, and kept still about it too long.”

“But I can’t stay here,” Maxwell said, his voice shaken. “I have to leave the hotel now, at once!”

“Impossible,” Chambrun said. “Unless you want to commit suicide.”

“Maybe I do,” Maxwell said. He reached forward and picked up a piece of paper from the coffee table. Chambrun read it, his face expressionless, and then handed it on to me.

It was a piece of hotel stationery with two lines scribbled on it in a kind of schoolgirlish handwriting.

My dear, dear Douglas:

I am so very sorry, but I can’t stand this any longer.

Grace

“She was here when Douglas went down to your office a little while back,” Clarke said. “She was gone when he got back.”

“Guards?” Chambrun asked Jerry.

“We weren’t instructed to cover Mrs. Maxwell,” Jerry said. “The guards stayed with Mr. Maxwell.”

“She’s probably gone home,” Chambrun said.

Clarke shook his head. “I’ve tried calling the house for Doug. No answer.”

“So what do you think this note means?” Chambrun asked.

“She pleaded with me over and over to give up the political race,” Maxwell said. “I thought she wasn’t rational about it and I refused.”

“Was she sober?” Chambrun asked. It sounded brutal.

“She’d had a lot to drink tonight,” Maxwell said, “but she stays in remarkable control. I mean, only if you knew her could you tell. I’ve got to find her, Pierre, to tell her I’ll do whatever she asks.”

“You can’t leave the hotel,” Chambrun said.

“I have to, Pierre!”

“You’ll force me to have Hardy place you in protective custody,” Chambrun said. He seemed without sympathy.

“Let me try to find her for you, Doug,” Clarke said. “She may be at home and simply not answering the phone. She may have gone to some friend’s. I know most of the people she might turn to.”

“For God sake, Watty, in the state of mind she’s in—”

“You can count on me, Doug,” Clarke said. “I can do everything you might do.”

“I suggest,” Chambrun said in the same unfeeling voice, “that you try to locate Diana. Ten to one she helped Grace arrange this.”

A nerve twitched in Maxwell’s cheek. “She would do anything to hurt me,” he said.

“She would do anything to help her mother,” Chambrun said. “Do we understand each other, Douglas? You’re not to leave this suite until the police tell you it’s safe.”

“I think Chambrun’s right, Doug,” Clarke said. “You won’t be doing Grace any good by exposing yourself to this killer.”

“I don’t have any choice, do I?” Maxwell said. He made a choking sound. He was fighting tears. It’s a terrible thing to see a strong man cry.

Clarke left the suite with us. “I’ll try the house first,” he said.

“And if she doesn’t answer the doorbell?” Chambrun asked.

“I have a key to their house,” Clarke said. “I’ve always been like one of the family.” He stood, frowning, as we waited for the elevator. “You really think Diana is in on this?” he asked.

“She had a date with Mark for a drink. She didn’t keep it. I suspect her mother asked her for help.”

“But she left the suite,” I said, “hours ago.”

“To make arrangements for her mother,” Chambrun said. He looked at Clarke. “It might be worthwhile checking airports, bus terminals. Grace hasn’t had time to get very far. You might intercept her.”

“It’s an idea,” Clarke said.

The down car came and the doors slid open. Chambrun made no move to board it. “I want you to go down to the basement, Mark,” he said to me. “Have Hardy post extra guards up here. Wait for me there.”

Clarke and I got on the elevator and I pressed the down button.

“Poor Doug,” Clarke said. “He’s had almost more than a man could bear in one night. I’m afraid he’ll throw in the towel on his political future. It’s too bad. We need this kind of integrity and courage; need it desperately.”

“Why is Mrs. Maxwell so set against it?” I asked.

“Alcoholism is a disease,” Clarke said, “not something you can control with will power. Grace is deeply ashamed of it, poor darling. If Doug gets into public life, it’s a secret she won’t be able to keep. I believe that’s why she’s so determined to stop him.”

The elevator stopped at the lobby floor. Clarke stepped out.

“Good luck,” I said.

“I’ll need it,” he said.

The doors closed and I went down to the basement. Hardy was standing in the doorway to the office. Inside were a photographer and a fingerprint man at work. I caught a glimpse of MacDonald’s body, covered now by a sheet. I gave Hardy Chambrun’s message and he passed along orders to one of his men. He looked glum.

“No weapon,” he said. “A hundred fingerprints, all of them MacDonald’s. Like always, nobody saw anything, heard anything. There’s a lot of traffic down this corridor to the garage, but not at this hour of the morning.”

I gave him a rundown on the Maxwell situation.

“We should have had her watched,” he said.

“There wasn’t any reason to think she was in danger.”

“It would seem that anybody remotely connected with this is in danger from this lunatic,” Hardy said. “You, me, Chambrun, anybody. This bastard is on a homicidal binge.”

I heard the elevator door open down the hall and I turned to see Chambrun approaching. He had Melody with him. It looked almost as if he was dragging her. He glanced into the little office.

“Uncover the body,” he said in a cold voice. “I want Miss Marsh to see him.”

It was a cruel thing to suggest. Hardy hesitated. Chambrun walked across the office and ripped the sheet back from MacDonald’s head—or what was left of it.

Melody screamed. She tottered away and suddenly she was clinging to me, sobbing.

Chambrun came out into the hall. He took her by the shoulders and wrenched her around so that she was facing him. “Is that enough to convince you, Melody?” he said. “Hyland has threatened you with jail. This killer doesn’t threaten. He intends to wipe out anyone who knows anything about him or his motives. You could be one. Hyland is almost certainly one. Would you rather face this than risk what Hyland has threatened you with? I can protect you from Hyland, but I can’t promise to protect you from that!” He jerked his head toward the bloody corpse. “You know something you haven’t told us. You know someone else who was on Charlie Sewall’s blackmail list. Do you want to be responsible for more deaths and maybe your own?”

“So help me God, Pierre, I don’t know any names,” she said, fighting for control. “I knew about Maxwell, but for a very special reason.”

“What reason?”

“Charlie hated Maxwell,” she said. “Most of all he hated the fact that they were like identical twins. He hated anything that made him like Maxwell. He tortured himself with it. One night when he was quite high and we—we were making love, he asked me some crazy questions. Like, how would I like to be making love to Maxwell, would I be able to tell the difference? Then he—he exploded. He said, ‘Well, I’ve got that sonofabitch over a barrel.’ He told me about the stealing and all. ‘And he’s not the only one,’ he said. ‘Barstow college has been a little gold mine for Uncle Charlie.’ I asked him what he meant, and he said there was someone else paying off just as big as Maxwell was. He didn’t say who, and after that he was tight-mouthed about the whole thing. I swear that’s it, Pierre.”

“And Hyland thinks you know? That’s why he beat you up, trying to get you to admit it? And then he told you you could go to jail for what you did know?”

She nodded. “I’m a coward, Pierre. I’m a miserable coward.” She put her head down on his shoulder, weeping. For the first time he showed something like sympathy. He touched her hair, stroked it gently. He looked at Hardy.

“Have Miss Marsh taken back to my penthouse and have her guarded,” he said.

“Right,” Hardy said.

“And we’d better pick up Hyland and have him protected. He’s almost certainly on the killer’s list.”

Chambrun vetoed Hardy’s suggestion that we telephone Hyland and warn him to stay put until he could be placed under protection.

“He’s such a devious clod that he’ll assume we’re being devious with him,” Chambrun said. “Probably run out on us. I suggest that we don’t dally, Lieutenant. Our killer has been a step ahead of us all along the way.”

We rode downtown to Beekman Place in a police car. At the apartment house Hardy instructed the uniformed driver to wait in the lobby. The building attendant refused to take us up without our announcing ourselves on the house phone. He wasn’t the man who had been there earlier. Hardy went through the business of showing his shield.

“You know if he’s in?” the lieutenant asked.

“Yes, he’s in,” the man said. “He had a caller only a few minutes ago.”

Hardy and Chambrun exchanged glances.

“Pass key,” Hardy said to the building attendant.

“I can’t do that, Lieutenant. I—”

“Pass key!” Hardy thundered at him.

The attendant went up with us in the elevator. Outside the door of Hyland’s apartment the man produced a ring of keys.

“As quietly as possible,” Chambrun said. “There is probably a killer inside there. He may let go at the first person he sees. Make noise and you may be the target!”

The man’s face broke out in a sweat. Delicately, he inserted the key in the lock. He turned it very slowly, his other hand on the doorknob, holding it steady. The door moved noiselessly inward, and the moment it did, we could hear Hyland wailing, pleading.

“For Christ sake, believe! I’ll turn over all the evidence to you, I swear. But it isn’t here. I’ll have to get it.”

“I don’t believe you,” a familiar voice said.

“I swear it! And you can count on it—I’ll never tell a soul! I promise!”

“I wouldn’t take your word for the time of day, Hyland.”

Hardy moved. He was silent and astonishingly quick for a big man. He went through the vestibule, his service revolver drawn. Chambrun and I were right behind him.

Hyland was literally crouching in the corner of the couch, his hands raised in a protesting, pleading gesture. Standing over him was Watson Clarke. In his right hand he had a short length of tire chain. He must have been taken completely off balance, but his reflexes were extraordinary. He swung the chain over his head and brought it down.

At the sight of us Hyland screamed like a woman and dove for us. It saved his life, I think. That brutal length of chain caught him a glancing blow on the shoulder—glancing, but sufficiently powerful to send him sprawling, face down, on the rug. If he had delayed a second longer, his skull would have been smashed.

Hardy was on top of Clarke. The two big men went down on the couch, Hardy on top. He had his knee on Clarke’s chest, his left hand closed on Clarke’s right wrist. His gun was pressed against Clarke’s throat.

Hyland scrambled on his hands and knees toward Chambrun. “He was going to kill me!” he screamed. “The sonofabitch was going to kill me!”

Chambrun shook off a clutching hand. “I almost wish we’d been a minute later,” he said.

“I’ll tell you what it’s all about!” Hyland promised. He sounded like a high-pitched girl. “He’s like Doug Maxwell, so high and mighty. He’s been paying to keep Charlie silent for years. I’ll tell you all about it. I’ll tell you what kind of a creep he is.”

“For God sake let me tell it!” Clarke said in a deep, angry voice. “I don’t want to hear him making filth out of it.”

I looked back at the couch. Hardy had managed to snap on a pair of handcuffs. He was standing to one side with the length of chain in his hand.

“He’s a killer, a murderer!” Hyland screeched. “He killed Charlie and Shaw. He was going to kill me!”

Clarke sank down on the couch, lifting his manacled hands to his face. Presently he lowered them and there was something tragic about the look of him. His dark eyes were fixed on Hyland. “I don’t know what the law can do to you, Dicky. But if I am allowed to testify, if my word in court means anything, you’ll spend the rest of your miserable life in jail.” He turned his gaze to Chambrun. “You came after me? You guessed?”

“We came after someone,” Chambrun said. “I had begun to wonder.”

Clarke nodded wearily. “You knew about the blackmail. What you didn’t know was that Douglas wasn’t the only victim.”

“I knew that, too,” Chambrun said.

“That it was me?”

“I thought it was not impossible,” Chambrun said.

“You see, the reason Grace went away is that she guessed it was I who had killed Charlie and Shaw.”

Chambrun’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t speak. “I knew about Douglas, of course,” Clarke said. “He’d discussed it with me. But he didn’t know about me. I couldn’t tell him.”

“You bet he couldn’t tell him!” Hyland said. “Sleeping all over the country with Doug’s wife. Maybe even—”

Clarke heaved himself up off the couch, but he was blocked off from Hyland by Hardy.

“Can’t you keep him still? Can’t you let me tell you?” Clarke said.

“You don’t have to make a statement without your lawyer present,” Hardy said. He went through the rigamarole of the prisoner’s rights.

“I don’t want a lawyer now,” Clarke said. “I want to tell it my way. Could somebody give me a cigarette?”

I went over to him, gave him one of mine, and held my lighter for him. He inhaled deeply and then took it out of his mouth with his chained hands. “Douglas married Grace two days before he was shipped overseas, back in 1942,” he said. “I—I was his closest friend. He begged me to look out for her, to see that she had everything she needed, that she had friends, that she wasn’t left alone.”

“Oh, boy, what a laugh!” Hyland said.

Hardy turned to the building attendant who was still standing in the doorway, his eyes popping. “There’s a patrolman waiting in the lobby,” he said. “Send him up here.” He turned to Hyland. “You open your mouth again and I’ll put my foot in it. Understand? Go on, Mr. Clarke. Or would you rather wait till I have this man taken away?”

“I was attacked!” Hyland said. “He’s the guilty one, not I.”

“He let me in here just now,” Clarke said, “because he thought I was coming to pay off. I wasn’t. I came here, frankly, to kill him. He meant to take over where Charlie left off. I’d had all of that I ever intended to take. Something blew up inside me last night. I decided to put an end to it, all the way down the line.” He lifted the cigarette to his mouth again. He was going to wait.

A moment later the patrolman appeared. Hardy ordered him to take Hyland to headquarters. “Hold him as a material witness,” he said. “I’ll bring other charges against him later, such as extortion, assault on Melody Marsh, and some other goodies.” Then, when a protesting Hyland had been dragged off: “Go on, Mr. Clarke.”

Clarke drew a deep breath. “As it happened, Douglas was in the Pacific for three years,” he said. “He never got back to this country in all that time. I—I began by calling Grace once or twice a week, taking her to dinner, to parties. You think you can live by certain rules, certain loyalties. It never occurred to me that I couldn’t. It wasn’t too long before I knew that I had fallen in love with Grace, but it never seemed possible to me that she could care for anyone but Douglas. Then, one day, we both knew. We tried separating, not seeing each other. It was impossible. One thing she wouldn’t do was to write Douglas a ‘Dear John’ letter. He would be back on leave. She would tell him then. But three years! By that time we had a way of living, a way of hiding.

“At last Douglas came home. We met him together. My God, you should have seen him! How overjoyed he was to be back, how wildly in love he was with Grace. He swept her away from me. We’d agreed, she and I, that she’d tell him before—before he could claim her. But she wasn’t able. She—she couldn’t hurt him that much on his first day, after three years. And then she was torn to pieces between us. Doug had done nothing to turn her away from him to me. He was a wonderfully kind, generous, considerate person, head over heels in love with her. She got in touch with me. She simply had to give him a chance.

“And so, down through all these years, it has never been resolved. It had been torture for me. Douglas and I have shared this one woman, he not knowing. But long before it became this kind of ghastly impasse, another factor entered into the situation. Charlie Sewall had somehow found out the truth. He had copies of hotel registries; he had somehow gotten his hands on one or two letters we’d been careless about. And so—and so I paid for his silence. Then, when Douglas agreed to run for office, Charlie put the screws on both of us. More pay or scandal on top of scandal.

“That’s when something snapped inside me. I decided to get rid of Charlie somehow, once and for all. It was Grace who told me that this joke was coming. She heard it from Diana. It seemed a perfect setup. Charlie would enter the hotel, posing as Douglas. I would shoot him from the balcony. Everybody would think it was someone gunning for Doug. With any kind of luck I would get away unseen, and that would be that.” He put out his cigarette in an ash tray on the coffee table.

“It was hard to believe that so many things could go wrong. I came to the hotel carrying my Walthers P-38 wrapped in a raincoat. I made my appearance in the ballroom, checked my lists, greeted the people I had to greet. I’d left the raincoat in my car in the hotel garage. When the time approached, I excused myself. I went up to check out on the balcony. It was locked!” Clarke shook his head. “I should have quit then, but I couldn’t give up. I went down to get the raincoat. I figured I’d have to chance the shooting from some other position. As I was coming back from the car, I passed the door to the maintenance office. Your man MacDonald was there. He knew me. He’d been involved with some of the earlier arrangements. I told him I was interested in watching Doug’s arrival from the balcony but that someone had locked the doors. Evidently no one had told him why. He made no bones about lending me his key. Simple as that. I went upstairs, waited until Charlie made his entrance, stepped out on the balcony and let him have it. Not a damn soul saw me. I went back downstairs, put the raincoat and gun back in my car, and headed back into the hotel. MacDonald wasn’t in his office, so I left the key on his desk. I thought I could persuade him later that someone else had had a key. That it had all happened before I got there.”

“But there was Shaw,” Chambrun said.

“Yes, there was Shaw. When the riot started, I headed upstairs to help protect Doug. I met Shaw in the hall. He told me he’d seen me on the balcony. He didn’t mind that I’d shot Charlie. Charlie was Doug’s enemy and he was Doug’s friend. But he thought it might be worth a little money for him to keep still again.” Clarke’s face hardened. “That’s when my cork popped. I’d grabbed a bat from one of those kids on the way upstairs. I saw red. I beat Shaw over the head with it till he stopped grinning at me. I dragged him into that linen closet and threw the bat out the window. I—I was spattered with blood, but so were a lot of other people. I went out into the hall and stood with the guards outside Doug’s door. Everybody took it for granted I’d been in the brawl downstairs. Or didn’t you take that for granted, Chambrun?”

“At the time,” Chambrun said. He had on his Sphinx face.

“Later I made the excuse of going home to change my clothes,” Clarke said. “On my way through the tunnel to the garage, MacDonald stopped me. Here it was all over again. Was it worth a little money for him to keep silent about the fact I’d borrowed his key? That piece of chain was lying on his desk. I killed him with it. Then I went to my car and drove home. I cleaned the Walthers P-38 and put it back in my gun case—only just in time. Your man arrived, Hardy, to check out on whether I had such a gun.” Clarke raised his hands once more to cover his face. Finally he lowered them again. “That’s it, gentlemen. You’ll want to ask about many details, I’m sure. But that’s it.”

Hardy looked at Chambrun.

“I think it would be a good idea,” Chambrun said, “if you got a special bulletin to all the radio and TV stations to the effect that Mr. Clarke has confessed to the murder of Charlie Sewall and the others. I also think you might ask the airport and bus terminal people to put the same bulletin on their P.A. systems.”

“What’s the hurry?” Hardy asked.

“I think if Mrs. Maxwell should hear that Mr. Clarke has confessed to killing Charlie Sewall, she might come back.”

“I don’t get it,” Hardy said.

“She’ll never let him take the rap for a crime she committed,” Chambrun said.

Clarke covered his face with his hands. He made a groaning sound.

“It won’t wash, Clarke,” Chambrun said. “There’s one thing we’ve known for certain from the start. You never left the ballroom. You could never have been on the balcony. One thing you never did was to shoot Charles Sewall.”

“Oh, God,” Clarke whispered, his face still hidden behind his hands.

“I can’t believe that you ever planned any of last night’s butchery,” Chambrun said. “The whole thing, after Sewall was dead, is the action of a man who goes berserk on the spur of the moment. How did you find out that Grace had killed Sewall, Mr. Clarke? Was it she who told you? Was it Shaw?”

Clarke just moved his head from side to side, a low, moaning sound coming from behind his hands.

Chambrun shrugged. “I suspect it was Shaw. That he approached you and told you he’d seen Grace on the balcony at the time of the shooting. From what I know of Shaw, he was deeply loyal to Douglas Maxwell. He must have been shocked to realize that Douglas’s wife was a murderess; he must have been desperately uncertain about what to do. That’s why he didn’t report it instantly to Douglas when he rejoined him just after the shooting. He had been sweating it out when he encountered you on the fourteenth-floor hallway. How was it? Did he tell you what he’d seen and that he had decided that he had no choice but to go to the police? Even then I suspect he was concerned for Douglas. You were his friend. He wanted you to stand by Douglas when the terrible truth came out. He had no idea what Grace meant to you, I’d guess. And you? Well, you’ve described it yourself. That’s when your ‘cork popped.’ Am I right, Mr. Clarke?”

There was nothing from Clarke. He still swayed from side to side, his face covered.

“After that I imagine you confronted Grace with it. She had a key to your apartment, didn’t she? After all, you must have met there often. She had taken your gun, your Walthers P-38. She knew how to use it. The Maxwells had been on safaris with you. Her reason for planning to kill Sewall? She had come to the end of her rope. Both the men in her life were being whipsawed by Sewall. But things went wrong for her. She found the balcony locked. It was she, not you, who asked MacDonald for a key. He gave it to her. Why shouldn’t Maxwell’s wife have a box seat for his arrival at the hotel? I daresay it never even occurred to him she could have been involved in the shooting, which he supposed was meant for Maxwell. But you couldn’t risk it.” Chambrun drew a deep breath. “Grace probably told you where she’d hidden the gun, and you took it back to your apartment when you went to change your clothes. Then there was one more thing. You had to silence Hyland. Because I think you had the wild idea that you were going to get away with all this, Clarke. How was it to be? You and Grace would disappear and there would be a letter to Douglas, admitting your long affair. No one would tie in your disappearance with the violence here. You hoped we would go on forever looking for a killer we’d never find.”

Clarke lowered his hands. He stared at Chambrun, his eyes sunken, like a man in a trance.

“At the end there was, I suspect, a near disaster,” Chambrun said. “Grace, because she was in shock over what she’d done—and what it had driven you to do—and because she’d been drinking heavily, simply wasn’t able, and couldn’t be trusted, to carry out the last step in the plan. You had to have help. You had to throw yourself on someone’s mercy. Diana was your only hope. She was on her way to have a drink with Mark when you stopped her, told her the whole truth. You needed her to make arrangements. Is it a plane, Mr. Clarke? A bus? A train? Diana, I imagine, was stunned by what you told her, but she was willing to help her mother, at least for now; at least until she had a chance to think it out. God help her. You’ve given her a nightmare to live with for the rest of her life.”

Clarke didn’t move or speak. He didn’t need to confess. The answer was in his stricken eyes.

Chambrun turned to Hardy. “I suggest you get those bulletins on the air, Lieutenant. If Mrs. Maxwell takes off for wherever she’s headed, you may never get her back.”

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copyright © 1971 by Judson Philips

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Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Contents

Part One

1

2

3

4

Part Two

1

2

3

Part Three

1

2

3

Copyright