Authors: Hugh Pentecost
Miss Ruysdale was just starting for her office to relay instructions, when the door opened. Emlyn Teague, his face the color of ashes, was there. Behind him, a glassy smile on his lips, was the massive Irishman, Delaney.
“You want me to come back later?” I asked Chambrun.
“Stay put,” he said. “Ruysdale, have this taken away.” He gestured toward his half-finished breakfast. She didn’t wait to summon a waiter. She carried out the tray herself. Teague and Delaney came in.
Teague was wearing a reddish-brown Harris-tweed suit, with a red carnation in the buttonhole. He had taken time to dress in his usual attention-getting style, but he looked badly shaken.
“What kind of a slaughterhouse are you running here, Chambrun?” he asked.
“Sit down, Mr. Teague,” Chambrun said, his voice cold.
“I want to know exactly what happened to Ivor,” Teague said. He sat facing Chambrun in one of the high-backed Florentine chairs. Delaney stood beside him, the smile fixed on his mouth as though it was painted there.
“He was shot to death,” Chambrun said. “Once between the eyes, and once in the heart.”
“And you sit here having breakfast!” Teague said.
“I am neither a mourner nor a policeman, Mr. Teague. I’m a hotel manager. I’m also very jealous of the Beaumont’s reputation, so I’m not happy.”
“Screw your happiness!” Teague said. Chambrun’s eyes were narrowed slits in their dark pouches. I had the feeling that this was a confrontation of two antagonists who, whatever the words spoken, regarded each other as formidable.
“Let’s get very clear about the issues here, Mr. Teague,” Chambrun said. “Neither Mr. Slade nor Mr. Jerningham is dead because of any negligence on the part of the hotel. On the surface, certainly, we have no reason to believe that any member of our staff is a murderer. We cannot, you understand, be sure of that. The techniques employed by you and your friends over the years can obviously have made mortal enemies in strange places. But there are not even the vaguest suspicions that anyone connected with the Beaumont is involved.”
“No?” Teague’s voice had a rasping edge to it. “What about Haskell, here? He’s been harboring Craig in his quarters, hasn’t he? You know what happened in your tawdry little club early this morning?”
“Gary Craig is being questioned by the police at this moment,” Chambrun said. “Miss Standing is under arrest as a material witness in the Slade case. The police are not inactive. Mr. Haskell shared his rooms with Craig, partly because you went over my head in the way of getting accommodations here. There wasn’t a single vacancy in the hotel.”
“You took no steps to protect us from a killer who’s prowling your corridors,” Teague said.
“You asked for no protection, Mr. Teague. And if you had we’d have told you to refer to the police. We protect you against inconvenience, against discomfort, against the maraudings of petty hotel thieves who might make the mistake of trying to operate here. We guarantee you quiet, efficient service, high-caliber cuisine. But we cannot guarantee you safety from someone seeking revenge for past outrages at your hands. I regret what’s happened because it will make a thousand other guests uneasy. If I had any wish at all, it would be that you and your friends leave the hotel.”
“Would you like it, Em, if I drubbed a little politeness into him?” Delaney asked.
Teague ignored the question. “You were my enemy before I got here, Chambrun,” he said. “You played foolish little games with us, like putting us all on separate floors. If we’d been together, Ivor would be alive now. You harbored a man who publically insulted Miss Towers. You left your apologies for that to a menial headwaiter, while your personal representative, Haskell here, coddled the insulter. I have a feeling Georgie Battle will be very interested with all I’ll have to tell him.”
“Perhaps he will,” Chambrun said. “Meanwhile, I have far too much on my hands this morning to devote any more time to reciprocal insults, Mr. Teague. Did you have some other reason for coming here?”
“I want and demand protection for myself and my three surviving friends,” Teague said. “I want it from you and your staff.”
Chambrun picked up the phone on his desk. “Be good enough, Ruysdale, to get me the police commissioner.” He put down the phone. “Lieutenant Hardy tells me that you’ve already had Mr. Battle intercede for you with the commissioner, Mr. Teague. I’m sure you can persuade him to provide you with an official bodyguard. Anything else?”
“I want to talk to Doris Standing,” Teague said. “I understand that you’re protecting her.”
“She’s under arrest,” Chambrun said. “You will have to make your request to the police.”
Teague reached into his pocket for a gold cigarette case. Delaney held a lighter for him. And then Teague grinned, an utterly disarming grin. Doris had said he had charm. This was the first glimpse I’d had of it.
“You’re a tough old bird, Chambrun,” he said.
“I’m not easily intimidated, even by a man of your talents, Mr. Teague,” Chambrun said. The corner of his mouth twitched in a suppressed smile. “You see, I know exactly what my value is to Georgie Battle.” The smile escaped him. It amused him to refer to the owner as ‘Georgie.’ “In a showdown, he’d have to let me have my way because he couldn’t bear to come home to run his own hotel. It gives me an edge.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret,” Teague said, enjoying himself. “I knew, after the unfortunate Julie Frazer affair, that I’d be politely told there were ‘no rooms at the inn’ if I tried to make reservations. I called Georgie to demand that the Beaumont take care of me. Do you know what he said? He said, ‘I’ll try. But if Chambrun says no, there’s nothing I can do about it.’ ”
“Why did you want to come here?” Chambrun asked.
“Wouldn’t you go to the scene of the crime if a friend of yours was murdered?” Teague asked. “And there was Doris, poor child. She disappeared into thin air two weeks ago. We’ve been frantic, trying to find her.”
“Two weeks?” Chambrun asked. I knew what he was wondering. February twentieth, three weeks ago, was the date from which Doris claimed she could remember nothing.
“She ran away from us once before,” Teague said. “That was when she met our murdering friend, Craig. We were afraid she’d gone to him again, but we discovered he, too, was trying to find her. Her housekeeper in Beverly Hills reported he’d been on the phone. He’d expected her here and she evidently didn’t show up. We were concerned, so Jeremy Slade came east to look out for her, protect her if she needed protection.” He paused to put out his cigarette. “I know you don’t approve of us, Chambrun, but we are a very close little group. Others may not appreciate our humor, our kind of fun, but it has tied us together for a long time. In the space of twenty-four hours, I’ve lost two friends I thought of as brothers.”
This Teague was a man of many faces. There had been the sardonic enjoyment I’d seen there while Craig was being beaten in the Blue Lagoon; the look of shock when he’d first come into the office; the flushed anger of the first exchange with Chambrun; the attractive, almost boyish smile of a moment ago. Now his face was marble cold, the eyes very bright, the mouth a thin slit. This, I thought, was the face of real danger.
“All my life,” he said to Chambrun, “I’ve been involved with the law. It’s been a lifelong amusement of mine to scurry through its loopholes. I know the handicaps under which your Lieutenant Hardy is working. He didn’t make an arrest yesterday, because he couldn’t make it stick, legally. He’s harassing Doris because he doesn’t know what else to do. Up to now she’d had no one to protect her but that black paladin!” His nostrils flared with anger. I suddenly sensed a kind of Klan bigotry in the man. He had contempt for T. J. Madison because he was black. “Doris is one of us. I will not have her put through a meat grinder just to satisfy an inept police investigation. I’ve made myself a promise.” His voice lowered. “I’m going to stop them from beating Doris, and if the law fails to deal with Craig, I will not!”
The phone rang on Chambrun’s desk. He picked it up, listened, and put it down again. “The commissioner is somewhere in the morning traffic between his home and his office,” he said. “He should call back in about twenty minutes.”
“Tell him I’ve changed my mind,” Teague said. “Tell him I’ve decided to make this a do-it-yourself project.” He stood up. “If your lieutenant isn’t quick, efficient, and final, Mr. Chambrun, the Beaumont may be the scene of events that will become part of the history of this little Dutch Village. Tally-ho, friend.”
He went out, with the carrot-topped Delaney at his heels. Chambrun picked up the phone again and said: “Ruysdale!”
Miss Ruysdale materialized.
“Call Mrs. Veach,” Chambrun said. Mrs. Veach was the chief telephone operator on the day shift. “I want every phone call, in, out and within the house, from Rooms 1204, 1612, 1421, and 609 monitored. I want an immediate report on all calls, even if it’s an order for ice water.”
“Right,” Ruysdale said.
“I want someone stationed in the hallways outside each of those rooms. I want to know instantly who comes out, who goes in.”
“Right.”
“Get hold of Dodd and tell him I want to know exactly where Teague, Towers, Maxwell, and Delaney are at all times. If they are joined by friends or guests from the outside, I want to know about it—who the friends are if possible.”
“Right.”
“I want these bastards covered every instant they’re in the place.”
“What can they do?” I heard myself ask.
“They could set fire to the place,” Chambrun said, drily, “which would be rather more simple than what we can expect.”
His phone rang again.
“Yes, Atterbury,” he said. Then. “Oh, God, I didn’t expect her so soon. Haskell will be there at once. Eighteen B is ready?” He put down the phone. “Veronica Trask,” he said. “Take care of her, Mark. Tell her I’ll come to pay my respects as soon as I can get free.”
I don’t know what I really expected to find at the reception desk. At the height of her career, thirty years ago, Veronica Trask had been considered one of the two or three most beautiful women in the world. There had been the mystique of Garbo, the curious, irregular beauty of Shearer, the bright, rollicking American warmth of Lombard, and the dark, romantic fires of Veronica Trask. I remembered her on the screen as tall, regal, all woman—the inaccessible one who, in the process of a hundred stories, became, at last, accessible, revealing a humor so delightful, a warmth so tender, a surrender so sweet, that all women seemed to turn pale beside her. She had been my idea of the living end!
She hit the very top in the first five years of the thirties and stayed there for another five years—until the outbreak of the war. Her picture-making career ended abruptly after Pearl Harbor. We saw her on the screen occasionally, in newsreels of her visits to Army camps in this country and, later, just behind the fighting lines in Africa, Italy, and, finally, the Western Front. She gave up everything to help sustain the morale of the American G.I. You still hear veterans talking about her sudden appearance in some bloody field hospital. She lived all the things she had once acted on screen—a genuine heroine.
I almost didn’t want to see her. She had to be, I thought, a good sixty-five. I knew, somehow, that she’d have grown old gracefully, but the prospect of seeing only the shadow of Veronica Trask filled me with a kind of sadness.
I should have saved myself those romantic fancies.
I saw the little entourage around Atterbury’s reception desk as I crossed the lobby from the elevators. Johnny Thacker, the day bell captain, was already in charge of a substantial collection of luggage. I saw the two women, both moderately tall, slim, expensively dressed. The one wearing the large, black glasses must be Veronica Trask. Black glasses are part of the uniform of visiting Hollywood dignitaries. But from ten yards away, I saw that I was mistaken.
Atterbury had already indicated my approach and the two ladies had turned to look at me.
Veronica Trask! No glasses. She hid nothing. And why should she, because it was still pretty glorious. I suppose the camera, even with special makeup, would have told the truth about the years. There would have been telltale lines at the slender neck and throat, at the corners of the wide, cornflower-blue eyes. I suppose Shelda, with those gimlets she uses for eyes when looking at another woman, would have told me that the dark hair was tinted. The remarkable thing was that she wore little or no makeup—just what the average woman wears on the street. Her skin was smooth, suntanned from much outdoors. She seemed to glow with all her old energy and vitality. Her smile, as I approached, made me feel I was hurrying toward an old and very dear friend. I had to remind myself that I’d never seen her before off the screen. She held out her hand to me in a comradely gesture.
“You needn’t have bothered to give us the celebrity treatment, Mr. Haskell,” she said. It was the voice I remembered, low and exciting. Her handshake was firm. The blue eyes danced with some private amusement.
“Mr. Chambrun is bitterly disappointed not to be here to greet you personally,” I said. “We have some problems here this morning. He’ll call on you the moment he can be free.”
A faint cloud passed over the wonderfully expressive face. “We had a rather gaudy account of your problems from the taxi driver who brought us here,” she said. “I’d like you to meet my secretary, Gail Miller.”
I really hadn’t looked at the other woman until then. The black glasses made her face unreadable, but I guessed her to be in her forties. Her figure was good. She gave me a brisk little nod without speaking.
“May I take you up to your suite?” I asked.
“Please do, Mr. Haskell. And tell Pierre not to bother with us until he has time to sit down and talk. I won’t let him go quickly when he does appear.”
I’d never heard anyone call Chambrun by his first name before.
We headed for the elevators, and I realized for the first time that dozens of people were watching us with open interest. Miss Trask could still stir excitement in those who remembered her.
It just happened that I’d never been in Suite 18B. The suites in the Beaumont are not identical. Each one has been individually furnished and decorated. I somehow expected something delicate and very feminine—perhaps French in the royalist period. To my surprise, 18B was supermodern, its colors bright, surrealistic reproductions on the walls. I wondered how this great lady of the past would react to it. She was pleased.