Authors: Hugh Pentecost
“Approximately a month went by, and then, on the night of February twentieth, Doris set out from her house to join Teague and Company for dinner. Down drops the blackout curtain. Here’s where it gets sticky. Eight days later, she called Craig in New York to say she was in desperate trouble and needed his help. She was coming to New York and would meet him the next morning, here at the Beaumont, for breakfast. She doesn’t remember making that call. Where was she during those eight days after she set out for dinner until she called Craig? We don’t know. Where has she been for the fourteen days after she made the call? We don’t know. Did she black out, have a moment of lucidity when she called Craig, and then black out again?”
“A psychiatrist could tell us if that’s possible,” Madison said.
“I’ve already discussed that with Dr. Partridge, our house physician, who’s a very wise old bird,” Chambrun said. “He makes this suggestion. There was nothing wrong with Doris from the twentieth to the twenty-eighth of February. She ran somewhere, she hid somewhere, but she knew at the time why and where. Finally, desperately, she called Craig for help. Then came the blackout. The mind chooses to shut out something intolerable. Whatever it was, it happened between the twentieth and the twenty-eighth. It also blotted out the present for her, and for two weeks she wandered around in a fog, coming back to reality in a train at Grand Central yesterday morning. It could be that way.”
“But if it is—”
“Let me finish,” Chambrun said. “As far as Teague is concerned, she’s been missing for three weeks. He was evidently desperate himself to find her. Jeremy Slade was sent to New York in case she should turn up here, a familiar stop off for her. It’s my guess that when Slade found she’d checked in yesterday, he got in touch with Teague. Teague and Company planned to head east. I’m guessing they came after Doris, not because Slade was subsequently murdered. Doris is their reason for being here and they are desperate to get her away. Why?”
“Because she may remember what happened between the twentieth and twenty-eighth of February,” Madison said.
“Right,” Chambrun said. “It must be something they cannot afford to have made public. By the time they got here, you were handling her case. You’d avoided an arrest, but she was inaccessible. When she was released, you advised her to stay on here in my apartment. They have to change her mind about that, and so they have to get rid of you. The way to do that is to totally discredit you and put you up to your neck in your own self-defense—your own problem. Their next move will be to get her away and make sure she never tells anyone what it is she knows and has, for the moment, psychosomatically forgotten.”
Madison’s lips tightened. “She could be their next murder victim,” he said.
“She’s certainly in very great danger,” Chambrun said, “but I’d like to be certain that we’re using the right words. You say ‘their next murder victim.’ By that, you mean Slade was their first victim, Jerningham their second, and Doris may be their third?”
“What else?” Madison asked, spreading his big hands.
“This is all theory,” Chambrun said, “but I can’t make it fit—the notion that Teague is responsible for the murder of two of his closest friends. When Slade was killed, I thought it could be part of a Teague game. But not now. Not two of them. Which brings me to the part of the puzzle for which I have no pieces. I think someone is out to massacre the entire Teague organization.”
“Craig?” Madison asked.
“Possible but improbable,” Chambrun said. “I have the feeling that someone we haven’t even dreamed of is waiting in ambush to knock off Teague or another of his friends.”
“With no connection with Miss Standing’s blackout?”
Chambrun’s eyes narrowed. “I didn’t say that. It could well be connected with what happened between the twentieth and the twenty-eighth of February. According to Doris, Jeremy Slade said he wanted to talk to her about the night of the twenty-fifth.”
“Where does this get us?” I asked, speaking for the first time.
“To some very unpleasant possibilities,” Chambrun said. “Accepting this theory as fact for a moment, we know two things. What Doris has blacked out is something so dangerous to Teague that she must be stopped from remembering and telling it, at any cost. So she is in grave danger from Teague. But bear in mind that Doris has always been one of the most notorious members of Teague’s team. Actually, they have been called Doris’ Standing Army, not Teague’s. So if someone is bent on wiping out the whole miserable company, Doris would be a prime target. The minute she’s set completely free, Teague will be after her, and the murderer will be after her.”
“Hardy’s theory is simpler,” Madison said. “He thinks Doris has blown her stack and is out to annihilate the Teagues, probably with Craig’s help. He doesn’t believe in the blackout for a minute.”
“It would be fine if he’d arrest her and lock her up in a good safe cell, somewhere,” Chambrun said. “But I’d like to bet that Mr. Wallace Harmon, a lawyer with all kinds of political contacts in this man’s town, is going to get her off—and hand her over to Teague. It will be a horse race then, to see who can do her in first; Teague or the person we can only, for the moment, call X.”
“First they have to get rid of me,” Madison said. “I think I could persuade Miss Standing to stay here, under my protection and yours. If—if she doesn’t believe Miss Towers’ story.”
“Will she? You know her,” Chambrun said.
“The longer I hide, the less chance I have of being believed,” Madison said.
Chambrun flipped the switch on his intercom. “Ruysdale? Locate Lieutenant Hardy and tell him Mr. Madison is here with me.”
Chambrun walked over to the sideboard to replenish his demitasse. There was part of his theory that didn’t quite make sense to me. Doris had told me that Teague, himself, wasn’t afraid of exposure. He’d been clever enough to keep himself legally in the clear, and he would actually relish being made a public symbol of evil.
“A good point, Mark,” Chambrun said when I put it to him. “But remember, what Doris told you related to all that had happened before the twentieth of February. If we want to buy my theory, we can tell ourselves that what happened after the twentieth—perhaps on the night of the twenty-fifth, a date Slade mentioned to Doris—has put Teague behind the eight ball. He is not legally in the clear for whatever happened then. Doris doesn’t threaten an exposure of something sinister that would actually give him a kind of twisted pleasure. She threatens his freedom, his safety—the exposure of a criminal act for which he can be punished.”
“It makes sense,” Madison said. “Two of his friends have been killed. He has to know someone is gunning for him. Why stay here and wait for it? With Teague’s money they could take off for the moon, out of reach of any danger. But if Miss Standing represents a danger, too, they can’t take off and leave her behind.”
Chambrun nodded. “That is exactly how I see it,” he said. “As a hotel manager, I say let them all go away from here as quickly as possible. Let them take Doris with them. Let them make their mess on somebody else’s rug. But as a human being—” He shrugged. “Doris Standing troubles me. Repent and ye shall be saved. Somehow she doesn’t fit the essentially vicious picture presented by the others. If I drove her out of here and read about her death in the headlines, I’d feel guilty.”
“And if she stays here,” I said, “the person who’s running berserk in the hotel, may choose her for his next target.”
“We have a chance to protect her here,” Chambrun said, “but who will protect her once she’s out in Teague’s world?”
“You’re right about Miss Standing,” Madison said. He seemed to be staring back into the past. “I grew up in Harlem, Chambrun. I’m not going to deliver you a lecture on Negro ghettos. I suppose kids that grow up there are no different from kids who grow up anywhere else—except for one thing.” His smile was bitter. “When you were a kid, your mother told you that in this great land of ours you had as good a chance as anyone else to grow up to be President. Negro mothers don’t tell their kids that because it just isn’t so. Not if you’re black. Not if you’re second class.
“But to get back to kids. They run in gangs; they always have. Everywhere. They’re basically high-spirited and full of mischief. But the mischief of kids, black or white, has two different kinds of motivation. There are those who go about it for the sheer joy of raising hell, and there are those who operate from bitterness, from a sense of injustice, and from the desire to fight back—to hurt. You’re all part of the same gang, all enjoying the same laughs, you think, and then, in the excitement of some prank a tenement is set on fire, an old lady is burned to death, a kid is crippled.” The big shoulders shuddered. This, I sensed, wasn’t an invention. It had happened.
“You want out,” Madison said, after a moment. “I was lucky. I could run with a football. I got an athletic scholarship to a fine university. I carried a football for four years. I was a big name.” He laughed. “You know why I use the initials ‘T. J.’ instead of a name? Because my family were old-time Negroes who lived in a shadowy world of the past. I was christened ‘Thomas Jefferson.’ Can you imagine what I’d have been subjected to—Thomas Jefferson Madison? Carrying a football got me into big money—bigger money than I’d ever dreamed of. During my professional career as a football player, I was able to study for a law degree in the off season. It took me seven years, but I made it. I’m a good lawyer. But there are only two things anyone ever thinks about me. I was perhaps the best running back in the pro league. And I’m a Negro. But I’m getting away from Miss Standing.”
“She was one of the ones who made mischief for the sheer joy of raising hell,” Chambrun said.
“I think so,” Madison said, nodding slowly. “Teague has contempt for me because I’m black. So do the others. That bitch upstairs thinks of me as second class, too, but she’s real twisted. She had a job to do; to frame me. But I was exciting to her, too. Maybe she’s heard the rumor that a big buck nigger has unusual sexual gifts. Damn her! She hoped I’d make it real—make a pass at her. It didn’t work, so she had to fake it.” He drew a deep breath. “Thank God there are other kinds of people in the world. There’s the rare one, hidden away, to whom color makes no difference at all. They take you for what you are as a human being. But it’s never quite normal. It takes courage for a white girl to marry a Negro, or vice versa. It doesn’t take courage for you to marry one of your own kind, except”—and he smiled—“except the courage it takes to get married at all. But a mixed marriage adds a dimension that has to be faced every day. So it’s never quite normal. Then there are another much larger group of people. Politically, they’re called ‘liberals.’ Morally, we think of them as ‘good people.’ They say, ‘Just because he’s a Negro doesn’t mean he isn’t entitled to everything I’m entitled to.’ They invite you to their homes, they do business with you, they give you a little extra—‘just because you’re a Negro.’ But it’s never quite normal. Never. Doris Standing is one of those—and we’re grateful for them. Don’t think we’re not.
“A couple of years ago, I was in California. I’d been asked to cover the Rose Bowl game for a newspaper syndicate. Years ago I’d had a good day in the Rose Bowl myself. The night before the game there was a big banquet and I was one of the chief speakers. I was the big hero returned to the scene of an early triumph. There was a lot of flag-waving, and an unfortunate introductory speech that went on about how the Negro had come up in the world! And I made my speech. I kept race relations out of it. I just talked about football.
“Afterwards there were dozens of parties that would go on into the night. Everybody slapped me on the back and told me how simply great it was to see me, but on the sidewalk outside the hotel I was suddenly all alone. No one had asked me to any party. I was hailing a cab when someone spoke behind me.
“ ‘Private date, Mr. Madison?’
“I turned around and saw Miss Standing. I knew who she was. Who doesn’t who reads the papers?
“ ‘Very private,’ I said, ‘with myself.’
“ ‘Walk me to the parking lot?’ she asked. ‘I’ve got a car there.’
“My impulse is always to run, and I always fight it, and maybe I shouldn’t. Anyhow, I walked her to her car—a very fancy Ferrari. She stood by the car and looked at me, her head high the way it always is, her eyes very bright.
“ ‘I am basically a stinker, Mr. Madison,’ she said. ‘I tell myself that I’m without any prejudices and I express my outrage when any one else shows any, but I’m not able to do something pleasant at the moment without being acutely aware that you are a Negro.’
“ ‘Then forget it,’ I said.
“ ‘If I saw anyone standing on the street corner after a dinner like that, with no place to go when everyone else was going somewhere, I think my impulse would be to suggest we go have a drink somewhere—especially someone like you, from out of town, who had no local network of friends. But I’m not sure whether my impulse to ask you to do something with me is that simple, or whether I’m building myself up to myself as a great, liberal heroine. Would you take a chance on it? If I find out I’m being a phony, I’ll let you know.’ ”
Madison laughed. “Hell, she’d put it on the line, which is more than most people do. I said I’d take a chance. She suggested her house because there’d be no one there to stare at us and remind her of what a fine, clean-cut, American girl she was trying to be. You know, I wondered then if I was being set up for one of her famous practical jokes. I’d read about them. I wondered if Teague and the others would appear out of the woodwork to make a fool and a chump out of me.
“But they didn’t. Miss Standing and I sat around on the terrace of her house, and had a drink or two, and eventually I was supplied with bathing trunks and we went for a dip in the pool. I—I don’t know to this day what she was thinking about me—if being a Negro really made a big difference to her—if she was secretly afraid, or intrigued, or what. There wasn’t a moment of self-consciousness between us. Then, as it came obviously time for me to go, she surprised me with a question.
“ ‘How would you like to go on a retainer to handle my legal affairs in New York City?’ she asked.