Authors: Hugh Pentecost
“So what, Ruysdale?”
“So someone may remember a girl in a trench coat, soft felt hat, and black glasses. You’ve been asking if anyone saw Doris Standing.”
Hardy’s crew were still up in the penthouse area, going over the apartment and the roof outside, the fire stairs for fingerprints or clues of any sort. Hardly called the apartment and in two minutes had the answer. There was no street coat or hat among Doris’ belongings. No black glasses.
And so a new question was fired at the Beaumont’s staff. Did anyone remember a girl in a trench coat, soft-brimmed hat, and black glasses?
Round and round it went.
Reports filtered in from Hardy’s crew. They’d picked up a dozen different sets of fingerprints in Chambrun’s apartment. It would take time to account for them. They would obviously include Chambrun’s, Madison’s, Doris’, Craig’s, mine, Hardy’s, probably the floor maid’s.
“Oh, we’re very thorough, very scientific,” Hardy said bitterly. He was sitting in one of the high-backed chairs facing Chambrun’s desk. He was chain-smoking. “A few hours ago, Chambrun, you talked me out of considering the Standing girl and Craig as suspects in our little drama. Well, I—”
“I know what you’re thinking,” Chambrun said. “We’ve assumed that X came up the fire stairs, opened the trench windows into my guest bedroom, and confronted Doris. There was some kind of row, and Madison came running and got the works. Then Doris was forced out at gun point. But you’re thinking there needn’t have been any X.”
“Right,” Hardy said. “Go back to what I always thought—that Craig or the girl or both of them together were what we wanted. Maybe Madison heard them talking together—heard the truth. He barges in and one of them shoots him. The girl then goes out on the roof, down the fire stairs and out of the hotel. Craig goes out the front door and picks up his bodyguard, goes down to Haskell’s rooms, and showers. Nobody knows the girl is missing and Madison shot for nearly two hours. Or it can have been the girl alone, without any cooperation from Craig. For my dough, we have to keep them in the picture, Chambrun.”
Ruysdale interrupted. “Long-distance call from California for T. J. Madison,” she said. “It’s some private-detective agency. If Mr. Madison isn’t available, they’d like to talk to Mr. Chambrun.”
Chambrun has one of those telephone talk boxes on his desk, where you can throw a switch and everyone in the room can hear the conversation. The call was switched through it.
“Chambrun, here.”
“I’m Harry Markson of the Markson Detective Agency,” the voice from the box said. “Mr. Madison said if I couldn’t reach him, I was to report to you.”
“That’s correct,” Chambrun said. “Madison isn’t here. You’ve got something?”
“We were to backtrack on Miss Standing’s trail starting February twentieth,” Markson said. “We’ve come on something which maybe you can simplify for us on that end.”
“Yes?”
“On the night of February twentieth, Miss Standing had dinner at a public restaurant here—The Cherub Club—with some friends. There were six men and another woman. The woman was a Miss Barbara Towers of Malibu. The men—I’ll skip the addresses—were an Emlyn Teague, a Jeremy Slade, an Ivor Jerningham, an Oscar Maxwell, a vanDeusen Delaney, and an old-time movie star named Norman Terry.”
The box was silent. So were we.
“You there, Mr. Chambrun?” Markson asked.
“I’m here.”
“You see why I’m calling? Three of these guys are dead. Right? Our check here tells us the rest of them are all registered right there in your hotel.”
“How true,” Chambrun said dryly.
“After dinner on that night—the twentieth—that whole crowd left The Cherub Club together. Private automobiles. We could spend days trying to pick up the trail of where they went. All you have to do is ask one of them there in your place.”
“Well just do that, Mr. Markson,” Chambrun said. “But I don’t promise we’ll be able to cut any corners for you. These people here come under the heading of hostile witnesses. Keep at it.”
“But if they do talk, let me know,” Markson said.
“That I will, Mr. Markson. Thank you—and good night.”
Chambrun switched off the box. He sat like a little dark statue, cigarette smoking between his fingers.
“What’s the surprise?” Hardy asked. “She’s always said she started out to have dinner with Teague and friends that night”
“The surprise,” Chambrun said, very quietly, “is Norman Terry. He committed suicide five days later. On the twenty-fifth. Ring a bell with you, Hardy? He was buried on the twenty-eighth. That was the day Doris called Gary Craig here in New York and said she was in trouble. And by the purest chance we came across Norman Terry’s trail earlier this evening. He paid a call on Veronica Trask the afternoon of the day he killed himself. Miss Trask is at this moment a guest of the hotel. When you have a violent death juxtaposed to a night out with Teague, you have a right to wonder.”
“I think it’s time we had Teague and chums all in one place and put them through the wringer,” Hardy said.
“Bring them up here if you like,” Chambrun said. “And while you’re at it, I think I’d like to have a word with my old friend, Miss Trask.”
He made a little gesture indicating he wanted me to go with him.
Chambrun didn’t speak to me or look at me on the way up to the eighteenth floor. I could tell he dreaded what lay ahead of us. Some pretty wild notions were running through my head. I was toying with the vision of Veronica Trask playing the dramatic role of avenging angel for Norman Terry, her one-time lover.
She didn’t look like an avenging angel when she opened the door to Chambrun’s ring. She had changed out of the cocktail dress into a wine-colored housecoat. She had on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, a new novel was tucked under her arm. A very calm avenging angel, I thought.
“Pierre!” she said. “I thought my social activities for the day were over. But please come in.”
We followed her into the living room.
“Your secretary’s still out?” Chambrun asked.
“I don’t expect her until all hours,” Veronica said. Then her eyes widened. “What’s wrong, Pierre? Has something happened to Gail?”
“It’s nothing like that. I just wanted to be sure we were alone. We’re deeper and deeper in trouble, Veronica.”
She stood very straight and still. “Another killing?”
“Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps more than one.”
We sat down and he told her everything that had happened since we’d left her, up to the point of Markson’s call from Hollywood.
“And Teague and his friends are in the clear?” she asked.
“Beyond question.”
“You didn’t come here to gossip with me, Pierre,” she said.
“No, Veronica.”
And then he told her about Markson’s call; what Markson had been called on to do.
“Norman!” she said. “But I don’t understand the connection, Pierre. What can poor Norman have to do with any of this?”
If it was a performance, it was a great one.
“Every minute we spend beating around the shrubbery, Veronica, may cost Doris Standing her life,” Chambrun said. “I’d like to ask you some questions, and later—later, perhaps, I can give you the reasons for asking them.”
“Ask me, Pierre,” she said, very quietly.
“Was Norman Terry a friend of Teague’s?” he asked.
“Not that I know of,” she said, promptly. “I was surprised when you said he’d had dinner with Teague.”
“Was he a friend of any of the others?”
“I really can’t tell you, Pierre. Even about Teague. I hadn’t seen Norman for nearly a year before that last afternoon of his life.”
“He didn’t mention Teague or any of the others to you that last time?”
“Good Lord, no! I’d remember anything about Teague.”
Chambrun took time to light a cigarette, eyes squinted against the flame of his lighter.
“That day when Terry came to see you,” he said. “He spent some time with Gail Miller while you were dressing. Did she give you the details of that conversation? You must have talked about it when you heard about the suicide.”
“There was nothing specific,” Veronica said. “She said he seemed distressed about something, but he didn’t say anything that gave her a hint of what was troubling him.”
“Veronica, you told us Gail Miller had had a tragic love affair. Who was the man?”
“Why should that interest you, Pierre?”
“Just tell me who he was,” Chambrun said.
“You may not believe it, but I don’t know,” Veronica said. “It had happened before she and I got together. That’s almost twenty years ago, Pierre. It was a private thing. If she’d wanted to tell me, she would have. She never did. I never pressed her for the details.”
Chambrun took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Could it have been Norman Terry?” he asked.
That one seemed to rock Veronica back on her heels. “Norman!”
“Could it?”
She took a long time to answer. She was looking back over a stretch of time. “It seems impossible she could have kept it from me. There are dozens of pictures of Norman in my house. We talked about him from time to time. Now and then, we saw some of the old films on television. Surely there’d have been something to suggest it—some little giveaway.”
“And there wasn’t?”
“Nothing, Pierre.”
“But it could have been,” Chambrun persisted. “They both lived and worked in Hollywood at the time her love life went sour? They could have known each other?”
“They could have,” Veronica said slowly.
Chambrun stood up. “Who are the friends she’s with tonight?”
“I don’t know, Pierre. I don’t question her. She said she was going to look up some friends. That’s all.” Veronica reached out a hand to him. “Pierre, you’re thinking—”
“I’m thinking Terry may have told her something that day at your house—the day he killed himself—that could help us. The minute she gets in, I want her to call me. Will you see to it?”
“Of course.”
Chambrun said nothing on the way down to the second floor. I knew what he was thinking. It could be, I told myself.
Ruysdale was in the outer office.
“Hardy has Teague and his friends inside,” she said.
“Anything from the staff?” Chambrun asked.
“Waters, the Fifth Avenue doorman,” Ruysdale said, glancing at her notes. “The only people answering the description we circulated—trench coat, soft hat, black glasses—to leave his way, were the two ladies from 18B. Miss Trask and her secretary. He remembers them, naturally. That’s all.”
Chambrun turned toward the inner office, and then stopped. “When was it he saw them go out?”
“Late this afternoon.”
“Holy God!” Chambrun said. “Put me through to Miss Trask.”
A moment later he was talking to Veronica, asking her when she and Gail Miller had gone out together. I guess I knew the answer without hearing it. Veronica hadn’t been out of the hotel since she’d checked in that morning.
“They’re about the same height, good figures,” Chambrun said.
“What are you talking about?” Ruysdale asked.
“Doris and Veronica,” Chambrun said. “Waters, recognizing the secretary, assumed the other one was Veronica. Get Hardy out here.”
Chambrun was at the telephone directory. He slammed it shut just as Hardy came out of the inner office.
“I haven’t got time to explain it to you now,” Chambrun said, “but I think I know who your killer is and I may just know where Doris has been taken. Let’s just hope I’m right and that it’s not too late.”
Chambrun and Hardy and I took a taxi outside the Beaumont. Chambrun gave the address of an apartment building about ten blocks north on Park Avenue.
Then he laid it on the line for us.
A uniformed doorman at the apartment building asked us politely who we wished to see.
Hardy flashed his shield. “The building superintendent,” he said.
The doorman put in a call on the house phone.
“What floor is Mr. Schramm’s apartment?” Chambrun asked.
“Eleven, sir. But Mr. Schramm’s in Europe.”
“There were two ladies staying there.”
The doorman smiled. “Sure,” he said. “Veronica Trask and her secretary. But they moved out this morning.”
“They haven’t come back?”
“As a matter of fact, they’re up there right now, sir. I guess they forgot some things.”
The building superintendent joined us. He was duly impressed by Hardy.
“Is there more than one way into Mr. Schramm’s apartment?” Hardy asked him.
“Front door, and service door at the rear.”
“You got keys for both of them?”
“Sure, but—”
“Let’s go,” Hardy said. “I want the key to the back door. You’re to let these two gentlemen in the front door.”
“But—”
“Without a sound!” Hardy said. “You make any noise and you may go to bed knowing you’ve killed somebody.”
The four of us went up in the self-service elevator. In the hallway, the superintendent showed Hardy how to get around to the rear entrance.
“Give me two minutes,” Hardy said.
We stood there, Chambrun’s eyes fixed on his wrist watch. In exactly two minutes he signaled to the superintendent to open the door of Schramm’s apartment.
The door was miraculously noiseless.
There was wall-to-wall carpeting in the little foyer inside. Chambrun and I stepped in. From some way off I heard a voice—a woman’s voice.
Chambrun tiptoed down the hallway. He stopped short of a door that opened into what proved to be a living room. I eased up beside him.
“We’re running out of time, Doris,” I heard Gail Miller say.
I could feel my heart jam against my ribs. Perhaps we were lucky at last. Chambrun took a step forward into the room.
“Entirely out of time, Gail,” he said.
It was quite a moment. Doris was seated on a couch in the room. Gail Miller stood directly behind her, a gun held against Doris’ neck. The secretary’s black glasses glittered in the lamplight as she saw us. One deep breath, I thought, and Doris’ head would be blown off. My feet felt as though they were buried in cement. I fought to keep my face deadpan as I saw Hardy appear in a doorway at the rear of the room, behind Gail Miller’s back. He had his gun out. I wanted to yell at him not to shoot. I didn’t know if he could see the weapon pressed against Doris. Even if he made a clean hit, Gail’s finger would squeeze the trigger.