Authors: Hugh Pentecost
“I won’t describe it to you, Miss Standing, because I wasn’t there,” Chambrun said. I gave him a quick look. His voice had changed. Quick footwork, I thought. He’d recognized his mistake as fast as I had. “But I will describe something I did witness. I was with Julie Frazer when she died. It should be the icing on that particular cake for you.”
The smile on that lovely face seemed to freeze. She wasn’t supposed to have feelings about such things, but I could swear Chambrun had drawn blood.
“What is it you really want, Mr. Chambrun?” she asked. “Permission to search my suite?”
“I want your word that Slade isn’t here and that you don’t know where he is,” Chambrun said.
“He is not. I do not,” Doris said.
“Thank you,” Chambrun said. “I’d like to say one thing to you, Miss Standing. A man who allows himself to be twice burned by the same fire is a fool.”
“Meaning?”
“You’ll have to judge for yourself whether or not I’m a fool,” Chambrun said. “Thank you again.”
He turned and walked briskly out of 9F. …
About four o’clock of what seemed a long afternoon, Shelda Mason, my fabulous secretary, and I were sitting in the Grand Ballroom watching Ormanski’s equally fabulous models parade in Ormanski’s fabulous designs for spring. Shelda and I had had a brief and comically heated debate about Doris Standing’s hair; I on the side of God, and she on the side of Clairol. It had left Shelda snappish about Ormanski’s models and Ormanski’s designs.
“It appears women are to be men again next summer,” Shelda muttered, as a collection of beach pajamas and slacks took their place on the runways. “These pansy designers are about to turn the world sexless.”
I said something about designs being unimportant. Women, I told her, were at their best taking off and putting on. She kicked me very solidly in the shins just as Johnny Thacker, the day bell captain, touched me on the shoulder.
“Boss wants you on the run,” he said. “Suite 9F.”
“What’s up?” I asked.
“A suicide,” Johnny said, and was gone.
My gut did a flip-flop. I felt Shelda’s hand close tightly over mine.
“Oh, no!” she whispered.
Whatever Shelda might have said about Doris Standing, when it came to realities she’s very genuine with very uncomplicated emotions. She and I were both thinking the same thing. Doris Standing was so young, so alive, so lovely. A good solid paddling by a good solid man could have put her on the rails toward a life which, with all her assets, offered everything.
I tried to be practical as I headed across the lobby toward the elevators. I knew my job would be to deal with the press and the radio and TV boys the minute this story broke. Doris Standing would make headlines. I’d have to do what I could to soft-pedal the Beaumont’s part in it. There wasn’t going to be much we could do except ask for favors in return for the many we had handed out to the news media in the past.
I asked myself if we shouldn’t have guessed something like this was in the wind. She had arrived without luggage. She’d signed in as Dorothy Smith. And the newspapers! Shelda had gotten the back issues for three weeks of both
The Times
and the
Examiner
for Doris, and delivered them in person.
“She looks pretty terrible when she isn’t done up like a circus horse,” Shelda had told me.
But why the new clothes if she meant to kill herself? I had an unpleasant vision of her, stretched out on her bed in that gold housecoat. Poison? Wrists cut?
I commandeered an elevator and was whisked up to the ninth floor. The elevator operator hadn’t heard anything but the simple fact of suicide. The hotel had already begun to buzz.
One of Jerry Dodd’s men was standing outside the door of 9F.
“You’re to go in, Mr. Haskell,” he said. “Only take a good, deep breath. It isn’t pretty.”
I didn’t want to go in, but I went in.
Jerry Dodd was there, and on the floor was a body covered with a sheet. Jerry is a thin, wiry little man in his late forties, with a professional smile that does nothing to hide the fact that his pale eyes are sharp, penetrating, and able to see and read a great deal at a moment’s glance. He is one of a half-dozen people on the staff whom Chambrun trusts and counts on without reservation.
“Where’s the boss?” I asked him, in a funeral-parlor whisper.
He nodded toward the bedroom. “In there with her,” he said.
I felt the small hairs rising on the back of my neck. “Her?” I said.
“Doris Standing,” Jerry said.
“But—?” I pointed at the sheet. “I thought—”
Jerry’s mouth was a grim slit. He bent down and pulled aside one end of the sheet.
“I thought it was an act,” Jerry said, “but it seems there may have been a loaded shell in that gun after all.”
I wouldn’t have recognized Jeremy Slade if I hadn’t been forewarned. The top of his head was blown away.
S
OMEDAY, I MAY GET
used to sudden death; even violent death. I have said the Beaumont was like a town. In the course of a year, I suppose a quarter of a million people walk its streets. I’ve never really figured, but when you add up the constantly changing population that occupies its more than twelve-hundred-and-fifty rooms, the daily lunch crowds, the cocktail drinkers, the dinner and night-club turnout, the visitors to fashion shows, special banquets, small conventions, perhaps a quarter of a million is a conservative guess. Take any real town of that size and you have a daily quota of small tragedies, accidents, violence, and death. In a well-run town the crime rate is low. In a very special town like the Beaumont, its citizenship made up almost entirely of rich and successful people—except for perhaps a thousand employees—the crime rate can be kept almost at zero. But suicides will match the average rate anywhere else. Perhaps it’s a little higher. Important men have further to fall when they make a mistake; women have more to lose when they are deserted for someone younger, or richer, or more daring. A high percentage of the Beaumont’s steady population are in an upper-age range. Terminal illness is not rare, and more people than we know of take their own lives when they’re faced with unremitting pain, or permanent disability.
There are routines to be followed when sudden death occurs at the Beaumont. Fortunately for my queasiness about death, my part in it usually involves only a discreet release to the news media.
Jeremy Slade was not an admirable person from what I knew of him. He’d been a key figure, according to Chambrun, in what had led to the final destruction of Julie Frazer, a tragic woman. He was a member of a group of vicious sensation hunters. But he was suddenly, violently dead—and he’d been alive a few minutes ago. Another’s sudden death reminds us too vividly of what lies, inevitably, ahead for all of us.
The palms of my hands were sweating as I watched Jerry Dodd cover the bloody, mangled remains of a human head.
“You’re to join the boss,” Jerry said. He was scowling, as though he, too, was unusually disturbed by what lay at his feet.
“What happened?” I asked, out of a dry mouth. “According to our Doris, he tried it once too often,” Jerry said. He fished in his pocket for a cigarette. “The cops may not buy it.”
“How do you mean?” I said. “It’s been a running gag with him. Only this noon—”
“No powder burns,” Jerry said, sharply. “What are you talking about?” I’d only partly taken it in.
“No powder burns,” Jerry said. “The gun wasn’t held close to his head. Catch on, dad?”
“Then—”
“Yeah—then!” Jerry said.
I walked into the middle of something in the next room. Doris Standing was sitting in a chintz-covered armchair, still wearing the gold housecoat. I noticed, irrelevantly, that the price tag was gone from its sleeve. She’d bought it. Her face was ivory white, accentuating the scarlet of her mouth. She was staring straight ahead of her, gripping the arms of the chair, as if she was watching some kind of nightmare movie on an invisible TV set. She wasn’t looking at Chambrun; she didn’t look at me as I came in. It was like a trance.
Chambrun, his eyes hooded, was standing a few feet from the chair, tapping an unlighted cigarette on the back of his hand. He gave me a quick look that told me I was expected to say nothing, ask nothing.
“I would like to make my position quite clear to you, Miss Standing.” Chambrun sounded as if he’d said exactly this before without its penetrating. “This is a police matter. They’ll be here at any moment and the situation will be out of my hands. You’re a special friend of Mr. Battie’s, the Beaumont’s owner. He’d want me to help you in any way I can. Do you have a lawyer here in New York?”
“I have lawyers everywhere,” she said, in a flat voice. “Poor little rich girls have lawyers everywhere, Chambrun—feeding off us!”
“Then I think you should let me call the one who represents you here in New York.”
“Why?” she asked, without looking at him. “Jeremy pulled his act once too often. Why should I need help?”
“It wasn’t a suicide, Miss Standing,” he said quietly.
She turned her head, very slowly, to look at him.
“Come again,” she said.
“It wasn’t a suicide,” Chambrun said. He lit his cigarette and watched her, eyes narrowed against the little cloud of pale, bluish smoke.
“You’re playing a game with me!” she said, her voice not quite steady.
“Games are your forte, Miss Standing,” he said.
A little nerve twitched high up on her cheek. “Let me tell you again exactly what happened,” she said.
“Please do.”
“Marinelli had just left me,” she said. “I bought some clothes, you know. Having arrived without any luggage, I needed a full wardrobe of things.”
“Why was that?” Chambrun asked.
“Why did I need clothes? My dear man, I—”
“Why did you come without luggage?”
She turned her head to look at the bed. For the first time, I saw that it was strewn with newspapers. More papers were scattered around it on the floor.
“I came on the spur of the moment,” she said. She laughed, and it was a bitter little sound. “I have a reputation for acting on impulse.”
“Have it your way,” Chambrun said. “Marinelli had just left you—?”
“She’d only been gone a moment or two when someone knocked. I supposed it was Marinelli who’d forgotten something. I opened the door and—and there was Jeremy.”
“An old friend.”
“Yes.” The scarlet mouth tightened. “He didn’t ask to come in. He just came in. I wasn’t glad to see him—just then.”
“Why?”
“I was sick of Jeremy and his act. I knew from you what he’d done earlier in the day—in the Trapeze. I didn’t want to be involved with him. It would call attention to my presence in the hotel. You know I didn’t want that. I’d registered as ‘Dorothy Smith.’ ”
“He wanted you to hide him?”
Doris shook her head, slowly. “He said he had to talk to me about something important. ‘The time has come, the Walrus said—,’ he said. I didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘Just to get in the mood,’ he said, and pulled out that silly gun. I told him I hoped it would work this time. ‘It won’t,’ he said, ‘until we’ve had a chance to talk things out.’ And then he held it to his head and pulled the trigger. There was the usual click, the usual delighted laughter from him. ‘This,’ I told him, ‘is the essence of Dullsville.’ I turned my back on him and came in here, closing the door behind me. He shouted after me that he could wait all night to talk to me, if necessary. I was angry. I didn’t have anything I wanted to talk to him about. I—I couldn’t think of anything. Well—the things I’d bought from Marinelli were all over the place in boxes, those boxes over there. I unpacked them and hung the dresses in the closet and put the other things away in the bureau. I’d just finished and was stacking the boxes when I heard a shot. I wasn’t startled. It just made me angry. I was supposed to go running out to see what had happened and Jeremy would be there laughing at me. But—but I heard a heavy thud, like someone falling. I waited for him to make his next move—like an exaggerated moan or a cry for help. There wasn’t anything. I—I have to admit I couldn’t resist looking to see what he was up to.” Her lips trembled. “I went to the door—and looked. Then I called you.”
“You didn’t hear anything else—like the outside door closing?” Chambrun asked.
She shook her head.
“If you hold a gun close to your head and fire it, there will be powder burns around the wound,” Chambrun said. “There weren’t any. The shot that killed Slade wasn’t fired at that kind of close range.”
She stared at him.
“Had you given anyone the key to this suite, Miss Standing?”
“No.”
“Where is it?”
“On the bureau—I think.”
It was.
“I’ve been playing around with this, Miss Standing,” Chambrun said, “without using the word that goes with it. Murder. Someone shot and killed Jeremy Slade. Since you were the only person in the suite with him, the police are going to be justifiably interested in you. I think you should let me call your attorney.”
She took a long, deep breath. I could see she was fighting for control. “His name is T.J. Madison,” she said. “You’ll find him in the phone book.”
T.J. Madison. It rang some kind of a bell but I couldn’t place it. I looked at Chambrun but his face was expressionless.
“I’d like to ask you one more question, Miss Standing,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Did you find what you were looking for in the back issues of
The Times
and the
Examiner
?”
Her right hand rose quickly to cover her mouth. Her eyes were wide with fright.
“I’m only guessing,” Chambrun said, almost gently. “Am I right in thinking you’ve drawn some kind of a blank, covering the last three weeks?”
Tears welled up into her eyes. “Oh, my God!” she whispered.
“Care to tell me about it?” Chambrun asked. “That’s why you walked out on Slade, isn’t it? Why you didn’t want to talk to him? You were afraid he’d bring up something that for the moment was blanked out for you.”
She began to rock back and forth in the chair, arms crossed over her stomach as if she was fighting pain.
“Since you’ve guessed,” she said. “This morning—I was asleep. Someone was shaking me awake. I opened my eyes and saw a man in a blue uniform looking down at me, smiling. He was the conductor on a railroad train. ‘End of the line, miss,’ he said. ‘Grand Central.’ There I was, sitting on a stopped train. Everyone else had left or was leaving. New York. I had no memory of any train trip, or why I was there. I knew who I was, I knew where I was. But I had no idea why I was there or where I’d come from. I didn’t have any luggage.