Authors: Hugh Pentecost
He has a little office just back of the cloakroom at the entrance to the Blue Lagoon. It was about six in the evening when I got to him. He was not yet wearing his full-dress regalia for the evening. The Blue Lagoon doesn’t open until eight. He was at his desk, smoking a cigarette in a long holder, and looking like a Spanish movie star.
“Thanks for dropping by,” he said.
“Pleasure,” I said.
“Drink?” He indicated a very handsome set of cut-glass decanters on his desk.
“I’m headed for two very dry martinis in the Trapeze,” I said. “Another time.” I knew he would offer me a rare Spanish sherry, which I loathe.
“I tried to reach the boss,” he said, “but I guess he’s suffering from ninth-flooritis. Hell of a mess. Ruysdale suggested I talk to you.”
“Shoot,” I said.
He picked up a clipboard on his desk and turned it around so I could read what was on the top sheet. It was a list of table reservations for that evening in the Blue Lagoon. There was a large checkmark after one name. The name was Emlyn Teague. The number five was circled just after the name with the time notation, eleven
A.M.
“He’s supposed to be in California,” I said.
“That’s where the reservation came from—about an hour ago. Teague’s manservant.”
“Then Teague himself can’t be out there,” I said.
“He could be,” Cardoza said. “I checked through our travel bureau. American Airlines has a Boeing Jet that leaves Los Angeles at six our time—right about now—and gets into Kennedy Airport at ten thirty-seven. He could just about make it here by eleven. Modern travel. Quite amazing. He could see our midnight floor show, and be back in Los Angeles for breakfast if he chose.”
I was frowning at the clipboard. The general of “the army” was on his way. I wondered if he’d made a reservation for a room or rooms.
“He’d know better,” Cardoza said. “We have ‘nothing available’ when Mr. Emlyn Teague inquires. Ordinarily, I don’t have a table for him, but with things the way they are, I thought possibly Chambrun might decide it would be advisable to see what he’s up to.”
A table for five. There were five names left on the list Chambrun had shown me that morning, Teague, Oscar Maxwell, Barbara Towers, Van Delaney, and Ivor Jerningham. The sixth name had been attended to in Doris Standing’s suite. Chambrun, as usual, had guessed right when he’d ordered us to be on the alert for Doris’ friends.
An army depends on its communications for survival. It wasn’t impossible that, sometime after four o’clock, someone had got wind of Slade’s death and telephoned Emlyn Teague in California. He would have had an hour and a half or better to make the jet flight to New York. And, I reminded myself, if Teague was on that flight, then left Los Angeles at six o’clock our time, he couldn’t possibly have had a direct personal hand in Slade’s death.
I guess when you’ve worked for Chambrun as long as Cardoza has, you have an instinct for the moment when a standing order should be broken. I managed to get through to Chambrun about ten minutes after I left Cardoza. He’d been closeted with Hardy and another old friend in the city’s legal machinery, Assistant District Attorney John Naylor. Naylor, bald as an egg, was a very tough cookie. Evidently the powers-that-be had decided not to play it sweet and low with Doris. Naylor was reserved for the no-holds-barred approach.
Chambrun indicated he was pleased with Cardoza’s decision to reserve a table for Teague.
“You and I will be on hand as a welcoming committee,” he said.
I learned later that Hardy had ordered a man to Kennedy to check on the arrival of the American Airlines jet at ten thirty-seven—just to make sure that Emlyn Teague actually arrived on it. The lieutenant wasn’t missing the most remote chance of a lead, because the truth was that after two hours he had nothing to go on except his own strong conviction that Doris Standing was a murderess, or at the least an accessory to murder.
I was ready for that martini when I hit the Trapeze Bar about six-thirty. The Trapeze is an experience the first time you hit it at the cocktail hour. Everything is very slick, seemingly unhurried, and yet you don’t wait between drinks. Mr. Del Greco, the captain, and his highly efficient staff see to that. Fumble in your pocket for a lighter, and someone is already holding a flame to your cigarette.
At six-thirty, many of the customers are dressed for the evening. The Trapeze is a way station before passing on to a private party somewhere, or to one of the hotel’s dining areas. On the whole, the customers in the Trapeze are totally unselfconscious. The women are expensively put together, gowned, jeweled. You’ll see many more hair colors than God ever invented. The men, in the uniform of the black tie, reveal very little about themselves. The people in the Trapeze are not displaying themselves to a gawking public. Even the recognizable movie star at a corner table seems relaxed. This is a refuge from autograph hunters and glamour-struck adolescents. The salient impression I think you get is that everyone in the room is too rich to be interested in you.
Eddie, the head bartender, must have seen me at the door, for my dry martini was waiting for me when I stepped up to the bar.
“Drink it and then I’ll give you the bad news,” Eddie said.
“What bad news?”
“Gent wants to talk to you,” Eddie said. He nodded toward a table directly across from us.
The “gent” sitting there was a little out of place in the Trapeze at that time of day. His dark gray flannels were rumpled, his tweed jacket looked slept in. He was smoking a pipe, which isn’t against the rules, but isn’t generally “done” in the Trapeze. He had blond curly hair, worn shaggy, and he was looking at me steadily from under bushy eyebrows. His eyes were a palish blue and unblinking.
“Who is he?” I asked Eddie.
“New one on me,” Eddie said. “He might be new on one of the papers. Boy, have we been swamped with questions. What really did happen in 9F?”
“Somebody shot a man named Slade,” I said.
“Him I know!” Eddie said. “He was here at lunchtime. You may have heard. Poor little rich girl pull an Annie Oakley?”
“I don’t know, Eddie. Honestly. Neither do the cops.”
“Well, here comes your friend,” Eddie said.
I didn’t turn. I was aware of the blond man coming up beside me at the bar.
“Mr. Haskell?” he asked. His voice was low, pleasant, cultivated.
“Yes,” I said.
Close up, he was older than I’d thought—early forties. There were tiny lines at the corners of both his eyes that came from pain or laughter or both.
“My name is Gary Craig,” he said, as though it ought to mean something to me. It didn’t.
“How can I be of service to you?” I asked.
“You can let me buy you your second martini at my table,” he said.
“Look, Mr. Craig, if you’re a reporter—”
“I’m not,” he said. One corner of his mouth drew down in a pleasantly crooked little smile. “I like to think of myself, among other things, as being a friend of Doris Standing’s.”
Warning signals went up. Was this a member of the “army” no one had told me about? “If you hope I can tell you anything about what’s happened this afternoon, Mr. Craig, it’s no go. I’m not at liberty to talk about it—friend or foe.”
“I’d like to talk about it,” he said, quietly. “You can just listen. You can’t lose anything by listening, can you, Mr. Haskell?”
“I’ll buy my own drink,” I said. I grinned at him. “You can’t bribe the employees around here. House rule.”
“It would be refreshing to find a man who doesn’t have a price,” Craig said.
In my business you learn to react to people quickly, to make snap judgments about them. I found I was attracted to this man, and there was nothing to lose by listening to what was on his mind. At the moment none of us could afford to overlook anything that might add to our stock of information about Doris and her army.
A waiter brought my second martini to Craig’s table. Craig’s drink was plain soda water with a twist of lemon in it. I made a note to go easy on the martinis.
Craig knocked out his pipe in the brass ash tray on the table, dropped it in his pocket, and came out with a second one that he proceeded to fill from a plastic pouch. All the while the pale blue eyes seemed to be studying me with a sort of amused detachment.
“My feelings used to be hurt when people didn’t recognize my name,” he said after he’d got his pipe going. “Twenty years ago I was a boy wonder. Ten years ago I was ‘promising.’ Now I’m just a guy who produces a novel once every two years, gets a polite hello from the critics, and is almost totally ignored by the reading public. I have to eat, so occasionally I do a stirring piece of dramaturgy for the idiot box. If you’re one of the very few people who look to see who’s written a television script—”
“I never do,” I said.
The crooked little smile reappeared. “So much for Gary Craig,” he said. The smile vanished. “How is she?”
“Doris Standing?”
He nodded.
“Things are rough,” I said.
“You know her?” he asked.
“Never laid eyes on her until this afternoon,” I said. “But I read the papers.”
“Then you don’t know her,” he said quietly. His teeth clamped down hard on his pipe stem. “Who’s helping her?”
“We’re trying to reach her attorney,” I said.
“Madison?”
“Yes. He hadn’t put in an appearance half an hour ago.”
“Is she under arrest?”
“She’s being questioned. I don’t know if there’s been a formal charge made.” I grinned at him. “You were going to do the talking. I was to listen.”
He sipped his soda water like a man enjoying a rare wine. I had a sudden hunch he was a man who’d had an alcoholic problem in his time. He handled that sparkling water like a man who’d once enjoyed what was in his glass.
“I can guess the question that must be on the top of your list,” he said, slowly. “Am I a member of Doris’ crowd—the ones who make the headlines along with her, from Hollywood to Istanbul? The answer is I’m not.”
“A plus mark for you,” I said.
“I’m a new boy,” he said, “which makes me a target for fun and games.”
“You look as though you could handle yourself,” I said.
“But can I handle Doris?”
“You want to?”
“I’m going to marry her,” he said. “She doesn’t know it, but I am.”
“I don’t know whether to congratulate you or not,” I said.
“I’m going to marry the real Doris if she can be rescued from the public Doris,” he said. He glanced at me again with the odd little smile moving his lips. “You’re thinking about her money and how much easier it would be to write unpopular novels with that kind of dough supporting you.”
“A fact of life,” I said.
“I’ve wondered whether I’ll be stuffy about it, or allow myself to sink down into it like quicksand.” He straightened his shoulders. “But I didn’t want to talk to you about my character—or lack of it. What I want is to make quite clear to you what my position is. I’m not a relative, or a fiancé—yet. I have no way to get to Doris, to help her, at a time when she needs help desperately.”
“She can buy the best help there is,” I said.
“No.” He shook his head. “She can’t buy love, or sympathy, or tenderness. That’s the kind of help she needs.”
“Question,” I said.
“Try,” he said.
“How do you know about what’s happened this afternoon? It hasn’t been released to the press.”
He hesitated for so long that I was sure he was trying to invent something plausible.
“Geography first,” he said, finally. “Doris’ base of operations is Beverly Hills. She has a magnificent house there—infested with rats!”
“Rats?”
“Emlyn Teague,” he said, his voice harsh. “Oscar Maxwell; the glamourous Bobby Towers—Barbara to you; Van Delaney; Ivor Jerningham. And there was Jeremy Slade. And a dozen lesser lights—disciples, adulators. They pop up in Paris, or London, or Rome, or New York, but Beverly Hills is the base. I live here in New York; a small studio apartment on the East Side. But that’s only a base, too. I travel. I light where the typewriter feels loose. I was spending last summer in a little cottage on the Mexican coast. That’s how I met Doris. A story in itself.”
“I’m listening,” I said.
“But I want to answer your question,” he said. “Roughly two weeks ago—it was the twenty-eighth of February, to be exact—I had a long distance call from Doris—here, in New York, in my studio.”
I felt a little tingling along the base of my spine. That was eight days after Doris professed to have drawn a blank. Craig saw he touched some kind of a button.
“That mean something to you?” he asked.
“Go ahead,” I said.
“I don’t know where the call came from,” he said. “It wasn’t person to person so there was no operator involved. She didn’t sound like herself. There’s a kind of brash bravado about her; a surface act. But not this time. She sounded desperate. ‘I’m in very bad trouble,’ she told me. ‘I need your help, Gary.’ So I asked her where she was and said of course I’d come at once. ‘I’m on my way to New York,’ she said. ‘I’ll be there tomorrow morning. Come to the Beaumont for breakfast.’ That was all. I came here, looking for her, the next morning. That was March first. She hadn’t appeared. I asked for her. I asked for ‘Dorothy Smith,’ a name she uses. No dice. About noon I called her home in Beverly Hills. She wasn’t there, and I couldn’t pry anything out of her housekeeper as to where she might be. I waited at home for her to call again. She didn’t. I kept calling here to see if she’d checked in under either name. She hadn’t. That’s been going on for fourteen days! This morning I had an appointment to discuss a script with a TV producer. It was the first morning I didn’t call here. I’d decided the only thing I could do was go on with my own life and wait for her to call me.
“I wound up having lunch with my TV man and I didn’t get back to my apartment till about three-thirty this afternoon. Five minutes after I’d walked in my door, the phone rang. It was Jeremy Slade.”
“You knew him?”
“Sure, I know the whole crowd. I was shown off to them at the end of last summer when I went to visit Doris in Beverly Hills.” He sounded bitter. “Slade told me Doris was at the Beaumont as Dorothy Smith and that she needed me.” He shook his head. “You have to know these people to know that you can’t believe anything they say. I came up here, on guard. If Doris had called me, I’d have gone straight to her. He’d told me Suite 9F. But since the call came from Slade I was prepared for some kind of burlesque joke. I got here a little after four, scouted around a bit, and then went up to the ninth floor without announcing myself. I was just getting out of the elevator when the car in the opposite bank opened up and out came cops, a plainclothesman, a photographer. They went straight to 9F. I pretended to be elevator-waiting. A few seconds after that, you came out of 9F. I followed you, meaning to ask you what was going on. You went to the public relations office on the fourth floor. I could hear you talking to your secretary and I got the whole pitch.”