Authors: Hugh Pentecost
“Then there’s nothing I can tell you,” I said. I was a little burned with myself. I remembered talking to Shelda in her reception-room office and, I guess, in the excitement, we hadn’t bothered to close the hall door.
“What about this amnesia thing?” Craig asked.
“You heard,” I said.
“They believe her?”
“Do you?”
“I would if she told it to me,” Craig said. He turned his glass round and round in his fingers. The lines at the corners of his mouth had deepened. “The fact that I didn’t hear from her for two weeks, after a cry for help—Oh, hell!” He sat there, chewing on the stem of his cold pipe.
I began to wonder about this tweedy gent. He must have followed me, as he said, or he wouldn’t have known about my conversation with Shelda. But Hardy would certainly be interested in knowing whether that was his first visit to the ninth floor.
“You’re wondering if I could have killed Jeremy Slade,” he said. “God knows I haven’t any love for him or the rest of that rotten crew.” He looked down at his big strong hands. “I might have strangled him, but I don’t own a gun, Haskell.”
“You seem to be a bit of a mind reader,” I said. “If you did hear my conversation with my secretary, you must know the next question I’d like to ask you.”
“About February twenty-fifth? I haven’t the foggiest. I hadn’t heard from Doris for about a month before her call to me on the twenty-eighth. The twenty-fifth was—was just Wednesday.”
“Everywhere,” I said.
He was silent.
“I’m going to tell you something that perhaps I shouldn’t,” I said. “Pierre Chambrun, the resident manager of this palace and my boss, has a very complete book on Doris and her army. The minute she checked in here, at five o’clock this morning, we were all alerted to be on the lookout. Before the murder. Before anything at all. It was Chambrun’s guess we could expect the rest of them to congregate. Well, Slade came. And Emlyn Teague has reserved a table for five in the Blue Lagoon Room tonight. Would you guess they were coming to help Doris, or to hunt down the killer of their chum Slade, or to set off more bombs under our noses?”
“To guess about Teague and Company is to wish a disaster on yourself,” Craig said. “And while I’m being pontifical, remind your friend, Chambrun, that it was Plutarch who said: ‘The pilot cannot mitigate the billows or calm the winds.’ And to mix metaphors, when the plague descends it strikes the rich and the poor, the well and the sick, the innocent and the guilty.”
“What is Teague like?” I asked.
The pale-blue eyes looked at me, narrowed. “He’s not like you, or me, or anyone else on this godforsaken planet,” Craig said. “To look at? Medium height, slender, mouse-brown hair which he wears a little too long but not in the current Beatle style. You might think him soft, unless you decided to test his physical strength. He’s like strung piano wire. His face? A pleasant, smiling mask. It disarms when it should be frightening the hell out of you. His taste in clothes is flamboyant, expensive, with a leaning toward women’s colors. His dinner jackets are like Joseph’s cloak. He wears, at night, an opera cape lined in scarlet satin. He would never be seen in a white shirt or wearing a simple tie. There is always a flower in his buttonhole to suit the time of day, or the particular occasion, or his whim of the moment. You can count on not missing him if he invades your hotel, Haskell. He will never come or go without being noticed. He is never alone, and the people with him make sure that they, too, are noticed, according to their personal tastes. There is a girl named Bobby Towers who goes in for something like public nudity. Let her walk into the Trapeze Bar, Haskell, and you’ll hear a sound from a hundred throats like wind in a cave.”
“Doris herself is something to look at,” I said.
Craig stared at a vision of her in space, objectively critical. “You look at Doris because she is perfection,” he said. “She holds her head high, like a thoroughbred. She has style. She attracts attention with a natural grace, an animal litheness. She’s like a wild horse you see on the plains, undisciplined, untrained, but superb in her naturalness. Every man could wish himself the luck of having a Doris Standing—and taming her.” He paused and his face clouded. “Bobby Towers is the
ne plus ultra
in evil sophistication. She’s a hothouse flower. She offers everything, and for a price you can have it.”
“Price?”
“Her price is to be amused. Find a way to amuse her and you can have what you want. But I warn you in advance, Haskell, in case you’re tempted; the coin of the realm is degredation and self-disgust.”
“You sound like a writer,” I said.
“So I’ve been told,” he said, dryly. His face clouded. “There is one thing that goes with all of them. Money. Doris is so rich it hurts me to think about it. Emlyn Teague can probably match her in blue-chip holdings. The others don’t need money as long as they’re in favor. Doris and Emlyn keep the clover stand rich and high.”
“Was Jeremy Slade out of favor?”
“He was top favorite two months ago,” Craig said. “He was the tough kid with the golden smile. Lei anyone say anything publicly unpleasant about any of the chums and Slade was the chopper—an athlete, an expert at judo and karate. In short, the club bodyguard. They needed one, because the wounded fight back with a kind of desperation, and there are always the wounded in the area of Teague and Company.”
“Then it wouldn’t be unlikely that one of what you call ‘the wounded’ followed him to 9F this afternoon and shot him dead when he opened the door to a knock.”
“Most likely thing in the world,” Craig said. “But he had better have run if Teague and Company are on the way.”
“Does it prove something that you haven’t run?” I said.
There was mischief in the pale-blue eyes for an instant. “I could be their public relations man, building up your advance expectations,” he said. He laughed, and it was mirthless. “No, Haskell, I didn’t kill Slade, but if I cared a damn for myself I would run. But Doris is in trouble. She said so two weeks ago and she’s in deep now. If someone is fighting back at Teague and Company, Doris is a target as well as the others. A way to punish her would be to frame her for Slade’s murder, wouldn’t it? So I’m not running. I’m going to get her out of this if I can, and then I’m going to amputate her from Emlyn Teague for the rest of time—if I can.”
I looked at my empty martini glass. “What did you really want of me, Craig, when you asked me to join you?”
“It’s not complicated,” he said. “I have no way of reaching Doris to say that I’m here and ready to help in any way I can. You can get to her, or get a message to her. I ask for that.”
“Why not,” I said.
“And perhaps you can get me a room in this gilded cage? I don’t want to be any further from her than I can help.”
“Let’s go down to the reception desk,” I said.
I wasn’t quite sure about Gary Craig. My instinct told me he was a right guy. My professional caution told me I could have been sold a bill of goods. Chambrun had warned me that no one connected with Doris Standing could be trusted.
But I had seen her cry. If they’d turned Naylor, the assistant D.A., loose on her, she was having a bad time right about now. I wondered how T.J. Madison, the fullback, would carry the ball in this league.
Karl Nevers was on the reception desk when I got there. There wasn’t a vacancy in the place except for the house seats—the name we have for a few rooms held open by the management for special emergencies. Only Chambrun could release them and I didn’t feel this was the moment to ask him for favors. There are twin beds in the bedroom of my apartment on the fourth floor. On impulse I asked Craig if he’d like to share the place with me till something opened up.
“I’d be eternally grateful,” he said.
While Craig was signing in so that he’d get any messages or phone calls that might come for him, Nevers slid a reservation card across the desk to me.
“One for you,” he said.
The reservation read: “Miss Veronica Trask and secretary; Suite 18B, March 15.”
“Red carpet,” Nevers said.
Veronica Trask! She’d been the star of the first motion picture I’d ever seen—when I was six years old. Veronica Trask! One of the great ones in the days when Hollywood was Hollywood. Great in the days of the silents, greater at the advent of the talkies. Veronica Trask, who had held her own with Garbo, and Shearer, and the young Crawford; who had played with John Gilbert, and Barrymore, and Leslie Howard and the other great male stars of her day. I had been madly, madly in love with her at the age of ten. I had hated Lewis Stone who had played the suave villain who wanted to marry her in my first movie.
“I thought she was dead,” I said. “I haven’t heard of her for years.”
“She retired about twenty years ago. According to the secretary who made the reservation, this is her first time out of seclusion since 1947.”
“She’ll be mobbed by fans who still love her,” I said. “Including me! I suppose she’ll want to keep her presence here quiet.”
“On the contrary,” Nevers said. “I was told we could notify the press.”
“Veronica Trask!” I said, sounding very juvenile.
“What about her?” Craig asked, at my elbow.
“She arrives tomorrow,” I said.
“Coming here?” he sounded interested. I guessed everybody in New York over thirty would be interested. “A very great lady,” Craig said.
“You know her?”
“No,” he said, “but I’ve always wished I did. We’ve forgotten about her kind of glamor in this a-go-go age.”
I
GAVE CRAIG AN
extra key to my rooms on the fourth floor. He had no luggage, but he announced he’d go back to his apartment for clothes after I’d gotten his message to Doris Standing. The back issues of
The Times
and the
Examiner
had been delivered to my quarters, and I left Craig there, going through them, chewing on his pipe.
It was twenty minutes past seven when I arrived in Chambrun’s office. I knew that his dinner would be served to him in ten minutes and that nothing short of an earthquake would be allowed to interfere with his relaxed enjoyment of it.
Chambrun wasn’t alone. Miss Ruysdale was with him, and a startlingly large Negro who had to be T.J. Madison. The ex-fullback was undeniably eye-catching. I’d guess he was about six feet four, with broad, broad shoulders tapering down to a ballet-dancer’s waist. He was quietly dressed in a charcoal-gray suit, white shirt, and a plain navy-blue tie. One look at him close up and you knew why some linebackers in the pro football league had retired early. They used to say of him that no one man could bring him down when he was carrying the football. They talked of him still as the greatest ever, of his extraordinary balance, speed, and power.
Chambrun introduced us, and he spoke my name in a low pleasant voice without any trace of the South in it. I remembered he’d graduated from one of our top Eastern colleges.
“Mr. Madison has a problem,” Chambrun said. “Lieutenant Hardy and Naylor haven’t brought any formal charge against Miss Standing, but they’ve warned us that if she tries to leave her suite, one will be placed. A plainclothes cop outside her door has a warrant for her arrest, charging her with murder which he’ll serve if she steps out into the hall.”
“They have no right to hold her without charging her,” Madison said, “but in effect they are holding her.”
“She’s certainly better off where she is than locked up in a cell downtown,” I said.
“I’m not sure,” Madison said. “I’m not sure we aren’t playing their game by letting her be a voluntary prisoner. They haven’t got a thing on her except that she was in the next room when Slade was shot.”
“She
says
she was in the next room,” I said.
Madison’s dark-brown eyes studied me. “You’ve made up your mind about her, Mr. Haskell?”
“Just trying to think the way Hardy thinks,” I said. “Has the fog lifted any?”
“Fog?”
“The blackout. The ‘amnesia bit,’ ” I said.
“Nothing,” Chambrun said. “Ruysdale and I have been through the papers. We draw a blank on February twenty-fifth, or any other day. Neither Doris nor any of her friends made the papers in that three-week span.”
I explained that I hadn’t had a chance to go through the papers myself, which brought me to a brief account of my meeting with Gary Craig. Craig’s name didn’t seem to ring any bell with Madison or Chambrun. Miss Ruysdale had read three of his novels.
“He’s a man with hope, competing with our successful writers who write hopelessly about their unhappy childhoods and their adolescent failures,” Miss Ruysdale said. “He’s one of the few adult novelists of our time. It seems nobody wants to be adult today, which is why he is determinedly overlooked.”
“Is there any reason I can’t get his message to Doris Standing?” I asked.
“Technically, no,” Madison said. “But they’re playing this so high-handedly that they may or may not let you in to see her.”
“She has to eat,” Chambrun said, glancing at his wrist watch. His own dinner was due. “Pick up a menu on your way in. We provide de-luxe service, even to people under house arrest.”
I took Chambrun’s cue and did it up in spades. I had a shaker of martinis made up at the service bar and carried it, with two glasses and a dinner menu to the door of 9F. One of Hardy’s men was sitting outside reading an evening paper. He knew me from a year ago.
“Might as well make the lady comfortable while we can,” I said.
The cop shrugged. “Normal hotel service is permitted,” he said.
“She can see friends?”
“Not without Hardy’s okay,” the cop said.
“Then she is under arrest?”
The cop grinned at me. “You know better than to get nosy, Mr. Haskell. Take the lady her drink. I’ll bet she can use it.” He unlocked the door for me.
I went into the sitting room. Doris was standing by the center table, her eyes blazing with anger. “Am I not even allowed the courtesy of a knock or a bell ring?” she demanded.
She was wearing a dark-green wool street dress. She’d evidently prepared herself to be whisked away on Hardy’s whim.
“Watchdog opened the door,” I said. “I didn’t want to discuss protocol with him in case he changed his mind about letting me in. I hope martinis are your dish.”