Death After Breakfast (8 page)

“That was it? No more talk about what made him angry?” I knew Chambrun had had his encounter with George Mayberry not too long before that. It would have explained his anger.

“While we were setting up the board,” Doc said, “he muttered something about ‘that goddamned film company’ that was going to disrupt things. That’s tonight, isn’t it? And something about ‘the brainless owners.’ Then he grinned at me, handed me a dice cup, and said, ‘Go, sucker!’ That was all. He plays any game—chess, gin, backgammon, billiards—as if his life depended on it. The only thing on his mind for the next hour and a half was skinning me alive. Which he did.”

“A medical question, Doc,” I said. “We’ve been concerned that he might have had a heart attack, a stroke, with nobody around—in some room we haven’t searched yet, some closet or storage space.”

Doc snorted at me. “Pierre? Pierre is fifty-eight years old but he has the heart of a boy of twenty. You should envy his blood pressure. For all his blusterings and displays of anger I’ve never known a man with fewer tensions. He’s in perfect shape for a man much younger than he is.”

“It’s good to hear,” I said, “but it doesn’t cheer me up. It makes the chance of some kind of violence greater.”

“If anyone has harmed him,” Doc growled, “I will end my life by killing the sonofabitch who did it!”

I guess a lot of us felt that way.

It is difficult to describe how that day wore on. Jerry Dodd and his men carried on the slow, grim search of the hotel. They would not have covered all the ground for hours and hours. But as time ticked away those of us who knew what they were searching for were plunged deeper and deeper into a kind of fatalistic despair. They weren’t going to find Chambrun.

Nothing was normal as the day wore on. A lot of us knew about Chambrun but the word hadn’t leaked to the press. However, we had a murder that had leaked, and the place was swarming with reporters and photographers trying to get some kind of newsbreak from Hardy. They had deadlines to meet, and facts were sparse. Laura Kauffman had been stabbed to death in her suite. The police were following rather slender leads. That was all they got.

About four o’clock I met with Ruysdale and Michael Garrity in Chambrun’s office. The big man, who was really the power in the owners’ group, turned out to be reasonable and stubborn at the same time. He thought at first that to throw the Chambrun story into the news hopper might draw attention away from the murder. Ruysdale and I easily persuaded him that to do that would turn the hotel into bedlam. Reporters would instantly hint at two murders. It was finally agreed that I would meet with reporters, representing the hotel. It would be my job to persuade them that Laura Kauffman’s murder had nothing to do with a breakdown of hotel security. She had, in effect, had an office here to handle ball arrangements. People were free to come and go. No one had broken into the room. Whoever it was had been let in by Mrs. Kauffman. There hadn’t been any reason at all to keep the lady under surveillance or guarded. Hotel security was cooperating with the police in every way possible. The theme, then, was that the Beaumont’s management had no reason to feel responsible for what had happened.

Michael Garrity was not so pliable in another area. He expressed himself in rather colorful language on the subject of George Mayberry.

“When the police get through with him,” Garrity said, in his deep rumbling voice, “I’ll see to it that the stupid bastard is kept out of the hotel—from here on in. Which brings us to the ball and the film.”

“Mr. Chambrun had laid out very specific rules and regulations,” Ruysdale said. She was sitting at Chambrun’s desk again, and she looked exhausted, deep dark circles under her eyes.

“I’m aware of that,” Garrity said. “But I think if Chambrun were here, I could persuade him to change his mind about those rules. You see, Miss Ruysdale, the ball will no longer be an elegant charity affair. A thousand people will be jabbering about rape, and murder, and violence. Very damaging to the hotel for months to come. The one thing that might divert them, give them something else to talk about and think about, would be a filming on the dance floor and later in the lobby and the Trapeze Bar while people are still here. Duval is a famous man, like a Bergman or a Fellini. He will put on a show for them, involve them, use them. They will go home talking about him and not the unfortunate Mrs. Kauffman. I think it’s just good sense to permit the diversion, where under normal conditions it might have been as objectionable as Chambrun thought it would be.”

It made some sense, I thought

“If Mr. Chambrun comes back and finds we’ve gone over his head—” Ruysdale said.

“He’s a reasonable man,” Garrity said. “When he understands the reasons for overriding him, he may award us all the order of merit.”

Ruysdale looked at me. For once I thought she was too done in to think clearly for herself.

“I think Mr. Garrity’s made a case,” I said. “I buy it.”

And so it was that Claude Duval got his way. Ruysdale and Garrity would notify him and make whatever arrangements had to be made to suit him. I went off to meet the press, hastily assembled in one of the small dining rooms off the lobby.

I think I made my case, that the hotel was not responsible for what had happened to Laura Kauffman. I had no facts for them because I had no facts. Among those present was that old chicken hash connoisseur, Eliot Stevens. As the session broke up I found him waiting for me in the lobby.

“Quite a day,” he said.

“Quite a day,” I said.

“Did Chambrun ever show up?” he asked.

“With endless apologies for you,” I said, lying as blandly as I could.

He gave me a narrow-eyed smile. “Have it your way,” he said. “I’m willing to sit on that story in the hope of getting a big one from him later. One question, just between us. Is there any connection between the Chambrun disappearance and the Kauffman case?”

“If I could answer that, it would mean I knew what has happened to Chambrun,” I said. “At this moment we haven’t a notion. That’s just between us, Eliot.”

“With the guarantee that I get first crack at the story when it breaks.”

“A deal,” I said.

He looked around the busy lobby. People were crowding into the bars early. It wasn’t business as usual. Everyone was trying to pump the doormen, the bellboys, the bartenders, any other identifiable members of the staff. Who killed her? Why?

“Does it occur to you that you may have a sex maniac running wild in your hotel?” Stevens asked me.

“Eliot, everything has occurred to me but the answer,” I said.

I had, literally, to fight my way across the lobby to the elevators. Regular customers and most of the Beaumont’s guests know me by sight. If anyone could tell them something juicy, I was it. I thought I was going to get my clothes torn off, like some movie star caught out by his fans, before I got to the elevator and the safety of the second floor.

I walked along the second floor corridor, mercifully deserted, to the door of my apartment and let myself in. I had company. Shirley was there, the only other person who had a key, and with her was a man I didn’t know. He was in his middle thirties, I thought, fishbelly pale, sick-looking really. He wore a seedy gray flannel suit that I recognized had cost a lot of money when it was new. Shirley looked very serious.

“Forgive me for barging in, Mark,” she said. “This is Jim Kauffman.”

The dead woman’s husband! I understood the ghostly pallor now, the unsteady hands, the faint tick at the corner of his mouth. This character was in the grip of a monumental hangover. Red-rimmed eyes looked despairingly from me to the little portable bar in the corner of my living room. This one was right on the verge of falling into a thousand pieces. I shook hands with him, and it was like taking hold of something dead.

“I didn’t know who else to go to for help, Mark,” Shirley said.

“Help?” I said.

Kauffman sat down because it was obvious his legs wouldn’t hold him up any longer. He raised a hand to try to control the twitching of his mouth. Shirley was eyeing me with a peculiar steadiness, more like a stranger than a lover.

“I went to find Jim,” she said. “I knew Hardy would be looking for him and I thought it was only fair to prepare him. After all, I sort of turned him in.”

True, I thought.

“When he told me his story I knew he’d never stand up under questioning by the cops. What to do? That’s why I brought him here, Mark.”

“Right through the lobby?”

“Nobody would know me the way I look now,” Kauffman said, in a hollow voice. He looked up at me. “I—I was here last night. I—I saw her.”

“Well, why not? You’re her husband,” I said.

He took in a kind of gasping breath. “After she was dead,” he said. “Oh, Jesus, Mr. Haskell, could I have just a little slug of your scotch?”

I felt a cold chill run right down my back. “I think you better tell me about it first,” I said. One good drink and he’d probably pass out right here on my rug. Shirley was in trouble, I thought, harboring a suspect from Hardy. Because, God knows, Kauffman was a suspect.

He didn’t look at me, just at the scotch bottle. “Miss Thomas has told you about me,” he said. “I’m shot, shot all to hell.”

“I can see that,” I said.

“Sometimes, when you’re in my kind of shape,” he said, “nothing matters to you except—except getting what you need, liquor. Not pride, not anything. Last night was like that.”

I waited for him to go on. His whole body shook with the desperate need for what was in that scotch bottle. “Laura and I have been separated for about ten months,” he said. He had a pleasant voice, an easy way of talking if he hadn’t been so beat. I could see that he had been an attractive guy—once upon a time. “I could never supply her with what she needed,” he went on. “No one man ever could. After a while I—I couldn’t stand having to knock on the door of her bedroom before I went in, to be sure there wasn’t someone else with her. So I walked. Oh, please, Mr. Haskell!”

“Keep talking,” I said.

“She offered to make a settlement on me, but I wasn’t having any of that. I was going to be a man, for a change, stand on my own two feet.” He laughed, a bitter sound. “My God! I’d been boozing it quite a bit by the time I walked out on her and I found—it was all I cared about. It—it’s come to this! What little money I had went quickly. Then I began to steal a little, and con people. And then—then last night—I was at the very bottom of the well.”

“So you came here?”

“I’d read in the paper that Laura had taken a suite at the Beaumont to handle the Cancer Fund Ball. I called her, the first time I’d talked to her since—in ten months. I said I was desperate, needed help. She told me to come to see her. It was about eleven o’clock at night then. It was after midnight when I got here, perhaps twelve thirty. So I went up to Twenty-one A. I—I was out of my mind with need then, Haskell. Physically, the walk had just about finished me. I—I rang her doorbell and she didn’t answer. I knocked. Nothing. Then I guess I blew my stack. I started pounding on the door, shouting at her. It should have raised the whole floor full of people.”

“The suites on twenty-one are all soundproofed,” I said.

“I was pounding and yelling,” Kauffman said, “and then I realized the door wasn’t latched! I went charging in. She wasn’t there. But there was a sideboard loaded with liquor. I just about made it and poured myself a whole glass of scotch. It—it works very quickly on me.”

“I can imagine,” I said.

“I—I was suddenly full of fantasies,” Kauffman said. His voice was shaking now. “She was in the next room, in the hay with some guy, paying no attention to me. I didn’t knock. I just charged in. And there—oh my God, there she was. Bloody, dead, destroyed! Now, Haskell, please!”

I was shaken myself. I walked very slowly toward the bar. From there I faced him. “And then?” I said.

“The room looked like a slaughterhouse,” he said. “Blood everywhere. I—I just turned and ran, stopping to grab a bottle of liquor from the sideboard.”

“You didn’t call the police or anyone?” I asked.

“All I wanted was to get out of there!” Kauffman said. “That jolt of scotch I’d had—I thought I was having a nightmare. I—I’ve had them, horror dreams. What I’d seen couldn’t be real. All I wanted to do was get out of there and blot out the world.”

“So you just took off and left her there?”

“I wasn’t a block away before I was convinced the whole thing was a crazy, liquor-induced hallucination,” Kauffman said. “I got back to my hole on the Bowery and—and drank enough of the scotch I’d taken to pass out. When I came to late this morning I
knew
it had been a nightmare. Then—then I went to the Salvation Army center for a cup of coffee. They had a radio going and I heard the news. It was real. What I had seen was real!”

He slumped forward in his chair and I thought he was going to topple out of it. I poured a good-sized drink for him that must have seemed inadequate to him. He swallowed it like water down a drain pipe. He trembled and shook and made an effort to pull himself together.

“You went looking for him?” I asked Shirley.

“I knew the cops would be hunting for him,” she said. “I thought he’d need a friend. I thought if he’d come in, voluntarily, you might be able to persuade Lieutenant Hardy to deal with him gently. If the cops went to work on him, they’d simply drive him up the wall. He’s a very sick man, Mark.”

Sick enough to butcher his wife if she turned him down, I thought. Sick enough not to be certain whether he’d done it or not. He was living in what someone has called Nightmare Alley.

“You’re going to have to talk to Lieutenant Hardy,” I told Kauffman. “You’re going to have to do it now, not some other time.”

“Oh, God!” he said, and held out his empty glass to me.

“After you’ve seen Hardy,” I said.

Hardy was where I had last seen him, in Chambrun’s office, going over reports from the fingerprint people, the police photographers, and the medical examiner. I told Hardy about Kauffman. Hardy listened, controlling his impatience.

“So bring him down here,” he said.

“Couldn’t you talk to him in my place?” I asked. “With Shirley there, and me, he may not cave in on you. He thinks of us, Shirley at least, as friends. He’s pretty near the edge of the cliff.”