Evil That Men Do (18 page)

Chambrun sat staring at the coals on the hearth. “I don’t know,” he said, in a faraway voice, “whether or not I’ll forgive you for being here ten days without letting me know.”

“I had to feel my wings, Pierre. I couldn’t come to the Beaumont and hide! Not this wonderful, glamorous place. But I’ve waited quite long enough to hear about your excitement.”

He gave her a fairly detailed account of the last twenty-four hours at the Beaumont.

“Mark tells me you’ve had a brush with Teague,” he said, when he’d finished.

She’d listened with bright interest and what I thought was growing outrage when he came to the part about Bobby Towers and Madison.

“I got the minor-league treatment, I guess,” she said, but she sounded bitter. “I met Emlyn Teague during the war, when I was overseas doing shows for the troops. He was an amusing creature. You understand, Pierre, I wasn’t Gloria Swanson in
Sunset Boulevard
when I went into retirement. I saw a few friends; I gave a few parties. I just stayed out of the public eye, and out of reach of the sightseers and the autograph hunters. Emlyn looked me up. He used to drop in occasionally for a drink. I knew his reputation. I allowed myself to believe, however, that I was a friend. He got the idea somewhere along the way that I should give a big party for a lot of the old-timers who’d been around in the old glamour days. An anniversary party—celebrating the making of my first picture. The idea appealed to me. There were a lot of the old stars around, many of them not so well off as I am. Emlyn said he would take over all the details for me—the caterer, the music, the guest list. I had invitations engraved and Emlyn sent them out.” Her face hardened. “The night of the party was a beautiful night. We had tables set up all over the terraces; there was music, and flowers, and champagne, and a full moon. And no one came.”

“What?” Chambrun said sharply.

“No one came, Pierre—except Teague and his friends. And they came—to laugh.”

“And no one else?”

“No one else. I made my big entrance—my big return to life, Pierre—and there was no one there to see it, except the laughing Teagues.”

“But the guest list—the invitations!” I heard myself ask.

“The invitations had gone into a trash can, somewhere,” Veronica said. “Of course, I didn’t know it at the time. It was a long while before I realized I wasn’t forgotten, abandoned by my friends.” She drew a deep breath. “I do not love the Teagues, Pierre. I do not love them at all.”

“Then you really did shut out the world after that?” Chambrun said.

“Until two weeks ago,” she said. “Oh, I knew the truth about my party long before that, but, somehow, I didn’t have the energy or the courage to come out of the hiding I need never have gone into.”

“They are nourished by cruelty,” Chambrun said.

Veronica held out her glass to me. “I’ll have another small gin and tonic, Mark,” she said. And then as I went over to the bar, she went on. “It’s part of a new world that I find very hard to adjust to, Pierre. Everything is so marvelously efficient that there’s no place for individual achievement any more. The whole Northeast was blacked out one night last fall. Why? Because when something went wrong, man wasn’t able to do anything about it. You look around and the great efficiencies are all threatening destruction. So something went wrong with the great machines and our lights went out. Tomorrow something may go wrong with another machine and before anyone can do anything about it, the whole world will be destroyed. There’s no place left for sentiment, or warmth, or traditions, or even good manners. Maybe we have to concede that Emlyn Teague is on the beam. There is nothing left for the individual to do but laugh at his own vanities, his own futile self-importance, his miserable little household gods. No single heroic voice can be heard directing us back on the rails. If one tries, he is shouted down by mobs with signs, or by hate groups who’ve lost track of what to hate, or by an assassin’s bullet—fired by one man who actually represents a faceless, directionless mob. It’s too late for me to become part of that mob, Pierre. I have to fight for meaningless things—like honor, and reason, and genuine friendship. I think of you as fighting for those things, Pierre; for a dead or dying way of life represented by the Beaumont.”

“You’re not making me feel cheerful,” Chambrun said, staring at the red coals in the grate. As he turned his head to look at Veronica from under his hooded lids, I wasn’t sure he’d been listening. “What went wrong with Norman Terry?” he asked. He had remembered our little coincidence. “I understand he was well off, financially; not ill.”

“Poor Norman,” Veronica said. “For forty years he was a romantic hero to the women of the world. And then we moved into the age of the un-hero. The matinee idol is dead. People today must laugh at sick jokes, or sit yogalike, examining their miserable childhoods. The image of the romantic hero has been ground up in the sausage machine that is television. Norman couldn’t take it. He couldn’t bear to be laughed at.”

“His funeral was on the twenty-eighth of February,” Chambrun said. “When did he shoot himself?”

“On the twenty-fifth,” Veronica said, sipping the drink I’d brought her.

Chambrun’s bright eyes flashed my way quickly, but his voice was quite casual as he asked Veronica if there’d been some specific incident that had set Terry off.

“I don’t know, Pierre. If I had, I might have saved him,” she said. “He came to see me on the afternoon of the night he killed himself. I guess it’s no secret that Norman and I had been more than an acting team in the old days. We might have married, but back then, the studios controlled our lives. We were a romantic couple. If we’d married, the studio felt we would have lost our box-office appeal. And also, Norman had a wife, locked away in a mental institution. A divorce would have turned him into a villain in the public mind. So he and I had what we could have in secret. In the end it died a natural death. There was nothing to nourish it. I was growing older. Younger, more exciting women camped on his trail. He was the big romantic figure of the day. We separated without bitterness, but with a continued affection and regard for each other.”

“You say you could have saved him?”

“He came that afternoon,” Veronica said. The little lines at the corners of her eyes showed pain. “I was bedded down with a flu bug. He told Gail he needed to see me, urgently. So I got up and dressed.” She smiled faintly. “At my age, Pierre, it takes a little while for me to ready myself for the outside world. Gail entertained him while he waited, and she says he seemed very distressed about something. When I finally joined him, was alone with him, I was shocked to have him burst into tears. He said he was going away. He wanted to say goodbye. I couldn’t get him to tell me what it was all about. He wanted to thank me for the past, for everything we’d been to each other. The best and the only good thing that had ever happened to him, he said. I was worried; anxious for him. But I never dreamed—” Her voice broke.

The telephone rang and, at a signal from Chambrun, I answered it. It was Mrs. Kiley, the night chief, calling Chambrun. The doctor Chambrun had sent for, had been able to get away sooner than he’d expected. He was waiting downstairs to be taken up to Doris Standing.

Chambrun apologized to Veronica for an abrupt leave-taking. Dr. Martin was told to go direct to the penthouse where we’d meet him.

“Coincidence on coincidence,” Chambrun said, when we were out in the hall together. “Both the critical dates in Doris’s blackout match up with the critical dates in the death of Norman Terry.”

“If you start looking for them, you’d probably find a dozen other sets of coincidences,” I said, without too much conviction.

Dr. Martin got out of one elevator at the penthouse level just as we got out of another. The doctor was a pleasant-looking crew-cut gent about forty. We stood a little distance from the front door to Chambrun’s place, out of earshot of Hardy’s bodyguard, while Chambrun gave the doctor a brief sketch of the problem he’d face inside. Then we went to the door and rang the bell.

There was a long wait.

“Mr. Craig went downstairs about half an hour ago,” the cop said, “but the lawyer’s in there.”

I tried the bell again. Chambrun was already fishing for his key. He unlocked the door and went in. The living room and study to our left was empty.

“Madison!” Chambrun called out, sharply.

There was no answer. Chambrun walked quickly down the corridor toward the bedroom wing. Seconds later he called out to us. The doctor and I hurried after him.

We found ourselves in what I took to be the guest bedroom. An open closet door revealed Doris’ Marinelli wardrobe. The french windows opening out onto Chambrun’s roof garden were open. Chambrun had evidently gone out through them. But the doctor and I were momentarily frozen where we stood.

Stretched out on the floor near the french windows, his head in a pool of blood, was the motionless figure of T. J. Madison.

D
R. MARTIN WAS THE
first to recover from the shock. He crossed quickly and knelt beside Madison.

“Looks like a gunshot wound,” he said. “He’s still alive, but he’s lost a bucket of blood. Get your house doctor, Haskell. I don’t have anything to work with. I came here to talk! And send for an ambulance.”

I ducked for the phone next to the bed. I relayed the emergency to Mrs. Kiley. We needed Dr. Partridge, an ambulance, and Jerry Dodd. Chambrun’s voice kept me from hanging up. He had reappeared in the french doors.

“Every exit to the hotel is to be blocked off!” he said in a cold, hard voice. He went past us and out to the front door. Hardy’s man came back with him, looking a little stunned.

“I didn’t hear any shot,” he said.

“You wouldn’t,” Chambrun said. “The place is sound-proofed. Did you see anyone come out of the other three penthouse entrances?”

“An old lady with a Pekingese dog,” the cop said.

That would be old Mrs. Haven who lived in the south penthouse. She walked her dog religiously four times a day.

“Have you looked through the rest of the apartment?” the cop asked.

“Waste of time,” Chambrun said. “She’s gone. And it’s my fault. I should have insisted there be a man stationed on the roof. There’s a fire-door exit at the other end of the roof. As sure as God, she was taken that way. Check out on your other men. Make sure Teague’s bunch are all accounted for.”

The cop went off on the run.

Dr. Martin was holding a clean linen handkerchief against the wound in Madison’s head, trying to staunch the flow of blood.

“I’ve been a psychiatrist for so long, I don’t carry a medical bag with me,” he said.

“How bad is it?” Chambrun asked.

“Could be very bad,” Martin said. “Deep, deep crease. Immediate need is transfusion. He’s lost a hell of a lot of blood. Pulse very faint.”

“It’s as clear as if they’d left a note for us,” Chambrun said. “Doris came in here to rest. We’d urged her to do just that. Someone came in through those french windows. Maybe she screamed. Anyway, Madison heard something and came in here and was shot for his pains. Idiot! I should have made sure of the roof. Mark, see if you can locate Craig.”

The details of the next hour are still pretty scrambled in my memory. It added up to a colossal sum in frustration. Dr. Partridge appeared from somewhere, and immediately afterwards the ambulance crew. Any hope that we might get a story from Madison was quickly doused. Critical was the diagnosis, emergency surgery indicated. Possible brain damage.

A preliminary report from Lieutenant Hardy’s men seemed to indicate that Teague and Company were accounted for every minute of time since long before Doris could have been spirited away. The penthouse was the one place—God help us—where the man stationed outside the door didn’t have a complete coverage on comings and goings. The roof was wide open. It seemed as certain as anything could in what seemed like a very uncertain world that none of Teague’s crowd could have gotten up to the roof level.

Craig had been covered with equal thoroughness by the man assigned to him. His story was simple enough. When Doris had obeyed instructions to get some rest, he’d gone back down to my quarters. He’d been routed out of bed early that morning, with no chance to bathe or shave. He’d wanted to take the opportunity to get freshened up. His bodyguard had gone with him, been invited into the suite by Craig, and waited in my living room while Craig showered and shaved. Craig was dressing when the word came down from the penthouse that Doris was missing.

It seemed that all of our nice, tidy suspects were as pure as lambs.

We were face to face with the other half of the coin. The side marked X.

At the end of an hour, it was apparent that the pattern had changed. Slade and Jerningham had been shot and left to lie where they fell. The entire staff of the Beaumont, plus Hardy’s men, had searched the hotel from top to bottom by the time an hour had gone by. They were still searching—but it was now obvious that Doris had not been shot in cold blood like the others and left to be found. X had either found a magic way to hide a body, or he had somehow managed to spirit Doris out of the hotel, hopefully still alive. To die somewhere else?

“She can’t have been carried out of the hotel or dragged out,” Chambrun said. We were in his office with Hardy. Ruysdale was at the telephone, answering the calls that came in every minute or two reporting—always negatively. “If she’s not found in the building, and I begin to think she won’t be, then she had to walk out of here under her own power.”

“Voluntarily?” I asked.

“If that’s what you call it, with a gun in your ribs,” Hardy said.

The ever-surprising Ruysdale looked up from her telephones. “Did anyone check on whether her street coat and hat are missing from the apartment? She checked in, you remember, wearing a trench coat, soft felt hat, black glasses. If she walked out of the hotel, bare-headed and without a coat, she’d have been almost bound to be recognized. She’s as famous as a movie star. But maybe, with the hat, coat, and glasses, she could have gone out without anyone paying any attention.”