Gilded Nightmare (18 page)

“You’d better leave it to the police,” Chambrun said. “There’s been no talk about Charmian’s disappearance that could give you any kind of hint as to what’s cooking?”

Wynn shook his head. “I can only tell you Helwig and Masters and the others are badly upset about it. They don’t know when or how she got out of these rooms. Is there any way I can help?”

“When this lady reports to them how much you’ve told me you may be safer somewhere else. I’ll have someone take you down to my office and we’ll have a policeman stand guard there.”

The doorbell rang and Chambrun signaled me to answer it. It was Jerry Dodd.

“Culver changed his mind,” Jerry told Chambrun.

“What do you mean?”

“He decided not to come down to your office. He’s sick of the whole thing, he says. He’s decided to stay in his own place. I’ve got to admit he looks half dead for want of sleep.”

Chambrun muttered softly under his breath. Then he instructed Jerry to take Wynn down to his office and have a cop placed on guard there. He turned to me. “Go up and talk to Sam,” he said. “Make it clear to him that I think he may be in real danger. I want him to be somewhere he can be watched. My office is the place. We haven’t got enough men to have every room in the hotel guarded.” He turned back to Jerry. “I asked Mike Maggio to get me the file cards on everyone on this nineteenth floor. Would you be good enough to find out what kind of drag-ass he’s playing.”

Jerry grinned. “If you’d stay in one place for five minutes—”

I went up to the twenty-fifth floor, where Sam Culver has his cooperative apartment. I was feeling pretty thoroughly pooped-out myself by now. I rang Sam’s doorbell three or four times before he opened the door to the width permitted by the chain-lock and looked out. Jerry was right. He looked like death. But I wondered why a man so anxious for sleep was fully dressed.

“Go away,” he said.

“I am the bearer of a very insistent message from the boss,” I said.

“Tell him to go peddle his papers,” Sam said. “Let me alone, will you, Mark?”

“You were warned,” I said. “We think it was probably by Charmian. She’s disappeared and her two prize bully boys are loose somewhere. Chambrun thinks you may be a target of some sort. He wants you protected. Incidentally, your instinct was right. It’s not Charmian Brown you’re involved with. There’s no Ponce de Leon mystery. This Charmian is her daughter. Till we can untangle it Chambrun doesn’t think you’re safe.”

Sam’s face turned stone-hard. He was silent for as long as twenty seconds. Then he said: “You might as well come in.”

He closed the door enough to unhook the chain, then pulled it open. I walked in, wondering if he had any coffee brewing. The door closed behind me.

“I’m sorry, Mark,” Sam said. “I tried to get you to go away.”

I turned. Masters was leaning against the door, smiling at me. He had a gun in his hand. It wasn’t pointed at me but he was caressing it, and I had a feeling he was split-second ready. I heard a movement behind me and turned again. Herr Helwig was standing in the bedroom door across the living room.

Masters chuckled. “Well, now we have a fourth for a couple of rubbers of bridge,” he said. …

I guess almost everyone has had a moment in his life when he thinks, Here it is! Death. You step off the curb and see a speeding taxi coming down on you ten feet away; you have a violent cramp when you’re swimming a hundred yards from shore; you’re in a skidding car. These moments last only an instant because you get out of them. If you don’t, you’re dead and you stop worrying.

I had that sick feeling as I stood there, looking first at Masters and then at Helwig. They were both pretty damned frightening. Nothing, I told myself, would turn the gray man, Helwig, from whatever his course might be. A human life meant nothing to him. He had been trained under Baron Zetterstrom. Masters was even more scary to me. Pulling that trigger would be a kind of sport for him. He would actually enjoy it.

“Where are the cards?” I said, trying to sound flip and casual.

“You’d better sit down, Mr. Haskell,” Helwig said.

“What’s the game—if it isn’t bridge?” I asked. Boy, was I playing the dime-novel hero!

“For some reason they think Charmian may show up here,” Sam said. He walked over to his desk and took a pipe from the cherry-wood rack. He began to fill it from a porcelain jar.

“To tell you what they have cooked up for you?” I asked. “Is that it, Helwig?”

“He’s a clever kid,” Masters said.

“The situation borders on the absurd,” Helwig said. “The police, bumbling as usual. Your pouter-pigeon Chambrun, imagining himself to be some sort of mastermind detective out of a storybook. Meanwhile, the Baroness is in danger, and we, her trusted friends, are denied the right to look for her or protect her.”

“You mean the Baroness’ daughter,” I said. “You might as well know Chambrun got the whole pitch from Peter Wynn.”

“Very well—Charmian Zetterstrom, the Baroness’ daughter,” Helwig said. “She is still our responsibility. She still depends on us.”

“Then why did she run away from you?” I asked.

“A question I’m most interested to have answered,” Helwig said. “It occurred to us that Mr. Culver or the man who calls himself Wood had persuaded her to leave our rooms. We came here to look for her. We think, since she isn’t here, that she will almost certainly come here. Mr. Culver is the only friend, beside ourselves, she has in this part of the world. She wouldn’t run to Stephen Wood. He’s obviously dangerous.”

“Why don’t you stop playing games with us?” I said. I had nothing to lose that I could see. “You want to find her before the cops do, because she knows one of you killed Heidi and she’s ready to talk.”

“I told you he was a clever, clever kid,” Masters said.

“There’s obviously no point in discussing this with you, Mr. Haskell,” Helwig said. “So just sit down and wait.”

“You got any coffee?” I asked Sam.

He gestured with his pipestem toward the kitchenette. “Electric percolator,” he said.

“A cup of coffee against the rules?” I asked Masters. After all, he had the gun.

“Help yourself,” he said, grinning at me. I had the unpleasant feeling he was like a gourmet looking at a magnificent dinner. I was the dinner.

I went out into the pantry and poured myself coffee in a white china mug. I knew the floor plan of these apartments well enough to know there was no exit from the kitchenette. I carried the coffee back into the living room. Helwig had disappeared into the bedroom. Masters lolled against the front door, petting his gun, smiling hungrily. Sam was sitting in the chair behind his desk, pipe belching a cloud of blue smoke, staring straight ahead of him at the place where Helwig had been standing.

“She is the daughter?” he asked, not looking at me.

“Been impersonating her mother for more than a year,” I said. “All that jazz about Malinkov’s magic is just that—jazz.”

“You say she sent that warning note to me?”

“We don’t know—just a guess. One of the women left it on a room-service tray. A waiter delivered it to the desk.”

“But why should I be in danger?” Sam asked. “I don’t get it. If she isn’t my Charmian Brown none of these people has any conceivable reason for wanting to harm me.”

“Ask Masters,” I said. The coffee tasted good.

“A clever, clever kid,” Masters said. “It’s going to be a pleasure if I get the chance, Haskell.” He aimed his gun at a point I imagined was directly between my eyes. Then he laughed and lowered it.

There was nothing to do but wait. For what? I asked myself. …

Things were happening in other places that I only learned about later.

First of all, Salinger, the absent watchdog on the nineteenth floor, was discovered in a linen closet a few doors down the hall from 19-B. He had been brutally slugged on the back of the head. A gun butt was Hardy’s guess as the weapon. Salinger was out cold and the hospital offered nothing very hopeful as to when he might come to and tell his story. The guess was that one of the men, probably Helwig, had come out the door of 19-B and been promptly stopped by Salinger. While they argued, Masters had slipped out of one of the rooms down the line, sneaked up behind the detective, and let him have it. They’d dragged him into the linen closet and left him there—to die, for all they knew. Salinger’s honor, if not his skull, was intact.

Our “pouter pigeon”—I’ll never forget that one—was still working in high gear. Jerry Dodd told me later about that next fifteen minutes.

Mike Maggio had been traipsing all over the joint with the file cards Chambrun wanted. He finally caught up with the boss in the infirmary where they’d taken Salinger. Chambrun took the cards, went into Jerry Dodd’s office with them, and proceeded to examine them. When he put them down his unshaven face was grim.

“I want a cop along with you, Jerry,” he said. “Room 1922 is occupied by a man named Robin Miller. You know him?”

Jerry nodded. “Big wheel in airlines,” he said. “Comes in about three times a year. Big spender. Something of a lush. We’ve escorted him politely out of the Grill and several other of the bars when he’s gotten too noisy and obnoxious. He plays the call-girl routine quite a bit. I’m surprised we find space for him year after year.”

Chambrun flipped the file card toward him. The letters
A
and
W
were on the card, indicating “alcoholic” and “woman-chaser.” There was also a single sentence which read: “Recommended by G.B.” G.B. were the initials of George Battle, who owns the Beaumont. That explained why Mr. Robin Miller had been allowed to return as a guest though his reputation with the staff was unsavory.

“What about him?” Jerry asked the boss.

“I want to get into his room.”

“If he’s out, a passkey will do it,” Jerry said. “If he’s in, ask and ye shall receive.”

“I doubt it,” Chambrun said. “How do you get past a chain-lock?”

“Quick or slow?” Jerry asked.

“Quick.”

“Leave it to me,” Jerry said.

I found out afterwards they have some kind of acid that eats right through the chain. Makes you wonder about the people all over town who count on chain-locks to keep out unwanted callers.

Jerry told me he got what was needed to obliterate the chain, and he and Chambrun and one of Hardy’s cops went up to the nineteenth floor. Chambrun never once hinted at what he was up to.

Room 1922 had a “Do Not Disturb” sign hung on the knob. They knocked on the door. No answer. Jerry tried the passkey and the door opened just as far as the chain-lock would allow. An angry voice bellowed at them.

“What the hell’s the matter with you? Can’t you read? Bring your clean towels back some other time.”

“It’s not a maid,” Chambrun said. “I’m the manager. I want to talk to you.”

“For Godsake, it’s not nine o’clock in the morning!” Miller said. “Come back some time when I’m awake.”

“Now,” Chambrun said.

“Knock it off,” Miller said.

Chambrun gestured to Jerry. Ten seconds later they were in the room.

Jerry has seen some pretty peculiar things in the hotel. There was the Eastern potentate who tied his mistress to the bedpost each night and beat her with a rawhide whip. There would have been no trouble about it, because I guess the lady liked it, but the gentleman got in trouble when he tried to force a reasonably attractive chambermaid to submit to the same treatment. The girl screamed so loudly she could be heard through the soundproofed walls. There have been many equally dizzy ones. But Jerry wasn’t prepared for what they found in Room 1922.

Mr. Robin Miller, friend of the owner, stood in the center of the room, stark naked. Cowering in a far corner, her dress half torn off, sporting a beautiful shiner, and holding a shiny steak knife like a dagger in her right hand, was Charmian Zetterstrom. A room-service dinner tray, which should have been removed long before, indicated where she’d acquired the knife.

Only Chambrun seemed completely unsurprised. He picked up an extra coverlet from the bed and handed it to Charmian. He didn’t ask her anything.

“Put this around you, Miss Zetterstrom,” he said. He turned to the cop. “Take the lady down to my office and have Miss Ruysdale attend to her. If anyone tries to stop you, use your gun. And stay on guard.”

Charmian, Jerry said later, seemed to be in a state of shock. She didn’t protest. She didn’t say a word. She let Chambrun put the coverlet around her naked shoulders. She let the cop take her by the hand and lead her to the door. While all this was going on, Miller had picked up a terrycloth robe from a chair and covered his nakedness with it.

“Let’s not have a lot of crap about this,” he said, playing the big bluff for all it was worth. “The little tart came into my room uninvited and then she turned noble on me. I think you know I’m a friend of George Battle.”

Parenthetically, I might say our owner, sitting on his golden beach on the Riviera, had some pretty strange friends, including Mr. Robin Miller and the Zetterstrom crew.

“What the hell brought you here? She didn’t make a sound,” Miller said, when Chambrun just stared at him out of narrow slits. “She was like some kind of zombie, but fought like a tiger.”

“I came here because our records showed what kind of man you are, Mr. Miller. May I ask you, Mr. Miller, do most of your women come through the window from the ledge outside?”

“I don’t know how she got in,” Miller said. “I was asleep. I woke up suddenly and there she was, creeping toward the door. I figured her for some kind of hotel thief and I thought she might as well pay a good price for breaking into my room.” He turned his head. “What the hell do you mean—window? It’s nineteen floors straight down to the street. What kind of a nut would walk along that ledge?”

Chambrun, Jerry knew, was controlling white-hot anger.

“You will be out of this hotel in ten minutes, Mr. Miller,” he said, “unless you want to face an attempted rape charge.”

“The little bitch tried to cut me up with that steak knife she grabbed off the tray.
I’m
the aggrieved party, Chambrun. My room has been illegally entered. I—”

“Ten minutes,” Chambrun said. “If you are not paying your bill at the desk by then you’ll be placed under arrest.”