Gilded Nightmare (20 page)

When the Baron died, the two girls were promptly brought to the Island to live. There were very few visitors or parties in those days. The Baroness was already fighting the cancer that would eventually kill her.

“I really got to know my mother then,” the girl said. “She spent hours talking to me about her life, most of it very bitter. As she told it, she had been forced into all kinds of excesses and immoralities by the Baron. Now that it was past her, no longer possible, she described it all with loathing and resentment. The chief targets of her hatred were all the men in the world who had had anything to do with her. I should have realized that she was sick, paralyzed with fright at the thought of dying, trying to place the blame somewhere else for the kind of life she’d lived, as though that would save her from eternal damnation. I didn’t see it that way. I believed her. I sympathized with her.”

The girl turned her wide blue eyes toward Sam. “The prime object of her hatred was you, Mr. Culver. You had destroyed her career in Hollywood. You had prevented her from living a decent, successful life. You had driven her into the Baron’s world. You were right of course, Mr. Chambrun. The Island was a haven for German war criminals. Dr. Malinkov gave them new faces and they stayed there until they were able to go out into the world again, unrecognizable. My mother was subjected to their interim pleasures. She felt she was responsible for sending them out into the world, free to continue their crimes. She blamed you, Mr. Culver. You were an obsession with her. You must be punished—she told me this day after day, week after week. I began to see you as some kind of monster. As my mother’s time to die came closer, she began to work on me. You see, the Baron knew I was his child. He wasn’t sure about Heidi, so he disinherited her. I would have all the Zetterstrom money and power, my mother told me. I would be the most powerful woman in the world. It was pretty heady stuff. I must make her one promise. When she was gone I would hunt down Sam Culver and destroy him. She kept at it and at it and I promised her. I wanted to do it!

“After my mother died it took a long time to straighten out the business affairs. As you’ve been told, I had begun to impersonate her with some success. Marcus had reasons for not making her death public. He wanted certain investments changed, certain deals made, before it was known and the Zetterstrom fortune became an estate for which he was accountable. I trusted him—why not? My mother and father had trusted him all their lives.

“In all the time it took to work out those arrangements Marcus kept reminding me of my promise to my mother. Before I could make a life of my own I had to settle with Sam Culver. And eventually Marcus had a scheme. We’d come to New York and establish contact with Sam Culver. We would make him believe that I was his Charmian, kept young and beautiful by Malinkov’s skills. He
had
kept my mother looking extraordinarily young, you know. But not—not as young as I am. I was to attract Sam Culver to his Charmian all over again. I was to get him to the point where he would be pleading with me to become my lover—again, as he would think. Then there would be a party for him, to celebrate our coming together. At that party, Mr. Culver, you were to be poisoned. You would die very quickly, writhing in agony, and I would hold you and whisper the truth to you: Charmian Brown had paid you off!” The girl drew a deep breath. None of us moved or spoke.

“And so we left the Island for the first time, stopping in London on the way. Heidi knew about the plan. She kept pleading with me to reject it. She and Peter were in love. They wanted a life completely separated from the Zetterstrom madness. Heidi had no part in the scheme against you, Mr. Culver, but knowing about it she felt she was an accessory. She pleaded and begged, day after day, for me to give it up. But I had been hypnotized by my mother into believing in the principle of an eye for an eye. It was just and proper that Sam Culver should pay for what he’d done. And Marcus and Masters and Clara kept pushing me that way. I thought how extraordinarily loyal to my mother they were.

“So we got here—and I was instantly in trouble. I didn’t recognize Stephen Wood. How could I? I had never seen him or his brother in my life.”

“But you remembered so much detail,” Sam said, his voice hollow. “Exact words spoken, exact actions.”

“Oh, I was schooled in that, Mr. Culver. My mother had forgotten nothing. She told me every detail, every word spoken between you that night.”

“Did she tell you the real truth about my father?”

“She told it to me both ways,” Charmian said. “I don’t know which was the truth.”

I heard Sam let out his breath in a long, quavering sigh.

“The minute we reached our rooms upstairs after I’d made my two blunders in the lobby, Marcus was at me, telling me things about Mr. Culver, how I could retrieve the moment of passing him by. But do you know, something had happened to me. In the time we’d spent in London I’d seen people living normally, happily. And the glimpse I’d had of you, Mr. Culver—you didn’t look like a monster. Suddenly I wanted to give up. Marcus was outraged. He had me send for Mr. Chambrun to arrange for the party. You came instead, Mark. You were pleasant, and charming, and relaxed. I began to think I was a character out of some kind of gilded nightmare. The whole project was unreal. But Marcus forced me on.

“I sent for Mr. Culver. I was ready for him. I convinced him I was his Charmian Brown. But I thought I saw a way to make Marcus’ scheme unworkable. I thought if you refused to come to the party, that would be that. And so I—I told you a different story about your father, Mr. Culver. I thought you would hate me so much for it, you wouldn’t dream of coming to the party. In the middle of that moment, Mr. Chambrun and Mark came to tell me about poor little Puzzi.

“After that it became a real nightmare. Marcus and Masters had been listening. They knew what I was up to. They talked together while they waited for you all to go, and Heidi overheard them. You weren’t to be the only victim, Mr. Culver. I was number two on the list. I was to be caught by the police as your poisoner. I would be convicted and executed. And then, by the terms of my father’s will, the entire Zetterstrom fortune would be divided among his faithful servants—Marcus Helwig, Masters, Clara, and Dr. Malinkov. If I did not provably die at their hands, the money was theirs. And so I was to commit a murder and they would see to it I was caught.

“Heidi got to tell me a little of this before we were interrupted by Clara. We sat there, frozen, while a waiter served us tea. I managed to slip a note on the tea table for Mr. Culver. I was terrified. I realized I was a prisoner. I had no one to turn to. Then Malinkov asked if Heidi would get a prescription filled for him. She was eager to go; she wanted to find Peter. Maybe he could think of a way out for us. And so she went—and Masters was waiting for her. Stephen Wood had played into their hands by killing Puzzi. Masters made Heidi’s murder look like the work of the same man. Moving the body away from the nineteenth floor was dangerous, so Masters borrowed Peter’s clothes. If anyone saw him they would think it was Peter. Peter, like the rest of us, was expendable.

“I was no longer the Baroness, or the heiress. I was their prisoner. I’d destroyed their plan and I knew about Heidi. Now they had to face out the police investigation and get me away, back to the Island. I wasn’t let out of their sight. If I opened my mouth to you, Mr. Chambrun, or to the police, I wouldn’t get the words spoken before I was dead. Marcus was always at my elbow. I did manage to leave a note for you, Mr. Chambrun. Did you ever find it?”

“I found it, but not for a long time,” Chambrun said. “Like an idiot, I played with it for hours before I opened it and looked at it. By the time I got to your suite you’d gone.”

Charmian shuddered. “It—it was the most awful experience of my whole life,” she said. “I’m terrified of heights. But it was the only way. I crept out on that ledge—and I froze. I couldn’t move away and I couldn’t go back in. It seemed as though I stood there, pressed back against the wall of the building for hours. But, at last, I found I could move inch by inch along the ledge, never looking down, because that could have been the end. I—I got around the corner of the building and in through the first window I found. It took me into the room with that incredible man! I couldn’t get away from him—I couldn’t get to the phone. I had begun to think my only hope was to give into him—when you arrived.”

“One of the techniques of running a hotel,” Chambrun said. “You get to know your people. Anyone on that floor but Robin Miller would have helped you, and called my office. So you had to be in his room.” He lit a cigarette. “Masters and Helwig were desperate when they found you were gone. They had to find you before you told us your story, and from talking to us they knew you hadn’t reached us yet. Their main mistake was, they felt certain you’d go to Sam to warn him instead of coming to me. They had Sam as a hostage. They were certain they could use him to get out of the hotel if it came to that. Mark gave them an extra card to play.”

“I think they had a plane chartered somewhere,” Charmian said. She sank down in her chair.

“But their position was hopeless,” Sam said. “I knew the truth about them.”

“You’d never have gotten to tell it,” Chambrun said. “If Charmian had come to your apartment you’d have been shot, Sam, and Charmian, in all probability, would have gone out the window, an apparent suicide. Then Helwig & Company would have had a long, lugubrious story for us, about a mother-nurtured revenge. They might have gotten away with it. But when she didn’t come, when we got to her first, they had you and Mark as hostages. They would almost certainly have gotten out of the hotel. We wouldn’t have dared move to stop them. Fortunately, I had my thought about the elevator. If they got you out of the hotel you’d almost certainly have been killed when they arrived wherever they were going.”

Charmian leaned back in her chair, covering her face with her hands.

Sam Culver walked over and stood beside her. “I’d like to help you, Charmian,” he said, gently. “It might make up for some of the past.”

Chambrun looked at me, and then at Jerry and Miss Ruysdale. “Let’s not dawdle around here all morning,” he said. “We’ve got a hotel to run.”

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1968 by Judson Philips

cover design by Julianna Lee

978-1-4532-6880-3

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