Girl Watcher's Funeral (15 page)

“The police are aware?”

“Naturally.”

“This cannot be allowed to happen!” Pappas said. “This cannot go unpunished!”

“That's the general theory,” I said. “The police and Mr. Chambrun, my boss, are determined.”

“Mr. Chambrun was Mr. Karados's great good friend,” Pappas said. “I would like to talk to him.”

“He's out of the hotel at the moment,” I said. I looked at this giant and thought he must know of many secrets in Nikos's private life. The yacht
Merina
had been a sort of home base for Nikos for many years. The famous and the infamous had been its guests. I thought of Jan, and asked the natural question.

“We're concerned about Jan Morse,” I said. “We can't find her. She hasn't visited the
Merina
this evening, has she?”

“Miss Jan? But no! She has a permanent cabin on the boat; she's free to come and go. But she hasn't been aboard for several days. How do you mean, you can't find her?”

I told him, briefly, what had happened with Faraday. “He says she came back to the hotel from a little bar where they were drinking. No one here has seen her. Mr. Chambrun is concerned. She could be in danger, as Miss Lewis was.”

“Faraday!” Pappas said, clenching his huge fists. “I have always dreamed he might explode at me one day. I would have the excuse to take him apart, limb from limb.”

“You know Jan well?” I asked, wondering if this beautiful male had ever been offered Jan's gift to mankind.

“She has been permanently on the
Merina
for the last two years,” Pappas said. “A wonderful girl, Mr. Haskell. She made Mr. Karados immensely happy. Do you need help in finding her? I have twelve men aboard the
Merina.
We will take apart the city of New York if you ask it.”

“It's a large place to take apart, Captain,” I said. “For the moment I think the most we'll ask you to do is let us know if she turns up at the
Merina.
If she does, hang onto her until someone comes to get her. She shouldn't be running around unprotected.”

“You can count on it,” Pappas said. “I will call the
Merina
at once. Ship to shore phone.”

I gestured to Eddie. “Give the Captain a telephone,” I said.

The phone appeared on the bar, jacked in. Pappas dialed a number. Presently he began to talk, volubly, in Greek. He finally put down the phone and pushed it away from him.

“She hasn't come to the
Merina
since I came ashore,” he said. “But my men have orders to call you if she does, and to detain her until they have instructions from you.”

“Many thanks,” I said, not feeling hopeful. The chance that she might have gone to the yacht after leaving Faraday had been a long shot.

At that moment Tim Gallivan came across the room toward us. I was a little shocked by his appearance. He'd changed out of his mod gear into a plain charcoal-gray suit, with white shirt and black knitted tie. The bounce seemed to have gone out of him. He looked tired and old.

“Hello, George,” he said to Pappas. He looked at Morrie Stein with something like distaste. “You better paddle upstairs, Morrie. They've found your stuff.”

“Found it!” Morrie shouted. “How wonderful!”

“Not so wonderful for you, friend,” Gallivan said. “It was all in the trash can outside the freight elevator on that floor. Miles of film, exposed, destroyed. Your camera looks as if it might still take pictures, but there's nothing in it.”

“Oh, God!” Morrie said, and he hurried away, yelping like a wounded animal.

Gallivan asked Eddie for a Scotch on the rocks. “Black day, George,” he said to Pappas.

“Hard to believe,” Pappas said.

The crow's-feet around Gallivan's eyes looked as if they'd been etched in with an engraver's tool. “You haven't found Jan yet, Mark?” he asked me.

“Not yet.”

He ran a hand over his eyes as if they ached. “I try to keep from believing it,” he said. “I keep assuring the police that, next to me, she was Nikos's most trusted friend. Knowing her, I tell myself it's impossible.”

“What's impossible?”

Gallivan looked at me steadily with his tired, lifeless eyes. “Sooner or later, however decent his intentions, man is corrupted by his private sickness, whatever it may be—drink, drugs, sexual deviation. Sooner or later his need to satisfy these destructive appetites makes him unreliable. Jan's sickness—well, it's no secret, is it, Mark? An insatiable sexual appetite. I believe she was genuinely fond of Nikos; I believe she was completely loyal to him in every way but one. But she was finally corrupted by Faraday. I don't blame Faraday. We've all been offered her golden gift. You, George, it happened to you, too, didn't it?”

Pappas nodded. “I laughed at her,” he said. “She was Mr. Karados's property.”

“There it is,” Gallivan said. He took a deep swallow of his Scotch as though he needed it badly. “Her sickness overcame her loyalty. So I say to myself, she had the most easy access to Nikos's medicine; Rosey was killed and thrown from the window in her room. I have to wonder if that isn't why she is missing.”

My mouth felt dry. “You mean she's running away from the police?”

Gallivan shrugged. “It sounds fancy,” he said, “but perhaps she's running away from herself. She arranged for Nikos to die, because the whispers about her were growing louder. He was bound to get wind of the truth. Would you believe she wanted him to die, not to save herself a fortune, but to keep him from being hurt by the truth? It could be that intricate, Mark. It could be—with her twisted concept of loyalty. Then Rosey stumbled on the truth and Jan had to act on the spur of the moment. Now—now she is living with a horror of herself and what she has done. She has disappeared to think it out.” He finished his drink and put the empty glass down on the bar. “It will not surprise me if, when she is found, she will not have inflicted her own punishment on herself.”

“You are suggesting—?” Pappas began.

“—that we may not find her alive,” Gallivan said. He signaled to Eddie for another Scotch. “How to go about finding her? She can have checked into any one of a thousand hotels in New York to think things out. She's not here, not on the
Merina,
the only places where she had belongings.” He shook his head from side to side. “I don't want to be the one to go to the police with this notion, damn it. I'm fond of the girl. I may be doing her a wild injustice. Nikos would want me to help her, no matter what she'd done. Your Chambrun may be right; she may be hiding out of fear of someone we haven't even thought of. Will you talk it over with Chambrun, Mark? He's had more experience with this kind of thing than I have. I—I just don't want to be the one to point the finger at Jan, but I can't help the unpleasant certainty that we want her for murder and not to protect her.”

I felt a sick knot at the pit of my stomach. It had never occurred to me for an instant to think of Jan as suspect. She was undisciplined, free of any moral checks, but never a coldblooded killer. Yet the way Gallivan had put it, the shoe might fit. She might have let Nikos die with the perverted notion that she was saving him from a big hurt. Confronted with it by Rosey, she might—but there I just couldn't go along. I couldn't imagine her killing Rosey and calmly heaving the body out her window. And there was the business of Morrie Stein's camera. To the best of my knowledge Jan had never been at the party in 19A. But there was a blank in my knowledge. During the time I'd been in Chambrun's office with Rosey Lewis Jan could have been in and out of 19A a number of times without my knowing. That I needed to check on, to be certain.

“I'll talk to Chambrun,” I said to Gallivan.

“Fine. It'll take the responsibility off my shoulders. If Chambrun wants me to come forward, I will. Meanwhile, George and I have a lot of business details to discuss—what's to be done with the
Merina
and its crew; other affairs that Nikos's death drops in our laps. With the police swarming over our quarters upstairs, is there someplace we can go to talk quietly? Some office somewhere?”

I suggested that little office back of the registration desk in the main lobby, and I took them down there and had Carl Nevers install them there.

“Mrs. Kiley has been trying to reach you,” Nevers told me, as he took Gallivan and Captain Pappas in tow.

Mrs. Kiley is the chief night operator on the hotel switchboard. I got her on one of the house phones.

“I thought you ought to know,” Mrs. Kiley said in her matter-of-fact voice. “It happened just after you and Mr. Chambrun left the hotel.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“An outside call,” Mrs. Kiley said, meaning it hadn't come from any phone connected with the switchboard. “A lady who didn't give her name, inquiring about you and Miss Ruysdale.”

“Name?”

“She didn't give her name,” Mrs. Kiley said. “She didn't ask to speak to anyone special—just asked her question of the operator, who turned the call over to me. She was concerned about you. She wanted to know what hospital Miss Ruysdale had been taken to. She obviously knew what had happened in Mr. Chambrun's office.”

“And you told her?”

“That you had left the hotel. That I couldn't tell her Miss Ruysdale's whereabouts. Against policy to give addresses to anyone.”

“Husky, kind of young-sounding voice?” I asked.

“I don't have a romantic ear, Mr. Haskell,” Mrs. Kiley said dryly.

“You sure it was an outside call?”

“You know our system well enough to know there's no question,” Mrs. Kiley said. “Outside calls came over to one set of operators, house calls to another. I can't tell you the call wasn't made in the hotel. There are dozens of private phones and coin boxes in the hotel. But it wasn't a room phone, or any of the house phones.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Kiley. And if the same woman calls again, try to hang onto her until you can connect me.”

“I'll try.
Are
you all right, Mr. Haskell?”

“Bruised but not broken, Mrs. Kiley.”

“Dr. Partridge left a message for Mr. Chambrun,” she said. “It's not the worst with Miss Ruysdale. No skull fracture.”

“Good news. Thanks again. And hang onto that gal if she calls.”

It had to have been Jan. What other woman knew what had happened in Chambrun's office and would be concerned? I turned away from the reception desk and saw Chambrun coming through the revolving door from the street. He had a trench coat draped over the shoulders of his dinner jacket. I was damn glad to see him.

“Faraday's been charged with criminal assault and suspicion of homicide,” he said. “They'll probably have him out on bail before breakfast, but we'll keep him occupied in the meanwhile. You find Miss Morse?”

“Not yet. Jerry's got a search in hand. But—”

“Let's talk in my office,” Chambrun said.

On the way up I gave him the good news about Miss Ruysdale. I could see some of the tensions in his face relax a little.

In his office he went straight to the sideboard and poured himself a demitasse of Turkish coffee and a snifter of old brandy. He gestured to me to help myself. I felt as if I'd been drinking steadily for hours. I didn't want anything.

When he'd settled in his desk armchair and got a cigarette going, I gave him the whole package, starting with the disappearance and eventual recovery of Morrie Stein's equipment, and ending with Gallivan's unhappy theory about Jan. Chambrun listened, his eyes hidden behind their hooded lids.

“You think Gallivan's theory holds water?” he asked me when I'd finished.

“I suppose it could,” I said.

“You sound reluctant to accept it.”

“I'll tell you the truth, sir,” I said. “My judgment about her isn't very sound. In spite of everything I—I found her attractive, quite candid about her way of life, different, and—and—”

“Disturbing?” he suggested.

“Yes.”

“But she did have access to the pills, it was her room, she could quite easily have removed Stein's camera and destroyed his film.”

“Yes.”

“But she did call in to find out if you and Ruysdale were all right. So she's a good scout.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And she did call us to tell us her room was the place from which Miss Lewis had been thrown. A clever way of throwing suspicion off herself, wouldn't you say?”

“I suppose so.”

“On the other hand, if she was guilty, why didn't she just remove the piece of cloth from the air conditioner, close the window and keep her mouth shut?”

“Just what are you trying to say, sir?”

He chuckled. “That you can use one set of facts to prove two different stories,” he said. “If you want to prove your Miss Morse is guilty, you can use the facts to bolster that theory. If you want to think she's innocent, you can use the same facts to make that stand up. Only one thing holds fast. Guilty or innocent, she's got to be found, Mark.”

“She's not at either of the two places where you might say she lives,” I said. “She's not on the
Merina
and she's not here.”

“We don't know for certain that she's not here,” Chambrun said. “She's not in any of the public rooms, or any of the rooms on the nineteenth floor occupied by the Karados party. But there are hundreds of rooms where she could be.”

“Her phone call came from outside somewhere.”

“There are nearly fifty outside lines in the hotel.” He reached for the house phone on his desk. “Find Jerry Dodd and tell him I want to see him in my office.” He leaned back in his chair and lit a fresh cigarette. “Thousands of people with thousands of complex problems have come under our roof here, Mark, in the last twenty years. I've listened to all kinds of reasons, motives, explanations for extraordinary behavior in my time. You can write down money and power at the very top of the list—and underline them. We're a luxury segment of our society. People who are dealing in peanuts don't stay at the Beaumont. I haven't seen Nikos's will, but way at the top of the heap, in terms of stakes, is our friend Gallivan. I listen to what he has to say with a little question mark at the back of my mind. He wants this mess cleared up and cleared up quickly so that he can inherit his fortune in cash and his empire in power. Nikos's estate will remain frozen until the police come up with his killer. Gallivan wants this to happen in a hurry. He'll suggest anything that might help to wrap things up.”