Shape of Fear (5 page)

I was in a ridiculous state of mind when I dressed for dinner. I couldn’t get my thoughts away from Juliet Girard. She wasn’t even remotely available to me; her troubles were none of my affair. But like a fifteen-year-old in love for the first time, I was ready to lie down and let trucks run over me if it would do her any good. I imagined myself saving her from some terrible danger while the romantic Digger Sullivan and her grim-faced husband stood by, unable to help. I was no better than a goofy adolescent in love at first sight that night. You would have to see Juliet Girard, be subject for a moment or two to her special magic, hear her husky voice speak a half dozen words, to understand how that could happen to a grown man of thirty.

I left the Trapeze and went to my room, shaved and dressed, and went back downstairs to prowl the hotel. Really I hoped to see the Girards again, but they had left the Trapeze and they were not dining in the Grill or the Blue Room or the main dining room.

During my search for the magic lady, I caught a glimpse of Murray Cardew, resplendent in white tie and tails, dining in solitary grandeur in the Grill. He gave me an almost imperceptible nod of greeting from across the room.

I was just turning away from the velvet rope outside the entrance to the, Grill when I encountered Jerry Dodd, our chief security officer—“house dick to you, Mr. Haskell.” Jerry is a thin, wiry little man in his late forties with a professional smile that does nothing to hide the fact that his pale eyes are sharp, penetrating and able to see and read a great deal in a moment’s glance. He is one of a half dozen people on the staff whom Chambrun trusts without reservation. He works the shift from seven at night until three in the morning when the bars, the Blue Room night club and the dining rooms, public and private, are going full blast. This is the chief trouble time—when the outside world comes in.

“You figured it out?” he asked me.

I was thinking about Juliet Girard and I looked at him blankly.

“The Sullivan business,” he said. It was typical that he knew all about it, knew I had been present during Chambrun’s interrogation.

“The boss evidently doesn’t think this Sullivan is a klepto,” Jerry said. “Standard routine for that kind: ‘Your room is needed.’ Twenty years on the job here, we’ve caught a lot of people in the wrong rooms. This is the first time nothing has been done about it.”

“Yet,” I said, “the boss said he was going to think about it.”

Jerry laughed, “He’d already done his thinking. But I don’t like not understanding. If you get a clue, leave me in on it, huh?”

“You bet.”

In my mooncalf state I wasn’t interested in the whys and wherefores of Chambrun’s handling of the Sullivan business. I wandered about, feeling cheated. There was no future in the evening for me except to wait until the Girards came back to the hotel from wherever they’d gone. Perhaps I’d get a glimpse of her as they went to the elevators, or they might even stop for a drink in one of the bars.

About nine o’clock I suddenly realized that, moonstruck or not, I was hungry. I dropped in at the Grill again and ordered myself a steak sandwich and a mixed green salad. Mr. Cardoza, the captain, mixes the finest French dressing I’ve ever tasted. By the time I’d finished and was having a demitasse and a Hennessy, I’d begun to laugh at myself. In my job I saw dozens of beautiful women come and go every day. How nonsensical could you get? I’d just about decided to give up watching for Juliet Girard and go out on the town somewhere when Mr. Cardoza came over to my table.

“Telephone for you, Mr. Haskell. It’s old Mr. Cardew.”

Cardoza had brought a phone with him, and he plugged it into a jack in the floorboard near my table. I picked up the receiver.

“Yes, Mr. Cardew?”

His voice sounded old and unsteady. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Haskell.”

“Quite all right, sir.”

“I’ve been trying to reach Mr. Chambrun, but he’s apparently gone out for the evening.”

“I believe he’s gone to the theatre, sir.”

“Something rather urgent has come up,” Murray Cardew said, “connected with the little matter we were discussing earlier today.”

“The seating problem, sir?”

“Not that, Mr. Haskell, but something concerned with the people involved in that seating problem. I should like to pass it on to you, so that you in turn can pass it on to Mr. Chambrun when he gets in. I suspect I’ll be sound asleep by that time.”

“Of course, sir. Go ahead.”

“Not on the phone if you don’t mind, Mr. Haskell.”

“You’d like me to come up to your room, sir?”

“If it won’t be too much trouble.”

“Of course not, sir. I’ll come at once.”

I signed my check, left the Grill, and started across the lobby toward the bank of elevators. Before I reached them, I saw Karl Nevers, the chief night clerk, wigwagging to me from the desk. He’d just gotten a wire making a reservation for Lily Dorisch, the German film star. She would arrive from Idlewild about one in the morning—not a good time to make a splash.

“This one likes the red carpet treatment,” Karl said. “If there aren’t a couple of photographers taking flash shots of her as she crosses the lobby, there’ll be hell to pay.”

“I suppose I can get our staff boy out of bed,” I said.

“And plan to be around yourself,” Karl said. “Our Lily likes to have nice-looking young men dancing attendance on her. It might be worthwhile calling a couple of night city editors. Our Lily always has a carefully prepared off-the-cuff statement spiced up with a little cheesecake. And she has the leg for it.”

“At one o’clock in the morning?” I said weakly.

“This hotel,” Karl said, “is owned by one Mr. George Battle who sits on the Riviera counting his money and other assets. Our Lily is among those ‘other assets.’ Hop to it, boy.”

I went into the office behind the desk and made a few calls. Miss Lily Dorisch would be received in a style that would please Owner George Battle. In all, it took me about twenty minutes. Then I started again on my interrupted journey to Murray Cardew’s room on the seventeenth floor.

The door to his room was standing open when I reached it, so I knocked and then walked in.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, sir, but I …”

It was as far as I got. Murray Cardew lay on his bed in an oddly grotesque position, as if he’d fallen there. He had replaced his tail coat with a black velvet smoking jacket. It was pulled half off one shoulder as if he’d wrenched away from someone holding him. The silver white hair on the left side of his head was soaked with blood. Someone had clobbered him good!

I’m no doctor. I couldn’t see that he was breathing, but I thought I detected a slight fluttering of his eyelids.

“Mr. Cardew!” I cried out

There was no response and the eyelids were still.

I did all the wrong things. I tried to move him into a more comfortable position, talking to him all the time. There was a bottle of his blessed sherry on a side table, and I tried to force some of it between his lips without success. Only then did I pick up the phone and ask urgently for the house doctor, for Jerry Dodd, and for Chambrun to be reached and warned of a serious emergency.

A curious impulse sent me into the bathroom for a damp towel. I wiped away the slowly drying blood from the wound on Cardew’s head, straightened his white tie, and pulled the smoking jacket back neatly over his shoulder. He wouldn’t have liked to be seen in a disheveled state.

I felt shock, disbelief, and a slowly mounting anger, directed unreasonably at Miss Lily Dorisch who had to have the red carpet treatment. Except for the delay in making arrangements for her, I might have been here when Murray Cardew had needed me badly.

The old boy, I found myself thinking, had stepped on one of Sullivan’s “land mines.”

T
HAT NIGHT WAS LONG,
tense, and exhausting, interrupted for me by the absurd arrival of the flaxen-haired Lily Dorisch. Eddie, the bartender’s; word “dish” applied to her in spades. Her measurements must have been unbelievable. Her smile was brilliantly artificial. Although it was the middle of the night, she wore black glasses when she first appeared, surrounded by bellboys with a dozen bags, and a hatchet-faced older woman who was obviously a maid. Our house photographers and a couple of boys from the tabloids flashed pictures. Karl Nevers greeted her at the desk like a visiting queen. I found myself mechanically expressing pleasure at her presence and heard myself rewarded by the promise that I should have a drink with her tomorrow and receive the answers to all the questions I must be dying to ask her. A couple of reporters, who would have shot me dead on the spot if they’d known I was concealing what was going on on the seventeenth floor and in Chambrun’s office, asked her routine questions about her plans. All of this was interrupted by a little screech of delight from the lady as she spotted someone crossing the lobby.

“Max! Darling Max!” she cried at the top of her lungs.

Max, whoever he might be, was a tall, broad-shouldered gent with hair cut tight to a Germanic-looking skull. He was in evening dress and a rimless monocle hung from a black silk cord around his neck. He came swiftly across to la Dorisch and bent low over her hand.

“My dear Lily,” I heard him say; I expected the German accent.

“You will have a late supper with me now, Max,” la Dorisch said. I was suddenly given the bellboy treatment. “You can arrange that for me, Haskell, in my rooms?”

“Of course,” I said.

“I will leave the supper to your chef—something light, yet filling. With it you will serve a magnum of Extra Quality Brut.”

I nodded, fighting a foolish anger.

Max Whoever stuck the monocle in his eye and looked at me coldly. “The check, of course, will go on my bill,” he said.

“No, no, Maxie dear,” la Dorisch cooed. “I want to place you in my debt! I want to hear everything about you, Maxie, and the civilized worlds of Berlin and Paris.”

Maxie popped the monocle out of his eye. “Well, if you insist,” he said. He certainly hadn’t tried very hard for that one, I thought. I kept thinking he reminded me of someone, and suddenly realized it was the late Conrad Veidt, playing German villains in the old war movies. Maxie was acting, I thought, but there was a cold, hard edge to it.

La Dorisch swept him off with her retinue toward the elevators. As I turned to watch them go, I felt my heart plump against my ribs. The Girards had just come in from the side street entrance. Juliet stood gripping the black sleeve of her husband’s coat as she watched the parade to the elevator. I couldn’t tell whether it was the blonde German tootsie who had startled her or the elegant, grim-faced Maxie. I know that she suddenly faced away as if she couldn’t bear to keep looking.

I turned back to Karl Nevers, the night clerk, who was grinning at me. “Good show,” he said.

“Who is Maxie?” I asked.

“Max Kroll,” he said. “Advance guard for the Bernardel party arriving tomorrow.”

“I could have sworn he was German,” I said.

“You’d be right,” Karl said. “He manages the Bernardel automobile factory in West Germany. A Nazi re-tread. Big wheel in the Common Market.”

That, I thought, might account for Juliet’s reaction at the sight of him. Anyone connected with Bernardel must bring back the tragedy of her father’s murder.

“You’d better order the lady’s supper, chum,” Karl said, still grinning, “or you may get a direct phone call from Mr. George Battle on the Riviera.”

“If I do, I’ll tell him about Maxie,” I said.

I glanced back at the lobby. The Dorisch party had disappeared in the elevators. Charles and Juliet Girard were moving slowly in that direction again.

“Any progress upstairs?” I heard Karl ask me, his smile gone.

“Nothing,” I said. “No weapon. No clue to who attacked the old boy. No one out of place in the halls or on the elevators.”

“Cops give you a rough time?”

“It isn’t over yet,” I said.

Upstairs.

Upstairs was a place of death and frustration and deep regret Murray Cardew, gentle ghost from the past, seemed such an unlikely choice for violence. Yet I remembered Chambrun’s comment to the effect that the old man could transform himself into the world’s greatest blackmailer if he chose to use what he knew to get rich. Was it possible that in his personal twilight he’d chosen to change his pattern?

It was as good a guess as any other. Guesses were all there was to work with at the moment. As I’d told Karl Nevers, the police had found no weapon in the room. The murderer had carried it away with him. The assistant medical examiner conceded it could have been a gun butt. It could also have been any one of a number of other hard, smooth objects. The night maid had seen no one suspicious in the hall. The elevator operators had seen no one odd, no one who looked like a murderer—however a murderer looks. Fingerprint men and the rest of the homicide crew hadn’t come up with anything helpful.

I was the only lead and a damned meager one. Cardew had sent for me, but it seemed likely I had been his third choice. The switchboard reported he had tried to reach Chambrun first. Failing that he had asked to be put through to the French Ambassador’s suite at the Waldorf. His Excellency, Monsieur Jacques Delacroix was in New York attending the current session of the General Assembly at the U.N. and would preside at the opening meeting of the International Trade Commission. But Monsieur Delacroix had been out for the evening. It was only then that Cardew had asked the girl on the switchboard to track me down, which she had done.

I had very little to offer. I tried to get some sort of lead from Chambrun, who had come quickly back from the theatre, but his hooded eyes told me nothing.

Lieutenant Hardy looked more like a pleasant, slightly puzzled college fullback than a homicide detective. He had me tell the story over and over—the story of the seating problem.

“You don’t kill a man because of a dinner-table arrangement,” he kept saying. “Repeat what he told you on the phone, Haskell.”

I repeated it—then and several times later. “
Something rather urgent has come up
,” the old man had said, “
connected with the matter we were discussing earlier today
.” Not the seating arrangement itself. “
But something concerned with the people involved in that seating problem
.”