Death After Breakfast (11 page)

“Mr. Chambrun didn’t tell you what had happened to him?”

“No, just what was cooking. He sounded as though we could expect him to turn up, but not in time for whatever.”

“What can I do?” she asked.

“Just stay here so I can keep reminding myself that there is something worth sticking around for.” I kissed the tip of her upturned nose. “You ever made Turkish coffee?” I asked. “There’s the special coffee maker over there.”

“I guess I could figure it out,” she said.

“Ruysdale didn’t get to it,” I said. “If Chambrun gets back here and there’s no Turkish coffee—after a day and a half—!”

Secondhand, I can tell you a little of something that was going on elsewhere. The lobby traffic was only mildly disturbed, I was told, when the bomb squad people arrived, dressed like men from Mars and carrying some sort of metal pot between them. The word had been so tightly kept that I imagine people thought this was a new laundry service dressed in some kind of mod uniforms. The penthouses and the two top floors were deserted, the evacuation smoothly accomplished by Hardy and Jerry Dodd. It was Jerry who took the bomb squad people, equipped now with Ruysdale’s safe combination, to Chambrun’s quarters and showed them the wall safe, hidden behind a colorful Gauguin painting. Jerry told me that the man in charge produced something that looked like a stethoscope and held it against the safe’s dial.

“Ticking away,” the man said, and glanced at his watch. Twenty-three minutes to go.

Then everyone except the experts were cleared out of the penthouse and told to go at least three floors down.

In Chambrun’s office Shirley and I waited. Ten minutes to nine—five minutes to nine—three minutes to nine. Nine o’clock. We strained to hear some sound, clinging to each other. Nothing. About five minutes past nine Ruysdale and Lieutenant Hardy walked into the office. I couldn’t read their faces.

“I know how lousy that Turkish coffee is,” Hardy said, “but I think I could stand a cup of it.”

“They made it?” I asked, as Shirley went to get him his coffee.

“They made it,” Hardy said.

Ruysdale started to laugh, a little hysterically for her.

“An alarm clock,” Hardy said. “An ordinary, drugstore alarm clock.”

“Attached to—?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Hardy said.

“What are you talking about?”

“It was attached to nothing,” Hardy said. “No explosives, no nothing. Just ticking its little heart away inside the safe.”

“A hoax!” I said, not really believing it.

“A hoax,” Hardy said. “A good enough one to have convinced Chambrun, it seems. Now all we can do is wait for him to explain it.”

I can’t tell you too much about the general activity in the hotel for the next hour. I know that the evacuated guests were returned to their rooms. There was no longer any danger. That made it all a kind of a lark to them; something to dine out on for the next month. Chambrun’s office, where I stayed, became a madhouse of people coming and going. I got to Mrs. Veach on the switchboard and told her to spread the word that we had an all-clear. Jerry Dodd and several of his security men, Atterbury from the front desk, the chief engineer, strangers I’d never seen before, were all asking questions for which there were no answers. Some facts emerged from Sergeant Bragiotti of the bomb squad, a dark-skinned, burly man who had learned to live with moments of high tension. Through it all the phones kept ringing and Ruysdale was busy reassuring guests that there was no danger. There had been no way to keep a hundred and fifty evacuees from spreading the word. False alarm was the message Ruysdale was handing out, and she had pressed Shirley into handling one of the phones.

Bragiotti, still wearing some sort of fireproof coverall and carrying a heavy metal helmet with a glass face shield, repeated the unbelievable news.

“A forty-eight-hour clock,” he told us. “You can find one in almost any drugstore. It was set to go off at nine this morning. But nothing else; no explosives, no gadgets, nothing.”

“What would have happened when the alarm rang?” someone asked.

“Nothing,” Bragiotti said. “If you were standing close enough to the safe you might have heard the bell. That’s all.”

“Chambrun thought it was real,” I said.

“So did I,” Bragiotti said, “when I first heard the ticking sound. An ordinary clock can be used to trigger a bomb.”

“How the hell did someone get the clock into the safe,” Jerry Dodd asked.

“Opened it, put it in,” Bragiotti said.

“Only Miss Ruysdale and Chambrun have the combination,” Jerry said.

Bragiotti shrugged, glancing across the office at Ruysdale who was busy on one of the phones.

“You know damn well neither one of them did it!” Jerry said.

Bragiotti found a cigarette somewhere inside his asbestos suit. “That safe is probably twenty-five or thirty years old,” he said. “It’s what, in my business, we call a Jimmy Valentine. Anyone with any skill could have opened it without the combination. I could have opened it without the combination if Miss Ruysdale hadn’t had it. Piece of cake. You just listen to the tumblers drop and you’ve got it.”

“But you’d have to know how?” Jerry said.

“It’s almost a lost art,” Bragiotti said, “because they don’t make locks that simple these days. But it could have been done. Must have been done because the safe wasn’t forced.”

“Fingerprints?” Jerry asked.

“Wiped clean,” Bragiotti said.

“Can the clock be traced?”

“No prints on the clock, also wiped clean,” Bragiotti said. “Could have been bought anywhere between here and San Francisco. You could try for months and not come up with an answer.”

“The whole damn thing is some kind of joke!” Jerry said.

“Not such a funny joke.” It was Frank Lewis, the FBI man, who had come in without my noticing him. “If someone took Chambrun by force out into New Jersey somewhere, it’s kidnapping. Across state lines. That’s not a joke when we catch him.”

“You know he was taken away from here against his will?” Bragiotti asked.

“No other way,” Jerry said. “If you knew the man, you’d know.”

“There’s nothing more I can do for you, or tell you,” Bragiotti said. He hesitated. “Chambrun did tell you on the phone that the bomb was in the safe? Not just a bomb somewhere?”

“He told us in the safe,” I said. “He mentioned the fact that Ruysdale had the combination.”

“It might make sense to search the whole hotel,” Bragiotti said. “But if he was so positive—and the clock
was
there— ”

“What’s this about a clock?”

And there he was, standing inside the office door. Chambrun! His gray tropical worsted suit looked as though he’d slept in it, and it turned out he had.

Ruysdale almost blew her own secret then, if she had one. She bolted from the telephone and ran across the room to him. I thought she was going to embrace him.

“I’m all right, Ruysdale,” he said, gently for him. It stopped her.

We all crowded around him, all asking silly questions. He walked past us to his desk and sat down. At last God
was
in his heaven. He gestured toward the Turkish coffee maker. Ruysdale reached it first and brought him a cup. He tasted it.

“My God, who made this?” he asked.

“I-I’m afraid I did, Mr. Chambrun,” Shirley said.

“You need schooling,” he said. He leaned back in his chair, lighting one of his Egyptian cigarettes. “The bomb?”

Bragiotti filled him in on our end of the story. The bomb was a hoax. Chambrun’s next question was how the guests had been handled and what their reactions had been. He seemed satisfied with the answers.

“So you’d better hear my end of it,” he said.

He had gone to his penthouse at one fifteen in the morning, as we knew from the phone logs. He had put some music on his stereo, gone out onto the roof garden for a few minutes, a standard relaxing routine on a fair night. He had come back into the penthouse and sat down to make some notes for the next day’s activities. At two fifteen he’d checked with the switchboard, as we knew. No more calls except in an emergency.

“I turned to go into the bedroom,” he told us, “and found myself facing a small, wiry man wearing a ski mask and holding a very large handgun pointed at me. A .44 caliber cannon, I think. How he got there I have no idea. The gun was very real.”

The masked man told Chambrun he was going to have to leave the hotel. If he went, without making trouble, he wouldn’t be hurt. If he was forced to use the gun on Chambrun that would only be the beginning.

“He told me there was a bomb in the safe, set to go off at nine o’clock this morning. That was some thirty and a half hours away. I didn’t believe him. He suggested I go over to the safe and listen. I put my ear against the dial and I could hear the timing mechanism ticking away. He wasn’t kidding, I thought.”

The hotel was more important to Chambrun than his own safety. He might, he told us, have made some attempt to disarm the masked man. Long ago, in the days of the Resistance, he had learned how to handle himself. But it was no better than a fifty-fifty chance. If he failed he could wind up dead. No one would have had any reason to look in the safe. There was nothing of any real importance kept there. He would be dead, and at nine o’clock this morning the top of the hotel could be blown to pieces and who knows how many people killed and injured.

“He told me that if I played the game his way I would be set free in time to have the bomb deactivated,” Chambrun said. “I asked him what it was all about. He wasn’t talking. Somehow he convinced me he was dead serious. A harmless alarm clock, for God sake!”

The blessed hotel had to be protected. Chambrun, gun at his back, took the masked man down to the basement in the private elevator. They sent the car back up to the roof, just the way I’d suggested to Hardy. Chambrun led the man out onto the side street where there was a car waiting. Chambrun was forced to drive.

“So you know where you went?” the FBI man asked.

“Of course I know where I went,” Chambrun said. “At least most of the way. This morning I know exactly where I was.”

“Where?” the FBI man asked.

“About twenty miles south of Princeton, New Jersey. We went out through the Holland Tunnel, up over the Pulaski Skyway, and on to Princeton. All familiar. But then he took me onto back roads. In the dark it was hard to pick out landmarks. It doesn’t matter because this morning I know. I can send you to the cottage where I was held.”

“He had a gun on you all this time?”

Chambrun made an impatient gesture. “We got to a simple little summer cottage. There was early daylight then. He never left me for an instant. About eight o’clock in the morning he asked me if I’d like some coffee. I would. There was some made in a pot on the stove. He told me to heat it up. I did, poured two cups. He wouldn’t let me get close enough to him to hand him his cup. He must have read my mind. I thought of throwing the hot coffee in his face and trying to jump him. I needed the coffee. I took a couple of deep swallows of it. It was the worst coffee I ever tasted.” He glanced at Shirley. “You are a genius compared to whoever made that stuff, Miss Thomas. After a moment I understood why it was so awful. The room began to spin around, and that sonofabitch in the mask was laughing at me. It was drugged. I fell flat on my face on the floor.” Chambrun’s face was set in rock-hard lines. “When I came to I couldn’t move, my muscles were so cramped. I looked at my watch. It was a few minutes past eight. I thought I’d only been out for a few minutes. Then I saw the calendar on the watch face. I’d been out for nearly twenty-four hours! And there was a bomb set to go off in less than an hour.

“No sign of my masked friend. I struggled up, holding onto a chair to steady myself. There was a telephone on a side table. To my surprise it worked. I called you, Ruysdale. I prayed a little that I was in time. A harmless alarm clock! It doesn’t make sense.”

“How did you get back here?” Lewis asked.

“The car we’d come in was gone,” Chambrun said. “I followed a country road till I came to a house. A man there drove me into Princeton where I hired a car.”

“Draw me a map so I can locate the cottage,” Lewis said. “Your friend must have left his fingerprints there.”

Chambrun picked up a pencil and began to draw. “I never saw him without gloves,” he said.

To quote from an oft quoted quote, there was a hotel to run. Frank Lewis, the FBI man, took off for New Jersey and the cottage where Chambrun had been an unconscious prisoner. Bragiotti went back to his headquarters to wait for another bomb scare from somewhere. They came every day, he told us. Shirley, without a word but with a signal to me, slipped away. She’d be in my apartment when I was free. I supposed that my job would be to circulate in the lobby and the other public rooms, to answer questions, to satisfy guests that there was no longer any danger or threat of danger.

I was just about to take off when I got a look from Chambrun which told me to wait He then turned to Hardy who was standing by the windows overlooking the park.

“Nice of you to help, Walter,” Chambrun said. “A friend is a friend is a friend.”

“I’m not here as a friend,” Hardy said.

“Oh?”

“You’ve got a murder on your hands, Pierre,” the big detective said.

I suddenly realized that Chambrun didn’t know about anything that had happened in the Beaumont for nearly thirty-six hours. In his hurry to get back from New Jersey he hadn’t stopped to buy a paper. If there had been a radio in his hired car, he obviously hadn’t turned it on. Chambrun looked stunned.

In a casual, conversational tone Hardy gave him the details of Laura Kauffman’s slaughter. He didn’t leave out any of the gory details. As I listened to them again, I was glad I hadn’t bothered with breakfast. When Hardy was finished, Chambrun turned to me.

“Reaction in the hotel?” he asked.

“What you might expect,” I said. “She was chairman of the Cancer Fund Ball committee. No way to keep it a secret from her committee people. Thousands of people were suddenly asking questions. We had no answers for them.”

“We still have no answers,” Hardy said.

“The ball went on, however?”