Death After Breakfast (3 page)

“That’s the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address,” I said.

“Lunch?” she asked, and I thought she sounded relieved.

“Lunch, dinner and breakfast,” I said. And then I added what may have been a fatal word. “Forever,” I said.

“You’re a love, Mark. One o’clock?”

That’s how it began. And now, after three months, it had become apparent to me that Shirley was not so cynical about romance as she had made me believe. This could be forever, I told myself.

So that fills you in on Shirley Who? Her message simply meant she wanted me to call. Much as I loved her—at the moment—it was not an ideal time.

She sounded bright and businesslike, probably working on her column.

“How are you this morning, darling?” she asked.

“A little harried,” I said. “Lots of goings-on.” Even Shirley couldn’t be told about Chambrun. I would trust her with my life but not with a secret.

“Claude Duval is starting his filming there tonight, isn’t he?” she asked.

“They’re taking shots at the Cancer Fund Ball,” I said, “and then, when the bars are legally closed, the actors will go to work with scenes shot in the lobby and the Trapeze Bar.”

“I’ll be at the ball, of course,” she said. “But I wondered if, when Duval goes to work, you could hide me away in the woodwork somewhere. I’d like to see him work.”

I laughed. “The price will be high,” I said.

“Of course, luv, and I promise to pay and pay and pay.”

“Breakfast?” I asked.

“Naturally,” she said.

The mills of the gods were grinding, but I didn’t know it at the time.

Chambrun was nearly an hour and a half missing, and George Mayberry was fuming up in Ruysdale’s office. Chambrun was not late for an appointment with the chairman of the board.

I have a simple four-letter Anglo-Saxon word to describe George Mayberry which I can’t use here. He is a big man—physically. He has a loud voice and he scowls a lot, self-importantly. He dresses expensively but conservatively. He demands and expects instant service at the snap of his heavy fingers. He meant to look and sound formidable, but I had the feeling that if you stuck a pin in him he would deflate like a pricked balloon, dissolve like the Wicked Witch of the East in
The Wizard of Oz.

Mayberry was a sort of one-man oversight committee for the board of directors. It is ironic, because he knows as much about the management of a hotel as I do about the construction of a nuclear submarine. I am of the opinion that wiser heads on the board had given this big windbag the job to get rid of him, convinced that Chambrun could make chopped liver out of him.

Unfortunately, that morning Chambrun wasn’t there to do the job. Mayberry was steaming at Ruysdale. I suppose he thought he was confronting a “helpless woman,” the perfect target for his bullying tactics. He didn’t know he had a tiger by the tail.

“He’s late for an appointment with me,” Mayberry was thundering as I walked into Ruysdale’s office.

“I regret to say he didn’t show up at all for an earlier appointment,” Ruysdale told him.

“Where is he?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know, Mr. Mayberry.”

“Don’t know! Aren’t you his secretary! Doesn’t he keep you informed as to where he is on a business day?”

“Ordinarily.”

“So what the hell is this?”

“An unusual circumstance,” Ruysdale said quietly.

The phone on her desk rang and she picked it up, moving very quickly. “Miss Ruysdale speaking.” Then: “Yes, Jerry. … Oh, my God! … Yes, of course you must. … I’ll tell Mark.”

She looked at me as she put down the phone, the color drained from her face. I didn’t want to hear what she had to say. Bad news about Chambrun, I was certain.

“There is a problem in Suite Twenty-one A,” she said.

“What kind of problem?” Mayberry wanted to know.

“Jerry Dodd thinks it’s a homicide.”

“Who is Jerry Dodd?”

The oversight chairman didn’t even know the name of the hotel’s security officer. Ruysdale didn’t answer his question.

“Laura Kauffman,” she said. “Mrs. James Kauffman. Big wheel in the social world. The former Baroness von Holtzmann: Chairperson of the committee that’s running the Cancer Fund Ball tonight.”

“My God,” Mayberry said. “I know Laura Kauffman well!”

“Jerry has called Homicide,” Ruysdale said. “You’d better get up there, Mark. We’ve got to keep the press away in case the facts have leaked, at least until—”

Until, or if, Chambrun put in an appearance.

I headed for the door.

“I’ll take charge here,” I heard Mayberry say.

I didn’t pay any attention to him.

A
NYTHING JERRY DODD DID
he did thoroughly. His search for Chambrun was slow and methodical, but none of the ground would have to be covered again. Part of the process begun that morning was sending teams of two men to every guest room in the hotel. They announced themselves as maintenance men if the guest was in. Some kind of electrical emergency that couldn’t wait. The possibility of a short circuit that might in turn start a fire. Irritated or not the guests let the “maintenance men” look. Where no one answered a doorbell ring the searchers used a passkey to get in. That was how Laura Kauffman was found in Suite Twenty-one A. No answer to the doorbell and the searchers had let themselves in.

When I arrived on the twenty-first floor I found one of Jerry’s men standing outside the door, a man named Sims.

“I was told to let you in, Mr. Haskell,” Sims said. He had a key.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I hope you’ve got your stomach screwed in tight,” Sims said. “It’s not pretty.”

Sims opened the door and I went in. Twenty-one A is a typical small suite: a foyer, a living room, a bedroom, bath, and kitchenette. Suites in the Beaumont are decorated in different styles, from Louis the Fourteenth to frightening modern. Twenty-one A is early American, with a Grant Wood and a Benton decorating the paneled walls.

Jerry Dodd turned from the windows as I came in. He nodded toward the bedroom door. “Keeping it shut till Hardy gets here,” he said. “Thank God I was able to get to him.”

Lieutenant Hardy of Homicide is an old friend who has been involved with Chambrun during other violences in the past. He is a big blond man who looks more like a not quite bright Notre Dame fullback than a very shrewd detective.

“What happened?” I asked.

“A bloody horror,” Jerry said. A nerve twitched high up on his cheek. “Maybe twenty stab wounds. Her breasts, her stomach, other unmentionable areas. My guess is that the Medical Examiner will tell us it was a rape and a murder.”

“My God!”

“What do you know about Laura Kauffman, Mark?”

“Nothing, really,” I said. “Ruysdale just said she is—was—a big wheel in the social whirl. Used to be the Baroness something-or-other. She was chairman of the Cancer Fund Ball tonight.”

“Your girl friend,” Jerry said. “She should have a rundown on her. See what you can dig up. Hardy’s got to have some place to start.”

As I was starting for the phone the outside door opened and Sims stuck his head in.

“A Mr. Mayberry insists on seeing you, Jerry. He says he’s in charge.”

Mayberry didn’t wait for an answer. He shoved Sims aside and came barging into the sitting room.

“Now what’s going on here, Dodd?” he asked.

Jerry, who was half Mayberry’s size, gave the board chairman a fishy look. “Out!” he said.

“Now just who the hell do you think you are?” Mayberry shouted.

“Oh, I know who I am,” Jerry said. “Just who the hell do you think you are?”

Mayberry looked close to apoplexy. “Tell him!” he said to me.

“Mr. Mayberry is chairman of the board of directors of the owners’ syndicate,” I said.

“Well, bully for him,” Jerry said. “The message is still ‘out.’ ”

“I’m a good friend of Mrs. Kauffman’s,” Mayberry said. “I demand to know—”

“Out!” Jerry said. It was the whisper of a snake about to strike.

“I’ll have your hide for this, Dodd!” Mayberry thundered.

“Sims!” Jerry said.

Sims had been pushed aside by Mayberry, but that was because he wasn’t expecting anything. He made a swift move up behind the big man, caught his arm and twisted it sharply behind his back. Mayberry made a sound that was almost a scream.

“Do what the man says,” Sims said, sounding very polite.

Mayberry was forced out of the room and into the hall, shouting that he would fire everybody on the staff if necessary. The closed door shut the noise of him out of the soundproof suite.

“If we find Chambrun, nobody will be fired,” I said.

“If we don’t find him, it won’t matter,” Jerry said. “Try to get onto your girl, will you?”

I called Shirley. She sounded surprised to hear from me so soon again. “You decided to buy someone else lunch,” she said

“Never,” I said. “But I’ve got trouble you can help me with.”

“Name it.”

“What do you know about Laura Kauffman?”

Shirley laughed. “More than would make her happy to know that I know.”

“Could you come over here with what you have?”

“Oh, Mark, I’m trying to finish a column before our lunch date. Won’t it wait?”

“It won’t wait,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Somebody has been caught dead here,” I said. “It’s important for us to have a dossier on Laura K.”

“She killed her husband!” Shirley said.

“You want a scoop, you’ll have to come over here to get it,” I said.

“Give me a hint.”

“I don’t trust the phone,” I said.

“Yours or mine?”

“Mine. It goes through a switchboard. Lather up the horses, will you, luv?”

“Mark, if this is a game—”

“I’ve never been more serious in my whole life,” I said.

The burly figure of Lieutenant Hardy appeared in the doorway, followed by his crew of homicide specialists, photographers, fingerprint men. His first question was not unexpected.

“Where is Chambrun?” he asked. When there was big trouble Chambrun was always on hand.

Jerry told him where Chambrun wasn’t. They had found what was in the next room while searching for him.

“Want me to put out an APB on him?” Hardy asked.

Jerry looked suddenly very tired. Dealing with a murder served only to sharpen his investigative wits, but searching for Chambrun, a man he loved, produced an anxiety that had worn him down.

“I’d be glad of any help,” he said. “Searching the hotel is a routine I can carry out, but every instinct I have tells me we’re not going to find him in the hotel.”

“Kidnapping?” Hardy suggested.

“Maybe. But nobody’s made any demands yet.”

Hardy went to the phone and ordered an all points bulletin set in motion at police headquarters. Then he and Jerry went into the bedroom where Laura Kauffman had been brutalized. I could have gone with them but I didn’t want to see what was there. Jerry’s description had convinced me my stomach wasn’t screwed in tightly enough.

I called Ruysdale on the phone and told her Hardy had arrived. On her end she’d heard nothing, but she reminded me of a fact that was hard to keep in focus. There was a hotel to run.

“Claire DeLune has been screaming her head off for Chambrun or you. Things are not the way she wants them in the small ballroom. I guess you’re elected, Mark.”

“Oh, God, Betsy,” I said. “I don’t give a damn about fashion shows at the moment.”

“You’re still working for Chambrun,” Ruysdale said very quietly. “He’d want everything covered, Mark.”

“I know,” I said. “So mine ‘not to reason why—’ ”

Claire DeLune was the name a Brooklyn-born girl named Gussie Winterbottom had taken when she entered the field of fashion design. She was a hard-driving, very efficient and talented woman. At forty she could almost have passed for one of her own very beautiful and talented models, except that she had replaced youth with a kind of lacquered finish. She dressed in her own designs and they were pretty sensational.

“Hi, Gussie,” I said, when I found her in the small ballroom.

“Keep you scurrilous tongue off me, you bastard,” she said. She didn’t like to be reminded of her real name. “Where is Chambrun?”

“Tied up,” I said, and almost choked when I said it.

“I was promised mirrors,” Gussie said. “Six full-length mirrors in the dressing room. How do you expect my girls to get put together if they can’t see what they’re doing?”

“Six full-length mirrors,” I said, trying to concentrate on where they could be found.

“So get off your butt and produce them,” Gussie said. Her eyes narrowed. “There’s a rumor around that Chambrun has skipped town.”

The news was beginning to leak. Too many people were involved in the anxious search.

“Your models drive him up the wall,” I said. “They remind him of his youth.”

“Don’t
you
get any ideas about them, buster,” Gussie said. They’re not here to titillate the male population. They’re here to sell dresses to women. Six full-length mirrors on the double, please. That ‘please’ is a figure of speech!”

A half-naked girl appeared in the doorway to the dressing room. “Madame DeLune, if you could—”

I might as well have been wallpaper as far as the nude model was concerned.

“You see, she needs a mirror!” Gussie said, and charged off.

In the lobby I got in touch with the supply department and asked for six full-length mirrors on the double. “Her show begins in less than an hour.”

“I’ll have to steal a few somewhere,” the supply department told me.

“There’s one on the back of my bathroom door,” I said.

As I put down the house phone I saw Shirley coming toward me across the lobby from the front entrance. She was carrying a briefcase under her arm.

I’m not much at rhapsodizing in words. I have thought of other women “forever,” and at the time I thought that, was convinced that each of them was the most beautiful ever. But, whatever my bias at the moment, Shirley was the most. Her blond hair, worn loose and down to her shoulders, was really gold. She was small-boned and she moved with the grace of a ballet dancer. Her wide blue eyes were devoid of any suspicion or cynicism. Beauty, I think, is as much personality as bone structure, skin texture, or measurements. The girl was so open, so apparently uncomplicated, so genuine that she took your breath away in a world of neurotics and psychos, in a world where a Chambrun could be whisked away into oblivion and a woman could be butchered in her bedroom in a civilized hotel. I wanted to take her in my arms as she came up to me, but I restrained myself. Too many people had their eyes on her as she crossed the lobby. I took her by the arm, without speaking, and led her toward a small private office back of the main desk. I guess, when she looked at me, she saw that the situation was real and serious.