Death After Breakfast (6 page)

Cardoza, the captain in the Blue Lagoon, would know when Chambrun had finished dinner by checking with room service.

“While the boss was talking to Cardoza, Mr. Mayberry called back again. I told him the boss’s line was busy. He told me to cut in and I said I couldn’t He told me he’d see to it that I was fired.”

“I hope you didn’t lose any sleep,” I said. “He’s fired us all at least once today.”

“I wasn’t concerned,” Kiley said. “I’d only have interrupted Mr. Chambrun for a bomb threat.”

“And Mayberry is only a wet firecracker,” I said.

“At twenty minutes past ten Miss Ruysdale called in to say that Mr. Chambrun had gone to Miss Janet Parker’s suite, Twenty-one C.”

Jerry and I looked at each other. Three doors down the hall from Laura Kauffman’s last resting place.

“There weren’t any calls for him. At eleven-oh-three he called in to say he was in the Blue Lagoon. Twenty minutes later he called to say he was ‘making the rounds’ and could be reached in the Spartan Bar in about half an hour. In half an hour he checked in from the Spartan.”

“A few minutes before midnight?”

“Eleven fifty-two. Nothing more until at one-fifteen he called to say he was on his way up to the penthouse.”

“Making the rounds” was a routine which either Chambrun or I carried out every night, I, when he was tied up with something. It meant checking the bars, the restaurants, and any special rooms that were in use for special events, like balls, conventions, private dinners. I have said somewhere that it was like Marshall Dillon putting Dodge City to bed. I had guessed that the hour or more in the Spartan Bar had been spent playing backgammon with Dr. Partridge, the house physician. Doc Partridge is a crotchety old man, one of whose remaining dreams was to win a few bucks from Chambrun at a game he had no chance of winning. Chambrun was a terror at it.

So much for Chambrun’s evening.

Jerry got on to Betsy Ruysdale when Miss Kiley left us. What did she know about Cardoza’s call and Chambrun’s visit to Miss Parker’s suite? It seems they were related. Miss Parker, the star of Duval’s film, had once, some years back, done a nightclub act which had played the Blue Lagoon. She had been a kind of present-day Helen Morgan, singing light, romantic songs. I remembered her when Ruysdale reminded us. The Blue Lagoon is an intimate room and Janet Parker, whose name had been something else at that time, had done very nicely in it. Miss Parker, it seemed, had called Cardoza, remembering him as a friend and a decent guy during the two weeks she’d played the room. She told Cardoza she was being given a hard time by some man in the hotel and what should she do about it.

“Guess who the man is?” Ruysdale suggested.

“No time for guessing Betsy,” Jerry said.

Ruysdale laughed. “Mayberry,” she said.

“Oh, God!” Jerry said.

“Since Mayberry apparently owns the hotel, according to Miss Parker, she didn’t know how to handle the situation,” Ruysdale told us. “Cardoza told her how. He’d have the boss come to see her. He went. That’s all I know, Jerry. I—I haven’t seen him since.”

The telephone log on Chambrun’s comings and goings the night before indicated nothing but a rather ordinary evening. Jerry put in calls for Doc Partridge and Mr. Quiller, the captain in the Spartan Bar. Doc had gone out somewhere and Quiller wasn’t due to report for work until the cocktail hour that afternoon. Mr. Cardoza, the elegant captain in the Blue Lagoon, wasn’t due till seven in the evening and he couldn’t be reached on a home phone they had for him.

The only thing with any substance about the evening was the rather absurd complication of Miss Parker’s troubles with Mayberry whom she believed “owned the hotel.” A complaint about one guest molesting another was usually passed on to Jerry Dodd to handle, but in this instance Chambrun had chosen to take it on himself. Perhaps, I thought, because Cardoza had made a personal plea and Cardoza was one of Chambrun’s special people.

Jerry sat at his desk in the security office, doodling on a scratch pad.

“Time of death in a homicide is a hard thing to be precise about,” he said. “Hardy tells me the Medical Examiner’s man thinks Laura Kauffman had been dead for from ten to twelve hours when they found her. That would place her killer in Twenty-one A between ten o’clock and midnight last night. The floor maid didn’t go in to turn down her bed because there was a
DO NOT DISTURB
sign hung on the doorknob. But Chambrun was on the floor, only three doors away, between ten and eleven. It’s possible he could have said something to the Parker girl, unimportant to her but important to us. I think I’d like to talk to her.”

It was going on toward one o’clock that afternoon that Jerry and I went up to see the young movie star in Twenty-one C. The Beaumont was buzzing with the usual midday business. The governors had broken for lunch, disappointed when I told them Chambrun was still unavailable. Gussie Winterbottom, Claire DeLune to you, was doing a land-office business with her new line of women’s wear. The Cancer Fund Ball committee was in hectic session because of the tragic death of its chairperson—God how I hate that new word. They talked of cancelling the ball out of respect to Laura Kauffman, all the while looking a half million dollars straight in the eye.

“Laura would want us to carry on,” they kept telling themselves. There really was never any doubt about carrying on.

And the Beaumont was swarming with news people. Jerry and I had used the freight elevator up to Twenty-one to avoid them. A couple of Hardy’s men were in the hallway up there, checking on comings and goings. All the guests on the twenty-first floor had been questioned about last night. Who had gone to see Laura Kauffman or tried to see her. The last call to her room that she had answered had been a little before ten o’clock. After that, till well past midnight, there had been a dozen calls she hadn’t answered. No one had been concerned about that. Laura Kauffman could have been, quite legitimately, anywhere.

Show business is a strange world, larded with luck. A young girl named Julia Parkhurst had started out as a singer in small nightclubs across the country. She had charm and not a little skill at the romantic and sentimental songs she sang. She had achieved something like real success when she was engaged to sing in the Blue Lagoon room at the Beaumont. It was there that some Hollywood big shot saw her. He decided, on the spot, that Julia Parkhurst was just the girl he wanted for a small part in a film he was casting. It didn’t involve singing but she had a special quality he wanted. She, of course, accepted the offer.

Why they changed her name to Janet Parker I don’t know. Perhaps they didn’t want her to be connected with a girl singer who had a minor reputation. The part was small but Janet made a big hit in it. She was nominated by the Academy for a best-supporting-actress award. She didn’t get it, but she was now in demand. She had two leads after that which lifted her to the top of the ladder and now she was being starred in Claude Duval’s latest. If it was as big a success as everyone anticipated, she was set for life.

Jerry and I got in to see her because, I guess, she had orders to see anyone who had “public relations” attached to his name. The filming at the Beaumont had gotten a lot of publicity and she was supposed to assist in exploiting it in any way she could.

She received us wearing a simple dark blue housecoat. Dark hair hung down to her shoulders. Her eyes were violet, like Elizabeth’s Taylor’s, but they weren’t sophisticated. They seemed to ask for help, and I, for one, was instantly prepared to give it. That, I think, was her special charm, her special appeal.

She took us into her sitting room. This was a French suite, an exquisite Matisse on the wall over the mantel. All the people in Duval’s company were in French suites.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Haskell? If it’s about the unfortunate Mrs. Kauffman, I’ve already talked to the police. I had nothing to tell them.”

“Mrs. Kauffman isn’t our only problem today, Miss Parker,” I told her. “Mr. Chambrun, our manager, is unaccountably missing. We understand he called on you last night.”

“Missing?” Her eyes widened.

“He simply hasn’t turned up for work this morning,” I said. “Not having heard from him makes for concern.”

“But of course.”

“Can you tell us about his visit with you, Miss Parker?” Jerry asked.

She looked down at her slender hands.

“We know something about it, Miss Parker,” I said. “Chambrun answered a call from Mr. Cardoza who was your friend when you worked in the Blue Lagoon as Julia Parkhurst.”

“Mr. Cardoza is a very nice man,” she said.

“And Chambrun is a very nice man,” I said. “It was unusual for him to take on the kind of problem you evidently had. Mr. Mayberry?”

“It was very awkward,” she said.

“You don’t have to tell us, Miss Parker,” Jerry said, “but it might be helpful if you would.”

She looked up at me. “Mr. Mayberry is a disgusting creep,” she said.

“Amen,” I said.

“I’m not sure that you know,” she said, “that the group that owns the Beaumont is heavily into financing Claude Duval’s film.”

That was something Chambrun had kept to himself, but it helped explain the hassle he’d had with the owners’ syndicate over the filming. They undoubtedly felt they had the right to have one investment feed another. Chambrun’s only concern would have been for the Beaumont and its image. The compromise had been restrictions on the filming that were driving Claude Duval up the wall.

“I was told by Mr. Herman and Mr. Duval when we checked in here that I should go out of my way to be nice to George Mayberry. He had, they told me, the power to make the filming here go smoothly.”

I wondered what “being nice” to Mr. Mayberry meant. Janet Parker evidently read my mind, and there was a firm little set to her chin.

“Not what you’re thinking, Mark,” she said. First names came easy with her. “He called on me before I’d even gotten settled in these rooms. He brought flowers and a bottle of very old brandy. He said he’d been in love with me since he’d seen me in my first film. At first I thought it was cute, a man in his late fifties flirting with a girl young enough to be his daughter. Well, almost young enough!” Again the little jut of her chin. “After one pony of brandy he was all over me, trying to maul me. I tried to laugh it off and get rid of him. He insisted on dinner. I suggested the Blue Lagoon room. I knew Mr. Cardoza would be helpful if I needed help. In public the big ape would have to behave himself, I thought. I agreed to meet him there in half an hour. Once I was rid of him I tried to reach Mr. Herman, our producer. I found him in Duval’s suite.”

“You didn’t have to keep your date with Mayberry,” I said.

“That’s what I thought,” she said. “I wanted Clark Herman to handle it for me. He sounded distressed. He said something to Duval I couldn’t hear and then he put Duval on the phone. Nothing in the world matters to Claude except having his own way. He made it very clear to me. He needed Mayberry’s help to handle the ‘stupid bastard of a manager’ who was throwing roadblocks in the way of filming. ‘Can it matter so much to let him have a few feels and maybe a little necking? You’re a big girl, Janet, and we need your cooperation. Play along. You have to be ready for shooting the ballroom sequences around midnight. You can stall him, promise him anything for later. Later we will have gotten our way with Chambrun and you can tell Mayberry to drop dead.’ ” She drew a long breath. “Starring in a Duval film, maybe others in the future, is very important to me. So—so I met Mayberry in the Blue Lagoon as I’d promised.”

“Nice business you’re in, Miss Parker,” Jerry said.

“Let’s face it,” she said, “there are hundreds of opportunities to advance your career by ‘being nice’ to someone, agents, directors, producers, male stars.” She gave me a bitter little smile. “I have managed to avoid most of that kind of thing. I wasn’t about to have any part of George Mayberry.”

“But you kept your date,” Jerry said.

“Yes, and you wouldn’t believe. The minute we were seated by Mr. Cardoza, who was very glad to see me, Mayberry was under the tablecloth, groping for my leg, my thigh, other areas. I think he expected me to light up and swoon with delight. I—I wanted to vomit in my soup. I kept telling him that a working night was ahead of me; I had lines to make sure of, the makeup people would need to prepare me a couple of hours before the rehearsal. Later, I told him, tomorrow, meaning today, when the filming was done—”

“Bastard!” I said. “But the filming isn’t until tonight.”

“Rehearsals,” Janet said. “I told him I wouldn’t be able to do anything but concentrate on my job until after the filming tonight. Then, I let him believe, my time would be my own—and his. He kept slobbering that he couldn’t wait, that he’d been waiting all his life for me—junk like that. Finally, mercifully, he had to go to the john. I signaled to Mr. Cardoza and he came over to the table. I told him what was cooking. He was very angry. He told me if I could stall Mayberry until ten o’clock he would call Mr. Chambrun. Chambrun, he said, was the one person who could handle Mayberry.”

Cardoza knew that Chambrun wouldn’t have finished his dinner till ten o’clock. You could tell time by that routine.

“At ten o’clock Mr. Cardoza came back to the table,” Janet said. “ ‘Mr. Chambrun wonders if he could see you in your suite for a few minutes,’ he said. ‘What the hell for?’ Mayberry wanted to know. ‘Something about the filming,’ I said. So I got away. A few minutes later Mr. Chambrun arrived here. He’s a charming man.”

“I know,” I said. That little knot was tightening in my stomach. Where the hell was he?

“He was very gracious,” Janet said. “He was angry, too. He told me not to worry about Mayberry. He’d take care of him, he said. Then he stayed and talked with me for about twenty minutes, about films, about music. I guess I’d acted as though I was in shock, but by the time he was ready to go, I was relaxed, had literally forgotten about my troubles. A delightful man. What can have happened to him?”

“ I wish to God I could tell you,” Jerry said.

“There’s one thing more, quite crazy,” Janet said. “I went to the door with Mr. Chambrun when he was leaving. He had phoned the switchboard to say he was going to make rounds. Pleasant reassurances from him. Just then a door opened up the hall and Mayberry came out of Suite Twenty-one A. I didn’t know then that it was Mrs. Kaufman’s suite. Chambrun gave me a wicked little smile and said something about the fates doing away with delay. He called out ‘Mayberry!’ and I closed the door. I—I didn’t want to witness the encounter.”