Evil That Men Do (5 page)

“I—I didn’t want to tell all this to the conductor, so I walked out into the station. I—I’ve had hangovers in my time, but I’ve never drawn a complete blank. It was like walking out of a fog. The station was relatively empty at that time of morning. I walked over near the information booth to try to gather my wits. I remembered I’d started out from my home in Beverly Hills to have dinner with a friend. The next thing was the conductor—shaking me—in New York! I wasn’t wearing the clothes I’d started out for dinner in. I had an explanation, but I don’t think you’d understand it.”

“One of Emlyn Teague’s elaborate games?” Chambrun suggested.

She looked at him like a child looks at her first magician.

“Since the Julie Frazer affair, I’ve made something of a study of you and your friends, Miss Standing,” Chambrun said, the gentleness gone from his voice.

“You must have!” she said. “Well, you’re right. It was Emlyn I’d set out to have dinner with. I told myself he must have fed me some kind of knockout drops. Then he’d have flown me East in his own plane, unconscious, and put me on a train somewhere outside New York. The conductor would have been bribed to play along. I—I looked around the station, expecting to see Emlyn and Jeremy and Bobby and Oscar and some of the others come out from somewhere, screaming with laughter. But they didn’t.”

“I—I looked in my handbag. I had quite a little money. So I did the only thing I could think of doing. I took a taxi to the Beaumont and registered. Then—then I saw the calendar behind the desk. March fourteenth, it said. The night I’d started out to have dinner with Emlyn was February twentieth—three weeks ago!”

“It didn’t seem like a very funny joke then,” Chambrun said.

“Oh, my God!” she said, rocking back and forth again. After a moment she went on. “I put in a long-distance call for Emlyn in Beverly Hills. His houseman answered. Out there, it was only a little after two in the morning. Emlyn was out on the town, somewhere. I tried some of the others and finally got Bobby Towers—Barbara Towers ‘Where on earth have you been?’ she wanted to know. ‘We’ve been frantic with anxiety for you. I wanted Emlyn to call the police, but he was against it. He said you wouldn’t like it—in case you were up to something.’

“That’s about it, Chambrun. I remember starting out for dinner in my car and waking up, three weeks later, in Grand Central Station.” She hesitated a moment. “There’s something I didn’t quite tell you all of. When Jeremy came in here a little while ago, he said, ‘ “The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—of cabbages and kings …” and the night of February twenty-fifth.’ That’s when I walked in here and left him. Because I don’t know anything about the night of February twenty-fifth.”

“The papers?” Chambrun asked.

“Nothing. Nothing that tells me anything.”

Chambrun walked over to a little side table and put out his cigarette in the ash tray there. “There’s one difficulty with your way of life, Miss Standing,” he said. “It’s made up of elaborate games, of fancy falsehoods, of traps for the unwary, of cruel jokes. Because of that, I can’t be sure you’ve told us one word of truth. If I believe you, I may find the donkey’s tail pinned squarely on my derriere.”

“Chambrun, I promise you I—”

She was interrupted by Jerry Dodd opening the bedroom door. “Lieutenant Hardy from Homicide,” he said.

Chambrun turned to me. “Games or no games, Miss Standing needs her lawyer, Mark. Have Ruysdale get in touch with Mr. T.J. Madison.”

“Right.”

Hardy and I passed in the doorway. We weren’t strangers. He’d been involved in the Cardew case, about a year ago. He has a kind of pleasant, shaggy-dog look, bewildered and earnest. He’s actually a very shrewd operator. “Happy anniversary,” he said. I took an elevator down to the second floor. There were other people in the car. The elevator man looked as if he was about to burst with questions, but he was too well trained to ask them in front of guests.

Betty Ruysdale was at her desk, cool and unruffled. I gave her a quick rundown on what was cooking and Chambrun’s instructions to get in touch with Doris Standing’s lawyer, one T.J. Madison. When I said the name out loud, it hit me right between the eyes.

“All-American fullback,” I said. “Big star in the National Professional Football League for nearly ten years. T.J. Madison! He’s—”

“Yes, he’s a Negro,” Ruysdale said. “Something wrong with that?”

M
URDER IS USUALLY A
climax. I think Chambrun was the only one of us who suspected that the murder of Jeremy Slade was just the beginning of a series of events with an unthinkable potential for violence and horror.

The death of Slade was murder; no ifs, ands, or buts. When you broke Slade’s gun and looked at the cylinder, there was the one brass cartridge case visible; the gambling chance for the Russian-roulette player. But an examination of the shell itself showed that it had been fired a long, long time ago, not that afternoon of March fourteenth. It was actually rusted. How long Slade had been frightening the life out of his audiences with a stacked deck, we had no way of knowing. One thing was certain. He had not been killed with his own gun.

And there was no other gun to be found in Suite 9F.

These were facts Lieutenant Hardy passed on to Chambrun a very short time after his arrival.

There were two possibilities. Doris Standing had shot and killed Slade and disposed of the gun in some fashion before she called Chambrun’s office to report the death. Or someone else had let himself into the sitting room, or been admitted by Slade, done the shooting and walked calmly out into space. The windows in the sitting room overlooked Central Park. No one could possibly have fired the shot from outside the suite.

“You pays your money and you takes your choice,” Hardy said in Chambrun’s office. “You are so damned perfectly soundproofed in this joint. The shot could have been fired in the suite and nobody in God’s world outside those rooms would have heard it. Doris Standing could have killed Slade, taken time to dress, gone out with the gun and disposed of it, and come back and phoned you. The medical examiner isn’t going to be able to pinpoint the time of death within an hour. Not to stick in court.”

I knew that while Hardy talked, every trash-disposal unit in the hotel was being searched, plus the areas outside the hotel, where the gun might have been dropped from a window.

“Unless the girl is lying about her key—” Hardy said.

“There are three keys to the suite,” Chambrun said. “There are two for occupants of the suite—in case a couple has registered, and a spare kept by the management for emergencies. All accounted for.”

“And the passkeys used by the maids and the housekeeper,” Hardy said. “You say Doris Standing always took 9F when she came to the Beaumont.”

Chambrun nodded. “If she reserved in advance. It was pure chance that it happened to be available this morning when she arrived without a reservation.”

Hardy was irritated. “It doesn’t matter too much,” he said. “It’s much more likely that, if there is anyone involved except Doris Standing, Slade let him in.”

Chambrun was sitting at his desk, demitasse of Turkish coffee balanced in his left hand, cigarette in his right. His eyes seemed to be buried in their dark pouches. “Games, games, games,” he said. “I can’t get away from the thought of games. This girl is a member of a group that exists and thrives on playing games. The games are always basically dishonest, basically cruel, and designed to have a dramatic outcome. The most dramatic of all outcomes is death. They’ve been involved with death before, but indirectly. The outcome of the game leads to dishonor, shame, and then to suicide or to self-destruction, which is another kind of suicide without the act being overt. We don’t know that they’ve never been directly involved in a killing. If the game was successfully played, they wouldn’t be caught or even suspected. Killing one of their own number would be unexpected, but—” He hesitated, inhaling deeply on his cigarette. “Like dope addicts, the dose has to be stronger and stronger.”

“Then you don’t believe the Standing girl’s story? The amnesia bit? The ‘what happened on the night of February twenty-fifth?’ bit?”

Chambrun shrugged. “I don’t believe or disbelieve anything yet,” he said. “But at this stage of the proceedings, I have to keep telling myself this could all be part of a game. The murder could be what our modern football coaches call a part of ‘the game plan.’ ”

“Look,” Hardy said, his irritation rising, “either she killed him and she’s lying, or someone else killed him and she’s not lying.”

“Or someone else killed him and she knows all about it and hasn’t lied, simply because we haven’t asked her that,” Chambrun said.

“Listening to you, I half-expect the corpse to sit up on the morgue table and start laughing at us!” Hardy said.

“It wouldn’t be out of key,” Chambrun said, quite seriously I thought.

“I can’t afford to make a mistake with her,” Hardy said. “She’s headlines whatever she does. She can hire the most expensive legal talent in the country.”

“Instead of which, she hires a famous football player who’s only just begun to practice law. T.J. Madison,” I said.

“Brother!” Hardy said. “Headlines wherever you turn.”

“You need facts. The gun would be a fact,” Chambrun said.

“And if we don’t find it?”

“If what you call ‘the amnesia bit’ is a part of the game,” Chambrun said, “then you are supposed to look into the night of February twenty-fifth. If that’s how it is, you’ll find something that’ll lead you somewhere else—directly into a sea of red herrings. But if she’s telling the truth—well, the night of February twenty-fifth may have some real significance. It could be a starting point. It could be a hoax.”

“What happened on the night of February twenty-fifth?” Hardy said. “Where? Beverly Hills? New York? Kankakee?”

“If it’s a game, then we are supposed to look through those newspapers and well come up with something. If the girl is on the level and was looking herself and found nothing, then we probably won’t find anything. Finding nothing might lead us to believe her just a little bit.” Chambrun put out his cigarette. “Let’s go through those papers, with different eyes and different points of view. I suggest your secretary, Mark. She’s a woman.”

“And how!” Hardy muttered.

“Ruysdale. You and me and Hardy,” Chambrun said. He stood up. “Meanwhile, the hotel has to run. Oil has to be poured on the waves created by this excitement.” He smiled, faintly. “We have to roll out our best stiff upper lip.”

“And I have to meet the ladies and gentlemen of the press,” I said. “What do I tell ’em?”

“Send ’em to me,” Hardy said, “and I’ll tell ’em nothin’. Games!” …

Focus your attention on one unusual situation in a place like the Beaumont and you suddenly become acutely aware of how much is involved in the daily routines that you handle automatically. It’s like one broken-down car on the West Side Highway, and immediately a thousand cars are stacked up behind it, tooting their horns.

My girl Shelda was up to her ears in routines I should have been attending to, and nearly dead of excited curiosity. There were problems connected with transforming the Grand Ballroom from a show ring for Ormanski’s fashions into a banquet hall for a foreign-policy association. Mr. Amato, our dyspeptic banquet manager, was feeding his ulcer with his own patented brand of anxiety. Ormanski had to be gotten out, tables set up and decorated, place cards and favors put around. Time was running out. Mr. Amato had reminded Shelda of this a half-dozen times in the last hour.

“I’ve got everyone working four-handed,” Shelda said. “So what’s the story on Doris Standing?”

“She did or she didn’t,” I said, scowling at a list of messages. Mr. Cardoza, captain in the Blue Lagoon Room, wanted words with me; a representative of the Conservative Party wanted to engage one of the private dining rooms for a committee meeting two nights away; a big movie company wanted two adjoining suites for writers, producers, and whoever else might be involved in working on a pilot script for a TV show. The show’s star must have a suite on the same floor but not “contiguous”—a television word for “adjoining.” And on and on.

“Will you pay attention to me and tell me what’s cooking!” Shelda demanded.

I kissed her very firmly on the mouth. “That’s what’s cooking,” I said.

“
Did she kill him
?” Shelda shouted at me, after a decent interval of nonresistance.

“She’s a prime suspect, baby,” I said. “In the area of real facts, Hardy is undernourished.”

I told her she had been elected by the boss to be one of the group to go over the back issues of the newspapers, looking particularly for something significant about February twenty-fifth.

“Of course she did it,” Shelda said.

“Because she dyes her hair?”

“Idiot,” Shelda said. “Because she thinks that none of the rules apply to her.”

“Because she’s rich and you’re jealous of her,” I said. “And because, as somebody has said, nobody is ever sorry for a girl on a yacht.”

“What does
that
mean?”

“It means you don’t wish the rich any good luck,” I said.

“Do you for a minute believe her amnesia story?” Shelda asked, sounding indignant.

I took a beat. “I think I do,” I said.

“I don’t think I’ll marry you,” Shelda said. “You’re too much of a sucker for a pretty face.”

“It was tears that did me in,” I said, grinning at her.

“That’s nice to know,” Shelda said. “I can cry at will.”

“I’ve got to circulate,” I said, “to see if the boat’s leaking anywhere.” I kissed her on the tip of her turned-up nose. “I’ll buy you dinner in the Grill Room, about eight—after you’ve gone through the back issues of
The Times
and the
Examiner
.”

“You think I’m available just like that—whenever you say the word?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You—you man, you!” she said.

Mr. Cardoza, the Blue Lagoon Room captain, is tall, and dark, and sleek, and very elegant—and very human when you get to know him. He runs his segment of the Beaumont operation with a smoothness that would have done Chambrun himself proud. There is a floor show twice each night in the Blue Lagoon. The bulk of the customers are not guests of the hotel. It is Cardoza’s job to keep it elegant and at the same time entertaining and nonstuffy.