Girl Watcher's Funeral (7 page)

“It seems fair, doesn't it?”

“Since they're all talking about it, the story will surely leak,” Chambrun said.

“But not what's being done about it,” Rosey said. “Not the truth about the pills. Your only weapon at this point is that you know what really happened. I'll hold it back, because I loved Nikos in my fashion, provided I get it in time for a beat when you're ready to talk.”

“It seems little enough to offer you for your silence, which we very much need at the moment, Miss Lewis. It's a deal. But cooperation is a two-way street. You're going to be a part of the fashion circus for the next two days. Can we count on you to eavesdrop and pass along anything that might leave us a little less paralyzed?”

“If I think it will help Nikos even his score,” Rosey said.

Chambrun stood up. “My cautious secretary will be told you are to be passed through to me any time you ask, Miss Lewis. You're going back to the nineteenth-floor brawl now?”

“It seems the sensible thing to do.”

“Mark, take Miss Lewis upstairs, and then come back here, please.”

Rosey and I went down the corridor to the elevators.

“Does he always eat dinner in such lonely grandeur?” she asked as we waited.

“Rarely,” I said. “Tonight he was expecting me—it seems.”

“How do you stand it—having him one step ahead of you all the time?”

“Mostly it's rather comforting,” I said.

The elevator door opened noiselessly.

“You don't have to come up with me, Haskell,” Rosey said. “I'm a big girl, you know. Thanks for not being stuffy.”

The tawny hair glittered in the light from the car ceiling, and she waved at me as the door closed. I watched the little lighted arrow over the door clicking off the floors toward 19
. …

When I got back to the office, Jacques had cleared away the dinner service and Chambrun was sitting at his desk, slumped down in his chair, his eyes hidden in their deep pouches.

“You did the right thing, bringing her here, Mark,” he said, exhaling a cloud of pale blue smoke, “but I'm damned if I know whether it's doing us much good to keep our small secret if everyone suspects there was something fishy about Nikos's death.”

“The killer will think we're looking for evidence of poison, when actually we're looking for something else,” I said cheerfully.

“What? What are we looking for, Mark? Five billion soda mint tablets have been sold in New York in the last twenty-four hours. What evidence can we expect to find? No fingerprints—no nothing.”

“So we stay very close to these fashion kids for the next two days and hope somebody's foot will slip. They do an awful lot of drinking. Someone might get careless.”

“And Christmas might come in July,” Chambrun said. “But I don't know anything better to do but watch and listen.”

“You want me to go back up to nineteen-A?” I asked.

“I think so. But first take a quick tour of the hotel, Mark. I'm anchored here waiting for someone from the police commissioner's office to try to convince me that the Beaumont should be swarming with cops.”

No matter what was shaking the earth under our feet, the Beaumont's guests were never to guess that anything threatened the Swiss-watch perfection of the hotel's routines.

It was a reasonably quiet night in the Beaumont. All vestiges of the fashion show had disappeared from the Blue Lagoon Room, presided over with his usual magnificent calm by Mr. Cardoza. Soft lights, soft music, and gourmet food were its principal attraction. A particularly noisy comedian of the Don Rickles school would shatter the quiet during the two upcoming floor shows.

The Spartan Bar, presided over by Mr. Novotny, was cathedral-quiet. This is a no-women-admitted room which is really a sort of club for elegant old gentlemen. Two white heads were bent over a chessboard in the far corner.

A charity ball for the benefit of a New Jersey PTA occupied the ballroom. The tickets were fifty dollars a head and the place was crowded, but the fashion kids on the 19
^th
floor would have shuddered at the 1935 styles.

I saved the Trapeze Bar till last because it's my favorite hangout in the hotel. I'd had no dinner, and I decided before I went back to the blast in 19A, I'd better have a Jack Daniels on the rocks and a steak sandwich to blot out the memory of that devastating martini schedule.

The Trapeze Bar is suspended in space, like a birdcage, over the foyer to the Grand Ballroom. The walls of the Trapeze are elaborate Florentine grillwork. An artist of the Calder school has decorated it with mobiles of circus performers working on trapezes. They sway slightly in the draught from a concealed air conditioning system, giving you the impression, on your third drink, that the whole place is swinging gently in space. The maître d' is Mr. Del Greco, who can tell you the exact boiling point of ten thousand of New York's steady drinkers.

The Trapeze was crowded, the atmosphere gay yet orderly. Mr. Del Greco saw me and did something complex with his eyebrows that was plainly asking me whether I wanted to stand at the crowded bar or have a table. I didn't see any empty tables, but I knew one would appear if I asked. I made motions like a man cutting a steak and eating it. And then someone called out my name.

“Mark!”

It was Jan Morse. She was sitting alone at a corner table, something that looked like a Bloody Mary in front of her. She'd changed out of the jump suit into a raspberry-colored wool thing, very short in the skirt, very scooped out at the neckline. Sexual weaponry, I thought, remembering Nikos's phrase by way of Jan. Some of the highest-priced call girls in New York wander in and out of the Trapeze. She looked like luxury goods, I thought, and realized I was still mad at her.

I didn't mean to do more than wave, but I found my feet taking me over to her table.

“I've been looking all over for you,” she said.

Mr. Del Greco was at my elbow. “Will you join Miss Morse, or shall I get you a table, Mr. Haskell?”

“You can get me a—”

“Of course he'll join me,” Jan interrupted. “We didn't finish what we were talking about, Mark.”

I ordered my Jack Daniels and steak sandwich.

“You were asking me who was thinking of lining up with another team when we were interrupted,” Jan said.

“Who was thinking of lining up with another team?”

“I haven't any idea,” she said.

“You came looking for me to tell me that?” I sounded angry. In spite of myself I was angry.

Her brown eyes were wide, but fixed very intently on me. “I came looking for you because I knew I'd hurt your feelings. I don't like to hurt someone.”

“What makes you think you hurt my feelings?”

She reached out and touched my hand. Her fingers were warm. I felt like a seventeen-year-old adolescent out with his first “fast” woman. There were suddenly butterflies in my stomach. I told myself, “React your age, Bud!”

“You don't have control over everything, even if you'd like to,” she said. “Mike Faraday sends me, Mark.”

“I noticed you weren't wearing those track shoes you mentioned,” I said.

Her body moved inside the raspberry wool, as though she was in pain. “I can't help myself with Mike. It's like I can't kick it. I want to but I can't.”

“Look, Doll,” I said, emphasizing his name for her, “I can't help you with your little problem. You said Nikos would have been angry if Tim Gallivan made a pass at you. How did he feel about Faraday?”

The brown eyes were wide, disturbingly honest. “He didn't know about Mike. Do you know, that was the first time Mike ever touched me in public? That moment in my room? It was because he didn't have to be afraid anyone would mention it to Nikos.”

“A lot of people do know about it, I hear,” I said.

“If anybody told Nikos, he would have asked me and I would have lied to him.”

“Because you didn't want to lose a very secure future.”

“Because I wouldn't have wanted to hurt him,” Jan said.

A waiter brought my Jack Daniels and I took a solid swig of it.

“He used to cry sometimes,” Jan said.

“Who used to cry?”

“Nikos. He used to cry because he wasn't a man any more. He used to cry because he couldn't make love to me. Oh, I would have if he'd asked. I really loved him, Mark. I wouldn't have hurt him for anything. I know what it was like for him, feeling he wasn't a man any more. That's why I felt so badly about you.”

“Non sequitur,” I said.

“I made you feel you weren't a man,” she said. “Suddenly everything was turned on for Mike and you might like not have been there. It was an awful thing to do to you.”

“I'll live,” I said. “Everyone said she wasn't terribly bright, but she'd hit the bull's-eye. That was exactly why I'd been burning for the last hour—because she'd put my masculinity in doubt.

“Some people think you have to have love and respect and all like that with sex,” she said. “To me it's just something you've got, and you give it because it's all you've got to give. So if you feel like giving something to someone, why, you give the only thing you've got.”

“Makes it all very simple,” I said. My mouth felt suddenly dry.

“So if it would help you to get over being hurt,” she said, the wide brown eyes leveled at me without a suggestion of coquettishness, “and it would give you any pleasure—”

Someone was tugging at my coat sleeve and I tried to shake it off. Stupid waiter, I thought. Something about the steak sandwich at a moment like this.

“Sorry to interrupt,” a familiar voice said. It was Jerry Dodd, the Beaumont's security officer. Jerry is a thin, wiry man with a professional smile that does nothing to hide the fact his shrewd eyes aren't ever missing a trick. “Speak to you alone a moment—?”

“I don't admire your timing,” I said. I stood up and walked a few steps away from the table with him.

“Boss wants you,” Jerry said. “Someone took a dive from the nineteenth floor.”

“A dive?”

“They're swabbing down the sidewalk now,” Jerry said.

“Who was it?”

“Some newspaper dame,” Jerry said. “Name of Rosemary Lewis.”

I
REMEMBER THE TRAPEZE
started to revolve slowly around me. It was nightmarish. I was acutely aware of the smells of perfume and tobacco and liquor and food. A raspberry blonde stared at me through a kind of fog, puzzled that I was walking away from her in the middle of her best offer. Voices sounded loud and harsh.

I was grateful for Jerry Dodd's firm grip on my arm. My legs felt like rubber hose.

“I just left her—not forty-five minutes ago,” I heard myself saying to Jerry in a voice that wasn't mine.

“It only takes seconds to hit the sidewalk from nineteen floors up,” Jerry said. It was callous. It was like cold water being thrown in my face. I realized afterward that was exactly what he meant it to be like.

We managed to cross the Trapeze, in and out of tables, and reach the hall outside opposite a bank of elevators. I was aware that people watched us curiously. They must have thought Jerry was helping a drunk out of the place. I wondered why we didn't just climb the one flight of stairs to Chambrun's office.

“He's in her room,” Jerry told me.

The elevator took us up, my stomach turning over in the swift ascent. I found myself hanging onto the little handrail in the car. I'd known her for less than an hour, but she'd seemed so alive, so competent, so basically
decent.
“I'm a big girl,” she'd said, so sure of herself. I closed my eyes, fighting nausea, as I thought of that fine, healthy body hurtling through space to be smashed into unrecognizable bits on the cement sidewalk.

“Do you have any idea who did it?” I asked Jerry as we walked along the corridor to 1919, her room.

“Who did what?” he asked in his flat, unemotional voice.

“She didn't jump!” I said, facing him.

“Who says?”

“I say!” I said, as certain of that as I was of tomorrow's rising sun.

“Let's see,” Jerry said. He rang the doorbell outside 1919.

The door was instantly opened by Joe Cameron, Jerry's top assistant on the security force. Joe is an affable redhead, Brooks Brotherish in clothes, looking more like a young Madison Avenue executive than a special cop. He'd been a modern language major at Columbia and he was valuable at the Beaumont, with all the U.N. people we had and other foreign guests.

Beyond Cameron in the room I saw Chambrun, standing in the center of the rug, chin sunk forward on his chest. The room smelled like woman, the perfume painfully familiar, although I'd known Rosey for less than an hour.

Then I felt myself sucking for breath. On the dressing table just beyond Chambrun was Rosey's tawny blond messy hair. It was on a little round stand, the shape of her head. Cameron must have sensed my reaction.

“Smart women wear wigs half the time,” he said. “She had a couple more in the closet—one red, for red-haired fanciers, I imagine.”

The room was neat. There were no signs of any hasty clothes-changing; certainly no sign that Rosey had put up any kind of a fight. The two windows were shut tight, and I was aware of the soft purring of the air conditioner fitted into one of them.

I started, trancelike, toward the window. Nineteen stories to the street!

“Don't touch anything,” Chambrun said sharply. He looked at me and his face was rock-hard. “You brought her up here?”

I shook my head. “I—I left her at the elevator on your floor,” I said. “She said—she said she was a big girl. I—”

“I don't think she ever came here,” Chambrun said. “There's no ledge outside the windows on this floor. You can't stand outside the windows and close them.”