Golden Trap Page 10

  “Charles!”

  “There is no end to the fantasies one has when death is waiting just around the next corner, in the corridor outside your room, right here in the Blue Lagoon. I came here with Mark because I wanted to say just two things to you, Marilyn. Stay away from me—just as far away from me as you can. It’s not safe to be my friend. It’s not even safe to be my enemy the way things are set up. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that I will never forget Paris. I wasn’t playing games with you there, Marilyn. Only twice in my life have I known anything real. Paris was one of those times.”

  “Another woman?” she asked.

  “She had been dead a long time when I met you, Marilyn,” he said gently.

  We were silent for a moment. Around us was the sound of muffled talk, the faint clink of cutlery against china, a small outbreak of laughter a few tables away. Cardoza materialized at my elbow.

  “Would you like to order, Mr. Haskell? The supper show comes on in about fifteen minutes and there’ll be no service, as you know, except for drinks while the show is on.”

  I looked at Lovelace and Marilyn. Dinner would make no sense to them at the moment. I inquired if either of them would like a drink. Marilyn shook her head.

  “A double Scotch on the rocks,” Lovelace said. That hollow leg was bottomless.

  Cardoza drifted away.

  Marilyn’s hand reached out and touched Lovelace’s where it rested on the table. He made no move to withdraw it.

  “How can I help?” she asked almost briskly.

  “No way,” he said, his voice sharp.

  “That can’t be, Charles.” She laughed. “Forgive me if I have to learn to call you George. Do you know that every day for five years—since that morning in Paris when you left—I have been trying to invent elaborate ways to destroy myself? Helping you may be dangerous, my darling, but as the man said—‘What a way to go!’”

  “Marilyn, I—”

  “Where are the ghosts from your past who are hunting you—George? Can’t we give them a little hell? Why must the fear be all on your side? Can’t we throw a little of the fear of God into them so that they’ll stop concentrating on you and begin worrying about themselves?”

  He stared at her, as though he didn’t believe her.

  “You can’t just walk around making a target of yourself and waiting for somebody to potshot you,” Marilyn said. “Let me stay with you, my darling. I’ll sit by you while you sleep, and you’ll let me hold that silly gun you still carry in my lap. And the rest of the time we’ll devote ourselves to throwing rocks through the windows of those other glass houses.”

  “Marilyn, I can’t let you—”

  “You can’t help yourself!” she said. “All the excitement I’ve ever had in my life has been purposeless. Now I have a cause; to help the only man I’ve ever loved out of a tight corner. Now—don’t talk to me about risks. I’ve been taking risks all my life. Foolish ones,” She looked at me, her eyes very bright. I’d never seen such a change in a human being. The boozy broad of the morning, uncomfortably flirtatious, had turned into a high-spirited thoroughbred. What a waste the last fifteen years of her life had been. “Does it sound unreal to you, Mark? Why let George’s enemy call all the shots?”

  I was going to tell her that Lovelace wasn’t all alone; Chambrun was back of him; the entire staff of the Beaumont had unobtrusively surrounded him. The enemy was in the position of being forced to run risks. I remember frowning. There was an or else. The enemy must run risks or else wait until the guard relaxed. Perhaps Marilyn’s idea of counterattack had its merits. I didn’t get a chance to say any of it because the lights in the Blue Lagoon began to dim as Cardoza slipped Lovelace’s drink onto the table at his elbow.

  It was, I suddenly remembered, the opening night of a new show to be presented on the raised stage at the far end of the room. It was to be the New York debut of a much talked-about French chanteuse, Jeanette Arnaud.

  A spotlight played down on the shiny dark head of a young man seated at a grand piano. He began to play a sort of overture through which was woven the familiar themes of Frère Jacques, Sur le pont d’Avignon, and finally a gay, skipping run of Mad’moiselle from Armentières. It ended on a series of crashing, crescendo chords. A wide pale-blue spot appeared at center stage, and into the circle of light stepped Jeanette Arnaud. She was slim, dark, with wide grey eyes, highlighted by an extravagant stage makeup. She was part child, part woman, part gamin. There are performers with a kind of electricity that hits you in the mid-section before they do a thing. The room broke into a thunder of anticipatory applause as the pianist repeated the bars of a sly little intro. The grave face of the singer broke into an enchanting smile as she looked around at the upturned faces below her.

  Suddenly she froze. I thought at first it was a part of the act. Her hands went up to her mouth, scarlet fingernails glittering in the stage lights.

  Then she screamed, turned unsteadily, and hurried off stage…

  My reactions were instinctive. The Beaumont is my town. For perhaps sixty seconds I forgot all about George Lovelace and his security. Something had gone startlingly wrong on stage, the room was crowded with our top customers plus most of the leading columnists and commentators to cover Jeanette Arnaud’s debut. Her hysterical rush off stage was a story which might be harmful to the hotel.

  I was almost at the velvet rope when the houselights came up. I turned to look back into the room, wondering if I’d see something or someone that would explain things.

  I saw plenty, none of it, so far as I knew, connected with Mademoiselle Arnaud. I’d been sitting with my back to the room during the meeting between Lovelace and Marilyn, and I guess Lovelace himself had been too involved with the moment to pay attention to anyone but Marilyn.

  There had been arrivals.

  Not three tables away from where I’d been sitting were Louis Martine and his wife, Collette, accompanied by no less a personage than Pierre Chambrun himself. It was a rare thing for the boss to visit the Blue Lagoon socially. He was standing, when I spotted him, his head turned my way. He was evidently looking for Cardoza. Louis Martine was also standing, and one hand was resting on his wife’s shoulder, as though he was pressing down on it to keep her from rising. I supposed she must be fifty-odd, but she was still very beautiful to look at. Her hair was black with a single streak of silver running from front to back on one side—a hairdresser’s dream. Her figure was magnificent. Her face had a fine, aristocratic bone structure. Her mouth was broad and painted scarlet, her eyes a limpid brown.

  Right now that face was white as the linen tablecloth in front of her.

  Then I saw Shelda and young Curtis Dark at a corner table. The young man was on his feet, as were so many people in the room, staring at the stage. Shelda was breaking away from the table and coming toward me.

  At a small table right by the piano, deserted now by the pianist who had run out after Jeanette Arnaud, was the grey, wrinkled Dr. Claus Zimmerman. His chin was sunk forward on his chest. I could have sworn he was asleep.

  On the other side of the room, but also at a ringside table, was Anton Rogoff, bulging out of a white shirt front, the host to three ladies, all of whom I recognized as professional call girls. He was paying high for his evening.

  A cool voice spoke at my elbow. “What’s all the excitement, Mr. Haskell?” Hilary Carleton was looking out over the room with a controlled curiosity. “The minister from Pakistan made some insulting remarks about the British Commonwealth, so luckily I was able to leave early with dignity. What happened to Miss Arnaud? I heard her in Paris. She’s rather exceptional.”

  Chambrun was giving me a clear signal to go backstage to find out the answer to that question. I remembered Lovelace and looked quickly back at our table. Mr. Cardoza, as I might have expected, was the one person to have reacted perfectly. Holding the large dinner menu, he was standing in front of Lovelace, completely shielding him from the rest of the room.

  I ig
nored Carleton and started for the door at the far end of the room that led to the backstage dressing rooms. Before I reached it Shelda’s arm was linked in mine. She was wearing a black dinner dress I particularly like, with a corsage of little white roses at her shoulder. Young Mr. Dark had done all the right things for an evening on the town.

  “Could you see what happened, Mark?” Shelda asked, breathless. “Something frightened her out of her wits!”

  “I saw what you saw,” I said, “unless you were looking at young Mr. Dark’s handsome profile!”

  “You look positively green,” she said, with a delighted giggle. “Your lady got prettied up considerably.”

  There wasn’t time for any more of that. I pushed through the door into the backstage. Already three or four of the newspaper men were standing outside the star dressing room, trying to persuade a flustered French maid to let them in.

  “Sorry, gentlemen,” I said. “No one talks to Miss Arnaud until she says the word.”

  Shelda is always a surprise. She spoke to the maid in fluent French and was instantly embraced and showered with a flow of Gallic hysteria. We were ushered into the dressing room and I closed the door and locked it.

  There was a tiny reception room, and beyond the curtained doorway we could hear Jeanette Arnaud sobbing—out of control.

  “Call Dr. Partridge,” Shelda said, and went through the curtain to the room beyond. I was her boss, you realize, but I took the orders. There was a wall phone in the outer room and I got Mrs. Kiley, the switchboard chief, to hunt down Partridge, who is our house physician.

  The maid had followed Shelda into the dressing room and I could hear the three of them, all chattering away in French. I didn’t understand a word any of them were saying. My high-school French couldn’t keep pace with it.

  Someone began to pound on the dressing-room door. I braced myself and opened it. The young pianist was there, with a package in his hand.

  “Spirits of ammonia,” he said in a good Brooklyn accent.

  I let him in and locked the door in the face of the newsmen again. He went straight into the women. The pianist’s French was loud, cajoling, and very American.

  After a while things seemed to quiet down a little, and then the curtain parted and Shelda came out to me. Her usually cheery little face with its pert, upturned nose was wrinkled in an effort to fight back tears.

  “Would you mind very much kissing me?” she asked.

  “Be my guest,” I said.

  There are kisses and kisses. This was the very rare unimpassioned but warm kind you get from someone who really cares and has a need for you. I felt very male and important for a moment.

  “What is it, baby?” I asked when she finally put her head down on my shoulder.

  “I—I wanted to remind myself that, in spite of all the excitement around us, what we have is very simple and uncomplicated and precious. I love you, Mark.”

  “The pleasure is all mine,” I said, and kissed her ear.

  Shelda turned away from me and began to do things to her face with the female tools of the trade she produced from the little gold mesh bag she was carrying.

  “It was just at the beginning of her career, seven years ago,” Shelda said. “She’d done a little singing at some Paris cafés, and her agent got her an engagement in Madrid. The second night she was there she was accosted by two men when she left the theatre, or nightclub, or whatever it was. She was dragged into a car and driven out into the country somewhere. There she was taken into a house and delivered, like a package, to a man. This man, without preliminaries or conversation, forced her into a room where he cold-bloodedly and savagely raped her—beat her and raped her. She was then dragged back into the car by the two men, returned to Madrid, and thrown out on a street corner, several miles from her hotel. She reported to the police, but they never found the man, nor could she give them any idea where she’d been taken in the car. She was in a state of shock and spent a good part of a year in a psychiatric clinic. Tonight she walked out on stage—and saw the man sitting at a table. She—she flipped her wig, Mark. I guess you can’t blame her.”

  “Rogoff!” I said. He’d been right in front of her with his collection of tarts. It was his kind of deal.

  Shelda shook her head slowly, not looking at me. “It was your Mr. George Lovelace,” she said.

  Four

  I FELT AS IF SOMEONE had kicked me in the pit of the stomach.

  Lovelace was really a stranger to me, but he was Chambrun’s trusted friend. In the course of twelve hours I hadn’t come to feel anything very personal for Lovelace except a kind of sympathy for the corner he was in. He was a good guy because Chambrun said he was a good guy. I would do anything for Chambrun so I would do anything for Chambrun’s friend. But I didn’t know him well enough to laugh off the story Shelda brought me from Jeanette Arnaud. I knew I had to take the story to Chambrun, and I knew it would rock him back on his heels. The one area where Chambrun considered himself infallible was his judgment of people. To have been wrong about Lovelace would be shattering. I’ve heard him say many times that when the time came that he didn’t know what was going on in the Beaumont and he began to make mistakes about people, he would retire and write that inevitable book about how to run a luxury hotel. He said it as a joke, because the idea was inconceivable.

  Someone was knocking rather sharply on the dressing-room door again. It was authoritative. I turned away from Shelda and opened up. Chambrun confronted me. Just behind him were Monsieur and Madame Martine.

  “Madame Martine is an old friend of Mademoiselle Arnaud’s,” Chambrun said. “Can she be helpful, Mark?

  Shelda moved swiftly through the curtains to where the singer and her maid and pianist were. I heard Jeanette Arnaud’s voice rise excitedly. Evidently she was eager to see Collette Martine. Chambrun stood aside and the French woman and her bearded husband came in. I was reintroduced and they gave me a cool hello and went into the room beyond.

  “Do you know what happened?” Chambrun asked.

  I nodded slowly. “Secondhand, through Shelda,” I said. And I told him. His face was rock-hard when I’d finished, his black eyes glittering with anger.

  “Bring Lovelace to my office,” he said. He started to go, and then hesitated. “Louis!” he called out.

  Louis Martine came through the curtains. Evidently he’d already heard the story. He and Chambrun stared at each other without speaking for a moment.

  “I would like to make sure,” Chambrun said, finally, “that Miss Arnaud doesn’t leave the hotel until she is confronted with Lovelace close up. Across a dimly lighted room she could be mistaken.”

  “It is barely possible,” Martine said in a flat voice. “A woman who has been through such an experience is not likely to make a mistake, Pierre.”

  “Nonsense,” Chambrun said. “Rape victims make that kind of mistake ten times a day in our local police stations. Hysteria breeds just exactly that kind of error. You and Collette do what you can to quiet her down and then call my office. I’ll arrange for a quiet confrontation.”

  “I tell you, Pierre, all the evidence goes to show that Charles Veauclaire—or Lovelace—is no longer the man we knew years ago,” Martine said. “He cracked. He became a senseless killer and God knows what else.”

  “I’ll believe that, Louis, when it’s proven,” Chambrun said. He looked at me. “Bring Lovelace,” he said, and was gone.

  The Blue Lagoon was still buzzing with excitement when I walked back through the velvet rope. I felt as if I was approaching a stranger as I headed toward Lovelace and Marilyn. Cardoza was hovering in the background. I stopped to speak to him.

  “The boss wants Lovelace in his office,” I said. “Tell Jerry we’re headed there, will you?”

  Cardoza nodded and drifted toward the telephone at his station by the entrance.

  “What on earth happened to her?” Marilyn asked as I reached the table.

  “Hysterics—overtired—God knows,” I said. I t
urned to Lovelace. “Chambrun wants us in his office.”

  I think he sensed something different in my attitude toward him. He looked at me, frowning. “Something new?” he asked.

  “I think so.”

  “May I come too?” Marilyn asked. “I’m part of the army now, aren’t I?”

  “I’m afraid not,” I said.

  “Does Mr. Chambrun know that I—?”

  “No. Not yet,” I said.

  “What the hell’s happened, Mark?” Lovelace asked. “Something to do with the singer?”

  He had to know the answer to that if Jeanette Arnaud was right. Marilyn reached out and touched his hand.

  “I’ll wait here for you,” she said.

  Lovelace got up and we walked together out into the lobby. I saw Mike Maggio and two of Jerry’s men on the ready. One of the security boys walked behind us to the elevator and made the trip to the second floor with us.

  Ruysdale should have been home hours ago but she was at her desk in the anteroom, looking as crisp as if she’d just arrived for a day’s work.

  “You’re to go straight in,” she said.

  Chambrun was standing by the windows at the far side of his office. He turned as he heard us come in. When he was angry he could look like a hanging judge. His little black eyes were slits under the heavy lids.

  “You told him?” he asked me.

  “No,” I said.

  “What’s with you two?” Lovelace asked. He couldn’t miss the smell of trouble.

  “Mademoiselle Arnaud says she knows you,” Chambrun said.

  Lovelace frowned. “I don’t recall ever hearing her work,” he said. “I certainly don’t know her personally.”