Evil That Men Do Read online

  “I have it here,” Ruysdale said, and handed him the folder.

  “Miraculous woman. Thank you, Ruysdale.”

  Miss Ruysdale left him alone with the folder. There was nothing miraculous about her having brought the folder. Chambrun had trained her to anticipate.

  And in Suite 9F, Doris Standing opened her gray-green eyes and looked up at the ceiling. Those eyes instantly squinted against the bright sunlight. She reached out, automatically, for the black glasses on the bedside table. After a moment she sat up and reached for the telephone.

  “Mr. Atterbury, please,” she said.

  Atterbury, the day receptionist, sounded delighted to hear from her. “Good morning, Miss—Smith,” he said. “Happy to have you with us. How can I help you?”

  “I don’t know who to ask for what I want,” Doris Standing said.

  “Whatever it is, I’m sure we have someone who can serve you, Miss Smith.”

  “I want copies of the last three weeks of the Los Angeles Examiner and The New York Times,” Doris Standing said.

  Two

  ON THAT MORNING OF March fourteenth, I had been in charge of public relations at the Beaumont for a little more than a year. I owed my position to romance and a hunch.

  The romance had developed between a wonderfully efficient and attractive girl named Alison Barnwell, who held the PR job, and a young man named John Wills. I had been Alison’s rather green assistant. When Alison gave Chambrun her notice, it seemed logical he’d go outside the office to find an experienced person to take her place. Instead, he offered me the chance.

  “You know just enough, Haskell, to keep from making a botch of it,” Chambrun told me, “and not enough to tell me how the job should be done. You have to remember just one thing. The Beaumont is not only a hotel, it is a way of life.”

  I was delighted, and scared, and moderately confident. Very shortly I found that Chambrun, by some personal magic, had changed my way of life without asking me to do any such thing. I gave up my apartment and moved into the hotel. At the end of the day’s work I found I didn’t run off into my old private life. There really was no end to the day’s work. After five, when my office closed, I’d have a drink or two in one of the bars, then go to my room to change into a dinner jacket, and spend the evening moving about the hotel, from the various bars, to the Blue Room night club, to the private banquet rooms where special events were in progress. I was a little like an old-time Western marshal checking out the town for the night.

  The Beaumont had become my town, with its own mayor, its own police force, its own public services, its cooperatively-owned apartments, its facilities for transients, its night clubs, its cafés, its restaurants, its quality shops opening off the lobby, its telephone switchboards, its complex human relationships. It was my town, and I felt possessive about it and jealous of its reputation. I guess that was exactly the way Chambrun felt, which is why it runs with the smoothness of an expertly engineered Swiss watch. Others felt as I did, I knew. There was Jerry Dodd, the security officer, who could smell trouble before it developed. There were Miss Ruysdale, and Atterbury and Karl Nevers, the reservation clerks, and Mike Maggio and Johnny Thacker, the bell captains, and the army of bartenders, and captains who presided over the various special rooms, and the chief telephone operators, and the housekeepers, and the banquet manager, and on and on. At any time of day or night, Pierre Chambrun could lift the telephone on his desk and have the answer to any question almost before it was out of his mouth. Of course he knew exactly whom to ask.

  I’d been in my office for about a half hour that morning, checking out the details of a fashion show that was to be held in the ballroom that afternoon, when the phone on my desk rang. It was Atterbury.

  “I take it you know Doris Standing checked in last night,” he said.

  “Dorothy Smith,” I said, smiling to myself.

  “Let’s hope,” Atterbury said. “She’s just called in, asking for back issues of the Los Angeles Examiner and The New York Times for the last three weeks. Can do?”

  “I suppose so,” I said. “The Times is simple. We keep a monthly file. The Examiner may take some digging.”

  “Hop to it, dad,” Atterbury said, “before Smith turns into Standing.”

  “Yes, master,” I said.

  I had only just put down the phone when it rang again. It was Miss Ruysdale.

  “Will you drop by at your convenience,” she asked. There was the faintest note of amusement in her voice. She was quoting Chambrun. What he meant was “Now!”

  One of the only problems in my job at the Beaumont was my secretary. Shelda Mason had been Alison Barnwell’s secretary and I’d inherited her. She was disconcerting because she was so damned beautiful. She belonged on a magazine cover and not shut away in a fourth-floor office. She had kept me at a distance for a long time, obviously uncertain whether she approved of me or not. I felt I should be dating her and not giving orders. I had the feeling there was some never-seen boy friend in the background who would clobber me if I raised so much as a flirtatious eyebrow. Men attached to girls like Shelda are inclined to be violently possessive. Then, unexpectedly, she had made up her mind about me. Her decision was favorable. It was making it very hard for me to keep my mind on the Beaumont.

  Shelda was at her desk in my reception room as I started out in reply to Chambrun’s summons. She gave me one of her special smiles that acted on me like power brakes.

  “You know, don’t you, that mine is natural?” she asked.

  “Your what is natural?” I asked.

  “My hair!” she said. “Hers isn’t.”

  “Who her?”

  “Doris Standing, dope. You know she checked in this morning, don’t you? Or haven’t you been tending to your knitting.”

  “I know.”

  “She dyes her hair. International beauty my foot,” Shelda said. “I suppose you’ll be dancing attendance and telling me its part of your job!”

  “You’ll do the first dancing, my sweet,” I said. “The lady has already expressed desires.”

  “Slut!” Shelda said.

  I conveyed the information about the need for back issues of the newspapers. “Your job,” I said. “With all your built-in charm when you deliver. See you!”

  “Stinker!” she shouted after me as I went down the hall.

  Miss Ruysdale gave me her cool smile and gestured, without speaking, toward Chambrun’s office.

  “Trouble?” I asked.

  “On the horizon,” she said, “which is the time to tackle it.”

  You’ve probably heard the old gag about the banker who was so mean that the only way you could tell the difference between his good eye and his glass eye was that the glass eye had a little more warmth in it. Chambrun could look that cold when there was trouble. This time he seemed relaxed and generally satisfied with the state of his world.

  “Morning, Mark,” he said. “ ‘Red in the morning, sailor take warning.’ ”

  “What’s up, sir?” I asked.

  “The last visitation of what Jerry Dodd calls ‘Doris’ Standing Army’ took place before your association with us, Mark,” he said.

  “I’ve already sensed a little tension in the atmosphere,” I said. “But aren’t we safe? She’s here as Dorothy Smith.”

  “Had any extensive dealings with chameleons?” Chambrun asked. He reached out and lit one of his thin, flat cigarettes. “She arrived without luggage. Suggest anything to you?”

  I shrugged. “Stayed in town for a party and decided not to go home,” I suggested.

  “Home is in Beverly Hills, California,” he said.

  “Well—,” I said, and let it hang there.

  “Sit down while I give you a history lesson,” Chambrun said.

  I sat down in one of the big, high-backed Florentine chairs. The Great Man’s pouchy eyes had a faraway look in them, and his smile had lost much of its warmth.

  “The stuffed shirt, as a member of society, is a pain in th
e neck,” Chambrun said. “I think most of us rather enjoy the spectacle of a really Grade-A stuffed shirt taking a good solid pratfall in public. Doris Standing and her army make a crusade of staging public pratfalls for the overstuffed.” Chambrun glanced at me. “I can see you have a tendency to applaud rather than hiss,” he said. “On the surface I would be with you. But there is an extra element to this that you must understand. Doris’ army are like cats after tunafish. They must have it! If there isn’t a genuine Grade-A stuffed shirt handy, they’ll take the next-best thing. They must have their sardonic laughter. They are unconcerned with who else beside the stuffed shirt gets hurt. An idol may have feet of clay and topple over from a good hard push. But it isn’t just the idol which is destroyed; a whole population of worshipers is left rudderless on a stormy sea. These people dig up unpleasant truths and expose them. They aren’t blackmailers. They are so rich that money is meaningless. They do what they do simply for the pleasure of inflicting pain.”

  “I’m beginning to feel a little queasy,” I said.

  “It began a few years back when a prominent member of a reform party was running for governor of a certain state,” Chambrun said. “Toward the end of his campaign, during which our reformer had blasted all of the crooked politicians, gamblers, bribe-takers and whatnot in his state, a document was circulated to a huge mailing list showing the candidate jumping out a window, carrying his pants in his hand. It turned out to be a perfectly legitimate photograph. The candidate had been staying in a motel somewhere away from home. There had been a fire. He’d gotten out of his unit fast, because the flames were already licking at his door. The implication in the picture, circulated without comment, suggested something far less moral. It seems it had been taken by an amateur photographer, also a guest at the motel, who had no idea who the gentleman without pants was. A bystander bought the film from him. A man was destroyed politically, despite his protests of innocence. His wife of twenty years divorced him some months later. So much for fun and games.”

  “Sophomoric,” I said.

  “Does it help to know it’s a sophomore who just kicked you in the groin?” Chambrun asked. “They play games like children, Mark, vicious games. They laugh at honest sentiment. But it goes a lot deeper than this. They destroy genuine human relationships. They drive people out of important jobs, out of government posts. The people have to be consequential so that the audience will be large and wide. When they appear on the scene, you can know that someone is about to be burned. They don’t act on impulse. Their plans are elaborate and detailed. They travel the whole world looking for important victims. People laugh when they see them coming, but if they’re sensible they run for the nearest exit.”

  “And you think they’re coming here?”

  “We have three United Nations delegations housed under our roof,” Chambrun said. “We have a half-dozen top stars in the entertainment world. We have the representatives of great wealth and great power. One of them could be the target for a game—Game spelled with a capital G.” Chambrun’s face was bleak. “Their one venture here had to do with the late Julie Frazer. You remember her?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Singer, movie star. The original Cinderella girl.”

  Chambrun nodded. “Millions of people loved her from the days of that Cinderella movie. She was a great chanteuse. She packed them in all over this country and abroad. She had her problems—liquor and eventually drugs. She went completely to pieces. But she made a heroic effort to get herself in hand. I was approached to give her a chance for a comeback, here in the Blue Lagoon Room. That,” Chambrun said, and his face went stony, “was when I first met Emlyn Teague.”

  “Who is Emlyn Teague?” I asked.

  “Doris Standing’s alter ego—her game-twin, you might call him. But I didn’t know, then. He posed as Julie Frazer’s friend. His personal charm sold me completely. He wanted the comeback chance for her, and he would underwrite a two-week contract for her. He didn’t mean just her salary, but what the Beaumont had to take to break even for two weeks in the Blue Lagoon Room. I was magnanimous. I refused the underwriting. I’d take a chance on Julie, I told him.” Chambrun’s lips were a thin, straight line. “Bastard,” he said quietly. I’d never seen him quite so stirred. “It was decided there’d be no hullabaloo about Julie. It was to be staged as something quite casual as far as the public was concerned. We gave a dinner that night for all the columnists. The regular floor show was to go on, and in the middle of it the MC was to spot Julie at a corner table. He would introduce her, beg her to sing. She would hesitate, and then come forward and put on a performance. Teague said he would spread the word, enough to guarantee a full house. He was as good as his word. Julie Frazer sat at her corner table with Emlyn Teague, and Doris Standing, and a young man named Jeremy Slade, and another girl named Barbara Towers. The big moment came, and the MC went into his spiel that would lead into the introduction of Julie. Suddenly, Jeremy Slade projected himself into the middle of the floor. He had a gun in his hand. Women screamed. The MC, who was a cowardly twerp, backed away from him instead of trying to stop him from what he had in mind. Before I could reach him, or Cardoza, the Blue Lagoon’s captain, could reach Slade, he waved for silence. He shouted a jumble of words to the effect that we live in a crazy world, threatened by the atom bomb, our lives in danger in the city’s subways and parks, the air we breath polluted, our water supply dwindling. Every moment of every day we risked death. Well, he wasn’t going to let other people threaten him. He’d create his own risks. Then he spun the cylinder on his gun. ‘I do this every day,’ he shouted, ‘and I thought I’d give you the pleasure of watching a game of Russian roulette.’

  “The place was bedlam, women screaming. Cardoza and I were fighting our way toward Slade when he put the gun to his forehead and pulled the trigger. Of course nothing happened but a dull click. We got to him and dragged him away.

  “That wasn’t the moment for Julie to appear with her nostalgic, sentimental ballads. Teague professed to be horrified. Slade, he said, was a casual acquaintance. He suggested that we wait until the second show to introduce Julie. And so we waited.”

  Chambrun sighed.

  “I remember,” I said. “It didn’t come off.”

  “It didn’t come off,” Chambrun said, grimly. “When the MC introduced Julie to a delighted audience, she came out onto the floor, dead, staggering drunk. She sang one number—a horrible caricature of herself. We took her away as gently as we could. Teague professed himself to be heartbroken. She had been so shaken by Slade’s performance that she’d needed a drink. She’d been close to fainting, he said. He hadn’t dreamed that a drink or two would have the effect it did have.

  “The columnists were as decent about it as you could expect, except for one of the most important ones whose stuff is syndicated all over the world. I’ve since come to know that he was a member of Doris’ Standing Army. He very effectively ended any chance of a comeback for Julie. She gave up trying and really went off the deep end. She wound up in an institution for alcoholics, where her heart stopped beating one cold, rainy day.”

  Chambrun got up and went over to the sideboard for a fresh cup of Turkish coffee. He seemed to need a moment to control a long-smoldering anger.

  “They made me an accessory to what happened to Julie Frazer. Innocent, but an accessory.” Chambrun walked back to his desk and sat down, balancing his demitasse in the palm of his left hand. “I have a list of names here, Mark.” He shoved a slip of paper across the desktop. I picked it up and read:

  Emlyn Teague

  Jeremy Slade

  Oscar Maxwell

  Barbara (“Bobby”) Towers

  Van Delaney

  Ivor Jerningham

  “You might call those people the high command of Doris’ Standing Army,” Chambrun said. “I want them watched for. The reception desk has been alerted. Jerry Dodd in security knows each one of them by sight. I want you and your staff alert around the clock.”

  �
��Right,” I said. I hesitated. “You seemed to place some significance in the fact that La Standing arrived without luggage.”

  Chambrun shrugged. “Anything unusual about any of these people suggests trouble in the wind.”

  The house phone on Chambrun’s desk rang. He answered and listened. Then he said, “Thank you, Jerry,” and hung up.

  “Jerry Dodd reports that Doris Standing has just ordered about three thousand dollars’ worth of clothes from Marinelli’s. Daytime stuff, evening gowns, negligees, lingerie.”

  Marinelli’s was the very chic women’s shop in the lobby.

  “It would seem she plans to stay,” I said.

  Part of my job as public relations man for the Beaumont is to keep society columnists and the Broadway boys posted on arrivals and departures that have any news value. My judgement on what is news is important to the hotel. There’s an old chestnut in the business about one of the first PR men in the trade. He conceived the idea of sending items back to the home-town newspapers of guests: “Mr. and Mrs. Tom Jones of X-ville are spending the weekend at the Waldorf.” This would work for the hotel when other prominent citizens of X-ville came to New York. It did work—for about four days. And then the hotel received an irate call from a lady in X-ville. “I am Mrs. Tom Jones and I am in X-ville. I would like to know who the blankety blank the woman is who’s spending the weekend with my husband in your hotel!”

  Doris Standing was news, wherever she went. But since she had registered as Dorothy Smith, I chose to ignore her presence in our midst. The situation wasn’t unique. Dozens of famous movie stars have registered under phoney names, with our full knowledge, to keep autograph hunters and salesmen and other nuts out of their hair. We always check with a famous name before we release any publicity on his presence.

  I had routine things to do that morning. Ormanski, the famous couturier, was showing his new spring line of fashions in the ballroom that afternoon. It involved special arrangements for fashion writers, buyers, a select list of prominent ladies on the “best-dressed” lists, television people, models, and God knows what else. These are high-strung people with a tendency toward hysteria. Let one small item in the arrangements go wrong, and the foundations of the hotel would begin to shake. I spent the balance of the morning after my chat with Chambrun, checking out each detail of the arrangements personally.