Murder Goes Round and Round: A Pierre Chambrun Mystery Hardcover Page 5

  "He didn't know. Just that Toby had okayed him."

  "London police may have his prints and picture," Herzog said. "Thanks, Margaret."

  "Everyone calls me Maggie," the girl said.

  "Well, Maggie, you've put us on the track, but it may take all day to get any kind of positive results from London."

  "I'm not interested in a stranger from London who was dead long before Chambrun was shot," I said. "I'm going to

  the hospital just in case there are any new reports on Cham-brun's condition."

  "You may be needed here," Herzog said.

  "My personal sanity depends on good news from the hospital," I said.

  My personal sanity might depend on good news, but the hospital environment doesn't do much for my general nervous system. I just find myself thanking God that I'm there to visit someone else, not as a patient.

  At St. Mark's, I was finally directed to the emergency ward where Chambrun was being held. A nurse sat at a long, narrow, almost tablelike desk. She told me she couldn't give me permission to see Chambrun.

  "You'll have to get that from Dr. Lockwood." She nodded toward a white-coated man who was standing at the far end of the desk, studying some medical charts. He looked up at the mention of his name.

  "Not much point in going in to see him," he said. "He can't see you."

  "You mean ...?"

  "He's, we hope, just temporarily blind," the doctor said.

  "Temporarily?"

  "I said 'we hope.' He was wearing a hat when he was shot. The inner sweatband — leather — deflected the bullets enough to keep them from going directly into his brain. The nerves controlling his vision are, for now, paralyzed."

  "Can he speak — talk?"

  "At the moment, he doesn't know if he's alive or dead."

  "It might comfort him if he knew I was here to see him," I said. "We're very close."

  "A brief visit might help bring him around," Dr. Lockwood said.

  He led me down a short corridor and into an unmarked room. Chambrun lay on a bed there, his head swathed in bandages. If he heard us come in, he gave no sign of it. His eyes were closed. I spoke his name. Nothing happened.

  "Pierre, it's Mark." I turned to the doctor. "His hearing damaged?"

  "We think not," Dr. Lockwood said. "Just overall shock."

  I reached down and touched Chambrun's hand. "It's Mark, Pierre." I thought I felt a faint twitching motion in his hand. "I just wanted you to know that we're all pulling for you. We're covering all your duty posts for you."

  Again a faint twitch.

  "I think he's hearing me," I said to the doctor.

  Dr. Lockwood just shrugged.

  "Is there anything you can tell us about what happened?" I asked Chambrun. "Did you get a look at the man who shot you?

  No movement. No response of any kind.

  "Cops have been burying him under that one," Dr. Lock-wood said. "He may not even know what's happened to him."

  "You know you were shot, Pierre?" I asked.

  No movement or twitch of his hand.

  Dr. Lockwood shrugged. "Knowing won't get him better, but you've had more response from him than the lady who was here."

  "Miss Ruysdale?"

  "I think that was her name. I thought I'd have to bed her down when he didn't respond to her at all."

  I turned back to Chambrun. "Did you know Betsy was here, Pierre? She was stunned because you didn't respond to her."

  This time his hand seemed almost to writhe under mine.

  "Ill tell her you know," I said.

  His hand moved again.

  "Come back when you can," Dr. Lockwood said. "You may be the medicine he needs. This Ruysdale lady is important to him?"

  "Vitally."

  "He might show her some signs of life if she'd come back," Dr. Lockwood said. "This can be a minute-to-minute situation."

  I hated to leave him, but the answers to too many questions were back at the Beaumont. And Betsy was there. If he was coming around, she was almost certainly the one who could speed it up.

  I found Betsy back in her office at the hotel. She was gone almost before I could tell her what his response to hearing her name from me had been. The people I wanted next were Millicent Huber and Colonel Watson. If anyone could fill in Maggie Hanson's story about Toby March giving the dead man in the basement a green light, they were the people to do this.

  Watson answered my knock on the door of the room where he and Millicent Huber were registered as Colonel and Mrs. Watson. They were eating breakfast that room service had brought them.

  "I've just come from the hospital," I told him, "where

  Chambrun is showing some very small signs of improvement."

  "Glad to hear it," Watson said.

  "But I want to talk to you two about something else. You know a girl named Maggie Hanson who's close to Frank Pasqua?"

  "I know her well," Millicent said. "She must be out of her mind with anxiety for him."

  "She is. But more important, she was able to tell us something about the dead man in the basement."

  "She knows him?" Watson asked.

  "Not exactly. But she saw him with Toby March in a London hotel. The Brunswick House."

  "That's where Toby and Frank and the whole show crew stayed in London."

  "And you?" I asked.

  "I had my own apartment," she said. "But —I stayed at the Brunswick quite often with Toby."

  "Maggie says she saw Toby talking to the man, in the basement, at the Brunswick House bar."

  "In public? Never."

  "But she says she saw them together. She was with Frank, and he told her that Toby said that the man was free to approach him."

  "It just doesn't fit the pattern," Millicent said.

  "What pattern?"

  "I've already explained to you," Millicent said. "Toby's professional career depends on no one knowing what he really looks like. If you're pretending to be Frank Sinatra or some other famous singer, the listener—the public—has to believe that if that mask came off he would see Frank Sinatra. If he can expect another face, the whole illusion would be spoiled. It's been that way now for years."

  "Millicent doesn't even know what Toby looks like," Watson said.

  "I first saw him when I was a nurse in the hospital in London. That was when he'd been brought in after his disaster. His face was a mangled mess. We got to be friends — close friends. Then he had plastic surgery done. His face was covered for a month or more after that. It was during that time, his face still covered with bandages, that he told me what he planned to do with his career. Imitations of the famous. He must remain personally anonymous for that to be successful."

  "But you," I said. "Why must he remain anonymous to you?"

  "It was like some kind of psychosis with him," Watson said. "I met him at the same time, never knew what he looked like before his accident, or after. It's curious how little it matters after a while. When I think of him, I think of bright blue eyes looking out at me through the holes in a black mask. That's what he looks like to me, to Millicent, and to the boys in his band."

  "But he is your lover," I said to Millicent.

  Her lips twitched. "You don't love a face, you love a person. After a while it didn't matter to me that he had an obsession to keep his looks a secret from the public. His wit, his tenderness, his talent as a lover were all that mattered. If he wanted to keep his looks hidden, it was all right with me. I even understood it after a while."

  "But to find him, the police need to be able to describe him," I said.

  "You think they will find him?" Watson asked.

  "That's their business. The hospital in London, the doctor who made over his face, should be able to tell them what they need to know."

  "When Frank Pasqua turns up from his unfinished business,' he may be able to give them a lead. I think he may be the only person who knows what Toby looks like now. The doctor planned a face for him but how well it turned out, the way he plann
ed it, only he would know if he saw Toby unmasked."

  "So give me the hospital's name and the doctor's name," I said. "Well see what we can dig up on the phone. March hadn't begun to wear a mask while he was still in the hospital, had he?"

  "No," Millicent said, "but I think the doctor had agreed to help Toby keep his secret. The secret of his appearance."

  "With a possible murder on the books, the doctor wouldn't have to keep that secret," I said.

  "You think Toby's been murdered?" Millicent asked.

  "The person who lost all that blood in 17C isn't very likely to be alive," I said.

  "More likely it is Frank," she said.

  "But Frank called Haskell on the phone," Watson said.

  "If that was Pasqua," I said.

  Colonel Watson wrote down the name of the London hospital and the plastic surgeon for me, and I went off to find Lieutenant Herzog. It wasn't much, but it was something.

  Herzog and I put through a call to London. The people at the hospital sure weren't too helpful. They could provide Herzog with fingerprints of the man who had been brought in to them with a ruined face. Dr. Clyde Ferris, the surgeon, gave us very little more. He was a pleasant-sounding Britisher, obviously willing to help but without too much to offer. "The damage to March's face was almost unbelievable," he said. "I asked him if he had a photograph of himself. He was a public performer. Photographs could be part of his business. But he claimed not to have any. I had to start from scratch."

  "March told me that people used to say he looked like Jimmy Stewart," Dr. Ferris continued. "I had to start with something-rebuilding cheekbones, mouth structure, forehead. So I used a photograph of Jimmy Stewart as a guide." "So he looks like Jimmy Stewart?" "No way I can tell you," Dr. Ferris said. "He was still a mass of stitches and bandages the last time I saw him. I never saw the final result." "He left you before the job was completed?" "Before the results could be seen. Medically, there was no reason he couldn't leave the hospital. I'd have liked to have seen the end results, but it wasn't medically necessary."

  "He told you what he planned to do? Keep his identity a secret?"

  "And he asked me to play along with him and I agreed. He probably doesn't look any more like Jimmy Stewart than I do. A stranger wouldn't recognize that Jimmy Stewart had been the model for the rebuilding. You understand, I'm only guessing because I don't know what Toby March looks like today."

  I sat by the phone in my office, trying to make some sense out of the horrors that had surrounded me since the early-morning hours of Sunday, when Toby March had returned to 17C after his performance in the Blue Lagoon to be confronted by some kind of a deathtrap. Who had been there? We assumed Frank Pasqua. But if the phone call to me, allegedly from Pasqua, had been genuine, then Pasqua hadn't been there. We had assumed that the dead man in the basement had been there, but only because he had been subject to the same kind of wound that had caused someone to bleed so copiously on March's bed. But who and why, no answers.

  Then there was Chambrun. Only the miracle of a tough inner hatband had kept two bullets from lodging in his brain. Chambrun hadn't expected anything of that sort. He'd walked out onto the roof unarmed, planning only to scare off an intruder. Neither Betsy Ruysdale nor I knew of any personal feud in his life, any quarrel of deadly proportions, any long-held grudge. Who and why? No answer.

  There was no starting point for any of this. I suddenly had a far-out notion. Not even the closest people to Toby March knew what his face looked like. Was it possible the dead man in the basement could be March? Would there be other ways of identifying him besides his face? Surely Millicent Huber, the woman in his life, would have private knowledge of the man if no one else had.

  I had some of Jerry's men try to locate Millicent and the four young musicians. They had to have some way of knowing Toby besides his black-masked face.

  Millicent, the first to turn up in my office, was outraged at being asked to look at the dead man again and at the suggestion that he might be her man.

  "It's absurd, Mr. Haskell," she told me. "Toby's face has never been a part of my life. I would have known, instantly, if the dead man was Toby."

  "How?" I asked.

  "I — I would have felt it. I would have known instantly if the man I love was lying there in front of me, dead."

  "You are his lover. You sleep with him," I said. "Are there things aside from his face you would know for certain? A birthmark? The way the hair grows on his chest?"

  "I would just know this man isn't Toby!" she said.

  "When I was a kid, I had a mole on my chest," I said. "My mother used to call it my 'kissy spot.' If I'd turned up with my face obliterated, she'd have been certain of me by that mole. Is there something unique like that about March?"

  "I tell you that man isn't Toby. Nothing will prove he is because I know, deep down, that he isn't."

  "And he isn't," a voice said from behind us. It was Ben Lewis, the young guitarist in March's group.

  "How do you know that?" I asked him.

  "Believe it or not, I had the same notion when you first took me downstairs to look at him," Lewis said, "but almost at once, I knew that was a wild fantasy. The dead man is missing the ring finger of his left hand."

  "A recent injury?"

  "No. The skin was all grown over, no scars. Probably happened to him when he was a kid. You understand, Mr. Haskell, I've been watching Toby play the piano every day of the week, except Sunday, for the past five years. A jazz pianist has to have a strong left hand. Toby has the greatest I ever saw. No missing finger! His face, which I've never seen, meant nothing to me. But a missing finger he didn't have."

  That was the end of that dream. The dead man wasn't Toby March. Millicent Huber left me with a great sigh of relief.

  "Any news about Mr. Chambrun?" Ben asked me.

  "Pretty bad, but alive and lucky." I told him about the sweatband that had probably saved Chambrun's life.

  "You know who had it in for him?" Ben asked.

  "No. Not that much 'in for him.' Who had it in for March and Pasqua?" I asked.

  Ben's eyes narrowed. "You think they were both attacked, or just one of them?"

  "It's hard for me to believe the phone call I got was from Pasqua," I said. "If it was, he wasn't hurt at the time, and he wouldn't have taken what might have happened to March so lightly."

  "You asked me before who might have it in for Toby or Frank," Ben said. "Ours is a crazy world. No one feels casual about a star like Toby. They are loved or despised. Not for any sensible reasons, you understand. They are loved because they answered a question in a crowd, or hated because they didn't."

  "But in spite of his secret way of living, March must have had close friends," I said. "You spent time with him every day. You must know who those close friends might be."

  "Believe it or not, I don't," Ben said. "Pasqua arranges our schedule and where we will stay when we go to some city to play—both here and abroad. If Toby had friends in those places, Pasqua would be instructed to inform them. None of the rest of us knew who they were."

  "Staying so anonymous doesn't make sense," I said.

  "It's what made his act so perfect," Ben said. "Behind that mask was Frank Sinatra, or Bing Crosby, or Tony Bennett, or whomever he might be impersonating. If it got out that what was really behind that mask was a beat-up Jimmy Stewart, the illusion would be destroyed."

  "So one of them was badly hurt. Why would March take Pasqua away, or Pasqua take March away, when help was right at hand? It must be because somewhere there is a friend who would cover for them. But why would Pasqua go that route?" I asked.

  "Because he knew that's the way Toby would want it," Ben said.

  "Millicent must know," I said.

  "If you knew how important it was for Toby to stay anonymous, you would understand how it's possible that the woman who made love with him was just as much in the dark as the rest of us concerning his appearance."

  "What about Colonel Watson?" I asked. "Y
ou knew him abroad?"

  "I never saw him or heard of him until after all this began," Ben told me. "Millicent told me he was a male orderly in the London hospital where Toby went after his face was obliterated. He must be close for Toby to suggest he and Millicent should register as husband and wife."

  "That doesn't make any sense to me," I said.

  "If it got out that Millicent was Toby's girl, she would have been snowed under by reporters and curious fans. As 'Mrs. Watson,' they'd have no interest in her."

  "Could any of the other boys in your orchestra know more than you do?" I asked.

  I'ld bet my shirt against it," Ben said.

  Dead-end streets no matter where I looked.

  Colonel Archibald Watson took me down my last blind alley. He sat opposite me at my desk, with no obvious desire to withhold anything. As I already knew, he'd been a medical orderly at the London hospital where Toby was taken after his disfiguring accident. Watson was called on to help him in and out of wheelchairs when he was well enough, and wheel him around to wherever he wanted to go. Where would he want to go?

  "There was a piano in the recreation room," Watson told me. "He wanted to go to it. I knew he was a small-time jazz performer so that didn't surprise me. I wasn't a fan, so I had no way of judging how good he was. But one afternoon, he began to sing along with what he was playing. Something about 'San Francisco.' Suddenly a nurse appeared in the doorway. 'What happened to him?' she asked me. I explained a bus accident and plastic surgery. 'I didn't hear anything about it on the radio or TV,' she said. 'Nothing in the news-papers."Why should there be?' I asked. 'Perry Como.'That's not Perry Como,' I told her. 'Of course it is,' she said. 'I'd know his voice anywhere.'"

  "I told Toby later," Watson went on. "He was delighted. 'That's who I was when I was singing,' he said. 'She couldn't see any face to contradict what she was hearing. I helped him get his first mask made, one that covered his whole head and the front of his chin and throat. Frank Pasqua, a small-time booking agent who had gotten some of Toby's pre-accident jobs, arranged a tryout of his new act. Toby would be Frank Sinatra for an evening, his face hidden, the sound Sinatra's.

  It was a huge success. Millicent and I, who had helped to prepare for it, attended and were impressed. A star was born, and we were a part of it. But friends?" Watson shrugged. "Of course with Millicent it was something else. Their closeness began right there in the hospital. But when I asked her about him, she just shrugged. Toby didn't want to talk about anything but his future. So no past history came up in their conversations. No past loves or close friendships."