Gilded Nightmare Page 6

  “A little while after dinner she came directly to the point.

  “ ‘I know you’ve always wanted to make love to me, Sam,’ she said. ‘If you’d still like me to, I’d like to—very much.’

  “Direct and to the point, our Charmian. We made love. It was a stunning piece of pure sexual techniques.” Sam drew a deep breath. “All the time I was waiting for the time when we’d lie side by side, mutually exhausted. When it came—that relaxed moment—I asked her, enormously casual.

  “ ‘Did my father really make a pass at you that night, Charmian?’

  “She snuggled close to me. ‘I’m sorry about Uncle Josh, Sam. I never dreamed—’

  “ ‘Never dreamed what?’

  “ ‘That he’d go to such lengths.’

  “ ‘As to kill himself?’

  “She nodded.

  “ ‘But did he do what you accused him of doing?’

  “She laughed. ‘Of course not. I suppose it was naughty of me, Sam, but you know how I am. Anything to be on camera.’ ” Sam’s voice shook. “I—I got up out of that monstrous bed. I remember looking down at her, wondering if I ought to kill her as she lay there, naked, smiling up at me. Then I dressed and ran. I was so close to murder I couldn’t trust myself.”

  Sam put down his glass and began to fumble in his pocket for a pipe and pouch.

  “I’m not proud of the rest of it,” he said. “You have to understand how much I loved my father to understand the fierce hatred I felt for this gal who’d done him in, made me doubt him.

  “I went to work on Charmian. I spread the story here and there, judiciously. Some of the important powerhouses who’d romped around in that mammoth bed were suddenly on the run. She was dangerous. I was responsible for their knowing it. She wasn’t a good actress, so no one was willing to risk giving her a chance just for the kicks involved in knowing her sexually. Charmian Brown’s career died a-borning, and I was responsible. A German director who was doing something in Hollywood decided to run the Charmian risk, but only on his home ground. He signed her for a small part in a movie to be made in Germany. Unless I’m very much mistaken, that film starred Bruno Wald. That may have been when she was first attracted to him.

  “I don’t know exactly what happened after that. Either the German director gave her the bounce, or she him. Anyhow, somewhere in that segment of time she met old Conrad Zetterstrom. The next I heard of her was that she’d married the Baron and gone to live on his island. I never saw her again until this afternoon.”

  Sam looked up over the flame of the lighter he was holding to his pipe. “That, Pierre, is the story Helwig was referring to. As for its supplying me with a revenge motif—I can only tell you it doesn’t. It’s all past and done with. My father’s image was restored and remains intact in my memory. If I feel anything at all, it’s a small sense of guilt for what I did to her back there in Hollywood. But, by God, she had it coming to her.”

  There was a long silence, and then Chambrun asked: “Did she mention it to you today—now—when you went to see her?”

  “Oh, she mentioned it,” Sam said. His laugh was short and bitter. “Trust Charmian! But there’s no way to bring my father up out of that cellar.” He shook himself, like a dog coming out of water. “I’m going out for a walk,” he said. “I need to get some fresh air into my lungs.”…

  I went looking for Shelda and found a note from her on my desk. It said, in effect, that she’d gotten tired of waiting for me, and if I cared to know what her relationship was, and promised to be, with young Mr. Peter Wynn, I might drop by her place some time. The bitch!

  I was just about to lock up my office and head for my apartment to change for the evening when Mr. Amato, the Beaumont’s banquet manager, poked his head in my office door.

  “Got a minute, Mr. Haskell?” he asked.

  Mr. Amato is a tall, dark, thin man in his early forties. He is a Roman, and he must have been a very beautiful young man with a profile like a god on a coin. There were now little puffs and pouches and lines that suggested dyspepsia and incipient ulcers. I knew that the top of his desk in his own private office was a small apothecary shop, loaded with all kinds of soothing medicines, the kind that coat and the kind that don’t coat, the kind that effervesce and the kind that go down like a milky chalk. I knew that three quarters of his daily intake was medicinal, not caloric.

  “I wanted to talk to you for a moment about the Baroness Zetterstrom,” Amato said.

  “Who doesn’t?” I said. I was, frankly, up to there with the lady. The two stories we’d heard about her from Sam Culver had left me with a strong feeling of revulsion for Charmian Zetterstrom. Her unnaturally preserved youth added an unhealthy dividend to a potion of sadistic villainy. I had the feeling that to be in her presence was to risk contamination, and I quietly hated myself because of a strong impulse to go to see her again. I would have denied that under oath to Shelda, but there it was. Evil has, unfortunately, a diabolical fascination for most of us that the Ten Commandments lack.

  “I want to know what she is like,” Amato said.

  “Oh, brother!”

  “I mean, does she really know food and wines? Is she a genuine connoisseur, or is she simply a rich show-off?”

  “I think she might even be able to tell you whether human flesh tastes better broiled or roasted,” I said.

  “My God!” Amato said.

  “Seriously, I suspect you can’t fake this dinner, Amato. Her palate is almost certainly educated.”

  Amato giggled. “I remember advice from Mr. Chambrun on another occasion,” he said. “Kangaroo tail soup, specially flown in from Australia. It is unbelievably foul-tasting, but the guests will eat every last drop of it, smacking their lips, lest somebody should guess that they have no experience of exotic dishes.”

  “I think if it wasn’t delicious the lady would complain,” I said. “I don’t think her aim is to impress.”

  Amato took a slip of paper out of his pocket. “Aged beef is a problem these days,” he said. “I was prepared to suggest roast venison grand veneur. I would precede it with special salmon flown in from the Canadian Northwest.”

  “I think you should discuss it with the Baroness,” I said. “It will keep you from guessing. I think she is altogether capable of saying yes or no. It should save you a lot of anxiety—and at least three Bromo Seltzers.”

  “You think I will not find her difficult?” he asked, little beads of sweat showing on his long upper lip.

  “I think you will find her unlike anyone you’ve dealt with before, chum. But I suggest you put off seeing her at least until tomorrow. She’s in an unhappy state this evening.”

  “The dog. I heard about the dog,” Amato said. “It’s unbelievable.”

  “I saw it,” I said.

  “Thank God it was not me,” Amato said, his ulcer obviously twitching. “Thank you for your advice, Mr. Haskell.”

  “I hope I haven’t misled you,” I said.

  At the door Amato turned back. “With the kangaroo tail soup you serve a Madeira sercial,” he said.

  For a man who couldn’t eat food his obsession with it was slightly comic. …

  Shelda has moments of infantilism. They appear almost always when she’s mad at me and thinks she can get even by making me jealous. She was reading a copy of Life when I let myself into her apartment. Have I admitted that I have a key?

  “He’s really quite masculine,” she said, not looking up.

  “Who? Cary Grant?”

  “Don’t be a dope!” she said. “I’m talking about Peter Wynn, of course.”

  “You have reason to be certain?”

  She gave me an evil little grin. “I was offered the opportunity.”

  “Fast worker, your Mr. Wynn.”

  “At the crucial moment we were interrupted,” Shelda said. And then she stopped playing games. “Oh, Mark, who could have done such a thing to that poor little dog?”

  “Someone not nice,” I said. “Was the news
of that what interrupted Mr. Wynn’s pass at you?”

  “Don’t be a jerk,” Shelda said. “He didn’t make a pass at me. He was politely admiring, which does a girl good.”

  “How did he take the news about Puzzi?”

  “He said, ‘That sonofabitch!’ and left me flat.”

  “Which sonofabitch?”

  “He didn’t say. Do they know who did it, Mark?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “But depend on Chambrun and Jerry. They’ll find out.” I lit a cigarette. “There are no lines or wrinkles,” I said. “Can you suggest how she does it?”

  “Monkey glands,” she said, bitterly.

  “They went out in the twenties.”

  “She’s hooked you!”

  “Yes and no,” I said. “She’s fascinating. She’s also scary.” I made us a pair of Scotch on the rocks, and then I brought her up to date. It took two drinks to get through Sam’s stories about Charmian, with Shelda interrupting like the commercials on TV. I’d just finished the story of Sam’s father when the telephone rang. Shelda answered and then handed the phone to me. “Jerry Dodd for you.”

  “You’ve found the dognapper?” I asked him.

  “We’ve graduated to people,” he said, in a strange, hard voice. I scarcely recognized it.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Baroness’ maid,” he said. “The little blond dish they call Heidi.”

  “What about her?”

  “She went to the corner drugstore to do an errand for the Baroness. Someone grabbed her, dragged her into an alley, bashed in her skull, and slashed her to pieces with a dull knife.”

  “Like Puzzi!” I said. My mouth was cotton-dry.

  “Like Puzzi,” Jerry said. “You better get over here.”

  Part Two

  1

  AS I’VE SAID BEFORE, a big hotel like the Beaumont is in reality a small town in itself. The same things happen in it that happen in any other town; births, natural deaths, suicides, fires, divorces, clandestine love affairs, robberies, business failures, celebrations, funerals—and murder.

  Technically, the murder of the girl named Heidi had probably not taken place in the hotel. I say probably not because her body had been found a block away in an alley, and so far there was no indication that it had been carried there from somewhere else, like the hotel. But the dramatis personae were very much a part of the hotel. The police investigation would be centered there with Charmian Zetterstrom and her curious staff. The story would make a field day for the news media, and the Beaumont would come in for an unwanted chunk of lurid publicity. My job, I knew, as I hurried back to the hotel from Shelda’s, would be to soft-pedal that aspect of it as best I could.

  The lobby looked normally quiet for eight o’clock in the evening, but I’d noticed two police cars parked down the block from the entrance as I came in.

  Karl Nevers, the night reservation man, was on duty at the desk and I hurried over to him.

  “The boss’s office,” he said, before I got out a question. “Hardy’s with him.”

  As I headed for the elevators, Mike Maggio, the night bell captain, flagged me down. Mike has a gamin Italian face that’s usually screwed up in a mischievous grin. He looked very serious at this moment.

  “I’m looking for the long-haired one,” Mike said. “You seen him?”

  “What long-haired one?”

  “The one with the red pants. Wynn, his name is. He’s missing. Hardy wants him.”

  “I haven’t seen him since six o’clock when he was buying a drink for Shelda in the Trapeze.”

  Mike’s mischievous grin wrinkled his face. “Shelda’s in good form, I hope,” he said.

  “Keep your nose out of my business,” I said, grinning back at him.

  I took the elevator to the second floor and headed for Chambrun’s office. “Hardy” was Lieutenant Hardy, a big, dark young man with an athletic build who looks more like a good-natured, if slightly puzzled, college fullback than a Homicide detective. We could be grateful for small mercies. We’d had Hardy with us before. He knew Chambrun and the inner workings of the hotel. He would know who to trust in our setup and wouldn’t waste a lot of time suspecting people like Mrs. Kniffen, the housekeeper, or some other innocent on the staff.

  Hardy was with Chambrun and Miss Ruysdale in the inner office. He gave me a friendly nod as I came in. I saw that Chambrun had a set of file cards on his desk. They must be the ones relating to Charmian and her crew.

  “Sorry to inconvenience you,” Chambrun said, drily. “The Lieutenant is anxious to find out what he can about the Zetterstrom mob before he starts on a questioning bee. We don’t have much on file except rumors.”

  “We have Sam Culver,” I said.

  “Sam has gone out somewhere for the evening. No reason he should have told us where he was going.”

  “I understand Peter Wynn is among the missing.”

  “I half hoped we might find him with you and Shelda,” Chambrun said.

  They say at the Beaumont that Chambrun must have some secret peepholes that allow him to see everything that’s going on everywhere at the same time. He was obviously aware that Peter Wynn had been in the Trapeze with Shelda and me.

  “You’ve got some kind of a nut prowling the joint,” Hardy said, scowling. “Only a sick mind could do the kind of job that was done on the girl—and the dog!”

  “Murder always involves a sick mind,” Chambrun said.

  “What actually happened to the girl?” I said. “No one’s told me.”

  “Another dog story,” Hardy said. “Woman walking a Pekingese. It started to bark and raise hell at the mouth of an alley down the street. The woman investigated and found the girl. Horror stuff. She was ripped to pieces, head smashed in. Lady had presence of mind enough to call the cops instead of running off screaming by herself. Quick identification. The girl hadn’t been robbed. Eighty-ninety dollars in her handbag, and the key to her room in the Beaumont. We knew who she was in ten minutes. Heidi Brunner.”

  “She’s the Amazon’s daughter,” Chambrun said.

  “She went out to get a prescription for sleeping pills filled—for the Baroness,” Hardy said. “Never got to the drugstore. The prescription was still in her handbag, signed by Dr. Malinkov.”

  “He’s licensed to practice here?” I asked.

  Hardy nodded. “He was a top-flight plastic surgeon during World War II. Brought here from Germany toward the end of the war to work on mutilated G.I.’s. Licensed then. He went back to Europe in 1950. Evidently became part of the Zetterstrom world about that time.”

  Chambrun glanced at me. “May explain the lady’s lack of wrinkles,” he said.

  The red button on Chambrun’s desk phone began to blink. Ruysdale answered, listened, then covered the mouthpiece with her hand.

  “It’s Marcus Helwig,” she said. “Both the Baroness and Madame Brunner are in hysterics. He knows the police are about to descend on them. He asks for the chance to answer preliminary questions away from them. Can he come here?”

  “God save me from hysterical women,” Hardy said. “Tell him to come. Let me talk to my man there.”

  One of Hardy’s assistants was already in the Zetterstrom quarters getting routine information. Hardy told him to send along a police stenographer with Helwig. Without waiting for instructions Ruysdale set up a small table and a chair for the stenotype operator at the far side of the room.

  “Thing I don’t like about this,” Hardy said, “is the pattern. When you have a repeated M.O. you learn to expect a sort of chain reaction.”

  “M.O. meaning modus operandi,” Chambrun said.

  “Meaning method of operation,” Hardy said. “Dog and woman—same pattern. Like you ask yourself, who’s next?”

  Helwig arrived with the police stenographer while Ruysdale was preparing a fresh demitasse for Chambrun. Helwig’s eyes were hidden by the black glasses. The grim lines at the corners of his mouth were etched deep, as though a sculptor had chis
eled them in stone.

  “I appreciate your courtesy in seeing me here,” he said. “As you can imagine, Madame Brunner is distraught. The girl was her daughter. The Baroness was very fond of the girl. She’s had her as a personal maid for some years. She is shocked, and a little frightened, I think.”

  “Frightened?” Chambrun asked, his heavy eyelids lifting.

  “Is it unreasonable for her to imagine that this is some sort of attack on her?” Helwig asked. “First her precious dog, then her close personal maid.”

  “This afternoon in the lobby, when there was the commotion with Stephen Wood, the Baroness said, ‘I have been in some danger recently.’ What did she mean? Why, to come to the point, does she have a bodyguard?”

  Helwig took a silver cigarette case from his breast pocket. I saw that it was an exact duplicate of the one carried by Peter Wynn. Merry Christmas from the Zetterstroms? “It is permitted to smoke?” he asked, and took a cigarette from the case and lit it with a silver lighter when Hardy nodded. “Surely, Mr. Chambrun, you are aware of some of the circumstances surrounding extraordinary wealth. The Baroness has one of the largest private fortunes in the world today. She’s automatically a target for confidence men, thieves, the operators of dishonest charities, but most of all, for revolutionary crackpots who simply feel she should be eliminated because she is rich. If she had children they’d have to be guarded day and night from people who would see them as prime objects for a kidnapping venture.”

  “There are other reasons,” Chambrun said, in a cold voice.

  Helwig nodded, as if to acknowledge a reasonableness in Chambrun’s statement. “Baron Zetterstrom was a much-hated man,” he said. “I don’t choose to rise to his defense at this moment. But I concede that every Jew who remembers, or has been taught to remember, Hitler-Germany hated him with a passion. Hated him and everything that was his—including his wife. He was unconventional in the way he lived after the war. There are moralists and religious fanatics who hated him, hate his memory, and hate what is left of his world—including his wife. There are people who attempted to ingratiate themselves with the Baron and Baroness on the Island, dreaming of financial gain, who found themselves tossed out into the night. They hate the Baron’s memory—and his wife.”