Evil That Men Do Read online

  “Doris herself is something to look at,” I said.

  Craig stared at a vision of her in space, objectively critical. “You look at Doris because she is perfection,” he said. “She holds her head high, like a thoroughbred. She has style. She attracts attention with a natural grace, an animal litheness. She’s like a wild horse you see on the plains, undisciplined, untrained, but superb in her naturalness. Every man could wish himself the luck of having a Doris Standing—and taming her.” He paused and his face clouded. “Bobby Towers is the ne plus ultra in evil sophistication. She’s a hothouse flower. She offers everything, and for a price you can have it.”

  “Price?”

  “Her price is to be amused. Find a way to amuse her and you can have what you want. But I warn you in advance, Haskell, in case you’re tempted; the coin of the realm is degredation and self-disgust.”

  “You sound like a writer,” I said.

  “So I’ve been told,” he said, dryly. His face clouded. “There is one thing that goes with all of them. Money. Doris is so rich it hurts me to think about it. Emlyn Teague can probably match her in blue-chip holdings. The others don’t need money as long as they’re in favor. Doris and Emlyn keep the clover stand rich and high.”

  “Was Jeremy Slade out of favor?”

  “He was top favorite two months ago,” Craig said. “He was the tough kid with the golden smile. Lei anyone say anything publicly unpleasant about any of the chums and Slade was the chopper—an athlete, an expert at judo and karate. In short, the club bodyguard. They needed one, because the wounded fight back with a kind of desperation, and there are always the wounded in the area of Teague and Company.”

  “Then it wouldn’t be unlikely that one of what you call ‘the wounded’ followed him to 9F this afternoon and shot him dead when he opened the door to a knock.”

  “Most likely thing in the world,” Craig said. “But he had better have run if Teague and Company are on the way.”

  “Does it prove something that you haven’t run?” I said.

  There was mischief in the pale-blue eyes for an instant. “I could be their public relations man, building up your advance expectations,” he said. He laughed, and it was mirthless. “No, Haskell, I didn’t kill Slade, but if I cared a damn for myself I would run. But Doris is in trouble. She said so two weeks ago and she’s in deep now. If someone is fighting back at Teague and Company, Doris is a target as well as the others. A way to punish her would be to frame her for Slade’s murder, wouldn’t it? So I’m not running. I’m going to get her out of this if I can, and then I’m going to amputate her from Emlyn Teague for the rest of time—if I can.”

  I looked at my empty martini glass. “What did you really want of me, Craig, when you asked me to join you?”

  “It’s not complicated,” he said. “I have no way of reaching Doris to say that I’m here and ready to help in any way I can. You can get to her, or get a message to her. I ask for that.”

  “Why not,” I said.

  “And perhaps you can get me a room in this gilded cage? I don’t want to be any further from her than I can help.”

  “Let’s go down to the reception desk,” I said.

  I wasn’t quite sure about Gary Craig. My instinct told me he was a right guy. My professional caution told me I could have been sold a bill of goods. Chambrun had warned me that no one connected with Doris Standing could be trusted.

  But I had seen her cry. If they’d turned Naylor, the assistant D.A., loose on her, she was having a bad time right about now. I wondered how T.J. Madison, the fullback, would carry the ball in this league.

  Karl Nevers was on the reception desk when I got there. There wasn’t a vacancy in the place except for the house seats—the name we have for a few rooms held open by the management for special emergencies. Only Chambrun could release them and I didn’t feel this was the moment to ask him for favors. There are twin beds in the bedroom of my apartment on the fourth floor. On impulse I asked Craig if he’d like to share the place with me till something opened up.

  “I’d be eternally grateful,” he said.

  While Craig was signing in so that he’d get any messages or phone calls that might come for him, Nevers slid a reservation card across the desk to me.

  “One for you,” he said.

  The reservation read: “Miss Veronica Trask and secretary; Suite 18B, March 15.”

  “Red carpet,” Nevers said.

  Veronica Trask! She’d been the star of the first motion picture I’d ever seen—when I was six years old. Veronica Trask! One of the great ones in the days when Hollywood was Hollywood. Great in the days of the silents, greater at the advent of the talkies. Veronica Trask, who had held her own with Garbo, and Shearer, and the young Crawford; who had played with John Gilbert, and Barrymore, and Leslie Howard and the other great male stars of her day. I had been madly, madly in love with her at the age of ten. I had hated Lewis Stone who had played the suave villain who wanted to marry her in my first movie.

  “I thought she was dead,” I said. “I haven’t heard of her for years.”

  “She retired about twenty years ago. According to the secretary who made the reservation, this is her first time out of seclusion since 1947.”

  “She’ll be mobbed by fans who still love her,” I said. “Including me! I suppose she’ll want to keep her presence here quiet.”

  “On the contrary,” Nevers said. “I was told we could notify the press.”

  “Veronica Trask!” I said, sounding very juvenile.

  “What about her?” Craig asked, at my elbow.

  “She arrives tomorrow,” I said.

  “Coming here?” he sounded interested. I guessed everybody in New York over thirty would be interested. “A very great lady,” Craig said.

  “You know her?”

  “No,” he said, “but I’ve always wished I did. We’ve forgotten about her kind of glamor in this a-go-go age.”

  Five

  I GAVE CRAIG AN extra key to my rooms on the fourth floor. He had no luggage, but he announced he’d go back to his apartment for clothes after I’d gotten his message to Doris Standing. The back issues of The Times and the Examiner had been delivered to my quarters, and I left Craig there, going through them, chewing on his pipe.

  It was twenty minutes past seven when I arrived in Chambrun’s office. I knew that his dinner would be served to him in ten minutes and that nothing short of an earthquake would be allowed to interfere with his relaxed enjoyment of it.

  Chambrun wasn’t alone. Miss Ruysdale was with him, and a startlingly large Negro who had to be T.J. Madison. The ex-fullback was undeniably eye-catching. I’d guess he was about six feet four, with broad, broad shoulders tapering down to a ballet-dancer’s waist. He was quietly dressed in a charcoal-gray suit, white shirt, and a plain navy-blue tie. One look at him close up and you knew why some linebackers in the pro football league had retired early. They used to say of him that no one man could bring him down when he was carrying the football. They talked of him still as the greatest ever, of his extraordinary balance, speed, and power.

  Chambrun introduced us, and he spoke my name in a low pleasant voice without any trace of the South in it. I remembered he’d graduated from one of our top Eastern colleges.

  “Mr. Madison has a problem,” Chambrun said. “Lieutenant Hardy and Naylor haven’t brought any formal charge against Miss Standing, but they’ve warned us that if she tries to leave her suite, one will be placed. A plainclothes cop outside her door has a warrant for her arrest, charging her with murder which he’ll serve if she steps out into the hall.”

  “They have no right to hold her without charging her,” Madison said, “but in effect they are holding her.”

  “She’s certainly better off where she is than locked up in a cell downtown,” I said.

  “I’m not sure,” Madison said. “I’m not sure we aren’t playing their game by letting her be a voluntary prisoner. They haven’t got a thing on her except th
at she was in the next room when Slade was shot.”

  “She says she was in the next room,” I said.

  Madison’s dark-brown eyes studied me. “You’ve made up your mind about her, Mr. Haskell?”

  “Just trying to think the way Hardy thinks,” I said. “Has the fog lifted any?”

  “Fog?”

  “The blackout. The ‘amnesia bit,’ ” I said.

  “Nothing,” Chambrun said. “Ruysdale and I have been through the papers. We draw a blank on February twenty-fifth, or any other day. Neither Doris nor any of her friends made the papers in that three-week span.”

  I explained that I hadn’t had a chance to go through the papers myself, which brought me to a brief account of my meeting with Gary Craig. Craig’s name didn’t seem to ring any bell with Madison or Chambrun. Miss Ruysdale had read three of his novels.

  “He’s a man with hope, competing with our successful writers who write hopelessly about their unhappy childhoods and their adolescent failures,” Miss Ruysdale said. “He’s one of the few adult novelists of our time. It seems nobody wants to be adult today, which is why he is determinedly overlooked.”

  “Is there any reason I can’t get his message to Doris Standing?” I asked.

  “Technically, no,” Madison said. “But they’re playing this so high-handedly that they may or may not let you in to see her.”

  “She has to eat,” Chambrun said, glancing at his wrist watch. His own dinner was due. “Pick up a menu on your way in. We provide de-luxe service, even to people under house arrest.”

  I took Chambrun’s cue and did it up in spades. I had a shaker of martinis made up at the service bar and carried it, with two glasses and a dinner menu to the door of 9F. One of Hardy’s men was sitting outside reading an evening paper. He knew me from a year ago.

  “Might as well make the lady comfortable while we can,” I said.

  The cop shrugged. “Normal hotel service is permitted,” he said.

  “She can see friends?”

  “Not without Hardy’s okay,” the cop said.

  “Then she is under arrest?”

  The cop grinned at me. “You know better than to get nosy, Mr. Haskell. Take the lady her drink. I’ll bet she can use it.” He unlocked the door for me.

  I went into the sitting room. Doris was standing by the center table, her eyes blazing with anger. “Am I not even allowed the courtesy of a knock or a bell ring?” she demanded.

  She was wearing a dark-green wool street dress. She’d evidently prepared herself to be whisked away on Hardy’s whim.

  “Watchdog opened the door,” I said. “I didn’t want to discuss protocol with him in case he changed his mind about letting me in. I hope martinis are your dish.”

  She relaxed a little and I saw the dark shadows of exhaustion under her eyes.

  “I’m really very grateful,” she said.

  I put down the tray, poured her a drink, and handed her the glass.

  “Please join me,” she said.

  I poured one for myself.

  “I really couldn’t eat any dinner,” she said, nodding toward the large menu.

  “Camouflage,” I said. “I had to have a reason for coming in.” I offered her a cigarette and she let me light it for her.

  “I know Chambrun’s trying to make things as easy for me as he can,” she said. “You know that I’m a prisoner, though I haven’t been arrested?”

  “Yes. That’s why the drink and the menu. You’re not denied hotel service. But my real reason for being here is that I have a message for you. Gary Craig is in my quarters on the fourth floor. He wants you to know that he’s here and ready to do anything on earth he can to help you.”

  I thought she was going to drop the martini glass. Then she reached out with her free hand to steady herself on the table.

  “Is the story out—in the papers and on radio and television?” she asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Then how did he know?”

  “He’s been waiting here every day for you to show up,” I said. “Ever since you called him two weeks ago.”

  She stared at me as though I’d said something in Arabic. “I called him?” she asked. It was almost a whisper.

  “The twenty-eighth of February,” I said.

  She turned away from me and took an unsteady step toward a chair. She sat down. I could see her shoulders trembling. If it was an act, it was superb.

  “You don’t remember calling him?” I asked.

  She shook her bright-red head without speaking.

  “You asked him to be here the next day—March first—for breakfast. You told him you were in trouble.”

  “Oh, God!” she said, softly.

  “You honestly don’t remember?”

  She turned, abruptly, her gray-green eyes bright with tears that wouldn’t flow. “Can you remotely imagine what it’s like not to remember, Haskell?”

  It was hard to imagine.

  “What do you want me to tell Craig?” I asked her.

  She drew a deep, shuddering breath. “Does he know that—that I can’t remember the last three weeks?”

  “He knows.”

  “Then tell him that I don’t remember calling him,” she said. “That I don’t remember what the trouble was I said I was in then. That he can’t help me now and that all I want him to do is go away and forget about me.”

  “Unless I’m very much mistaken, he won’t,” I said.

  “He must!”

  “It’s none of my business, but why?” I asked. “He’s your friend—or isn’t he?”

  “He—must—not—involve—himself—in—this!” she said, hammering out each word with a beat of her fist on the arm of the chair. “Tell him, Haskell! Tell him to go!”

  “He won’t,” I said. I took a sip of my martini and waited.

  “What has he told you about me?” she asked.

  “That he intends to marry you,” I said, making it sound casual.

  She looked at me, and despite the lacquer of sophistication—the Marinelli dress, the skillful coiffeur, the eye makeup, the bright-scarlet mouth, the platinum and diamond clip at the V-line of her dress that probably cost more than my annual salary—she was a wistful little child for a moment. Then her face hardened.

  “Tell him for me that he’s an idiot,” she said.

  “He mentioned the need to amputate you from your friends,” I said. “By the way, has anyone told you that they, too, are rallying round?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Table for five in the Blue Lagoon tonight at eleven—in the name of Teague,” I said.

  “But if, as you say, the story isn’t out, it must be a coincidence!” she said, and now she looked frightened.

  “I said the story wasn’t in the papers or on the radio,” I said. “I didn’t say it hadn’t leaked. If you didn’t kill Jeremy Slade, Doris, then the person who did is walking around loose and could easily have passed the word to Teague in California. Teague had plenty of time to make a jet flight that will get him here to the hotel by eleven.”

  “Is there a little more in that shaker?” she asked, holding out her empty martini glass.

  I filled it for her. Two little feverish spots had appeared beside her high cheekbones. I had the sudden feeling that she was trying to see some way out of a trap. You understand, I wasn’t investigating this case, but while she seemed willing to talk a little I thought I should encourage it.

  “I’m sure Craig will do anything you ask him—except desert you,” I said, when she didn’t speak.

  She stared at me over the rim of her glass, sipping at her drink.

  “You seem like a nice guy,” she said, finally. “You want to help.”

  “Without breaking too many laws,” I said, hoping a mild crack would loosen her up a litüe.

  “Then use your energies to help someone decent,” she said.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning Gary. Get him out of here—away—anywhere! And
then stay out of it yourself. You’re the kind who has a nice girl somewhere. Go to her and thank God she isn’t someone like me.”

  “Melodrama,” I said.

  “I wish it was. Do you know anything about amnesia, Haskell?”

  “Mostly what I’ve read in suspense novels,” I said. “It’s usually a plot convenience for the author. It’s a nice way to hide a secret from a reader.”

  “That’s exactly what it is,” she said with a touch of impatience, “a way to hide a secret. A mechanism of the mind that helps you to forget something intolerable. That’s what’s happened to me, a reasonably intelligent girl. There’s something I can’t bear to remember.”

  “And you really don’t know what it is?”

  “I’ve been running for a long time,” she said. “But there was no place to run, so finally the mental machinery has taken over.”

  “I still say melodrama.”

  She got up from her chair and began to walk restlessly around the room, twisting from side to side as if something hurt her. I suddenly felt like an intruder, an involuntary Peeping Tom. But before I could tell her to-hell-with-it as far as I was concerned, it began to spill out of her.

  “Some people are unwillingly involved in situations that are completely unfamiliar to most other people. My situation involves money, Haskell. I was an only child, and I grew up in a world you probably can’t imagine. My grandparents were native Californians. My grandfather ran a modest truck farm not far from where Hollywood is today. I don’t suppose at the end of a year he had a thousand dollars’ profit to show for his work. But somehow he managed to save something, and just before World War I he put what he had saved into something called ‘moving pictures.’ Before you could say Mary Pickford he was suddenly a moderately rich man. He bought some property along the way, and when Hollywood began to grow into a city he owned a handsome piece of it. He was making money hand over fist, but until the day he died he didn’t believe the movies would ‘last.’ Property—land—was the only thing he really believed in. He sent my father looking for interesting buys, and Dad wound up purchasing a chunk of Texas. There turned out to be so much oil on the Texas property that I guess by the time I was born in 1940, Dad couldn’t even guess how rich he was. Just for fun there was the house in Beverly Hills, and a model ranch in Texas, and a kind of hunting lodge in the Adirondacks, and a beautiful house outside Paris that was eventually bombed into rubble during the war, and yachts, and planes, and anything you woke up in the morning with a whim to buy.