Murder in Luxury Page 6

  "If Jerry Dodd's gotten around to telling him. Jerry knows. The cops know. I guess they figured he'd be back when the lady wakes up. You see, he claims to be an old family friend. Heard the news about the murder on Tenth Street; couldn't reach her. Wanted to be helpful. Finally he found out she was here through Gardner Fails, and took the first plane."

  "From where?"

  "Tucson. The lady's old man had a spread of some sort down there, that was in the paper. She grew up in Tucson. This Spector guy is, or was, part of that setup. 'You tell Mrs. Summers,' he said to Atterbury, 'the minute she wakes up, that I'm here, ready to help any way I can.'" Mike grinned. "I've got to say I'd rather have that guy on my team than playing against me."

  "Tough?"

  "Strong and silent. I've got to add, Mark, I don't think the lady will look at you twice with Gary Cooper onstage."

  I was too tired just then to care whether Gary Cooper got the girl or not. Later on it mattered.

  It seemed to me my head had only just touched the pillow when my bedside phone rang. I'd told them on the switchboard to give me an extra hour. A bleary-eyed look at my clock told me someone had goofed. I'd been called an hour earlier than usual. It was only seven-thirty. I picked up the phone—because I knew it would just keep on ringing till I answered—ready to have someone's scalp.

  "Cool it, Mark," Ora Veach said. She's the chief operator on the board. "I am sorry to do this to you, but the boss wants you in his office—'at your earliest convenience' I think the phrase was."

  '"Mine not to reason why, mine but to do or die...'"

  "I'm of the hot shower school as opposed to the cold for waking up," Miss Veach told me.

  Somehow I managed to shower and shave and get into some clothes, feeling thick fingered, in about twenty minutes. Chambrun's office is only a few yards down the hall. Miss Ruysdale is always in the outer office whenever the boss is working, no matter what time of day or night, but not this morning. Then I remembered she was up in 1216 with Valerie. I crossed the room and opened the door to the inner sanctum.

  Chambrun was sitting at his desk, and across from him, long legs crossed, cowboy boots shining in the morning sunlight, was obviously Mike Maggio's Gary Cooper.

  "This is Mr. Spector, Mark," Chambrun said. "We've just ordered some breakfast and I took the liberty of counting you in."

  Spector stood up, towering over me, and damned near crushed my right hand with his.

  "Pleasure," he said.

  He wore his hat in the house, I saw, pushed back a little to reveal sandy-red hair. With my hand hurting, I thought there was something almost sadistic about his white, even-toothed smile.

  "Mr. Spector manages the McCandless ranch in Tucson," Chambrun said. "I thought talking with him might save you a long trip."

  "Valerie owns a ranch somewhere?" I asked.

  "No, sir, she don't," Spector said in a Texas drawl. "OP Jeb McCandless's estate owns it. I ran it for Jeb before he died, and the lawyers have kep' me on." He gave me what I considered was a patronizing smile. "What would a pretty gal like Val do with a cattle spread?"

  "She could raise her own beef?" I said.

  "She jes' collects the profits," Spector said.

  "Pve tried to bring Mr. Spector up-to-date," Chambrun said. "I've told him the line the police are following, and that we are working on other angles."

  "Get my hands on that cop," Spector said, "and I'll break his damn neck. Val killin' a couple o' creeps? How crazy can you get?"

  "Just that crazy, according to Lieutenant Kee-gan," Chambrun said.

  "Damn fool," Spector said.

  "To think of Mrs. Summers as a killer? Perhaps," Chambrun said. "But one thing is certain. If she isn't, then someone out of her past somewhere is out to destroy her. You said you were prepared to do anything you could to help her. Tell us what you can about the Tucson aspects of her life. She grew up there? Lived there with her father till he died? Or was it just till she got married?"

  I learned later that it wasn't Spector who had hunted Chambrun down. When Jerry Dodd let Chambrun know that the king of the cowboys was at the Plaza it was the Man who got to him. "Time," Chambrun said later, "was vital. There was a killer loose who might strike again."

  "People say I don't look it," Spector said, after a moment of silence, "but I am forty-five years old." He waited for us to comment on the miracle of his youthful looks, and when we didn't he, so help me, proceeded to roll a cigarette for himself. Cowboy right out of a movie, I thought. "I went to work on the McCandless spread when I was eighteen," he said, squinting at us through the smoke from his cigarette, which he got going by snapping an old-fashioned kitchen match into flame with his thumbnail. "That was twenty-seven years ago, and Val was jes' a baby, jes' three years oP the first time I saw her. All golden an' shinin', even then. OP Jeb McCandless was kind o' mixed up about the kid, I guess. She was his daughter an' he was supposed to love her. But she'd stole his precious Georgie from him by bein' born. His wife's name had been Georgiana, but they called her Georgie. But the oP man got to love Val as she grew up. Sometimes toward the end I thought there was somethin' almost—almost indecent about it. That's not the word I want..."

  "Incestuous?" Chambrun suggested.

  "Yeah... father dreamin' the wrong dreams about his daughter. You could see it in his eyes when he was lookin' at her without her knowiri'. Not thinkin' about her like a daughter at all."

  "I'm sure he hasn't come back to haunt her," Chambrun said. He sounded impatient. He's not a patient man before breakfast. "There were, of course, men in Valerie's life."

  Spector flicked the ash from his homemade cigarette. He was smiling at the past somewhere. "Can you imagine what she was like ten, twelve years ago?

  Eighteen, twenty? I want to tell you, Chambrun, they buzzed around her like bees after the queen. It wasn't because she was goin' to be one of the richest girls in the world. She was young, and alive, and beautiful, and—and hot stuff!"

  "Are you saying she was promiscuous?" Chambrun asked, looking down at his well-manicured fingers.

  "Hell, no," Spector said. "She was real choosy, but she had plenty to choose from. Older men, young men, teenaged boys. You could almost hear 'em sweatin'." He laughed. "You're gonna ask me so I'll tell you. I was one of 'em. I hankered after her till it hurt, way down inside. Still do, I guess."

  "But you never got lucky?"

  Pale blue eyes narrowed. "I should tell you that's none of your business, Mr. Chambrun. But in the circumstances—so you don't keep askin' yourself over and over—there was a moment in time when I thought I had it made. I didn't want the ranch, or ol' Jeb's money. I jes' wanted Val. It was the night before she went off East to college. I invited her to picnic up at the lake. It's a beautiful spot, high up, on the ranch. There was a moon, a soft, warm night. I told her how I felt, what I wanted. For a moment or two she let me touch her. We jes' about made that connection that sets off the rocket. You know what I mean? An' then she turned off." Spector drew a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. "The moment never came again. She went off to college, an' there she found someone else."

  "Richard Summers, the man she married?" Chambrun said.

  "There was someone else the first year," Spector said. "A professor fellow; taught literature of some-thin'. Name of Newton, I think. I never saw him, but oF Jeb told me about it. I think he knew what I was dreamin' and he wanted me to be let down easy. I got the message, and when Val came home that summer we never got back to where we left off. Then, the next year there was Dick Summers and Val was off to what she really wanted."

  "You got to know Summers?"

  "Oh, sure," Spector said. "I suppose Val could have run off somewhere with Dick Summers, married him, and told her oV man about it later. She didn't. She's a square shooter. She brought him out to Tucson in the spring vacation. OP Jeb had one bee that was always buzzin' in his bonnet. Somebody was goin' to sweep his little girl off her feet for her money and not because of the person she was." H
e smiled at the past again. "Dick Summers was a good kid. I shouldn't call him a kid, I guess. He'd been through two years in Vietnam, which was a quick way to grow up. He was twenty-five that spring, be damn near thirty when he finished his education and got out of law school. That's startin' a career later than most, but it didn't bother Dick. That's what he wanted to do, that's what he was goin' to do. He didn't want help. He had veteran's benefits, and Val could get a job!" Spector laughed. "Ol' Jeb damn near split a seam when he heard that, but he approved. He'd persuaded Val to use her mother's name—Hanson—when she went to Vassar, so people wouldn't be suckin' around her for her money. Dick Summers was too good to be true. In June, when college was over, Dick came out to Tucson and he and Val were married. Simple ceremony, justice of the peace, no family, no relatives or friends, no announcement to the papers. Jes' two witnesses; me and Mrs. Renfrew who kept house for the ol' man. I kissed the bride, and I never saw Val again until she came back to Tucson for the ol' man's funeral. Dick didn't come with her then. He was tryin' a case in court, she told me. But I could see the marriage had worked out jes' fine. When we heard last year that Dick had died in a fire it was hard to believe. I tried to get in touch with Val, but she'd left Jeddo, the town in Ohio where they lived. Gardner Fails, the oP man's lawyer knew where she'd gone, of course, but he'd promised her to keep it under his hat. Then yesterday I heard on TV what had happened in her apartment on Tenth Street. I tried to reach Fails, couldn't get him, and hopped the first plane I could get. When I hit the airport around two a.m. I called Fails again, and he tol' me there was a second murder and that Val was stayin' here at the Beaumont. So I came here."

  Chambrun looked up, his eyes hooded. "You'd had no contact with Mrs. Summers for five years, except for the funeral of her father, yet when you heard what had happened you were out of the starting gate like Man o'War."

  Spector recrossed his long legs. "The ol' man was my friend, my good friend. He left things so that I'm fixed good for keeps. His kid was in trouble!"

  "And you still have a yen for her," Chambrun said.

  Spector's cold, white smile widened. "I'd be lyin' if I said I didn't. I've never got over that gal, but I don't expect anythin' except to be of use to her. That crazy

  cop gets tough with her and I'll pull out his arm by the roots and beat him to death with it."

  "Pretty picture," Chambrun said. He kept glancing at the far door and I knew he was thinking about breakfast. "You skipped pretty quickly over the professor at Vassar whose name, you say, was Newton."

  "I never saw him," Spector said. "Val talked about him, that summer after her first year at college. I could tell she thought she was in love with him. Older man, opened up the windows to new things in her life: literature, art, music—I don't kndw. Stuff I didn't glom onto." Spector frowned. "Something bad happened to him, I think."

  Chambrun seemed to perk up. "Bad?"

  "I don't know what it was," Spector said. "That next winter, when Val was back at Vassar, the ol' man mentioned that something bad happened to 'that professor friend of Val's.' 'We're a hell of a lot safer out here than we'd be in New York, with all their cops,' he said. That professor friend of Val's got mugged. Crippled for life, according to the radio.' That's all. I never heard anymore about it. It was jes' a news item. Val had already found Dick Summers."

  Chambrun sat forward, suddenly intent. "Derek Newton? Was that his name, Derek Newton?"

  "Dirk, or Derek—somethin' like that," Spector said.

  Chambrun leaned back. "The people who touch Mrs. Summers' life really are unlucky," he said. He glanced at me. Derek Newton was someone we knew here at the Beaumont. He was—or had been—an attractive young man, scholar, teacher, who wrote—and still does—brilliant and witty book reviews for the

  Sunday book sections and the more sophisticated literary-type magazines. He used to be a regular in the Trapeze Bar, stopping by two or three nights a week. He'd sit at a corner table and in ten minutes there'd be eight or ten people gathered around. Derek had revived the art of conversation. Three years ago the sky fell in on him. He'd been visiting some friends down in the Village. He was out on the street looking for a cab a little after midnight. He was brutally mugged. It was so senselessly brutal the cops thought it might be some personal grudge, even though a few bucks were stolen. Derek couldn't help them. He had no enemies, he told them. He had trouble enough reorganizing his own life. His spine had been injured and he was paralyzed from the waist down, confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He was blinded in one eye, the side of his face crushed by that famous "blunt instrument." No more public appearances. No more rap sessions in the Trapeze Bar. He didn't want to see old friends, but he'd talk on the phone. I called him every few weeks, just to say hello. It didn't stop his reviewing and writing for the papers and magazines, but a charming and attractive young man simply vanished from public view. I remembered now that he'd delivered a series of lectures at women's colleges—Vassar, Barnard. So our Valerie, in her freshman year at Vassar, had taken a header for Derek. He'd been a real charmer back then.

  Chambrun was right. It wasn't lucky to have been associated with Valerie McCandless. First her mother, then a man she'd had a crush on, then her husband, then her closest woman friend, and then the murder of two punks she may or may not have known. Varying

  degrees of violence in all the cases; no wonder she felt hounded by misfortune.

  The special chef who handles Chambrun's breakfast appeared at that moment with a wagonload of goodies. I wasn't particularly interested in watching our cowboy friend eat what he'd ordered—juice, a sirloin steak, hashed brown potatoes, and a mound of toast. The prospect was somehow oppressive, and I knew what my cue was. Derek Newton might have something important to add to the saga of Valerie McCandless Summers.

  FIVE

  It is painful to invade the privacy of someone like Derek Newton. He was a man who loved people, had used his physical as well as his intellectual charms to attract them, and who now felt repulsive; felt that people only presented themselves because they felt sorry for him. He may have had close friends who'd gotten around that obstacle, but I wasn't one of them. The one contact with the outside world in which none of his troubles showed was in his writing. It still had all the wit and probing cleverness it had always had.

  Derek wasn't eager to see me until I told him why I needed to talk. "Dear God, not another one!" he said when I called him. He hadn't heard the news about Willie Bloomfield. "I don't know how I can be useful. Valerie was a—a moment, long ago. But I know so little."

  It wasn't quite ten in the morning when I reached his place. Valerie would be asleep for at least another two hours according to Doc Partridge.

  Derek lives in a modern apartment building with elevator service. He has to because of his wheelchair. It is an attractive, lived-in looking place; books, paintings, an elaborate hi-fi set, and a view of the East River. He was ready when I arrived, having left his door unlocked for me. He just called out for me to come in when I knocked. I suspected he wanted to be set somewhere, not wheeling awkwardly around. He was actually sitting behind a flat-topped desk, his useless legs hidden. He wore large shell-rimmed black glasses. His left eye was, I gathered, a mangled mess. No cosmetic repair had been possible. Living with it had taught him little tricks. He'd learned how to sit so that you saw only the good side of his face. His smile was still as warm and friendly as it had been in the old days.

  'This is a shocking business, Mark," he said. 'There's coffee in that percolator on the sideboard if you'd care for some." He'd already poured a mug for himself. "How is Valerie bearing up?"

  "She took the first one very well," I said, getting myself coffee. He gestured to a comfortable armchair across the desk from him. He'd placed it so that I was only looking at his good side. 'The second one last night did her in. The doctor's sedated her and she's finally getting some sleep. Cops have been rough." I sat down.

  "It just doesn't make any sense," Derek said.
"Two total strangers!"

  "The cops aren't sure of that. That's why I'm here, Derek. We need to find out everything we can about her past, her early beginnings—friends who might hold some kind of grudge against her. Because unless she's lying through her teeth someone is trying to punish her for something."

  "Why did you think of me?" Derek asked.

  I told him about our Tucson cowboy. "He seems to think you and Val had something going for a while. Even if you didn't, you knew her 'when,' as the saying goes."

  He sat very still for a moment, his face turned away to look out the window at the river. "There was a time," he said finally, "when I had them lying at my feet like new-mown hay. Girls. They tend to develop crushes on the teacher. I was a guest lecturer at Vas-sar when I first met Val. There were a couple of dozen of them who had their eye on me. I was an attractive 'older man.' Would you believe twenty-six?" He turned his face and smiled at me. "I could have had my pick. I could have, and I did."

  "Valerie?"

  "No. No, not Valerie. She was a beautiful, young, fresh, lovely, delightful girl, and she offered it all to me, and I said a polite, if regretful, no thank you. I had my eyes—both of them in those days—focused somewhere else."

  I suggested I found that hard to believe.

  "Chemistry," he said. "There's no explaining chemistry, is there? This other one had it all for me. The morality rules in a girls 5 college today date back to 1910, but the behavior patterns are strictly the 1970s. A teacher who had an affair with a student would be tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail in 1910. Today, unless you are blatantly indiscreet, nobody pays much attention. Poor Val— poor me. She wanted something to happen with me so much, but I wanted something else. The gal I wanted was all involved with someone else. Didn't have the time of day for me. Maybe that's what attracted me. Hard to get."

  "But Valerie wouldn't have been?"

  "Not for me she wouldn't. She wasn't just a little tramp, you understand. She was single-minded. What made it tough for her was that the girl I was interested in was her close friend."