Gilded Nightmare Read online

  “How perfectly ridiculous,” Charmian said. “May I look at it?”

  Chambrun leaned forward, holding the note so she could see it, but not releasing his hold on it.

  “Do you recognize the handwriting, Baroness?”

  “It’s so precise, so careful, one guesses it’s faked,” Charmian said.

  “My thought,” Chambrun said. “Well, the day clerk will remember who handed it in.” He put the note and envelope back on the desk in front of him. “In passing, I assume that in view of what’s happened you won’t proceed with plans for this party.”

  “Of course I will,” Charmian said. “I won’t be frightened out of doing something I want very much to do. I hope Sam hasn’t taken this seriously.”

  “He’s supposed to look at your mangled dog and your mangled friend and take this as a joke?” Chambrun asked.

  “It’s not a joke,” she said. “It’s a vicious, silly attempt to deny me a special pleasure. I am giving this party for Sam Culver. I owe him a party. He didn’t know it at the time, but Sam was responsible for my coming up with everything on earth I’ve ever wanted.”

  “Conrad Zetterstrom?” Chambrun asked, a deadly quiet to his voice.

  “What Conrad had to offer,” Charmian said. “I propose to express my gratitude to Sam, my childhood friend, by throwing the biggest bash that’s ever been given anywhere for him.”

  “Let’s face reality, Baroness. There’s been very little time for word to get around about this—this bash. Mark hasn’t released anything to the press, have you, Mark?”

  I shook my head. “Amato’s the only person I’ve mentioned it to.”

  “And Shelda?” Chambrun asked.

  “And Shelda.” I thought I detected a faint gleam of amusement in his narrowed eyes.

  “My point is, Baroness, that only your own little army of people know about it, plus three members of my staff who wouldn’t dream of mentioning it without my permission. So this warning to Sam—where could it have come from except the nineteenth floor?”

  Charmian sat very still and straight in the high-backed chair, her bright blue eyes fixed steadily on Chambrun.

  “Let us ask some questions of ourselves, Baroness,” Chambrun said. “Does any one of the people in your entourage have a reason for wishing you not to give this party?”

  “Why on earth should any one?”

  “No reason whatever,” Helwig said, quietly.

  “If Sam Culver refused your invitation, would you still go ahead with the party or would it become pointless?”

  “It’s to be for Sam!”

  “Quite so. If, then, Sam refused to come, you’d probably give it up.”

  “I might have—before I saw that note. Now I’ll give it, come hell or high water! I will not be pushed around, Mr. Chambrun.”

  “But the note, designed to have frightened Sam into refusing to come to the party, would seem like a reasonable way to get you to give it up.”

  “But why?”

  Chambrun shrugged. “Perhaps nothing very sinister, Baroness. Your man Helwig there has told us he feels it is dangerous for you to be off the Island. Your late husband had many enemies, and now that he’s dead you may become a target for these people. The killing of your dog has convinced Helwig you’re in danger, and he thinks you should at once go back to the safety of your island. He knows you.” Chambrun’s mouth moved in a slow smile. “He knows you are stubborn, determined to have your own way. You’ve just made it quite clear. Now that you’ve seen the note you’ll give the party ‘come hell or high water.’ That’s stubbornness, Baroness. Helwig knows it’s a quality of yours. Perhaps he thought if he could frighten Sam into refusing the party invitation—a party which will take several days, perhaps a week, to prepare—you could be persuaded to leave here now, at once.” He glanced at the stony-faced Helwig.

  “You’re suggesting I have to be managed, like a bad child?”

  “I’m suggesting that you’re not a coward, Baroness. When you’re threatened, crossed, you hold your ground. That’s not always wisdom, but it takes courage. Helwig has been described to me as a devious man. Could he have written the note?”

  “Preposterous,” she said. “Ask him.”

  “Masters? Can he have some urgent reason to want to get back to the Island?”

  “What possible reason?”

  “He’s a killer, Baroness, a gun. It’s silly for me to ask you how many times he used that gun, or other weapons, in your husband’s service. You wouldn’t tell me. But he too becomes a target. New York may be a very dangerous place for him to be.”

  “Masters goes where he’s paid to go, and he’s quite competent to take care of himself.” Her eyes brightened. “He enjoys danger. He’s bored when it’s not just around the corner.”

  “Malinkov? The wide world is dangerous for him too, according to Helwig.”

  “Poor Malinkov,” she said. “What he fears most is a sudden sharp pain in his chest, an unexpected thumping of his heart against his ribs, a cramp in his stomach—brought on, I should explain, by eating too much caviar with chopped onion. He’s a quivering hypochondriac. He’s terrified of death—in bed, in his dreams, at the breakfast table, in the bathroom. Study him. He seems to be concerned with time, constantly consulting his watch as if he were afraid of being late for an appointment. He’s actually counting his pulse beats.”

  “The Island spells safety to him, then,” Chambrun said. “He could have written the note in the hope you’d give up the party and go back there.”

  “Look at his fingers,” Charmian said. “Arthritic. His writing is a hen-track scrawl. He couldn’t produce that precise script if his life depended on it. And to save you time, Clara Brunner is German. She knows very little English. The note is an impossibility for her.”

  “Peter Wynn?”

  “The one person who had no intention of returning to the Island. He and Heidi were to have been married in a few days—poor kid. No, Mr. Chambrun, whoever wrote that note, it wasn’t one of my people. I’d stake my life on it.”

  “That’s just what you may be doing,” Chambrun said.

  Charmian had moved a little memo pad around in front of her on Chambrun’s desk. She’d taken a gold pen from her handbag and was scrawling something on the pad with a child’s frowning concentration.

  “That precise handwriting looks so easy to imitate,” she said. “But it isn’t.” She tore the sheet off the pad, crumpled it into a little ball, and rolled it away along the polished top of the desk. “Well, Mr. Chambrun, do I spend the night here in your office?”

  “You stay till Molloy’s done upstairs,” Hardy said. …

  It took Sergeant Molloy and the Homicide experts, assisted by Jerry Dodd, about two hours to go over the Zetterstrom rooms from top to bottom, picking up bags of dust in their little vacuum cleaners, examining every unexplained stain through their magnifying instruments, examining every piece of clothing in the closets and bureau drawers.

  At the end of that time Molloy reported back in Chambrun’s office that there wasn’t the slightest sign of anything to indicate that Heidi Brunner had been killed in any one of the rooms and carried away from there.

  Blood types had checked out at the police lab. The stains in the service area and elevator matched in type the dead girl’s blood. It was a pretty solid guess at that point that Heidi had been killed in the service area or the elevator, taken down to the cellar level in the car, and carried out through the back alleys to the place where she’d been found.

  “Clear trail all the way,” Molloy said. “She bled like a stuck pig. She was gotten out into that service area—sweet-talked or at the point of a gun—clobbered, and cut up.”

  “If she bled so much,” Hardy said, “seems impossible some of it didn’t get on the killer.”

  “Nothing on any clothes we found. Masters’ gun is clean, by the way. Not a trace of anything on the butt to indicate it was used on the dog or the girl.”

  “He ha
d plenty of time to clean it up,” Hardy said.

  “Remarkable if there wasn’t some small trace left, no matter how thorough he was,” Molloy said. “But Dodd’s come up with something interesting.” He looked at Jerry.

  “May be nothing,” Jerry said. “You remember that pale-blue Carnaby Street outfit Peter Wynn was wearing when the Zetterstrom party arrived at the hotel? Well, it’s missing. Nowhere in the apartment. He’s wearing an ordinary business suit now, you know. There are three or four other mod outfits in his closet, but not the pale-blue one.”

  “What does he say about it?” Hardy asked.

  “Doesn’t know why it isn’t there,” Jerry said. “He says he changed out of it in the late afternoon or early evening, after the dog had been found. You remember, he told us he was free to go out then? I gather the Amazon acts as a sort of house-mother for all of them. Wynn says she may have sent the clothes to the cleaner.”

  “Easy to check,” Chambrun said, from the depths of his desk chair.

  “Not so easy,” Jerry said. “Cleaning service closes at seven o’clock. Our man doesn’t have a home phone. I went through the tailor shop downstairs. No sign of that blue frock coat. It could have come down in time to go out to the cleaning people before they shut up shop. Be morning before we can know for sure.”

  “So ask Madame Brunner,” Chambrun said.

  Charmian Zetterstrom and her people were all in the outer office waiting for permission to reoccupy their rooms. Hardy went to the door and asked Madame Brunner to come in. The tall, erect, hard-faced woman came in. Helwig was at her heels.

  “Just Madame Brunner,” Hardy said.

  “You’ll need me,” Helwig said. “Clara can’t answer your questions.”

  “I have no difficulty with German,” Chambrun said.

  “It isn’t that,” Helwig said. “She can’t speak. I can manage a hand language with her.”

  “She’s a mute?” Hardy asked.

  “She can’t speak,” Helwig said, his face stony.

  “Deaf, too?”

  “No.”

  “They go together,” Hardy said.

  The Amazon stood looking straight ahead at the far wall during this exchange. If she heard, there was no sign of it.

  “During World War II Clara Brunner was a nurse in the prison complex commanded by General Zetterstrom,” Helwig said. “She was a beautiful girl. It was easy for her to make friends with the prisoners. They confided in her, and she carried bits of information back to the General. One day she reported on a planned escape. The prisoners were caught in the act and several of them executed. A couple of nights later when Clara was on duty the prisoners, who’d learned that she was the cause of their failure, seized her, and—and her tongue was cut out.”

  “My God!” Hardy whispered.

  I saw Molloy take a handkerchief out of his pocket and wipe the sudden beads of sweat from his forehead.

  “General Zetterstrom did what he could for her,” Helwig said. “He took her into his household and eventually to the Island.”

  “What happened to the men who mutilated her?” Chambrun asked in a flat, dead-sounding voice.

  “Gas chambers,” Helwig said. The tip of his tongue touched his lips. “After being treated to the same thing that Clara had suffered. An eye for an eye—the General’s code.”

  I remembered those words spoken by Charmian. I felt cold sweat trickling down my back. The Amazon still stared at the far wall, expressionless.

  “What is it you want to ask her?” Helwig said.

  Hardy cleared his throat, as though it was difficult to speak. “A suit of Peter Wynn’s clothes is missing,” he said. His voice was husky. “We wondered if Madame Brunner had sent them to the cleaners.”

  Helwig glanced at the Amazon. She shook her head slowly from side to side.

  “It consisted of red trousers and a pale-blue frock coat,” Jerry Dodd said. “He changed out of them late in the day. Did Madame Brunner see them?”

  Again the slow negative headshake.

  “She has no idea where they could be? They’re not in your rooms anywhere.”

  The woman’s hands moved in some sort of quick sign language.

  “Have you asked Peter?” Helwig translated.

  “Of course,” Jerry said. “He changed out of them late in the day. Left them on a chair in his room, he says, because they were going to need pressing. He thought Mrs. Brunner might have sent them out for him.”

  “She didn’t,” Helwig said. “Why are you concerned about them?”

  Jerry’s shrewd eyes were fixed on the Amazon. “We think they may have been stained with Heidi Brunner’s blood.”

  The Amazon might not have heard for all the reaction she showed.

  “You suspect Peter?” Helwig asked.

  “Right now we’re just interested in finding those clothes,” Jerry said. “Thanks for your help.”

  “Can we go back to our rooms now?” Helwig asked.

  Jerry glanced at Hardy. The Lieutenant shrugged. “Why not?” he said. “I’m putting a guard outside your doors, Mr. Helwig. None of you is to leave the hotel without my permission.”

  “It will be a relief to have some privacy again,” Helwig said. “Shall we go, Clara?”

  “One moment,” Chambrun said.

  The Amazon turned to look at him.

  “The girl was your daughter, Madame Brunner. We’ve searched for a motive that involved the Baroness. It’s possible she was killed to get back at you; that you were the object of a grim punishment.”

  “Absurd,” Helwig said.

  “You had guests on the Island—war criminals. Perhaps one of them—”

  “We had no war criminals on the Island,” Helwig said. “That was a pipe dream of the Wald brothers. The Greek police cleared us of all suspicion of that ridiculous charge.”

  Chambrun was silent for a moment and then he shrugged. “You may go,” he said.

  The Amazon turned, like someone in a trance, and walked stiffly out of the room.

  A sound like a deflating balloon came from Molloy. “What the hell kind of people are these?” he asked no one in particular.

  “The monsters who almost pinned us to the mat a generation ago,” Chambrun said. He lifted his demitasse to his lips and put it down abruptly. It was obviously stone-cold. “Any report yet on who left that note for Sam Culver?” he asked.

  “Negative,” Jerry Dodd said. “Just one of those things. Along about five o’clock that cultural delegation to the U.N. from Thailand was checking in. There was a lot of confusion—interpreters—God knows what else. When Atterbury finally got them untangled and off to their quarters he noticed that note for Sam lying on the desk by the registration blotter. He hadn’t seen who put it there. It didn’t seem important and he just put it in Sam Culver’s mailbox. You know Atterbury? He says he may be able to dredge it up ‘out of his subconscious’ later, but right now he has no memory of anyone putting the note there. He was surrounded by people jabbering a strange language at him. He was busy.”

  “Someone else is getting all the breaks at the moment,” Chambrun said.

  “You believe what you told the Baroness—that the note was meant to persuade Culver to refuse the invitation to her party so that she herself could be persuaded to go back to the Island?” Hardy asked.

  “Not for a minute,” Chambrun said.

  “But why—?”

  “I was content to let them all think I believed that,” Chambrun said. He took a deep drag on his cigarette, his eyes narrowed. “We’ve been so concerned with facts—bloodstains, where it all happened, a search for missing weapons, missing clothes—we haven’t come to the point of considering a solid motive for the murder of the girl.”

  “None of them can be believed,” Molloy said.

  “Take the note at face value,” Chambrun said. “It warns Sam Culver that his life is in danger, particularly if he attends the Baroness’ party. Let’s assume for a moment that Heidi Brunner wrot
e that note and slipped it onto the desk during the confusion Atterbury described. She could have been killed for having warned Sam and to keep her from telling him exactly what the danger is.”

  Hardy’s lips pursed in a soft whistle.

  “If the girl confided in anyone it would most likely have been Peter Wynn. They were in love, by all accounts.”

  “Who believes what anyone tells you?” Molloy said. “Wynn didn’t mention any such thing when we talked to him. You’d think he would have if he cared about the girl.”

  “None of these people, from the Baroness on down the line, places a very high value on human life,” Chambrun said. “Wynn may very well think it’s safer to keep his mouth shut. Where is he?”

  “My office in the lobby,” Jerry Dodd said. “He was to stay there till I told him it was all right to go back to his room. I haven’t told him.”

  “Get him up here,” Chambrun said. “Meanwhile, I think it’s time we talked to Sam.”

  Jerry went to the outer office to phone.

  Sam looked old and beaten when he came in from Miss Ruysdale’s office. His hand was unsteady as he held a lighter to his cold pipe.

  “I thought you should know about the note while you were talking to the others,” he said to Chambrun.

  “You better pour yourself a drink,” Chambrun said, gesturing toward the sideboard.

  “I’m past the point where a drink will do me any good,” Sam said. He sat down in the big armchair recently occupied by Charmian. He shook his head slowly. “Even when she’s gone you can smell her perfume,” he said.

  “What do you make of the note?” Chambrun asked.

  “Kid stuff—except that there is death all around us,” Sam said. “So why not mine, too?”

  “Why would one of them want you dead?”

  “Search me,” Sam said. “Except that the Zetterstrom people play everything larger than life. Death for stealing an apple, or passing a small insult.”

  “You insulted anyone recently?”

  “Who knows?” Sam said.

  “I think you better tell us what you left out earlier,” Chambrun said.

  “Left out?” Sam sounded surprised.