Death After Breakfast (2 page)

Ruysdale reappeared. She entered behind Stevens and gave me a little negative shake of her head. Nothing—or, it turned out, nothing that did anything but increase anxiety.

“Mr. Stevens, I’m dreadfully sorry,” Ruysdale said, “but I just don’t know what can have happened to delay Mr. Chambrun. I know when he does come he will have an explanation and a humble apology for you.”

“Tell him all is forgiven if he’ll invite me to breakfast again and have chicken hash. My God, that was wonderful,” Stevens said.

I don’t think he was aware of the tensions around him. He went off cheerfully after giving Ruysdale a private number where he could be reached. He didn’t seem to notice the little man standing by the windows in Ruysdale’s office.

It was Jerry Dodd, our security officer. The minute he was alone with Ruysdale and me, he turned from the windows. I don’t think I had ever seen him so tense. Tense and coldly angry.

“Mrs. Kniffin has just reported,” he said. Mrs. Kniffin is the hotel’s head housekeeper. “It’s routine for maid service to go into the boss’s penthouse about ten o’clock in the evening, turn down his bed, and put out clean pajamas for him. That’s if he isn’t there. They went in last night, did their job. Mrs. K. reports now that his bed was never slept in, pajamas not used.”

“But he called Miss Kiley on the switchboard at two fifteen?” Ruysdale asked.

“So whatever happened, happened after that,” Jerry said.

“What happened? What do you mean ‘whatever happened’?” I asked.

“I don’t know what I mean,” Jerry said. “You got any bright ideas, Mark?”

“First time in the ten years I’ve known him he hasn’t followed routine.”

“Hell man, I know that!” Jerry said, as if he hated me for reminding him.

“So what explanation can there be?” Ruysdale asked, still cool, still outwardly unmoved. But I knew her heart must have felt cold behind her handsome bosom. She loved the man, whether or not there was a special physical intimacy between them.

“A man in his fifties,” Jerry said, “working round the clock at high pressures, could be subject to a heart attack. But he has to have it
somewhere!
I’ve alerted every place from the roof to the subcellars. Nothing. There are, of course, eight hundred and twenty rooms, all occupied by someone. And there are hundreds of offices, closets, storage places to be checked.”

Ruysdale’s tapering fingers gripped the edge of her desk. “You have to begin at the beginning, Jerry,” she said. “He didn’t check with the switchboard when he left his penthouse. First time ever. Why? He didn’t have a heart attack or an accident in the penthouse or you would have found him there.”

“We have to go back to two fifteen
A.M.
,” Jerry said. “He was okay then. He called Kiley in the usual fashion.

“We don’t know he was all right then,” Ruysdale said. “If someone was with him. If he—if—”

“You’re suggesting—?”

Ruysdale looked at Jerry and then me. Fear had darkened her eyes. “He wouldn’t leave the hotel voluntarily without checking with the switchboard. He wouldn’t voluntarily change his routines without explaining in advance.”

“You keep saying ‘voluntarily,’ ” I said, knowing damn well what she meant. Only a crippling health seizure or a violence could account for his behavior. Since a preliminary search had failed to locate him, the health theory was doubtful. Violence, then. What kind of violence?

Jerry Dodd was thinking right along with me. “Let’s take the grimmest possible view of it,” he said. “Somebody out to get him.”

“Why?” Ruysdale asked.

“Never mind ‘why’ for the moment,” Jerry said. “Let’s suppose someone was holding a gun on him when he checked out with Miss Kiley at two fifteen this morning. There would then be no calls, no interference. So, some maniac kills him.”

“No!” It was a whisper from Ruysdale. Her lovely face had turned a sort of chalk white.

“So where is the body?” Jerry said, cold, matter-of-fact. “There are places it could be hidden—closets, storerooms, hundreds of rooms occupied, one possibly by some psychotic freak. If there is a body, it has to be somewhere in the hotel. We’ll find it, sooner or later.”

“How much sooner?” I asked.

“Mr. Chambrun and I figured it out once,” Jerry said. “Take six crews of two men each, ten minutes to each room. It would take a day and a half, thirty-six hours, to cover every place and come up empty.”

“Oh, God!” Ruysdale said.

“There’s no way for anyone to lug a corpse out of this hotel without being spotted,” Jerry said “Even if it was stuffed into a trash barrel, it would be found in the subbasement where trash is checked over before it’s carted away. Chambrun himself would know how to get out of the hotel without being spotted because he knows where every check spot is and how security is rotated.”

“With a gun at his back?” I asked

“If he thought his best chance lay that way,” Jerry said.

“A kidnapping?” I suggested.

“If that’s it we can expect some kind of demands from someone presently,” Jerry said.

Betsy Ruysdale drew a deep, shuddering breath and then straightened up in her chair. Dear Miss Efficiency! “I can see the boss walking in that door sometime from now and demanding to know what the hell is the matter with us,” she said. “There is a hotel to be run. You and I are going to have to do it, Mark, while Jerry keeps searching.” She glanced at a calendar on her desk. “He has an appointment with George Mayberry at eleven o’clock. Meanwhile there is a whole schedule of events for the day, Mark. That’s your job.”

I nodded. There was, I knew, a fashion show starting fifteen minutes from now. Also a convention of governors from the northern states, an all-day hassle. There was a benefit ball for the Cancer Fund in the evening, a big society-type wingding. In the early hours of tomorrow morning the lobby and the Trapeze Bar were to be turned over to a film company for shooting footage for some super-spectacular directed by Claude Duval, the famous French genius. This filming had been foisted on Chambrun by his board of directors and over his dead body, God forgive the phrase. It was my business to see that everything was properly prepared for these happenings, properly executed when they began.

Yes, there was a hotel to run, and the best thing we could do for a missing Chambrun was to see that nothing interfered with his Swiss-watch perfection of performance.

It is difficult to describe the atmosphere in the Beaumont that morning to someone who doesn’t understand the workings of the staff, what Chambrun calls his “family.” Outwardly the hotel went its cool, smooth way. Guests smiled at staff, unaware of any problem, and staff smiled at guests, hiding an anxiety that had spread in their ranks like a plague.

The first item in the daily routine that was ruptured by Chambrun’s absence was the morning examination of registration cards. They were on Chambrun’s desk ready for his attention when he got to his first cigarette of the day along with his first cup of Turkish coffee. Guests of the Beaumont might have been a little disturbed by how much information the management had about them. When they registered, several people made a notation on the card before it reached Chambrun. Credit ratings were supplied by Mr. Atterbury, ranging from unlimited down through A, B, and C. The cost of a stay at the Beaumont was no laughing matter. Security supplied other information. A for an alcoholic, WC for a woman chaser, XX for a man double-crossing his wife, WXX for a woman double-crossing her husband, G for gay. After Chambrun had looked at the cards, you might find his initials, P.C., in a bottom corner, which meant that Chambrun had special information about the guest which wasn’t for general consumption.

I looked at those cards, which lay neglected on Chambrun’s desk. Part of my job was to pay special attention to guests who rated it. The movie people were the most interesting. They had checked in the night before. They all had unlimited credit. Two items were on the fascinating side. Janet Parker, the girl star, had nothing but a credit okay after her name. Robert Randle, the glamorous male star, rated a G. What would his army of women fans think if they knew it? Hell, it, was probably no secret in the film world, where people were probably laughing up their sleeves at the rumors in the gossip columns that Bob Randle and Janet Parker were “like that.” Security had nothing on Clark Herman, the producer, except a B for bachelor. Claude Duval, the maestro, the French director, had even less, except a note from Jerry Dodd saying he wanted no interviews, no photographs, no special publicity. “A loner,” Jerry had written, “with a phobia about privacy.”

There was only about eight other cards, all people who had histories as guests of the hotel. Most of the Beaumont’s guests are repeaters. Of course Chambrun’s initials appeared on none of the cards because he hadn’t seen them.

I made a mental note of the fact that flowers should be sent to Janet Parker’s suite in addition to the usual fresh fruit and champagne that went to every guest when they registered. I went down to the lobby. There the climate of strain was obvious to an insider.

Johnny Thacker, the day bell captain, was helping a newly registered guest to the elevators with his luggage. I recognized a late-arriving governor for the politico’s convention. Johnny had on his best smile for an important guest, but when he turned to me the smile vanished.

“Anything?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Jesus!” Johnny said, and went back to his governor.

Mr. Atterbury, the credit manager, gave me an imperceptible signal from the front desk.

“News?” he asked, when I joined him.

“Nothing,” I said.

Atterbury gave me a feeble smile. “Maybe no news is good news,” he said.

“Let us pray,” I said.

The governors were beginning to gather in a small ballroom off the lobby and I went there. At the door I ran into Ralph Crowder, their press representative and an old acquaintance.

“We’d hoped Chambrun would be here as we begin,” he said. “He’s always had a little speech of welcome for the governors, and he does it so well.”

“Unfortunately, Mr. Chambrun is involved with an emergency,” I said.

“I didn’t know there were ever emergencies at the Beaumont,” Crowder said.

I tried a smile. “A leaking faucet is an emergency to Mr. Chambrun,” I said. “That’s why the Beaumont is the Beaumont.”

“That’s good,” Crowder said. “May I quote you when I explain his absence?”

“When you explain his absence I’ll buy you a steak dinner, which costs about twenty-five bucks in this joint,” I said.

That went over his head.

“Anything out of order? Anything you need?” I asked.

“Everything is perfection as usual,” Crowder said. “When Chambrun gets a new washer in his faucet tell him we’d still like to see him. Perhaps he’d drop in at the lunch break.”

“I’ll make a note of it,” I said.

I called my office on the second floor. My secretary had a message for me. “When you can. Shirley.” That was the message.

Perhaps I should take time out to repeat something I have said before. About every four months I fall in love forever. It used to be every six months. I was in love forever on that morning when Chambrun failed to appear. Her name was Shirley. Shirley Who? That isn’t a question; it’s the way her syndicated gossip column is signed. “Shirley Who?” In the beginning, when she started writing the column, the idea was to hide the identity of this female Peeping Tom. But after about five years of lifting the lid on the juiciest scandals from coast to coast it became generally known that Shirley Who was really a strikingly beautiful blonde named Shirley Thomas. A Peeping Thomas, I called her.

My in-love-forever situation of the moment was approaching the rocks the day I met Shirley. I don’t think her interest in me amounted to much more than that. I, Mark Haskell, public relations man for the Beaumont, might be a source of items for her column. I don’t think the fact that we wound up making love that first day I met her was any sort of a bribe on her part. She enjoyed sex with any sort of male man. She was something very special, I don’t mind saying.

I think I should deliver a short lecture at this point. Attitudes toward sex in this day and age bear no resemblance to the attitudes of my father and mother or yours. Romance is almost a forgotten ingredient. Sex is an activity, a sport. Sex magazines are all over the newsstands, revealing all there is to reveal to both men and women. Nice girls out of finishing schools talk about it in the four-letter words of the barnyard. Men have always played the field. Now women play the field without any damage to their reputations or standing.

I was glad of that change of attitude that first evening with Shirley. She came to my apartment on the second floor of the Beaumont. I didn’t have to show her any etchings. We both knew what we wanted and why she was there.

I remember it was a Friday night because of what followed. About midnight, after a marvelous passage together, she kissed my cheek and sighed and said she had to go home.

“I need to get some rest and freshen up for tomorrow,” she said. “I’m spending the weekend on Tex Holloway’s yacht. He’s the Texas oil man, you know.”

I didn’t know, and I was surprised to feel a sharp stab of jealousy. I had no right to, but I felt it.

“How is sex on a yacht?” I asked her.

She gave me a dazzling smile. “Rather unusual,” she said, “specially if the seas are running high. Added motion you wouldn’t believe.”

So I lay there in bed watching her dress. I felt a kind of schoolboyish anger when she kissed me on the forehead and left. She had no right to walk out on me. But of course she had every right.

The next morning, a few minutes before nine and my daily appointment with Chambrun, my phone rang as I was coming out of the shower. It was Shirley.

“Not on the oil man’s yacht yet?” I asked, acid dripping.

“I’m not going, Mark.”

“Oh?”

“I have the feeling it matters to you,” she said. “If it does, I discover I don’t want that.”

I could have told her not to be a damn fool and that would have been that, but I felt an unexpected surge of relief.