Deadly Joke (9 page)

“Didn’t bother him,” Jerry said. “Clarke’s alibi is solid.”

“But if he collects guns, he might own a German
P-38
Walthers,” Chambrun said. “If he does, it might be interesting to know if it’s where it ought to be—and if it’s been used, like tonight.”

“Some friend of Clarke’s might have borrowed it?”

“Probably far-fetched,” Chambrun said.

I could almost feel Chambrun’s pain when we stepped out into the lobby. The rioters were gone, but the Beaumont was a disaster area. The cleanup crew which normally came on about two in the morning were already at work, and a couple of our maintenance men were boarding up the broken shop windows. One of the great glass chandeliers that hang in the lobby was badly battered. Kids must have thrown their clubs and bats at it.

Chambrun stood staring, as though he couldn’t believe it. From a distance away I could hear the soft string music coming from the Blue Lagoon. Something was going on as usual. Late-returning guests who had been at the theater or meetings looked stunned as they came in from the street.

Mike Maggio, the night bell captain, came over to where we were standing. He had the beginnings of a beautiful shiner and his lower lip was cut and swollen. He tried a grin.

“You oughta see the other guys,” he said.

“Are many of our people hurt?” Chambrun asked.

“Nothing serious,” Mike said. “They didn’t get into the Blue Lagoon or upstairs to the Trapeze. There’s some damage—not much—in the Ballroom. Mostly china and glasses got broke. They didn’t even find the Spartan.”

The Spartan Bar is the last bastion of male exclusivity. No women allowed. Perhaps it’s a symptom of the times that most of the regular customers are over sixty. It was like a game room for them where they could play backgammon or chess and talk about the good old days.

“There’s a lady waiting to see you, Mr. Chambrun,” Mike said.

“Lady?”

“I use the word in the sense of gender, sir, not class.”

Chambrun wasn’t amused. “Who is it, Maggio?”

“A Miss Marsh, sir.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Chambrun, “what a time to choose!” His face had relaxed. He was smiling, almost fondly. “Where is she, Maggio?”

“Your offices are all locked up, sir—nobody there. So I asked her to wait in the little office back of the front desk while I tried to find you.”

Chambrun looked at me. “Old friend—from very old days. I’ll have to explain to her why I can’t talk to her tonight.” He glanced at his gold wrist watch. “Nearly midnight. Strange time for her to call.”

“Melody Marsh?” I asked him.

“You’ve heard of her?”

“Earlier tonight,” I said. “I was told she was Charlie Sewall’s girl. Young Mr. Tennant went to tell her what had happened to Sewall.”

Chambrun’s smile faded. “Bring Miss Marsh up to my office, Maggio. Do you mind if I tell you you’re not a very good judge of class, son? Your best manners, please.”

Chambrun gestured to me to follow him. We went up to his office. He let us in with a key and we walked through Miss Ruysdale’s domain to the inner sanctum. There is indirect lighting in the office that gives it a soft, comfortable feeling after dark. The blue period Picasso on the wall opposite Chambrun’s desk has its own special lighting. It’s really something.

Chambrun went over to the sideboard and checked his pot of Turkish coffee. He seemed concerned that everything should be just so. I’d never seen him that way before.

“Your informants tell you anything about Melody?” he asked.

“That she used to be a stripper,” I said. I risked a grin. “Something about revolving bosoms.”

Chambrun laughed. “Extraordinary. I saw it once. Oh, my God!” Then his face darkened. “The black days, Mark.”

I knew what he was talking about. Chambrun was French by birth. He’d been brought to this country as a small boy and became an American citizen when his parents were naturalized. He’d started out early in the hotel business. When World War II broke out, he went back to France. He enlisted in a French army already on the verge of a disastrous defeat. When defeat came, Chambrun disappeared underground and spent the next four years in the Resistance. He always referred to that time as “the black days.”

“She has to be in her early fifties now,” he said. “In nineteen forty she was in a traveling burlesque show that was playing in Paris. Her—her routine made her a sensation. As an American, the Germans would probably have let her get home; we weren’t in the war yet. Instead she went underground. That’s when I met her—crazy, tough, wonderful girl. She mothered us, and loved us, and made us laugh when all around us was horror. She was magnificent in those days.” He scowled. “Charlie Sewall’s girl, you say? Surprising.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I have the feeling he wasn’t her type. Yet she liked to laugh. That may explain it.”

We heard movement in the outer office and Chambrun went to the door and opened it. The woman who came into the room was not what I’d expected. She was what my father used to call a “peroxide blonde.” She was large and motherly. She hadn’t paid much attention recently to her figure. She had on a wide sort of peasant skirt, down to her ankles, and a bright red blouse with an almost embarrassing cleavage. The famous bosoms were ample. Her eyelashes were false, but the blue eyes were candid, vaguely amused. She exuded a kind of warmth and openness.

“Well, Pierre,” she said.

“My dear Melody.”

“Long time,” she said.

“Long time.”

She looked at me, and Chambrun introduced us.

“Would you like me to leave you two together?” I asked.

“It’s up to Pierre,” she said. It wasn’t coquettish.

“If I’ve guessed why you’re here, Melody, Mark might be helpful.”

“If he won’t be embarrassed, it’s fine with me,” she said.

“The young don’t embarrass easily,” Chambrun said. He took her to the armchair facing his desk. “Scotch on the rocks, as I remember.”

“Boy, do I need it,” Melody said.

I made the lady’s drink for her and brought Chambrun a brandy. He’d moved around to his desk chair.

“You know about me and Charlie?” Margo asked.

Chambrun nodded.

“Poor Charlie,” she said. She sipped her Scotch. “You once said if ever I need help I should come to you, Pierre.”

“It still stands,” he said.

“I saw it all on television,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Melody.”

“I’ve seen men die before. You know that, Pierre.”

“Yes. We saw good friends die—back there.”

“Charlie was a good friend,” she said. She sipped her drink. “He was also something of a sonofabitch, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

Chambrun’s hand shielded his smile. “You’re among friends,” he said.

“Men have all the luck,” Melody said. “When you get older, you get more attractive than when you were young. We gals go to seed. Older man marries young girl, it’s okay. Older woman marries young man, it’s pornography. We’re just as hungry, Pierre, but we don’t have much choice.”

“You like to take care of people,” Chambrun said. “I suspect Charlie Sewall needed care.”

“Poor Charlie,” she said. “I could have gone to the police, but since it happened here, Pierre, I thought—you first.”

“How can I help?” he asked.

She took a deeper swallow of her drink. “All the news reports say the killer meant to get Maxwell,” she said.

“It’s fairly obvious.”

“I don’t think so,” Melody said. “I think it was meant for Charlie.”

Chambrun sat very still, not blinking.

“Oh, Charlie had asked for it for a long time from a lot of people,” she said. “The Sewalls were the poor cousins, you know. The Maxwells were the rich cousins. Charlie hated that. He thought he should have had all the advantages; he thought someone had cheated him by leaving him poor. ‘Who could enjoy money more than me, baby?’ he used to ask. ‘It ought to go to the people who can really enjoy it.’ But he lived pretty well; maybe thirty thousand a year. You wouldn’t call that poverty, would you, Pierre?”

“Not exactly.”

“Would you believe he never inherited a cent of it, never earned a penny of it, never worked a day of his whole life? He would have been fifty-six years old next month.”

“Where did the money come from?” Chambrun asked.

Melody swirled the dregs of her drink around on the ice cubes. I got the message. I took her glass and refilled it. While I was at the bar, she spoke one word.

“Blackmail,” she said.

Chambrun sat quite still, waiting. I brought the lady her refill.

“Charlie was fun,” Melody said. “He made people laugh. He got invited everywhere—the odd man. And he spent his whole life prying into people’s secrets. He used what he found. It kept him comfortable.”

“And you went along with it?”

Melody shrugged her ample shoulders. “He didn’t hurt little people who couldn’t afford. The rich figure they don’t have to obey the rules, Pierre. When they get caught out, they call it bad luck and they pay. It’s easier to pay than to fight.”

“I think you’d better come to tonight, Melody,” Chambrun said.

“Pierre, if I were to make a charge against someone and I couldn’t prove it, I’d wind up in the coop, wouldn’t I?”

“You could.”

“So that’s why I came to you, for your advice. Charlie had tightened the screws on someone, but good.”

“Who?”

She looked at Chambrun steadily. “Douglas Maxwell,” she said.

“Charlie was blackmailing Maxwell?”

“In spades,” Melody said. “It’s been going on for nearly thirty years, so far as I know. It began when they were in college. Maxwell has supplied the backbone of Charlie’s living for all that time.”

“You know what it is Charlie had on Maxwell—or said he had?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever see Maxwell pay Charlie any money?”

“Of course not. If Maxwell knew Charlie had told anyone, he might have balked.”

“But you knew you didn’t do anything about it?”

“What could I do? Charlie had his faults, Pierre, but he was my guy. Probably the last guy I’ll ever have.”

“Nonsense.” It was a politeness. Chambrun took a cigarette from his gold case and lit it. “Douglas Maxwell is an old and good friend of mine,” he said.

“I know, Pierre. That’s why I came to you. I’ll do what you tell me to do. But you see, I’m sure it wasn’t a mistake. I’m sure that bullet was meant for Charlie. Charlie was very tight-mouthed about what he had on people. He had to be, because keeping what he knew a secret was his bread and butter. But he was pretty loose-mouthed about his jokes. He wanted to be sure he had an audience when they came off. He told a lot of people what he planned for tonight. Some of them were there; a lot of them, like me, were watching it on the tube.” Her painted lips twitched. “It was funny while it lasted. Oh, God, it was funny.”

“So people knew it was coming.”

“Sure. A lot of people. It could have got back to someone who saw a way to use it. The cops, and you, and everyone would think it was meant for Maxwell. Everybody would be headed down the wrong street.”

“You think that’s the way it is?”

“Wouldn’t you, if you were me, Pierre?”

Chambrun exhaled a little cloud of blue smoke. “I’m not sure I want to know, but perhaps you’d better tell me, Melody, what it was Charlie had on Maxwell.”

“He stole some money,” Melody said.

“Maxwell?”

“It was while they were in college. Douglas Maxwell hadn’t come into his money then. It was his father’s. He was in some kind of a jam—a bookmaker, I think. He and Charlie loved to bet on the races. Maxwell couldn’t go to his old man. So he stole a few thousand bucks from some college fund. Charlie knew about it, and he used it. He had some kind of proof that put Maxwell over a barrel. When Maxwell came into his old man’s dough, Charlie put the screws on him. When Maxwell decided to run for political office, Charlie really bore down on him.”

“It’s just not believable,” Chambrun said. “Not Doug Maxwell.”

“Why don’t you ask him?” Melody said.

Chambrun stood up and began to prowl restlessly behind his desk. I knew this story had hit him where he lived. We both knew something that Melody didn’t know. Earlier that night, we’d been told, Maxwell had left his house on 69
^th
Street with Stew Shaw to come to the hotel for the banquet, arranging it to arrive at exactly seven-thirty. They had arrived at seven-thirty. Presumably they had been together when Charlie Sewall had been shot. That was Maxwell’s iron-clad alibi. But with Stew Shaw dead, we only had Maxwell’s word for it. Maxwell’s alibi had evaporated.

We knew something else that Melody didn’t know. Charlie’s plan had leaked right into the center of Maxwell’s family. Diana had known and she had told her mother. It wasn’t impossible that Maxwell had known what was in the air.

Chambrun stopped his prowl in front of Melody’s chair. “Most blackmailers protect themselves against violent reactions from their victims,” he said. “If they didn’t they’d be knocked off like flies on a summer day. What was the proof Charlie had that would brand Maxwell a thief?”

“I don’t know, Pierre.”

“Whatever it was he’d keep it somewhere safe, with instructions for it to be turned over to the police if anything happened to him. Did he have a safety deposit box somewhere?”

“I don’t know.”

“Someone is going to come forward with that proof,” Chambrun said.

“Unless they think it was a mistake,” Melody said. “Unless they think it was really meant for Maxwell. The bullet, I mean.”

“Does it occur to you, Melody, that if someone has that proof he may decide, now, to use it for his own profit?”

Her eyes widened. “I suppose that’s possible.”

“So who could it be?”

“Before God, Pierre, I don’t have any idea.”

“It’s not you, Melody? You were Charlie’s woman.”

“Pierre!”

“There were two men who arrived at the hotel with Charlie when the joke was launched. Do you know who they were?”

“No. Charlie said ‘a couple of guys’ were going with him to pose as Maxwell’s friends. He didn’t say who.”

Chambrun turned to his desk and Hardy’s folder, which still lay there. He produced the photograph and showed it to Melody. I thought she took an extra-long time before she shook her head.