Death After Breakfast (17 page)

She had left me one obligation. I was to see to it that she was cremated.

I can’t really put times together. I know it was evening when I got to the city morgue with an authority from the lawyer. They’re pretty cold-blooded in the morgue, but the guy who handled me had some feelings. They keep the bodies in sort of icebox drawers. We stopped by the one that had Shirley’s name on it.

“If you cared about her, you won’t want to look at her,” the man said. “Official identification was made by her secretary.”

Poor Bernice Braden. I realized I didn’t want to see anything that would blur my memory of what she’d been. I turned away from the box. I still had my Shirley, alive and laughing and loving. I made arrangements for the cremation, and that was that.

A light summer rain was falling when I walked out onto the street. Where to go? What to do? Who to talk to? There was only the Beaumont, and Chambrun and Ruysdale. I walked what seemed miles in the rain. I must have been a sight when I walked through the revolving door from the street into the Beaumont’s lobby, my hair matted, my suit waterlogged.

Mike Maggio, the night bell captain, had me by the arm and was steering me to the elevator. He is a mischievous, smiling Italian who, for the first time I could remember, looked dead serious. He went upstairs with me, took my key from my shaking hands, and opened the door to my apartment. I was to take a steaming hot shower while he made me a drink. I got out of my clothes and into the shower. When I came out and had toweled myself down, I went to my closet for a bathrobe. There, hanging right in front, was a negligee Shirley kept there. I sat down on the floor, stark naked, and cried. Mike Maggio let me weep it out.

Then, after I’d had the drink Mike made me, believe it or not, I slept on the couch in my living room. I couldn’t face the bed where she had been only the night before.

If you’ve ever been through that kind of experience, and I hope to God you haven’t, you’ll know that nothing is stable. You tell yourself you have to go about your regular routines, and you do, in a mechanical fashion, but every now and then your grief sweeps over you in waves, literally doubling you up with pain. I woke up, bones aching, a little after midnight. For about ten seconds I wondered why I was there on the couch, and then it came over me like a nausea. I wanted to get out of the apartment. She was everywhere.

Normally there were things to do at this time of night. It wasn’t much better out in the real world. I should have known that Shirley’s death had already been on radio and TV. Everyone who knew me and of my connection with her had words of sympathy. And questions! Did I have any idea who might have done it? Did I know why it was done? Reporters, still hanging around for some news in the Kauffman case, had something new to occupy them. Me. They followed me around like the tail of a kite as I went from the Blue Lagoon, to the Spartan, to the Trapeze.

In the Trapeze I was astonished to see Chester Cole, the PR man for Duval’s film, still sitting where I’d left him at that corner table, hours and hours ago. He looked stiff drunk to me, or maybe it was just that he hadn’t moved for so long. Five o’clock I’d left him, one o’clock now. I asked Eddie, the head bartender, about him.

“I don’t know where he puts it,” Eddie said. “Must have drunk two quarts of Irish whiskey. Doesn’t show it, though. Just signals for another double.”

I walked over to the table. “The bartender says you have a hollow leg,” I said.

The black glasses looked up at me. “I’m sorry about your girl,” he said. His speech wasn’t thick, just a little overprecise. But he hit me where I was living at that moment.

“I’d just as soon not talk about it,” I said.

“Understandable,” he said.

“You ever do jigsaw puzzles?”

“When I was four, with my grandmother,” I said.

“I’ve been doing one for hours,” he said. “Ever since you left me.”

It didn’t make sense. “Mine was Napoleon at Waterloo,” I said.

He laughed, as though what I’d said was much funnier than I thought it was. “I guess you could call mine that, too,” he said.

So two quarts of Irish had done its work, I thought. “I’ve got no place to go,” he said. “I lose this job I’ve got with Herman Productions and the only place to go is down. What do I care about Laura Kauffman, a crazy, sex-mad doll? But I saw you dancing with your girl at the ball. She was something else again.”

“I just can’t talk about her now, Chester,” I said. I was being buried under one of those waves of self-pity.

“You seen anyone around lately who reminds you of Napoleon?” he asked.

The Irish whiskey talking again, I thought.

His smile was twisted. “I might just decide to bring about his Waterloo—on account of your girl.”

“Who the hell are you talking about?” I asked.

“Napoleon,” he said. “Who else got the works at Waterloo?” He drew a deep breath. “Couple of pieces still don’t fit. But don’t get lost, Mark. I may be able to show you the finished product any time now. Your girl deserves it.”

He was getting to me. “If you know something—”

“I need time to figure out why I feel like being a hero,” he said. “But I’ll leave you with a question. Who do I know anything about in this cockeyed world of yours?”

“The film people,” I said, “who are no longer here.”

“That’s the joker,” he said. “Are they or are they not?”

He stood up, gave me a stiff, formal little bow and walked, straight as a ramrod, out of the Trapeze.

I have a lot of pretty good friends who come and go at the Beaumont, but that night, of all nights, none of them seemed to come in. Perhaps it was for the best. It would have meant telling the same unfinished story over and over.

I went up to Chambrun’s office and found it locked. I checked with Miss Kiley and learned that the “No more calls except in an emergency” rule was in play. The boss had turned in. He hadn’t had any real sleep for a long time. I couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination classify Chester Cole’s crazy talk as an emergency.

I felt so goddamned lonely! For months now, when the day’s work was over, there had been Shirley to gripe to, to laugh with, to love. No more. Not ever.

Ruysdale? She could be up in Chambrun’s penthouse with him. I never had known where her private hideout was. There was an emergency unlisted number for her, but no address to go with it. She would have listened with patience and understanding while I went round and round about Shirley. But I wasn’t, or shouldn’t let myself be, an emergency.

I tried to get Lieutenant Hardy on his home phone but he didn’t answer. It would be legitimate for me to call to ask if there was anything new. He wasn’t at Police Headquarters. The best I could do there was leave a message I’d called. He’d know why.

In the end I went to my apartment. I had to face it sometime. In the morning I would pack up Shirley’s things and deep-six them somewhere. Having them around would make the pain a little too exquisite.

I slept on the couch again.

I woke up about eight o’clock, my usual time. You get so you have a kind of internal alarm clock. It was another day, a hotel to run—a man to find and punish. The impulse to tears was gone, the burning rage. In their place was a kind of cold determination. Everything else in my life, from now on, came second to finding the man who had shot Shirley. Nothing else mattered a damn.

I made coffee and toast in my kitchenette. I didn’t have an appetite for more. At a few minutes after nine, shaved and dressed for this new day, I went down the hall to the main place. Ruysdale was at her desk as I had found her on hundreds of other mornings. She gave me a look and decided that the time for sweet talk and sympathy was past. She was right.

The boss was having breakfast of course. Didn’t he always? Ruysdale thought I should go in. Hardy was there.

Chambrun was working on one of his breakfast favorites, a salmon steak with Bernaise sauce.

“Glad you came in, Mark,” he said. “Hardy has a question for you.”

Hardy looked his usual self. The sonsofbitches had all had their normal quota of sleep without nightmares. Hardy was sitting at the table with Chambrun, toying with a cup of coffee. Across the room M. Fresney, the chef, stood expressionless, behind the serving table. He looked disappointed, really, as if Chambrun had passed up some special work of art he’d provided for this morning. He pointed to the coffee service and I nodded that I would.

‘The Shirley Thomas case isn’t mine,” Hardy said. He sounded as though he was talking about some distant case in China somewhere. A distant place, a non-person. Perhaps they’d decided that was the way to handle it with me. The Shirley Thomas case! “So it isn’t your case,” I said.

“But there may be a connection with what is my case,” Hardy said. “You see, I’d asked her to dig up what she could on Laura Kauffman. The husband has given us so many names that it’s worse than none. No place to start. Now, I have no way of knowing what Miss Thomas had in her files, nor who she may have talked to here in the city, in person or on the phone. But the telephone company has provided us with two numbers she called yesterday afternoon, not long after she went home to hunt for me. The first was an overseas call to a Miss Grace Peyron in Paris.”

“She’s a correspondent for
The Paris Herald
,” I said. “An old friend. She ran down stories for Shirley abroad.”

“I know,” Hardy said. “We’ve talked to her. Miss Thomas asked her to dig out anything she could about Laura Hemmerly, Laura von Holtzmann, Laura Kauffman, going all the way back to the war. That was in line with what I’d asked for.”

The second call is more interesting,” Chambrun said.

“The second call was to Hollywood, to Claude Duval,” Hardy said. “The call was put through, because her phone was charged for it. I just finished talking to Duval. He didn’t get her call personally. He has one of those automatic answering services attached to his phone. ‘When you hear the buzzer leave your name, your phone number, your message.’ He came home well after midnight, he says, which would have been four, five o’clock our time this morning. Shirley Thomas had called, left her number, and asked him to call collect. He had been planning to do so this morning at a decent hour. He had no idea why she’d called. He was shocked to hear what had happened to her.”

“Do you have any idea why she called him, Mark?” Chambrun asked.

I shook my head. Something was bothering me. “We called back Miss Peyron in Paris,” Hardy said. “I thought perhaps she’d suggested Duval as some sort of source for Miss Thomas. She hadn’t. Miss Thomas hadn’t mentioned Duval to her.”

It clicked. “Napoleon,” I said.

“Napoleon?”

I had an absurd impulse to giggle. “Something funny happened on the way to the forum,” I said.

“Cut it out, Mark,” Chambrun said.

I told them about my strange conversation with Chester Cole last night. The talk about his jigsaw puzzle which could also be called ‘Napoleon at Waterloo’; about his impulses to be a hero on Shirley’s behalf; about how maybe all the film people hadn’t gone. “‘That’s the joker,’ he said. ‘Are they or are they not?”’

Chambrun’s look froze me. “You didn’t think this was worth reporting until now?” he asked.

“He was drunk! Two quarts of Irish whiskey, Eddie told me. I don’t know how he managed to walk out of the place. It all sounded like drunken idiocy.”

Chambrun pushed back his chair and stood up. “I think we’d better have a talk with Mr. Cole,” he said.

The front desk gave us his room number on the ninth floor, and we went in search of Chester Cole. Ringing his doorbell and knocking on the door didn’t produce any results. Chambrun went down the hall to the maids’ pantry and came back with a passkey. We opened the door and found Cole standing just inside it. He could have been waiting there, hoping the trouble, whatever it was, would evaporate. He looked the way he ought to look, I told myself; red-eyed, disheveled. He was a man with a ghastly hangover. He had a seersucker robe pulled around his bony frame. “What the hell is this? Some kind of raid?” he asked. “We have to talk to you, Mr. Cole,” Chambrun said, briskly. “This is Lieutenant Hardy of Homicide. You know Mark.”

“Do you let yourself in anywhere you choose?” Cole asked. “If I don’t answer my doorbell, it’s because I don’t want to answer it.”

“A man who thinks about being a hero could be in trouble,” Chambrun said. “I was concerned for your safety, Mr. Cole.”

Cole backed into his room. From the bureau he picked up his black glasses. He seemed to feel more secure once he was hidden behind them. “I don’t understand any of this,” he said. “Hero?”

“You had a conversation with Mark last night,” Chambrun said.

“Ah yes, in the Trapeze, wasn’t it, late in the afternoon?”

“And again much later at night,” I said, “after you’d taken on a couple of quarts of Irish.”

His thin mouth moved in a forced smile. “I’m afraid I did rather tie one on,” he said. “I’m afraid I don’t remember our second visit together—if we had one, Mark.”

“We talked about jigsaw puzzles and Napoleon at Waterloo,” I said.

“It doesn’t sound very elevating,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mark, but I just don’t remember.”

“Very convenient for you, Mr. Cole,” Chambrun said. “You don’t remember considering being a hero.”

“Hero about what?” he asked.

“You were going to help me—about Shirley,” I said.

“Shirley?”

“Shirley Thomas, my girl!” I said. I was suddenly steaming.

A nerve twitched at the corner of his mouth. “I remember hearing,” he said. “I’m terribly sorry about it, Mark.”

“You told me you might have answers,” I said. “You told me not to get lost, that you might be able to put it all together. You said Shirley deserved your help! Come on, Chester. You can’t have forgotten all that!”

“My God, I must have been really stewed,” he said. “Put what together? How could I help?”

“Put together your jigsaw puzzle. You said you’d been working on it for hours. ‘Napoleon at Waterloo.’ You asked me who you knew here at the Beaumont. The film people, you said. I said they were all gone except you. And you said, ‘That’s the joker. Are they or are they not?’ ”