Death After Breakfast (18 page)

“So what movie people are not gone?” Chambrun asked.

Cole gave a helpless little shrug. “Duval and Herman both went straight to Hollywood. Janet Parker and Bob Randle were supposed to head west sometime yesterday afternoon.”

“The crew, the camera people?” Chambrun asked.

“They’re all still on the film, all headed west,” Cole said.

“So what the hell were you talking about?” I demanded.

“Just being a drunken bigshot, I guess,” he said.

“You asked me if I’d seen anyone around who reminded me of Napoleon,” I said. “You said you were thinking of bringing about his Waterloo. Who were you talking about, Chester?”

He gave me a helpless look.

“Duval?” Chambrun asked. “I gather he’s a sort of Napoleonic figure in the film world.”

“We talked about him earlier in the Trapeze,” I said. “You weren’t drunk then, Chester. You remember that?”

He nodded. “I told you about his summoning Mrs. Kauffman to his suite and behaving like a bastard,” he said. “That’s par for the course for him. He is a bastard.”

“He knew Mrs. Kauffman?” Hardy asked, joining in for the first time.

“Not before that meeting, I think,” Cole said. “She was chairman of the ball committee. He wanted her to get some of your rules changed, Mr. Chambrun. He didn’t ‘want,’ he demanded.”

“How old is Duval?” Hardy asked.

“Early sixties,” Cole said. “That’s just a guess.”

“I’m trying to figure out why Miss Thomas called him long distance,” Hardy said. “I’d asked her to go back on Mrs. Kauffman as far as she could—back to the war. A Frenchman Duval’s age could have known her then, when she was Laura Hemmerly. Miss Thomas was on a fishing expedition. It may have cost her her life.”

“You have a photograph of Duval?” Chambrun asked Cole.

“There are no photographs of him,” Cole said.

“A Hollywood bigshot without photographs?”

“It’s a fetish with him,” Cole said. “No photographs. Everyone connected with him knows that. There have been incidents. He’s smashed news cameras when photographers tried to get a shot of him.”

“He looks like Telly Savalas the actor,” I said.

That didn’t seem to ring any bells with Chambrun.

“Who are you afraid of, Mr. Cole?” he asked.

“Afraid?”

“Sober, you’ve decided not to help. That suggests you’re afraid of someone, of what might happen if you did.”

“I tell you, I was just being a drunken bigshot,” Cole said. “If I said all those things Mark says I said, I was being a phony. Maybe it pleased me to pretend I could do something to help Mark.”

“Maybe you’re the one who needs help, Mr. Cole,” Chambrun said. “If you do, there’s a way to get it from us.”

“How?” Cole asked.

“By telling us the truth,” Chambrun said.

T
IME WASN’T ANY LONGER
a factor with me. It wasn’t as though Shirley was in danger and I had to do something before it was too late. It was already too late. Unfortunately, I had time to find the facts, to build a case, with or without help. And when I found my man! Stupid. I was no better than Chester Cole, pretending to myself I was superman. Hardy was a professional. Chambrun was a man with a degree in dealing with violence. The best I could hope for, to satisfy my need to get revenge for Shirley, was that they could use me somehow, that I could contribute.

“When you’ve been around as long as I have,” Chambrun said, “you get so you can smell it.” We were back in his office, and Hardy was on the phone to someone in the Hollywood police department. He wanted a check made on Claude Duval’s whereabouts for the past twenty-four hours. With today’s travel speeds a man could get a call on the West Coast in the early afternoon, fly to New York, and be back west again after midnight their time. There was no way Duval could have had a call from Shirley in the early afternoon and been here two hours later to shoot her and loot her apartment. The point was, had he ever been on the West Coast? Had Shirley got his answering machine in Hollywood and then found a way to reach him here? Chester Cole had suggested that not everyone who was supposed to have headed west had really gone.

What Chambrun said he could smell was fear. “When a man is as obviously frightened as Cole is,” he said, “there’s no use beating on him. Sooner or later he may get his nerve back, or he’ll get so terrified he has to ask for help. I could see you wanted me to keep at him, Mark. Experience told me that now wasn’t the moment.”

Hardy came back from the phone to join us. “If Duval has been in Hollywood all day yesterday and today, we should know in a very few minutes,” he said. “If he was filming, there’ll be dozens of witnesses. If he was there, we can write him off.”

Chambrun’s eyes narrowed against the smoke from his cigarette. “We had a theory, Walter, early on, that someone had hired a professional to get into my apartment, open my safe, and carry me off to New Jersey. That professional carried the same kind of weapon as was used to murder Shirley Thomas. His employer didn’t have to be anywhere near here. Alibis for that ‘employer,’ whoever he may be, don’t mean a thing.”

“You suspect Duval?” Hardy asked.

“So far he’s just a name on a list as long as both our arms,” Chambrun said. “So far as I know he isn’t on any list you have of people who’ve been involved with Laura Kauffman. He didn’t know her, according to Cole.”

“‘According to Cole’ doesn’t impress me,” Hardy said. “That jerk was running for his life.”

“I know,” Chambrun said. He leaned back in his desk chair, his eyes almost closed. “Let’s play games, Walter. The man who shot Shirley Thomas had a .44, same as my abductor. So let’s say he is the same man, involved in both happenings. I was carried off to keep me from seeing someone or something. Not Laura Kauffman’s murderer, because I was here, I was circulating when that happened. It was someone or something that came on the scene after that butchering. Now, Shirley Thomas was on the trail of people who might have been connected with Laura Kauffman through most of a lifetime. Aware or not, she must have been headed in the right direction. She had to be stopped. Her records had to be destroyed in case there was something there that would tell us where she was headed. I think we have to assume, Walter, that all three things, two murders and my abduction, involve the same man or men.”

“I’m willing to assume it,” Hardy said. “What else is there?”

“What did Shirley know about Laura Kauffman, Mark? Had Laura appeared in her column?” Chambrun asked.

“I suppose she did,” I said. “International hostess, big party giver, operator in big charity drives. She appeared in all the gossip columns.”

“After Laura was killed, what did Shirley tell you about her?”

“What she told Hardy. She didn’t believe Laura had been raped She’d have said ‘yes’ to anyone.”

“But she didn’t have any list of names for us,” Hardy said.

“That kind of scandal wasn’t Shirley’s dish,” I said.

“But she set out yesterday to get that kind of list for you, Walter,” Chambrun said.

“She had the contacts, if she wanted to tap them,” I said. “Like the Peyron woman in Paris.”

“The Peyron woman didn’t have anything immediate to give her,” Hardy said. “So she calls Claude Duval in Hollywood.”

“With how many local calls in between?” Chambrun asked. “She hadn’t heard Chester Cole’s statement that Duval and Laura were strangers, had she, Mark?”

“For God sake, boss, she was dead at the time Chester was telling me that—late yesterday afternoon.”

“So being a good reporter she just followed a natural lead,” Chambrun said. “She had started, through the Peyron woman, to try to delve into Laura’s past in Paris. Duval, a Frenchman, must have known the Paris swim in those days. I’d have asked him.”

“But she didn’t get to ask him,” Hardy said. “She got the mechanical answering service.”

Chambrun’s eyes were closed again. “He says,” he said.

“If we could only talk to Shirley, know who she called, what she was looking for,” I said. “Poor darling, she couldn’t have dreamed she was in any danger.”

“She went to her apartment to start digging for me about one o’clock in the afternoon,” Hardy said. “Bernice Braden found her dead only about three hours later. She must have struck a nerve somewhere very early on.”

Chambrun glanced at me. “You know who her friends are, Mark. Who would she have called for the kind of information she wanted? Other columnists? If we knew the kind of questions she was asking—”

“She always used to say the last person you’d go to for a story was a rival columnist,” I said. “ ‘Exclusive’ is the name of the game. Friends—?” I shrugged.

I think Chambrun understood. I didn’t really know who Shirley’s friends were. Our relationship, over a six-month period, had been so personal, so private. We hadn’t been concerned with anyone but ourselves. We hadn’t been party goers. She had to cover nightclubs, theater openings, high society wingdings. I didn’t go to any of those things with her. My job kept me anchored at the Beaumont until about three in the morning. We joined up after she’d done her job and I’d done mine. Sundays, our mutual day off, we might drive out into the country, or just stay shacked up in my apartment, enjoying each other. She often had jokes about people, but famous people, not friends. There was a curtain drawn over her life before me. No mention of any other men, and I never mentioned other women. I was in love forever.

“Who do you know in the French embassy here, Mark?” Chambrun asked.

I knew the PR men for most of the UN delegations and the foreign governments in town. “Henri Latrobe,” I said.

“See if Shirley called anyone there to ask questions,” Chambrun said. “She had Paris on her mind.”

I located Latrobe at his apartment, after persuading some gal at the embassy to give me his number. His day began in the early afternoon like most people who cover the night life in town. He had heard about Shirley. He was properly shocked. She had not called him and he thought she might have if she wanted something in his world. They had exchanged information in the past. He would check, but he was reasonably certain that, with the story of Shirley’s death public property since the day before, he’d have heard if she’d called anyone.

Dead end.

When I rejoined Chambrun and Hardy to report—I’d made the call from Ruysdale’s office—I found Frank Lewis, the FBI man, with them. He was just back from New Jersey.

“The cottage belongs to people named Hudson,” he told us. “They’re in Europe for the summer. They advertised their cottage for rent and the agent got a call from someone named Smith, of all things, wanting it. That was eight days ago. The agent, a busy man, never saw this Smith. The rent was delivered by hand when he was out of the office. A messenger service he thinks. One thousand and fifty dollars in cash.”

“For eight days?” I asked.

“For three months at three hundred and fifty a month,” Lewis said. “It’s a good rent for a weekend summer cottage.”

“All he wanted it for was to keep me out of sight for a day and a half,” Chambrun said.

“Seems like,” Lewis said. “Nobody saw him then or since. Neighbors didn’t know the place was rented until you found someone to drive you into Princeton.”

“Nothing in the cottage itself?” Chambrun asked.

“A pot of drugged coffee. Our department lab is checking out on it. This ‘Smith’ didn’t even bother to get rid of it. Two coffee mugs, both with what I suspect are your prints on them. Nothing else that doesn’t seem to relate to the owners.”

Chambrun studied the ash on his cigarette, as though the moment it would drop into the ashtray was fascinating. “Most interesting thing about all this,” he said, “is that they planned having me as a guest well in advance of the moment. Whoever or whatever I wasn’t to see was prepared for ahead of time.”

“And worth three months rent to cover who or what,” Hardy said.

The little red light winked on Chambrun’s phone. The call was for Hardy from his Hollywood police friend. The Hollywood cop had solved Hardy’s problem with one phone call. Duval had been in Hollywood since midmorning after the ball here in New York. He had worked all day yesterday and until late in the evening at the studio, filming. The Hollywood cops could do a more thorough check if Hardy wanted, but there was no way Duval could have been in New York in the last forty-eight hours.

“So we’re trying to fit a square peg into a round hole,” Hardy said when he hung up.

Chambrun gave him a strange little smile. “It’s been done before, Walter,” he said. “As a matter of fact, we’ve done it.” He paused to light a fresh cigarette. “We only have Duval’s word that he didn’t talk to Shirley. He admitted there’d been a call, registered on his answering machine. He had to admit that because we knew she’d made the call to his number. The fact is, she may have talked to him, and asked him a question or suggested something to him that triggered him into action.”

“You’re saying he’s our ‘employer’?” Hardy asked.

“We’re just playing games, aren’t we, Walter? If he is our employer, then his next action becomes obvious. Shirley, whether she knew it or not, had made herself dangerous to him.”

“How, for God sake?” I asked.

“By suggesting to him, perhaps through a question, that if she continued her line of inquiry he was in trouble. So the ‘employer’ calls the ‘employee’ who is in New York and can get to Shirley in almost no time at all. Her inquiry is ended before she can make even a few more telephone calls.”

“And we can’t prove any part of it,” Hardy said. He sounded tired of games. “So we’re back at square one.”

“Humor me, Walter,” Chambrun said. “I’d like to play this out as far as it takes me.”

Hardy shook his head. “I’ve got a list of names I got from James Kauffman which is, like you said, as long as my arm. I’ve got to check out on them before they all die of old age. Have fun, maestro.”

When we were alone, Chambrun turned to me. “If I wasn’t supposed to see someone, someone I didn’t see was Duval,” he said. “That fits, doesn’t it? We have a man who won’t let pictures be taken of him. So I would like to see one.”

“But if there aren’t any—?”