Gilded Nightmare (16 page)

Wood sat there, breathing hard.

“But you hung around, waiting for the next member of the Zetterstrom party to show, and when the Brunner girl came out, hours later, you gave her the same treatment,” Hardy said.

“No! I went back to my hotel. You can check out on that.”

“We are,” Hardy said.

“I went up to my room. I had a few drinks.”

“You didn’t need them. You were half tight,” Jerry Dodd said.

“I had them,” Wood said. “I lay down on my bed, hoping I could get drunk enough to go to sleep. Somehow I had to wipe out the picture of my own monstrous behavior. I couldn’t sleep. I turned on my bedside radio. Sometimes that helps. I must have dozed off, but I woke up in the middle of a newscast. They were talking about a girl who’d been murdered in an alley near the Beaumont. They identified her as a member of the Baroness’ party—Heidi Brunner. And—and it seemed to be a duplication of what I’d done to that poor dog.”

Sergeant Molloy’s smile was twisted. “Maybe you’re like your twin brother, Mr. Wood. Maybe you suffer from lapses of memory. Maybe you came back here to the Beaumont, murdered the girl, dragged her out in the alley, and went back to your place and conveniently forgot all about it.”

Wood shook his head, wearily. “I didn’t come back here till after I’d heard that newscast. Then—then I had to. I had to know what was going on here. I mean, the girl—killed just the way I’d killed the dog.”

“While you were in a trance,” Molloy said, his voice harsh.

“I don’t think there’s much point in trying to force a square peg into a round hole, Sergeant,” Chambrun said. We all stared at him. He was thumbing through Wood’s scrapbook. “It would be nice if we could wrap the whole thing up in one package, have some breakfast, and go to bed. There are too many things going on—things that I know don’t involve Mr. Wood—for me to buy him in a one-package deal.”

“Like what?” Molloy asked, his feelings ruffled.

“Like where is Charmian Zetterstrom? Like where are Peter Wynn’s clothes? Like who delivered the warning note to Sam Culver at the main desk? Those things for a starter, Sergeant.” Chambrun turned the pages of the scrapbook and bent down to have a closer look at the picture of Charmian, leaning on a cane, her face lined. “You’re not the only one, Mr. Wood, who wondered about the Baroness. Your friend Sam Culver had a ‘feeling’ about it. But she convinced him. She remembers intimate details of things that happened twenty years ago, snatches of conversation that only Charmian Brown could have known.”

“She could have learned them,” Wood said.

“Learned them?”

“Like a history lesson—from the real Baroness,” Wood said.

“And where, do you suggest, is the real Baroness?”

“Back on her Island, torturing some other poor devil like my brother Bruno!”

“That is, at least, an interesting theory,” Chambrun said. “And
this
Charmian Zetterstrom, the one who is here, who is she? She is certainly a double for these earlier pictures of Charmian Brown—the Hollywood Charmian.”

“God only knows!”

Chambrun’s voice was thoughtful. “Would you say a daughter?” he asked. …

That early morning was the first time I’d ever seen Chambrun when he didn’t look bandbox-fresh. He needed a shave. He kept touching his face with the tips of his fingers, as if he were reminding himself that he needed to find time for his razor.

We had gone back to his office. I was bursting with questions. Did he really believe the Charmian we knew and were trying to find was not the Baroness—the Charmian Brown who had been involved years ago with Sam Culver? Did he really believe she might be Charmian Brown’s daughter? None of it made any sense.

Miss Ruysdale was at her desk in the outer office when we got there. The long night had done nothing to her perpetual chic.

“Thank you for staying about, Ruysdale,” Chambrun said.

“Where else would I be?” she asked. “If you don’t need me—?”

“Oh, I need you, Ruysdale. I always need you. My compliments to Monsieur Fresney in the kitchen, and I’d like my breakfast now instead of at the usual time. A half a cantaloupe, broiled lamb kidneys, an English muffin, not too brown, and American coffee. And a bottle of properly chilled Rhine wine.” He glanced at me. “You’d better have something, Mark.”

“Ham and eggs,” I said, and saw him shudder.

“Then, Ruysdale, will you drag Dr. Partridge out of his beauty sleep and ask him to report here. Ask Lieutenant Hardy, who’s in Jerry’s office, to have Dr. Malinkov brought here. And finally, have someone find me an electric razor.”

“Your own razor and other toilet articles are in your dressing room,” Ruysdale said. “I put them out for you, knowing you’d need them.”

“Quite right. But I don’t want to disturb Sam.”

Ruysdale’s frown was a thin pencil line. “I don’t follow.”

“Sam Culver is sleeping in my dressing room, isn’t he?”

“I haven’t seen him,” Ruysdale said.

Chambrun scowled. “He probably went to sleep again after I called him. Wake him and tell him he’s to get down here at once.”

His cruise toward the inner-office door was stopped by the arrival of Mike Maggio, the night bell captain.

“Got some dope for you, boss,” Mike said.

“Come in, Mike,” Chambrun said, and went into his private sanctum. I saw him go over to the Turkish coffee-maker. It was cold.

“Item one,” Mike said. “I can tell you about the note. I checked out room service records. Tea was served in 19-B late yesterday afternoon. The waiter was a fellow named Ruiz, Puerto Rican. Been with us eight years. On a hunch I got his home phone and called him.”

“And?”

“He served the tea—tea, cucumber sandwiches, small cakes for three. The three ladies. I assumed the Baroness, the big one, and the dead girl. Ruiz was told to come back in three quarters of an hour for the tea wagon. He did. Check signed. Nice tip. He took the wagon downstairs and when he picked up the used napkins to throw them in the soiled laundry hamper he saw this note. Envelope, slip of paper attached to it, plus a five-dollar bill. The slip of paper simply said, ‘Please deliver this to the front desk.’ He thought it was odd no one had mentioned it to him directly, but five bucks is five bucks. He delivered the note.”

“All three women were there when he came back for the tea wagon?”

“I asked him,” Mike said. “They were all three there.”

Chambrun was silent for a moment, letting it sink in. There was no way to guess which one of the women might have left the warning note under a used napkin on the wagon. My best guess was the Brunner girl. Someone had found out about it afterward and knocked her off.

“Item two,” Mike said.

“Yes?” Chambrun’s eyes seemed to be closed.

“The empty room on the nineteenth floor,” Mike said. “Where the Baroness might have come in if she tried tightrope-walking the ledge. The windows were locked on the inside.”

“She could have locked them after she got inside,” Chambrun said.

Mike shook his head. “Dust, undisturbed,” he said. “Room been unoccupied since day before yesterday. You know how it is, boss. A few hours unattended and you got dust and soot on all flat surfaces in this town.”

“If she got into an occupied room,” Chambrun said, slowly, “she would explain her problem, whatever it is, and get to the phone. She would have called me.”

“Not necessarily,” I said.

“She asked me for help,” Chambrun said. “Mike, I want the file cards on everybody occupying rooms on that side of the hall on nineteen.”

“Right,” Mike said. “There’s item three.”

“What is it?”

“The clothes. Wynn’s clothes. They were at the bottom of the laundry chute, spattered with blood. Sergeant Dolan was with me when I found them. He took ’em.”

“Thanks, Mike. Good job.”

Mike beamed. Praise from Chambrun was the equivalent of the Distinguished Service Medal. “I’ll have those file cards here in nothing flat,” he said, and took off.

Chambrun sat silent, staring down at his desk blotter.

“How long are you going to hold out on me?” I said.

He looked up. “Hold out?”

“You believe Wood may be right? Charmian isn’t the Baroness?”

“It’s possible,” he said, slowly. “She certainly didn’t show any recognition of Wood in the lobby when she arrived. And she passed by Sam as though he were a stranger—though she explained that, not unreasonably. But there was a moment when we went to tell her about the dog. Do you remember? When I asked her, she said she hadn’t recognized Wood. Helwig stepped in and told her Stephen is Bruno Wald’s twin. She acted surprised, as though she’d never heard of a twin, and never heard the story Bruno told Stephen just before he died. ‘What story?’ she said. ‘You all seem to know it but me.’ ”

I remembered. Helwig had said something about keeping the Bruno Wald story from her, which he said was utterly false, because it would have distressed her.

“The Baroness we’ve had described to us—a voluptuary, a cold, unfeeling woman who enjoyed torturing Bruno Wald and probably others, wouldn’t have needed to have her feelings spared. It’s hard to believe they’d have felt it necessary. But,” and Chambrun shrugged, “they could have.”

“The picture in the scrapbook,” I said.

“Interesting,” Chambrun said. “She showed her age there. Walking with a cane, no less. Still beautiful, but not young. That’s why I want to talk to Malinkov in front of Doc Partridge. I want him to describe his techniques. Maybe she grows old, and is refurbished by his surgical gifts periodically. Maybe she falls apart from time to time and is put together again.”

“You believe that?”

“I’ll listen to Malinkov’s explanation.”

Ruysdale came into the office. “Sam Culver doesn’t answer his phone,” she said.

“Probably on his way down,” Chambrun said. “Took his good time about it.”

A moment or two later Dr. Partridge appeared, wearing an old-fashioned flannel bathrobe over a hastily pulled-on pair of pants. His white hair was askew.

“Don’t tell me you’ve produced another body for me?” he said. “What are you running here, Pierre, a slaughterhouse?”

“I want your medical opinion on a miracle,” Chambrun said. He brought the doctor up to date on the story of Charmian Zetterstrom, her amazingly youthful appearance, the rumor that this was the result of Malinkov’s gifts as a plastic surgeon, plus other magic of diet, massage, exercise, and makeup. “Is it possible, Doctor?”

“You could be fooled at a distance,” the doctor said. “Let me see this woman up close and I’ll tell you.”

“I wish I could,” Chambrun said. “She’s out of circulation for the moment.”

Ruysdale then ushered Sergeant Dolan into the room, bringing with him a reluctant Malinkov. The fat man was wheezing and sweating, his face the color of bread dough.

“I’m not well,” he said, between chattering teeth. “I should be in bed. I have a chill.”

“This is Dr. Partridge,” Chambrun said in a dry, hard voice. “He can prescribe for you if it gets serious. Please sit down, Dr. Malinkov.”

“There’s nothing I can tell you about Charmian’s disappearance,” Malinkov said. “I was asleep when Helwig discovered she was gone. I know nothing about it.”

“I don’t want to ask you about it,” Chambrun said. “I want to talk to you about her as a medical case.”

Malinkov’s legs seemed to buckle. He almost crawled into the armchair by Chambrun’s desk. He sat there, chewing on the knuckles of his clenched right fist.

“The Baroness is something of a miracle,” Chambrun said. “From all accounts, your miracle, Dr. Malinkov. We know her to be forty-one or -two years old, yet she looks like a girl of twenty. We’ve been told that every two or three months she goes into retirement, that you do whatever it is you do, and age is miraculously defeated. Dr. Partridge and I are anxious to know just how you manage it.”

Malinkov’s mouth opened and closed like a beached fish. “It is very complicated,” he said, his thick accent growing thicker. “It would be beyond the comprehension of a layman.”

“Dr. Partridge isn’t a layman,” Chambrun said. “That’s why I asked him to be here.”

“I am a plastic surgeon,” Malinkov said. He spread his hands as though that was all that needed to be said.

“Tell us how the Baroness happened to come under your care,” Chambrun said.

Malinkov shivered. “I was an old friend and associate of the Baron’s,” he said.

“You performed so-called experiments for him on Allied prisoners in World War II,” Chambrun said, his eyes glittering.

“Yes. Then I came to this country—to help your doctors with the war-wounded—the mutilated. I can show you letters of gratitude from your government.”

“I’m not questioning that, Doctor. About the Baroness, please.”

“I—I had a letter from the Baron asking me to join his little community on Zetterstrom Island. I was obligated to him. I went.”

“You would also be safer there,” Chambrun said. “There were people who didn’t appreciate the value of your wartime experiments for the Baron.”

“Yes. That is true. The picture of things had changed.”

“No more master race,” Chambrun said. “So you went to the Island. I suggest you were needed on the Island. The Baron’s war-criminal friends needed a change of face. You help to send these men out into the world, safe from prosecution.”

“No, no!” Malinkov cried out. “Nothing like that. There were never any war criminals. I swear it.”

“Then why did the Baron need you?”

“It was quickly explained to me why the Baron wanted me there. Charmian was afraid of growing old. It was not unnatural. She was so very beautiful—and there were beginning to be signs. She was then thirty, very active. No matter how carefully one conditions oneself with exercise, with diet, with massage—there begin to be signs.”

“We have all seen those signs in the mirror,” Chambrun said.

“I—I did what I could for her.” The fat man turned to where Doc Partridge sat in the shadows. His smile was sickly. “You know how it is, Doctor. A little tuck in the skin here, a tightening there, a pulling back in another place. It can be done, a little at a time, without leaving scars.” He looked back at Chambrun and shrugged.