Death After Breakfast (9 page)

“Okay, mother Haskell,” Hardy said, giving me a tired smile. He reached for the phone. “I’d better have a police stenographer present.”

“When he’s ready to make a statement,” I said, “try treating him like a human being not as if you were the public executioner. It’s your best chance with him.”

Hardy, for all his official efficiency, is a decent guy. He’s also a pretty good psychologist. I remembered him talking a potential suicide off a window ledge on the top floor of the Beaumont some years ago. I knew he had the skills to talk to a disturbed person like Kauffman without trying to bludgeon him for facts.

Kauffman looked at the detective with a kind of cornered-animal panic in his bloodshot eyes when Hardy faced him.

“Thanks for coming in, Mr. Kauffman,” Hardy said.

It was a good beginning.

Kauffman shook his head from side to side. “I didn’t know what to do, Miss Thomas persuaded me—” It drifted off.

“Miss Thomas was right, of course,” Hardy said. “Mr. Haskell has given me a brief account of what you’ve told him. I’d appreciate your telling it to me.”

It was the same story, told a little more haltingly this time. When he came to the part where he’d decided it was all some kind of alcoholic dream, I could see that Hardy was growing impatient.

“So you weren’t sure it was real till you heard the news on the radio this morning?” Hardy asked.

“I was sure it
wasn’t
real till I heard the radio,” Kauffman said. “My God, Lieutenant, you saw her! It was something out of a horror story.”

“Yes, I saw her,” Hardy said. He hesitated. “Is it possible, Mr. Kauffman, that in a moment of imbalance you could have attacked her and blotted it out of your memory?”

“My God, Lieutenant, I was wearing this suit! No one could have done that to her and not been covered with blood.”

“You could have had it cleaned.”

“Hell, I didn’t have the money to take the subway back downtown,” Kauffman said. “This is the only suit I have. I have some jeans and shirts, but this is the only suit. I wore it because I wanted to look the best I could for Laura.”

“But you have had memory blackouts? It’s not uncommon for people with your problem.”

Kauffman twisted desperately in his chair. “Whole days go by sometimes and I don’t remember much of anything. But I don’t have any reason to remember those days. I want to forget!”

“You could have wanted to forget what happened up there.”

“It wasn’t like that!” Kauffman cried out. “I tried to persuade myself it was a bad dream, but all the time I knew I’d seen it.”

“Not done it?”

“No! No! No!” Kauffman protested.

“All right, Mr. Kauffman,” Hardy said, not unkindly. “Let’s try for some other details.”

“Oh, my God!” Kauffman said. “Could I—could I have another drink? I just can’t function without some help, Lieutenant.”

Hardy nodded to me and I poured the poor bastard a modest slug and took it to him. He downed it in one gulp and handed back the empty glass. Hardy took up the questioning.

“You called your wife about eleven o’clock, you say?”

“Yes.”

“She invited you to come see her?”

“Yes.”

“You cleaned yourself up and walked all the way up from the Bowery. When did you get here?”

“I don’t have a watch,” Kauffman said. “It’s long gone in a hock shop. I can only guess it was quarter past, half past twelve.”

“You called her on the house phone, you said. Did you get her room number at the desk?”

Hardy knew damn well the desk wouldn’t give a room number out to anybody. They’d make a call for you but they wouldn’t give out a room number to a stranger. “I’ll see if Mrs. Kauffman is in,” was the best they would do for him, even if he said he was her husband.

“Laura gave me the room number when I called her,” Kauffman said.

Then why didn’t you go straight up to the room?”

“Because—oh, for God’s sake, Lieutenant, hasn’t anyone told you that Laura spent half her life in bed with other men. I didn’t want to interrupt something.”

“But you went up when she didn’t answer?”

“I was at the end of the line, Lieutenant.”

“Did you see anyone in the hall on twenty-one?”

“No. I rang the bell. She didn’t answer. I knocked. No answer. Then I began pounding and yelling.”

“And you didn’t see anyone?”

“I wasn’t looking for anyone. There could have been ten people looking out of rooms at me and I wouldn’t have seen them. All I wanted was to get in.”

“And then you noticed that the door wasn’t latched tight?”

“I was pounding on it and it—it just opened in a little.”

“So you went in and there wasn’t anyone there?”

“No one. No sign or sound of anyone. Then I saw the liquor. She had a supply there—for the people who were coming and going.”

“There are fingerprints on bottles and glasses,” Hardy said. “We’ve identified Mrs. Kauffman’s. We haven’t caught up with the others. What did you touch?”

“A bottle, a glass.”

“What else did you touch?”

“Nothing. That’s all I was interested in. You can’t imagine how badly I needed a drink.”

“I can imagine,” Hardy said. “So after you’d had your drink you decided to investigate the bedroom?”

Kauffman gave him a bitter, trembling smile. “I was a big shot after I had that drink. I decided to break in. I expected to find her in the hay with someone. I was going to tell her thanks for nothing, grab a couple of bottles, and take off.”

“So you broke in and saw—?”

“My God, Lieutenant, you saw her! Do I have to describe it to you?”

“No,” Hardy said. “You didn’t try to see if she was still alive?”

“Alive in that condition?” Kauffman cried out.

“So you didn’t touch her?”

“No!”

“Or anything in the bedroom?”

“No!”

“And then?”

“I just ran out. I grabbed a bottle off the sideboard and ran out.”

“So you’re out in the hall, bottle tucked under your jacket, I suppose. You see anybody then? ”

“No. No, I ran to the elevator and rang, and it came.”

“So the elevator operator saw you.”

“It was self-service,” Kauffman said. “There wasn’t any operator.”

Hardy gave me a questioning look.

“There are four elevators to that floor,” I said. “After one o’clock only two of them have operators, the other two become self-service.”

“So you pressed a button and went down to the lobby,” Hardy said to Kauffman. “There must have been people in the lobby.”

“I suppose so,” Kauffman said. “All I wanted to do was get out. I just went. Nobody tried to stop me or ask me anything. I walked back downtown. It seemed to take forever. I stopped in a few alleys to have a drink from the bottle. God help me, it was almost gone when I got back to my place.”

“Your place?”

“I’ve been sleeping in the basement of a deserted house,” Kauffman said. “I remember getting there, falling down on some rags I’d collected, and passing out. By then the whole thing was a drunken dream.”

“And that’s it?”

“That’s it, Lieutenant.” Kauffman looked longingly toward the glass in my hand.

Hardy fished a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. “I ought to place you under arrest as a material witness, Mr. Kauffman,” he said. He looked at me. “Is Doc Partridge available?”

“Round the clock,” I said.

“So I am placing you under arrest, Mr. Kauffman, but I’m going to suggest that you stay here in the hotel’s hospital under the care of Dr. Partridge, the house physician. Maybe he can give you some medication that will get you some sleep and help you dry out. It’s your choice. Here or in a cell at the precinct house.”

“There’s no choice. Certainly you have to stay here,” Shirley said. She reached out a hand to Kauffman’s shoulder.

“I’d be glad to help,” he said. It was an exhausted whisper.

My presence at the Cancer Fund Ball was a requirement of my job. I usually enjoy big parties thrown at the hotel. The very rich and the famous are always on hand. The women are always spectacularly dressed and bejeweled. There were two bands for this ball and they were society’s darlings. With Shirley looking like the brightest of stars to me, it should have been a fun evening, but neither of us had any taste for it. Her concern was for Jim Kauffman, lying sedated in the hotel’s infirmary, a cop guarding the door of his room. Her concern was for him and for me. She knew that nothing that was going on around us was of any consequence to me, could in any way penetrate the thick, dark gloom that had settled over me and the other intimate members of the staff. Nothing whatever had turned up to explain Chambrun’s disappearance. Jerry Dodd was at the point of being able to say for certain that Chambrun was nowhere in the Beaumont, alive or dead. All the nonpublic areas of the hotel had been searched. The last room-by-room search of the guest accommodations was drawing to a gloomy conclusion without result.

Early in the afternoon the FBI had come into the picture. The agent in charge, one Frank Lewis, had nothing to work with. A possible kidnapping was what justified his presence, but there was only Chambrun’s unexplained absence to suggest such an answer. He had been missing for some seventeen hours when Lewis and two other agents showed up a little after seven o’clock in the evening.

I had already changed into my dinner jacket when Ruysdale called to ask me to come down the hall to Chambrun’s office. Lewis, the FBI man, was there with her. He was a slim, dark young man with cool gray eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses.

“We haven’t much to go on, Mr. Haskell,” he said. “In a routine kidnapping we should have heard something by now; demands for money, something else they want. There has been nothing. There’s no evidence of violence. Lieutenant Hardy has been over Chambrun’s penthouse. It is just as the maids left it for him, bed turned down, pajamas laid out. We know he was there at two fifteen
A.M.
He called the switchboard to say he was turning in and would accept no calls except for an emergency. There were four or five cigarette butts in ashtrays, all the Egyptian brand Chambrun smokes. No others. We know, from the switchboard again, that he’d been in the penthouse for about an hour before that last goodnight call. Nothing forced, not the door, not the windows opening onto the roof garden outside. There are some fingerprints, mostly Chambrun’s, a few identified as being the maid’s. No others.”

“Music?” Ruysdale asked, her voice husky from fatigue.

“There was a Beethoven symphony on the stereo system. Chambrun’s prints on it.”

“He—he always plays music when he’s alone,” Ruysdale said.

“So it comes down to this,” Lewis said. “He announced to the switchboard that he was going to bed, but he didn’t. He went out on his own, or he was persuaded by someone to go out in a nonviolent fashion.”

“At the point of a gun is not nonviolent,” I said.

“That’s only a supposition, Mr. Haskell. We have no way of knowing that’s so. How big a ransom would you say kidnappers might ask, Miss Ruysdale?”

“Mr. Chambrun is moderately well off,” Ruysdale said, “but the owners could go very high.”

“And would they?”

“I think,” Ruysdale said, “Mr. Chambrun is more valuable to their investment than the real estate.”

“Mr. Garrity assures me they’ve received no demand of any kind,” Lewis said.

Ruysdale and I looked at each other, helplessly. No one had received any demands.

“One last thing,” Lewis said. “There’s a private elevator leading up to the penthouse?”

“It’s one of a regular bank of elevators that goes to that wing of the hotel,” I said, “but it is only used by Chambrun, or one of us going to the penthouse to see him for some reason.”

“‘One of us’?”

“Miss Ruysdale, Jerry Dodd, the security chief, and sometimes I use it if the boss sends for me.”

“If Chambrun wanted to leave the hotel, unseen, he could take that elevator down to the basement, couldn’t he?” Lewis asked. “There must be ways of getting out to the street without encountering anyone, if you know your way around.”

“The boss certainly knows his way around,” I said.

“That elevator, according to Hardy,” Lewis said, “was found at the penthouse level. Suggesting that he didn’t use it to go down.”

“It would be simple enough for someone to make it look that way,” I said. “You ride the car down to the basement. When the doors open, you press the penthouse button, holding the doors open, and step out. The doors close, the car shoots up to the roof again. I’ve done it many times, not necessarily from the basement, you understand. I’d go to see the boss, he’d send me to see someone on one of the lower floors. I’d use the private elevator, go down to the tenth floor, say, and do what I told you; send the car back up to the penthouse so it would be there when the boss wanted it.”

“So the elevator tells us nothing,” Lewis said.

“I don’t see that it does,” I said.

Lewis shook his head, “There’s been an all points bulletin out on him since early this morning,” he said. “He’s not a movie star, but thousands of people must know him by sight. Thirty years of traffic in and out of this hotel. Not a word from anywhere that anyone has seen him.”

“He isn’t circulating where anyone would see him,” Ruysdale said, “or he would have been in touch long ago.”

Lewis nodded. “I don’t like to be a purveyor of gloom,” he said, “but there is nothing about this so far that suggests a classic kidnapping-for-ransom. An enemy? A revenge for something? Some kind of nut? A discontented dishwasher?” When neither of us commented he said: “You seem to have had enough violence here today to last for a lifetime.”

It looked as if there were a million dollars worth of flowers in the main ballroom. As I’ve said, the women looked spectacular. Shirley and I danced a little, but we weren’t enjoying it as much as we should. People kept stopping us to ask me questions about the murder. A little before midnight the drummer in the band that was playing gave with a long roll that presaged an announcement.

Out onto the bandstand came Claude Duval, his bald head glittering in the light from the crystal chandeliers. He was wearing a turtle-neck shirt, a gaudy plaid sports jacket, and black glasses. This was in marked contrast to the black and white ties, the evening gowns and jewels. Before he could speak, his name went around the room like a grass fire, and people started to applaud. Finally they were willing to listen.