Golden Trap (13 page)

Shelda is always a surprise. She spoke to the maid in fluent French and was instantly embraced and showered with a flow of Gallic hysteria. We were ushered into the dressing room and I closed the door and locked it.

There was a tiny reception room, and beyond the curtained doorway we could hear Jeanette Arnaud sobbing—out of control.

“Call Dr. Partridge,” Shelda said, and went through the curtain to the room beyond. I was her boss, you realize, but I took the orders. There was a wall phone in the outer room and I got Mrs. Kiley, the switchboard chief, to hunt down Partridge, who is our house physician.

The maid had followed Shelda into the dressing room and I could hear the three of them, all chattering away in French. I didn’t understand a word any of them were saying. My high-school French couldn’t keep pace with it.

Someone began to pound on the dressing-room door. I braced myself and opened it. The young pianist was there, with a package in his hand.

“Spirits of ammonia,” he said in a good Brooklyn accent.

I let him in and locked the door in the face of the newsmen again. He went straight into the women. The pianist’s French was loud, cajoling, and very American.

After a while things seemed to quiet down a little, and then the curtain parted and Shelda came out to me. Her usually cheery little face with its pert, upturned nose was wrinkled in an effort to fight back tears.

“Would you mind very much kissing me?” she asked.

“Be my guest,” I said.

There are kisses and kisses. This was the very rare unimpassioned but warm kind you get from someone who really cares and has a need for you. I felt very male and important for a moment.

“What is it, baby?” I asked when she finally put her head down on my shoulder.

“I—I wanted to remind myself that, in spite of all the excitement around us, what we have is very simple and uncomplicated and precious. I love you, Mark.”

“The pleasure is all mine,” I said, and kissed her ear.

Shelda turned away from me and began to do things to her face with the female tools of the trade she produced from the little gold mesh bag she was carrying.

“It was just at the beginning of her career, seven years ago,” Shelda said. “She’d done a little singing at some Paris cafés, and her agent got her an engagement in Madrid. The second night she was there she was accosted by two men when she left the theatre, or nightclub, or whatever it was. She was dragged into a car and driven out into the country somewhere. There she was taken into a house and delivered, like a package, to a man. This man, without preliminaries or conversation, forced her into a room where he cold-bloodedly and savagely raped her—beat her and raped her. She was then dragged back into the car by the two men, returned to Madrid, and thrown out on a street corner, several miles from her hotel. She reported to the police, but they never found the man, nor could she give them any idea where she’d been taken in the car. She was in a state of shock and spent a good part of a year in a psychiatric clinic. Tonight she walked out on stage—and saw the man sitting at a table. She—she flipped her wig, Mark. I guess you can’t blame her.”

“Rogoff!” I said. He’d been right in front of her with his collection of tarts. It was his kind of deal.

Shelda shook her head slowly, not looking at me. “It was your Mr. George Lovelace,” she said.

I
FELT AS IF SOMEONE
had kicked me in the pit of the stomach.

Lovelace was really a stranger to me, but he was Chambrun’s trusted friend. In the course of twelve hours I hadn’t come to feel anything very personal for Lovelace except a kind of sympathy for the corner he was in. He was a good guy because Chambrun said he was a good guy. I would do anything for Chambrun so I would do anything for Chambrun’s friend. But I didn’t know him well enough to laugh off the story Shelda brought me from Jeanette Arnaud. I knew I had to take the story to Chambrun, and I knew it would rock him back on his heels. The one area where Chambrun considered himself infallible was his judgment of people. To have been wrong about Lovelace would be shattering. I’ve heard him say many times that when the time came that he didn’t know what was going on in the Beaumont and he began to make mistakes about people, he would retire and write that inevitable book about how to run a luxury hotel. He said it as a joke, because the idea was inconceivable.

Someone was knocking rather sharply on the dressing-room door again. It was authoritative. I turned away from Shelda and opened up. Chambrun confronted me. Just behind him were Monsieur and Madame Martine.

“Madame Martine is an old friend of Mademoiselle Arnaud’s,” Chambrun said. “Can she be helpful, Mark?

Shelda moved swiftly through the curtains to where the singer and her maid and pianist were. I heard Jeanette Arnaud’s voice rise excitedly. Evidently she was eager to see Collette Martine. Chambrun stood aside and the French woman and her bearded husband came in. I was reintroduced and they gave me a cool hello and went into the room beyond.

“Do you know what happened?” Chambrun asked.

I nodded slowly. “Secondhand, through Shelda,” I said. And I told him. His face was rock-hard when I’d finished, his black eyes glittering with anger.

“Bring Lovelace to my office,” he said. He started to go, and then hesitated. “Louis!” he called out.

Louis Martine came through the curtains. Evidently he’d already heard the story. He and Chambrun stared at each other without speaking for a moment.

“I would like to make sure,” Chambrun said, finally, “that Miss Arnaud doesn’t leave the hotel until she is confronted with Lovelace close up. Across a dimly lighted room she could be mistaken.”

“It is barely possible,” Martine said in a flat voice. “A woman who has been through such an experience is not likely to make a mistake, Pierre.”

“Nonsense,” Chambrun said. “Rape victims make that kind of mistake ten times a day in our local police stations. Hysteria breeds just exactly that kind of error. You and Collette do what you can to quiet her down and then call my office. I’ll arrange for a quiet confrontation.”

“I tell you, Pierre, all the evidence goes to show that Charles Veauclaire—or Lovelace—is no longer the man we knew years ago,” Martine said. “He cracked. He became a senseless killer and God knows what else.”

“I’ll believe that, Louis, when it’s proven,” Chambrun said. He looked at me. “Bring Lovelace,” he said, and was gone.

The Blue Lagoon was still buzzing with excitement when I walked back through the velvet rope. I felt as if I was approaching a stranger as I headed toward Lovelace and Marilyn. Cardoza was hovering in the background. I stopped to speak to him.

“The boss wants Lovelace in his office,” I said. “Tell Jerry we’re headed there, will you?”

Cardoza nodded and drifted toward the telephone at his station by the entrance.

“What on earth happened to her?” Marilyn asked as I reached the table.

“Hysterics—overtired—God knows,” I said. I turned to Lovelace. “Chambrun wants us in his office.”

I think he sensed something different in my attitude toward him. He looked at me, frowning. “Something new?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“May I come too?” Marilyn asked. “I’m part of the army now, aren’t I?”

“I’m afraid not,” I said.

“Does Mr. Chambrun know that I—?”

“No. Not yet,” I said.

“What the hell’s happened, Mark?” Lovelace asked. “Something to do with the singer?”

He had to know the answer to that if Jeanette Arnaud was right. Marilyn reached out and touched his hand.

“I’ll wait here for you,” she said.

Lovelace got up and we walked together out into the lobby. I saw Mike Maggio and two of Jerry’s men on the ready. One of the security boys walked behind us to the elevator and made the trip to the second floor with us.

Ruysdale should have been home hours ago but she was at her desk in the anteroom, looking as crisp as if she’d just arrived for a day’s work.

“You’re to go straight in,” she said.

Chambrun was standing by the windows at the far side of his office. He turned as he heard us come in. When he was angry he could look like a hanging judge. His little black eyes were slits under the heavy lids.

“You told him?” he asked me.

“No,” I said.

“What’s with you two?” Lovelace asked. He couldn’t miss the smell of trouble.

“Mademoiselle Arnaud says she knows you,” Chambrun said.

Lovelace frowned. “I don’t recall ever hearing her work,” he said. “I certainly don’t know her personally.”

“You would remember the occasion,” Chambrun said.

“I don’t like this,” Lovelace said. “Would you mind very much coming to the point, Pierre?”

“I do mind—very much,” Chambrun said. “But I will. Madrid. Seven years ago.”

Nothing happened to Lovelace’s face except a look of exasperation. “What about Madrid seven years ago?”

“Miss Arnaud was singing there in a café,” Chambrun said. “One night after a performance she was kidnapped by two men, driven to a house somewhere out in the country. There she was delivered to a third man who beat her and raped her. She says that third man was you.”

Lovelace’s mouth dropped open. “You have to be kidding,” he said.

“When she came out onto the stage tonight she saw you, and that’s what sent her off into hysterics.”

“For God’s sake, Pierre, you don’t buy that, do you?” Lovelace said. He, too, was suddenly angry.

“Why shouldn’t I?” Chambrun said. “You say you don’t know Miss Arnaud. I assume you are saying also that she doesn’t know you. Then what could she have against you and why would she make such a charge?”

“God only knows!” Lovelace said.

“Would you be willing to face her?” Chambrun asked.

“Of course.”

Chambrun stepped over to his desk and pressed the intercom button. “Call Louis Martine and have him bring Mademoiselle Arnaud here.” He clicked off the box.

“Louis?” Lovelace said. “She’s a friend of Louis’s?”

“Of Collette’s in particular.”

“My God, Pierre!”

“What?”

“Of course Collette will believe her, and therefore so will Louis.”

“If she’s lying, George, why is she lying?”

“I don’t know!” Lovelace said. His hands shook as he lit a cigarette. “I saw her come out on stage tonight. I swear I’ve never seen her before—except for large blown-up photographs outside a nightspot in Paris where she was singing a couple of years ago. She meant absolutely nothing to me except that she’s a show business name on the Continent. When she blew her top up there, it never for a moment occurred to me that it had any connection with me. She’s a total stranger.”

“She can have been mistaken,” Chambrun said quietly. “She may admit that when she sees you here, close up. She can be deliberately lying, which could only mean that she is part of the conspiracy to destroy you, George. Or you can be lying, and you did assault her in Spain.”

“You think that last is possible?” Lovelace asked, his face frozen.

Chambrun walked over to his Turkish coffee-maker. He spoke without looking at his friend while he filled a demitasse.

“There isn’t time, George, for niceties. There isn’t time for me to tell you that I know the real George Lovelace couldn’t possibly be guilty of such a thing.”

“What do you mean—the real George Lovelace?”

“Sometimes, under severe pressures, a man cracks—comes apart—is no longer his real self. You have lived under pressures for twenty-five years that the average man couldn’t endure for a month. You could have gone to pieces from time to time, George—you could have adopted a schizoid pattern. You could be a modern Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

“And not remember?” Lovelace asked in a low voice. “Not turn myself in afterwards?”

“Louis says you became a psychotic killer somewhere along the way during the war,” Chambrun said. “He says there is a trail of senseless killings stretching out over the years.”

“Louis is under the influence of his wife, who hates me!”

Chambrun sipped the strong black Turkish brew. “We have to consider all the possibilities, George,” he said. The harshness had gone out of his voice. He looked down at the blinking red light on his telephone. “Would you like a drink before Miss Arnaud is brought in here?”

“Please!”

Chambrun waved toward the portable bar. “Help yourself,” he said.’ He avoided looking at me.

I could see the line his thinking was taking, and how deeply it hurt him. His friend could be guilty—guilty of this horror presented by Jeanette Arnaud and perhaps a whole series of others. It could be a sickness, only now being revealed to outsiders. If it was, Chambrun would still stand by him, but the going would be very rough.

He watched Lovelace fill a glass at the bar and toss off an unbelievably stiff drink of Scotch in two long swallows. Then he pressed the button on his intercom box.

“Monsieur and Madame Martine with Miss Arnaud,” Ruysdale’s cool voice said.

“Show them in, please,” Chambrun said.

I could feel a prickling on the back of my neck. I could see Lovelace put down his glass and figuratively brace himself.

The office door opened and the three people whom Lovelace had to think of as mortal enemies came into the room. Jeanette Arnaud was in the protection of Louis Martine’s strong arm. Collette Martine walked beside them, rigid, straight. Her eyes looked for Lovelace, found him, stayed fixed on him, unblinking. The Arnaud girl seemed to shrink against Martine’s lithe body. Her eyes were wide as saucers.

Chambrun moved toward her. “I’m sorry to have to put you through this, Mademoiselle,” he said. “The accusation you’ve made is, of course, most serious. It is made against a man whom I think of as friend. He denies ever having seen you before tonight. It’s possible, in the half light of the Blue Lagoon, that you were mistaken. I’ve asked you to come here, quietly, where you can see Mr. Lovelace and be absolutely certain about him.”

Her answer was in the wide, frightened eyes. She pointed a shaking finger at Lovelace. “There can be no doubt,” she whispered. “He is the man!”

The action was so sudden neither Chambrun nor I could move. Collette Martine launched herself at Lovelace with a fury the like of which I’ve never seen. She was on him, screaming at him in French, her long fingernails tearing at his face. He stood like a statue, not lifting a hand to protect himself.