Free Golden Trap by Hugh Pentecost Page B

“You’re suggesting kid games,” he said to Chambrun. “I’ve got a murder on my hands and another man threatened with assassination. Am I supposed to sit on my behind while you people drink martinis and chat about old times with a bunch of highly probable suspects? I ought to drag every goddam one of them up here now and put ’em over the jumps.”
    “You do that and you scare them off,” Chambrun said. “It would be like surrounding George with the Coldstream Guards. Whoever is interested in him just backs away and waits until we get tired of protecting him—or he gets tired of being anchored in one place. Can you connect any of these people with Smith?”
    “I can’t connect anyone with Smith, or Smith with anyone,” Hardy muttered.
    “Until you can, just let us sniff around the edges,” Chambrun said. “We can’t hurt your case and we may damn well help it.”
    “I haven’t got a case,” Hardy said.
    The phone rang and I answered it. It was Ruysdale. One of Hardy’s men was trying to locate him. He had a ballistics report. Hardy ordered him to come straight to my place.
    Neither Chambrun nor Hardy would have a drink, but I made one for me and one for Lovelace. As I came back with them Hardy was scowling over the report his man had brought. Finally he looked up.
    “The bullet that killed John Smith didn’t come from Lovelace’s gun or from his own. That means we don’t have the murder weapon.”
    “And it means George is in the clear,” Chambrun said.
    Lovelace took a swig of his Scotch. He wasn’t drinking carefully anymore. “So you see, Lieutenant, it is, to coin a phrase, open season on good old George!” He finished his drink in one more swallow and held out the glass to me.
    “Reports on Smith’s fingerprints and other pertinent data should be back here from the FBI in a couple of hours,” Hardy said. “Play your fancy games if you like, but I’m pulling in the whole lot of them the minute I have one slim lead.”

Part 2

One
    T HE TRAPEZE BAR IN THE early evening is a way station for people going on to private parties or to one of the hotel’s dining areas. When I got there, looking for Shelda and Curtis Dark, the Trapeze was doing a rushing business. Mr. Del Greco and an assistant maître d’ were moving about among the tables helping the waiters to take orders. Mr. Del Greco prides himself on the swiftness and efficiency with which orders are filled in this room.
    The clientele at the Trapeze are not the ordinary off-the-avenue customers you find in most Fifth Avenue hotels. They are, by and large, not the new rich or the publicity-hungry celebrities from Hollywood or Madison Avenue. The women are expensively put together, dressed for the evening, jeweled. You’ll see more different hair colors there than God ever dreamed of. The men wear the black and white uniform of dinner jacket or tails. There is a curious blankness to the faces. They aren’t there to display themselves to a gawking public. This was their room, not open to autograph hunters or glamor-struck adolescents.
    Two of the half dozen people in the room not yet dressed for the evening were Shelda and young Curtis Dark. I paused in the entry way, watching them. To me they stood out like neon signs in the dark. Shelda is Shelda, her gold hair shimmering in the lights from the glass chandeliers, her basic black dress revealing all the soft and lovely curves of her body. I wondered how much the blankness in the faces of the older men who looked at her, pretending not to notice too much, hid a sudden hunger for lost youth and adventure. Shelda is something! She has a gift for listening with a kind of breathless eagerness that makes you think what you are saying is the most important thing in the world. She had turned on that particular facet of her charm for young Dark.
    I watched him with a slight pang of my own. He was tall, slender, with the almost beautiful face of an Apollo on a coin. His eyes were blue and