Free Gilded Nightmare by Hugh Pentecost

Haskell.”
    “I hope I haven’t misled you,” I said.
    At the door Amato turned back. “With the kangaroo tail soup you serve a Madeira sercial,” he said.
    For a man who couldn’t eat food his obsession with it was slightly comic. …
    Shelda has moments of infantilism. They appear almost always when she’s mad at me and thinks she can get even by making me jealous. She was reading a copy of Life when I let myself into her apartment. Have I admitted that I have a key?
    “He’s really quite masculine,” she said, not looking up.
    “Who? Cary Grant?”
    “Don’t be a dope!” she said. “I’m talking about Peter Wynn, of course.”
    “You have reason to be certain?”
    She gave me an evil little grin. “I was offered the opportunity.”
    “Fast worker, your Mr. Wynn.”
    “At the crucial moment we were interrupted,” Shelda said. And then she stopped playing games. “Oh, Mark, who could have done such a thing to that poor little dog?”
    “Someone not nice,” I said. “Was the news of that what interrupted Mr. Wynn’s pass at you?”
    “Don’t be a jerk,” Shelda said. “He didn’t make a pass at me. He was politely admiring, which does a girl good.”
    “How did he take the news about Puzzi?”
    “He said, ‘That sonofabitch!’ and left me flat.”
    “Which sonofabitch?”
    “He didn’t say. Do they know who did it, Mark?”
    “Not yet,” I said. “But depend on Chambrun and Jerry. They’ll find out.” I lit a cigarette. “There are no lines or wrinkles,” I said. “Can you suggest how she does it?”
    “Monkey glands,” she said, bitterly.
    “They went out in the twenties.”
    “She’s hooked you!”
    “Yes and no,” I said. “She’s fascinating. She’s also scary.” I made us a pair of Scotch on the rocks, and then I brought her up to date. It took two drinks to get through Sam’s stories about Charmian, with Shelda interrupting like the commercials on TV. I’d just finished the story of Sam’s father when the telephone rang. Shelda answered and then handed the phone to me. “Jerry Dodd for you.”
    “You’ve found the dognapper?” I asked him.
    “We’ve graduated to people,” he said, in a strange, hard voice. I scarcely recognized it.
    “What do you mean?”
    “The Baroness’ maid,” he said. “The little blond dish they call Heidi.”
    “What about her?”
    “She went to the corner drugstore to do an errand for the Baroness. Someone grabbed her, dragged her into an alley, bashed in her skull, and slashed her to pieces with a dull knife.”
    “Like Puzzi!” I said. My mouth was cotton-dry.
    “Like Puzzi,” Jerry said. “You better get over here.”

Part Two

1
    A S I’VE SAID BEFORE, a big hotel like the Beaumont is in reality a small town in itself. The same things happen in it that happen in any other town; births, natural deaths, suicides, fires, divorces, clandestine love affairs, robberies, business failures, celebrations, funerals—and murder.
    Technically, the murder of the girl named Heidi had probably not taken place in the hotel. I say probably not because her body had been found a block away in an alley, and so far there was no indication that it had been carried there from somewhere else, like the hotel. But the dramatis personae were very much a part of the hotel. The police investigation would be centered there with Charmian Zetterstrom and her curious staff. The story would make a field day for the news media, and the Beaumont would come in for an unwanted chunk of lurid publicity. My job, I knew, as I hurried back to the hotel from Shelda’s, would be to soft-pedal that aspect of it as best I could.
    The lobby looked normally quiet for eight o’clock in the evening, but I’d noticed two police cars parked down the block from the entrance as I came in.
    Karl Nevers, the night reservation man, was on duty at the desk and I hurried over to him.
    “The boss’s office,” he said, before I got out a question. “Hardy’s with