Free Death After Breakfast by Hugh Pentecost

Mark? I feel a little unsteady.”
    “Give you a slug of something?” I asked.
    “This is a time to keep your wits about you,” he said.
    “I take it you spent some time with Chambrun in the Spartan last night?”
    “Midnight till a little after one,” Doc said. “Sonofabitch threw more doubles than you could imagine. Decent people shouldn’t be allowed to play backgammon with him.”
    “Was there anything unusual about him last night, Doc? Did he seem tense, or nervous, or distracted?”
    “Not so distracted that he couldn’t concentrate on beating my brains out,” Doc said.
    The Spartan Bar is one of the last bastions of male chauvinism in the city. Not long ago it had been clearly marked to indicate that women were not admitted. There are no signs these days but there are subtle ways to let ladies know that they aren’t welcome. Its principal patrons are elderly gentlemen who sit around at tables playing chess, backgammon, and gin. And drinking. Doc Partridge, whose practice now is only the emergency care of hotel transients, spends most of his time in the Spartan, mourning with his cronies all the things of elegance and pleasure that had once made up his world and theirs. I wouldn’t for the world have told Doc that Chambrun had discussed a future for the Spartan Bar that would totally change it. Old-timers like Doc couldn’t go on forever. They were already thinning out.
    “You don’t hand around the Spartan very much,” Doc said, giving me a hostile look. “Things don’t change very much there.”
    “My time will come,” I said.
    “When you time comes it will have changed,” Doc said. “Thank God I won’t be here to see it. There is one thing that never changes. Pierre shows up there around midnight every night. Sometimes he stays, sometimes, when he’s needed somewhere else, it’s just to say hello. It reassures us old codgers. Our world is on an even keel as long as Pierre is around. We need to know it.”
    “So he came in last night to reassure you,” I said, prodding him gently.
    “Nothing different. He was mad as hell about something. That’s par for the course. He’s always mad as hell about something. He’s just finished his rounds, you see, and he’s always found something out of place, someone not doing his job up to Chambrun standards, maybe some finger marks on a bar glass in the Trapeze. ‘You got an instant prescription for high blood pressure?’ he asked me last night. ‘I feel inclined to commit a murder, Doc.’ I asked him who and he said: ‘Oh, to hell with it. Where’s the backgammon board?”’
    “That was it? No more talk about what made him angry?” I knew Chambrun had had his encounter with George Mayberry not too long before that. It would have explained his anger.
    “While we were setting up the board,” Doc said, “he muttered something about ‘that goddamned film company’ that was going to disrupt things. That’s tonight, isn’t it? And something about ‘the brainless owners.’ Then he grinned at me, handed me a dice cup, and said, ‘Go, sucker!’ That was all. He plays any game—chess, gin, backgammon, billiards—as if his life depended on it. The only thing on his mind for the next hour and a half was skinning me alive. Which he did.”
    “A medical question, Doc,” I said. “We’ve been concerned that he might have had a heart attack, a stroke, with nobody around—in some room we haven’t searched yet, some closet or storage space.”
    Doc snorted at me. “Pierre? Pierre is fifty-eight years old but he has the heart of a boy of twenty. You should envy his blood pressure. For all his blusterings and displays of anger I’ve never known a man with fewer tensions. He’s in perfect shape for a man much younger than he is.”
    “It’s good to hear,” I said, “but it doesn’t cheer me up. It makes the chance of some kind of violence greater.”
    “If anyone has harmed him,” Doc growled, “I will end my life by killing the