Free Death After Breakfast by Hugh Pentecost Page B

press, hastily assembled in one of the small dining rooms off the lobby.
    I think I made my case, that the hotel was not responsible for what had happened to Laura Kauffman. I had no facts for them because I had no facts. Among those present was that old chicken hash connoisseur, Eliot Stevens. As the session broke up I found him waiting for me in the lobby.
    “Quite a day,” he said.
    “Quite a day,” I said.
    “Did Chambrun ever show up?” he asked.
    “With endless apologies for you,” I said, lying as blandly as I could.
    He gave me a narrow-eyed smile. “Have it your way,” he said. “I’m willing to sit on that story in the hope of getting a big one from him later. One question, just between us. Is there any connection between the Chambrun disappearance and the Kauffman case?”
    “If I could answer that, it would mean I knew what has happened to Chambrun,” I said. “At this moment we haven’t a notion. That’s just between us, Eliot.”
    “With the guarantee that I get first crack at the story when it breaks.”
    “A deal,” I said.
    He looked around the busy lobby. People were crowding into the bars early. It wasn’t business as usual. Everyone was trying to pump the doormen, the bellboys, the bartenders, any other identifiable members of the staff. Who killed her? Why?
    “Does it occur to you that you may have a sex maniac running wild in your hotel?” Stevens asked me.
    “Eliot, everything has occurred to me but the answer,” I said.
    I had, literally, to fight my way across the lobby to the elevators. Regular customers and most of the Beaumont’s guests know me by sight. If anyone could tell them something juicy, I was it. I thought I was going to get my clothes torn off, like some movie star caught out by his fans, before I got to the elevator and the safety of the second floor.
    I walked along the second floor corridor, mercifully deserted, to the door of my apartment and let myself in. I had company. Shirley was there, the only other person who had a key, and with her was a man I didn’t know. He was in his middle thirties, I thought, fishbelly pale, sick-looking really. He wore a seedy gray flannel suit that I recognized had cost a lot of money when it was new. Shirley looked very serious.
    “Forgive me for barging in, Mark,” she said. “This is Jim Kauffman.”
    The dead woman’s husband! I understood the ghostly pallor now, the unsteady hands, the faint tick at the corner of his mouth. This character was in the grip of a monumental hangover. Red-rimmed eyes looked despairingly from me to the little portable bar in the corner of my living room. This one was right on the verge of falling into a thousand pieces. I shook hands with him, and it was like taking hold of something dead.
    “I didn’t know who else to go to for help, Mark,” Shirley said.
    “Help?” I said.
    Kauffman sat down because it was obvious his legs wouldn’t hold him up any longer. He raised a hand to try to control the twitching of his mouth. Shirley was eyeing me with a peculiar steadiness, more like a stranger than a lover.
    “I went to find Jim,” she said. “I knew Hardy would be looking for him and I thought it was only fair to prepare him. After all, I sort of turned him in.”
    True, I thought.
    “When he told me his story I knew he’d never stand up under questioning by the cops. What to do? That’s why I brought him here, Mark.”
    “Right through the lobby?”
    “Nobody would know me the way I look now,” Kauffman said, in a hollow voice. He looked up at me. “I—I was here last night. I—I saw her.”
    “Well, why not? You’re her husband,” I said.
    He took in a kind of gasping breath. “After she was dead,” he said. “Oh, Jesus, Mr. Haskell, could I have just a little slug of your scotch?”
    I felt a cold chill run right down my back. “I think you better tell me about it first,” I said. One good drink and he’d probably pass out right here on my rug. Shirley was in