Read Online Girl Watcher's Funeral by Hugh Pentecost - Free Book Online Page A

else,” I said cheerfully.
    â€œWhat? What are we looking for, Mark? Five billion soda mint tablets have been sold in New York in the last twenty-four hours. What evidence can we expect to find? No fingerprints—no nothing.”
    â€œSo we stay very close to these fashion kids for the next two days and hope somebody’s foot will slip. They do an awful lot of drinking. Someone might get careless.”
    â€œAnd Christmas might come in July,” Chambrun said. “But I don’t know anything better to do but watch and listen.”
    â€œYou want me to go back up to nineteen-A?” I asked.
    â€œI think so. But first take a quick tour of the hotel, Mark. I’m anchored here waiting for someone from the police commissioner’s office to try to convince me that the Beaumont should be swarming with cops.”
    No matter what was shaking the earth under our feet, the Beaumont’s guests were never to guess that anything threatened the Swiss-watch perfection of the hotel’s routines.
    It was a reasonably quiet night in the Beaumont. All vestiges of the fashion show had disappeared from the Blue Lagoon Room, presided over with his usual magnificent calm by Mr. Cardoza. Soft lights, soft music, and gourmet food were its principal attraction. A particularly noisy comedian of the Don Rickles school would shatter the quiet during the two upcoming floor shows.
    The Spartan Bar, presided over by Mr. Novotny, was cathedral-quiet. This is a no-women-admitted room which is really a sort of club for elegant old gentlemen. Two white heads were bent over a chessboard in the far corner.
    A charity ball for the benefit of a New Jersey PTA occupied the ballroom. The tickets were fifty dollars a head and the place was crowded, but the fashion kids on the 19 th floor would have shuddered at the 1935 styles.
    I saved the Trapeze Bar till last because it’s my favorite hangout in the hotel. I’d had no dinner, and I decided before I went back to the blast in 19A, I’d better have a Jack Daniels on the rocks and a steak sandwich to blot out the memory of that devastating martini schedule.
    The Trapeze Bar is suspended in space, like a birdcage, over the foyer to the Grand Ballroom. The walls of the Trapeze are elaborate Florentine grillwork. An artist of the Calder school has decorated it with mobiles of circus performers working on trapezes. They sway slightly in the draught from a concealed air conditioning system, giving you the impression, on your third drink, that the whole place is swinging gently in space. The maître d’ is Mr. Del Greco, who can tell you the exact boiling point of ten thousand of New York’s steady drinkers.
    The Trapeze was crowded, the atmosphere gay yet orderly. Mr. Del Greco saw me and did something complex with his eyebrows that was plainly asking me whether I wanted to stand at the crowded bar or have a table. I didn’t see any empty tables, but I knew one would appear if I asked. I made motions like a man cutting a steak and eating it. And then someone called out my name.
    â€œMark!”
    It was Jan Morse. She was sitting alone at a corner table, something that looked like a Bloody Mary in front of her. She’d changed out of the jump suit into a raspberry-colored wool thing, very short in the skirt, very scooped out at the neckline. Sexual weaponry, I thought, remembering Nikos’s phrase by way of Jan. Some of the highest-priced call girls in New York wander in and out of the Trapeze. She looked like luxury goods, I thought, and realized I was still mad at her.
    I didn’t mean to do more than wave, but I found my feet taking me over to her table.
    â€œI’ve been looking all over for you,” she said.
    Mr. Del Greco was at my elbow. “Will you join Miss Morse, or shall I get you a table, Mr. Haskell?”
    â€œYou can get me a—”
    â€œOf course he’ll join me,” Jan interrupted. “We didn’t