Evil That Men Do by Hugh Pentecost Read Free Book Online

had been fired a long, long time ago, not that afternoon of March fourteenth. It was actually rusted. How long Slade had been frightening the life out of his audiences with a stacked deck, we had no way of knowing. One thing was certain. He had not been killed with his own gun.
    And there was no other gun to be found in Suite 9F.
    These were facts Lieutenant Hardy passed on to Chambrun a very short time after his arrival.
    There were two possibilities. Doris Standing had shot and killed Slade and disposed of the gun in some fashion before she called Chambrun’s office to report the death. Or someone else had let himself into the sitting room, or been admitted by Slade, done the shooting and walked calmly out into space. The windows in the sitting room overlooked Central Park. No one could possibly have fired the shot from outside the suite.
    “You pays your money and you takes your choice,” Hardy said in Chambrun’s office. “You are so damned perfectly soundproofed in this joint. The shot could have been fired in the suite and nobody in God’s world outside those rooms would have heard it. Doris Standing could have killed Slade, taken time to dress, gone out with the gun and disposed of it, and come back and phoned you. The medical examiner isn’t going to be able to pinpoint the time of death within an hour. Not to stick in court.”
    I knew that while Hardy talked, every trash-disposal unit in the hotel was being searched, plus the areas outside the hotel, where the gun might have been dropped from a window.
    “Unless the girl is lying about her key—” Hardy said.
    “There are three keys to the suite,” Chambrun said. “There are two for occupants of the suite—in case a couple has registered, and a spare kept by the management for emergencies. All accounted for.”
    “And the passkeys used by the maids and the housekeeper,” Hardy said. “You say Doris Standing always took 9F when she came to the Beaumont.”
    Chambrun nodded. “If she reserved in advance. It was pure chance that it happened to be available this morning when she arrived without a reservation.”
    Hardy was irritated. “It doesn’t matter too much,” he said. “It’s much more likely that, if there is anyone involved except Doris Standing, Slade let him in.”
    Chambrun was sitting at his desk, demitasse of Turkish coffee balanced in his left hand, cigarette in his right. His eyes seemed to be buried in their dark pouches. “Games, games, games,” he said. “I can’t get away from the thought of games. This girl is a member of a group that exists and thrives on playing games. The games are always basically dishonest, basically cruel, and designed to have a dramatic outcome. The most dramatic of all outcomes is death. They’ve been involved with death before, but indirectly. The outcome of the game leads to dishonor, shame, and then to suicide or to self-destruction, which is another kind of suicide without the act being overt. We don’t know that they’ve never been directly involved in a killing. If the game was successfully played, they wouldn’t be caught or even suspected. Killing one of their own number would be unexpected, but—” He hesitated, inhaling deeply on his cigarette. “Like dope addicts, the dose has to be stronger and stronger.”
    “Then you don’t believe the Standing girl’s story? The amnesia bit? The ‘what happened on the night of February twenty-fifth?’ bit?”
    Chambrun shrugged. “I don’t believe or disbelieve anything yet,” he said. “But at this stage of the proceedings, I have to keep telling myself this could all be part of a game. The murder could be what our modern football coaches call a part of ‘the game plan.’ ”
    “Look,” Hardy said, his irritation rising, “either she killed him and she’s lying, or someone else killed him and she’s not lying.”
    “Or someone else killed him and she knows all about it and hasn’t lied, simply because we haven’t asked her