Francesca Read online

  Still undecided, I groped on the night-table between the beds for my cigarette pack. My fingers felt the base of the lamp, then the room key linked to its brass plate, and, on Douglas Jones’ side of the small night-table, something cool and leathery to the touch. I frowned in the darkness, touching it again. I closed my fingers on it. Then I felt a hackle-raising chill on the short hairs in back of my neck, and I almost knocked the lamp over jabbing for the light switch.

  It was Douglas Jones’ hand, palm down, on the night-table. He lay on his back with the covers flung off and one arm stretched out. His eyelids were half shut. I saw glassy white between them. There was blood all over the pillow. His face had been criss-crossed with cuts, and a flap of flesh hung down his left cheek, exposing the cheekbone.

  Blood covered the bedsheet and his shirt, too. The shirt was almost ripped to shreds. He had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest. While sleeping. While dreaming of his Mary in Peekskill, or of Francesca Artemi.

  I took hold of the hand on the night-table and dug for the pulse. Not that there was any need to. There were more than enough stab wounds in Douglas Jones’ chest to have killed a whole platoon of freckle-faced corporals.

  chapter five

  ONE OF THE COPS who came in answer to my call knew enough English to lean on me in two languages. I had no reason to hide anything, not even the fact that I could speak French. I might be in a jam, and I knew it. Swiss cops think like their American opposite numbers. They lose no love on private investigators. And they had a gripe which wouldn’t have confronted me in Washington, Maryland or Virginia, where I’m licensed.

  While the lab boys were at work in my room the English-speaking cop took me to a vacant double down the hall. “On your passport, Mr. Drum,” he said, “your occupation is listed as private detective.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But of course you would have no authority to conduct an investigation here in Switzerland.”

  “My license and forty centimes would get me a ride on any streetcar in Geneva. I know that.”

  “Are you working on a case?”

  “No,” I said. That was true, as far as it went. I’d turned Spade down.

  “What was the dead man doing in your room?”

  I said Douglas Jones had been sleeping off a load and I’d gone out and returned to find him dead.

  “You went where?”

  I told him. He poked his head out the door, and a uniformed cop in the hallway listened to his instructions. He came back. “Was Jones drunk because he had been in some trouble?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  I said nothing.

  “Mr. Drum, whatever rights your license would give you to protect the interests of your client—”

  “I don’t have a client.”

  “—are abrogated,” he went on with a dry smile, “both by the fact that you are in a foreign country and that murder has been committed. What sort of trouble?”

  “Money trouble,” I said. I was stalling for time. The first shock of finding Douglas Jones stabbed to death had worn off, and I realized I’d have to spill everything I knew. But before I got in any deeper I wanted something working for me. I wanted him to know that Francesca Artemi could verify my whereabouts at the time of the murder.

  The cop was a big shaggy man in English tweeds, with large hands, a large smile and, fortunately, a large amount of patience. “You’re waiting for something,” he said. “I can even tell you for what—to have your alibi verified. I can’t say I blame you. And then?”

  Before I could answer, the uniformed cop returned. The big tweedy guy spoke to him for a few moments, and then told me: “You were at 17 Quai Gustav Ador with the cinema star Francesca Artemi. She verified that, and the night concierge verified the time you left. Francesca Artemi,” he repeated. “I envy you.”

  “I could have killed Jones before I took off,” I suggested.

  He seemed surprised. “You could have. But you did not.”

  It was my turn to be surprised. “Why not?”

  “In his sleep Jones must have accidentally pressed the night-table button to call the chambermaid. She came at eleven-forty-five. He was in bed, alive and snoring. He was killed some time after that, while you were with the Artemi. So now, now I will listen. And now you will talk.”

  It took me ten minutes to tell him everything that had happened since I flew to Geneva at Axel Spade’s expense. He listened without batting an eyelash. Then he said: “You don’t seriously believe Jones was murdered because he threatened Axel Spade with mayhem?”

  “I think he was murdered because he was sleeping in my room,” I said. “I was supposed to be the victim.”

  “Why?”

  “Pick up Yves Piaget,” I suggested.

  “You are accusing him?”

  “How many times was Jones stabbed?”

  “Sixteen wounds,” the big, shaggy man said, and winced. “Any one of a dozen could have been fatal.”

  “I saw Piaget in operation tonight,” I said. “He’s a guy who wouldn’t stop at one thrust with his knife. Especially if he didn’t like you. And he probably doesn’t like anybody.”

  “But why should he … Spade’s bodyguard.…”

  “Francesca Artemi’s scared of him. I don’t know why. She indicated Spade lost no love on him either, even though he worked for Spade.”

  “And so?”

  “Try this on for size. Spade really wants to find Howard Ridgway and the three million bucks. Piaget doesn’t. Piaget’s working for Ridgway, maybe. What kind of a hold he has on Spade, that I don’t know. I’d like to find out. Anyway, Spade thinks I’m a pretty sharp detective. That’s no secret. He flew me here at his expense just to discuss the case. If Piaget doesn’t want it solved, and if Spade blew my horn loud enough, Piaget decided to carve me.”

  “Believing you could succeed where Interpol and the police could not?”

  He had me there. That was bothering me too. I shrugged and said again: “Pick up Yves Piaget.”

  “And you, monsieur? What will you do?”

  “I’ll accept Spade’s retainer,” I admitted frankly, and waited for him to explode.

  “You cannot play detective here,” he said, raising his voice. “I, Inspector Dumas, tell you that. I realize how you must feel responsible for Douglas Jones’ death, but in Switzerland you are nothing but a tourist.”

  “Keep your shirt on, inspector,” I said. “Spade’s sending me to Chamonix.”

  “Chamonix, France,” Inspector Dumas said, beginning to smile.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “In Chamonix, for all it matters to me,” Dumas laughed, “you can be Maigret on a pair of skis. I might even say—good luck. I like you, Mr. Drum.”

  He asked me to accompany him to headquarters to put what I had told him in a deposition. While I was doing that he sent out a pick-up order for Yves Piaget. But the ugly little Genevois was not at home. Neither was Axel Spade.

  It was after three in the morning by the time I returned to the du Rhône. They gave me another room. They seemed surprised that I had returned so soon. I fell asleep like a man jumping head-first off a cliff.

  At ten I had breakfast in my room and put a call through to Spade’s office. He was neither in nor expected. I left my name.

  Fifteen minutes later a man named Hoffmann, who was with the “Union Bank Suisse, called. “If you are interested in the contract you discussed last evening,” he said vaguely, “I should be happy to discuss it with you further in my office. Would noon suit you?”

  “If you mean do I want to take on Spade’s case, the answer is yes.”

  “I am sorry,” he insisted, “but the name Spade means nothing to me. I am calling on behalf of the owner of a numbered bank account, you see. There are to be no names.”

  I went to the bank, and through the big electric-eye doors, and up to Hoffmann’s office. There were, as he predicted, no names.

  But there wa
s a check for me—five thousand Swiss francs. “A retainer,” Hoffmann said. “From my client. You understand?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Tell him I’m in.”

  I packed my B-4 bag and got my skis from the Du Rhône storeroom. As it turned out, I disappointed Francesca Artemi after all. I was too late to catch the morning bus for Chamonix. But a bus left from the depot behind the English church in Geneva at three that afternoon, and I was on it.

  chapter six

  THE BUS GOT ME to Chamonix, fifty-odd miles from Geneva, in time for cocktails.

  The twilight air was crisp and the ground was covered with many feet of snow. The chalet-style houses in the little skiing town were huddled together at the foot of Mont Blanc, Western Europe’s highest, and the skiers were just returning to them from their day’s runs.

  I checked into the Hotel Savoy, where the American skiing team was staying, courtesy of a couple of sports-minded philanthropists who were footing the bill, and watched the skiers come in, a Martini in my hand, an elbow on the bar and no idea at all as to how I would approach Helen Spade.

  “They beat bathing suits all hollow, don’t they?” a voice next to me said. I turned to see a man of about fifty with twinkling eyes and a large pepper-and-salt mustache. “Those stretch-pants, I mean,” he said, and he had a point.

  In twos and threes, the female contingent of the American team was entering the big lounge of the Savoy. They had been skiing the high slopes at Brevant and Flegère. They looked suntanned and windblown, their eyes sparkled with health, their skin glowed with it and they walked in with casually delightful grace despite their heavy, clodhopping ski-boots.

  “Stretch-pants-watching, you know,” my companion at the bar confided, “has become a spectator sport. It’s made skiing. I say, look at that one.” A girl had bent over to unlace her boots. The stretch-pants, which fit her legs and sleek bottom like a pair of gloves a couple of sizes too small, moved with the lithe feminine muscles of her thighs and the flaring curves of her hips. They left as much to the imagination as an extra layer of skin.

  “Jolly good,” my twinkling-eyed companion chuckled. “And not only stretch-pants.” There was a flurry of bright colors as ski-parkas were doffed, and sweaters, filled as healthy young girls’ sweaters will be filled, were all over the place.

  “I see what you mean,” I said.

  “Splendid specimens, aren’t they? May I have your drink refilled? Havill’s my name. Geoffrey Havill, Torquay, England. I say, do you ski? You’re young enough.”

  I said that I skied. He toasted me with his Pim’s Number One Cup, nuzzled the orange slice with his mustache and drank. “I say, you’re lucky then. Here’s to it. They won’t give me a tumble, you know. My fault. I don’t ski.”

  “Does it matter?”

  He looked shocked. “Does it matter? Of course it matters. Expert skiers are the most exclusive club in the world.” He sighed. “To everyone else they as much as say, look but don’t touch. Can I Christiana? Can I wedl? How is your Alrberg technique, old boy? What’s your time in the Giant Slalom? It wouldn’t matter if I was the greatest lover since—what’s his name?—yes, Valentino. Damn it all, if I don’t ski I’m out of it, and I’m too old to learn.” He sighed again. “But that hardly stops me from watching.”

  I bought the next round of drinks while Geoffrey Havill, Torquay, England, went on to tell me about the mores of skiers. He was an expert. “I follow the circuit,” he said. “Form of self-torture, I suppose, because these girls are lovely. St. Anton, Kitzbuhl, Davos, Megeve, Cortina—wherever they go you will find Geoffrey Havill. Spectator by nature, I imagine. And the wild life they lead—it’s something to see.

  “Skiing all day, and they jump when their coach cocks a finger. It’s hard work and it’s dangerous, and I suppose that’s why at night they are like an army on leave from the front. They are not supposed to drink. They drink like fish, the girls too. If their coach tried to stop them, they would likely throw him out the window. And they carouse into the wee hours, ignoring their coach’s curfew. He knows it. He can do nothing about it. As long as they are on the slopes at nine the following morning, bright-eyed and full of vinegar, he has got no complaint. So they dance, and they sing, and they race sports cars from here to Megeve and back if the roads aren’t too icy, and they—but you said you were a skier. Perhaps I am boring you.”

  I shook my head. Geoffrey Havill asked: “Did you ever make love to one of them? They do, you know. They are push-overs—for a fellow skier. Did you?”

  “The next time I do,” I said, “I’ll give you an engraved invitation.”

  “Sorry, old man. I do see what you mean. Invasion of privacy and all that. I hardly know you after all, so why should you reveal the delights of … but damn it all, how do they get those stretch-pants off? Peel them or—”

  “They unzip them,” I said.

  I had cut Geoffrey Havill intentionally, because a couple of elbows down the bar I’d heard the name Helen. How many girls on the American ski team could there be named Helen? But I was grateful to Havill. I’ve skied, but never in competition. This world was strange to me and I might have fumbled around trying to strike up an acquaintance with Helen Spade without success unless I knew what kind of approach to use. The leper’s bell that Havill admitted he wore told me what approach not to use. I could not be a stretch-pants-watcher like Havill. I would have to be a skier.

  “No, Helen, I’ll have to take a rain check,” the girl down the bar was saying. “Believe it or not, for once I’m pooped.”

  Helen said: “But they do a really keen twist at Whisky-a-Gogo—with French overtones, yet.”

  “Some other time.”

  I looked at Helen Spade. She was the sort of long-stemmed, blue-eyed, blonde-haired dish that would make even a. Parisian wish he’d been born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She was only a kid—twenty-one, her old man had said. Her figure was as good as Francesca Artemi’s, though slimmer. She wore black stretch-pants and an aqua sweater with a fierce Indian head guarding her high, tip-tilted breasts. Her blonde hair was a short and artfully disarrayed helmet cut close to her head. Sexpot body and a co-ed’s bright and sunny face—that was Helen Spade. Whatever else he had done, whatever had happened to him or might happen to him, I thought Howard Ridgway was one lucky guy.

  The approach I used, after her friend left the bar, was the oldest in the books. It was old enough, in fact, to throw a co-ed type off her stride. I moved toward her and put a half-smile, half-frown on my face and said: “Don’t I know you from somewhere? Aspen? Squaw Valley, maybe? Mount Snow?”

  She looked at me coolly. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You weren’t skiing in competition last summer by any chance, were you?”

  “Summer?” she asked blankly. “You don’t call waterskiing skiing, do you?”

  I laughed. She didn’t laugh. I said: “I meant in Chile.”

  Her interest quickened then, and after that it was easy. “Chile? No, I wasn’t. I’d love to ski in South America. I never have. I never met anybody who did—till now. Were you competing?”

  “Slalom,” I said, but went on deprecatingly, “not that it’s anything like the organized competition you have here. But it will be one day. Kind of primitive now. You’ve got to put pelts on the bottoms of your skis and hike cross-country all to heck and gone.”

  “It sounds like fun. Did you win?”

  “I entered a gate too fast on a patch of ice, caught an edge and took an eggbeater,” I said. “A guy from Argentina named Garcia or something like that copped the prize.”

  “Did you break anything?”

  I smiled shamefacedly. “What do you think, taking an eggbeater at forty miles an hour like that? I haven’t tied my long-thongs since.”

  She seemed horrified. “You mean you can’t ski any more?”

  “No, I’m okay now. But not for competition. Not that I ever entered anything like the Chamonix setup.”

  “Surely you’re being
modest, if you represented us in Chile.”

  “It was an unofficial type thing. I paid my own way.”

  “It sounds fascinating. I’d like to hear more about it.”

  “Listen,” I said, “if this is out of line or something, holler, but I couldn’t help overhearing you talk about that twist place.”

  She arched an eyebrow at me, but there was a smile on her lips.

  “Be my guest,” I said.

  “Well, if your leg holds out. I can twist all night. I love it. It was a leg you broke?”

  “Never mind the medical reports,” I said. “If you outlast me you get your money back.”

  “Who gets the bill?” She smiled again. “I mean, I don’t even know your name. I’m Helen Spade.”

  “Chet Drum, Helen. Eight-thirty be okay?”

  She said it would be okay, and left the bar. Geoffrey Havill caught my eye. “You’ve a line as smooth as glass,” he said admiringly. “But you picked yourself a strange one.”

  I asked him what he meant.

  “Didn’t you notice the engagement ring on her finger?”

  “I don’t want to marry the girl. Just take her twisting.”

  “My dear fellow, I merely meant I’ve never seen her out except in convoy with others of her delightful ilk. And I’m a chap who follows the girls at night.” He said that wistfully, and repeated his lament: “I do wish I could ski. Well, you are likely to see me at Whisky-a-Gogo. It is this year’s place in Chamonix, that sort of thing. And the twist!” He sighed. “Their après-ski pants are even tighter, and the twist of course is a vertical demonstration of what a girl can best do horizontally. I envy you. Did you really ski in Chile? It was so far-fetched that I almost found myself believing you.”

  Geoffrey Havill’s vicarious lechery was amusing, but it had a way of getting under your skin, too. I told him: “That’s what I said, isn’t it?”

  He guffawed and ordered another drink and returned to his hobby of ski-pants watching.

  chapter seven