Death After Breakfast Read Online Free PDF Page A

were pretty sensational.
    “Hi, Gussie,” I said, when I found her in the small ballroom.
    “Keep you scurrilous tongue off me, you bastard,” she said. She didn’t like to be reminded of her real name. “Where is Chambrun?”
    “Tied up,” I said, and almost choked when I said it.
    “I was promised mirrors,” Gussie said. “Six full-length mirrors in the dressing room. How do you expect my girls to get put together if they can’t see what they’re doing?”
    “Six full-length mirrors,” I said, trying to concentrate on where they could be found.
    “So get off your butt and produce them,” Gussie said. Her eyes narrowed. “There’s a rumor around that Chambrun has skipped town.”
    The news was beginning to leak. Too many people were involved in the anxious search.
    “Your models drive him up the wall,” I said. “They remind him of his youth.”
    “Don’t you get any ideas about them, buster,” Gussie said. They’re not here to titillate the male population. They’re here to sell dresses to women. Six full-length mirrors on the double, please. That ‘please’ is a figure of speech!”
    A half-naked girl appeared in the doorway to the dressing room. “Madame DeLune, if you could—”
    I might as well have been wallpaper as far as the nude model was concerned.
    “You see, she needs a mirror!” Gussie said, and charged off.
    In the lobby I got in touch with the supply department and asked for six full-length mirrors on the double. “Her show begins in less than an hour.”
    “I’ll have to steal a few somewhere,” the supply department told me.
    “There’s one on the back of my bathroom door,” I said.
    As I put down the house phone I saw Shirley coming toward me across the lobby from the front entrance. She was carrying a briefcase under her arm.
    I’m not much at rhapsodizing in words. I have thought of other women “forever,” and at the time I thought that, was convinced that each of them was the most beautiful ever. But, whatever my bias at the moment, Shirley was the most. Her blond hair, worn loose and down to her shoulders, was really gold. She was small-boned and she moved with the grace of a ballet dancer. Her wide blue eyes were devoid of any suspicion or cynicism. Beauty, I think, is as much personality as bone structure, skin texture, or measurements. The girl was so open, so apparently uncomplicated, so genuine that she took your breath away in a world of neurotics and psychos, in a world where a Chambrun could be whisked away into oblivion and a woman could be butchered in her bedroom in a civilized hotel. I wanted to take her in my arms as she came up to me, but I restrained myself. Too many people had their eyes on her as she crossed the lobby. I took her by the arm, without speaking, and led her toward a small private office back of the main desk. I guess, when she looked at me, she saw that the situation was real and serious.
    In the small office I kissed her. “Just seeing you lifts loads,” I said. “Mark, what is it?”
    I sat down beside her on a green leather sofa and took her hand. My hand wasn’t steady.
    “Whatever I tell you is strictly off the record,” I said. “Don’t protest, luv. When I tell you, you’ll see why.” She waited, without comment. “Chambrun has disappeared. We suspect some kind of violence, perhaps a kidnapping.”
    “Mark!”
    “In searching for him we have been going from room to room in the hotel. We didn’t find him in Laura Kauffman’s suite, but we found her. She had been assaulted, probably raped, and stabbed about twenty times.”
    “My God!” Her hand tightened in mine.
    “The police need whatever they can find out about Laura. That’s why I asked you to bring what you have.”
    “But, Mark, what I have is just—gossip!”
    “Probably truer than the truth,” I said. “You ready to go up to talk with Hardy? He’s the homicide man.”
    “Do I have to see—?”
    “No, luv.”
    We went up to twenty-one and