Death After Breakfast Read Online Free PDF Page B

war and the Hemmerlys left their beloved Europe and came back to New York. Papa was making millions providing steel for tanks and guns and battleships. Laura spent her time, I gather, entertaining the armed forces. I use the word ‘entertain’ in a loose sense.”
    “I get the point,” Hardy said.
    “After the war Laura went hotfooting it back to Papa’s villa in France. That’s when she met and married Baron Siegfried von Holtzmann.”
    “Sounds rather German for the south of France at that time,” Hardy said.
    “Von Holtzmann was an unusual German,” Shirley said. “Very blond, very handsome, with an eyeglass and a dueling scar. German army to the hilt, you’d say. But he spent the war underground, the story goes, dedicated without success to destroying Hitler and his puppets. He did a lot, we are told, to help the French Resistance.”
    “Chambrun would know about him,” I said. Only there was no Chambrun to ask.
    “Von Holtzmann has no connection with this,” Shirley said. “In 1953, after five years of marriage to Laura, he blew his brains out in a hotel room in Paris. He left Laura with his title and apparently no explanation for his self-destruction.”
    “That’s twenty-five years ago!” I said.
    Shirley nodded. “The year I was born,” she said.
    So now I knew—about Shirley.
    “For twenty years after that,” Shirley went on, “Laura became the hostess in the swinging social set. New York, Paris, Florence, Geneva, Acapulco. She has a place there, too. I grew up reading about her in the social columns. My first job as a reporter on a newspaper was covering her third wedding. That was seven years ago.”
    Shirley fumbled in her briefcase and came up with an eight-by-ten photograph. It was of a very lovely woman in a gorgeous wedding gown, attended by the groom, one James Kauffman.
    “My God, she was forty-six,” Hardy said. “She looks thirty.”
    “She had a secret a lot of us hope we have at her age,” Shirley said.
    “That’s Kauffman?” Hardy asked. “He looks her age in the picture.”
    “You mean thirty? That’s about what he was. Sixteen years younger. A stockbroker in Wall Street. He didn’t belong in her set—the social set, I mean. I never did know how and where they met, but he was quickly indoctrinated. Photographs, news items, gossip tidbits. I felt he was more like a faithful watchdog than a romantic husband. He dropped out of sight in Wall Street. Why shouldn’t he, with all her money? No need to work. And then, a couple of years ago, he dropped out of sight everywhere. Laura was seen with other escorts. There was never any official announcement, he just sort of vanished. By then I was a prier, what Mark calls a Peeping Thomas. I blush to tell you that I tried to locate Jim Kauffman.”
    “Any luck?”
    She hesitated. “In my business we are supposed to be ruthless, Lieutenant,” she said. That means utter disregard for privacy. I—I’ve never played it that way, particularly when there is a tragedy below the surface.”
    “There is a tragedy involving Kauffman?” Hardy asked.
    “I suppose you have to find him,” Shirley said.
    “His wife has been murdered, Miss Thomas.”
    Shirley nodded. “Jim Kauffman has become a hopeless alcoholic,” she said. “A skid-row bum.”
    “She left him without money?”
    “Maybe. Maybe he wouldn’t take what she offered. I found him down in the Bowery. He sometimes sleeps and eats in a Salvation Army shelter down there. I—I tried to talk to him but he didn’t make much sense. It was too painful to pursue it, and I don’t use that kind of thing in my column. I felt sorry enough to want to help him, but he just turned his back on me and walked away. Staggered away would be nearer to the fact.”
    “Did he speak with any bitterness about his wife? ”
    “He wouldn’t talk about her at all,” Shirley said, “which might be interpreted as a kind of bitterness, I suppose.”
    The phone rang and Hardy answered