Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. No. 75, April 1959, British Edition

Rufus King The Tigress of the Chateau Plage

The porcelain miniature was an Aladdin’s lamp that could bring Henri Pazz his heart’s desire — even against so ruthless a foe as la femme formidable.

Madame Dufour emerged from her mezzanine suite and descended marble stairs to the rococo lounge of the Chateau Plage.

Outside, beyond a bank of plate-lass doors that led to a flagged terrace and an irritable Atlantic Ocean, the late afternoon was miserable. The weather was creating one of those rare mid-January rhapsodies of wind and tropical rain that drive the Chambers of Commerce along Florida’s Gold Coast into spells of acute despair and premonitions of bankruptcy.

Madame Dufour both owned and personally operated the Chateau Plage, which remained one of the few finer old hotels left standing along that costly stretch of sand between Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale.

Madame herself was a perfect specimen of what the French are accustomed to label la femme formidable. At the age of ten she had been struck totally bald as the result of typhoid fever, a tonsorial disaster that had naturally distorted the whole course of her childhood and adult life into odd channels. Even the foggiest psychiatrist would have attributed her absolute amorality to this catastrophe of hairlessness, and with no professional bother about stretching her out on a couch.

For years now a naturalized citizen of the United States, Madame had been born in Montreal during the closing period of Queen Victoria’s tightly bodiced reign. Her appearance (whenever she thought to wear one of her scarlet wigs) was superb for her years, while her bold features showed the bland arrogance common to ladies of the French noblesse who had managed to retain their heads upon their necks. Her intensely dark hypnotic eyes had the waiting quality of unfired bullets, and the Chateau’s selective clientele naturally — being fed up to their fleshpots and gilt-edged incomes with the commonplace — adored her.

While she crossed the lounge to the reception desk, several bets changed hands among small groups of guests who were marooned indoors by the weather. There was a running book on whether her public appearances would be scarlet-wigged or wigless — in the latter stage, of course, she rather resembled a caricature of Yul Brynner, the bizarre baldness not detracting an iota from her commanding presence and general aura of her reserved power.

She said to the desk clerk, “Let me have the reservations for this evening’s arrivals, Enrico.”

Enrico, a killingly good-looking type full of rich dark Italian blood, took six cards from the rack. Madame Dufour made a pretense of inspecting them. She was perfectly aware of their contents from her regular early-morning checkup, and she knew exactly the one she intended to put to her uses.

“This one, Enrico. Mr. J. Compton Bell. You will change the location of his room. I wish this number reserved for a Mr. Henri Pazz. It is understood that Mr. Pazz arrives on the evening flight from Montreal.”

Enrico shrugged with that Latin effect which translates each gesture into a delicately suggested seduction. He was indifferent to the bedded or unbedded future status of J. Compton Bell, whom he knew to be an inconsequential cousin to the soap dynasty outfit whose 30 room winter home lay a mile or so along the beach.

“But impossible, Madame. We are full up.”

Madame’s basilisk eyes pinned him coldly. “There is always 1207,” she said.

The shock of astonishment stamped itself on Enrico’s classic features. “You wish Mr. Bell transferred to 1207?”

“I wish.”

Enrico tore the Bell reservation in half. He took a fresh card and assigned the room number being held for J. Compton Bell to this out-of-the-blue Henri Pazz. “Credit rating, Madame?”

Madame Dufour’s brief smile reflected the glint of distant icebergs. “Unlimited.”

The situation made little sense to Enrico as he took a blank card and assigned the negligible cousin of the soap makers to 1207. It was a puzzle of magnitude. 1207, a handsome suite of plum velvets, ormolu and Louis Quinze, was a constant vacancy, one held strictly in reserve for the unheralded appearance of some personage of exceptional prominence. Not over four times during Enrico’s tenure had it been assigned — the last having been to an ousted South American dictator in passage, incognito, to a Caribbean hideout where reposed three of his eight mistresses and the main bulk of his loot.

That suite 1207 should now be placed at the disposal of this abysmally obscure, this very tiny cake of soap, was a grotesque. And how about this Montreal Henri Pazz with his for-the-good-Madonna’s-sake unlimited credit? Why had he not been awarded this unique distinction of the VIP suite, and the Bell nonentity permitted to retain his more modest and certainly more seemly room-and-bath?

Shortly after seven o’clock Madame Dufour, a monolith of patience in dark violet crêpe-de-Chine, acknowledged the nod of a page boy stationed at the lounge’s front entrance by rising from a citron damask love seat and moving toward the shallow staircase that descended to the lobby doors.

A young man entered, followed by a bellboy carrying a winter overcoat and a single suitcase, the latter inexpensively manufactured out of imitation leather in a bilious yellow. Madame stood immobile and regarded with intense if — passive concentration the advancing youth. He was a burly young brute, compact, with an acrobat’s physique and dressed with a flashy clutch toward elegance. His features stirred sharp and now dreaded memories of long ago.

“It is Henri?”

“Madame.”

She signaled to the bellboy. He departed desk ward with the overcoat and bag, being evidently under orders.

Madame continued her close study of Henri’s face. Yes, it was there, that reluctant cowardice of character no matter how protectively overlaid by a coating of strength.

“You have your grandfather’s look. The lashes of his eyes.”

“So it is said, Madame.”

“You left it cold in Montreal?"

“The winters remain frigid — as perhaps Madame remembers.”

She was shepherding him toward the mezzanine stairs, ignoring and bypassing the reception desk.

“I do not register?”

“It is arranged. The card for your signature awaits in my suite. Formalities do not exist between us, Henri. Your luggage is en route to your room.”

A smile that was something of an enigma brushed Henri’s full and remotely cruel-looking lips. Old fool, he thought. As if he would entrust what was to become a veritable Aladdin’s lamp to a flimsy suitcase! “An honor, Madame,” he murmured without obsequiousness.

In the living room of her suite, the windows of which opened directly above the storm-drenched terrace, Madame Dufour took Henri’s unbelievably blue felt fedora and deposited it on a console. She went to a cellarette.

“Cognac, cher enfant?”

“Please.”

She filled two glasses of a larger size than would be considered proper, indicated a comfortable armchair, and herself elected to sit with impressive formality on a side chair, the seat of which was covered in a gros-point bouquet of shallow roses. For a moment or two they regarded each other, the unfathomable old one and the athletic young one, and after a while Madame Dufour said with no inflection whatsoever, “You have come to blackmail me, of course. And how much do you expect, dear boy?”

Henri regarded her with unwilling admiration. A competent adversary, of a fact! His assurance, however, that inner power of sheer animal youth, remained unruffled. “Madame is direct.”

Madame accepted the obvious without comment.

“And,” Henri added, “clairvoyant.”

“A gift I must repudiate, Henri. Your telegram could be read between its lines by a veritable imbecile. Which,” Madame Dufour mentioned complacently, “I am not.”

“I had no sense of being set gauche. The wording was for your personal convenience, to prevent embarrassment should the wire intrigue the curious.” His piglike eyes glanced brightly at her from beneath the beautiful lashes. “Then all is clear?”

“Well, no, Henri. There are shadows.” Madame Dufour then asked, dreading the probable answer — and yet she must ask it in order to be sure — “Why is it you have waited until now?”

“But surely that is obvious, Madame? Need I do more than mention — with the most abject respect — the name of your grandniece, the virginal and charming young Seraphine?”

A solid lump of ice and rage occupied Madame Dufour’s roomy insides, where lay her deepest rooted, most timeworn fear — fear for her beloved Seraphine. Even though she had known what Henri’s answer would be, the shock of his avowal was no less acute. She thought, how wise I have been! My plan, each least arrangement shall proceed. Pity for the youth of this creature, compassion for the memory of his grandfather — they would be follies embraced by fools. There is no answer but death.

Seraphine, her grandniece, who had been orphaned at the age of three, had promptly been enveloped by Madame Dufour and translated into the solitary representative of humanity whom Madame had ever loved. It had been for Seraphine’s future that Madame had invested her capital in the Chateau Plage and divorced herself, with infinite safeguards, from any connection with her past in the Province of Quebec.

She had bestowed on Seraphine a rigorous but the most loving of upbringings, an English governess, an exemplary finishing school outside of Washington, and in recent years the religious and intellectual influence of the sisters of Barry College in nearby Miami Shores. And now the ultimate accolade of an approaching marriage, both of prominence and true love...

If.

If this cowardly link with that distant Quebec past, who was facing her with the poisonous attention of an assured gila monster, would fall into her trap.

Madame Dufour permitted a hint of the deadly to freight her voice. “There is nothing, there is no person — living, Henri — who shall prevent the marriage ceremony of Seraphine and Jeffrey Sand next week.”

“The truth would be able to do so, Madame.” Henri again indulged his enigmatic smile. “The exalted Sand family are conditioned by the flexibility of modern society to accepting as a daughter-in-law the grandniece of an hotel keeper. But would they accept the grand-niece of a woman notorious throughout the Province of Quebec for having owned and operated a—”

“Silence!”

“Ah!” Henri twisted the knife. “So Madame agrees. There is no defense against it.”

Madame allowed a crumbling change to creep over her solid body and her face. “You have me. There is no argument, dear boy. The mere suggestion would spell ruin. Not for me, you understand, because that would not matter, but for the one who is dearer to me than either life or punishment or wealth. No, Henri, there is nothing left but to arrange the terms that will put a lock upon your tongue.”

Henri could not repress an expression of surprise, for this was complete capitulation. He did not like it; it worried him. There had been no doubt in his mind but that Madame Dufour would go down, but he had been prepared for her to go down fighting.

Personally, he knew nothing about this woman other than what his grandfather had divulged during the semi-delirious mutterings of his dying hours, while Henri had sat at his bedside. The old man had been under the delusion that he was talking to his son, Henri’s father, who had died in Henri’s fifth year.

The dying man’s babblings had been drunk in by Henri as a draught of liquid gold. And some hours after the old man had passed on, Henri had managed to locate, in its hiding place among his grandfather’s effects, the small oval of porcelain with its damning painting in miniature and ribald doggerel which confirmed the secret that had been fixed in the old man’s no longer functioning heart.

But Henri had also gathered from the mutterings that Madame Dufour was a character of indomitable will who could, when put upon, turn into a tigress. There had even been the babbled incident about one of Madame’s girls who had attempted extortion upon several of her married clients. The old man had then been the establishment’s bouncer and later, after the silly girl had been properly and permanently attended to, a minor partner of Madame Dufour’s.

This did not coincide in Henri’s opinion with Madame’s present lack of resistance and her instant yielding. En garde!

“The terms need not be overwhelming,” Henri said. “And assuredly not for a woman of Madame’s property and wealth.” He added with impudent modesty, “Myself, I am of simple tastes.”

With an artistically contrived sigh of relief, the falsity of which was difficult to detect, Madame arose, took Henri’s empty glass and her own and went with them to the cellarette.

Henri, with a great show of manners, had also risen. He strolled to a window, turning his back to Madame Dufour and the cellarette. Thus he achieved his first tactical mistake. He parted lime draperies, looked out at the black and storm-harassed evening, and down upon the flagged terrace dimly visible only a dozen feet or so beneath him.

“Your card of registration is here on the desk, Henri.”

He went over to the desk and wrote his signature on the card, noting that the room to which he was assigned was Number 101.

“We are both on this floor, Madame?”

“Yes. A matter of a few doors along the corridor. It is agreeable?”

“But why not?” He saw that his glass, refilled with cognac, stood near the card. He raised the glass and said with heavy cynicism, “To the approaching and now assured nuptials of your grandniece, Madame.”

“Of a surety, dear boy. It is agreed.”

Both drank.

Several moments and several remarks of inconsequential fencing later, the eyelids of Henri with their long lovely lashes closed.

Several moments — several hours? — later, the eyelids opened. Madame Dufour, a portrait of resignation, sat facing him. But — of course! — the room had changed. This was a bedroom. Hers? Of her suite? But no. He observed the inner, solid hall door that stood open into the room. On a white panel in black numerals was the number 101. The outer door, shuttered for ventilation (the Chateau Plage abjured the nonsense of air conditioning, since it remained open only during the lucrative winter season) was closed. So, Henri decided, he had in some fashion been moved to Room 101, his assigned accommodation on the registration card.

The second glass of cognac — a child could deduce the fact — must have been drugged. And the purpose, to Henri’s devious brain, was simple: his pockets and wallet had been searched, just as his overcoat and suitcase had been. It was amusing in the extreme.

Surreptitiously his fingers touched the inner side of his left thigh and were reassured. Beneath the trouser cloth the small oval miniature was still taped to his flesh.

But no, it was not amusing in the extreme. Indeed, it was not amusing at all. The collapse of all defenses on Madame Dufour’s part, that had struck him at the time as being out of character, must definitely have been an act — a role she was continuing to play even now.

“Dear boy, you awaken,” she said. “You feel refreshed?”

Henri looked at his watch. The hour approached midnight. His smile was as cunning as hers. “I — fell asleep?”

“But naturally! A day of exhausting journeying — the nervous pressure of the affairs that brought you here — you were as they say, out on your feet. I, too, am of a physique, Henri. I led you stumbling the few steps along the corridor and have deposited you here in your room."

Henri allowed this rank fatuity to pass unchallenged. Madame Dufour’s first move in her counterattack, the search, had resulted in failure. That was all that immediately mattered. But her second move, for his eyes were opened now to the truth that there would be a second, even a series of moves... The sensation of a growing, unknown danger increased.

“The pressure of affairs, as Madame chooses to call it, is felt mutually. Shall we to our muttons? There is a bistro, a small hotel in reality, situated on the banks of the Richelieu River a half hour’s drive from Montreal. It is a good property and the price is cheap.”

“You wish to own it, Henri?”

“It is my purpose to.”

“Ah, yes. And the cost?”

“A mere bagatelle. Thirty-seven thousand dollars.”

Madame Dufour waved jeweled fingers through the air. She said with frigid repression, “A triviality indeed. And in return — it is reasonable, Henri, that you do not rely upon your say-so alone to convince the family of Jeffery Sand?”

“Madame is correct.”

“Your proof, then?”

“Perhaps, in the years long ago, you will recall a frequent patron of your house, a young artist who later was to become well-known for his miniature paintings? And his gift to you for the fifth anniversary of the opening of Madame’s establishment?”

“Ah...”

It was an unavoidable intake of breath. Madame Dufour remembered the small porcelain miniature with its ribald doggerel and (now) baneful painting only too well. But (her mind concentrated on the doggerel’s exact wording and the detail in the painting) would the miniature of itself be sufficient proof? Would it rather not be simply a suggestive confirmation? When used in conjunction with the verbal knowledge now lying in this viper’s poison sac?

Was either one of value without the other? She decided not. Therefore, if one were eliminated, the more dangerous one of the two, the speaking tongue... yes, she had been right. Eliminate Henri, and Seraphine’s security would be assured. Madame Dufour’s philosophy of induced death was medieval.

“So your grandfather was a thief,” she said.

“No, a sentimentalist, Madame. The miniature was a souvenir of sentiment, a tangible memory of his services with you. It shall be yours again when our transaction is completed.

“One understands, dear boy, that there are securities to convert? That the bagatelle, as you so wittily describe it, will take a day or two to procure?”

“Naturally.”

“During the brief delay you will remain, of course, the Chateau’s honored guest. It is arranged that your credit shall rate as unlimited.”

“Madame is too kind.”

“This room is agreeable?”

Henri could not rid himself of the premonition that he was being led into some subtly clever trap. Madame Dufour’s jelly-like submission, her outrageously false anxiety to lull him into a state of vulnerability...

“The room serves admirably, Madame.”

Henri rose and made a casual tour. He opened a door that disclosed a spacious bathroom, another a roomy cupboard. He swung the solid inner door in upon the shuttered outer one, and noted that it had a brass safety chain that would permit, when in place, the door to be opened for the space of only a few inches.

“Is this chain not unusual, Madame?” he asked quietly. “Does one find them throughout the hotel?”

“No, Henri. It is unique. For several seasons this room was the standing reservation of a rich widow, a Mrs. Artemus Blaine. One found her an eccentric old creature with delusions of pursuit. Each knock on the door presented itself to her as a menace to her safety. She died, alas, last spring in Antibes from cirrhosis of the liver.”

With the quiet power of the Queen Mary getting under way Madame Dufour moved toward the hall door, allowing her hypnotic eyes to play directly on Henri’s.

“You have shared this knowledge of my past with no one?”

“Do you take me for a chump, Madame?”

“Some jeune fille whom you love?”

“I have no use for love. Women, I do not have to bother about. I am beset with them.”

Madame Dufour smiled.

“Restez tranquil, cher ami,” she said, and left.

The safety chain.

Henri fingered its brass links with wary bemusement after he had shut and locked the door. Madame Dufour’s choice bit of blague concerning the eccentric Mrs. Blaine could, one must concede, have been true. But why, then, had not the chain been removed after Mrs. Blaine’s unhappy liver had put an end to its need?

He examined each link minutely, searching for some indication that the metal had been secretly weakened by a saw and the cut masked with, say yellow soap. There was nothing. The chain had not been tampered with. He latched it in place. He was now secure.

Secure...

Was that it? Was this very feeling of security the bait with which Madame Dufour could have set her trap? The trap which Henri had by now convinced himself did in truth exist. Any other supposition seemed an absurdity when one considered this formidable woman.

He was being deliberately lulled.

Into precisely what? To sleep in peace? To sleep for — good? Henri’s nature was of a type that entertained elaborate suspicions about every person and thing. Also, as with so many men of trained physical strength, he was both superstitious and afflicted by a fear of the unknown. No personal combat would have bothered him. But a pending combat with secret dangers...

A light sweat began to bead Henri’s brow as Madame Dufour’s imagined plan of attack began to take shape. The Chateau Plage — this particular room with its innocent-looking brass safety chain — was, Henri felt certain, the crux of it. The hotel became transformed in his thoughts into the old tigress’s personal jungle, where she could with utmost familiarity maneuver his defeat. And what could that defeat constitute if not extinction?

Did the menace hinge (Henri stabbed at possibilities) on Room Service? She had given him unlimited credit? A poisoned drink that he might order, or a succulent dish that would eventually simulate a fatal attack of ptomaine? Or was the danger secreted within the room itself? A panorama of scorpions, coral snakes, even water moccasins, paraded across Henri’s imagination — all with deadly effect on his nerves.

He would be a fool not to take every possible precaution. He would be a fool to remain here, where from but a few doors along the corridor Madame’s poisoned claws could reach out and clutch. An overwhelming urge possessed him to change his base of operations to some obscure hotel.

To leave at once. But could he? Would not the possibility of his departure have been foreseen and appropriately guarded against? Would not Madame Dufour have in her employ some muscled, conscienceless, weapon-adept cat’s-paw?

Even though he should encounter no physical barrier on the way out, Henri thought, he would surely be followed. He could be certain that would have been arranged. And any hideout he might select would shortly become known to the tigress.

An unusually strong gust of the storm slashed against the room’s seaward windows, drawing Henri’s eyes toward them and bringing him the perfect solution to his dilemma. In retrospect he saw himself standing by the parted lime draperies of Madame Dufour’s living room and looking down upon the flagged terrace. An insignificant drop for a man of his acrobatic abilities.

Yes — he would leave the hall door locked and chained, secure against any waiting dangers in the corridor, and no watchful eyes would even know that he had left the hotel until morning came. By that time he would be safely incognito and could arrange some rendezvous by telephone to receive Madame’s payment for his silence.

Henri checked the papers and the money in his wallet. He untaped the porcelain miniature from his thigh and put it in an inner pocket of his jacket, where it would be more protected from damage should he slip on the wet flagstones upon landing — a possibility remote, considering his athletic prowess, but one that he must consider nevertheless. His suitcase and overcoat he would leave in the room. He could replace them a thousandfold after he had collected his price for silence.

He opened a window and for an instant was blinded by the sheeting rain and pitch darkness of the harried night. He lowered his body over the sill, clung for a second with strong fingers, and then, relaxing his muscles for an athlete’s safe landing, Henri let go.

Madame Dufour paused before the desk in the living room of her suite and observed the registration card on which Henri had written his signature. With a pen she corrected a slight clerical error and then, taking the card with her, left the suite and went to the lounge.

The lounge, with its rococo touches of grandeur, was empty and quiet. It was the doldrum hour between midnight and one o’clock.

Madame crossed to the reception desk, where the night clerk was amusing himself with the book of the month.

“Arturo, here is the registration card of Mr. Henri Pazz.”

Arturo, a man of Sicilian extraction and every fascinating bit as good-looking as the day clerk Enrico, put the card in its proper place on the rack.

“Thank you, Madame.” He emitted an impatient Sicilian sigh and said, “Will this storm never break? I believe it is a curse deposited upon our heads at long range by the jealous peasants of California.”

“Either a curse or a blessing, Arturo. One never knows.”

“And, madre mia, what imbecile have we now!” Arturo exclaimed as one of the plate-glass terrace doors flew open, letting in both a vicious blast of rain and the oilskin-swathed night watchman.

The watchman, a recent graduate from an Ivy League university, shut out the elements and then bore down on the desk.

“A man is lying outside on the terrace, Madame Dufour. He is dead. Very dead.”

Madame Dufour retained her imperturbable air of calm...

“Accident over to the Chateau Plage,” Police Sergeant Day said to his wife Ethel as he accepted a cup of the coffee she had crawled out of bed to make for him. “Young guy from Montreal. Fell out of a window. Could have been suicide, of course, but that bald red-wigged dame who owns the joint knew all about him and his folks.” He sipped noisily at his coffee.

Ethel, who was a devotee of mystery novels, suggested succinctly, “Or he might have been pushed. Those fall-out-of-a-window jobs are always open to doubt.” She looked triumphant.

“Not this one, Ethel. Brass safety chain fastened on the room door. Had to file it to get in, after what was left of the body had been identified. Absolutely impossible for a second person to have been in the room with him. Only one funny thing.”

Ethel perked up. “What, Charles?”

“I noticed it while we were fiddling with the door, getting the chain cut. There was a damp Spot on the white paint, and traces of cleaning powder dried around the spot’s edges — sort of like a thickish white paste made out of something like, say, Bon Ami. The damp spot covered the first numeral of the room’s number. A numeral figure 1.”

“What was the room number, Charles?”

“1101.”