"Conklin. Robert Conklin."
Cora pretended to flip through cards in the box. "Nope. Sorry. Doesn't seem to be a reservation for Conklin. Are you positive you contacted us?"
"Absolutely."
"This is quite irregular. Our reservation department never makes a mistake. And what about you, Mr…?"
"Magill," Rick said.
"Well, there is a reservation for Magill, but it's for a woman only, I'm afraid. The noted historian Cora Magill. I assume you've heard of her. The best people stay here." Cora again reached under the counter and this time set down a thick ledger, raising more dust. She opened it and pretended to read names. "Marilyn Monroe. Arthur Miller. Adlai Stephenson. Grace Kelly. Norman Mailer. Yves Montand. Of course, only well-to-do people can afford to stay here." She picked up a card from next to the bell. "Our rates vary from ten to twenty dollars."
"When twenty dollars was twenty dollars." Rick laughed.
"Actually, you're not wrong about some of those guests," the professor said. "Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller, and Yves Montand did stay here. Monroe and the playwright were having domestic difficulties. After Miller checked out in a huff, Montand arrived to console Marilyn. Cole Porter stayed here, as well. So did Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Maria Callas, Aristotle Onassis, who was having an affair with Callas, and so on. In fact, Onassis tried to buy the hotel. The Paragon attracted a lot of famous and powerful people. And a few who were infamous and powerful. Senator Joseph McCarthy, for example. And the gangsters Lucky Luciano and Sam Giancana."
Balenger frowned. "Carlisle let gangsters stay here?"
"He was fascinated with their lifestyle. He ate dinner and played cards with them. In fact, he allowed Carmine Danata to keep a permanent suite here, 'a place to roost,' Danata called it, when he wasn't working as an enforcer in Atlantic City, Philadelphia, Jersey City, and New York. Carlisle gave Danata permission to have a vault put in behind a wall in his suite. It was done in the coldest part of the winter of 1935 when the hotel was virtually empty. Nobody knew about it."
"But if nobody knew about it…" Cora shook her head from side to side. "This reminds me of what's wrong with Citizen Kane."
"There's something wrong with Citizen Kane?" Vinnie asked in disbelief. "That's impossible. It's a masterpiece."
"With a big flaw. In the opening scene, Kane's an old man. He's dying in bed in his fabulous mansion. He has a snow globe in his hand."
"Everybody knows that opening," Vinnie said. "You and I once watched that movie together on the classics channel. You never mentioned anything about a flaw."
"I only realized it after you moved to Syracuse. Kane murmurs, 'Rosebud,' then drops the globe, which shatters on the bedroom floor. The noise makes a nurse charge through a door. All of a sudden, the newspapers and the newsreels are filled with the mystery of Kane's last word, 'Rosebud.' Then a reporter sets out to solve the puzzle."
"Yeah? So?"
"Well, if the nurse was out of the room and the door was closed and the bedroom was empty except for Kane when he died, how does anybody know his last word?"
"Oh," Vinnie said. "Shit. Now you've ruined the movie for me."
"The next time you watch it, just skip over that part."
"But what does this have to do with-"
"Professor," Cora said, "how could you know about a secret vault in Danata's room, one that was installed in the winter of 1935 when the Paragon was deserted?"
Conklin smiled. "You are indeed my student."
Balenger waited for the answer.
"It turns out that Carlisle kept a diary, not about himself but about the hotel, all the interesting events he observed over the decades. He was especially fascinated by the suicides and other deaths that occurred here. There were three murders, for example. A man shot his business partner for cheating him. A woman poisoned her husband for threatening to leave her for another woman. A thirteen-year-old boy waited until his father fell asleep and then beat him to death with a baseball bat. The father had molested the child for years. It took all of Carlisle's wealth and influence to keep those incidents from being publicized. After he died-"
"How?" Balenger asked. "Old age? Heart failure?"
"Actually, he committed suicide."
The group became still.
"Suicide?" Balenger scribbled a note.
"He used a shotgun to blow the top of his head off."
The group seemed to stop breathing.
"Despair because of ill health?" Balenger asked.
"The autopsy report was among the documents I examined," Conklin said. "Thanks to the strict health regimen and exercise program with which he tried to offset his hemophilia, he was remarkably fit for a man of ninety-two. He didn't leave a note. No one was able to explain why he killed himself."
"His mind must have been as sharp as his body," Rick said. "Otherwise, he wouldn't have been able to hide his intentions from his servants."
"In his last few years, Carlisle didn't have any servants."
"What? He took care of himself in this huge place all alone?" Cora frowned. "Wandering the halls."
"But if he was alone…?" Vinnie sounded puzzled.
"You mean, how was he found?" Conklin said. "For probably the first time in his life, he left the hotel in the middle of the night, went down to the beach, and shot himself there. Even then, Asbury Park was in such decline, it wasn't until noon the next day that someone found him."
"A man with agoraphobia going down to the beach for the first time in his life so he can kill himself?" Balenger shook his head firmly. "That doesn't make sense."
"The police wondered if he'd been murdered," the professor said. "But it had rained earlier in the night. The only footprints on the beach were Carlisle's."
"Eerie," Cora said.
"After his suicide, the old man's personal papers were deposited in the Carlisle family library, which is actually a storage area in the basement of the Manhattan building that used to be the family mansion. Carlisle's trust occupied the building until its funds ran out."
"The papers include the diary?" Balenger asked.
"Yes. When I chose the Paragon for this year's expedition, I did my usual research and discovered the existence of the storage area. The man who oversees the trust allowed me to examine the materials. He was trying to get various universities to bid on them. Evidently, he thought I had my university's authority to participate in the auction. I was given a day with the papers. That's when I discovered the diary."
"You weren't just repeating a rumor? There really is a vault in Danata's suite?" Balenger asked.
"All I can tell you is, there's no record of its having been removed."
"Hell, this is going to be more interesting than usual." Vinnie rubbed his hands together. "Of course, we still have to figure out which suite Danata had."
"Six-ten," Conklin said. "According to the diary, it has the best view in the hotel."
"Not the penthouse?"
"Because of Carlisle's agoraphobia, he couldn't bear large windows. A full view of the ocean would have terrified him. But he had other ways of looking. When I told you earlier that Aristotle Onassis wanted to buy the Paragon, I didn't add that Carlisle couldn't have sold it even if he'd been tempted. Without major reconstruction, almost tearing the hotel to the ground, Carlisle would have been publicly embarrassed and probably arrested."
"Arrested?" Rick asked in surprise.
"Because of his curiosity. The building has hidden corridors that allowed him to watch his guests without their knowledge."
"Peepholes? Two-way mirrors?" Balenger wrote hurriedly.
"Carlisle was diseased in more ways than his hemophilia. He allowed his diary to survive because he believed it served a social purpose. He thought of himself as a cross between a sociologist and a historian."