Walking Dead Man

by Hugh Pentecost

  Art Stein and a couple of others of Jerry’s security men showed up while the phone calls were being made.

  Jerry finally gave it to them straight. “There are several possibilities,” he told them. “The first and most unlikely for my money is that the boss has left the hotel of his own free will. He stumbled on something, probably relating to the Battle case, and it took him away without giving him time to notify us. Or, having been lured out of here by a phony phone call, he was persuaded to go somewhere, willingly, without telling us. He’s been gone about fifty-five minutes now. Ordinarily you don’t think a man is missing when you haven’t seen him for fifty-five minutes. It’s different in this case.”

  “You still think that shot upstairs may have been meant for Mr. Chambrun?” Stein asked.

  “I do. Maybe more than ever now. They didn’t get him one way they try another.”

  I felt Shelda’s hand tighten in mine.

  “So he was suckered into a trap,” Stein said.

  “That’s almost certain,” Jerry said. “First possibility is they took him somewhere and are holding him, maybe for ransom which we’ll hear about, maybe for something worse that I don’t want to think about. Second possibility, it was all over fast. They knifed him, clubbed him—the body is not very far away, in a broom closet, down one of the elevator shafts, in one of the cellar areas.”

  I glanced at Ruysdale. Her face was a pale mask.

  “I figure the way that could have happened would be either just outside here in the hall, or in an elevator on the way up. So first we look for a body, hopefully still alive.”

  “It would be hard for anyone to carry him out of the hotel,” Stein said, “and I can’t imagine the boss letting himself be taken.”

  “Not with a gun in his back?” Jerry asked.

  “He’d have been seen,” Stein said. “You’d have heard, now that you’ve started asking.”

  “He could have gotten out if he didn’t want to be seen,” Ruysdale said. “He’s done it hundreds of times, don’t ask me how.”

  “But he wouldn’t show somebody how to take him out,” Stein said.

  “He might,” Ruysdale said. “He’d be very tough to handle if the danger was just to him. But if someone else was threatened—Mr. Battle, or you, Jerry, or Mark. Or me.” She looked away.

  “So first we go over the hotel like a vacuum cleaner,” Jerry said. “Then, God help us, there isn’t any kind of a lead to anything.”

  “Oh, I think there’s a lead, Jerry,” Ruysdale said. “It would be too wildly coincidental if it didn’t have something to do with Mr. Battle’s presence here in the hotel. Mr. Chambrun has known Mr. Battle for more than thirty years. He knows more about him than perhaps anyone else. Someone may think Mr. Chambrun has the key to a great deal of money. There are not millions, but several billion dollars represented in that penthouse—industrial power, political power.”

  “And the crazy sonofabitch is slugged out with a sedative when so many people want to talk to him,” Jerry said.

  “There is one person it might be worth talking to while you wait for him to wake up,” I said. “Like Chambrun said, you don’t have to have pulled the trigger to be responsible. Richard Cleaves apparently hates both Battle and the boss.”

  “So you and I will go and talk to him,” Jerry said. “Get moving, Art. I want every square inch of this hotel covered.”

  “It’s a long job, Jerry.”

  “Let’s hope you don’t have to finish it,” Jerry said. He beckoned to me, taking it for granted I was with him.

  I looked at Shelda.

  “You have to go, darling,” she said.

  My girl!

  Just outside the office door is the bank of elevators. The wall opposite is the outside wall of the building. Behind the elevators is the lobby, and open space rising three stories high. The second floor, then, is a corridor facing the elevators, with Chambrun’s offices ballooning out on one end and on the other, the bookkeeping offices, the switchboards, my apartment and my office. East of the elevators is a wide, open stairway leading down to the lobby. There is a fire stair next to the bookeeping offices. Those are the only two exits from the second floor except the elevators, four of them.

  Jerry and I stood by the elevators, looking up and down the corridor, not speaking. Each of us, I guess, was trying to imagine what had happened out here. Chambrun had been summoned, he believed, to the penthouse. There would have been three possible things he could have done. He could have walked down the open stair into the lobby and taken the one elevator that went up all the way to the roof. He could have taken one of the other elevators down to the lobby. That would, I thought, have been out of character unless the car was standing right there with the door open. He was a much too impatient man to wait for a car to take him one flight down. The third possibility was that he had taken an up-elevator to the twenty-fourth floor, planning to change elevators there.

  “The guys who suckered him out of his office couldn’t gamble on what he’d do,” Jerry said. “They have to meet him right here, head on. They couldn’t risk the lobby, where a hundred people would see whatever happened, or the twenty-fourth floor, where cops are seeing to it that no one gets up to the roof.”

  “They waited for him in the elevator that goes to the roof?”

  Jerry shook his head. “Elevator operator and a cop in that car,” he said. “First question I asked when I came down from the penthouse was whether they’d seen him.”

  You should know that all the elevators at the Beaumont have operators from seven o’clock in the morning until midnight. The rest of the time they are self-service. There’d have been no employee on the regular elevators at the time Chambrun had left his office.

  We walked down the open stairway to the lobby. Things had quieted down here. The Spartan Bar had closed for the night and the lady invaders had reluctantly left. The Blue Lagoon, the hotel’s night club which opens off the far end of the lobby, had also closed. The Trapeze Bar, overhead, was dark.

  Mike Maggio, the night bell captain, saw us and came hurrying over. Mike is a handsome, dark Italian with a normally mischievous grin. There was something almost comical about the seriousness of his face now.

  “I was just on my way up to the office,” he told Jerry. “When I got the word from Miss Ruysdale, I wanted to check out as well as I could down here first. Nobody saw him, Jerry. I swear I would have. I was afraid he’d show while those broads were raising hell in the Spartan, and I kept looking for him, wondering what I’d say to him.”

  “You better get your orders from Ruysdale,” Jerry said, “but keep asking. Don’t make it sound like anything’s happened; just say he’s needed and we don’t know where he is.”

  “Will do,” Mike said. “You think it’s bad, Jerry?”

  “I think it’s bad,” Jerry said.

  The lobby had a strange feel for me. This place was my home; I lived here, I worked here, I found most of my recreation here. In spite of its great size I think I would have noticed any small thing out of place, any routine not running normally. The lobby seemed perfectly normal now, and yet it felt wrong. I suddenly realized what it was. At all times, no matter what the problems the complaints, the irritating confrontations with irritating guests to whom you had to be polite, the fashion people, the society mothers demanding perfection for their “coming-out” daughters, the press agents for important people and for people who wanted to be important, there was the inner assurance that no problem was too tough to solve because God was in his heaven—on the second floor—and all was right with the world. Now God wasn’t there, and not even Betsy Ruysdale could fill the void. The Captain wasn’t on the bridge; the coach had left the team to improvise its own game plan. I knew, as Jerry and I took the elevator to the fourteenth floor, how much we depended on Chambrun, and that the simple knowledge that he wasn’t there made us—or me at least—feel curiously incompetent.

  Outside the door of Richard Cleaves’ room I glanced a
t my watch. It was a quarter past two. He’d probably be in bed, very much annoyed by our intrusion.

  He wasn’t in bed, but his annoyance was electric. He opened the door and stood looking at us, black glasses hiding his eyes. He was wearing slacks and a white shirt, sleeves rolled up to reveal muscular, tanned arms. He reminded me a little of George Peppard, the actor.

  “Yes?” he said. A cold voice, a hostile voice.

  “I’m Dodd, the hotel’s security officer,” Jerry said. “This is Mr. Haskell, the hotel’s public relations director. We’d like to talk to you, Mr. Cleaves.”

  “Not tonight,” Cleaves said. He started to close the door, but Jerry’s foot was in the way. The hall light glittered against the black glasses. “Get your foot out of the door, Dodd, unless you want it broken.”

  I was mildly amused. I’d seen Jerry handle belligerent drunks twice his size. The aggressive Mr. Cleaves wasn’t going to intimidate him. There’s something enjoyable about watching a little guy handle a big guy.

  “I can get a cop down here in about five minutes to arrest you,” Jerry said, “or we can talk nice and friendly.”

  Cleaves made a right judgment. He didn’t try to break Jerry’s foot. “What is it you want to talk about?”

  “An attempted murder, possibly two,” Jerry said.

  I thought I’d try something direct. “We know something about your history, Mr. Cleaves.”

  “If you do,” he said, “you know I regret George Battle didn’t get it right between the eyes.”

  “And what do you hope has happened to Chambrun?” Jerry asked, his foot still in the door.

  “What has happened to him?” Cleaves asked.

  “That’s what we’re here to ask you.”

  I was watching his face. It’s hard to guess what a man is thinking when you can’t see his eyes, but I could have sworn he was surprised. There was a little intake of breath, a little twitch at the corners of his bidden eyes.

  “You’ve hooked me, gentlemen,” Cleaves said. “Come in and tell us what you’re talking about. He stepped back from the door.

  “Us” turned out to be David Loring and the glamorous Miss Angela Adams. Cleaves had a sitting room-bedroom suite, and the actor and his lady were sitting on a couch, side by side. On a coffee table in front of them were a variety of bottles—Scotch, vodka, brandy. There was an ice bucket, glasses, a couple of the Beaumont’s silver stirrers. Ash trays were full. I saw Jerry take that all in.

  “How long have you been here, Mr. Loring?” he asked.

  “Just a minute,” Cleaves said. “You don’t have to answer any questions, David. This is just the house dick.”

  It’s strange to meet someone like Loring whom you’ve seen a hundred times on the screen. You feel as if you knew him and you don’t know him at all. His one-sided little smile was familiar, the way he cocked his head to one side was familiar, the very direct look in his dark blue eyes was familiar, the husky speech with the slightly British sound to it was familiar.

  “Miss Adams and I have been drinking with Richard since a little before midnight,” he said. “So I think you should bear in mind, Mr. House-dick, that we are all a little potted and therefore not entirely reliable.”

  The gorgeous Miss Adams was leaning back, her arms spread out on either side of the back of the couch. This tended to reveal a rather stimulating amount of bare bosom. Her eyes were narrowed, watching me, as if she was daring me to let my mouth drop open. There was a zipper in the front of the scarlet housecoat she was wearing that would have opened it right down to the floor.

  “If you three have been together since before midnight, I don’t have any questions to ask you,” Jerry said.

  Cleaves was sweetening a Scotch on the rocks. “You can’t get away with that, Dodd,” he said. His straight, hard mouth moved in a tiny smile. “You’ve whetted my curiosity. What has happened to Chambrun?”

  “If you’ve all been here since before twelve, you can’t help me to provide an answer to that,” Jerry said. He turned toward the door.

  “How about a drink?” Cleaves said, turning on charm.

  “No thanks,” Jerry said.

  “Maybe you feel more communicative than your friend, Haskell,” Cleaves said. He gestured toward the drink table.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “I gather you know that I’ve made a life study of Mr. Battle and Mr. Chambrun. You seem worried. Let me reassure you. They are indestructible, those two. They live charmed lives. Has someone taken a shot at Mr. Chambrun and missed? That would fit the pattern?”

  “What pattem7” Jerry asked.

  “Things are not what they seem when you deal with Battle and Chambrun,” Cleaves said. “Someone is said to have shot at Battle and missed. My life study tells me that missing is exactly what was intended. What is supposed to have happened to Chambrun? Because whatever is supposed to have happened is probably not what happened at all. That’s the way the game is played.”

  Jerry was intrigued in spite of himself. “Mr. Chambrun gets a phone call from the assistant D.A. in the penthouse asking him to come up. He went, and has disappeared into thin air.”

  “How exciting,” Miss Adams said in a slow, drawling voice. She moved slightly, almost exposing an entire breast.

  “And the phone call turned out not to be from the D.A. at all?” Cleaves asked. He certainly knew how part of the game was played. “Any signs of violence?”

  “Not yet,” Jerry said.

  Cleaves took a sip of his drink. “I have every reason to regret that,” he said. “I take it you know why.”

  “Your father,” I said.

  His mouth became a straight, hard slit. “Chambrun told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve spent thirty years trying to convince myself that Battle and Chambrun are Siamese twins,” Cleaves said. “It doesn’t quite work. Chambrun was a genuine patriot. I could cut his heart out for what he did, if that kind of thing was possible for me. But I understand it. Perhaps in his shoes I’d have done the same thing. His cause, he thought, was just. He faced me with it a long time ago, when I was still in my teens. He laid it on the line without any ifs, ands, or buts. He took the entire responsibility. He left himself wide open to me. I—I spent a lot of time preparing myself for the perfect crime. You see, I don’t want to die for a justified crime, gentlemen. I made myself into an expert marksman with any kind of gun.” He smiled. “Rest assured, if you can break my alibi for the time Battle was shot at, I still have another alibi. I couldn’t have missed at that distance. He paused a moment to light a cigarette. “In the last ten years I’ve had a dozen chances to settle with Chambrun. Would you believe I’ve looked at him five times through the sights of a gun and could never pull the trigger? Something about him, god damn him! I could have gotten away with it and I couldn’t do it. Battle is something else again.”

  “In what way?” Jerry asked.

  “In every way you can imagine,” Cleaves said.

  “I hate him,” Angela Adams said. “Why does he insist on that girl being in David’s picture?”

  “Good question,” Cleaves said, “because it isn’t for any of the reasons that come instantly to mind. That’s the key to George Battle. None of the motives he appears to have for anything he does are the real ones.”

  “His money is real,” David Loring said. “That’s what’s important to us.”

  “Only we haven’t got it yet, so it isn’t real,” Cleaves said.

  “You shouldn’t have any trouble getting financing for your book,” I said. “It’s a best seller.”

  “If I told you that ordinary money sources have, without explanation, dried up, would you be surprised? Battle hasn’t said yes to financing the film, but he hasn’t said no. Would you believe that in the complex financial world in which he lives, in which he has such enormous power and influence, that the word is out that A Man’s World is not to be considered until he says so?”

  “It doesn’t make sense,�
� I said. “Could he make that much profit out of it?”

  “In his terms the profit will be chicken feed,” Cleaves said, “Have you read my book, Haskell?”

  “Sorry, but I haven’t gotten to it.”

  “I wrote it, so I must know it pretty well,” Cleaves said.

  “It’s so wonderfully sexy,” Angela Adams said. “The woman’s part is just perfect for me. Why he wants that blonde tootsie who has never acted in her life is beyond me.”

  Cleaves allowed himself that tight smile. “Wasn’t it Lord Chesterfield who said about sex that the pleasure was momentary, the price exorbitant, and the position ridiculous? What you have to sell, darling, is not so wildly extraordinary.”

  “Louse!” she said.

  David Loring laughed and put his hand on the lady’s thigh. “You are obviously speaking without experience, Richard. Let me assure you all cats are not alike in the dark.”

  “Angel,” Angela said, and stroked his hand.

  “My book isn’t a sex manual,” Cleaves said. “It’s the story of a political assassination; someone like Robert Kennedy, killed by some juvenile crackpot at a political rally. The hero, the part we hope David will play, is the victim’s brother. He doesn’t believe the killer is just a psychotic kid who killed his brother for kicks. He believes it was planned by someone high up in the political power structure and that the kid was just the unbalanced instrument. People thought that about Robert Kennedy’s killer, about President Kennedy’s killer, about Martin Luther King’s killer. It’s not a new idea. In my book the hero sets out to expose the truth and finds himself suddenly the hunted and not the hunter. It’s a good suspense story, it makes what I hope are some fairly shrewd comments about the power structure in our society, but there is no reason why George Battle should either like it or want to stop its being made into a film. There’s no one remotely like him in the story.” Cleaves laughed. “There is no one remotely like George Battle. What I have invented must seem like kindergarten stuff to him.” Cleaves suddenly hit the drink table with his fist, so hard that glasses and bottles jumped. “Why has he gotten into the act? He’s never financed a film before. Maxie Zorn didn’t go to him for money; he came to Maxie. I said to hell with it. I didn’t want him connected with my book. I didn’t want him contributing to my success. I didn’t want to owe the sonofabitch anything. So I went to other sources and, believe it or not as I told you, the doors were all suddenly closed.”