Walking Dead Man

by Hugh Pentecost

  “Please. Let’s try again, Pierre. I couldn’t resist needling you. You’re right, of course. My enemies are legion.”

  “There are too goddam many of them,” Chambrun said. “But exposing yourself to two of them as you have doesn’t make sense. Why are you involved in a deal that includes Richard Cleaves and Peter Potter, two gilt-edged enemies of yours? You’re not interested in making motion pictures. These two men hate your guts, and yet you play at making a business deal that involves them, and you move into the same hotel with them. Let’s start with making sense out of that, George.”

  Battle was silent for a moment. “Have you read A Man’s World by Richard Cleaves, Pierre?”

  “No.”

  “Take time to skim through the first fifty pages,” Battle said. “When you have, you will understand my interest in it.”

  “Interest in having it produced because you think it’s a work of art?” Chambrun asked.

  “Interest in not having it produced,” Battle said. His bright eyes looked past Chambrun to the rest of us. “You understand, gentlemen, what I am saying is off the record. You understand, Pierre, I didn’t know who Richard Cleaves was when I picked up the book. When I had read it, I saw a notice in the Paris Tribune that Maxwell Zorn had optioned the book for a film production. I had to stop the book being filmed, or at least control what the final shooting script was to be.”

  “Why, George?” Chambrun was obviously puzzled.

  “Read the first fifty pages, Pierre. At first I thought it was one of those strange coincidences; the inventive mind of a storyteller had hit on something that paralleled something that had happened in real life, down to the last detail. Something you will recognize, Pierre, that was part of my life. It was quite possible that a popular work of fiction might not fall into certain hands. But make it into a film that will be seen all over the world, a film starring a popular star like David Loring, and the wrong people would be certain to see it. I had to stop it, or control it, change certain details of the story. I cabled Maxwell Zorn and offered to put up the money for the film. He came running, bringing the author with him, and his public relations man—my old friend Peter Potter. Potter doesn’t frighten me, Pierre. He is just a disgruntled ex-employee. I was interested to meet the author, whose imagination had paralleled my life so closely, Cleaves didn’t attempt to hide the truth about himself when he came to my house with Zorn. He hadn’t been in the room with me three minutes, hiding behind those damned black glasses, when he said to me, cool as you please, ‘My real name is Richard St. Germaine.’ Then I knew. His book wasn’t pure fiction, accidentally copying my life. It was the result of careful research. It was a diabolical scheme for personal revenge. He wouldn’t have to lift a finger. When the right people saw the film, they would kill me. They could and they would.”

  “What people?” Hardy asked.

  “Sorry, Lieutenant. All I can tell you is that they are not here in New York; that they haven’t been involved in what has happened so far.”

  “And yet you’ve come here, making yourself a much easier target,” Chambrun said.

  “A lesson I learned from you long ago, Pierre,” Battle said. “When someone is hunting you, don’t run. You always used to say that, friend. Force his hand. Make him attack. He’ll have to come out in the open and you’ll be ready for him. So I came here, feeling certain Cleaves would make a try for me and that I’d have him. I didn’t think he’d strike the first night. I thought he’d have to scout out the territory. I had intended to alert you, Pierre, after I’d had a night’s rest. But he moved too soon for me, and as you can see, if he can’t get at me one way, he’ll find another.”

  “Hold it, Mr. Battle,” Jerry Dodd said. “He has a perfect alibi for the time you were shot at. Miss Mason was with him, along with two other witnesses. And are you suggesting that he’s the one who kidnaped Mr. Chambrun?”

  “He could have been.”

  “Impossible,” Jerry said. “He had an alibi for that time, too.”

  Battle’s eyes narrowed. “Provided by the same two witnesses who covered for him the first time—David Loring and Angela Adams. Too many perfect alibis become no alibi at all, Mr. Dodd.”

  “He could have sent you a birthday card at Cannes just as readily as here,” Chambrun said.

  “But I was here,” Battle said.

  “He could have sent it any time during the last ten years,” Chambrun said.

  “That’s unlikely, Mr. Chambrun,” Captain Carlson, the bomb expert, said. “We haven’t known much about the technique of these letter bombs until relatively recently. The Arabs began to use them against the Israelis about a year—eighteen months—ago. Before that bombs came in the mail, to be sure, but in packages. You can suspect an unordered package. But these letter things—well, unless you’re expecting them, they’re almost impossible to detect until it’s too late. Unheard of ten years ago.”

  “That’s nit-picking, Captain,” Battle said. “The fact is the letter came this morning, and damn near did what it was intended to do.” He drew a deep breath. “I came here, inviting attack so I could catch him at it. He turns out to be much cleverer than I had foreseen.”

  “Proof?” Hardy asked, looking like a puzzled basset hound.

  “That’s your job. Let me point out one thing to you, Lieutenant. Perhaps his alibis will hold up. That would be clever, wouldn’t it? He didn’t actually fire the shot at me. In this day and age you don’t have to do the deed yourself, Mr. Hardy. I have run an empire from inside the fences of my place in Cannes. Someone else does the actual leg work, but I plan it. Cleaves, unless he’s an unexpected genius, didn’t make that bomb himself. He hired someone to make it for him. He probably hired someone to take a shot at me. Why do you suppose Pierre was kidnaped?”

  “I’ll bite,” Hardy said.

  “Because he needed money to finance his war against me,” Battle laughed. “Ironic, isn’t it? I pay for the plan and the weapons that are meant to destroy me.”

  I remembered something Chambrun had said the night before, when Shelda had given Cleaves his alibi for the time of the shooting at Battle. “The finger that squeezes the trigger isn’t necessarily attached to the brain that plans the action.”

  “You’re accusing Cleaves, then?” Hardy asked.

  “I accuse him of being the planner,” Battle said. “But let me tell you something. You can arrest him on suspicion, put him in jail, and you’ll only provide him with an alibi for the next move against me. What you have to find out, if you’re going to do me any good, Lieutenant, is who is his trigger man? Who is his bomb expert?”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “There are things about your own scheme I don’t understand, George,” Chambrun finally said. He lit a fresh cigarette. He turned to look toward the phones. “Shelda, for one. Why have you made her playing a nude scene in the film a condition for your financing?”

  Battle glanced at Shelda, smiling. “Because I am a very shrewd and very wicked old man,” he said. “I needed time and I thought I knew Shelda well enough to count on the certainty that she would say ‘no’, at least until Zorn’s offer became so astronomical she couldn’t refuse. I insisted on having five prints of the film. I knew they’d assume I expected to get some kind of sexual jolt out of watching Shelda perform in the raw with Loring.” He gestured toward Shelda. “Believe me, my dear, decrepit and ancient as I may appear to you, only the real thing would give me the slightest satisfaction.”

  I stuck in my oar for the first time. I didn’t like the way the old man was leering at Shelda. “According to Cleaves, you have fixed it so that no one else will finance the film,” I said.

  “That is momentarily true,” Battle said. “As long as I am actually interested, he won’t find any other financing. But, as the old saying goes, if I don’t get off the pot pretty soon, someone will make an offer. So I will, in the end, have to agree to the financing in order to control the script, get the changes made that must be
made. I’ll only get that concession from Zorn when he is desperate. But beyond a certain point someone will offer him a way out. Right now”—and he pointed a finger at Hardy—“I am more concerned with saving my life than dealing with Zorn. If Cleaves gets to me, it won’t matter about the film. I can only be dead once.”

  I thought Chambrun had other questions, but he evidently changed his mind about asking them. “We’re going to have to move you out of here, George,” he said. “This place isn’t livable, and it obviously isn’t safe. We’ll put you in another suite, with Hardy’s men or Jerry’s occupying the rooms on either side of you. The halls will be covered. There’s no possible way for Cleaves to know in advance where you’re going—because I don’t know myself at this moment. There can’t be any advance booby traps for you.”

  “What about Edward Butler?” Battle asked. “Is he in shape to stand by?”

  “Whether he’s in shape or not, Jerry Dodd isn’t going to let you out of his sight,” Chambrun said. “Our friend with the stocking mask seems to have been invisible to Butler. Jerry’s eyesight is infallible. I do have one more question to ask you, George. How do you account for the fact that the shot of sedative which Dr. Cobb said would knock you out for twelve hours didn’t work?”

  Battle actually grinned. “It wasn’t a shot, if you mean by that an injection,” Battle said.

  “Pills?”

  “Yes.”

  Chambrun nodded slowly. “And you didn’t take them,” he said.

  Battle was obviously delighted with himself. “Cobb thought he saw me take them, but of course I didn’t,” he said. “You don’t suppose I was going to let myself be knocked out when there was a killer waiting for just such an opportunity, do you?”

  We left the penthouse with Jerry staying behind as Battle’s special bodyguard. We headed for the office with Hardy and Kranepool coming with us. Plans had to be made.

  As we walked into Miss Ruysdale’s outer office, she got up from her desk and handed Chambrun a book. It was A Man’s World by Richard Cleaves.

  “I thought you might be wanting this,” she said.

  She could set up as a psychic, I thought.

  In his office Chambrun, who’d shown no surprise at being handed the book, asked us to excuse him for a moment while he made some necessary arrangements by phone. He knew how to play it close to the vest. He talked, first, to Atterbury on the front desk. A suite was available on the seventeenth floor, and by checkout time the two rooms on either side of the suite would be available.

  “No one is to know that Mr. Battle is occupying that suite,” Chambrun said. “Mrs. Kniffin is the housekeeper on that floor. She is to be told nothing about the occupant of the suite, except that he doesn’t want the suite service. Battle will not be registered. The office is only to know that I am holding those rooms. The switchboard, if asked, is simply to say that Mr. Battle is no longer registered here. That will be a fact, so the operators won’t need any special instructions. There will be a DO NOT DISTURB on the suite, which means that no calls will be put through, even though someone simply asks for the room number, unless there are special instructions from me or Jerry. I will let you know exactly when Battle is to be moved down. It will be when we are quite sure people we are concerned with are occupied. All clear?—Thank you, Atterbury.”

  Chambrun leaned back in his desk chair. He reached for the cup of Turkish coffee Ruysdale had placed within reach.

  “You want me to stay, Mr. Chambrun?” she asked.

  “Please, Ruysdale,” he said. His smile was bitter. “In case I should disappear again, you’d better know what the score is.”

  “You buy this Cleaves theory?” Kranepool asked.

  “It could very well be.” Chambrun said. “Cleaves has a motive. Potter might be willing to help him. Potter knows exactly how George’s mind works. George is right, of course. You can hire killers and experts. He’s also right in assuming that coming out of his private fortress he could flush his killer into the open—Cleaves, his hired hands, or someone we haven’t even thought of yet.” He glanced at the bright jacket on Cleaves’ novel. “I’m going to have to find time to look at this. My theory is, Hardy, that you have perfectly good grounds now for holding Cleaves and Potter for questioning. You have a murder. That letter bomb makes alibis for any special time meaningless. You don’t know when it was made, when it was mailed. I suggest you bring Cleaves and Potter down here. While you’re holding them, Battle can be moved to his new quarters. And while they’re here, we should arrange for the detective and the operator who were on the elevator and took the mail from our mystery man in the lobby to have a look at Cleaves. I think it’s unlikely, but he just could be the man.”

  “Not Potter?” Kranepool asked.

  “You’re not aware, Kranepool, that Potter is a dwarf, not quite four feet tall?” Chambrun asked.

  As I have suggested, the story of the explosion in the penthouse had spread. People in the other two penthouses and on the two floors below the roof had actually heard and felt it. The switchboard had been swamped with calls. Bombs seem to be a part of today’s climate; bomb threats are so frequent that people are almost indifferent to them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found myself walking along a city street, a popular busy avenue like Madison, or Fifth, or Park and seen an abnormal number of people crowded around a corner. You look for what you suppose has been an accident and you see none. Then you ask, and someone tells you, quite casually, as though it was everyday, that people have been evacuated from the building across the way because of a bomb threat. Public schools are constant targets for bombing sorties by idiot teen-agers. It is all part of an age of terror that is crippling our cities and even our rural communities. The usual explanations are “radicals” or “racists.” The frightening thing about it is that, while people stay home at night because they feel the streets aren’t safe, the bombing thing is everywhere, from the United Nations to the Staten Island Ferry terminal, and people allow themselves to be herded away from the danger area like sheep, and then go back when they get the all-clear, still like sheep.

  I wasn’t in on Battle’s move from the penthouse to his new quarters on the seventeenth floor, and therefore I wasn’t in on the beginning of the session in Chambrun’s office with Cleaves and Potter. I had to deal once more with the press and with dozens of guests who wanted assurances from Chambrun and nobody else that it was still safe to stay in the hotel.

  The bomb had gone off in the penthouse about eleven o’clock. It was nearly twelve-thirty when I left Chambrun’s office and went downstairs to undertake my part of the job. I learned afterwards that at about one-thirty Battle had been moved, along with Cobb, Butler, Gaston, and, somewhat to my dismay, Shelda. I wanted her out of there, away from the center of trouble, but, knowing her, I knew she’d stick with Battle as long as he wanted her to. People on the seventeenth floor must have guessed something was up. The corridors were patrolled by men who had cop written all over them. Cobb, Butler, Gaston, and Shelda were moved down first, accompanied by Jerry’s men. When they were safely in, Battle himself was brought down, surrounded by Jerry and a half dozen plainclothes men. An elevator was commandeered for the purpose, and I don’t think many people saw it happen.

  Just before the exodus from the roof started, Hardy had picked up Cleaves and Potter and brought them down to Chambrun’s office. There was no way they could know exactly where Battle had been taken unless, and it seemed possible, Cleaves had somebody watching for him. I knew, later, that when Cleaves was brought down to the office, the detective who had brought up the mail and the elevator operator who had run the penthouse car had been given an opportunity to get a good look at him. He was not, they both said without any question, the man who had delivered the letters which had included the birthday greeting.

  It took me forever, it seemed, to satisfy the men from the newspapers and the TV and radio stations. There was no way to evade the truth this time. Yes, there had been a second attempt o
n George Battle’s life. Yes, a so-called letter bomb, addressed to Battle, had been opened by Battle’s valet and the man was dead. No, there was no reason to think there was any danger to anyone else in the hotel, no reason to think that public areas in the hotel were in any danger of being bombed.

  My friend from the News threw me another curve. “Is it true, Mark, that Pierre Chambrun is among the missing?”

  “Not true. He’s in his office now.”

  “Can we get a statement from him?”

  “Not now.”

  “Was he among the missing?” my News friend persisted.

  “He was out of the hotel for a few hours,” I said.

  “Come on, Mark, it’s all around that he was kidnaped and that a ransom was paid to get him free. True or false? And has the ransom been paid and is he free?”

  “He’s in his office now, consulting with the police on the best way to protect Mr. Battle,” I said, ducking. All we needed to start a panic was to confirm the fact that Chambrun himself had been in trouble.

  I finally got out of there with a whole skin and headed upstairs to Chambrun’s office. Cleaves and Potter were with him along with Miss Ruysdale, Hardy, and Kranepool. I hesitated in the doorway.

  “Come in, Mark,” Chambrun said. He was leaning back in his desk chair, his dark eyes buried deep in their pouches. “I think you know both Mr. Cleaves and Mr. Potter.”

  I said. “Hi!”

  It didn’t look like a rubber-hose third degree had been going on. Both men had coffee cups on side tables beside their chairs. Potter gave me his mischievous smile, looking as though he was having a ball. Cleaves, hidden behind those black glasses, gave me a curt nod. Without waiting for an invitation I went over to the sideboard and poured myself a slug of Jack Daniels. Kranepool was evidently handling this part of the interrogation. He didn’t look as bright and fresh as he had twelve hours ago.

  “You don’t deny, Cleaves, that you’ve dreamed most of your life of getting revenge for what happened to your father, and that Mr. Battle and Mr. Chambrun were your prime targets?”