But it turned out there were others. Another of Hardy’s cops joined us. “There’s a phone call for Mr. Haskell,” he said. “He says he’s Eliot Stevens of International Press.”
Stevens is a reporter with whom I have a good relationship. He would be calling me to chat about the weather. I glanced at Chambrun and Hardy, asking without words for instructions.
“This thing has leaked, Lieutenant,” the new cop said. “Reporters, photographers, the TV people in the lobby and outside this place in the corridor. They want to know is it true the victim is Stan Nelson’s son.”
“Damn!” Hardy said.
“It seems our anonymous friend has been busy,” Chambrun said.
In my job at the Beaumont the press can wear two hats. If we have a story we want to publicize they can be our friends. If there is something we want to keep under cover they can be the enemy. Right now we had nothing to give them except the fact of a murder, not who the victim was or who was responsible for his death, or why. Mr. Anonymous was way ahead of us with his phony rumor that the dead boy was Stan Nelson’s son. But that was enough to provide the media with a scandalous field day unless we could put a stop to it.
“We can’t have an army in here,” Hardy said. “We’ve got to go over every inch of this place without interference.”
“They know Homicide isn’t here for a picnic,” Chambrun said. “You better see them, Walter. Tell them you have no facts yet.”
“And, for God’s sake, tell them I don’t have a son this age,” Stan Nelson said. “I never laid eyes on this dead boy before.”
“Except when you signed an autograph for him, Mr. Nelson,” Hardy said.
“He’s one of a jumble of hundreds of faces,” Stan said.
I suggested we let Eliot Stevens in. He could be trusted. He might help turn off the garbage about the dead boy being Stan’s son. Eliot could be counted on to sit on a story if he knew he was going to get it all on the level when the time came to break it.
Chambrun agreed with me.
I went out to the telephone in the office where Eliot was waiting patiently on the other end of the line.
“I was just about to give up on you, chum,” he said.
“Look,” I said, “we’ve got a murder up here. The victim isn’t Stan Nelson’s son. Where did you get that?”
“Anonymous phone call,” Eliot said. “Every newspaper, radio and TV station has had the same call.”
“Can you get away from the rest of them and come up on the service elevator? Hardy’s waiting. He’ll send a cop down to bring you up. You’ll have to hang on to what you get till we give you the green light.”
“Is Stan Nelson there with you?”
“Yes.”
“Will he talk?”
“He’ll tell you the dead boy is a stranger to him.”
“I don’t want to wind up running behind the rest of this gang, Mark.”
“A promise,” I said.
“Send down your guide dog,” he said.
Eliot Stevens is slender, sandy-haired, looking amiably professorial behind owlish, horn-rimmed glasses. He is, however, just about the sharpest investigative reporter I’ve come across in my experience, and I’ve had dealings with quite a few of them in my time at the Beaumont. Eliot will never have to give back a Pulitzer prize for having faked a story. When he goes into print you can depend on it that his facts are facts. Rumor is rumor until he can nail it down for truth.
One of Hardy’s men went down to the lobby level in the service elevator to pick up Eliot. I met him when he came up the back way to the Health Club. While we walked through the gym and the massage room toward the pool I gave him the bare bones; Hulman’s discovery of the body, the bullet that exited from the back of the boy’s head not yet found, no gun, no I.D. Just the green pledge card on which Stan Nelson had signed his autograph.
“This crazy on the phone who says the dead boy is Stan’s son is full of it,” I said. “Stan has two kids, a daughter ten, a son eight, both alive and well and with his wife in Beverly Hills.”
“Nobody alerted Missing Persons? Nobody asking the cops to find a lost boy?” Eliot asked.
“If anyone has it hasn’t gotten to Hardy yet,” I said.
We reached the pool. Chambrun, Hardy, and Stan Nelson were standing in one group; Butch Mancuso, Johnny Floyd, and Tony Camargo in another. Carl Hulman wasn’t there any longer. Hardy’s men were going over the whole area like busy insects. Eliot is well known to Chambrun and Hardy.
“You understand whatever you see or hear is off the record till I say so, Eliot,” Hardy said.
“Until you keep something back from me, Lieutenant,” Eliot said with his gentle smile.
I introduced Eliot to Stan.
“Nice to meet you, Stan,” Eliot said. “The man who outlasted rock music. I bless you for that. You helped keep something alive that’s worth hearing.”
“There are others who deserve your blessing,” Stan said. “Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Mel Tormé, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme.”
“Fun to talk about it sometime,” Eliot said. He turned back to Hardy. “Do I get to view the remains, Lieutenant?”
Hardy bent down and pulled back the tarpaulin from the dead boy’s mangled face.
“Oh, wow!” Eliot said. He looked away quickly. “His own mother wouldn’t know him.”
The canvas went back over the body.
“You signed an autograph for him, Stan?” Eliot asked.
“And a hundred others like him,” Stan said. “The thing I’m most interested in making clear to you, Stevens, is that he’s a total stranger to me. I didn’t sign an autograph for anyone I knew, or I’d remember. He isn’t, for God sake, my son. I have two kids: Kathy, ten, and Bobby, eight. That’s my total score.”
Eliot fished a cigarette out of his pocket and held his lighter to it. “You and I met before, Stan, but there’s no reason you should remember it.”
“Oh?” Stan said.
“Was it nineteen sixty-eight? California. Some broad was suing you for what we now call ‘palimony.’ Been living with you for a couple of years. She lost the suit. That was before some smart lawyers found a way to make a profit from that kind of case.”
“Oh, God,” Stan said.
“Her name was Nora Sands, as I remember it,” Eliot said.
“It wasn’t a secret then. I hoped it was forgotten about now,” Stan said. “I’ve been very happily married for eleven years, I have a family. Nora Sands is a bad dream I’d almost forgotten.”
“I was in a group of reporters who interviewed you after the trial,” Eliot said.
“So what does that have to do with the price of eggs?” Hardy asked. “We’ve got work to do, Eliot.”
Eliot was looking steadily at Stan. “The Hollywood gossip ladies had some fun with that case for a while, didn’t they, Stan? Nora Sands had an infant son when she brought suit against you. A lot of people at the time thought it might be your kid, as I remember.”
“Oh, God save us!” Stan said. “Yes, yes, yes! There was talk. Nora never claimed I was the kid’s father. If she had she might have collected from me. After all, we did live together for two years, and her baby was born a few months after we broke up.”
“So?”
“You covered the trial?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know I was making a film—on location for about ten days. I came home unexpectedly one night and found her in the hay—in our bed—with some creep. I just turned around and walked out. That was that. I provided her with funds to move out and get set up somewhere else. She tried, through the suit, to collect half of my property, which was pretty substantial. If she’d claimed I was the father of her child she might have got lucky. She never did. You know why?”
“No, Stan, why?”
“My lawyer was a smart guy,” Stan said. “He had me take blood tests. I don’t know the medical details but I understand there are ways to match blood sam
ples. They could prove that you might be a child’s father or that you couldn’t possibly be. In judge’s chambers we offered to face that match-up—my blood samples, the kid’s blood samples. Nora wouldn’t go for it. And so the judge ordered her lawyer not to even hint that I was her child’s father or be in contempt. I believed at the time that Nora was sleeping around so much she had no idea who the father might be.”
“Let’s see. Nineteen sixty-eight, the kid under a year old,” Eliot said. “That would make him about fifteen now. Just about the age of that thing under the canvas. Right?”
“What the hell are you getting at?” Stan asked, anger flaring.
“It can be pure coincidence,” Eliot said. “But back in sixty-eight there were people who believed the rumor, or wanted to believe the rumor. We are a nation of people who like to hear dirt about the famous. Our anonymous phone caller just might be one of them. No? Do we know where Nora Sands is living now?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Stan said. “I tell you, she’s a bad dream I’ve forgotten until this moment.”
“What the hell, boss, I know where Nora lives,” Johnny Floyd burst in. “Right here in New York—in Greenwich Village. I’ve been in touch with her from time to time.”
“Johnny!”
“She’s been after you for more handouts. I was a sonofabitch if I’d let her mess up your life anymore. I took care of her from time to time, kept her out of your hair. The kid is about fifteen now.”
“You recognized him and didn’t say?” Hardy asked.
“I never saw the kid in my life,” Johnny said. “But she talked about him when we met. That’s why she needed dough, for the kid.”
“How do we reach her?” Hardy asked.
Johnny reached in his pocket for his wallet. “I have a phone number for her here.” His cigarette was a stub between his thin lips. “Don’t be sore at me, boss. I just wanted to keep that mess out of your life again. You and Ellen and the kids didn’t deserve that kind of stink in your life.”
And so it turned out that the murdered boy was known as Eddie Sands, that his mother was Nora Sands, and his father was take-your-pick.
THREE
I HAVE IMAGINED FROM time to time that I am a connoisseur of women. God knows they pass by me in the Beaumont in an endless parade, the grand ladies of American Society with a capital S, the beautiful foreign contingent, the women of kings, shahs, dictators, glamorous movie stars and Broadway actresses, American housewives who can be as exciting as all hell, professional call-girls whom we pretend not to see in our bars and corridors, and the young girls from everywhere, wide-eyed, rushing into whatever the future is. Women and girls! I have to tell you they make my teeth hurt. Not from chewing on them, but from standing back and letting them—most of them—pass.
I tell myself, as I approach my fortieth birthday, that my view of women has become more sophisticated than it was fifteen years ago. Now I tell myself that I am more concerned with personality, intellect, and wit than I am with simple physical beauty. But every now and then a woman comes along who is so loaded with sheer animal excitement that it doesn’t matter if she can’t add up to two.
Nora Sands took my breath away when I first saw her. I didn’t get anywhere near her but it was like touching a live wire. She came running into the pool area, one of Hardy’s cops behind her. She was down on her hands and knees, looking at the dead boy under the tarpaulin. From her came a cry of despair that ripped at my gut. No doubt, the dead boy was her kid.
She ignored everyone, including Stan Nelson, who stood a few yards away, the color drained from his face. There were things I knew about her as I watched, things I’d learned as we’d waited for her to arrive. She’d been eighteen when she’d shacked up with the young Stan Nelson in Hollywood, twenty when they separated, just over twenty-one when she’d sued him for a share of his property and lost. She’d been twenty-three when he married Ellen Davis, which made her thirty-five as she knelt beside her murdered son. At thirty-five she was in full bloom!
Johnny Floyd had done some talking while he waited. The year after the lawsuit Nora had posed for the center fold of the magazine Private Lives, stark naked—along with half a dozen other nude photographs in suggestive poses. That scurrilous magazine had not said in print that this luscious body had shared Stan Nelson’s bed for two years, but a few hundred thousand people guessed it and slavered over the idea. I hadn’t seen the pictures then, but I could imagine them. She had red hair, dark, violet eyes like Elizabeth Taylor’s, and a figure that would have made Michelangelo breathe just a little harder.
“You can make an identification, Mrs. Sands?” Hardy asked, his voice quiet.
“Miss Sands,” she said, not looking at him. Under other circumstances her husky voice would have been a magnet for interested males. She reached down to pick up the dead boy’s hand and encountered some resistance. She looked up at Hardy, wide eyes wider.
“He’s been dead quite a few hours—Miss Sands,” the lieutenant said.
“Oh, my God!” she said.
“You can make a positive identification, Miss Sands?” Hardy hesitated. “His face—”
“Oh Jesus, you think I don’t know my own son?” Nora Sands said. “I was about to show you. When he was a baby there was an accident. The little finger of his right hand got jammed in a door. They had to amputate it at the first joint. No fingertip or nail.” She pointed down at the dead boy’s stiffening right hand.
“So he is—”
“Eddie Sands, my son.”
“Living at?”
“Forty-four Jane Street, in the Village.”
“With you—Miss Sands?”
“Who else, for God sake!”
Hardy reached down and covered the mutilated face again. She grabbed the edge of the tarpaulin and yanked it back. She made a kind of moaning sound as she stared at the ugly wound.
“We have to move him, Miss Sands,” Hardy said. “There has to be an autopsy.”
“Cut him up?” she asked.
“A legal requirement,” Hardy said.
“He could look better when they get through with him,” Johnny Floyd said.
She turned her head, not to look at Johnny but at Stan Nelson, who was standing a little way off. “He came here to see you, Stan?” she asked.
His voice sounded far away, strained. “He came here to watch the telethon, Nora. I evidently signed an autograph for him but, of course, I had no idea who he was.”
Nobody spoke for a minute and then Hardy picked up on it again. “You hadn’t reported anywhere that he was missing—Miss Sands.”
“I didn’t know he was missing.”
“He must have been here for hours when he was found,” Hardy said. “You weren’t surprised when he didn’t come home last night?”
“I work at night,” she said. “He was old enough to be left alone. There are people in the building he could ask for help if he needed it. I didn’t get home till after nine o’clock this morning. He wasn’t there, but I just supposed he’d gone out in the neighborhood somewhere to play with friends. He—he was on a stickball team. They often play on Saturday mornings. I went to bed. Your cop woke me up and told me.”
“Where is it you work at night, Miss Sands?”
“The Private Lives Club. It’s only a few blocks from where I live.”
The publishers of Private Lives Magazine have a half a dozen or more of these nightclubs spread across the country. They don’t rate very highly with churchgoers. They are designed to provide pleasure for single males, salesmen, delegates to conventions from out of town. They advertise, obliquely, that you could anticipate meeting a “Private Lives Girl” if you became a customer. A lot of these girls had posed for the famous nude photographs that were a feature of the magazine. If they hadn’t they would, sooner or later. I’ve been told you could be provided with nude pictures before you picked out a companion for the evening. The law doesn’t choose to recognize these places for what they really ar
e.
“You’ll pardon me for saying so, Miss Sands, but you strike me as being a little old to be working as a Private Lives Girl,” Hardy said.
“I don’t pardon you! My age is none of your business, Lieutenant. But—I’m the hostess at the club, not one of the girls,” Nora Sands said.
“What time do you go to work?”
“Nine o’clock in the evening.”
“And you work till nine o’clock in the morning? That’s a long shift.”
“I didn’t say I was working till nine in the morning. I said I got home then.”
“If your son had been home he wouldn’t have been worried about you?”
“No. It wasn’t unusual.”
“It wasn’t unusual for him to go out in the evening after you’d gone to work? Like here to the telethon?”
“It would have been unusual, without his leaving some kind of a note for me.”
“He didn’t leave a note last night?”
“No. So I didn’t have any idea that he’d gone out till morning—for his stickball game.”
“No note for that?”
“No. That was usual. He knew I’d know where he was.”
“Breakfast?”
“Eddie is—was—a wonderfully neat boy. He got his own breakfast every morning, washed the dishes and silver and the frying pan if he cooked something—put them all away. I had no reason to think this morning wasn’t perfectly normal when I got home.”
“Do you know how we got on your track, Miss Sands?”
“The cop you sent said something about a phone call,” Nora Sands said.
“An anonymous phone call,” Hardy said. “Someone told us the dead boy was Stan Nelson’s son. That led us to you.”
“Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!” she said. She leaned forward and covered her face with her hands for a moment. I was aware, for the first time, of a diamond ring about the size of a walnut.
Hardy waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. The medical examiner’s boys had come in with a stretcher and were waiting for instructions. Hardy gestured toward the tarpaulin, and the men began to lift the body onto the stretcher. Nora Sands grabbed at it, like a drowning person reached for a life raft.
With Intent to Kill Page 3
