“I’m sorry, Miss Sands,” Hardy said.
The woman stood up. I guess I was the closest to her, which may explain the next thing that happened. She suddenly threw her arms around my shoulders and buried her face against my neck. Great, convulsive sobs shook her.
“Please, please, for God sake help me!” she whispered.
Chambrun spoke for the first time in all this interrogation. “There are better places to talk than this,” he said. “What about my office, Walter?”
“I need some time here,” Hardy said. “Your office would be fine, Pierre, but I don’t want her leaving the hotel. I’ve only just started with Miss Sands.” It seemed to bother him to use the word “Miss” for the mother of the dead boy.
The medical team carried the body away. Stan Nelson, Johnny Floyd, and Butch Mancuso drifted off behind them, evidently permitted to use the freight elevator to go back to their suite on thirty-five. I was still being clung to by a sobbing Nora Sands. Chambrun gestured to me to take her away, down to his office. Hardy assigned one of his cops to go with us.
I instructed the elevator operator to take us directly to the second floor, and he did, ignoring the frantic lights on his light board. Betsy Ruysdale was waiting for us in her outer office. I should have known that Chambrun would have phoned down to forewarn her. She went with us into Chambrun’s elegant office. I eased Nora Sands into one of the antique armchairs.
“Damn crybaby!” she said. “Is there a Kleenex in this joint?”
Ruysdale brought her one from the cabinet back of Chambrun’s desk. “Would you like some coffee?” she asked Nora. “There’s Turkish which I made for Mr. Chambrun—which is ghastly. I have American out in my office.”
Just the sound of Ruysdale’s casual but friendly voice seemed to relax Nora. “What I’d really like is a drink, a good slug of bourbon. But you’ve got to be sure I don’t take a second. I’m not to be trusted after one good one.”
Ruysdale went over the Burmese cabinet and produced bourbon, ice in an old-fashioned glass. “Plain water or soda?” she asked.
“Very little plain water,” Nora said. She drank the liquor almost straight down when Ruysdale handed it to her. A second short swig and she handed back the glass. “Just a touch more?”
“Sorry. Your orders,” Ruysdale said, smiling at her. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got things to do for the boss.”
Nora leaned back in her chair and for a moment her shadowed eyelids closed down. Then they lifted and she was looking at me with those incredible violet eyes.
“Why me?” I asked her.
“Meaning?”
“Why did you ask me for help, grab onto me?”
“Funny. I don’t even know your name,” she said.
“Mark Haskell. I run public relations for the hotel.”
“Who could I turn to?” she said. She gave out with a bitter little laugh. “Cops? Stan Nelson and his two goons must hate my guts. Your Mr. Chambrun looked like a judge on the bench. That left you, Mark.”
“I hoped it was because I was irresistible, not just the best of a bad lot,” I said.
“I’ve been making judgments about men ever since I was twelve years old,” she said. “That’s when I discovered my stepfather had more on his mind than playing doctor. I’m not very often wrong about them.”
“You asked me up there in the club to help you, how?”
Her eyes narrowed and the warmth seemed to go out of them. “That wasn’t an accident up there—what happened to Eddie. By the way, I get him back, don’t I? I mean, for a decent funeral and all that?”
“Of course.”
“How did he get there, Mark? How did he get up there in that pool?”
“We don’t know that,” I told her. “If everything happened the way it should—and we’re told it did—there’s no way he could get there. But he did.”
“He didn’t carry money,” Nora said. “There are a thousand people in this hotel who would be better targets for a cheap mugging.”
“He had two dollars and some change on him that wasn’t taken,” I said. “That and a green card on which Stan Nelson had signed his autograph.”
“Can you imagine that? Stan signing something for him and not knowing who he was?”
“Did he know who Stan was?”
“How do you mean? Everybody knows who Stan is.”
“That Stan had once been your guy, and that he just might be his father?”
“He knew that I used to know Stan. He didn’t know any of the lurid details.”
“You never told him?”
“It was coming up one of these days, but it hadn’t—yet,” she said almost bitterly.
“Why not? He was bound to hear about you and Stan sometime from somebody,” I said.
“I wanted it to come from me, and somehow that ‘right time’ hadn’t come,” she said.
“Is Stan his father?”
She was silent for a moment, looking down at that huge diamond on her left-hand finger.
“If you were to ask one of the nice girls you know a question like that, she’d have the answer, wouldn’t she? Will it shock you if I tell you I haven’t the faintest idea who his father was?”
I have to admit it did shock me a little.
“Some people get hooked on liquor,” she said. “Some on drugs. I’ve been hooked on sex all my life.”
“You lived with Stan for two years. He supported you. You were committed to him, weren’t you?”
“I gave him all he wanted,” Nora said, a sharp edge on her voice. “It wasn’t enough for me. Not nearly enough. And so, when he was away working, there were others. A lot of others.”
“You could have claimed Stan was the boy’s father and probably collected a lot of money from him,” I said.
“I may be a bitch on wheels,” she said, “but I wouldn’t accuse my worst enemy of something I wasn’t sure about. If you were to ask me right now, Mark, to go with you to wherever you live and make love to you I would.”
My breathing felt a little thin!
“If I was pregnant after that I wouldn’t accuse you,” she said, “because there was someone else that night, and the night before that, and the night before that. That’s how badly I’m hooked, Mark. I need it like water, or breakfast, or air!”
For once in my life I wanted to get away from that subject. I might ask, just for the excitement of it.
“Why would someone want to kill the boy?” I asked her. “Is there someone who wants to get even with you for something?”
“If there is he’s going to wish he’d never been born when I find out who it is,” she said. “The man on the telephone—he seems to have been trying to hurt Stan, wouldn’t you say?”
It was true, we’d only guessed at her. The anonymous caller had never mentioned her.
“You had no idea your boy was going to go out last night to listen to Stan’s telethon?”
“If this hadn’t happened,” she said, “and you asked me where Eddie might have gone last night, the last place on earth I’d have thought of would have been Stan’s music. Eddie was born in the sixties; he grew up on the sounds of rock music and country music. He thought Stan’s music—and Sinatra’s, and Tony Bennett’s, and Rosemary Clooney’s—was old hat. He never listened to it at home on TV or radio. He collected records—all rock and country. I would never in the world guess he’d come here to hear Stan sing. He didn’t collect autographs, trade them with other kids—a Stan Nelson for a Mick Jagger.”
“A personal interest in Stan—somebody slipped him the rumor that Stan might be his father, and he came to have a look?” I suggested.
“Eddie and I were very close,” she said, her husky voice lowered. “If he’d heard a rumor like that he’d have asked me.”
“Did he—ask you about his father?”
“When he was old enough to realize that something was missing,” she said. “I wrote him a good tight scenario.” Her smile had that bitter twist to it again. “A
whirlwind romance, I told him, just before his father had to go off to war—Vietnam. His father was dead, killed in action. That satisfied Eddie.”
“Didn’t he wonder why his name was Sands—your name?”
“He had no reason not to think that was my married name.”
“Yet he came here and got Stan Nelson’s autograph.”
“Did he?”
Both Nora and I turned sharply. Neither one of us had heard Chambrun come into the office. He walked past us and sat down at his desk.
“He had the autograph on him,” I said.
Chambrun reached for one of his flat Egyptian cigarettes and got it going with his gold desk lighter. His eyes, not cordial, were narrowed against the smoke.
“You saw it,” he said. “The boy’s name wasn’t on it. Stan doesn’t put the names of the people he signs for when he gives an autograph. He told us that. He could have signed that pledge card for anyone and it can have been put in the boy’s pocket later.”
“Why?”
“Why any of it?” Chambrun said. “What was the boy doing here at the Beaumont if he wasn’t interested in Stan or his music? I have to confess, Miss Sands, that I’ve been eavesdropping a little.”
I glanced at the intercom on his desk. Ruysdale, ever efficient, had switched it on while she was in the office so that everything Nora and I said to each other could be heard out in her office. There was no First Amendment around here when Chambrun chose to invade your privacy. That didn’t seem to bother Nora.
“I trust you enjoyed yourself,” she said.
“There’s been a murder in my hotel, Miss Sands. I’ll do anything I can to get to the bottom of it. If your history, your habits, will help I’ll use them.”
“Help yourself,” she said. “I want the answers just as badly as you do.”
“Your work at the Private Lives Club here in the Village,” he said. “This is well-organized, luxurious pornography all over the country. Hundreds of thousands of magazine readers looking at your nude photographs. Thousands of weak-minded males looking for free girls all across the country use the clubs.”
“Free my foot,” Nora said. “There’s nothing free about anything Private Lives promotes anywhere.”
“I used the word ‘free’ to apply to morals, not money,” Chambrun said.
“Those nude pictures I posed for were fourteen years ago,” Nora said. “Food isn’t free, Mr. Chambrun. I had to eat!”
“And you’ve been working for Private Lives ever since?”
“Before that,” she said. “I was a Private Lives Girl working in the Hollywood club when I met Stan. I was eighteen years old when he came there one night, looking for fun. He chose me, and afterwards he took me out of there. I lived with him for two years.”
“But you still kept at your trade,” Chambrun said.
“If you’re suggesting I slept around for money, you’re off your rocker, Chambrun.”
“And when Stan walked out on you you went back to Private Lives?”
“For help,” she said. “Zach Thompson thought Stan owed me. He got his own lawyer to handle my case. I guess he wasn’t as good a lawyer as Zach thought.”
“Zachary Thompson is the publisher of Private Lives, the operator of the clubs, the King of Porn?” Chambrun asked.
“He stood by me when I had no place else to turn,” she said.
“And he’s still standing by you?”
“When we lost the lawsuit against Stan he let me pose for the center fold of the magazine. There was a nice piece of change in that. I had a baby. I needed money wherever I could find it. He’s found work for me, one way or another, ever since.”
“He’s your lover?”
She laughed. “Zach doesn’t stay put long enough for anyone to think of his as ‘theirs.’ He has thousands of beautiful girls to choose from, anytime, day or night.” She nodded towards the intercom. “I hope your secretary isn’t sitting out there blushing.”
“She just might be,” Chambrun said. “Ruysdale has different ideas about the man-woman relationship than you do, Miss Sands.”
“Maybe she doesn’t know what she’s missing,” Nora said. She could really play it tough.
Chambrun crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray on his desk as though he was angry at it. “Would Eddie have talked to any friends before he set out for the Beaumont last night? Kids he was close to, his stickball friends?”
“I suppose he might have.”
“Give me some names,” Chambrun said, pulling a legal pad toward him and picking up a ball-point pen.
“I don’t intend to involve kids in this mess,” Nora said.
“Somebody put a magnum-sized gun to that boy’s face and blew a hole in him,” Chambrun said. “You want that someone to go free?”
“No!”
“So, names, please!”
The phone light blinked on Chambrun’s desk. He picked it up, and Betsy Ruysdale’s voice came through the intercom. “There’s a man named Zachary Thompson and a lawyer named Wallach here to see Miss Sands,” she said.
Chambrun drew a deep breath. “Bring them in. By the way, Ruysdale, were you blushing?”
“I think I’ll skip lunch,” she said.
Zachary Thompson doesn’t have the familiar face of a movie star, but hundreds of thousands of people would know him by sight. His picture appears on the masthead of his magazine Private Lives, on the advertisements of his Private Lives clubs, and all too frequently in the press and on television news shows. In the last year Greta Jansen, the film star, has been suing Thompson for what she claimed were libelous statements in the magazine, plus some pretty steamy photographs of her in a nude scene in a foreign film. It was all grist to the Thompson mill, gave him endless exposure, plus in the end the courts ruled in his favor. The actress had made that nude scene for public distribution—in the film, of course—and she had made a spectacle of herself under the influence of drugs in a famous Hollywood restaurant. Private Lives had reported on public facts, the court ruled, and not invaded the lady’s privacy. Drinks were free in all the Private Lives clubs across the country the night the verdict came in.
Zach Thompson has to be at least fifty years old. He’s been running what Chambrun calls his “porno empire” for twenty-five years. As he walked into Chambrun’s office he looked like a slightly overage hippie, with his long hair, his Fu Manchu mustache and pointed beard, wearing blue jeans, a garish orange sports shirt, a chamois vest with no jacket over it. He walked straight to Nora, ignoring Chambrun and me, and took the woman in his arms.
“Now, now, baby, just take it easy,” he said. “Papa’s here.”
She accepted his embrace, snuggling her face against his beard. He looked over her head at Chambrun. “You’re Pierre Chambrun?”
“You weren’t admitted into the men’s room,” Chambrun said.
“So, we’re going to play hard ball, are we?” Thompson said. “This is Lou Wallach, my lawyer.”
Wallach looked a little more civilized to me than his client. A businessman’s haircut, a pale gray tropical worsted summer suit, a white shirt with a tie with regimental stripes. Probably a Brooks Brothers customer, I thought.
“I understand the police are holding Nora, not allowing her to leave the hotel,” Thompson said. “On what charges?”
“Somebody killed Eddie,” Nora said in a husky whisper.
“Do they say you did it, Baby?”
“It’s awful, Zach. His whole face was blown away.”
“Do they say you did it?”
“They don’t say anything yet. They don’t know anything yet, Zach.”
“Then we’ll just hightail it out of here,” Thompson said. “You got any objection to make, Chambrun?”
“The air might be a little fresher,” Chambrun said.
Thompson put the girl aside, gently, and took a step toward Chambrun’s desk. “You want to make cheap wisecracks I’m liable to wash out your mouth with soap, Dad,” he said.
“I just wanted to be sure I spoke a language you’d understand,” Chambrun said.
Thompson took another quick step toward the desk.
“Cool it, Zach,” the lawyer said. His voice was quiet, level. “Is Miss Sands being detained here, Mr. Chambrun?”
“It isn’t quite that way, Lou,” Nora said, before Chambrun could answer. “It was so awful up there in the Health Club where it happened. Mr. Chambrun kindly offered to let me wait here till the cop in charge could ask me questions about Eddie.”
“What kind of questions?” Thompson asked.
“Who blew his brains out and why,” Chambrun said.
“They don’t know who or why?” Thompson asked.
“They didn’t even know who Eddie was, when they found him,” Nora said. “He wasn’t carrying anything on him that would identify him.”
“How did they get to you?” Lou Wallach asked.
“An anonymous phone call,” Nora said. “A man phoned the police and told them Eddie was Stan Nelson’s son. Someone knew Stan and I had once been close. They asked me to try to identify Eddie, and of course, I could.”
“Stan Nelson’s here in the hotel, isn’t he?” Thompson asked.
“Yes, he is,” Nora said. “He did his cancer telethon here last night.”
“Sonofabitch!” Thompson said. “I hope to God they haven’t let him take off. Mr. Big Shot!”
“You brought a suit against Nelson some years ago, didn’t you, Wallach?” Chambrun asked.
“I wasn’t Zach’s lawyer in those days,” Wallach said.
“Nora brought the suit,” Thompson said. “I supplied the lawyer. A square-headed judge ruled against her. She ought to be living in clover off Mr. Big Shot instead of working for me. I stand by my people, which is more than can be said for Nelson.”
“I know you don’t have to answer questions from me, Mr. Chambrun,” Wallach said. “But just what did happen here in your hotel?”
Chambrun hesitated for a moment, and then reached for another cigarette. He lighted it and leaned back in his chair. “I don’t mind telling you what I know, Mr. Wallach,” he said, “because it isn’t really anything. The day manager of the Health Club came to work a little before nine. He started to check out the place before he opened it up for the public and found Eddie Sands, floating in the pool, dead of a gunshot wound in the face that exited out the back of his head. The police were called. As Miss Sands has told you, he had no identification on him.”
With Intent to Kill Page 4
