The phone rang and Toto expressed his resentment from the corner to which he’d retreated.
“That will be Pierre to find out if you’ve surfaced,” Mrs. Haven said. “The switchboard was ordered to protect you from anything casual.” She picked up the phone. “Yes, Pierre?” She listened for a moment and then she said, “Oh my God! Yes, I’ll tell him.” She put the receiver back in place and faced me. “Nora Sands died a half an hour ago—without talking.”
I found myself standing up.
“Pierre’s coming,” Mrs. Haven said. “Haskell, you’ve got to remember what it is you’ve blotted out. You’ll be next, you know, if you don’t!”
TWO
I SUSPECT ALL OF us are brought up to accept the fact that we are constantly surrounded by danger. All of childhood is surrounded by warnings. “It’s raining, Mark. If you don’t wear your rubbers you’ll catch cold. Look both ways before you cross the street—or else. Don’t talk to strangers—it may be a burglar trying to find out when the family won’t be at home.” I could give you a list as long as my arm. My mother saw disaster everywhere. My father, on the other hand, was a fatalist. “You slip on the soap in the bathtub and break your neck. If your number is up, it’s up.”
In today’s world, as Victoria Haven had just been pointing out, the dangers are very real. In any fifteen-minute newscast on radio or TV you are certain to hear of at least three or four violences—a holdup-robbery-murder sequence, or hijacking and hostage taking, a fire in which people die is of “suspicious origin.” Rape, sodomy, God knows what other aberrations, are everywhere. But I know I don’t walk around every day expecting to be the target of some horror. I take it for granted it will happen to some other guy, some other group, people I don’t know. I’ve been confronted with violence and death in Chambrun City. Security is better in the Beaumont than in most “cities,” but when violence does take place it has never involved friends, people I know well. My face has never, until that Sunday, been in the center of the bulls-eye.
It isn’t a pleasant sensation, I can tell you. I didn’t quite believe it yet, but I couldn’t ignore the possibility. Chambrun, Hardy, Jerry Dodd, and my remarkable old lady friend, who had more experience with life than any of us, were all convinced that what had happened to me was directly connected with two murders—three now, for God sake.
“You think I’ve inconveniently forgotten something,” I said to Chambrun when he and Jerry Dodd appeared in the penthouse. Chambrun looked fresh and rested, but I guessed it was a surface accomplishment. There was dark trouble in his deep-set eyes. It was comforting to know that he was concerned for his beloved hotel and for its population for whom he felt responsible. “I keep telling myself it’s not so, Boss, because I can’t imagine where to start trying to remember.”
We had moved out onto the terrace outside the penthouse, shielded from the afternoon sun by a wide green awning. Chambrun sat sunk in a white wicker armchair, eyes squinted against the smoke from one of his flat-shaped Egyptian cigarettes. Jerry Dodd paced restlessly up and down by the row of flower boxes, looking out over the roof at Mrs. Haven’s penthouse and the one that housed Stan Nelson and his two people. Mrs. Haven brought a tray of fresh coffee in mugs.
“Don’t get to like this service, Pierre,” she said. “I’m not about to turn housemaid.”
He gave her a sort of faraway smile. “I’ve always hoped that you might someday be my slave, Victoria. Let me go on dreaming.” He turned his attention to me. “There are several areas you may have to cover, Mark, but it begins here at the hotel. I’m personally convinced that when you go back over the last forty-eight hours here in the hotel you may suddenly remember what a psychotic killer so urgently wants you to forget.”
“Until Carl Hulman found the Sands boy in the pool yesterday morning everything here had been routine,” I said.
“Oh, come on, Mark, get your head screwed on,” he said. “Just because it hasn’t been routine is why you could forget something which at the time seemed unimportant.”
“But I tell you—”
“Let me tell you, since you don’t seem to be making sense,” he said. “Let’s go back to Thursday noon. Thursday noon Stan Nelson, his bodyguard and his musical genius, checked in. You took them up to their suite, made sure that everything was arranged for them as Nelson wanted it.”
“I’ve done that five or six times in the last five or six years,” I said. “And for hundreds of other famous guests since I’ve been working here. Routine.”
“Of course it’s routine,” he said, impatient with me. “The minute Stan Nelson walked into this hotel nothing has been quite normal again. A thousand people who had never been in this hotel before—unless it was at Nelson’s last telethon—inundated us like a hurricane’s high tide. Security had to be heightened. Not routine. The comings and goings of our guests, our regular clientele, were interrupted, dislocated. Not routine. Starting early in the evening, intensifying at midnight when the telethon started, you were constantly in and out of the ballroom, ignoring your usual patterns. Not routine. For twenty-four hours that unusual pattern for you persisted. Not routine. Then, yesterday morning, Hulman found the dead boy in the pool and Mr. Anonymous began informing the world and pointing at Stan Nelson. You have none of your regular jobs since then; you’ve been out into the world of stickball, of professional pornography, of the New Morality. Routine? Come on, Mark, come on!”
In a way he was right, of course. The whole telethon time in the hotel wasn’t an everyday occurrence. But my job was to deal with out-of-the-ordinary situations. In that sense it was routine. I had done it before and in dozens of other excitements created by the presence in the Beaumont of famous and glamorous people. But the deaths of the last two days?
I had been at the front desk at noon on Thursday when Stan Nelson, Johnny Floyd, and Butch Mancuso arrived. I was waiting for them because Johnny had phoned from Kennedy Airport that they were on their way. I ferried Stan and his bodyguard directly up to the suite on the thirty-fifth floor. Johnny Floyd stayed behind to do the formal registering for all three of them at the front desk. We managed all that without raising any squeals of delight and surprise in the lobby. Stan had gone unrecognized. Nothing to remember there.
Up in the suite Stan had given me a typed list, prepared in advance, of things he wanted done in the ballroom—the position of the microphones and speakers, the piano, exactly what he wanted in the private rest room he would have to use during a twenty-four-hour nonstop musical marathon. I didn’t need the list. I had done it all for him at least four times before. Nothing out of the ordinary here.
Stan ordered a substantial meal for all three of them to be brought up from room service. After they’d eaten they would all go to bed and try to get an extra quota of sleep until they had to get up and dress for the midnight beginning of the telethon. The switchboard was to be informed that no calls be put through until they got different instructions. If anyone claimed it was an emergency the call was to be put through to me and I would make the decision.
“And it better not be anything except that the hotel is on fire,” Johnny Floyd told me.
All quite usual.
There was a breakfast order to be put in for eleven o’clock that night. I, personally, was to put through a call to wake them at ten-thirty. Jerry Dodd’s people were to cover the front corridor outside the suite and in the service area at the rear so that no eager Nelson fan could come pounding on the doors, front or back, during the rest period.
I had arranged all that before, could have done it in my sleep. Routine!
“So let’s pick it up at ten-thirty,” Chambrun said.
“The first thing that wasn’t routine happened about four in the afternoon on Thursday,” I said. “I took a nap myself. It was going to be a long night. I dreamed about a girl—but never mind that. It’s private and had nothing to do with Stan Nelson.”
“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Haven said. “I thought you were going to get interesti
ng at last, Haskell.”
“Ten-thirty,” Chambrun said, hiding any irritation he felt.
“I had dressed for the evening—dinner jacket,” I said. “I called Nelson’s suite and Johnny Floyd answered. I checked with room service to make sure their ‘breakfast’ was on the fire. Then I went downstairs to check out on the ballroom. A foretaste of the future was already on hand.”
Chambrun nodded. “People,” he said.
“Crowded into the lobby and in the corridor outside the ballroom. Out onto the street, I think. Mass insanity, but routine for the telethon. I had to go into the ballroom from the back way, or risk being trampled to death.”
“Nothing unusual? You didn’t stop to talk to anyone you hadn’t expected to see?”
“No. The sound technicians were in place in the ballroom, mikes where they should be, speakers where they should be. Outside the closed door you could hear those crazy chicks, squealing and giggling. It would have made you sick if you didn’t stop to realize each one of them was prepared to make a contribution to a worthy cause. You can’t get into the ballroom unless you make a contribution or a pledge.”
“Then?”
“Nothing, until Stan and Johnny and Butch Mancuso turned up at a quarter to twelve, using the service elevator to get down there.”
“They report any problems or difficulties?”
“No. Everything smooth as silk. You know how the telethon begins? Johnny sits down at the piano, plays a brief intro, and then Stan begins to sing ‘Oh What a Beautiful Morning’ from Oklahoma. The doors are opened and the screeching mob shoves its way in. After that it’s bedlam for twenty-four hours, except when Stan sings, which is about every twenty minutes. How he lives through that I’ll never know.”
“So the mob is in,” Chambrun said. “Did you see anything unusual, anyone behaving in a peculiar fashion?”
“Everybody behaves peculiarly at those telethons. They go quietly mad for twenty-four hours.”
Chambrun’s mouth was a thin, tight line. “Someone went not so quietly mad,” he said. “Three people dead and a fourth under fire! Think, Mark! Someone shouting threats over the din? Someone giving Security a bad time?”
“I’d seen it all before,” I said.
Chambrun twisted impatiently in his chair. He was fishing in a pool where there were no fish. At least I couldn’t stir one up. Projecting ahead, through the early hours of that Friday morning, all through a day in which every normal procedure in the hotel was off its tracks, into the evening and up to the finish at midnight—twenty-four hours of madhouse—I still couldn’t come up with a single memorable moment. There had been other telethons where funny things happened, like the time when some dizzy doll stood up on a chair in the ballroom and let her dress drop, leaving her stark naked while Stan sang “You’re Delightful, You’re Delovely—” The screams and shouts shook the chandeliers in the distant lobby. Good clean fun in the name of cancer research. There was the time when a girl fell off the balcony that surrounds the ballroom right into the center of a cut-glass bowl of wine punch and sat there, soaked from head to foot, applauding as Stan sang “Ain’t She Sweet.”
“The only thing that was unusual about Friday’s telethon,” I told Chambrun, “is that nothing unusual happened.”
“Except that a killer was on the prowl,” he said.
Victoria Haven interrupted us. “Oh my, here comes my big moment,” she said.
I looked out across the roof and saw Stan Nelson and his two guys headed our way.
They came straight to where we were sitting. Stan, wearing a white linen jacket, a navy-blue shirt open at the neck, was his handsome self except that his usual friendly smile was missing. Johnny Floyd and Butch Mancuso in summer suits were right out of an old Warner Brothers gangster film.
“I’m sorry to interrupt, Mr. Chambrun,” Stan said, “but I just heard the news on the radio.”
Chambrun introduced the three men to Mrs. Haven. Stan gave her a polite but disinterested little nod. Toto took the stage for a few minutes, giving the three men a sort of group snarl. Mancuso, the gunman, took a startled step backwards.
“Toto!” Mrs. Haven said, and the little spaniel retreated back under a chair. “Toto has never heard you sing, Mr. Nelson.” The old lady gave Stan her brightest smile. “If he had, he would have welcomed you.”
“Nora Sands is dead,” Stan said to Chambrun, ignoring Mrs. Haven.
“I know,” Chambrun said.
“I’ve been trying to reach Lieutenant Hardy on the phone,” Stan said. “I want Johnny to go down to where she is to see if there is anything we can do. We agreed none of us would leave the hotel without the lieutenant’s okay, but no one seems to know where he is.”
“What do you mean ‘do’?” Chambrun asked.
“She has no family, with the boy gone,” Stan said. “And there they are, both of them, needing to be buried, to have done for them whatever one has to have done.”
“She has Zachary Thompson,” Chambrun said. “Mark tells me he was at St. Vincent’s, preparing to pay Miss Sands’ medical bills.”
“She was alive then,” Johnny Floyd said in his rasping voice, cigarette bobbing up and down between his lips. “Dead, whatever she had on him is dead, too. He doesn’t have to help her now.”
“Had on him?” Chambrun asked.
“She worked for him—eighteen, twenty years,” Johnny said. “In that time she must have collected quite a lot on him. He’d pay to keep that quiet. Sonofabitch runs a kind of blackmail factory. Now that Nora’s gone he couldn’t care less what happens to—to what’s left.” Always angry Johnny.
“If she had so much on him how did it happen she came to you for help?” Chambrun asked. “You told us yesterday you’d helped her out from time to time, with Mr. Nelson’s money.”
“Not many people understood Nora,” Stan said. He put his hand on Johnny’s shoulder as if to reassure him. “She had an extraordinary code of fair play. Whatever she had on Thompson she wouldn’t use it to force him to help. He’d stood by her once when she was in trouble. She could have made trouble for me and my marriage by claiming I was the boy’s father. She didn’t, because she wasn’t sure it was a fact.”
“But she went to Floyd for help,” Chambrun said. “That was a way of putting the heat on you, wasn’t it?”
“Johnny may have thought that. I don’t,” Stan said. “Johnny has been a part of my life forever—before Nora, and specially during the two years Nora was my life. She needed help because of the boy. She would have crawled on her hands and knees to an old friend like Johnny if she needed something for the boy. I’m certain she wasn’t trying to burn me. In any event, I don’t want some poverty burial for her and the boy. I want a decent service for them and someone to say good-bye to her in the proper way. I owe her that for two rather special years she gave me.”
“Some special!” Johnny said. “In the hay with anyone who came along!”
Stan gave his friend a tired smile. “You smoke too many cigarettes, Johnny. You’ll probably die of lung cancer, but you can’t stop. Nora couldn’t stop. She couldn’t break a habit she’d contracted long before I came on the scene.”
Chambrun wasn’t interested in Nora’s sex life. “You told us yesterday, Floyd, that you’d been helping Miss Sands. You had her address and telephone number. When did all this start, helping her to protect Stan?”
“At the telethon two years ago,” Johnny said. “She called me here at the hotel, asked if I’d see her. I told her I’d meet her away from here. I didn’t want to risk her running into Stan. It would have been embarrassing and painful for him.”
“So you went to her apartment.”
“No. I never went to her apartment. We met in the old Roosevelt Bar on Madison Avenue. The kid had to have some kind of a tonsil operation. She was flat. I loaned her the money. She gave me her address and phone number and I gave her a way to reach me in California. She did, twice after that. There’d been some kind of compli
cation following the boy’s operation. He had to be hospitalized for a spell. I helped out those two times. Since then, nothing. I thought I’d hear from her during the telethon a year ago, and this time. Nothing. I thought I was being set up to be a permanent sucker. She didn’t play it that way.”
“It wouldn’t have been Nora’s style,” Stan said.
“You told us yesterday you never saw the boy,” Chambrun said, keeping at Johnny.
“Never. I only saw Nora once—I mean since the old days—that time in the Roosevelt Bar. The other two times she asked for help was by long distance to California.”
“You didn’t see the boy at the telethon Friday night?”
“I wouldn’t have known him if he was there,” Johnny said. “If he was resurrected and he walked in here right now I wouldn’t know if it was him.”
“I know you couldn’t tell anything by what was left of his face down there in the pool,” Chambrun said. “But if we had a picture of him do you think you might know whether you’d seen him Friday night or not?”
“For Christ sake, Mr. Chambrun, we go all kinds of places, all around the world, night clubs, theaters, outdoor concerts. We see, I guess, hundreds of thousands of faces. I’d have to have a reason to notice, like someone had two heads, or an ugly scar, or someone dropped a drunk on my foot!”
“Whoever killed Miss Sands tore her place to pieces,” Chambrun said. “Sergeant Keller, in charge down there, tells us there were no pictures. You’d think a woman who was so fond of a child as Miss Sands appears to have been, would have had pictures of him. Papers, Keller tells us, were burned in the fireplace. Perhaps—”
I had a bright idea. “There’s a girl who was a close friend of Nora’s who came to St. Vincent’s with Thompson. She works at the Private Lives Club. Linda. They don’t have last names. Would Nora have had a picture of the boy in her dressing room at the club? Linda would know, I think.”
With Intent to Kill Page 12
