With Intent to Kill

by Hugh Pentecost

  “But no initials?”

  “That just wasn’t part of the system,” Jimmy said.

  “How do you account for them, then, on Friday night?”

  Jimmy shrugged. “Maybe Tony was just doodling,” he said.

  “And maybe they’re the initials of someone who came in at the very last,” Chambrun said. “You think of anyone on the hotel staff with those initials?”

  “Not off the top of my head,” Jimmy said.

  Ruysdale came in from her office with a sheet of paper. “List of employees whose last names begin with C,” she said to Chambrun. “I don’t find any T.C.” She looked at me. “There’s a man in my office who wants to talk to you, Mark. He says he’s the Reverend Leonard Martin.”

  “That’s the New Morality guy I told you I met at Nora’s apartment,” I told them all. “He found her. We went to St. Vincent’s together.”

  “Bring him in, Ruysdale,” Chambrun said. “I think we’d all like to talk to him.”

  The Reverend Leonard Martin had changed out of his smart tan gabardine suit into something dark, dark tie, black shoes. Probably his Sunday suit, I thought. I introduced him to Chambrun and Hardy and Lawson and Jimmy Heath.

  “I heard what happened to you on the radio, Haskell,” he said to me. “Thank heaven it wasn’t more serious.”

  “There’s a man in the hospital with a broken jaw,” Chambrun said.

  “Monstrous,” Martin said. “I came here because I’ve had no luck with the police, the district attorney, or Zachary Thompson.”

  “A strange combination,” Chambrun said.

  “I’ve been trying to find out what the funeral arrangements are for Nora Sands and her boy. I would gladly conduct services for them. If not that, I would like to be present to pay my respects.”

  “I don’t think arrangements have been made as yet,” Chambrun said. “Stan Nelson has offered to pay expenses, but there isn’t anybody, really, to accept.”

  “After their past it’s rather decent of him,” Martin said.

  Chambrun and Hardy exchanged looks, and the unspoken decision was made that the ball was in Chambrun’s court.

  “We have three people murdered and an attempt at a fourth, Mr. Martin,” Chambrun said. “Anyone who had contact with those people could be helpful to us.”

  “Any way I can be,” Martin said.

  “You didn’t know Tony Camargo, did you? Anthony Camargo? He worked for me here in the hotel. He was the second victim.”

  “His name on the radio,” Martin said. “That’s all.”

  “Show Mr. Martin the picture,” Chambrun said to Lawson.

  Lawson took the picture out of his briefcase and handed it to the minister. A spasm of pain contracted Martin’s face. “Nora’s boy,” he said. “What a tragedy! A lovely, well-mannered, nice, open kid.”

  “You knew him?”

  “As I told Haskell, I had supper at Nora’s apartment a couple of Sunday evenings. The boy was there both times.”

  “Forgive me, Mr. Martin, if I seem a little puzzled by your relationship with Nora Sands,” Chambrun said. “Your movement, your cause—it’s called the New Morality?—was aimed at putting the Private Lives Club, its world of pornography, and Zachary Thompson out of business. Yet you became friendly enough with Nora Sands, a key figure in Zachary’s business, to visit with her, take supper with her in her own home. She was the enemy, wasn’t she?”

  Martin gave Chambrun what looked to me like a patronizing smile. “Our primary responsibility in this life, Mr. Chambrun, is to redeem the evildoer, to save him, if possible, from eternal damnation.”

  “Even if your evidence is a very attractive and tempting female?” Chambrun said. “In the brief time that I saw her I wasn’t blind to Miss Sands’ charm.”

  Martin looked down at those well-manicured fingertips of his. “Imagine the mark she might have made in this world if she’d taken the right road in the beginning. Some people are blessed with a special magnetism and vitality that makes for power. Nora Sands had that power and she used it to tempt men onto the path of evil. Imagine what she might have been able to give to a good man in the way of support and help.”

  I sensed Chambrun’s impatience with that kind of talk.

  “I’m afraid we are more interested in discussing facts, Mr. Martin, than we are with the ‘might-have-been,’” Chambrun said. “When did you begin your crusade against Zachary Thompson’s world of pornography?”

  “It’s all around you, all the time,” Martin said. “You can’t walk into a family drugstore or your local newsstand without seeing his magazine on display.”

  “And others like it,” Chambrun said. “Thompson’s empire is only one of several. There’s a public demand for what he peddles. If there wasn’t he would have to bootleg it, like liquor in the twenties. Shouldn’t you be taking aim at that public appetite?”

  “Man is weak, has always been weak,” Martin said. “But it’s not just the pictures of nude women in suggestive poses with which I’m concerned. It’s the women themselves and the purposes for which they’re used.”

  “Professional sex?” Chambrun said.

  “Criminal purposes,” Martin said, his voice hardening.

  “The word ‘criminal’ interests me, Mr. Martin,” Lieutenant Hardy said.

  “And should, Lieutenant. And should!”

  “One of the girls from the Private Lives Club, a friend of Nora Sands’, who came to St. Vincent’s when you and Haskell were there waiting for a report on Nora Sands’ condition, talked about blackmail, about what she called ‘picture palaces.’ Is that what you’re talking about, Mr. Martin?” Chambrun asked.

  “Do you know that all across the country there are men of importance in their communities who are paying huge sums of money into Thompson’s pockets for having been tempted into one fall from grace? And there is no way to get them to take action against that creature because they would be destroyed by pictures taken of them in a moment of degradation.”

  “How did you propose to entrap him, Mr. Martin? Did you plan to let yourself be caught with one of Thompson’s girls and then expose him and damn the torpedoes?”

  “Good God, no!” Martin said. “I had no solid plan except to observe and look for a way. I thought if I could locate one of these ‘picture palaces’ I might save some poor devil from disaster, and at the same time have something on which the police and the district attorney could act.”

  “And no luck?”

  “Zachary Thompson is no fool,” Martin said. “I am not a totally unknown figure. The New Morality is a public cause. The first time I walked into that Private Lives Club they knew who I was and why I might be there.”

  “So you had lost before you began,” Chambrun said.

  “I knew at once that they would play it safe while I was there,” Martin said. “So I went there, night after night. I could out-wait them, I thought. They would get careless, I thought.”

  “And they aimed one of their best weapons at you, Nora Sands,” Chambrun said.

  “At first she just turned on her charm as a hostess,” Martin said. “She knew who I was, had seen one or two of my New Morality rallies on television. Right from the start she made it clear she knew why I was there. She never once tried to make me believe they weren’t doing in that club what I knew they were doing. There was no cat-and-mouse. All right out in the open.”

  “And you aren’t used to sinners who are open and aboveboard about their sins,” Chambrun said. The tone of his voice should have told Martin that respect was not one of the Man’s feelings at the moment.

  “I am used to people who repent their sins,” Martin said. “That’s at the core of the whole Christian ethic, repentance.”

  “And did Nora Sands put on a repentance act for you, to divert you from your primary purpose?”

  “On the contrary, she talked about her past and her present with delight, like someone describing a whole series of wonderful surprise parties,” Martin said
. “She wasn’t impressed when I talked to her about the Day of Judgment. ‘Now is what I care about, Reverend,’ she told me. “I’ll take my chances on the Hereafter when I get there.’ I—well, I must admit, I became more concerned for a time with trying to save this one lost woman than I was with destroying Zachary Thompson’s filthy business.”

  “Samson and Delilah,” Chambrun said.

  “In a way,” Martin said, ignoring what he must have sensed was contempt. “My—my priorities were altered. I wanted to change her, to save her. Tearing down the Temple could come later.”

  “Oh, brother!” Chambrun said. “And then?”

  “We talked about everything. Her growing up, my youth. She tried to persuade me to ‘take her out on the town,’ away from the Private Lives Club. I knew she wanted to get me away from there so that they could carry on their regular business without my observing. I refused.”

  “It must have been one of the few times a healthy male ever said ‘no’ to her,” Chambrun said.

  “She understood my commitment,” Martin said. “Then she invited me to her apartment one Sunday, the day the club was closed. ‘I’ll make you supper while you wrestle with my soul, Leonard,’ she said. I suspected she might try to tempt me into a violation of my principles, but when I arrived the boy was there. He never left.”

  “A disappointment, I suspect,” Chambrun said.

  “Only in that I couldn’t talk to her about the matters that were important to me,” Martin said.

  “Her salvation?”

  “Of course. What did happen was that I discovered a whole new aspect of that extraordinary woman. In addition to what I knew she was, she was a mother, deeply concerned with her son, tender, loving. Would you believe we spent most of the evening talking about baseball, his passion? I’d had some of the same interests when I was a kid, and I could talk his language. I left there without having spoken one word that I had come there to speak.”

  “But you went again?”

  “Yes. And the boy was there again, and it was the same.”

  “Disappointed?”

  “In a way,” Martin said. “But I sensed that the way I got along with the boy pleased her. I have to admit that it pleased me to please her.”

  “There were more times?”

  “Just those two times,” Martin said. “The second one was only last Sunday.”

  “And during the week you continued to go every night to the Private Lives Club, hoping someone’s foot would slip?” Chambrun said.

  Chambrun nodded. “She never left me when I was there. I began to suspect that while she kept my attention on her they’d found a way to operate as usual. Male customers came and went, drank at the bar, talked with the girls. I never saw one of the girls leave with a man and assignations were arranged for the girls to meet them later in one of Thompson’s hideouts.”

  Lieutenant Hardy broke in. “In all of this time, Mr. Martin, did Miss Sands ever mention anyone, a man, she’d had trouble with? Did she suggest she’d ever been involved in one of these blackmail schemes you’ve mentioned and that someone was out to punish her for it?”

  “No, and I don’t think she ever was,” Martin said. “Not, at least, in recent years. She talked about working for Thompson out on the West Coast when she was eighteen. Perhaps then. Then she met and fell in love with Stan Nelson, the singer. He taught her, she told me, how much fun it was to have sex for pleasure rather than being paid for it. She was frighteningly frank about herself, Lieutenant. ‘You could offer me a thousand dollars to make love to you, Leonard,’ she told me once, ‘and I’d say no. But if I thought it would be fun with you it would be yours for the asking.’”

  “And did you ask?” Chambrun inquired.

  “You must know that I didn’t, that I couldn’t,” Martin said. “It would have been against all my precepts, my rules for living.”

  “It seems you missed a golden opportunity,” Chambrun said, the edge on his voice cutting.

  “I don’t particularly like your attitude toward me, Mr. Chambrun,” Martin said.

  “This woman you played games with is violently dead,” Chambrun said. “You were a self-appointed investigator and you spent hours and days at it. You haven’t come up with one single fact from the investigation that is any use to us. Let me ask you a far-out question. Do you know anyone whose initials are T.C.? Someone who worked at the Private Lives Club? Someone Nora Sands mentioned in her marathon conversations with you about her past and present?”

  “T.C.,” Martin said. “I don’t think so. Wait! There was a baseball player who was one of the kid’s heroes of the past, Tony Conigliaro.”

  “Who would have shot the boy, clubbed Tony Camargo and Nora to death, and made a try at Haskell?”

  “Not very likely,” Martin said. “But no other T.C. comes to mind.”

  Chambrun had had it. He looked at Hardy and gave a little helpless shrug of his shoulders.

  “About yesterday, Mr. Martin. I understand from Haskell that you’d heard about the murder of Eddie Sands on the radio. You tried to reach Nora Sands on the telephone but you kept getting a busy signal on her phone.”

  Martin nodded. “I knew she needed a friend, must need help. I went to where she lived on Jane Street. She didn’t answer her doorbell, but I thought she might have shut herself away, not wanting to see anyone. The janitor fellow let me go upstairs to knock on her door. It was open, and I went in and found her. She was alive but unconscious. I’ve had some experience with first aid. Her pulse was very weak. I tried mouth to mouth, and then I called 911 for help.”

  “You had thoughts about what had happened?”

  “The apartment was a shambles,” Martin said. “Robbery was my first thought.”

  “And your second?”

  “That it must have some connection with what had happened to the boy,” Martin said. “There had been talk on the radio about anonymous phone calls pointing to Stan Nelson.”

  “Did she ever suggest to you that she had something on Nelson?”

  “Never. She actually spoke of Nelson with a kind of affection. She tried to sue him for some of his property when they split up years ago, but I think that was Thompson’s advice. I got the notion that she regretted that suit. She was at fault, not Nelson, for what had broken up their thing together.”

  “I guess that’s it, Mr. Martin,” Hardy said.

  “About the funeral arrangements?” Martin said.

  “When there is some decision about them we’ll let you know,” Hardy said.

  Martin hesitated a moment. He didn’t seem satisfied. But he nodded to us, turned, and walked slowly out of the office. In the doorway he almost collided with Mike Maggio, our night bell captain. Mike stood aside to let the reverend gentleman out and then he joined us.

  “I just came on duty, Mr. Chambrun, and found a message that you wanted me,” Mike said.

  Mike is a dark, curly-haired Italian with bright black eyes. I think of him as one of the sharpest people on our staff, street smart, never missing anything that goes on in the hotel. I know Chambrun has a special regard for him.

  “Maybe you can help us with something, Mike,” Chambrun said. He picked up the clipboard sheets from his desk and handed them to Mike. He explained our curiosity about the initials T.C. at the bottom of the Friday night sheet. “We thought at first they were Tony Camargo’s, but he never initialed any other sheet like that. Make any sense to you?”

  Mike frowned down at the sheet for a moment. “It doesn’t seem possible,” he said, “but do you remember a guy named Tom Colson who used to work here, Mr. Chambrun?”

  “Regrettably, I do,” Chambrun said.

  I remember Colson, too. It went back three years or more. Colson had been on the maintenance crew, clean-up work in the early hours of the morning. He’d been a brash, smart-aleck kind of a guy. One night someone heard a woman screaming in one of the upper corridors. One of the hotel guests called Security. The Security man arrived upstairs to find Colson
unmercifully beating a girl. Colson ran, and they never caught up with him. Chambrun regretted remembering it because it involved two things that were black eyes for his beloved hotel. Violence by an employee was bad enough, but the badly beaten girl was a prostitute who had been satisfying the demands of some hotel guests. Call girls are a fact of life in a modern hotel, whether you care to admit it or not. The police hadn’t caught up with Tom Colson, the girl wouldn’t say who her customer had been and wouldn’t or couldn’t explain why Colson had attacked her. The whole thing was swept quietly under the rug, but it was a black mark that none of us involved at the time cared to recall.

  “Colson was never called by his last name, or his first name, Tom,” Mike Maggio said. “He used his initials. Everyone called him ‘T.C.’”

  I felt small hairs rising on the back of my neck. I’d never had anything to do with Colson when he worked in the hotel. The clean-up crews in the early hours were not part of my pattern. I don’t think I’d exchanged a half-dozen words with him in the four or five years that he’d worked for us. I’d completely forgotten about him until this morning.

  “I—I saw Colson yesterday,” I said. My mouth felt dry. “He was at St. Vincent’s when I went there with Martin to check out on Nora Sands. He was in the sitting room outside the emergency ward.”

  The man in the baseball cap!

  FOUR

  YOU CAN HAND CHAMBRUN a surprise or a jolt, but he never explodes. I thought there was something a little glacial about his deep-set eyes, but his voice was perfectly calm—almost too calm.

  “You say you saw this Colson fellow—T.C.—yesterday at St. Vincent’s, and yet you’ve never mentioned it?”

  I nodded. “Because I didn’t put the face and the name together,” I said. “I suppose it’s been four years since I last saw him.”

  “Three years and seven months,” Chambrun said. He remembered the exact date of Colson’s violence with the call girl.