“Nora knew a lot of Zach’s people from other places,” Linda said. “The night this thing happened with the Reverend Martin she saw trouble coming, and, like I told you, signaled one of the waiters. If she knew the man was one of Zach’s people I don’t think—”
“Your own people can go sour on you if they drink too much or take drugs,” Sergeant Lawson said. “Tell me something, Miss Zazkowski. You girls who work for Thompson must constantly be at risk. You take a strange man off to one of Thompson’s hideaways, knowing nothing about him. Your customer could be some kind of violent pervert for all you know. What happens if somebody goes off his rocker while you’re—while you’re entertaining him?” Lawson seemed to have searched for the word “entertaining.”
Again that challenging little jut out of her chin. “I know how to take care of myself,” Linda said.
“A one-hundred-and-five-pound girl against a big man?”
“We know ways,” the girl said.
“I wondered if Thompson might have some strong-arm boys cruising around, ready to help if they were needed. You’re too valuable property for Thompson to want you put out of business for a while.”
“I’ve never had any trouble of that kind,” Linda said. She held up her right hand with the fingers crossed. “But—”
“But what, Miss Zazkowski?”
That frightened look I’d noticed when she first arrived seemed to take charge of Linda’s face again. “I’m already in big trouble,” she said. “I talked to Mr. Haskell in that bar across from St. Vincent’s and I told him too much,” she said. “I was sick with worry for Nora and it all just came out.”
“About the ‘picture palaces’?” Lawson said.
“Yes. Zach knew I’d had a drink with Mr. Haskell. He probably wondered how much I’d blabbed. Then you grab me out of my apartment and bring me here. Zach knows that by now and he’ll put two and two together. You wouldn’t be bothering with me unless you thought I could tell you something important. And I could, like names of customers, and—and—”
“And what?” Lawson persisted.
“I could be floating down the Hudson River by breakfast time,” Linda said. “Zach won’t put up with anyone who talks too much.”
“If you’ve already talked too much hadn’t you better tell us the whole thing? If we know it all, there wouldn’t be any point in punishing you. It would just add to the charges against him.”
“And will you protect the girl, Sergeant?” Mrs. Haven asked.
“Of course,” Lawson said, just a trifle too fast, I thought.
The girl’s laugh was bitter. “Will you assign a cop to live with me?” She shook her head. “There are so many ways Zach could get back at me if he chose to. And he’d wait his time if he has to.”
“You said you could give us the names of customers, but I imagine you won’t. You suggested there was something else—?”
She was silent for a moment. “You asked if there was some way we could get help if we had big trouble with a customer,” she said finally. “I told Mr. Haskell about the picture palaces. There are three of those. But there are six other apartments, or rooms, in addition to those. All of them—including the picture palaces—are wired. Every word that’s spoken in those places is monitored by someone at the club. All a girl would have to do if she was in trouble was to make it clear by what she said and there’d be help in a hurry.”
“How do you know this?”
“When I first started to work for Zach a couple of years ago I took my first customer to one of the outside places. When I reported in I got a lecture from Zach about how I’d talked to the john I was entertaining. I’d told the man what Zach thought was too much about where I grew up and stuff. The guy could finger me if he knew too much and wasn’t satisfied. You’d be astonished about the men who go out with girls like me. They always want to know how we got started in the business, where we came from—stuff like that. Zach invented a line for me that was complete fiction. I wouldn’t want to repeat it to you, because it was designed to excite the customer. I knew then that everything I said and everything the customer said was being heard. The customer might tell me enough for Zach to decide that the next time he should be taken to one of the picture palaces.”
“You can give us the addresses of these places?” Lawson asked.
“That would qualify me for a tombstone,” Linda said.
“Not if we could put Thompson away,” Lawson said.
“You’re a dreamer, Sergeant. Zach’s operation is so slick. You could go to the club and it will cost you a hundred bucks for a couple of drinks and a steak sandwich. You want to look at pictures of center-fold girls in the raw, that’ll cost you another hundred bucks. But that doesn’t entitle you to touch, just to look.”
“My goodness!” Mrs. Haven said.
“This is not your day, lady,” Linda said. “But even in Calvin Coolidge’s time you could go to a burlesque show, right on Broadway, and get a free peep for fifty cents. Today you don’t have to pay anything. You just stay home and look at a soap opera on TV if you want to see naked people in bed! But if you do your shopping at the Private Lives Club and you want real action, then you have to pay real money for it. But the action doesn’t take place there. You pick a girl after looking at her, or her pictures, then she asks you to take her someplace for a drink. You go out with her. If Zach is there he’s whistling ‘Dixie’ at the bar, innocent as a lamb. You made your money deal with Nora! If you tried to take a shot at Zach he’d tell you he hired these girls as entertainers, had no notion they were involved in prostitution on the side! You could spend a year and you’d never get anything the district attorney could use for a conviction.”
“So you couldn’t really harm him?” Mrs. Haven said.
“But if he thought I’d tried I’d be lucky to get off with no more than a couple of broken legs,” Linda said. “Maybe you can understand, I don’t want to turn myself into a target—even if I thought it might square things for Nora. It’s too late to matter to her.”
Sergeant Lawson evidently decided that was that. “I want to show this to Stan Nelson and his boys,” he said, indicating my drawing. “You can come with us, Miss Zazkowski, or if Haskell wants to buy you a drink you can wait for me here.”
“Do I have to wait for you to head for home?” Linda asked. “I’m going to have to face the music with Zach, sooner or later. The longer I put it off, the worse the results may be.”
“You’re free to go,” Lawson said. “If you think you need protection I think Lieutenant Hardy would have someone escort you home.”
“It’s after I get there that the trouble may come,” Linda said.
“Your choice,” Lawson said.
“A drink might make you feel better,” I said to Linda.
“The last drink I had with you got me talking too much,” the girl said. “But one good slug of something would help—if you feel like it.”
“I’ll be back as soon as Nelson and his boys have had a look at this,” Lawson said.
“If I’m gone you’ll know where to look for me if I don’t show up again,” Linda said. “In the river!”
Lawson turned and started across the roof toward Penthouse number 3.
“Vodka and tonic, if I remember,” I said.
“This is medicinal,” the girl said. “If you have a slug of straight bourbon—?”
As I headed for the kitchenette I heard Victoria Haven say to the girl, “I was always an amateur, you know, my dear.”
As I poured drinks for the girl, Mrs. Haven, and myself, I realized my own tensions had relaxed. We might not have a case yet against Tom Colson, T.C. to his friends, but there wasn’t any doubt he was the man we wanted. There were several dozen people in the hotel who knew T.C. by sight and were looking for him. The place was swarming with cops and extra security. T.C. had run out of room. Up here, under the stars, we couldn’t be safer. I had a slight guilty conscience that I wasn’t helping in the search, but I was do
ing what Chambrun wanted me to do.
I took the drinks out on the terrace. I’d poured about three ounces of bourbon into an old-fashioned glass for Linda, and she drank almost half of it in the first swallow. Mrs. Haven was chattering away about when Fifty-second Street was the jazz center of the world, about the fun she’d had at Leon & Eddie’s, about how every second brownstone in the block was a speakeasy, about the gangsters and their molls who looked just the way they were portrayed in Warner Brothers movies, about the first time she’d heard the magnificent Lena Horne, and on and on. I knew she was trying to distract Linda from her personal panics.
The girl put down the balance of her drink on the terrace table.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m grateful to both of you, but I’ve got to face the music with Zach. I’ll feel better when it’s over with.”
“I have always found,” Mrs. Haven said, “that putting off bad news is better than being brave about it.”
“So we are different!” Linda said.
“Just walk straight through the living room to the front door and you’ll find yourself in the elevator alcove,” I said. “Good luck.”
“I may need it,” she said.
She walked through Chambrun’s penthouse and to the front door. I don’t know to this day why I didn’t walk to the elevator with her. She wasn’t exactly a guest, the police had brought her. She was going out to the policeman who was riding the elevator. There was Mrs. Haven who was a guest. Perhaps I was just plain lazy. Whatever, I sat sipping my drink while Mrs. Haven commented on Linda.
“Somehow you don’t expect these professional prostitutes to be like other women,” she said. “They sell their bodies for cash on the barrel head. But how is that so different from the rest of us? Down through the ages women have married for social position, wealth, prestige, and power. There’s really not much difference between making yourself available for that sort of thing and charging a set fee for it, is there?”
“It could even be more honest,” I said. “You don’t have to pretend anything that isn’t so.”
“I think I can look back and say, with some pride, that I never had to pretend anything,” Mrs. Haven said. She chuckled. “In the days when I was that impudent drawing you made of me, Haskell, the choices were infinite. I didn’t have to pretend.”
At that moment the calm of the evening was shattered by the most blood-chilling scream I can ever remember hearing. It rose to a piercing climax and then seemed to be cut off, as though someone had cut a power line.
Perhaps it was the acoustics, because I thought the scream came from out on the roof. I ran out into the open, looking for the source. At the same moment outside lights were turned on. Mrs. Haven had found the switch inside Chambrun’s place, and the lights surrounding Penthouse number 3 came on and I saw Sergeant Lawson, followed by Stan Nelson and his two guys, come running out into the open. It was suddenly daylight-bright, floods aimed to cover the whole area of the roof. Rounding the corner of Chambrun’s place I saw her first. Linda was lying flat on her face just outside the elevator alcove. I shouted to Lawson and gestured.
I reached her first. Her face was turned to one side and I could see blood trickling out of the corner of her mouth. I knelt down beside her.
“Linda! For God sake!” I said.
I slid an arm under her, trying to lift her. I saw her eyelids flutter.
“Linda!”
She opened her eyes and looked at me. “Your man,” she whispered. “The man you drew!” And then she was heavy against my arm, slipped out.
Lawson and Stan Nelson and the others were there by then. Between us he carried her into Chambrun’s place and put her down on the couch. Mrs. Haven was already on the phone calling for Doc Partridge.
“She speak to you?” Lawson asked me.
“Said it was T.C.”
“Well, he can’t get away,” Lawson said, taking his gun out of its holster.
“He couldn’t get up here,” Mrs. Haven said. She had come over to us from the phone. “Dr. Partridge is on his way. How bad is she?”
“Get Hardy,” Lawson said. “Tell him to check the men on the fire stairs and on the elevator. The only way he could get up here is by knocking off one of those teams.” He went out again onto the floodlighted roof, gun at the ready.
I called Chambrun’s office and could hear him muttering a string of unprintable words as I told him what had happened.
There was nothing wrong with the operator and the cop on the elevator. They produced Doc Partridge two or three minutes later, and then went down again to collect Chambrun, Hardy, and whoever. No one unaccounted for had come their way, they assured us.
Mercifully, Linda appeared not to be too badly hurt. She had been slugged on the jaw and had a broken tooth to remind her of it for some time. Doc Partridge administered some kind of smelling salts and she was just beginning to show signs of life when Chambrun, Hardy, and a couple of Hardy’s men joined us in the already crowded living room.
Talking a little thickly through swollen lips Linda told us what had happened. She’d walked through this room to the front door, stepped out into the elevator alcove, and there he was.
“The man you drew on your pad, Haskell,” she managed to say. “The man I told you about who insulted the Reverend Martin at Zach’s club.”
Chambrun and Hardy had to be brought up to date on that story.
“No question, Linda?” Chambrun asked.
“I—I’d know him anywhere,” she said. “I guess I started to scream and he took a step toward me—and he hit me because I blacked out.”
“Brass knuckles,” Chambrun said.
“You didn’t see him go,” Hardy said.
She shook her head. It hurt her to talk. Mrs. Haven had provided her with a Kleenex to hold to her bleeding mouth.
Lawson had rejoined us. “Guys on the fire stairs are okay,” he said. “Seen no one, coming or going. They couldn’t hear the girl scream because the door to the roof was closed. Peaceful as a wake out there on the stairs.”
“I want those men and the two on the elevator replaced,” Hardy said. “I want to talk to the four who are on duty now. Someone has sold us out. No other way this T.C. could get up here.”
“That’s a waste of time, Walter,” Chambrun said. “I can vouch for my elevator operator and my security man. Your two men could only sell us out over their dead bodies.”
“It’s touching of you to be so certain of your own people,” Hardy said. He was angry. “There’s no other way this character could have got up here.”
“There was no way he could get Eddie Sands’ body into the Health Club swimming pool, but he did,” Chambrun said. “There’s no way he could get up here, but he did.”
“Up the outside of the building?” Hardy asked.
“If he’s a human fly,” Chambrun said.
“So he’s still got to be up here somewhere,” Hardy said. “Has your place been searched, Mrs. Haven?”
“I hope not!” the old lady said. “It’s a mess.”
“He could be there,” Hardy said. “He could have slipped into the back rooms here, or the back room in number three.”
Half an hour later we knew for certain that T.C. was no longer on the roof—if he ever had been. Hardy came up with the theory that Linda had been “jumpy.” She’d been thinking and talking about T.C. and when she got a quick glimpse of someone in the shadows she imagined it as T.C.
“But it was someone, Walter,” Chambrun said. “She didn’t knock herself out. How did ‘someone’ get up here?”
“It was that man!” Linda insisted. “I didn’t dream it, I saw him!”
Hardy was looking at Nelson, Mancuso, and Johnny Floyd.
Chambrun laughed. “You can’t force the wrong key into a lock, Walter,” he said. “Your man Lawson was with Nelson, Mancuso, and Floyd when the girl screamed.”
Hardy was steaming. “For once your happy faith in your people has to be misplaced, Pierre,” h
e said. “You made a mistake with this T.C. character years ago. You’ve made another one now. It’s the only answer.”
“And you don’t trust your people?” Chambrun asked.
“How can I, when one of them must have had a price,” the lieutenant said.
“There’s nothing more I can do for this young woman,” Doc Partridge said. “Her next stop is the dentist.”
Chambrun had gone to the phone. I couldn’t hear what he was saying but I imagined he was warning Jerry Dodd that T.C. had been up here and was now gone. He still had to get out of the hotel. Jerry would have every possible exit guarded. I knew.
Somehow that wasn’t comforting. T.C., our crazy killer, had us all on edge. He wasn’t anywhere on the roof, but he had a way of turning up where he couldn’t be. I found myself staying out of line of the window, half expecting to see that grinning face looking in at us from the outside. It wasn’t possible because the roof was swarming now with Hardy’s people and yet T.C. had us all buffaloed. The crazy bastard didn’t need a reason for another violence. He was on some kind of psychotic binge. I had a feeling that everyone was strung up as tight as I was except for Chambrun. He sat by the telephone where he just finished talking, and his lips were spread in a kind of Cheshire cat smile. I’d seen that look before when he was about to pull a rabbit out of his hat.
At her suggestion Mrs. Haven took Linda over to her penthouse, surrounded by three of Hardy’s cops. There was no question of allowing Linda to go home unguarded now, and what was happening where we were now was police business. Four very unhappy-looking men were ushered into Chambrun’s living room: the elevator operator and his cop partner and Jerry Dodd’s security man and his cop partner who’d been guarding the fire stairs. I knew the two hotel people well, longtime and long-trusted employees.
Hardy laid it on the line to them. T.C. had attacked Linda up here on the roof. There was no way he could have gotten up here without riding the elevator or coming up the fire stairs. The four men all tried to answer at once. No way! Not possible!
The elevator operator, named Dick Welles, spelled out his position.
With Intent to Kill Page 17
