Remember to Kill Me (The Pierre Chambrun Mysteries, 19)

by Hugh Pentecost

  ‘Who is in charge of the hotel in Chambrun’s absence?’ Guardino asked.

  It was a good question. Chambrun rarely left the hotel. The world came to him, he didn’t go out to it. Maybe once or twice a year he would go to the theater, and we would know the theater’s phone number and his seat number. I used to kid him about the way the city had changed in the thirty-odd years he had been the Beaumont’s manager. ‘You could get lost if you went out there alone,’ I have told him.

  ‘Nothing that really matters to me is anywhere outside the walls of my hotel,’ he would tell me. ‘The day I get lost in my hotel it will be time to send for psychiatric help.’

  Was this that day? Had he cracked under the pressure of what was going on inside the walls of his hotel? That was nonsense, I told myself.

  ‘We are set up to handle every aspect of the running of the hotel,’ Betsy Ruysdale told Guardino.

  ‘I don’t doubt that for a minute—under normal circumstances,’ Guardino said. ‘But did you have contingency plans for a raid on your hotel, like last night’s? Are you prepared for hundreds of guests leaving at the same time? The confusion in the lobby indicates that you aren’t. Do you have a blueprint for action in case of a bomb or a major fire?’

  ‘I can answer “yes” to that last,’ Jerry Dodd said.

  ‘Does that include an invasion by vandals at the critical moment?’ Guardino asked.

  Jerry gave the police commissioner’s man a sour look. ‘It does not include a way to handle violence after a free concert in the park which the police couldn’t handle,’ he said.

  ‘If what happened here had anything to do with the free concert, you’ve got me there,’ Guardino said without anger. ‘I don’t believe for a moment that the characters who raided the hotel had anything to do with the concert or were ever there. The concert was used to divert our attention from the real situation.’

  ‘So, I give you that,’ Jerry said.

  ‘Suppose I suggest to the commissioner that the hotel be evacuated—all the guests, all the staff and help—and that he deploy a trained SWAT team to take over, deal with the characters in Twenty-two B, stage an armed rescue of the hostages if it comes to that?’

  Jerry’s face was a frozen mask. ‘I guess you could order all the guests to leave the hotel and be obeyed,’ he said. ‘I guess you can bar the curious public and the press from coming in. But I can tell you that not one member of the staff, and in particular my security people, will leave their posts without orders from The Man.’

  ‘Chambrun?’

  ‘Who else?’ Jerry said.

  ‘What you’re saying is that Chambrun, who has disappeared, who may be dead, his body stuffed into a trash can somewhere, is still in charge?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Jerry said. ‘Our orders are to keep everyone off the twenty-second floor, and that we’ll do, whether they are vandals or cops.’

  ‘Pierre is not dead,’ Mrs. Victoria Haven said in a clear, strong voice.

  ‘How do you know that, Mrs. Haven?’ Guardino asked.

  ‘I would know,’ the old lady said, ‘because if Pierre was dead my heart would have stopped beating. You and Jerry, and everyone else who cares, have two people to find. First there is Pierre. But really, first there is this Ricardo Avilla, with his artificial hand, who can, undoubtedly, tell you where Pierre is.’

  ‘I would like to help find this Avilla,’ Lois Tranter broke in. ‘I would know him if I saw him, hand or no hand.’

  ‘And he knows that,’ Sam Yardley said, speaking for the first time. He moved in on us. ‘I’ve been sitting here, waiting for that damn phone to ring. If Avilla and his friends in Twenty-two B are responsible for Chambrun’s absence, they will use that to bring extra pressure of some kind on us.’

  ‘And at least we’d know that Chambrun isn’t wandering around somewhere whistling Dixie!’ Guardino said. ‘So, if you are in charge, Mr. Dodd—’

  ‘I’m in charge of hotel security,’ Jerry said.

  ‘If you were in charge, what would your next move be?’ Guardino asked. ‘I’m trying to tell you, friend, that I respect your judgment, will pay attention to your opinion.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Jerry said. He fished a cigarette out of the pack in his pocket and snapped his lighter into flame. ‘If I had a decision to make I’d have to know about other decisions. I’d have to know what Washington intends to do about the political prisoners—really intends to do. I’d have to know what London intends to do. I’d have to know what the OAS boys are advising. I’d have to know just how important the hostages up in Twenty-two B are to them.’

  ‘They’re assembling the prisoners at that airport in Georgia,’ Yardley said.

  ‘But do they intend to set them free when it comes down to the wire?’ Jerry asked. ‘I suggest that you haven’t been told, Yardley, and that Guardino and the Police Commissioner haven’t been told.’

  Nobody protested that notion.

  ‘If they’re playing it on the level and the prisoners are being flown to Georgia, then I advise sitting tight and waiting till the last minute on the chance that the hostages upstairs will be set free.’

  ‘Or used further by their captors to get themselves free,’ Yardley said.

  ‘If that’s their plan they’ll tell us,’ Jerry said.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then I would have to think the hostages don’t have a chance. They know too much,’ Jerry said. ‘If the terrorists discover that Washington and London are double-crossing them, the hostages don’t have a chance either. In those two situations, either of them, I would attempt a rescue; a simultaneous attack, back and front, on Twenty-two B. Properly planned and timed, we just might save one or two of the hostages.’

  ‘Oh, my God!’ Lois Tranter whispered.

  ‘One or two is better than none, Miss Tranter,’ Jerry said.

  ‘You don’t have anyone up there you care about,’ Inspector Brooks said, in a voice that was a growl.

  ‘I care about them all, Inspector,’ Jerry said, ‘which is more than I can say for you.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘We have about nine hours if they give us the time they promised.’

  ‘Their promises aren’t worth a damn!’ Brooks said.

  ‘I’d like to circulate,’ Jerry said, ignoring him. ‘There’s just a chance someone may have seen Chambrun somewhere. If Avilla is the outside contact for those men upstairs, then he may be around somewhere. And then I will plan an attack on Twenty-two B—if it comes to that.’

  ‘I can provide you with all the extra men you need,’ Guardino said.

  ‘I don’t want strangers stumbling around unfamiliar corridors, advertising their presence. If it comes to an attack, it will be my men, who have a chance of producing some surprise.’

  ‘You think they’re so stupid they won’t be thinking miles ahead of you, Dodd?’ Inspector Brooks asked.

  ‘Maybe I’m smarter than they—or you—think, Inspector,’ Jerry said.

  ‘You gentlemen can talk us all to death!’ Mrs. Haven said, quite casually. ‘I’m like Inspector Brooks. My primary concern is for one person—Pierre! Find him, Jerry. Please find him!’

  Victoria Haven didn’t have to plead with me to find Chambrun. He was all that mattered to me in the whole damn situation. I didn’t care about revolutions in Central America or political prisoners. I really didn’t care about the hostages in Twenty-two B. I scarcely knew Hilary Foster, the girl singer who’d been snatched. Sir George Brooks, Sheldon Tranter and Raul Ortiz were guests of the hotel whom I knew by sight and nothing more than that. Chambrun was the most important person in my life! It may sound a little florid to say that I loved him, but I did.

  Jerry Dodd stopped by me as he was leaving. ‘Do what you can with that army of reporters,’ he said. ‘They’ll be asking to see The Man. Don’t tell them we don’t know where he is. Just tell them he’s got to sit tight here, waiting for a call from Twenty-two B. I don’t want them spreading rumors that he’s missing until we kn
ow, for sure, that he isn’t missing of his own free will.’

  ‘You think that’s possible?’ I asked.

  Jerry gave me a hard look. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want an army of irresponsible hoodlums looking for him.’

  I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror on the office wall. I looked like a bum who’d been on a three-day drunk. Before I faced the press I had to improve on that.

  My apartment is at the other end of the hall from Chambrun’s office and as I headed for it I remembered for the first time in hours that I’d left a bruised and beaten-up Sally Mills there.

  I let myself in, expecting that she’d call out to me when she heard the front door open. She didn’t call out because she was gone. It wasn’t until I’d showered and shaved and put on a fresh tropical worsted suit that I noticed the note propped up on my mantel.

  Mark, dear:

  I’m sorry you couldn’t get back sooner. I’ve been listening to your radio. I have to do what I can to help Hilary Foster. I owe her.

  See you around, lover,

  Sally

  All we needed was a romantic girl who didn’t know what the whole score was adding to our troubles. Well, I couldn’t raise a sweat over her now, much as I cared for her. I had to cool off the reporters and then get to the only thing that really mattered to me.

  I left my place and walked across the hall to the door that opened onto the mezzanine gallery that circles the lobby. I looked down at what should have been a familiar world and saw something I couldn’t have imagined. There were hundreds of people milling around, and dozens of blue-uniformed cops who looked strangely out of place. Bellhops were trying to help checking-out guests with their luggage, and not having much luck getting them through the mob and out onto the safety of the street. Purse snatchers and chain grabbers, Johnny Thacker had told me, were having a field day. I could see cops nabbing a few of them, but in fact the whole place looked out of control.

  ‘I saw you go to your apartment to freshen up. Do you mind if I join you, Mark?’ Lois Tranter had come up behind me.

  ‘This is the safest place to stay,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to go down there.’

  ‘If Avilla’s in that crowd I could spot him, sooner or later,’ Lois said. ‘Please let me stay with you, Mark.’

  ‘It’s important that we find Avilla,’ I said. He could be part of the whole conspiracy to free the political prisoners, could be the mastermind behind the hostage taking, could know what had happened to Chambrun. ‘Did your father ever mention Avilla to you before that time in the Trapeze?’ I asked her. ‘In addition to being his daughter, you’re his personal secretary. Had Ricardo Avilla’s name ever come up before?’

  ‘I spent a lot of my growing up time with my father in Central America,’ Lois said. A look of pain twisted her movie-star face. ‘My mother died when I was only four years old. It was a flu epidemic. Father was away—in Guatemala, I think. Friends of his took care of me till he could get back, which was three or four days. They hadn’t been able to find him to tell him about my mother. I—I was a problem to him. There was no immediate family, no brothers or sisters on either side, no aunts or uncles.’

  ‘A busy, active man left with a four-year-old child,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘I—I didn’t really understand that at the time. I was in shock, having had it explained to me that my mother wouldn’t be back from the hospital. It—it was my first encounter with death.’ She gave me a little smile. ‘I was only concerned about me, not my father.’

  ‘That’s understandable.’ While she was talking I was watching the unruly mob that had taken over my world.

  ‘The first night he was home I was put to bed while he had a conference with someone from Washington, one of his superiors. I crept down the hall and listened outside the living-room door. That—that’s when I found out how much my father cared for me. He was telling his friend—or boss—that he was going to have to resign from his position and find work that would let him stay with me. The friend—or—boss—was urging him to find some other answer. Dad was vitally important down there in Central America. He was one of the few Americans who had friendly contacts on both sides of the perpetual revolutions that were going on. I didn’t understand all that then, of course. What was going to happen to me was all that mattered. The friend kept urging him not to resign, and finally suggested that Dad must have some friend, a family down there somewhere, where I could stay, where he could see me every day. I was an exhausted little girl that night, but I listened and listened, until my father began to consider the possibility of taking me back with him. I wasn’t to be deserted after all! I guess, when I felt safe, I fell asleep—right outside the living-room door. The next thing I knew, I was in my father’s arms, being held very tenderly, and carried back to my room. There has never been a day of my life—until today—that I haven’t shared some part of with him.’ Her hands were gripping the railing of the mezzanine gallery. ‘It’s not possible to think of him, up there in that room with those monsters, his life hanging on a decision some stranger will make!’

  ‘Let’s get back to Ricardo Avilla,’ I said, after a moment of watching the knuckles on her hands turn white as she gripped the balcony railing. ‘Your father never mentioned him to you before he pointed him out to you night before last in the Trapeze?’

  ‘The name Avilla is a familiar one in Central America,’ she said. ‘The Avillas are heroes or villains, depending on which side you talk with down there. They go ’way back, as you obviously know from Mrs. Haven. Carlos Avilla, Mrs. Haven’s man, was a kind of national hero to the people on the left. Their George Washington! His sons were leaders on the left after him. The family where I grew up, an English engineer named Craven, used to talk about them. “I wish we had their kind of fighter on our side,” Mr. Craven used to say.’

  ‘His side being the right?’

  ‘The English side, the American side,’ Lois said.

  ‘And Ricardo Avilla?’

  Lois shook his head. ‘I don’t think I ever heard him mentioned till my father pointed him out to me the other night.’

  ‘But your father suggested he was a major terrorist,’ I said. ‘Tell me, your father must have records, papers, diaries which would contain information about a man he considered so important. You’re his secretary. Are there documents of his you don’t get to see?’

  ‘I see what he wants to show me,’ Lois said.

  ‘Where does he keep those documents?’ I asked. ‘There could be something that might tell us where Ricardo Avilla could be staying in New York, who his friends are who might know.’

  She shook her head again. ‘Our visit to New York was to be a short one. We were due to head back in two or three days. He didn’t bring records or files with him except those that might have to do with the peace negotiations the OAS is trying to get started.’

  ‘There’s a chance,’ I said. ‘Would he have papers here in his hotel room?’

  ‘A day-to-day diary, I think. That would just cover what’s been happening since we got here.’

  ‘He might have seen Ricardo Avilla here in the hotel before your time in the Trapeze. There could be some comment about him.’

  ‘I could look, if you can arrange to get me into his room,’ Lois said.

  ‘Should be simple,’ I said. ‘Now I’ve got to deal with the press before they get completely out of hand. So circulate. If you see Avilla, flag me down wherever I am.’

  When I got to the foot of the stairs leading into the lobby I was hit by what seemed like a tidal wave of people. Many of them were familiar. I deal with the press every day of the year, round the clock, and many of them were familiar. Strangers were, I assumed, special police reporters and feature writers who didn’t ordinarily come our way. In addition to them were dozens and dozens of familiar faces, regular guests of the hotel who used our bars, restaurants, and other facilities. They knew me as the Beaumont’s PR man, who should have all the answers, and they were all shouti
ng their questions at me. All of them seemed to be asking the same question in one form or another. ‘What are you doing about the crisis on the twenty-second floor?’ There was no way an answer could be heard over the bedlam of questions.

  I signaled to Jack Wilson, my International News friend. ‘Pick out eight or ten people who can cover for your whole army and bring them to my office. No way I can handle this here.’

  Jack nodded and took off, and I headed back upstairs to the second floor. My office is right next to my apartment, down the hall from Chambrun’s. My secretary wasn’t there, which was a sign of the general disorder.

  I called Chambrun’s office and Betsy Ruysdale answered. There was no news of Chambrun. There had been no call from Twenty-two B.

  ‘They’re making out-calls, though,’ Betsy told me. ‘The switchboard is taping them. Mr. Guardino’s up there listening.’

  Then I remembered Lois Tranter. I asked Betsy to have one of Jerry’s men find Lois in the lobby and get her the key to her father’s room.

  ‘And call me here in half an hour,’ I asked Betsy. ‘I’m dealing with the press. Just tell me I’m needed and I’ll dump them. That’s all the time I can give them.’

  For a moment or two, in the quiet of my office, I was suddenly conscious of the almost unbearable fatigue I was feeling. It wasn’t only the lack of sleep and food, but the anxiety that mounted with every passing minute, especially since Chambrun had vanished from the scene. I was tempted by the bottle of Jack Daniel’s I keep in my desk drawer, but I decided that even one drink might knock me on my behind. Chambrun wouldn’t disappear without letting one of us know his intentions. He had been tricked, trapped, possibly even worse than that. Body in a trash can, Guardino had suggested. No, please God, not that!

  Jack Wilson was a man I could trust, and he turned up with exactly ten of his fellow-journalists, most of whom I knew.

  ‘I’m sorry I have to do it this way,’ I told them, ‘but I haven’t got time to answer a thousand scattered questions.’