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

by Hugh Pentecost

  ‘He hates the communist guerrillas,’ Sanchez said. ‘No way. I’d bet my life on that, Mr. Haskell.’

  Doubts, doubts, doubts. Sanchez could be trying to get us to look some other direction. I thanked him and left. Then I had some luck. In the corridor outside I ran head-on into Jerry Dodd.

  ‘Boy, am I glad to see you! Anything?’

  Jerry, his face frozen, shook his head. ‘Not a trace of him,’ he said.

  I told him I’d come up with part of the trail. He’d been told that Eddie Walsh was in the hospital on four and gone there to see him. He’d asked Eddie about Avilla and gotten his story. Eddie had seen Lois Tranter come out of the Annex, a couple of days before, seen her again in the Trapeze when she said she’d been there with her father, but no Avilla.

  ‘I’ve just shown Eddie this drawing and he still says Avilla wasn’t there,’ I said. ‘Just now Luis Sanchez confirms that the drawing is of Avilla, but he’s certain he isn’t involved with the people in Twenty-two B. Wrong politics, or what have you.’

  Jerry stood for a moment, tugging at his lower lip. ‘There’s a coincidence in all that,’ he said. ‘The Man was in the hospital on the fourth floor. He gets Eddie’s story about seeing Miss Tranter come out of the Annex.’

  ‘Delivering papers for her father,’ I said. ‘I checked that with Sanchez—and her.’

  ‘But Eddie didn’t know that and neither did The Man. From the service area on the fourth floor there’s a catwalk over to the roof of the Annex. It’s used by the cleaning people and the trash collectors so they don’t have to go out on the street to get in.’

  ‘I’ve been working here more than ten years and I didn’t know that,’ I said.

  ‘The Man knew, of course. He could have used it to go over there.’

  ‘Why? There’s no one there. He’d know that, too.’

  ‘Eddie had called it to his attention. He was right there.’

  ‘And stayed there for all this time?’ I asked.

  ‘He could have had a fall, hurt himself, something. Let’s have a look, Mark.’

  We took an elevator to four and walked across the little catwalk to the roof of the Annex. The door from the house to the roof was unlocked and we went down into the building. There was, as we knew, no one in the building and it was dead quiet.

  The top three apartments were neatly prepared for guests in case there should be an overflow.

  We walked into the living room of the ground-floor apartment, and there was Chambrun! He was handcuffed to a pillar that supported the ceiling in a far corner of the room, a wide strip of adhesive tape fastened over his mouth.

  Jerry reached him first, peeled off the adhesive strip. The hanging judge was staring at us. ‘It took you long enough,’ Chambrun said. ‘You can’t bite off those handcuffs with your teeth. You’ll have to get a metal saw somewhere.’

  ‘Are you okay, Boss?’ Jerry asked.

  ‘Do I look okay?’ Chambrun asked. ‘Well, don’t just stand there!’

  The reunion in Chambrun’s office was almost like a party for a few minutes. Chambrun was swarmed over by all of us. The first person to reach him when he walked into the office was Betsy Ruysdale. There was just a touch of hands, but I could see she was fighting the impulse to throw her arms around him. Their personal feelings would have to wait. Guardino and Yardley were there; Dr. Patridge, the house physician, had been summoned. It turned out that Chambrun had been slugged and there was a lump on the back of his head the size of an egg.

  He managed, after a rush of greetings, to tell us what had happened. Mike Maggio had stopped him as he was starting up to see Mrs. Haven on the roof and told him that Eddie Walsh had been hurt and was in the hospital on the fourth floor. Eddie is one of Chambrun’s favorites on the hotel staff and he decided to stop on the way up to see how he was. Eddie was preparing to go back to work and couldn’t be dissuaded. Chambrun, remembering Lois Tranter’s story, asked Eddie about Ricardo Avilla and got the answer we had. Avilla hadn’t been there. Eddie’s remembering that he’d seen Lois coming out of the Annex a few days back roused Chambrun’s curiosity. He would take the time to cross over to the Annex and see what there was to see—if anything.

  He’d found things, as we had, neatly prepared for the next tenant, when and if. As he was walking down from the third floor he heard voices from below. He knew the Annex wasn’t occupied at the moment. There shouldn’t be anyone there.

  ‘Men’s voices,’ Chambrun told us, ‘speaking in Spanish. My Spanish isn’t fluent, and they were speaking rapidly, as if they were talking on the telephone. I couldn’t follow what was being said. I moved down as quietly as I could. The door to the ground-floor apartment was standing ajar and I looked in. One man was sitting at the table there with some kind of radio gadget in front of him. The second voice was someone being received by him from somewhere else. This was it, I thought, the outside contact with the people in Twenty-two B. I was a damn fool not to be alerted by the fact that the apartment door was standing open. I should have known someone else was around. Before the man at the radio saw me, I was slugged from behind, knocked cold.’

  ‘Lucky you don’t have a concussion,’ Dr. Patridge said.

  ‘Always had a hard head, Doctor,’ Chambrun said. ‘When I came to I was chained to that post—handcuffs, I guessed—and my mouth taped over. The two men were packing up their radio gear. They never spoke to me. They just left. There was nothing I could do to get free. I could just hope someone might have occasion to come into the Annex for something. So—catch me up?’

  ‘First, you’d know those two men if you saw them again?’ Guardino asked.

  ‘I’d like to think they were photographed on my mind,’ Chambrun said. ‘Dark, Hispanic types. I might or might not be able to pick them out of a lineup. I don’t have a good-enough ear for Spanish to pick out anything from their speech patterns.’

  The red light on Chambrun’s telephone began to blink. The switchboard wouldn’t put through a call that wasn’t important. Betsy Ruysdale answered. She stood there, pointing toward the ceiling. It was a call from Twenty-two B.

  Chambrun switched on the squawk box and answered.

  The voice that came through the box had a kind of sardonic humor to it. ‘Welcome home, Mr. Chambrun,’ the man said. He knew! ‘Sorry, but no questions about your adventure. I warned you, Mr. Chambrun, that any attempt at heroics would cost lives. I am sending you a present on the service elevator. When you take the lid off the trash can it carries, you will find that I was not joking.’

  Chambrun’s voice was ice-cold. ‘One of the hostages?’

  ‘Too bad you have to learn the hard way,’ the voice said, and the connection was broken.

  Jerry Dodd was instantly on the phone to one of his men somewhere, presumably in the basement garage. Chambrun was already on the move, with Doc Patridge and me at his heels. I suppose Guardino and Yardley and the others followed. Could it be Hilary Foster, or Tranter, or Sir George Brooks, or Raul Ortiz?

  It was easier to run down the two flights of stairs to the basement than wait for an elevator. When we got there, several cops and one of Jerry’s security men were standing around the service elevator from the west side of the hotel. One of them had taken the lid off a metal trash can in the car.

  No one spoke, but they made way for Chambrun. I was right behind him. There was a body in the can—the body of a man. Thank God it wasn’t Hilary Foster, I thought. Then I saw that it was Inspector Brooks. His eyes were rolled up in his head and he’d been shot squarely in the middle of the forehead.

  ‘Crazy bastard tried to pull a rescue on his own,’ I heard Chambrun say.

  I felt a little sick to my stomach.

  Part Three

  Chapter One

  SO NOW WE HAD a murder on our hands and it changed things in a radical way. The police had been with us for hours since the raid, but we had been running our own show. Now Guardino was in charge of this one detail of our problem. Somehow, though, t
he good Lord has a way of smiling on Chambrun. The homicide chief for our particular district was Lieutenant Walter Hardy, an old friend who had been involved with our troubles before. He and Chambrun could work together without hostility, they could listen to each other and neither of them be Mr. Know-it-all.

  When Hardy appeared in Chambrun’s office after our grim discovery in the basement I felt some of my tensions relax. We had a winning team together again.

  ‘This isn’t our usual kind of case, Walter,’ Chambrun said, his voice bitter. ‘We know who the victim is. We know why he was killed. We know who killed him. We know where the killer is. And our hands are tied. You can’t go up there and take them without risking four other lives.’

  Hardy is a big, blond man who looks more like a slightly befuddled fullback than a sometimes-brilliant crime fighter. He takes it slow and easy and stays with it no matter how long it takes.

  ‘I’ve started my kind of slow approach, Pierre. It seems this Inspector Brooks used police authority to get the keys to his brother’s penthouse. I should have thought your man Atterbury would have known that Scotland Yard doesn’t have any authority here.’

  ‘I would have gotten him the keys if he’d asked me for them,’ Chambrun said. ‘He was assigned by the British government to come here to help his brother. He had the right to see his brother’s possessions, papers, whatever.’

  Hardy shrugged. ‘He did go up to Penthouse Three, it seems. Your security people up there saw him, questioned him, were satisfied that he had a right to go in. He stayed there nearly an hour, they say. Your switchboard says he made a call to London while he was there.’

  ‘You know who he called?’ Guardino, who was listening, asked.

  ‘Lord Huntingdon, chief of British Security. I have a man trying to check with him. Past eleven o’clock over there. The number Brooks called is Huntingdon’s office. We’re trying to find a home number for him.’

  ‘Twenty-two B has also been calling Huntingdon,’ Chambrun said. ‘I doubt you’ll find him at home. He’ll be wherever they’re discussing what the final decision is to be about the prisoners at that Georgian airport.’

  ‘We’ll find him,’ Hardy said. ‘Anyway, after an hour, Brooks left Penthouse Three. He spoke to your security people up there. Said he’d found what he wanted. They say he was carrying a manila envelope with him that probably contained papers. He took the front elevator, not the service elevator where you eventually found him. Your people had no responsibility except to make sure he’d gone and they knew exactly who was on the roof—only Mrs. Haven at that time. She went down shortly afterwards—going to the Trapeze for a drink, she told them.’

  ‘She did,’ I said. ‘I saw her there.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Hardy said. ‘Point is, nobody watched the elevator indicator to see where Brooks went.’

  ‘Why should they?’ Chambrun asked. ‘He was legitimate, on legitimate business.’

  ‘No reason,’ Hardy said. ‘It would have been nice, that’s all.’

  ‘We know where he went,’ Chambrun said. ‘To the twenty-second floor.’

  ‘Why? He knew how dangerous it was. He’d been warned, along with all of you.’

  ‘Perhaps he just didn’t believe they’d shoot him in cold blood when he stepped off the elevator,’ Guardino said.

  ‘We don’t know that happened,’ Hardy said.

  ‘Why would he risk going there?’ Guardino asked.

  ‘Maybe he found something in his brother’s papers he thought he could trade for him,’ Yardley said.

  ‘And it wasn’t good enough?’ Hardy asked.

  ‘Unless you know terrorists, you can’t believe they’ll do what they do,’ Chambrun said. ‘I was there once.’

  I knew he was referring to what he called ‘the dark days,’ the Nazi occupation of Paris when he was a very young man.

  ‘He believed they’d talk to him, and that he had something to sell,’ the CIA man said. ‘You have to know them to understand how totally cold-blooded they can be. Knowing them is why we’ve been sitting around here for hours doing nothing.’

  ‘What are you thinking of doing?’ Hardy asked.

  ‘We don’t have an answer yet from higher up,’ Yardley said.

  ‘And only a few hours for that answer to come,’ Hardy said. ‘Well, it’s not quite as cut-and-dried as you put it, Pierre. Yes, we know who the victim is. We think we know why he was killed, simply that he turned up there. It could be something he found out when he got there and talked to them. We know who the hostages are, but we don’t know who “they” are, the people holding them.’

  ‘We know who “they” represent,’ Yardley said.

  ‘That’s not good enough for me,’ Hardy said. ‘I want the man who pulled the trigger. So, now I’d like to catch up on you, Pierre. They knocked you out, had you trussed up. Why did you go there?’

  ‘Impulse,’ Chambrun said.

  ‘Impulses will be the death of you some day, friend,’ Hardy said.

  ‘Somebody working on the outside, communicating with the people up in Twenty-two B,’ Chambrun said. ‘Eddie Walsh told me about seeing Lois Tranter come out of there some days ago. I remembered that the Sanchez delegation had been assigned there for a couple of days.’

  ‘You don’t trust them?’

  ‘Right now I don’t trust anyone who has a Hispanic sound to him. I was there on the fourth floor. I thought I’d take a look.’

  ‘And got clobbered for your pains.’

  ‘But my impulse was right,’ Chambrun said. ‘They were using the Annex as a base for communicating with Twenty-two B.’

  ‘You said you don’t understand Spanish. How do you know they were communicating with Twenty-two B? Could be some whole other ball game, couldn’t it? You just happened to stumble in on it.’

  ‘You don’t believe that, Walter. Coincidences like that don’t happen.’

  ‘Maybe—maybe not.’

  ‘There’s one other thing Eddie Walsh told me that I’ve let drop in all that’s been happening,’ Chambrun said. ‘The night Lois Tranter says Avilla was in the Trapeze and Eddie says he wasn’t. There was a message which Eddie couldn’t deliver because Avilla wasn’t there—a phone number Avilla was supposed to call.’ He reached in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled slip of paper. ‘Worth a try?’ He looked around at us, then switched on the squawk box and dialed a number.

  It rang four or five times and finally a male voice answered. Just a simple ‘Hello.’

  ‘May I ask to whom I’m speaking?’ Chambrun said.

  ‘May I ask who’s asking that?’ the voice said.

  ‘I am Pierre Chambrun, manager of the Beaumont Hotel,’ Chambrun said. ‘The night before last a message was left here for Ricardo Avilla.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘We were unable to deliver the message. I am calling to inform whoever left his number for Avilla to call.’

  ‘Thank you for telling me,’ the voice said. The phone went dead.

  Guardino reached out and took the slip of paper from Chambrun. ‘The telephone company will tell us whose number that is,’ he said.

  ‘So you’re putting me in the same straitjacket you’re in, Pierre,’ Hardy said. ‘I can’t go after my killer because of the hostages.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Chambrun said.

  ‘What difference are a few hours going to make?’

  Chambrun gave him a grim look. ‘The direction the heat is coming from could change,’ he said.

  Everybody seemed to have something special to do. Guardino was off somewhere, trying to check the telephone number Chambrun had called; Yardley was at another phone trying to make contact with Lord Huntingdon in London, in the hope that Inspector Brooks might have told his chief something useful; Hardy, I think feeling that he was stalled in his tracks by the hostage situation, had taken a couple of fingerprint experts over to the Annex. The two men who had attacked Chambrun and held him prisoner must have left traces of themselves. How useful
could fingerprints be? It wasn’t likely that foreign terrorists would have fingerprints on file with the police or the FBI, but Hardy wasn’t a man to leave anything to chance. It could pay off later in case Chambrun wasn’t able to identify the men if they were picked up later. I was tempted beyond belief to go down the hall to my room, fall on the bed, and get some shut-eye. I had been up around the clock twice and more. Chambrun was back. All was right with our world; God was in his heaven again. But there was a little less than five hours to go now before the fate of the hostages would be decided, with a bomb threatening the building and other lives as well. Even in the condition I was in, I knew sleep would be impossible. But doing nothing was unbearable.

  Chambrun indicated he didn’t need me, and that the best thing I could do was keep moving around the lobby area, watch out for Avilla, and fend the press away from The Man’s office. I wanted to ask him what he’d meant about the heat coming from another direction, but this didn’t seem to be the right moment. I left him alone with Betsy Ruysdale, telling myself they were entitled to a moment of privacy.

  Down in the lobby the clock over the front desk told me it was seven-thirty, just four and a half hours to go for the hostages. Lois was still there, watching and waiting.

  ‘Avilla isn’t going to show,’ I said. ‘He has to know that we’re looking for him.’

  ‘If he’s working for the people in Twenty-two B, he has to be able to report to them,’ she said.

  ‘We’re not so sure he’s the one,’ I said. I told her about Chambrun and the two men in the Annex with radio equipment. As I was telling her I remembered something that nobody had commented on. When the man in Twenty-two B had made his last call to The Man’s office he’d begun by saying ‘Welcome home.’ He not only knew that Chambrun had been held prisoner, but that he’d been rescued.

  ‘Does your man in the Trapeze still say I was wrong about seeing Avilla there?’ Lois asked.

  I told her the police were checking out a phone number Eddie had been supposed to deliver to Avilla. ‘I suspect they’re also checking out the Plaza Hotel, where Sanchez says he is staying. They’ll either catch him there or he’ll really have gone underground.’