Nightmare Time

by Hugh Pentecost

  “And you’d rather face the ‘or else’ than let them have the boy?” Zachary said.

  “I’d rather keep the boy safe than live the rest of my life knowing that I’d contributed to the deaths of four people while there was still a chance to save them.”

  Colonel Martin was obviously trying to make a decision when Jerry Dodd, looking grim, came into the office. He was carrying a small square cardboard box in his hand, along with what looked like a piece of wrapping paper.

  “This came for you by special messenger, Boss,” he said. “Atterbury, at the front desk, is just as bomb sensitive as the rest of us. Letter bombs are in the news every day. He turned this over to a bomb squad cop, who opened it. No bomb.”

  “What is it?”

  “A cassette tape,” Jerry said. “You better brace yourself and listen.”

  “To what?” Chambrun asked.

  “Betsy,” Jerry said. He walked over to the bookcase at the far wall and came back with a small radio-cassette player that was kept there. He took the tape out of the box and fitted it into the machine.

  “You’re not going to enjoy this, Boss,” he said, “but I guess you have to hear it.”

  The tape began to turn, and for a minute there was no sound. And then Betsy’s voice.

  “Where is this place?”

  There was no question about its being Betsy’s voice. The man’s voice that followed wasn’t familiar. It was medium baritone, with a heavy accent, almost a musical comedy version of Russian, I thought. Someone faking?

  “It doesn’t matter where you are, doll,” the voice said. “Your head hurt?”

  “How would you expect it to feel after being knocked out? Are you going to tell me what this is all about?”

  “It’s quite simple,” the comedy Russian said. “We want the Willis boy. If your Mr. Chambrun cares anything about you he’ll let us have him.”

  “He knows?” Betsy asked.

  “Of course he knows, but he’s been very slow in responding. Maybe he doesn’t care as much for you as we thought.”

  “I wish I was as sure of everything as I am of what Mr. Chambrun feels for me. But you’re not going to let me go, are you, even if he does what you tell him to do?”

  “You are a smart lady, Miss Ruysdale. I can’t let you go, because you can identify me.”

  There was a scratching sound but no voices as the tape wound on.

  “An erasure,” Lieutenant Hardy said, speaking for the first time. “She mentioned his name!”

  And then Betsy was back. “Don’t count on Mr. Chambrun’s playing it your way.”

  “So meanwhile we can have some fun and games, no?”

  There was a quick, sharp “Stop that!” from Betsy. Then, “Take your filthy hands off me!”

  “We might as well enjoy ourselves while we wait,” the comedy Russian voice said.

  Then a cry of pain from Betsy. “Stop it—damn you! No, I tell you! Oh God, please—no!”

  There was a moment of silence as the tape wound on. Chambrun was leaning toward the cassette player, gripping the edges of his desk.

  Then the Russian voice came back. “The rest is left to your imagination, Mr. Chambrun. I suggest that if you want to make it painless for your lady, you do as you are told. Turn the boy loose!”

  “That’s all there is,” Jerry Dodd said after the tape had wound on for a moment. He switched off the machine.

  “It sounds staged,” Zachary said, “as though the girl was reading from a script, like a soap opera.”

  “No question that it is Miss Ruysdale’s voice?” Colonel Martin asked The Man.

  Chambrun, looking straight ahead at nobody, just shook his head. There was no doubt.

  “It’s Betsy,” Hardy said.

  “The girl could have been forced to put on an act,” Colonel Martin said.

  “How?” Jerry Dodd asked.

  “Threats to Mr. Chambrun or the hotel,” the Colonel said.

  “Of course it was staged,” Chambrun said, his voice harsh. “A man doesn’t set out to rape a girl with a tape recorder running to record the act. Betsy certainly thought it was for real, but that creep with the phony Russian accent was giving an Academy Award performance.”

  Colonel Martin gestured toward the cassette player. “You don’t think the attack on the girl was real?”

  “Not what was recorded,” Chambrun said. “After that—who knows?”

  “You’ve checked with the messenger service that delivered the tape?” Colonel Martin asked Jerry Dodd.

  “Of course. Kellog’s Messenger Service,” Jerry said. “It’s got four or five offices all over town. Reliable—long time in business. The tape was handed in at their office at Grand Central Station. They don’t have any particular reason to check on a customer. They take his money, give him a receipt, deliver his package. Wouldn’t notice him unless he had a Rip Van Winkle white beard on a W. C. Fields nose.”

  “Or if she was a pretty blond girl like Pamela Smythe,” Zachary said.

  “I’m awfully sick of your Romanov fixation, Captain,” Chambrun said.

  “Only lead we’ve got,” Zachary said.

  “So follow it up, but don’t bother me with it,” Chambrun said. He rose from his desk, as though all his muscles were stiff, and faced Colonel Martin. “So you have a court order to serve?”

  Martin gave him a thin smile. “I think you’ve convinced me, Chambrun. Letting them have the boy won’t get back the people who matter. Question is, what’s our next move?”

  “The only things we’ve got, Steve, are the boy and that man Gary up in Penthouse Three,” Zachary said. “I don’t agree about the boy. I think we should ready a team of our best men, turn the kid loose, and hope they take him to his father and our men follow him there. You don’t agree. So the only thing I can suggest is that we turn a team of our best interrogators on Frank Gary, keep at him, round the clock, until he cracks.”

  “And if he’s innocent and doesn’t crack?” Martin asked.

  “He was Father Paul Callahan,” I said.

  “I’ll buy it,” Colonel Martin said. “Your opinion, Mr. Chambrun?”

  “It’s a way to keep busy,” Chambrun said. “My opinion is that Mr. Francisco Garibaldi-Gary won’t crack unless you use hot irons on him. But if that will keep Captain Zachary from concentrating on Romy Romanov and his lady, it would be a step forward.”

  “Remind me, when this case is over, to tell you what I think of you,” Zachary said.

  “No problem,” Chambrun said. “I’ll be wanting to tell you what I think of you.”

  “All right gentlemen, it’s time to do something positive,” Martin said.

  THE TWO Intelligence officers took off to put together an interrogation team to deal with Frank Gary. Chambrun explained that the men selected would have to be identified to him and Jerry Dodd and the security men on the elevator and the fire stairs.

  “You weren’t very talkative, Walter,” Chambrun said to Lieutenant Hardy, who was left with Jerry and me in the office.

  “There’s one thing I’ve learned in my business,” Hardy said. “Don’t argue with a man who’s decided he has everything wrapped up. In your friend Zachary’s case, he doesn’t have a shred of evidence against Romanov, just a hunch.”

  Chambrun’s smile was a bitter little twist. “Me too,” he said.

  “And you don’t buy this working over of Gary routine?”

  “It must drive Zachary crazy to have me say that I have a hunch it won’t work. Tell me, Walter, are my priorities out of whack? I care first for Betsy’s safety, then for Ham Willis’s safety, then the boy, and finally Mrs. Willis. God help us, it may already be too late for her.”

  “The convenient thing about your priorities, Pierre,” the Lieutenant said, “is that if you handle one of them correctly, they’ll all come out right. It doesn’t matter which one comes first in your emotions. It’s different with Zachary and Martin.”

  “In what way?”

&
nbsp; “They have only one goal, only one thing that matters,” Hardy said. “They want to keep their Star Wars secrets out of enemy hands. At any cost, you understand. They don’t care about rescuing Major Willis except to keep him from talking. If the Major should refuse to cave in and the bad guys kill him, Martin, Zachary, and company will have won the war and give the Major a posthumous medal for bravery and patriotism. If the Major talks, what happens to him and his family—and your Betsy—won’t matter. They’ll be asked some pretty embarrassing questions by the top brass as to how they screwed up. You see different things under your magnifying glass than they do under theirs. You see people, they see military secrets. Flesh and blood versus scientific formulas.”

  Chambrun’s frown deepened. “To be fair to them, let’s say they think they see the end of the world!”

  “One man, Major Willis, can’t keep that much vital information stored in his memory—unless he’s a human computer,” Hardy said. “But there are other questions to be answered, Pierre.”

  “Such as?”

  “You can’t just sit here and wait for your world to collapse, friend. What do you propose to do next, and what can I and the resources at my disposal do to help you?”

  “You have a murder to solve,” Chambrun said. “Solve it and you’ll have provided me with all the help I need.”

  “It’s not quite that simple,” Hardy said. “We think we know what happened. We think the Willises got on that elevator at seventeen with someone they had no reason to doubt. That someone pulls a gun on them and Tim Sullivan tries to interfere and is killed. He can never tell us who the man was—if he knew. He can never describe him to us. The only people who can help us in this respect are the Willises. So we’re both after the same thing. We happen to agree that letting the killers have the boy will get us nowhere. So, if not that, what, Pierre?”

  “There is Frank Gary, who may crack under a tough interrogation, and there is the man who registered as Henry Graves, took possession of 17E where, later, Mrs. Willis’s brooch was found, and who probably was the man who carried Betsy out of her apartment building. Note the word ‘probably.’ Men with snap-brim hats and dark glasses are not too uncommon. The minute we let people back into the hotel, this character can circulate right under our noses without our having the slightest clue as to how to pick him out.”

  “So it really narrows down to Frank Gary, who, your hunch tells you, won’t break under questioning.”

  “Not questioning by Zachary,” Chambrun said, “who wants to pin the whole thing on Romy Romanov. The real problem, Walter, is not to convince ourselves of who’s involved, but how to force them to get us to Betsy and the Willises before it’s too late.”

  “We’ve done the only practical thing I can think of,” Hardy said. “We’ve offered a reward. We can increase it. But the only way we can tempt someone to help us is to let them know we’re tempting them.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Enlist every branch of the media we can reach to collaborate with us—newspapers, radio, television. How big a reward can we offer?”

  “The sky’s the limit,” Chambrun said.

  “How high is the sky?”

  “Six figures,” Chambrun said. “Half a million dollars if someone produces information that gets Betsy and the Willises back alive.”

  “That will be your job, won’t it, Mark?” Hardy asked, turning to me. “Can you set up a press conference in the Grand Ballroom, say an hour from now? Reporters will risk their necks for a story, even if the bomb squad hasn’t given the hotel a clean bill of health by then. You, Pierre, and young Guy Willis make a plea for help.”

  “You want me to bring the boy down from the roof?” Chambrun asked.

  “I’ll provide you with a regiment of cops to bring him down and get him back up there,” Hardy said. “We offer a half-million-dollar reward, promise confidentiality to anyone who can point the way to Betsy and the Willises—but they can’t wait till next Christmas!”

  “And the information has to produce results,” Chambrun said.

  “Of course. No results, no reward,” Hardy said.

  Chambrun took a deep breath. “Done!” he said. “Set it up just as fast as you can, Mark,” Hardy said to me.

  PERHAPS I SHOULD correct an impression I may have given. Chambrun wasn’t putting up half a million dollars of his own money as a reward. I don’t think he’d accumulated anything like that amount of money over the years. But he had many friends on whom he could count to come to bat for him.

  One thing was certain. He wasn’t going to pay a monstrous reward for gossip or hearsay. He would only pay for something worth paying for. My job was to get the top media people together for this proposed press conference. It wasn’t the instant business that it would have been under other circumstances. Key people were not in the offices, and no one at those offices knew exactly where they could be located. They were all covering the Beaumont story, and like hundreds of other people, they had all been pushed out onto the street to wait for the bomb squad to sound the all clear.

  Outside the hotel was a kind of quiet chaos. Hundreds had been evacuated from the hotel, to be joined outside by thousands of others who’d been listening to their radios or watching their televisions. They were packed together, staring up, waiting for the forty-story hotel to come tumbling down. A small army of cops guarded each of the three entrances to the hotel and, I suspected, the ramp on the side street that led down into the basement garage.

  Lieutenant Hardy, anticipating all this, went out onto the street with me. I guess he knew that if he wasn’t with me I wouldn’t be able to get back into the hotel for my own press conference.

  Reporters hadn’t wanted to leave the hotel. That’s where the action was. I got lucky. The police sergeant in charge of the Fifth Avenue entrance was able to locate Rex Chandler for me. Rex is one of the top television newsmen, rating along with Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite in the old days. I had had dealings with him many times in the past, setting up interviews for him with famous guests of the hotel, tipping him off to informal gatherings in one of the bars, restaurants, or private dining rooms, in return for information from him about foreign visitors to the United Nations who were staying with us, information important to Chambrun for his files on individual patrons. Rex had taken over a small beauty salon across the street from the Beaumont. I don’t know if he knew the lady proprietor, or if she just found it exciting to be helping a famous newsman. Anyway Rex was in the shop, watching the hotel through its plate-glass window, holding the shop’s telephone. He was apparently making a running comment which was undoubtedly being broadcast on his network. A cameraman was stationed a few feet away from him, taking pictures of Rex and probably of the crowd outside.

  “We’re in luck, ladies and gentleman,” I heard him say into the phone. “Mark Haskell, public relations man for the Beaumont, and Lieutenant Hardy, homicide man in charge of the Sullivan murder, have just come into the shop.” He gave me a big grin. “You’re on the air, Mark.” He held out the phone toward me.

  “I need to talk to you in private, Rex,” I said. I don’t know if I’ve described Rex. He’s tall, athletic-looking, with blond hair worn rather thick around his collar line, and with a warm and ingratiating smile. He knew how to take the stage, and he was on camera.

  “We’re setting up a press conference in the ballroom,” I said, wondering if I looked as deadbeat as I felt. “Interviews with Chambrun, the Willis boy, Colonel Martin, head of Air Force Intelligence. The problem is to get you and all the other news people gathered there as quickly as possible.”

  “That’s all we’ve been trying to do for the last couple of hours,” Rex said, still for the public. “Get back in the hotel.”

  “The quicker the better,” I said. “Cameras, sound equipment, the works. There’ll be statements and interviews with Chambrun and the others. And we’re posting a five-hundred-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the safe return of Major Willis and his
wife, and Betsy Ruysdale.”

  “Out of my way, man!” Rex said. “You want hurry, you’ll get hurry.” Then, into the phone, “I’m leaving the air now, ladies and gentlemen. I’ll be back as soon as we’re set up for this press conference Mark Haskell has promised us. Until then—thanks for being with us.” He put the phone down. “How do we get back into the hotel?” he asked Hardy.

  “A legitimate press card will get your people in,” Hardy told him.

  “Half a million bucks!” Rex Chandler said. “Who’s putting up that kind of money? Don’t tell me. Chambrun and his friends! Your boss knows the right people, Mark.”

  “You want a press conference, or do you want to chew the fat?” I asked him.

  “On my way!” Rex said.

  Suddenly people outside that beauty shop knew who I was. I suppose there were dozens of portable radios in the crowd with people all around them listening to Rex Chandler’s running commentary. What kind of information would earn them a half million bucks? Did we have any reason to believe that the people who’d been kidnapped were still alive? And on and on…

  All I could do was tell them to listen to the press conference that was coming up. Those questions would be answered, and many more. It took Hardy’s help and a wedge of policemen to get me back inside the Beaumont. I found myself wondering if Betsy and the Willises were being allowed to watch all this on some television set in some secret place. Unfortunately for them they’d know whether what we were doing was futile and hopeless as far as they were concerned.

  Inside the hotel the staff all seemed to be in place, obviously alerted. In some cases we were at double strength. Atterbury, the head day clerk, was at the front desk, and with him Karl Nevers, the night clerk. John Thacker, the day bell captain was at his post, with Mike Maggio, his night replacement, alongside. Mr. Cardoza was hovering outside the Blue Lagoon, not open at this time of day. The maître d’ was covering what he must have thought of as his nightclub. The staff was ready for whatever.

  Hardy and I stopped to talk to the two bell captains.