Bargain with Death

by Hugh Pentecost

  “I welcome company,” he said. “I was just getting ready to turn in when an army descended on my room, looking for bombs, they said. I decided on a quiet drink. Does Chambrun really expect more explosions?”

  “He’s using a planned system—really trying to find Treadway, Olin, and Gamayel,” I said.

  “I trust he isn’t locking the barn door too late,” Clarke said.

  A waiter brought me a double Jack Daniels on the rocks, an automatic. I realized I’d poured down quite a little alcohol in the last twelve hours. It might as well have been water.

  “I was looking for Val to make sure she’s all right,” I said. “She seemed a little stunned by what’s been happening.”

  He looked at me, eyes twinkling. “I wish I was your age,” he said. “That’s a one-in-a-million woman, but you’d have to be all man to handle her.” He rattled the ice in his glass. “I’ve unfortunately reached that age when my supply can’t meet the demand.”

  “You don’t look it,” I said.

  “Flattery’ll get you no place,” he said. His face clouded. “The butchery of that Woodson child has brought Val’s own tragedy back to her all too vividly. Do you think your Lieutenant Hardy is satisfied with her account of how her package of underthings was stolen?”

  “Why not?” I said. “But we’d all like to know how they turned up in Sassoon’s room.”

  “Obvious frame-up,” Clarke said, scowling. “They hoped you’d believe J.W. died from an overindulgence in sexual exercise. J. W. would never have gone for a call girl, but no one could resist Val if she made herself available.”

  “These bastards are so elaborate!” I said.

  “It’s an elaborate game with an elaborate pattern,” Clarke said. “When you get a glimpse of the behind-the-scenes manipulations of governments, of business conglomerates, it’s dumbfounding. ‘Morality’ and ‘ethics’ are just words used in public to satisfy an unsophisticated public. When you get down to bedrock, there’s only one thing that matters. Checkmate the enemy and collect the reward for winning. Ways and means are only a matter of concern to naive idiots.” As he spoke, a bitterness came into his voice I hadn’t heard there before.

  “I have a hunch they may be in for a surprise,” I said.

  “Oh?” Clarke looked at me, his craggy eyebrows raised.

  “When Chambrun is driven to playing it rough, they may be surprised at just how rough he can be,” I said.

  Clarke sighed and lit a cigarette. “Interesting man, your Mr. Chambrun,” he said. “You expect a hotel manager to be a sort of expert traffic cop—keeping things running efficiently and smoothly. I’ve had reason once or twice in the past—when I’ve been involved with the State Department—to inquire about him. Some very important foreign dignitaries make the Beaumont their ‘home-away-from-home.’ I know, from personal experience, that Chambrun has been asked to handle some very delicate and top-secret negotiations for State. As a very young man he was a tiger in the struggle against the Nazis occupying Paris. But that was long ago, Mark. The lines were clearly drawn. No doubt about who were the good guys and who the bad guys. Today’s ball game is played by entirely different rules. Definitions aren’t so clear. The good guys and the bad guys all look alike. Today there are only winners and losers. Your best friend, your own father, may step on your neck and wipe you out tomorrow if you stand in the way of his winning.” Cigarette ash dribbled down on his necktie. The bitterness in his voice had a sharper edge. “As I said, thirty years ago your man was a tiger, but I wonder if his teeth are sharp enough this much later.”

  “I think they may be,” I said. “I wouldn’t want him to test them out on me.”

  Clarke took a deep drag on his cigarette and watched the smoke curl upward as he exhaled. “Tell your Mr. Chambrun something for me,” he said. “Something I suspect he already knows. I wouldn’t take a step near the center of this mess. I care too much for my own hide. If he comes even close to the inner circle of this particular intrigue, they’ll wipe him out—like that! He’ll never know what happened. Tell him for me I’m afraid he can’t learn to play this new-fangled ball game well enough to win. He may be tough, but at bottom he’s a decent man. That decency will always make him hesitate a second too long when the showdown comes. I could give you a long list of decent and patriotic men who have tried to match their toughness and dedication against today’s amoral power boys. Most of them are dead. A few of them live—crippled as far as productive lives are concerned—wishing they were dead.” Clarke gave a little mirthless laugh. “Believe me, I know when to back away. Tell Chambrun to let the police do the hunting. They’ll muddle out of it in some way. Tell Chambrun for me that if he insists on trying to dig deeper, I think he’ll be pronouncing his own death sentence.”

  When he’d started to talk, I thought Clarke was just theorizing. When he came to the end of it, I had the uncomfortable feeling that he meant his warning to be very real.

  “You’re serious,” I said. “You really want me to tell Chambrun what you’ve said.”

  “I’ve never been more serious in my life,” he said. “What do you know about me, Mark?”

  “A distinguished statesman,” I said. “A man who knows certain parts of the world better than most other men. A trusted servant of our government.”

  Again that short, mirthless laugh. “I should designate you to deliver the eulogy at my funeral,” he said. “I am more nearly like your Mr. Chambrun than you know. Somewhere inside me there has always been that spark of decency. I’ve never been quite able to pay the price to reach the top. The big prize has always been there for the taking if I’d had the guts. If I’d been willing to risk my life to take it. It’s too late for Chambrun to try to stop a rockslide or a tornado. It’s not within a decent man’s power.” He put out his cigarette with something like ferocity. “Tell him I never meant anything so sincerely. Now, if you want to check out on Val, you’d better do it. She’ll have turned in, I imagine.”

  “She wasn’t in her room a few minutes ago,” I said.

  He looked at me, his eyebrows raised. “I took her straight there when we left your apartment,” he said. “She didn’t want to talk or have a drink.”

  “She isn’t there now.”

  “Perhaps she just wants to pull herself together in private,” Clarke said. “Maybe, like me, she left her room when your bomb squad arrived.”

  “They were just knocking on her door when I got there,” I said. “Does she have other friends in the hotel she may have joined?”

  “She hasn’t mentioned anyone to me,” he said. “Of course she has friends in the city. She may have decided to go out.”

  She’d asked me to come to her room when I could. Her plea to me had been too urgent for me to be comfortable with that suggestion.

  I left Clarke, telling him I had to circulate. I tried Valerie’s room from a house phone in the lobby on the chance she’d gone back there after I’d left. No answer.

  I flagged down Mike Maggio, the night bell captain, who was circulating in the lobby. I knew his assignment was to keep things under control there and to help out the people on the main doors in case someone got obstreperous about leaving. I asked him if he’d seen Valerie.

  “Earlier,” he said. “She had dinner with old man Clarke. She in some kind of trouble?”

  “The way things are going around here, anything unexplained smells like trouble,” I said. “She asked me to catch up with her, but she isn’t in her room. Keep an eye out for me.”

  “Will do,” he said. His face darkened. “Nothing new on Johnny-baby?” I remembered it was Mike who had first dubbed the Sassoon heir “Johnny-baby.”

  “Nothing after the first demand for ransom,” I said.

  “He and the Woodson doll were babes-in-the-woods in this scenario,” Mike said. “Johnny-baby sure didn’t know how to run a hotel, but he was a decent kid. I’d help him if I knew how.” He was the second person to be concerned with decency in the last few minutes. Th
ere wasn’t much of it around at the moment, that was for sure.

  I saw lights blinking on and off in some of the dress shops, the drugstore, the gift and book store that were located off the lobby. The search was in full swing.

  I was just starting for the stairway to report to Chambrun when I saw him barging across the lobby to the front desk with Jerry Dodd in tow. I joined them.

  “We’ve located Olin,” he told me. “He’s in his room, but he refuses to let anyone in.” Karl Nevers on the desk handed over a set of passkeys for the fourth-floor rooms. Chambrun and Jerry started for the elevators and I tagged along, telling the boss that I hadn’t been able to find Valerie. That didn’t seem to concern him very much. On the way up in the elevator, I gave him the gist of Clarke’s message.

  “I can turn it on or off at will,” Chambrun said.

  “Turn what on or off?”

  “Any basic decency or human sympathy,” he said. “I learned how to do that long ago. Hesitate? Every ten minutes I remind myself of Trudy Woodson cut to pieces in that bathroom upstairs. Don’t think there’ll be a moment’s hesitation if I find myself facing the bastard who’s responsible for that.”

  We reached the fourth floor and went along the corridor to the door of James Olin’s room. Two of the fourth-floor search crew were standing there, looking uncertain.

  “Any other trouble on this floor?” Chambrun asked.

  “Nothing, Mr. Chambrun. We didn’t find anything, either—or the people you’re looking for. Only this.”

  Chambrun pounded on the door. “Olin? This is Pierre Chambrun. Open up.”

  After a moment the door opened a little, but only as far as the chain lock would permit. One green lens looked out at us.

  “I’ve had about enough of this, Chambrun,” Olin said. “Your people say they’re looking for a bomb. You can assure them there isn’t one in here. I’ve looked.”

  “I want to talk to you,” Chambrun said, “and I’m coming in.”

  “And I don’t choose to let you,” Olin said.

  “It’ll take me about three minutes to saw through that chain,” Jerry said. “And if you try to jam the door closed on my foot, friend, I’ll take pleasure in smashing your foot when I get inside.”

  Olin laughed. “So we’re going to play rough!” he said. “Well, you’re going to have to take your foot out of the door if I’m to unhook this chain.”

  Chambrun nodded and Jerry stepped back. The door closed, and then opened. Olin faced us, fully dressed. He certainly hadn’t been going to bed. The room looked perfectly normal, perfectly neat.

  “This is pretty damned highhanded, Chambrun,” Olin said.

  “Security problems,” Chambrun said, his bright black eyes covering the room. “I’m sure my people told you that a bomb blew the door off Mark’s apartment on the second floor. This is a routine check of the whole hotel.”

  “My ass!” Olin said, smiling his thin smile. “You particularly want to talk to me, right? Am I number one or number two on your list? Have you located Treadway? You ought to think of him first, you know.”

  “We’ve found you first,” Chambrun said.

  “Well, I’ve been thinking about it and I’ve decided to make it easy for you,” Olin said. He moved to the bedside table and took a cigarette from an open pack that was lying there. He snapped a gold lighter into flame. “I want Treadway just as badly as you do,” he said. “Not because he killed some people. That’s the name of the game. I want him because he stole some documents that belong to J. W. Sassoon Enterprises. They’re the people I work for.”

  “So make it easy for us,” Chambrun said.

  “I’ve been in touch with certain contacts of mine,” Olin said, “and I’ve decided to provide you with my Washington alibi. You see, I didn’t kill J.W. I didn’t kill that girl upstairs. I didn’t kidnap Johnny. I was in Washington, or in transit from Washington when all that happened. I believe you know a man in the State Department named George Fentriss. He says he knows you well.”

  Chambrun’s eyes narrowed. “I know him well,” he said.

  “Call him,” Olin said. “He’ll tell you that I was with him in Washington from approximately ten o’clock this morning—yesterday morning to be precise—until about eight o’clock in the evening, when he put me on the shuttle flight back to New York. I was either with Fentriss or in the air flying back here when J. W. was killed, when Johnny disappeared, and when the Woodson girl was killed.” His thin smile widened. “I have no alibi for your bombing. I was here in the hotel. But you’ll have to prove a case against me.”

  “You have a phone number for Fentriss? Call him,” Chambrun said.

  Olin picked up the phone and gave the switchboard a Washington number. It was so quiet in the room while we waited I could hear the ticking of the little bedside alarm clock on the table. Then the connection was made.

  “Mr. Fentriss?” Olin asked. “James Olin here. I have Mr. Chambrun ready to talk to you.” He held out the phone.

  “George?” Chambrun asked. “Yes, well, we’re up to our necks in trouble here. Olin tells me you can account for him from ten in the morning till eight in the evening.” He listened to what the Washington man had to tell him. Olin’s green glasses were fixed on him. “I’m not concerned at the moment with why he was there, George. Just that he was there. I’m grateful. Thank you.” Chambrun put down the phone. “That seems to do it, Olin.”

  “It hurts my pride to have to prove anything to anyone,” Olin said. “But I think we need each other, Chambrun. I want Treadway maybe even more than you do.”

  “You think Treadway is responsible for this mass shambles?”

  Olin shrugged. “Who else?” he said. “J.W. was on the verge of making a deal with the people Gamayel represents. It would have put the people Treadway works for out of business. The documents that are missing reveal an entire conspiracy to overthrow Treadway’s crowd. A small army of people named in those documents are likely to be put up against a wall and shot. Naturally those people want the documents before Treadway can deliver them to his people. Gamayel wants them before they reveal him as a double agent—working for both sides. I want them because J. W. Sassoon Enterprises can’t afford to be linked with the conspirators in case they lose out. Someone else would be able to make the big deal then. No one would deal with J. W. Sassoon Enterprises if they were known to have been dickering with the conspirators. So it’s documents, documents, who’s got the documents?”

  “And Treadway would resort to murder and kidnapping to get them?” Chambrun asked.

  That baleful smile widened. “So would I,” Olin said. “But Treadway made it. Now, if he gets away, I’ll have blown it. So I’m after your help to find him.”

  “You said it could be a third party.”

  “Let’s face it,” Olin said. “Treadway is one of the top men in the business with electronic gadgets. You tell me there were bugs all over the hotel, installed right under your nose. Treadway is a genius at that kind of thing. He’s an expert with explosives. He’s a cold-blooded killer. I always believed he killed Michael Brent, but I was never able to pin it on him. The same trademark turns up in the case of the Woodson girl. Two and two.”

  “But you had thoughts about other people?”

  Olin nodded. “Gamayel, always the double agent. He doesn’t have the nerve for killing, but Treadway just could be working for him. Treadway will work for anyone if the price is right. I even thought of Mrs. Brent. She’s been hysterical on the subject of revenge. I warned J.W. that her apparent change of heart about him was a phony. But killing the girl is out of line for her, and she couldn’t change a fuse, let alone install sophisticated electronic listening devices. She hated J.W., but she’s not a professional.”

  “Her newly bought lingerie was found in J.W.’s room,” Chambrun said quite casually. “Sex can be a powerful weapon.”

  Olin laughed. “You know, I thought of that,” he said. “It would be a woman’s way to kill, wouldn�
��t it? Tempt an old man with a weak heart into bed with her and let him die from the exertion. Mrs. Brent would have been tempting, but J.W. was a realist. He knew the condition of his heart. He didn’t want to die just now. He had big irons in the fire.”

  “He didn’t die from sexual exertion,” Chambrun said. “He was smothered with a pillow and there’s a nice clear thumbprint on the headboard of the bed. Not yours, Mr. Olin, or the tenor of this conversation would be a little different. But how do you explain Mrs. Brent’s lingerie in the room?”

  “I was playing with that one when you began banging on my door,” Olin said. “You see, before all this went into motion, I was watching Mrs. Brent. I figured she had something cooked up against the old man. I thought she might have an ally. I was keeping her under surveillance. I saw her buy that stuff at Charlene’s and bring it back to the hotel. How to figure, after the fact? Well, I told myself, she planned to seduce the old boy, went to his rooms, prepared to go into the “getting into something comfortable’ routine, found him dead, panicked and left her nice new black seduction clothes behind her.”

  “But that couldn’t be,” I said. “The things were stolen from her before she got them back to the hotel!”

  The green glasses turned my way. “Stolen?”

  I barged on, ignoring the warning look Chambrun gave me. “She stopped in the park on the way home, sat down on a bench watching some children play. Some guy in a loud sports shirt and white buckskin shoes came up behind her, snatched the package, and took off with it. So someone framed her.”

  Chambrun’s look was withering. “Aren’t you forgetting, Mark, that Mr. Olin says he was following Mrs. Brent?”

  “Then he must have seen it happen!” I said.

  “I can’t imagine why she would tell you that,” Olin said, “because I can assure you she never stopped in the park, and there was no man in a loud sports shirt and white buckskin shoes there, or anywhere else.”

  “So you’re probably right,” Chambrun said. “She planned a seduction, arrived too late, panicked.”

  He accepted it so readily. I wanted to tell him that nothing on earth would make me believe that Valerie Brent would have allowed herself to be mauled by that monstrous old jellyfish. To kill him? It was nonsense.