I was suddenly aware that all the while we’d been talking, Jerry Dodd had been going over the room pretty carefully. Olin was aware of it too. “No evidence that I manufactured a bomb here, Mr. Dodd?”
Jerry didn’t answer. He was looking at Chambrun for instructions. Chambrun seemed to be in no hurry.
“It’s up to Lieutenant Hardy to deal with two known murders,” he said. “We’re concerned with preventing any further violence, and, if possible, negotiating for Johnny Sassoon’s release. You’re a professional, Mr. Olin. You tell us Cecil Treadway is the man we should be after. You tell us he is a coldblooded killer; you tell us he’s an electronics and explosives expert; you tell us he could be working for Gamayel’s government, or some third party, not the group that was dickering with Sassoon. So how do you read the evidence, you, a professional? Let’s take it step by step. To begin with, your alibi isn’t quite as good as it sounds.”
“In what way?” Olin asked. I thought they sounded like two chess players discussing the moves of a game they’d already played.
“You told us Sassoon summoned you about dinnertime. He wanted you to look at documents. I take it some of them were the documents that are supposed to be missing?”
“Are missing,” Olin said.
“You left your fingerprints all over the desk. Sassoon, served by Room Service, ate his dinner while you were looking at the papers. The room service waiter saw you?”
“Yes.”
“Then you say you left Sassoon, carrying information in your head, and made arrangements to go to Washington. Did you leave Sassoon alive?”
Olin smiled. “Not my fingerprint on the headboard, remember? Talk to the room service waiter. He’ll tell you I was gone when he came to take away the tray. I hope he’ll tell you that J.W. was alive.”
“How was Sassoon dressed when you saw him?”
“Trousers, white shirt with no tie, a seersucker robe.”
“He was stark naked when the maid found him dead in the morning,” Chambrun said. He must have been stark naked when he was killed. Who would he let into his room when he was naked? The windows in that suite are barred, because it’s a straight drop to the street. No way in or out except through the door. In theory no one could come in unless he wanted them in. Why would he receive somebody without any clothes on?”
“There are passkeys,” Olin said. He frowned. “We come again, of course, to the possibility of the lady. He might well have gotten undressed after she came.”
“So he is smothered with a pillow—maybe by the lady, but from that thumbprint I’d guess a rather large man. The papers are stolen. By Treadway, you think?”
“Who else?”
“Then give me answers, Mr. Olin. If Treadway has the papers, why doesn’t he get out as fast as he can and get them to his employer? Why does he hang around and, late in the day, kidnap Johnny Sassoon? Why does he butcher that girl in Johnny’s room? Why does he try to bomb his way to Gamayel? He had succeeded after one murder. Why all the rest? If the papers were his objective, then all I can assume is that he failed in the first place. He didn’t get them.”
Olin snubbed out his cigarette. The green glasses hid what he was thinking.
“He didn’t take off because he didn’t have what he was paid to get,” Chambrun said. “Now maybe he killed Sassoon, but if he did, the papers were already gone. He isn’t sure who’s got them, but he tries all the possibilities—perhaps including Mrs. Brent, whom we don’t seem to be able to locate at the moment. But any way you figure it, Mr. Olin, that third party you mentioned is involved. He has the papers and he’s on his way with them, unconcerned by Treadway’s bloody attempts to find them. Who is he?”
Olin seemed to be frozen.
“Could you be on Treadway’s target list, too, Olin?”
“I can take care of myself,” Olin said, as though he was far away somewhere.
“Treadway has to know we’re looking for him and that the police are looking for him. What does he do now? You are a professional. What would you do in his shoes?”
“I wouldn’t have got into this mess in the first place,” Olin said. “He can’t just walk out of the hotel?”
“Not if he was the bomber. No chance after that. And let me point out to you that whoever your third party is, Mr. Olin, he persuaded Gamayel to leave Mark’s apartment quite a few minutes before the bombing took place. Why would the third party want Gamayel if Gamayel doesn’t have the papers?”
“To keep him from talking to anyone ever again,” Olin said.
“Again, who can it be, Mr. Olin? Who should we be looking for? I really can’t buy Gamayel himself or Mrs. Brent, you know.”
“I need to give it some thought,” Olin said.
“There isn’t time for thought!” Chambrun said.
2
THE ONE THING IN the world that Chambrun doesn’t want in his hotel was beginning to happen when we hit the lobby. Panic. Hundreds of rooms had already been checked out and guests were swarming around the main desk, ten deep, demanding reassurance, demanding the right to leave the building, demanding the right to check out at once. People were storming the main doors on Fifth Avenue and the two side entrances, only to find their way blocked not only by hotel employees but by the police. Hundreds of normally elegant people were on the verge of becoming involved in an old-fashioned Tenth Avenue brawl.
The minute Chambrun appeared, I thought he was going to be torn to pieces. Men and women grabbed at his clothes, all shouting at him, some hysterical, some angry, all loud!
There’s a loud-speaker system in the lobby, used for paging people under normal circumstances. Jerry Dodd and I, along with Mike Maggio, formed a kind of flying wedge to get Chambrun to the desk. Karl Nevers helped him up, so that he was literally standing on the desk, high above the crowd, holding a microphone in his hand. Somehow he managed to get a degree of quiet simply by standing there and waiting. I was searching the faces of the crowd for some sign of Valerie, but she wasn’t there. I saw Emory Clarke somewhere on the fringes.
“Most of you know that I am Pierre Chambrun, the Beaumont’s manager,” Chambrun said into the speaker system. He spoke so softly they had to quiet down to hear him. He regretted the confusion. He assured them he felt the danger was over, but that the criminal responsible for the second-floor bombing was still somewhere in the hotel. It might take another forty-five minutes to cover the building from top to bottom. People who were known to us were free to leave, but the hotel and the police would have to have a list of everyone who chose to go out. This would be a slow and irritating process. “Meanwhile,” he told them, “the bars and late night restaurants will be kept open and whatever you need to revive your spirits will be on the house. Believe me, the inconvenience is only part of our effort to protect you from any conceivable danger. If all of you try to check out, it will take hours. So eat, drink, and be merry—and try to forgive us for the trouble.”
Somebody started to applaud and the tension seemed to break a little. We helped Chambrun down from his precarious perch on the desk. People began to move, almost happily, toward the bars and the Blue Lagoon. By the time he handed out several hundred free drinks, free food, and paid the staff overtime, this night was going to cost Chambrun plenty.
Chambrun and I went out through the office behind the desk to avoid the crowd and up the fire stairs to the second floor. Miss Ruysdale was at her desk, buried under floor plans for the entire building.
“Better than half the floors have reported in,” she told Chambrun. She smiled. “Only five lawsuits threatened so far. Nothing found, and no one has seen anyone matching Treadway’s description, or Gamayel’s.”
“Put Mrs. Valerie Brent on that wanted list,” Chambrun said.
“You have a very agitated Mr. Carlson in your office,” Miss Ruysdale said.
“I thought you fed him sleeping pills,” Chambrun said.
“Evidently they don’t work on him.”
Carlson was far from the
dapper lawyer we’d first met early yesterday. He needed a shave, and his eyes looked sunk in their sockets.
“I’ve got to get out of here, Mr. Chambrun,” he said.
“You’ve heard something?” Chambrun asked.
“No!” He seemed to have trouble controlling his face. The corners of his mouth twitched. “You don’t really expect to hear anything now, do you? It’s hours since they cut out on us. God help Johnny!”
“You’re the man they’ll want to talk to,” Chambrun said. He glanced at the black suitcase behind his desk. “You’re the money man. Have you thrown in the towel on Johnny?”
“Anybody can take instructions from them if they ever do call,” Carlson said. “Do you have any idea what kind of a madhouse is going on in our offices?”
Chambrun glanced at his wrist watch. “At one o’clock in the morning?”
“That’s the time here,” Carlson said. “The time is different in London and Berlin and Moscow and Hong Kong. I know we’re being swamped with inquiries, demands for decisions. Our whole business world can collapse on us if we don’t have the right answers. I simply have to get to the office.”
“And Johnny goes down the drain?”
Carlson twisted his head from side to side. “If Johnny is alive, if he comes out of it, his future may depend on what happens at the office in the next few hours. When the stock market opens in the morning, there’ll be a panic if we haven’t made plans to avert it.”
Chambrun hesitated for a moment, his eyes narrowed as if he was trying to read Carlson’s mind. “What do you want us to do with the money?” he said.
“Keep it here,” Carlson said. “They may want someone to deliver it quickly.”
Chambrun nodded. “All right,” he said. “Mark, take Mr. Carlson downstairs and arrange for the people on the doors to let him out.”
“Some other time I’ll thank you for what you’ve tried to do,” Carlson said.
“The doing still lies ahead of us, Mr. Carlson,” Chambrun said.
The lobby looked less like the Titanic going down than it had a few minutes ago. There are always some people who insist on having their way no matter how easy you make it for them not to. Karl Nevers at the desk was trying to appease them. I managed to get Carlson to a side exit presided over by one of Jerry’s men. They took down the lawyer’s name, address, and phone number and bowed him out.
Back in the lobby I bumped into Emory Clarke, his Charles Laughton face crinkled with amusement. “Free drinks will work miracles on people’s courage,” he said. “Any real progress?”
I told him that except for Olin we hadn’t come up with any of the people we were looking for.
“Nothing more from the kidnappers?” he asked. “Perhaps I shouldn’t ask, but seeing you usher Ray Carlson out of the building, I wondered.”
“Nothing since eight o’clock,” I said. “Carlson’s having a nervous breakdown over tomorrow morning’s stock market.”
“He could be right,” Clarke said. He inhaled on his cigarette. “I’m pretty well pooped out,” he said. “I don’t know what it might be, but if there’s any way I can help, I’ll be in my room. I take it you found Val?”
“Not yet?”
He frowned. “Not in her room?”
“Not when it was searched.”
“Oh, well, you’ll find she went out to join some friends somewhere.”
“Not if you took her to her room when you left my place,” I said. “By then every exit was blocked off—Chambrun’s orders.”
“There could have been a slip-up in the first few minutes,” he said.
“Don’t let Chambrun hear about it,” I said.
“I wouldn’t sweat over it,” he said. “In all the excitement somebody could have turned his back for a moment. She didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to go out.”
I watched his shaggy gray head move through the crowd that still milled around the lobby toward the elevators. I made my way to one of the house phones and called Valerie’s room. Still no answer. Well, in a little while there wasn’t going to be a broom closet that hadn’t been searched. She had to show up unless Clarke was right.
As I turned away from the phone, I saw Karl Nevers trying to flag me. I edged my way over to the desk.
“The switchboard’s flooded with calls from the media,” he said. “Newspapers, TV and radio. The boss gave orders no one was to be let in except registered guests. We can’t shut them out forever. Too many people have been given the green light to leave. Everything but the truth has been leaked to the outside by now. What do we tell them?”
I had no instructions from Chambrun about the media. I went back up to the second floor to get orders. Miss Ruysdale was still surrounded by her floor plans.
“Only two floors and the basements unreported,” she told me. “No luck so far.”
I went into Chambrun’s office and found Lieutenant Hardy with him. In the midst of all the confusion the Homicide man had been going doggedly about his business—catching a murderer. He’d now check out the fingerprint evidence with one exception—the thumbprint on the headboard of J. W. Sassoon’s bed. The other sets of prints in the old man’s room belonged to Johnny and the room service waiter. Item two, the gun Olin had been carrying was not, as I suspected, the one that had killed Trudy. Item three, one of Hardy’s men had noticed Treadway leave the Trapeze shortly after Gamayel and I had gone up to Chambrun’s office. Treadway had headed for the elevators. The man had no particular reason to pay attention to Treadway until he got a description of him later. Item four, the bullet the Medical Examiner had pried out of poor little Trudy’s skull did not match the ballistics record of the bullet that had killed Michael Brent two years ago. Same “trademark,” as Clarke had called it, but not the same gun.
“Item five,” Hardy said, “with Olin alibied, we’re just exactly nowhere until we can lay hands on Treadway or Gamayel. I’d just about decided that Treadway and Olin were fighting a war in our line of country, but with that Washington alibi—”
“Don’t write off the idea,” Chambrun said. “A war is what’s going on, and Treadway and Olin will do till we come up with some more likely antagonists.” He waved smoke from his cigarette away from his face. “I’ve said it many times, but it’s worth saying again. In this day and age, with life so cheap, the man who pulls the trigger is only a minor character in the drama. The killer-shark is out of sight, in deep water. Treadway and Olin are sophisticated technicians, but in the final analysis they are paid mercenaries. You may put one or both of them in jail, Hardy, but I’m after the killer-sharks myself.”
“Who would appear to be thousands of miles away in the Middle East,” Hardy said.
“Maybe,” Chambrun said. “Just maybe.”
I pulled myself together and told Chambrun why I was there. The press. The media. How did we handle them?
“Normally I’d say tell them nothing that would disturb the peace in the hotel,” Chambrun said. “It’s too late for that. I’d say give them the works for once—if Hardy agrees.”
Hardy shrugged. “Draw up a statement, Mark, and I’ll sign it. Hand it out to them, but no interviews yet. Two murders, a kidnapping and a bombing ought to keep them busy for a while.” His smile was sour. “It may also find me pounding a beat on Staten Island when the Commissioner reads it!”
I remember I reached in my pocket for a cigarette and found something unfamiliar along with the pack. It was a slip of paper I hadn’t seen before. I frowned at it, trying to figure it out.
“What is it, Mark?” Chambrun asked. He’d read the look on my face.
“A telephone number,” I said.
“Whose number?”
“You’ve got me,” I said. “It’s not something I wrote down—not my writing.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Again, I don’t know. Somebody must have slipped it in my pocket when I was milling around in the lobby. But why? No instructions. Just the number.”
“
Call it,” Chambrun said, gesturing to one of the phones on his desk.
I picked up one of the phones and asked the switchboard for the number. It rang about four times before someone picked up the receiver on the other end. I felt the small hairs rising on the back of my neck. No one spoke—but it was the breather again. Long, shallow, quavering breaths.
I pointed urgently to the black suitcase beside Chambrun’s chair. He hurried toward Miss Ruysdale’s office.
“This is Mark Haskell,” I said. “I had a message to call.”
There was a kind of sigh, and then something that sounded like a sepulchral whisper. “Alone. Phone booth. Fifty-ninth Street. Twenty minutes.”
The phone clicked off. The dial tone sounded. There’d been no time for Chambrun to trace it. He came back from the outer office.
“We’ll have the telephone company check out the number for us,” he said, “but ten to one it’s a phone booth somewhere.”
“What do I do?”
“Go,” he said.
“But you’ll be covered,” Hardy said, reaching for the phone.
I have to tell you that I was happy to know that somewhere in the shadows behind me as I walked down Fifth Avenue there was someone I could count on. The Avenue was almost deserted. An occasional taxi whizzed past, but I saw only one other pedestrian in the five-block stretch—a woman walking a miniature black poodle.
I got to the phone booth with about three minutes to spare. I couldn’t see Hardy’s man anywhere, but I took him for granted. Right on the dot the phone rang and I picked up the receiver.
“Mark Haskell here,” I said.
“Congratulations on your promptness,” a brisk voice said. No breathing this time. The voice was, as I say, brisk, energetic, but it sounded as though the man was talking with his mouth full. As though he was eating! Suddenly I thought of that denturelike device Jerry had found in the trash barrel. Olin had called it a voice alterer.
Bargain with Death Page 12
