by Howard Fast
She turned back toward the hotel, and there he was, standing at the top of the stairs, blocking her return. He was studying her appraisingly, thoughtfully, with objective interest—as a horse buyer might watch a horse that he had almost decided to buy. At least that was Sally’s reaction at the moment.
He was the man they had seen on Sixty-seventh Street. There was no question about that. He was the right height—about five feet, ten inches; he had blond hair and very pale blue eyes; and his narrow black trousers were immaculately creased and creaseless. It occurred to Sally that it could conceivably be a coincidence; it also occurred to her that such a coincidence would be beyond the scheme of all mathematical probability.
Then he squinted at her and nodded at her and panic enveloped her. She ran across the street, and she narrowly missed being hit by a car. At the other side of Fifty-fifth Street she spun around, and there he was, still standing on the steps of the hotel.
But now, slowly and deliberately, without hurry, without any sign of anxiety on his part, he walked down the steps and began to cross the street. Sally ran to the corner, became aware of the fact that she was running and that a grown woman running on Fifth Avenue is ridiculous, turned right onto Fifth Avenue, and walked uptown as rapidly as she could. The urge to run again overtook her and then she pulled herself back to a walk, while her eyes sought desperately for a policeman.
There had to be a policeman. There had to be one somewhere around here. This was the crossroads of the world. She thought of stopping the nearest stranger and pleading with him to help her, to protect her. She would cry out that a man was following her and that he had been paid to kill her. But the thought evoked only the certainty of ridicule and rejection.
She turned once more to look back. This time she could not see him. Taking some comfort from that, she continued her flight north on Fifth Avenue.
CHAPTER
9
CLARE KENNEDY, the head of security at the hotel, was as different from any ordinary conception of a private detective as the actuality could ever be from the idea. He was a man in his early forties, immaculately dressed, great style, thin hair combed carefully to cover bald places on his head, rimless glasses, and a gentle, almost apologetic look. Behind that look, as Gonzalez had reason to know, was a rather extraordinary mind and a very retentive memory. This memory contained a file of hundreds of dead beats, con men, professional credit-card thieves, jewel thieves, hotel inside men, card sharps, bellhop thieves, chambermaid thieves, and a dozen other varieties of crooks whose specific hunting ground was the hotel.
Without ostentation, toughness, or any of the popular virtues of a protective agency, Kennedy saw to it day in and day out that the people who passed through the hotel, lived, dined, or drank there, were unconscious of his presence and remained unconscious of any need for his presence.
When Gonzalez entered his office, he was sitting back in a swivel chair, his feet up on his desk, reading a biography of Pope John. He smiled with a trace of embarrassment as he laid it aside. He asked Gonzalez whether he, Gonzalez, was a Catholic and how did he feel about John?
“Religion is something I don’t discuss,” Gonzalez replied, “and I am very cold on the question of heroes.”
“John was not a hero. He was a saint.”
“I am also cold on the question of saints. Otherwise, how have you been?”
“You’re Catholic, aren’t you?” Kennedy asked him.
“It’s none of your damned business,” Gonzalez replied. “Anyway, a lousy Catholic is like a lousy picture with an admirable frame.”
“That makes absolutely no sense,” Kennedy said.
“No, I guess it doesn’t. The hell with it. Maybe the way I feel religion makes no sense. Look—some day you call me up, I’m off duty, I’ll come down and I’ll talk about religion with you. It won’t get us anywhere, but I’ll talk about it with you. As far as I’m concerned, the Irish are a little nuts on the question of their religion, but still I’m willing to talk to you about it Right now it’s business.”
“What kind of business? This is out of your territory, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but what brings me here began in my territory,” Gonzalez said. “We got a very unusual case indeed. What do you know about a kid who’s staying here whose name is Sally Dillman?”
Kennedy nodded, took his feet off his desk, closed his eyes for a moment, and then opened them and regarded Gonzalez with interest. “Sally Dillman—right?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Been staying here quite awhile. Bedroom and parlor that sells for two thousand dollars a month—that’s a lot of cabbage. And, mind you, I got no argument about the prices the hotel charges. I think they’re reasonable and I also think we may be the best hotel left in the United States. Nevertheless, this kid doesn’t go with two thousand a month.”
“You’re smart.” Gonzalez nodded. “What do you mean, she doesn’t go with two thousand dollars a month?”
“Oh, come off it,” said Kennedy, “you know what goes with two thousand a month. Alligator bags at three hundred and fifty dollars apiece, alligator shoes at a couple of yards each, mink stole at the least, a piece of ermine for the evenings, mink coat for the bad weather, a few diamonds, pearl necklace, a brooch at seventy thousand dollars. You know what I mean, Gonzalez. When you pay two thousand bucks for a room, you got the goods that goes with it. This kid hasn’t any of the goods. This is a lower-middle-class kid, living in a two-thousand-dollar-a-month room, and that situation asks all kinds of questions—no end of questions.”
“Did you ask the questions?” Gonzalez wanted to know.
“No, I didn’t ask them. She pays her rent every month. She doesn’t make any trouble. She’s a sad kid. I figure she’s got some personal misery that’s very big and very deep, but there’s no hot call out on her. And, like I say, she pays her two thousand bucks a month, so I don’t ask any questions. That’s what you run a hotel for—for the money across the counter. This is a civilized hotel, not some kind of fink service for the FBI or the cops.”
“I’m not running down your hotel,” Gonzalez said. “I’m not asking you to be an informer. Just tell me, how do you figure the kid? She’s honest, isn’t she?”
“Oh, my God,” Kennedy said. “You still go for the old slogans. What is honest? What is dishonest? There’s no honest and dishonest in my job. Honest and dishonest is for the local precinct at night, when you pull in the drunks and the sex nuts and the petty thieves. Do you want to know whether this kid is working a racket? The answer is no, she’s not working a racket. She’s a straight kid. In fact, my guess would be that she’s a schoolteacher. She doesn’t keep any late hours, and she hasn’t had a man up to her room since she’s been here. Her luggage is new luggage, fairly cheap, and she draws her checks on the Chase Manhattan Bank. So in answer to your question, ‘Is she honest?’ in that way she’s honest. She lives an open life. She’s got no secrets.”
“What do you mean?” Gonzalez asked.
“What I mean is that she’s got no secrets that are associated with her presence here in this hotel. That’s all that interests me. I am not a cop. I am not an FBI man. I am not one of your stinking spy slobs. I am merely a means of seeing that people live here without undue annoyance and, if possible, that they pay their bills quietly and that they don’t steal from each other. She pays her bills. She doesn’t steal from anyone else. She doesn’t make any trouble, and the only thing you could hold against her is that up to a few days ago her chin was always dragging the ground between her feet. She had big trouble, terrible trouble, and then something happened and the trouble went away. Not that I’m saying she is untroubled in these last few days, but the big trouble must have either eased up or gone away.”
“There was big trouble,” Gonzalez agreed. “The poor kid thought she was dying of leukemia. Then she found out that it was the wrong diagnosis of some stupid son-of-a-bitch quack.”
“Did you ever want to be a doctor?
” Kennedy asked him shrewdly.
“I did once,” Gonzalez admitted.
“So you’ll spend the rest of your life hating doctors. All right, now the heat is off. What’s for her to worry about? And where does the two thousand clams a month come from?”
“The two thousand a month is a means of doing away with a little bit of an estate that her father and mother left her—a house and some insurance.”
“Don’t look at me, Gonzalez. I don’t make the prices. Let her move to a cheaper hotel. Nobody keeps her here.”
“She will in due time, but it’s not as simple as that. Not quite so simple.”
And then Gonzalez told Kennedy what Sally Dillman had gotten herself into. He told the whole story and Kennedy listened gravely and thoughtfully, and when Gonzalez had finished, Kennedy said, “You know, if you’re patient, if you sit in one spot long enough, you hear everything and you see everything, absolutely everything. There’s an old Arab proverb, they tell me, to this effect. If one sits quietly and patiently, they will carry one’s enemy dead past one’s doorway. Well, dead or alive, let me tell you, Gonzalez, past this doorway comes everything, absolutely everything. But this—this just beats it all.”
“Nor is this killer a man who is indifferent to the responsibilities of his profession,” Gonzalez said, tapping his finger on the desk. “I heard a psychiatrist lecture on the subject down in Centre Street once—on the question of contracts. The way he saw it, the killer hated life; he was compelled to kill. But there’s another angle too. Your professional killer has professional pride. Think of any famous killer—any gun for hire. Those murderous bastards have their pride. Otherwise he could have walked away from it once he killed Compatra. But he won’t. Because this is his life, his profession, his justification of his own rotten existence—to fulfill the contract and kill Sally Dillman. Not just murder. Murder means nothing to him. A little while ago he knocked over Patsy Mendoza, the way you knock a glass off a shelf. You remember Patsy Mendoza. He was a hell of a good welterweight, as good as anyone in the past twenty years. Then he became punchy. He never had much sense after that, poor bastard.”
“I watched him fight once,” Kennedy agreed. “He was a very good welterweight. He had style and he had class. He was as good as they come.”
“Well, Mendoza must have seen him around Compatra’s gym. He was tailing us, and poor Patsy spotted him. So he knocked over Mendoza. Shot him just like that! He’s cold, he’s well trained, and he kills easily. There’s a good likelihood that this same contract man killed Compatra. Three bullets. No more than an inch and a half between them or among them, however you would put it. Anyway, three bullets right around Compatra’s left nipple. In fact, they made a pattern around the nipple, a nice, cute little triangular pattern.”
“I got the anatomy.” Kennedy nodded. “Spare me the details.”
“She’s upstairs now, and we got to work out a sort of a program.”
“She’s upstairs,” Kennedy repeated, frowning. “I don’t want any rough stuff here. We’ve never had it. I don’t intend that we should ever have it. This is not some crummy West Side inn.”
“Look, you won’t have any rough stuff here if this works out properly. We don’t want him in the hotel. We want to lead him out of the hotel, if he is in here now. Or if he comes to the hotel, we want to lead him away from the hotel. But as far as the girl is concerned, no more games. What we intend to do is sit the girl in her room and keep her there. I am with her. Meanwhile Lieutenant Rothschild has gone downtown to Centre Street to beg for men. If they can give him a hundred men in plain clothes, we’ll put a noose around Fifty-fifth Street and around Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue, leading to the hotel. Then we’ll play our game with him and we will take him. The kid runs a risk, but I still think we can take him and that she can come out of it clean.”
“From what you tell me,” Kennedy said, “the kid ran a helluva risk already.”
“She runs a bigger risk by delaying it,” Gonzalez said. “I want to end it today—today—you understand me, Kennedy? I don’t want to delay it. Every hour she delays it, it makes it worse, it makes it riskier, it makes it tighter for her. I want to get him off balance, and right now he’s got to be off balance. You can be as cold-blooded as if you had alcohol and ice in your veins and still, you kill a man, you’re going to be off balance. In the past couple of days he has killed two men. That’s not something you do lightly. He’s off his balance now, and he is also in motion. I don’t think he can stop that motion without trying again. Every killer is psychotic. But to my way of thinking, your professional killer in some lunatic psychopathic manner atones for each previous killing with a new killing. He wipes out the past with murder. He kills so that he can sleep again after he has killed the time before. Maybe I don’t make any sense. I’m talking in the most pragmatic fashion and I’ve never sat down and tried to figure this thing out the way a serious scholar would. Anyway, it’s my big guess that he’s going to kill again. He has this warped pride in his profession and this crazy need to keep killing. So he’s going to kill soon, and the whole thing will explode and finish in the next few hours.”
“You’re sure the kid is safe?” Kennedy asked him.
“I left her upstairs. Her door is locked. She has instructions not to open it to anyone but myself. How safe can you be? She’s safe all right—at least until I go back up there she’s safe.”
“O.K. Now, as far as the killer is concerned, you got any kind of a lead on him? You think you know who he is?”
“I got a lead on him. How good it is I don’t know. It’s a venture kind of a thing—a guess—but it’s an educated guess. We got a connection with San Francisco that we’re checking on right now. It may or it may not give us an M.O. and a description to check against what we’ve got, but we’ll have our answer within the next hour.”
“What have you got?” Kennedy asked him.
“Well, like I said before, an educated guess. He’s a kid, anywhere from twenty-two to twenty-five years old, maybe five-ten, -eleven inches in height, blond hair, sandy, straight, pale-blue eyes, black trousers, light-gray tweed jacket, light shirt, dark tie—”
“Where did you get that?” Kennedy interrupted him. “What’s it worth?”
“I saw a man on Sixty-seventh Street and I played him for a long shot.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
Kennedy regarded Gonzalez with admiration, nodded, and said, “You have remarkable instincts, Gonzalez. This guy frequents the hotel.”
“You mean registered here?” Gonzalez asked him.
“No, not registered, but I have seen him around the hotel twice. Day before yesterday was the first time, and today—oh, maybe twenty minutes ago—I saw him standing on the sidewalk when I came into the hotel. I stopped for cigarettes at the cigar stand. I turned around and there he was, standing inside of the door of the hotel.”
“Well, why the hell didn’t you tell me that first thing?” Gonzalez demanded.
“You didn’t ask me about it first thing. You didn’t even ask me now. You were just showing off and telling me what kind of smart guesses you could make.”
“All right, all right! Let’s have a look. I shouldn’t have left her alone in the room. God damn it, it was stupid of me to leave her alone in the room.”
Kennedy grabbed his phone and said, “One-one-one-oh quick. This is Kennedy. Emergency!”
He held the receiver so that Gonzalez, leaning over his desk, could hear the ring with him. It rang once, twice, three times, four times.
Kennedy slammed down the telephone and both of them raced through the lobby to the door and leaped down the steps to the street. Kennedy grabbed the doorman by the arm, swung him around, and snapped at him. “Joe, did you see Miss Dillman just now? Did she come through here out of the hotel to the street?”
The doorman—a big, burly, slow-moving man—had to think for a moment or two. Then he nodded slowly.
�
�How long ago?” Gonzalez demanded. “Come on—speak!”
“Ah—only maybe—maybe sixty, eighty seconds—maybe two minutes ago.”
“Which way?”
“Up the street toward Fifth. She was behaving very peculiar. She ran across the street right here and almost got herself killed by a car, and then she stood for a moment on the other side, and I was watching her and I said to myself. ‘That dame’s nuts.’ Well, you know how it is with that dame, Mr. Kennedy. She is always a little strange with that sad pan of hers. Then she runs down the street to Fifth like she is scared as hell of something.”
“If you saw that she was scared, why the hell didn’t you go to help her?”
“Well, look. I didn’t know whether she is scared or peculiar or what. I got my post here.”
“The hell with that!” Gonzalez said. “Look, Joe, did anyone else leave after her? Now listen carefully, a guy with blond hair, blue eyes, well-dressed, young guy—maybe twenty-two, twenty-three years old?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” the doorman said.
“When?”
“Maybe—maybe thirty seconds—twenty seconds after her. Could she have been scared of him?”
“She could have been. Where did he go? Which way?”
“West—to Fifth Avenue.”
“Take it here,” Gonzalez said to Kennedy. “Call Rothschild, bring him up on it, get to work on it, please.”
“O.K.” Kennedy nodded.
Then Gonzalez ran down the street to Fifth turned to his right and north on Fifth. He ran with a long, loping stride, and people, seeing him, stepped aside and made way for him. To see a grown man run on Fifth Avenue is not a usual sight in New York, nor do New Yorkers take it for granted that men run in the street. Also Gonzalez was the kind of a man who stated by his motion, by his decisiveness, “I got a right to run. I have to run. So get the hell out of my way!” They got out of his way.
Gonzalez reached Fifty-sixth Street and then Fifty-seventh Street. There was no cop at the corner of Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth.
