Murder Round the Clock

by Hugh Pentecost

  "You know anything about the occupant in 912?" Chambrun asked Jerry.

  "Name—Warren Wilson," Jerry said. "Checked in yesterday. I haven't had a chance to look at his card."

  Guests of the Hotel Beaumont might have been a little disturbed to know how complete the record was on them. On their cards were symbols that indicated their credit standing, their marital status, whether or not they were cheating on a spouse, how they handled their liquor. On the card there could be a notation that Chambrun had something special about them in his private file that he didn't want to become general knowledge.

  Warren Wilson's card showed that he had not been a guest of the hotel before. We had nothing yet on his habits or his private life. But there was one interesting thing about him.

  His room had been reserved for him and his credit vouched for by a deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington.

  "Cloak and dagger," Chambrun muttered. His eyes glittered. "The whole damned country is playing spy games these days, a million phones bugged. Half the world takes it as some sort of amusing parlor game. Who's listening to whom? Not, by God, in this hotel!" He took a deep drag on his cigarette, then ground it out in the ashtray on his desk. "Call Mr. Wilson, Mark, and tell him wed like to come up to see him."

  Mr. Wilson didn't answer his phone. Chambrun decided we would make an examination of Wilson's room whether he was there or not.

  There was very little of interest in the room. Wilson had one extra suit, half a dozen shirts, some fresh underwear and handkerchiefs, two rather plain neckties, and shaving things in the bathroom. There were no letters, papers, or briefcases, only a slightly aged canvas airplane bag. It was rather less than you'd expect to find in a seventy-dollar-per-day room.

  I checked all this out while Jerry searched the room for a bugging device. He found what he was looking for in the telephone instrument itself. He had unscrewed the mouthpiece and sat looking at it, scowling.

  "This is it," he said to Chambrun. "Sophisticated little doo-jigger. Sends the sound to a listener somewhere or to a tape recorder somewhere. Like a tiny radio."

  "Be careful how you handle it," Chambrun said. "It's so small, it couldn't have been installed by a man wearing gloves. There might be a fingerprint on it."

  At that moment there was the sound of a key in the door, and a man came in. Warren Wilson was, I guessed, in his early thirties. He had sandy hair, cut short, and what was normally a pleasant, boyish face. He was angry now.

  "Who the hell are you, and what are you doing here?" he demanded.

  "I'm Pierre Chambrun, the hotel manager," Chambrun said. "This is Mr. Dodd, our security officer, and Mr. Haskell, our public relations man."

  "You're not entitled to be in my room!" Wilson said. He was staring at the phone, which Jerry still held, taken apart, in his hands.

  "We had reason to think your phone was bugged, Mr. Wilson," Chambrun said. "I didn't choose to wait for you to get back. Show him, Jerry."

  Jerry held out the instrument. "Tiny radio device," he said. "Anything you said on the phone went out somewhere. I haven't had a chance to check it, but it may have reported anything that went on in here whether the phone was in use or not."

  "That's crazy!" Wilson said. "Who had the room before me? It could have been for them—no chance to remove it"

  "Your room was reserved for you by the CIA, Mr. Wilson. I assume you work for them," Chambrun said.

  Wilson drew a deep breath and fumbled for a cigarette. "I guess there's no point in trying to pretend," he said. "Yes, I work for the CIA."

  "You care to tell us why you're here at the Beaumont?"

  "I can give you a surface explanation," Wilson said. "I'm what you might call a courier. I am carrying documents to be delivered to someone else registered here at the hotel."

  "Who?"

  Wilson studied the end of his cigarette. "I don't think I can tell you that, Mr. Chambrun. I will say that my contact is supposed to register here at the hotel. He hasn't done so yet."

  "So you are waiting for him to show up?"

  "Yes."

  Chambrun glanced at the card in his hand. "You checked in yesterdav noon."

  "Yes."

  "Did you ask for the man you're supposed to meet?"

  "Yes."

  "Whom did you ask?"

  "The man at the desk who registered me."

  "Atterbury," Jerry Dodd said. He knew exactly who was on duty every hour of the day.

  "Whom did you ask for?" Chambrun asked.

  "Sorry. I can't tell you that."

  Chambrun turned to me. "Find out, Mark," he said. "Call Atterbury on the housekeeper's phone. We can't use this one." He looked at Wilson. "Atterbury will remember," he said.

  Wilson shrugged. "I don't suppose the name matters," he said. "It isn't his real name. I asked for Curt Helwig. The man at the desk told me he had a reservation but that he hadn't checked in."

  "And he still hasn't checked in?"

  "According to the front desk."

  "Have you any idea who might have wanted to overhear your conversations, Mr. Wilson?"

  Wilson shook his head slowly. "No idea," he said.

  "If you'd had any sensitive telephone calls to make, would you have made them on this phone that goes through a switchboard?" Chambrun asked.

  "Of course not."

  Chambrun was, I saw, controlling his anger. "I don't like this kind of mumbo jumbo going on in my hotel," he said. "The whole damn country seems to be in the hands of idiot children playing spy games. Privacy seems to be a dead privilege. Well, by God, it isn't going to happen in the Beaumont! If somebody will bug your phone, Wilson, they may also try to steal the documents you're carrying. I suggest you put them in the hotel vault."

  Wilson grinned. "I put them there right after I registered yesterday," he said. "I intend to leave them there till Helwig shows up."

  "Good. Meanwhile we'll remove this device from your phone. When they realize they're not hearing what's going on here, that may scare them off. Handle it carefully, Jerry. Remember, we may find a helpful print on it."

  We left Jerry Dodd with Wilson and went down to the lobby where Atterbury was on duty again. Atterbury wasn't some kind of memory genius, but he did have total recall about Warren Wilson.

  "He asked me for a Curt Helwig," Atterbury told Cham-brun. "Helwig wasn't registered. Wilson seemed distressed and asked me to check on whether Helwig had a reservation."

  "And did he?" Chambrun asked.

  Atterbury nodded. "He did—and not quite usual, Mr. Chambrun. The reservation was made by a Washington source we honor without question. Same people who reserved Wilson's room. The thing that was unusual about Hel-wig's reservation was that they weren't quite sure when he would arrive—yesterday, today, tomorrow, even the day after that. We were to make sure, however, that there was a room for him when he did appear."

  "Damn!" Chambrun said.

  I knew what irritated him. The Beaumont is not far from the United Nations building, and many foreign diplomats and attaches make the hotel their home-away-from-home. Quite often we are asked by the State Department or the CIA or top White House personnel to provide special accommodations. It isn't always convenient because the Beaumont rarely has any long-range vacancies.

  So, more often than not, to accommodate the government, we'd have to turn away a regular guest. We had what we called "house seats," three or four rooms we kept open, day to day, for emergencies; but these were almost always quickly filled. To hold a room for an indefinite arrival tended to upset our smooth routine.

  "Let me know when this Helwig checks in," Chambrun said. "Wilson will pass over his documents—which he tells me are in the vault."

  "I put them there—a briefcase—myself," Atterbury said.

  "Then let's get rid of these two cloak-and-dagger Johns as fast as we can," Chambrun said.

  Mr. Wilson and his bugged phone went out of my mind during the rest of that day. I knew Jerry Dodd had removed
the electronic gadget from the telephone in 912 and that he was trying to check out its source—that is, the manufacturer. It wasn't, Jerry assured us, a homemade device. There was a fashion show that afternoon that I had to cover, and in the evening there was to be a coming-out party in the Grand Ballroom for some debutante chick. These are routines in which a PR man has to involve himself.

  It was nearly three in the morning before I finally got to bed in my apartment on the second floor of the hotel. I was bushed, and I went to sleep the moment my head hit the pillow. Actually, I hadn't been asleep more than twenty minutes when my phone rang.

  I dredged myself up out of some dark void and managed to answer it. It was Mike Maggio, the bell captain.

  "Trouble," Mike said. "You're wanted in the lobby office on the double, Mark."

  I mumbled something.

  "Robbery," Mike said. "Somebody held up Carl Nevers, the night manager, forced him to open the vault, and took off with God knows what."

  There had been robberies at the Pierre, the Plaza, the Waldorf-Astoria in the past. We had been waiting for our turn, although we thought our security setup was foolproof.

  Behind the front desk in the lobby is a private office for use by the day and night managers. And behind that office is the vault. Only the manager on duty can open it. There's no time lock, because guests come in at all times of the day or night with possessions they want to keep safe. Those possessions are mostly jewelry. There have been so many gem robberies around town in plush hotels that we urge guests to keep their gewgaws in the vault. We make it easy for them by having someone who can give them access round the clock. Every room and suite in the hotel has a notice in it urging this precaution.

  It seemed that, at a few minutes after three, the party in the ballroom being over, a Mrs. Horace Paradine, one of the guests, came to the desk and asked Carl Nevers to place her jewels in the vault. They started through the back office to the vault when someone came up behind them and stuck a gun against Mrs. Paradine's head. Nevers and Mrs. Paradine both described him as medium tall, medium thin; he was wearing a raincoat and had a tan-colored stocking mask over his head and face. Nevers would turn off the alarm system and open the vault, or Mrs. Paradine would have her brains blown out onto the office rug.

  Nevers is a cool character. He wasn't going to risk Mrs. Paradine's brains, if any, and he wasn't going to risk his own hide. He also knew exactly what would happen when he turned off the alarm system. There were two ways to turn it off which, Nevers felt certain, the gunman couldn't know. One way was the ordinary turnoff, used when a guest came to get something or deposit something. The second way turned off the alarm but set off another. The instant that second way was used, a silent-alarm system went into operation. The security office and Chambrun's penthouse apartment were warned, every maintenance office showed a blinking red light, and every doorman was alerted.

  At the vault there was no sign of anything except the absence of an alarm. Within two minutes of that second turnoff, there was almost no way a thief could get out of the hotel undetected. The system was Jerry Dodd's pride and joy and Carl Nevers's comfort in a tense moment.

  He used the second turnoff and opened the vault. Stocking Mask forced him and Mrs. Paradine into the vault, the woman sobbing hysterically.

  It was a strange business. Mrs. Paradine, by her account, was wearing $100,000 worth of diamonds and other precious stones. The robber had only to snatch them off her, but he didn't.

  Instead, the thief opened a couple of small lockboxes and took a handful of jewels without really looking at them.

  "He didn't seem to have anything special in mind," Nevers told us. "He didn't examine what he took. Then he went to the box for Room 912, took out a small zippered briefcase, told us to go to the end of vault, went out, and shut us in."

  Three minutes later Jerry Dodd opened the vault and let them out. He hadn't met anyone on his way in.

  Dr. Partridge, the house physician, was called to deal with the weeping Mrs. Paradine who had lost nothing. Jerry went to cover all his checkpoints. When I arrived, Chambrun, that hanging-judge look on his face, was in the vault room, waiting with Nevers for Jerry's report.

  "It seems quite clear," Chambrun said, "that he wanted it to look like a haphazard robbery, which is why he took a few pieces of jewelry. What he really wanted was Warren Wilson's briefcase. We'd better tell Wilson what's happened."

  I called Wilson on the phone. He sounded sleepy. I told him what had happened, and he was suddenly wide awake.

  "Be with you as soon as I can throw on some clothes," he said.

  Chambrun fidgeted with one of his flat Egyptian cigarettes, walking around the vault room and actually into the vault itself, which was still open. His forehead was drawn together in a concentrated scowl.

  "Carl, describe to me again just how he behaved here in the vault," he said, turning to Nevers.

  "He forced Mrs. Paradine and me in ahead of him," Nevers said. "He was still holding his gun to her head. Once we were inside the vault, he shoved her away and ordered us to the rear of the vault. He was still covering us with the gun, though."

  "How did he get the lockboxes open?" Chambrun asked.

  "Master key," Nevers said. "He told me to throw him the master key. I did. I wasn't resisting, you understand, Mr. Chambrun. I figured there'd be help any minute."

  "You did just the right thing," Chambrun said. "Go on."

  "He opened two boxes that were closest to him. He reached in them with his free hand and dug out some pieces of jewelry from each box. He didn't even look at what he had. just stuffed the things in his raincoat pocket. Then he walked directly to the box for 912 and opened it.

  "He seemed to know exactly what he was doing 0 "

  'Yes. sir. He opened the box, took out the small briefcase, tucked it under his arm. then backed out of the vault and shut us in."

  Chambrun took a deep drag on his cigarette. There's a raincoat hanging on the hat rack in the outer office. I noticed it when I came in. Is that yours, Carl?'*

  "No, sir. It was a beautiful night when I came on duty. I didn't wear any kind of coat. I wouldn't leave a coat in the outer office anyway. There's a coat closet for employees, as you know."

  "Get that raincoat. Mark." Chambrun said.

  The so-called "outer office" is not a space occupied by anyone in particular. It is a place where a guest can talk to the manager on duty, or to the credit manager, or to anyone else he wants to talk to in private. There is a table in the center of the room, several comfortable Windsor armchairs, a telephone on the table, and an old-fashioned hat rack in the corner near the door.

  Chambrun rarely misses anything, and he hadn't missed the raincoat hanging on the rack. There shouldn't have been a coat there without someone to go with it. It's the kind of detail that is endlessly registering in his mind as he moves around the hotel—something out of place, no matter how inconsequential.

  There was nothing special about the raincoat. I carried it back to the vault room and handed it to Chambrun. He felt in one of the pockets, and I saw a bright, hard look in his eyes. He brought his hand out, and in it was a tan stocking mask. He reached in the other pocket and produced a handful of jewelry which he put on the table.

  "The briefcase was all he wanted." Chambrun said. "Smart operator. He left you and Mrs. Paradine in the vault, took off his mask and coat, left them on the hat rack, and walked out of here with the briefcase under his arm, all casual and innocent-looking."

  "Not so casual and innocent-looking," Jerry Dodd said from the doorway. We turned to look at him, and his face was pale and tense with anger. "Butch Schooley, whose job it was to cover the northwest fire stairs when that number-two alarm went off, is dead. Neck broken. Looks like a karate expert did him in."

  Schooley was one of the night security staff. He had evidently responded to the number-two alarm and taken up his position in the northwest fire stairs. There are four inside fire stairs at the Beaumont, one at each corner o
f the building. They lead from the penthouse level down to the subbase-ment, where the elevator machinery, the heating and air-conditioning units, and the chief engineers shops are located. From that lower level there are exits to the street.

  Schooley's body had been found at the third-floor level by Jerry. Someone had killed him on the way up or down. There was no escape possible from the hotel from the upper levels, so I guessed the murderer had been on the way down to his only way out. I said so.

  "No, he didn't get out through the basement," Jerry said. "All the exits were covered down there as soon as the alarm went into effect. The killer is still somewhere in the hotel."

  At that moment Warren Wilson joined us. He seemed to have hurried into his clothes, not bothering with a necktie. He looked frightened, I thought.

  "Did they really get my briefcase?" he asked.

  "I'm afraid so," Chambrun said. "But Dodd thinks he's still somewhere in the hotel."

  "I—I'd better get in touch with my chief in Washington," Wilson said. "If those documents are lost—even long enough to be photographed—I'm a dead duck, along with quite a few other people."

  "There's a phone in the outer office," Chambrun said.

  "Thanks," Wilson said and went to it.

  There was nothing secret about the phone call. Wilson asked the night supervisor on the switchboard to charge it to his room. He gave her a number, and I could see that Cham-brun made a mental note of it. Presently there was a connection.

  "Mr. Tabor?" Wilson asked. "I'm sorry to call you at this time, sir. . . . There's been a robbery at the hotel, and the stuff I was carrying is gone. . . . Yes, I know that, sir. . . . No, Helwig hasn't checked in yet. ... I don't know who knew, except the clerk who put it in the vault for me. . . . Yes, the manager is here." Wilson turned to Chambrun. "It's my boss, Mr. Clarence Tabor of the CIA," he said. "Would you please talk to him, Mr. Chambrun?"

  Chambrun took the phone. I couldn't hear the other half of the conversation, but Tabor seemed to know Chambrun, and Chambrun appeared to know him. "Wilson hasn't told you the whole story," Chambrun said. "Earlier today we discovered that the phone in his room had been bugged. What happened tonight was an armed holdup by a masked man who seemed to know exactly what he was looking for in the vault. . . . No, but we don't think he can have gotten out of the hotel, and he won't get out carrying that briefcase. He can't hide it on himself. . . . No, but we are about to bring in the police because one of my people has been killed. ... I don't give a damn about your top-level secrecy, Tabor! One of my staff has been murdered, and I don't intend to hold back for God himself!" He put the phone down hard.