Random Killer

by Hugh Pentecost

  “No one broke into thirty-four-oh-six,” Chambrun said. “Hammond let whoever it was in—if there was someone. The person who killed him either had breakfast with him or came in after Bryan left, if you’re right about that. Whoever that person was didn’t bother Hammond, didn’t alarm him. He wasn’t prepared for what happened.”

  “What about Bryan?” Hardy asked. “Were there difficulties between them you haven’t mentioned?”

  “Bobby is like a son to Geoff,” Conklin said.

  “Sons have been known to kill their fathers,” Hardy said. “I could cite you scores of cases.”

  “Two people couldn’t have been closer,” Conklin said.

  “What about you, Mr. Conklin?” Chambrun asked. “Where were you for breakfast, or just after breakfast? You handle Hammond’s money, his career. Had something gone wrong between you?”

  “What bull!” Conklin said.

  “You mentioned Zionist hoodlums,” Hardy said. “Did you have someone in mind?”

  “The woods are full of them,” Conklin said. “They’re never mentioned in this country’s Jewish-controlled press. It’s always Arab or Palestinian terrorists who get the headlines.”

  Chambrun’s eyes glittered in narrowed slits. “Suppose you tell us, Mr. Conklin, how you got that bad leg of yours,” he said quietly.

  I have seen hatred mirrored on human faces in my time, but nothing to equal the murderous look that Conklin gave Chambrun. I think it jarred Hardy, too.

  “I don’t have time for a private war,” he said.

  “I have been accused of prejudice,” Chambrun said, looking smugly happy. “I think it should be made clear to you, Hardy, that Conklin is at least equally prejudiced. Tell him what happened to your leg, Conklin.”

  Chambrun evidently knew, but how he had come by the information I had no idea. Ruysdale, I thought, looked surprised, too. When Conklin didn’t respond, Chambrun spelled it out.

  “It’s no secret,” he said, “that Hammond has for a long time been an expert observer of the conflict in the Middle East. It’s also no secret that his contacts and his sympathy have been with the Arab cause. There’s no law against that. I suspect, however, that Hammond, and probably Conklin, have gotten rich on information and tips passed on by the Arab oil barons. Hammond has covered the action out there for years, has been informed in advance of anti-Israeli moves by Arab terrorists. He has always been on hand to report them, giving the Arab cause a sympathetic coloring. Not popular in this country.”

  “If you knew or would listen to the facts—” Conklin said.

  “A few years back Arab terrorists raided an Israeli settlement in the Sinai,” Chambrun said.

  “An illegal settlement!” Conklin said.

  “Women and children were butchered,” Chambrun said. “Hammond and Conklin were there as observers. Hammond would have to justify it later. That’s what he got paid for. Israeli commandos appeared out of nowhere and the observers had to take it on the run. Hammond made it, but Mr. Conklin found himself cornered. An Israeli commando didn’t have time to take prisoners, but he made sure Conklin would still be around to be picked up later. He fired a round of machine-gun bullets into Conklin’s knee and leg. Hammond staged a rescue before a mop-up squad could take Conklin prisoner, but Conklin no longer has a rational view of Jews, or Israelis, or those who sympathize with them.”

  “Would you, in my place?” Conklin almost shouted. He yanked at his right trouser leg, pulling it up, and revealed a shiny aluminum artificial leg. I noticed his sock was fastened to it with some kind of tape. “Would you love people who left you to hop around the rest of your life on a tin foot?”

  Chambrun sipped at his demitasse of Turkish coffee and put the cup down on his desk. “Thirty-odd years ago,” he said, “I fought in the French Resistance in Paris. I saw atrocities, cruelties, inflicted by the Nazis on innocent French civilians. I hated the Germans as a people, irrationally and to the death. If, to this day, you hear me take off against a German man, mark it down as not to be trusted. And so, Mr. Conklin, I despise and distrust myself in that area, just as I despise and distrust your remarks about Jews in this city, about the American press, and about ‘Zionist hoodlums’ who may be responsible for Hammond’s murder. You are as sick about Jews as I am about Germans. My point about all this is that Lieutenant Hardy should know that you will even use the death of a friend as a means of striking at a whole nation of people you hate.”

  The room was deathly still for a moment except for the faint whirring sound of the tape recorder in the desk drawer. The little red light blinked on Chambrun’s phone, Miss Ruysdale answered.

  “Mr. Robert Bryan is in the outer office,” she said.

  I got to know and like Bobby Bryan before this grim adventure was finished. He was young, not yet thirty, which is a kid in my book. I am not yet forty. He wears his blond hair crew cut. Short hair is “in” these days. He is so American it’s almost funny, and it’s surprising that he should have become so close to the British-bred-and-educated Geoffrey Hammond. He wasn’t smiling when he came into Chambrun’s office that day, but it was almost the only time I was to see him without a smile near the surface, a mischievous humor that was the key to his personality. He was a Brooks Brothers boy, wearing grey flannels and a summer sports jacket, with a pink button-down Brooks shirt and a moderately gay figured blue tie. There was a stunned look in his normally bright blue eyes.

  He seemed relieved to see Conklin present. “What in God’s name happened, Roy?” he asked.

  “Someone strangled him with a wire,” Conklin said. Anger had deserted him.

  Bobby looked around, bewildered, while Hardy introduced himself and the rest of us.

  “Did you have breakfast with Mr. Hammond this morning?” Hardy asked.

  “No!”

  “Someone did. Do you know who, Mr. Bryan?”

  “No!”

  “You made his appointments, set up his daily routines for him. And you don’t know who was scheduled for breakfast with him this morning?”

  “No. I didn’t know anyone was supposed to breakfast with him. I—I had some early morning errands to do for him. I just got back to the hotel a few minutes ago. A security man in the lobby told me Geoff was—was dead, and I was to come up here. I just don’t believe it! My God, he was so fine, so full of beans the last time I saw him.”

  “When was that?” Hardy asked.

  “Last night about ten o’clock. I went to tell him—” He stopped.

  “That you’d arranged for a girl for him?” Hardy asked.

  “Oh, brother!” Bobby said.

  “It’s important we know who that girl was, Mr. Bryan.”

  “She couldn’t have had breakfast with him,” Bobby said.

  “So who was she?”

  For the first time I got a glimpse of Bobby’s boyish smile. “You won’t believe it, but I don’t know,” he said.

  “You got him a girl and you don’t know who she was?”

  “That’s how it was,” Bobby said. Hardy waited for him to go on. “You see, we—Mr. Hammond and I—have stayed at the Beaumont before.” He glanced at an impassive Chambrun. “Best hotel—maybe in the whole world, Mr. Chambrun. Mr. Hammond wouldn’t dream of staying anywhere else, even when he wanted to stay under cover. ‘Most public place in the world where you can be the most private if you ask for it,’ Geoff said about the Beaumont.”

  “The girl, Mr. Bryan,” Hardy said sharply.

  “So we’ve stayed here before,” Bobby said. “I knew the ropes. You see, when Geoff wants a girl he wants her right then. I have to know, quickly, who to contact, where to go—”

  “The girl!” Hardy said, out of patience.

  “So help me, I’m trying to get to it, Lieutenant,” Bobby said. “There is a girl who operates out of the Trapeze Bar, just across the mezzanine from here. Three or four visits ago—through channels, you might say—I unearthed this girl for Geoff. She satisfied. On the next visits I located her again
. I was instructed to find her last night.”

  “Her name!” Hardy demanded.

  “Dorothy DeLavergne,” Bobby said. He laughed outright. “My God, where do they dream up their stage names?”

  “Address,” Hardy said.

  “Slow down, Lieutenant. It wasn’t Dorothy who played games with Geoff last night. Incidentally, I don’t know her address. I just go looking for her in the Trapeze. I tried to get her address the first time, after Geoff had been pleased with her. She wouldn’t give me an address or a phone number. She said I could find her in the Trapeze or, if not, ask Eddie.”

  “Eddie who?”

  “Just Eddie. He’s one of the bartenders there.”

  I confirmed that for Hardy. Chambrun knew how these things worked but I knew he wouldn’t want to seem involved. As I’ve said, the call girls go with the territory.

  “Last night Dorothy had what she called ‘a previous commitment,’ ” Bobby said, and laughed again. “But she had a friend she thought would please Geoff. She ought to know what would please him, you see. So I gave her the room number and she said she’d send her friend up. I went upstairs myself to tell Geoff what I’d arranged, and that was the last I saw of him.”

  “So this girl could have been the one who had breakfast with Hammond,” Hardy said.

  “I doubt it,” Bobby said. “Unless she turned out to be the Queen of Sheba. With Geoff it’s ‘Take off your clothes, dear’; forty-five athletic minutes in the hay; then ‘Put on your clothes, dear.’ A hundred and fifty bucks and an extra five for taxi fare. No romantic approach, no chitchat afterwards. It was a standard routine with him, involving about as much emotion as brushing your teeth. Always the same with him; from Peking to Cairo.”

  “Sounds like setting-up exercises,” Hardy said. He was running out of patience. He looked at me. “Can you dig up this girl for me, Mark?”

  “I can give it a try,” I said.

  “I don’t want a try, I want her,” Hardy said. “I can put cops on it if you don’t care how much hell they raise with your peace and quiet.”

  “Do it, Mark,” Chambrun said.

  “We’re just where we started,” Hardy said. “An unknown girl in Hammond’s bed; an unknown breakfast guest; an unknown killer. They can all be one and the same, or they can be three different people. Damn!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  IT WAS APPROACHING LUNCHTIME, which is busy, busy, busy at the Beaumont. There’s been a lot of political hoopla about three-martini lunches written off as business expenses. The Beaumont is where it’s at.

  The Trapeze Bar is on the mezzanine, a half floor up from the main lobby. It is a very popular drinking spot, no food served except an enormous variety of hot and cold hors d’oeuvres. An artist of the Calder school had decorated it with little mobile circus figures operating on trapezes, which is where the room got its name. These mobiles are constantly in motion, thanks to an air-circulating system, which sucks off the fog of cigarette and cigar smoke. It is very bright and gay and charming, empty at noon, crowded at twelve-thirty.

  I took Bobby Bryan with me on my search for Dorothy DeLavergne’s girl friend. He was still pretty shaken up by what had happened.

  “It’s just not easy to take in,” he said, as we walked down a flight of stairs to the mezzanine level and a side entrance to the Trapeze. “This girl isn’t going to produce anything, you know.”

  “Oh?”

  “She was with Geoff by eleven o’clock. Dorothy D. told me it would take half an hour for her friend to get there. She would have done her job and been on the way home by midnight. It never varied. What time did room service serve Geoff breakfast, do you know?”

  “Eight o’clock, the order was for two. The waiter saw Hammond, who told him to leave the wagon and go. The same waiter came back a couple of hours later for the wagon and found Hammond dead.”

  “The girl had been gone eight hours when that breakfast was served,” Bobby said.

  “Maybe he talked to her, told her something that will give Hardy a lead.”

  “If he talked at all it was sex talk, to help stimulate him,” Bobby said. “She won’t have anything to help the police.”

  I turned and faced him just outside the door to the Trapeze. “You must have some ideas about what happened,” I said.

  “It’s been going round and round in my head,” he said, “and there’s nothing.”

  “Conklin told us about this interview coming up with a Palestinian guy named Zadir,” I said.

  Bobby nodded. “Scheduled for tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll have to tell them it’s off.”

  “Conklin suggested it may have been Israeli terrorists —Zionist hoodlums he called them—who didn’t want that interview to happen.”

  “That’s pretty far out,” Bobby said. “Too much risk to stop what can’t be too much trouble for them. Zadir has nothing new to talk about. Geoff has been all over it with him, and I was there to hear it. Pro-Palestinian, pro-Arab line from way back. You’ve heard it all, from Sadat on down.”

  “Private, personal enemies?” I asked.

  He looked past me through the glass door to the Trapeze. The bar was filling rapidly with laughing, happy people. “Geoffrey was a cantankerous bastard,” Bobby said. “I was fond of him, I loved my job with him, but I have to tell you what he was. In his work he got to know a great many things about a great many people that they didn’t want him to know. He used those things, not just in his work, but to line his pockets and enhance his personal power in a power-hungry world. What was he like? He was a man interested in more money, more power, more wine, more women, more song, more power, more money. Does that describe him for you?”

  “I guess.”

  “God knows who he had his knife in, twisting it and twisting it until he got what he wanted. Enemies? Countless, I’d say.”

  “You’re telling me he was a professional blackmailer,” I said.

  Bobby shook his head as if he was remembering something with pleasure. “But nothing so crude as ‘your money or your life,’ ” he said. “ ‘I know something about you and if you don’t turn over X bucks I’ll make it public.’ He moved important people around behind the scenes like a master chess player. Sure, he had a reputation as a television journalist, but those people behind the scenes knew that he had far more power than that public exposure gave him. He was a genius at gratifying his own ego and getting paid for it in the bargain.”

  “So a lot of powerful people could have wished him dead,” I said.

  “It’s ten to one that in a safe-deposit box somewhere in the world, probably Switzerland, there is evidence that will pay off the person who killed him. When the news of his murder breaks, Mark, dozens of world figures are going to be trembling in their boots. They may all go down the drain, whether they were involved in killing him or not. A good-sized earthquake in the offing.”

  “So, let’s locate the girl if we can,” I said.

  “Waste of time,” Bobby said.

  I opened the door into the Trapeze and we were instantly greeted by a rumble of voices and laughter, which we couldn’t hear out in the hall. Mr. Del Greco, the maître d’, who evidently had eyes in the back of his head, spotted us the moment we came in and gestured toward what appeared to be the only empty table in the room. There was a little “reserved” sign on it, but I knew it was reserved by Del Greco for his own friends.

  “Early in the day for you, Mark,” he said.

  “Problems,” I said. I could tell he didn’t know about the situation in 3406. I introduced Bobby. “We’re looking for a girl named Dorothy DeLavergne.”

  Del Greco raised a surprised eyebrow. The call girl situation in the Beaumont is handled as though it didn’t exist. The girls, who patronize the various bars and restaurants in the hotel, are well known to the staff, but none of them would ever admit it. If, as a customer, you wanted to find yourself a woman and you asked—a bartender, a maître d’, a bellboy—you would be told politely that they coul
dn’t help. But a few minutes later you would be approached, wherever you were, by what you were looking for. To ask for a girl by name was not according to Hoyle.

  I had Del Greco bend down so that people at the next table couldn’t hear. “Not for publication,” I said. “We have a homicide upstairs. The victim had a girl last night, sent to him by this Dorothy DeLavergne. He had asked for Dorothy but she was “otherwise engaged,” to coin a phrase. The boss and the cops want to find the girl she sent.”

  Del Greco looked unhappy.

  “The girl isn’t suspected of anything,” I said. “But she might be able to give Lieutenant Hardy some kind of lead.”

  Del Greco looked at Bobby. “You’re Geoffrey Hammond’s secretary, aren’t you, Mr. Bryan?”

  Bobby nodded.

  “Is he the one?” Del Greco asked.

  I said he was. Del Greco permitted himself a mild French oath.

  “Big trouble,” he said. He turned to survey the Trapeze, which was his kingdom. “Have a drink, gentlemen. I’ll see what I can do.”

  I was brought up to believe that what my grandfather called “ladies of the evening” were “painted hussies,” cheaply but suggestively dressed. My grandfather’s image had them hanging around low-grade saloons, a cigarette dangling from scarlet lips, inching suggestively close to prospective customers. That image of the modern call girl must date back to the gold rush of forty-nine, eighteen forty-nine, that is.

  In spite of her unlikely name, Dorothy DeLavergne looked like a nice, fresh, healthy Smith girl on her summer vacation. She wore little, if any, makeup; she had a nice summer tan. Her dark hair hung shoulder length, her dress was a simple cotton print. She could have been somebody’s very pleasant sister, and probably was. She came over to our table less than one drink after Del Greco left us. Bobby and I both stood up to greet the lady. A waiter placed a chair for her. I found myself being looked over by candid dark eyes. I suspected she was an expert at making assessments of men.

  “Del Greco says you want to talk to me, Mr. Haskell,” she said. A pleasant husky voice.

  “Hello, Dorothy,” Bobby said. He’d had dealings with her, for Hammond, in the past.