Random Killer

by Hugh Pentecost

  “Even though she’d just been strangled by the same guy who killed out there, the guy she may have seen?”

  “Mark, it’s a meaningless coincidence. Remember something. Nobody who was at High Crest the night Carpenter was murdered was allowed to leave. Not for three days. Joanna Fraser had three days in which to circulate, to look for her night prowler. In fact, the police urged her to do just that. She came up empty. It was such a thoroughly useless fact that I just plain forgot about it.”

  I couldn’t let it go. “Who says the person who murdered Carpenter was a guest at High Crest?” I asked. “Who says he had to be hanging around for three days to be identified by someone? Who says he couldn’t have come in off the road after dark, knocked off his man, and taken a powder? Al Ziegler’s mysterious client who even Ziegler couldn’t identify?”

  “You don’t know that for a fact—about Ziegler’s client,” Galt said. I thought he sounded just a little hooked. “That’s something dreamed up back there in Chambrun country.”

  “It’s as good as anything we have to go on,” I said.

  “I can dig up the police record on what Joanna said she saw,” Galt said. “As I remember she said she saw a man, his back turned to her, looking in Carpenter’s window. I don’t think it’s any more than that. Surely the Coyle girl or her husband would remember what Joanna Fraser had to say about it at that time.”

  “You’re one step ahead of me,” I said. “But don’t you wonder why neither of them has thought it worth mentioning up to now?”

  “Same reason I didn’t,” Galt said. “It was a nothing then, and I’m afraid you’re going to find it’s a nothing now.”

  Parker seemed relieved to hear that other people had failed to remember the incident. I guess it made him feel less guilty. I headed back down to the second floor and Nora.

  She looked at me, wide eyed, when I laid it on the line for her. “But of course!” she said.

  “Of course what? Of course it wasn’t worth mentioning?”

  “It was two years ago, Mark!”

  “But everything connected with that time must have seemed important after she was killed the same way Carpenter was,” I said. “She must have talked to you about it. She must have talked to Dobler about it. Neither of you thought it was worth mentioning?”

  “I don’t know about Colin,” she said. “But I swear I just didn’t think about it. It turned out to have no importance at the time. I’ve been asked so many questions about so many other things the last two days.”

  I thought she was near to tears.

  “Tell me everything about what Joanna saw and thought back there at High Crest.” I guided her over to the couch and sat beside her, my arm around her shoulders. To hell with the cop who sat stolidly on the chair by the front door.

  “Two of the women in Joanna’s liberation group had one of the cabins there at High Crest,” Nora said. “Joanna went to visit with them that night. I don’t remember any particular reason why. Maybe just to have a drink and socialize. The cabin where her friends were was a couple of hundred yards from the main building where she and I were housed. Sometime after midnight she walked back. I was already in bed and she didn’t disturb me. I could hear her moving around in the next room. It wasn’t too easy to sleep. The piano was still going strong in the main hall, people singing.” I could feel Nora’s body shudder. “Then there was this crazy screaming outside somewhere. I could hear people running out to whoever was making the commotion. It was Sharon Dain, but we didn’t know that till later. You remember her story? She’d been knocked unconscious. When she came to she’d found Carpenter, strangled with picture wire.

  “Well, we couldn’t go calmly to sleep with all that clamor outside. Joanna and I both got dressed and joined other people in the big room. That’s when we heard what it was, everybody talking at once. The police came in about fifteen minutes. Mike Chandler was trying to keep everyone away from where it had happened.”

  “And Joanna told them she’d seen somebody at the cabin?”

  “Not then. She didn’t mention anything about it then.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t think she realized she’d seen anything then. It wasn’t until the next morning. Everybody went to gawk at the cabin where it had happened. You know, there were state police, photographers, God knows who else. When we saw which cabin it was, Joanna grabbed my arm and said, ‘Would you believe I saw someone peering in the window of that place on my way home last night?’ That’s when she went to the state police.”

  “She hadn’t mentioned it to you the night before?”

  “No reason to, before we heard the screaming. No reason to afterward until she saw what cabin it was where Carpenter and Sharon Dain were living. She didn’t connect the two things until they connected themselves—if you see what I mean.”

  “How did she describe what she saw?”

  “She said a man was standing close to the window, arms spread out as though he was holding onto the window frame, his back to her. She stood watching him for a moment, and then he walked away, around the corner of the cabin toward the front door. That was all. She never saw his face.”

  “It was dark?”

  “There was moonlight, but he never turned her way.”

  “And the troopers thought that wasn’t worth following up?”

  “They were pretty cynical about it, Mark. And other people had seen people wandering around. It wasn’t any secret that Carpenter was always playing sex games with some woman or other. A Peeping Tom they said of Joanna’s man, trying to get a look at what was cooking inside. They’d already decided that Sharon Dain was it.”

  “Joanna was angry about it?”

  “No. She shrugged it off. She’d done her duty, told what she’d seen. As the gossip got really loud I think she decided the police were probably right—she’d seen a Peeping Tom.”

  “Alvin Parker says she was angry about it when she gave him money for the defense fund.”

  “She wasn’t angry about her story being ignored,” Nora said, “but she was contemptuous of the police. She felt they’d settled on Sharon Dain without looking anywhere else. ‘Typical male chauvinist pigs,’ she called them.” Nora laughed. “A common phrase in the liberation movement. Mr. Parker probably mistook it for anger.”

  “You must have talked about it afterward,” I said. “No description of the man she saw that stood out at all?”

  “Mark, it was January,” she said. “Bitter cold, probably below zero. Everybody at High Crest wore the same kind of clothing—ski pants, boots, parkas with hoods to keep your ears from freezing. Your face would be hidden unless you were looking straight at someone. That kind of winter protection was almost like a uniform out there.”

  Like the cowboy regalia they were wearing out there now, in summer, I thought.

  “Joanna must have tried hard to remember something distinctive about the man she saw.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by ‘tried hard,’ Mark. The police asked her. She told them what she’d seen—a man, bundled up, parka hood over his head, standing with his face right against Carpenter’s window. There wasn’t anything else to remember, so she wasn’t trying hard.” Nora twisted in my arm and looked up at me. “At the time, Mark, it had just happened! She didn’t have to dredge something up out of the past, something she might have forgotten. It was all right then, a fresh experience.”

  “Did she talk about it often afterward? After you’d left High Crest?”

  “I don’t think so, Mark. I mean, not about that man. We followed the Sharon Dain case in the papers and on TV. Joanna still thought she’d been railroaded by a gang of insensitive males. But I don’t remember her talking about the man she saw. He hadn’t proved out. I’m telling you the truth, Mark, when I say I hadn’t thought about him for a long time, almost two years, until you reminded me of him just now.”

  “Not even when you found her, killed the way Carpenter was killed?”

  �
��You don’t believe me, do you?” she said. “Perhaps there’s no way to make you understand. I—I went shopping for Joanna that morning, personal things, hair shampoo, some—some coloring she used. A book she wanted at Brentano’s. I came back and I—I found her.” Her whole body began to tremble again. “Do you think I stood there, wondering if she’d been killed by a man she saw looking in a window two years ago, in a place two thousand miles away? I didn’t think of anything but getting help! Damn it, Mark, I was in shock! Your Mr. Dodd came, and then the police. All the questions then and later have centered on who might have joined her for cocktails, who her friends were, who her enemies were, if any. Do you imagine it popped into my head that she might have made drinks for a man she didn’t know, couldn’t identify, certainly hadn’t thought of for months and months and months? Of course it didn’t. That man hadn’t crossed my mind for almost two years and he didn’t then. I didn’t even think about it and reject it. Can you understand that?”

  I supposed I had to. It made sense. And yet—“Now that I’ve reminded you?” I said.

  “Nothing makes any sense, Mark!” And the tears came. “If that man she saw is the killer, she couldn’t have done him any harm. She wouldn’t have known him from Adam! You’ve got a policeman guarding me, but what possible danger could I be to him? I never even saw him at High Crest—with his back turned! Joanna may have talked to Colin about the man she saw, two years ago, but Colin never saw him, was never even at High Crest. Colin couldn’t harm that man, but you’re guarding him, too. Either one of us could sit down and have a drink with that man and not have the faintest idea that he was Joanna’s Peeping Tom. Don’t you see, it just doesn’t add up, Mark.”

  It didn’t, but, somehow, I didn’t want to drop it. At least, I thought, I must present my notion to Chambrun and Hardy and let them reject it. There was no way I could foresee that it would be quite some time before I would get to that.

  I tried to soothe Nora’s tattered nerves and then went out into the hall to head for Chambrun’s office. I came face to face with Chambrun outside my door. He’d just come off the elevator and was walking briskly, head down, toward his quarters. I was shocked when he looked at me. This was the hanging judge, his face a white marble mask. For a moment I thought he didn’t recognize me.

  “We found Guido Maroni|” he said in a flat, cold voice.

  “Good,” I said.

  “In a trash barrel in the basement of his house,” Chambrun said. “Picture wire.”

  He brushed past me and went on down the hall.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THERE IS NO WAY I could have been everyplace at once. When I came to writing down an account of this grim and bizarre adventure there were key parts of it to which I couldn’t be a witness. One of them was the discovery of Guido Maroni. In a calmer aftermath I did get the details of those events from Chambrun and Hardy and Jerry Dodd, our security chief.

  As I have reported, Hardy sent Sergeant Baxter to look for Guido and talk to his wife, Sarafina. Baxter was still working on the theory that Guido had gone out to buy a paper, run into some friends, been lionized for his role in the Hammond murder, and got himself potted. The trail faded out for Baxter after a while. He located the newsstand where Guido had bought a copy of the Post. Mrs. Maroni had indicated where Guido might go to buy his paper. She’d also told Baxter of a local pub where Guido and his friends were in the habit of gathering. She’d even given Baxter the names of several of Guido’s chums.

  The newsdealer remembered Guido’s buying the paper. They’d talked for a minute or two about the murders at the Beaumont, which had made the headlines. Guido, the newsdealer reported, seemed to be in a highly nervous state. He could have gone to the pub that Sarafina Maroni had mentioned. Guido would have had to pass it on the way home, so the direction Guido took, with his newspaper tucked under his arm, didn’t provide an answer.

  The proprietor of the pub was quite definite, however. Guido had not stopped there. The proprietor and some of Guido’s pals had hoped that he would, eager to hear the real dirt from the horse’s mouth. But Guido hadn’t ever come, not that night, nor the next day, nor today.

  When Baxter went back to Sarafina Maroni, she went into hysterics. Baxter was swamped under a torrent of words, spoken in Italian, not one of which he understood. It was clear that she was convinced of disaster. Her wailings and moanings suggested she was already mourning her missing husband.

  Baxter got in touch with Hardy. He needed a cop who could speak Italian. It happened that Hardy was in Chambrun’s office when the call came from the sergeant. He had taken Dick Barrows, the Times man, there to discuss just how much special consideration they would give him. He relayed Baxter’s call to them.

  “I’ll go with you,” Chambrun said. “I know Mrs. Maroni and I speak Italian. She will trust me.”

  Chambrun knows the people who work for him well, makes a point of it. Twice a year there was a huge party for the staff and their families. Chambrun knew what the status of all the marriages was, how many kids they had, the states of their health. He dealt compassionately with their problems. His door was open to them and they counted on him. That was the reason loyalty to him was so intense among his people.

  Chambrun and Hardy and Dick Barrows went to the Maroni apartment on the Upper East Side. Sarafina Maroni was in a pitiable state. She took one look at Chambrun and clung to him for dear life. He held her, stroking her oily black hair, soothing her in her own language.

  It came out of her in bits and pieces. Guido knew something he hadn’t told the police. Something about a man who bumped into his wagon when he was delivering breakfast to Hammond’s suite. At the time it hadn’t seemed important, but when he got home and thought about it, he decided it was something Mr. Chambrun should know.

  “He would have come to you the next morning when he returned to work,” Sarafina said. Oceans of tears. “But he never came home from buying his paper.”

  “He thought the man who bumped into his wagon might be important to me?” Chambrun asked.

  “Si, si!” Vigorous noddings. “He thought the man who bumped into his wagon might be the one for whom the second breakfast on the wagon was intended.”

  “Did Guido describe this man, Sarafina?”

  Guido had not. It would not have been important to his wife. “But he would have described him to you!”

  The newsstand where Guido had bought his paper was only a block away. According to the newsdealer, Guido had headed for his home after buying his copy of the Post. That was about six o’clock in the evening, broad daylight.

  “Have Baxter search the alleys between here and the newsstand,” Chambrun said to Hardy. “And then this house, from top to bottom.”

  In less than an hour, while I was playing games with Parker and Nora, Baxter had found Guido’s body in the basement of the house, jammed into a metal trash can, strangled with picture wire.

  Another of Hardy’s tortuous routines was underway, with cops questioning all the tenants in the Maronis’s building, storekeepers in the neighborhood, children who had been playing on the street. Who had seen what around suppertime the day before yesterday? With luck, in that kind of tenement area, someone might remember a stranger, a man out of place. Dick Barrows was working with the cops, trying to dig out his own story for the Times.

  I had followed Chambrun into his office after our encounter in the hall outside my place. He walked past Betsy Ruysdale in her outer room without a word. She and I followed him.

  He sat down behind his desk, rigid, not looking at either of us, his face still that pale marble mask. Then he raised his right fist and brought it down on the desk so hard that everything on it jumped.

  “I blame myself!” he said in a bitter voice.

  Ruysdale didn’t have a clue to what he was talking about. I whispered to her the news about Guido. He told us then, briefly, what I have just outlined about his visit to Sarafina Maroni and the grim discovery in the tenement basement.


  “I should have insisted on being present when the staff was questioned,” he said. “But we were faced with panic here in the hotel.”

  “What difference would it have made?” I asked.

  “Guido Maroni would have kept his cool if I’d been there,” Chambrun said. “He trusted me. Like most people of his kind, cops were the enemy to him. He answered what they asked him, offered nothing of his own. Perhaps he hadn’t thought it through. I don’t even know what they asked him, for God sake! My first question would have been had he seen anyone who might have been the breakfast guest?”

  “Surely Hardy or Baxter—” I began.

  “Nothing is sure unless you are there yourself,” Chambrun said. “Guido undoubtedly had a bad case of hysterics. He’d found the body, eyes popping out, tongue protruding. All he wanted to do was get out of there, get away, get home.” He turned to Ruysdale. “Get Jerry Dodd here as fast as you can. Call Ray Dominic and get him here, too.” Dominic is the headwaiter in charge of room service. Ruysdale took off for her own phone.

  Chambrun had pulled a yellow pad toward him and was making notes on it in great bold strokes. “It was eight o’clock when Guido arrived on the thirty-fourth floor with Hammond’s breakfast. He bumped into a stranger in the hallway. In view of what’s happened we have to think that was the killer.” He drew an angry line under what he had written. “We don’t know the exact time Hammond was killed, but it was before ten o’clock, which was when Guido found him. Two hours later Joanna Fraser was making martinis for that same killer. Nora Coyle found her dead at about one o’clock. Within the space of five hours, eight to one o’clock, our man has managed two murders. No fingerprints, no trace of anything to lead to him. A careful man. But there was one thing he couldn’t have prepared for.”

  “Bumping into Guido?”

  “Right!” Another savage line across the pad. “Guido might have mentioned it, might even have described him. But until Guido could actually point a finger at him he was safe. What should the next question be, Mark?”