Random Killer

by Hugh Pentecost

  “Oh, wow!” Carl said.

  “Guido could have described him,” Chambrun said. “How about you, Carl?”

  The elevator man stared at Chambrun for a moment, searching, I thought, for a description. “I don’t know if you know how it is, Mr. Chambrun. I carry hundreds and hundreds of people every morning. Most of them I notice getting in the car. They have to pass me, they look at me. A lot of them are familiar and I smile and say good-morning. But this fellow—well, he was already in the car when I took over from the Greek. The Greek and I, like I said, were joking. I just didn’t look at the passenger. I was making some crack at the Greek as I closed the car door and started up. First run of the morning. I heard this guy behind me say, ‘Thirty-four, please.’ I didn’t look around at him. I was thinking about some wisecrack I’d neglected to throw at the Greek.”

  “But he got off at thirty-four, and you held there to watch the row when he collided with Guido?”

  “Yeah, but his back was to me, mostly. Guido was facing me.”

  “Some kind of description, man!” Chambrun said sharp now. “Old? Young? Dark? Light? Tall? Short?”

  “Medium height,” Carl said, struggling to remember. “He had on a hat so I didn’t see the color of his hair. Not young, I’d say. I’m sorry, Mr. Chambrun, I wouldn’t know him if you brought him into this office.”

  Chambrun leaned back in his chair with a sigh. He was thinking, I guessed, that this man had a genius for being seen and yet not seen. Guido had been face to face with him, but Guido was dead before he could tell about it. Three others who had seen him were dead.

  Carl started for the door, unhappy about his inability to give Chambrun what he wanted. At the door he stopped and turned back.

  “There’s one thing I forgot to mention,” he said.

  “Yes, Carl?” Chambrun asked.

  “This guy was clumsy. He almost fell against the wall when Guido came whizzing around the corner with his wagon. Later, when he walked away down the hall I saw he was lame.”

  Chambrun was on his feet. “He was what?”

  “Lame. A real gimpy leg. Could have been a phony. You’ve seen war veterans—you know what I mean?”

  Chambrun looked at me, his eyes very bright. “That just could be your second head, Mark,” he said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE CASE WAS OVER as far as I was concerned. Roy Conklin was clumsy and he had an artificial leg. He had the kind of ugly temper that matched the man who’d shouted curses at Guido.

  There were things that didn’t fit, but they were all things we’d accepted as fact from Conklin himself. He had told us he’d never been to High Crest in his life. He had told us that, when Hal Carpenter was murdered at the ski resort, he, Conklin, was in New York “minding the store.” So those statements had to be proved lies. He had told us he had no idea who had breakfasted with Hammond. Another lie, of course. He was the breakfast guest and the killer. Carl Brewer would be a witness of sorts to place Conklin there.

  So what was Joanna Fraser doing making martinis for him? Chambrun had a suggestion. “It was Miss Coyle who told us what Joanna saw that night,” he said to Hardy, who had come to the office on the run to hear Carl Brewer’s story. “She saw a man at the window of Carpenter’s cabin. She watched him for a while and then ‘he walked around to the front door of the cabin.’ Wasn’t that it? She didn’t say ‘limped around to the front door.’ Perhaps because she thought he was awkward in fairly deep snow, she didn’t think of it as a disability. Didn’t think of it as a means of identifying him.”

  “So?” Hardy said.

  “Hammond is murdered, the hotel is agog with it,” Chambrun said. “Joanna is circulating in the lobby. She sees a man—and Conklin was here, God knows—sees him from behind, let’s say, to make our case. Lame, limping! Something about the way he moved brought it all back to her. The picture-wire killer had just struck again, and here was a limping man, like the man outside Carpenter’s cabin.”

  “So she doesn’t bother to tell anyone?” Hardy asked. “You’re reaching, Pierre.”

  “A very straightforward, self-motivated lady,” Chambrun said. “She wasn’t sure. ‘Play the game like a sportsman,’ Dobler said. She walks boldly up to Conklin and says something like, ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere? Didn’t we meet at High Crest in Colorado?’ Conklin is stunned. He tells her she’s mistaken. Joanna, still uncertain, goes up to her apartment to decide what to do. Has she really got something?

  “Conklin knows he’s up the creek. He can’t leave the hotel. He can’t run away. Somehow Joanna has to be dealt with before she talks to the cops. Conklin knows about her original testimony at High Crest. She saw a man at the window of Carpenter’s cabin.”

  “How does he know that?” Hardy asked.

  “From Ziegler, the detective who was working for him at High Crest at the time. No time to waste for brother Conklin. He follows Joanna up to her apartment, sixteen eleven. He rings her bell. Joanna is making herself a drink. She goes to the door. Conklin is all apologies. How could he have been so stupid as not to remember? Of course they met at High Crest—at the time of Carpenter’s murder. She must forgive him for drawing a blank, but his own close friend and business associate has just been killed in the same ghastly fashion. He had just drawn a blank when she spoke to him.

  “Joanna is a friendly, outgoing person. She must have been wrong. He was Hammond’s friend, a victim once removed, you might say. She was just making herself a drink, wouldn’t he like to join her? He could, I’ll bet he said, use a drink. And so they drink, chatting about murder, if you like. Something as simple as the need for an ashtray lets him move around behind her, and that is the end of Joanna Fraser.”

  “Takes time to wipe his fingerprints off glasses and whatever, and goes,” Hardy said.

  “If this isn’t how it was, I’ll buy you a steak dinner, Walter,” Chambrun said. “And I’ve got another one to throw at you, perhaps more provable. Ziegler, the detective, had his office in Los Angeles. Conklin, who handles other personalities besides Hammond, undoubtedly had clients in the movie capitol. That was where Sharon Dain operated. Ziegler’s client, I say Conklin, could have met her there. He hires Ziegler to find out what she was up to at High Crest. Conklin must have been in L.A., not here ‘minding the store.’ Money delivered to Ziegler by messenger in cash, wasn’t it? If Conklin was in L.A. on legitimate business you should be able to find someone who knows it. Bobby Bryan could probably tell you who Conklin’s clients were out there.”

  You may ask why we sat there theorizing instead of acting; why Conklin wasn’t immediately placed under arrest. It was because Lieutenant Hardy was a very thorough man. He wanted to plug the holes in his case with something more tangible than Chambrun’s guess work. Conklin wasn’t going anywhere. He had a cop at his elbow. I know Hardy gave orders for that cop to be told that Conklin was now our prime suspect. Conklin’s bank account might show that he had financed Sharon Dain’s defense. Sharon Dain, questioned in jail, would recall Conklin as a customer. No one had ever asked her that. If we placed him in Hollywood, we just about had him cold. The wheels were turning, but slowly. Fatally slowly, it turned out.

  Bobby Bryan wasn’t in his room. He and his bodyguard must be in the hotel or the bodyguard would have managed to get word to Hardy that they were taking off somewhere. I set out to find him to ask about Conklin’s clients in L.A.

  I found him. He was in the Trapeze Bar again, and Roy Conklin was with him again at the same corner table. I can’t tell you what it was like to see Conklin sitting there, calmly drinking a Scotch on the rocks. The Conklin I now knew to be a killer! I couldn’t ask Bobby my question in front of him.

  “You two decided to live here?” I asked.

  “It’s all right, isn’t it, as long as we pay the tab?” Conklin growled at me.

  “Anything new?” Bobby asked.

  I think now I must have been as transparent as a windowpane. I couldn’t take my eyes off Conklin
and he must have read what I was trying so hard to hide from him. I muttered something inane about looking for someone who might have seen someone who might have been recognized by Guido, the dead waiter, as Hammond’s breakfast guest.

  Conklin gave a sour little laugh. “Your Mr. Chambrun never lets go of an idea once he’s proclaimed it, does he? For God sake, why would Geoffrey invite an enemy to breakfast? Count on it, the killer came in after the breakfast guest was gone, posing as a waiter for the wagon, or a maintenance man, or even a maid. Geoff was preoccupied with business, paid no attention to whoever it was.”

  “It could be, I suppose,” I said.

  “Hell, don’t you even back up your resident mastermind?” Conklin pushed himself up. “I think I could use the plumbing,” he said. I watched him limp away, pausing at the bar where the two cops, acting as bodyguards for these two guys, were sitting. A bodyguard for a killer! That was a new twist. I saw Conklin’s man get off his stool and follow the lame man to the men’s room at the far end of the bar.

  I unloaded the word to Bobby Bryan then. He looked as if he thought I’d blown my stack as I started talking.

  “Roy? You all have to be dreaming!”

  “We need your help,” I told him. “The names of any clients Conklin has in Hollywood; did he go there often; could he have been there at the time Hal Carpenter was murdered?”

  We were both watching the door to the men’s room. “I can give you half a dozen names in Hollywood,” Bobby said. “Yes, Roy went out there three or four times a year, no special times. And remember, Roy told you himself that Geoffrey Hammond and I were in Switzerland at the time of the High Crest killing. I don’t know where Roy was. He said he was in New York.”

  “We think not. We’d like to prove not.”

  Bobby took a pen and a notebook out of his pocket. He tore a page out of the book and began to write a list of names on it. I watched the men’s room. Presently a couple of guys who had been at the bar went in together. Bobby handed me his slip of paper.

  “Five names I can think of off the top of my head,” he said.

  One of the guys who had just gone into the men’s room came running out shouting something at Eddie, the bartender. I couldn’t hear what it was over the general noise of conversation. Eddie ducked out from behind the bar and ran into the men’s. Instinctively, I knew we had trouble.

  “Come on,” I said to Bobby. We took his bodyguard along with us.

  In the white-tiled men’s room Eddie was bending over a man who was crumpled on the floor in one of the closed-in cubicles. Almost before I looked I knew it was going to be Conklin’s guard.

  “You see someone else with him?” I asked the two excited guys who had found the man.

  Eddie looked up and saw me. “Better get Doc Partridge, Mark,” he said. “This guy has had his skull smashed in.”

  I wasn’t interested in the house physician just then. I was looking at the red fire door in the far wall of the men’s room. Conklin was on the loose.

  Conklin, you’d think, would not be a hard man to spot with that painful limp. That fire door opened out into the second-floor corridor, midway between my apartment and Chambrun’s office and directly opposite the door to the main fire stairs, which ran from the penthouse on the roof to the subbasement—forty-one floors plus the two basement levels. All Conklin had to do was cross the hall and he could come out anyplace he chose in the hotel.

  I ran into Chambrun’s office to tell him and Hardy what had happened. Hardy set about alerting all his people, all the special guards. The people on our switchboard got through to all the staff people at their posts and they, in turn, contacted everyone who was on the move, like bellboys, elevator men, waiters, kitchen help. In ten minutes several hundred people were looking for one lame man on the run.

  “He could have made it to one of the basement levels and out onto the street,” was my contribution.

  “He might not have been stopped,” Chambrun said, “but he’d have been seen.”

  At the end of a half an hour, preliminary reports began to come in over Chambrun’s phone. No one had seen a limping man anywhere. Then another call came and I saw Chambrun freeze in his chair. He reached forward and turned on the squawk box so we could all hear the conversation.

  “Chambrun? Is that you?”

  It was Conklin. We all knew that harsh voice. Miss Ruysdale, always efficient, turned on the tape recorder.

  “Where are you calling from, Conklin?”

  “No reason not to tell you,” Conklin said. “Your switchboard will tell you, if you check, that I’m in Mark Haskell’s apartment.”

  “There’s a cop there!” I said.

  “There was a cop,” Chambrun said. “Am I right, Conklin? There was a cop?”

  Conklin laughed that sardonic laugh of his. “Your brilliance always amazes me, Chambrun. But I’ve called to make a deal.”

  “Naturally,” Chambrun said. “You have Miss Coyle.”

  Hardy was gesturing frantically to one of his men, but Chambrun made a sharp countergesture.

  “Tell your lieutenant to hold his water,” Conklin said, almost as if he’d seen. “As you say, I have Miss Coyle. Lovely girl. Would not be so lovely if her face was contorted from strangling.”

  “Sonofabitch,” I said in a voice I didn’t recognize.

  “Talk,” Chambrun said.

  “There must be a way out of here through one of the basements and to the street,” Conklin said. “Fix it for me.”

  “No way,” Chambrun said. “Everybody is alerted, looking for you.”

  “Come, come, Big Daddy. You can take me out and nobody would even look. I will, of course, have Miss Coyle with me. Arrange for a car to be left at the exit you choose. No driver. You will drive. When I get to where I want to go, you and Miss Coyle can have a drink together. If you screw it up, neither one of you will ever have another drink with anyone. How long will it take you to set things up?”

  “Twenty minutes—half an hour to get a car here from the hotel garage.”

  “Fine,” Conklin said. “I can read Hardy’s mind, you know. Sharpshooters, tailing police cars. One twist of the wire and Miss Coyle has had it. When you’re ready for me, just ring this phone.” That was all.

  Chambrun leaned back. “Call the garage, Ruysdale, and have a car delivered to the cellar exit on the north side.”

  Ruysdale flew to her own office.

  “We can take him in five minutes, you know,” Hardy said.

  “If you want to pay the price,” Chambrun said. “He has nothing to lose and everything to gain.”

  “And you’re going to help him get away?” Hardy said.

  Chambrun’s cold eyes looked steadily at his friend. “Over my dead body, quite literally,” he said.

  I was sent to the subbasement to warn people to stay out of sight. The lame man, his hostage, and the boss were to be allowed to pass without question.

  The journey to the basement kept me from knowing what Chambrun had planned, and I never did know till it was all over. When I got back to the office I was just in time to hear that the car had been delivered from the garage and to see Chambrun pick up his phone and tell Conklin that he was on his way.

  What now seems like a long time later I got it all from Nora. When she told me, I was holding her in what I hoped she would know were strong, irresistible, masculine arms.

  She had been in my apartment, reading. Her bodyguard-cop was sitting in his usual place by the door. There was a knock. The guard asked who it was.

  “Relief man,” a voice said.

  The cop opened the door, and was hit over the head by Conklin, who had some kind of iron bar in his hand. We found out later it was the handle to a mop wringer kept in the Trapeze men’s room. Conklin used it on both cops. Nora screamed, but he’d slammed the door shut. My place is soundproof, like most apartments in the Beaumont. He told her what her options were. Play it his way or she had none. He took a coil of picture wire from his pocket to
emphasize the point. Then he called Chambrun.

  And so eventually the time came when Chambrun called to say he was ready. At which point Conklin produced a gun and stood behind Nora. Ironically, Hardy had allowed Conklin to have that gun—to protect himself! He’d left the door on the latch. Chambrun knocked and let himself in.

  “I was relieved,” Nora told me, “but he looked like a stone statue. There was nothing about him that suggested any hope. That man!”

  Conklin ordered Chambrun to empty his pockets, take off his coat. He wanted to be sure Chambrun wasn’t armed. Satisfied, after slapping Chambrun all over, Conklin smiled and said, “It’s your game, master. We follow the leader.”

  Down the deserted hallway they went, Chambrun leading the way, to the service elevator at the rear. The elevator was there, door propped open. Chambrun had made certain that there would be no delays during which some innocent bypasser might disrupt the whole procedure. You don’t come on a girl in the hands of a strangler, with a wire around her neck and a gun at her back, without running screaming for help. Jerry Dodd and Hardy had tried to minimize that possibility. No elevators except the service car to stop at two; stairway and fire stairs blocked; the hallway on two shut off at each end.

  Chambrun removed the block that propped open the door of the service car. Conklin and his hostage had moved in behind him.

  “We are going down to the subbasement,” he said, not turning his head. “We will then walk through the corridors there to the north side of the building where the car is waiting.”

  “Your ball game,” Conklin said. “Just bear in mind that if you screw it up, I won’t wait for explanations—or for one of your theories!”

  Nora told me that as the service car started down, noiselessly, she felt as if her blood had turned to ice water, her legs were scarcely able to hold her up.