Nightmare Time (12 page)

“And he isn’t a cop,” Johnny said.

“He isn’t wearing a blue suit, if that’s what you mean. But he has a badge and the regular ID. Plainclothesmen are everywhere in the hotel right this minute. A million-dollar operation, police badges could come their way in bags, like potato chips…”

“So, one of Hardy’s men has been bought by the other side,” Johnny said.

“Maybe you didn’t get enough sleep, dummy!” Mike said. “I didn’t say he was one of Hardy’s men. I said he said he was one of Hardy’s men. That would explain why Betsy’d let a stranger into her place at that time, wouldn’t it, Boss?”

Chambrun nodded, slowly. “It could be,” he said. “And that means we don’t have to be looking for some friend of Betsy’s, just an actor pretending to be a plainclothesman.”

Mike grinned, pleased with himself. “You don’t have to be an actor to pretend to be a cop. Just don’t look too bright!”

None of us laughed at his joke. We were imagining a strange man, faking his way into Betsy’s apartment, roughing her up, dragging her out of there against her will.

“He could have had a confederate downstairs, waiting with a car,” Johnny said. “She didn’t call for help. Jerry questioned other tenants in the building.”

“She couldn’t call for help if she’d been gagged, or knocked unconscious. No one around the hallways at four
A.M.
No people on the street,” Mike said.

“I don’t like to buy it,” Chambrun said after a moment.

“Why not, Boss?” Mike asked.

“It explains how it could have happened, but it leaves us with no leads at all.”

“Fingerprints,” Mike said. “If this guy remade Betsy’s bed and straightened up the apartment, he must have left prints.”

“What’s this about fingerprints?” a voice asked from behind us. Lieutenant Hardy had joined us.

Chambrun explained Mike’s theory about the fake cop.

“Ingenious,” Hardy said, “and quite possible. We’re involved in an ugly game here, so much money available you have to know your own mother might sell you out. We dusted that apartment for prints, Pierre, and came up with a hat full. Thanks to your security system here at the Beaumont, every employee is fingerprinted and those prints kept on file. We know, of course, that Betsy was in her apartment, there were some prints of yours, Pierre, and a couple belonging to a hotel maid named Nancy Coughlin who is moonlighting as a cleaning woman for Betsy. Then there are one or two more.”

“Who?” Mike asked, eager to have his theory prove out.

“There’s an unfortunate thing about fingerprints, Mike,” Hardy said. “They don’t have a name on them. They’re no use to you unless you can match them with someone’s. So what do we match those other prints against? We don’t even have a suspect. They might help to hang a man someday—after we’ve caught him.”

“Romanov and his lady friend,” Mike suggested.

“I have a feeling that would just add another rivet to his alibi,” Chambrun said.

“You still don’t buy him as a suspect, Pierre?” Hardy asked.

“Gut feeling,” Chambrun said.

“Who don’t you have a gut feeling about, Boss?” Mike asked.

“The whole damned world out there,” Chambrun said.

“I’m afraid we’re going to find that’s where we are—out there,” Hardy said. “The theory that the Willises and Betsy are being held somewhere in the hotel, moved around as we search places and don’t think we have to go back to them, is beginning to run out of gas. All the paying customers are off the grounds now. The police, Jerry’s men, the bomb squad with dogs, are going over the place, inch by inch. A bomb wouldn’t have to be any bigger than a grapefruit. When that search is over and we haven’t found Betsy and the Willises, we have to know that they are being held ‘out there’ somewhere.”

“If they are still being held,” Chambrun said, his voice grim.

“I have a ‘gut feeling’ about that,” Hardy said. “What these people want from Major Willis is so important to them they just won’t throw him away, or anyone who can be used to make him talk. It didn’t work with his wife, so we have to write a question mark after her name. Betsy wasn’t expected to get him to talk. She was to force you to release the boy who could be used to break down his father.”

“And that hasn’t worked so far.”

“I don’t mean to scare you, Pierre, but I have a feeling you will hear again, some evidence that Betsy’s in big trouble.”

“Evidence?”

“It’s happened before, Pierre. An ear, a finger—a photograph showing her in some unbearable situation.”

“Oh my God!” Chambrun muttered.

“I happen to agree with you,” Hardy said. “Turn the boy loose and they snatch him. Torturing the kid in front of his father may get what they want. After that, good-bye Willises and good-bye Betsy. They will know too much.”

“So what do I do? Just wait here for the bad news to come?” Chambrun sounded almost desperate.

“I’ve been talking to Colonel Martin, Willis’s commanding officer in Washington,” Hardy said. “Zachary has been trying to persuade him to get a court order to force you to release the boy. I’ve persuaded him to come up here and talk with you and the boy and Zachary before he takes any such action. He’s on his way. He should be here in a couple of hours. Meanwhile—”

Chambrun’s phone blinked its little red light at us and he picked it up and answered. Then, “Put her on, Mrs. Veach.” He reached out and threw the switch on the squawk box that would make the phone conversation audible to all of us. “Mrs. Haven,” he said. “Some emergency about the boy?”

“Pierre?” The old lady’s voice came over the box.

“What’s wrong, Vicky?”

“I seem to have lost my ability to charm young men,” Mrs. Haven said with a kind of chuckle. I had the feeling she was putting on a performance for someone who was there with her. “Your young card-sharp decided he’d had enough of my company. Went to the bathroom, slipped out the window there onto the roof, and tried to take off down the fire stairs. Fortunately, Jerry Dodd’s people were on the job. I think maybe you ought to find time to have a little chat with Master Willis. You rank high on his list of people to be trusted; his father, you, God, and almost no one else.”

“Be up as quickly as I can, Vicky. Sit tight.”

“Somebody get to the boy?” Hardy asked.

“No way,” Chambrun said.

“The young man’s notion of what a soldier and a gentleman should do in a crisis,” I said. “Betsy’s in terrible danger, Chambrun’s hotel is threatened with bombs. The only honorable thing for the Willises to do is face their own problems without involving friends.”

“A fairly sound code of ethics, except in this case,” Chambrun said. “Will you come up with me, Mark? I think you may rate just after God on the boy’s list of the trustworthy. You got me for him when I was needed. You might persuade him to change his mind if his feet get itchy again.”

If Chambrun could operate around the clock without any sleep, so could I, I thought.

“Give you a chance to do some thinking while we wait,” Hardy said to The Man.

“To hell with thinking,” Chambrun said. “What we need is just one solid fact to hook on to.”

“I’d think of going public with this whole story, every detail of it,” Hardy said. “You’d be astonished how often publicity and a reward offered will turn up someone who saw something.”

“Offer whatever reward you think is likely to produce results,” Chambrun said. “I’ll stand back of it. What about our phony Mr. Gary? Could he be tempted, do you think?”

“I’m afraid you’d be outbid by the other side, Pierre. Incidentally, Frank Gary isn’t a fake. He’s exactly what he says he is, native-born Italian named Francisco Garibaldi, brought to this country as a child, name changed, father in the cab business, he changing it to a limousine service. He is married. The fake is Father Paul Callahan, and I’m convinced Gary played that role. But getting him to talk, even with promises of immunity, isn’t likely. Once again, the other side can outbid us. But an honest person on the street who saw something, didn’t think it was important till he hears the whole story—well, we can hope.”

“What about the good old-fashioned third degree for Mr. Gary?” I asked.

“I’m afraid the third degree is pretty much a myth in modern police work,” Hardy said. “Sometimes I wish to God it wasn’t.”

THINGS SEEMED
quiet enough in Chambrun’s penthouse, except that there was apparently no more gin rummy game in process. Victoria Haven was watching a coverage of the Beaumont story on television, outside shots of the hotel and crowds of people, an occasional interview with someone who’d been evacuated. Guy Willis sat by a far window, looking out at the city’s rooftops, apparently not interested in the TV excitement. He looked up quickly as Chambrun and I came in, then turned away again. Guilty as charged, I thought.

Victoria turned down the sound on the TV set. “I’m sorry to bring you up here at a time like this, Pierre,” she said. “It turns out I’m just an old woman giving advice to a man of the world. It just never occurred to me he’d try to go somewhere on his own. He’s made friends with Toto, who let him go across the roof without barking once.”

We walked over to the boy, who didn’t turn his head again even when Chambrun put a hand on his shoulder.

“Want to tell us what your plan was, Guy?” Chambrun asked.

The boy hunched up his shoulder as if to free himself from Chambrun’s touch. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m sorry you didn’t trust me,” Chambrun said.

I realized the reason the boy didn’t look at us was that he was fighting that old problem of tears again.

“You scared the hell out of Mrs. Haven,” I said.

“She’s a very nice lady, and I—I’m sorry,” the boy said.

“You’re sorry, we’re sorry, but would you mind telling me what you had in mind?” Chambrun asked.

Then he faced us, eyes glistening, lips unsteady. “Betsy’s in danger and they’re threatening to blow up your hotel, sir. All because of me. I couldn’t let that happen to two people I care for. I knew the elevator wouldn’t take me down without an okay from you, sir, but I thought the fire stairs—”

“There are men there to keep people from getting up, but also from getting down,” Chambrun said.

“I found that out.”

“What was your plan if you made it?”

“I—I thought I would get out onto the street, like all the other people who were being evacuated, lose myself in the crowd. Once I was out of the street I’d just wait for someone to pick me up.”

“Someone?”

“The people who have my dad, and Rozzie—and Betsy. Once they had me, they might turn Betsy free and your hotel would be safe, sir.”

“And your parents?”

“We Willises would have to face whatever they have in store for us,” the boy said.

“You realize that these people who might pick you up want to use you to make your father talk?”

“That would be Dad’s decision.”

“And if he decided to talk, what do you think would happen to you then?”

“I know you think they wouldn’t let us go because we’d know who they are,” the boy said.

“Don’t you think your father is bright enough to know that, too?”

“It would be his decision, sir. Not yours or Betsy’s. You’d be safe and Dad would have solved the Willises’ problems.”

“Betsy will never be safe once they think she won’t be any use to them,” Chambrun said. “Your parents won’t be safe once they’ve played their last card—you. Our one hope of keeping them and Betsy alive is to let them know that we’re still holding you here, haven’t made up our minds yet what to do about you.”

“Captain Zachary said if you’d let me go he’d arrange to have me watched and followed, and rescue Dad and Rozzie and Betsy when they took me to them.”

“But if you went out on your own, Captain Zachary wouldn’t have been ready to cover you,” Chambrun said.

“I was going to try to find him,” the boy said.

“You decided his advice was better than mine?”

The boy pounded his fists on the arms of his chair. “I care for you and Betsy, sir! I couldn’t let you pay for the trouble Dad’s got himself into.”

“Let me put it to you this way,” Chambrun said, his voice very quiet. “I love Betsy Ruysdale better than anyone else in the world, boy. I admire your father and I owe him. But Betsy comes first. These people may still think they can persuade me, through her, to turn you over to them. For as long as they think that, Betsy has a chance. I appreciate what you tried to do for her and for me. But I can’t let it be played any other way than my way. I’d have to live with myself afterwards, knowing that I’d cost Betsy her life by not following my own judgment. You understand that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. With that understood, let’s see where we’re at.”

“It looks like we were at the foot of the hill with no path going up, sir,” young Guy said.

“Smart kid,” I heard myself say.

“How do you think your father would handle a situation like this?” Chambrun asked.

“Different than you, sir,” Guy said. “You have people you can trust—Mark here, and Mr. Dodd, and Lieutenant Hardy, and goodness knows how many more. You can count on them. It’s different in Dad’s work.”

“He doesn’t have people he can count on?”

“Oh, I suppose the President, and Colonel Martin, and other big shots in the government. But what Dad calls ‘the working stiffs’ are different.”

“In what way?”

“The temptations are too great,” the boy said. “The people who want to buy something can offer so much a lot of people couldn’t refuse.”

“They could make the same kind of offers to people in my world,” Chambrun said. He glanced at the old lady and me. “Do you think Mrs. Haven or Mark could refuse that kind of big offer?”

“Of course they could,” Guy said.

“How do you know?”

“I just know,” the boy said.

Chambrun reached out and touched his shoulder again. “That’s how it is with me, Guy. I just know—know who I can trust. People who work for me feel they owe me loyalty, and that’s great. But people in your father’s world are working for their country, their nation, their government. Wouldn’t you think you could count on them more than I can count on my people?”

“My dad says that working for a government is different than any other job in the world,” Guy said. “A majority of the people elect a President, and they tell you it’s patriotic to support his programs. But a lot of people didn’t vote for him, and they’ll tell you it’s just as patriotic to oppose him. Salt that with a bribe big enough to buy a yacht, my dad says, and it can become even more patriotic to oppose the man in power.”