Nightmare Time (14 page)

Shortly after that moment of what Chambrun thought was the truth about himself, Lieutenant Hardy joined us in the office.

“The farther we go the more likely it seems the hotel is clear of bombs,” he said. “The critical areas, the basement and the roof, get a clean bill of health from men and dogs.” He gave us a fleeting smile. “For a moment I thought a couple of those German shepherds were going to be annihilated by Mrs. Haven’s Japanese gentleman friend, but she managed to control him. I just had a phone call from Kennedy Airport. Colonel Martin has arrived and is on his way here in a police car. Most important, Pierre making the whole story public and offering a reward—ten thousand dollars, by the way—has produced results.”

“Somebody saw something, heard something?” Chambrun asked. He sounded suddenly alive again.

“Something, nothing,” Hardy said. “A man named Betts, Randolph Betts, who lives in the brownstone across the street from Betsy’s building, came forward. His dog had gotten a short call in the night and he’d put on some clothes and taken the animal out for a walk. It was a little after four. He knows, because he quite naturally looked at his watch when his dog demanded an outing. He had walked the dog down the block, crossed over, and was coming back down Betsy’s side of the street. He noticed a car parked there, motor running, man sitting at the wheel. Nothing particularly intriguing about it except that the running engine suggested the driver was waiting for someone. He didn’t get a really good look at the driver because just then someone came out of Betsy’s building. It was a man, carrying a woman—‘slung over his shoulder like an old laundry bag,’ Betts says. They almost came face to face. Betts asked what the trouble was, if he could do anything to help. The man laughed. ‘A little too much party for the lady. I’m taking her home.’ He tossed the lady into the car, got in with her, and the driver took off.”

“Face to face!” Chambrun said. “A description?”

“A familiar one,” Hardy said. “Hat brim pulled down over his forehead, dark glasses when it was still night. Could have been the same man described by your hotel clerk who registered him as Henry Graves, who claimed to be a friend of Major Willis’s—without any luggage.”

“Nothing more? Nothing else distinctive?”

“Nothing. Though I guess we can assume it was the same man.”

“Mr. X,” Chambrun said.

“Switch on your radio and TV,” Hardy said. “I’ve given out the story of the girl who had ‘too much party,’ suggesting that it was Betsy. Someone may have seen her delivered somewhere.”

“A very long shot,” Chambrun said, his voice grim.

“I don’t have to ask you if you have any better lead to follow,” Hardy said. “If you did you wouldn’t be sitting here playing this eternal guessing game.”

“So we have Mr. X or Mr. Graves, with his hat brim and his dark glasses, who claimed to be a friend of Major Willis’s and got himself registered into an adjoining room. The same Mr. X is seen carrying Betsy away from her apartment building. You don’t have to guess that he was involved in both abductions.”

“And there is Mr. Francisco Garibaldi, Frank Gary to you, Father Paul Callahan to Mr. Cardoza, the Willis boy, and Mark a little earlier on. It brings me to the conclusion that Mr. X and Mr. Gary are just foot soldiers, carrying out orders from higher up.”

“Why not let Gary make his phone call?” I suggested. “Maybe his lawyer will spring him and then he’ll take us to the higher-up guy you want.”

“None of these people are stupid,” Chambrun said. “If we let Gary go he knows we’ll be planning to have him followed. He’ll take us somewhere, but it will probably be to the Bronx Zoo or the Aquarium.”

“Pierre’s right,” Hardy said. “We’re not playing hide-and-seek with kids. These people are playing for keeps, and they aren’t amateurs.”

“I’ve ordered Mrs. Veach to monitor any call she puts through to me that pretends to be from Betsy, about Betsy, or about the boy,” Chambrun said. “I’ll try to keep them talking while she traces the number.”

“They’ll guess you’ll try that,” Hardy said.

“You can’t throw in the towel, Walter. You have to try!” Chambrun said.

The phone rang, and Chambrun switched on the squawk box. He looked almost eager as he picked up the receiver. It was Jerry Dodd. Colonel Martin had arrived from Kennedy and he and Captain Zachary wanted to come up.

“Stay with us, Walter,” Chambrun said to the police lieutenant. “This Pentagon type is apt to put more stock in a police officer than an aging civilian with a foreign name.”

“You underestimate yourself, friend,” Hardy said. “But I’ll stay. Officially, my murder case can be affected by what they decide to do. Whoever it is they’re after on espionage charges, I’m after for the murder of Tim Sullivan.”

I guess I react to soldiers the way millions of people have for years. If they’re your soldiers, they’re good guys. Out of uniform the soldier looks like any other civilian. He can be anything from your friendly doctor to a confidence man or a gun-toting gangster. His business suit or sports clothes don’t label him the way a uniform does. I’d gotten used to accepting Captain Clinton Zachary as a tough, humorless military man despite his civilian clothes. Colonel Steve Martin was a little harder to pigeonhole right off the bat. He was about six feet tall, slim, suntanned with crew-cut gray hair, friendly blue eyes, and a smile that said “Welcome.” Zachary made you brace yourself; Martin suggested it was safe to relax.

He shook hands with Chambrun and Hardy, nodded to me when I was introduced. I guess I was just “office help.”

“We seem to have unloaded a miserable mess on you, Mr. Chambrun,” Martin said.

“I didn’t know you’d chosen my hotel as a battleground,” Chambrun said. “I’d supposed it was the bad guys.”

“Trouble has a way of following us in our business,” Martin said. “We might have chosen your hotel as a base for Major Willis, but, as a matter of fact, we didn’t. Willis wasn’t actually on duty. He had a week’s leave, chose to bring his wife and young son to New York on a vacation—shopping for Mrs. W., some big-league baseball for the boy, a little good jazz music for Ham himself. He played a pretty damn good jazz piano himself when we were in school together. Maybe your Duke Hines attracted him to the Beaumont.”

“Have you forgotten that Willis and I had a pretty rough experience together about three years ago?” Chambrun asked. “We became friends. I owed him. If he’d gone to any other hotel, my feelings would have been hurt.”

“Unfortunately your hotel, with its hundreds of foreign guests involved at the United Nations, is a perfect cover for strangers,” Martin said.

“I don’t think Willis and his wife were tricked and abducted by strangers,” Chambrun said. “Someone he had no reason to mistrust trapped him, murdered my elevator man, stripped him of his uniform, and took him away.”

“Romanov,” Zachary said.

“Your needle is stuck, Captain,” Chambrun said. “Romanov had an alibi.”

“Which could be as phony as a Confederate two-dollar bill,” Zachary said.

“I understand from Zachary that you trust Romanov, Mr. Chambrun,” Martin said. “He’s been on our list of people to watch closely for quite a number of years.”

“Because he’s Russian?”

“Partly. Your reason for trusting him?”

“Gut feeling,” Chambrun said. “He’s lived here for a couple of years. I have no reason not to trust him.”

“You’re not in our business, Mr. Chambrun, so you don’t have any reason to think of him in the same way that we do.”

“He’s a human being, and human beings are my business,” Chambrun said. “You’re right, I don’t think in terms of spies, but I’m dead sure that, whatever his game, Romy would not manhandle my Miss Ruysdale. It’s just not in character.”

“He would do whatever he was ordered to do,” Zachary said. “Friendship for you wouldn’t count for beans if he was ordered to go against it.”

“So we come down to the nitty-gritty, Mr. Chambrun,” Martin said. “Zachary tells me he has asked you to release the Willis boy, we cover him, and when the enemy take him we follow them to where they have the Willises and your Miss Ruysdale.”

Chambrun had the impatient look of a man who’d been asked the same question once too often. “I have explained to Captain Zachary that, one: you can’t guarantee they wouldn’t give you the slip if they got the boy. They are professionals, just as clever as you are. Two: they know you’ll be trying to tail them, and if they can’t get clear, they won’t take you anywhere that matters. Three: there is no reason to suppose that the Willises and Miss Ruysdale are being held in the same place. Miss Ruysdale isn’t important to getting Major Willis to betray your secrets. She’s important in forcing me to let them have the boy who could be used as a weapon. Four: if they get the boy to his father, whether the father talks or not, the ballgame is over. The Willises, Miss Ruysdale, and the boy will be eliminated. Our one chance to keep them alive until we can find another trail that leads to them is to keep the boy away from them.”

“They could find another way to get the boy,” Martin said.

“Not where he is. Not while I’m alive and in one piece, and while I have a staff that is loyal to me.”

“Not if you are served with a court order?” Martin asked. He smiled a relaxed smile and tapped at his jacket. “Because I have one here, to be served on you at my discretion.”

“I would resist it with my last ounce of strength,” Chambrun said, “because I believe four lives may depend on my resisting it.”

Martin looked at Zachary, eyebrows raised in an unspoken question. Do I serve it or not?

“For my money, serve it!” Zachary said.

Martin hesitated. “Let me ask you a question, Mr. Chambrun,” he said. “The Willises left their suite, 17C, at about nine o’clock, leaving the boy watching the TV and with a promise to be back in an hour. We assume they were captured on the way to the Blue Lagoon, since they never got there. The boy fell asleep, didn’t wake till one o’clock. That’s four hours after he was left alone. If these people wanted the boy, all they had to do was go back up to 17C sometime in that four-hour stretch, ring the doorbell, and take him when he opened up to them. Why have they waited until getting him is so much more complicated?”

Chambrun frowned in silence for a moment. “‘The best laid plans of mice and men—’” he said. “The Willises leave their suite at nine. Out in the hall or by the bank of elevators they meet someone they know.”

“Romanov, probably with the Smythe girl,” Zachary said.

“Or someone else,” Chambrun said stubbornly. “They all get on the elevator together and then the ‘friend’ shows his true colors. The Willises are held up at gunpoint. My man, Tim Sullivan, tried to interfere and is shot dead for his pains. Now our killer has a problem. He not only has two prisoners he must get to a prearranged place, but he has a dead body he must dispose of. He can’t just leave Sullivan in the elevator. All hell could break loose in five or ten minutes when it’s reported the car isn’t running. So they go to the basement, Major Willis is stripped of his uniform, Sullivan’s body and that uniform are dumped in the trash bin, and they are off to wherever the prisoners are to be held.”

“That still doesn’t explain why they didn’t go back for the boy in a while,” Martin said.

“We don’t know how long all this took,” Chambrun said. “An hour? If so, then the boy could already have reported his parents missing. They had no way of knowing whether he had or not. In any case, they had Mrs. Willis and may have hoped her husband would talk to save her.”

“We know she, probably both of them, were taken back to 17E,” Zachary said. “That’s where the brooch with the remnants of poison in it was found.”

“Maybe the brooch was left there just to make us think Mrs. Willis had been there,” Chambrun said. “Whatever they tried with Mrs. Willis evidently didn’t make the Major talk. Now they have to have the boy. Our friend Frank Gary, playing the role of Father Callahan, is dispatched and comes within an eyelash of making it.” Chambrun’s mouth tightened. “A few hours later they play their next card, kidnapping Betsy Ruysdale and telling me what I must do to set her free—or else.”

“And you’d rather face the ‘or else’ than let them have the boy?” Zachary said.

“I’d rather keep the boy safe than live the rest of my life knowing that I’d contributed to the deaths of four people while there was still a chance to save them.”

Colonel Martin was obviously trying to make a decision when Jerry Dodd, looking grim, came into the office. He was carrying a small square cardboard box in his hand, along with what looked like a piece of wrapping paper.

“This came for you by special messenger, Boss,” he said. “Atterbury, at the front desk, is just as bomb sensitive as the rest of us. Letter bombs are in the news every day. He turned this over to a bomb squad cop, who opened it. No bomb.”

“What is it?”

“A cassette tape,” Jerry said. “You better brace yourself and listen.”

“To what?” Chambrun asked.

“Betsy,” Jerry said. He walked over to the bookcase at the far wall and came back with a small radio-cassette player that was kept there. He took the tape out of the box and fitted it into the machine.

“You’re not going to enjoy this, Boss,” he said, “but I guess you have to hear it.”

The tape began to turn, and for a minute there was no sound. And then Betsy’s voice.

“Where is this place?”

There was no question about its being Betsy’s voice. The man’s voice that followed wasn’t familiar. It was medium baritone, with a heavy accent, almost a musical comedy version of Russian, I thought. Someone faking?

“It doesn’t matter where you are, doll,” the voice said. “Your head hurt?”

“How would you expect it to feel after being knocked out? Are you going to tell me what this is all about?”

“It’s quite simple,” the comedy Russian said. “We want the Willis boy. If your Mr. Chambrun cares anything about you he’ll let us have him.”

“He knows?” Betsy asked.

“Of course he knows, but he’s been very slow in responding. Maybe he doesn’t care as much for you as we thought.”

“I wish I was as sure of everything as I am of what Mr. Chambrun feels for me. But you’re not going to let me go, are you, even if he does what you tell him to do?”