Walking Dead Man (7 page)

It wasn’t an illogical idea. “If he was going to the penthouse, he might have gone down to the lobby to get the one elevator that goes to the roof,” I said to Ruysdale and Shelda. Shelda was holding tightly to my hand and I felt strong and tall and manly! “Things are kind of screwed up downstairs, and you know the boss.”

Ruysdale nodded, as if she were only half listening. “I know the boss,” she said. “His first concern tonight is what’s going on in the open house. If he went through the lobby and saw something wrong, he’d make a note of it, but he wouldn’t have let himself be sidetracked. He thought Kranepool had sent for him.”

I couldn’t get it through my head that Chambrun could be made to do something he didn’t want to do. I couldn’t believe that any kind of violent thing could have happened to him; not in the Beaumont, not in the place he controlled so effectively. And yet someone had broken through security and fired a shot at a man in his bed earlier that night. If that had been an inside job—one of Battle’s four trusties—as Chambrun had suggested, then Chambrun was in no danger from them. They had known who was in the bed.

“The Battle case is what he’s concerned with, I’ll admit,” I said. “Maybe he stumbled on something connected with it. Maybe he ran into Richard Cleaves or someone else he knows who might be involved. He would let himself be sidetracked, wouldn’t he, if he thought he was onto something important?”

Ruysdale didn’t answer. I knew I was fishing for comforting answers. She was way ahead of me, assuming the worst, and moving to face it. She was at the phone again, asking Karl Nevers, the night manager, and Mike Maggio, the night bell captain, to come up to the office at once.

Then Jerry Dodd was with us. His bright eyes asked a question without words.

“Nothing,” Ruysdale said in a flat voice.

“What about that first phone call?” Jerry asked.

“I took it,” Ruysdale said. “An unfamiliar male voice said he was Lester Kranepool, the assistant
D.A
., and would Mr. Chambrun come up to the penthouse at once.”

“You don’t know Kranepool?”

“Never heard of him until tonight,” Ruysdale said. “I’ve never seen him or spoken to him until he phoned.”

“Except that wasn’t Kranepool,” Jerry said. “Damn! One thing’s for sure. The boss wouldn’t leave the hotel voluntarily without letting you know, Betsy—letting some one of us know.”

“That’s for sure,” Ruysdale said. “Let’s face it, Jerry. There’s nothing voluntary about what’s happened to him.”

“If there is, I’ll break his goddam neck,” Jerry said.

There was no one with the title of Assistant Manager at the Beaumont. I knew why in the next few minutes. Ruysdale was the boss’s stand-in, with every detail of the operation at her fingertips. While Jerry Dodd used one phone to call his best people into immediate action, Ruysdale was calmly alerting the top people on the hotel staff that we had an emergency. The hotel must continue to operate as though nothing had happened. There mustn’t be a hint that anything had happened to Chambrun. If he wasn’t back on the job when the next day’s business began, the word must be that he was simply out of the office for personal reasons for a few hours. She, Ruysdale, would make any emergency decisions that had to be made, and if anyone doubted her authority, she had special orders from the boss in writing. I don’t think anyone would have questioned her.

Art Stein and a couple of others of Jerry’s security men showed up while the phone calls were being made.

Jerry finally gave it to them straight. “There are several possibilities,” he told them. “The first and most unlikely for my money is that the boss has left the hotel of his own free will. He stumbled on something, probably relating to the Battle case, and it took him away without giving him time to notify us. Or, having been lured out of here by a phony phone call, he was persuaded to go somewhere, willingly, without telling us. He’s been gone about fifty-five minutes now. Ordinarily you don’t think a man is missing when you haven’t seen him for fifty-five minutes. It’s different in this case.”

“You still think that shot upstairs may have been meant for Mr. Chambrun?” Stein asked.

“I do. Maybe more than ever now. They didn’t get him one way they try another.”

I felt Shelda’s hand tighten in mine.

“So he was suckered into a trap,” Stein said.

“That’s almost certain,” Jerry said. “First possibility is they took him somewhere and are holding him, maybe for ransom which we’ll hear about, maybe for something worse that I don’t want to think about. Second possibility, it was all over fast. They knifed him, clubbed him—the body is not very far away, in a broom closet, down one of the elevator shafts, in one of the cellar areas.”

I glanced at Ruysdale. Her face was a pale mask.

“I figure the way that could have happened would be either just outside here in the hall, or in an elevator on the way up. So first we look for a body, hopefully still alive.”

“It would be hard for anyone to carry him out of the hotel,” Stein said, “and I can’t imagine the boss letting himself be taken.”

“Not with a gun in his back?” Jerry asked.

“He’d have been seen,” Stein said. “You’d have heard, now that you’ve started asking.”

“He could have gotten out if he didn’t want to be seen,” Ruysdale said. “He’s done it hundreds of times, don’t ask me how.”

“But he wouldn’t show somebody how to take him out,” Stein said.

“He might,” Ruysdale said. “He’d be very tough to handle if the danger was just to him. But if someone else was threatened—Mr. Battle, or you, Jerry, or Mark. Or me.” She looked away.

“So first we go over the hotel like a vacuum cleaner,” Jerry said. “Then, God help us, there isn’t any kind of a lead to anything.”

“Oh, I think there’s a lead, Jerry,” Ruysdale said. “It would be too wildly coincidental if it didn’t have something to do with Mr. Battle’s presence here in the hotel. Mr. Chambrun has known Mr. Battle for more than thirty years. He knows more about him than perhaps anyone else. Someone may think Mr. Chambrun has the key to a great deal of money. There are not millions, but several billion dollars represented in that penthouse—industrial power, political power.”

“And the crazy sonofabitch is slugged out with a sedative when so many people want to talk to him,” Jerry said.

“There is one person it might be worth talking to while you wait for him to wake up,” I said. “Like Chambrun said, you don’t have to have pulled the trigger to be responsible. Richard Cleaves apparently hates both Battle and the boss.”

“So you and I will go and talk to him,” Jerry said. “Get moving, Art. I want every square inch of this hotel covered.”

“It’s a long job, Jerry.”

“Let’s hope you don’t have to finish it,” Jerry said. He beckoned to me, taking it for granted I was with him.

I looked at Shelda.

“You have to go, darling,” she said.

My girl!

Just outside the office door is the bank of elevators. The wall opposite is the outside wall of the building. Behind the elevators is the lobby, and open space rising three stories high. The second floor, then, is a corridor facing the elevators, with Chambrun’s offices ballooning out on one end and on the other, the bookkeeping offices, the switchboards, my apartment and my office. East of the elevators is a wide, open stairway leading down to the lobby. There is a fire stair next to the bookeeping offices. Those are the only two exits from the second floor except the elevators, four of them.

Jerry and I stood by the elevators, looking up and down the corridor, not speaking. Each of us, I guess, was trying to imagine what had happened out here. Chambrun had been summoned, he believed, to the penthouse. There would have been three possible things he could have done. He could have walked down the open stair into the lobby and taken the one elevator that went up all the way to the roof. He could have taken one of the other elevators down to the lobby. That would, I thought, have been out of character unless the car was standing right there with the door open. He was a much too impatient man to wait for a car to take him one flight down. The third possibility was that he had taken an up-elevator to the twenty-fourth floor, planning to change elevators there.

“The guys who suckered him out of his office couldn’t gamble on what he’d do,” Jerry said. “They have to meet him right here, head on. They couldn’t risk the lobby, where a hundred people would see whatever happened, or the twenty-fourth floor, where cops are seeing to it that no one gets up to the roof.”

“They waited for him in the elevator that goes to the roof?”

Jerry shook his head. “Elevator operator and a cop in that car,” he said. “First question I asked when I came down from the penthouse was whether they’d seen him.”

You should know that all the elevators at the Beaumont have operators from seven o’clock in the morning until midnight. The rest of the time they are self-service. There’d have been no employee on the regular elevators at the time Chambrun had left his office.

We walked down the open stairway to the lobby. Things had quieted down here. The Spartan Bar had closed for the night and the lady invaders had reluctantly left. The Blue Lagoon, the hotel’s night club which opens off the far end of the lobby, had also closed. The Trapeze Bar, overhead, was dark.

Mike Maggio, the night bell captain, saw us and came hurrying over. Mike is a handsome, dark Italian with a normally mischievous grin. There was something almost comical about the seriousness of his face now.

“I was just on my way up to the office,” he told Jerry. “When I got the word from Miss Ruysdale, I wanted to check out as well as I could down here first. Nobody saw him, Jerry. I swear I would have. I was afraid he’d show while those broads were raising hell in the Spartan, and I kept looking for him, wondering what I’d say to him.”

“You better get your orders from Ruysdale,” Jerry said, “but keep asking. Don’t make it sound like anything’s happened; just say he’s needed and we don’t know where he is.”

“Will do,” Mike said. “You think it’s bad, Jerry?”

“I think it’s bad,” Jerry said.

The lobby had a strange feel for me. This place was my home; I lived here, I worked here, I found most of my recreation here. In spite of its great size I think I would have noticed any small thing out of place, any routine not running normally. The lobby seemed perfectly normal now, and yet it
felt
wrong. I suddenly realized what it was. At all times, no matter what the problems the complaints, the irritating confrontations with irritating guests to whom you had to be polite, the fashion people, the society mothers demanding perfection for their “coming-out” daughters, the press agents for important people and for people who wanted to be important, there was the inner assurance that no problem was too tough to solve because God was in his heaven—on the second floor—and all was right with the world. Now God wasn’t there, and not even Betsy Ruysdale could fill the void. The Captain wasn’t on the bridge; the coach had left the team to improvise its own game plan. I knew, as Jerry and I took the elevator to the fourteenth floor, how much we depended on Chambrun, and that the simple knowledge that he wasn’t there made us—or me at least—feel curiously incompetent.

Outside the door of Richard Cleaves’ room I glanced at my watch. It was a quarter past two. He’d probably be in bed, very much annoyed by our intrusion.

He wasn’t in bed, but his annoyance was electric. He opened the door and stood looking at us, black glasses hiding his eyes. He was wearing slacks and a white shirt, sleeves rolled up to reveal muscular, tanned arms. He reminded me a little of George Peppard, the actor.

“Yes?” he said. A cold voice, a hostile voice.

“I’m Dodd, the hotel’s security officer,” Jerry said. “This is Mr. Haskell, the hotel’s public relations director. We’d like to talk to you, Mr. Cleaves.”

“Not tonight,” Cleaves said. He started to close the door, but Jerry’s foot was in the way. The hall light glittered against the black glasses. “Get your foot out of the door, Dodd, unless you want it broken.”

I was mildly amused. I’d seen Jerry handle belligerent drunks twice his size. The aggressive Mr. Cleaves wasn’t going to intimidate him. There’s something enjoyable about watching a little guy handle a big guy.

“I can get a cop down here in about five minutes to arrest you,” Jerry said, “or we can talk nice and friendly.”

Cleaves made a right judgment. He didn’t try to break Jerry’s foot. “What is it you want to talk about?”

“An attempted murder, possibly two,” Jerry said.

I thought I’d try something direct. “We know something about your history, Mr. Cleaves.”

“If you do,” he said, “you know I regret George Battle didn’t get it right between the eyes.”

“And what do you hope has happened to Chambrun?” Jerry asked, his foot still in the door.

“What
has
happened to him?” Cleaves asked.

“That’s what we’re here to ask you.”

I was watching his face. It’s hard to guess what a man is thinking when you can’t see his eyes, but I could have sworn he was surprised. There was a little intake of breath, a little twitch at the corners of his bidden eyes.

“You’ve hooked me, gentlemen,” Cleaves said. “Come in and tell us what you’re talking about. He stepped back from the door.

“Us” turned out to be David Loring and the glamorous Miss Angela Adams. Cleaves had a sitting room-bedroom suite, and the actor and his lady were sitting on a couch, side by side. On a coffee table in front of them were a variety of bottles—Scotch, vodka, brandy. There was an ice bucket, glasses, a couple of the Beaumont’s silver stirrers. Ash trays were full. I saw Jerry take that all in.

“How long have you been here, Mr. Loring?” he asked.

“Just a minute,” Cleaves said. “You don’t have to answer any questions, David. This is just the house dick.”

It’s strange to meet someone like Loring whom you’ve seen a hundred times on the screen. You feel as if you knew him and you don’t know him at all. His one-sided little smile was familiar, the way he cocked his head to one side was familiar, the very direct look in his dark blue eyes was familiar, the husky speech with the slightly British sound to it was familiar.