Walking Dead Man (8 page)

“Miss Adams and I have been drinking with Richard since a little before midnight,” he said. “So I think you should bear in mind, Mr. House-dick, that we are all a little potted and therefore not entirely reliable.”

The gorgeous Miss Adams was leaning back, her arms spread out on either side of the back of the couch. This tended to reveal a rather stimulating amount of bare bosom. Her eyes were narrowed, watching me, as if she was daring me to let my mouth drop open. There was a zipper in the front of the scarlet housecoat she was wearing that would have opened it right down to the floor.

“If you three have been together since before midnight, I don’t have any questions to ask you,” Jerry said.

Cleaves was sweetening a Scotch on the rocks. “You can’t get away with that, Dodd,” he said. His straight, hard mouth moved in a tiny smile. “You’ve whetted my curiosity. What has happened to Chambrun?”

“If you’ve all been here since before twelve, you can’t help me to provide an answer to that,” Jerry said. He turned toward the door.

“How about a drink?” Cleaves said, turning on charm.

“No thanks,” Jerry said.

“Maybe you feel more communicative than your friend, Haskell,” Cleaves said. He gestured toward the drink table.

“Sorry,” I said.

“I gather you know that I’ve made a life study of Mr. Battle and Mr. Chambrun. You seem worried. Let me reassure you. They are indestructible, those two. They live charmed lives. Has someone taken a shot at Mr. Chambrun and missed? That would fit the pattern?”

“What pattem7” Jerry asked.

“Things are not what they seem when you deal with Battle and Chambrun,” Cleaves said. “Someone is said to have shot at Battle and missed. My life study tells me that missing is exactly what was intended. What is supposed to have happened to Chambrun? Because whatever is supposed to have happened is probably not what happened at all. That’s the way the game is played.”

Jerry was intrigued in spite of himself. “Mr. Chambrun gets a phone call from the assistant
D.A.
in the penthouse asking him to come up. He went, and has disappeared into thin air.”

“How exciting,” Miss Adams said in a slow, drawling voice. She moved slightly, almost exposing an entire breast.

“And the phone call turned out not to be from the
D.A
. at all?” Cleaves asked. He certainly knew how part of the game was played. “Any signs of violence?”

“Not yet,” Jerry said.

Cleaves took a sip of his drink. “I have every reason to regret that,” he said. “I take it you know why.”

“Your father,” I said.

His mouth became a straight, hard slit. “Chambrun told you?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve spent thirty years trying to convince myself that Battle and Chambrun are Siamese twins,” Cleaves said. “It doesn’t quite work. Chambrun was a genuine patriot. I could cut his heart out for what he did, if that kind of thing was possible for me. But I understand it. Perhaps in his shoes I’d have done the same thing. His cause, he thought, was just. He faced me with it a long time ago, when I was still in my teens. He laid it on the line without any ifs, ands, or buts. He took the entire responsibility. He left himself wide open to me. I—I spent a lot of time preparing myself for the perfect crime. You see, I don’t want to die for a justified crime, gentlemen. I made myself into an expert marksman with any kind of gun.” He smiled. “Rest assured, if you can break my alibi for the time Battle was shot at, I still have another alibi. I couldn’t have missed at that distance. He paused a moment to light a cigarette. “In the last ten years I’ve had a dozen chances to settle with Chambrun. Would you believe I’ve looked at him five times through the sights of a gun and could never pull the trigger? Something about him, god damn him! I could have gotten away with it and I couldn’t do it. Battle is something else again.”

“In what way?” Jerry asked.

“In every way you can imagine,” Cleaves said.

“I hate him,” Angela Adams said. “Why does he insist on that girl being in David’s picture?”

“Good question,” Cleaves said, “because it isn’t for any of the reasons that come instantly to mind. That’s the key to George Battle. None of the motives he appears to have for anything he does are the real ones.”

“His money is real,” David Loring said. “That’s what’s important to us.”

“Only we haven’t got it yet, so it isn’t real,” Cleaves said.

“You shouldn’t have any trouble getting financing for your book,” I said. “It’s a best seller.”

“If I told you that ordinary money sources have, without explanation, dried up, would you be surprised? Battle hasn’t said yes to financing the film, but he hasn’t said no. Would you believe that in the complex financial world in which he lives, in which he has such enormous power and influence, that the word is out that
A Man’s World
is not to be considered until he says so?”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Could he make that much profit out of it?”

“In his terms the profit will be chicken feed,” Cleaves said, “Have you read my book, Haskell?”

“Sorry, but I haven’t gotten to it.”

“I wrote it, so I must know it pretty well,” Cleaves said.

“It’s so wonderfully sexy,” Angela Adams said. “The woman’s part is just perfect for me. Why he wants that blonde tootsie who has never acted in her life is beyond me.”

Cleaves allowed himself that tight smile. “Wasn’t it Lord Chesterfield who said about sex that the pleasure was momentary, the price exorbitant, and the position ridiculous? What you have to sell, darling, is not so wildly extraordinary.”

“Louse!” she said.

David Loring laughed and put his hand on the lady’s thigh. “You are obviously speaking without experience, Richard. Let me assure you all cats are not alike in the dark.”

“Angel,” Angela said, and stroked his hand.

“My book isn’t a sex manual,” Cleaves said. “It’s the story of a political assassination; someone like Robert Kennedy, killed by some juvenile crackpot at a political rally. The hero, the part we hope David will play, is the victim’s brother. He doesn’t believe the killer is just a psychotic kid who killed his brother for kicks. He believes it was planned by someone high up in the political power structure and that the kid was just the unbalanced instrument. People thought that about Robert Kennedy’s killer, about President Kennedy’s killer, about Martin Luther King’s killer. It’s not a new idea. In my book the hero sets out to expose the truth and finds himself suddenly the hunted and not the hunter. It’s a good suspense story, it makes what I hope are some fairly shrewd comments about the power structure in our society, but there is no reason why George Battle should either like it or want to stop its being made into a film. There’s no one remotely like him in the story.” Cleaves laughed. “There is no one remotely like George Battle. What I have invented must seem like kindergarten stuff to him.” Cleaves suddenly hit the drink table with his fist, so hard that glasses and bottles jumped. “Why has he gotten into the act? He’s never financed a film before. Maxie Zorn didn’t go to him for money; he came to Maxie. I said to hell with it. I didn’t want him connected with my book. I didn’t want him contributing to my success. I didn’t want to owe the sonofabitch anything. So I went to other sources and, believe it or not as I told you, the doors were all suddenly closed.”

“Battle’s trying to make it up to you,” Jerry suggested. “What he helped do to your father back there.”

Cleaves’ laugh was bitter. “He never tried to make anything up to anyone in his whole life. Nobody in the whole world matters to him except himself. Incidentally, I’ve never been able to get close to him except with an army of people around him. His villa in France is like a fortress. He never travels in any public way. I’ve never had him in the sights of a gun. If I had, I’d have had no trouble squeezing the trigger.”

“Because he helped finance the Resistance that killed your father,” I said.

“It was a cause with Chambrun,” Cleaves said. “With Battle it was a means for acquiring money and power. He placed his bets on the right horse—the Resistance.” He shook his head slowly. “He wouldn’t bother to try to make something up to me. He may be afraid of catching a heavy cold, but he’s not afraid of me. There’s something about my book, as a property, that concerns him. The hell of it is I wrote it, I invented it, and I don’t have the vaguest notion what it can be.”

“Interesting parlor game,” Jerry, said, “but I’m looking for a missing man.” He started for the door again.

“Ask Battle,” Cleaves said. “It’s a hundred-to-one he can tell you exactly where Chambrun is. He knows everything that goes on in this godforsaken world.”

“W
HEN YOU HATE SOMEONE
, you can really build him into a monster,” Jerry said, as we walked along the corridor toward the elevators.

I was thinking that the story I’d had from Potter went right along with what we’d heard from Cleaves. “Nothing you know about Battle or you hear about him, true or false, makes him very much like anyone you’ve heard about before,” I said.

“Just remember something, Buster,” Jerry said, giving me an angry look. “Battle is the boss’s friend; he’s the boss’s boss. He can have two heads for all I care. Chambrun wants him safe and that’s the way we’re going to keep him.”

From a house phone near the elevators Jerry checked with his people. No sign of Chambrun, alive or dead. No leads. Nobody had seen anything.

“Let’s see how Hardy is doing,” Jerry said.

Getting from the twenty-fourth floor to the roof was like trying to break into Fort Knox. The horse was gone, so to speak, but the cops really had the stable locked now. Finally word came down from Hardy that we were permitted to come up to the penthouse.

The law was still stalled up there. Apparently no one had gotten to the bedroom yet, where they hoped to find fingerprints, to dig the bullet out of the headboard so it could be submitted to ballistics, to question the sleeping George Battle. Dr. Cobb had, so far, held the fort, it seemed. He was sitting on the couch in the living room, looking exhausted. A cigarette dangled between his flabby lips, and a little drool of saliva ran out of one corner of his mouth.

A dark, intense young man in a nicely tailored blue suit was not letting the doctor relax. I guessed this was Kranepool, the assistant
D.A.

“There has to be something you can give him that will bring him to, Doctor,” he was saying as we came in. “We can’t stall any longer. Either he can be waked, or he’s so far gone we can work around him,”

The doctor shook his head, mechanically, from side to side. Cigarette ash dribbled down the front of his dressing gown.’

Kranepool was diverted by our arrival. “Anything?” he asked Jerry.

“Not yet.”

“You able to trace the call that was supposed to have come from me?”

“Only that it was made on an outside phone.”

“What do you mean? Outside the hotel?”

“No. Just not a phone that connects directly with the switchboard; not a room phone, not a house phone. There are fifty pay phones scattered around the hotel. Most of the co-ops, like this, have their own lines in addition to a house phone.” He gestured. “That phone on the end table is an outside line. The one on the sideboard is a house phone.”

“What are you doing to find Chambrun?” Kranepool asked.

“Looking,” Jerry said, and turned away. I had a feeling he didn’t like bright young men in authority at that moment. “Where’s Lieutenant Hardy?”

“Guest bedroom,” Kranepool said. “He’s questioning the help.” He turned back to Dr. Cobb. “Now, for the last time, Doctor—”

Jerry and I went down the hall to the guest room. Hardy was not questioning “the help,” not now, at any rate. He was standing by the far window looking down at the lights on the East River. A young uniformed cop was sitting in front of a stenotype machine waiting for whatever was to come next.

Hardy turned to us. He looked tired. “Nothing, I take it.”

“That’s how it is,” Jerry said.

“I understand there’s some coffee in the kitchen, Molloy,” Hardy said to the cop; “Get yourself some. I’ll call you when I need you.”

“Bring you some, Lieutenant?”

“No, thanks. You guys?”

We didn’t want coffee. The young patrolman took off.

“You’re searching the hotel?” Hardy asked.

“Yes. It’s long, slow job unless we get lucky. And if we don’t find him in some public place, then we’re going to have to start waking up about seven hundred guests!”

“Chambrun wouldn’t like that,” Hardy said.

“Unfortunately he isn’t here to object,” Jerry said. “You have any luck with Battle’s people?”

“It wouldn’t seem so—on the surface,” Hardy said. “Dr. Cobb was here in this room when the shot was fired. Battle went to bed early, as you know. Nine o’clock. Cobb came in here to snatch forty winks and get himself some oxygen.”

“Oxygen?” I asked.

“Emphysema,” Hardy said. He pointed to a brass cylinder that stood on the floor by the head of the bed. “He was pooped out from the trip and all the nonsense that went with it. He was breathing deeply when the shot was fired.”

“He says,” Jerry said.

Hardy nodded. “He says. He says he scrambled off the bed. That suggests speed, but with him I would think not. He got out into the hallway just in time to see Butler, the bodyguard, come running out of the bathroom waving his gun. He thought for a moment Butler had done the shooting. He waddled into Battle’s room and found him sitting up in bed, covers pulled up around him, in a state of shock. So much for Dr. Cobb.”

“And the others?”

“Gaston, the chef, was in the kitchen preparing a casserole of white fish in wine, Mr. Battle’s favorite breakfast dish. He heard the shot. He didn’t move at once because he thought it had come from somewhere out on the roof. Then he heard Butler shouting and he went along the hall to the bedroom. Allerton, the manservant, had taken the opportunity for a bath. He was soaking in a hot tub when he heard the shot. It took him a minute or two to get out, get dry, and into his bathrobe. He found everybody in the bedroom when he got there.”