Golden Trap (10 page)

I found Lovelace in my living room playing games with his gun, which had been returned to him by Hardy. A glance at the side table told me half a bottle of scotch had gone down some hatch. Lovelace had dressed for dinner, but he wasn’t wearing his dinner jacket. It was hung over the back of my desk chair. He had on his black trousers, patent leather pumps, and a bright red cumberbund and tie. The harness and gun holster hung from his left shoulder. It was the shiny color of rich cordovan. He was freshly shaved, his neatly brushed hair pomaded. There was some color in the handsome, deeply lined face now, and the bright blue eyes had an almost feverish glitter to them.

The particular game he was playing rather took my breath away. As I opened the door with my key and walked in he was standing across the room, his back half turned. He spun around and the gun came out of the holster and into his right hand so fast, that it aimed at me like a striking snake.

I held awfully damn still, fighting the impulse to dive into the corner. I wanted to be sure he knew who I was.

His laugh was on the high side. “Just practicing,” he said. “I knew it was you.”

“Anyone could have a key,” I said. “This is a hotel.”

“I knew by that little cigarette cough of yours as you put the key in the lock,” he said. “Maybe you should switch to cigars or pipe. In my business a man with a cough is sooner or later dead. You can follow him anywhere.”

I was secretly mad as hell at having been scared out of ten years’ growth. “You could get a job in television playing Westerns,” I said.

“For twenty years being fast has kept me from having the back of my head blown off,” he said. “While the police had this I felt like a scared rabbit.” He stroked the gun with his long fingers and slid it gently into the holster. The corner of his mouth gave a little spasmodic twitch. “Shall we go down and face Marilyn?” he asked. “It’s got to be done sometime. And I’m interested to see what happens when some of my old friends see me.”

“Take me ten minutes to dress,” I said.

I’m not an action boy. I know how to handle people who complain about service in the hotel; I know how to wheedle an obnoxious drunk out of one of the bars;

I can sooth a hysterical Hollywood star who feels the red carpet isn’t thick enough; and I can calm down an excited meat chef in the kitchen with a cleaver in his hand. But guns make me uneasy, and my ten-year-old nephew knows more about Judo and karate than I do. Somebody once told me you always lead with your left, but I’m like the average guy. I can count the number of times I’ve thrown a punch since I was five years old on the fingers of one hand. This guy in the next room might be a Cary Grant to Marilyn VanZandt, but to me he was just a nervous guy with a gun, and I stood a very good chance of being in the line of fire from him or someone who was after him.

When I’d gotten into my dinner clothes I called Jerry Dodd’s office and told him Lovelace and I were about to head down to the Blue Lagoon for dinner.

“Stop in my office on the way,” Jerry said. He sounded uncharacteristically hard. “One of my guys is polishing brass around the elevators on your floors. Tell him you’re headed to see me.”

“What’s up?” I asked.

“You’ll see when you get here,” Jerry said. “I was just reaching for the phone to call you when you rang. Step on it, Mark.”

I went out into the living room. Lovelace had put on his jacket, which was perfectly tailored to hide any bulge there might be under his left arm.

“We’re wanted in the security office downstairs,” I told him.

“Why?”

“We’re probably going to be told how to behave,” I said.

There was no one in the hall outside but the brass polisher. I told Lovelace who he was because I saw that slender right hand go inside the jacket toward the invisible holster. Scotch whisky seemed to have restored Lovelace’s mood to fight for himself.

The elevator let us out at the lobby level. Mike Maggio, the night bell captain, was standing just a yard or so away as we walked out. He has the mischievous, grinning face of a Peck’s bad boy.

“I’m to appear to be giving you a message and walk in front of you to Jerry’s office,” he said.

Lovelace’s bright eyes swept the lobby. He appeared to see no one familiar. We walked briskly through the lobby traffic to Jerry’s office, which is located just behind the main reception desk.

Jerry wasn’t alone. Hardy was with him, hands jammed in his pockets, a cold pipe gripped between his strong white teeth. There was another man I’d never seen before. He sat in one of the office armchairs, facing the door as we came in. Thick black glasses turned his face into an expressionless mask. He seemed to be completely relaxed in his dark suit, dark tie—remarkably inconspicuous except for the glasses that glittered in the office lights. It was instantly apparent that he was in charge of the moment, but neither Jerry Dodd nor Hardy introduced him.

“Mr. Lovelace?” he said. His voice was crisp, efficient sounding; a man in control.

Lovelace nodded. He rubbed his right hand restlessly against the side of his jacket.

“If someone had asked you a year ago what your name was and what your business was, Mr. Lovelace, how would you have answered?” The black glasses were fixed steadily on Lovelace.

Lovelace hesitated. This was a man trained to face oddities. He made a decision. “I would have said I was Michael O’Hanlon, Irish journalist,” he said.

“So I tell you, Mr. Lovelace,” the man with the black glasses said, “that I am Henry Kline, certified public accountant with offices on Wall Street, and it is no more true than your O’Hanlon cover.”

Lovelace nodded slowly. Name games were evidently perfectly understandable to him.

“And I tell you that John Smith was no more John Smith than you are O’Hanlon or I am Kline,” the man said.

“So you have an advantage,” Lovelace said, “because you know that I am really George Lovelace.”

“It’s an unimportant advantage at the moment,” Kline said. He shifted very slightly in his chair. “About an hour ago I had a long distance call from Senator Maxim in Honolulu. He told me what had happened to John Smith. That’s why I’m here, because I know who John Smith was.”

“Who was he?” Lovelace asked.

“We will continue to call him John Smith,” Kline said. “You told Lieutenant Hardy and Mr. Dodd that you’d never seen him before the moment you looked at him, dead?”

“Yes.”

“Would it surprise you to know that John Smith has, in effect, been living with you for the last eight months?”

I saw that little twitch at the corner of Lovelace’s mouth. “It would surprise me,” he said. “And I would lift my hat to John Smith. He must have been extraordinarily skillful at the job of surveillance, if that is what it was.”

“He was about the best in the business,” Kline said.

“And why was he tailing me?” Lovelace asked.

“To try to save your life,” Kline said.

Lovelace stared back at the black glasses. He moistened his lips. I looked at Jerry and Hardy. They’d obviously heard this already.

“If I’ve guessed right about you,” Lovelace said, “that just isn’t true. You fellows couldn’t care less what happens to me.”

Kline’s mouth hardened. “I think that caring about what happened to you cost Smith his life at the end. It’s a fatal weakness in our business—to care what happens to somebody else.”

Lovelace nodded slowly, as if he was remembering moments in the past when he had been tempted himself.

“Shortly after you retired early last summer we became aware of what was happening to you,” Kline said. “The near accidents, the threats. Our concern was, very frankly, not what might happen to you. You were no longer one of us, no longer useful to us. But we were very much interested to find out who was out to get you. That person might be dangerous to others who were still useful to us. Smith was given the assignment to try to identify the man or woman who was on your trail. He went where you went. Once or twice he dismantled booby traps set up for you before you could fall into them. But in all this time he’d not been able to make the critical identification.

“He knew you were leaving Shannon yesterday for New York, and that you were coming here to the Beaumont. A second man was assigned to cover you in Ireland and Smith came on ahead. He checked in here, with Senator Maxim’s help. He was here in the lobby this noon when you checked in.

“About ten minutes before you were due to arrive he called me to say that he had the Beaumont staked out and that he was ready to take up the job of tailing you. Half an hour later he called again. I had gone out on other business. My secretary tells me that he sounded excited. He told her to tell me that he thought he’d identified the person he’d been looking for.”

“Who?” Lovelace asked, his voice husky.

“He didn’t tell my secretary. Quite properly. I am a certified public accountant. My secretary knows nothing about my other activities. He said he had identified the person we were interested in and that he’d call me back in half an hour—when my secretary told him I was expected. He never called back. Obviously he couldn’t.”

“What was he doing in my room?” Lovelace asked.

“I think he must have gone there to warn you,”

Kline said. “He’d identified your enemy. He followed the human impulse to try to put you on guard. I’m only guessing, but I think he let himself into your room and decided to wait for you. When someone opened the door he expected it would be you. He’d let down his guard for perhaps the first time in his career. The door opened and it wasn’t you, and he could never even reach for his gun.”

I saw there were little beads of sweat on Lovelace’s forehead.

“How did he get a passkey—and how did the other person who came after him get a passkey?” Hardy asked

Kline’s smile was thin. He looked at Lovelace. “Is there a lock in this hotel you couldn’t negotiate if you wanted to, Mr. Lovelace?”

Lovelace shook his head. He was far away somewhere.

“Part of our training involves locks,” Kline said to Hardy. “Don’t waste time checking the hotel staff, or your key collections. Smith could have gotten into the room without trouble, and so could the man who killed him. If you take the lock apart, it’s a hundred to one you’ll find fresh scratches in the lock mechanism that weren’t made by the regular key.”

“What next?” Lovelace asked, the husky voice gone dull and flat. “You keep saying ‘person.’ Didn’t Smith indicate to your secretary whether it was a man or a woman?”

“No. As for what’s next, someone else will take over for Smith. He’s being briefed now. He will arrive at the hotel in the next hour or so. He’ll be pointed out to you by Mr. Hardy or Mr. Dodd. We have to expose him to you all because there are so many of you watching Mr. Lovelace that a stranger might easily be taken for the enemy.”

“The new man’s name?” Lovelace asked.

“John Smith,” Kline said.

Lovelace laughed. It was a small, bitter sound.

“I know from Mr. Chambrun and these gentlemen that you have no direct suspicions,” Kline said. “I have the list of names of people registered here in the hotel who might have reason to want to get even with you. Do you have any particular hunch about any one of them? With your experience I’d be inclined to pay attention to your hunches.”

Lovelace suddenly had that exhausted look I’d recognized when I first met him. “Who can measure degrees of hatred?” he said. “Who can guess at the depth of a desire for revenge? You can only guess how much a person wants to live and what he has to live for. On that score I have some theories about the five people on our primary list.”

“I’d like to hear them,” Kline said.

Lovelace moistened his lips. “I put them in reverse order,” he said. “Killing me means risking death at the hands of the law. My Roumanian friend, Rogoff, is a blustering bully, but that bluster covers a basic cowardice. He thinks he has everything to live for—a successful business, a wife and children, a mistress in Vienna, a certain amount of power in his community. I think he would run fewer risks than anyone.”

Kline nodded.

“Louis Martine was once my good friend. I never hurt him directly. He understands the reasons for my behavior in the past. He is a real patriot, and he is serving his country in an important diplomatic post I think he would weigh his value to his country against anything personal. I would write him off entirely except for his almost fanatical devotion to his wife. A man may momentarily lose his balance when a woman is at the center of his life.”

“And Madame Martine?” Kline asked.

“Like a tigress hunting down the killer of her cubs,” Lovelace said. “She is a sophisticated and intelligent woman. If she stops to think, she may hesitate. She loves Louis. Their life together is a particularly good one. They have money, position, the capacity to enjoy the good things of life. If she stops to think—?” Lovelace shrugged. “But her devotion to her father was almost psychotic. It could trigger almost anything in a moment of passion.”

Kline made no notes, but I had the feeling he had the kind of memory that would permit him five years from that moment to repeat everything Lovelace was saying, word for word.

“Hilary Carleton is a man who doesn’t know the meaning of the word fear,” Lovelace said. “Long ago he threatened to get even with me for exposing his brother. It could be that he was never able to find me till a year ago. He could enjoy playing me as he enjoys playing the Scottish salmon he fishes for so avidly in season. He would calculate risks without emotion. He would expect to be clever enough to outrun any consequences. If he has me in mind he’s the most competent of the lot.”

“I mentioned your name to him a little while ago,” I said. “He didn’t seem to recognize it.”

“But he would recognize me if he sees me,” Lovelace said, “as Michael O’Hanlon who exposed his brother.”

“That leaves the German doctor,” Kline said.

“One other before him,” Lovelace said. “Marilyn VanZandt.”

“Not on my list!” Kline said sharply.

“But on mine,” Lovelace said. “Does it occur to you, Kline, that what is happening to me might have nothing to do with my past as you know it? A purely personal matter? Marilyn VanZandt is a woman who loved me five years ago, who lived with me for three months, and whom I left cold one rainy Paris morning. She’s a woman of wealth who could follow me anywhere. She’s an alcoholic, a user of drugs, a woman whose beauty is fading and who has used up a life in thirty years of living at a blazing pace. She could hate me unreasonably and with an intensity it would be hard to believe. A woman scorned in the only relationship of her life in which she felt something real—God help her. She could be the most dangerous of all.”