Golden Trap (16 page)

In that moment Jeanette Arnaud gave herself away as far as I was concerned. She didn’t say “pig” again. She didn’t say anything. You could almost see the wheels turning behind her ivory-white forehead. I glanced at Louis Martine. I could see that he knew too. Collette was staring down at the girl, as if willing her to deny the charge. But the girl just sat there, calculating her next move.

Chambrun turned to Martine. “I leave it to you and Collette, Louis,” he said. “Perhaps you can persuade her to remove herself from very great danger by naming the man. The hotel switchboard will know where to find me.” He turned and walked out of the suite with me at his heels.

“I feel the need of fresh air,” he said when we were out in the hall. “Do you have any doubts about that girl, Mark?”

“I think you made your point,” I said. “I think even Madame Martine was shaken.”

“You’d better get some sleep,” Chambrun said. “I’m having Jerry double the watch on all these people. I have a feeling the man we’re after may not play the waiting game. His little ballet with Miss Arnaud hasn’t worked. He must know she may talk. He can’t afford to wait to get George—and to silence the girl.”

“Why didn’t she tell you?” I asked.

“The greedy always eat too much,” Chambrun said. “She is thinking, not of life and death, but of money. How else can you figure her? She is a successful
chanteuse.
She makes more money as a singer than you or I do at our jobs. Yet she sells herself on the side for money—large sums of money. Money represents something special to her. Power? Perhaps a way of castrating the male of the species?”

“Dr. Sigmund F. Chambrun,” I said.

He shrugged. “Laugh if you like. There is some psychic reason for this hunger for money. She looks death in the eye and asks ‘How can I use this situation to get richer?’ It’s a sickness. Get some sleep.”

We took the elevator down. I got off at four and left Chambrun in the car to go to his office.

I was somewhat surprised not to see the brass polisher at his post. I looked up and down the hall but there was no sign of him. A tiny little worry began to gnaw at my gut. Someone had been there all the preceding afternoon and evening.

I walked quickly down the hall to the door of my apartment, digging my key out of my pocket on the way. I opened the door to blackness. The lights were off in the living room and there was no sign of light coming down the short corridor from the bedroom.

I reached out for the wall switch to the right of the door and pressed it. A naked light bulb glared up at me from the floor.

The room was a shambles. Chairs were overturned. The cloth had been jerked off the center table, taking the lamp with it and smashing the china shade—which explained the naked bulb. All this I saw almost subconsciously, because my main attention was riveted on something else.

Marilyn VanZandt lay face down on the rug, her head turned at a grotesque angle. She was carefully covered with one of the blankets from the beds.

I heard myself shouting at the top of my lungs. “Lovelace!”

There was no answer from the bedroom.

There was blood on Marilyn’s visible cheek, and a kind of lopsided look to her face as though her jaw might be broken. I knelt beside her, fighting the impulse to run. She was breathing, a rough gurgling sound as though there was blood in her throat. I knew I should call Doc Partridge the house physician. I knew I should call Chambrun and Jerry Dodd. I also knew I should look in the bedroom. My legs didn’t want to take me, but somehow I managed it.

There was no sign of Lovelace.

That seemed to release me. I hurried back to the living room to phone. Before I could get to it the hall door opened and Dr. Partridge came in, carrying his medical bag.

“I got here as quickly as I could,” he said, and went to Marilyn.

“How did you know?” I asked him.

“You called, didn’t you?” he said, impatient.

“No!”

“The switchboard just told me I was needed in your apartment. My God, who did this to her?” He had pulled the blanket back, gently. “Ambulance,” he said.

“It’s bad?” I asked him.

“About as bad as it could be,” he said. “Looks like she was hit by a truck. Don’t stand there gaping.”

Somehow I got into action. I had Mrs. Kiley on the switchboard send for an ambulance and notify Jerry he was needed. Then I called Chambrun and told him what I’d found.

“No sign of Lovelace?” Chambrun asked, his voice cold.

“Thin air,” I said.

“The girl can’t talk?”

“She’s damn near dead,” I said.

“How was Lovelace when you left him?”

“Two sleeping pills in him. I’d have said he’d sleep round the clock.”

“You think—?”

“I don’t know, sir,” I said. “He was so close to breaking. Only queer thing—someone else called Partridge. He arrived before I could send for him.”

“Find out from Mrs. Kiley who sent for him,” Chambrun said.

I
KNOW NOW FROM TALKING
to Chambrun later how bad a moment that was for him. He had put all his chips on Lovelace and he had to wonder, as he listened to me on the phone, if he hadn’t made the worst mistake of his life. He’d ignored all the warnings; Martine’s description of Lovelace as a psychotic killer and Lovelace’s own moments of wavering doubt about himself. Jekyll and Hyde! Chambrun wondered, in that moment, if he’d allowed himself and his precious hotel to be used by a homicidal maniac whom he’d chosen to regard as a friend in danger who needed protection.

While Chambrun was on his way, I got back to Mrs. Kiley on the switchboard and asked who’d made the call to Partridge. She checked with her operators and reported back.

“They thought it was you, Mr. Haskell. It came on your phone—the one you’re talking from now.”

“The girls know my voice. I’d have said who I was.”

“They assumed it was you,” Mrs. Kiley said. “You sounded unnatural, excited—but they assumed it was you. I mean—it was your phone, Mr. Haskell.”

Partridge had recovered Marilyn. He was standing beside her, looking down. His face wasn’t reassuring.

“Broken jaw,” he said. “Could be a skull fracture. Blow across the throat that may be the worst of all.”

“Chances?” I asked.

“About as bad as you could imagine,” he said. “You did the right thing covering her with a blanket. Most people don’t even know enough to do that.”

I didn’t tell him I hadn’t covered her. I was thinking that a maniac wouldn’t beat up a woman, then call the doctor and cover her tenderly with a blanket. Or would he? Jekyll and Hyde—in and out.

“I don’t want an army of people storming in here till we get her moved,” Partridge said. “Can you keep them out in the hall?”

I just did get out in the hall in time. Two elevators hit the fourth floor at the same time. Chambrun came out of one and Jerry Dodd and three other men out of the other. I explained Partridge wanted quiet until Marilyn could be moved.

“We’ve got every possible exit covered,” Jerry told Chambrun. “It’s probably too late, but it’s done.”

“Your brass polisher is missing,” I told Jerry. “He was gone when I first got here fifteen minutes ago.”

“Find him!” Jerry ordered his men. Two of them took off. The third one, whom I’d never seen before, stayed with us. He was a thin, dark, scholarly-looking young man I’d never seen before.

“This,” Jerry told Chambrun and me, “is John Smith.”

Kline’s replacement for the dead John Smith.

Chambrun nodded. “Anderson was the brass polisher?” he asked Jerry. “Good man.”

“We can just hope he’s on the trail,” Jerry said.

“It seems unlikely,” Smith said in a flat voice. “His job was to keep people out of the room, wasn’t it?”

“Who says he didn’t?” Jerry said grimly.

“Meaning no one went in? It was Lovelace who attacked the girl?” Chambrun asked.

“Who else,” Jerry said angrily. “Lovelace attacks her, leaves. Anderson wouldn’t have stopped him if he didn’t know what had happened in the room, but he’d have followed him—to protect him, God help us!”

“You checked on the phone call for the doctor, Mark?” Chambrun asked.

I told him about that, and the blanket someone had put over Marilyn.

Smith nodded owlishly. “I think you’ll find your man Anderson stashed away in an empty room or a broom closet,” he said.

“How do you figure?” Jerry asked.

“Lovelace could have gone berserk, but it doesn’t seem reasonable,” Smith said. “He was, according to all accounts, exhausted and under reasonably heavy sedation. He was asleep when you left him with the girl, Haskell?”

I’d reported that to Jerry earlier. “Out like a light,” I said. “I thought he’d go round the clock.”

Smith nodded. “My guess is someone took care of your man Anderson and let himself into the apartment. The girl heard him and tried to stop him from getting in to Lovelace.”

“She fought someone like a tiger,” I said. “So the noise brought Lovelace to the surface,” Smith said. “He struggles to get himself awake. He calls to the girl. The man fighting the girl hears him. He knows Lovelace is armed and that he’s a dead shot. He finishes off the girl and runs. He doesn’t want to meet an armed Lovelace on a level footing. Lovelace starts after him, finds the girl, stops to help her. He realizes how bad it is, sends for the doctor, covers her with a blanket, and goes after the killer.”

“But the man was gone then!” Jerry said.

“Not if Lovelace knew or guessed who it was,” Smith said. “While we’re standing here, guessing, there’s another murder in the making it would be nice to prevent.”

If Smith’s theory needed any corroboration, it was provided at that moment by the reappearance of Jerry’s two men with Anderson, the brass polisher, rubber-legged between them. They’d found him where Smith had suggested he might be—in the broom closet at the end of the hall, bound and gagged with a bed sheet There was a nasty wound at the back of his head. His story was simple enough. An elevator had arrived at four. He’d turned away to keep his face hidden. Whoever got off the elevator slugged him with some kind of a heavy weapon and the lights went out for him. He’d come to in the dark, dazed, and unable to untie himself or get rid of his gag.

They took Anderson off to get his head fixed.

“Whoever fought with Marilyn must have some marks on him,” I said. “She didn’t go quietly!”

“Not necessarily,” Smith said. “The man who slugged Anderson had a billy, or an iron bar—a weapon. She may never have gotten her hands on him.”

Chambrun’s face was a cold mask. “We must find Lovelace and stop him,” he said to Jerry. “One way to stop him is to keep him away from the people we have on our list—the Martines, Rogoff, Carleton, Dr. Zimmerman. They must be warned and guarded.”

“Jeanette Arnaud,” I said.

“That young lady could get us off the hook,” Chambrun said. “I think you and I must find some way to persuade her, Mark.”

He turned toward the elevators. One of the car doors opened and three men in white coats wheeling a stretcher came off the car. We waited in the hall until they came back out of my rooms with Marilyn. Dr. Partridge followed them.

“How is it, Doctor?” Chambrun asked.

“She’s alive, and that in itself is a miracle,” Partridge said…

Louis Martine was not glad to see us. His broad-shouldered body barred the door when he saw us.

“There has been no time to persuade the girl to talk, Pierre. If there is anything to talk about. She is hysterical—a little.”

“We have just run out of time, Louis,” Chambrun said. He explained briefly what had happened. Instinctively Martine glanced past us into the hall beyond.

“Perhaps you had better come in,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” Chambrun said. “Perhaps we had better.”

Jeanette Arnaud was still sitting on the couch where we’d left her. She didn’t look hysterical to me. Collette Martine was standing in the doorway that led to the suite’s bedrooms. I had the feeling that Martine had been talking to the girl alone, and that Collette had reappeared at the sound of the doorbell.

“Really, Pierre!” she said, rigid with indignation.

“I want to tell Mademoiselle Arnaud what Mark found when he left here. He went to his apartment, opened the door. The place was torn to pieces. On the floor was a half-dead girl—her skull beaten in, her jaw broken, and God knows what other injuries. She was a friend of Lovelace’s who was standing guard while he slept. Someone had knocked out the security man stationed in the hall, entered the apartment, and fought with this poor woman. Lovelace, in a drugged sleep, was wakened by the noise. He came out of his bedroom, found the girl, sent for the doctor, and then set out, armed with a gun which he knows how to handle very well, to get even for what had happened to his friend. We haven’t found him. He may know who he is after or he may simply decide to wipe out everyone he knows to be an enemy. All three of you are in that category, my friends.”

“Then you must protect us!” Jeanette Arnaud said shrilly.

“We will try, Mademoiselle, but we cannot promise,” Chambrun said.

“He’s a wild animal!” Jeanette Arnaud said.

“He is being driven to murder by someone you know, Mademoiselle.”

Chambrun seemed to me to be overpolite under the circumstances.

“You still persist in thinking—?”

“I still persist,” Chambrun said.

The girl’s gamin face seemed to close hard, like a trap.

Chambrun looked blandly at Louis Martine. “This young lady’s friend, the one for whom she played her little game tonight, is also desperate. If Lovelace didn’t identify him, then he must make very sure that Mademoiselle here doesn’t tell anyone. If I were in your shoes, Louis, and if Mademoiselle persists in silence, I would suggest that you ask her to leave. If she stays here, she may be placing you and Collette in grave danger. There are two men on the loose who can’t be counted on to behave rationally. If Mademoiselle chooses to protect one of them, then I think she should turn to him to protect her from the other.”

It was almost as if the girl had not heard what he said. Her face was screwed up in a kind of terrible concentration. Collette Martine came slowly into the room. I expected her to strike out angrily at Chambrun, but she didn’t. She went to her husband, and his protective arm went round her. These two were suddenly drawn very close in crisis.