Nightmare Time (17 page)

“Question!”

Rex Chandler had apparently been elected or appointed by his fellow reporters to handle the questioning.

“I’ll recognize you one at a time,” he called out. “It would be a madhouse if you’re all shouting questions at once.” He smiled. “But I’m going to take advantage of my position by asking the first question. It’s to you, Lieutenant Hardy, while you’re still on deck. How do we know the Willises were ever on Sullivan’s elevator? How do we know that Sullivan’s murder has anything to do with the rest of this case?”

It was a smart question, and it created a buzz of excitement.

Hardy smiled at the reporter. “I asked myself that question hours ago, Mr. Chandler. I got an answer from Jerry Dodd, head of the hotel security. Jerry, you want to tell him?”

Jerry appeared from the back of the hall. “Tim’s body and the Major’s uniform in the same trash bin made it look certain they’d been on the same elevator,” he said. “But Hardy asked me to make certain. There are no elevators on self-service at nine o’clock at night. Major Willis wasn’t a stranger to hotel help. The thing with Mr. Chambrun a couple of years back made him a kind of hero to most of us. He simply couldn’t have traveled on an elevator without being recognized by the operator, especially in uniform. He didn’t travel with anyone else, so he had to be on Sullivan’s car.”

“Thanks, Jerry. And one more unpopular question while I still have the floor, this one to Colonel Martin.”

The Air Force man stepped forward.

“Is it possible that Major Willis arranged for his own disappearance?” Chandler asked. “That he sold out on you long ago? That while you’re searching for his abductors, he’s laughing all the way to the bank with a pocket full of Russian money?”

Before the Colonel could answer, young Guy Willis came charging downstage, shouting at Chandler. “Not my dad! Don’t you dare say that about my dad!” He was clawing at Chandler, those dreaded tears streaking his cheeks again.

Chandler handled him gently, even before Chambrun got to him. “Listen to me, boy,” he said, “I’m not accusing your father of anything. I’m just asking a question that must be asked and answered so we can get on with things. If we don’t ask, suspicions may be lurking around us forever.”

“I would stake my life on Major Willis’s honesty and patriotism,” Colonel Martin said.

Chambrun had reached the boy, and his protective arm was around him. “Why, if he is the villain, would Major Willis kill Tim Sullivan, Mr. Chandler?”

“Sullivan wouldn’t do something Willis ordered him to do,” Chandler said.

“Tim could only take him up or down,” Chambrun said. “He could not take him sideways or to the moon! He wouldn’t have objected to taking Willis to any floor level, penthouses or basement. Willis could have anything he asked for in this hotel. Let’s not play games with this man’s honor, Mr. Chandler. Let’s get to another line of questions.”

“So I’ve accomplished something by asking the questions,” Chandler said. He turned to the audience. A hundred hands were raised. Chandler smiled and pointed to a woman reporter in the front row. “Maureen Lewis, International Network.”

“To Colonel Martin,” the lady said. “The classified information Major Willis is supposed to have—is it all just something that is stored in his head, or are there documents—written plans, technical designs, whatever? If there are such documents, you must have searched for them. Have you found them?”

Martin looked uncomfortable. “Major Willis has sat in on a whole series of planning sessions over the last six months. He must have taken notes. If he did, we haven’t found them in his suite. He didn’t leave anything in the hotel safe.”

“May I add to your answer, Colonel?” Chambrun asked. “Whether there are notes or documents doesn’t seem relevant to me, Ms. Lewis. The Major wasn’t carrying documents like that on the way to listen to a jazz piano player. And the attempts to kidnap the boy to use him to force his father to talk makes it clear the Major wasn’t carrying Star Wars secrets in his uniform pocket. If there are documents, the people who kidnapped the Major haven’t got them, or they wouldn’t be going to the lengths they are to force him to talk. You people are wasting valuable time trying to cast doubts on Major Willis.”

Later on Chambrun and Hardy both agreed that asking those questions at the very start of the conference had been valuable. Intelligent reporters must all have had suspicions that Major Willis might have defected. Setting aside those suspicions at the very beginning had left them free to ask questions that might be important.

But as I listened to question after question directed to Chambrun, Hardy, Jerry Dodd, and Colonel Martin, nothing that I didn’t already know came to light. Probably a million people who were listening to their radios and watching their TV sets were brought up to date on all the details we had, but no questions took us to anything new. I know now that while the conference was still being broadcast the HOSTAGE line was being bombarded with calls, most of them from crackpots, none of them providing us with anything new that mattered.

It was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon when it all came to an end. The reporters didn’t hang around; all headed off to prepare their special stories and comments for later news broadcasts that would interrupt the regular features for the rest of the afternoon and evening.

I went back to Chambrun’s office with him and Hardy and Jerry Dodd.

“Was it anything but a piece of show business?” I asked The Man.

“We can only hope,” Chambrun said, “somewhere out there are people who really know something. If they heard, they know there is a way for them to get rich. They may have to think about it a bit before they make a move.”

“So all we can do is wait,” Jerry said.

“I find myself looking at people who are half dead from fatigue,” Lieutenant Hardy said. “You, Pierre, and Mark and Jerry have been on the go right around the clock. You look beat.” His smile was twisted. “I haven’t looked at myself in the mirror. I’m suggesting that all of us go somewhere and get some rest—forty winks, or whatever time allows. If anything turns up except greedy people trying to sell us nothing, we can be alerted and instantly on the job. If something important does turn up, we’d better not be in a coma when it happens.”

It didn’t seem possible that we could just shut our eyes and forget, but I knew how badly I needed it. Except for some brief shut-eye when I’d been with young Guy Willis in Chambrun’s penthouse, I’d been on the go since seven o’clock in the morning—of the day before! As far as I knew Chambrun hadn’t had even that much relief. Jerry and the Lieutenant had been at it almost as long. Sense or not, I was eager to take advantage of it. Chambrun agreed to stay in the little rest room off his office. I went to my apartment just down the hall. Jerry and the Lieutenant went to a special room at the far end of the hall that was kept in reserve for the security staff. The proper people on that staff, Hardy’s crew, and the switchboard operators were told where they could reach any or all of us at a moment’s notice. I know when I got to my quarters all I did was take off my jacket, hang it over a chair, and plop down on the bed. I knew I couldn’t sleep… and then I was gone.

It was still daylight when I opened my eyes. It was six o’clock, and I’d slept like a log for three hours. No one had called me. The phone is right beside my bed. I got up and switched on my TV set. The six o’clock news was on and my timing was perfect. They were showing a clip of the press conference. It showed little Guy Willis shouting at Rex Chandler and clawing at him. Drama in spades! Then the announcer came on to tell us that, as of that moment, 6:10
P.M.
, there had been no significant response to the rich reward offered for information.

I switched off the set, freshened up in the bathroom, put on my jacket, and headed down the hall to Chambrun’s office. A different girl from the steno pool was at Betsy’s desk. Seeing someone unfamiliar in that spot revived all my anxieties for Betsy.

“He hasn’t stirred,” the girl said, gesturing toward The Man’s office.

I wasn’t going to disturb The Man if he could still stay resting. At the other end of the hall is the switchboard, handled by four operators with Ora Veach in charge. The motherly Mrs. Veach has held her job longer than I’ve had mine.

“Half the world has been trying to get us on the phone,” she said. “Most of them we had to refer to the HOSTAGE number. Mr. Chambrun got one from the people who have Miss Ruysdale.”

That woke me up, but good. “When? What happened?”

“About an hour ago,” Ora Veach said. “We’d turned away a thousand calls for him. Everyone who saw him on television wanted to tell him something. This one sounded different, and the operator who got the call put me on. Smooth-sounding guy who said he had information about Miss Ruysdale Chambrun would need to have. We had special orders for that kind of call, and I plugged in the Boss.

“‘I’ll keep him talking, Mrs. Veach,’ he said. ‘You get the phone company trying to trace where it’s coming from.’

“We’d already set up a routine with the phone company, and I got things in motion. After three or four minutes I was able to listen in on Mr. Chambrun’s call.

“‘Let me hear your phony Russian accent,’ the Boss was saying. ‘Then I’ll know I’m talking to someone who matters.’

“The man on the other end just laughed and hung up. There we were, listening to the dial tone. I told Mr. Chambrun I was afraid there hadn’t been time to trace the call. He just said, ‘Thanks for trying.’”

“You hear the man’s voice?”

“No. Nellie Forebush took the original switchboard call, told me someone said he had information about Betsy. I got straight through to Mr. Chambrun. He told me to set the tracing in motion. I did. When I finally tuned in, Mr. Chambrun was telling the caller to use his ‘phony Russian accent.’ All I heard from the caller was his laughter when Chambrun said what he did. Then the dial tone.”

“Mr. Chambrun report this to Lieutenant Hardy or Jerry?”

“Not on the phone,” Mrs. Veach said. “But his office is just down the hall from them.”

“He’s supposed to let you know where you can reach him,” I said.

“You want me to call him?”

I didn’t. If he could have gone back to sleep after the call from Betsy’s jailer, he was entitled to it.

As I walked out of the switchboard office, I ran head-on into Jerry and Lieutenant Hardy coming out of the security room where they’d holed up.

“After a while you begin to feel guilty doing nothing,” Hardy said. “Anything at your end?”

I asked him if Chambrun had reported his telephone call to them. Hardy looked surprised.

“He must have thought it was just a crank call,” he said. “Let’s ask him.”

“He still hasn’t stirred,” the girl in Betsy’s office told us.

Chambrun wasn’t in his office when we went in. Just to the rear of the office is the rest room or dressing room where Chambrun had gone to rest. There is a cot there, a change of clothes in the closet and a chest of drawers, and shaving and shower facilities in a little bathroom. And, of course, there was the ever-present telephone on a small table beside the cot. Chambrun was never out of reach of a telephone. The switchboard always knew where to find him.

Except at six-thirty on this particular afternoon. Chambrun wasn’t in the dressing room. There were signs that he had been there. An ashtray on the table beside the telephone had a half a dozen crushed-out butts in it. He couldn’t have done much sleeping if he’d done that much smoking.

Jerry picked up the telephone, asked for Mrs. Veach, and inquired where Chambrun had gone. Mrs. Veach hadn’t been told anything, supposed The Man was still in the office or the rest room. The rest-room phone is just an extension of his office phone.

“How long ago was that call he got?” Jerry asked.

It had been about five o’clock, he was told.

The girl in the outer office had come on duty at four o’clock. She’d been ordered not to disturb Chambrun or let anyone else disturb him without special instructions from someone in authority. There’d been no such instructions, and Chambrun hadn’t left the office, not past her.

But he had left the office. The answer was simple enough. There was a door in that little rest room opening out into the hall. It had a Yale lock on the inside, and the only way you could get in from the hall was with a key. In all the time I’ve worked for The Man, I could never remember him using that rest-room door. He is a man of routines, and I don’t think he ever left the office that way because Betsy would be in the outer office and he’d always let her know where he could be found. Without Betsy there he might have chosen the most immediate way to leave, but he would surely have let Mrs. Veach know where he was going. But he hadn’t.

We didn’t begin to panic for about half an hour. No one had seen him anywhere. He hadn’t been seen in the lobby area or in the basement, where police were still very much in evidence. He wasn’t in his penthouse; nor, Vicky Haven reported, had he been seen since the press conference. He had chosen to rest in his office rather than in the comfort of his own quarters because he could get into action quicker from the second floor. He could be in any one of hundreds of rooms above the second floor.

“He could have taken an elevator somewhere, ordered the operator not to report seeing him,” Hardy said.

“And that operator wouldn’t report it, not even if God asked him,” Jerry said.

But why?

B
Y SEVEN O’CLOCK
that night everyone who worked in the Beaumont had changed his or her focus on the crisis. Never mind about a missing Air Force officer and his wife, never mind about bombs, never mind even about Betsy Ruysdale, one of us. Where was Chambrun? Why had he broken all his rules, ignored all his regular routines? It couldn’t have happened that way, most of us felt. Somehow the enemy had got to him. The only way they could get Guy Willis released, which they apparently felt was the only way to get Major Willis to talk, was on a direct order from Chambrun. Kidnapping Betsy Ruysdale hadn’t worked. Now they would put the heat on Chambrun himself. How did they get to him? They couldn’t have stormed his office. They couldn’t have dragged him, bodily, out of the hotel.