Nightmare Time (20 page)

“I haven’t been twenty-five for about ten years,” I said. “I’m not a hero. But I am a man. Tell me what I should be doing.”

She gave me a kind of strangled laugh. “You should be out there looking for the man who won’t turn and show his face in young Guy’s nightmare.”

“Be serious,” I said.

“I am serious. He’s right there. Take off that snap-brimmed hat and those dark glasses and make him look at you, and you’ve got him!”

“There’s only one problem with that,” I said. “He knows by now that we’re looking for that hat and those glasses, so he isn’t showing up around here wearing them.”

“Of course not. He’ll just be having a drink with you in the bar and you won’t have the faintest idea that you just bought a murderer a bourbon on the rocks.” She shook her head. “Then optimism overcomes me, and I tell myself that Pierre knows who he is, and is waiting for him to lead him to where Betsy and the Willises are being held.”

“But if that’s true, the man knows the Boss is on his trail, and we’ve really run out of time,” I said.

“I think I’d like it if you’d take your cheerful thoughts somewhere else, Mark,” the old lady said.

I
T WAS ABOUT
nine o’clock when I took my “cheerful thoughts” down off the roof. Just about twenty-four hours before, Major Willis and his Rozzie had been setting out to listen to a little jazz piano in the Blue Lagoon. Was it possible they hadn’t really expected any kind of trouble? They leave their kid alone to watch Clint Eastwood on TV and take off like a couple of youngsters on a date. Duke Hines’s rendition of “St. Louis Blues” was said to be fabulous! A few minutes later Tim Sullivan was dead, murdered in cold blood; Rozzie had been separated from her brooch that contained a way of escape for her if things got too tough, and God knows what she’d been subjected to to make the Major talk. Or was not a word of that the way it was? Was it all a charade acted out to make us think exactly the way we had been thinking? I remember wondering, just before I left Victoria Haven and the boy, if young Guy Willis could have been in on the game from the start and been acting out his own star performance. I had what Chambrun would have called a “gut feeling” about it. The boy was on the level. The Major and his wife were on the level. Unfortunately my gut feelings didn’t have the track record that Chambrun’s did. Chambrun’s instincts about a situation were never wrong. I was lucky if mine were right half the time.

My last words to the boy before I left the roof were half kidding. “You come up with a face for that second man in your nightmare, Guy, sound all the alarms you can get to!”

He took it quite seriously, promising he would.

The last time I’d wandered across the Beaumont’s busy lobby without any special destination I’d been flagged down by Mr. Cardoza outside the Blue Lagoon to tell me he had a young boy in trouble. Right after that my whole world began to turn itself upside down. It was still not anything I’d seen before. There were people everywhere, going in and out of the bars—the Trapeze and the Spartan—plus the grill, and Mr. Cardoza was stationed outside the Blue Lagoon. But these weren’t the fun seekers of a normal evening. These were rubberneckers, staring curiously at a bloody accident. This wasn’t the Beaumont, this was the scene of the crime.

Many of those sightseers knew who I was and stopped me with a flood of questions. I decided I’d better get out of there if I didn’t want to be buried alive. But as I was crossing toward the stairway that would take me to the second floor, to my apartment and Chambrun’s office, I saw something else that wasn’t normal. Johnny Thacker, the dayshift bell captain, was handling that job. Mike Maggio, the night captain, wasn’t there. It was probably reasonable, I told myself as I approached Johnny for an explanation. Both men had been going at it round the clock. They’d probably flipped a coin to decide who’d handle the early-evening rush. In passing, it might surprise you to know how many people, literally hundreds, were trying to get rooms in the hotel, not for its luxurious service or its famous guests, but because it was bloodstained.

Johnny’s explanation wasn’t what I’d anticipated.

“The Boss had to have left the hotel under his own steam, or been carted away by a killer,” Johnny said, “like Betsy. With all the ballyhoo on TV, radio, and in the papers, there are people who might be a little scared about coming forward with something they saw. There are people who won’t go to the cops about anything. Maybe they have something personal to hide, maybe they’re just anti-cop.”

“So what’s that got to do with you taking over for Mike?”

“Mike grew up a smart street kid,” Johnny said. He gave me a tight little smile. “Maybe just a little on the crooked side, until he tried to lift Chambrun’s wallet one night on a street corner. The Boss didn’t send him to jail, he reformed him and turned him into one of his trusted people.”

“A familiar legend,” I said. “So Mike took the night off?”

“Come on, Mark. Mike is trying to find the Boss. There is an army of street kids out there who still think Mike is some kind of a hero. Mike’s got them mobilized. People might talk to those kids, who are obviously not cops; kids can listen to conversations that obviously aren’t meant for them. To a lot of people, a black kid carrying a shoe-shine kit doesn’t exist. They’ll talk like he wasn’t there. Mike’s got his army all over the neighborhood. Someone had to see the Boss walk away from here, or be taken away. It took Hardy almost a day to find the guy who saw Betsy carried off. We don’t have that much time to find Mr. Chambrun. He’s too hot a potato for anyone to hang on to for too long. Mike hopes his kids may sniff out something faster than the police.”

“He’s told Lieutenant Hardy?”

Johnny shrugged. “If he ran into him he probably has. He wasn’t going to wait to ask permission.”

Somehow Johnny’s explanation made me feel good. People who cared were working, not just cops doing a job. I had an impulse to go out onto the street to have a look at “Mike Maggio’s army” doing a job.

There were more cops stationed to keep people out of the hotel than were working on the case, I imagined. There was no space in any of the bars or restaurants for more customers. It would result in a mob scene if they just let people in at will.

“You live or work here?” a cop at the north-side exit asked me as I started out. “You better be able to prove it if you expect to get back in.”

“It’s my address,” I said. “Driver’s license do?”

It was crazy out there on the street, people elbow to elbow, crowding, jostling, pointing, shouting. Every once in a while I saw a young boy milling around. I had an unkind thought about Mike’s army. There would probably be a hell of a lot more pockets picked than information gathered. I hoped I might see Mike somewhere. I was too exhausted to think clearly for myself. Mike might suggest something positive I could do instead of just being a question box for some excitement-hungry spectator.

I hadn’t gone more than a couple of yards from the entrance when I felt a hand on my arm. I turned and looked at a dirty-faced bum who was grinning at me. Then I realized it was Mike Maggio.

“Out for an evening constitutional?” he asked me.

“You had me there for a minute,” I said. “Johnny just explained what you’re doing out here, and I came out to have a look.”

“Trouble out here,” Mike said, “is that most of this crowd are people who came here after the fact. This mob aren’t the neighbors who might have seen something, these are clowns who’ve been watching their TV sets.”

“I think it’s great, what you’re trying to do,” I said. “But is there any real chance it will pay off?”

“You’ll never find out if you don’t try,” Mike said. Something about the look on his face under that applied dirt told me that he was hurting. He loved Chambrun, just as I did. “I watched the cops fumbling around trying to collect fingerprints to match against a master set they haven’t got. I watched those Air Force characters playing their hush-hush spy games, knowing all the important secrets except the one they want—where their Major is and who took him. I watched the hotel which is my life jerked around by bomb threats, people I care about murdered and abducted, and Jerry Dodd isn’t any closer than the cops or the generals.” He drew a deep breath and hunched his shoulders. “So—I figure I can’t do any worse than the others by coming out here in the street and trying to smell it out!”

“A progress report?”

“So far, not a whiff,” Mike said. Then he stiffened. “Oh brother, there’s one of my kids getting himself in trouble.” He gave me a tap on the chest with his knuckles. “See you around!”

He was instantly swallowed up in the crowd, and in the dim light from the street lamps I couldn’t see a trace of him or the kid who was “getting himself in trouble.”

I turned back toward the entrance, the glass canopy out over the sidewalk, brightly and skillfully lighted. Under ordinary circumstances that lighted area was a sign of welcome. Now it was a gateway to terrorism and murder. Pierre Chambrun, who knew it so well, who managed every detail to perfection, from a dinner for the President of the United States to the mending of a cigarette burn in a back hall carpet, was gone. It could never be the same again if we didn’t find him. Nothing could have happened to him in the hotel, I thought. It was absurd, but I found myself dreaming that the building itself would somehow have risen up to protect him. Doors would have closed that couldn’t be unlocked, walls and ceilings would have crowded in on Chambrun’s enemies.

When you start having such foolish thoughts as that, you’d better get away somewhere and try to make sense, I told myself. Better to get away from all these gaping gooks who were waiting, hopefully, for some butchered hostage to be tossed out onto the street for their pleasure, and find a quiet place where something really useful might take shape.

I walked slowly, just trying to ease my way out of the crowd, for almost two blocks before it began to thin out. I’d never have made it in daylight. Someone would have recognized me as one of the Beaumont’s staff and I’d have been buried under questions. Oh, there were people, and the movement was all toward the Beaumont. I guess that’s why I noticed a man on the other side of the street, on the far sidewalk, headed, as I was, away from the excitement. There was something familiar about him, but I couldn’t place it at that moment. A reporter leaving the scene to file a story? Someone who just didn’t have an appetite for sensation or a taste for blood? I don’t know why I kept speculating about him except that there was something about him, something about the way he moved, that was familiar. There was no way to recognize a face, hidden by a hat brim in the semidarkness.

Then the man turned and climbed the five or six front steps of a brownstone house. At the top of the steps he turned and looked back down the street toward the hotel. Reflected light from the great city was evidently a little brighter at the top of those front steps than it was on the sidewalk. No wonder he’d looked familiar. It was Captain Zachary.

I called out to him, waved to him as he turned my way, and started across the street to him. My intention was to tell him about my conversation with Romy Romanov and Pamela Smythe. Zachary stood very still as I approached him, hands jammed in the pockets of his tropical-worsted jacket. I was close to Chambrun, and Chambrun and Zachary didn’t hit it off, so it didn’t surprise me that the Air Force captain wasn’t prepared to give me a “good old buddy, buddy” greeting. His face had the stony look I associated with it, his mouth set in a kind of thin sneer.

“Just trying to get away from questions for a few minutes,” I told him. “Saw you across the way and thought I’d report to you about my conversation with Romy Romanov.”

“He provide you with some more alibis for himself and his little blond tootsie?”

“Well, not exactly. But some interesting suggestions.”

“Well, let’s not stand here,” Zachary said. “Somebody’s bound to recognize one of us, and we’ll be swamped with questions again.”

To my surprise he produced a key and proceeded to unlock the front door of the brownstone. Intelligence had probably taken over the building as some kind of headquarters, I reasoned. It was pitch-black beyond the door, but Zachary obviously knew where a light switch was located. It revealed the typical old-fashioned interior; a stairway leading up, and narrow hallway going back to a rear apartment. The carpeting was old, worn, and dirty. It didn’t look as if anyone who’d cared for the place had lived here recently.

As we stepped in, the door at the end of the hallway opened and a man appeared. He was a big, heavyset fellow, wearing a dark blue work shirt and slacks, what looked like a day’s growth of red beard on his cheeks, chin, and neck. What stopped me in my tracks was seeing that he was cradling some sort of automatic rifle or machine gun in his arms. As I stood there staring at him, I heard the front door close behind me.

“What’ve you got here?” the man with the gun asked in a deep, rasping voice.

“This is Mark Haskell, the P.R. man for the hotel,” Zachary said from behind me, “either the stupidest or the unluckiest man in the city of New York.”

I spun around, and he was giving me that sour grin of his. “You can call my friend Smith, or Jones, or Brown, or Red. I don’t imagine you’ll be carrying on any lengthy conversations with him.”

I felt myself grabbed from behind and subjected to a frisk for a weapon, which of course was a waste of time. I was painfully clean.

“You bring in very many more like this, Zach,” the man behind me said, “and we’ll have to start stacking them up like firewood.”

“I didn’t exactly bring Mr. Haskell on purpose,” Zachary said. “Either he followed me, or I just got unlucky.”

“Let’s get this light out,” Smith-Jones-Brown said. “Somebody may get curious if they see it from the street. Down the hall to the back room, buster.”

I felt the muzzle of that gun jammed into my kidneys, and I walked. Things were spinning around at a dizzy rate in my head. Zachary! Was he the mole, the betrayer from within that Romy had suggested? If he was, I was no more stupid than Chambrun, or Hardy, or Colonel Martin being caught off base by a slick move. I felt a cold chill run down my spine. Was I afraid for myself, or for Chambrun, who may have been caught off base just as simply as I’d been?