Nightmare Time (3 page)

“Willis talked to you when he checked in?” Zachary asked. “Told you the boy might be left alone and need help?”

“As a matter of fact, we had only the briefest telephone conversation,” Chambrun said. “He was busy, I was up to my ears. We made a date to have lunch here in my office tomorrow—today, that is.”

“He mentioned that he’d given your name to the boy in case there was trouble?”

“No, which suggests that he didn’t anticipate any trouble, doesn’t it?”

“In our business—intelligence—you can’t anticipate anything
but
trouble,” Zachary said. “Let me just say this, Mr. Chambrun. Willis has access to highly classified information that enemies of this country would give an arm and a leg to get. Willis could be a target for any kind of terror tactics imaginable that might force him to tell what he knows.”

“The boy mentioned Star Wars.”

“Not far off target, I think,” Zachary said. The grim lines at the corners of his mouth deepened. “There are always two sides to every coin. Willis could be tortured into giving away vital secrets. He could also be persuaded to sell them for the right price.”

Chambrun’s face showed his surprise. “Are you suggesting treason?”

“It may surprise you, Mr. Chambrun, to know that something like four hundred thousand people have access to some level of classified information. We’re supposed to check out on them, but it would take an army to cover them all more often than once every five years. Some carefully screened people get to know about really high-level stuff. Willis was one of those. But who knows what turns an apple bad in the barrel?”

“You’re suggesting that Willis, tested and trusted, is selling out on you?”

“I have to look at both sides of the coin,” Zachary said. “Willis can have, somehow, been abducted by the enemy. Or he can have gone bad, sold us out, and taken a powder before we could know he was gone.”

“Leaving the boy behind him?”

Zachary’s thin lips tightened. “Perfect screen if he wanted us to believe he’d been abducted. No? Boy in on the act, and perfectly safe with a grateful Pierre Chambrun ready to play ball. I’d like to talk to the boy as quickly as possible.”

CHAMBRUN, ZACHARY, AND
I signaled for an elevator on the second floor. A specially wired button would indicate to the operator that it was Chambrun buzzing and that he should direct any passengers he had on to take another elevator. The door opened and we stepped into an empty car, empty except for the operator, a kid named Eddie Naples.

“All the way, Eddie,” Chambrun said, and we started up.

Chambrun and Eddie and I knew that we wouldn’t go “all the way.” Rooftop security was in effect. The car would stop at the thirty-ninth floor, one down from the roof, the elevator door would open, and an armed security man would check on us. Get the right word from Chambrun and that security man would throw a switch outside the car that would let it proceed to the roof.

It happened just that way. We stopped at thirty-nine, the door slid open, and Captain Zachary found himself looking at a short-barreled automatic rifle aimed straight at his stomach.

“What the hell!” Zachary said.

“All okay, Mr. Chambrun?” Dick Matson, the security man, asked.

“Okay,” Chambrun said.

I knew the code. I knew that if Chambrun had answered, quite casually, “All okay,” it would have meant he was under duress from the passenger. Just “Okay” meant it really was okay. The elevator door closed, and we went up one more floor to the roof. Chambrun explained the precaution but not the code to Zachary as we walked across the roof to his penthouse, lights shining brightly in the windows. I knew Betsy Ruysdale would have chain-locked the front door on the inside. Chambrun didn’t even bother with his key, just rang the bell. After a moment or two the little observation window at the top of the door slid open and we were seen. Then Betsy opened the door.

Chambrun introduced Zachary. Betsy was smiling at the man. “You should have warned
me
not to play gin rummy with that boy,” she said. “He’s a whiz at it.”

We walked into the living room. Young Guy Willis was sitting at a card table. He and Betsy had been using poker chips for money, and most of them were piled up in front of the boy. He left them the moment he saw Chambrun, slid off his chair and came toward us.

“You know something, Mr. Chambrun?” he asked.

“I’m afraid not, Guy,” Chambrun said. “This is Captain Zachary. He’s in your father’s department in the Air Force. Colonel Martin sent him here.”

The boy’s pale blue eyes narrowed. “Would it be impertinent to ask you your first name, sir?” he asked Zachary.

“Clinton,” the Captain said.

The boy seemed to relax. “My father has mentioned you, sir. Do you know something that explains what’s happened?”

“Not yet,” Zachary said. “But I came up here to find out if you could help me.”

“I wish I could, sir.”

“So let’s sit down and talk about it,” Zachary said. He sat down next to the card table, twisted the goose-necked lamp beside it so that the light would shine directly in young Guy’s face. Police tactics, I thought.

“Do you know what your father’s business was on his trip to New York, Guy?” Zachary asked.

“Surely Colonel Martin could tell you that, sir,” the boy said.

“Of course he could. I’m asking if you knew?”

“My father never discussed any official business with me or Rozzie, my mother.”

“How would you know what your father discussed with your mother in private? They did have some private time away from you, didn’t they?”

“Of course,” the boy said, in a tone that suggested he thought Zachary must be an idiot. “What I’m telling you is that my father told us both not to ask questions about his official business. What we didn’t know we couldn’t be forced to tell anyone.”

“Has anyone ever asked you questions about your father’s business?”

The boy hesitated. “It wasn’t any secret that my dad is in Air Force Intelligence,” he said. “People would ask me if I knew anything exciting about what he was doing—mostly kids. They love spy stories. But I didn’t have anything to tell them.”

“Did your parents have any friends visit them here in the hotel?”

“There was Mr. Romanov. He lives here in the hotel. He came to say hello almost immediately after we arrived. He was there for cocktails last night—before my parents set out for the Blue Lagoon.”

Zachary glanced at Chambrun. “‘Mr. Romanov’ would be Alexander Romanov, the Russian portrait painter?”

“He did a portrait of my dad,” the boy said as Chambrun nodded. “It’s in our apartment in Washington. They were friends from some time long ago when my dad was stationed in Moscow.”

“This hotel seems a strange place for an artist to live,” Zachary said. “There must be better accommodations, studio-type, easily available.”

“Happenstance,” Chambrun said. “Romy was living in an artist’s colony upstate—Woodstock, I think. He came to New York on a visit, stayed here. On the north side of this building there are two rooms with large picture windows. I don’t know why they’re there. They were there before my time. Romy was assigned to one of them on that visit. He was delighted with it, the light perfect for painting. He got a yearly lease from us and has been there ever since.”

“You call Romanov ‘Romy’?”

Chambrun shrugged. “We have become friends.”

“My dad calls him ‘Romy,’ too,” Guy said. “I guess all his friends call him Romy.”

The corner of Zachary’s mouth twitched. “This is a perfect place for a secret agent from anywhere,” he said. “Close to the United Nations, meet here with anyone without attracting attention. Did your father meet privately with Romanov anywhere, boy?”

The boy stiffened. “Are you suggesting that my dad—”

“I’m asking if he met with Romanov privately.”

“If it was private I wouldn’t know, would I, sir?” A smart kid, our Guy Willis. He couldn’t be handled like a child. “I know Dad and Rozzie were planning to go to his apartment to look at some of his new paintings. I was at the Stadium watching the Yankees play the Red Sox. When I got back they told me I should ask Romy to let me see his new work. It was marvelous, they said. Romy promised he’d arrange it before he went back to Washington.”

“When was that to be?”

“In a few days. I don’t know exactly what day.”

Zachary looked at Chambrun. “You should be able to answer that,” he said. “How long was he checked in for?”

“As long as he wanted to stay,” Chambrun said. “He told me it was uncertain. I told him 17C was his for as long as he wanted it.”

“That’s unusual, isn’t it, for a place as busy as the Beaumont?”

“I owe him an unusual debt,” Chambrun said. “My life!”

The front doorbell rang. Knowing the details of roof security I knew only one of two people could be outside the door without Chambrun being warned in advance. It had to be Jerry Dodd, our security chief, or Victoria Haven, who lived in Penthouse Number Two and was already on the roof. Betsy Ruysdale went to the door, and it was Jerry Dodd. One look at his grim face and I knew something was cooking.

“I’ve been trying to check out on the B shift,” he said to Chambrun. “Most of them are home or out on the town.”

Chambrun explained to Zachary. “We work in three eight-hour shifts here at the Beaumont,” he told the Air Force captain. “The A shift works from six in the morning till two in the afternoon. The B shift from two in the afternoon till ten at night. The C shift goes from ten at night till six in the morning. The B shift would have been on duty when the Willises left their suite to go down to the Blue Lagoon, but long gone when we started looking for them. Dodd’s been trying to locate an elevator operator, a bellboy, a desk clerk—someone who may have seen them.”

“I’m afraid I found something I wasn’t looking for,” Jerry said. “Maintenance people dumping trash in a container in the basement—they found Tim Sullivan there, head smashed in like a rotten pumpkin. Very dead, I’m afraid.”

“Damn!” Chambrun said, his voice an angry whisper.

“Who is Tim Sullivan?” Zachary asked.

“Elevator operator on the B shift,” Jerry answered. “He was on the west bank of elevators, the one the Willises would have used to leave 17C. But that isn’t all I found.”

“Let’s have it, man,” Chambrun said.

“In the same trash container was a uniform of an Air Force major.”

There was a little cry from young Guy Willis, and he was suddenly clinging to me, the closest person to him. His fingers bit into my forearms like the claws of a frightened bird.

P
EOPLE WHO
didn’t know Chambrun well might have thought, cynically, that all that mattered to him was what violence like this would do to the reputation of his precious hotel. The truth is that what he cared for most of all was the welfare of “his people.” Major Hamilton Willis was a friend and he owed him a debt, but Tim Sullivan was one of his people, a member of his family. He could have told you at that moment what I had no reason to know until I checked—Tim had a wife named Eileen, a young daughter named Nora, and a cherished son named Patrick. He could have told you what grade in school those kids were in and how they were doing. I suppose he could have told us who their grandparents were and where they lived. Chambrun had that kind of information about hundreds of employees, from dishwasher to board chairman, as readily available to him as the programmed information in a computer. He cared about Tim and he was hurt and angry for him. He owed Major Willis and he would pay his debt by caring for the boy, but Tim had counted on him, on the hotel, to make his job safe and secure, and we had somehow failed him. Revenge isn’t a civilized notion, but I knew Chambrun was thinking of it. God help the person responsible for Tim’s death if Chambrun caught up with him.

“Homicide?” Chambrun asked Jerry Dodd.

“No question. I’ve already notified the police,” Jerry said.

Captain Zachary was somewhere else. “The uniform?” he asked. “Any way to be sure who it belonged to?”

“Simple,” Jerry said. “A nametag sewed into the collar of the jacket, the waistband of the pants.”

“Willis?” Zachary asked.

Jerry gave him a sour look. “You were expecting maybe Shirley Temple?”

“But no body?”

“Not yet,” Jerry said.

Guy Willis was hanging on to me so tightly it hurt, not physically but out of sympathy for the boy. He was whispering to me, urgently. “Why? Why would they take off Dad’s uniform?”

I didn’t want to give him the obvious answer. A body dressed in that uniform would be easily identified. A body not wearing it, mangled and tossed away somewhere, might not be so easily checked out. Chambrun was thinking along another line, and I almost thanked him for it—for the boy.

“They couldn’t have walked Major Willis out of the hotel in full uniform,” Chambrun said. “Raincoat, hat, gun in his ribs, and they could have walked him past Captain Zachary unnoticed.”

The boy turned in my arms. “Rozzie—my mom?” he asked.

“We haven’t even started to look yet, boy,” Chambrun said.

“I want to check out on the Willises’ suite,” Zachary said. “I’d like the boy with me. It could simplify things.”

“The boy stays here,” Chambrun said.

“I don’t take orders from you, Chambrun,” Zachary said. “The boy goes with me, if I have to get a warrant for his arrest!”

“Help yourself,” Chambrun said. “Only you’ll have to get back up here to serve the warrant.”

“You want to get in the way of national security?” Zachary almost shouted.

“I’m only interested in the boy’s security,” Chambrun said. “His father made me responsible for that. He stays here, protected by me and my people.”

“You want to fight the United States government, you must be off your rocker!”

“If the United States government wants to fight me here, in my hotel, they may find they’ve started World War Three,” Chambrun said. He turned to Jerry Dodd. “Let’s clear the decks here, Jerry, and go look out for Tim. Get Captain Zachary a key to 17C. He can search the suite to his heart’s content, but the boy stays here.”

“I’ve got to talk to the boy!” Zachary protested.