Nightmare Time (4 page)

“Here—with me present,” Chambrun said.

THERE WAS NO
possible way of keeping the grim discovery in the basement a secret, even temporarily. Almost two hours before, the search had begun for Major Willis and his wife and everybody alive and well and circulating in the hotel had been asked for a sighting. Reporters were already on the scene when Tim Sullivan’s body and the Major’s uniform were found. On our way down in the elevator to 17C, Zachary asked how long we could keep the press off our backs.

“Turn on a radio,” Jerry Dodd said, “and you’ll find they already know more than we do.”

The housekeeper on seventeen provided a passkey to 17C, and we left Zachary there and went on down to the basement where Tim Sullivan’s body was found. There was a swarm of reporters and curious rubberneckers, but the police had cleared them away from the trash disposal area where Tim’s body had been found. There was a familiar figure on hand whose presence, I knew, would please Chambrun. Lieutenant Walter Hardy of Manhattan Homicide, an old friend out of the past, was in charge.

“I seem to turn up here about once a year, Pierre, like Santa Claus—but not so cheerful,” Hardy said.

I suppose, like any other city, the Beaumont did have violence at fairly regular intervals. Hardy, a big, broad-shouldered blond man, looked more like a thickheaded professional wrestler than the brilliant investigator he was.

“Sorry to see you, Walter—but glad,” Chambrun said.

They had worked well as a team, those two, in the past. Chambrun, intuitive, with an instinct for the truth before he had facts to confirm what he guessed, and Hardy, a dogged, step-by-step investigator, never leaving a stone unturned along the way. Together I thought of them as unbeatable.

“Theories, Pierre?” Hardy asked.

Chambrun, I thought, didn’t have anything yet on which to base a theory. I was, of course, wrong.

“Major Willis is the key to whatever has happened here,” Chambrun said. “A man with secrets worth any kind of risk for an enemy to take. I don’t have any way of knowing how anyone knew what his plans for the evening were—mainly that he was going down to the Blue Lagoon to hear Duke Hines play his piano. But someone knew, I think. When the Major and Mrs. Willis left their suite, there was someone else waiting to take the elevator on seventeen. Once in the car, that someone pulled a gun, took charge. I think, when the Medical Examiner gets through with Sullivan’s body, you’ll find that a bullet was the cause of death, not the head wounds.”

“Already determined,” Hardy said. “Forty-five-caliber handgun, right in the center of his forehead. Keep guessing, chum.”

“I don’t think they want Willis dead. They want him alive so he can reveal the secrets they want so badly. They have him and his wife. They would use her to get him to talk. So it didn’t work quickly, at any rate.”

“You mean they’d torture his wife in front of him?” Hardy asked.

“Something like that. They knew it might happen sometime, and the lady was prepared to take it if it did.”

“Brother!”

“But these monsters realized they had another card to play,” Chambrun said. “The boy—Guy Willis. Harm the boy in front of his father and Willis might sell out the world!”

“So, why didn’t they take him?” Hardy asked.

“Guessing again, Walter. I think they took Willis and his wife out of the hotel.”

“With everyone watching for them?”

“Not at nine o’clock, Walter. We didn’t know anything was wrong until the boy alerted us at one o’clock this morning. They stripped Willis of his uniform and tossed it in that trash bin along with Tim Sullivan’s body, covered him with a raincoat, or dressed him in a suit they had ready for him, took both the Willises away in a car they had parked down here in the basement garage.”

“So they torture Mrs. Willis for three or four hours to get him to talk?” I could tell Hardy didn’t want to believe that.

“I don’t like to think of the alternative,” Chambrun said.

“What alternative?”

“If the Willises knew this might come sometime,” Chambrun said, “they might have been prepared. The lady carried—in a ring or a broach she wears—a dose of some kind of lethal poison. Rather than subject herself or her husband to some kind of brutality, it is agreed the lady will take the poison.”

“I repeat—brother!” Hardy said.

“So then their only chance is the boy. He may already be in my care. They can’t just run in and grab him. So we come to a gun-toting priest who didn’t make it. Now, if I’ll just get careless when I find myself looking for Tim Sullivan’s killer—”

“Where is the boy?” Hardy asked.

“Safe—as the saying goes—as a church. In my penthouse, with no one able to get to him.”

“All this without a shred of evidence,” Hardy said.

“But highly probable,” Chambrun said.

“So Sullivan tried to stop the kidnapping and was shot,” Hardy said.

“Or he knew the kidnapper, or the man is so distinctive-looking, a description of him would tell someone who he is—you, me, Captain Zachary.”

“The Air Force Intelligence guy? Dodd told me about him.”

“We haven’t exactly hit it off,” Chambrun said.

“Everybody wants a medal except a couple of suckers like you and me,” Hardy said. “I guess the next step is to search the elevator Sullivan was operating for fingerprints.”

“If we’re right, all this happened just about nine o’clock,” Chambrun said. “That’s when the Willises left 17C, according to the boy. Since that time, Walter, hundreds of people have traveled in that elevator. Prints over prints over prints. I suppose you have to check out for the record, but it’s a pretty long shot I’m afraid.”

Hardy nodded slowly. “How come if Sullivan was killed around nine o’clock no one reported him missing? His relief didn’t come on till ten o’clock, I understand.”

“I’ve got a man checking out on that,” Jerry Dodd said, speaking for the first time.

“If Sullivan was killed around nine o’clock,” Hardy said, “how come his body wasn’t found in that trash bin until after two o’clock?”

“Simple explanation for that,” Chambrun said. “Hotel’s at its busiest until around two in the morning. Maintenance people don’t start moving trash around from the various floors, from the private dining rooms and the closed shops, until about two
A.M.
That trash is brought down here starting then. An hour or so from now, an outside trucking firm comes in and empties this bin, taking its contents away to official dump sites.”

It was at that moment that I saw Captain Zachary arguing with one of the cops who was holding back the crowd of reporters and curiosity hounds. I called him to Chambrun’s attention.

“Air Force Intelligence is trying to get to us,” Chambrun said to Hardy.

The Lieutenant signaled to his man to let Zachary through. Zachary walked straight up to Chambrun, ignoring the rest of us.

“You and I got off on the wrong foot, Chambrun,” he said. “You think we could forget it and start over again?”

Chambrun’s face was a cold mask. “You need me for something, Captain?”

“We both need each other,” Zachary said. “You can tell me how this hotel works, which people of yours are above suspicion. I can tell you about Ham Willis’s world, and who might be involved in what’s happened to him. The answer to that is the answer to what happened to your man Sullivan.”

Chambrun seemed to relax. “We can give it a try,” he said.

“You can be helpful in something that seems important to me,” Zachary said. “I would like to talk to Alexander Romanov. If I confront him he’ll clam up. You’re his landlord, his friend. He needs an alibi for the evening. He might give it to you if he’s got one.”

“You’re suggesting that Romy may be a Russian spy? He’s lived here, like an American citizen, for two years.”

“Any Russian can be a spy if he gets orders from the KGB,” Zachary said. “Do what they tell you, or wind up dead or in Siberia.”

Chambrun’s shoulders moved in a faint shrug. He introduced Zachary to Lieutenant Hardy. “Walter’s in charge of the murder investigation,” he said.

“I’m trying to protect national security, Lieutenant,” Zachary said. “This Russian artist has made himself a friend of Major Willis. It would be duck soup for him to have led Willis into a trap.”

“I’ll go with you,” Hardy said. “We have to find someplace to start.”

ALEXANDER ROMANOV’S
suite with its north-light windows was on the tenth floor. There are only a half dozen people outside of Chambrun and some of the work force who live permanently in the hotel. There’s old Mrs. Haven in Penthouse Two, who bought her penthouse as a condominium long before Chambrun was involved with the hotel. There are four or five older people who have been given space on long-term leases. And there is Romy Romanov, a vigorous man in his midforties with a loud, joyful laugh and a flashing white smile, popular with everyone who works in the hotel—about as unlikely a candidate for a spy as I can imagine.

The four of us—Chambrun, Hardy, Zachary, and I—waited outside Room 1006 for someone to answer the doorbell.

“Sound sleeper,” Zachary said.

“It is going on three in the morning,” Chambrun said. “I wouldn’t want to be disturbed if I were asleep.” He put his finger on the doorbell and held it there. If Romy was in his room, he couldn’t ignore it forever.

“You can get a passkey?” Zachary asked.

“Of course,” Chambrun said.

It wasn’t necessary. There was a sound of the lock turning, and the door opened a crack. Romy Romanov scowled out at us. Then he relaxed.

“Pierre! What on earth—?” Romy opened the door a little wider and saw us all. He didn’t open up any wider to accommodate us. “It’s after hours for a party, Pierre. Do you realize what time it is?”

“I’m afraid I do, Romy. There has been a kidnapping and a murder. Everyone in the hotel will be questioned between now and breakfast.”

“Questioned about what?”

“In your case, Romy, the kidnap victims are your friends Hamilton and Rosalind Willis.”

“Oh my God! Are they hurt? Is someone demanding ransom! You said murder—?”

Chambrun identified Hardy and Zachary. “There’s no use talking out here in the hall, Romy. Let’s go in.”

Romy blocked the door opening. “I’d rather you didn’t,” he said. “Give me a minute to put on some clothes and I’ll go wherever you like with you.”

“There’s no point in making it difficult for Mr. Chambrun,” a pleasant woman’s voice said from inside the room. “I’m not at all ashamed of being found here with you, Romy. After all, I am over twenty-one.”

The lady turned on a light switch inside the room and there she was. I knew her instantly, a regular patron of the Beaumont. Pamela Smythe, the computer heiress.

“Mr. Chambrun, Mark—” Her smile was charming. “I don’t know these other gentlemen.”

She was wearing a flimsy negligee that did nothing to hide a gorgeous figure, golden hair hung down below her shoulders. She seemed totally unembarrassed.

“I’m sorry, darling. I tried,” Romy said.

“You’ve left us hanging on the edge of a cliff, Mr. Chambrun,” the lady said. “You mentioned murder.”

Chambrun gave it to her straight out. Tim Sullivan, an elevator operator, had been murdered. Ham Willis’s uniform had been found in a trash bin in the basement along with Tim’s body.

That seemed to convince Miss Smythe that this wasn’t some kind of game. Her smile faded. “The Willises’ boy?” she asked. “Is he safe?”

“You know the Willises, Miss Smythe?” Zachary asked.

“They’re friends of Romy’s. They had cocktails with us here—yesterday, wasn’t it, Romy?”

Romanov’s handsome face had become cold and hard. “You’re here, Pierre, because Captain Zachary suspects me of some complicity in this crime.”

“What makes you think that?” Zachary asked.

“You’re obsessed with the notion that anyone with any kind of Russian heritage is an enemy,” Romanov said. “You’ve been sniffing around my heels for about three years now. You haven’t been as clever about it as you imagine, Zachary. Friends of mine pointed you out to me and warned me about you more than two years ago.”

“Russian friends?” Zachary asked.

“It may surprise you to know that it was Major Hamilton Willis,” Romanov said. “We are friends from twenty years ago when Ham was a military attaché in Moscow. He said you were just doing your job, Captain, and that as long as I wasn’t an enemy spy—which Ham knew I wasn’t—I had nothing to worry about. ‘An American living in Moscow would be under surveillance. It’s no different for a Russian here,’ Ham said. So what is it you suspect me of, Captain?”

“You have cultivated a friendship with Willis,” Zachary said. “You have persuaded him that you can be trusted. If you wanted to maneuver his comings and goings you could, without any trouble. Someone tricked him tonight. Who more easily than a trusted friend? So, where were you at nine o’clock tonight, Romanov? And after that?”

Pamela Smythe stepped forward to stand directly in front of Zachary. “What is the phrase, Captain? ‘An officer and a gentleman’? Romy isn’t going to want to answer your questions, because he’s a nice guy. He isn’t going to want to tell you that I’ve been sharing his bed with him since about six o’clock yesterday afternoon.” She turned to Chambrun. “If you check, Mr. Chambrun, you’ll find that dinner for two was served in this room about eight o’clock. The waiter who brought it didn’t see me. I wasn’t, I suppose you could say, dressed for the occasion. I stayed out of sight while the waiter was here, but he must have known there was a woman in the next room.”

“How could he know that?”

“Oh, come, Captain! Dinner for two. And I like to think that the perfume I use is not unattractive. Or hadn’t you noticed?”

“You’re telling us, Miss Smythe, that neither you nor Mr. Romanov have left this suite since six o’clock yesterday afternoon?” Hardy asked.

“Precisely,” Pam Smythe said. She smiled at Romanov. “And if I were invited to stay for another twenty-four hours, I’d accept with pleasure.” Then back to Zachary. “If I tell you that Romy is an incomparable lover, would that make me a threat to national security?”

“Did you have any reason to know that Major Willis and his wife were planning to go to the Blue Lagoon last night?” Hardy asked.