Nightmare Time (5 page)

“As a matter of fact, I did,” Romanov said. “They invited me to go with them.” He glanced at Pam Smythe. “I told them I had other plans for the evening.”

“But you could have passed on the Willises’ plans to someone else who might want to know them,” Zachary said.

“I could have, but I didn’t,” Romanov said. He wasn’t smiling anymore. “Ham Willis is my friend. I’m just as eager to find out what’s happened to him as you are. I would help if I could, but I can’t as long as you waste time trying to tie me into it.”

“Can you tell us who might be after classified information that Major Willis may have?” Hardy asked.

“I could give you a list of names,” Romanov said, “which, I may add, doesn’t include mine. But Captain Zachary can produce that same list out of his files. I suspect certain of my countrymen of working for the KGB, but I’m not involved with them, nor do I share their secrets. I have lived as an American for the last five years, and I think of myself as an American.”

“That’s what you would say whether it’s true or not,” Zachary said.

Romanov’s patience appeared to be wearing thin. He spoke directly to Chambrun. “If anyone could have an instinct for the truth about me, it would be you, Pierre. Do you think I’m an enemy agent? If you do, kick me out of your hotel. I will have betrayed your hospitality. If you don’t, get this clown off my back and let me help you find the Willises.”

“I’d like to help, too,” Pam Smythe said. “They’re such very nice people.”

“You’d both be well-advised to stay out of it,” Chambrun said. “These people, whoever they are, play for keeps. But—yes, I have a gut feeling about you, Romy. I’m not going to kick you out of the hotel. If Captain Zachary wants to keep on questioning you, I won’t prevent it. I am going to join my staff now in trying to find some clue as to how the Willises were spirited away.”

“You think they may still be alive?” Romanov asked.

“I think that way because I want to think that way,” Chambrun said. “I prefer to assume that I’m on a rescue mission, not searching for dead people.” He turned to Hardy. “I’m headed for the basement garage to see if anyone down there remembers anything of importance.”

“I’m with you,” Hardy said. Then to Romanov, “I have to ask you and Miss Smythe not to leave the hotel until I can get back to you.”

“I wouldn’t dream of leaving,” Pam Smythe said. “The night’s still young.” She slipped an arm through Romanov’s and looked up at him, flirtatiously provocative.

“Brazen bitch!” Zachary said when Chambrun, Hardy, and I were with him in the outside hall.

Chambrun’s smile was thin-lipped. “She couldn’t avoid being found with Romy,” he said. “What was she supposed to say to us? ‘I was just waiting for a bus’? I don’t think there are any doubts about motives in this case, Captain. It’s even possible that Romanov is part of a network of information gatherers for the KGB. But the fact is that he wasn’t physically involved with the abduction of the Willises. The lady gives him a perfect alibi.”

“I’d like to be left alone with him with a hot iron up his behind until he was ready to tell us what he knows,” Zachary said.

Chambrun stopped in his tracks and faced the Air Force man. “You haven’t asked me where I was at nine o’clock, Captain. Don’t you suspect me? I let Romanov live in my hotel.”

CHAMBRUN MADE IT
very clear on the way down to the basement garage how he felt about the situation. He was talking to Lieutenant Hardy, but Zachary and I were there to hear it.

“There isn’t any doubt about the motive for the abduction of Ham Willis and his wife,” he said. “Someone wants information from him that only he has. The boy spoke about Star Wars—information about secret technology for the ultimate destruction of any enemy. There can be a horde of agents involved. My only hope is that someone slipped up somewhere along the way, leaving us a clue as to how the Willises were taken and where they are now. I’m only concerned with finding them before it’s too late. Identifying enemy spies is your job, Zachary. Finding Ham Willis is mine. I owe him.”

“If you two would stop arguing with each other, we might have a better chance,” Hardy said.

“You’re right, of course,” Chambrun said. “Bury the hatchet, Zachary?”

“Do I have a choice?” Zachary asked.

Later I knew that Chambrun was hoping that the Willises were being held somewhere in the hotel. Willis, a man of real courage, would have been difficult to get out of the hotel in front of people who would be watching, no matter how casually. You didn’t get a car out of the basement garage without involving an attendant. You checked a car in, were given a ticket, and the car was parked for you by an attendant. You didn’t get it out without presenting that ticket, when an attendant would deliver the car to you. All Willis would have to do was shout at the attendant that he was being taken away against his will. He would know that if he and his wife were taken away, they were as good as dead.

“Or he would take the chance that by spilling the beans to these people when they got him away he might save his wife, if not himself,” Zachary said.

“I don’t think so,” Chambrun said. “I think they were prepared every day of their lives for that kind of emergency. I suggested before how Mrs. Willis might be prepared.”

“But if you search the hotel from top to bottom, as Jerry Dodd is doing—” Hardy said.

“Needle moving around in a haystack,” Chambrun said. “There can be half a dozen of these KGB people registered in the hotel under phony identities. We search a room, move on, and the Willises are moved to a room or suite we’ve already searched and won’t go back to. But if that isn’t it, garage attendants who were on at nine or ten o’clock may have something for us.”

“If they do, then we have a whole city to search,” Hardy said.

“Then we’ve had it,” Chambrun said.

“Let them take the boy, stick close, and maybe we haven’t,” Zachary said.

“Nobody’s going to take that boy,” Chambrun said. “That’s what I really owe Willis. He trusts me to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“If Willis is willing to give away military secrets, why protect his boy?” Zachary asked.

“Willis and his wife are ready to hold the fort unless we provide the enemy with a weapon—the boy,” Chambrun said. “That I’m not going to do, whether you like it or not, Captain.”

Garage attendants on the A and B shifts had been found and returned to the hotel. Not one of them was missing. There were a dozen men who’d been on the job at the critical time. It was difficult to get to ask them questions, they were so full of their own. Tim Sullivan’s murder was what concerned them. Chambrun finally got them quieted and ready to answer his questions.

“There is no way the Willises could have been walked out of the hotel through the lobby and to a waiting car or taxi,” Chambrun said. “If they were taken away from the hotel, it seems to us it had to be down here, in a car parked in the garage.”

Dick Matson, the gray-haired foreman of the garage operation during the busy hours of the evening, had held his position for long before I ever went to work for Chambrun. The underground world of the parking garage was his special province, and he was proud of its efficiency.

“Nine o’clock at night is one of our busiest times,” he said. “People leaving after dinner, people coming in for the evening’s fun. My guys wouldn’t be liable to notice anything special unless there was a commotion.”

“And no commotions last night?” Chambrun asked.

“Not that were reported to me—and it would be,” Matson said.

“Explain to Lieutenant Hardy and Captain Zachary just what the routines are down here, Dick,” Chambrun said.

“We aren’t lit up down here like a stage set, as you can see,” Matson said. “The entrance is across the way—over there at the north side of the building. The person wanting to park drives in. An attendant approaches him, asks when the owner expects to check out, gives him a claim check, and takes over the car. There’s a platform or walk over there like the one we’re standing on here. The owner leaves on foot for the elevators that will take him up into the hotel. When he’s ready to leave, he comes down to this side.” Matson pointed. “There’s a cashier’s window over there. The owner pays for whatever time he owes, walks out here, and gives his paid claim check to an attendant, who gets his car for him. When the car is delivered here, the owner takes over. He drives out over there, stopped by a security guard who checks his paid claim check and turns him loose.”

“So if a man was being taken out at gunpoint, he’d have several chances to ask for help,” Hardy said.

Matson nodded. “At the cashier’s window, to the attendant who gets the car, to the guard at the exit who gives them final clearance.”

“A lot of people who park here regularly must be familiar to you,” Zachary said.

“I suppose there are hundreds of them, but we don’t know most of them by name. Of course, if it’s a well-known movie star, or a politician who gets on TV a lot, we know his name. But let me tell you, Captain, a big percentage of the cars that are parked here are driven by chauffeurs.”

“They don’t park their own cars?”

“No one drives a car inside this place, beyond the entrance gate and to the exit, except a trained attendant. We’d have a traffic jam forever if we let it be any other way.”

“But you know a lot of them?”

Dick Matson grinned at the Captain. “The good tippers we remember.”

“They get better service?” Zachary asked.

Matson glanced at Chambrun. “Everybody gets the same service. The good tippers get remembered with a wider smile, that’s all.”

“There had to be at least four people in the car we’re looking for,” Hardy said. “Probably five. Major Willis and his wife, a driver for the car, and two men holding guns on their prisoners. Wouldn’t your people be likely to remember a group like that?”

“I can check it out,” Matson said. “It would be noticeable because mostly just a driver picks up a car. If he has passengers, he drives out to the front entrance of the hotel and picks them up there.”

“Almost certainly these people wouldn’t have had the Willises hanging around the front entrance, in the main stream of traffic,” Chambrun said. “Check it out, Dick. See if anyone remembers a woman and four men coming down here to pick up a car.”

“Could be two women and three men,” Zachary said. “No reason an extra woman couldn’t have been involved.”

Not to make it a matter of suspense, I can report here that Matson couldn’t find an attendant who had served any such group leaving the garage area from nine o’clock the night before until now, which was about three in the morning. This tended to support Chambrun’s theory—or was it a hope?—that the Willises were being held somewhere in the hotel.

Zachary wasn’t buying. “These people aren’t dummies,” he said. “They could have had more than one car parked down here. One man takes out Major Willis—just two people. Later another one takes out Mrs. Willis. Just two! Two people wouldn’t be so unusual coming down here to take off, would they, Matson?”

Matson had to admit that two people coming down for their car after a night of fun in the hotel wouldn’t have attracted any particular attention.

“You go to your church, Zachary, which is the whole city of New York,” Chambrun said. “I’ll stay in mine, which is the Beaumont. There’s just a chance we could still get lucky here.”

CHAMBRUN TOOK OFF
to locate Jerry Dodd and give the orders that would have hotel security rechecking on the areas they’d already checked, on the theory that the kidnappers could have thought of moving the Willises to a place that had already been cleared. Before he left, he had orders for me.

“I want you to go up to the penthouse, Mark. I don’t want that boy left with anyone but you or Betsy. And Mark, one of the worse dangers for us in this kind of situation is fatigue. You and Betsy have been going full speed ahead since you came to work yesterday morning—seventeen, eighteen hours. One of you needs some rest.”

“How about you, Boss? You’ve been going as long as we have.”

“My motor hasn’t started to run down yet,” Chambrun said. “In my case someone I really care for is in bad trouble. I couldn’t sleep if I tried. Check it out with Betsy. One of you take three or four hours off and then relieve the other one.”

“I’ll give Betsy the first crack at some shut-eye,” I said. “You’ll need her more than you’ll need me as the day wears on.”

“I hope to God I won’t need either one of you as the day wears on,” Chambrun said. “If we don’t find Ham Willis and his wife in a very short time—” Chambrun’s shoulder shrug had a kind of angry jerk to it. “Young Guy Willis is important to me, Mark. Treat him as if he was my own kid.”

When roof security is in effect, I am one of three people who can get by the blockade without a direct order from Chambrun, the others being Betsy and Jerry Dodd. The lights were still burning in the living room windows of Chambrun’s penthouse when I came out onto the roof. I have a key, so I let myself in without ringing the doorbell.

“Is that you, Mark? Or is it Jerry?” Betsy called out from the living room. She had a special way, apparently, of sensing that it wasn’t Chambrun. In passing, let me say that it has been said of me, not too kindly, that I fall in love forever every few months of my life. Perhaps the reason for that is that the woman I could really be in love with forever is beyond my reach. If the man in Betsy Ruysdale’s life had been anyone but Pierre Chambrun, I would have been full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes.

There is something about a tired woman—the dark shadows under the eyes, the suggestion that resistance is low—that makes her particularly sexy for me. That’s how Betsy looked to me in the early hours of that morning, but it was no time for dreaming.

“All okay?” I asked, looking around for the boy.

“In the guest room,” Betsy said. She smiled. It was a tender smile, but for the boy, not me. “I lost over four million dollars to him playing gin rummy. Pierre should have warned me, not him. But I found a way to pay him off.”

“Oh?”

“He will call it quits if I don’t tell anyone but Pierre and you that I found him crying.”