Nightmare Time (6 page)

“I’m flattered, but why am I honored with this information?”

“He trusts you. You got Mr. Chambrun for him when he was in trouble. There’s no reason that people you trust shouldn’t know your weaknesses.”

“Weaknesses?”

Betsy smiled again, this time for me. “A man doesn’t cry when he’s frightened. It would be shameful for anyone else to know except the people he trusts.”

“Poor kid,” I said. “He’s scared for his parents, and I’m afraid he has every right to be.”

“It’s that, and something more,” Betsy said. “I persuaded him to try to nap. He’d only been down for a short time when I heard him screaming. I rushed into the bedroom and found him sitting bolt upright in bed, sobbing. It had been nightmare time.”

“Not surprising, considering what he’s been through.”

“What bothered him most was that I’d caught him acting like an eleven-year-old kid,” Betsy said.

“Which is what he is.”

“He doesn’t think of himself that way,” Betsy said. She laughed. “Anyway, I canceled my multimillion-dollar loss by promising not to tell anyone but you and Pierre.”

Betsy and I didn’t have too much of an argument about who should take the nap. Chambrun would need her when the regular day started in the hotel. She could handle the business of the hotel almost as efficiently as he could. He wasn’t going to have time for anything but a murder investigation—unless it had been solved and the Willises were accounted for.

“Guy has dozed off again,” Betsy told me. “Just be where he’ll know you’re here if he has another nightmare. I’ll leave a call for seven-thirty. Relieve you by eight.”

I took a look into the guest room when Betsy had left. The boy was there, his blond head turning restlessly on the pillow. He must be dreaming again, I thought. Even as I thought it, he sat straight up in bed, saw me outlined in the doorway, must have thought for a minute that something had happened to Betsy and that I was a stranger. His hands went up to his mouth as if to stifle a cry.

“It’s okay, Guy,” I said. “It’s Mark Haskell.”

He lowered his hands. “Oh, wow! For a minute I thought it was—”

“Dreaming again?”

“Betsy told you?”

“Yes. She’s gone to take a snooze.”

“I—I was so ashamed,” the boy said. “To be crying just over a dream!”

“Dreams are sometimes scarier than the real thing,” I said.

“Oh, boy!”

“You want to tell me what it was? It may help you forget it.”

His lips were trembling, and I realized he was fighting tears again. “It was my mom and dad,” he said, his voice shaken. “They were lying side by side on the ground. I couldn’t tell if they were tied there or—or if they were dead. And—and there were two men beating them with clubs—or maybe baseball bats. And—and there was blood everywhere. Their—their faces were all smashed to a pulp, but I knew they were Rozzie and Dad.”

“Ugly, but a dream,” I said.

He looked at me, and tears had welled up in his eyes again. “One of the two men with the bats was facing me, and I could see who he was—that priest, Father Callahan. The other one had his back to me, and I never did see his face, but somehow—somehow I was sure that I knew him. I’m still trying to think who it could have been, because—because I was just starting to dream it all over again. I started screaming, sat up, and there was a man standing in the doorway. It was you, of course, but with the light behind you I couldn’t see your face, and for a minute I thought you were the other man who, with the priest, had been beating up on Mom and Dad. Of course, when you spoke…”

I put my arm around him and gave him a little hug. “Dreams are usually pretty easy to trace back,” I said. “Something that’s just happened to you, or you’ve seen, or read, or heard. The uncertainty about what’s happened to your parents, that gun-toting priest who tried to get you to go away with him, the murder of our Tim Sullivan; I suspect we’d all be having nightmares if we’d had a chance to sleep. You’re afraid for your folks, and that makes you dream the worst. It was just a bad dream, Guy. Not real.”

His eyes were wide, looking past me. I realized he was seeing it all again, just as clearly as when he’d dreamed it. His whole body was trembling.

Behind me I heard the front door open. It could only be Chambrun.

“In the guest room,” I called out to him.

He wasn’t alone; Lieutenant Hardy was with him. I sensed there was something new that brought them both here.

“I’m glad you’re awake, Guy,” Chambrun said. “There’s something I wanted to show you and ask you.” He held out his hand, palm up. I saw he was holding a brooch, a gold frame with a large red stone set in it. It looked like a gorgeous ruby. “You ever see this before, Guy?”

“It looks like Rozzie’s,” Guy said, frowning.

Chambrun moved his fingers and the scarlet stone popped upward, and I saw that it wasn’t a stone at all, just a cleverly painted piece of glass that covered a cavity almost as big as the inside of a thimble.

“It’s Rozzie’s,” the boy said. “She showed me how it worked once.”

“Did she tell you why she wore it?”

“She said she had it made so she could surprise anyone who got fresh with her.”

“Did she tell you what that surprise was?”

The boy shook his head. “She just laughed and said there’d be something in the ring that would surprise anyone who gave her any trouble. I thought it might be something like Mace. I’d heard about that. Some people carry it to throw in the eyes of a mugger if they get attacked on the street.”

“Can you remember if she was wearing this when she and your father went out last night?”

The boy shook his head. “I didn’t notice particularly. But she always wore it when she went out, like a good-luck charm. I guess I just stopped looking for it when they were going somewhere. I just took it for granted.”

I think I guessed what was coming and wished I could put it off. “Where did you find it?” I asked Chambrun.

“Room 17E, the next room on the same side of the corridor as the Willises’ suite. Do you know someone named Henry Graves, Guy?”

The boy shook his head. “I don’t think so, sir.”

“A friend of your father’s?”

“Gee, sir, Dad has so many friends all around the world that I’ve never heard of. There was no one named Henry Graves who was an ‘at home’ friend, a social friend.”

“About eight o’clock last night your father made a phone call to the front desk. Do you remember hearing him?”

“No, sir.”

“Had he left your suite for a while?”

“No, sir. But I was in the living room. He could have made a call from the bedroom phone.”

“Your father told the desk clerk that an old friend of his had arrived in town unexpectedly. He hoped we could find a room for him, preferably near 17C. By coincidence the guest in 17E had checked out earlier than expected. We’d normally have held that room for someone on the waiting list, but everyone knew that I’d want Major Willis given special treatment, so 17E was made available for his friend, Henry Graves.” Chambrun’s eyes focused on the boy. “Your father didn’t mention this friend of his, Henry Graves, to your mother in your presence, Guy?”

“No, sir.”

“You say you found that brooch in 17E, Graves’s room?” I asked.

Chambrun was obviously thinking way ahead of me. He sounded almost irritated as he answered. “We began the search for Willis and his wife on seventeen, working down,” he said. “I gave orders to search again the rooms we’d already checked out.”

“The possibility that the Willises could have been moved back to a place we’d already searched?”

Chambrun nodded. “So we started on seventeen again. There was no one in 17E either time we searched.”

“But the brooch wasn’t there the first time around?”

“Can’t be sure,” Chambrun said. “We were looking for people, not small objects like this. Second time around one of Jerry’s men just happened to see the brooch lying in the corner of the room. It could have been there the first time.”

“How does Henry Graves explain it?” I asked. “It certainly suggests that Mrs. Willis was in 17E at some point.”

“Mr. Graves doesn’t explain it because Mr. Graves is among the missing,” Chambrun said. “He wasn’t there the first time we searched the room, nor the second.”

“When did he check in?”

“Just after eight o’clock, just after Major Willis’s phone call to the front desk. Karl Nevers, the chief night clerk, was involved with a group that had just come in from Kennedy Airport. Miss Jacobs handled Graves’s registration. He had no luggage. He told her he hadn’t expected to be in town overnight. He said he’d buy himself a toothbrush and borrow a razor and some pajamas from his friend Major Willis.”

“Did your father leave some things—a razor, pajamas—for someone to pick up?” I asked Guy.

“No, sir.”

Chambrun sat down on the edge of the bed beside the boy. “There is no way to hide certain ugly possibilities from you, Guy,” he said. “If I’m not honest with you now you’ll hear it all in the morning on the radio, the TV, or read it in the morning papers. I think Henry Graves is a phony, like your priest. I don’t think your father called to reserve him a room. No way the reservation clerk could have known that the voice on the telephone wasn’t your father’s. I think this Graves, whoever he is, maneuvered your parents into his room when they left to go down to the Blue Lagoon. Was able to persuade them to go into 17E.”

“Probably at gunpoint,” Lieutenant Hardy said.

“Oh, wow!” the boy said.

“What I think your mother carried in that brooch, Guy, was a deadly poison. We’ll know for sure presently. There was just a trace of it left in the brooch, and the police lab is testing it out now.”

“Why would Rozzie carry poison?” Guy asked.

“I don’t know this for sure, Guy, but I think she had it to use in case someone planned to harm her to get your father to give away secret information.”

“How could she get anyone to take it?” Guy asked.

“Not anyone, Guy—herself. She could die painlessly, or at least quickly that way, and not be used to force your father’s hand.”

“I’m afraid that’s why the priest wanted you, boy,” Hardy said. “They no longer had your mother to use to force your father to talk.”

The boy’s whole body shook like a palsy victim. He was hanging on Chambrun’s arm as if his life depended on it. “Are you saying that Rozzie—that my mother killed herself?”

Hardy’s grim face offered little hope. “I’m sorry, boy.”

“But that’s in no way certain,” Chambrun said, briskly, like a man getting his second wind. “It’s a pretty sound guess, I think, that this man who calls himself Henry Graves is not a friend of your father’s, Guy. Oh, he may have posed as a friend, even convinced your father that he was a friend. But he was ‘the enemy.’ As such, he would have studied your father carefully and in detail, his habits, his likes and dislikes, how he might react if it came to a showdown. He might know about that brooch of your mother’s and how she intended to use it if it came to it. You think your mother would have the courage to take her own life if the danger was great?”

Tears had surfaced in Guy’s eyes once more. “Rozzie would have the courage to do anything she had to do if my dad was in danger or threatened in some way—or if someone planned to use her to make him betray some of the secrets of his job.”

“It was understood between your parents?”

“They never talked about it in front of me,” Guy said. “But when you suggest it may have been that way, I believe it could have been.”

“So your parents had been forced into Henry Graves’s room,” Hardy said. “Your mother was threatened, or actually attacked in some way, and she took the poison in the brooch.”

It was too much for the boy, and he lowered his face against Chambrun’s shoulder and wept.

Chambrun gave the boy a cheerful pat on the back. “There are other possibilities, Guy. As I suggested, Graves may have known a great deal of intimate detail about your parents. He may have known about the brooch. When he had your parents under his control in 17E, he may have ripped the brooch off your mother’s dress, dumped the poison out of it, and tossed the brooch into the corner of the room. Your mother no longer had her grim method of escape.”

The boy looked up, cheeks tear-stained. “Could that be?”

Hardy answered him. “My lab technicians are going over the room now, boy. If they find traces of the poison on the rug, or on a piece of furniture, it would make Mr. Chambrun’s explanation likely.”

“But if she took the poison, what did they do with her?” Guy asked.

The alternatives were obviously not pleasant to present to the boy. If she had taken the poison and was dead, how had Graves disposed of the body? How could they have taken her out of the hotel, alive, with hundreds of people looking for her? I asked those questions to satisfy my own curiosity.

Chambrun gave me the look of a patient parent trying to deal with a dim-witted child. “You’re not thinking, Mark,” he said. “Hundreds of people were not looking for the Willises from the time they took off from their suite at nine o’clock to go down to the Blue Lagoon until after one in the morning when Guy notified us that they were missing. That’s a stretch of four hours in which no one was concerned about them, looking for them, had any special interest in them. There are more ways than I can think of that they could have been moved around, alive or dead, in that four-hour stretch without attracting any attention.”

“How long had Tim Sullivan been dead when he was found?” I asked. “He must have been caught in the middle when they were moving the Willises around. No?”

Hardy answered my question. “The Medical Examiner thought Sullivan had been dead about three hours. He was found around two this morning, which would suggest that he was done in somewhere around eleven o’clock last night. But—that trash bin is as hot as an oven on warm, which makes it impossible to be dead certain. It could have been earlier, later—who knows?”

“It’s all my fault!” the boy suddenly cried out. “If I hadn’t fallen asleep watching the television I’d have let you know right after ten o’clock that something was wrong. I let them have hours to work on Mom and Dad!”