Random Killer (19 page)

“Did she talk about it often afterward? After you’d left High Crest?”

“I don’t think so, Mark. I mean, not about that man. We followed the Sharon Dain case in the papers and on TV. Joanna still thought she’d been railroaded by a gang of insensitive males. But I don’t remember her talking about the man she saw. He hadn’t proved out. I’m telling you the truth, Mark, when I say I hadn’t thought about him for a long time, almost two years, until you reminded me of him just now.”

“Not even when you found her, killed the way Carpenter was killed?”

“You don’t believe me, do you?” she said. “Perhaps there’s no way to make you understand. I—I went shopping for Joanna that morning, personal things, hair shampoo, some—some coloring she used. A book she wanted at Brentano’s. I came back and I—I found her.” Her whole body began to tremble again. “Do you think I stood there, wondering if she’d been killed by a man she saw looking in a window two years ago, in a place two thousand miles away? I didn’t think of anything but getting help! Damn it, Mark, I was in shock! Your Mr. Dodd came, and then the police. All the questions then and later have centered on who might have joined her for cocktails, who her friends were, who her enemies were, if any. Do you imagine it popped into my head that she might have made drinks for a man she didn’t know, couldn’t identify, certainly hadn’t thought of for months and months and months? Of course it didn’t. That man hadn’t crossed my mind for almost two years and he didn’t then. I didn’t even think about it and reject it. Can you understand that?”

I supposed I had to. It made sense. And yet—“Now that I’ve reminded you?” I said.

“Nothing makes any sense, Mark!” And the tears came. “If that man she saw is the killer, she couldn’t have done him any harm. She wouldn’t have known him from Adam! You’ve got a policeman guarding me, but what possible danger could I be to him? I never even saw him at High Crest—with his back turned! Joanna may have talked to Colin about the man she saw, two years ago, but Colin never saw him, was never even at High Crest. Colin couldn’t harm that man, but you’re guarding him, too. Either one of us could sit down and have a drink with that man and not have the faintest idea that he was Joanna’s Peeping Tom. Don’t you see, it just doesn’t add up, Mark.”

It didn’t, but, somehow, I didn’t want to drop it. At least, I thought, I must present my notion to Chambrun and Hardy and let them reject it. There was no way I could foresee that it would be quite some time before I would get to that.

I tried to soothe Nora’s tattered nerves and then went out into the hall to head for Chambrun’s office. I came face to face with Chambrun outside my door. He’d just come off the elevator and was walking briskly, head down, toward his quarters. I was shocked when he looked at me. This was the hanging judge, his face a white marble mask. For a moment I thought he didn’t recognize me.

“We found Guido Maroni|” he said in a flat, cold voice.

“Good,” I said.

“In a trash barrel in the basement of his house,” Chambrun said. “Picture wire.”

He brushed past me and went on down the hall.

T
HERE IS NO WAY
I could have been everyplace at once. When I came to writing down an account of this grim and bizarre adventure there were key parts of it to which I couldn’t be a witness. One of them was the discovery of Guido Maroni. In a calmer aftermath I did get the details of those events from Chambrun and Hardy and Jerry Dodd, our security chief.

As I have reported, Hardy sent Sergeant Baxter to look for Guido and talk to his wife, Sarafina. Baxter was still working on the theory that Guido had gone out to buy a paper, run into some friends, been lionized for his role in the Hammond murder, and got himself potted. The trail faded out for Baxter after a while. He located the newsstand where Guido had bought a copy of the
Post.
Mrs. Maroni had indicated where Guido might go to buy his paper. She’d also told Baxter of a local pub where Guido and his friends were in the habit of gathering. She’d even given Baxter the names of several of Guido’s chums.

The newsdealer remembered Guido’s buying the paper. They’d talked for a minute or two about the murders at the Beaumont, which had made the headlines. Guido, the newsdealer reported, seemed to be in a highly nervous state. He could have gone to the pub that Sarafina Maroni had mentioned. Guido would have had to pass it on the way home, so the direction Guido took, with his newspaper tucked under his arm, didn’t provide an answer.

The proprietor of the pub was quite definite, however. Guido had not stopped there. The proprietor and some of Guido’s pals had hoped that he would, eager to hear the real dirt from the horse’s mouth. But Guido hadn’t ever come, not that night, nor the next day, nor today.

When Baxter went back to Sarafina Maroni, she went into hysterics. Baxter was swamped under a torrent of words, spoken in Italian, not one of which he understood. It was clear that she was convinced of disaster. Her wailings and moanings suggested she was already mourning her missing husband.

Baxter got in touch with Hardy. He needed a cop who could speak Italian. It happened that Hardy was in Chambrun’s office when the call came from the sergeant. He had taken Dick Barrows, the
Times
man, there to discuss just how much special consideration they would give him. He relayed Baxter’s call to them.

“I’ll go with you,” Chambrun said. “I know Mrs. Maroni and I speak Italian. She will trust me.”

Chambrun knows the people who work for him well, makes a point of it. Twice a year there was a huge party for the staff and their families. Chambrun knew what the status of all the marriages was, how many kids they had, the states of their health. He dealt compassionately with their problems. His door was open to them and they counted on him. That was the reason loyalty to him was so intense among his people.

Chambrun and Hardy and Dick Barrows went to the Maroni apartment on the Upper East Side. Sarafina Maroni was in a pitiable state. She took one look at Chambrun and clung to him for dear life. He held her, stroking her oily black hair, soothing her in her own language.

It came out of her in bits and pieces. Guido knew something he hadn’t told the police. Something about a man who bumped into his wagon when he was delivering breakfast to Hammond’s suite. At the time it hadn’t seemed important, but when he got home and thought about it, he decided it was something Mr. Chambrun should know.

“He would have come to you the next morning when he returned to work,” Sarafina said. Oceans of tears. “But he never came home from buying his paper.”

“He thought the man who bumped into his wagon might be important to me?” Chambrun asked.

“Si, si!”
Vigorous noddings. “He thought the man who bumped into his wagon might be the one for whom the second breakfast on the wagon was intended.”

“Did Guido describe this man, Sarafina?”

Guido had not. It would not have been important to his wife. “But he would have described him to you!”

The newsstand where Guido had bought his paper was only a block away. According to the newsdealer, Guido had headed for his home after buying his copy of the
Post.
That was about six o’clock in the evening, broad daylight.

“Have Baxter search the alleys between here and the newsstand,” Chambrun said to Hardy. “And then this house, from top to bottom.”

In less than an hour, while I was playing games with Parker and Nora, Baxter had found Guido’s body in the basement of the house, jammed into a metal trash can, strangled with picture wire.

Another of Hardy’s tortuous routines was underway, with cops questioning all the tenants in the Maronis’s building, storekeepers in the neighborhood, children who had been playing on the street. Who had seen what around suppertime the day before yesterday? With luck, in that kind of tenement area, someone might remember a stranger, a man out of place. Dick Barrows was working with the cops, trying to dig out his own story for the
Times.

I had followed Chambrun into his office after our encounter in the hall outside my place. He walked past Betsy Ruysdale in her outer room without a word. She and I followed him.

He sat down behind his desk, rigid, not looking at either of us, his face still that pale marble mask. Then he raised his right fist and brought it down on the desk so hard that everything on it jumped.

“I blame myself!” he said in a bitter voice.

Ruysdale didn’t have a clue to what he was talking about. I whispered to her the news about Guido. He told us then, briefly, what I have just outlined about his visit to Sarafina Maroni and the grim discovery in the tenement basement.

“I should have insisted on being present when the staff was questioned,” he said. “But we were faced with panic here in the hotel.”

“What difference would it have made?” I asked.

“Guido Maroni would have kept his cool if I’d been there,” Chambrun said. “He trusted me. Like most people of his kind, cops were the enemy to him. He answered what they asked him, offered nothing of his own. Perhaps he hadn’t thought it through. I don’t even know what they asked him, for God sake! My first question would have been had he seen anyone who might have been the breakfast guest?”

“Surely Hardy or Baxter—” I began.

“Nothing is sure unless you are there yourself,” Chambrun said. “Guido undoubtedly had a bad case of hysterics. He’d found the body, eyes popping out, tongue protruding. All he wanted to do was get out of there, get away, get home.” He turned to Ruysdale. “Get Jerry Dodd here as fast as you can. Call Ray Dominic and get him here, too.” Dominic is the headwaiter in charge of room service. Ruysdale took off for her own phone.

Chambrun had pulled a yellow pad toward him and was making notes on it in great bold strokes. “It was eight o’clock when Guido arrived on the thirty-fourth floor with Hammond’s breakfast. He bumped into a stranger in the hallway. In view of what’s happened we have to think that was the killer.” He drew an angry line under what he had written. “We don’t know the exact time Hammond was killed, but it was before ten o’clock, which was when Guido found him. Two hours later Joanna Fraser was making martinis for that same killer. Nora Coyle found her dead at about one o’clock. Within the space of five hours, eight to one o’clock, our man has managed two murders. No fingerprints, no trace of anything to lead to him. A careful man. But there was one thing he couldn’t have prepared for.”

“Bumping into Guido?”

“Right!” Another savage line across the pad. “Guido might have mentioned it, might even have described him. But until Guido could actually point a finger at him he was safe. What should the next question be, Mark?”

“How did he find Guido?” I suggested.

“Good man,” Chambrun said. “He wouldn’t know Guido’s name, unless he’s a guest in the hotel who may have been served by Guido. The man has certainly been practically living in the Beaumont the last three days, whether or not he has a room here. But knowing Guido’s name wouldn’t lead him to the tenement where Guido lived. He had to ask someone.”

“Who would give it to him?”

“Some plausible story might pry it out of someone,” Chambrun said. “Something that looked like doing a favor for Guido. We have rules about giving out addresses, but rules are made to be broken. However he got the address, he got it. He is hanging around Guido’s tenement when Guido goes out to buy his paper, follows him back to the house, and attacks him in a dark hallway. From behind, as usual. Drags the body down to the basement and stuffs it in a barrel.”

Another line slashed across the page.

“He’s safe then,” Chambrun said, “to stay around the hotel.”

“Why isn’t he long gone?” I asked.

“A guess,” Chambrun said. “He couldn’t leave because he would be missed. Because leaving would attract attention to him.”

“Someone on our staff?”

“I’d bet against it,” Chambrun said. “If you want to follow that line, Mark, get me a list of our people who spent the skiing season at High Crest two years ago. The man we’re looking for was there. No, Mark, he’s not one of ours.”

“So he stays in the hotel, sees Ziegler-Davis wandering around, and knows he’s in trouble again,” I said. “Ziegler could identify him.”

“On the contrary, if we’re right he couldn’t. Ziegler hadn’t any idea what he looked like.”

“So why didn’t he just ignore Ziegler?”

“Ask him when we catch up with him,” Chambrun said. “Because I promise you we will, Mark. Guido was my friend and employee, the others were my guests. If I don’t get him, I wouldn’t have the gall to sit in this chair any longer.”

Jerry Dodd and Raimondo Dominic, an elegant head-waiter type, came in together, followed by Miss Ruysdale. Chambrun told them what had happened to Guido.

Jerry reacted with a kind of tight-lipped anger. He was responsible for security in the hotel and he had to feel that someone was making him look like an incompetent fool. Dominic looked shocked. Guido had been one of his crew.

“It’s hard to believe,” he said.

“Believe,” Chambrun said grimly. “I saw the poor bastard stuffed in a garbage can. But you see where we’re at, both of you? Guido had an encounter with the killer just before he served Hammond his breakfast. Any gossip in your section, Ray?”

“About that? No.” Dominic shook his head. “I took the order for breakfast from thirty-four-oh-six myself. Juice, eggs and bacon, toast and coffee for two. On the phone the man said he was ‘Mr. Conklin.’ I learned later that Hammond was registered under that name.”

“He was,” Chambrun said. “A ‘John Smith’—with our knowledge.”

“He asked to be served promptly at eight o’clock,” Dominic said. “I’d have to look at the slip, but I guess his call came about twenty minutes past seven. Thirty-four and thirty-five were the floors Guido was assigned to. It was routine for him to deliver the order to thirty-four-oh-six.”

“When he came back from making that delivery, did he have anything to say?” Chambrun asked. “Bumping into someone or being bumped into?”

“No,” Dominic said. “I saw him when he came back. He was in a lather. Eight o’clock is our busiest time. Everybody wants breakfast at the same moment. Guido had other orders to deliver. He just went about his business.” Dominic gave Chambrun a sad little smile. “He always talked to himself a mile a minute in Italian when he was rushed. But it was just his usual complaint that God put too many burdens on his shoulders. Afterward—” and Dominic raised his hands in a helpless gesture.