Random Killer (7 page)

“If you heard Chambrun, you know he thinks there must have been some base that they touched mutually,” I said. “I think he meant, for example, that they both contributed to the Red Cross, or to Jimmy Carter’s campaign fund, or were both opposed to some piece of legislation. The same base, without knowing each other or being involved together.”

“So far as I know, Hammond never interviewed anyone connected with women’s lib,” Dobler said. “The only legislation Joanna concerned herself with was equal rights for women. I don’t know where Hammond stood on that. Probably they both did contribute to the Red Cross, along with millions of other people. But anything that would account for this incredible kind of slaughter, no! They simply didn’t know each other.”

“It doesn’t have to be something that would account for it in our minds,” I said, “only in the killer’s mind. All we know about his mind is that it’s twisted out of shape.”

At that point Hardy reappeared from down the hall. He stopped by Nora Coyle and the police stenographer. She was just removing the headset from her soft dark hair. The stenographer had turned off the tape recorder.

“You satisfied with it, Miss Coyle?” Hardy asked. “Want to change anything?”

“No,” Nora said. “You asked me for facts and I’ve given them to you.”

“It’ll be transcribed and then you can sign it,” Hardy said. “But I need you where I can find you, Miss Coyle. New things will keep coming up. You and Mr. Dobler are our only sources for double checking.”

“Do I have to stay here?” Nora asked, her voice not steady.

I realized that she meant this apartment. She was apparently occupying one of the bedrooms down the hall.

“Certainly not in this suite,” Hardy said. “We have a lot to check out here.” He glanced at me. “Maybe Mark can find you another room somewhere in the hotel.”

“From all accounts there may be hundreds of them available,” I said.

“I’d be very grateful, Mark,” Nora said. “I’ll get a few things from my room.”

She took off down the hall.

“Pierre going to close up shop?” Hardy asked me.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “He’s going to get warnings to everyone but leave it up to them. He thinks—”

“I know what he thinks,” Hardy said. He drew a deep breath and turned to Colin Dobler. He gestured toward the tape machine. “It’s your turn, Mr. Dobler.”

I
THINK IT WAS
Noel Coward who said that no matter what a man and woman appear to be talking about on stage, they are really talking about sex.

Before that afternoon Nora Coyle and I had been involved in a rather casual fencing match. She knew what I wanted. Being rather expert at the game, she played it so well that I wasn’t sure whether she was going to say yes in the end or not. I guess I am old fashioned. Kids today just say to the girl, ‘Will you?’ and if the girl says no they go whistling off down the block to find someone else to ask. I enjoy the preliminaries. I’m not so hungry that I’m partial to one-night stands. I have said somewhere before that I am inclined to fall in love forever every six months. I guess I play the game in the hope that the show will have some sort of a run after opening night.

That afternoon was no time to think of game-playing with Nora. But I am a sinister bastard, come to think of it. Kindness and sympathy at this moment of shock might pay dividends in the long run. I would even be doing my job for Chambrun in the process. So much for my image as a white knight.

Nora reappeared with a small traveling case, which I took from her.

“Let me know where I can reach you, Miss Coyle,” Hardy said.

Nora and I walked out into the hall and to the elevators. The moment we were out of Hardy’s sight she was hanging onto my arm as if her life depended on it.

“I’m going to take you to my apartment,” I said. She’d been there before. She had, in effect, seen my etchings and survived. “There’ll be a drink, or coffee, or whatever you need. From there I’ll try to locate a place for you. To go down to the lobby right now is to walk into the middle of a riot.”

She nodded. She was fighting tears and suddenly she lost the battle. She clung to me, sobbing, as we waited for the elevator. By some miracle we inherited an empty car on the way down. We got off at two and I herded her down the hall to my place. There she collapsed in an armchair, still weeping.

She drank Scotch, I knew, and I fixed her a moderately stiff drink with soda. She took a sip of it, choked on it, put it down on the table beside the chair, and went back to fighting the torrent of tears. I pretended to be looking for something at my desk across the room. Suddenly I saw her bang her fists down on the arms of the chair.

“I’ve got to stop this foolishness!” she almost shouted.

“Why?” I said, drifting back to her. “Do you good.” I handed her my handkerchief.

She gave me a ghastly smile through her tears. “Scene from a movie,” she said, and blew her nose—in my handkerchief. Then: “Oh God, Mark, I found her. I saw her, you know.”

I nodded. “Don’t tell me. I saw Hammond.”

“Was it—was he—”

“Just the same, from all accounts.”

“She never hurt anyone in the world, except herself, and maybe Colin,” Nora said.

“Try your drink,” I said. “It could work magic.”

She drank, and the hurricane of tears seemed to abate. “Can you imagine walking in there and—seeing her—like that?”

“Rough,” I said. I went over to the kitchenette and made myself a drink. It was early in the day for me, but I decided I needed one, and she needed time to get in complete control. I have to say one thing for Nora. She looked pretty damned appetizing even when she’d been crying.

It all came out of her now, in a flood of words. “I’ve worked for her now for six years,” she said.

“You must have started awfully young.”

“I’m twenty-six, if that kind of statistic interests you, Mark.”

“You’ve aged well,” I said.

She shook her head as if to say she wasn’t interested in that kind of game. “A whole new world for me,” she said. “Travel—every place you can imagine in this country and Europe. I’d never booked a plane flight in my life, and suddenly I was a travel expert. But it was different from anything I’d known. An all-woman world. She really believed in it, you know.”

“Not enough to have done anything about it until she had the money to play the role,” I said.

“You’ve been talking to Colin,” she said.

“Not about that,” I said.

“I have to admit he got the short end of the stick,” she said. “She couldn’t front for the liberation movement and be a happily married woman.”

“But she kept him in her bed,” I said. “And he came whenever she whistled. For the money?”

“I think he really loves her.” She caught her breath. “Loved her. He took what she gave him in order to stay close to what he wanted.”

“Were they legally divorced or just playing that game for her public?”

“Legally divorced,” Nora said. “The record had to be clear in case somebody wanted to check up on her,” She hesitated, frowning. “He’s a very rich man now. She willed him a big chunk of her estate.”

“If you told Hardy that, it’ll make Colin a pretty solid suspect.”

“Hardy didn’t ask me that.”

“If he had, and you told him, his next question would be what did Colin have against Geoffrey Hammond?”

“I never heard either of them mention Hammond,” Nora said. “I don’t think Joanna knew him or was concerned about him in any way.”

“Chambrun thinks there must be some connection between them.”

“I don’t know what it could be.” She paused again, with that little-girl frown marring her forehead. “I used to watch some of his interviews on television. Joanna didn’t think much of him as an interviewer. Joanna thought he was always trying to sell himself instead of the person he was talking to. But she never indicated that she knew him or had ever had any contact with him. What could it be, Mark?”

“You’ve got me,” I said.

She emptied her glass and put it down on the side table. “I’m confronted with something pretty unpleasant,” she said. “This morning I had a job, a future, a well-organized life. Right now I don’t know where I go next.”

“You shouldn’t have any problems,” I said.

“You think not?” She gave me a bitter little smile. “If your policeman doesn’t solve this case in a hurry, everyone connected with Joanna will be a suspect in the public eye. Colin. Me. No one is going to hire a girl who might be a strangler.”

“Bull,” I said.

“Think about it.”

“All right. I’ve thought about it. I don’t buy it.”

Again that bitter little smile. “Fine. You got a job for me?”

“Could be. How about another drink?”

“I might as well be potted as the way I am,” she said, and handed me her glass.

“It’s hard to believe that this could happen to anyone,” she said, as I was building her drink.

“It’s happened to all of us,” I said.

“Not to you,” she said. “Would you believe this is the second time I’ve been in the same place with a strangler who used picture wire to do the job?”

I felt a strange little chill run down my spine. “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked. I handed her the fresh drink.

“The Sharon Dain case,” she said, not looking at me.

“Who is Sharon Dain?”

She looked up at me. “Don’t you remember, Mark, a couple of years ago, in a ski resort in High Crest, Colorado? The girl who strangled her lover with picture wire? It was the hot story of the day.”

It came back to me out of a dim past. Some tootsie living with a ski instructor someplace in Colorado. She’d strangled the guy. I didn’t recall the picture-wire detail. The girl had some big-name friends in the movie colony who tried to help her, but she was convicted of murder one, as I recalled it.

“What have you got to do with this Sharon Dain?” I asked.

“Not anything, except that I was there when it happened.”

“In Colorado?”

“High Crest,” she said. “It’s a fancy resort. One of Joanna’s liberation groups was holding a convention there when it happened. It was pretty shocking. I mean, we’d seen Sharon Dain and her boyfriend around in the evenings. Glamorous and something of a local scandal.”

“And she killed him with picture wire?”

Nora nodded.

“So everybody else at High Crest was connected with it just the way you were—which is not at all,” I said.

“I was connected a little more than some,” she said. “You remember an up-and-coming young movie star named Lance Wilson?”

It was a name I couldn’t put a face to.

“He came to me for help,” Nora said.

“Why you?”

“Because I was Joanna’s secretary. He wanted Joanna’s help. A lone woman being persecuted by male police, a male district attorney, a predominantly male community. That, Wilson thought, would be Joanna’s meat. He persuaded me to go to the local jail to see Sharon Dain.”

“And you, soft-hearted sucker, went?”

“Yes. I had to have facts if I was going to get any help from Joanna. And it was better to get them from Sharon herself than from her lawyer.”

“Oh, brother!” I said.

“Sharon Dain was a very beautiful, very sexy, very desperate girl,” Nora said. “She told me her ski instructor boyfriend—his name was Harold Carpenter—was a sadistic monster. He beat her up, threatened her life. In the middle of one of his sadistic orgies she strangled him to save her own life.”

“She drew her trusty picture wire and shot him down?”

“Something like that.”

“And you bought it?”

“I took it to Joanna, in any case.”

“And she?”

“Wouldn’t touch it. She told me, quite sensibly, that women’s liberation didn’t mean the freedom to commit murder. She got an anonymous threatening letter from someone after I told Lance Wilson she wouldn’t help.”

“Where is Sharon Dain now?”

“In prison—I think. She got a stiff sentence after she was convicted. As I remember, it would have been twelve to fifteen years before she’d be eligible for parole.”

It was far out, but a picture-wire killer had crossed Joanna Fraser’s path in the past.

“I think maybe we better go down the hall and talk to Chambrun,” I said to Nora.

Ruysdale was at her desk in the outer office when Nora and I got there. I wondered where the press and media people were who’d jammed up the place earlier, and learned that Chambrun, in spite of a storm of protest, had barred them from the second floor. Our security people were sealing off thirty-four, sixteen, and here. They couldn’t have been doing much about looking for a crazy man with a roll of picture wire in his pocket.

“Nora has come up with something interesting I think the boss should hear,” I said.

Ruysdale gave Nora a sympathetic look. “There just isn’t anything very comforting to say, Miss Coyle,” she said. I guess she saw that any kind of sweet talk would loosen the floodgates again. She picked up the phone on her desk. “Mark and Miss Nora Coyle to see you, Mr. Chambrun.” Then she waved toward the far door.

“How is the general climate?” I asked her.

“Warnings are out,” Ruysdale said. “They seem to have turned the tide. People not so anxious to leave. They’re like motorists rubbernecking at an accident.”

Chambrun was at his desk. His exterior never showed any signs of his being ruffled. He knew I wouldn’t be here with Nora unless she had something that might interest him.

“Please sit down, Miss Coyle,” he said, gesturing to the armchair beside his desk.

“It’s a coincidence that may not mean anything,” I said.

“Most coincidences don’t,” he said. “However, let’s hear it.”

Nora, in pretty good control now, told her story of the Sharon Dain case and Joanna Fraser’s connection with it. Chambrun listened, his eyes narrowed in those deep pouches. He didn’t interrupt or ask her anything. When she’d finished he picked up his phone and spoke to Ruysdale.

“Get Roy Conklin or Bobby Bryan in here,” he said, “whichever can move fastest.” He put down the phone and lit one of his flat cigarettes. “You mentioned an anonymous threat, Miss Coyle.”

“It was a letter, written on High Crest stationery,” she said, “available to hundreds of people, Mr. Chambrun, the way Hotel Beaumont stationery is available to any guests here.”