Walking Dead Man (14 page)

“Neat,” Chambrun said. The corner of his mouth moved in a tight smile. “Going to make an unhappy story for you, friend, when the press gets hold of it. The bomb which killed the wrong man was delivered by a police detective.” He turned back to Butler. “Some time ago, in Cannes, Maxie Zorn came to visit Mr. Battle. With him were Peter Potter, who had once worked for Battle, and Richard Cleaves. The appointment was with Zorn. The other two weren’t admitted until George—Mr. Battle—had given you the green light Right?”

“Right. But afterwards—”

“Afterwards you were ordered not to let Cleaves inside the grounds again. How about Potter?”

“You got to understand something,” Butler said. “No one was ever let in without an okay from Mr. Battle—not even his mother if he had one. There were no old friends who just dropped in. The thing that was different about Cleaves—well, Mr. Battle acted real scared of him. He seemed to think he might have some trick for getting in. He said—and this sounds crazy—that if he, Mr. Battle, was to tell me, right to my face, to let Cleaves in, I wasn’t to do it. It didn’t make any sense, but I kept an eye out for Cleaves.”

“He didn’t show again?”

“No. Then I heard he was here in the hotel. That’s another reason I effing well didn’t fall asleep on the job last night.”

That seemed to be all there was to get from Butler. An all-around pretty odd story. When we got back to the sitting room, Jerry Dodd was there. He was talking to Shelda over by the phone. Battle was still sitting on the couch, with two cops standing directly behind him. Jerry joined us.

“Christ, what a mess here,” he said.

“You find out anything?” Chambrun asked.

“For what it’s worth. The room you were held in, boss, was rented for a week in advance by a man named Smith. What else! About six feet tall, the landlady says; blue eyes, light brown hair, maybe thirty-five years old.”

Chambrun and Hardy exchanged glances. The letter man.

“The old lady is something of a lush,” Jerry said. “Spends most of her time in a basement apartment sucking on a gin bottle. This Smith character paid her in cash and she says she never saw him again. Never happened to run into him in the building. She had no reason to check on him because he still had four days to go on his advance payment. She isn’t curious as long as the gin holds out. So maybe we have a kind of description of Stocking Mask.”

“Twice over,” Hardy said, and told Jerry about the mail deliverer.

“Maybe you’ll find fingerprints on the letters,” Jerry said.

Hardy didn’t brighten. “Have you looked in the other room?” he asked.

Then the doorbell rang and the people from the bomb squad were there.

A little later we had a report from Captain Carlson of the bomb squad. From the bits and pieces they’d been able to sweep up there was no doubt it was a letter bomb.

“A very sophisticated piece of equipment,” Carlson said. He was an efficient-looking gray-haired man in his late fifties. I learned later he’d spent most of World War II in the army, defusing live bombs that had fallen on the city of London and either failed to go off, or were equipped with delayed firing mechanisms. He had spent most of his life, seconds from death, working with a watchmaker’s precision to save his own life and thousands of others. He knew all there was to know about bombs, large and small.

“It had to be put together by an expert,” Carlson told us. “This was no homemade piece of junk that kids might build. It had to take pretty rough handling—travel in the mail, tossed around by the deliverer. It would only go off when the flap was ripped open, theoretically by the person it was addressed to. Ordinarily no one opens a birthday card except the birthday boy.”

“The letters were faked,” Hardy said. “By that I mean they didn’t come through the regular mail delivery to the hotel. I saw them before the explosion. They were addressed to the hotel; they appeared to have postmarks. I mean, nothing looked odd about them. But we know they didn’t come through the mail to the hotel.”

“I don’t know what we can produce for you,” Carlson said. “That poor devil in there was evidently holding all the letters in his hands when he opened the birthday card. The force of the explosion blew off his arm and half of his head and all that’s left of the letters is a charred mass of paper—only one or two unburned pieces. They don’t look promising. There are enough tiny scraps of metal for us to identify the kind of bomb it was, but nothing that could have fingerprints or anything else helpful.”

George Battle had been listening very intently to Carlson’s report. A little nerve kept twitching around the cut on his cheek.

“This man has failed twice to get me, Pierre,” he said.

“Failed first by a matter of inches, failed the second time by what he must consider an extraordinary piece of bad luck. The first time he walked past your men and my bodyguard, even though they were supposedly on the alert. Now Allerton, who protected me from the possibility of other subtle forms of attack, like poison, has died in my place. The police are here”—and he waved his hand in a derisive gesture at Hardy and his men—“but they never prevent anything from happening. They may catch my murderer after I am dead, which is very little comfort to me. And this explosives genius can tell us all about the bomb—after it has exploded. So, Pierre, what are you going to do to find this man before he gets me? I know you will try, perhaps not because you are fond of me, but because this man is giving your beloved hotel an incredibly bad reputation. When this bomb story gets public, people are going to start checking out of the Beaumont like rats leaving a ship.”

“We’ll do what we can, George,” Chambrun said in a flat voice.

“That’s not good enough! In the old days, Pierre, you could plan a campaign. Have you lost your touch? Have you, unhappily, grown old? If I can’t count on you, God help me.”

Believe it or not, Chambrun smiled at him. “Your helpless-baby act may impress the others, George, but not me. In all the years I’ve known you, I’ve never been able to beat you at a single game of chess, and I’m not a bad player. You are the best planner, the best schemer I know. So tell us what to do, George, because I’m sure you’re way, way ahead of us at this point. We can’t help you if you keep secrets from us, you know.”

T
HESE TWO OLD FRIENDS
looked at each other, and they were both smiling now. Thirty years ago they had fought together, perhaps for different motives, to save a dying nation. Violence, like the violence in the other room which had made me sick and weak in the knees, was no stranger to them. I thought of Chambrun’s twenty friends cut down in the basement of the St. Germaine house, and later St. Germaine hanging from a lamppost outside that house. They weren’t smiling because of anything in the present, but because they were remembering the life-and-death games they’d played together in the past, remembering their skills which must have been very different. Battle’s weapons were wealth and power and influence which he could very well have handled with a kind of Machiavellian competence. Chambrun’s must have been the quick mind, the physical courage, the ability to cut through to the very center of a problem without ever being sidetracked.

“If you will tell us some of the things we don’t know George, we’ll be a lot better able to help you,” Chambrun said. He tapped one of his flat Egyptian cigarettes on the back of his hand before he lit it, his eyes narrowed against the smoke.

It was a strange moment, Hardy, Kranepool, and Jerry and I were circling the two friends, with Shelda a little way off at the phone. Behind us men came and went; men from the bomb squad, men from Homicide, because Hardy really had a murder now. And finally I was aware of men carrying a stretcher with a sheet covering what was left of Allerton. Cobb was still with Ed Butler in the rear bedroom, and somewhere, probably in the kitchen, was Gaston, the chef. It was a busy place, and yet it somehow seemed to me that there were only two people there—Chambrun and George Battle.

“What is it you want me to tell you that you don’t know, Pierre?” Battle asked. He was leaning back against the couch, holding a handkerchief to the cut on his cheek. His blue eyes seemed to have lighted up with a kind of excitement. He and Chambrun are playing an old, familiar game, I thought and it has brought him to life.

“What are you doing here in New York, at the Beaumont, to start with?” Chambrun said.

“It’s my hotel,” Battle said. I thought he said it to annoy Chambrun. Chambrun is the hotel; he has made it what it is, a way of life. Battle owned the real estate, that was all.

“Not good enough, George,” Chambrun said, still smiling. “For seventeen years you have lived behind the walls of your own fortress in Cannes. You have lived in fear of an attack on your life. I know what most people don’t know, George—that it is not a form of hypochondria. You have a right to be afraid. You have earned the undying hatred of too many people. Yet you suddenly come away from your safe place, cross an ocean, set yourself up where you are wide open to attack.”

“Not wide open,” Battle said. “I had every reason to think I would be as safe here, under your protection, as I could be anywhere else.”

“Let’s not play games with each other, George. The risk here had to be greater. You took it for a reason. If I knew what the reason was it might be useful.”

“I have a great many million dollars invested in this hotel,” Battle said. “I thought it was time I came to see how things are here.”

Chambrun wasn’t smiling any more. He turned to me. “Let’s go, Mark. We have the press to deal with and a hotel to get back on an even keel.” He started for the door.

“Wait, Pierre!” Battle’s voice had a note of pleading

Chambrun looked back at him. “I don’t have time to play games with you, George. The police can protect you. I have a hotel to run.”

“Please. Let’s try again, Pierre. I couldn’t resist needling you. You’re right, of course. My enemies are legion.”

“There are too goddam many of them,” Chambrun said. “But exposing yourself to two of them as you have doesn’t make sense. Why are you involved in a deal that includes Richard Cleaves and Peter Potter, two gilt-edged enemies of yours? You’re not interested in making motion pictures. These two men hate your guts, and yet you play at making a business deal that involves them, and you move into the same hotel with them. Let’s start with making sense out of that, George.”

Battle was silent for a moment. “Have you read
A Man’s World
by Richard Cleaves, Pierre?”

“No.”

“Take time to skim through the first fifty pages,” Battle said. “When you have, you will understand my interest in it.”

“Interest in having it produced because you think it’s a work of art?” Chambrun asked.

“Interest in not having it produced,” Battle said. His bright eyes looked past Chambrun to the rest of us. “You understand, gentlemen, what I am saying is off the record. You understand, Pierre, I didn’t know who Richard Cleaves was when I picked up the book. When I had read it, I saw a notice in the Paris
Tribune
that Maxwell Zorn had optioned the book for a film production. I had to stop the book being filmed, or at least control what the final shooting script was to be.”

“Why, George?” Chambrun was obviously puzzled.

“Read the first fifty pages, Pierre. At first I thought it was one of those strange coincidences; the inventive mind of a storyteller had hit on something that paralleled something that had happened in real life, down to the last detail. Something you will recognize, Pierre, that was part of my life. It was quite possible that a popular work of fiction might not fall into certain hands. But make it into a film that will be seen all over the world, a film starring a popular star like David Loring, and the wrong people would be certain to see it. I had to stop it, or control it, change certain details of the story. I cabled Maxwell Zorn and offered to put up the money for the film. He came running, bringing the author with him, and his public relations man—my old friend Peter Potter. Potter doesn’t frighten me, Pierre. He is just a disgruntled ex-employee. I was interested to meet the author, whose imagination had paralleled my life so closely, Cleaves didn’t attempt to hide the truth about himself when he came to my house with Zorn. He hadn’t been in the room with me three minutes, hiding behind those damned black glasses, when he said to me, cool as you please, ‘My real name is Richard St. Germaine.’ Then I knew. His book wasn’t pure fiction, accidentally copying my life. It was the result of careful research. It was a diabolical scheme for personal revenge. He wouldn’t have to lift a finger. When the right people saw the film, they would kill me. They could and they would.”

“What people?” Hardy asked.

“Sorry, Lieutenant. All I can tell you is that they are not here in New York; that they haven’t been involved in what has happened so far.”

“And yet you’ve come here, making yourself a much easier target,” Chambrun said.

“A lesson I learned from you long ago, Pierre,” Battle said. “When someone is hunting you, don’t run. You always used to say that, friend. Force his hand. Make him attack. He’ll have to come out in the open and you’ll be ready for him. So I came here, feeling certain Cleaves would make a try for me and that I’d have him. I didn’t think he’d strike the first night. I thought he’d have to scout out the territory. I had intended to alert you, Pierre, after I’d had a night’s rest. But he moved too soon for me, and as you can see, if he can’t get at me one way, he’ll find another.”

“Hold it, Mr. Battle,” Jerry Dodd said. “He has a perfect alibi for the time you were shot at. Miss Mason was with him, along with two other witnesses. And are you suggesting that he’s the one who kidnaped Mr. Chambrun?”

“He could have been.”

“Impossible,” Jerry said. “He had an alibi for that time, too.”

Battle’s eyes narrowed. “Provided by the same two witnesses who covered for him the first time—David Loring and Angela Adams. Too many perfect alibis become no alibi at all, Mr. Dodd.”

“He could have sent you a birthday card at Cannes just as readily as here,” Chambrun said.