Walking Dead Man (19 page)

“I don’t suppose you recognized the driver?” He reached out and picked up his house phone on the desk. “Get Mike Maggio, but quick,” he said. Then back to me. “I don’t suppose you did anything intelligent like taking down his license number?”

“I’ve had just about enough of this,” I shouted at him again. “Why the hell should I take down his license number? What is this, Mr. Chambrun? So help me God, I—”

He made an impatient silencing gesture. He spoke into the phone. “Mike? You put Shelda Mason into a cab an hour or so ago. Yes. Yes, I know Mark was with you. Was the driver one of the regular ones in the line? You know him? Good boy. Mike, I’ve got to find that guy just as fast as it can possibly be done. Tell him there’s a hundred dollar bill in it for him if he makes it here by ten forty-five. Thanks, Mike. It’s really important.” Chambrun put down the phone and he looked, suddenly, very tried. “I’m sorry, Mark,” he said, all the edge gone off his voice. “I had to get you to answer questions quickly, yes or no. I’m not angry at you. I’m angry at myself for having been so stupidly slow!”

“About Shelda,” I said, trying to hold onto myself.

“I told you, Mark, you don’t know her as well as you should. She doesn’t crack up in crisis. Try to remember back to the time she worked here and was tested. I think Shelda heard something, found out something. Before she could get to us with it, she was caught.”

“Caught? By whom?”

“I’m not dead sure,” Chambrun said. “But whoever it was scared her into leaving the hotel.”

“But she was perfectly free to go or not,” I said.

“She was free to tell you she was going home to her parents,” Chambrun said, “which we now know she hasn’t done.”

“We were alone in the Trapeze,” I said. “She could have told me.”

“I think not,” Chambrun said. “You wouldn’t have let her go.”

“She wouldn’t scare that easily,” I said. “You’ve said so yourself.”

“She might,” Chambrun said. “If the threat was aimed at someone else, she might. You, Mark. She does what she’s told to do or you get it. The girl loves you, Mark. She’d play any kind of game to keep you out of danger. I could kick myself around the block because I figured some kind of a play of this sort. I expected it to come later. I thought it might be Ruysdale they’d aim at. Whatever Shelda stumbled on made them move faster than I think they’d planned.”

“You keep saying ‘they,’” I said.

“Figure of speech,” Chambrun said. “Surely you must see there’s been more than one body involved in this from the start. The man in the stocking mask who fired at George; the man in the stocking mask who kidnaped me; the man who delivered the letters; the man who emptied Dr. Cobb’s oxygen cylinder so that he died for want of it.”

“You know that?”

Chambrun nodded. “The cylinder wasn’t faulty. Someone emptied it while Cobb was down here talking to us.”

“No fingerprints on it except Cobb’s, Doc Partridge’s, and Mr. Chambrun’s,” Hardy said, answering a question before I could ask it.

“Is that what Shelda found out? She caught someone emptying the cylinder?” I asked.

“It’s possible,” Chambrun said. “Or she overheard a conversation. Or she came across something in her notes that told her something.”

“It had to be somebody up in Seventeen B,” I said. “Butler? Gaston? Battle himself?”

Chambrun hesitated, taking time to light a cigarette. “There have been two forces operating here from the start, Mark. George Battle broke the habits of two decades to come here to nail down Richard Cleaves. He had to stop that film being made, and I know why now. I’ve had a brief look at the novel and the script. There were at least two other people who knew why. Allerton and Dr. Cobb.”

“Both dead!”

“Yes, Mark, but I’m still alive.” I think he meant to go on, but Ruysdale appeared in the doorway.

“The reporters have been alerted,” she said. “And your two guests are here.”

“Have them brought in. And take notes, Ruysdale.”

Ruysdale stepped aside and Richard Cleaves and Peter Potter came into the office, accompanied by two of Hardy’s plainclothes men. The little dwarf was smiling his bright smile. He gestured toward the two cops.

“Are we being protected, or are you being protected, Chambrun?” he asked. He perched on the arm of a chair, his short legs dangling. Cleaves stood very straight and still, expressionless behind the black glasses.

“There are a great many things I’d like to say to you two,” Chambrun said, moving around behind his desk, “but I only have time for one of them. You are a pair of cold-blooded liars.”

Potter giggled. “You’ve read the script,” he said.

Cleaves stood still as a statue.

“I’ve glanced at the script,” Chambrun said. “May I remind you that my association with George Battle goes back more than twenty years. I go farther back than our two dead friends, Allerton and Cobb.”

That jarred Cleaves. “Dr. Cobb is dead?”

“Expired from lack of oxygen,” Chambrun said. “Just before he died, he tried to ask for you.”

I didn’t remember any such thing and I gave Chambrun a puzzled look.

“Doc Partridge thought he said something about ‘sleeves,’” Chambrun said. “Of course what he said was ‘Cleaves!’ He wanted to warn you, Mr. Cleaves, or get your help. The lack of oxygen, by the way, was a practical fact. Somebody emptied his cylinder. Had someone guessed that Cobb was collaborating with you, Cleaves?”

“That’s a shot in the dark,” Cleaves said in his flat, hard voice.

“Look here, Mr. Cleaves, I suspect your novel, read at leisure, would be quite fascinating. But George Battle referred to the first fifty pages as being of concern to him. I found there the story of an assassination, apparently arranged by political enemies. In the script, Mr. Cleaves, you have changed your motives somewhat. In the script your mastermind is someone interested in a fabulous oil contract. In your script a second man is killed trying to protect the victim. But I don’t have to tell you about your changes. No wonder George Battle wants it stopped. Twenty-two years ago he engineered just such a coup. And twenty-two years ago, Cleaves, the real victim’s trusted bodyguard—you made him a brother in your story—wasn’t on hand to protect him. He was in the hay with a beautiful girl planted by the mastermind. That isn’t in your novel.”

“It’s just a sex scene to make the film more salable,” Potter said.

“Nonsense. It’s a factual detail that was part of the real life story. Somebody fed you these details, Cleaves. You were happy to use them because your source made it clear to you that when the film appeared George Battle would be revealed to enemies who would almost certainly find a way to kill him. Was it Cobb, or Allerton, or both? They had been with him long enough to know or guess at the true story. Or was it you, Potter? Had Cobb, in some drunken moment while you were working for George, let it slip?”

“A complete pipe dream, Mr. Chambrun,” Potter said.

“I ask you one more question, and God help you if you don’t answer it honestly, Cleaves. Have you already tipped off the people who would want to kill Battle? You have dreamed for a lifetime of getting revenge. This would be an ideal way, leaving you completely innocent.”

Cleaves stood straight and silent.

“There isn’t time for games,” Chambrun said. “If I’ve made a right guess then you know that Shelda Mason is in mortal danger, and I promise you that if anything happens to her I will personally see to it that you go just as colorfully as your father went.”

“You sonofabitch,” Cleaves said tonelessly.

“Last chance for some truth,” Chambrun said.

A little trickle of sweat ran down Cleaves’ cheek. “I think you just told me that Cobb was murdered,” he said.

“That’s what I told you.”

“And someone is threatening the Mason girl?”

“Yes.”

Potter laughed. “Uncle George Battle is an original. He won’t stop at anything, will he?”

“I’m sick of games and I haven’t got time for them,” Chambrun said. “Someone took a shot at George; someone tried to kill him with a letter bomb; I, his friend, was kidnaped and held for ransom; his two most trusted employees are dead. I suggest Dr. Cobb revealed these new facts to you, Cleaves, after he’d read your book. I suggest you took them, happily, added them to the film script, and passed along what you knew to people who were ready and willing to wipe him out when they heard the truth.”

Cleaves shook his head slowly. “You’re half right,” he said. “Only half right, Mr. Chambrun.”

“Which half?”

Cleaves took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “My book was pure invention,” he said. “Not too many suspense novels reach the best seller lists. Mine did. Maxie Zorn made me an immediate offer for it—an extremely good deal contingent upon his getting the financing for it.”

“In other words, he took an option on it?”

“Yes. A generous option. Getting financing didn’t seem to be a difficult matter, particularly after Maxie got David Loring to agree to star in it. It happened almost at once George Battle offered to put up the money under certain conditions. We were to go to France to discuss those conditions.”

“You can imagine my state of mind. Maxie knew nothing about my past, my personal feelings about George Battle. I didn’t want Battle involved, but, on the other hand, I was curious. I wondered if Battle knew who I was. For fifteen years I’d been trying to get to him, and now I was invited to his house, for God sake. So we flew to France and went to the villa in Cannes.

“The beginning of that session was reasonable enough. Battle would put up the money, seven million dollars, provided he was satisfied with the film script. He wanted at least a scene-by-scene outline of what the film would be. And he wanted the right to disapprove anything he didn’t like.”

“Not unreasonable if you’re putting up seven million dollars,” Chambrun said.

“Perhaps not, But I wasn’t having any. George Battle, my enemy, wasn’t going to control my work. I said so, and I told him who I was—Richard St. Germaine. He really blew his stack on that. Ordered me out of the house. Told me I would never be readmitted. I left, supposing the deal was off, satisfied that I’d jarred him a little. Maxie, not understanding, stayed on to plead with him. To my surprise, Battle didn’t back away. His dislike of me, he told Maxie, was personal. He would still put up the money if he got an outline of the script. Maxie caught up with me at the hotel in town where we were staying. He asked me to do an outline. I told him to go to hell. I went out on the town to get thoroughly drunk. That’s when I met Dr. Cobb. I’d seen him, briefly, at the villa. I didn’t realize, at first, that he’d come looking for me. I’ll try to boil down his story.”

Chambrun glanced at his watch. “Please,” he said.

“Battle doesn’t trust people,” Cleaves said. “Dr. Cobb, Allerton, Butler, Gaston, other people who have worked for him over the years, weren’t just bought with big salaries and nice treatment. Battle had something on each of them, something big. If any one of them betrayed him, if anything happened to Battle, they would all be facing prison, the gallows, or whatever the maximum is in France. The guillotine? Nice little arrangement. Not only was each one of them threatened, but each one of them was watching the other, because betrayal by one meant the works for all of them.

“Cobb had read my book. He’d been astonished to see how closely, in many ways, it paralleled an incident in Battle’s life. He told me the reason Battle wanted in was that he wanted to be sure nothing was added that would be a complete giveaway. Having found out who I was, Battle suspected I might know more than was in the book, that I would add this more to the film, and that Middle East terrorists who saw it would recognize the truth and find a way to get him. Of course I didn’t know anything more. I had invented a plot. It happened to match something real in some respects. That much I could have gotten out of old newspaper clippings. Cobb offered to give me other facts that would blow Battle sky-high.”

“He was risking his own hide,” Chambrun said. “How much did he ask you to pay for these facts?”

“Not a penny,” Cleaves said. “You see, Mr. Chambrun, Cobb was a doctor. He knew exactly what his own physical condition was. He knew he had a very limited time left on this earth. He decided that a last pleasure for him would be to see Battle on the hook, hopefully eliminated. He guessed that would also give me pleasure. And so he talked, and he told me things, and I went back to the hotel and told Maxie I’d do an outline. I did. It went back to Battle in three or four days. Then he knew that I knew, and that the film mustn’t be done that way at any cost. He stalled, he made new conditions—apparently unimportant ones like insisting Miss Mason should play the girl in the nude scene. He also spread the word, and Maxie found other sources of money shut off. The real condition was, of course, that he had editorial control of the script. The new material would have to be out, but he didn’t say that. Not yet. I knew, of course, Finally he announced that he would come to New York to close the deal. I got pleasure out of watching him wriggle, Chambrun. There was something macabre about the final arrangements. We were all to be here at the Beaumont. Battle and you under the same roof.”

Chambrun’s smile was grim. “You found that tempting?”

“Not really. You see I had Battle by the short hairs.”

“Didn’t it occur to you that you were in danger? If something happened to you here in New York, no one would tie it into George.”

“Wrong,” Cleaves said. “A copy of that script you read is in my lawyer’s safe. If anything happens to me, he’ll know how to use it. That’s the half of your guess that’s right, Chambrun. The other half? I’ve never contacted the people who will be interested in the script, Battle’s enemies. I wouldn’t know how to contact them. Neither did Cobb. The produced film was to be our way of telling them. According to Cobb, they had an army of dedicated assassins at their disposal.”

“An elaborate and very neat murder plan,” Chambrun said.

“But I doubt provable in court,” Cleaves said.

“Can you be sure Cobb hadn’t given these assassins advance notice?”

“What can you be sure of in this world? He told me he hadn’t, didn’t know how to.”