Murder in High Places

by Hugh Pentecost

  ''Of course.''

  '*Bob and Johnny went to school and college together—Columbia. They played football together." She gestured toward the photograph on the wall. **We jumped at the chance. Richard was three years old and Marilyn was one. We'd be back here in New York, where we grew up and had family and friends. It meant we could find someone to stay with the kids if we wanted some free time together—a movie, or just out having a beer somewhere and listening to music. Johnny said once Mr. Chambrun got to like and trust you the job at the Beaumont could be forever." A little shudder shook her body. '*Oh, God, Mr. Haskell!"

  ''It would have been forever, Fm sure," I said. "And know that it wasn't the hotel's laxity in any way that led to what's happened, Anne. Mr. Chambrun will stay with this just as long as it takes to make certain that the man who shot Bob is punished."

  "Punishment I want," she said, "but it won't bring Bob back."

  I couldn't tell her how complex the situation was back at the hotel but asked her if she could give me the address of the building where Bob had worked in Washington. She wrote it down for me on a slip of paper.

  "Anything we can do to help you, Anne, with money, with arrangements for Bob's funeral, with the police, anything, call me at the hotel. I hope you won't

  feel you're dealing with a stranger when you ask for me/' I said.

  She touched my hand with fingers that were ice cold. "The thing I want most is to know whafs happening!" she said. "It isn't as though Bob had bera in an accident. Someone deliberately killed him."

  "I promise," I said. "I'll let you know the moment there's any hard news."

  I hated to leave her to sweat things out alone, but I had to get back with what I had. I had let myself be convinced of one thing. Bob Ballard, in his job in Washington, had been in a position to see all kinds of important people come and go at the State Dqjart-ment. He could very likely have known Martin Steams by sight and would have detected a phony. He could also have recognized the dark man with the black glasses from the Trapeze, and remembered something about him that had so far eluded Mitch Prescott. That seemed the more likely, since the dark man appeared almost certainly to be the murderer.

  Back at the hotel, I ran into a conference in Cham-bran's office. Prescott and Lieutenant Hardy were there along with Jerry Dodd. I had to remind myself that this wasn't a gathering where Chambmn's real problem could be discussed. Chambran, sitting behind his carved Florentine desk, looked to me as if he was just about at the end of his rope.

  I told them what Fd learned from Anne Ballard, and handed them the address of the building where Bob Ballard had worked in Washington.

  Prescott nodded. "That's the building where Martin Steams has his headquarters/' he said. "Ballard obviously knew the man he brought down from the roof was a fake."

  "I got thinking on the way back that it could be something else," I said. "As we know from Hilda, it was the dark man from the Trapeze who was arguing with Bob on ten, shoved him into the service area, and probably shot him. He could have been the someone Bob recognized." I looked at Prescott. "That dark guy could have been from the Washington scene, couldn't he? That could be where Bob knew him, and where you must have seen him, Mitch, but can't remember."

  "At least someone is thinking intelligently," Chambrun said.

  Prescott ground down on his pipe stem. "Goddamn it, it just won't come to me."

  "One thing I can tell you for sure," Jerry Dodd said. "Mr. Dark Glasses X isn't in the hotel. We've been over it, top to bottom. He just slipped away without anyone paying any particular attention."

  Lieutenant Hardy was among the unhappy ones. "There are enough fingerprints in that service area and in that special roof car to keep us busy for a month. We have to lift them, see if we can find a set in each

  place that match, then fingerprint everyone we know was in both places legitimately to discover if there is a matching set that we can't write off. If we get lucky and find such a set, then we have to check the police files, the FBI files, army, what have you. Our man can have taken a slow boat to China—and arrived before we have a lead to him, if we get lucky enough to find a lead/'

  **Why complicate things, Walter?" Chambrun said. *'We have two men we're trying to find. Prescott knows them both. Surely he will very shortly be able to tell us for certain whether the man who visited Welch was the real Martin Stearns or a fake. If he was real, we can forget about him." Chambrun's lips moved in a bitter little smile. *'When that clears up maybe Prescott will find some way to jog his memory about Mr. X in the Trapeze."

  Hardy suggested to Prescott that sometimes a uniform can confuse your memory of a man. *'Maybe you saw him in an army uniform, a marine, air force, navy uniform. See him later in civilian clothes and he's familiar, but somehow the picture isn't right."

  Prescott shook his head slowly.

  "There are other uniforms," Chambrun said. ''Doorman, bellboy, porter?..."

  Prescott continued to shake his head. "I'm sorry, gentlemen, but it just won't come to the surface-yet."

  "Thanks anyway for the 'yet,' " Hardy said.

  Chambrun stood up. "If I don't get myself freshened up, I'm going to find myself walking in my sleep. Mark, will you and Jerry come up to my penthouse with me. We've got to discuss how to deal with the media. The hotel is crawling with reporters—papers, radio, television."

  **rve given them the only facts we've got," Hardy said. ''We have a murder. We're looking for a man whose picture I circulated. Prescott has suggested we leave Steams out of all this until he's located."

  ''If Steams is under cover," Prescott said, "we don't want reporters both here and abroad looking for him."

  "When you say *we,' do you mean the CIA?" Chambmn said.

  "I mean State, the whole danmed government," Prescott said.

  "Well, the hotel must have something to say, too," Chambmn said. He marched across the office to the outer room, where another girl from the steno pool had taken over for Dolly Malone.

  "Let the switchboard know that I'll be in my penthouse, '' Chambmn told her.

  We went down the second-floor corridor to the roof-car door. Chambmn's three quick rings told the operator that it was the Man signaling. Lucky Lewis, the regular night man, was on the car.

  "Any traffic?" Chambmn asked.

  "Not since you came down, Mr. Chambmn."

  **No one asking you for Mr. Welch in Penthouse Three?"

  **No one, sir. Not for him, or you, or Mrs. Haven/'

  My stomach always turns over a little as the roof car zooms noiselessly up to the top. Jerry and I followed Chambrun into his living room. He went straight to his desk over near the French windows. He opened the deep right-hand drawer of the desk and brought out a little tape recording machine. I knew from experience that it was attached to his telephone so that he could tape any telephone calls he wanted to preserve.

  **I had a call just before I went down to the office to check with Prescott," he said in the flat, dead voice he seemed to have acquired that morning—what seaned like years ago to me. **I want you to listen."

  He pressed the *Tlay" button on the machine. The tape made a whirring sound, and then we heard a male voice.

  'Tierre Chambrun?"

  **Speaking." That was Chambrun.

  "You've been treading on pretty thin ice over th^e, Chambrun. I warned you." A slightly British or Irish voice, as Chambrun had guessed.

  Chambrun again: *'One of your people murdered one of my people. There was no way I could block off the police."

  ''I know. Wrong man meets the wrong man at the wrong moment. But you've got to get things back to normal during the next twenty-four hours—or else.'*

  **How is Miss Ruysdale?"

  ''I suppose I could say *fine.' Fine but not happy. I'm going to let you talk to her in a moment. Let me tell you that the man the police want is miles away by now. There's no reason for the hotel not to go back to its normal routines."

  'Tut Miss Ruysdale on."

  **Wh
ynot?"

  There was a moment's silence and then Betsy Ruysdale spoke. There was no questioning her voice,

  ^Tierre?"

  "Ruysdale! How are you, my dear?"

  "Pierre, list^i to me. You have to forget about me and do what you have to do."

  There was the sound of an angry male voice in the background and Betsy Ruysdale was gone. The first voice came back.

  "Not a very bright lady, your Miss Ruysdale, Chambrun," the man said. "She was supposed to tell you there was no doubt that we mean business. Perhaps we can scar her up a Uttle so she'll always remember that we weren't kidding."

  "If you harm her in any way—"

  "Now, now, Mr. Chambrun, threats are a waste of time. If things are not back to normal routines by morning. Miss Ruysdale won't have to remember. She

  won't be alive to remember. This is the last time FU be in touch with you."

  **I warn you, if anything happens to Ruysdale—'*

  *'Good-bye, Mr. Chambnin."

  The tape machine started to make that whirring sound again. Chambrun touched the **Rewind" button. We sat silent for a moment. Chambrun's voice was a little unsteady when he spoke.

  **How like her/' he said. ''Torget about me and do what you have to do.' She knows I'm being asked to turn my hotel into a shooting gallery."

  **ril never forget that guy's voice," Jerry Dodd said. **If I ever hear it again, they're going to have to prepare a slab in the morgue."

  Chambrun seemed not to hear. **The important thing is he didn't mention Jericho or Mrs. Haven. We may still be in the ball game, Jerry."

  For more than twelve hours now I hadn't given much thought to my personal life. Remember, I was *'in love forever." I'd seen Hilda, almost impersonally, around three in the afternoon when we'd had a drink in the Trapeze and she'd gone off to rehearse. We'd had no personal contact at all in the time she was r^>orting to Lieutenant Hardy what she'd seen on ten. After hstening to that frightening tape in Cham-brun's penthouse I went back down to my own apartment on the second floor. My orders were to circulate, cool off the reporters, who would certainly be aftCT me

  I

  for information. My story was to be that the murder of Bob Ballard was something personal, something in his own life and past, in no way connected with the hotel. I knew that would send reporters churning around Anne Ballard and her two small children, and I regretted that, but we were playing a touchy game to protect two lives in real danger, Ruysdale's and Larry Welch's. I called Anne Ballard to tell her that she might be snowed under in the middle of the night by news people. She wasn't surprised. There'd already been reporters there before they'd had any lead from me. As I put down the phone in my apartment I saw a note lying beside it on my desk.

  '*Mark dear: Please, when you can, be in touch. I'm dying of curiosity. Lx)ve, love, love—Hilda."

  Yes, I was in love forever, and I'd given Hilda a key to my apartment. She'd obviously been here, waiting for me till she had to do her thing in the Blue Lagoon.

  My clothes felt as if they were sticking to me after this long day, so I shaved and showered, and put on fresh things from the inside out. It was normal for me to circulate about this time of night. I've been told I was imitating Marshall Dillon putting Dodge City to bed.

  My first stop was to slip into the Blue Lagoon to tell Hilda I'd catch up with her after I'd done my duty with the reporters. Hilda was already into her eleven o'clock show, standing by the piano on stage, looking beautiful, with Billy Chard making soft magic on the

  keys behind her. She was singing an old folk song I'd cut my teeth on when I was a kid.

  When I was a young man I lived by myself And I worked at the weaver's trade. And the only only thing that I ever did wrong Was to woo a fair young maid.

  I wooed her in the summertime,

  And in the winter, too.

  And the only only thing that I ever did wrong

  Was to keep her from the foggy, foggy dew.

  The audience loved it and clamored for more. She couldn't see me standing by Mr. Cardoza, the captain in the Blue Lagoon, at the back of the room. The stage hghts were focused directly into her eyes, so that she couldn't see beyond the first ring of tables right by the stage.

  **Tell the lady I'll be back," I said to Cardoza, who looks Uke an elegant Spanish nobleman. ** When I get here, if you've got something hot that will go down easy—I haven't had anything to eat since breakfast."

  '*Leave it to me," Cardoza said. ''Is there any news, Mark?"

  ''The only news is that there is no news," I said. I felt a little twinge of conscience every time I didn't tell the truth to someone I liked and trusted. "We haven't found the guy Hilda saw."

  It would be hard to say whether the greatest amount of curiosity came from the reporters who had gathered at the hotel—along with an unlikely collection of rubbemeckers who had wandered in off the street to view **the scene of the crime"—or from the hotel staff itself. Most of the people on duty now had come on after the tragedy on the tenth floor had taken place. Bob Ballard had been a much-liked member of what could be called a family. There was anger and a kind of grim determination to do something to help get justice for him. But do what? The poUce artisf s drawing of the probable killo* had been circulated, but almost no one but Eddie, his two assistants, and one or two waiters remanbered seeing the man in the black glasses we were now calling "Mr. X.'' Apparently this man had not visited any of the other bars or restaurants in the hotel. No one outside the Trapeze remrai-bered seeing him at all, except Johnny Thacka:. Mr. X, a few days back, had asked him where the Trapeze was located. Apparently he had come in the last three or four days a httle after five, gone to the Trapeze, ordered oi^ vodka and tonic, nursed it for about an hour, standing at the bar, and drifted away. He had attracted no particular attention from anyone but Eddie. "One drink, no tip." The chance that he would turn up again, after having been identified by Hilda Harding, was zero.

  Mike Maggio, the night bell captain, whose tour of duty was from seven in the evening till three in the

  morning, had never been on the job during the hour Mr. X had spent in the Trapeze each of the last few days. Mike is a very sharp, shrewd, street-raised young man who has a special eye for trouble and a photographic memory for faces. His tour is what might be called a trouble time in the hotel, from the dinner hour to the bar closings in the early morning. That is when we get flooded by what we call "out-of-towners," people who aren't registered in the hotel, who patronize the bars and restaurants, drink too much, and stay up too late for the people who have to clean up after them. Mike Maggio studied the artist's drawing of Mr. X and shook his head.

  ''Never saw him," he told me. "Not recently, not ever. But..."

  "But what?"

  "Could be a villain out of Dick Tracy comic strip," he said. "Almost like he was made up to look like a bad guy."

  "Mitch Prescott thinks he might have seen him in a lineup, or in a mug shot," I said. "I suggested maybe it was an actor he'd seen in a late movie."

  "I don't get to see late movies," Mike said. "If I did, I'd remember. I can tell you, for sure, this creep hasn't been in the hotel during my tour for the last ten years!"

  A dozen or more police reporters, circulating in the hotel, were no more help. These are men likely to know by sight most criminals operating in the city.

  I

  None of them came up with anything when they saw the drawing of Mr. X. There were a few **it could bes/' but nothing definite. I knew from Hardy that the police, trained to identify known criminals, had come up with nothing.

  '^Something about this smells," Mike Maggio said. "He comes here four days running, stands around for an hour in one of the busiest places in the hotel, noticeable because he talks to no one, meets no one, isn't a lush. One drink in an hour? It's almost as though he wanted to be noticed."

  **And then gets caught as he's trying to kill a man?" I didn't buy it. Later on I could have kicked myself around the block for not remembering
what a shrewd observer Mike Maggio is.

  Perhaps, in retrospect, I can excuse myself for brushing off Maggio's notion. Something else had popped into my head. The roof car hadn't responded when someone else had called on Larry Welch. That was after Martin Steams, real or fake, had left. There had been no roof car; Johnny Thacker had discovered it on ten and taken over so that Welch's caller could go up. I had gone from Chambrun's penthouse across the roof to Penthouse 3. It was to ask Welch about Steams, and where we might locate him. He'd been occupied with someone and bmshed me off rather quickly. Neither of us knew then that there had been a murder. But no one had ever mentioned that caller who was with him when I went there. Later it

  hadn't mattered. We knew, when Johnny Thacker took that caller up, that Bob Ballard was abeady dead, shot and shoved into a trash can. But it was a loose end.

  Johnny Thacker had long gone, but I went to the front desk and asked Karl Nevers, the night clerk, to see Johnny's record sheet from the roof car. His first passenger, after retrieving the car from the tenth floor, was one Paul Dumont, cleared by Welch at 6:10, brought down again at 6:45. Short visit, probably unrelated but should be checked out.

  I was on my way from the desk to the roof car when Mike Maggio flagged me down again. He was grinning.

  **Lady in the Blue Lagoon has sent out a general alarm for you, Mark."

  '^Hilda?"

  ''You got some other chick in there who has to see you, come murder or high water?" Mike asked.

  I glanced at my watch. Hilda would be going on for her last show in a half hour or so. I stopped at the entrance to the Blue Lagoon and asked Cardoza to let Hilda know I'd be there when her last turn was over.