“And you wound up in the hay with her?”
“No!” he almost shouted. “But—but I have to admit to you, Haskell, the temptation was there. I had to stop going to the club, stop seeing her. I came as close as I will ever come to breaking my vows, to abandoning my principles.”
I could imagine Nora had made it rough for him. She needed sex “like air,” she’d told me. A man would have to be a saint to turn his back on her if she baited her hook for him.
“I was sitting in my study this afternoon, trying to make plans to attack Thompson somewhere else, in some other city, some other area, when I turned on my radio and heard the news that Nora’s son had been found murdered in your hotel. I knew that this must be a total devastation for her. I had the feeling there were no real friends she could turn to. Thompson and the people in the club couldn’t offer her any real comfort, help to bolster her courage, turn her in God’s direction in a time of terrible need. I—I tried to call her on the phone but it was perpetually busy. I finally persuaded an operator to help me and got the word that her phone was out of service, probably the receiver had been left off the hook. And so—so I came over here.” Martin took a deep breath, “She didn’t answer the doorbell but the main door was open, so I walked up the two flights to her apartment.”
“You knew where it was?”
He gave me a steady look. “Yes, I knew where it was. Nora had invited me here for supper one Sunday—her day off.”
“A good chance to put her on the road to salvation,” I said.
The Reverend Leonard Martin wasn’t a dummy. He sensed my antagonism to him and his “message.” “I guess we live in different worlds, Mr. Haskell,” he said.
“I’m just interested in knowing how you came to find Nora Sands,” I said.
He nodded. “As I said, she didn’t answer her doorbell, but this street-level front door was open. I could see the building superintendent mopping the floor at the rear of the front hall. I asked him if he knew if Nora was in. He just shrugged and said he had no idea. I—I went up to the third floor where her apartment is. I was about to knock when I saw the door was standing open an inch or two.” He took a deep breath. “I pushed the door open a little wider and called out to her. No answer, but I got a glimpse of her living room. It was a shambles, Mr. Haskell. Furniture tipped over, couch cushions ripped apart by a knife or something, books thrown out of the cases onto the floor, drawers pulled out of her desk and dumped on the floor. I—I called out to her again. No answer. And so I—I walked through the mess to the little hall that leads to her bedroom and bath.” His breathing came harder. “There was the same crazy destruction in the bedroom, plus—plus Nora, lying half on and half off the bed, covered with blood, her face terribly bruised and bleeding. I went to her. Unconscious. I—I felt for a pulse and it was almost not there. The phone was lying on the floor, receiver off the hook. I could hear the steady dial tone. I dialed 911, the police emergency number, reported what I’d found, and waited for help to come.” He took a white handkerchief out of his breast pocket and blotted at the little beads of sweat that had appeared on his forehead.
“You didn’t try to get help from anyone in the building—the super or other tenants?” I asked him.
“I—I have been trained in first aid,” Martin told me. “I was afraid she was going. I—I tried mouth-to-mouth to get her breathing a little better. I got a wet cloth from the bathroom to try to clean up her face. Her eyelids fluttered a little. She was still trying to make it. The police and the ambulance responded very quickly—eight or nine minutes, I would guess. Cops are up there now, trying to find something that will give them a clue to the attacker. He must have handled nearly everything in the apartment. There must be fingerprints—something.”
“When she comes to—” I said.
“I don’t think they think she will come to,” Martin said. “I think I’ll go to St. Vincent’s and see if there’s any news.”
“I’ll drive you there,” I said. “I have a car parked down the block.”
It took about ten minutes to get to the hospital and find a parking place. The waiting room outside the emergency room was crowded with a strange assortment of people; a wailing Hispanic woman whose son was behind the closed doors suffering from a knife wound received in a street brawl, a young woman whose child was a hit-and-run victim, an old man whose wife had suffered a heart attack—and on and on. The desk informed us that Nora Sands was still in the emergency surgery, in the care of one Dr. Morgan.
“You’ll have to wait for Dr. Morgan to come out to get any report,” the girl at the desk told us.
“Long?” Martin asked her.
“Depends on the patient. Could be minutes, could be hours.”
“I’ll wait,” Martin said.
He may have been a phony, but he was also a friend, I told myself. I had to find a phone to get back to Chambrun. He may already have heard about Nora, but I had to be sure.
The pay phone was in an outer hall. I started for it when my attention was called to a man sitting on one of the waiting benches. He was looking directly at me, giving me a bright, white-toothed smile. He was, I thought, probably about thirty. He was dark-skinned, possibly Hispanic, or a black Irishman, or an Italian. He was wearing a baseball cap with a Yankee insignia on it, the kind they give away free at certain ball games, jeans, an orange sport shirt, blue sneakers. The smile suggested that he knew me, but I drew a partial blank. It was partial because there was something vaguely familiar about him. If I hadn’t felt it was so urgent to get to Chambrun I might have stopped to speak to him, to place him; I didn’t, and I was to regret it.
You have to understand that the nature of my job at the Beaumont brought me into contact with hundreds of different people every day of my life. They come and go to register as guests, to eat in the restaurants, to drink in the bars, to patronize the Blue Lagoon, our night club. Hundreds of faces become familiar without my knowing who they are or anything about them. The man in the baseball cap didn’t look like a patron of the hotel. I decided he’d made some kind of mistake in thinking that he knew me.
Chambrun had heard about Nora. Sergeant Keller had been in touch with Hardy. There was more. There’d been another phone call from Mr. Anonymous. “Stan Nelson is rich enough to hire an army of hit-men. He sits calmly in your hotel while he arranges to exterminate the Sands family.”
“Were you able to trace the call?” I asked Chambrun.
“A pay phone on the corner of Greenwich Avenue and Jane Street,” Chambrun told me. “Right there in the neighborhood where you are. The cops were too late.”
“Damn!” I said. “What next, boss?”
I’d told him about Norman, my stickball friend, and the Reverend Leonard Martin. “Stay where you are for a while,” Chambrun said. “See who comes inquiring for Miss Sands. I think you can expect Zachary Thompson. Who else?”
“If she dies without talking?”
“Then we’re back at square one,” Chambrun said. “Get your reverend friend to start praying.”
I went back to rejoin my reverend friend in the waiting room. The man in the baseball cap was gone.
Staying anchored in the waiting room outside that emergency ward with the wails of that Hispanic mother reaching ear-piercing crescendos from time to time is not a way I recommend for passing time. There wasn’t any way to carry on a conversation without making it so loud it would become everyone’s business. Leonard Martin sat erect on the bench next to me, staring straight ahead at the opposite wall. There was nothing to look at there except a poster asking you to support your local blood bank. Maybe he was praying.
We’d been there about forty-five minutes when Chambrun’s forecast came true. Zachary Thompson made a flamboyant entrance accompanied by a sexy-looking dark-haired girl who couldn’t have been more than twenty. I was reminded of the girls who advertise jeans on television. She was wearing jeans, tight around the hips and a curvaceous behind, and a blue man’s shirt unbuttoned d
own to there in front. They barged up to the desk where Thompson poked his bearded face almost into the receptionist’s and demanded to know where Nora Sands was and how he could get to her. He was told she was in Emergency, not seeable. He drowned out the wailing lady with his demands. He must talk to someone in authority. He had a right to be with Nora, whatever she was going through. The receptionist, apparently used to loud voices and hysteria, promised she would find someone he could talk to. He’d have to wait. He spun away and spotted the Reverend Martin staring at the blood donor poster. He was almost on top of us before he appeared to recognize me. I guess I didn’t matter to him.
“You found her, Martin!” Thompson shouted.
Martin seemed to come out of a kind of trance. I thought for a moment he actually didn’t recognize Thompson, but then his thin mouth tightened.
“Yes, I found her,” he said. “I heard on the radio about her son. I went to see if I could be of any help. I found her.”
“How bad is it, Mr. Martin?” the dark-haired girl asked.
He looked at her. “You are—?”
“Linda,” she said.
“Ah, yes,” Martin said. He had obviously met her in his “work” at the Private Lives Club. “It is not good, I’m afraid,” he said. “Not good at all. The ambulance doctor wasn’t sure he could get her here alive, but he did. We’re waiting. They say it could be hours before they know.”
“What doctor has she got?” Thompson demanded.
“Someone on the staff, I suppose. A Dr. Morgan.”
“I know him!” Thompson said. He turned and headed back for the receptionist.
The girl watched him go, and then turned to Martin. “Dr. Morgan has helped us out at the club now and then—a customer had a heart attack once, one of the girls will turn up sick now and then. He has a private office just around the corner from the club.”
“I’m Mark Haskell,” I told her. “I’m waiting to hear about Nora, too. You’re Linda what?”
“Just Linda,” the girl said.
“The girls at the club don’t have last names,” Martin said. “The customers might try to see them without Thompson sharing in the profits.”
“It’s for our own protection,” Linda said. She seemed unperturbed by Martin’s suggestion that she was a prostitute. Maybe she just saw it as a fact of life. She looked at me. “You know Nora?”
“For a very short time,” I said.
“She’s the nicest person I ever met,” Linda said. “She’ll help you out of any kind of trouble. She’s kind and generous. She’s even loaned me money a couple of times when I was broke. And poor little Eddie! My God, Mr. Haskell, what kind of a world is this?”
“We make the world we live in,” Martin said.
Linda looked at him and for a moment I saw anger. “She was even nice to you, Mr. Martin, though she knew you were trying to do her harm.”
“I was trying to save her from a terrible judgment,” Martin said.
“You know something, Mr. Martin?”
“What?”
“You’re some kind of creep!” Linda said.
“My values are different from yours, child,” he said. “Perhaps, someday, you and I can—”
She laughed at him. “You have to be kidding!” she said.
I found I rather liked Linda.
Zach Thompson came back from the receptionist’s desk. “That stupid broad has finally got me to someone who has some authority. Wait here, Linda.”
Linda watched him disappear into the bowels of the hospital. “You’d be surprised how many doors he can get to open up for him,” she said. She didn’t, of course, have any idea how close to home that comment hit. Someone with a gift for opening doors had got into the Health Club at the Beaumont, into Nora Sands’ apartment on Jane Street, into a restricted area in the basement of the hotel. Of course Linda hadn’t meant opening doors in that literal sense.
At that moment a man in a green doctor’s suit and surgical cap came out of the emergency room. He went to the desk and the receptionist pointed to Martin. The doctor came over to us.
“Reverend Martin?”
Martin stood up and held out his hand. The doctor ignored it, flexing his hand as though it hurt in advance. “I’m Dr. Morgan,” he said. Then he noticed Linda. “You’re from the Private Lives Club, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Dr. Morgan. Zach’s here, looking for you. I guess he went to see the boss, the king, whoever runs this place.”
“He would!” Morgan said. He turned back to Martin. “I understand from the police that you found Miss Sands, Mr. Martin.”
“Yes. How is she, Doctor?”
“Not good,” Morgan said. “She didn’t tell you anything when you found her?”
“She was unconscious.”
“We’ll be lucky if she ever tells anybody anything,” Morgan said.
“That bad?” Linda asked, her voice unsteady.
“That bad,” Morgan said. “I want to move her into a private room with special life-support systems. We are supposed to dispense mercy here, but unfortunately mercy costs money.” He sounded bitter. “I have to assure the front office that someone will pay the freight.”
“I’m sure Zach will take care of it,” Linda said. “Nora’s worked for him for a good many years. Zach never lets his people down.”
“They have too much on him,” the Reverend Martin said.
“You may have something there,” Morgan said. “When he comes back ask him to go to the business office and tell them. I’m going to put him down as responsible for Miss Sands.”
“Is there anything any of us can do?” Martin asked.
“If you’ve got a special pipeline to God, Mr. Martin, use it,” the doctor said. He turned and walked away toward the emergency room.
Linda put a cold hand on top of mine. “Let’s go have a drink somewhere,” she said.
You don’t have to go very far in any direction in New York without finding a reasonably presentable bar. There was one directly across the street from the hospital, something a little better than a side-street dive. I suppose the families and friends of people who can afford to be sick want something better than sawdust on the floor.
I’m not quite sure why I decided to buy Linda a drink when I should have been on my way back to the Beaumont to give Chambrun a detailed report. Perhaps it was because she seemed to be genuinely fond of Nora Sands and badly shaken by what Dr. Morgan had told us about Nora’s chances. I told myself it wasn’t because she was a sexy-looking girl who just might be available. I guess I’ve mentioned that I’m not to be trusted about women who can be had. Some other time, perhaps. There was, I convinced myself, a legitimate reason for staying with her for a little. She knew Nora well, apparently knew Eddie Sands, knew Zach Thompson and his porno world. Perhaps, without realizing it, she could tell me why someone had set out to eliminate the Sands family and was trying to persuade the police that Stan Nelson, who just might have been Eddie Sands’ father, was responsible.
We sat in a booth in the bar across from the hospital. A waitress came over and asked us if we wanted to eat or if we were just drinking. We weren’t interested in food. Linda ordered a vodka and tonic, and I a Jack Daniels on the rocks with a splash of plain water.
Linda took a Kleenex from her handbag and dabbed at her eyes with it. I realized she’d been crying as we walked across the street.
“Is my mascara smeared?” she asked me.
“You look fine,” I said.
She asked me about Eddie Sands, and I gave her a brief rundown. He’d been found in the pool in the Beaumont Health Club. Someone had made duplicates of the keys that opened the place and taken him there after everyone had left and the place was, theoretically, inaccessible.
“Both of them in one day!” she said.
“And that isn’t all,” I told her about Tony Camargo. “Beaten up much the same way Nora was beaten.”
It obviously didn’t make any more sense to her than it did to me.
“Do you know much about Nora’s private life?” I asked her.
The waitress brought our drinks and Linda didn’t say anything until we were alone again. “Nora wasn’t like a lot of the girls who work at Private Lives. She was older, of course, and she’d been through it all long ago—I guess out on the coast where she worked in Zach’s club out there. Sometimes she’d talk about one of the movie stars she’d known, some of the big-shot Hollywood executives. Now she’s a sort of hostess-manager for Zach. He travels around a lot. There are seven other clubs, you know; Atlantic City, Miami Beach, Chicago, Houston, Tucson, New Orleans, Hollywood. The offices of Private Lives Magazine are in Hollywood, too. Zach has to keep an eye on all of them and he keeps moving around. We don’t see him as often as some of the other places do. That’s because he trusts Nora and she does such a good job of running the club here. If she can’t work for a while I imagine he’ll stay with us pretty steadily till she can. That we won’t like too well.”
“Why?”
She gave me a steady look, almost a defiant look. “I’m a prostitute, you know.”
“I assume that’s what working at a Private Lives club meant,” I said.
“Working for Nora is different from working for Zach,” she said. “You know how the club operates, Mark?”
“Tell me.”
“A customer comes in. The girls are parading around in the lounge. There’s music and drinks, of course. Customer picks out a girl he likes the looks of and that means, in the end, that you wind up in the hay with him.”
“There in the club?”
“Oh, no. The cops would have nailed us long ago if that was the way it worked. Zach has eight or ten small apartments scattered around the Village. The same thing is true in the other cities, I guess. When the time for the payoff comes you take your customer to one of those apartments.”
With Intent to Kill Page 9