With Intent to Kill

by Hugh Pentecost

  I said something that sounded like “Glub, Glub!” Then I smelled something far pleasanter than the disinfectant. It was a woman’s perfume, and Betsy Ruysdale swam into view. One of her warm hands closed over one of mine.

  “Mark dear, welcome home,” she said.

  “What happened?” I managed to say, quite clearly.

  “That’s what everyone wants to know,” Ruysdale said. I suppose she’s in her late thirties, with coppery red hair and a lush figure. As I think I’ve mentioned, the rumor is that she is more to Chambrun than his “executive assistant,” which is her official title. That rumor was enough to keep the wolves around the Beaumont at a distance, a fact that in occasional fantasies I have regretted. She is a very nice lady. “You got very lucky, Mark.”

  “My head doesn’t feel lucky,” I said.

  “If you hadn’t been lucky your head might have looked like Tony Camargo’s when that creep got through with him down in the garage,” Doc Partridge said. He is a sour old curmudgeon, but as a doctor I’d have let him do brain surgery on me if it was required.

  “You may owe your life, indirectly, to all those gawking sightseers who’ve invaded the hotel since morning,” Ruysdale said. “They’ve refused to go away so Mr. Chambrun and Jerry Dodd set up a special patrol of security people to make sure invaders weren’t seeping into places they had no business to be. You know Alec Watson?”

  “One of Jerry’s men,” I said.

  “You owe him, Luv,” Ruysdale said. “He was assigned to cover the mezzanine and the second floor. He’d just come up to the second floor when he saw you getting out your keys at the door to your apartment. As you got the door open a man, someone, came out of the linen closet right next to your place, and attacked you from behind. Alec let out a shout, drew his gun, and came running. I guess that shout turned the attacker away from you.”

  “Or you’d have had it!” Doc Partridge said.

  “He lashed back at Alec with whatever his weapon was, caught him right across the jaw and knocked him flat,” Ruysdale said.

  “Broke his jaw in three places,” Doc Partridge said.

  “The man ran down the hall. Alec, almost blinded by pain, took several shots at him, but he must have missed because they haven’t found any traces of blood anywhere. Mr. Chambrun and Hardy assume you never saw him.”

  “Not a glimpse. But Alec—?”

  “It was all so quick,” Ruysdale said. “He came out of the linen room and pushed you into your dark apartment before Alec realized what was happening. Afterwards, lying on the floor, his jaw broken, he says he just fired at a blur.”

  “Where is Alec now?”

  “In the hospital,” the doctor said. “He’ll be drinking his meals through a glass tube for the next month!”

  “I gather I wasn’t important enough to take to the hospital,” I said.

  Doc Partridge gave me a sour look. “You must be feeling better to make a stupid crack like that,” he said. “Someone intended to kill you. Take you to a public facility like a hospital and if he wanted to try again he could make it. Here Chambrun’s got you surrounded with a small army. He seems to think you’re worth protecting.”

  “How long have I been here?” I asked.

  Ruysdale glanced at the little jeweled watch on her left wrist. “Just after midnight,” she said. “You’ve been here a little more than four hours.”

  The journey to wherever and back had taken time!

  “When the doctor says so, they’re moving you up to Pierre’s penthouse. You’ll be easier to guard there.”

  “I’d rather be in my place,” I said.

  “Until they know who and why, the penthouse level is the easiest to protect,” Ruysdale said.

  Who or why? I didn’t have the remotest idea. But as I thought about it I thought I came up with a sensible answer. The hotel was full of freaks who didn’t belong there. The technique was one you read about in the papers or hear on radio and TV day after day. Some character coming home to his or her apartment—usually some old lady—is pushed in from behind when she gets the door open, slugged, and the place robbed. So one of the goons from that crowd in the lobby had been floating around upstairs where he didn’t belong. Hidden in the linen room, he’d seen me go down the hall to Chambrun’s office. When I came back and started to let myself into my apartment he saw his chance, went through the attack-from-behind routine, and only Alec Watson’s unexpected arrival had kept him from cleaning out my place. That’s what came of letting the outside world into our private, well-ordered kingdom.

  “No way,” Chambrun said.

  Doc Partridge and Miss Ruysdale had taken me in a wheelchair, surrounded by three of Jerry Dodd’s men, up to Chambrun’s penthouse on the roof. I was bedded down in one of the guest rooms and Ruysdale made a list of things I wanted from my apartment. In the middle of that Chambrun and Lieutenant Hardy arrived.

  Chambrun’s first words were to Doc Partridge. “How is he?”

  “Thick skull,” the doctor said.

  Chambrun looked at me. “Feel up to talking, Mark?”

  The expression in his deep-set eyes was reward enough for a rather big headache. He cared, really cared how I was.

  “Except there is nothing to talk about,” I said. “I never saw the sonofabitch.” I gave him my theory about the routine mugging-from-behind.

  That’s when he said, “No way.” He explained they’d been over the second floor, the stairways leading up and down from it, the elevators. He seemed certain Alec Watson’s bullets had missed. It turned out he’d fired four shots and they’d found all four slugs embedded in the mouldings and the ceiling on the second floor. Four clean misses. Watson had been in agony and half stunned when he tried.

  “This bastard knew exactly how to get away, where the back stair is. He knew he could wait for you in the linen room. We’re up against someone, Mark, who knows this hotel well. He knew where your apartment is, knew where to hide while he waited for you to show. He knew what Tony Camargo’s routines were and where he could wait for him and bring him down.”

  I felt my eyes grow wide. “You think it’s the same—?”

  “I don’t believe in coincidences, Mark. This man knows the hotel well enough to know where he could find keys to the Health Club and when they might be unguarded long enough for him to make an impression from them. He knows our routines, where things are, like your apartment, where things are kept, like the wrecking bar he used to beat Tony to death on the loading platform. One thing he didn’t know and it may have saved your life, Mark.”

  “That being—?”

  “He didn’t know that we’d set up a security patrol on the mezzanine and the second floor to keep those creeps in the lobby from drifting upstairs.”

  “We have to believe it’s someone who knows the hotel inside out,” Hardy said. “Probably someone working here.”

  “If it is,” Chambrun said in a tight, hard voice, “I will take personal pleasure in shoving him off this roof, which is a forty-story drop!”

  “But why me?” I asked.

  “The same reason that he wiped out Tony Camargo,” Chambrun said. “You know something that would attach him to the murder of Eddie Sands. Tony knew that something, but it hadn’t clicked yet. You better get it to click with you, Mark, or it won’t be safe for you to walk out of this place!” He stared at me. “So think, man, think!”

  My mind was as blank as a freshly scrubbed blackboard.

  “We seem to be living in a world of slow takes,” Chambrun said. He sounded impatient. “You can’t remember something, but a killer thinks you may and you become a target. Tony Camargo hadn’t remembered something, but the killer was sure he would. It’s easy to think Nora Sands may be a member of the club—would remember something sooner or later and had to be silenced.”

  “And the boy in the pool?” Hardy asked.

  “Would remember, or had remembered and was ready to talk,” Chambrun suggested.

  “It doesn’t add
up, Pierre,” Hardy said, scowling. “These people all operate or operated in different worlds. Mark and Tony Camargo never heard of the Sandses till after the boy was murdered. The Sands woman and her son have no connection with the hotel.”

  “Wake up, Walter,” Chambrun said. “There is a connection and he’s just across the roof. Stan Nelson!”

  I must have been a lot woozier than I realized at the time because I have no memory of the ending of that conversation or Chambrun and Hardy leaving me. I must have dozed off trying to make something “click” in my head that wasn’t there. When I opened my eyes again the sun was streaming through the bedroom windows and it was another day. Sunday, and for no sensible reason I wondered where the Reverend Leonard Martin took his message on the Lord’s Day.

  I smelled coffee and it was tempting. I reached up and touched the back of my head. Doc Partridge had left some kind of medical patch or pad there. I wasn’t tempted to press hard to see how it felt.

  “So, you’re alive,” a voice said from the doorway.

  If I tell you that I have a kind of a crush on the lady who was standing there you might be inclined to laugh. Victoria Haven admits, without blushing, that she was born in the year 1900. She is tall, stands very straight, and has a mass of henna-colored hair, a shade that God never dreamed of. There are wrinkles in her face, but the high cheekbones, the wide mouth, the bright blue eyes are remnants of great beauty. Thirty-five or forty years ago when parts of the Beaumont were co-op apartments she had bought the middle penthouse on the roof and lived there ever since. “With my Japanese friend,” she would tell anyone who asked. Her “Japanese friend” was a hostile little Japanese spaniel who had no use for anyone but his elegant mistress. His name was Toto. In my time there have been two Totos and I’ve been told there was a third one before I came to work for Chambrun. Mrs. Haven has some kind of pull with the Man, because pets are strictly against the rules of the hotel. There were even rumors that years ago there had been some kind of young man–older woman relationship between Mrs. Haven and Chambrun. Whatever there was in the past, Mrs. Haven was permitted to violate the no-pet rule. She not only kept him up there on the roof, but every afternoon about five o’clock Toto accompanied his mistress down to the Trapeze Bar on the mezzanine where she had a corner table reserved. Toto sat on his own red satin cushion on a chair beside her while she held court. Men of all ages seemed to flock to her table, and in spite of her age she was still capable of enchantment. She wears so much gaudy jewelry that the manager of Tiffany’s, seeing her, must have been tempted to run back to his store to check out his inventory.

  “Every one of these things,” she told me one day, “is a memento of a romance. And when I say romance, Haskell, you should visualize a capital R.”

  “When she was a young girl,” Chambrun told me, “she was a dancer in a Broadway cabaret, toast of the town. She had legs that would have made Betty Grable, her ancestors and descendants, envious. They broke the mold when Victoria was invented.” He said it with genuine affection.

  “Are you the coffee maker?” I asked her.

  She gave me her still brilliant smile. “Smell good?”

  “Marvelous!”

  “Have you tried walking yet?”

  “No.”

  “So toddle off to the little boys’ room and do your morning whatevers. I’ll have an egg and toast as well for you.” She started to go and turned back. “If you fall down I shan’t be too upset. I’ll have to call on that handsome young man in number three to pick you up.”

  “Handsome young man?”

  “Stan Nelson,” she said. “Can you imagine having him for a neighbor? I’ve been swooning over his singing for the last twenty years.”

  I grinned at her. “Make it two eggs and I’ll introduce you to Stan after breakfast,” I said.

  “My dear Haskell, for that I’ll add a few strips of bacon,” she said, and was gone.

  Dear Betsy Ruysdale had produced all the things I’d wanted from my place. I shaved, and since Doc Partridge hadn’t told me not to get the patch on my head wet, I showered. I wasn’t going anywhere so I put on a clean pair of pajamas and a white terry-cloth robe and joined the cook.

  As I stepped out of my temporary bedroom I was greeted by a snarl, small but menacing. Toto, snuffling through his snub nose, imagined he was in charge no matter where he happened to be.

  “Knock it off, Buster,” I told him.

  He appeared to be measuring me for the kill.

  “Toto!” Mrs. Haven called from the kitchen.

  The little bully recognized real authority. He gave me a “get-you-later” look and waddled off to join Mrs. Haven. I glanced at Chambrun’s beautiful gold French clock on the mantel. It was a quarter past one in the afternoon! I had slept right around the clock.

  I guess that knowledge brought me back to earth. I walked over to a side table and switched on the radio to CBS, which does a perpetual news show. They were talking about violence in the Middle East. Mrs. Haven appeared in the kitchen doorway, an apron tied around her still shapely waist.

  “The Sands woman is still fighting to make it,” she told me.

  I switched off the radio. Mrs. Haven had obviously been staying abreast of things.

  “Has she been able to talk?” I asked.

  “No, and they’re not hopeful,” she said. “Your breakfast is ready.”

  She’d set up a place for me in the little alcove in Chambrun’s kitchen. As she’d promised there was juice, bacon and boiled eggs, toast, and coffee. I sat down, but I suddenly wasn’t very hungry. However far out Nora Sands’ lifestyle might be, she had seemed so very alive, so vital in my brief contact with her.

  “Which Pierre thinks should make you take your situation seriously,” Mrs. Haven said. “He thinks the same animal who attacked you, Haskell, used the same technique on Nora Sands. She went home from here, in shock over what she found here at the Beaumont, went to open her apartment, was shoved in from behind, beaten unconscious—and then this monster took his time tearing up her apartment, looking for something he either did or didn’t find. You’d better open your eggs, Haskell. They won’t be worth eating presently.”

  “Did or didn’t find?” I asked, cracking open a boiled egg that was done just perfectly for my taste.

  “They have no way of knowing,” Mrs. Haven said. “The people who lived in the apartment can’t tell them what’s missing, if anything. The boy is dead, Nora Sands is flirting with death.”

  The coffee was perfect, the bacon crisp perfection.

  “I didn’t dream you could cook,” I said.

  She gave me a broad smile. “Basic training,” she said. “The way to a man’s heart …”

  I couldn’t concentrate on the food, perfect as it was. “None of it fits together for me,” I said. “We haven’t the faintest idea why Eddie Sands was shot. I found out he’d lost his apartment key and was planning to get in by going up the fire escape. Maybe he caught someone searching the place.”

  “That had to be Friday afternoon or early evening,” Mrs. Haven said. “A whole day before poor Tony Camargo was attacked, more than that before his mother got here, you even later. I know Pierre thinks the order in which it happened is important.”

  “Order?”

  “The boy first. That was the start, the beginning. The boy saw something, knew something, that was a danger to someone. Where was he killed? It’s hard to imagine that it was anywhere else but here in the hotel. You don’t travel around the streets of New York carrying a body! Though God knows there’s enough violence to make a dead man pretty commonplace. You know how old I am, Haskell. Nineteen-hundred was the historic year of my birth!” She laughed. “I used to walk the streets of this city at two, three, four o’clock in the morning. I was a show girl, furs, jewels. I felt as safe on the streets as I had on my grandmother’s back porch in Dorset, Vermont. We never locked a door in those days, never had any fear of people. Today I can’t walk down Fifth Avenue in broad daylight with
out being afraid someone will snatch at a necklace I’m wearing, or an earring, or my purse. If I get shoved under the wheels of a taxi it will just be another everyday event. Do you know I haven’t been outside the hotel since they passed a law that I had to go around after Toto with a shovel and a plastic bag to pick up his leavings? When I had to be that undignified I decided I might as well stay where I was safe. I’m a little too old to learn karate.”

  “Which gets us where?” I asked, breaking off a piece of toast into my eggs.

  “This animal, this killer, is a part of today’s world,” she said. “It’s a world I really regret I’ve lived to see, Haskell. Drugs, cheap sex, violence for the fun of it, no value on life itself. A crazy kid tried to kill the president to impress an actress he’s never met; John Lennon shot in his tracks by someone who’s never even met him; the Pope a target for a mad terrorist who had no personal reason for his crime. Now we have a fifteen-year-old whose own mother doesn’t know who his father is! Then Tony Camargo, who chatted casually with McPherson five minutes before he’s beaten to death, apparently had nothing on his mind; then Nora Sands, who can’t tell anyone why she was brutalized and has no friend who can guess at why; and finally you, Haskell! You are the only one who can talk and who still has all his wits—and you don’t know what to tell anyone.”

  “There isn’t anything to tell,” I said. “It’s just a coincidence. Someone in that crowd that was milling around the lobby decided he could find something worth stealing in this place. He got to the second floor, saw me going into my place, and used what is now a common street violence to take whatever I might have worth anything.”

  “Please, please, my dear Haskell, don’t be an ass!” Mrs. Haven said. “If you can’t come up with whatever it is someone thinks you know they’ll be holding a funeral for you. God knows it isn’t even safe to die today, with vandals ripping up our graveyards.”

  She was serious, and she wasn’t an idiot. I reached for my coffee cup. It was a warm spring day but I felt a chill run along my spine. Was there something I’d managed to black out? The only person I’d known before all had started with the dead boy in the pool was Tony Camargo, and he was just somebody I said hello to when we passed on our jobs. We hadn’t been friends, just acquaintances. I didn’t know anything about anyone, or any fact relating to all this, that could possibly be dangerous to anyone. Or did I?