“The only one who won’t talk to Chambrun is someone who’s guilty of something,” I said. “People trust him and he’s earned that trust.”
“I used to think everyone who was innocent would trust us cops,” Lawson said. “It turns out they’re more certain the criminals will punish them if they talk than they are that we can protect them. We’ve got a crazy killer circulating here. Better not to talk if you suspect something. They may get what Camargo got and what you almost got.”
“And what Nora Sands and the boy got,” I said.
Lawson was carrying a briefcase and he unzipped it and took out a framed photograph.
“The Sands kid,” he said. “Ms. Zazkowski produced it.”
“Who?”
“Your friend Linda Zazkowski.”
“So that’s her last name.” I looked down at the picture of the boy. “Nice-looking lad.”
“More important, do you recognize him?” Lawson asked. “You were circulating in the ballroom during the telethon.”
Something else to try to remember. I’d had no reason to study the faces of the yammering kids in the ballroom. My job had been to make sure everything was functioning properly, and to be available when an important big shot dropped by to make a contribution. When someone is making a gift of a few thousand dollars he likes to be noticed, I find. I would greet him and make sure he was maneuvered into range of the TV cameras, make sure his name was pronounced right. The kids didn’t matter. They were just part of the scenery. I handed the photograph back to Lawson. “No dice,” I said.
“Like to take me across the roof while I show this to Stan Nelson and his guys?” Lawson asked. “I’d like to get your reaction to their reaction.”
It was something positive to do. We started across the roof, only to be greeted by Toto with that “They shall not pass!” snarl on his face. Victoria Haven stepped out of her place, smiling.
“No one approaches me that I’m not warned,” she said. “Toto!” The little dog eased away, muttering to himself. I introduced Lawson.
“You weren’t at the telethon on Friday, were you, Mrs. Haven?” he asked.
“The risk of being trampled to death at my age is not inviting,” Mrs. Haven said. “From five to seven Friday afternoon I was in the Trapeze bar as usual—with Toto. People who gave big money dropped in there to be admired. After that I watched the show on television.”
Lawson showed her the framed picture of Eddie Sands. “Didn’t happen to see this boy, did you?”
She took the picture. “Nora Sands’ son?” She studied it for a second or two. “He doesn’t look even remotely like Stan Nelson.”
“You thought he might?”
“I hear rumors, like anyone else,” Mrs. Haven said. She handed back the pictures. “I’m afraid I can’t be any help, Sergeant.”
We left her with her Japanese bodyguard and went on to Penthouse number three. Butch Mancuso answered our ring at the doorbell.
“It’s about time,” he said to Lawson. “We’ve been locked in here long enough, Sergeant. You finally decided to turn us loose?”
“Not my decision to make,” Lawson said. “I’m here to show you three men something.”
Stan Nelson and Johnny Floyd were right behind Mancuso. Lawson handed them the picture.
“Nora’s boy?” Stan asked. He looked at the picture for what seemed a long time, and then handed it back. “If he asked me for an autograph I don’t remember it.” He gave us a sort of sad smile. “I’ve often wondered about him. I suppose I’ve wondered if there might be a chance that he—well, you know the talk.”
“Looks about as much like you as I do,” Johnny Floyd said.
“None of you noticed him at the telethon? You have to take a minute to write even the little that you did on the pledge card, Nelson. It must be routine to look at the person who asks you to sign, give them a smile.”
“There were hundreds of them,” Johnny Floyd said.
Stan nodded. “They become a kind of sea of faces after a while,” he said. “I’ve tried to put this together for myself, Sergeant. From what Nora told us, and what Mark Haskell here found out when he went down to the Village, the boy played stickball Friday until dark. It gets dark about eight-thirty. If he came up here after that to get an autograph it had be nine or nine-thirty at the earliest. I would have been at the telethon for better than twenty-one hours at that time. I was damn near dead on my feet by then. Signing an autograph then could have been automatic, almost like in a trance. I probably wouldn’t have recognized my own wife if she’d handed me something to sign.”
“He could have been here much earlier on,” Lawson said. “Say, right after the telethon started at midnight on Thursday. His mother would have been at work, wouldn’t know that he’d left the apartment to come up here. You’d have been fresh then. You might remember.”
“This is a dead end, Sergeant,” Stan said. “I had no reason to pay special attention to anyone except the big giver, people representing corporations and foundations. I could give you a list of those, plus a few politicians and others who wanted to be noticed. But a fifteen-year-old kid would just be a part of a big blur. It shouldn’t be that way, I suppose. A boy with a dollar to give is just as important in a moral sense as an executive with a check for five grand from his company. Unfortunately the kid isn’t noticed the same way. Yes, I thank them and smile at them, but notice or remember? No way.”
“Our anonymous informant still keeps pointing at you, Mr. Nelson,” Lawson said. “Why, do you suppose?”
“Because he’s both anonymous and crazy,” Stan said.
“And maybe not so anonymous,” Johnny Floyd said, in his harsh, rasping voice. “Maybe his name is Zachary Thompson and he’s still out to get Stan for what happened long ago.”
Lawson took back the framed picture and slipped it into his briefcase. “I’ve just come back from talking to Thompson,” he said.
“And?” Stan asked.
“He’s not your best friend, Mr. Nelson,” Lawson said.
THREE
I FOUND I WAS LIVING a totally new experience when I left the roof with Sergeant Lawson and went down with him to Chambrun’s office. The last time I’d been on that second floor, where my own apartment was located, I’d been clobbered. There was my office at one end of the corridor, then the linen room and a housekeeper’s quarters on either side of my apartment, and then Chambrun’s suite of offices, which took up half the space on that section of the second floor, and a bank of elevators, four shafts wide. It had been the safest and most relaxed place in the world for me for years. The people who came and went were mostly staff, friends, co-workers. Hotel guests or customers off the street didn’t wander around this small section of our world. If they had business with Chambrun they went to his office. If they had business with me they came into mine. There were no shops or bars to attract anyone. Normally, when I hit that second-floor corridor I would let my breath out, relaxing from the high-speed functioning of the rest of our world. I might even loosen my tie and undo the collar button on my shirt. On this floor I didn’t have to make “an appearance”—the smart, well-dressed director of public relations in the world’s top luxury hotel.
But here was where I’d been creamed, probably saved from death by the unscheduled appearance of Alec Watson, Jerry Dodd’s man, who’d kept me from joining Tony Camargo somewhere in a pine box. It wasn’t home-sweet-home anymore, even on a quiet Sunday afternoon. A madman with a club or an iron bar could be lurking behind each door we passed. I was grateful for Sergeant Lawson’s company.
Chambrun was in his office, along with Lieutenant Hardy and Betsy Ruysdale. The top of the Man’s carved, Florentine desk was littered with papers.
Chambrun looked up at me and his smile was wry. “I would have told you to stay put, at least until tomorrow,” he said. “Doc Partridge seems to think you could do yourself more harm fretting than being up and around. Walter thinks you could be useful.” He nodded at the lieutenan
t. “Ruysdale makes the most sense of all of us. She thinks you should collect one of your girl friends and take off for Bermuda, or Canada, or the South Sea Islands until we have our man locked up.”
“You go with me, Ruysdale?” I asked. She gave me a Mona Lisa smile and went back to sorting papers. “Then it’s no deal. How can I help?”
Chambrun and Hardy were more interested in Lawson. He reported no luck with the picture, with me, Mrs. Haven, and Stan Nelson and his crew. “The next thing is to try the technical people who were in the ballroom during the telethon, camera crews for the TV and film people. One of them may have got a picture of the boy.”
“They edit those films,” I said. “The boy could have wound up, as the struggling actor complains, on the cutting-room floor—swept up in the trash. So what if he was in the background of a picture?”
“It would prove he was here,” Chambrun said. “Here, alive and well.”
“We’re going into Sunday evening,” Hardy said, “but we’re still back at Friday as far as the boy is concerned. We know how he got into the Health Club, but where was he shot and when? Square one.”
“So how can I help?” I said again.
“Step number two, going back to Friday, is to try to determine who took an impression of the Health Club keys,” Chambrun said. “It would seem that it must have happened in the last forty-five minutes or so of Camargo’s shift. That was when Jimmy Heath was playing squash with Mr. Shuttleworth. If Camargo wanted to leave the office then, to start his closing routines, someone would have gone into the office and made the impressions.”
“Why didn’t he just take the key?” I asked.
Chambrun looked at me as if I was a not bright kid in the second grade. “Because if the keys were missing when Camargo and Jim Heath were ready to leave they’d have reported it to Jerry Dodd. We’d have had someone watching for trouble.” Chambrun moved restlessly in his chair. “Standard practice. There’s always someone in the office, except for a minute or two, here and there, during that last forty-five minutes. A member comes in earlier on to go through whatever his routine is. He says hello to whoever’s in the office and that someone, Camargo or Jim Heath on that shift, signs him in on the clipboard sheet. When he leaves he goes out the same way, past the office. Ten to one he says ‘goodnight’ to whoever’s in the office. If it was a stranger he would probably remember, be able to give us some sort of description. We’ve gotten in touch with all but three of the people who used the club during that evening shift on Friday night. Mr. Shuttleworth, the last man to leave, is away somewhere for the weekend. Ditto Mr. Fessler, the other squash player. Mr. Crowder, a member who went through the gym routines, is also out of town. All the others saw Camargo or Jim Heath when they left. It may be tomorrow before we can catch up with those three we haven’t reached. One of them may have the answer we need.”
“One hopes to God!” Hardy said.
“I’m puzzled by something, Mr. Chambrun,” Betsy Ruysdale said. “It may not mean anything, but—”
“If it puzzles you it means something,” Chambrun said.
“I have these clipboard sheets,” Ruysdale said. “I went back in the files for other Friday nights to see if they had pretty much the same group of customers each Friday night.”
“And do they?”
“I guess you’d say that, more than any other time, the Friday night people are regulars. Mr. Shuttleworth, Mr. Fessler, and Mr. Crowder are always there late.”
“So what’s puzzling?”
Ruysdale put down several sheets in front of the Man. “Look at the top of the sheet, Mr. Chambrun. Camargo signs it there with the time he took over. Look at the daytime sheet, and you see that Carl Hulman signs at the top and the time he opened up in the morning. Now, this last Friday night we have a sheet with the names of the members and guests who came in. It’s signed at the top by Tony Camargo, like always. But at the bottom of this sheet are his initials, T.C.”
“So, he closed up shop and initialed it,” Chambrun said.
“But not the Friday before that, or the Friday before that,” Ruysdale said. “No initials to close out. No initials on the bottom of Hulman’s sheets. It wasn’t common practice for anyone to initial the sheet at the bottom.”
Chambrun shuffled through the sheets she handed him. He looked up at her. “You think?”
“Could they be the initials of someone who came into the club—the last person to come in?”
“They’re Camargo’s initials,” Chambrun insisted.
“But if he never initialed the sheets before?”
“If it was a last member to come in, why not his full name?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Chambrun,” Ruysdale said. “It could be someone who wasn’t a member, a guest-customer. Maybe someone who works in the hotel, someone he knew well and just made a record of it, automatically? It may mean nothing at all, but—”
“Get Jim Heath up here,” Chambrun said. “And get me our employees’ file, everyone whose name begins in C.”
“On the double,” Ruysdale said, and took off for her own office.
“Ring any bell with you, Mark?” Chambrun asked.
No kind of bells seemed to be ringing for me that afternoon. I tried, off the top of my head, to think of someone on our staff of hundreds of people whose initials were T.C.
“Mike Maggio,” I suggested. Mike is our night bell captain, a friend of Tony Camargo’s I knew, and a very bright guy who knows everything that goes on in the hotel during his shift.
“Get him,” Chambrun said.
I picked up the phone on his desk, called the front office and told them the boss wanted Mike.
“You think this adds up to something, Pierre?” Hardy asked.
“It’s your kind of nit-picking, Walter. Wouldn’t you follow it up?”
The red light blinked on Chambrun’s phone. I answered. It was Ruysdale from the front office. “Officer Scott, one of Hardy’s men, is out here with a young woman.”
“That’ll be the girl Camargo was dating,” Sergeant Lawson said.
She was about five feet tall, with bright red hair and a little-girl face. She was clearly out of her skull with fear. Scott was just another cop, cut out of the same mold as Lawson.
“This is Margradel Rousch,” he said to Hardy. “She’s the girl Camargo had a date with on Friday night.”
Cops surprise me now and then. A city of millions and they find a girl named Margradel who works in a bar somewhere. No trouble.
“I’m Lieutenant Hardy of Homicide, Miss Rousch. You know what’s happened to Camargo?”
“The—the radio.” It was a whisper.
“You saw him Friday night?”
“It—it was more like Saturday morning,” she said. “I—I don’t get off till one o’clock.”
“You expected him? You had a date with him?”
“Yes.”
“There’s nothing to be frightened of, Margradel,” Chambrun said gently. “The lieutenant just wants to know if Tony talked to you about his job, anything unusual that may have happened Friday night.”
“No sir. He didn’t.”
“Think carefully,” Hardy said.
“I—I don’t think so. Oh, he said he’d been afraid he’d be late. He—he’d run into an old friend he hadn’t seen in a long time. But he wasn’t late.”
“Did he mention the friend’s name?”
“No sir.”
“The initials T.C. mean anything to you?” Chambrun asked.
She looked bewildered. “Those are Tony’s initials.”
“Do you know someone else with those initials?”
The girl shook her head slowly, reaching for something she couldn’t find. I knew how she felt. I’d been there all day. “I can’t think of anyone,” she said.
“Did Tony Camargo ever write you any letters, notes, Miss Rousch?” Hardy asked.
Faint color mounted in her pale cheeks. “Two or three times,” she said. I got the impression
from looking at her that Tony’s note had been something more than casual. He’d had “hot pants” for little Miss Rousch, according to Jimmy Heath.
“How did he sign those notes?” Hardy asked.
“You mean, what did he—?”
“I mean, how did he sign his name.”
She moistened her lips. “Just ‘Tony,’” she said. “Or—or maybe, ‘Your Tony.’”
“Not his initials, T.C.?”
“No sir.”
I wanted to ask her if she’d been nice to Tony that last night of his life, but it didn’t seem to the point. I imagined she might regret it now if she hadn’t.
“One more time, Miss Rousch,” Hardy said. “Camargo told you he’d been afraid he’d be late because he’d run into an old friend he hadn’t seen in a long time. He didn’t say anything about that friend, who he was, where he’d run into him?”
“No sir.” The color mounted in her cheeks again. “He—he had other things on his mind.”
“Not unusual for a young man with a very pretty date,” Chambrun said, smiling at her.
So much for Miss Margradel Rousch. Hardy knew how to reach her if he wanted to talk to her again. He gave Officer Scott orders to send her home in a taxi.
In the doorway she encountered Jimmy Heath on his way in. They apparently didn’t know each other.
“That was Tony’s girl friend,” Chambrun told Jimmy.
“Oh, wow!” Jimmy said. “From the way he described her I’d have expected a lot more—more glamor.”
“Glamor is in the eye of the beholder,” Chambrun said. “Look at these clipboard sheets, Jimmy.”
Jimmy looked at them, frowning. “They seem regular,” he said.
“The one for Friday night. The initials at the bottom of the list of people who came in.”
“Tony’s,” Jim said.
“He didn’t initial any other sheets,” Chambrun said. “If you closed out the clipboard sheet any night did you add your initials?”
“No, Mr. Chambrun. Whoever was at the desk when our shift took over signed at the top. That was almost always Tony. Maybe two or three times in the last six years it was me. Once, way back, Tony was sick and didn’t come in at all. A couple of other times Carl Hulman had something to talk to Tony about before he left and I took over the check-ins.”
With Intent to Kill Page 14