With Intent to Kill

by Hugh Pentecost

  ‘We heard there was a shooting up in the roof, Mark.’ That was Jack Wilson, the International News man, an old friend.

  ‘One of them got up there before we got the elevators shut down,’ I told him. ‘He did some wild shooting. Victoria Haven was hit.’ I was aware he knew Mrs. Haven.

  ‘Badly hurt?’

  ‘No, fortunately.’

  ‘Can we go up to talk to her?’

  ‘Not yet. As you can imagine, the lady is in shock.’ Which was a bald lie. Mrs. Haven wasn’t nearly as much in shock as I was.

  ‘Some of the creeps are still in the hotel?’ Wilson asked.

  ‘We’re afraid so. We don’t know yet how much damage there is or how many people may be hurt upstairs. When Chambrun talks to you, he’ll have more facts and figures. You’ve got to give us a little air for a while, friends.’

  I had something else on my mind. As I’ve said somewhere else, I am always in love forever—every three months. Right now there was a lady working in the Blue Lagoon who was my forever dream of the moment. I wanted to find out if she was okay. Sally Mills is a beautiful blonde who’s been acting as a hostess in the nightclub for the last few months.

  The Blue Lagoon had been hit hard by the attackers. Mr. Cardoza, the club’s captain, greeted me at the entrance. Someone had placed an adhesive patch on a cut over his right eye.

  He gave me a bitter little smile. ‘You don’t look as if you’d been in the middle of things, Mark,’ he said.

  ‘I guess I got lucky.’ I was looking past him into the wreck of his nightclub, tables overturned, glassware and china shattered, the grand piano on the stage splintered. ‘Sally?’ I asked him.

  His smile tightened at the corners. ‘One of those goons tried to rape her, right there on the stage in front of my hysterical customers,’ Cardoza said. He touched the adhesive on his forehead. ‘That’s how I got this—trying to help her.’

  ‘My God! Where is she?’

  ‘Backstage, in one of the dressing rooms. It didn’t happen to her, Mark, but she was pretty roughly handled.’

  I didn’t wait for more. I stumbled across the destroyed room, up onto the stage, and back into the dressing room area, calling out Sally’s name.

  I found her, lying on a chaise longue, in the star’s dressing room. Hilary Foster, the star of that week’s show in the Lagoon, was sitting beside her, holding a wet towel to Sally’s face.

  ‘Sally!’

  She turned her head slightly. Her mouth was swollen and there was a dark bruise under one eye.

  ‘For God’s sake go away, Mark,’ she said, her voice rough and strained. ‘Unless you enjoy looking at raw hamburger.’

  I knelt down beside her and took her hands in mine. Her fingers gripped me so tightly I might have been going to save her from drowning.

  ‘Oh, Mark!’ she whispered. ‘That animal having at me … If it hadn’t been for Mr. Cardoza—’

  I had never felt such a hot rage in my whole life. ‘Can you describe him?’ I asked her. ‘Because I’m going to kill him.’

  ‘Oh, I can describe him,’ Sally said. ‘Every inch of his ugly face, his stained teeth, the wicked, hungry gleam in his eyes!’

  ‘I think we should all just consider ourselves lucky that nothing worse happened to any of us,’ Hilary Foster said in a quiet voice. ‘I could identify that thug if I ever saw him again, but I think we should just thank God for Sally that he didn’t get what he was after.’

  ‘He—he dragged me up on stage,’ Sally said, a little breathless. ‘He—he started to tear off my clothes. I tried to fight him off, but he hit me back and forth across the face with the back of his hairy hand. I was too groggy to fight any more, and then Mr. Cardoza was there. He had a carving knife from the buffet, and he slashed at this character with it. The man is wounded, if we ever find him!’

  ‘He hit Mr. Cardoza with a candlestick he picked up off the piano,’ Hilary said. ‘But then he took off, clutching at his shoulder where Mr. Cardoza had knifed him. I could see the blood trickling out between his fingers.’

  ‘I’ll find him, if I have to search every dive in the city,’ I said.

  Hilary Foster stood up. She gave me a sympathetic smile. ‘Just take Sally somewhere she can be quiet,’ she said, ‘out of all this confusion. The police may have picked up your man when he tried to get away. That means you can deal with him legally.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn about legal!’ I said, and I realized I was being pretty loudmouthed about my heroism.

  ‘I have friends who need to be told I’m safe,’ Hilary said. ‘Take care of her, Mark.’ She bent down, touched Sally’s naked shoulder where her dress had been torn away, and left.

  ‘They took all her jewelry,’ Sally told me as Hilary left. ‘It was stage stuff, but it looked expensive.’ She was still hanging onto me for dear life.

  ‘I can’t kiss you, because it would hurt you,’ I said. ‘Let me take you up to my apartment. You’ll be perfectly safe there.’ I grinned at her. ‘You’ve got a robe up there, and you can get the touch of that creep washed off you.’

  I helped her up. She was pretty unsteady on her feet.

  ‘Can’t we go up the service way?’ she asked me. ‘I don’t want people to see me like this.’ She touched the torn front of her dress.

  ‘It’ll be safer the front way, and you’ll only be one in a crowd. They mauled a hell of a lot of people, love.’

  I got Sally up to my apartment on the second floor where, I must admit, she was perfectly at home, with quite a few of her own things there. I told her not to let anyone in. ‘Even if they say they’re cops or whoever.’

  I had to get geared to what was going on when I got back downstairs. A makeshift interrogation center had been set up in one of the banquet rooms. Hotel guests were trying to provide the police with lists of what had been stolen in the raid, most of it jewelry or cash from the male guests, which was certainly gone with the wind. People’s moods varied. Outrage and anger was the loudest note to be heard, but it didn’t seem to be aimed at the Beaumont. Free concerts in the park shouldn’t be allowed. If they were the city should provide enough police! The Mayor ought to be impeached! Then there were people laughing at each other for the way they looked, clothes torn, faces bruised. Some of the men were happily boasting that they’d gotten in a lick or two on their own. Up in the Trapeze Bar on the mezzanine Eddie, the head bartender, and his staff, in a sea of broken glass and shattered tables and chairs, were serving drinks to the thirsty in paper cups. Mr. Del Greco, the Trapeze’s captain, trying to stop the first rush into his domain, had been knocked cold by one of the goons with a baseball bat, and was being tended to up in the hospital unit on the fourth floor—could have a fractured skull, I was told.

  I hadn’t spotted Chambrun anywhere, and I walked around the mezzanine to his second-floor office. The Man was there, along with Betsy Ruysdale, his secretary, who should have been home and in bed but who is somehow never missing when Chambrun might need her. With them was an old friend, Lieutenant Walter Hardy, a homicide detective with whom we’d had dealings in the past. The Beaumont is a city within a city, with its own bank, shops, restaurants, homes for transients, health club, hospital, its own police force and maintenance crews. Crimes happen here just as they do in other cities, but tonight had been a kind of small war. I hadn’t, at that point, heard that anyone had been killed, which would call for a homicide cop. And then, before I asked, I realized that Chambrun had Victoria Haven on his mind.

  ‘There isn’t much I can do for you, Pierre,’ the lieutenant was saying. ‘No one, at least so far, saw the man who shot at Mrs. Haven. The motive was probably robbery.’

  ‘How would he know that Victoria had a small fortune in jewelry up there?’ Chambrun asked.

  ‘Rich people live in penthouses,’ Hardy said. ‘Just a good guess.’

  ‘Why would he try to kill her?’ Chambrun asked. ‘All he had to do was slap her down and go looking for whatever valuables he could fin
d.’

  ‘People in that kind of psychotic outburst don’t have to make sense,’ Hardy said. ‘The time he was up there you figure he could have used an elevator? The power hadn’t been turned off yet?’

  ‘I think,’ Chambrun said. ‘When this rabble burst into the lobby the help moved to try to stop them. I assume the elevator operators charged out of their cars to try to help the rest of the staff. That probably means nobody saw who took the elevator.’

  ‘We’ve got three bullets from the gun,’ Hardy said. ‘Ballistics may be able to tell us if there’s a record of some other firing of it. One in a million chances, I’d say. The lady doesn’t know of anyone who might be gunning for her?’

  ‘No. She laughs at the idea.’

  ‘Well, if ballistics doesn’t give us a lead—and I wouldn’t hope for it, Pierre—we have no place to start. Possibly, when the smoke has cleared and people have calmed down—and the story breaks in the press and on radio and TV—someone may remember seeing someone commandeer an elevator, or have seen someone coming down the stairways from the roof after the power was shut off. Keep your fingers crossed. It’s a chance.’

  Chambrun moved restlessly from behind his desk. ‘I have the feeling that someone took advantage of the confusion and went up there to kill Victoria. No connection with the mob at all.’

  ‘She’ll have to tell you who hates her that much,’ Hardy said.

  Chambrun had his would-be murderer to find, and I had a would-be rapist I wanted to nail to the barn door. But it was mop-up time. The major physical damage to the hotel had taken place in the lobby, the main dining room, the Spartan Room, the Blue Lagoon, and up on the mezzanine in the Trapeze Bar. Of the several hundred thugs who’d invaded the hotel the police had been able to arrest about sixty—the actual number, I find, was sixty-one—and carted them off to jail. The hope was that cooperative guests of the hotel and members of the staff would be able to identify some of them and charge them with specific crimes—armed robbery, unprovoked assault, vandalism.

  ‘Six months in the cooler and they’ll be back on the streets again,’ Mike Maggio said when he passed the word to me that I was wanted to have a look at the prisoners when I could get free. My man wouldn’t be hard to identify if they had him. Mr. Cardoza had left him well marked.

  I had expected to sit in on the press conference with Chambrun, but he asked me to keep circulating, make contact with the guests who had complaints, possibly with identifications and descriptions. Everybody, it seemed, wanted to talk to someone about their personal experiences during the riot, and express their outrage, mostly against the Mayor and the police force. I don’t think I heard one person hold the hotel accountable for what had happened to them.

  While all this was going on, still another miracle was happening. Every member of the hotel staff was at work; people on the day shift called back or came back on their own when they heard the news on radio or TV. No one who works for Chambrun will ever let him down, because they know he will never let them down. The cleanup had looked as if it would take a year. Only a little more than an hour after the mob had been hustled out of the hotel, the broken glass and broken furniture were gone, most of it replaced by emergency supplies from the storerooms. The Blue Lagoon was closed for the night, but the Spartan Bar on the lobby level, the lobby itself, and the Trapeze on the mezzanine were doing business, and a stranger who didn’t know what had happened wouldn’t have noticed anything special—except for the unusual number of blue-uniformed cops filtering in and out.

  About three in the morning, it was possible for me to go to police headquarters to have a look at the prisoners who’d been taken. They all looked alike, I thought; blue jeans, gaudy sports shirts, a collection of facial bruises and cuts. I questioned the cops in charge, but they didn’t have anyone with a knife wound in the shoulder. Quite a few guests were present, still wearing rather rumpled-looking evening clothes, pointing to this or that prisoner and being jeered at for their pains. It didn’t look as if many of the prisoners could be charged with specific crimes, only the mob invasion. That wasn’t good enough for me, but what could I do? Go out into a city of millions of people and hope to stumble on a man with a knife wound in his shoulder?

  There was a reddish light to the east of the city as I got back to the hotel. ‘Red in the morning, sailor take warning.’ It looked as if we were due for a stormy day. I was dead on my feet when I finally made my way up to my apartment on the Beaumont’s second floor.

  I let myself in with my key and instantly heard Sally call out to me, ‘Is that you, Mark?’

  ‘I have the only key,’ I said.

  I walked into the bedroom, and there she was, covered with a sheet, and looking very appetizing in spite of her bruised face.

  ‘I thought you’d never come,’ she said.

  ‘Nobody bothered you?’

  ‘No.’

  I told her I’d been down to the police station in the hope of identifying the man who’d attacked her. ‘No luck,’ I said. ‘The bastard must have gotten away.’

  Then the bedside phone rang. I figured Chambrun must be needing me for something and I wished he didn’t. I’d had it. It was Mrs. Veach, the chief operator on the switchboard.

  ‘There’s a man trying to reach you, Mark,’ she said. ‘He says his name is Max London.’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ I said.

  ‘He says he’s Hilary Foster’s agent and manager,’ Mrs. Veach told me. ‘He says it’s urgent.’

  ‘Put him through,’ I said.

  The voice that came through was sharp and agitated. ‘Haskell? I’m Max London, Hilary Foster’s manager.’

  ‘I’ve been told,’ I said.

  ‘Where is she?’ London asked.

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. I saw her a couple of hours ago, but that’s it.’

  ‘She was all right?’

  ‘Yes. She was taking care of one of the girls who was hurt during what went on here. You know about it?’

  ‘Of course I know. That’s why I was worried. She hasn’t turned up at her own apartment. Nobody seems to know where she is.’

  ‘Why did you happen to call me? Miss Foster isn’t a friend of mine. I mean, I just know her to say hello to since she’s been working in the Blue Lagoon.’

  ‘Because the captain there—what’s his name, Cardoza?—said Hilary was taking care of a friend of yours who’d been hurt. That when you arrived, Hilary left. I thought—I hoped—she might have told you where she was going.’

  ‘She just said she had to let some friends know that she hadn’t been hurt in the ruckus here.’

  ‘Didn’t say who?’

  ‘No. And understand, she wasn’t hurt. She was perfectly okay.’

  I heard a long sigh. ‘Well, thanks anyway. I’m sorry to have bothered you. And Haskell …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She might come back for some reason—curiosity, anything. If she does, please get her to call me.’

  ‘Mr. London, I’ve been going for about twenty hours straight. I’m going to be sound asleep.’

  ‘Could you ask someone on the staff there to keep an eye out for her? Most of the hotel help must know her by sight.’

  ‘This place is a madhouse just now,’ I said. ‘I’ll do my best for you.’

  I did sleep, but before I drifted off I’d gotten Mike Maggio on the phone and asked him to keep an eye out for Hilary Foster.

  ‘She’s not around unless she’s doubling for one of the cleaning women,’ Mike told me.

  It didn’t seem I’d been asleep for more than a few minutes—it was actually a couple of hours—when my phone rang again. Damn Max London, I thought. But I had to answer. It could be something else.

  It was something else. ‘Mr. Chambrun wants you in his office on the double, Mark,’ Mrs. Veach told me.

  I splashed some water on my face, combed my hair, got into some clothes and went down the hall to The Man’s office. I wasn’t feeling any too cheerful, I don’t
mind saying, but when I walked into Chambrun’s elegant office I thought I’d arrived at a wake.

  Chambrun was sitting at his carved Florentine desk, his face the color of ashes. His hand rested on his telephone, like a man trying to remember a forgotten number. Betsy Ruysdale stood beside him, waiting for some kind of instruction that didn’t come. Jerry Dodd stood facing Chambrun, like a soldier at attention—or a man facing a firing squad.

  Chambrun’s thin lips moved. ‘Play it for him, Ruysdale,’ he said. He has a way of neutering Betsy by only using her last name. There are rumors that they are a lot closer than that, but you’d never guess it when they are at work.

  Betsy moved around the desk. ‘Mr. Chambrun got a phone call a little while back. We’ve been flooded with calls from people in trouble and with complaints. But when this conversation started Mr. Chambrun realized there was something odd about it and switched on his tape recorder. Three or four sentences have been spoken when the tape picks it up.’ She bent down and switched on the recorder.

  ‘Just stop interrupting and listen to what I have to say,’ a strange voice said. ‘I am in Suite Twenty-two B. Don’t bother to look at your registration cards. I am not Raul Ortiz, who is supposed to be the occupant.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Chambrun’s voice.

  ‘That is of no consequence. Just listen and do what you’re told. I have taken over this suite along with several men of mine. We are holding four hostages.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter to you,’ the voice said—I thought there was a kind of sneering note to it—‘except that we have them. I want you to evacuate all the other guests on this corridor. They’ll probably be happy enough to leave when you tell them we’ve taken over this area. You will order the maids who cover this floor to leave. I want no service of any kind to this floor except the telephone. It is to be completely deserted.’

  ‘You really think I will follow such instructions?’ Chambrun again.

  ‘I will tell you who one of the hostages is,’ the voice from Twenty-two B said. ‘She is the star of your nightclub show.’