Remember to Kill Me (The Pierre Chambrun Mysteries, 19)

by Hugh Pentecost

  ‘I can give you a history on this one,’ Brooks said, jabbing a forefinger at the drawing. ‘He couldn’t have been more than five or six years old forty-five years ago. He is, however, quite capable of having masterminded this whole damned adventure here.’

  Yardley was still on the extension of Chambrun’s phone, and so I went to the outer office and asked the switchboard to call Mrs. Haven’s penthouse. The lady answered almost immediately after the first ring.

  ‘Mark Haskell here, Mrs. Haven,’ I said. ‘I’d like to speak to Mr. Chambrun.’

  ‘So would I,’ the lady said.

  ‘He isn’t there with you?’

  ‘What made you think he would be?’ she asked.

  ‘He started up to see you almost half an hour ago,’ I said.

  ‘Well, he never made it, Mark. Is there something wrong?’

  ‘This whole place is topsy-turvy,’ I said. ‘He got waylaid somewhere. If he gets to you before I find him will you tell him he’s urgently needed down here?’

  ‘Of course. He isn’t in danger, is he, Mark?’

  I hadn’t thought so, but I was suddenly aware of the small hairs rising on the back of my neck.

  ‘If anyone can take care of himself it’s the boss,’ I said, and hoped I was right.

  Back in Chambrun’s office I told Jerry and the others that the boss hadn’t arrived at Mrs. Haven’s place yet.

  ‘There are five thousand reporters in this bughouse,’ Jerry said. ‘They probably cornered him before he could get started.’

  ‘I’m going to find him,’ I said. I didn’t want to mention the anxiety I was feeling in front of the others. They didn’t seem to think there was anything unusual about the circumstances. When Chambrun sets out to do something he does it, five thousand reporters or not.

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ Jerry said.

  ‘Tell Miss Ruysdale when she comes back, will you?’ I asked Guardino.

  ‘Somebody better bloody well come up with a plan of action,’ Inspector Brooks said. ‘I’m not waiting very much longer.’

  Jerry was suddenly angry. ‘Before you decide on some harebrained scheme of your own, Inspector, you better be damn sure it makes some sense!’

  Jerry and I walked down the hall and down the stairway to the lobby.

  ‘I know how that limey must feel,’ Jerry said. ‘His brother! But he could blow something before we’re ready.’

  There were two of Jerry’s men guarding the entrance to the stairway at the lobby level.

  ‘Mr. Chambrun come down this way a while back?’ Jerry asked.

  ‘Yeah. Headed for the roof, he told us,’ one of the men said.

  ‘He was headed for the elevators,’ the other one said.

  We edged our way out into the crush of people. There are six elevators in the west bank. The doors to all of them were closed, lights off in the cars. The regular operators in their blue uniforms were standing guard in front of those closed doors. Only the two cars at the far end of the row went up to the roof. Jerry and I reached the two operators on those cars.

  ‘Either of you see Mr. Chambrun?’ Jerry asked.

  The one named Pat Mullins gestured toward the ceiling. ‘He went up to his place,’ he said.

  ‘You took him up, Pat?’ Jerry said.

  ‘No,’ Pat said. ‘He took himself. He said I must be pooped out like everyone else. Told me to go get myself a cup of coffee and take a few minutes off. He didn’t want anyone going up to the roof, anyway, and he could handle the car.’

  ‘I see it’s there, so he must have come down,’ Jerry said.

  Mullins shook his head. ‘Sent it down on the automatic,’ he said. ‘It was here when I came back from my coffee.’

  It wasn’t too unusual for Chambrun to operate a car, particularly late at night. Only one of the two roof cars would have an operator on it after one in the morning. Chambrun would often use the car that was out of use for his private transportation. If he was going up to stay he would often send the car back to the lobby on the automatic gadget. When you get to the top you open the door, press the button for the lobby on the automatic, step out, close the door, and the car goes down.

  Jerry turned to me. ‘You have a key to the boss’s penthouse, don’t you, Mark?’

  Betsy Ruysdale and I were specially privileged. If Chambrun wants something in his penthouse I can fetch for him. Betsy, I think, has other reasons for having a key.

  ‘We can handle the car, Pat,’ Jerry said.

  Pat opened the locked door for us and we headed for the roof.

  ‘It’s not like him,’ Jerry said, ‘but I’ve never seen him so tired before. He could have gone to his place, decided to lie down for a couple of minutes, and conked out.’

  I didn’t believe that for a minute, but it was something to go on. There were still two of Jerry’s men stationed on the roof and one in Mrs. Haven’s penthouse. Neither of the men on the roof had seen Chambrun.

  ‘If the elevator had come up we’d have been waiting,’ one of the men said. ‘We’d have been right there when he got off the car.’

  I used my key to get into Chambrun’s place. He wasn’t there, not was there any sign that he’d been there recently. The maids had done their cleanup job that morning and everything was neat as a pin, no butts in the ashtrays, no coffee cup where it shouldn’t be.

  We walked across the roof to Mrs. Haven’s place. She’d seen us arrive and was waiting for us.

  ‘Still looking for Pierre?’ she asked.

  ‘I guess he hasn’t made it up here,’ I said. I brought her as nearly up to date as I could; the arrival of Sir George Brooks’s brother and Lois Tranter’s appearance on the scene.

  ‘Nobody has decided yet just what they will do?’ Mrs. Haven asked.

  ‘Different people with different interests,’ I said. ‘They haven’t gotten together yet on any plan.’

  ‘Time keeps passing,’ Mrs. Haven said. ‘What is it Pierre wants of me?’

  ‘As far as we know, the person who shot at you is still walking around free. I guess he wondered if there was anything you’d forgotten to tell us in the excitement of the moment.’

  ‘I never saw anything or anyone,’ Mrs. Haven said. ‘I heard the first shot, just as I was struck, and had the presence of mind to duck.’

  ‘You told me about your kidnapping forty-five years ago,’ I said. ‘Man named Carlos Avilla.’

  I told her about Lois Tranter’s father pointing out a character at the Trapeze Bar, the police artist’s improvisation and Inspector Brooks’s identifying him as one Ricardo Avilla.

  The old lady gave me an incredulous look. ‘There was a child,’ she said, ‘Carlos Avilla’s grandson. His name was Ricardo. Six, seven, eight years old at the time. A charming little boy who stayed with his grandfather at the camp where I was held. The child spent a lot of time with me, begging me to teach him English.’

  ‘Kid look like Clark Gable?’ Jerry Dodd asked.

  ‘I can’t imagine Clark Gable at seven years old,’ Mrs. Haven said. Her eyes clouded. ‘Carlos Avilla, the grandfather and my captor, did look a little like Gable! Dark, handsome, big ears! Do you suppose—?’

  ‘The man Tranter pointed out to his daughter had lost his right hand in some kind of an accident,’ Jerry said.

  Mrs. Haven’s eyes widened. ‘The child, Ricardo, had lost his right hand!’ she said. ‘Some kind of guerrilla raid and bombing in one of their endless wars down there.’

  ‘That’s our man,’ Jerry said, ‘grown up!’

  ‘If he looks enough like his grandfather for you to recognize him, plus the right hand missing, that may account for the attempt to put you out of business, Mrs. Haven,’ I said.

  ‘I’d like to see that police artist’s drawing,’ Mrs. Haven said. ‘I’ll go down with you. Pierre will surely turn up in his office, and then he can ask me what he wants to ask me.’

  ‘It’s safer for you to stay here, well-guarded,’ Jerry said.

  ‘I
can’t bear staying up here, not knowing what’s going on,’ the lady said. ‘If I’m not safe in Pierre’s office, I’m not safe anywhere!’

  I hoped she was right, but that wasn’t what concerned me at the moment. Where had Chambrun got to? He had disappeared somewhere between the lobby and the roof.

  People in high places may have been concerned about a confrontation between the two great world powers, a nuclear war, and control of the world; Lois Tranter and Inspector Brooks were concerned about the hostages in Twenty-two B; but in a very short time several hundred members of the work force at the Beaumont were concerned with only one thing. Where was The Man?

  There had certainly never been a time in my ten years on Chambrun’s staff when he couldn’t have been reached within minutes of his being needed. He never let his whereabouts be a mystery. If he left his office, the girls on the switchboard and Betsy Ruysdale knew where he could be reached. He had told us this time where he was going. If the man in Twenty-two B called he was to be switched to Mrs. Haven’s penthouse. If he’d changed his plans voluntarily he would have let us know—under normal conditions. There were security men or police on every floor of the hotel except Twenty-two West. If he had left the elevator he was running on any floor but Twenty-two he would have been spotted. It took what seemed an endless time to check with everyone guarding thirty-nine floors, but in the end we came up empty. No one had seen the boss. The last person known to have a contact with him was Pat Mullins, the elevator operator he’d sent off to have a coffee while he took over Mullins’s elevator himself.

  ‘The last I saw him he was standing in the open door of the car, watching me take off,’ Mullins told us.

  ‘You saw him get in the car, close the door, and start up?’ Jerry Dodd asked Mullins.

  ‘No, I mean, I was glad to take the break he offered me. I wasn’t concerned about him. He’s run that car himself a thousand times.’

  ‘So you didn’t see him actually start up?’

  ‘No. There wasn’t any reason to wait and watch him go,’ Mullins said. ‘Is there some reason I should have?’

  ‘I’m not blaming you for anything, Pat. I’m just trying to find a clue.’

  ‘He changed his mind after Pat left,’ Betsy Ruysdale suggested, her face ghost-white. ‘He didn’t go up, or he changed his mind partway up and came back down while Pat was still missing.’

  ‘Or he decided to be a big shot and face it out with the characters in Twenty-two B,’ Guardino suggested.

  ‘In which case they now have five hostages,’ Inspector Brooks said.

  That was something I just couldn’t buy. The last thing in the world Chambrun would try was some kind of James Bond heroics. He was a man who, in all my experience with him, added up the pluses and the minuses and played it the way the odds suggested. He might be reckless about himself but never about his hotel or the people in it.

  While we had been trying to check every possible base, Victoria Haven, accompanied by her security guards, had arrived in Chambrun’s office. There was the elegance of a queen about this great lady. She had gone directly to Chambrun’s desk where Pollard, the artist, and Lois Tranter were still fiddling with the dream-up of the man at the bar. She took a quick look at the drawing and turned away. Something about her commanded everyone’s attention.

  I quickly introduced her to Yardley, Guardino, and Inspector Brooks.

  ‘I may owe my life to your brother’s quick action, Inspector,’ she said. ‘How can I help?’

  ‘Persuade some of these people to concentrate on how to get him free instead of looking for a man who is perfectly competent to take care of himself,’ Brooks said. His anger was barely under control.

  ‘The drawing, Mrs. Haven,’ Guardino said.

  ‘A long time ago,’ she began, ‘forty-five years ago—’

  ‘I think most of us are familiar with at least the outlines of that time in your life, Mrs. Haven,’ Yardley said.

  ‘That drawing could be of Carlos Avilla, the man who abducted me back then,’ Mrs. Haven said. ‘It can’t be, of course, if he is someone Miss Tranter saw in the Trapeze night before last. Carlos Avilla would be well over a hundred years old now—if he is alive.’

  ‘Miss Tranter tells us you were in the Trapeze at the same time her father pointed out the man at the bar to her, the man in the drawing. You could have seen him.’

  She gave him a little smile. ‘At my age, Mr. Guardino, there are little vanities. Standing ten feet away from me, as you are, your face is a blur. I need these to see you clearly.’ She opened her purse and took out a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. ‘I don’t like to wear these unless I have to.’ She put them on and they gave her an unexpectedly owlish look. I’d never seen her wear them before. She took them off. ‘I was surrounded by friends in the Trapeze,’ she said. ‘I didn’t need to be looking for someone I might know. I had all the company I needed. Without these glasses I couldn’t have seen the man Miss Tranter’s father pointed out to her.’

  ‘The child without a hand you mentioned to Jerry and me upstairs,’ I said.

  ‘A bright, charming little boy of about seven who had lost his right hand in some sort of bombing outrage,’ Mrs. Haven said. ‘His name was Ricardo.’

  ‘That’s our man,’ Brooks said.

  ‘Just because of the coincidence that I may have known him forty-five years ago?’ Mrs. Haven asked.

  ‘In my world, in Yardley’s world, in Guardino’s world, Ricardo Avilla is a genius at terror, an architect of violence. Put him down in a place where there is terror and violence, like this hotel, and you simply can’t believe it’s a coincidence,’ Inspector Brooks said.

  ‘The man on the outside who has a way to communicate with the people on the inside—in Twenty-two B,’ Guardino said.

  ‘You think he is the man who came up to the roof after the raid started and tried to kill me?’ Mrs. Haven asked, looking around for an answer from any of us.

  Inspector Brooks shrugged. ‘He saw you in the Trapeze Bar,’ he said. ‘He didn’t know about your vision problem. He supposed you’d seen him and could identify him. After the violence started, you’d remember and report his presence to the police.’

  ‘If it was that important that I not remember him,’ Mrs. Haven said, ‘why didn’t he keep trying to finish me off?’

  ‘Your dog,’ Brooks said, ‘brought my brother out on the run from his penthouse. George would have recognized Avilla, and Avilla couldn’t risk a shoot-out with George. He had to take the chance that you wouldn’t remember in the excitement, or with the possible physical pain you might be suffering from your wound. Avilla is apparently important to whatever their plans are in the next few hours. He had to take the chance—if you’ll forgive me, Mrs. Haven—that a very old woman just might not remember after all.’

  ‘All you have at my time of life, Inspector, are memories.’ She smiled at him. ‘If you’ve still got all your marbles. And let me assure you I have!’

  ‘If Avilla is part of this whole operation, he must have known Tranter by sight,’ Guardino said.

  ‘But Tranter wasn’t going to be able to talk after the fact,’ Brooks said. ‘Tranter was to be a hostage.’

  ‘Miss Tranter? She was there in the bar with her father.’

  ‘Avilla had no way of guessing that Tranter was giving his daughter a rundown on him,’ Brooks said. ‘Chances are, Avilla didn’t think Tranter would recognize him. Had they had any direct contact that you know of, Miss Tranter?’

  Lois shook her head. ‘My father didn’t say, but there was no question that he knew Avilla by sight. My father has spent most of the last ten years of his life in Central America. Ricardo Avilla is a public figure down there. Thousands of people would know him by sight, including foreign observers like my father.’

  ‘One thing is certain,’ Guardino said. ‘We must circulate copies of this drawing to all your security people, Dodd, and to all the cops. If Avilla is still prowling the hotel, he could just be the key th
at would open the door of Twenty-two B to us.’

  I didn’t say so just then, but Avilla might also be the person who could tell us where Chambrun was. I felt a cool hand slip into mine. It was Lois Tranter’s.

  ‘Let me help you look, Mark,’ she said. It was almost a whisper. ‘I want to find him just as badly as you do.’

  Bright girl, I thought. She could read minds.

  Chapter Two

  WE WERE, I THOUGHT much later, like kids who needed the support and approval of an all-wise papa. Guardino and Yardley, a couple of pretty tough cookies, were in luck. They didn’t have the authority to determine what was to be done about what was going on in the Beaumont, or at an airport in Georgia, or in half a dozen prisons around the world. They could ‘suggest,’ come up with their ‘best judgments,’ but they knew that their Great White Fathers were in Washington and in police headquarters in Manhattan. The final decision would be made for them. They would never have to take responsibility for the eventual outcome.

  I wasn’t so sure about Inspector Brooks. He was a tough, strong, impassioned man, caring deeply for a brother in danger, thousands of miles away from his Great White Father—or was it Mother?—and trying to justify to himself taking an action on his own. He could be dangerous to us, to his brother, and to the other hostages if he made a wrong move. Looking at him I could almost see wrong moves, cooking like a boiling pot, behind his angry eyes. We had to sit on him somehow.

  Betsy Ruysdale, Jerry Dodd and I, and a large, well-trained staff of people in the Beaumont were much worse off than those others. We had been trained over our working lives at the hotel to depend on Chambrun for any critical decisions that had to be made. He had always, would always, must always make the key moves, and he would always, had always, been willing to take the full blame if something didn’t work. We were geared, equipped, and prepared to take any order he gave, any action he demanded of us. Without him to give the orders, plan the action, we were responsible for his hotel, his world, his future. I could see him now, staring at us, the hanging judge, letting us know that we had taken an action that any idiot should have known could only lead to disaster.