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

by Hugh Pentecost

  ‘My father doesn’t have much more time, Mark.’ Her voice was unsteady.

  ‘Your father and three others,’ I said. ‘We’re waiting for some kind of decision from the men at the top.’

  ‘And if they decide not to give in? The murder of Inspector Brooks makes it clear what we can expect, doesn’t it? They’re not playing games, Mark. They mean what they say.’

  ‘I don’t think Chambrun and the others who are here have ever doubted that,’ I said.

  ‘So what will they do when the time comes?’

  ‘I don’t think that decision has been made,’ I told her.

  Her hands reached out to me. ‘It’s just not bearable—not to know,’ she said. ‘Will you tell me when they decide? Knowing that they have a plan would make it easier.’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I know anything,’ I promised her.

  ‘Thank you, Mark. If there was someone up there you cared about, you’d know how I feel. Anything that offers a speck of hope …’

  I left her there, waiting and hoping. The lobby had thinned out considerably as I crossed to the entrance of the Blue Lagoon night club. I had neglected trying to catch up with my girlfriend, Sally Mills, long enough. The note she’d left me suggested she might be trying something dangerous on her own, trying to help Hilary Foster. If she’d heard about Inspector Brooks, it should have cooled her off.

  Mr. Cardoza was standing by the red velvet rope that kept you out of the club if you didn’t have a reservation. He looked his elegant self, in spite of last night’s violence.

  ‘Looking for your lady?’ he asked. ‘She insisted on coming to work, though she looks a little battered.’

  I looked past him and saw Sally talking to a couple of customers at a far table.

  ‘Business as usual?’ I said.

  Cardoza shrugged. ‘Regular customers only,’ he said. ‘We’re not swamped, as you can see. No show without Hilary Foster, but I’ve got a young man who plays a pretty good jazz piano. People mostly just want to know what the score is. Incidentally, so would I.’

  ‘Join the club,’ I said. ‘There’s still time for someone to come up with an answer.’

  ‘I’d like to do anything I could to help the Foster girl,’ Cardoza said. ‘One of the nicest people who ever worked for us here.’

  ‘Was getting quite a rush from one of the hostages,’ I said.

  Cardoza smiled. ‘Señor Ortiz? I suspect you’ve been talking to Bobby Roth.’

  ‘Flowers, jewels, the works,’ I said.

  ‘I suspect Master Roth isn’t familiar with men of Spanish extraction,’ Cardoza said. He ought to know, I thought, being Spanish himself. ‘As a matter of fact Ortiz and Hilary are old friends; Washington where he worked, South America where she worked. Señor Ortiz was delighted to find someone he knew here. He played it a little more elaborately than the average American man would. He wasn’t the only Latin who paid attention to Hilary.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘The man you’re all looking for—the picture I’ve seen that the police artist drew.’

  ‘Avilla?’

  Cardoza nodded. ‘The first week she worked here, Señor Avilla came several times, bought her drinks, chatted with her. Of course he is an older man—but not too old to be interested in an attractive younger woman. Who ever is?’

  ‘You told anyone else this?’ I asked.

  ‘Jerry Dodd, about fifteen minutes ago. He came to show me the police picture and I told him.’

  ‘Had Avilla ever been a customer before Hilary came here to work?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, a number of times over the past few years. Whenever he’s in New York, I think.’

  ‘What do you know about him?’

  ‘Down in his part of the world it depends on which side you’re on,’ Cardoza said. ‘A patriot if he’s on your side, a monster if he’s on the other.’

  ‘So do we see him as an enemy or a friend?’ I asked.

  Cardoza hesitated, frowning. ‘You have to live in that part of the world to know who’s who and what’s what,’ he said. ‘Jerry Dodd asked me if I thought he could be working with those characters in Twenty-two B.’

  ‘And you told him …?’

  ‘I can only make a guess,’ Cardoza said. ‘The prisoners they want set free have all been part of the communist-sponsored revolution in Central America. What I’ve heard of Avilla from my friends is that he hates the communists almost more than he hates the power structure in his country.’

  That was exactly what Sanchez had told me.

  ‘So your guess is that he isn’t involved upstairs?’

  ‘My guess is,’ Cardoza said, ‘that he must be very interested and concerned with what’s going on. The men they’re talking of setting free are his enemies. Turn them loose and he would have to fight them all over again. I understand he helped get them captured in the first place.’

  ‘So he wouldn’t care what happens to the hostages?’

  ‘A guess again,’ Cardoza said. ‘He might regret it if they were harmed, but saving them might be too big a price to pay for setting his enemies free.’

  ‘Sheldon Tranter indicated to his daughter that Avilla is the enemy,’ I said.

  Cardoza gave me his Latin shrug. ‘I told you I was guessing, Mark. Mr. Tranter has spent most of his diplomatic life in Avilla’s world, and knows it better than you would know your own bedroom. He is Mr. Expert with a capital E. I’d have to accept his judgment.’

  ‘If his ear is so close to the ground, it’s surprising they were able to take him hostage,’ I said.

  ‘It was very cleverly planned, Mark,’ Cardoza said. ‘They chose the night of the park concert. There had been riots after an earlier one. When they struck here everyone thought for the first hour that it was the same thugs who had raided Times Square after the Diana Ross show. It was a giant red herring. While we were trying to protect the hotel from vandals, key terrorists went after the hostages they wanted. Duck soup.’

  ‘I understand Tranter and Sir George Brooks and Ortiz,’ I said, ‘but why Hilary Foster?’

  ‘Provided them with a lady in distress,’ Cardoza said. ‘There would be public clamor to make a deal for her safety. Also, she had Hispanic friends, might see somebody she knew taking part.’

  ‘Roth thinks Raul Ortiz is the villain and that he arranged to have Hilary taken so he could have his sexual way with her,’ I said.

  ‘Roth is a very nice but idiotic young man,’ Cardoza said.

  Sally Mills had spotted me and I made my way across the room toward her. The young man at the piano was grinning at me and I realized he was playing an old jazz tune for my benefit, ‘Insufficient Sweetie!’

  ‘The piano player’s got your number,’ Sally said, as I got to her.

  ‘I’m sorry, love,’ I said. ‘I don’t have to tell you things have been a little crazy.’

  ‘I know.’ Her hand reached out to touch me.

  ‘I found your note and it made me nervous. I was afraid you’d do something foolish.’

  ‘I didn’t have the guts,’ she said.

  ‘What did you have in mind?’ I asked, smiling at her.

  ‘Human-fly act down the outside of the building; just knock on the door and tell them to stop being foolish.’

  ‘You heard about Inspector Brooks?’

  She shuddered, nodded. ‘I decided the best thing I could do for Hilary was to help restore order down here,’ she said. ‘Leave it to the people who know how to come up with something more sensible than I have.’

  ‘Smart girl,’ I said, and patted her cheek.

  ‘What will they do, Mark?’

  ‘They’ve still got a little more than four hours to come up with solutions,’ I said, avoiding a direct answer to her question. Hell, I didn’t have one!

  ‘When it’s over …?’

  ‘We’ll either celebrate or mourn,’ I said.

  ‘It can’t be—that they’ll do what they threaten,’ she said.

  �
�I wish I was Pollyanna,’ I said.

  There was a council of war going on in Chambrun’s office when I returned there. Chambrun, a stone statue at his desk, was listening to Guardino, Lieutenant Hardy, Yardley, a uniformed cop who turned out to be a bomb squad expert, and, of course, Betsy Ruysdale.

  Yardley was talking as I walked in. ‘My guess is,’ he was saying, ‘that some time before midnight the powers that be will decide to load those eight prisoners on a plane and fly them to wherever they want to be taken. Public opinion would be too outraged if they were to just write off the hostages. They are too important, even the girl.’

  ‘So then?’ Chambrun asked in a flat, cold voice.

  ‘They release the hostages,’ Guardino said.

  ‘And what happens to the men who’ve been holding them?’ Chambrun asked.

  ‘We turn them loose,’ Guardino said. ‘If we let the prisoners go we might as well let them go.’

  ‘Will they believe us if we promise them that?’ Chambrun asked. ‘Should they believe us? Would you let them go without trying to identify them, name them, Guardino?’

  ‘It would be a temptation,’ Guardino said. ‘But if the big shots are going to throw in the towel, we might as well throw it in all the way.’

  ‘If I were one of them, I wouldn’t move an inch without taking the hostages with me,’ Chambrun said. ‘Would I turn them loose eventually?’

  ‘Why not?’ Guardino asked. ‘They would have served their purpose.’

  Chambrun moved, as though every muscle in his body ached. ‘Three of the hostages, Tranter, Sir George Brooks and Raul Ortiz, are experts on Central America. The girl at least knows the area. All four of them speak the language. They have been shut up for twenty hours now with their captors. They have heard conversations between those captors, they have probably listened to dozens of phone calls. It has been pointed out that those four hostages have enough information by now to hang quite a few people if they are ever set free.’

  ‘It’s not easy to hang someone when he has an army to protect him,’ Yardley said.

  ‘First he has to get to the army to be protected,’ Chambrun said. ‘They’d have to get out of New York, find transportation to Central America. Their one chance would be to keep the hostages as a guarantee of safe passage. After that they and their army will dispose of them as they see fit. Like garbage, perhaps?’

  ‘You’re right, of course,’ Yardley said.

  ‘You’re saying we don’t have a very enviable choice,’ Guardino said. ‘We don’t let them go and the hostages die here and they blow up your hotel; we let them take the hostages and go and they die hundreds of miles away in a foreign country. Your choice would be to save your hotel from a bombing, Mr. Chambrun?’

  ‘I imagine if Mr. Chambrun had a choice,’ Yardley said, ‘it would be not to have a choice.’

  ‘Amen!’ Chambrun said.

  ‘What are the chances of a raid in force working?’ Lieutenant Hardy asked. ‘You have a front entrance, a back entrance. Two SWAT teams mounting a double attack? It’s a two-door suite. Properly planned, the SWAT teams could reach the hostages within a matter of seconds after they smashed in the front and back doors.’

  ‘Let me point out one thing to you, Walter,’ Chambrun said. ‘The men up there who are holding the hostages are criminals, yes; they have murdered a man, yes; but in their minds they are also patriots with a cause. They will die for that cause. The hostages know so much now that they would threaten that cause.’

  ‘A matter of seconds after the break-in, we could protect those hostages,’ Hardy said.

  ‘It’s a fantasy, Walter, but picture if you will a man sitting with his finger poised over a button or his hand resting on a plunger. The first sound of an attack on a very solid door and the finger touches the button or the hand pushes the plunger, and both the hostages and their captors—and my hotel—will be blown to pieces. There won’t be seconds after a break-in, Walter. Not only will everyone in Twenty-two B be dead, but also the SWAT team standing outside the doors. Is that a risk you would take if you could give the orders?’

  No one spoke for a moment, but Lieutenant Hardy isn’t a man who gives up easily. He turned to Yardley. ‘Your people are endlessly busy down in Central America, Yardley. Covert operations, you call them. You must have scores of men down there. If we let the terrorists go from here, taking the hostages with them, couldn’t your people save them when they got there?’

  All vestiges of good humor had faded from the CIA man’s face. ‘If they ever got there, it’s possible,’ he said. ‘So we let them go, put them on a plane—with the hostages—and send them off to their people, their army. The hostages know too much. What simpler way to dispose of them than to drop them from a few thousand feet into the ocean?’

  ‘Checkmate!’ Chambrun said. ‘Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.’

  The little red light blinked on Chambrun’s phone. Betsy was at the sideboard getting coffee, so Chambrun picked it up himself. The squawk box was still on so we could all hear the call.

  ‘Pierre Chambrun’s office,’ The Man said.

  ‘It’s Jerry, Boss,’ Jerry Dodd’s voice came through. ‘There’s a gentleman here in the lobby who has asked me to bring him up to see you.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘He says his name is Ricardo Avilla.’

  It hit us like a jolt of electricity.

  ‘He wants to see me?’ Chambrun said, rising from his chair as he spoke.

  ‘He put it a little differently,’ Jerry said. ‘He says he thought you wanted to see him.’

  ‘Bring him up, Jerry. And carefully!’

  Perhaps I was too tired for anything to make sense. Ricardo Avilla, knowing that the police, the hotel security, and even the CIA were looking for him, walking into the hotel voluntarily and asking for Chambrun?

  Everyone seemed to be suddenly in a kind of confused action. Chambrun was demanding to have Mrs. Haven and Lois Tranter brought here to his office. Guardino, believe it or not, was examining a gun he had taken from a holster under his arm. I hadn’t guessed he was armed. Yardley was at the phone. Betsy had gone on the run to find the two women Chambrun wanted. I just stood there like a dummy.

  ‘I also want Eddie Walsh up here,’ Chambrun said to me.

  ‘Identification?’ I asked.

  ‘You think the man with Jerry may not be the Avilla we’re interested in?’ Chambrun asked.

  ‘It doesn’t make sense, his coming here,’ I said.

  Chambrun gave me his tight little smile. ‘Doing the unexpected is the way you win ball games like this one,’ he said.

  I went to the outer office, got Eddie on the phone in the Trapeze, and told him he was wanted on the double. I had just turned away from the phone when Jerry Dodd appeared in the hall door. With him was a tall, dark, rather handsome man, a sprinkling of gray at his temples. I looked closely and saw the little scar below his eye that Sanchez had mentioned and that wasn’t in the police artist’s drawing.

  ‘This is Mark Haskell, hotel public relations,’ Jerry said. ‘Mr. Avilla. The boss told me to bring him up.’

  The man gave me a pleasant smile. ‘I know Mr. Haskell by sight,’ he said.

  ‘Mr. Chambrun’s waiting for you,’ I said.

  We walked into the inner room. Chambrun was at his desk. Guardino was standing just behind him, his right hand held up by his left coat lapel. Yardley had positioned himself so that he was behind us as we walked into the room.

  ‘This is Mr. Ricardo Avilla,’ Jerry said.

  ‘What can I do for you, Mr. Avilla?’ Chambrun asked.

  The man smiled. His voice was deep and pleasant. ‘I rather thought the question should read another way, Mr. Chambrun. Shouldn’t it be, “What can I do for you?”’

  ‘Let me introduce these others,’ Chambrun said. ‘Mr. Guardino is—’

  ‘New York City police,’ Avilla interrupted. ‘And Mr. Yardley is CIA. You might as well bring your gun out int
o the open, Mr. Guardino. It makes me nervous to see you just standing there, patting it.’

  Guardino let his hand drop.

  Avilla looked back at Chambrun. There was nothing sinister about his smile. It was attractive. I noticed that he kept his own right hand in his jacket pocket.

  ‘I have to admit your coming here is unexpected,’ Chambrun said.

  ‘So that there can be no confusion,’ Avilla said, ‘I was told that you were looking for me.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘I am registered at the Plaza Hotel,’ Avilla said, ‘but I have been staying on a yacht in the Hudson river boat basin for the last few days. My friend Luis Sanchez left a message for me at the hotel to call him. When I did, he told me that Mr. Haskell had been asking about me, that you were circulating a police artist’s drawing of me, based on a description of me given him by Miss Lois Tranter. If you wanted me that badly I thought I’d better come here and check with you.’

  ‘A yacht?’ Sam Yardley asked.

  ‘My friend David Romberg keeps it at the boat basin. I have been his guest there for the last five days. You can ask him, of course.’

  ‘Romberg is the millionaire arms manufacturer,’ Yardley said to the rest of us.

  ‘You have been staying in seclusion on a yacht for the last five days?’ Chambrun asked.

  ‘Oh, no. I’ve been coming ashore every day, attending to the business that brings me here,’ Avilla said. ‘I have spent the evenings on his yacht with David.’

  ‘So you know what’s going on here?’

  Avilla’s smile broadened. ‘Doesn’t the whole world?’

  ‘Do you have some kind of ID on you, Mr. Avilla?’ Guardino asked. ‘A passport, perhaps?’

  Before Avilla could answer, the far door opened and Betsy Ruysdale appeared. With her was Mrs. Victoria Haven, tall, elegant, tense. Avilla turned and saw her.

  ‘My dear Mrs. Haven!’ he said.

  Mrs. Haven opened her purse, took out her glasses, and put them on. Her eyes widened behind the lenses. ‘Extraordinary!’ she said. ‘He looks almost exactly like a man I knew forty-five years ago—Carlos Avilla.’