Bargain with Death

by Hugh Pentecost

  “Let’s get down to some simple questions,” Chambrun said, his eyes buried deep in their pouches. I knew the signs of impatience. “Where is Johnny Sassoon? He left your office over three and a half hours ago, presumably to come back here.”

  “No idea,” Carlson said. “He said he wanted to get back here to stay on top of what was happening. I thought he might be running away from what he had to face at the office, but I had no doubt he was coming back here. He may still be running. You have no idea of the load that’s descended on him—a load he isn’t even remotely equipped to carry.”

  “But he has you and other loyal troops,” Chambrun said.

  “God help us all. J. W. Sassoon had a computer for a mind. The rest of us are just ordinarily bright human beings, but with no buttons to push.”

  Chambrun turned his attention to the Ivy League. “A man named Mark Zorich called you to tell you that J. W. Sassoon was dead, Mr. Webster?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He also told you there was evidence to suggest the old man’s heart may have given out in the midst of a sex adventure?”

  “Yes, sir. Zorich got the word to us as quickly as he could. He knew how important it was to us.”

  “Did he tell you how he knew?”

  “No, sir.”

  “It was a pretty complete report—about the lady and all.”

  “Yes, sir. No details, of course. Just the basic information.”

  “You know Zorich?”

  “Not personally, sir. He’s been a telephone contact ever since I went to work for Mr. Carlson.”

  Carlson nodded. “Mark Zorich has been a sort of private aide to J.W. for the last twenty years. What shall I call him? An undercover investigator? He’s relayed messages to me hundreds of times on the telephone, but would you believe I’ve never laid eyes on him?”

  “But he’s registered here in the hotel?”

  “So he told me,” Webster said.

  “Well, he isn’t,” Chambrun said. “At least not under the name of Zorich.”

  “He didn’t say he was registered under the name of Zorich, sir,” Webster said. “He just said he was registered here.”

  “It may sound very cloak-and-dagger,” Carlson said, “but I have the feeling Zorich used a number of aliases. The nature of the work he did for J.W.”

  “So even ‘Zorich’ may be an alias and his real name is something else?”

  “‘Zorich’ is the name he’s used with us for twenty years,” Carlson said.

  “But neither of you would know him if you saw him?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Carlson said.

  “Do you have a way to reach him? A phone number, a mailbox?” Chambrun asked.

  “He contacted us, we never contacted him,” Carlson said.

  Chambrun reached for the three registration cards on his desk. He handed one to Carlson. “Who is James Olin?”

  Carlson frowned. “No idea,” he said.

  “Sassoon reserved a room for him,” Chambrun said. “He’s still registered in, but we haven’t been able to locate him. Could he be ‘Zorich’?”

  “I just don’t know, Mr. Chambrun. I never heard the name James Olin.”

  Chambrun handed him a second card. “Mrs. Valerie Brent?”

  I saw a nerve twitch high up on Carlson’s cheek. “She’s here in the hotel?” he asked.

  “Suite arranged for by Sassoon,” Chambrun said. “I take it you know her.”

  Carlson nodded slowly. Somehow he was no longer a “man of distinction.” His handsome face looked haggard and old. “Yes, I know Valerie,” he said. That was all he said.

  “That card indicates she’s a widow,” Chambrun said. “Home base London. Extremely well off financially. What was her connection with Sassoon?”

  Carlson drew a deep breath. “You’ll find out anyway if you keep digging,” he said. “Valerie is an American. Her husband—her late husband—was Michael Brent, a British journalist and author. Free lance. Into very important stories in the world of politics and big business. A couple of years ago he was preparing to do a book on the J. W. Sassoon empire. The old man seemed to like him, gave him access to all kinds of information that had been more or less secret over the years. The Brents were based in London, but toward the end of the research period they came to New York and stayed in a house in the East Sixties that the old man rented for them. The old man opened all kinds of doors for Michael Brent. He seemed pleased that there was going to be some kind of glamorized account of his career. And then—”

  “Michael Brent was murdered,” Hardy said unexpectedly.

  Carlson nodded.

  Hardy was fingering his black pipe with no apparent purpose. “One I fumbled,” he said, his voice sounding harsh. “One I wanted badly to break and fumbled.” He glanced at Chambrun. “I should have made the connection. Valerie Brent—Mrs. Michael Brent. Maybe I wanted to forget.” He put his pipe back in his pocket. “Michael Brent was shot between the eyes sitting at his desk in his study in that Sixtieth Street house. The shot killed him. He was also brutally slashed up with a knife, disfigured, mutilated. Jesus, I wanted that killer.”

  “How did you miss?” Chambrun asked.

  “A dozen dead-end streets,” Hardy said. “Reams of paper had been burned in the fireplace in that study. A manuscript and a carbon of the manuscript and stacks of notes and tapes, Mrs. Brent told us. She told us her husband had been writing a sort of biography of J. W. Sassoon. An approved biography, you understand. Sassoon was outraged. He had, he told us, very much wanted that biography finished and published. It had to be enemies of his, perhaps revealed in an unpleasant light in the book, who had slaughtered Michael Brent. Who? Like in this case, there were hundreds of possibilities.”

  Hardy stopped and Carlson looked at him, waiting for him to go on. Chambrun watched.

  “There’s more,” he said.

  “Mrs. Brent didn’t buy it. She was, naturally, pretty hysterical.”

  “She loved Michael,” Carlson said.

  “Things her husband had said to her before he was killed made her think he’d come up with some dirt on Sassoon,” Hardy said. “She thought her husband and Sassoon had quarreled over this. Michael Brent was going to print the dirt whether Sassoon liked it or not. She was convinced Sassoon had ordered Michael Brent destroyed.”

  “She hadn’t a shred of proof,” Carlson said. “I was J.W.’s lawyer, of course. She didn’t even know what the ‘dirt’ was her husband had unearthed. There was absolutely nothing pointing to J.W.—except his interest in Michael, in the book, in the help he had given Michael in preparing it.”

  “Dead end,” Hardy said. He shook his head. “God how she hated me for not being able to pin it on Sassoon.”

  “When the case was closed,” Carlson said, “I begged her—”

  “The case wasn’t closed,” Hardy said, angry. “No unsolved murder case is closed.”

  Carlson shrugged. “When there was nothing more to be done, J.W. offered her a handsome financial settlement. She refused. She didn’t need money and she wouldn’t have taken any from him if she had. I remember her passionate intensity the last time I saw her. She was going to nail J.W. if it took her a lifetime.”

  The room was silent for a moment.

  “Yet she’s here at the Beaumont,” Chambrun said, “in Sassoon’s hotel, in a suite arranged for by him—her enemy. How do you account for that, Mr. Carlson?”

  “I don’t. I can’t,” Carlson said.

  The office door burst open, an unheard-of happening, and Trudy Woodson came charging into the office, a ruffled Miss Ruysdale behind her. Seeing Ruysdale without her cool was an event in itself.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Chambrun,” she said. “I had my back turned for a minute—”

  Ray Carlson gave Ruysdale a wry smile. “I sympathize, Miss Ruysdale,” he said. “Trudy has been known to get by security police in our office.”

  Trudy faced Chambrun across his desk, hands on her hips, jaw jut
ting forward. “All right, buster,” she said, “what have you done with Johnny?”

  “We’ve been trying to find you to ask you what you’d done with him,” Chambrun said.

  Trudy turned on Carlson. “You’ve got him shut away down in that damned office of yours!” she said. “Couldn’t you even let him call me?”

  “He left the office over three hours ago,” Carlson said. Trudy seemed to have brought him back to life a little. Webster, the Ivy League character, was quite clearly undressing her in his mind’s eye.

  “I’ll break his back when he shows up,” Trudy said. She looked at me. “I’ll be waiting in Johnny’s room—in case you have any news, Haskell.”

  She turned on her heel and walked out. Carlson was grinning at me and I think I was blushing. Carlson evidently knew she wasn’t interested in news.

  Chambrun was all business. “I want James Olin the minute he shows up,” he said to me. “I’d like to talk with Mrs. Brent, if it’s all right with you, Hardy. And Emory Clarke, if you can find him.”

  “I want them all, too,” Hardy said.

  “We’re up to our necks in trouble at the office,” Carlson said. “Don and I must get back there if you’re through with us.”

  “For now,” Chambrun said.

  “If this man Zorich gets in touch with you, tell him I want to talk to him,” Hardy said.

  So we had a murder, and a missing heir, and people to talk to if we could find them. And, Chambrun reminded me, a hotel to run. I was swamped by reporters from the media. So far all I could or would tell them was that J. W. Sassoon had died of a heart attack. If they wanted stuff on the old man, Raymond Carlson was their boy. But we live in a world of leaks, and the word was out that there was something more in the air than a cardiac failure.

  “The place is crawling with cops!” I was reminded.

  “Routine,” I kept saying. “Someone dies unexpectedly, it’s routine to check out.”

  “Why is a Homicide man in charge?”

  “You’ll have to ask him.”

  We weren’t going to be able to cover up for very long, I saw. Then we’d have newsmen crawling out of the woodwork. It was important to get James Olin and Mrs. Brent and Emory Clarke to Chambrun before they were swarmed under by curious reporters. Olin and Mrs. Brent didn’t answer their room phones, but some sort of secretary answered promptly in Clarke’s suite. Mr. Clarke was, she told me, at the United Nations in conference with someone or other. She thought she might be able to reach him and tell him Chambrun and Hardy wanted to talk to him.

  James Olin had one of the less expensive rooms on the fourth floor of the hotel. (‘Less expensive’) is a relative phrase at the Beaumont—like fifty dollars a day. Neither the maid nor the housekeeper for that floor could tell me much about him. He had been in the hotel for about a week, paid his bill promptly when it was presented, used an American Express credit card for that purpose. The night maid had see him once when she went to his room to turn down his bed. All she could remember was that he was tall, rather sharp with her in saying he didn’t want his bed turned down, and that he wore green-tinted glasses.

  I checked out on his American Express card. We have a kind of mutual exchange of credit information with them. James Olin had no home address. They billed him through his bank, the Waltham Trust in Chicago. He’d carried the card for some eight years and his bills were paid promptly. It was too late in the day to get any information from the bank. American Express told me he had listed his occupation, when he applied for a card, as “investment counselor.”

  By the time I got through collecting facts on James Olin, I had a call from Johnny Thacker, the day bell captain, that Mrs. Valerie Brent had returned to the hotel and gone up to her room on the eighth floor. But she didn’t pick up the phone when I called her.

  I went up to the eighth floor and knocked on her door.

  “Who is it?” a pleasant, low voice asked.

  “It’s Mark Haskell, Mrs. Brent. Hotel management.”

  There was a moment’s hesitation and then the door was opened and I saw Valerie Brent for the first time. You can describe a person with words and not come even close to conveying the impact that person has on you.

  She had a beautifully made face—high cheekbones, a strong, molded chin, a generous mouth, wide, very candid hazel eyes. Her hair was a darkish red—natural, I was certain. She had the figure of a high-fashion model—slim, erect, curved where it ought to be, flat where it ought to be—long, elegant tanned legs.

  She gave me an unexpected dazzling smile, and that’s when my knees began to buckle. I had expected a grieving widow woman, or perhaps a vengeful Medea. This was the handsomest gal I could ever remember seeing, with so much vitality, energy, and sheer electric excitement she took your breath away. Not a professional sex-peddler, you understand; just an unbelievable, outgoing radiance.

  “My dear Mark Haskell,” she said in her deep, husky voice, “I swear, by all that’s holy, I meant to look you up, but I’ve been so darn tangled up in things—Do come in. Will you forgive me?”

  “Almost anything,” I said, “except if you were supposed to look me up and didn’t.”

  A tiny little frown creased her forehead. “You are Shelda Mason’s Mark Haskell, aren’t you?” she asked.

  Now Shelda Mason is another story. Shelda is a girl who was once my secretary. She is a girl in whose apartment two blocks from the hotel I kept shaving equipment and a change of clothes. We had a parting and Shelda went to Europe for a year to work for George Battle, who at that time owned the Beaumont. Not too long ago she had come back and we had made it together again. At the present moment she had gone west to visit her parents, whom she hadn’t seen for a year. But as I looked at this extraordinary woman, God forgive me, Shelda, I didn’t want to be thought of as belonging to anybody. I wanted to be free to put all my chips on the red.

  “If Shelda steered you my way, she is both an idiot and a fairy godmother,” I said.

  Her laugh stirred up butterflies in my stomach. “She said you were a hopelessly charming flirt.”

  “Hopeless’ isn’t a word I like to think of at the moment,” I said. “Where did you and Shelda meet?”

  “In London, a couple of months ago,” Valerie said. “She had come over from the south of France on an errand for George Battle. I met her at a friend’s house. I told her I was going to New York, would be staying at the Beaumont. She told me to be sure to look you up, that you were a doll and might be feeling lonely. Didn’t she tell you?”

  Shelda hadn’t told me anything. We’d been too busy in the crisis that destroyed George Battle and in getting together again.

  “If she had,” I told Valerie, “I’d have been at the airport to meet you.”

  “Is it too early in the day for a drink?” she asked. “I make a very good martini.”

  At that moment I came rather solidly down to earth. “You haven’t listened to the radio or TV or seen a late afternoon newspaper?” I asked her.

  “No,” she said. “Should I?”

  “Then you don’t know that J. W. Sassoon is dead,” I said.

  She stood very still, very straight. I thought a dark shadow crossed over her eyes.

  “The press and TV people have it that he died of a heart attack,” I said. “The truth is he had a heart attack, but it was brought on while he was struggling for his life with a killer.”

  She gave me a cool, level stare, as if she was trying to read something more. “I think I’ll have a Scotch on the rocks,” she said. “It seems a little less frivolous than a martini. Will you join me, Mark?”

  I said I would. She went over to the sideboard in the living room of her suite and made two drinks. I joined her there.

  “You didn’t come here to say welcome to New York,” she said, handing me my glass.

  “No. The police officer in charge of the case is a man named Hardy.”

  “Lieutenant Hardy!”

  “He remembers you, of course.”r />
  The shadow darkened her eyes. “He’s a good man who tried his best,” she said.

  “At a time that must have been very tough for you you made some hysterical threats against Sassoon,” I said. “Something to the effect that you would get him if it took the rest of your life. Hardy remembers that, and now someone has polished off the old man. So it’s just a coincidence that you are here in the hotel. Puzzling is the fact that J. W. Sassoon made your reservation at the Beaumont for you.”

  She sipped her Scotch—just sipped. “You came here to tell me that I’m a suspect?”

  “To tell you that Hardy and Pierre Chambrun, my boss, would like to talk to you,” I said. “Neither one of them is a conclusion-jumper.”

  “Would you believe me if I told you I didn’t kill him?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Oh, I meant to get him,” she said. She took another sip of her drink. “Not personally, Mark. Not with my own hands, or my own gun, or knife, or bottle of poison. I meant to find proof that he had Michael killed and turn that proof over to the police. Michael was my husband.”

  “I know.”

  “And so you’re wondering how it happens that Sassoon made my hotel reservation for me?”

  “I’m not wondering. I don’t care why,” I said. “But Chambrun and Hardy—” I was totally prepared to be her knight, ready to fight all the dragons in the world for her.

  “You’re very sweet,” she said. She must have read my mind. “I suppose we’d better face the inquisition.”

  She took a look at herself in the glass over the sideboard, touched her rich red hair with the tips of her fingers, and then we went downstairs together to the second floor.

  Miss Ruysdale gave Valerie that special look of appraisal that women reserve for each other. They had something in common, those two: a kind of pride, a kind of openness, a kind of courage.

  “Mr. Clarke is with Mr. Chambrun and the Lieutenant,” Ruysdale said.

  Valerie’s eyes widened. “Emory Clarke?”

  “Yes.”

  Valerie looked toward the closed door of Chambrun’s office. “This is turning out to be a very strange day,” she said.

  “Enemy?” I asked her.