“Turn around,” Treadway said.
Valerie was next to me, close enough to touch. Treadway was next to her, his gun held against her head, just as he’d said. There wasn’t a sign that Valerie might crumble. She stood straight and brave.
The car stopped almost at once at thirty.
“Out, Haskell,” Treadway said.
“I stepped out into the main corridor. I heard the elevator start down. Behind the doors on either side of us were sleeping people—or waiting people. I had to believe that Chambrun was having us watched, even though he couldn’t make a move. I could hear the indicator clicking as the car went down.
“You lead the way to the freight elevator, Haskell. Bear in mind that one false move means Mrs. Brent is dead—and you one second later.”
There was going to be no miracle here. I walked along the corridor to the far end where the freight elevator was located. It was standing there with its door open. The door on the freight car doesn’t work automatically. You have to open and close it manually.
I went into the car and presently I heard the door being closed. I turned around as we started down.
“Your Mr. Chambrun has arranged things very nicely,” Treadway said.
Down we went to the mezzanine. The mezzanine is taken up entirely by offices. They were all closed at this time of night. I led the way to the fire stairs. I realized that the only place where I’d have a chance and where Valerie would have a chance was out on the sidewalk. I was to open the door of the getaway car for them. He would have to come close to me to get in. That was probably the moment when I was to get it. That was when I would move.
We went down the fire stairs, our footsteps echoing on the cement steps. The door opening onto the street was operated by a heavy brass bar stretching across it. It opened out to conform to the law.
“You’ll open the door, Haskell, and assure me that the car is waiting there,” Treadway said.
I felt, suddenly, breathless. The door was heavy. I thought it would have been difficult for a woman or a child to open it. I thought I’d have to point out to Chambrun that something should be done about it. I almost laughed at the idea.
I got the door about half open and saw a black limousine parked directly opposite at the curb. That side street isn’t too brightly lit, but I could see the driver sitting at the wheel.
“There’s a car,” I said.
“Move out then,” Treadway said.
The night air felt suddenly fresh. I saw a blurred moon, surrounded by haze, high in the sky. The driver in the car turned his head to look at us. I couldn’t see his face.
“You’ll move forward and open the rear door of the car,” Treadway said. “Toss in the suitcase.”
I thought my legs wouldn’t work. My moment was seconds away.
I was about a yard from the car when a figure rose up from the far side of the hood. The driver didn’t move.
“You’ll drop the gun, Treadway, or I’ll blast you right through your lady friend,” a cold voice said.
I saw who it was. I saw the green glasses. I saw the rifle raised to his shoulder.
“You can’t do that, Olin! For Christ sake!” I said.
“He can do it and with my blessing.”
I turned my head. Chambrun stood a few yards away, hands jammed in the pocket of his coat.
“Move away, Mark,” he said. “Over here toward me. Don’t bother with the suitcase.”
“You can’t let him do it!” I shouted.
Something hit me from my blind side. It was a flying tackle the velocity of which you wouldn’t believe. I hit the concrete pavement so hard I thought I was going to black out. I struggled feebly with my tackier.
“Take it easy, man,” Jerry Dodd said.
Somehow I wrenched around, horrified by what I thought would happen. Treadway would blow Valerie’s head off”. Instead I saw him give her a violent shove away from him, saw her go down on her knees. At that moment there was a fusillade of gunshots that sounded like the Battle of the Bulge. Treadway seemed to do a grotesque dance, like a jumping jack on a string. Then he was sitting against the building, a fountain of blood coming out of his mouth. It must all be some kind of a nightmare, I thought, because I saw Lieutenant Hardy pounce on Valerie, yank her to her feet and tear her handbag away from her. She seemed to be screaming obscenities at him. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
I think I passed out for a moment right about then. Having it come to an end had pulled my cork, I guess.
I opened my eyes and found Chambrun kneeling beside me. In the background there was an ambulance siren.
“You went down pretty hard,” Chambrun said.
“What in God’s name is going on?” I said.
“Treadway’s run out his string,” Chambrun said. “Come on, boy. Pull yourself together and come up to the office. It’s really quite a story.”
He helped me to stand up. Cops and a couple of ambulance people were crowded around Treadway. I didn’t see Valerie anywhere. A few feet away Jerry Dodd was rubbing his shoulder.
“I don’t know if it was you or the concrete,” he said.
I saw Olin talking to the driver of the car.
“You’d have let him shoot her,” I said to Chambrun. “What have you done with her?”
“Hardy’s taken her away,” Chambrun said in a cold voice. “I hope you don’t have to see her again, boy.”
“I’d have bet my life Treadway would shoot her,” I said.
“You’d have lost,” Chambrun said. “Don’t let it get you down, boy, but Treadway was her lover.”
I knew then I was hallucinating. None of this was happening. I let Chambrun lead me into the side entrance and to the elevators. We went up to his office. The shocks weren’t over. Miss Ruysdale met us at the door, touched a bruise on my forehead tenderly, kissed my cheek.
“They’re all here,” she said to Chambrun, “except Hardy and the woman. Kramer is in charge of the other prisoners.”
I followed Chambrun into the office. I still didn’t believe it. Emory Clarke was sitting in one of the green leather armchairs. Olin was standing at one of the windows, looking out at the night through his green-tinted lenses. They weren’t a surprise. But Mr. Gamayel, smiling his very white smile, was. And Johnny-baby Sassoon, looking white and shrunken, was a shocker. But even that was topped, because I saw that Kramer was standing behind Emory Clarke’s chair and that there was a pair of handcuffs on the diplomat’s wrists. Clarke!
Chambrun gave me a little pat on the shoulder and moved around behind his desk.
“It’s all over, gentlemen,” he said. “The police shot down Treadway. Mad dog treatment. Lieutenant Hardy has taken Mrs. Brent into custody. I assume you’re not going to make a statement without your lawyer, Mr. Clarke?”
Clarke spoke from the bottom of a deep well somewhere. The voice could have been coming from his own tomb. “Not an official statement,” he said. “I would like to say something to Johnny.” He turned his shaggy head and I saw that his eyes were red, as if he’d been crying. “Listen to my advice, son,” he said. “Take what money you can from your father’s estate. You should be a very rich man. Go live somewhere for your own pleasure. Don’t take even one look at the possibilities of power that will be presented to you. It corrupts. I was a decent and happy man until the temptation got too great. Run away from it, Johnny.”
“You sonofabitch,” Johnny said in a monotone. “You killed my father. Your hired man killed my girl. You sonofabitch.”
Clarke managed to get up out of his chair. “Shall we go to wherever it is we’re going?” he asked Kramer.
Johnny watched them go, and then he stood up. “I have to go to the office,” he said in a bitter voice. “Advice or no advice.”
Olin turned away from the window. He watched Johnny go, and then he looked at me. “You’re wondering if I would have shot her,” he said. He smiled. “It was my strictly legal night, Haskell. Lieutenant Hardy wouldn’t let me hav
e any bullets in my gun.”
Mr. Gamayel was all smiles. “I don’t know how to thank you, Mr. Chambrun. The return of my documents and knowing that they have always been in safe hands is the difference to me between life and death.”
Chambrun looked at me. “Would you believe that all the time Mr. Gamayel’s documents were locked in my office safe?”
“I don’t believe anything I’ve seen or heard so far,” I said, and headed for the Jack Daniels bottle on the sideboard.
It was several drinks later—as a matter of fact the first gray light of morning was showing at the windows—when Chambrun began to put the pieces together in some kind of order. Miss Ruysdale had set up a tape recorder on his desk.
“We’re going to have to make some sort of formal statement later in the day,” Chambrun said. “The tape will help remind us of anything we’ve left out.”
It was what I might have called a family gathering except for the man with green glasses—Miss Ruysdale, Jerry Dodd, Lieutenant Hardy, Chambrun and me.
“Tortoise and the hare,” Hardy said, chewing on the stem of his black pipe. He looked like a very tired man, but quite happy. “My job is slow. Check on everything. Check and keep checking. Everybody who had even a remote connection with the case rated a checking. So when Emory Clarke’s room was searched by the B Plan people, I asked one of my boys to pick up some of his fingerprints. It turned out to be a ten-strike. We were able to match the thumbprint we’d found on the headboard of J. W. Sassoon’s bed.” Hardy looked at me. “All of a sudden we had our killer—Sassoon’s killer—and you were on your way up to the penthouse for the second time. No way to stop you while we reorganized our thinking.”
Chambrun put down his demitasse of Turkish coffee. “Clarke crumpled,” he said. “Strange man, with all his talk of decency. He had it, you know. But he had gone up to the top of the mountain and he’d been tempted by what he saw. All his life he’d played a minor role in the drama of power. He’d been an adviser to the top men, but he’d never had any of it for himself. Somewhere along the way he met Valerie Brent, the alleged grief-stricken widow, who was panting for revenge against Sassoon. I imagine it took a while for them to get down to brass tacks, but I think Clarke persuaded her that the best revenge would be to hit J. W. Sassoon in his power structure, to coin a phrase. She changed her attitude toward Sassoon, which pleased his vanity. Our friend Olin, here, never believed in that change, but he couldn’t convince the old man.”
“But I kept on watching her,” Olin said. “I told you the truth about those clothes she bought. They were never stolen from her.” He smiled. “But now we have a picture of amateurs at work.”
“Gamayel’s deal was the way Clarke saw to break J. W. and get power for himself,” Chambrun said. “He and Valerie now had professional help. Valerie had introduced Clarke to Treadway. Clarke was shocked when he learned the truth about Valerie Brent, but he was too far committed to turn back.”
“What truth?” I asked.
“Treadway was Valerie’s lover,” Chambrun said. “Had been for more than five years.”
“Jesus!” I said. “Clarke told you that?”
“He told us,” Chambrun said. “And you had just about reached the penthouse by then. No way to tell you that Valerie was in no danger at all. You were the hostage Treadway would use against us.”
“The reason Treadway was here five years ago, and then two years ago,” Hardy said, “wasn’t professional. He was here to be with the woman he loved. I’m guessing now, but I think we’ll get to prove it. Michael Brent hadn’t found something out about Sassoon, as Mrs. Brent told us. He’d found out about her and Treadway. In his Middle East research he had come up with stuff on Treadway. He threatened to use it. So Valerie and her lover killed him. Her grief and her passion for revenge were total phonies.”
I guess I was in shock. She had seemed so lovely, so in need of help.
“Olin mentioned amateurs,” Chambrun said. “Night before last Clarke had a summons from J.W. The old man wanted advice on the papers Gamayel had brought him. When Clarke heard what was in those papers, he knew that if he could get them he would be in the driver’s seat. Somehow he gave himself away. The old man accused him. He tried to call for help, and Clarke grappled with him to keep J.W. from getting to the bedside phone. The old man was screaming and Clarke tried to silence him with a pillow. The old man died under his hands. Clarke made a quick, frantic search of the room, but he couldn’t find the documents. He panicked. He went to find Valerie and Treadway. He found her and told her what had happened. They couldn’t locate Treadway. He’d gone out of the hotel somewhere. Clarke was afraid someone—Olin perhaps—would know he’d had an appointment with J.W. They had to make it look like something else.” Chambrun’s mouth moved in a bitter smile. “The lady thought of sex. Sex had always gotten her everything she wanted. They went back to J.W.’s apartment, and she took her newly bought lingerie—bought to make Treadway happy—with her. Clarke went through the difficult business of undressing J.W. and leaving him naked on the bed. Valerie spread her lingerie around. They made another quick search for the documents and, failing to find them, left.”
“Amateurs always blow it,” Olin said. “Chambrun determined at once that the lingerie had never been worn, and any half-wit cop could have traced their purchaser through the labels.”
“Our talents are small, but we plug along,” Hardy said.
“And about the time we’d figured that far,” Chambrun said, “we had a call from you saying Treadway was coming out via the mezzanine and the fire stairs.”
“You’ve left out something,” I said. “The kidnapping.”
“Perhaps that does come next,” Chambrun said. “You see, there was no kidnapping.”
I gave him a blank stare. “Come again,” I said.
“You’ll have to rewrite your estimate of Johnny Sassoon,” Chambrun said. “He may have been an idiot about hotel management, but he isn’t without courage and J.W. trusted him. Sequence of events: after Olin had looked at the papers and taken off for Washington—”
“The old man had to know where the State Department would stand if a coup took place in Gamayel’s country,” Olin said.
“The old man was nervous about keeping those papers in his room until Olin got back from Washington. He called Johnny. Johnny came to the room and the old man gave him the documents to put in my safe—Johnny’s safe at that point in time. It was after the papers were safely gone that the old man sent for Clarke.”
“You said there was no kidnapping?”
“When J. W. was found dead, Johnny guessed that someone had been after the documents. He might very well be the next target. After he’d gone to the offices of J. W. Sassoon Enterprises, he left to come back to the hotel. But he didn’t, of course. He went to a fleabag place somewhere and holed in. He called Carlson and pretended to be a kidnapper. Then he made a fatal mistake. He called his room here at the Beaumont and got Trudy Woodson, who was waiting there for him. He told her he was faking the kidnapping, that she’d be named to bring him the ransom money, that they’d take off together. He told her the only thing they could do was to get away. ‘Because,’ he said to her, ‘you know and I know who killed my father.’ It seems they suspected Treadway without knowing for whom Treadway was working. He was an enemy hatchet man.”
“Treadway picked up that conversation on the listening device,” Hardy said. “Treadway got to Trudy and that was one of them out of the way. Johnny didn’t know this had happened until you, Mark, went to that phone booth in her place.”
“Treadway wore that disguise Jerry found when he went to Trudy’s room to kill her?” I asked.
“He couldn’t risk being seen—as Treadway—going to her room or leaving it,” Chambrun said. “Now Johnny went into action. As I’ve said, he wasn’t a genius at running a hotel, but there were people who liked him—and there were people who felt they owed him, as the new manager, loyalty. Johnny came out of his hiding pl
ace and managed to get into the basement area of the hotel. He waited until his loyal staff member showed up and he got the whole story from him of what was going on. This staff member had just seen Mark take Mr. Gamayel to his apartment and leave him there. Johnny got to a coin box phone and called Mark’s rooms. He told Gamayel he knew where the documents were. And he did! They were in my safe. I haven’t had occasion all day to open that safe. He persuaded Gamayel to come to where he was in the basement. The best way Johnny could get even with his enemies was to make a deal with Gamayel. He had to be sure Gamayel would play along with him, now that J. W. was dead. While he and Gamayel were discussing this, the staff member came and told him someone had bombed the apartment. Johnny and Gamayel made a quick decision. They would come to me, in the open, and get me to open the safe and turn over the documents to them. They walked in here just as you were starting down from the penthouse.” Chambrun leaned back in his chair. “We had to do some quick thinking, Mark. You were the one in danger, not Mrs. Brent.” He glanced at Olin. The green glasses hid all expression on that one’s face. “The true professional came up with the answer. He, Treadway’s enemy, would make the threat. Treadway would be certain that none of us would shoot Mrs. Brent in cold blood, but Olin was something else again. Olin was capable of doing what he threatened to do. Treadway would almost certainly push Mrs. Brent out of danger and try to get Olin.”
“It took some courage,” Hardy said, fumbling with his pipe, “since I wouldn’t let him have a loaded gun. I wasn’t sure he wouldn’t go through with it if he had the chance.”
“We were, literally, only seconds ahead of you in getting into place,” Chambrun said. “We got the driver out of the car and replaced him with a cop. I hadn’t even been able to take cover when the door opened and you appeared, with the woman and Treadway behind you.” He took a cigarette out of his silver case and lit it, his eyes narrowed against the smoke. “And that, he said, “is that.”
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Bargain with Death Page 16