Time of Terror

by Hugh Pentecost

  Cleaves’s broad shoulders drooped. “She had something of importance that belongs to me,” he said, his voice low. “She refused to tell me where she’d hidden it.”

  “So you beat her up, and when that didn’t work, you came down here to find it,” Chambrun said.

  “She was trying to blackmail me with it,” Cleaves said. “It is something important to my job, my position of trust, my country.”

  “There are indications in 805,” Jerry Dodd said casually, “that she may have been tied up there in an armchair. Some strips of adhesive tape that got thrown in the wastebasket, a bathrobe cord. I think she managed to get away while he was gone somewhere, and came back here.”

  “Or did he bring her down here and try to get her to show him where she’d hidden whatever it is he wanted? Maybe some of the beating took place here,” Chambrun suggested. “What was she blackmailing you for, Cleaves? What did she want from you?”

  Cleaves moistened his lips. They looked blue. “The children,” he said. “Custody of the children.”

  “Need I point out that Coriander has custody of the children?” Chambrun asked.

  “After—after they’re free,” Cleaves said.

  “What you were looking for is a document of some kind? A letter, perhaps?” Chambrun asked.

  Cleaves seemed to have turned to stone. He didn’t answer.

  “How much chance do you think you have of raising the ransom money?” Chambrun asked.

  Cleaves shrugged. “Unless the governments will help—”

  “Can Buck Ames raise it?”

  “It’s not impossible,” Cleaves said.

  Chambrun took a cigarette out of his silver case and lit it.

  “Can he get away with this?” I asked, gesturing around the room.

  “There’s one thing Mr. Terrence Cleaves can’t do,” Chambrun said. “He can’t hide. The whole world is watching him, waiting to see what happens on the fifteenth floor. I think it will be up to the lady to decide what’s to be done about this. Let me warn you, Cleaves. The heat is going to begin to get hot in the morning. Coriander will begin to be impatient, I feel certain. Maybe you should go to Buck Ames for help.”

  “Joke!” Cleaves said bitterly.

  “Let him go, Jerry,” Chambrun said.

  “You’re kidding,” Jerry said, looking disappointed.

  “For now,” Chambrun said.

  Jerry stood aside, and the Coldstream Guardsman walked, stiff and straight, out of the room. At the same moment Doc Partridge appeared in the bedroom doorway, snapping closed his black bag.

  “She’ll do,” he said. “Only time is going to heal those bruises. I left her some medication to help.” He looked around. “You let the husband go?”

  “We gave him a little rope,” Chambrun said. “Jerry, I want Cleaves followed every minute, inside and outside the hotel. I want to be able to put my hand on his shoulder any time I need him.”

  “Right,” Jerry said, and was gone.

  Chambrun turned to me. “You may seem less like a policeman to Mrs. Cleaves than anyone else, Mark. Maybe she’ll come clean with you. It’s worth a try. Keep in touch.”

  So I was alone in my wrecked apartment, with Connie in the next room. It wasn’t exactly how I’d imagined it might be.

  She lay on her back on the bed. She was fully dressed, of course, but Doc Partridge had pulled a sheet up over her and supplied her with two gauze patches, soaked in something, that rested over her eyes. She was breathing slowly, regularly. I thought she might be asleep, that exhaustion had overtaken her. But when I reached down and touched her hand, her fingers closed tightly around mine.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “Have they gone?” she whispered.

  “Gone,” I said. “Can I get you anything? Another drink?”

  “Was it brandy I had before?”

  I went into the next room and brought back the bottle of Cognac and a glass. I poured a little for her, and this time she sipped it the way brandy should be drunk. I took the glass from her hands and put it on the bedside table.

  “We have a pretty clear picture of some of it,” I said. “It was Cleaves who wrecked the other room. Fingerprints. Our security man thinks he had you tied up in 805. Have you been there all the time since you left here?”

  “Till he brought me back here,” she said. I had to lean close to her to hear her.

  “To find the document or the letter you’d taken from him?” I asked.

  “He told you I had something of his?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s not so,” she said. “Not true. I have something he wanted, but it’s not his.”

  “What?”

  Her scarlet mouth quivered slightly. “The truth about him,” she said.

  “Care to tell me?”

  “No, Mark, I can’t tell you.”

  “Will you bring charges against him for what he did to you?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  Her hand tightened on mine. “I had what may seem to you to have been a mad idea,” she said. “I intended to call this Coriander man and ask him to let me be with the girls; to hold me as a hostage, too.”

  “Chambrun thought that might be where you were, but we knew you hadn’t contacted Coriander and that you couldn’t have gone up to Fifteen without being seen by our security people.”

  “I had to see Terrence first before I tried it,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “I had to be sure that he’d do everything in his power to meet Coriander’s demands.”

  “And you didn’t think he would?”

  “I thought he’d fail as far as the money’s concerned and that he’d give up. He’d leave it to someone else who had nothing at stake.”

  “Your father. He cares. He’s trying now to find the money.”

  “Poor dear Buck,” she said. “He’ll find that it’s easy to raise money for oil wells, for steel mills, for airplanes, but not for two little girls. There’s no return on that kind of money; no interest, no profits, no capital gains. He’ll try, I know. But there had to be someone who could be made to make it work.”

  “So you have something on your husband?”

  She nodded slowly. “I have facts about him that could smash him forever,” she said. “I sat down at your desk and I wrote down where the proofs could be found. I sent them, with a note, to a friend of mine. If anything happens to me, she is to pass the letter on to someone who will know how to use the information.”

  I took a long shot. “Colin Andrews?” I asked.

  She turned her head. “You know Colin?”

  “I know him, and what he believes about your husband.”

  “He’s right. Well, I told Terrence what I’d done. Not who I’d sent the letter to, of course. He thought—he thought I might have given it to you. He tried to make me tell him.” She lifted fingertips to her bruised face.

  “So get to your friend and tell her to turn the information over to Andrews,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “It must be the last thing, the last act. When everything else has failed, not before. Terrence knows now that he must pull out all the stops. If by some miracle he succeeds, then I keep his secret. Don’t worry about me, Mark. He won’t try anything more to hurt me. He won’t dare.”

  It was quite clear she wasn’t going to tell me any more. I poured a little more brandy for her and held it to her lips.

  “Don’t leave me alone, Mark,” she said.

  I stretched out on the bed beside her and put an arm around her. She drew a deep breath and was asleep before I could say another word to her.

  It was a strange interlude in a time of violence. I lay still beside her, holding her gently. In her sleep she pressed her body against mine and her coppery hair was next to my face. I cared about her, I thought; I cared about what happened to her; I felt a fierce anger against the man who had be
aten her; I puzzled over why she didn’t let him have both barrels. I didn’t quite understand her explanation. It didn’t matter. She had asked me to stay with her, to be her protector. I guess, eventually, I dozed off, not wanting to move my arm, which was cramped and uncomfortable, for fear it would disturb her.

  Would you believe that I had almost literally forgotten the one-armed man in 15 A? I’d forgotten the murder of Horween, and the two little girls who must now be frozen with fear since no one seemed to be doing anything to get them released. I had forgotten that with every beat of Connie’s heart, which I could feel against my chest, time was running out for those children. Inside and outside the hotel Coriander’s Army For Justice must be preparing for the next move. They wouldn’t wait, motionless and inactive, forever. A little girl’s ear, a hand, a foot! Would you believe I had wiped all that out of my consciousness as I cruised in and out of sleep, holding another man’s wife, and imagining some future time when it would make more sense?

  I might be standing still in space, but not the rest of the world. Everywhere presses were rolling with the full story of the kidnapping and Coriander’s demands. Men on trucks were tossing bundled accounts of the situation to corner newsdealers and in front of small stores for the early morning readers. I need only to have pressed a button to discover that all-night talk shows on television had been with the story, hour after hour. Diplomats and government heads in Europe, five hours ahead of us and well into their day, had opinions that were being expressed. England in particular was being very vocal, since the victims of Coriander’s scheme were British subjects. Official comments were guarded. Only the United States government could do anything about political prisoners in Vietnam. Unofficial voices were more positive. The United States had turned a blind eye to the actions of the South Vietnamese government, her ally in Indochina. Now the day of reckoning was at hand.

  Crackpots everywhere had opinions. We were reminded that the “tiger cages” in which political prisoners were held in Vietnam had been supplied by Uncle Sam, actually manufactured in this country. Isolated groups of veterans of the war in Vietnam applauded Coriander. It was time attention was called to the duplicity of the Peace With Honor. It was time the real villains in the world of the Pentagon were forced to face up to some kind of real justice. Harley Latham, that ever-present man of God, publicly prayed for the cleansing of our national conscience. “No price is too high to pay for the safety of two innocent children!” he told the all-night audiences. “They are worth more than all the armies, all the power, all the men in high places.” He would personally urge the President, he promised, to pay whatever the price might be for the release of those innocent children, and he was certain every mother in the United States would support his plea.

  Outside the Beaumont the army of pickets, augmented by hundreds of uninvolved curiosity hounds, grew to such proportions that the police were forced to reroute traffic around four blocks of Fifth Avenue. Across the street in Central Park people brought blankets and their breakfasts and lunches, prepared to make the death watch a kind of national picnic.

  For real, a grim-faced James Priest, State Department, discussed the facts of life with Chambrun, the Assistant Police Commissioner, a representative of the mayor’s office, Captain Valentine of the bomb squad, Gus Brand of the FBI, Lieutenant Hardy of Homicide, and hotel security represented by Jerry Dodd, as dawn crept over the city.

  The President would make a public announcement at nine in the morning that the government was considering the possibility of meeting Coriander’s demands. He would say that the Pentagon was reexamining the possible guilt of higher-ups. But, Priest told his audience, this simply represented the willingness of the President to stall for a little time. Political prisoners could not be released. No way. Even if the Pentagon was honestly reexamining, it would take months to bring new men to trial.

  Priest was asked about the money.

  “It would take an act of Congress for the government to give away such a huge sum,” Priest said. “The congressmen would have to get what they call ‘the sense of their constituents.’ Most Americans will have a deep sympathy for the little girls, but those same Americans in very large numbers will oppose the idea that the government of the United States submit to blackmail by a criminal. You’ve seen that attitude in a jail in Texas where innocent hostages were shot rather than submit to blackmail by the criminals; you saw it at Attica; people on hijacked planes are regretfully abandoned by the authorities; there is a long history of refusing to be intimidated.”

  “So we stall, with phony promises, while pieces of little girls are sent back to us on their breakfast trays,” Chambrun said.

  “Until you find a way to storm the fifteenth floor,” Priest said.

  “And have the hostages and ourselves blown to pieces,” Chambrun said.

  “Coriander might settle for the money and a safe way to escape,” Gus Brand said. “He must know the other demands can’t and won’t be met.”

  “I have never thought anything but the money mattered,” Chambrun said. “The other demands simply make it all seem more righteous to some people. Let’s suppose the money can be found. How do we assure the escape of thirty people? I know your system, Mr. Brand. You’ll have a hundred sharpshooters ready to mow them down the minute they leave the fifteenth floor. They’ll have the hostages with them, because of course no one will be released until they’re safely away. So everyone dies and we save the money. That’s an American ‘attitude’ too, isn’t it?”

  Gus Brand didn’t answer.

  “There has to be a way,” Jim Priest said.

  “I’m willing to listen,” Chambrun said. “I’ve spent the last twenty hours trying to think of a way and I’ve come up empty.”

  While all this was going on, I drowsed through the first light of morning, holding Connie in my arms. The telephone bell in my living room sounded shrill and harsh. I came awake, and Connie stirred and moaned softly in her sleep. I managed to stumble up and go into the living room to answer the persistent ringing.

  An anguished woman’s voice that I didn’t recognize in my foggy state said, “For God sake help me, Mark!”

  “Who is this?”

  “Martha. Martha Blodgett.”

  “What’s wrong? Where are you?”

  “They assigned me a room on the tenth floor,” she said, her voice breaking. “Ten fourteen.” All of Cleaves’s staff had been on Fifteen and were now scattered around the hotel.

  “What’s wrong?” I said again.

  “Please come, Mark. Please!”

  “Look, I’ve got trouble here,” I said. “I’ll send someone if you’re in real trouble. I—”

  “It’s Colin!” she cried out. “They’ve killed him, Mark.”

  “What are you saying?” I must have sounded like a dummy to her.

  “Oh, my God, will you please come!” she said.

  “Hang up,” I said. “I’m bringing help.”

  I called the switchboard and asked them to locate Jerry Dodd. I was told he was in Chambrun’s office. I got Chambrun and told him what Martha had just said. When I met him out in the hall, having left Connie still asleep, not only was Jerry with him but also Lieutenant Hardy, the homicide man.

  “No more details than you gave me?” Chambrun asked as we waited for an elevator.

  “‘They’ve killed him’ is all she said.”

  I guess we reached 1014 within five minutes of Martha Blodgett’s call. She answered our knock the instant Jerry’s knuckles rapped on the door. She was wearing a pale blue robe. A river of blood was running down from her disheveled blonde hair across her face and down onto the robe which she clutched around her throat. She didn’t speak, but just stood aside to let us in.

  I know I turned away because I thought I was going to be sick at my stomach. What may have been Colin Andrews lay twisted on the bed, stark naked, his head battered in like a smashed pumpkin. The sheets and the pillows looked as if they’d been used to mop up a sl
aughterhouse.

  Chapter 4

  THE FIRST THING TO do was get Martha away from there and leave the bloody arena to Hardy and his homicide squad, who would presently be riding sirens through the city streets. We were clumsy about it, I suppose. Martha was barefooted, and she obviously had nothing on under her bloodstained blue robe. Like other people who had been shut off the fifteenth floor by Coriander, she had almost no personal belongings. An empty box from the lobby boutique suggested the robe was something she’d bought there since yesterday morning, along with an inexpensive comb and brush on the bureau. The dress she’d been wearing when she and Colin Andrews had been in my apartment was on a hanger in the closet. A pair of panty hose and a bra were on another hanger. Shoes neatly placed in the middle of the otherwise empty closet.

  Colin Andrews’ clothes were draped over an armchair.

  “Bring Miss Blodgett’s things, Mark. My office,” Chambrun said. There was no other place to take her.

  Hardy held up the exodus for a moment. “A brief statement, please, Miss Blodgett. You saw who did it?”

  “No.” A whisper.

  It was awkward. She and Andrews had obviously been in bed together, and probably not to sleep. Martha was standing by me and she reached out to my arm to steady herself. It took guts for her to go on.

  “We were making love,” she said almost inaudibly. “Someone struck Colin and he—he rolled away from me, trying to escape, I think. And then I was struck.” She lifted her hand to her bloodied hair. “That was all. I didn’t see anyone. I—I must have been unconscious for a while. I don’t know how long. What time is it?”

  “Five-thirty,” Hardy said.

  “A half hour, then,” Martha said. “When I came to I—oh, my God—I saw Colin like that—the way he is. I called Mark, the only person I could think of to call.”

  “You heard whoever it was come into the room?”

  “No.” She fought encroaching tears. “We were making sounds together—loving sounds. Can you understand, Lieutenant? I wasn’t listening for anything.”

  “The door wasn’t forced,” Jerry Dodd said. “Whoever it was had a key. Coming could have been almost noiseless.”