Random Killer

by Hugh Pentecost

  “Del Greco told me about Mr. Hammond,” she said. “My lucky night.”

  “Oh?” I said.

  “I wasn’t able to accept his invitation,” she said. A nice way of putting it, I thought.

  “But you sent someone to take your place,” I said. “It’s important that we locate her and talk to her.”

  “Loss of memory,” Dorothy said.

  “She’s not in any trouble,” I said. “From all accounts she was long gone when Hammond was attacked. But he might have said something to her, told her something; or she might have noticed or heard something, like a phone call.”

  “I wouldn’t like to be fingered by someone if I were in her place,” Dorothy said.

  “Lieutenant Hardy, who’s in charge of the case, understands that,” I said. “That’s why Bobby and I—not the police—are talking to you. Your friend may know absolutely nothing that will help, but they can’t bypass her. If she would talk to me—”

  Her dark eyes looked around the crowded room. “This place is going to explode when the news breaks,” she said. “Anyone involved is going to make the headlines. If I tell you that will be bad for business, I think you’ll understand, Mr. Haskell.”

  “If your friend won’t make it difficult, she need never get any publicity,” I said. “Mr. Chambrun wouldn’t want it any more than she would.”

  She gave me a cheerful smile. “Your Mr. Chambrun doesn’t want to deal with us but he can’t do without us,” she said. “We are an unmentionable part of his hospitality.”

  “Boys will be boys,” I said.

  She made up her mind. “Where and when?” she said briskly.

  “My apartment. Two B on the second floor,” I said. “As soon as possible.”

  She glanced at a plain gold wristwatch. “Half an hour?”

  “Fine. What’s her name?”

  Again the cheerful smile. “That’s up to her,” she said. She stood up.

  “Buy you a drink, Dorothy?” Bobby asked.

  “I’ll take a rain check, Bobby,” she said, and disappeared into the crowd, headed for a phone booth at the end of the room.

  I reported to Hardy and he suggested I go on with it, so I headed for my apartment. Bobby had people he had to talk to, to notify that tomorrow’s taping was off forever.

  It couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes and a cup of coffee after I’d gotten to my place when there was a knock on the door. Another “Smith girl” stood out in the hallway. The most distinctive thing about her was a classic black eye.

  “Mr. Haskell?” she asked.

  She was blond, the same fresh, young, unspoiled look about her as Dorothy—except for the shiner. I invited her in. She didn’t seem reluctant. She looked around my living room, which is a hodgepodge of furniture styles, mementos of special events at the Beaumont, and photographs of famous people I’ve managed to serve in some fashion, including Jack Kennedy, the late Joan Crawford, and dozens of others. I had a notion that my guest was an expert at sizing up strange rooms, learning something, quickly, about the men who occupied them.

  “You have a name?” I asked her.

  “Professionally, Sally Southern,” she said. “It’s not the name on my social security card.”

  “Coffee?”

  “Black,” she said.

  I brought her a mug from the kitchenette, along with a fresh one for me. She was looking at the picture of a famous rock singer on my wall. She gave me a wry smile and I got the notion that he might have been a customer.

  “Dorothy told me,” she said. Her face hardened. “The sadistic bastard was all in one piece when I left him.” She touched her eye, gingerly, with the tip of a forefinger. “I was warned that he liked to play rough, but it was an understatement. I got double the fee for this eye, because he had, at least, the decency to recognize that it would put me out of business for a couple of days.”

  She was so cool about her profession. I hadn’t thought I could be turned off by it, but I was. I have always been absurdly romantic about my love life.

  “Maybe we can begin with times,” I said. “When you went to thirty-four-oh-six and when you left it.”

  She sipped her coffee. “Dorothy didn’t tell me how it happened,” she said.

  “After he’d had breakfast with someone, served at eight o’clock, he was strangled from behind with a length of picture wire,” I said.

  “Oh, God!” she said. It was more politeness than shock.

  “The first question the police asked was, were you his breakfast guest?” I said.

  “The man is a quickie expert,” she said. “I went to his room at a few minutes past eleven. I was home, bathing my eye, just a little after midnight.”

  “No proof of that, I suppose.”

  She gave me that wry smile again. “It may surprise you to hear that I live with two other girls,” she said. “One or the other of them was at home all night. We come and go.”

  “I suppose,” I said.

  “It just happens they could testify for me if it was necessary.”

  “People who knew Hammond were certain you hadn’t spent the whole night with him. Not his style, they said.”

  “Style! You know, Mr. Haskell, you run up against some awful creeps in this business. There are old guys who talk and talk and can’t get anywhere. There are young guys who need teaching. And there are out-and-out sadists from whom you’re lucky to escape in one piece. That was Hammond’s ploy. Rip off your clothes, bang you around, a quick payoff and then you can’t leave soon enough to please them.”

  “No preliminary conversation?”

  “You’re kidding,” Sally Southern said. “I knocked on his door, he opened it, dragged me into the room, told me to go in the bedroom and take off my clothes.”

  “No phone calls?”

  “One phone call,” she said. “He made it. He told the switchboard operator not to put through any calls to him for an hour. He knew exactly how long it was going to take him!”

  “He didn’t mention anything about anyone he might be expecting after you left?”

  “I tell you there was no conversation! About anything! He tore my dress when I wasn’t ready for him quickly enough. When it was over he gave me twice the fee, four hundred clams. Plus taxi fare. I went down the fire stairs to the basement. My dress was in shreds. I called Mr. Cardoza, the maître d’ in the Blue Lagoon, on a house phone and he sent someone with a raincoat I could wear home. I couldn’t go out on the street the way I looked.”

  “So Cardoza can also vouch for the time you left,” I said. Cardoza is one of our good people.

  She looked pleased, as though it hadn’t occurred to her she could call on him for that kind of help.

  “How do I reach you, Sally, in case Lieutenant Hardy wants more?”

  She gave me a telephone number, which I wrote down. She smiled at me. “You don’t have to keep it just for the police,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said. I knew I’d never call her for anything else.

  My own telephone rang at that point. It was Betsy Ruysdale. She sounded strange, far away.

  “Mark, you’d better get over here,” she said. “We’ve got another one.”

  “Another what?”

  “Picture-wire job,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Joanna Fraser,” Ruysdale said. “Room Sixteen fourteen. Same method, same result.”

  “Dead?”

  “Very,” Ruysdale said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I BUSTLED LITTLE MISS Southern out of my place and hurried down the hall to Chambrun’s office. I couldn’t really take in what Ruysdale had told me. Another picture-wire job! Joanna Fraser!

  Joanna Fraser was no “John Smith” at the Beaumont. She was a famous lady, though she might have slapped me down for calling her that. A famous “person” she’d have insisted. She was a big bell ringer for women’s lib. Among other business activities, she was the publisher of Liberation, a magazine devoted to celebrating
woman’s escape from male domination. She financed a couple of fancy homes, one on the West Coast, for unwed mothers. She was behind a very successful job-finding agency for women executives. She lectured up and down and across the country.

  Joanna Fraser’s father was MacDonald Fraser, who made it in oil, steel, railroads, airlines, and God knows what else. He left it all to Joanna, including a house in Newport, another in Palm Beach, and one in New York. At the time all this dropped into Joanna’s lap she was married to Colin Dobler, a painter and sculptor of no particular distinction. The minute she came into her huge fortune Joanna mounted the platform of women’s lib, took back her maiden name, kicked Colin Dobler out on his behind—but onto a very soft landing place. She provided him with a posh studio apartment on Gramercy Park, an allowance that gave him the look of a more than comfortably rich man, and maintained a room in each of her houses in case she needed him for whatever she might need him for. She sold the New York house, however, and bought a half-million-dollar co-op in the Beaumont. That was 1614. In our house chart 1614 was described as LR, DR, 2C, B, K, MR, P, or for you it meant living room, dining room, two chambers, boudoir, kitchen, maid’s room, pantry. Rumor had it that the maid’s room was kept for Colin Dobler, in case he was required to stay overnight. Maid service was supplied by the hotel, and at a maintenance fee of thirty-five-hundred dollars a month they could afford to supply it in style.

  Joanna Fraser was, I guessed, in her early forties, handsome, always dressed to the nines, gay, almost neurotically verbal, determinedly devoted to her causes. A lot of women who like to use the title Ms. in front of their names were going to be very unhappy about her passing.

  Others were going to be a lot unhappier, most notably Chambrun. Two murders in his hotel in the space of a few hours was a disaster. Two murders, giving all the indications that they’d been committed by the same person, suggested some kind of sick chain of violence that might still have a future.

  Ruysdale’s outer office was crowded with press people, among them my friend Dick Barrows. Two security men were blocking any kind of end run into Chambrun’s office.

  Barrows gave me a sardonic smile. “You didn’t tell me there was going to be another one,” he said.

  “Nobody told me,” I said.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “I haven’t caught up with it yet,” I said. I had to fight off the others with a series of “no comments.” What the hell, I had nothing to comment on yet.

  I got through them and past the two security men into Chambrun’s office. Ruysdale was there. Roy Conklin was still there, planted in that green leather armchair. He was parrying questions from Sergeant Baxter, one of Hardy’s men. Baxter is a hard-nosed cop who takes no nonsense from anyone. I gathered he was trying to establish some connection between Geoffrey Hammond and Joanna Fraser. That would be an obvious police line, I knew. Chambrun and Hardy were both absent, undoubtedly up in 1614.

  “My dear Sergeant,” Conklin was saying in a weary voice, “I keep telling you Hammond didn’t even know the Fraser woman.”

  “She was a personality,” Baxter said. “Personalities were his business.”

  “He didn’t know Elvis Presley, either,” Conklin said. “Or the Beatles.”

  Ruysdale was standing by the west windows looking down at the park. I went over to her. She appeared to be as close to being rattled as I’d ever seen her.

  “It’s simply not believable,” she said in a low voice. “Everything the same. There’d been someone there for a luncheon cocktail, which she’d made herself. No hotel service. Her chair tipped over backwards, wire around her neck. My God, Mark.”

  “Who found her?” I asked.

  “Her secretary. Nora Coyle. You’ve seen her around. She has a key to the apartment.”

  I had not only seen Nora Coyle around, I’d made a few light-hearted passes at her in recent months. She was an extremely attractive brunette who didn’t seem to have any permanent male appendages. I had supposed that might be a rule of the game if you worked for Joanna Fraser and her liberated allies. You mustn’t seem to be any man’s sex image. The modern woman is not supposed to be what women have always tried to be in the past.

  “Rough for her,” I said. “She has no explanation? No connection between Hammond and Joanna Fraser?”

  “Nothing in a business or professional way,” Ruysdale said. “The Coyle girl says Ms. Fraser had a social life that she kept very private. Not unnatural, maybe, since the other part of her life was so very public. Chambrun thinks Hardy’s wasting his time trying to connect the two crimes.”

  “Same M.O.,” I said.

  “In the sense that there has to be a link between Hammond and Ms. Fraser. Each of them had some connection with the killer but not necessarily with each other. Look, Mark, you are to get to Mr. Wheaton at personnel. We need extra people.”

  “What kind of people?”

  “To implement Security. Jerry Dodd has twenty men. We have forty floors, five hundred residence rooms, plus all the bars, restaurants, private rooms for private parties, kitchens, offices, God knows what else. Jerry’s people can’t begin to cover the whole territory.”

  “Cover?”

  Ruysdale gave me a level look that had fear behind it. “Chambrun thinks we have a psycho on our hands, Mark. He thinks we can expect it to happen again.”

  The Man was thinking along the same lines I had. A sick chain of violence that might still have a future.

  “How did this second thing get public?” I asked. “Your office is jammed with news people.”

  “The Coyle girl went screaming out into the corridor when she found Ms. Fraser,” Ruysdale said. “A couple of guests were waiting for an elevator and went to help her. Before anyone could clamp down on them the word was out. There’s going to be a run on the bank.”

  “How do you mean—run on the bank?”

  “Front desk reports that transients are already starting to check out. Panic.”

  I can only imagine what it was like when the Titanic, the unsinkable ship, started to sink in midocean. I wasn’t born then. What was happening in the Beaumont must have been more like the panic that swept the Bellevue-Stratford hotel in Philadelphia when news of the Legionnaires Disease spread. People wanted out, and in a hurry. It wasn’t like a broken water main, or a fire, or some kind of violent private quarrel. You couldn’t reassure people that it wouldn’t happen again. The hell of it was that it could, and might. There was a madman on the loose and until we had him behind bars anyone could be his next target.

  There is a private exit at the rear of Chambrun’s office and I used it to avoid Dick Barrows and the other members of the fourth estate waiting in Ruysdale’s office. From the mezzanine I took a look down at the main lobby. It was like the rush hour in the Times Square subway station, people jostling and crowding each other, a queue of them trying to get to the front desk to check out. People seemed to sense that there was safety in numbers. Nobody wanted to be left alone in an upstairs room. I had the uncomfortable feeling that a killer was watching this turmoil and enjoying it in his sick mind.

  Later, when it was all over, I was impressed by the calm efficiency of Chambrun’s staff. No one seemed to lose his or her head. No one left his post. The frightened people trying to check out were handled coolly and expertly by the desk clerk and the cashiers. Some people just took off without bothering to check out or to pay their bills. The doormen and the bellboys helped them with their luggage, got them taxis. There were no arguments or debates. The bars were crowded and noisy. Again, the safety-in-numbers theory held. There is a fascination about being a spectator to violence if you don’t feel in danger yourself.

  My problem that early afternoon was that I’m a pretty well-known figure around the Beaumont. Most of the regulars are aware that I am a spokesman for management. If I went down into the lobby or into one of the crowded bars I’d never get away. I knew the back ways around the place, the fire stairs, the service elevators and
corridors, and so I was able to get to the personnel office without being trapped by people hungry for the gory details.

  Bill Wheaton, the personnel manager, was way ahead of me. He’d already been in touch with three major protection agencies. He’d come up with thirty-five men to augment our own security force. They were on their way.

  “You know anything that makes any sense?” he asked me.

  “Only what you know. Two people dead, one has to think killed by the same freak.”

  “No leads?”

  “I haven’t caught up with the second one yet,” I said.

  Bill is a pleasant, sandy-haired, breezy guy who is very shrewd in his judgments of people. That’s why he has the job of hiring the help. “If I had Jerry Dodd’s job, which thank God I do not,” he said, “I’d be thinking very hard about this Frazer woman’s husband—or ex-husband. I hear rumors, you know. What’s his name? Dobler? The maids on sixteen tell me they’d had some pretty loud screaming fights. Knock-down-and-drag-out.”

  “You’re suggesting Colin Dobler—?”

  “Why not?” Bill said cheerfully. “I read statistics somewhere. Seventy-five percent of all homicides in the United States are the result of family quarrels!”

  “So he killed Geoffrey Hammond first just to practice up?” I asked.

  Bill grinned at me. “Man has to perfect his skills,” he said. “You catching up with Jerry Dodd? I haven’t been able to get him on the phone.”

  “My next stop is sixteen,” I said.

  “Tell him I’ll have extra men for him here any minute, but someone else will have to brief them on what they’re expected to do.”

  They were expected to protect more than a thousand resident guests and God knows how many hundreds of in-and-outs from a strangler’s wire. But how?

  For the first time in my experience Chambrun and Lieutenant Walter Hardy were at odds. Hardy, the methodical one, confronted with two murders, was proceeding as though they were routine. He was trying to build up a picture of the lives of the victims, their relationships with people, searching for a motive. By the time he was done there would be detailed dossiers on Geoffrey Hammond and Joanna Fraser, on their relatives, friends, business associates, rivals, on truths about them, rumors about them. When all these details were carefully collected, Hardy would sit down in front of them, like a jigsaw wizard, and put them together into a finished picture. Combine this with whatever tangible evidence the professionals could dig up and you might have an answer. Today? Tomorrow? Next week? Whenever, it would be solid, it would be firm, it would hold.