Random Killer

by Hugh Pentecost

  She drank Scotch, I knew, and I fixed her a moderately stiff drink with soda. She took a sip of it, choked on it, put it down on the table beside the chair, and went back to fighting the torrent of tears. I pretended to be looking for something at my desk across the room. Suddenly I saw her bang her fists down on the arms of the chair.

  “I’ve got to stop this foolishness!” she almost shouted.

  “Why?” I said, drifting back to her. “Do you good.” I handed her my handkerchief.

  She gave me a ghastly smile through her tears. “Scene from a movie,” she said, and blew her nose—in my handkerchief. Then: “Oh God, Mark, I found her. I saw her, you know.”

  I nodded. “Don’t tell me. I saw Hammond.”

  “Was it—was he—”

  “Just the same, from all accounts.”

  “She never hurt anyone in the world, except herself, and maybe Colin,” Nora said.

  “Try your drink,” I said. “It could work magic.”

  She drank, and the hurricane of tears seemed to abate. “Can you imagine walking in there and—seeing her—like that?”

  “Rough,” I said. I went over to the kitchenette and made myself a drink. It was early in the day for me, but I decided I needed one, and she needed time to get in complete control. I have to say one thing for Nora. She looked pretty damned appetizing even when she’d been crying.

  It all came out of her now, in a flood of words. “I’ve worked for her now for six years,” she said.

  “You must have started awfully young.”

  “I’m twenty-six, if that kind of statistic interests you, Mark.”

  “You’ve aged well,” I said.

  She shook her head as if to say she wasn’t interested in that kind of game. “A whole new world for me,” she said. “Travel—every place you can imagine in this country and Europe. I’d never booked a plane flight in my life, and suddenly I was a travel expert. But it was different from anything I’d known. An all-woman world. She really believed in it, you know.”

  “Not enough to have done anything about it until she had the money to play the role,” I said.

  “You’ve been talking to Colin,” she said.

  “Not about that,” I said.

  “I have to admit he got the short end of the stick,” she said. “She couldn’t front for the liberation movement and be a happily married woman.”

  “But she kept him in her bed,” I said. “And he came whenever she whistled. For the money?”

  “I think he really loves her.” She caught her breath. “Loved her. He took what she gave him in order to stay close to what he wanted.”

  “Were they legally divorced or just playing that game for her public?”

  “Legally divorced,” Nora said. “The record had to be clear in case somebody wanted to check up on her,” She hesitated, frowning. “He’s a very rich man now. She willed him a big chunk of her estate.”

  “If you told Hardy that, it’ll make Colin a pretty solid suspect.”

  “Hardy didn’t ask me that.”

  “If he had, and you told him, his next question would be what did Colin have against Geoffrey Hammond?”

  “I never heard either of them mention Hammond,” Nora said. “I don’t think Joanna knew him or was concerned about him in any way.”

  “Chambrun thinks there must be some connection between them.”

  “I don’t know what it could be.” She paused again, with that little-girl frown marring her forehead. “I used to watch some of his interviews on television. Joanna didn’t think much of him as an interviewer. Joanna thought he was always trying to sell himself instead of the person he was talking to. But she never indicated that she knew him or had ever had any contact with him. What could it be, Mark?”

  “You’ve got me,” I said.

  She emptied her glass and put it down on the side table. “I’m confronted with something pretty unpleasant,” she said. “This morning I had a job, a future, a well-organized life. Right now I don’t know where I go next.”

  “You shouldn’t have any problems,” I said.

  “You think not?” She gave me a bitter little smile. “If your policeman doesn’t solve this case in a hurry, everyone connected with Joanna will be a suspect in the public eye. Colin. Me. No one is going to hire a girl who might be a strangler.”

  “Bull,” I said.

  “Think about it.”

  “All right. I’ve thought about it. I don’t buy it.”

  Again that bitter little smile. “Fine. You got a job for me?”

  “Could be. How about another drink?”

  “I might as well be potted as the way I am,” she said, and handed me her glass.

  “It’s hard to believe that this could happen to anyone,” she said, as I was building her drink.

  “It’s happened to all of us,” I said.

  “Not to you,” she said. “Would you believe this is the second time I’ve been in the same place with a strangler who used picture wire to do the job?”

  I felt a strange little chill run down my spine. “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked. I handed her the fresh drink.

  “The Sharon Dain case,” she said, not looking at me.

  “Who is Sharon Dain?”

  She looked up at me. “Don’t you remember, Mark, a couple of years ago, in a ski resort in High Crest, Colorado? The girl who strangled her lover with picture wire? It was the hot story of the day.”

  It came back to me out of a dim past. Some tootsie living with a ski instructor someplace in Colorado. She’d strangled the guy. I didn’t recall the picture-wire detail. The girl had some big-name friends in the movie colony who tried to help her, but she was convicted of murder one, as I recalled it.

  “What have you got to do with this Sharon Dain?” I asked.

  “Not anything, except that I was there when it happened.”

  “In Colorado?”

  “High Crest,” she said. “It’s a fancy resort. One of Joanna’s liberation groups was holding a convention there when it happened. It was pretty shocking. I mean, we’d seen Sharon Dain and her boyfriend around in the evenings. Glamorous and something of a local scandal.”

  “And she killed him with picture wire?”

  Nora nodded.

  “So everybody else at High Crest was connected with it just the way you were—which is not at all,” I said.

  “I was connected a little more than some,” she said. “You remember an up-and-coming young movie star named Lance Wilson?”

  It was a name I couldn’t put a face to.

  “He came to me for help,” Nora said.

  “Why you?”

  “Because I was Joanna’s secretary. He wanted Joanna’s help. A lone woman being persecuted by male police, a male district attorney, a predominantly male community. That, Wilson thought, would be Joanna’s meat. He persuaded me to go to the local jail to see Sharon Dain.”

  “And you, soft-hearted sucker, went?”

  “Yes. I had to have facts if I was going to get any help from Joanna. And it was better to get them from Sharon herself than from her lawyer.”

  “Oh, brother!” I said.

  “Sharon Dain was a very beautiful, very sexy, very desperate girl,” Nora said. “She told me her ski instructor boyfriend—his name was Harold Carpenter—was a sadistic monster. He beat her up, threatened her life. In the middle of one of his sadistic orgies she strangled him to save her own life.”

  “She drew her trusty picture wire and shot him down?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And you bought it?”

  “I took it to Joanna, in any case.”

  “And she?”

  “Wouldn’t touch it. She told me, quite sensibly, that women’s liberation didn’t mean the freedom to commit murder. She got an anonymous threatening letter from someone after I told Lance Wilson she wouldn’t help.”

  “Where is Sharon Dain now?”

  “In prison—I th
ink. She got a stiff sentence after she was convicted. As I remember, it would have been twelve to fifteen years before she’d be eligible for parole.”

  It was far out, but a picture-wire killer had crossed Joanna Fraser’s path in the past.

  “I think maybe we better go down the hall and talk to Chambrun,” I said to Nora.

  Ruysdale was at her desk in the outer office when Nora and I got there. I wondered where the press and media people were who’d jammed up the place earlier, and learned that Chambrun, in spite of a storm of protest, had barred them from the second floor. Our security people were sealing off thirty-four, sixteen, and here. They couldn’t have been doing much about looking for a crazy man with a roll of picture wire in his pocket.

  “Nora has come up with something interesting I think the boss should hear,” I said.

  Ruysdale gave Nora a sympathetic look. “There just isn’t anything very comforting to say, Miss Coyle,” she said. I guess she saw that any kind of sweet talk would loosen the floodgates again. She picked up the phone on her desk. “Mark and Miss Nora Coyle to see you, Mr. Chambrun.” Then she waved toward the far door.

  “How is the general climate?” I asked her.

  “Warnings are out,” Ruysdale said. “They seem to have turned the tide. People not so anxious to leave. They’re like motorists rubbernecking at an accident.”

  Chambrun was at his desk. His exterior never showed any signs of his being ruffled. He knew I wouldn’t be here with Nora unless she had something that might interest him.

  “Please sit down, Miss Coyle,” he said, gesturing to the armchair beside his desk.

  “It’s a coincidence that may not mean anything,” I said.

  “Most coincidences don’t,” he said. “However, let’s hear it.”

  Nora, in pretty good control now, told her story of the Sharon Dain case and Joanna Fraser’s connection with it. Chambrun listened, his eyes narrowed in those deep pouches. He didn’t interrupt or ask her anything. When she’d finished he picked up his phone and spoke to Ruysdale.

  “Get Roy Conklin or Bobby Bryan in here,” he said, “whichever can move fastest.” He put down the phone and lit one of his flat cigarettes. “You mentioned an anonymous threat, Miss Coyle.”

  “It was a letter, written on High Crest stationery,” she said, “available to hundreds of people, Mr. Chambrun, the way Hotel Beaumont stationery is available to any guests here.”

  “Do you remember what it said?”

  “Just a sentence,” Nora said. “ ‘You will pay for your indifference to Sharon Dain.’ ”

  “No signature?”

  “No.”

  “And that was two years ago? Nothing since?”

  “Not that I know of.” Nora twisted in her chair. “Anonymous threats and slanderous attacks weren’t unusual. I guess most public people get them. Joanna ignored them.”

  “She wasn’t afraid?”

  “Joanna wasn’t afraid of God himself,” Nora said with a little smile.

  “She should have been, it seems,” Chambrun said. “I think Hardy should be in on this.” He had Ruysdale connect him with 1614. While he waited for Hardy to come on he spoke to Nora. “You didn’t mention all this in the statement you gave Hardy?”

  “I hadn’t even thought of it until Mark and I got to talking,” Nora said. “I mean, it was two years ago, and what happened today was so immediate. I wasn’t thinking of anything else when Lieutenant Hardy questioned me.”

  Hardy came on and Chambrun said, “I may have something, Walter.”

  While he waited, Chambrun proceeded to make a series of phone calls from a list on the desk in front of him. I recognized the people he was calling as permanent residents of the hotel, mostly co-op apartment owners and old friends and customers. He had a set speech for them, telling what had happened, what the risks were. They were not to let anyone into their rooms, not even maids, or waiters, or bellboys, until the coast was clear.

  “You suspect someone on the staff?” I asked him between calls.

  “I suspect someone posing as someone on the staff,” he said. “Both Hammond and Joanna Fraser were unprepared for any sort of attack. They wouldn’t have suspected a waiter, or a maid, or a maintenance man who managed to get behind them, ostensibly doing some routine job.”

  He went on with his calling until Hardy walked in.

  The detective listened to Nora’s story, frowning. “It provides some sort of remote motive,” he said when she’d finished. “But what, if any, is the connection with Hammond?”

  “Let’s see,” Chambrun said. The light was blinking on his phone and he picked it up. “Send him in,” he said to Ruysdale.

  Bobby Bryan, Hammond’s secretary, joined us. Chambrun introduced him to Nora.

  “We both seem to be out of a job, Miss Coyle,” Bobby said. Then, to Chambrun, “What’s up?”

  “You ever hear of the Sharon Dain case?” Chambrun asked.

  “Sure,” Bobby said promptly. “Gal who strangled her boyfriend at some ski resort in Colorado.” He stopped, his eye widening. “With picture wire!”

  “Interesting, no?” Chambrun said. “Tell me, Bryan, were you and Hammond out in High Crest, Colorado, when that happened?”

  “Good God, no,” Bobby said. “I’ve never been to Colorado. Neither had Hammond in the ten years I was with him.”

  “And Hammond had no connection with the Dain case?”

  “No. That is, he refused to have a connection.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Bobby shrugged. “The Dain girl had stirred up a lot of support for herself among the guests out there. They got Max Steiner, one of the most famous and expensive defense lawyers in the country, to handle the Dain girl’s case. He called Hammond, long distance to New York, with a crazy proposal. He wanted Hammond to interview Sharon Dain on TV. His case was to be self-defense while the girl was driven to legal insanity by her boyfriend’s sadistic treatment. Max Steiner wanted to make his case to the whole world and not just to a jury.”

  Chambrun was almost smiling. “And Hammond refused?”

  “Sure. In spite of a whopping fee Steiner offered. Hammond felt he was being used, and nobody ever used Geoffrey Hammond.”

  Chambrun leaned back in his chair, and his smile had reached Cheshire-cat proportions. “So there’s the base they both touched without either of them knowing it,” he said. “They both refused to help Sharon Dain.” The smile evaporated. “The next question is, who else refused? Someone who may be staying here in the Beaumont?”

  Part Two

  CHAPTER ONE

  LIEUTENANT HARDY WAS ON the phone to High Crest, Colorado, almost before Chambrun had finished speaking. Nothing so obvious as an escaped Sharon Dain, out to massacre all the people who refused to help her in her time of trouble, developed. Colorado police assured Hardy that Sharon Dain was safely tucked away in a state prison for women. She hadn’t escaped. She wasn’t even due for a parole hearing for another ten years. She had, it seemed, through her lawyer, Max Steiner, moved to appeal her conviction on technical grounds involving her trial, and had been turned down by the state’s highest court. That final decision had been handed down just about a month ago.

  “You might think the woman’s lover was out on some kind of revenge kick,” Hardy said, “except that she killed her lover—with picture wire!”

  “She killed that lover with picture wire,” Chambrun said. He looked around at the rest of us. “Who knows anything about this Dain girl except for the murder case?”

  No one spoke.

  “You, Miss Coyle,” Chambrun said, “were approached by an actor named Lance Wilson to get help from Joanna Fraser.”

  Nora nodded. I could see she was trying to put together memories of something almost forgotten.

  “He had just had a big success playing a supporting role to a major star,” she said. “I can’t remember—Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, somebody like that. He is young, in his early twenties, I’d guess. Th
e Dain girl must be ten years older.”

  “Maybe he liked older women,” Chambrun said. “I did at that age. What’s become of him?”

  “I don’t think he’s had anything big,” Nora said. “I see him on TV dramas from time to time. But I don’t think—”

  “What don’t you think, Miss Coyle?”

  “The situation at High Crest was rather special,” she said. “High Crest is a ski resort, but it’s more like a private club. The same people come back year after year, or friends of those same people come. They book most of the accommodations well in advance. There isn’t ever much room for the general public.”

  “Just what point does that make?” Chambrun asked.

  “Everybody knew everybody,” Nora said. “Everybody was rich, or friends with someone rich.”

  “But you were there for a convention.”

  “Joanna could afford to buy space anywhere she wanted. If she needed a friend in court she had one.”

  “So everybody was well off. The Dain girl?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “She hired the most expensive defense lawyer in the country.”

  “I think friends put up the money for her.”

  “What friends?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Chambrun. The only friend I met was Lance Wilson. Somehow I didn’t think he was a friend in the sense that we use the word. It was more that he was on her side.”

  “I’m afraid you’re confusing me, Miss Coyle,” Chambrun said.

  “Everyone knew Harold Carpenter, the man who was murdered,” Nora said. “He’d been a ski instructor at High Crest for a number of years. A dark, handsome man with a beautiful athletic body. A kind of noisy glamor boy.” She lowered her eyes. “The Dain girl lived in his cabin, but that didn’t reduce his interest in other attractive women. I think—I think he brought Sharon Dain to High Crest. The management would have permitted him to have any guest he chose. He was important to them.”

  So our Nora had battled with Harold Carpenter, I thought. I hoped he’d had no better luck than I’d had.