Random Killer

by Hugh Pentecost

  “I’ll have you called at seven,” Chandler said. “The state prison is about an hour away. I’ll provide a car for you.”

  “With you driving that’s about a hundred miles,” I said.

  He laughed. “Not me. It’s about forty-five miles.”

  Everybody in the room was dressed like cowboys and cowgirls. A blond cowgirl came over from the bar to join us.

  “Welcome, Mr. Haskell,” she said.

  “My wife, Nikki,” Chandler said. I found out the spelling later.

  Nikki Chandler had a curious charm of her own. Late thirties, I thought, tanned mahogany brown from the sun. Hair worn shoulder length, bleached by that same sun. Endless exposure to weather, summer and winter I supposed, gave her skin a leathery look, fine little wrinkles at the corners of her blue eyes and across her high forehead. She was slim, athletic looking, with not too much in the way of bosoms. But there was a kind of tension about her, very near the surface, as if she was waiting for someone to provide her with an excruciating excitement. The way she looked at me I had to believe she was wondering if I might be that someone. It was flattering.

  “I’ve been trying to remember when I got off the jet and into Mike’s Rolls,” I said to her. “Both experiences were about the same.”

  She glanced at her man. “Did you ask him to slow down, Mr. Haskell?”

  “Against my better judgment, no.”

  “You get a drink on the house for that,” she said. “Mike’s main pleasure in life is to scare people out of their wits, force them to ask him to let up on the pedal.” Then to Mike, “Lance Wilson asked to see you as soon as you got back.”

  “Lance Wilson is here? What luck,” I said. That, I thought, would save me a trip to Hollywood.

  “Have someone show Mr. Haskell his room,” Mike said.

  “My pleasure,” Nikki said.

  Mike Chandler handed me my bag and Nikki led me across the room to a rear exit. No one seemed to be interested in a newcomer, even though I looked out of place in my tan slacks, navy sports shirt, and seersucker jacket among all those fake cowpokes.

  Nikki took me down a long hallway off which dozens of rooms seemed to open. The one for me was at the very end of the line. It was a small room with two built-in bunks, one above the other, with a little ladder to the upper berth. Off it was a tiny bathroom—basin, stall shower, john. You’d be apt to bump your elbows shaving.

  “I promised you a free drink,” Nikki said. “What’ll it be? I can have it sent to you or you can join me at the bar.”

  “A double Jack Daniels on the rocks ought to put me to sleep,” I said. “And of course you don’t have to buy it.”

  She stood in the middle of the tiny room, not making any move to leave. “I remember staying at the Beaumont, your hotel, Mark, long ago. They presented me with a split of champagne and fresh flowers when I checked in. We’re not quite that fancy, but a double Jack Daniels is easy. Here or out there?”

  “Having a drink with you is something I’d better regret having to delay,” I said. “I’ve got to be up at the crack of dawn, my time, to get over to the state prison. May I have a rain check?”

  She didn’t move. I’ve been looked over by women before, and I have to confess I felt a kind of weary excitement at the way she was studying me. Any other time, I thought.

  “It’s not going to be exactly fun to go over old history,” she said. “Why do you have to?”

  “You know what’s happened in New York, at the Beaumont?”

  She nodded. “It was on the tube,” she said.

  “The three cases have to be tied together somehow,” I said. “We’re trying to stop a killer before he strikes again.”

  “But you won’t find him here,” she said. “He’s obviously in New York.”

  “A lead to him,” I said.

  “Sharon Dain’s in jail, convicted of the crime that happened here,” she said.

  “There are people who don’t believe she did it, including her lawyer,” I said.

  She kept giving me that calculating look. I began to think, reluctantly, that it wasn’t sex that interested her. “Certainly Sharon Dain wasn’t in the Beaumont early this morning,” she said. She gave me a wry little smile. “The only person at High Crest who could have been there then is you.”

  “But I wasn’t here two years ago,” I said. “If Sharon Dain isn’t guilty, why do you resent my looking into it?”

  “I don’t resent it for that reason,” she said. “But it’s hopeless, Mark. Steiner is the best, but he failed. A very good private eye named Jack Galt tried, and he failed. Sandra Potter, a first-class newspaper woman, also tried, and she failed. It’s dead end out here, Mark.”

  “Maybe they didn’t ask the right questions or talk to the right people,” I said. I remembered Chambrun’s line. “We know more now than anyone did back then.”

  “Hal Carpenter got what was coming to him,” she said, and her voice was suddenly not quite steady.

  “But someone has now gone off his rocker and is killing people who had almost no connection with the early case. He’s got to be stopped, and he has to have some connection with what happened out here.”

  She was suddenly a statue there in the center of my room, staring past me at something she wanted to forget.

  “Mike and I contributed to the Sharon Dain defense fund,” she said.

  “I know. He told me.”

  “But he didn’t tell you why.”

  “I made a guess,” I said. “To stay on the right side of Alvin Parker. Mike said it wasn’t that.”

  “It wasn’t that.”

  To my surprise her whole tense body seemed to be shaking. I waited for her to go on.

  “One night, long ago, I stopped at Hal Carpenter’s cabin to deliver a message about some lesson cancellation for the next day,” she said. “There are no phones in the cabins. He suggested I come in for a drink. I knew his reputation but I thought I was too old to interest him, and besides that, I was the boss’s wife.” A nerve twitched high up on her cheek. “He closed the door when I came in, turned, ripped off my clothes—being a man you’ve never been raped, Mark.”

  “My God!” I said. “And he was kept on here after that?”

  “I didn’t tell Mike—then,” she said, “He would have tried to kill Hal, and Hal was too tough for him. I didn’t tell him till after Hal was dead. Mike was all for having Sharon Dain burned at the stake. I felt, whatever she’d done, she deserved help after polishing off that animal! I would have done it myself if I’d had the guts!”

  “But you wouldn’t have gone on doing it,” I said. “Someone has. Someone who first tried to save Sharon Dain from taking the rap for a crime he’d committed by paying for her defense; someone who has waited for all the appeals to fail before starting to punish the people who wouldn’t help. Then, maybe there’ll be a third category. People who didn’t help enough! It can go on and on, Nikki.”

  “What I just told you—and a lot of other garbage that could destroy High Crest—can come out if the case here is reopened,” Nikki said.

  “And other people can get killed if this psycho isn’t stopped,” I said. I reached out and touched her hand. It was like ice. “Some bright boy in the press is going to remind people of two years ago when the connection is made, and it can’t miss being made. I was sent out here to avoid the sensation a police investigation would cause —and because we don’t trust the local police to admit they could have been wrong about Sharon Dain. I have one question to ask anyone I talk to. What other men were interested in Sharon Dain two years ago, or before that?”

  Nikki was still the frozen statue, not looking directly at me any more. The past was torturing her—a sophisticated woman brutally mauled by a punk. I wondered what it had done to her relationship with Mike Chandler. She couldn’t forget, and I suspected he couldn’t forget.

  “No man,” she said in a low voice, “who had any contact with Sharon Dain could miss knowing that she was ready, any t
ime, any place. You keep hunting, Mark, and you’ll find a list as long as your arm. I can’t name anyone in particular. The time she was here she was strictly Hal Carpenter’s property. No one at High Crest at that time was going to make a play for her. Hal was too dangerous to mix with, and he showed her off as belonging to him quite openly. I don’t think anyone killed him because he got in the way of a dream. So if you’re right, it must have been someone out of her past, before she ever came here.”

  “But who was a guest at High Crest at that time,” I said. “You must have a list of who was staying here at the time of Carpenter’s murder.”

  “Of course,” she said almost impatiently. “The police have it, too, and they came up with nothing.”

  “They weren’t looking,” I said. “They had Sharon Dain trussed up like a Christmas turkey. Can I see that list?”

  She took a breath and let it out in a long sigh. “I suppose there’s no reason why not. In the morning?”

  “Fine,” I said. “If I could have it before I take off to see Sharon Dain, I could look at it on the way. It might make me smarter in talking to her. And take it easy, Nikki. What you told me doesn’t have to go public.”

  “Thanks,” she said. She moved. “A double Jack Daniels, you said? I’ll have one of the barboys bring it down.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  I WAS ALMOST GONE before the barboy came with my drink, and I was out like a light a few moments after I’d had it. The fresh mountain air drifting through my screened window was like a drug.

  Someone was pounding on my door in what seemed like five minutes later. I mumbled something and opened my eyes. It was daylight outside.

  “Mike Chandler here, Mark,” the knocker said. “Seven o’clock. Breakfast in fifteen minutes.”

  I thanked him and struggled out of bed. A shave and shower seemed to bring me back to life. The damned time change made it nine o’clock on my schedule. I’d had about six hours sleep. My bloodshot eyes looked it. I put on a pair of tinted glasses I use for driving and went down the hall to find breakfast.

  There was a dining room off the big hall I’d seen last night. Quite a few cowboys and cowgirls were already up and eating. Mike Chandler was waiting for me at the entrance and took me to a table, set up for four.

  “All-day trail ride,” he said, indicating the people. “We start early. What’ll it be, eggs, bacon, ham, corned beef hash? There may even be some brook trout.”

  “Juice, a couple of boiled eggs, toast and coffee would be fine,” I said. “If I could have the coffee now—”

  I realized then that the breakfast was served buffet style, self-service, but Chandler was going to take care of me. He brought me coffee and went back to the buffet. I was feeling grateful for the first swallow when I was joined by a young man I recognized without ever having seen him in the flesh before. He was Lance Wilson, the movie actor.

  “Mark has told me why you’re here, Haskell,” he said. He didn’t bother to mention his name. Everyone was expected to know that on sight. “Mind if I sit down?”

  “Help yourself.”

  I don’t quite know how to describe Lance Wilson. He could have been trying to look like Robert Redford, or trying not to look like him and not able to make it. Being too like a famous star is bad for a career. There were never two Clark Gables, or two Gary Coopers, or two Jimmy Cagneys. Lance Wilson was the clean-cut-Robert-Redford-American-boy. In his cowboy clothes he looked like the Sundance Kid.

  He sat down. He’d brought coffee with him. He offered me a cigarette, which I refused, and lit one for himself. I have to have that first cup of coffee before I start killing myself with nicotine.

  “A lot of us had hoped that two years ago was gone and forgotten,” he said.

  “I can imagine,” I said.

  “It’s not good in my business to get yourself connected with a crime or a scandal,” he said. “The big wheels get awfully moral when they’re not involved themselves. I’ve only just started to get some decent jobs again.”

  “But how were you involved?” I asked.

  “Gave my name to the Sharon Dain Defense Committee,” he said. “Not a sensible thing to do, it seems.”

  “But nice, and human,” I said.

  He inhaled on his cigarette. “I’ve learned it’s better not to show your human side in this business. It cost me.”

  I looked across the rim of my coffee cup at him. “You had some connection with Sharon Dain?”

  “God, no,” he said. “That is, not till she was in trouble. Never laid eyes on her till I saw her here with Carpenter that January. But—well, I was willing to help anyone get off the hook who had trouble with him. You remember the movie Jaws?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “I was supposed to have one of the leads in that but I couldn’t make it.” His eyes were steel cold. “Carpenter tried to mess around with a girl I brought up here. I called him for it. He beat the shit out of me out on the slope one afternoon. I couldn’t go in front of the camera for six weeks. Lost a big chance.” He shrugged. “So when I heard someone polished off the miserable bastard I was willing to help the little lady take as small a beating as possible.”

  “Help generously, I hear.”

  “Five grand,” he said. “Alvin Parker and I were the big sugar daddies on the committee, but when we counted it all up Max Steiner just laughed at us. Then Sharon’s fairy godmother waved her wand and up came support from Mr. or Ms. Anonymous.”

  “No clue as to who that was?”

  He gave me a very direct, sincere, Robert Redford look. “You notice I said ‘Mr. or Ms.’—Miz, that is. Been thinking about it ever since I heard you’d come out here to smell around; after I heard what happened in the Beaumont in New York.”

  “You think a woman may have made the big donation?” I asked.

  “We were inundated with unattached women that January,” Wilson said. “Liberation convention. They supported all women’s causes, including homes for unwed mothers. Is it unreasonable to think that Sharon Dain may have seemed like a worthy cause to some of them?”

  “Joanna Frazer turned her down,” I said. “The thinking in New York is that that’s why this crazy killer went after her.”

  “Maybe all he knew about was the turndown,” Wilson said. “Joanna Fraser had the kind of bread Anonymous put up. She may not have wanted to support a murderess publicly, but privately it could have been her kind of cause. Maybe it’s too bad for her she kept it a secret.”

  It certainly wasn’t a notion that had occurred to me before. I wondered if Nora Coyle had been holding out on me, and if so, why? It didn’t change my goal, though. I told Wilson we were looking for some man in Sharon Dain’s past who was getting revenge for what had been done to her.

  “I can’t help you there,” he said. “I never heard of the girl until that New Year’s week out here. But Max Steiner hired a supposedly very competent private investigator named Galt who, I understand, did an in-depth study of her past, looking for anything that would help.”

  Mike Chandler was at my elbow, putting down my juice, eggs, and toast in front of me.

  “Galt’s on his way from Hollywood to see you, Mark,” he said. “He phoned last night after you’d turned in. Max Steiner asked him to cooperate with you. He should be here by the time you get back from seeing Sharon at the prison.”

  The eggs were just to my liking. I kept looking around for Nikki, who had promised me the guest list from two years back to take on my trip. Mike Chandler had joined us at the table with his coffee.

  “Your wife doesn’t get up with these early birds?” I asked.

  “Nikki? First one up. She’s overseeing the lunch we take on our trail ride.” Mike laughed. “Caviar among the mountain goats. We take the comforts of life very seriously at High Crest.” Then he patted at the pocket of his fancy shirt. “I almost forgot,” he said. “She gave me something for you.” It was the list I wanted.

  I had gone down in the class of my transp
ortation. It was a four-wheel-drive Scout that would have been left far behind by Mike Chandler’s Rolls. My driver was a high school boy about seventeen, who told me this was his first summer job at High Crest. He hadn’t been dry behind the ears when Hal Carpenter was murdered and knew nothing about the case except for some unreliable gossip he’d heard around the bunkhouse. After a few minutes of gaping at the unbelievable beauty of the sun-drenched mountains I started to study the list Nikki Chandler had left for me. It was a machine-duplicated copy of the original, which must have gone to the police. It was smeared a little in some places. There must have been three hundred and fifty names on it.

  It didn’t do me much good. There were, of course, names that connected. Joanna Fraser was there, and Nora Coyle, and Sharon Dain herself, Lance Wilson and maybe a dozen other movie names I recognized, and Sandra Potter, the girl reporter I was supposed to contact, and Alvin Parker. There was one name, Charles Davis from Las Vegas, which had a question mark written after it in pencil. I’d have to ask Nikki what that meant. Some of the gals in the convention group had names in the world of women’s lib. I’d actually seen a couple of them around the Beaumont in the past few years. I put check marks after them because they just might be worth a further look. But put them all together and they didn’t spell “mother.”

  My driver wasn’t Mike Chandler, but he drove a nice, steady run, and at about twenty minutes to nine the grey stone walls of the prison loomed up ahead of us. I was going to make my appointment on time.

  I thought afterward that it was a good thing I had. The authorities were anything but friendly. I think they’d have used any excuse to turn me around and tell me to go peddle my papers. The prison guard who took me down a long, cold corridor to what I assumed was some kind of interrogation room, probably bugged, looked at me as though he’d caught me driving without a license and with some pot stashed away in my glove compartment.

  “How much time do I have?” I asked him, as he ushered me into a small square space with white-washed walls, a small table, and two straight-backed kitchen chairs.