Random Killer

by Hugh Pentecost

  “Same phony address,” I said. “Same phony name.”

  “You’d better get back here with what you’ve got on this man, Mark. Chambrun is climbing the walls.”

  Part Three

  CHAPTER ONE

  GALT FOUND IT JUST as hard to believe my news as I had been to hear it from Ruysdale.

  “The New York cops will have an advantage over me,” he said. “They’ll have his fingerprints. That will make a starting point I didn’t have. Let me know what they come up with, Haskell. I wasted half a year trying to identify that bastard.”

  Getting underway wasn’t dead simple. The first flight I could get from Denver was at about five o’clock. That would be seven o’clock New York time. I wouldn’t get into Kennedy until shortly before midnight.

  While I was waiting for the man in the office to confirm a reservation for me I got lucky. Sandy Potter found me. She was the girl reporter who’d been on my list of people to see. She wrote a sort of semigossip column for a syndicate, which appeared in most of the West Coast newspapers as Sandra Says. She was a breezy, uninhibited blond, wearing the in-style costume for High Crest—jeans, boots, man’s shirt, and a Stetson perched on top of her golden head. She introduced herself while the man in the office was on the phone to the airport in Denver. High Crest was pretty well deserted, almost everyone having ridden up into the hills to have “caviar with the mountain goats,” Mike Chandler’s gag.

  She came down the hall with me and perched on the edge of my bunk while I packed my bag. She’d already told the man in the office not to bother about transportation for me. She’d drive me to the airport.

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

  I told her I had, and I brought her up to date on the latest news about Charles Davis. It was no secret. The media would be shouting it all over the country within the next hour. The picture-wire killer had struck for the fourth time.

  She listened, frowning, and that frown made her look, somehow, like a very serious child.

  “Murder isn’t usually my beat,” she said. “What well-known male star was seen in what famous restaurant or at what party with what glamorous lady? That’s my kind of stuff. But I happened to be here two years ago, and a follow-up now is logical for me.”

  “Did you run across this fellow who called himself Davis?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Not to be aware of it,” she said. “There were several hundred people here, top of the skiing season. I trotted out here because of Joanna Fraser’s convention of liberated broads. Different from the usual. Worth a look and a listen. Then Hal Carpenter got his, and since I was on the scene my syndicate assigned me to the story.”

  “But Charles Davis doesn’t ring a bell with you?”

  “Maybe you don’t know what it’s like here at High Crest,” she said. “It’s about as informal as you can get. When you’re here, you’re one of the boys or one of the girls. Everyone talks to everyone. You don’t bother with formal introductions. I could have had a drink at the bar with this Davis without ever bothering to find out what his name was. Most of the people from Hollywood I know, at least by sight. But there were plenty of people strange to me I didn’t bother to find out about. Joanna Fraser’s women were my interest that week.”

  “Until Carpenter was strangled.”

  “Right. But like a good newspaperwoman I stayed close to the cops then. Sharon Dain was their only interest from the first ten minutes on, so I stayed with the Sharon Dain aspect of the case at first. Good, rich, gossip-column crud.”

  “Later?”

  “Later I had some doubts about her guilt,” Sandy said.

  “Max Steiner help create those doubts?”

  She shook her head. She tossed her Stetson on my bunk and fluffed out her golden hair. I had a feeling I’d like to see her out of pants and in something feminine.

  “Steiner actually made me think the cops were right, at first,” she said. “When you hire Max Steiner to defend you, you “are most likely guilty. He gets you off with a lesser sentence. That’s his particular expertise.”

  “But you changed your mind?”

  “Not at first,” she said. “But I developed a healthy sympathy for Sharon as we began to learn what kind of guy Hal Carpenter had been. Then the cops kept saying that strangling a man with picture wire was a ‘woman’s method.’ That’s just plain hooey, Mark. I can’t imagine a woman thinking of doing it that way. Carpenter was an athlete, a very strong, agile man. A woman would have to be incredibly strong to slip a wire noose over his head and hold him still while he fought for his life. To plan it that way and think she could succeed just doesn’t make sense to me. Never has, once I’d thought about it. I had to think it was some kind of incredible hulk of a man—powerful, relentless. Maybe these others—like Joanna Fraser—were weaklings, but not Carpenter. He would have been free of that wire, in a woman’s hands, in seconds.”

  “You should have passed that on to Max Steiner at the time,” I said.

  “Oh, I did. And he agreed. You see, by then I’d decided that the cops had chosen the easy way out, and I was interesting myself in the defense committee. Steiner used my argument during the trial but the jury didn’t buy it.”

  “You think Steiner fumbled the ball?”

  “No,” Sandy said, with a kind of certainty. “I think he took the only road open to him. You have no idea what the climate was like out here that January. This is ‘Male Town,’ Mark. Hal Carpenter was a male here, king of the ski slopes. The cops were, of course, all male. The judge was a man. The jury had ten men and only two broads— the kind you knew, from just looking at them in the jury box with the men. Papa knows best. A lot of people resented the presence of Joanna Fraser and her people. You heard talk about ‘lesbians’ and ‘dikes.’ It was almost as if the authorities wanted to show those liberated females, demanding ‘equal rights,’ just what equal rights really were. They’d throw the book at Sharon; just, I must admit, as they’d have thrown the book at a man who’d murdered Prince Hal. Steiner had no choice but to plead guilty and claim self-defense and temporary insanity. But evidently a prostitute didn’t deserve any kind of break. If Carpenter had beat her up, and there was no question but that he had, she’d asked for it.”

  “But, because you didn’t buy a woman using the wire method, you thought it had to be someone else—a physically powerful man?”

  She nodded. “I hitched my wagon to Jack Galt about then,” she said. “He’s a good man at his job, Mark. He did a rundown on every single soul who was staying at High Crest at the time. The only blank he drew was this Charles Davis.” She hesitated a moment, and then asked me a very shrewd question. She was no dope, that girl. “A phony name, a phony address, a disappearing act just as quickly as he could manage it. The prime suspect, you’d say, since nobody else came up hot for Jack Galt. Will you tell me, Mark, why that man for whom we’ve been looking for almost two years suddenly registers in your hotel in New York under that same phony name, giving the same phony address? Wasn’t that a sure way for him to get himself caught?”

  We looked at each other, wondering.

  “Some psychos want to be caught,” I said.

  “But he attracted the killer, not the cops,” Sandy said. “I don’t get it.”

  There was no getting around that. Charles Davis, whoever he was, had known too much for the killer to let him live. He had been at High Crest when Carpenter was murdered. He must have seen something, heard something, known something. He hid behind that alias for almost two years and suddenly, when the killer struck again, made his presence known in or about the Beaumont, the mystery man advertising his presence and inviting his own death. As my grandfather used to say, “Try that on your pianola.”

  Sandy Potter drove me to the airport in Denver in a little top-down MG. She didn’t need any driving lessons from Mike Chandler. We kept hashing things over on the trip, but neither of us came up with anything new that helped. She asked me to keep in touch with
her. It was her story out here. I suggested she come to New York with me and get it all firsthand. For a little while there I forgot about my interest in Nora Coyle.

  “Part of the story’s on this end,” she said. “When it’s all over maybe we can celebrate, here or there.”

  I bought her a drink at the airport and boarded my plane. I dozed a little and drank a little and decided I’d accomplished very little on my trip. I’d formed an opinion about Sharon Dain’s guilt. I had a hatful of nothing about “Charles Davis”—only that he wasn’t Charles Davis. I knew that Hal Carpenter, among other things, had raped Nikki Chandler, which could have made Mike Chandler a number-one suspect, except for the fact that he had certainly not been in New York when Geoffrey Hammond and Joanna Fraser were killed, and I knew exactly where he was when Charles Davis got himself garroted. Chambrun wouldn’t find any of that any sort of windfall.

  Just before I’d left High Crest, I’d wired Chambrun the time I was due at Kennedy. Lucky I did, because taxis were as scarce as hen’s teeth, but Jerry Dodd, the Beaumont’s security man, was there to meet me in one of the hotel’s limousines.

  Jerry looked like a man who’d been put through an old-fashioned laundry wringer. His face looked as if it might crack from fatigue.

  “How did they happen to let you get away?” I asked when we got going.

  “There are more cops and special guards in the hotel than customers,” he said.

  “Chambrun?”

  “He thrives on not sleeping,” Jerry said. “He’s waiting up for you.”

  “Anything new?”

  “We know who ‘Charles Davis’ was,” he said.

  That sat me up straight.

  “He was a third-rate private eye with an office in Los Angeles,” Jerry said. “His real name was Al Ziegler. Fingerprints got us that—FBI files. We’ve talked to Galt since you left High Crest. He knew this Ziegler. At least he knew who he was. He had a crummy practice, most of it involving divorce cases. He was an expert at being under the bed when some guy or doll was playing games with the wrong mate.”

  “So what was he doing at the Beaumont?”

  “Setting himself up to be killed,” Jerry said.

  It seemed that other people had asked the same question Sandy Potter had asked me.

  “Nothing but theory to go on,” Jerry said. “The L.A. police have searched his office for us. Just one room in a crummy office building. We don’t know yet where he lived. But he must have kept his records in his head. Nothing about why he’d gone to New York. Nothing about High Crest two years ago. Less than a hundred bucks in a checking account, which he seems to have used only in emergencies, mainly to overdraw. His customers probably dealt with him strictly in cash. People who hire a bum like this Ziegler don’t want it known. Whole damn thing is a puzzle.”

  “You think he was handling his specialty, some kind of a divorce thing at the Beaumont?”

  “And at High Crest two years ago?” Jerry sounded angry. “He registered yesterday. This morning his registration card was on Chambrun’s desk. Chambrun certainly would have known that ‘Charles Davis’ had pulled a disappearing act at High Crest two years ago. He was bound to be pulled in for questioning. He must have realized that.”

  “Maybe he didn’t plan to be here that long,” I said. “He was trying to attract someone else.”

  “He sure as hell managed that,” Jerry said. “Maid found him at ten o’clock this morning when she went in to make up his room.”

  “Chambrun must have seen the registration cards by then,” I said. “Every day, nine forty-five on the dot.”

  “First time in thirty years he was off schedule,” Jerry said. “Hardy had him busy with something.”

  There was one familiar homelike thing about being back. The air, unlike High Crest’s, was heavy with carbon monoxide. The Beaumont’s lobby, however, wasn’t like home. A dozen guys who had cop written all over them were sitting around in lobby chairs.

  I headed straight up to the second floor and Chambrun’s office. He was there, and Betsy Ruysdale was with him. She had no regular hours. When he was working she was working. He suggested I have a drink and I helped myself at the sideboard.

  “You know we’ve identified ‘Davis’?” he asked.

  “Jerry told me.”

  “Let’s have it,” he said. I swear he looked just as fresh as he did at breakfast every morning. He nodded at Ruysdale. “Tape recorder, please.”

  When she’d switched it on, I told him all I had to tell. He never interrupted till I came to the end.

  “That’s all?” he asked.

  “Best I could do, boss,” I said.

  His eyes narrowed. I couldn’t tell if it was to keep out the smoke from his Egyptian cigarette or because he was angry with me.

  “What did the Dain girl have to say about Geoffrey Hammond?” he asked.

  I didn’t remember that we’d discussed Hammond, except perhaps to mention him as one of the current victims.

  “He was a man who took his pleasure from call girls,” Chambrun said. “Sharon Dain was a call girl. It’s not impossible their paths had crossed.”

  “She didn’t say so. I think she would have. I mean, she got the news from me. about the two jobs here.”

  “Call girls don’t hand out their lists of customers without some urging.” Chambrun sounded impatient. “You had noticed a habit Hammond and Hal Carpenter had in common? Your girl here in the Beaumont with a black eye, Sharon Dain with her broken ribs, and your Nikki Chandler, violently raped. A couple of strong-arm sex goons, just asking for trouble.”

  “But that doesn’t tie in with Joanna Fraser,” I said. “I wasn’t interested in bedroom gossip. I was looking for someone who cared enough for Sharon Dain to kill her persecutor and anyone else who’d turned his back on her. Someone with a hell of a lot of money to throw around to defend her.”

  “And you came up with ‘Charles Davis,’” Chambrun said. He sounded disgusted. “A cheap private eye with less than a hundred bucks in the bank. I ought to ask you to pay your own expenses to High Crest.”

  “So I goofed,” I said. “I’m sorry. What next?”

  Chambrun reached for the demitasse of Turkish coffee Ruysdale kept filled at his desk. He suddenly looked tired. “I’m sorry, Mark,” he said. “I’m really burned up with myself. We haven’t done any better on this end than you did out there. We found out who ‘Davis’ really was. That’s all. And we found that out too late.”

  I felt myself relaxing. There wasn’t an unfair bone in Chambrun’s body. That was why any of us who worked for him would go out on the farthest limb to please him.

  “You put what pieces you have together and you don’t come out with much,” he said. “Take a look at it, Mark. You may see something that I don’t.”

  Not much chance of that, I thought, as I waited for him to go on after he’d lit a fresh cigarette. I noticed Ruysdale hadn’t turned off the tape recorder.

  “Let’s take this Al Ziegler,” he said. “He goes to High Crest two years ago and registers as ‘Charles Davis’ from One eleven Peace Street, Las Vegas. He doesn’t go there for a holiday. He doesn’t have that kind of private money. He’s on a job, and a client is paying his expenses. He takes skiing lessons from Hal Carpenter, also an expense. Was Carpenter his reason for being there, or was that just a cover to make it look as if he had a genuine reason for vacationing at High Crest? His track record would indicate he was there to catch some guy playing games with the wrong woman, or some gal there with the wrong man. Grounds for divorce. So that’s one missing answer. We don’t know if Carpenter had a connection with Ziegler’s case. He wasn’t married. He was shacked up with a prostitute, not someone’s wife.”

  “Certainly no divorce angle there,” I said.

  “But we can’t be certain he was on a divorce case. He would take any kind of job, I’d guess, for the right kind of fee. A client who would pay his freight at High Crest wasn’t broke. So, as I said, that is on
e missing piece.

  “Three days after Ziegler-Davis arrives at High Crest, Carpenter is murdered. The cops are very casual about questioning the guests. They are fixed on Sharon Dain. Ziegler gets out of there as fast as he can, because if they should eventually check up on ‘Charles Davis,’ they might discover who he was. Private investigators aren’t popular with the cops and they might try to force him to tell who he was working for and why.

  “At that point ‘Davis’ turns back into Ziegler. The L.A. cops tell us he was working at his regular job for the last two years, perfectly visible in his office until a couple of days ago. Then he comes here and ‘Charles Davis’ is reborn. Why?”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “He was running the risk of your uncovering his whole charade.”

  “It made sense to him,” Chambrun said. “That’s another missing piece.”

  “If he left Los Angeles two days ago, that was before the killer struck at Hammond and Mrs. Fraser,” I said. “No connection.”

  “But ‘Charles Davis’ reborn after two years makes a connection,” Chambrun said. “Maybe he came to New York on some legitimate case and heard the news about the killings here after he arrived. Suggest anything to you, Mark?”

  “Carpenter’s killer was at it again. He’d know that.”

  “So Ziegler advertises his presence by registering as ‘Charles Davis.’ But who would see the advertisement? This isn’t fifty years ago. Our guests don’t register in one big book so that the next guest can see who’s registered ahead of him. Each guest signs a separate card, the room clerk files it away. No way for anyone else to see it unless he was standing right there when Ziegler signed in. The room clerk might say, audibly, ‘Your room is six-oh-four, Mr. Davis.’ Aside from that, there’s no way for anyone outside the staff to know who’s registered and in what room.”

  “And did that happen?”

  “I don’t know,” Chambrun said. “Things were pretty hectic, people checking out, asking questions. It isn’t reasonable for Atterbury, or anyone else on the desk, to remember a small thing like that. They don’t. There’s only one thing on the ‘Davis’ card that distinguishes it from the usual. He didn’t have any luggage. He told Atterbury he’d missed his plane to the coast and his bags were at the airport. He paid cash in advance for his room. We had so many people checking out that there were rooms. It’s not so unheard-of that Atterbury had any reason to hesitate.”