Random Killer

by Hugh Pentecost

  “He didn’t intend to stay long,” I said. “You’d be likely to spot him when you saw the cards this morning.”

  “Could he know that?”

  “With everyone in the hotel being checked over by the police? He’d have to know it was possible,” I said.

  Chambrun leaned back in his chair, his eyelids lowered. “You want to hear a wild theory?” he asked.

  “If it’s your theory it may not be so wild,” I said.

  “Wild. Far out,” he said. “But it could be.” He drew a deep breath. “Let’s go back two years. Ziegler is hired to go to High Crest to look for someone or to spy on someone. But he doesn’t know who his client is. He’s hired over the phone, the name wouldn’t mean anything if a name was given. Expense money delivered in cash by mail or by messenger. Ziegler goes to High Crest and registers as ‘Davis.’ Carpenter is murdered, and Ziegler has reason to believe his client is the killer. But he doesn’t know who he is!”

  “That is wild,” I said.

  “If he was hired to look for Sharon Dain and find out what she was up to?”

  “Oh, brother!” I said.

  “For two years Ziegler tries to track down that client. Why? Because that client obviously had money and Ziegler’s silence could be worth a good chunk of it.”

  “Not so wild,” I said.

  “Then the killer strikes again here, after two years. It’s all over radio and television and the papers. Ziegler, in New York on some other business, guesses that his client is in or around the Beaumont. He can’t finger him because he has no idea who he is or what he looks like. But maybe he can draw the killer to him. The name ‘Charles Davis’ would do it. Ziegler expects the man to come to him and pay for his silence. It works, except that the man comes with a length of picture wire in his pocket.”

  “Wouldn’t Ziegler be prepared for that?”

  “Maybe. Also—maybe—he left his room and circulated around the lobby, hoping the killer would spot him if the registration gimmick didn’t work. The killer has spotted him, one way or the other, gets into Ziegler’s room while Ziegler is out of it, and is standing behind the door when Ziegler comes back, wire noose at the ready.”

  “No struggle?” I asked.

  “The body was found just inside the door of six-oh-four,” Chambrun said. “The maid actually couldn’t get the door wide open because the body blocked it. He was caught from behind, like the others, and it was over almost before he knew what was happening to him.”

  “Was the door to six-oh-four forced?”

  “No. But all the killer had to do was stop at the desk and ask for the key to six-oh-four. In all the confusion nobody asked him for any ID.” Chambrun opened his eyes wide. “Add up to anything like sense to you, Mark?”

  “It could be. It could very well be,” I said.

  “And it’s no more than a conversation piece,” he said, impatient again. “We’re no closer to guessing who the killer is, who Ziegler’s client was two years ago.” He gestured to Ruysdale to turn off the tape recorder. “Play that for Hardy next time he shows up here,” he said.

  “So where do we stand?” I asked him.

  “In total confusion,” he said. “The hotel is swarming with cops, special guards, and the press. In the bars, the restaurants, the shops, people don’t talk about anything else. Somebody sees some lonely guy wandering around the corridors and they run screaming for help—if the guy doesn’t start screaming for help first. It’s mad. We’ve got special guards thrown around people who may have had even the remotest connection with High Crest two years ago—Alvin Parker, Bobby Bryan, your Miss Coyle. Hardy has cops watching Roy Conklin at his apartment and office, Colin Dobler at his Gramercy Park studio, and Max Steiner at his apartment and office. There may be other people right here in this hotel, but no one has come forward to say they were at High Crest. Hardy got the list of guests at High Crest two years ago from the police out there—the one you saw with the question mark after the name Charles Davis. So far, Alvin Parker and Nora Coyle are the only people staying here at the Beaumont who are on that list. As you know, neither Roy Conklin nor Colin Dobler are on it. Nor Bobby Bryan. Just to cheer you, I can’t see your Miss Coyle as the physically powerful killer of three strong, agile men—Carpenter, Hammond, and Ziegler.”

  “She’ll be glad to hear it,” I said. “You still think Hammond and Joanna Fraser were done in just because they refused to help Sharon Dain?”

  “How can we possibly be sure of anything until we know who the killer is?” Chambrun said. “My invention about Ziegler and his client explains why the killer waited two years to go after him. But if Geoffrey Hammond and Joanna Fraser knew something that would incriminate Carpenter’s killer, why would they have kept it to themselves for two years? The original theory that the killer waited for two years till all Sharon Dain’s appeals had been exhausted and then went after people who had refused her is as good as any.” Chambrun pushed back his chair and stood up. “Max Steiner is coming here for breakfast, nine o’clock. I’d like you present, Mark. Get what sleep you can.”

  “You think Steiner can be helpful?”

  “He’s spent two years on the Dain case, hasn’t he? And God help us, Mark, if the Dain case isn’t at the core of this we’re really lost.”

  I went down the hall to my apartment. I unlocked the door and went into the dark living room. I’d only taken two steps into the room when someone grabbed me from behind.

  “Stand just where you are, buster,” a harsh voice said.

  I felt something like a gun jammed into my back, and for one moment, so ghastly I can’t describe it, I expected to be fitted with a wire collar.

  Then the living room lights were switched on. The man behind me was slapping me over for a weapon of some sort. Nora Coyle appeared in the door to my bedroom, wearing some kind of a thin, see-through nightgown.

  “Thank God, Mark!” she said. “It’s all right, officer. It’s Mr. Haskell and this is his apartment.”

  I turned to face a grim-faced cop. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t they tell you the lady was being guarded? You should have identified yourself before walking in like that.”

  I felt ten years older.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I DIDN’T GET MUCH sleep that night. The cop sat down in his chair by the door. He wasn’t going anywhere.

  I went into the bedroom with Nora. She climbed back into bed and sat there, a sheet pulled up around her. I had to tell her about my trip, everything I’d found out and had heard from Chambrun. I remember I went out to the kitchenette and made drinks. I offered the cop one, but he asked for a rain check for when he was off duty.

  I don’t know how long we talked, a couple of hours I’d guess. I said something about not wanting to sleep on the couch with the cop watching me. Would you believe that eventually I slept beside Nora in my bed and never touched her? Unless I stroked her in my sleep.

  I have some kind of inner alarm clock that wakes me for that daily breakfast meeting with Chambrun. Nora was sleeping like a happy, healthy child. She didn’t stir when I went into the bathroom, shaved and showered, and dressed for the day. I made coffee and discovered that there was a different cop at the front door. The relief man was cut out of the same pattern. He thanked me for coffee as I left to go down the hall to Chambrun’s office.

  It was the same as always there. The breakfast buffet was laid out, with Monsieur Fresney, the chef, presiding. Max Steiner, the lawyer, small, grey, bubbling with energy, was just as I’d pictured him. The cop I’d seen in Ruysdale’s outer office was evidently his bodyguard. Steiner said hello to me. He’d evidently been listening to the tape Chambrun had made of his “wild theory” the night before.

  “Ingenious,” Steiner said. “Quite possible. All you need to do is prove it. If I’d been able to spot Ziegler two years ago, I might have got Sharon off. Sonofabitch sat on what he knew and let them railroad her.”

  “If there’s any truth in my dream-up,” Chambrun said
, “he couldn’t have helped you much. He didn’t know who his client was.”

  “But he could have forced the cops to look for that client,” Steiner said. “It would have injected someone else into the case. That’s all I needed at the time.”

  Steiner selected eggs and bacon for his breakfast. Chambrun chose a filet mignon, with his usual gluten toast, sweet butter, and wild strawberry jam. I had chicken hash. Chambrun had taught me to develop a taste for it.

  “How long am I going to be followed around by these bodyguards?” Steiner asked, when we had got to our second cups of coffee and cigarettes.

  “Till you’re safe,” Chambrun said.

  “You’re still buying this theory of a psycho who’s going to punish everyone who failed Sharon?” Steiner asked.

  “I don’t know what I’m buying,” Chambrun said. “Anyone connected with the case, no matter how remotely, needs protection until we know more than we do. No one could have been any more remote than Geoffrey Hammond. He wasn’t at High Crest. He didn’t know Sharon Dain—or did he?”

  “Not so far as I know,” Steiner said.

  “You asked him to interview her and he turned you down?”

  Steiner made a hopeless gesture with his expressive small hands. “We were just approaching the trial by then,” he said. “Two months after the murder. Hammond owed me, in a way. I thought he might be willing to pay off.”

  “Owed you?”

  “Some years ago he did a show on the failure of the courts to handle crime in the big cities. Courts overcrowded. Plea bargaining. Only five percent of the people charged with felonies ever go to jail. He was to interview a couple of judges, a couple of big city prosecutors. He wanted to be primed with the right kind of questions to ask. He came to me. I gave him the ammunition he needed. He offered to pay me a fee for my time, but I told him it was on the house. I was interested in seeing our court system get the business. But I suggested that some day I might want a favor from him.”

  “And Sharon Dain was that favor?”

  Steiner nodded. “He had to turn me down. You see, the interview with Sharon would have had to take place before she went on trial. That was about three weeks away when I called him from High Crest and asked him. There was no way he could fit it into his schedule. Time was already bought, advertisers lined up for interviews he’d already taped. No way to slide in a different show. His contracts wouldn’t permit it. He didn’t turn me down because he thought it wouldn’t make a good show, or because he had any sort of prejudice against Sharon Dain. He just couldn’t handle it.”

  “As far as you know he’d never met her? He was interested in her kind of woman. Girls in the hotel here knew him on that basis.”

  “Certainly he never suggested it, nor did I think of it,” Steiner said.

  “And Joanna Fraser. You went to her, top, for help, didn’t you?”

  “That was in the very beginning, when I first came on the case,” Steiner said. “She was there at High Crest, with her convention of liberated dolls. It was one of the people on the defense committee, a young movie actor named Lance Wilson, who suggested that a statement from Joanna Fraser might be useful. I wanted the case tried somewhere else. High Crest was what you might call a man’s town.”

  I’d heard that before from Sandy Potter.

  “I thought Sharon would have a better chance in some other climate,” Steiner said. “Wilson went to the Fraser woman’s secretary.”

  “Nora Coyle,” Chambrun said. He glanced at me. “She’s here in the hotel now, with bodyguards like you, Steiner.”

  “Mrs. Fraser had refused to talk to me or to Wilson, but Wilson managed to charm Miss Coyle into presenting our case. She came back with a not-too-unreasonable answer from Joanna Fraser. Fraser thought her getting into the act might do Sharon Dain more harm than good. The prejudice out there in the Colorado mountains against the ‘liberated female’ as a political entity was high. If she took some kind of public stand in support of Sharon, it could very well hurt instead of help. To show that she wasn’t just brushing us off she contributed five hundred dollars to the defense fund.”

  “Nora never mentioned that,” I said, “or Colin Dobler either, so far as I know.”

  Steiner chuckled. “Joanna Fraser was really liberated,” he said. “I think she didn’t want to show support for Sharon for the reason she gave. So she didn’t tell anyone, not even her secretary or her ex-husband, that she’d sent me a cash contribution with the request that it not be made public. That lady lived her own life in her own way, I dare say no one close to her knew all there was to know about her.” The little grey lawyer made an impatient gesture. “There’s a question I keep asking myself.”

  “So ask us,” Chambrun said.

  “I’m not a psychiatrist,” Steiner said, “but in my time I’ve had a lot to do with psychotic criminals. There often aren’t rational explanations for their behavior. You people have come up with an explanation for this killer’s irrational behavior. He killed Hammond and Joanna Fraser, you think, because they refused to help Sharon Dain. Now you come up with something a lot solider to explain why he killed ‘Charles Davis.’ Fear of exposure. But tell me this, gentlemen, if he wanted to punish the people responsible for Sharon Dain’s conviction, why pick on a man who couldn’t schedule a public interview in time to be useful, and why pick on a woman who sympathized with Sharon, contributed to her defense fund, and refused public support only because she felt it might damage Sharon’s chances? So help me, that’s reaching, even for a disturbed mind. Why not go after the judge who presided at the trial and whose rulings and eventual summing up to the jury were incredibly prejudiced? Why not go after the prosecutor who smeared Sharon from one end of the country to the other, damned her for her life-style, nailed her on purely circumstantial evidence? Why not go after the investigators for the state police, who built up that circumstantial case and refused to look anywhere else for any other possible killer? Why not the jury? Why not the local press who tried and convicted Sharon Dain before she ever went to court? Aren’t those the logical targets for some kind of a nut out to get revenge for Sharon?”

  “Logical for a logical mind,” Chambrun said. “We’re not dealing with a logical mind.”

  “Who says?” Steiner asked. “If you’re right, he had a logical reason for silencing Ziegler-Davis. Has anyone thought of looking for more logical reasons for eliminating Hammond and Joanna Fraser than some vague, two-year’s delayed reprisal because they didn’t help? Haven’t you and the cops just grabbed at an easy explanation, Mr. Chambrun?”

  Chambrun sat very still, his eyes narrowed against the smoke from his cigarette.

  “I think you’ve let yourselves be mesmerized by the first concept you came up with on the workings of a deranged mind,” Steiner said. “The motive for the murders of Hammond and Joanna Fraser may be a lot more rational than you’ve let yourselves believe. You had to come up with something realistic in the Ziegler-Davis case because that didn’t fit your starting theory about the others. Wouldn’t it be worthwhile to look for something more realistic to explain the first two cases? I say you’ve let yourselves be handcuffed by your first, entirely invented concept of the workings of a psychotic mind. I suggest you get off your butts and look for real motives.”

  Chambrun reached for the ashtray beside his place and snubbed out his cigarette. I knew him well enough to recognize that Steiner had rung a bell with him.

  “If I ever get into trouble with the law, Mr. Steiner,” Chambrun said, “I’d like to put in a bid, now, for your services.”

  Steiner laughed. “Flattery will get you everything,” he said.

  “It’s not flattery, because of course you’re right,” Chambrun said.

  There was a council of war later that morning, with Lieutenant Hardy representing the police, Nora Coyle and Colin Dobler from the Fraser camp, and Bobby Bryan and Roy Conklin, the people closest to Geoffrey Hammond. Alvin Parker was there, neat as always. I suppose you could sa
y that Betsy Ruysdale, Jerry Dodd, and I represented Chambrun and the hotel.

  Chambrun laid Steiner’s case on the line to them.

  “It can be that we’ve been accepting an easy explanation,” he said at the end. “Someone—perhaps I—suggested it and we haven’t bothered to look for anything else, just as the police in High Crest refused to look for another suspect in the Carpenter murder. Max Steiner made his point to me. I want to make it to you. Somewhere, unconsciously buried in your minds for the last two years, may be the real motives that will lead us to the killer.”

  Roy Conklin lurched up out of his chair and limped over toward the windows on his aluminum leg. “Damned meddling amateur,” he said under his breath.

  Chambrun looked as though he hadn’t heard.

  Colin Dobler, Joanna Fraser’s ex-husband, spoke in his low, quiet voice. “You have to rub two sticks together to strike a spark,” he said. “Or a match and a striking surface. Our problem is that we have nothing to relate to, no striking surface. Tell us whom you suspect, Mr. Chambrun, and that might kindle some helpful memory.”

  “We don’t have any genuine suspect, Mr. Dobler,” Hardy said.

  “So you’re protecting us from a phantom!” Conklin said from the window in his harsh, angry voice.

  “You want protection, don’t you, Mr. Conklin?” Hardy asked.

  “What the hell good is it if you don’t know from whom or what you’re protecting us?”

  “Oh, we know what, Mr. Conklin. We’re protecting you from a man with a coil of picture wire in his pocket,” Hardy said.

  I could almost sense a kind of controlled panic in the room. Somewhere—around the next corner—a killer could be waiting for one of them. I remembered Nora’s enormous relief, earlier on, when she saw that it was me and not the killer that cop had cornered in my apartment. They were all living with it every second, no matter how cool they appeared on the surface.