Random Killer

by Hugh Pentecost

  Lieutenant Hardy had taken over what we call the executive room on the lobby level. You can bring your board of directors there and seat them around a long, narrow table. I found Hardy talking with one of the maids from the thirty-fourth floor, along with Mrs. Kniffin, the head housekeeper. I guessed Mrs. Kniffin wasn’t going to have the police questioning “my girls” unless she was there to protect them. Maybe I was pooping out, because the three of them looked a long way off at the far end of the table, almost like a distorted camera angle. I signaled to Hardy and he came down the room, rather reluctantly I thought, to join me. I assumed Jerry Dodd was rounding up other personnel for questioning.

  “Dick Barrows of the Times is looking for Guido Maroni,” I said.

  “Damn!” Hardy said.

  “If we don’t tell him something, he’ll have the thundering herd down on us, Lieutenant. What is there we can tell him? He knows Guido hasn’t turned up for work for two days.”

  “I didn’t know that myself till half an hour ago,” Hardy said. “I’ve sent Sergeant Baxter uptown to talk to Mrs. Maroni.”

  “What do you think can have happened to him?”

  “Probably the center of attention in his neighborhood. He found a murdered man. His friends spotted him when he went out to buy a paper, persuaded him to tell them his story, plied him with some good red wine. He’s probably sleeping it off somewhere. Baxter will find him when Mrs. Maroni tells him who Guido’s friends are.”

  I didn’t think Hardy spoke with any real conviction.

  “You believe that?” I asked.

  “I hope,” he said, frowning.

  “You think—?”

  “The man we’re looking for could have found him,” Hardy said. “If Guido could recognize him, saw him on Hammond’s floor that morning, he might have to be silenced.”

  “God!” I said.

  “We have a way of thinking melodramatic thoughts just about now,” Hardy said. “I hope the first explanation is nearer the truth.”

  “What do I do with Dick Barrows?”

  “Shove him down the nearest laundry chute,” Hardy said.

  “Seriously, pal,” I said. “If you let him in on this, he may be willing to hold his fire until you say the word.”

  Hardy nodded. “I’ll talk to him,” he said.

  I found Dick Barrows in the lobby where I’d left him.

  “I was beginning to think you’d hung me out to dry,” he said.

  “Talk to Hardy. Play it his way,” I said. “Don’t try to put the heat on him. He doesn’t like heat.”

  “Does he know where Guido Maroni is?”

  “He’ll tell you,” I said.

  So much for the problem of Dick Barrows. What to tell him would be Hardy’s decision.

  I decided to take a swing up to the Trapeze Bar. There would probably be more regulars up there than down on the lobby floor. Almost the first people I saw as I walked into the Trapeze were Bobby Bryan and Roy Conklin, Hammond’s secretary and his business manager, sitting at a corner table. A waiter was just delivering what appeared to be at least their second drinks. He was removing empty glasses before he put down the current order. Bobby spotted me and waved to me to join them. Two men sitting at the bar watched me closely as I crossed the room. Police bodyguards I guessed.

  “Martinis help stimulate your memories?” I asked, as I sat down in a chair the waiter pulled up for me.

  “Goddamn it, there is nothing to remember!” Conklin said. He was still enjoying his angry mood. “That Chambrun clown seems to expect us to come up with magic tricks for him.”

  “He’s not a stupid man,” I said.

  “What could we possibly have forgotten that would help him?” Conklin asked. “I don’t know who Geoff Hammond invited for breakfast. He didn’t tell me. He didn’t tell Bobby. No reason why he should have. We each had our jobs to do, which didn’t involve his breakfast. If he wanted to invite a friend, he didn’t have to ask our permission, for God sake, or tell us about it.”

  “So who were his friends?” I asked. “Particularly one who was friendly enough to strangle him to death?”

  Bobby Bryan gave me a wry little smile. “A question Roy and I have just been asking ourselves,” he said. “I told you a little about Geoff the other day, Mark. Wheeling and dealing with people who wheel and deal for money and power. It doesn’t have to have been a friend in the true sense of that word. Geoff didn’t have close friends who he’d just invite in casually for an early morning breakfast. It wasn’t a social time of day for him. You can depend on it’s being business, and I don’t mean the kind of business Roy handled for him. Nothing to do with television or lecture dates. Some kind of secret shenanigans that Roy and I were never in on. He was putting the screws on someone, and that someone fought back. That’s my theory, and I think Roy buys it, too.”

  “It could have been anyone, from anyplace in the world,” Conklin said. He gave me a nasty look. “I hardly dare suggest to a friend of Chambrun’s that it could have been some kind of Zionist terror boy.”

  “Or Arab terror boy, or South African terror boy,” Bobby said. “Brown, or black, or—green. The color of money.” He shook his head. “Where we draw a complete blank, Mark, is any possible connection with Joanna Fraser.”

  “Which is what takes Chambrun back to High Crest two years ago,” I said. “Joanna Fraser was there. Ziegler, the dead private eye, was there.”

  “But we weren’t!” Conklin said. “Not me, not Bobby, not Hammond. Weren’t there then, never have been there. None of us knew Joanna Fraser or had any contact with her. How the hell could we possibly guess who she was having a martini with? And I hope it was better than this one.” He emptied his glass and put it down, hard, on the table.

  I stood up. “Keep concentrating on your terror boy, whatever nationality or color,” I said. “Maybe we can make a connection between him and Joanna Fraser that you’d have no way of knowing about.” I turned to go. “One thing I think you ought to keep in mind, Conklin,” I said to the angry one. “Chambrun is far from being an amateur at dealing with violence. Try cooperating with him. It might just help to keep one of us from being the killer’s next target.”

  One of the things that tends to happen to you in the middle of a murder case like this is grabbing at straws that don’t have any real substance. I had come up with one. Bobby Bryan had made sense to me. Hammond could have breakfasted with someone involved in his secret power playing. Zionist, Arab, South African, Bobby had suggested. The Middle East had been Hammond’s playground. If that notion held together, then it would make sense to find out if Joanna Fraser had any dealings with that part of the world. Either Nora Coyle or Colin Dobler could have answers to that. Dobler had probably gone back to his own quarters or to Gramercy Park, but I thought I knew where to find Nora.

  She was in my apartment, having coffee with the young cop who was assigned to guard her.

  “It really isn’t fair for me to camp out here,” she said.

  “It’s fine with me,” I said. I thought there was a faint heightening of color in her cheeks. She was undoubtedly remembering that we had shared my bed last night. I wondered if she was thinking I’d been a nice guy for not taking advantage of her—or some kind of village idiot for missing my chance.

  I didn’t want to talk to her about my idea in the presence of the cop. He wasn’t a detective on the case, just someone assigned to keep anyone from coming up behind Nora unexpectedly.

  “Time for a drink,” I said, and guided Nora out into the kitchenette. While I broke out ice, I told her I had some questions for her.

  “I’ve been racking my brains, Mark,” she said. “I can think of a hundred women who might have dropped in for a drink with Joanna that day. But men?”

  “I had a feeling you might be protecting Dobler when you couldn’t remember any men,” I said.

  “I like Colin,” she said. “I think he was rather badly treated by Joanna. He loved her, so he took what she dished out
without ever complaining—that I heard. But if I knew of any man I’d have told Mr. Chambrun.”

  “But there must have been men, not necessarily lovers,” I said. I asked her what she’d like to drink. She didn’t want anything and, as a matter of fact, neither did I. I poured some soda into two glasses, added a twist of lemon, and we sat at the kitchenette table, staring at each other. It was as if we were trying to force something sensible to emerge from one of us.

  “Joanna was a very gregarious person,” Nora said, groping for that sensible something. “She liked people, all kinds of people. She enjoyed being with them, talking to them about anything that interested them. Men as well as women.”

  “You mean,” I said, grinning at her, “that she was willing to admit that men are people?”

  “She wasn’t a nut, Mark,” Nora said. “She went along, in public, with a lot of clichés that the ‘new woman’ makes about men, and the discrimination against women in modern society. But in private she laughed at a lot of it and at a lot of the women who’ve pushed themselves forward as spokesmen—spokeswomen—for women’s causes.”

  “Think about men, luv,” I said. “We’re concerned about men. It wasn’t a woman who sneaked up behind Mrs. Fraser with a roll of picture wire.”

  A little shudder ran over her slim body. Joanna had not only been her employer but her friend.

  “There are three or four men who work on her magazine Liberation in the business, circulation, and advertising end,” she said.

  “Isn’t that a contradiction?”

  “She was a very sound business woman,” Nora said. “She’d been asked that question. She always said those men would be replaced by women when women learned the jobs. But she wouldn’t allow crucial positions to be held except by the most competent people she could find. The ‘cause’ wasn’t enough to justify anything but the best.”

  “Any of those men could have dropped by and she’d have invited them up for a drink?”

  “Of course. They were close working associates.”

  “Hardy should be given a list of them,” I said. “It should be part of his methodical checkout.”

  “No problem,” Nora said. “They were all in touch that first day, shocked and concerned.”

  I fiddled with my glass of soda, not really wanting it. “You and Joanna traveled a lot?” I asked.

  “All over Europe. Joanna lectured in most of the big cities where there are women’s movements. London, Paris, Brussels, West Berlin, a women’s congress in Geneva, Switzerland, Rome. So many places.”

  “The Middle East?”

  She gave me a nostalgic little laugh. “The Middle East was a project for the next decade,” she said. “Women there are really kept under wraps by their men. The men, Joanna used to say, are almost paranoid about keeping their women as sex objects. How could we persuade them to set their women free when we haven’t managed the simplest kind of equal rights for our own women, in a free world?”

  “She have contacts with people there?” I asked.

  “Not that I know of. She tried to arrange a meeting with President Sadat of Egypt on one of his visits here, but he smelled it out as a publicity gimmick—which it was—and regretted that he couldn’t fit a meeting into his busy schedule.”

  Then I explained to her why I was asking about the Middle East. It was Hammond’s special interest. He undoubtedly had enemies there. His breakfast guest could have been someone from there. I was looking for some connection between that possible breakfast guest and Joanna.

  Nora shook her head. “It just doesn’t fit in with anything I know about her, Mark.”

  So much for that particular straw.

  My telephone began to ring and I picked up the extension, which was a wall-set in the kitchenette. It was Betsy Ruysdale.

  “Alvin Parker has come up with something he thinks Chambrun or Hardy ought to know, but I can’t locate either of them.”

  I told her where Hardy was.

  “Not now he isn’t,” Ruysdale said. “Both he and Chambrun have left the hotel.”

  “Left?” For Chambrun to leave the Beaumont was an event.

  “They’ve gone to talk to Guido Maroni’s wife,” she said. “The missing waiter. I suggested to Parker that he talk to you.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In his suite on the twelfth floor. Twelve nineteen. Shall I call him and tell him you’re on your way? After all, you’re our expert listener.”

  “Hear everything, understand nothing,” I said. “Sure, call him.”

  I went along the corridor to the elevators. I suddenly had the uncomfortable feeling that someone might be watching me. My own private paranoia, I thought.

  The neat little executive director of the Parker Foundation was waiting for me in 1219. He was dressed as if he was going to a formal luncheon. I guessed he was never caught with his image down.

  “It’s hard to believe,” he said, “but I’ve remembered something about two years ago that nobody else seems to have mentioned.

  “At High Crest?”

  “Of course—yes. I had forgotten it in all of the—the horror here. But it seems strange to me that Miss Coyle, or Mr. Dobler, or some of the people at High Crest haven’t mentioned it. Of course, maybe they have and nobody has bothered to mention it to me.”

  “I can’t answer that unless you tell me what it is,” I said.

  He took a neatly folded handkerchief out of his pocket and blotted at the little beads of sweat on his upper lip and his forehead. He seemed to have trouble breathing.

  “Has nobody mentioned that the night Hal Carpenter was murdered Joanna Fraser saw someone outside his cabin?” he asked.

  I just stared at him. Surer than hell nobody had mentioned such a thing in my hearing. I could feel the hackles rising on the back of my neck.

  “It wasn’t a secret at the time,” Parker said. “She went to the police with it. Why it hasn’t been brought up I can’t imagine.”

  “Why you’ve only just remembered it is on the odd side,” I said.

  He shook his head from side to side like a man suffering from guilt. “There was so much else—one thing after another. I had the Foundation ball on my mind, everyone frightened, almost hysterical. But after I left Mr. Chambrun’s office this morning I suddenly realized that nobody had mentioned what seemed to me to be an important fact.”

  “So two years later this person she saw kills her and two other people?”

  “I don’t know. But doesn’t it seem to you—?”

  “Yes, it does,” I said. “You say she went to the police?”

  “Yes. She couldn’t describe the person she saw, except that it was a man. The police weren’t, I think, particularly interested. They were already convinced about Sharon Dain. There were over three hundred guests at High Crest. There wasn’t anything unusual about someone wandering around the cabin area, even late at night. Ms. Fraser was asked to keep an eye open—a hundred and fifty male guests at least—for someone she might recognize. She said, from the beginning, that she wouldn’t know him if she came face to face with him. She was trying to make the point—she told me—that there was someone else hanging around Carpenter’s cabin the night of the murder. The police should know that, should look for someone else besides Sharon Dain.”

  “She told you?”

  “I—I was heading up the defense committee for Sharon Dain,” Parker said. “She came to me with five hundred dollars. She was angry because the police had brushed what she had to tell them under the rug. I think that’s why she contributed. It never came up again, you know—all through the trial. Max Steiner must have felt it wasn’t worth using.”

  The thought I had was too farfetched to make sense. Two years ago Joanna Fraser sees someone hanging around Carpenter’s cabin the night of his murder. It’s night. She can’t identify him. Just someone. Then, two years later, in the Beaumont, she suddenly can identify him, lets him know that, and he wraps a strand of wire around her neck. Far out, and y
et I couldn’t shake it.

  I used Parker’s phone to call Max Steiner. He was in court, or out to lunch, or something. His office simply said he was not there and they couldn’t say when he was expected. I left a message for him to call me back, and then I got the switchboard to put through a person-to-person call to Jack Galt at High Crest. It would be about eleven o’clock in the morning out there. I got lucky.

  “What’s new?” Galt asked me.

  I told him we were still floundering, but why hadn’t he told me that Joanna Fraser had seen someone the night of Carpenter’s murder?

  “It was a nothing,” he said.

  “Some nothing! She’s dead and it just might tie in.”

  “Look, Mark, I chased that down from top to bottom at the time,” the detective said. “Along with other similar leads. A dozen people thought they saw someone wandering around that night. And there were people, going from one cabin to another. Some of them were identified, came forward, told us what they were doing. It checked out. Whoever it was Joanna Fraser saw, it could have been one of those. I got a police artist to try to draw a picture of the man she said she saw. She didn’t have anything to offer; no face, nothing outstanding like very tall, or very short. Nothing for the artist to even start a mock-up. The police wrote it off. I wrote it off. She saw someone, and there were people around, but what she had was valueless.”

  “Max Steiner didn’t buy it either?”

  “There wasn’t anything to use,” Galt said. “He knew that people had been wandering around in the cabin area, but someone who couldn’t be identified, couldn’t be described, wasn’t of any value, even if he was seen by an important lady.”

  “If she couldn’t describe him then, it doesn’t seem likely she would suddenly recognize him two years later,” I said.

  “I’d say no way,” Galt said. “Steiner did use the fact that other people had been seen in the cabin area, but he didn’t mention that Joanna Fraser had seen someone because it was just an echo of what other people—with more details—had seen. I didn’t mention it to you because I’d long ago erased it from my mind as having any bearing on the case.”