Better Dead

by Max Allan Collins

  Behind the check-in counter, a nice-looking brunette in the standard blue blazer spoke up: “Sir, here it is! The registration card for Room 1018a.”

  Pastore went over and she passed it across to him. “Thank you, Miss Stevens.”

  She wasn’t through: “And as you asked, I checked with the switchboard girl—no one has called down to us from that room.”

  He said, “I’d better talk to her myself,” and he disappeared behind the counter.

  Maybe a minute and a half later, Pastore came back, reading aloud to us from the registration card: “Two names—Robert Lashbrook and Frank R. Olson. Lashbrook from Washington, D.C., Olson from Frederick, Maryland. No home telephone numbers listed. Registered about ten hours ago.”

  The security man said, “Let’s check it out—I have my passkey.”

  “Good.”

  I brought up the rear as Pastore led the slender security man to the bank of elevators.

  We got on and as we went up, the young man said to Pastore, “You don’t really think the other guy’s still in there, do you? I mean, if you were in a room and the person you were staying with went out the window … wouldn’t you get out?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” Pastore said, shaking his head.

  “No one called down from that room,” I reminded them.

  At the tenth floor—or was it the thirteenth?—the night manager led the way, the security guy behind him with me once again trailing. At this time of night, actually morning, the floor was dead quiet. The carpeting was thick, the hallway wallpaper a bit dingy—the Statler, formerly the Pennsylvania, was one of those grand old hotels that maintained a lovely lobby while the rest of the place turned slowly shabby.

  At 1018a, the stocky little night manager pressed an ear to the door and listened.

  He drew back. “Nothing,” he said softly.

  He gave the door two rather soft knocks.

  Nothing.

  Two slightly louder ones, and still nothing.

  Then he tried the door—locked.

  Handing his boss the passkey, the security man whispered, “Sir, there won’t be anybody in there.”

  Pastore stood poised to work the key in the lock, then his face seized up with thought and he backed away. He motioned and gathered us in a small group down the hall.

  Quietly, he said, “If some son of a bitch went off his head and tossed his friend out the window, he could still be in there. Who knows what we’re walking into? Let’s wait for the police to come.”

  The security man said, “Good idea.”

  I stepped forward, drawing the nine-millimeter from under my suit coat. “Gentlemen, I am the police. Mr. Martin, take that key from Mr. Pastore and open that door for me.”

  The young man looked at his boss, who said, “No, I’ll open it. You can go in first, Mr. Heller.”

  I shook my head. “You’re right about the danger. I’m going in alone. Stay out here till I say otherwise.”

  The night manager accepted that, then unlocked the door and hopped quickly aside, and I pushed in.

  But for spill-in light from the hall behind me, the room was dark, and chilly with outside air, the flapping of the window shade like lazy applause. In a few steps, to my right, light edged the nearly closed bathroom door.

  Nine-millimeter ready, I nudged the door open with my foot.

  Seated on the toilet, lid down, was a man wearing—like Frank Olson—a white T-shirt and white boxers. Lanky, mid-thirties, sandy-haired with a big cranium, straight nose, and bulb chin, the man sat slouched, head in his hands, as if lost in thought or maybe weeping. But when he looked up at me his eyes were not moist, not even red.

  I said, “Robert Lashbrook?”

  He reached for his glasses by the sink and put them on, but remained seated on the toilet. The small white bathroom had a jaundiced, unremodeled look; hanging over the shower rod were a pair of socks and an undershirt.

  “Yes,” he said in a controlled baritone. “You’re with the police?”

  If he recognized me from a photo any of his colleagues might have shared, it didn’t show. I saw no reason to help him.

  Still in the bathroom doorway, I nodded. “Didn’t you hear us knocking out there?”

  “No.”

  I put the nine-millimeter away, but left both the trench coat and suit coat unbuttoned.

  I asked, “What happened here?”

  “I heard a sound,” he said. “I woke up and saw my friend, Frank Olson, standing in the middle of the room. Then, at a dead run, he plunged through the window. Glass and all.”

  That had a hell of a rehearsed sound to me—maybe he’d been sitting in here cooking that up.

  “You didn’t call down to the desk,” I said.

  “No.”

  “You didn’t go down to check on your friend?”

  “I went over to the window. I leaned out and saw Frank lying there down on the sidewalk. What could I do? People were rushing toward him, from the train station and around. I could see he had help. So I waited for … for you people … and just stayed put.”

  “Well, keep doing that,” I said.

  I left him there and went to the light switch just inside the door, gesturing to Pastore to remain where he was. The security man was no longer around.

  The switch triggered a nightstand lamp between two twin beds. Cold air continued to rush in. Against the right-side wall were a small portable television on a stand, a dresser with a mirror, and an armchair in the corner with a small reading table. The bed closer to the window had its covers on the floor, in a pile, as if a sleeper had woken and thrown them off.

  Or had they been yanked off the sleeper and dumped there?

  I returned to the john, where Lashbrook sat with his hands clasped between open legs. “Which bed is Olson’s?”

  “Nearest the window,” he said, not looking at me.

  I checked around and under and in the bed and found nothing that seemed of import. The nearby single window was gone but for a few random teeth of glass sticking from the frame. A radiator in front of the window showed no shattered glass on or behind it; no shards on the sill or carpet, either.

  Could Olson really have made a run for this window? If he was contemplating suicide, wouldn’t he open it first? The window had been closed, the shade down. And in this small room, how could he have gotten up enough speed to make the “dead run” Lashbrook claimed he’d witnessed? And what about that radiator in the way?

  I went to the nightstand. The wallet there proved to be Lashbrook’s, with various government IDs in it—Department of Defense, U.S. Army Chemical Center, and Central Intelligence Agency. Also in the wallet were individual slips with Abramson’s office and home numbers and addresses; the same for magician John Mulholland; and another with no name but a phone number (Oregon 5-0257) and an address (81 Bedford Street, in Greenwich Village) but no name. There was also a key to a Yale lock with a “2B” etched on it. I slipped that in my pocket.

  In the hall, I asked Pastore if he had a handkerchief. He gave me one. Mine had gotten bloody down on the sidewalk, dabbing Olson’s mouth. Using the hanky, I did my best not to leave any of my prints or to smudge anyone else’s as I gave the room a quick thorough search, primarily checking dresser and nightstand drawers, and also going through each man’s lightly packed suitcase. Nothing meaningful turned up—to me, anyway.

  Finally I checked the closet and found a hanger with a pair of dark dress slacks. I took them to Lashbrook, who was still sitting in the bathroom, and dangled them in front of him. “Are these yours?”

  He shook his head. “Frank’s.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know where your friend’s wallet is? It’s not in his pants or on the nightstand.”

  “I think he might have lost it a couple of nights ago.”

  “Why don’t you elaborate.”

  He thought for a moment. “My friend was suffering from ulcers.”

  “Well, that explains it.”

&n
bsp; He tried again. “Frank’s been having some mental problems. Wednesday night we went to a play—Me and Juliet, Rodgers and Hammerstein. It had some lighting effects that upset him. He rushed out at intermission, but I settled him down and we had something to eat and he seemed all right. But then he slipped out of our room during the night and threw his wallet with all his identification and money in it down a sewer grating. Or so he said.”

  A man who wanted to disappear might well throw his identification away. A man who had visited a magician in the CIA’s employ might have tossed his wallet, too, if he thought it or the money in it had gotten coated with something toxic.

  Lashbrook was saying, quite calmly, “In the morning, Frank wasn’t in his bed. Thanksgiving morning. I found him sitting in the lobby with his hat and coat on. He had kind of a rough day after that.”

  “Mental problems, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you thought checking him into the tenth floor of a hotel was a good idea?”

  He looked at me, harder. “… Who are you? What’s your name?”

  “I’ll check my wallet and let you know. Just sit there.”

  With the door onto the hall standing open, I was able to hear the faint ding of the elevator, which probably meant the real cops had arrived.

  As two seasoned-looking detectives came down the long dreary hall toward us, I asked Pastore, “You been a hotel man long?”

  “All my working life.”

  “Ever hear of somebody getting up in the middle of the night, running across a room in his underwear, and diving into a closed window with the shade down?”

  “Nothing like it,” he said. He shivered. “Christ, at least when Murder Incorporated threw Kid Twist out that Coney Island hotel window, they opened the damn thing first.”

  I grinned at him. I liked him, and patted him on the shoulder.

  “What kind of monster is this ‘friend’?” he asked bitterly. “His buddy down there bleeding on the pavement. You know, he made a phone call, this Lashbrook. Or did I mention that already?”

  “No. You didn’t.”

  “I checked with the switchboard girl, to see if he called down.”

  “And he didn’t. Yeah, you told us that.”

  “No, but he did make a call—out to Long Island.”

  Dr. Abramson.

  I asked, “Your girl didn’t happen to listen in?”

  “Well, actually she did. Sometimes, when it’s slow, they do that, these girls. Wasn’t much of a conversation—just, ‘He’s gone,’ this Lashbrook says. And the guy on the other end says, ‘That’s too bad.’ And they both hung up.”

  I spent fifteen minutes with the dicks, left them my card, and got the hell out of there. I doubted they’d get any further with Lashbrook than I had. Out front, nobody was around and the doorman was glumly mopping up the blood. I caught a cab and when I got to Bettie’s apartment, I hadn’t even been gone an hour.

  I knocked at her door but she didn’t answer—it was ajar and my knocking swung the door open onto an empty apartment. That gave me a bad feeling, though there was no sign of any problem, much less a struggle—everything was pink and lilac and as pretty as the woman who lived here.

  But who wasn’t here.

  I’d been looking around the place for any indication of a problem for maybe three minutes when the phone rang.

  Smiling, thinking it was Bettie, I answered and quickly the smile went away.

  “We’ve got your girl,” a male voice said. “Don’t do anything. Don’t say anything to anybody. Stay right where you are. And maybe you’ll get her back.”

  The line went dead.

  As dead as Frank Olson.

  As dead as some other people were going to be.

  CHAPTER

  21

  Bedford Street in the Village was in a residential section where trees and narrow streets provided a contrast to the nightlife of nearby Sheridan Square. Structures told a scattered history of the city—here a remodeled farmhouse with twin gables, there an old three-story frame building, down the way a group of two-story-and-dormer houses from the nineteenth century. Number 81, on the corner of Bedford and Barrow, was a converted stable of ancient brick, now a small apartment house. The lower-floor windows were dark, but on the second floor, light smudged the glass like a threat of dawn.

  At just after 4 a.m., I was alone on the street. The door to number 81 was at the left of the narrow-fronted building, wide enough for two windows below and three above. Up five steps to the stoop, a dead-bolt lock awaited me, but the key I’d pocketed from Lashbrook’s wallet was a Yale. That was no great surprise—I’d figured that was an apartment key (2B)—so I got out my little sheath of lock picks from my wallet, selected the tension-wrench and short-hook picks, and started in.

  With my back to the street, I presented a picture of a well-dressed man in a Burberry trench coat and Dobbs hat, having a little trouble working the key in his door—tipsy maybe?—as long as no one noticed the scarlet-brown edging along the coat’s bottom, where Frank Olson’s blood had touched it. But with not a single pedestrian and only a couple of cars to roll past, the risk was slight. I was out of practice at picking a lock, so it took almost twenty seconds.

  Once inside, no vestibule awaited, only darkness. I got out the nine-millimeter. Minimal street light seeped in through a transom window and revealed, at right, a hallway that gave access to two side-by-side apartments in this boxcar of a building, while at left, a steep stairway yawned upward before me. This interior had been remodeled in recent years and had a bland newness at odds with the building’s history.

  The stairs were carpeted and I went up in silence, the automatic in my fist like a flashlight leading the way. The layout echoed the first floor, a hallway (hemmed by a railing that continued on from the banister) with two side-by-side apartments—2A, 2B. Light seeped under the door to 2A like spilt milk. I pressed my ear to the door and listened, the way Pastore had outside Olson’s hotel room.

  Conversation.

  I couldn’t discern any words—too muffled—but it was two men. They occasionally laughed. Some music was playing, a radio or a record player, instrumental, upbeat. Maybe Latin—“April in Portugal”? Somebody was having a good time tonight, even if it wasn’t me. But who knew? Maybe after while things would turn around.…

  My gun and I moved quietly down the hall. Had my key been to 2A, not 2B, life might have been simpler, although the click of the key opening the lock could signal my arrival and that might complicate things. Maybe I was better off this way.

  Anyway, I had a feeling these two apartments connected—I made this as a CIA safe house, a facility where out-of-town agents could meet and even bunk in, where witnesses could stay under protection, where suspected bad guys could be questioned unofficially and possibly brutally.

  No light escaped from under the door to 2B. Again, I leaned my ear to the wood, but heard nothing—not even a faint echo of the festivities in the apartment next door.

  Using my left hand, I inserted the Lashbrook key in the lock and turned it till it clicked open. I turned the knob slowly, pushed the door open the same way, then closed it quietly behind me. A floor lamp with a zebra shade was on in a large living room with modern furnishings, walls painted red with white trim, off-white shag carpet, and bizarre sexually charged touches, from pinup-bottomed ashtrays to heart-shaped throw pillows, from bisque nude figurines to lamps with nude-girl bases.

  Those red walls bore large elaborately gold-framed posters of racy French images—Toulouse-Lautrec can-can girls, a topless beaming wench opening a spurting bottle of Perrier champagne, a blonde leaning back with her graceful arms and hands above her, barely covered by a filmy black negligee (“Naughty Revue of 1952!”).

  Here and there, mounted on the wall, were exotic items that while not overtly sexual added to the general air of depravity—a Burmese spirit mask, a Tachi sword, a large hand-carved opium pipe. The right half of the wall on the street end was mirrored, wit
h glass shelving holding a virtual library of booze behind a glass-brick ebony-topped bar with a handful of stools—leopard-skin seats and chromium stems.

  What the fuck was this place?

  It screamed high-end brothel, but wasn’t set up to handle more than a john or two at most.

  A door led to a bedroom, which was all but filled by a double bed with black silk sheets and a contemporary bookcase—headboard filled not with volumes but small pornographic Indian and Oriental statuettes of women demonstrating their acrobatic abilities and their potential to add new pages to the Kama Sutra.

  Using Pastore’s handkerchief (which was apparently mine now), I checked the nightstand drawers: more Trojans than had fought over Helen. Also various lubricants and tissues. The drawer below that offered handcuffs, a black blindfold, a black whip, a leather collar, leather ankle restraints, and a red ball gag.

  On the wall facing the bed, over a low-slung dresser with a row of liquor bottles, was a big picture window of a mirror. Always a good whorehouse prop—many a man likes to see himself having his way with a beautiful naked woman.

  And I bet any men on the other side of that mirror also liked to watch.…

  A so-called two-way mirror is really just glass treated to be partly reflective and partly transparent—a brightly illuminated room on one side can be viewed on the other by watchers in the dark. That meant the johns lured here would be getting precious little mood lighting. Maybe their wives only liked it with the lights off and this made for a nice, bright change of pace.…

  In the bathroom off the bedroom, a closet’s fake rear wall was a door that easily nudged open onto a smallish room—with thick carpet on the floors, walls, and ceiling—that was set up to observe the bedroom I’d just examined and an identical one in the adjacent 2A. RCA reel-to-reel recorders were on the carpeted floor near each big window, by stacked tape boxes; and a pair of Kodak 16mm movie cameras were positioned facing in opposite directions to capture both rooms through their respective “mirrors.”

  Otherwise, this control booth was strictly Spartan—first Trojans, now Spartans—with decorations limited to thumbtacked black-and-white photographs on the carpeted walls of couples in those identical bedrooms doing what came naturally, and sometimes unnaturally. Four straight-backed wooden chairs were available for views on the proceedings. The only creature comfort was a small refrigerator stocked with bottles of beer. I wondered how often the DeMilles here had sneaked back into a bathroom to take a leak while a call girl and her john were covering the pissing sound with bed springs.