Murder in High Places Read online

  Part One

  There are certain things in our daily lives that we take for granted, like the rising of the sun. It is a miraculous event to which we pay almost no attention. It will happen and we have no anxiety that it will not happen. We don't believe that even God Himself will interfere with that certainty. But what if one day it did not rise, if there was no daylight?

  Something as unbelievable as that happened in my world, which is the Beaumont, New York City's top luxury hotel. I am Mark Haskell, the hotel's public relations man for the last eleven years. Every day as I move through various departments and areas of the hotel I see dozens of things going on that are so fa-mihar that I don't really notice th^i. They are supposed to happen and they do happen because of the Swiss-watch efficiency of the organization designed by the Man. *The Man" is Pierre Chambrun, the Beaumont's legendary manager. In the world of the Beaumont, Chambrun is king, the mayor of a city within a city. You might even say Chambrun is God in the world of the Beaumont.

  But even God has to have subordinates he can count on completely. I suppose the single most important person to Chambrun in the daily running of his hotel is his incomparable secretary, Betsy Ruysdale. Cham-brun neuters this handsome, copper-haired woman in her late thirties by calling her ''Ruysdale," never *'Betsy" or "Miss Ruysdale," but rumor persists that in secret times and secret places the lady is much more to her boss than simply an efficiency expert.

  Every day of my life begins the same way. I am up the night before till three or four in the morning, till all the bars, and the Blue Lagoon nightclub have closed and the customers have retired to their rooms or, if they are casuals, have gone home. I sleep for four and a half hours, am called by the operator on the hotel switchboard, shower, shave, and dress, and go down the hall to Chambrun's second-floor office.

  At precisely nine o'clock the special chef is removing Chambrun's gourmet breakfast from his office, which is more like a magnificent living room than a place of business—paintings, including a Picasso given to Chambrun by the painter himself, Oriental rugs, Florentine and French carved furniture. Betsy Ruysdale will be standing by his desk as I enter, a stack of registration cards brought for Chambrun's perusal. These cards will tell him who has checked in since yesterday morning. The reason for my presence each day for this view of the registration cards was that if we had a new guest of importance, a foreign diplomat, a Hollywood movie star, a famous figure in the arts, someone who wanted special attention—anonymity or a big press ballyhoo—it would be my job to handle the press.

  I suppose I could call it "the morning the sun didn't come up." It was a beautiful August day, not a cloud in the sky, a cool breeze drifting from the city's canyons from the northeast. I walked through Betsy Ruysdale's deserted office and into the inner sanctum at precisely nine o'clock. Things were not as they always were. Chambrun was standing behind his carved Florentine desk, drumming impatiently on its edge with his squarish fingers. He is a short, stocky, dark man with heavy pouches under dark eyes that twinkle with humor or, if he's displeased, turn cold as a hanging judge's. I have written many accounts of adventures at the Beaumont, and a movie company, considering film possibilities, had asked me to suggest an actor who could play the role of Pierre Chambrun. Unfortunately, the actor who would have been perfect is no longer with us, the late Claude Rains, jaunty, elegant, witty, but with an interior of cold, hard steel. Chambrun was the hanging judge at this moment and I knew why. I knew the reason at once. Betsy Ruysdale wasn't there, nor were the registration cards.

  Chambrun glanced at his wristwatch. ''Ruysdale must have overslept," he said. *'Would you be good enough to call her apartment, Mark? Her number's on my emergency phone list."

  Betsy Ruysdale never overslept. She was never not exactly where Chambrun needed her to be, morning, noon, or night. I dialed her apartment, which is less than a block from the hotel. No answer. I called the front desk and talked to Paul Atterbury, the head clerk. I asked him if Miss Ruysdale had picked up the reservation cards.

  "Not yet," Atterbury told me. *'I was beginning to wonder.''

  "Have someone else bring them up," I said, and turned back to Chambrun. "You're sure she didn't tell you she was going to be late this morning?"

  He didn't answer. It was obvious he wouldn't be fretting if he'd known in advance that she wouldn't be here on time. The little red light was blinking on the phone on his desk. Betsy should have been there to answer it.

  "Tell the switchboard to hold all calls until we can get a girl up here from the stenographic pool to screen calls for us," Chambrun said.

  I gave his message to Ora Veach, the chief telephone operator, asked her to get us a girl from the steno pool, and also asked her if she'd heard anything from Betsy Ruysdale. She hadn't.

  ''Call the local police precinct," Chambrun said. ''There may have been an accident."

  "Hadn't I better get Jerry Dodd to go over to her apartment?" I asked. Jerry is the hotel's security chief.

  "'She may be sick, or fainted, or had a fall or something.''

  "'Thanks for thinking, Mark," Chambrun said. **And then call the police."

  I could take a lot more space than it merits to go into all of the moves that were made to locate the missing Betsy Ruysdale. Jerry Dodd, a wiry little man, tough as nails, a former FBI agent, had gone to Betsy's apartment. It was an old brownstone, with no doorman, night or day. Jerry located the janitor, who let him into Betsy's apartment. She wasn't there.

  "'No doorman," Jerry told Chambrun, "so there's no one who saw her arrive home last night or leave this morning. Place is neat as a pin, bed made up. No way to tell whether she slept in it last night, made it up this morning, or whether she never got home at all last night."

  The police reported no accident in the neighborhood during the night or this morning. No employee on the night shift at the hotel or this morning's shift had seen Betsy.

  The impossible had happened. Betsy Ruysdale, as reliable and dependable as the rising sun, had disappeared into thin air.

  I REMEMBER talking to a psychiatrist friend of mine one time—not professionally. I was telling him about my feelings at being kept waiting for an hour by a chick who'd agreed to let me buy her dinner.

  "I found myself afraid that she'd been in some kind of accident, hit by a taxi or a truck, instead of guessing at the much more likely thing—that h&r hairdresser had made her late."

  My shrink friend gave me a cynical smile. *'You don't read yourself correctly, Mark," he told me. **You weren't afraid she'd been hit by a truck, you hoped she'd been hit by a truck. Anything less would be a threat to your image of yourself as an irresistible male!"

  I wondered about Chambrun that morning—"the morning the sun didn't rise" at the Beaumont. Was he calling the cops, the hospitals, sounding alarms and excursions, because he felt that anything less than a disaster would reduce his image of himself as a boss whose trusted employee would never let him down? There would be, I told myself, a simple and probably comic explanation for Betsy Ruysdale's tardiness on that August morning.

  But things didn't run with their usual smoothness that first hour of no Ruysdale. Chambrun didn't sccti able to concentrate on the registration cards. Each time the little red light winked on the phone I could see him grow tense, waiting for Dolly Malone, the girl from the steno pool who was now installed at Ruysdale's desk, to put the call through to him. Chambrun had instructed Dolly not to put through any casual calls, and in that first hour none came through. Chambrun was chain-smoking his flat Egyptian cigarettes. I think it came to him as a shock when he went over to the Tbrkish coffee maker on the sideboard and found there was no coffee. Ruysdale had been preparing that hair-raising brew for him every morning for years. Not today.
r />   At precisely ten o'clock Dolly Malone put through a call. Chambrun had the intercom system turned on, so I could hear the conversation.

  "Mr. Welch is here, Mr. Chambrun,'' Dolly said.

  "'Who the hell is Mr. Welch?" Chambrun asked.

  "I don't know, sir, but Miss Ruysdale has him down on your appointment pad for ten o'clock."

  "I don't know a Mr. Welch!"

  "'Under his name on the appointment pad is another name," Dolly told the Man. "Claude Per-rault."

  "Danm!" Chambrun said. I'd never seen him as scattered as he seraied to be that morning. "Hold Mr. Welch for five minutes and then send him in," he told Dolly. He hung up the phone and looked at me. "You ever hear of someone named Lawrence Welch?" he asked me.

  It didn't ring a bell with me.

  He shuffled papers on his desk, almost aimlessly. "Ruysdale would have had a file on him for me," he said. "Lawrence Welch—Larry Welch."

  "Larry Welch is something else again," I said, my personal computer starting to work. "He's a political journalist and writer, half a dozen books. Rates up along with people like Teddy White—Afa/cmg of the President stuff. Claude Perrault doesn't mean anything to me."

  'Friend of mine from the old days," Chambrun said/'the Black Days."

  Way back around 1940 a French boy in his late teens named Pierre Chambrun had come to America to study hotel management at Cornell. A year and a half later he was on his way back to join the French army, which was in total rout at the hands of the Nazis by the time he got there. Chambrun joined the French Resistance, fighting the brutal occupation of Paris by the Germans. He rarely talked about that time in his life, but when he did he referred to it as "the Black Days."

  Chambrun picked up his phone. "I'm ready for Mr. Welch," he told Dolly.

  The man who came into the inner sanctum was almost a startling double for Burt Reynolds, the movie actor, dark hair, a dark mustache, a bright, white-toothed smile, laughing blue eyes. He crossed straight to the Man, holding out his hand—ignoring me, by the way.

  "This is a long-looked-forward-to pleasure, Mr. Chambrun," he said. "Once he gets started, Claude can never stop talking about you."

  "That was another time, another world," Chambrun said. He wasn't clicking on all cylinders. He should know why Welch was here, and he clearly didn't. The facts he should have were somewhere with Betsy Ruysdale.

  "I haven't registered," Welch said, **because I thought I should check in with you first. I mean, if the penthouse isn't ready for me?..."

  That seemed to make sense to Chambrun. "Ah, yes, the guest penthouse," he said. He introduced me to Welch and asked me to call the front desk and check with Atterbury. *Tind out if Penthouse Three is ready for Mr. Smith."

  "Who is Mr. Smith?" I asked.

  Welch grinned at me. "I guess I am," he said.

  Atterbury told me all was in order for "Mr. Smith," and I nodded to Chambrun.

  "Tell Atterbury I'll arrange to register him later," Chambrun said. He turned to Welch. "Your luggage?"

  "A suitcase in your outer office and this," Welch said, patting a bulky briefcase he had tucked under his left arm. "I hope Haskell won't mind if we have a short talk alone, Mr. Chambrun."

  "Mark is one of my closest people," Chambrun said. I felt myself grow a couple of inches. "If you need help, or assistance of any kind, he'll be your man. I'd like him to stay."

  That didn't seem to please Welch. His bright smile had faded.

  "I'd trust Mark with my life," Chambrun said. "I trust him with yours."

  Welch decided, with some reluctance, I thought, to go along. "Claude assured me the security in the penthouse was rather special," he said.

  "It is rather special as far as privacy is concerned," Chambrun said. "It's not a fortress, Mr. Welch. I'm not sure I'd want it used as a fortress."

  "Will you tell me what the setup is there?" Welch asked.

  "There are forty-four floors to the hotel," Chambrun said. "The roof is the forty-fifth. There are three penthouses."

  "Three?" Welch sounded surprised.

  "I live in one," Chambrun said. "A very elegant octogenarian lady hves in the second one. The third is reserved for special guests like yourself—usually foreign diplomats here for United Nations business."

  "If there are three separate living apartments up on the roof, that means there must be considerable traffic up there—back and forth." Welch was frowning. "Claude Perrault gave me to understand that—"

  "I don't know what Claude gave you to understand, Mr. Welch. And so far I don't quite understand your concern. You want privacy, I can guarantee it. Only one of the elevators in the hotel goes all the way to the roof. I use it, Mrs. Haven, the lady in Penthouse Two, uses it, and whoever may be occupying Penthouse Three uses it. The operator who handles that particular elevator takes no one to the roof without first clearing it with me, or Mrs. Haven, or whoever is occupying Penthouse Three. The roof area is not available to sightseers or rubberneckers, Mr. Welch."

  Larry Welch still seemed to be hesitant about talking freely. I guessed it was me. Claude Perrault had guaranteed Chambrun but not, apparently, anyone else.

  "I just remembered something I must do,'' I said. *'If you'll excuse me—" I started for the door.

  "'Mark!" Chambrun's voice was sharp. He was still on edge about Betsy Ruysdale. "Stay, please." He turned to Welch. "The operation of a hotel like this is a little more complex than you may imagine, Mr. Welch. Every detail of its functioning is very precise. If you have something confidential to tell me that relates in any way to running the hotel, you'd better know that I will share what you tell me with at least three other people: there will be Mark; my secretary, Miss Ruysdale; and my chief of security, Jerry Dodd. If you require anything special of me and I should be unavailable, then someone else must be able to carry on without having to delay for explanations from you. Mark, Miss Ruysdale, and Dodd are extensions of me. If you can trust me, you can trust them. If you can't trust me—well, I have a hotel to run, Mr. Welch."

  Welch hesitated a second or two, and then his face lit up with his bright, disarming smile. "Trusting people is something I've spent my professional life learning not to do, Mr. Chambrun," he said. "Being a journalist, I find that people tend to tell me what they want me to believe rather than real facts. My instinct warns me not to tell anyone anything I don't want made public until I'm ready to make it public myself."

  "'You'll have to make your own decision, Mr. Welch," Chambrun said. He kept glancing at the far door as if he expected Betsy Ruysdale to suddenly materialize.

  Welch let his breath out in a long sigh. ^'So—I'll tell you what you need to know," he said. He turned to me. ''Holding back had nothing to do with you personally, Haskell. Just a lifelong habit." He put his attache case down on the edge of Chambrun's desk. "In this briefcase, Chambrun, are the ingredients that just might start World War Three."

  "Forgive me if I say that sounds a bit extravagant, Mr. Welch," Chambrun said.

  "I know," Welch said. "God help me, I know. But let me tell you what I feel free to tell you. In this briefcase are letters, photographs, photostats of documents all relating to one man—who for the time being must remain nameless. This man holds a very important position, very high up in the government of our country. In the process of gathering material on the complex and volatile situation in the Middle East—Arabs versus Israel, Iran versus Iraq, Egypt and Israel, the involvement of powerful outside forces like the United States and Russia—I kept coming across this nameless man's trail. From thinking of him in the beginning as being a key figure working in the interests of the United States, I eventually began to wonder whose side he was really on. He appeared to be a double or triple agent, working for two or three sides at the same time."

  '"But really working primarily for himself?'* Chambrun suggested.

  Larry Welch nodded. "And getting fabulously rich by selhng out first one side and then the other. Well, I found myself getting less and less interested in
the story rd set out to research and more and more fascinated by this one man. Fascinated, and scared half out of my wits, Mr. Chambrun, as I began to see the possibilities for a monumental explosion if someone doesn't stop this conniving sonofabitch before he goes too far."

  Chambrun was drumming on the edge of his desk with his fingers, wondering about Ruysdale, I knew. **If what you suggested is so, Mr. Welch, you have the material in your briefcase to do just that—stop him."

  Welch grinned. *'To quote the Bard—'Aye, there's the rub.'" He reached in his pocket and produced a cigarette and a lighter. He drew smoke deep into his lungs and exhaled in an almost exhausted-sounding sigh. *To reveal what I have found out about my man will also expose the treachery of certain Arab leaders and terrorists, diplomats from countries we think of as friendly, heads of huge international corporations.

  To put it bluntly, Mr. Chambrun, to reveal what I know about this man may set off the same disaster I'm afraid will happen if I do nothing. Dead if I do, and dead if I don't."

  "May I ask what this has to do with me, with my hotel, and with Penthouse Three?" Chambrun asked.

  "'It's a decision I can't make all by myself," Welch said. "To reveal or not to reveal. What's in that briefcase is dynamite. I need other people, men in high places, to look at it and help decide what's to be done. It's not as simple as it sounds. The man whose record is in that briefcase knows what I've been up to. Obviously, certain of his treacherous friends know. My life isn't worth a lead penny at the moment. It could happen to me on the street. I could be poisoned in a restaurant. They might even kill me while I sleq). Your friend Claude Perrault, a man I trust, suggested your hotel might be a sanctuary for me. He told me you could keep me safe here while the people I need to consult come here to look at the evidence I have. The whole process will take a few days. The men I must consult have seen my evidence, the decision will not be mine to make, and the personal danger to me will, at least, diminish. If you tell me to go peddle my papers somewhere else, Mr. Chambrun, and I walk out of your hotel now, that may be that."