With Intent to Kill Read online

  With Intent to Kill

  A Pierre Chambrun Mystery

  Hugh Pentecost

  Contents

  PART ONE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  PART TWO

  ONE

  TWO

  PART THREE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  Preview: Remember to Kill Me

  PART ONE

  ONE

  AS HE DID EVERY morning of his life except Sundays, Carl Hulman arrived at work a few minutes before nine o’clock in the morning. His place of employment was on the fourteenth floor of the Hotel Beaumont, New York’s top luxury hotel. Hulman was the day manager of the Health Club, a very busy place in the life of the Beaumont. There was locker-room space, a fully equipped gym, two squash courts, a swimming pool, massage tables, and resting areas over which sunlamps hovered. Once a customer had been through the mill there was a lounge where, still without dressing, he could be served fruit juices, or coffee, or even a short-order sandwich.

  It was Carl Hulman’s custom to arrive about fifteen minutes before the rest of the staff was expected on the job. He was a quiet-spoken perfectionist. After changing out of his street clothes and into chino pants, a white T-shirt, socks, and sneakers, he took a tour of his domain, pausing to turn on the power in the steam room. If the slightest thing was out of place or had been neglected by the night crew at close-up time, Hulman would spot it.

  That morning everything was exactly as it should have been until he reached the swimming pool. He switched on the fluorescent lights and stepped out to the edge of the pool. There he stopped, taking in his breath in a sudden, sharp gasp. Floating in the pool was the fully clothed body of a man, arms and legs spread-eagled, smears of blood in the water around it. Hulman knew instantly that it was a body and not a living person. He had been a medic in the army for a couple of years in Vietnam. He moved closer, squatting down on the edge of the pool. He knew a gunshot wound when he saw one, and there was what he guessed was an exit wound at the back of the dead man’s head. The dead man had been shot in the forehead or face.

  Hulman went quickly to the nearest phone. This was a job for Jerry Dodd, chief of the Beaumont’s security force.

  The Beaumont is famous for a number of things, perhaps most notably its legendary manager, Pierre Chambrun. The French-born Chambrun, who could have been played to a tee by that late great actor Claude Rains, is short, stocky, and elegant in his movements. His dark eyes are buried behind deep pouches and they can twinkle with humor, grow warm with compassion, or turn cold as a hanging judge’s. His clothes are custom tailored, his shirts, ties, and shoes made to order. He is something of a Beau Brummell but he handles it without affectation.

  Some of us who work for Chambrun believe he is equipped with some kind of magical radar system that makes it possible for him to detect a malfunction in the Swiss-watch working of the world over which he presides almost before it happens. He is, of course, the king, the mayor, the boss of a small city within a city. He operates his own police force, a shopping center, restaurants and bars, a bank, the Health Club, living quarters for a thousand guests, hospital facilities, game rooms, banquet halls. Unfortunately, Chambrun can’t change human nature. He can’t eliminate greed, or jealousy, or a passion for revenge, or the impulse toward treachery and betrayal in the individual man or woman. And so, as in every other place on earth, these ugly psychoses erupt in Chambrun’s world, dislocating his best efforts toward peace and order. It was one of these dark and twisted impulses that presented Carl Hulman with a dead man in the swimming pool.

  I was with Chambrun in his second-floor office that morning when he got the word that there was a “problem” in the Health Club. Chambrun’s office is more like an elegant living room than a place of business. He sits at a carved Florentine desk with a blue-period Picasso, a gift from the artist himself, staring crookedly down at him from the opposite wall. The beautiful Oriental rug on the floor was a gift from some Middle Eastern potentate for whom Chambrun had done some special service during a stay at the Beaumont. The chairs and tables, the couch, are comfortable but priceless antiques.

  Chambrun lives by rigid routines at certain times of the day. The early morning is one of these times. He arrives at his office from his penthouse on the roof at precisely eight o’clock. Betsy Ruysdale, his incomparable secretary, greets him in the outer office. In the private office Claude Boucher, assistant to the master chef, waits with a gourmet breakfast. It is always hearty because the Great Man will not eat again until the evening hour. The main dish, after juice, may consist of a filet mignon with hash-browned potatoes, or brook trout, or a ham steak, or shad roe, or lamb chops. The rest never varies: gluten toast, sweet butter, a variety of jams and marmalades, and two cups of American coffee. The rest of the day he drinks, constantly, a foul-tasting Turkish coffee, which Betsy Ruysdale prepares for him in a special coffee maker on the Burmese sideboard.

  For an hour Ruysdale guards him with her life against anything including fire, flood, tornado—perhaps even murder. At precisely nine o’clock I, Mark Haskell, in charge of public relations for the hotel, am ushered into the Presence to start the day’s business. Chambrun, at his desk by then, has the registration cards from the day and night before. He and Ruysdale and I go over them. Our guests might have been surprised had they known of the information that appears on those cards. There is, not unexpectedly, a credit rating. But there are other symbols that tell us whether the guest, man or woman, is an alcoholic, a man-chaser or a woman-chaser, gay, lesbian, a man cheating on a wife or a wife cheating on a husband. We are close to the United Nations and many of our guests come from other parts of the world. The cards will reveal where they are from, their politics, their business. There is sometimes another symbol, which indicates that Chambrun knows something special about the guests he doesn’t want made available to the rest of the staff. That whole file on guests would have been worth a billion dollars to a professional blackmailer.

  There are usually a few wisecracks as we go over those cards each morning. “Here’s old so-and-so again” is the way it goes. “We’d better tell the maid on the twenty-fourth floor to wear her chastity belt!” My reason for being there has to do with serving the guests properly. A Hollywood celebrity may want to be in town incognito, without fanfare, or he may want the word spread that he is in town, probably to promote a film, or a television series, or even a book. My job is to keep him hidden or blow a horn, depending on his desires.

  One of the phones rang on Chambrun’s desk—I say “rang” but it’s really just a silent, blinking light. Betsy Ruysdale picked it up and answered. She handed the phone to Chambrun. “It’s Jerry Dodd,” she said. “Some kind of emergency.”

  Chambrun took the phone. “Yes, Jerry?” I saw that cold, angry look take over his face that happens when something has upset orderly routines. He put down the phone.

  “We may have a homicide up in the Health Club,” he told us. “Let’s move it, Mark.”

  Abnormality had already taken over when Chambrun and I reached the fourteenth floor. One of Jerry Dodd’s men was guarding the entrance to the Health Club with half a dozen of Carl Hulman’s daytime staff barred from reporting for work as usual.

  “What’s the story, Alec?” Chambrun asked Jerry Dodd’s man. He knows everyone’s first name who works for the Beaumont and uses it unless you are out of favor. The only last name he uses consistently is Betsy Ruysdale’s. He neuters her by simply calling her “Ruysdale,” although rumor has it that she plays a more intimate role in his life than that of secretary and executive assistant.

  “Gunshot homicide, Mr. Chambrun,” Alec Watson tol
d Chambrun. “Jerry wants everyone kept out until the homicide cops get here. That doesn’t mean you, of course.”

  “And Mark,” Chambrun said.

  Alec Watson let us in.

  We walked through the deserted gym and the massage room to the pool. Jerry Dodd and Carl Hulman were at the far end looking down at the body in the water. Jerry Dodd, our security chief, is a slim, wiry, intense little man, tougher than nails, whom Chambrun stole away from the FBI some years back to protect his world.

  We joined them. I wasn’t sure my breakfast was going to stay put when I looked down at the gaping hole in the back of the dead man’s head.

  “We haven’t touched anything, boss,” Jerry said. “Carl found him when he was opening up. Carl was an army medic, you know. He saw there was nothing he could do for him and called me.”

  “Small little man,” I heard myself say.

  “More likely a young boy,” Chambrun said. “Sneakers, Levi jeans, sports shirt.”

  “Somebody sure didn’t like him,” Jerry Dodd said. “Shot in the face with something like a cannon.”

  “Why here?” It was a typical Chambrun question. He wasn’t, as yet, concerned with the identity of the victim or the murderer. A violence here meant police, and reporters, and an unwelcome spotlight on his beloved hotel.

  Nobody answered Chambrun’s question because at that moment we were invaded by the men from Homicide. Lieutenant Hardy, the man in charge, could be called an old friend of Chambrun’s. He was a big, blond man who reminded me more of a professional football linebacker than a highly efficient detective.

  Hardy gave Chambrun a tight little smile. “So you’ve staged another one, Pierre,” he said.

  There have been murders at the Beaumont. As I’ve said, it is a city within a city. What happens in the metropolis outside its walls also happens inside them. Stationed in the area that includes the Beaumont, Hardy had found himself in Chambrun’s world rather more frequently than he was welcome. He and Chambrun were totally different and yet complementary to each other. Hardy is a dogged collector of detail, Chambrun a brilliant hunch player. Chambrun came up with intuitive answers way ahead of his friend, but it was Hardy who gathered the evidence and proved out Chambrun’s theories. Together they had so far been an unbeatable team. Whoever was responsible for the victim in the pool had better be on his way to some far corner of the earth, I thought.

  When Hardy’s people, after taking many photographs, lifted the body out of the pool and laid it, face up, on the tile floor I wished I had gone somewhere else. There was, in fact, almost no face to look at. The victim had been hit by some kind of expanding bullet that had obliterated the forehead and eyes. The lower half of the face, drained of blood, fish-belly white, looked strangely out of shape like something in a fun-house mirror.

  Hardy, kneeling beside the body, touched the chin with the tips of his fingers.

  “Hadn’t started to shave yet,” he muttered. “Can’t be over thirteen, fourteen years old.”

  One of Hardy’s men went through the pockets of the waterlogged pants and the patch pocket on the sports shirt.

  “Couple of dollar bills and some change,” the detective reported. “And this.” He held up a folded slip of green paper he’d found in the shirt pocket. “No I.D.”

  “A kid wouldn’t be carrying a driver’s license or a Social Security card,” Hardy said. He scowled at the green slip of paper and handed it to Chambrun. I knew what it was without looking.

  For twenty-four hours, from midnight to midnight the night before, there had been a telethon held in the ballroom of the hotel to raise money for cancer research. It was an annual event, presided over by Stan Nelson, the popular singing star who is today’s version of the earlier Vallee, Crosby, or Sinatra. The green slip was a pledge card you could fill out with your name, address, phone number, and the amount you wanted to give.

  “Not filled out,” Chambrun said. He turned it over and his frown deepened. On the back of the card, blurred slightly by exposure to the water, was a handwritten message. “With best wishes and lots of good luck. Stan Nelson.”

  Chambrun handed the slip back to Hardy so that the detective could read the message.

  “Every year Stan Nelson holds a telethon here for cancer research,” he said. “Midnight to midnight. He picked up over a million dollars this last time—Thursday night to Friday night. Thousands of people turn up to hear him sing, to kick in something or pledge something. Jerry Lewis does the same kind of thing for muscular dystrophy. This is a pledge card. This kid evidently used it to get Stan Nelson’s autograph.”

  “But no pledge, so no name.”

  “Unfortunately no name.”

  “Could Nelson know him?” Hardy asked.

  “Not likely, I should think,” Chambrun said. “Hundreds of kids along with genuine donors asking for autographs.”

  “It could be worth a try,” Hardy said. “You have any idea where Nelson might be located?”

  “He’s probably sound asleep in his suite on the thirty-fifth floor,” Chambrun said. “Twenty-four hours without any sleep takes some catching up.”

  “We better get him down here to take a look,” Hardy said.

  “The switchboard undoubtedly has orders not to put through a call till sometime this afternoon,” Chambrun said.

  “So cancel the order,” Hardy said. “We have a homicide here, Pierre.”

  Chambrun glanced at me. “Go up to Stan Nelson’s suite, Mark. He has his own bodyguard and that accompanist of his staying with him. One of them might know this kid. I don’t like to rouse a man who’s just raised a million dollars for charity. He’s entitled to recover.”

  “Bodyguard?” Hardy asked, his eyebrows raised.

  “Thousands of screaming freaks trying to get at him every day of his life,” Chambrun said. “In this crazy world we live in, Walter, who knows when one of them may turn out not to like music?”

  TWO

  THIS IS PARTLY A story about one of the most popular men in America, Stan Nelson. I like music and I’ve been a fan of Stan Nelson’s for a long time. When I say I like music I don’t mean I like rock or country music, where the same phrase and the same lyrics are repeated over and over.

  Mamma, I gotta tell you it hurts,

  Mamma, I gotta tell you it hurts,

  Mamma, I gotta tell you it hurts,

  It hurts, it hurts, it hurts.

  After a while you get the idea that “it hurts.” Stan Nelson has stuck all his career to the songs I first heard when I was growing up—the tunes of Cole Porter, and Gershwin, and Duke Ellington, and Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Irving Berlin. That period. The melody and the lyrics when Stan worked with them were clean, and warm, and romantic—and witty when wit was called for. I know girls screamed at Crosby and Sinatra the way they do at Stan Nelson, which proves, I guess, that his kind of music can still compete with a bearded slob with an electric guitar, or someone with a swiveling pelvis like Presley or a Tom Jones.

  Over the past few years since the cancer telethon began to be held at the Beaumont I’ve come to know Stan Nelson in a casual way. It is my job to greet him when he arrives, make sure that everything is the way he wants it in his private suite and in the ballroom where he’ll do what I think of as his man-killing marathon for charity. He is a quiet, pleasant guy with no apparent sharp edges to him. In his early forties, he still has a boyish quality to him, with his reddish-brown hair worn a little longer than short, and a little shorter than long. His eyes are a sleepy blue with a suggestion of vulnerability in them. I suppose that may explain why girls—and women—go for him so hard. He needs something and they want to give it.

  In his early days I guess Stan Nelson cut quite a swathe in Hollywood. He sang in a movie, a secondary part, and he was a star overnight. That’s when the women thing started. He was linked with quite a few glamorous names, and the gossip ladies had a field day with him. Eventually there was some kind of scandal about a live-in pal, who sued him for w
hat is known today as palimony. The lady lost her case in court. And then the female segment of the population went into mourning. Stan Nelson married a girl who had no connection with show business. It changed his image but not at the cost of his career. It was apparently a perfect marriage, there were two children—a girl and a boy—and he became the ideal husband to the women who idolized him.

  A half-dozen films had been blockbusters, and he had a hatful of gold records, he cleaned up in Vegas and Atlantic City. This was the all-American boy grown into the all-American success. He was the all-American Mr. Nice Guy.

  As far as I know Stan comes to New York only once a year for the cancer thing. His wife, Ellen, doesn’t make these trips with him so I have never met her or the two kids, now ten and eight. He showed me pictures of the kids, like any proud papa. They were dolls, little blond dolls.

  Stan Nelson did not, however, travel alone. In this day and age of drug-ridden crazies people with any fame at all are targets for psyched-out freaks. The president of the United States is the victim of a young man who wants to create a macho image of himself to impress a young actress he has never met. John Lennon of Beatle fame is shot down in cold blood by a kid he never met, never knew, who was apparently not a member of any cause.

  “Half the women in the world are in love with Stan, which means that all their husbands and boyfriends are jealous of him and hate his guts,” Butch Mancuso told me once, to explain his presence.

  Butch is Stan Nelson’s permanent bodyguard. He has patterned his own image after the late George Raft—shiny, patent-leather black hair, narrowed dark eyes, swift and agile as a cat. Threaten Stan in any way and you were facing death when Butch Mancuso stepped between you and his man. Butch was pleasant enough when he was sure of you. He liked to joke. He collected wisecracks from the best comics. He wasn’t much of a drinking companion because he didn’t drink.

  “I have to be on the ball around the clock,” he told me.