Golden Trap Page 16

  “I owe you for all three of them,” Chambrun said.

  “Without you I’d have been home having my eggs and bacon about now,” Hardy said.

  Some men in white came across the garden carrying a stretcher. Chambrun went behind the hedge with them to where Lovelace lay.

  “Nobody phoned the cops from around this neighborhood?” I asked Hardy.—

  “Nobody,” Hardy said. “But there wasn’t any shooting until we were already in place, thanks to Chambrun. When Miss Mason walked out into the garden we knew what was up, but all we could do was watch. With three of you here in the garden we couldn’t just barge in. We couldn’t see exactly where you were behind that hedge. We had to wait.”

  “By the way, has my hair turned white?” I asked him…

  Lovelace belonged in the hospital but they didn’t take him there at once. The young intern patched up the wounds in his shoulder and leg and gave him a shot of something and he was taken by ambulance to the Beaumont.

  “He needs some answers so he can really relax,” Chambrun said. “It’ll do him more good than all the drugs in China.”

  Shelda and I, clinging to each other like a couple of kids, rode with Hardy in a police car to the hotel. We didn’t talk because what we had to say wouldn’t have been good for Hardy’s young ears. Chambrun had gone ahead in the ambulance with Lovelace. Shelda’s apartment and garden were swarming with homicide men, taking fingerprints, photographs, and what have you, so we couldn’t have stayed there anyway.

  In Chambrun’s office we found Lovelace propped up on a chaise longue which Ruysdale had materialized from somewhere. Chambrun was at his desk with Ruysdale standing at attention beside him. At a signal from him she went into the outer office.

  “I think we are all too tired to tell this story more than once,” he said. He went over to the sideboard and poured himself a steaming demitasse of Turkish coffee. He suggested with a small gesture that we might like to join him. None of us did. Hardy and Shelda and I had all been conned into trying that hair-raising brew in the past.

  Jerry Dodd was the first to arrive. He knew better than to ask questions, but he gave me a pat on the shoulder. “Good to see you in one piece,” he said.

  Louis Martine was next, accompanied by his wife and a Jeanette Arnaud who looked as though her legs were rubber.

  And then the owlish Mr. John Smith arrived with Hilary Carleton. The Englishman seemed to be almost pathologically calm.

  “You understand I am here voluntarily,” he said to Chambrun. “I could claim diplomatic immunity, but—”

  “Your boy is dead,” Chambrun said coldly. “And, as you see, George Lovelace is alive.”

  Neither Carleton nor Lovelace looked at each other.

  Chambrun lit one of his Egyptian cigarettes. His eyes had that cold look of the hanging judge under their heavy lids. “Tonight, after we realized that George and his would-be killer had both managed to leave the hotel, I was sitting here at my desk, doodling,” he said. “I was writing down the names of every one connected with the case—trying to put them in some order; hoping that an answer would pop out of nowhere. And it did.” He looked at Lovelace. “You and I should have guessed it at the very beginning, George. We are both fluent in German. Kurt Schwartz, the Nazi butcher who was married to your friend Carole.” He looked around at the rest of us. “Schwartz means ‘black’ in German. Kurt Schwartz—Curtis Dark was Carole Schwartz’s child. The six-year-old boy who had been so thoroughly indoctrinated into Nazism by his father. The little monster who screamed ‘Jew!’ at his mother when she tried to discipline him. The minute it occurred to me I was on the phone to connections of mine in England.” The black eyes turned to Carleton. “Shall I tell it, or will you, Mr. Carleton?”

  “Your version should prove fascinating,” Carleton said dryly.

  “Air Marshal Carleton was a fine officer and a decent man,” Chambrun said, “until the day George—as Michael O’Hanlon—learned the truth about his brother, Digby Carleton. In spite of the evidence Air Marshal Carleton simply refused to believe that his brother was a spy and a traitor. All of his rationality left him. His one aim in life was to track down Michael O’Hanlon and kill him. But O’Hanlon had disappeared into thin air. He was now someone else—Kessler, or Veauclaire, or Bodanzky, or Smith. Carleton kept on the trail, learning in a tortuously slow fashion something of George’s history. A trip to Germany unearthed the Schwartz story. He got it from Dr. Zimmerman whom he visited in jail. Evidently the story was common knowledge among the Nazi elite. Not that Carole betrayed you, George, but that Schwartz knew all along where she was and hoped that in trying to get her out of Berlin you’d expose the underground. Schwartz knew, and Schwartz stirred up hatred for Carole and for you in the small boy—Kurt Schwartz, Junior.

  “Air Marshal Carleton is a long-range hater and a realist. He found the little Kurt Schwartz in a German orphanage and he made arrangements to adopt the boy. Why? Because sooner or later he knew he might need help from someone who hated George Lovelace as much as he did. Carleton knew that something might happen to him—he might die—he might suddenly be too ill to act. Curtis Dark—the name Carleton gave him—was his insurance. One or the other of them would someday find George and finish him.

  “But George was so clever, covered himself so well, that twenty years went by before Carleton and Dark located him. That was when George retired and, quite openly, settled down in the south of France to live under his real identity. It was then that Carleton gave in to Curtis Dark’s plea to let him deal with George. This young man, for all his exterior charm, had a vicious streak of cruelty in him. He didn’t want George to die quickly. He wanted him to suffer all the terrors of being hunted, of not knowing when it would happen, of being publicly disgraced and tortured before the finishing moment came.

  “Dark and Carleton had come on George’s trail in Madrid seven years ago. In their checking they came across the story of Jeanette Arnaud’s rape. It was filed away for future use. When the time came, one of them went to Miss Arnaud and offered to pay her handsomely if she’d name George at the right moment. I suspect it was Carleton. She likes to deal with important people. Am I right, Miss Arnaud?”

  The girl stared at him stonily. She was still afraid to speak.

  “The answer isn’t too important now,” Chambrun said. “Carleton is a cold, relentless man. She would be afraid to talk about him. There would be Dark to deal with if she did, and Dark was a man of action. She was properly afraid of them both.

  “Dark had one obsession, I think. Before he killed George he wanted George to know who he was and why he was doing it. He chose the moment—half an hour after George had checked into the Beaumont. He went to Ten B, George’s suite, and let himself in. Instead of finding himself face to face with George he was confronted by John Smith. He must have known that John Smith was on the trail of the truth, which was why the moment was now. There was Smith, obviously waiting for George to tell him what he’d guessed—that Dark was the hunter. Dark didn’t wait for words. He shot and killed the man who’d guessed the truth about him.”

  Chambrun paused to light a fresh cigarette.

  “We’d built a fence around George. We’d set up a trap for the killer. Dark—and Carleton—knew this. The thing to do was to get us to turn our backs on George. So they set Miss Arnaud in motion with her dramatically phony exposure of George as a rapist. We didn’t buy it. Time was running out on them. So Dark took the big risk. He went to the fourth floor, knocked out Anderson, and went into Mark’s apartment. He expected to have a few minutes alone with George before he killed him. His luck was bad. George wasn’t alone. Marilyn VanZandt was there, ready to give her life for George if necessary. Incidentally, they think she will recover.

  “The rest we know. He heard George stirring. He knew how deadly George was with a gun. He didn’t want to face him there with no chance to move. And so he ran. When George followed, it almost worked. Two inches difference in his aim and George
would be dead.” Chambrun looked at Shelda. “Perhaps you’ll tell us, Shelda, what happened when he came to your place.”

  Shelda’s fingers were linked in mine, painfully tight,

  “He was so very charming,” she said. “I’d spent most of the evening with him, you know. Dinner at Le Pavillon and then back to the Blue Lagoon to hear Miss Arnaud’s debut. I—I was sound asleep when my doorbell rang. I—I thought it was Mark, and that he’d forgotten—” She looked up at me, wide-eyed. I knew she’d been about to say she thought I’d forgotten my key. “Well—I thought it must be Mark. I got up and opened the door. I was surprised—and startled. Curtis’s face was cut and bleeding. But he was smiling that charming smile of his.

  “‘Got myself in a bit of a brawl,’ he said. I wonder if you’d help.’

  “Well, of course I let him in. I mean—he was a friend. He said he’d gotten in trouble with some UN people at a bar somewhere. He didn’t want to go back to the Beaumont because Mr. Carleton would be angry with him. Maybe I would help him patch up his face so it wouldn’t be too noticeable. I swallowed it hook, line, and sinker for a little while. I got some gauze and tape and antiseptic from the bathroom. I—I even made him a drink! All the time he was laughing and joking. And then the phone rang. Before I could get to it he was ahead of me—and pulled the wires right out of the wall. He was still smiling, but now it was frightening.

  “‘You might as well know the truth, my sweet,’ he said. ‘Lovelace is after me. I think he’s followed me here.’ And just then we heard a noise in the garden. He switched off the lights and suddenly his arm was around me and his hand over my mouth. ‘You do exactly what I tell you, Shelda dear, or you’ll be on the unfortunate end of a fatal accident. Not one sound out of you or else.’

  “I can only tell you I believed he meant exactly that.”

  “You were quite right,” Chambrun said. “He did.”

  “He—he was at the French windows leading to the garden then. He had a gun.

  “‘He’s out there,’ he said.

  “I pleaded with him to let me go. He just laughed. And then—then I heard Mark’s key in the lock. He has a key in case I’m not home and he wants to come in—to get away from the hotel now and then.”

  “Very nice for him,” Chambrun said, deadpan.

  Shelda blushed. “The chain was on the door. Curtis grabbed me. ‘Send him away if you don’t want him dead,’ he said. I believed that too, and so I—I told Mark I didn’t want to see him.” She looked up at me. “I never wanted to see anyone so much in my life, darling, but I had to send you away.”

  I explained that I knew something was wrong but never guessed it had anything to do with Lovelace.

  Then I told how I climbed the fence and landed right on top of Lovelace.

  “We just waited and waited,” Shelda said. “He kept asking me whether I thought Mark had believed me. I kept saying yes. It must have been while he was asking me that over and over that Mark climbed the fence. Because he didn’t know Mark was there.

  “Finally it got to be daylight—just a grey, early light. That’s when he told me I must walk out in the garden, locate Mr. Lovelace, and go over to him. I—I knew what he wanted. I’d show him where Mr. Lovelace was and he’d open fire. I—I’d never have done it, Mr. Lovelace. But I had to locate you so that I wouldn’t walk right up to you by accident. Once you spoke I’d never have come your way.”

  “I’ll never forget your courage,” Lovelace said. He looked at Chambrun. “But how did the police get there into position?”

  “Guesswork—plus,” Chambrun said. “When I came up with Dark as my man I wondered where he’d go. I remembered your date with him, Shelda. It was an outside possibility, I thought. I called you and got a ‘Temporarily out of order’ report from the operator. I knew Mark was on his way to you, but he’d hardly had time to get there. Then Hardy’s work paid off.”

  Hardy nodded. “We had a general alarm for Lovelace—a wounded man who might have taken a taxi from the side entrance of the Beaumont. A taxi driver reported in. He’d taken a man to the corner of Seventy-third Street and Third Avenue. The next fare he picked up let out a howl. The back seat was covered with blood.”

  “And Seventy-third and Third was your corner, Shelda,” Chambrun said. “Two and two.”

  The room was silent. Chambrun looked steadily at Hilary Carleton. “The real murderer in this affair is you, Carleton. You nursed the boy’s hate. You urged him on. You helped him to track George down. You are the murderer—but there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”

  “Accessory,” Hardy said.

  “Possibly provable,” Chambrun said. “Diplomatic immunity makes it hopeless, I’m afraid.”

  “And so,” Lovelace said bitterly, “I wait for you to come up with another idea, Carleton.”

  “I think not,” Chambrun said. “Mr. Carleton has one vulnerable spot—the true story of his brother. I think he would not want that story documented and made public. The Carleton pride.”

  “You wouldn’t!” Carleton said.

  “I would—and will,” Chambrun said, “if anyone on this whole earth threatens George Lovelace again.” He turned toward the sideboard for another demitasse.

  “I’ll need you at headquarters, Mr. Carleton,” Hardy said in a cold voice. “Vital statistics on Curtis Dark.”

  The room slowly emptied of people till only Shelda and I and Ruysdale were left. Chambrun turned toward us, a faint smile on his lips.

  “I always say the Beaumont is not a hotel but a way of life,” he said. “God forbid the last twenty-four hours should be presented as a sample!

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  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Contents

  Part 1

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part 2

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part 3

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Copyright