With Intent to Kill Page 16

  “I never had any dealings with Colson when he worked here,” I said. “You could say he wasn’t in my orbit. ‘Hello,’ or ‘Goodnight’ or something like that, no more. I didn’t know, till Mike just told us, that he was called T.C. If it was mentioned back there—three years and seven months ago—I didn’t recall it.”

  “Never mind the apologies, Mark. About seeing him—?” Chambrun asked.

  I repeated my story of going to talk to Eddie Sands’ stickball friend, and from there to Jane Street where I found cops and an ambulance and the Reverend Leonard Martin with his horror story about Nora Sands. Martin and I had gone on to the hospital and waited outside the emergency ward for some news.

  “I noticed this guy sitting across from me, smiling at me as if I should know him. There was something familiar about him, but I couldn’t place him. He was wearing a baseball cap, with the peak pulled down over his forehead. Of course I’d never seen T.C. with any kind of a cap on. I had no reason to be thinking about something that happened here in the hotel years ago. I—I was pretty shaken up by what had happened to Nora. I went out to telephone you about what had happened. When I came back I looked for the guy in the baseball cap, thinking I might be able to place him, but he was gone. I didn’t think about him again. There was too much else cooking.”

  “He saw that you hadn’t placed him,” Chambrun said, “came back here and waited for you to show up so he could polish you off before you did remember.” He picked up the phone on his desk. “Get Jerry Dodd up here,” he told the switchboard operator.

  “What do you suppose he was doing at the hospital?” Hardy asked.

  “He had just beaten up Nora Sands and ransacked her apartment,” Chambrun said. “He had to know whether she was dead, or whether she’d been able to tell the doctors or the cops who had attacked her. He didn’t expect to see anyone there he knew, and suddenly, there was Mark, who sooner or later would remember him. When Mark walked past him to go to the phone he realized that for the moment he was safe. He came back here to make sure he stayed safe.”

  “But this clip sheet with his initials on it goes back to the day before that, Mr. Chambrun,” Mike Maggio said.

  “You don’t have to be a handwriting expert to know that those initials were written by Tony Camargo,” Chambrun said. “Look at the other names—same capital T., same capital C. Colson, or T.C., walked into the Health Club and encountered an old friend, Tony Camargo. Tony did an automatic, he put down the name of a customer on the clipboard sheet. Maybe he didn’t know his name, just what he’d always been called—T.C.”

  “Put it down and never mentioned it to anyone, a guy he knew was wanted for an old crime?” Mike said. “That doesn’t fit with what I know of Tony Camargo.”

  “Who knows what kind of line T.C. fed Tony,” Chambrun said. “He’d come back to clear himself? He needed time? He needed some sort of favor from Tony.”

  “But he came to get the keys,” Hardy said.

  Chambrun nodded. “He knew the routines. He knew if he waited around he’d probably be left in the office alone for a few minutes. Tony was willing to help, but he was also in a hurry to get the place closed up. He had a date with a pretty little redhead, Miss Margradel Rousch. He left T.C. alone in the office and when he came back T.C. was gone.”

  “With a wax impression of the keys,” Hardy said.

  “He must have told Tony where he could be reached,” Chambrun said. “Tony didn’t bother then, because he had a date. After his date he went home and slept late. We woke him up with a phone call about finding a dead man in the pool.”

  “And he didn’t mention T.C. then,” Mike said.

  “Didn’t connect the two things. He did tell Scotty McPherson that he was on his way ‘to see a guy.’ I suspect that ‘guy’ was T.C. Tony was giving him a chance to prove whatever it was he’d sold Tony on, before he reported that T.C. had been around the hotel again. T.C. made sure Tony never got the chance to make that report.”

  “If you’re right, this T.C. is a crazy psychotic,” Hardy said.

  “He’s that, whether I’m right or wrong,” Chambrun said. “We know that from three years and seven months ago. Interesting pattern. He beats up a prostitute back then, would probably have killed her if he hadn’t been interrupted. He kills the son of a prostitute last Friday. He kills Nora on Saturday, a woman of the same profession. He kills Tony to cover that crime, and tries to kill Mark for the same reason. That’s all madness out of this world!” He brought his fist down on his desk top. “So while we’re playing games I’ll make you a bet, Walter. The best steak dinner, with drinks and wine, that the Beaumont can provide says that we have another name for T.C.”

  “Another name?”

  “Mr. Anonymous!” Chambrun said. “I should have to give you odds it’s so certain.”

  Jerry Dodd arrived at that point and listened to Chambrun’s theory. He clearly accepted it as gospel.

  “The sonofabitch is on a killing binge,” he said. “I wonder what sets him off?”

  “Money,” Mike Maggio said. “I knew this guy well enough during some four years he worked here to hate his guts!” He glanced at Chambrun. “You hired him, Mr. Chambrun, so I kept my mouth shut.”

  “I should have that printed on a sign and hung on the wall over there,” Chambrun said. “Every time I get to thinking I’m pretty hot stuff I should look at it. ‘You hired T.C.’” His eyes widened. “Do you know who recommended him? Tony Camargo! Which explains why Tony was prepared to help him in some way on Friday night. Old friend.”

  “Soft-touch Tony,” Jerry Dodd said.

  “He wouldn’t have knowingly betrayed Mr. Chambrun,” Mike Maggio said. “But he would have tried to help someone he thought was a friend.”

  “You said ‘money,’ Mike,” Chambrun said.

  “I’d bet my shirt he’s working for someone,” Mike said. “You mentioned a ‘hit man.’ That’s what T.C. is, a crazy hit man. There’s no profit for him in this killing spree. He wouldn’t run the risk of circulating in the Beaumont unless someone paid him well for it.”

  “He is the weapon but someone else controls it?” Chambrun suggested.

  “The way I see it,” Mike said.

  “That would seem to eliminate Stan Nelson,” Hardy said, “because the anonymous phone calls keep trying to point to him.”

  “A very shrewd way to make us react just as you have, Walter,” Chambrun said. “Right now we have another problem, however. He can be circulating still, God knows where, in the hotel. I want every inch of the place checked out, Jerry, every nail hole!”

  “Right,” Jerry said. “There must be twenty-five or thirty people still working here who would know T.C. on sight. We know he was here on Friday night. You were on duty then, Mike.”

  “I know,” Mike said. “You remember what it was like here on Friday night? A thousand screaming creeps everywhere. I had my eyes open for pickpockets and street crumbs. I wasn’t looking for T.C. Like Mark, I haven’t thought about him for damn near four years!”

  “A man wearing a baseball cap in the Beaumont lobby?” Hardy asked.

  “You wouldn’t believe the get-up people wear to that telethon,” Mike said. “All kinds of clothes and almost no clothes.”

  Jerry Dodd was poised to take off. “You don’t have any reason to suspect T.C. could still be roaming around the hotel, do you, Boss? It’s almost twenty-four hours since he tried to get Mark. He could be in Mexico by now.”

  Chambrun’s heavy eyelids lifted. “There are too many unanswered questions for us to ignore the possibility that he’s still in our neighborhood,” he said. “Why was Eddie Sands killed here, or brought here after he was killed? To implicate Stan Nelson—because that seems to be part of the plan? Because it is a safe place for T.C. to operate because he knows every inch of the place? Because, as Mike suggests, he is being paid by someone whose base is here in the hotel—like Stan Nelson? A man who knows the geography of this building could stay hidden her
e indefinitely, Jerry, moving from place to place as you search for him. And he is just crazy enough to enjoy watching us get nowhere. I suggest that when you’ve searched some unlikely place and not found him that you check back on that place again. He will think he’s safe in some place you’ve already searched.”

  “On my way,” Jerry said, and took off.

  Chambrun looked at me. “I still think you should stay up in my penthouse, Mark,” he said.

  “Why? I’ve remembered,” I said.

  “To this madman you may still be unfinished business,” Chambrun said. “We can’t expect there’ll be any rhyme or reason to what he does next.”

  Sunday evening is normally quiet in the Beaumont. The Blue Lagoon nightclub is dark on Sundays, the main dining room serves a buffet supper, a reduced staff handling it, the Trapeze bar on the mezzanine is primarily a hangout for business people in the area and the regulars are not in their offices on Sundays. On that special Sunday night the hotel guests saw nothing out of the ordinary. Perhaps there was a little more talk in the bars and the restaurants about the violence of the last forty-eight hours, more curious questions directed at the staff, but the Stan Nelson fans had evaporated. The hotel appeared to be at peace. To an experienced eye like mine there were a couple of out-of-the-ordinary things about the climate. There were perhaps a dozen reporters from the newspapers, radio, and television spending the evening in the bars hoping for something to happen. I saw other faces that shouldn’t have been there on a Sunday night. Jerry Dodd had called in his entire security force, day and night shifts, to conduct Chambrun’s “nail hole” search for a psychotic killer.

  Chambrun had “advised” me to stay up in his penthouse. I knew it wasn’t really advice, but an order. There weren’t enough cops or security people available to supply me with a bodyguard who would follow me on my usual routines. The roof was impenetrable, with a trusted operator and a cop riding the elevator, and another cop and a security man guarding the fire stairs. On this summer night I could sit out on the terrace and “wish upon a star” if I chose, and not worry about being “unfinished business.”

  Daylight was finally fading when I did settle down on the terrace with a Jack Daniels on the rocks. Almost instantly I was aware that I had company. First there was a strangled little growl from Victoria Haven’s Japanese friend, and then the lady herself, tall and straight, came across the roof from her own penthouse.

  “How dare you not come at once to tell me what’s going on, Haskell?” she said. She sat down in Chambrun’s white wicker chair.

  “Drink?” I asked her.

  “I’ve already had my day’s allotment,” she said. “Tensions and curiosity got me started early. Still—”

  “Gin and tonic?” I asked, knowing the answer. I went inside and made her a drink and brought it out to her.

  She was looking out at the city, where millions of lights were popping on in a million apartments. “Do you suppose Thomas Edison ever imagined that?” she asked. She took a sip of her drink. “Exactly right. Thanks, Haskell.”

  “Edison probably thought—”

  “Now cut that out, Haskell!” the lady said. “Tell me what’s happening.”

  So I told her how we’d come to put a name to the man we were certain was the killer. I gave her Mike Maggio’s theory that he was being paid by someone to perform his violences. I quoted Chambrun on the uselessness to expect any rhyme or reason for whatever his next move might be.

  “Pierre is not thinking like himself,” Mrs. Haven said.

  “Oh?”

  “There’s always rhyme and reason behind any pattern of behavior, particularly violent patterns,” she said. “Once you’ve determined what triggers a man, then it’s child’s play to guess what his moves will be. Our Mike Maggio is probably right. Greed is what makes T.C. tick. What’s missing is the identity of the person who’s paying him for what he’s doing. That’s where the madness is, Haskell—in the mind of the man who’s paying for services. When you know who that is and why he’s paying a killer to kill, the rhyme and reason will fall into place.”

  Toto gave us a throaty warning. Someone was coming our way from the elevator alcove. For just an instant I felt my muscles tense, and then in the shadows I recognized Sergeant Lawson. He had someone with him. As they came into the circle of light thrown by the terrace lamps, I saw that it was Linda, the girl from the Private Lives Club, Nora Sands’ friend.

  “Chambrun wants you to try to help Miss Zazkowski,” Lawson said to me.

  I said hello to the girl and introduced her to Mrs. Haven.

  “How fascinating,” Mrs. Haven said. “You were the Sands girl’s friend! You work in the incredible club where she worked! I would very much like to gossip with you about it sometime.”

  Linda looked at the old woman as though she wasn’t quite right. There was, I thought, a change in Linda. Back at St. Vincent’s and in the bar where she’d shared drinks with me, I’d thought of her as tough, self-possessed, going her own way and to hell with what I thought of her. Now I thought she looked vulnerable, which made her look younger, frightened, a little helpless.

  “Mr. Chambrun says you’re very clever at sketching likenesses of people, Haskell,” Sergeant Lawson said. “He wondered if you could draw a likeness of this Colson fellow—T.C.—and show it to Miss Zazkowski. She might be able to tell us if he ever circulated at the Private Lives Club.”

  “I don’t do likenesses,” I said, “just caricatures.”

  I picked up the legal pad on which I’d been doodling earlier, tore off the used sheet and put it aside, and tried to recall what I could of T.C. when he worked for us. To be successful with that sort of thing you have to have a feeling about the subject. I remembered an arrogant smile, a kind of swaggering insolence, a sort of “screw you” defiance. I began to play with it, and something happened. I handed the pad to Linda.

  “That’s libelous!” Mrs. Haven said. She laughed.

  I glanced at her and saw she’d picked up the sheet I’d torn off the pad. I’d forgotten that on it was the thing I’d done of her, all bosoms and legs, followed by a smirking little dog. Well, good or bad, she’d recognized herself.

  “Done with affection, luv,” I said.

  “I should hope so!” the lady said.

  I turned back to Linda who was frowning at the thing I’d done to T.C. “I’d guess he’s about six feet tall, about a hundred and eighty pounds,” I said. “Stocky. When I saw him at St. Vincent’s his dark hair was longer than it shows in that sketch, but I can’t really visualize it long. He had on a baseball cap, so I can’t guess how the whole hairdo looks today.”

  “There’s something about this—” Linda said.

  “A little like the top guy of a street gang,” I said. “I suppose he could be twenty-eight, thirty years old today.”

  “This brings something back to mind,” Linda said. “You say it isn’t a likeness, but right away I thought of an incident a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Tell us,” Lawson said.

  “The man you were with at St. Vincent’s,” Linda said to me. “The Reverend Martin?”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s been camping out at the Club for about a month, every night we were open,” Linda said. “It was Nora’s job to keep him occupied, and she did. We all knew why he was there.”

  “To get something on you.”

  “Yes. We’ve been playing everything pretty close to the vest since he started in. One night he was sitting at a table with Nora—she never left him for a moment—when a man barged in from the street, or maybe from the back somewhere. He wasn’t our type of customer.”

  “What is your type of customer?” Mrs. Haven asked.

  “Well dressed, money,” Linda said. She gave Mrs. Haven that challenging look I remembered from our drink together. “We’re not inexpensive luxuries.”

  “Oh my!” Mrs. Haven said, sounding delighted.

  “The man who barged in,” Lawson prompte
d. “Was it Tom Colson—T.C.?”

  “Could have been,” Linda said. “This drawing made me think of what happened.”

  “So what happened?”

  “This man—” and Linda tapped my sketch “—was suddenly at the bar. He ordered a drink, something straight in a small glass, then he turned around and looked over the room and the people. He spotted Nora and the Reverend Martin at their table. I—I remember his smile. It was like this.” She tapped the sketch again. “He tossed off his drink, put the empty glass down on the bar, and started across the room to Nora’s table. She could sense trouble a mile away and I saw her give a little signal to one of the waiters. The man got to the table, reached out, and chucked the astonished Reverend Martin under the chin. ‘I hope you’ll say one of your sanctimonious prayers for me, you phony old bastard,’ he said. The waiter reached him and took him by the arm. The man shook himself free. ‘I’m going, I don’t need help,’ he said. ‘This place is a little too rich for my blood.’ He sneered down at Martin. ‘Sweet dreams, Reverend. If you don’t make the lady I’m sure she’ll give you a picture to take home to bed with you.’ The waiter took him to the front door and gave him a shove out onto the street.”

  “That’s what Haskell’s sketch made you think of?” Lawson asked, after a moment.

  She nodded.

  “Then that is our man?”

  “I can’t be sure,” Linda said. “But this drawing reminds me of a man I would know if I saw him again.”

  “You think he may have been someone working for Zach Thompson?” I asked her.

  “Could be, could not be,” she said. “You understand, man, I just work here in the New York club. I’ve never worked anywhere else for Zach. There are all the other clubs and the magazine. I wouldn’t know any of the people who work in those places.”

  “Is it likely that someone working for this Thompson man would deliberately insult a customer?” Mrs. Haven asked.

  Linda gave her a look that suggested maybe Mrs. Haven wasn’t a senile idiot after all.