Walking Dead Man Read online

  “I suggest you convey George’s message to Maxie Zorn,” Chambrun said. “You may be able to find out whether your lady is really a candidate for the big sex scene with the Golden Boy. Talk to Peter Potter.”

  “Who is Peter Potter?”

  “Public relations man for Zorn. If you saw them arrive, you must have seen him. He’s a dwarf.”

  “That one!”

  “A very witty, very bitter, very charming little man,” Chambrun said. “If he chooses, he can tell you the truth, which may be more complex than you imagine.” The elevator stopped at the second floor where Chambrun gave me a gentle pat on the shoulder and went along to his office. I continued down to the lobby.

  The Beaumont’s lobby normally has a kind of cathedral quiet and elegance. It had been thrown completely out of character by the arrival of David Loring. The Golden Boy had disappeared along with his entourage when I got there, but the memory lingered on. The place was still crowded with gabbling, breathless women. I had the feeling they might camp out there until the glamour boy took off for some other sanctuary. The Spartan Bar, normally reserved for elderly gentlemen who played marathon games of chess, had been invaded by females. A glance upward told me that the Trapeze Bar on the mezzanine was bursting at the seams.

  “What we need is a bull horn,” Johnny Thacker, the bell captain, said at my elbow. “David-baby isn’t going to show again tonight. Dinner party arranged for in Fourteen-B, his suite. Did you get a look at that dame he had with him?”

  “Briefly.”

  “Angela Adams, said to be our David’s number-one candidate for private and public lovemaking. Raquel Welch is an also-ran beside Angela-baby.”

  “Where is Zorn located?” I asked. I hoped Johnny was right. If Angela Adams was David Loring’s choice for the epic, then Shelda was almost certainly out. Loring would surely have his way.

  “Maxie-baby is in 1421, right next to Golden Boy and Golden Girl,” Johnny said. “Excuse. Some nut is drawing phallic symbols on the wall over there.”

  The Beaumont was having it tough. If Chambrun knew what was happening, he’d probably appear, point imperiously to the front door, and the ladies would all slink away with their tails between their legs. He had that kind of command.

  I found Maxie Zorn alone in 1421. He was dark, slim, with a long nose and black eyes that seemed to burn. He was highly irritated by the message I delivered. “Crazy bastard!” he said. “He’s exhausted from crossing a very calm ocean in a luxury yacht that makes Onassis look like a pauper. He’s got to rest while hundreds of people are waiting for the word.”

  “What word?”

  He looked at me as if I was some kind of idiot child. “Money, friend. Haven’t you ever heard of money? Mr. George Battle is the money behind my film, or will be when he says yes. You know this Mason doll?”

  “Yes, I know the Mason doll,” I said, feeling my jaw muscles tighten. “She used to be my secretary.”

  “Maybe I can use you,” Maxie said.

  “I wouldn’t try,” I said

  The black eyes burned into me. “Can you imagine why she hesitates?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “You’ve read about the big moment in this picture of mine?”

  “Who hasn’t?”

  “We’re offering your Miss Mason the part,” he said, “and she can’t make up her mind. Would you believe there’s seven million bucks on the line?”

  “Probably not.”

  “That’s what Battle has agreed to put up to finance my film—under two conditions. Condition number one, the Mason doll is to play the big scene in the raw with David. Condition number two, he is to have five prints of the film. Of course a share of the profits, chum, and there will be profits. And the Mason dame can’t make up her mind! How do you like that for dizzy blonde thinking.”

  “Probably not everyone thinks that rolling around with David Loring is the key to happiness,” I said.

  “The hell with that. We’re offering her a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for seven minutes’ exposure on film and she can’t make up her mind. Talk to her for me. Don’t tell her I said so, but I’ll go to a quarter of a million if she’s trying to make a tough deal with me. It’s worth a quarter of a million to get seven.”

  “Why does Battle want five prints of the film?” I heard myself ask.

  “To warm up his old age, I suspect,” Zora said. “He’ll probably keep looking at those seven minutes until he’s worn out all five prints.”

  “You mean he’s a dirty old man?”

  “I mean he’s a screw pot.”

  “There must be plenty of beautiful girls who’d jump at the chance,” I said.

  “Battle wants her and nobody else,” Zorn said. “So it doesn’t matter if she’s wall-eyed and knock-kneed. We’ll make that popular if we have to. Will you talk to her?”

  “I promise,” I said. My ten cents’ worth was not going to help him.

  But I didn’t get the chance that evening. My spies informed me that Shelda was one of the dinner guests in David Loring’s suite. He was evidently using his personal charms to persuade her.

  My normal routine in the evening is to climb into a dinner jacket about seven o’clock and circulate. Shelda used to say I was like Marshal Dillon putting Dodge City to bed for the night. There was always someone to talk to, some celebrity staying with us for a spell, someone to drink with. My job was to promote people who wanted a little promotion and to keep others under cover. Then there were fashion designers and buyers who use the hotel often for special showings, society people planning charity functions, people concerned with special social or diplomatic banquets. And just lonely people who like to talk.

  That night I didn’t want to talk. This cockamamey business about Shelda and the Maxie Zorn film had me climbing the walls. I could imagine her up there in 14-B with Golden Boy, being sold a bill of goods. They might even be practicing!

  I’m a slow drinker and I hold my liquor pretty well. I have to in my job. That night I was pouring it on at a pretty good clip. About ten o’clock I was in the Trapeze Bar with Eddie, the head bartender, giving me the fish eye when Mr. Del Greco, the captain, touched me on the shoulder and told me I was wanted on the phone. It was Mrs. Kiley, the chief night operator on the switchboard.

  “Mr. Haskell?”

  “Probably,” I said.

  “You’re wanted on the double in the boss’s penthouse,” she told me. She sounded up tight.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  “Somebody just tried to kill Mr. Battle,” she said.

  Two

  ON THE WAY UP in the elevator I didn’t take it too seriously. By that time I was thinking of George Battle as a degenerate old creep, scared of his own shadow. Somebody had probably said “Boo!” to him unexpectedly. That could bring on a breakdown, I told myself.

  But when I stepped off the elevator at the penthouse level, I saw that it wasn’t a joke. One of Jerry Dodd’s men, Art Stein, was standing outside the front door. He was fish-belly pale.

  “How the hell he ever got in is beyond me,” Art said. “Three of us patrolling the outside, never in one place for a minute.”

  “Who got in where?” I asked.

  “Some jerk wearing a stocking mask. Took a shot at Mr. Battle in his bed. Then, somehow he got away, which is just as impossible as getting in.”

  “Is Battle hurt?”

  “The bullet missed him by about six inches,” Art said, “but the old boy may have had a heart attack, Jerry says.”

  Art gave the doorbell some kind of a signal ring and it was promptly opened by Ed Butler, Battle’s guntoter. Butler looked nasty. Before I could say anything, he began to slap over my clothes, evidently looking for concealed weapons. He wasn’t gentle and I protested.

  “You hold still if you don’t want your effing neck broken,” he said. Finally he was satisfied that I wasn’t carrying a hand grenade and let me in.
r />   Chambrun and Jerry Dodd were alone in the living room. Jerry Dodd, our security officer, is short, thin, wiry tough with ice-cold blue eyes. He predates me at the Beaumont, and I guess that next to Miss Ruysdale he comes as close to being indispensable as anyone on Chambrun’s staff.

  “Hell to pay,” Chambrun said, and his eyes were those of the hanging judge at that moment. Anyone who disturbs the efficient routines of the Beaumont, anyone who commits a violence or a nuisance on the premises, has made himself a mortal enemy.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Old man went to bed about nine o’clock,” Jerry said in his crisp, cool voice. “I had three men acting as sentries on the roof. Seemed kind of nonsensical, but they were there, goddamit. Inside was Butler, sitting outside the bedroom door reading a magazine. Allerton and the chef, Gaston, and Dr. Cobb were in their respective rooms. They all heard the gunshot, so did my men outside. Butler was the first one in the room. Mr. Battle was sitting up in bed, light on at the bedside table, covers pulled up around him, screaming. Bedroom window on the north side was open. As you know, it’s barred, because it’s flush with the side of the building—twenty-four floor drop, for Christ sake. Butler ran into the bathroom, which also opens into the hall. No one in sight. By then Allerton and the chef were there. No one had seen or heard anything but the gunshot. They finally got some kind of sense out of Battle. He’d been asleep. He woke up, suddenly certain that there was someone in the room. He reached out and turned on the bedside lamp. What he says he saw was a man wearing a stocking mask with a gun aimed at the bed. The instant the light came on the man fired. Bullet’s buried in the headboard about six inches from Battle’s forehead. According to Battle, the man cried out—something unintelligible—and ran into the bathroom. No one else saw him or heard him. Disappeared into thin air.”

  “It’s just possible,” Chambrun said, scowling. “Butler breaks into the room, the gunman runs out through the bathroom, doubles back past the door through which Butler has gone, and makes it out to the vestibule.”

  “The minute the shot was fired my man on the roof nearest the door stepped into the vestibule,” Jerry said, “twenty seconds, maybe. He looked at the elevator indicator and saw that the car was down in the lobby.”

  “Fire stairs,” Chambrun said.

  “Bolted on the inside,” Jerry said. “You can’t leave by the fire door and lock it behind you.”

  “He got across the roof to the next penthouse,” I said.

  “Only just possible. My two men outside were standing by, guns drawn. I say ‘possible’ only because there isn’t any other way.”

  “Your men weren’t doing what they were supposed to be doing,” I said.

  Jerry gave me a bitter little smile. “I’ll be denying that to the cops and the District Attorney for the next month. I know those guys.”

  The door to the bedroom opened and Dr. Cobb came out. The fat man was wearing a food-stained dressing gown. He found a cigarette in a torn pocket and lit it with unsteady hands.

  “He wants you in there, Edward, sitting beside his bed,” Cobb said to the bodyguard. “You better hold his hand nicely, Edward. You don’t smell like roses to him right now.”

  Butler went into the bedroom, muttering something about this being an effing injustice world. Dr. Cobb’s watery eyes were roving anxiously around the room. I knew the look of an alcoholic desperate for a drink.

  “Liquor in that Chinese cabinet, Doctor,” Chambrun said.

  “God bless you,” Cobb said. He opened the cabinet and poured himself five fingers of Jack Daniels in a highball glass. He tossed it down like water. “Lifesaver,” he said.

  “The patient?” Chambrun asked.

  “He’s never as sick as he appears to be,” Cobb said. “But he had the bewadding scared out of him, Mr. Chambrun. That bullet missed him by inches. I’ve given him a sedative. He’ll sleep presently, scared or not.” he took a deep, wheezing breath. “Puzzling thing. The man wanted to kill him, yet when the light came on and he had a clear shot at him, he only fired once, missing.”

  “Maybe he thought he’d frighten him to death,” I said.

  Jerry Dodd gave me an odd look. “Maybe when the light went on he saw he had the wrong man,” he said.

  Chambrun’s heavy lids lifted.

  “Not very many people knew that you wouldn’t be sleeping in your bed tonight, boss,” Jerry said. “When he saw it wasn’t you, he managed to jerk off that first shot a little wild and went away. How does it go? ‘Come again another day’?”

  Dr. Cobb reached for the Jack Daniels bottle.

  One thing you don’t do with Chambrun in a serious situation that involves the hotel is make jokes. I was a little tight, angry over Battle’s desire to have Shelda make a sex movie, and thinking everything was pretty comic about this two-yacht, two-chef, two-Cadillac tycoon. I’d been prepared to believe this whole thing was some kind of psychotic charade—until Jerry said what he did. Jerry was making a serious suggestion.

  Chambrun didn’t comment. His eyes were hidden again, deep in their pouches.

  Jerry didn’t let go of his idea. “Any minute now we’re going to be swarmed under by cops,” he said. “Homicide cops, assistant D.A.’s maybe the D.A. himself. Mr. George Battle is the richest man in the world.”

  “The second richest,” Dr. Cobb wheezed. He’d poured himself a second massive slug of bourbon.

  “Newspapers, the media,” Jerry said. “Everybody’s going to be digging into the Battle history: how he got so rich, how much of the world he controls, the hotel in detail, his love life, his health, who hates him, who could have a motive for trying to kill him. And all the while some character is hanging around the fringes waiting to take a second shot at you, boss.”

  Chambrun’s smile was wry. “So how did I get so rich, how much of the world do I control, what about my love life, my health, and who hates me.”

  “I’m not laughing,” Jerry said. “Let me say that it’s a miracle this guy got in here and got out again. There’s only one realistic way it could have been done.”

  “The fire stairs,” Chambrun said.

  “Right. Someone who knows the hotel in detail. Someone who came up here earlier in the day and threw the bolt on the fire stairs door. I didn’t check it personally when I came up here. I’m afraid I took it for granted. It was a way into the vestibule that we may have overlooked.”

  “And how did he get through the front door?”

  “Someone connected with the staff, planning long in advance, could have gotten a duplicate key made. From the housekeeper’s set.”

  “And how did he get past Butler, sitting outside the bedroom door with a gun in his lap?” Chambrun asked.

  “Human fallibility,” Jerry said. “Butler will deny it with his dying breath, but he could have fallen asleep.”

  “Wouldn’t this killer of yours have been surprised to find a bodyguard outside my door, if he knows so much about the hotel and me?”

  “It’s a good question,” Jerry admitted.

  “And the three men on the roof?”

  “If he came by the fire stairs, he’d have no reason to know they were there. Look, boss. Take it seriously. The guy is after you. He’s planned a way to get in. He finds a guy sitting outside your bedroom door, asleep, a gun in his lap. He’s puzzled, but he’s in. He decides not to blow it. He tiptoes down the hall, into the bathroom, through it to the bedroom. He knows the layout. He knows where your bed is located in the room. He’s going to pour lead into where the pillow ought to be. Then the light goes on. His finger is on the trigger and he squeezes. But a fraction of a second of light shows him it’s not you in the bed. The shot misses. He cries out in surprise and splits. But there’s a silver lining to every cloud. Nobody’s going to be looking for him. They’re going to be looking for someone who might want to rub out George Battle. So he waits for another good moment. You don’t take it seriously, boss, and you’re a walking dead man.”

  �
��What do you want me to do?” Chambrun asked. “Lock myself in my office until you pin the tail on this donkey?”

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say yes to that,” Jerry said. “I want to cover you every minute, day and night. If there’s an intelligent cop on the case, I want to alert him to the fact he’s looking for the wrong guy. Let Mark and Betsy Ruysdale run your routine errands for you so I can keep you covered. I want to check out on every guest in the hotel and recheck the entire staff, along with a list of people that may have been fired in the last year.” Jerry ran slender fingers through his sleek, dark hair. “I want to keep you safe, boss.”

  “Thanks for being concerned, Jerry,” Chambrun said, “but if I have to walk around my own hotel scared, I might just as well be dead. What am I supposed to do, say ‘Please, sir, may I go to the bathroom?”

  “Stubborn bastard!” Jerry said.

  Chambrun smiled, “At least that makes you sound less like a mother hen.”

  The doorbell rang, and a moment later we were inundated by cops, police photographers, a young man from the D.A.’s office. In the confusion Jerry had me by the arm.

  “Get hold of Betsy Ruysdale,” he said. “She’d be intuitive about anyone who might want to get the boss.”

  “You believe that’s the way it is?” I asked.

  “I’m not going to risk its being any other way,” he said.

  For a few moments the elements of a mad comedy stayed with us. Dr. Cobb, his stained dressing gown drawn around him like a toga, was blocking the way into the bedroom.