Remember to Kill Me Read online

  ‘Organization of American States,’ Jerry Dodd told me. ‘Here to talk about peace in Central America.’

  ‘Could he be one of the hostages?’ I asked.

  ‘Or our friend on the phone,’ Chambrun said. ‘He’s been here for about a week. Plenty of time to prepare for something—if he’s the one.’

  ‘You wouldn’t recognize his voice?’

  ‘I never had any reason to talk to Ortiz,’ Chambrun said.

  ‘If you monitor his phone, you’ll know who he’s calling and what demands he’s making,’ I said.

  ‘He knows I can do just that and it doesn’t bother him,’ Chambrun said. ‘We’ll find out who the other hostages are and that, he must think, will make us even less likely to try something.’

  ‘Makes you wonder about the whole night,’ Jerry Dodd said. ‘Did that mob charge in here just to rob and raise hell, or were they deliberately here to act as a diversion while the main people took over Twenty-two B and grabbed their hostages?’

  ‘It could be that way,’ Chambrun said, his dark eyes narrowed in their deep pouches. ‘And to give someone time to put Victoria Haven out of business. I’m convinced that wasn’t just a chance shooting, Jerry.’

  ‘The cops took almost sixty prisoners,’ Jerry said, ‘almost all of them blacks and Hispanics. Some kind of a “cause”?’

  ‘Half a million dollars’ worth of loot in jewels and cash would be cause enough for almost anyone,’ I said.

  Chambrun glanced at me. ‘Could be just the tip of the iceberg,’ he said. ‘Hostages being held to demand a lot more than that.’ He brought his fist down on the desk again. ‘So help me …!’ He didn’t finish.

  The telephone rang and Betsy Ruysdale answered. She glanced at The Man. ‘The State Department in Washington,’ she said.

  Chambrun leaned forward and switched on the squawk box on his desk so we could all hear the conversation.

  ‘Pierre Chambrun here.’

  ‘Mr. Chambrun, I’m Frank Laughton, calling for the Secretary of State. We’ve heard about the upheaval at your place last night. We’ve been trying to reach one of our people who’s registered there—Sheldon Tranter. He doesn’t answer his room phone.’

  ‘We’re not expected to nursemaid our guests, Mr. Laughton.’

  ‘Quite. But the radio says the people who raided your hotel were mostly blacks and Hispanics. Could be Cubans, Central Americans, we suppose. Tranter is an expert on that area. We wondered—’

  ‘Nobody has behaved quite normally in this hotel since a little before last midnight,’ Chambrun interrupted. ‘People changed plans, did things they wouldn’t normally do, altered normal time schedules. I’ll have to check where your Mr. Tranter is registered—’ As he spoke Betsy Ruysdale slipped a card in front of him. Chambrun gave her a wry little smile and went back to the phone. ‘I see he’s in Room 1712. I still don’t have a final report on all the areas that were invaded by those thugs last night. But we have checked every floor and every room and that there were no serious injuries to anyone—painful and disfiguring wounds, but not serious.’

  ‘Can you take a special look for Tranter?’ Laughton asked. ‘The Secretary would appreciate it, I think I can say that the President would appreciate it.’

  ‘Look, Mr. Laughton, there is no rule that says a man has to spend the night in his hotel room. Friends, a romance—’

  ‘In this instance the circumstances are a little different,’ Laughton said. ‘Tranter is involved in very delicate negotiations involving national security. He would not, normally, be anywhere we couldn’t stay in constant touch with him. I understand what happened there can have upset normal routines, but if Sheldon Tranter is in one piece he should have been in touch with us to let us know just that.’

  ‘We’ll do what we can to locate him for you,’ Chambrun said.

  ‘Please call me during the next hour, whether the news is good or bad,’ Laughton said. He gave Chambrun a Washington number.

  Jerry Dodd started for the door. ‘I’ll start the ball rolling,’ he said. ‘Someone on the staff must know this Tranter by sight.’

  ‘Pass it on to someone else,’ Chambrun said, ‘and then get yourself some rest. You’ve been on the go for almost twenty-four hours.’

  Jerry grinned at The Man. ‘You too, Boss,’ he said.

  ‘An exhausted zombie isn’t going to be much use to us,’ Chambrun said.

  When Jerry left, Chambrun leaned back in his desk chair and sat for a moment with the tips of his fingers pressed against what must have been tired eyes. God knows I felt I could use a couple of hours of shut-eye.

  Betsy had answered another ring on the phone. ‘There’s a flood of calls for you, Mr. Chambrun,’ she said. ‘Press, people with missing friends. The whole world seems to assume that their unaccounted-for friends must have been here last night. Mrs. Veach has to use her own judgment on who to put through.’

  ‘I really don’t want to take any calls except from Twenty-two B,’ Chambrun said. ‘But tell Mrs. Veach I trust her. Let her know I’m expecting the Police Commissioner.’

  ‘You’re going to tell him?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know—yet,’ Chambrun said. He straightened up. ‘I’m concerned about Mrs. Haven, Mark. She’s had some time to think about what happened to her. Maybe something has occurred to her that would help. Go to see her, will you, Mark? She’ll talk to you. She’s fond of you.’

  ‘What am I after?’ I asked him.

  ‘Some recall of someone who has it in for her,’ Chambrun said. ‘By now she must have had a chance to sift through her past and come up with something—if there is something.’

  ‘I’ll get back to you,’ I said, and took off.

  I went down the stairs from the second floor to the lobby where I could get an elevator to the roof. I’ve talked about miracles, and what the maintenance people had done with the wrecked lobby was certainly one. Unless you were as familiar with small details as I was, the lobby looked in perfectly normal working order.

  I was headed for the bank of elevators when Johnny Thacker, the day bell captain, stopped me.

  ‘Nice to see someone who might be able to tell me what the hell’s going on in this palace,’ Johnny said. He’s a nice-looking blond guy, probably in his mid-thirties, who knew the workings of the hotel almost as well as Chambrun himself.

  ‘What are you talking about, Johnny?’

  ‘I’m talking about the twenty-second floor,’ he said. ‘All the guests except the South American bunch in suite Twenty-two B have been evacuated, maids taken off duty. Chambrun’s orders. Why?’

  ‘You better ask him yourself,’ I said.

  ‘I would, if Mrs. Veach would put me through to him. What is it, Mark? You have to know. You’ve been with him for the last hour.’

  I couldn’t tell him, and I’m not a very good liar when I’m talking to people who know me well. ‘I think the boss has reason to think some of last night’s mob may be holed in up there,’ I said.

  ‘No security people, no cops,’ Johnny said. ‘Is that how you deal with crooks?’

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘the police commissioner is on his way. I imagine he’ll advise the boss how to handle things. Meanwhile Chambrun’s handling it the way he thinks best.’

  ‘Tell him he better let some of us know what’s cooking.’ Johnny said. He was angry, and I couldn’t blame him. ‘Everyone on duty’s asking questions, and when the next shift comes on they’ll be asking. If the boss has something going he better tell us what it is before someone upsets the applecart. You know we’ll all go along with whatever he wants, Mark, but we deserve to be told what it is. Tell him that, will you?’

  ‘I’ll tell him,’ I said.

  The operator on the roof car asked me the same kind of questions on the way up. ‘What’s going on on Twenty-two?’

  Walking out onto the roof, I was conscious for the first time of a gorgeous summer morning. The minute I headed for the middle penthouse, I was closed in o
n by two of Jerry Dodd’s men. I wasn’t a stranger to them and they had to know I wasn’t a danger to Mrs. Haven. They, too, wanted to know what was cooking on the twenty-second floor. I had to play it dumb.

  When I rang the penthouse doorbell I was confronted by Joe Simpson, another of Jerry’s boys. He was staying inside with the lady.

  ‘She up and around?’ I asked him.

  He nodded toward the inside and I could hear a radio or TV set going full blast. ‘Probably the only person in this dump who isn’t exhausted,’ Simpson said.

  ‘Ask her if she’ll see me. The boss wants to reassure himself about her.’

  Simpson went back into the living room, the radio or TV was turned off, and Victoria Haven called out, ‘Mark! Come in! Am I glad to see someone from the other world!’

  She looked marvelous. She is tall and straight, and just then looked thirty years younger than her actual age. Her dark red hair wasn’t natural, I assumed, but it didn’t look dyed. She is really something. She was sitting on a sofa in the living room, surrounded by newspapers. A silver coffee pot and several cups were on the low table beside her.

  ‘I’ve been prepared for a party, but nobody came,’ she said. She gestured toward the coffee and a plate of cinnamon buns. ‘I was beginning to think I was forgotten, except for the watchdogs.’ She patted the sofa beside her. ‘Come on, Mark. Catch me up on things. The reporters on the radio and TV don’t seem to know what the score is.’

  I sat down beside her. The coffee and buns looked inviting. She poured for me and gestured towards the buns. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘as they used to say in the theater, “take it from the top,” my friend.’

  ‘It’s been a crazy time,’ I said. ‘The lobby, the bars, wrecked. Some of those goons sifting up into the hotel, robbing people in their rooms. But you? You’re okay? You’re not hurting?’

  She was wearing a pale blue chiffon robe with long sleeves. If you didn’t know she’d been wounded you’d have had no way of guessing it.

  ‘I got lucky,’ she said. ‘Like a pinprick. Pierre?’

  ‘Okay, but pretty well pooped out, like most of us.’

  ‘Not hurt? Those monsters didn’t get to him?’

  ‘Not hurt,’ I said, ‘but worried about you.’

  ‘Nothing to worry about,’ she said. ‘Whatever it was, it’s over. Houdini couldn’t get to me now, with Jerry Dodd’s men out there.’

  ‘What’s bothering Chambrun is why somebody tried in the first place.’

  ‘Somebody gossiped about what I have up here. Seemed like a way for someone to get rich quick,’ she said.

  ‘Trying to kill you doesn’t make sense when what he had on his mind was robbery,’ I said. ‘All he had to do was shove you in a closet, lock the door, and take all night to find what he wanted.’

  Putting her coffee cup down in its saucer made a little clicking sound. ‘I’ve come to an unfortunate conclusion about that,’ the lady said. ‘It had to be someone I knew, at least knew by sight. There was no way he could just push me around to get what he wanted, because I could have put a name to him.’

  ‘A hotel employee?’

  She gave me a quick little smile. ‘Pierre wouldn’t like to hear me say that. He likes to believe that the people who work for him can be trusted right down to the end of the line. But I’m sure there’s been gossip about me, my eccentricities—’ She waved a hand around the room. ‘—this apparent junk pile I live in. The temptation was too great, and when an opportunity arose, when everyone’s attention was distracted by those invading vandals, he took it. Took it and failed.’

  ‘He missed by an inch, and then you were too quick for him,’ I said.

  She laughed. ‘You’d think I’d been dodging bullets all my life.’

  ‘Have you ever dodged one before?’ She took a sip of her coffee. ‘Not literally,’ she said. ‘In the slang sense—“dodging the bullet,” meaning to escape an accident, a disaster—many times.’ She chuckled. ‘Escaping the wrong man quite a few times. And once, long ago, escaping what might have been a violent death. It’s odd, Mark, but I was thinking about that one time when you arrived. The radio has been saying over and over that most of the mob that invaded the Beaumont were blacks or Hispanics. My one violent adventure had what you might call Hispanic overtones.’

  ‘Tell me.’ The coffee tasted wonderful, the buns were delicious. I was willing to listen forever.

  ‘It was long ago—forty-five years ago. You weren’t even born, Mark. But I—I was thirty-nine and telling myself that I was staring old age in the face. My fortieth birthday was just around the corner! I would spend the rest of my life crocheting place mats, or rolling bandages for the Red Cross.’ She glanced at me, her eyes twinkling. ‘I didn’t dream how much romantic fun was still to come in my life. I wasn’t bad-looking, you know.’

  ‘You were beautiful—and still are,’ I said.

  ‘Flattery will get you almost anything,’ she said. ‘But at forty—the approach of old age, I thought—a young man came into my life. He was only thirty, from Central America—Guatemala, to be exact—dark, dashing, a Spanish-style nobleman. Rich, anyway, with what he described as a magnificent estate in his own country. He wasn’t playing games with me. He wanted marriage. But first I must go with him to his home country to meet his parents. They must approve, or he might be cut off from what he told me was a huge fortune.’ She looked away and there was a kind of dreamy look in her still-bright blue eyes. ‘I wasn’t sure I wanted to marry him but, being “so old,” it might be my last chance for anything permanent. Going to a part of the world I’d never seen was tempting. I could always say no when it came down to having to decide.’

  ‘So you went with him to meet his family?’

  She nodded. ‘We didn’t fly in those days. My friend had his own private yacht. There were days of cruising south in magnificent weather. I managed to stay pure, you might say, in spite of passionate advances by my young man. We finally arrived at his family estate, somewhere outside Guatemala City. You wouldn’t believe it, Mark. It was a castle, a palace—luxury beyond belief: servants, Rolls-Royces, Arabian saddle horses, and a father and mother who were elegant, cultivated, educated beyond my dreams, who lived like reigning monarchs. They treated me a little like some theatrical floozy their son had lost his head over. There was, I think, a local princess they had ticketed for him.

  ‘They didn’t have much time to get to know me,’ Mrs. Haven went on. ‘That first night I was in their palace I was abducted.’

  ‘You’re kidding!’

  ‘Their palace was attacked by an army of guerrillas. I guess things weren’t very different down there then than they are now. First one side in power, and then the other. The place was attacked, fires set, gunshots all over the place. I was literally torn out of my bed, and carried away on the pommel of the saddle of a wild-riding horseman who took me up into the mountains. I spoke very little Spanish and the people who took me spoke very little English. I didn’t know what it was all about for a day or two. I was held in an elaborate mountain camp, well treated, well fed, but not able to take a step without being confronted by an armed guerrilla. About the fourth day an older man came on the scene—a man in his sixties, I guessed—who spoke English fluently. He told me his name was Carlos Avilla. He explained to me that my young man’s family, part of the ruling powers at that time, had taken several guerrilla leaders prisoner. He regretted to inform me that I was being held hostage—my life in exchange for the freedom of those guerrilla prisoners. I didn’t feel very cheerful about that, Mark. My young man and his parents might regret what had happened to me, but if it meant the loss of a political advantage, to hell with me, I thought. I said as much to that man Avilla. He explained to me that my young man’s parents were supported by the United States government. The President would bring pressure to bear on them when he knew an American woman’s life was in the balance.’ Her laugh was humorless. ‘I didn’t have much hope that the President would give a damn wha
t happened to me.

  ‘Days went by, and then this Carlos Avilla came to my tent one morning, all smiles. The deal had been made. His guerrilla friends had been set free, and I was to be escorted down to the coast where a cruise ship would take me back to New York. I asked him about my young man and his parents. He gave me a grim smile. “They have been dealt with,” he told me. He escorted me to a group of horsemen who were to take me down to my ship.’ She laughed. ‘That’s when I made perhaps the only romantically heroic remark of a long life, Mark. I looked Mr. Avilla in the eye and said, “If you ever see me again, remember to kill me, or I will surely see to it that you pay for this.” He just laughed and watched me ride off with his men. There was a government agent waiting for me at the cruise ship. He asked me a hundred questions I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t identify anyone but Carlos Avilla. I couldn’t report any conversations because I didn’t speak Spanish well enough. The agent didn’t seem to be interested in Avilla, or he already knew all there was to know about him. Later I heard that he ruled the country down there for a while. My young man and his elegant parents were said to have faced a firing squad.’

  I found myself sitting up straight. ‘Are you suggesting that your Señor Avilla took your advice—“Remember to kill me”—and was up here on the roof last night?’

  She laughed. ‘You’re not thinking, Mark. All that was forty-five years ago. Avilla would be well over a hundred years old, and he couldn’t have been here unless he flew down from Heaven or rose up from Hell. It all came back simply because the two violent adventures in my life seem to involve Spanish-speaking people.’

  I stood up. ‘Well, so much for that,’ I said. ‘I’d better get back to the boss and let him know you’re very much alive.’

  ‘Tell Pierre to let someone else carry the ball for a while,’ she said. ‘He must be dead on his feet.’

  Chapter Three

  I DON’T KNOW HOW long a man can go under a full head of steam without having any rest, but I guess I was about to find out. When I got back to Chambrun’s office he was there with Betsy Ruysdale and a stranger who was introduced as ‘Mr. Guardino, the police commissioner’s assistant.’ It seems the commissioner had been summoned to the mayor’s office to explain how things could have gotten so out of hand after the concert in the park.