Nightmare Time Read online

  “Ugly, but a dream,” I said.

  He looked at me, and tears had welled up in his eyes again. “One of the two men with the bats was facing me, and I could see who he was—that priest, Father Callahan. The other one had his back to me, and I never did see his face, but somehow—somehow I was sure that I knew him. I’m still trying to think who it could have been, because—because I was just starting to dream it all over again. I started screaming, sat up, and there was a man standing in the doorway. It was you, of course, but with the light behind you I couldn’t see your face, and for a minute I thought you were the other man who, with the priest, had been beating up on Mom and Dad. Of course, when you spoke…”

  I put my arm around him and gave him a little hug. “Dreams are usually pretty easy to trace back,” I said. “Something that’s just happened to you, or you’ve seen, or read, or heard. The uncertainty about what’s happened to your parents, that gun-toting priest who tried to get you to go away with him, the murder of our Tim Sullivan; I suspect we’d all be having nightmares if we’d had a chance to sleep. You’re afraid for your folks, and that makes you dream the worst. It was just a bad dream, Guy. Not real.”

  His eyes were wide, looking past me. I realized he was seeing it all again, just as clearly as when he’d dreamed it. His whole body was trembling.

  Behind me I heard the front door open. It could only be Chambrun.

  “In the guest room,” I called out to him.

  He wasn’t alone; Lieutenant Hardy was with him. I sensed there was something new that brought them both here.

  “I’m glad you’re awake, Guy,” Chambrun said. “There’s something I wanted to show you and ask you.” He held out his hand, palm up. I saw he was holding a brooch, a gold frame with a large red stone set in it. It looked like a gorgeous ruby. “You ever see this before, Guy?”

  “It looks like Rozzie’s,” Guy said, frowning.

  Chambrun moved his fingers and the scarlet stone popped upward, and I saw that it wasn’t a stone at all, just a cleverly painted piece of glass that covered a cavity almost as big as the inside of a thimble.

  “It’s Rozzie’s,” the boy said. “She showed me how it worked once.”

  “Did she tell you why she wore it?”

  “She said she had it made so she could surprise anyone who got fresh with her.”

  “Did she tell you what that surprise was?”

  The boy shook his head. “She just laughed and said there’d be something in the ring that would surprise anyone who gave her any trouble. I thought it might be something like Mace. I’d heard about that. Some people carry it to throw in the eyes of a mugger if they get attacked on the street.”

  “Can you remember if she was wearing this when she and your father went out last night?”

  The boy shook his head. “I didn’t notice particularly. But she always wore it when she went out, like a good-luck charm. I guess I just stopped looking for it when they were going somewhere. I just took it for granted.”

  I think I guessed what was coming and wished I could put it off. “Where did you find it?” I asked Chambrun.

  “Room 17E, the next room on the same side of the corridor as the Willises’ suite. Do you know someone named Henry Graves, Guy?”

  The boy shook his head. “I don’t think so, sir.”

  “A friend of your father’s?”

  “Gee, sir, Dad has so many friends all around the world that I’ve never heard of. There was no one named Henry Graves who was an ‘at home’ friend, a social friend.”

  “About eight o’clock last night your father made a phone call to the front desk. Do you remember hearing him?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Had he left your suite for a while?”

  “No, sir. But I was in the living room. He could have made a call from the bedroom phone.”

  “Your father told the desk clerk that an old friend of his had arrived in town unexpectedly. He hoped we could find a room for him, preferably near 17C. By coincidence the guest in 17E had checked out earlier than expected. We’d normally have held that room for someone on the waiting list, but everyone knew that I’d want Major Willis given special treatment, so 17E was made available for his friend, Henry Graves.” Chambrun’s eyes focused on the boy. “Your father didn’t mention this friend of his, Henry Graves, to your mother in your presence, Guy?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You say you found that brooch in 17E, Graves’s room?” I asked.

  Chambrun was obviously thinking way ahead of me. He sounded almost irritated as he answered. “We began the search for Willis and his wife on seventeen, working down,” he said. “I gave orders to search again the rooms we’d already checked out.”

  “The possibility that the Willises could have been moved back to a place we’d already searched?”

  Chambrun nodded. “So we started on seventeen again. There was no one in 17E either time we searched.”

  “But the brooch wasn’t there the first time around?”

  “Can’t be sure,” Chambrun said. “We were looking for people, not small objects like this. Second time around one of Jerry’s men just happened to see the brooch lying in the corner of the room. It could have been there the first time.”

  “How does Henry Graves explain it?” I asked. “It certainly suggests that Mrs. Willis was in 17E at some point.”

  “Mr. Graves doesn’t explain it because Mr. Graves is among the missing,” Chambrun said. “He wasn’t there the first time we searched the room, nor the second.”

  “When did he check in?”

  “Just after eight o’clock, just after Major Willis’s phone call to the front desk. Karl Nevers, the chief night clerk, was involved with a group that had just come in from Kennedy Airport. Miss Jacobs handled Graves’s registration. He had no luggage. He told her he hadn’t expected to be in town overnight. He said he’d buy himself a toothbrush and borrow a razor and some pajamas from his friend Major Willis.”

  “Did your father leave some things—a razor, pajamas—for someone to pick up?” I asked Guy.

  “No, sir.”

  Chambrun sat down on the edge of the bed beside the boy. “There is no way to hide certain ugly possibilities from you, Guy,” he said. “If I’m not honest with you now you’ll hear it all in the morning on the radio, the TV, or read it in the morning papers. I think Henry Graves is a phony, like your priest. I don’t think your father called to reserve him a room. No way the reservation clerk could have known that the voice on the telephone wasn’t your father’s. I think this Graves, whoever he is, maneuvered your parents into his room when they left to go down to the Blue Lagoon. Was able to persuade them to go into 17E.”

  “Probably at gunpoint,” Lieutenant Hardy said.

  “Oh, wow!” the boy said.

  “What I think your mother carried in that brooch, Guy, was a deadly poison. We’ll know for sure presently. There was just a trace of it left in the brooch, and the police lab is testing it out now.”

  “Why would Rozzie carry poison?” Guy asked.

  “I don’t know this for sure, Guy, but I think she had it to use in case someone planned to harm her to get your father to give away secret information.”

  “How could she get anyone to take it?” Guy asked.

  “Not anyone, Guy—herself. She could die painlessly, or at least quickly that way, and not be used to force your father’s hand.”

  “I’m afraid that’s why the priest wanted you, boy,” Hardy said. “They no longer had your mother to use to force your father to talk.”

  The boy’s whole body shook like a palsy victim. He was hanging on Chambrun’s arm as if his life depended on it. “Are you saying that Rozzie—that my mother killed herself?”

  Hardy’s grim face offered little hope. “I’m sorry, boy.”

  “But that’s in no way certain,” Chambrun said, briskly, like a man getting his second wind. “It’s a pretty sound guess, I think, that this man who calls himself
Henry Graves is not a friend of your father’s, Guy. Oh, he may have posed as a friend, even convinced your father that he was a friend. But he was ‘the enemy.’ As such, he would have studied your father carefully and in detail, his habits, his likes and dislikes, how he might react if it came to a showdown. He might know about that brooch of your mother’s and how she intended to use it if it came to it. You think your mother would have the courage to take her own life if the danger was great?”

  Tears had surfaced in Guy’s eyes once more. “Rozzie would have the courage to do anything she had to do if my dad was in danger or threatened in some way—or if someone planned to use her to make him betray some of the secrets of his job.”

  “It was understood between your parents?”

  “They never talked about it in front of me,” Guy said. “But when you suggest it may have been that way, I believe it could have been.”

  “So your parents had been forced into Henry Graves’s room,” Hardy said. “Your mother was threatened, or actually attacked in some way, and she took the poison in the brooch.”

  It was too much for the boy, and he lowered his face against Chambrun’s shoulder and wept.

  Chambrun gave the boy a cheerful pat on the back. “There are other possibilities, Guy. As I suggested, Graves may have known a great deal of intimate detail about your parents. He may have known about the brooch. When he had your parents under his control in 17E, he may have ripped the brooch off your mother’s dress, dumped the poison out of it, and tossed the brooch into the corner of the room. Your mother no longer had her grim method of escape.”

  The boy looked up, cheeks tear-stained. “Could that be?”

  Hardy answered him. “My lab technicians are going over the room now, boy. If they find traces of the poison on the rug, or on a piece of furniture, it would make Mr. Chambrun’s explanation likely.”

  “But if she took the poison, what did they do with her?” Guy asked.

  The alternatives were obviously not pleasant to present to the boy. If she had taken the poison and was dead, how had Graves disposed of the body? How could they have taken her out of the hotel, alive, with hundreds of people looking for her? I asked those questions to satisfy my own curiosity.

  Chambrun gave me the look of a patient parent trying to deal with a dim-witted child. “You’re not thinking, Mark,” he said. “Hundreds of people were not looking for the Willises from the time they took off from their suite at nine o’clock to go down to the Blue Lagoon until after one in the morning when Guy notified us that they were missing. That’s a stretch of four hours in which no one was concerned about them, looking for them, had any special interest in them. There are more ways than I can think of that they could have been moved around, alive or dead, in that four-hour stretch without attracting any attention.”

  “How long had Tim Sullivan been dead when he was found?” I asked. “He must have been caught in the middle when they were moving the Willises around. No?”

  Hardy answered my question. “The Medical Examiner thought Sullivan had been dead about three hours. He was found around two this morning, which would suggest that he was done in somewhere around eleven o’clock last night. But—that trash bin is as hot as an oven on warm, which makes it impossible to be dead certain. It could have been earlier, later—who knows?”

  “It’s all my fault!” the boy suddenly cried out. “If I hadn’t fallen asleep watching the television I’d have let you know right after ten o’clock that something was wrong. I let them have hours to work on Mom and Dad!”

  “You’re not to blame at all, boy,” Chambrun said. “You weren’t told to stay awake, were you? If anyone is to blame, I am. I let this happen to a cherished friend in my hotel!” Something of the enormous fatigue Chambrun must have felt showed in the deepening lines of his face. He had been on the go since seven-thirty the previous morning, his normal rising time. There had been the pressures of the regular daily routine, then the growing tragedies of this early morning—the murder of a trusted employee, the disappearance and the threat of terminal violence to a friend he owed, now this boy to protect and care for. He looked down at the boy now with something that looked like genuine affection. “I can’t promise you everything will turn out all right, boy,” he said, “but I can tell you that every resource I have, every bit of manpower, every ounce of special skills at my disposal will try to make it come out all right. Play it the way I am, Guy. Hope for the best. It can happen, and we’ll fight to make it happen.”

  Guy still hung on to this man his father had told him to trust. “If Rozzie took that poison while I was sleeping—”

  “If you had warned us at ten o’clock we might have had no better luck than we’ve had later,” Chambrun said. “I’ve got to check with our security people who are searching. Mark will stay with you. Try to get some sleep. Win or lose, it’s going to be a pretty hectic day coming up.”

  “Sleep isn’t easy,” I said. “It’s nightmare time.” I gave Chambrun a brief sketch of Guy’s gory dream.

  “Try thinking about all the good times you’ve had with your parents, Guy,” Chambrun said. “Perhaps that’ll help.”

  A FEW MINUTES after Chambrun left me alone with Guy in the penthouse, I began to be aware of how vital sleep was to all of us. The boy, in spite of what must have been a shattering anxiety for his parents, dozed off, twitching and turning on the bed where he lay. It must have been nightmare time again, I thought. I remembered leaning my head back against the chair where I sat and closing my eyes because they felt raw and tired from more than twenty hours without closing. The next thing I knew, early-morning sunshine was streaming through the bedroom window. I glanced at my wristwatch. It was almost quarter of eight. Betsy Ruysdale would be relieving me any minute now. I glanced at the boy. He seemed to be sleeping quietly now.

  I tiptoed out into the kitchenette and got the Mr. Coffee machine going. There must not be any news, good or bad, I thought, or I would have heard from Chambrun.

  I realized that one of the morning news shows must be showing on TV. I switched on the set in the kitchen, keeping the volume low with the hope it wouldn’t disturb Guy. I was suddenly in the lobby downstairs, where Rex Chandler, one of the top newsmen, was interviewing Eleanor Jacobs, the night clerk who had registered the man who called himself Henry Graves. Eleanor looked worn out, probably from answering the same questions dozens of times for dozens of reporters.

  “Can you describe this man who called himself Henry Graves, Miss Jacobs?” Chandler was asking her.

  “It was about eight o’clock in the evening,” Eleanor told him. “It was a hectic moment at the front desk. A bus had just come in from Kennedy with eight or ten people from the West Coast all trying to register and get to their rooms at one time. Mr. Henry Graves got to me to handle his problem. There was a note on his reservation card indicating that he was a friend of Major Willis’s and that Mr. Chambrun would want special care for him. Room 17E had been set aside for him.”

  “But you had a reason to pay special attention to him, didn’t you?” Chandler asked.

  “Yes and no,” Eleanor said. “He didn’t have any problems. He explained that he’d found himself in town unexpectedly, had no luggage, would borrow anything he needed from Major Willis. Asked where the drugstore was so he could buy himself a toothbrush.”

  “His looks, Miss Jacobs? The police and we, the press, are all trying to find him.”

  “A dark summer suit—dark gray or dark blue, I can’t be certain. A gray snap-brim hat with brim pulled down over his forehead. Black glasses—”

  “At eight o’clock in the evening?”

  “You’ve been in this business long enough to know, Mr. Chandler, that dark glasses these days are more often cosmetic than medical. Way of staying anonymous for movie stars and other important people.”

  “Anything else distinctive about him?”

  “Nothing. That was it, I guess—the only distinctive thing about him was that there was nothing di
stinctive! I couldn’t see the color of his hair, so it must have been worn short under that hat. Glasses concealed the color of his eyebrows—big round glasses. He was medium tall, just about six feet, I’d say. Not overweight or underweight.”

  Eleanor had seen more than most people see in a stranger. I suppose it was part of the training for her job. The TV news went from the lobby of the Beaumont to riots in South Africa, and I turned it off. Enough coffee had come through the Mr. Coffee machine for me to pour myself a cup when I heard the front door open. It would be Betsy to relieve me, I thought, and I went out into the living room to greet her.

  It wasn’t Betsy. It was Chambrun, accompanied by Jerry Dodd. Chambrun was almost unrecognizable. His face was the color of gray ashes in a fireplace. His mouth was a thin knife slit in his face. His eyes were clouded ice. I guessed there was news of the Willises—bad news. It was worse than that, from Chambrun’s point of view. He held out a folded sheet of white paper to me, not speaking.

  “Came by special messenger,” Jerry Dodd said.

  There was one sentence typewritten on the piece of paper. “IF YOU WANT TO SEE YOUR MISS RUYSDALE ALIVE AGAIN TURN THE BOY LOOSE.”

  Part Two

  One

  I FELT MY LIPS MOVING but no sound came.

  “Betsy doesn’t answer her phone,” Jerry Dodd told me. “I’ve sent a couple of my men around the corner to her apartment to check it out.”

  Chambrun sat down at his writing desk, pounding at its flat surface with his clenched fists. I slipped out into the kitchen and brought him a mug of coffee. He drinks it round the clock, and I guessed he could use it now. The phone was ringing as I brought it to him. Jerry answered. It was apparently one of Jerry’s men reporting to him. He shook his head as Chambrun stared at him.

  “Talk to any people you can find in the building.” Jerry put down the phone. “She isn’t there, Boss. No sign of any violence. My man says it doesn’t look as though she slept there. Bed neatly made, just the way she might have left it when she went to work yesterday morning.” He turned to me. “What time did she leave you, Mark?”