Authors: Hugh Pentecost
“The Army seems to be new as far as our records are concerned,” he told me. “The CIA draws a blank on it, too. Our best unofficial contacts also draw a blank.”
“Yet there are a couple of hundred of them milling up and down out on the sidewalk,” I said.
“There always has to be a first exposure,” Brand said.
“Coriander?” I asked him.
His face hardened. “The number of amputees out of Vietnam would make you sick at your stomach,” he said. “It’s going to take a long time to check out on how many lost an arm, and specifically a left arm. By the time we come up with an answer, the ball game may be over.”
Later on while I was passing through the lobby, I saw Johnny Thacker guiding a three-star general toward Chambrun’s office. The Pentagon was obviously responding to the outrageous notion that they should be held responsible for civilian massacres in Indochina carried out by some young punk lieutenants.
Valentine, the big, gray bomb squad man, was very much in evidence, and the hotel was generally swarming with men who couldn’t be anything else but cops. Late in the afternoon I called Ruysdale to ask her if Cleaves had reported back with a hatful of money.
“He’s called in,” Ruysdale told me. “He’s working on it. He made it sound as though the going was tough.”
“Anything from Mrs. Cleaves?”
“She’s in your apartment, isn’t she?”
“She’s gone somewhere,” I said.
I have to admit I’d called my rooms on the house phones a few times. No answer.
Just before six o’clock we had a small riot in the lobby. A couple of dozen of the pickets, all young males and females, long-haired, bearded, navels bared, barged in carrying their signs.
FREE THE VIETNAM POLITICAL PRISONERS. JUSTICE IN THE PENTAGON. THE SINS OF THE FATHER SHOULD NOT BE PAID FOR BY HIS CHILDREN. PEACE WITH HONOR FOR REAL. LET THE RIGHT PEOPLE LIVE AND THE WRONG PEOPLE DIE.
These young people, screaming and yelling, gave us a picture of how tight the security was. They’d hardly got through the door from the street when they were surrounded by an army of cops, some uniformed, some in plain clothes, and a dozen of Jerry Dodd’s hotel security people. They were swept back out onto the street so fast they must have thought they’d been hit by a cyclone. The hotel guests must have wondered if they’d really seen what they’d seen.
About six-thirty I went back up to my apartment and tried knocking. There was no answer, so I let myself in with my key again. The place was just as I’d left it a few hours back: the unopened packages from the boutique on the couch, and no Connie. I was beginning to be genuinely anxious about her, and not on account of my possible love life. I decided I’d go down the hall and report this matter to Chambrun, but just as I reached the door, my phone rang.
It was Chambrun. “You’re wanted,” he said.
“On my way,” I said.
“Not here,” he said in a flat voice that I knew spelled trouble. “Fifteen A. Coriander wants you on the double. There’s something wrong, Mark.”
“What?”
“No idea. He won’t talk to anyone but you in person.”
“Have we got anything for him?” I asked. “Money? Concessions?”
“Nothing yet.”
“I was just coming to tell you that Constance Cleaves has taken a powder on me. She’s been missing for about four hours. She ordered stuff from the boutique but she didn’t stop to open the packages.”
“You come on too strong?” he asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“I know you, Mark. I know you. Jim Priest’s remarks about the lady opened new vistas for you.”
“She’d gone before I could make an ass of myself,” I said.
“Get upstairs as quickly as you can,” Chambrun said. “Coriander could explode if you keep him waiting.”
And so, with my heart beating rather unpleasantly against my ribs, I headed upstairs. I took the elevator to 16 and walked down. One of Jerry Dodd’s men checked on my right to be on the fire stairs.
The fifteenth floor was deserted, just as it had been on my first visit. I walked to the door of 15 A and knocked. The door was opened promptly, not by Coriander, but by one of the men wearing a stocking mask. He waved me in without speaking.
A second man wearing a stocking mask was sitting, very relaxed, on a straight chair tilted back against the wall. He had a machine pistol resting on his lap, one hand caressing it as though it was a live pet. Coriander, in his Halloween mask and his fright wig, was standing behind a stretcher table in the center of the room, the left sleeve of his red dressing gown hanging limply at his side. In front of him on the table was a bulky package wrapped in newspapers.
“I warned you, Haskell,” he said. “No tricks.” His voice was shaken by a fierce anger I hadn’t heard there before.
“What tricks?” I asked him. “I don’t know about any tricks.”
“It surprises me that Chambrun would try anything so amateurish,” he said. He gestured with his good arm at the package on the table. “Open it.”
I stepped forward and pulled the newspapers away from what they covered. I felt a trickle of sweat running down my back. What I saw was a pile of clothes: underwear, a white shirt, a black tie, black shoes, black trousers, and a bright scarlet waiter’s jacket. The shirt and the undershirt were stained with what looked like blood. Then I saw something else, buried under the garments. It was a white wig. There was also a pair of rimless spectacles and a wallet.
“Did your master-minding boss imagine I couldn’t detect an obvious disguise?” Coriander asked.
Horween, I thought. He had made his move in spite of all orders.
“The stupid sonofabitch even carried his own wallet,” Coriander said. “Douglas Horween, the alleged master spy in the employ of Cleaves. Did any of you really imagine he could pull off some kind of stunt, or report back to you on our defenses?”
“Where is he?” I asked, my voice sounding weak and reedy.
“He is dead!” Coriander almost shouted. “He has, you might say, gone down the drain. I want you to take that bundle of clothes back to Chambrun and tell him the man’s blood, which you can see on his shirt, is on his head. And tell him that one more miserable trick of this sort and the blood of one of the little girls will also be on his head. One more stroke of genius like this and we’ll really go into action. Now, pick up that package and go!”
I fumbled with the papers, my fingers stiff and clumsy. Any uncertainty about Coriander’s capacity for violence was dissolved. Now we had a murder on our hands.
“Horween acted on his own,” I managed to say, “against strict orders from Mr. Chambrun.”
“I almost believe you,” Coriander said, “because this was far too stupid for Chambrun to have approved. But tell him I hold him responsible for any fun and games anyone tries up here.”
Somehow I managed to gather up the package and got the hell out of there.
L
IEUTENANT HARDY OF MANHATTAN’S
Homicide Squad was an old friend of ours. The Beaumont had had its murders over the years and Hardy had handled several of them, had come to respect Chambrun and Jerry Dodd, and the feeling was reciprocated.
Hardy looks more like a big, good-natured, slightly puzzled all-pro fullback than a highly efficient expert in the field of homicide. He moves slowly, but with a kind of dogged stubbornness. No flash of genius carries him past any given fact until he has worked it over, shaken it out, dissected it. There are never any loose ends on Hardy’s back-trail.
There is a brief, nightmare period in my memory. I don’t recall who I saw or may have spoken to on my way down from 15 A to Chambrun’s office, carrying that ghastly bundle wrapped in newspaper. I remember thinking I could feel the wetness of blood seeping through onto my hands, but of course I couldn’t and didn’t. I remember lunging past Ruysdale in her outer office and arriving at Chambrun’s desk where I, dramatically, threw the package down in front of him. He looked at me, startled. I guess I must have been the color of a pale pea soup.
“What the hell is this?” he said.
“Horween,” I said, and sat down in the leather chair facing him because my knees were buckling under me.
Chambrun stared at me as if I’d gone out of my mind, and then, gingerly, he unwrapped the package. One by one he examined the articles he found: the shirt, the underthings, the pants, the jacket, the shoes, the tie, the white wig, the rimless glasses, the wallet. No need to explain to him what the scarlet stains on the shirt and undershirt were. Through a kind of fog I saw him pick up the wallet and thumb through it. Then he was reaching for the phone and I heard him telling Ruysdale to try to get Lieutenant Hardy at Homicide.
Then he did something I can never remember his doing before or since. He walked over to the sideboard, poured a very stiff slug of Jack Daniel’s, neat, and brought it over to me. People always waited on him; reversing the role was an historic moment which I wasn’t really able to enjoy.
“Drink this and get pulled together,” he said. He stood in front of me while I downed the whiskey and then took the glass away from me. “You saw the body?”
I shook my head.
“Then you don’t know for certain—?”
“He told me,” I said. “Down the drain.”
“Down the drain?”
“That’s what he told me.”
Chambrun had moved to his desk. I heard him ask that Fritz Schindler and whoever had served anything to 15 A since lunch should report at once. At that point Jerry Dodd came into the office. I guess he looked at me, I’m not sure. The whiskey felt hot in my gut, but things were still a little foggy.
Jerry was going through the things in the package. I saw him take something out of the wallet.
“He carried a blood-type card,” Jerry said. “AB negative. Not too usual. If the bloodstains on the shirt match—” He shrugged. I saw that, so evidently I was coming around.
“We need it from the top, Mark,” Chambrun said.
I told them exactly what had happened; the armed men in stocking masks, Coriander’s anger, his threats, his warnings.
“What did you think he meant by ‘down the drain’?” Chambrun asked.
“Hack it to pieces, a little acid, and gurgle, gurgle,” Jerry Dodd said. “We better get Fritz Schindler and whoever else served drinks or supper to Fifteen A. In spite of what you told him, Horween obviously took Schindler’s place.”
Chambrun didn’t act, but I realized the intercom was on and that Betsy Ruysdale was already doing what he wanted done. Her voice came through to us after a moment.
“There were drinks ordered about five-thirty,” she told us. “According to Room Service, Schindler and a waiter named Edward Sprague delivered the order. They’re both still on duty and are on their way up. And Lieutenant Hardy should be here in a few minutes.”
“Thanks, Ruysdale,” Chambrun said.
“You notified the police?” Jerry asked the boss.
Chambrun nodded.
“You don’t know yet if you’ve got a homicide,” Jerry said. “Just some clothes, a bloodstained shirt, and some articles of disguise. You got to have a body they always say.”
“Horween was wearing all those articles of clothing and disguise not too long ago,” Chambrun said. “And we have his wallet. If we don’t have a homicide, we’ll buy Hardy a drink and send him home.”
The real Fritz Schindler jolted me when he came into the office along with Edward Sprague, who looked a little like an exprize fighter. The white-haired Schindler, rheumy eyes behind his rimless spectacles, was an exact replica of the phony Schindler that Horween had tried to pass off on us. When he spoke in his slow German accent, the total sameness was astonishing. Horween had been some kind of genius.
“I hope there is nothing wrong, Mr. Chambrun,” Schindler said.
“What could be wrong, Fritz?” Chambrun asked.
“My letting Mr. Horween take my place,” he said. “I mean—” And then he saw the stuff lying on Chambrun’s desk and his mouth dropped open.
“Something may have happened to Mr. Horween,” Chambrun said.
Schindler muttered something under his breath in German. Then: “I was sure it was in accordance with your wishes, Mr. Chambrun. Miss Ruysdale brought him down late this morning. She said I was to cooperate in every way with Mr. Horween.”
“How did you cooperate, Fritz?”
“He took some candid snapshots of me. Mostly he talked to me, and after a while he was talking back to me. It was amazing. He sounded just like me. Then he borrowed my extra set of clothes, my extra uniform, and he went away. A little before six he came back to Room Service and I swear I thought I was looking in a mirror.”
“I would never of known if I hadn’t seen them standing together,” Sprague said.
“You saw them together, Ed?” Chambrun asked. “Who else saw them?”
“I dunno. Two or three others. I was in our locker room.”
“So Coriander could have known before Horween ever started up there,” Jerry Dodd said. “Can you remember who those two or three others were, Sprague?”
“I’m not sure,” Sprague said. “One of ’em was Georges Makroupolis, the Greek. I—I was so stunned by the look-alikes I didn’t notice who else. I remember I said, ‘Will the real Fritz Schindler step forward.’ You know, like the TV show? And, God, they both stepped forward.”
“And somebody warned Coriander,” Jerry said. “I better get on that, Mr. Chambrun. Find out if Makroupolis remembers who else was there.”
Chambrun nodded and Jerry left us.
“Now, Fritz and Ed, I want to know exactly what happened. I want to know what the order was that went upstairs and what happened when you got up there,” Chambrun said.
Fritz Schindler shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything, Mr. Chambrun, because, you see, I didn’t go. While we were marveling at Mr. Horween’s disguise, the order came over the loud-speaker in the locker room for me and Sprague to prepare an order for Fifteen A. Drinks, the room service captain said. Mr. Horween said that was his moment and he and Edward left me in the locker room.”
“The order was all drinks,” Sprague said. “Two dozen glasses, ice, four six-packs of imported beer, two bottles of Scotch, two gins, tonic water. It took two service wagons to carry it up.”