Random Killer

I
SUPPOSE IF YOU
were psychotic and you wanted to kill famous people at random, you couldn’t find a better hunting ground than the Hotel Beaumont. You have only to knock on the next door to your own to encounter someone who is famous for something, if only the possession of a great deal of money. You don’t stay at the Beaumont without at least that one claim to fame. It is the top luxury hotel anywhere and it will cost you an arm and a leg to stay there overnight and enjoy its fabulous service, its gourmet foods, its incomparable wines, its quiet elegance. You can buy a cooperative apartment in the Beaumont if you can get up several hundred thousand dollars, and the annual maintenance will be more than the average man earns in any one year of his life.

Its location on New York’s East Side makes it a home-away-from-home for foreign diplomats concerned with the operation of the United Nations. Movie stars on the move, today’s young millionaires in the world of sports, corporate executives with six-figure salaries and limitless expense accounts, Arab oil billionaires are all patrons of this legendary hotel. It is like a small city, operating almost isolated from the rest of the world, with its own shops, a bank, restaurants and bars, a hospital, elegant rooms for elegant parties large and small, its own security force. Sitting on top of this extravagant world is a man who built the legend and is an essential part of it. He is Pierre Chambrun, a short, dark, square little man with bright black eyes buried in deep pouches, who can look like a compassionate father confessor or a hanging judge depending on his mood of the moment. The Beaumont is
his
hotel. He owns a piece of it and his board of directors wouldn’t dream of interfering with any move he makes. He is the Man who makes the Beaumont what it is. He knows everything that goes on, on every one of its forty floors, every minute of every hour of every day and week, of every month and year. We on his staff claim that he has a special built-in radar system. The truth is that no one who works for him, from the lowest busboy to his incredible secretary Miss Betsy Ruysdale, would think of not reporting the slightest thing out of order directly to him. He knows how to handle any emergency and he will take the responsibility for that handling. If any of his people try to deal with a problem without reporting to him, and something goes wrong, then that person will be out on the street on his or her rump.

But Chambrun cannot always foresee trouble that comes from the outside. The little city that is the Beaumont is contaminated on occasion by violence, which is part of today’s world. It’s like a plague that strikes before you can be aware that it’s within the walls.

So it was that murder struck at us on a gentle spring day that year, murder so grim that it threatened to destroy Pierre Chambrun’s world.

I am Mark Haskell, in charge of public relations for the Beaumont. I have just celebrated my tenth anniversary in the job, and, without self-flattery, I think I can say that I know more about the intimate workings of the hotel than anyone with the exceptions of the Man himself, Betsy Ruysdale, his personal secretary, and Jerry Dodd, our chief of security. In the old days Jerry would have been called the house dick. The four of us constitute a sort of upper-echelon brain trust. In theory we know everything there is to know, and pass on to people in the lower brackets only what is important to their functioning. I say “in theory” because on that spring morning none of us knew that there was a killer loose somewhere in the sacred confines of the Beaumont who was about to turn the smooth working of a sort of Swiss watch machine into something approximating a madhouse.

There is a paradox involving the handling of the famous people who are guests of the Beaumont. Some of them come there because it is
the
place to be seen. It is my job to let the media know that a glamorous movie star, a political hotshot, a notable writer, or a ballet artist is a guest. Instantly the reporters, photographers, interviewers, and the general public swarm over us to get a look at the “stars.” But the same kinds of people may inform us that they want to be anonymous, unnoticed, their presence in the hotel, perhaps in the city itself, kept secret. We can handle that just as efficiently as we can provide notoriety. The current Clark Gable, whoever he may be, can stay at the Beaumont, his presence undetected, his comings and goings carefully shielded. He is given what is called “the John Smith treatment,” and not a maid, a waiter, a bellboy, or a desk clerk will whisper the fact of his presence to anyone.

That particular spring day when all hell broke loose in the hotel began as every day begins for me on the job. I am called by the switchboard at nine o’clock. Since my nighttime duties keep me on the go till all hours of the morning, that isn’t what could be called sleeping late. My apartment—a sitting room, bedroom, bath, and kitchenette—is on the second floor of the hotel, just down the hall from Chambrun’s office. My own office is on the same floor. I plug in the coffee percolator, shave, shower, and dress. I have a glass of juice, an English muffin, sometimes with jam, and coffee. At precisely nine forty-five I present myself to Chambrun in his office.

Chambrun may have been up much later than I, but he arrives in his office from his penthouse on the roof at exactly nine o’clock. Waiting for him, every day, is Miss Ruysdale, looking fresh and lovely whatever her nightlife may have been, and Monsieur Fresney, the number one chef at the breakfast hour. On a sideboard are selections of food, ranging from bacon or ham to a small filet mignon, to a broiled salmon steak with béarnaise sauce, to Chambrun’s favorite, old-fashioned chicken hash. There are eggs to be prepared in a chafing dish in any fashion the Man suggests. There is a choice of gluten bread or English muffins, which he eats with sweet butter and wild strawberry jam imported from Devonshire in England. There is American coffee, to be distinguished from the Turkish coffee he drinks all day, prepared for him in a samovar on the sideboard by Miss Ruysdale. No juice or fruit. He takes those on the run during the day. He will not eat again until a gourmet dinner at nine in the evening.

Each morning Chambrun makes his choice, eats with relish, lights one of his flat Egyptian cigarettes with his second cup of coffee, and glances at the door. I am supposed to be there, coming in from Miss Ruysdale’s outer office. He doesn’t have to look at his watch to know that it is precisely nine forty-five and that only an earthquake could prevent my appearing on the dot.

Miss Ruysdale—he calls her “Ruysdale” in a sort of neutering process although most of us are convinced she is something more to him than an indispensable management aide—follows me in, carrying a stack of cards, which represent the new guests who have checked in since the morning before.

Hotel guests might have been a little uneasy if they had seen those cards. Each one is an intimate and very personal dossier. Symbols indicate credit ratings; personal habits such as alcoholism or woman chasing (man chasing if it is a woman); business, professional, and social friends; past performances as guests of the Beaumont. If Chambrun’s initials are on the card, it means he has special information about that specific guest.

Chambrun’s office is not like an office at all, really. It is like a very elegant living room except for the carved Florentine desk behind which he sits after breakfast, fingering the cards Ruysdale has brought him. The Turkish rug, the drapes, the antiques, the blue-period Picasso, a gift from the artist, which peers down at him from the opposite wall, are not what you expect to find in a business office. There are no filing cabinets or safes. On the desk are a telephone and what I call a squawk box, to which he can transfer a phone call and make it audible to anyone else who may be in the room with him.

On that fateful spring morning Chambrun was looking at the registration cards and Ruysdale and I were waiting for some comment from him when the little red light blinked on his phone. There is no bell or buzzer.

Ruysdale picked up the receiver and answered. “It’s Mrs. Kniffin, the head housekeeper,” Ruysdale said.

Chambrun leaned forward and turned on the squawk box. “I know who Mrs. Kniffin is,” he said dryly. Then, to the caller, “Yes, Mrs. Kniffin?”

“There is a dead man in thirty-four-oh-six,” Mrs. Kniffin said in a shaken voice.

“Name?” Chambrun said, his own voice gone flat.

“Mr. Geoffrey Hammond,” the housekeeper said.

“Oh, brother!” I heard myself say.

I don’t think there are many readers who won’t know who Geoffrey Hammond is—or was. That handsome dark face, that clipped British voice, had invaded millions of homes in America over the years. He was as familiar to television viewers as Walter Cronkite, or as Edward R. Murrow in another generation, or perhaps David Frost would come closer today. He had started out twenty years ago as a news analyst for the BBC in London. It had fallen to him to interview some of the political hotshots in the Middle East and Israel during the fifties and sixties. American television had lured him away from his homeland with a huge financial bait, and he had become the man who interviewed all the important people in the world for International. Controversial, but with an audience so large that sponsoring advertisers battled to the death trying to buy time on his shows. Something like a gold mine had passed on into the next world if Mrs. Kniffin was right.

I had a small hope that Mrs. Kniffin was wrong, as Chambrun and I headed for the thirty-fourth floor. Ruysdale stayed behind to alert security and hold the fort there. Understand, I had no doubt that there was a dead man in 3406. The small hope I mentioned was not that death would go away from us, but that the dead man might not be Geoffrey Hammond. Let it be a friend of Hammond’s, his male secretary, anyone but Hammond. That wasn’t because I had any affection or personal regard for Hammond. In my book he was an arrogant sonofabitch. But a dead Geoffrey Hammond would bring the news media from all around the world cascading down on us; the smooth routines of the hotel would be disrupted. On the way up to thirty-four in the elevator with Chambrun I was ticking off on my fingers the number of events scheduled for that day in the hotel. There were to be five special dinners held in five of our very special private dining rooms; a big blowout by the Parker Foundation to be held in the grand ballroom; an all-day session in the executive suite for the top brass of a big multinational corporation, oil the main topic of discussion. And it went on and on, from a fashion show to a photography exhibit. Shout the news of Geoffrey Hammond’s death and every one of these events would be in some way dislocated.

And Geoffrey Hammond was dead. Worse than just being dead from natural causes, he had been violently executed.

Jerry Dodd had beaten us to thirty-four. He is a wiry, dark, intense little man who always seems to be angry. He had been an FBI agent before Chambrun recruited him to the top security job in the Beaumont. He knows his job and is better at it than most people ever get to be.

Jerry opened the door of 3406 to us, and the look he gave Chambrun told us all we needed to know. The news was bad.

“Not pretty,” Jerry said.

“Hammond?” Chambrun asked.

“In what you might say was the flesh,” Jerry said. “And it wasn’t a heart attack, Mr. Chambrun.”

“What, then?”

“Better see for yourself,” Jerry said.

No two suites in the Beaumont are decorated and furnished alike. It was no accident that 3406 had been assigned to Hammond. There were British hunting prints on the walls, panels consisting of brilliantly painted coats of arms of famous British families. The furniture was heavy and solid enough to have accommodated knights in armor.

My first look at the way it now was didn’t instantly suggest violence. Except that one heavy armchair had fallen over backwards and that behind it, covered by a sheet, must be the body of a dead man, the place looked in order.

“Room-service waiter came for the breakfast wagon and found him,” Jerry said.

The wagon was there. It had been set up in front of the tipped-over armchair. A straight-backed chair had faced the armchair.

“He had company,” Chambrun said.

Jerry nodded. “Service for two. Juice, eggs and bacon, toast and coffee. Two of everything.”

“How?” Chambrun asked.

“Brace yourself,” Jerry said.

He bent down and pulled back the sheet. I remember turning away, wondering where the bathroom was. I thought I was going to be sick.