Random Killer (10 page)

“Right now I’m stone deaf,” I said.

Chambrun gave me his patient-parent look. “Mark, we are looking for someone else beside Sharon Dain who may have killed Carpenter. Carpenter was strangled with picture wire, and two people here have been hit the same way. It can’t be Sharon Dain who is at work here. So it is not improbable that it’s the same person, same method. So who is he, and what was his motive for killing Carpenter in the first place? Still deaf?”

“There’s still a whirring noise,” I said. “If Galt and this girl reporter couldn’t find that answer two years ago, how do you expect me, following a cold trail—”

“Because now we know more than they did,” Chambrun said.

“We do?”

“Snap out of it, Mark,” Chambrun said, no longer patient. “Two years ago they played with the idea that Sharon Dain was innocent. Steiner believed she was, Galt and the girl reporter worked on that premise. Someone had it in for Carpenter, got into the cabin where Sharon Dain was unconscious from a beating. Like here, it was someone Carpenter didn’t fear. He turned his back and got strangled. Motive? Two years ago it could have been a hundred different things. They didn’t have an idea who it was, so they couldn’t begin to guess who had it in for Carpenter or why. Now we can make a good guess.”

“I’m glad you can,” I said. “I don’t see—”

“There’s no time to suggest that you
think,”
Chambrun said. “The killer cared for Sharon Dain, had his eye on her at least, and killed Carpenter for the way he treated her. He waits for the trial and all the appeals to be over and then, still caring for the girl, he sets out to knock off people who failed her. The same motive, the same psychotic driving force, could fit all three cases. So you’re looking for some boyfriend out of Sharon Dain’s past, or someone who was trying to take her away from Carpenter two years ago. Sharon Dain may tell you, she may not. I have a hunch you’re looking for a very rich man. Could be a movie star, someone she knew in Hollywood.”

“You think the murderer may be the mysterious person who put up the money for Steiner’s fee?” I asked.

“Good boy,” Chambrun said. “I was beginning to be concerned about you.”

I have never enjoyed flying. If something goes wrong with a car you’re driving you can get out and walk. It’s childish, but I don’t feel comfortable in the air. There was to be a stopover in Chicago, and then on to Denver. High Crest, I’d been told, was about thirty miles from the airport there.

Chambrun’s last word to me was a suggestion that I shouldn’t try to invent answers till I had some facts. I was to sleep. That was an order! One I couldn’t obey.

I had a couple of drinks on the way to Chicago, a couple in the airport there, and a couple more on the way to Denver. I was feeling no pain when I got off the plane at Denver and looked around for someone who might be there to meet me. The airport clocks said a quarter to eleven, but it was a quarter to one my time and I was ready to hit the sack anywhere.

A tall, lean man wearing blue jeans, cowboy boots, Stetson, and a gaudy shirt walked up to me. He had a neatly trimmed red beard and pleasant blue eyes with a mass of crow’s-feet at their corners.

“Mr. Haskell?” he asked. “I’m Mike Chandler, the manager at High Crest.”

“How did you spot me?”

He grinned. “You looked lost,” he said. “Let me take your bag.”

He led me out into a parking lot and to, of all things, a Rolls-Royce station wagon.

“Take us about thirty minutes,” he said as we pulled out of the lot.

I didn’t say anything for a few minutes, and then I said, “With you driving.”

He grinned, without looking at me. “Too fast for you? We learn to cover distances in a hurry out here.”

“I left my parachute in the plane,” I said.

He laughed, but he didn’t ease up any.

“I take it this is a slow season for you,” I said, to make conversation.

“Hell, no,” he said. “We turn to dude ranching in the summertime. Horses, trail riding, camping trips. We’re bursting at the seams with customers. I wouldn’t have had a place for you if Alvin Parker hadn’t insisted.”

I was suddenly conscious of the air. We don’t get to breath anything like it in my part of the world. Chandler took a corner like you wouldn’t believe. We were climbing. It was a beautiful night, full moon, a million stars. On a straightaway Chandler gave me a sidelong glance.

“I’m not sure I’m exactly happy about your being here, Mr. Haskell,” he said.

“Opening up old wounds?”

“It’s not good for business,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve got some people to talk to. Your guests won’t know I’m alive. Of course, you’re one of the people I need to talk to. Do you know why it’s opened up again?”

“Mr. Parker told me. It’s crazy, you know.”

“I know. Which side were you on two years ago?”

“Side?”

“The prosecution or the defense?”

“Man, you’re involved with running a hotel, I understand,” Chandler said. “You know you don’t take sides. The customer is always right. ‘Yes, sir! You’re absolutely right!’ And just the reverse to the next one.”

“But which side were you really on?” I persisted.

He seemed to push down on the gas pedal. We were doing eighty, going uphill and around curves. Indianapolis lost a great competitor in this cowboy.

“There are things that sometimes make you feel two ways,” he said. He fished a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. I wished he’d keep both hands on the wheel. I held my lighter for him. He laughed. “Fingertip control,” he said. And the sonofabitch took everything off the wheel but one finger. Then he stopped playing games and went back to my question. “Hal Carpenter was not my favorite man,” he said. “He made trouble for me, but he also attracted special customers I couldn’t afford to lose. He was brilliant on skis, and just as brilliant as a teacher. Lot of the big male stars in Hollywood came here on account of him and what he could teach them about the sport. Those were the customers I couldn’t afford to lose. They came, and they sent their friends—because of Hal. Women? That was another story.”

“Oh?”

“He attracted them, like a moth to a night-light. There was talk about his technique. He liked to play rough. Some women enjoy that. Some of them ran away screaming after a taste of it. It was those who gave me trouble.” Chandler was suddenly gripping the wheel as if he was driving a truck, his mouth a thin, straight line under the red beard.

“So when it happened you figured he’d got what was coming to him?”

Chandler nodded. “And that spelled woman to me,” he said. “The picture-wire deal was the way a woman might have gone about it, I thought. Carpenter could have taken on Muhammad Ali in his prime and done pretty well. He wouldn’t have let an angry man get behind him. So, Sharon Dain was there with him, he’d been beating the hell out of her for a couple of weeks. She may have liked it at first. Maybe she still liked it, and he was about to give her the gate. But it had to be her.”

“The cops had no doubts.”

“None. Neither did I.
Do
I. But—well, I gave a hundred bucks to Mr. Parker’s defense committee.”

“To stay on his good side?”

“Not exactly. I felt Sharon had been driven to it and was entitled to help.” Chandler’s laugh was mirthless. “She’d solved a problem for me. I was just about at the end of my rope with Carpenter.”

“What is she like—Sharon Dain?”

We had reached a high spot on the winding road we were traveling. Below us was a deep valley, silver in the moonlight. Across the valley, at about the same height we were at on this side, were what looked like a thousand lights.

Chandler gestured. “High Crest,” he said.

“Looks like a city!” I said.

“Small town,” he said.

It was going to be like a roller-coaster ride, down into the valley and then up again. My stomach did a roller-coaster flip-flop as we started down. Chandler seemed to increase speed rather than reducing it.

“Women, women, women,” he said.

Glancing at him I thought he probably did all right with the girls himself. He was lean, hard, dashing in a kind of way. He must be constantly surrounded by them at his High Crest resort. I wondered if Harold Carpenter had been a kind of rival.

“I see ’em in all shapes and sizes and stations of life at High Crest,” he said. The tires on the Rolls screeched a little as we took a hairpin right, headed down. “They have to have money, or their men have to have money, if they come to High Crest. But they’re a special breed. They’ve either made it big themselves, probably in films, or they’ve made men who’ve made it. It isn’t high society, like you have back in, say, Newport. They’re mostly at High Crest because they’re good in somebody’s bed. Most of them are ornaments to some male ego.”

“Strange place for Joanna Fraser to have held a convention of women libbers,” I said.

Chandler laughed. “Those gals created quite a problem,” he said. “They came without men, and they damn near created a riot going after the men who were there and already had women with them. They talked a great ball game about not being ‘sex objects,’ but they sure had an appetite for it after they got through telling you their slogans.”

“Sharon Dain?” I suggested again.

“Carpenter came to me that January,” Chandler said, “and told me he was bringing his own woman to High Crest for a while. We’ve got maybe a hundred cabins scattered around the main complex of buildings, and Carpenter had the use of one of them in the skiing season. This woman he was bringing would stay there with him. I didn’t object. Most of the cabins are occupied by people who haven’t been sanctified by the Pope. Nobody bothers these days to sign ‘Mr. and Mrs.’ People living together, not married, is the name of the game. They even have children, not married, and the gossip columnists write about it and nobody cares. Not like when I was a kid and you took a girl to a hotel, signed ‘Mr. and Mrs.,’ and tried not to look at the room clerk so you wouldn’t see his cynical smile. No, I didn’t object to Carpenter’s having a woman in his cabin. It might keep him from making passes at other women who belonged to other men.”

“So Sharon Dain was the woman Carpenter brought to his cabin,” I said. I wondered if Chandler just wandered in his conversation by habit, or if he was deliberately avoiding the subject of Sharon Dain.

We were racing across the floor of the valley, with High Crest almost directly above us, looking like something perched on top of a skyscraper.

“Yeah, she was the one,” Chandler said. “She wasn’t usual. I mean, a lot of the women who come to High Crest in the skiing season don’t ski. But they dress for it. Pants, turtlenecks, wool toques, boots. Expensive, you understand, but winter sports. Sharon didn’t even pretend she was there for the skiing. Most of the time she looked like an actress who had been dressed by a costume designer for some porno movie. One zip of her zipper and she’d be ready for action. I suspect that look had gotten her wherever she was in films, which wasn’t very far. A man couldn’t look at her and think about the weather, or the skiing surface, or the downhill slope. All you could think about was taking her someplace and letting her demonstrate what she was obviously good at.”

“Pretty?” I asked.

“In an artificial way. False eyelashes, makeup. But built like you wouldn’t believe.”

“So, did she solve your problems with Carpenter?”

“Not really. He was a guy who was designed to preside over a harem. My wife called him ‘the golden gooser.’ ”

I hadn’t heard about a wife before. We were charging up a mountain at what seemed to me a reckless speed.

“Back in New York they’re wondering if Sharon had some other boyfriend, maybe from her past, who resented Carpenter and decided to do him in,” I said.

“She probably had dozens of them,” Chandler said, tight-lipped again. “Boyfriends were her stock in trade. But there was no one here that January I could point a finger at. Oh, there are men who come here with a woman one season, and a different one the next season. And the first woman is here with some other dude. Everyone acts like strangers. Sharon had never been here before, so there was no way I could tell if there was someone here then who’d been involved with her past. Could have been, but I had no way of knowing.” He took a corner so fast I shut my eyes. “Sharon was attractive, alluring even, but you could tell she came from way over on the wrong side of the tracks.”

There were lights everywhere, in the windows of the buildings, outside the front doors, hanging from poles in a sort of compound surrounded by cottages, in a huge main building, and in little shops where they apparently sold western clothes, boots, tack for western riders. I imagined all these were turned into ski shops in the wintertime.

“How many people can you take care of here?” I asked Chandler, as he pulled up outside the main building.

He leaned back, flexing his fingers. Maybe he wasn’t as relaxed as he looked, driving that crazy way. “People doubled up, and mostly they do,” he said, “about three hundred and fifty. Cabins will take more than two if someone doesn’t mind sleeping on the couch. When there’s a ski jump in the winter season, we have squeezed in over four hundred.”

Windows to the main house were open on this cool June night and I could hear a low murmur of voices and laughter against a background of someone giving a very good imitation of the late Fats Waller on a piano. “Ain’t misbehavin’—I’m savin’ my love for you.”

“Party?” I asked.

“Every night,” he said. “Just sitting around. Freddy Lukes can keep ’em occupied as long as we want to sell booze.”

“Lukes?”

“Black piano player,” Chandler said.

He carried my bag into a huge, high-ceilinged room, dimly lit. There were two enormous fireplaces at either end of the room with low fires burning, for cheer not heat. Couples were draped around on couches, on the floor. There was a bar at one side of the room, handled by two white-coated bartenders. Opposite, on a little raised platform, was an upright piano. The black man playing was lighted by a little pinspot over his head. He wore black glasses even in the semidarkness. He broke into “Honeysuckle Rose,” one of Fats Waller’s best, as we came in.