Random Killer (12 page)

“Joanna Frazer turned her down,” I said. “The thinking in New York is that that’s why this crazy killer went after her.”

“Maybe all he knew about was the turndown,” Wilson said. “Joanna Fraser had the kind of bread Anonymous put up. She may not have wanted to support a murderess publicly, but privately it could have been her kind of cause. Maybe it’s too bad for her she kept it a secret.”

It certainly wasn’t a notion that had occurred to me before. I wondered if Nora Coyle had been holding out on me, and if so, why? It didn’t change my goal, though. I told Wilson we were looking for some man in Sharon Dain’s past who was getting revenge for what had been done to her.

“I can’t help you there,” he said. “I never heard of the girl until that New Year’s week out here. But Max Steiner hired a supposedly very competent private investigator named Galt who, I understand, did an in-depth study of her past, looking for anything that would help.”

Mike Chandler was at my elbow, putting down my juice, eggs, and toast in front of me.

“Galt’s on his way from Hollywood to see you, Mark,” he said. “He phoned last night after you’d turned in. Max Steiner asked him to cooperate with you. He should be here by the time you get back from seeing Sharon at the prison.”

The eggs were just to my liking. I kept looking around for Nikki, who had promised me the guest list from two years back to take on my trip. Mike Chandler had joined us at the table with his coffee.

“Your wife doesn’t get up with these early birds?” I asked.

“Nikki? First one up. She’s overseeing the lunch we take on our trail ride.” Mike laughed. “Caviar among the mountain goats. We take the comforts of life very seriously at High Crest.” Then he patted at the pocket of his fancy shirt. “I almost forgot,” he said. “She gave me something for you.” It was the list I wanted.

I had gone down in the class of my transportation. It was a four-wheel-drive Scout that would have been left far behind by Mike Chandler’s Rolls. My driver was a high school boy about seventeen, who told me this was his first summer job at High Crest. He hadn’t been dry behind the ears when Hal Carpenter was murdered and knew nothing about the case except for some unreliable gossip he’d heard around the bunkhouse. After a few minutes of gaping at the unbelievable beauty of the sun-drenched mountains I started to study the list Nikki Chandler had left for me. It was a machine-duplicated copy of the original, which must have gone to the police. It was smeared a little in some places. There must have been three hundred and fifty names on it.

It didn’t do me much good. There were, of course, names that connected. Joanna Fraser was there, and Nora Coyle, and Sharon Dain herself, Lance Wilson and maybe a dozen other movie names I recognized, and Sandra Potter, the girl reporter I was supposed to contact, and Alvin Parker. There was one name, Charles Davis from Las Vegas, which had a question mark written after it in pencil. I’d have to ask Nikki what that meant. Some of the gals in the convention group had names in the world of women’s lib. I’d actually seen a couple of them around the Beaumont in the past few years. I put check marks after them because they just might be worth a further look. But put them all together and they didn’t spell “mother.”

My driver wasn’t Mike Chandler, but he drove a nice, steady run, and at about twenty minutes to nine the grey stone walls of the prison loomed up ahead of us. I was going to make my appointment on time.

I thought afterward that it was a good thing I had. The authorities were anything but friendly. I think they’d have used any excuse to turn me around and tell me to go peddle my papers. The prison guard who took me down a long, cold corridor to what I assumed was some kind of interrogation room, probably bugged, looked at me as though he’d caught me driving without a license and with some pot stashed away in my glove compartment.

“How much time do I have?” I asked him, as he ushered me into a small square space with white-washed walls, a small table, and two straight-backed kitchen chairs.

“Half an hour,” he said, and slammed the door on me.

I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was locked in and might never get out. I think I was a little stir-crazy within thirty seconds.

It was ten minutes after nine when a woman jailer ushered Sharon Dain into my presence. I wondered if that ten-minute delay counted in my half hour.

None of the things anybody had told me about Sharon Dain was true that morning. This was no sex queen. There were no seductive false eyelashes or makeup; the grey prison clothes disguised what Mike Chandler had described as “built like you wouldn’t believe.” Dark hair was cut short. Narrowed dark eyes looked at me with a kind of hostility that actually hurt. You sensed how desperately alone she was.

“Who are you and what the hell do you want?” she asked. Her voice was harsh, almost as if she hadn’t used it for a long time and had to force it to work.

I told her my name. I told her the New York police had arranged for this interview. Then I realized she had no idea why the New York police could be interested in her, and I told her what had happened at the Beaumont.

“Sweet Jesus!” she said.

I offered her a cigarette and she almost grabbed the whole pack. Her hands were shaking. I held my lighter for her and she dragged smoke down into the bottom of the well. Then she sat down in one of the chairs, rigid.

“One thing is for certain, Haskell,” she said. “They don’t give you a furlough from this joint. I sure as hell didn’t kill anyone in your hotel. What am I supposed to be able to do for you?”

“Maybe I’m the one who can do something for you,” I said. “Max Steiner still believes you didn’t kill Hal Carpenter. Now, after what’s happened in New York, other people are beginning to wonder.”

“You mean there’s some chance I might—?”

“A chance. A good chance. But we need help.”

“ ‘We’? What’s in it for you, Haskell?”

“To keep someone else from getting killed, particularly in the Beaumont.”

She turned her head and looked around the upper molding of the white-washed walls. “You know this goddamned room is probably bugged,” she said. “You can’t go to the john in this cave without someone watching, listening.”

“Can’t be helped,” I said. “Try to listen to me, Sharon, and think while you’re listening. In New York they think there’s a pattern that goes something like this: A man who loved you, or wanted you so badly he was ready to kill Carpenter for the way he was abusing you. Then you get hooked for it. He doesn’t want to turn himself in, naturally, but he doesn’t mean for you to be convicted. He puts up the money for your defense.”

Her sudden laugh was bitter. “Mr. Anonymous? I tell you something, Haskell. I’ve been surrounded by men ever since I was fourteen years old. But I never knew one who’d put up two hundred thousand bucks for me.”

“Let me finish,” I said. “This man waits for your trial to be over; he waits for the appeals, down to the very last one, which was denied a month ago. He can’t save you, but he’s crazy enough to set out to punish the people who wouldn’t help, or perhaps failed you. We don’t think he’s through.”

“He’s not doing me any good, whoever he is,” she said.

“He’s got to be stopped, Sharon. Two people already dead, and maybe more to come.”

She gave me a look that made me uneasy, as if she was trying to read something very private about me. I had no idea what it might be.

“I don’t know how to help you,” she said. “When I got out to Hollywood as a teen-age kid, I believed what I’d heard—that the way to a career in the movies was to sleep with the right people. At first what I got were extra players and stage hands, the bottom-of-the-drawer agents and studio executives. Oh, I got one or two screen tests but nobody took any trouble with them. I guess my guys were the go-no-place people in the business. The film business, I mean. Because I suddenly had a business of my own.” She gave me a bitter little smile. “I found I had a special talent for listening to men who had big troubles. The little mother of all the world! But someone who would put up almost a quarter of a million bucks to help me out of a jam!” She shook her head slowly from side to side. “Could I have been comforting a gold mine and didn’t know it?”

“How did you get involved with Harold Carpenter?” I asked her.

She smiled again, that bitter little smile. “My usual run of good luck,” she said. “I was hanging around a bar in L.A., looking for something promising to turn up. This handsome guy comes in, fancy sports clothes, smelling of money, I thought. He slides down the bar to where I am, offers to buy me a drink. The usual pickup.” She dropped her cigarette on the floor and stamped it out. “Don’t give me the critical eye, Haskell. I’m a professional hooker and I don’t care who knows it. It wouldn’t matter now, would it? After two years ago everybody in the United States knows it.”

“So your pickup was Carpenter?” I said.

She nodded. “I went back to his hotel room with him. Different men have different tastes. Some don’t want to talk at all. Some like to talk sex to get them to the ready. Carpenter wanted to know what it was like to be with two, maybe three, different guys a night. Suddenly he was ready. It—it was a little more athletic than I like it, but he didn’t ask my price. He just handed me two hundred bucks and said he’d be back the next day or the day after. That was double what I usually got, you understand. Maybe more than double most times. I was waiting for him.”

“And he came back?”

“The next night,” she said. “We didn’t have advance conversation this time. He beat me up a little, not bad, but I didn’t enjoy it. This time, however, he talked afterward. He asked me if I had a pimp I was working for. I didn’t. He asked me if I had a lover I went to bed with for pleasure. I told him I didn’t. Finally I was giving him my life story, which was that I was trying to screw my way into some kind of a career as an actress.

“ ‘Maybe I can help,’ he said. He told me about his job at High Crest, and how a lot of big shots in pictures came out there to ski and take lessons from him. He had some kind of Olympic medals, he said. He suggested I come out there with him and he might steer me to some guys who could do me some real good. So why not? I went. It sounded like maybe I’d hit something good.”

“But it didn’t turn out that way.”

“Oh, God, man, how it turned out!” That fierce anger she’d first shown me came back into her blazing dark eyes. “That bastard just wanted me out there in his isolated cabin so he could play his own game of beat the drum. I could scream my head off and nobody would hear or care. He warned me that if I complained to anyone or tried to run out on him, he’d catch up with me and make me wish I’d never been born.

“Oh, he showed me off around the cocktail lounge and the dining room. And there were a lot of famous people there, just as he’d promised, but if I started to have a conversation with anyone he was always right there.” She hesitated, and lifted the tips of her fingers to her face. “He —he never hit me in the face or marked me up where anyone would notice with my clothes on! That’s how he threatened me. If I tried to get away from him, I wouldn’t have a face left for any profession I might be in. Would you believe they’re still treating me for internal injuries in this crummy joint—after two years. Pieces of a broken rib dug a hole in my gut. That—that last night he was throwing, me around the cabin like a football and I—I passed out cold. When I came to, there he was, with his eyes popping out and his tongue black as a slab of licorice. You can’t begin to believe how glad I was. The sonofabitch! It never occurred to me I’d get nailed for it, because I hadn’t done it!”

I waited for her to go on, but she’d told it all. I handed her the list Nikki Chandler had supplied. “Is there anyone that you didn’t notice at High Crest on this list, who might date back to some other time in your life?”

She studied it quite intently. I think she realized I was on the level and that I might be able to help her. Finally she shook her head, slowly. “There were a lot of people there who might have helped my career as an actress, but Carpenter never gave me the chance to meet them, the bastard!”

“You’re positive?”

“Of course I’m positive! Wouldn’t I tell you? You think I look forward to staying in this dump for the next ten years? That’s how long it’ll be before I come up for parole.”

My prison guard friend appeared in the doorway. “Time’s up,” he said. He gave Sharon an odd look, as if he wondered how this piece of garbage could ever have been attractive to anyone in the hay. He’d certainly been listening.

I had drawn a blank, except for becoming convinced that Sharon Dain had been handed a bum rap. Nora Coyle had called her coarse and cheap; Mike Chandler had remarked on her distance from the right side of the tracks. Neither one of them had mentioned a strange kind of sympathetic sadness about her.

Well, whatever she was—little mother of all the world or a cheap whore—she didn’t deserve being shut away behind those grey stone walls for something she hadn’t done. I could see no reason why she should be covering for anyone. The very best years of her life as a woman, her thirties, were going to be spent shut away from the world unless we could come up with something. I found I wanted to help her. Maybe what I felt explained the “Defense Committee”—something intangible about her.

The drive back to High Crest was beautiful and uneventful. What Chambrun had called my “talent” as a listener hadn’t done me a damn bit of good so far. I’d listened to Mike Chandler, and Nikki, and Lance Wilson, and Sharon Dain, and I might as well have stayed back in New York making a sneaky pass at Nora Coyle. I’d developed a pretty clear picture of Hal Carpenter, a sadistic monster who’d provided a small army of people with motives for choking off his life with a length of picture wire. But the people at High Crest who’d had motives had not been in New York yesterday. The fog in which a murderer had been hidden for two years simply wouldn’t clear away.

There were two people left for me to see, Jack Galt, the private eye, and Sandy Potter, the newspaper gal. Galt was waiting for me back at High Crest when my teen-age car jockey got me back there.