Random Killer (13 page)

The detectives I knew back in New York dressed in sober business suits. I suppose, when they went under cover, they changed their appearances like chameleons to fit the world into which they moved. In the Beaumont, my world, they always reminded me of undertakers’ assistants.

Jack Galt was something else—slim, blond, bright eyed and gaudy. He wore plain sports slacks, white buck shoes, a gold and green shirt. A white linen sports jacket was draped over the back of a chair in the dining area where I found him. He was drinking coffee laced with brandy, which the barboy had brought him in a little glass carafe. He was a chain smoker and he’d been waiting for me for at least three butts, snuffed out in an ashtray on the table. He’d been briefed by Max Steiner, his employer at the time of Carpenter’s murder, and we didn’t have to go into any preliminaries.

“If Steiner had told me why you were coming before you’d started,” he said, “I could have saved you the trip. I spent six months, while the trail was still hot, looking for what you’re looking for. Nothing, dead end, zilch.”

I sat down, ordered coffee.

“How did you find the lady?” Galt asked.

“Never having seen her before I can only guess how much she’s changed,” I said.

“No beauty parlors out there,” Galt said.

“Nor could she make any guess about who paid her bills, Steiner’s and yours, and whatever else.”

Galt lit a fresh cigarette and sniffed at his coffee. “Like I said, I spent six months looking for him,” he said. “Not a clue. Quite a trail, though. Little Miss Roundheels must have slept with an army of Hollywood dudes. Always looking for someone who had enough drag to give her alleged career a boost. Actress! From all accounts she had no great gifts in that direction. But what she did do well—” Gale shrugged. “I never found a sign that she ever had a permanent lover, just a long string of one-night stands that stretched out into the wild blue yonder. I don’t mean she never repeated with the same customer. You ever had dealings with a professional prostitute, Haskell?”

“No business dealings,” I said. I knew the call girls at the Beaumont but I’d never investigated their charms.

“The good ones are surrogate lovers,” Gale said. “Stand-ins for someone lost, someone never found. Those last two weeks with Hal Carpenter were the nearest thing to something permanent I ever found in her history.”

“And that was because she was afraid to run out on him,” I said.

“The more I found out about Hal Carpenter,” Galt said, his voice turning tough, “the more I wished I could have spent a little time alone with him. I’d have killed the sonofabitch myself; do the world a favor.”

Something was nagging at me and I remembered what it was, the list of names. I took it out of my pocket and showed it to Galt. He nodded.

“I checked out every name on that bloody list,” he said.

I pointed to the name with the question mark after it —Charles Davis of Las Vegas.

“The one phony on the list,” he said. “I put that question mark after his name. I was never able to locate a Charles Davis in Las Vegas. Common enough name. There are probably thousands of Charles Davises. But I couldn’t find this one.” He reached for a briefcase that was on the chair where he’d hung his white linen jacket. “Reams of notes on the whole damned case.” He shuffled a stack of notes written on yellow, legal-size paper. Finally he found what he was looking for. “Charles Davis,” he read from his notes. “One eleven Peace Street, Las Vegas, Nevada. There is no such address, by the way. I’ve got friends out there and no one ever heard of this guy. Mike and Nikki Chandler didn’t know him. His reservation was made through a travel agent in New York City, who didn’t know him either. Just a walk-in customer. He stayed here at High Crest three days, took some skiing lessons from Carpenter. He’d reserved a room for a week, but he left as soon as the cops were through questioning people after Carpenter’s murder.”

“Nothing fishy about him?”

“Not till much later, when I couldn’t find a Charles Davis who matched High Crest’s guest.”

“The cops didn’t spot the fact that he’d registered under a false name?”

Galt made an impatient gesture. “The cops had the case wrapped up in the first ten minutes—they thought. Sharon Dain was it. All they asked was if people had seen or heard anything. They weren’t looking for anyone else. They had their pigeon. Max Steiner believed the girl and he hired me to make the only proper investigation that was made.”

“And you believed her?” I asked.

“I was hired to believe her,” Galt said. “I came to believe her after a while.”

“This Davis. The Chandlers didn’t check him out before they let him sign in?”

“My God, you don’t have to show a birth certificate to register. Do they at your hotel?”

Damn near, I thought, thinking of Chambrun.

“Did this Davis have friends here, or make friends?” I asked.

“No one remembered that there was anyone obviously a friend. He chatted with a few people at the bar. Anyone you don’t know at High Crest you assume is in the movie business. This Davis never said so to anyone I could find, but a couple of people got the notion that he was in the art department of one of the big studios. It didn’t check out. I thought he might be connected with one of the big showcase places in Las Vegas. That didn’t check out either.”

“But you got a description of him?”

“I got a couple of dozen descriptions,” Galt said. “Almost everyone said ‘middle aged.’ Depending on how old you are yourself that means anything from forty to sixty. Dark, most of them said, except for one girl who’d persuaded him to buy her a drink, who swore he was as blond as I am. Everyone wears ski clothes out here in January, just the way they wear cowboy duds here this time of year. Nothing stood out about this guy. He wasn’t a physical cripple for sure. Carpenter didn’t teach beginners—unless they were pretty girls. You had to be in good physical shape to take lessons from him. So you have a dark, middle-aged man, who was in pretty good physical shape.” Galt frowned at his notes. “This Davis told the police he came to High Crest specifically to take lessons from Carpenter. He’d heard how great he was. The only person who might have told us anything about Davis was Hal Carpenter, who was dead.”

“Had you thought Davis might be the man who was paying the bills?” I asked.

“I’ve thought of everything there is to think of in the last eighteen months,” Galt said, “but I haven’t come up with a single, substantial, provable fact. I decided a while back that Davis was just an irritating red herring; some big shot who used a fake name to keep from being recognized.”

The barboy came over to the table. “There’s a long-distance phone call for you, Mr. Haskell,” he said. “You can take it in the office, just beyond the door there.”

It would be Chambrun, I thought, impatient for results. It was Betsy Ruysdale, sounding far away.

“Nothing of any consequence so far, luv,” I told her.

“You’re wanted back here, Mark,” she said. “It’s—it’s happened again.”

“What’s happened again?” It didn’t click at first.

“Another picture-wire job,” Ruysdale said.

“My God! Who?” I asked.

“A stranger to us, so far,” Ruysdale said. “Registered yesterday. Name of Charles Davis. Nobody here seems to know much about him.”

I was staring at the phone, not believing what I heard.

“Ruysdale, listen to me,” I said. “Would you believe I was just talking about a Charles Davis when your call came? He was here when Carpenter was murdered. Galt, the private eye Steiner hired, has never been able to track him down. Address he gave here was a phony.”

“One eleven Peace Street, Las Vegas,” Ruysdale said.

“Same phony address,” I said. “Same phony name.”

“You’d better get back here with what you’ve got on this man, Mark. Chambrun is climbing the walls.”

G
ALT FOUND IT JUST
as hard to believe my news as I had been to hear it from Ruysdale.

“The New York cops will have an advantage over me,” he said. “They’ll have his fingerprints. That will make a starting point I didn’t have. Let me know what they come up with, Haskell. I wasted half a year trying to identify that bastard.”

Getting underway wasn’t dead simple. The first flight I could get from Denver was at about five o’clock. That would be seven o’clock New York time. I wouldn’t get into Kennedy until shortly before midnight.

While I was waiting for the man in the office to confirm a reservation for me I got lucky. Sandy Potter found me. She was the girl reporter who’d been on my list of people to see. She wrote a sort of semigossip column for a syndicate, which appeared in most of the West Coast newspapers as
Sandra Says.
She was a breezy, uninhibited blond, wearing the in-style costume for High Crest—jeans, boots, man’s shirt, and a Stetson perched on top of her golden head. She introduced herself while the man in the office was on the phone to the airport in Denver. High Crest was pretty well deserted, almost everyone having ridden up into the hills to have “caviar with the mountain goats,” Mike Chandler’s gag.

She came down the hall with me and perched on the edge of my bunk while I packed my bag. She’d already told the man in the office not to bother about transportation for me. She’d drive me to the airport.

“You’ve been talking to Jack Galt,” she said.

I told her I had, and I brought her up to date on the latest news about Charles Davis. It was no secret. The media would be shouting it all over the country within the next hour. The picture-wire killer had struck for the fourth time.

She listened, frowning, and that frown made her look, somehow, like a very serious child.

“Murder isn’t usually my beat,” she said. “What well-known male star was seen in what famous restaurant or at what party with what glamorous lady? That’s my kind of stuff. But I happened to be here two years ago, and a follow-up now is logical for me.”

“Did you run across this fellow who called himself Davis?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Not to be aware of it,” she said. “There were several hundred people here, top of the skiing season. I trotted out here because of Joanna Fraser’s convention of liberated broads. Different from the usual. Worth a look and a listen. Then Hal Carpenter got his, and since I was on the scene my syndicate assigned me to the story.”

“But Charles Davis doesn’t ring a bell with you?”

“Maybe you don’t know what it’s like here at High Crest,” she said. “It’s about as informal as you can get. When you’re here, you’re one of the boys or one of the girls. Everyone talks to everyone. You don’t bother with formal introductions. I could have had a drink at the bar with this Davis without ever bothering to find out what his name was. Most of the people from Hollywood I know, at least by sight. But there were plenty of people strange to me I didn’t bother to find out about. Joanna Fraser’s women were my interest that week.”

“Until Carpenter was strangled.”

“Right. But like a good newspaperwoman I stayed close to the cops then. Sharon Dain was their only interest from the first ten minutes on, so I stayed with the Sharon Dain aspect of the case at first. Good, rich, gossip-column crud.”

“Later?”

“Later I had some doubts about her guilt,” Sandy said.

“Max Steiner help create those doubts?”

She shook her head. She tossed her Stetson on my bunk and fluffed out her golden hair. I had a feeling I’d like to see her out of pants and in something feminine.

“Steiner actually made me think the cops were right, at first,” she said. “When you hire Max Steiner to defend you, you “are most likely guilty. He gets you off with a lesser sentence. That’s his particular expertise.”

“But you changed your mind?”

“Not at first,” she said. “But I developed a healthy sympathy for Sharon as we began to learn what kind of guy Hal Carpenter had been. Then the cops kept saying that strangling a man with picture wire was a ‘woman’s method.’ That’s just plain hooey, Mark. I can’t imagine a woman thinking of doing it that way. Carpenter was an athlete, a very strong, agile man. A woman would have to be incredibly strong to slip a wire noose over his head and hold him still while he fought for his life. To plan it that way and think she could succeed just doesn’t make sense to me. Never has, once I’d thought about it. I had to think it was some kind of incredible hulk of a man—powerful, relentless. Maybe these others—like Joanna Fraser—were weaklings, but not Carpenter. He would have been free of that wire, in a woman’s hands, in seconds.”

“You should have passed that on to Max Steiner at the time,” I said.

“Oh, I did. And he agreed. You see, by then I’d decided that the cops had chosen the easy way out, and I was interesting myself in the defense committee. Steiner used my argument during the trial but the jury didn’t buy it.”

“You think Steiner fumbled the ball?”

“No,” Sandy said, with a kind of certainty. “I think he took the only road open to him. You have no idea what the climate was like out here that January. This is ‘Male Town,’ Mark. Hal Carpenter was a male here, king of the ski slopes. The cops were, of course, all male. The judge was a man. The jury had ten men and only two broads— the kind you knew, from just looking at them in the jury box with the men. Papa knows best. A lot of people resented the presence of Joanna Fraser and her people. You heard talk about ‘lesbians’ and ‘dikes.’ It was almost as if the authorities wanted to show those liberated females, demanding ‘equal rights,’ just what equal rights really were. They’d throw the book at Sharon; just, I must admit, as they’d have thrown the book at a man who’d murdered Prince Hal. Steiner had no choice but to plead guilty and claim self-defense and temporary insanity. But evidently a prostitute didn’t deserve any kind of break. If Carpenter had beat her up, and there was no question but that he had, she’d asked for it.”

“But, because you didn’t buy a woman using the wire method, you thought it had to be someone else—a physically powerful man?”

She nodded. “I hitched my wagon to Jack Galt about then,” she said. “He’s a good man at his job, Mark. He did a rundown on every single soul who was staying at High Crest at the time. The only blank he drew was this Charles Davis.” She hesitated a moment, and then asked me a very shrewd question. She was no dope, that girl. “A phony name, a phony address, a disappearing act just as quickly as he could manage it. The prime suspect, you’d say, since nobody else came up hot for Jack Galt. Will you tell me, Mark, why that man for whom we’ve been looking for almost two years suddenly registers in your hotel in New York under that same phony name, giving the same phony address? Wasn’t that a sure way for him to get himself caught?”