Random Killer (18 page)

“Not that I know of. She tried to arrange a meeting with President Sadat of Egypt on one of his visits here, but he smelled it out as a publicity gimmick—which it was—and regretted that he couldn’t fit a meeting into his busy schedule.”

Then I explained to her why I was asking about the Middle East. It was Hammond’s special interest. He undoubtedly had enemies there. His breakfast guest could have been someone from there. I was looking for some connection between that possible breakfast guest and Joanna.

Nora shook her head. “It just doesn’t fit in with anything I know about her, Mark.”

So much for that particular straw.

My telephone began to ring and I picked up the extension, which was a wall-set in the kitchenette. It was Betsy Ruysdale.

“Alvin Parker has come up with something he thinks Chambrun or Hardy ought to know, but I can’t locate either of them.”

I told her where Hardy was.

“Not now he isn’t,” Ruysdale said. “Both he and Chambrun have left the hotel.”

“Left?” For Chambrun to leave the Beaumont was an event.

“They’ve gone to talk to Guido Maroni’s wife,” she said. “The missing waiter. I suggested to Parker that he talk to you.”

“Where is he?”

“In his suite on the twelfth floor. Twelve nineteen. Shall I call him and tell him you’re on your way? After all, you’re our expert listener.”

“Hear everything, understand nothing,” I said. “Sure, call him.”

I went along the corridor to the elevators. I suddenly had the uncomfortable feeling that someone might be watching me. My own private paranoia, I thought.

The neat little executive director of the Parker Foundation was waiting for me in 1219. He was dressed as if he was going to a formal luncheon. I guessed he was never caught with his image down.

“It’s hard to believe,” he said, “but I’ve remembered something about two years ago that nobody else seems to have mentioned.

“At High Crest?”

“Of course—yes. I had forgotten it in all of the—the horror here. But it seems strange to me that Miss Coyle, or Mr. Dobler, or some of the people at High Crest haven’t mentioned it. Of course, maybe they have and nobody has bothered to mention it to me.”

“I can’t answer that unless you tell me what it is,” I said.

He took a neatly folded handkerchief out of his pocket and blotted at the little beads of sweat on his upper lip and his forehead. He seemed to have trouble breathing.

“Has nobody mentioned that the night Hal Carpenter was murdered Joanna Fraser saw someone outside his cabin?” he asked.

I just stared at him. Surer than hell nobody had mentioned such a thing in my hearing. I could feel the hackles rising on the back of my neck.

“It wasn’t a secret at the time,” Parker said. “She went to the police with it. Why it hasn’t been brought up I can’t imagine.”

“Why you’ve only just remembered it is on the odd side,” I said.

He shook his head from side to side like a man suffering from guilt. “There was so much else—one thing after another. I had the Foundation ball on my mind, everyone frightened, almost hysterical. But after I left Mr. Chambrun’s office this morning I suddenly realized that nobody had mentioned what seemed to me to be an important fact.”

“So two years later this person she saw kills her and two other people?”

“I don’t know. But doesn’t it seem to you—?”

“Yes, it does,” I said. “You say she went to the police?”

“Yes. She couldn’t describe the person she saw, except that it was a man. The police weren’t, I think, particularly interested. They were already convinced about Sharon Dain. There were over three hundred guests at High Crest. There wasn’t anything unusual about someone wandering around the cabin area, even late at night. Ms. Fraser was asked to keep an eye open—a hundred and fifty male guests at least—for someone she might recognize. She said, from the beginning, that she wouldn’t know him if she came face to face with him. She was trying to make the point—she told me—that there was someone else hanging around Carpenter’s cabin the night of the murder. The police should know that, should look for someone else besides Sharon Dain.”

“She told you?”

“I—I was heading up the defense committee for Sharon Dain,” Parker said. “She came to me with five hundred dollars. She was angry because the police had brushed what she had to tell them under the rug. I think that’s why she contributed. It never came up again, you know—all through the trial. Max Steiner must have felt it wasn’t worth using.”

The thought I had was too farfetched to make sense. Two years ago Joanna Fraser sees someone hanging around Carpenter’s cabin the night of his murder. It’s night. She can’t identify him. Just someone. Then, two years later, in the Beaumont, she suddenly can identify him, lets him know that, and he wraps a strand of wire around her neck. Far out, and yet I couldn’t shake it.

I used Parker’s phone to call Max Steiner. He was in court, or out to lunch, or something. His office simply said he was not there and they couldn’t say when he was expected. I left a message for him to call me back, and then I got the switchboard to put through a person-to-person call to Jack Galt at High Crest. It would be about eleven o’clock in the morning out there. I got lucky.

“What’s new?” Galt asked me.

I told him we were still floundering, but why hadn’t he told me that Joanna Fraser had seen someone the night of Carpenter’s murder?

“It was a nothing,” he said.

“Some nothing! She’s dead and it just might tie in.”

“Look, Mark, I chased that down from top to bottom at the time,” the detective said. “Along with other similar leads. A dozen people thought they saw someone wandering around that night. And there
were
people, going from one cabin to another. Some of them were identified, came forward, told us what they were doing. It checked out. Whoever it was Joanna Fraser saw, it could have been one of those. I got a police artist to try to draw a picture of the man she said she saw. She didn’t have anything to offer; no face, nothing outstanding like very tall, or very short. Nothing for the artist to even start a mock-up. The police wrote it off. I wrote it off. She saw someone, and there were people around, but what she had was valueless.”

“Max Steiner didn’t buy it either?”

“There wasn’t anything to use,” Galt said. “He knew that people had been wandering around in the cabin area, but someone who couldn’t be identified, couldn’t be described, wasn’t of any value, even if he was seen by an important lady.”

“If she couldn’t describe him then, it doesn’t seem likely she would suddenly recognize him two years later,” I said.

“I’d say no way,” Galt said. “Steiner did use the fact that other people had been seen in the cabin area, but he didn’t mention that Joanna Fraser had seen someone because it was just an echo of what other people—with more details—had seen. I didn’t mention it to you because I’d long ago erased it from my mind as having any bearing on the case.”

“Even though she’d just been strangled by the same guy who killed out there, the guy she may have seen?”

“Mark, it’s a meaningless coincidence. Remember something. Nobody who was at High Crest the night Carpenter was murdered was allowed to leave. Not for three days. Joanna Fraser had three days in which to circulate, to look for her night prowler. In fact, the police urged her to do just that. She came up empty. It was such a thoroughly useless fact that I just plain forgot about it.”

I couldn’t let it go. “Who says the person who murdered Carpenter was a guest at High Crest?” I asked. “Who says he had to be hanging around for three days to be identified by someone? Who says he couldn’t have come in off the road after dark, knocked off his man, and taken a powder? Al Ziegler’s mysterious client who even Ziegler couldn’t identify?”

“You don’t know that for a fact—about Ziegler’s client,” Galt said. I thought he sounded just a little hooked. “That’s something dreamed up back there in Chambrun country.”

“It’s as good as anything we have to go on,” I said.

“I can dig up the police record on what Joanna said she saw,” Galt said. “As I remember she said she saw a man, his back turned to her, looking in Carpenter’s window. I don’t think it’s any more than that. Surely the Coyle girl or her husband would remember what Joanna Fraser had to say about it at that time.”

“You’re one step ahead of me,” I said. “But don’t you wonder why neither of them has thought it worth mentioning up to now?”

“Same reason I didn’t,” Galt said. “It was a nothing then, and I’m afraid you’re going to find it’s a nothing now.”

Parker seemed relieved to hear that other people had failed to remember the incident. I guess it made him feel less guilty. I headed back down to the second floor and Nora.

She looked at me, wide eyed, when I laid it on the line for her. “But of course!” she said.

“Of course what? Of course it wasn’t worth mentioning?”

“It was two years ago, Mark!”

“But everything connected with that time must have seemed important after she was killed the same way Carpenter was,” I said. “She must have talked to you about it. She must have talked to Dobler about it. Neither of you thought it was worth mentioning?”

“I don’t know about Colin,” she said. “But I swear I just didn’t think about it. It turned out to have no importance at the time. I’ve been asked so many questions about so many other things the last two days.”

I thought she was near to tears.

“Tell me everything about what Joanna saw and thought back there at High Crest.” I guided her over to the couch and sat beside her, my arm around her shoulders. To hell with the cop who sat stolidly on the chair by the front door.

“Two of the women in Joanna’s liberation group had one of the cabins there at High Crest,” Nora said. “Joanna went to visit with them that night. I don’t remember any particular reason why. Maybe just to have a drink and socialize. The cabin where her friends were was a couple of hundred yards from the main building where she and I were housed. Sometime after midnight she walked back. I was already in bed and she didn’t disturb me. I could hear her moving around in the next room. It wasn’t too easy to sleep. The piano was still going strong in the main hall, people singing.” I could feel Nora’s body shudder. “Then there was this crazy screaming outside somewhere. I could hear people running out to whoever was making the commotion. It was Sharon Dain, but we didn’t know that till later. You remember her story? She’d been knocked unconscious. When she came to she’d found Carpenter, strangled with picture wire.

“Well, we couldn’t go calmly to sleep with all that clamor outside. Joanna and I both got dressed and joined other people in the big room. That’s when we heard what it was, everybody talking at once. The police came in about fifteen minutes. Mike Chandler was trying to keep everyone away from where it had happened.”

“And Joanna told them she’d seen somebody at the cabin?”

“Not then. She didn’t mention anything about it then.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t think she realized she’d seen anything then. It wasn’t until the next morning. Everybody went to gawk at the cabin where it had happened. You know, there were state police, photographers, God knows who else. When we saw which cabin it was, Joanna grabbed my arm and said, ‘Would you believe I saw someone peering in the window of that place on my way home last night?’ That’s when she went to the state police.”

“She hadn’t mentioned it to you the night before?”

“No reason to, before we heard the screaming. No reason to afterward until she saw what cabin it was where Carpenter and Sharon Dain were living. She didn’t connect the two things until they connected themselves—if you see what I mean.”

“How did she describe what she saw?”

“She said a man was standing close to the window, arms spread out as though he was holding onto the window frame, his back to her. She stood watching him for a moment, and then he walked away, around the corner of the cabin toward the front door. That was all. She never saw his face.”

“It was dark?”

“There was moonlight, but he never turned her way.”

“And the troopers thought that wasn’t worth following up?”

“They were pretty cynical about it, Mark. And other people had seen people wandering around. It wasn’t any secret that Carpenter was always playing sex games with some woman or other. A Peeping Tom they said of Joanna’s man, trying to get a look at what was cooking inside. They’d already decided that Sharon Dain was it.”

“Joanna was angry about it?”

“No. She shrugged it off. She’d done her duty, told what she’d seen. As the gossip got really loud I think she decided the police were probably right—she’d seen a Peeping Tom.”

“Alvin Parker says she was angry about it when she gave him money for the defense fund.”

“She wasn’t angry about her story being ignored,” Nora said, “but she was contemptuous of the police. She felt they’d settled on Sharon Dain without looking anywhere else. ‘Typical male chauvinist pigs,’ she called them.” Nora laughed. “A common phrase in the liberation movement. Mr. Parker probably mistook it for anger.”

“You must have talked about it afterward,” I said. “No description of the man she saw that stood out at all?”

“Mark, it was January,” she said. “Bitter cold, probably below zero. Everybody at High Crest wore the same kind of clothing—ski pants, boots, parkas with hoods to keep your ears from freezing. Your face would be hidden unless you were looking straight at someone. That kind of winter protection was almost like a uniform out there.”

Like the cowboy regalia they were wearing out there now, in summer, I thought.

“Joanna must have tried hard to remember something distinctive about the man she saw.”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘tried hard,’ Mark. The police asked her. She told them what she’d seen—a man, bundled up, parka hood over his head, standing with his face right against Carpenter’s window. There wasn’t anything else to remember, so she wasn’t trying hard.” Nora twisted in my arm and looked up at me. “At the time, Mark, it had just happened! She didn’t have to dredge something up out of the past, something she might have forgotten. It was all right then, a fresh experience.”