Random Killer (6 page)

“You’re suggesting Colin Dobler—?”

“Why not?” Bill said cheerfully. “I read statistics somewhere. Seventy-five percent of all homicides in the United States are the result of family quarrels!”

“So he killed Geoffrey Hammond first just to practice up?” I asked.

Bill grinned at me. “Man has to perfect his skills,” he said. “You catching up with Jerry Dodd? I haven’t been able to get him on the phone.”

“My next stop is sixteen,” I said.

“Tell him I’ll have extra men for him here any minute, but someone else will have to brief them on what they’re expected to do.”

They were expected to protect more than a thousand resident guests and God knows how many hundreds of in-and-outs from a strangler’s wire. But how?

For the first time in my experience Chambrun and Lieutenant Walter Hardy were at odds. Hardy, the methodical one, confronted with two murders, was proceeding as though they were routine. He was trying to build up a picture of the lives of the victims, their relationships with people, searching for a motive. By the time he was done there would be detailed dossiers on Geoffrey Hammond and Joanna Fraser, on their relatives, friends, business associates, rivals, on truths about them, rumors about them. When all these details were carefully collected, Hardy would sit down in front of them, like a jigsaw wizard, and put them together into a finished picture. Combine this with whatever tangible evidence the professionals could dig up and you might have an answer. Today? Tomorrow? Next week? Whenever, it would be solid, it would be firm, it would hold.

Chambrun couldn’t wait for that “whenever.” Two guests in his hotel had been murdered within a space of four or five hours. The waiter who had served Hammond’s breakfast for two had seen Hammond alive at eight that morning and found him dead at ten. Nora Coyle, Joanna Fraser’s secretary, had seen her employer alive at eleven o’clock that morning, gone out to do some errands, and found her dead at a quarter past one. The two murders had taken place three to four hours apart. Chambrun’s concern was not a wrapped-up case for the district attorney.

“If a madman follows this cockeyed pattern,” Chambrun was saying to Hardy when I joined them in 1614, “we can look for him to strike again about four o’clock this afternoon!”

“We can only just keep digging,” Hardy said patiently.

“Digging my foot!” Chambrun said. “I am only concerned with protecting my guests, my friends, my staff. You sit here, Walter, dusting this room for fingerprints and getting a history from ex-husbands and secretaries and business associates, while a psychotic killer may already have selected his next target, could be moving in on it as we stand here arguing.”

The man with the long hairdo in the far corner of the room must be, I thought, Colin Dobler, Joanna Fraser’s husband or ex-husband. He looked like a man in a trance. The lovely Nora Coyle was sitting beside a police stenographer-equipped with a tape recorder. She’d evidently been making some sort of statement when Chambrun had blown his top. Jerry Dodd was involved with some police technicians. There was an overturned armchair, but Joanna Fraser’s body had been removed. Chalk marks on the rug indicated where it had been found.

“What is it you think I should be doing?” Hardy asked patiently.

“We need protection!” Chambrun said.

“Five-hundred-odd suites and rooms and special assembling places—bars, restaurants, the works,” Hardy said. “You’re asking for an army I haven’t got, Pierre.”

Chambrun brought his fist down on the back of a chair behind which he was standing. “Where will he strike next? That’s the answer I want. Getting statements from people who won’t tell you the truth if they’re guilty isn’t going to do us a damn bit of good!”

“The news is out,” Hardy said. “It’s on every television and radio station. There isn’t a person in this hotel, coming or going, who doesn’t know what’s happened. That’s protection in itself, Pierre. No one is going to be careless.”

“If this sick bastard is just killing at random, Walter, no one is going to suspect that he is the next target. That in itself is a carelessness. There is no time to warn people, no time to make a convincing public statement.”

“I repeat, Pierre, what do you want me to do that I can do?” Hardy asked.

“Goddamn it, Walter, if I had the answer to that I wouldn’t be standing here talking.”

“It’s possible that there’s no connection between these two crimes,” Hardy said, “in spite of the identical method. It can be a psycho, as you suggest, just killing for the pleasure of it. But it’s also possible that there is a connection. If there is, it would help us protect the next intended victim—if there is one. That’s what I have to stay with, Pierre. I’ll get you as many men as I can to help, but it will only be a handful, and I’m afraid I don’t think it will be the slightest bit of help if you’re right about the nature of the killer. He’ll simply strike where no one is watching, and we can’t possibly watch everywhere.”

I managed to interrupt. I told Chambrun that Bill Wheaton had thirty-five extra guards on the way.

“You could empty the hotel,” Hardy said quietly. “You would if it were a bomb.”

There are plans, techniques, set up for evacuating the hotel in case of a major emergency, like an all-consuming fire, a serious bomb threat, or the possibility of an enemy air raid. There are plans for evacuating portions of the hotel. But none of them are as simple as pressing a button and, presto, the hotel is empty of people. People, up to a few thousand, bewildered, frightened, have to be moved. They would, I suspect, become like cattle in a burning barn. Their personal stalls would appear to be the safest place. They would, quite literally, have to be prodded out. No matter how efficient the staff, the resulting panic would lead to unbelievable confusion.

I could almost hear those thoughts revolving in Chambrun’s mind as he stared steadily at Hardy. Such a happening in the Beaumont would be to him like painting graffiti on the walls of a church would be to a priest.

“If it was a bomb,” he said to Hardy very quietly, the anger gone out of his voice, “we would locate it, clear the area, and get experts to deactivate it. When that was done the place would be safe and people could come back to it. This is different. We can push people out onto the streets, keep them there for hours, days, weeks, and if we haven’t nailed this monster, it will be just as dangerous for them to come back as it is for them to stay here now. This bastard has chosen the Beaumont as his playground. We will only catch him
in
it. After you have sifted all the statements and counterstatements, you may have a lead. It’s my fear that he’ll move again before you reach that point. Our best chance is to catch him when he makes that move. The people best equipped for that are those on my staff, who will know when someone is in some place he has no business to be. You go to your church, friend, and I’ll go to mine.”

He turned and walked out of the room, but he called me from the foyer. He was standing there, lighting a cigarette, when I joined him.

“I’m going to prepare a statement for all the resident guests of the hotel,” he said, “telling them that there is a lunatic loose. We’ll do our best to protect them. They can stay or go as they choose. I’ll arrange a statement to be broadcast in all the public rooms, and something for television and radio. People will be warned and can make their own decisions.”

“You’ll need me to help you with that,” I said.

“No, Mark.” He took a deep drag on his cigarette. “I understand you’re friends with the Coyle girl.” He nodded toward the living room.

“We’ve had a few drinks together.”

“Talk to her when Hardy’s finished with her. If she isn’t under pressure, she may spill something she doesn’t realize she’s been holding back. You obviously have special charms for most ladies.”

“I’ll talk to her,” I said.

“And cultivate Bobby Bryan when you can,” he said. “When Hardy stops asking them where they were at the time of the murder, they may come up with something helpful.”

“But if the killer is just choosing people at random—?”

“I don’t really believe in that,” Chambrun said. “There is a connection of sorts. It may not be rational, it may not make sense to anyone but the killer. But it’s a pattern he’s dreamed up out of something. Hammond’s people say Hammond didn’t know Joanna Fraser. Ms. Fraser’s secretary and her ex-husband say she didn’t know Hammond. But there has to be someplace where they touch the same base. See if you can smell it out, Mark. Because there may be a third person who touches that base, and if there is, he or she is marked down as the killer’s next victim.”

“I’m not an expert at that kind of questioning,” I said.

“You’re an expert at listening,” he said. “That’s your special gift, Mark. Get them talking—and listen as you’ve never listened before.”

I had never really thought of myself as a listener. My job is to sell the hotel, which means talking and writing—giving out. But Chambrun had seen another aspect, the listening part of it: listening to complaints, listening to people who try to con us one way or the other. My judgments of people from what they had to say to me was important to management. I hadn’t thought of that very seriously before now. It was flattering that Chambrun saw a value in me I hadn’t considered.

The actors had moved to new positions when I went back into the living room. Hardy had disappeared, along with Jerry Dodd and the police technicians. I could hear their voices down the hall where they were obviously going over the other rooms in Joanna Fraser’s luxurious pad.

The police stenographer had fitted Nora Coyle with a headset so that she could listen to her own statement on the tape recorder.

Colin Dobler, the ex-husband artist, was standing so close to the entrance that I wondered if he’d been trying to listen to my conversation with Chambrun. A closer look told me that this was a far from unattractive man. Men in their early fifties with long hair tend to turn me off. I don’t think I have any particular prejudice against long hair, but it has seemed to me to be a symbol of the very young, and when older men choose to go that way they seem to be reaching for an irretrievable past.

But there was nothing affected about Dobler. He had obviously been taken away, hurriedly, from whatever his daily routine was. His tan summer-weight slacks were paint stained, as was his pale yellow sports shirt, open at the throat. He’d put on a clean corduroy jacket. I got the feeling he’d been painting in his Gramercy Park studio when the word came.

He had pleasant brown eyes, a relaxed mouth, and a low, easy voice when he spoke. He could, I thought, be attractive to women, which explained why Joanna Fraser hadn’t been willing to let him go entirely, even after they had split.

“It’s just not possible to take in,” he said to me. “I saw her and I don’t believe it.”

“Shocking for you,” I said.

“My God, for anyone who saw her,” he said. “She was a beautiful woman suddenly transformed into a grotesque horror. She was—was frightened of growing old, frightened of death, but this is beyond anything she could have thought of in her wildest nightmares.”

“Two in one day is a little hard for any of us to take,” I said. “I’m told she was apparently having cocktails with someone.”

He nodded. “She prided herself on her extra-dry martinis,” he said. “That’s what she made for this butcher, whoever he is.”

“Nora—Miss Coyle—doesn’t know who she was expecting for a drink? The time suggests it was a drink before going to lunch with someone.”

“Joanna had no formal appointment,” Dobler said. “But coming in here was like coming through a revolving door. Joanna prepared for the day very carefully—bathing, makeup, dressing. She kept all that very private, even from her husband—when I was working at it. But after juice and coffee she belonged to the world, to anyone who knocked on her door. People in the women’s movement came and went like characters on a merry-go-round. Joanna would listen to anyone’s gripes. It didn’t have to be a friend she made drinks for; it could have been for anyone who turned up at the cocktail time. She was a very private woman in her private life, and very public the rest of the time.”

“What concerns us at the moment is to find some connection with Geoffrey Hammond,” I said. “Two violences exactly alike—”

He shook his head. He was fumbling in his pocket for a pipe, which he began to fill from an oilskin pouch. A very relaxed man in spite of what had happened.

“I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation with Mr. Chambrun,” he said.

He couldn’t help it if he had moved over to the doorway to listen, I thought.

“I was very close to Joanna, though we were technically separated,” he said. He held a lighter to his pipe and puffed out a mildly aromatic cloud of smoke. “There was nothing wrong with our marriage except the Cause.”

“The Cause?” I said.

“Women’s lib,” he said. “When she came into her money she went haywire. She insisted on taking back her maiden name; she insisted on separate domiciles. She made a great public display of those moves. But privately —well, I was still her lover, Mr. Haskell. All she had to do was beckon, and I was here, there, wherever she wanted me to be. What I’m trying to say is that we remained intimate, close. She talked to me about everything that mattered to her; talked to me as she would not have talked to anyone else. I’ve been trying to remember, since Lieutenant Hardy first spoke to me, if there was ever anything at all about Geoffrey Hammond.”

“And was there?”

“Only one very small meaningless thing,” he said. “One night when I was staying here—oh, I spent nights here, Mr. Haskell. I was expected to spend nights when she wanted me, to reassure her that she was still an ‘old-fashioned’ woman, in spite of her public insistence that she was a ‘new’ woman.”

And he responded because she kept him, I thought. He made love to her for money. Perhaps that wasn’t fair. Perhaps he really cared about her. Was there a way to know which it was?

“As I was saying, one small meaningless thing. Hammond was interviewing Henry Kissinger on television and we had the set turned on. A little into the program Joanna said to me, ‘What an insufferable ego!’ I said something to the effect that that was Kissinger’s style. ‘I’m not talking about Kissinger,’ Joanna said. ‘That jerk, Hammond!’ That is the only time I can remember Hammond being mentioned. She certainly had no professional dealings with him, no private social life that involved him. As far as I know she had never met him or talked to him. She could have, of course, at some public function or in some public place. It could have been no more than a public introduction. Her mention of him that night was no more important than if you or I had said we didn’t like an actor in a certain part. It wasn’t a personal thing.”