Time of Terror (12 page)

“But you certainly know who beat you up.”

She didn’t answer, but buried her face against my shoulder.

“You’ve been gone since early afternoon, Mrs. Cleaves,” Chambrun said. “Where have you been?”

No answer. And then old Doc Partridge, wearing an ancient flannel bathrobe and carrying his black bag, joined us. He took one look at Connie and began to swear under his breath again.

“Get the hell out of my way,” he said to me, “and turn on a light. I can’t do a damn thing in the dark.”

With the light on she looked worse than I’d thought. The skin was broken over one cheekbone. Her swollen eyes were a dark purple. Her jaw, somehow, looked a little lopsided.

“This didn’t happen five minutes ago,” Doc Partridge said. “When and who did it, girl?”

Chambrun’s voice was cold and without sympathy. “A family quarrel?” he asked.

Connie winced as Doc Partridge swabbed at the cut cheekbone with cotton dipped in something from his bag.

“You got a husband who did this, girl?” Doc asked as he worked. “Sonofabitch ought to be in jail. You bring charges against him, hear me?” He looked up at Chambrun. “I don’t think the jaw is broken, but it could be. I suggest the hospital.”

“No!” Connie cried out.

“Mrs. Cleaves is the mother of the two children who are being held up on Fifteen,” Chambrun told Doc.

We had another customer then. Jerry Dodd came in, obviously sent for by Chambrun after I’d called.

“There must be some fingerprints in that mess out there,” Chambrun said, gesturing toward the living room. Jerry ducked back out there and Chambrun picked up the bedside phone. He got the night supervisor. “Mrs. Kiley? Terrence Cleaves has been assigned a room while Fifteen is out of business. Room 805, I think. Connect me.” He waited, frowning down at Connie. Then: “Cleaves? Pierre Chambrun here. Your wife has had an accident. She’s in Mark Haskell’s apartment on the second floor.” Pause. “Well, you damn well better make it your business or I’ll send the police to pick you up.” He slammed down the receiver. “Have you been with your husband all afternoon and evening?” he asked Connie.

Again her head turned from side to side. “Please, I’ve got nothing to tell you, Mr. Chambrun. It’s—it’s a private matter.”

“Do you know that your father is in town looking for you?”

“Oh, God,” she said. “Does he—does he have to know?”

“He has to know, Mrs. Cleaves, and I have to know,” Chambrun said.

He didn’t wait for her to tell him, however. He turned toward the living room, gesturing for me to follow. We joined Jerry Dodd out there and Chambrun closed the bedroom door. Jerry was dusting the desk for fingerprints.

“Place is lousy with prints,” Jerry said. “You had an army in here, Mark?”

There was me, of course, and Connie, and there had been Colin Andrews and Martha Blodgett for a drink earlier on.

“I’m playing a hunch,” Chambrun said. “Terrence Cleaves should show up here in a minute or two, Jerry. The minute he does, head up to 805 and get a sample of his prints. I’m guessing you’ll find it matched somewhere in this room.”

Jerry nodded and went on with his work.

“How did Mrs. Cleaves get in here?” Chambrun asked.

“No sweat. I gave her a key when I first brought her here.”

“So Cleaves beat her up, took the key from her, and came here to look for what, Mark?”

“Search me.”

“She didn’t give you anything to keep for her?”

“No.”

“Cleaves had to believe she’d left something here that was important to him,” Chambrun said. “Something she’d try to hide; otherwise, why the books, the paintings?”

Jerry was photographing prints with a tiny pocket camera when there was a sharp knock at the door. I opened it and Terrence Cleaves was standing outside, tall and straight, his eyes blazing with anger. He brushed past me and walked straight up to Chambrun, towering over him.

“I resent your ordering me about, Chambrun,” he said. “As for the police, you very well know that I enjoy diplomatic immunity. What is this about an accident to Constance?”

“Figure of speech,” Chambrun said. “There was nothing accidental about the beating you gave her.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Cleaves demanded.

Chambrun turned away from him, went to the bedroom door and opened it. He stood aside for Cleaves to go by him. At the sight of her husband Connie turned her face away from Doc Partridge’s ministrations. The old doctor looked around.

“This the husband?” he asked. His eyes glittered. “I’ll tell you something, fella. You ought to have your ass kicked around the block and I’d be glad to join in the fun. This girl is hurt.”

Cleaves’s face was rock-hard. His eyes remained fixed on Connie. “Does she say I did this to her?” he asked.

“She doesn’t say anything,” Doc Partridge said. “You may have broken her jaw.”

Cleaves did an about-face like a soldier on parade and stalked out into the living room. Chambrun closed the bedroom door.

“You’ll see to it that she gets the best of care,” Cleaves said.

I noticed that Jerry Dodd was gone.

“Aren’t you curious about what’s happened in this room?” Chambrun asked.

“There’s only one thing in the whole damn world I’m interested in,” Cleaves said, his voice harsh. “That’s finding the money that may ransom my children. Is there any news from upstairs?”

“I suppose the legal position is that if your wife won’t bring charges against you you can beat her to your heart’s content,” Chambrun said. “But breaking into this room and tearing it apart is another story.”

“That’s an absurd suggestion,” Cleaves said. “In any event I have diplomatic immunity.”

“Did you know that Buck Ames is in town?” Chambrun asked.

Cleaves turned sharply. “When? Where is he?”

“I have the feeling that when he gets a look at Connie, diplomatic immunity isn’t going to do you much good, Mr. Cleaves,” Chambrun said.

“Then for God sake let her accuse me!” Cleaves almost shouted.

“Her silence is an accusation,” Chambrun said. “What did she have that you wanted so badly?”

“I’ve had enough of this,” Cleaves said, and started for the door.

Before he reached it, it opened and Jerry Dodd came in. He closed the door and stood with his back to it. “His prints are all over Mark’s desk,” he said.

Cleaves’s handsome face turned a sickly gray. You could almost hear his mind working. He was wondering if he could charge past Jerry and get away. Jerry, who was four inches shorter and forty pounds lighter, looked almost hungry for it to happen. I’d seen Jerry handle big men who got obstreperous. It was rather pretty to watch.

Cleaves took a handkerchief out of his pocket and blotted at a trickle of sweat that had started to run down his cheek. He’d evidently decided against trying to tackle Jerry. Perhaps he’d guessed it would be as unequal as it looked.

“So you did rip this room apart,” Chambrun said in his prosecutor’s voice.

Cleaves’s broad shoulders drooped. “She had something of importance that belongs to me,” he said, his voice low. “She refused to tell me where she’d hidden it.”

“So you beat her up, and when that didn’t work, you came down here to find it,” Chambrun said.

“She was trying to blackmail me with it,” Cleaves said. “It is something important to my job, my position of trust, my country.”

“There are indications in 805,” Jerry Dodd said casually, “that she may have been tied up there in an armchair. Some strips of adhesive tape that got thrown in the wastebasket, a bathrobe cord. I think she managed to get away while he was gone somewhere, and came back here.”

“Or did he bring her down here and try to get her to show him where she’d hidden whatever it is he wanted? Maybe some of the beating took place here,” Chambrun suggested. “What was she blackmailing you for, Cleaves? What did she want from you?”

Cleaves moistened his lips. They looked blue. “The children,” he said. “Custody of the children.”

“Need I point out that Coriander has custody of the children?” Chambrun asked.

“After—after they’re free,” Cleaves said.

“What you were looking for is a document of some kind? A letter, perhaps?” Chambrun asked.

Cleaves seemed to have turned to stone. He didn’t answer.

“How much chance do you think you have of raising the ransom money?” Chambrun asked.

Cleaves shrugged. “Unless the governments will help—”

“Can Buck Ames raise it?”

“It’s not impossible,” Cleaves said.

Chambrun took a cigarette out of his silver case and lit it.

“Can he get away with this?” I asked, gesturing around the room.

“There’s one thing Mr. Terrence Cleaves can’t do,” Chambrun said. “He can’t hide. The whole world is watching him, waiting to see what happens on the fifteenth floor. I think it will be up to the lady to decide what’s to be done about this. Let me warn you, Cleaves. The heat is going to begin to get hot in the morning. Coriander will begin to be impatient, I feel certain. Maybe you should go to Buck Ames for help.”

“Joke!” Cleaves said bitterly.

“Let him go, Jerry,” Chambrun said.

“You’re kidding,” Jerry said, looking disappointed.

“For now,” Chambrun said.

Jerry stood aside, and the Coldstream Guardsman walked, stiff and straight, out of the room. At the same moment Doc Partridge appeared in the bedroom doorway, snapping closed his black bag.

“She’ll do,” he said. “Only time is going to heal those bruises. I left her some medication to help.” He looked around. “You let the husband go?”

“We gave him a little rope,” Chambrun said. “Jerry, I want Cleaves followed every minute, inside and outside the hotel. I want to be able to put my hand on his shoulder any time I need him.”

“Right,” Jerry said, and was gone.

Chambrun turned to me. “You may seem less like a policeman to Mrs. Cleaves than anyone else, Mark. Maybe she’ll come clean with you. It’s worth a try. Keep in touch.”

So I was alone in my wrecked apartment, with Connie in the next room. It wasn’t exactly how I’d imagined it might be.

She lay on her back on the bed. She was fully dressed, of course, but Doc Partridge had pulled a sheet up over her and supplied her with two gauze patches, soaked in something, that rested over her eyes. She was breathing slowly, regularly. I thought she might be asleep, that exhaustion had overtaken her. But when I reached down and touched her hand, her fingers closed tightly around mine.

I sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Have they gone?” she whispered.

“Gone,” I said. “Can I get you anything? Another drink?”

“Was it brandy I had before?”

I went into the next room and brought back the bottle of Cognac and a glass. I poured a little for her, and this time she sipped it the way brandy should be drunk. I took the glass from her hands and put it on the bedside table.

“We have a pretty clear picture of some of it,” I said. “It was Cleaves who wrecked the other room. Fingerprints. Our security man thinks he had you tied up in 805. Have you been there all the time since you left here?”

“Till he brought me back here,” she said. I had to lean close to her to hear her.

“To find the document or the letter you’d taken from him?” I asked.

“He told you I had something of his?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not so,” she said. “Not true. I have something he wanted, but it’s not his.”

“What?”

Her scarlet mouth quivered slightly. “The truth about him,” she said.

“Care to tell me?”

“No, Mark, I can’t tell you.”

“Will you bring charges against him for what he did to you?”

“No.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

Her hand tightened on mine. “I had what may seem to you to have been a mad idea,” she said. “I intended to call this Coriander man and ask him to let me be with the girls; to hold me as a hostage, too.”

“Chambrun thought that might be where you were, but we knew you hadn’t contacted Coriander and that you couldn’t have gone up to Fifteen without being seen by our security people.”

“I had to see Terrence first before I tried it,” she said.

“Oh?”

“I had to be sure that he’d do everything in his power to meet Coriander’s demands.”

“And you didn’t think he would?”

“I thought he’d fail as far as the money’s concerned and that he’d give up. He’d leave it to someone else who had nothing at stake.”

“Your father. He cares. He’s trying now to find the money.”

“Poor dear Buck,” she said. “He’ll find that it’s easy to raise money for oil wells, for steel mills, for airplanes, but not for two little girls. There’s no return on that kind of money; no interest, no profits, no capital gains. He’ll try, I know. But there had to be someone who could be
made
to make it work.”

“So you have something on your husband?”

She nodded slowly. “I have facts about him that could smash him forever,” she said. “I sat down at your desk and I wrote down where the proofs could be found. I sent them, with a note, to a friend of mine. If anything happens to me, she is to pass the letter on to someone who will know how to use the information.”

I took a long shot. “Colin Andrews?” I asked.

She turned her head. “You know Colin?”

“I know him, and what he believes about your husband.”

“He’s right. Well, I told Terrence what I’d done. Not who I’d sent the letter to, of course. He thought—he thought I might have given it to you. He tried to make me tell him.” She lifted fingertips to her bruised face.

“So get to your friend and tell her to turn the information over to Andrews,” I said.

“No.”

“Why the hell not?”

“It must be the last thing, the last act. When everything else has failed, not before. Terrence knows now that he must pull out all the stops. If by some miracle he succeeds, then I keep his secret. Don’t worry about me, Mark. He won’t try anything more to hurt me. He won’t dare.”

It was quite clear she wasn’t going to tell me any more. I poured a little more brandy for her and held it to her lips.

“Don’t leave me alone, Mark,” she said.

I stretched out on the bed beside her and put an arm around her. She drew a deep breath and was asleep before I could say another word to her.