Time of Terror (30 page)

“I didn’t know who else to go to for help, Mark,” Shirley said.

“Help?” I said.

Kauffman sat down because it was obvious his legs wouldn’t hold him up any longer. He raised a hand to try to control the twitching of his mouth. Shirley was eyeing me with a peculiar steadiness, more like a stranger than a lover.

“I went to find Jim,” she said. “I knew Hardy would be looking for him and I thought it was only fair to prepare him. After all, I sort of turned him in.”

True, I thought.

“When he told me his story I knew he’d never stand up under questioning by the cops. What to do? That’s why I brought him here, Mark.”

“Right through the lobby?”

“Nobody would know me the way I look now,” Kauffman said, in a hollow voice. He looked up at me. “I—I was here last night. I—I saw her.”

“Well, why not? You’re her husband,” I said.

He took in a kind of gasping breath. “After she was dead,” he said. “Oh, Jesus, Mr. Haskell, could I have just a little slug of your scotch?”

I felt a cold chill run right down my back. “I think you better tell me about it first,” I said. One good drink and he’d probably pass out right here on my rug. Shirley was in trouble, I thought, harboring a suspect from Hardy. Because, God knows, Kauffman was a suspect.

He didn’t look at me, just at the scotch bottle. “Miss Thomas has told you about me,” he said. “I’m shot, shot all to hell.”

“I can see that,” I said.

“Sometimes, when you’re in my kind of shape,” he said, “nothing matters to you except—except getting what you need, liquor. Not pride, not anything. Last night was like that.”

I waited for him to go on. His whole body shook with the desperate need for what was in that scotch bottle. “Laura and I have been separated for about ten months,” he said. He had a pleasant voice, an easy way of talking if he hadn’t been so beat. I could see that he had been an attractive guy—once upon a time. “I could never supply her with what she needed,” he went on. “No one man ever could. After a while I—I couldn’t stand having to knock on the door of her bedroom before I went in, to be sure there wasn’t someone else with her. So I walked. Oh, please, Mr. Haskell!”

“Keep talking,” I said.

“She offered to make a settlement on me, but I wasn’t having any of that. I was going to be a man, for a change, stand on my own two feet.” He laughed, a bitter sound. “My God! I’d been boozing it quite a bit by the time I walked out on her and I found—it was all I cared about. It—it’s come to this! What little money I had went quickly. Then I began to steal a little, and con people. And then—then last night—I was at the very bottom of the well.”

“So you came here?”

“I’d read in the paper that Laura had taken a suite at the Beaumont to handle the Cancer Fund Ball. I called her, the first time I’d talked to her since—in ten months. I said I was desperate, needed help. She told me to come to see her. It was about eleven o’clock at night then. It was after midnight when I got here, perhaps twelve thirty. So I went up to Twenty-one A. I—I was out of my mind with need then, Haskell. Physically, the walk had just about finished me. I—I rang her doorbell and she didn’t answer. I knocked. Nothing. Then I guess I blew my stack. I started pounding on the door, shouting at her. It should have raised the whole floor full of people.”

“The suites on twenty-one are all soundproofed,” I said.

“I was pounding and yelling,” Kauffman said, “and then I realized the door wasn’t latched! I went charging in. She wasn’t there. But there was a sideboard loaded with liquor. I just about made it and poured myself a whole glass of scotch. It—it works very quickly on me.”

“I can imagine,” I said.

“I—I was suddenly full of fantasies,” Kauffman said. His voice was shaking now. “She was in the next room, in the hay with some guy, paying no attention to me. I didn’t knock. I just charged in. And there—oh my God, there she was. Bloody, dead, destroyed! Now, Haskell, please!”

I was shaken myself. I walked very slowly toward the bar. From there I faced him. “And then?” I said.

“The room looked like a slaughterhouse,” he said. “Blood everywhere. I—I just turned and ran, stopping to grab a bottle of liquor from the sideboard.”

“You didn’t call the police or anyone?” I asked.

“All I wanted was to get out of there!” Kauffman said. “That jolt of scotch I’d had—I thought I was having a nightmare. I—I’ve had them, horror dreams. What I’d seen couldn’t be real. All I wanted to do was get out of there and blot out the world.”

“So you just took off and left her there?”

“I wasn’t a block away before I was convinced the whole thing was a crazy, liquor-induced hallucination,” Kauffman said. “I got back to my hole on the Bowery and—and drank enough of the scotch I’d taken to pass out. When I came to late this morning I
knew
it had been a nightmare. Then—then I went to the Salvation Army center for a cup of coffee. They had a radio going and I heard the news. It was real. What I had seen was real!”

He slumped forward in his chair and I thought he was going to topple out of it. I poured a good-sized drink for him that must have seemed inadequate to him. He swallowed it like water down a drain pipe. He trembled and shook and made an effort to pull himself together.

“You went looking for him?” I asked Shirley.

“I knew the cops would be hunting for him,” she said. “I thought he’d need a friend. I thought if he’d come in, voluntarily, you might be able to persuade Lieutenant Hardy to deal with him gently. If the cops went to work on him, they’d simply drive him up the wall. He’s a very sick man, Mark.”

Sick enough to butcher his wife if she turned him down, I thought. Sick enough not to be certain whether he’d done it or not. He was living in what someone has called Nightmare Alley.

“You’re going to have to talk to Lieutenant Hardy,” I told Kauffman. “You’re going to have to do it now, not some other time.”

“Oh, God!” he said, and held out his empty glass to me.

“After you’ve seen Hardy,” I said.

Hardy was where I had last seen him, in Chambrun’s office, going over reports from the fingerprint people, the police photographers, and the medical examiner. I told Hardy about Kauffman. Hardy listened, controlling his impatience.

“So bring him down here,” he said.

“Couldn’t you talk to him in my place?” I asked. “With Shirley there, and me, he may not cave in on you. He thinks of us, Shirley at least, as friends. He’s pretty near the edge of the cliff.”

“Okay, mother Haskell,” Hardy said, giving me a tired smile. He reached for the phone. “I’d better have a police stenographer present.”

“When he’s ready to make a statement,” I said, “try treating him like a human being not as if you were the public executioner. It’s your best chance with him.”

Hardy, for all his official efficiency, is a decent guy. He’s also a pretty good psychologist. I remembered him talking a potential suicide off a window ledge on the top floor of the Beaumont some years ago. I knew he had the skills to talk to a disturbed person like Kauffman without trying to bludgeon him for facts.

Kauffman looked at the detective with a kind of cornered-animal panic in his bloodshot eyes when Hardy faced him.

“Thanks for coming in, Mr. Kauffman,” Hardy said.

It was a good beginning.

Kauffman shook his head from side to side. “I didn’t know what to do, Miss Thomas persuaded me—” It drifted off.

“Miss Thomas was right, of course,” Hardy said. “Mr. Haskell has given me a brief account of what you’ve told him. I’d appreciate your telling it to me.”

It was the same story, told a little more haltingly this time. When he came to the part where he’d decided it was all some kind of alcoholic dream, I could see that Hardy was growing impatient.

“So you weren’t sure it was real till you heard the news on the radio this morning?” Hardy asked.

“I was sure it
wasn’t
real till I heard the radio,” Kauffman said. “My God, Lieutenant, you saw her! It was something out of a horror story.”

“Yes, I saw her,” Hardy said. He hesitated. “Is it possible, Mr. Kauffman, that in a moment of imbalance you could have attacked her and blotted it out of your memory?”

“My God, Lieutenant, I was wearing this suit! No one could have done that to her and not been covered with blood.”

“You could have had it cleaned.”

“Hell, I didn’t have the money to take the subway back downtown,” Kauffman said. “This is the only suit I have. I have some jeans and shirts, but this is the only suit. I wore it because I wanted to look the best I could for Laura.”

“But you have had memory blackouts? It’s not uncommon for people with your problem.”

Kauffman twisted desperately in his chair. “Whole days go by sometimes and I don’t remember much of anything. But I don’t have any reason to remember those days. I want to forget!”

“You could have wanted to forget what happened up there.”

“It wasn’t like that!” Kauffman cried out. “I tried to persuade myself it was a bad dream, but all the time I knew I’d seen it.”

“Not done it?”

“No! No! No!” Kauffman protested.

“All right, Mr. Kauffman,” Hardy said, not unkindly. “Let’s try for some other details.”

“Oh, my God!” Kauffman said. “Could I—could I have another drink? I just can’t function without some help, Lieutenant.”

Hardy nodded to me and I poured the poor bastard a modest slug and took it to him. He downed it in one gulp and handed back the empty glass. Hardy took up the questioning.

“You called your wife about eleven o’clock, you say?”

“Yes.”

“She invited you to come see her?”

“Yes.”

“You cleaned yourself up and walked all the way up from the Bowery. When did you get here?”

“I don’t have a watch,” Kauffman said. “It’s long gone in a hock shop. I can only guess it was quarter past, half past twelve.”

“You called her on the house phone, you said. Did you get her room number at the desk?”

Hardy knew damn well the desk wouldn’t give a room number out to anybody. They’d make a call for you but they wouldn’t give out a room number to a stranger. “I’ll see if Mrs. Kauffman is in,” was the best they would do for him, even if he said he was her husband.

“Laura gave me the room number when I called her,” Kauffman said.

Then why didn’t you go straight up to the room?”

“Because—oh, for God’s sake, Lieutenant, hasn’t anyone told you that Laura spent half her life in bed with other men. I didn’t want to interrupt something.”

“But you went up when she didn’t answer?”

“I was at the end of the line, Lieutenant.”

“Did you see anyone in the hall on twenty-one?”

“No. I rang the bell. She didn’t answer. I knocked. No answer. Then I began pounding and yelling.”

“And you didn’t see anyone?”

“I wasn’t looking for anyone. There could have been ten people looking out of rooms at me and I wouldn’t have seen them. All I wanted was to get in.”

“And then you noticed that the door wasn’t latched tight?”

“I was pounding on it and it—it just opened in a little.”

“So you went in and there wasn’t anyone there?”

“No one. No sign or sound of anyone. Then I saw the liquor. She had a supply there—for the people who were coming and going.”

“There are fingerprints on bottles and glasses,” Hardy said. “We’ve identified Mrs. Kauffman’s. We haven’t caught up with the others. What did you touch?”

“A bottle, a glass.”

“What else did you touch?”

“Nothing. That’s all I was interested in. You can’t imagine how badly I needed a drink.”

“I can imagine,” Hardy said. “So after you’d had your drink you decided to investigate the bedroom?”

Kauffman gave him a bitter, trembling smile. “I was a big shot after I had that drink. I decided to break in. I expected to find her in the hay with someone. I was going to tell her thanks for nothing, grab a couple of bottles, and take off.”

“So you broke in and saw—?”

“My God, Lieutenant, you saw her! Do I have to describe it to you?”

“No,” Hardy said. “You didn’t try to see if she was still alive?”

“Alive in that condition?” Kauffman cried out.

“So you didn’t touch her?”

“No!”

“Or anything in the bedroom?”

“No!”

“And then?”

“I just ran out. I grabbed a bottle off the sideboard and ran out.”

“So you’re out in the hall, bottle tucked under your jacket, I suppose. You see anybody then?”

“No. No, I ran to the elevator and rang, and it came.”

“So the elevator operator saw you.”

“It was self-service,” Kauffman said. “There wasn’t any operator.”

Hardy gave me a questioning look.

“There are four elevators to that floor,” I said. “After one o’clock only two of them have operators, the other two become self-service.”

“So you pressed a button and went down to the lobby,” Hardy said to Kauffman. “There must have been people in the lobby.”

“I suppose so,” Kauffman said. “All I wanted to do was get out. I just went. Nobody tried to stop me or ask me anything. I walked back downtown. It seemed to take forever. I stopped in a few alleys to have a drink from the bottle. God help me, it was almost gone when I got back to my place.”

“Your place?”

“I’ve been sleeping in the basement of a deserted house,” Kauffman said. “I remember getting there, falling down on some rags I’d collected, and passing out. By then the whole thing was a drunken dream.”

“And that’s it?”

“That’s it, Lieutenant.” Kauffman looked longingly toward the glass in my hand.

Hardy fished a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. “I ought to place you under arrest as a material witness, Mr. Kauffman,” he said. He looked at me. “Is Doc Partridge available?”

“Round the clock,” I said.

“So I am placing you under arrest, Mr. Kauffman, but I’m going to suggest that you stay here in the hotel’s hospital under the care of Dr. Partridge, the house physician. Maybe he can give you some medication that will get you some sleep and help you dry out. It’s your choice. Here or in a cell at the precinct house.”