By Reason of Insanity (81 page)

And he knew that was the right thing to do.

And he knew he would grieve for the dead.

IT WAS 2:l0 when Bill Torolla got back from lunch expecting to find Henry Field. The office was empty. He tried room 1438 again without luck. At 2:30 Torolla, still alone in the office, took his passkey to the fourteenth floor and entered the corner room. No one was home. He noticed dark stains on the rug by the bed, and he bent down for a closer look… .

BY 3 P.M. the hotel on East 61st Street was an armed camp. Police vehicles were everywhere, precinct cars and division cars and forensic wagons and emergency trucks. Unmarked detective cars too. And, of course, those of the special task force under the command of Deputy Inspector Alex Dimitri. Network TV crews were arriving, setting up their equipment on the pavement since they were not allowed inside the hotel. Not yet anyway. The street itself was closed to traffic, and pedestrians were restricted to the opposite sidewalk for halfway down the block.

Inside, the confusion appeared even worse as seemingly endless police paraded through the lobby or gathered in ominous groups. The most frightful rumors were passed from one excited man to the next, all of which would eventually pale before the reality. One name was heard repeated over and over, often more as an improper epithet than a proper noun.
Chess Man
. The only certainty in those first hectic moments of arrival, during that first half hour as police brass set up field communications and priority missions, was that they had discovered, or stumbled into, the madman’s latest outrage. It was not yet clear whether they had caught Chess Man in the act or arrived only after the final curtain.

Upstairs on the fourteenth floor every room was quickly searched with the help of a still dazed backup security man, but only the dead awaited the living. The count was five bodies, including that of Henry Field. Other units were beginning to check out the thirteenth floor in a more systematic approach as the nature of the gruesome task became evident. Still more police prepared for a search of lower floors. At ground level the entire building was sealed; men were stationed everywhere around the base, in every alley and passageway. If Chess Man were inside he would not escape again.

Soon after three o’clock the sensational news began to be broadcast on radio and television, special bulletins interrupting regular programming. TV showed the dramatic scene at the Ashley as network executives agonized over whether to scrap their regular schedule for the event. Either that or sandwich coverage between shows. Machine minds quickly began to calculate the cost.

Adam Kenton got the call at 2:50 from Fred Grimes. The police had just found Bishop’s handiwork, and they might’ve found him as well.

No one was sure of anything yet. Except a lot of dead bodies.

The Ashley Hotel for women. Between Park and Lexington on 61st. About five blocks from the St. Moritz.

The crazy bastard was trying to knock off a whole building full of females!

Kenton was already gone.

A quick cab got him to Park Avenue and he was on the street in minutes. It was bedlam. His press card got him through police lines and Captain Olson, whom he spotted on the hotel steps, got him inside.

“Is he still here?” Kenton shouted into Olson’s ear in the lobby.

“We don’t know,” Olson shouted back. “We’ve only been through the top floor so far. Five dead.”

Kenton’s face turned sick, the color draining out of him. “My God!” he mumbled. There were hundreds of rooms in the hotel and he didn’t know how many floors. That meant hundreds of women. “My God!” he repeated to himself.

“The inspector’s around somewhere,” Olson yelled above the noise. “We’ve set up a command post in the manager’s office. Over there.” He pointed. “Only go easy on him right now.”

“Why’s that?”

“His daughter lives here,” said Olson gravely, “and he hasn’t heard from her yet.”

In the crowded office Alex Dimitri sat barking out orders and talking on phones, trying not to think of his eldest daughter. She was a fashion designer, often worked in her hotel room. Her office hadn’t seen her since Monday noon when she left for some client meetings. She had taken a few things she intended to work on at home.

Dimitri said a silent prayer. He had already talked to his wife, assured her that Amy was safe and would call them any minute. Just as soon as she heard the news. Her room on the sixth floor had been looked into by one of his own men. She wasn’t there.

Meanwhile he had work to do… .

It was a little past noon in California when the news broke. John Spanner heard about it as he returned from a briefing of a new homicide division he had started. He rushed to his office and snapped on the TV.

In Berkeley, Amos Finch was doing the same thing, having heard the announcement on the radio. As he pondered what lay ahead, Finch had the craziest urge to race for the airport and grab the next plane to New York.

By 3:30 the thirteenth floor had been gone over by special weapons units trained to deal with such emergencies. They had found seven more bodies. Only then did the full horror of the disaster become apparent to all. Hardened police officers were seen near tears, others turned to stone. A dozen bodies butchered beyond belief And no one knew what lay below. There were still twelve floors to go.

As rapidly as possible the women were being evacuated from their rooms, at least those who answered. Police groups raced through the various hallways pounding on doors and herding emerging women into waiting elevators. They passed by those rooms whose doors remained shut. Chess Man could be in any one of them. Or another victim, beyond help. Their concern was to get the live ones out first. They would take care of him last, and forever.

At the lobby the frightened women, most wearing coats hastily donned, were told they wouldn’t be able to return to their rooms for the moment. Perhaps by evening—they would have to wait and see. Then they were asked to leave the hotel so the police could get on with their work.

On the twelfth floor three more bodies were soon discovered, two in adjoining rooms at one end of the hall and the third several doors down. But a half dozen women were still alive, unaware of the slaughter around them. To Dimitri’s men it looked as if Chess Man had been forced to stop at that point by the arrival of police. When the eleventh floor yielded no new bodies the conviction grew that the madman had suddenly abandoned his plan on twelve. Which meant he was still somewhere in the building. Maybe. If he hadn’t left through a basement exit as the police entered through the front door. Or flew away in an invisible spaceship parked on the roof

Bishop had heard the sirens of course. Not having an invisible spaceship, he did the next best thing and blended into his surroundings. Scooping up his coat and bag, he raced down the fire stairs to Emma deVore’s room on the tenth floor, letting himself in with the key taken from her body in the early morning. There he waited until police shepherded all the women into the elevators. In the lobby he walked silently through the confusion and out the front door with a dozen other women. Newsmen were waiting for them but Bishop managed to keep moving, saying nothing, and they quickly lost interest. He didn’t linger on the block, walking rapidly to Park Avenue and around the corner. Eventually he slowed his pace and began to breathe easier.

He had done it again. Fooled them all.

At the Ashley the search went on, room by room. Over the next few hours police teams checked the entire building, including the top two stories again. Three more bodies were found, one each on the seventh, ninth and tenth floors.

But no Chess Man. Not in the rooms or halls or stairs, not on the roof or in the basement, not anywhere. He was gone. Like the wind, he was seen only by what he left behind.

What he left behind were eighteen dead. More than twice the number of Richard Speck’s victims for a single night.

“We were lucky,” said Dimitri privately to a few of his men. “It could’ve been a hundred.”

No one disagreed.

In all the horror and confusion Bill Torolla never even thought of a possible tie-up between the infamous maniac and a female prowler whom Henry Field believed he had seen early that morning. By the time Inspector Dimitri finally heard of the incident it was too late to matter.

At the moment, though, Dimitri was happy for another reason. His daughter was safe. She had called home at five o’clock when she learned of the Ashley siege, knowing her parents would worry. Where had she been? She was a bit hazy about that, something to do with working elsewhere for the day. To her father it sounded like she had been with a man, probably at his place. Damn kids today! Hell, she was twentyfive years old. It was her life. But the thought saddened him, he didn’t know why.

Now at 7:30 P.M., he was ready to call it a day. The hotel had been gone over top to bottom. No one was hiding anywhere, the bodies had been removed, most of the police equipment was gone. The TV crews had left after the last of the bodies, when it was obvious that Chess Man was not in the building. Even the day-long drizzle had just about stopped.

The inspector wanted several men stationed in the lobby for the night, just in case. Would give the hotel guests a sense of security and keep away the overly curious. He told the manager they could start returning to their rooms—those who still wished to return. The manager knew what he meant. It would be a miracle if any hotel could survive such a blow.

For his part, Alex Dimitri was discouraged and suddenly resigned to the strong possibility that he would not get Chess Man. He snorted. Probability seemed more like it at the moment. There was something crazy about how the man was able to disappear like that. And he didn’t mean mad crazy, he meant
weird
. What was that Adam Kenton had said about magic? Dimitri had a feeling this latest trick might cost him his career with the Department. He walked across the now quiet lobby on his way out. Wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it either.

KENTON HAD left earlier, thinking Bishop might call him again at the St. Moritz to gloat over his latest triumph. By nine o’clock there had been no call and now as he sat in his room smoking cigarettes, the
Newstime
reporter began to think more clearly about the day’s events. Maybe it hadn’t been such a triumph after all. Bishop had obviously intended to go through the entire hotel, killing every woman in sight. An arrogantly impossible concept, too hideous even for contemplation.
Yet he could have done it
. If left alone, he might have literally committed the homicidal crime of the century. Without any exaggeration or hyperbole, it would have been exactly that. Nothing less than the absolute and irrevocable homicidal crime of the century, and would have assured him of a sinister immortality, far beyond even that of Jack the Ripper.

In that sense, then, Bishop had really failed in his own eyes.

But he was a sly fox.

A fox …

Without warning, as if by magic, Kenton was struck by a thought so bizarre, so hopelessly terrifying, that his whole frame shook in reaction. His eyes broke open in shock, his face tightened in a death mask. Moisture appeared almost instantly above his upper lip and across his brow. He sat there in stunned silence for a lifetime before fumbling for the phone. Two minutes later he was hurrying out of the St. Moritz.

BISHOP’S EUPHORIA had left him. He sat in the darkened theater and absently watched the movie for the third time, his mind elsewhere. Even though he had demonstrated his superiority over all of them, his brilliant planning had largely failed.

He didn’t like failure. His feet hurt from the shoes and his hands tightly gripped the shoulder bag on his lap. All he owned was inside; his knife and what was left of his money.

“ARE YOU serious?”

“Let them all go. It’s the only chance we have.”

The inspector hesitated.

“If he spots them, we’ll never get him,” Kenton urged. “And we’ll probably never get another crack at him.”

“Who says we have one now?”

“He’ll come,” said Kenton with quick conviction.

Dimitri looked at him a long moment before walking across the lobby to the cops on duty, his mind made up. Then the two of them were in the elevator.

“Why the twelfth floor?”

“Bishop’s methodical. He left on twelve and he’ll pick up on twelve.”

“You got the room number too?” asked a skeptical Dimitri.

“Almost,” answered Kenton. “Only two possibilities.” He pulled out the diagram made earlier by the police. “He killed both women on this end over here. Then he got the other just two doors down, meaning he skipped this one.” Pointed. “He’ll either go for that door again or start on the other side of the third victim.”

“You really think you know him that well?”

“I hope so.”

A task force man in the basement would monitor the TV hall scanner, constantly turning to different floors. Anyone getting off at the twelfth floor would be immediately suspect. Other task force personnel would be in the manager’s office waiting for any sign of trouble. The relief elevator operator was also a police officer.

“You sure he’s dressed as a woman?” Dimitri asked when they got upstairs.

“Has to be,” said Kenton. “That’s how he got in and how he got out when he heard your men.”

Dimitri found it hard to believe. “He should’ve been an actor instead of a nut,” he growled.

“Maybe he could have, if things had been different for him.”

It was 9:30 when they entered their respective rooms. Between them was the empty suite of the dead Alice Troop who had started a new life in New York.

BY THE end of the movie the young woman with the bruised feet and clutched bag was no longer in her seat. On the floor were a half dozen candy-bar wrappers and a popcorn container.

AT 11:20 a slim blonde in a green coat bounced up the two steps and through the door of the Ashley. She crossed the dim lobby to the elevators, obviously knowing her way. In the elevator she smiled shyly at the operator and asked for the twelfth floor. Upon leaving she pleasantly bade the man good-night.