Golden Trap (4 page)

Jerry and I gave Lovelace a fresh looking-over. We’d never heard Chambrun speak of anyone in quite those terms.

“Mr. Lovelace’s life is in danger. It is going to be our job to protect him.”

None of us asked the obvious question about police.

“I’m going to ask Mr. Lovelace to tell you his story,” Chambrun said. He leaned back, reaching into the lacquer box for one of his Egyptian cigarettes.

Lovelace, hesitant, frowning, took one step closer to us, and stood looking at us, hands jammed in his pockets. I guess he must have thought, at that moment, that we didn’t look like a very hopeful set of bodyguards.

“My name is really George Lovelace,” he said.

He looked at me, as if he meant to explain the encounter with Marilyn in the lobby.

“My father, Roger Lovelace, was in the diplomatic corps,” he said. “I grew up in half a dozen different places as a boy. By the time I was in my early teens I could speak five languages in addition to English—French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Russian. I was fluent in all of them. When I was eighteen years old, I entered Columbia University here in New York. My father was attached to the American embassy in Warsaw. My mother had died many years earlier. The Germans marched on Poland in nineteen thirty-nine, my sophomore year in college. My father managed to get out of Poland unharmed and he was stationed in Paris. I heard very little from him at that time. Communications were difficult. When France fell I didn’t hear from him for months. The State Department told me they’d lost contact with him. There was nothing for me to do but go on with my education—and pray. In the fall of forty-one I got a letter from my father which had passed through dozens of hands to get to me. He was alive and well. He was working in some underground organization helping British fliers who’d been shot down over the Continent to get back home.

“Then came Pearl Harbor and silence. I wanted to enlist at once, but I was persuaded by my father’s lawyer to finish out the few months of my senior year and get my degree. And then came the word I’d dreaded for so long. My father was dead. He had been captured and shot as a spy by Nazi soldiers. All I wanted was to get into the army and get to Europe to fight. But certain people had different ideas. I was whisked off to Washington, to the offices of the OSS. I spoke five languages. I knew Europe like the back of my hand. I could be a thousand times more valuable to my country working for them than as a foot soldier in the infantry. I—I was boiling with patriotism and hate. So I became an agent for the OSS—and later the CIA—along the way, a double agent and a triple agent, all in the line of duty. I was lucky. I lived through the war. But my job didn’t end. Until a year ago I was still in Europe, still working for the CIA. But never, in all that time, was I George Lovelace. I assumed a series of identities, and those identities were so solidly created that I actually became those different people for periods of time. I was Michael O’Hanlon in England, Charles Veauclaire in France…” He glanced at me. “Karl Kessler in Germany, Gregor Bodanzky in Roumania and other iron-curtain countries, and plain John Smith here in America.”

Chambrun interrupted. “It was in occupied France in nineteen forty-three that I met one Charles Veauclaire in the resistance movement, and came to know him and love him—and eventually to learn his real identity. It is a story for another time, but it explains my connection with Mr. Lovelace.”

“All of it is a story for another time,” Lovelace said, “I resigned from service a year ago, and for the first time in twenty-five years I became my real self, George Lovelace. Whoever he may be!” His voice was bitter. “And then a month or two after I’d rented a little cottage in the south of France and settled down to recover from twenty-five years of exhausting tensions, things began to happen. Accidents, I thought at first. A broken steering rod on my car; an almost fatal attack of food poisoning; a self-service elevator that fell; a midnight mugging on a dark side street in Rome. And then a direct word from an unknown enemy. I had been a hunter for twenty-five years. Now I was to know what it was like to be hunted. And one day, without warning, the hunter would pull the trigger and I’d die.”

Lovelace paused, and the office was so still it hurt.

“I tried to fight back,” Lovelace said, his voice gone husky. “It was—and is—hopeless. There are so many people in so many places who might hate me and want to revenge themselves—and the relatives of people, and the descendants of people, and the members of organizations I helped to smash. People who, individually, I never knew existed. It—it is like looking for a leaf in a forest. And so I stopped fighting and tried running, changing colors and identities like a chameleon. No use. When I arrived here today at noon there was a letter waiting for me showing that someone knew where I was heading—and was waiting for me.”

He turned away toward the window. Chambrun slid the stack of envelopes across the desk to Jerry Dodd, who glanced at them and passed them along to Ruysdale. Eventually they came to me. The precise script on the note was characterless, almost like printing.

Chambrun’s voice was matter-of-fact. “I don’t intend to let it happen here,” he said.

I had a vision of revolving doors, bringing in and taking out an endless stream of people, hundreds of them complete strangers to the staff; of a thousand guests in residence; of the staff itself, many of them with foreign backgrounds. How did we not let it happen if the man or men hunting Lovelace were determined?

“How good is your memory, George?” Chambrun asked.

“Too damned good!” Lovelace said, without turning. “I don’t count sheep when I try to sleep; I count faces. Thousands of faces, each with a vivid memory attached.

“I was trained not to forget. But I can’t remember people I’ve never seen—the friends of those faces; the hired assassin who may finally do the job.”

I put the letters back on Chambrun’s desk. “We can surround him with an army of bodyguards,” I said.

Lovelace looked at me, his smile bitter. “Who will sample my food before I eat it? Test my drinks? Take each step before I take one to search for booby traps? To make me invisible? Is there any way to disappear, Mr. Haskell, except to die?”

“I was just thinking out loud,” I said.

“The man who sent this collection of envelopes and the message is very sure of himself,” Chambrun said. “He’s in no hurry. He wants Lovelace to agonize. So—time is on our side. Time gives us a chance to set a trap for him.”

“What kind of a trap?” Jerry Dodd asked.

“That’s what we’re here to discuss,” Chambrun said.

“I don’t intend to spend what little time may be left to me locked in a closet,” Lovelace said sharply. “If I want a dry martini I intend to go to one of your bars and buy one. If I want to be entertained, I will go to your Blue Lagoon nightclub. If I want to pick up a girl, I’ll pick up a girl. I won’t be swept under the rug, Pierre, simply to survive. Survival is not living.”

“We certainly won’t hide you away, George,” Chambrun said. “Without you in evidence we have no bait for the trap we’re about to discuss.”

A private little anger was boiling in me. “How do you propose to dodge the lady who knows damn well you recognized her in the lobby this morning, Mr. Lovelace?”

A little nerve twitched high up on Lovelace’s cheek. “She didn’t buy the idea of a mistake?”

“For God sake, Mr. Lovelace, the woman is in love with you—or Charles Veauclaire, as she knew you. She gave me a detailed account of a certain three months in Paris.”

“What woman?” Chambrun asked.

“A customer,” I said. “And as usual, the customer is always right.”

“Her name is Marilyn VanZandt,” Lovelace said. “She knew me in Paris five years ago as Charles Veauclaire.” A faint color mounted in his tanned cheeks. “I had a strange and very precious three months with her.”

“And left her cold, without a word, just when she had come to think she’d found someone in whom she could believe,” I said.

“It’s none of your business, Mark,” Chambrun said.

“You’re going to have to have some story to tell her, my business or not. She knows you’re registered here at the hotel as George Lovelace,” I said, pointing a finger at Lovelace. “She’s going to come looking for you because she has to have an explanation from you—unless I tell her it really was a mistake and you aren’t Charles Veauclaire.”

“Would she believe you?” Lovelace asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

Chambrun’s hooded eyes were narrowed little slits. “I know Miss VanZandt, George,” he said. “Were you just taking advantage of the lady’s tendency toward nymphomania, or was it something more genuine?”

Lovelace’s face had gone hard. “Much more genuine,” he said.

“Then you can’t fool her.”

“I hoped,” Lovelace said. “I hoped maybe she was tight and that she’d go away thinking it was a mistake.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want her hurt again. I have nothing to give her any more. Because it isn’t safe to know me. You can get killed around me, Pierre, the way things are. Let me think about what to do. Perhaps this means I’ll have to give up the idea of facing things out here at the Beaumont. I won’t have her hurt or put in danger.”

A little red light blinked on the base of Chambrun’s hotel phone. The fact that there’d been no calls indicated that the switchboard had been instructed not to ring in except for a serious emergency. Chambrun frowned his displeasure and picked up the receiver.

“Yes, Mrs. Veach?”

Mrs. Veach is the motherly chief operator for the day shift on the switchboard. I could hear her colorless voice but not what she said. Chambrun’s black eyes were fixed hard on Lovelace as he listened. Then he put down the phone.

“Mrs. Kniffen, the housekeeper on the tenth floor, reports that you have a visitor, George.”

“Marilyn?” Lovelace asked.

“A man,” Chambrun said. “He’s sitting in the armchair in your living room with a bullet hole between his eyes.”

That April day was now under a full head of steam.

S
UDDEN DEATH IS NOT AN
oddity at the Beaumont, any more than it is an oddity in any other community. People of all ages die unexpectedly. Murder isn’t quite so common, and yet it has happened twice in my time as PR man. There are certain automatics. The news itself must not be allowed to spread, or hysteria would begin to run through the hotel guests like a grass fire.

There would be the first brief examination by Jerry Dodd and Dr. Partridge, the house physician. Then the police. My job would be to handle the release of the story to the press, radio, and television.

A kind of cold, controlled anger takes possession of Chambrun when something happens to upset the hotel’s smoothly operating machinery. He looks on sudden or violent death on the premises as a personal affront.

He hesitated only a fraction of time before deciding that Lovelace should come to 10B with us.

“The man has not been identified,” he said. “We may need your help, George.”

Lovelace’s handsome face was drained of color.

“The police?” Ruysdale asked quietly.

“Give us ten minutes,” Chambrun said. “Then try to locate Lieutenant Hardy personally.”

Jerry Dodd was already on the phone, calling the doctor and issuing instructions to have the tenth floor covered by extra members of his staff. I knew what he was hoping. A suicide does nothing to hurt the Beaumont’s image. A murder is something else again.

Mrs. Kniffen, her eyes wide as saucers, was standing outside the door of 10B when we arrived.

“I called you the minute I—I found him, Mr. Chambrun,” she said. “I went in to check out the suite—and he sat there, staring at me. I—”

“Just wait out here, Mrs. Kniffen,” Chambrun said. “We’ll get your story from you later. Did you see anyone else coming to or leaving this suite?”

“No. You see, I—”

“Later, Mrs. Kniffen.”

Jerry Dodd had already opened the door with his passkey and gone in. Chambrun, Lovelace, and I followed him. My mouth was suddenly cotton dry.

A square, thick-set man sat in the armchair facing the door. His dark eyebrows were raised in an expression of surprise. A little black hole, flecked with red, was midway between those eyebrows.

Jerry Dodd was kneeling beside the chair. “No gun,” he said. His fingers opened the dead man’s coat. He exposed a shoulder holster. With his handkerchief he removed the gun from it and sniffed the barrel. “Not fired,” he said. He put the handkerchief-wrapped gun down on the table beside the dead man’s chair and stood up. He gave Lovelace an odd little glance. “His name is John Smith,” he said. “Registered yesterday. Room Six-eleven.”

“How do you know?” Lovelace asked.

“We take a little extra notice of the John Smiths when they register,” Jerry said. “Know him, Mr. Lovelace?”

Lovelace let his breath out in a long sigh. “I never saw him before in my life,” he said. “Complete stranger.”

Jerry leaned close to the dead man’s face, studying the little black hole. “Blood dried,” he said. “At least an hour, I’d say.”

“You’re sure you don’t know him, George?” Chambrun asked.

“Positive,” Lovelace said.

“How did he get in?” Chambrun asked.

Jerry shrugged. “Now that we know it isn’t suicide I don’t want to disturb things, Mr. Chambrun. The door wasn’t forced. Key—or Mr. Lovelace left the door on the latch.”

“No,” Lovelace said. “In my business there are certain habits. One of them is to make sure, automatically, that a door you want locked is locked.”

“A maid,” I suggested.

Nobody seemed to buy that.

“Anything in here disturbed?” Chambrun asked.

Lovelace shook his head. “The bedroom—” he suggested.

Lovelace hadn’t stopped to unpack his bags after he’d read the letter. He’d called Chambrun and gone straight down to the second floor. The bags stood where Johnny Thacker had left them. If they’d been opened here was no outward sign of it.

“Look inside them,” Chambrun said.

Lovelace opened the three cases. “Untouched as far as I can tell,” he said. He left the bags open.

Jerry Dodd tapped a cigarette thoughtfully on the back of his hand. “Looks like our friend Smith came to pay a call on you, Mr. Lovelace; let himself in somehow, and when you weren’t here sat down to wait for you. Someone else opened the door and shot him dead before he could even lift a hand toward his own gun. You saw the look on his face? Surprise. I think he expected you, Mr. Lovelace.” He hesitated. “Do you have a gun, sir?”