Nightmare Time (21 page)

The back room was a dingy little place, furnished only with a blanket-covered cot, a small kitchen table, its white paint peeling off, and three plain kitchen chairs, never painted. A single unshaded light bulb in a ceiling fixture provided the light.

Zachary’s friend put his weapon down on the table, reached in his shirt pocket for a cigarette, and lit it with a lighter which he produced from his pants pocket. Neither he nor Zachary seemed to be concerned with the possibility that I might make a grab for that gun on the table. They were right. I wasn’t about to try heroics. I wasn’t sure, at that moment, if my shaking knees would hold me up if I tried to move.

“It doesn’t really matter whether you got onto me or it was just an accident that you saw me outside this place,” Zachary said. “But I’m curious.”

“It matters,” the gunman said, “because if he figured us out we may have the whole United States Army down on us in a few minutes. You sure no one else was following you, Zach?”

“Positive,” Zachary said. “I’m not likely to miss someone who’s intentionally tailing me, Red.”

“There can always be a first time,” Red said.

Things began to fall into ugly place for me. Major Willis and his Rozzie, on the way to the Blue Lagoon, could have met Zachary in the hall outside their suite. They might have been surprised, but would have had no reason to be concerned. Zachary was part of the Major’s team, probably saying he’d been on the way with some kind of message when they met in the hall. They go on the elevator together, Zachary shows his true hand, and Tim Sullivan tries to interfere and gets his. Zachary could have been the man with the hat and the dark glasses who’d called himself Henry Graves, a friend of the Major’s who was assigned to 17E, the room next to the Willis suite. At nine o’clock last night no one in the Beaumont had ever heard of Captain Zachary. The desk clerk would have had no reason to associate him with “Henry Graves.” And Betsy—she’d have let Zachary come up to her apartment at four in the morning. He was a “good guy.” And Chambrun though I knew he didn’t like Zachary, would not have been likely to be suspicious of him.

“Are they all here in this building?” I asked.

“We ask the questions, you give the answers,” Zachary said. “Had you gotten wise to me, or was it an accident?”

The only card I held was to keep him guessing. “Romy suggested we should be looking for a mole in your organization,” I said.

“So you followed me from the hotel?”

“Well, I spotted you anyway, didn’t I?”

“Is this one any use to us?” Red asked Zachary. “We can’t keep nursemaiding more and more people, Zach. If he’s no use to you, let’s get rid of him and be done with it.”

Zachary stood staring at me, like a kid studying a puzzling problem on the blackboard. “Chambrun is very soft about his people,” he said. “This one could be useful. Let’s hang onto him for a bit. Give him the treatment, Red.”

I was grabbed from behind, my arms twisted behind me. I struggled, but Red was giant strong. I felt cold steel against my wrists and realized that I’d been handcuffed. I was spun around like a doll, and a wide strip of adhesive tape was slapped over my mouth, even before I could shout.

“March toward the door!” Red ordered.

Zachary opened the door and stood there, frozen, staring at Chambrun, who was pointing a gun straight at his forehead—the little gun I’d seen him put in his jacket pocket hours ago. Chambrun wasn’t alone. Behind him in the dark hallway was a small army—kids, headed by Mike Maggio!

I didn’t have to see Red reaching for his automatic rifle. It was Mike who moved, launching a vicious karate kick at Red’s jaw. Red staggered away against the wall and Mike had the gun.

“Do we let the law have them, Boss, or do we kill the sons of bitches right here and now?” Mike asked.

“We take them in,” Chambrun said.

The army of kids swarmed around Zachary and Red. Chambrun approached me.

“I thought you were going to blow the whole ball-game, Mark, when I saw you walk into the house with him! This is going to hurt.”

He reached out and gave the adhesive tape over my mouth one swift jerk. It was the loveliest pain I ever felt. And then his arms were around me in a fatherly hug. I couldn’t return it, because my hands were still chained behind me. Then one of the kids was releasing me. I suppose he’d found the handcuff keys in Red’s pocket.

Chambrun turned to Zachary, who’d been given the handcuff treatment by Mike’s kids. “I’ll give you just thirty seconds, Zachary, to take me to the others—or I’ll shoot your miserable brains out. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether I’m fooling. I start counting now—twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven—”

“Down in the cellar,” Zachary said.

SO MUCH HAPPENED so quickly.

A couple of Mike’s kids went racing off to the hotel to find Lieutenant Hardy and Colonel Martin and bring them back with reinforcements. Mike, holding Red’s repeating rifle in his hands, grinned at his two prisoners.

“I’ve always wanted to play with one of these,” Mike was saying. “Don’t tempt me.”

Some of the kids found the cellar stairs, found a light switch, and went down ahead of Chambrun and me. I don’t know what I expected, but whatever it was going to be, I dreaded it.

What we found were three people, handcuffed to uprights that held up the ceiling, mouths taped, eyes wide and frightened until they saw Chambrun. Betsy and the Willises were alive.

Chambrun was with Betsy. “This is going to hurt,” he said again, and ripped the tape off her mouth.

“Oh, Pierre—I was such a fool, such an idiot.”

“Not now—maybe next year,” he said. “Right now it’s all over.” He held her very close for a moment, and watching was almost like an invasion of privacy. Then he went over and knelt beside Mrs. Willis. “Take care of the Major, Mark,” he said.

A bright-eyed little black boy was working on the Major’s handcuffs.

“That boy could pick the lock on the United States Mint if it was called for,” I heard Chambrun tell Rosalind Willis.

“Guy—my boy?” I heard her ask.

“Just fine,” Chambrun said. “I’ll get you to him right away.”

I wasn’t good at that quick jerk, but I got the adhesive off the Major’s mouth.

“Thanks, Mark,” he said. His voice sounded as though he’d forgotten how to use it. “I was beginning to give up hope—” The grinning kid who’d been kneeling behind the Major came around, holding up the handcuffs. The Major held out his hands, flexing his fingers. Then he walked over to his wife, took her in his arms, and held her.

There was a thunder of footsteps on the cellar stairs, and Hardy, Colonel Martin, and three or four cops came down.

“You got those two characters upstairs, Walter?” Chambrun asked the detective.

“Got them, but have you got something on them?” Hardy asked. “They’re already screaming ‘false arrest.’”

Chambrun just gestured toward Betsy and the Willises. Hardy wasn’t going to have to worry about a false arrest.

A POLICE CAR
carrying Betsy, the Willises, and me went around to the back of the Beaumont and into the basement garage. We took an elevator from there to the roof, avoiding all the reporters and sightseers in the lobby. In Chambrun’s penthouse there was a touching reunion between the Willises and their boy. Mrs. Haven whisked Betsy off into the bedroom section to freshen up and indulge in woman talk.

My first impulse was to call the desk downstairs and release the front-line story—the hostages were freed and safe, their abductors under arrest. Then I decided I’d wait for a green light from Chambrun and Hardy. I decided I could use that drink I’d refused earlier at Romy’s, and I went over to the sideboard and poured myself a slug of Jack Daniel’s.

I should have guessed what Mike Maggio told me later. Chambrun was making a “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world” tour of the lobby. His people would know that he was back on his throne and in business.

The bits and pieces were put together about an hour later when the three hostages, young Guy Willis, Mrs. Haven, and Chambrun, along with Hardy, Colonel Martin, and a policeman at a stenotype machine were gathered together. They took it in sequence, the Willis story coming first. It was much as we’d imagined it.

“Rozzie and I had just left our suite to go down to the Blue Lagoon,” Willis told us, “when we ran into Clint Zachary out in the hall. I was surprised, yet not surprised in a way. He told me he was on his way to find me, had some official business. I told him Rozzie and I were headed down to hear Duke Hines’s nine-o’clock show. Could he wait for business talk till after that? He was cheerful enough about it, said he’d go with us.”

“You knew who he was, Mrs. Willis?” Hardy asked.

“Oh yes,” Rozzie Willis said. She was sitting on the couch, holding young Guy’s hand in hers, beaming, a far cry from the haggard woman I’d seen in the basement of that brownstone a little while ago. “Ham and I had run across him several times in Washington. He’d even been to our apartment there—on official business. He was ‘one of us,’ you know?”

“In any case, we started down in the elevator, the three of us with your man Sullivan,” the Major said. “Zachary told Sullivan to keep going down to the garage area. There was something he wanted to get in his car. I said Rozzie and I would get off at the lobby and he could join us in the Blue Lagoon. ‘We’ll all go to the basement,’ Zachary said, and produced a revolver. Your man Sullivan, brave guy, made a move and was shot right between the eyes. Then I knew, much too late, what was happening.”

“You weren’t armed, Major?” Hardy said.

Willis glanced at Rozzie. “I was just taking my wife out on a date, not planning to leave the hotel. I felt perfectly safe here in the Beaumont.”

“I wish you had been,” Chambrun said.

“No way you could possibly have foreseen it, Pierre,” Willis said. “Anyway, I was forced, at gunpoint, to carry Sullivan’s body to that trash bin. I was ordered to strip myself of my uniform and leave it there. Zachary was wearing a raincoat, and he gave it to me to put on over my shirt and underthings. We just walked out onto the street that way, walked past some backyards and into the basement of that brownstone where you found us.”

“You were badly treated, Mrs. Willis?” Colonel Martin asked.

“Mostly just humiliated,” Rozzie Willis said. “Fondled, pinched, handled by a big red-haired goon who was our jailer.”

“And threatened with the works if I didn’t talk,” Willis said.

“The brooch?” Hardy asked.

“They must have known what it was for,” Willis said. “It was ripped off Rozzie the minute we were in the basement.”

“And left in 17E to make us think you’d been brought back to the hotel,” Hardy said.

“They told me they were going to bring Guy to where we were, and when they got through working him over in front of me, I would talk.”

“But you wouldn’t, would you, Dad?” the boy asked.

The Major looked at his son. “I like to think I wouldn’t, Guy,” he said. “It would have been pretty rough.”

“I would have come, but Mr. Chambrun wouldn’t let them have me,” the boy said.

“Bless you, Pierre,” Willis said.

“I thought it was the only way to keep you alive till we could find you,” Chambrun said.

Hardy turned to Betsy. “Did you know, Betsy, that Zachary recorded his scene with you in his apartment?”

Betsy nodded. “He played it for me later. I didn’t think Pierre would be buffaloed by it—I hoped he wouldn’t. Zachary rang the front doorbell at my building about four in the morning. Just after I’d left Mark here with Guy and gone home to get some sleep. He didn’t bluff, said he was Captain Zachary. He couldn’t locate Pierre and needed some information about hotel routines.”

“This over the front-door intercom?” Hardy asked.

“Yes. So I told him to come up, let him into my place, and found out I’d been had. He went through that routine of a sexual attack—of course, I didn’t know he was recording it—and when I started to scream at him he slugged me with something and I blacked out. When I came to I was being carried into the basement of that brownstone by Rozzie’s ‘red-haired goon.’”

“It’s interesting the role that tapes play in this,” Chambrun said. “Zachary used a tape to try to bluff me into turning young Guy loose, and I used a tape to nail him.”

“Would you mind explaining that, Mr. Chambrun?” Colonel Martin asked.

“Half my life is spent on the telephone,” Chambrun said. “I have a recorder on my desk so that I can tape any phone calls I want for later use. I also have one in the little rest room off my office. In the afternoon, while I was resting, Mrs. Veach put through a call to me from Betsy’s abductor. I turned on my recorder and I tried to stall him while Mrs. Veach tried to trace the call. I knew the caller was faking his speaking voice. Eventually I told him to use his ‘phony Russian accent’ so I’d know I was talking to the right person. He just laughed and hung up. But that laugh did him in!”

“Explanation?” Hardy asked.

“The voice was not familiar. But that laugh! Zachary and I had not gotten along, you know. I didn’t like him. I particularly didn’t like him when he laughed at some suggestion I made. I don’t forget the sound of someone laughing at me. That laugh, when the man hung up, was Zachary’s. I played the tape over several times. No doubt of it. But would it sell anybody else? Probably not. Was it evidence that could be used in court? No way. But I knew, whether I could convince anyone else or not, who my man was.”

“So you decided to play The Lone Ranger?” Hardy said, sounding just a little angry.

“Not quite,” Chambrun said. “I knew if I told you there’d be cops following Zachary and he’d spot them. I knew if I told you, Colonel Martin, you’d probably think I was balmy, tell Zachary, and he’d be watching for me. I was afraid if I told you, Mark, or Jerry, that somehow even with the best intentions, you’d tip my hand. You see, knowing it was Zachary, I was convinced the hostages were being held somewhere close by, not in Cuba or Canada or someplace far away. He had to show here and he had to be able to get to them quickly if he got the boy free. So, Mike was the person I trusted because he had something I could use, an army of street kids whom Zachary would have no reason to suspect.”