Random Killer (22 page)

Ruysdale flew to her own office.

“We can take him in five minutes, you know,” Hardy said.

“If you want to pay the price,” Chambrun said. “He has nothing to lose and everything to gain.”

“And you’re going to help him get away?” Hardy said.

Chambrun’s cold eyes looked steadily at his friend. “Over my dead body, quite literally,” he said.

I was sent to the subbasement to warn people to stay out of sight. The lame man, his hostage, and the boss were to be allowed to pass without question.

The journey to the basement kept me from knowing what Chambrun had planned, and I never did know till it was all over. When I got back to the office I was just in time to hear that the car had been delivered from the garage and to see Chambrun pick up his phone and tell Conklin that he was on his way.

What now seems like a long time later I got it all from Nora. When she told me, I was holding her in what I hoped she would know were strong, irresistible, masculine arms.

She had been in my apartment, reading. Her bodyguard-cop was sitting in his usual place by the door. There was a knock. The guard asked who it was.

“Relief man,” a voice said.

The cop opened the door, and was hit over the head by Conklin, who had some kind of iron bar in his hand. We found out later it was the handle to a mop wringer kept in the Trapeze men’s room. Conklin used it on both cops. Nora screamed, but he’d slammed the door shut. My place is soundproof, like most apartments in the Beaumont. He told her what her options were. Play it his way or she had none. He took a coil of picture wire from his pocket to emphasize the point. Then he called Chambrun.

And so eventually the time came when Chambrun called to say he was ready. At which point Conklin produced a gun and stood behind Nora. Ironically, Hardy had allowed Conklin to have that gun—to protect himself! He’d left the door on the latch. Chambrun knocked and let himself in.

“I was relieved,” Nora told me, “but he looked like a stone statue. There was nothing about him that suggested any hope. That man!”

Conklin ordered Chambrun to empty his pockets, take off his coat. He wanted to be sure Chambrun wasn’t armed. Satisfied, after slapping Chambrun all over, Conklin smiled and said, “It’s your game, master. We follow the leader.”

Down the deserted hallway they went, Chambrun leading the way, to the service elevator at the rear. The elevator was there, door propped open. Chambrun had made certain that there would be no delays during which some innocent bypasser might disrupt the whole procedure. You don’t come on a girl in the hands of a strangler, with a wire around her neck and a gun at her back, without running screaming for help. Jerry Dodd and Hardy had tried to minimize that possibility. No elevators except the service car to stop at two; stairway and fire stairs blocked; the hallway on two shut off at each end.

Chambrun removed the block that propped open the door of the service car. Conklin and his hostage had moved in behind him.

“We are going down to the subbasement,” he said, not turning his head. “We will then walk through the corridors there to the north side of the building where the car is waiting.”

“Your ball game,” Conklin said. “Just bear in mind that if you screw it up, I won’t wait for explanations—or for one of your theories!”

Nora told me that as the service car started down, noiselessly, she felt as if her blood had turned to ice water, her legs were scarcely able to hold her up.

“I started to sag, Mark,” she told me, “and that terrible wire began to tighten around my neck. My God, I had seen Joanna, you know.”

The service car reached the subbasement.

“There’s a long corridor with rooms opening off it,” Nora said. “But you know that, Mark. I saw machinery of different sorts, and what looked like a laundry. But no people! It was almost like a tomb, lighted by bare electric bulbs spaced every few feet along the corridor. Chambrun walked ahead of me, never looking back. Conklin had his wire around my neck, held in one hand, and his gun, pointed at Chambrun’s back, held in the other. And then—oh my God, Mark—all the lights went out and we were in total darkness.”

Conklin shouted at Chambrun, demanding to know what had happened. No answer. Nora felt the wire starting to tighten around her neck.

“I’m warning you, Chambrun!” Conklin shouted.

“And then,” Nora told me, “I heard Chambrun’s voice. He was
behind
us now! ‘What you feel pressed against your head, Conklin, is a gun,’ he said, in the coldest voice I’ve ever heard. ‘If you haven’t dropped your gun and let go that wire in two heartbeats, they’ll be scraping your brains off the side walls here.’ ”

“ ‘You haven’t got a gun!’ Conklin said.”

“ ‘Try me,’ Chambrun said. ‘I start counting now—up to two!’ I felt the wire loosen, Mark, and I guess I dropped down on my knees—on all fours as a matter of fact. I think I heard Conklin’s gun drop on the stone floor. And suddenly all the lights were” on again and the corridor was crowded with people who swarmed over Conklin. Chambrun was there, and he
did
have a gun. He handed it to a big man with a grey walrus mustache and said ‘Thanks, Mac. Handled perfectly.’ Then he came over to me and helped me, gently, to stand up. ‘You’re a gutsy girl, Miss Coyle,’ he said. ‘But it’s all over now, quite finally over.’”

It was a day or so before we had the pieces all put together, because Conklin never spoke a word, never offered any explanation.

Of course what had happened in the subbasement was obvious enough, even before Chambrun explained it. The man with the grey walrus mustache was McPherson, our daytime engineer. He had been stationed in one of the side rooms off the corridor with a gun and a clear way to signal a man on the master control board. As Chambrun reached that doorway McPherson signaled and the lights went out. Chambrun took a quick step to the right in the darkness and he was suddenly armed. End of Conklin as a threat.

And the Conklin story? It was put together with the help of Sharon Dain, released from custody in Colorado, by Bobby Bryan, and by Chambrun’s theories, which had to be fact.

It had started, a long way back, with a handsome, arrogant man named Conklin being shot down by Israeli commandos in an Arab town. The loss of his right leg crippled Conklin in more ways than one, psychologically as well as physically. Always successful with women, Conklin now felt mutilated, ugly, ashamed. He saw himself forever shut off from romantic seductions. He turned to the business of buying his sex from women who didn’t care whether he had one leg or three, as long as he paid the price. On a trip to Los Angeles some two and a half years ago he had encountered Sharon Dain, a hard-boiled hooker. What there was about Sharon that overwhelmed him, I don’t know, but Conklin fell in love with her. She laughed at him when he suggested marriage. But she played along with him on succeeding visits because he might, with his connections, get her the only thing she wanted, a career in films.

That January, two years ago—with Hammond and Bobby Bryan in Switzerland—he took off for L.A. to make another pitch to Sharon Dain. He couldn’t find her. Questions produced the fact that she had gone to High Crest with a man. That was when he went into the elaborate routine of hiring Al Ziegler, the private eye, to go to High Crest to find out what was cooking. Ziegler reported that she was having her ears beaten off by a sadistic punk. And so Conklin drove to High Crest, slipped into the grounds at night and, looking through the window of Carpenter’s cabin, saw his ladylove being pounded unconscious. He went in and killed her tormentor. Where the technique of the picture wire came from we never knew, but he was prepared to do it that way.

“An old terrorist technique,” Chambrun said. “The silent murder in a dark alley. We used it during the days of the French Resistance in Paris.”

So Conklin slipped away from High Crest, unaware that anyone had seen anything. Sharon would come back to her Hollywood haunts and he could approach her again. But that never happened because the police arrested her for the murder he’d committed.

“This haunted him,” Chambrun told us in a final session on the case, two days after Conklin’s arrest. “He got reports from Ziegler for a few more days so he knew the defence committee hadn’t been able to raise enough money to hire Max Steiner to defend Sharon. It had to be found, and he knew where.”

This part of it came from Bobby Bryan. Geoffrey Hammond kept a large sum of money in a special account. This was money acquired through Hammond’s highly sophisticated blackmail techniques in the Middle East.

“Roy had access to that account, as Geoff’s business manager,” Bobby told us. “If Hammond was across the world somewhere and needed funds, Roy could produce them for him.”

“So then, with Hammond in Switzerland with you,” Chambrun said, “he produced two hundred thousand dollars for Sharon’s defense.”

“I doubt if he stole the whole amount from Hammond,” Bobby said. “Roy had made a lot of dough himself from those Arab oil sheiks. I suspect what he put up at first was his own. But then Steiner’s costs mounted and mounted, and he had to dig into Hammond’s special account. The money was kept the way it was to avoid taxes. Roy took it, expecting to find a way to get it back before Hammond found out. But he didn’t find a way.”

“Which led to three more deaths,” Chambrun said, “so long after the first one. I guess again, gentlemen. Hammond discovered his special account was short. Only Conklin had access, could account for it. He invited Conklin for breakfast. Conklin, who had never been able to repay the money, sensed disaster. He came prepared—you might say wired for murder.”

“And so the snowball started rolling,” Hardy said. “We’ll never know for certain, but you must have been right about Joanna Fraser. An encounter in the lobby, he follows her upstairs, gets invited in, and he’s still safe.”

“Then Ziegler-Davis shows up and tries to get him to expose himself. Conklin was perfectly willing to kill a dozen people by now to stay hidden,” Chambrun said.

“All for love of a cold-hearted hooker who didn’t give a damn about him,” Hardy said. The Lieutenant was happy. He had his case.

“Mark might not agree with the words ‘cold-hearted,’ Walter,” Chambrun said. “She provided Conklin, a sick man, with some kind of warmth, some kind of simulated tenderness, for which he was grateful enough to kill for her.” He put out his cigarette. “Well—” he began.

I raised my hands in a gesture of surrender. “I know, boss, I know,” I said. “We still have a hotel to run.”

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copyright © 1979 by Judson Philips

cover design by Julianna Lee

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