Random Killer (8 page)

“Do you remember what it said?”

“Just a sentence,” Nora said. “ ‘You will pay for your indifference to Sharon Dain.’ ”

“No signature?”

“No.”

“And that was two years ago? Nothing since?”

“Not that I know of.” Nora twisted in her chair. “Anonymous threats and slanderous attacks weren’t unusual. I guess most public people get them. Joanna ignored them.”

“She wasn’t afraid?”

“Joanna wasn’t afraid of God himself,” Nora said with a little smile.

“She should have been, it seems,” Chambrun said. “I think Hardy should be in on this.” He had Ruysdale connect him with 1614. While he waited for Hardy to come on he spoke to Nora. “You didn’t mention all this in the statement you gave Hardy?”

“I hadn’t even thought of it until Mark and I got to talking,” Nora said. “I mean, it was two years ago, and what happened today was so immediate. I wasn’t thinking of anything else when Lieutenant Hardy questioned me.”

Hardy came on and Chambrun said, “I may have something, Walter.”

While he waited, Chambrun proceeded to make a series of phone calls from a list on the desk in front of him. I recognized the people he was calling as permanent residents of the hotel, mostly co-op apartment owners and old friends and customers. He had a set speech for them, telling what had happened, what the risks were. They were not to let anyone into their rooms, not even maids, or waiters, or bellboys, until the coast was clear.

“You suspect someone on the staff?” I asked him between calls.

“I suspect someone posing as someone on the staff,” he said. “Both Hammond and Joanna Fraser were unprepared for any sort of attack. They wouldn’t have suspected a waiter, or a maid, or a maintenance man who managed to get behind them, ostensibly doing some routine job.”

He went on with his calling until Hardy walked in.

The detective listened to Nora’s story, frowning. “It provides some sort of remote motive,” he said when she’d finished. “But what, if any, is the connection with Hammond?”

“Let’s see,” Chambrun said. The light was blinking on his phone and he picked it up. “Send him in,” he said to Ruysdale.

Bobby Bryan, Hammond’s secretary, joined us. Chambrun introduced him to Nora.

“We both seem to be out of a job, Miss Coyle,” Bobby said. Then, to Chambrun, “What’s up?”

“You ever hear of the Sharon Dain case?” Chambrun asked.

“Sure,” Bobby said promptly. “Gal who strangled her boyfriend at some ski resort in Colorado.” He stopped, his eye widening. “With picture wire!”

“Interesting, no?” Chambrun said. “Tell me, Bryan, were you and Hammond out in High Crest, Colorado, when that happened?”

“Good God, no,” Bobby said. “I’ve never been to Colorado. Neither had Hammond in the ten years I was with him.”

“And Hammond had no connection with the Dain case?”

“No. That is, he refused to have a connection.”

“How do you mean?”

Bobby shrugged. “The Dain girl had stirred up a lot of support for herself among the guests out there. They got Max Steiner, one of the most famous and expensive defense lawyers in the country, to handle the Dain girl’s case. He called Hammond, long distance to New York, with a crazy proposal. He wanted Hammond to interview Sharon Dain on TV. His case was to be self-defense while the girl was driven to legal insanity by her boyfriend’s sadistic treatment. Max Steiner wanted to make his case to the whole world and not just to a jury.”

Chambrun was almost smiling. “And Hammond refused?”

“Sure. In spite of a whopping fee Steiner offered. Hammond felt he was being used, and nobody ever used Geoffrey Hammond.”

Chambrun leaned back in his chair, and his smile had reached Cheshire-cat proportions. “So there’s the base they both touched without either of them knowing it,” he said. “They both refused to help Sharon Dain.” The smile evaporated. “The next question is, who else refused? Someone who may be staying here in the Beaumont?”

L
IEUTENANT HARDY WAS ON
the phone to High Crest, Colorado, almost before Chambrun had finished speaking. Nothing so obvious as an escaped Sharon Dain, out to massacre all the people who refused to help her in her time of trouble, developed. Colorado police assured Hardy that Sharon Dain was safely tucked away in a state prison for women. She hadn’t escaped. She wasn’t even due for a parole hearing for another ten years. She had, it seemed, through her lawyer, Max Steiner, moved to appeal her conviction on technical grounds involving her trial, and had been turned down by the state’s highest court. That final decision had been handed down just about a month ago.

“You might think the woman’s lover was out on some kind of revenge kick,” Hardy said, “except that she killed her lover—with picture wire!”

“She killed
that
lover with picture wire,” Chambrun said. He looked around at the rest of us. “Who knows anything about this Dain girl except for the murder case?”

No one spoke.

“You, Miss Coyle,” Chambrun said, “were approached by an actor named Lance Wilson to get help from Joanna Fraser.”

Nora nodded. I could see she was trying to put together memories of something almost forgotten.

“He had just had a big success playing a supporting role to a major star,” she said. “I can’t remember—Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, somebody like that. He is young, in his early twenties, I’d guess. The Dain girl must be ten years older.”

“Maybe he liked older women,” Chambrun said. “I did at that age. What’s become of him?”

“I don’t think he’s had anything big,” Nora said. “I see him on TV dramas from time to time. But I don’t think—”

“What don’t you think, Miss Coyle?”

“The situation at High Crest was rather special,” she said. “High Crest is a ski resort, but it’s more like a private club. The same people come back year after year, or friends of those same people come. They book most of the accommodations well in advance. There isn’t ever much room for the general public.”

“Just what point does that make?” Chambrun asked.

“Everybody knew everybody,” Nora said. “Everybody was rich, or friends with someone rich.”

“But you were there for a convention.”

“Joanna could afford to buy space anywhere she wanted. If she needed a friend in court she had one.”

“So everybody was well off. The Dain girl?”

“I don’t think so.”

“She hired the most expensive defense lawyer in the country.”

“I think friends put up the money for her.”

“What friends?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Chambrun. The only friend I met was Lance Wilson. Somehow I didn’t think he was a friend in the sense that we use the word. It was more that he was on her side.”

“I’m afraid you’re confusing me, Miss Coyle,” Chambrun said.

“Everyone knew Harold Carpenter, the man who was murdered,” Nora said. “He’d been a ski instructor at High Crest for a number of years. A dark, handsome man with a beautiful athletic body. A kind of noisy glamor boy.” She lowered her eyes. “The Dain girl lived in his cabin, but that didn’t reduce his interest in other attractive women. I think—I think he brought Sharon Dain to High Crest. The management would have permitted him to have any guest he chose. He was important to them.”

So our Nora had battled with Harold Carpenter, I thought. I hoped he’d had no better luck than I’d had.

“The people at High Crest seemed to take sides after Carpenter was murdered,” Nora said. “I don’t mean that there were people who were Sharon Dain’s friends—who loved her. She was—in my opinion—a cheap, rather gaudy little tramp. The division was over Harold Carpenter. Some people thought he was marvelous; some people thought he was a jerk. Those who thought he was a jerk believed Sharon Dain’s story of sadism and violence. They accepted her story that she’d acted in self-defense. The others adored Carpenter and thought Sharon should get the works.”

“A question,” Hardy interrupted. “How can you sneak up behind a man, strangle him with picture wire when he’s off guard, and call it self-defense?”

Nora seemed to be having trouble keeping her voice steady. “Those on Sharon’s side believed Carpenter was capable of all kinds of perverted violence,” she said. “Max Steiner, her lawyer, contended that she was a prisoner in Carpenter’s cabin; that in a lull between violences she chose the only possible way she could to escape him. Her supporters bought that. I think Lance Wilson was one of them. They formed a defense committee and I’ve always thought they paid the bills.”

I noticed Ruysdale going through the phone book. She marked a place with her forefinger. “I have Max Steiner’s phone number,” she said.

Chambrun gave her a special little smile I’d seen there before. It signaled his appreciation of Ruysdale’s ability to be one step ahead of his demands.

“Please,” he said. Then, as Ruysdale went out to her own office, “Max Steiner can at least tell us who did pay his bill, which, with appeals and all, must have been quite something.”

“From what I know of him,” Hardy said sourly, “he won’t talk to you without a consultation fee.”

The lieutenant proved to be wrong. Almost at once the red light blinked on Chambrun’s phone. He turned on the squawk box and picked up the receiver.

“I have Mr. Steiner on the line,” Ruysdale said.

“Mr. Steiner?” Chambrun said.

A brisk, energetic voice came through to us. I’d seen pictures of Steiner and knew him to be a small, wiry, grey powerhouse. “I had a feeling someone in your world might be trying to reach me, Mr. Chambrun,” he said.

“Oh?”

Steiner laughed. “Not everybody in the world has the dubious pleasure of being involved with strangling-by-picture-wire.”

“I have you on an open line, Mr. Steiner. Lieutenant Hardy of Homicide is here, also a member of my staff; my secretary, and a young woman who was Joanna Fraser’s secretary. You’ve heard the news from here?”

“Yes. I don’t mind an audience, Mr. Chambrun. I’m at my best with an audience.”

“We’ve made a strange connection with the Dain case,” Chambrun said. “It seems that both our victims, Geoffrey Hammond and Joanna Fraser, had a similar involvement with Sharon Dain. They both refused to help her.”

“I know,” Steiner said. “I knew at the time. I was sitting here wondering if I should tell someone that when your call came.”

“You think there’s some significance in that?”

“I don’t know enough about your end of it to make a guess,” Steiner said. “But if I were you I’d certainly be wondering.”

“So then you’ll understand my first question. Who paid your fees, Mr. Steiner?”

“You won’t believe it,” Steiner said.

“Try me.”

“I don’t know,” Steiner said. He laughed again. “I have been paid over two hundred thousand dollars for the first trial and for the appeals, and I don’t know who paid it.”

“It is hard to believe. I understand there was some kind of defense committee. I thought they—”

“Oh, there was a committee, and they hired me. They, technically, paid me. But the money came from an anonymous source.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There was a man out there named Parker, Alvin Parker. He’s president of the Parker Foundation. They give away millions of dollars to the arts every year. He was chairman of that committee. He approached me. I told him what a defense was likely to cost. He didn’t know how to raise it.”

“With millions at his command?” Chambrun asked. He was making some kind of signals to Ruysdale, who was standing in the far doorway. It suddenly came to me in that moment. The Parker Foundation was giving some kind of a fund-raising do in the Grand Ballroom that night. Alvin Parker was a guest in the hotel!

“Alvin Parker is the nephew of Joshua Parker, the oil billionaire, who created the Parker Foundation in his will. Alvin Parker is, no doubt, well off. But he doesn’t have a free hand with the foundation money. It has to go to the arts. Perhaps, if Sharon Dain had been an artist, the foundation could have justified some sort of contribution to her defense. But she wasn’t that kind of artist.”

“What kind of artist was she?”

Steiner chuckled. “In bed,” he said.

“So Parker didn’t foot the bill?”

“I think he made a contribution. There were half a dozen others. When they put it all together they didn’t have enough for the first roll of the dice. Then, a couple of days later, Parker came back to me, looking bewildered but happy. An anonymous contributor had anted up a hundred grand, with a promise that there was more where that came from if it was needed. Neither Parker nor anyone else on the committee had the faintest idea who Mr. Anonymous was. Sharon Dain couldn’t guess who was willing to underwrite her defense. But whoever it was, he’s lived up to his word. He came up with another hundred grand before we were done.”

“Two hundred grand to defend an obviously guilty woman?” Hardy broke in.

“That’s Lieutenant Hardy, Mr. Steiner,” Chambrun said.

“You used the right words, Lieutenant. ‘Obviously guilty.’ ” Steiner said. “The police had an open-and-shut case. She lived with Carpenter. She was in the cabin with him that night. There were no fingerprints but hers and his. There are watchmen on the property and none of them saw anyone go into the cabin. It was no secret that Carpenter enjoyed beating her up. She had a motive. But —” and I could hear Steiner let out a long breath—“she swore to me she didn’t kill him and I believed her.”

“But she pleaded guilty!” Hardy said.

“In self-defense, by reason of insanity,” Steiner said. “The curlicues of the law, Lieutenant. I thought I could get her off that way. I knew, with the case the police had, I could never get her off if she pleaded innocent. I tried to get the trial moved away from High Crest. There was too much local sentiment for Carpenter. The court turned me down. The judge who presided was obviously prejudiced. I based the appeals on dozens of exceptions I took to his rulings. The State Supreme Court wouldn’t buy. The sentence was improperly heavy, even the way we pleaded. The little lady got just about the worst deal I’ve ever encountered.”

Chambrun cut in. “If she didn’t do it she was in the cabin when it was done,” he said.