Shape of fear, p.14
Shape of Fear, page 14
“You’re dead sure of your own man?” Chambrun asked.
I thought Clark was going to hit him. He actually took a step toward him, his fist drawn back. But he stopped.
“Dead sure, Chambrun,” he said. “Absolutely dead sure.”
There was a moment of tense silence and then Juliet’s unsteady voice broke it “I think I’d better go to Charles,” she said.
She stood up unsteadily, as if no one else was there, as if she was going to go by herself. Clark and Decker looked uncertainly at each other.
“Is there any reason she shouldn’t go back to the hotel?” I asked.
“We need a statement from her,” Decker said.
“Can’t it be taken from her at the hotel?” I said. “How much do you think she can go through in one stretch of time? She needs a chance to get pulled together, for God’s sake.”
The sergeant hesitated. “I’ll send a man back with her,” he said.
“I’ll take her,” I said. “Somebody’s got to tell her husband what’s happened. He doesn’t know.”
“Maybe—he doesn’t know,” Harry Clark said grimly.
I dont think Juliet heard him. She had started to move blindly toward the door. Chambrun had come up beside me.
“Mark may be able to get a little more detail from her,” he said to Decker. “They’re friends. It may be a little easier for her to talk to him.”
“Go ahead, Mr. Haskell,” Decker said. “If she tells you anything she hasn’t told us …”
I didn’t answer. I felt unaccountably angry at being placed in the position of trying to pry at her. She needed someone to hang onto at this moment.
One of the cops out on the pavement flagged down a taxi for us. Juliet sat in one corner, staring straight ahead. How can I explain that I felt happy being there with her, able to offer some sort of support.
“I did it to him,” she said, without looking at me. I could feel her whole body begin to tremble. I took one of her hands in mine and held onto it hard.
“You didn’t do anything to him,” I said.
“He came because he knew I was there and wanted to see him. If I’d just had a chance to convince him how dangerous it was for him.”
“It wouldn’t have changed the danger,” I said, “and he wouldn’t have gone away. He told us that earlier. He was determined to get to the truth about your father.”
“I don’t understand any of it,” she said, turning her head from side to side. “If that other man was Loring, as they say, what happened between them?”
“We’ll find out sooner or later,” I said.
For the first time she turned those wide blue eyes on me. “You know what Charles will think? That this proves he was right from the start about Digger. That Loring had discovered he was part of the conspiracy and that Digger was cornered and had to try to fight his way out.”
That was exactly what I’d been thinking myself. I’d been trying not to, but how else could you explain what had happened?
“One thing is certain,” I said. “He came to see you because he loved you.”
“And no matter what the truth is I love him,” she said. “It’s like a sickness for which there’s no cure. Mark, will you try to help me to explain what’s happened?”
“Of course,” I said.
“And—Mark?”
“Yes.”
“Will you promise to let me know what happens? How he is?”
“Of course I will.”
It was only a short run to the Beaumont and that was all the conversation we had time for. I helped her out of the cab and hurried her across the lobby to the elevators. If the news had reached the hotel, I saw no signs of it.
We were whisked up to the fifteenth floor and then walked down the corridor to the door of the Girard suite.
Girard opened the door. He took one look at Juliet, and his face seemed to light up.
“Juliet!” He had her in his arms. He looked at me over the top of her bowed head and must have sensed instinctively that something was seriously wrong.
“I think I’d better talk to you for a minute,” I said.
“Come in.”
She seemed to be hanging onto him, almost dead weight, as he helped her into the living room of the suite.
“Please,” I heard her whisper, “I’d like to go to my room, Charles. Mark will explain.”
He went with her. After a moment or two, he came back.
“Where was she?” he asked.
I told him that Shelda had offered Juliet the use of her apartment. I told him what had happened there. It must have been hard for him not to show what he really felt—relief and satisfaction.
“How badly off is Sullivan?”
“Very bad,” I said
“There’s not much comfort in being proved right,” he said “That she should have seen it happen! She’ll go on blaming herself forever. How do we live with that?”
“It’s rough,” I said. “But whatever the showdown was, Mr. Girard, it was bound to happen sooner or later, whether Digger had gone to see her or not. It’s just unfortunate for Juliet that it happened there. You’ve got to try to convince her that she’s not responsible.”
“I’d give my life for her,” he said bitterly, “but even revealed for what he is, Sullivan controls her heart, her future. Damn him, damn him, damn him!”
“She’s in shock,” I said. “She needs tenderness, and understanding—and time.”
“I know,” he said. He held out his hand to me. “Thanks for being her friend, Haskell.”
“Friendship is an easy thing to give to her,” I said.
THREE
IN CHAMBRUN’S OFFICE, HARRY Clark worked with a kind of cold, efficient fury. Jerry Dodd had been manning the phone set up for Clark while Clark had made his trip to Shelda’s. A glance at the chart Jerry had kept revealed that Girard had never left his suite and that Bernardel, Kroll, and Miss Lily Dorisch had migrated to the Trapeze Bar. No outsider had joined them there.
As I came into the office, Clark was on the phone to one of his men giving orders that Delacroix and LaCoste were to be picked up at the Waldorf and brought here.
“I’m going to get ’em all here,” Clark said to Chambrun. “I’m going to get to the bottom of this if I have to beat it out of all of them with a lead pipe!”
“Not very fair to the men you’re so dead sure of,” Chambrun said. He had wandered over to the pot of Turkish coffee on the sideboard in the corner of the room.
“What are you talking about?” Clark said angrily.
“If you’re right about Loring …”
“I’m right about him!”
“If you’re right about him,” Chambrun said, unruffled, “he gave his life trying to expose the whole conspiracy. You blow your top now, and you blow the whole game. Play your cards right, and Loring may not have died for nothing.”
“What cards?” Clark said.
“You’ve probably got your killer,” Chambrun said. “In the hospital, alive or dead at this moment. He’s probably Cardew’s killer too. He must also have been in on the murder of Colonel Valmont. Big day for you, Mr. Clark. Announce it. Make the headlines. Be openly satisfied that you’ve caught the Big Boy and smashed the ring. American playboy heads international dope ring. Everybody will be happy and the thing you’ve been waiting for will happen—an exchange of money for drugs. Bring them all up here, put the heat on all of them, and the whole thing will be called off until a safer time comes. You’ll have lost your grip on the situation just for the pleasure of playing it tough.”
Clark hesitated.
“You’ve got a lot of chances if you don’t spoil them by using your heart instead of your head, Mr. Clark. As long as Sullivan lives, there’s a chance he may talk. Quite often a dying man will tell you things he wouldn’t think of revealing if he had a chance to live. That’s one chance. A complete revelation: the naming of names, details of plans. You may even find out what really happened in that garden.”
“What really happened? Sullivan opened fire on him, and Sam shot him in self-defense before he died.”
“Maybe,” Chambrun said. He poured some coffee into a little demitasse.
“Maybe, for Christ’s sake, Chambrun, the woman saw it all!”
“Did she?” Chambrun walked toward his desk, balancing the cup in the palm of his hand. “She was sitting on the couch. Her back was to the door. It was Sullivan, facing her, who saw someone in the garden. He got up and went to the door. She, I suppose, half turned to see what was what. There’s a low awning outside that door. Perhaps she couldn’t see all that Sullivan saw.”
“But …”
“There could have been five men perched on the garden wall. She couldn’t have seen them because of the awning. They could all have been shooting at the same time Sullivan and Loring were shooting. In the excitement—and with those riveting machines going. Not to be absurd, what I’m suggesting is there might have been someone else, hidden from Mrs. Girard, who was also shooting. If I were in charge of this case, I’d like a ballistics expert to convince me that Sam Loring was shot by bullets from Sullivan’s gun, and vice versa.”
“You’re off your rocker,” Clark said. “Are you trying to tell me you think Sullivan didn’t kill Sam?”
“I’m saying I’d like to be convinced,” Chambrun said, sitting down in his desk chair, “that Sullivan killed Loring and that Loring killed Sullivan.”
“So we’ll prove it to you.”
I looked at Chambrun, a faint tickling sensation at the back of my neck. His heavy-lidded eyes didn’t tell me anything. The shambles at Shelda’s place had left me, reluctantly, without any doubts. Girard had been right about Digger. Digger had taken us all in, including Juliet, with his charm. Now Chambrun was hinting that things might not be exactly as they seemed. It was possible there’d been a third person there in that garden; that Juliet hadn’t seen him; that, in the racket of gunfire and riveting machines, she hadn’t realized there was a third person shooting.
“Before we discuss this any further,” Chambrun said quietly, “I urge you to think again about what you’re setting in motion, Clark. I’d countermand that order to bring in Delacroix and LaCoste if I were in your shoes. I’d get Lieutenant Hardy here from the hospital and issue a joint statement to the press. His case and yours are closed. He has Cardew’s murderer. You have the head of an international drug ring. Lull our friend Mr. Bernardel and his associates into a sense of security. And while they feel safe, we tighten our surveillance. We watch them like hawks. And we can hope they’ll play into our hands.”
Clark nodded slowly. “I’ll need an authorization from my boss,” he said. “Can I use the phone in your outer office to call Washington?”
“Help yourself. But I suggest you lay off Delacroix and LaCoste, even if it’s only for fifteen minutes.”
“Will do,” Clark said, and left us.
Jerry Dodd and I sat there in puzzled silence waiting for Chambrun to say something. He seemed to be far away, lost in his own thinking. Finally he looked at us with a faint smile. “Do you remember the time, Jerry, when that girl in six-o-nine kept sending downstairs for out-of-town telephone books? She got three or four big, thick phone books sent to her room. There was something odd about it She kept sending down for out-of-town phone books, but she didn’t make any out-of-town calls.”
“I remember,” Jerry said.
“It was Mrs. Veach who twigged it,” Chambrun said. “She called me and told me about it. I suggested an avid letter-writer in search of addresses. Mrs. Veach had another notion. They could be used to stand on, she suggested.”
“When we got to six-o-nine, the girl had hung herself,” Jerry said.
Chambrun nodded, scowling at the memory. “Things like that happen,” he said. “Something seems perfectly straightforward, and then it begins to pressure you—bug you.”
“So you’re bugged about this,” Jerry said.
Chambrun nodded. “Sam Loring was apparently a first-class agent,” he said. “He was head of the Bureau’s Rome office. He was fighting the big Italian distributors. He was in charge of this French case. A top guy. Now, fellows like Loring don’t work under their own hats. The job is too tricky, too dangerous. They’re in constant touch with their home office. They report their suspicions as well as facts. A couple of years back Loring came to trust Sullivan. He actually showed him lists of names of suspects. When did he change his mind about Sullivan?”
“Who knows?” Jerry said.
“Someone who should know is Clark,” Chambrun said. “Clark, who was working with Loring on this end. If Loring had become suspicious of Sullivan, wouldn’t he have told Clark? They were setting up a trap here. Would Loring keep back the fact that he suddenly suspected Sullivan when Sullivan was right here under Clark’s nose? I say no.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Jerry said.
“And surely if he’d gotten to the point where he had enough evidence to arrest Sullivan, he wouldn’t be silent about it. So what took him to Shelda’s apartment and why climb the back fence into the garden?”
“He did that?” Jerry asked.
“He didn’t come in the front door. Mrs. Girard was there.”
“Maybe he was already there in the garden,” Jerry said, “before Mrs. Girard got there.”
Chambrun snorted. “Spying on Shelda? Come on, Jerry.”
“Maybe Mrs. Girard,” Jerry said.
“How could he know Mrs. Girard would be there? It happened completely spontaneously as I understand it. Mrs. Girard ran away from the fight in Mark’s office. She asked Shelda if there was some place she could be alone. Shelda took her to her apartment. There was no way Loring could know that would happen ahead of time. He had to come over the fence.
“And that third person was doing what?” Jerry asked, puzzled. “Not after Shelda. Mrs. Girard?”
“After Sullivan,” Chambrun said. “He was said to be in danger. Mrs. Girard was trying to warn him off. So this third person follows him to the apartment, climbs the back fence to get at him. But Loring is following that one. Sullivan sees someone in the garden. It’s not Loring but the other man. He draws his gun because he knows this other man may be after him. The shooting starts. Loring comes into view—Mrs. Girard’s view. He’s not after Sullivan but the man who’s shooting at Sullivan. That one gets both Sullivan and Loring and high-tails it over the wall.”
“So when they dig the bullets out of Sullivan and Loring, they find neither of them shot the other and that they don’t have the gun that did the killing.”
“That’s what they may find,” Chambrun said.
“So you still believe in Sullivan,” Jerry said.
“I believe in Sam Loring,” Chambrun said. “He was too well trained at his job to suddenly suspect Sullivan and not pass it on. I think he was tailing someone on the list—someone Sullivan also recognized as dangerous.”
“According to our reports,” Jerry said, waving to the chart by the telephone, “Bernardel hasn’t left the hotel since he arrived this morning. Kroll and Miss Dorisch have been with him.”
“But no one’s been watching Delacroix or LaCoste,” Chambrun said.
“It could have been one of them,” Jerry conceded.
“What about Girard?” I said. “The last thing he said to us, Mr. Chambrun, was that if Digger tried to play games with his wife again, he’d kill him. He could have followed Digger to Shelda’s place and found it was an assignation with Juliet. He was on Loring’s list. Loring could have followed him.”
“Except that our chart shows that Girard hasn’t left his suite.”
“He could have slipped out. Maybe he bought someone. You said that was a possibility.”
“Bought the floor maid and an elevator man and Jerry’s man in the lobby and the doorman? Not so many, Mark.”
“Maybe he hired someone to tail Digger.”
“Not impossible. But who?” Chambrun shook his head. “You like Digger, Mark. You don’t like Girard. You can’t make a case out of that. You can’t ignore facts.”
“Your theory about a third man in the garden isn’t based on fact,” I said.
“Oh, yes, it is, my boy,” Chambrun said. “Sam Loring wouldn’t have kept a suspicion of Digger to himself. Fact number one. If Loring didn’t suspect Digger, what reason would Digger have to start shooting at him without a word, with Mrs. Girard there to witness it? None. Fact number two. We can hope the ballistics experts will prove it out for us with fact number three—Loring and Digger were hit by bullets from a third gun.”
The special phone over by the chart rang. Jerry went to it and picked it up. Then he covered the mouthpiece with his hand, still listening.
“Bernardel’s on the phone to Girard from the phone in the Trapeze. He’s getting the whole story from Girard.” Chambrun nodded. He looked tired. He beckoned me, and I went over to stand beside him. Jerry went to call Clark back from the outer office.
“Try to locate Lieutenant Hardy at the hospital,” Chambrun said. “If Digger is still alive, tell him I think he should take every precaution to make certain he has no visitors. There are people who won’t want him to talk just as much as we do.”
I went into the outer office, passing Clark in the doorway, to make the call. It took quite a while for Hardy to come on at the other end.
“How is Sullivan?” I asked him.
“Still alive,” he said.
“Chances?”
“Poor.”
I gave Hardy Chambrun’s message.
“Tell your boss I do my sleeping—if any—at night,” he said sourly. “But there’s no chance Sullivan will be able to do any talking for a while. Two bullets in the chest and one in the neck. He lost a tub full of blood. They think he’s partially paralyzed at the moment.”
“They got the bullets out of him?”
“What’s the matter? You want a souvenir?”
“Chambrun thinks there may have been a third person involved in the shooting. He’s interested in the ballistics report”
“Third person my foot!” Hardy said.
“Ballistics …”
