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Remember to Kill Me
A Pierre Chambrun Mystery
By Hugh Pentecost MysteriousPress.com
Copyright © 1984 Judson Philips
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-4636-6
CHAPTER 1
It was a moment of such shocking violence that I couldn't have imagined it in my wildest nightmare. It turned my world, which is the Beaumont, New York's top luxury hotel, into a bloody shambles. A person very dear to me escaped being murdered as a result of what I can only call three miracles.
Where to begin? I suppose I should start by identifying myself. I am Mark Haskell, the public relations man for the Beaumont and have been for the last ten years or so. The disaster that overtook us that summer night began, I suppose I could say, almost a year ago when Diana Ross, the glamorous pop singer, gave a free concert in Central Park. Believe it or not, some eight hundred thousand people turned out for that event. That number of people is hard to believe but I got a look at them from the roof of the Beaumont and I can only tell you that it looked like an ocean of people. Miss Ross had only just begun to sing when a violent thunderstorm hit the city and that section of the park. Standing in the rain, Miss Ross announced that she would sing the next night and thousands of people scrambled for cover, in the subways, in the lobbies of neighboring buildings, covering themselves with whatever they had, like blankets they'd brought to spread on the grass or trash bags. Some just had to laugh philosophically and let themselves be drenched.
The next night the crowd was smaller—only three hundred and fifty thousand people! The outcome was even more of a catastrophe. An army of young goons armed with baseball bats and knives—and some of them with guns—swarmed among the concertgoers, stealing jewelry and money and anything else of value people had on them. Having mugged Miss Ross's audience, they headed downtown from Columbus Circle into the Times Square area, attacking and robbing the exiting theater audiences.
It was a citywide scandal. Hadn't there been enough police? Only forty arrests were made, with more than a thousand police assigned to cover the event. Should there be any more free concerts in the park? The debate raged hot and heavy for months. In the end it was decided to give it another try, and Donna Ward, one of the newest pop stars, appeared before another huge crowd.
Pierre Chambrun, the legendary manager of the Beaumont and my boss, wasn't asleep to the possibility of trouble. People in that crowd might choose to invade his hotel for drinks at the famous Trapeze Bar, the Spartan Room, and the Blue Lagoon, the hotel's glamorous nightclub. Our security staff, headed by Jerry Dodd, a wiry, intense former FBI agent, was mobilized. Both the day and night forces were on duty to deal with any noisy drunks who might come aboard. No one could have imagined in advance what did happen.
There was peace in the park, but shortly after the concert ended, bands of young thugs, armed as before with clubs, knives, and guns, charged the three main entrances to our hotel, plus the basement garage and the service entrances. The result was wild hysteria as guests in the lobby, the bars, and the nightclub were shoved around, beaten, and robbed. Vandalism was rampant. Pictures on the wall were smashed; so were glassware and liquor behind the bars. Dozens of them raced for the stairways to invade the upper floors of the hotel and rob the guests in their rooms. Jerry Dodd's small army of forty men were almost helpless. They couldn't use the guns they were authorized to carry for fear of shooting innocent guests who were struggling to get away to safety. It was a total horror.
Pierre Chambrun, alerted, ordered all power to the elevators shut off and ordered Dodd's men to block the stairways. Quite a few of the invaders had already gotten upstairs in the hotel, but with Jerry Dodd's men stationed in the stairways and the elevators not running, those few wouldn't get away. Two of them tried and were winged by Dodd's men. It was safe to use guns there because there were no guests in the line of fire.
The police came, late but finally effective. The Beaumont's lobby, bars, and nightclub looked as if they had been struck by a tornado. Emergency medical help was treating wounded guests and even some of the goons.
Police and some of Jerry Dodd's men were searching the upper floors for any of the young thugs who might not yet have been caught or fled. I remember suddenly seeing Pierre Chambrun, standing in the middle of the lobby, which was littered with broken glass, smashed furniture, and wounded and sometimes moaning guests. I have said somewhere that Chambrun reminds me of that great, late actor Claude Rains—short, stocky, capable of humor and wit, and also capable of being cold and hard as a hanging judge. That night I thought he looked like a general surveying the scene of a lost battle. How do you recoup the loss? How do you get revenge for a bitter defeat?
I was just approaching him for orders when Mike Maggio, the night bell captain, came running up to him. He was holding a handkerchief to a bloody wound at the side of his forehead. Mike is a dark, bright-eyed young man, born street-wise. He'd obviously not backed away from an encounter with the attackers.
'Someone has tried to murder Mrs. Haven,' Mike told The Man. Most of us call Chambrun 'The Man.'
'Get the elevators running,' Chambrun said. Even he couldn't face climbing forty flights of stairs. To hell with whether someone got away. Mrs. Victoria Haven mattered a great deal to him.
There are three penthouses on the roof of the Beaumont. One of them is occupied by Chambrun, The Man; one is reserved for very special guests, usually foreign diplomats in New York on United Nations business; the middle one, sold as a condominium when the hotel was first launched more than forty years ago, is owned and occupied by a fabulous lady. Fifty years or more ago Victoria Haven was a famous international beauty. There are rumors of romances with the most famous men of her time. Today, at eighty-four, she is still an extraordinarily handsome and vigorous woman. I have heard a whisper here and there that forty years ago there had been a young-man-older-woman romance with Pierre Chambrun. True or not, I know that today he considers her a valued and cherished friend.
When we reached the roof in a re-activated elevator, Chambrun and I, along with Jerry Dodd, our security chief, heard the story of the three miracles I have mentioned earlier.
Mrs. Haven had been fascinated by the huge crowds of people gathered in the park across the way to listen to Donna Ward. Mrs. Haven had walked out of the little fenced-in garden behind her penthouse and over to the high parapet that surrounded the roof. She was a tall woman, just tall enough to see over the high wall and down at the sea of people across the avenue in the park. Miss Ward's performance was amplified through loudspeakers, and Mrs. Haven could hear her quite clearly. The girl was really good, Mrs. Haven told herself.
When the concert ended and the crowd in the park began to drift away Mrs. Haven suddenly realized that she'd been standing, watching and listening, for a good two hours. She started back for her penthouse, complaining, she told us later, about her 'damned old bones.' She felt painfully stiff as she let herself into her fenced-in garden. It was a beautiful night, stars and moon, and she sat down in a wicker garden chair, stretching her still rather handsome legs to get her circulation going again.
That was when it happened. There was the sound of a gunshot and Mrs. Haven felt a sudden searing pain. That was the first miracle. The bullet tore through the flesh on the inner side of the lady's upper left arm. Just a few inches to the left it would have gone straight through her heart and that would have been that.
The second miracle was that this old lady moved with astonishing speed and almost unbelievable foresight. She dove out of her chair and rolled over to the flower bed against the fence, face down. Two more bullets plowed into the fence not a foot above her head. Had she stood up to run the gunman would have taken her down with ease.
The third miracle came from an unexpected source. Mrs. Haven always referred to her constant companion in the penthouse as 'my Japanese gentleman friend.' He was a little black-and-white Japanese spaniel with a nasty disposition except for his mistress who was the love of his life. His name was Toto, and when the second and third shots had been fired he set up an outcry of rage and fear at an earpiercing level. Toto's outcry brought the occupant of the guest penthouse out onto the roof. He was Sir George Brooks, an English diplomat in town on a mission to the UN. There couldn't have been anyone better in the world to take care of Mrs. Haven in her emergency. Sir George Brooks had once been a Scotland Yard detective, knighted for bravery above and beyond the call of duty. He had, I found out later, saved the Queen from an attack by a would-be assassin in Buckingham Palace.
Brooks was not a stranger to gunshot wounds, and he got Mrs. Haven into her penthouse and called for just the right help. When Chambrun and Jerry Dodd and I got there, Mrs. Haven was already being cared for by Dr. Partridge, the Beaumont's house physician. Toto and Sir George Brooks had to be considered that third miracle.
Victoria Haven was stretched out on the couch in her cluttered living room being tended to by Dr. Partridge when we arrived. I say 'cluttered' because Mrs. Haven's apartment looked like a residence for the famous Collier brothers—books, papers, and magazines scattered everywhere and piled in stacks. It appeared to be total confusion until you looked closer and saw that there wasn't a speck of dust anywhere. 'A storehouse for her memories,' Chambrun once told me. 'Those memories are more precious to her than priceless paintings, or draperies or antiques.'
She looked up at Chambrun and gave him a wry smile. I thought it probably helped to cover what must have been considerable pain.
'It seems, Pierre, that someone chose me for target practice,' she said.
Chambrun's hanging-judge look was tempered by a genuine anxiety for his friend. 'Doctor?' he asked.
'Flesh wound,' Dr. Partridge said. 'No muscles or bones hurt. A couple of inches to the left ...' He shrugged.
The tall gray-haired man standing to one side whom I realized was Sir George Brooks chipped in, 'If the lady hadn't been quick-witted enough to take cover, the second shots would almost certainly have been fatal. I didn't hear any shots—my penthouse is soundproofed, air-conditioned. But if that blessed little dog hadn't raised such a racket, I wouldn't have known anything had happened.' He reached down to pat the dog's head and Toto snarled at him. That was Toto for you.
'You're not hurt anywhere else, Victoria?' Chambrun asked.
"I'm not hurt physically, Pierre. I'm a little hurt that someone wanted to do me in.'
'We didn't know what was going on downstairs,' Brooks said. 'The lady didn't know, or she wouldn't have been sitting out in her garden, looking at the stars. If she had known the hotel was overrun by violent looters, she'd have been inside with her doors locked!'
'This gunman must have been one of the first ones in,' Jerry Dodd said. 'Commandeered an elevator and got up here before we had the power shut off.'
'I suppose he thought people who lived on the roof might have something worth stealing.' Brooks glanced around Mrs. Haven's disorderly living room. 'You have anything of real value here, Mrs. Haven?'
'Only about a half-million dollars' worth of jewelry,' Jerry Dodd said.
Brook's eyes widened. 'Just here—loose?'
'I've never thought it made any sense to have beautiful trinkets locked away in a safe where you couldn't enjoy them. I've lived in this penthouse for forty-one years, Sir George, and no one has ever stolen so much as a postage stamp from me. Mr. Dodd runs a tight ship.'
'Tonight was different,' Jerry Dodd said grimly.
'You didn't see anyone when you came out on the roof, Sir George?' Chambrun asked.
'Only this bloody little dog, screaming his head off.'
Chambrun turned to the doctor. 'Shouldn't we get Mrs. Haven down to the hospital unit?'
'I'm staying here, Pierre,' the old lady said. 'Dr. Partridge has stopped the bleeding. That's all there is to it. I don't want some silly nurse poking around at me.'
'This killer could still be somewhere around the upper floors,' Jerry Dodd said. 'The power was off by the time he tried to go down. We're going to have to go over the whole place, room by room, anyway. Unless you need me here?'
'Go,' Chambrun said.
'What puzzled me,' Sir George Brooks said as Jerry left us, 'is why this man tried to kill Mrs. Haven. He could have handled her, ransacked the place, and not risked facing charges for a major crime.'
Chambrun gave the Englishman a bleak look. 'I've been asking myself the same question,' he said.
It was after midnight when we left Mrs. Haven. I was about to say 'alone,' but that would have been only a figure of speech. Her friends left her, including Dr. Partridge, who was needed to care for the dozens of people who'd been injured by the invading hoodlums. But Mrs. Haven wasn't, technically, alone. In spite of the fact that we needed every security man available to comb the hotel for invaders who might have sifted to the upper levels, Chambrun ordered three men to guard the old lady, one to stay in the penthouse with her, and two to patrol the roof outside.
I can't begin to describe the scene of destruction, the hysteria and confusion, that greeted us when Chambrun and I got back to the lobby. The destruction done to furnishings and decorations made the place look like a disaster area after a storm. Everywhere, police doctors and a couple of nurses from our hospital were helping people who'd received minor injuries. Outside the wail of ambulance sirens indicated that others had been more seriously hurt. Police were everywhere—and the press! The moment Chambrun appeared he was surrounded by a horde of reporters and TV camera crews shouting questions at him.
Chambrun held up his arms for silence and got as much as was possible.
'I will hold a press conference in the grand ballroom in an hour,' he told them, 'circumstances permitting. Right now there are more important things to do than talk, as you must see for yourselves.'
I was left to handle them. I felt as though I was caught in the middle of a whirlpool. I knew a lot of these people, but suddenly they seemed like a pack of hungry animals.
'I don't know much more than you do,' I tried to tell them. 'It was like a dam breaking. They seemed to come from everywhere.'
'You weren't prepared for trouble?'
'Not this kind of trouble,' I told them. 'We had extra men on, thinking we might attract a few stray drunks. But this! There must have been two or three hundred of them!'
'We heard there was a shooting up in the roof, Mark.' That was Jack Wilson, the International News man, an old friend.
'One of them got up there before we got the elevators shut down,' I told him. 'He did some wild shooting. Victoria Haven was hit.' I was aware he knew Mrs. Haven.
'Badly hurt?'
'No, fortunately.'
'Can we go up to talk to her?'
'Not yet. As you can imagine, the lady is in shock.' Which was a bald lie. Mrs. Haven wasn't nearly as much in shock as I was.
'Some of the creeps are still in the hotel?' Wilson asked.
'We're afraid so. We don't know yet how much damage there is or how many people may be hurt upstairs. When Chambrun talks to you, he'll have more facts and figures. You've got to give us a little air for a while, friends.'
I had something else on my mind. As I've said somewhere else, I am always in love forever—every three months. Right now there was a lady working in the Blue Lagoon who was my forever dream of the moment. I wanted to find out if she was okay. Sally Mills is a beautiful blonde who's been acting as a hostess in the nightclub for the last few months.
The Blue Lagoon had been hit hard by the attackers. Mr. Cardoza, the club's captain, greeted me at the entrance. Someone had placed an adhesive patch on a cut over his right eye.
He gave me a bitter little smile. 'You don't look as if you'd been in the middle of things, Mark,' he said.
'I guess I got lucky.' I was looking past him into the wreck of his nightclub, tables overturned, glassware and china shattered, the grand piano on the stage splintered. 'Sally?' I asked him.
His smile tightened at the corners. 'One of those goons tried to rape her, right there on the stage in front of my hysterical customers,' Cardoza said. He touched the adhesive on his forehead. 'That's how I got this—trying to help her.'
'My God! Where is she?'
'Backstage, in one of the dressing rooms. It didn't happen to her, Mark, but she was pretty roughly handled.'
I didn't wait for more. I stumbled across the destroyed room, up onto the stage, and back into the dressing room area, calling out Sally's name.
I found her, lying on a chaise longue, in the star's dressing room. Hilary Foster, the star of that week's show in the Lagoon, was sitting beside her, holding a wet towel to Sally's face.
'Sally!'
She turned her head slightly. Her mouth was swollen and there was a dark bruise under one eye.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Remember to Kill Me by Hugh Pentecost. Copyright © 1984 Judson Philips. Excerpted by permission of MysteriousPress.com.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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