Free Time of Terror by Hugh Pentecost Page A

heart beating rather unpleasantly against my ribs, I headed upstairs. I took the elevator to 16 and walked down. One of Jerry Dodd’s men checked on my right to be on the fire stairs.
    The fifteenth floor was deserted, just as it had been on my first visit. I walked to the door of 15 A and knocked. The door was opened promptly, not by Coriander, but by one of the men wearing a stocking mask. He waved me in without speaking.
    A second man wearing a stocking mask was sitting, very relaxed, on a straight chair tilted back against the wall. He had a machine pistol resting on his lap, one hand caressing it as though it was a live pet. Coriander, in his Halloween mask and his fright wig, was standing behind a stretcher table in the center of the room, the left sleeve of his red dressing gown hanging limply at his side. In front of him on the table was a bulky package wrapped in newspapers.
    “I warned you, Haskell,” he said. “No tricks.” His voice was shaken by a fierce anger I hadn’t heard there before.
    “What tricks?” I asked him. “I don’t know about any tricks.”
    “It surprises me that Chambrun would try anything so amateurish,” he said. He gestured with his good arm at the package on the table. “Open it.”
    I stepped forward and pulled the newspapers away from what they covered. I felt a trickle of sweat running down my back. What I saw was a pile of clothes: underwear, a white shirt, a black tie, black shoes, black trousers, and a bright scarlet waiter’s jacket. The shirt and the undershirt were stained with what looked like blood. Then I saw something else, buried under the garments. It was a white wig. There was also a pair of rimless spectacles and a wallet.
    “Did your master-minding boss imagine I couldn’t detect an obvious disguise?” Coriander asked.
    Horween, I thought. He had made his move in spite of all orders.
    “The stupid sonofabitch even carried his own wallet,” Coriander said. “Douglas Horween, the alleged master spy in the employ of Cleaves. Did any of you really imagine he could pull off some kind of stunt, or report back to you on our defenses?”
    “Where is he?” I asked, my voice sounding weak and reedy.
    “He is dead!” Coriander almost shouted. “He has, you might say, gone down the drain. I want you to take that bundle of clothes back to Chambrun and tell him the man’s blood, which you can see on his shirt, is on his head. And tell him that one more miserable trick of this sort and the blood of one of the little girls will also be on his head. One more stroke of genius like this and we’ll really go into action. Now, pick up that package and go!”
    I fumbled with the papers, my fingers stiff and clumsy. Any uncertainty about Coriander’s capacity for violence was dissolved. Now we had a murder on our hands.
    “Horween acted on his own,” I managed to say, “against strict orders from Mr. Chambrun.”
    “I almost believe you,” Coriander said, “because this was far too stupid for Chambrun to have approved. But tell him I hold him responsible for any fun and games anyone tries up here.”
    Somehow I managed to gather up the package and got the hell out of there.

PART TWO

Chapter 1
    L IEUTENANT HARDY OF MANHATTAN’S Homicide Squad was an old friend of ours. The Beaumont had had its murders over the years and Hardy had handled several of them, had come to respect Chambrun and Jerry Dodd, and the feeling was reciprocated.
    Hardy looks more like a big, good-natured, slightly puzzled all-pro fullback than a highly efficient expert in the field of homicide. He moves slowly, but with a kind of dogged stubbornness. No flash of genius carries him past any given fact until he has worked it over, shaken it out, dissected it. There are never any loose ends on Hardy’s back-trail.
    There is a brief, nightmare period in my memory. I don’t recall who I saw or may have spoken to on my way down from 15 A to Chambrun’s office, carrying that ghastly bundle