Walking Dead Man by Hugh Pentecost Read Free Book Online

looking a little ruffled but not really disturbed, just after Chambrun had made his remark about trigger fingers and detached brains. He might even have heard it from Ruysdale’s office.
    “So you’re at it again,” he said to Chambrun, “making work for me.” He gave the rest of us a casual salute.
    “Welcome to our city,” Chambrun said, grinning at him. “Have you been upstairs?”
    “Have I been upstairs!” Hardy said. He glanced at the Turkish coffeemaker on the sideboard, then at Ruysdale. “You don’t have any decent drinking coffee, do you, Miss Ruysdale?” He’d had experience with the thick, strong brew from the sideboard.
    “If you can drink instant,” Ruysdale said, and went off to her own office and her own equipment.
    Hardy sat down in a big armchair facing Chambrun’s desk. “I had a call from my great white father, the mayor, telling me that I must do everything possible to insure the safety of your great white father upstairs,” he said. “Trouble is I can’t talk to the only witness in the case. Your Mr. Battle saw the gunman, but it will be several hours before he comes out of the shot Dr. Cobb gave him. So while I waited I thought I’d come down and go over Jerry Dodd’s theory with you.”
    “That I was actually the target?” Chambrun asked.
    “Does it add up?” Hardy asked. He took a charred-looking black pipe from his pocket and began to fill it from an oilskin pouch. Chambrun didn’t answer till Hardy had his pipe going by way of a battered Zippo lighter.
    “It’s a theory,” Chambrun said.
    “You know someone who would like to do you in so elaborately?” Hardy asked. “I mean, there are twenty places in this hotel where it would be easier to get at you than that penthouse. And what luck he had, getting by three sentries, one bodyguard, and three other people bedded down in the place.”
    “Marvelous luck,” Chambrun said.
    The two of them smirked at each other like a couple of old biddies gossiping over the back fence. They enjoyed each other.
    “Mostly, when you ask a man if he knows someone who wants to kill him,” Hardy said, “he says ‘No’ or, ‘Well, there is this John Smith.’ I heard a name dropped as I came in; someone who couldn’t have done it.”
    “Richard Cleaves couldn’t have done it,” Chambrun said. “Shelda has provided him with an alibi.”
    Hardy glanced at Shelda. “Maybe she’s in love with him. Maybe his alibi won’t hold up. I’ll check it out.” He meant it as a joke and he clearly thought it was quite funny.
    “Let’s get serious, friend, because it’s going to be a long night,” Chambrun said. “A man like George Battle has enemies all around the globe. It’s very unpopular these days to be as rich as George Battle is.”
    “You don’t get that way by passing out free liquor,” Hardy said.
    “Thirty years ago I had enemies,” Chambrun said, his voice gone cold. “I lived for a good many years expecting to meet an assassin down some dark corridor. It never happened. Tonight I find that the son of a man I had killed thirty years ago—who was five years old at the time—is a guest in the hotel. This man has a reason to hate George Battle, who was an ally of mine thirty years ago. But he didn’t fire the shot that lodged in the headboard of my bed. He was having what I hope was an intellectual conversation about films with Shelda.”
    “But as you said as I was coming in, he could have arranged to have it fired. That’s the fashion of the day. You can get a man killed today for a very few dollars.”
    “There are undoubtedly a great many people,” Chambrun said, by-passing Hardy’s comment, “who have come to hate me quite a lot over the years I have run this hotel. There are people whose credit I’ve cut off, there are the wives of double-crossing husbands I’ve covered for, there are mobsters who have tried to look respectable by registering here and who got kicked out by me, and there are perhaps