The Pierre Hotel Affair Read online

  CHAPTER 2

  NOVEMBER 1971

  Bobby Comfort, in his late forties and looking tailored in a taupe, three-quarter length Burberry trench coat, was frittering away time in the exquisitely decorated lounge of a midtown Manhattan hotel. The lounge itself, Café Pierre, was sunken three feet lower than the lobby level, and the elaborate wrought iron scrolling of the three-step brass hand railings were inspired by the rococo style. Two etched glass doors lent the café privacy and quietude. The twelve round tables there, topped with black granite, each accommodated four green leather upholstered club chairs.

  Comfort’s brown eyes, roaming and inquisitive, were obscured by dark sunglasses, his face hidden behind a copy of the New York Times. The headlines read: NIXON PLANS TRIP TO NEW YORK FIRST WEEK OF NEW YEAR. On prior travels to Manhattan, President Richard Nixon had lodged at the Pierre, and presumably he’d do the same on his next visit. This might pose a dilemma and interfere with Comfort’s plot.

  On this evening at 11:40, the café’s twenty-six-foot bar, tastefully veneered with golden-colored brushed stainless steel, was sparse of people. At twenty-minute intervals, Comfort had been ambling nonchalantly into the black-and-white-checkered-floor lobby, his gray tweed Totes hat pulled snugly over his forehead. He had followed this practice on numerous nights, occasionally parking himself at the Café Pierre’s softly lit bar, drinking Dewars and soda.

  “Care for another?” asked the bartender, timely striking a match to light the cigarette Comfort had stuck between his lips.

  “Yes, but this time I’ll have a shot of Baileys.” He leaned in closer to the bartender for him to light his Pall Mall. “Thanks.” Comfort drew on the cigarette and exhaled a puff, his eyelids squinting from the smoke. It was a rarity to see him not smoking. “By the way, what’s your name?”

  “Dean. And yours?”

  “I’m George St. John. Pleased to meet you, Dean.” Comfort’s diction was polished and deliberate, and he chose his words to connote an educated background.

  Dean turned his back to fetch the Baileys from the liquor rack, and Comfort said, “Not many people here tonight” To the casual listener this might’ve been idle talk, confabulation. Not at all, Comfort was collecting intelligence. He tasted the Baileys’ dense sweetness and surveyed the surroundings, sumptuousness everywhere.

  Dean, an engaging smile on his face, and always apt with a witty phrase, pulled on his own cigarette. “This is not unusual. After eleven o’clock it quiets down. Sometimes I can fall asleep.” He winked and added, “By the way, this late, when everything is nice and quiet, the right fish might walk in. Know what I mean?”

  Comfort returned the wink and downed his drink. “I sure do know what you mean.” He bid Dean good night, and perused the ground floor of the sleepy lobby. He was waiting to see at what time of night the hotel’s bookkeeper shut the cast iron door to the vault, where the guests’ safe deposit boxes were. At 12:05, the vault’s door was still open. But rather than mill about at this late hour, possibly looking suspicious, he thought it best to leave, and adjourn his stakeout until the next evening.

  The following afternoon, a bone-chilling, rainy weather, Comfort, his long sideburns trimmed, face clean-shaven, tinting his complexion in a greenish shadow, paid another visit to the same hotel. In a black double-breasted suit, he walked with a purposeful gait to the registration desk, a black-marbled ebony counter. A six-foot, predominantly powder-blue painting hung behind it, flanked by two beige marble columns.

  Comfort, his Burberry raincoat draped over the left arm as he lugged along a Louis Vuitton garment bag, accosted the reception clerk. “Good day. I’d like a room for the night,” he said, sternness and formality in his voice.

  The clerk’s garnet uniform was custom fitted, a beige handkerchief folded in the breast pocket, and he had the faintness of a British accent. “Good afternoon, sir. Welcome. Will it be just one night?”

  “Yes. My name is Dr. George St. John,” Comfort said. His black hair combed to the side in a neat part, fingernails manicured, certainly befitting the image and comportment of a physician. Earlier that day, at Nalo’s apartment in the Hell’s Kitchen quarter of Manhattan, Comfort had applied heavy makeup to lessen two revolting scars on his face: one over the left eyebrow, and the other to the right of his mouth.

  The clerk assigned Room 2169, and Comfort gave him a credit card, an American Express. The card holder’s name read: Dr. George St. John. A bogus account. The clerk consulted the weekly bulletin of invalid and stolen credit cards, and indeed, Dr. St. John’s account was in good standing. The clerk laid the Amex onto the credit card hand printer, swiped it with the roller and placed the receipt on the desktop for the customer to sign. “It’s been a pleasure to be of service to you, Doctor. Please put your John Hancock here.” Then almost forgetting, he said, “Oh, Doctor, here’s the key to your room.”

  Comfort smiled politely and wandered to the elevators in the main hallway of the hotel. Before the advent of computers, credit card merchants received from banks a weekly bulletin of lost and fraudulent account numbers. The time that lapsed between the reporting of a card theft and the storekeepers’ receipt of the advisory was twenty-one days. Inside that window, fraudsters could axe out a costly spending spree.

  The lift operator, a black man in a black uniform and a crop of white hair under his hat, sprung into a stance of attention. “What floor, sir?”

  “Twenty-first floor, please.”

  The elevator thrust into a heart-fluttering ascent. When it slowed to a bumpy halt, Comfort disembarked and went to his suite.

  Comfort’s purpose to lodge at this hotel was to track the daily practices of the management and the staff, and of greater importance, to pinpoint the hour of night the bookkeeper locked the vault.

  Bobby Comfort settled into the room—the walls veneered with peach-sand satin wallpaper—and undressed to shower and shampoo his wavy, jet-black hair. Although a few hours earlier he had showered at Nalo’s apartment, the stressful ordeal of assuming an alter ego, Dr. St. John, and passing a stolen American Express, a film of clamminess was seeping in his underarms. Tired, Comfort lumbered into the shower stall, and lay under the hot, foggy water for twenty minutes. He dried off and napped until the early evening. Rested and perfumed, he dressed and centered the gray Totes hat on his head, casting an aura of erudition.

  Comfort strode down to the lounge, and a different bartender welcomed him. Dean was off that evening. A woman, her legs crossed, had been sitting on one of the barstools nursing a cocktail, rattling the ice in her tumbler. The bartender asked Comfort, “Can I get you something, sir?”

  Comfort scanned the bottles behind the bar. “Let’s see . . . uh, how about a Remy cognac?”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “That’s a good choice. Cognac warms my insides on a cold, lonely night,” intruded the lady on the barstool to his right, her voice low and smoky as if she’d just wakened.

  Comfort stole a glance at her partly uncovered legs. “Yes, a dry cognac warms me all over as well.” He put out his arm for a handshake. “I’m Professor T. Phillip Pickens. Madame?”

  The brunette, appealing and sprightly, tilted her head as though she were in awe, and placed her hand in his. “I’m Glenda. Glenda Atkins. Pleased to meet you Professor Pickens.”

  “Oh, please call me Phillip. And will you join me for a drink?”

  To Comfort’s fluster, she held on to his hand. “Sure, I’ll have a Remy, too.” And she moved over onto the stool beside his.

  He ordered for Glenda, and with an inquisitive look in her black, olive-size eyes, she asked, “What do you teach, Phillip?”

  “I’m an archeologist.”

  “An archeologist! What are you doing in New York? I wouldn’t have thought you’d find dinosaur bones in Manhattan.”

  Comfort raised his index finger as if he were about to give a lesson. “Actually, after extensive research my colleagues and I have formed a consensus and . . .”


  “What’s a consensus?”

  Comfort knew that word would stump Glenda, who was from Queens. “Consensus means an accord . . . an agreement among a group.” He rubbed his chin and cleared his throat. “Anyway, we have reasons to believe that fossils of behemoth prehistoric animals may lie beneath the 42nd Street subway station.” He was having fun.

  Glenda didn’t know the word behemoth either, but not to further lay bare her ignorance of the language, she tuned to a different frequency. “Interesting stuff! And you, too, Phillip, you’re an interesting man.” She brushed her hand on the lapel of his jacket. “Uh, I love your gray tweed blazer. And your yellow V-neck wool vest matches so well.” She stared at him as if something had struck her nosiness, a smile opening to fairly nice rows of teeth. “Do you always wear sunglasses in the dark?”

  He touched and jiggled the frame of his glasses. “I’m sensitive to light.” Comfort chortled to move the conversation along. “Are you here regularly?”

  “You can say that, Phillip. I work in the hotel, and after I’m done I come into the lounge and have a drink . . . or two.”

  She works here! Perfect, Comfort thought. “What do you do here, Glenda?”

  She patted Comfort’s wrist and pursed her succulent lips as if in a moment of confusion. “Oh, you mean what kind of work I do?” Glenda recrossed her legs, revealing meaty thighs. “Well, I’m the assistant to the bookkeeper who keeps track of the inventories inside the guests’ safe deposit boxes.”

  Comfort gulped. This is getting better by the minute. What a wonderful coincidence.

  NICK SACCO

  Whenever Bobby Comfort was on a mission, he was as smooth as silk. He could hoodwink a cop, an FBI agent, a judge, or a lady. He was loyal to his marriage and loved his wife. And if he got involved with another woman, it was strictly business and nothing personal.

  Comfort was one of the smartest jewel thieves in the country, and most of all, he wouldn’t cheat you out of a penny. Except for smoking, he was free of vices. The man was ultracautious, and always on the alert. That’s how he survived.

  CHAPTER 3

  A taxi cab slowed in front of 280 Broadway, the NYC Building Department, and Sammy “the Arab” Nalo, bald, five-foot-three, of Turkish descent, paid the fare. A cup of hot tea in hand, in the jerky strides of a short man he ran inside there, hurrying to stop the closing doors of the elevator. He made it in time, and walked out on the eighth floor, where the land records were warehoused. These premises were smoke-polluted and had the drabness of an ancient municipal facility. There, for the past month, pretending to be an architect, Nalo had been poring over certain architectural floor plans. He drew the attention of the records custodian, a plump, graying woman of retirement age whose straw hair could’ve been a bird’s nest. Sourly, she asked, “Same file, young man?”

  “Uh, yeah. Same file. Two East 61st Street.”

  “How many times do I gotta tell you? You have to give me the Section, Block, and Lot numbers, otherwise I gotta go through the whole drawer in the cabinet to look it up.”

  Nalo patted his dense, curly wig as if he had to ensure it was still in place, and put on a red baseball cap. When he didn’t wear it, you could see that his dome-like bald scalp was as white as milk. “All right, all right.”

  “You better, ’cause this is the last time I’m doin’ this for you.”

  Under his breath, he muttered, “Do everybody a favor and get yourself a four-hundred-volt dildo. That’ll keep you in a nicer mood.”

  “And the next time, you should bring me a box of chocolate for my troubles.”

  Yeah, I’ll bring you chocolate, all right. Chocolate with razor blades, Nalo was tempted to say.

  The woman, her two chins sloshing loosely, had found the file and slapped it onto his chest. “Here, and remember: next time, no Section, Block, and Lot numbers, no shirtie.”

  The pudgy, forty-six-year-old Nalo carried the manila folder under his arm, looked about the room, and settled the paperwork onto an empty table, a scratched, splintering antique from the turn of the century. A dozen or so other researchers had been inconvenienced by the bantering between him and the spunky attendant. He shot the nosey-bodies a sinister glare and all heads lowered. Nalo emptied the folder on the table and unfolded a set of blueprints of the targeted hotel.

  Looking sneakily as if in the midst of a subterfuge act—a fake beard on his cheeks and the red baseball cap overshadowing the eyes—he was copying into his notebook notations from the legend of a specific architectural drawing, the ground floor of the chosen hotel. Skimming over those plans, Nalo noted the locations of the elevator shafts, the stairwells, the distance from the side entrance to the vault room, and the square footage inside there. Also crucial for him to trace were the height of the ceiling in the vault and the thickness of the cement separating the first from the second floor. He then flipped to the electrical page of the blueprints and pinpointed the light switches in the various areas of the hotel lobby and stairwells.

  At 3:45, the nagging clerk clapped her hands and announced for all to hear: “All right, everybody turn in your files. This office is closing in fourteen minutes. Let’s go.”

  Nalo tidied the official documents, restuffed them into the folder, and rested it on her desk. A cab drove him to one of his pads, “the safe house,” on 51st and Tenth Avenue. He paid the driver and fast-stepped around the corner to his apartment building, a brick structure where panhandlers and loiterers congregated. Suddenly stricken with paranoia, Nalo believed, as always, that someone might’ve been tailing him, possibly an FBI informant. He quickened his stride, ankles wobbling due to the two-inch lifts in his shoes.

  He was looking forward to a quiet evening at home. One of Nalo’s mistresses, Lupe, a twenty-three-year-old illegal immigrant from Ecuador, had been dwelling in his apartment. Lupe, an aspiring ballerina, freelanced as a topless pole dancer. Nalo unlocked the door, and as he opened it a raspy voice said, “Welcome home, Sammy.”

  Nalo strained to peer into the darkish apartment. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he saw Lupe, her hands tied behind her back. More alarming, an oversize, obese man, a stiletto knife in one hand, was clutching the girl’s arm, and lightly gouging her throat. The trespasser was a collector for the bookmaker to whom Nalo owed $17,000.

  CHAPTER 4

  Comfort looked at his diamond pavé Piaget, a watch he only wore on special occasions. Ten-forty P.M., and Café Pierre was teeming with drinkers, a cloud of smoke hovering above the bar. Piano music sifting through hidden speakers was playing a medley of Bach opuses, and Comfort and Glenda were on the fourth cocktail. He was upbeat about her job in the vault room, and she was of interest to him. The liquor was dissolving the formalities, and tempted by Glenda’s long lashes and what he visualized as her apple-shaped breasts, he said, “I’m staying the night here, and this evening the Rangers’ hockey game is televised on closed circuit TV. I’m a die-hard fan and never miss a game. So I’m ready to go to my suite and tune in. Would you . . .” He paused as if he thought it too bold to ask. “Eh . . . would you care to join me? It’s a very exciting sport to watch.”

  “I never watched a hockey game,” she said, slurring. “My husband is closed-minded. He’s into football and nothing else.” Glenda swilled her cocktail and added bitterly, “His whole life is football, football, and football. I could be gone for days, and he won’t even know it.”

  “Sounds like he lacks social vitality. Well, let me to introduce you to hockey,” Comfort chanced, sort of tugging at her arm but with gentleness.

  “I . . . I don’t know, Phillip . . . I mean, my husband works nights, and he don’t get home until seven in the morning and all that, but . . .”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. The game will be over in less than an hour.” In actuality, the Rangers vs. Montreal game had already ended, and Comfort knew that. He glanced at his watch. “It’s only a quarter to eleven. You live in Queens, so at the latest you’ll be home by one.”

  Glen
da slung her head back. “Oh, what the hell. But let’s get another cognac and take it to the room with us.”

  Drink in hand, she kicked off the red, six-inch pumps and crammed them into her purse. They frolicked across the lobby, and the concierge, who saw his co-worker, noticed the tipsy couple. The new lovers blended into the main corridor leading to the elevators. Freshly polished oak panels and brass sconces were the signature of the Pierre’s masterfully built elevators.

  He unlocked the door of his suite, a soothing scent in the air. In the main room was a king-size bed attached to a beige padded headboard, and a rusty-tan tufted blanket lent it richness, an inviting warmth on this windy November night. A leather settee upholstered in a garnet damask fabric lay across the foot of the bed. Glenda, though an employee of the Pierre, had never been in any of the rooms and, astonished by this splendor, forgot about the hockey game, relieving Comfort from inventing a reason why in truth it wasn’t on television.

  Rather than sipping her cognac, she downed it in one swallow, and he knew it was time to charm her. He suggested, jokingly, it might be more comfortable if she slipped off her white, low neckline mini-dress and drape herself in one of the fluffy terry cloth robes supplied by the hotel.

  To Comfort’s surprise and delight, she said, “I’ve been up and running since eight this morning, and I can use a bit of unwinding.”

  He helped her disrobe, and pulled down the long zipper of the dress, sliding his palms along her neck and shoulders, whiffing Glenda’s Chanel No. 5. Her back was silky and flat until it reached the buttocks, a pair of round buns that Comfort could’ve buttered and eaten right there and then. She leaned her head back in ecstasy, her breathing accelerating. “You got soft hands, Phillip.”

  Indeed he had, because moments later, standing behind the fast-heating Glenda, he was sensually pinching her nipples. “I love the feel of your pomegranate-size papayas.”