Murder in the Dog Days

by P. M. Carlson

  Was that it? Was that what choked her up about the dog? “He should have been a hero,” said Maggie gently, and added, “So should Ernie. And so should you. You should all have been heroes.”

  Holly was trembling. When Maggie put her arms around her, she shoved back at her angrily. Be strong, Schreiner. But Maggie was stronger, would not be pushed away this time. She held Holly tight. “Let it out,” she murmured. “Please don’t let it kill you too. We need you.”

  Holly was shaking uncontrollably. She fought it another moment but then the tears started and she had to give in. Locked in the safety of those arms, she rested her head on Maggie’s shoulder and let the shuddering sobs escape, let someone else be the strong one. Maggie held her a long time, stroking her hair, rocking her gently in her arms, until at last the weeping was spent and Holly stood exhausted. Maggie pulled a packet of tissues from her bedraggled blue dress and handed it to her.

  “Thanks.” Holly swabbed at her ravaged face. “Uh—”

  “If you say you’re sorry I’ll kick you in the shin!” said Maggie fiercely.

  “Yeah, okay.” Holly pulled herself together, managed a trembly grin. “God, with peaceniks like you, who needs wars?”

  “Yeah,” said Maggie. Her grin was shaky too.

  Holly looked down at Ernie’s braided rug, then up again into the blue eyes. “Maggie, can you tell me why?”

  Maggie shook her head slowly. “We have to work out the meaning for ourselves.”

  “And if there’s no meaning?”

  “Then we have to bear witness to the waste.” Maggie shrugged. “All I know is it can’t be ignored. Can’t be forgotten.” She looked at the weapons display. “And there aren’t any shortcuts. Quitting before we’ve worked it out is dangerous. Revenge won’t cure grief.”

  Holly nodded. Ernie had quit too soon. Mitch might have helped, all that talk about confronting pain, renewing life. Helping a guy do it for himself.

  Maggie’s mind was running along the same track. She leaned back against the wall and said, “This counselor you called, Mitch. Ernie’s friend. He works with vets?”

  “Vietnam vets. Yeah, a rap group.”

  “Have you joined it?”

  “It’s for men only.”

  “Why? You’re a vet.”

  “Hey, look, are you kidding? Nurses weren’t their buddies. If they got wounded, okay, we were their moms. Like Ernie just now. But if we went to a party we found out that off-duty we were nothing but round-eyed pussy.” Holly waved away Maggie’s indignation. “Guys we worked with were mostly okay, the doctors and corpsmen. They knew we were on the team. But guys like Mitch never saw us that way. Can’t expect miracles now.”

  “Maybe not.” Maggie looked glum. “Especially since I bet half the rap group involves telling each other they were scared shitless. Can’t do that in front of some broad.”

  “Yeah. John Wayne dies hard.”

  “Maybe because there’s some truth in John Wayne amongst the lies.” Maggie studied Holly a moment, a tiny frown between her brows. “You’re a good detective. You like homicide work.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, really. It satisfies something.”

  “Yeah, okay, I like to figure out why the poor suckers bought it. So what?”

  “So maybe—well, it’s just that in Vietnam guys died and no one could tell you why. You don’t want that to happen to Dale Colby and the others.”

  Nurse, tell me why. Holly said, “Maybe. Yeah, maybe so.” She did feel good when she managed to cut through the crap to a fact. To something real. Something authentic. “Sometimes,” she told Maggie, “when I’ve solved a case, they let me sleep for a few nights.”

  “They?”

  “The dreams. It’s as though for a little while—I don’t know.” She remembered Mitch’s words. “As though my survival means something.”

  “Yeah. That’s good. You’re onto something,” Maggie said eagerly. “Look, Holly, we’ve got to find someone to work through this stuff with you.”

  Holly felt suddenly betrayed. “You think I’m crazy too!”

  “The hell I do!” Maggie shook her black curls fiercely. “You’re a normal, smart human being who had to go through something inhumanly horrible! Seems to me that hurting and grieving about it proves you’re not crazy. If it didn’t bother you—now, thatwould be sick.”

  She was right, damn it. It wasn’t crazy to hurt. To hell with Alec. With Mitch. Though Mitch almost understood even if he wouldn’t help. He knew that the dead refused to go unremembered. Knew that trying to be numb wouldn’t work no matter how hard you wished it would. Holly pushed back her hair and looked at the woman who kept prodding her toward this necessary unwelcome knowledge. “You know,” she said acidly, “your brother is right. You are a maggot. Always gnawing away.”

  Maggie grinned sadly. “Guilty as charged. Just trying to uncover what’s healthy and alive.”

  Healthy and alive? That needed some thinking about. Holly said slowly, “There was this other nurse. Billie Ann. She wrote me a couple of times but I didn’t answer.”

  “Call her,” Maggie urged. “You need each other.”

  “Maybe so.” Holly looked around the room and returned to the immediate problem. “I just wish I could do something for Dale Colby.”

  “You’ve got Nate Rosen, right?”

  “No. I mean, even if everything works out, and we get proof that he was at Colby’s yesterday afternoon, and that he was worried that Dale would find out he was blackmailing Ernie, and so forth—even then, we don’t know how he got in and out of the room. And his attorney will hammer that home for the jury.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Except for that, it’d be a pretty case. No sweat.”

  “Yeah. Oh, God!”

  “What’s wrong?” Holly stepped toward Maggie, concerned. She was standing with one hand jabbed into the black curls over her forehead, her eyes closed. After a moment her hand dropped and she looked bleakly at Holly.

  “Sorry. Just remembered a phone call I have to make. God, did you ever notice how life can be a shitheap?”

  “That fact has come to my attention.” Holly put her arm around Maggie’s droopping shoulders. “Hey, buck up now, Maggot. Let’s go get this damn paperwork out of the way.”

  Near midnight Holly sat across from Nate Rosen in the interrogation room, Gabe quiet with a notebook in the corner. Nate looked even more mournful than usual, worry written in his wrinkled forehead and the nervous motions of his long fingers.

  “We’re not ready to charge you with anything yet,” Holly explained. “But we’d like some information.”

  “Do I need a lawyer? I didn’t do anything.” He stuck his hands in his pockets, where his fingers twitched nervously.

  “You’re not under arrest. But you could clear up some questions for us.”

  “Arrest?” There was panic in his voice. His hands jerked out of his pockets and a note fluttered to the floor. Gabe picked it up and handed it back politely.

  Holly repeated, “You’re not under arrest. We just have some questions.”

  “Do I have to answer?”

  “Why wouldn’t you want to?” She watched him alertly. “You want to help us find the guy who killed Dale, right?”

  He licked his lips. “Yeah.” The implications of not answering were sinking in. “Yeah, let’s talk, then.”

  “Okay, let’s start at the beginning, with Representative Knox’s plane. You went to the scene of the crash as a reporter, right?”

  “Yeah, I was in my car. Heard someone talking about the crash on my CB. Drove right over.”

  “You were first on the scene?”

  “One of the first. The wreckage was spread out over the hillside.”

  “Ernie Grant said you found a photograph in the wreckage.”

  The name shocked him. He passed a hand over his face and apparently decided to brazen it out. “Yeah. The tail section was burning and a few people were there shouting. I
noticed what looked like a hunk of the cockpit. The pilot’s, uh, body was nearby. I, uh, looked at his ID and stuff, and put it back. Then the emergency people started arriving so I ran back to the car and got to a phone.”

  “A phone?”

  “To call in the story.”

  “Yes. Now, Ernie Grant mentioned a photograph he’d left with the pilot.”

  “Yeah. I found it. Picture of Ernie’s Vietnam buddy pretending to be Elvis Presley. But I didn’t know that at first.” His brown eyes brimmed with worry.

  “Nothing was printed in the Sun-Dispatch about the photograph.”

  “No. I, uh, just took it to investigate. But I didn’t find out anything right away because there was so much else to do. The first thing I did was check the pilot’s name and the air charter company. They said it was a congressman’s plane so I knew it was a big story. Started working on the political side. Had to interview all those investigators, too.”

  “Did you show the photo to the investigators?”

  “Uh, no.” Nate studied his fingers and decided to add something. “I was so busy with the rest of the story.”

  Just like Olivia Kerr. Holly sighed. Reporters were such very busy people. Weaselly people, valuable to cops but only when it suited them. Holly said, “Now, Mr. Edgerton said he’d assigned Dale Colby to the story too.”

  “Yeah, like I say, it was a big one.”

  “Did you show the photo to Dale Colby?”

  “No.”

  She waited for him to elaborate, but this time he was quiet. She asked, “What did you do about the photograph?”

  “Well—I took it because I was curious. See, the signature said ‘To Ernie Grant’ but his ID had said Lewis. And the photo on his ID didn’t match either, so it wasn’t a picture of him. I figured he must be holding the photo for a friend, and if I could find this friend I’d get myself a nice human-interest piece out of it, that’s all. So I called a few Grants in the directory, asked if they knew any pilots. When this one said yes I told him about the crash, and said I’d found a photo for him. He agreed to meet me. When we did—well, I guess he just assumed I knew everything. Started telling me about the guy dressed up like Elvis in the picture, how Lewis’s mistake killed him. Didn’t take long to realize this was the guy who’d put the explosive on the plane.”

  “So you had a nice story,” said Holly, her voice tight. “But it never got printed.”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Would you like to explain why not?”

  Nate was silent a moment. Then he said, “The direction these questions are going, I don’t think I want to answer.”

  “That’s your decision, Mr. Rosen. You’re not under arrest. Let me just point out that Ernie Grant told me you said you’d keep quiet about the photo. We know that Mr. Grant had just sold some valuable land to a developer so he had the money to pay blackmail. We plan to subpoena bank records and—”

  “All right, all right!” Nate flopped his hand nervously. “Yeah, I needed the money. He didn’t. Not really, said he just wanted to hang around with his dog, go hunting—hell, I felt for the guy.”

  Wonderful. Blackmail as a humanitarian act. But there’s no time for a lecture, Schreiner, find out about that locked room. She said, “Let’s move on to yesterday afternoon, Mr. Rosen. You were in the office until two o’clock?”

  “Yes. Approximately. Then I went out to get some man-on-the-street quotes for the heat-wave story. The weather people were talking about cooler air coming in—well, you know what the weather was.”

  “Yes. And you stopped by Colby’s.”

  He stared at his fingers.

  She said, “You were seen by two neighbors.”

  “Yes,” he said at last.

  “You rang the bell?”

  “Yes.”

  Holly waited but he didn’t add anything. She asked, “Did Mr. Colby answer?”

  “No. But I didn’t expect him to. I thought he was at the beach. I just rang the bell, well, just in case.”

  “You went in anyway?”

  “I wanted to find out—see, the trouble is, this story of his got a lot of people nervous. Including me, because it told about the pilot meeting a vet before the crash. I wanted to hear Dale’s taped interviews, to hear what he really had.”

  Holly thought a moment. What could Dale have had on those tapes? Priscilla’s account of her brother’s encounter with an unknown vet who upset him. And Mitch’s no-names-given discussion of the rap group. But he wouldn’t have had Ernie’s name. Or would he? She asked, “You wanted to know, because if he published Ernie’s name your payments would dry up?”

  The sad brown eyes met Holly’s. “You’ve seen Ernie. If he saw his name in the paper—inmy paper—before you cops got there to arrest him, you think I’d be alive long?”

  “So you were afraid of Ernie.”

  Nate shrugged uncomfortably and jammed his hands into his pockets. “Yeah! Not the world’s most stable guy. It was important for me to know what Dale had. Maybe there was no reason to panic. The front door was unlocked so I went in.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Three-thirty, maybe a few minutes later.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “I went to his den. Knocked and waited.” Holly could visualize him, his hands twisting nervously in his pockets as they were now, the bar napkin dropping unseen to the floor. Nate went on, “Nothing happened. So I tried the door, but it was locked. I struggled with it for several minutes. Worked up a real sweat, it was so damn hot yesterday, but I couldn’t push the damn thing open. So I went back to the living room to get those tapes and—”

  “You didn’t go into the den at all?” asked Holly sharply.

  “No, I just told you, I couldn’t. Locked from the inside.”

  “Did you hear Mr. Colby in there?”

  “No. I realize now—he must have been in there—already—” His thin mouth clamped thinner.

  “You saw or heard nothing from that room?”

  “Nothing. But it didn’t worry me then, I thought he was at the beach, you see.”

  Holly exchanged a glance with Gabe. This was a clever story, damn it. Admitting only what they could already prove. A good lawyer could make Nate look like the soul of cooperation, waiving counsel, freely answering questions, the innocent little blackmailer and burglar caught up in an unfortunate coincidence. She needed more or he’d slither out from under a murder charge. Presumed innocent. Suddenly angry, Holly slapped the tabletop with both hands and pressed herself to a standing position.

  “Thank you, Mr. Rosen,” she said. “That’s all for now. But we’ll be wanting to question you again.”

  “Well. All right.” Surprised by the abrupt dismissal, he looked at her uncertainly.

  “You’re free to go, Mr. Rosen.”

  Nate got up, gave Gabe a thin smile, and ambled out.

  “Tail him?” asked Gabe.

  “Yeah. Set it up, okay? Let’s hope he makes a dumb move. We need everything we can get against that weasel.”

  He was watching her check hastily through her handbag. “Where are you going?”

  “Colby’s. I was hoping we’d get a hint from Rosen about how he managed the locked-room trick. But he’s sharp. So I’m going to go look at that goddamn room again.”

  21

  Holly was glad to see a light still burning in the Colby living-room window. It was midnight and she’d worried that Donna would be in a drugged sleep. She stood on the cement platform and knocked instead of ringing, just in case. Donna answered almost immediately.

  “Sorry to bother you again, Mrs. Colby,” Holly said. She saw that Donna was not dressed for bed, she was still in the sleeveless blouse and denim skirt Holly had seen earlier that day. Holly went on, “We’re making some progress toward finding your husband’s killer, and I’d like to see the room again.”

  “Yes, please, come in.” Donna stepped back. The hall light glared on her bedraggled blonde hair and on eyes puf
fy from weeping. She glanced into the living room and said, “Please sit down. Can I get you something to drink?”

  “Thanks, no.” Holly went into the living room. Maggie was slouched in one of the wing chairs, one leg dangling over the armrest. She’d changed from the rumpled blue sundress into a red cotton maternity shirt and white shorts. She said, “Hi. I take it your suspect didn’t explain how it was done?”

  “We’re getting there. Shouldn’t be long before we have what we need.”

  “And now you want to look at the crime scene again,” said Maggie. “Well, tonight’s as good as tomorrow. Maybe better.”

  Holly looked at her sharply. Strange mood here. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Why are you here?”

  “I was just checking on Donna. To see how things were going. To tell her about a phone call I just made.”

  Holly plunked herself down on the sofa and pulled out her notebook. Exasperating woman. Just when she thought things were under control she was playing catch-up again. “What have you found out this time?” she asked.

  Maggie watched Donna cross the room and sink into the other wing chair before she said, “I’ve found out that Josie and Tina are smart kids. If they keep making good grades they’ll get to college someday.” She flipped a hand toward Holly’s notebook. “You can put that away for a while.”

  “It’s top secret that the girls are smart?” Holly asked in a vinegary voice.

  Maggie pulled her leg from the armrest of her chair and stretched both feet out before her. “I thought you might want to know how Dale Colby died. Donna and I were getting ready to discuss it. But I can’t seem to remember with that notebook out.”

  “You know how it was done?”

  “Can’t remember.”

  Holly slapped the notebook closed and shoved it into her pocket. So the take-charge hotshot was back in the picture again. Couldn’t trust anyone. She looked coldly at Maggie and said, “Yes, I’d like to know.”

  “Oh, hey, come on.” Maggie breezed across the room to perch on the sofa arm. “We’re all on the same team.”

  Donna was looking at Maggie with eagerness and fearfulness. “You know how it was done?”