Rogues Gallery

by Dan Andriacco

  “Indeed it is not,” Mac said. “Except for the ring found on Tim Crutcher’s corpse, Miss Blake’s jewelry is resting comfortably in her own home - unless it has already been quietly sold to a private buyer.”

  “What the hell?” Charlie exclaimed.

  Insurance scam, that’s what the hell. But not life insurance. Suddenly, I saw it all - or at least the big picture.

  “Spare us the theatrics, Mr. Hayworth,” Mac said. “I am reasonably sure that your hands are not clean in this business.”

  “What business?” Erica demanded, clearly unhappy at being left in the dark until now.

  “Meredith Blake, desperately in need of funds to finance her chosen lifestyle, planned to report her jewels stolen, collect the insurance, and then sell the jewels to an undiscerning buyer. Fearing that she would be suspected because of her rather colorful reputation, she groomed Tim Crutcher to be the fall guy. I use the term ‘groomed’ advisedly, for Miss Blake was the ‘other woman’ in his life. He thought he was her love and her co-conspirator in insurance fraud. In reality, he was her victim.”

  Ashley shook her head. “Of all people, I never even suspected...”

  Meredith’s laugh rang hollow. “That’s absurd. Tell me what you’re smoking, McCabe, because I want some of it. Tim Crutcher was a flunky, a guy who did odd jobs around my house. He was lucky to have a job at all, but he abused his position to steal from me.”

  “I have some photos that would indicate your relationship was quite a bit closer than that.”

  Mac pulled a series of prints out of his sport coat pocket and held them up for all of us to see. They showed Meredith Blake and Tim Crutcher looking more than a little chummy. She hung on him amorously as he fed a slot machine.

  “Oh, all right, I was slumming, getting it on with the hired help,” Meredith said. She looked as if she’d been caught with her hand in a cookie jar. “Big deal! Charlie doesn’t mind that kind of thing. How do you get from there to your pipe dream about the insurance?”

  “It does seem kind of a stretch,” Oscar allowed.

  “You need to learn that sometimes looking a gift horse in the mouth is the only wise course, Oscar,” Mac lectured. “What man would be caught dead wearing a woman’s ring? Tim Crutcher was. Moreover, no thief, not even one without a previous record, would be so stupid as to wear hot merchandise.” So that’s why Joe Robards never noticed Crutcher wearing the ring - Crutcher never really had it.

  “The inference was immediately clear to me: That ring was placed on Crutcher’s finger to frame him, and it was placed there by the person who accompanied him across the threshold of his former domicile - the same person who killed him, Meredith Blake.”

  Mac looked at her. She looked back, maybe trying to figure out if he had any more evidence to whip out of his pocket. “You’re just blowing smoke, Fatty. You can’t prove anything.”

  “I have something better than proof - an eye witness.”

  Charlie edged away from his meal ticket, maybe not even realizing it. That’s when I knew we had her.

  “There was no - That’s just a crock. If there was a witness, we’d have heard from him by now.”

  “We already did. Would you like to hear from Ranger again - just as you did on the night of the murder?”

  At the sound of his name, the German shepherd reprised the low growl. He pointed himself at Meredith like an arrow. Ashley tightened her grip on his chain.

  “Hell’s bells,” Oscar breathed.

  Mac smiled grimly. “Sherlock Holmes was right. Dogs don’t make mistakes.”

  Charlie’s shoulders slumped as if he’d just struck out. “Oh, shit, I knew this wouldn’t work.”

  “Shut up, you moron!” Meredith shouted at him.

  “Actually, that’s very good advice,” Erica assured the former ballplayer. “You should get a lawyer before you say another word.”

  “What’s the use? I know when my goose is cooked. I’ve been here before. But it was all Meredith’s doing. She needed the money.”

  “You spineless bastard!”

  Oscar moved closer to the heiress, close enough to grab if necessary.

  “First, she figured out that she could make twice the dough on her jewelry by both making an insurance claim and selling it. Then she had this bright idea that if there wasn’t somebody else to take the rap, the insurance investigators might figure out pretty quick that she still had the goods. That may sound loony, but - ”

  “The guilty flee where no man pursueth,” Mac said. “And Ms. Blake does have a notorious reputation.”

  “So she got me to look for a scapegoat,” Charlie said.

  “And you just did it?” Oscar said.

  Charlie looked at his erstwhile companion uneasily. “Meredith can be very persuasive. She threatened to deprive me of certain things if I didn’t go along. And she didn’t say anything about murder at first. By the time she did, I was in too deep.

  “Anyway, I struck up a conversation with Crutcher at the Forty Thieves about a week after it opened. He looked like a guy with problems. I found out that he was out of a job and I was sure he was too fond of gambling, just the kind of poor sap we were looking for. After I convinced him that I wasn’t Charlie Hayworth, just somebody who looked like him, I gave him a card with Meredith’s name and phone number on it. He knew who she was. He called her the next day. By that afternoon, he was working for her. Within a couple of weeks, she had him convinced she was in love with him.”

  “Poor Tim,” Ashley mumbled. “He always was gullible.”

  “I presume that Crutcher was unaware of your relationship with Miss Blake?” Mac said.

  “No, he never saw me again. As far as he knew, Meredith was sex-starved.” He chuckled. “Fat chance. Anyway, about the time he was swallowing the bait, Meredith laid the big one on me: She’d decided that as long as he was alive there was a danger that he might be able to prove his innocence and it would all bounce back to her. So he had to go. Meredith figured that if he was shot in his own house his wife would be blamed, and if he was wearing one of the stolen rings it would be easier to hang the heist on him.”

  “That was your idea, you liar!” Meredith needed a cigarette; I know the signs.

  “Oh, right, like Charlie Hayworth would come up with a murder mystery plot like that,” Charlie said. “Gimme a break!”

  “How did she get Crutcher to return to his house that night?” I asked Charlie, interrupting this mutual blamefest. That had always been one of the big puzzles - what was the victim doing there?

  “She told him that if he really loved her he’d prove it by killing his wife.”

  Ashley’s mouth fell open. “What! And he went along?”

  Charlie chuckled grimly. “Went along? Honey, he was on it like white on rice. He even bragged that he bought life insurance, but he insured both of you so it wouldn’t look suspicious. Of course, we thought that was just the stars aligning in our favor because it also gave you a great motive for doing away with your husband.”

  “That - that - ” Ashley couldn’t even find a word for Crutcher’s perfidy. I couldn’t either. But in the next morning’s Erin Observer & News-Ledger, Johanna managed to sneak the word “scoundrel” past the copy editor. Good for Tall Rawls!

  “He also came up with the idea of moving out of your house,” Charlie went on. Who pushed the “play” button on you, sport? Not that Oscar minds. “He thought that would divert suspicion from him when she got shot by an intruder. Shows how dumb he was. I mean, being split from the wife would have made a more likely suspect, not less likely. But it suited our purposes just fine, right Meredith?”

  “Drop dead, asshole.”

  “And here’s the best part: Meredith said she’d go along with him for moral support. She even offered to hold the gun. I bet he never saw what w
as coming even when she pointed it at him, poor dope. Of course, I wasn’t there. You can’t pin that on me. It was all her.”

  “That’s not exactly how it works,” Erica informed him as Meredith used some of her most colorful vocabulary to disagree with her accomplice. “An accessory doesn’t have to be present. You need a lawyer now even more than you did ten minutes ago, friend. Here, take my card.”

  She’d just lost a client in the best possible way. Odds were strong that she’d just gained one, too.

  The McCabe visage assumed a look of satisfaction akin to that of a man who has just enjoyed his favorite cake piled high with ice cream. Cake and ice cream!

  “Mac! I forgot!”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Yes, Jefferson?”

  “Happy birthday.”

  XII

  Lynda returned home to Erin just in time to dash with me that night to the concert, at which Mac squeezed monster-caught-in-the-tar-pit sounds out of his bagpipes for a good (actually, bad) fifteen minutes, though it seemed longer to me. It wasn’t exactly Boléro. (That came later, after Lynda drove us home.) Wrapped in my own domestic bliss at the concert, I paid scant attention to Oscar, his mother, and Popcorn in her modest blue dress. But Popcorn told me later that they got along like three fingers of a glove. I guess that’s good.

  The story plastered atop the next morning’s newspaper, HEIRESS ARRESTED IN CRUTCHER MURDER, filled Lynda with pride in her protégé. And rightly so. Tall Rawls did a great job.

  That night, the alumni dinner went off without a hitch or a stitch. The Cardinal’s humorous but pointed talk, in particular, registered a big hit. Maybe the next time he goes to the Vatican for a conclave, he won’t come home. It could happen.

  When a task is high stress, it leaves you drained afterward even if all went well. So with the St. Benignus Day events coming right on top of Mac’s virtuoso performance in the case of the dog that did bark in the night-time, I was happy to spend Sunday getting reacquainted with my wife. We didn’t even have brunch with the McCabes after Mass.

  It was the following Saturday night, therefore, before Mac got to hold forth for an audience on how he figured it all out. The now-richer Ashley Crutcher had invited Mac, my sister, Lynda and me, along with Erica Slade, to dinner at Ricoletti’s Ristorante. The beaming Ms. Slade, possibly the happiest person at the table, basked in the afterglow of a vindicated client and a totally pissed ex-husband. For her, it didn’t get any better than that.

  “The coincidence of Crutcher’s supposed larceny being uncovered the day after he was shot weighed heavily on me,” Mac related, “particularly when the presumptive proof of his thievery was his highly implausible wearing of a woman’s ring.

  “So I immediately began to believe that the reported jewelry theft was, in fact, an attempted insurance swindle by the fast-spending, high-living Meredith Blake. It was more than that, however. The tell-tale ring had to have been planted on his body immediately after the shooting. Therefore, Miss Blake and her latest paramour were guilty of murder as well as fraud.”

  “Wait a minute.” Lynda set down her Manhattan. “The insurance con and the murder didn’t have to be connected. It could have been that Crutcher hid the jewels at his house and Ashley found them. Then she killed him for the jewels. Did you ever think of that, Mac? No offense, Ashley.”

  “None taken.” A financially comfortable widow who no longer faced a criminal trial, Ashley looked about ten years younger than she had ten days before.

  “Yes, I considered and rejected that scenario,” Mac assured my bride. “Why would a murderous Ashley plant the ring on her husband? She would not want anyone to know that her husband was the jewel thief. She also would have either killed him somewhere far from home or she would have leaped at the chance to claim self-defense.”

  Erica Slade, sporting some fancy jewels of her own over a low-cut scarlet dress for weekend dining, also had a question. “How did you come up with that picture of Meredith Blake and Tim at the Forty Thieves?”

  He’d been waiting all week for somebody to ask, which is why I refused to do it.

  “Those who know me only from reading Jefferson’s account of our little adventures undoubtedly believe that I farm out legwork to him out of sloth or incompetence in that realm. Such is not the case. I secured photos of Miss Blake and Tim Crutcher, both published in The Erin Observer & News-Ledger on different occasions, and took them to my friend Cal Daley.”

  “Isn’t he the security guy at the Forty Thieves?” I said, earning a nod from Mac. Daley, an old friend of Mac’s, had been an assistant chief of police in Cincinnati before retiring to take the casino job.

  “Exactly, old boy. Cal and I spent more than an hour reviewing the security recordings of patrons until we found one in which our two quarry appeared together.”

  So that was his research.

  “I have to admit I wasn’t sure you were going to pull this one off,” I said.

  “Well, I’m sure glad he did,” Ashley said. “I’ll always be grateful. It feels so good to just be Ms. Slade’s paralegal again, and not her client, too. But I can’t imagine how we’re going to defend Charlie Hayworth.”

  “Leave that to me.” The sparkle in Erica’s eyes gave her diamond earrings competition. “I’ll come up with something that will give Marvin fits.”

  **** See No Police Like Holmes, MX Publishing, 2011.

  A Few Words of Thanks

  This time special thanks go to my friends Leah Cummins Guinn, Paul Hayes, Roger Johnson, Kathleen Kaska, Marcy Mahle, and Kieran McMullan for their support of this book and of my writing in general.

  Additional thanks to the usual suspects:

  Ann Brauer Andriacco, for her constant help and encouragement, as well as her readership;

  Kieran McMullen again, for being my reliable consultant on all matters involving firearms, animals, and police procedure (among other topics);

  Jeff Suess, for proofreading and final preparation of the manuscript; and

  Steve Winter, for applying his engineering eye to the text.

  I will never stop thanking Steve Emecz for being my publisher and Bob Gibson at Stauch Design for producing yet another outstanding cover.

  About the Author

  Dan Andriacco has been reading mysteries since he discovered Sherlock Holmes at the age of nine, and writing them almost as long. The first four books in his popular Sebastian McCabe - Jeff Cody series are No Police Like Holmes, Holmes Sweet Holmes, The 1895 Murder and The Disappearance of Mr. James Phillimore. He is also the co-author, with Kieran McMullen, of The Amateur Executioner and The Poisoned Penman, mysteries solved by Enoch Hale with Sherlock Holmes.

  A member of the Tankerville Club, the Illustrious Clients, the Vatican Cameos, and the John H. Watson Society, Dan is also the author of Baker Street Beat: An Eclectic Collection of Sherlockian Scribblings. Follow his blog at www.danandriacco.com, his tweets at @DanAndriacco, and his Facebook Fan Page at www.facebook.com/DanAndriaccoMysteries.

  Dr. Dan and his wife, Ann, have three grown children and five grandchildren. They live in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, about forty miles downriver from Erin.

  Praise for the earlier Sebastian McCabe - Jeff Cody mysteries

  “The villain is hard to discern and the motives involved are even more obscure. All-in-all, this (The Disappearance of Mr. James Phillimore) is a fun read in a series that keeps getting better with each new tale.”

  - Philip K. Jones

  “The 1895 Murder is the most smoothly-plotted and written Cody/McCabe mystery yet. Mr. Andriacco plays fair with the reader, but his clues are deftly hidden, much as Sebastian McCabe hides the secrets to his magic tricks under an entertaining run of palaver.”

  - The Well-Read Sherlockian

  “I loved Dan Andriacco’s first novel about Sebastian McCabe and Jeff Cody, and I�
��m delighted to recommend the second (Holmes Sweet Holmes), which has a curiously topical touch.”

  - Roger Johnson, The Sherlock Holmes Society of London

  “No Police Like Holmes is a chocolate bar of a novel - delicious, addictive, and leaves a craving for more.

  - Girl Meets Sherlock

  Sebastian McCabe, Jeff Cody, and Lynda Teal will return in

  Bookmarked for Murder

  Also available