Killed on the Rocks

by William L. DeAndrea

  We pressed on. Ralph, Cal Gowe, nothing. We tried all the unoccupied rooms, just in case Barry Dost was cowering under a bed somewhere, but still nothing.

  Now for the guests. My room first, to use the bathroom, and to check in with Spot. He was delighted to have a chance to play with Roxanne. Then to the other rooms. Wilberforce’s room had all the personality of its occupant, so we were out of there in five seconds. Haskell Freed had made his place a pigsty; clothes scattered everywhere, scraps of paper lying around. I picked up the paper. Each piece was covered with figures, including one by the phone that had a telephone number on it. It wasn’t the Network’s number. I memorized Haskell’s number and put the papers back more or less where I’d gotten them.

  Carol Coretti’s room was next. Roxanne had joined us by now, with Spot in tow.

  “What the hell is this?” I asked. “The Wizard of Oz? Every time I turn around, there’s more of us.”

  “Oh, be quiet,” Roxanne said. “Spot can sniff out Barry Dost for you.”

  “Spot is lucky he can sniff out his dinner dish. He was bred to be a sled dog, not a bloodhound.”

  Roxanne changed the subject. “Whose room is this, Carol’s? Bet you don’t find a diaphragm in here.”

  “Droll,” I said. “How did you know?”

  “Ha!” Roxanne shouted. “You mean she is?”

  “She got you again, Cobb,” Ralph said.

  “Thanks, Deputy Ingersoll, I might not have noticed.” I turned to Roxanne. “Will you stop hooting, please? Or would you rather set off a skyrocket announcing: YOUR ROOMS ARE BEING SEARCHED?”

  Roxanne shook her head in wonder at herself. “Wow. What instincts the kid has.”

  I ignored her, then gave the room a quick look. I found no diaphragm. There was nothing of any relevance to the case, either. The only thing worth looking at was a silver-framed photograph of Carol Coretti with her arm around a plump little blonde.

  Roxanne was at my side. “The competition, huh?”

  “Rox, knock it off, okay?”

  “I saw you mooning over her all the way up in the car.”

  “I do not moon. In any sense of the word.”

  “Hey, I knew you when Monica was still around, so you can forget that line.”

  I smiled in spite of myself. “I didn’t say I’ve never mooned.”

  “That’s one for Cobb,” Ralph said. “We about done here?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “let’s press on.”

  I could detail what we found in Bats Blefary’s room and all the rest, but it wouldn’t do you any more good than it did us.

  We did discover a few things. Gabby Dost had been exaggerating slightly when he’d said the place was finished. Only five or six rooms besides the one his family and guests were occupying came up to the standard set by my room. The rest were furnished, but not decorated. The TVs were in place, but were still on wheeled stands instead of ensconced in custom-made mahogany. They were plugged in, but not hooked up to cable or VCR, or even house antennae.

  We discovered what had happened to the telephone service, too. The switching console that had controlled the separate lines to the separate rooms, the telex, the fax machine, and the rest of the voice communications system was in a closet backstairs on the third floor. We noticed it especially because the lock had been forced.

  The console had been wrecked beyond repair. It looked as if someone had hit it with an ax, then stomped on the pieces.

  “Somebody knows we lied,” Ralph said.

  “Worse than that, somebody wanted to make sure we couldn’t call for help.”

  Roxanne was still catching up. “How could you possibly have gotten through to the sheriff with that thing all broken—ohh. Somebody knows you lied. You mean me?”

  “In addition to you. The person who did this knows we never got through to the sheriff. Now you know why I wanted you to promise to keep your mouth shut.”

  “Can’t you get in trouble doing what you’re doing? Impersonating an officer or something?”

  “That’s the least of our worries,” I said.

  “Well,” Ralph said. “At least we know this guy is serious.”

  “The dead body on the rocks wasn’t serious enough for you?” I demanded.

  “I mean really serious,” Ralph said.

  “He means,” Roxanne said, “a really serious threat to the rest of us.”

  “I know what he means,” I said. “Come on, let’s finish this up.” So we did. We looked at a million empty rooms. Well, it seemed like a million. I was getting a headache. The headache reminded me to look in the room in which my pal Barry had tried to kick my head in. Nothing had changed, except now the sun coming through the big square of glass had heated the place up so that it was quite warm. Of course, I had clothes on now, too.

  We saved the best for last—Barry’s room.

  And found nothing. Except for the fact that Barry had imposed some of his personal taste on his stepmother’s decorating. There were three walls of bookshelves in Barry’s room. One held nothing but books on public relations, one was college texts on clinical psychology, and the third was strictly sword and sorcery novels. There was a case of videotapes—horror movies and cartoons.

  “Chacun à son goût,” Roxanne said. “That’s French for ‘Everyone to his own taste.’”

  “Excelsior,” I replied. “That’s Latin for ‘Let’s look in the attic.’”

  There was nothing in the attic, either.

  What I needed was a couple of Advil and a nice long nap.

  “Let’s go ask people questions,” I said.

  12

  I’ll give it a seventy-five, but I wouldn’t buy it.

  —Numerous teenagers, “American Bandstand” (ABC)

  WE SET UP SHOP in the library. There were comfortable leather chairs and a bar, in case anyone needed his tongue oiled.

  We questioned Calvin Gowe first. He hadn’t seen or heard anything. (I’m a sound sleeper, you know?) He had formed no opinion of the people he found himself snowed in with. (I mind my own business, you know?) Ralph, who worked with the guy pretty frequently, told me that sounded like a fairly accurate summary of Gowe’s capabilities, so we put him to work watching the door. “We don’t want anybody listening at keyholes,” Ralph explained.

  Cal didn’t care. He did, however, exact his price. “I didn’t know you was a deputy sheriff,” he told Ralph. He sounded hurt. “You see, I got this outstanding dangerous-lane-change ticket, I wonder if you could maybe help me out. ...”

  I told him Ralph would do what he could, which got me a smile from Gowe and a dirty look from Ralph. But it got us a doorman. I told him to send the Normans in first.

  I let Ralph ask all the questions, in the interests of peace. He was pretty good at it, too. He didn’t take anything at face value, just because the questionees were close relatives. Not that it did any good. They hadn’t seen or heard anything. They had no idea how Mr. Dost’s body crossed the snow without marking it. They wouldn’t dream of accusing anybody here of such a crime. No, they couldn’t tell us where to look for Barry Dost.

  “There are so many rooms,” Aunt Agnes said.

  “He could just stay ahead of a search, and slip back into a place you’ve already been, you see,” Uncle Fred said.

  “He always has been high-strung,” Aunt Agnes said. “And he was doing so well, lately, too. And then this had to happen.” At which point husband and wife turned at me and offered me identical expressions of distaste.

  I spoke for the first time since they’d been in the room. “Now wait just a darned minute here. You two have been on my case since this morning. Do you sincerely think I killed your boss? Or do I just have BO or something?”

  “The way you talk,” Fred Norman said. I guessed I wasn’t supposed to say “BO” in front of a lady. I apologized.

  “You don’t mean it. You come here all city-wise, slick as a Teflon griddle. And when trouble comes up, you just take over, running around ha
lf-naked, bossing us poor, dumb hicks around, ignoring the real lawman in your midst.”

  “Mr. Dost never treated us like that.” Aunt Agnes sniffed.

  “Mr. Dost wasn’t City,” Uncle Fred explained. Judging by his face and voice when he said it, I decided “City” was synonymous with “pond scum.”

  Uncle Fred wasn’t done. He went on about how I might have fooled the sheriff, and even poor Ralph, but I didn’t fool him.

  “There was never any trouble until Mr. Dost took up with you Network people, Norman said ominously. He stared at me, waiting for me to squirm under the crushing weight of his logic.

  I just looked at him. Him and his wife. I couldn’t believe it. They were rubes. Backwater American rubes. I’d thought the breed was extinct, but no. Here they were in the flesh, a couple so intimidated by city people, they think every word and every gesture is intended to offend. I’d read about them, but I’d never expected to run across any in this day and age. I sure hope I never meet any more.

  I turned to Aunt Agnes. “We’ll have our lunch in here,” I told her. “Sandwiches will be fine. You may go, now.” Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, I thought.

  They sniffed their way out of there. Ralph turned to me and shrugged. I grinned at him, said, “What the hell,” and told Calvin to send in the next victim.

  We spent the better part of six hours questioning people, and I could show you the big pile of negatives we accumulated, but it wouldn’t do you any more good that it did us. In fact, less, because at least we got to eat ham sandwiches on Aunt Agnes’s homemade bread while we accumulated them, which was some minor consolation.

  Suffice it to say nobody saw, nobody heard, nobody had any ideas. As for the rest of what was said, I’ll just give you the highlights.

  Haskell Freed came in smiling, as though he were about to close a deal. He pulled a cigar out of his pocket, started to unscrew the tube, then looked up from his chair and said, “Oh, I’m sorry. Is it okay if I ...” He tilted his head toward the cigar.

  We told him to go ahead, and he beamed at us through clouds of smoke as he got the thing going. He was acting like a man lounging in the park humoring a couple of kids who want to play cops and robbers.

  Fine, I thought. I hope he has fun.

  “Haskell,” I said, “I’d like to take advantage of some of your financial expertise. Something occurred to me, and I wanted to check it out with you to see if it’s feasible.”

  “Of course,” he said. He leaned back and took a puff.

  “Since Dost announced he wanted to buy the Network, Network stock has been rising, hasn’t it?”

  “Through the roof. Do you own some?”

  “A little. It’s impossible to be a vice-president at the Network without accumulating some stock. Isn’t that right? I mean, you’ve been a vice-president a lot longer than I have, you must have a lot more stock.”

  He shrugged. “A fairly significant amount,” he admitted. “Nowhere near what Roxanne Schick has, for example. Of course, that came from her family.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Now, it occurs to me that if knowledge or even rumors of this little gathering had gotten out before we came up here, the stock would be peaking just about now, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would have,” Haskell said. “But it won’t for long.”

  “Why not?” Ralph asked.

  “Because Dost is dead. Dost was the magic name. Even if the merger were to go through, which, believe me, it won’t, the public won’t care, since it won’t be Dost who’s heading up the combined enterprise.”

  “So without Dost, demand will go down, and the price will go down.”

  “Down the toilet,” Haskell conceded sadly. “I’ve probably lost paper profits of two million dollars today. Or I will, as soon as the word gets out. I must say, Deputy ... Ingersoll?” Ralph nodded. “I must say that the sheriff’s department is remarkably discreet. The word of Dost’s death has yet to leak, out.”

  “How do you know that?” Ralph asked.

  “Because although the phones seem to be out, the cable TV is fine, and I’ve been watching the ticker on the Financial News Network. Network stock is still going up, and all of Dost’s other companies—NorAmBake, Dost Tool Company, all the rest—are doing just about as expected. If the word got out, they’d all be dropping drastically.”

  “But what if somebody knew right now Dost was dead? This would be a great time to sell, wouldn’t it? You could make a couple of million in profits. When the stock bottomed out, you could buy it back and have a much bigger block of stock than you had before without having to dip into your pocket for a penny in cash, except for broker’s fees.”

  “That’s illegal, Cobb,” Haskell had had enough of the game, but us kids weren’t going to let him go.

  “Murder, too,” I said. “We’re obviously theorizing about a sick individual here. Somebody, say, bitter over having twice been passed over for the presidency of the Network, facing the fact that if somebody like Dost bought the company, the parade would really have passed him by.”

  Haskell’s face began to get red. “By God, I don’t like this, Cobb.”

  I was amiable. “You don’t have to like it, just listen to it. Yes, I am talking about you, Haskell. No Dost, no merger. And a chance to accumulate enough devalued Network stock to force a change at the top.

  “You weren’t trying to call Falzet earlier, were you? You were trying to call your broker and tell him to start selling.”

  I’d caught him with that one in the middle of a puff. It can’t be good for you to gasp down half a cigar in one breath, and Haskell Freed’s face went from bright red to sea-green in a second. He coughed for about five minutes. Ralph got him a drink of water, which he downed eagerly. Half of it wound up on the burgundy sweater that went so beautifully with his white hair.

  Haskell sank back to his chair and caught his breath.

  “You okay now?” I asked.

  He was wet, and his eyes were teary, but he drew himself up and became formidable. “You’ve accused me of murder, Cobb. I don’t like it. And I won’t forget it.”

  “Your broker just better have the right answers to some questions when we can finally get word out of here, that’s all.”

  “I can’t believe this. Do you really think that I killed Dost?”

  I was stern. “Do you want the truth?”

  “Of course I want the truth.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  If Ralph had had a cigar, he would have been choking on it. “You don’t?”

  “Haskell’s no fool. If he were going to set this up, he wouldn’t depend on being able to get a message out to his broker. Suppose something roused the house, and his moves were being watched, the way they are now? He wouldn’t be able to count on the word not getting out for enough time for him to take his profits without being too obvious about it. He wouldn’t have lied about whom he’d tried to call, and he wouldn’t have nearly choked to death when we confronted him with the lie. He also wouldn’t have admitted trying to make a call in the first place.”

  I turned to Haskell. “What you would have done was to have sold your stock already, before you even came up here. You’d give up a few dollars for the security. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about how quickly word of Dost’s death got out. The sooner the prices dropped, the sooner you could buy back in. You could do that openly. Hell, as far as the Network would be concerned, you’d be a hero. It would help you in your power grab.”

  Haskell reached to his breast pocket for a handkerchief to wipe his brow, but we were being informal today. Haskell’s sweater had no breast pocket, and therefore, no handkerchief. Ralph handed him a cocktail napkin.

  Haskell took it without a word and blotted himself. All the while, he gave me a stare that Fred Norman would have been delighted to add to his repertoire.

  “Why did you do this, Cobb?” he asked. “I’ve just passed the worst twenty minutes of my life. Why? Did I do something to y
ou?”

  “You lied to me. This morning at breakfast. We’re rubbing elbows with a killer, and all you can think of is trying to line your pockets. And lie about it.”

  “I just wanted to avoid ... You asked if the phone was working. I was just trying to help without ...”

  “I know what you were trying to do, and I know what you were trying to avoid. Listen, Haskell. Trying to call your broker was tricky. Lying about it was tricky. And the one and only thing we can say about the person who killed Dost is what a tricky son of a bitch he is. Now. You’re not going to be tricky to Deputy Ingersoll and me anymore, are you?”

  “No,” Freed said. He narrowed his eyes at me. “No, I’m not. Are you done with me, now?”

  “Unless we think of something else.”

  Freed stood up. “Fine,” he said. “We’ll talk more about this when we get back to the city, Cobb.” He looked at me, probably to see if I was going to tremble. When I didn’t, he left.

  Bats Blefary was next. He came in, took a sniff, and started trying to wave smoke away. He sat in the leather chair without waiting to be asked.

  “Whew. Haskell and his cigars. I have to put up with them at the office, of course, but I thought he was going to gas me and Spot dead in the car on the way up here. What can I tell you? I’m not sure how I can be of help, but fire away.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Here’s one. Why the hell are you so jaunty, Bats?”

  He threw one skinny leg over the arm of his chair. “Look. A paid vacation in the mountains. That was good enough before, when there was work, to do—now, I’ll just let the money pile up back home, and wait here until spring.”

  Ralph was taking a dislike to the man. “Doesn’t Mr. Dost’s death bother you?”

  Bats put his leg down on the floor and looked surprised at himself. “Yes. Of course it bothers me. I mean, I’m sorry for anybody who dies hurting. But you know, it’s easy to forget about him as a person. For weeks he’s been this secret savior of the Network. The way we talked about him in planning sessions made him seem like somebody from another planet—‘Dost’ can give us this, ‘Dost’ will want that, the ‘Dost people’ will insist on something else. Am I making any sense?”