Murder in the 11th House

by Mitchell Scott Lewis

“Are you kidding?” asked Sarah. “You’ve never played one of these?”

  “Good God, no.”

  “You take a coin and scratch off these boxes, like this, and try to match the numbers to the winning numbers.”

  “On this one,” she picked up another, “you try to get three sevens in a row, like tick-tac-toe.”

  “Marvelous. Let’s play.”

  The three sat in a circle around the coffee table and each took a pile of tickets.

  “They really are messy, aren’t they?” Lowell began to make little piles of scratch-off stuff. “Put the shavings on this plate.”

  He pushed a small candy dish into the middle of his desk.

  For almost half an hour they scratched off the tickets. Some cost one dollar, some two, five, ten, and even twenty dollars. If someone had a winner they announced it and put it in a separate pile. When they were done Lowell picked up the winners and counted.

  “Thirty-eight dollars,” he announced, “from two hundred dollars worth of tickets. Is that common?” he asked Sarah.

  “I don’t know, but it’s not the kind of game real gamblers like to play.”

  Lowell turned to the computer and went to the New York State Lottery website. He hit scratch-offs and then odds of winning.

  “Well, this can’t be right,” he said, after scrolling through the website.

  “What is it?” asked Melinda.

  “These odds, they can’t be right. How could they get away with this?”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Well, for example. The odds against winning fifty dollars on a two-dollar ticket are 5,040 to one. How can that be?”

  He scrolled down a bit more.

  “Here’s one where the odds against winning one hundred dollars are 12,600 to one. And a five-hundred-dollar winner on this five-dollar Win for Life is 50,000 to one. If it was an even-money bet it would pay two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Instead it pays five hundred. My God, with odds like that, you can’t even call this gambling.”

  “What would you call it?” asked his daughter.

  “Theft.”

  Chapter Five

  Lowell and Melinda left his office together and said their goodbyes on the corner.

  Melinda pulled back the sleeve of her coat. “Good God, it’s almost noon. I have to scoot, Dad. Other cases and clients.”

  Lowell watched as his daughter stuck her hand in the air hoping for an empty cab, often a rare breed in midtown midday. “I’m going to begin my investigation. If you’re free we can catch up tonight.”

  She snagged a cab quickly and got in. “I can meet you at the townhouse at seven.” It sped away before he could respond.

  As he watched the yellow car carrying his daughter recede downtown he felt a mixture of pride and loss.

  Andy was waiting around the corner by the limousine. At six-feet-three, he was an imposing figure, but it was his attention to detail and dry sense of humor that had really been just as important. With a fourth-degree black belt in aikido, Lowell was quite capable of taking care of himself, but it was good to have back-up, and one so pleasant.

  Andy held the door as Lowell got in the back.

  The first stop was the precinct on East Nineteenth St. His work had led him to this building many times before, and he was familiar with several of the officers, including the sergeant on duty. Lowell always smiled at the looser feeling of a real precinct house, versus the tense and shadowy versions depicted on most TV shows. Just as the public has been trained by CSI to think that lab work was instantaneous, most people never got to see the cordial nature of most precinct desks.

  “Good afternoon, Sergeant Miller.”

  “Mr. Lowell, how are you?” The sergeant looked up from the Daily News.

  “Quite well.”

  “Hey, I wanted to thank you for the work you did for my kid last year. After all the psychologists and social workers failed, I don’t know how you did it, but he’s been doing much better in school and his attitude is remarkable.”

  “Simply a matter of identifying what is best for the individual,” replied Lowell. “Your son’s chart showed that he is a night owl, always will be. If you let him make his own hours he will get his work done. Never push a round peg into a square hole.”

  “Right, right. Thank you again.”

  “Sergeant, who’s in charge of the Winston case?”

  “That would be Lieutenant Roland. You working on that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, good luck.”

  ***

  The lieutenant was sitting at his desk when Lowell entered. There were piles of papers, files, and assorted knick-knacks covering the entire top. On the wall behind his desk were framed pictures of Ronald Reagan and George H. Bush. He looked up as Lowell approached.

  “Oh, swell, if it isn’t the last of the red-hot liberals. This’ll just make my day.”

  “Hello, lieutenant. How have you been?”

  “Do you really care?” asked the policeman. “My feet hurt, my daughter’s dating a transvestite, I’m eight months behind in my case load, I think my wife’s having an affair, I owe the I.R.S. eleven grand and my prostate’s the size of a cantaloupe. Glad you asked?”

  Lowell sat in the wood guest’s chair and looked up at the pictures. “No George W.?”

  “I’m a Republican, not an imbecile. To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”

  “I’m working on the Winston case.”

  “Winston? Why?”

  He reached over, picked up a file from the top of one of the stacks and opened it. “Judge Farrah Winston, killed, blah, blah, blah. Oh, here it is, attorney Melinda Lowell?” He raised his eyebrows.

  Lowell smiled. “My daughter.”

  Roland shook his head. “Life isn’t fair.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “So what do you want?”

  “First of all, I want access to the victim’s apartment. I’m sure your people have been there already, so I won’t be interfering with your investigation.”

  “I suppose that can be arranged. Anything else?”

  “I would appreciate it if you could keep me in the loop and let me know any new information that comes across your desk.”

  Roland shook his head and laughed. “I’ll do all your work and you’ll take the credit, is that how it is?”

  “Lieutenant, all I’m interested in is helping my daughter, and by proxy, her client. You can have all the credit. I would be happy to keep my name out of this whole mess. I abhor publicity.”

  Roland held up his hand. “Where have I heard that before? All right, I guess I have no choice, anyway. You are a licensed PI working for a reputable defense lawyer. You’re by law entitled to see the evidence. But I’m afraid you and your daughter are going to be disappointed.”

  “Oh?”

  “Her client did it all right, and I don’t think the D.A. will have a hard time proving it.”

  “What do you have so far?”

  “You know that the judge was killed with a car bomb in the parking garage of the courthouse?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen the preliminary report. The security cameras in the garage showed nothing unusual?”

  “Nobody came in or went out all day that couldn’t be easily accounted for. And there was nobody else in the garage when she got in her car except her.”

  “That only leaves two possibilities,” said Lowell. “That someone in the building planted it…”

  “Or?”

  “Or that the bomb was already in place when she came to work in the morning.”

  “That’s what we think.”

  “So why Johnny Colbert?”

  Lowell had crossed paths with the lieutenant on several
celebrated cases, most of which had ended with the policeman a frustrating few steps behind his as he solved it. Now he saw that Lieutenant Roland was enjoying himself very much indeed.

  The policeman began counting on his fingers. “She had motive: the judge had put her in jail on a contempt charge. She has the temperament. You’ve met her, right? I’ve felt safer in lockup with a dozen gang-bangers than I did sitting next to her.”

  Lowell nodded unconsciously.

  “And she had opportunity.”

  “What opportunity are you talking about?”

  The lieutenant smiled. “I see you haven’t done your homework yet.”

  Lowell frowned.

  “Didn’t you know,” continued the cop, “that Johnny Colbert is in the Army Reserves? Or that her specialty happens to be demolition?”

  “No, I was not privy to that information. Thank you for that elucidation.”

  “Privy to that… elucidation,” said Roland. “Why don’t you talk like normal people?”

  “My father was from London.”

  “So why don’t you talk that way all the time?”

  “My mother was from Brooklyn.”

  The lieutenant stood up and walked to the coffee machine. “Want some?” he asked, as he poured himself a cup.

  “No thanks, never after noon.”

  “Not a bad rule. I should try that; I think it’s keeping me up at night.” Roland took a sip and grimaced. “You’re not missing much anyway.”

  Roland came back and sat on the edge of his desk. “I’ve got nineteen unsolved murders in my open files. This isn’t one of them. According to her squad leader, your sweet little Joanna Colbert is, if you’ll excuse the expression, dynamite with explosives. She has the highest rating the army gives. I don’t think she would have had any trouble rigging a bomb with a timer or remote control. And, she recently spent two weeks in training where she had access to explosives of various sorts. We’re waiting for her C.O. to complete an inventory to see if anything is missing. The D.A. will have a search warrant for her place this afternoon. We’ll find what we need. ”

  “Are you looking into any other possible suspects?”

  “No. The facts all point toward the defendant and we’re satisfied that we have the right person.”

  Lowell sat silently.

  “Something you don’t like about this?”

  “There’s a lot I don’t like about it. It’s too neat. Too easy.”

  “Sometimes it works out that way. Not everything is complicated.”

  “Yes, it is,” replied the astrologer, “when human beings are involved.”

  Roland took that in. “What doesn’t work for you?”

  “For one thing, as you said, nobody was in the garage with the judge. And a timing device would be very risky. How could my client be sure the victim would go to her car exactly at that time? The judge would likely leave at slightly different times every day, even if she was a creature of habit, which my investigation will tell us.”

  “Maybe your client just got lucky,” said Roland. “She set it to go off at a time when the judge would most likely leave.”

  “It seems awfully risky to me. No, I don’t think a timing device was used. It had to be a remote control. Which means the bomber had to be nearby at the time.”

  “So, she was across the street watching and set it off by hand. She has the skills to do it, and no alibi.”

  “Hmm, I suppose it’s possible. Aren’t there surveillance cameras around the courthouse?”

  “A few, but not as many as we’d like. We’re looking through the tapes now, but we’d have to be awfully lucky to catch her on camera.”

  “What did the lab guys come up with?”

  “They’re still working on it. So far they found pieces of the device rigged to the seat. They’re still putting it together. It’ll take another few days before they can tell us positively exactly how it was detonated. It was a lot of explosives though.”

  “Plastic explosives of some sort?”

  Roland nodded. “They’re trying to track the manufacturer. They think it’s made by a French company that deals with U.S. government contracts. Probably something that your client could have come in contact with in the reserves.” Roland remained seated. “She had motive, temperament, and opportunity,” he said. “And she doesn’t have a verifiable alibi. She did it, all right.”

  “We’ll see,” said Lowell. “We’ll see.”

  Chapter Six

  Andy was waiting when Lowell left the precinct.

  “Where to next, boss?”

  “It’s past two already. This day is slipping by. The victim’s home is the closest on my list.”

  The judge’s apartment was on East Forty-eighth Street, a sixth-floor, two-bedroom condo. Lowell looked up at the wall of glass as he got out of the car. The building was brand-new, part of the great apartment building mania that had taken place all over New York City. Hundred-year-old but perfectly solid three- and four-story buildings with vibrant small businesses occupying the ground floors had been knocked down for glass and chrome monstrosities, with interchangeable drug chains swallowing up the retail spaces. How much chrome and aspirin did one city need, Lowell thought.

  In fact, the lobby was still being completed, and workmen scurried past him in a comical ballet of near-catastrophes reminiscent of the silent screen. One swung a bucket of white paint barely an inch from Lowell’s head as he approached the concierge’s desk. Behind it stood a man in his forties dressed in a blue suit with the building’s logo stenciled on his lapel.

  Lowell presented his card.

  The man looked at it for a moment. “Yes, Mr. Lowell, a Lieutenant Roland called. You are expected. Please take either of the first two elevators to the sixth floor, and someone will meet you as you get off.”

  The elevator was mirrored on all sides, including the ceiling. It was empty and the ride took less than twenty seconds. As he got off his ears popped uncomfortably.

  What’s the damn hurry? he thought.

  “Mr. Lowell?” asked a short, dark-haired man of indeterminate age and ethnic background. He, too, was dressed in the company’s standard blue suit and logo.

  Lowell nodded.

  “The apartment is down this way.”

  He headed down the hall and turned right, Lowell at his heels. At the second door he stopped, put a key in the lock, and opened the door.

  “I was told to give you free rein, so just lock up and bring the keys back to the front desk when you’re done.”

  He handed Lowell the keys and left.

  Lowell took out the astrological birth chart of Judge Farrah Winston and looked around her apartment to see if things jelled. It was a habit he had gotten into years before. If something was very amiss and didn’t concur with the chart, he would notice immediately. But that wasn’t the case here. Lowell looked at the natal chart. She was a Virgo with the Moon and Venus also in that most concise and detail-oriented sign, a difficult placement for the planets of love. She was probably quite critical of her suitors and could be very demanding. But the apartment also showed her conscientious nature and attention to specifics common with those planetary placements.

  She was obviously a painstakingly meticulous woman. Everything was in its place. The carpet was off-white, a challenging choice for a neat-freak. The furniture was expensive, but not pretentious in any way. The living room had an airy feel about it. Nothing was too cluttered.

  One of the bedrooms had been converted into an office. There was a desk next to a window that caught a slight view of the East River. Lowell smiled to himself at the fact that the East River wasn’t really a river at all. It was a several-mile-long strait connecting Upper New York Bay to the Long Island Sound. The tides made the water move like a river. But New Yor
kers’ minds are hard to change once they are locked in on something. So a river it is.

  Uranus was very active in Judge Winston’s chart at the time of her death, which one would expect with such a sudden and violent act. That planet also holds domain over all things electronic, and he knew where he would find some of the answers he sought. He turned on the computer but couldn’t get past the password.

  Damn, he thought, why didn’t I bring Mort?

  The bedroom told him little. There was a king-sized bed, a matching dresser and night table, several lamps, and a large chair, almost big enough to be considered a day bed, all brand-new. Her closets were well organized and her clothes, though expensive, as the designer labels attested, were neither flamboyant nor showy. Most of her possessions spoke of a conservative individual who took pride in her appearance.

  He did the usual movie-detective search, looking behind paintings, pulling out drawers, and searching for the hidden safe-deposit key. He wondered if anyone ever really found a clue that way, or if it was just an easy plot device for Hollywood writers.

  Still, despite all its sense of normalcy, there was something amiss in that apartment. It took a few moments to put his finger on it. It wasn’t what he saw that bothered him so much as what he didn’t see. Everything was in its place, but where was anything personal? There were no family pictures or bundles of old letters. It was almost as if this were just a stop-off, a pied-à-terre. If the judge had planned on staying in this building, wouldn’t she have brought her most precious possessions?

  ***

  Lowell left the keys with the concierge and went out past the workers as they attempted to finish the lobby.

  He walked out of the building. It was a bright sunny afternoon with just a slight chill. He looked at his watch. It was almost four and too late to get much more done for the case. Andy stood next to the limo, ever patient. He opened the back door.

  “How’d it go, boss?”

  “Okay, I guess. There really wasn’t much there.”

  “What’s the next stop?”

  “Andy, I’d like to walk a few blocks. I’ll be okay. Just stay near.”

  Lowell had always enjoyed walking through the city, and he was now forced to limit them, and always to pre-sunrise sojourns.