“That stuff in your bathroom. You know what I mean. You shot any of it?”
“Lieutenant! You said—”
“I said I wouldn’t bust ya for possession. And I’m not. I took the evidence yesterday, without a warrant. But I had what I took analyzed by the narcotics lab. Mr. Newcastle… that little vial of powder, supposed to be speedball, had enough digitalis in it to stop the heart of a horse.”
Mickey staggered backward. “No!”
“Where’d you get it, Mr. Newcastle?”
Mickey turned and threw himself on his couch. He shook his head. “How do I know where I got it? You get it from guys. Who are they? I don’t have any regular supplier.”
“Whoever supplied you this came close to killing you, Mr. Newcastle. Now, either someplace downtown there’s a guy you don’t know who’s sellin’ deadly poison speedball, or you got a special source of this who’s got some reason for wantin’ you dead. My idea is, it’s got somethin’ to do with the murder of Regina Savona. You got any idea it might have somethin’ to do with that?”
“You mean to say somebody is trying to murder me?” asked Mickey.
Columbo turned down the comers of his mouth. “How you figure? Guys cut dope with all kinds of stuff— sugar, soda, flour, plaster, even rat poison. But why would a dealer cut speedball with digitalis? It doesn’t save him any money, and it’s gonna kill his buyer, for sure. Hmm?”
Mickey Newcastle covered his face with his hands. “What will you do for me, Lieutenant?” he asked. “What ya got in mind?”
“Well, right now— If you’d gotten here ten minutes later, I’d have shot some of that stuff. I need it. I need it bad. Right now. I need one clean shot, Lieutenant. Then I can tell you things. I know things I can tell you, things you want to know. But why should I? I’m on the verge of going into convulsions.”
Columbo sighed and shook his head. “No matter what you’re goin’ into, Mr. Newcastle, I can’t supply you with a fix. I haven’t got the stuff, and if I did, I couldn’t give it to you.”
Mickey stared at Columbo and smiled sadly. “Do you remember the old Wolfman movies, Lieutenant? Lawrence Talbot was the werewolf, bitten by a werewolf and turned into one.”
“Yeah, I remember,” said Columbo.
Mickey went on, his breath shortening. “Larry Talbot would beg the doctor—‘But doctor, you don’t understand. When the moon is full, I turn into a wo//'!’ And of course the doctor never understood and would just pat him on the shoulder and say, ‘Now, now, Mr. Talbot.’ Nobody understood but the old gypsy woman, played by Maria Ouspenskaya. She understood.”
“Mr. Newcastle—”
“Nobody who hasn’t been to the gates of hell like I have can understand it. In a few hours, I’ll turn into an animal. Maybe you can’t give me a fix, just one safe fix. But you can put me in a detox program. If you just lock me up, in hours I’ll be climbing the walls! You’ve got no idea what it’s like to go cold turkey.”
Two paramedics and two police officers had stood just inside the door and heard all this.
“One of you guys get on the radio and call Lieutenant Billy Low. Tell him I need him here, fast!”
5
“Columbo, you’ve gotta be out of your mind! I can’t give this guy a fix!”
“Billy— Just one. Just one time, so he doesn’t go into withdrawal before I get some answers out of him.” Lieutenant Billy Low stood outside Mickey Newcastle’s flat, staring through the door at the woebegone man sitting on the tattered couch. “The best I can do is get him on a methadone maintenance program.”
“Which’ll take time,” Columbo protested. “By the time we get him to a doc and get that started, he’ll be writhing around thinkin’ things are crawling on him.”
Billy Low shook his head emphatically. “You can’t ask me to take something out of the evidence lockers and let him shoot it. Be reasonable, Columbo.”
“Yeah. Well… No harm in asking, was there? Look. I’m gonna arrest him on a serious charge. I want him to cooperate, and I think he will, providin’ we promise him he won’t just be locked up and left to go cold turkey. Can you promise he’ll be taken care of? I mean, put in detox.”
Low nodded. “I can do that.”
“Then let’s talk to him.”
Columbo led Billy Low into the flat. Mickey stood. “Mr. Newcastle, this is Lieutenant Billy Low of the narcotics squad. I asked him to come talk to you.” Wide-eyed and alarmed, Mickey shook hands with Billy Low.
“Mr. Newcastle,” said Columbo, “I’m gonna have one of the officers place you under arrest. The charge will be interfering in the investigation of the murder of Regina Savona. They’ll give you your rights and so on, so don’t say anything now. Right now, the point is, you’re goin’ to jail. Billy Low has promised me, and he’ll promise you, that you’ll go to a hospital ward and be treated for addiction, not just locked up.”
Tears flooded Mickey’s eyes. He began to tremble. Billy Low frowned hard. “I promise what Lieutenant Columbo said. We’ll put you in a detox program, so you won’t have to go cold turkey. Now— I want something from you. That stuff you’ve got is deadly poison. You have any more of it?”
Mickey nodded. “I’ll give it to you.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Where I got it, there’s no more. Somebody mixed it especially for me.”
“You mean somebody tried to kill you?” Billy Low asked.
Mickey’s voice broke. “Yes,” he whispered. “No doubt about it.”
6
Mickey went into the bathroom to get the vials of speedball—leaving the door open. He’d noticed that one vial was missing, and he’d suspected Columbo had taken it. Damned good thing he did, too.
Twenty vials. His stash. It would have taken care of him for more than a month—except that the stuff in nineteen of the twenty would have taken care of him permanently. Johnny had brought twenty. Just one vial was left from Mickey’s own supply. It was lucky that when Columbo grabbed one, he’d grabbed one of Johnny’s.
Mickey picked up the one that was his own and stuck it in his pants pocket. He gathered up a double handful of the rest and took them out to hand over to the narc. “There’s more,” he muttered and went back to get another double handful.
“I’ll make the necessary arrangements,” Billy Low said.
Mickey nodded. He spoke then to Columbo. “Before I… have to go, I have to go. You know what I mean? I don’t think I could get downtown without having an accident.”
“Uh… you wouldn’t have it in mind to harm yourself or somethin’, would you?”
Mickey managed a faint smile. “I don’t think you could cut your wrists, or your throat, with a Gillette Sensor razor. Anyhow… no way.”
“Okay, Mr. Newcastle. I trust ya. Don’t be too long.” Mickey closed the bathroom door this time. He took the vial from his pocket and quickly mixed it with water. He needed one final shot. He needed to be sharp when they interrogated him.
7
“He put one over on you, Columbo,” said Billy Low. They had returned to headquarters in Billy’s car. Mickey had come in with the uniformed officers. By the time they met again, Mickey was dreamy, floating on his fix. “He had to go to the bathroom, alright, but not to use the toilet.”
“It may be okay,” said Columbo. “By the time he needs another one, you’ll have him established in a detox program, methadone or whatever. I need to talk to the guy. He wouldn’t have been much good to me if he was shakin’ with D.T.’s.”
“Well— After you get his mug shots and fingerprints, you can have him delivered to the hospital.” Billy shook his head. “It’s disgusting how damned happy they get.”
“He’ll be coherent enough so I can talk to him by this evening, I figure,” said Columbo. “Anyway, I thank ya, Billy.”
Captain Sczciegel stopped Columbo in the hall between the narcotics squad room and homicide. “Hey, Columbo. Martha’s looking for you.”
“That wom
an can find out anything,” said Columbo. “Gonna have to promote her.”
“Right. Look, uh— Explain to me this charge you’ve placed against Mickey Newcastle.”
“Preliminary charge,” Columbo corrected. “I’m prob’ly gonna charge him with the murder of Regina.”
“You can make that stick?'’
“Good enough to make him talk.”
“Did he really do it?” Sczciegel asked skeptically. “He had somethin’ to do with it.”
“I’d like to be there when you question him.”
“You got it.”
“Columbo— Where’s your Beretta?”
“I didn’t bring it this morning. I don’t figure I should carry it around till I have a chance to get some bullets and get out to the range and shoot it a few times.”
“Is it wrapped in a bath towel and stuck on the hat shelf in your hall closet?”
“Right. That’s where it is, temporarily.”
“Columbo… Dammit!”
8
As Captain Sczciegel had said, Martha was waiting to see him. She pulled a chair to his desk and sat watching him, bemused, as he scanned a stack of memoranda and bulletins and casually tossed them one by one into the trash. She was not impatient. She knew Columbo would need no more than half a minute to dispose of departmental paperwork.
“Poop from the group,” he said as he glanced at papers and tossed them.
“I’ve got poop from the FBI, from Bob Brady,” she said.
Columbo scooped up half a dozen more sheets and tossed them without scanning them. “What’s Brady got for us?”
“The boys from Brazil.”
“Already?”
“Columbo, there’s something you and I have gotta understand. In Rio they never heard of you or me, or of the Los Angeles Police Department either—and what’s more couldn’t give a damn. But about Regina— About that they give a damn. People are stumbling all over themselves to help us find out who killed her.”
“I never been so important,” said Columbo.
“Brady called. You were out trying to save Newcastle. So he sent this over by messenger.” She handed Columbo a memorandum from Brady. “A list of guys who flew into Rio from the States on February 18, 1992. Recognize the names? Get the drift?”
Columbo ran his finger down the memorandum, reading the names. Each was followed by a sentence or two identifying the subject, but Columbo didn’t need the explanations; he knew most of the names.
Of the notorious Five Families of New York, four of their chiefs had entered Brazil on February 18, 1992. “Capidi tutti capi,” Columbo muttered. “New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, L.A… . And look at this: even Albanese from Palermo.”
“Bigger than the Appalachin meet,” said Martha. “And our old man, supposed to be Vittorio Savona, was there. It’s no coincidence, Martha. The old man was at the meet. I been sayin’ he was somebody. Well, he was.”
“Keep reading, Columbo. You haven’t come to the most important name.”
“Who could be more important than—? Uh-oh! Giovanni Visconti!”
“Johnny,” said Martha.
Seventeen
1
As promised, Mickey Newcastle was in a hospital, not in jail. For all the difference it made. He might as well have been in jail. The four-bed ward had barred windows and a barred door. What was worse, on his right ankle he wore a steel shackle attached to a chain that was bolted to the bed frame. He wore a rough white hospital gown stenciled with the word PRISONER. It was open in back, and he could not possibly have walked out wearing it.
He was one of four men chained to their beds in that ward. One was recovering from a gunshot wound. The others were like him: jailed addicts going through detoxification and in varying stages of discomfort. He watched them closely. They were going through what he would be going through shortly.
“Better than cold turkey,” a big black man said to him.
“Anything’s better than that,” said Mickey.
He was not surprised when Lieutenant Columbo appeared at the barred door and the attendants admitted him to the ward. A taller man accompanied the lieutenant, a man distinguished by a head as bald as a cue ball, as the Americans liked to express it.
Two ward attendants came in. Unceremoniously, they wheeled the other men’s beds to the front wall and Mickey’s bed to the window. Then they surrounded the bed with screens and pulled in two chairs.
“Mr. Newcastle, I’d like you to meet Captain Sczciegel,” said Columbo as he sat down. “He’s my boss.”
Mickey nodded. It didn’t seem appropriate to say he was glad to meet the captain.
“How’re they treatin’ ya?” Columbo asked.
“Alright. I had that fix you know about. When I start coming down, that’s when we’ll see how they’ll treat me.
“You’ve been told your rights, haven’t you? Okay. Then you know you don’t have to talk to us. You have a right to a lawyer, too—at public expense if you can’t afford one. But if you’re willing to talk, then I’d like to run this little recorder here and make a record of what you say.”
Mickey shrugged. “It’s alright with me.”
“Okay. But before you consent, let me tel! you one more thing: I’m chargin’ you with murder.”
2
For a long moment Mickey Newcastle covered his face with both hands.
“I think you killed Regina,” Columbo went on. “I don’t think you did it all by yourself. I think somebody else was in on it. In fact, I suspect you were just a helper. I also got a pretty good idea who you were helping.” Mickey shook his head. “Why me?” he asked hoarsely. “What makes you think I did it?”
“To start with, you’re an addict. You’ve got a very expensive habit. You’ll do just about anything to get the money to support your habit. Right?”
“Exactly what do you have in mind?” Mickey asked apprehensively.
“You stole from Regina,” said Columbo. “She put a safe in her bedroom because you’d been stealin’ money. You told me she reduced what she was payin’ you. That was because she was taking back what you’d stolen from her.”
“Stealing is one thing. Murder is quite another.”
“Right. That’s certainly true,” said Columbo. “And lying isn’t the same thing as murder, either; but the lie you told me and persisted in made me suspicious of you from the beginning.”
“What lie?”
“About the man in the red nylon jacket.”
“Why is that a lie?”
“For two reasons. You told me you had to go ’way down the balcony to get a view of the diving board. And that’s right; you couldn’t have seen a man bang into the diving board just by looking out your window. What you also would have had to do was walk more than halfway to the end of that balcony—which you didn’t do.”
“What makes you believe I didn’t?”
“Because to get far enough out on the balcony to see the diving board, you’d have had to go past the door to the little crosshall that makes it possible for people in the front guest rooms to get out on the balcony. And you didn’t. There was an eyewitness to the murder standing at that door, staring.”
“Bob… or Christie?”
Columbo smiled faintly and nodded. “Christie. She’s terribly nearsighted without her contact lenses, but she’d have seen you go by. She’s so nearsighted that she couldn’t identify you down by the pool. But she’s not so nearsighted she couldn’t have seen a red jacket—and she didn’t see any red jacket.”
“It’s her word against mine.” Mickey didn’t sound very confident.
“True.”
“I don’t think you’ve got much of a case against me, Lieutenant, now that I think of it.”
“Maybe. But there is one more thing I need to ask you.”
“What?”
“Who’s been tryin’ to kill you?”
3
Mickey shuddered.
Capta
in Sczciegel, who had kept silent and solemnly listened all this time, spoke now. “You’d better answer that one, Newcastle.”
“I got a pretty firm idea who,” said Columbo. “But suppose you tell me.”
Mickey Newcastle closed his eyes and seemed to be exerting great effort to control himself and stop shuddering. He shook his head convulsively. Then he drew a deep breath and muttered, “I don’t know.”
“C’mon, Mr. Newcastle. Of course you know. Okay, let’s come at it another way. Why would anybody want to kill a nice fellow like you? Why would somebody serve you a cocktail of speedball and digitalis?”
“Why do you think?” Mickey asked weakly.
Columbo turned up the palms of his hands, lowered his chin, and looked up at Mickey from under his eyebrows. He smiled. “The only reason I can think of is, to shut you up. And what is it you could talk about that would be so harmful to somebody that he’d kill you to prevent your tellin’? Pretty simple, I think. It took two people to drown Regina, because she was a strong swimmer. You and somebody else. That somebody else tried to kill you. And he’ll try again if you get outta here.”
“Lieutenant Columbo’s the best friend you’ve got, Newcastle,” said Captain Sczciegel. “You’re alive because of him. I wouldn’t forget that if I were you,”
“We’ve got enough on Johnny to pick him up,” Columbo said. “You think he’s gonna protect you?”
“What you’re asking me to do is confess to murder,” Mickey whispered tearfully.
“Well… only if you did it,” said Columbo.
Mickey pressed fingers to his eyes and squeezed out tears. “It was Johnny,” he sobbed, “And me. The two of us.”
“Why did Johnny want Regina dead?”
“He didn’t, it was the old man that wanted her killed, and I don’t know why.”
“Which raises the big question again,” said Columbo. “Who was the old man?”
“If I knew. I’d know where to find him. He promised Johnny and me a million dollars to kill her. Then he cut out and disappeared, and we didn’t get our money. My share was to be $250,000. I had plans. I was going to check into a private detox clinic, then rebuild something of my career.”
Columbo: The Hoffa Connection Page 19
