After a glance at my notes, I outlined the developments of the last two days. But, because Richter was there, I didn’t mention the possibility that Frederick Tharp might be Ryan’s bastard son.
“Well,” Richter said, exhaling quietly as he leaned back in his chair, “you’ve been busy, Lieutenant.” His voice registered careful disapproval. His bureaucrat’s stare was frosty. He was wondering how much more we’d discovered and weren’t revealing.
“What about you?” I asked the FBI man. “What’ve you found out?” I tried to make the question blandly friendly.
“We’ve been working closely with Ferguson on the blackmail angle—the payment. Or rather the request for payment.”
“Has there been a request?” I asked.
“No,” Richter answered. “No specific instructions for payment. But just about two hours ago there was a phone call. Tharp—if it was Tharp—said to get the money ready in small bills and prepare to make the drop tomorrow, Tuesday.”
“Who’d Tharp talk to?” I asked.
“He talked to Ferguson. Ferguson instructed his staff, finally, to put all anonymous calls through to him, no questions asked. And, of course, we had a man with him.”
“Did you get a recording of Tharp’s voice?” Friedman asked.
“Naturally,” Richter sniffed.
“Well,” Friedman said cheerfully, “maybe, between the two of us, we’ll catch him before he can screw up the dedication. It sounds like it could all come down tomorrow. That’s probably why he stole the car.”
“That’s the way I figure it,” Dwyer said, nodding genial approval. Hands flat on the table, rings sparkling, he smiled at each of us in turn. “It looks like we’re making progress, gentlemen. Good progress. The senator should be pleased. Very pleased.”
None of us returned the smile.
Twenty-two
“I REALLY THINK,” ANN said, “that Billy could sleep past noon if I’d let him. And Dan, too, for that matter.”
“As I remember, that’s what summer vacations are for.”
“Is that what you did?”
“Sure,” I answered. “Didn’t you?”
“You know,” she said, “I honestly can’t remember. I have a feeling that I did, but that I’ve forgotten. Which is what makes a generation gap, when you think of it. More coffee?”
“No, thanks. I had a cup while you were getting dressed.”
She didn’t reply, but instead got up from the table and stepped to the stove. She was wearing jeans and a checked gingham blouse, her favorite around-the-house outfit. Her tawny hair was pulled back in a ponytail and fell midway to her waist. As I’d done so often, I moved my eyes over her body, lingering on the particular tilt of her head, the small, squared-off shoulders, the subtle swelling of her breasts, the flare of her hips and buttocks. More than with any other mature woman I’d known, her body invited my touch. With Ann, as with no other woman, a casual touch, or a kiss, or the actual act of love were all of the same quality, differing only in the urgency of desire. And for her it was the same. We’d never spoken about it in so many words. We’d never declared to each other, in so many words, that we were in love.
Yet the quality of the attraction we felt for each other had remained a constant, unchanged from the moment we’d first touched each other until now, this moment, when I was moved to get up and go to her and put both arms around her and draw her body intimately close to mine. If I should do it, she would respond. She would respond urgently, but gravely. Because, for Ann, the ceremony of love, before, during and after, was a serious celebration. She could sometimes be playfully bawdy, and sometimes she could tease me with sly, secret laughter. But her last word, and her final caress, were always serious. Always serious, and always—
In the hallway, the phone rang. As I moved quickly to pick up the receiver on the second ring, mindful of the sleeping boys, I checked the time. It was 8:15 A.M.
“Frank?” It was Friedman.
“Yes. What?” As I said it, I turned to look back into the kitchen. Ann was at the table, looking at me over the rim of her coffee cup.
“Juanita Tharp’s dead.”
“Jesus. How’d it happen?”
“I think someone broke into her room and killed her.”
“Where are you?”
“At the Brentwood sanitarium.”
“Any suspects? Any leads?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “I’m not sure.” Meaning that he couldn’t talk.
“You want me to come out there?”
“It’d be a good idea. Nothing’s been moved.”
“All right. It should take me about half an hour. Maybe a little longer in the rush hour.”
Except for Friedman and Bruce Taylor from the coroner’s office, the small room was deserted. Twisted in an agony of violent death, the body lay on the bed. She was stretched on her back; her eyes stared at a point just beyond my left shoulder. In death her face was placid, no longer tormented by the demons that had disfigured her in life. Finally at peace, she’d reclaimed some of her lost beauty.
She was dressed in a plain pin-striped institutional-style cotton nightgown. As I stepped closer, holding my breath against the excremental smell of death, I saw a purplish bruise on her left temple.
Friedman waited for me to turn away, then said, “So far it’s speculation, of course. But I think I have a pretty good idea how it happened.” He spoke in a soft voice, unconsciously respectful in the presence of death. I waited for him to go on.
He pointed to the sliding glass door that led to the small private patio. The door was open about two feet. The patio was surrounded by a six-foot brick wall, unbroken by a door or gate. A straight-backed chair had been placed against the wall.
“On the other side of the wall,” Friedman said, “there are three sacks of manure piled up high enough to let someone stand on them and get over the wall.”
“Manure?”
He shrugged. “At least it’s original.” He almost smiled. But as his glance strayed toward the bed, he self-consciously cleared his throat, saying, “As I said, it’s a pretty straightforward MO, at least on the face of it. There’re five acres of grounds surrounded by an eight-foot cyclone fence. There’s a big iron gate in front of the institution, as you know, for cars. That’s closed at eight P.M. and can’t be opened except with an electronic opener. There’re two other smaller gates, one at the east side of the property and one at the west side. Both these gates are secured by a padlock and chain. Whoever did it simply brought along a pair of bolt cutters and cut through the chain.”
“Are they drive-through gates?”
“The front gate is drive-through. The other two are pedestrian gates. He came through the pedestrian gate on the east side.”
“Isn’t there an alarm system?”
Friedman shook his head. “No, not for the east and west gates. There’s a night watchman, but that’s all.”
“Where was he?”
“He was unconscious most of the time.” Friedman turned toward a small bureau, and for the first time I saw a policeman’s nightstick. It was encased in a plastic evidence bag. On the blunt end, I saw dried blood.
“Will he be all right?” I asked.
“He’s got a bad concussion. A skull fracture, too. But he’s conscious, and he’ll probably be all right. He’s at General.”
“So how do you think the time frame went?”
“Putting it all together, I’d say that the suspect went through the east gate sometime between one A.M. and two. Obviously he was familiar with the terrain, and he was also very well prepared. He had bolt cutters and some kind of a pry bar, probably, for this—” He gestured to the sliding glass door. “Maybe he had a gun to disarm the watchman. It would make sense. He took a small path that led more or less directly from the east gate to the gardener’s shed, where he got the manure sacks. I figure that, really, he was looking for something like a stepladder. When he didn’t find it, he had to improvise.
>
“But—” He paused for breath. “But on the way, he came across the watchman. He used the watchman’s own baton to knock him out. Then he hauled three sacks of manure about fifty yards to the patio wall here—” He gestured. “Each sack weighs ninety pounds. So you can see that he was pretty determined. Then he came over the wall, and pried open the patio door. He hit her on the head, possibly with something like a blackjack. He used a pillow, probably, to smother her. Then he put the chair to the patio wall, and climbed over and split. Nobody saw or heard anything. Except, of course, the watchman. And he won’t be able to talk until this afternoon, if then.”
“What about a car? Did anyone see him drive up to the gate?”
“Trees pretty much surround the perimeter of the fence,” Friedman said, “so it would’ve been difficult to see a car in the dark, at least from inside the grounds, assuming anyone was looking at that hour. However, the area near the east gate is a popular lovers’ lane, it turns out.” As he spoke, he glanced at his watch. “Right about now, there should be a newscast out. Maybe someone saw something and will phone in. The victim was discovered at three A.M., when the watchman came to and started moaning. A night attendant found him and called the local police. They searched the grounds. When they saw the manure, they investigated and found the body. That was about four. As you know, we handle homicide investigations for Daly City. We were called about five A.M. Rafferty caught the call and gave it to Culligan, who was on the rotation. He called me at home. That, I regret to say, was about six. The local police conducted the preliminary investigation. Which is to say that they tried to preserve evidence as best they could. The reporters have already come and gone—one from the local paper, one from a San Francisco paper, and one from radio station KCBS, I think. And the radio reporter promised to broadcast a plea for information. So maybe we’ll get lucky, like I said.”
“How many men have we got here?”
“Culligan and Marsten and Holloway. They’re questioning the staff. The photographers and the lab crew have already come and gone. The local police are working the grounds and the roads that go around the fence on the outside. There’s quite a network out there, all dirt.” As he spoke, he gestured to the small patio. “Why don’t we go outside and let Bruce, here, get to work.” He nodded to Taylor, standing patiently beside a small washbasin. He would make a preliminary examination and then co-sign an authorization for removal of the body to the morgue.
As we stepped out into the fresh air, I asked, “Will she go to our morgue or San Mateo’s morgue for the post-mortem?”
“San Mateo agreed to a waiver. It took a little persuasion. The local D.A., I suspect, sniffs a chance for some preelection publicity. But I put in a call to Dwyer, and apparently he pulled the right strings.”
I was looking at the chair, placed beside the patio’s six-foot brick wall. The chair was covered with fingerprint powder.
“Okay to stand on this?” I asked.
Friedman nodded.
When I stood on the chair, the top of the wall struck high on my chest. Experimentally, I stood on tiptoe and pressed down on the wall with both hands. If I jumped, I could raise myself high enough to swing a leg over. But just barely. I looked down to the ground outside the wall. The three plastic bags full of manure were still there, also covered with white powder. The topmost bag showed the imprint where the murderer must have stood.
“If you look to your left,” Friedman said, “you’ll see the gardener’s shed. And just to the right is a path that the suspect probably took to get back to the gate.”
Standing on the chair, I looked carefully at the surrounding area. The sanitarium was situated high on the slope of a low range of coastal hills that ran south from San Francisco. In recent years, the California real-estate boom had destroyed much of the pine forest that had originally covered the hills. But here, the pines had been left undisturbed, probably because the sanitarium had been built in a “green belt” where forests were protected by the state.
I looked again at the hard-packed ground beneath the patio wall. The lab crew had marked off the area with white tape. Soil sweeps would have been taken after the ground was systematically photographed. But I doubted whether either the sweepings or the pictures would help much.
I jumped down from the chair and turned to face Friedman. “How do you figure it?” I asked.
“How I figure it doesn’t go much beyond the obvious. Whoever did it knew exactly what he was doing. He must’ve known exactly where to find her room by counting windows from the outside. Which is quite a trick, when you think about it. Also, he had to have been familiar with the inside of her room.”
“Why do you say that?”
He pointed to the chair. “If he didn’t know he could use that to get back the way he came, he would’ve trapped himself.” He motioned to the top of the wall. “You’re in good shape,” he said, “considering your age. I’ll bet you can’t pull yourself over that wall without using the chair.”
I nodded. “I know. I was just thinking the same thing. I was also thinking that this place doesn’t really have much security, considering that it’s a sanitarium. With a pair of bolt cutters and a little luck, anyone could get in.”
“Right. I asked the administrator about that. He said that, first of all, they don’t take violent patients. Basically, anyone who wants to go can go. There’s a fence, of course, but it wouldn’t stop anyone who wanted to leave. In fact, the barbed wire strands at the top are slanted outward, not inward. They figured the fence, and also the six-foot patio walls without gates, would be all the security they need.”
“Do they keep a visitors’ log?”
“Unhappily, no. They encourage visitors and want to make it as easy for them as possible. However, I’ve got Culligan and Marsten working on the staff. Maybe we’ll luck out. The administrator, his name is Penziner, is sure she didn’t have many visitors.”
“I don’t think we can say definitely that the murderer visited her.”
He shrugged. “In this business, only a fool says anything is definite. But I think it’s a lot better than fifty-fifty that the murderer is familiar with the layout, inside and out. Also—” He pointed to the chair and the wall. “Also, we know that he must be fairly tall and fairly athletic. Otherwise, he wouldn’t’ve made it back over the wall, even with the chair, let alone the manure sacks. Which, as it happens, aren’t piled as high as the chair seat. Incidentally, speaking of manure, whoever handled those bags had to’ve gotten manure on him. The pile of bags inside the shed was covered with manure, probably when one of the bags was cut open, or broke.”
“All he’d have to do, though, is get rid of whatever he wore.”
“You’re in kind of a negative mood this morning,” Friedman observed. “You know that?”
Ignoring the gibe, I said, “Any other theories?”
“Sure,” Friedman answered airily. “It’s obvious what happened. See, Donald Ryan has been secretly supporting Juanita all these years through Byron Tharp, courtesy of a Swiss bank. However, what with inflation and the high cost of maintaining two homes, and all, three thousand dollars a month got to be a problem. So Ryan hired a hit man to—”
The gaunt, stoop-shouldered figure of Culligan was stepping through the open doorway to the patio.
“Ah,” Friedman said, regarding Culligan with a kind of owlish leer. “I can tell by his euphoric expression that he’s made a major discovery.”
To myself, I smiled. Culligan’s long, gloomy, hollow-eyed face never changed. He always looked like an undertaker’s assistant. Culligan had a nagging wife, a peptic ulcer and a twenty-six-year-old son who grew organic marijuana somewhere in Colorado. Long ago, Culligan had given up on the whole human race—the cops as well as the robbers.
“I’ve gotten through most of the staff,” Culligan said morosely. “Or at least all the ones that have anything to do with visitors. And all of them seem to agree that during the past couple of months, say, she only had fou
r or five visitors, all men. It was pretty easy to nail down three of the visitors. There was her brother once or twice, and her son a couple of times. And there was you, Lieutenant. And then, a few days ago, there was another man. Nobody seems to remember his name. But he was a big man, wearing a dark suit. About fifty, fifty-five. Someone said he looked like a KGB agent.”
I exchanged a look with Friedman, then asked Culligan, “When you say a few days ago, what d’you mean?”
“One or two,” he answered. “Or, anyhow, it was just about the same day you came—or maybe the day after.”
Again, Friedman and I looked at each other for a long, significant moment before Friedman said, “Okay, Culligan. Keep scratching. Try the nurses and orderlies. Get a description of that KGB type.”
“Right.” Culligan turned away and shambled off through the half-open glass door.
“I can tell you who he is,” I said. “It’s Lloyd Eason. Sure as hell.”
“I figured.” Friedman was staring off across the patio, deep in thought. “Christ, I was only kidding about Ryan’s hit man. Or at least I thought I was kidding.”
“You’re still assuming that the murderer visited her beforehand, though,” I objected. “But if someone was planning to murder her, he would’ve said he was visiting someone else, probably.”
But as I said it I saw the hole in the argument. First the murderer must get the name of another patient. And secondly, an orderly would probably have escorted him to the strange patient, as I’d been escorted.
Friedman had another objection: “You’re assuming that the murderer had already decided to murder her before the visit. Maybe he didn’t decide to do it until after he visited her.”
“What you’re saying is that Eason visited her and reported to Ferguson, or Bayliss—or maybe even to Ryan. Then he came back and murdered her to shut her up.”
“No,” Friedman said, “that’s what you’re saying. Me, I figure I’ll stay in this business until it’s pension time.”
“He could’ve done it,” I said. “Honest to God, he could’ve done it. There’s something scary about him. He’s totally devoted to Ryan. Like a—a dog. If he thought she was a threat to Ryan, he’d do it, with or without orders.” I realized that I was speaking very softly, awed at the thought behind the words.
Stalking Horse (The Lt. Hastings Mysteries) Page 15
