by Barbara Paul
One of the police officers in the hallway said Jack McKinstry had gone to Bruce’s room shortly before the latter had come storming down the hall demanding to be let in to Joanna Gillespie’s room. Then McKinstry had gone into his own room.
Ivan issued instructions. “If either Gillespie or McKinstry tries to leave, stop him. Or her. And don’t let ’em talk to each other. Go into their rooms and take out their phones.” He knocked on Richard Bruce’s door and opened it without waiting for a response.
This room was larger than Joanna Gillespie’s, but it had no window seat. Richard Bruce stood in the middle of the floor, his arms folded, waiting for them. He was still wearing yesterday’s clothes but managed to look moderately elegant just the same. “I’ve already told you I’m not going to answer your questions without an attorney present.”
On the spur of the moment Marian decided to try something. “Mr. Bruce, we’re pretty well satisfied that Joanna Gillespie couldn’t have killed A. J. Strode. One of the house staff saw her going into her room right before the fire broke out,” she lied. “The maid seems sure of the time and we have no reason to doubt her. There just wouldn’t have been time for Ms Gillespie to go back downstairs, get the cleaning fluid from the supplies closet, and get back to the monitoring room before the fire was first spotted. As far as we’re concerned, she’s in the clear. That leaves you and Mr. McKinstry.” Ivan kept a practiced poker face during his partner’s fairy tale.
Richard unfolded his arms and took a step toward Marian. “Joanna is no longer under suspicion? Is that the truth?”
“That’s right. We’ve eliminated her as a suspect.”
For the first time since Marian and Ivan had met him, Richard Bruce’s face lit up in a smile of genuine pleasure. “Thank god,” he said quietly. “I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear that.”
“Why’s that?” Ivan asked in a conversational tone. “Did you kind of think maybe she was the one who got to Strode?”
“Of course not! Don’t be ridiculous. But as long as she was suspect, she was in danger. From you, Sergeant.”
Marian picked out a chair and sat down. “So, Mr. Bruce. Now you no longer have to worry about protecting Ms. Gillespie. Now you can let her worry about protecting you.”
“You think I killed Strode? You’re mistaken. I would have gladly wrung his neck if he’d been here earlier, but as it happens I am thoroughly guiltless in the matter of his murder. A. J. Strode was dispatched without any help from me—not counting moral support, of course.”
“Sheesh!” Ivan said in disgust. “What is the matter with you people? Moral support? For a murderer? You sink a ship full of men and you talk about moral support?”
“Encouragement, I should have said,” Richard interposed, not at all ruffled by Ivan’s outburst. “You already know we all three wanted him dead. Would it do any good to pretend otherwise? And be very careful about the accusations you toss about so casually, Sergeant Malecki. The sinking of the Burly Girl was fully investigated at the time and I was cleared. I don’t think that jigged-up evidence of Strode’s is going to convict me of anything.”
“It doesn’t look jigged-up to me,” Marian said. “And you went to a hell of a lot of trouble to get it back. But that’s not our problem. What happens about the crew of the Burly Girl is up to the Hawaiian authorities. We’re looking for the killer of A. J. Strode, and that’s all.”
“Then arrest Jack McKinstry,” Richard said sharply. “Put an end to this.”
“Not just yet,” Marian said. “There are still a few holes in your story. For instance, this House of Glass stock. You ended up selling it to Strode. Why weren’t you willing to sell earlier, before things got ugly?”
“Things were ugly right from the start, Sergeant Larch. I don’t give a damn about House of Glass—I was always willing to sell my stock. What I could not tolerate was the thought of the control of my life passing into the hands of another man. Especially a man like A. J. Strode.”
Essentially the same answer as Jack McKinstry’s, Marian thought. “McKinstry thinks you and Joanna Gillespie killed Strode together.”
A look of disgust crossed his face. “McKinstry doesn’t think at all. He’s mentally incontinent. Slick as a whistle, sharp as a tack, and original as a cliché—that’s Jack. Of course he’d say we did it. Do you think he’d admit killing Strode himself? If you caught him standing over the body with all three knives in his hands, he’d still say ‘It’s not my fault’ or ‘Somebody else did it’ or maybe, at worst, ‘I couldn’t help it.’ He’ll never accept responsibility for his acts. It’s just not in his nature.”
Marian tried a different tack. “Why didn’t you help put out the fire in the monitoring room? You were downstairs, by your own account. You had to know something was going on. Yet you stayed away. Why?”
Richard pulled over a chair and sat down facing her. “I didn’t help put out the fire because I couldn’t,” he said simply. “And I couldn’t because I was locked in one of the bathrooms at the time.”
The two police detectives stared at him.
“I wasn’t going to mention this, but now … after I asked one of the maids to bring up Joanna’s and my suitcases from the wine cellar, I decided to make a quick trip to the bathroom before we left. While I was in there, someone came along and locked it from the outside—to keep me from interfering, I suppose.”
Or to give you an alibi, Marian thought. “Wait a minute. How can a bathroom be locked from the outside?”
“There’s a knob on the outside, the kind that turns an internal bolt. The door can be locked from inside the bathroom, too, with the same sort of arrangement. But there are two separate bolts in the door.”
“How’d you get out? Is there a window?”
“Not in that bathroom. I called out and pounded on the door. No one heard me for a while—they were all too busy with the fire, I suppose. Then someone heard me and unlocked the door. I was in the process of thanking him when that overmuscled bodyguard came thundering down the stairs roaring that Strode had been murdered. I was locked in the whole time that fire was burning. So if Strode was killed sometime during the fire, then I couldn’t possibly have done it.”
No, you couldn’t have, Marian thought. One down. “Who let you out?”
Richard leaned forward in his chair and smiled. “Myron Castleberry.”
There was a moment of silence. Then Marian stirred and asked her partner, “You have the number?”
“Yeah,” Ivan said, pulling a notebook out of his pocket. He went to the phone on the bedside table and tapped out a number.
“Mr. Bruce, why didn’t you tell us this before? We could have cleared you right away.”
He shook his head. “Obviously it was the killer who locked me in. As I intimated earlier, I had no burning desire to see the killer brought to what you undoubtedly consider justice.”
“You thought Joanna Gillespie was the murderer.”
“Nonsense! Don’t be absurd. It had to be Jack, I knew that. Joanna was upstairs testing her blood sugar and I was locked in the bathroom. Jack was the only one on the loose.”
“So you risked being accused of murder just to protect Jack McKinstry? Are you seriously asking me to believe that?”
“No, of course not. If it looked as if you were going to charge me with Strode’s murder, then I would have told you.”
“Even if we hadn’t cleared Joanna Gillespie?”
He was saved from answering by Ivan’s hanging up the phone. “Castleberry confirms it. He says he let Mr. Bruce out of one of the downstairs bathrooms only seconds before Millwalker came running down the stairs with the news of Strode’s death. He apologizes profusely for not telling us, but it just slipped his mind with all the other things going on.”
Richard made a sound of disbelief but refrained from comment.
“Let’s go take a look at that bathroom door,” Marian said. “You too, Mr. Bruce.”
The three of them left Richard’s
room. In the hallway Ivan reminded the two policemen on duty that the suspects were not to be allowed to talk to each other.
“Is that really necessary, Sergeant?” Richard asked as they started down the stairs. “Since Joanna is cleared and I am cleared—”
“About that,” Marian interrupted. “I’m afraid I lied. There was no conveniently passing houseservant to give Joanna Gillespie an alibi. She’s still a suspect.”
“What?” Richard grabbed Marian’s arm. “You lied? Joanna hasn’t been cleared?”
“You want to let go of my arm?”
“Let go of her arm,” Ivan said.
“You were lying? None of it was true?”
“My arm,” Marian repeated.
He let go. “What a rotten trick! Of all the underhanded, unethical—”
“Hold it!” Marian commanded. “You’re going to give me a lecture about right and wrong? Is that what you’re going to do?”
The two locked gazes until Marian thought she saw amusement appear in Richard Bruce’s eyes. “Very well, Sergeant Larch,” he said. “No lectures.”
He led them down to the same bathroom they’d both used in the early hours of the day. The door was precisely as he’d described it—two bolts, each controlled from a different side of the door.
“Why would anyone want to lock a bathroom door from the outside?” Marian stepped into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. When she heard Ivan turn the bolt from the outside, she tried the door; it didn’t budge. She looked at the hinges; they all fit tightly and she could see no scratches or other indication that the pins had ever been pried out of their sockets. She took a credit card out of her billfold and tried slipping it between the doorjamb and the bolt, but the jamb overlapped the door by a good half inch and the plastic card wouldn’t go in. “Okay,” she called out.
Ivan unlocked the door. “No go?” A phone rang somewhere nearby.
“No go. Well, Mr. Bruce, it looks as if you’re in the clear. You couldn’t have been locked in down here and upstairs killing Strode at the same time. You are officially off the hook.”
“I am so very grateful,” he said with only the lightest trace of sarcasm.
A police officer came up to them. “Sergeants? Telephone. Either of you.”
“I’ll take it,” Ivan said and followed the officer away.
Richard moved in close to Marian. “Sergeant Larch, you must know Jack McKinstry is the one you’re looking for. Arrest him. He’ll break down and admit everything, and he’ll break down rather fast. The man has no backbone at all. Arrest him.”
“Can’t do that without hard evidence, Mr. Bruce. All he has to do is hold out twenty-four hours and we’d have to let him go.”
“He won’t hold out twenty-four hours. I can virtually guarantee it. Why put Joanna through all this when you know she’s not the killer?”
“But I don’t know that. You’re the only one around here who seems sure she’s innocent. And if you’ll excuse my saying so, you’re hardly an impartial observer.”
“No,” he admitted. “But you must not charge her with murder. You must not.”
Ivan came back. “That was the captain. He wants to know why in the hell we haven’t arrested these three people. Time’s up, partner.”
9
While puffing up a flight of stairs one afternoon a little over a year earlier, Captain Ralph H. Michaels had surprised himself by suffering a coronary. By medical standards, it was a mild one; but by the captain’s personal standards, it ran a close second to all-out nuclear war. So he listened when his doctor lectured him about smoking and drinking and overeating. Now, fourteen months and forty-two pounds later, he was proud of his new near-svelte appearance. No one had the heart to tell him he looked better the other way; the baggy skin and the deep creases in his cheeks made him look old enough to be thinking about retirement. Which he wasn’t.
He’d turned on the heat in his office, even though the day was mild and pleasant; Captain Michaels claimed he got cold faster now, without all that insulation he used to carry around. He told Marian Larch and Ivan Malecki to sit down and got straight to the point. “Ozzie Rogers and Estelle Rankin have disappeared,” he said. “The police in Texas and Oregon can’t find them. No one’s seen them for a couple of days. Now what do you suppose that means?” he inquired innocently.
Ivan growled. “It means Richard Bruce’s men got to them. And no, we can’t prove it.”
“And Richard Bruce is the one suspect you’ve cleared in the Strode murder? Have I got that right?”
“He couldn’t have done it, Captain,” Marian said. “Myron Castleberry let him out of that locked bathroom only a minute or two after Strode was killed. There just wouldn’t have been time, even if he had figured out a way to lock himself in. No, he’s in the clear. It’s one of the other two.”
“Pity,” the captain said sarcastically. “He was my pick.”
“Mine too,” Marian agreed without irony. “He’s the most cold-blooded of the lot, but we can’t pin this one on him. God, I hope he didn’t have those two people killed. The finger pointers. Maybe he’s just bought them off.”
“Why would he go after the mercenary?” the captain wanted to know. “The first mate’s widow I can understand, but Ozzie Rogers is no threat to Richard Bruce. Bruce is just helping out the violinist—why would he want to do that?”
Ivan explained that one, and in his usual inelegant fashion. “Richard Bruce and Joanna Gillespie are screwin’ each other. They’d never met before Friday, so I guess they’re making up for lost time. Bruce must like it a lot because he’s doing his damnedest to keep Gillespie out of jail. Any word on McKinstry’s helicopter pilot?”
“He’s alive and well and in the custody of the Miami police,” Michaels said. “When he learned A. J. Strode had been killed, he started talking and hasn’t stopped yet. The cops there casually mentioned Jack McKinstry was one of our suspects and let him jump to his own conclusions.”
“Which just might be correct,” Marian pointed out. “Fifty-fifty chance. If the helicopter pilot is talking, that means at least one of them won’t get away with those other murders, and that’s something. But we need a little more time to pin down the Strode killing, Captain. Give us at least the rest of today.”
“Uniforms come off the site at midnight. That doesn’t leave you much time.”
“Better’n nothing,” Ivan said. “We’ll haul ’em all in at midnight, but let us put off charging them until then.”
Captain Michaels thought about it. “What can you do there that you can’t do here?”
“Maybe get them to talk,” Marian said. “Play them off one another. There’s no love lost between Jack McKinstry and the other two. A lot of tension there, Captain. If we bring them in now and separate them, the bomb won’t go off.”
“You guarantee it will if we keep them there?”
“No. But it’s a damned good opportunity and I think we ought to take advantage of it.”
The captain thought about it some more. “Okay. You got until midnight. But at or before twelve o’clock I expect three arrests. And it would make me very happy, Sergeants, if only two of the three perpetrators are to be held for extradition. I want to keep the other one right here, charged with the murder of A. J. Strode. That would make me very happy indeed. Do you think you could possibly manage that?”
“We’ll sure as hell try,” Ivan assured him earnestly.
“Give it our best shot,” Marian agreed.
The two police detectives left, determined to do their best to keep their captain happy.
Divide and … cross your fingers.
“Show me how you and Richard Bruce got back in the house.”
“You know how we got in. Through the wine cellar.”
“Show me.”
Joanna Gillespie did not heave a big sigh of annoyance but managed to convey the impression that she’d done just that. She led Marian Larch out to the back patio and around to the door t
hat led to the wine cellar.
“Did you lock it after you went in?”
“No.”
Marian tried the door; it was still unlocked. Inside was pleasantly cool, just the right temperature for the undoubtedly expensive wines kept there. “Where did you leave the suitcases?”
“There.” Joanna pointed.
There were no imprints in the dust on the floor to mark the place because there was no dust on the floor. The entire place was spotless, unlike any other wine cellar Marian had ever seen. A small table was shoved up against the wall with a chair on each side; Marian took one of the two chairs and pointed to the other. “You know Richard Bruce has cleared himself.” Not a question.
Joanna Gillespie carefully lowered herself into the other chair. She kept her eyes on Marian. “Yes.”
“Did you know he was going to do that? Did he tell you?”
Joanna licked dry lips. “I don’t see how that’s the police’s concern.”
“He didn’t tell you, did he? Must have been quite a surprise.”
She bit. “Look, Sergeant Larch, you know perfectly well Richard thought I was in the clear when he told you about being locked in the bathroom. You lied to him, and now you’re trying to make it appear as if he was worrying about saving his own skin all along.”
“You mean he wasn’t? I thought you all were.”
“Well, of course we are!” Joanna snapped. “You know what I mean. What does it matter anyway? Richard is in the clear, isn’t he?”
“Yes, he is. And then there were two.”
Joanna stared at her a long time. “There should be only one. Jack McKinstry.”
“Then give me something solid. Something other than your dislike of him. Think back. You must know something you haven’t told me.”
“I have thought back—god, I’ve been over it and over it. I didn’t hear him in his room during the time of the murder. That’s all lean think of.”
“Would you have heard him? These walls are pretty thick.”
“Maybe not,” she admitted. “Unless he were making an extraordinary amount of noise.”
