Good King Sauerkraut

by Barbara Paul

  Osterman was suddenly looking his age. “My god.”

  “And what about Mimi, right now?” King pressed on. “Out there on that balcony, exposed like that? Somebody with a high-powered rifle in another building could pick her off easy as pie. We can’t guard against everything, Warren. There’s just no point trying.”

  The other man rubbed his forehead with a clenched fist. “I must be slowing down. I didn’t think of any of that.” He levered himself up off the sofa with difficulty, like an old man. He went to the balcony and told Mimi to come inside. As soon as she understood why, she hurried back in, looking frightened and stammering out a thank-you. “Thank King,” Osterman said. “He thought of it.”

  She threw King a surprised but grateful look and sank down in a chair some distance from the balcony doors. King had meant to use Mimi as an example of how impossible it was to be on guard all the time; but if the other two chose to interpret it as concern for Mimi’s safety, he wasn’t going to argue. Osterman said he’d be in touch later and left.

  The minute he was gone, King called Gale Fredericks and told her to catch the next plane to New York.

  King and Mimi were hard at work making out a list of design priorities when Sergeant Ivan Malecki paid them a visit. King was annoyed; he didn’t like being interrupted when the work was going well, and he didn’t like the way Malecki so obviously appreciated Mimi’s good looks. There were a time and a place for everything; he expected the police to be more professional. “Anything new, Sergeant?” he asked testily.

  Sergeant Malecki reluctantly dragged his attention from Mimi to concentrate on the matter at hand. “I brought some pictures for you to look at,” he said, plopping a thick mailing envelope down on a table in the office. “See if any of the guys who attacked you are in there.”

  King remembered. “Oh, that’s right—Officer, uh, Jones wanted me to look at mug shots. I forgot all about it. Sergeant Malecki, the guys who attacked me were just roughneck kids. They didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Dennis and Gregory.”

  “Some of the kids we got files on would kill their grandmothers for a twenty-dollar bill. I couldn’t bring all the pictures we got, but those are the ones we think most likely. Take a look.”

  King opened the envelope and about forty photos spilled out, four-by-five glossies. He stacked them up neatly and started looking. Sergeant Malecki took advantage of the time to carry on a low-tone conversation with Mimi.

  Right away King spotted the leader of the gang of teen-aged muggers who’d got him. He could even hear the young hoodlum’s voice in his head as he stared at the kid’s image. He quickly tossed the picture aside with the other rejects. Toward the end of the stack he found one that he felt fairly sure was another member of the gang. He finished the rest and said, “I’m sorry, Sergeant. It wasn’t any of these kids.”

  “You sure? You did that awfully fast. Take another look.”

  “A lot of these kids are black or Hispanic. I told Officer Jones the muggers were white.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s always a chance you’re not remembering right. Look at the pictures again. Take your time.”

  So King went through the motions of looking at them all again, studying each photo carefully … and obviously. This time when he said no, Sergeant Malecki took his word for it.

  “Thass too bad,” the sergeant said. “My partner and I were sure at least one of ’em would be in there.”

  King barely remembered Malecki’s partner. “Uh, Sergeant Lurch?”

  “Larch. Tell me something. This project you’re both working on—who’s paying for it?”

  Mimi answered him. “Well, DARPA funds the initial research, but once the Army approves the working model—”

  “Hold it. DARPA?”

  “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,” Mimi explained. “It’s a branch of the Defense Department that searches for new weapons technology. They fund research on everything from talking computers to exploding postage stamps—anything that might provide an edge in the arms race. Our job here is to put together a practical electromagnetic gun platform for field combat.”

  “Lotta bucks involved?”

  “A lot.”

  Sergeant Malecki nodded. “Who would get the project if you two pulled out?”

  Mimi shook her head. “There’s no waiting list, Sergeant. DARPA would have to start all over, from scratch.”

  The sergeant gathered up the pictures and put them back in the envelope. “Well, somebody thinks they’ve got a crack at it. Mr. Sarcowicz, you told my partner you left the apartment Thursday around nine or ten. It had to be closer to nine. The way we figure it, you must have walked out only minutes before the killer got there. Did you see anybody? In the hallway, on the elevator?”

  “I didn’t see anyone at all,” King said. “The hall and the elevator were both empty.” He’d run down the stairs instead of using the elevator, as a matter of fact, but he didn’t want to have to think up a credible reason for that. “How can you be sure I left at nine instead of ten?”

  “Time of death. Gregory Dillard died at nine-seventeen, so you had to be gone a little while before that.”

  King swallowed. “Nine-seventeen. Ah, I didn’t know the medical examiner could pinpoint time of death so precisely.”

  “He can’t. We’re going by other evidence. Y’know, somebody’s head comes falling down out of the sky, people notice.” Mimi made a sound of distress. “Sorry. But we got eight witnesses saw Dillard’s head hit, and two of ’em are friends who were checking their watches when it happened. Nine-seventeen, on the button.”

  King didn’t like where this was going. “I still have trouble believing it was anything other than an accident.”

  “Oh, it was no accident. No chance of that. Because there was somebody else in the apartment at the time.”

  Mimi gasped. “How do you know that?”

  “The witnesses say there was a man standing at the window. They couldn’t make out the feaures, he was too high up. It couldn’t have been Dennis Cox, because Mr. Sarcowicz here told my partner Cox was already soaking in the tub when he left. That means there was another man in the apartment Thursday morning.”

  King felt as if he were drowning. “How do your witnesses know which apartment the man was in?”

  “One of ’em had enough presence of mind to count the floors. It was that apartment, all right. Gregory Dillard must have let this other man in, and he must have trusted him to hold the window while he leaned out to feed his one-footed pigeon. He was someone Dillard knew.”

  “Wait a minute,” King said in a strangled voice, “then it could have been an accident! Gregory let a friend in, the friend held the window, the window slipped and killed Gregory, and the friend got spooked and ran! Couldn’t it have happened that way?”

  Sergeant Malecki got up to leave. “Then how do you explain Dennis Cox?”

  Dennis. King had no answer.

  “Look, I don’t want to alarm you two any more than I have to,” the sergeant said, “but if the killer was someone Gregory Dillard knew, then he’s probably someone you know too. I’d be real careful about who I let in here, if I was you.”

  “Count on it,” Mimi said grimly.

  “Lock the door after me,” Malecki said, and left.

  Mimi locked up while King stared unseeing at the door that had just closed, his carefully rebuilt sense of safety crumbling all about him.

  8

  King told Mimi he needed to take a pain pill and lie down for a bit. It was true; everything in his body had started hurting. In his room with the door closed, he stood in the middle of the floor and shook. Good god—how easily he’d allowed himself to be lulled into a false sense of safety! Going about his work on the project with Mimi, as if all that unpleasantness were over and done with!

  All along he’d been hoping the police would not be able to pinpoint the time of death so exactly; with the time of his mugging moved up to late morning, he needed a
medical pronouncement of the vaguer sort—Death occurred between nine and eleven A.M., that sort of thing. He’d completely forgotten about Gregory’s head tumbling down to the street, an event unusual enough to attract attention even in New York.

  How could anyone in his right mind overlook a thing like that? Maybe that’s the problem, King thought; maybe I’m not in my right mind. He swallowed a pill dry and stretched out on the big bed. Eight people, Sergeant Malecki had said, eight people had seen him standing at the window after he’d unintentionally decapitated Gregory Dillard. The shock had momentarily paralyzed him; he’d just stood there and let the witnesses on the street below get a look at him.

  Unintentionally decapitated. How in the hell did you explain that you’d unintentionally decapitated someone?

  How long would the police keep looking for a killer among MechoTech’s competitors? How long before they gave it up as hopeless and moved the case to the unsolved murders file? Or, more likely, how long before they started suspecting King Sarcowicz?

  King tried to think. Would the police have any specific reason to suspect him? He had no cause for wanting either Dennis or Gregory dead. He was not better off with them dead—in fact, he was worse off. Dennis was no friend, but King needed him. Warren Osterman understood that. Mimi Hargrove understood that. But would Sergeants Malecki and Larch understand?

  King sat up in the bed. The conclusion was obvious: he’d have to find a way to make them understand—subtly, without seeming to. He’d have to convince them that the success of the project had depended as much on Dennis Cox as it did on King Sarcowicz; that would be a bitter pill, but he’d swallow it. Persuading the police … it could be managed. He would have to manage it.

  Something nagged at him: if he could overlook an event so gruesomely obvious as Gregory’s head smashing into the sidewalk, what else might he have missed? Let’s see, he’d spoken to a lot of strangers on Thursday, during his flight from the apartment … starting with that guy among the garbage trucks on Pier 97. Then he’d gone into that first restaurant, ordered pastrami, tried to start a conversation with the kid with the green Mohawk, paid his bill, and left.

  Whoa. He’d left a tip in cash, but to pay the bill he’d used a credit card. With a new sense of horror King realized he’d left a credit trail all the way across Fifty-seventh Street. He jumped off the bed and looked for his billfold a moment or two before remembering it had been stolen. He’d wanted to destroy his receipts, but his adolescent muggers had probably just thrown them away; they’d have no reason to keep them. Not for the first time King thought that the mugging was the luckiest thing that could have happened to him, god bless those vicious little bastards.

  Also not for the first time, King wished he weren’t so tall and therefore so noticeable. If those two police detectives started looking on Fifty-seventh Street, they were bound to find someone who remembered him. The waiter in the Russian Tea Room who’d cleaned up his spilled wine. The machine-hating old man in the Sutton Place park, whatever it was called. The kid Ricky, who thought his newly widowed mom was dallying with the family lawyer; King had told him his name. And Shawna—he’d actually given Shawna one of his business cards. He’d left tracks everywhere he’d been.

  Don’t panic—think. All right. How would the police know to check Fifty-seventh Street in the first place? They had no reason to pick one street out of the hundreds in Manhattan and go knocking on every door. And Fifty-seventh was such a big street, people coming and going all the time. The chances of the police’s finding any of the folks he’d talked to were really pretty slim, perhaps nonexistent. As King thought about it, he slowly became convinced that he had little to fear from Fifty-seventh Street.

  All the same, he’d make a point of avoiding that particular thoroughfare for the rest of his natural life. He’d have to remember to feign ignorance if someone asked him where Carnegie Hall was. Or the Hard Rock Café. If anyone mentioned Pier 97, he’d ask what kind of ships docked there. All he had to do was keep his wits about him and he’d be safe. Stay frosty, don’t get rattled.

  A light tap sounded at his bedroom door. “King, are you awake?”

  “I’m awake, Mimi. Come on in.”

  She looked troubled. After an awkward pause, Mimi blurted out: “I think I know who killed Gregory and Dennis!”

  King’s knees buckled and he sat down on the side of the bed, hard. So much for staying frosty. “Who?” he croaked.

  Mimi took a deep breath and said, “Rae Borchard.”

  King was so surprised he forgot to feel relieved. “Rae Borchard? Why on earth would Rae Borchard want to kill Dennis and Gregory?”

  She found a chair and sat down before answering. “I can only guess about the motive—but the thing is, the killer was somebody Gregory knew. He let him or her into the apartment.”

  “That’s what the police think. So?”

  “So, how many people could that be? That he’d let in, I mean. It just doesn’t make sense to think that Gregory had called a friend and arranged to meet him at nine in the morning of a workday. I’m not sure he even had any friends in New York. King, who would be likely to come to the apartment? There are only two—Warren Osterman and Rae Borchard.”

  “Well …”

  “You know it’s not Warren. Why would he call us all here and try to kill us? Besides, Warren’s an old man. He’s not all that strong. He might have been able to surprise Gregory at the window, but surely Dennis could have stopped him from tossing that little TV set into the tub.” She crossed her legs, uncrossed them, crossed them the other way; nervous. “So that leaves Rae Borchard.”

  King tried to visualize the scene that had never taken place, Rae Borchard walking into the bathroom and picking up a TV set she had no way of knowing was in there … ah. He pointed that out to Mimi.

  “She could have improvised,” Mimi said. “Maybe she had a gun in her purse, but when she got there she found she didn’t have to use it.”

  Uh-huh. “But why would Dennis have been able to stop Warren from throwing the TV into the water but not Rae?”

  “Well, think of the scene. Dennis is lying in the tub, stark naked, when this attractive woman walks in and looks at him. Dennis would have loved that. You know he would. He wouldn’t have paid any attention if she started fiddling with the television.”

  Reasonable, King thought. Utterly wrong, but reasonable. “Okay, but what’s her motive?”

  Mimi took a moment to get her thoughts in order. She said, “This is only a guess, but I think it’s right. You know Rae is Warren’s heir apparent.”

  “I’d wondered about that. Go on.”

  “He’s been training her to take over MechoTech when he retires, but nothing is carved in stone. She could still lose it. I think Rae Borchard saw Gregory and me as potential rivals. It was Gregory and me she was after—Dennis was killed because he just happened to be in the apartment.”

  King scrunched up his eyes. “I don’t follow that. Why—”

  “King, I’m going to tell you something in confidence. Will you give me your word not to repeat it?”

  “Yes, of course. What is it?”

  “Warren Osterman has proposed a merger of MechoTech and SmartSoft. That would have put both Gregory and me in the running as Warren’s possible successor.”

  King felt his mouth drop open. “Why, that wily old fox! He’s after Keystone too—I just found out about that myself.”

  Then it was Mimi’s mouth that dropped open. “He wants both our companies? That means you and Dennis … oh my. Then she’d meant to kill Dennis all along, and now you and I are still in her way—”

  “Hold it, Mimi. It’s a nice theory, but you’re wrong. It couldn’t have been Rae Borchard.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well … remember the witnesses on the street? They said it was a man they saw standing at the window.”

  “Rae has short hair. If she was wearing a tie and jacket, nobody would have been able to tell the difference from
that distance.”

  King just looked at her.

  “Well, it’s possible!” Mimi said crossly. “All right, Mr. Know-it-all, who do you think killed them?”

  “I think,” King said firmly, “I think both deaths were accidents.”

  “And the man the witnesses saw at the window?”

  King shrugged. “Maybe there was no man. Or maybe the one witness counted the floors wrong and our mystery man was in a different apartment. The witnesses had just had a nasty shock, remember, and they couldn’t have been thinking too clearly. They might be mistaken about what they thought they saw.”

  Mimi made a sound of contempt. “Two separate fatal accidents—same time, same place. You’re going to stick to that lamebrained theory?”

  “Like glue,” said King.

  Gale Fredericks had taken King at his word when he said catch the next plane to New York. She showed up at the apartment that evening with a nylon carry-all slung over her shoulder and wearing a Saturday work outfit of jeans, sneakers, and sweater. Mimi, of course, was the essence of California chic—designer clothing, full make-up, earrings and bracelets (no gold chains). Suprisingly, neither woman seemed to find anything unusual in the way the other was dressed.

  King made the introductions; Gale murmured something to Mimi but couldn’t take her eyes off King’s bruised face. “King, you look terrible.”

  “You should have seen him yesterday,” Mimi said wryly. “A lovely royal purple.”