AHMM, December 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The widow was a tall, very slender woman in her middle forties. She looked haggard in spite of a considerable amount of makeup. Her legal name was Julienne Cossegrin, but professionally she was Julia Westgaard. “I was already pretty well along in my career when Dewey's father died,” she explained, “so I kept his name even after my second marriage.” Like the two drama students Auburn had interviewed at the restaurant, she radiated a kind of stage presence, an artificial poise that effectively concealed whatever emotions she might be experiencing. But she was a singer, not an actress, and she was obviously piqued that Auburn didn't already know that.

  Her version of what had happened during the last performance of The Brides of Dunraven Castle tallied with what he had already heard from other witnesses. She denied having put anything whatsoever into Cossegrin's champagne glass. “And I can't believe Desmond took even a little sip from that glass. Actors never really eat or drink anything during a performance. Swans can swallow gracefully; people can't. You can't say your lines with something in your mouth, unless your character is meant to be a complete slob. Swallowing can throw off your timing, change your voice, make you choke. And anyway, that stuff Bish puts in the bottle foams up like shampoo."

  "Did you smell anything in your glass?"

  "Nothing. I was on the other side of the table from Desmond when he started having trouble. I only smelled that chemical after I went around to him, after it was all over."

  Did she have any idea who might have poisoned Cossegrin?

  "I've tried to think, and I just can't. Some people look for peace and order in their lives. Desmond was just the opposite. He was driven by chaos. He put everything off to the last minute—income taxes, airplane tickets, learning lines—because the only way he could function was with Time nipping at his heels. He could be—he was exasperating. It drove people around him crazy. But you don't kill somebody for a reason like that."

  She apologized for leaving the restaurant before giving a statement. “I felt like I was going to break down any minute. All those people trying to be sympathetic and just making it worse. I called and left a message for Dewey to pick me up as soon as he got off work."

  "Where do you work?” Auburn asked Dewey.

  "Couple places. Last night I was at Hobart-Royale. It's a telemarketing job."

  Auburn hoped the young man's telephone style was more gracious with potential customers than it was with police detectives.

  A visitor was just coming up the walk as Auburn left the house. He recognized the trademark beard and sandals of the Reverend Randy Stickle, whose much-publicized triumph over drugs and alcohol had earned him a place in local folklore. Evidently the recognition was mutual.

  "How are they doing today, Officer?"

  "Composed."

  The minister nodded. “I was here with them until two o'clock this morning. Just having Desmond Cossegrin out of the house seemed to contribute substantially to the general tranquillity."

  "I gather he could be hard to live with."

  "If the Devil has nightmares, Cossegrin is in them somewhere."

  "You don't hesitate to speak ill of the dead,” remarked Auburn, who found Reverend Stickle's manner faintly irritating.

  "Oh, I'm not judging him, just describing him. Desmond Cossegrin always struck me as a man who was right on the verge of being completely overwhelmed by his own awesomeness. And woe betide the person who saw things any other way.

  "But Julia is a saint. She understood him and managed somehow to put up with him. And she'll get over losing him too. The one I'm worried about is Dewey. He was only seven when his father killed himself, and it scarred him for life. He's had terrific emotional problems ever since. He thinks he's some kind of militant neo-Nazi, but the poor kid is just another lost soul with scrambled ideas."

  "Was Dewey close to his stepfather?"

  "Oh no. Quite the reverse. Resented him from day one, defied him at every opportunity. But that's just the sort of situation that sets up a person for an exaggerated grief reaction after a death, due to the heavy guilt feelings."

  Another amateur shrink heard from, thought Auburn. Then again, maybe he wasn't an amateur. “Have you been counseling Dewey?"

  "Oh no. His needs go a good deal beyond the scope of pastoral counseling. He's twenty-three or -four and he's never kept a full-time job for more than a few weeks. Started college two or three times, and each time he lasted about a month. He must have had half a dozen different psychologists working with him through grade school and high school. I will say this, though—he's been doing a lot better the past few months since they got him in with Fiona Cremner-Bate. I'm sure you've heard of her.” Auburn hadn't.

  When he got back to headquarters, his desk was piled high with fresh documents. The forensic pathologist's preliminary autopsy report listed cyanide poisoning as the principal cause of death but included rib fracture with pleural and pericardial tears, due to resuscitation efforts, as a possible contributory cause.

  A test of Cossegrin's blood showed a lethal level of cyanide, but there was none in the gastric contents. Moreover, analysis of the liquid in the champagne bottle and of residues left in the glasses confirmed the presence of ginger ale and baking powder but showed no trace of anything else—no alcohol, no drugs, and no cyanide.

  Before even looking at any of the other reports, Auburn went to the forensic lab on the top floor to consult with Sergeant Kestrel, the director of the lab, as to the significance of these contradictory findings.

  "If he didn't swallow the cyanide,” Auburn asked him, “how did it get in his blood?"

  "It could have been given by injection,” said Kestrel, “but they didn't find any puncture wounds in his skin. It had to be by inhalation. A couple whiffs of concentrated hydrocyanic acid gas or cyanogen fluoride can be lethal within a few minutes."

  "But how do you get somebody to inhale cyanide in front of a hundred people? How would you even carry the stuff around?"

  "In a pressurized container of some kind."

  "What are we talking about? Something like an oxygen cylinder, a fire extinguisher...?"

  "Wouldn't have to be that big.” Kestrel reached across the laboratory bench and pulled a big square aluminum field kit toward him. Raising the lid, he folded out an awesome succession of compartmented trays, each containing materials and instruments in precise geometric arrangement. From the bottom of the case he drew a device about the size and shape of a marking pen, except that it was fitted with a small adjustable jet nozzle. “Pocket torch,” he said. “Easily concealed."

  He wrapped his long bony fingers around it to illustrate the point. “All kinds of things come in pressured containers these days. Look around at the drugstore or the grocery. Hair spray, furniture polish, asthma medicine, insect repellent, car wax, pepper gas..."

  "But surely not cyanide?"

  "You could refill something as small as this torch with cyanide gas if you had access to the necessary equipment. And too many people do. There are wildcat outfits everywhere out there refilling propane tanks for domestic heating, oxygen and acetylene cylinders for welding, you name it. It's a major safety problem, because they overfill cylinders, put in the wrong gases, force the wrong valves on the cylinders..."

  "But where would you get the cyanide gas in the first place?"

  "It's widely used in industry. Metal, rubber, plastic."

  "I know, and photography. But in the form of a gas?"

  "Sure, sometimes. And they use the gas to fumigate warehouses for vermin. Plenty of opportunities for a guy working in a certain kind of factory to grab himself some cyanide."

  Auburn had requested basic record probes on the cast of the play and the staff of the restaurant, as well as on Bish Gardner and Dr. Mickelhaws. None of them, not even the arrogant and egocentric Professor Cossegrin, had had any brushes with the law. Julia Westgaard's first husband, Virgil, had been a lawyer. Arthur Mickelhaws, M.D., had retired after conducting a family practice in Wilmot for more than forty
years.

  Auburn spent an hour researching cyanide on the Web and possible local sources of it in the Yellow Pages. In order to work out a timetable of events at the restaurant, he went to the dispatchers’ room and played back the tape of Karl-Heinz Weyermueller's frantic call for help, which had been logged at 7:43 P.M. While Auburn was still there, one of the dispatchers referred a call to him.

  A man's voice, strident and brash, asked, “Is this the detective who's investigating the death at the restaurant last night?"

  "Yes, sir. Who's calling, please?"

  "If I had a videotape of the whole thing, how much would the police pay for it?"

  "You say you have—"

  "How much?"

  "That would depend on whether the tape contains any evidence we don't already have, and whether it can be proved to be authentic."

  "This would all be confidential, right?"

  "That might be hard to manage if your tape has to go to court."

  "I'll call you back."

  The call had been made from a phone booth at the Greyhound bus station on the south side of town. A videotape of “the whole thing,” thought Auburn, would be too good to be true. Just when he'd been handed the impossible challenge of figuring out how Cossegrin could have been given a fatal whiff of cyanide before witnesses, a videotape might solve everything. But it was probably a hoax.

  Half an hour later, while Auburn was having lunch in the canteen, the man with the videotape called again from a different phone booth.

  "Here's the deal,” he explained. “My girlfriend is one of the waitresses at Weyermueller's. She sneaked me up on the balcony last night so I could tape the show. You're not supposed to, but I wasn't going to sell it or anything, just maybe show it to a couple friends. I don't want to get in any trouble or anything over this, and I don't want her to lose her job either.” Auburn suspected that this latter development might turn off the caller's principal source of support.

  By the exercise of considerable diplomacy, he got the caller to identify himself as Jerry Prentice and arranged for him to bring his tape to headquarters for a private viewing. Prentice was thirty-something with a beer belly and a mane of unkempt hair spewing out from under a cap advertising ball bearings. Auburn had set up a portable videotape player in his office where, abiding by his promise, he sat down alone with Prentice to view the tape.

  As Prentice had said, the whole thing had been shot from the gallery overlooking the main dining room. Not only was the sound quality of Prentice's camcorder abominable, but he was a most inexpert cameraman. It wasn't his fault that the human figures on the main level were foreshortened by the high angle of view, but the camcorder seldom remained stationary, and abrupt panning shots occurred frequently and inexplicably.

  When the tape began, the serving staff was still distributing soup and salad. During the two or three minutes before the show started, the camera showed undue interest in one particular waitress. Morgan Carruth also appeared from time to time, gliding among the tables with a bowl in each hand and two more deftly balanced along her left forearm. And there sat Dr. Mickelhaws, stiff as a scarecrow in his ringside seat.

  The program began with an eerie flourish of organ music and a violent electrical storm created by sound and lighting effects. Auburn recognized the voice of the narrator, with its denture lisp, as that of Bish Gardner. It took a little longer for him to identify the actress playing Gloria DeVoyd, kittenish and featherbrained in a blond wig, as Julia Westgaard. His first impression of Desmond Cossegrin was also entirely different from what he expected. Lord Anthony stalked among the tables like a hungry wolf, delivering his inane lines in a husky tenor voice with a phony Eastern European accent.

  After the first act, which ran for about twenty minutes, Prentice had turned off the camcorder until the main course of the meal was over. The second act began with more raucous music and more strobe light effects. As Cossegrin poured out the fake champagne, Auburn found the suspense of watching this real-life murder drama unfold almost intolerable. It stood his hair on end to realize that that boisterous clown was about to be murdered before his eyes.

  Lord Anthony's death scene began, as Gardner had said, as pure slapstick. Cossegrin was hamming it up with a vigor that no dying man could have mustered. After he sank to the floor, while Julia Westgaard was still on the far side of the banqueting table, a dim figure, dressed entirely in black, suddenly crawled crab-fashion across the floor toward him. The figure was probably invisible to everyone on the main level, except perhaps Cossegrin himself. Even from the vantage point of the gallery, much of what was going on was concealed or distorted by the strobe light. The shadowy form moved its right hand swiftly back and forth a few times, as if wiping condensed moisture from a window, and then closed in on Cossegrin, bending close over him before fading away again.

  Cossegrin's death struggles started looking more authentic, his gasps and gurgles more desperate. The wraiths sent up a wail and began their mournful procession. Dr. Mickelhaws got into the act briefly before being bulldozed into the wings by Ms. Carruth. Then all hell broke loose. At this point Prentice had turned off his camcorder and vacated the premises.

  Auburn ran the last five minutes of the tape over again three times. “Have you ever seen this play all the way through?” he asked Prentice.

  "I tried to tape it about six weeks ago, but it didn't turn out."

  "Tell me how it's supposed to end."

  * * * *

  At Sounds Great, the audio and electronics store in Willoughby Mall, Bish Gardner had just finished writing up a big sale. But the smile of satisfaction melted from his homely features as soon as he saw Auburn.

  "Hi, Officer. Making any progress?"

  "Some. You didn't tell me about the fake body under the table last night."

  "Hey, a magician doesn't give away all his secrets. I told you about the fake champagne."

  "The fake champagne wasn't where the poison was. Could you run through the end of the play for me? Describe what happens after Lord Anthony dies?"

  "Sure. Come on back here.” Gardner led him to a stuffy, cluttered office and made room for him on a chair next to the desk.

  "The tables around the stage area have floor-length tablecloths. The gimmick is that under the table where the cast eats there's a dummy dressed and made up to look like Lord Anthony. After he does his death scene, while he's down there between the tables where nobody can see him, he pulls the dummy out from under the table and crawls under the table himself.” Again Gardner was illustrating his narration with a constant stream of fluid gesticulation. “Then Igor and the wraiths bring in a coffin and put the dummy in it. With the strobe light going, nobody can tell it isn't the real Lord Anthony. They put the coffin on the table and screw down the lid.

  "There's a female wig and a gown under the table, and while all that's going on, Lord Anthony puts those on and slips out on the other side of the table. He's pretty well hidden by the production booth, but if any of the guests happens to notice him out of the corner of their eye, they figure he's one of the wraiths. Then he goes into the kitchen, takes off the gown and wig, and just as all the lights come back on he makes a grand entrance as the mysteriously resurrected Lord Anthony."

  "When you put away the props and costumes last night, were the wig and gown still under the table with the dummy?"

  Gardner's gaunt, slouching form straightened like a snapped whip. “No, they weren't,” he said. “Last night was such a mess I never even thought about it at the time, but now that you mention it, I didn't find that gown or wig anywhere."

  On his way back to headquarters, Auburn sorted out the implications of this latest information. He now understood why, during one brief moment near the end of the tape, four wraiths were visible instead of only three. But since Cossegrin was also still in view, and moribund at that, that fourth wraith had to be the murderer. Gardner and Brad Benediktus alibied each other for the time of the murder, and so did the two actresses who had been in Wey
ermueller's office touching up their makeup.

  Could the murderer have been somebody from outside who slipped in unnoticed during the program? Weyermueller evidently didn't run a very tight ship. Auburn had found the alley door, by which he had made his own escape to evade the TV crews, ajar and unattended. Jerry Prentice seemingly had the run of the kitchen and had twice gained access to the gallery with his camcorder. But whoever had written himself into the script of The Brides of Dunraven Castle must have known that script perfectly.

  That evening Auburn had a dinner date with Rochelle Harris at the Docksider Restaurant. From their window table they had a view of the river, where reflections of the lights on the opposite bank glowed fuzzily through the autumn fog and murk. The marine decor inside the restaurant was as phony as Monopoly money, and their server suffered from defective vision, being able to see African-American couples only intermittently, briefly, and indistinctly. But the seafood was the best in town.

  On principle Auburn avoided discussing criminal investigations in progress, but eventually he got around to asking Rochelle, who was a professional art therapist, a question relevant to the Cossegrin murder. “Have you ever heard of a psychologist named Fiona Cremner-Bate?"

  "Um-hmm.” She threw him a whimsical glance. “Were you thinking of going to her for help?"

  "Maybe. Not the kind of help you mean."

  "Good. Can I tell you something unofficially? Off the record?"

  "Anything you say will be taken down in writing and immediately run through a shredder."

  "Fiona Cremner-Bate has a bad rep in the psych community."

  "What kind of a bad rep?"

  "I guess it's really no secret. She persuades all her clients that they were mistreated as children, usually by their parents, and that that's why they have emotional problems in adulthood. Her standard gimmick is to take some phobia or recurring dream and fabricate an interpretation that fits the scenario she's trying to push."

  "Fabricate? Why would a health professional pull such a rotten trick? And how can she get away with it?"

  Rochelle swallowed more gracefully than a swan. “Why do some so-called doctors tell all their patients their troubles are due to a difference in the lengths of their legs? And how do they get away with that?"