Cold In The Grave_A Kilroy Mystery

by Stephen Mertz

  “Did you stay in touch? Postcards, Christmas cards?”

  She shook her head, no.

  “I wasn't even sure she was still in Denver. I thought about looking her up when I got the gig here, but I didn't have to.”

  “It must have been kind of strange, seeing her at that place you were working, but knowing what she was doing upstairs.”

  “It was very strange, at first,” she nodded. “I didn't know what to say or how to handle it. Cheryl was embarrassed, too, I could tell; ashamed of having me see her there like that. At first, she tried to cover it with a real defensive attitude, almost bitchy, but after a while, one night after the place closed, we went out for drinks at an afterhours bar and we got pretty drunk. I could see it was a release for her to talk to somebody, that it was what she needed. Pressure had really been building up down inside her, and barriers between us weren't there anymore and it was almost like old times again. For a little while, anyway.”

  “What did you talk about specifically, do you remember?”

  “I asked her if there was anything I could do to help her out. She said she didn't need help, mine or anyone else’s, that she was doing something to get herself out of the hole she was is. She was sort of boasting girl-to-girl, but I could tell she wasn’t sure of herself, if that makes sense. She said it was something that was just about to happen; that she'd been waiting for just the right time, and the time was now.”

  “Did she elaborate?”

  “No, but I've got a feeling you already know about that.”

  “I know part of it. Cheryl was trying to extort money from someone. One of her johns, would be my guess. At least, that's the way it looks so far.”

  She sat silently for a moment in contemplation of that.

  “Poor, dear Cheryl,” she said softly to herself. Then, to me, “I told her she ought to find a man. Not the kind of users she has to deal with all day, but a good man; someone she could share her inner self with, to help ease the load. When I said that, she . . . fell apart. She told me she'd really hurt a good man and it was tearing her up inside because she didn't know what to do about it, but she didn't have a choice; something about how he was so good and unspoiled and how she was so bad and how she was getting ready to get even dirtier so that she could kiss everything off once and for all. Does that make any sense to you, Kilroy?”

  “It fits. It does sound like she was talking about blackmail, doesn't it? Whoever had Cheryl killed set it up a few days in advance and part of the setup was having Cheryl tailed first, to see if anyone else knew what she was up to, anyone who might be able to finger the killer because they knew who Cheryl was trying to squeeze. They put her under surveillance and they saw her confiding in you that night. That's how you got on their hit list.”

  She shivered. The movement did nice things beneath her blouse.

  “It's terrible to think about. I wonder –” She paused.

  I said, “Anything would help at this point.”

  Gia said, “I've got a scrapbook I carry with me when I travel. I've had it for years; ads, any write-ups I might happen to get, that sort of thing. There are some pictures in it from when Cheryl and I used to play Denver.”

  “Fetch it, by all means,” I urged.

  The tension from what had gone one back at The Tattle Tail was starting to ebb.

  The scrapbook had seen some hard traveling. The covers were peeling and faded, stuffed to overflowing with newspaper clippings, glossy photographs, and a little of everything else.

  “Here we are.” She handed me a glossy publicity shot. “Allen, Kim, and Mona.”

  I studied the picture and felt a poignant twitch. Cheryl and Gia gazed out at me fetchingly, kneeling to either side of a muscular, haughty looking guy who stood with his arms folded across his manly chest, eyeing the camera with a sardonic, slightly depraved look.

  “Which one are you, Kim or Mona?”

  She smiled. The glint in those dazzling dark eyes could have meant anything.

  “I was Kim. The aggressive one. Here are some more. These are from our last days in Denver before Cheryl and I called it quits as an act.”

  The photos she handed me were personal snapshots, some of Gia and Cheryl together, most of Cheryl Kaplin alone or with assorted people.

  The first to catch my attention was a snapshot of Robert Pierpont's departed love in a park somewhere, standing before a fountain, encircled by the arms of a handsome dark-haired guy in brown corduroy. He and Cheryl didn't look in love, exactly, but their smiles for the camera suggested that at least they were greatly enjoying each other’s company.

  Another snapshot slowed me down; a candid shot, snapped at a party or social gathering of some sort. Four people sat on a large sofa, nursing drinks, chatting with each other the way people will at such affairs. Cheryl was on the left with her hand being held by the same guy she'd been with in the picture by the fountain. To the man's other side was a slim, youngish, quietly attractive brunette and she in turn had her shoulder encircled by the arm of the man on the far right of the sofa, a heavyset, gray-haired guy in his mid-fifties.

  I gave this last face a couple of extra seconds, trying to tag him with a name, but it was no go. The strong (or maybe brutal) features seemed vaguely familiar, but not familiar enough.

  Cheryl's beau of those days appeared to be chuckling appreciatively at something the gray-haired guy was saying. I wondered if it was a polite laugh or if it really had been a joke worth hearing. Another look at Heavyset's eyes in the picture gave me the answer. A lot of things were reflected in those eyes, but not humor.

  I indicated the snapshots that interested me.

  “Can I borrow these? They could come in handy.”

  “Of course, if you think they'll help.”

  I set the two photos down, the one in the park and the foursome on the sofa and set the scrapbook aside.

  “Any idea if Cheryl kept a scrapbook like this or if she had copies of these two pictures?”

  “I don't think she kept a scrapbook. Sometimes she would take the negatives of a roll of film I had shot and have a set developed on her own if some of the pictures were of her and she liked the way they turned out, but I don't know what she did with them.”

  “Do you know any of the people in these pictures?”

  She studied them.

  “No, I'm sorry. There were . . . a lot of men for Cheryl, even in those days before it was her . . . livelihood. I don't remember the woman either, I'm sorry to say. Those were crazy days. Lots of parties where we didn't know people. They could have been Cheryl's friends, or people she'd just met. Sometimes she'd ask to borrow my camera. I don't remember taking either of those shots. I just saved them because . . . well, for the memories, I guess. Why do you think those two pictures are important?”

  “Maybe they're not,” I admitted, “but we've got to start somewhere. I've seen the face of one of those men before, maybe both. I just can't remember where.”

  She reached over them and touched the back of my hand with delicate fingertips.

  “It will come,” she said quietly. “Maybe you just need to pull back from it for a while.”

  “And maybe I should leave,” I agreed. “There’s your boyfriend in Vegas.”

  “Ex-boyfriend,” she said. “These days we're at the good friends’ stage. Besides, he'd want someone to stay with me tonight after what happened.”

  “Do you want me to stay?”

  Her answering smile was pure feminine mystique.

  We made love that night like two people who had been to the precipice and looked Death in the face and had been touched by the blood craziness that a closeness to Death can bring.

  We made love, drawing our passion from a bottomless pit.

  Getting human again.

  8

  Seeing people off at airports is always bittersweet and saying goodbye to Gia Passionne, when she caught her flight to Las Vegas the next morning from Stapleton, was no exception.

  Thou
sands of people arriving and leaving and bustling in an airport terminal always infects me with a desire to board a plane with some of them; to leave behind the big and little problems of everyday life on the ground and lose myself in travel to places far off; to embrace the illusion that it could all change, or at least that I could change, by the simple expedient of purchasing an airline ticket and leaving on a jet plane.

  Then I always remember that's what most people, myself included, thought they were doing when they packed up and moved to Colorado.

  Then, too, are the goodbyes. Terrible things, goodbyes, especially when the person you're goodbye-ing is someone like Gia.

  Her real name was Sandra . . . well, the last name wasn't Passionne; let's leave it at that.

  We both tried to be adult about parting ways but when her flight was announced, I thought she walked away from me – after a final, lingering kiss that said all kinds of things – wondering, like I was, just what the hell life was all about sometimes. We'd met under bizarre circumstances, to say the least, and what can you really tell about someone after only one night together making love. But it had been such a good night after we put the outside world behind us and let things happen. So much had been shared and enjoyed in such a short time and the promise was there for so much more. Or maybe it was the unexpectedness of finding someone like her, that ships-passing-in-the-night cliché that made it seem so perfect, so fine. I had her address, she had mine, but I knew that I would probably never see her again.

  I walked back through the terminal to the parking area. An outdoor pay phone stood a few feet from where I'd parked, so I dropped in some coins and gave Joe Gallegos' office a call. His men would have been following through during the night, searching Cheryl Kaplin's apartment and questioning the man who'd run her down. Joe might have some information I could use.

  He wasn't in his office. One of his buddies in the Detective Bureau said he'd left a number for me to call, and he read it off to me, stressing twice that Lieutenant Gallegos had insisted I contact him immediately, if not sooner. Even as I jotted the number down, it sounded familiar. I checked the phone directory before calling. I was right.

  It was Robert Pierpont's home phone.

  Now what the hell.

  I dialed.

  A burly voice, not belonging to my client or Joe, answered after the first ring and it took another few seconds while they called Joe to the phone.

  He said, I’m at Rolling Green Manor. Know it?”

  “I know it. Robert Pierpont lives there. What's going on?”

  “Never mind that. Get over here like right now. No excuses, no delays, understand?”

  “On my way,” I said, but the connection had already clicked in my ear. The dial tone sounded across the line.

  I drove west on I-70, feeling myself winding up inside. Getting ready for whatever lay ahead. Those stolen moments with Gia were gone. She was gone. Kilroy was back in the real world. I exited the expressway at Wadsworth Boulevard, followed Wadsworth until I reached Alameda in Lakewood, another half mile west on busy Alameda, and I was there.

  Rolling Green Manor, where Robert lived, stretched out across five acres in all its prefab splendor; a half a dozen, L-shaped modern apartment buildings, separated and surrounded by sloping, immaculately trimmed lawns and leisurely winding walkways, giving an impression midway between a country club and a city block somehow transported out of here to the middle of nowhere, far from the smog and city pavement.

  Three squad cars and an ambulance were parked near the curb of the blacktop parking area nearest Robert's place. Some people, mostly in their twenties and early thirties, all extremely casually attired, loitered at a distance with mild interest as if they had nothing better to do than wait for something exciting to happen on their doorsteps. A bigger crowd was gathered around the plate glass front entrance of the third building down from the parking lot; the building in which Robert lived.

  I walked over and eased my way through this group.

  A uniformed policeman stood guard at the door, politely but firmly denying entrance to anyone.

  “Sorry, bud. No one goes in until they finish upstairs.”

  “Lieutenant Gallegos sent for me. The name's Kilroy.

  He stepped aside.

  “Okay, you're cleared. Straight up the stairs.”

  I found Joe Gallegos waiting for me in the corridor, midway between Robert's front door and the stairway landing. The whole area buzzed with the comings and goings of white-smocked technical crews who moved in and out of the apartment, oblivious to everything else.

  Joe's normally serious expression was more serious than usual. His greeting, as I approached was, “Where the hell have you been? We've been trying to track you down for two hours.”

  “Didn't know I was on call. What's going on?”

  He indicated a man who stood beside him.

  “This is Neil Dickensheets from the DA's office.”

  The guy had sandy hair and pinched features, was in his early forties, and sported a well-tailored three-piece-suit and a pronounced air of self-satisfied superiority.

  “I demand a full rundown of your whereabouts for the last twenty-four hours,” Dickensheets said to me. “Begin now.”

  I said, “I don't hear anyone reading me my rights.”

  The DA's man steamed, but before he could say anything, Joe looked at me and nodded at Robert's apartment.

  “Take a look. It happened forty minutes ago. Neil and I just got here ourselves.”

  I stepped between them and walked over to the doorway. I looked in, past all the activity that was going on in the living room.

  A corpse was stretched out, face downward, on the carpet. I didn't need to see its face to know who the corpse had been. The dead man wore the same clothes he’d worn yesterday afternoon at The Tattle Tail and again later when he was being questioned by the police after he killed Cheryl with his car. All that was left of Leon Somerset now was a messy job for the authorities. A powerful bullet, obviously fired at close range, had blown away most of the back of his head. The carpet around him was soaked with sticky looking reddish-gray goop.

  Joe and Dickensheets were eyeing me the way a science student watches litmus paper.

  “Am I supposed to have done that?” I cracked, meaning it to be funny,

  No one laughed.

  “Do you know him?” asked Dickensheets.

  “I recognize him. Where's Robert?”

  “The super called this in,” said Joe. “He and everyone else on this floor heard the shot but it took three or four minutes for anyone to get up enough nerve to open their doors and look. When they did, six witnesses saw Pierpont standing in the doorway of his apartment with a gun in his hand.”

  “So, where is he?”

  “He took off running. No one tried to stop him, naturally. We don't know where the hell he is.”

  “This doesn't add up,” I told them. “Why the hell would the man who drove the car that killed Cheryl yesterday come visiting her boyfriend today? And I can't believe that Somerset would allow Robert to get around behind him, to set himself up to be killed the way it looks like he was, from behind.”

  “We'll talk about that downtown,” said Dickensheets. “There was another kill at The Tattle Tail last night, Kilroy, besides Cheryl Kaplin.

  “A black kid named Boines,” said Joe. “Called himself Sparky. Known to run odd street jobs for the Fallaci family. Someone tossed him off the roof of the club, into the alley that runs alongside.”

  “We found a gun lying next to the body,” said Dickensheets. “A .44 short-barreled Magnum. We traced it. The gun belongs to you.”

  “Trace this,” I said. “That gun was stolen last night. I reported the theft, soon as I realized it was missing.”

  “We'll check it, alright,” said Dickensheets, “but that doesn’t help you now. Three people have been killed in this town in the last twelve hours – the Kaplin woman, Boines, and now Somerset – and you're in the middle of
all of it. Lieutenant, read this man his rights.”

  “Sorry, compadre,” he said, and I could tell he meant it, “but I've got to play this one by the books. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you --”

  I turned slightly and hit Dickensheets in the stomach as hard as I could.

  The air gushed out of his mouth and he doubled over, then crumpled to his knees. He started hacking away in dry heaves.

  Joe's face flared with surprise.

  “Kilroy, no!”

  He had time to say that much, but I did not give him time to move. I extended a foot out behind one of his legs and gave him a shove in the chest that sent him tripping backwards against a wall. He was tugging out his service revolver as he went down. There had only been the three of us in the hallway at that moment, the white smocked police technicians were all inside the apartment, plying their trade over Leon Somerset's corpse, too busy with a dead man to pay much attention to the living.

  I hustled at full steam down the hallway, away from the apartment doorway, toward the rear of the building; also, well away from the stairway that led down to the cop at the front entrance of the building. A hallway window, still open for the unseasonably warm weather of the day before, loomed before me. A screen was fastened to it, but it looked flimsy enough.

  A quick glance behind told me that Dickensheets was still on his knees, hacking.

  Joe had pushed himself to his feet. His pistol was out all the way now, tracking right on me.

  “Kilroy, don't be a fool!”

  “Too late!” I yelled back at him.

  I hit the open screened window at a dead heat run, blasting out into the morning sunshine like a clumsy Superman who forgot to look before leaping.