Rook Takes Knight (The Howie Rook Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

  Rook said “Thanks” and called the sergeant immediately. This could be the break he was looking for.

  “Howie,” said the now-genial McDowd. “I owe you a favor for digging up young Wade and the Wirtz girl. Now it’s a cinch! They described the Dibbles’ car, and swear it was murder.”

  “What about the driver?”

  “The boy was only looking at the car, which you could expect. The girl said the driver could have been a woman! In a man’s hat!”

  “Mac, level with me! Did she come up with that, or did you plant the idea?”

  “I did not, and neither did anybody else! I’ll play you the tape, any time. And remember, there was a man’s old hat in the station wagon, as well as gloves and sunglasses. The disguise was right there handy.”

  “Thanks, Mac. Thanks a whole lot.” Rook hung up. It was all very neat—too neat. He poured himself a dark beer and turned to his precious shoebox files again, as was his habit in moments of desperation. Hadn’t there been a case in Minneapolis a year or so ago, the Arthur murder, where a jealous wife had discovered her husband’s infidelity by something in the family car, in spite of the philanderer’s frantic precautions? He started a furious search.

  VII

  HOWIE ROOK HAD LONG been of the considered opinion that there was an element of unfairness in the fact that the State (or, here in California, the “People”) had practically unlimited funds and manpower for investigation while the defense usually had to do its best with little or none. He was doing tiresome work now that should be up to the police or the D.A.’s men. But that was the way of the world.

  When the authorities made their minds up that someone was “good for it,” they had a way of concentrating upon that one suspect and forgetting everything else. Nine times out of ten it might be all right that way, in the tenth case it could be rank injustice.

  All he could do now was to try to think of things they maybe hadn’t thought of—like the possibility of such things as seat belts and rear-view mirrors in the station wagon which had been the murder weapon. So now he telephoned the Dibble home, to his disappointment receiving no answer. But presumably they both had jobs, like so many married couples nowadays. It might be better to walk in on them unannounced anyway; he had found that many people will say a quick no over the phone when they might have a different reaction face to face. He made a mental note to try them later. Next he called the Tribune, and got hold of Lou Elder at the city desk. “Got anything for me?” demanded that hard-pressed worthy. “Just putting together the front page.”

  “Nothing that’s fit to print,” Rook had to admit. “There were two eyewitnesses to the Charteris killing, and it was murder one all right. The names of the teen-agers are being kept quiet, for the present. But what I told you this morning still goes. Deirdre Charteris is innocent, and we’re going to prove it somehow. You may get a press release from Wilt Mays—”

  “Already have. He handed it out to the boys in the press room at the Hall of Justice a little while ago. Definitely promises an arrest for tomorrow afternoon, and wants the photogs there and everything.”

  “A Roman holiday, huh? He may be going off a little half-cocked. You know he took the case away from the police and is going to sign the complaint on his own. But better not say that. In fact, the less you say the better. But plan to hold a full column for Sunday’s front page.”

  “Okay, we’ll play along, Howie. But you better be right!”

  “As if I didn’t know.”

  “The funeral is tomorrow at four, isn’t it? Forest Lawn? Is it a private ceremony?”

  “No, though I think for Deirdre’s own sake it should be.”

  “You’ll cover, I imagine. Want a photographer?”

  “I think not,” Rook decided after a moment’s hesitation. “If I do I know where to get one. The widow isn’t news—yet. But she’s damn well going to be. You better start somebody digging up professional photos of her back when she was a hopeful TV starlet. They’ll be in the old theatrical files, or maybe her former agent Max Linsky—offices in the Taft Building, Hollywood—will let you have something. But not too much cheesecake, Lou. We gotta stress her dignified beauty, not her curves.”

  “Will do, Howie.” Lou hung up.

  Rook looked at his watch, and was surprised to find that it was only a little after four. So much had been happening today that somehow it seemed later. He thought of phoning Deirdre, and then decided against it. She wouldn’t be any more likely to level with him now than she had this morning. But wait—wasn’t there something she had let drop that he had made mental note of? Yes, he remembered now. She had mentioned that the psychiatrist, Dr. Mortensen, had said that sadomasochistic types like John Charteris often wound up as suicides. It hadn’t registered deeply at the time, but come to think of it, that sort of remark was hardly the thing a head-shrinker would make to somebody who had come to him asking help for mental disturbance. Dr. Mortensen must have said it to somebody else, then—and who could that be except the wife?

  Rook looked up the number and dialed. As usual he had trouble in getting past the overprotective office “nurse” and getting through to “dear Doctor,” but Rook was an old hand at never taking no for an answer. Dr. Mortensen first said that his appointment book was filled for the afternoon, but perhaps a week from Monday …

  “Doctor, this concerns a patient of yours, a Mr. John Charteris, who came to you, I believe, last May.”

  “I cannot tell anybody about one of my patients. You should know that.”

  “Even when the patient is dead by violence, and his wife is in danger of being arrested for the crime?”

  The psychiatrist hadn’t followed the newspapers very closely, he admitted. And he unbent enough to admit that he usually took a short break just before five and could spare a few minutes then …

  “It’s a date,” said Rook. He could make it out to Beverly Hills in fifteen minutes, which would give him just time for a haircut. He realized as he sat in the barber’s chair that he was doing it largely for Deirdre’s benefit—he’d be seeing her tomorrow if not before. Never underestimate the power of a woman, as the old saying went. And any woman who could drive Howie Rook into getting a haircut could drive other men to even more drastic steps, he thought wryly.

  Dr. Mortensen was a man of his word, and even offered Rook a cup of coffee. The visitor was not, however, asked to recline upon the couch. Mortensen was a pleasant, soft-spoken man—evidently on the post-Freudian side, for he even affected a neat Vandyke beard.

  “Of course I remember John Charteris, and I even have some preliminary notes,” he admitted. “But in one fifty-minute session no therapist can be expected to get at the root of the problem.”

  “He made but one visit? His wife was correct in her suspicions, then. Did he tell you exactly what his problem was?”

  “Insomnia, in spite of taking long evening walks to tire himself out. Shortness of temper, headaches, despondency, intermittent hostility toward his wife—”

  “Hostility is hardly the word for it, Doctor. Take a look at this.” Rook produced one of the photos. It was the first time he could be sure that the viewer had not seen Exhibit A before.

  Dr. Mortensen whistled, and then frowned. “Of course the man was obviously schizoid, but I had no idea the sadomasochistic impulses had gone to such an extreme. If he had continued with me, perhaps—”

  “You talked to Mrs. Charteris, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but not until about a month ago. Originally I had told Charteris that we usually need to have at least one interview with the spouse before really getting into analysis or any therapy, and asked him to have her make an appointment. I gather that he neglected to do so, but she finally phoned me of her own volition, and came in to see me. I might say she was more disappointed than surprised to find that he hadn’t kept his promise. But if he wouldn’t accept help, there was nothing she or I could do about it, other than try to have him committed—”

  “Did Mrs. Ch
arteris suggest that?”

  “No. The situation didn’t seem to be serious enough to require anything so drastic. And she seemed to be fond of him. A very lovely woman, Mrs. Charteris, I might say.”

  “Indeed you might. And her reason for coming to you was to find out if her husband had been a regular patient?”

  “Not exactly. I think it was mostly to get my advice on what she could do to help him. I told her that I would have to be giving advice on insufficient information, to say the least. In our one session he wanted to talk about the stock market and horse racing and everything except the point at issue—he was retreating behind his defenses, moving back to previously prepared positions, as the Army phrase goes. I could only tell her that she should do her best to get him to come back to me or some other qualified man, and that meanwhile she was his only hold on reality and that her leaving him might do irrevocable damage.”

  “Her not leaving him did even more irrevocable damage,” Rook put in. But now he understood Deirdre a little better. Dr. Mortensen was looking at his clock. “Okay, Doctor. One final question. What was your impression of Mrs. Deirdre Charteris as a person?”

  “Apart from her extreme charm and beauty, you mean?” The psychiatrist smiled. “An intro-extrovert, reasonably well adjusted to life, extremely feminine and not too logical in her thinking. Something of the Electra complex—she had come to prefer men older than herself. Basically dependent, emotionally and psychologically, on her husband. Not completely sure of herself, but strong will to survive.”

  “Would you say that she could, under any circumstances, resort to violence and try to kill him?”

  “Not from my superficial observation, no.”

  “Or be a party to a planned assassination?”

  “Even less likely.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. You may have to say that in court one of these days.” And that was that.

  It was now around five fifteen and the Dibbles should be coming home any minute. So Rook drove out to the address McDowd had given him—which was in a stretch of old stucco one-family houses on Kiowa Street—and found nobody home. As he parked by the curb to wait the Dibbles drove up in their station wagon. The old Dodge still bore its marks of the accident that wasn’t an accident, Rook noted. But one had to be in front of the car to see them.

  Leroy Dibble was a rather thin, very tall, medium-boyish man wearing an Esso gas station attendant’s uniform. Mrs. Dibble, also in her twenties, was fairly attractive, the small, birdlike type who could be shrewish in ten years or so. They both got out of the car, puzzled by Rook’s seemingly professional interest in the damage to headlight and fender.

  “I’d say about a hundred and a half,” he advised them. “That is, if the bumper is straightened instead of being replaced.”

  “Mister, there must be some mistake,” Dibble put in. “Our insurance lapsed. The best estimate we had was $138, but the police say there’s no way to recover.”

  “The cops may not always be right,” Rook told them. He introduced himself without going into any unnecessary details.

  “You mean there’s some way we can collect from that woman who stole our car?” demanded the Dibble woman hopefully.

  “Well now, whoever stole it and used it to commit murder is probably going to be safe in jail, and out of reach of Small Claims court. Murder is sometimes hard on the innocent bystander. You’re lucky it wasn’t any worse.”

  “Well, it’s bad enough!” the woman insisted. “A hundred and something—”

  “Now take it easy, and maybe we can work something out. I work for Mr. Agnews the attorney, and if you cooperate he might feel like picking up the bill for your body work.”

  That hit the target, as he’d known it would. “But I don’t see what we can tell you that we didn’t tell the cops,” said the young man. “Nothing that could possibly be worth that much money.”

  “You shut up, Leroy, and let the gentleman go on!” she said.

  “The police went over your car pretty thoroughly, yes?” Rook wanted to know.

  They both nodded, and Dibble said, “They took it away and held it overnight. And they took our fingerprints like we were common criminals. But I guess they didn’t find much.”

  “Except for the sunglasses, and the gloves, and the old hat?”

  “Yeah. And they kept the hat. Not that it was worth much.”

  Rook had visions of Wilt Mays in the courtroom, politely asking Deirdre if she would pose in the hat, and then when Agnews objected, having some other woman demonstrate how even long hair could be tucked up inside it. “What I want to do is to go a little deeper than the police did,” he told them. “I want you both to think back to that night, late Wednesday, when you found your car not quite where you thought you’d left it on the supermarket parking lot. Who drove home?”

  “I did,” said Leroy Dibble. “Mimi doesn’t drive. That’s why I have to pick her up after work—”

  “Okay. Now, Mr. Dibble, think real hard. Was anything different about this car when you got into it that night? I don’t mean the front-end damage which you didn’t see until you got home here, I mean other things—”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “No two people are alike in their driving habits. When you take over somebody else’s car, you automatically adjust the seat forward or back, you fix the rear-view mirrors so you can see. Was anything changed in this car?”

  “Gosh, I dunno. I know I didn’t slide the seat any, because it’s been stuck for years. I—I might have—”

  “Leroy, you did! You adjusted the rear-view mirror!” she put in.

  “Up or down?” pressed Rook.

  “I think—yes, I tilted it a little bit away from me.”

  “That means that the unauthorized driver was perhaps an inch or two shorter than you! What about the seat belt?”

  Dibble looked sheepish. “No dice, mister. I have to admit I quit bothering with the thing. When I first had them put in we used to be real fussy about fastening ’em, but lately—”

  “But nobody else drives the car, do they? Except whoever took it last Wednesday night! Or did the cops drive it?”

  “They picked it up and towed it, didn’t they, dear?” She nodded.

  Rook worded his next question very carefully. “Then presumably the last person to use the safety belt in the driver’s seat was you, Mr. Dibble. I mean, leaving out Tuesday night?”

  “I guess so, yes.”

  “Do me a favor and get in and see if the seat belt is comfortable for you. Because if it’s been taken in or let out, we have a vital piece of information!”

  Dibble hesitated and then, urged by his wife, went around and got in behind the wheel. He fumbled around for the seat belt and finally brought the two ends together. “Gosh!” he said. “Somebody’s let it out maybe an inch or so.”

  “Very good,” said Howie Rook. “Because anybody who was planning to crash a car—even against a pedestrian victim—would want to be wearing the belt. For most people it’s becoming an automatic habit anyway. And not one person in a thousand ever thinks of putting it back the way it was originally. There was a case in Minneapolis where a wife knew her husband had been taking out a thinner woman … but never mind that. Please remember this conversation, both of you. I think I can safely promise that Mr. Agnews will foot the bill for your repairs, though it’s strictly between us. Thank you both very much.”

  He shook hands with both of them. Then he hesitated. “One thing more. Of course the police checked the ashtray and found nothing. You didn’t either of you empty it on the way home that night?”

  “No,” said Dibble. “Neither of us smokes.”

  “Whoever used your car for murder wouldn’t have been stupid enough to have left cigarette butts around, or anything else. But did you smell tobacco in the car when you got back into it that night?”

  They looked at one another blankly. “No,” said Dibble. “But we’d had a few beers, remember.”

  “Wait!” c
ried Mimi Dibble. “There was something. Let me think! It completely slipped my mind until just now. What you said about smelling tobacco in the car reminded me. The old cigar butt!”

  “Go on!” cried Rook eagerly.

  “It was on the floor in the front seat—a nasty dirty old cigar butt! I stepped on it as we were driving. And I guess—I guess I just threw it out of the window!”

  “Where, woman, where? Was it right there on the Safeway parking lot? Because if you know, even approximately, where you threw it, it could still be there—and that might bust this case wide open. Cigar smokers leave the mark of their teeth on the butt, and it’s sometimes better even than fingerprints!”

  She shook her head slowly. “I wish I could tell you, you being so nice and all. It was somewhere in the street, between the supermarket and here. That’s all. We’d had a few beers, and we were talking about how funny it was that we parked the car in one place and found it in another, and we didn’t know yet that there’d been any funny business—”

  “Thanks, anyway,” said Howie Rook. He felt like the country boy who almost heard the cowbell.

  Rook drove slowly home through the late afternoon traffic, always rough and rougher still on a Friday night, with so many people taking off for holiday weekends. But he comforted himself with thinking of the seat belt behind the wheel of the Dibble Dodge. To him, at least, it proved that Deirdre Charteris—who had a very slim waistline indeed, probably a twenty-four or even twenty-two—could never have been the one to need more room in the seat belt than Dibble.

  Once back in the apartment, Rook lost no time in phoning the Agnews office. Hal was in, and Mike Finn was on his way in, having reported satisfactory progress in Boyle Heights and Covina and no luck at all in Pomona. “And I got word that the Charteris estate is estimated at something over three-quarters of a million, not including the house on Tigertail and the race horse,” Agnews informed him. “How you been doing, Howie?”

  “Not too badly. Might as well report in person. How about you and Finn and me having dinner and a council of war around seven thirty?” Hal said it would be okay with him, he only had a date with one of his ex-wives and that could be broken. “And better send somebody out to cash a check,” Rook put in. “And I need gas—”