The delivery was so dry and factual that I couldn’t tell if she were being catty or not. But it was just the sort of thing a jealous and envious woman might say.
“Just for the sake of discussion, Judge,” I said, “where were you around the time of the murder - say an hour in either direction?”
“I don’t know because I don’t know when the murder happened. I presume I was dressing in my hotel room, enjoying the cocktail hour or in transit between the two. At any rate I was with my husband the entire afternoon and evening.”
“Your husband?” Lynda echoed.
Her obvious surprise - and mine, too - put a smile on Molly Crocker’s face.
“You mean you sleuths didn’t know? I’m married to Noah Queensbury.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight - The Key to Everything
The Crocker-Queensbury connection still had me numb some minutes after the distaff side of that combo had returned to the Hearth Room.
“I knew she was married because I noticed her wedding ring yesterday,” I told Lynda, leaning my rear end against the escalator, “but why didn’t somebody tell me her husband was Queensbury?”
“Why should they?” Lynda demanded. “Is that supposed to be the most important thing about her - who her husband is?”
“Maybe not, but it could be important enough, and there was no way for me to know it. Even the hotel room was in the Crocker name.”
“Well, it had to be in one name or the other.”
There was no way to respond to that without digging myself into a deeper hole, so I changed the subject.
“If Maximum Molly is married to Queensbury, she could have been wearing his deerstalker last night,” I said.
“Oh, yeah? When does he ever take it off? I bet he even wears it to bed. Jeff, whoever was wearing that hat could have easily bought it, borrowed it or brought it from home. She or he didn’t have to be married to it.”
“I vote against buying,” I said. “If the deerstalker was a kind of minimal disguise, the killer would have thought of that earlier and wouldn’t have had to buy it here at the colloquium.”
“You’re assuming premeditation?” Lynda asked.
I nodded. “The use of a gun smacks of planning. I know we have a concealed carry law in Ohio, but I can’t see these Sherlockians packing heat to a quiet campus in Erin.”
“Maybe not, but I know who might have.” She paused to give the name the appropriate amount of drama. “Al Kane. He’s always shooting guns on those TV commercials.”
“But he doesn’t have any possible motive!”
“Correction: He doesn’t have any motive that we’ve found out about yet. Don’t dismiss him as a suspect just because you like his sexist, adolescent-”
“Okay, this isn’t getting us anywhere,” I interrupted. “I’m not writing off anybody as a potential suspect. For instance, Molly Crocker still could have been fooling around with Matheson, even though she is married and three months pregnant.”
Molly had offered that last bit of information unsolicited.
It was easy to see Renata Chalmers with her septuagenarian husband as easy pickings for a handsome, charismatic dude like Matheson. She knew his reputation, but I bet all of his other women did, too. So why should Molly Crocker be any less vulnerable than anyone else just because she was a judge and a tough cookie?
“An affair between Molly and Matheson would give Queensbury a hell of a murder motive,” I said. “Maybe Dr. Q. had just caught on to what his wife was up to and that’s what his argument with Matheson was really about - not some Sherlock Holmes silliness, as Queensbury claimed. And as you just pointed out, Queensbury’s been wearing a deerstalker all weekend. Don’t overlook the obvious.”
Lynda shook her head. “You’re spinning this out of whole cloth and your fiction writer’s imagination. Crocker just gave Queensbury an alibi. I hardly think she’d be protective of him if he’d killed Matheson in a fit of jealousy. Anyway, I believe the judge when she said there wasn’t anything between her and Matheson. As a political figure she had too much to lose.”
“Wait a minute. What do you mean? Politicians get caught with their pants down all the time.”
“Sure, men do. But can you think of a single female governor, senator or U.S. Representative who had to resign because of a sex scandal?”
She had me there. Whether that proved anything was beside the point, because Lynda steamed on:
“You can cross both her and Queensbury off your suspect list. The key to everything, Jeff, is something else Crocker said - bragging rights.”
She tore the gold wrapping off of a Werther’s Original caramel and popped the candy into her mouth.
“Remember how Crocker said she thought Chalmers could live with his wife’s infidelity as long as he maintained bragging rights to her?” Lynda continued. “Well, how long do you think that would last? According to Crocker’s account, Matheson was taunting Chalmers with the knowledge that he’d made time with Renata. That was probably the whole point of the affair for him - to take away, in a sense, another one of Chalmers’s prize collectibles.”
“I had that same feeling.”
“Then do you suppose Matheson could be content to tell only Chalmers about it?” She shook her head. “No way. That was just the first step in humiliating the old man. Next he would have spread the word all around, making Chalmers a laughingstock, a comic opera cuckold.”
“Chalmers wouldn’t put up with that.”
Lynda nodded. “That’s my point.”
“No, no, Chalmers as killer doesn’t work. He couldn’t have gone to the Winfield. Mac was with him during the murder hour, remember?”
“But at a cocktail party. You know how packed those things get and how time flies when you’re talking and drinking, especially drinking. Chalmers could have slipped out for a half hour or forty-five minutes without Mac being any the wiser.”
And Renata wouldn’t have seen it, I thought. She’d been back at Mac’s house, still fixing her hair in that elaborate ’do.
“He must have taken a cab to the Winfield,” Lynda said with building excitement. “We can check that out easily enough through the cab company, or at least Oscar’s troops could. Matheson’s unknown visitor wore a deerstalker cap. How many of those do you suppose Chalmers owns?”
“About enough to outfit the Chinese army, I guess.”
With a sense of exhilaration I was beginning to believe Lynda could be close to the truth, a truth Mac probably didn’t suspect even though he had put Chalmers on the list to be interviewed.
“And what about Chalmers’s precious stolen books?” I said.
“I don’t know why he missed two of them, but I bet he has the one that’s still missing. We need to search his room at the McCabes’ house.”
“I didn’t see anything when I was there with Renata this morning.”
Lynda’s eyes dilated. “What were you doing-”
“I wasn’t looking for the books,” I said. Wait, that didn’t sound right. “I’ll explain later. I guess it would take a really thorough search to find the books if they were hidden, and I can’t do that now. I have to take Nakamora to a live interview on WIJC in” - I looked at my watch - “five minutes.”
“Fine. I’ll do it.”
Applause echoed over the speaker in the hallway. Bob Nakamora apparently had finished enlightening his audience about “Holmes on the Radio.”
“You can’t just go barging into Mac’s house,” I told Lynda.
“Why not? You would if you weren’t tied up.”
“I’m kin.”
“And don’t tell me you’ll do it later,” she said, talking right over me. She pulled a folded-up copy of the colloquium schedule out of her purse. “This is the perfect time because Mac’s talking next. You can bet your sister a
nd both Chalmerses will be hanging on every word. Nobody’s going to go back to the house for anything.”
All of a sudden we had a lot of company in the hallway. People were oozing out of the Hearth Room, taking advantage of the end of Bob Nakamora’s talk to run outside for a smoke, hit the john, or just stretch their legs.
Nakamora himself paused just outside the doorway, straining his neck to look around. Renata Chalmers, standing next to him, tapped him on the arm and pointed at me. He smiled in relief and started coming my way.
“You win, dammit.” I pulled the key to the McCabe household out of my pocket and gave it to Lynda. “Wipe your feet on the hall carpet before you go in.”
“I always do. Meet you back here.”
She snatched the key out of my hand like one of those toy banks that grabs your coins. She was down the escalator by the time Bob Nakamora reached me.
“Are we going to be late for the interview?” he fretted.
“Not if we hurry. Come on.”
As we descended on the escalator, Renata Chalmers peered over the railing at us, her lovely face devoid of any expression that I could read. What did she know about the murder, I wondered, and what did she suspect?
We reached the main level and kept going down. The studios of WIJC-FM, like the offices of the campus newspaper, The Spectator, are located on the lower level of Muckerheide Center. The Spectator was shut down for spring break, but not the radio station, which is college-owned but not exclusively student-run. With impeccable timing, Tony Lampwicke was just finishing his interview with the author of some incredibly obscure (and therefore noteworthy) academic book when we arrived.
The long-time host of the weekly Crosscurrents program nodded to acknowledge our presence and moved smoothly into an introduction of a new topic in his heavy British accent. “Very stimulating indeed,” he said to an invisible conversation partner, apparently a telephone interviewee. “I’m sure your fine book will spark quite a revival of interest in Bulgarian neoclassicism. You know, the medium of radio itself is undergoing something of a revival these days...”
Lampwicke famously has a penchant for analyzing everything beyond the bounds of reason with a humorless intensity. He must be well into his forties, but he somehow seemed younger sitting behind the microphone in his loafers and cable knit sweater. His chin was sharp enough to be a lethal weapon and was covered by a neatly trimmed goatee.
“We have with us in the studio today on Crosscurrents an expert on old-time radio, and particularly the many radio adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the famous...”
I wanted to pace or crack my knuckles or do anything other than sit and listen to those two babble on. Most of all I wanted to join Lynda at Mac’s house. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore and I eased myself out of the studio. After all, I’d done my duty just by making sure that Nakamora had arrived on time. I was sure he could find his way back upstairs.
The glass door to the studio had just closed behind me when I heard, “Cody! Hold it right there.”
It was the law. And he was wearing a deerstalker cap.
Chapter Twenty-Nine - Police Procedures
“Popcorn told me I’d find you here.”
“Oscar, you look ridiculous in that deerstalker,” I said.
“I’m just trying it on.” At least he had just enough taste to sound a little defensive. “You liked the Panama hat better?”
I ignored that.
We started walking toward a bench across from the studio.
“How’s the investigation going?”
“It’s continuing.”
Wow, that was informative. “Throw me a bone here, Oscar. For instance, did you find out who it was your witness saw coming out of Matheson’s room, wearing the deerstalker?” He hesitated, as if he didn’t want to tell me, so I went into persuasion mode. “Come on, Oscar. I have a stake in this. We’re on my turf here. I just want to know where things stand.”
He shook his head. “Nobody admitted it, and it could have been just about any clown in this carnival.”
We sat down.
“Including a woman?” I pressed. “You said ‘he’ when you told me about it, but couldn’t it have been a woman, like Molly Crocker, for example?” I was having a hard time letting go of that particular bone, even though I liked her.
“I guess so, if she were dressed in a man’s clothing or something that could pass for it - gender-neutral, I guess you’d call it. Funny you should mention the judge, though. We had an interesting conversation, for reasons I won’t get into. I think she’s clean. If she hasn’t killed that lunatic she’s married to, I figure she wouldn’t kill anybody.”
I could see his point. That would make an interesting defense strategy.
“So you’re nowhere on the deerstalkers?”
“I didn’t say that and don’t put words in my mouth. I got the names of the five people who bought deerstalkers from that guy selling them along with the books. I’ve got Gibbons working the list.”
Damn. I should have pressed Pinkwater on that.
“Five not counting you, I presume. Anybody I know?”
“I don’t know who you know, but I’m drawing the line there, pal. I’m not giving you any names. Besides, it may not mean anything anyway. We’ve got a new witness, a woman on the housekeeping staff, who got a better look at a guy coming out of Matheson’s room.”
Now he tells me. In the news business, that’s what is known as “burying the lead.”
“He was a redhead,” Oscar added. “That’s all I know right now. What I wanted to tell you is, I’m going back to the Winfield right now to interview the witness myself.”
Somebody saw me. Fighting panic, I tried to pretend my hair wasn’t the color of a carrot and this couldn’t possibly have anything to do with me.
“Al Kane is a red-head,” I mused, hating myself for casting suspicion on one of my favorite writers. “And we know he likes guns.” I was thinking of all those years of National Pistol Association commercials that ended with him pointing a Magnum .357 right at the viewer.
“He claims he’s never even owned a gun,” Oscar said. “I’ve got a search warrant to have all the hotel rooms checked. We’re looking for a .32 revolver. The bullet was still in the body, didn’t go right through. That and the fact that there were no powder burns - ‘tattooing’ they call it - probably means the killer wasn’t too close to the body. Now, that’s kind of odd. How far away can you get in a hotel room? But it doesn’t tell us much. And, of course, the killer wiped the place clean of fingerprints.”
Happy as I was that I hadn’t missed any of my prints or Lynda’s, I also felt guilty that I’d possibly destroyed important evidence. But what were the chances of that, really? In detective stories, fingerprints are almost always false clues that get the wrong people in trouble. Surely whoever killed Matheson knew enough to wipe up afterwards.
“But I have a hard time figuring Al Kane for this,” Oscar went on. “From what I can tell, he’s about the least popular guy here but that’s just because he isn’t one of those Sherlockian wackos. I don’t see a motive. In fact, I don’t see a reason for anybody to kill Matheson. But then again, I also don’t see why a guy with all his dough would steal the stuff from that collection. Kleptomania, maybe?”
“What!”
Oscar looked puzzled. “Didn’t Ed Decker tell you? I told my guys to let him know. We found two of the missing books in Matheson’s hotel room.”
Chapter Thirty - Not Tonight, I Have a Headache
My surprise was a put-on, of course. Oscar’s force is small but not incompetent. I knew they would find the books sooner or later, or the housekeeping staff would.
But Oscar wasn’t within a mile of solving this murder. And so far as I could tell, neither was Mac - never mind his mysterious pronouncements designed to give th
at impression.
That left it up to me - and Lynda. Having no more real questions for the chief, I wrapped up the conversation and walked out of Muckerheide Center as casually as I could muster.
Then I broke into a jog.
Not much more than fifteen minutes later, taking a few shortcuts along the way, I arrived at the old McCabe house on Half Moon Street. I didn’t have my key, having given it to Lynda, so I banged the iron door knocker. A long minute passed without the door opening. I banged again, loud enough to wake the dead. Still no answer.
Finally I turned the doorknob and gave an experimental push. The door opened.
“Anybody home?” I yelled, standing in the hallway. The words seemed to echo off the brass hall tree, the antique secretary, the framed paintings. Everything was familiar, yet somehow ominous. The silence was creeping me out. “Lynda!” I called
No response.
She might have completed her reconnaissance mission in Mac’s guest suite and returned to St. Benignus already - except that I’d seen her yellow Mustang in the driveway outside my carriage house apartment.
I moved through the house slowly, like a thief in the night. That made no sense at all after the racket I’d already made, but I was functioning on the level of raw nerves and instinct now; sense or nonsense had nothing to do with it.
Within several feet of the guest suite I could see that the door was open. Nothing surprising about that, but it made the hair on the nape of my neck do handstands. I walked even slower, trying to prepare myself for whatever I might find in the room.
It didn’t work, of course; nothing could prepare me for the awful sight of Lynda lying just inside the guest room, limp and lifeless as a marionette with its strings cut. Her body was curled almost in a fetal position, with her legs bent back and one of her blue-gray shoes off.
Unsteady on my legs, I dropped to my knees and felt her pulse. It was strong.
Satisfied that she was in no danger of dying, I held her hand and kissed her on the forehead. “Lynda, Lynda,” I murmured, not expecting her to hear. “If we could get back together, I’d never be a jerk again.”
No Police Like Holmes Page 16
