Shakeup

by Stuart Woods

  —

  Shortly, he was at the hotel’s service entrance and took the elevator upstairs. Back in his room, he stripped off his clothes and put them into a plastic bag marked dry cleaning. He filled out the ticket and put that into the bag, too, then hung it on the doorknob. Then he went into the bathroom and used a solvent to free the beard, which he washed and dried with the hair dryer, then put back into its case. Finally, he showered, scrubbing with a brush the areas that had been exposed.

  He dried his hair with the hair dryer, got back into his robe, found his slippers and his key card, then walked down the hall to Debby’s suite and knocked softly on the door.

  “Who’s there?” she asked from inside.

  “Rocco.”

  She opened the door, still dressed in her robe, and closed it behind him.

  “Tell me how it went,” she said.

  “From all appearances, Mr. Craft had a disagreement with his girlfriend, and he shot her twice in the head as she lay in bed. Then he went into his study, opened a window, and departed for the alley below. He was still in the alley, undisturbed, when I last saw him. I dropped the weapon after him, and it rests near his body. Then I got the hell out of there.”

  “Rocco,” she said, kissing him and feeling for the opening of his robe, “you’re a wonder.”

  “I believe I am, at that,” Rocco replied, freeing her of her garment.

  She led him to bed. “Let’s celebrate,” she said, pulling him in behind her.

  “Hip, hip, hooray!” Rocco said.

  54

  Stone and Maren were taking a walk up Park Avenue in the late afternoon when Maren got a call. She stopped. “Excuse me for a moment, Stone. Yes?” She listened intently. “What’s the address? Cross street? I’ll be there in ten minutes.” She hung up and took Stone’s arm again, and they walked on. She was very quiet.

  “Is anything wrong?” he asked.

  “Well,” she said. “It appears that I’ve lost my witness, who could have convicted Little Debby.”

  “Eddie Craft?”

  She nodded. “We’re only a few blocks away. You’re an old homicide detective, Stone. I’d like you to give me your take on this.” She wouldn’t say more.

  They reached East Sixty-third Street and crossed Park. “Here we are,” she said.

  “This is Dino’s building.”

  “I know.” They entered the building, and she flashed her badge to the doorman.

  An agent stood nearby. “I’ll take you up, Director,” he said, then led the way to the elevator.

  The door to apartment 14D stood open, and Stone could see men down the hall in the living room.

  “This way,” their agent said, pointing at the doorway. “Bedroom is right, then left.”

  Stone and Maren bent over the body. “One in the temple, one in the back of the head,” he said. He saw a pill bottle and read the label. “Ambien.”

  “This way, Director,” the agent behind them said. He led them through the living room to the dining room, where a window stood wide open. “Stand on the chair and look down,” he said, then helped Maren up. She got down, and Stone took a turn.

  “Any conclusions?” Maren asked Stone.

  “Only the obvious ones: he shot her twice while she was sleeping, then took a dive out the window, taking the gun with him. It’s next to the body. I’d like to hear from the medical examiner before I go any further.”

  “Why would he shoot her?” Maren asked.

  “The ME isn’t going to tell us that. My guess is they were married or longtime companions, and that makes this a case of domestic violence. They’re unpredictable before the fact and, often, unsolvable afterward, unless you can locate a few good friends and hear what they have to say about the relationship. My guess is that Eddie was a loner, except for his girl, so he wouldn’t have a lot of friends.”

  “You don’t see anything professional in this, then?” she asked.

  Stone shook his head. “Not unless your crime scene team comes up with some DNA or other evidence indicating the presence of a third party.”

  “So, it’s a murder-suicide?”

  “Probably. It would be a hard thing for a pro to plan, but he might have done it on the fly, found himself in circumstances that required killing them both. Someone recently mentioned Occam’s razor to me.”

  “We’d never solve anything, if we didn’t look beyond Occam’s razor,” she said.

  “Good point, but why tie yourself in knots? If you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”

  Maren managed a chuckle.

  “I think you would spend your time more profitably looking for someone who can back up Eddie’s story about Little Debby stealing the gun from the D.C. evidence locker.”

  “We’ve already interviewed his neighbors in the lockup. The cop in charge was in the john with a crossword.”

  “Hang on,” Stone said.

  “What?”

  “Let’s go take a look at the scene in the alley.”

  They rode the elevator down and walked outside, then around the corner. The rain had stopped an hour before, but they had to avoid puddles.

  Eddie’s body was a crumpled heap, and the weapon lay nearby. “What kind of weapon was stolen from the evidence room?” Stone asked.

  “A .22 semiautomatic pistol with a silencer,” Maren said.

  Stone pointed at the gun near the body. “Voilà,” he said.

  They were walking back up the alley when the ME’s van backed in. Maren slapped a palm on the fender; it stopped and a door opened. She gave the man her card. “Call me when you’re done; I don’t want to wait for the written report.”

  They walked on up the alley to the street. “Let’s steal a car,” she said, pointing at an FBI vehicle.

  “Go right ahead, Director,” an agent said.

  “Hello, Karl. I’d like you to get a ballistics report on the weapon at the scene. It resembles one stolen from a D.C. evidence room, and I want a comparison.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the man said. They got into the car, and Maren gave the driver Stone’s address.

  * * *

  —

  They were at dinner that evening, at Patroon, with the Bacchettis.

  “I don’t like people getting killed in my building,” Dino said. “Or jumping out windows. It’s bad for property values.”

  Maren’s phone rang, and everybody kept quiet while she listened. Finally, she hung up.

  “What?” Stone asked.

  “The gun in the evidence room was used in a homicide, so they had a full ballistics report on it. They did another at our offices on the gun found near Eddie’s body. It’s the same weapon.”

  “No doubt?” Stone asked.

  “No doubt.”

  “What does that tell us?” Maren said.

  Stone sighed. “I’m trying to think of a scenario that would make possible the use of this gun in two murders, in separate cities.”

  “One murder,” Dino said.

  “Two,” Stone replied. “The woman was shot twice.”

  Dino nodded.

  “Can you think of such a scenario?” Stone asked.

  Dino squinted. “Little Debby steals a gun from the evidence room in D.C., then she gives it to the guy who’s about to testify against her, so he can use it on his girlfriend before he offs himself?”

  “You see the problem,” Stone said to everybody. “I can’t make it make sense.”

  Maren shook her head. “It happened, so there is a scenario. We just have to figure it out.”

  “I need another drink,” Stone said.

  55

  Stone and Maren were getting into bed, but sex was not on either of their minds.

  Stone froze for a moment, deep in thought.

  “There was a third party in
the apartment,” he said.

  Maren turned and stared at him. “Why do you think that?”

  “Because it’s the only thing that makes any sense. Debbie stole the gun from evidence, not Eddie, right?”

  “That’s true.”

  “And Eddie hotfooted it out of the country to England, as soon as he hit the street. He may even have been the guy who coshed me.”

  “‘Cosh’ is an old-time criminal’s word,” Maren said. “Eddie’s friend, Alfie, probably coshed you.”

  “My point is, Eddie was in the room; he was in the country in England. He was not someplace where Little Debby could hand him the gun. In fact, she probably stole it to use it on Eddie. Wait a minute, wasn’t Donald Clark shot with such a weapon?”

  “I believe he was.”

  “Okay, compare the ballistics of the gun in custody to that of the Clark bullets.”

  Maren tapped out an e-mail and sent it. “We should have that tomorrow, since the record already exists for both shootings. Now, what else?”

  “Do we believe that Little Debby shot Clark and Eddie herself?”

  “I don’t. She had an ironclad alibi for the Clark murder. My bet is she’ll have one for Eddie’s death, too.”

  “You read the ME’s report,” Stone said. “Were there any bullets in Eddie’s body?”

  “No, they’re saying the fall killed him.”

  “Where’s the report?”

  She went to her handbag, produced it, and gave it to Stone. “Okay,” Stone said. “‘Death resulted from head injuries resulting from a fall from a fourteenth-story window.’ There’s no mention of a slug in the body.” He read on. “Wait a minute, there were some marks on the body not associated with the fall.”

  “I didn’t get that far,” Maren admitted. “I probably would have later. What were the marks?”

  “An elongated bruise on the back of the neck,” Stone read, “and another mark, but not a bruise, over the right kidney. I remember the body lying on its left side,” Stone said. “Leaving it open to the injury above the kidney.”

  “Go on; the rest of the scenario, please.”

  “I’m not a doctor, but let me play one for a minute.”

  “Go right ahead, Doctor.”

  “A bruise is formed by blood collecting under the skin from an injury, breaking tiny blood vessels, I think the little blood vessels are called capillaries.”

  “Right.”

  “So, our third party hit Eddie across the back of his neck, rendering him unconscious, but not dead, so there was still blood flowing to collect under the skin, forming the bruise.”

  “Agreed.”

  “The other injury, the one over the kidney, did not form a bruise, so we can posit—I love that word, posit—that Eddie was already dead when he suffered the non-bruising blow above the kidney.”

  “One injury before death, one after,” Maren agreed. “I buy the gun being used for the blow to the back of the neck, but what caused the one above the kidney?”

  “The gun,” Stone said.

  “But it didn’t cause a bruise.”

  “Here’s how it went, to my mind,” Stone said. “First of all, I was wrong about the guy not being a pro. He was very much a pro. He gets into the apartment—probably Eddie let him in—he slugs Eddie, who goes out like a light. Then he opens a window and tosses Eddie out.”

  “Why do you think that?” Maren asked.

  “Because Eddie went out the window—no question about that. And if he was unconscious at the time, it was because the third party in the apartment—the pro—made him that way.”

  “I buy that,” she said. “Tell me about the girl.”

  “The pro would have cleaned up after himself, so he’s looking around, and he finds the girl in bed, asleep—she’s taken Ambien—and he finds it necessary to improvise, so he shoots her. But he has to hang the murder on Eddie, so he goes back to the open window and tosses the gun out. Eddie is lying, dead, in the alley, and the falling gun strikes him over the right kidney, then bounces off to where your agents found it. I’ll give you odds there are no fingerprints on the weapon, because Eddie couldn’t make any, and the pro would have wiped the gun, because he couldn’t put Eddie’s prints on it at that time, and he certainly didn’t want his own on the weapon.”

  Maren took herself through the scenario, making little gestures as she thought, then stopped and looked at Stone. “I buy it,” she said, “all of it. Horses, not zebras. Now I’m too excited to sleep.”

  “Let me make another suggestion,” Stone said, reaching for her.

  56

  They slept quietly through the night, sated with each other. The bell on the dumbwaiter woke Stone at seven. They finished their saugage and eggs quietly and were having coffee when Stone spoke.

  “We’ve got another problem,” he said.

  “Swell,” she said, “and just when I thought we’d—or rather, you’d—worked it out. What is the problem?”

  “We don’t know who the third party was—the pro.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “And how are we going to find out?” he asked.

  “Well,” Maren said, “pros don’t take out an ad in the Times, do they?”

  “They used to do that in Soldier of Fortune magazine,” Stone said, “but I’m not sure that’s even still in business.”

  “I haven’t heard of it in years,” Maren said.

  “How well do you know Little Debby?” he asked.

  “I’ve had a drink with her. I think we’ve been at the same dinner party a couple of times, but I can’t say I know her.”

  “Who’s her best friend?”

  “Donald Clark,” she replied, “but she apparently got tired of him.”

  “Do you know of anybody who knows her well?”

  “She’s not the sort to have a lot of friends, and certainly not the kind she would confide in about how to hire a pro.”

  They finished their coffee and went to their respective showers.

  * * *

  —

  Debby awoke in a bed that was empty on the other side, but still a little warm. She called Rocco’s room.

  “Yes?”

  “Aren’t you coming to me for breakfast?”

  “I didn’t think I should be there, naked, when the room service waiter arrives.”

  “Well, there is that.”

  “You order, I’ll shower and dress. Call me when the waiter has gone.”

  “I’ll do that.” They both hung up.

  * * *

  —

  They had breakfast at the table in Debby’s sitting room. “Is it too early for us to scram?” she asked.

  “Do you want to stick around until the cops call on you?”

  “Why should they do that?” she asked.

  “Well, if the only person who could give credible testimony against you takes a dive out a high window, they might have a few questions for you.”

  She looked at her watch. “I’ll give them until we’re ready to check out, then we’re out of here. Call the driver for me, will you? Here in an hour?”

  “Certainly,” Rocco replied.

  * * *

  —

  At his desk later in the morning, Stone called Dino.

  “Bacchetti.”

  “Let me run a scenario by you about Eddie Craft’s death,” Stone said.

  “You know that’s a federal matter, don’t you? Craft had already been served with a subpoena.”

  “Well, yeah, but listen to this anyway. I just want to know if you think it plays.”

  “Okay, I’m listening.”

  Stone took him through his theory of the murders, pausing frequently to answer Dino’s questions. Finally, he was done. “What do you think?”

  “I think you’ve crafted a
theory to match the circumstances, but that doesn’t mean it will convince a jury. You’ve gotta come up with the third guy, the pro.”

  “And even if we do, why is the pro going to tell us all?”

  “Tell you what. You find the pro, then leave him in a room with me for half an hour, and he’ll tell me all.”

  “So your plan is to beat it out of him?”

  “Of course not! You know we don’t do that anymore!”

  “I do?”

  “Trust me, you do.”

  “Okay, okay, but if we’re going to find the pro, we’re going to have to get his name out of Little Debby, and if we left her alone in a room with you for half an hour, she’d probably beat you up.”

  “You wound me,” Dino said, sounding wounded.

  “No, but Little Debby certainly would.”

  “Whatever,” Dino said.

  “So, who do you know who knows what makes Little Debby tick?”

  “Donald Clark,” Dino said, “but he’s out of action.”

  “You’re a big help. Anybody else?”

  “Maybe,” Dino said.

  “Don’t be coy. If you’ve got something, spit it out.”

  “Okay,” Dino said. “How’s this for a trail of breadcrumbs for you to follow . . . Little Debby had a rep for liking her lovers in pairs, didn’t she?”

  “Yes, and sometimes treys.”

  “Then ask somebody she fucked.”

  “Well, let’s see: I can think of three, and two of them are dead. In fact, it has just occurred to me that one of them, Deana Carlyle, died the same way Donald Clark did.”

  “Deana Carlyle? Producing another victim isn’t going to get you the name of the pro, but she was somebody’s girlfriend, wasn’t she?”

  Stone snapped his fingers. “That’s it!”

  “Did you snap your fingers?” Dino asked. “You hardly ever do that. You must have come up with something good.”

  “Art Jacoby,” Stone said. “Deana was his girlfriend, and they’ve both been in the sack with Debby.”

  “And Art hates her, so he knows her well!”