Murder Times Two

by Haughton Murphy

Stymied, Frost sat for a moment collecting himself. He was tired, his fatigue hardly surprising given the appalling event that had just occurred, plus the fair amount that he had eaten and drunk. As he looked around the room, decorated with autographed pictures of jazz musicians and three or four framed examples of Tobias’ needlepoint, he spotted a manila folder on the desk, labeled simply “GREAT KILL OPERATIONS—Week ending March 3.” He could not resist looking inside and examining the summary sheets he found.

  The information in the neat folder showed that Great Kill was profitable indeed: cash receipts were $402,000 for the week. Frost calculated that if this was typical it meant annual cash flow on the order of $20 million, or perhaps even more, most of which was pretax profit. Not bad, not bad at all, Reuben thought. And certainly enough money to interest a murderer.

  Frost tried to recall the terms of Tobias Vandermeer’s will, then remembered that the 50 percent share of Great Kill still in Vandermeer hands was in trust for Tobias’ children. But Tobias had not had any children. Who would inherit? The Bloemendael Foundation? Dr. Givens’ foundation? Reuben shuddered, trying to repel the nasty speculation that crossed his mind.

  But how about Robyn? he asked himself. Again he tried to reconstruct what he knew of Vandermeer family affairs, but could not recall how Robyn was provided for. Certainly she must be, he reasoned, and, based on the figures before him, ruefully concluded that she would be able to pay the servants without his help.

  He snapped the folder shut, realizing that he must return to the others, though he first stopped in Tobias’ bathroom adjoining the study.

  When he went to wash his hands, he saw that the top of a plastic medicine bottle was sitting in the middle of the washbasin. Looking around, he discovered the topless bottle under the sink. Capsules, each half-blue and half-aqua, were tumbling out onto the floor. He was going to pick the bottle up when he noticed for the first time a peculiar smell in the room that was strongest near the spilled container. He could not decide what the odor was; perhaps burnt almonds, but he couldn’t be sure.

  Reuben had already decided that if Tobias has been poisoned the lethal substance must have been in one of his manifold drinks. But now he realized that perhaps there was an alternative, and that he might now be looking at the source of the poison. He gingerly got down on his hands and knees and was able to read the label, which described 120-milligram capsules of Inderal–LA, two capsules to be taken once a day. Shaken, he got up and closed the bathroom door firmly behind him, the pill bottle still in its odd location, and headed downstairs.

  The group he encountered in the library was frightened, if not downright terrorized. All eyes turned to him as he entered and announced that the police were on the way.

  Robyn Vandermeer sat forward in the armchair in which she was sitting. “Why do we have to have the police, Reuben?” she pleaded. “You’re a lawyer and Wayne is a doctor. Can’t you take care of the red tape? The death certificate, all that?”

  “I’m afraid it’s not the simple,” Frost said. “After all, Tobias was poisoned.”

  Robyn sighed deeply; the others stirred uncomfortably. “I can’t believe it. I know Wayne says so. But it’s ridiculous. Tobias drank himself to death. That’s the truth and I know it.”

  “Robyn, it’s distasteful, but there really was no choice but to call the police. I’m sure they will make things as easy as possible,” Frost said.

  His words were belied by a noisy troupe that invaded the apartment—two radio patrolmen and two paramedics. Reuben, nearest the library door when the doorbell rang, went to admit them.

  “Someone’s been poisoned?” the taller of the policemen, Patrolman Aurelio, asked brusquely.

  “Where’s the body?” one of the paramedics asked simultaneously.

  “Yes, in there,” Frost said, answering both questions and gesturing toward the living room.

  “Other people here?” Aurelio asked.

  “They’re all in the library. Across the hall.”

  “Who called us? You?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And you said it was a poisoning?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s back there?” Aurelio said, pointing in front of him.

  “The dining room and the kitchen.”

  “Come with me.”

  Frost, with Aurelio on one side and Patrolman McKenna on the other, was gently propelled toward the kitchen and told to sit down at the kitchen table. He gave the two policemen Tobias’ vital statistics as best he knew them, a brief account of his host’s dramatic collapse and a rundown on the witnesses who had been present.

  “How did you know he was poisoned?” Aurelio demanded.

  “I didn’t. That was Dr. Givens’ conclusion. He’s a psychiatrist, which I believe means he’s an M.D.”

  “Go get him,” Aurelio said to his partner. “Bring him out here.”

  While they were waiting, Frost remembered the offending bottle upstairs.

  “There’s one thing I think you ought to do right away,” Frost said, going on to describe the Inderal bottle and how he had found it. He remembered his friend Bautista’s complaints about ordinary cops messing up evidence, but felt nonetheless that it was important to have it under police control as quickly as possible.

  While Reuben was talking, McKenna returned with Dr. Givens and was given the new assignment of securing the medicine bottle and its spilled capsules. Givens seemed shaken in the presence of the police. He started to ask Reuben what was happening, but Aurelio brusquely interrupted him.

  “Mr. Frost, could you wait in here, please?” he said, motioning to the maid’s room normally occupied by Kathleen Boyle.

  “Can’t I join the others in the library?”

  “No, best you stay here. I want to talk to Dr. Givens and then I’ll get back to you.”

  Frost went into the servant’s room without protest, Aurelio closing the door behind him. In the circumstances, the austerity and minuscule size of the room reminded him of only one thing: a jail cell. He sat down in the solitary chair, nervously contemplating the religious iconography assembled by the devout Miss Boyle.

  Frost could hear Aurelio and Wayne Givens talking in the kitchen, but could not make out what they were saying. (He prudently refrained from putting his ear directly to the door, though he concluded that it was fair game to stand near it and try to hear.) When the voices disappeared, Frost stayed obediently in his confinement. He was tempted to stretch out on Miss Boyle’s chaste single bed but decided against it. Instead he concentrated on the religious pictures on the dresser until the eyes of the Virgin in the largest chromo appeared to him to move, whereupon he fled the room, police orders or not; a murder and a miracle in one night would be too much.

  The kitchen was empty, but voices were audible in the dining room. He opened the swinging door, lightly striking Aurelio’s arm as he did so.

  “Pardon me, officer. I was wondering …”

  “Okay, Frost. We’re almost ready for you. Stay there in the kitchen and we’ll be with you in a minute.”

  “Can I make a telephone call while I’m waiting?”

  “Later, sir, if you don’t mind.”

  Was there some new hostility there? Frost wondered. “Frost,” not “Mr. Frost.” Not that he cared in the least, but why the change in attitude? Or was he simply edgy in the surreal circumstances in which he found himself? And what about the phone call? Even criminals caught red-handed could make one free phone call, or so he had always believed. He wanted very much to reach Bautista, who would not keep him waiting in suspense in Robyn Vandermeer’s kitchen.

  Reuben’s nervous-making meditations were interrupted by a new pair of strangers. He rose from his seat at the kitchen table almost reflexively as they approached.

  “Sit down, sit down,” the shorter of the two said. “You Frost?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Detective Springer,” said the short one, an ample, rounded figure fully occupying his composition br
own suit, both his shape and clothing making him look older than he probably was.

  “And this is my partner, Detective Mattocks,” he added, with a jerk of the thumb toward a tall young black wearing a plaid sportcoat and navy-blue slacks. Both showed Frost their police shields.

  “What happened?” Springer asked, carefully opening his notebook and pulling a ballpoint pen from his pocket after taking a seat beside Frost at the round kitchen table. Mattocks, who remained standing, leaned against the wall and looked directly at Frost.

  Reuben was disconcerted by Springer’s vague but direct question and Mattocks’ unflinching stare.

  “How do you mean, officer?” Frost asked, resorting to the stalling device of lawyers and appliance repairmen of answering a question with a question, and realizing as he spoke that his response must have sounded stupid.

  “Let’s take it step by step,” Springer said deliberately. “There was a call to nine one one at eight fifty-five. You made that call?”

  “I called nine one one and that certainly would have been about the time.”

  “And you said the victim—” Springer glanced at his notebook—“Tobias Vandermeer, was dead of poisoning, right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “As I told your colleague, one of the people in the room was a doctor. A psychiatrist, but a doctor. He said Tobias had been poisoned.”

  “After he’d examined him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not before?”

  “No, I’m certain not.”

  “So you had no independent knowledge of the victim being poisoned, aside from what the doctor, Dr. Givens, said?”

  “That’s right. Except of course that even I could see that something was terribly wrong. Tobias’ lips and mouth were blue.”

  Springer questioned Reuben closely on this. How had he been able to see Tobias, sprawled on the floor several feet from where Reuben, on further interrogation, placed himself? Where were the others standing or sitting? Who actually touched the body? Who broke one of the glasses that fell to the floor?

  Frost answered the detective’s queries as clearly and concisely as he could. Working with Springer, the two constructed a diagram of where everyone had been sitting at the crucial moment. As for who touched the body, Frost said he was sure that Dr. Givens had been the only one. And, while cautioning the detectives that he could not be sure, he told them he believed Helena Newcomb had stepped on the glass that had broken.

  As Springer and Frost talked, Mattocks remained silent and kept up his disconcerting surveillance of Reuben. Springer’s initially gruff and suspicious attitude seemed to vanish as his subject gave patient, straightforward answers to his questions. Frost was nonetheless puzzled by the detective’s seeming disorganization. He jumped from subject to subject in no particular order or logical sequence. Surely this was intentional, Frost concluded—some police-academy technique to keep him off base.

  Once Springer had established the seating arrangement in the living room, for example, he took up the subject of the medicine bottle found upstairs, pressing Reuben about how he had happened to find it. (The very simple fact that Reuben had gone to the bathroom and had found the spilled bottle in the process seemed to him a completely plausible explanation of the discovery, yet he had the feeling that Springer found it deficient.)

  “Did the bottle contain the poison?” Frost asked, turning the tables on the detective.

  “We won’t know until the lab does its analysis. All we know now is that it had a damn strange smell, like you said.”

  Springer then took Reuben through a chronology of the evening, starting with the cocktail hour before dinner but concentrating on the sequence of events after the reading club had assembled in the living room.

  “How much do you know? Have you talked to the others about this?” Frost asked.

  “No, we’ll get to them in due course. We’re starting with you,” Springer said curtly, implying that it was none of Reuben’s business who had been questioned.

  “Well, I’ll try to reconstruct things as best I can.”

  Prodded by Springer’s clarifying questions, Reuben pieced together the happenings of the evening as he remembered them. Now very tired, he told the detective what he could recall, including the mixing of Tobias’ rusty nail and his trip upstairs to the bathroom.

  “How did you know he was going upstairs to go to the bathroom?”

  “I guess I assumed it,” Frost replied, a little sheepishly. Springer did not criticize Reuben, but his look said that the latter should keep his assumptions to himself.

  Frost then told his interrogators about Tobias’ inexplicable outburst shortly before he died.

  “What exactly did he say?” Springer asked.

  “Something like ‘What do you want this time?’” Frost replied.

  “Any idea what he meant?”

  “None.”

  “Who was he shouting at?”

  “It appeared to be Sherman Deybold. Tobias was looking at him when he spoke.”

  “Were there any servants around, by the way?” Springer asked.

  “The only one I’m aware of was a waiter.”

  “Who cooked the dinner?”

  “The Vandermeers’ Japanese cook, I believe.”

  “Name?”

  “I’m not sure. But I don’t think he was here at dinnertime. I wasn’t paying much attention, but I had the idea he’d prepared the meal earlier and this waiter dished it out and served it.”

  “The waiter. What do you know about him?”

  “Next to nothing. He was a temporary, from a service.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Frost reluctantly told the officers about Robyn’s financial embarrassment.

  “What did he look like?”

  “Black hair. Very green eyes, I remember that. And one of those Mark Spitz mustaches,” Frost said. All of his questioners were too young to know about Mark Spitz, so he had to explain who the Olympic swimmer was and describe his mustache, which, Frost suddenly realized, resembled Patrolman Aurelio’s and Detective Springer’s.

  “Did this guy serve drinks after dinner?”

  “Yes, he did. I remember distinctly that when Tobias went upstairs, the waiter cleaned up around his chair and brought him a new drink. Brought him and Deybold new drinks. He faded into the woodwork and I really didn’t notice his manner or what else he did.”

  “Was he here when Vandermeer was stricken?” Springer asked.

  “No, he left at eight-thirty. On the dot.”

  “You remember that?”

  “I happened to glance at my watch.”

  “He faded into the woodwork all night, but you looked at the time when he left?”

  “You forget my loan to Robyn. She had borrowed enough to pay him until eight-thirty, and I was curious to see if he had gone overtime.”

  Springer wrote laboriously in his notebook, with what Reuben took to be a look of skepticism on his face. Then, to Frost’s discomfort, he went over the whole sequence of events in the living room again. Reuben was sure, or almost sure, that his answers the second time around were the same as the first.

  “Did anybody else that you know of go upstairs? The waiter, for example?”

  “I don’t know about the waiter. Let’s see. Sherman Deybold did, before dinner.”

  “To the bathroom?”

  “I don’t know that for a fact,” Frost said with satisfaction, “but that was my assumption.”

  “Deybold. He’s an art dealer?”

  “Yes.”

  “A friend of the Vandermeers?”

  “Yes, though I don’t know how close.”

  “The paintings out there,” Springer asked, “were they bought from Deybold?”

  “I’m certain some of them were.”

  “And this fellow Costas. He’s, uh, Deybold’s assistant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything more than that?”r />
  “You’d better ask him.”

  “I will, Mr. Frost. I just wanted your impression.”

  “My impression is yes.”

  “Lovers?”

  “I don’t know that for sure.”

  “But a good bet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did anyone else go upstairs that you saw? Mrs. Vandermeer?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Okay, is there anything else we ought to know?”

  “Offhand I can’t think of anything.”

  “You’re satisfied you’ve told us all you know?”

  All you’ve asked about, Reuben felt like answering, but shook his head affirmatively instead.

  “Okay, there’s something else. Art, get that knitting thing from the CSU guys, will you?” Springer asked Mattocks, who went into the living room.

  Minutes later he returned with a plastic bag. “Christ, they’re still all over the place,” he muttered, referring to the Crime Scene Unit personnel who were going over the room where Tobias had died, as he handed the bag over to Springer.

  “Recognize this?” he asked, putting the object down in front of Reuben.

  “Why, yes, I do. It’s the needlepoint Tobias was working on tonight.” The scene of the vain woman and her mirror was visible through the transparent bag.

  “Kind of odd lettering, don’t you think?” Springer asked.

  Frost recalled that Tobias, when he had shown his handiwork to the group, had stitched part of the word “PRIDE” at the bottom. Now, examining the object more closely, he saw that he had completed the word “PRICK” instead. He had no idea what to make of the change, recalling only that the dead man had been stitching as furiously as his drunken state would allow, presumably to complete the altered word.

  “You agree that it’s odd?” Springer pressed.

  “Yes, indeed,” Frost replied, before relating how Tobias had displayed the needlepoint to the assembled group.

  “Did he do this sort of thing often?”

  “You mean, change ‘PRIDE’ to ‘PRICK’?”

  “No,” Springer said impatiently. “Did he do this embroidery stuff, or whatever it is, a lot?”

  “Yes, it was one of his hobbies. Eccentricities, you might say.