Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 11/01/12

by Dell Magazines

  While Auburn was updating his computer file on the Sleate murder, Stamaty phoned from his office in the courthouse across the street. “Another strike in the county typing pool, Cy,” he announced. “The report Doc Valentine dictated last night on Sleate’s autopsy may not exist in hard copy until after we both retire. I thought I’d call and give you the high spots.”

  Auburn picked up a pen. “Ready when you are.”

  “One hollow-point thirty-two-caliber lead pellet plowed through Sleate’s brain stem like an eggbeater. No powder tattooing or scorching of the skin or hair, but lots of emphysema.”

  “Are you trying to tell me this guy with a hole in the side of his head smoked himself to death?”

  “Pathology lesson, Cy. We’re talking subcutaneous emphysema, not pulmonary. Pockets of gas under the skin around the wound plus no powder marks equals a point-blank shooting with an air gun.”

  During the ensuing brief silence, Auburn remembered Gayle Van Till blithely offering her hands to be tested for powder traces.

  “That’s really the whole story,” said Stamaty. “I’ll send you a copy whenever the pool thaws out. The bullet’s on the way to the state. Lab reports are pending.”

  Auburn went to books and the Internet to refresh his memory about air guns. They were highly favored for target competition because their kick was less erratic than that of a firearm. Also, though far from silent, they weren’t nearly as noisy as weapons with explosive charges. They had never been popular for either hunting or homicide, nor were they even subject to legal regulation in most jurisdictions. But although air rifles and air pistols usually took ammunition smaller than .32 caliber, accidents with them often proved lethal.

  Around eleven that morning Kestrel sent him a preliminary report on the investigation of the crime scene, including the empty apartment across the hall and the trash room in the basement. Kestrel had found no weapon, air-powered or otherwise, and no usable latent fingerprints. The even distribution of dust in the vacant apartment made it unlikely that anyone had entered it for several weeks. Although, with one exception, the trash room contained nothing but trash, the catalog of it filled seven pages.

  The exception was a nearly new wooden pencil that Kestrel had found lying loose among the plastic bags at the bottom of the chute. It was of the same premium brand as the half dozen pencils lying on Sleate’s desk, and like them, it had been sharpened with a knife. Unlike them, it bore teeth marks.

  Teeth marks. As often happened, Auburn couldn’t decide whether Kestrel had given him too much information or too little. He called the lab.

  “What’s the deal with this chewed pencil?” he asked.

  “Not chewed,” said Kestrel, as if Auburn had misquoted an article of the Constitution. “Bitten—once. Somebody held it clamped in his teeth with the eraser outside.”

  “Or her teeth.”

  “No. Unless maybe a female gorilla. This biter had a big mouth with big teeth in it.”

  “Any idea what this female gorilla was doing with one of Sleate’s pencils in her mouth?”

  “Not my field,” replied Kestrel, without a trace of humor. Humor wasn’t his field either.

  When Auburn had finished putting all the available data into some kind of order, he sketched out a timetable of events yesterday morning at Spaulding Towers.

  The carpenters started working on the seventh floor at nine A.M.

  W. R. McConnahay arrived for his regular appointment with Sleate at ten and signed out at ten thirty-five.

  At a quarter to twelve, Van Till arrived for a meeting with Sleate that, according to her, never took place.

  DiPalma saw her leaving the building at noon, around the time the carpenters broke for lunch.

  The carpenters came back at one o’clock.

  At ten past one DiPalma, starting her regular rounds on the top floor, found Sleate dead.

  Assuming that McConnahay had really left Sleate alive, that Overbeck had really talked to him just before Van Till went upstairs, that Van Till had really failed to gain access to the apartment, and that DiPalma’s story was strictly true, the murder of Conrad Sleate must have taken place while Van Till was on her way up in the elevator. A pretty narrow window of time.

  Every Tuesday all Public Safety officers with the rank of lieutenant or above vanished for a protracted lunchtime conference with the chief. Auburn caught Savage just minutes before he had to leave for the conference.

  Over the years they had evolved a comfortable and efficient working relationship that enabled them to communicate without waste of words. Because time was short they stood in the doorway of Savage’s office instead of sitting down. Auburn briefly reviewed the salient features of the case.

  “Given the security setup over there,” said Savage, “this is obviously not a simple robbery. Whoever got to Sleate had an interest in grabbing his files as well as in snuffing him. Which is why I like your idea of blackmail. The killer didn’t have time to sort through the files to find whatever he wanted to destroy, so he took everything with him in order to go through it at his leisure. You think he searched the whole place?”

  Auburn nodded. “So does Kestrel.”

  “Which means he may not have found what he was looking for. The stuff from that cabinet must have made a mighty big bundle.”

  “Which nobody saw him walk out with.”

  “Maybe it’s still in the building someplace. Better check those other empty units. But searching the occupied apartments is out of the question because no judge this side of the Rio Grande would issue that kind of a warrant.”

  Savage signified the end of their meeting by switching off his office lights. “Keep working the motive angle and look for a break in the security over there—somebody with a key they shouldn’t have, somebody posing as a delivery person. But since that other apartment on the top level apparently hadn’t been entered, we can probably postpone calling in Batman and Spider-man for questioning.”

  As Auburn was on the way back to his office, a thought struck him out of the blue—Why had Savage never nudged him in the direction of promotion, much less groomed him for it? Was it because he didn’t want to lose control of a docile and dependable flunky, or because he just didn’t see Auburn as officer material?

  Batman, Spider-man . . .

  Auburn needed to clear his head of vanishing bulky bundles, narrow windows of time, and female gorillas that bit pencils once. He accessed a computer site that presented, in varying degrees of detail, a composite satellite view of the entire surface of planet Earth. As he scrolled down on Spaulding Tower, the focus improved steadily until he reached an altitude of two hundred sixty meters above street level.

  The photo on the screen, dated three years back, showed a substantial structure resembling a greenhouse on Conrad Sleate’s portion of the roof. Auburn phoned Aaron Fernsall.

  “That’s exactly what it was,” said Fernsall. “A small greenhouse. A tenant had it built out there before my time. Sleate never used it, and a couple of years ago a storm kicked the daylights out of it.”

  “I saw some pipes. Was this place heated in the wintertime?”

  “Oh, no, nothing that fancy. Just a cold-water line. The runoff went into the gutter and downspout along with the rain.”

  During lunch Auburn mulled over the implications of this latest line of inquiry. Although at first it had seemed to him to have no possible bearing on the murder of Conrad Sleate, a vague hunch was now trying to mature into a firm conviction. When he got back to his office from the canteen he found that the sky had turned as dark as if the sun had already set, and the wind was rattling the window in its frame. But instead of abandoning the expedition he had by now decided on, he just added a high-powered flashlight and a windbreaker with a hood to the list of necessary equipment.

  The guard on the desk at Spaulding Tower Apartments was a stranger to Auburn, a finicky stickler for law and order with graying hair. Even after showing identification, Auburn had to explain why he had
turned up at the apartment building at that particular moment in grubby civvies with a tool carryall slung over his shoulder. And when he had made the desired explanation, the guard informed him with unmistakable satisfaction that Sleate’s apartment door now had a lock bar on it.

  Auburn assured him that he had brought along a key to the lock in question. “Is Mr. Fernsall in this afternoon?”

  “I’ll check.” While the guard was phoning, Auburn glanced at the register. Only two visitors had signed in since J. C. Pulfresh yesterday afternoon. With considerable effort he deciphered the upside-down signatures and with no effort at all he memorized the names.

  Fernsall was in this afternoon, and all upset about the adverse publicity Sleate’s murder had created. “Not much of an endorsement for our security arrangements,” he groused.

  “So have you replaced your guard staff?”

  Fernsall looked blank for a moment. “No, no, this is just DiPalma’s day off. If Chilcomb’s at the desk, Overbeck is patroling somewhere.” He wiggled a hand in the direction of Auburn’s bag. “What, uh . . . ?”

  “Just an idea I had about that greenhouse. The remains of it, anyway. I have a key to the lock bar the other officer put on the door of Eight B, but if the door is locked as well . . .”

  Fernsall called Overbeck’s cell phone and arranged for him to meet Auburn on the top floor. “I’d come up with you myself but I’ve got the heating people coming to look at the boiler. Again.”

  When the elevator shuddered to a stop at the eighth level, Auburn found Overbeck waiting for him in the corridor in an alpaca jacket of vaguely military cut. Before they entered Sleate’s apartment Auburn had a question for the guard.

  “When you called Sleate yesterday to announce that Gayle Van Till was here to see him, did you actually talk to him?”

  “Yes, sir. Otherwise I wouldn’t have sent her up.”

  “What’s the possibility that it was somebody other than Sleate on the line?”

  Overbeck’s only reaction to the novelty of the idea was a longish silence before he answered. “Actually, I guess it could have been somebody else. All he said was ‘Yes?’ when he answered and ‘Okay’ or something like that when I told him his visitor was here. I talked to him on the phone almost every day because he had a lot of visitors, but, like I told you yesterday, I never saw him face to face. Yes, I’d have to agree it could have been somebody imitating his voice.”

  Overbeck unlocked the door to Sleate’s apartment and Auburn disconnected the security bar that Kestrel had left there. The heat in the apartment had been turned down, or maybe off, and the tang of stale smoke seemed more pungent than ever in the dank, chilly atmosphere. Now vacant and lighted only by the lowering, overcast sky, the whole place wore a forlorn air.

  Auburn put down his bag and unbolted the door that led out to the roof.

  “You going to need any help out there?” asked Overbeck.

  “Possibly. There’s a piece of pipe out there I want to get loose.”

  “Pipe?”

  “Black pipe. Two inch ID.” He turned back the flap of his tool tote and pulled out two pipe wrenches, a large screwdriver, and a flashlight.

  “One winter I worked construction,” he said. “One godforsaken, record-setting winter. When it got too cold to work on the roof I went inside and helped the plumbers. I didn’t learn much, but I do know that you can’t run water through black pipe.” He lifted a propane torch out of the bag and laid it on the floor.

  Overbeck asked the obvious question.

  “The pipe is painted black,” explained Auburn, “to show that it’s iron instead of galvanized steel. It’s okay for gas or compressed air, but if you use it for water or steam, it rusts through in less than a year. So why is there a big piece of black pipe out there where there used to be an unheated greenhouse?”

  He opened the roof door to the rush and squawk of the wind. Overbeck followed him out to the place where a few weathered planks bolted to the brickwork represented almost the only traces of the greenhouse. Clamped to the wall between them were a few odd lengths of pipe, including a black one a yard long and as big around as a man’s wrist. Auburn tackled this with one of his wrenches, but quickly found that it wasn’t threaded into anything at either end. All he needed to free it from its clamps was a twist or two of the screwdriver.

  Fitted snugly inside it was a cylinder of clear hard plastic. Even without using the flashlight they could see that it was crammed with papers—handwritten letters, yellowed newspaper clippings, photocopies of legal documents, and, at one end, a bundle of fifty- and one-hundred dollar bills.

  An ominous metallic click, clearly audible above the whistling of the wind, made Auburn look swiftly back over his shoulder. Funny he hadn’t noticed before what a large mouth and large teeth Overbeck had. The pistol he’d just pulled out of his jacket and primed or cocked looked like a prop from a James Bond thriller, with a grip like a heavy-duty cordless drill and a muzzle like a flamethrower.

  Overbeck’s left hand took possession of the plastic tube while, brandishing the weapon with unmistakable intent, he drove Auburn back toward the low parapet. “Like they say, you want to watch that first step.”

  Auburn’s windbreaker was zipped up to his chin. In the three quarters of a second it would take him to unzip it and draw his own weapon, Overbeck could plug him, bulldoze him over the parapet, or both. He had a fleeting vision of a velvet-lined case containing a pair of lieutenant’s bars being presented to his grieving parents, along with the flag that had covered his casket at the funeral attended by his comrades-in-arms in full dress uniform . . .

  In desperate circumstances such as these, the self-defense instructors at the Police Academy had urged their students to “unleash the killer instinct that’s inside every one of us.” Auburn had long doubted that he possessed such a thing as a killer instinct. But since he didn’t care to pick up a case of subcutaneous emphysema and all the inconveniences that went along with it, he now put his mind seriously to the business of disarming and disabling his assailant.

  Although six sizes bigger than Auburn, Overbeck was clumsy, almost oafish, and like many before him he overestimated the advantage that a handgun gave him. Conrad Sleate, elderly and unsuspecting, had been an easy target. But it’s hard to aim a pistol accurately at a vital spot when one’s opponent is zigging and zagging and making sudden, violent, painful jabs with a large screwdriver at one’s own vital spots, including the eyes and the trachea. When Overbeck threw up his gun arm to fend off another swipe at his eyes, it was the last mistake he made. In an instant Auburn had both hands locked around that right wrist, and by hurling himself violently forward he knocked his opponent off balance. A pellet escaped from the chamber of the air pistol with a sinister ping and took off for the clouds. Overbeck crashed heavily against the edge of the parapet behind him.

  By the time his vision cleared he was looking into the muzzle of a Smith and Wesson .38, which had something noisier than compressed air behind its six brass slugs.

  A search of the utility shed behind Gordon Overbeck’s house uncovered a large canvas mailbag containing a pair of rubber gloves and apparently the entire contents of Sleate’s file cabinet—contracts and other legal documents, checkbooks, bankbooks, and a considerable quantity of cash, as well as a whole library of tittle-tattle, gossip, and scandal.

  The bite marks on the pencil Kestrel had recovered from the bottom of the trash chute perfectly matched Overbeck’s robust dentition.

  By the time Overbeck had been indicted by the grand jury and scheduled for trial, the city prosecutor had worked out a highly plausible scenario of his movements on the day Sleate had died. Between ten thirty-five that morning, the time McConnahay signed out of the building, and eleven, when Overbeck’s hour of patrol ended, the guard entered Sleate’s apartment on some pretext and shot him. Wearing rubber gloves, he emptied the file cabinet into the mailbag and did as much searching as time permitted.

  When Gayle Van Till a
rrived for her appointment around noon, Overbeck, by that time covering the desk, only pretended to get clearance from Sleate before sending her up. She found Sleate’s door locked and his radio blaring to the max. During Overbeck’s next turn at patrol, between noon and one, he returned to the apartment, finished searching, removed Sleate’s papers in the mailbag, and dropped it down the trash chute for later transfer to his car.

  Before leaving the apartment he stowed his gloves and probably his weapon in the bag. Rather than risk leaving fingerprints on the inside door hardware, he picked up one of Sleate’s pencils and, holding it in his teeth, used the eraser end to open and close the door. After repeating this maneuver with the hatch to the trash chute, he let the pencil drop from his mouth before the hatch closed. In recovering the canvas bag he apparently thought retrieving the pencil was an unnecessary waste of time.

  Although this sequence of events fitted the known facts, the prosecution were unable to establish a motive for Overbeck. An analysis of Sleate’s papers, particularly the cache of blackmail materials contained in the piece of black pipe, disclosed nothing that had any connection with Overbeck. The obvious conclusion was that he had been hired to kill Sleate and purloin his papers.

  In hopes of inducing him to finger the person or persons for whom he had acted, the assistant city prosecutor urged plea bargaining. During several conferences with police authorities and the prosecutor Overbeck was persuaded that he could expect nothing less than a life sentence. Eventually he cracked and disclosed who had hired him.

  Some might have wondered, over the years, why Conrad Sleate, self-appointed custodian of public morals for the community, had never so much as mentioned the most notorious of local racketeers, swindlers, and all-around rotten eggs, Steve “Sticker” Preiss.

  Overbeck supplied the answer.

  Preiss had been paying the gossip columnist handsomely not to reveal certain incriminating information about him. Then one day he decided to pay a hit man to erase Sleate once and for all and take possession of his famous files. With the same resourcefulness that had kept him on the right side of prison bars throughout a life of crime, Preiss recruited a venal and amoral assassin whose occupational resumé enabled him to penetrate the security arrangements at Spaulding Tower by becoming part of them. Overbeck then proceeded to overcome Sleate’s habitual reserve by bringing his mail up from the rack in the lobby when he made his late morning rounds.