David Dakin, recently paroled after serving part of a prison term for a daytime burglary of untenanted premises, was living in a three-room apartment on Charleston Pike. For various reasons, including the unsavoriness of the neighborhood, Auburn decided to take along a uniformed colleague. To put it more accurately, Patrolman Dollinger, at the wheel of a cruiser, took Auburn along as a passenger.
Dakin came to the door chewing a substantial portion of whatever he was having for dinner. He was a colossal man with a bald pate and deep-set eyes like a gorilla. If prison fare had taken any inches off his waistline, he was losing no time in putting them back on.
Auburn showed identification. “Mr. Dakin? Sergeant Auburn with Public Safety. Good to have you back among us.” Auburn was habitually courteous with malefactors, except now and then in the heat of battle. “I hope you're getting things back together again."
"Trying to. Come on in.” Dakin swallowed his food and glanced in the direction of the kitchenette as if wondering how long it would be before his next mouthful. He wiped his hand on his shirt and shook hands with both of them. Like many big men, he had a grip as gentle as a woman's. “Are you checking up on me?” He was talking to Auburn but looking at Dollinger's uniform.
"Not exactly. I'll leave that up to Sergeant Dormeyer. I just wondered where you were Tuesday night."
The apartment was small and sparsely furnished, with cardboard boxes stacked in odd corners and an overpowering atmo-sphere of carryout chicken and fries.
"This past Tuesday?"
"Yes, sir."
"I was at my brother's up till about midnight. Sit down, both of you.” He cleared things off the worn sofa, but Auburn and Dollinger remained standing. Dollinger also remained silent throughout the interview, possibly distracted by the pervasive aroma of food.
"Where does your brother live?"
"At 357 Rushmore Avenue. Ron and Blair had me over for dinner and after that we set around and had a few, you know, and played some cards."
"Blair is your sister-in-law?"
"Yes. Well, they ain't exactly married."
"What time did you get there?"
"I drove there from work. I was probably at Ron's by about twenty after five. What's the beef?"
"And you were there until midnight or so?"
"Yes, sir, at least. And Ron and Blair will back me up on that one hundred percent."
"Is Ron's last name the same as yours?"
"Sure."
"Where does he work?"
"Advance Dry Cleaners out on Pearl."
"Mind if we look around here?” Auburn's application for a search warrant had been denied on the grounds that he lacked probable cause. “You're within your rights to say no. You're not under arrest, you're not charged with any crime, and I don't have a warrant to search."
"Sure, you can look around. There ain't nothing to see but a lot of mess."
He was absolutely right about that.
After leaving Dakin, Auburn and Dollinger drove to Ron Dakin's place on Rushmore. He was a more compact and refined version of David. He confirmed his brother's alibi in every particular. His friend Blair Damico worked till nine on Thursdays at a party supply store up the street. Auburn and Dollinger visited her there, and as soon as she got over her panic attack or hysterics or whatever it was that the sight of Dollinger's uniform had brought on, she too confirmed David Dakin's alibi for Tuesday evening.
Next morning, the day appointed for the cremation, Auburn verified by phone that Dakin had been at work until five on Tuesday, as scheduled, at the warehouse where he was employed.
Before ten o'clock he met briefly with his supervisor, Lieutenant Savage, to discuss the case. The markings on the .32-caliber slug removed from the body didn't match any set of markings on file. Kestrel's investigations at the Kennebaugh residence had yielded the usual blitz of technical information, most or all of it seemingly useless as criminal evidence. Ron Dakin and Blair Damico had snow-white backgrounds, making it unlikely that they had collaborated with David in the robbery and murder or were supplying him with a false alibi.
"Kennebaugh mentioned a hobo camp within earshot of their house,” said Auburn. “I checked on that with Fourth District this morning. There's a woods down behind Dene Hollow Road and a culvert with a storm sewer running through it where tramps hang out during the warmer weather. The neighbors, including the Kennebaughs, have been complaining for years about the noise down there and the smell of burning trash. Fourth District runs them out, they come back."
Savage tapped the file lying open on his desk. “One or two of those tramps could have pulled this off,” he conceded. “But if they did, they're long gone."
"I still think it'd be worth checking down there, maybe looking for the weapon."
"My stars, Cy, if I sent Kestrel to a place like that to gather evidence it would be like sending an archaeologist to dig at Gettysburg or Bunker Hill with a soup spoon. We wouldn't see him for two months. And if you're thinking of questioning any bimbos you happen to find down there, forget it. They didn't see nothin', didn't hear nothin', don't know nothin'."
"They won't talk to a cop,” agreed Auburn. “I was thinking of putting on some old clothes, messing up my hair, shuffling along out of the woods around sundown..."
"All by yourself?"
"I think that would work better, don't you?"
Savage peered at him for a long moment. “Probably,” he said at last. “But if I were you, I'd shuffle out of those woods right after lunch and not wait till dark. And, Cy—this is your idea, not mine. Don't come crying to me if you get blown away with that .32."
* * * *
Auburn left his car in the parking lot of an abandoned church about a mile from the hobo jungle, locking his badge and his service revolver in the trunk. The cap he was wearing had a visor that looked like the mudflap of a garbage truck and his shirt had begun life as a pajama top designed with the free-spirited adolescent in mind. The last time he'd worn the pair of Levi's he had on was when he'd helped his brother-in-law clean out a basement. To enhance the effect of their liberal embellishment of rust, soot, and paint, he had replaced the belt with a length of cotton clothesline.
The lowering sky, with its threat of a downpour, held no terrors for Cyrus Auburn. His father, who had worked for decades as a mason in all sorts of weather, had impressed upon him early in life the principle that umbrellas are for the effeminate and the effete. But without a sun to guide him, he had to navigate by dead reckoning.
At first he followed a rural road that wound and doubled among rocky rises and weedy lowlands. Finally leaving the road, he struck off across a trackless waste in the general direction of his goal. The land behind the Kennebaugh property sloped gradually down toward a thickly wooded culvert, at whose bottom an ancient and badly weathered open concrete channel carried a viscous trickle of turbid water.
In the midst of a small clearing stood one of those mysterious structures that one often sees near moving water—an ugly, windowless hovel of brick with a padlocked iron door and bizarrely shaped bits of pipe jutting out of its top and sides. By the look of things, many fires of brushwood and rubbish had blazed in the lee of that building. But today the ashes were cold.
Among the nearby trees lay a tangle of wild honeysuckle, some of it in bloom, within which Auburn found a half dozen rough shelters constructed of boughs, cardboard, and plastic sheeting. Despite signs of recent human tenancy, the only living creatures he encountered there were birds and squirrels foraging beneath the dismal sky.
What had he been thinking when he planned to come here at night? He could hardly see anything at two o'clock in the afternoon, at least today. Picking up a yard-long scrap of rusty iron, he started poking among the heaps of garbage and debris that lay everywhere around him.
He found no cache of illicit drugs, no stolen jewels, no dismembered corpses. Just a very old .32 caliber Smith and Wesson revolver with one round fired.
The rain started just as he was try
ing to decide on the shortest route back to his car.
It was late in the afternoon when, his hair still damp, he returned a call from the coroner's office.
"Have you got anything so far on this Kennebaugh homicide?” asked Stamaty.
Auburn told him about finding the revolver. “Anything new at your end?"
"Oh, yes. The plot sickens. The preliminary blood tests showed up a major discrepancy. There's no trace of the heart medicines she was supposed to be taking. But there are exactly seven more pills missing from each bottle than there would have been if she'd been taking them on schedule since the day the prescriptions were filled."
"Well, thank you very much.” Auburn pondered in silence for a while. “Do you think it was the son? Tried to polish her off by juggling her medicines, and when that didn't work he slipped her a dose of lead?"
"And faked the break-in and ditched the piece down where the vagrants gather to make merry? It sure looks that way, doesn't it?"
Auburn guessed correctly that the rain would dissuade Stu Byron from taking his evening constitutional. Byron answered his call and acceded enthusiastically to Auburn's plea for further information about the Kennebaughs. In fact, perhaps scenting sensational developments, he even offered to come to head-quarters to discuss them as he had done during his years as a newspaper reporter. Auburn assured him a telephone interview would suffice.
"I just wanted to ask you about something you said the other night. You saw Mrs. Kennebaugh working in the garden a few days back?"
"Correct. The day she died, in fact."
"Would you say she was a pretty active, healthy type of person?"
"Sure, considering her age. She could handle a spade with the best of them. And she did all the shopping—groceries and so forth. That old bomb she drove has a cracked muffler, and we'd hear her going by, flying low, about four or five times a week."
Auburn slept on that but found in the morning that he was no wiser than he'd been the night before. While he slept, the journalists had been busy. Although his finding of the revolver hadn't yet leaked out, the morning paper hinted sinisterly that the break-in at the Kennebaughs’ might have been faked. Auburn thought he detected the hand of Stu Byron in some of the racier passages.
Kestrel had found no fingerprints on the revolver. The piece was very old and its serial number couldn't be traced. The ballistics report was still pending. Around ten o'clock, while Auburn was shuffling reports and using a magnifying glass to bring up details in Kestrel's photographs, his phone rang.
"Sergeant, there's a lady down here who says she's gotta talk to you ASAP, PDQ, and the day before yesterday."
Auburn looked at his watch. “Has this woman got a name, or just initials?"
"Says her name's Iris Kennebaugh."
Why, sure, Auburn commented to himself. “I'm coming down,” he said.
One of the few things of which Auburn was certain when he entered the waiting area off the main lobby was that the stout woman standing by the counter was not the one whose autopsy he had attended Wednesday afternoon. She was as tall and broad, and if age had put a few dents in her fenders, it hadn't yet dimmed the shine in her headlights or made her front bumper sag.
"Oh, Sergeant! I've seen your picture in the paper and on TV."
"Yes, ma'am?"
"I have to talk to you right away. Willy doesn't know I'm here.” She had applied makeup sketchily and in haste, and Auburn suspected her light raincoat concealed a correspondingly sketchy job of dressing. “We never thought this could turn into such a mess. We never dreamed that she'd been shot."
Auburn started for the elevator and beckoned her to follow him. “Who'd been shot?"
"My niece Gilda. That's whose body they cremated yesterday."
"Could you show me some identification, ma'am? Just routine."
"All I have is my driver's license.” She handed him that as they rode up in the elevator. “I left everything else at home so it would look like Gilda was ... me. But I needed this for identification, to rent an apartment."
When they reached Auburn's office he closed the door, made sure she was seated comfortably, and swept the litter of papers on his desktop to one side. “Please start from the beginning,” he said, “and take all the time you need."
"The beginning was a long time ago—almost fifty years. My late husband Gerald came from a very wealthy family in the East. Gerald's father believed his son had married below his station, as they used to say, because I worked as a secretary and my father was a remodeling contractor. So he cut Gerald out of his will and wouldn't give us a penny to help us get started.
"Gerald was drafted during the Korean War, and afterward he tried to get an engineering degree with his veterans’ benefits, but that didn't work out. So he became an electrician and started up his own company with some borrowed money."
Despite her agitation, Iris Kennebaugh impressed Auburn as a disciplined and clear-thinking woman.
"Gerald had a niece, Gilda, his brother Arthur's daughter. If you read yesterday's paper, you know about her. She was—I don't know what they'd call it nowadays, not exactly retarded, but peculiar—hyperactive, unmanageable, just plain wild. They had to have somebody with her all the time to keep her from setting fire to the furniture or running away. Or both.
"And like it said in the paper, this guardian, Rachel Ferrante, hit Gilda over the head—it was about two weeks before the Robert Kennedy assassination—shot both parents, and ran off with all Arthur's money and all Gilda's mother's jewelry. After that Gilda got worse. Brain damage. She hardly talked, and she'd sit for hours staring at a flower or trying to wipe a sunbeam off the floor.
"Well, Gerald and I took her in to live with us, not entirely out of charity or family feeling. Gerald's father was still living and we figured he'd eventually come around and help us with her upkeep, maybe even put Gerald back in his will now that Arthur was dead.
"Gilda was nine years older than Willy. There was never any question of raising them together as brother and sister, but Gilda always had a quiet room with her own TV, and good food, and nice comfortable clothes. But when Gerald's father died, every penny of his estate went to some cousins in the East. We got nothing and neither did Gilda.
"But by that time we'd had her on our hands for years, and we couldn't just throw her out in the street. After Gerald died it got even harder for me to make ends meet, but by that time Willy was running the business, and we did the best we could. One day Willy said to me, ‘Mother, if Gilda ever dies, we're going to tell the undertaker she's you. Because Dad insured you for a quarter of a million, but we're never going to get a penny out of her.'
"I didn't take him seriously at first, but the more I thought about it, the better it sounded. Nobody in the neighborhood besides the two of us even knew Gilda existed. She looked much older than she was because she didn't eat right or get any exercise. The business wasn't doing well, and as Willy said, I was worth more dead than alive.
"So when I got home from my bridge party Tuesday night, and Willy told me Gilda had died—"
"What time did you get home?"
"Probably about ten."
"Your son told you at ten o'clock Tuesday evening that she was dead?"
"Yes. He said he found her about eight-thirty."
"Where?"
"In bed. At least he thought she was dead. And so did I, though I only looked at her from the doorway. Of course we thought she'd died a natural death. We didn't turn on all the lights or we would have seen the damage to the window."
"So then you decided to exchange identities with Gilda?"
"We had a terrible scramble, putting her things away in the closets upstairs and moving all my things out of my bedroom and down to hers. Then I crammed everything I could in one big suitcase and Willy drove me to Wilmot, where I stayed overnight at a motel. The next day I moved into an efficiency apartment.... Oh, Sergeant, I still have a cab waiting outside with all my things."
Auburn sent a clerk o
ut front to pay off the cab driver and collect Mrs. Kennebaugh's luggage.
"The plan, as I understand it, was for your son to call the undertaker Wednesday morning and report that you had died during the night?"
"Yes. And to be sure and have Gilda cremated without a viewing, because none of my friends could mistake her for me, dead or alive. But from what I heard on the news, Gilda obviously wasn't dead when we thought she was, and during the night ... Oh, that must have been so terrible for Willy!"
"You say you haven't been in touch with him since Tuesday?"
"No, not even to tell him where I was. That was what we agreed on, so there wouldn't be any slip-ups. Not for at least a week."
"We're going to have to bring your son in for questioning this morning, ma'am. Does he have a cell phone where we can reach him if he's out on a job? Or would he be working on a Saturday?"
"I can give you that number. Are we going to be arrested?"
"We'll have to ask you to stay around until you've signed formal statements. We'll probably be making some criminal charges. Do you have a lawyer you've worked with before?"
When Iris Kennebaugh and her suitcase had been relocated temporarily in another room, Auburn called Stamaty.
"Nick,” he said, “I'm afraid of what I'm about to hear you say. Is there any chance you rolled a set of fingerprints on Iris Kennebaugh before she was released to the undertaker for cremation?"
"That's routine."
Thank the Lord for routines, said Auburn to himself, and for people who stick to them. It was a thought he hadn't often entertained in the past.
"What's the gig?” Stamaty wanted to know.
"The gig, Nick, is that Iris Kennebaugh is down the hall right now working her way through a lunch tray from the canteen."
AHMM, September 2008 Page 12
