Alone

by Loren D. Estleman

  The sum started the room rumbling all over again. This time, Conroy let the noise die down on its own. Adams, whose quietly theatrical tones were as well suited to a theater as a courtroom, had his audience in his pocket. Rankin, pale as ever beneath his tan, stared at the floor.

  “Patently, Mr. Rankin doesn’t need another hundred million dollars, and it would do nothing to erase the memory of the ordeal through which he has passed. His is a simple demand, representing a fair and forgiving heart. He wishes only a formal apology from Chief Conroy for the conduct of his department and the immediate resignation of Lieutenant Ray Padilla, with forfeiture of benefits and pension. It is because of this man’s blind, unreasoning hatred toward my client that this bitter affair did not end weeks ago.”

  The camera swung on Padilla, perspiring heavily now under the lights.

  “Lieutenant, I believe you have another statement to make at this time,” said Conroy.

  “Yes, sir.” He patted first one pocket, then another, and produced a printed card from a third. “Matthew Rankin, you’re under arrest for the murder of Roger Akers. ‘You have the right to an attorney. ...”

  Valentino didn’t hear the rest, and neither did anyone else including Rankin and Adams, gripping the arms of their chairs as they stared at Padilla. The room went up in a roar of questions.

  **

  CHAPTER

  25

  CONROY WAS TRUE to his word. At a signal from him, a troupe of officers left their station at the back of the room and formed a cordon to drive the jabbering defenders of the First Amendment out the door. There were casualties: A bank of TV lights mounted on a pole slipped more or less accidentally, cutting a policeman’s forehead with a sharp corner, and a lens was smashed when a shoulder-mounted camera struck the door frame on the way out. The chief raised his voice, promising a statement later; a reporter shouted a different sort of promise back, and then Valentino was alone with the Beverly Hills Police Department, Matthew Rankin, and Clifford Adams, who was on his feet now and glaring down at Conroy behind his desk.

  “Consider the lawsuit reinstated,” he said. “Consider the amount doubled. You just earned yourself a place in the unemployment line behind Padilla.”

  The chief was calm. “Please sit down. I’m doing your client the favor of not having him placed in restraint. His age and his standing in the community entitle him to that courtesy, but it doesn’t extend to tampering with the evidence at a police crime scene.”

  Rankin spoke for the first time since Valentino had entered the room. His coloring remained sickly, but his voice was steady. “Come to the point, Chief. Not even your man Padilla found anything in my study to support his suspicions of me.”

  “I wasn’t referring to the room where you shot Roger Akers. How long have you had a key to his apartment?”

  “Don’t answer that,” Adams said.

  Rankin ignored him. “I’ve never had one.”

  Conroy said, “My guess is he kept an extra set in his desk at your house, though I don’t suppose we’ll find it now. You’d have thrown it away after you planted the letters in his bedroom.”

  “You’re burying yourself,” Adams said.

  “Sit down, Clifford. When a man sets out to commit career suicide, it’s a mistake to stand in his way.”

  Adams took his client’s advice. He opened his briefcase and took out a legal pad and a gold pencil. “You don’t mind if I take notes. I wouldn’t want to forget a grievance in the blizzard.”

  “Certainly not. Lieutenant?”

  Padilla had stopped sweating. Valentino half expected him to risk Conroy’s wrath and stick a cigarette between his teeth, but he stood without moving, his hands at his sides. “That space under the floorboard led to a heating duct before the apartment building was renovated. The register was removed and the board cut to fit. Akers may never have known about it. There was nothing but dust in the hole the first time we checked it out.”

  “Can you confirm that?” Adams asked.

  “We took pictures. The camera dated them digitally. I sent a crew back a second time to record every possible place in the apartment where a bundle of letters could be hidden, just before I asked Valentino to tell Rankin we were reopening the investigation.”

  Rankin and Adams looked at Valentino for the first time. They hadn’t seemed to notice he was in the room. He fidgeted.

  “It was the only way I could think of to bring those letters out into the open,” Padilla said. “No judge would issue a search warrant for your house to make a case everyone wanted to go away, and I couldn’t be sure you hadn’t hidden them somewhere else. I knew they existed; you’d needed them to fake the evidence to support your claim of self-defense, and I gambled on the fact you hadn’t destroyed them because of their intrinsic value. No one makes billions by forming a habit of throwing away thousands, and you needed a surefire backup in case the Stockholm angle didn’t pay out.”

  Adams said, “This is all storytelling. You haven’t a shred of proof my client planted those letters.”

  “Sergeant Stimson?”

  A woman in uniform stepped from her corner. “Yes, Lieutenant.”

  “The shoes.”

  “Yes, sir.” She left the room, drawing the door shut behind her on the pandemonium outside; either the media had successfully thwarted attempts to ban them entirely from the premises or Chief Conroy had considered the effort not worth the expenditure of taxpayers’ time.

  Padilla said, “When those letters surfaced, I took them and the crime-scene photos to a judge and got that search warrant. That’s why it took so long to get this show started. I had to make sure you were out of the house long enough to get what I needed and run tests.”

  “What tests?” Adams lifted his pencil from the pad. “What shoes?”

  No one answered him. Moments later the sergeant returned, carrying a plastic bag stenciled PROPERTY B.H.P.D. She placed it on the desk. Padilla opened it and withdrew a pair of walking shoes, thick-soled and obviously handmade; meticulous stitching showed where the mass-produced product was usually glued.

  “You have a lot of shoes, Mr. Rankin,” Padilla said. “We left the dress pumps for last, on the theory that you’d choose stealth over style. Not that it narrowed things down as much as we’d like; a health nut like you has plenty tied up in athletic footwear.”

  Valentino sneaked a look at Rankin, leaning forward in his chair with his hands gripping the arms, staring at the shoes as if he’d never seen a pair to compare with them. Padilla placed them to one side, reached back into the bag, and took out a gooseneck lamp with a metal shade. Sergeant Stimson, still close to hand, uncoiled the cord and stooped to plug it into an outlet behind the desk.

  “Lights?”

  The officers at the back of the room stirred. One found the switch to the overhead fixture and manipulated it. Now the only illumination came filtered through smog by way of the windows.

  “Not exactly state of the art,” Padilla said as he switched on the lamp. “You’re a high-tech guy, and I couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t spot a surveillance camera. So I fell back on an old wheeze: infrared powder, invisible except when exposed to black light.” He picked up both shoes and turned them soles up under the dim ray from the lamp. They gave back a bluish glow.

  “We scattered the powder on the floor in every room in Roger Akers’ apartment,” Padilla went on. “After we found the letters, we took pictures with an infrared camera. Footprints in the powder matched the soles of these shoes.”

  “Entrapment!” snapped Adams, when the overhead light was back on. “You took the shoes from my client’s house and manufactured this evidence.”

  “No, sir, we did not.” Conroy folded his hands on the desk. “I don’t mean to tell you your business, but you’ll have a hard time convincing a jury that any member of this department had access to those letters except by removing them from your client’s house; which brings us right back to the incontrov
ertible fact that they have been in his possession this entire time. With malice aforethought, he set out to murder his assistant, and used the letters to create a computer-generated letter containing scandalous material to suggest that Akers was a blackmailer, and that when his blackmail scheme failed he attacked your client, providing just cause for your client to take Akers’ life. Without the letter there is no blackmail, and without the blackmail, there is no motive for malice on the part of the victim. That leaves a clear-cut case of murder in the first degree.”

  Adams curled his lips back from his bright teeth; shark’s teeth. “You’ve overlooked two important considerations. To prove Murder One, you need to establish motive.”

  “Deposits in Akers’ bank account match withdrawals in Rankin’s,” Conroy said. “Some kind of blackmail was going on, and that’s a strong enough motive for any jury.”

  “You just hit upon the second consideration, and the one that explodes your own theory. He was being blackmailed, and when he decided to put an end to it, Akers attacked him, giving him reason to take steps to defend his life.”

  Conroy gave no sign that they had reached an impasse; which was proof enough for Valentino that they had. He was an efficient administrator, and—one of the big surprises in a day packed with revelations—a staunch defender of even so unsavory a subordinate as Ray Padilla, he of the cheap haberdashery and undiplomatic demeanor—but he was not a good working detective. He was the reason why the Ray Padillas of the world remained in the trenches. He looked to the lieutenant for support.

  Padilla was more than ready. He snatched off the clip-on tie, stuffed it into a pocket, and opened his collar to restore circulation to his brain. His tobacco-stained leer was a match for the lawyer’s polished orthodontry. “What was he being blackmailed over, counselor? And what was so bad about it that dragging his marriage through the sewer was brighter by comparison?”

  “That’s your end, Lieutenant.” Clifford Adams, the poster boy for dignity under fire, folded his hands on his legal pad. “The burden of proof is on the prosecution.”

  “Shut up, Clifford. Game over.”

  A curtain of silence fell upon the room, with lead weights at the bottom. A dozen pairs of eyes turned upon the bloodless face of Matthew Rankin.

  “Roger was a good assistant at the start,” he said. “If you’ve never had one, I can’t make you understand what he represents: priest, mistress, wife. You find yourself confessing things to him you’d never tell your closest friend. The worst mistake I ever made was to tell him I murdered Andrea.”

  **

  CHAPTER

  26

  “I POISONED MY wife.”

  Matthew Rankin’s aristocratic facade was peeling. Seated in his chair facing the tripod-mounted video camera that had been brought in to record his statement, he was an old man with a sagging face, his trademark tan as thin as cheap gold leaf. Clifford Adams sat beside him scribbling in his pad, coiled to raise objections for the record. The muscles stood out on the sides of the attorney’s jaw; the confession was taking place over and above his protests.

  “I was a good chemist,” Rankin said. “I spent two years developing a drug to prevent cardiac arrest, and I was close to a breakthrough when the funding for the experiment was withdrawn. At that point I had a toxin that counterfeited the symptoms of a heart attack, causing death in laboratory animals. The company panicked over the implications; my samples were confiscated for disposal and I was ordered to destroy my notes. But no one could destroy what was in here.” He touched a temple.

  “When was this?” Ray Padilla had taken Conroy’s place at his desk. The chief of detectives, deferring to the lieutenant’s interviewing skills, stood in a corner with his hands folded behind his back.

  Rankin smiled thinly. “Before you were born. My Horatio Alger story begins many years later, when I met and married Andrea and went to work for her father in the department-store business.” He turned in his chair to look at Valentino, standing among the officers at the back of the room. “I told you Andrea started out as a salesclerk in one of her father’s stores, so she could learn the business from the bottom up; that was the bond that held her to Greta, the shared experience. When I came along the old man was ailing, and he hadn’t time to bring me up through the ranks, so he put me in charge of the chain. He was impressed by my technical knowledge, and was convinced, as I was, that computerizing the operation would reverse the decline brought on by competition from shopping malls.

  “Andrea never forgave him for that. She’d been told her whole life that the business would be hers someday, but when push came to shove he bowed to convention and gave it to one of his own sex.”

  He returned his attention to Padilla. “After the old man died, she transferred her resentment to me. Nothing takes place overnight: When the profit picture was slow to improve and the malls continued to drain customers from our downtown stores, she blamed me for poor management. I was incompetent, I was a spendthrift, pouring millions of company capital into a computer system that was profligate and unproved. As she saw it, in a few months I’d succeeded in driving a sixty-year-old institution to the brink of ruin.

  “She couldn’t break the will that named me chief executive officer, but she owned twice as many shares as I did, and if she could convince enough stockholders that I was a threat to the company, they would vote with her to remove me at the annual meeting. I was just a glorified employee, after all. All the time that campaign was going on, I remembered the frustration and humiliation I’d felt the last time someone in authority pulled the rug out from under me on the verge of triumph. It was a short leap from there to that toxin I’d developed. At the time, no autopsy could prove that whoever ingested it hadn’t died of simple cardiac arrest.

  “I put it in her tea,” he said. “You see, we continued the charade of a contented married couple at home. I really think she believed it was possible to separate our public squabbles from our domestic life. If she’d lived a bit longer, she’d have learned that you can’t exist in both worlds. I chose privacy.”

  “It seems you did all the choosing for both of you.”

  “I’m sorry she didn’t live longer. She’d have seen the computer program I designed drag her father’s company into the twentieth century and reverse its fortunes in spectacular fashion. Of course, that wasn’t possible, because if she had lived, she’d have fired me, and my only satisfaction would have come from witnessing the inevitable collapse.”

  “Is that the same program you used to forge the Garbo letter?” Padilla asked.

  “Hardly. That program was grammar school beside the business plan I invented. Any dunce can create a font from a model of someone’s handwriting. The trick was to make it look good enough to have fooled me in a distracted state, but not so good it couldn’t be exposed when the time was right.”

  “Where’d you get Garbo’s letters? You said your wife burned them.”

  “I swiped a bundle when she wasn’t looking. They were worth something, and I’m too practical a businessman to stand by and watch sentiment get the better of profit. At the time I didn’t know just how valuable they’d prove to be.”

  “Tell us about Stockholm. That theft was too timely to be a coincidence.”

  “I had nothing to do with that. A man approached me in the lobby of my hotel, offering to sell me some letters written by Garbo; he’d heard I was a fan. He showed them to me. I knew right away they were genuine, and that he couldn’t have come by them honestly; for all I knew, it was a trap set by a competitor to arrest and embarrass me. I sent him on his way.

  “Later, of course, I saw that the episode could be of use, as the theft was bound to be discovered sooner or later, and there was Roger Akers, in Stockholm with me at just the right time. It’s not always easy to know the precise moment when a plan was conceived, but I can trace it to that encounter.”

  “How did you come to tell Akers you’d killed your wife?”

 
; “I actually don’t remember telling him. I was drinking pretty heavily at the time, and I must have been in a confiding mood. He made sure to remind me of the conversation when I was sober. I haven’t had more than one drink in an evening since. I couldn’t take the chance of betraying myself in front of someone else and adding another blackmailer to the list.”

  “When did it start?”

  “Just before the Swedish trip. I spent most of my time there thinking about how many improvements had been made in criminal science and worrying what a modern toxicologist would find if the body were exhumed. That fellow in the lobby came as a godsend. I couldn’t very well kill Roger and tell the police he was holding me up for murdering Andrea, but if I was protecting her memory from a scandal, it occurred to me I might squeeze by on self-defense, or if not, escape serious punishment because public sympathy would be with me and against a man who exploited a man’s loyalty to his dead wife.