I was barely within view of what passes for Popcorn’s office - two-thirds the size of mine and twice as stuffed - when she bounced up like a jumping jack in a green knit dress. “Thank God you’re here!”
“Good morning.”
“Not so far.” She held up a handful of those ubiquitous yellow phone message slips that say “WHILE YOU WERE OUT” at the top. My voicemail directs callers to Popcorn and to my cell phone, and this morning I had kept my cell phone off through breakfast in the vain hope of a fueling up in peace and quiet for a horrendous day. I’d already talked to Morrie Kindle, the Associated Press stringer, when he woke up me up at five-thirty.
“Ben Silverstein from The Observer called,” Popcorn informed me. “He’s working on tomorrow’s story.” Of course. There’s no such thing as a one-day wonder anymore. “The Cincinnati Enquirer and The Dayton Daily News each called twice. The New York Times, USA Today, Fox News, Access Hollywood, Inside Edition, Variety, and TMZ also called. They’re climbing all over the Peter Gerard angle.”
“What, no CNN?” Oscar would be disappointed.
She shook her dyed blond hair. “Not yet. But WIJC and The Spectator did.” Those were our campus radio station, college-owned but not student-run, and our campus newspaper. “Sylvester Link from The Spectator said if you didn’t call him back within the hour he’d come over here and camp out all day inside my office.”
“He’ll do it, too. Good reporter, Sylvester. Well, what did you tell everybody?”
“I told them you’d call back.”
“Perfect. You have everything under control. I’m leaving.”
“But you just got here!”
“I’m sorry, Popcorn.” I meant it, too. “I hate to dump everything on you, but I have to cut out for a few hours. No longer than that, I promise. If one of the bosses calls, tell him I stepped out and he can call me on my cell.” I whipped out my iPhone and turned it on. “I’m going to see Oscar. I’ll tell him you said hi.” She likes Oscar, who likes her back but has yet to make his move. I suspect he may not know how.
“I was halfway into the hallway by then, but Popcorn called after me anyway. “Jeff!”
I turned. “Yeah?”
“Was it . . . very horrible?”
Words seemed so inadequate. “Very,” I said.
Who Was That Dead Man?
“Isn’t this just the damnedest case, though?” the police chief of Erin, Ohio, demanded.
Oscar Hummel, decked out in a maroon sport coat and Panama hat, glared at me across his gray metal desk as if I had dared to disagree, which I sure hadn’t.
“I mean, look at what we’ve got here,” he went on. “The way it looks at first, this actor-writer-director guy comes to town and gets himself killed in a room with five college types not more than, what, thirty feet away? Then it turns out he’s not the famous guy at all, he’s some unknown.”
“He wasn’t unknown to everybody, Oscar. Rodney Stonecipher had to be somebody’s husband or lover or father or son - or maybe all of those. What have you found out about him?”
Oscar leaned back and regarded me with a squint. I think he needs glasses.
“Why are you asking?”
“Personal pique. Whoever committed murder last night ruined my dinner.”
He snorted. “Bull. I know what you’re up to, so you might as well admit it. You want to get a handle on authentic police procedure for your mystery books, right?”
I sighed. “Well, I didn’t really want to bother you with -”
“Hey, I don’t mind a bit! I wish your brother-in-law would talk to me once in a while before he writes his fairy tales.”
Oscar opened a manila folder on his desk. “I don’t want any of this showing up in the paper, though. I’m still pissed about Teal being on the scene last night. That kind of press attention just makes our job harder. All right, then. It’s kind of sketchy, but here’s what we’ve got on Stonecipher: He originally came from just up the road in Licking Falls. He went to college at UC” - the University of Cincinnati - “but something happened to him there. I think maybe it had to do with drugs. Anyway, he flipped out, was a mental basket case for years. Just recently he started to get his act together. He moved back to this area and became a certified mental health technician. He got a job in a group home.”
“No known connection to Peter Gerard?”
“He didn’t seem to have many connections at all. His phone number was unlisted and there was no name on the mailbox at his apartment. He was married young, but that fell apart about ten years ago, after he had his breakdown. I talked on the phone this morning to his ex-wife, a woman named Jane Sofer. She was shocked, but not exactly broken up. It was like to her he was already dead. She’s been remarried for eight years and has two kids by her current husband. Mrs. Sofer sort of gave me the bum’s rush, but I can’t say I blame her. I guess to her this guy is just a bad memory come back to haunt her.”
Was that all Rodney Stonecipher was - an inconvenient ghost out of somebody’s past? Somebody must have cared about the poor S.O.B. - cared enough to kill him. Or maybe not.
“Have you figured out yet who was the intended victim - Stonecipher or Gerard?” I asked.
Oscar shook his head. “That’s one of the things that makes this the damnedest case I’ve ever seen. How can we get a handle on the motive when we don’t know who was supposed to be the victim? It’s like something out of a mystery novel!”
Not that again.
“There were probably a lot of people who knew Peter Gerard was supposed to be on campus last night for a dinner party on the eve of his lecture,” I said. “The five other guests between us could have mentioned it in passing to a couple of dozen other people. It wasn’t publicized, but it wasn’t a secret, either. But who would know that Rodney Stonecipher was going to be there instead? In fact, why was he there instead? That’s the biggest question of all. What was this guy doing impersonating Gerard? What possible gain could there be in it?”
“How the hell should I know, Jeff? We’ve only been at this - ” Oscar looked at his watch. “Eleven hours. All I know about this impersonation business is that even the coroner did a double take when he cleaned the body up. You want some coffee?”
I didn’t. Oscar only has the kind with caffeine. He reached behind his desk for the pot, sitting on an old library table next to piles of police paperwork and a picture of Oscar’s mother.
Everything in here was old, even the smell. It smelled like kindergarten. I looked around, trying to capture a fleeting memory. Something Oscar had just said almost reminded me of - what? I nearly had it, then it was gone like a butterfly.
Well, whatever it was, it wasn’t on the cracked plaster walls of the Erin police station. The station occupied the basement level of City Hall, a stone fortress you couldn’t dislodge with a nuclear weapon. The barred windows of holding cells poked just above street level, giving Oscar’s prisoners a monotonous view of legs passing on the sidewalk. The criminals of Erin were mostly drunks, small time drug offenders, and clumsy car thieves - until last spring, and now again.
Something Oscar had said . . .
“Routine procedure is what’s going to get our killer for us,” he pontificated, pouring his coffee. That didn’t help much last time, Oscar. You almost nabbed me!
“You mean like fingerprints?”
“Not them. We picked up mostly smudges. A zillion people must have used that room. The clearest prints were from your dinner party - Mac and Karl Hoffer on the doorknobs. That’s what happens when you’ve got a bunch of amateurs crawling all over a murder scene.”
Well, they kind of had to get into the room, Oscar.
“But we’ve got a few other angles,” he droned on. “There were other people besides you six on campus last night. Somebody must have seen the killer hanging around, and
sooner or later that somebody is going to come forward.”
I shook my head. “Something’s wrong with this whole picture, Oscar. How could anybody possibly know that Rodney Stonecipher - or Peter Gerard, if that’s who the killer thought he was - would be on the phone in that room at that particular time, just ripe for murder?”
Oscar pulled a pack of cigarettes out of the top drawer of his desk. I guess he can’t beg them off of other nicotine addicts all the time. “Maybe it wasn’t premeditated. The murder weapon came from the room. That doesn’t smack of great advance planning.”
“You mean somebody just happened to be walking past the room, saw somebody inside, and decided to kill him?” I’m sure my voice was rich with skepticism.
“There could have been an argument.”
“There rest of us didn’t hear one. I can understand why we didn’t hear the blow on the head, but a heated argument? And it must have been a damned quick argument. Stonecipher was in that room, what, maybe ten, fifteen minutes? That seemed like a long time while we were waiting, but it wasn’t very long for a disagreement - with somebody who just happened to wander in from the outside, by the way - to turn murderous.”
Oscar blew a smoke ring and gave me a cynical smile. “It didn’t have to take long. You’d be surprised at what some people die for.”
“And all this hinges on the door to the hallway being open so that somebody could see who was in there. Why would it be open if Stonecipher was just in there using the phone? That particular door is hardly ever used.”
“Maybe the killer just opened the door by accident, or to use the phone himself. Say he saw Gerard’s double in there and went bonkers. This was a guy whose picture he’d seen all over the place - magazines, newspapers, TV. For some reason he’d built up a hate for him. When he saw him in the flesh, or thought he did, he picked up that bookend and smashed Stonecipher’s head in while Stonecipher was talking on the telephone.”
Gerard’s double. Something about that phrase struck a chord. I was straining to think what it was when the sound of Ravel’s Boléro erupted from my iPhone. It was the special ring tone I’d recently set up for Lynda. (Everybody else gets the Indiana Jones theme song, although I’m thinking of assigning Darth Vadar’s music to Ralph, matching the image that appears on the screen when he calls.) Not wanting to face the wrath that would surely be showered upon me if I interrupted Oscar to take a call from Lynda, I sent her call to voicemail and made a mental note to check later for a message.
“I don’t say it happened that way,” Oscar was saying. “I told you, I don’t even know if the killer was after Gerard or Stonecipher. But that scenario is one possibility.”
“Why did the killer hit Stonecipher on the left side of the head?”
“What do you mean?”
I didn’t even know where the question from. All of a sudden it was just there.
“That door the killer came through is to the right side of the person sitting at the desk. Yet the killer went around to the other side and hit Stonecipher on the left side of his head. Why?”
“No great mystery there, Sherlock. He hit him on the left because it was easier. The victim was on the telephone, remember? And the phone was up to his right ear. You saw how the whole side of the head was bashed in. If he’d done that on the right side the telephone receiver might have absorbed part of the blow. Then our killer could have had a hell of a fight on his hands from one pissed-off would-be victim.
“I see it like this: The killer walked in back of the victim, casual-like, not wanting the victim to suspect something and put up a struggle. He picked up the murder weapon from the bookshelf, a heavy brass bookend. Then he clobbered the poor bastard where there was a clear shot - on the left side.”
“Makes sense, I guess. But you make Stonecipher sound pretty accommodating. He just lets the killer walk behind him. Do you figure he knew the guy? Or maybe it wasn’t a guy.”
“You mean, could it have been a woman?” Oscar said. “Sure. All that storybook business about whether a woman would be strong enough to do in a guy with a tire iron or whatever is just a lot of smoke. When the adrenaline gets pumping size and sex don’t mean that much. I’ve seen it too many times. Shirley Lynne Ray weighed about eighty pounds with all her chains on. She did in her cheating boyfriend, Masher Calloway, with a crowbar - and he weighed more than McCabe. It took three strong men to move the body.” Charming story, Oscar; I’ll sleep well tonight.
“Male or female, Stonecipher didn’t have to know him,” Oscar said, “and I’ll leave it ‘him’ for convenience. The killer just walks in and says, ‘Excuse me, I need a book back here. Won’t be a minute.’ Why would Stonecipher suspect anything? He wouldn’t, not unless he knew somebody was out to get him, and we sure don’t see anything like that so far. He just didn’t seem to have any friends or enemies.”
Oscar stubbed out his cigarette, pulled open the desk drawer, looked at the rest of the pack inside, then closed the drawer. He was a model of self-control this morning. I figured he might hold out as much as ten minutes before lighting up again.
“Nobody’s that isolated from other people, Oscar,” I said, “not even if he tried. And somebody called him on the phone! That means that at least somebody knew he was on campus.”
“You got your head up your ass, Jeff. That call was for Peter Gerard, not Rodney Stonecipher, remember?”
“Oh, yeah.” How humiliating that I’d forgotten! Whoever you were, Rodney Stonecipher, you sure left a lot of confusion behind you. Even the coroner had done a double take when he saw the body, Oscar had said.
Wait a minute. A double take - that’s what I had been straining to remember for the past twenty minutes. And it could crack this case wide open. My head wasn’t so far up my posterior after all. The temptation to tell Oscar, to redeem myself, was strong. But that was risky. I could be way off-base. I had to check this out on my own before I told anybody else.
I stood up, thanked Oscar for his time, and told him I had to run back to work. It wasn’t a lie. I did have to - I just wasn’t going to.
“Happy to show you how the real world works,” Oscar said. “I’ll keep you posted on this one. You might be interested.”
With that classic understatement, he lit a cigarette. I clocked it at seven and a half minutes since the last one. Not too bad.
On the first floor of City Hall, I found a quiet corner and tapped the icon for the yellowpages.com app on my iPhone. I started punching in the name of the business I was looking for and it came up before I was even finished: Double Takes.
I hit “Call.”
“Thank you for calling Double Takes,” a voicemail message responded. It was a man’s voice, high pitched and raspy. “I’m very sorry we’re not in the office right now, but if you leave your . . .”
And so forth. You know the drill. I hate recorded messages. Normally I hang up as soon as I know it’s a recording, but not this time.
“This is T.J. Cody calling from the Erin police station,” I said at the appropriate point. “I’m eager to speak with you about an important police matter.” I left my cell phone number.
I figured mentioning the police a couple of times would give Mr. Double Takes an incentive to call me back. And I told the truth: I was eager.
Double Takes was a local business I’d read about in The Erin Observer & News-Ledger a few weeks back - a business that supplied doubles of famous people.
Serious Sylvester
Before I went back to my own office, I stopped next door at Popcorn’s to catch up on anything that might have happened while I was gone.
I wasn’t surprised to find a tall, skinny, African-American kid sitting on the uncomfortable wooden chair in front of her desk. He was absorbed in applying a yellow highlighter to a fat textbook with George Washington on the cover. Then he saw me.
“I l
eft a message that I’d be waiting for you, Mr. Cody,” he said in a “shame-shame” voice as he hurriedly stuck the book and highlighter under the chair.
Sylvester Link, only a sophomore and already the best reporter on The Spectator, is easy to underestimate. He wears glasses, his mustache is so slight it looks like the peach fuzz on a kid still looking forward to his first shave, and he appears underfed.
But Sylvester doesn’t take crap from anybody. He’s serious. Today he was dressed in khaki slacks, a light blue shirt, and a darker blue sport jacket. In all the time I’ve been at St. Benignus, including student days, I’ve only known four kids who wore a sport coat to classes. The other three were ROTC students. I could imagine Sylvester growing up to be Frank Woodford, Lynda’s three-piece-suited boss.
I try to avoid Sylvester when there’s something I don’t want to tell him, but he’s about as hard to avoid as foredoom at a Faculty Senate meeting.
“Come on into the office,” I told him. “I’ll give you fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll take thirty.”
Without a word Popcorn thrust another batch of yellow phone messages into my hand. “You’ll get fifteen for now,” I told Sylvester. “Your rag isn’t the only one demanding my attention.” I’d once been the editor of that rag, but that was long ago.
In my office Sylvester sat down on the threadbare couch and made himself at home. And why shouldn’t he? Sylvester had been one of my work-study students for a semester until he and I agreed that his interests and talents lay elsewhere - like exposing things instead of writing news releases and campus calendars. He was one of the few work-student types I could remember. We parted friends, but friends don’t count in journalism - or shouldn’t. Lynda had that down pat.
“I want to ask you about the murder,” Sylvester said, pulling out a notebook.
Really? Wow, didn’t see that one coming! “I think maybe you should be talking to the Erin police, not to me.”
Holmes Sweet Holmes Page 7
