A Room For The Dead (THE GHOST STORIES OF NOEL HYND # 3)

by Noel Hynd

  “Too late for Gary,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “Maybe.” He waited, then asked, “What about an 'S. Clay'? Some of the worst evidence against Gary was found in a storage locker leased to an 'S. Clay.' Do you remember that name ever coming up?”

  She shook her head.

  “It wasn't in your transcript, either,” he said. “But Gary had someone who knew his ways pretty well. Either that or he's back as a ghost committing more murder.” Several seconds passed.

  “Or,” O'Hara mused further, “Gary was never guilty at all. And the real killer remains among us.”

  The logs hissed.

  “Gary's dead,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Gary's dead. That's the one thing everyone agrees on. And know what? That's what troubles me the most.”

  “How do you reconcile all of that?” she asked after several more seconds.

  He threw up his hands, as if to end all serious discussion. “I have no idea,” he said. “And if you think of something, please tell me.”

  “I promise,” she said. Again, she smiled. And he liked her all the more for it.

  He stood and gathered the cups and saucers. There was a silence in the house as she remained in the living room, the glow of the fire keeping her company. It occurred to him that a woman's presence in the house was something that he sorely missed.

  For a moment in the kitchen, as he poured out the remainder of the coffee, he thought of putting on some music, as their professional encounter had apparently run its course.

  But naturally, O'Hara would have preferred Sinatra. Maybe one of the tapes from the mid-1950s when Francis Albert's voice was as powerful and smoothly polished as a new Caddy V-8, the epitome of brash, romantic, snap-brimmed cool. Maybe some hard-core sexy stuff like that would loosen Julie Steinberg even more.

  He would like that if it happened, O'Hara decided. And yet, he couldn't bear one more defensive discussion of the other Frank.

  So he let the moment pass. No Sinatra for his guest. Damned thirty-something psychologist from Boston, he reasoned. She was probably into Aerosmith.

  Their final cups of coffee were consumed peaceably. No mysterious creaks upstairs, no visitations from a netherworld. The fire remained constant, and Julie Steinberg was gone by seven P.M. O'Hara laid off any booze, and the rest of the evening passed less eventfully than the previous one.

  O'Hara's feelings toward Wilhelm Negri were purely professional. He knew before he went into Negri's office at the newspaper in Nashua the next morning that they would have to be.

  Negri broadcast his daily radio show out of the newspaper's executive suites. A small broadcast chamber had been constructed adjacent to the publisher's office, and he took to the airwaves at eleven thirty each morning, filling his half hour with conservative opinions, liberal-bashing accusations and, when it was convenient, the assorted half truth. The targets were familiar and easy, and his growing audience loved it.

  In New England, many stations had once used Wilhelm Negri as a cheaper, watered-down version of Rush Limbaugh. This had so mortified Negri that he had asked his writers to intensify all his attacks. He moved as far right as a man could on the radio and not be termed crackpot, then edged even a little farther.

  Ratings soared. He became the Dracula of far-right radio commentators. And in the last few years, he had gone national.

  Wilhelm Negri's grandfather, Benjamin Negri, had owned a papermill in the early part of the century. After World War One, Grandpa Negri had had two commodities in abundance: a lot of nasty opinions and a lot of cheap paper. In 1920, he combined the two, founding the New Hampshire American, and staying in business by covering hunting accidents, sticking up for the timber industry, selling advertisements for local hardware stores, and printing jingoistic editorials.

  Through some select Jew-baiting, Red-bashing, and FDR-hissing, Benjamin Negri became a regional celebrity in the 1930s. He had mined all these topics very profitably and mixed them with some Olympic-caliber flag-waving up until the 1940s when he went to jail for income tax evasion.

  The next Negri, Wilhelm's father Peter, had been sent to school at Exeter and Princeton. Somehow sanity prevailed. Peter Negri ran a temperate middlebrow local rag that served the community and let the Manchester Union-Leader do the editorial screaming. This changed in the 1980s, however, when Wilhelm Negri at age thirty-five took over from the old man, who retired.

  Wilhelm Negri turned the American into a tabloid, launching screaming editorials, and backing redneck causes-such as finding ways to execute every convicted killer in America. He turned the journal into a pulpit and a power base. Apparently in the Negri family, the wacko stuff tended to skip generations.

  On the morning of the interview, O'Hara was met in the lobby by one of Negri's lackeys, a fortyish man named Howard Chambers. Chambers was thin and wore a dark suit. He was half butler and half bodyguard.

  Chambers led O'Hara first to a third-floor waiting room outside the publisher's office. The meeting was scheduled for nine thirty. O'Hara was kept waiting till ten.

  But as O'Hara waited, he had already come to a few decisions. He would treat Negri as he would the bereaved in any other murder investigation. He swore that to himself and simultaneously knew that he would not be able to. On account of who Negri was. On account of what he did, the paper he published, and the opinions he put forth on the radio.

  O'Hara reflected back to the thought that he had had outside the medical examiner's office: Whenever a $60,000 car was parked near a murder case, there were always complications. It never had failed. He knew it wouldn't fail here, either.

  Finally, at a few minutes after ten A.M., Chambers admitted O'Hara to Negri's office. O'Hara was given a seat before a long, wide, mahogany desk.

  The publisher was preparing for his radio show, he said, but certainly wished to spend a few minutes with the chief investigator in Abigail's death. He received the detective cordially but with coolness. O'Hara was hard-pressed to understand whether the chill had an edge of hostility to it or whether Negri was a man whose emotions had been drained by the death of his wife.

  The question was only amplified by the short conversation that ensued. Early in the previous summer, Abigail Negri had asked for a divorce, the publisher said, leaning back in a thousand-dollar leather swivel chair behind a five-thousand-dollar desk. He had never completely understood her reasons, Negri pouted, much less come to grips with them.

  “She said things about not wanting to be a celebrity's wife, that she was disappointed with our life together,” Negri told O'Hara. “But I'm hard-pressed to see how our life together was any different than what she should have expected.”

  O'Hara allowed that it was unfortunate when two people fell into avenues of misunderstanding. And that the marriage couldn't have been saved. As he listened, he tried to get a fix on the publisher. Negri stood after a few more minutes and, continuing to talk, went to a clothing closet and began to change his shirt. He also pulled out a sports jacket and tie. He dressed sharper on the radio, he explained.

  At forty-seven, Negri remained a relatively young man, even if slightly porky. He had a dark jowl that looked as if it had been knocked off-center and then repaired, as if from an accident or some unseemly fracas. As associations free-floated through O'Hara's mind, the very invocation of anything off-kilter summoned an image of Gary Ledbetter, and O'Hara wondered if Gary was peering over his shoulder right then.

  “How long were you married, sir?” O'Hara asked.

  “Two years. A little longer.”

  “When did things start to go wrong?” O'Hara asked.

  The publisher turned on him. “What sort of question is that?” he asked.

  “I'd call it 'background,'“ O'Hara explained.

  “I think things were okay for about a year,” Negri said. “You know, it's not as if I didn't have a lot of love for Abby. I'm sorry things didn't work out. She was quite a woman.” He spoke without affection, reje
cting one piece of neckwear from the closet as he spoke. When he found the tie he wanted, he looked up. “Execution is too good for whoever killed her. Do you know what I'm saying?”

  O'Hara said he knew. He was even able to say that he agreed.

  “New Hampshire has a death penalty,” Negri continued, “and it hasn't been used since pre-Gary Gilmore.”

  “I'm familiar with that fact, sir.”

  “You're a policeman. Why do we have laws that aren't used? Maybe you could tell me that?”

  “I couldn't possibly, sir. And if you'll permit, I came here to ask you questions. Not answer yours.”

  Negri gave him a look, but backed off.

  O'Hara moved quickly past the moment of tension.

  “Enemies?” O'Hara asked. “I'm sure you have a few. Any who would do something like this to Abby? Perhaps to get at YOU?”

  “Enemies,” Negri repeated. “I probably have millions. Liberal left. The usual hate groups. Homosexuals. Abortionists. Book and film riffraff. Teachers. A lot of schoolteachers really hate me. Many enemies among them. It was a schoolteacher who shot Huey Long, you know. Were you aware of that?”

  “Can you be more specific about your enemies?”

  “I couldn't possibly be.”

  “Hate mail?” O'Hara asked. “How much do you get?”

  “A bag each week. Couple of hundred letters. Most with New York postmarks.” Negri seemed proud of this, as if it somehow made him more butch.

  “Any specific threats in it? “

  “How would I know? I don't read it.”

  “Could I examine it?”

  “Ha!” Negri snorted. “You can have it, man. You don't think I want it, do you?”

  Someone else, it seemed, sorted through the day's post. The stuff of pure adulation was passed along to “The Great One.” Questions were answered by staff. The sicko stuff-most of it unsigned-was piled in a corner and burned once a month.

  O'Hara listened to this without taking issue, just letting Negri talk. He had been a detective long enough to know a fraud when he saw one. He thought he saw a world-class one right here.

  “How did you first meet Abigail?” O'Hara asked.

  “We met at a social function in Boston,” Negri said. “But I don't see how that ties into whatever you're investigating.”

  “I'm investigating her death, sir,” said O'Hara with endless patience. “So I'm trying to understand her life.”

  Negri seemed to take this under advisement. He thought about it as he massaged a wrinkle on the necktie he had chosen for his radio appearance.

  “Yes, I suppose you are,” Negri said, a tiny air of boredom overtaking him. Or maybe it was growing annoyance. O'Hara couldn't properly tell.

  Negri followed all this with several well structured anecdotes on the nature of his marriage, little stories which reflected favorably upon him and not-so-well upon Abigail. All this while readying himself for air time.

  At ten forty, Howard Chambers reentered the room to give Negri his twenty minutes until broadcast notice. This doubled as a hint that their interview time was winding down.

  O'Hara frowned. “I thought you were on at eleven thirty.”

  “Oh?” Negri asked, his interest perking. “You know my time slot? You're a listener?”

  “I've heard the show. And when you're on the air you say you're on 'live.'“

  Chambers smiled like a cobra. “The tape is 'live' when we make it. Then we do a thirty-minute delayed feed.”

  “Nothing's on the radio live any more,” Negri explained. “But keep listening. I’ll put in a good word for the New Hampshire State Police.”

  “My superiors will be thrilled,” O'Hara said, consciously not saying that he would be equally impressed.

  Negri looked him in the eye and caught the distinction.

  “So what's the deal?” the publisher finally asked.

  “Deal?”

  “Have a suspect in Abby's murder? A theory? A way to solve the case? That's what I'm asking.”

  “There really isn't a 'deal,'“ O'Hara explained. “We track down every lead, we explore every possibility, we turn every clue inside out. When that's exhausted, we do it over and over again and we hope to get lucky.”

  “I'd love to see a quick arrest.”

  “With all due respect, sir, I'd prefer an accurate arrest.”

  Negri turned away and grunted. “Let me ask you something, Officer,” he said. “What percentage of homicides in this state get solved?”

  “It's about the same as the national average. We close about fifty percent of our homicide investigations.”

  Negri nodded. “That's about what I expected,” he said. “Some kind of country, isn't it? A murderer can walk away from the scene of his crime knowing that his odds of getting off scot-free are about fifty-fifty. You can't tell me that the Supreme Court of the 1960s isn't responsible for a situation like that.”

  O'Hara said nothing.

  “Pretty disgusting,” Negri repeated, angling for a response from O'Hara. O'Hara wasn't in the mood to give him one.

  Then Negri was before a full-length mirror on the inside of the closet door, tying an eighty-five-dollar strip of silk Nicole Miller neckwear into a Windsor knot. Nice and tight. The knot, not the interview. As far as the latter was concerned, Negri was signing off. Just like his show: He had said what he wished to in the time he had allotted. Now the performance was over.

  Negri must have felt O'Hara's eyes on his back, because the knot came out less than perfect. He pulled the tie apart, the room still in silence, and tried again. Then he turned with his tie in mid-flip.

  “Is there anything else, Officer?” Negri asked.

  O'Hara closed his notepad. Chambers was waiting and watching, arms folded.

  “Nothing else,” O'Hara answered.

  “Then, thank you for your time,” Negri said. “I'd like to proceed with my program. If you don't mind.”

  “Not at all,” said O'Hara.

  He rose and thanked his hosts. As he departed he caught a snippet of conversation from the two men, concerning the day's radio script, which apparently Negri had not yet read.

  Later, O'Hara put Negri's show on the car radio. The topic for the day was divorce and the alarming number of Americans who no longer were trying to hold their families together.

  And your estranged wife was murdered, and it comes as a relief to you, O'Hara thought but didn't say. Fact is, it's damned convenient. Maybe you could someday detail for me all the ways in which it made your life easier.

  The gold chain and pendant, which O'Hara should have turned over to the victim's estranged husband, remained in his pocket. He felt it was better off there.

  But how any of this might have tied back into Gary Ledbetter and the Ledbetter style of homicide was still something that eluded Frank O'Hara. And it eluded him completely.

  Chapter Fourteen

  O’Hara arrived at the door to the captain's office at ten the next morning. Mallinson, standing behind his desk, never raised his eyes. His head was inclined downward and he was studying the contents of a fresh file upon his desk as O'Hara entered. The captain finally looked up when he finished reading and as O'Hara shifted his weight before him.

  “Talk to me,” Mallinson said.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Sometimes I don't believe the nickel-and-dime crap we get,” the captain said.

  “So what's that?” O'Hara asked.

  “A bunch of mutts held up a Sainsbury truck outside of Hillsboro,” Captain Mallinson said.

  Sainsbury was a food and liquor retailer with a string of cut-rate stores across New Hampshire. Low prices, quality that matched. Cheap imitations of name brands. The truck's cargo had been seventy-six cases of house-label booze-vodka with fake Russian names, gin milled in Puerto Rico that called itself Buckingham Palace, and medicinal-tasting Scotch with a McSomething label-the stuff that gives a guy a good quick drunk, but the next morning he feels like a horse kicke
d him in the head.

  “White guys? Black guys?” O'Hara asked.

  “White,” Mallinson said cautiously. “The truck driver was a colored guy. Vernon Frealy. Got popped in the teeth by one of the robbers. Here. Look at the report.”

  Mallinson presented O'Hara with a manila folder. Photographs of the stickup scene. Reports from the first uniformed man who had arrived, plus the first two detectives.

  There had been three big, sturdy white guys, Frealy had said. They ambushed him when he stopped his eighteen-wheeler outside a late-hour burger joint. The entire stickup team had been masked with heavy headgear. They pulled Frealy behind a building, took his keys, and went to work moving his cargo into a follow-up truck of their own. Meanwhile the backup truck driver, a big, strapping guy, held Frealy at bay with a baseball bat. Sixteen degrees Fahrenheit while all this was going on. Naturally, no witnesses.

  In the course of the robbery, however, one of the hold-up men lost his headgear. He was completely bald. Shaved head bald.

  That was one of the queer details. Then, as O'Hara kept reading, there was another. During the heist, Frealy-touched with some sort of insanity or indignation-had resisted giving up the company's goods. When his guard glanced away for a moment, Frealy took a heavyweight kick at his captor's cojones.