Barbara D'Amato - [Cat Marsala 09]

by Hard Road (html)

  Judge Danvers approached waving his arms. "Edmond! I have some news on Comerford v. Illinois."

  "Since you don't want me here, I'll leave," I said, snappishly.

  "Well, at least you have that much decency."

  Don't count on it, I thought. I sidestepped between a serving person and the judge. Walking swiftly toward the door, I lost myself to Pottle's eye. Just to be on the safe side, I put my hand on the front doorknob, but an elderly man entered at that instant. Glancing back, I couldn't see Pottle anywhere.

  I crossed into the side hall, seeing three closed doors, and the open door to a bathroom. I figured the last door would lead to the largest bedroom, which would be Pottle's. I opened the door next to that.

  It was a guest bedroom. The bed was made, the night tables flanking it held only lamps and a clock, and the dresser held nothing but two candlesticks. This room was not used much.

  Fine. I opened the closet. Extra Pottle clothes. It looked like his winter stuff was in here.

  I slipped inside and closed the closet door.

  My informant had said Pottle and the Pottle party were going to attend a late celebrity charity auction at Mrs. Marcus Mortimer's estate right after dinner.

  I settled down to wait.

  The distant hum of conversation was practically enough to put me to sleep, if I'd been in a relaxed frame of mind. But I was keyed up and a little frightened. This foray was illegal, wasn't it?

  The best you could say was it was a gray area, ethically speaking.

  I'd been let into the apartment. I hadn't broken in. That was good. I'd been told to leave. That was bad.

  Well, I was here now, and planning to tough it out.

  There was a clinking of glassware and a delicious smell of chicken— and what? Maybe mushrooms and butter and potatoes and other wonderful things. At least they were starting to eat. That was truly good news.

  Because sitting in a closet is horribly boring. I mean, there's only so much you can do before even Armani begins to pall.

  The group would be going out to that auction. They'd better hurry, hadn't they?

  My informant had said Pottle did not have live-in help, as far as she knew. Better be right. She thought he had a cook five days a week and a housekeeper seven days, nine to five. Better be right.

  My left shoulder was cramping. There was no position in which it felt pain-free. If I leaned my back against the closet wall and drew my legs up to my chest, the shoulder blade pushed on the wall. If I curled up in a fetal position on the floor— which was carpeted, thank goodness— I couldn't lie on the left side, for obvious reasons. When I lay on the right side, the weight of my left arm pulled the left shoulder down and made it hurt.

  Better stop whining. You got yourself into this. Lie there and take it. So I lay on my back, which wasn't great either, since there wasn't much room. I had to push a batch of shoes aside, and I kept reminding myself that they had to be replaced carefully before I left, so that Pottle wouldn't know anybody had been here. If he found signs of an intruder, he'd for sure remember that he never really saw me leave. He was snotty, but he wasn't stupid.

  And what if he came in to get something out of the closet before leaving for the auction? Don't even think such things!

  When at last I heard an increasing babble of noise, with high-pitched didn't-we-have-a-lovely-time kinds of voices, it was enough to make me weep with delight.

  There was still the caterers' cleanup time to get through. But I was willing to bet that once Pottle and gang had left, the caterers would have the china in the dishwasher and be out of the apartment as fast as you could say Brillo.

  It was longer than that. But they didn't wait to run several loadings of the dishwasher. They were in a hurry to get home. Probably they had zipped the dinner dishes through the dishwasher while the guests were eating dessert and drinking coffee. They would have served dinner on Pottle's china and silver, so they had to put it away. Their own food-transporting pans and coolers of ingredients they could wash back at the shop. They would probably hand-wash anything else of Pottle's hanging around, while the dishwasher did its thing. Still, it took them an hour. Finally they were out of there, voices fading and the apartment sinking into blessed quiet.

  How long did I have?

  Sidling silently into the hall, I checked the kitchen. Sure enough, it was empty. The caterers had left the light on but taken the garbage with them. I quickly checked the other rooms in what turned out to be a ten-room apartment, all of it decorated in dark wood, red carpets and drapes, and lots of dark brocade. Pottle just didn't have a frivolous bone in his body.

  I took out a pair of surgical gloves. They had been almost all my little formal purse was able to hold. I slipped them on.

  The first search area was the office, predictably a dark wood room, with shelves on three sides and a heavy carved desk under the window. I sat in Pottle's chair and began methodically pulling out drawers. They contained the usual gunk— pens, pencils, paper clips, Post-its, erasers. The two large bottom drawers were file drawers, the left one legal-width, the right one 8 1/2 by 11-inch regular. There were files labeled "car," "insurance," "medical," "products," and so on. They were correctly, not deceptively, labeled. "Products" turned out to be warranties and instruction booklets on all his household products, including the oven, refrigerator, CD player, and other electrical stuff. Also in this folder were bills of sale for his oriental rugs, including the dealer's description of the origin of each rug. Another file labeled "art" was stuffed with letters of provenance of his collection of paintings. In the entire office, there was no computer equipment. Thinking back to his bank office, also free of techno-equipment, I'd bet that Pottle was not computer-literate. Probably he hired people to do his cyberwork for him and had just never bothered to learn.

  His medical file only told me that he was being treated for high cholesterol levels, that he occasionally suffered from gout, and had shots for a trip abroad last year. His CBC and urinalysis looked normal to me.

  Being this nosy was not nice. Well, hell, I wasn't feeling nice right now.

  Did I expect to find a letter from Plumly saying, "I'm on to your kickback scheme, Pottle, you wretch?" Not really, although stranger things have happened. Or a form letter with Pottle's letterhead saying to a vendor, "I'll intercede with the city for you if you pay me" and a line for the "donor" to fill in his name and another line to fill in the amount?

  Well, no, but you never knew. If he felt safe here at home, he might file incriminating letters.

  I could riffle through all the books on the shelves, looking for hidden documents, but I didn't have time. The last thing I needed was to be discovered here.

  What other places did people hide things?

  I tried under the mattress in the red-and-black bedroom, but there was nothing. What about the bathroom? Inexpert people thought hiding things in the toilet tank was a clever idea. Nothing there. The medicine cabinet held only medicines. I felt under the drawers in the vanity, next to the sink.

  Bingo! There was something taped to the underside. This was very good. If he hid it, it must be important. I peeled one end of the tape from the bottom of the drawer by feel and pulled out a flat package, a bubble pack of medication. They were labeled with their European manufacturer's ID, but were illegal in the United States. He'd put them where neither energetic nor nosy cleaning women nor snoopy female guests would find them.

  Rohypnol! The so-called date-rape drug. In two-milligram doses.

  "Roofies," I said aloud. "Oh, Pottle, you are a nasty man."

  * * *

  I hit END on my cell phone. McCoo wasn't in his office. He got to the office early in the morning; he was probably home in bed. It was now ten o'clock. I stood on the corner of Michigan and Chestnut trying to make up my mind. Did I dare call him at home? Wait a minute. Some innocent girl might be about to be raped. Of course I'd call him at home. Let him yell at me if he wanted to.

  But he didn't.

  "
Explain that again, Cat. I was half asleep."

  I heard his wife say in the background, "Wholly asleep."

  I explained again, ending with, "There was a girl, young woman I should say, at the dinner. Now that I think back, Pottle put his hand on her arm and lingered."

  "Cat, what do you want me to do?"

  "Rohypnol is illegal, isn't it?"

  "It's a Schedule III drug, not a Schedule I. The reason is it has medical uses. It's a benzodiazepine used all over the world for insomnia."

  "Not in this country, right?"

  "Well, no."

  "It makes people compliant and causes amnesia so they don't remember later that they've been raped."

  "There have been cases, true. It's happened on college campuses a fair amount. The stuff dissolves quickly in alcohol—"

  "Do something, McCoo. He may be going to rape this girl."

  "Cat, even if this were crack cocaine, what would you have me do? I can't go up to him and arrest him. I can't enter his apartment and search. I don't have probable cause."

  "I've told you it's there. I put it back under the drawer."

  "Listen to yourself. You did an illegal search. I can't move with that. Against a citizen who has no criminal record. I'd never get a warrant."

  "But, McCoo—"

  "What I could do—" He stopped and thought a few seconds. "I could have somebody go hang around that auction if it's still going on and then just follow your friend Pottle. If the woman he's with seems ill or unsteady, my guy could always call the paramedics. It'll look funny, and Pottle may have fits, but my guy can't really get into trouble if he plays it right."

  "Thanks. I like that. Later on, maybe I'll have a serious word with Pottle."

  "Well, if you do, claim you know his supplier, not that you tossed his house."

  "The heck of it is, none of this is related to the Oz Festival. It doesn't help Barry."

  * * *

  So when McCoo telephoned and woke me up at 10 A.M., I thought I knew why.

  "Cat, there's been a serious complication you need to know about."

  "You arrested Pottle?"

  "No. Mazzanovich is dead."

  "What?" I blinked, startled. I had tentatively picked Mazzanovich as the killer, but I stopped myself before blurting that out.

  "When did he die?"

  "This morning."

  "At home? Northbrook or here in Chicago?"

  "Neither. On the job site."

  "Murdered?"

  "Pretty clearly. Apparently his cement trucks were coming, like one every half hour or some such. He's always there to direct them. Although the man driving the truck said he knew where he was supposed to pour, even without Mazzanovich."

  "Don't keep me in suspense."

  "Guy drives to the place where he's pouring some footings or whatever, and swings his cement tube thing into place, and since Mazzanovich isn't there, he figures he'd better look into the forms, just in case the other truck already poured that particular footing. Because if he had, it would overflow, naturally. Does this make any sense to you?"

  "Yes. Go on."

  "So he looks in. I guess you pour new concrete onto concrete that's still wet. So he looks in to be sure, and he sees a hand."

  "That'd get my attention."

  "Did his for sure. He calls nine-one-one and they come and they call us and so on. Near as we can reconstruct it right now, somebody shoved Mazzanovich over the lip of the form and into the wet cement and either pushed him down or left him there knowing he couldn't crawl out. The form is like a big square box, maybe twenty feet deep, so I'm betting on the couldn't-crawl-out scenario."

  "Good God, that's nasty."

  "There were several workers around, but not right near that very spot, and the site is filled with gear and forms and finished footings—"

  "Yeah, I've been there. It's a jungle. You could easily be out of sight of other people."

  "And there are machines going all the time, so a scream might sound like a lot of other noises. Metal screeching. Well. The investigation is barely beginning. If we're lucky, we may find out that somebody saw Mazzanovich with the killer."

  "Wouldn't they have come forward by now?"

  "Workmen on the job would have. But maybe some pedestrian passing by saw something. Maybe some delivery truck driver who came and went. There's a lot of shoe-leather investigation still to do."

  "Good luck. I didn't exactly like Mazzanovich, but this is pretty ghastly."

  "That, yeah. But it also tells you there's somebody very dangerous out there."

  "We knew that already."

  23

  DING DONG

  McCoo had added that his "friend" had followed Edmond Pottle from the auction last night. Pottle and a young woman, trailed by McCoo's friend, went to a trendy singles bar. There he saw Pottle slip his hand over the young woman's drink while she was watching the action on the dance floor. The friend immediately ordered a very sticky drink, a pousse-café, made of layers of sweet liqueurs. Before the young woman actually drank her drink, he got up, lurched toward the dance floor, and spilled his pousse-café down Pottle's shirtfront. Pottle made such a nasty fuss that the woman called a taxi and went home alone.

  McCoo's friend then poured some of her drink into a Baggie inside his own pocket, wetting his jacket but keeping a good deal of the liquid. A chemist could later find Rohypnol in it, if in fact it was there. He would be willing to testify to what he saw.

  I thanked McCoo.

  I phoned Hal Briskman.

  "Hal," I said, "I'm returning your call. Have you heard whether Pottle—"

  "You know, I've been thinking a person could do a social history of a culture entirely through its slang. 'It's a doozy' came from the admiration for the Duesenberg automobile, for example, in the days when cars were the latest invention."

  "Hal, not now. Can you tell me whether Edmond Pottle's family sent him here to get him out of New York?"

  "Mm. Well, yes. That's what I was calling about. There was talk that he'd become something of an embarrassment. Complaints from women."

  "And about Taubman. It isn't just his wife who wants him to become a big success, is it? He's more rapacious than he lets on."

  "True. He'd go about it differently, though. But I guess you could call him very hungry."

  * * *

  I had to make one more connection. Time to go to the cop shop.

  "Lieutenant, things are just too serious for us to be at cross-purposes all the time."

  Hightower sat back in his chair and looked questioningly at me.

  I said, "We can help each other."

  "There's no particular way you can help me. Unless you actually witnessed something— something that wasn't in error."

  Low blow. But no worse than I might expect from Hightower.

  I said, "Now that Mazzanovich is dead, do you have ali-bis for Taubman or Pottle for the time he was killed?"

  "Not the whole time. There's about an hour's gap when Mazzanovich wasn't seen by anybody. Except the killer. Pottle was in his office, but it's not far away. Taubman was in his studio." He smiled at me. "And your brother was working alone at the Emerald City castle."

  Very patiently, I said, "Let me tell you what I've been thinking." He glanced at his watch. "Maybe you could have a cup of coffee while I do, Hightower, so that you won't have to totally waste your time."

  "I don't drink coffee. I don't consider it healthful."

  "But coffee is good for— Oh, never mind. I'll make this as brief as possible."

  "Please do."

  The guy should choke on a sea urchin!

  "All right. Let's for the moment assume Barry didn't kill Plumly."

  "I believe he did."

  "Just for the purpose of argument. Can you do that much?" Since he didn't answer, I went on.

  "There were three of them there with Plumly— Pottle, Mazzanovich, and Taubman. They were either arguing or talking very animatedly. Jennifer probably noticed that, too.
"

  "Just as accurate, I suppose, as her words that she saw Plumly had an unstained shirt."

  Grrrr!

  "Does that mean you now accept that his shirt was bloody?"

  "Only that you couldn't tell one way or the other. And you said you could tell. No, Barry's the killer. We have the fingerprints on the knife to prove it. Plus, he's the only person known to have struggled with Plumly."