Barbara D'Amato - [Cat Marsala 09]

by Hard Road (html)

  "Let me finish. Struggle or no struggle, the three were in heated discussion with Plumly. One of them stabbed him. I think to the surprise, but maybe not to the dismay, of the other two. Why did the killer attack Jennifer and me? Because he thought we saw the blood on Plumly as he ran past us. Not the actual stabbing; they were in a huddle right then and Plumly was facing away from me. Why was I not attacked the next day? Because by then the killer had heard that you very seriously suspected Barry, and soon he heard that in fact you had cautioned him, and he knew you wouldn't suspect Barry if Jennifer and I had told you anything to contradict that. So he had killed Jennifer for nothing." I stopped for a moment in sadness, but went on quickly because I didn't want to lose his attention.

  "Once you brought in Barry for serious questioning, the killer thought he was home free. We had not told you that there was blood on his shirt from the time he ran away from the three men. Now, the killer knew that he could always blame the murder on one of the other two, if it ever became necessary. For reasons of their own, none of them wanted to talk to the police.

  "But then he hears that there's doubt about Barry's guilt. Suddenly things are not so easy. I'm hanging around asking questions of the three of them. Each knows I'm visiting the other two. If one of the innocent ones tells which one really stabbed Plumly, the other innocent one may go along and the next thing you know, the killer is in jail. He can't let that happen. So he has to reduce it to one man's word against the other."

  "So he kills Mazzanovich? Unprovable."

  "Maybe. I think he killed Mazzanovich for more reasons than just making it one man's word against another's, though. Mazzanovich was either blackmailing him or on the verge of telling the truth about the murder. I saw Mazzanovich the day before he was murdered, and he was rattled. He was a cheap crook and what used to be called a chiseler. But not a killer.

  "Now, with Mazzanovich dead, the killer is left with his word against the other guy's. This is perfectly satisfactory for him, because even if the other guy breaks down and runs to the cops, the killer can just say he's covering for his own crime."

  "So you've got three men, two of whom are covering up for the spontaneous murder of a friend."

  "Not a personal friend at all. A business associate. And not so spontaneous, either. One of the three came equipped with a knife and an untraceable gun. People don't just do that every day."

  "Well, Mazzanovich, Pottle, and Taubman weren't friends, either. They have no mutual history. Why protect each other?"

  "No, but they had a mutual interest. Mazzanovich, the contractor, and Pottle, the banker, were in a position to get dirty money from the Oz Festival. The lighting designer, Taubman, didn't have money but he needed recognition badly. He and his wife spend like drunken sailors and they have very little income. He sold his car to get money and personally I think he used the money to bribe Mazzanovich and Pottle to get the Oz job. Mazzanovich had a lifetime history of doing 'favors' for payoffs. He was in a position to throw lucrative contracts to people supplying the festival. He also had a lot of cash going out, with two houses, including an expensive one in Northbrook. And Pottle even more so. He's the kind of guy who can never have enough money. He could grant major contracts to suppliers or unions in return for payoffs.

  "If it was made public that they were crooks, they lost big. It would utterly ruin Taubman's reputation, obviously. Mazzanovich would lose his aldermanic position and might go to prison. Pottle as a banker has to be above suspicion."

  "This is all speculation."

  "Plumly told me he hated payoffs. He wasn't the bookkeeper for the festival, but he went over all the festival business papers. For a while I thought he found evidence of the bribes there, but now I don't see how that information would have been in black-and-white anyplace. I think he overheard Mazzanovich, Pottle, and Taubman talking. The walls in the Emerald City castle are three-quarter-inch plywood, and you can hear everything through them. I suspect the three men were alone inside, feeling that they had privacy, talking, and he heard them from outside."

  "Conjecture."

  "You must be doing serious research into their financial dealings. You'd want to know if they had unexplained sources of income. They're suspects."

  "Of course." By his tone, though, I knew he had not given it top priority.

  "Then there was the timing. Why was Plumly meeting those three in that half-hidden location behind the popcorn stand at that exact moment?"

  "I'm sure you can tell me."

  "He invited them to meet him there. It was the opening night of the festival. The mayor, the police superintendent, and a whole lot of other dignitaries and press were going to be present. He met with the three men. He told them what he knew. And he threatened to walk right on over to the bandstand and make it public unless they all agreed to return the money and admit their wrongdoing."

  I paused for him to reply.

  "Well, Ms. Marsala, thanks anyway. I think our time is about up."

  So I didn't tell him I also knew who the killer was.

  I left word for McCoo where I was going, why I was going there, and who had killed Plumly.

  24

  DREAMS REALLY DO COME TRUE

  Seven P.M.

  It was a small, shiny gun, an older nickel-plated revolver. Pottle's pudgy hand covered most of it.

  "I thought you pitched your gun into the fountain."

  "Of course I did. This is a nice fresh new one. Surely you realize there are places you can just about stand on the street corner and yell 'Money for a gun!' "

  "Someone will be able to identify you."

  "No, not really. I didn't do it quite that way, and I didn't look quite like myself when I bought it, either."

  We were in Pottle's office in the bank. Pottle had stopped wheezing. That was surely a bad sign. If his own analysis was right about what gave him an asthma attack, it meant that he was no longer nervous. He'd made up his mind how to get rid of me and he thought his plan would work.

  "I've told people I was coming here."

  "Indeed. And if they ask, I will tell them you came here. Just in case you really did leave word and anybody outside saw you come in. A secretary leaving work late, the occasional homeless person. Whatever. And I'll tell them you left soon after."

  "I told the cops you were the killer."

  "Oh, sure. If they believed you they'd be here. So either you didn't tell them or they thought you were a nut. On the whole, I'd suspect the first. But still—"

  McCoo would come. But would he come soon enough?

  "I must admit, I found it hard to believe you carried a gun to the festival. After all, you're a banker! It was easier to believe a crazy, hungry-to-succeed artist would be a killer. Shows my prejudices, doesn't it?"

  "Out the door, Marsala."

  "But now I know there's something very wrong with you. I guess your family thinks so, too."

  "Nice try. You won't make me mad enough to behave irrationally, you know."

  I said, "Once Mazzanovich was killed, I knew it was you. Taubman is a lighting expert. He would have known right away that Jennifer and I couldn't have seen blood on a gray shirt in a red light. He wouldn't have needed to kill Jennifer and chase me and Jeremy."

  "You're too clever too late."

  "And the other reason I knew it was you was this. The man who chased us in the tunnels reminded me of the Tin Woodman. I thought it was something about the way he looked. Taubman was lanky like the Tin Woodman. Mazzanovich had hair that stuck up straight on top. But it wasn't either of them. The similarity wasn't visual; it was auditory. You were wheezing. The Tin Woodman's joints squeak."

  "Let's get going," Pottle said, gesturing with the gun. "We don't want to be interrupted."

  "I won't move from this office. You can't shoot me here. There'd be too much evidence around. And what would you do with the body?"

  "I'd do the same thing I'm going to do with the body as it is. Take you to the basement. I'd just have to use a document
cart to move you instead of having you walk there."

  "There'd be blood."

  "This is a varnished wood floor. I'd deal with it. Get moving. Out the door, please."

  Suddenly it seemed like a good idea to do as he said. In this closed room he really could do whatever he wanted. Plus, he was much bigger than I was. He wouldn't really have to shoot me. He could bash me on the head.

  Out in the hall, there might be other people around that he didn't know about, or escape routes. I got moving.

  The hall was black-and-gray marble, set in a well-bred checkerboard pattern. I couldn't see anybody on this floor. He gestured to the elevator. "Don't yell," he said. "There's nobody to hear you at this time of night."

  "Well, then if I yell, you won't mind."

  "Yes. I guess that's true."

  I screamed "Help! Help! Help!" at the top of my lungs.

  He waited, bored. He was so unworried that I decided to save my breath. "What about janitors? Cleaning people?"

  "They don't come in until 10 P.M."

  "Guards?"

  "There's one on the first floor in a soundproof booth looking at monitors of the doors and vaults. There are no monitors trained on the elevators."

  The brass elevator door, decorated in a pattern of vines and leaves, slid smoothly open to reveal a marble-and-brass interior. Pottle pushed a button and the elevator descended. Yup, he could wash this floor, too, if he had enough time. And while tests can reveal traces of blood on almost anything, the cops would have to suspect I'd been in here before they bothered to run tests. And even then, how tightly could they tie the blood to Pottle? What's more, I'd be dead by then so it wouldn't help me much.

  Pottle was in a position where he really had very little to lose by killing me now and taking his chances later.

  The elevator door sighed open on a floor labeled BB, which apparently was the bank's way of saying subbasement. No marble here. The flooring was institutional vinyl.

  A long hall led away to the right and left. Pottle nudged me to the left. The walls were poured concrete, painted cream. The hall itself was about fifteen feet wide. There were shelf-lined equipment alcoves along the way. In some were boxed supplies for the bank, mostly reams of paper. A couple of boxes were labeled pencils or pens or erasers, but in keeping with the twenty-first century, far and away most of them were fax cartridges, printer cartridges, both color ink-jet and regular, and so on. I hadn't much time to look. Pottle was pushing me on.

  I said, "Don't be so impatient."

  "I suppose I'd drag my feet if I were going to die, too," he said with more satisfaction than regret.

  We passed janitorial supplies, cleaning supplies, floor polish, mops, brooms, dusting cloths, furniture polish, toilet disinfectant, rest room soap, whole alcoves filled with letterhead paper on shelves with the different letterheads posted underneath each batch. My mind raced, trying to see a possible weapon among all the useless objects.

  "Where are we going?"

  "Why, the tunnels, of course. Would you believe we never even realized that there were tunnels under the bank until that flood a few years ago? The one where somebody broke through the top of one of the old freight tunnels? We had hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. All of a sudden the water started to rise in our basement. The maintenance staffers were up to their ankles in dirty water. Nobody could figure out why at first. It wasn't raining. There were no plumbing leaks. It was utterly amazing. Nobody had any inkling. The tunnels had been down here all along and literally nobody knew. Anyhow, we know now. There's a door down some stairs at the end of this corridor where I can push you into the tunnel."

  I had come to a stop next to a storage area for vacuum cleaners.

  "I've had it, Pottle. I'm not going any farther. And you'd better rethink this. This isn't going to work for you. They'll just find me, sooner or later. Why don't you come to Chief of Detectives Harold McCoo's office and work out a plea bargain."

  "A plea bargain for two murders? Oh, certainly! They'd give me a slap on the wrist, I don't think. This is very safe. For me. Once I pitch you into the tunnels, they probably will never find a body. It's pitch dark down there, and you'll wander blindly until you die of thirst. Nobody will ever figure out where you went in."

  I grabbed one of the vacuum cleaners. "Stand back or else!"

  Pottle actually giggled. "You're going to hit me with a vacuum cleaner?"

  He raised his hand to slap it out of my grip. He could have disarmed me in two seconds, because he was bigger, and also because my left shoulder was so horribly painful. All I could do was hold the vacuum at my waist, while my other hand pulled open the zipper and grabbed at the dust bag.

  "No," I said. "I'm going to hit you with this bag!"

  "So what?"

  He pulled the vacuum and I pulled frantically at the paper-fiber bag, ripping it, which was what I meant to do. Pottle hesitated for maybe two seconds, wondering whether to shoot me right then and there or not. He didn't want to leave a trail of blood if he could help it. And I didn't seem to be doing anything threatening.

  "I'm going to hit you with two quarts of dust!"

  Then I poured the bag of dust over his head.

  His first breath went halfway down. Then the air and dust stuck in his throat. He coughed. He wheezed. He gasped for breath and the gasp just sucked in more dust. Dust ran over his hair and into his eyebrows. Two rivers of dust ran around his nose, across his mouth, and made a little funnel shape as he sucked it in. He grabbed frantically for the inhaler in his pocket.

  I was in a fury. I poured more dust over his head, shouting, "That's for Jennifer! And that's for Plumly! And that's for Jennifer again!" She had been a sweet, talented, and kind young woman and now she was dead.

  Pottle's face turned red and then purple.

  "That's more for Jennifer! And for what you put Barry through!"

  I coughed. My eyes watered. My throat itched and partly closed up.

  But I didn't have asthma.

  As I poured the last of the dust over him, I shouted, "Oh, Pottle. What a world. What a world!"

  25

  REALLY MOST SINCERELY DEAD

  Edmond Pottle didn't die from the dust. So I didn't kill him directly. In his pocket with the inhaler was a Rohypnol pill not in its packaging. Apparently he kept it unwrapped and ready to drop into a woman's drink when opportunity offered. It had stuck to the mouthpiece of the inhaler and he sucked it into his windpipe when he sucked desperately on the inhaler. I actually tried the Heimlich maneuver on him when he started to turn blue, but it was too late.

  I had further damaged my shoulder throwing the vacuum cleaner around, although the injury was well worth it. With my shoulder immobilized in a fiberglass two-piece cast held together by straps, I spent the night in the hospital sedated. Sedated but happy.

  The next morning, the hospital released me. I wasn't supposed to drive. The taxi let me off at home at nine-thirty in the morning. Long John was delighted to see me. Sam had stopped by to give the parrot a change of water, and judging by the half banana in its skin on the kitchen counter, had also sat around doling out treats. LJ gets a banana one half-inch slice at a time, as Sam well knows. Birds can't hold bigger pieces and make a mess if they try. LJ takes several minutes to savor each slice.

  My answering machine played back three messages.

  "Cat, this is Harold Briskman. I have an idea for a snazzy article you could do for us. Call me chop-chop."

  "Ms. Marsala, this is E. T. Taubman. My attorney will ring you to discuss your persistent harassment of me." (A click that sounded louder than others, although I knew it wasn't.) This from a man who was happy enough to knowingly let an innocent man take the blame for a murder.

  "Aunt Cat?" There was a gulp. "They want to take Lion away from me. They can't do that, can they? Can you help me?"

  Shoulder problem or no shoulder problem, I grabbed up my car keys and headed out.

  * * *

  Barry and Maud live in
a modest brick house in Oak Park. There's a small front yard with two plots of grass, one on each side of a tan cement crazy-paving path. As I started up the walk to their house, the front door opened.

  The woman who came out was about fifty-five, gray-haired, with wings of white at her temples. She wore a light blue knit dress and, given the heat of the day, an unnecessary cardigan sweater, left open. Many women don't believe they can go out without a jacket of some kind.

  "Well, thanks. I just feel much better about it all now," she said, turning to face the doorway.

  Maud stood in the doorway, flanked by Jeremy, who held a bundle under his shirt. They waved at the woman. She got into a blue Chevy and drove away.