Another Word for Murder (27 page)

Rosco moved his gaze from the corpse and looked toward Abe Jones and Al Lever, who stood in the center of the room beside a convertible couch that was open into its bed position. From the amount of trash that had collected around the bed's base and on its surface, Rosco guessed that the convertible had been in the same position for some time. As with the sofa-bed, all other surfaces of the apartment—two folding chairs, a green resin table near the cramped galley kitchen, two window sills, a TV stand, and a battered bureau—were covered with trash. There were stained takeout food containers, beer cans that had been either crumpled or not, a couple of empty bottles of Jack Daniel's, a stack of free weekly newspapers, yogurt containers, opened potato chip bags, red pistachio shells scattered over the floor, soda cans, a paper plate of half-eaten Oreos, balled-up wrappers from prepackaged sandwiches, and several orange-yellow plastic prescription drug vials. One of Abe Jones's assistants was dusting a soiled drinking glass for fingerprints while another was shooting flash photographs with a motor-drive Nikon camera.

“So Frank hung himself?” Rosco said as he approached Al and Abe. “That's not going to make his connection to the Tacete situation any easier to prove.”

The men exchanged handshakes and Abe said, “Not definitively, maybe.”

“Who called it in?”

“The landlord,” Al answered. “He said he'd been poking his head in twice a day, knowing that we were looking for his tenant. He's kind of a kook. In fact, I think he was hoping for a little gore, but at least he informed us in a timely fashion.”

“Did our boy leave a note?”

Lever pointed to the table near the galley kitchen. Sitting atop a discarded Hawaiian-print shirt was an old manual typewriter. In its roller was a letter.

Rosco walked to the table and began to read in a subdued and level voice: “
What's the point? What's the point of going on? Okay, so I did it. I killed him. You'll have no trouble piecing things together, but if you think you're going to get a blow by blow confession, you're crazy. Because the real deal is; I'm bored. I don't see anything left for me here so I'm moving on. Just moving on. I'm going to a better place, and I won't miss a one of you in the slightest, so please don't waste your energy crying into your beers. Except you, Bonnie. You're the only one I really loved. You I will miss, but I couldn't stand it here anymore. So
, adios, amigos. Hasta la vista, sayonara,
and all that stuff.”

Rosco's gaze returned to Abe and Al. “Does his sister know?”

“No,” Lever replied. “Carlyle will move the body to the morgue in a bit, and she can come in and identify it before he does his autopsy. I don't need an hysterical relative in here until Abe's done with the place.”

“Find anything interesting?” Rosco asked Abe.

Abe nodded. “I thought you'd never ask. Here's where my ‘not definitively' gets a little help…. We've got an army tarp that's fits the description of the one Leo Moody saw covering the Corvette in the ravine; we've got Tacete's Rolex watch; we've got a few of his credit cards; we've got about six thousand dollars in fifties, which is the denomination Karen was instructed to leave in the gym bag; and we've got this …”

Abe's gloved hands reached down toward the tangled bedding, produced a legal-sized manila envelope, opened it, and proceeded to show and describe to Rosco what it contained. “We'll want Belle to examine this, of course, to see if she can discover any hidden clues; but for starters, we have five sheets of graph paper with crossword grids penciled in. They're in varying degrees of completion—lots of erasures and restarts…. I'm guessing they're probably prototypes for ones O'Connell later completed. There are also two blank sheets containing lists of words, quotations, and what I gather must be possible puzzle titles…. The “Frankly, Dear” crossword has a solution that runs the width of the grid: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN. The words are written in red, as you can see.”

Rosco nodded; his expression had turned very grave. “I've got to admit that this doesn't make me feel any too comfortable. It looks like our dead man spent a lot of time emulating Belle—down to the red pen and the same gauge of graph paper. And we know he was targeting her…. She received four of these puzzles under different authorships.”

“Well, Poly—crates,” Lever tossed in. “The guy's a goner. He can't bother your wife now.”

Rosco turned back to Abe. “So, Frank went missing in order to take care of the Tacete business, left the place a junk heap, and then sneaked back in and hanged himself? What's his motive? And don't tell me it was remorse.”

“I'm not sure there's a motive, per se.” Abe indicated the vials of medications. “My guess is that he wasn't lucid when he decided to take his own life.”

“The letter looks clear enough.”

“There's no telling when he wrote it,” Lever responded. “He could have been clean and sober when he was pounding away on the keys, and then needed a little help to get on with the job.”

Rosco returned to the typewriter, studied the letter again, and frowned in thought. “Doesn't this confession seem a tad too easy to you both?”

Al shrugged. “The guy was about to take his own life. My guess is that he wanted to keep it sweet and simple. There's no hedging your bets when you've decided to check out.”

Rosco's frown of concentration deepened.

“Okay, Poly—crates,” Lever said, “what's eating you?”

“I don't know, Al…. Something seems wrong. The guy was a total slobola—”

“And slobs don't get depressed?”

“That's not the problem,” Rosco answered, shaking his head.

“C'mon, Poly—crates, give. Whatever it is, I'm sure it'll be good for a few laughs.”

“I keep coming back to the fact that the Tacete deal was carefully orchestrated. To be honest, I don't think Frank was capable of pulling off such a sophisticated plan alone.”

“You knew him?”

“No, but …”

“Okay, then who? Bonnie?”

“Or Karen … Remember, we've got a whole slew of possible suspects…. We could even be looking at a group effort.”

“And one of those sweethearts was about to rat, and Frankie couldn't take the pressure,” was Al's acerbic response.

“That's possible,” Rosco said, but his tone wasn't enthusiastic.

“Come on, Poly—crates. What's O'Connell's M.O.? A guy who was into a lot of iffy stuff, who believed he had more on the ball than anyone had ever given him credit for, who'd spent his life dreaming up small-time cons—and whose substance abuse issues could easily have been escalating. Which means he was probably strapped for cash. Look at the letter he wrote. Maybe being ‘caught' by those security cameras wasn't an accident, and the same thing goes for his attempt to sell Tacete's Explorer. Maybe our boy knew exactly what he was doing. Maybe he wanted us to nab him. It wouldn't be the first time.”

“Or else someone was setting him up, and he was either too vain or too dumb to realize it,” was Rosco's quiet answer.

“And you think it was a woman?”

“Wouldn't be the first time.”

“AND THE COW JUMPED OVER THE …”

Across

  1.  Pea coat?

  4.  See 53-Down

  7.  Plead

10.  Goose——

13.  “The Greatest”

14.  Edge

15.  Altar words

16.  34-Down inspiration

17.  —Pan Alley

18.  Stubborn

20.  Put-down

21.  Quote; part 1

24.  Philly Pops leader, Peter——

25.  Rug

26.  Helpers; abbr.

28.  Collection

30.  Quote; part 2

32.  Mr. Yale

34.  In debt

35.  Fishing pole

36.  Quote; part 3

41.  Mr. Franklin

42.  Poetic contraction

43.  Word to 22-Down

44.  Quote; part 4

47.  Colorful fish

51.  “After you,” in Italy

52.  Heating no.

55.  Groan

56.  Quote; part 5

60.  The limit

61.  Refine

62.  Spanish uncle

63.  Do away with

64.  Fib

65.  Revolver

66.  Mr. Cheney

67.  Wallet item

68.  007

69.  Tie breakers; abbr.

70.  Ship's heading

Down

  1.  ——leather

  2.  Stanley's partner

  3.  Scratch

  4.  Waiter's prop

  5.  Black——

  6.  Muscat native

  7.  Prejudice

  8.  Ms. Ferber

  9.  Exploded

10.  E. U. moneyman's concern?

11.  5 miles No. of Kenton, OH

12.  USA output

19.  Ms. Ryan

22.  Many a dog

23.  Kyrgyzstan City

27.  Forlorn

29.  Wapiti

30.  Overwhelm

31.  “——at 11”

33.  “Got it”

34.  See 16-Across

36.  Hide of 29-Down

37.  Wife of James VII

38.  Imperfect; abbr.

39.  Smack

40.  2
^nd
on the agenda

41.  Power rating; abbr.

45.  It may be huge

46.  A&E

48.  Stroll

49.  RCA output

50.  Whosoever

52.  Lei

53.  “It takes 4-Across to——”

54.  Raw, film-wise

57.  Cut

58.  “——Died with Their Boots On”

59.  Urges

60.  Hit sign

To download a PDF of this puzzle, please visit
openroadmedia.com/nero-blanc-crosswords

CHAPTER 33

“Oh, this is so sad…. ” Belle murmured over and over again while Rosco perched in the canvas deck chair near her desk and watched her fill in a Xerox copy of Frank O'Connell's final crossword. The afternoon sunlight made the bearded irises outside the window glow like the flowers in van Gogh's famous painting, but neither husband or wife seemed aware of the lovely sight. “Because, from the evidence of this, as well as of his previous puzzles, Frank was obviously brighter than anyone believed. He was certainly better read.”

“He's also the prime suspect in a homicide, my dear.”

She sighed. “I know … I know that, Rosco…. And I realize that we were hot on Frank's trail last night, ready to accuse him of everything and anything, and full of righteous indignation—at least, I was.”

“I expect we both were. But that's what happens when the bad guys ride into town. They get folks angry and upset.”

Belle released another pensive breath, but didn't immediately reply. “‘And the Cow Jumped over the …,' by Frank T. O'Connell,” she read aloud, then paused again in thought. Beside her lay a duplicate of the entire file Al Lever and Abe Jones had found in the dead man's apartment; its contents were spread across her desktop. “It's interesting that he used his middle initial, and also added them to each phony name on the other puzzles; and then built
this
crossword around a lesser-known step-quote from Mark Twain; a man who was famous for poking fun at personal pretensions.”

“Whoa, hold on.” Rosco craned his neck toward Belle's desk. “I didn't see any mention of Mark Twain when Abe showed me the file.”

Belle tilted her head and looked at her husband in innocent surprise. “That's because the quotation wasn't attributed in the puzzle.”

“Don't tell me you have this Twain thing memorized, along with everything else in the world?”

“All right, I won't.” Belle gave a brief smile.

“Very funny…. ” Rosco also smiled lightly. “No wonder you have such a hard time recalling the really important things, like recipes for meatloaf. Your brain is already stuffed with aphorisms and poems and derivations—”

“‘Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to,'” she interrupted.

“That's what Frank wrote? He sure wasn't blushing when I saw him. He was as blue as Paul Bunyon's ox.”

“Thank you, Mr. Sensitive…. No. It's a quote from
Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
, which is the book Frank referenced. ‘When in doubt, tell the truth,' is from the same work.”

“So what did O'Connell use?” Rosco asked.

Belle's face returned to its thoughtful expression. She pointed to the crossword in her hand. “Start here at 21-Across, continue with 30, 36 and 44-Across, and conclude with 56-Across.”

“‘EVERYONE'S A MOON AND HAS A DARK SIDE WHICH HE NEVER SHOWS TO ANYBODY,'” Rosco read aloud.

“I guess that theory must have summed up Frank T. O'Connell's life,” was Belle quiet comment. “All this time, I assumed those child-themed crosswords were intended as a threat, or else a reference to the Snyder case … when they may simply have been the product of a lonely soul wanting to connect with something he'd never had: a carefree youth.” She lined up the five puzzles. “‘Baby Steps,' Frank's first attempt at contacting me … Even its nursery rhyme step-quote has a sinister tone. A MAN OF WORDS AND NOT OF DEEDS IS LIKE A GARDEN FULL OF WEEDS … then ‘Sugar and Spice,' which was probably inspired by Bonnie…. ‘As Time Goes By';
‘Frankly, Dear.'
… I feel as though we're witnessing an entire life unraveling within these crosswords.” She grew silent once again; at length she sighed and returned her gaze to her husband. “So, we're supposed to meet Al at Bonnie's apartment? I don't know if I'm up to it, Rosco.”