Murder on Location (26 page)

The hotel dick left off reading his detective magazine long enough to let me use his phone to call Lowell Mason in Grantham. He was the guy who was paying me and I'd let his wife get away from me twice. The least I owed him was an explanation. I could make a preliminary report. After he was sure that I charged the call to my office number, the hotel dick went back to his reading.

“Mason Real Estate. Can I help you?” It was Mason himself trying to sound like a receptionist.

“You could have, but now it's too late. This is Cooperman. Remember me? I've got a report for you if you want hear it.”

“Cooperman! Where is my wife? What have you done with her?” He sounded like the same bastard who'd hired me, but the concern in his voice sounded genuine.

“I think I can promise a full recovery, Mr. Mason. But if you want it to last, I'd cast off from your business friends. I don't think they help the relationship.”

“I'll ask for advice when I need it. Right now I want my goddamned wife back. Do you hear?” He didn't wait for an answer. And I didn't have one anyway.

I took the paper to the Guard Room and ordered an egg-salad sandwich and coffee. The headline in the Falls paper grabbed me at once:

GANGLAND WAR HOTS UP: CLAIMS FOUR

The story continued:

Shotgun blasts killed four men today in what has been described by police as a “gangland style” war which has suddenly exploded in the Falls area. Dead are one of the alleged underworld dons, Tullio Solmi, and three of his business associates. The shootings occurred in Mr. Solmi's private office at Cataract Vending in the Pagoda Tower. There were no witnesses to the murders, described as “executions” by a police spokesman. With Mr. Solmi on the blood-spattered carpet were the bodies of Frederico Pacifico, president of Old Pal Juice Company, Sean O'Feeney, a director of the consortium that owns and operates the Pagoda Tower, and Vic Bertolini, of the Ben Nevis Trucking Company of Fort Erie. A special Niagara Regional task force
is being established to deal with an increasing number of incidents that can be linked to organized crime …

And so on. It was clear that the writer, crime reporter John Pozzetta, was aiming for a National Newspaper Award with his prose, but he got the essentials where they belonged. Now it was the turn of the heirs and assigns of Tullio to blast away at Mordecai Cohn, who, for my two dollars, had his name written all over this job. I wondered whether Tony Pritchett would then just step in and take over the pieces of a buckshot-pitted empire after the smoke cleared. That would be playing it smart. But you can never tell about these guys. Maybe next spring Solmi's Cadillac will show up parked next to Al Capone's bullet-proof limousine in the exhibition around the corner.

Savas shoved in beside me, moving my coffee cup aside with his big elbow. Sergeant Pete Staziak, a fellow-sufferer of Harry Croft's geometry class in Grade 13, plunked down opposite me. Both wore grey faces, daring me to lighten the moment with a witty saying. Savas glanced at the paper. He'd been working too hard to have seen it. Nor did he see the rehashed story about the Pride suicide, which had now been moved to the bottom of the front page. The Chamber of Commerce wouldn't like having two major deaths on page one. Editors can't unmake the news, but they'd managed to lose poor David
Hayes among the advertisements toward the end of the first section.

“Benny, Savas and I are dead beat,” Pete said, rubbing the red mark on his forehead where his hat had been sitting. I waved down one of the gingham-dressed waitresses and she brought two fresh cups and a Silex full of coffee. Chris blew into a spoonful of hot blackness and sipped it, looking at me from under his generous eyebrows.

“Benny, where are you in this thing? I'm going nuts.” I could feel my brain trying to draw breath. There comes a time to bring out into the open the facts that are known and the speculations which might be harbouring facts under the ivy.

“Okay,” I said, “let's talk about it. Question number one?”

“Who let the mob out? They've been quiet for years; now, suddenly we're back in the twenties. What gives?”

“It's like launching a boat.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know how they knock out the last wedge to coincide with the bottle of champagne? That's what's been happening. The wedge is gone and look out below.”

“Who knocked out the wedge?”

“The short answer is: me. I did. But I was just the dull immediate cause. The deep, underlying cause was more complicated. One gang was moving in on the other; it was inevitable. Pritchett and his crowd, mostly centred around Atlantic City, are crowding the syndicate which
has controlled vice in this area for the last ten years. The explosion was unavoidable.

“Why can't everything be as tidy as Hayes and Miranda Pride,” Pete said, almost under his breath. “At least some things obey the rules of probability.”

“That's where we went wrong,” I said. “Miranda didn't kill Hayes and she didn't kill herself either.” Four eyes looked at me with dislike. I was supposed to make things easier for them, not more complicated. I repeated it a different way, but their eyes didn't change.

“Pete, take hold of your tie and pull.”

“Not now, Benny. No time for …” I leaned over and grabbed Pete's tie which was hanging like a blue tongue down his yellow shirt.

“Hey!”

“Just watch a second. Look, if I pull this side, the knot gets tighter and the end gets longer. If I pull this side the knot gets tighter, but it doesn't slip. Now watch when I pull both ends together as hard as I can: nothing happens.”

“You've wrecked this tie!”

“What's going on, Benny?”

“Why does Miranda tie a noose in the middle of the curtain cord?”

“She wanted the cord doubled; didn't trust a single strand.”

“Yeah, but it was single around her neck, wasn't it?”

“That's right. I don't know.”

“Tell me, were you there when she was cut down? I'd been taken to another room for questioning, you remember.” Usually Chris would take this as a cue for a wisecrack, but he let it slide by.

“Yeah, I watched the whole thing. What about it?”

“Well, when I saw her I don't remember seeing two separate strands of rope. Were they twisted around one another?”

“Maybe half a twist, not much for the length. She didn't turn on the rope because her legs were touching the wall.”

“The noose worked like Pete's tie; there were two ends to it, one pulled, the other didn't.”

“Check. So?”

“So, why were both lengths the same? If she'd tied off the rope and jumped, the slipping side would have tried to cause strangulation and death. But the other end would have virtually remained fixed and would have prevented the slipping side from doing its job.”

“What are you working up to?”

“The rope we saw was holding the body with equal tension on either side. I'm saying that she can't have achieved that by tying off the ends and jumping. If the two ends are tied off even, that doesn't allow for the slack needed to kill Miranda. So, what I'm saying is that she was strangled first and then hung up behind the curtains. Otherwise the …”

“Hold on, Benny. Drive this by me again.” I demonstrated with Pete again, showing how the non-slipping side prevents the other side from slipping.

“So let me put it this way: if you tie off a slipknot so both ends are the same length, it isn't a slipknot any more.” I put the stretched ends of Pete's tie in Chris' hand. “Try it out, you'll see.”

“But we've got latent prints from her bare feet.”

“It's that clever bandit you were talking about.”

“What are you going to tell me about the scarves? How do they figure? You're going to surprise me again, right?”

“The scarves look right. Honest. If she did it herself, she would have tried to protect herself from unnecessary marks. And they certainly were used to prevent our finding more than one set of marks. The scarves blurred the impressions, so that on the basis of marks alone the coroner couldn't say she was hanged after she was strangled.”

“Let's see if I can jump a step ahead of you. If Miranda didn't kill herself, that means she didn't kill Hayes, right?”

“In a roundabout way, right. I mean she could have killed herself for reasons that had nothing to do with Hayes. Also, she could logically have killed Hayes and in turn been murdered herself.” Both policemen got that look in their eyes again. So I added, “But my bet is that both of them were killed by the same person.” They relaxed a little at that and Chris began to sip cold coffee.

“This is getting to sound like one of those English murder mysteries. Our training says look for the simple explanations first.”

“And it makes sense. Let me show you a couple of things I've found out and see what simple pictures develop.”

“Movie time, eh?”

“Reel one. For this we have to go back nearly thirty years.”

“Oh, God,” said Chris, “one of those.”

“Monty Blair was in his heyday putting on plays in Grantham. Monty befriended a young mechanic named Furlong. Furlong paid him off by stealing a play Monty wrote, changing a few things, then passing it off as his own. By that time Monty's spent a lot of time knocking the rough edges off Neil; nearly ten years. Monty didn't squawk about the play because he didn't have enough beak and claws to make it hurt. Time moves on, you can see the calendar pages blowing away, and it's the late seventies. Monty takes another writer under his wing, maybe boasts a little about ‘knowing Furlong when.' The young writer fires off a play he's written; and sure as rent day, Furlong doctors it and passes it off as his own work. He pays Hayes a little, but gives him no share of the credit. Hayes isn't like Monty: he's mad, and just as ambitious as Furlong ever was. Call that reel one.

“Reel two. For this we go back to the mid-sixties. We meet a Furlong with more poise. He's living and working in the Falls and has two girl friends. One is Dulcie
Osborne, the other you know as Billie Mason. He puts both of them into his shows here, in Grantham and across the river. When fame calls from Toronto, Neil decides that he wants to cut his losses around here, so he tells both girls that the fun and games are over. Billie takes it like a pro. She's as ambitious in her way as he is, so she's not hung up on anybody. He's not so lucky with Dulcie, who is thinking of rose-covered cottages and meeting Neil at the door with news of how baby's cut a tooth. Neil doesn't buy the idea of married bliss with a girl from the sticks, so he tries to shake her, but she's made of glue. Eventually he gets her drunk and stages a phoney accident. She kills herself on that bad bend on the Lewiston-Youngstown road.”

“The burden of proof, Benny. I hope you know about that,” Chris said, and I nodded. It was true, but with what we knew we could build up a pretty good circumstantial case.

“Let's change to a fresh reel. Our third. It's announced that a movie is going to be made here in the Falls. The author is to be none other than the home-town kid himself. Two people who are still living in the area hear about it and decide that there's capital to be made from it. They happen to know one another, but neither knows the other's hold of Furlong. Hayes has the better hold. He can make a lot of trouble. Billie has only old times to drag up. Or maybe she just wanted to say ‘Hi!' and then turn to the cameras.

“Billie finds that Neil is glad to see her. His wife is away and New Year's Eve is coming up. They shack up for a few days for old times' sake. Out of it, Billie wants a small bit in
Ice Bridge
. That's not a lot to ask from an old friend. Not when you look like Billie Mason. Hayes is a more serious pest. He can spoil things. He has a grievance going back to Monty's day. Hayes doesn't just want to get his face on the screen, he wants his name in the screen credits: ‘Written by Neil Furlong
and
…'

“When Furlong is convinced that Hayes won't just go away, he puts his mind to getting himself out of a corner. This time he can't simply put his own name on somebody else's work. Things are more complicated. Pritchett spots Billie talking to Neil, and wonders whether Billie has gone on a talking spree with his whole operation spelled out for the matinee audience. Meanwhile Solmi and Cohn have more than suspicion to go on. They have the script and they don't like what they see about themselves in it. They put the gears on Raxlin, who insists on big changes. Hayes wants to help with the changes, but for credit. Hayes has had five years to get his act together, so Furlong can't buy him with promises. He's back in the same corner he was in when Dulcie Osborne told him how happy they'd be in a little two-room flat over the fish store. That required cool thinking and steady planning, and so does this.

“By the time I'd traced Hayes to the Falls, he was on Furlong's personal payroll and he was busy making changes. Meanwhile Miranda returned to the Falls on
New Year's Day. Dear, superfluous Miranda. She began asking questions about Hayes. She'd fallen for him. She'd seen Furlong take advantage before, but probably never with someone so young, attractive and green. She knew where to find all of Furlong's pressure points.

“Furlong had had good mileage out of Miranda. He'd used all her connections and walked through the doors she opened for him like he'd opened them himself. By now Miranda knew all about his funny business with scripts. She was capable of dragging that out when they fought. But even when things were placid on top, there was always the chance that she'd tell. It was like sitting across the breakfast table from a blackmailer. Of course most of it was in Furlong's own mind. He knew what Miranda
could
do, maybe what she threatened she
might
do. But as far as we know, she wasn't doing it. All she wanted was for things to go on as usual. She wouldn't want to hear about separations or divorce, would she?