Columbo: The Hoffa Connection Read online

  Columbo: The Hoffa Connection

  William Harrington

  Contents

  Note to Reader

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part II

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part III

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part IV

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Praise for William Harrington and the Columbo series

  * * *

  “Mr. Harrington seems to know everything.… He knows how to write, too… cleanly and unobtrusively, letting his material have its way.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Harrington finds a way to impart necessary technical information to the reader without either being heavy-handed or impeding the progress of gripping tales.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Harrington writes admirably and takes pains to develop his characters as real people.”

  —St. Louis Post Dispatch

  “Columbo is a wonderful character, a triumph of human low-tech—smarts and persistence—in a high-tech world. I love Columbo.”

  —Barbara D’Amato, author of Killer. App

  “Wickedly successful…. With solid plotting, fully fleshed-out characters, and dry humor, Harrington’s series, begun with Columbo: The Grassy Knoll, is primetime entertainment.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “We know who, what, when, how, and why from the start. The fun is watching Columbo—polite, oblique, and seemingly distracted—disassemble the ‘perfect’ crime while playing cat and mouse with his suspects.”

  —Booklist

  “Harrington outdoes himself with this one—lots of twists and turns, lots of excitement, and a first-rate mystery to solve. A DAZZLING ADDITION TO THIS EXCITING NEW SERIES.”

  —Mystery Scene on Columbo: The Helter Skelter Murders

  * * *

  “A wonderful tale full of spectacular twists and stunning surprises.”

  —Margaret Truman on The Grassy Knoll

  “O ye of little faith! That rumpled raincoat is as convincing in the mind’s eye as it is on the small screen. Everybody’s favorite police detective catches the squeal when an acerbic TV talkshow host is shot dead just i inside his door. True to television form, we know from the outset that the killers are his ex and her lover, a TV producer. Harrington manufactures a perfectly plausible connection between the slaying and the Kennedy assassination, which Columbo duly, deftly dopes out. And oh, just one more thing… let there be a sequel.”

  — The New York Daily News on Columbo: The Grassy Knoll

  * * *

  “Readers who are not familiar with the TV show will be delighted to get a very entertaining mystery, a new angle on the assassination attempt, and an introduction to a hero who is as delightful on the page as he must be on television”

  —Rapport on Columbo: The Grassy Knoll

  “Our greatest detective tackles our greatest unsolved crime? What a fascinating idea! A dazzling thriller you won’t put down, any more than you would switch off a Columbo mystery on television.”

  —Jack Anderson, Pulitzer Prize-winning columinst on

  Columbo: The Grassy Knoll

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  COLUMBO: THE HOFFA CONNECTION

  Copyright © 1995 by MCA Publishing Rights, a Division of MCA, Inc.

  A novel by William Harrington

  Based on the Universal Television series COLUMBO

  Created by Richard Levinson & William Link

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Cover art by Dan Gonzalez

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  175 Fifth Avenue New York, N.Y. 10010

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  ISBN: 0-812-55078-1

  First edition: July 1995

  First mass market edition: August 1996

  Printed in the United States of America

  Note to Reader

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters

  and events portrayed in this novel are

  fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  Part One

  One

  1

  TONIGHT!

  IN CONCERT!

  REGINA!

  An exuberant crowd filled the Hollywood Bowl early, a whole hour before the show was scheduled to begin. The promoters had sold every seat. All day the rumor had circulated that someone had counterfeited thousands of tickets and that some holders of genuine tickets would arrive to find their seats taken. The counterfeit tickets didn’t appear, but four thousand people showed up without tickets, naively supposing they could buy them at the door. They milled around outside, grumbling. Some of them accosted people approaching the gates with tickets in their hands, offering fifty dollars—even a hundred—for a ticket. A few people with tickets called for bids.

  A hundred uniformed police officers were on special duty outside and inside. Sergeant Ed Dugan, LAPD, working inside, spotted a fistfight and rushed in to break it up. He separated two young men, one with a bloody nose, and ordered them to sit down and be quiet.

  “Hey, Sarge, how come you didn’t make a collar there?” an officer asked him.

  “Are you kiddin’?” Dugan replied. “If I made a collar. I’d have to take those guys to the station. Hell, man, whatta ya think? I’d miss the concert!”

  The officer looked up at the sky. “Well, we got Regina weather,” he remarked.

  The legend was that rain never fell on a Regina concert. Actually, it had rained on the night of a Miami concert—and the night after, too—compelling the promoters to cancel and refund the ticket money because they had booked their megastar for a performance in London the following night. But rain had never postponed a Regina concert in Los Angeles, and never in New York.

  The sun set. The sky darkened. Then suddenly at 7:30 it was alight again with scores of red, white, and blue laser beams crisscrossing above the Bowl. Instantly a crashing sound filled the Bowl: a computer-generated melange of rhythms and tones such as no musical instruments had ever made.

  Six dancers pranced onto the stage: three male, three female, three black, three white, each with a beautiful physique and a handsome face. The white dancers wore sheer black body stockings, the black dancers white ones. Every feature of their bodies was dimly visible in the low stage lighting and distinctly visible when hit by the brilliant flashes of strobe lights. They danced barefoot, an athletic and acrobatic performance.

  After two or three minutes the dancers slowed and danced a sinuous and erotic ballet routine. Then the three young women jumped on the men’s backs and rode piggyback and giggling as the men trotted offstage.

  The crowd stood and roared.

  “AND NOW… LADIES… AND… GENTLEMEN! REGINA'.”

  A thick curtain of smoke rose in front of the stage. A wall of crisscrossed red laser beams formed a backdrop. Strobes flashed on the smoke. The computer-generated cacophony rose to an ear-blasting crescendo, and abruptly the curtain of smoke disappeared, sucked away by powerful fans.

  R
egina stood in the center of the stage. The audience, on its feet, howled, stamped, screeched, whooped, clapped. She smiled and bowed.

  Regina was a young woman in her late twenties, of medium stature, busty, long-legged, and with a bit of a belly that swelled slightly over the waistband of the black bikini panties that were part of her costume. She wore also a strapless bra, a garter belt that supported fishnet stockings, and shoes with stiletto heels. Her shoulder-length hair was straw blond, bleached to the point of brittleness—it was in fact a wig. Her thin, plucked eyebrows were dark brown, as were her eyes. She wore an overall makeup that lightened her skin to almost white, but her lipstick was flaming red.

  She clutched a wireless microphone in her right hand and belted out her signature opening line:

  You wouldn’t call your crotch va-jeena.

  So don’t call me Ra-jeena.

  I’m… RAY-GINE-A!

  An’ we’re gonna have a hell of a time!

  Ho-ho!

  One hell of a, hell of a time!

  The music erupted into a frenzy, and so did she. She strutted around the stage, singing a song about dancing. The lyrics clearly had two meanings—and the second meaning was not dance, but copulation. Her voice was shrill. She threw her head back and forth, and the hair of her wig swung wildly.

  The main stage lights dimmed gradually, and more and more Regina was visible only in the sharp bursts of the strobes, which flashed twice a second now. She turned her back, pulled down her bikini panties, and strutted around showing her bare bottom.

  Her six dancers came onstage again, now in identical bright red leotards cut high on their hips, and backed up her frenetic dancing and singing with a vigorous routine.

  Regina stalked across the stage, ran across the stage, stalked across the stage, all the while clutching the microphone close to her mouth and muttering, murmuring, or shrieking the lyrics that ranged from risque to crude—but remained carefully on the edge of obscene and never crossed that line.

  She tossed the microphone aside and danced. The backup dancers left her alone on the stage. With the main lights out, she danced in the light of one red strobe. The duration of its flashes diminished. Their frequency increased. It gave her performance the character of a flickering silent movie. Then the intensity diminished. Staring at Regina in the quick, short bursts of strobe light, the audience could not tell for sure whether or not she had lowered her bikini panties and was dancing with her crotch exposed. Most chose to believe she was, and they stood and yelled.

  They were already happy, and what they had seen was not even half the show. They knew there would be no intermission. A Regina show was nonstop, for two hours and fifteen minutes. Her shows built to a climax, then slacked off a little, then built to another peak. All of them.

  2

  At 10:00 a silvery Rolls-Royce entered the driveway of Regina’s estate in Beverly Hills. Although cars crowded the narrow'lane bumper-to-bumper, space had carefully been left for the Rolls to glide through unimpeded; and it stopped only at the front door to the sprawling Spanish-style mansion. Before the chauffeur could come around to open the door, Regina opened it and flung herself impatiently from the car, stark naked.

  Without the blond wig, she exposed her hair: dark brown and brush cut. Her skin gleamed with sweat. Speaking to no one, she strode through the house and out the back door to the swimming pool, where she threw herself off the edge and into the water. She floundered. People gathered around the pool as she thrashed and struggled and—gradually made her way across the pool to the opposite side. Breathless and sputtering, she reached up and accepted a glass from Johnny, her houseboy, a handsome dark-visaged young man. She drank. Straight gin, no ice.

  Her guests gathered around her, none of them surprised to see her naked, most of them anxious to have a look at her—or, as it was for many of them, another look.

  The guests were mostly young people. Only two or three of the men wore jackets. The others wore bright-colored slacks and golf shirts. Two wore shorts. Most of the women were determinedly young—that is, afraid to age, afraid to lose whatever it was they prized. A few of them wore chic minidresses. The rest were in slacks or jeans, mostly with T-shirts—three wore skimpy halters.

  The pool was kidney-shaped, forty feet long from end to end. At its widest point, it was some twenty-five feet from side to side. A diving board was mounted at the wide end. Three palm trees stood in the pool area, which was embraced by the two wings of the house. Other subtropical shrubbery shielded the pool from curious fans who might approach the fence.

  Regina climbed out of the pool. Johnny handed her a terry robe. She pulled it on. He handed her a cigarette and snapped a lighter for her.

  “Oh, Maude, for God’s sake!” she exclaimed to a middle-aged woman who stood a little back, smiling faintly and watching. “You got any idea how tough it is being me?” Off the stage, the famous star spoke slightly accented English. She walked over to the woman. “You know?” she repeated.

  Maude Ahern nodded. “I do know, dear,” she said. “You may believe I do.”

  Maude Ahem was a free-lance writer, a stout woman who should have eschewed the tight designer jeans she was wearing. She had done a sketch of Regina in Rolling Stone, another in New York Magazine, and was working on one for Vanity Fair: She was a self-proclaimed lesbian, and rumors had circulated that her respectful—even affectionate—treatment of Regina in her writing was in part because at one time they had been lovers.

  “Oh, God, Mickey,” Regina said to a gaunt, ugly young man who came up to her and Maude. “Pronounce judgment.”

  Mickey Newcastle grinned at her. “First-rate,” he said. “Tomorrow we’ll go over it, and I’ll give you some ideas to make it top-notch.”

  “Wherever do you collect your cliches, Mickey?” asked Maude.

  Regina kissed Mickey. “Thank you, lover,” she said. “I can always depend on you.”

  He walked away, and Maude said to Regina, “I’ll never understand how you can plant a kiss on that unkempt, unwashed, pimply wretch.”

  “He was a big star in his day,” said Regina.

  “Yes. In the days when unkempt, unwashed, pimply wretches with crooked yellow teeth were the idols of British rock.”

  “Meow, Maude!”

  Maude laughed. She lifted an eyebrow. “You didn’t show it tonight, did you? Not really. I saw the little black G-string under the panties.”

  Regina laughed louder. “Leave a girl some secrets.”

  “A girl who walks through her party in her altogethers hardly has any secrets,” said Maude.

  Regina stuck out her tongue at Maude, dropped her robe, and trotted over to the pool to jump in again.

  A few feet away, Christie Monroe watched angrily. She had been close enough to overhear most of the conversation between Regina and Maude; and as she watched Regina splash in the pool, she was unable to conceal her contempt entirely.

  “A real class act,” she murmured to Bob Douglas, nodding at the naked Regina thrashing around in the pool.

  “Watch it,” Douglas cautioned her. “She’s still the source of our bread.” He took Christie’s hand and squeezed it.

  Christie Monroe was a far more beautiful young woman than Regina: genuinely blond, with fine, smooth hair to her shoulders, soft features, wide blue eyes. The tiny flared skirt of her white minidress displayed her long, shapely legs; and its bold decolletage showed off her high, firm breasts. She was one of the six dancers who worked behind Regina.

  Bob Douglas was a handsome man. He bore a distinct resemblance to the late Rock Hudson. He wore soft stone-washed jeans and a white golf shirt. A gold chain hung around his neck, suspending something inside his shirt. Everyone who knew him knew what it was: a smaller-size replica of his Olympic gold medal, won for ski jumping. He was almost never without it.

  Mickey Newcastle approached them. “What time can you be over to the Bowl tomorrow?” he asked Bob.

  “I don’t know. Whatcha have in mind?”
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  “I think there are two or three places where we ought to go over the sound,” said Newcastle. “It’s first-rate now, but I’d like it to be top-notch.”

  “You want me to reprogram some?”

  “Maybe a little. Can we experiment a bit?”

  “Sure,” said Bob.

  Newcastle started to turn away, but he paused and grinned at Christie. He pointed at her half-empty glass of Scotch. “Take it a little easy on that, dear,” he said. “You’re looking a little wobbly, and I wouldn’t want you to fall in the pool.”

  “Or jump in,” she said.

  When Newcastle had moved away, Christie snorted. “He's going to monitor my drinking? That cokehead! Did you catch his eyes? Already dilated. He’s been out and copped some speedball. He’ll be blind before the night’s over.”

  “But she still listens to him,” said Bob. “Don’t get on his bad side.”

  “I don’t know how long I wanta work behind the bitch.”

  “Well, I know how long I want to work for her,” Bob said. “As long as possible. I couldn’t make this kind of money anywhere else. And neither could you.”

  “Don’t you resent what she did to you, even a little bit?” Christie asked.