Columbo: The Hoffa Connection Page 12

  Columbo ran his right hand through his hair and down the side of his face. “I said I have two problems. The other one is motive. You may have hit on something there, tellin’ me what the old man said about cookin’ the books. Still— That suggests he claimed a part of her earnings. But once she was dead there weren’t going to be any more earnings. What about you? More than one person has called you a genius. More than one person has said you made more money workin’ for Regina than you could make anywhere else. She was a goose that laid golden eggs for a lot of people, wasn’t she?”

  “Somebody must have hated her more than he loved the money.”

  An assistant brought in the Pepsis.

  “Miss Monroe says you’re looking for a new job,” said Columbo.

  “I got a new job—that is, a new contract.”

  “My, that’s fine! So quick. Must make you feel a lot better. It must make Miss Monroe happy, too, that you—”

  “Christie and I are going to be married,” said Douglas. “Next week.”

  “Well, congratulations!”

  “Thank you.”

  Columbo drank thirstily from his Pepsi. “I’ve really taken more of your time than I ought to. I shouldn’t have to bother you anymore.”

  Douglas glanced at his watch. “I’ll leave the building with you. I want to get home to Christie. She doesn’t know about the new contract yet.”

  “Fine. My car’s in the lot.”

  “Oh, say, Lieutenant. Somebody told me you’ve never seen a Regina show. Let me give you a tape.”

  “Oh, sir, it’s against department policy for me to—”

  “It’s worth twenty dollars, Lieutenant. I could hardly bribe an LAPD homicide detective for twenty dollars, now could I?”

  Columbo grinned. “Well… offer me fifty, and I’d have to think about it.”

  “You mean fifty thousand.”

  Columbo’s grin widened. “As a matter of fact, somebody offered me fifty thousand once.”

  “You didn’t take it?”

  “If I had, would I be here asking dumb questions? I’d have taken early retirement.”

  Douglas shook his head. “I have a feeling, Lieutenant, you never ask a dumb question.”

  4

  Johnny knew a lot about Bob Douglas. He knew, for example, that Bob favored big cars and drove a four-door silver Mercedes. It was parked, as it would be most days, in the lot beside the building that housed the Douglas studio. Getting into it was nothing. He’d grown up on the east side of Cleveland, and he’d stolen fifty cars before he became a made man. Most cars Johnny could get into and start with his tools in no more time than it took the owner to do with his key.

  He lay on the floor in the rear seat. He could have started the engine and run the air conditioner, but he didn’t dare. He was drenched with sweat and wondered if he stank so bad he would alert Douglas when he opened the door.

  He checked the biscuit again. Foolishly. To keep checking the biscuit was nothing but a sign of nervousness. It was perfect: a deadly little revolver, probably stolen, traceable to nobody but its one-time legitimate owner. Even so— He was nervous. He was a made man, but he’d never whacked out a guy.

  People walked past the car. He saw their heads and shoulders as they walked by. Fortunately for him, Douglas was tall and liked to drive with his seat leaned back. Johnny pressed his body to the floor and was all but out of sight.

  Then— Key in lock! The driver’s-side door opened.

  “I agree, it’s a really nice car, Lieutenant. I bought it before I could afford it. But I’m glad I did.”

  “Oh, yeah. It’s a great car. I see you’re like me; you favor foreign cars. My car’s a French car. Of course, it was never anything like this; but, I tell ya, if you take the right kind of care of one of these foreign babies, it’ll take care of you. My! Smell that leather!”

  It was Columbo! My God, was he going to get in the car?

  “The way I look at it,” said Douglas, “I don’t like to tie up too much capital in a car. But this one’s an investment. I’ll be driving this car ten years from now.”

  “Yeah, that’s the way my car is,” said Columbo. “What miles have I got? I think I’m runnin’ up on two hundred thousand miles.”

  Johnny pressed himself as hard as he could into the angle between the floor and the tilted-back seat. He • shoved the biscuit under the seat. If one of them spotted him, at least he’d be clean. Of course— What good was being clean going to do him?

  “Well, sir, I appreciate the tape. I’ll run it tonight. This is Mrs. Columbo’s bowling night, and while she goes bowling with her league ladies, I’ll just watch a Regina performance. Oughta know what she looked like on stage.”

  “Okay, Lieutenant. Best to you. Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”

  Douglas swung himself into the car and slammed the door. In a moment he had the engine running and the air conditioner spewing cool air into the car.

  Johnny had intended to shoot him here, in the parking lot. He would show the biscuit to any onlookers and walk out of the lot and down the street, to the gray Plymouth. Nobody would trouble him so long as he had the gun, and nobody would make any real fix on the gray Plymouth. Once he drove a block or three, he’d toss the biscuit out the window. Then he’d abandon the Plymouth.

  Now everything was changed. He couldn’t shoot Douglas here, with Lieutenant Columbo in the parking lot. The biscuit wouldn’t intimidate the lieutenant. He’d pull his sidearm and blast. He’d be on the radio in a minute, calling for backup. Johnny had no choice but to crouch and wait.

  Douglas pulled out of the parking lot.

  Johnny reached under the seat and retrieved the biscuit.

  He waited. He couldn’t tell where Douglas was going. He supposed he was going home to Van Nuys, but from the floor of the backseat he couldn’t tell.

  He had rehearsed what he would do. He didn’t have to change his plan much. Just a little.

  Douglas stopped for a traffic light. Johnny pressed the muzzle of the biscuit against the back of the driver’s seat. He didn’t want to take so much time that the light would change again. He fired twice. Twice should be enough. Douglas slumped forward.

  Johnny opened the door and stepped out into the street. The light changed, and drivers honked at him: a pedestrian in the middle of a busy street. Johnny trotted for the curb.

  The Mercedes drifted across the centerline into the path of oncoming traffic and struck a Federal Express van.

  5

  Columbo arrived at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center a few minutes before two uniformed women officers led in a distraught and staggering Christie Monroe.

  “Christie!” Columbo walked toward her. “He’s not killed. He’s gonna make it.”

  She fainted. An intern and a nurse helped the policewomen to stretch her out on a gurney, and they set to work reviving her.

  Sergeant Wendy Brittigan resumed making her report to Columbo. “Like I said, Lieutenant, he’s gotta be the luckiest man alive.”

  “Lucky to have a woman care for him that much,” said Columbo, whose attention was still fixed on Christie.

  “Yeah, I— Jeez, she’s somethin’, isn’t she?”

  Columbo nodded. Sergeant Brittigan was something, too, in a very different way, and he wasn’t sure which he admired more: the exquisite, fluffy dancer or the husky professional policewoman. The sergeant’s blond hair was cut short, and her complexion was ruddy and a little rough. What he liked most about her was that she was a woman and remained a woman in spite of her uniform and the Beretta and handcuffs hanging from her belt.

  He took the cold cigar from his mouth. It was producing tense stares from people in white uniforms, who seemed to fear he might light it. He dropped it in the pocket of his raincoat.

  “Anyway,” Sergeant Brittigan went on, “two .38 slugs hit metal braces in the seat. That deflected one of them so much it caught him only under the bottom rib on the right, made a flesh wound, and bang
ed into the dashboard. The other one went through another piece of steel, which took so much steam out of it that it only penetrated a couple of inches. Otherwise— Gangbusters.”

  “Y’ got any line on the guy that shot him?”

  She shook her head. “Witnesses say the guy got out of the backseat. Some say he was carrying a gun. Some don’t think so. Anyway, he trotted across the street and walked away along the sidewalk. Descriptions vary, of course. Oh— Here’s Dr. Gonzalez.”

  “We’ve met before,” the doctor said to Columbo. “We sure have. Hiya, Doc. We’re gonna make it with this one, huh?”

  “Unless he dies of frustration. He’s madder’n hell. A little shock. Apart from that—”

  “Tell the young lady, will you?” Columbo pointed at Christie. “She’s the one in shock. We got the slugs?” he asked Sergeant Brittigan.

  “Badly deformed,” she said. “Enough for ballistics to make a comparison, though.”

  “Compared to what? If we haven’t got a gun, we got nothing to compare to.”

  “The thing has some of the marks of a professional hit,” said Sergeant Brittigan.

  “Except for one little thing,” said Columbo.

  “What’s that?”

  “The guy’s not dead.”

  6

  Columbo and Brittigan sat over cups of coffee, receiving reports from officers working on the case. The best news was that a hot-dog vendor had found the gun lying in the gutter a block away from the intersection where the shooting occurred. It was a .38, and two shots had been fired.

  “Tell me it’s not a professional hit,” said Brittigan, looking at the revolver through a clear plastic bag. “Look at the tape.”

  “Yeah. Have ballistics check it out. There’ll be no fingerprints on it, but have it checked. I—”

  “Lieutenant Columbo?” A nurse approached. He looked up and nodded. “Mr. Douglas would like to see you.”

  “He’s in condition to see me?”

  “He’s in condition to fight bulls, Lieutenant.”

  Christie was in the room with Bob Douglas. She was crying, despite the fact that the man she loved was obviously going to survive and survive without major damage.

  “How ya doin’?” Columbo asked.

  “It fuckin’ hurts'."

  “Yeah, well, you should be grateful for that. Somebody had it in mind that you shouldn’t feel anything anymore.”

  “Lieutenant… The guy was in the backseat on the floor when you and I were standing there by the car talking. He was waiting for me. He couldn’t have got in any other time.”

  “I don’t suppose you got a look at him?”

  “Are you kidding? No, I didn’t get a look at him.”

  “And you got no idea who?”

  Bob glanced at Christie. “We have some kind of idea. Christie has something to tell you, Lieutenant.”

  She was sitting in a chair by the window, and now she got up, came to the bedside, and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue from the box on the bedside stand. She took deep breaths and composed herself.

  “Lieutenant…” she whispered. “I saw the murder. I was an eyewitness.”

  Columbo frowned and shook his head. “Well, Christie, you could have saved everybody a whole lot of trouble, probably includin’ this—” He waved a hand toward Bob—“if you’d told the truth from the beginning.”

  “I know that. But, you see—”

  “Alright, who did it?” Columbo demanded. For once, he was annoyed.

  “That’s the point. I don’t know. We’ve talked about how I didn’t have my contact lenses in. Well— Without them I couldn’t see well enough to identify the two men.”

  “ Two men… Why don’t you start from the beginning?”

  Christie returned to the chair. “You figured out that Bob and I made love before we went to sleep. I woke up. I had to go to the bathroom. While I was in the bathroom, I heard screaming. Regina sometimes yelled and screamed when she was drunk, and at first I didn’t pay any attention. Then I decided this sounded different. So I grabbed on a pair of panties and pulled Bob’s white shirt over my head. That was quicker than trying to get into my dress. I went out of our room and across the hall, then along the hall to the balcony door. And I saw two men murdering Regina. Well— No. They had murdered Regina. I could see her—I mean, I could see a sort of vague outline of her. She was under water. One of the men had his back to me. The other one”—she sighed loudly. “You can check with my ophthalmologist. At that distance, he was a blur.”

  “A red nylon jacket?” Columbo asked. “Either of them? You could have seen that, right?”

  Christie shook her head emphatically. “Mickey was lying when he spoke of a red nylon jacket. I could have seen a red jacket.”

  Columbo ran his hand through his hair. “What did you do? Did you go back to bed? Why didn’t you call the police?”

  “It was too late to help Regina. It was perfectly obvious that she was dead. I couldn’t identify the murderers. But if I came forward as an eyewitness, they wouldn’t realize how blurred my vision was, and they—”

  “Tell the rest of it, Christie,” Bob urged.

  “Well… Frankly, I didn’t give a damn.”

  Part Three

  Eleven

  1

  Martha Zimmer caught up with Columbo when he stopped briefly at his desk on Tuesday morning.

  “Hey, Columbo. How come I have to find out from the papers that somebody shot Bob Douglas yesterday afternoon?”

  “ ’Cause you didn’t check in,” he said. “You’d checked the status file before you signed out last night, you’d have seen it. Me, I was tired and went home. It was Mrs. Columbo’s bowling night, and I watched a tape of a Regina concert. I’ll lend it to ya.”

  “They want to fly the body back to Italy,” said Martha. “You oughta get Captain Sczciegel to authorize you to go to the funeral. You speak Italian. You could learn a lot in a day or two in an Italian fishing village.”

  “The answer’s here.”

  “Maybe and maybe not. We’ve got another fax from Milan.”

  She handed him the sheets, and Columbo frowned over them.

  * * *

  SERVIZIO INFORMATIOZIONI SICUREZZA DEMOCRATICO

  I have the honor to report additional facts about Regina Celestiele Savona. You will perhaps find them suggestive.

  Regina’s father exploited the child, if he did not actually abuse her. As I reported before, a few families in Marino di Bardineto earn part of their living by diving for sponges. It is not a prospering trade except as a tourist attraction. The divers collect coins for diving beneath glass-bottom boats. Some throw the coins in the water and watch the divers attempt to catch them as they sink or find them on the bottom. From an early age, Regina was trained to pursue this trade. Lorenzo Savona saw to it that his daughters became strong swimmers. While they were still very young for the business, he sent them down into the water. They earned more money than most divers.

  As soon as each girl developed a figure, Lorenzo sent them down nude. For a time the naked Savona sisters were an attraction that people drove to Marino di Bardineto to see. The girls went aboard his glass-bottom boat at the dock, and people came aboard to go out to see them dive. Lorenzo did not rely on coins they might throw but collected a fee as each person came aboard. When he judged he had all the tourists he would get, he steered the boat out to a place where there might or might not be sponges, and then the girls stripped off their dresses and dived in. For two or three years it was a thriving business.

  The sisters, however, resented this exploitation and the accompanying humiliation—Regina especially. She seems to have looked for ways to escape from her father. For one thing, she looked for a man who might rescue her.

  The story told in the town is that she established a relationship with an American tourist, who invited her to live with him in his hotel in San Remo. She went to San Remo, where a month later her father found her living as a concubine and learn
ing to speak English. We have no firm evidence of this, but the citizens of Marino di Bardineto are unanimous in saying that Lorenzo Savona confronted the American and demanded whatever money he was paying Regina. The American struck Lorenzo and broke his nose but then fled, fearing that Italian law might be on the side of the father.

  Regina returned to Marino di Bardineto and to diving. She was sixteen years old.

  Columbo looked up at Martha. “Is this about the same girl?” he asked. “Regina could hardly swim at all, we hear. This Italian girl dived for sponges?”

  “Read on,” said Martha.

  From time to time thereafter, Lorenzo sold Regina in prostitution. She hated him. In fact, she so much hated him that when she became a millionaire in the United States, she ignored his pleas for a few dollars. It may be significant that Lorenzo Savona pleaded for money but never suggested he would do anything else, such as reveal certain facts about Regina.

  Those facts are as follows. For some time a man named Angelo Capelli had lived in a mountainside villa above the town. He was elderly and was obviously wealthy. He showed the local police an Italian passport and lived placidly and without incident, receiving visitors from time to time. The villagers assumed he was a retired leader of the Honored Society, known in the States as the Mafia. He bothered no one, and no one bothered him.

  In 1984, when she was nineteen years old, Regina Celestiele Savona moved to the villa. From that time she did not dive for sponges, nor did she submit herself to prostitution.

  I suggested to you before that it would be difficult to imagine where the young woman found the money to pay her passage to the United States. Our further inquiry develops that Angelo Capelli left his villa at the same time Regina Savona left. Quite obviously, she went with him.

  Angelo Capelli has no criminal record in this country. I have inquired of Interpol, and it has no record of him.