Columbo: The Game Show Killer Page 2

  “I’ve been talking with Emily about working topless. She says you get used to it in less than half an hour.” Grant glanced at Emily. “She’s young and resilient and optimistic.” He put his hand on Erika’s. “You aren’t reduced to working bare-titted—to say it the way you put it the other night. You’ve got better things ahead of you than that.”

  Erika swallowed the rest of her whiskey and nodded to Emily to pour her another. “You gonna find me a new job, Grant?”

  “I found out something, kid. Don’t get sloshed. You’re going to need a clear head.”

  "Got something important to say to me, Grant?”

  “Goddamned important.”

  When they walked into the dining room, the crowd fell silent for a moment. Grant Kellogg! And Erika Björling! For the moment, he was the most famous lawyer in the world. He might not be next week, but he was now. And she was— No one could say what she was, exactly, but she was a real celebrity.

  As he had ordered, they were given one of the booths along the wall, where they could talk quietly and not be overheard. He overruled her order for another whiskey and told the waiter to bring a bottle of Chateauneuf-du- Pape.

  He sat beside her and caressed her leg. "Erika… Get your ducks in a row. I’ve got something to tell you that’s going to hurt. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked you to dinner to hear this. Maybe we should have met in my office. I don’t know. I want you to know that I care deeply for you and don’t want you to—”

  "Spit it out, Grant.”

  "I know who killed Tammy.”

  If he had struck her with a hammer, he could not have staggered Erika worse.

  The tabloids had never discovered her affair with Tim Wylie, a Hollywood legend, the squeaky clean all-American-boy superstar. Twenty years ago, when Try It Once was a new show and she was being called a “starlet,” she had become pregnant by Tim Wylie, whose real name was Leonard DeMoll. He was fifty years old, and she was twenty-two. She bore him a daughter she named Tammy.

  To preserve his image, which would have been destroyed if it had become known he was the father of an illegitimate child, Wylie had promised her he would agree to anything. She retained a young lawyer named Grant Kellogg, who dealt with Wylie’s lawyers and negotiated a contractual commitment from Wylie to pay her $3,000 a month child support until Tammy was twenty-five years old—that is, until she would have graduated from college and maybe from a graduate school.

  Tammy was a beautiful child, intelligent and promising in every way. But when she was fourteen she disappeared. The tabloids went into a feeding frenzy. Erika went into a clinic. Four months after Tammy disappeared, her body was found in a canyon fifty miles north of Los Angeles. The coroner identified her by her dental work. The body was so far decomposed that the medical examiner could not determine if she had been sexually abused.

  That was six years ago. Erika did not return to Try It Once for six months, but when she did, she was greeted by a standing ovation and dozens of articles and stories about her dignity and courage. Tammy’s death made Erika a far greater celebrity than she had been as a game-show squealer. If she’d had talent for acting, singing, or dancing, she could have been a star, not just a celebrity.

  She would gladly have worked as a topless barmaid if that would have saved Tammy.

  “I’m sorry, Erika. I thought about just leaving it alone. But I think you have to know.” He squeezed her hands under his. “It’s worse than anything either of us could have imagined.”

  “What could be worse?”

  “To know who did it.”

  “Grant… ? ”

  He sighed and took one hand off hers to wipe his eyes.

  “You know, not every client I defend gets off. I had to go up to San Quentin Wednesday to talk to a man I defended, about his appeal. He’s guilty as crap. But we’re appealing anyway. Not all my clients are rich and famous. Some are just felons, which is what this guy is. He told me something that— I told him I’d see to it that he spent the rest of his life up there if he was lying. He swore he wasn’t. He told me who killed Tammy. And why.”

  Erika was crying. “Who?”

  Grant drew a deep breath. “Tim… Leonard DeMoll.” She gasped. Then her flushed face hardened. “You believe this?”

  He nodded. “My man in San Quentin told me Tim paid him $10,000 to dispose of her body. He was supposed to take it out to sea and dump it off a boat with a weight attached, so it would never be found. But he’d lied to Tim. He didn’t have a boat. He just drove out and abandoned the body in the canyon.”

  “But why?”

  “At the time when he murdered Tammy, Tim Wylie was in eclipse. Think about it. He’s had a revival now, but at that time he hadn’t made a picture in four years. He had an expensive style of life, too, you know. Also— Well, Erika, you aren’t the only woman he had to pay money to. You were the only one getting monthly payments—”

  “But they were for Tammy, not me. If I ever got $10,000 out of him that was for me, I’d be surprised. I haven’t kept count.”

  “The payments came to $36,000 a year, and he had eleven years more to make them—$396,000 more—at a time when his income was drying up. And that’s the why.”

  “You believe this. You’re sure it’s true.”

  “I have to believe it. Why would my man in San Quentin lie to me?”

  ‘I’ll kill the son of a bitch!”

  Grant took both her hands in his and held them tightly. "Maybe you should,” he said. "Maybe you just should. But let’s think about it.”

  Her face was a mask of anger. “If I could figure a way so I wouldn’t get caught—”

  "Erika. Be calm. I want you to think about something. Suppose you do kill him. But suppose you do it in such a way that you and I can make five million dollars out of it. And maybe twice that.”

  "How? How could I do that?”

  "Get caught. Go to trial, defended by me, and be acquitted. We can sell a book contract for at least a million. Probably more. We’ll let the police discover that Tim Wylie was Tammy’s father. That will make the story twice as delicious. We can sell interviews, TV appearances—you and I both. We might even get a pay-per-view television show— you talking about your ordeal. There can be millions in it.”

  “How can we be sure I’ll be acquitted?”

  "We’ll set it up that way. We’ll work it out. We won’t do it until we have it set up to make acquittal absolutely certain.”

  "I’ll have to go to jail, won’t I?”

  "Yes. That’ll be a valuable part of the deal. Say you appear on pay-per-view. The fact that you can tearfully describe what it was like for you to be in jail will get us twice the audience. Hey! We might even be able to arrange things so you could be interviewed—say by somebody like Barbara Walters—through the bars of a cell. I mean, there’s no end to—”

  "How long would I have to be in jail?”

  "Well… Jim Price was in for eleven months. But we can work faster. You’ll have to figure on six months.”

  "For six months in the slammer I get my revenge on that bastard and a couple of million, minimum? And we can set it up so my acquittal is absolutely certain?”

  “Absolutely certain.”

  “I don’t have to do it if I feel uncertain of the acquittal?”

  “You’re the one who’s going to do it. You can back out anytime.”

  Erika lifted her chin high. “Alright. Let’s work on it.”

  2

  MONDAY, APRIL 10—7:45 PM.

  Sonya Pavlov was working behind the bar in the Ten Strikes Lounge, adjacent to the Ten Strikes Bowling Alley. She was the manager of the lounge and not usually a bartender, but sometimes she filled in.

  Grant Kellogg took a stool as far as he could get from the knot of drinkers at the end of the bar. Sonya mixed a Beefeater martini on the rocks and set it before him.

  “How’s it going, Sonya?”

  “It’s a tough damned town, Grant. You know it is.” She spoke English
with an accent that had diminished over the years but remained distinctly Russian.

  “Oh, something may open up. I wish I could help you, but I’m afraid I have no influence where it would count.”

  Sonya Pavlov was thirty-five years old. She had lived in the States for about fifteen years and had been naturalized six years ago. She was a tall, husky blond. She had managed when she was in her twenties to get six brief appearances on television shows where her accent was an advantage. For most shows it was a disadvantage and limited the number of roles she could play, even though she was a striking woman and a competent actress. Tonight she wore skintight black leggings and an LA Dodgers T-shirt. The bowlers who came in the lounge would appreciate it that she was wearing no bra under the shirt and would manifest their appreciation with generous tips.

  “How’s the boy?”

  Sonya shook her head. “Smart. “I’ve got to get him through college some way.”

  “That’s why I came in, to talk to you about a way to make enough money to put him through college.”

  “Who I have to kill?”

  “Nobody. All you have to do is lie under oath.”

  3

  9:10 PM.

  Fred Mansfield was the regular bartender in Ten Strikes. He had asked Sonya to cover for him until nine o’clock, because he had a big problem with his girlfriend and needed to take her to dinner to talk it out.

  “I do you a favor, you do me,” she said to him as soon as he had served three customers and had a moment.

  “Sure thing, kiddo.”

  “How’d you like to get into a deal that can make you and me a hundred thousand bucks each?”

  “Who do I gotta make dead?”

  III

  1

  THURSDAY, APRIL 13—8:14 P.M.

  Erika sat on the bed in her room at King’s Court Motel, nervous and impatient, watching television. She wore well-faded blue jeans and a gray sweatshirt. She had brought along two airline bottles of Jack Daniel’s, to limit herself to that much, and had just tipped the second bottle and drunk a swallow when at long last the phone rang. “Yeah?”

  “King’s Court.”

  That was all he said. It was Grant, calling from his cellular phone, and he had used the code they had agreed on that would tell her the coast was clear. Sitting across the street from the Wylie house, he had seen Faye leave the house for her usual Thursday-night bridge game. Tim was home alone.

  They had thought Faye would leave an hour earlier. Erika had begun to wonder if she was going at all, if their scheme was not frustrated for this week.

  Erika drank the last of the sour-mash whiskey and shoved the empty bottle into her purse. She was being careful to leave nothing in this room that could possibly identify her. In fact, she had worn white cotton gloves during the hour she had been here. She had left no fingerprints whatever.

  She shoved the bottles to the bottom of the purse, leaving the pistol readily accessible without fumbling. She knew almost nothing about firearms, but Grant had given it to her and taught her how to use it. She had never actually fired it, but she had snapped it twenty times. She knew when the safety was on or off. She knew how to cock it. She knew she had eight shots.

  Eight would be more than enough. The gun was a .32 caliber Colt, small enough to go in a purse, powerful enough to kill a man. But it might take two or three shots, depending on how far away she was when she fired and where she hit him.

  They had rehearsed. She should step close. She should be certain to get her first shot into Wylie’s chest or at least the stomach. If she missed or hit him only in the shoulder or arm, he might have enough strength to lunge and grab the gun away from her. Once he was .down, she had to put a shot into his head, to be sure he died.

  It was all very gruesome, but he would die more easily than Tammy had. He had strangled Tammy.

  2

  8:24 P.M.

  North Perugia Way. Bel Air. Nine minutes from the motel. She did not pull her car, an MGB, British-racing-green, into the driveway where it would be visible in the lights mounted on the garage, but parked on the edge of the road. She checked the pistol one more time. Breathing heavily, she walked up the driveway to the house and rang the bell.

  He answered. Tim Wylie. That was what he called himself. Actually, his name was Leonard DeMoll—hardly the name for the gangling, drawling Goody Two-Shoes he had carefully developed and maintained as a persona. He was seventy years old, and he had aged well. He had aged like such actors as Spencer Tracy and Burt Lancaster, whose graying hair and lined faces gave their later characterizations strength they had not attained when they were youthful and smooth. He was dressed as if he expected a reporter to stop by—meaning that he wore pipestem jeans, a checkered shirt, and cowboy boots. She was surprised he wasn’t wearing a gunbelt and “totin’ his old .44”—which he had confessed to her during pillow talk he had never fired in his life, not even blanks. He’d said he was afraid he’d blow his foot off with it—he, the man who was supposed to shoot the heads off rattlesnakes that crawled too close to his ranch house. He was a fraud. That was all he’d ever been.

  “My god! Erika! Well… Come on in.”

  She stepped inside the door. He closed the door and pointed the way to the living room. She knew the way. They had conceived Tammy on the couch, while Faye was out playing bridge on Thursday evening. The television set was on, showing something noisy.

  “Want a drink? I can offer bourbon. I don’t keep Tennessee sour mash on hand.”

  “I’ll have a bourbon.”

  He led her into the living room, where he pointed at a couch and went to a bar to pour drinks. “What are you up to?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. I may have to take a job as a topless barmaid.”

  “I suppose that means you want money again. I can’t go on giving you money.”

  Erika had needed a minute to build up her courage. Now she was ready. She rose from the couch and walked toward him.

  “No, I don’t want anything from you, Len. I’ve got something for you.” She called him “Len,” as his best friends did. “It’s from Tammy.”

  “Well…” He saw the Colt automatic as she pulled it out of her purse. “Erika! What—”

  She was calm and determined enough to point the muzzle where she wanted her bullet to go. Her first shot struck him squarely in the middle of his chest. He screamed and stumbled back. He grabbed at his chest, and blood oozed between his fingers. She stepped even closer. Her second shot went through his hands. His knees failed, and he fell on his face.

  Erika held the gun in both hands and fired a shot into his ear.

  As Grant had promised, the Colt had not made big explosions. Anyone hearing it might well have thought it was shooting on the television.

  She returned the pistol to her purse and withdrew her white cotton gloves. She was confident no one had heard her shots, but she wanted to be out of the house as soon as possible. She knew the rooms. She ran to Len’s bed- room. It was separate from Faye’s. She opened a drawer in his nightstand and put a sheet of notepaper inside. The bastard kept a package of condoms there. Maybe he was expecting a visitor even tonight. She closed the drawer and returned to the living room.

  There they were on the wall: “Printemps du verger byVincent van Gogh and signed “Vincent,”

  “Entrer en danse ” by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and “Harlequins nus” by Pablo Picasso—each one worth three fortunes. There were five other paintings hanging in the living room, but these were the three Grant had said she should take. She went to the Van Gogh and pulled it from the wall. It did not come away easily, and she wondered if jerking it off the wall had not activated an alarm. She listened and didn't hear anything, but—

  Here was a fault in their plan. Taking the three paintings would create a motive for the murder. But, she realized now, she had already risked setting off an alarm, and she realized further that she could not carry all three to her car at once. She'd have to take the Van Gogh out firs
t— or maybe two of them—and return for the third. She decided quickly that stealing one painting worth two or three million dollars, minimum, made motive enough. She would quit while she was ahead.

  She took one last look at Len—Tim Wylie—before she left the house. He looked like a piece of meat, she decided. “Murder our daughter, you bastard!” she muttered.

  3

  8:42 P.M.

  At the motel she returned to her room through the back door, then went down to the desk and handed over her key. “If my friend shows up, tell him to go to hell,” she said to the clerk.

  She had paid for the room with cash. “The room's yours for the night, Barbara,” said the clerk. “You've paid for it. You know, you might find a new friend to share it with you.” He smirked. “After midnight.”

  “Not tonight, lover.”

  The clerk’s face darkened, and he nodded and said nothing more.

  Now the point was to change clothes and get to the Ten Strikes Lounge as quickly as possible. She pulled into a parking lot, took a space as far out of the lights as possible, and changed. Before she left the lot, she tossed the blue jeans and sweatshirt into a Dumpster.

  4

  9:34 P.M.

  .

  “You look like a million,” Sonya told her as Erika took a stool at the bar.

  “I look like a hundred thousand.”

  Sonya grinned. ‘You look like a college education.”

  The dress Erika had changed into in the car was a hot pink mini, with a skirt five inches above her knees. She wore sheer dark stockings and shiny black shoes. “Everything okay?” Sonya asked.

  “Piece of cake. But I need a drink. I’ve got a long night ahead of me and no more drinks till god knows when.” Fred was behind the bar. Sonya signaled him. “Pour the lady a double Jack Daniels Black. And meet Erika Bjor- ling.”