Columbo: The Hoffa Connection Page 3

“The maid found her, about nine-thirty this morning. The maid’s name is Rita Plata. She arrived about eight-thirty. The house was a colossal mess, from a party here last night. She worked inside the house for an hour before she came outside to see what she had to clean up around the pool. She saw the victim at the bottom of the pool.”

  “Eight hours… That means she died around one-thirty. Was anybody else in the house?”

  Martha smiled. “Oh, yes. Quite a collection. In the first place, Regina had a full-time houseboy. His name is Johnny Corleone.”

  “Corleone?”

  “Right. You know, there really is a town in Sicily named Corleone. Anyway, he’s twenty-eight, and he’s the live-in houseboy. Besides that, there were at least six other people in the house overnight. Regina’s aged grandfather lives in a suite of rooms on the second floor. His name is Vittorio Savona. I haven’t tried to talk to him. Johnny and Rita agree that he’s feeble and does not speak English.”

  “Can Johnny speak Italian?”

  “Sort of, he says. Okay. Regina, Johnny, and the old man make up the household. But there were five other people here overnight. It seems that certain people stay overnight with some regularity. She had issued a standing invitation to certain people. It seems to have been, ‘If you’ve got so drunk or high you can’t drive home safely, stay.’”

  “Thoughtful,” said Columbo. “So, who stayed?” Martha consulted her notes to get the names exact. “First, there’s a superannuated British rock star named Mickey Newhouse. Apparently he had a great deal to do with teaching Regina the basics of the business, and she hired him as a sort of artistic manager—if‘art’ is a word we ought to apply to her exhibitions. They were lovers for a while, Johnny thinks.”

  “ ’Kay. Who else?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Joshua Gwynne. They own a company called Joshua Records and did her recordings. Then, a 'couple named Bob Douglas and Christie Monroe. Douglas is the computer programmer who creates those nauseating raucous sounds that substituted for music in her ‘concerts.’ Monroe was one of her backup dancers. They shared a room last night.”

  Columbo smiled. “I guess you didn’t like Regina much. That is, you weren’t a fan.”

  “I think she represented everything that’s wrong with our country,” Martha said.

  “I’ll invite ya to expand on that idea sometime. Meanwhile—”

  “We made them all come down and wait in the living room. I checked out their rooms while they were downstairs.”

  “You didn’t grab any evidence?”

  “No, of course not. But—C’mon and take a look.” The house consisted of a main block and a wing that slanted off at an angle to the east. Martha pointed to the open door into Regina’s suite, which occupied the entire west end of the house. The next suite, occupying about half as much space, was where her grandfather lived, behind a closed door. A hallway divided the rest of the second floor in half, and the houseboy’s rooms were on the northeast corner. The hall turned and ran the length of the east wing, with two guest rooms on either side. The guest rooms were also separated by a short perpendicular hall that afforded all the guests access to the balconies on the north and south sides of the wing.

  “Save the best for last.” Martha nodded toward the door to Regina’s suite. “Let me show you something interesting first. Down the hall.”

  She led him to a room she identified as Mickey Newcastle’s. Martha told him to look in the bathroom. Lying beside the basin was a hypodermic needle, a vial of white powder, and a bottle of distilled water.

  The next room was the one where Joshua and Barbara Gwynne had slept. It was notable for the complete lack of anything personal: no nightclothes, no cosmetics, toothbrushes, or razors in the bathroom. They had not expected to stay all night.

  Bob Douglas and Christie Monroe had. Their shared overnight bag was open on a small table. In the bathroom were their toothbrushes, his razor, her cosmetics, combs and brushes, and a set of contact-lens fluids: cleaner, saline solution, and lubricating drops.

  “I guess they had high times.” Martha, pointed at the rumpled bed. A sheer black nightgown was half-stuffed under one of the pillows. A spot in the center of the bottom sheet bore a yellowish stain that looked like dried semen.

  Johnny Corleone had a small suite at the front of the house, not overlooking the pool. It consisted of a little sitting room, a bedroom, and a bath. It looked very ordinary and suggested nothing.

  ‘‘Hey Martha, take a look at this,” said Columbo from the bathroom. “Looka.”

  He was pointing at a tiny round frosted bottle of perfume, capped with a gilded butterfly. It sat in a mount in the bottom of a little box. Script on the top half, which lay to one side, labeled the perfume “Annick Goutal—Paris—Gardenia Passion.”

  “So,” she said.

  “Would Johnny be using that himself? I mean, is that something a man would use or—”

  Martha grinned. “Definitely a woman’s scent,” she said. “And not available on a houseboy’s wages, either.” Columbo grinned. “I wonder if we can find any more of that in the house.”

  They did, in Regina’s personal suite. In her own rooms she had lived like a queen. Her sitting room and bedroom were lavish and, some would have said, tasteless. Everything was white: carpets, drapes, walls, bedclothes, upholstery. No pictures hung from the walls, only mirrors in white frames. One whole wall of each room was a mirror. When she saw herself in these mirrors, she must have seen the only touch of color in these determinedly white rooms.

  The sheets on her king-size bed exuded a subtle but distinctive scent. Columbo had not opened the perfume bottle and did not recognize the scent as the same, but it was the same: Gardenia Passion.

  “There’s an odd thing, don’t ya think?” said Columbo. He pointed to a small steel safe sitting to the right of the bed. “It’s the only thing in the room that’s not white. Make a note to get it opened, Martha. Gotta know what’s in it.”

  Regina’s huge, tiled bathroom was all white, too, and equipped with a whirlpool tub almost large enough to swim in, a marble shower stall that included a needle spray and bidet, a toilet with armrests and a slanting padded back, and another bidet. White towels hung on white racks. The only touch of color in the bathroom was the pale-gold wrappings on extra bars of soap— Savon Fin, Gardenia Passion, aux sues de laitue 2%.

  “The lady must have favored the smell,” Columbo said. He picked up a bar of the soap—there could be no fingerprints on that—and he sniffed it. “Well… if that’s what ya like. What’s ‘ de mean?

  Y’know?”

  “My menu French tells me laitue is lettuce. What sues is, I don’t know. Probably extract or something like that.”

  “Gardenia and lettuce. Odd combination, don’t ya think? On the other hand, what is it the French say? ‘Everybody to his own taste.’ Right?”

  “I’m going to make a guess,” Martha said. “That bar of soap is worth fifteen dollars.”

  “Y’ don’t say? My, some people do live well.”

  “She didn’t die well,” said Martha.

  Three

  1

  Columbo walked into the living room, where the house-guests waited with various degrees of impatience and apprehension. Regina’s obsession with white had not prevailed here, and Columbo guessed the room was very much as it had been when she moved in. It would have been difficult to believe the furnishings, though conspicuously luxurious and expensive, were in her taste; they were the dark-wood-and-leather appointments of a Southern California Spanish-style mansion and had a somewhat gloomy aspect. It wasn’t Regina’s room for sure, and he guessed she hadn’t spent much time there.

  “Hey, folks,” he said. “I apologize for keepin’ you all waiting like this. I know it’s a big inconvenience. But I do thank ya for cooperating with the Los Angeles Police Department. Uh… Do you mind if I smoke? I’ve got a certain fondness for cigars. If it’s okay, anybody gotta match?”

  Martha handed him a cigarette lig
hter. She didn’t smoke, but she’d picked up a lighter and put it in her jacket pocket when she heard she’d be working with Lieutenant Columbo.

  He fished his half-smoked cigar out of his raincoat pocket and sucked fire into it. That gave him a moment for a quick study of the six subjects in the room. Subjects. That was what he would call them now. Suspects? Maybe later.

  He identified Johnny Corleone readily enough. Yeah, the good-looking fellow in black slacks, white shirt, black bow tie. Sure. The houseboy.

  The grungy man had to be Newcastle. He might be anxious for a fix by now.

  That left the two couples. Okay, the older pair had to be Mr. and Mrs. Gwynne, and the younger pair were Bob Douglas and Christie Monroe.

  “Well,” he said. He sat down on the piano bench at the Steinway grand. “What a beautiful room this is. What a beautiful home. And what an awful tragedy here. Uh—I guess I should tell you I’m Lieutenant Columbo, LAPD Homicide. I gotta ask a lot of questions. I’m sorry, but we don’t have any alternatives, you or me. I got no grounds to hold you here, and you’re all free to leave if that’s what you wanta do. But I’ll have to ask my questions sooner or later, so—”

  “A homicide detective,” said Joshua Gwynne. “Are we to understand that you think Regina was… murdered?”

  Columbo nodded. “For the moment, that’s the theory the evidence most supports.” He shrugged. “Could be it was an accident, but right now it looks like somethin’ else entirely.”

  “Well, Lieutenant,” said Joshua, “you know how to do your job. But the last time I saw Regina, she was staggering drunk, reeling around, and jumping in the pool. She couldn’t swim. I mean, she could just barely. The party broke up. Most people went home. The rest of us went to bed. If she drank some more and—”

  “And jumped in again, she might have drowned accidentally,” Columbo interrupted. He nodded. “That’s true. But there are other facts that don’t square with that. Like, she had a knife wound on her face.”

  “ Knife… wound?”

  “Yes, sir. So, y’ see, that’s why I’ve gotta investigate. And I’ve gotta do that the only way I know how, which is by accumulating all the facts I can and trying to put them together. Which means I have to ask a lot of questions. I’m sorry to have to take your time.”

  “Lieutenant,” said Christie Monroe. “I’m half-blind without my contact lenses. And half-blind with a hangover headache. I wonder if I could go back upstairs, put in my lenses, and take some Advil?”

  “Of course, ma’am,” said Columbo. “You go right up and do that.”

  She stood. The cocktail dress with the flared miniskirt that she had worn last night was not appropriate for a morning meeting of this kind. “I wish I had other clothes, too,” she said almost tearfully, her glance suggesting that she somehow blamed Columbo that she didn’t.

  “You look very pretty, ma’am,” Columbo said.

  She hurried from the room.

  2

  “The first thing I’d like to know,” said Columbo, “is what was the last time each one of you saw Miss Savona alive?”

  “ Please, Lieutenant,” said Mickey Newcastle, “don’t call her ‘Miss Savona.’ No one ever did. It sounds hokey. She was ‘Regina’ to everybody. She didn’t like anybody calling her anything else.”

  “Okay. When did you last see her?”

  “I don’t know,” Newcastle said. “It had to be sometime around midnight. I was pretty well out of it by then.

  I’d had a lot to drink. And you’re going to find out, so I might as well tell you, that I use controlled substances. Maybe you’ll want to arrest me for that. I really don’t much care. With Regina gone, I don’t have much left in life. I devoted my whole being to making her a great star, and now—”

  “Spare us, Mickey,” Bob Douglas interrupted. “We all know that without Regina around to pay you an exorbitant salary and support your habit—”

  “You bastard!”

  “—you’ll be hard put to keep yourself out of cold-turkey withdrawal. But don’t tell us you made her a star. She was a star without you—and without me, too, I admit. Without any of us. She had talent, Mickey. You wouldn’t know anjihing about that.”

  “Uh… gentlemen,” said Columbo. He looked at Newcastle. “You last saw her about midnight, the best you remember. How about you, Mr. Douglas?”

  “I’ve gotta make the same confession he’s made. I was schnocked last night, out of my skull. I remember her doing the pool bit. She’d jump in and pretend she was drowning, whooping and giggling. Frankly, Lieutenant, Regina liked to show herself off naked. That’s why she liked to have parties here. It was her place, and she could do it.”

  “But when?” Columbo said. “When’d you last see her?”

  “I can’t say it was any time much after midnight. About midnight is when Christie and I went upstairs. We were—Whoo! If you know what I mean.”

  Columbo turned to Joshua and Barbara Gwynne, who sat together on a couch, looking hung over and unhappy. “When’d you last see her?”

  “Lieutenant,” said Joshua, “the death of Regina is going to cost my wife and me millions. I don’t know if we can keep Joshua Records afloat without her. If that doesn’t exonerate us, I don’t know what would.”

  “Mr. Gwynne… You don’t have to exonerate yourself. Nobody suspects you of anything, that I know about. All I’m asking is, when did you last see her?” Joshua glanced at Barbara. “Maybe a little later than midnight,” he said.

  Rita Plata, the maid, came in carrying a tray laden with a coffeepot and cups. The others had had coffee before, and she presented the tray first to Columbo. He took coffee, as did Martha.

  “That brings us to you, Mr. Corleone.” Columbo turned to the houseboy. “ Parla italiano?” "Non parlo bene, ”Johnny answered.

  " Va bene,” said Columbo. “That’s alright. When did you last see her?”

  Johnny shook his head. “She asked me to bring her a drink. I don’t know just when that was, exactly. People were leaving. There was a lot of traffic in the house: party breaking up, people looking for her to say thanks, and so on. I got her a gin. But I don’t know what time that was. I think the last time I saw her was when I brought her the gin.

  “Where was she then?”

  “Sitting at a table by the pool. She was talking with somebody, a man. I don’t think I knew him.”

  “What’s the earliest time she could have been at the pool alone?” Columbo asked.

  “The earliest time? I don’t know, really. I guess it must have been after two o’clock.”

  “What time did you go to bed?”

  “It must have been two-thirty. I took a bottle of Scotch and went up to my rooms. That had to have been about two. I watched television while I put down a couple of drinks, and then I went to bed.”

  “Your rooms are… where?”

  “At the front of the house. I have a view of the driveway. Her rooms have a view of the pool. So do her grandfather’s rooms. The guest rooms are in the east wing. Mickey’s room has a view of the pool. So does the room the Gwynnes were using. The one Bob and Christie were in overlooks the front lawn.”

  “In other words,” said Columbo, “if she was in the pool at, say, two o’clock in the morning, you couldn’t have seen her from your windows, and Mr. Douglas and Miss Monroe couldn’t have seen her, but Mr. Newcastle and Mr. and Mrs. Gwynne could have.”

  “Not really,” Joshua Gwynne said. “The balcony outside our rooms is not private. Anyone in the house can go out on that balcony by coming through a little hall. So you don’t undress and go to bed in any of the guest rooms until you pull the drapes.”

  “Okay,” said Columbo. He looked around for an ashtray, spotted one on a coffee table, and walked over to deposit his cigar butt. “Ah, here’s Miss Monroe. Just in time. I hope your headache’s better. I was just about finished with asking when each person last saw Regina. When did you see her last, Miss Monroe?”

  Christie sat down beside
Bob Douglas. She frowned deeply. “Lieutenant, I… I don’t remember how I got up to our bedroom. I’m told I got down on my hands and knees and crawled up the stairs. I don’t remember… anything.”

  Columbo ran a hand over his rumpled hair as if he supposed that might substitute for brushing it. “Uh, I wanta change the subject a little,” he said. “There must have been some kind of struggle. I mean, even if she drowned accidentally, she must have screamed for help. Didn’t anybody hear anything?”

  “The idea that she would scream is an said Joshua Gwynne. “Maybe she struck her head on the edge of the pool and knocked herself unconscious.”

  “But she didn’t,” Columbo said. “The medical examiner looked for a bruise and didn’t find any. What he did find was a knife cut on her face.”

  “She did scream,” said Mickey Newcastle. “I heard her. I’d got up in the night to go to the bathroom. I heard a scream. I went to the bedroom window, pulled the drapes apart, and looked. I didn’t see Regina. There was a man standing beside the pool. He had light hair, cut very short, and he was wearing a red nylon jacket. His back was to me. He was just standing there. Then suddenly he broke into a run, running as fast as he could go. He looked back, and he ran into the diving board and fell. But he scrambled up and ran again. He ran out of the light, and I couldn’t see where he went.”

  “You didn’t see Regina?”

  “No. From that window some palm fronds partly block my view of the pool. If she was in the pool, I didn’t see her.”

  “Well, why the hell didn’t you go down to see what was happening?” Joshua asked. “If you heard her scream—”

  “Seeing the man suddenly take off and run, I supposed somebody—maybe Johnny—had come out of the house. Or maybe she’d gone inside and got a kitchen knife or a gun. Or maybe he saw her using the phone. Anyway, I didn’t see her. And… And she didn’t scream again.”

  “Besides, you weren’t in very good shape,” Joshua sneered.

  “Besides, I wasn’t in very good shape.”