Columbo: Grassy Knoll Read online

  “Paul… I could help relax you tonight. You can go to sleep while I’m doing it”

  He put his hand on hers. “Friday night,” he said. “The Friday show is easy. Friday and Saturday… And Sunday.”

  “Swim?”

  “You bet. A good time. Just a good time.” He beckoned to the waiter. “I’m sorry, baby, but I’m going to have a cab take you home. I’ve gotta hit the sack. I’ll probably sleep in my clothes.”

  “Oh, Paul, it’s not even eleven o’clock!”

  “Sorry.”

  5

  He was lucky he hadn’t gone to sleep driving, Drury reflected as at long last he turned into his driveway, deactivated the security system, and hit the button that opened the garage door. He eased his big, dark green Mercedes into the garage, switched off the lights and engine, and opened the door. He walked to the door into the house and put his card in the slot.

  “H’lo, Paul.”

  “What…? What the hell?” asked Drury as he jerked his head to the right and saw Tim Edmonds. “Where were…? What are you doing here…?”

  Alicia stepped up behind him. She had been hidden on the far side of the second car in the garage: the vintage Lamborghini Drury drove only for fun, never to the studio. Tim had been hidden there, too, and had stepped out in front to distract Drury as Alicia moved around the rear of the Mercedes and slipped up behind him.

  Clutching a pistol in both hands, Alicia put it to the back of Drury’s head and pulled the trigger. The small-caliber pistol made a small, sharp crack that echoed inside the garage but probably not beyond. As Drury collapsed, she fired a second shot into the back of his head. With him flat and silent on the garage floor, she squatted beside him, unfastened his watch, reached into his jacket pocket for his billfold, and pulled a heavy gold ring with a huge diamond from his finger.

  Tim brushed past her, opened the door of the Mercedes, and leaned across the front seat to pull a small black box from under the seat on the passenger side.

  Alicia opened the door into the house, and they hurried up into the dark living room. For a minute or so they stood behind a large window, watching the area. They saw nothing. From all indications, no one had heard the shots in the Drury garage.

  They deactivated the security system for three minutes at a station in the kitchen, left the house through the kitchen door, slipped around the pool in the shadows of the cabana, and returned to the gate that opened onto the driveway.

  As they walked back along Hollyridge Drive, to where they had left their car, they were frightened three times by approaching headlights, and three times they scurried off the road and hid. When finally they reached the car—a rented green Oldsmobile that was unlikely to be remembered—they literally flung themselves onto the seats, physically exhausted, emotionally drained.

  “Not finished,” Alicia whispered.

  6

  “I hope we’re not too late for dinner, Roberto,” Tim said to the proprietor of Cocina Roberto. “It’s after eleven-thirty.”

  “We serve until one o’clock, Senor Edmonds.”

  “Wonderful! Let’s start off with margaritas and with some guacamole.”

  “Certainly, Sefior. And welcome to you also, Sefiora Drury. It is always good to see you.”

  Alicia and Tim were silent as they drank their margaritas and dipped chips in the guacamole. From time to time, Tim glanced at his watch.

  “Relax,” she said after a while. “It worked out fine, and there’s just one more thing to do.”

  “Do it,” said Tim. “I want it off my mind.” Alicia nodded and left the table. She went to the women’s room. A woman was there, repairing her makeup, and Alicia went inside a toilet stall and sat down to wait. After a minute the woman left. Alicia went immediately to the pay telephone near the door—a telephone thoughtfully provided by Roberto for women who wanted to make calls without their dates knowing. She punched in a number and waited, pulling a Sony Walkman from her purse while the telephone rang four times.

  "Hello. This is Bill McCrory. I can’t take your call right now, but if you will leave your name and number, I will get back to you as soon as I can. Please wait for the beep.”

  Alicia pressed the play button on the Walkman. “Hi. This is Paul. Make a point of calling me first thing in the ay-em, please. Kind of important.” Back at the table, she smiled at Tim Edmonds and said, “Done. Done and done.”

  Three

  1

  At 9:00 a.m., Thursday, June 3, rain was falling on Los Angeles. Officer Ted Dugan, LAPD, was irritated. A three-year man on the force, his duty this morning was to stand at the end of a driveway on Hollyridge Road and turn away reporters and assorted curious. Some of the reporters were pretty damned pushy.

  And now here came… God almighty! A wheezing old heap of junk, God-knew-what: battered, silver paint showing rust in some places, crude brushed-on repair work on the right front fender. Only one windshield wiper was working, fortunately the one in front of the driver. Dugan stepped out and raised his hand imperiously. He’d be damned if he let—

  But hold on. Wait a minute. Dugan stared at the license plate: 044 APD. Somewhere in the back of his mind he had a fix on that number—044 APD. The driver stopped, rolled down his window, and showed a shield.

  My God, it was Columbo! Lieutenant Columbo! That was the license number he’d been told to look out for: on the ancient Peugeot driven by Columbo. The man in the car was short. He badly needed a haircut; his dark hair was disheveled and falling over his ears, collar, and forehead. His eyes— narrow, set inside a pattern of lines—were sharp and intense; yet somehow he looked distracted and not entirely sure he had come to the right place.

  “Can y’ help me out a little, Dugan?” he asked, reading the officer’s name from the board on his shirt.

  “Yes, sir. Of course.”

  Columbo pulled the car a little to one side. It still half blocked the driveway, but the paramedics’ squad wagon, which was parked at the garage door, red and blue lights flashing, could squeeze past. So could any of the three police cars on the driveway. He got out, dragging from the rear seat a large sheet of once-clear plastic. “Car leaks a little when it rains,” he explained to the tall blond Officer Dugan. “Put this plastic over it to keep out the rain. Like a raincoat for a car. Right? Raincoat for the car. Don’t want rain drippin’ on the seats.”

  It would have, without the plastic. The convertible top had tears and would have let in water by the gallon—had let in some water during Columbo’s drive up from the city. The lieutenant himself had come prepared for rain. He was wearing a wrinkled short raincoat, stained and frayed, on the verge in fact of being called shabby. He tossed the plastic over his car and walked around it, smoothing it down.

  “If a wind comes up. I’d appreciate your keeping that from blowing off, Dugan. Just put a couple rocks on it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Columbo glanced around. He stood in the rain and frowned at the house. The facade it presented to the street was the garage doors. The house, Spanish-style stucco with a red-tile roof, was beyond the garage and above it as the land sloped sharply up. He could see why the main rooms of the house would face west—because from the windows the view would be out over Los Angeles and the Pacific. From the driveway he could see the roof of the cabana and so surmised that a swimming pool lay on the flat land at the top of the slope. The house was not a mansion; that was not the right word for it. It was a villa.

  “My, this is some place, isn’t it? Imagine the money y’d have to have to live in a place like this! But I’ve seen the man’s TV show. The man earned what he had. And now—” The lieutenant shook his head. “Tragedy.”

  Officer Dugan had heard the name Columbo often. He’d heard all about him. Even so, it was difficult to believe this was Columbo. Below the bottom of the stained raincoat, a thread hung down the lieutenant’s leg, inspiring in Dugan an all but irresistible urge to reach down and tear it loose.

  “Where’s everybody?�
�� Columbo asked. He glanced around at the six official cars drawn up on the street and in the driveway. “They removed the body?”

  “No, sir. The body is in the garage. Most of the people are in there, I imagine.”

  Columbo looked around. It looked to Dugan as if the man were oblivious to the rain falling on him and wetting his unruly dark hair. “How do you get in?” he asked.

  Dugan pointed to the gate—not a gate that was part of the security system, just a decorative gate, low, wrought-iron painted white. “Through there and into the side door of the garage.”

  2

  Columbo walked to the gate. For a moment he fumbled with the latch. Finally he got it open, then went through and up a paved walk to the garage.

  The officer outside had been right. The body of Paul Drury lay on the garage floor, and half a dozen people milled around it, some staring at it and others intent on examining the cars and the garage clutter.

  “Lieutenant!”

  Martha Zimmer came toward Columbo. Her rank was detective, LAPD, and she was wearing the badge exposed on the pocket of her white blouse. She had to. Otherwise, men were not readily disposed to accept the fact that she was a detective. She was short. To use the term most often applied to her, she was “squat.” Her dark hair was cut short, her apple-cheeked face was plump, and she wore no makeup. Her weight might not have been acceptable to the department except for two things: first, that she was an intelligent, effective officer; second, that she had just borne her second child and had gained weight during her pregnancy.

  “H’lo, Martha,” said Columbo. “Welcome back. I hear everything went okay. How you feelin’?”

  “Perfect,” she said.

  “What we got?”

  Martha nodded toward the corpse lying facedown on the concrete floor of the garage, his head in a dried pool of blood. “That’s Paul Drury, the journalist talk-show-host fellow. The medical examiner has made a very preliminary finding that he’s been dead since before midnight last night. This is his car. It looks like he came home, used his radio controller to open the garage door, and was shot in the back of the head, twice, before he could get in the house. He’s absent his billfold. The house has been ransacked.”

  “How’d the assailant or assailants unknown get in here?” Columbo asked.

  “Don’t know. There’s an alarm system, but it didn’t work.”

  Columbo nodded. He reached into his raincoat pocket and pulled out the cold, half-smoked stub of a cigar. “Gotta match?” he asked.

  Martha smiled and handed him a book of paper matches. “Keep them,” she said.

  “Who found him?”

  “A Mrs. Badilio,” said Martha Zimmer. “She’s the housekeeper. You get into the house with a sort of credit card that has a PIN you can use to work the alarm system. She’s got one of those cards and used it to get in.”

  “You talked with her?”

  “Just for a moment. She’s not in very good shape.”

  Columbo used one of the paper matches to light the cigar. He looked at a man standing beside the body. “Hi, Doc,” he said. “What ya figure?”

  “Preliminary…” cautioned Dr. Harold Culp. “Very preliminary.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Columbo. “Understood.”

  Dr. Culp was a man of forty, forty-five maybe, and if he were the former he was prematurely gray and prematurely turning bald. The round tanned bare spot on the back of his head was not wide enough for the bald spot of a tonsured monk; it was more like the size of a yarmulke. He wore hornrimmed bifocals.

  “There are two small bullet wounds at the back of the head and low,” said Dr. Culp. “No exit wounds. The bullets are still inside the head, somewhere in the brain. There is considerable powder residue around one wound, very little around the other. One shot was fired with the muzzle almost pressed against the head. The other was fired from a foot or so away. The size of the wounds suggests a small-caliber weapon, even as small as a twenty-two.”

  “No big noise,” said Martha Zimmer.

  “What do you figure was the time of death?” asked Columbo.

  “Before midnight,” said Dr. Culp. “State of the body. State of the dried blood.” He nodded em-

  phatically. “It could have happened as early as ten last night. At the very outside, not after twelve-thirty. But that’s a preliminary estimate, remember.”

  Columbo glanced around the garage. “My, look at that other car the man had. That’s a Lamborghini. That’s an expensive foreign car. That one’s a classic. I drive a foreign car, y’ know. My car’s a French car. Not a Japanese car—not that I got anything against Japanese cars—but my car was built in France, and they sure know how to build cars over there. Uh… The door’s open on the Mercedes, but the interior lights aren’t on. Why is that, y’ s’pose?”

  “The battery is down. Lieutenant,” said a uniformed officer. “Rose, Lieutenant. I responded to the call and was the first officer on the scene. The car door was open when I came in, and the battery is dead.”

  “That’s odd, don’t y’ think?” asked Columbo. “I mean, the man got out of his car, it looks like. He walked to the front of the car and up to the door to the house. What’s that in his hand there? A plastic card? Credit card? Why…? Oh, I see. Slot. Door opens with a card, not a key. Anyway, why would he leave the car door open?”

  Columbo reached for the button that opened and closed the garage door. He pressed it. As the door rumbled up, a bright light came on.

  “See, he didn’t need the light inside the car. So why would he walk away from his car and leave the door open?”

  “Why would he?” asked Martha Zimmer.

  Columbo shook his head. “He wouldn’t. The killer opened the door to get somethin’ out of the car. He left the door open. He was nervous and in a hurry. Besides, what’d he care if the battery ran down in Mr. Drury’s car?”

  Columbo reached inside his jacket and pulled out a small notebook. He checked his pockets. “You got a pencil to spare, Martha?” he asked. “I want to make a note of this. What was in the car that the killer wanted? Can you think of any other reason why that car door was left open and the battery was left to run down?”

  Columbo made a note with the pencil Martha had handed him. Then he pointed toward the house, and the two of them went in.

  “My, what a place! Isn’t this elegant!" he said of the kitchen, which was equipped with two microwave ovens besides a conventional oven, a dishwasher, huge Sub-Zero refrigerator, electric stovetop, electric grill, glass-enclosed refrigerated wine cellar…? How’d you like to cook a dinner in here, Martha?”

  A uniformed sergeant came into the kitchen. “Lieutenant,” he said briskly, “there are two friends of Mr. Drury outside. They’d like to come in. One’s the ex-wife.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Columbo. “Don’t let the woman go out to the garage, though. She shouldn’t have to see that.”

  Tim Edmonds and Alicia Drury came into the kitchen and were introduced to Columbo.

  “We came up here as soon as we heard,” said Tim. He had walked up the driveway in the rain.

  and drops of water gleamed in his blond hair. His long Burberry raincoat was spotted. “I guess there’s no hope that we were told wrong.”

  “If you were told that Mr. Drury is dead, you were told right,” said Columbo.

  Alicia put her hands over her face and sobbed. She, top, wore a Burberry coat, almost identical to Tim’s.

  “How did it happen?” asked Tim.

  “Murder,” said Columbo. “Shot in the head. Sometime last night. Midnight, give or take an hour.”

  Tim looked at Alicia. “When we were at Cocina Roberto,” he said.

  She nodded. “My God! While we were having a good time, he…” She put her hands to her face and sobbed again.

  Columbo spoke to Tim. “The lady is Mr. Drury’s ex-wife, as I understand. What’s your connection?”

  “I’m— I was his producer.”

  “And a friend, too, I
bet. Huh? Listen, Mr. Edmonds, I need somebody to take a look at the body. I wouldn’t want to ask the lady to do that, but—”

  “I’ll do anything I can to help,” said Tim solemnly.

  “Well, that’s nice of you, Mr. Edmonds. I know this isn’t easy. Right this way. Well, I s’pose you know the way. You’ve been in the house before, haven’t you?”

  “Many times,” said Tim.

  3

  “Yeah. Well, there he is, sir. A gruesome sight. I’m sorry. This is how he was found. Lyin’ there, facedown. The car door was open, the way it is now. The battery had run down, because the door was open all night.”

  Tim Edmonds shook his head convulsively and covered his face with his hands. For a moment Columbo wondered if he would vomit. “I can’t believe it,” Edmonds whispered hoarsely.

  “Does anything look odd about the body?” asked Columbo. “Anything look different?”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m askin’ you. Just… Does anything about him look different from what you’d expect?”

  Tim forced himself to stare at the corpse for most of a minute. “Well… There’s his ring?” he asked. “There’s a good question. What ring?”

  “Paul wore a heavy gold ring with a big diamond in it. It’s missing. And— Okay, his watch is missing.”

  “Was that expensive jewelry, Mr. Edmonds?”

  “The watch was a jeweled Vacheron Constantin.”

  “And that’s expensive?”

  “That’s expensive. Lieutenant. Several thousand dollars. And the ring had to be worth several thousand. You know show-biz people. The watch was elegant. The ring was flashy. But that was Paul: a combination of the elegant and flashy. That was his personality. Is his billfold missing?”

  “Right. The officers looked for that. Did he usually carry a lot of money?”

  Tim Edmonds shrugged. “I never noticed that he carried more than other people carry.”