Columbo: The Hoover Files Page 4

  “I don’t hafta tell ya it’d be great to find out how the bomb was set off. Any chance at all?”

  “Good chance. What we’ve got to do is sift this debris like we were sifting sand for gold. I wouldn’t be surprised if we find enough to tell us what kind of detonator was used.”

  “Spraying all that water isn’t preserving the evidence,” said Columbo, glancing at the firemen whose nozzles were set to drench the debris with spray, not to shoot streams at it.

  “When I got here there was still a lot of flame,” said Jean Pavlov. “The oil tank ruptured, and the heating oil caught fire.”

  “It looks to me,” said Columbo, “like there isn’t much for me to do here tonight. This has gotta be a scientific investigation.”

  “We can’t even get in there and begin to sift,” said Jean, “until the fire guys are sure the fire is out and stop their damn spraying.”

  “Thanks, Pavlov. I’ll be talkin’ to ya again, I expect.”

  Columbo went to the watch commander, Lieutenant Patrick Lawrence. “Hiya, Pat. Ever see anything like this before?”

  The watch commander was everyone’s picture of the perfect policeman: tall and erect, with intent blue eyes, wearing a crisply pressed uniform. “I never did, Lieutenant Columbo,” he said grimly.

  “Y’ started inquiries in the neighborhood?”

  “A little. One family is away somewhere and doesn’t even know yet that their house has been damaged. Sergeant Zimmer over there is talking to Mr. Agon. He lives three doors down.”

  “I’ll see what he’s telling her.”

  Martha Zimmer introduced Columbo to Edmund Agon, a balding, middle-aged man. “Mr. Agon has lost all his windows, and a piece of debris landed on his roof.”

  “Insurance will take care of me,” said Agon. “But Jesus Christ!”

  “Ya know the woman?” Columbo asked.

  “To speak to, that’s all. She seemed like a pleasant enough person.”

  “I guess you’ve been asked the usual questions, like did ya see anybody strange around the neighborhood, and all.”

  “My wife and I didn’t see a thing. We were getting ready to go out. Suddenly—” Agon threw out his hands. “During the Gulf War I heard a Scud missile land—” He shook his head. “It was like that. By the time I got outside and could look, I saw a car going around the corner up there. It was too far away for me to get any kind of a fix on it. Anyway, I wasn’t looking at it. Lieutenant Columbo… I saw her head lying out there on the street.”

  “Well, thank ya, Mr. Agon. I’ll leave you with Sergeant Zimmer. I—Oh. One little thing. Is that your house, with the garage door open?”

  “Right. And maybe that’s odd, Lieutenant. We didn’t open that door. It just opened. It happened yesterday, too. I came home and found my garage door up.”

  “Make a note of that,” Columbo said to Martha. “And make sure Pavlov knows about it. Thank ya again, Mr. Agon. I think you just told us somethin’ very useful.”

  New Year's Day—9:19 A.M.

  New Year’s Day. A glum smog hung over Los Angeles, and the scene on West Santa Monica Boulevard was grimmer than it had been last night. One red pumper remained on the street, but the firemen had rolled up all but one of their hoses and were just keeping watch. The block was still closed by black-and-whites parked across the street at both ends. Two other units were at the house, also three unmarked cars with emergency lights stuck on by magnets. A Crime Scene Unit van was parked in front of the house.

  Columbo frowned and stared and was glad to see the woman’s head no longer lay on the street.

  He stopped the Peugeot at the yellow tape that was stretched across the street. “Hiya, Ramirez,” he said, reading the uniformed officer’s name off his tag. “Columbo, Homicide.”

  “Yes, Sir. I recognize you.”

  “No holiday for us guys, huh?”

  “Well, at least I got to stay home last night,” said Ramirez. “I saw you on television.”

  “I wasn’t here long. This is a job for Crime Scene, right now. I got home for the party my wife had, most of it. I may get home for the football games. Hey, kinda keep an eye on my car, will ya? It’s got a lotta miles on it, and I wouldn’t want anything to happen to it.”

  Ramirez stared skeptically at the aged Peugeot, sitting sort of squat on the street, as if its wheels were in danger of buckling outward and dropping the chassis on the pavement. “I’ll lift the tape, Lieutenant. Then you can drive it into the closed area with the rest of the official cars.”

  “Thank ya, Ramirez. I’ll—”

  “Hey, Columbo!”

  It was Adrienne Boswell. She was climbing out of her shiny new red Alfa Romeo.

  “The lady wants to enter the area, Lieutenant,” said Ramirez.

  “She’s a reporter,” Columbo explained.

  Adrienne strode toward her. She tossed her head as she came, to flip her flaming-red hair off her face. She was always stylish, always handsome in no matter what she wore; and this morning she was stunning in nothing but a pair of tight, well-faded blue jeans and a red sweatshirt.

  “I saw you on the tube last night,” she said. “Figured you’d show up here this morning. Hey! Take me in with you. This is the story of the new year.”

  “That’d be a little tough to do, Adrienne. The area is closed. If I take you in, it’d look like I got a pet reporter.”

  “Closed? Pet reporter? Whatta you call those television cameras and the people working them? It’s not Ramirez’s fault, but somebody’s got the signals crossed.”

  Ramirez shrugged. “Your call, Lieutenant,” he said. ‘You outrank the guy who gave me the orders.”

  “Well, I’ll take the lady in with me. My responsibility.” Columbo and Adrienne walked toward the debris of the Clendenin home.

  “Thought you’d take the day off,” Columbo said.

  “Dan’s mad as hell,” she said. “But this is a story, Columbo. This is a story. Dan will be there when I get home.”

  “Yeah. So will Mrs. C when I get home. But I wish I didn’t hafta—”

  “You hafta. I hafta. I figured out something about you a long time ago, Columbo. Your work is your life. Well… so’s mine.”

  “You know the lady? I mean, the deceased.”

  “I knew her well,” Adrienne said sadly. “Hell—This could’ve happened to me.”

  “So who did it? Y’ got any ideas?”

  “Well—That book she did on Jonathan ruined him. She got threats while she was working on it, warning her not to publish. And she got threats afterward. Jonathan is not capable of killing anybody, particularly this way. But he was a valuable asset to some people who are.”

  “There are others?”

  ‘You bet. She told the truth about people, Columbo. She wasn’t quite as careful about it as I try to be. She accepted as evidence some things I wouldn’t accept. But she never lost a libel suit. If you want a suggestion from me, look into the people she exposed.”

  “I gotta kind of different idea,” Columbo said. “I kinda figure this is a hard way to go just to get revenge. I’d like to know what was coming, what she was working on.”

  “You ought to read Glitz. Having put Ai-ling Cooper away for ten years, the least you could do is read her magazine. Or watch tabloid TV. You’d know what she was working on.”

  “What?”

  “An expose of J. Edgar Hoover.”

  “Well, it’s for sure he didn’t kill her.”

  “I’d like to know what else she was working on,” said Adrienne, “but what you want to bet her files were in the house?”

  * * *

  The Crime Scene Unit had driven stakes in the ground all around the debris and had run white cords from stake to stake, to form a grid of squares. Men and women were working gingerly in the grid, finding bits of what might be evidence, photographing it in place, then placing the bits in bags and boxes marked with the coordinates of the grid, to show where each piece was found.

  Columbo told Adrienne she could not go with him to the grid and the collection of evidence. She went to the pumper and began to interview the firemen.

  “Hiya, Pavlov. You been here all this time?”

  Jean Pavlov shook her head. “I went home and came back,” she said. “Had a bath, a little sleep, a change of clothes.”

  “Findin’ a lot of stuff?”

  She rubbed her hand on her sweatshirt and then wiped her eyes. “Yeah. Some things we wish we hadn’t. We’ve found some pieces of the victim. Two fingers. Part of a foot. Let me show you some other things.”

  Boxes were laid out on the lawn. She put on rubber gloves and picked up a shred of metal. It was torn and twisted, exposing bright steel, but part of it was covered with a metallic-gray enamel.

  “We don’t know what that is for sure,” said Jean, “but when you sent word last night that a neighbor’s garage door went up, we started looking for pieces of a garage-door opener. That could be the steel case of an opener. And we’ve got something else—”

  She picked up from another box a fragment of vinyl. One side of it was marked with a pattern of silvery lines. Two tiny cylinders that Columbo recognized as resistors clung to the fragment.

  “Piece of a circuit board,” she said.

  “Could be a piece out of her computer.”

  “Look closer.”

  “I don’t know much about these technological things. What am I supposed to be seein’, Pavlov?”

  “Look how thick that board is. You don’t see that in a computer manufactured in the last ten or twenty years. I can be wrong, and the lab guys will check it out; but I’d guess that circuit board is older than any computer she had in the house.”

  “Meanin’ garage-door opener?”

  “Meaning old garage-door opener.”

  “Meaning the guy that set off the explosion took down the opener off his own garage,” said Columbo. “Good. All we gotta do is find a garage with an opener that was taken down.”

  Jean Pavlov shrugged. “We do the best we can.”

  “An’ ya do very well, Jean. I sure don’t mean to put ya down.”

  “Show you something else,” she said. “Look over here. These are fragments of a Federal Express carton—or maybe several FedEx cartons. I think several. Notice how most of these pieces are the size of a playing card or bigger. Then we’ve got these pieces that are the size of a postage stamp. Speculation, Columbo. The little pieces are fragments of a carton the bomb came in.”

  “They could survive like that?”

  She nodded. “Only a few of them. Explosives don’t vaporize things, generally. Just rip them to pieces. We’ve got work to do. The bigger pieces may fit together and make, like, the ruins of a carton—some pieces missing. The little pieces aren’t going to fit together. Maybe they come from another carton.”

  “You’ll be at it all day, huh?”

  “And all night. Another tour will come on. Sifting, sifting. God save me we don’t find more fingers and toes.”

  Saturday, January 2 —11:39 A.M.

  “This one ya don’t have to show me, Doc. This one I don’t want to see.”

  Columbo was talking to Dr. Harold Culp, the medical examiner, on Saturday, the day after New Year’s.

  “In that case,” said Dr. Culp, “let’s go to lunch. I was just about to go out.”

  “Hey! I can introduce you to the best chili in town! I got a place where—”

  The doctor smiled and shook his head. “I’ve heard about Burt’s chili. I understand its harder on the stomach than doing a messy autopsy. No, thanks, Columbo. You ever eat at Drake’s Sandwich Shop?”

  “How ’bout fish ’n’ chips?” Columbo asked. “I do like seafood.”

  Ten minutes later they were seated in a booth in Bow Bells Fish ’n’ Chips. Columbo’s raincoat hung on the hook beside him, one pocket bulging with the two hard-boiled eggs he had carried from home that morning and had not found time to eat. He had two cellophane-wrapped cigars in the breast pocket of his jacket, plus a half-burned stub in a raincoat pocket. (He was always careful not to put unwrapped cigars in the same pocket with eggs.) As usual, the narrow end of his necktie hung below the wide end.

  “I guess I know what killed the lady. You find anything unusual? I mean, you find anything you didn’t expect?”

  Dr. Culp shook his head. “The usual thing. She was literally torn to pieces, died instantly. I picked a lot of junk out of the trunk of her body and turned it over to the crime lab. There were some bits of steel, like shrapnel. Also, some hunks of brown plastic with etching on them, which I took for hunks of a circuit board. I picked out some shreds of some kind of heavy paper, or paperboard. It was soaked with blood, so I couldn’t tell much about it, but some pieces seemed to have been printed blue and some red.”

  “Bits of a FedEx box?” Columbo asked.

  Dr. Culp ran his hand over the cup-sized bald spot on the back of his head as he thought for a moment, then nodded. “Could be.”

  “We pretty well know how the bomb was delivered and how it was detonated.”

  They paused while a waitress put their lunches in front of them—generous servings of fried white fish with what Americans called French fries, also large paper cups of Pepsi. “What I call lunch,” Columbo observed after the waitress was gone. “I mean, second to Burt’s chili. I’m a guy with simple tastes, ya know? Once in a while I hafta eat in fancy places, but for everyday this suits me just fine.”

  “I’m that kind of guy myself,” said Dr. Culp. “I can’t take a lot of time for lunch. Some people wonder how I can eat lunch at all, considering what I do in the morning.”

  “I won’t go into that,” said Columbo.

  “Getting back to the body of Betsy Clendenin, you might be interested in what I didn’t find—which is the remains of her clothes. I didn’t find a shred of any kind of fabric. Or a button, or a piece of zipper, or anything. If that other junk was driven into her flesh by the explosion, her clothes would have been, too. Conclusion: When the lady died, she was stark, staring naked. Isn’t that kind of interesting?”

  Columbo frowned. “Could you tell if she’d had sex just before she died?”

  Dr. Culp turned down the corners of his mouth and shook his head. “No way to tell. Not enough left of her to tell. I couldn’t even find the contents of her stomach and intestines. They had been torn open, and whatever was in them went flying. It might have been on the floor, but I’m told the fire department had to spray water all over. In fact, their spray had washed all the blood off of her.”

  Columbo poured malt vinegar over his fish. “Interesting as usual, Doctor,” he said. “What did you think of the Rose Bowl game?”

  1:18 P.M.

  “Hiya, Mulhaney,” said Columbo as he walked into the police laboratory.

  Tim Mulhaney, a tall, solemn young man, wearing round, plastic-rimmed eyeglasses, with hair neatly trimmed and clothes pressed and brushed, was the product of a special program established by LAPD to attract young university graduates to police work. He held the rank of detective and often went out on investigations, but he spent most of the time in the lab. He had attended many seminars and conferences on forensic science. Lately he had begun teaching seminars.

  “Good afternoon, Lieutenant. Come on in my office and have a seat.”

  Mulhaney’s office was a cubicle. It was crowded with books on gray steel shelves. A long white lab coat was draped over the visitor’s chair, and he picked it up and hung it over the top of the cubicle.

  “I don’t think I can tell you anything you don’t know,” he said to Columbo. “Mostly, what I can do is confirm what Jean Pavlov told you or surmised. There may be some other information next week. We’re turning some explosives residue over to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, for laboratory analysis.”

  “Whatta ya figure those guys can tell us?” Columbo asked. “I mean, that you don’t already know.”

  “Well, I can tell you that the explosive was RDX, cyclonite, but I want to know what the binder was. When you know that, you can sometimes tell who made the bomb. Different people make plastic explosives different ways.”

  “What about the circuit board?”

  “Jean had that one figured out,” said Mulhaney. “That circuit board came out of a device manufactured at least ten years ago, and I’d think more like twenty. They don’t make ’em like that anymore: thick and brown.”

  “Garage-door opener?”

  “Could be. That would send and receive a strong signal. The switch in it, tripped by the radio signal, would very well close the circuit between the battery and the detonator.”

  “There’s a man down the street by the name of Agon,” said Columbo. “His garage door went up about the same time as the explosion. I’d appreciate it if you’d check that opener and see what frequency it operates on.”

  “Had a note to do just that,” said Mulhaney.

  “So. We got a pretty good idea what kind of bomb it was and how it was set off. All we need to do now is figure out who did it.”

  That afternoon Columbo went to a men’s clothing store. He stood on the street outside Pittocco’s, studying the clothing displayed in the window. He had to go in; there was nothing else for it. For Christmas, Mrs. C had given him a gift certificate, so he had to go in here; he had to use it.

  Why couldn’t she have given him a gift certificate in a less swanky place, like a nice outlet store? He dreaded the clerk who would try to sell him something. He absolutely dreaded it. Those guys—

  Well. He took a final puff from his cigar, tossed the stub into the gutter, and pulled open a big glass door.

  “Good afternoon, Sir. How can we help you?”

  It wasn’t a guy. That is, she wasn’t a guy. She was a woman and a damn good-looking woman, too: probably in her forties, as he judged, dark-haired, dark-eyed, wearing a form- hugging but modest gray wool dress.