Columbo: Grassy Knoll Read online

  “F’r instance.”

  “Do you remember when Orange International tried to take over Smathers Petroleum? Orange offered every Smathers stockholder a share of Orange for a share of Smathers, plus a bonus of $ 12.75 a share. Remember?”

  “Uh… I don’t follow the stock market, sir.”

  “Well. Paul Drury did a show about Orange International. He showed that a share of Orange plus the $12.75 was a bad deal for a share of Smathers. I mean, the Orange officers had inflated salaries and perks, plus golden parachutes. What was more. Orange had a huge potential liability arising from an oil spill. Paul dramatized all this on a show about the disastrous securities manipulations of the eighties. The Smathers stockholders saw the show, didn’t accept the Orange offer, and the takeover collapsed.”

  “Isn’t that interestin’…” said Columbo as he accepted from McCrory the tape he had finally managed to remove from the machine.

  “It gets still more interesting,” said McCrory. “Guess who did take over Smathers.”

  “I’m afraid I wouldn’t know.”

  “Bell Explorations. See the connection?”

  “No, sir. I’m afraid I don’t.”

  McCrory smiled tolerantly. “Charles Bell, the chairman of the board of Bell Explorations, is the chief stockholder of Paul Drury Productions.”

  “Oh! I get it. You figure he used the Drury show to shoot down the Orange bid so he could pick up Smathers for himself.”

  “Exactly. I’m not sure Paul understood it at first. I imagine he really thought he was doing a show along the lines of the Milken-Boesky market manipulation story.”

  “But would the Smathers people hate him enough to kill him?” asked Columbo.

  “Probably not. But tonight he was going to do a show on the hazards of cigarette smoking. There are people in the tobacco industry who are capable of murder.”

  “What about things closer to him, that I’m capable of understanding Like, what was the cause of the divorce?”

  “Only that they should never have married in the first place,” said McCrory. “Paul had a big ego. He was promiscuous. Another possibility— A jealous husband. A jealous boyfriend.”

  “But Mrs. Drury, she—”

  “She got a generous settlement. Anyway, she and Tim Edmonds are a pair. But Alicia is no angel. Lieutenant. She’s an addictive gambler. She may be something worse.”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask ya to spell that out, sir.”

  “There are stories that she is—or was—mob-connected. Rumors. I can’t substantiate them. But there are stories.”

  “Are you thinkin’ that maybe the death of Paul Drury was a mob hit?” asked Columbo.

  “I couldn’t say that. I’m suggesting a line of inquiry.”

  Columbo rose. “I sure do thank ya, Mr. McCrory. I won’t take any more of your time right now. I’ll return your tape as soon as possible.” McCrory came around his desk and extended his hand. “Don’t worry about the tape,” he said. “And call anytime.” He reached past Columbo and opened the door.

  “Thank ya. Thank ya,” said Columbo. He stepped out into the reception room. “Oh. Just one more thing. One little thing kinda bothers me. Why would Mr. Drury call you at eleven forty-seven? He didn’t expect to find you here, did he?”

  McCrory turned up his palms. “I don’t know. Maybe it was just something on his mind. Maybe he was afraid he’d forget it.”

  “Umm. Did he ever do that before? I mean, did he leave messages on your recorder late at night?”

  “Once or twice before, I guess.”

  “Well, thank ya, sir. Thank ya. I’ll try not to bother you any more. I know your time is valuable. And, uh, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell anybody else about the call and the tape.”

  3

  The offices of Paul Drury Productions and of Tim Edmonds Productions were in another square glass office building, this one on La Cienega, only two blocks from the studio where the show had been done. Though the rain had stopped and the sun was hot, Columbo still wore his raincoat.

  As he walked from the parking lot to the front entrance of the office building, he hummed a tune under his breath. He didn’t know what it was called, but the words that passed through his mind as he hummed were—

  This old man, he played one.

  He played nicknack on my thumb.

  With a nicknack patty-whack, Give a dog a bone.

  This old man came rolling home.

  He had something else on his mind as he rode up in the elevator: that he was glad he was a homicide detective and not one of the laborers in one of these faceless, graceless buildings. There was another song. How’d it go? “And they’re all made of ticky-tacky and they all look alike.” This one was made of green glass, as about half of them were. That was the only way they differed: green glass or smoky glass. Columbo had worked hard to get the job he had, and the struggle had been worth it, even if it just kept him from having to work in one of these cubes.

  “We thought you’d be here before we were,” Tim Edmonds said in the reception area of Paul Drury Productions.

  “Oh, I had another call to make,” said Columbo.

  “Well, who would you like to see?”

  “Anybody. I don’t want to be too much trouble. I know everybody has to be feelin’ awful.”

  “Well, maybe you’d better talk to Karen Bergman. She may have been the last person to see Paul alive. You can use Paul’s office. I’ll send her in.”

  Paul Drury’s office was dominated by a huge desk, some eight feet long and five feet wide. The top and the vertical panels were of green marble. The desk was absolutely uncluttered. Green leather boxes with lids contained, apparently, the papers he had been currently working on. A pen-and-pencil set sat on the front of the desk. A computer monitor and keyboard sat at each end of the desk, and Columbo was amazed to see that holes had been drilled through the marble for the cables that obviously connected to the computers out of sight below. The floor of the office was of a green marble similar to that of the desktop. Couches and chairs sat on oriental rugs laid on the marble. Behind the desk the marble was bare, so Drury could wheel his chair from one end of his desk to the other.

  The walls were white and were covered with autographed portraits of scores of celebrated people: every President of the past twenty years, senators, governors, judges, actors, actresses, singers, dancers, and “personalities.” Other photos sat in frames on the credenza behind the desk. These were nudes. Columbo recognized Alicia Drury. Her picture, in black and white, was dramatically lighted and even somewhat modest for a nude. Others were not modest at all.

  At one end of the room stood a wooden statue of Drury. It was rough, as if it had been carved with an axe, but it was an accurate and not unflattering caricature, though oddly discordant in this room.

  The room seemed to be divided into two conference areas, each with a couch and chairs, one set in light-brown leather, one in black. Apparently two meetings could be held in the office at the same time—even three if some people gathered around Drury’s desk.

  “Lieutenant Columbo.”

  He turned around and faced a small attractive blonde. “Miss Bergman?”

  “Yes. Won’t you sit down?”

  He chose a chair facing the light-brown couch, and she sat down on the couch. Her tight black skirt crept back, exposing six inches of her legs above her knees. He noticed, but his attention was fixed more on her face. It was puffy. She had been crying.

  “Uh… Mr. Edmonds suggests you may have been the last person to see Mr. Drury alive. Other than the murderer, of course.”

  “I may have been.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me. Your way.”

  The young woman shrugged. “It’s the usual story,” she said sadly. “Trying to make a career in this rotten business. I slept with Paul. But there was more to it than just that. I really cared for him. I know he cared for me, a little. Last night—”

  “Tell me abo
ut last night,” said Columbo, pulling out his notebook, checking his pockets for a pencil, finding one at last.

  “We went to dinner. At La Felicita. Paul was very strung-out, very tired. I don’t know if you’ll understand this, but Paul would lose three or four pounds while he was on the air. In an hour. Sweat. He’d gain it back as he took in fluids again, but when he came off the set he was dehydrated and exhausted. Last night more than usual. I offered to go home with him after dinner and help him relax. He begged off, saying we’d spend the weekend together.

  He didn’t even drive me home. He called a cab for me.

  “What time was that, ma’am?”

  Karen frowned at Columbo’s word “ma’am.”

  “Quarter to eleven, about. I remember saying, My God, it’s not even eleven o’clock.”

  “And you never saw him again.”

  She shook her head.

  “He said he was too tired to drive you home, said he was too tired to… How should I say it?”

  “You don’t have to say it. We know what I mean. He was too tired even for that. I mean—”

  “How far is it from this restaurant where you ate to his house?”

  “Uh… Say twenty minutes’ drive. To take me home he’d have had to drive twenty minutes more each way, which would have made an hour for him to get home. That’s why he called a cab.”

  “So he could have been home by eleven-oh-five, eleven-ten?”

  “Sure.”

  “And if he was as tired as he said, he could have been in bed asleep by eleven-fifteen, eleven-twenty.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, Miss Bergman, he made a telephone call at eleven forty-seven. To his lawyer.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “He reached one of these answering machines that makes a note of what time it is when a call comes in. The machine says he called his lawyer at eleven forty-seven.”

  “From where?”

  “Well, of course we don’t know.”

  “There’s something damned screwball here. Lieutenant,” said Karen Bergman. “Paul was a fraud in a lot of ways. But I knew him pretty well. He was tired! He couldn’t fake that with me. Besides, he wasn’t a man to turn down what I was offering—”

  “Unless he had an appointment to meet somebody,” Columbo suggested.

  “Another woman…?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that, ma’am. But I’d give a lot to know what happened between, say, quarter to eleven when he left you and eleven forty-seven when he called his lawyer and said he wanted to talk about something important first thing in the morning.”

  “A whole hour,” she said.

  “That’s the point,” said Columbo. “And then, according to the medical examiner, he died within forty-five minutes at most after he made that call.”

  “By twelve-thirty…”

  “What’s more, he almost certainly didn’t make the call from home. Because he was killed in his garage, with the card that works the locks on his house in his hand. He’d just come home, it looks like.”

  “Between eleven forty-seven and twelve-thirty,” she said. She shook her head vehemently. “No. There’s something screwball. It’s not like Paul. He wouldn’t have—” She stopped. “Unless I didn’t know him at all.”

  “Miss Bergman, I’m gonna ask you not to tell anybody about the eleven forty-seven call.”

  “All right. But I tell you there’s something screwball about it.”

  Columbo reached into his raincoat pocket and took out the cigar he had allowed to become cold. He struck a match and lit it. “Ma’am,” he said, “I was wonderin’ if you know anything about a little computer Mr. Drury carried around. What they call a laptop.”

  “Yes. It’s a Zeos notebook computer.”

  “Where is that little computer now, do you know?”

  She shook her head again. “The last time I saw it, it was in the car.’’

  “When was that?”

  “Last night. When we went into dinner at La Felicita, he shoved it under the seat. He always shoved it under the seat when he left it in the car. Sometimes he locked it in the trunk, but usually he just shoved it under the seat. He trusted the valet parker at La Felicita.”

  “Would there have been information stored in that computer?”

  “Absolutely. A lot of information. He had a sixty-megabyte hard disk in that computer. Sixty megabytes would be something like seventy-five to a hundred books, depending on how fat they are.”

  “That much! I wish Mrs. Columbo could see a machine like that. She took a night course at the university about computers, got very interested in ’em. Sixty-five— All the information he had on some subject could have been in that little computer.”

  “A copy, Lieutenant. Just a copy. He kept all the original files in the computers under his desk. The disk drives in those two could hold twenty times as much.”

  “Twenty times! Two thousand volumes. Four thousand.”

  “No. Two thousand. The two computers were what the technicians call redundant. That is to say, they backed up each other. If something happened to one, the information would be in the other.”

  “Where are the files? I mean, where are the papers with all this information?”

  Karen Bergman shook her head. “There is no paper,” she said. “Oh, there are probably some notes lying around, plus some photographs; but Paul saw no reason to store a warehouse full of crumbling paper. With redundancy, he saw no need to keep paper. He was scornful of people who filled file drawers.”

  “Interestin’… Tell me, ma’am, do you know how to run this system?”

  She nodded. “I did a lot of research for him.”. Columbo pointed toward one of the computer terminals on the marble-top desk. “Uh— Would you mind showin’ me how it works?”

  She rose from the couch, walked behind Drury’s desk, and switched on the power on one of the monitors. “The computers are up twenty-four hours a day,” she said. “The technicians tell us that’s better for them than being powered up and powered down all the time. We do power the monitors down overnight to save the screens. They haven’t been powered up yet today, for obvious reasons.”

  Columbo came around and stood behind her.

  The monitor, which looked much like a television screen, though the resolution on it was immeasurably finer, came to life, at first greenish and dull, then in brilliant colors.

  The young woman typed cd/folio. For most of a minute the screen was blank, while a grinding sound rose from the computer under the desk. Then a message appeared on the screen—

  GENERAL SYSTEM FAILURE READING DRIVE C:

  ABORT, RETRY, FAIL?

  Karen Bergman snatched up a telephone and punched a number. “Geraldo, get in here! I’m in Paul’s office, and I’m getting a system-failure message on the number-one computer. I’m going to try number two.”

  The technician was in the office before the second system displayed the same message. He took Drury’s chair and struggled with both computers while the young woman paced the office.

  “Is this somethin’ serious?” Columbo asked.

  “His life’s work…” she whispered. “My God! All the information about the Kennedy assassination! A whole library of irreplaceable information about the Kennedy assassination!”

  After five minutes of nervous key-tapping, the technician leaned back in defeat, closed his eyes, and blew a loud sigh through a wide-open mouth.

  “Geraldo…?”

  “The hard disks have been wiped,” the technician muttered. “You know what that means? If the data had just been erased, we could have recovered most of it. But this was a wipedisk, the way the CIA and Defense Department erase disks: so you can’t ever get back what was on them. There’s not a byte of data left in either of these computers.”

  Five

  1

  They sat at a lunch table in the bar at the Topanga Beach Club—Alicia, Tim, and Bell. It was a country club without golf, having instead an olymp
ic-size pool with diving bay, tennis courts, squash courts, and a bowling green—all overlooking but separated by a wall from the public beach. The lunch tables had a view of the ocean. Bell, who had not been at the office, was wearing lemon-yellow slacks and a pale blue polo shirt carrying the club initials, TBC.

  “Boy! Boy! Busboy!”

  Charles Bell snapped his fingers at the young man hurrying toward his table.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Clear these empty glasses. And we want more popcorn. And tell our waiter we want another round of drinks.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Bell shook his head at Alicia and Tim. “Service gets worse here every year,” he said. “A few years ago we had blacks, but I guess they’re all out mugging people and selling drugs. At least they could be taught to serve a table properly. Do you see anything on this menu that appeals?”

  The busboy—Korean perhaps, or Vietnamese— acted as if he did not hear any of this and hurried to clear the table.

  “It would be appropriate, Charles,” said Alicia, “if you looked a little bit distressed. After all, our good friend is dead.”

  “Murdered,” added Tim.

  “There’s no way to replace him,” said Alicia. “The show simply won’t go on the air tonight. They’re running an old Beverly Hillbillies, followed by a Sanford.”

  “After an appropriate announcement,” said Tim. “I taped that before I left the office.”

  “All right,” said Charles. “It came off perfectly. He’s dead. The data bases are gone. I made the call that activated the virus after you didn’t call to say you’d failed. You did get the laptop?”

  “I got it,” said Tim.

  “What’d you do with it?”

  “Smashed it open with a hammer. Got the disks out. Smashed them to bits with the same hammer, on my garage floor. Ground the bits through the garbage disposal in the kitchen.”

  Bell smiled. “Overkill.”