Columbo: Grassy Knoll Read online

  “Please…” murmured Alicia.

  “Did you find the key?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “But?”

  “The envelope has the box number on it,” said Tim. “But not the name of the bank. The key is stamped Mosley, which is the vault manufacturer. We know he had a box, but we don’t know in what bank.”

  “It doesn’t make much difference,” said Bell. “You got the key, so the police may not know he had a box. We couldn’t have used the key ourselves and opened it, because we couldn’t have duplicated his signature. In any case, in the absence of the information erased from his disks, the photos in the deposit box are nothing but a lot of snapshots.”

  “I hope you’re right,” murmured Alicia. “What’d you do with the pistol?”

  “What we said we’d do,” Tim answered. “It went into the trunk of a Buick waiting to be smashed in the hydraulic press. I went by the junkyard this morning to make sure the Buick had been squashed. It had been. It’s on a flatcar now, with fifty other smashed-down cars, on its way to be melted at a steel mill. The pistol will get melted along with the rest of it.”

  “What time did you get home?” asked Bell. “Four-fifteen,” said Tim. “I don’t like that part of it. The Los Angeles detective on the case already asked where we were between the time we left the studio and the time we got to Cocina Roberto.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him we were out on the beach doing you-know-what. He seemed to buy that okay. I wouldn’t want him asking where we were between one-twenty and four-fifteen.”

  “Romantic drive in the mountains,” said Bell. “Parked. Went to sleep in each other’s arms. You don’t have to prove where you were. They have to prove where you were.”

  Their waiter approached carrying a tray with another round of drinks.

  “We’ll order,” said Bell brusquely.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll have the open-faced fried shrimp sandwich. I assume that’s with ginger mayonnaise.”

  “Yes, sir. And would you care for a chilled white wine?”

  “Definitely. Choose one for us. Something very dry.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll have the same,” said Alicia.

  “Yes,” said Tim. “I will, too. But bring us also an order of the roasted zucchini with yogurt, to share.”

  The waiter bowed and hurried away.

  “The detective,” said Bell. “You say he’s an idiot?”

  Alicia grinned. “Charles, you wouldn’t believe it!”

  2

  Columbo crushed crackers into his bowl of chili. He had ordered extra crackers.

  “Listen,” he said to Martha Zimmer, “you gotta know where to go to get chili like this. You can’t get it just anyplace. I don’t know what they do, how they do it… I just know they make it great! I come from N’ York, you know. You can’t get chili like this in N’ York. Not that I ever saw. I s’pose it’s the Mexican influence. The Mexicans prob’ly know the secret of it. I don’t get it at home. Mrs. Columbo, she tries, but she can’t get it right like this. Y’ gotta come to a place like this to get the great chili.”

  He picked up his bottle of root beer and took a swig.

  Martha wasn’t having chili, said it gave her heartburn. She took a great bite from the mustard-covered hotdog she had ordered and nodded at Columbo’s dissertation on the chili.

  “The man from the alarm company ever show up?”

  “Umm-hmm.”

  “Have anything to say?”

  Martha chewed for half a minute, then swallowed. “He checked it all over. The alarm system was working fine. Those people are no amateurs. He said the only way anybody could have gotten into that house was with one of those magnetic cards.”

  “How’d it work exactly?”

  “You put the card in the slot in the fake mailbox. The machine read the magnetic numbers and then waited for you to punch in four more numbers. If you did it right, that disabled the alarm system for three minutes, which was enough time to get to a door and do it again, so’s to get inside. After you got inside, the system would reactivate itself, but that didn’t make any difference so long as you didn’t bump an outside door or a window. It’s a motion detector outside and a peripheral system inside.”

  “Could somebody have swiped one of Drury’s cards temporarily and have had a copy made?”

  “Not likely but not impossible. But it wouldn’t do you any good unless you knew the other four numbers. There’s no such thing maybe as an absolutely secure system, but this one comes close.”

  “Figures. The guy was obsessed with security, it looks like.”

  “Officer Rose, responding to the call from Mrs. Badilio, set off the alarm by pounding on the front door with his nightstick.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Anyway, it was no robbery, you know,” said Martha. “No burglary. The perp came to kill Drury, plain and simple.”

  Columbo nodded.

  “The perp took his billfold and ring and watch to make it look like robbery. And I wonder if he didn’t break open that desk and scatter the papers for the same reason.”

  “Whatta you figure’s the motive?” asked Columbo.

  “To stop a show he was gonna do sometime soon,” she said. “To stop him from exposing something.”

  “You got it figured. All his computer data banks were erased last night. Plus, the murderer stole a little laptop computer out of his car.”

  “What’s next, Columbo? Whatta you want me to do this afternoon?”

  “Check with the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and find out all you can about three cars: Edmonds’s, Mrs. Drury’s, and Bergman’s. Drive to Bergman’s apartment and see how long it takes to drive from there to La Felicita and from there to Drury’s house. Also, see how long it takes to drive from Cocina Roberto to Drury’s house. Check with Roberto and see when Mr. Edmonds and Mrs. Drury came and when they left.”

  “Okay. Oh listen, Columbo. I got a message for you. Captain Sczciegel says to tell you you absolutely have to get over to the police range and requalify with the pistol, which you’re six months overdue on doing.”

  “First thing I’ll have to do is find that revolver. I guess it’s gotta be in the house someplace. Hid it, you know. Always hid it, so the kids wouldn’t get to it. I think it’s in the top of the guest-room closet. Maybe Mrs. Columbo knows where it is.”

  “Sczciegel’s serious.”

  “Yeah. Listen, Martha, maybe you could give me a lesson or two with the thing. I don’t wanta shoot myself in the foot.”

  “Sure. We can go someplace and pot bottles.”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  “You on your way to visit the corpse?” asked Martha.

  “I don’t see any way to get out of it,” said Columbo.

  3

  Columbo did not like to go to the morgue. He did not like to see bodies cleaned up and laid out for autopsy. It was bad enough seeing them lying where they were found, but seeing them in the morgue was worse. The only worse thing was seeing them all made up and laid out in caskets.

  “Would ya mind not doin’ that for a few minutes, Doc?”

  Dr. Harold Culp had the electric bone saw in hand and was about to open the body of Paul Drury, from throat to crotch. He smiled wryly. “I didn’t know you were squeamish, Columbo.”

  “I just ate an awful good bowl of chili, an’ I don’t wanta leave it here on the floor. I mean, if you can spare a minute—”

  “Sure,” said the doctor, and he switched off the whining little saw.

  “You find anything surprising?” Columbo asked. “Anything you didn’t expect?”

  Dr. Culp put his hands on his hips and stared at the corpse for a moment. The naked body lay on its back. It was wet. The doctor and his assistant had just hosed it down again, to wash off blood and other fluids, which had run down the drain in the autopsy table. The head had been opened and the pieces of skull pushed back into thei
r approximate original positions, so that the head looked like a cantaloupe that had been dropped and unskillfully put back together.

  The doctor reached for a stainless-steel bowl on the wheeled table and handed it to Columbo. “There are your bullets,” he said. “Twenty-two hollow points.”

  The little bullets were totally deformed and looked like irregular lumps of lead, with only tiny cylindrical tails showing what had been the rear end of each and what the caliber had been. The noses had been cast with short round holes in them, so the bullets would do just what they had done: spread open and deform, tearing bigger holes than they would have done if they were not hollow-point slugs.

  “One bullet went in through the occipital lobe, through the parietal lobe, and into the corpus callosum. The angle was about twenty degrees below horizontal.”

  “Umm…” Columbo muttered. “That suggests whoever shot him wasn’t as tall as he was.”

  “He’s six feet five,” said the doctor. “Not many people are as tall as he was.”

  “Okay. Whoever shot him wasn’t as tall as he was but wasn’t an awful lot shorter. Right?”

  “I would guess whoever shot him was six feet tall.”

  “Yeah. That pretty much eliminates one suspect,” said Columbo.

  “Hmm?”

  “A young woman. Cute little thing. For her to have shot Drury in the back of the head, she’d have had to hold the gun above her eyes.”

  “Okay. I’ll guess that was the first shot. The second shot went in through the temporal lobe, up through the limbic lobe, and all the way into the frontal lobe. The angle of that penetration was sixty degrees above horizontal. My guess would be that when the first shot hit him, he began to fall and maybe paused with his head against the door, and when the second shot hit him his head was bent forward, his chin maybe all the way down to his chest.”

  Columbo turned down the corners of his mouth and ran his hand across his hair. “Those two shots must have scrambled his brains,” he said with a sigh.

  Dr. Culp nodded. “I see a lot of head wounds. I always hate them. The greatest thing in the world, the brain; and to see it torn apart like this— Well… I hate it, Columbo. I just goddamn hate it.”

  “No other wounds on him? Bruises?”

  “No.”

  “Okay… I don’t wanta stay and watch you do this, but when you get him open will you be able to make a judgment about how long his food had been in him? I mean, the state of digestion. He left the restaurant where he had dinner about a quarter to eleven. Will you be able to tell how far digestion had progressed?”

  “Right. I can give you a pretty good estimate.” Columbo nodded. “What I figured. I think I’ll leave you to that wonderful work.”

  Dr. Culp grinned. “Suit yourself. What’d he have to eat, y’ know?”

  “I can ask.”

  Dr. Culp’s grin broadened. “I can find out before you can.”

  “Yeah. So good luck. I— Oh. There is one more thing. Can you tell me how long it had been since he had a sexual experience? I mean an orgasm.”

  “No. I can tell you if he ejaculated within the last few hours of his life.”

  “I’d like to know.”

  “Well, hold on, you squeamish bastard. I can tell you in two minutes. Just hang on. Help me turn him over, Eduardo.”

  With the assistance of the morgue attendant, Dr. Culp turned the body facedown. As Columbo stood back and averted his eyes. Dr. Culp forced the stiff legs of the body apart and made a small, neat incision. Drained of blood, the body did not bleed.

  “Here y’are, Columbo. Seminal vesicles. Full. An ejaculation empties them, or mostly so. Then the testes fill them again, but that takes a while, as most of us know, to our sorrow.” He shook his head. “I don’t think Mr. Drury had sex in the last few hours of his life.”

  “Thanks, Doc.”

  4

  Columbo returned to the offices of Paul Drury Productions, and once more, they gave him Drury’s big, handsomely furnished office as his investigation headquarters.

  Tim Edmonds led him into the office. “I didn’t expect to see you again today. Lieutenant,” he said.

  “Well, I didn’t want to bother you again today, sir; but, y’ see, I’m an untidy person, one of those people that just can’t get organized, and I can’t seem to, in one visit, get all the stuff I need. And this morning I forgot to ask you if you could give me a list of the shows that would have been done over the next few weeks, maybe months, if Mr. Drury hadn’t been murdered.”

  “I see. You think maybe someone killed him to prevent his revealing something on the air?” Columbo fished a half-smoked cigar from his raincoat pocket and began to search other pockets for a match. “That’s one of the lines of inquiry I have to pursue,” he said. “It’s obvious he wasn’t killed by a burglar, so I have to look for another motive.”

  “‘Obvious’ he— Is it really so obvious. Lieutenant?”

  “Oh, yeah. I mean, I could tick off on my fingers the reasons why it wasn’t a burglar. But you know. You’re smart enough to see that right away.” Columbo sat down. Edmonds remained standing, leaning against Paul Drury’s marble-top desk.

  “Well, uh, you’re an experienced police detective, so I guess what’s obvious to you isn’t so obvious to me. But I can of course give you the list. I suppose the fact that all his files were erased out of the two computers is pretty persuasive that it was no simple robbery.”

  “Right. Did anybody ever threaten to kill him?”

  Tim nodded and showed a weak smile. “About four times a week, on average.”

  “Did he keep any record of those threats?”

  “Yes, he did. In the computer.”

  “No paper copies?”

  “Paul laughed at people who kept paper files. He said one time you might as well chisel your records on rocks as—”

  “But what happened could happen.”

  “That’s right, Lieutenant. But if he’d kept paper files, someone could have poured kerosene in all the file drawers and struck a match.”

  “Speaking of a match—”

  “There’s a lighter on the table.”

  Columbo used the lighter. “Seems like a man’s life got erased,” he said thoughtfully.

  “No clues, Lieutenant?”

  “Oh, lots and lots of clues. Just gotta put ’em together.”

  “Is there any other way I can help you, Lieutenant?”

  “Well, maybe I ought to talk to Mrs. Drury. Maybe to Miss Bergman. I’m afraid I’m makin’ a pest of myself, but I—”

  “Not at all, Lieutenant Columbo. Don’t think of it that way. Our time is yours. Anything we can do to help you find out who killed Paul, we’ll gladly do. I’ll tell Alicia you want to see her.”

  Columbo was scribbling a note to himself when Alicia Drury came in. His wife had asked him to pick up a tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter on his way home and he didn’t want to forget. Alicia Drury was wearing a black dress. That was not what she had been wearing earlier, and Columbo guessed she had gone home and changed into mourning. She sat down where Karen Bergman had sat when Columbo interviewed her just before noon, and she lit a cigarette.

  “I’m sorry to be bothering you again, Mrs. Drury, but there are some things I’*e gotta clear up.”

  “Of course.”

  “Since it’s clear enough that Mr. Drury was not killed by a burglar. I’ve gotta find another motive. Lookin’ at the shows coming up, can you think of anything he might have been gettin’ ready to reveal that—”

  “Someone would kill him to prevent,” she finished his sentence.

  “That’s what I’ve got in mind.”

  “Let’s face facts, Lieutenant. Paul was not an investigative reporter. Virtually everything he used came from published sources. Occasionally something came up in a letter or a phone call—I mean, some new information. What was unique about his show was the way he used information, brought it up out of the computer and related this t
o that, something else to something more, and made a picture. He was… a clarifier. Then a publicist. He was also a great tooter of his own horn.”

  “I see.”

  “Of course—” She shrugged as she tapped ash off her cigarette. “‘He who tooteth not his own horn, the same shall not be tooted.’”

  Columbo grinned. “Who said that, ma’am?”

  “John L. Lewis.”

  “Really? Isn’t that interestin’? Are you saying Mr. Drury was really no expert on the Kennedy assassination?”

  “He was a cataloger of facts. He did no research on his own.”

  “But he was there when the assassination happened.”

  Alicia shook her head. “He was on Houston Street, at the corner of Houston and Elm. He got a very good look at the President when the car slowed down to make that sharp turn onto Elm. But when the shots were fired, there were trees between him and the car. He heard shots. He didn’t see anything. By the time he ran through the crowd and got over to Elm, the limousine was through the underpass and out of sight, on its way to the hospital. I have no doubt he was moved emotionally, and he would never forget the experience, but he was not a witness to the assassination. He all but made his career out of saying he was a witness, but he wasn’t. Men tell the truth in bed, Lieutenant.”

  Columbo nodded. “Don’t they just? Anyway… I’ve still gotta look for somebody with motive to—”

  “There are plenty of nuts, Lieutenant. He got a lot of threats. A nut—”

  “No, ma’am,” said Columbo, shaking his head. “What?”

  “It couldn’t have been a nut, ma’am. The murder was carefully planned and meticulously carried out. Whoever killed Mr. Drury had a card that worked his alarm system and unlocked his doors.”

  “As I told you, I once had a card. You should check with McCrory, Paul’s lawyer. I handed over my card on the day I moved out, in McCrory’s presence.”

  “Whoever killed Mr. Drury had been in the house before,” said Columbo. “He knew where to find the crowbar. I mean, you’d look for tools in the cellar, wouldn’t you? Not in the garage.”

  “I don’t know. Lieutenant. I guess I find that conclusion a little bit facile.”