Columbo: The Game Show Killer Read online

  “Mr. Johnson? I’m Lieutenant Columbo, LAPD Homicide.”

  “You took your time about coming. You expect me to stay home and wait for you? Good thing for you I’ve finished my lunch. I wouldn’t see you during my lunch.”

  The old man stepped back from the door and tilted his head to invite Columbo into a small, littered apartment. The living room was dominated by a huge round coffee table covered with the tools of a writer: a huge old Underwood manual typewriter, two reams of typing paper, an untidy stack of typescript, ajar of pencils, pens, and typewriter erasers, and a big round brown ashtray almost full of cigarette butts.

  Jay Johnson sat down behind all this, on a frayed old couch, and plucked a short-but-still-burning butt of a cigarette from the ashtray.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Johnson.”

  “The hell you are. Anyway, you’re not bothering me. All you have against me are those letters I wrote to the son of a bitch, and you’ll never convict me of murder on those. Sit down. That chair over there won’t damage your backside.”

  “You’re not a very good suspect, Sir. That’s why I didn’t come sooner.”

  “Not a very good suspect? Oh, hell. I was hoping you’d arrest me, handcuff me, take me in and lodge me in jail, then grill me. That kind of thing holds no terror for me. I went through it before, you know, forty years ago.”

  “Contempt of Congress,” said Columbo.

  “Right. These days everybody holds Congress in contempt, but I went to jail for it. Worse than that, I was deprived of my means of earning a living. Blacklisted. This script right here in the typewriter will be seen by tens of millions of people on television, but the screen credit will list another writer. My name is still poison.”

  Jay Johnson drew hard on his cigarette and burned away all that remained of it. He dropped it in the ashtray. “You wrote some threatening letters to Mr. Wylie.”

  “He stole a story of mine, that’s why. He was a millionaire many times over, I live here in squalor, and he steals from me! Well… What else is new? The rich steal from the poor. That’s how they get rich.”

  “Did you know the man at all?”

  “Len? Sure I knew him. He was a liar and a fraud.”

  Columbo pulled a cigar from his raincoat pocket. “Gotta match?” Johnson handed him a book of paper matches, and Columbo lit the cigar. “ 'Liar and fraud.’ I keep hearin’ that. Well— I better be goin’. I’m sorry to interrupt your work.”

  “I wish more people did.”

  “You’re not a suspect, Mr. Johnson.”

  “Oh. I’m disappointed. It might have been fun, for a while.”

  Columbo stood. But he paused, frowning, and did not move toward the door. “Did you know Mr. Wylie in the days before you were blacklisted?”

  Johnson nodded. “Lieutenant! You wanta know? You really wanta know?” He shook out a cigarette—an unfiltered Camel—and lit it. “You wanta take the time to hear? I’m gonna have a shot of gin. You?”

  “I’m on duty, Sir.”

  Pouring a shot of gin was only a matter of reaching for a bottle and a glass. Johnson didn’t worry about ice. 'You know how long I been around Hollywood? I sold my first script to MGM in 1936. By the time Leonard DeMoll—Tim Wylie—showed up, in 1939, I was one of the hottest properties in town—hotter than he was. I didn’t meet him until 1941, when he had a supporting role in a picture I wrote. But we got to know each other. Drinking buddies. He was married to Faye, but he already—Well, you’ve heard. Nobody can ever take his war service away from him. He did his duty, and maybe more. When he came back in ’46, he thought he was going to play war heroes, like Audie Murphy, like some other guys.” Johnson shook his head. “I was the guy that told him to try westerns. ‘Ha!’ he says. ‘Oaters? Not this guy.’ But he did it, and I wrote his best parts. When I got in trouble, he didn’t know me. That was Len. That was Tim Wylie. Orson Welles still knew me. Spence Tracy still knew me. But—” He shook his head. “Len didn’t know me. The son of a bitch testified he didn’t know me!”

  “Sir— Do you know anything about the murder?” Johnson nodded. “I know there are a hundred guys in town, and fifty women, who are glad he’s dead.”

  “Do you know Faye Wylie and Victoria Wylie Glassman?”

  “Lieutenant! Don’t you know anything? In all the years she was stuck in that awful marriage, Faye stepped out of it only one time, do you know with who?”

  “Who, Mr. Johnson?”

  “With me, for Christ’s sake! I wasn’t always an eighty-year-old schmuck.”

  “And—?”

  “What do you think? Me, a blacklisted writer, out of jail but living like… this. She loved me. I’m sure she did. But to give up what she had—No way.”

  “Erika Björling? Whatta ya know about her?”

  “I know that poor, pitiful child didn’t kill Len. Yeah, I saw the news story—she thinks Len maybe killed Tammy. But I can tell you two things: One, Len didn’t kill his daughter. That cowardly son of a bitch couldn’t have killed a burglar. Second, poor little Erika couldn’t have killed Len.” Johnson shook his head. “Y’ wanta know something, Lieutenant? Faye knew about Erika. And Tammy. She felt sorry for them both.”

  “What do you know about his art collection?”

  “Only what Faye told me. Fakes. Nothing but fakes. Len was a fake; his collection was fakes. Okay?”

  XIII

  1

  MONDAY, APRIL 17—2:13 P.M.

  Columbo paused to tighten the knot of his necktie before he rang the bell at the door on North Perugia Way. He glanced down and shook his head. The little end hung below the wide end. Tied carelessly again. Well, he’d rung the bell and could not pull his tie loose now. Anyway, it didn’t have any cue chalk on it, or any chili.

  Victoria Wylie Glassman answered the ring. “You’re prompt, Lieutenant,” she said crisply. “Thanks. Mother and I are out by the pool again this afternoon.”

  Faye, who the other day had sat in a chaise lounge in a blue bathrobe, today sat in a white terry beach coat, showing her tanned legs. Victoria wore an almost-identical short coat, open and showing an iridescent-blue bikini.

  Without asking if he wanted it or not, Vicky poured Columbo a vodka gimlet. She pushed toward him on the glass-topped table a platter of lox and cream cheese, with crackers, no bagels. “The Department will forgive you.”

  “I’m sure it will, Ma’am.”

  “C’mon, now. Call me Vicky.”

  Columbo spoke to Faye. “Something is gonna be in the papers, Ma’am. I thought I’d better stop by and tell you before you read it. Y’ see, the fact is, the Van Gogh painting that was stolen is a fake. So are all the other paintings in the collection—according to a professor of art at UCLA who looked at the photographs.”

  “How could he tell from photographs?” Vicky asked sharply.

  “The Van Gogh painting hangs in an art gallery in London. The Toulouse-Lautrec picture is out at the Getty Museum. I saw it this morning. It’s exactly the same as the one hanging in the living room here.”

  “You mean, Dad was—”

  “Defrauded?” Faye interrupted. She shook her head. “No. He knew they were copies. Millions of dollars’ worth of art? Len never had millions.”

  “We’re making some effort to find out where he bought them, Ma’am.”

  “What’s the difference? He had them for twenty years and more. The forger is probably dead. He probably bought all of them from the same forger. Not a very good forger, I guess, since your professor saw through them so easily.”

  “It was just because he knew where the real paintings are.”

  “I wonder how many of our friends they fooled all these years—and how many just smiled behind their hands and concluded Len and I were either dupes or liars.”

  Columbo sipped from the gimlet. He wasn’t sure if it had alcohol in it or not but guessed it did. He took a piece of the lox. He loved all kinds of seafood, and he recognized this cured salmon as expensive and
tasty.

  “Liars, is what they had to think,” Faye went on. “I’d rather be thought that than a fool. Len was a fraud. In everything he did. A fraud. And a lecher nonpareil.”

  “Mother!”

  “Face it, Vicky. Your father was a satyr.”

  Faye shrugged. “Lieutenant Columbo, my husband would have mounted a sheep or a goat if he hadn’t had a woman during the past twenty-four hours. I mean, he would have when he was younger. I’m not sure how long ago that ceased to be a possibility. He enjoyed himself with most of the actresses and wannabe actresses during the fifty years he was a star. Most of them thought they were honored.”

  “He sure didn’t have that reputation, Ma’am.”

  “Everyone in the business has, I should imagine, some talent—the great ones like Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and Jimmy Stewart and Humphrey Bogart had real talent; others like Clark Gable and John Wayne and Rock Hudson had a talent for pleasing the public while cleverly hiding the fact that they didn’t have talent shit—”

  “Mother—”

  Faye went on. “Joan Crawford had talent enough to conceal the fact that she broke into show business as a star of stag films. Marilyn Monroe broke out of the ranks of starlets because she was willing to French any producer who asked her. Jimmy Dean had no talent whatever for anything, except for scowling and pretending he was—”

  “Mother… Lieutenant Columbo doesn’t need a history of Hollywood.”

  “My husband had a lifelong ambition: to be like Henry Fonda. To achieve what Fonda did. To be honored by people who really knew talent from popularity.”

  “Mother—”

  Tears streamed down Faye’s cheeks. “Look for an aggrieved husband, Lieutenant.

  “Can you name names, Ma’am?”

  “Eva Cline,” Victoria said glumly. “Her husband divorced her because of Dad.”

  Faye sobbed. “Try for a father, Lieutenant Columbo. In recent years, he developed a predilection for girls. The younger the better.”

  “How’d he keep all this stuff secret?” Columbo asked.

  “He paid people off,” said Faye. “He’d have left a bigger estate if—Well. Besides, there’s a conspiracy in the media to preserve certain names. His was one of them. Even tabloid TV wouldn’t touch him.”

  “Any other women? Girls?”

  “Lots of others. Oh, yes, others. We’ll think of others. We’ll make a list.”

  Columbo rose. “It’s kind of disillusioning,” he said.

  “My husband made a career of illusion.”

  “Well, thank ya. I’ll be going. Maybe some of these leads will—Oh. Say. One more thing. Miss Björling’s lawyer says she wrote the note to Mr. Wylie two months ago. Did he ever mention receiving a note from Miss Björling?”

  “No,” said Faye.

  “Would he have? Was it like him to keep secret a note accusing him of murdering his daughter?”

  Faye shook her head. “I don’t know. In spite of everything, he did confide in me, generally. That’s how I know about the girls he—Maybe he would have told me if he had received a threatening letter.”

  2

  4:24 P.M.

  “Hey, Columbo!”

  Striding through the hall, raincoat flapping around him, Columbo stopped, turned, and faced Captain Sczciegel. “What can I do for you, Captain?”

  “Apart from carrying your sidearm in compliance with official regulations, you can explain how this newspaper story got loose.”

  The captain was a tall man who was all but totally bald and chose to shave off á la Kojak the little gray hair that remained to him. He brandished a folded newspaper as though it were a weapon.

  “Haven’t see a newspaper story. What paper is that, Captain?”

  “Only this week’s PROBE. Looka this—”

  ERIKA WAS THERE, WITNESS SAYS! CHECKED IN AND OUT OF MOTEL ROOM IN WYLIE NEIGHBORHOOD Special to PROBE

  by Betsy Mahoney

  The desk clerk at a motel less than three miles from the Bel Air estate where Hollywood star Tim Wylie was murdered last Thursday says that Erika Björling, former star of the long-popular TV game show Try It Once checked into his motel about 7:00 p.m. and checked out less than two hours later.

  The busty, long-legged sex goddess, who was the source of the game show’s long run, has been charged in the murder and now languishes in jail.

  David Logan says he recognized the star from the moment she checked in and paid cash for her room—even though she registered under a false name.

  “Tough talk,” said Columbo. “Y’ gotta like the picture, though.” He pointed at a photograph of Erika Björling posing in a brief bikini. “This case gets more and more difficult.”

  “Why you figure this Logan character gave the interview?” Sczciegel asked.

  “The paper paid him money.”

  “Right. Which means jurors won’t believe him. The question is, who told the reporter that—”

  “Aw now, Captain. I know you’re not suggestin’ I did. How long’s a man gotta serve before—?”

  “No, Columbo. I know you didn’t tell. What I wanta know is, you got any idea who did?”

  Columbo shook his head. “Had to be Dave Logan himself. Which makes his testimony completely worthless. If he sold his story—”

  “The DA is going ballistic,” Sczciegel said. “It was a break to have a witness that put Erika Björling near the scene of the crime at the right time. Now—” He shrugged. “Pfft.”

  “I can go talk to Logan.”

  “An assistant DA is doing that.”

  “Captain, we gotta consider that Miss Björling may not be the right one.”

  “She did it, Columbo. Concentrate on her.”

  3

  4:38 P.M.

  On his desk he found a cigar wrapped in a note. Okay. Carol Davidson wanted to see him. He picked up coffee, put milk and sugar in it, and went to her office.

  “It pays to work with a genius,” she said.

  “Just ’cause I remembered how you like your coffee doesn’t make me a genius.”

  She grinned, but she shook her head. “Saturday you asked me to have the lab test the ballpoint ink on Erika Björling’s letter to Wylie. Bingo! Grant Kellogg says she wrote the letter in February. The lab says that oxidation of the ink has not proceeded beyond a week.”

  Columbo scratched his ear. “Wonder what’s the explanation for that. Somebody’s not tellin’ us the truth, I don’t think.”

  XIV

  1

  TUESDAY, APRIL 18—12:12 P.M.

  Adrienne Boswell sat at a table in a restaurant called Emilio’s. She frowned over a newspaper clipping and sipped from a martini on the rocks. She was waiting for Columbo, and he was a few minutes late.

  “Sorry,” was his first word. He shrugged out of his raincoat and hung it over a chair. “Hey, you sure do look elegant today!”

  “Thank you, Columbo.” She was wearing an emerald-green jacket and miniskirt over a pale-yellow knit shirt. “Martini?”

  “Uh, well, I’m on duty, but I guess a Scotch and soda would be okay.”

  Adrienne signaled their waitress and told her to bring another martini for herself and a Scotch and soda for Columbo.

  “I’m sorry I’m late. I had a meeting with the assistant DA this morning. Mr. Kellogg is pressing for an early trial of the Erika Björling case. So far as I’m concerned, we’re not ready yet. I’d like to see some more evidence.”

  “Off the record, you don't think she did it, do you?”

  “Well… she prob’ly did.”

  “You've seen the PROBE story, I assume. And have you seen this?”

  She handed him the clipping she had been reading. It was from yesterday's—Monday's—edition of the Sun. Adrienne had clipped Peg Brinsley's column. Part of it read:

  Columbo sighed and shook his head. “Jeez,” he said. “I sure hope Mrs. Columbo doesn't read this. She will, though. She reads all this kinda stuff. Keeps me fille
d in on it.”

  For years a conspiracy of silence has kept secret the intimate escapades of the late Leonard DeMoll, better known as Tim Wylie. His violent death may serve at long last to correct the record on a man who was one of Tinseltown’s most aggressive skirt-chasers.

  It is known in Hollywood but studiously kept from public knowledge that “Tim Wylie” was the man behind the scandalous divorce of sex symbol Eva Cline. Wylie, then in his sixties, bedded the gorgeous Eva, then in her twenties, and outraged her husband, Victor. Why did the name of Eva’s paramour not come out? Two reasons. Eva did not contest the divorce, and . . . $$$.

  The same “reasons” quieted what could have been a far more serious matter, the affair between sixty-something Tim and sixteen-or-so Natalie Moore.

  Erika Björling was not the only person in town with a motive to murder the sexagenarian Lothario.

  “Did you read my story about the art?”

  “I sure did. Those two women who wrote those stories aren't in your class, Adrienne.”

  “Thank you. There aren't many detectives in your league, Columbo.”

  “Aw, a lot of fellas outclass me.”

  They paused while the waitress put their drinks on the table.

  “I’ve been looking around a little,” Adrienne said. “I’ve got some news for you.”

  “I’ll appreciate it.”

  “Grant Kellogg has hired an agent.”

  “Meanin’?”

  “He’s getting ready to peddle the rights to some story. And it has to be the Erika Björling story.”

  “But the case isn’t even—”

  “He’s getting ready. He hired the Murray Hill Agency in New York.”

  “Because—?”

  “Because there’s millions of dollars to be made. Every newspaper, magazine, and broadcast station in the country is slavering over this story. The death of Tim Wylie and the arrest of Erika Björling are big business, Columbo. Don’t you know that?”

  “Well, I try to keep outa that side of things.”