I TURNED ON THE “haunted TV,” which was still hooked up to nothing but the power supply, and immediately was presented with the image of Wile E. Coyote falling two million miles or so into some desolate western canyon.
I gave a bitter little laugh. Roxanne had picked the video tape from Barry Dost’s collection. It was a shame, I thought, that Aranda and Jack weren’t here to see it, especially Jack. They were locked securely in separate top-floor rooms, guarded by Ralph and his Uncle Fred.
I’d already explained to the rest of the gang how the bogus haunting was done, and the thinking that led me there.
Bats Blefary, perhaps because he remembered Barry doing this kind of thing, had the easiest time catching on.
“All right,” he said. “All you need is the VCR and something to use as an antenna. But if the cable you climbed the tree to find out about isn’t the antenna, what is?”
“Something a lot better,” I said. “And a lot closer. Something made of nearly as much uninsulated wire as Barry’s web of coat hangers.”
“Cobb,” Wilberforce warned me, “you are making mysteries to no purpose.”
I supposed he had a point. I sighed and went on. “It’s a bed. Jack Bromhead’s antique boardinghouse nightmare, with the metal bedstead and the open box spring. There was a piece of dipole antenna wire in his closet.” It would be evidence in Jack’s trial, I supposed. Jack had said all the evidence would point to him. “A piece of antenna wire,” I went on, “just long enough to reach from the VCR in Jack’s room to his bed, with the insulation already skinned back at the ends to make it easy to hook up.
“I’ve got to give him credit for nerve,” I said. “They had the scam set up, and Aranda was screaming to get us all on the scene. Jack Bromhead’s room is the one just below this one. He poked his head out to ask me what was going on. If I’d stopped for a chat and leaned against his door, I would have seen what was going on. It must have given him quite a scare to see Barry, back from hiding, rushing upstairs right behind me. That might have blown everything right there, but they got lucky. Barry made two mistakes, then: he was cryptic about the trick, and he thought I was in on it somehow.”
“It seems to me that shotgun was a mistake, too,” Haskell Freed said. “It gave Bromhead a chance to shoot him down before he could say anything more.”
“True. Of course, once they showed the tape, Barry had to die in any case. I suspect they hoped he’d disappear again. Then they could try to find him and finish him off in some way that looked like suicide.”
Carol Coretti shuddered, but she wasn’t chilled enough to forget she was a lawyer. “You just suspect this?”
I shrugged. “Jack has gone mute, and Aranda won’t say anything but it was all Jack’s fault. By now, she’ll be ready to swear that Jack killed Cock Robin.”
Another cartoon had started. The coyote (Stupidicus maximus) was back, none the worse for the catastrophes that had befallen him in the last cartoon, still trying for the Road Runner.
I leaned out the doorway and called, “That’s enough, Rox!” To the rest of the gang I said, “Now I’ll show you how the body got out there.”
Roxanne joined us, and we went down the hall to the wire room.
Earlier, Ralph and I had commandeered some supplies from Aunt Agnes’s kitchen, specifically, a one hundred-pound sack of long-grain rice and one broom handle. Fred had cut the broom handle to a convenient length, and we’d poked it through the top of the rice bag, just below the seam. It was waiting for us in the wire room. We’d also taken the surf-casting rod from the tackle room and cut loose the tangle.
“Now, some of this I know for sure; some of it is my best guess, okay?”
“Why are you doing this?” Wilberforce demanded. “Why don’t you wait and make these demonstrations for the police, when they get here.”
“Because I want you people convinced. Prudence demands we spend at least the rest of today and tonight here. That means we are de facto jailers for two very dangerous people. Again, tomorrow, if it is tomorrow, when we leave, we have to get them to the sheriff.”
I’d wanted to save this speech for the end of the demonstration, but what the hell. I looked at each of them in turn. “None of us is a professional at this. That means we’re going to have to help each other all we can. I want you all to be as sure as possible that we’re doing the right thing.”
I got nods in reply. Fine with me.
“All right then,” I said. “When everyone went to bed, Jack sneaked out to disable the cars. He waited for Wilberforce, Ms. Coretti, and me to go back inside, then went to Dost’s room and woke him, if he had to. Part of Dost’s legend was that he’d just as soon work as sleep. Anyway, Jack said he had some business thing to talk about. Dost was always ready to talk business. Maybe he said it was something they should talk over with Barry—that would be a good way to get him to the wire room—Barry’s room is right next door.
“I know my name came up in conversation, because Barry heard his father saying it. That’s why he suspected me.
“Anyway, Jack gets Dost in here and beats his head in with something. Take your pick. There’s a modern sculpture in each of the finished bedrooms that would do just fine. Dost falls. There he lies.”
Agnes Norman gave a little scream. All eyes followed my finger to the bag of rice.
“Actually, this is a little light to be Dost’s body, but it will do. I’m going inside now. I hope you can all see.”
I went to the panel just inside the window, and pulled loose the dummy cable. I had checked earlier—there was plenty of slack, the extra having been tucked into the panel box. I took the end of the cable over to the bag.
I slapped my hand down on the brand name painted on the bag. “This is Dost’s chest,” I said. “And the broom handle is his arms. All I do then is run the cable across his chest a couple of times, then around under his arms. Then, after I make sure everything is tight enough so that he won’t slip out by his own weight, I tie everything off here behind his head with a knot called a sheep shank. Any Boy Scouts in the audience?”
“Girl Scout,” Carol Coretti said. I asked her to tell me about a sheep shank.
“It’s a very strong knot with a free end. If you pull the free end, the knot comes loose.”
“Exactly. Next, I get some good strong fishline, which I pull off the reel, cut, wrap a few times around something sturdy, like this pipe, then tape securely to the free end of the cable.” I used black electrician’s tape, of which there were several rolls in a toolbox.
“What I don’t want to do,” I said, “is, in getting the line the right length, or cutting free a tangle, to somehow drop a little piece of the fishline on the body, where it can get caught in the clothes, and be found near the body later. Which Jack Bromhead unfortunately did.”
I lifted the rice up by the long end of the cable. The knot held. “You will notice,” I said, “that the cables dig into the sack. This would cause bruises across the chest, and on the back, angling up toward the neck. There wasn’t enough of Dost’s chest left to check, but Ralph and I did find bruises just like that on his back. I had a wild idea of the man’s beating himself, but it didn’t really suit him. This makes a lot more sense.”
I told them that they might want to watch what happened next from a window, either from Barry’s room next door, or the room next to that. The crowd dispersed. I opened the window of the wire room and got rained on, but I was used to that.
“All I have to do now is to get the body to the window-sill, inevitably cleaning it of snow in the process ...” I grunted as I did it—my arm still hurt from catching Jack.
“Then give it a little push.”
That’s what I did. The sack dropped about five feet straight down, until the slack was taken up, then it started to swing on the pivot of the branch. It went faster and faster until it bottomed out, but even then it didn’t slow down. The kinetic energy would have kept it swinging upward, the way a watch on a chain would. I didn
’t think the rice (or Dost) had enough kinetic energy to swing all the way around, but it was theoretically possible.
Before we had to worry about any theoretical possibilities, though, the fishline pulled taut, the sheep shank came free, and the cable unwrapped from the bag-body, which at that second was keeping a high-speed rendezvous with the rocks. Rice sprayed everywhere. I heard gasps and screams from the other rooms.
“Keep watching,” I said. I began pulling in the fishing line, hand over hand. The black end of the cable seemed to twitch, like the head of an impossibly long snake, lunging slowly from the tree toward the house. I pulled it the rest of the way in. It tangled the fishing line, but who would be suspicious of a fishing line? When I had the cable close enough to the window, I grabbed it, took off the tape, and reattached it to the panel board.
I joined the rest of them in Barry’s room. “If you do it right,” I said, “you don’t leave a mark on the snow.”
Roxanne was shaking her head. “I’m sorry I saw the rice bag hit,” she said. “I have too good an imagination. He did that to his best friend. Why didn’t you let him jump, for God’s sake?”
I turned to the group. “Any other questions?”
24
Works for me.
—Fred Dryer, “Hunter” (NBC)
THREE DAYS LATER, ROXANNE sat with her head on my shoulder as an Amtrak train brought us southward. Spot slumbered peacefully (and illegally) at our feet. I would have been just as glad to rest my head on hers and go romantically to sleep, but she kept asking questions.
I really couldn’t blame her—we hadn’t been able to speak to each other for a couple of days. When our caravan reached the sheriff’s office in town (Fred Norman had found the spark plugs) the sheriff, a gray-haired old guy named Mallin whose beer belly did not disguise the iron underneath, immediately ordered two things. First, he sent one of his men with the medical examiner up to Rocky Point to see if there actually were two bodies up there. Second, he took everybody into custody.
By late afternoon, he had thrown back most of the catch, retaining only Jack and Aranda—and Ralph and me.
I was charged with obstruction of justice, impersonating an officer, interfering with a crime scene, being a general pain in the ass, and mopery with intent to gawk. The charges against Ralph were similar.
Wilberforce had been outraged. He had been so outraged, and had raised such a stink, he pissed off the sheriff so much that Mallin kept us in custody until the very last second he legally could without going for an actual indictment.
In the meantime, the medical examiner had come back with the bodies and the Normans and the Network people (including Wilberforce) had been questioned and allowed to go home. Aranda had started accusing me and Ralph of raping her. Jack had started to talk.
Roxanne had stayed behind at the local Quality Inn, fending off reporters, getting Ralph and me a local lawyer, and just generally behaving the way the girl of your dreams would in circumstances like that.
Finally, Sheriff Mallin had formed a pretty good idea of what had happened, and he let us go.
“I suppose I ought to thank you,” he said as he unlocked my cell. His face did not seem to be filled with gratitude.
“Don’t mention it,” I said.
“You’ll be back up here for the trial,” he said. “All you out-of-town people will be back here for the trial. One for him, and one for her, if we can get him to blow the whistle on her under oath. If he don’t, she could be sitting a lot prettier than she deserves.”
“He’ll open up,” I said. “Jack’s getting used to the idea of just how big a fool he’s been. He won’t let Aranda walk away from this.”
Mallin grunted. “We’ll see. Anyway, the trial is the only time I ever want to see you again. Don’t come up here on no ski trips. What’s so goddam funny?”
Roxanne and I had decided to hop the train on its way down from Montreal because it was slow, and because we hadn’t had a chance to talk since I’d been arrested.
“Do you think he did it on purpose?” she asked.
“Of course he did it on purpose. He rigged the cable, he set up the murder—”
“Not Jack. Wilberforce. Do you think he gave the sheriff a hard time so he would keep you in jail longer?”
I laughed. “I hadn’t thought of it, but now that you mention it, I’m sure that’s why he did it.”
“Do you want me to get him fired?”
“Huh?”
“Well, it looks like I’m stuck with being the Network’s biggest stockholder. Maybe it’s time to get involved. Do you want to be president of the Network or something?”
“No, I do not. And if you think I got into this ... relationship for you to buy me things, the Network or anything else, we can call the whole thing off right now.”
She showed me an impish smile. “Just reminding myself why I love you,” she said. “I had a few doubts when you as much as told Jack Bromhead to go ahead and kill me.”
“Didn’t fool him for a second,” I told her.
“He wasn’t tied up and gagged. But you know, I never did think he was going to kill me.”
“I’m glad,” I said. “No, the only one you have to fire because of this is Falzet’s secretary. Turns out she was Dost’s inside source.”
“Matt, they really were stupid, weren’t they? Jack and Aranda?”
“Almost unbelievably stupid,” I acknowledged. “There were any number of fairly safe ways they could have done away with Dost. But that wasn’t enough for Aranda—she had to fix Barry, too.”
“But how could they have foreseen ... ?”
“That’s the point. The didn’t foresee a single damn thing, but they went ahead with the murder anyway.”
“But why?”
“They were psyched. Mallin sort of accidentally left a copy of Jack’s statement on his desk when he went to get my stuff, so I know what they thought they were doing. The idea was, snow or no snow, they’d screwed their courage to the sticking place, and if it came loose now, they’d never get it back. So even when the snow turned out to be six times worse than expected, they went ahead and killed Dost, anyway.”
“But what was the point of moving the body away from the house? Why make an impossible crime out of it?”
“It wasn’t supposed to be an impossible crime. It was supposed to be a crime that took place away from the house. The forecast was for only about five or six inches, remember. That would have left the tops of the black rocks uncovered. The idea was that Dost was meeting someone secretly outside for some shady reason, and that he and the person he was meeting had walked on the rocks so as not to leave tracks. Jack had, apparently, already put some recognizable scuff marks on tops of some of those rocks, using a pair of Dost’s shoes, and a pair of Barry’s.”
“So they were going to frame Barry all along.”
“Right. They’d even set up some of the financial chicanery their people in New York were pulling to look as if Barry were the one who’d planned to cash in on his father’s death.”
“But they didn’t figure on the snow,” Roxanne said.
“Right. They also didn’t figure on Dost hitting the rocks and busting like a water balloon, either. Or Barry going quite as crazy as he did, and disappearing until the worst possible moment. I mean, as far as Jack was concerned it turned out to be the best possible moment, but he couldn’t have know that.”
“What about the television-set business?”
“Ah. Jack didn’t come out and say this, but I suspect it was directed at me, personally. Ralph and I had scoffed at the supernatural earlier. Got pretty giggly about it. Aranda was peeved. I guess she wanted to rub my nose in it. It wouldn’t do Barry any good, and it would Teach Cobb A Lesson. Once again, they didn’t expect Barry, who’d shown them how to do the trick in the first place, to show up and go into hysterics. They just figured that since they’d pulled off a frightening, impossible crime, why not milk it?”
“Even their origi
nal plan was pretty dumb.”
“What’s harder to understand? The smart things people do, or the stupid things?”
“Good point.”
“Thank you. Besides, I think deep down, Jack wanted to be caught.”
Roxanne looked at me with the same penetrating gaze she’d used on the night of the inquisition. “What do you want, Cobb?”
“What?”
“You don’t want to be president of the Network; what do you want?”
“I want a vacation. A nice, long vacation. Just me and you. And Spot.”
Her face lit up. “You really mean that?”
“Hoo boy, do I mean it. Think you can arrange it with the higher-ups, O mighty stockholder?”
“Piece of cake,” she assured me.
“Good. Can I get some sleep now?”
“In a minute. One more question.”
I sighed. “Let’s have it.”
“Why didn’t you let Jack kill himself?”
“Ah,” I said.
“I mean, you set that woman up ...”
“So why did I twice keep jack from punching his own ticket? Well, he did save my life, you know.”
“He’s the one who put your life in danger in the first place!”
“He could have let Barry kill me, first.”
“Then he wouldn’t have had you around to say he saved your life!”
“Good point,” I conceded. “Then there’s the idea that maybe, though I don’t really have any qualms about screwing over a murderer any way necessary, I don’t especially like to picture myself as a roving executioner, even at second hand.”
“Keep talking.”
“Don’t like that one, huh? Maybe I’m so brilliant that I saw through the legal ramifications of what I had, and I realized that if Jack died, Aranda would probably walk. Not that her conviction’s a sure thing, even now, but at least there’s a chance. She became the murderer I had to screw over, and a living Jack Bromhead was the only means of accomplishing that.”
I shrugged. “The truth’s in there somewhere. I’m damned if I know exactly what it is, though. Does it matter?”
Killed on the Rocks Page 20