by Parnell Hall
I was not restoring MacAullif’s faith in my sanity. “I’ve seen ’em,” he said. “They don’t look anything alike.”
“No, no. It’s their voices I can’t tell apart. Never mind that. The point is, they’re on vacation and he replaced them with this other girl Mary Mason.”
“So?”
“She changed her name to Maggie. And that’s what put me on the right track.”
“The right track?”
“Yeah. Actually, you had me on it already. With what you said yesterday about the keys.”
“What about ’em?”
“What you said about it must be the keys to his home because why would anyone want the keys to his office when everybody had ’em.”
“That was important?”
“Right. It was dead wrong, but it was an important idea to state. The other thing you gave me was my chief suspect. Marty Rothstein. That got me thinking. Well, actually it was my wife Alice got me thinking. But, anyway, wherever the credit is due, the point is, if Marty Rothstein did the crime, then Marty Rothstein had the gun. So what did he do with it, after the three people were dead?”
“Is there a point to this?”
“There sure is. The point is, who died last? We know who died first. Cranston Pritchert. But the real question is, who died last? A bit hard to determine from the medical evidence, as we discussed, but logically it’s the girl. Last to die, I mean. At least the way we doped it out. Killer kills Pritchert. Killer says, Oops, gotta get rid of the people can connect me to this crime. Killer goes does ’em in. Logically, the killer doesn’t know where the girl is any more than I did. So the killer finds the girl through the talent agent. Which makes the talent agent die second.”
“So what?”
“The girl was killed with the same gun. Big stumbling block. If the gun was used to kill the girl, how does it wind up in my car?”
MacAullif frowned. “What do you mean?”
“It’s like you said yesterday. Just because the bartender changed his story once, he doesn’t have to be telling the truth now. And Alice says what if he planted the gun? So, I’m thinking about that. And it occurs to me—when I’m out at the talent agent’s house—when the gun winds up in my car—when I get framed with the gun—well, what happens just before that? Sandy the bartender arrives to look at the resume photos. I’m there at the talent agent’s house, suddenly he walks in the front door, looking for the cops. And all the time my car is parked out front.”
I frowned, hit my forehead. “Then it occurs to me, how would he know it’s my car? And, lo and behold, I have the answer. The day before. At the talent agent’s office in the city. When we went through resume photos there. When we were done, I go out, get in my car, and drive off. Sandy’s right there, sees me go. So he’d know it was my car.”
MacAullif was staring at me, openmouthed. “Are you telling me the bartender killed these people?”
I waved it away. “No, no, no. That’s all bullshit. The bartender had nothing to do with it,”
“Then what the hell are you talking about?”
I raised one finger, scowled. “I’m talking about Belcher. That son of a bitch Belcher. The guy I wanna nail. The guy caused me more problems than you could believe.”
“I understand the sentiment. Could you be more explicit?”
“Belcher’s the reason I couldn’t solve this case to begin with. All along it’s been Belcher fucking everything up.”
“We knew that.”
“Yes and no.”
MacAullif raised one eyebrow. “I’m getting ready to strangle you. I don’t care how stressed out you are. You better start making sense, or I’m coming around the desk.”
“Okay,” I said. “The big stumbling block here has always been Belcher framing me. Because it’s hard to get past. The solution is Belcher framed me. The fact it’s not the solution to the crime gets swept away.”
“We’ve been through all that.”
“Yeah, but there’s a wrinkle. And that’s what did it for me. I spent the whole morning with the bookkeeper for Philip Greenberg Investments, so I know that I’m right.”
“About what, for Christ’s sake? Right about what?”
“About the snake.”
“What?”
“I’m right about the snake. See, that was the problem all along. That goddamn Belcher. That’s what screwed everything up.”
I ticked them off on my fingers. “It looks like a snake. It has rattles like a snake. It has fangs like a snake.”
I raised my finger in the air. “And …it even bit me!”
I spread my arms, shrugged, smiled.
“But it’s not a snake.”
52.
“GET OUT OF HERE OR I’ll call the police.”
“That’s what you said the last time.”
Amy Greenberg’s eyes blazed. “Hey, like, I mean it. Barging in here like that.”
“You really shouldn’t have opened the door. It’s the suburban life sucks you in. In New York City you’d open that door on a safety chain.”
Amy Greenberg blinked. “Are you retarded or what? I said to get the hell out of here.”
“And I heard you. I believe you also said you would call the police.”
“That’s right. I will.”
“If you must, you must. Remember to ask for Sergeant Belcher. He knows me. He’s the one arrested me before.”
She backed away. “What is it with you? You get weirder every time you come.”
I shook my head. “No. Not weirder. Just another day older and deeper in debt.”
She frowned. “Huh?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Way before your time. The thing is, I keep learning more and more. I have more information now. And it’s information I might want to share.”
She looked at me suspiciously. “What does that mean?”
I shrugged. “Well, that’s the thing. I could share it with you. On the other hand, if you call the police, I’d have to share it with them.”
“Share what? What are you talking about?”
“My theory of the case.”
“Oh, you have a theory?”
“What, you think my theory is I killed those people? No, my theory is I didn’t. My theory is someone else did.”
She looked at me mockingly. “What a great defense. I bet no one’s ever thought of that before.”
“Oh, I’m sure they have. Only in this case it happens to be true.”
“Yeah, right. If you didn’t kill those people, who did?”
“You did.”
She looked at me a minute. Blinked. “Now I know you’re nuts.”
“No, I’m actually rather sane. In fact, compared to the last few days, I got both feet on the ground,”
“I’m gonna call the cops now.”
“If you do, I’ll have to tell ’em what I know.”
She hesitated. I could see her eyes move from me to the phone. She looked back at me. “Just what do you know?”
“Just about everything. Which is remarkable, because yesterday I knew just about nothing. But suddenly it all fell into place.
“From the beginning the thing that stymied me was What’s the scam? A guy gets set up in a bar with a topless dancer, there’s gotta be a scam. It was a real shock to find out that there wasn’t.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know perfectly well. You’re the one who set it up. You’re the one who went to the talent agent to hire the dancer to make the play. Pretty stupid in retrospect, but only in retrospect. After all, you didn’t know you were going to have to kill anyone. So you hired the girl to drug Cranston Pritchert and steal his keys. That’s where you blew it—that’s where you made the bad move. And, ironically, you did it just when you thought you were being so smart. That’s because you’re young—you didn’t take account of human nature.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know you don’t. Which is just my poin
t. I’ll try to explain. In case Cranston Pritchert should try to figure out what happened, you didn’t want the trail to lead back to you. So you thought you would insure against that happening. So, here’s what you did. In addition to paying the talent agent and the girl for doing the job, you told ’em if anyone should come snooping around, you’d pay them a bonus not to tell ’em the truth, but to feed ’em a bullshit story. The girl’s story was that she’d been hired to have drinks in the bar with the guy, but nothing else happened—basically not to tell about drugging the drink and stealing the keys.
“The talent agent’s story was different. She was the only one who had supposedly had personal contact with the person who hired her. Her story was to describe that person as six foot six. So any detective Cranston Pritchert hired would think his client was giving him the runaround. Which, I must admit, was pretty neat.”
I held up one finger. “Except for one thing. Human nature. You saw these bonuses as a contingency—if a detective comes around, here’s what you have to say. But that wasn’t the way the talent agent and the girl saw it at all. They looked at it as, There’s the money, how do we get it? If the detective wasn’t finding them, they’d go out of their way to find him.”
I shrugged. “See what I mean? So, instead of being hard to find, which is what you intended, by offering them a bonus, you guarantee the fact they’ll be found. Once found, they tell the stories you wanted told. Which, again, might have been okay if no one died.”
“I don’t see what any of this has to do with me.”
“You don’t? Weil, let me spell it out for you. This started out as white-collar crime. Little bit of corporate greed. Granddaughter playgirl of company head, dismissed as young, flaky, and, dare I say it, female—because I’m sure gender bias had something to do with all this. Well, I’m sure none of that sits too well with a headstrong young lady, sick to death of never being taken seriously, and when Grandpa dies she sees a chance to do something about it. She’s inherited his stock, she’s gonna have an interest in the company and be a force on the board.
“But what happens? Before you can say boo, all the guys in the company are swooping down on her, feeding her a line of patronizing bullshit, trying to line up her stock.
“Not if she can help it. That’s when she gets the plan.
“The guys have asked for her proxy. She has it there in her hands. A proxy which, if she wanted to, she could fill out in their favor.
“But she doesn’t want to. She has her own shares of stock. And she has Philip Greenberg’s shares. Plus any proxies that have come in in his name.
“Which is when it occurs to her, what if a lot of proxies came in in his name?”
“You’re full of shit.”
“I’m right on target. See, the tip-off was the key. Cranston Pritchert was set up to get his keys. That meant someone either wanted the keys to his home or the keys to his office. My first thought was it had to be the keys to his home, because why would anyone want the keys to the office, they all had them? Well, that’s true, they did. Marty Rothstein, Kevin Dunbar, and Jack Jenkins all had keys to the office.
“But not you. The little granddaughter visited the office, but the little granddaughter didn’t have the keys. She needed the keys to get into the office. Why?” I stopped. Smiled. “Mary/Maggie Mason.”
She gawked at me. “Huh?”
“That’s what gave it to me. A girl by the name of Mary Mason changed her name. That bothered me, and I didn’t know why. But it was the concept. Changed the name. Changed the name. Changed the name. You had to get into the office to change the name on the proxies.
“Here’s how you did it. You went into the office at night, you found the proxies, you xeroxed them. You had your own blank copy you were supposed to send in. You xeroxed a bunch of blanks from that. Then, working from the copies you made, you forged a whole bunch of new proxies, filling in Philip Greenberg’s name. Not on all of them, of course, but on enough to give you over fifty percent.
“You did a careful job. It took you several days. When you were done, you went back to the office to replace the real proxies with the set of forgeries you’d made.
“One small problem. Cranston Pritchert showed up, caught you doing it, and you had to kill him.”
I broke off, shook my head. “See, I feel sorry for you, except for one thing. Well, a couple of things, actually, but one thing here. Up until that point in time, you got a white-collar crime. Corporate theft. No one’s gonna despise you. No one’s gonna point at you and yell thief. You’re a corporate crook, no better, no worse than all the rest.”
I pointed my finger. “Except you had a gun. Had it with you all the time. As a contingency, you could say, just in case something went wrong. But the fact is, that contingency was planned. If something went wrong, you had a gun.
“You see what I mean? That’s where I stop feeling sorry. Because, any way you slice it, you were ready, willing, and able to kill.”
I shrugged. “But you probably haven’t admitted that, even to yourself. You probably still think it just happened.”
She said nothing, just looked at me.
“But no matter how you want to justify it, the fact is you did it. You’re up there in the accountant’s office, making the switch. You hear Cranston Pritchert come in. You can’t afford to be caught there. You try to get out. But there’s no time. You’re trapped, and you hide in Marty Rothstein’s office. Only he sees you and he finds you. Bad news. You got no excuse for being there. Even if he doesn’t see the proxies, once you win the election, he’ll know. The way you see it, you’ve got no choice. You pull your gun and you shoot him.”
She looked at me sideways. “What are you doing? You’re trying to get a rise out of me, aren’t you? Trying to get me to say something. What’s the idea?” Her eyes narrowed. “What’s that?”
“What?”
“There. In your shirt pocket.”
“Nothing.”
She stepped forward, wrenched my jacket aside. “Oh, yeah?” She reached in, jerked the microcassette out of my shirt pocket. “And what do we have here? A pocket dictaphone. Switched on and recording. Well, what a surprise.”
She clicked it off, flipped it open, popped out the cassette. “How stupid do you think I am? You come in here, talking nonsense. You’re all, I know all about you. Trying to goad me into saying something. Probably thought you were being subtle too. Now, let’s us just have a little talk with the recorder off, okay?”
Amy Greenberg set the dictaphone and cassette down on the coffee table. She straightened up, said, “You come in telling me this story. You know what? I think you made it up. I don’t think you have shit.”
“Oh, yeah? Then how’d I know about drugging the drink? No one knew that. Just you, the agent, and the girl. The agent and the girl are dead, so how did I know?”
“How the hell should I know? Maybe your client told you way back when—I was out with some girl who drugged my drink. Is that what the guy said to you?”
I shook my head. “No. He had no idea. I didn’t find out till yesterday.”
“Who told you?”
“Sorry. I’m not going to tip you off to someone else you need to kill. Even if you don’t have the gun anymore.”
I held up my finger. “And that’s the second reason I can’t feel sorry for you. Because you’re the one got me into this whole mess.”
“And how did I do that?”
“By giving me the gun. The first time I was out here. You slipped it under the seat of my car.”
“The hell I did.”
“The hell you didn’t,” I said. “I gotta admit, it was a pretty nifty move. I come out, talk to you, you realize I’m the private detective Cranston Pritchert hired. You know I met the talent agent and the girl, because you had to pay ’em the bonuses for lying to me. So there I am, perfect patsy. Even without the murder weapon, the police can tie me in to all three victims. Give me the gun and I’m dead.
“So, tha
t’s exactly what you did. The office beeped me, I had to make a phone call. When I get off the phone, I go out and find you in your car. You’ve backed out of your driveway to let me get out. Perfectly natural. Only, you know, it’s just like you opening your door just now—sucked in by the suburbs, I left my car unlocked. You figured I had, and you figured right. So when you moved your car, you gave me the gun.”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “You remember what I was wearing? Like I really had a gun on me.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “The gun was in your car. You took it out of your car, you put it in mine. You figured eventually the cops would find it. If they hadn’t, I guess they would have got an anonymous tip.
“They found it just fine. In fact, it couldn’t have been better. Because where should they find it, but at the talent agent’s house.”
I stopped, shook my head. “Which is what screwed me up from the start. I knew the gun had been planted. I just didn’t know by who. With my car being out at the crime scene, I figured it was planted there. Which is one of the reasons it has taken me so long to get to you.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “You got a real nice story there. But that’s all it is. A story. It’s all theories. You haven’t got one fact. There’s not a single thing you can prove.”
“I don’t think you’ve been paying attention,” I said. “Which is understandable. There’s been a lot of information you’ve had to assimilate very fast. You remember the proxies? The forged proxies? Well, that can be proven. A handwriting expert can prove that just fine. He can prove that they’re forged. And he can prove that it’s your forgery. There’s no way to get away from that.”
“So what? What if I did? You said it yourself, that’s corporate crime. Nobody gives a damn.”
“Like I say, you’re a little slow on the uptake. It’s understandable, but make the effort. Cranston Pritchert was killed in the office. He surprised the forger, and the forger killed him. If you’re the forger, it’s not good. That is not the part in which one would wish to be cast.”
I could see her eyes moving, calculating. “Who knows this?” she said.