Carol shuffled the papers containing Bridges’ interview comments and her own until she came to one headed Janet Myers. After a few lines devoted to her failed marriage to Gerlach and her move to Crooked Lake, it came to an abrupt end with the words “spent the afternoon driving aimlessly around—saw no one—was seen by no one.”
“That’s it?” Kevin asked after quickly scanning Carol’s notes.
“I’m afraid so. She says she never went near the campus, but she doesn’t seem to have anyone who can back her up.”
“It’s too late now, but I think Brae Loch made a mistake in not creating some kind of temporary parking permit system for the opera company. It probably wouldn’t have done any good, but as it is, my people were simply driving in and out, parking wherever they found a place. I’d guess that unless any of them had an unusual car, say a Rolls or a Bentley or maybe a fire engine-red Porsche, nobody would have known they were there.”
“I’ll have one of my men talk to Brae Loch security or whatever they’re called, see if anyone remembers somebody poking around Wayne Hall. Funny, isn’t it? Seems like there’s a news story every month or so about a crime on some college campus. But it doesn’t make much difference. These places are always wide open, students, visitors, who knows, all wandering about. It’d be pretty hard to recognize a guy bent on mayhem, much less stop him.”
“Or her,” Kevin added, thinking of Janet Myers.
Carol picked up her papers and pulled out the ones with notes on her conversations with Conklin and Rosetti, the other two members of the company Kevin had said she should interview herself.
“I didn’t make much headway with your other prime suspects,” she said, and started to walk him through her interviews with them.
Kevin interrupted her.
“Let’s not call anyone a prime suspect,” he said. “It’s too soon. I don’t want to get fixated on someone just because I know there’d been tension between him, or her, and Gerlach. Truth is, most of the cast probably hated his guts. He sure gave a lot of my people reason to dislike him. You take Carpenter, that guy who’s got a thing for Merriman. He didn’t like the way Gerlach treated her, made it obvious. Or Redman—she’s the one who’s been putting the orchestra through its paces. She doesn’t say much, but I think Gerlach annoyed her. You could see it on her face whenever he tried to upstage the other members of the cast. And that was most of the time.”
It was Carol’s turn to interrupt.
“Okay, he was a pain in the ass, so any one of them could have strangled him. But you asked me to talk with three people who apparently had issues with him before rehearsals ever started. Let me tell you what they told me. It isn’t much.”
She began with Conklin.
“He came right out and told me that Gerlach had had an affair with his wife. Happened a little over a year ago. It seems it started when Gerlach attended a program featuring a string quartet that Conklin plays in. Helen—that’s the wife’s name—was there, and apparently that was the beginning of a relationship with Gerlach. It lasted right up to the time that she died. She fell down the stairs in their house, suffered a head injury, never recovered. Anyway, Conklin was up front about all this. Guess he figured I’d hear about it one way or another, so why not just tell me himself.”
“What did he say about yesterday afternoon? I don’t suppose he confessed to lurking around the auditorium.”
“I’m afraid not. Says he didn’t arrive on campus until around 6:30, shortly before the scheduled dress rehearsal. By that time Gerlach’s death was common knowledge.”
“What did he do before that?”
“Spent some time on the computer at the house. Business, he said. Made the rounds of his nurseries.”
“So he has an alibi,” Kevin said.
“At the nurseries, I suppose, but there’s no one else at the house in Geneva, not since the wife died. I decided it was a bit premature to quiz him about neighbors seeing him leave, but he volunteered that he waved good-bye to someone who was mowing a lawn next door.”
“Sounds like he figures you might suspect him.”
“No question. He said as much, then dismissed the idea as ridiculous.”
“That leaves Rosetti, our Schicchi wannabe.”
“Right. He’s a character, isn’t he? Not that big, but he seems like he’s several times life size. Sucks the air right out of the room. Tell you what. Let me fill you in on Rosetti—it won’t take long. Then let’s take a swim before I plow through the rest of this file.”
“Love to, if you feel you can take the time.”
“This is one of those days when I feel I have to take the time. But let’s do Rosetti first. He’s another one without what you might call an ironclad alibi. Says he spent the afternoon fishing.”
“Fishing? In the afternoon? Everybody I know who does much fishing says they do it in the early morning.”
“Well, Mr. Rosetti seems to be an exception. According to him, he took his boat out after lunch, spent the next several hours on the lake.”
“Catch anything?”
“The way he tells it, no. A few bites, but that’s all.”
“And he spent most of the afternoon just sitting in his boat? Sounds awfully boring to me,” Kevin said, reflecting his own lack of interest in fishing. “Wonder what he was thinking about all that time.”
“He says he was becoming anxious about the opera—about his role. Needed to have some quiet time to go over it in his mind.”
“I don’t suppose he volunteered any information about chitchat with fellow fishermen.”
“Afraid not. He didn’t say anything about neighbors seeing him take off or return either.”
“Where’s he live?”
“South of Yates Center on the other side of the lake. According to Sam’s and my notes, he probably lives about as close to Brae Loch as anyone in your company.”
Kevin shook his head. It didn’t sound as if Carol had learned anything which ruled out anybody as Gerlach’s murderer. They set aside the pile of interview notes, went back into the cottage to put on their bathing suits, and headed for the water.
CHAPTER 12
While Kevin and the sheriff were reviewing the information gleaned from the other interviews with members of the opera company, the provost of Brae Loch College was engaged in a serious discussion with Deputy Sheriff Bridges back on campus. From Jason Armitage’s point of view, their discussion was not going well.
“I don’t think you understand,” he said. “It hasn’t been 24 hours since that man was murdered, and already I have had two phone calls from anxious parents. One of them announced that she was withdrawing her daughter from the school, and the other sounded as if he might do the same thing. For all I know, my secretary has fielded half a dozen more such calls from parents while I’ve been down here talking with you.”
“Well, why don’t you just ask these parents to bear with you for awhile. The sheriff is as interested in the college getting back to normal as you are, but we can’t afford to overlook something that could let whoever killed Mr. Gerlach get away with it. Anyway, there’s no reason to think this has anything to do with the college. I’m sure there’s not a killer loose on campus, and you can reassure the kids and their families that there’s no reason to worry.”
Sam had no idea who had strangled Harley Gerlach, and for all he knew his casual dismissal of the idea that it had been someone from the college might turn out to be dead wrong. But he’d been trying without success to put the provost at ease for almost a quarter of an hour, and he was prepared to say almost anything if it would persuade the man to go back to his office and let him rejoin Officer Barrett to finish their task of scouring the crime scene for evidence.
“What are you looking for that is taking so long to find?” Armitage asked.
“No way of knowing until we find it,” Sam said, trying to sound as if he’d had lots of experience with difficult crime scenes.
“Things like fingerprints?�
�
“Yes, of course, but that’s only a part of it. And let me tell you, there are fingerprints all over back there—the bed, the other furniture, the piano, the piano bench, music stands, the door knobs and door frames, the pulleys that open and close the curtain. Not to mention the fixtures in the bathroom, the vending machine, the tables and chairs in those other little rooms, whatever they’re for. Wall to wall prints. It’ll be a nightmare trying to sort them out.”
The provost listened to this catalog of surfaces which appeared to be covered with fingerprints and experienced a growing feeling of guilt. It wasn’t his fault, of course, but it was clear that the custodian who was responsible for Wayne Hall had not done any dusting and polishing there for several days.
“I’ll have to look into it,” he said. “Our people should have cleaned here this week, but it sounds as if they didn’t.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Sam said. “Unless it was cleaned late yesterday morning or midday, it wouldn’t have helped us much. Anyway, like I said, we’re looking for more than fingerprints.”
And they hadn’t found much of anything that looked as if it could shed light on the mystery of Harley Gerlach’s death. The waste container in the bathroom contained most of what might or might not prove to be important evidence, and Sam was inclined to doubt that it was important. With the possible exception of the note. There were quite a few wadded up paper towels, a used maxi-pad wrapped up in toilet paper, a gum wrapper, a tiny battery from a hearing aid, and, perhaps most significantly, a crumpled piece of paper on which had been scrawled an unfinished note. The note contained no name, so it provided no information as to who had been writing it or for whom it was intended. It consisted of but six words:
How about Tuesday noon? We could
It was now Wednesday afternoon, so whoever had started to write the note was talking about the previous day, the day when Gerlach had been killed. Or was he? Maybe the reference was to some earlier Tuesday. But no, the custodial staff may have been lax, but it was doubtful that they had failed to clean in Wayne Hall in over a week.
Sam shook his head. What did he know? For all he knew, Brae Loch College was having problems with its staff. They might be on strike. He immediately rejected that thought. It was highly unlikely that they were even organized, more likely that they would be fired if they walked off the job.
He turned his attention to the other things in the waste container. It shouldn’t be hard to find out if anyone in the opera company wore a hearing aid. Or chewed gum. And then there was the maxi-pad.
The provost had finally left to do whatever it was that provosts had to do, and Barrett had just stopped pounding out a poor rendition of chopsticks and was coming out of the piano room in the wing adjacent to the stage.
“Do you have a piano in your house?” he asked.
“No, why?”
“Or do you know anything about pianos?” Barrett obviously did not.
“Is something wrong with the piano?”
“I don’t know. But it looks like they were going to do something to the one back there. There’s a coil of piano wire on the floor over in the corner—at least that’s what the label says it is. And there’s some other stuff in there, probably things a piano tuner or repairman needs.”
“Yeah, I noticed that. I know as much about pianos as you do, and I doubt if the sheriff knows much more. She can ask her friend Whitman about it. No big deal. It probably needed work and they just hadn’t gotten around to doing it.”
“I was just thinking about the guy that got killed. They said it was done with piano wire, and it seemed kinda strange that a coil of wire was handy, just lying around backstage here.”
“It’ll be easy to check that out. Why don’t you stay here while I go up to the head shed and see what’s up with the piano.”
It took a little over half an hour for the deputy sheriff to find out why the murder weapon had been so conveniently located only a few yards from the bed where Harley Gerlach was strangled. The provost knew nothing about the piano wire, but his secretary put Sam in touch with the chairman of the school’s small music department, who gave voice to what was apparently long-standing frustration over the condition of the piano in Wayne Hall.
“Don’t get me started,” was the way that Valerie Cubbins, the department chairman, responded to Sam’s question. “That piano needs lots of work. I’m surprised that the opera people didn’t complain about it. We had someone scheduled back in June, but you know how it is. One thing after another. He had an emergency appendicitis that set him back a few weeks, then it was cancelled appointments. Several of them. Promises, promises. I talked to him just the other day and he says he’ll be here before Labor Day for sure. I’m not holding my breath.”
“So the piano wire’s been around for quite awhile?”
“Right. We ordered it back when we expected the work to be done in June. Why are you interested in the piano wire?”
Sam was surprised that she had not heard about its use as a garrote.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that you didn’t know about the death of one of the opera people. It happened yesterday. He was strangled, and it was done with a length of that piano wire.”
“Oh, my god, that’s terrible,” Cubbins said, sounding as if she meant it. “The word was out that somebody’d been killed, but I hadn’t heard anything about strangulation. At Brae Loch! That’s terrible.”
Professor Cubbins made it sound as if a death by strangulation was especially terrible because it had occurred at her school. As Sam left to rejoin Officer Barrett back in Wayne Hall, he found himself wondering if the chairman of the music department might be sharing the provost’s worry that this news might lead to enrollment problems for Brae Loch.
CHAPTER 13
His name was Francis Farris, but everyone who knew him called him Jeff. And he was Jeff because he reminded them of the Jimmy Stewart character L.B. Jeffries in Hitchcock’s famous film Rear Window. Wheelchair bound since youth, his principal pleasure in life, much like Jeffries’, came from observing his surroundings through a powerful telescope. He enjoyed observing the birds which frequented the area, but his favorite pastime was people watching, and the favorite people to watch were Harley Gerlach and the women who went into and out of his house.
On this particular morning, Jeff turned his telescope until it faced Gerlach’s house nearly a hundred yards down the hillside from the small second-story balcony on which he was sitting. He adjusted the scope until it gave him a clear and close-up view of the back porch of his neighbor’s home. The porch held a small stack of wood on one side and a fancy outdoor grill across from it beside a flight of steps which provided access to a detached garage and an expanse of yard dominated by several flowering shrubs the names of which Jeff did not know. Otherwise the porch was empty, which was not surprising inasmuch as the front porch on the other side of the house had a spectacular view of Crooked Lake. That was where Gerlach and his company would be sitting on pleasant evenings of the kind that the area had been enjoying for much of the month of August.
Jeff, like Gerlach, had a good view of the lake. Their homes occupied what was arguably the premier real estate on the lake. For decades the hill which bisected the lake, giving it its distinctive Y-shape, had had almost no homes or cottages other than those which crowded the shoreline. Except for a few small farms along its crest, the hill, or bluff as the locals called it, had remained a forested area, and most lake residents preferred it that way. But then some developer had moved in, cut down the trees on the sloping hillside at the end of the bluff, and erected a handful of large and widely spaced houses, each overlooking the lake from a vantage point high above the water. The owners of these mansions may not have had easy access to the water, but they shared a glorious vista, stretching south from their decks and porches toward Southport at the end of the lake.
Jeff Farris was not bothered by the fact that he couldn’t easily use the lake for swimming and boatin
g. What mattered to him was his telescope, and what better place was there for observing the world around him through that telescope than his balcony, so high above the lake. And above Harley Gerlach’s house.
It was Wednesday afternoon, the day after Gerlach’s murder, and Jeff was unaware that his neighbor had met his death by strangulation at Brae Loch College. But Gerlach almost never closed his garage doors, so Jeff was aware that his car was not in its accustomed place in his garage. Nor had it been there since early that morning. In fact, Jeff was fairly certain that the car had not been in the garage or on the blacktop apron in front of the garage since sometime before noon the previous day.
It wouldn’t have been the first time that Gerlach had been away over night, but Jeff’s interest in the missing car on this particular afternoon was stimulated by the fact that his neighbor had had two visitors within the last twenty-four hours. The first had arrived the previous afternoon, shortly after 1:30. It was a woman, and she arrived in a recent model black BMW bearing a New York license plate. He had recorded the number on the plate in a spiral notebook he kept for such purposes. The telescope had given him a good look at the woman. She appeared to be in her early fifties, although Jeff had to acknowledge that he was not very good at judging age. While she was not beautiful by any means, she was not unattractive. Her hair was showing some signs of grey, but she wore it in a becoming mannish fashion. A pair of designer jeans and a stylish white blouse added to the impression the BMW had made on Jeff: She was a woman of class and probably of means. He had a pretty good mental file of the women who had been visiting Gerlach, and he was quite sure he had never seen this one before.
He had watched her as she stood beside her car looking the house over. She made no effort to try the porch door, and eventually walked around the house, disappearing from Jeff’s line of vision. After a few minutes, she reappeared. After considering the house for a moment, she finally tried the door. Finding it locked, she returned to her car and sat there for awhile, as if deciding what to do next. It was the better part of fifteen minutes after arriving that the woman started the engine, turned around in the driveway, and headed back toward the upper bluff road.
Setting the Stage for Murder Page 8