Setting the Stage for Murder

by Robert W. Gregg

  “No, just enjoying the peace and quiet. It’s a lonely road. Not much of anyone lives up there.”

  True enough, Carol thought. But one of the people who does live up there is Harley Gerlach. Make that did live up there.

  “What if I told you that you were seen that afternoon at your former husband’s house out at the end of the bluff?”

  This was something that Janet Myers had not expected.

  “But that’s impossible. I can’t imagine who told you that, but they’re mistaken.” Her voice was firm, but her face betrayed her anxiety.

  “Perhaps, but I doubt it. The man who saw you gave me a very accurate description of your car and of you. He tells me that you parked behind Harley’s house. That you walked around the house, tried the back porch door, and eventually drove away. And that this took place somewhere around 1:30.”

  “I’m sure it was someone else. Why on earth would I go to Harley’s? I wouldn’t be caught dead there.”

  “No, I’m sure you wouldn’t. But it seems you were caught alive there. My informant happened to have been watching the house through a powerful telescope. It brought everything, including you and your BMW, up so close that you could almost see the time of day on your wristwatch.”

  Janet Myers visibly winced as she absorbed this information.

  “You’ve had someone stalking me with a telescope? For God’s sake, why me?”

  “I haven’t been stalking you, Mrs. Myers. I didn’t even know the man who saw you until one of my officers realized that someone was watching Harley’s place. He wasn’t keen on admitting he was spying on your ex-husband, but I convinced him that he’d be better off if he told us what he’d seen. And what he’d seen was you, poking around Harley’s on the afternoon when he was killed down at Brae Loch. Now what were you doing there?”

  The Myers woman busied herself with her coffee, showing no inclination to answer the sheriff’s question.

  “I do not see how you are helping yourself by refusing to admit you were there. That is not in dispute. Really, it isn’t. You may have a perfectly reasonable explanation, and I’d like to hear it.”

  Myers resolved her inner conflict in the only way now open to her.

  “Yes, I did go to Harley’s that afternoon,” she finally said in a quiet voice. “I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you’d jump at it as evidence that I meant to kill him.”

  “Why would I reach that conclusion, Mrs. Myers?”

  “Well, he’d been killed and you’d be sure to find out how much I detested him.”

  “The way I hear it, many people detested him. Including a fair number of people in the opera company. So why would I assume it was you who meant to kill him?”

  The paper napkin in Janet Myers’ hands had been wadded and squeezed into a small ball.

  “It wasn’t a big thing,” she said. “I mean being at Harley’s house. I’d never been there. But then I found myself on that upper road and I remembered that he lived out near the end of the bluff. It just seemed like it would be interesting to see what kind of place he lived in. So I drove around until I found the turnoff with his name on the mailbox. It was stupid, I know, but it was just curiosity, nothing more.”

  “You could have saved yourself some trouble by telling me that in the first place,” Carol said.

  Janet Myers put the napkin down. Her face brightened.

  “But then you tried to get into the house, didn’t you?” Carol asked “Why was that?”

  The worried ex-wife picked the napkin up again. Her ordeal wasn’t over.

  “Well, it was clear he wasn’t there, so I thought I might get a peek at the inside.”

  The sheriff didn’t comment on this further explanation of Mrs. Myers’ actions on Tuesday afternoon. When she spoke again, she raised another question.

  “So I assume that when you found the house locked, you drove to the college. Is that right?”

  “On, no,” was the answer. “I went back home. It was way too early for the dress rehearsal.”

  “Which means that you were home from, say, 2:15, 2:20, until early evening?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  The woman had lied to her twice, refusing to acknowledge the visit to Gerlach’s house. She might have gone directly home as she claimed to have done. But she could as easily be lying when she denied stopping at Brae Loch. She only had Janet’s word for it that she had visited his house out of curiosity. What if she had gone there with the purpose of seeing her ex-husband, of talking to him? Or killing him? After all, if Harley Gerlach was not at home, the most obvious place for him to be was at the college.

  In any event, Janet Myers’ credibility was now in tatters. When she bade her good-bye, Carol knew that she would have to make the acquaintance of the husband and the neighbors. She would have to ask them whether they had seen her or her BMW in Southport on Tuesday afternoon. Especially during those crucial hours when the forensic evidence indicated that Harley Gerlach had been strangled.

  CHAPTER 24

  Before Carol had an opportunity to talk with Janet Myers’ husband or her neighbors, much less pursue the lead suggested by the unattended fishing boat at Ben’s Marina, she was confronted by an unexpected wrinkle in the Gerlach case. It was Kevin who brought it to her attention.

  His phone call caught her at the office late that Saturday afternoon.

  “I need to see you,” he announced, “and the sooner the better. Any chance that you can join me for dinner tonight? Better yet, that you can stay over at the cottage? I know you’re up to that lovely neck of yours in the Gerlach case, but that’s one of the reasons I need to see you. I’ve learned something you ought to know about.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  This wasn’t what Kevin had hoped to hear, and he said so.

  “I was hoping you’d let me tell you at my place, tonight. The phone isn’t my favorite medium, Carol. You know that. And you’ve got to eat anyway—and sleep. Why not do it here? You know, kill two birds with one stone.”

  “Why do I have the feeling your agenda has nothing to do with Gerlach? Or less to do with Gerlach than coaxing me into the sack?”

  “Carol! I’m shocked that you should even think such a thing. I’m quite able to keep my priorities straight.”

  “Of course you are,” she said, the smile in her voice reflecting the smile on her face. “And I know just what your priorities are.”

  “So, are you going to come over?”

  “What choice do I have? How about six?”

  “Great. Believe me, you’ll be interested in what I have to tell you.”

  “I’d better be.”

  The dinner Kevin had whipped up would not have rated stars in any food critic’s review, but it filled their stomachs and put them in the mood to talk about the Gerlach case.

  They traded reports about their visits to Janet Myers and Arthur Conklin’s neighbor, Sherri somebody, and then Kevin got down to what it was he’d told Carol she ought to know about.

  On his way home from Geneva, he had decided on the spur of the moment to turn off on the upper bluff road and drive down to the late Harley Gerlach’s house. There had been no particular reason for doing so. But he had no plans for the afternoon, and something about the house and its collection of opera memorabilia beckoned. And so it was that he had found himself parked behind the now empty house a little after noon, observed, no doubt, by Francis, a.k.a. Jeff, Farris.

  Kevin would not have been there had he not pocketed a set of Gerlach’s keys he had found in a bedside table drawer the day he and Carol had visited the house. He hadn’t expected to use them, and he had neglected to tell Carol that he had them. But now they provided entree into the house on the bluff, and he intended to make use of them. He considered going around to the front of the house, the better to enter without being seen by Farris. But why should he worry about being seen going into Gerlach’s house? Farris had certainly seen him clearly through his telescope when he and Carol had been there
together, and must therefore assume he had some sort of official status. And if he didn’t, so what? The sight of someone, familiar face or stranger, entering the house of the recently murdered Harley Gerlach would make his day.

  So Kevin had boldly marched up the steps to the back porch and extracted the keys from his pocket. He had selected the key that looked to be the one most likely to fit the lock when he noticed that the small glass pane in the lower right-hand corner of the colonial-style door was missing. He had felt an instant frisson of excitement. The pane had not been missing the previous day, of that he was certain. He bent down and looked closely at the now empty square. Someone had used a glass cutter to remove the pane. It had been done so deftly that he had almost failed to notice it. A broken pane would have been much easier to spot. In fact, had the sun been lower in the sky or had it been an overcast day, he might have missed the evidence that someone had broken into the house. Whoever had done so had been very careful.

  The door was locked, but was easily opened by reaching through the empty square where the glass had been. Kevin had gone on in, and begun looking immediately for some sign that an intruder had been in the house at some time during the previous 24 hours. Very probably at night. The most obvious reason for the break-in was theft—a dark and vacant house, some distance from its neighbors, an easy target. It didn’t take long for Kevin to conclude that if theft was the motive, it had not been a common, garden-variety thief who had broken into the Gerlach house. None of the big-ticket items which would have tempted most thieves had been removed. None of the pictures and posters decorating the walls was missing, although some of them might have brought a tidy sum on the Antiques Roadshow. The bookshelves were similarly untouched, or appeared to be. Kevin had made no effort the previous day to examine Gerlach’s books for first editions or other rarities, much less spend the time to undertake even a crude inventory of the collection. It was possible that one or two books had been stolen, but there were no gaps on the shelves and Kevin doubted it.

  He went through all of the drawers in the desk, the file cabinet, the bedside tables. Carol had done the same thing the previous day and found nothing that looked interesting, but Kevin did it all again, trying to think like a thief with a mission. He found nothing, but that, of course, could be because the thief had beaten him to it. The same was true of the darkroom. There had been lots of photos, but the only ones that had interested Carol and him had been the ones in what he thought of as the harem album, and they had taken that with them.

  No, he thought, whoever broke into the house had a very specific reason for doing so, and it wasn’t to make away with valuable loot. What might that reason have been? Was there something in the house that he—or was it she—wanted? Something that might incriminate him—or was it her—in the death of Harley Gerlach? Kevin realized that he was assuming that the break-in and Gerlach’s murder were related, and that was a very large assumption. But it would have been quite a coincidence for the man to have been killed and his home broken into, all in one week, by two very different people with two very different motives. And he knew that Carol was always telling him that she didn’t put much stock in coincidences and that he shouldn’t either. So Kevin chose to stick with his assumption that what had happened at the house was related to what had happened at the college.

  He spent another quarter of an hour scouring the house for anything that might offer a clue to the identity of the burglar. There had been no burglary, of course, but for lack of a better term Kevin continued to think of whoever had broken into the house as a burglar. He tried to be careful around surfaces which might contain fingerprints, although he doubted that someone who had been so meticulous in removing the pane of glass on the back door would be so careless as to leave a trail of prints. Crawling around the floor in the study, looking for what, he wasn’t quite sure, the thought occurred to him that he looked for all the world like a caricature of Sherlock Holmes. All he needed was a magnifying glass and a deer stalker hat. When he finally decided to call it a day, the only thing he had found was a small sliver of silver paper that looked like a piece of the wrapping for a stick of gum. He slipped it into his pocket, took one more quick look around, and left the house to the ghost of the late Harley Gerlach.

  Carol agreed with his initial assessment that this was something she ought to know about.

  “Interesting, isn’t it?” she said. “Quite a lot of activity at the Gerlach mansion, considering that the owner hasn’t been home. First there’s Janet Myers, poking around there the day he’s killed. Then there’s somebody else—or is it Myers again?—sneaking in, uninvited, three days later. I’d figured that what mattered was what happened at the college. Now it’s beginning to look as if Gerlach’s house is a veritable crime-scene annex.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t turn up anything that points to somebody as the killer.”

  “Don’t be so sure of that. There’s that piece of paper. And I’m sure it’s from a gum wrapper. That makes two gum wrappers, one in the bathroom wastebasket at Brae Loch, the other in Gerlach’s study. Harley could have chewed gum himself, in which case the gum-wrapper clue goes out the window. But what if it’s from one of the other members of your little company?”

  “I take it you don’t have a record of who in the Gianni Schicchi crowd chewed gum,” Kevin said. It was a statement, not a question.

  “No, not yet. I guess I’ve been assuming it was Heather Merriman who’d left the wrapper in the wastebasket. You know, chewing gum is the sort of thing young girls do. But I can’t picture Merriman breaking into Gerlach’s house. Anyway, Bridges has been questioning all of your opera people.”

  “And now they’ll be on their guard. They’ll think that you suspect the killer of being a gum chewer. Crazy, isn’t it? A stick of gum turns out to be the smoking gun.”

  “Come on, Kevin,” Carol said. “You don’t believe that, and neither do I.”

  “I wonder what kind of gum Heather chews.” Kevin did not expect an answer to his non-question.

  By the time they retired to the bedroom they had ceased speculating about who chewed gum and who might have broken into the murder victim’s home. Kevin was relieved that Carol had not chastised him for going back to Gerlach’s without consulting her. When they climbed into bed, both of them were relieved that there was more, much more, to their relationship than tracking down a killer on Crooked Lake.

  CHAPTER 25

  It was Kevin who was up and about on Sunday morning, while Carol was still under the covers at 9:10. The smell of coffee had not awakened her. The rattling of dishes in the kitchen had not disturbed her sleep. Kevin knew that she would be angry with herself for sleeping in so late. She might even be angry with him for not rousing her. She was entitled to a lazy day, but she would not see it that way. There were crimes and misdemeanors awaiting her attention, especially the murder of one Harley Gerlach five days previously, and Carol would not want to treat Sunday as the proverbial day of rest.

  He made up his mind. Reluctantly. Leaning over the bed, Kevin planted a kiss on her forehead. He would have preferred to have kissed her on the lips, but she was buried under the sheet and that was impossible. Of course he could have shaken her or simply called out her name, but such an approach seemed cruel. Slow and easy does it, he thought.

  Carol burrowed deeper into the bedding, muttering something unintelligible. He was about to give it up and go back to the kitchen when she suddenly bolted upright in the bed.

  “What time is it?” It was a wide-awake voice, and the question hinted at panic.

  “And good morning to you, too,” he said, ignoring her question.

  “Really, what time is it?”

  “You’ve got the whole day in front of you. It’s only a little after nine.”

  “Nine?” Carol practically leaped out of bed. She grabbed her robe and hurried down the hall to the bathroom. In less than a minute the shower was running. There would be no leisurely breakfast at the cottage this mornin
g.

  “I hate to eat and run,” she said not much more than ten minutes later as she slid into a chair in the breakfast nook, “but I’ve got to get going. This is the trouble with staying here with you. It’s too damn comfortable—I forget I’m a working girl.”

  “But it’s Sunday morning, for God’s sake. You don’t actually have an appointment, do you? Or are you going to quiz somebody during the sermon?”

  Carol busied herself spreading some marmalade on her toast.

  “What I’m going to do is talk with some people, see if I can’t get some straight answers about who was where last Tuesday. In my experience, Sunday’s a good day to do it, at least in the morning. Which is why I’m taking a pass on the bacon and eggs.”

  “Who specifically do you have to see?” Kevin wanted to know.

  “Your Gianni Schicchi wannabe, Rosetti. The man who was fishing, or so he says, while Gerlach was being strangled. And the Myers woman’s neighbors. Somebody who can shed some light on where she was when she wasn’t casing Gerlach’s house. Then there’s Redman. I still haven’t talked to her since she admitted to spending time with our murder victim.”

  “All of this in one day?”

  “Which is why I can’t sleep in or have a second cup of coffee. Look, I love you and I’d love to stick around, but I’ve got a murderer to catch, and since you haven’t been able to finger the culprit for me, I’ve got to go out and hassle some suspects. Excuse me while I brush my teeth.”

  Kevin watched her disappear down the hall. You’re crazy, but I love you, he thought.

  “I’ll drop by on my way home, let you know what if anything I’ve learned,” Carol said as she took out her keys and turned to give Kevin a quick kiss before leaving.

  “I know you get a kick out of this,” she said, pausing briefly at the door, “but don’t you get a little tired of what seems to be our annual murder? I know I am. If it hadn’t been for the death of your prima donna, I’d be suggesting we go back to bed.”