Setting the Stage for Murder

by Robert W. Gregg

  _____

  While she was waiting for reports from Bridges on his conversation with Geneva’s police chief, from Barrett on what he had learned at the restaurants Gerlach might have visited for his last lunch, and from Owens on the result of the Redman autopsy, Carol had to decide on her own next move. There were several people she needed to see. Myers, to find out whether her friend Pederson had been right about her change of heart regarding Gerlach. Merriman, to find out whether Sean Carpenter had said anything about the reason for his failure to become a member of the Metropolitan Opera chorus. Conklin, to discuss his wife’s death and his shaky alibi for the afternoon of Gerlach’s murder. Rosetti, to question him about breaking into Gerlach’s house.

  She’d have to wait for Bridges’ report before seeing Conklin. It would make more sense to speak with Merriman after she had learned what the medical examiner had to say. This left Myers and Rosetti. Myers would be the easier of the two to talk with, although that was no guarantee that she would be more truthful. Rosetti would be predictably unpleasant, but unlike Myers he could not stake out an ambiguous middle ground. He could either deny that he had broken into Gerlach’s home or admit that he had.

  Carol chose to approach Rosetti first. After her experience with Sean Carpenter, she had decided that it was probably better to question people in her office than on their own turf. For one thing, it meant that she had control over who else was present. For another, it gave her a psychological edge. Or at least she believed it did. Whether it would do so in Rosetti’s case, she wasn’t sure.

  Rosetti worked at home, or so he had told her, and so she expected him to be there when she called. The phone rang six times before Paolo himself answered.

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Rosetti, this is Sheriff Kelleher. How are you today?” Carol didn’t much care how he was today, but she hoped he would reciprocate if she were pleasant. He didn’t.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure of your call?”

  “I’d like to talk with you, and I’m calling to ask you to come over to my office so we can have a chat.”

  “This is Friday, Sheriff. It’s a workday. I can’t just drop everything. If you need to ask me a question, why don’t you do it over the phone, then we can both get back to work.”

  “I don’t think this is something we can do over the phone, Mr. Rosetti. It’s very important. I really do need to see you.”

  “I can’t do it. My wife has the car. She went shopping, and you know how women are when they go shopping.”

  Rosetti could simply be commenting on his experience with his own wife, but she doubted it. In all probability he subscribed to a lot of negative generalizations about women. It wouldn’t surprise her if he were a thorough-going misogynist.

  “When do you expect her back?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Look, Mr. Rosetti, it’s only 10:45. I doubt she’ll be away all day. And I plan to be in my office all day. So any time will be okay with me. I’m looking forward to seeing you.”

  Carol hung up the phone before he could protest further. She could imagine him fuming. And perhaps worrying about what her agenda might be. But she was confident that he would be there.

  She was momentarily pleased with herself for handling the conversation in such a way that Rosetti would have no choice but to make the trip to Cumberland. It took but a few seconds, however, to realize that she had trapped herself. She would now have to remain at her desk until he arrived, and heaven knew when that would be. She only hoped that it wouldn’t be so late in the day that she’d have to call Kevin and tell him to hold dinner. She resisted the temptation to call Rosetti back, and turned her attention to her in-basket.

  She pulled out the photos of Gerlach that Kevin had brought back and spread them out in front of her. She was glad that he had not settled for a single photo; Barrett might have to leave one or more at the restaurants if the people on duty weren’t the ones who had been on duty a week ago Tuesday.

  The pictures reminded her that Gerlach had been a handsome man. He looked a bit like a film star who, as he aged, had acquired wrinkles that spoke of experience and wisdom. The mane of white hair enhanced the image. Carol wondered, not for the first time, why he had favored middle-aged women when he might well have spent his mature years seducing women in their 20s and 30s.

  Rosetti arrived shortly before two o’clock, by which time Carol had made a few phone calls, dictated some correspondence, and consumed a takeout lunch which she had prevailed on Miss Franks to pick up at the Rustic Inn.

  “Ah, Mr. Rosetti, I’m so glad you were able to make it.”

  “You didn’t give me much choice. What seems to be the trouble this time?”

  Carol had no intention of revisiting his dubious story that he had been fishing while Gerlach was being strangled. Nor did she intend to ask him where he had been the previous Friday night, the night of the break-in at Gerlach’s house. That would have given him the opportunity to say he had been at home with the wife who spent all her time shopping. No, she would come right out and tell him that she knew he had broken into Gerlach’s residence on the bluff.

  She did not know whether he had been anywhere near the house. But she did know that he chewed gum and that a gum wrapper had been dropped on Gerlach’s living room carpet the night of the break-in. It hardly constituted strong circumstantial evidence. After all, lots of people chew gum. Carol was sure it had not been Lisa Tompkins, the other member of Kevin’s company Bridges had identified as a gum chewer. For that matter, the break-in could have been the work of someone unconnected with the Brae Loch opera project. Nevertheless, Carol was prepared to act as if she knew that Paolo Rosetti had paid a surreptitious visit to his late rival’s house the previous week.

  “I want you to tell me why you broke into Harley Gerlach’s house last Friday night. What were you looking for?”

  Rosetti looked stunned, as well he might. Usually in control of what he said and how he said it, this time he fumbled for words.

  “But I didn’t break into his house.” It was a weak denial. “What makes you think I did?”

  “You left a calling card, Mr. Rosetti.”

  “A calling card? I don’t carry calling cards.”

  “I used the word figuratively. You dropped something that belonged to you.”

  “But I’m sure I didn’t drop—” Rosetti caught himself too late.

  “Why don’t you tell me what you were after?”

  “What was it?” He still was having trouble believing that he had left something incriminating behind in Gerlach’s house.

  Carol resisted the temptation to turn on a smile that said she had won this round.

  “Nothing big. Just a gum wrapper. The fingerprints are yours.”

  The wrapper had not been tested for prints. It might or might not have any, but what mattered was that Rosetti believed that it did.

  “It’s not what you think,” he said. The pompous air which came so naturally to him was nowhere in evidence. “I wasn’t after anything. I was just curious.”

  “Curious? About what?”

  “About Gerlach. His house, his life. I knew he was dead, so the house would be empty. I thought it would be easy to get in and look around. I just wanted to get a feel for the man. You can usually learn a lot about someone by seeing where and how he lives.”

  Carol was prepared to indulge him in his attempt to explain himself. Whether his reason for breaking in was curiosity, she didn’t know. It was possible that there was something in the house, or something he thought might be in the house, that he wanted.

  “What was your impression?”

  The expression on Rosetti’s face suggested that he wasn’t quite sure how to answer the sheriff’s question.

  “Well, it was clear that he had money. I don’t know where it came from, but there was expensive stuff all over. I didn’t like the art, but he was a pretty good photographer. It was obvious that opera was a big part of his life.”


  “Did you kill Mr. Gerlach?” Carol asked.

  The question was not what Rosetti expected, but this time he didn’t fumble for an answer.

  “I did not!” he snapped. The anger she had encountered when she spoke with him at his house on Sunday had returned.

  CHAPTER 41

  As Sam Bridges pulled into a visitor’s parking space at the Geneva police department building, he was struck by the number of patrol cars in the lot. He counted nine, and in view of the fact that it was a weekday, he assumed that there would be at least that many and probably more out and about on the city’s streets. He wished the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department had a fleet of comparable size. Carol had called ahead to alert them to the fact that her deputy was coming and to explain the purpose of his visit. The police chief himself was on vacation, but a knowledgeable veteran on the force had been tapped to meet with Sam and answer his questions.

  Sam enjoyed these opportunities to sit down with his counterparts in other upstate jurisdictions. It gave him a chance to talk shop and swap stories about law enforcement problems. He had never gotten the sense that Cumberland County and its nearby cities and counties were competitors, seeking to one-up each other. To the contrary, a spirit of cooperation seemed to prevail, whether the issue was the occasional inter-jurisdictional car chase or a need to share data. Toby Jensen, the officer who sat across the desk from Sam on this morning in late August, was a representative example of this cooperative spirit.

  They chatted amiably for the better part of half an hour before getting down to the business which had brought Sam to Geneva. Jensen had heard of Harley Gerlach’s murder, but knew little about the case, which gave Sam an excuse to regale him with the story of the failed Brae Loch opera project and the gallery of personalities who were now the object of their investigation. Most of this information was not strictly necessary, given the limited nature of Sam’s mission, but he enjoyed the chance to show off his command of the issues, and Jensen was a good listener.

  At the appropriate point in the story, Sam segued into the matter of the death of Arthur Conklin’s wife Helen.

  “You see, Mr. Conklin is being treated as a suspect in the case. We have no idea at this point whether he had anything to do with Gerlach’s death, but seeing as Gerlach had an affair with his wife not long before her death, I guess you could say that he had a motive. We know that he knew it was Gerlach who’d been carrying on with his wife. He admits she told him before she died. But we don’t know much about what happened to her, what caused her death. Rumor has it that you people may have suspected Mr. Conklin for a time. Want to tell me about it?”

  “Sure, though you might get a different version depending on who you talk to. She had a fall, a pretty bad one. She took a tumble down a flight of stairs in their house, got banged up pretty bad. But the worst of it was what it did to her head. She was in the hospital for quite awhile, in and out of consciousness. You’d have to see the medical records if you want to know the details. Anyway, just when it looked like she might be going to make it, she had a relapse and died.”

  “If she had a bad fall, where did Mr. Conklin fit into the picture?”

  “Well, he reported her accident. Called 911. Of course we have no idea whether he called right away or not. In the beginning, there didn’t seem to be any reason to suspect it was anything but what he said it was, a fall down the stairs. But when she got to the hospital they found quite a bit of bruising, and not all of it looked like it could have been caused by the fall. I mean some of the bruises were older. That’s the sort of thing that starts us thinking about spousal abuse. So we talked to Mr. Conklin. Of course he denied ever having abused his wife. Some of his neighbors got worried when they heard we’d been questioning him. They assured us he was a kind man, someone who’d never hurt his wife. But it was when we talked to neighbors that we learned about the wife’s infidelity. Conklin hadn’t mentioned it. So naturally we started to wonder if maybe he had a reason to mistreat her. Maybe even try to kill her.

  “One of the guys who was looking into it got this idea that a simple fall down those stairs couldn’t have hurt her that badly. He got it into his head that she might have been pushed. Or even that Conklin followed her down the stairs and slammed her head against the floor or a marble column that stood there on the landing. She was questioned about it, of course, but all she said was that she’d fallen. Said she’d been careless. But she wasn’t very coherent, so we never did know whether she was telling the truth or covering for her husband. Anyway, there wasn’t anything we could do. You can’t arrest a husband for assault or attempted murder when the wife denies he’d done anything.”

  “Who’s the guy who thought she might have been pushed?”

  “Name’s John Freitas. But he’s not with us any longer. He moved to California back in the spring. Most of the guys didn’t buy his argument. We couldn’t figure why the wife would deny she’d been deliberately pushed if that’s what had happened. She was in bad shape, but I thought she was lucid enough to remember something like that.”

  “The way I hear it, she’d been drinking heavily. That could have affected her balance, explain why she fell.”

  “You hear wrong. They checked her blood alcohol level when she got to the hospital. She hadn’t been drinking at all. Zero. Nada.”

  “Really?” Sam was surprised by this information, which contradicted what Sandy Temple had told the sheriff’s friend.

  “Really. She was stone cold sober. That’s one of the reasons Freitas was suspicious about Conklin’s story.”

  Why had a close friend of Conklin’s claimed that his wife’s fall had had something to do with her drinking? If he remembered the sheriff’s summary of Whitman’s report correctly, the Temple woman had not simply assumed Mrs. Conklin had been drunk when she fell. She had reported it as a fact.

  “I assume that there was a lot of local interest in Mrs. Conklin’s death,” Sam said. It was a question, but he treated it as if he already knew the answer.

  “Yes, indeed. The Conklins have been important local figures for years. The local paper gave the accident and Mrs. Conklin’s condition prominent coverage. It got quite a bit of attention on the TV station, too.”

  “Do you remember if there was any talk in the media about her being drunk at the time of the accident?”

  “I’m sure there wasn’t. Like I said, she was sober, and the hospital wouldn’t give out information about a routine blood alcohol level test to a reporter. No reason for my department to talk about it either, especially when she wasn’t drunk.”

  “Then why would a close friend of the Conklins be saying that Mrs. Conklin fell because she was drunk?”

  Sam thought he knew the answer to that question. Arthur Conklin had told her his wife had been drunk. And if he had told Temple, he had probably told others. Or assumed that Temple would spread the word. Why?

  On the way back to Cumberland, the deputy sheriff went over in his mind what he had learned about the possible relevance of Helen Conklin’s death to that of Harley Gerlach.

  Gerlach’s affair with her still gave Conklin a motive for killing him. His conversation with Toby Jensen had neither strengthened nor weakened that motive. Or had it?

  CHAPTER 42

  Officer Jim Barrett had inherited Sam Bridges’ spaghetti and meatballs assignment. He had kidded Bridges about it, but now that it was his, he was enjoying the task of tracking down the place where Gerlach had taken lunch on that fateful Tuesday. He had started at Bartoli’s, using the investigation as an excuse to have lunch there. The lunch had been good, but nobody recognized Gerlach’s picture and the owner assured him that he had no staff other than those on duty that day. The Hilltop also produced a blank. That left The Cedar Post, one of the favorite eateries of the officers in the sheriff’s department, although most of them spent more time at the bar than at the tables. They frequently patronized the bar after work, and much as they enjoyed the beer, they enjoyed admiring Ginny Smith, the
bartender, more. She was not always on duty, of course, and Barrett and his colleagues typically settled for just one beer when they discovered that Ginny was not there.

  Barrett would have been happy to stop by The Post on any day that Ginny was on duty. But today promised to be even better than usual. Not only would she be there (he had checked on her schedule on his way over to Bartoli’s), but now, by process of elimination, there was an excellent chance that it was The Post where Gerlach had had his last lunch. And Ginny was noted for being observant and having a good memory as well as a cheerful personality and a great figure. When Barrett entered the restaurant at 1:25, he was in a very good frame of mind.

  Most of the lunch crowd had departed, and there were several empty stools available at the bar.

  “Hi, Ginny,” he said as he slid onto one of the stools. “How are things?”

  “I don’t know about things,” she said, a welcoming smile on her face, “but I’m just fine. How about you?”

  “Not bad. I’m glad you’re here today, because I’m hoping you may be able to help me.”

  “Help you?”

  “Right. Why don’t you pour me whatever you’ve got on draft, and I’ll tell you what’s on my mind.”

  He watched her as she walked down to the taps, admiring the way she looked in her tank top and short shorts. When she turned to bring him his beer, he looked away, seeking to create the impression that he had not been staring at her. Ginny, of course, knew better.

  “So, you need to talk to me. Personal business or official business?”

  “Official. Sheriff’s orders.”

  Ginny had expected that to be the case. Barrett was probably the most laconic member of the sheriff’s department. She had long ago divided the frequent visitors to The Post’s bar into three categories: the talkers, the oglers, and the talkers and oglers. Jim Barrett was an ogler, albeit one who tried to pretend that he wasn’t.

  “You know me, always glad to be able to help you people out. What’s on your mind?”