Setting the Stage for Murder

by Robert W. Gregg

  “It was in Harley’s house up on the bluff,” Carol responded.

  “Why?” Janet asked, but she wasn’t addressing the question to Carol. “Our relationship ended years ago.”

  For a moment neither of them said anything. Then Janet asked a question. This time it was intended for Carol.

  “Do you think it looks like me?”

  “Oh, yes. What drew my attention to it was that I recognized you. You’d done something else with your hair, and of course you were a bit younger. But it’s still an unmistakable likeness.”

  Janet Myers continued to look at the picture.

  “I do look younger, don’t I? But of course. Can you believe that Harley and I were in love back then?”

  Carol wished that she could read minds. Was Janet experiencing nostalgia for another, more innocent time? Was she thinking about her own lost youth, or were her thoughts focused on Harley Gerlach? Was she reflecting on what might have been? It was time to pull out the album and let her look at the other pictures.

  “The picture you’ve been looking at was part of an album of pictures we found in Mr. Gerlach’s home last week. As a matter of fact, the first picture in the album was the one of you and Harley. I’m not sure whether he had given it pride of place or simply put it first for chronological reasons. In any event, I thought you might want to see the album.”

  She removed the album from her briefcase and laid it, unopened, on the coffee table.

  “It looks like a scrapbook,” Janet said.

  “Well, in a way it is. Harley was keeping a record.”

  Janet set her glass of tea on the table and opened the album. She quickly flipped through it without pausing to study any of the photos. Page after page were devoted to pictures of Harley and different women, most of whom meant nothing to her. With three exceptions. Printed beneath each picture was a name. There was a Gwyneth, a Lauren, a Helen, and several others. The last picture identified the woman as Mercedes.

  While Janet looked at these pictures, Carol looked at Janet. Her expression, so inscrutable while she was studying her own picture, underwent a dramatic change. Initially she looked shocked. And then color spread across her face. When she flipped back to the photo of Harley and Mercedes, her face was red, her jaw clenched. A blood vessel was pulsing in Janet Myers’ forehead.

  “This is Mercedes Redman, isn’t it? And these are pictures of Harley’s women, going back to me?”

  “That’s what we think. We know for a fact that at least two of the women pictured had affairs with him, the ones named Lauren and Helen.”

  “Redman, too?” Her tone suggested that the idea struck her as preposterous.

  “We’ll never know, but I doubt it. I suspect that he would have liked her to be one of his conquests, but she died before she could tell us what, if anything, happened.”

  “She’s dead?” Janet’s surprise was real.

  “I’m afraid so. It was a heart attack or something like that. Last Wednesday.”

  Janet stared at the photo of Gerlach and Redman, both of them now deceased.

  “I can’t believe it. In fact, I don’t think I can believe any of this. But I suspect you’re right about the purpose of the album. This woman Gwyneth was the one who led to my divorce—at least one of the ones. Can you believe that he would have kept a photographic record of his conquests? The egotistical bastard.”

  To say that this was a different Janet Myers than the one who had so pensively studied the photo of her younger self with Harley Gerlach would have been a large understatement. Three minutes earlier it was hard to know what she was thinking. No more. Carol doubted that she had ever seen such a sudden transformation.

  “I think you have answered my question—the question I intended to ask,” Carol said. “Whether you had ever seen this album of photos before.”

  “No, never. But I’ve never been in his house on the bluff, as I think I told you, so I couldn’t have seen it. And he was never so crude as to bring it to our rehearsals.”

  A sudden thought seemed to have crossed Janet’s mind.

  “I suppose you think this proves that I could have killed Harley, don’t you? You set me up, didn’t you? If you could get me to tell you how I hated him, then you’d know I could have strangled him.”

  “But you’d already told me you hated him, way back when we first met. Remember? And you told Professor Whitman that you hated Gerlach and didn’t want him in the opera, even before the rehearsals had begun. No, Mrs. Myers, if there is any reason to suspect you of killing your first husband, it isn’t because of how you reacted when you viewed the photographic evidence of his relationships with women.”

  Later, while she was driving back to the cottage, Carol reviewed what she had witnessed and heard in the Myers’ living room. It had been an inconclusive afternoon, but it actually tended to bear out what Sonia Pederson had said about Janet Myers’ feelings towards Harley Gerlach.

  CHAPTER 46

  Monday of the last week of summer before Labor Day brought with it a return of seasonable weather. The cold front had moved on to the east, and Carol and Kevin took their breakfast out onto the deck.

  “Do you remember when we had our very first conversation? It was right here. We were probably sitting in these same two chairs.”

  It was Carol who was recalling the morning they had met, two years earlier, on the day that Kevin had returned from an early morning swim to discover a dead man on his dock.

  “I sure do. And I was nervous as a cat, thinking you’d suspect me of having killed Britingham.”

  “Well, what was I to think? I’d never met you, and there you were, telling me you’d been taking a swim at five o’clock in the morning. I thought you were nuts.”

  “Don’t you wish every story had a happy ending? Like ours did.” Kevin was enjoying reminiscing, remembering the relationship which had grown out of such an inauspicious beginning.

  “Has our story had a happy ending?”

  Carol immediately regretted the question. They had now been in a relationship for two years, but it was a relationship which faced the same problem every Labor Day. For that was when he had to close up the cottage and return to the city to take up his duties as professor of music at Madison College. And that meant that they would be living many miles apart through autumn, winter, and spring, a separation interrupted occasionally by all too few and all too brief weekends together. This year’s separation would begin in one week.

  “Sorry, Kevin, I didn’t mean to bring it up.”

  They both knew that a happy ending was at best problematic if they continued to live separate lives for so many months out of every year. The summer just ending was to have changed things. The opera Kevin was staging at Brae Loch College was supposed to have led to an invitation to a year’s visiting appointment there. That had never been guaranteed, but any prospect that it could happen disappeared the day Harley Gerlach had been murdered and the opera cancelled. By tacit agreement they had agreed not to dwell on it, but it had been hard to banish it from the back of their minds.

  “Enough of the long faces,” Kevin said. “How about one more cup of coffee before we face the day?”

  “Sure. I’ll have another Danish, too.”

  They gradually changed the subject of the conversation to the next steps in the investigation of Gerlach’s death. It was 8:50 when Sam Bridges called. The sheriff was once again proving his point that her relationship with Whitman was affecting her morning arrival time.

  “Good morning,” he said cheerfully. “I thought I’d catch you at the professor’s.”

  Carol wished he wouldn’t refer to Kevin as the professor. She’d told him as much, but it hadn’t made a difference.

  “Chief Owens just called from Ithaca,” he said. “He’s got a report on the autopsy of that Redman woman. Says to call him back at your earliest convenience.”

  “Thanks, Sam. I’ll do it right now. I may need to go directly over to Ithaca, depending on what he tells m
e. If I do, I’ll let you know. One way or another, you take the morning briefing. And thanks for holding the fort.”

  She experienced a brief pang of guilt. Had she been letting her team down? She knew the answer was ‘no,’ that her many discussions of the case with Kevin had helped the investigation along in important ways. But she wasn’t sure that Bridges and the others saw it that way.

  “I’ve got to put a call in to Owens,” she told Kevin when she hung up. “Autopsy report at last.”

  Two minutes later she was talking with Ithaca’s police chief.

  “It’s pretty much what we thought,” he said. “Redman did have a heart attack. I guess they can come sometimes without warning. This one did. No previous history. Unfortunately, she was alone and apparently couldn’t call 911. Anyway, she didn’t, and she was dead when her partner, Miss Kane, got home. According to the autopsy, she’d been dead for as long as seven or eight hours when Kane called for help and the rescue squad arrived.”

  “Damn shame,” was Carol’s sincere reaction to the news. “Anything on my theory that Redman and Kane had been fighting?”

  “You were right on the money on that one. No question about it, there was stuff under Redman’s fingernails—pieces of skin, like you said. We’ve already verified that it was Kane’s. She started to raise a fuss about her rights, but she came around. Of course that doesn’t say anything about Kane causing the heart attack. There’s no way to prove that Redman was so traumatized that her ticker failed her.”

  “Do you know when they had their fight, or what it was about?”

  “All we have to go on is what Kane tells us. She says they got into an argument the night before, which is convenient, I suppose. It’d be easier to see a connection between the fight and the heart attack if it had occurred just before Kane went to work the morning Redman died. And maybe it did. But no neighbor heard anything.”

  “And what about their argument?”

  “Same story. Kane says it was just a disagreement about her pulling her weight around the apartment. I guess Redman was neat, Kane was sloppy, and their odd-couple relationship finally blew up in their faces.”

  “I don’t buy that for a minute, Doug. I’d bet money that Kane thought Redman was enamored of another woman, challenged her, and it led to pushing, shoving, scratching. It probably got real nasty, ending in Redman’s heart attack. And I think it happened Wednesday morning.”

  “We’d never prove any of that, Carol,” Owens said.

  “Probably not. But I know the young woman I think Kane saw as her rival for Redman’s affection. And she’s pretty credible. It’s not my jurisdiction, and my hands are full of the Gerlach business—our Brae Loch opera murder. You’ll have to decide if it’s worth pursuing.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement. By the way, Kane vehemently denies writing that threatening note to Redman.”

  “I think I’d believe her on that one. Like I told you when we met in the apartment, that ‘remember Gerlach’ line doesn’t sound like Kane. She didn’t know much of anything about our Crooked Lake murder. Gerlach isn’t a name that’s likely to have popped into her mind if she wanted to threaten Mercedes. It’s my guess that the author of that note is someone who was involved in the opera over here. Lucky for him it looks like Redman’s death can’t be laid on him.”

  “Do you want to read the medical examiner’s report?”

  “No thanks. Your summary’s good enough for me. Thanks for fixing it, so I don’t have to worry about a two front murder investigation.”

  “You’re welcome, as always.”

  Carol filled Kevin in on what Owens had told her, or at least what he had not been able to figure out from overhearing one end of the conversation. They would like to have spent the rest of the morning dissecting the case, but Carol was anxious to get back to the office and demonstrate to her troops that she was still very much in charge of Cumberland County’s law enforcement team.

  Before she left, however, they had reached an agreement that they would have dinner at The Cedar Post and travel together to Rochester the following morning. Sean Carpenter would not welcome their visit.

  CHAPTER 47

  “Why so insistent on dinner here tonight?” Kevin asked as they took their seats at a corner table at The Cedar Post.

  “I thought you liked it,” Carol replied. “It’s the scene of some of our best evenings, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yes, but you seemed especially anxious to get away from the cottage. Getting tired of my cooking?”

  “Never. If you ever want a second career, you could try being a chef.”

  “Thanks but no thanks. By the way, do you realize that I’ve hardly ever had one of your meals? It’s always me or places like this.”

  “It’s called division of labor, Kevin. I work a long day while you swim and goof off. And maybe do a bit of writing every once in awhile. So you cook to even things out.”

  The banter went on for a couple of minutes until a waitress came by to take their order.

  “I’d love to try a recipe on you. Ever try calamari?” Carol said when the young woman moved on to another table.

  “Indeed I have. There’s a nice seafood place about two blocks from my apartment in the city. We should try it when you come down.”

  “Damn, I’d hoped I could expand your culinary horizons a bit.” Carol gave Kevin a big smile and looked across the room to where the waitress was waiting for the bartender to set up their beers. The bartender was Ginny Smith, and the fact that she was on duty was the reason Carol had been anxious to dine at The Post.

  “I’m going to put a couple of questions to Ginny,” she said, “as soon as the beer arrives.”

  When Carol got up to talk with Ginny, Kevin busied himself observing his fellow patrons. By the time she came back, his beer was gone and their steak sandwiches had arrived.

  “Dig in before it gets cold,” he said.

  “It was an interesting conversation. I got a pretty precise time as to when Gerlach and Conklin left after their lunch. More importantly, Ginny was pretty sure that Gerlach was drunk, almost out on his feet. She didn’t get a good look at them when they left, but she had the impression that Conklin was holding him up. Her report gave me an idea. What if Gerlach didn’t drive when he left here? What if he couldn’t? Suppose Conklin drove him to Brae Loch and—”

  “Tucked him into bed and strangled him.” Kevin finished her thought.

  “Maybe, maybe not. But what if Gerlach’s car is still here at The Post? We’ve been looking for it for a week. We know it isn’t at his house, and it doesn’t seem to be at the college. How about it never left here that day?”

  “But surely someone would have noticed that a car hadn’t been moved for days. Somebody would have complained.”

  “I don’t know. Their parking area is kinda strange. Some of it’s paved, then there’s that grass area out back, plus a couple of places beside the shed where they keep their cordwood. You’ve seen it. Bar’s open late, staff comes in and out at all hours. This isn’t a valet parking kind of restaurant.”

  “So let’s look,” Kevin said. “You hold the table and I’ll do it.”

  “Your steak will be cold. I suggest we eat and then go walk about.”

  “Sorry. I can’t put my curiosity on hold. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

  “Okay, then I’m coming with you. I’ll have the waitress hold the table and keep the steak warm.”

  They were gone only three minutes. Gerlach’s car was indeed at The Post, tucked away in a corner of the grass plot behind the restaurant. It was covered with a layer of dust and grass clippings that had been thrown up by a mower.

  Back at their table and digging into steaks that were not as rare as they had ordered, Carol and Kevin were discussing next steps.

  “I think it’s time to confront Conklin. Like tomorrow.”

  “Agreed,” Carol said. “We’ve got that appointment with Carpenter tomorrow morning. Glad I insisted it be ea
rly. We should be back by noon, which gives me plenty of time to talk with Conklin.”

  “Wait a minute,” Kevin said. “Are you saying that you want to see him alone? I’m going along to Rochester, why don’t I come with you when you see Conklin, too?”

  “It’s not like Carpenter. In his case, you’re the one who has the contact at the Met. You can sound knowledgeable about their recruitment practices, make Gerlach’s role sound convincing. But Conklin would just wonder why you’re with me.”

  “Let him wonder. I’d be your silent partner if you like, let you ask the questions.”

  “Are you kidding?” Carol asked, a hint of a smile on her face. “You wouldn’t be able to stay out of it. I know you too well.”

  They might be close to the end of the chase, and Kevin didn’t want to be left out.

  “Suppose I came with my mouth taped shut,” he said.

  “That would really have Conklin wondering what we were up to,” Carol said. “All right, you can keep me company. But remember, the way he sees it, I’ll be investigating Gerlach’s murder, and you’ll be a music teacher who tried to put on an opera. Let’s not confuse him.”

  That problem settled, Kevin asked about the car.

  “What are you going to do about Gerlach’s car?”

  “I’ll turn it over to Jack Grieves. He’s been spinning his wheels looking for it in the wrong places, so I’ll give him a chance to bring it in. I can’t imagine we’ll learn anything from it, but he can give it a thorough going over. He can pick it up tomorrow.”

  En route back to the cottage, Carol was wondering out loud whether Arthur Conklin had suddenly become her number-one suspect.

  “It’s likely he took Gerlach back to the college, and it’s likely that Gerlach was in no shape to defend himself. If Conklin wanted to kill him, he couldn’t have had a better opportunity.”

  “If he wanted to kill him,” Kevin said. “That’s a big if.”

  “I know. To be honest about it, I find it hard to believe that any of my so-called suspects have what looks like a compelling motive for killing Gerlach. I’ve disliked a lot of people in my life—well, at least a few. But I don’t remember ever considering killing any of them. What about you?”