“Too easy? Well, maybe so, maybe so.”
Alicia Drury dragged hard on her cigarette, then crushed it in an ashtray—having gotten only four or five such deep, hard drags from it. “Just as a matter of information, Lieutenant Columbo,” she said crisply, “the divorce between me and Paul was friendly. We decided we’d made a mistake. We didn’t have a big fight, and we didn’t try to ruin each other in court. You can ask anyone. Paul made me a generous settlement, kept me on as assistant producer, and continued to promote my career.”
“Ma’am, I didn’t ask about your personal life.”
“But now you know, and you can check. If you want to know who had a card that controlled his alarms and locks, I suggest you ask Karen Bergman. He gave his girlfriends cards.”
“Miss Bergman didn’t kill him, ma’am.”
“How can you be so sure of that?”
Columbo shook his head. “She’d have had to climb on a stool or a stepladder. Miss Bergman is too short to have fired the shot through the brain at the angle the shot took.”
Alicia stared at him for a long moment, then nodded. “Then maybe you should talk to Bobby Angela. Her relationship didn’t work out so well.” Columbo pulled his notebook from his raincoat pocket. For a moment his face was blank, and then he frowned and said, “Bobby Angela? You mean the country-and-western singer?”
“The same. Bobby Angela. Quite a kid. Lieutenant.”
“She was on the Drury show,” he said, making a note.
“Right. Accusing her father of incest. She and three others that night. One of the worst shows we ever did. Sleazy. Paul usually wouldn’t descend to that. He said it was a big social problem.”
“So what was the relationship?”
“Stormy,” said Alicia. “And it broke up with ugly words. Tabloid stuff. If she had a card, I bet she didn’t hand it back to him the way I did mine.” Columbo turned down the corners of his mouth and nodded. He thrust the pen he’d been using back in its holder on the desk. “I sure do appreciate your suggesting this line of inquiry,” he said. “I mean, if nothin’ comes of it, still I’ll have got to meet Bobby Angela. Wait’ll I tell Mrs. Columbo about that!”
“I hope it’s helpful. Lieutenant.”
“I bet it will be, ma’am. And I won’t trouble you for more of your time right now. I’m sure grateful.” Alicia rose and went to the door of the office. “Anything else I can do, just call,” she said.
Columbo stood respectfully. “Well… actually, there is just one little thing,” he said. “Doesn’t amount to anything. Just a matter of making the record complete, y’ understand.”
“Yes, Lieutenant,” said Alicia, now impatient. “Uh, well… do you like to gamble, ma’am?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” she asked acerbically.
“Oh, nothin’, I don’t think. Just tryin’ to get all the facts in line. So… do you, in fact, do some gambling?”
“I make an occasional trip to Las Vegas,” she said coldly.
“Las Vegas. Just an occasional trip.”
“Just an occasional trip. Lieutenant.”
“Yeah… well, I can understand that. I play pool. Play a little nine-ball now and then, for a dollar a rack. A little adventure, what y’ call. Relaxes the nerves, doesn’t it? Ever lose more than you could afford, ma’am?”
“I can’t afford to lose any money, Lieutenant, so anything I lose I can’t afford. Okay?”
“Sure. That’s the way it is with me, too. Mrs. Columbo, she gets real upset if I lose ten dollars at nine-ball. I can understand that. I sure can understand that.”
“Anything else, Lieutenant?”
“No… ’Course, you never had to leave Vegas owin’ any money.”
“Of course not. Those people want too much interest.”
“Right.”
Six
1
“Do you mind if I ask you a question?” asked Bobby Angela. “Why in the world are you wearing that raincoat?”
“That’s a very good question, ma’am,” said Columbo. He glanced around. He had caught up with the famous country-and-western singer beside a hotel swimming pool, where she had just finished modeling for a photographer for Playboy, and was now tanning in a white bikini and sipping a gin and tonic. In the middle of a group of people wearing nothing but swimming clothes—some of them the skimpiest imaginable—he was a curious sight. “Y’ see, I carry a lot of stuff in my pockets, like my notebook and pencil and cigars and— Well, it’s a lot of trouble to transfer all that stuff over to my other pockets. Line of least resistance, y’ might say. Yeah, that’s what my wife says of me: that I like to take the line of least resistance.”
The singer smiled. He knew she was only nineteen years old, but it was not easy to believe that. She was womanly, not girlish. Her black hair was cut short and styled to curl under her ears and along her upper cheeks. Her eyes were brown. She wore dramatic dark-red lipstick. Her legs were long and slender.
“I’ve never before had the honor of a visit by a homicide detective,” she said. “You want my alibi for last night?”
“Well… not necessarily,” said Columbo. “Of course, if you have one, it wouldn’t hurt anything.”
Bobby Angela raised her finger and summoned a waiter. “What would you like to drink, Lieutenant?”
“Technically, I’m on duty—”
“What would you drink if you weren’t?”
“Maybe a beer.”
“Maybe a Scotch?”
“Well, ma’am… in fact, I do like Scotch. Bourbon, too. In fact, I—”
“A Chivas on the rocks for my friend,” she said to the waiter. “And let’s do this gin and tonic again.”
Columbo sat on the lower part of a chaise longue. He moved to an aluminum-and-vinyl armchair. “My,” he said, “this here’s a nice pool. Inviting. I wish I had some swim trunks with me.”
“They have paper ones,” said Bobby Angela. “Wear once, throw away.”
“Well, uh… maybe not this afternoon. Uh, you did know Mr. Drury?”
“Intimately. He was a real bastard. And I don’t have an alibi and can’t prove I didn’t kill him.”
“Did you have one of those cards that work his alarm and door locks?”
“I have a card. You want it?”
“Let’s go back to what you said, miss. You said he was a real bastard.”
“An ego, Lieutenant. He didn’t think he was God. He thought God was inferior to him. He thought he could snap his fingers and God would do what he said. Make it rain. Send thunder. He was not a nice man, Lieutenant Columbo. I didn’t kill him, but I’m not going to tell you I’m sorry he’s dead.”
“You say you’ve got no alibi. Where were you when he was killed?”
“When was he killed?”
“That’s a good question. Let’s say between ten o’clock and twelve-thirty.”
“I have no alibi for that time. I was at home. I went to bed about eleven.”
Columbo reached into his pocket, felt the stub of a cigar, then decided that lighting a cigar here at the side of this pool would only add another element to the incongruity of his appearance. “I don’t have you on the list of suspects,” he said. “Should I?” The young woman drew a deep breath. “He was abusive,” she said. “When I was seeing him, I was eighteen years old. If my father knew what he did to me, he’d have killed him—in spite of what my father did to me. On the other hand, I suppose I should admit Paul helped me make it in show biz.”
“I take it your relationship with him was after he was divorced from Mrs. Drury.”
“Last year. It was just last year. You want me to tell you about it?”
“Well, uh… you don’t have to go into the details, if you know what I mean.”
“Okay. I met him in Las Vegas. I was doing a gig there, in a bar at the Piping Rock Hotel, not out on the big stage. You ever catch my act? Anyway, Paul came in, listened through a coupla songs, and sent up his card. Was I surpris
ed! Would I see him after the show? Paul Drury! Of course I’d see him. I guessed what he’d want, and he probably guessed what I’d want.”
“Was Mr. Drury a gambler? Did he bet much on the tables?”
Bobby Angela shook her head. “He just wasn’t much interested in it. I saw him play a few hands of blackjack once or twice. He just wasn’t much interested in gambling. Well… in another way, he was interested. He was thinking about doing a show, exposing the way the odds are rigged against the suckers. Somebody talked him out of doing it.”
“Who talked him out of it?”
“Alicia. She argued that not one percent of the people of the United States ever gamble in a casino and the other ninety-nine percent could care less what the odds on the tables are. She was still his assistant producer, you know, and he still accepted her judgment on a lot of things.”
“Would you say she killed that idea?”
“Right. He told me she did. It bothered me, because I didn’t think Paul would come to Vegas anymore, and I was going to be working there for a while yet. But he did come, on weekends. She’d come with him. It was odd. They’d come in together, just like they were still husband and wife, but as soon as they were in the hotel they’d separate and wouldn’t see each other till they caught the same plane back.”
“Did she gamble?”
“I—”
Bobby Angela paused while a waiter brought their drinks. Columbo glanced around the pool. He recognized three celebrities and guessed there were several more. He guessed a woman across the pool was Barbra Streisand, though he knew he could be wrong. A striking, tall, gray, deeply wrinkled man looked to him like James Arness but maybe wasn’t. The crowd was a mix of people who came here to be recognized and people who came to recognize them: luminaries and would-be luminaries and tourists come to gawk. Both kinds stared at him. He’d flashed his shield to get in here, and the word was around, apparently, that Bobby Angela was being questioned by a Los Angeles police detective.
“He said she gambled. I never saw her do it. He said she gambled too much and lost more than she could afford.”
“Is that so? She lost more than she could afford? That’s interestin’.”
“Is she a suspect?”
“Well… Miss, y’ gotta understand that in a thing like this everybody’s a suspect. If I ask questions about somebody, it doesn’t mean that person’s particularly a suspect, more than anybody else.”
Columbo took a sip of his Scotch. It was the dark, smoky kind of Scotch, the kind he liked. “I understand you play the guitar when you sing.”
She reached into a copious round bag sitting beside the table and pulled out a video cartridge. “There,” she said. “You can catch my act.”
“Well, thank you! That’s very generous of you. I’ll watch it tonight. Mrs. Columbo’ll love it, too.”
“The outfit I was wearing in Vegas is what you see on that tape,” she said. “Shiny little black vinyl shorts. See-through blouse. Net stockings. High heels.”
“Yeah? An’ you play the guitar?”
“I play the guitar.”
“Gettin’ back to Mrs. Drury. Not that she’s the lead suspect or anything. But if she didn’t gamble, what was she doin’ in Las Vegas those weekends when Mr. Drury was with you?”
“She had friends there,” said Bobby Angela. “I’d see her sometimes at dinner with a man.”
“Same man? Always the same man?”
“Never the same man twice. Always a high roller, if you know what I mean.”
“Are you sayin’ she was pickin’ up guys? Or lettin’ herself get picked up?”
“That’s what Paul thought. He didn’t like it. She had one particular friend. I never saw them at dinner together, but I sometimes saw them together during the day. Phil Sclafani. Everybody knew him. Paul didn’t like it that his ex-wife was seeing Phil Sclafani, either.”
“Sclafani? Who is he?”
“You know how stories get around. There are all kinds of stories about who he is. He lives in the penthouse of the Piping Rock, where I was working. His father lives up there, too. Actually, it’s the old man’s penthouse. His father is Joe Sclafani. Of course, the story is that… they’re connected.”
“Mob connected?”
“Don’t quote me on it. I mean, I can’t afford to have hostility from those people.”
“But you think Mrs. Drury is a good friend of this Phil Sclafani?”
“1 don’t know how good friends they were. If they were—Well, if they were lovers, they didn’t look it. When I’d see them at lunch together, she usually looked miserable.”
“That’s very helpful, Miss Angela,” said Columbo. He took another sip of Scotch. “I appreciate it.”
2
“Fancy seeing you, Columbo. You got something you want to talk about?”
Columbo dragged fire from a match into his cigar. In Ben Palermo’s office he had no hesitation about it. Ben was an FBI agent. “I figure when I need information, the thing to do is go see the man that prob’ly has it.”
“Or a fellow New Yorker, hey?”
“Well, New York boys do make the best cops. The worst crooks, too.”
The FBI provided its agents with starkly utilitarian offices, just like the LAPD provided its officers —which was one reason why Columbo went to his office only when he couldn’t avoid it. He didn’t like gray steel office furniture any better than he liked office work.
“Who you got in mind?”
“Whatta ya know about a coupla guys in Las Vegas who call themselves Sclafani? There’s Joe Sclafani, apparently, and Phil Sclafani.”
“The Sclafani Family,” said Ben.
“They’re the Sclafani Family?”
“What’s left of it. Joe Sclafani is of course Giuseppe Sclafani. He’s gotta be eighty-five. He was at the Apalachin meet in 1957. Philip is his eldest son. He’s sixty or so.”
“When I was a cop in New York, Giuseppe Sclafani was a legend,” said Columbo. “He’s still alive and livin’ in a penthouse in Vegas?”
“The penthouse of the Piping Rock Hotel— named, incidentally, for Meyer Lansky’s casino at Saratoga Springs.”
“Giuseppe Sclafani…” Columbo muttered, shaking his head. “Still alive! The only one. Carlo Gambino, Albert Anastasia, Joe Profaci, Vito Genovese, Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello… all dead. Hey, Ben! Fill me in on the Sclafanis, huh? They’d already left New York when I was on the job there. Gimme a briefin’, will ya?”
Ben Palermo leaned back in his chair. He was Columbo’s age but looked older. His yellow hair, always thin, was all but gone except above his ears and around the back of his neck. His complexion was pink. He wore silver-framed glasses.
“Let’s look at Giuseppe Sclafani’s curriculum vitae backward,” said Palermo. “He’s been in Las Vegas since about 1964, and he’s built up a highly profitable business there. He had to start small, because he’d lost six fortunes in Cuba. He’d built a casino hotel in Havana, using his own money and some from investors, plus some from the Batista government. In October 1960, the Castro government confiscated all the American hotels, including Giuseppe Sclafani’s and Meyer Lansky’s.”
‘‘It broke Meyer Lansky,” said Columbo. “I mean, both ways: money and health.”
“But not Joe Sclafani,” said Palermo. “It just made him mad. When he came to Las Vegas he made his presence known by having a couple of guys killed. It was understood he had sanction for it, too: from The Commission. Why not? Here was a guy who’d been at Apalachin. People stepped aside and made room for him in Vegas.”
“I remember stories about what he did in New York,” said Columbo.
“If the stories say he killed a lot of people, our files say the contrary. He was a friend of Meyer Lansky. It was Lansky that got him involved in Havana. Before that, Sclafani was a partner in two of Lansky’s casino operations: one at Saratoga Springs and one in Broward County, Florida. He and Lansky shared a business philosophy: that the
best way to make a dishonest dollar was in gambling, avoiding violence and publicity, and Lansky wouldn’t work with a man who didn’t accept that philosophy. Except for a few girls that worked the casinos, they weren’t involved in prostitution. The Sclafanis weren’t involved in loan-sharking, which requires leg-breaking to collect. They weren’t in drugs. They were in the waterfronts rackets: corrupt unions, skimming shipments. They took a percentage off what came in through Brooklyn. They broke a few heads when they had to, but it wasn’t the Sclafani way.”
“He’s a Sicilian, as I remember,” said Columbo. “Well, I said I’d give you his biography backward. He was brought to this country from Sicily in 1924, by Salvatore Maranzano.”
“The Castellammarese connection,” said Columbo.
“Right. Maranzano brought young Sicilians over here to form a cadre of tough young guys absolutely loyal to him. Sclafani delivered whiskey for him and collected the money. For a while. Then Maranzano recognized in Giuseppe Sclafani a young fellow too smart to use as nothing but an errand boy. He promoted him, gave him a territory. Of course… two things happened. Maranzano was murdered in 1931, and Prohibition was repealed in 1933. Sclafani made his peace with Luciano and was allowed to look for new businesses. That’s when he made his connection with Meyer Lansky.”
“What about this Piping Rock operation? Is it legit?”
“As legit as any Las Vegas casino. You don’t have to cheat to make money out of a gambling casino. The odds take care of that. You want to tell me why you’re asking about all this?”
“The Paul Drury murder,” said Columbo. “The ex-wife seems to be a close friend of Phil Sclafani. Somebody told me to look out for a mob connection, and then somebody else told me she’s a buddy of Sclafani.”
“The Vegas office has Sclafani under surveillance,” said Palermo. “We’d still like to have the ass of a guy who was at Apalachin, who’s a member of The Commission. We don’t give up easy, and for ten years we’ve been looking for a way to make a conspiracy charge stick. We know pretty much everybody he sees. I’ll ask the Vegas office to run through their surveillance reports to see if the name Alicia Drury comes up. Any others?”
Columbo: Grassy Knoll Page 8