“Not necessarily, if you think about it,” said Jessica O’Neil. “Austin Bell would have hated the Castro regime as an ideological matter—and he would have hated it more because of the loss of his investment in the Riviera.”
“That makes sense.”
“I told Paul something of what my father thought. Not all of it. Paul just shrugged it off. ‘Money is money,’ he said. Meaning he didn’t care where Charles Bell got the money he invested in Paul Drury Productions.”
“Did Mr. Drury confide in you, ma’am?”
She grinned. “Paul was a pillow talker. Especially when he thought he could make an impression. Look, Paul knew I had money. He knew my father was scornful of him. He told me things he thought would make him look good. He told me he was going to break the mystery of the Kennedy assassination. Thirty years after it happened, he would broadcast the greatest television show of his career and reveal who really killed President Kennedy.”
“How’d he figure he was gonna do that?” asked Columbo.
“Computer technology. He said he already had in his computers’ memories the greatest existing library of information on the assassination. And he was going to get more. With his computers he could match this fact to that fact and compare and compare… until he built a case that would prove who really killed John F. Kennedy.”
“Did you tell your father that?”
“Yes, and my father said Paul was an egomaniacal nut.”
“What’d you think. Miss O’Neil?”
“I’m more computer-oriented than my father. Generation gap, you know. I didn’t think it was impossible Paul could put together a case, by using his computers to compare and compare… the way he said.”
“Well, we have to forget what he might have done that way,” said Columbo. “His computer library got somehow erased. Permanently. Beyond recovery. Every bit of it.”
“That’s what I read in the papers.”
“If there was somebody shaking in their boots, they can stop shakin’,” said Columbo.
“Not necessarily,” said Jessica O’Neil.
“Not necessarily…?”
“They have to find the pictures,” she said.
“Whatta you mean?”
“He had pictures. And they weren’t in his computers. I don’t understand this exactly, but when you put images—pictures instead of words—into computer memory, it involves something called pixels. I guess they’re dots, you know, like in a newspaper engraving. Well, each one of those pixels uses computer memory, and it adds up to so much memory that storing more than a few pictures in a computer is not very practical—not in the present state of the technology. So his pictures were not in the computers.”
“Then where were they?” asked Columbo.
“Ask me another question first,” said Jessica O’Neil. “Ask me how I know.”
“How do you know?”
“He knew I was skeptical that he could solve the Kennedy problem. He knew my father was scornful. One night he showed me two photographs taken on Dealey Plaza. ‘See that man?’ he said. ‘See that guy with the rifle? That man could have killed Kennedy.’ It was clear enough. A man with a rifle, standing beside a tree. I mean, who knows if that’s the man who shot the President, rather than Oswald up in the School Book Depository building? But there was a man with a rifle standing beside a tree, with another man standing beside him, as if he were keeping lookout for the rifleman. I’ve since looked at the published pictures. Those men had to be standing on what they call the Grassy Knoll.”
“So where are the pictures?” Columbo demanded.
“In the house, I supposed. In a safe. In a safe at the office. In a safe-deposit box in a bank. Buried in a box in the yard.”
“Are you suggesting that something about the assassination of President Kennedy could be the motive for the murder of Paul Drury, thirty years later?”
“Look at it this way, Lieutenant. The assassination has become a multimillion-dollar industry. Books. Movies. Television series. Suppose Paul was in possession of absolute evidence, proving who did kill Kennedy? The millions would dry up. Nobody wants to know who killed John F. Kennedy anymore. If we ever find out for sure, it destroys the industry.”
“But he showed you pictures? Did he tell you where he got these pictures?”
“He was on the air once a month if not more, exploiting his own niche in the industry. He got endless publicity. People sent him letters, diaries, clippings… and pictures. The world is full of people who think television personalities are the court of last resort; if you can just convince some TV character that something is true, you’ve proved it’s true. That was The Paul Drury Show. He got evidence and faked evidence. Part of his formula was exposing faked evidence. You ever watch The Paul Drury Show, Lieutenant Columbo?”
“Frankly, ma’am, I never watched it when I could avoid it. Mrs. Columbo liked it, especially his Kennedy shows, so I did see some of them. But on the whole the kind of show he did was not to my taste. Anyway, I do appreciate your time. I won’t take any more of it.”
2
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I appreciate your time. Look, there is something you can do for me in the Drury murder case.”
Columbo was on the telephone, talking to the office of the district attorney, specifically to Assistant District Attorney Jonathan Lugar.
“It’s possible… I don’t know for sure, but it’s possible that Mr. Drury had a safe-deposit box in some bank. The problem is, we don’t know what bank. I wondered if that’s not somethin’ the DA’s office can find out faster’n we can at LAPD. The information could nail the murderer of Mr. Paul Drury. Yeah. Well, I sure do appreciate your cooperation.”
3
Martha Zimmer sweated as she faced Columbo just before five o’clock. “Thank God I’m not nursing my child,” she said. “What kind of schedule could I keep?”
Columbo smiled at her. “Should I apologize because I trust you more than other detectives?” he asked.
“Columbo…”
“Well I do, Martha. Find anythin’?”
They stood in the living room of the Paul Drury house on Hollyridge Road. She was in charge of a team of uniformed officers who had been searching the premises for a hidden safe or a safe-deposit box. Two of them had metal detectors.
Martha Zimmer shook her head. “You want we should empty the swimming pool and check under the floor of the pool?”
“No, we won’t need to go that far. And you don’t need to stay any longer. I want this house locked up with the alarm system set. Tell the precinct to run a car by here every half hour all night, at irregular intervals. I gotta rush on down to La Cienega. People are waiting for me.”
4
“How is it going. Lieutenant Columbo?” asked Alicia Graham Drury. “The newspapers say you have leads.”
She stood talking with him in the reception area of the Paul Drury office. It was closed, and the doors were locked, but he had knocked and had been admitted. A few cartons sat around. The staff had already begun to disassemble the office.
“Yeah, yeah. We have leads, ma’am. Probably most of them are worthless, but that’s the way you get to the bottom of these things: by checkin’ out all the leads.”
“Do the leads suggest who killed Paul?” Columbo made a swaying gesture with his right hand. “Sort of,” he said.
Alicia was wearing faded blue jeans and a blue cotton shirt. If she had gone into mourning yesterday, that had lasted less than twenty-four hours. She was smoking a cigarette. She flipped her hand in a gesture of nervousness or impatience, and ash fell to the floor. “You are not, I imagine, ready to say where your leads are taking you.”
“Oh no, ma’am. No. The leads wouldn’t support a charge. Not yet.”
“Well, good luck, Lieutenant. Is there anything more I can do for you?”
“No, ma’am. I came by to see some other people. I don’t wanta bother you any more than I have to.”
“Well… you can use Paul’s
office again. If you need anything more from me, I’ll be here a few more minutes.”
She opened the double doors into Drury’s office. Columbo stepped in, again impressed by the lavish office. “Oh, Mrs. Drury,” he said, turning around to speak to her before she left the reception area. “There is one other thing. Nothing important. Routine question. Do you happen to know if Mr. Drury had a safe-deposit box?”
“I’d like to know,” she said. “We haven’t found his will. I called Bill McCrory today and asked him. He doesn’t know. What’s more, he doesn’t have the will. What bearing does it have on anything?”
“None that I can think of,” said Columbo. “Just part of the routine. Y’ know, a big part of my work is routine.”
She nodded and walked out of the reception area. Columbo went into Drury’s office and sat down. In a moment Drury’s secretary came in.
“You’re Miss Whistler, aren’t you?” Columbo asked.
Leslie Whistler was an attractive redhead, stocky and busty, wearing a white blouse and a black skirt. She nodded.
“I have a few routine questions. Miss Whistler. I’d appreciate it if you’d think of my questions and your answers as confidential. First, did Mr. Drury have a safe in the office?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“No locked cabinet where he could keep confidential things?”
“No, sir.”
“All his confidential information was kept on the disks in his two computers?”
“So far as I know, Lieutenant. Of course, you had to know the password to get into his computers.”
“Did anybody besides Mr. Drury know that password?”
“Quite a few people did. Researchers…”
“And when those disks were erased, everything was lost?”
Leslie Whistler nodded. “Mr. Drury said more than once that people could break into this office and corrupt paper files. In other words, someone could steal papers, substitute other papers, or even pour kerosene into the file cabinets and bum up everything before the fire department could get here. He said computer files were just as secure as paper files. Nothing was safe, he said. No kind of records were absolutely secure against tampering or destruction.”
“What about photographs?”
“I don’t know what he did with those. He had some. We do have file cabinets, and we’ve been through everything. The pictures aren’t in them.”
“Meaning that he kept some records somewhere outside the office.”
“At home, I suppose,” she said. “I understand the house has been sealed by the police. When we get in, we’ll find the pictures.”
“Probably. Okay, Miss Whistler, I wanta ask you to listen to a tape.”
Columbo fished out of one of the deep pockets of his raincoat a small tape recorder/player, furnished him at headquarters. It would play the tape from McCrory’s answering machine. He held up a finger and pressed the play button.
"Hi. This is Paul. Make a point of calling me first thing in the ay-em, please. Kind of important.”
Leslie Whistler put both hands over her mouth. Her face reddened.
“Is that his voice. Miss Whistler?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“Sounds right? Sounds like something he’d say?”
“Lieutenant, if I’ve heard him say exactly that one time. I’ve heard him say it fifty times. If he wasn’t coming in the next morning, he’d usually tell me, saying he was going to work at home the next day. Lots of mornings I’d come in and find a message like that on my recorder. He’d got some idea in the night and wanted me to type it up first thing in the morning. That’s how he’d say it: ‘Call me in the ay-em.’ It’s eerie!”
“You don’t hear anything wrong with it?”
She shook her head. “Play it again, I—”
"Hi. This is Paul. Make a point of calling me first thing in the ay-em, please. Kind of important.”
She sighed. “If I’ve heard those exact words once. I’ve heard them fifty times.”
Columbo nodded. “Right. ‘Call me first thing in the ay-em.’ It was almost like a formula with him, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was.”
“But that’s all he’d say? He didn’t say what was important?”
“Actually,” she said, “he usually added something, like ‘I want to send a letter to Humphries.’ In the morning I’d call him and ask him, ‘What do you want to say in a letter to Humphries?’ That’d remind him of what he’d had in mind, and he’d dictate something or give me some kind of instructions.”
“And his voice sounds normal? I mean, on this tape. His voice sounds normal?”
She nodded.
“Okay, Miss Whistler. I’m gonna ask you to keep our conversation strictly confidential. Right?”
“Sure. If you say so.”
Columbo’s final interview at the Drury office that afternoon was with Geraldo Anselmo, the computer technician who had yesterday discovered that all the disks in the two computers had been wiped. The technician was a very young man, somber, and a little frightened.
“Let me make sure I understand this, Mr. Anselmo. You say you can recover information that has just been erased?”
Anselmo nodded. “When you order a computer to erase a file—that is, a body of data—the computer usually doesn’t really erase it. It eliminates it from the disk directory, making it invisible, and it eliminates it from the FAT, the table that tells the computer what space on the disk is available for writing new data. You can’t retrieve the file, and the computer has been told to write over it whenever it needs space for new data. But until it is written over, the data is still there, and there are programs that can recover it. If, coming in here Thursday morning, I’d found that the disks had been erased, I could have recovered almost everything. But this wasn’t done that way. This was a wipedisk. The disks had been totally blanked.”
“How could that have been done, Mr. Anselmo?”
“Three ways,” said Anselmo. “First, someone could have sat down at Mr. Drury’s desk and done it. Second, someone could have done it from another office, since the computers under Mr. Drury’s desk were networked—that is, cabled to terminals in other offices. Not every researcher could get to all the information, since access was controlled by passwords, but half a dozen other offices had some access. Third, a virus could have been planted in the computers. The computers were linked to outside information sources by telephone. Someone outside could have sent in a virus.”
“Tell me about this virus,” said Columbo.
“It would have been an outlaw instruction code, probably just a little bit of it, hiding on one of the disks. It could have been set to activate on June 3, 1993, or it could have been set to wait for a signal sent in by telephone. Either way, the virus went active during the night and wiped the disks. In the process, it wiped itself, too, so we can’t know what it looked like.”
“Does it take a brilliant technician to do this?” asked Columbo.
“Not very. A computer illiterate couldn’t do it, but thousands and thousands of technicians could.”
“Hackers,” said Columbo.
“No. Someone who did this thing, with a motive for doing it.”
“Aren’t there protections against it?”
“Yes, sir. Two protections. One is to run an antivirus program periodically. I ran ours last Saturday. It is possible for a very ingenious virus to get past antivirus programs, but ours said the machines were clean. Of course, the second is to back up everything, either on tape or other disks. I’m afraid Mr. Drury didn’t do that. He didn’t want multiple copies of his proprietary information lying around. In fact the work stations in the other offices were disabled so far as copying was concerned. People could read from the files but couldn’t copy anything.”
“Took an awful risk, didn’t he?”
“Yes, sir. I’m afraid he did.”
5
After dinner, while Mrs. Columbo was in what seemed likely to be an
hour-long telephone conversation with their daughter in San Diego, Columbo took Dog in the Peugeot and drove out to Blocker Beach. Holding eager and happy Dog on a leash, he walked along the road above the beach and watched the hordes of kids frolicking in the sand and in the water.
Nine
1
Paul Drury was buried late on Saturday morning. In point of fact, his body was laid to rest in a vault in a mausoleum. The nonsectarian funeral service was private, but the men and women of the news media crowded the little chapel at the cemetery and then shoved their way forward toward the door of the mausoleum.
“Bastards!” muttered Charles Bell.
Besides Bell, the chief mourners were:
* * *
—Alicia Graham Drury, ex-wife of the deceased, dressed in mourning black and clinging to the arm of
—Tim Edmonds, producer of the now-defunct television show that had made the dead man rich and famous, wearing dark blue and glancing nervously at frequent intervals at
—Marvin Goldschmidt, director, who seemed genuinely distressed, eyes misty, and who had given his arm, whether to steady her or himself, to
—Karen Bergman, executive assistant, wearing a tight black skirt and a white blouse, weeping quietly and from time to time fixing hostile stares on
—Bobby Angela, country-and-western singer wearing black: black ski pants and a black cashmere sweater, short-sleeved, and, finally
—Jessica O’Neil, dressed in a dark green linen suit, her eyes covered by big sunglasses.
* * *
The redheaded secretary was there, crying openly. William McCrory, Drury’s lawyer, stood throughout the funeral, looking miserable and for once wearing a lawyerly suit. Geraldo Anselmo, the computer technician, hung on the rear of the group, apparently wondering if he should have come.
No member of a family appeared. The news media would wonder if there was a family.
Columbo: Grassy Knoll Page 11