Columbo: Grassy Knoll

by William Harrington

  “The chef who does that for you doesn’t work this late. You can have it for dinner tomorrow night.”

  Giuseppe Sclafani spoke to Columbo. “My mother made farsumagru palermitano," he said. “Do you know what it is, Lieutenant Columbo?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s a stuffed beef roll, with veal and prosciutto, tomatoes and onions, and chopped hard-boiled eggs.”

  “I was not born in Castellammare del Golfo but in San Vito lo Capo. Close enough. When I was last at home, in 1934, my mother spent an entire day making farsumagru for the whole family. The tables were set up in the garden in the evening, and we ate under the lanterns.”

  “What we’re having for supper tonight. Papa, is roast beef and a salad.”

  “Ahh. Well, I am not hungry. When I’ve finished my cigar, I will go to bed. What could my son know about the Drury murder. Lieutenant?”

  “Nothin’ about the murder directly, sir. I just wanted to ask him a question or two about a coupla suspects.”

  “Why Menninger, Lieutenant?” asked Philip Sclafani.

  “Because of his daughter. Y’ see, she had one of the plastic cards that shut off the alarm system and opened the locks at Drury’s house, and Drury was killed by somebody who had a card. What’s more, she’s got no alibi.”

  “Why would she want Drury dead?”

  “That’s the point. That’s what I wanted to ask you. Can you think of any motive she might have had?”

  “Virgil had a motive,” said Sclafani. “A grudge. I am sure you know what the grudge is about.” Columbo nodded.

  “Alicia… I don’t know what her motive could have been. Maybe Drury lent her the money to pay her gambling debt and was pressing her for it.” Giuseppe Sclafani put his half-smoked cigar aside in an ashtray. “I am pleased to have met you, Lieutenant,” he said, “but I am not interested in this conversation and so am going to bed. Good luck to you.”

  “Thank you, sir. It’s been great meetin’ you.” Cronin accompanied the elderly man until he was almost out of the room, at which point another man, apparently a valet, came and offered his arm.

  The supper was brought in. It was what Sclafani had said it would be: rare slices of cold roast beef with sliced tomatoes, sliced onions, some relishes and condiments, and bread. It was on a wheeled table, and Columbo and Sclafani sat over it alone.

  “My father dislikes Alicia Drury,” said Sclafani. “That’s why he calls her a hooker. He got it in his head I was sleeping with her and was going to marry her. She’s been married and divorced twice, she’s not Catholic, and she’s not Italian. The idea of my marrying her made him very angry.”

  Columbo nodded. “I can understand that. Parents usually want their children to—”

  “Papa took a strong dislike to Alicia. I’ve heard him call her worse than hooker.”

  “Is it possible she was a hooker? He’s not the first person to suggest it.”

  Sclafani shrugged. “She didn’t give her marker for all the money she lost at the tables. Maybe she was picking up a little on the side. I don’t know. 1 didn’t want to know. I’d have had to put her out of the hotel if I thought so. The Gaming Commission is strict about letting hookers work the casinos.”

  “Well… cheers, sir,” said Columbo, saluting with his wine glass.

  They ate sparingly. A postmidnight supper had not been the best of ideas. Columbo was tired and anxious to get back to his motel and to bed. They finished.

  “It’s been very, very kind of ya,” Columbo said as he walked across the foyer to the open and waiting elevator. “Please give your father my best wishes. He’s a legend.”

  “Okay, Lieutenant. If there’s anything I can do for you, let me know.”

  Columbo stepped into the elevator. He grinned and lifted his hand. Then abruptly he frowned and stepped out of the elevator. “Oh, there is one little thing I ought to ask. Little point… kinda bothers me. Your father’s description of Alicia Drury is awfully definite, sir. Where’d he meet her? You say he hasn’t been out of the penthouse since 1991. Does that mean she was up here?”

  Sclafani sighed. “Papa has a vivid imagination, Lieutenant. I imagine he read someplace about the woman’s cold eyes and how she stares at people, and he incorporated that into his impression of her. He’s seen plenty of pictures of her. He’s seen her on television a hundred times. If you asked him directly if he’d met her, he might say he has. But I promise you he never did.”

  “Well, thank ya. That clears up that. Thank ya again for all your kindness, sir. Good night.”

  3

  Before he left his motel room in the morning, Columbo placed a call home.

  “Ah, yeah. It’s a great place. We oughta come over here sometime. We oughta come over here and stay a coupla nights in one of the big places, see a great show. We can drive. Flyin’s too hard on a person. It gave me an upset stomach. I didn’t get to bed last night until… ah, I guess it was close to two o’clock. An’ you know what? Nothin’ had slowed down. The streets were full of people. It’s like they say: twenty-four hours a day. I was offered a great supper last night, but I couldn’t eat too much; I was too beat. Yeah, it’s goin’ okay. I’ll catch a flight sometime later today, I’m pretty sure. Should be home for dinner. If anything gets in the way, I’ll call. Hugs for everybody. See ya.”

  By chance he got the same waitress for breakfast he’d had for his mid-afternoon lunch yesterday. “Hard-boiled eggs? You live on hard-boiled eggs?” she asked.

  “Well, I like ’em for breakfast,” said Columbo. “Yesterday I had them to settle my stomach. And some black coffee strong enough to melt the spoon. ’Kay?”

  “Decaf?”

  “Any spare caffeine ya got left over from the decaf other people are drinkin’, give it to me.”

  He left the motel a little after nine. He wore his raincoat this morning.

  A taxi dropped him at Caesars Palace. As he had told his wife an hour before, time of day meant little or nothing in Las Vegas. Neither did it make any difference that this was Sunday morning. The casino hotel was as active as it had been twelve hours before. He decided not to go to the desk and ask for the room number of Henry Sanders. The desk would not give a guest’s room number, maybe not even if he showed identification, and he didn’t want to alert anyone to who he was. He walked into the casino. He had come out ten dollars ahead in the casino at Piping Rock, so he went to the cashiers and bought a hundred dollars’ worth of five-dollar chips.

  This was different. No miniskirted legs were displayed under glass tabletops at Caesars. The amount of money circulating was far greater here than it had been last night at Piping Rock. He went to a blackjack table and began to play. The security men were on the lookout for people who didn’t play. They wouldn’t interfere with them. They just watched them. By playing he satisfied them, and they would by and large ignore him—to the extent they could ignore a tousled man in a rumpled raincoat. For a little while he was able to keep even with the house. Then in a few minutes he was down thirty dollars. Players who were down three hundred or three thousand smiled condescendingly as he walked away from the table.

  Okay. It was all right. A short, squat man in a black vested suit walked in, bought chips, and walked toward a craps table.

  “Uh, excuse me, sir. Are you Mr. Henry Sanders from Los Angeles?”

  “Right. That’s me. Why?”

  “Lieutenant Columbo, LAPD, Homicide. I wonder if you and I could talk for two or three minutes?”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Oh, no problem for you, sir. Just tryin’ to check out a little detail that’s come up in the course of an investigation and thought you might be able to help out. Won’t take you five minutes.”

  Henry Sanders glanced around. “All right. We can sit down over here. What you got in mind?” Before they could sit down, an officious man, obviously house security, blustered up. “Is this man bothering you, sir?” he asked Sanders.

  “No, no. Friend of mine. No problem.” Colum
bo watched the man retreat, obviously still suspicious. “That’s right, sir,” he assured Sanders. “No problem.”

  “Okay. What do you want to talk about, Lieutenant?”

  “I’m sure you’re aware of the fact, sir, that Mr. Paul Drury was murdered last Wednesday night—”

  “Uh-oh. I figured this’d come up.”

  “Sir?”

  “What was my relationship with Alicia Graham —Alicia Drury? When I saw he’d been killed, I figured this question would come up sooner or later.”

  “All right, sir,” said Columbo. “What was your relationship with Mrs. Drury?”

  Sanders licked his lips. “Wanta drink. Lieutenant? We can pop in the bar.”

  “A little early for me, sir.”

  “Well, come on with me. You can have coffee.”

  They walked into a tiny bar just off the casino, where gamblers could retire for a few minutes to ponder their strategy. Columbo ordered coffee as Sanders had suggested. The rotund little gambler ordered a Bloody Mary.

  “I could, uh… I could decline to answer your questions,” said Sanders. “You’re outside your jurisdiction. Lieutenant. Besides, I could decline to answer anybody’s questions until I consult with a lawyer.”

  “All that is very true, sir,” said Columbo apologetically. “That’s very true. I’m sorry if I’m a nuisance to you. I’m not tryin’ to make out you’ve done anything at all wrong. I’m just a poor workin’ detective, tryin’ to clear up points in his record.”

  “To start with, I didn’t bring her to Las Vegas, Lieutenant. I found her here.”

  “You talking about the old-fashioned—?”

  “Transporting a woman across a state line,” said Sanders.

  “Oh no, sir. Nobody suggests you transported the lady anywhere.”

  “Well, I didn’t. I was staying at the Piping Rock, gambling there. You see, Lieutenant, I love to gamble. Over the years I may have lost a hundred thousand, maybe two hundred, but if it’s a two-hundred-thousand loss. I’ve had a lot more than two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of fun. Some men like to go to Europe and trudge through the art galleries, some to buy expensive treasures. Some will spend ten or twenty thousand a crack for the opportunity to hunt or fish in some spectacular place. I know a man who spent twenty thousand to be allowed to accompany an expedition toward the South Pole—and they didn’t make it there. I like to gamble. You know what business I’m in, Lieutenant?”

  “No, sir. I don’t.”

  “I sell wire, Lieutenant. I guess I’m just about the biggest wholesaler of wire in the country. Electrical wire. Telephone wire. Electronics wire. Hell, I even sell barbed wire for fences. Would you believe I’ve got an inventory of over a hundred thousand different kinds of wire?”

  “That’s hard to imagine, sir,” said Columbo, frowning and turning down the corners of his mouth as if it really were hard to envision a hundred thousand different types of wire.

  “I came back from the war in Korea. They were still selling what was called war surplus then. I bought some stuff, opened a store. And pretty soon I decided the future was in wire. Do you have any idea how many miles of wire are in a space shuttle? The talk is all about chips and circuit boards. Well, it’s true we don’t hook tubes and resistors and capacitors together with wire, the way we used to do in radio and television sets. But what those chips and boards do still has to be sent out to perform their functions… over wire, mostly. I’ve made ten fortunes in wire.”

  “That’s fascinatin’,” said Columbo.

  “No, it isn’t. It’s boring as hell. Like a lot of businessmen, I have to find some way to make life worth living. Alicia. All right. Whatta you figure the relationship was?”

  “I’d rather you told me, if you don’t mind, sir.”

  “I bought her services as a prostitute,” said Sanders. He drew a breath and blew a sigh. “I couldn’t imagine she was one. But she was. And— My God, Lieutenant! My wife had been dead for seven years, and I’d been without a woman in bed since she died. And then suddenly I find out that this… television personality that I’d seen on TV for years and admired for years was available— But, Jesus Christ, it didn’t have anything to do with the death of Paul Drury. In fact, I haven’t seen Alicia for six or eight months.”

  “Would you mind telling me how much you paid for her services, sir?”

  “A thousand dollars a night,” said Sanders. “Plus dinner and a show, champagne from room service. All that. She wasn’t cheap. But—”

  “You weren’t bored when you were with her,” said Columbo, nodding, communicating sympathy and understanding. “And you looked forward to the next time.”

  “Exactly.”

  “How did you find out she was available?”

  “She came to me in the casino. It took me a little while to figure out what she was saying.”

  “How many times were you with her, Mr. Sanders?”

  “Six times. Then suddenly, about the first of April, she stopped coming to Las Vegas. I telephoned her at KWLF, and she would not return my calls. I felt like a fool.”

  “Why did you feel like a fool, sir?”

  “Because I was a fool. The last time I was with her, I asked her to marry me.”

  Columbo nodded. “Well, I’m sorry to hear you were embarrassed, sir. Please understand that I won’t embarrass you. I can’t think of any reason to bother you again.”

  “You are a gentleman. Lieutenant.”

  “I try to be, sir. It isn’t always easy in my business.”

  Sanders swallowed the last of his Bloody Mary. They got up from the table.

  “I guess there’s one other thing I oughta ask you, sir,” said Columbo. “I notice you’re here, not at the Piping Rock. Is there any particular reason for that?”

  Sanders scowled. “I never saw her anywhere but at the Piping Rock,” he said. “I don’t want to run into her accidentally. Besides—I can be a bitter and suspicious man. Lieutenant. I began to wonder if she hadn’t been a shill for the Sclafanis. The casinos use women that way, you know.”

  4

  Lieutenant Bud Murphy of the LVPD had offered to drive Columbo to the airport.

  “It’s possible,” he said in the car. “She wouldn’t be the first woman who signed on to pay off a gambling debt by selling herself. Alicia Graham… Alicia Drury. Sure, she’d be worth a thousand a night in this market. A celebrity woman is worth as much as her celebrity, to some of the high rollers.”

  “The question is,” said Columbo, “do the casinos use them to keep the high rollers in the house?”

  “It’s not unheard of,” said Murphy. “The penal-

  ties for doing it are severe, but how are you going to prove it? Alicia Graham Drury would be small peanuts in this market. She’d be worth a lot more than a showgirl, not worth anything like a featured performer on one of the big stages. I suppose she’d be worth her thou. Yeah, I suppose she would at that. Easy.”

  “It’d take a long time to work off a big debt at a thousand a night,” said Columbo. “Particularly when she was only in Vegas on weekends.”

  “It doesn’t make much sense, does it?” asked Murphy. “But I’ve seen worse.”

  Twelve

  1

  Columbo stopped at his office on Monday morning.

  On his desk he found a telephone message from Karen Bergman. He called her, and she said she would like to see him. She didn’t want to talk on the telephone. He met her in a drugstore on La Cienega Boulevard, where she waited for him at the lunch counter, drinking a cup of coffee and munching on a cheese Danish. Once again she was wearing the white blouse and tight, short black skirt that identified her.

  “I appreciate your coming. Lieutenant,” she said when he sat down beside her. “I don’t trust the office telephones anymore. In fact, you never could be sure who was listening. Even Paul himself sometimes listened in on the lines.”

  “Was that the way it was?”

  “It was never a friendly littl
e office,” she said.

  “Coffee? There was always a certain degree of hostility, always a certain amount of suspicion.”

  “Yeah, coffee,” he said to the counter girl. “I wondered about that. Hostility. What, jealousy?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. Tension. It had nothing to do with the divorce. Or at least I don’t think it did.”

  “No?”

  “No. Alicia didn’t care what Paul did. And I don’t think he cared what she did. The thing is, you know, Tim fell madly in love with her. I suppose he was before she and Paul were divorced. Anyway, the man is one hundred percent totally mad about her. And she is a manipulative woman. She plays Tim like a puppet on a string. Paul frustrated her. She couldn’t manipulate him.”

  “Tim…?”

  “Tim could have killed Paul. He hated him.”

  “Why?”

  “Business reasons, partly. Mostly because he thought Paul had abused Alicia: dumped her.”

  “Miss Bergman…? don’t think you called me to tell me stuff like this.”

  “No. I found out something. Bill McCrory asked me to go through Paul’s bills, checkbook, and credit-card accounts, to try to get some idea of what he owed, what bills have to be paid somehow. He kept most of that stuff in the office, not at home, so it wasn’t hard to get a rough idea. I was scanning his VISA account and came across something interesting. Last month he bought four boxes of three-and-a-half-inch microdiskettes. Floppies… y’ know? That’s forty diskettes. Looking around the office, I couldn’t find forty diskettes. I found about six. I ran back through his bills for the past two years and found that he’d bought more than two hundred microdiskettes since 1991. That’s an awful lot of diskettes, and there are only like six in the office.”

  “Does that mean he kept copies of what was on the computer hard disks?” asked Columbo. “Does that mean that wipedisk deal didn’t really destroy his archives?”

  “That’s a real possibility. It means he wasn’t as big a fool as we thought he was,” she said. “Isn’t that what we thought, Lieutenant? That he was a fool to have kept everything on those hard disks, even if he did have two and so had redundancy.”