Columbo: Grassy Knoll

by William Harrington

  “Ah, I sure have. Six or eight times.”

  “Dracula was given a line in that film,” she said. “He was confronting Dr. Van Helsing, who had just ascertained that the count was a vampire. And Dracula said something like this: ‘Now dat you know… vat you know… vat do you plan to do. Dr. Van Helsing?’ Do you see my point? What are you going to do to me, Columbo, now that you know what you know?”

  “Oh ma’am, what I found out—supposing it’s true—doesn’t seem to have much to do with the death of Mr. Drury. I didn’t go to Las Vegas to look into your personal life. I found that out sorta by accident. To tell ya the truth, ma’am, I’m sorry I heard about it. I’d rather not know.”

  “What you found out could hurt me very much if it got widely known.”

  Columbo nodded. “Oh, yeah. I wouldn’t want that to happen. It’s not information that’s useful to me.

  “Do you want an explanation?”

  “Ma’am, you don’t have to give me one.”

  “I want you to know. I trust you. Lieutenant Columbo.”

  “Ma’am— Maybe you shouldn’t. I am after all the police detective investigatin’ the murder of your former husband. I can’t say to you that the thought hasn’t crossed my mind that you might have somethin’ to do with it.”

  “Of course. You’ve said all along he had to have been killed by someone close to him, someone who had a card, someone who knew the house. I have to be on your short list. So, listen. Let me tell you something about me. You see, I am a compulsive gambler. I don’t have to explain what that is. I’ve always gambled, since I was a teenager. When I came to LA, I started going to Vegas. I settled on the Piping Rock after a while and started to do all my gambling there. Lieutenant… I loved it! I do love it! I’d give anything, almost, to be at a blackjack or craps table in Las Vegas. I’ve won. I’ve lost. Of course, in the long run most of us lose. I lost more than I could afford, and the house began to take my markers. After a few months, Philip Sclafani called me into his office and showed me all my markers. Lieutenant, I owed the house over sixty thousand dollars!”

  “That’s a lot of money, ma’am.”

  “The chief problem for Mr. Sclafani was that I was recently divorced. He’d authorized that much credit, supposing Paul would make good if he had to. Lieutenant Columbo… Paul didn’t even know about it! When we were divorced, I got a nice settlement, including this house which— Frankly, it was a house he bought to keep a girlfriend in, before he married me, and he’d kept it for a love nest. Anyway, I paid Mr. Sclafani half what I owed. He was nice about it, but he said I had to pay, that debts like that couldn’t be allowed to stand; people would get the idea they could tell the casinos to go to hell. He suggested I borrow from Paul. I couldn’t. Paul would have scorned me, might even have fired me. Well, he said, think about it. Let me know what you decide you can do.” She stopped.

  “I see,” said Columbo.

  “Out of my salary I could pay him five or six hundred a month. He said he’d accept that temporarily, but I’d have to do better. Lieutenant, he wasn’t even charging me interest, and even so it would have taken me five years to pay off at that rate. Well… if I’d been propositioned at the tables once, I’d been propositioned a hundred times. The next time a nice-looking older man propositioned me I negotiated a deal.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about this,” said Columbo. “You don’t have to go into details.”

  “I won’t. I handed the money over to Mr. Sclafani, didn’t tell him where I got it. I did it again. And again. By about February of this year I had paid my debt down to something like fifteen thousand. I’d surrendered every shred of dignity I ever had, but I was working my way out of the mess. By this time Tim was in love with me and had started to talk about marriage. He didn’t know what I was doing, of course. Didn’t guess. I couldn’t go on—I guess the term is ‘turning tricks’—and seeing Tim. I told Tim I owed Mr. Sclafani fifteen thousand. I told him why. He made me a loan of that much, provided I never go back to Las Vegas. I paid off Mr. Sclafani, and I’ve never been back to Las Vegas since.”

  Columbo nodded. A faint smile appeared. “All of this,” he said, “has got nothin’ to do with the death of Mr. Drury. And I’m glad to know it, ma’am. ’Cause I sure wouldn’t want to have all this come out in the news.”

  “I wouldn’t want the man I’m going to marry to know about it,” she said.

  “It was a terrible thing you had to do,” said Columbo.

  “I appreciate your understanding.”

  “Did you think the Sclafanis would have got rough?”

  “Probably only in the sense of making my indiscretions public—which is the worst thing they could do to me.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “Tim is very angry about the office being sealed. So is Charles Bell.”

  “Yeah,” said Columbo. “I can understand how they would be. So, uh… I expect I’d better be gettin’ on.” He stood. “Mrs. Columbo is makin’ spaghetti carbonara tonight. She can get upset if I don’t show up on time for somethin’ like that. You don’t need to get up. I know the way out. I’ll just leave my glass in the kitchen. And, uh, you don’t need to worry about me tellin’ the story. I’m just sorry it all had to happen.”

  Alicia swung her feet around and sat up, but she did not rise from the chaise. “It’s been a rough couple of years,” she said.

  “Yeah. You have my sympathy.”

  “I thought I’d be married to Paul Drury for the rest of my life, then—”

  “Oh yeah. That’s awful rough. And I bet ya still cared for the guy.”

  “Yes, sure. So— Well, good luck, Lieutenant. I hope you get it all straightened out soon.”

  “So do I,” said Columbo as he walked toward the back door of the house. “Uh… ah, say,” he said, turning. She had just turned to stretch out again on the chaise. “Maybe you can clear up a point for me. Little things, little details, get stuck in my head, and I have a hard time keeping my attention on the big issues. I’m sure it doesn’t make any difference, but—”

  “What?”

  “Well, ma’am, Mr. Giuseppe Sclafani, the old gentleman, talked about how he met you and what your eyes look like and so on. He also said he hadn’t been down from the penthouse since 1991. So, did you meet him up there, in the penthouse?”

  “Are you asking me if I had a relationship with that old man?” Alicia asked sharply.

  “Oh no, not at all, ma’am! No idea like that ever crossed my mind.”

  “The hell it didn’t,” she said. “Well, the answer is no. Hell no. I met with Philip Sclafani up there. Twice. I met the old man. Twice. Frankly, he wasn’t very cordial.”

  Columbo grinned. “He thought you wanted to marry his son.”

  Alicia softened and grinned. “He’s senile,” she said. “But I bet he was tough when he had all his brains.”

  “I bet he was. Well, thank you again. Thanks for the Scotch.”

  As Columbo left the house, he met Tim Edmonds coming up the walk.

  “Good evening, sir.”

  Tim shook his head. “Lieutenant,” he said. “How long is this going on? When do I get my office back? Frankly, I think your investigation is foundering, and you’re foundering.”

  Columbo tipped his head to one side. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Mr. Edmonds. It’s in the nature of the job. I just can’t do it so as to please everybody. I wish I could, sir. I don’t like to inconvenience people.”

  “You’re inconveniencing me very seriously.”

  “Well, I’ll expedite the examination of the office, so you can get back in as soon as possible.”

  “I would appreciate that,” said Tim, and he turned and strode toward the house.

  2

  Martha Zimmer was temporarily in charge of the Paul Drury Productions office. Columbo had told her to admit Karen Bergman and Leslie Whistler, Drury’s secretary, to the office. The three women were there when he arrived the next morning. They had
made a pot of coffee.

  “I’ve come across something interesting,” said Karen Bergman. “In the company records. It was Paul’s practice to pay travel expenses for some of the people who appeared on the show, but he only rarely paid an appearance fee. Even so, he was paying Professor John Trabue two thousand dollars a month. He began paying him in February. The checks are listed as being for consulting services. Also, there is one more. In March he sent Professor Trabue a check for one hundred eighty-five dollars. It’s marked ‘Expenses.’ It’s not travel expense. You can’t fly from Texas to California and back for one hundred eighty-five dollars. Besides, Professor Trabue was already a visiting professor here in Los Angeles in March. There’s no suggestion about what it was.”

  “There’s one sure way to find out,” said Columbo. “Ask Professor Trabue.”

  3

  He met with the professor in a small office just off a classroom. The old oak desk was scarred with cigarette bums and scratches, as were the three wooden armchairs. Shelves were crammed with books and files and loose papers. The professor sat comfortably behind his desk, not wearing academic tweed but a light brown suit. His eyeglasses were lightly tinted, green. He was not condescending to the rumpled detective who sat across his desk and was fumbling in the pockets of a wrinkled old raincoat, but he was plainly intensely interested in him.

  “Since you’re smokin’ a pipe, sir, maybe you won’t mind if I smoke a cigar.”

  The diminutive professor’s fixed smile broadened slightly, and he said, “Not at all. Lieutenant. I hope it’s a cheap cigar. My pipe tobacco is cheap, and I’m told it stinks.”

  “Y’ know,” said Columbo, “I’ve always been sorry this is a part of life that I missed. I mean, college. Mrs. Columbo, she takes courses at night, and I think she’s goin’ to get a degree sometime. Two of my kids graduated from college. But me, I went from high school to Korea and came back and joined the New York Police Department. All this kinda thing… the campus, the classrooms, the offices, is very interestin’ to me. Gotta match?”

  Professor Trabue shoved a package of paper matches across the desk. “It’s never too late. Lieutenant Columbo,” he said. “You could take classes, too.”

  “Well… I live with an odd schedule, y’ know. I never know where I’m gonna be when.”

  “On the other hand,” said the professor, “there is nothing magic about a college degree. Abraham Lincoln didn’t have one. Neither did Harry Truman.”

  “And neither did Sherlock Holmes,” said Columbo as he lit his cigar.

  “Good!” The professor laughed. “Well… lieutenant, if you hadn’t called this morning, I would have called you. I assumed you would be hard-pressed and would in your own good time inquire about what little I might be able to contribute to your investigation of the death of Paul Drury.”

  “What can you contribute, Professor?”

  “Very little. I’m afraid. But since you’ve come to see me, you must have something in mind.”

  “Well, goin’ through the corporate records we’ve come across some checks written to you.”

  “Exactly. I thought you’d ask about that. I was acting as a consultant to Paul Drury Productions. He had me on what lawyers call a retainer.”

  “Meanin’—?”

  Professor Trabue grinned. “Meaning he paid me whether I did any work or not. Actually, I was doing some work for him. You know, he was preparing a special show for the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy.”

  “So I understood.”

  “My job was to prove he was wrong in what he was planning to broadcast,” said the professor.

  “And what was that, sir?”

  “Frankly, it’s another Grassy Knoll theory. Paul had photographs showing two men on the Grassy Knoll, one of them holding a rifle. He had the pictures computer enhanced. Do you know what that is. Lieutenant?”

  “I have heard of it, yes, but suppose you explain it to me. Professor.”

  “I don’t understand it exactly myself,” said Professor Trabue, “but I’ve seen a wonderful demonstration of the technique. There are photographs of Abraham Lincoln delivering his second inaugural address. Those pictures were taken from a distance. You can see which figure is the President, but you couldn’t recognize him. Computer enhancement of those photographs produce portraits of Lincoln as he looked that day. They also produce a portrait of John Wilkes Booth, standing not far from him.”

  “Let’s see,” said Columbo. “If I remember, it’s got to do with the laws of probability.”

  “That’s right. Like this—” The professor took a pencil and began to make dots on a sheet of paper. “Suppose each dot represents a grain of silver on a photographic negative, enlarged as far as optical enlarging can go: thousands of times. Suppose they look like this—”

  He pointed at his line of dots: It s fair to suppose, by the mathematical laws of probability, that with the missing information the line of dots would look like this—”

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  “And that,” he concluded, “is the photographic representation of a line like this—”

  “Dots like this—”

  .

  . .

  .

  . .

  .

  .

  “—almost certainly represent an egg shape, roughly. The technique was developed for the enhancement of aerial reconnaissance photographs.”

  “And Mr. Drury—?”

  “Had a computer lab apply the technique to some photographs taken on Dealey Plaza on the day of the assassination. The enhanced photographs show two men standing on the Grassy Knoll. One has a rifle.”

  “Where’d he get these pictures?”

  “Because he was a popular television personality, people sent him pictures, letters, notes, and so on, that they had never shown to the police or FBI. Very few of the items he received were of any value, but he did have these two photographs of the Grassy Knoll, and he had them computer enhanced.”

  “Where are those pictures, sir?” asked Columbo.

  “Locked up in a vault,” said Professor Trabue. “Paul kept the most important of his Kennedy materials in a vault. He’d come to the conclusion that they were dangerous. I mean—”

  “Are you sayin’, sir, that somebody might have killed him to prevent his runnin’ the thirtieth-anniversary show and broadcasting TV images of those photos?”

  “I imagine you have a better theory than that. Lieutenant. It’s just an idea.”

  “You know somebody erased his disks. All his information is gone.”

  “Not the Kennedy stuff,” said the professor. “It’s in the vault with the pictures. He told me that was where it was.”

  “Diskettes?”

  “That’s right. He ran some of them for me, right here in this office, on his laptop computer.”

  “What about a script for the show? Did he have a script on the computer?”

  “It would have been a little premature for that. We had working notes.”

  “Do you have a copy of those notes. Professor?”

  “No. Only my notes, not his.”

  “Well, okay. These two men in the enhanced photo. Who are they, do you know?”

  “No. Maybe we could find out by going through his data base. We’ll need the diskettes.”

  “Which are in a vault.”

  Professor Trabue nodded.

  Columbo shrugged and stood. “Well, okay, sir. I guess I know what we have to do. I won’t take any more of your time. I may call on you again, though. You’ve been more than helpful.”

  Professor Trabue stood and reached to shake hands with the detective. He looked a little confused.

  “Oh. There is one other thing, sir,” said Columbo, pausing in the door. “Your checks from Paul Drury Productions were for two thousand apiece. Except one. It was for one hundred eighty-five dollars. What was that for, sir? Can ya tell me?” The professor nodded. “A year’s rental of the
vault,” he said. “I rented it in my name, as Paul asked me to do. He thought it would be more secure if it were not in his name.”

  Columbo ran his hand across his tousled hair. He pulled out his cigar and all but crushed it in his hand. “You rented the vault? In your name? So you know where it is?”

  “Exactly. I wondered if you wouldn’t ask.”

  4

  “Mustard and relish,” said Columbo to Martha Zimmer and Geraldo Anselmo, the computer technician. “Mort knows how to do ’em. There aren’t that many hotdog vendors in town that know how to do it right. Look at that! Just look at that.” Martha and Geraldo looked at Columbo’s hotdogs and at theirs. His were burned. Much of the skin was black. “Some of these guys actually boil their hotdogs, can ya believe it? Ya never get as good as Coney Island hots, not anywhere but Coney Island, but Mort does come close. And look at this mustard! Yellow. Not that awful brown stuff. Oh, well… the brown stuff is good on salami and stuff like that, but for hotdogs— Hey! Those people bought me country-club lunches lately, but nothin’ was as good as this.”

  They were in Pershing Square, where Martha had sat on a bench and held places for them while the two men bought hotdogs, chips, and orange soda from Mort. A little way from them a ragged zealot was haranguing the crowd about something or other: no one could really tell; certainly no one cared.

  “Geraldo, I need to talk with ya about those two computers in Mr. Drury’s office.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Geraldo apprehensively.

  “Okay. Now. What I need to know is, are the machines damaged? I mean, like tryin’ to bring Frankenstein back to life, can they be made to work again?”

  “I don’t see why not,” said Geraldo.

  “That virus that screwed ’em up. Is it still in there?”