Columbo: Grassy Knoll

by William Harrington

  “That bad, huh?” Columbo asked, squinting toward the target.

  “Well, let’s say that you need practice with the Beretta. All your practice has been with your Colt, huh?”

  “Yeah. Right. All the practice I’ve had was with the Colt.”

  Sergeant Brittigan looked at the report form for a moment, then began to scribble. “What I’m writing here. Lieutenant, is— ‘Lieutenant Columbo was unable to fire his qualifying rounds with his personal sidearm, since it appears to have a cracked cylinder. Firing a 9mm Beretta, which he had never fired before, he nearly qualified. When his own sidearm is repaired he can fire qualifying rounds again.’ I’ll sign that, and you can hand it over to Captain Sczciegel.”

  “Well, thank ya, Sergeant. Thank you very much. Uh…? Nearly qualified.’ I imagine that means 1 didn’t shoot myself in the foot.”

  Brittigan grinned. “Something like that. Come back and practice, Lieutenant. I’ll work with you. You’ll requalify. I promise you will.”

  Columbo took the sergeant’s hand and shook it. “I’ll do that. I’ll be back first chance I get.”

  “Let’s stop by the house on Hollyridge Road for a minute on the way back,” said Martha. “I came across something interesting yesterday.”

  4

  A uniformed officer continued to guard the house, six days after the murder of Paul Drury. In only that many days the place had taken on an odor of abandonment. The rooms somehow seemed not just rooms in a house temporarily deserted by an owner who would return but subtly yet distinctly those of a house permanently abandoned. Columbo would have sworn it would be noticed even by someone who did not know the owner was dead.

  He remembered the same thing of his parents’ home. Returning after both of them were gone, he had entered rooms where silence seemed normal, where the air had not moved for days: rooms heavy with death.

  Martha sensed the impact the place had on Columbo, and for several minutes she maintained a studied silence while she waited for him to speak.

  “Whatta ya wanta show me, Martha?”

  In the living room, she went to a bookshelf and pulled down a volume—

  AN AMERICAN LIFE: BIOGRAPHY OF A PATRIOT

  THE LIFE AND TIMES OF AUSTIN BELL

  By Foster Cummings,

  Historian

  The book had not been published. It had been printed by a Dallas printer and bound by a Dallas binder.

  Inside the front cover, it was inscribed—“Paul. May this biography of my late father be an inspiration to you as it has been to me. A man is fortunate if he is loved by his father. If his father was a great man, he is triply fortunate. Charles Bell.”

  Columbo flipped through the pages. The book had been written when its subject was still alive. In fact, it contained a foreword in which Austin Bell thanked the author for his honesty and accuracy.

  “Look at his affiliations,” said Martha.

  In the beginning of the book there was a list of the organizations to which Austin Bell belonged, together with a list of causes to which he claimed he had been a major contributor. The organizations included the John Birch Society and the Minutemen. He claimed to have been a major contributor to the Campus Crusade for Christ, Young Americans for Freedom, and the Oliver North Defense Fund.

  “Go to page 185,” said Martha.

  Columbo did and read—

  On November 17, 1963, Austin Bell sent the following telegram to the White House:

 

  URGE THAT THE PRESIDENT OMIT

  DALLAS FROM HIS TEXAS ITINERARY.

  MANY IN DALLAS BELIEVE

  PRESIDENT KENNEDY A TRAITOR

  AND COMMUNIST. HIS VISIT HERE

  MAY RESULT IN VIOLENCE. RIOTS

  ETC. WOULD BE EMBARRASSMENT

  TO HIM, TO STATE, AND CITY. TRUE

  AMERICANS IN THIS CITY DO NOT WANT HIM.

  * * *

  AUSTIN BELL,

  PRESIDENT

  BELL EXPLORATIONS

  * * *

  If President Kennedy and/or his staff had heeded the patriotic warning of Austin Bell, the tragedy that followed less than a week later could have been avoided. The arrogance of the Kennedy Administration in sending their leader into Dallas that November was the immediate cause of the death of the President. The record demonstrates that Austin Bell did all he could to protect the President but was ignored.

  “The whole book may be worth reading,” said Martha. “I skimmed through and came up with that.”

  “Worth reading if we think Mr. Drury was killed because of something he was going to broadcast in November. Meaning something he was going to broadcast about the Kennedy assassination. Also, are you suggesting that this man Bell—?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything, Columbo. You might draw some sort of inference from that book, and you might not.”

  “I’ll take it home for tonight,” said Columbo.

  5

  Van Nuys Airport has two parallel runways, one of them eight thousand feet long and so suitable for landings by jet aircraft. As the sun set on Tuesday evening, a Falcon jet settled down through an overcast that had developed late in the afternoon and touched wheels to the longer runway. Charles Bell waited in his Cadillac convertible, and when the small jet came to a stop on the ramp not far from where he was parked, he hurried out of the car and strode to the Falcon. The steps were let down, and Bell climbed into the jet.

  “Compagno,” said Phil Sclafani, extending his hand.

  Bell didn’t know what compagno meant but guessed it meant friend or partner, and he shook hands.

  The copilot came from the front of the plane, carrying a tray of hors d’oeuvres covered with Saran Wrap. He asked what the gentlemen would like to drink.

  “Why don’t you and Bill take a walk around the airport and stretch your legs,” said Sclafani. “The gentleman and I have a couple things to talk about.”

  The copilot nodded, and shortly he and the pilot left the Falcon. Sclafani opened the bar that was located under one of the front seats and pulled out bottles, glasses, and ice. He mixed martinis.

  “So what’s the problem?” Sclafani asked.

  “This,” said Bell. He reached into the pocket of his light-blue sports jacket and pulled out a newspaper clipping. “I thought we agreed—”

  “Papa didn’t agree,” said Sclafani. “Papa doesn’t like to take chances.”

  Bell scowled over the clipping. It was from the Los Angeles Times and told that the body of a German immigrant named Klaus Hunzeicker, twenty-two years old, had washed ashore in Malaga Cove. An autopsy on the body, which had been nibbled on by fish, had discovered a gunshot wound at the base of the skull. The German had been murdered.

  “No one would ever have made the connection,” said Bell.

  “No one will now,” said Sclafani. “You can be sure of it. No one will ever make a connection.”

  The newspaper story went on to say that Hunzeicker, who had come to California from Leipzig only a year ago, had been a computer systems analyst and programmer.

  “The kid didn’t even know—”

  “What’d you do with his virus?”

  Bell hesitated for a moment, then said, “I’ve got it. Securely hidden. A thing like that is damned valuable.”

  “So. We’re even. I said we wouldn’t get rid of him, and you said you’d destroy his program. Now… I want you to make us uneven again.”

  “You mean destroy the virus,” said Bell. “Dammit. It’s worth— It’s a technological masterpiece.”

  “You’re not dealing with fools!” snarled Sclafani. “That LAPD detective—”

  “All right. I’ll destroy it,” Bell conceded grudgingly.

  “For sure. For damned sure.”

  Bell nodded.

  “Yeah. The next question is—”

  “No!”

  “Maybe. If she talks… "

  “She wouldn’t dare! After all, she’s the one who pulled the trigger.”

  “Papa doesn�
��t like the idea that we spend the rest of our lives wondering if she keeps quiet. If Columbo hadn’t got so close it might have been something else, but—”

  “He’s not so close.”

  “He’s closer than you think. He’s got her fingered as a hooker. He wants to know why she was a hooker. If he decides to blow the story, let it go in the papers that she was a hooker— She’ll be a psycho case.”

  “Phil! What the hell you talkin' about?"

  “Suppose she had an accident,” said Sclafani.

  Fifteen

  1

  “I’ve got it in my head,” Columbo said to Martha as he watched her make coffee in the Paul Drury Productions offices on Wednesday morning, “that Drury’s murder has somethin’ to do with the murder of President Kennedy.”

  “To prevent him from broadcasting the thirtieth-anniversary show,” she said.

  “Right. What’s the significance of those two pictures he went to the trouble of having computer enlarged? Who were the two guys on the knoll? I got the idea that Drury knew who they were and was gonna reveal it on the November show.”

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” said Martha, “but I wasn’t born when Kennedy was assassinated.”

  “I was. I remember that day. I remember just where I was and what I was doin’ when I heard about it. There are three things I can remember where I was and what I was doin’ when I heard about them. One was Pearl Harbor. Then there was the death of President Roosevelt. Then the assassination of President Kennedy. Anyway… tell ya somethin’ else. We were members of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and Mrs. Columbo ordered a copy of the Warren Commission Report. I got it out last night and kinda sketched a simplified map of the place where it happened. Here.”

  Martha stared at Columbo’s rough sketch map of Dealey Plaza. She remembered now that she had seen maps of the place before, also an aerial photo, but Columbo had sketched in the essentials.

  “That map is laid out with directions normal,” he said. “In other words, north is up at the top, south is down at the bottom, west at the left, and east at the right. The motorcade came west on Main Street. Main is the traditional parade street in Dallas because it’s got tall buildings and more people can see the parade, from the windows. It’s the street they used for President Roosevelt’s motorcade through Dallas in 1936. It seemed like a nice bow to tradition, to follow the route President Roosevelt had used. So, anyway, the motorcade came west on Main, then turned north onto Houston Street and made a sharp left turn into Elm Street.”

  “Why didn’t they just keep going west on Main Street?” Martha asked. “It looks like the most direct way.”

  Columbo traced her suggested route on the map with his finger. “Because after they went under the underpass—here—they had to get on the ramp to the northbound lanes of the Stemmons Freeway, which is a right turn off Elm. And you can’t do that from Main Street. There’s a concrete barrier that prevents it. Right there. See?”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Off Main Street, that’d be a right turn across the Elm Street traffic. See? Right there. They don’t allow that. It’d be dangerous. Traffic headed for the Stemmons Freeway has to come down Elm. Not just the presidential motorcade. All traffic.”

  “A person with a camera, standing in the triangular park between Elm and Main—” She tapped the triangle with one finger. “And—”

  “And trying to take pictures of the motorcade,” Columbo interrupted, “would have been takin’ pictures of the Grassy Knoll in the background— unconsciously, not interested in the background, but gettin’ it in the pictures anyway. The pictures this photographer took didn’t look like much. They were probably just snapshot-size prints. Even enlarging them didn’t show the rifle. It took the computer enhancement to do that.”

  “A stroke of luck that they got them enhanced,” said Martha.

  “A stroke of luck that the photographer sent them to Drury,” said Columbo. “Not just luck that Drury had them enhanced. He’d have recognized that if there really was firing from the Grassy Knoll, these pictures might include some evidence of it.”

  “Geraldo has the computers up and running. I brought copies of the diskettes, also copies of the enhanced photographs.”

  “Is he copying the diskettes onto the hard disks?”

  “Yes. He says it will take all morning.”

  “In that case, I’ve got some other things to do. I’ll be calling on Jessica O’Neil again.”

  2

  “I hope I’m not makin’ a nuisance of myself, ma’am,” said Columbo.

  “Not at all. Lieutenant,” said Jessica O’Neil. “Not at all. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, I’d like to show you a coupla pictures.”

  “I’m sitting on the deck again. Come on back. Actually, now that I think of it— You’re not a nuisance at all, but if you want to compensate, how about doing something for me?”

  “What can I do for you, ma’am?”

  “To start with, call me Jessie. Being called ‘ma’am’ makes me feel like the proprietor of the Long Branch Saloon. But besides that, let me sketch you while we talk. You have an interesting face, Lieutenant. I might want to try a painting of you.”

  “Well, that’s very flatterin’, ma’am… Ah, Jessie. Sure. Sketch away.”

  She picked up a sketch pad and a bundle of pencils as they walked through the house. The morning smog blocked the view from her deck. It was not a heavy, irritating smog, but it was enough that they could not see the beaches. Columbo sat down, and she stared at him for a moment and began to sketch.

  He took a moment to reappraise her, before he began to talk. He confirmed the judgment he had made before: that though she was no great beauty, she was a natural beauty, not one contrived by a cosmetologist. She was the kind of woman he most appreciated. Like most California women, she was enthralled with the effect of the sun on her skin, and she was wearing a flower-patterned bikini.

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d look at two photos I got and tell me if they’re the ones Mr. Drury showed you.”

  She took from his hand the envelope containing copies of the two computer-enhanced prints. She studied them for a moment, then said, “He only showed me one. I’m reasonably sure this is the one. As for the other, I never saw it before.”

  “And he told you that was the solution to the mystery of the Kennedy assassination.”

  “Well… he said these two men, with that rifle, could have killed Kennedy.”

  “The important question is, who were those two men? Did he give you any idea who they were?” Jessica O’Neil shook her head. “I got the impression he didn’t know, that he figured when he broadcast the pictures on his show someone would come forth with the identification. That was the whole point, that millions of people would see the pictures and someone would know.”

  The maid came out from the kitchen, bringing Bloody Marys with celery sticks. Jessica O’Neil hadn’t asked if he wanted one. She assumed. It was mid-morning and time for a light drink, if you were a person who drank all day. The vodka had been poured sparingly, and Columbo sipped twice before he realized he was drinking anything but a glass of tomato juice.

  “It’s been thirty years since those pictures were taken,” he said. “And only one was taken from the front. They’re not the world’s greatest images anyway. Wasn’t he depending on anything else?”

  “On his great big computer library,” she said. “Yeah. But if you’re going to search in a library, computer or otherwise, ya gotta have a name to start with. That’s the start, huh? A name.”

  “Or a description,” she said.

  “Right. But look at those two guys. How would you start to describe them that would make them out any different from any other two guys? One is tall and has dark hair. The other is short and has light hair. Big description!”

  “Sorry, Lieutenant,” said Jessica O’Neil. “I’m afraid I can’t be of any more help. It’s really outside my field.”


  “Yeah. Well, ma’— Jessie. I really gotta go. Thank ya for your time and the drink. You have enough time to get any kind of sketch?”

  She turned the pad and let him see her sketch. The likeness, in quick, deft lines, was perfect: rumpled hair, smile-wrinkles around his eyes, the smile that somehow managed to be a smile even when the comers of his mouth turned down, the collar and lapels of his raincoat. She smiled modestly, but Columbo grinned.

  “My! That’s amazin’! You got a real talent there. I sure wish Mrs. Columbo could see that.”

  “After I try doing a painting from it, I’ll send it along,” said Jessica O’Neil.

  “I’ll appreciate that.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.”

  “Actually… actually, you’ve been more help than you know,” he said. “You just gave me what may turn out to be a great idea, and I’m obliged.”

  3

  He met the artist Diana Williams in her studio on the top floor of a big old brick house. A segment of the roof had been replaced by a slanting glass skylight, affording the room the northern sunlight artists say is best for their work. Mrs. Williams was in her fifties. Her hair was steel-gray. The frames of her spectacles were gray. She was a broad-shouldered, strong-looking woman dressed in a white T-shirt and blue jeans. She was barefoot. On a platform directly under the sunlight a teenage girl stood nude. She was the model for a painting on Mrs. Williams’s easel, and she held her pose since the artist continued to work.

  “Columbo, I’d rather drink Drano than eat a bowl of that wretched fiery chili you profess to think is delicious. If LAPD is too cheap to buy a woman a tuna salad sandwich at a lunch counter—”

  “Mrs. Williams, I’ll gladly buy you a tuna sandwich.”

  “With half a bottle of champagne,” she said.

  “Well…”

  Diana Williams slapped Columbo on the arm and laughed. “Whatta ya want for free this time?” she asked.