“Anything a man ever said can come back to haunt him,” said Columbo. “What I’d like to see, if you can find it, ma’am, is a draft of the script for the November show, or any notes for that script. Think you could find that?”
Karen Bergman nodded. “We’ll use a different program to look for that,” she said.
While she worked to change programs and search for the script or notes, Columbo took his notebook from his raincoat pocket, then fumbled in his pockets for a pencil, and finally used the ballpoint pen from the desk set to write a note.
“I’m looking at his Kennedy assassination files,” she said after a while. “There are plenty of scripts, but the dates on them tell us they’re the scripts for shows already done. Ninety-five percent of what’s in here is source material.”
“Ma’am, do you have any idea what Mr. Drury was planning to reveal in November?”
“No. He was pretty closemouthed about what his plans were, particularly if he thought a show was important. I suspect he was afraid somebody would leak information and another show would get in ahead of us.”
Columbo walked out from behind the desk and went to one of the couches, where he had placed an envelope containing the enhanced photographs. He brought them to her and asked, “Have you ever seen these before, ma’am?”
“Yes. He thought they were very important. I was afraid they were lost.”
“Do you have any idea who those two men there might be?”
She shook her head.
“Do you think he knew?”
Karen Bergman drew a deep breath. “I don’t think he did. I think he intended to broadcast the enhanced pictures and let the whole country see them, hoping then someone would come forward and identify those two men.”
“Miss Bergman, I gotta ask you a favor. Could you come back here this evening? I gotta pick up some other information that might be helpful. Besides, I’d like to have Professor Trabue with us when we do some more searching in those data bases.”
“What time?” she asked.
“Say seven. That way you’ll have time to have dinner before you come back.”
4
“I thought I had till tomorrow,” said Diana Williams.
“Somethin’s come up,” said Columbo.
“Cecilia, you might as well get dressed. This man has no patience.”
While the model dressed and Diana Williams cleaned some brushes, Columbo studied the unfinished painting. He had always admired the woman’s work, though in some ways it had always puzzled him. The girl on the model stand had had no greenish and angular shadows, but the girl on the canvas did. Somehow, even so, the odd shadows in the odd color gave the painted image of the girl’s body a more three-dimensional character than she had when you looked at her standing there. That was what distinguished an artist, he supposed. In some way, the girl on the canvas was more real than the real girl. He resolved to ask Mrs. Columbo what she thought of that, first chance he had.
Diana Williams stood at a work table, where she had already pinned the enhanced photograph of the two men on the Grassy Knoll. She put a finger on the man with the rifle and began a sketch of the face she saw. It went as Columbo had hoped. With her artist’s eye she saw more than he did. She had studied anatomy and knew that one of the lines made by the enhancement was, though logical, impossible; the bone beneath the skin dictated the line, and the one she drew was the possible line.
“I’d guess our rifleman was in his twenties,” she said as she sketched. “From the way he stands, I’d also guess he hasn’t gained twenty pounds in thirty years. Something about these tall fellows; they tend not to go to flesh.”
“How would he change?” Columbo asked.
“Well… you want him as he is now, not as he was then, I suppose. Okay. Let’s suppose he did gain a little weight. Likely you’d see some evidence of that along here.” She rounded the line under the jaw. “And he’d get some lines around his mouth, like this. With age his eyelids would loosen a bit. So… and his hair— That was black, from the look of the photo. It’d be a little lighter by now, and he’d probably wear it very different, not brush-cut. We can assume he didn’t lose his hair, but it probably backed up a little. Beginning to look like anybody you know, Columbo?”
“Put a pair of glasses on him, ma’am. Goggleshaped with silver frames.”
“Like so?”
Columbo grinned. “Aw right! Mrs. Williams, you are a wonderful artist!”
She smiled wryly and shook her head. “Let’s see what we can do with your other man,” she said. “Much less distinctive, this one. Shorter. A rounder face. Let’s suppose he was in his twenties. He was a little too round for a man his age, so we have to expect he got rounder yet as the years went by. Probably aged a little less gracefully. I’d guess we’d have now a tubby little fellow. Lots of jowl. Thin hair, probably graying. Kind of a contrast with the other one.”
As this sketch developed, Columbo frowned. As she had said, the face was much less distinctive. It would be difficult to match sketch to man. A possibility crossed his mind. He put it away and left it to think about later.
As she stepped back from the two sketches, Diana Williams said, “I guess I’ve helped you a little.”
Columbo nodded. “More than a little,” he said. “More than a little.”
5
“Yeah, yeah. Right. I’m glad you got a class tonight, ’cause I’m gonna have a meeting with some people about the Drury case. Oh, sure. I saw the story. If that reporter thinks he can bring a charge that will stick, let him try it. Me? Sure, I gotta pretty good idea. I just don’t wanta stick my neck out before I’m sure. Listen, when this is over I’m gonna arrange for you to see how these computers work. I’m afraid you wasted your time learning to write programs in BASIC. Yeah, I know it was required. But nobody uses it anymore. Also, hey, did you pick up those pills for Dog? Well, if you ever go in that vet’s office and look at those heartworms in those bottles— I’ll get ’em down him. I gotta method. You mold the pill into a ball of cream cheese, and down it goes. Me? I’m gonna have a couple egg rolls and some chicken stirfry. Yeah. Well, you too. I won’t be too late. Prob’ly be home before you.”
Columbo took a stool at the counter of the Chinese diner. “I’ll have a Chinese beer. An’ a coupla egg rolls. An’ I’ll look over the menu.”
At seven he arrived at the offices on La Cienega. A uniformed officer guarded the door and let him in. He had relieved Martha of any duty this evening, so she could be at home with her baby.
Professor Trabue was already there, sitting in the reception room smoking his pipe.
“I bet you been here more times than I have, Professor. Isn’t this some place!”
“I’m not sure I’d be comfortable working in a place like this,” said the professor.
“I know what ya mean. That office of yours… it shows that a man loves his work. A man’s awful lucky when he can make his livin’ doin’ what he loves to do.”
“I guess that means you, too. Lieutenant.”
“Yeah. I never regretted goin’ on the job. Not that I haven’t sometimes wondered what it’d be like to do somethin’ else.”
“Did the diskettes prove to work?” asked Professor Trabue.
Columbo nodded. “Looks like it. Miss Bergman was able to make the computer find the name Columbo in Mr. Drury’s computer files. In newspaper stories.”
“Miss Bergman…?”
“Mr. Drury’s assistant. She’ll be here shortly. Incidentally, Professor, did you get your call from Mr. McCrory?”
“Yes. Unbelievable.”
“Congratulations, sir.”
“I’m not sure how far we will be able to go, spending the trust money to extract historical data out of the Drury files.”
“Gotta match?”
Karen Bergman arrived ten minutes late, apologetic for the difficulty she’d had finding a parking place. The three walked into Drury’s office. Geraldo was there, working with the second compute
r. He left the room.
“Before we work with the computers, I’d like to show each of you a drawing done by a fine artist, a friend of mine,” said Columbo. “What she did was, she took the enhanced photo of the two men on the Grassy Knoll, and she drew their portraits. Then she worked some more on her drawings to try to get some idea of what those two men would look like today. Here’s the first one. That’s of the taller, darker man. Did either of you ever see that man?” Both of them shook their heads.
“Here’s the shorter man.”
“No.”
“No.”
“You’re sure? About the second man, especially. Never saw him before?”
“The problem with him. Lieutenant, is that he could be anybody,” said Professor Trabue. “Thousands of men look like that. That man could even be me.”
“Well… we don’t need to worry about that. It’s not you. Miss Bergman?”
“It could be a lot of men, Lieutenant. That’s the trouble. The other face is much more distinctive. But I feel sure I’ve never seen him.”
“I’d like to get some information out of those computers, then,” said Columbo.
He and Professor Trabue stood behind her as Karen Bergman called up the Folio Views program. “First question?” she asked.
“Is there anything in there that would tell us if any weapons were found abandoned on the Grassy Knoll?” asked Columbo. “Maybe the professor already knows.”
“I don’t remember anything of that kind,” said Professor Trabue.
“Well…” said Karen Bergman. “Paul stored some of the Kennedy information chronologically —that is, by when he got it—and some of it by subject. He must have considered the Grassy Knoll a major topic, because there’s a special file for it. What would we be looking for?”
“I’d like to know if that rifle was left behind sooner or later,” said Columbo.
She typed in the word “rifle.” It generated fifty-eight items. Then she put in “abandoned.” She shook her head. “No matches,” she said. “A window in this system is defined as about half a typewritten page. This means there is no place in this file where those two words fall within the equivalent of half a typewritten page—say, a hundred fifty words.”
“Try ‘find’ or ‘found,’” said the professor.
The same result. No matches.
“Okay,” said Columbo. “How ’bout a pistol or revolver or automatic.”
She tried those word combinations. “Revolver” and “found” produced two hits.
“My God, it’s in the Warren Commission Report,” she said. The excerpt read—
A thirty-eight caliber Iver-Johnson revolver, Serial # 38-1286-334, was found lying in the grass under the trees on the east side of the Grassy Knoll. The pistol was loaded with six cartridges. None had been discharged. The revolver was examined for fingerprints, as were the cartridges, by the Dallas Police Department, then by specialists of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The weapon and the cartridges were absolutely clean of all fingerprints. What is more, the barrel was clean of all residue, demonstrating that the pistol had not been fired since it was last cleaned.
The serial number was traced. The pistol had been manufactured in 1934 and sold to a wholesaler in Illinois. The wholesaler had sold it to a retailer in Chicago, who in turn had sold it to a named customer. The name proved untraceable and was either a false name or the name of someone with no criminal or other record.
In view of these circumstances, the Iver-Johnson pistol did not seem a promising lead. That it was found clean of fingerprints is a suspicious circumstance. That its ownership could not be traced since 1934 made it seem extremely unlikely anything could be learned from it.
The second excerpt was from a news story in the Dallas Morning News—
A revolver found on the Grassy Knoll had not been fired and bore no fingerprints.
“A dozen men could have carried pistols away from Dealey Plaza,” said Columbo. “In brown bags, lunch boxes… the rifle’s somethin’ else.”
“When people are in shock,” said Professor Trabue, “they see things that didn’t happen and overlook things that did.”
Columbo nodded. “Ten or twelve years ago, a man walked into a strip club on Sunset Boulevard and shot a man. He walked right up behind him, shot him in the back of the head, and turned around and walked out. Thirty or forty witnesses saw him. An’ ya know what? We got as many descriptions as we got witnesses. He was tall, short, thin, fat, blond, dark, white, black, dressed in a suit, jeans, a sweater, a golf shirt, carrying a revolver, an automatic, a sawed-off shotgun… one witness swore the man was shot by a woman. We never cracked the case. Never did.”
Karen Bergman sighed. “What next. Lieutenant?”
Columbo ran his hand over his forehead, then through his hair, and he turned down the corners of his mouth and shook his head. “Well… Let’s look for a name. Sclafani. S-C-L-A-F-A-N-I. Never mind a first name. Just Sclafani.”
“In the Grassy Knoll file?”
“Probably not. In whatever ya think.”
“Let’s look at the file of information collected in 1993,” she said.
She changed to that file, typed in the name, and shortly the computer reported it found thirty-eight occurrences.
“Thirty-eight! Hey, that’s interestin’!”
“We can reduce the number by adding a first name.”
“Start with Giuseppe,” said Columbo.
The first item found was an article from The New York Times Sunday Magazine, dated 1977. It was about the fall of major crime figures, some dead, some in prison, some in retirement. The part on the screen read—
Giuseppe (Joe) Sclafani, 70 years old, lives in semiretirement in a penthouse atop a casino hotel in Las Vegas, apparently content. No longer a menacing Mafia don, feared boss of the Brooklyn waterfront, he seems to have found a degree of respectability. Or perhaps he doesn’t dare move back into the rackets, since he is under constant surveillance by more than one state or federal agency.
The article had been pulled from the vast electronic files of the newspaper by the NEXIS computerized research service, as had two other articles mentioning Giuseppe Sclafani as semiretired but still suspected of racketeering; and they had been entered in this private electronic library kept by Paul Drury.
Using the name Philip Sclafani, Karen Bergman found other articles. Philip was identified as-the operating manager of the Piping Rock Hotel. Of him, the San Francisco Chronicle said—
The tall, handsome, graying bachelor has lived his life in the shadow of his commandeering father. Philip Sclafani never married. Although he is reputed to have used "muscle" for his father when he was a young man in New York, he has no criminal record that would preclude his gaining a Nevada gaming license. He keeps a “squeaky clean” appearance to the extent that he is said to have refused to allow some of his father’s old friends to stay in the Piping Rock.
“This is all data Paul added to the data base in 1993,” said Karen Bergman. “Let’s see what he put in there in past years.”
A little more searching showed that a few Sclafani items had been added to the data base in 1992 and none before that. In 1991, 1990, and other past years, a search based on the name produced nothing.
They went through the 1992 materials, then the rest of the 1993 materials, printing some of the excerpts.
“It’s all very interesting,” said Professor Trabue when they were finished, “but I’m afraid it doesn’t prove anything.”
“I beg your pardon, sir, but I think it proves somethin’ very important,” said Columbo.
“And what is that. Lieutenant?”
“It proves that Mr. Drury was very interested in the Sclafanis,” said Columbo. “What’s more, it was a new interest. Now, just whatta ya suppose that interest was about?”
Seventeen
1
Locked out of the office of Paul Drury Productions, with no particular project going, Alicia drank coffee and ate Danish on
her lanai, wearing her black bikini. She made several telephone calls. Even though she planned to marry Tim as soon as the investigation of Paul’s death was finished, she felt she had to keep up her contacts with people in the television industry. She was sure of Tim but not so sure she was willing to give up every other possibility in life.
She had only one obligation for this Thursday, June 10. She had to be at the Topanga Beach Club for lunch, in case Phil wanted to call her from Las Vegas. She had asked Charles Bell to meet her there. The unhappy fact was, she was running short of cash, and Charles would sign the check. Paul Drury Productions owed her a paycheck, but God knew when she would see that. She was considering establishing a small home-equity credit line on the house, to cover her bills until she married.
She needed to make a couple of stops on her way to the club, so she left the lanai about ten-thirty and went in the house to dress. She pulled on a favorite outfit: a pair of tight lime-green pants and a white golf shirt. Before leaving her bedroom she gathered up a bundle of soiled clothes to drop at the dry cleaner’s. That was one of her errands on her way to the club.
Her car was something else from her marriage with Paul Drury: a big Oldsmobile station wagon he had once used to haul camera equipment and lights to locations. At the time of their divorce he had suggested it was something of a classic car and might increase in value over the coming years. She had accepted it.
She usually left it parked on the driveway, as she had done last night, and it sat there this morning, looking a little sullen in the heat of the sun. It would take its air conditioner ten minutes to cool it off. She walked to the rear. The dirty clothes belonged on the rear floor, not on the passenger-side seat. As she pushed the key into the lock on the rear door, her thought was that it might be well to drive with all the windows open for a few blocks, to let air cool the car some before she turned on the air conditioner.
As she turned the key she was startled by a yellow flash, then terrorized by the shock and pressure of a powerful explosion. As she fell to the driveway, Alicia saw steel and glass flying away from the Oldsmobile.
Columbo: Grassy Knoll Page 21