7 - Rogue: Ike Schwartz Mystery 7

by Frederick Ramsay

  “So who, then?”

  “I don’t know. To be honest, I haven’t really given your two murders much thought, sorry. I hear what you’re saying about seeking simplicity, but my instincts tell me it’s a lot more complicated. As far as we know, Smith didn’t have a problem until after you busted him. Maybe he remembered something or heard something during the course of his stay with us. If it weren’t for his uncle Jack, he’d still be in jail and alive.”

  “There you go. Burns.”

  “It’s at best only a distant maybe. Look, Smith goes home, digs out the book, and within twenty-four hours he’s dead. I think you need to look at that book. But that will have to wait until we’re done with Fiske. As soon as we take him down, we’ll go after your guy.”

  Elroy Heath’s call interrupted Ike.

  “What do you have, Elroy?”

  “Well, before I left to sit on the office, an old lady in the neighborhood stopped me and wanted to know if I was the one asking questions about that Overton woman. That’s how she put it, ‘that Overton woman.’ I said, ‘Yes I am,’ and she said, ‘Well you should know that that woman had a paramour.’ That’s what she said. Turns out she meant boyfriend. Anyway, she has a daughter works up at the school and that’s what she said, she said…you know what I mean. She also said he was there earlier and seemed upset when he left. Paramour, for God’s sake. I had to ask her to spell it out. I thought she was telling me the woman owned a lawnmower. Okay, I’m almost to the school.”

  “Thanks, Elroy. I don’t know what it means but we’ll keep it in mind. Lawnmower?”

  “Yeah, sure sounded like it.”

  “Right, thanks, Elroy.” Ike closed his phone and scratched his head. “Paramour? Oh…I must have lost a step. Frank, turn here.”

  “I know. What about a lawnmower?”

  “Tell you later.”

  Chapter Forty-one

  Frank pulled into the driveway and settled the police car with its front bumper touching the rear bumper of what he assumed must be Fiske’s car. If Fiske had returned, as it appeared he had, and if he tried to make a run for it, the only way he could use his car would be to drive it across his backyard and through a chain-link fence. The fence had a gate and it was open but too small to allow an automobile to pass through.

  “You take the back, Frank. Most of these houses have an exterior cellar stairway so stand a little toward one side or the other so you can watch the back door and the stairwell at the same time. I’ll go in through the front. I’ll call you when I have him, or am sure he isn’t in the basement. Keep your radio on.”

  “Roger that.”

  Ike waited until he was certain Frank had positioned himself, and then climbed the three steps to the porch. He crossed to the door, rang the bell, waited, and then pounded on it.

  “Fiske, open up. It’s Sheriff Schwartz. I have a warrant to search this house and for your arrest.”

  The second part wasn’t true, but he hoped Fiske might be more amenable to giving up if he thought the game was over for him. There was no answer. Ike shouted and banged on the door twice more. He stepped back, took aim, and kicked the door open. His entry was quick but cautious. The front room was clear. There was no other sound in the house besides the pounding of his heart. He asked Frank if anything stirred out back.

  “Nothing much. The grass hasn’t been mowed for a while and you can make out where somebody walked from the back gate to the house recently. Nothing else.”

  “Hasn’t used his paramour lately, I guess.”

  “What? That’s what you all meant. Paramour!”

  Ike moved to the adjoining room. He found Fiske slumped over the dining room table as if asleep. One arm dangled from the side of the table and a Colt .45 lay on the floor beneath it. Ike shook Fiske’s shoulder and then stepped back as he collapsed in a disorderly heap next to the gun. Scott Fiske had taken at least five bullets, four to his core, and one, complete with powder burns, to his head. Ike marveled how that could have happened and not have made him fall out of his chair.

  “We’re clear in here, Frank. You can come in. And then call in for the evidence technicians and anyone from the day shift that’s not busy. We have another homicide on our hands.”

  Frank entered while calling in the shooting. “Essie, dispatch the ETs, and send over as many guys as are available to Faculty Row—Fiske’s house.” He stopped short of the dining room table and stared at the corpse. “Well, it looks like Fiske wasn’t your guy after all.”

  “You think? What the hell did we miss?”

  ***

  The house had been sealed off and yellow crime scene tape festooned the porch and yard. Evidence technicians filled the house. Cameras flashed, men dusted for prints, and Ike retreated to the porch. Billy Sutherlin, who had been on patrol when the call came in, kept the crowd of gawkers behind the crime scene tape. Ike watched as a man approached him. Billy listened and then waved him through to talk to Ike.

  “Sheriff? I live next door. I told your deputy that I heard shots earlier and I thought I ought to say something.”

  “Shots? When did you hear them?”

  He looked at his watch, thought a second as if the math might be difficult, “Two and a half hours ago. Two hours and thirty-seven minutes to be exact. I heard, blam, blam, blam, blam, a pause and then, blam—five.”

  Ike exhaled. “We’ve been here an hour. You heard the shots an hour and thirty-plus minutes before that. Why didn’t you call 9-1-1 right away?”

  “Well, I couldn’t be sure, you know. I mean it could have been—”

  “Stop. Please don’t say ‘a car backfiring.’ Cars rarely backfire these days. And even years ago when they did, five times in a row would never happen.”

  “Well, look, I’m just trying to cooperate here.”

  “Appreciate that. You are?”

  “Harvey Applegate. I am in the Physics Department.”

  “I see. Well, Doctor Applegate—”

  “It’s Mister. I’m an A.B.D., not Ph.D.”

  “Sorry, good luck with that, Mr. Applegate. Just give your name to the deputy and make yourself available in case we need to take a formal statement from you. And thank you.”

  He walked Applegate back to the tape and noticed a woman standing on the porch of the other adjoining house. He slipped under the tape and strolled over to her.

  “Your neighbor on the other side said he heard the shots that killed Doctor Fiske. Were you home two and a half hours ago, and if you were, did you happen to hear the shots, too?”

  “Not really. I heard something that in retrospect I assume must have been shots, but that is not what I thought of at the time.”

  “You thought they were what?”

  “Someone hammering. Look, I have my studio on the opposite side of the house and on the second floor. It’s as close as I can get to a north light. The walls are draped and stacked with canvases. So any sound that I hear is usually muffled. I like it quiet when I work.”

  “I see. Is there anything you can tell us that might help?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know if it’s relevant or not, but he has a cleaning service that comes in once a week. Today was their day to clean so…”

  “Any prints we find, at least on the more obvious surfaces, would be new today.”

  “That was my thought.”

  “Did you recognize any other person—man, woman—with him?”

  “Sorry, no. I was turning to go back into the house.”

  “Thanks. Someone will be by to take a statement from you later.”

  Ike walked back to the crime scene and entered the house. The ME looked up from examining Fiske.

  “What have you got for me?”

  “Very interesting, Ike. The first four shots were fired directly at the v
ictim. The shooter was sitting at the opposite end of the table like they were having a meeting or something. He must have had the gun in his lap—”

  “You’re assuming the killer was a man?”

  “No, just trying to save time by not having to say ‘he or she’ all the time, but you just ruined that. Anyway he or she must have had the gun in his…crap…in his lap. He gets to the point in the conversation when shooting becomes the preferred option. Raises it to tabletop height and shoots. Look on this end of the table. There are powder burns in the finish. Okay, he squeezes four straight in. The guy is heavy and so is the chair. By the looks of the entry wounds, I’m guessing the slugs are small caliber, .32, or maybe .25—a lady’s gun.”

  “Or a professional.”

  “A pro might choose a small-caliber gun, but he wouldn’t need five shots to get the job done. I wouldn’t put any money on that horse. My money says, not a pro. And since there isn’t a lot of punch in a weapon like that, he wasn’t knocked backwards out of the chair. The shooter pumps four in and your victim is sitting there trying to figure what hit him and sinking fast, if I judge the wounds right, and the perp gets up, calm as you please, walks around the table, puts the gun to this guy’s head, and delivers the coup de grâce. Deep powder burns on the forehead and upper face.”

  “Saw those. A very cool and deliberate character, whoever he was.”

  “Looks like.”

  “So the .45 on the floor definitely wasn’t the gun used to shoot him?”

  “No way, but I can tell you something about it. It has been recently fired and that’s not all.”

  “What else?”

  “The fingerprints on this piece are not right. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear the gun has been wiped and then one set of prints applied to it. If I had to guess, the gun was pressed into his hand after he was shot.”

  “But you don’t know that.”

  “As I said, of course not, but what sort of a person wipes his own gun down after firing it, but doesn’t clean it at the same time?”

  “All kinds. Maybe he just started to clean it and…I don’t know. You said it had been fired recently. That’s interesting. Send the report over as soon as you can. Oh, and the ballistics from the stiff in the woods, too. Anything else I should know right now?”

  “He had two cell phones. Is that important?”

  “I think so, yes, it depends on their numbers.” Ike returned to the porch.

  A car pulled up and a woman got out. She stared open-mouthed at the police cars and crime tape, then started for the house. Billy held up his hand to stop her.

  “What’s happened?” Her voice carried to the porch. “I have to see him. He’s in danger.”

  Ike took the porch steps in a single jump and walked over to the woman.

  “And you are…?”

  “I’m his A.A.”

  “Why is he in danger?”

  “He said he’d received threats. He said someone was trying to blackmail him.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know, but he said he wasn’t going to pay, and that he had a gun, and if anyone tried anything, he’d handle it.”

  “But you don’t know who that somebody might have been?”

  “No, he wouldn’t tell me, but he did say they were ‘pretty high up,’ whatever that means.”

  “I’m afraid your boss wasn’t successful in handling it after all.”

  “What?”

  “He’s been murdered.”

  Sheila Overton’s eyes rolled up out of sight and she folded gracefully to the ground.

  Chapter Forty-two

  Frank left Ike at Fiske’s house speaking to the paramedics, and returned to the office. There wasn’t anything more he could contribute to that scene and his two murders, as Ike had called them, were on his mind. He picked up the notebook found in Smith’s truck and carried it to his desk. Something had been nagging at him for hours. Had Ike said something about the notebook? Burns figured in the two deaths he’s been investigating somehow, he was sure of it. He carried the book to his desk as if he’d been entrusted with the Rosetta Stone and it would soon reveal its secrets to him.

  “What you got there, Frank?” Essie might show respect for Ike—sometimes—but Frank was family, Billy’s older brother and, in her often-expressed opinion, a pretty dull guy.

  “Something I hope will make you and Billy happy.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Patience, mother of my nephew. I have work to do. I am hot on the trail of your candidate for bad man of the year, Jack Burns. You want to help?”

  “I thought we already were. We’ve been looking into the mayor’s campaign funds like you said.”

  “Any luck?”

  “Do you have any idea how hard it is to get that kind of information from politicians? It’s like they’re holding on to the formula for classic Coca-Cola or something.”

  “It will probably take an application of the Freedom of Information Act to get it and then you can’t be sure which set of books you’ll be looking at. More importantly, what have you found out with your calls to Burns’ former associates?”

  “You mean the cops he worked with over the years? Not much we didn’t know already. He’s a little dirty but not enough to make a big difference. Most of them weren’t too happy about talking to us—Band of Brothers kind of thing. Probably in it with him.”

  “Ike said you had this idea about his financing. That’s why I asked. You are not going to find much in the mayor’s books, either the real or the cooked versions. The answer is in here.” Frank held up the book. “Where’s he getting the money to run a campaign, Essie?”

  “Not the mayor?”

  “Don’t think so. Not enough to pay for his campaign or get the mayor in trouble. Our fearless leader acts like an idiot some days, but he’s smart enough to stay clean. So where is the money coming from?”

  “He fixes tickets and takes money for that.”

  “Essie, dentists get rich doing root canals, plastic surgeons get rich from performing boob jobs, bankers get really rich by bundling bad paper with good. Fixing tickets gets you beer money, not rich.”

  “Then what?”

  “I’m thinking hay.”

  “You got to be kidding.”

  “Watch and learn.”

  It took over an hour for Frank to sort out the entries in the book. The columns of figures didn’t always total in the places he assumed they would or should. Duffy or Smith, he had his doubts whether the latter kept the books, had developed a unique method of bookkeeping. After he’d established a pattern, he began writing. He leaned back in his chair and looked at what he had.

  “Essie, you’re good with figures. What does this look like?”

  Essie flipped the pages Frank had assembled and scowled. “Which? These scratchings you wrote or this old book?”

  “The ones I wrote.”

  “Looks like my Ma’s egg records. That would be before she gave up on chickens. You got the source, which chicken, and next to it the number of eggs it laid each day. Only this is different and we ain’t talking about chicken or eggs, are we?”

  “No. But you are right. This is a record of the hay stealing, bales swiped, bales sold and—this is the good part, on this last sheet, the split.”

  “So you know how much Smith and how much Duffy took home. Is there a bribe in there for you know who?”

  “Close enough, but no bribe. A three-way split, Smith, Duffy and…?”

  “There’s another partner? Not…?”

  “It sure looks that way. Get me the State Police and ask for the guy who was investigating those robberies.”

  It took three transfers and one rude operator, but Essie finally got through to the corpor
al who’d been saddled with the task of sorting out the robberies. He sounded less than pleased to hear from the Picketsville sheriff’s office as they had pretty much co-opted his investigation.

  “So, what do you need now? We gave you what we had and next thing I hear is two guys are dead. That’s rough justice, Deputy.”

  “Never our intention to have it end this way. It appears they got tangled up in something bigger than lifting bales of hay from local farms. What I need to know is, were there people in the video the farmer shot, the one with the truck?”

  “Yeah, but we couldn’t make anything out. It was night and the equipment pretty primitive.”

  “Can I have the video on loan?”

  “Sure. You want me to upload it to your computer?”

  “That would be great. Listen, we think there may have been others involved. If we catch them, you get the nod, okay?”

  “Thanks. Pictures on the way.”

  While Frank waited for the transfer, he dug his calculator out from his desk drawer and began adding and dividing. He made three columns and totaled them separately. His next stop was Grace’s office. She was on her way out the door but he asked her to stay.

  “There’s a video coming in. See if you can enhance the people in it, will you? See if there is anything on the edges of the surveillance tapes that might not have showed up in the first transmission. If you have trouble, call the Highway Patrol. They have really good video equipment.”

  “Sam Ryder left some stuff on this rig,” she said, sweeping her arm across the array of electronic equipment. “I haven’t had an excuse to use it until now. I’ll give it a go.”

  “Good, then I want you to check this guy’s bank records.”

  “I’m not sure that’s legal, Frank.”

  “Trust me, it will be. You may have to run it again, officially, but right now, it’s part of an investigation. Tell the bank he’s a person of interest in a murder and we can have a warrant to him in the morning if we have to, but he can save us a lot of time if he’d give us a peek.”