A Cadillac …
“Is he sure it was a Cadillac?”
Decisively, Canelli nodded. “Definitely, he says. No doubt about it, according to him. Repeat, no doubt.”
“How close was he to the car?”
“About ten feet,” he answered. “No more. He was just right off the edge of the parking lot, like I said.”
“What about the passengers?”
“One. A man, he says. A big man, he thinks, wearing a hat.”
“What about the color of the car?”
Canelli shook his head. “No dice, Lieutenant. No color. It was pretty dark, don’t forget.”
“Just how drunk is he, Canelli? How do you rate his testimony? On a scale of one to ten, how do you rate it?”
“Well, gee, Lieutenant, that’s kind of hard, you know. I mean, sure, he was drunk. But then, on the other hand, I’ve taken him through his story twice, and it seems to hold up. So I’d say—”
“Come on, Canelli. Give me a number.”
“I’d say six and a half,” he said. “Maybe seven.” He looked at me anxiously, as if trying to decide whether he’d won a guessing game.
“Good. Stay with him. When we’re through here, put him into protective custody. Treat him good, but put him in custody. If he objects, let me know. Don’t hassle him. Kid gloves. Clear?”
“Yessir, Lieutenant, that’s clear.”
“Have you got any idea when the shots were fired?”
Canelli shook his head. “Afraid not, Lieutenant. I mean, I can make a guess. Because, see, this guy—his name is Claude—he said that when he first woke up, he wasn’t sure if it was a dream. And then he saw the Cadillac leaving the scene, and he figured something was wrong. So then he walked up the driveway for a ways, but he didn’t see the body. I mean, it was dark and everything. And even if it wasn’t dark, with the body in the bushes and all, I don’t see how—”
“What’d he do then, Canelli?”
“Well—” He drew a deep breath. “Well, Claude was still sort of uneasy and everything, and he figured that he didn’t want to stick around here any more. Like he said, he wanted to go where there were lights and people. Which, for sure, you can understand. So he rolled up his sleeping bag and went down to the main drive. And after a little while he saw a black-and-white on patrol.” Canelli pointed to one of the patrol cars, with a pair of officers standing by. “That’s the unit there. Number 364. They saw Claude on the side of the road and did a routine check. They could tell something was bothering him. So they put him in the car and came back up here and examined the area.”
“So they actually found the body.”
“Yessir.”
“And so far we don’t have any independent confirmation of Claude’s story.”
“That’s right, Lieutenant,” he said, adding cheerfully, “For all we know, he could’ve done it.”
My involuntary response was an irritated click of teeth, followed by another anxious look from Canelli.
“What we need,” I said, “is a time frame. Does he have any idea how much time elapsed between the time he heard the shots and the time the body was discovered?”
“Jeeze, I’m afraid not, Lieutenant. I mean—you know—he was pretty gassed. He’s still pretty gassed.”
“Does he have any idea how long he was standing on the main drive before he was picked up?”
“No. But Robinson and Walters, they checked him out on their second pass, so that was about twenty minutes, they said, right there.”
Standing in the parking lot and letting my eyes wander across the parking lot and down through the dark trees to the intermittent headlights that marked the main drive, I mused, “It sounds like about an hour from the time the shots were first fired to the time the body was discovered.”
Canelli nodded. “I was thinking the same thing, Lieutenant.”
“What time was the body actually discovered?”
Frowning, he riffled through a notebook, finally pronouncing, “It was ten minutes after nine. Repeat, ten minutes after—”
“Lieutenant. Lieutenant Hastings.” Someone was hailing me from the murder scene.
“What is it?” I shouted in return.
“Lieutenant Friedman is ready to move the body.”
“All right, I’m coming.” And to Canelli I said, “Remember, keep Claude on ice.”
“Yessir.”
“And keep scratching around here. It’s a big park. Somebody else must’ve heard those shots. We need witnesses and a time frame. Clear?”
“Yessir, that’s clear.”
I turned away and strode toward the floodlight glare. Friedman had used white cloth tape to mark off the area, and now only Friedman and an assistant coroner stood inside the tapes beside the body.
“Come in, Frank.” Friedman gestured.
I stepped over the tape and stood between Friedman and the coroner’s man.
“This is Paul Garvey,” Friedman said. “Frank Hastings.”
While Garvey and I nodded silent greetings, Friedman stepped over the body, bent double, took hold of the victim’s jacket and his jeans, braced himself and heaved the body over on its back.
A revolver was clutched in the victim’s right hand. The gun had been completely concealed beneath the body. It looked like the same gun that I’d seen pressed to the blond girl’s head earlier in the day.
Above the body, Friedman and I exchanged a quick, meaningful look. Theoretically, it would have been possible for the revolver to fire when the body had been rolled over. We’d been lucky.
Friedman and I stepped aside while the photographer snapped half a dozen pictures. While we waited, I briefed him quickly on Canelli’s witness.
“All right, Paul,” Friedman said, “he’s all yours. Any chance you can still do an autopsy tonight? It could be important.”
“Well—” Doubtfully, the coroner frowned. “It’s quarter to eleven already. I don’t know whether we could make it.”
“It really could be important,” Friedman urged, holding the other man’s eyes. “When you read the papers, you’ll see what I mean.”
Garvey’s glance was skeptical, but finally he shrugged. “All right, I’ll see what I can do.”
“I’ll call you first thing tomorrow,” Friedman said earnestly. “And I won’t forget it. I’ll owe you one, guaranteed.”
Reluctantly, Garvey smiled. “I won’t let you forget.” He turned away, and gestured to the two ambulance stewards waiting with their stretcher. But Friedman signaled for them to wait, then called for a pair of surgical gloves. Wearing the gloves, he took the revolver from Tharp’s hand and stepped back from the body, beside me. Handling the gun gingerly, he first sniffed the barrel, then swung the cylinder out and ejected the six cartridges into his hand. Four of the cartridges were intact; two had been fired. Friedman carefully dropped the revolver into one plastic evidence bag and the cartridges into another bag, then gave the gloves and the two bags to a waiting lab man. Friedman pointed to the body.
“It looks like he’s been shot twice, at least.”
“I know.”
“So there were probably four shots fired, maybe more.”
“Which would tie in with the witness’s statement.” As I spoke, the two ambulance stewards put the stretcher on the ground beside the body, leaned forward, took firm hold of the body at the shoulders and knees, braced themselves and heaved. The body settled gelatinously on the flat canvas: a formless mass of inert solids and liquids, incongruously dressed in jeans and a jacket, with hands and boots and a lolling head attached. Whatever he’d been, whoever he was, Frederick Tharp was nothing more than dead meat now, on his way to the morgue.
“Has Canelli got that witness sewed up?” Friedman asked.
“Yes. I told him to put the guy in protective custody, at least until he sobers up.”
“Any other witnesses?”
“Not yet. Canelli’s looking.”
“Does Canelli really think it was a Cadillac
leaving the scene?”
I nodded.
“Well, then,” Friedman said, “it seems that our next stop should be the Fairmont.”
“What about Dwyer? I think we should tell him about this—” I gestured to the murder scene. “And then ask for orders.”
“I don’t agree.” Friedman spoke in a flat, uncompromising voice. “Don’t forget, we’ve already been waiting for orders. We’ve been waiting for hours. And maybe if we hadn’t been waiting, we’d have one less corpse to worry about. So I say we go down to the Fairmont and start knocking on a few doors.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s now almost eleven. By the time we get there, Ryan and company should be getting ready for bed. In my experience, that’s a good time to catch people off balance, when they’re in bed.”
“Who’re you planning to wake up?”
“Eason, naturally. Do we have a time estimate?”
“I figure the shots were fired about eight P.M. Maybe a little later.”
“Then, for openers, let’s find out where Eason was between, say, six o’clock and nine o’clock. And if he can’t give us a good answer, corroborated, I say we take him downtown.”
“Just like that.”
He nodded. “Just like that. I’m getting sick of this crap, waiting in hotel lobbies with my hat in my hand.”
“You’re also sick of your nice big office, it seems to me. And maybe your nice big pension, too.”
“The office, yes. The pension, no. Come on.” He led the way across the parking lot toward our car.
Twenty-nine
WHEN WE GOT OFF the elevator at the eleventh floor, we were met by four FBI agents instead of the usual two. Looking at their faces, I realized that something had happened. Of the four men, I knew only Parsons, their spokesman. When he learned that we’d come to see Eason, Parsons slowly shook his head.
“Mr. Eason isn’t here, I’m afraid,” he said solemnly. “But Mr. Richter and Mr. Draper are in Mr. Ferguson’s suite. I’ve got orders to bring you there.”
“How about Chief Dwyer?” Friedman said. “Is he there too?”
Still speaking solemnly, his face expressionless, Parsons nodded. “Yes, Mr. Dwyer’s there, too.”
“Anyone else?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered, already turning away down the corridor. “I just came on duty, after—” He let it go unfinished.
Exchanging a quick look, Friedman and I followed the impeccably dressed agent down the hallway to the third door, where he stopped and pressed the bell-button. Almost immediately, James Ryan opened the door. He was dressed in a sports shirt and corduroy slacks. With his hair disheveled, blue-jowled and bleary-eyed, James Ryan looked strangely out of place in his elegant surroundings.
“Oh—Lieutenant.” Anxiously, he looked back over his shoulder for instructions. As he turned, I caught the strong odor of alcohol.
Fastidiously dressed in his trademark gray suit, white shirt and understated gray-on-gray silk tie, white hair dramatically swept back from a broad forehead, Chief Dwyer sat in a silk brocade armchair, the perfect complement to his air of complacent self-importance. A pained look crossed his face as he saw Friedman and me. Covertly, Dwyer’s glance fled to Richter standing in front of a marble fireplace, one elbow resting gracefully on the mantle. Reluctantly, Richter bent his head in subtle assent.
“Come in,” Dwyer said. “Quickly, please.”
I nodded to Ferguson, sitting behind a small writing desk. Ferguson was robed in a blue dressing gown, wearing house slippers. His dark eyes were alert and calculating. His face revealed nothing as he coolly returned my greeting.
Friedman and I sat side by side on a sofa facing both Dwyer and Richter. Ferguson was seated obliquely to our left. Returning from the door, James Ryan took a straight-backed chair set against the wall. Somehow it seemed expected that the senator’s son should take the least comfortable chair, putting him subtly outside the privileged circle. Something in his sullen eyes and petulant mannerisms suggested that he resented his exclusion but was unable to change his status. In the same room with Ferguson, James Ryan would always be subordinate.
At the fireplace Richter cleared his throat. Looking directly at me, he said, “There’s been some, ah, movement.”
As Richter continued, I wondered how he could have heard about Tharp’s murder so quickly.
“The fact is—” Richter glanced at Ferguson, as if for support. “The fact is that this whole situation seems to have come down to some kind of a split. And at the moment we’re not sure which direction things are moving.”
“I don’t think we understand,” Friedman said. “We’ve just come from the field.”
“Yes. Well, initially, Eason and Katherine Bayliss were going to get together a dummy packet of money with our help. Then they—and we—were going to wait for instructions from Tharp for the drop. Eason was going to make the delivery. We were going to wire him and the money. Then we were going to take it from there.
“However,” Richter said heavily, once more glancing at the impassive figure of Ferguson sitting motionless, eyes still revealing nothing. “However,” Richter continued, “it’s becoming pretty obvious that they, ah, had other ideas.”
“By ‘they’ whom do you mean?” Friedman asked quietly.
“I mean Eason and Mrs. Bayliss,” Richter said. “And, I gather, Senator Ryan. Or at least they would’ve had to have his approval to get the money and then to, ah, do what they did.”
“What’d they do?” Friedman asked.
“What they did,” Richter said, “was to slip away and apparently make the payment on their own. Or at least so it seems. Because both Eason and Mrs. Bayliss have disappeared.”
“Did they leave together?”
“We’re not sure. From what we can discover so far, Eason has been gone since about seven-thirty while Mrs. Bayliss was reportedly last seen an hour or so ago.”
“Didn’t you have them under surveillance?” I asked.
“Of course not,” Richter snapped. “After all, they’re not the enemy. And they’re not the target, either.”
“What does the senator say?” I asked.
“Well, that’s the—” This time, Richter’s frustrated glance fled first to Ferguson, then to James Ryan. Finally he said, “That’s the problem. The senator left strict orders that we were to communicate with him through Mrs. Bayliss. Only Mrs. Bayliss. So far we’ve honored his request. In fact, he’s in bed right now. His doctor gave him something to sleep, I think. After all, tomorrow’s the dedication.”
“What kind of cars were they driving?” Friedman asked.
“We aren’t sure,” Richter answered, “but we assume that Eason took one of the pool Cadillacs. He had the keys to one, anyhow. And that one’s missing.”
“Are all the other Cadillacs accounted for between seven thirty and now?” Friedman asked.
Richter nodded. “Only one went out during that time.” He turned to James Ryan, saying, “Mr. Ryan checked one out, I believe.”
“I drove out to the airport to meet the Vice-President,” Ryan said, adding resentfully, “but he’s been delayed until tomorrow morning, it turns out.”
“You mean you weren’t told that his trip was delayed until you’d actually gotten to the airport?” Friedman asked.
Petulantly, James Ryan nodded. “That’s right. Some goddamn clerk forgot to make the call, apparently. I was furious.”
“Did you make the trip alone?” I asked.
“Yes.” Ryan shifted uneasily in his chair, avoiding my eyes.
Suddenly Ferguson’s telephone rang on the desk. Quickly Ferguson lifted the receiver, listened for a moment, then spoke quietly into the phone: “No, I’ve got some people here, senator.” He listened for another moment, frowning, his eyes fixed on the desktop. Then: “There’s James, and Mr. Richter of the FBI, and Police Chief Dwyer. And then there’s the two detectives, Friedman and Hastings. As a matter of fact, we were wondering whether we should—” He b
roke off, listening again. Slowly, his eyes lifted from the desk to focus on me. I could see concern in his eyes, and surprise. Finally he said, “Well, certainly I will, if that’s what you want. Yes. Sure. I understand. Fine. I’ll tell him. And then will you get back to me, or should I—” Still with his puzzled eyes fixed on mine, he said, “All right. Yes. Fine. I’ll tell him.” Slowly, reflectively, Ferguson replaced the phone in its cradle while his gaze shifted from me to Dwyer, then to Richter.
“He wants to see Lieutenant Hastings,” Ferguson said. “Right now.”
I got to my feet and moved to the door, aware that everyone in the room was watching me. I opened the door, then turned to look at Friedman. He was struggling to keep glee from showing too plainly on his face.
Thirty
USING A WALKIE-TALKIE, RICHTER ordered the FBI men stationed in the corridor to let me pass down the hallway to Ryan’s suite. I pressed the buzzer, listened, pressed it again. Had I heard Ryan’s voice, or had I imagined it? With a reassuring glance over my shoulder at the watchful FBI agents, I tried the door. It swung slowly open. I stepped inside.
“Senator Ryan?”
“In here, Lieutenant. In the bedroom.”
Except for a small lamp, the large sitting room was in darkness. The bedroom door was ajar, throwing a narrow band of light across the room. I pushed the bedroom door open to find Ryan sitting up in his bed. Even in the shaded glow from a bedside lamp, I could see that his face was ashen. Pain pulled at the corners of his wide, expressive mouth. His eyes were sunken, smudged by illness and fear. He was propped up in bed with his head resting on the pillows behind him. On the wide white counterpane, his hands were motionless. Tonight Donald Ryan was making no pretense at animation or vitality. He’d run out of larger-than-life poses. He was tired, and he was sick, and he was alone: the king in his royal bedchamber, facing the terrible truth of his own mortality.
“Take a chair, Lieutenant. Bring it close to the bed so we can talk.” He waited for me to obey. Then, moistening his dry lips with an uncertain tongue, he said, “Here we are again, Lieutenant, you and me.” He smiled: a wry, sad twisting of stiffened lips. “I guess you must know by now,” he said, “that I find myself in a strange position where you’re concerned. Circumstances have forced me into a situation where I have to trust someone—one person, no more. And you seem to be that person. Do you understand?”
Stalking Horse (The Lt. Hastings Mysteries) Page 20