He Huffed and He Puffed

by Barbara Paul

  “Will she be living here, do you think?”

  “Oh yes. Katie put a great deal of herself into this house. I think she was sorrier to lose the house than she was Mr. Strode when they separated.”

  Ivan held a hand out to his partner. Marian grumblingly fished a five-dollar bill out of her shoulder bag and gave it to him.

  Castleberry didn’t notice. He’d stopped clenching his fists and now had his hands palms down on the table, steadying himself. “I just can’t do it,” he muttered. “I can’t take that kind of responsibility on myself. It’s unfair to ask me to. I can’t do it.”

  Marian waited a moment and said, “What is it you can’t do, Mr. Castleberry?”

  His head jerked up and he looked her straight in the eye. “I can’t keep quiet about what I know. I can’t take his money. I’d be living in fear for the rest of my life. And my wife and the kids—what about them? I could be putting them in jeopardy. I just can’t do it!”

  Marian and Ivan waited.

  Castleberry gave a short laugh. “I could be a rich man, do you know that? All I have to do is keep my mouth shut and move to California. Do you know what Richard Bruce was doing in this room when you two first arrived? He was offering me a bribe. He offered me the same salary Mr. Strode was paying me to come work for him, plus the same amount again every year under the table. No taxes. I think he was going to offer something more, but just then the policeman came in and we couldn’t talk anymore.”

  “You’ve not talked to Bruce since?” Marian asked, more to keep him going than because she thought it was important.

  Castleberry shook his head. “I’ve been avoiding him. It wouldn’t be any too easy to talk anyway, what with police all over the place. But I know what he wants. He wants me in California where he can keep an eye on me. He wants me under his thumb.” He seemed to be having trouble breathing. “I can’t work for a murderer! I can’t!”

  Marian exchanged a quick look with Ivan. “I think you’d better tell us what you know, Mr. Castleberry. Withholding evidence is itself a crime, you know. If you’ve got anything at all that links Richard Bruce—”

  “Not this murder. I don’t know which one killed Mr. Strode. I’m talking about the crew of the Burly Girl, seventeen years ago. Richard Bruce is responsible for their deaths. This afternoon he burned the evidence—Sunday afternoon, that is. And now he wants me to keep quiet about it, about all of it, for the other two as well.”

  “Whoa,” said Ivan. “What’s this Burly Girl you’re talking about?”

  “It’s a ship, was a ship, it belonged to Richard Bruce. He sank it for the insurance money and left the crew to drown so they wouldn’t talk. He let thirty-seven men die so he could get away with cheating the insurance company! Thirty-seven of them.”

  The two detectives were stunned. “And he burned some evidence, you say?” Marian asked. “What evidence was that?”

  “A letter, an affidavit, private investigators’ report. We had something like that on all three of them—”

  “All three? You mean Joanna Gillespie and Jack McKinstry as well? What did they have to do with the Burly Girl?”

  “Nothing, nothing—oh, it’s all so complicated. Mr. Strode had something on each of them, you see. Separately. No one of them was connected with the others. As far as Mr. Strode was concerned, they were three separate targets for, uh …”

  “Blackmail,” Marian and Ivan said together.

  “Persuasion,” Castleberry amended. “But this afternoon, yesterday afternoon, I mean, they got together and forced me to open Mr. Strode’s vault. That’s what the knives were for, to threaten me with. Richard Bruce even nicked my chin.” He thrust his chin out so they could see the small cut. “They burned the evidence, right there in Mr. Strode’s office. And then they stole some other papers—”

  “Shit!” Ivan exploded. “You mean you had evidence that Richard Bruce killed thirty-seven people—and now it’s gone?”

  “Well, not completely.” Castleberry was sweating now. “It’s in the computer. All I have to do is print it out.”

  Both Ivan’s and Marian’s faces lit up. “In the computer!” the former said. “Then they didn’t really solve anything by burning the papers?”

  “No. But they don’t know that yet.”

  “There is a God,” Ivan grinned.

  “Unfortunately, the original of a letter incriminating Richard Bruce is gone—burned. But we did keep copies, of course.”

  “Of course,” Marian agreed straight-faced. “Mr. Castleberry, I think you’d better start at the beginning—the very beginning. Tell us everything that happened and tell us in the order in which it happened. One thing followed by another, in sequence. Can you do that?”

  “Certainly, that’s what I came to do.” He paused a moment to get his thoughts in order. Then he took a deep breath and began. “It all started with a company called House of Glass …”

  8

  It was daybreak when the two police detectives assigned to investigate A. J. Strode’s murder called a temporary halt. Nearly two hours of listening to Myron Castleberry recite the odyssey of A. J. Strode’s pursuit of the ever-elusive House of Glass had left all three of them numb. When Castleberry told them Richard Bruce, Joanna Gillespie, and Jack McKinstry were all successful murderers, his two interrogators gazed at him with frank skepticism. Rather than go into detail about what Strode had on them, Castleberry instead recounted their close call with the collapsing crane at Los Angeles harbor and Strode’s conviction that Richard Bruce was behind it. When pressed, Castleberry reluctantly admitted their detective had been unable to find any connection between Bruce and the crane operator.

  But there were lots of other nasty bits to chew over and spit back out before the case would be closed. The detectives asked for printouts of the evidence Castleberry maintained was stored in the office computer. Ivan Malecki said he needed time to assimilate what he’d heard. Marian Larch said she just needed some sleep. Castleberry left for A. J. Strode’s office to get them the evidence they wanted.

  “I’ve got to crash,” Marian told her partner, “even if it’s only for an hour. Wake me when Castleberry gets back?” She went into the television room and collapsed on the sofa there, leaving Ivan to find his own place to nap.

  There’d been a time when Marian could stay up all night and still put in a full day’s work the next day. But at thirty-five her staying power was slipping away, along with a few other things she didn’t care to think about. Her partner could probably outlast her, if it was ever put to a test; but then Ivan was younger than she was. By almost a full year.

  An hour and ten minutes later Ivan woke her with the news it was time to get back to work. “Couple of men from the fire marshal’s office are here. And the captain just called, wants to know our progress. He was mad as hell when I told him we hadn’t questioned our three primes yet.”

  Marian winced. “You shouldn’t have told him that.” She sat up reluctantly; she could have done with another three or four hours.

  “Had to—he asked me. He’s just grumpy ’cause he didn’t get much sleep. Anyway, he’s made a statement to the press. He says Strode’s murder made the front page of the morning editions.”

  “Terrific. Any word from Castleberry?”

  “Not yet.”

  “How much of what he told us do you believe, Ivan?”

  “Dunno. But why would anyone make up a story like that?”

  “No reason that I can think of. I believe Castleberry told us what he thinks is the truth. Maybe some of the details are off, but the basic stuff is probably right on target. It just all seems so incredible.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it. Let’s go talk to these guys about the fire.”

  The two men from the fire marshal’s office were poking through the monitoring room. They’d turned up a charred Energine can in the rubble, and that’s what had made them say arson. The cleaning fluid was one hundred percent naphtha, which would do the job very nicely. Wh
en questioned, the housekeeper said yes, they always kept a few cans of Energine on hand; there were a couple in the cleaning supplies closet right now. Was a can missing? She had no idea; no one kept that close track.

  There’d been a change in shifts while Marian and Ivan were grabbing a nap, but the new officers on duty had been well briefed. One of them reported that the screwdriver belonging to O’Connell, the inside security guard, had been found behind a chair near the stairway; evidently someone had just tossed it over the banister. Sorry, no fingerprints. The other thing the officer told them was that Richard Bruce had spent what remained of the night in Joanna Gillespie’s room.

  Marian grunted. “Nice. He’s old enough to be her father.”

  “Yeah?” Ivan asked. “How old is she? I’ve never seen her.”

  “Thirtyish. He’s over fifty, wouldn’t you say?”

  Her partner shrugged. “That’s not so much difference. It happens all the time. Nothing wrong with it.”

  “There’s a lot wrong with it,” Marian muttered. “I’ve known a few father-daughter marriages.” But that was no time for a discussion of symbolic incest, for just then Myron Castleberry arrived.

  The three of them went into the conference room. “I had two copies made of everything, one for each of you,” Castleberry said, handing them each three folders. “I thought it would be easier for you that way.”

  Marian thanked him, getting a quick glimpse of why A. J. Strode had chosen Myron Castleberry as his executive assistant. “Have you thought of anything else you want to tell us?”

  “No, I believe I covered everything, except the details of what we learned about Joanna Gillespie and Jack McKinstry. But all that’s in the folders. If there’s anything that isn’t clear, just give me a call. I want to go home and change and then go back to the office, if you have no objection. You can imagine what it’s going to be like in there today.” He stood up to go. “I almost sent those folders over by messenger. But when the time came, I felt a certain reluctance to let them out of my possession. I’m happy to say they’re all yours now.”

  Marian asked, “Who’ll be running Strode’s business interests now?”

  “That will be up to Mrs. Strode.” Castleberry gave them a polite nod and left.

  Ivan grinned. “Think he’ll get the job?”

  “Wouldn’t be surprised. He’s in a position to know the business better than anyone else.”

  “Yeah, but can he run it, that’s the question.”

  “Oh, Castleberry could probably maintain the status quo, but he’s not going to do any empire building. Or empire expanding, I guess it would be.” She opened a folder labeled Gillespie, Joanna. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

  They both read silently for a while and then looked up at the same time. “Her parents?” Ivan asked incredulously.

  “That’s what it says,” Marian replied no less incredulously.

  They didn’t speak again until both had finished reading all three folders. They stared at each other in silence until Marian said, “So? What do you think?”

  “I think we’ve got three killers upstairs, that’s what I think! Jesus! All three of them? And Strode was using it to get this House of Glass stock? The man was crazy—he must have been!”

  “Money-crazy, at any rate. But those other three … what the hell kind of people are we dealing with here? They do whatever they want and to hell with everybody else? Don’t get in my way or I’ll kill you?”

  “Well, Strode was no sweetheart himself,” Ivan pointed out. “He ran over people like they weren’t even there. He was just the one to bring out that old urge to kill, doncha think?”

  “A very killable man,” Marian agreed. “Who chose to conduct business with three people eminently qualified to do the job. And now we’ve got to figure out which one did.”

  “What does it matter?” Ivan muttered. “They’re already murderers, all of them. If we say it’s conspiracy—”

  “Then we’ll be sure to get the right one … and punish the other two for past sins as well? Come on, Ivan, you know we can’t do it that way. One set of this evidence will have to go to the captain so he can inform the police where these earlier killings took place. If we can’t nail the one who killed Strode, then we’ll get them all on the earlier charges. But the only murder you and I have to worry about is this one, A. J. Strode’s. Let the captain handle the rest of it.”

  “You know what he’ll do, don’t you? He’ll tell us to put them all under arrest.”

  “So?”

  “So that means we do our investigating in an interrogation room instead of here. Don’t you want to keep ’em here at the scene?”

  “Sure. But we’re not going to have uniformed help much longer. At the end of twenty-four hours they’ll all be pulled.”

  “Yeah, but we’ve still got today. Just hold off on sending those folders over to the captain until we’ve had a chance to talk to our three primes. C’mon, Marian, you know damned well once they’re locked up we’re not gonna get shit out of them.”

  She sighed. “Okay, in for a penny … we’ll hold on to the folders until after we’ve had a shot at the big three. Which one did we decide on first? McKinstry?”

  “Jack McKinstry it is.”

  “Christ!” Marian suddenly cried. “I just thought of something! The finger pointers. The first mate’s widow, the mercenary—”

  “Yeah, yeah, what about them?”

  “Their names and addresses are all in here. And Bruce and the others read those folders yesterday afternoon.”

  “Oh, shit. They could have phoned somebody—”

  “There’s no holding anything back now. We’ve got to get the captain to get those people some protection. Look, you call him, tell him what’s happening, tell him where they’re all living. I’ll go find one of the uniforms and have him take one set of the folders over right now.”

  “Right,” said Ivan, heading for the phone. “And get Jack McKinstry in here. Fast.”

  “And get Jack McKinstry in here fast,” Marian agreed.

  One of the uniformed officers brought Jack McKinstry to the conference room and then left.

  His clothing was rumpled, but Jack came in with a big smile on his face and proceeded to size up the two detectives quickly. “At last—Authority has issued its summons!” he said lightly and sat down at the conference table with them. “I was beginning to think you folks had forgotten about me. Now, what can I do to help you?”

  Marian was almost amused by the way he had taken charge, or thought he had. Jack McKinstry was a good-looking man in spite of the shadows under his eyes; he had an easy charm he obviously relied on to get him out of tight spots. Marian found both their male suspects attractive, making for a nice change from the usual run of perps she had to deal with. She introduced herself and her partner. “First of all we want to know your whereabouts between the time your meeting in this room broke up and the time Mr. Strode’s body was discovered. When did the meeting end, exactly?”

  “Oh, it must have been close to eleven. We’d been in here for hours—god, how I hate this room. Then I went up to my room to finish packing. I didn’t intend to spend another night in this house. I was in such a hurry to get out I got careless and dropped the suitcase on my toe. I let out a yell to wake the dead.”

  “A rough weekend, we hear.”

  “The roughest.”

  “How long did you stay in your room?”

  “Until I smelled smoke. Then I started downstairs and one of those pet gorillas Strode liked to keep around yelled up at me everything was under control and to go back to my room. So like a good little boy I went back to my room. The next thing I knew everyone was screaming that Strode had been killed and there were police everywhere you looked.” He hesitated. “Is it true, about the knives? All three of our knives were used to kill him?”

  “It’s true.”

  Jack’s grin stretched from ear to ear. “Somebody’s got a nice sense of irony.”


  “Any idea who?”

  He pulled his chair closer to hers. “Sergeant, let’s skip the games. You know as well as I do that it had to be one of the three of us.” He smiled disarmingly. “Now, I know I didn’t kill him—but you don’t. You look at me and all you see is Suspect, with a capital ‘S.’ But Strode and I had nothing more to do with each other. Once Richard Bruce sold him his House of Glass shares, it was all over. None of us had any further business with Strode.”

  “Not even the business of the fingerprints on the knives? Strode did have those knives taken away from you, didn’t he?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “So you know about that, do you? Then you know that’s the way Strode was able to force Richard to sell. That’s all that was about.”

  “And you were going to go away and leave a knife with your fingerprints on it in A. J. Strode’s possession? Mr. McKinstry, nobody would do that.”

  “What could I do about it? They were locked up, there were guards … sure, somebody broke ’em out during the fire, but I didn’t know there was going to be a fire, now did I?”

  “Where are the household cleaning supplies kept?” Ivan broke in.

  “Why, they’re … uh, ah, I don’t know—in the back of the house somewhere?”

  It didn’t work. He knew, and they knew he knew.

  While he was still off balance, Marian asked, “Why didn’t you just sell your House of Glass shares when Strode first showed you the affidavit the helicopter pilot signed? You could have ended it all right there.”

  He tried to bluff. “What affidavit?”

  Silently Ivan opened a folder and slid the pilot’s statement across the table to him. Marian watched as Jack’s tanned face slowly turned gray. “It was in A. J. Strode’s computer all the time,” she said. “Your helicopter and Joanna Gillespie’s parents and Richard Bruce’s ship. We’ve got it all.”