Night Games (The Lt. Hastings Mysteries)

by Collin Wilcox

  As Hastings spoke, Katherine Haney swung her legs to the floor. She sat on the edge of the bed for a moment with her arms braced wide on either side of her body, as if she were testing her balance. Then, experimentally, she rose to her feet. Two steps took her within arm’s length of Hastings. She was smaller than she’d seemed, lying on the bed. Hastings was conscious of her closeness, conscious of her vulnerability—conscious, most of all, that she was looking into his eyes with an intensity that was almost intimate. She began to speak, but faltered on the first words. Beginning again, her voice was husky as she stepped closer.

  “Will they—can they take him away? I—I don’t want to see him again. Not like he is. Not down there, lying on the floor.”

  Lightly, he touched her forearm. “They won’t be much longer. I’ll tell them to hurry. And I’ll tell someone to notify you, when they’re gone.”

  “Thank you. I—” About to say something more, she hesitated, then broke off. But, in answer to his touch on her arm, she raised a hand, as if to touch him in return.

  Four

  CLOSING KATHERINE HANEY’S DOOR behind him, Hastings gestured for Canelli to follow him to the head of the staircase, where they could talk without being overheard.

  “Sorry to bother you, Lieutenant. But—” Canelli waved to the half-dozen men working in the hallway below. “—But Stark wants to get going, and he wants to know whether it’s all right to move the body.”

  “Is everything finished? Did they get plenty of pictures?” As he spoke, Hastings looked at the four bedroom doors and the short corridor that opened off the half-circle of the upstairs hallway. On the door farthest to his right he saw a Do Not Disturb sign and a werewolf cartoon taped to the carved walnut panels. This, obviously, was the daughter’s room.

  “The fingerprint guys and the lab guys are still working,” Canelli answered. “But the photographer’s finished and gone.” Anxiously, Canelli looked at Hastings. “Is that okay? I mean, he said he’s got to do some work over on Octavia, so I let him go. There was a real big traffic accident over there.”

  Now looking down at the body, Hastings nodded. “That’s all right.” With his black bag packed, Stark was standing a few feet from the victim, silently looking up at Hastings. Every line of Stark’s body projected barely suppressed impatience.

  “I’ll go talk to Stark,” Hastings said, gesturing for Canelli to accompany him down the staircase.

  “Jeez,” Canelli said, “this is really some layout. I mean, just look at all this. It’s like—you know—we were debutantes, or something, going down the stairs to the grand ballroom. That’s what they do, you know—they always have their pictures taken coming down real fancy staircases, where some guy in a tux is waiting for them at the bottom.”

  Hastings’ sidelong glance was unreadable. When he’d first been promoted to lieutenant, Canelli had been his driver. One rainy, windy winter afternoon, they’d answered a 301: an armed robbery in progress, at the Excelsior Branch of the Bank of America. They’d arrived in front of the bank as the two suspects were driving away in a red pickup. In hot pursuit, fighting the steering wheel, Canelli had kept up a constant commentary that, even in the heat of the chase, had reminded Hastings of a better-than-average comedy record.

  At the foot of the stairway, stepping around the body without looking at it, Hastings gestured to the study, where he could see a fingerprint technician dusting one corner of a leather-topped desk.

  “See how close they are to being done,” Hastings ordered. “I’ll be with you in a few minutes.” He turned toward Stark, who picked up his satchel and walked with Hastings toward the front door. Through the leaded windows above the door, Hastings could see a bright, sunny morning sky. He glanced at his watch. It was exactly 6:30 A.M. Ruefully, he shook his head. “What a way to make a living.”

  Stark shrugged. “The hours aren’t so good, and the pay’s only fair. But me, I flunked out of medical school. So I’m not complaining. Plus my wife and I get along, more or less, and the house is paid for, and my daughter-in-law just got a raise.”

  “So what’s it look like?” Hastings swung his chin in the direction of the body.

  “Multiple knife wounds, one of which severed the carotid artery, as I thought. I’ll know more when we start working on him, downtown.”

  “Today’s Saturday. Can you do the autopsy today?”

  “I can try, Frank. You know how it goes. I propose, and the boss disposes. I’ll see what he says.”

  “Maybe I’ll get my boss to talk to your boss.”

  Stark shrugged. “That’s fine with me.”

  “What about the time of death?”

  “Assuming that the room temperature remained constant at seventy degrees,” Stark answered, “and estimating his weight at a hundred seventy-five, and assuming that he wasn’t running a fever when he died, then I’d put the time of death somewhere between midnight and two A.M.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “As sure as I can be. In these conditions, the body heat loss wouldn’t be measurable for the first two hours. Then, at the weight I estimated, he’d lose a half-degree an hour. When I took his temperature, at precisely six o’clock, he’d lost two degrees. So, roughly, I’d say that he couldn’t have died after two A.M., and not before midnight. Also, rigor mortis is starting. Typically, we don’t see rigor before four hours after death, in these conditions—four to eight hours. So, again, that makes it look like midnight to two A.M.” He looked at his watch. “Anything else? More corpses await.”

  “No, that’s all. Thanks, Alex. See if you can do the autopsy today, will you?—whether or not my boss calls your boss. The victim was apparently a big shot—a publicity man who handled a lot of politicians. So, sure as hell, the reporters’ll be around. I’d like to have some answers for them.”

  “I’ll do what I can.” As Hastings nodded, then began walking toward the study, Stark opened the front door, put his fingers to his lips, and whistled. Almost immediately, two ambulance stewards materialized, rolling a wheeled gurney. Standing with Canelli just inside the doorway to the study, Hastings watched as the two men from the crime lab began packing up their equipment. Aware of their importance in any homicide investigation, the men moved calmly, deliberately. They didn’t look at the two detectives, who were crowded together shoulder-to-shoulder, giving the technicians room.

  “Did you find any blood in here?” Hastings asked.

  Joe McCarvelle, supervising the lab crew, shook his head. With his equipment packed, he turned to face Hastings across the oversize leather-topped desk. The other technician picked up his equipment, nodded to Hastings, and left the room.

  “No visible blood,” McCarvelle said. He was a tall, gaunt man, forty-five years old, hollow-chested, stoop-shouldered. His face was deeply lined by displeasure and disillusionment. None of his co-workers had ever heard him laugh.

  “How about out in the hallway?” Hastings asked. “Anywhere, except right where he was lying?”

  “Again,” McCarvelle said sourly, “there’s nothing visible. What tests will show, I don’t know. You should bear in mind, though, that most of the surfaces are wood—” He gestured to the hallway floor, then to the staircase. “Any blood visible to the naked eye could be washed up. But what we’ll get with chemical analysis, that’s something else.”

  “Have you finished?”

  “We’re finished down here, inside. We’ve still got the garden to do, outside—” He gestured to the French doors and the garden beyond. “And there’s upstairs, too—the central staircase, and the balcony up there. And the other rooms, if you want us to do them.”

  Hastings looked inquiringly at Canelli. “Is there another stairway—another way down, for Mrs. Haney and the girl to use while McCarvelle’s working?”

  Canelli nodded. “There’s a back stairway that goes down to the kitchen.”

  “All right, then—” Hastings stood back from the doorway, dismissing McCarvelle with a gesture. “Get started
on the stairway, and the upstairs hallway. Maybe you can finish before Mrs. Haney and her daughter get up. Then you can do their rooms.”

  “You want me to do their bedrooms?” Plainly, McCarvelle disapproved.

  “I want them vacuumed, at least. Don’t bother fingerprinting them. Not now, anyhow. But I want the upstairs hallway fingerprinted. And the staircase, too—the railing. Take your time. Do it right.”

  As McCarvelle left the room Hastings stepped past Canelli to stand near the far end of the desk, where he could see both the interior of the study and the garden. The room was furnished with the desk, a desk chair, a leather lounge chair and matching leather sofa, lamp table and lamp, and a low credenza. Floor to ceiling, three walls were lined solid with shelves, most of them filled with expensive-looking books. The six drawers of the credenza were open, spilling out their contents on the Oriental rug. Another step took Hastings behind the desk. Each of the desk drawers had been rifled. The few papers on the desk top apparently hadn’t been disturbed. Black fingerprint powder covered the desk. Some of the powder had collected in the drawers, and had been spilled on the rug. The rug would probably have to be cleaned at public expense.

  Tentatively, Hastings pulled each desk drawer fully open, fruitlessly looking for James Haney’s gun. He straightened, turned, looked out across the bricked patio and the small formal garden to the six-foot brick wall that bordered the property in back. A small ornamental wooden stepladder had been propped against the wall.

  Still staring thoughtfully out into the garden that was now bright with morning sunshine, Hastings said, “So what d’you think happened?”

  “Well,” Canelli said, earnestly furrowing his swarthy brow, “I’ve been giving that a lot of thought, Lieutenant.”

  “Good,” Hastings answered drily. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Of course, it’s all a guess. You understand that.”

  Gravely, Hastings nodded. “I understand that.”

  “Well—” Canelli drew a deep, portentous breath. “Well, the way I figure it, Haney came in—whenever he came in, say one o’clock, or whatever—and he was drunk, see. Which is why he forgot to lock the service door behind him when he came into the house from the garage. And maybe, also because he was gassed, he didn’t notice that someone had sneaked into the garage when he was driving in. I mean, we know that happens, a whole lot. So then—” Quickly, he drew another breath. “So then he pays off the baby-sitter, and sends her home, and he goes upstairs, and gets into his pajamas, and goes to bed.

  “Meanwhile, while all this is going on, this black guy can get from the garage to inside the house, here, because the service door isn’t armed—isn’t connected into the burglar-alarm system. So when everything quiets down, the black guy starts doing his thing. Which means, naturally, that he’d come to the front of the house. I mean, that’s where the loot is—in the dining room, and the study, and the living room. Maybe he’s even cased the layout, who knows? Anyhow, he goes into the study, and starts turning’ out the drawers, and everything. But then Haney hears something. So he does the stupid thing—comes downstairs, to be a hero. And he gets himself killed. The assailant doesn’t want to go out through the garage, for whatever reason. So he goes out into the garden—” Canelli gestured through the French doors. “He sees he needs something to get over the wall. So he gets the ladder from in here, and—” He spread his hands. “And he’s gone.”

  “He’d have to know how to disarm the burglar-alarm system, though.” Hastings gestured to the French doors. “Otherwise, when he went out into the garden, the alarm would’ve gone off. Did you check with the alarm people?”

  “No,” Canelli admitted, “I didn’t. I will, though.”

  Nodding, Hastings stood silently for a moment, letting his gaze wander around the room and into the hallway. While they’d been talking, the stewards had removed the body, leaving a large pool of blood at the foot of the stairway, already coagulating. If the blood hadn’t already stained the parquet floor, it soon would. Slowly, Hastings walked out into the hallway. Two technicians were using small battery-operated vacuum cleaners to systematically vacuum each stair of the central staircase, allowing one transparent bag for each step. McCarvelle was dusting the bannister for fingerprints. Hastings’ gaze wandered to Katherine Haney’s door, then to the girl’s door, upstairs. Both doors were still closed.

  “I’m going downtown and get things started,” Hastings said. “I’ll get you another man from our squad, maybe two, depending on the workload. I’m going to keep a uniformed man front and back until tomorrow—or until we get someone in custody. When you get reinforcements, tell them to start canvassing the neighbors. Maybe you’d better wait until eight o’clock to start canvassing. See if they heard anything, saw anything. You stay here, in the house, until the woman and the kid wake up. Help them, any way you can. I’ll have you relieved at, say, noon. Maybe I’ll come by, if it works out. I want you to get the name and address of the baby-sitter. Her first name is Amy. I also want you to interrogate Mrs. Haney’s daughter, Maxine. But be careful. She’s only eleven, and she apparently took it pretty hard. So be guided by what her mother wants. If she wants to be present during the interrogation, that’s fine. If you can get the kid alone, though, that’s probably better. Find out if she heard anything, any sounds of a struggle. Find out if—” He broke off, waiting while Canelli carefully made notes in his spiral-bound notebook. “Haney had two guns, pistols, one upstairs, one here in the study. Find out if the upstairs gun is still on the premises. If it is, and if we assume that Haney was upstairs, in bed, then I have to wonder why he didn’t have that gun with him, assuming that he came downstairs to look for a prowler.

  “Also, I want to get Mrs. Haney working on a list of whatever was stolen. Find out if any of it’s identifiable, except for the gun. And if you have any spare time”—wearily, Hastings smiled—“contact the burglar-alarm people. I want the exact time of the crime pinned down, and if we can find out when these were opened”—he gestured to the French doors—“we might have what we need.”

  “What about Mrs. Haney?” Canelli asked. “The way it sounds, she must’ve gotten here right after the murder. She might be able to give us the exact time.”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. Anyhow, we need more than her word. The guy might’ve been in the house for some time, before she got home. Otherwise, he wouldn’t’ve had the loot all bundled up, ready to go.”

  “I know,” Canelli mused. “I was just thinking the same thing myself. Most guys, though, they kill someone, they split. Quick.”

  Hastings made no reply.

  “What time did Mrs. Haney get home?” Canelli asked.

  “She’s not sure. Which reminds me—if you can do it without antagonizing her, get her exact time frame for last night. If she was with someone, then we should be able to backtrack. Don’t press her, though. Not now. So far, she’s been very cooperative. I want to keep it that way.”

  “Yes, sir,”

  “By the way, how’d she seem, when you got here?”

  “She seemed—” Once again Canelli’s brow furrowed as he searched for the right words. “She seemed real cool, I thought. Or maybe she was—you know—frozen, from the shock. It’s always hard to tell, at least for me.”

  Hastings smiled, clapped the younger man lightly on the shoulder. “Me too, Canelli. Me too.” He turned toward the front door as he said, “I’ll see you later. Good luck.”

  “Thanks, Lieutenant.” Unsuccessfully, Canelli tried to stifle a long, loud yawn.

  Five

  HERBERT GRANVILLE YAWNED AS he tied the two fishing poles to the station wagon’s roof rack. Weeks ago, he’d promised his son that, someday soon, they’d go surf fishing. Immediately, he’d regretted making the offer. At age ten, Bobby didn’t have the strength necessary to cast the bait far enough to clear the breakers. The boy had had rheumatic fever when he was six years old, and had never been strong, never been good at sports, never been able to hold his own
in the boyhood rough-and-tumble that Granville could still vividly remember from his own childhood. Granville realized, therefore, that the consequences of his impulsive promise would be yet another defeat inflicted on his son.

  Satisfied that the fishing poles were tied securely, he opened the door of the station wagon and edged into the driver’s seat. His wife had insisted on storing some of her sister’s furniture in the garage. Result: No one except the driver could get into the car until it was clear of the garage.

  Granville started the engine, let it warm up. Out of long habit he glanced back at Bobby, to make sure the boy wasn’t behind the car. Then Granville put the gear selector in reverse and began slowly backing the car across the sidewalk. As he cleared the garage he saw Bobby bending over a large brown paper bag with PETRINI’S printed in bold orange letters on the side. The bag was on the ground at Bobby’s feet, and as Granville watched he saw his son’s eyes suddenly light up. Over the sound of the car’s engine he heard Bobby exclaim, “Hey, Dad. Hey, look what I found.”

  Interested, Granville moved the gear selector to Park and slid across the seat to the passenger’s window, for a better look. He saw his son reach into the sack and withdraw a large blue-steel revolver.

  “Look at this,” the boy said, excitedly waving the revolver. “And there’s other stuff in here, too. Good stuff.”

  Six

  CUTTER LAY ON HIS back, staring up at the concrete ceiling. From deep inside himself, he could feel the demons stirring.

  How long had it been?

  How many hours, how many minutes, how many seconds had it been?

  How many times had they hit him?

  With his tongue, he explored the inside of his mouth, where his teeth had shredded the skin when they’d hit him. With his fingertips, delicately, he explored the cut along the left side of his jaw, and the bruises around his right eye.

  When they’d beaten his brother, closed his eye, his brother’s sight had never been right again. Ever.