PERFECTING A MURDER
He’d given it a lot of thought. A lot of thought. And he’d also done a huge amount of research. Perfect murders—at least unsolved murders—happened all the time. That was one of his conclusions. And those were homicides that came to the attention of the police, usually the routine killings occurring in a mass society: drive-by shootings, murder following rape of a woman unknown to the assailant, serial murders, and the like. But the homicides that involved clear-cut motives—money, unrequited love, revenge—where the victim and murderer were known to each other, were the ones most often solved.
The reason the perpetrators of such crimes were so often caught was simply due to poor planning. Motives are difficult to hide, foolproof alibis almost impossible to construct, hit men notoriously untrustworthy. With that knowledge as a base, Oscar Garland moved on to perfecting the murder, the murder of his partner in the firm of Garland & Moss, Inc., Master Architects.
There would be no disguising his motive, nor could there be. With his current forty-nine percent ownership of the business, Garland had to leave the blue-chip decisions up to Wilfred Moss and, more and more, those decisions were leading them toward bankruptcy. The only feasible way of solving the problem was to exercise the option written into the original contract, one that they had decided on because neither of them had close family attachments—Garland being a bachelor and Moss long-since divorced. The contract simply stated in one clause that Garland & Moss would be solely owned by the surviving partner. That wasn’t the exact wording, but it was certainly the gist of the proviso. And now Garland had settled down to serious preparation toward putting that clause into effect.
The gods were favoring him. Moss had just recently moved into an apartment in a new building and had thought nothing of leaving his apartment key attached to the same ring as the car key when Garland borrowed the vehicle. Having a copy made was a simple procedure, and was done at a locksmith shop far removed from home base. The transaction was cash. The key maker barely looked at the customer wearing dark glasses. The necessary weapon, an unregistered automatic plus silencer, had been surprisingly easy to obtain on a weekend trip to New Orleans. Then, it became simply a matter of patience.
There had to be an evening when Moss would have gone out and then be predictably coming home so that Garland could be waiting for him. Yes, an alibi would be desirable, but Garland planned on fashioning a flimsy one, since he’d already dismissed the possibility of an unbreakable one. The important thing was that the alibi wouldn’t greatly matter.
The Chamber of Commerce monthly board meeting provided the perfect occasion for the perfect murder. Garland and Moss had shared the burden, alternating attendance, and this was Moss’s night. He would definitely be leaving the meeting before nine and so should be coming through the door of the apartment shortly afterwards. As a precaution, Garland showed up early. He had come thoroughly prepared.
The first step had been taken at home—a thorough shower and scrubbing. And then came clothing for the event. Having left his street clothes in his car, he was now wearing a pair of cheap trousers, a shirt, a pair of coveralls, plastic gloves, a stocking cap to keep stray hairs from escaping, a set of running shoes with socks on both the inside and outside—all new and purchased from different shops on the New Orleans trip.
He’d been careful to make sure no one saw him enter the building and had put on the more unusual items in the stairwell, which he had used rather than risking the elevator to get to the third floor apartment. The key worked perfectly, even while he was distracted by an annoying mosquito looking for a meal. Within moments he was inside, had relocked the door and taken up a position facing it. Despite the unlit room, he could see his surroundings clearly from the streetlights shining through the window and reflecting off of the ceiling. Eight-thirty-five. He touched nothing. Back in the early planning stages he had toyed with the idea of making the killing look like a burglary gone awry, but had dismissed it because of the risks of contaminating the surroundings.
The earlier distraction reappeared. It must have accompanied him through the door. At first he toyed with flailing away at it, then decided the fewer movements he made, the less likely he would be to leave a trace of himself behind. Nothing, nothing should be done that might possibly point to his having been there. The annoyance soon disappeared on its own.
Eight-forty-two. A key in the lock, a hand groping for and flipping on the light switch, the familiar figure of his partner, two quick shots and it was all over. Garland slipped past the corpse, pulled the door closed behind him, retraced his steps down the stairs, and went off to the mall where he had parked his car. Five minutes found all of his clothes in a trash bag, and a return to his street wear. The places had been carefully chosen ahead of time. The gun and key into the river, the clothing scattered into several dumpsters far across town from the scene of the crime.
And now, the last act of the play. The police would notify him, would question him, and he would have the answers.
***
Homicide Detective-Sergeant Ben Ormond told himself, “Just one year, three months and twelve days to retirement.” The reasons for counting were many, though they mainly centered around his most recent assistants. When Lou Keller had retired, Ben hadn’t expected a replacement who could measure up to Lou, but he also hadn’t expected the string of misfits and losers he inherited. The first one he’d caught pocketing small change from the dresser of one victim. The second had managed to completely mangle an investigation by starting an affair with a key witness. If anything, though, the current one was the worst of the lot.
Shelly Winter was about as incompetent a detective as Ben had ever encountered. It wasn’t hard to figure out that she’d moved swiftly from patrol duty to detective status through connections, namely through being the mayor’s niece. By the second day of her new position as assistant to Ormond, he had found that even the simplest tasks were beyond Shelly’s ken. The best approach, he decided, was to do everything himself. So, when the call came through at ten-forty-six, Ben made it a point to do the driving. Arriving at the scene, he managed to keep Winter as far in the background as possible while he questioned the patrolman who’d answered the initial call and was now standing outside the apartment.
“It was a young couple who found him. They’d been to a party that started early, but they must have started to party even earlier. Their apartment is right above, and they just moved in last week. According to them, they got off on the wrong floor. Thought this was their apartment. He put his key in the door, after a lot of fumbling and laughing by both of them. Didn’t need to, since the door was unlocked. With the lights on, the way they are, they spotted the body immediately and sobered up fast. She called 911 on their cell phone, and now they’re both upstairs in their apartment with my partner. Neither of us touched a thing once we were sure the occupant—name’s Moss—was dead. So now it’s all yours, Sergeant.”
Ben slipped on a pair of polyvinyl gloves, gingerly opened the door and viewed the scene. Before going very far into the room, he waved Winter back, told her not to touch anything, then made a quick survey of his surroundings. The body was lying a few feet into the room, face up, a splash of blood marking the entry wounds. It had been evident from the outside that the building had been newly constructed, and there was still the smell of newness in the room. A quick check showed no indications of a struggle or of anything having been disturbed. As Ben was weighing the possibility of a burglary turned deadly, he heard a thump behind him. Turning around, he saw Shelly looking at her hand.”
“What the…” Ben exclaimed.
The explanation was immediate. “Damn mosquito. I hate them.”
“You smashed it against the wall?” Ben’s tone was thick with disbelief.
“Why, sure. The little bugger was just sitting there.”
Ben looked at the splash of blood and shook his head. “Now we have one more set of fingerprints for the crew to work with.” Before his ex
asperation could be fully expressed, the three members of the scene-of-crime team showed up in the doorway followed shortly by the deputy coroner. They needed no instructions, but went immediately to work, while Ben herded Shelly out, telling her to wait in the patrol car.
A trip to the upstairs apartment found the couple drinking black coffee and looking much the worse for wear. There was little difference in the story they told from what Ben had gotten second-hand from the patrolman, adding only when questioned that they didn’t know the victim and had never seen him before. That they might have been involved in the murder seemed unlikely, though he dutifully took down their names and would check out their backgrounds.
By the time he’d returned to the downstairs apartment, the DC had pretty much wrapped up his end of the work. One of the technicians mentioned that in a new apartment such as this, their job was enormously simplified, especially since there were no pets. Fingerprints would be few. Extraneous debris such as hairs would also be minimal. The DC noted that little blood had flowed from the wounds, and what there was had stayed on the victim’s clothing. He confirmed Ben’s opinion that there were no signs of a struggle. There was certainly no indication of blood under the victim’s fingernails, though he’d taken the usual precaution of bagging the hands to keep them pristine for closer examination later.
Death, he estimated at somewhere around eight, perhaps as late as nine. He said it with the usual caveat that estimates were always uncertain and that he might be able to do better at postmortem time. “From the way the body’s lying, my guess is that it wasn’t someone who came in and shot him. Whoever it was, was waiting for him.”
Ben looked around the room once more. The dust left by the fingerprint man seemed to be everywhere, including—and this provided Ben some wry amusement—on the wall where the bloody remains of the mosquito stood out on the pale wallpaper. A thought occurred to him. Pointing to the spot, he asked the D.C., “Could the lab tell the DNA using a small splotch of blood like that?”
“Sure. Hell, they can do it with just a single hair follicle. Want me to run it off to them?”
Ben nodded.
With a scalpel and an obviously skilled pair of hands, the DC carefully excised the wallpaper and a large portion of the plasterboard under it, leaving the spot of blood almost entirely intact. The result went into its own evidence bag, with a tag initialed by both Ben and the D.C. The latter assured the detective sergeant that, with new state-of-the-art methods, the results of at an at least preliminary analysis would be available in twenty-four hours or less.
***
Garland had expected to hear from the police, but not quite so soon. He’d answered the insistent ringing of the doorbell in his bathrobe shortly after midnight.
Greeting the detective sergeant and his assistant with the requisite amount of surprise, he expressed a similar degree of shock at the news they bore. His alibi, a weak one, was that he had gone to a film at the local movie house—a film he admitted he was already familiar with. The theater had been crowded. No one would know when he arrived or when he left. He assured Ben that he’d gotten there at seven-thirty and left by nine.
Further questions produced both the admission that he was now the sole owner of Garland & Moss, Inc., and irritation. His irritation peaked at the request that he appear at the station the following day to complete and sign a statement. He assured the sergeant he would be there—with his attorney.
That had been part of his plan. He had even chosen a none-too-bright lawyer who had defended him on a DUI charge, which had been dropped almost entirely because of the ineptness of the arresting officer. In any event, the choice of Leon Hay was mainly for show. Hay would certainly not probe very deeply into the circumstances around the crime, would take his word for his total lack of involvement, and would blunder along, thinking his advice to be of value at the approaching questioning.
Meeting with Hay in his office for an hour, Garland went into his explanation of what had happened and why he was a suspect. It rather surprised him to find that Hay asked some fairly penetrating questions, after first being assured that Garland had had nothing to do with the murder.
“Were you ever in Moss’s apartment?”
“No, never. In fact, I’m not even sure where it is. I know it’s somewhere north of town, but that’s about it.”
“Do you have any idea when he was murdered?’
“He left work late. Around six. He was on his way to a Chamber meeting which wasn’t due to get over until nine. So it must have been between then and midnight. No, it must have been a lot earlier than midnight, because the police must have spent some time at the crime scene. They showed up at my place shortly after midnight.”
“Alibi?”
Garland shrugged and told him what he had told the police. adding that all they’d told him was that they’d found Moss shot to death.
“Do you own a gun?”
“No. I do know about them. Three years in the National Guard reserves.”
“O. K. If they can’t find any evidence that you were there, then you’re home free as far as I can see. But you want to cooperate with them all the way. They’ll have the usual dust from the rug, dog hairs and what not, so they may want to check your wardrobe, your shoes, your car and whatever. They may even ask for a blood sample. Any problem with that?”
“Absolutely none.”
“Fine. It’s obvious that they’re just blowing smoke. They don’t have any other suspects so they’ll bring the pressure down on you. I’ll go with you and see to it they don’t try to intimidate you, but I can’t see any reason why you shouldn’t answer all of their questions. Cooperate!”
Five-thirty the following afternoon found Garland, Hay, Ormond and Winter gathered in the interrogation room. With the preliminaries of identification for the tape out of the way, Ormond gave the assurance that, while Garland was a current suspect, it was only because no other motive than his was readily apparent. He went on to assure Garland and his attorney that all possible leads would be followed.
The questioning was surprisingly similar to what Garland had faced in his attorney’s office. The only difference was a request at the end for a blood sample. As Ormond explained, the blood on the victim might or might not all be his. This was simply a way of checking possible suspects.
Garland tried not to smile and quickly agreed, following a nod from his attorney. They left the station together, congratulating each other on the quick elimination of Garland as a suspect.
“The key,” Hay again emphasized, “is that no one can be convicted unless there’s evidence they were in that apartment sometime last night. As far as I can see, you’re free and clear.”
At work, the following morning, as Garland was going through his late partner’s files, the receptionist announced the arrival of two visitors. Within moments of their entrance into his office, Ormond had mirandized him, shrugged at his demand to have his lawyer present and allowed him his one phone call. As they sat in the patrol car, Ormond asked, “Are you still insisting you were never in Moss’s apartment.”
“Absolutely. I never set foot in there. Ever!”
“Then you better get that lawyer of yours busy trying to explain how a mosquito with your blood in it could have been flying around there when we arrived on the scene.”
RED-CLAY COUNTRY
Highway 127 cuts right through the middle of red-clay country. There must have been at least five companies scattered around there at one time, with a dozen kilns turning out water-struck bricks by the millions. Then the fad burnt out sometime in the early forties and the countryside never recovered. Red clay’s fine for brick making, but not much good for anything else. It’s poor for pasture and poorer yet for any kind of crops.
The county’s much too far from any big city for the average commuter. And it doesn’t have much to offer to second-home buyers, except for a handful of multimillionaires who like the solitude and can afford to helicopter in whenever they want to get away
from whatever it is they want to stop doing. Other than those few isolated mansions, the whole area is just one mass of abandoned clay pits and red muck, especially like now when the spring rains keep pelting down.
The first few drops of the next storm were splattering across the windshield, when I spotted a car on my side of the road with its hood up and a guy staring forlornly at the machine’s innards. I pulled over next to him, turned down the radio, punched the button to roll the passenger-side window down and hollered. “Need a ride?” 127 doesn’t have much traffic on it. I figured he’d probably be a long time waiting for someone else to offer him a lift.
He was a little guy, with glasses and an apologetic expression, probably an accountant or some such thing. My guess was that he knew about as much about cars as I do about double-entry bookkeeping. Well, I wasn’t about to get out to try any repair work, but I did offer to take him the five miles into Juniper Springs, in the direction I was heading toward, anyway. He looked kinda reluctantly at the motor, shook his head and dropped the lid before climbing aboard.
As I expected, he didn’t have a clue about why his car wouldn’t run, except to say that he turned the key and nothing happened. Well, with luck, he might get a mechanic to come out and give him a jumpstart.
I hadn’t gone more than a half-mile down the road, with the raindrops getting bigger and bigger and promising a regular drencher, when I spotted a hitchhiker with his thumb out. I don’t usually pick up hitchhikers, but it would have been hard to pass up a dog in that kind of weather, and daylight was fading fast. Maybe the main reason I stopped was because of my passenger. It’s easy enough to pass up a hitchhiker when you’re alone. You can just kind of avoid eye contact, and drive right by. But with a stranger along, and with plenty of room, I’d have felt kind of guilty to let that guy stand out there in the pouring rain. But about then I was beginning to wonder if we wouldn’t arrive in Juniper Springs looking like those circus cars that drive out into the middle of the ring and empty out twelve clowns and a donkey.
Mayhem, Mystery and Murder Page 27