The Brink of Murder

by Helen Nielsen

  When Simon reached the Toyota he could see why it had stopped. Verna had swerved off the single track and was stuck in deep snow. Tracks in the fresh snow on the road showed that she had gone ahead on foot. He opened the car door to peer at the tracks and heard the sound of an approaching motor in the canyon below. At the same time he noticed a narrow trail veering off to his left: fresh snow over a single track that must not have been used for hours. He swung the Jaguar across the road and turned into the trail. A clump of snow-covered brush afforded cover from the main road. He stopped and switched off the lights. It was about three minutes before the approaching headlights hit the Toyota. A black sedan braked to a stop, hesitated for a few seconds and then roared on. Simon started the Jaguar again and shifted into low. He released the clutch, pressed down on the accelerator and heard the rear wheels grind deeper into the snow. Stuck. By this time the second car was out of sight and sound and all Simon could do was get out and dig at the snow under the rear wheels.

  He opened the trunk and found a tyre iron and a piece of torn sail-cloth. He dug out the snow with the iron and shoved pieces of sail under the tyre treads. He got back into the car and tried to move it again. This time the tyres found traction and the Jaguar lurched forward. Simon drove forward about three feet and then slammed on the brakes because the sky had suddenly lighted up like a torch. Simon switched off his lights again and watched a spire of flame rising from somewhere beyond the next curve and, at the same time, heard the roar of a big motor grinding down the road away from the conflagration. The big sedan roared past again and screeched to a stop just short of the abandoned Toyota. He saw it grind into reverse and then roar forward smashing its front bumper into the small sedan resting precariously on the bank above the ravine. The Toyota groaned and slid backwards off the bank as the big sedan, swerving away from it, roared on down the road. Grabbing a flashlight from the door pocket Simon ran to the place where the Toyota had been stuck. He directed the beam into the ravine and saw it sliding down slowly until it picked up momentum and bounced off a rocky ledge into blackness. By that time the headlamps of the descending sedan were raking the canyon walls miles below.

  But the fire above was still blazing. Simon sprinted back to the Jaguar and drove up to see what had precipitated the big sedan’s hasty departure. Beyond the next bend he found an open gate and fresh tyre marks in the snow that led past the burned ruins of what must have been the Love Chalet. Beyond the ruins stood a tall barn with the loft ablaze. The barn doors were closed. Parking with the lights of the Jaguar focused on the doors, Simon ran to the doors and found them unlocked. He pulled them open and saw, bathed in the glare of headlights and backed by bright orange flames, a 1959 Oldsmobile, blue and white, with the right side of the windshield shattered, the left headlamp crushed and the left front fender battered and half rusted away. Barney Amling’s first new car. A five-gallon gasoline container stood near the left rear wheel. Empty. Some of its contents had been splashed over the car and the rest, obviously, on the stalls at the rear of the barn. A length of harness rope extended from the open gas tank towards the approaching fire. Simon yanked it loose and re-capped the tank. He backed the Jaguar around until he could use the rope as a hitch and pull the Olds free of the burning barn. The rope held. The Olds shuddered and moved forward. Simon drove until well clear of the fire area and pulled to a sloping piece of ground where he untied the rope, moved the Jaguar out of the way, and watched the Olds roll slowly, as if exhausted by the years of waiting, into a snow bank and stop. Snow was falling heavily now. The car would soon be covered by a protective white blanket.

  Simon drove back down the mountain. At his first opportunity he called the sheriff’s station to report the fire and the wrecked Toyota. A second call was made to Reardon’s office. Lieutenant Wabash answered the phone.

  “The captain isn’t here,” he said. “He’s gone to some society dance.”

  “What are you doing?” Simon asked.

  “Still working on this damned report,” Wabash said.

  “Meet me at the Marina View Inn at Marina del Rey,” Simon said, “and you can file a report on the Amling case. Or didn’t Captain Reardon tell you that it wasn’t Amling who died in Buenos Aires?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  WABASH’S BLACK AND white was waiting in a no-parking zone when Simon reached the Marina View Inn. He took one look at Simon’s face and asked: “Why the panic?”

  Simon answered: “There’s a yacht anchored a quick trot from here and the woman who owns it knows too much for her own good.”

  They ran all the way but were too late. At the end of the floating dock where the Funky Frigate had been moored was nothing but black water. Simon hailed a man on the nearest boat and had him summon the marina patrol boat. When it appeared the skipper admitted that he had seen the yacht move out of the channel about half an hour earlier. By this time a small crowd had gathered that included Cherry Lane and her two friends who had been partying on another boat. They were appalled that the yacht was gone.

  “Verna can’t sail a boat,” Cherry wailed. “She doesn’t even sail it around the marina.”

  “Does it have an automatic pilot?” Simon asked.

  Cherry responded with blank silence. It was her host from a neighbouring yacht, Dr Goldstone, who volunteered the information that the Funky Frigate was fully equipped.

  “Are you a medical doctor?” Simon demanded.

  Goldstone answered in the affirmative.

  “Then come along. You may be needed.” Simon climbed down into the patrol boat followed by Wabash and the doctor and barked an order. “Coastguard station,” he said. “There’s heavy sea beyond the breakwater. The Funky Frigate needs help.”

  Simon filled in the lieutenant on what he knew of Verna Castle’s rôle in the Amling case while the coastguard searched out the missing yacht. It was almost an hour before they found her. By that time the air patrol had joined the search and a second cutter was converging on the area. They were almost upon the Funky Frigate before they realized it. She carried only running lights. No lights showed in the cabin or below decks.

  “Maybe she’s derelict,” Goldstone said. “Verna may have taken to the dinghy when she found herself heading outside the marina.”

  The cutter raked the decks of the yacht with a searchlight. The dinghy was missing from its hangar and a message had to be radioed back to the coastguard base to start a search for it. Derelict or not, the yacht had to be brought back to harbour. As the cutter drew alongside a grappling hook was thrown across her bow where it caught on the railing and grew taut. Simon peeled off his coat and grabbed the rope with both hands.

  “Don’t wave goodbye,” Wabash yelled into the wind. “This is no sea for a swim.”

  It was a black, churning sea that was icy cold halfway up Simon’s thighs as his weight pulled the rope down. He went hand over hand pulling up out of the water as he neared the yacht’s deck. He kept his eyes on the chrome deck railing where the searchlight was focused because both boats were still in motion and only by keeping the cutter parallel to the yacht could the rope hold taut. At last he grasped the railing. One more pull and he was over the side. He braced himself against the railing to gain balance and then ran to the cabin. Once inside the lounge, he found the light switch and then the wheel. The auto-pilot was set full speed ahead. He brought it back to slow and watched the cutter cut speed accordingly. He brought it then to stop. The cutter stopped and a second line was tossed easily to the railing. Dr Goldstone was the first across; Wabash followed. Simon turned on the lights below deck and the doctor bounded down the narrow stairs. He found Verna spread-eagled on the queen-size bed. She was unconscious. No bruises and no blood. Only a crushed hypodermic needle on the carpet. Goldstone made a hurried examination.

  “She’s alive—but just barely,” he announced. “She’s taken a nearly lethal dose of something I can’t identify at the moment.”

  “What a way to commit suicide,” Wabash said.

/>   “Or murder,” Simon added.

  “Murder? Any suspect I know?”

  “For the time being we can call him Fred Smathers,” Simon said. “This is his brand of insurance. What do you think, Goldstone?”

  “If we can get her to a hospital soon enough,” the doctor said, “the policy may be cancelled.”

  They decided against trying to transfer the woman to the cutter. Simon signalled for the ropes to be hauled away and took over at the wheel. He turned the yacht around and resumed full speed while Wabash got busy on the ship-to-shore and ordered an ambulance to stand by at the dock. Goldstone remained below with his patient. With a coastguard escort the Funky Frigate returned to port. Verna was still alive when they reached the coastguard station. Dr Goldstone accompanied her into the ambulance but Simon declined a ride. He talked Wabash into commandeering the nearest black and white and they drove off together to make a late appearance at the Shoreline Country Club dance.

  • • •

  It was after 2 a.m. when they arrived. The parking-lot was half empty but in the patrons’ section they found two black Cadillac sedans, one as clean as if it had just come off a car wash and the other streaked with dirt. Simon opened the door of the dirty one and peered inside. The keys were in the ignition. He switched it on and the gas gauge registered almost empty. He examined the floor mat. It was damp and caked with mud.

  “Pull the mat on this one and have it analysed,” he told the lieutenant. “Don’t be surprised if you find bits of straw and traces of gasoline. I’ll explain why later.”

  He closed the door and walked around to the rear of the car. Attached to the licence plate holder was a medical insignia.

  “Whose car is it?” Wabash asked.

  “Eric Larson’s,” Simon said.

  He moved on to the clean Cadillac and opened the door. Again, the keys were in the ignition. He switched it on and the gas gauge registered almost full. “And this little piggy stayed home,” he said.

  They went inside the club-house where a handful of couples were still dancing to the strains of a youthful combo. Most of the remaining guests had gravitated to the bar and that was where Simon found Larson and Knox Reardon having a nightcap. Larson carried a mink stole over his arm. Reardon had a whisky glass in his hand.

  “How’s the party going?” Simon asked.

  Larson smiled wearily. “It’s ending,” he said. “I’m waiting for Carole to come back from the little girls’ room so I can drive her home.”

  “I hope you can find a gas station open,” Simon said. “Your tank’s almost empty.”

  Larson looked startled. “That’s impossible. I had it filled on the way to the party.”

  “And you’ve been on the premises all evening, I suppose.”

  “Of course. I’m on the entertainment committee. I spent most of the night behind this bar.”

  “That’s right, Drake,” Reardon said. “I relieved him about an hour ago.”

  “Glad I missed it,” Simon said. “Volunteer bartenders aren’t my idea of fun. There’s an art to every profession—even murder. I guess that’s why Verna Castle is going to live and, being female, talk and talk and talk.”

  The trouble with exploding a bombshell in a cosy corner was that there was so little space for the débris to fall. Faces, mostly. That’s where the damage showed. Eric Larson’s face, suddenly ashen; Knox Reardon’s face suddenly alert. “Verna Castle,” Simon repeated, “formerly Alverna Castile. Do you recall her, doctor? She was the one who took Barney to the Laurelwood sanatorium twelve years ago.”

  “I—I may have heard Barney mention the name,” Larson said.

  “I’m sure you did. Did Barney also mention that he had a concussion when he was admitted? There must have been some evidence of the accident when you visited him. Did he tell you that he killed a man in a hit-and-run accident the night he was admitted?”

  “Christ,” Larson said, “you lawyers really dig up dirt, don’t you?”

  “Then he did tell you. No wonder he didn’t want to see Carole for several months. It takes time for an honest man to learn to live with something like that.”

  Simon didn’t know, of course, if Verna Castle would live but Lieutenant Wabash, who had lingered in the shadows further down the bar, didn’t contradict him and that was a help. He was going to have trouble getting to the truth without her. With her another man’s life was heading for swift oblivion.

  “It’s been a bad night all round,” Simon added. “I followed Verna up to Mount Waterford tonight. Barney’s Olds, the hit-and-run car, didn’t burn when the barn on her property was set afire. I pulled it clear.” He heard a slight hissing sound as if somebody was having trouble breathing. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Lieutenant Wabash moving closer along the bar. “Motivation,” he said, in a louder voice, “that’s what a lawyer digs for when the least likely man in the world turns thief. I dug a path straight to Alverna Castile—prostitute, madame and blackmailer. Never arrested, never convicted because she always knew the right people and paid off the right cops. But you know that, don’t you Reardon? You must have been on her pad back in the Love Chalet days. You two have a lot in common. You both knew how to pick a promising sucker and bleed him right up to the point when he couldn’t bleed any more.”

  Simon heard a sick groan behind him. Wabash. Then he heard a sharp click that had to be the safety coming off somebody’s gun. He looked down and saw that the gun was in Reardon’s hand.

  “It won’t do any good to shoot me,” Simon said. “I’ve been working with a private detective who knows as much as I do. Who better than a policeman would know that Alverna had a brother in prison who had been crippled in a knife fight? Who better than a policeman would know when he was paroled and groom him to double for Barney after he took the Pacific Guaranty funds? What did you use for leverage? Kevin Amling? Yes, I think that would do it. I think even Barney Amling would steal to save his son from prison. I advise you to put your gun away, captain.”

  “Is that professional advice?” Reardon choked.

  “Very professional. Conspiracy isn’t a capital crime. Coldblooded murder is.”

  And then Reardon told him what he had done with Barney Amling. He pulled the trigger.

  Simon dropped to the floor as the mink stole, airborne, slashed across Reardon’s wrist. The gun fell to the floor. Reardon dived for it and came to his knees and then fell backward as a second explosion tore away the front of his dinner jacket. He raised his head just long enough to stare at Lieutenant Wabash with a kind of childlike bewilderment and then he died. Wabash was still holding the captain’s head in his arms when the ambulance arrived. The only words Simon heard him speak were: “He was the best damned cop I ever knew.”

  • • •

  It was a long time before the press tired of the Amling story. Verna Castle did live and did talk, and when she was through it seemed that her record of no arrests and no convictions would stand. She had met Barney for the first time at one of Jake Ehrenberg’s parties during the period when Barney and Carole were separated. Sensing profit, she befriended him and was with him the night his Olds struck down a man who died on the way to the hospital. Dave Adler had the full story waiting for Simon before Reardon’s body reached the morgue. An unidentified hit-and-run killer, the news stories had read, driving a new two-tone sedan according to eye witnesses. A nice mess for young Barney Amling to learn from a visitor to the sanatorium who called himself Fred Smathers a few weeks later. He came in plain clothes, of course, because by that time he was no longer a uniformed cop who guarded football heroes at ceremonial dinners. He was Sergeant Reardon, soon to be lieutenant and later captain because, like Alverna Castile, he knew how to feather his nest.

  “Amling didn’t remember anything about the accident,” Verna told Simon. “He believed the story I told the admittance nurse at Laurelwood. The poor fool was too drunk to remember anything that night. Reardon gave him a second chance. After all, the man was dead and nob
ody would find the Olds because Reardon had disposed of it. Hell, the worst Amling would have drawn then was a few years for manslaughter with his father-in-law’s money behind him, but he wanted his wife and son back and Reardon knew it. Later, I visited him again at the sanatorium and explained how much it would hurt me if he didn’t go along with Reardon’s terms because I was in the car too. Golden Boy bought the whole package and it cost him plenty over the years—all of it legal with no loose ends until Reardon lost a bundle on the stock market and came up with the Savings and Loan scheme. Do you want to know what Amling discussed with me at those dinners we shared, lawyer? He asked my advice. That’s a laugh—Mr Big asking me? I told him to use his own judgement because I had no piece of that action. I didn’t know anything about Reardon using my half-brother as a decoy. When the story broke I thought it really was Amling in South America. I didn’t even know Tony had been sprung.”

  Simon believed her. She didn’t need the Savings and Loan money. She had made good investments and wasn’t a lady to take unnecessary risks.

  “Amling said Reardon’s plan was to split the take with him,” she added. “He was to go to South America with his half and start a new life. In time his wife and children could join him—but Barney didn’t seem to think that was likely. He didn’t say it in so many words, but I had the feeling he thought Carole had another lover waiting in the wings. ‘If I do go it will be a clean break,’ Barney told me. ‘I don’t want my family dragged into this.’ That’s my story, lawyer, and it’s not going to change no matter how long I’m questioned.”

  “So, when I came to the yacht asking questions,” Simon said, “you called Reardon and told him to get me off the scent. Reardon must have called Tony and dictated the message he sent to Carole—from Buenos Aires. When I went to Buenos Aires and closed in on Tony he had to be killed. That sort of thing is easy to arrange down there.”