A Nice Murder For Mom

by James Yaffe

  “And this also explains why the murderer had to pick Van Horn’s party for the scene of the phone call, why Fletcher couldn’t have been called up when she was alone in her own house. There had to be witnesses. More people than one had to listen to Bellamy’s voice and say it was really him.

  “And then there’s your client, Mike Russo. The murderer’s plan was not only to give himself an alibi but also to make sure Mike Russo didn’t have an alibi. So one day last week the murderer steals Russo’s keys and has duplicates made. Then, on Wednesday afternoon, he sneaks into Russo’s house with a quart of mint-chip ice cream, which he knows is Russo’s special favorite. He puts something in the ice cream that’s going to make whoever eats it fall asleep, and he throws out any other ice cream that’s in the refrigerator, so there’s no chance the mint chip won’t be eaten.

  “Then, when Russo is fast asleep, the murderer takes his car—which he’s got duplicate keys for, remember?—and drives out to Bellamy’s place, maybe seven o’clock or a little later. He hits Bellamy over the head with the paperweight, he takes the phone off the hook, and he gets out of there, leaving plenty time for himself—did I also say herself?—to get to Van Horn’s party before five minutes to eight. Because at five to eight the phone is going to ring, Bellamy is going to be on the line, and he’s going to be killed while people are listening to his voice.”

  It was impressive, I couldn’t get around it. “All right, Mom, let’s say you’re right. Who do you think was behind it?”

  Mom spread her hands. “This I couldn’t tell you for sure. We know some things about this person though, don’t we? It has to be someone with enough technical knowledge to set up the wiring and to finagle with the tape. Also, it has to be someone who owns the right-type equipment—”

  “Marcus Van Horn!” I said. “He told me he’s been working with tape recorders and other electronic gadgets lately, it’s his hobby and he really plunges himself into it, he’s even got a workroom in his basement. And he was scared of Bellamy—scared he’d take over the department chairmanship—and he obviously doesn’t like Mike much either. All those snotty remarks he made about Mike’s background! And his guests didn’t start coming to his party till seven-thirty, so that gave him plenty of time—No, but wait a second, the call came in on Van Horn’s own phone. So where did he keep this magic tape recorder, with the doctored tape on it—which had to be connected to a phone?”

  “Why couldn’t he keep it in his office at the college?” Mom said. “They’ve all got phones, those college offices. And you remember how Mike Russo described Van Horn’s desk, how it looked on Tuesday the day before the murder. It was covered with all kinds of stuff, Russo said, and one of the items he mentioned was a tape recorder.”

  “But Mom, I interviewed Van Horn in his office on the day after the murder. I sat across from him at that desk, and I never saw any—” I stopped short, the light suddenly breaking. “Wait a second—it wasn’t there the day after the murder, because a sneak thief got into his office and stole it! And the incriminating tape along with it!”

  I turned my eyes immediately to the package in brown paper that was sitting on the coffee table. But then I gave a groan and said, “No, it won’t work. Once the tape had served its purpose, Van Horn wouldn’t have been crazy enough to leave it in his office, out in the open, where somebody might see it. He would’ve hotfooted it back to Llewellyn Hall as fast as he could on Wednesday night, to disconnect the tape recorder from the phone and get rid of the tape.”

  “Positively,” Mom said. “But when could he do this? After the phone call, he had to stay in his house until the police came, and he couldn’t go out again until they went away—and that was almost midnight. You’re right, he rushed over to his office as soon as he could after that, but by that time he was too late. The tape and the recorder were already stolen.”

  “My God, these last few days Van Horn must’ve been frantic!” I said. “He must be waiting any minute for somebody to blackmail him with that tape!”

  “If it’s Van Horn who did it,” Mom said.

  Now she had me confused again. “But you just proved—”

  “I proved it was somebody trying to give himself an alibi and also to put the blame on Mike Russo. All right, so Van Horn has a tape recorder which wasn’t on his desk when you talked to him the day after the murder. Does that necessarily make him the murderer? Maybe it was under his desk. Maybe he took it to use at home. Was he the only person at that party, do you think, who owns a tape recorder and knows something about electronics?

  “How about Samantha Fletcher, for instance? Her father is a sound technician in the movies—maybe he taught her something about it while she was growing up. And she didn’t get to Van Horn’s party until a quarter of eight. And she can say what she likes about how she’s stopped being mad at Bellamy because he treated her so rotten, but believe me, when a woman gets treated rotten by a man, she wouldn’t forget it so easy.”

  “Then you’re saying Fletcher killed him, Mom?”

  “I’m saying she’s a possibility, just like Van Horn. And who knows how many other possibilities we could dig up? There were plenty people at that party.”

  “You’re right, Mom, it won’t be easy to pick out the one person. But now that we’ve got the tape recorder, there are a lot of things I can do. I can see if it has a serial number on it. I can check stores in case somebody remembers selling it and whom they sold it to. I can find out if the person who used it left any fingerprints on it—”

  “Absolutely, Davie, you can do all this if you want to. But there’s one question I’d like to ask you—why should you want to?”

  “Why should I want to find out who the murderer is? Doesn’t that go without saying?”

  “Not to me it doesn’t. Your job, am I wrong about this, is to get your client out of jail. It isn’t to put somebody else in his place.”

  “You’re right, Mom. And this tape should be enough to do that job. But I’m only human, it’s hard not to be curious about who made this tape.”

  Then I realized something, a major thing which in all my excitement had slipped my mind. “If that really is a tape recorder in there.”

  “So open it,” Mom said. “Why should we have any doubts?”

  I opened it, and it was a tape recorder all right, and there was one spool of tape all set up inside it. I plugged in the machine and pushed the button, and a moment later a voice, clearly recognizable, came through: “Stu Bellamy here. Samantha Fletcher, please.”

  I let it run longer. Richard Wright’s words about the brotherhood of man rang out, and after they died away there was a loud thud, a gasp, and silence.

  Mom broke it by speaking up softly. “So maybe you’d like to celebrate already? I’ve made a new batch of schnecken.”

  CHAPTER 26

  THINGS HAPPENED FAST IN the next twenty-four hours.

  First, I called Ann and told her what I’d been given in the park. “Good,” she said calmly. “That ought to wrap it up nicely.” This remark, coming from Ann, was equivalent to a gush of enthusiasm from anyone else.

  Next, I called Mike. He had asked me to call him after I got back from the park, he didn’t care how late it was, so I took him at his word. His reaction did my heart good. In between his questions about the tape recorder and his sudden exclamations of amazed delight—“It’s really over? Everything’s really going to be all right?”—he kept saying how grateful he was to Ann and me.

  At the end of our conversation, Mike said he wanted to throw a party, a “coming-out” party he called it—coming out from the shadow of the gas chamber. Tomorrow night, at his house, and Ann and I had to be there: As far as he was concerned, we’d be the guests of honor.

  The next day, though it was Sunday, Ann asked George Wolkowicz to see us in his office. Not room 211, she insisted: his real office. We took the tape recorder down there, played the tape for Wolkowicz, and went through our chain of reasoning with him. We told him we expected
the charges against Mike Russo to be dropped within the hour.

  He didn’t like it much, a spot of red was growing around his neck. He hemmed and hawed a little about how hard it might be to locate District Attorney McBride on a Sunday morning. We suggested that he tell McBride’s wife it was an emergency, so she’d better drag him out of bed no matter how bad his hangover was. If we didn’t get action within an hour, we said, we’d tell our story to the newspaper and the TV stations, and the district attorney’s office would have a lot of egg on its face.

  Wolkowicz saw the point. We left his office and went back to our own, and forty-five minutes later Wolkowicz was on the phone, telling us that Mike Russo was officially a free man. The media were being informed right now. McBride would make an official statement this afternoon, explaining how his office had worked diligently in spite of Mike Russo’s arrest and had finally averted what might have been a dreadful miscarriage of justice.

  It was Sunday, I could’ve gone back to bed until it was time for Mike’s party. But I was too keyed up to sleep. The DA’s office now had the tape recorder and the tape, and they’d investigate them as thoroughly as they could, but that didn’t do a thing to relieve my curiosity. I decided to do a little off-hours’ snooping on my own. So I started calling the stores in town where the machine might have been bought—if it was bought in town. If the store wasn’t open, I called the owner at home. I made them all check their records for this machine’s serial number, but nothing came up.

  The cops would go through the same process on Monday morning, and their resources were a lot better than mine, they could put a dozen men on the job; but I had a feeling they wouldn’t get any different results. That tape recorder wasn’t going to be traced. Whoever killed Stuart Bellamy was going to get away with it.

  At dinner that night, Mom and I talked about everything except the murder. She seemed nervous about something. She had been spending the day at one of the local hospitals, with a friend who was a volunteer there. (How the hell had Mom managed, after five days in town, to pick up so many friends?) She told me stories about the patients she had met, but her heart obviously wasn’t in it. Once she even told the same story twice, which I had hardly ever heard Mom do.

  After dinner I asked Mom if she’d like to come along with me to Mike’s party—wasn’t she curious to meet some of the characters she’d been making deductions about?—but she shook her head and said, “For me it wouldn’t be much of a party.”

  Her tone of voice made me look at her sharply. Then she sighed and took my hand. “Come into the living room, Davie. You’ve still got a few minutes before you have to leave. I’ve got something to tell you.”

  “What is it, Mom? Are you feeling all right?”

  “I never felt better. Sit down already. To hear this you should be seated.”

  “To hear what?”

  “The truth about who did the murder.”

  CHAPTER 27

  I TOOK THE COUCH, and Mom sat across from me in the chintz-covered rocker, which had become her favorite chair.

  “What are you talking about, Mom?” I said. “You know who made that tape? You know who killed Bellamy?”

  “All of that I knew last night. As a matter of fact—it’s a little embarrassing to admit it—I knew a lot of things last night that I didn’t say to you. Maybe I even lied to you a little.”

  I started to react to that, but she interrupted me by raising her hand. “Everything I said last night wasn’t lying, you understand. Only part of it. It’s true that somebody made a tape of Bellamy’s voice and played it over the phone, so people would think Bellamy died at five to eight when actually he died earlier. I figured that out easy enough, because the phone call was so peculiar. But there were some other peculiar things about that phone call which last night I didn’t mention.

  “For instance, Bellamy’s voice over the phone asked to talk to Samantha Fletcher. So why not? He had his argument with her, he was coming up with a quotation for her, so naturally he wanted to talk to her. But why, I’m wondering to myself, didn’t he also ask to talk to Mike Russo? Russo was part of the same argument, wasn’t he? He was sitting on the sidelines, listening to every bit of it. And Russo, as far as Bellamy was concerned, was going to be at the party, too. So how come Bellamy didn’t want to read the quotation to him just as much as to Fletcher?”

  “Mom, Bellamy didn’t actually want to read that quotation to anybody. That whole phone conversation was a fake, You proved that the murderer edited that tape—”

  “Certainly, certainly. But what I’m wondering is, why didn’t the murderer edit it so that Bellamy’s voice asked to talk to Fletcher and Russo? Wouldn’t this have sounded more natural and believable?”

  “Maybe so, Mom. But what would’ve been the point of asking to talk to Mike? He wasn’t even at the party.”

  Mom smiled with satisfaction. “Exactly,” she said. “The voice on that tape didn’t bother to ask for Mike Russo—because the person who edited that tape knew Mike Russo wouldn’t be there, but forgot that Bellamy wasn’t supposed to have that information. Now who could possibly know such a thing? Who could know ahead of time, for a fact, that Russo wasn’t going to be in Van Horn’s house at five minutes to eight?”

  “I don’t see where that gets us. The murderer put knockout drops in Mike’s ice cream. So obviously he didn’t expect Mike to be at that party.”

  “Expect isn’t the same as being sure. How sure could anybody be that the knockout drops would actually knock Russo out? What guarantee was there that Russo wouldn’t decide for a change not to eat any ice cream? In which case he’d come to the party, am I right? But that tape was made by somebody who was so sure Russo couldn’t come to the phone that it never even occurred to him to include Russo’s name in Bellamy’s conversation. Somebody who knew beyond any doubt that Russo wouldn’t be at that party. And only one somebody could possibly fit that description.”

  “What are you saying, that Mike made the tape himself?”

  Mom just gave a little shrug.

  “But that’s plain crazy!” I said. “That tape was made so that the murderer could provide himself with an alibi. But it doesn’t provide Mike with an alibi. He was at home, fast asleep, while the tape was playing. Nobody can corroborate his story—remember? As a matter of fact, he’s practically the only person of Bellamy’s acquaintance in Mesa Grande who doesn’t benefit from that fake phone call.”

  “Naturally. This is one of the biggest pieces of evidence against him.”

  “Come on, Mom—”

  “Listen to me already. I’ll try to reconstruct it, what Mike Russo did, and then you’ll understand. To begin with, he was desperate about his job. It seemed to him, if he didn’t get Bellamy out of the way, his whole life would be destroyed. Because being a professor at a college was his whole life. At the same time he’s no dope. He knew, with such a motive, that he’d be the biggest suspect. What he needed was an alibi. But let’s face it, good alibis don’t grow on trees. They’re hard to finagle. And if you do finagle one, the police get suspicious, they make a very thorough investigation. If the alibi isn’t legitimate, the chances are pretty good the police will find the hole in it and let out all the air.

  “As a matter of fact, it’s exactly like the little Greenspan girl.”

  “Excuse me, Mom, but who is the little Greenspan girl?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Greenspan from upstairs, when I was living in the Bronx. He was a plumber, a big fat man, and his wife was big and fat, too, and the little girl, she was eleven, twelve, at the time, was taking after both of them. The mother liked chocolate peppermints, she ate up a couple boxes a week from Fanny Farmer’s, but she didn’t want the little girl to get at them so she hid them on the shelf at the top of her closet. The little girl found them—what else?—and then she had a problem. If she stole some of the peppermints, her mother would notice they were gone, and right away who would get the blame?

  “So the little girl came up with a clever
plan. She did steal some of the peppermints, and she was careful the next morning to leave the paper wrappers under her pillow. The mother got mad at her, but the little girl cried and swore she wasn’t the one that did it. The mother changed the hiding place, and naturally the little girl found the new one, and again she stole some peppermints and again she left the wrappers under her pillow. This time the mother said to herself, ‘She wouldn’t be so dumb she’d keep leaving the peppermint wrappers under her own pillow. Somebody else is doing this and trying to put on my little darling the blame.’

  “So the upshot was, the mother suspected everybody—the janitor, the next-door neighbors, the man who read the gas meter, even her husband the plumber—and the little girl went on stealing peppermints to her heart’s desire, and everybody felt sorry for her because somebody was playing such a dirty trick on her.”

  “Now let me get this straight, Mom. You’re saying Mike deliberately framed himself?”

  “I’m saying he realized he was the one everybody would suspect first if Bellamy got killed. So he got this idea—it’s a pretty smart one, I wouldn’t deny it—of fixing up for himself a reverse alibi. Instead of giving himself an alibi, he decided he should take it away from himself. He decided to fix it so there was positively no doubt about the time of the murder, and then to make sure he couldn’t account for his whereabouts at that time. And along with that, he decided to arrange a fancy alibi for other people who also had motives—though not such big ones as his—for killing Bellamy.

  “But this fancy alibi had to be a fake, naturally. Sooner or later it would have to be exposed—this was the whole point of the plan. And when it was exposed, everybody would know that the murderer tried to frame Russo, everybody would be sure he was innocent.