Killed in the Ratings

by William L. DeAndrea

  “This knife,” the lieutenant said, shoving a photograph toward me. It showed a stainless steel blade with a horn handle; a steak knife, with the monogram RSJ on the handle.

  “Can you imagine what I felt like when I saw that?” Mr. M. was getting personal again, but I let it pass.

  “Couldn’t have been any worse than I feel,” I said.

  “I don’t need an expert to identify that knife, you know,” he said. “I can do it myself. I know it came from your apartment—I mean your friends’ apartment—because I recognize it from that dinner you cooked for your parents and me and Mrs. Martin and Cornelius and his wife at Easter.”

  I nodded. Certain cats were going to be let out of certain bags.

  “Devlin took it from my apartment yesterday,” I said.

  “He did what? You trying to tell me Devlin was in your apartment yesterday?”

  “Yes, he said he had some aspect of the case he wanted to discuss. I met him at Penn Station in the morning, went to NetHQ for a couple of minutes, then to my apartment.”

  “Yeah, we knew you were with him at the Network.”

  “Did you expect me to deny it?”

  It was a rhetorical question, and the Lieutenant didn’t try to answer it. Instead, he said, “Some aspects of the case to discuss with you?” He scratched his head. “Isn’t that a lot like what Carlson said?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “What aspects?”

  I braced myself. “I can’t tell you.”

  The explosion I was expecting didn’t come. “You can’t tell me?”

  “No,” I said. “I reclaim my right to remain silent for this question.”

  “It doesn’t look good, you know,” he said. I said nothing. “Okay, have it your way. When did you leave Devlin?”

  “Just before noon,” I said. “What time was he killed?”

  “Between four and five.”

  “This morning?”

  “Yesterday afternoon.”

  “Then what am I doing here?” I exploded. “You know where I was that time yesterday.”

  “I knew you were going to say that,” he said. “Where were you that time yesterday?”

  “At Goldfarb’s house!”

  He leaned back, lacing his hands behind his head. “Well, let’s take a look at that, shall we? You say you were at Goldfarb’s house. Goldfarb isn’t saying anything. Ray Cali says he brought you there, but you left about one o’clock in the afternoon. Tolliver is still out of commission, in no shape to talk. How do I know you didn’t kill Carlson, then go back to Goldfarb’s house to find those two men beat up? You don’t have much of an alibi after all.”

  “Well, what about Monica?” I protested.

  “We have this saying around here,” he said. “ ‘If she’ll lay for him, she’ll lie for him.’ She’s not going to do you much good with a jury, especially when we found a picture of you in his wallet.”

  He gave me another photograph to look at. It was a picture of me, which Devlin had sealed in plastic. I recognized it as the photo of me that had run in the April 2, 1973 issue of Broadcasting, along with the announcement in “Fates and Fortunes” that I’d been promoted to Special Projects.

  “What’s wrong with his carrying a picture of me?”

  “It shows you had more to do with him than you ever admitted. It shows you’ve been covering up and are still covering up.”

  “What was my motive?” I challenged.

  “I don’t know, but we can damn sure prove you had one—I mean that you had it in for Devlin. You tried to hang a murder rap on him.”

  The lieutenant took out his cigarettes, put one in his mouth, struck a match. “Incidentally,” he said between puffs, “Rivetz is pushing to clear the Carlson murder with this arrest, too.”

  I didn’t make a comment. My brain was running the word cigarettes over and over. Cigarettes, cigarettes. It was trying to tell me something, but what?

  “What?” I said.

  “I said,” Lieutenant Martin repeated, “do you have anything else to say?”

  “No,” I told him. “What can I say?”

  Sadly, he picked up the phone. “Tell Rivetz he can come book his prisoner.”

  This is it, Cobb, I told myself. Once again I asked myself the two Great Questions.

  Rivetz knocked and entered. “Come along, Cobb,” he said.

  For once, I came up with an answer for question two. “Wait!” I barked. “The old lady! Mrs. Goldfarb! Has she been questioned? Has she had a chance to fix a story up with anybody? She’s my alibi. Give her a line-up with me in it. She was there, ask her!”

  Rivetz gave a snort, and pulled at my arm. “Come on,” he said.

  “Hold it, Rivetz,” the lieutenant said.

  “Lieutenant,” Rivetz pleaded, “don’t listen to this guy. He’s been playing on your goddam emotions the whole time. We can talk to the old lady any old time. Let me get him booked—”

  “Shut up, Rivetz,” the lieutenant said.

  “But sir!”

  “Shut up. I can wreck my career a little worse. My full responsibility.”

  Rivetz shut up, but he hated me worse than ever. He threw my arm down as though I were a rag doll. He backed up a few steps, but didn’t leave the office.

  The lieutenant picked up the phone again. “Get me Bellevue,” he said. He was connected (at last) with the head nurse on Mrs. Goldfarb’s floor. He asked if she was awake.

  “She is?” he said. “Good. Has she seen anyone? Good. Thank you, good-bye.” He reached for his jacket and hat. “You come with me,” he told me. “Rivetz, you wait here for that operator, what’s her name?”

  “Gayle Spencer,”

  “Right. You meet her as soon as she gets here from D.C., and whip her right over to the morgue for positive ID on Devlin. Question her, but don’t be impolite.”

  In the lieutenant’s car, heading for Bellevue, I solved the murder of Vincent Carlson for the second time. This time, though, I wasn’t about to go off half-cocked. I was in for something much worse than mockery if I was wrong.

  The clouds Cynthia Schick had noticed from her husband’s hospital room two days ago finally delivered the rain they’d been promising. I looked at the fine droplets hitting the windshield, then being mowed down by the wiper blades as I ran through my theory step by step.

  I turned the events of the last few days over and over—gingerly, like a drunk trying to gift-wrap an expensive bottle.

  “Who is Gayle Spencer, Lieutenant?” I asked.

  “Devlin’s fiancée. He doesn’t have any family living, so she gets the body.”

  “You said she was an operator?” I prayed for the right answer to this one. Operator, you see, had been the right word, the one my mind was groping for before Monica became so delightfully distracting.

  “Yeah,” the lieutenant said, “she runs the switchboard at CRI.”

  I turned my eyes to heaven. “Thank you, God,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing. One more question, if you don’t mind. What happened to Devlin’s glasses?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Devlin’s eyeglasses. Did you find them?”

  “No, because he didn’t wear glasses. His license said he had twenty-twenty vision.”

  Mrs. Goldfarb was sitting up in bed when the lieutenant and I walked into her private room. She was eating chicken soup.

  Her face became animated when she saw me. “Oh, Matt,” she breathed. “Have you heard from my Herschel? Is he all right?”

  “He’s fine,” I told her, “but he’s under arrest.”

  “I know, I know. It’s a good thing you and Monica left when you did! Somebody came and beat up Tolly and Ray, and the police, the stupids, arrested my Herschel. I can’t even talk to him on the phone, and his lawyer is in the Virgin Islands. The doctor tells me don’t worry, but I have to worry, I’m his mother.”

  “I’m sure everything will be all right,” I said lamel
y. “I just came by to see if you were all right. I wanted to thank you for the wonderful dinner the other night.”

  “What other night? It was only yesterday, last night!” She made a face. “This is lousy chicken soup. How do they expect me to get well with lousy soup?”

  “What time last night did you have dinner, Mrs. Goldfarb?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Five-thirty, six.”

  “What about before that? Was Mr. Cobb there before that?”

  “Yes he was, whoever you are. I was cleaning the hallway the whole time, all afternoon Mr. Cobb was at my house. I swear it.”

  The old lady folded her arms and set her chin. She gave off waves of virtue, like a transmitting tower. It was impossible not to believe her. At least I hoped it was.

  Lieutenant Martin said, “Well, I don’t mind saying that’s a relief. Thank you, ma’am.” He tipped his hat to the lady on the bed.

  “You’re welcome, whoever you are,” she said.

  The lieutenant signaled me to leave with him.

  “Good-bye, Mrs. Goldfarb. I hope everything works out all right.”

  “It will if they let my Herschel go.”

  Let my Herschel go, I thought, a whole new battle cry.

  On the way out of the hospital, the lieutenant said, “I’m sorry, Matty.”

  “Well you should be,” I said. “You should have known better.” I didn’t mean it. In the same circumstances, I would have hauled me in. But I wanted to shake loose from police supervision, and the best way was to play on Lieutenant Martin’s guilt feelings. It was the kind of move I always hated myself in the morning for.

  “Well, it did look kind of bad against you,” he said. “In fact, it still does. But I believe you, and I believe the old lady—I think anybody would believe that old lady—and that means somebody is out to frame you, Matty.”

  “I know.”

  “Who? Why?”

  “I don’t know who. I think the reason is I’m handy. Or maybe because somebody thinks I know who killed Carlson.”

  “You thought you did, too.”

  “So I did,” I said cagily. “Well, just goes to show you.” I grinned at him.

  What followed was a conversation without words, until the very end of it when the lieutenant stated, “You’re up to something.”

  “I could be,” I admitted, “if I weren’t here.”

  “You want me to let you go.” It wasn’t a question.

  “The old lady says I’m innocent,” I reminded him.

  “You want me to let you go.”

  “Remember the Broadway extortion case,” I told him.

  “Son of a bitch!” he said. “You actually do want me to let you go!”

  “Could you be worse off with the department than you are now?”

  “You’re damn right I could! I could be hit with an accessory rap!”

  “Then forget it,” I said flatly.

  “You could escape,” he said slyly.

  “I’m not that sure of myself.”

  “You’re pretty sure?”

  I nodded.

  “All right, then,” he said, “get the hell out of here before I come to my senses.” He turned his back on me, and I was gone.

  20

  “To boldly go where no man has gone before.”

  —William Shatner, “Star Trek” (NBC)

  MY SECRETARY KEEPS A diary on her face. As I walked into the office, I could see she’d been yelled at.

  “Matt,” she said, “Mr. Falzet wants to see you immediately. He sounded crazy!”

  “More so than usual?” I said. “No calls, Jazz. Send Harris and Shirley to my office, assuming they’re here.”

  “They’re here, but Mr. Falzet—”

  “Mr. Falzet can go slide down a barbed wire fence,” I told her. I’ve been told I’m a much more decisive person when I know what I’m trying to accomplish.

  Spot didn’t want anything to do with me; I had deserted him for too long. He didn’t exactly growl as I sat down, and he suffered himself to be petted, but he lay on the office floor in a sulk instead of acting like his usual hyperkinetic self.

  He let me know I was being punished by playing up to Shirley when she came in. Brophy was right behind her, and got the same treatment.

  “Another death-defying escape, I see,” he said.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I assured him. “But there’s no time for that. I think I’m about to get fired—”

  “That is one of the rumors,” Brophy said. “There’s another one says you’ve been arrested.”

  “Both true. Now, for all I know, Falzet has the guards outside calling him right now to tell him I’m here, so I’ve got to talk fast. Here’s what I want you to do ...”

  It couldn’t have been staged better in a movie. Just as I’d finished saying, “ ... and I want them by this evening. One of those people is a killer,” the phone rang. It was probably my imagination, but it seemed a particularly vehement ring.

  “Cobb!” a voice roared in my ear.

  “Yes, Tom?” I said cordially.

  He was too mad to notice the familiarity. “I want you up here immediately, if not sooner!”

  “Okay, I’ll be there sooner.”

  Falzet said “What?” but I hung up on him.

  “Harris, Shirley,” I said, “thanks. I’ll be in touch this evening. We who are about to die, and all that.”

  They wished me luck. I went up the stairs to Falzet’s office.

  “You wanted to see me, sir?” I said.

  “You’re through, Cobb!”

  I shrugged. “Okay,” I said, and started to leave.

  He went wild. “Come back here!”

  “Okay,” I shrugged again. “Makes no difference to me.”

  “It may make no difference to you, but it does to the Network!”

  It was a pleasure to be getting the boot. Now I could say things I always wanted to say, like: “Diagram that sentence.”

  “What?”

  “I defy you to show me a diagram of the linguistic monstrosity ‘It may make no difference to you, but it does to the Network.’ You are a disgrace to the communications industry. No wonder Edwin Newman ran screaming off into the night that time at the Emmy Awards.”

  He was sputtering. “I’m ... I’m ... me ... I’m a disgrace! I’m a disgrace! Look at this! Look at this headline!”

  He thrust a New York Post at me. I had made the front page. The headline, “NET V.P. HELD IN SLAYING” got second billing only to “Latest Track Results” which was printed above the mast.

  “I’m a disgrace!” he said again.

  “It could be worse,” I told him.

  “What could be worse than that!” He slapped the headline with the back of a hand.

  “Buy a copy tomorrow,” I told him.

  The idea now was to get moving while he was still having his fit. I dropped through the Tower to the garage, where I checked out a car. I hoped to have it back before word filtered down. If not, and Falzet put out a complaint of Grand Theft Auto, my position would be that I had a contract, and I wasn’t fired until I got my severance pay.

  I had made a brief detour to Special Projects, ostensibly to clean out my desk, but in reality to make it up with Spot by promising him a ride in a car. He loves that.

  I got him stowed in the Network dinosaur, and took off for Kennedy Airport. While Harris and Shirley checked on the affairs of certain individuals, I wanted to see just who had rented the car that ran Tony over Wednesday night.

  I didn’t think it was one of Goldfarb’s boys. Guys in that line of business figure it’s easier and less messy to steal a car and then ditch it than it is to rent one. But for the amateur, I could see where renting a car for a hit-and-run would have a certain appeal. The rental company would obligingly eliminate the evidence of the hit-and-run, and if nobody got the license (and most times no one does), you’d be home free. And with any luck, the next day, someone else will rent the car, and take
it to Boise, or Dubuque.

  “It’s enough to make me want Dubuque,” I told Spot.

  He didn’t pay attention. He was using the car as a gymnasium, vaulting the seat, and standing on his hind legs to look out the back window. Then he found a switch for the power window with his paw, then jumped back yelping when the window hummed and started down. A little experimentation, and he had the window open all the way. He stuck his grinning furry face out into the drizzle, the way all dogs seem to love to do, and rode that way the rest of the trip.

  They call the Long Island Expressway the World’s Longest Parking Lot. The name is excruciatingly apt, especially at rush hour. I didn’t let it get to me, though. I hummed along with the radio as I inched eastward, occasionally pulling a hair from the back of my hand, and chewing the inside of my cheek, where my souvenir of Tolly was healing.

  The first terminal you come to on the incredibly confusing drive around Kennedy Airport is the one that houses El Al, Air India, and a few others. I drove up to it, dashed inside, and found the Big Apple Rent-a-Car desk. I asked the girl where they kept their records, and got directions to their main office and lot in a remote corner of the airport.

  Spot was snarling at an airport cop when I emerged. I smiled at him, got in the car, and drove out from underneath the ticket he’d been about to stick on the windshield.

  I managed to find the Big Apple lot without driving out onto any runways. When I got there, I told the young man at the counter what I needed.

  “I’m not able to do that, sir,” he said with a smile. He had lovely teeth.

  “Come on,” I coaxed. “I’ve got the license number of the car. I know you keep a record of who had what car when. All I want to know is who had it Wednesday night.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, I still can’t.” Employees of Big-Apple Rent-a-Car wore red blazers with green slacks or skirt, according to gender. I was willing to bet this clown had a worm in him. I took a ten dollar bill out of my wallet, and started fondling it on the counter top. He looked at it longingly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said at last.