Crime scene photos from Fizer’s bedroom and witnesses statements and spiral notebooks and assorted diagrams and papers were scattered across the desk like puzzle pieces that refused to go together. Chandler, in shirtsleeves and the same loosened maroon tie as last night, sat with an expression so bleak, he might be the next suicide contender.
“Hi, Jack,” I said to myself. “Thanks for giving up your Sunday afternoon. Pull up a chair. Get you anything? Coffee? A Coke, maybe? You are still on the wagon, right, Jack?”
His blue eyes were bloodshot as he looked up from the scattering of official paper. He smiled but it was pretty ghastly. “If you were any funnier, I’d have to strangle you.”
I sat down in the wooden chair opposite him in his swivel number, tossing my fedora on the edge of the mess. “If I were any funnier, I’d charge you for it. And I’m pretty sure strangulation is illegal in this state. Even the governor prefers the hot seat.”
“It’s not suicide,” he said.
“Wow, you are a detective.” I started to get up. “Is that all?”
“Quit clowning, Jack. This is a hell of a mess. Famous people, a clumsily faked Dutch act, and more suspects than . . . than . . .”
“Want me to come up with something clever for you? How about, more suspects than you could shake a stick at, especially if you’re a poor underpaid public servant who can’t afford a stick and’s been up for twenty hours or so?”
“Not funny. But accurate.” He gestured to the pics and papers on his desk. “And there’s one good suspect in particular . . . maybe a little too good. . . .”
I rested an ankle on a knee and folded my hands across my belly. “Hal Rapp, you mean? Why ‘too’ good?”
He grunted something that was almost a laugh. “Either Rapp’s an idiot. . . and I find it hard to believe a man as successful in so tough and competitive a field could be an idiot. . . or somebody’s fitted him for a hell of a frame.”
I shrugged. “If you have suspects, including a good one, why the long face?”
And it was pretty damn long—normally Chandler was so handsome any self-respecting guy had to hate him; today his mug looked like a bad passport photo.
“For one thing,” he said, rocking back, “we talked to lots of people at that party last night—just preliminary interviews, of course, and we’ll follow up in the days to come . . . but I’ve already got a man working on a timeline, a chart—it’ll be up on easel, next time you drop by.”
“This room always did lack something—that sounds like just the touch. And maybe a bowl of wax fruit? . . . What’s the timeline of?”
“Rapp’s movements at his party. Like I said, we’ve taken preliminary statements from all the guests except for half a dozen who chose to leave Rapp’s suite, despite his advice that they stay.”
“But you have their names?”
He nodded. “Yes. We’ll be talking to them today and tomorrow. Theater people, mostly. But already it’s looking tough to come up with a time frame that gives Rapp enough leeway to get the deed done. Early this morning we used a stopwatch on our police artist, and—”
I frowned. “Why your police artist?”
He gestured with an open hand. “So I could have a trained artist go through the motions of penciling and inking that suicide note.”
“Pretty smart.”
“Don’t sound so surprised.” He leaned on his elbows on the desk and clasped his hands. “Our man fired a gun—we used a blank round—to see if any neighbors in the suites turned up, checking on the noise . . . They didn’t—whether it was the thick Waldorf walls or simply New Yorkers writing off the sound as a car backfire or some other burp of the city, I can’t say.”
I was frowning. “What did your stopwatch tell you?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Did you factor in Rapp’s wooden leg?”
“What?” His face fell. “Oh hell. . . No. Hadn’t thought of that.”
“Well, you were distracted. Chorus girls and all. But I have to think you’d need to add a couple of minutes for that. The guy walks the way a rusty gate swings.”
He nodded glumly.
“And have you considered how risky this would’ve been for Rapp? He’s famous. He’s a resident of that tower. People could have been coming in and out of their suites—Rapp’s wasn’t the only Halloween party in town. Why would he chance being recognized?”
Chandler shrugged. “Maybe the alibi his own party provided made it worth the risk. But we’ll talk to everybody at that party in depth, and do our best to create a timeline, and see if we can demonstrate he had the chance.”
I was shaking my head and working at making my smile not be a smirk. “Captain, I understand Rapp’s a good suspect—hell, I was the one who clued you in on his feud with the victim. But Fizer wasn’t universally beloved; there may even have been other potential suspects at that party.”
His eyebrows went up. “I’m sure there were. For one thing, a certain guest last night, who played regularly in a poker game with Fizer, says the victim was in debt to local gamblers.”
“What guest?”
“Charlie Mazurki. The TV funnyman? Although I frankly don’t get his humor. You know, I shouldn’t tell you that, but it’s that spirit of cooperation I mentioned before, understand?”
“Sure. I’ll keep it to myself that you don’t get his humor. What gambling interests?”
Chandler shook his head. “That much Mazurki didn’t know, or at least wouldn’t say. But this wasn’t nickel/dime/quarter poker, Jack, like that game of yours. Not even hundreds. Thousands changed hands at that table.”
“What table?”
He pointed to his desk, as if the game had been held at the Tenth Precinct. “A table right in Fizer’s suite,” he said. “Been going on for years, even before Fizer moved to the Waldorf, when that suite was used as his studio and his assistant’s living space.”
I cocked my head. “Was the assistant in the game?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it.”
“Why?”
He shrugged a single shoulder. “Murray Coe made ten grand a year working for Fizer. Not bad money—better than twice the average Joe’s income these days, and certainly well above mine. But not the kind of dough it takes to play in a weekly high-stakes poker game.”
“What night did they meet?”
“Sundays. A week ago today, or a week ago this evening, rather, was the last game.”
I uncrossed my legs and sat forward. “Do you have a list of players?”
“Sure.” He fished around among the papers, found his notebook, thumbed it open to the correct page and handed it across to me. The names were as follows:
Sam Fizer
Charlie Mazurki
Tony Carmichael
Ray Alexander
Mel Norman (guest)
“Ray Alexander is a big-time cartoonist,” I said, “in case you didn’t know.”
“I did know—I wouldn’t have, but Mazurki filled me in when I interviewed him. Alexander does that science-fiction strip, right?”
“The top one—Crash Landon”
“One of yours?”
“I wish—King Features has it.”
“Do you know Alexander?”
I shrugged. “Just to nod to. Met him at a few NCS events.”
“NCS?”
“National Cartoonists Society—Alexander’s the current prez. It’s a professional group that Sam Fizer helped form just after the war.” I still had his notebook, studying the list of names of poker players. “Why is Mel Norman marked ‘guest’?”
“Because he was one—there’s a floating chair at the game, though Norman’s been something of a regular of late. Played several times over the last few months. Norman was a guest at Rapp’s party, too—he’s on the list of the handful who scooted before we got there. Haven’t connected with him yet, but we will, we will.”
“You do know who Norman is?”
Chandler nodded, as I handed hi
m back his notebook. “Hotshot Hollywood movie director, screenwriter, producer.”
“And who says a cop can’t be a patron of the arts? Norman’s producing his first Broadway show, d’you know that? You may have heard of it. Tall Paul?”
“That Mazurki didn’t mention,” Chandler said with a frown, and made a note next to the original notes. “You figure that’s significant?”
“Could well be. Fizer was thinking about suing Norman.”
He was still frowning. “For what?”
“Plagiarism. That’s the core of the Fizer/Rapp feud—Fizer claiming Rapp stole his hillbilly characters. Taking those characters into another medium was an excuse for Fizer to haul out the old charges, and make new trouble.”
“Could Fizer have won?”
“No, but he could have stirred things up. Maybe even’ve got an injunction to block the opening of the show. A long shot, but Fizer was furious about Norman hiring Fizer’s wife, Misty Winters, to appear in the play.”
Chandler was nodding. “Her we talked to. She didn’t seem too broken up about her husband’s death. Maybe she was in shock.”
“Or maybe she hated him—they were on their way to a divorce.”
His eyebrows hiked. “Her idea or Fizer’s?”
“Not sure. Possibly grew out of Misty accepting a role in the Tall Paul musical. My assumption is Rapp encouraged, maybe demanded, that Norman hire Misty.”
“Why would Rapp do that?”
I laughed but there wasn’t much humor in it. “To stick a finger in Fizer’s eye. Just out of spite. The Hatfields and McCoys didn’t need much of an excuse to fire a squirrel gun at each other, did they? And the upshot is, a match got tossed on the Fizer/Rapp gasoline—I mean, this time Fizer’s marriage broke up as a result of Rapp’s mischief.”
Chandler offered up a rumpled grin. “That’s why I need your help, Jack. You know these people, these situations, not to mention the stupid damn comics business, inside out. And Maggie’s in the goddamn play!”
I was hoping he wasn’t going to start up the “damn”/ “goddamn” barrage again; I didn’t offend easily, but it was distracting.
Chandler gave me his best blue-eyed innocent look, and gestured to the list of poker players on the notebook sheet. “Is this Tony Carmichael a name you recognize?”
I studied him while trying not to seem to be. I did recognize the name; the question was, did the captain? And was he baiting me?
“No,” I said.
Chandler grunted. “Sounds familiar. It’ll come to me.”
Maybe when he hadn’t been up since last month, it would. Tony Carmichael was an alias for Tony Carmine, a gambler who took down high-stakes bets on championship boxing matches, big-purse horse races, the World Series and other high-profile sporting events. He was tied in with the top mobster in Manhattan, Frank Calabria.
Calabria was an old friend of the major’s; they’d done various kinds of business together. Let’s put it this way: Frank was my godfather. Problem here was, by not sharing this info with Captain Chandler, I was getting off to a bad start on this whole spirit of civic cooperation thing. . . .
Switching subjects, I asked, “Do the papers have the Fizer death yet?”
He shook his head. “We’ve been getting calls. Happened too late to make the Sunday editions. I’m supposed to issue a statement by . . . well, about half an hour from now. I’ve got a girl in public affairs working on it.”
“What are you calling it? Murder?”
He raised his eyebrows, but then nodded. “It’s certainly not a suicide. We’re just getting started with the lab work, but we already have enough to rule out Fizer dying by his own hand; and we’re well on our way to having enough to arrest Hal Rapp.”
“I appreciate the overview. How about some specifics?”
His brow furrowed. “This is not for public consumption, Jack.”
“No. It’s strictly part of this share-the-wealth program you and I are instituting.”
He let out what must surely have been his twenty-seventh world-weary sigh of the day. “The gun was Fizer’s—he bought it six months ago, and it was registered to him. He had a license to carry.”
I sat up. “Why?”
“Stated reason was he carried large amounts of cash with him from time to time, and wanted the protection. I have no idea why he’d be hauling around greenbacks enough to warrant packing heat. Do you?”
I shook my head. “No idea.”
But I did have one: if Sam Fizer was hanging around with the likes of Tony Carmine, the cartoonist could well have been indulging in high-stakes gambling—and not just a weekly poker game.
“That the gun belonged to Fizer himself,” Chandler was saying, “is about the only thing consistent with suicide. Oh, and the .38 was fired at near-contact range, leaving a burn mark and gunpowder residue around the wound.”
“How about the angle of the wound?”
A suicide-by-handgun wound is normally at an upward angle.
“The angle’s acceptable,” the captain admitted. “But everything else hits a very wrong note. First, no fingerprints on the gun. Apparently wiped clean.”
“Jesus. Wouldn’t even the sloppiest killer, faking a suicide, press the damn weapon into the victim’s mitt?”
Chandler half smiled. “So you’d think. Then there’s Fizer’s left hand, and for that matter his right: no powder burns. We did a paraffin test right at the scene, Jack—Fizer did not fire that revolver.”
“Something stinks, and it’s not just cordite.”
He regarded me with half-lidded eyes. “Did you happen to notice the tumbler of Scotch?”
“Yeah, I figured there was some kind of booze in that glass.”
“Some kind, all right. The heavily-laced-with-a-sedative kind.”
I frowned. “How strong?”
He was rocking in the chair again. “The lab boys say Fizer would have gone off to lullaby land with just one gulp—that strong.”
My hands were on the edge of his desk. “Enough to kill Fizer? Was he dead before the gunshot?”
“We don’t know,” Chandler said cheerfully. “There’ll be an autopsy performed this evening, or first thing tomorrow.”
“No rush. Wait till Tuesday or Wednesday—he’ll still be dead.”
“Not everybody works on Sunday, Jack.”
“No. God takes it off. You and I seem to be working.”
Chandler grinned. “We do, don’t we? And here’s something really interesting—we did find some fingerprints . . .”
“But not on the gun.”
“No. Not on the gun. On a pen. Something called a . . .” He thumbed back a page on the spiral pad and checked his notes. “. ..a Gillott number 170.”
“A lot of cartoonists use that. But neither the nib nor the shaft would give you much of a fingerprint.”
“No.” His eyes met mine. “But we got a partial, and we have enough points of similarity to identify it as Hal Rapp’s right forefinger.”
“Hell you say.” I sat back in the hard chair and regarded him suspiciously. “Why haven’t you picked him up, then?”
He shrugged with two open hands. “So far it’s all we’ve got. And he may have a perfectly good explanation for how that fingerprint got onto a pen of Fizer’s. But, Jack, what bothers me is— this is already too pat.”
“You’ve got the most blatantly faked suicide in history,” I said, nodding, “with the deceased’s worst enemy living a floor above.”
“Motive and opportunity,” Chandler said. “And all Rapp needed for means was knowing where Fizer kept his gun, and some kind of access to a sedative.”
“Which would hardly be tough to pull off.” I thought for a moment. “Wait. . . Maybe it’s not quite so pat, Pat.” I usually called him “Captain,” but I couldn’t resist. “What’s the scenario this all adds up to?”
“What do you mean?”
“How does it all fit together? Like this, maybe? Rapp somehow gets into Fizer’s
apartment—presumably the front door was locked, right? And then Rapp, what? Waits till Fizer goes off to the John to slip him a Mickey in his Scotch?”
Chandler was frowning. “I don’t think a jury would buy that.”
“Not unless they’ve been in the Scotch, first. Or maybe Fizer went to the door and invited his archenemy in, and provided Rapp with the opportunity to somehow slip a sedative into his drink? Can you buy that? I can’t.”
Chandler was thinking hard, a deep furrow between his brows. “Maybe Rapp had got hold of a key, somehow . . . bribed somebody at the hotel, maybe . . . and went in when Fizer wasn’t around, searched out where the gun was kept, and drugged Fizer’s Scotch?”
“Why, was the whole bottle doped?”
“No,” he admitted. “Just that tumblerful.”
I shrugged. “I don’t think you have enough to haul Rapp in for anything but questioning. Material witness, maybe.”
World-weary sigh number twenty-eight. “You might be right at that. But we can rule out suicide.”
“Yeah, but don’t.”
He gave me an RCA Victor dog look. “Don’t?”
“Not officially. When you put out your police statement today, call it an ‘apparent suicide.’ Don’t label it murder, don’t even call it a ‘suspicious death.’ Make it ‘apparent suicide.’ Got it?”
“Why, Jack?”
“Let the killer think he’s fooled you. Or if it was a phony suicide setup, meant to implicate Rapp, then make the killer think he or she has screwed up.”
His head was tilted, his eyes skeptical. “You mean, make the killer think the police are just that stupid”
“Well, that would be swell, wouldn’t it? What we’re after is to give the killer a false sense of security. You’re just out there asking questions because you have loose ends to tie up—suicide of a prominent person requires every t dotted and every i crossed.”
“You got that backwards, Jack.”
“See?” I got on my feet and tugged on my fedora. “I told you you were a detective.”
CHAPTER SIX
I COME TO BURY FIZER, NOT TO PRAISE HIM . . .
Strip for Murder Page 9