EQMM, December 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Moody asked him a few unimportant questions to start, then, “We can't find anyone else who's ever seen Ms. Behringer with a cane. Didn't you tell us she had trouble walking? Used a cane?"

  Behringer didn't miss a beat. “She didn't like people to see her with it. I doubt she'd have let anyone but Diane and me know."

  * * * *

  Around 5:30, Moody and I dropped into the Sherlock Holmes Pub on Northumberland to kill time while the home-bound traffic sorted itself out. Over the course of the day our team had logged, conservatively, fifty transatlantic phone calls but we had nailed down the motive for Helen Behringer's murder. Money. No surprise there. It seemed that Ms. Behringer was worth about ten million or so in real estate, stocks, cash, and life insurance. Ted Behringer was listed as beneficiary of the relatively new million-dollar life-insurance policy, and he and his sister Diane stood to jointly inherit everything else.

  Behringer's gym was mere weeks away from bankruptcy and foreclosure, and Ted personally was flat broke. Diane Coles had been left with a big mortgage and a boatload of credit-card debt by a husband with a gambling problem.

  "You asked me why he took all the trouble to strangle her when he could have just given her a bigger dose of morphine and had done with it. Think about the insurance policy.” Moody slid a pint of Guinness across the table to me. “An overdose of morphine could be suicide. Or accident. Or murder.” He took a long pull on his beer. “In fact, in lieu of a suicide note, it's often hard to tell the difference between suicide and accident. Our man—and I'm convinced that it was our man Ted, since Helen Behringer outweighed Diane Coles by three stone, at least—had to make it clear that it was murder. A ruling of suicide would have ruined it. He couldn't take that chance."

  "Oh, right! Insurance policies often won't pay off for suicide. But still, that's only about a million out of a total of ten million or so."

  "He's a greedy bugger, what?"

  "So Behringer and his sister needed to do for the lady before the gym went into foreclosure and while the group was in London, because Ms. Coles couldn't have pulled it off by herself. And it had to be done in such a way that the time could be nailed down precisely."

  "Precisely,” Moody said.

  "At a time for which Coles and Behringer both had alibis."

  I foolishly offered to share our saucer-sized table with a couple of young women in very high heels, then found there was insufficient room for us all. Moody and I stood to finish our pints, wedged in so tightly against other patrons we had to give fair warning all round before we could raise our glasses to our mouths.

  Giving that up, we left and walked down two blocks to the Embankment, turning south along the river. From here, we had a perfect view of the London Eye, turning now as if nothing had ever happened. I located a bench far enough from a line of waiting tour coaches to escape the worst of the diesel exhaust. We sat.

  "So we know who, we know when, we know why, we know where. We only need to know how.” Moody stretched his legs straight out and jammed his hands into his trouser pockets, his long face looking even longer than usual. “How did he get from Buckingham Palace to the London Eye, take his aunt for a little ride, kill her, and escape without anyone seeing him?"

  "Did you notice that none of the ladies at the palace were sure they actually saw Ted Behringer between the time he bought the tickets and when he saw them off in their cabs?” I asked.

  "Problem is, would he have had time to get in his car, drive across the river to the Eye, buy a ticket, meet up with his aunt, and be inside the capsule by four-seventeen? It's not far, but think about the traffic around Westminster at four o'clock. We were caught in it ourselves yesterday."

  I reminded him of the gaggle of bicycles we'd recently seen at Behringer's Gym. “He could have done it on a bicycle."

  "Brilliant!” Moody clapped me on the knee. “On a bike, he could have done it."

  "We still have our original problem, though,” I said. “Pauline Newsome saw only one person in capsule eighteen, the one right above the Japanese group, and Elizabeth Gaskins confirmed it."

  "Number eighteen."

  "Yes.” I stared at the wheel and realized that it was turning in the same direction as yesterday, that is, counter-clockwise from where we sat on the north bank of the river. It's called the north bank even though the Thames makes a sharp turn and runs south to north at that point, and we were actually sitting on the western side. But yesterday, looking at it from the other side, it had seemed to go clockwise. I pictured Pauline Newsome in her capsule several steps behind No. 18. She would have been on the southern side while number 18 was descending on the northern side. But Elizabeth Gaskins had got on the Eye earlier. She would have been nearing the end of her ride on the northern side as number 18 was rising in the south.

  "No!"

  Moody jumped.

  "No, it wasn't number eighteen that Elizabeth Gaskins saw above the Japanese group; when she saw it, eighteen would have been below them. Then, on the descending side, when Pauline Newsome saw it, eighteen would have been above them!” I rotated my hands to show what I meant.

  "That's it. That has to be it.” Moody sat hunched forward and stared at the wheel for a long time. “That coat Behringer was wearing last night. It was reversible, wasn't it?"

  "It was light-colored with a dark lining. Could have been reversible."

  "It was reversible. So how could Behringer have sneaked out of that capsule without anyone seeing him?"

  I shrugged.

  "By turning into a security man. Security were all wearing black jackets, weren't they? He could have made himself hard to see if he stood close to one of those strips inside the stabilizing bands, reversed his coat quickly when the girl came in to see why Helen Behringer wasn't moving, and suddenly there he is, with a metal detector, pretending to search for bombs."

  "Where did he get the metal detector?"

  "The cane, of course. The cane."

  * * * *

  Ted Behringer made a couple of mistakes. First, he returned the black 2kg weight to the weight rack in his gym without bothering to remove the threaded insert in the hole which had enabled him to screw it to the bottom of the cane to give the appearance of a metal detector. The rod that had kept the poor woman's body propped up was found, once we pulled off the loop on one end, to precisely fit inside the hollow cane. That explained how he got the metal rod in to begin with; the cane itself would have set off the alarm at the entrance, but aroused no suspicion.

  His second mistake? He threw his ticket stub for the London Eye—flight time: 16:17—into his own trash can.l(c) 2007 by Maria Hudgins

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Fiction: SNOWBIRD by Michael Bracken and Tom Sweeney

  * * * *

  Art by Mark Evans

  * * * *

  This collaboration between Michael Bracken, author of hundreds of works of short fiction, and Tom Sweeney, a former nominee for the PWA's Shamus award, is set in Mr. Bracken's home state of Texas. Mr. Bracken is also the editor of eight crime-fiction anthologies. His editorial instincts must have been at work here, for the collaboration is seamless.

  * * * *

  The P-47 Thunderbolt raced across Parker Lake thirty feet above the water. The insect-like drone of its engine, seemingly magnified by the surface of the water, echoed off the bare hills of the far shore. Dave Fogelman nudged the radio controller with his thumb and the plane dipped lower, then continued to drop even after he released the altitude lever.

  He quickly jerked back the stick, feathered out the throttle, and lifted the quarter-scale model to a safer altitude. The plane wobbled, then steadied, but Fogelman shook his head. It still wasn't right.

  The plane passed in front of the sun and he squinted at the sudden glare. It had snowed in Detroit last week, but here in the Texas Hill Country, where he'd retired, the October sun kept the temperature blisteringly close to three digits.

  The scale-model plane drifted to the south, keeping F
ogelman constantly working the controls to keep it steady. The little plane fought back, as if trying to escape the same way its predecessor had. He'd named his first plane Elise, after his former fiancée. That plane had escaped his control and flown off over the hills. He'd spent a week looking, but never found a trace of it. Much like the real Elise.

  Fogelman hadn't named this plane.

  As he swung the model in its wide arc to the landing strip, a plume of dust about a half-mile down the flat valley caught his eye. A car had turned off the paved road and was coming his way. Rafael, he hoped, with some information. Fogelman didn't need to supplement his retirement income with his private-investigation service, but he needed to remain active. He refused to be one of those cops who ate his pistol because he couldn't adjust to retirement.

  The car threaded its way up the private drive, swerving with care around the deep ruts Fogelman's truck had dug out during last spring's rains. Not Rafael at the wheel, then.

  Fogelman frowned. He did get the occasional snowbird stopping by his shop, wanting to fly or talk flying, but they rarely ignored the No Trespassing sign to come directly onto his flying strip. In a moment the car resolved itself into the brown and white markings of the county sheriff. Shit.

  Fogelman had the radio-controlled plane on the ground and idling by the time Sheriff Ezekiel Parker rolled his patrol car to a stop on the grass strip next to Fogelman's extended-cab dualie. Parker grabbed a tan file folder off the seat beside him and hefted his bulk out of the car. Fogelman extended a hand, and after a slight hesitation Parker shook it. Whatever his attitude toward Fogelman, his grip remained firm enough.

  Parker pulled off his hat and wiped his eyes with his forearm, leaving a damp spot on his uniform sleeve. “Hot for October,” he said. “But I guess that's why you snowbirds come down here, eh?"

  Six years after Fogelman had cleared a patch of mesquite and prickly pear cactus and set up his doublewide mobile home, the sheriff still treated him as an outsider. Fogelman shrugged. Better that way.

  Parker stared across the lake, silent. He might have seen something or he might be playing cop games. Without moving his gaze, he handed the file folder sideways to Fogelman.

  Fogelman opened it and thumbed through a series of crime-scene photographs. Years of experience working with photos like these gave him a living view of the crime scene: an almost-new motor home, Good Sam sticker in the rear window, surrounded by other motor homes with Good Sam stickers; the motor home's open door with the bloody handprint beside it; the inside of the motor home and the trail of blood stretching down the floor from the rear bedroom. He placed the folder on the hood of his truck and joined Parker in studying the opposite shore of the lake.

  Finally Parker turned. “No body and no witnesses. No one heard a thing,” he said.

  "Couldn't have gone too far,” Fogelman said, “losing blood like that. Any idea who it could be?"

  "Found his wallet on the RV's dash. Vladimir Strenko. Ring any bells?"

  Fogelman kept his cop face on, but couldn't control his rising pulse. He shook his head, watching the sheriff closely.

  "Found this in his wallet.” Parker held a plastic evidence baggie and laid it on the truck's hood next to the photographs. Inside the clear baggie, Dave Fogelman's name and a six-digit number had been written on a corner torn from a sheet of lined notebook paper. “Know what the number is?"

  He certainly did. The question was, did Parker? Fogelman considered speaking up, but one thing he'd learned in twenty-five years as a cop was that volunteering information rarely worked in a suspect's favor. Not that Fogelman considered himself a suspect yet, but he might be when Parker learned the six-digit number had been his Detroit PD badge number. “Could be anything,” he said.

  Parker nodded as if satisfied. He asked, “You working anything now?"

  "Hermie thinks someone's taking his RVs off the lot for joyrides,” Fogelman said. Herman Wonders operated Wonder RVs a few miles north of San Antonio. He lived in Lakeview Terrace, a new development carved out of the scrubby forest a couple of miles south of Fogelman's shop. Sometimes he flew his quarter-scale Piper alongside Fogelman's P-47. “Claims the mileage is wrong on a couple of his rigs. In fact,” Fogelman added, “when I saw you pull off the road, I thought it might be Rafael bringing me information about Hermie's problem."

  "Rafael? What the hell would that no-load know?” Like most in this region, Parker was quick to discount anything said or done by a Mexican, just as a Detroit cop would put little credence in a Menominee witness from the Upper Peninsula.

  "His brother's a shrimper out of Port Aransas,” Fogelman explained. “Hermie said two of the RVs had shrimp tails on the passenger-side floor, and the extra miles on them were just about enough to get to the coast and back."

  "Tracking down shrimp-eating joyriders seems like a waste of your many talents."

  Fogelman glanced sharply at Parker. The sheriff's face remained guileless, but who could tell? Barry Gorman had seemed guileless, too.

  Fogelman turned and stepped around to the back of his truck. The hell with Parker. The hell with him, his cousin, and the whole state of Texas. Whatever made Fogelman think he could put down roots here or anyplace else?

  He popped open the custom cap and removed a small canvas tool bag. It had been seven years since he'd crossed paths with Vladimir “Vlad the Impaler” Strenko on a bitterly cold Detroit winter night. Strenko had left him bleeding and shivering on the floor of an abandoned warehouse. Fogelman lived, but his life had fallen apart: Elise disappeared without saying a word, his partner quit the force without saying goodbye.

  Fogelman shook his head to clear the memory and began removing the left wing of the P-47.

  "We ran the prints. They're Strenko's,” the sheriff said from behind him. “He's got a jacket longer than my arm."

  A winter jacket, they'd called it back in Detroit, because it was so long. Fogelman ignored him and carefully laid the left wing on the ground and started to remove the right.

  "Key suspect in seven murders. Arrested only once. No convictions.” The sheriff paused as if waiting for Fogelman to comment. “Not a peep out of him for years. Then he shows up here. His wallet. His fingerprints. Your name."

  Fogelman carried the fuselage to the back of his truck and slid it into the center of three padded compartments. The two wings followed. Still Parker waited. Did he know about Strenko? Why didn't Parker mention that Strenko's rap sheet came from Detroit? What kind of game was he playing?

  Fogelman's own file would certainly mention Strenko, but what would be in Strenko's file? The worst thing Fogelman could do now would be to ask questions or try to explain anything. He closed the truck cap and checked his watch. Rafael was late, and Fogelman wanted to shower and change before picking up Nettie. “We done?"

  "Nope. Need you to come look at the RV."

  Fogelman raised an eyebrow. After he'd started dating Parker's cousin Nettie, he and Parker had sometimes exchanged cop talk, usually when Parker happened to drop by Nettie's when Fogelman was there. But Parker had never asked Fogelman to ride anywhere on official business. Was he seriously looking for help or trying to trap him?

  Fogelman asked, “For what?"

  "Just another pair of eyes."

  Right, Fogelman thought, but he fired up his dualie and followed Parker's dust cloud toward the main road.

  The impound lot comprised a fenced-in corner of Pablo's Salvage Yard that the county rented at a reduced rate, but rarely needed. The motor home was the sole vehicle in the lot, covered with a cheap blue tarp. Parker unlocked the gate and Fogelman followed him in on foot. Parker slipped the tarpaulin tie-downs from pegs driven into the hard-packed clay and the two of them flipped the tarp back over the roof.

  "Keeps the rain from washing the blood off,” explained Parker.

  Fogelman grunted, eyes on the dark red streak on the side of the RV, about eye level and a few inches to the left of the door. At the top of the streak was a large han
dprint.

  Fogelman was surprised at how quickly he reverted to cop. The bloody print wasn't a sad reminder of someone's life, but a puzzle to be solved. “Someone had blood all over his hands,” he said to Parker. “He leaned against the trailer, pushed against it hard. His hand slipped up to here.” Fogelman held his own hand even with the dried handprint. He had to stand on his toes to reach it.

  Parker grunted.

  "Yeah,” said Fogelman. “If this guy was standing on the ground when he made these marks, he is one tall dude.” Strenko was a giant, six feet, eight inches tall and weighing well over three hundred pounds. Parker had Strenko's file—he must know this.

  Parker made a show of eyeing the height of the handprint. “About six-eight, I make it, assuming that he first pressed his hand against the RV at shoulder level. I figure he tried to escape, but someone pulled him back inside. He leaned against the door, but the other guy was stronger or Strenko was about done in from loss of blood."

  Fogelman stepped into the trailer, careful not to step on the dried bloodstains, and whistled at the mess inside, instantly forgetting Parker's dumb act about Strenko's height. Contents of the built-in cabinets were strewn across the floor, something that hadn't been apparent from the pictures. The built-in dinette was smashed, ripped from the wall and turned on its back. A closet door hung from one hinge. “Someone tossed this place,” he said. “Tossed it good."

  Parker climbed inside. “Wallet with your name was up front there, on the dash."

  Fogelman squeezed past Parker. The glove compartment hung open and magazines littered the floor next to an empty rack. Fogelman ran his hands over the plush captain's chairs. Neither had been sliced open. “So who discovered the blood?” Fogelman asked.