“Oh yeah? Well, now, where was I? Okay—she was naked when we found her, her clothes were neatly folded in the bedroom, and there are no signs of forced entry, so we assume her assailant was a lover.”
“Some lover. I’ve heard of post-coital depression, but this is too much. Do you have any possible motive or—dare I say it—a suspect?”
The back walk came around the south side of the house and curved to link up with the walk from the front door to the street. We were by now nearly to the curb. “Yeah-h,” Banner said guardedly as we stopped at the end of the sidewalk. She shifted the throat lozenge in her mouth. “But we haven’t got all the bugs ironed out yet. We’ve got the murder weapon—managed it without you this time, Sherlock—a very large and very wicked-looking hunting knife that the killer thoughtfully left in the bathroom. Where, I should add, he apparently took a nice hot shower after he finished the job. The knife is Jennings’s. His initials are burned into the handle, and we found a toolbox in the front closet that contained a leather sheath the knife fits. Could Jennings have come back and killed Christina last night? Possibly. Motive? Well, maybe he thought Christina had been more help to us than she really had been. Or to you.” She looked at me slyly. “How did she seem when you were here last night?”
I laughed. “You are a detective after all. What gave me away?”
“Your ever-vigilant police force. A patrol car spotted your car and called in the license number.”
“Wait a minute, if you had the place under surveillance, then how’d the killer—”
“Who said anything about surveillance? We stepped up patrols in this area, sure, but twenty-four-hour surveillance costs beaucoup bucks, and we couldn’t justify the expenditure. No one expected Jennings’d come back here.”
“Well, it’s no secret; I was here last night—in the early evening, this was. And Christina seemed just fine, perfectly relaxed, not like a woman who expects to get killed. What she was expecting was company, probably masculine company; I mean, she was really dolled up. But I couldn’t imagine it being Jennings. I still can’t. His hanging around here would be even stupider than his hanging around the Castelars’. He’d be putting himself at risk fo—”
“Wait a minute: What do you mean, hanging around Castelars’?”
I looked down into her face and saw genuine perplexity. “That business out there last night.” No change in her expression. “Vince. Thinking he saw Jennings. Last night. Out there. Hello?”
“Nobody told me anything about this.”
“Didn’t Knut call you?”
“No, the son of a bitch,” she said, grinding what was left of her Sucrets into fine granules between her molars. “Damn it.”
“Well, he didn’t appear to be buying into Vince’s story wholeheartedly. Maybe he decided it wasn’t worth the bother …”
“That’s not his decision,” Banner rasped fiercely. “It’s his job to report it; it’s my job to decide whether it’s worth the bother. Damn him. I’m going to have to have a chat with the sheriff this morning. Anyway, what did go on last night?”
I showed her some exciting scenes from last week’s episode and she absorbed them without comment. “Who knows,” I said when I’d finished the recap, “maybe killing Castelar set him off—like a dog getting his first taste of blood. Maybe he killed Castelar and killed Kate and got frustrated when he couldn’t kill the rest of the family so he came over here and killed Christina. It’s crazy, all right—but then, so was our lad Charlie Starkweather.”
Banner smiled indulgently. “Before you get carried away completely, consider this; it’s one of the unironed bugs I told you about.” She paused and blew a frosty sigh—of weariness, frustration, resignation, something—into the cold gray midmorning. “I got a call from the South Dakota state cops this morning. Seems they found Jennings’s truck. Stuck in a drift on I-29 just north of Sioux City. A deputy reported it abandoned at about eleven-thirty last night.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It’s an easy trip: You simply get on I-29, just across the river from beautiful downtown Omaha, and head north. That’s it. It’s not the most scenic drive in the world, but it does take you directly and almost effortlessly into Sioux City, Iowa, hard by the banks of the Missouri River.
Problem is, it gets you there after about ninety minutes—meaning it would be tough for Jennings to have killed Christina in Omaha between ten p.m. and two a.m. and abandoned his truck north of Sioux City in time to have been discovered there by eleven-thirty.
Unless he did it the other way around. “He could have decided that the weather had improved enough for him and Kate to make a run for it,” I said dubiously, the tone of my voice matching the look on Banner’s face as she leaned against the unmarked car at curbside. “Maybe for Canada. He got stuck, so he turned around and came back. He could’ve hitched a ride on the southbound lane or stolen a car—you wouldn’t expect a murderer to shrink from grand theft auto—and gotten back here in time to kill Christina, if he was of a mind to.”
“Uh-huh.” Her voice, her posture, her whole attitude said she didn’t think it too likely. “And what about his surprise cameo appearance at the Castelars’? Say he killed Christina at eleven on the dot. Give him fifteen or twenty minutes to get himself cleaned up and everything. He doesn’t leave here until eleven-twenty or eleven-thirty, and it’s a good hour’s drive to the Castelar place. He can’t make it there by midnight.”
“Unless he drives like a maniac.”
She squinted at me. “He’s trying to avoid the cops, remember? All he needs is to be picked up on a traffic violation. In a stolen car, no less.”
A uniform appeared with a clipboard, which he handed to Banner. I waited while she signed several forms. My head hurt and my gut hurt and I didn’t want to have to think, much less speak, so I didn’t mind the interruption. The uniform told Banner that the back door had been sealed and she told him there was no reason for everyone to hang around any longer. He set off for one of the patrol cars left on the street. The cruiser was one of the older ones that OPD was phasing out. The old models—white sedans with blue markings, like the new ones—had a friendly OPD slogan pasted to the front doors: your safety is our concern. This one, however, had been through the wash once too often, and part of the decal had torn away. As far as this cop was concerned, then, our safety is our concern. Tough town.
“What if you run it the other way?” I said wearily when the cop had left. “Jennings ditches the truck near Sioux City, we know not when. He secures transportation back to the Big O in time to stage a midnight reconnaissance of the Castelar place, and is scared off by Vince and the mutt. He returns to the city and, unhappy about his evening being ruined, kills Christina.”
“You have a real gift for invention, Marlowe. I can’t wait to read this book of yours; it must be a masterpiece of imagination gone wild. Okay, say he gets scared away from the Castelars’ at twelve-fifteen, twelve-twenty, somewhere in there. Give him an hour or so to get back to town. One-thirty.”
“Giving him half an hour to shove Christina off the mortal coil before the deadline. No pun.”
“Except Christina hit the sack with her killer first. That eats up your half-hour. And then some.”
I shrugged. “Maybe Jennings has no staying power.”
“Maybe Vince Castelar’s mixed up on the time.”
“He certainly seems definite.”
“Come on, Nebraska, you’ve worked with witnesses to this or that over the years. You know how unreliable people’s memories can be.”
“Some people’s memories. I look at what we have, it seems to bring us to the conclusion that Walt Jennings could not have killed Christina.”
She looked at the sky in a speculative way. “Well, if you have any other nominees, now’s the time. Meanwhile, nothing changes for me. The APB stands, the local investigation continues, and the beat goes on.”
“ ‘The beat goes on?’ You’re dating yourself.”
“At
least somebody is.” She pulled a throat lozenge from her coat pocket and went to work on the foil wrapper. “Personally, I think Jennings did kill her, but I can’t figure out the timing, so give him the benefit of the doubt on that one. But with Castelar … hell, everything points to Jennings. He had the motive and the means, he’s unaccounted for at the time of the killing, he came home behaving very peculiarly after Castelar was killed, he hid a gun that turned out to be the murder weapon, and then he packed and split.”
“So said Christina.”
“And look what happened to her. I know there are lots of problems with the time-frame, but I say Jennings felt she had stabbed him in the back—bad choice of words—and repaid her in kind. Goddamn it!” She had been fumbling with the lozenge wrapper and getting nowhere. Now she grabbed the fingers of one glove in her teeth and yanked it off so she could get a nail under one corner of the foil. “Damn sadists. Next time I’m getting the kind you just pop off the little card.” She tossed the thing into her mouth and jammed her hand back into the glove.
“But don’t you think everything’s just too pat, that everything points too directly at Jennings? I mean, the gun was hidden so badly, and the knife wasn’t hidden at all.”
“What’re you saying, a frame?”
“Big enough to put around The Last Supper. Not that you’d put a frame around a fresco …”
“Again, I’ll give you the benefit on Christina,” Banner said. “She could’ve been killed by someone else, like a jealous lover, who heard all about Jennings on TV and figured one more killing wouldn’t make any difference to him. It’s a real stretch. Lover boy—whoever he might be, why ever he’d want Christina dead—would have to plan it out literally overnight. He’d have to know where Jennings kept his hunting stuff, he’d have to invent some reason for going into that closet and getting the knife, then he’d have to sneak it into the bedroom to use when Christina was most defenseless.” She shrugged. “It could be”—she pushed herself away from the side of the car and walked around the front of it to the driver’s side—“but the trouble is, I work for this crazy bunch that sort of expects me to stick with what-is and leave could-be out of it.” She pulled open the car door. “Hop in; I don’t think this cold air is doing my throat much good.”
I opened the door on my side and slid in. Banner started the engine and shoved the temperature and fan controls to their highest settings. I looked out the window at the forlorn house, gray against a gray sky. “Not quite forty-eight hours ago I was sitting in almost exactly this spot with Kate Castelar. No one had been murdered, no one had gone missing, no one was … out there, somewhere … It seems like a lifetime ago. Someone else’s lifetime.”
Banner looked into my face and rested a gloved hand on my arm. “We’ll find her. She’s with Jennings and we’ll find Jennings.”
“I don’t know. Jennings killing Christina—I can’t make it work. I think he took off, taking Kate. The weather got vicious. So they ditched the truck and went for a walk in a blizzard …
“You know, several years ago there was a nasty snowstorm here. The kind that comes from nowhere and dumps thirty-six inches in an hour. This place I was working at closed up at noon, the weather was so bad. The streets were clogged, so I left my car in the lot and hoofed it. It was only about a mile. But the snow was up past my knees, and by the time I got to my street I was so exhausted that all I wanted to do was lie down and rest. For just a minute. This was in broad daylight, I knew where I was going, and I could see my building right there in front of me. So I kept walking. But Jennings and Kate, they’d be out at night, in unfamiliar territory, and who knows how far from shelter. What if they stopped to rest for ‘just a minute’? You’re forever reading about some poor slob found frozen to death a hundred feet from his own front door because he couldn’t see where he was going and had to rest for just a minute.”
“Hey.” Her face, and her voice, had gone earnest. “We don’t know positively that it’s the right truck—”
“But the license—”
“Screw-ups happen. In the dark, in a blizzard, a rookie up on the highway might’ve read the plate wrong. Hell, anyone might’ve. Besides, he’d mainly be interested in seeing whether anyone was still in the pickup. No one was. Maybe someone saw them go off the road and picked them up. Maybe someone happened by a few minutes later. Maybe it wasn’t even them in the truck—Jennings’d know we’d be looking for it, maybe he sold it to someone. I don’t know. I do know that we will find them. As soon as the weather lifts, the state and county cops up there are going to be all over the place, checking all the homes and businesses and farm buildings, covering all the bases. If they’re there, they’re not going anyplace.
“But the thing is, they’re not there, they’re here. Christina was killed by the same man who killed Castelar—different MO, but it only makes sense—and I can’t see Jennings running up and down the highway all night. No, South Dakota’s got the wrong truck, or Jennings got rid of it, or something. He’s been here all along, and Kate’s with him, and we’ll find them.”
“You’re guessing, Kim.” It was the first time I had called her by her first name, or even thought of her by it. It sounded funny.
“So sue me.”
I had a better idea. I’d seen enough movies to know what the dashing young adventurer is supposed to do at a time like this, and it didn’t have anything to do with lawsuits.
The kiss was deep and sweet, albeit Sucrets-laced—and brief. “Awright, break it up, break it up,” Banner growled as she pushed me away and straightened up behind the steering wheel. “I told you before, I don’t mix business and pleasure. Usually.” She glanced at me and then out her window. “Jesus Christ, is that your car? What happened to it?”
“No, that’s my car,” I said. “Like it? I’m hoping to start a fashion trend.” The defroster had developed a squeak that went through my head like a nail, so I reached forward and lowered the fan lever a notch or two. “Actually, I have the distinct feeling that someone wants me to go back to my typewriter and leave this case alone. You can’t see it very well from this angle, but my remodeler painted stop on the hood after dumping the better part of the can on the windshield—after he realized he wasn’t getting anywhere smashing it in.”
“Good Lord. Any idea who?”
“Once upon a time I had half-thought Christina, but it didn’t work right then and it certainly doesn’t make sense in light of recent developments. I don’t mean just the murder; I was buzzed once or twice yesterday by person or persons unknown in a new blue Thunderbird. Which reminds me: Do you know anything about a charming creature called the Fat Lady?”
Banner nodded. “We know the Fat Lady real well. I forget her real name. It might just as well be the Fat Lady, because that’s what everyone calls her. She used to be a fairly well-connected madam back in the fifties, but then the political winds shifted and she took a nosedive. Now she’s just another hustler looking to make a buck, and she’s spread out all over the map.”
“Literally as well as figuratively.”
“She’s still got a few girls—strictly down-scale—and she’s into drugs, numbers, sharking, liquor, guns. That makes her sound like public-enemy number one, but we’re talking a couple of girls, a couple of guns. You can own stock in a hundred companies, but if you only own one share of each …” She ended the sentence with a shrug. “Every so often she oversteps the line, or one of her girls propositions an undercover cop, and we haul them all in. Nothing ever sticks. Not that anyone tries real hard; the Fat Lady’s hardly worth worrying about. Why are you?”
“I’m not worried; just interested. One of Jennings’s haunts is run by the Fat Lady. I was there last night and had a spectacularly bizarre evening. First one of the hired hands beat up on me, then the grande dame herself pulled a gun on me, refused to answer any questions of any variety about Jennings, and made it clear that my smiling face was unwelcome on her property. But then she gave me a lead to follow up. It was a de
ad end—but was it an intentional dead end?”
“Sure it was.”
“Oh. Thanks for clearing that up for me.”
“She was trying to get rid of you. Did she send the T-bird?”
I shook my head. “I was being tailed before I ever even heard of her, or she of me. Same with the new paint job on my car. And it doesn’t make sense, the Fat Lady sending me on a merry chase just to get rid of me; I was literally on the way out when she suddenly changed her mind and started talking.”
“She was funnin’ you, brother,” Banner said with conviction. “A woman like the Fat Lady turns helpful for one of two reasons: to make a buck or to save her butt. What’s the story on this supposed hideout?”
I told her about the old ramshackle transients’ hotel and gave her rough directions to it. She made a few notations in her book and pledged to ask about it down at the station.
“And on the subject of hideouts,” I said, “I meant to ask you about a second, disused farmhouse on the Castelar property. I understand Kate had a key to it.”
“Yeah, the sheriff checked it out first thing yesterday, as soon as we learned that she was missing again. It was locked up tight; no sign of anyone having been in for ages. Why? Were you thinking maybe she and Jennings were hiding out there?”
“Too much to hope for, I know. But I once spent not quite four days looking for a runaway who turned up in the basement. He slept in a storage room under the stairs during the day and sneaked up for food at night. It could have gone on forever except Ma wondered where all the milk was disappearing to.”
“Well, I can ask the sheriff to take another look at it when I call to bitch about Knut.” She added it to her list. “Anything else?”
I looked at her a long time, and finally she glanced up. “Just one more thing,” I said, and leaned close. She brought her notepad up between us and batted me lightly on the nose with it.
Moving Targets Page 18