Vince had the thing more or less under control now. He played the wheel with the expertise you soon acquire driving in our Midwestern winters, and was getting the fishtailing smoothed out, getting the Blazer aimed fairly straight toward the long driveway, getting away. In the time it would take me to get inside, get my keys, and get going, I wouldn’t even know which direction he’d chosen. The main highway was three miles north. And from there … anywhere.
Son of a bitch.
I grabbed the sweat-darkened handle of the old ax lying next to my outline in the snow. With no clear objective in mind I fell/ran toward the receding Blazer, the breath burning in my lungs, hands and feet and lungs throbbing from the cold, tears of pain and frustration running down my face and freezing in my beard. I felt like the kid in Shane.
The Blazer was into the curve where the drive fanned around the back of the house. He took it too quickly and the back end slid far to the right.
I was at the rear bumper.
A belch of blue exhaust choked me as Vince straightened the car and gave her the gas.
I pulled back the ax and, in a batter’s swing, brought it down hard and fast. The blade bit into the right rear tire, just below the curve of the exhaust pipe.
The explosion of pressurized air that followed sent the ax rocketing backward, out of my grip. Luckily. Because I ducked to the left, cowering, covering my head, picturing a pretty graphic decapitation, while the Blazer growled and skidded and tilted to the right. Its momentum and the slight unevenness of the yard were enough to topple it onto the passenger side, its grille toward the house.
I pulled myself to my feet. It seemed to be all I was doing these days. My left leg must have gone on coffee break, but I managed to get over to the Blazer anyway and crawl up the undercarriage to the driver’s-side door. I opened it.
Vince lay crumpled against the opposite door, bleeding, moaning and crying quietly. This is why you should always wear your seat belt. I reached past him and pulled the rifle out of the footwell near his head, then flung it—the rifle—backhanded across the yard as far as I could. Which was perhaps four feet. Then I reached back in and grabbed the ends of the short scarf dangling from inside his opened coat. I yanked on them and lifted his head four or five inches. He groaned and raised his hands limply.
“Where?” I croaked. There was blood in my mouth. I hadn’t noticed before.
Vince groaned louder.
I released the scarf and his head fell against the door with a hollow thump. He groaned louder. I tugged on the knitting once more.
“Where,” I repeated, louder. Spit and blood jumped from my lips.
His eyes opened fractionally, closed again. He moved his mouth. “The—other place,” he grunted raspingly.
I let go the scarf again and leaned back, raising my head, waiting out the dizziness and the nausea. I was kneeling on the back side window, my hands braced on the lower and upper door frames, my face toward the colorless sky. Snowflakes melted in my open mouth. Their coolness felt good.
The Blazer’s engine had cut out, which is why I could hear the other car, turning into the driveway. I opened my eyes, squinted through the curtain of snow. The little red car drew nearer. Koosje, I thought stupidly. What a morning to be late for work.
I started the long climb down. It suddenly seemed like hard work. I’d’ve never made it if it weren’t for gravity.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
In detective novels there almost invariably comes a point, usually along about Chapter Twenty-eight, where the tough-minded, square-jawed, hard-headed hero-for-hire explains to the benighted, befuddled flatfoots how he unraveled the complexities of the crime in question; how he deduced, logically and psychologically, the foul perpetrator’s identity; and how he then tricked or trapped him into exposing himself, figuratively speaking.
There was no such scene in this little production. I had hardly been light-years ahead of the cops in my reasoning. And even after we had our man, even after Kate Castelar fingered him as her captor and told us how he had explained to her his scheme to kill their father and let Jennings take the fall, we could only guess at the number and depth of his motives. They were good guesses, a lot of them—most were proved out in the prosecutor’s investigation, the hearing, and Vince’s subsequent treatment—but they were still guesses. And for some reason, I had a hard time convincing the cops that I was just guessing right along with them, that I, unlike Philo Vance, had no secret inside line to the killer’s psyche.
The sheriff and his men, who were waiting for me when I limped back from “the other place” with Kate, weren’t too bad. They had plenty of questions, but this wasn’t really their case and they were content to let it be so. The sheriff, a slow-moving, soft-spoken fellow about my height but with twenty pounds and as many years on me, seemed to think it was his responsibility merely to keep the motor ticking until OPD showed up; he questioned me halfheartedly while Bruhn, the family doctor, whom Koosje also had called while I was off being heroic, patched my ear and told me I may have cracked a rib.
The sheriff shook his head lethargically as I gingerly pulled my sweater down. “I’ve lived in this county my whole life, except for two years working for Uncle Sam, and nothing like this ever happened before,” he said with mild reproach, as if it were my fault. “And I’ll tell you something else.” He leaned forward conspiratorially and the wooden dining chair beneath him creaked mildly. “We never used to have this kind of stuff—this child abuse, this incest, and stuff—when I was younger. You never heard a thing about it, now it’s all you do hear.” It struck me as the most fatheaded comment I’d heard in months—would a fifteenth-century European say the New World didn’t exist before Columbus because he never heard anyone talk about it?—but I’d learned the hard way never to express such opinions to outstate sheriffs, especially when I’m in their counties.
I grunted noncommittally and said, “Don’t you think you should move the party to someplace a little more secure?”
He leaned back in the chair. “He’s fine up there. There’s no fight left in him, and if there was, my men’d take care of it.” Two strapping lads were keeping an eye on Vince in his bedroom; Koosje was off somewhere with Amy; Kate was asleep in her own bed, thanks to ol’ Doc Bruhn, who seemed a little quick on the draw with the tranquilizers; and Mom, Uncle Charlie, and the southern contingent had yet to arrive. “Everything stays as is until OPD shows up and says otherwise.”
I shrugged. It was nothing to me, and it was a hell of a lot more comfortable here than any county jail I’d ever seen. The coffee was better, too. I drank some and said, “Too bad our boy Knut missed all the fun and games.”
The sheriff colored slightly. “He went off duty at eight. Besides, the only fun and games he’ll be seeing for the next few weeks will be at a desk. He’s on restricted assignment for not telling the Omaha police about the reported sighting of Jennings the other night. Dumb-ass jerk; I don’t know what he was thinking.”
“He was thinking he could collar Jennings himself and make ‘The CBS Morning News.’ ” I chuckled sadistically. “The irony is, Jennings never was spooking around here, or anywhere. Vince concocted it—in part, I suppose, to make Jennings look even more culpable, to make everyone that much quicker to blame him for Christina’s murder that same night.” I winced inwardly as I explained it. I had been so sure of my theory about Jennings’s hanging around that I never asked him if in fact he had been. If I had, it might have pointed me in the right direction that much sooner.
The sheriff opened his mouth but was interrupted by a racket on the back porch. Since I hurt everywhere, I let the old spaniel, who had been dozing under the dining table, take care of jumping up and trouncing over to say hello to the Omaha cops.
Kim Banner came through the kitchen in stockinged feet, still wearing her overcoat and cap, carrying a gigantic bag. The other detective, Swanson, the stout, pale one, was taking the time to hang up his coat and scarf. Neither of them fussed over the do
g, so I called him over and scratched his floppy ears while he stood with his forepaws in my lap.
“Well, if it isn’t Mr. Holmes of Baker Street,” Banner murmured as she entered the dining room. She nodded at the sheriff, who had stood. “Another case solved, eh what?” She deposited the bag on the table, shucked her coat and hung it over a chair back, and rooted through the purse for a pair of low-heeled shoes.
“Now you see what comes of keeping pure thoughts.”
“Uh-huh.” She slipped on the shoes and looked at the sheriff. “What’s the story?”
“The Castelar boy’s upstairs. A couple of my deputies are watching him, but he’s not going anywhere. He’s pretty banged up, but he’ll be all right. As for the rest”—he inclined his head toward me—“he can tell you better than I can.”
Banner looked at me. Her face was serious, but her eyes were narrowed to half-moons. “Your time, boy. Tell our viewers all about how you cracked the case of the century. What was the big break?”
I raised my Scottie-dog mug. “The coffee.”
One eyebrow went up and her mouth went down. Swanson, standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, made a noise.
“Seriously. I know it sounds insane, but the night I stayed here, the same night Christina was killed, as it happens, Vince made me a pot of coffee that was abysmal—thick, bitter, muddy, really awful. But the coffee he made this morning was fine. Great, in fact. Now, Columbo could build a whole case around that. Me, I’m a little slower. But I did get to thinking about how lousy I felt yesterday: logy, unfocused—dopey. I wondered if someone had doped me. The only one with the opportunity was Vince, and this place is lousy with downers. I sort of naturally wondered why he’d want to.”
“To be sure you’d be out cold when he slipped out to murder Christina Jennings. Or whatever her real name is. Was.”
“Very good, Watson. But wrong. I arrived here more than half an hour after the latest time the coroner thinks Christina could have been killed. Vince already had dispatched Christina and hastened back here to make his phony report.”
“But he made the report at midnight,” Banner protested. “To kill Christina at eleven, shower and dress, and be here by twelve …”
“He’d have to move pretty fast. He did. But keep in mind, number one, that coroners’ estimates of time of death are just that—estimates. That eleven-to-two figure could be off by ten minutes or more on either end. And number two, Vince claimed Jennings was here at around midnight, but he didn’t actually phone the sheriff ’s office until …”
“Twelve twenty-two,” the older man supplied.
I turned toward Banner and spread my hands. “If quizzed, he could say that maybe it was five or six minutes after midnight when he heard noises out front, then he checked on his mother and sister, investigated a little, and so on. The point is, he could have had something like ninety minutes between the time he knifed Christina and the time he called the sheriff. That’s more than enough time.”
Banner pursed her lips and raked a hand through her short blondish hair. “O … kay,” she said speculatively. “And he killed her because she knew he had killed his own father and framed her husband, boyfriend, roommate, whatever you want to call him. She must have been in on it all along. And the cockeyed stories she kept telling us and taking back, they were to help us think Jennings was guilty, that she was lying to protect him.” She wagged her head sadly. “Do I have to ask what was in it for her?”
“She was doing a big favor for someone who was going to wind up owning a bank. As Jennings himself said, Christina would’ve cut off her own head for the right price. Cutting off Jennings’s would’ve been easie—”
“Wait a minute; what do you mean, ‘Jennings himself said’—what have you forgotten to tell me?”
“Oh. Yeah.” I cleared my throat and told her about my midnight rendezvous with Walt Jennings. I also told her about my subsequent meeting with Frank Kirby—I had to, because that was supposed to be the reason I didn’t take time to call the cops as I should have—but I glossed over the details. Specifically, I omitted the parts about breaking in and tying people up and waving guns around.
As I spoke, Banner propped an elbow on the tabletop and rested her chin in her palm. When I finished she said, almost boredly, “You know, you’re wide open to, oh gosh, a whole bunch of charges. I mean, it doesn’t matter that Jennings is innocent. He was still wanted for suspicion, and you had an obligation to let us know that he had contacted you.”
“A civic obligation, maybe, but not a legal one, I don’t think. I couldn’t have collared him myself.” A slight lie, there; I think I could have taken him on any number of occasions, though getting out of the Bottom Dollar would’ve been another story. “And what good would it have done for me to call you, after he was long gone, and say he used to be there? It all zeroes out.”
“And what about Kirby? You know, Narcotics has been working on him for a long time. If you’ve screwed that up …”
“Narcotics should kiss me: I may have quashed their dreams of seeing Kirby behind bars, but I have it on good authority that he is going to be retiring from business. I guess it’s bad for his nerves or something.”
She grunted. “Well … I hope you realize there are a lot of hard-asses who’d run you in just because.”
“Then I can merely say that I am most fortunate in my inquisitor,’” I misquoted from The Benson Murder Case. “Should I look forward to any trouble from the DA?”
“I doubt it. See, on top of everything, Jennings is dead.”
“Holy shit,” the sheriff said. It was his first commentary on the debriefing.
“You can say that again,” Banner drawled. “We got it in the car on the way up from the city. The Kansas state cops stopped him for a minor violation—a dead headlight, or something equally stupid—near Lyndon, Kansas, wherever the hell that is, earlier this morning. Jennings rabbited. They chased him. He spun out on an icy patch and plowed into a light pole on the highway. Killed him dead, the poor bastard … All right, where are we at? I suppose the kid killed the old man because he wanted to run the bank; why’d he nab his own sister?”
“I think we’re going to find out it’s a whole lot more complicated than Vince just being peeved because Dad wanted to take his own sweet time turning the business over to him. There’s that; there’s a whole big father-son thing, with Vince feeling that Jack never took him seriously and wouldn’t trust him with any real responsibility; and then there’s the fact that, well, evidently, Castelar had an incestuous relationship with Kate, going back many years.”
“Ho-ly shit,” Banner said, flabbergasted, with a glance toward Swanson, who made no sign. Stoic.
“I agree,” I said. “Even in the best families, huh? He tried to get something going with Amy a while back, but she got hysterical or something and it scared him off. Anyhow, I think you’re going to find that all this—this stuff is kind of mixed up together in Vince’s head and that it all, to one extent or another, figures into him doing what he did.”
“Why do you figure he set up Jennings to take the rap?”
I emptied my mug. “I’m just guessing, but, in the first place, Jennings was the perfect target. He had the motive, he’d made frequent threats, he’d be the prime suspect even if you didn’t try to frame him. With Christina’s statement, he was practically in the chair. What I can’t figure is where Vince and Christina linked up. My guess is that when he began concocting the plan, he poked around some into Jennings’s life, turned up the fact of Christina’s existence, and contrived to meet her. He’d know right off that her cooperation could be bought; she’d see the life of Reilly after the kid got his bank; and the rest, as they say, is hysterical.”
“I don’t suppose Christina found it too humorous when he slashed her to death.”
“I don’t suppose so either, but Vince could hardly be expected to let her live happily ever after. She’d soak him for the rest of his life.”
> “Plus, assuming Jennings was taken alive, Christina would have been put on the stand and grilled like a Porterhouse,” Banner said meditatively. “You wouldn’t want to gamble on whether or not she could take the heat. What’s your second place?”
“Right. In the second place, Jennings was an appealing patsy because of his relationship with Kate. This morning, Kate told me something that Vince said to her the night he killed their father. She didn’t understand it, but I think a headshrinker could have a lot of fun with it.
“That evening, fairly early, Vince called Kate at the hotel—it was no secret she was there—said he was going to the airport to meet Jack’s flight and did she want to come along. She did; she wanted to talk to him. So he swung by for her, but, of course, he wasn’t going to the airport. He told Kate what he had in mind, and she was, shall we say, unenthusiastic. Vince was prepared for that contingency with a pair of handcuffs and a bandanna to use as a gag. He subdued her and brought her back out here.
“But what he said to her was this: ‘You’ll come around.’ Kate didn’t get it, but I think what he was saying was, ‘You’ll come around to seeing that this is for your own good; I’m saving you from the old man, from Jennings, from yourself.’ It’s just a guess—you could talk to Koosje and get all the right lingo—but I know that Vince was extremely dismayed about Kate and Jennings. He felt that she was debasing herself, demeaning herself by being with him. And I think she was; I think it was purposeful. From what I hear, her sexual tastes had become kind of—well, out of the mainstream. Having your old man jumping you is bound to run all sorts of numbers on your sexual identity and emotional stability. Vince thought he was yanking her off the road to ruin. And he must have thought she’d see that sooner or later and all would be forgiven—after all, he couldn’t’ve expected to keep her chained to a radiator in that other farmhouse forever.”
Moving Targets Page 28