AHMM, Jan-Feb 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Now here's the kicker, Cy. Rakovy was the maiden name of Maria Casteven, the late wife of your witness at The Green Fish tavern across the street from Blanford's house. The only Rakovy listed in the current city directory is a Gregory J., who works for Allied Bell as a lineman and troubleshooter."

  As Auburn furtively twisted sideways in his seat for a glimpse of the man behind the bar, his heart skipped a beat. At least, he felt something like a blow from a child's fist in the middle of his breastbone. Before speaking again, he covered his mouth with his hand, as if he thought Greg Rakovy—who wasn't even looking his way—could read lips.

  "I'm pretty sure I have the subject in view as we speak."

  "You are? Where in this world are you calling from, Cy? It sounds like a shopping mall."

  "I'm at The Green Fish."

  "And you think Rakovy is there?"

  "Pretty sure,” Auburn said again.

  "Well, can he hear you? What are you doing, playing poker with him?"

  Even though the sight of people talking on cell phones in public places had become so commonplace that the few patrons around him were ignoring him completely, Auburn saw fit to mumble through a heavily veiled account of his current position and the grounds on which he believed that the number one suspect in the murder of Ida Blanford was the second-shift barman at The Green Fish.

  "Okay, Cy,” said Savage at length. “I'm trusting you to play this one by ear.” Auburn waited until Rakovy was at the back end of the bar running a batch of glasses through the steamer before he approached him and showed identification.

  "Mr. Rakovy?"

  "Help you?"

  "I wonder if you'd mind answering a few questions?"

  The bartender stared at him with dead-fish eyes in a deadpan face. “What about?"

  "I'm sure you know we had a shooting death across the street last night. Were you here at work last evening?"

  "Till eleven."

  "Is there somewhere we could talk privately?"

  "Not right now. Unless you want to get me lynched.” Patrons at that end of the bar were watching and listening as well as they could over the hubbub of voices and the relentless din of the TV. Two of them were clamoring for refills.

  "I imagine Scotty would take over for you for a few minutes."

  Rakovy bridled, now frankly hostile. “So who died and left you in charge?"

  Remarks like that usually got Auburn's blood flowing, and sometimes prompted him to retaliate in kind. But, conscious of the increasingly attentive audience, he was determined to do things exactly right.

  "This is a homicide investigation, sir,” he said. “You were on or near the scene around the time of the shooting. That makes you a material witness.” Auburn kept his voice quiet and steady, almost amiable—but not quite. “If you don't want to talk here, we can go downtown to headquarters—that's up to you. But I'm not going to go away, so you might as well get it over with."

  By this time Casteven had appeared to see what the commotion was all about. He took over behind the bar while Auburn and Rakovy adjourned to a stuffy back room where full and empty beer kegs were stacked beside a walk-in freezer.

  Auburn first verified that he was talking to Gregory J. Rakovy and recorded his address and phone number. Rakovy worked full-time for the telephone company and (for the past eight months) part-time at The Green Fish. He had left immediately after locking up at eleven p.m. the night before and had gone straight home to his apartment and to bed, since he had to get up at five thirty to go to his other job. He lived alone. He hadn't heard or seen anything unusual across the street at Ida Blanford's house, and he denied being acquainted with her.

  "Have you ever been inside her house? Ever talked to her? Out on the street, on the phone? Ever have any contact with her by mail?” Rakovy gave unqualified negative answers to all these questions. Auburn avoided saying anything that might tip him off to the fact that the gun and other articles had been recovered from the river bottom.

  Had Ida Blanford ever been inside The Green Fish? Did Rakovy know Ida's nephew Dale? Had anybody at The Green Fish had any association with either of the Blanfords? No, no, no. By now Rakovy's face was set in a disdainful smirk. The oppressive heat from the freezer condenser and the sour fumes from the empty kegs were making Auburn sick.

  On his way to his car he took a long look at Rakovy's truck. Because he didn't yet have probable cause for search and seizure, he confined his attention to inspecting it from the sidewalk. Then he climbed the levee for another view of the spot where Ida Blanford's body had been found. Although it was still broad daylight, the shadows were gathering under the sycamores and lights were coming on in the apartment buildings across the river. A cool evening breeze rippled the water and carried a vague threat of rain.

  Auburn didn't sleep very well that night, probably because of all the coffee he'd put down at The Green Fish. But he was at his desk before eight thirty the next morning, shuffling through background probes on Ida Blanford and the people he'd talked to yesterday. The deceased had a distinguished history as an elementary school teacher and later, when her vision began to fail, as a volunteer tutor in a literacy program. And she had indeed been a woman of vast wealth. But her moneylending activities had never come to the attention either of law enforcement authorities or of the other agencies and services that participated in the surveillance system.

  Her nephew Dale's construction company was operating in the black and had a favorable rating with the Better Business Bureau. Fred Shannoy, the playboy fisherman, and Darlece Fontaine, the waitress at The Green Fish, had so far kept on the right side of the law. Melvin J. Casteven was deeply in debt to two credit card companies and a local savings and loan. Gregory J. Rakovy had a long history of frequent job changes and had incurred several fines for minor infractions of traffic laws.

  Stamaty had sent Auburn a preliminary autopsy report from the coroner's office across the street in the courthouse. A single .38-caliber slug, fired almost at point-blank range, had penetrated Ida Blanford's right ventricle and vena cava, producing a massive and rapidly lethal internal hemorrhage. Routine tests had shown powder burns on both her hands, probably sustained as she struggled with the killer. Anyway she hadn't shot herself through the heart and then tucked the gun in a plastic bag and tossed it into the river. The bullet and the gun had already been delivered by police courier to the regional ballistics lab.

  No member of the public had come forth to report any unusual activity around Ida Blanford's house on Wednesday night.

  Auburn went up to Kestrel's lab under the skylights to view the rest of the evidence for himself. Kestrel took a red plastic box marked “Biological Hazard” out of a locked cabinet, and after donning a pair of rubber gloves, he laid out its contents in a neat row on a sheet of clean paper. The resealable plastic food bag in which the other articles had been found was made of heavy-duty opaque polyethylene with a metallic sheen; it was jumbo-sized, big enough to hold a ham or a whole turkey.

  The strip of white adhesive tape with “Johnston” lettered on one surface and the negative of “Rakovy” on the sticky side had been stretched out flat and mounted on a sheet of clear plastic. The blood on the leather work gloves had turned the color of chocolate syrup. The gloves were generic, worn, and untraceable. According to Kestrel, intensive examinations for trace evidence had turned up only the usual nonspecific particulate and microscopic garbage.

  "I hear you found bloodstains in the basement."

  "Back near the furnace. Nothing much to see except a spot where the dust had been wiped up, but it gave chemical traces of blood, same type as the victim. So did this.” He opened a folder and showed Auburn a sheet of paper that had been tightly wadded and then partly smoothed out again. Besides bloodstains, it bore traces of grit and dust. “Found this in the crawl space under the back porch. He must have used it to wipe the blood off the floor."

  Auburn examined the paper. One side was blank. On the other was printed, under the logo of a f
irm called Arco-Net Security Limited, a standard work contract to install an electronic security system. None of the blanks had been filled in, and the paper appeared to be a photocopy of an original document.

  "I didn't see any loose papers in that basement,” said Auburn. “This must be something the killer had with him. Has anybody checked on this company?"

  "Not yet. I'm still putting my report together."

  "How can I get a photocopy of this form?"

  "I'll put it in a transparent sleeve."

  Doing his own Web search, Auburn found that Arco-Net was still in business but had dropped its local franchisee three years ago. Probably the murderer had used the blank contract form to gain admittance to Ida Blanford's house on the pretext of giving a sales pitch or preparing an estimate for an electronic security system.

  Premeditated murder seemed unlikely. According to her nephew, Ida was a gutsy character. She might have put up a fight, forcing the robber to use a weapon he'd brought along merely as a threat. But once he got hold of her keys, he went straight to the safe and cleaned it out without even bothering to search for loot elsewhere in the big house. Maybe he was somebody who owed Ida Blanford money. In that case, by removing his IOU along with a bundle of cash, he'd reduced the risk that he'd be counted among the suspects.

  Dale Blanford presumably wasn't the killer, since his aunt would have recognized him in spite of her visual impairment, and the ruse about the security system would have been unnecessary. Yet Dale knew about both her safe and her weakness for security devices. And he admitted that she'd lent him money; he didn't say he'd ever paid it back.

  None of the neighbors had reported seeing any visitors or unusual activity at the house. That could mean the killer had arrived after dark. If he parked down the street and went to the back door, nobody on the street or at The Green Fish would have seen him entering the house. He evidently had something with him that had been marked with Rakovy's name, probably a toolbox in which to carry away the loot, but that didn't prove he was Rakovy.

  Auburn found eighty-one Johnstons in the metropolitan telephone directory. He decided to assume, for the time being, that the alternative name on the tape had been chosen at random. After spending some time in Records consulting a collection of old city directories, he made a call to Pittsburgh and another to the local office of Allied Bell. That second call led to a personal visit to the phone company, which he made on foot.

  The day was cloudy and breezy, cooler than yesterday. The air smelled like rain. After leaving the Allied Bell offices, Auburn returned to headquarters just long enough to prepare an application for search and arrest warrants and the necessary affidavits, and then took them across the street to the courthouse.

  By eleven thirty he was back at The Green Fish, where he found the table in the window vacant just as if it had been reserved for him. Nothing much had changed. Scotty and Darla were still chanting their enigmatic antiphons and responses above the mutter of voices and the squawk of the radio speakers. The special today was codfish Creole, but the place smelled exactly the way it had yesterday.

  The Blanford homicide had been a featured item on the TV news and in the morning papers. Some of the regulars obviously recognized Auburn and did double takes on seeing him back again at the same table. Yesterday he'd been a stranger, an anomaly in this milieu. By now he was becoming absorbed into it, was almost a regular himself. When a juvenile diner accidentally tipped a full glass of water onto the floor, Auburn was on the spot, helping with the mop from behind the serving counter before Darla got there.

  "We're going to have to put you on the payroll, Officer,” she said. “You going to try the codfish today? This time yesterday it was still swimming around in Chesapeake Bay."

  "I think I'll stick with the Salisbury steak."

  "You want that with soup and salad again?"

  "Just coffee today, please."

  There was nothing much to see across the street. Ida Blanford's Victorian revival house stood as it had for decades, stodgy and aloof. Only a strand of yellow tape caught in a hedge showed that anything unusual had happened there lately. And inside The Green Fish, life went on according to the usual routine as well.

  The group of East Indians came in for lunch again, followed shortly by the retiree with the smashed thumb. They sat at the same tables as yesterday, ate the same food. Then the crowd in the dining area gradually thinned out again, so that by half past two Auburn almost had the place to himself. At a few minutes before three, Patrolman Fritz Dollinger entered in plainclothes and took one of the stools at the lunch counter.

  Things were already picking up at the bar when Greg Rakovy came in from the back room, tying on a short black apron. He cast a quick eye over the dining room and seemingly made a point of not noticing Auburn.

  When Auburn took his check to the cash register, Scotty Casteven interrupted the daily chore of cleaning the grill to take care of him. Auburn waited until he had his change to make the pinch. “Melvin Casteven,” he said, so quietly that only Dollinger and Casteven himself could hear him, “I have a warrant for your arrest on a charge of first-degree murder. There may be other charges as well. You have the right to remain silent..."

  Casteven didn't try to bluff, he didn't bluster, he just caved in. By the time Auburn finished reciting the familiar formula, his knees had turned to jelly and his face was the color of barley soup. Dollinger stepped into the gap in the counter, prepared to hold him up if necessary. Casteven was stout, but Dollinger was stouter.

  "Hey, Darla,” said Casteven, his voice hoarse and shaky, “I need to go downtown with these men. Close the dining room. And call Kriegel's before four fifteen and cancel that meat order.” He didn't say anything to Rakovy.

  After they left the bar and grill, Auburn looked back to see Darla staring in bewilderment through the window with the picture of the big fish while she mechanically pocketed the tip he'd left and wiped the table with a cloth.

  "First we're going upstairs to look around your place,” Auburn told Casteven. He waited to serve the search warrant until Casteven had unlocked the door to the stairs leading to the apartment over The Green Fish. The apartment was a dump, the typical living quarters of a widower who worked about sixty hours a week. Only the kitchen was more or less presentable, probably because Casteven ate all his meals down in the restaurant. They didn't find Ida Blanford's money.

  "Okay,” said Auburn, “now let's go back downstairs and see what's in your freezer that you didn't want the meat man from Kriegel's to find tomorrow morning."

  "Hold on a minute,” said Casteven. “You can't go poking around in there without a food-handler's card from the Board of Health."

  "We're going to risk it. I worked at a deli when I was in high school. I know all about freezers. And freezer bags."

  Buried under cuts of beef and pork they found a bag just like the one the divers had brought up from the river, only this one was stuffed with money. Dollinger spent the entire time it took them to get downtown counting it. There was over thirty thousand dollars, mostly in large bills. Dale Blanford would no doubt be pleased to learn that his aunt's outstanding promissory notes were there too.

  When they arrived at headquarters, they took Casteven directly to an interrogation room, euphemistically styled “Conference A,” on the second floor. At the risk of throwing the central air-conditioning out of adjustment, Auburn opened one of the big frosted glass windows, as he often did at this time of year. Dollinger stood at attention just inside the door like a sentry, even though his main function there was to serve as an official witness.

  "Please make yourself comfortable, sir,” Auburn told Casteven. He was always scrupulously polite to persons under arrest. It looked like the prisoner was planning to stand mute. They didn't need a confession to make the charges stick, but Auburn hoped to get some more details before he turned the case over to the prosecutor's office. He'd already given Casteven the statutory warnings, but he gave them again.

  "I'm
going to remind you that you're entitled to have a lawyer here before you say anything. But once you have legal representation, the city will have it too, in the form of an assistant prosecutor. And then those two lawyers will take over the case and decide your future between them."

  Casteven sat with his bulky frame huddled on the edge of his chair like a little boy caught stealing apples. His dominant emotion seemed to be shame rather than fear. But clearly he was skeptical that Auburn had any other motive than the desire to see him convicted and sentenced. And Auburn knew that nothing he could do or say would convince this man of his genuine compassion, or persuade him that he enjoyed this part of his job about as much as Casteven enjoyed scraping burnt grease off the grill.

  "I'm going to put my cards on the table,” he said. “Most of them anyway. I'm sure you know that the divers brought up the gun and the gloves from the river where you threw them."

  Casteven looked as if he were going to make a last-minute effort to deny everything, but something about Auburn's businesslike tone apparently told him it wouldn't work.

  "You don't need to say a thing if you don't want to,” Auburn assured him again. “Let me tell you what I think happened. Your business has been going down for years, along with all the other businesses in the neighborhood. And things only got worse when your wife died and you had to decide between struggling along without her and hiring some backup help. Getting your brother-in-law to work for you took off some of the workload, but it also cut your net income even further."

  A gentle breeze from the direction of the river stirred forms on the table and cobwebs in the corners. They could hear the piping of dozens of birds in the trees around the courthouse half a block away.

  "From your apartment you had a view of Ida Blandford's house across the street. You saw people visiting her in the evening—couples, individuals—and these obviously weren't social visits. Probably you could see her talking to them in her front parlor. Maybe you even saw her go upstairs and take her keys out of her purse and unlock her safe—"