“What’s your name, ma’am? And where are you calling from?”
“Call from phone boot’. No name. Don’t want get mixed up.”
She hung up the telephone and returned to the car.
Back in their suite at Piscina Linda they found the coffee service that had been brought up at midnight, filling their standing order. The ten-dollar bill, the tip, was gone.
They poured two cups of coffee, drank a part of each, then poured all but a little of what remained in the Thermos carafe down the bathroom basin.
They changed into the clothes they had worn in the dining room and stuffed the others into Kimberly’s bag. They switched off the television set, left the room, and went downstairs. Knowing their habits, Jorge, the parking attendant, had already brought the gull-wing Mercedes to the door. He held the door open for Kimberly and saluted Yussef with a bow and a happy grin.
“Good night, ma’am. Good night, Mr. Khoury. Hope to see you again soon.”
“You will, Jorge,” said Yussef, handing a ten-dollar tip from the car window. “You will.”
3
Kimberly drove the Oldsmobile to Santa Monica, then up the highway to the beach at San Luis Rio. Two fishermen still sat on the pier, and she had to wait until almost three o’clock before she could walk out on the pier alone. At the end of the pier she dropped the two Bali-Songs and the burglar tool into the water. Then she threw in two blood-stained white cotton gloves and finally, the Baggie that had contained the gloves.
As she drove back, she switched on the radio in the car. Breathless reports of the grisly murders at the Khoury home on Mulholland Drive already eclipsed every other story on the news.
Five
1
Columbo pulled up to the gate to the Khoury estate. The officer on duty there recognized his beat-up old Peugeot and the license 044 APD. and he opened the gate, saluted, and pointed to a place where Columbo could park to the right of the driveway.
Emergency equipment filled the long drive: black and white police cars, seven or eight of them, and two emergency-squad ambulances sat nearest the door, their red and blue lights flashing for no particular reason. People hurried in and out of the house, some of them carrying pieces of equipment. Columbo walked up the driveway, his raincoat flapping around him in the wind, which ruffled his dark hair, too. He stopped for a moment to light the stub of cigar he carried between his lips, but the wind blew out his match, and he tossed it aside with manifest impatience and strode on toward the house.
A sergeant stepped out and came toward him. He recognized Columbo. Most men on the force did. “Good morning, sir. We’ve got a triple homicide here.”
“Yeah, I know. They called me. Woke me up.” His New York accent still sounded in his voice, even after all the years in California. “I wouldn’t know if there’s rest for the wicked. Or maybe I would. Maybe I’m wicked. I sure find it hard to get any rest.”
“The victims are Mrs. Arlene Khoury, a man identified as Steve Heck, and a houseboy we know so far only as Sergio.”
“Where is Mr. Khoury?” asked Columbo.
“In one of the guest rooms in the west wing,” said the sergeant. “Sedated. Dr. Amos is with him. He got home about”—he stopped and looked at his notebook—“a little before two o’clock. Our people were already on the scene, and he wasn’t taken in to look at the bodies. Even so, he went into shock, and one of the patrolmen called his personal physician.”
“You in charge?” Columbo asked.
“No, sir. Detective Sergeant Jackson has been here since three o’clock or so.”
“Well, I guess I’d better go in and talk to him.”
He found him sitting on a couch in the living room, talking intently to a younger man. “Hi, Jackson.”
“Columbo. About time.”
Detective Sergeant Ted Jackson was a twenty-year veteran of the force, a handsome man with thick white hair and a ruddy complexion, dapper in a checked dark-blue and white jacket and dark-blue trousers. He had served as a uniformed officer for eleven years, reaching the rank of sergeant before he was assigned to the detective division. He was known as a highly practical man, unimaginative and plodding but street-smart and effective.
He had been the first detective on the scene, arriving about three in the morning. Having viewed the bodies and decided the deaths were not accidental or self-inflicted, he had called headquarters and asked that the homicide division take over the case. The captain had awakened Columbo about six and asked him to go directly to the Khoury house on Mulholland Drive.
“So whatta we got?” Columbo asked.
“We got three victims,” said Jackson, reading from the notes he had written with a blunt pencil on the lined pages of a pocket notebook. “Mrs. Arlene Khoury, a guy named Steve Heck, who was apparently a business associate and friend of both Khourys, and the houseboy, for which we’ve so far only got the name Sergio. The guys found the bodies of Mrs. Khoury and Heck in bed in the master bedroom—nekkid, probably’d been doin’ it. They found the body of the houseboy first, on the floor of the sitting room just outside the master bedroom. Each of them had been stabbed a minimum of twenty-five times, says the medical examiner. The words ‘Helter Skelter’ are written in blood on the bedroom wall. Only misspelled—‘H-E-A-L- T-E-R Skelter.’”
“Who’s here? SID?”
“Right. And the doc from the coroner’s office.” He turned to the young man sitting beside him. “This is Mulhaney. Mulhaney’s the SID man.”
Sergeant Timothy Mulhaney commanded the unit from Scientific Investigation Division. He knew the celebrated Lieutenant Columbo was coming, and he stared in disbelief at the disheveled figure talking to Jackson. Mulhaney’s father, who had been a police officer for thirty years, had often spoken of Lieutenant Columbo—and had sometimes spoken in droll Irish terms, describing Columbo as an eccentric, to say the least—but he had not prepared his son to confront this odd little man with his tattered raincoat, flying hair, stub of cigar, and unpressed brown slacks.
Mulhaney was a product of a special, federally funded program at Cal State, which would train a student in criminology if he would agree to serve a four-year apprenticeship with an urban police force. He had never served in uniform but had made an outstanding record in crime-scene investigation and lab work, which had resulted in his being made a detective at the end of his four years and a detective sergeant two years later. He was a tall, solemn young man with neatly trimmed hair, wearing round, plastic-rimmed glasses and a dark- gray suit pressed and brushed.
“Sir,” said Mulhaney to Columbo, “it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’ve heard your name for many years.”
“Well, thank ya, Mulhaney,” said Columbo. He spoke warmly and nodded, but his attention seemed fixed on the stub of his cigar. “Uh… anybody gotta match?” he asked.
Jackson had a lighter. He snapped it, and Co lumbo pulled flame into the cigar.
‘‘The medical examiner fixed the time of the deaths as about midnight,” said Mulhaney. “We’re taking pictures. Also blood samples, urine samples, samples of vomit—”
“All that?” asked Columbo.
“Violent death makes the body let go,” said Mulhaney. “All the fluids run out. Solids, too.”
“Yeah. So I’ve noticed,” said Columbo. With the stub of his cigar afire, he took a puff. He glanced around. “Say, this is some place, isn’t it? Khoury… Yeah, sure. Khoury, the guy with the great store. No wonder the place looks so beautiful. It comes from Khoury’s, it costs money! Hey, I went in there one time to look at a—Well, never mind. So it’s Mrs. Khoury, a Mr.—What’d you say? Heck? And the houseboy.”
“With printing on the walls, in blood,” said Jackson. “‘Helter Skelter.’ ‘Death to pigs.’ Like that. You’ve seen it before.” He turned to Mulhaney. “Lieutenant Columbo was one of the detectives that worked on the Tate-LaBianca murders.”
“It’s sickening,” said Mulhaney. “They dipped their fingers in blood and wrote on the walls.�
��
Still puffing to keep his cigar burning, Columbo shook his head. “I wouldn’t put too much emphasis on that,” he said. “In the last twenty-five years we’ve seen several of these cases—people trying to cover up very ordinary murders by writing that kind of stuff in blood on the walls.”
“Except we’ve got somethin’ else with this one,” said Detective Jackson. “One of the original Manson girls worked for the Khourys, at the store.”
“How’d ya know?” asked Columbo.
“Mr. Khoury. One of the boys told him somebody had smeared Helter Skelter on the bedroom wall, and he yelled out a name—Puss Dogood! Then he said Puss Dogood was Cathy Murphy. That was about all he got out before the doctor gave him a shot. I had the woman picked up this morning, with two of her friends. They couldn’t account for where they were last night. We’ve got ’em in custody.”
“The bodies?” asked Columbo.
“Still here. You know we never move them until the homicide man gets here.”
“Yeah. Which means I gotta look at ’em.”
2
The bodies were covered with blood-spotted white sheets, but an officer pulled those off when Columbo came into the bedroom suite. The officers working there stepped out to let the lieutenant see it all as they had found it.
uBoy, is somebody gonna have to redecorate this place,” he muttered to Jackson and Mulhaney.
The carpet was white. The walls were white. So much white had highlighted the vivid colors of the upholstery and bedclothes and the paintings and prints on the walls. Now it afforded a ghastly contrast with the bloodstains and the garish lettering in blood, now all dried to a reddish brown.
The blood of the houseboy stained the carpet of the sitting room—a broad asymmetrical stain. He lay facedown. It was difficult to tell what color his shirt might have been; his blood had dyed every square inch of it an ugly reddish brown.
Most of the other two victims’ blood had soaked into the sheets and mattress of the king-size bed. The body of the man lay with his head against the headboard, his shoulders on two pillows. The body of the woman lay on her back with a pillow under her hips. The eyes were open. The bodies had been mutilated by repeated stabs to the genitals, but no part of either torso was without a wound.
“Nothing’s been moved?” Columbo asked.
“No,” said Mulhaney. “The medical examiner estimated the time of death by the condition of the bloodstains. He hasn’t touched the bodies.”
“Odd…” Columbo muttered.
“What’s odd, sir?” asked Mulhaney.
“Well, if they haven’t been moved, then they died right like that, lying there just the way they are. Wouldn’t you think somebody seeing a knife attack coming would have rolled over or somethin’, trying to get away from it? I don’t see any cuts on the arms. Wouldn’t they have put their arms up, trying to stop the knives coming at them?” He pointed at the bodies with the stub of his cigar. “This looks like they were doing it, alright. And he just rolled off her. But…” Columbo paused to scratch the top of his head. “People killed with knives don’t just lie back and die, like you see on television. The murderer has gotta stab and stab and stab, like in the movie—I mean Psycho. This pair— Tell the examiner to look for slugs. Maybe they were shot first. Tell him to check for somethin’ in the blood, like they were drugged and couldn’t move.”
“That could have been,” said Mulhaney. “I found four rocks of crack cocaine wrapped up in a handkerchief in Mrs. Khoury’s handbag.” Columbo looked up, his curiosity piqued. “You found it. Who else knows about it?”
“Just Sergeant Jackson,” said Mulhaney.
“Just the three of us know about it?”
“Right,” said Mulhaney. “Just the three of us.”
“Don’t talk about it,” said Columbo. “You’ll have to put it in the inventory and hand it over at the property room. But don’t tell the news guys, and don’t tell anybody else—except maybe Captain Sczciegel. Our little secret. Might be very handy down the road.”
“Gotcha,” said Jackson.
“When was that pizza delivered, you suppose?” Columbo asked, pointing at the pizza smeared across the bed.
“I called to find out,” said Jackson. “Ordered at eleven-oh-seven. Guaranteed delivery within half an hour.”
“Who delivered it?”
“They don’t know. They’re checking.”
“Fixes a time when they were alive, probably,” said Columbo.
“Right. Anyway, whoever killed them broke in through a window on the back of the house.”
“Let’s see.”
The three men went through the kitchen.
“The smoke alarms were howling when the first units arrived,” said Jackson. “Somebody had been cooking tomato soup, and it burned.”
Outside, Jackson showed Columbo where the window had been pried open with a burglar tool.
“Not good work, Jackson,” Columbo said, shaking his head. He pointed at the ground, at footprints on the soft earth between the foundation shrubbery and the wall. “Wonderful footprints—”
“I’m afraid—” Mulhaney started to say. “Yeah,” said Columbo. “Those are the footprints of the big brogans of the uniformed cops that checked all this out. Tell ’em to stand back next time, Jackson.”
“They did better over by the fence,” said Jackson. “Lemme show you.”
Columbo and Mulhaney followed Jackson to the chainlink fence. There, inside and outside the fence, plaster was drying in footprints in the soft earth. SID had been at work.
“And look at the ladder,” said Jackson, pointing at the short stepladder lying just outside the fence. “They’re going to try to lift prints off it, though I don’t think we’ve got much chance getting them off wood.”
“Scenario,” said Mulhaney. “The perps brought the ladder with them, used it to climb the fence, and used it to climb back out. Two sets of footprints are deep, suggesting they jumped down from the ladder.”
“How many, y’ figure?” Columbo asked.
“Not sure,” said Mulhaney. “There are two kinds of prints: leather-soled shoes and the distinctive imprint of some brand of running shoes. All running shoes have special patterns in the soles. So—two people? Could be. Yeah, probably. Maybe three, two wearing the same kind of shoes. We’ll know better when we get exact measurements.”
“Any prints between the fence and the road?”
“Possibles. Pressure places. Nothing distinct.”
“Well, there’s a footprint in blood in the sitting room,” said Columbo. “Be sure you get a trace.”
“Yes, sir,” said Mulhaney. “And we’ll match the trace to the plaster casts.”
“Now y’ talkin’,” said Columbo, slapping Mulhaney lightly on the arm.
They went back inside the house, to the utility room inside the broken-open window.
“Now, that’s odd, too,” said Columbo, again scratching his head. “Now, that’s very strange.”
“I’m beginning to feel like a straight man, Lieutenant,” said Mulhaney, “but I’d appreciate knowing what’s strange.”
“Well, look here, Mulhaney. When the pry bar was pounded in, it splintered the wood of the sill. See? Splinters. Now, to climb in that window, you’d have to put your body down on the sill and kind of crawl over the sill and in. Right? So, how is it that those splinters still stick up? Wouldn’t somebody crawlin’ across that sill—putting his belly down on it or putting his backside down on it— have pressed the splinters flat?”
Mulhaney glanced at Jackson. He nodded. ‘‘And maybe the splinters would have caught on the perp’s clothes and left a thread or two.”
‘‘There y’ are,” said Columbo. “Good thinkin’. That’s the way you figure things out.” He pulled a small spiral notebook from a pocket of his raincoat and began to pat his pockets. “Anybody have a pencil?” he asked. “Mrs. Columbo puts a nice new yellow pencil in my pocket every morning and—I bet it’s on the floor of
the car. I ought to make a note here.”
“You’re not buying the idea it was done by the last Manson girl,” said Jackson. “Her and her friends.”
“Well, you never know about these things,” said Columbo. “We gotta get it all straight.”
“You know what yesterday’s date was?” asked Jackson.
“Uh… August ninth. That special?”
Jackson nodded. “It’s the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca murders. To the day.”
“Really? Twenty-fifth… anniversary. To the day. Well, they say time flies, and that makes it for sure. It does fly. Twenty—Are you sure?”
“If I wasn’t, the news guys would have made me sure. They’re already saying this was a Tate-LaBianca copycat crime.”
Columbo shook his head. “When they get the name of this young woman, uh… What’s her name?”
“Cathy Murphy, also known as Puss Dogood. When the news boys get their hands on the name Puss Dogood—”
“Yeah,” said Columbo, smiling grimly. “They’ll think they’ve died and gone to heaven.”
Six
1
Having authorized the removal of the bodies, Columbo moved into the living room, where he lit a fresh cigar and listened to the reports of several members of the Scientific Investigation Division.
Detective Madge Wilson was in charge of a team of three that was lifting fingerprints. “We’ve made matches,” she said. “The house is full of fingerprints, naturally, but we haven’t found any that belong to anybody but people who had reason to be here: the Khourys themselves, Mr. Heck, the houseboy, the cook… and so on. Unfortunately, we’ve also found some prints that belong to some of the patrolmen who first entered the house last night.”
“The murderers wore gloves,” said Columbo.
“I’d guess so, but what makes you sure?”
“Look at the writing on the walls,” said Co- lumbo. “Look at it close. That wasn’t done with fingers. That was done with fabric, with the fingers of cloth gloves, or maybe with fingers inside handkerchiefs or somethin’.”
Columbo: The Helter Skelter Murders Page 4