Kimberly shook her head. “Well, let’s think about it a little,” she said.
“I can’t think about it too long,” said Khoury. “I have to pretend I discovered the loss the first time I reviewed the police inventory—which I must have done this morning.”
2
Columbo liked Detective Sergeant Ted Jackson. Other people liked Ted because he was a handsome, white-haired, ruddy-faced guy. Columbo liked him as a good, street-smart cop. He liked him also because Jackson shared his fondness for the pool table—also because he was willing to eat bowls of Burt’s fiery chili.
Jackson watched Columbo take aim on the nine ball. It was a tough shot, but he’d make it and win the game. Columbo might clown around on the one ball and two and so on, but he was deadly when it came to the nine ball. He didn’t even take off his raincoat, and it was smeared with blue cue chalk.
“Am I wasting my time checking out Cathy Murphy and her buddies?” he asked Columbo.
With his cigar clamped between his teeth, Columbo took his shot, pocketed the nine ball, then pulled out the cigar and said, “Huh-uh. It’s never a waste of time to get more facts in the record. The more facts, the better.”
“But you’re focusing on Khoury.”
“That’s because I know you’re handling the Manson Family idea. Find out anything interesting?”
“Yeah. There were four of them out Tuesday night. Not just three. The fourth man is one Buddy Drake. He drove them. His Toyota is the only really operational vehicle the group has. Cathy drives a Chevy Vega and Douglas a Chevy pickup, but only the Toyota is reliable. Drake doesn’t live with them. He dropped them off at the shack and went home. That’s why he wasn’t there when the black-and-whites responded to the shack.”
“You arrest him?”
“No. He’s a little more of a solid citizen than the others, and since he doesn’t know we know about him, we can pick him up any time. He’s sweating, I figure, but he hasn’t lammed.”
“How’d you find out about him?”
“Jenny Schmidt told me. Being in jail has got her totally discombobulated. All she wants is out, and she’ll tell anything to get out.”
“She’s the one Cathy calls Kid,” said Columbo. Jackson nodded. “I really like the names Charlie gave them,” he said. “Puss Dogood, Kid, and Bum Rapp. Buddy Drake doesn’t have a nickname. That makes him a kind of lesser member of the tribe. It means Charlie Manson didn’t favor him as much—according to Kid. The names are a problem, though. Kid says two or three others came to the shack pretty often. Buddy Drake she knew as Buddy Drake. But two other girls she knows only as Squatty and Boobs. She describes them as looking like what their nicknames suggest, but she has no idea what their real names are or where they live.”
“What does Puss Dogood say about that?”
“She says there are no other real Manson people in the L.A. area. She says anybody else who comes around the house is just a curiosity seeker: kids who want to attach themselves to what she calls The Charlie Legend but are too young ever to have met him.”
“What about Squatty and Boobs?”
“She says there may have been girls by that name around the house but she doesn’t know them. She says she was working all day, and Kid wasn’t, so Kid may know people she, Puss, doesn’t know. Which makes sense.”
“I suppose you searched the shack pretty thoroughly,” said Columbo.
“Right. We found their stash, the marijuana Puss says she bought Tuesday night. Three hunting knives, but not ones that could have made the wounds in the victims. A Winchester lever-action rifle. And a dock nine-millimeter automatic. With ammunition for both. No bloody clothes. Not much money. Nothing that looked like loot from the Khoury house. Mostly junk, nothing Khoury would have owned.”
Columbo racked the balls. They were playing for a dollar a rack, and he turned and marked his latest victory on the blackboard. Jackson had won three games, Columbo six. As winner, he broke the next rack. He put the nicely balanced jointed cue in the frame and took down a crude, heavy cue. He clenched his cigar in his teeth, and with that heavier cue he slammed the cue ball into the rack. The balls scattered, and two sank: seven and five. The cue ball hit two rails and wound up behind the seven, blocking any possible shot on the one ball. He shot the cue ball against the right rail and brought it up the table to kiss the one. Good enough. He hadn’t scratched. The cue ball wound up against the top rail, leaving Jackson a difficult shot on the one.
“Might be worthwhile locating Squatty and Boobs,” said Columbo. “Y’ never know what’s next.”
“Workin’ on it,” said Jackson.
“And one more little thing. Did you ever find out when that pizza was delivered? The one smeared all over the bed?”
Jackson nodded. “Delivered by a girl named Molly Ridley. At a little after eleven-forty. She was a little worried she hadn’t made the thirty-minute delivery and that the guy’d ask for it free. But he didn’t. She describes the guy that took delivery and paid her. It was Heck.”
“Alive at eleven-forty,” said Columbo, nodding.
3
Before leaving Burt’s, Columbo checked headquarters to see what telephone calls he had, if any.
“Mr. Yussef Khoury called,” said the dispatcher. “He will be at home this afternoon and would appreciate it if you called him or stopped by.” Shortly Columbo drove up the driveway at the Khoury house on Mulholland Drive. An LAPD black-and-white still blocked the driveway, keeping away the news people and the curious. The officer cleared the way for Lieutenant Columbo.
Mrs. Nagako Takeshi met him at the door and led him out to the swimming pool, where Yussef Khoury sat on a chaise longue, dressed in a dark- blue golf shirt and dark-blue slacks and reading a loose-bound script.
“Lieutenant…” he said. “Sit down. Can I offer something cooling? Personally, I find Scotch cooling. But it can be Coca-Cola or—”
“I’ll take a light Scotch,” said Columbo. “And, hey, I want to tell you, I find this a most elegant place. Your home is… elegant.”
Khoury nodded at Mrs. Takeshi, who went off to the kitchen.
“Well, thank you. I have always tried to live well. It’s too warm for the raincoat, Lieutenant, if you don’t mind my saying so. Would you care to—”
“Oh, sure,” said Columbo. “Y’see, sir, I carry so much of my junk in the pockets. I’m lost without the thing. Anyway—” He shrugged out of the raincoat and laid it over a chair. His light-gray suit was more rumpled than the raincoat. “Anyway, I got your message.”
“You came because I called,” said Khoury. “Let me tell you why. You asked me to review the inventory of my wife’s jewelry, as found by the officers who investigated the scene. I really wasn’t quite up to doing that until this morning. And then—Something is missing, Lieutenant. I still can’t bring myself to enter those rooms, but Mrs. Takeshi went in and looked for me. Something is missing.”
“Yes, sir?”
“In June, I think it was, I bought my wife a gold choker from Harry Winston’s. I paid $48,350 for it. It is not on the police inventory. Frankly, I have not yet been able to bring myself to enter the rooms. Mrs. Takeshi has and tells me the item is missing.”
“That’s curious, isn’t it, Mr. Khoury?” asked Columbo. “I mean, isn’t it curious that somebody would steal one item of jewelry and leave all the rest?”
“I can think of two reasons why, Lieutenant,” said Khoury. “In the first place, the choker, gold with diamonds and emeralds, from Harry Winston’s, was the most valuable item Arlene owned. In the second place, the last time I saw it, it was lying in a tray on top of the dresser. In other words, it was in sight. My theory is that Sergio heard screams and came into the bedroom suite while the killers were writing on the walls. They’d grabbed the choker but hadn’t gotten into the dresser drawers. They killed him, but they couldn’t be sure he hadn’t called 911. Or maybe he screamed so loud they were afraid the neighbors had heard him. So they figured they had
no more time, and they ran. Does that make sense?”
“Oh, yes, sir. That makes a lot of sense,” said Columbo.
“Well… Figuring it out is your business. That’s just my best idea.”
“I’m not sure I’ll come up with a better idea.” Khoury turned away from Columbo and looked out over the mountainside, at the Pacific visible in the distance. “We bought this house… I don’t know why, to tell you the truth. She never really liked it. The kids never lived here. We couldn’t afford the place when the kids were at home. If we’d stayed in the old, smaller place… Well, who knows?”
Mrs. Takeshi arrived with Columbo’s Scotch. He tasted it and knew he’d been given something fine. This was no ordinary Scotch. He’d said light. Mrs. Takeshi had not offended this whisky by putting water or soda in it. She had, in fact, put only one ice cube in the glass. Something more representing the famed Khoury elegance.
“I don’t see how you handle it, Lieutenant Columbo,” said Yussef Khoury, still staring into the distance.
“What’s that, sir?”
“Murder…” said Khoury. “I have to cope with it once. I guess you have to cope with it every day.”
“Well, sir,” said Columbo, “I do have to cope with it all the time. To do what I do I have to keep a kind of detached attitude, you understand. I hope that doesn’t mean I’ve got callous. I don’t want to ever get to be that. In every one of these cases there’s a person who was once living and now isn’t anymore. Investigating that is my business. It’s what I do. But I’ve always gotta keep in mind that some person has been made dead. Dead is permanent. That’s the whole thing, isn’t it?”
Neither of them had more to say. Columbo drank the last of his Scotch, rose, picked up his raincoat, and left. Khoury sat silent, his mind maybe focused on the detective’s last words.
4
Kimberly dialed a telephone number for the tenth time. Maybe the twelfth or fourteenth, she hadn’t counted. Her impatience had grown to outright annoyance.
“Hello…”
At long last! She whispered hoarsely into the phone. “Boobs?”
“This is Squatty. Who’s this?”
“Kid.”
“You sound funny.”
“You know what’s cornin’ down?”
“What?”
“We been busted. I’m callin’ from the slammer. You got to go out to the house and get those guns outa there. Hang in an’ warn everybody. It’s what Charlie’d want ya to do. Got it?”
“Got it. What—”
Kimberly hung up.
Twelve
The double walnut doors were lettered with gold leaf—
* * *
YUSSEF KHOURY PRODUCTIONS
ANTONIO VADO PRODUCTIONS
* * *
Below, in smaller letters—
Adam W. Brinsley, Cp.A
Inside, it was obvious that Yussef Khoury had not decorated this suite of offices. The reception area was a model of impersonal efficiency, not of Khoury elegance. Paneled with walnut that matched the doors that opened onto the several offices, the area was carpeted in blue and lighted by spots recessed in the ceiling. Two small palms grew in black plastic tubs. No movie posters hung here, no photographs of stars, nothing to distinguish this suite from a hundred thousand just like it in this city alone.
The receptionist was as grimly efficient as the office. She spoke to Brinsley on the phone, then pointed to a door. Columbo knocked once and opened the door.
Brinsley’s office was almost exactly like the reception area. It had just two modest personal touches: photographs of his three children on the credenza behind his desk—of his children, not of his wife, Columbo noticed—and a single Miro print, in depressing dark colors, on the wall.
Adam Brinsley was a small man, short and trim, with pale-blue eyes behind almost-white lashes, a ruddy complexion, and thin blond hair that he kept down and in place with a shiny hair dressing. His carefully tailored summer-weight dark-blue suit was a little limp and wrinkled by the heat and humidity of Los Angeles in August. He sat behind a desk covered with papers—tax forms, mostly— and a desktop computer.
“Eleanor Russell had an attack of conscience over what she said to you about Steven Heck and called to tell me she had suggested you come to see me,” said Brinsley. “Let me ask you something in all frankness, Lieutenant Columbo.”
“Yes, sir. And I’ll answer in all frankness,” said Columbo. He was glad to see an ashtray with cigarette butts on Brinsley’s desk, so he took a cigar from his raincoat pocket. “Would you happen to have a match handy, sir?”
Brinsley shoved a lighter across the desk—rather brusquely. “My frank question is this,” he said. “If Manson types or Manson copycats murdered Arlene Khoury and Steven Heck in a wanton, vicious, animalistic orgy of violence, what difference does it make if Steve was stealing from Joe? I mean, it looks to me like you’re investigating Joe Khoury.”
“Oh, no, sir. Who I’m investigating is Mr. Heck,” said Columbo, puffing on his cigar. “When a man is dead by reason of murder, you can’t overlook any fact you can get about him. Any fact at all. That’s in the nature of my business, y’ understand. I have to find out everything I can.”
Brinsley lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. “Eleanor says she accused Steve of stealing from Joe.”
“Let’s don’t worry too much about what anybody accused anybody else of doing,” said Columbo. “She told me you could give me the facts.” Brinsley hesitated for a long moment. “Lieutenant LAPD, homicide…” he muttered. “Okay. Steve is the one who’s dead. I guess you need some history. How much do you know about Joe Khoury?”
“Some,” said Columbo. “Why don’t you tell me what you think I need to know?”
“Joe Khoury inherited his business from his father. His father was a genius. So is Joe, some ways. The store does better than it used to do. But I’ll tell you something about Joe. He calls himself a merchant, and he thinks being a merchant is beneath his dignity. He has always wanted to be something better. People with money and position come to him because he sells wonderful things, but he has this sense that he’s their merchant—which means he’s not one of them. Living in this town, he wanted to be a movie producer. He’s put a lot of money into the idea. Too much.”
“I understand he’s made four movies,” said Columbo.
Brinsley smiled. “Yes. Joelle, the first one, was a showcase for the Khoury Collection. Short on plot, short on characterization, short on production values. He got Willa Wood to do it. All she ever was was a sex kitten, and in Joelle her chief function was to walk on camera in Khoury lingerie, show herself off, pout a little… You know the kind of thing. The picture made money. Hell, he didn’t spend much on it. But the community laughed at him. It was just one of the Khoury Collection videotapes expanded. So then he hooked up with Tony Vado to make a couple of sci-fi extravaganzas.”
“Those were the ones Mr. Heck designed, right?”
“Right. Listen, Lieutenant. Those pictures carried the stamp of Steve Heck. It was what he knew how to do. Color. Mood. Atmosphere. Sex. The first one was R-rated because of the nudity. Joe insisted on toning that down a little for the second one, to get a PG-13. Star Wars they weren’t. But they did well. Tony Vado worked to get good distribution. The pictures didn’t stay long in the theaters, but Joe put them on video tape. The tapes sold damned well. The space movies made money.”
Columbo reached forward and tapped his cigar on the edge of Brinsley’s big ashtray. “So, did Mr. Heck steal from Mr. Khoury, do you think?”
“If you weren’t a police detective investigating a triple murder, I’d tell you it’s none of your business,” said Brinsley. “But you are. So… A prosecutor would have had a tough time making a case of grand larceny against Steve Heck. Joe would have had a tough time making a case if he’d sued him. It’s complicated. Lieutenant. It has to do with Steve overcharging for products and services he used. Common in the industry. Subcontractor
s overcharge and pay a kickback. It’s illegal, of course, but it’s difficult to prove. And Steve Heck was an artist at it—which was known to the smart money. People would underbid on Steve’s services, knowing he’d make it up by taking a percentage off his contractors.”
‘‘For example, sir,” said Columbo. “Give me an example, so I can understand. This kind of thing is outside my line of experience, y’ know.”
“For example, Lieutenant—in a sci-fi space picture there are always a lot of explosions. Making miniature explosions is a minor art form in motion-picture production. I happen to know that the subcontractor for miniature explosions overcharged by twenty percent on Return to the Galaxy —and guess who took most of that. That’s just one example.”
“Are you saying Mr. Heck cost Mr. Khoury the profits on his two space pictures?”
Brinsley stiffened for a moment and frowned, thinking. Then he said—“Yes. Well, not exactly. This business runs on tight budgets, Lieutenant Columbo. If a picture succeeds big, the budget doesn’t make much difference. If it fails, it doesn’t make much difference. The great majority of pictures fall in between—that is, between making it big and outright failing. On those, the budget does make a difference. A big difference. Steve Heck skimmed enough off those two films to make them modest winners when they would have been very respectable winners.”
“Miniature explosions… Columbo mused, puffing on his cigar.
“Lieutenant. Miniature explosions is just an example. A space picture requires models, expensive models—and they blow a lot of them up in miniature explosions. Animation. Computer animation. Artists. Special effects designers and technicians. Blowing up a model city with miniature explosions can look like blowing up a stack of matchboxes with firecrackers if the special-effects people aren’t on the ball. There are a hundred special contractors on pictures like Galactic Revolt, each bringing some special skill or talent to make a scene look the way it’s supposed to look. Steve Heck knew them all, every last one of them, and knew which ones would kick back how much. That was his business.”
Columbo: The Helter Skelter Murders Page 10