“That wouldn’t clean out gunpowder residue, sir,” said the sergeant.
“Well, you see there wouldn’t be any gunpowder residue in there. That pistol has never been fired. I mean, that pistol has been well taken care of. I keep it wrapped in an old scarf and—”
“You mean you don’t carry this weapon, sir? Regulations require—”
“Don’t wanna risk shooting myself in the foot,” said Columbo.
“When did you last qualify, Lieutenant? Don’t I remember your being out here and firing my Beretta about a year ago?”
“Right. I didn’t really try to qualify that time, ’cause I supposed I oughta qualify with my own gun. You got any bullets for this pistol?”
“Yes, sir.”
Brittigan reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a handful of .38 cartridges. He rolled out the cylinder and. loaded Columbo’s service revolver.
“I’m supposed to shoot at one of those targets out there, huh?” said Columbo.
The sergeant handed the pistol to Columbo. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Target number five. Station five shoots target five.”
Columbo drew a deep breath, blew it out, and leveled the sights of the revolver on the target.
“You can pull the hammer back, Lieutenant.”
Columbo lowered the muzzle and used his thumb to pull back the hammer. He sighted again. And fired.
Sergeant Brittigan pulled a small spotting scope from a leather case on his belt and squinted through it at the target. “Good work, sir,” he said. “An eight.”
Columbo stared skeptically at the revolver. “Eight…” he muttered. He shook his head, took aim again, and fired a second shot.
Brittigan raised the scope and took a look. “Right in the X-ring,” he said. “Bull’s-eye!”
Columbo tossed his cigar on the ground. A small smile came to his face.
“Borrow your scope a sec’, Sarge?” asked a uniformed officer standing behind the next shooter down the line, at station six.
Brittigan handed the man the scope and waited impatiently for it to be returned. The man checked the target belonging to his shooter and shook his head.
Columbo fired again.
“Seven,” said Sergeant Brittigan.
Columbo’s next two shots were an eight and a nine.
“Damned good,” said the sergeant. “Come over here, and I’ll fill out your qualifying report.” Columbo shook the empty cartridges out of the cylinder as he walked with Sergeant Brittigan to the range table and signed the report that would go to Captain Sczciegel on Monday.
As Columbo walked away to his Peugeot, the officer behind the shooter at station six took another look through Sergeant Brittigan’s scope. “Goddammit, Murphy,” he said. “This is station six. You been shootin’ at target five.”
“Uh-oh. Brittigan will—”
“Never mind. What Dan Brittigan don’t know won’t hurt him. Only thing is, I wonder where the shots from the guy in the raincoat went.”
3
Columbo returned to Sybil Brand Institute to resume his interrupted talk with Puss Dogood.
“Is Charlie God?” he asked. “I flew up to Folsom to see him yesterday afternoon, and I didn’t quite get the answer.”
She grinned and shook her head. “That’s a dumb question. You only ask a question like that because you don’t understand the thing about Charlie. C’mon, Columbo! Was Jesus God? The answer is yes, and the answer is no. To understand about Charlie you’d have to spend a lot of time listening to him. I mean, listening respectfully, listening attentively. He makes everything clear. Everything.”
“Boobs says Saint Paul never met Jesus, never heard him preach, but was still the second-most- important man in Christianity.”
“Meaning she’s important even without ever meeting Charlie? No one’s important that never met Charlie.”
“She’s important for a very different reason,” said Columbo. “You know what’s on her rap sheet?”
“You tell me,” said Puss derisively. “Let’s see. She shot Kennedy. No, she shot Martin Luther King. No, she was one of the Watergate burglars!”
“She was arrested for grand theft, for stealing from the Khoury place on Mulholland Drive,” said Columbo. “She’d worked there about two weeks.”
“So?”
“One of the weak points in the case against you is that nobody can remember when you were ever inside the Khoury house. So how could you have known how to find the different rooms? How’d you pick the window to break open? How’d you know they didn’t turn on the alarm system until they went to bed? Well… Boobs worked there, so maybe she told you.”
“Yeah, maybe she did. What the hell? Maybe I oughta plead guilty and not have to worry about it anymore.”
Before he left Sybil Brand Institute, Columbo stopped in to see the resident psychologist.
“Cults, Lieutenant,” the woman said. “We get quite a few of them here: cultists of one stripe and another. Once a person falls under the spell of a charismatic, it’s all but impossible to reach her. They give their money, in the easiest case. They give their lives. At worst, they commit crimes the leader orders. Puss and Kid are the only two Manson girls I’ve ever talked to. They’re thoroughly programmed. I can’t get through to them.”
“Off the record,” said Columbo, “if Puss does talk to you, try to discourage her from pleading guilty. That’ll close the case, and I’m not at all sure it oughta be closed.”
4
Columbo knew where he was going Saturday afternoon, but he had time first to take a look at the Topanga Diving Club.
He leaned on the Peugeot and studied the little building. On the edge of a state beach, it seemed to have been designed to have a modest appearance, neither to attract nor to offend the users of the public beach. It was a one-story cinder-block building, painted pale green and shaded by half a dozen palms. The parking lot would hold no more than twenty cars. It had anything but the appearance of the sophisticated and expensive and exclusive kind of club Mr. Yussef Khoury would be likely to join.
He had parked his car along the edge of the road when he spotted a hot dog vendor with an umbrella-shaded cart. A fellow selling hot dogs from a cart like that could be depended on, he knew from experience, to sell a tasty hot dog. And he’d been right. He liked the first one so well, he had bought a second: a boiled hot dog, not grilled, in a nice bun with relish and yellow mustard. On a grilled hot dog he liked darker mustard, but this yellow stuff was just right for the classic boiled wiener. With a bottle of orange soda, it made the kind of lunch a man could really enjoy.
“Sell here every day?” he asked the vendor when he walked back to his cart to deposit his used napkins and paper cup in the man’s litter bag.
“Every day but Friday,” the man said. “That’s my sabbath.”
“Friday?”
“For the followers of Allah, the beneficent, the merciful,” said the man. “You can be sure, too, that hot dog’s all beef. A man of the faith will not poison the guts even of the unbelievers with unclean meat.”
“I appreciate that, sir,” said Columbo. “I really do. A man can’t be too careful about what kind of meat he eats. I wanted to ask ya. Do you ever see an unusual car parked down there by that building? I mean a car that”—he paused to put his hands on his hips and run his elbows up and down “—opens and closes like that.”
“A 1954 Mercedes gull-wing sports coupe,” said the Muslim hotdog vendor.
“Right.”
“It parks there from time to time. It is the property of Mr. Yussef Khoury. He is of the faithful. Or was, once. His father was faithful. The son”—The man paused to spit on the ground— “The son and his wife became heretics.”
“Yeah, right. Well, I’m Lieutenant Columbo, a homicide detective with the Los Angeles Police Department. Anyway, you say Mr. Khoury comes here from time to time—”
“He parks the car there,” said the hot dog vendor. “And he goes out into the sea, wearing a
rubber suit and air tanks and all that. The devil fish don’t eat him. Limitless is the mercy of Allah.”
Columbo nodded. “I see. Well, thank ya, sir. You serve a good hot dog.”
“Thank you, sir. I shall see you again, I hope.”
5
The man behind the counter in the diving club was a mass of hard muscle and contradicted Khoury’s argument that scuba diving was for the older and flabbier man, not for the athlete. His muscles bulged inside a yellow T-shirt, and he wore black swimming trunks. “What can I do for ya, buddy?” he asked.
“I’m Lieutenant Columbo, homicide, LAPD. I’m investigating the murder of Mrs. Yussef Khoury. In the course of talking with Mr. Khoury, I got a suggestion from him that I oughta stop by and talk about joinin’ your club and learning to dive.”
“Bill McGinnis,” said the man behind the desk, extending his hand. “Lemme show you around the place and give you an idea of what we got.”
He led Columbo through a door and into a locker room, then through another door and into a room that housed a surprisingly small swimming pool. After a moment, Columbo understood what he was looking at: a small round pool that was as much as fifty feet deep. Thirty at the very least. It was not a pool; it was a tank. Diving equipment hung from hooks around the walls.
“How good a swimmer are you, Lieutenant?”
“Well… the truth is, I can’t swim at all.”
“1 can teach you that in twenty minutes,” said McGinnis, not in the least taken aback. “The problem a lot of people have is, they think they’ve gotta have some way to stay afloat. Once you get that idea outa your head, you can dive. You aren’t gonna drown, ’cause you can’t drown. You can’t. You’re carrying your own air with you, on your back. You got a few bucks for a first lesson, I can take you down to twenty feet right now.”
“Well, I just ate a couple hot dogs,” said Columbo.
McGinnis laughed. “And mother said never swim right after you eat.” He clapped Columbo on the shoulder. “Okay, buddy. You really wanta dive? Or did you come about something else? Is Joe Khoury a suspect in his wife’s murder?”
“No,” said Columbo. “Of course, y’understand that whenever a woman is murdered, we have to do a little checking on the husband. I mean, I couldn’t file my report if I didn’t eliminate the possibility that the husband killed his wife.”
“I thought it was plain enough that some Manson types did it,” said McGinnis. “That’s what all the newspapers and television guys say.”
Columbo nodded. “That’s probably who did it, all right. But we haven’t got the proof of that, so we gotta look into everything. Gotta close all possibilities. Y’ know what I mean?”
McGinnis shrugged. He walked away from the pool, back into the office and behind the counter.
“Joe Khoury’s a real gentleman,” he said.
“Oh, I certainly agree with that,” said Columbo. “Anyway, did he learn to dive here?”
“Right. He’s in good shape, a strong swimmer. He picked it right up.”
“Where does he usually dive?” Columbo asked.
“Two places,” said McGinnis. “He can just walk down the beach here and swim out. He’d trail a marker buoy so that boats wouldn’t run over him. There’s some interesting stuff out there. I mean there are three wrecks on the bottom. Some sharks work around here, just enough to make it interesting, give the divers something to think about. We’ve never had a problem. The other place he dives is where we take him. We arrange boat trips and take our members out where there are interesting things to see. An old square-rigged sailing ship. A tanker. Some airplanes. Reefs. Joe goes on those trips.”
“Is Mr. Khoury a safe swimmer?”
“Meaning what?”
“Well, does he use the buddy system and never go out alone?”
“You got it. He never goes out alone. In fact, a friend of his is almost always his buddy. Ben Willsberger. Ben’s a movie director: a good one, too, I’m told. He’s Joe’s age, and he’s a good swimmer. I think Joe and Ben worked on a picture together.”
“Do any of your club members ever dive off the beach at San Luis Rio?” Columbo asked.
McGinnis shrugged. “Not that I know of. There’s nothing up there.”
Sixteen
1
Columbo parked the Peugeot along the side of the road and left the card in the windshield that showed it was a police car on police business. Puffing on a cigar, his raincoat flapping around him in the stiff breeze that had begun to come in off the Pacific, he walked toward the cheering crowd standing around a roped-off section of beach. He squinted into the sunlight and wore a faint, skeptical smile.
Beach volleyball. Columbo had heard of it. More than that, he had watched it on television. The cameras were there now, three of them on platforms raised a little above the sand. A pair of broadcasters with microphones sat on another platform. A van with a dish antenna on top completed the television paraphernalia.
They were taping a show for broadcast later.
. Columbo pushed his way through the beach crowd and up to the rope that separated the playing area from the rest of the beach. “Hi-ya, Gonzalez,” he said to the uniformed policeman guarding the rope, reading the name off the board on the officer’s shirt pocket. “Lieutenant Columbo, homicide. How’s it goin’?”
“I could draw a worse assignment,” said Gonzalez, glancing at the bikini-clad young women playing volleyball. He lifted the rope and gestured that Columbo should step inside. “The wife’ll see me on TV when they broadcast this. She’ll say that’s how I spend my days, watchin’ half-naked broads playin’ in the sand.”
“Half-naked?” said Columbo. “I’d call that a good deal more than half.”
Gonzalez nodded. “Yeah. And, know somethin’? Those girls are makin’ more money doin’ this for an hour than you and I are going to make for our eight-hour shift.”
“Well, I guess that represents the American people’s sense of values.”
“Hi, Lieutenant!”
That was Kimberly Dana. Her words were cut short by her labored breath. Walking up to the beach, he had seen her working hard at an exchange of shots over the net. Now, in position to receive a serve, she was only a few feet from him.
“Hi, Miss Dana,” he said. “I stopped by to return your video tapes.”
She nodded and turned quickly toward the net, to ready herself as a young woman on the opposite side struck the ball with her fist and sent it flying.
The crowd, held back by the rope, cheered for nothing more than a serve, then jumped up and down with excitement as the ball flew. All of them wore beach clothes; many of the spectators’ bikinis were far scantier than those worn by the volleyball players. They drank beer from cans and wiped away sweat on the backs of their hands. It was a youthful crowd, fun-loving, watching a fun game.
“You know her?” asked Gonzalez.
“Right. She’s a close friend of Yussef Khoury. Mrs. Khoury was murdered Tuesday night.” Gonzalez stared for a moment at Kimberly Dana. She was bouncing around the sand, maneuvering to stop the ball. “She’s no Manson girl,” said Gonzalez. “Didn’t I read in the papers that it was probably Manson girls that killed Mrs. Khoury?” Columbo grinned. “Kimberly Dana’s no Manson girl. That’s for sure.”
The tall, lithe, and leggy Kimberly Dana wore a red-and-yellow bikini. She had tied her hair back and threaded her ponytail through a Dodgers baseball cap. Dark, wraparound sunglasses completed her outfit. She gleamed with streaming sweat.
Beach volleyball might not be a sanctioned sport, but it was not a rehearsed show like TV wrestling. Because they taped the program and did not broadcast live, there were no interruptions for commercial breaks. The two teams played hard. From time to time a player fell and came up with sand clinging to her sweaty body. Two had angry red knees. The coaches pulled out players and sent in others. Players cooled off with damp towels, sipped Gatorade, and jumped up and down on the sidelines when they were not in.
Columbo pursed his lips around his cigar and squinted at the two volleyball teams. “Yeah,” he agreed. “No ugly ones. Not an ugly one on either side.”
“Which is no coincidence,” said Gonzalez.
“How long this game got to go?” Columbo asked.
“Just about over.”
It ended a few minutes later. Kimberly Dana scored the winning point and shot a fist at the sky as she took the cheers of the crowd and the congratulatory slaps of her teammates. She took a drink of Gatorade, then walked over to where Columbo was waiting, carrying a towel and wiping sweat off her face as she walked. Her chest heaved as she gasped for breath.
“Hey… Lieutenant… Columbo. There’s… no place… we may not… run into you. Is there?”
“Well, I checked your office, and they said you were playing out here this afternoon, and I wanted to return your tapes. So… Congratulations. You play to win.”
“Is there another way?” she asked.
Having wiped the sweat from her face, she now used the towel to wipe it off her body.
Columbo grinned and nodded. “Not that I ever heard of,” he said. He frowned over his cigar, then dropped it in the sand and stepped on it. “My only game is pool, and I play to win.”
“Did you enjoy the tapes?”
“Oh, my, Miss Dana! Mrs. Columbo asked me to add her thanks to mine. Three movies on one night! We stayed up late last night. Mrs. Columbo said to tell you she thinks Lingering Melody is one of the best pictures she ever saw. Me, I liked the space shows better, but… they were all fine. They were all fine.”
He handed her a brown paper grocery bag containing the three video cartridges.
“You have a few minutes, Lieutenant?” she asked. “I usually pop into a bar down the beach and have a cool drink after a workout like this. It’s a place where they don’t get excited if somebody comes in in a bathing suit. I get cool, I’ll get dry.”
Columbo: The Helter Skelter Murders Page 14