Columbo: The Helter Skelter Murders

by William Harrington

  “You think I’m nuts?” he asked.

  Columbo ran a hand over his tousled hair, in a futile effort to smooth it. It was a gesture he consciously used to cover awkward moments and give him time to think of an answer to a difficult question. Willsberger had persuaded him to leave his raincoat in the closet in the reception area and he realized he had neither a pad for notes nor a pencil to write them—and what was more, no cigars, though Willsberger had assured him he would join him in a cigar after lunch. He checked his sandwich—at first skeptically, then appreciatively, eyeing what looked like first-rate salami.

  “I mean, to suggest that Kim might have done it,” said Willsberger. “Do you think the idea’s nuts?”

  “Well, sir, I can think of a lot of reasons why it doesn’t seem likely, but I’d be more interested in your reasons for thinking it might be.”

  “Is it impossible?” Willsberger asked. “Tell me it’s impossible. Tell me why it’s impossible.” Columbo frowned. “Uh… We haven’t told the news people anything about this. Understand? But, uh… Well, you know that Mrs. Khoury was in bed with Mr. Heck when she was murdered. That’s been in the news. What hasn’t been is that at the same time, Mr. Khoury was in bed with Miss Dana.”

  “How do you know?” Willsberger asked.

  “Both of them say so. Besides, the night staff at a motel saw them there.”

  “Suppose Joe is trying to protect Kim? Suppose she slipped out of the motel, went and did it, and came back—and he’s lying for her, to protect her.”

  “Why would he do that?” asked Columbo.

  “Because he’s one hundred percent in love with her. Because he thinks she’s the greatest thing that ever happened to him.”

  “Well… Even so, Mr. Willsberger—”

  “Ben. Please, Lieutenant. Ben. Even so, what?”

  Columbo put the tips of his fingers over his eyes. “Start with somethin’,” he said. “There had to be two people. At least. One person couldn’t have done it.”

  “Go back to your simple solution, Lieutenant Columbo. The simple solution is that the three Manson types did it. Well, maybe they did. But maybe Kim Dana procured them to do it.”

  “Why? Why would Miss Dana want Mrs. Khoury dead?”

  “Maybe it was Steve Heck she wanted dead,” said Willsberger. “Maybe it was both of them.”

  “Start w’th him,” said Columbo. “Why would she want Steve Heck dead?”

  “To understand what might have motivated Kim, you have to understand her history. She’s a beautiful young woman. Do I have to tell you that? But she hasn’t got talent one. She can’t sing. She can’t dance. And she sure as hell can’t act. Give her two great female leads, say, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She’d play them so alike you couldn’t tell them apart. But she’s got delusions and ambition. What she needs is a guy like Joe Khoury to stake her to a part—by which I mean put up the money to make a movie starring his girlfriend.”

  “I wondered about that,” said Columbo. “But what’s that got to do with Mr. Steve Heck?”

  “A girl like Kim, with her looks, her—She does have one talent. She’s great in bed, Lieutenant. To which I can attest from personal experience. So could Steve Heck.” Willsberger took a bite from his sandwich. “Hey, you can’t find better salami than this, incidentally.”

  “I agree, and bein’ a New Yorker bom and bred, I know something about salami. This is first rate. But… You mean Miss Dana… . It’s that way, huh?”

  “That way. With whatever man she thought could make her a star. She settled on Joe Khoury because she saw in him a guy who could finance a picture for her and wouldn’t be too discerning or too demanding about talent. After all, Joe had funded pictures for Willa Wood and Fairleigh Richmond. He didn’t sleep with those two, incidentally.”

  “Still, why would Miss Dana want to kill Steve Heck?”

  “Revenge. He’d rained on her parade all over town. When she left him, he was jealous and furious and decided he’d kill whatever little chance she had to make it in Hollywood. Whenever her name came up, he put her down. He did it repeatedly. I don’t think she had much chance anyway, but—”

  “She left Mr. Heck for Mr. Khoury?” Columbo asked.

  Willsberger shook his head. “For me. As a director I could have—but…” He paused and shook his head. “The only way Kim was going to star in a picture was to find a sugar daddy to fund it. It never occurred to me that would be my old friend Joe Khoury.”

  “Uh… Ben, I don’t know exactly how to put this, but—”

  “Yeah. You’re about to suggest I got some bad feelings about Kim. You’re right. I do. About Joe, too. He took her like she was some kind of beautiful object he’d found and wanted to put in his store. And she jumped at the chance. I’d thought I… maybe had a little stronger relationship with her. Hell, I’d thought Joe was a better friend than that—though you can’t be too hard on a man in his fifties who falls for a girl like Kim. Anyway, it’s for sure I wouldn’t be talking like I’m talking for any emotional reason. I just don’t want to see some innocent people convicted because somebody didn’t give you information you should have had. Remember, I said to you from the beginning I was only talking about a remote possibility.”

  “What about Mrs. Khoury?” Columbo asked. “Was she in the way of Miss Dana’s ambitions?”

  “You better believe it. In the most fundamental of all possible ways,” said Willsberger. “Meaning?”

  “Let me go back a little bit. Did it occur to you to wonder why Steve Heck was having an affair with Arlene Khoury?”

  Columbo shrugged. “I wouldn’t want to suggest that Mrs. Khoury wasn’t the town’s most attractive woman.”

  “Joe Khoury is cash poor,” said Willsberger. “He lost a lot of money on Lingering Melody—more because Steve was stealing from him. And in that, incidentally, Arlene was helping him. But Joe Khoury is not assets poor. Khoury’s is worth… god knows how many millions. But Joe would never consider borrowing against the store or, god forbid, cashing out. But suppose you’re Steve Heck, and you’re flattering Arlene Khoury, who is ten years older than you, and have her emotionally tied to you. Suppose Arlene divorces Joe. Suppose you marry Arlene. Under California community property law, Arlene owns, maybe not half, but a big chunk of Khoury’s. Now you are never going to have to worry about money again. What’s more, you can stomach it, because Arlene is a Middle Eastern woman, totally complaisant about whatever her man wants her to do—I mean, physically.”

  “If Mrs. Khoury had divorced Mr. Khoury—”

  “It would have been financial disaster for Joe. Oh, he’d have recovered, in time. But time is what Kim Dana doesn’t have. She’s twenty-nine and has never made a picture. Given a few more years, she’ll have to have real talent to become a star.”

  “Did Mrs. Khoury in fact threaten to divorce Mr. Khoury?”

  “I don’t know. He never told me she did. Not in so many words. But, you know, under the law today, you don’t have to have a reason. I mean, you used to have to prove adultery or nonsupport or abandonment—whatever. Not anymore. Anyway, Arlene could have proved Joe slept with Kim, also that he did with the Manson girl.”

  “Cathy Murphy?”

  Willsberger grinned. “Puss Dogood.”

  “You know her?”

  “Oh, Joe allowed me to play around with his cast-off. I’ll tell you something, Lieutenant. Puss is nuts. She’s also the most honest person I’ve ever met. You know what they said about Heinrich Himmler—that if you could just overlook one little thing, you had a man of principle and honor. Well, it’s that way with Puss. If you can overlook the fact that Charlie Manson—or maybe drugs—destroyed her mind, you have a woman of innocence and honor.”

  “You don’t think she and her pals killed Mrs. Khoury and the others, then?”

  “Not so far as its being her own idea. If she did it, she was influenced by somebody else. A psychiatrist would call Puss ‘an influence
able personality.’ Manson influenced her. So could someone else.”

  Columbo had before him a can of Diet Dr Pepper. He tipped it back and took a sip. “People aren’t very complimentary about Mrs. Khoury,” he said.

  “There was nothing wrong with Arlene except that she grew old,” said Willsberger. “Once her children left the nest, she had nothing to do, no purpose in life. She never shared Joe’s obsession with elegance. She interfered in his business. She didn’t help. She couldn’t. It must have been tough for her, being married to Joe Khoury, a man whose whole life centered on beauty, and not beautiful. For example, Joe and Arlene went to the Motion Picture Association awards dinner and ball, about… Oh, Jesus, it was just about a week before her death. Monday, August first. I mean, he took her to that affair, and she looked great, in a green dress. She looked good. But you could just see that Joe was disturbed because the woman on his arm wasn’t the beautiful Kim Dana.”

  Columbo shook his head. “That had to be tough on Mrs. Khoury. Mr. Khoury doesn’t care about anything but—”

  Willsberger interrupted. “The point is, whatever Joe touches, he wants it to be perfect, perfect and exquisite—and he’s very unhappy if it isn’t. Let me show you something. I’ll show you what I mean.” Willsberger picked up from his credenza a lacquered cigarette box. It was inlaid with mother of pearl and overlaid with gold leaf.

  “Look at that,” he said. “We’ve seen a thousand of them, right? Cigarette box, what th’ hell. But look at that one. Khoury. Somebody gave you that, who’d want to put cigarettes in it? Open it. Silk satin, f’ god’s sake!”

  Lying inside the box was in fact a pair of silver cuff links in the shape of two owl faces.

  “Cuff links,” said Willsberger. “I don’t wear the shirts for them, but I’m gonna have some shirts made for that pair. Something else. Look at this.” He opened a sliding door in his credenza. He took out a leather box and carried it back to the table where he and Columbo were eating. “Open that,” he said.

  Columbo put aside the last of his sandwich and opened the leather box. “I’ve seen these before,” he said, unfolding the handles and uncovering the blade of the knife.

  “I bet you never saw one like that before,” said Willsberger. “The town is full, unfortunately, of knives with folding handles. But that one there is something else. That’s a Bali-Song. Look at the workmanship! You want to pay, like, two hundred dollars for a knife? And probably more? A street thug doesn’t. But Joe Khoury did. Why? Why would he want a thing like that? Because it’s the best, the best of its kind; and in its way, it’s a beautiful thing. Joe gave me that. He gave several of them to his friends. What can you do with it? Nothing. It’s a trophy, a treasure. I keep that one in the office. My wife wouldn’t want it in the house.”

  “Well…” said Columbo. “I’ll keep what you told me in mind. And I’ll keep it confidential, like you said. I thank ya for the lunch.”

  “No after-lunch cigar?”

  “I’m afraid not. Y’ see, I’ve got a lot of things to check. So I gotta be moving on.”

  “Actually, I do too,” said Willsberger. “We’ll be shooting again this afternoon.”

  Columbo retrieved his raincoat from the closet. “It’s hot and dry outside,” said Willsberger. “You don’t need a coat today.”

  “Well, I know I don’t,” said Columbo. “But it’s sort of like an office away from the office. I carry a lot of stuff in the pockets. Including a cigar, which I’ll smoke in the car. You happen to have a match handy?”

  The receptionist handed Willsberger a book of paper matches, which he gave to Columbo.

  “So, uh… So thank ya again, for lunch. I wish you luck with that picture you’re shooting. It looks interesting.”

  “If you’d like to see some more of the shooting, stop around any time.”

  “Maybe I will,” said Columbo. “I’d like to. I—Oh, say, there is one more little thing I’d like to ask you.” He ran his hands down over his eyes. “That dinner and dance you mentioned. A very fancy affair, was it? I mean formal?”

  “Oh, sure. Black tie.”

  “Jewels?”

  “Absolutely. The gals wore their jewels, if they had any.”

  “What jewels was Mrs. Khoury wearing?”

  Willsberger shook his head. “I don’t remember.”

  “In July Mr. Khoury bought Mrs. Khoury a forty-eight-thousand-dollar jeweled choker. Gold and diamonds and emeralds. Wasn’t she wearing it that night?”

  “Are you sure it has emeralds on it?” Willsberger asked.

  “I’m sure. It was stolen the night of the murder and recovered this morning. I personally carried it to headquarters to be locked up as evidence. Emeralds. Green stones, right?”

  “Right,” said Willsberger. “So why wasn’t she wearing it with her green dress?”

  “I wonder about that,” said Columbo.

  Nineteen

  1

  “How could you have done it, Kim? How could you? We had agreed the choker was to go in the Pacific.”

  Still concerned that no one should see him with Kim in public, Joe Khoury had again arranged to meet her at Le Cirque in Pasadena, and once again he had driven his Toyota, not the gull-wing Mercedes. Again, she waited for him, casually sipping a Bombay gin martini and nibbling a sesame bread- stick. She was wearing the purple-and-white denim shorts she had worn on the pier and after the beach volleyball game, with the rib-knit cotton T-shirt. It was one of his favorites among her outfits.

  “You might have said, ‘Hello, how are you?’ first,” she remarked. “So, hello, how are you? Less gloomy than last night?”

  “The choker! It’s not in a mayonnaise jar off San Luis Rio,” he said. “It’s at police headquarters, locked up in a property-room safe for evidence!”

  Kim nodded. “Where it’s doing us some good. Since you know about it, you know where it was found. Evidence. It’s doing us some good.”

  “For god’s sake! The damned thing doesn’t have Arlene’s fingerprints on it!”

  “No, and it doesn’t have mine, either,” said Kim. “Or yours. Or anybody else’s. Before I put it in the mail, I cleaned it of every fingerprint. I spent half an hour rubbing it with a cloth, handling it with gioves.”

  “Suspicious in itself!” he whispered hoarsely. “Columbo will wonder why it’s clean of fingerprints.”

  She smiled. “If you were Puss Dogood and had the choker and were going to mail it, what would you have done? Cleaned your own fingerprints off. Well…”

  “It couldn’t have been mailed by Cathy—by Puss Dogood, for god’s sake! She was in jail!”

  Kim smiled. “The postmark shows she mailed it Tuesday night.”

  “How… ?”

  “Simplest thing in the world,” she said. “When you mail a package at a post office, they run a little white tape through a meter and stick that little tape on your package. When we mail something from the store, the postage is put on the same way, by the meter. And you set the date on the meter. I mailed the package Friday. But I set the store postage meter back to show it was mailed Tuesday. Set it to Tuesday, ran it once, set it back to the correct date. The store meter doesn’t add a logo or message,, thank god. It looks exactly like the tape from a post-office meter.”

  “Well… It sounds okay. I can only hope you didn’t some way outsmart yourself.”

  Kim shook her head. “I thought it all through. Puss Dogood snatched the choker off the dresser, wiped it off, and stuck it in the mail. She figured they’d have to let her go within forty-eight hours, for lack of evidence, and the choker would be waiting for her in Arlene’s office at the store.”

  “Lack of evidence…” Joe mused. “We went to some trouble to set up enough evidence.”

  “Not enough evidence,” said Kim. “As it turned out. Columbo didn’t buy it. Puss stays in jail, but that son of a bitch is investigating Everything he does, so far as I can figure out, is against us.

  “The man’s not bright,�
�� said Joe. “If I have to be investigated by a homicide detective, give me Lieutenant Columbo.” He smiled nervously. “Right?”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Kim. “That’s why I decided to reinforce the case against Puss Dogood.”

  “Right. Yes. But one thing, my lover. Let’s agree we don’t do things this important all by ourselves, not without talking it over together. From now on, everything’s a partnership between us. Isn’t it?”

  “It’s been that for a long time, Joe. And it always will be. It was just that—You had so much on your mind. I thought throwing forty-eight thousand dollars in the Pacific… Hey! Not when it could do us some good. Major good! They’ve got to charge Puss Dogood with the murders now. The choker may close the case! Besides, think of something else. We get it back!”

  2

  “You still don’t buy it,” said Captain Sczciegel. “You don’t think Puss Dogood did it.”

  Columbo shook his head.

  Sczciegel sighed. “We’re getting heat,” he said. “The murders were committed a week ago tomorrow night. The chief wants to know—”

  “Remind him how long it took to crack the Tate-LaBianca case,” said Columbo.

  “But this one seems so simple.”

  “It’s not simple. There’s a lot of things not simple,” said Columbo.

  “Ted Jackson thinks it’s simple. He thinks that finding the choker where it was closes the case.” Columbo turned down the corners of his mouth and nodded. “Whose fingerprints were on the choker?” he asked.

  “No one’s.”

  “On the wrapping paper? On any part of the package?”

  Sczciegel shook his head.