Vado spoke quietly to Columbo. “Is it necessary to chain these two people?” he asked.
“The charge is murder, sir,” said Columbo, shaking his head. “Multiple murder. There are certain specific regulations—”
Khoury was indignant—or pretended he was, to cover his fear. “You have jumped to the wrong conclusions,” he said in a wavering voice. “And to the wrong conclusions. Even after Puss ran away you—”
“We’ll have her back here tomorrow,” said Columbo.
“But you won’t charge her with murder, I suppose.”
“We bring charges on the basis of the evidence, sir. That’s all we can do.”
“So what happens now? Do we go to jail?”
“Yes, sir. You go to jail.”
Kim shrieked. Her face gleamed red and was wet with tears. Still more color faded from Khoury’s face, leaving him quite pale.
Khoury shook his head. “What in the name of God could make you believe… what you believe?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it,” said Columbo. “You have a right to keep silent, you know. If I start telling you things, and you start denying things, you’ll be making a statement. I doubt your lawyers would want you to do that.”
“To hell with lawyers,” said Khoury. “I can take care of myself.”
“Well… We oughta sit down and—” He glanced around. There were not enough chairs for all of them.
“Sit in the set,” said Willsberger. “Sort of bitterly appropriate, huh?”
They walked out onto the soundstage. The desks and chairs and the rest of the set were nostalgically familiar to Columbo. The set was like a Manhattan precinct station. He sat down behind an old scarred oak desk, in a wooden armchair. The others found chairs. Khoury and Kim sat in the center of the room, together.
Seeing cigarette butts and cigar ash in the ashtray on the desk, Columbo decided he could smoke there. He reached into his pocket and found a half-smoked cigar.
“Anybody got a match?” he asked.
Ted Jackson offered his lighter.
“Where to start?” asked Columbo rhetorically. “What I’d like to know is, which one of you first had the idea? The idea of killing Mrs. Khoury didn’t come up on the spur of the moment. You hired Melissa Mead ten weeks ago.”
“What’s hiring Melissa Mead have to do with the murder of my wife?” Khoury asked. “Unless she was the one who knew the layout of the house and either guided the killers in or was one of them herself.”
“Mrs. Takeshi says the house was fully staffed and you didn’t need anybody, but you hired her anyway.”
“Mrs. Takeshi works for me,” said Khoury. “I decide when we need more household staff. The truth is, we didn’t need her, but I was trying to help a girl in trouble,” said Khoury. “Puss told me Melissa was desperate to earn some money.”
“You hired her in a very peculiar way, then: on the word of Puss Dogood, a Manson follower with a long criminal record, without ever interviewing Melissa or asking for references. You put her to work in your house, and then you started to complain that money was disappearing. Then silver. You fired her, but you wouldn’t press charges.”
“I still felt sorry for her,” said Khoury.
“I gotta read it another way,” said Columbo. “You were planning on murdering your wife, and you wanted to hang that on Puss Dogood and her pals. But that would be hard to do if none of them had ever been in your house and didn’t know the layout. You could have invited her up there for some reason, and I’d guess you were figuring on doing that, but when Puss asked you to give Melissa a job she handed you the perfect opportunity. You’d let Melissa work for you a while, long enough to learn the layout of the house and people’s habits; then you’d accuse her of stealing and fire her— giving her reason to resent you and reason to help Puss murder Mrs. Khoury. Of course you wanted the larceny charges dropped. A Melissa in jail didn’t fit the plan.”
“We always wonder,” said Ted Jackson, who by now was smoking, pinching his cigarette tight between his lips and drawing in the smoke as if it sustained life, “why someone who’s the victim of a theft refuses to cooperate in prosecuting.”
“You build inference on inference on inference,” said Khoury scornfully. “All you’re doing is guessing. Do you really expect to convince a jury that all your guesswork is correct?”
“Oh, no, sir. There’s more. Somebody pried open the utility-room window but then didn’t climb in through that window. The pry bar had splintered the wood of the sill, and those splinters were standing straight up. A person climbing in that window would have flattened those splinters. The window was pried open to make it like somebody climbed in. Whoever entered the house entered through a locked door, with a key.”
‘“Whoever,”’ said Khoury. “That’s the word: ‘whoever.’ None of this proves it was me.”
“That’s right, sir. It doesn’t. But there are some other things—”
“Anyway, Kim and I were at Piscina Linda that night and didn’t leave until well after the murders had been committed.”
Columbo paused as he drew on his cigar. “You were at Piscina Linda,” said Columbo, “but you weren’t necessarily there all evening. You had been going there for some time and had established a pattern—dinner in the dining room, then privacy in your room until midnight, and midnight coffee brought up by a room-service waiter. You left big tips so people would remember you. But the room-service waiter never saw you when he came up to your suite, not that night or any other. He heard voices from your room, but those could have come from the television set. You could have checked the TV schedules to be sure a quiet program with voices—no western with shooting—would be on at midnight.”
“I am a little relieved,” Khoury said to Kim. “I was worried that they had something.”
“I’m covering the circumstantial stuff first,” said Columbo. “I’m telling you some of the things that made me suspicious, that made me focus the investigation on you and not on Puss Dogood. I’ve gotta tell you, I’m curious about why you ate so many dinners at Piscina Linda. You’re a man with a taste for the best, and that restaurant is anything but. The only explanation I can think of is, you were busy establishing your pattern.”
Khoury sneered. Kim blinked out her tears and began to look a bit defiant. She lifted her chin and stared at Columbo.
“I can be a little more concrete,” said Columbo. “The murders of Mrs. Khoury, Mr. Heck, and Mr. Flores were exceptionally bloody. Knives make bloody deaths. One of the perpetrators stepped in blood and tracked it across the carpet. Of course the Scientific Investigation Division took a tracing of the most complete footprint. The shoe was not a running shoe, in fact not a rubber-sole shoe of any kind. A shoe with a leather sole. Interesting. The tracing of that footprint makes that shoe a Gucci loafer, a very elegant and expensive shoe that you yourself wear, Mr. Khoury.”
“How many thousands of those shoes do you suppose there are in Los Angeles, Lieutenant Columbo?” Khoury asked.
“You got a point. But it builds up little by little, y’ see.” He gestured with his cigar and with his left hand. “One little thing and then another, building up toward a proved case.”
“You’ll have to do better than that,” snapped Kim, speaking for the first time since she had entered the room. With her fists clenched, she tugged at her chain, angrily frustrated at being unable to move her hands more than a few inches.
Two of the actors who had been working in this set appeared at the edge of the soundstage and stared in amazement at what must have looked to them like a new cast preparing a different scene— until they recognized the two characters in handcuffs.
“We can do better than that, Miss Dana,” said Columbo. “Let’s look at the way the two bodies in bed were lying. They hadn’t jumped up or rolled over or tried to escape. Some of the bodies in the Tate-LaBianca murders had knife wounds on their arms, because they’d tried to shield themselves against the attacks. But these bodies di
dn’t. That means these two people didn’t suspect until the very last second that the people who came into that bedroom were there to kill them. If they’d looked up and seen Puss Dogood, Kid, and Bum Rapp coming into their bedroom, they’d have… Well. What would they have done? Not just lay there and waited for people with knives to stab them. They’d been found in an embarrassing situation, but obviously they didn’t think their lives were threatened.”
“Which doesn’t prove Kim and I were there,” grunted Khoury indignantly. “Other people could have embarrassed them and not terrified them.”
“Friends? Social friends?” asked Columbo. “Walking into the bedroom and interrupting what they were doing. How many of your friends had keys to the house, Mr. Khoury? How many knew the alarm was not on yet?”
“I have no idea who Arlene may have trusted with keys,” said Khoury.
“I can tell you something else that doesn’t conclusively prove it but still goes to build the case,” said Columbo. “The three people were killed with the same knife, or with two identical knives. The blades were sixteen centimeters long and two and a half centimeters wide. Not only that, the murderers drove the knives into the bodies with great force, making big bruises where the guard hit the flesh, and even breaking one of Mr. Heck’s ribs. It looks like the killers used both hands to drive the knives in. There’s a kind of knife that has a handle that folds out into two grips, which makes it possible for a person to stab with two hands. Mr. Willsberger has one of those knives. Mr. Vado has one, too. And where do you suppose they got them?”
Kim flexed her shoulders and rubbed her manacles against her stomach, to slip them into a different position on her wrists. “What about Puss Dogood?” she demanded. “It looks to me like you’ve ignored her completely.”
“Oh, not at all, Miss Dana,” said Columbo. “But, y’ see, the facts just don’t fit for her. Why would she and her friends pry open a back window and then not climb in that window? If she didn’t climb in that window, how’d she get in?”
“Maybe Melissa gave her a key,” suggested Kim.
“I thought of that, too. But Mrs. Takeshi had the locks changed within a few hours after she had Melissa arrested.”
Khoury shot a hard glance at Kim. His frown darkened.
“There were no complete fingerprints on the front door knob,” Columbo went on. fingerprints. Why would that be? Because somebody wearing gloves turned the knob.”
“Which could have been anybody,” said Kim.
“Could have been,” Columbo agreed. “So maybe it’s time to move on to something still more concrete.”
“I think that would be a good idea,” said Khoury.
“Okay,” said Columbo. “Let’s talk about the choker. What would make me think Mrs. Khoury never saw the choker?”
“Stupidity,” grumbled Khoury.
“A possible explanation,” said Columbo, nodding. He paused to puff on his cigar. “But what else do we know? The murderers stole nothing else, according to Mrs. Takeshi and according to you, Mr. Khoury. Mrs. Khoury had other jewelry, but the killers took only a jeweled choker worth $48,350. Why? Your explanation, sir, was that Mrs. Khoury had left the choker out on her dresser. All her other jewelry was inside her jewelry drawer. Just one item, worth more than all her other jewelry put together probably, was lying out in plain sight.”
“Arlene could be careless, particularly when she was drinking,” said Khoury. “And she was always drinking.”
“You told me you bought it for her in June,” said Columbo. “Isn’t that right? When you come to trial, Mr. Khoury, produce a witness who saw her wearing it. Produce a witness who heard her speak of it. On—” He stopped to check a note. “On Monday night, August first, you took Mrs. Khoury to a dress dinner and ball, where all the women wore their jewelry. Mrs. Khoury didn’t wear the choker. She wore a green dress, and the green emeralds of the choker would have looked great on it, but she didn’t wear it.”
“Do you expect to send me to prison on the evidence that my wife didn’t wear a particular piece of jewelry on a particular night?” Khoury asked.
“No, sir. On the basis of something else about the choker,” said Columbo.
“Oh, let’s do hear it.”
“The package with the choker in it arrived in your office on Saturday morning. Because the store was closed Saturday and Sunday out of respect to Mrs. Khoury, no one opened it until Monday morning. The postmark on it was Tuesday, August ninth. Now, we’re supposed to believe that package was mailed on Tuesday, August ninth, by Puss Dogood. But of course it wasn’t. It couldn’t have been. Mr. Heck was alive at eleven-forty when he took delivery of a pizza.”
“Pizza?” asked Kim. “What’s a pizza got to do with anything?”
“Well, ya see, ma’am, Mr. Heck accepted delivery of a pizza, and paid for it, at eleven-forty or even a little after. For the choker to have been mailed on Tuesday, the murderers had to arrive at the house, kill three people, snatch the choker, escape from the house, wipe the fingerprints off the choker and pack it in a box, and get to a post office open that late at night… all in twenty minutes. The nearest post office that has windows open in the middle of the night is at least thirty minutes away.”
“Then how did the mailing carry a postmark of Tuesday, August ninth?” asked Kim.
“That’s very easy, ma’am. When you have a postage meter, you set the date. You can set it forward or back. That’s why the courts won’t accept postage-meter imprints as evidence of the date something was mailed. The box could have been mailed Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. Of course it couldn’t have been mailed by Puss Dogood, because she was in jail.”
“Anybody with access to a postage meter could have set the date back and mailed the package,” said Khoury.
“Only somebody who had access to the postage meter at Khoury’s,” said Columbo. “A microscopic comparison of the meter imprints on the choker box and on packages mailed from Khoury’s proves the package was mailed from the store. You did it, Miss Dana. You set the meter back to Tuesday, imprinted the little white tape you put on the package, and reset the meter to the correct date. It wasn’t a bad trick, but you outsmarted yourself. If you’d set it to Wednesday, August tenth, you’d have left open a possibility.”
“You still don’t have a case, Columbo,” said Khoury. “Even if a jury believed all that, it’s a long way from convicting two people of murder.”
“The nine-one-one call that came into headquarters at twelve-thirty-six a.m. was recorded,” said Columbo. “All nine-one-one calls are. The voice was a woman faking a Spanish accent. The police lab has made a voice print off that tape. We served a search warrant at the store this morning and got a tape of Miss Dana’s voice, one of those tapes she uses to announce the lunchtime fashion show at Hammond’s. The lab made a voice print off that tape, too. The prints match.”
Kim began to cry again, but Khoury turned down the comers of his mouth and shook his head. “A smart lawyer can beat this,” he said to her.
“Mr. Khoury,” said Columbo. “Do you mind if I ask you one question?”
Khoury shrugged.
“You said we found crack in Mrs. Khoury’s handbag. How’d you know about that?”
“You told me,” said Khoury. “Even if you hadn’t, it would have been easy enough to guess. She used the stuff.”
“She hadn’t used any that evening,” said Columbo. “And not for quite some time. Neither had Mr. Heck. The autopsy didn’t find a trace of it in either of them, and not a symptom of its use. People who knew her say they never saw a symptom of it. Of course… she might have been just a minor user. She only had a tiny little bit of it.”
“I hadn’t supposed four rocks is a ‘tiny little bit,’” said Khoury sarcastically.
“What makes you think she had four rocks?” Columbo asked.
“You told me.”
“No, sir. I didn’t tell you we found crack in her handbag, and I sure didn’t tell you there were four rocks. The
re were four rocks, but I was very careful not to tell you.”
“Well, one of your men told me.”
“No, sir. Sergeant Mulhaney found the four rocks. He showed them to Sergeant Jackson and to me. I ordered them not to mention the crack to anybody but Captain Sczciegel, and they didn’t.”
Khoury glared at Columbo, his face turning red.
‘‘You know there were four rocks, sir, because you put them in Mrs. Khoury’s handbag. You put them there after she was dead. That handbag was the one she had carried that day; it had her billfold and car keys in it. If you had put the four rocks of crack, wrapped in a handkerchief, in her handbag while she was alive, she would have found it when she opened the bag for her car keys or for some money.”
‘‘Fanciful…” Khoury muttered uncertainly.
“An investigative technique,” said Columbo. “Sometimes we withhold a piece of information, to see if somebody will mention it. We didn’t tell the news media or anyone else about the four rocks of crack. You knew about them because you put them there. It’s the only way you could have known.”
Kim dropped her chin to her chest and groaned. She began to shake with sobs.
Khoury watched. “She’ll break,” he said quietly. “She’ll confess.”
“And you?” asked Columbo.
Yussef Khoury shrugged. He stared down disconsolately at his handcuffs and chain. “What’s the difference?” he whispered. “I might as well.”
Ben Willsberger looked confused, as if he were unsure if he should offer his sympathy to Khoury, or should condemn and shun him, or should applaud Columbo for having solved the mystery. He did none of these. Instead, he said to Columbo, “It is really unbelievable.”
“What?” Columbo asked. “You mean unbelievable that those two could have murdered three people?”
“Well, that, yes. But it’s unbelievable too that they could have been so stupid. With all due respect to you, Lieutenant, Joe and Kim weren’t very smart.”
“Well, sir, I look at it different. I’d say they were too smart. If they hadn’t been so clever making false clues and giving false leads, they might’ve got away with it. If they wanted the police to believe Puss Dogood did it, they should have left us a little work to do to figure it out.”
Columbo: The Helter Skelter Murders Page 22