Name Games

by Michael Craft

  “Second—and this is what kept me awake last night, at least till I sorted it out—second is the question of what motivated the bogus note. The obvious reason for implicating Pierce is to cast suspicion away from the real killer. But there’s another possibility, one that we’ve overlooked.” I paused, letting them mull this.

  Pierce, Lucy, and Glee glanced at each other, puzzled. Then Glee suddenly sat up rigid and alert, enlightened. She slipped her reading glasses off her nose, letting them drop to her chest on their gold chain. She told the others, “Election shenanigans!”

  “Of course,” I said. The others nodded, now seeing this secondary motive as clearly as Glee had. “Whoever framed Doug was not only trying to pin the crime on the wrong man; he was also well aware that he was jeopardizing Doug’s chances for reelection. The note’s reference to Doug and Carrol’s sexual ‘dalliance’ has the smell of a classic smear campaign. Ironically, the writer may have had no direct knowledge of their fling.”

  “A lucky stab,” Lucy commented, sitting with us again at the table.

  “That depends on your perspective,” Pierce dryly reminded her.

  “In any event,” I told everyone, “if election shenanigans have in any way tainted the murder investigation, it falls to the press—it falls to us—to expose them. That’s why I feel the Register is more than justified in pursuing this.” I paused, then added for Pierce’s benefit, “I also feel obligated to help a friend to clear his good name.” I didn’t need to mention that I’d already endorsed that friend for reelection, so in a sense, my own reputation was at stake as well.

  Glee drove our discussion forward (I was pleasantly surprised by her analytical approach to our discussion—had she been wasting her time in features all these years?), suggesting, “If the motive for framing Doug was election shenanigans, we need to ask ourselves, ‘Who would have the most to gain by hurting Doug’s chances?’ Obviously, the opponent, Deputy Dan Kerr.”

  Lucy tapped her notes with her pencil. “And Deputy Dan is now in charge of the investigation—an investigation that has implicated Doug on the basis of a computer file found by none other than Deputy Dan himself. Pretty slick.”

  “Hold on,” said Doug, leaning toward the rest of us, tightening our circle. “Dan Kerr may be my political opponent, but he’s also a good detective and an honorable cop—I trained him myself. If you’re suggesting that Kerr is behind all this, forget it.”

  Pointedly, Lucy asked him, “The laptop computer containing the extortion note—was it fingerprinted to determine if anyone had used it other than Cantrell?”

  Pierce squirmed, settling back in his chair, admitting, “No. Kerr had no idea—”

  “Claimed to have no idea,” Lucy interjected.

  Pierce rephrased, “Kerr claimed to have no idea that the computer might contain material not authored by Carrol, and in fact, the official stand of the investigation is that Carrol himself wrote the note. Anyway, Kerr didn’t bother to dust the laptop before going to work on it. At this point, I’m sure the only prints we’d find all over it are his own.”

  Glee perched her glasses on her nose again and added a note to her pad, musing, “A handy oversight on the lieutenant’s part.”

  “Here’s a thought,” said Lucy, running a hand through her mannish crop of red hair. “We’ve been assuming that whoever wrote the note is Cantrell’s killer. But let’s consider Kerr. Presumably, he had no motive whatever to want Cantrell dead. On the other hand, he has a strong motive to want the murder pinned on Doug. Maybe he was cunning enough to recognize a golden opportunity when he got hold of the laptop. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that he suddenly had the means to divert the murder investigation and secure his own election.”

  Pierce seemed stunned by this observation, not only by Lucy’s solid reasoning, but by the feasibility of foul play from his opponent, who happened to be his protégé. Pierce had already made it clear that he believed Kerr incapable of murder. Was he now willing to believe that Kerr was capable of this lesser crime? Lucy had raised an intriguing and compelling possibility.

  “Uh, Doug?” There’d been something on my mind that needed to be dealt with, and now was as good a time as any. Everyone at the table could tell from my reticent tone that I was broaching something awkward.

  Pierce cracked a smile, unable to fathom where I was headed. “Yes, Mark?”

  “I believe you—we all believe you. There’s no one in this room who thinks that you murdered Carrol Cantrell. We know, however, upon your own admission, that you did have sex with him, which is disturbingly consistent with the tenor of the blackmail note. What’s more, Grace Lord has come forth as an eyewitness to your overnight visits with Carrol. My point is that you’re now in a weak position to make a public denial of your relationship with Carrol, even if your sense of ethics would allow that. If you did make such a denial, and it were proven that you lied, you’d arouse serious suspicions that you just may be the murderer.”

  I paused a moment, making sure everyone had followed this logic. Perhaps the deeper-seated reason for my pause was that I had reached the stickiest aspect of what I had to say. So I rose, pacing a few steps from the table, not looking at Pierce as I asked him, “Will the autopsy reveal the presence of semen, other than his own, in Carrol’s body?”

  “No,” said Pierce, surprisingly calm and objective. As I turned to listen, he explained, “We ‘played safe.’ Still, I’m well aware that if I deny our relationship, it’ll trigger a scrupulous search for any physical evidence linking me to Carrol—a stray hair, a loose button, anything. It would be easy to prove I’d been in that bed. So there’s no point in denying it. My best hope is to be forthright. Before this is all over, my private life will be very much a matter of public record.”

  We were all silent. I knew how painful this was for Pierce. Though I’d thought all along that he’d be better off “out,” he didn’t deserve the ignominy of being outed, especially under circumstances that accused him of murder.

  Glee spoke first, and as she attempted to comfort him, I realized an embarrassing irony—she was the only straight person in the room. “Listen, Doug”—she leaned to tell him—“this town is full of your friends. You’ve never done anything to betray your office, and you’ve never given anyone cause to distrust you. When a man in his midforties is still a bachelor, assumptions are made about him. This news will barely raise an eyebrow, in spite of the headlines.”

  I jumped into the conversation, assuring him, “And there won’t be any headlines. As the story breaks, of course we’ll report it—we have to—but it won’t be sensationalized, at least not in the Register.”

  He sighed. “I appreciate that—believe me.”

  I sat again, joining the others around the low table. “Okay, then. We’ve all got our work cut out for us. We’ve got news to report, but at the same time, we’re investigating a murder and the possibility of election antics. Let’s concentrate on the murder and assume, for now, that the bogus extortion note is the work of the killer. Let’s review the possible suspects.”

  “There still aren’t many,” said Pierce with a toss of his hands. “By my count, we’ve got three: Bruno Hérisson, Deputy Dan Kerr, and…me.”

  “Now, Doug—”

  “Stay objective,” he reminded me. “I’ve been implicated. And you’ll note that none of these three suspects are puny. Any one of us would have had sufficient physical stature to subdue and strangle Carrol.”

  “Fine,” I said, adding Pierce’s name to the lineup on my pad, “the sheriff himself has joined the ranks of the suspicious, but he’s at the bottom of my list, so let’s start at the top. Where are we with Bruno?”

  Pierce told us, “His alibi checks out, as far as it goes. The Pfister confirmed that Bruno arrived late Saturday morning before his room was ready, then checked in after lunch. The computer log verifies this, and the desk clerk remembers him vividly. As for his departure on Sunday, the facts are consistent with Bruno’s claim
that he simply left before noon; housekeeping had his room turned by one o’clock. The sticking point, of course, is that there’s no way to pinpoint how long before noon he left—was it mere minutes, as he claims, or possibly six hours? He still can’t seem to establish proof of his whereabouts at the exact time of the murder; a simple parking stub would do the trick. Clearly, Bruno had the most obvious motive to want Carrol dead, so he’s still first on my list.”

  I reminded him, “There’s also the matter of dalliance.”

  Glee and Lucy exchanged a puzzled look.

  I explained, “The extortion note uses the word dalliance to refer to Doug’s fling with Carrol. Both Doug and I found the word not only vague, but downright peculiar—who would talk like that? Is the word perhaps French?”

  Glee and Lucy both nodded that they now understood the implication, but then Glee shook her head uncertainly. “Dalliance may have the look of other French words, but I have a hunch it derives differently.” She rose, asking me, “Okay if I check the unabridged in your office?”

  “Please do.” I chided myself for not having already done it.

  She stepped from the conference room to my inner office, where Webster’s Third lay open like a Bible on a stand behind my desk. With one hand, she riffled to the d’s; with the other, she adjusted her glasses. Leaning over the book, she read, telling us, “No. It derives from dally, which in turn comes from Middle English. It was Anglo-French five hundred years ago, but that’s not exactly au courant.” She laughed at her clever understatement.

  Lucy called to her, “Check with the morgue. They have French dictionaries.”

  We waited while Glee used the phone on my desk to call the paper’s reference room. After a short conversation, she joined us again at the table, reporting, “There’s no dalliance in common usage in modern French.”

  Lucy said to me, “Nice try—it sounded promising. It would have been tidy if the extortion note had pointed directly to Bruno.”

  I scribbled over dalliance on my pad. “Okay,” I conceded, “the note doesn’t point to Bruno, but it doesn’t exonerate him either. His English is fluent, if stilted—he may very well know the word.”

  Glee, thinking, tapped her pencil on her pad. “It is an odd word choice. Who’d say dalliance? It’s so…affected.”

  Pierce reminded us wryly, “Carrol Cantrell was highly affected. Maybe he did write the note—and someone killed him before he had a chance to deliver it.”

  Lucy eyed him askance. With a tinge of sarcasm, she asked, “And just what is it, Douglas, that Carrol Cantrell might hope to wring out of you? He seemed like a big-bucks kind of guy, while you…well, your salary’s a matter of public record. Not that you’re ‘hurting,’ but—”

  Pierce laughed, interrupting her, then finished her sentence. “But people in my line of work aren’t in it for the money. I’m an unlikely target for extortion.”

  “Unless,” Glee interjected, “Carrol was desperate. Maybe he was having financial difficulties. We still don’t know much about his background.”

  Pierce opened a file he’d brought along. “This might help for starters,” he said, extracting a sheet of paper that appeared to be a printout of raw data. “We got a record of his cell-phone activity since his arrival in Wisconsin. Mostly calls to California, probably business. Quite a few Chicago calls too. It proves one thing”—Pierce chortled while passing the page over the table to me. “He talked a lot.”

  I could tell at a glance that the rows of numbers would be meaningless to me, so I passed the printout to Lucy, asking, “Could you run a check on these?”

  She nodded, placing the document atop her to-do pile. When it came to hard research skills, few could match Lucille Haring. This would be child’s play at her computer terminal.

  “Back to the extortion note,” I said, returning to our original topic. “Moneywise, the murder-to-silence-blackmail scenario doesn’t seem to fit our profile of Doug or the victim. So let’s maintain our assumption that the note was faked and planted. What else does the word dalliance tell us?”

  Lucy whirled a hand in the air, rattling off, “It’s affected, it’s stilted, it’s poetic, it’s old-fashioned, it’s academic…” She ran out of adjectives.

  “Which could be Bruno,” Pierce summarized, “but it doesn’t fit our other active suspect at all. Deputy Kerr is as corn-fed and plain-talking as they come.”

  Glee suggested, “He’s also smart. The question is, is he clever enough, devious enough, to invent an extortion note that doesn’t ‘sound’ like himself?”

  “No,” Pierce answered emphatically. “I’ve worked with Dan Kerr for years. Granted, I don’t agree with his stand on the pornography issue, and I certainly don’t appreciate his ambition to take my job, but I refuse to believe he’s capable of criminal action. He’s a cop to the core.”

  “But he also has a motive,” I reminded Pierce. “The circumstances of his involvement in all this are highly suspicious—the note he found, supposedly found, on a computer that he didn’t bother to check first for fingerprints—”

  “Hey,” said Lucy with a snap of her fingers. “Computers always notate their files with a date-and-time stamp. Do we know exactly when the extortion note was written? That should easily clarify whether Cantrell wrote it or not.”

  “Good point,” said Pierce, jotting something. “I’ll try to find out.”

  Something Pierce had said was triggering a new thought—then it came to me. “Pornography,” I blurted.

  The others looked at me.

  I elaborated, “Doug just mentioned that he doesn’t agree with Kerr’s stand on the pornography issue. That’s an issue that keeps popping up—not only in the context of the obscenity trial, but also in the context of this murder. Why?”

  Lucy looked up from her notes. “You’ve lost me, Mark.”

  I related to everyone the details of my Saturday-morning visit to the coach house: the odd “welcoming committee” that consisted of antiporn crusaders Harley Kaiser and Miriam Westerman, the piles of porn strewn about Cantrell’s quarters, and—that most intriguing of details—Cantrell’s telephone reference to the Miller standard.

  “I’ve since learned that the Miller standard is a set of legal guidelines used in judging obscenity—an odd thing indeed for the king of miniatures to be chatting about on the phone in his bathrobe on a Saturday morning—the morning before he’s killed. Harley Kaiser overheard the telephone conversation as well. At the time, I didn’t understand what Cantrell was talking about, but it was clear from his reaction that Harley did. Then yesterday, when Roxanne and I joined Doug and Harley at lunch, Roxanne raised the topic of the Miller standard. Harley got uncharacteristically sheepish, acknowledging that he’d heard Cantrell mention it, but insisting that it took him by surprise. Squirming, the DA went on to tell us that the visit was entirely Miriam’s doing, that he’d had no idea what he was walking into.”

  The others looked at each other in silence for a moment. Glee asked, “What was he walking into?”

  “I don’t know. But it strikes me as unlikely that a pair of antismut zealots would just ‘happen’ to waltz in on a visitor’s conversation regarding the legalistic definition of obscenity.” I sat back, as if resting my case, but in truth, I was wondering, What next?

  Glee answered my unspoken question. “We should talk to the defense team,” she said, adjusting her reading glasses while scribbling a note.

  Lucy’s eyes widened with interest. “Of course,” she said, adding something to her own notes, “let’s check with the legal team handling defense of the porn shops in the obscenity case. It’s a big-city firm somewhere—I’ll find them. Maybe they can shed some light on the ‘coincidences’ of the Saturday visit.”

  “Sounds promising,” Pierce conceded with a thoughtful nod.

  It was a promising new turn, perhaps one too many, and I felt compelled to rein in the various possibilities we’d discussed that morning. “Okay, Lucy”—I was now writing notes
of my own—“you need to do a bit of digging. Track down those numbers from Cantrell’s cell phone, see what you can find out about his finances, and talk to the pornography defense team. Meanwhile,” I told the others, “we were weighing the possibility that Deputy Kerr might have played a role in this—if not in the murder, then at least in planting the extortion note. Kerr ought to be the subject of a separate investigation.”

  “Have you forgotten?” asked Pierce. “Kerr’s now in charge of the investigation.”

  “Not our investigation. We need to at least talk to him, question him.”

  “Good luck.” Pierce closed his notes. “Kerr won’t talk to you. Why would he?”

  Stymied, we sat in silence for a moment.

  “Hey.” Glee again. “The endorsement. Tell him that ‘circumstances’ have caused the Register to reconsider its endorsement in the sheriff’s race.”

  I told the others, “I’ll bet he’d trot right in for an editorial-board interview.”

  Pierce said, “I’ll bet he would too.”

  Lucy said, “I’ll phone him right away.”

  We had our plan.

  Neil was meeting me for lunch that day at the First Avenue Grill, and I invited Glee Savage to join us as well. When Glee and I arrived shortly after noon, I found the crowd considerably sparser than it had been on Monday. The hostess, looking less harried, greeted me at the door and showed us to my usual table, a prime spot between the fireplace and a corner window. The fireplace was dark and bare—though September had brought its cooler weather, it would be many weeks, I hoped, before winter would justify a fire.

  Waiting for Neil, we ordered tea, hot for Glee, iced for me. I could predict with near certainty that Neil would want iced cappuccino (a recent kick of his), so I ordered this for him in advance, as it was apt to throw the kitchen into a panic.

  Glee straightened her hat—it looked for all the world like a priest’s biretta, except that it was made of a leopard-print damask that matched her flat two-foot-square purse. She said, “I can’t thank you enough, Mark, for including me on this project. Your predecessor, Barret Logan, wouldn’t let me anywhere near ‘hard news.’ I think he considered it unladylike.”