Puzzled Indemnity

by Parnell Hall

  “Apparently, she and I do, too.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  “Well, if you’re going to beat me up.”

  “Oh, is that what I’m doing?”

  “Come on, Cora. I’ve told Stephanie all about you.”

  “That’s nice. Funny you never told me all about her.”

  “I didn’t think you’d be interested.”

  “Maybe you thought I’d be too interested.”

  Crowley said nothing, cut off a bus.

  “You know you’ve been accelerating ever since the conversation started. Any faster you’d have to turn on your siren.”

  Crowley sped down Madeline Greer’s block and screeched to a stop in front of her building. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  “I’m not going in,” Cora said.

  “Don’t you want to hear what she has to say?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t want to be there when she says it. I don’t want to muddy the water. I followed the guy here. I may have to testify to that. I don’t wanna have to also testify that I questioned the witness.”

  “Suit yourself,” Crowley said. He left Cora in the car, rang the bell, spoke on the intercom. Whatever he said worked. The door was buzzed open and he went up.

  He was gone long enough that Cora was beginning to wonder if he was afraid to come back. Then the door opened and he slid into the front seat. “Well, that was interesting,” he said.

  There was a pause.

  Cora said, “You gonna make me ask, or you gonna tell me what?”

  “She claims she’s not his girlfriend.”

  “Of course she’s going to deny it. The guy’s married on the one hand and dead on the other. Not the sort of relationship you wanna claim.”

  “Maybe not, but I believed her. I’m a cop, and I’m good at these things. I’d say she was telling the truth. According to her, she barely knew the guy. He was just trying to sell her insurance.”

  “Yeah, right,” Cora scoffed. “And you fell for that?”

  “I took note of her claim. In my opinion, it has validity.” Crowley cocked his head. “Now here’s the interesting part. According to her, a couple of days ago somebody came around trying to shake her down for sleeping with a married man. She told him he was all wet, but he just laughed and demanded money. As soon as he left she called Hank demanding to know what the hell was going on. He came rushing over and tried to calm her down. The guy’d made a mistake, but he’d handle it. Just leave it to him. There was nothing to worry about.

  “While he was trying to convince her the guy came back, and tried to blackmail him. She said he stalled the guy off for forty-eight hours.”

  “You believed her?”

  “Oh, I believed her. You tried to get me to blackmail the guy and I turned you down. Who’d you get to pinch-hit?”

  “You’re making a lot of assumptions.”

  “I’m making one assumption. It’s one a child of three could make. You wanna fess up now, or you wanna keep playing games?”

  “I prefer games.”

  “I’m sure you do. It now occurs to me you were mighty reluctant to go upstairs. Maybe you didn’t want to be recognized. Could it be the pinch hitter was you?”

  “Come on, Crowley. She said it was a guy. You think I was mistaken for a guy? That’s not very flattering.”

  “Of course not. But you might have told her to say it was a guy.”

  Cora rattled her fingers alongside her head. “Doublethink. What have you got, snakes in your head? ‘Hi, I’m Cora Felton the Puzzle Lady and I’m going to blackmail you now, but if the police ask you about it would you please tell them it was a man that did it?’ Have fun trying to sell that one.”

  “Fine. You didn’t do it yourself. But you had it done.”

  “Prove it.”

  “I don’t have to prove it. I’ll just tell Harper you did it and he can take it from there.”

  Cora took a breath. “Okay, let’s calm down for a minute. I caught you with your girlfriend and you’re taking it out on me.” When Crowley started to protest she said, “Quite understandable. When you’ve been married as many times as I have, you get used to men’s behavior. The counteroffensive is a simple and effective ploy. I get that. Let’s drop it and move on.”

  “Wait a minute, wait minute,” Crowley said. “This is not a ploy. Blackmail is a crime.”

  “So is murder. Could we concentrate on the big picture here? What’s important is what this woman did, not what I did. The two have nothing to do with each other.”

  “Funny you should say that.”

  Cora looked at him suspiciously. “Why?”

  “Oh. You and the woman having nothing to do with each other. No connection whatsoever.”

  “What’s funny about that?”

  Crowley reached in his pocket, pulled out a piece of paper. “She gave me this.”

  Cora reached for it.

  “I’d prefer you didn’t get your fingerprints on it,” Crowley said.

  “You’re touching it.”

  “By the edges. And I touched it when she handed it to me. Not knowing what it was.”

  “What is it?”

  Crowley turned the paper around.

  It was a crossword puzzle.

  Cora’s eyes bugged out of her head. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

  “I’m not.”

  “Where did this come from?”

  “I told you. The woman gave it to me. She found it under her door.”

  “So she gave it to you?”

  “Well, she wasn’t going to, but I asked her if anything peculiar had happened lately.”

  “And she whipped out a crossword puzzle?” Cora said sarcastically.

  “Actually, she mentioned the blackmail. Which would have been my first choice. But I’m a cop. Just because I get an answer doesn’t mean I stop asking the question. I asked her if she’d heard from the blackmailer again; she said she hadn’t. I asked her if there’d been a note; she said there wasn’t. I asked her if anything else peculiar had happened; she said yes, but it wasn’t a note. And she gave me this.” Crowley looked at her. “Now, if you’ve used up all your arguments for why she shouldn’t have got it or why she shouldn’t have given it to me, you wannna discuss the puzzle itself?”

  “You know I can’t solve it.”

  “I’m not talking about solving it. Why do you think she got it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Me neither. But it certainly cements your connection to this woman.”

  “Maybe that’s the point.”

  “How can that be the point?”

  “I don’t know, but you start making assumptions. I’m going to make some, too.”

  “Fine. You wanna make something about this?”

  Crowley pulled out a sudoku.

  Cora gawked. “Are you kidding me?”

  “No, but it’s something connected to you. And it’s something you can solve.”

  “So what? It’s just numbers. Without the crossword puzzle it’s not going to tell you anything.”

  “No, we’ll have to solve that, too.”

  “Be my guest.”

  “I’m no better at crosswords than you are.”

  “Right. So run it down to your boys at the station.”

  “They’ve gone home.”

  “What are you telling me? We’ve gotta go all the way to Bakerhaven and have my niece solve it?”

  “No. I happen to know someone who’s good at crossword puzzles.”

  “You do? Well, why didn’t you say so? We can—” Cora’s eyes widened. “Oh, no!”

  “She does the New York Times puzzle every day.”

  “Even Saturday?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I hate her.”

  “I know.”

  “Come on. Saturday’s hard.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Sherry told me. You are not having your girlfriend solve this pu
zzle.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “I don’t care what you call her. It’s not happening.”

  “You don’t have to be there.”

  “What do you mean, I don’t have to be there? Of course I have to be there.”

  “I can call Chief Harper tomorrow, say you got ahold of me, I interviewed the woman, got these puzzles, and got ’em solved.”

  “How about the sudoku?”

  “She can do sudoku.”

  “Of course she can. Well, she’s not going to do it. You left with me. You come back with a crossword puzzle, she’s going to know I couldn’t solve it.”

  “Actually…”

  Cora’s eyes blazed. “You told her I couldn’t do puzzles!”

  “In strictest confidence.”

  Cora told Crowley what she thought of his strictest confidence, what she thought of Stephanie, what she thought of crossword puzzles, and what she thought of him, though not necessarily in that order. Her language was colorful, if not downright actionable. In mid-tirade, without missing a beat, Cora demanded, “Well, what are you waiting for? Let’s go!”

  Chapter

  37

  Cora was torn between wanting Stephanie to solve the crossword puzzle and wanting to strangle her for being able to do so. Cora had solved the sudoku in the car on the way there, leaving her with nothing to do. She paced up and down Crowley’s living room in smoldering frustration.

  “It’s not enough you have to torture me with an old girlfriend, you gotta humiliate me by telling her my failings.”

  “It’s not a failing,” Stephanie said. “It’s a skill you don’t have.”

  “Wanna see a skill I do have?”

  Stephanie smiled. “Believe me, I wasn’t taunting.”

  “Don’t be nice,” Cora said. “It’s harder if you’re nice.”

  Crowley exhaled noisily.

  Without looking up from the paper Stephanie said, “You expected some huge revelation?”

  “Why?”

  “It looks like a pretty tame message.”

  “What is it?”

  “Hang on. I’m not done.”

  “I thought you knew the message.”

  “I do,” Stephanie said. “It’s ‘Hang on, I’m not done.’ The message is, ‘Mind games have begun. You hang on. I’m not done.’”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Crowley said.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Cora?”

  “Who, me? I thought I was just a spectator.”

  “Don’t be silly. Other people solve the puzzle. You’re the one who figures out what it means.”

  “What’s to figure out? Our killer has suggested that more murders are in the offing. Fine. We’ll be on our guard. Not that we weren’t already.”

  “Forewarned is forearmed,” Crowley said.

  “Yeah,” Cora said. “An octopus is forewarned twice.”

  Crowley stared at her, but Stephanie burst out laughing. “You’re actually very good with words.”

  “Just as long as they don’t intersect,” Cora said.

  “Oh,” Crowley said, finally getting it. “But aside from that, the puzzle doesn’t mean anything?”

  “No, and that’s not all. It doesn’t reference the sudoku.”

  “Should it?” Stephanie said.

  “It came with the sudoku. They can’t be unrelated. Without the crossword the sudoku’s just numbers. There should be something in the crossword that tells us why the sudoku is there.”

  “Wait a minute,” Stephanie said. “You think these are puzzles the killer sent to the victim’s girlfriend?”

  “That’s right,” Cora said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know why, but they usually are.”

  “Usually? How many killers make up crossword puzzles?”

  “More than you’d think,” Cora said. “Accepting that absurd premise as a given, the question is how does the crossword relate to the sudoku and how do both puzzles relate to the crime?”

  “You may be in luck,” Stephanie said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Some of these clues are starred.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?”

  “You went off on a crossword killer rant.” Cora opened her mouth, and Stephanie put up her hand. “No offense meant.”

  “What are the clues?”

  “Here. Look.”

  Stephanie held out the puzzle and pointed. “5 across: column down—four. 17 across: number of numbers—three. 24 across: type of wood—oak. 54 across: position—center. 57 across: venue—street.”

  “Oak Street!” Cora said. “And the numbers will give us the address.”

  Stephanie snatched up the sudoku.

  “Fourth column down, three center numbers are: five, seven, four. There you go. Five-seventy-four Oak Street.”

  “I’m a New York girl born and bred,” Cora said. “You don’t have to tell me there’s no Oak Street in New York City.”

  “That’s for sure,” Crowley said.

  “But there is in Bakerhaven.”

  “Okay. Whose address is it?”

  “I have no idea. I could call Chief Harper, but he’ll want to hear the whole story and I’ll be on the phone for hours.”

  “Why bother?” Stephanie said. “We can look it up on MapQuest.”

  “Yeah, but Sergeant Stone Age doesn’t have a computer. Surely you know that.”

  Stephanie dug in her purse, whipped out an iPhone, began tapping the screen. “What’s the address we want? Ah, yes. Five-seventy-four Oak Street. Bakerhaven.” She punched it in. “Oh.”

  “What is it?” Cora asked.

  Stephanie held it up for her to see.

  Cora’s mouth fell open.

  “Well? Whose address is it?” Crowley said.

  “Hank Wells’.”

  Chapter

  38

  Chief Harper looked like a man on the verge of a violent eruption or a nervous breakdown. Cora figured it was touch and go.

  Harper pointed to the crossword lying on his desk, looked at Sergeant Crowley. “The woman gave you this?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And she told you she was being blackmailed over an affair she wasn’t having with the decedent. And did the blackmailer by any chance leave this puzzle?”

  “According to her, it was slipped under her door.”

  “How soon after the blackmailer left?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “You didn’t ask?”

  “It’s your theory, Chief. With the benefit of hindsight.”

  “Hindsight?”

  “Yeah. The puzzle’s solved, and there seems to be some connection.”

  “Yeah. To the guy she wasn’t having an affair with.” Harper turned to Cora. “You have any idea what that means?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  Harper jerked his thumb. “And you needed your lawyer here to help you say that?”

  Becky had insisted on coming along when she heard what Crowley would be telling Chief Harper.

  “I don’t think I need a lawyer, Chief, but Becky needs the work.”

  “Why? She hasn’t got time for the work she has now.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Becky said.

  “You were supposed to produce your client’s life insurance policy.”

  “I don’t see why you need it.”

  “If her husband really was planning on killing her for the money, it would be motivation to beat him to the punch.”

  Becky smiled. “Are you suggesting she plead self-defense?”

  “I’m suggesting you produce the document you promised to produce two days ago. Or have you changed your mind?”

  “My client’s looking for it, Chief. If she can’t find it, we may have to start inquiring of insurance companies.”

  “She doesn’t know which one?”

  “The amount was the thing that grabbed her attention. However,
if you’ve ever met my client, I think you’d agree it’s very unlikely she constructed a crossword puzzle giving her own address.”

  “This is all very nice,” Crowley said, “but New York’s a big city, and I happen to have cases of my own. If we could speed this along.”

  “Anything you haven’t told me about the girlfriend?”

  “She claims not to be the girlfriend.”

  “I take that with a grain of salt.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “Right. It’s not your case, so you don’t mind complicating it. If you were in charge, how’d she look to you?”

  Crowley frowned, considered. “Too good to be true. I wouldn’t write her off.”

  “There you are.”

  “And her blackmail story?”

  “Could be a complete fabrication. Just like her claiming she’s not the woman.”

  “You think that’s likely?”

  “No. You do. I think she’s not the woman and her blackmail story’s true. But you’re talking gut reaction with no investigation whatsoever. I’m a New York cop. I can’t drop everything I’m doing to investigate a Bakerhaven homicide.”

  “I understand.”

  “So is there anything else I can tell you about the woman?”

  “If you were investigating her, what would you do next?”

  “Well, I’d sit her down with a sketch artist, try to get a picture of the blackmailer. That’s one thing I could do for you. You probably don’t have a police sketch artist.”

  “He’s on vacation,” Harper deadpanned. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “I’ll put someone on it.” Crowley got up. “Okay, I gotta be going.”

  “I’ll walk you out,” Cora said.

  The minute Cora and Crowley were outside, she wheeled on him. “All right, what was that all about?”

  “What was what all about?”

  “You’re going to make him a police sketch of the blackmailer?”

  “Why? You afraid it might be someone you know?”

  “Don’t be an ass.”

  “Oh? You have someone blackmail the woman, use me as a cat’s-paw to interview her, lie to me about your involvement, and I’m being an ass?”

  “If you know all of that and then act as if you didn’t so you can turn on me and make that accusation, you’re being an ass.”