“Why should I tell you?” Lynda fired back, reasonably enough. “You haven’t answered any of my questions.”
“That is inaccurate. I have answered all of your questions. I simply have not answered them in a way that is useful to you.”
He stood up and exerted himself to top off my decaf and Lynda’s.
Mac’s logic was dazzling, and Lynda looked properly dazzled. She was even disarmed into answering the question.
“He was looking through back issues of The Observer & News-Ledger,” she said.
“In search of what?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. Maybe you’d have better luck.”
“I doubt it,” Mac said. “If Peter could resist your charms he is not likely to give into mine.” Oh, gag me with a ladle.
“Who goes through a newspaper to look at back issues instead of Googling?” I asked.
“Someone who does not know exactly what he is looking for, but believes he will know it when he sees it,” Mac said. “Did he find anything?”
“He seemed to. I noticed he was taking notes off of a story. It looked like an issue from a few months back, but when I approached him he folded the paper over so I couldn’t see what he was looking at.”
My feeling that the story was the one about Double Takes was more than a hunch. It was an oppressive conviction of certain doom bearing down on me.
“So Peter may be on to something,” Mac murmured.
That was a chilling thought. Peter had said in Hoffer’s office that the two key questions were why Stonecipher was impersonating him and how he had arranged it. He came up pretty lame in the sleuth department by not even asking Mac about the latter, although my brother-in-law presumably would have obfuscated as he had with me. But now, if Gerard had the Double Takes story, he had Lem Carpenter. And Lem Carpenter could give him the answer to both of those questions - Sebastian McCabe.
“He wouldn’t even give me a hint of what he’d found,” Lynda said. “The most I could get out of him was a promise that if he comes up with anything leading to an arrest I’ll be the first to get an interview with him.”
“An admirable concession,” Mac said. “I can do no less - and no more, except for what I have already told you.”
“Which is almost nothing,” Lynda pointed out.
The jousting was over, and I took her home shortly after the apple pie was served and consumed.
“He was about as candid as the Sphinx,” she said as soon as she got in my car. “At least I’ll get a story out of it eventually - maybe.”
“I hope so,” I said fervently. “That reminds me. Be sure to check out The Spartan on Monday morning. In fact, you might want to look at their website over the weekend - they sometimes post stories early.”
“What’s up?”
“I think they’re going to have a story about Ralph and the popular culture program that you’ll want to follow up.” I felt lousy all over again for cutting the deal with Sylvester; it seemed disloyal to Lynda. I expected her to pepper me with questions. Instead, she responded with a perfunctory, “Thanks, I’ll do that.”
She appeared distracted, as she had at the beginning of the evening.
“Okay, tell me about your tough day. What’s going on?”
“I wish I knew.”
“Now who’s being the Sphinx? You must know something or you wouldn’t be so worried.”
“I got a summons today from Megan Whitlock,” Lynda said. “She wants to see me on Monday.”
The only thing that stopped me from whistling is that I’ve never been very good at it. Megan Whitlock was the president of Grier Ohio NewsGroup, based in Columbus. That made her Lynda’s boss’s boss. She was apparently an excellent publishing executive who had come up through the news side, but she also had a reputation as something of a Dragon Lady.
“I don’t know what I did wrong,” Lynda said, “but I must be in some kind of trouble. Why else would she want to meet with me? I’ve never even been in a room with the woman.”
So that was it. She was suffering job anxiety. Well, who wouldn’t in her position? Nationally, Grier seemed to be laying off people every few weeks right in the midst of the worst employment market in years. Given the evolving state of journalism, those jobs weren’t likely to ever come back.
“Whatever she wants, I’m sure it’s something positive for you,” I said. “You’re a rising star, a Best of Grier Award winner.”
“That’s what I keep telling myself, Jeff. Why don’t I believe me?”
Gone Fishing
Nobody in his right mind would haul his rear end out of bed on a foggy Saturday morning, the twenty-fourth of September, with the temperature hovering in the mid-forties, just to go fishing.
But a real fisherman would, and Oscar Hummel is a real fisherman. Sitting there on his favorite rock with an expensive fishing pole in his hand, drinking high-test coffee and lighting one cancer stick off the other, he looked like he owned the river.
“Do you ever think about getting married?” I asked him. This was part of the softening up before Mac started pumping Oscar for info. I was also curious.
“Hell, yeah,” Oscar said. “Every time Mom goes to visit Aunt Pearl in Scranton and I have to do my own laundry. I almost went through with it once, too.” He stared out into the water, remembering. “We were engaged for nearly three weeks.”
“What happened?”
He shrugged. “She wised up, I guess. I was already past forty; she was just a little younger. We stayed friends, but I don’t see her much since Mom and I left Dayton.”
“Popcorn’s sweet on you, you know,” I said.
“What? Get outta here!”
But by the light of the rising sun just beginning to burn through the fog I could see that he was pleased. Pushing fifty, grumpy as hell, he was still thinking romance.
“It is worth noting that most of the great detectives of fiction are unmarried,” Mac noted, barely looking up from his task at hand. He was sitting on a boulder, wearing an immense sweatshirt with a drawing of the Hound of the Baskervilles on the front. Balanced on his lap, thus living up to its name, was a laptop computer. He was working on his latest mystery novel while Oscar and I fished and talked.
“Well, then, I guess that nails it,” Oscar said with a look of triumph on his face. “You obviously are no great detective.”
“What I am not is fictional,” Mac declared. “Speaking of detectives, however, perhaps you would be good enough to share some insights into your investigation of the intended murder of Peter Gerard.”
Wow, that was subtle - as a freight train.
“I don’t think there was any intended murder of Peter Gerard,” Oscar said. “I think the murderer wound up with just the body he wanted.”
“On what basis do you reach that conclusion?” Mac asked.
“On the basis that nobody’s tried to kill Gerard since the murder. If somebody wanted him pushing up daisies, they’d have made their move by now.”
“Perhaps Geoffrey Kenlake’s ill-advised joke got in the way. Or, more likely, perhaps the killer is waiting for a time Peter is not under the protective custody of the local constabulary.”
“I don’t think you should rule out Kenlake so quickly,” I stuck in. “He may he be crazy, but that hardly disqualifies him from being a murderer.”
Oscar ignored me. “If there was no hurry about the murder, then how come the killer made the first attempt in Erin to begin with instead of back in Bloomington or somewhere Gerard was making a movie. Why follow him here?”
“Perhaps to draw attention away from Bloomington because that is where the killer is,” Mac said. “Candidates would include his wife, his business partner - or perhaps even Carl Janzig, the former associate who lost a lawsuit against Peter some years ago. Enraged by the suc
cess of Peter’s latest film, Janzig strikes back in the only way he sees left to him.”
“Alice Gerard had a breast removed last week and hasn’t been out of the house since she got home from the hospital,” Oscar said. “So guess who was home holding her hand the night of the murder?”
“Her husband,” I said. Why do I always have to say the obvious?
“You got it in one, bucko.”
So Alice wasn’t in Erin, and wasn’t the female who called for Peter Gerard at the Faculty Club that night since he was with her.
“As for Janzig and Fitzwater, the partner,” Oscar went on, “we’re still going through the motions. But why in the world would they think Gerard was in our little town that night? It wasn’t announced anywhere. Your little party was private.” Oscar shook his head. “If Peter Gerard winds up dead, I’ll get more excited about investigating his murder. But right now, some poor schlep named Rodney Stonecipher is the one who got a free ride to the morgue. And that’s the murder I’m interested in solving. Hell’s bells, I caught one!”
Oscar’s fishing pole bent and the line pulled taught. Oscar strained, cussed, and finally pulled in his catch - a catfish.
“I never eat catfish,” he said, tossing the lucky fellow back. Actually, Oscar never eats any kind of fish. He just likes to catch them and throw them back.
“How does your theory explain Rodney Stonecipher’s murder?” Mac asked.
Oscar snorted. “Professors have theories, Mac. Police chiefs just have ideas that knock around inside their brains until one or two spill out and put somebody in jail. One idea I have is about this masquerade. Nobody can tell me why Rodney Stonecipher would do something like that - not his landlady, not the people he worked with. He wasn’t a prankster and he didn’t have any possible motivation for doing what he did. So why did he do it?”
“I have a feeling you’re going to tell us,” I said.
And it wasn’t a good feeling.
“Money,” Oscar said. “Cash. Greenbacks. Currency. Somebody paid Stonecipher to pretend to be Peter Gerard.”
“Indeed,” said Mac. “That is, at least, a motivation easy to understand. But who hired him? And why?”
“I’m thinking maybe the killer.”
The last wisps of fog were dissipating over the sparkling waters of the river. The sun shone bright and clear on a new day, full of promise like every new day. I wanted to barf. Oscar was getting just too close.
“Why would the murderer first hire Mr. Stonecipher to engage in this madcap impersonation and then slay him?” Mac asked.
“Try this on for size: Let’s say somebody wanted to kill Stonecipher to begin with. This somebody has noticed that Stonecipher looks an awful lot like Peter Gerard. When the somebody hears that Gerard is coming to Erin, he gets a cute idea: Hire Stonecipher to play Gerard, then kill him while he’s doing it. So the cops look for somebody with a motive to kill Gerard instead of Stonecipher. Like it?”
“I love it,” Mac said. “Why did I ever accuse you of lacking imagination, Oscar? Rather the reverse is true in this instance, I should say. I suspect you have been reading too many fanciful mystery novels by Sebastian McCabe.”
“You still haven’t said who’d want to murder Rodney Stonecipher,” I pointed out.
“We’re working on that,” Oscar said. “Takes a lot of legwork, that kind of job. But sooner or later we’ll find somebody he loved or hated or worked with or met in a bar who had a reason to do him in.”
I immediately thought of Chickory Williams. If the cops stumbled on to her she might forget all about her promise to Mac to button up. Then they wouldn’t have to look any further for that someone who hired Rodney Stonecipher. Sure, in a perfect world Oscar would immediately realize that Mac had no reason to kill the poor guy - but the world is far from perfect, and so is Oscar. It would be a mess before the whole thing got straightened out.
“I still think it’s weak,” I said. “How did the killer even know about the dinner that night?”
Oscar shrugged. “We don’t know that yet. Just like we don’t know how the killer managed to keep Gerard from knowing about the dinner so he could replace him with Stonecipher. But we’ll find out. Like I said, it’s just a matter of legwork, asking the right person the right question. Personally, I figure somebody has a big mouth. There were five of you there, not counting the victim. One of you must have told somebody, maybe without even thinking of it.”
He eyed Mac speculatively. Mac typed and smoked.
“And why not, Oscar?” I said. “Nobody ever said it was supposed to be a secret. I may have told Lynda, for instance; I don’t remember.”
“You don’t much like my little idea, do you?” Oscar said. “Well, here’s another one I’ve been kicking around. It starts with asking the old question: Who benefits from the murder?”
Cui bono? But I kept the Latin to myself. “Howard Fitzwater would have collected ten million bucks in insurance if that had really been Peter Gerard,” I pointed out.
“It was not Peter, however,” Mac said.
Shut up, Mac! I’m trying to help you here!
“Maybe Fitzwater didn’t know that,” I countered, but Oscar waved that away.
“Let’s just concentrate on what we know for a minute,” he said. “We know that it’s Stonecipher who’s dead. And what’s been the result? What changed? Well, when Peter Gerard really did come to town he got even better coverage on TV and in the papers than he would have otherwise. That was a lot of publicity for your school, Jeff, and especially for your popular culture program, Mac.”
Oscar baited a hook, carefully looking at neither of us.
“But it’s all bad publicity,” I said, taking a viewpoint completely opposite the one I had championed a couple of weeks before to Ralph Pendergast. “And who would kill somebody just to get publicity?”
“What do you mean ‘bad’ publicity?” Oscar snorted. “They spelled ‘Benignus’ right, didn’t they?” He threw out his line.
“Not all of them.” The New York Times had made it “Bennigus,” and I was still smarting about that.
But Oscar’s talk of publicity had me thinking along a bizarre track. Peter Gerard was a subtle master of publicity. This would get a lot for his next movie. But in addition to having his wife for an alibi, Peter couldn’t have known about Mac’s stupid impersonation gag. Besides, why would a guy whose picture had appeared on the front of every publication from People to The Wall Street Journal need to kill somebody for publicity? No, he was going to get publicity out of this by investigating the crime himself - something he surely wouldn’t have done if the true solution was one that he never wanted to be revealed. A (deliberately) failed attempt to play Sherlock Holmes in real life was a non-starter that would make him look as foolish as I felt right now.
I was really grasping at straws - flat and mushy ones. This was scaring me.
“Oscar, it has been a surprise and a joy to see how your brain works,” Mac said. “Tell me, though, jocularity aside, do you really think that the murder motive could have anything to do with the college? After all, it really does reflect rather poorly on the institution - and on me - that a guest was killed on the school grounds.”
“Maybe somebody’s out to get you,” Oscar said. “Maybe bad publicity is what he wanted. Or she - I don’t want to be sexist.”
Now there was a theory I could learn to love. It was tailored to fit only one person I knew of: Ralph Pendergast. I should be so lucky.
“But to answer your question,” Oscar went on, “I’ll be damned if I know. I don’t know if I believe any of this. This is just blowing a lot of smoke around the old fishing hole, right?”
Death’s Double Take
We stayed on the river into the early afternoon with me blissfully unaware that my cell phone was out of a service area. I found a text mes
sage and a voice mail waiting for me when we got close to town.
The text was from Karl Hoffer: Please call me @ 5 pm at home. I didn’t know his home number, but I would look it up on whitepages.com. I wondered for a moment how he’d have my cell phone number, and then I realized it was on the business card I’d given him the night of the murder. Was that really just Wednesday night?
I held out the phone to Mac as I played back the voicemail. “Jeff? It’s Quandra. I’m in my room at the hotel. Please get over here as soon as you can. Thanks.” Her voice was ragged, on the edge of hysteria.
“Let’s go,” I said as soon as her message finished.
“Let’s as in ‘let us’?” Mac inquired. “My presence was not requested, old boy.”
“That doesn’t matter. You heard her. She sounds terrible. If it’s about the murder, she’ll want you there. And if it’s not about the murder, I’ll want you there - for my protection. I’m not going to be alone in a hotel room with that woman.”
We drove over to the Winfield in Mac’s car, a bright red 1959 Chevrolet with a “221B” license plate. Anybody with enough money might own the iconic ’57 model; he had to be different. At least I talked him into putting the top up.
The Winfield, built in 1916 and lovingly restored in 2002, is the sort of place that has overstuffed chairs and satin sheets and you feel like you ought to clean up your mess so it looks good for the maid. We rode up to Quandra’s room on the third floor in an ancient, elegant elevator car with walls of inlaid walnut and polished brass. I couldn’t help but think of a trip I’d made on one of those elevators six months before, with murder at the end of it.
I rapped on Quandra’s door, waited a few moments, and had my knuckles poised to give it another go when she jerked the door open. She didn’t exactly look like the Sea Hag in a Popeye cartoon; she never would. But you could tell she’d been giving her tear ducts a workout and she’d missed her daily one hundred strokes or whatever with the hair brush.
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