by Otto Penzler
He nodded. "Exactly as I expected. But honestly, I don't know how you guys put up with room service at the Abbey. I've heard their restaurant tends toward Italian by way of the Borgias."
I explained to him how we have to bring food in. "Last night Spitz and Braverman fetched us some chow from the New Bamboo Palace. My almond gai ding was quite good."
"Ah, the old New Bamboo Palace." Compton laughed as much as I'd ever heard him laugh. Come to think of it, I'd never heard him laugh. "I remember that place. Used to love the pu-pu platter there."
Although we were clearly alone in his office, he looked around as if to ensure our privacy. "Dale, may I tell you why I ask about your poker party? Last night someone broke into my office. Pried open the drawer where I was keeping the fall schedule. Took it. Stole it. Stole a schedule that CBS would pay somebody a fortune for. like stealing jewelry. And there were only four people, other than myself, who knew that the schedule already existed and where it was kept."
"When did this happen?" I asked.
"The night watchman discovered the forced lock on my door when he was making his eleven P.M. rounds. I keep telling RCA they have to make people sign in and sign out around here. Anyone could have taken an elevator to a couple of floors above us, waited somewhere along the fire stairs until later in the evening, then grabbed the schedule from my office, walked down to a lower floor, and taken another elevator from there to the lobby. After that, they could walk out of here free as a bird. Or if they felt like celebrating, head back up to the Rainbow Room and dance the night away."
I agreed that the scenario was plausible. "But there must be some other explanation. Because the four people who knew where you kept the schedule were otherwise occupied last night, until after the break-in."
"Well, I know that, for gosh sake. You were all having Chinese food from the New Bamboo Palace at the Abbey Victoria." He flashed me a mirthless grin that showed me more of his teeth than I'd ever wanted to see. "It's just a damn shame they closed the New Bamboo Palace three years ago."
As my brain tried to reason how Spitz and Braverman had brought back food from a restaurant that was no longer in business, Compton discarded his genial manner and taught me how frightened one man can be of another.
"Now let me ask you, sonny: Why would you make up a pack of lies unless you had something to hide? I've already asked each of your three associates where they were last night. Their stories were impressively consistent. It seems Spitz bet like a wild man and won over a hundred dollars. They ordered in a pizza with anchovies, since the Abbey Victoria graciously allows deliveries. They arrived at six P.M. and played until two A.M. They talked about their upcoming projects at the network, compared notes on current movies, discussed rumors about Wilt Chamberlain leaving the Globetrotters to sign with the Warriors, and indulged in some fairly graphic speculation regarding the mores of a girl in the secretarial pool named Rita Truscott. Each man's story was completely consistent with the others. Whereas you, Winslow, are totally at odds with all of them. So the question is, why would you so ignorantly and desperately lie to me if there weren't something you need to hide?"
A window alongside the door to the office looked out upon the hallway. Over Compton's shoulder, I could see Donna standing at the water cooler, having herself a quick laugh with Spitz and Braverman, while Spitz was having himself a quick feel of Donna's derriere. It was a silent movie, and I was not a member of the cast. Donna was opening the manila envelope that Dancer had left with her, and withdrawing what looked to me like currency. She wore an expression of pleasure, likely the first genuine one I'd ever seen on her face, including last night at the planetarium.
I understood now. There had never been a Monks of the Abbey Victoria. Not until I came on the scene. The one meeting I'd attended of "the Order" had been the only meeting ever convened. My fellow Brothers must surely have struck a deal with someone at CBS. Perhaps they'd made a similar deal the year before, one for which my predecessor, Ted Thissel, had taken the fall.
Whatever cash from CBS they were splitting, I was certain a modest percentage of their take could be found in the envelope now in Donna's hands.
I knew. But I couldn't speak, couldn't offer my real alibi, tell anyone with whom I'd been the night before, because Donna would simply deny it. Besides, any such claim on my part would give my wife, Joanie, abundant grounds for divorce. I was caught in a fool's mate, where my king could only toggle between two squares, either of which placed me lethally in check.
"All right, maybe I got some of my facts wrong," I rasped from my suddenly dry mouth. I was about to be given the red-carpet treatment, my head bouncing down the hall, bound for the express elevator that eagerly awaited my plunge to the street. "But Compton, how would I know about the poker club, and the name we gave it, even the room number, if I hadn't been there?"
He frowned. "Your associates independently explained that, sympathetic to your being the new man here, they offered you the fellowship of their club, which you attended for the first time last week. They were stunned and insulted that, after reaching out to you in a brotherly way, you were so rude as to simply not show up last night."
I had no idea how I'd explain to Joanie that I wouldn't be working at NBC. What reason could I give her for my dismissal? How might I earn a living after this? I looked back at Compton as if I were staring into the very sun that was setting on me.
He wasn't quite done. "A very foolish bluff to try to put over, Winslow. Frankly, your friends are lucky to be rid of you." He stood without offering his hand. "You must play one lousy game of poker."
The Eastvale Ladies' Poker Circle
Peter Robinson
The man was very dead. Even Dr. Glendenning, the Home Office pathologist, who hesitated to pronounce death when a victim was chopped into little pieces, admitted that the man was very dead. He also speculated as to time of death, another rarity, which he placed at between 7:00 P.M. and 10:00 P.M. that same evening.
All this took place in the spacious study of the Vancalms' detached eighteenth-century manor house on the western fringe of Eastvale's chic Dale Hill area, sometime after midnight. The man lying on the carpet was Victor Vancalm, wealthy local businessman, and a large bloodstain shaped like the Asian subcontinent had spread from his skull and ruined the cream shag carpet.
The stain came from a massive head wound, which had been inflicted with enough force to splinter the cranium and drive several sharp shards of bone into the soft tissue of Victor Vancalm's brain. Blood spatter on the flocked wallpaper and on other areas of the carpet testified as to the power of the blow. A brass-handled poker lay on the carpet not far from the body, surrounded by a red halo, as if it were giving out heat.
The rest of the study was in just the sort of mess Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks would have expected after someone had been pulling books from shelves and overturning furniture looking for valuables. From one wall, a gilt-framed painting of the Blessing of the Innocents had been removed and dumped on the floor, exposing a small safe whose door hung open. It was empty. Someone had smashed the computer monitor, which sat on a desk by the window, and emptied the contents of the drawers on the floor. The Scenes-of-Crime officers had cordoned off the study, from which they jealously repelled all comers, even Banks, who stood at the door gazing in, looking rather forlorn, a child not invited to the party.
In the living room across the hall, discreetly out of the sightline of her husband's body, Denise Vancalm sat on the sofa sniffling into a soggy tissue. Music played faintly in the background, the andante movement from Schubert's Rosamunde Quartet, Banks noted as he returned to the room. Chandeliers blazed in the high-ceilinged hall, and outside in the night, police officers went up and down the street, waking up neighbors and questioning them.
The problem was that Hill Crest was one of those expensive streets where the houses were not exactly cheek by jowl as in the poorer neighborhoods, and some of them had high walls and gates. Hardly conducive to keeping an ey
e on your neighbor. Hill Crest was aptly named, Banks thought. It stood at the crest of a hill and looked out west over the River Swain, along the meandering valley where the hillsides of the dale rose steeper and steeper as far as the eye could see. On a clear day you could see the bare limestone outcrops of Crow Scar, like skeleton's teeth grinning in the distance. The skull beneath the skin.
But this wasn't a clear day. It was a foggy night in November, not long after Bonfire Night, and the police officers outside blew plumes of mist as they came and went. Even inside the house it wasn't that warm, Banks thought, and he hadn't taken his overcoat off.
"I'm very sorry, Mrs. Vancalm," he said, sitting in an armchair opposite her, "but I do have to go over this with you again. I know you talked to the first officer on the scene, but—"
"I quite understand," said Denise Vancalm, crumpling her tissue and dropping it on top of the copy of Card Player that lay on the glass coffee-table. The magazine looked out of place to Banks, who had been expecting something more along the lines of Horse and Hound or Country Life, But each to her own. He knew nothing about Victor and Denise Vancalm; he didn't move in those kinds of circles.
"You say you arrived home at what time?" Banks asked.
"Half past eleven. Perhaps a few minutes after."
"And you found your husband..."
"I found Victor dead on the study floor, just as you saw him when you arrived."
"Did you touch anything?"
"Good Lord, no."
"What did you do first?"
A V formed between her eyes. "I ... I slumped against the wall. It was as if all the air had been forced out of me. I might have screamed, cried out; I really can't remember." She held out her hand. "I bit my knuckle. See?"
Banks saw. It was a slender, pale hand with tapered fingers. The hands of an artist. She was an attractive woman in her late thirties, with tousled ash-blond hair falling over her shoulders, framing a heart-shaped face, perfect makeup ravaged by tears and grief. Her clothes were expensive casual, black trousers of some clinging, silky material, a burgundy blouse tucked in at the waist. A waft of delicate and expensive perfume emanated from her whenever she moved. "And then?"
"I called the police."
"Not an ambulance?"
She shook her head impatiently. "I dialed 999.I can't remember what I said. I might have asked for all of them."
She hadn't, Banks knew. She had asked for the police, said there'd been a murder. He could see what she meant. Even someone who has never watched Taggart or A Touch of Frost would be hard pressed to miss a murder scene like the one in the study, a body more obviously dead than Victor Vancalm's. But people panic and call an ambulance anyway. Denise Vancalm hadn't.
"What did you do next?" Banks asked.
"I don't know. I suppose I just sat down to wait."
"And then?"
"Nothing. People started to arrive. You must know how long it took. I'm afraid I lost all sense of time."
It had taken seven minutes from the emergency phone call to the arrival of the first patrol car. A good response time, especially given the weather.
"How many people knew about the wall safe?" Banks asked.
Denise Vancalm shrugged. "I don't know. Victor always kept the key in his pocket, with all his keys. I suppose Colin must have known. Anyone else who visited the house, really."
"Colin?"
"Colin Whitman, Victor's business partner."
Banks paused and made a note. "Where had you been all evening?"
"Me? Gabriella Mountjoy's house, on Castle Terrace."
Banks knew the street. Expensive, in the town center, it commanded superb views of Eastvale Castle, rumored, like so many others in the Dales, to have provided a brief home for Mary, Queen of Scots. He estimated it was probably a fifteen- or twenty-minute drive from Hill Crest, depending on the traffic.
"What were you doing there? Book club or something?"
She gave Banks a cool glance. "The Eastvale Ladies' Poker Circle. It was Gabriella's turn."
"Poker?"
"Yes, hadn't you heard, Chief Inspector? It's become quite popular these days, especially among women. Texas Hold 'Em."
"I've heard of it," said Banks, not much of a cardplayer himself.
"Four or five of us get together once a month for dinner, drinks, and a few games. As I said, it was Gabriella's turn to host us this time."
"How many of you were there tonight?"
She raised an eyebrow at the question, but said, "Five. Gabriella, me, Natasha Goldwell, Evangeline White, and Heather Murchison. I'll give you their addresses if you like."
"Please."
Denise Vancalm picked up her handbag and took out a sleek Palm Pilot encased in tan leather. She read out the names and addresses. "Is that all?" she asked. "I'm tired. I..."
"Nearly finished," said Banks. "What time did you arrive at Mrs. Mountjoy's house?"
"I went there straight from the office—well, I met Natasha in the Old Oak after work for a drink first; then I drove her over to Gabriella's. It's not far, I know, but I had the car with me for work anyway."
The Old Oak was a trendy pub off the market square. Banks knew it but never drank there. "What kind of car do you drive?" he asked.
"A Cabriolet. Red."
A Mercedes sports car, Banks thought. Hardly inconspicuous. "Where was your husband?"
"He'd been away on a business meeting. Berlin. He was due back from the airport about half past seven."
"Did you see him?"
"I haven't seen him since last week. Look, Chief Inspector, I've had a terrible shock, and I'm very tired. Do you think...?"
"Of course." Banks had wanted to get as many of the preliminaries out of the way as possible—and whether she knew it or not, the spouse was usually the first suspect in a domestic murder—but he didn't want to appear as if he were grilling Denise Vancalm. "Is there someone you can go to, or would you like me to—"
She shook her head. "There are plenty of people I could go to, but believe it or not, I just want to be by myself."
"You don't ... I mean, are there any children?"
"No." She paused. "Thank God."
"Right. Well, you clearly can't stay here." It was true. Banks had checked out the house, and whoever had killed Victor Vancalm and ransacked the study had also been through the master bedroom, separating the expensive jewelry from the cheap—not that there was much of the latter—and even going so far as to cut up several of Denise Vancalm's favorite dresses and strew them over the bed. It would take most of the night to process the scene.
"I realize that," she said. "There's a small hotel just off the market square, the Jedburgh. My husband often suggests it for clients when they happen to be visiting town."
"I can take you there," Banks offered.
She regarded him coolly with moist, steady blue eyes. "Yes," she said. "Thank you. I probably shouldn't be driving. May I collect a few things? My nightgown? Toothbrush?"
Banks went into the hallway and saw Detective Constable Winsome Jackman coming through the front door. "Winsome," he said. "Mrs. Vancalm will be spending the night at the Jedburgh Hotel. Will you accompany her while she gathers a few essentials?"
Winsome raised her eyes in a "Why me?" expression.
Banks whispered, certain he was out of Mrs. Vancalm's earshot, "And make sure there's someone posted outside the Jedburgh all night."
"Yes, sir."
A short while later, as Banks followed Denise Vancalm out into the chilly night where his Porsche stood waiting, he again reminded himself why he was taking such precautions and feeling so many reservations in the face of the poor bereaved wife. By the looks of it, Victor Vancalm had disturbed a burglar, who might have been still in the house. Confronted with a dead husband, a wrecked den, and a big empty house, most people would have run for the hills screaming, but Denise Vancalm, after the immediate shock had worn off, had dialed 999 and sat down to wait for the police.
By late morning
the next day, a weak gray sun cut through the early mist and the day turned out the color of Victor Vancalm's corpse spread out on Dr. Glendenning's postmortem table. Banks stood on the steps of Eastvale General Infirmary wishing he still smoked. No matter how many he attended, he could never get used to postmortems, especially just after a late breakfast. It was something to do with the neatness and precision of the gleaming instruments and the scientific process contrasted with the ugly slop of stomach contents and the slithery lump of liver or kidneys. Anyway, as far as stomach contents were concerned, Victor Vancalm's last meal had consisted of currywurst, a German delicacy available from any number of Berlin street vendors.
There had been no surprises. Vancalm had been in general good health and the cause of death, barring any surprises from toxicology, was most certainly the head wound. The only interesting piece of news was that Vancalm's pockets had been emptied. Wallet. Keys. Pen. All gone. In Banks's experience, burglars didn't usually rob the persons of anyone they happened to bump into on a job. They didn't usually bump into people, for that matter; kids on drugs aside, burglars were generally so careful and elusive one might think them quite shy creatures.
Dr. Glendenning stuck by his estimate of time of death, too, between 7:00 and 10:00. If Mrs. Vancalm had gone straight from the Old Oak to the poker evening with Natasha Goldwell and had not arrived home until 11:30, she couldn't have done it. He would still check her alibi with the rest of the poker crowd. It was a job for a detective constable, but he found he was curious about this group of wealthy and powerful women who got together once a month to play Texas Hold 'Em. Did they wear shades, smoke cigars, and swear? Perhaps more to the point, could they look you straight in the eye and lie like a politician?
Banks took a deep breath of fresh air and looked at his watch. It was time to meet DI Annie Cabbot for lunch at the Queen's Arms, though whatever appetite he might have had had quite vanished down the drain of the autopsy table plughole, along with Victor Vancalm's bodily fluids.