“When your husband bought the circus, you brought Rudolpho here and put in a pitch for him. But your husband refused to hire him. His circus already had a knife thrower. So, to keep him near, you hired Rudy Ace as your chauffeur and valet. Life was good again. Now you had money and the rooster of your choice. What you didn't foresee was Alida Harrison popping up, twisting herself into inviting shapes in front of Rudy, stealing your lover away, and involving him in murder.”
“I don't blame her,” Danita said. “She's a rotten slut. But the world is full of sluts.” She looked at her former lover in a heap on the floor. She spit on him. “He should have resisted. He owed me.”
“Okay,” Wenders told the rich widow, halting the proceedings. “That's murder one, Mrs. Callicoat. You're gonna have to come along with us.”
Danita shook her head. “You'll never prove murder. You won't even make the charge.”
The lieutenant stared. “We got a barn full of witnesses.” He chucked a nod at the corpse. “Saw you fire three bullets into him.”
Danita nodded her agreement. “But he didn't exist.”
Wenders turned his confused bovine face my way, asking without asking.
“She makes an interesting point,” I told him. “Before he was Rudy Ace, he was Rudolpho Acciai. Rudolpho the Great. Before that, if you chase the circus records down he was Chandu the Magnificent, another Impalement Artist, and was paid under the name Tedaris. His real name, God only knows.”
“He wasn't,” Danita said stiffly. “His driver's license was a forgery. He had no papers. No green card. He didn't even have a birth certificate. You can't prove who he was… because he wasn't. He was an illusion. You can't murder a man who never existed.”
“You–” Wenders stopped, looking like a deer in the headlights. “You can't just walk out of here.”
“Have no fear, Lieutenant,” Danita said as if he was a child. “I'll go quietly. Go through the motions, if you like, it makes no difference. Put me on trial, if you're able. I'm a grieving widow, a paragon of society, seduced and made a fool by a manipulative gypsy. A criminal foreigner with no identity. A three-time murderer, who started a gun battle in my back yard and who, at the time he was shot, was threatening not only me but all of my guests, including yourself. Murder, bargained to manslaughter, becomes justifiable homicide. Before it's over, Governor Thompson will take me to dinner and Mayor Byrne will give me a key to the city.”
“You got it all figured out?”
“If I don't…” Danita shrugged her shapely shoulders. “If they don't… I'm rich, attractive, and can afford the best lawyers in the country. Extreme emotional disturbance; that is a hung jury over and over again. The thin gold plating on the watch they'll give you at retirement, Lieutenant, will turn green before I spend a minute in a cell.”
Wenders examined it, his face running the gamut of emotions, annoyance, anger, disgust and, finally, despite his best efforts, confusion.
Lisa put the question. “Could she get away with that?”
I screwed up my lips and shrugged. How the hell did I know?
“Well,” my secretary went on, “that's Wenders' problem. You captured the murderers you were after.”
“Dummy up,” Wenders barked.
“Don't sweat it, Frank,” I told him. “Lisa means well. She's just wrong.”
“Wrong? How am I wrong? What do you mean?”
The time had come for a confession (I hated confessions). “I mean,” I said, unbagging the cat. “We unwound four murders without solving the murder we intended to solve.”
“Blake,” Lisa exclaimed. “What are you talking about? Rudy's there!”
“And,” Wenders added. “Mason took the acrobat out in cuffs! What game are you playin'?”
“It's no game,” I told him. I turned to Lisa and reminded her, “This started when you set out to find the victim in my vision. I tried to solve his murder; the murder of the drowned man. But I got my psychic wires crossed because I can't control…” I waved at my own head. “…this thing. I conflated images from two separate visions. I didn't solve the murder of the drowned man. I solved the murder of the guy you pulled out of the lake.”
“Huh?” Lisa twisted her lips and poked her glasses off the end of her nose. “You're saying Mickey the Geek wasn't the drowned man?”
“Lisa,” I said with a sigh. “Did he drown?”
“Well, yeah…” She stopped herself. “No. No, he didn't. He bled to death in the cold water from a stab wound we didn't know he had.”
“Right. But I'm here to tell you, and make no mistake about it, I saw a man who was drowning. A man who drowned.”
“So it wasn't Mickey?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“And my finding Mickey in Lake Michigan really was just a coincidence?”
“I'm afraid so.” I smiled, but only because Lisa looked so dejected. “There was a connection, but only coincidentally. The bottom line is, we solved the circus murders, but we've yet to solve the murder of the drowned man.”
“Aw-right, you two!” Wenders growled. “Enough of your babblin'. Enough of your nonsense about visions, and ESP, and drownin' men. I'm sick of it! Do either of you two geniuses got a suggestion for how we proceed with Mrs. Callicoat here. She committed murder right in front of us and now she's blowing raspberries at justice takin' a hand.”
Wenders definition of justice had never walked arm-in-arm with mine. That didn't mean he didn't have a point. I stepped past Rudy's body, crossed the space to the circus owner, and looked Danita in the eyes. I held the look, taking every ounce of amused contempt and superiority she was laying on me, then called for my secretary over my shoulder.
When Lisa arrived at my side, I asked, “Your car. Not the Pinto, your car, the roller skate. It broke down while you were tracing our vandals?”
“Yeah,” Lisa answered. She shook the question from her voice, cleared her throat, and answered again. “Yes. It's in Des Plaines. Both of our vandals live on the same block in Des Plaines.”
“That's where I thought you said.” I nodded my appreciation.
It's a character flaw of mine, sisters and brothers. I'll often go on with something, in spite of a huge likelihood of making an ass of myself, if there's the remotest chance I'm right. The last time I'd gone through this nonsense, during the Reverend Delp murders, the excruciating visions had come to an end when the killer died and his accomplice was hustled off to the hoosegow. The appeased murder victims, for want of a better way to express it, got what they wanted and shut up. Here, the case was solved. Alida and the late Rudolpho had done it. But I'd messed up and something told me not to let it stand.
“Your husband,” I asked Danita. “He was an Ivy League graduate?”
Her beauty disappeared as her face twisted. She couldn't figure me out and, clearly, had grown tired of trying. “Yes, you poor, sad, amusing little detective. Princeton.”
I reached for Lisa, telling her, “Take my hand.” She hesitated among so many strangers. Then, as it was me asking, interlaced her fingers with mine and held on.
“Forgive me,” I told Danita. “This will either annoy you or add greatly to your amusement.”
The rich widow yelped as, with my free hand, I clutched her by the neck beneath her left ear. She and everyone else in the pavilion, probably, reacted in shock to one degree or another. I didn't see it. For several painful seconds, I saw nothing at all. I was being thunderstruck.
There were no instructions to go with my lovely affliction. I'd never succeeded in initiating a psychic vision at will and was as surprised as anyone in the barn. I gritted my teeth and took it as the heat and pain shot through my head, the colored lights exploded behind my eyes, and the hallucinations came.
I expected another trip through the valley of the shadow of death (forgive the Biblical flowers). I expected to again experience the demise of each of the recent circus victims; Mickey's stabbing and a shove into the drink, Sybil's stabbing and subsequent mutilat
ion, Alfonso's bludgeoning and a nap in my spacious kitchen cabinet, The Major's being hung like a Christmas goose. I expected all the pain and terror of each as, over and over again, I entered the Undiscovered Country. But it didn't come.
What came instead was a fiery flash of hell on earth. Holy balls!
I'd never been mistaken for a philosopher. Chroniclers were not beating down my door. Those few who knew me knew that, if asked, only if asked, I could dispense a cynical word about life on the mean streets of Chicago. But that I'd as soon keep it to myself and let you carry your own load. That said, I had on occasion, if only fleetingly, contemplated the meaning of life and the eventuality of death. No one that has been dragged to the edge as often as I, without falling off, would claim any different. But I'd never obsessed on it or arrived at any answers profound enough to warrant a speech in the town square. Sadly, I still operated under the basic belief that, regardless of family, friends, love, or lust, we puny humans come into the world alone and, owing to the laws of nature, go out the same way. But, holy balls, I'm telling you, in the next few seconds I learned there are times when death was anything but lonely. Sometimes death was a spectator sport.
My ears buzzing, my brain flashing, my neck flushed with heat, my noggin ready to explode, I found myself standing in the middle aisle of a passenger plane. Yeah, I know, but I'm telling you. Despite the fact my body was physically in the Callicoat wagon pavilion, glared at by Wenders and company, in a human chain between Lisa and Danita, my mind and senses were on a commercial jetliner.
A quick glance, coupled with the hum of several hundred voices, told me the plane was full. The vibration in my feet told me we were already hauling ass down the runway. Experience told me we were nearing take-off speed. Then, above the din of the passengers, I heard a loud snap and crunch; the sounds of metal coming undone. I looked up and to my left, through one of the windows overlooking the wing and, in a twisted reality where everything moved in slow motion, I saw a three-foot piece of the leading edge of the wing rip away. The plane's port engine – torn from its moorings – flew forward as if it had lift, then up, then back and over top of what remained. The engine and chunk of wing vanished behind us. Other than a few passengers near the window, who raised their heads in confused curiosity, nobody aboard appeared to notice. They were still chatting amiably. The plane was still rolling forward – and lifting off.
We cleared the ground, went airborne and, seconds later, the plane began to roll hard to the left. The happy chatter stopped. An excited, then frightened, murmur rose in its place. The plane rolled over. I hit the ceiling of the fuselage, now the floor, with my head and shoulders. Forward, near the lavatory, two stewardesses did the same. Between us hundreds of passengers buckled in their seats hung like bats, shrieking and screaming madly, while their carry-on baggage and personal effects flipped and fluttered through the confined space. We were flying upside down.
Flying is too strong a verb. And no adverbs or adjectives come to mind that might better describe the situation. You can either imagine it or you can't. The flight was over in less than a minute; fifty seconds according to the record books. Fifty seconds – then the lives of all aboard would end in a horrific crash. Their short nightmare would be over. Mine would only have begun.
Upside down, we hit the ground. I was crushed and ripped apart, like the others, as the world burst into flames around us. Yet somehow, I was still there, taking it in and feeling it. Tearing metal, splashing fuel, fire, screams, rended bodies, blood, and death. And then, from among the screams came individual cries aimed, not at the horrifying situation, but at me. One, then another, then another, until there were hundreds of tortured souls yelling directly at me.
As quickly as it had started, the vision ended. I was back in the pavilion. Back on my feet, at least for an instant. Then, shaken and trembling, I released my holds on Lisa and Danita and fell to my knees. “Not there,” I screamed. “He isn't there!”
“Nod,” Lisa called. “Nod, are you all right?”
“What's not there?” Wenders demanded.
“He isn't,” Danita insisted, pointing at me. “He isn't all there. He's obviously mentally ill. He had one of these attacks before, right here on this spot. There's something wrong with him!”
“There is something wrong with me,” I said, fighting for breath in order not to puke. Lisa helped me back to my feet. Holding tightly, I took a deep breath. “I'm sick. Murder makes me sick.”
“Grand. Me too.” Wenders sneered. “So tell me, smart guy, if you're done crying and sweating, what are you trying to prove? What ought I do with our trigger-happy socialite?”
“Arrest her. Murder in the First Degree.”
“We've been over that,” Danita said with disdain. “Take me in, for all the good it will do you. My attorneys will have me out before you've finished your reports. Nobody will be shedding any tears over a homicidal maniac.”
“No,” I agreed. “They probably wouldn't. But you're going to jail for murder all the same, either for life or to await your day in the death house, whichever the People of the State of Illinois choose.”
Now everyone was talking at once, Danita denying the charge and calling me mad, Wenders defending a rich taxpayer and calling me a fool, Lisa confessing her confusion and begging for an explanation. They were making my battered head hurt. “Stop. Stop!”
The pavilion went quiet.
“What are you talkin' about?” Wenders demanded. “If you agree we won't tag her for this.” He pointed at Rudy's cooling corpse. “And you insist she had nothin' to do with the circus murders. Then what the hell are you talkin' about?”
Lisa nodded – which made me pause. I'd never seen her agree with Wenders before. I didn't blame her this time. “Nod,” she asked, “who did she kill?”
“The drowned man.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Good,” Wenders shouted. “Clear as mud. Who, for the love of Mike, is this drowned man?”
“Danita's husband,” I said. “Reginald Callicoat III.”
“What are you…” Wenders was so beside himself there were almost two of him. One was plenty. “The whole world knows her husband died in a plane crash. The worst crash ever, fer cripes sake!”
“They do,” I agreed. “And it was. But he wasn't aboard.”
I stepped unsteadily away from the women, still shaken by my last vision, got my bearings and addressed the group. “The Callicoats were not getting along. By then the new chauffeur had settled in. Rudy wasn't just taking care of the limousine, he'd gone off-road and was doing the driving in Danita's bedroom as well. Reginald may have caught on to that fact. Or he may simply have grown tired of an expensive wife that didn't love him anymore. He said as much to a number of friends and talked about it at length with at least one attorney.”
I turned to Danita. “Do I have that correct?” If looks could kill. But they can't, not by themselves, so I moved on without an answer.
“Danita returned the feeling. She was as tired of her husband as he was of her. But divorces are messy, unsettling and, most of all, expensive. Danita's position could be summed up using simple math; divorcées get a settlement, widows get it all. Reginald Callicoat had to die.”
I wandered the circle, avoiding what remained of Rudy. “The plan, equally as simple, went like this. Reginald would board a commercial airliner and fly out of her life.”
“That's a plan?” Wenders asked with contempt.
“That was it. He would fly away and never be heard from again. He would be reported missing, the authorities would search (spending oodles of tax dollars), and find nothing. Many rumors would be collected, a few theories would be developed: he ran away with another woman, he was kidnapped and something went wrong, he changed his identity for his own reasons and vanished, he suffered a mental breakdown. But the complete answer would never be known and the millionaire would never be found. Like I said, simple.
“Of course, there was a bit more to it than that.
When an appropriate number of days passed and Danita learned her husband had disappeared, the plan called for her to report the loss with mixed fear, grief, and embarrassment. She would have no idea where he'd gone or why. She would be unable to say whether he was a victim of depression, disenchantment, or foul play. She would be aghast at the suggestions he'd run away or had a secret lover somewhere. But, when all was said and done, how could she know and what difference would it make? Reginald had gone on a business trip and never returned. She would eventually accept the fact, get over it, and move on. So would the authorities.
“To that end, the most important part of Danita's plan required her to remain under the radar, to act like an abandoned wife, and patiently wait until the required number of years had passed and Reginald could be declared legally dead and his estate and life insurance become hers. Four years? Or is it seven in Illinois? What's the difference with millions waiting and drawing interest? She had her trust to keep her in brandy and a chauffeur on the premises to keep her in shape. She's pragmatic. She's patient.”
I paused speaking directly to Danita. “You killed your husband. You reserved a First Class ticket for him aboard Trans Air Flight 191, non-stop from Chicago O'Hare to Los Angeles. You put Rudy in one of your husband's best suits and sent him to the airport the morning of the flight. You had him pick up your husband's ticket and present it at the boarding gate. But, instead of boarding, Rudy came home to you. The plane took off with Reginald Callicoat III listed as a passenger.”
“Minutes later,” I told the group, “in an unplanned and unexpected twist, the business world, the banking world, the circus world, and Danita and Rudy – in particular – got the surprise of their lives. A shock that, once the vibrations ebbed, as far as Danita was concerned, became the handiest stroke of luck. The DC-10, supposedly carrying her escaping husband, had suffered a catastrophic mechanical malfunction. It lost an engine on take-off. It was airborne less than a minute before it flipped and hit the ground in a fiery crash that killed two by-standers, all 297 persons aboard, and – at least on paper – one wealthy entrepreneur not on board.”
Red Herrings Can't Swim (Nod Blake Mysteries Book 2) Page 26