Columbo: The Game Show Killer

by William Harrington

  Columbo looked up at the car on the rack. ‘You service Peugeots?”

  “I’ll service a baleen whale if I can get the parts.”

  Columbo grinned. “There y’ go! Well… my car doesn’t need any service right now. But I’ll keep ya in mind. Uh— What I came in to talk about is a murder case I’m investigating.”

  “The Erika Björling case.”

  “Right.”

  “I saw her in the lounge at the Ten Strikes Alley the night of the murder.”

  “What time?”

  “Ten maybe. Ten-fifteen.”

  “Y ever see her there before?”

  “Nope. I bowl once a week—member of a league, y’ understand. I never saw her there before. But— I might not.”

  “You and Mike Reilly are members of the same league?”

  “Right. Sure.”

  “Well, now. You say you saw Erika Björling at ten o’clock or so. Mike thinks he saw her about nine. When did you guys finish your game that night?”

  Schmidt stiffened. “Hey. Is Mike in some kind of trouble?”

  “No, no, no, no. I’m just tryin’ to compare notes, y’ understand. If Mike says it was nine, you say it was ten— Big deal. But it’s the kind of thing I gotta check into, y’ know. It’s just a question of judgment. I don’t think Mike messed around with the facts. Nothin’ like.”

  The mechanic’s cheeks swelled out as he blew away a big breath and frowned. “Hey. We start bowling sometime after eight. You know, we all got jobs, then eat supper with the wife and kids, and— Gotta drive to the alley. Wives are always on our butts about what time we get home after— which is always close to eleven. Got finished and went in for a beer and saw Erika Björling by nine?” He shook his head. “No way!”

  Columbo nodded. “That’s helpful. I ’preciate it.”

  Schmidt grinned. “Hey. Don’t lock that luscious dish up for the rest of her life. What a waste!”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  XXIV

  1

  TUESDAY, APRIL 25—1:01 P.M.

  “Hiya, Mobley. Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner,” Columbo said to the man in the police forensic lab. “Whatta ya figure? Anything?”

  “It may be interesting, Columbo. None of the samples are as long as I’d like to have, but they’re long enough to suggest an identification.”

  “Good.”

  “Listen, I’d like to call Sergeant Maria Prieta in here to talk to you. She’s been a big help.”

  “Call her.”

  Lieutenant Roger Mobley put in the call. Columbo sat and stared around the room, at the varied electronic equipment that covered the tables and shelves. All kinds of tests were run here, some of them mysterious to him.

  “She’ll be here in a minute,” Mobley said. “Will it be possible to get more extensive samples, you think?”

  “It may be, if it comes to it. Right now, if it suggests somethin’, that may be good enough. I got an idea, and I’m looking to reinforce it.”

  Sergeant Prieta arrived. She was a young woman apparently of mixed African and Indian descent, with flawlessly smooth chocolaty skin, close-cropped, charcoal-black hair, and piercing dark eyes.

  “Let’s listen to the Erika Björling tape one more time,” Mobley suggested.

  He pressed a button on a small tape player. Loaded in it was the cartridge from the telephone answering machine in Erika’s apartment in Van Nuys.

  —“Thursday, April 13, seven… p.m.”

  “Hi, Erika. This is Constanza. Give me a call when you can, okay? Kinda anxious to hear from you. Hoping we can work something out.”

  —“Thursday, April 13, seven… twenty-two p.m.”

  “Miss Björling? This is Larry calling again. I don’t wanta be a nuisance, but I’d really appreciate a yes or no answer. If it’s no, it’s no. But I would like to have an answer. I mean…, you can tell me to go to hell if you want to. That’d be better than no call from you at all.”

  —“Thursday, April 13, seven… thirty-eight p.m.”

  “Constanza again. Guess you’re out for the evening. I’ll try you again tomorrow, okay?”

  Sergeant Prieta grinned. “Constanza speaks with a fake accent. That’s like Benny Hill pretending he’s a flamenco dancer. Not Spanish. No way Spanish, not any dialect.”

  “Did you listen to the other answering-machine tapes?” Columbo asked.

  “Yes.” But she shrugged.

  “Okay, the voiceprints,” Mobley said. “Like I said, we really need better samples. But— The woman who answered her phone Sunday night and talked with the guy about his wrong number— Columbo! You’re no better at faking than the man and woman on the answering-machine tapes. If you ever talked to that woman—”

  “I thought that wasn’t a half-bad southern accent” said Columbo.

  “Anyway, the woman you talked to is very likely the same woman who faked the Spanish accent on Erika Björling’s answering machine. Look.”

  He played the Sunday-night conversation, sending the sound into an oscilloscope as well as into a speaker. The glowing green phosphor on the face of the tube formed a distinctive jagged pattern.

  “Now,” said Mobley. He laid out photographs taken of the screen. “This is the word ‘okay,’ spoken twice Sunday night. “You can see the two ‘okays’ make identical patterns. And here are two ‘okays’ off the Björling answering-machine tape. They are identical. Then we try to match all four. You can see they are not identical, but they are very, very similar.”

  Columbo clapped his hands together. “That means ‘Constanza’ is Sonya Pavlov.”

  “Not beyond a reasonable doubt,” Mobley said dryly. “Now— ‘Larry’ uses the words ‘call’ and ‘calling.’ Kellogg uses those words on his answering-machine’s outgoing message. The voice prints are not identical, but I’d guess that 'Larry’ is Grant Kellogg.”

  “Bingo!”

  Sergeant Prieta frowned. “Why would he take a risk like that?”

  Columbo shrugged. “I don’t know, but I’ll guess. He didn’t want any more people involved. If he did what I’m beginning to suspect he did, he had too many people in on it already.”

  2

  3:09 P.M.

  “Do you fully understand what you’re saying, Lieutenant Columbo?” asked Charles Dunedin, the Assistant District Attorney. Columbo and Captain Sczciegel sat in chairs facing the young lawyer’s desk. “You’re suggesting that Erika Björling’s defense attorney is potentially a co-defendant.”

  “I can only go where the evidence leads me, Sir.”

  “Can you suggest a reason why Grant Kellog himself would put a fake message on her answering machine?”

  “Yes, Sir. It’s only a guess, you understand, and I gotta have lots more evidence before I’d call it a fact, but I’m guessing Mr. Kellogg wanted Miss Björling to be arrested and charged with murder.”

  “Now, wait a minute. Why would the woman’s defense lawyer want—”

  “’Cause he’s made more than a million dollars already out of selling her story, and there’s lots more millions where the first one came from.”

  Dunedin shook his head. “It’s preposterous, Lieutenant. I mean, c’mon!”

  “Columbo has reasons to think what he’s suggesting,” said Sczciegel.

  “I’d like to hear them.”

  “Okay,” said Columbo. “What evidence do we have against her? First, there’s the evidence of the note. Mr. Kellogg said she wrote it in February, but a chemical test of the ballpoint ink proves it was written within a week before the murder. Second, when I went to arrest her, she said she’d been at home until after eight, but there were three unanswered calls on her telephone answering machine. The voiceprints suggest those calls were made by Mr. Kellogg and Miss Pavlov—who is, of course, the chief alibi witness. Those calls were put on that recorder to make it look like Miss Björling was lying and, together with the note, make me decide to arrest her. Then, when she went out to the Wylie home in Bel
Air—if she went to the Wylie home in Bel Air—she didn’t go directly but checked into a motel, where she made sure to let the room clerk have a good look at her. So we had a witness to testify she was within ten minutes drive of the Wylie house at 8:40 or so. But that witness turned sour for us when he sold his story to a tabloid. Where did the tabloid get his name? From Grant Kellogg.”

  “This doesn’t make a grain of sense,” argued Dunedin, flushing and shaking his head.

  “It doesn’t make sense until you look at it this way,” said Columbo. “They built a case against her, strong enough to make us arrest and charge her. Then they built a defense case, strong enough to make sure she’d be acquitted—based on alibi witnesses. While she’s in jail, the celebrated Erika Björling, whose face and figure is known to everybody in America, Mr. Kellogg hires an agent, gets in touch with a tabloid publisher, auctions off a television interview… Let me tell ya something else, Sir. You saw the topless pictures of Miss Björling in PROBE? They’re fakes. It’s her face put on another woman’s body. The publisher of PROBE is very upset about that.”

  Charles Dunedin closed his eyes and shook his head. You can’t make it stick,” he said quietly. “I’m beginning to believe you, but we can’t make it stick.”

  “No, Sir. We gotta figure some way to make it stick.”

  3

  4:44 P.M.

  Columbo rang the bell at the house on North Perugia Way. Vicky Glassman opened the door.

  “Am I early?”

  “You said a quarter to five.”

  “I have a way of showing up places early. Sometimes it embarrasses people. Sometimes it embarrasses me.”

  “Well… Come on in. For once you need that raincoat. Mother’s in the living room.”

  Faye sat on the couch. A figure still marked by tragedy, she had recovered her color, was wearing a little makeup, and sat erect, not slumped, wearing a red silk ao dai. “Lieutenant Columbo,” she said, “I hope you’re not surprised to see that I’ve redecorated a bit. I could hardly have left that blood-soaked carpet on the floor, could I?”

  “No, Ma’am.”

  The fake art had been taken down and replaced with framed lithographs: posters by early-twentieth-century artists.

  “The girls will be playing bridge here Thursday night,” said Faye. “They can’t wait to see this room again,” she added dryly. “I’m ready to answer their questions now, to say things like, ‘Oh, yes, right there is where he was.’ ”

  “Mother!”

  Faye shrugged. “I’m going to sell the place and move into a nice condo with a view of the ocean. Why not?”

  Vicky flushed. The idea of selling her family home did not appeal to her, apparently. She was wearing tennis whites, with fluffy pompoms on her shoes. She had not sat down but was standing at the bar. “What’s yours, Lieutenant?”

  “Just a very light Scotch and soda. I gotta drive home, ya know.”

  “I bet you came out here with some kind of a question,” Vicky said. “I’m beginning to understand you, Columbo. You don’t do things without a reason.”

  “Well, I do have a question. A little thing that’s started to bother me. I’ve been thinkin’ about that note that Miss Björling wrote to Mr. Wylie. Y’ know? Mr. Kellogg says she wrote it in February—”

  “It wasn’t in the drawer of the escritoire for two months, I can tell you,” said Faye. “That’s where we keep postage stamps, and I was in that drawer every three or four days.”

  “It wasn’t in the escritoire, Ma’am. That’s where the newspapers said it was, and I don’t know where they got that idea. It was in the nightstand beside Mr. Wylie’s bed.” Vicky handed her mother a drink—gin or vodka over ice; Columbo couldn’t tell which.

  “It wasn’t in there for two months7 either,” said Faye. “I looked in that drawer every few days, too.”

  “Mother… why in the world—?”

  “It was where he kept his stash of condoms. I looked in there from time to time, and not just out of curiosity; I thought I ought to know what he was up to. His escapades had cost too much money, and—”

  “Do you mean to say he was using them?”

  “Vicky, for god’s sake!”

  'You’re certain about this?” Columbo asked.

  Faye nodded firmly. “I counted his supply. I didn’t just glance in casually. He kept those and a nasal inhaler and some tablets for acid stomach. No letter or note. If anything like that had been in there, I’d have seen it.”

  Columbo smiled. “The investigating officers took an inventory of what was in that drawer that night. It was just like you said: a dozen or so Ramses condoms, a Vicks nasal inhaler, and a package of Turns. And the note.”

  “There was no note there on, say, Monday or Tuesday,” said Faye. “I know damn well there wasn’t.”

  “This is very helpful, Ma’am. This is very helpful. Suddenly the whole thing makes sense.”

  4

  8:11 P.M.

  “It’d have been nice if we’d got to see that television interview,” said Miriam.

  Erika sat on her cot, her shoulders hunched, her eyes wet with tears. “Some things you don’t get to do when you’re in jail,” she whispered.

  “Ain’t it a fact,” Pearl muttered.

  “The story is, you get a million dollars for that show,” said Miriam.

  “Yeah. I can use it to buy chewing gum and peanuts.” Erika sighed. “A billion dollars wouldn’t do me any good in here.”

  “Shit! You’re gonna walk. You’re gonna go. You’ll get to spend your million dollars.” Miriam stopped and grinned. “Or maybe you’ll use it to buy your way out.”

  Erika got up and stepped to the bars of their cell, where Lily habitually stood, as if she could relate better to the world outside the imprisoning steel if she stood and folded her hands outside.

  “’Buy your way out…’ Hell, Miriam. You didn’t have to do what got you in here. I… did”

  XXV

  1

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 26—10:11 A.M.

  Grant Kellogg stirred sugar and heavy cream into his coffee. Columbo took his black.

  “Am I wrong?” Grant asked. “Or do I have to suspect you are focusing some part of your investigation on me?”

  “I just go where the facts lead me, Sir,” Columbo said ingenuously.

  “It would be highly unprofessional and improper for the police department to undertake an investigation into the personal life of an attorney for the defense. The court will never stand for it.”

  “Oh, I understand,” Columbo agreed. “The personal life of the lawyers is no part of a case.”

  “Well, your patrol officers are not subtle, Lieutenant. Last night I get up to take a pee and see a black-and-white outside, shining a spotlight on a car in my driveway. Half an hour later, they’re back. No spotlight this time, but— It ruined my night’s sleep, Columbo. What were they doing?”

  “I’d imagine looking for a stolen car.”

  Grant’s face darkened and hardened. “Whose car?”

  “I’m with Homicide, Mr. Kellogg, not Auto Theft.”

  “Okay. You’re going to play it that way. You’d have no idea why I got an angry, threatening call from Harry Gottsman, would you?”

  “Gottsman? I don’t believe I know any Mr. Gottsman.” Grant drank coffee. He turned away from Columbo and looked out his window. “Is it any part of the investigation to know that Mary Nell Fiske is pregnant?”

  “I didn’t ask if she was. I was just runnin’ the usual background check on your alibi witness, and—”

  “You know how this is going to sound when it’s heard before a court?”

  “How what is going to sound, Mr. Kellogg?”

  “You’re running this so-called investigation far beyond any proper limit, Lieutenant Columbo. And you seem determined to pay no attention to obvious exculpatory facts. It may be that the Van Gogh was a fake, but the burglars who came to steal it didn’t know that. Why—?”

  �
�Why did Mr. Wylie let the burglar in and serve him a drink?”

  “Lieutenant, have you made any effort to find the burglar or burglars who stole the Van Gogh, fake or not, and are the very likely murderer or murderers of Tim Wylie? I’ll be asking you that in court.”

  “Mr. Kellogg— I gotta figure the best thing is for us to talk in the presence of Mr. Dunedin. Maybe in the presence of a judge. This thing has got beyond us just talkin’ in private.”

  “Let’s do it that way, Lieutenant. And on the record.”

  2

  THURSDAY, APRIL 27—1:08 P.M.

  Word that some kind of hearing was being held had somehow leaked, and the hall outside the conference room was jammed with reporters and cameramen. Officers guarded the doors, and the principals entered the room through a rear door.

  The District Attorney himself presided. Charles Dunedin would speak for the prosecution. Chief Wilson and Captain Sczciegel were present, but they would let Columbo speak. Erika sat beside Grant Kellogg, red-faced and tearful. She wore a white blouse and a black skirt and was handcuffed. Jesús Ruiz sat behind Columbo. A court stenographer recorded the proceedings.

  Grant Kellogg spoke first. “Mr. District Attorney, I concede that this is a strictly informal hearing, but it is outrageous that Miss Björling be kept handcuffed. I demand they be taken off her.”

  The District Attorney nodded. Erika grimaced as if it were painful as a woman unlocked and removed the handcuffs.

  “I asked for this hearing,” said Grant, “to put on record my emphatic protest against the unconscionable conduct of the Los Angeles Police Department, as represented by Lieutenant Columbo, in ignoring every scrap of evidence tending to exculpate my client, while focusing obsessively on weak evidence that tends to inculpate her, and conducting an irrational investigation directed at me, apparently because I dare to defend this unfortunate woman. I can only conclude that the Department is trying to bolster a weak case by attacking her counsel.”

  Charles Dunedin spoke. “Mr. Kellogg makes a dramatic speech, as always. Does he want to review the evidence at this time?”