Killed in Fringe Time Read online

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means these nutty little sideshows that show up upon the fringes of the case. Your mountain man with his gun, shooting at shadows. The mother who isn’t. All that crap. It isn’t that stuff that’s worrying me. Richard Bentyne is dead from poison. When I find somebody with the motive, opportunity, and means to have killed Richard Bentyne, I’m going to arrest that person, and only then will I worry about this fringe shit.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “This is a fringe-time murder.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Any time between late local news and the Rise and Shine shows is called fringe time. It’s the last frontier of expanding profits for the traditional TV networks. We paid Bentyne to make us a fortune on the fringes of the broadcast day.”

  “So?”

  “So, maybe on a fringe-time murder, it’s the stuff on the fringes that carries the real importance.”

  “You,” the lieutenant said, “are simply trying to bust my ass and shake my confidence.”

  I grinned at him. “Maybe,” I conceded.

  “It won’t work.”

  “Good for you. So, you’ve got the lift of a firm resolve. How about you, Rivetz?”

  “What about me?”

  “You seem more your old hostile self. Are you borne along on the lieutenant’s tide, or do you think you see daylight somewhere?”

  “I see daylight somewhere, but not in the case. My wife’s gonna have the operation she needs.”

  “Hey, that’s great!”

  “Yeah. The doc said she hasn’t waited too long, thank God, so her chance of coming through healthy is really good.”

  “What made her change her mind?”

  “I did. I got fed up and yelled at her last night. I told her if she was so scared of the goddamn operation that she’d rather die than have it, that was her business, but she had some brass-bound nerve to say she was avoiding it because she wanted to be fair to me. I told her I did not love her for her tits, and that I didn’t marry her for her tits. I told her I loved her for what she was inside, not outside, and if she didn’t know that and believe it by now, our whole marriage was a joke, so she might as well forget being ‘fair to me’ and have the operation anyway.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Yeah. Anybody else ever talked to her like that, I’d a slugged him. As it was, I wanted to slug myself.

  “But it worked. Before I knew it, she was in my lap like we were newlyweds, crying all over my paper and saying it was the nicest thing that ever happened to her.

  “So, not being a dope, I called the doctor before she could change her mind.”

  “I’m glad it worked out.”

  “Yeah, me too. Now enough of the sentimental bullshit, tell the lieutenant what you’re bursting to tell us.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll tell you. But the first thing is only what you would call a fringe issue, so don’t be disappointed.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The reason Vivian Pike wanted me out there today was to tell me she was the one who gave Bentyne the rhino powder.”

  Fringe issue or not, they wanted to know all about it, so I told them. I included Marcie’s having told me that Bentyne had actually been using the stuff for months before he was killed.

  “Great!” Rivetz said. “Now we can forget all about the crap. It can’t possibly have anything to do with his murder.”

  “Not so great,” the lieutenant countered. “Once this gets out, there goes our smoke screen with the press, and they’ll zero right back in on us again.”

  “There’s no rule you have to tell the press, is there? I sort of promised Vivian Pike I’d keep her involvement quiet, if I could.”

  “Her story is still going to have to be checked. We’ll tell the L.A. cops to tiptoe, but you can’t investigate a news operation without running into journalists, know what I mean?”

  “I know. Just do the best you can.”

  “We will. Now what about the other thing you’re so eager to tell us?”

  “That envelope she opened—the one with the bomb in it.”

  “What about it?”

  “The lab looking at it?”

  “In Connecticut. They wouldn’t let go of it. Them, I should say. It was torn up into a few pieces, as you might expect.”

  “Do they think they’ll be able to read it?”

  “They sounded optimistic. They can do some amazing things with damaged documents these days. They’re supposed to call me when they’re done. That’s one reason we’re hanging around the office. Why?”

  “Because I got a good look at the letter. I saw the address.”

  “So?”

  “It was addressed to Richard Bentyne. Not to Vivian Pike. Richard Bentyne.”

  “And you waited till now to tell us this?”

  “I wanted to get rid of Bates first. I knew you’d want to talk about it.”

  The lieutenant grumbled but eventually accepted my reason for delay. That was nice, because it was a lie. The real reason was that I wanted some time to think about it myself.

  “This raises a few possibilities,” Rivetz said. “Did she open his mail as a regular thing? You think the guy who poisoned Bentyne was after a clean sweep?”

  “The impression I got was that she didn’t ordinarily open his mail. In fact, she looked at the envelopes, saw that it was all for him, and put it aside. I think she only opened the package, one, because it was a package—I don’t know about you guys, but I’m always more curious about merchandise than I am about regular letters.”

  “I’m most curious about brown envelopes from the IRS,” the lieutenant said.

  Rivetz snorted. “I’d rather get a bomb.”

  “The other reason was that she was agitated, and wanted something to do with her hands. I don’t think anybody could be sure she’d open that package.”

  “There’s one way,” Rivetz pointed out. “If she sent it herself. Shunt suspicion aside.”

  “Rivetz, it blew her up. It could have killed her.”

  “She wasn’t actually hurt bad, was she?”

  “She isn’t under much suspicion, is she?” I countered.

  Lieutenant Martin intoned, “The wicked flee where no man pursueth.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but only the moronic playeth footsie with bombs for effect.”

  Rivetz grinned. “Not bad. I never believed it, anyway. But it happened in a mystery novel I read once.”

  “The Dain Curse, by Dashiell Hammett. Hammett himself said it was silly.”

  “Just something else we have to check,” the lieutenant said. He leaned back in his chair. He had shifted into his wise-old-man-seen-it-all-done-it-all mode. He only did that when he was tried.

  “But look,” Rivetz said, “it still could have been intended to get the Pike woman. Bentyne was dead—somebody was bound to open the damn thing eventually.”

  “Not necessarily Pike, though,” I pointed out. “She’s not next of kin or anything, she was just shacking up with the guy. That bomb was just as likely to get Bentyne’s mother—his real one, out West—or a lawyer as it was to get Vivian Pike.”

  Rivetz shrugged. “Well, a lawyer, what the hell? And as for the mother, this is a murderer we’re talking about. They’re not known for sentimentality. Maybe it was worth a chance.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but what I’d like to see is the postmark on that envelope.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I know it seems like forever, but Bentyne bit the big chicken on Monday morning—only yesterday. Which reminds me—if our killer was out to make a clean sweep, why didn’t he poison Vivian Pike’s coffee and Danish while he was at it?”

  The lieutenant was professorial. “You’re digressing, Matty. Keep to the point. Bentyne was killed late yesterday morning, early yesterday afternoon. What of it?”

  “Well, it’s not unknown for a letter to get from New York to Connecticut in
a single day, but if that thing was mailed before yesterday, it means Bentyne was poisoned while another murder plan was already in the works.”

  The lieutenant’s eyes opened wide. “And if it was mailed yesterday, or after say, noon yesterday ...”

  “Right. Somebody mailed him a bomb when he was already dead.”

  “Either way it doesn’t make any sense, unless Rivetz is right. About the killer trying for the woman, I mean.”

  “I think,” I said, “you ought to have a talk with the post office.”

  Which he did. He worked his way through various layers of federal employees until he reached someone both willing and capable of telling him what he wanted to know.

  “All right,” the lieutenant said, hanging up the phone. “This comes with no guarantees, but given traffic, volume of mail yesterday, and general procedures, he says the thing could have been mailed as late as one o’clock P.M. yesterday and made it to Darien, Connecticut, today—if it was dropped at the post office.”

  “Damn progress, anyhow,” Rivetz said, “In the old days, the postmark, if we get it, would tell us exactly what time and what post office. Now it’ll only have the date and ‘New York’ on it.”

  So now, all there was to do was wait. We waited for L.A. to come through on the rhino horn story, which they did about ten o’clock our time. And we waited and waited for the Connecticut lab to give us the word on the envelope fragments.

  About four o’clock, the lieutenant hauled us out to Earnie’s, insisting that grease was good for us.

  Ten minutes to five, a warm glow had set up in my esophagus that would keep me awake for hours. The phone rang behind the counter, and a guy with tattoos “Lieutenant? It’s your office. Connecticut’s about ready to fax you something. That mean anything to you?”

  We threw money at him and ran.

  “You’re in the picture!”

  —JOHNNY OLSEN

  You’re in the Picture, CBS

  18

  IT WOULDN’T DO FOR US to wait until the fax came through, and then look at it like sensible adults. No. We had to cram into a closet with a civilian fax machine operator like clowns in a circus car, and watch it come across inch by inch.

  “Why’s it so dark?” I asked.

  “They’re sending a negative and a positive,” the technician said. “Sometimes things show up one way better than the other.”

  So I stood there, sweating like an idiot, watching first a dark gray rectangle with some lighter gray on it appear, followed by a light gray rectangle with some darker areas.

  When they’d both come through, along with some technical notes from Connecticut lab boys, the lieutenant grabbed them greedily and brought them back to his office. He lay the documents down on his desk and took a magnifying glass to it.

  “There it is,” he said. “17 Aug. Yesterday’s date all right.”

  “A.M.,” I added. “So it was mailed in the morning before Bentyne was killed, or almost literally before the body hit the floor. There’s something funny about this?”

  Rivetz was indulging himself in a fiendish chortle. “Post Office stuff. Federal business. I was just wondering how the blue boys were going to like this case.”

  “Of course, there’s one possibility we didn’t mention,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Two different murderers.”

  The two cops groaned.

  “We haven’t mentioned it, Matty, because we don’t want to think about it. If there’s two of them out there, we’ve got to catch them both, or there’s no sense of catching any.”

  “Why?” I demanded.

  “Because defense lawyers aren’t stupid. ‘You mean to say, Lieutenant, that though you accuse my client of poisoning Richard Bentyne, you have no explanation whatever for the bomb that exploded in his house that same morning. That by some extraordinary coincidence someone totally unknown to you was trying to murder Mr. Bentyne? Yet you deny the reasonable possibility that this person might have been responsible for the poisoning as well? Really, Lieutenant.’ And on and on.”

  “I hate those guys,” Rivetz said.

  “It was the next day,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “The bomb went off the next day, not the same day. But you’ve made your point.”

  “Two killers is a nightmare. Even one killer and one potential killer.” The lieutenant shook his head. “Two cases to make. Two lawyers. Two trials. If, as I said, you catch them both in the first place. Enough to drive a cop to drink.”

  “Okay, okay. I’m sorry I mentioned it.”

  “All right, then. If, God forbid, it turns out to be true, we’ll find out the bad news soon enough.” Lieutenant Martin stretched and yawned. “Now, Matty,” he said. “You got any other reason to be here?”

  “You trying to get rid of me?”

  “Hah!” he said. “I’m trying to get rid of me! I personally got five dozen reasons to hang around here, most of them in the form of paperwork.”

  “Me, too,” Rivetz said.

  “But paperwork doesn’t do anybody any good when you’re so tired it comes out alphabet soup. I’m gonna go home and get some sleep before I lose the knack.”

  “Me, too,” Rivetz said.

  “I’ve got to get home and walk the dog,” I said.

  Rivetz grinned. “Have fun. Don’t break the poop-scoop law.”

  “Neither Spot nor I would dream of it. Good night.”

  The lieutenant massaged the back of his neck. “Yeah, good morning. Let us know if you get any more bright ideas, but not for, oh, twelve to sixteen hours, okay? After I wake up, I’m gonna want to eat.”

  I told them I’ve never felt farther from a bright idea in my life, and started for the door.

  “Matty?”

  I turned. “What?”

  “Nice haircut,” the lieutenant said.

  I walked and fed Spot, caught a few hours of sleep, a shower and a shave, and was at my desk at the Tower of Babble at a time not too unbecoming an executive of my stature. What I would have liked to have been doing was pounding my ear for another eight or ten hours, but I spent so little time actually at the office lately, I thought I’d better put in something longer than a cameo. We run a reasonably loose ship at Special Projects, but I didn’t want Those Higher Up to start asking questions, either. Not that I didn’t have the answers, mind you, I just didn’t want the bother.

  It was almost a relief to face a deskful of routine reports and queries.

  Shirley Arnstein reported from Washington that it was in fact true that News’s new Supreme Court correspondent was a Scientologist. Did we care?

  As a strict believer in the First Amendment, I certainly didn’t give a damn, as long as the guy didn’t try to put the Chief Justice on the cans and discover his hidden traumatic birth engrams, which he wouldn’t be able to do and keep his job, anyway. I decided to kick the whole matter back to News, with a recommendation that the Network mind its own damn business, and who over there started this inquiry, anyhow?

  There was a short report from Harris Brophy. Harris’s reports of failure were always short. In this case, he was telling me that nobody’d heard from Frank Harlan in a year and a half at least, but that he’d keep trying.

  Well, I thought, Harris is the best there is. If he can’t find Frank Harlan, then Frank Harlan was nowhere around to be found.

  Who the hell was Frank Harlan?

  It took me a good two minutes to remember. Frank Harlan was the writer who’d wanted to do the bio of Clement Bates. I’d wanted to talk to him, but the case had sort of twisted away from that line of thinking. I made a note to tell Harris to forget it, when I saw him.

  Bookkeeping had sent a query—our expenses for June and July had been down 30 percent from the same period in the previous year—was there something wrong?

  There is no pleasing these people. If you spend more than they think you should, they gripe about it, and if you spend less, like a true corporate hero
, their sleazy little bookkeeping brains give birth to the suspicions that you’re not doing your job.

  I had Jazz get them on the phone, and once I had them, I explained with all the patience I could muster on three hours’ sleep that Special Projects wasn’t like other departments at the Network. We couldn’t predict, we had to react. The reason we spent more money last June and July than for the same two months this year was that last year we had three potential scandals we had to defuse with a lot of travel and large-scale bribery, and this year we didn’t.

  The talk did about as much good as usual.

  Then there was a note from Bart Eggelstein in Programming.

  I thought, Programming? Programming was a bunch of people who sat in the dark all day long looking alternately at pilots of TV shows and computer printouts of demographics, arranging little blocks of time on a magnetic board, and giving themselves ulcers trying to figure out in advance what The American Viewer (whoever that was) was going to want to watch next season. They were kings and queens when they guessed right, and unemployed when they guessed wrong.

  But isolated as they were, they never had anything to do with Special Projects.

  The novelty of the thing led me to place the call to Bart Eggelstein myself. That and Network protocol. He and I were both vice presidents, but that’s a lot like saying Carl Lewis and your golf-playing Uncle Wally are both athletes. Strictly true, but laughable in reality.

  I got through to him in about a minute and a half, a pretty fair indication of our relative importance in the Network scheme of things.

  “Cobb!” Eggelstein yelled. He wasn’t mad, that was just his style, a very New York style. He didn’t just talk, he made declarations! The late Isaac Asimov was the same way. I think the fact that you usually find this trait in successful people is no accident—they always sound so excited about everything, you get swept along just talking to them.

  “Yes, I’m returning your call.”

  “Yes! Very good of you to be so prompt!”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Well, first of all, you could tell me what to put on in place of Bentyne. I’m going with old cop show reruns, but I don’t like it. Also, I have an opening in my department, and I—”