Killed in Fringe Time Read online

  Bates’s eyes and mouth opened wide. “They got him,” he said.

  Mr. M was beginning to look exasperated. “Just a minute,” he demanded. “Who got him?”

  “Well, bless me, Lieutenant, how the hell should I know? Whoever I scared off Friday. I didn’t see them too good. How’d they do it? I didn’t hear any shots, but this is a funny old building with heavy doors, and I might not have. So what can I do for you?”

  The lieutenant said, “Huh?”

  “Well, I assume you’ve come to me because you want my help in catching the bastards, right? I’m the only one who’s had anything to do with them after all, even if they were just shadowy figures in the dark. Who do we question first?”

  I decided I’d better do something about this situation right away, or Lieutenant Martin really would shoot me.

  “Oh, that comes later, um, Clem. For now, the lieutenant is going to hand you over to one of his detectives, and you can brief him.”

  “Her,” the lieutenant said. He opened the door and said, “Hernandez!” A young woman with nice black eyes a lot like Roxanne’s came up to the door. “Yeah, Lieutenant?”

  “This is Mr. Bates. Find a place to talk with him, see what he can tell you. He’s a background witness.” Now the lieutenant looked at me, and I nodded. “Come back here when Hernandez is through with you,” Martin told Bates.

  “Sure thing, Lieutenant.”

  They left. Mr. M’s face clouded up in a scowl. “You’re doing it to me again, boy.”

  I asked him what he meant.

  “Pulled me in on some lunatic case. Bates is a background witness? To what? The Alamo?”

  The only thing to do at that point was to fill him in, fully. I did so, right up to the little visit with Kriecz, and Marcie’s dissatisfaction with our efforts over the soon-to-be-clay of Richard Bentyne.

  It failed to cheer him up.

  “Now, you’re going to try to persuade me that this isn’t a madhouse, right?”

  “Somebody’d have to persuade me, first. It looks like a pipe dream to me.”

  “Yeah,” he growled, “well, one thing’s not a pipe dream. That stiff up there isn’t a pipe dream. He’s about the deadest SOB I ever saw. You told the cop heavy metal poisoning. You know something?”

  I shook my head. “I just read a lot. After Lenny Green got murdered in front of us, I went through a phase of being morbidly curious about poisons. This fit the symptoms. The bitch of it is that I had a bodyguard right outside his door, and Bentyne got the chop anyway.”

  “We’re going to have to check your bodyguard out.”

  “Of course. But he’ll check out fine. He’s been with the Network for years.”

  “Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t suddenly need money and arrange to turn the other way when somebody sneaks in some arsenic-laced chicken.”

  “You sure it was the chicken?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “Assuming you’re right about it’s being arsenic. It’s a long time since I took toxicology, but I remember enough to know that. Acute arsenic poisoning rarely takes longer than an hour or so to polish off the victim. Of course, there’s cumulative arsenic poisoning, smaller doses over time, but that tends to look like a progressive disease. Right, Mr. Morbidly Curious?”

  “Yep,” I said, “absolutely. But that wasn’t what I was talking about. I mean we know the poison wasn’t in the beer—again, if it was arsenic. It doesn’t dissolve in liquid that way, and beer is nice and clear—too easy to see the flakes in it. And we know the chicken was the last thing he ate. Hell, I think he had some in his mouth when I got there.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The question is, did he eat anything before the chicken?”

  The lieutenant shrugged. “The lab boys will tell us about that. And if anybody around here knows anything about it, Rivetz will dig it up.”

  He paused for a moment and scowled. “Maybe I better go see how Rivetz is doing.”

  This was unprecedented. Rivetz was a thirty-year man, and a detective first (who makes more money than a sergeant) on top of it. He’d never been Mr. Personality, but his efficiency and competence were the next best thing to automatic. The lieutenant certainly felt that way.

  “Yeah,” I said. “What’s the matter with Rivetz? He seems a little out of it, today.”

  Martin grunted. “Not just today. All week. His wife’s been diagnosed with cancer—she’d been ignoring a lump in her breast—and now she’s supposed to have that surgery. It’s really got him down,” the lieutenant said.

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Hasn’t affected his work yet, but you can only be depressed for so long before it starts to get to you. So I keep tabs. It makes me nervous he hasn’t noticed yet that I’ve been doing it. When he does, he’s going to kick me in the ass.”

  A television studio, when no taping is actually going on, is a remarkably noisy place, but not now. Everywhere we looked, plainclothes or uniformed cops had individuals or small groups aside, and were engaging them in earnest, but quiet confab.

  Respect for the dead. In a couple of hours, the shock would be off, and all these TV people would return to being their usual brash selves. In fact, that night, out in L.A., after a number of facts about the case had leaked out, one West Coast talk show host sent a rival a full fried chicken dinner, along with a note that said, “My own personal recipe. Enjoy, sucka.” This earned him a couple of rather unpleasant hours with the LAPD, doing a favor for their brother officers back East.

  As for now, though, the jokes hadn’t started, and the small gatherings of people huddled against the walls of the building and waiting to talk to someone in authority reminded me of nothing so much as Holy Saturday at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I had to admit, though, that if all these people were getting ready to make confessions, this case might never be solved.

  We found Rivetz leading a team tossing Bentyne’s dressing room.

  The body was gone, but I’ve got to tell you something. If you’ve actually seen the stiff before it is taken away, the tape outline on the rug is no real help. Your memory and imagination team up to fill in that outline with a mental image that’s even grislier than the reality. I had to blink away a mental image worthy of The Exorcist before joining reality.

  The search was about done. Rivetz and the detectives had been neat, professional, and thorough—it looked as if the lieutenant had no need to worry about Rivetz’s performance yet.

  In fact, Rivetz seemed a lot more like his old self. The twisted smile was back on his seamed face. “Ah, Lieutenant,” he said. “I was just about to send for you.”

  “Find anything?”

  Rivetz took off his omnipresent Broderick Crawford Highway Patrol gray fedora, and ran his hand over the spikes of iron-gray hair that sprang up from his head, having not the slightest effect on them.

  “Yeah, something,” he said. “Let me catch you up before I show it to you, though. The ME agrees with me that it was probably arsenic that got him. They’ll be doing a rush job on that—we gotta have a bone to throw the media types before they tear us poor civil servants to ribbons, right, Cobb?”

  Gee, he was taunting me again, and everything. In a little while, he might forget he had a wife at all, let alone a sick one. “Right, Rivetz,” I said.

  “The other thing is, if the stuff was in the chicken, it may be no big help. Turns out everybody in the world knew he had this special fried chicken limoed in from Connecticut every day in an insulated picnic basket. So anybody who wanted to could make the opportunity to get to it.”

  He shrugged. “The next question, of course, is who wanted to, and we’re working on that. Looks like a pretty long list, and what I found in here could make it longer.”

  Bentyne had a ceramic statue of Groucho Marx, about three feet high, in one corner of the dressing room. Rivetz went over to it and unscrewed the hand that held the cigar close to Groucho’s mouth. Inside the hollow was a black velvet bag, the kind they sometimes put booze
bottles in at Christmastime.

  “I put it back after I let the lab guys take some to test. I didn’t want to leave it lying around.”

  Rivetz brought the black bag to Bentyne’s desk. I noticed that he stepped smack in the middle of the tape outline to get there. I always walk around. He opened the string on the bag and spilled the contents out onto the glass desktop. There were four little plastic bags, taped tight, each about the size and shape of an Italian sausage, and one a little smaller, maybe two thirds the size. Say a pound in all.

  “There was an open one,” Rivetz said. “I sent that off with the lab boys—don’t worry they signed for it. I promised them the rest as soon as you saw it.”

  I asked permission, and fingered one of the bags. They contained a coarse, grayish-white powder. “Dope?” I said.

  I was thinking, no wonder the shithead needed forty-five million dollars if this was his idea of a little stash. It was hard to figure, though. Bentyne was weird, but he didn’t act like a junkie or even a cokehead.

  Rivetz was shaking his head. “Beats the crap out of me,” he said. “It’s not like any dope I ever ran into, and I was on narcotics for six years. Didn’t smell like it, didn’t feel like it, so I ran a few street tests. It doesn’t dissolve in water or alcohol—Bentyne has some aftershave in the bathroom over there—and it doesn’t melt, it just chars and makes a smell like my Aunt Sophie used to make singeing the hair off her arms over the stove.”

  “Interesting,” the lieutenant said. “Okay, send somebody to the lab with the rest—”

  My phone rang. This was the new deal at the Network. No more beepers—cellular phones. I hated the goddam things. It’s one thing to keep in touch; it’s another to be constantly attached to your office by an electronic umbilical cord, even if it is invisible and runs through a satellite.

  This time, though, I was glad I had it. I picked up and listened, then told the caller I was on my way and rang off.

  “That was the Connecticut State Police,” I said.

  “Why’d they call you?” Rivetz demanded.

  “Tell you on the way.”

  The lieutenant raised an eyebrow. “We’re all going?”

  “I think you’ll want to. They just caught someone breaking into Bentyne’s house.”

  “He’s a good boy.”

  —MAE QUESTEL

  Scott Towels commercial

  9

  SHE SAT ON A GURNEY in the emergency room of St. Mary’s Hospital in Stamford, smiling at us and talking as if she were entertaining us in a living room.

  “Thank you, gentlemen, for coming. I do so want to talk to someone. I’m so embarrassed, and I must look a fright.”

  She didn’t look close to a fright. She wasn’t as polished as she might ordinarily be—the bandage on her hand covered a good forty or fifty stitches from where she’d punched through the glass in Richard Bentyne’s kitchen door, and there were a few consequent spots of blood on her frilly white silk blouse and her lavender suit. A few wisps of soft gray hair had escaped her chignon. She was pale, partly from shock, partly from loss of blood, and partly, no doubt, from painkillers.

  She definitely looked as if she’d been through something, but she didn’t look a fright. She looked like a bright (blue) eyed, ever-so-slightly plump, wrinkle-free, attractive lady in her mid-fifties. Give her brown hair, and she could have been the model for the Betty Crocker of my youth.

  She definitely did not look the obsessive nutcase who had frustrated police forces across the country. But she was.

  Her name was Barbara Bentyne Anapole, and she was originally from Akron, Ohio, an ordinary housewife and mother until about eight years ago. We learned her sad story from a Connecticut State Trooper who was more than glad to surrender her to the NYPD because (1) a murder case took precedence over a mere breaking and entering, (2) because she was currently a legal resident of New York, and (3) because Connecticut didn’t have the foggiest notion of what to do with her.

  Nobody said so in so many words, but I got the impression that the guardians of the Nutmeg State would feel less sadness about the passing of a rising American superstar than they otherwise might because his death probably meant that they wouldn’t have to go on busting this unbalanced, but otherwise nice old lady.

  You couldn’t even blame her for being unbalanced. Eight years ago, she’d been home, fixing Thanksgiving dinner while her husband drove around Akron in the minivan, picking up their two sons and their families. The vehicle was full of passengers and on its way home when they were broadsided by a drunk driver, and driven into oncoming traffic. The only survivor of the family had been a daughter-in-law Barbara had never liked anyway.

  Husband, kids, grandkids, boom, gone. One second, family, next second, no family. I don’t know if I could face it.

  Unfortunately, just about that time, a young comedian named Richard Bentyne was coming to prominence. It so happened that as a teenager, Mrs. Anapole had had a son out of wedlock, whom she gave up for adoption. With the logic of desperation, out of the aching need not to be alone, she decided that Richard Bentyne was the long-ago departed infant. He had her maiden name, didn’t he? He had blond hair and blue eyes like her family, didn’t he?

  She denied or ignored everything that didn’t fit her desires. For instance, the fact that Richard Bentyne had a living set of parents all present and accounted for, or the fact that he was at least five years too old to be the child she’d put up for adoption.

  When you tried to raise these facts, she’d just smile an indulgent, motherly smile and tell you that the press would say just anything these days, it was just a disgrace.

  “There I was, just sitting in my apartment—” She lived in a high-rise across the street from Lincoln Center and went to the opera frequently. Insurance and her late husband’s investments had left her well fixed. “Just sitting in my apartment,” she said, “having a cup of coffee. I love a cup of fresh-brewed coffee in the middle of the morning, it perks me right up. In the afternoon, though, I like tea. Wouldn’t you gentlemen like a cup of tea? Young man!”

  She stopped an orderly and gave him a tea order. “And plenty of cream, sugar, and lemon, now,” she concluded.

  The orderly was about to be offended when Lieutenant Martin flashed him his shield and said, too quietly for the lady to hear, “Homicide investigation. Besides, I heard the doctor tell her to force fluids. Just do it, okay?”

  The orderly thought it over for a few seconds, then said, “Uh, okay.”

  She smiled happily at us again. “Now, where was I?”

  “Watching television and drinking coffee.”

  “That’s right.” She nodded at me like a second-grade teacher at a bright pupil. “Well, there I was, and they interrupted Phil Donahue, and came on with a news bulletin saying My Richard was dead.

  “That was a very cruel thing to do, you know, even for the press. They might have known I’d be watching, or at least that I’d find out about what they’d said. Of course, I was shocked at first, but then I recognized it for the cruel joke it was.”

  “How?” I asked.

  I saw that indulgent smile for the first time. “A mother knows,” she said. “When the ... tragedy ... happened out in Akron, you know, I felt something at the moment it happened. I think I already knew when I saw the policeman coming up the walk.

  “But let’s not talk of unhappy things. Are you religious?” she asked.

  “I’m not an atheist,” I told her. It seemed to make her happy.

  “Well, I firmly believe that the Lord doesn’t try us beyond our strength. I lost many people I loved, but then I found Richard. Now, I know how busy and successful he is, and that he doesn’t have a lot of spare time to spend with me, but I’m not one of those possessive mothers you read about. I understand he’s a grown man, now, and needs to spread his wings and make his own decisions.

  “Still, on a day like today, with the media telling such nasty lies about him—Can’t you do anything about tha
t, Mr. Martin?”

  Lieutenant Martin looked as uncomfortable as I felt. “Um, no, ma’am. Unfortunately, the media gets to say pretty much what it wants to.”

  Especially, I thought, when it’s the truth. Eventually, somebody was going to have to tell her that she’d lost her (delusionary) second family as well as her first. I was just glad it wasn’t going to be me.

  “It seems disgraceful they can get away with that. However, I decided that after dealing with something like that, I would do something I’d never done before. I’d go to Richard’s house and let myself in and make him a good home-cooked meal. It would be something comforting to come home to.”

  “How did you know how to get there?”

  “Oh, I’ve been there many times. Sometimes I just like to take the train up from the city, get a taxi at the station, and just sit in the car awhile and admire how far my boy has come. Why, even the taxi drivers know him personally.”

  Which explained, I thought, how Barbara Anapole found the place in the beginning—undoubtedly, Bentyne had used taxis around here sometimes, and the drivers had, understandably enough, remembered where the star lived. I had no trouble believing Mrs. Anapole could have convinced them that she was Richard Bentyne’s mother; I had to keep reminding myself it wasn’t true.

  “Today, when I came, I didn’t just sit in the taxi and look; I got out and paid him and sent him away. And then I realized I’d forgotten my keys.”

  “Your keys,” the lieutenant said.

  “Yes,” she said. She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “Richard gave them to me after he first moved in here. At one of our secret meetings. We have to have secret meetings because of That Woman.” For the first time, Mrs. Anapole didn’t seem so nice.

  “You mean Vivian Pike?”

  She gave me a grim nod. “That’s the one. She’ll do anything to keep my son and me apart. She wouldn’t even let my phone calls go through. And it’s all so unnecessary. I’m not one of those jealous or possessive mothers. I’m the kind of mother who wants her son to find a nice girl.”