Killed in Fringe Time Read online

I detected a little extra emphasis on the word “nice.”

  “I would be happy if he were married, though. Young people today mock marriage, but in a marriage, you know where you stand.”

  “Did you make the chicken, Mrs. Anapole?”

  She smiled brightly. “What chicken?”

  “The chicken,” I said, “that Mr. Gambrelli, the driver, drove into New York with for your—for Richard’s lunch.”

  “Oh, I’m glad he’ll have at least one good meal today. No, I didn’t make any chicken. I never even got inside. I tried to force the door open, and the glass broke, and I cut my hand horribly. It was such a foolish thing to do, but I wanted to be there for my son.”

  “Yeah,” the lieutenant said. “Will you excuse us for a moment, ma’am? We’ll be right back.”

  “But we haven’t had our tea!” she protested.

  I’d forgotten all about it, but sure enough, at the moment, the orderly returned with a tray on which sat a pot of boiling water, some tea bags, some foam cups, sugar, lemon, and little plastic things of nondairy creamer. He smiled like a waiter, told us his name (Vernon), and even poured for us.

  All I could figure was that he’d been hypnotized by the flashing of the lieutenant’s tin, and was now convinced he was Nick Carter undercover on the trail of Dr. Quartz. Or maybe he knew that Mrs. Anapole would go for her purse and tip him two bucks, which she did, and he needed the money.

  In any case, we had our tea now, and we stood there sipping it exactly as though we actually wanted it, while trading remarks about gardening. Rivetz, it turned out, grew roses in his garden out in Queens, and Mrs. Anapole had been a prize rose grower in her day. My eyes glazed over, but I fought to keep from showing it. As a Manhattanite, I feel the only place vegetable matter really needs to be is floating next to matzoh balls in a good chicken soup.

  Finally, after I’d heard more about fertilizers and aphids than I ever cared to, we were done, and the lieutenant again made our excuses. She graciously granted us leave.

  We withdrew to a little supply closet.

  “Jesus,” Lieutenant Martin said, “what are we going to do with her?”

  “Bust her,” Rivetz said, “She’s a loon. She probably did it. Maybe she was aiming for the girlfriend.”

  “What’s the matter,” I said, “don’t like the way she grows roses?”

  “Her roses are fine. I just think when you have a homicide on one hand and a nut on the other hand, they just naturally go together.” The seams in his face got smaller, tighter, and more numerous. “Besides, I know you’re a TV expert and the lieutenant’s known you since you were a baby, but that don’t make you a cop, and never will. All right?”

  “Take it easy, Rivetz,” the lieutenant said.

  “I’m taking it fine. I just don’t need to be razzed by an amateur in the middle of a homicide investigation.”

  Fair is fair, and he was right. “I’m sorry, Rivetz. I didn’t mean any disrespect.”

  His small dark eyes looked disappointed, as though he’d not only been expecting a fight, but wanting one, too.

  Still, he nodded at me, and said, “Just so we know where we stand.” A few seconds later, he added, “Hospitals. God, they make me depressed.”

  It was as close to a conciliatory gesture as he was ever likely to make.

  “Is that all you have against her?” the lieutenant demanded. “Just a hunch?”

  “Yeah,” Rivetz said. “For now. What the hell, check into it, right? I mean, she could have a motive, easy. Maybe she’s faced the fact that he’s not her son, or that he’ll never admit it. Or maybe it was aimed at the Pike woman, the one she saw coming between her and Bentyne.”

  “Means? If it’s arsenic, the way we figure—”

  The lieutenant shook his head. “I’m going to be glad when we get that lab report.”

  “I know what you mean,” Rivetz said. “But look, if it is arsenic, well, you can get that anywhere. Rat poison, roach poison. When I was a kid, there used to be flypaper.”

  “There still is,” I said. “I heard about some today.”

  “You did?” Rivetz said. “Where?”

  “At the studio. Bates sent the producers of the show a bunch of stuff he uses, living out in the mountains like that. Kerosene lamp. Snowshoes. Flypaper, a few sheets of which disappeared, things like that. I think they were going to have a sort of show and tell on the air, with Bates being picturesque about what each thing is used for.”

  Mr. M stared at me. “Matty?” he said softly. “You suspected arsenic poisoning?”

  “Right.”

  “And you knew they had this flypaper?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “And it never occurred to you to tell me about it?” His voice was no longer soft.

  I had to admit that in retrospect, it did seem rather dumb. I defended myself by pointing out that I was younger than Rivetz, and had never seen flypaper, at least the poisoned kind, actually in use. In fact, my only exposure to the stuff had been a Dashiell Hammett story.

  “Call the studio on that gadget of yours. I want to tell them to find that stuff and latch hold of it, get some to the lab.”

  I did so. When Mr. M was done and had handed me back the phone, I said, “If it was the flypaper, that lets the mother off the hook.”

  Rivetz reminded me that she wasn’t the mother.

  “You know what I mean,” I said. “Anyway, she’s pretty clean on the opportunity issue, too. As far as I can make out the times from back at the studio and from the hospital log, Mrs. Anapole was having her hand sewn up here just about the same time the basket of chicken was showing up at the studio. I grant you it sat around for a while, and anybody there might have gotten to it, but it would have been awfully hard for her—she wasn’t there.”

  Rivetz shook his head. “There’s no problem there. I talked to the Pike woman. Somebody named Frances Jarmy comes on a daily basis to clean up and to make Bentyne’s lunch—wouldn’t you think a guy getting paid as much money as your Network was giving him could eat at a goddamn restaurant?”

  “There were dietetic considerations,” I said. “Go on.”

  “Yeah. Try and stop me. Anyway, Jarmy would make the lunch and hand it over to Gambrelli when he showed up. If Jarmy had to go out before Gambrelli showed up, the stuff was left on the front porch with a note. Tell me why Mother Machree over there couldn’t have switched baskets.”

  “I think,” I said, “that I would really treasure a talk with Frances Jarmy about now.”

  The lieutenant grunted. “Me, too. The state cops are looking. Local boys in the Weston area, too.”

  “In the meantime, I want to have a look at Bentyne’s house,” Rivetz said. “We’re out of state—do we need a warrant?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Don’t tell me—you’re a lawyer, too.”

  “No, but I am an officer of the Network. We own the house. A free house to live in was part of Bentyne’s deal.”

  The lieutenant just grunted again, but Rivetz couldn’t stand it. “Free houses. Multimillion-dollar salary. For what? For bullshitting on television. There’s no justice at all in this goddamn world.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “You’re the one with the dangerous job, ducking bullets and all that, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “But Bentyne is the one who’s dead.”

  Rivetz pursed his lips. “Good point,” he said.

  “I want to get out there, too,” the lieutenant said. “But what are we going to do with Mother Hubbard over there? Nobody in this state is willing to bust her or commit her, but I’m damned if I’m going to let her run around loose.”

  The answer was obvious to me, and had been for some time now, but I would be damned if I would be the one to say it, as touchy as everybody was lately.

  There was silence for a long time. When Rivetz finally broke down and said, “I guess we have to take her with us,” I suppressed a smile.

  “Robin, I bel
ieve this calls

  for a session with the Bat Cave’s

  computerized crime files.”

  —ADAM WEST

  Batman, ABC

  10

  WE CLEARED OUR VISIT with local authorities, who after checking that I was representing the Network as legal owner, grumbled a little and let us be.

  We drove out in the lieutenant’s unmarked car, him in the front with Rivetz, me in the back with Mrs. Anapole. She was awfully quiet as we traveled, and as I watched her, the Demerol they’d given her at the hospital finally began to click in. Her eyes would droop and her head would loll, until she jerked herself awake with a wide-eyed snap of the neck.

  “Hang in there,” I told her. “We’ll be there before you know it. Then you can lie down.”

  She squinted at me. “Do you think it will be all right?” Her words were a little slurred. “I mean, do you think Richard will mind?” Through the fog came genuine worry.

  “No,” I said truthfully. “I’m sure Richard won’t mind.”

  In the front seat, Rivetz let out a low whistle, and I wanted to slug him.

  “You know, Matty,” the lieutenant said, “you may be representing the legal owner and all that, but you still don’t have a key to this place, do you?”

  “Don’t need one,” Rivetz growled. “We can get in where Moth—where the lady here broke the window.”

  “Precisely,” I said smugly, exactly as though the matter had even crossed my mind.

  And that’s what we did. There was broken glass outside the door and a goodly amount of blood with it, but Rivetz crunched across, reached through the hole, and opened up. I was afraid our guest might be affected by the sight of a coagulating pool of her own personal gore, but by now, she was too woozy to notice.

  I led her through to the living room, and put her down on the big leather couch with a couple of cushions.

  “Want the afghan?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she buzzed. “Thank you, Richard.”

  I ignored it. I made sure she’d taken her shoes off, then I covered her. I took her injured right hand and placed it across her chest, just under her breast, so that it wouldn’t fill with blood and swell while she was out. In a matter of seconds, she was snoring.

  “Maybe she oughta adopt you,” Rivetz said. “Now that there’s a vacancy, I mean.”

  “Rivetz,” I said, “I never met anybody like you. You can’t even stand the sight of someone being decent to another human being.”

  “Fine. Sit here and be decent and baby-sit her while the lieutenant and I look around the house.”

  “Not necessary,” I told him.

  “No?” She could be faking, you know. As soon as you leave the room, she could be up off that couch and out of here, and who knows who could wind up dead?”

  “She’s not going anywhere,” I said. “Stay here a second. I’ll be right back.”

  I dashed out to the kitchen, opened a wall panel, pushed a few buttons on a security console, and rejoined them.

  “There,” I said. “Now the whole place is alarmed except the door we came in by.” I picked up Mrs. Anapole’s shoes and slipped them into my pocket. “Now, if she wants to leave, it has to be barefoot over broken glass.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. I said I was decent, not an idiot. There is a difference.”

  “Matty,” the lieutenant said, “lighten up.”

  I didn’t feel like lightening up. “I know she’s a few pictures shy of a portfolio, all right? I just happen to sympathize with what made her that way.”

  I spread my hands. “Look, I’m a grown man, my father died last year of natural causes, and I still haven’t completely gotten over it. This woman lost her whole family in a second. It might send me around the bend, if it happened to me. You, I suppose are immune.”

  Rivetz looked at me as if I were a slug he’d found in the lettuce on his Whopper. He stared at me for a long time.

  “You think so?” he said. They were the three bitterest words I’d ever heard, and suddenly I remembered what the lieutenant had told me this morning.

  I hastened to apologize, but Rivetz went on before I could get any of the words out.

  “Listen, Cobb. My wife’s name is Marie. I met her in junior high school. In high school we dated, then I went into the army. I traveled a lot, met a lot of girls. But it was a funny thing. Some of them reminded me of Marie, and the rest of them made me wish they did.

  “When I got out, by some miracle she was still available, so I married her. For thirty years she’s been a cop’s wife. You know what being a cop’s wife is, Cobb? Of course you don’t, how could you? Being a cop’s wife is the only job in the world tougher than being a cop.

  “We’re old-fashioned, Cobb. We live in a little house in Queens, and Marie keeps it clean and decent and cheerful, and when I go there, I can forget the shit we wade in in the streets. We weren’t lucky enough to have kids, but we’ve been happy together.

  “Only now she’s going to die, Cobb. She’s going to die. She doesn’t have to, but she’s going to. Because she won’t have the operation she needs to live. Says she doesn’t want to be ‘mutilated.’ Says it wouldn’t be fair to me.”

  He gave a little bewildered laugh. “Can you believe that? Married to this woman for over thirty years, and she thinks I’m such a bastard that something like that is going to matter to me?”

  He took off his hat and rubbed uselessly at his hair.

  “I don’t even know what to say to her,” he went on. “We sit around the house with the TV on and pretend to watch it, and then I go to work and deal with death all day long, then I go home at night and deal with it some more.”

  He pointed at me. “So, Cobb, do me a favor. Don’t tell me I’m immune from anything. I’m losing my whole family by inches only because she wants to die.”

  I told him I was sorry. It sounded, as it always does in circumstances like this, pitifully inadequate.

  “Forget it,” he said. “I’m sorry I mistook you for Ann Landers.”

  “You two done?” the lieutenant asked. He was trying to sound impatient, but I think he was glad Rivetz had let some of his troubles out. “Come on, we’ve got work to do.”

  This was the point at which Rivetz usually reminded me that the cops had work to do, and that I was merely along for the ride, but apparently, we had entered an Era of Good Feeling, of which I heartily approved. I didn’t risk upsetting it by taking part in the search, a chore that is too much like housework to appeal to me, anyway.

  Instead, I followed them around, a polite little representative of the owner, giving them permission to do anything they felt would solve the case, occasionally going back to check our elderly Sleeping Beauty.

  Whatever they felt, the case didn’t get solved.

  The house was surprisingly empty. For somebody who faced the prospect of having forty-five million dollars to spend furnishing his (free) domicile over the next several years, Richard Bentyne, to judge by his house, had come down with a surprising case of galloping frugality.

  There was none of the stuff that marks a house as your own—quirky furniture, artwork, knickknacks, souvenirs, anything. There wasn’t much in the way of clothes, and there was no mess at all. Even his toothbrush bristles were neat and square.

  It was as if he used up so much of his personality on the air, he didn’t have enough left to impose on his house, even after having lived there for over six months.

  It was kind of sad. This was turning into National Understand a Pathetic Wretch Day. By the end of it, I’d be one myself.

  Of course, as Rivetz pointed out, if you were a devotee of white powders, such as had been found in his dressing room, you’d have reason to husband even a large income.

  We did find various white powders in the house—sugar and cornstarch in the kitchen. His bath powder was green, and the laundry detergent in the pantry was blue. There was none of the strange, coarse stuff that we’d seen earlier in the day.
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br />   The only room that showed any promise at all was a small den/office off the living room. There was an IBM PC there, and a box of floppies next to it.

  Lieutenant Martin read off labels.

  “Skit ideas. Poss stunts, solo. Poss stunts, with guests. Monologue topix. Jarmy. Odd news stories—”

  “Jarmy?” I said.

  “Yeah. Oh, right. That’s the name of the housekeeper.”

  “The chicken chef. I’d like to know what’s on that.” Rivetz said.

  “Have to bring it into headquarters and get one of the wizards to go through all this stuff and tell us what’s on it.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “But I hate to wait for the Jarmy disk.”

  “Yeah. So what are we supposed to do? You know how to run these things?”

  “In a limited way,” I said. “I couldn’t break into the Pentagon for you, but I can read a damn disk.”

  “Fine. I hereby deputize you to do it.”

  “Okay, move,” I said.

  I sat at the console and booted up. Then I put the Jarmy disk in, and called for the directory.

  I had a heavy breathing cop over each shoulder.

  “Don’t you need a password or something?” Rivetz said.

  “Apparently not,” I said, as the directory blinked on. “After all, he was the only one who used this machine, what’s he got to hide?”

  “Well, he was cheating on his live-in girlfriend, and he was stashing some weird shit in his dressing room, you know?”

  I had a list of files to call up. There weren’t any, unfortunately, entitled POISONED CHICKEN, or any that mentioned chicken at all. I passed up BEDMAKING, DUSTING, and EMPLOYMENT CONDITIONS, among others, and went for D. ROUT.

  “Let’s try this one,” I said.

  “What the hell,” agreed my companions.

  And that was the one. It started with a message in flashing caps: DO NOT ARRIVE BEFORE MR. BENTYNE’S DEPARTURE AT 9:15 A.M.

  “Immediately upon arrival,” it went on, “you will prepare Mr. Bentyne’s lunch of oven-fried chicken prepared to the following recipe. Note: YOU MUST NOT DEPART FROM THIS RECIPE.”

  I read the recipe. “Well, that settles that,” I said.