I shook my head in disagreement. “It won’t wash, Simon. The lit arrow above the elevator doors was pointing up.”
“Fenton could have fixed that with a ladder and a screwdriver, which I imagine is what he did. He came here to the hotel several hours early, probably dressed as a workman. He unscrewed the face plate from those indicator lights and rewired them so the up arrow came on whether the elevator was going up or down. It was probably Rager’s idea, but he needed Fenton to carry out the details.”
“No one noticed it?”
“Why would they? The elevator still arrived sooner or later. I’ll admit I checked my theory earlier this morning, before meeting you at police headquarters. It was simple enough for me to duplicate the trick, covering the buttons with my hand so you couldn’t really be sure which one I pushed. I got out of the elevator in the garage and then sent it back upstairs empty, adding only about ten seconds to its trip. Then I took the stairs up to surprise you.”
“You’re forgetting one thing,” I reminded him. “You and I were in the lobby. We actually saw Rager going up inside that glass elevator.”
“Consider the timing, my friend. We watched the elevator doors close on Rager and then took the escalator up to the lobby. His elevator was just coming into view. Certainly an elevator travels much faster than an escalator. That should have told us the elevator had been delayed somehow for several seconds. Rager left the elevator at the garage level and replaced himself with—”
“With what?” Fisk asked.
“—with a lifesized cardboard cutout of himself like the ones in the lobby of Madison Square Garden.”
“He was holding a guitar in those,” I objected.
“The part over his body could be easily covered with black paper or painted out. Both ends of the guitar could be cut away, leaving a color duplicate of Rager alone. He probably hid it under a car parked by the elevator, pulled it out, stood it up in the glass elevator, near the door so its two-dimensional flatness wouldn’t be visible from the lobby, and sent it on its way. He’d coated the back with the fast-burning sulfur compound used in his fireballs. The sulfur was the brimstone odor in the air. A short fuse on the back ignited the cardboard just as it passed from view, and when the doors opened at the Skytop Restaurant only the last of the cardboard was still burning. Again, a test run in the elevator would have told Rager — or Fenton — how long a fuse was needed. They may have tested the burning time of the cardboard as well.”
“When did Fenton kill him?” the detective asked.
“Right after he left the elevator, I imagine. Fenton hurried downstairs, strangled him in the garage, and hid his body in the Dumpster with another fuse that would start the fire later. Once I established what had happened, I pretty much ruled out the two women. The killer had to strangle his victim, a twenty-two-year-old man in good health, carry his body across the garage to the Dumpster, and then hoist it over the edge. Certainly a woman could have done it, but a man seemed far more likely. Robock was upstairs all the time, from the discovery of the empty elevator to the discovery of the body. That left Fenton as the most likely killer, the only one among the suspects with the physical means and the opportunity. It was guesswork, of course, but it paid off.”
Lieutenant Fisk said, “Lucky for you he seems to have cracked. Once you confronted him he just went to pieces.”
“I think you’ll discover the motive lies in the financial manipulation of Rager’s various assets. Robock mentioned advance payments to Rager, but I think you’ll find the payments were actually made to Les Fenton as Rager’s business manager. He may have felt Rager had to die before he and Robock got together and compared notes on the transactions.”
“What about Rager’s jacket?” I asked. “Why was that so important?”
“At the performance the other night we noticed he looked just like the lifesized cutout in the lobby, meaning he was wearing the same costume. Susan told us it was unusual for him to wear that silver vest two days in a row. Why did he wear it yesterday? Because he needed to be dressed like the cutout again, to make the disappearance work. I suppose it was meant as a publicity stunt, but Fenton turned it to his own ends.”
We went away from there then, and Simon and I walked for a time among the crowds in Times Square. “The Devil didn’t take Rager after all,” I said at one point.
But Simon wasn’t ready to admit that. “Perhaps he did, my friend. Perhaps he only works in devious ways. Perhaps he has taken both Rager and Les Fenton. It’s something we shall never know.”
Deuteronomy 32:35
by Lawrence Doorley
When word reached Ainsley Yaugher Means, town banker of Battle Grove — population 3875 — county seat of Walnut County, West Virginia, that Crazy Bill Grapeseed had died in a squatter’s cabin on state land up on Elder’s Knob, Banker Means heaved a mammoth sigh of relief (everything about Banker Means was mammoth, as shall be shown) and said to himself, “Well, that’s that. Thank God I’m finally rid of that crazy old coot.”
So it seemed, for what further harm could a poor old shrunken seventy-year-old dead man possibly do? Obviously not much, but then there was a Higher Authority to consider.
As a self-promoted pillar of the community, Banker Means was very active in community affairs and seldom missed an opportunity to attend weddings, family reunions, church suppers, and funerals, especially funerals. His funeral attendance was close to ninety percent of all such affairs. And he had actually become, over the years, the county’s most sought-after pallbearer, bereaved folks taking a peculiar pride in sending their dearly beloved off into the Hereafter with the pompous assistance of the most prominent personage in that neck of the woods, a rapacious individual who had gotten filthy rich by foreclosing on barely overdue mortgages, by charging interest a fraction of a point from blatant usury, by assiduously procuring valuable coal and timber acreage for little more than the miserably low back taxes.
It got so that folks who had sent their Dear Departed to the Great Beyond with Banker Means, an imposing figure, massive and jowly, over six feet, at least two hundred and seventy-five pounds, manning the left front of the casket (usually little more than a pine box) actually felt superior to those families who for one reason or another had buried a family member without Banker Means’ adding “jest the right smart tech to the lastin’,” as they say up the hollow (“holler” there).
And perhaps they had a point, for funerals are important affairs in that part of West Virginia and Banker Means, attired in an expensively tailored black suit, white silk shirt, black derby, and long dark overcoat, spurious sympathy oozing from every clean-shaved pinkish pore, did indeed give a distinct air of importance to the melancholy proceedings which was transferred to the poor unfortunate in the casket, however ordinary, unimportant, even pathetic, he or she might have been in life.
Although poor Crazy Bill had a whole slew of first, second, and third cousins and nieces and nephews, they were all “as poor as Job’s turkey,” so the county authorities told Willard Gravely, the undertaker, to provide Bill with a cheap box and lay the poor fellow to final rest in Potter’s Field (“And they took counsel, and brought with them to the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.” Matt. 27:7), where in times past indigents from the now closed county home were buried.
Willard, a jovial little round pumpkin with twinkling blue eyes and a shiny bald pate, rounded up five of Bill’s cousins to act as pallbearers and then, chortling inwardly, he phoned Banker Means and inquired if he planned to take part, as per custom, in the obsequies for his long-time adversary, the late William Grapeseed.