“I don’t know. Several weeks ago. In August.”
“Back when you told me you greased it?”
“Yes. He greased it.”
“Who?”
“The man who came to work on it.” He got down off the ladder and fit a cigarette. “The controller wouldn’t work. I replaced the battery, but that didn’t help. Inside the battery compartment there was a sticker with a phone number for service. I called, and they sent a man out.”
“And did he fix it?”
“Yes. He also told me the safety code now requires some kind of automatic release, and he put one on for me.”
“That little black box you were just looking at?” Roetherl smoked furiously, peering into the twilight behind Auburn. “When was the next time you saw him?”
Getting no answer, Auburn supplied one himself. “Last night you heard a noise here in the garage. You came down and found that the man who worked on the door in August had come back. That black box he put on enabled him to disconnect the door from the opener mechanism by using a remote control unit from outside. He was getting ready to cover his tracks by taking the box off again when you surprised him and hit him with — what? A golf club? A hammer?”
Roetherl ground out his cigarette on the garage floor with the toe of his shoe. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “I can’t hear Lambie from here.”
“You go on in,” said Auburn. “I’ll put the door back down and come around to the porch. Better lock the door to the basement until you get this door fixed.”
Before Auburn had time to ring at the front door, Roetherl opened it for him and led him once again into the venomous atmosphere of the living room. Mrs. Roetherl seemed to be dozing.
“Why didn’t you admit a while ago that you’d had transmission work done on your car?”
“Because I thought you were getting around to telling me this fellow had been rim down by my car. I knew that wasn’t true, but I wanted to avoid—” After stopping to light another cigarette he picked up his narrative on a different tack. “Sometimes I let my wife’s nurse, Mrs. DePaul, use my car. Last summer I had her take it in for some transmission work.”
“And that was when Brendel pulled a wire loose in the remote unit for your garage door opener and put in a label inviting you to call a number to get it fixed — his number.”
Roetherl, smoking in silence, shrugged and nodded.
“So what did you hit him with?”
“A crowbar he swung at me. It’s in the Raysters’ fishpond along with some other tools he had. Aren’t you supposed to read me my rights?”
“I wasn’t planning to arrest you for killing Brendel. At the very worst it was manslaughter. But I do have to read you your rights about another matter. I think I know why you went to the trouble of carrying Brendel’s body all the way down to the road in the dark last night instead of calling the police and telling them what had happened.”
As Auburn recited the Miranda formula, the bravado glare died out of Roetherl’s eyes, to be replaced by a dark gleam of fear.
“I read over some old newspaper accounts of your trouble in Canada back in the fifties,” said Auburn. “You were accused of shooting your cousin and making it look like a hunting accident.”
“And I was fully exonerated,” said Roetherl. “It was an accident.”
“Your cousin was a Marine on leave. You had just inherited your grandfather’s business — all of it. You and your cousin were both named Karl after your grandfather. You had the same name, the same build, almost the same face—”
“That’s ancient history.”
“But you, sir, were the Marine on leave, weren’t you? The man who died was the architect, the successor to your grandfather’s business and fortune. After shooting him in the head, a day and a half away from civilization, you exchanged clothes and personal effects with him.” Roetherl was shaking his head and indeed the whole upper half of his squat body in a frenzy of denial.
“You and your cousin were the only surviving representatives of your family. After your acquittal you traveled outside the country for years before you could safely return and step into the other Karl Roetherl’s shoes.”
“That’s the most fantastic, idiotic—”
“Six years ago you had a break-in here and failed to report it. One of your neighbors did. When the police came to investigate, you claimed you’d broken the window yourself and refused to let them in. Why? For the same reason you didn’t call the police last night and tell them you’d surprised an intruder and hit him a little too hard — because you couldn’t risk having them go over the place and find the fingerprints of a man who’s supposed to have died forty years ago.”
Roetherl collapsed into a chair. “I’ve dreaded this moment every waking hour of my life for all those forty years. All right, yes, I changed places with my cousin. What are you going to do about it now? There isn’t much left of the money. There isn’t much left of me.”
An overwhelming wave of pity threatened to wipe away Auburn’s objectivity. “There’s no statute of limitations on first-degree murder,” he forced himself to say.
“I tell you I was acquitted,” Roetherl snarled, with something like a return of his former pugnacity. “You can’t try a man twice for the same crime.”
“That won’t work, sir. You weren’t acquitted because you never came to trial. You were exonerated of a charge that you had murdered Karl Roetherl the Marine. If your prints match his in military records, you can be tried for the murder of the man you’ve been claiming to be. The case against Karl Roetherl the millionaire architect fell apart because there was no apparent motive. But Karl Roetherl the disinherited grandson, the instructor in hand-to-hand combat—”
Roetherl ran a jerky hand over his shaven scalp. “I’ll have to make some arrangements about Lambie,” he said. “And it’s time for her medicine.”
They went to the kitchen, where Roetherl emptied a bottle of clear liquid into a drinking glass and added grape juice. In the nick of time Auburn woke up to the fact that Roetherl was on the point of giving his wife a lethal overdose. Preferring not to scuffle with an ex-Marine who had carried the hundred eighty-eight pound Brendel a quarter of a mile over rough ground in the dark, he drew his weapon.
He nearly had to put a bullet through Roetherl to stop him. Keeping the big man covered, he called headquarters on the kitchen phone. Funny how steady his hand was now, holding a loaded revolver, when his charade with an empty one to verify Neldrick’s blindness had turned him into a shivering wreck.
At least he had recovered his self-command in time to prevent Roetherl from committing deliberate murder right under his nose. That, as the lieutenant’s daughter might express it, would have been majorly uncool.
The Honeymoon Kill
by Bill Knox
David Bannerman knew it as a sad, cynical truth. When you’re feeling happy, at the crest of a wave, hold on tight — there’s often a deep trough of misery lurking on the other side. He heard a sigh come from Helen Bannerman, his sister and business partner, and knew she felt the same.
Andrew Adams, the man seated opposite them, was in his fifties, well-dressed and prosperous, a director in a rock-solid Scottish stockbroking firm. He had arrived without an appointment at the Banner Agency, the small private investigation and security consultancy the Bannermans operated from the top floor of an old Georgian building in the heart of Edinburgh.
But Adams had a handwritten introduction from the banker who nursed the Bannermans’ joint overdraft through moments of crisis. So they’d listened, almost able to feel his despair.
Two weeks earlier the world had been bright for Andrew Adams. He and his wife had been in New York, where his only son was being married. Now they’d been told their son was dead, buried under an avalanche in Switzerland.