“I still like Gyro Gearloose,” I said. “Carl Barks is the great guy who writes and draws him.”
He gave me an odd look. “I wouldn’t spread that around if I were you.” He wasn’t kidding. Then: “You’ll be happy to know, Ross, that I’m actually going on the assumption that you didn’t kill her.”
“I appreciate that.”
“But your man McCain here has given me some pretty good motives to work with, I mean.”
Your Man McCain? A possible TV series?—
“I haven’t seen those,” Murdoch said, nodding at the notebook in Spellman’s hand.
“This Carlson—he was jealous of her? Having to share her?”
“Yes.”
“This Mike Hardin—he loses all his money. He could have been forced into killing her because he was broke and didn’t want you people to know.”
“How about Gavin Wheeler?”
“He doesn’t have anything written down here.”
I sat up straighter in my chair. The way you do when the nun calls on you for the answer to the question she just asked that you in your daydreaming didn’t hear.
“He’s just an all-around jerk,” I said. To Murdoch, I said, “Did Carlson really try and buy up all your shares?”
“Yes,” Murdoch said. “He wanted her for himself.”
“Did she want him?”
“He’s the only one who can answer that,” Murdoch said.
“So there’s nothing with Gavin Wheeler?” Spellman said. He was not a patient man.
“Nothing specific,” I said. “But I guess I could see him killing somebody.”
“Maybe he could kill Gyro Gearloose for me.”
I’m glad Ross-about-to-be-arrested-for-murder found Spellman so funny.
I decided to trump him. “I may have figured out how her body got in here.”
“You’re kidding,” Spellman said.
“There’s a new rug in the bomb shelter. I don’t know if anybody gave it any thought, any law enforcement people. Ross, do you happen to know when it was delivered?”
“I’d have to check to be sure. But I guess it would have been the afternoon before I found Karen in the bomb shelter.”
“It’s a long shot,” Spellman said.
“True,” I said, “but right now we have to consider it a possibility. Who’d you buy it from?”
“Home Furnishings. I always try to buy everything I can in town here. You know, support the town. Our merchants are getting massacred by the shopping center and with Cedar Rapids and Iowa City so near. I gave my ladies strict orders to buy whatever they could right here.”
I tried to imagine giving Deirdre Murdoch a strict order. It wasn’t easy. She just wasn’t a strict-order kind of girl.
“I’ll get the name of the driver and talk to him,” I said.
“The toughest part of this’ll be getting the names of enemies she made before she came here,” Spellman said. “She played a rough game. Even when you’re a high-priced call-girl—which in essence is what she was—it’s still a dangerous job. You run into some real nut jobs. They fall in love with you, they follow you, they get scared they’re going to be found out, they’re woman-haters deep down—you’ve got all these things in play.”
“And then you start shaking them down,” I said.
“Exactly,” Spellman said. “You start shaking them down. And that’s when they get really dangerous. You may have let something slip that makes you especially dangerous. It’s not just getting your time with her exposed—maybe she knows something that can send the guy to prison. He panics. He can’t spend the rest of his life worrying that every day might be the day she hands you over to some DA somewhere in order to save her own skin.”
“So he kills her,” I said. “And her brother, too. The killer figuring the brother probably knows his secret also.”
“Good Lord,” Ross Murdoch said. “If that’s the case, the killer could have been in town a couple of hours and then gone back home to wherever he lives.”
“It’s possible.”
“I still think it was local,” I said.
“You don’t, of course, have any proof of that?”
“No, I don’t. But being a good defense lawyer, I’ll make some up if you’ll give me a couple of minutes.”
“I love working with people who’re strictly local,” Spellman said. He sounded weary and long-suffering. I was beginning to suspect that deep down I didn’t like this guy. As in I’d like to run him down with my ragtop and then back over him a few times.
“And I love working with people who waste time overlooking the obvious.” I looked at Ross. “Karen Hastings and her brother were shaking you and your friends down for more money. And then they both wind up dead, one of them in your bomb shelter. Does any of this sound like somebody who just happened to be breezing through town?”
“He makes some good points,” Murdoch said.
Spellman was saved from responding because the phone rang.
Murdoch picked up, listened and said, “Thank you.” He hung up again. “I have a friend in the police department. His father worked for me for years. He just wanted to warn me that Sykes is on his way to arrest me.” He glanced at me and said, “I’m going to wait for him on the porch.”
“Why the hell would you do that?”
He would do that because he knew the kind of mischief Cliffie would be up to.
Three police cars arrived, sweeping up the drive. One had its red lights going. No siren, at least. Cliffie was restraining himself in his old age.
And then came the press. Cliffie had apparently invited every reporter in a six-state area. There was, and I do not exaggerate, a caravan of at least fifteen cars, station wagons and vans.
A low fog had set in. The reporters hit the front lawn like soldiers on a beach landing. They resembled monsters. The fog cut them off at the waist. They all moved toward a single place—the center of the front porch on which Ross Murdoch stood in his top coat with the brim of his grey dress hat pulled low over his face.
Murdoch knew how Cliffie operated. If Murdoch hadn’t been on his porch, Cliffie would’ve walked in a crouch up to the front door, his gun drawn, waving to his men to fan out, as if Murdoch was going to come charging through the front doors with a couple of grenade launchers and an armload of automatic weapons. Murdoch had just decided to deprive Cliffie of his usual fun. Cliffie would pistol-whip a nun if he thought there was a press camera nearby. And then explain why the eighty-two-year-old Sister was a true danger to the community.
Cliffie kept looking over his shoulder. There weren’t any live TV cameras, just three youths with bad complexions holding shaky film cameras. The film would be bathed in time for the ten o’clock news.
When he was sure that the cameras were rolling, Cliffie said, “Ross Murdoch I arrest you on the charge of first degree murder.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Cliffie, cut the cornball bullshit,” I said.
The cameras swung to me. “He knows he’s being arrested. He’s been standing here for fifteen minutes waiting for you to arrest him. And he’s obviously going to go along peacefully. And he has nothing to say at this point except that these charges are ridiculous, as does his lawyer, the famous Richard Spellman from Chicago.” I nodded to Spellman. “Mr. Spellman, if you would.”