She sniffed and flicked a half-inch of ash into the ashtray beside her. Her crossed leg was swinging up and down as if some demented doctor were tapping the reflex.
“I might as well tell you first of all that we’ve got Michael Bannister’s testimony,” Banks began.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do. It was you who took those photographs at the banquet and in the hotel room afterwards. It was you who spent the night with Michael Bannister, not Kim Fosse.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“No, it’s not. You told him later that if anyone asked, he’d better say it was Kim Fosse he slept with or you’d tell his wife. You knew Lucy had a weak heart, and he thought such a shock might kill her.”
Norma had turned a shade paler. Banks scratched the small scar beside his right eye. Often, when it itched, it was telling him he was on the right track. “As it turns out,” he went on, “Lucy Bannister was well aware that her husband occasionally went with other women. It was just something they didn’t talk about. He thought he was protecting her feelings; she thought she was protecting his. I suggested they talk about it.”
“Bastard,” Norma Cheverel hissed. Banks didn’t know whether she meant him or Michael Bannister.
“You seduced Michael Bannister, and you planted incriminating photographs on Kim Fosse’s living room table after you’d killed her in the hope that we would think her husband had done it in a jealous rage, a rage that you also helped set us up to believe. We’ve checked the processing services, too. I’m sure you chose Fotomat because it’s busy, quick, and impersonal, but the man behind the counter remembers you picking up a film on Wednesday, not Kim Fosse. Beauty has its drawbacks, Norma.”
Norma got up, tossed back her hair, and went to pour herself a drink. She didn’t offer Banks or Susan anything. “You’ve got a nerve,” she said. “And a hell of an imagination. You should work in television.”
“You knew that David Fosse walked the dog every evening, come rain or shine, between six forty-five and seven-thirty. It was easy for you to drive over to the house, park your car a little distance away, get the unsuspecting Kim to let you in, then hit her with the trophy and plant the photos. Then all you had to do was convince us of her infidelity and her husband’s violent jealousy. There was even a scrap of truth in it. Except you didn’t bargain for Lucy Bannister, did you?”
“This is ridiculous,” Norma said. “What about the film in the camera? You can’t prove any of this.”
“I don’t believe I mentioned that there was a film in the camera,” said Banks, “but we’ll leave that for the moment. I’m sure it seemed like a brilliant idea at the time, but that film couldn’t possibly have been taken in that camera, or Michael Bannister wouldn’t have had red eyes.”
“This is just circumstantial.”
“Possibly. But it all adds up. Believe me, Norma, we’ve got a case, and we’ve got a good chance of making it stick. I imagine Kim had perhaps had a bit too much to drink that night and you put her to bed. When you did, you also took her room key. At some point during the night, when you’d finished with Michael Bannister, you rewound your film manually until there was only a small strip sticking out of the cassette, then you went to Kim Fosse’s room and put it in her camera, taking out whatever film she had taken herself and dumping it.”
“Oh, I see. I’m that clever, am I? I suppose you found my fingerprints on this film?”
“The prints were smudged, as you no doubt knew they would be, and you wiped the photographs and camera. I’m sure you wore gloves when you killed Kim Fosse. When you’d loaded the film, you advanced to the correct frame in the dark with the flash off and the lens cap on. That way the double exposure wouldn’t affect the film at all.”
“I’m glad you think I’m so brilliant, Inspector, but I—”
“I don’t think you’re brilliant at all,” Banks said. “You’re as stupid as anyone else who thinks she can get away with the perfect crime.”
In a flash, Norma Cheverel picked up the ashtray and threw it at Banks. He dodged sideways and it whizzed past his ear and smashed into the front of the cocktail cabinet.
Banks stood up. “Time to call the solicitor, Norma.”
But Norma Cheverel wasn’t listening. She was banging her fists on her knees and chanting, “Bastard! Bastard!” over and over again.
Hamadryad
by William Beechcroft
© 1994 by William Beechcroft
After retiring from Maryland Public Television, where he was director of development and information services and had a hand in launching, among other things, Wall Street Week, William Beechcroft, a.k.a. William Hallstead, moved to Florida. The Sunshine State has since become the setting for many of his stories, including this tale of a gangster from up north...
Ten miles north of Fort Myers — where the Tamiami Trail arrowed through miles of scrub and sand and the fringes of Punta Gorda hadn’t shown up yet — Sammy “Little Shot” Pippitone pushed himself straighter behind the wheel of his rented Honda Civic. The Garden of Serpents should be coming up soon, according to the info he’d been given yesterday. Out here in the southwest Florida boondocks, he ought to be able to make the hit Q & E — quick and easy — then zip back down to Southwest Regional and catch a redeye back north in time for an early breakfast in Manhattan.
Sammy’s nickname hadn’t come from his smallness, though he wasn’t a lot bigger than a slightly oversized jockey. They called him “Little Shot” because he was at the bottom end of the caliber scale from Orlo “Big Shot” Orsini. The Big Shot packed one of the new .50-caliber Desert Eagles, a monster hand-cannon with huge, half-inch-diameter Spear Lawman ammo that would stop a charging rhino if there’d been one up in Queens to try it on. It also made a gut-jarring bang you could hear from Borden Avenue all the way up to 44th, even with heavy traffic.
Sammy Little Shot hated Orlo’s kind of slam-bang service. Sammy considered himself an artist at what he did. No big boom. He used a sweet little .25-caliber Sterling Model 300, a six-shot automatic only four and a half inches overall — not much more than eight inches with its fat steel carrot of a noise suppressor threaded to its muzzle. Sammy never called the fat carrot a silencer. There was no such thing as a “silencer,” but the suppressor cut the Sterling’s normal bark to no more than a sput. Sammy always placed that little sput just an inch from the mark’s skull, just behind the ear. The neat, quiet work of an artist.
He’d gotten the Sterling here in the bag he’d checked through from JFK. The airlines didn’t often x-ray checked baggage. If they did, his bag carried a phony name and address tag. And he was always careful to case the crowd at baggage pickup, willing to let the bag stay on the conveyor if he spotted any security waiting. At Southwest Regional, nobody had looked suspicious about anything. A holiday crowd.
There the place was, maybe a mile ahead on the right, a one-story, pink stucco building done in phony Spanish hacienda style. Sammy let the speedometer begin to slip back from sixty-five. The speed limit was fifty-five, but everybody else was topping that. A cream and brown RV blared past to his left as he pulled off the road and found a slot in the sand and crushed-shell parking lot.