“As to the question of killing Chief Neustadt and Mr. Wise, don’t be silly. I didn’t know the one, and Mr. Wise has always been very kind and generous to Mickey and me.”
A few heads nodded at the good sense of what they had just heard. Victoria smiled across at me. Mickey tried to comfort her, but she kept her eyes on me.
“Your crime, Victoria, wasn’t like most crimes. It wasn’t motivated by greed or frustration, but by revenge. Neustadt and Wise between them had destroyed your family. You are the only one left. It was up to you. It had nothing to do with like or dislike. It was a pure crime, if you like. You didn’t come into it at all, not as Drina Tait or as Victoria Armstrong. You were simply the instrument of retribution, a settling of accounts, an evening of scores.
“You studied your quarry from afar. It wasn’t hard to learn that Neustadt was an amateur mechanic, who used to tinker with his car in the driveway. You knew about cars yourself. You grew up around cars and grease pits and tools. It was no trick for you to turn the valve on Neustadt’s hydraulic jack. It took someone like you to tamper with the steering on Wise’s Volvo.
“But Wise was a harder nut to crack than Neustadt. He had built a wall around himself. To cross over, you sought him out through your connections in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. You knew enough about cooking to get into the house. You hadn’t planned on Mickey. But it worked out very well. Better than you’d hoped, maybe. Once inside the citadel you found all the weapons you needed ten times over, but how could you kill him with the boys always hovering near? That posed a problem, but you solved it masterfully. You used a silencer. That covered the sound so that the boys could finish their breakfast never dreaming that it was the last of them that Wise would pay for. You left the gun at the scene-over there,” I pointed to the bloodstain still visible on the carpet.
“And what did I do with this silencer you’ve invented?” Victoria asked, her eyes now flashing anger at me. “You searched the house, Sergeant. Did you find this silencer he’s talking about?”
“She’s got you there, Benny. We went through the house several times room by room.”
“I have to admit, you nearly had me there, Victoria. But let me show you how I discovered your secret. Hart, you told me that when you came in to see your father for the last time, Victoria and Mickey were in the kitchen.”
“That’s right. She was baking.”
“And Julie, when you got there some time later?”
“I could smell cinnamon and apple in the kitchen. She was baking pies.”
“Good,” I said. “And Pete, you say you found flour near the body. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes. But since it was Victoria who discovered the body, I don’t see how-”
“Pete, Julie says that she smelled the pies. They were in the oven by the time she got there. How was it that Victoria was still wearing a floury apron after the murder had been committed?”
“I wasn’t wearing an apron. I took it off after I’d tidied the kitchen. I told you that, Sergeant.” Victoria Armstrong said this as though it had figured importantly in her statement. Mickey looked like he was going to lash out at me all the same.
“You better have a good reason for putting us through this, Cooperman,” he said, which came off less effectively than it might have with the women removed from the room. Mickey watched his tongue with women about.
Suddenly everybody was looking at me. I hoped that what I was going to say was made out of the right words. “So, the flour didn’t come from the apron, and yet it was in the room. Could it have come from her shoes, Pete?”
“Not according to the forensic people. It wasn’t connected to a footprint. There were no footprints. The flour-and we’re talking about slight traces, you understand-was evenly distributed in the area where the murder took place.”
“I see. Pete, will you come into the kitchen with me for a minute?” Pete got up and assured the others that we would be right back.
When we returned, Pete was wearing a puzzled expression. “You were baking pies, Mrs. Armstrong, but we don’t seem to be able to find your rolling pin. Can you help us?”
“What has baking pies to do with anything?” asked Hart.
“More than you think,” I said. “Didier told us that Victoria was holding a rolling pin some time after Julie sniffed pies cooking in the oven. What was Victoria doing with a rolling pin after all of the pastry had been rolled out? And the latest of the mysteries: what has happened to the rolling pin?”
“Who gives a damn?” said Syl Ryan, looking at Hart for support.
“Pete, you told me that an effective silencer for a gun like the gun that killed Abe Wise would be a cylinder about eighteen inches long and around two and a half inches in diameter. You didn’t say it, but you might have: a silencer for Wise’s gun would be about the size and shape of a rolling pin without the handles. Drina, we know, was familiar with car motors and the tools in the shop of Freddy Tait’s garage. She would be capable of making such an object, together with the rod and clamp she’d need to install it.”
“Rod and clamp, Benny? I don’t follow you.”
“You need the one to align the exit hole of the silencer with the barrel of the gun, McStu. The clamp holds the silencer firmly on the barrel. Dudley Dickens would have known that.”
“Well! That’s quite a yarn. It’s not proof, of course, but it’s a good story. I may use that silencer idea. I think it might work in fiction, but Benny, this is real life, for Gawd sake!”
“Yes,” said Hart. “Lots of people had access to the kitchen, just as they had to the guns.”
“And what about that shot through the window at Wise?” asked Pete. “And the one at you,” he added as an afterthought.
“You already know about the tunnel, Pete A shot from near the garage into this room could have the shooter back inside the house within a minute at the outside.”
“Cooperman, I’m going to get you for what you said here tonight!” It was Mickey’s red face that was glowering at me.
“I’m just doing my job, Mickey. And if I were you I wouldn’t stray away from your wife right now. It could be-” Just then we heard a sudden cry. Victoria had jumped over the arm of the couch and come down on Julie’s foot. Before Julie had recovered, Victoria was in the kitchen. Pete was the first off the mark. He moved after her with astonishing speed. By the time I got past the preparation table in the middle of the kitchen, they were both gone.
“The tunnel!” Syl Ryan shouted, and started in after her. To the hounds a quarry is a quarry, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a fox or a hare.
The tunnel didn’t do justice to its name. There was nothing mysterious about it: just another back way out that happened to run down a set of stairs and come out near the garage. From a distance away, we could hear raised voices, sounds of a struggle. “Let me through!” shouted Mickey, shoving both Pete and a uniformed man aside. But before he could get to the stairs, Syl Ryan came up, followed by two men in uniform carrying a struggling Victoria Armstrong between them.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The next few days are a bit hazy. I don’t remember much. I cleaned my office, got rid of a lot of old files, emptied the drawers of ancient apricot stones and Kogan’s empty bottles. I didn’t sleep much, and I wasn’t much fun for Anna to be with. But I hadn’t been much fun to be with when I was working either.