Rogues Gallery (24 page)

“I guess his luck ran out,” I said.

IX

After the funeral, a nondenominational service ably presided over by Jonathan Hawes with a minimum of sentiment and an appropriate amount of Scripture, Mac pointed his big red Chevy toward campus and our respective offices.

“Now we know where Tim did some of his gambling, if that's any help,” I observed. “Maybe a big losing streak is the reason he helped himself to Meredith's sparkles.”

“Conceivably,” Mac allowed. He didn't say much more.

Casino gambling had long been available in nearby Indiana, originally restricted to boats. Ohio joined the party after voters approved four casinos in the state, including the new Arabian Nights-themed Forty Thieves in Cincinnati. I could imagine Crutcher walking out of there shell-shocked and penniless.

In late afternoon, Mac asked me to go with him to see Oscar. Since I was having a quiet day, without a single student arrested or coach fired, I put Popcorn in charge and told her to call me if she needed me. I left with “Okay, Boss” ringing in my ears.

We arrived outside Oscar's office in the basement of City Hall just in time to see Meredith Blake leaving, with Charlie Hayworth in tow. I hoped she'd at least sent flowers to the funeral since she hadn't sent herself, at least not while we were there.

“Reporting the stolen jewelry?” Mac said after we'd all gotten through the conventional acknowledgements of each other's existence.

“No, we were identifying some of it.” Meredith began fumbling with her Coach purse, fingers screaming for nicotine.

“We filed the report this morning and Chief Hummel - ” her beau began.

“Let's get a move-on, Charlie,” Meredith said, talking out of the side of her mouth that did not hold the cigarette she was lighting.

And they left.

“Charming couple,” I muttered to Mac. “You can sure tell who wears the jeans in that duo.”

“The one with the money, I suspect.”

Oscar beamed when we walked in, appearing inordinately glad to see us. “Well, look who the cat dragged in! What brings you geniuses into my humble quarters?”

Without waiting for an answer, he turned around and picked up the office coffee pot from the credenza behind him.

“Originally, we were going to ask if you had turned up any indication that Tim Crutcher was carrying on an
affaire de coeur
,” Mac said.

“I don't even know what that means. Coffee?” He held up the pot.

Mac accepted a cup of the awful stuff and repeated his question in English.

“I'm investigating Crutcher's murder, not his love life,” Oscar protested. “Of course, now that you mention it, a girlfriend would give his wife another reason to kill him.”

That's not really what we were thinking.

Mac ignored that. “You are also investigating the theft of some jewelry from Meredith Blake, and apparently having some success.”

“How the hell did you know that?”

“He has his ways,” I said, before Mac could. Why ruin the illusion that he'd done something brilliant?

“I do not know all of it, Oscar. Please elaborate.”

Oscar was only too happy to relate his own triumph. “Ms. Blake and her, uh, friend came to me this morning to report the robbery. They gave me a list of the stolen jewelry, with photographs. One of the diamond rings, a round bezel design with a platinum band, reminded me of the one that had been on Crutcher's body.”

“His body!” I repeated.

“Yeah. I didn't notice it at the time, but the crime scene photos show that he was wearing it on his pinky finger. I remembered seeing it later, in the envelope that I gave his wife with his personal effects in it. So I called her. I don't think she was especially happy to hear from me. But, sure enough, she said she'd never seen this ring before, figured it must have been something he bought or was given after they split. She drove it over here right away.”

“See, she's an honest person,” I pointed out.

“And it's the ring in the photos Ms. Blake gave me. She just confirmed that.”

“Congratulations, Oscar.” Mac sipped caffeine. “You really have done quite well.”

“I'm just beginning, Sherlock. I've asked for a warrant for both the house where Crutcher lived with his wife and the one where he'd been staying the past few weeks. I figure he must have socked the rest of the jewelry away somewhere. Maybe that's why Ashley killed him.”

But I was thinking of Mac's first off-the-cuff theory, the “Three Garridebs” ploy. Maybe Crutcher and his unknown accomplice, presumably the girlfriend, entered the house that night to recover Meredith's stolen jewelry that he had hidden there and didn't have a chance to recover the night he left his wife. That would answer the big question of what he was doing in the house.

“Really, Oscar,” Mac said. “That makes three theories you have offered as to why Ashley took her husband's life with malice aforethought - life insurance money, romantic jealousy, and the stolen gems.”

Oscar grinned irritatingly. “Yeah, it's an embarrassment of riches, ain't it?”

“Oh, come on!” I admit to being a bit cross. “You can't be all that confident. You haven't filed charges.”

“Just a matter of time, Jeff. It's the prosecutor's call, and he's a cautious dude.”

X

“Be of good cheer, Jefferson! All is clear now.”

Then you must be wearing night vision goggles.
It wasn't that there wasn't anything to go on - there was too much. Ashley had more motives than I had rejection slips, but we didn't believe any of them. Instead, we were looking at a hypothetical girlfriend, maybe somehow connected with a stash of jewelry looted from the infamous Meredith Blake - or not.

“Okay, genius,” I snapped, missing my wife to the point of irritation and worn down by all this brainwork. “Who do you figure for the killer?”

“It would be premature to share my thoughts at this point, old boy.” As usual, Mac was keeping me in the dark so that I could clap with everybody else when he finally pulled the rabbit out of his hat at the end. Until then, he wouldn't even let me see the tip of the bunny's ears. “Tomorrow, I must venture out for a bit of on-the-ground research.”

“Good luck. You'll have to fly solo this time.”

He looked at me and raised an eyebrow - not a good move since he was driving us back to campus at the time. “I am lost without my - ”

“Can it! Maybe it slipped off your radar screen, but tomorrow night's the St. Benignus Day concert. That might not be a big deal to you - you just have to play your bagpipes.”
I prefer to think of them as gagpipes.
“But I've got about a hundred details to take care of, and that's just for tomorrow. Saturday will be even worse. I have to make sure everything goes smoothly with the Cardinal, from picking him up at the airport to making sure he gets the gluten-free dinner.”

“I completely understand. Far be it for me to take you away from the responsibilities of your day job.”

New policy, Mac?
He'd never given up so easily before. I felt a little irked that he didn't try harder to get me to go with him.

“So what are you researching?” I asked.

“I merely wish to confirm a certain suspicion of mine which, if true, would almost certainly validate my theory about the killer.”
Oh, now I see.

“Give me a hint so that I can work on it, Mac. What's this all about? What's the motive?”

“Insurance, old boy.”

For the next two hours, after Mac dropped me off in front of my office in Carey Hall, I tried to puzzle that out with half my brain while the other half fielded media calls and tested the live-streaming that we would be doing of the concert and the Cardinal's speech on our website. I'm sure you see the puzzle that Mac had handed me: The insurance angle didn't make sense unless Ashley killed Crutcher. She's the one who benefitted from the policy on his life. But if Mac thought she was the killer after all, he wouldn't be so danged cheerful about it.

Insurance, insurance ... Whenever the word ran through my head, the one that immediately got in line behind it was “scam.” I kept shoving it aside, but it kept coming back. Finally I let it stick around while I gave it a good look.

“What's the matter, Boss?” Popcorn stopped in the middle of asking me which of her favorite dresses I thought Oscar's mother would like better on her. “Your eyes are kind of popping out.”

“I just had an inspiration. Suppose Tim Crutcher isn't really dead.”

Popcorn chuckled. “Then they'd better not bury him.”

I ignored her attempt at levity. “You weren't at the funeral, so you don't know that Tim and Tom Crutcher look almost exactly alike. So suppose it's really Tom who died, and Tim took his place!”

“What would be the point of that?”

“To collect on Tim's life insurance policy, which names Ashley as the beneficiary.”

Popcorn frowned. “That would mean that she and Tim were in it together - murder and insurance fraud. And their breakup was just a façade.”

“Exactly.” And if that's what Mac had deduced, an insurance scam, no wonder he'd been cheerful. He would be patting himself on the back for figuring out the plot, even though it meant that Ashley was a colder-than-cold-blooded murderer. It would be far from the first time that the detective's “client” turned out to be guilty, after all.

But Popcorn shook her head vigorously. “No, no, no. You guys are supposed to prove that Ashley's completely innocent.”

“You wouldn't want that if she really
isn't
, would you?”

I can't say she rushed to respond in the negative. “No, I guess not,” she admitted eventually. “But she is! Otherwise she would have claimed self-defense, wouldn't she? Or killed him somewhere else.”

“I admit I haven't worked it all out yet.”

“So you think this is what Mac is researching somehow?”

“I'd bet on it.” I thought a minute. “But we can do some research of our own.” I leaped up. “Come on, Popcorn! The game is afoot!”

“What?”

I can't believe I said that.

Joe Robards lived in a mid-century modern house, a split-level. I'd called ahead. He opened the door when I rang. I could hear loud voices inside the house.

“Hi, Joe. Thanks for agreeing to see us. Oh, this is my assistant, Aneliese Pokorny.”

“Assistant? I thought you were Professor McCabe's assistant.”

Why does everybody think...

“We work together at St. Benignus,” Popcorn explained. “I've taken an interest in the Crutcher case.”

“Well, like I said on the phone, I don't know anything more than what I said at the funeral home, but come on in.”

We walked into World War III. I'm not sure how many boys of various ages were tearing up the house, but it must have been three or four. I could almost smell the pre-pubescent testosterone. Mrs. Robards, an island of placidity in this turbulent sea, was calmly diapering number four or five in the family room when Joe took us in and introduced us. Toys lay everywhere, at least half of them broken. Looking at all this chaos, I thought:
I want this - a houseful of noisy kids.

JoAnn Robards, a pleasant-faced brunette in a white sweater over a blue and white polka dot housedress, stood up from a diaper-changing table to welcome us. A slender woman, she topped her husband by about three inches.

“Joe says you're trying to help Ashley.”
Well, that was the original idea, at least.
She shook her head. “Well, good luck. I feel sorry for Ashley, whatever happened. Living with Tim Crutcher can't have been easy. I've known him since high school. In fact, I took him to my junior prom.”

“I guess that didn't work out too well,” Popcorn said.

“Oh, it worked out great! Tim introduced me to Joe that night.”

The way she looked at her husband as she picked up the baby, a girl for a change, made me want to shout, “Rent a room!” It also made me miss Lynda.

“This may seem a strange question,” I said, “but we were wondering whether Tim and Ashley kept in contact when he was living here. I mean, were they friendly? Did they call each other?” Oscar could know that from checking cell phone records, if he'd thought of it. But there was no reason for him to think of it.

JoAnn looked at me shrewdly, as if to say, “If you're helping Ashley, why don't you ask her?” That was a very good question, but not one that occurred to Robards.

He just snorted. “Not hardly. I never really got the lowdown on who wanted the split, but I tried to get Tim to swallow his pride if he had to and work things out. That went over like a lead balloon. He said something like, ‘If she thinks I can't do better than her, she'll find out different.'”

“Sounds like he was looking for a girlfriend,” Popcorn said.
Or he already had one.
The hypothetical girlfriend was looking less hypothetical.

“Well, that's that,” I said. “I had an idea, but it looks like it's dying a fast death.” But just then, another idea took up residence in the Cody brain. “Do you mind if we look in your basement?”

JoAnn looked at me with something approaching horror. “It's a mess down there. And kind of sad - we haven't touched any of Tim's stuff.”
Perfect!
“Why do you want to look in our basement?”

“It's a real long shot, but we have reason to believe that Tim hid something before he died, and he may have hidden it in your basement.”
And I don't want to wait for Oscar to get his search warrant.

Robards shook his head. “That's weird. What kind of something?”

“Jewelry,” Popcorn said. “Meredith Blake is missing some, and she thinks Tim took it.” Popcorn knew the whole story, and now the Robardses did, too. Well, why not? They might as well know. We were asking to search part of their house.