Snowjob (17 page)

He listened and said, “And you’re sure the car was there?” He waited again and said, “Thank you. ’Preciate the assistance.”

He hung up and turned to Phillips. “How come you had your car out at Cat’s Cradle?”

“That’s where we met Jack Grant. He was out there, skiing, I guess. Anyways. He called and said to meet him there so I picked up Will and we went to Cat’s Cradle to meet Jack.”

Hinton had the obvious question. “What was Grant doing at Cat’s Cradle? He doesn’t work there.”

“I din’ ask him. He called me, told me he’d be there so that’s where I went.”

“You met him in the lot, or inside, in the snack bar?”

“Inside. He was havin’ a coffee, talkin’ to a guy.”

Hinton didn’t let his excitement show. “Did you know the guy?”

“Never seen him before.” Phillips shrugged. “Hell, there’s people skiing at Cat’s Cradle from all over. You know how it is.”

“Describe him.”

Phillips had to think about it. Like most people he was unobservant and embarrassed when questioned. “Well, you know. Nothing special. He was sitting down so I can’t be sure but he didn’t look big. He had dark hair.”

“How was he dressed? Like a skier?”

Phillips blinked. “Could’ve been a skier, I guess. But he wasn’t wearin’ ski clothes, not right then. Had a suit on, gray suit, kind of shiny. Good suit.”

“Any topcoat, next to him on a chair maybe?” Hinton persisted.

“Yeah, come to think of it. Black topcoat an’ a fedora hat. Don’t see many guys in fedoras, do you?”

Hinton kept on at him, getting the best description he could, and the more we learned, toe more the guy sounded like the man who’d spoken to me toe night Angie Ford was kidnapped. I said nothing, and Hinton got all the information he could. Then he told Phillips not to leave town or talk to anybody and to telephone if he saw the man in town.

“You think he done it?” Phillips asked in amazement.

“Let’s say we’d like to talk to him,” Hinton said. “Right now you’re as much a suspect as anybody so keep your nose clean, Fred. We’ll be back to you.”

When we got to Hinton’s car I told him about the resemblance to the hood I’d seen and he nodded grimly. “Everything we hear makes it sound like Doug’s right on this one. That guy sounds like a city hood. You don’t see nine-hundred-dollar suits in Chambers. The locals don’t dress that well, and even the rich skiers dress casual while they’re here.”

“I’d say he was the likeliest guy to have killed Grant. I spoke to him. He was a mob soldier; he’d do whatever he was told, no questions asked.”

“Sounds like our boy okay,” Hinton said. “The trick’s gonna be finding him so we can have a chat.”

He drove in silence and I asked, “Where to now? Garfield?”

“Yeah. And it might make it easier if I talked to him on my own. He’s smooth as silk. He won’t give me a goddamn thing if you’re there. He’ll talk about legal privilege or some bullshit and clam up. He might be easier with me. He knows me from court.”

“You’re the boss.” I would have liked to have been there, watching Garfield’s reactions, but I’ve done enough interrogation to know that you have to play your subject like a fish. If he doesn’t want to cooperate, he won’t.

And so I sat in the car for five minutes while Hinton went into the big house with its gracious veranda with flower boxes around the rail, all capped with snow now but promising beauty in a few months’ time when this town went back to being a quiet little place with nobody in it but locals.

Hinton came out with Garfield behind him. The lawyer stood at the door and looted out at the car and made a comment to Hinton who replied and touched his hat in goodbye.

He got in, tossing his hat onto the seat beside him. “He was pretty upset to see you with me. Asked if the department had to count on criminals for help,” he said.

“That figures. Did you get anything useful?”

“Nada,”
he said. “Says he didn’t take the gun off Giant. Says Grant was calm and he didn’t see any need to disarm him. He wasn’t about to do anything foolish.”

“Did he leave him in the Glauwein?’

“No. He says he advised the kid to go home, that he shouldn’t drive after drinking. Dropped him off at his house around ten-thirty and went home himself.”

“Grant didn’t go home. I was there this morning with Maloney. They hadn’t seem him all night,” I said.

“Exactly.” Hinton pulled out of the drive and headed up the street. “Make you wonder whether our good counselor is telling it like it is.”

We looked at one another and left it at that. Hinton drove back to the station house and we wait in. The same uniformed officer at the desk said, “They’re all in the detective office, Pat, the chief, everybody. Said for you to join ’em.”

“Thanks.” Hinton led the way upstairs and opened the door of the office. Lieutenant Cassidy was standing at one end of the room with a flip chart and a Magic Marker. The chief, Captain Schmidt and Sergeant Detective Morgan were sitting around the two tables.

“Ah, there you are,” the chief said. He waved at a couple of chairs. “Steve’s just summing up what we’ve got so far. We’ll get to you in a minute.”

We sat while Cassidy finished. He hadn’t got much, but he had the findings of the autopsy. The doctor’s best bet was that Grant had died around midnight but because of the cold weather he could be out by as much as two hours each way. He apparently hadn’t eaten in some hours before death but he had alcohol in his blood, enough to suggest he had been drinking earlier in the evening but not a high enough level to make him impaired at the time of death. Also, from the look of the lividity marks, Grant had been dumped where he was found within a few minutes of dying. Cassidy gave us these facts, then went on to talk about the wallet I’d found at the scene It had been fingerprinted and searched. The only prints found were those of the deceased. He also had a list of the contents of the billfold.

He went over these in detail. A couple of Visa slips, one of them for gasoline. This was being checked with the gas station to see when he had bought it. A phone number which had been checked against the backward phone book which lists numbers sequentially with the names following them. This number belonged to a girl in town. She would be questioned later. Aside from that, he had a driver’s license, the ownership paper for his car, a membership for Cat’s Cradle and for the gun club and his pistol license. There was no money or credit cards in the wallet.

The chief munched through this for a couple of minutes, assigning Cassidy to check with the girl he’d mentioned and to report back on when the gasoline had been bought. Then he turned to Hinton. “Okay, Pat. What did you find out?”

Hinton took over the flip chart and ran through what we’d got. He pointed out that Grant’s pistol was missing and that he had reportedly been seen last at the driveway of his house at ten-thirty. “At that time he had ingested three scotches within three quarters of an hour. That suggests that his blood alcohol would have been considerably higher than it was in the postmortem. It suggests that he wasn’t killed before midnight.”

Cassidy took over, looking at the chief first. “He must have put the gun in Ids glove compartment?’

“Not if he went straight home. His car was at Brewskis,” Pat countered. “Maybe he left it at home and went out again.”

“I was at his home this morning with Mr. Maloney,” I said. “His father told us that the guy hadn’t been home. Assuming the parents were still up at ten-thirty, that means he didn’t go back there. He must have gone on somewhere else after Mr. Garfield dropped him off.”

“Any chance that Garfield’s lying?” Schmidt asked. He was avoiding talking to me but he dropped the obvious question on Hinton who shrugged. “Could be, Captain. But he isn’t going to change his story to me. Maybe a senior officer should talk to him.”

The chief said, “Right. I’ll go over there myself. Anything else?”

“Yessir,” Hinton said. “According to Fred Phillips who was with him after he was released from custody last night, he’d picked Grant up from the company of a snappy dresser, guy in good city clothes, in the snack bar of Cat’s Cradle.”

“Any description of the guy?” the chief asked.

“Not very accurate. But Reid says he sounds like the same man he spoke to the night Doug Ford’s daughter was abducted. Reid.” He turned it over to me.

“This man was five-six, one-sixty, about thirty-two years old. Latin appearance, New York area accent. I’m no expert, could have been Brooklyn, New Jersey, something like that. But he was wearing the same kind of hat and coat that Phillips described.”

“Ring any bells with anybody?” the chief asked and all the others shook their heads. I waited. They were allowing me to join the investigation but there were some big egos in the room. Cassidy and Schmidt both resented my presence. I didn’t want to make things worse by coming up with half-baked notions.

When nobody answered the chief said, “I’ll go over to talk to Garfield, then to the Grants, ask them if I can look through his room. See if the gun’s there. Meantime, let’s look for this New Yorker and for Grant’s car. Pat, you and Mr. Bennett get on that. Also, take a run back to Phillips’ place, see if he can add anything to the description of the guy in the suit.”

“Yes sir.” Hinton was ready to go but I still had a question. “One thing, Chief. I guess you’ve already checked it, but I’d like to know, please. What time does the ski lift stop running at Cat’s Cradle?”

The chief pursed his lips. “Yeah. I checked that. It closes at ten o’clock. The ski patrol take a last run down all the dopes and they put the lights off then.”

“Is the lift house locked up at night?”

“Yes.” He was too professional to be angered by
my
question. “I’ve already been over this with the other officers, before you got here. It’s locked but if s a Mickey Mouse lock. You could open the door with a credit card.” He waved one hand dismissively. “You don’t need anything more. We’re a law-abiding town, normally.”

Cassidy jumped in now. “And just for your information, Reid, or should I say Chief, we’ve sent the fingerprint guy out there. He’s dusting the lock and the lift controls and he’s also checking each car in turn for bloodstains. If he finds any he’s going to print the car.”

“Reid’s fine,” I said evenly. “Thank you, Lieutenant.” I could see he was going to do whatever he could to make me look small. He was jealous of his own rank and the integrity of his town’s department. Most cops would be the same way. I didn’t expect any friendship.

“Anything else?” the chief asked. He was almost as resentful as Cassidy but covered it better.

“The only thing I wondered is, how hard is it to operate the lift? Should we be looking for someone who knows how to do it or is there a simple on-off switch?”

“It’s simple. A kid could do it,” Cassidy said. “That was the first thing we looked at.”

“Good.” I gave him a big smile. “It’s a pity, but now we know the guy who dropped him off that chair could have done it alone.” I wasn’t going to be intimidated. “The only question left is, why did they go to the trouble of dumping him on the slopes? They could have dropped the body anywhere, left him in his car, anything. But they took the extra risk and trouble of lugging him up to the gondola lift and turning it on while they dumped him. Anybody got any ideas?”

They looked at one another and shook their heads. So I gave them my own theory. “The only reason that makes sense is that they’re trying to scare the management of Cat’s Cradle. The publicity won’t do the place any good, will it?”

“You still think young Huckmeyer’s involved in this?” the chief asked slowly.

“There’s a connection. Huckmeyer was at Brewskis when I got there. I rubbed him up the wrong way and he made a phone call. Next thing I know, Grant and his buddies are waiting to beat me up.”

“This is all coincidence,” Schmidt said. His face was even more florid this morning. He looked as if he had spent the night with his old pal Jack Daniel’s.

“It would be worth asking the help at the coffee shop at Cat’s Cradle whether anybody called on the phone for Grant last night.”

“’ve you been in that place?” Schmidt demanded. “Hell, they must have a couple hundred people in there, different people all the time. It’s not some private club where you can get a guy paged.”

“I’ve been there. But Grant was a member at the place. He’s a local. The help probably knew him. It wouldn’t be like trying to find a stranger.”

“Worth a shot,” the chief said doubtfully. “Fred, you take a run out there, find out who was working last night, ask them about the phone call and if they saw anybody with Grant.”

“Will do,” Schmidt said. He looked angry, the way you look when you know you’ve goofed and other people are aware of it.

He stood up. “I’ll get on it right now,” he said and the meeting was over.

Hinton was anxious to defuse the tension. “We’ll get back to Phillips’, Chief,” he said. “Let’s go, Reid.”

We got nothing there. Phillips said he had waited in the car outside, listening to the radio. We thanked him and left.

“Not a lot else to do but search for the car,” Hinton said. “I guess we’ll check the center of town first, then just drive around the streets and look for it.”

“How about we divide and conquer? If you drop me at Maloney’s house I’ll pick up my car and take a section of town.”