Тимоти Уилльямз - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

“Did you expect your husband to be there?”

“Oh, no. Roger was never welcome there and he knew it.”

“How’s that?”

“Those cookouts are for Jerry’s pets, and that didn’t include Roger. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, he wouldn’t pad estimates.”

“Do you think one of Welbeck’s ‘pets’ might have unlocked that circuit breaker and turned it back on?”

“No. No, I can’t believe that. But if Roger’s death wasn’t an accident, whoever was behind it was probably the same person who played that trick with the circuit breaker.”

“Any guesses who that might be?”

She sighed heavily and he could see her vague silhouette shifting in the deep chair. “It was probably one of Chuck Fibbiger’s goons,” she said, her voice now barely above a whisper, as if she were afraid of being overheard. “But you’ll never prove it. I can’t even imagine the police department taking him on.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because he’s got too much clout. Look how the newspapers always treat him like some kind of saint, even though everybody knows he’s as crooked as—”

“I mean, why did you say he might have been behind your husband’s death?”

“Because he wanted Roger to double-cross Jerry Welbeck on the skating-rink job, and Roger wouldn’t do it.” She seemed very positive of the basic facts, but couldn’t supply any more details.

She had some questions about funeral arrangements. Auburn wrote Nick Stamaty’s name and phone number for her on the back of one of his own cards and left it by the porch door without going back through the house.

At eleven o’clock that night, the local radio and TV newscasts included an appeal for information to anyone who had seen the accident in the construction zone on the Interstate. Auburn watched to be sure the announcer used the exact text of the message he’d e-mailed to the station, in which he’d carefully avoided the word “witness,” with its connotations of stuffy courtrooms, bullying defense lawyers, lost time from work, and endless red tape.

Ten minutes after Auburn arrived at headquarters next morning, Stamaty called him from the coroner’s office at the courthouse across the street with the preliminary results of the autopsy. Auburn abandoned once and for all the hypothesis that Roger Mulreedy’s death might have been accidental.

His skull and rib cage had been shattered, his brain and internal organs pulped, and all four limbs nearly wrenched from his torso. The forensic pathologist, who knew about the pockmarks on the windshield of Mulreedy’s motorcycle, had taken X-rays, and these showed two.50-caliber steel balls buried in his neck.

“Fifty caliber?” repeated Auburn incredulously. “We’re talking cannonballs here!”

“Near enough,” agreed Stamaty.

“Were they the cause of death?”

“Not directly. I mean, they didn’t get near his spine or cut any major blood vessels. But they sure must have taken his mind off his driving.”

“Two,” said Auburn, deep in thought. “And four dents in the windshield. Any way these could have come out of a piece of machinery up ahead?”

“I think maybe that’s what somebody wants us to think, but I wouldn’t buy it. If a ball bearing accidentally came apart up ahead on the highway and flipped out a handful of balls, they couldn’t have had enough velocity to penetrate the skin, even with him coming to meet them at fifty or sixty miles an hour.”

“So either there were a half-dozen hoodlums up there on the Sixth Street overpass with slingshots...”

“Or there was one hoodlum up there with a semi-automatic weapon of some kind that lobs half-inch ball bearings. A smooth-bore weapon — there weren’t any rifling marks on the projectiles.”

The lab tests had shown no alcohol or drugs in Mulreedy’s blood.

The Records Department, shut down to a skeleton crew for the weekend as of five o’clock the previous afternoon, had completed partial background reports on Hoopes, Mulreedy and his wife, and Welbeck and his business. So far there was no evidence that any of them had police records, bad credit ratings, or suspected criminal associations. Patricia Mulreedy, nee Dermott, was a hospital volunteer in her spare time and Jerome R. Welbeck was a deacon at his church.

From the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, Auburn had obtained the names and addresses of the people to whom the private cars and motorcycles at the Welbeck farm were registered. According to the city directory, every one of those people was employed by Welbeck Heating and Cooling. Auburn asked Records to initiate background checks on all of them, and did such investigating as he was able to do on his own.

Also pursuing his own research on Fibbiger, he found no record of arrests or convictions. But an Internet search turned up lots of newspaper references, including several pertaining to the liquor license for the skating rink in Wilmot. Besides the projected rink, Fibbiger was proprietor of an electronic penny arcade called Total Aggravation at an upscale suburban mall, identified by persistent rumors as a hard-drug distribution center.

As Patty Mulreedy had said, the papers tended to handle Fibbiger with kid gloves. But the cumulative impression one gained from all the articles was that of a callous and unscrupulous slum landlord, a predator who bought at rock-bottom prices from people who had to dispose of real estate to settle an estate or a divorce or to avoid bankruptcy, an ambitious and unprincipled promoter of schemes that often went sour at other people’s expense. Whether he was capable of murder remained to be determined.

Radio and TV appeals for information had so far yielded no returns.

At ten o’clock Auburn met with his immediate superior, Lieutenant Savage, who had pulled weekend duty as first watch commander. They agreed that all charges against Gavin Hoopes should be dropped, and then discussed what direction the investigation should take.

“If this is just a random killing by some loony with a pellet gun,” said Savage, “we’re not going to get very far with it. But it sounds to me like this Mulreedy was the kind of misfit who gets people’s backs up pretty easily, and I’ve got a feeling the killer knew exactly who he was taking down. Especially since there’s a question of a prior attempt. So it’s basically a matter of nosing around till you find somebody who had a clear motive, and opportunity for both attempts.”

“The widow said she thought her husband was in some kind of trouble with Fibbiger. He could have paid somebody — she said one of his ‘goons’ — to do the job while he was somewhere else establishing an alibi.”

“And maybe she paid a goon to do it while she was fifteen miles out in the country establishing an alibi.” Savage got up and started pacing slowly around his desk. “Whoever did the actual killing must have known Mulreedy was going to be at that exact spot at that time.”

“Maybe because they told him to go that way,” suggested Auburn. “The one witness, Wamblitt, says Mulreedy got a phone call at the shop right before he headed for the Interstate. We probably can’t get anything from the phone company without a court order, but I’d like to try.”

“Okay, but you might as well put that on a back burner. On a Saturday you’re not going to get anything out of the business office at the phone company but a bubbly voice on an answering machine. What were you planning to do this morning?”

“I thought I’d try to see Fibbiger, if I can get past his answering machine. I’d like to find out if he knows anything about this alleged incident with the circuit breaker at the skating rink. Or if he’ll admit he had some kind of fight with Mulreedy.”