Jeff Sherratt - Detour to Murder

“No, I’ll call him back. But he does have an office there, in the Tower, correct?”

“Yes, but as I said, he’s not in today.”

Sol disconnected the speaker. “Yeah, he has an office there, all right. But what does that prove?”

“What do you mean?” I said. “It all fits. He has an office at the-”

“Doesn’t prove a thing. He’d deny everything you said. The only witnesses are Danny and Rollo and they’re dead. You killed them.”

“What about Morelli? I didn’t kill him.”

“Do you know where he is? Plus, does he know anything? You said he only drove Danny around for a couple of days. And even if he does know something, would he talk? No, Jimmy, we need more.”

“What about Hathaway’s blackmail payments? They stopped when she died.”

“Byron could’ve told him. Byron could have heard about the murder from Rinehart. The DA would automatically get the police report. Now that I think about it, it’d be a waste of time to even question the bank’s employees.”

“What about the warehouse in the middle of an oil field? Haskell’s in the oil business, too. Maybe-”

“I checked, ran a title search. Gannett Air Research, successor to Signal Oil, owns the property. What do you think-those engineers went to the motel and beat her up with slide rules? Bored her to death waxing poetically about the quadratic equation?”

I sat back in the chair and exhaled. Sol was right. We had nothing to prove that Haskell had murdered anybody.

“Look, Jimmy, he’s a putz , but he’s not a foolish putz. He’d have his tracks covered every which way. And you just can’t run around and accuse a big macher like Haskell of murder without dead-on proof. For chrissakes, he’s giving a speech tomorrow evening at the Coolidge League banquet. They’re honoring him for his service to our country. Gonna present him with a Calvin.”

“What the hell is that?”

“Kind of like the Academy Awards ceremony, but for businessmen. A bunch of billionaires giving each other attaboys.”

“I don’t give a damn how big he is. He’s the reason Al Roberts rotted in his cell for twenty-nine years. He killed those two women. I just know he did.”

“What about his motive? Blackmail? We have no evidence, just speculation that Vera and Mrs. Hathaway had anything on him. Without that, there’s no motive.”

Rita set the shoebox back on the coffee table. “I guess we really are back where we started from. No motive, no case.”

We sat back in silence, thinking. What would we do now? We were so close. But close could be a million miles from the facts, and without facts and a motive we’d never get there.

“Sorry, Jimmy,” Sol said. “But we’ll keep looking.”

Just then my eye caught the corner of the yellowing newspaper sticking out of Mrs. Hathaway’s shoebox. I fished it out and looked it over for a moment. Then I frantically dug through the box.

“What are you doing?” Rita asked.

I pulled out a torn sheet from the motel’s guest register and glanced at it. Then I took out some old newspaper clippings, including obituaries, buried under Vera’s make-up jars and creams and studied them. A minute later, the light bulb went off.

“Why hadn’t I noticed this stuff before?” I said out loud. “Because, damn it! I hadn’t really looked.”

“Looked at what?” Rita asked.

Sol leaned forward. “What’d you find?”

“Oh, he had a motive, all right.” I held up the papers. “Haskell had a real dandy motive. A big reason to kill them both.”

I glanced at my watchagain: 7:35. Where in hell was Sol? He should’ve been here over an hour ago. I paced back and forth under the canopy at the lobby entrance to the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire among the tastefully dressed patrons who milled about and watched the out-of-breath bellhops play tug-of-war with their luggage. A doorman decked out in a uniform that even a strutting Bangui emperor would be embarrassed to wear opened the double-wide glass doors, nodding to each guest as they waltzed in and out. It was a typical night at one of the world’s busiest big-city hotels.

The marquee out front said that Freddie Martin and his orchestra would be performing tonight in the hotel’s historic nightclub, the Cocoanut Grove. But I wasn’t there to enjoy the music. The music would come later, after a twenty-nine-year wrong had been made right.

Sol’s limo finally pulled up in front of the hotel and stopped. He climbed out of the rear seat and went to the driver’s window. “Wait here,” he told his chauffeur. “I’m going to the main ballroom with Jimmy. When that call comes through on the radio phone, let me know what they say-and fast.”

The driver nodded. Sol turned to me, straightened up, and tugged on his dinner jacket.

I glanced at my watch again. “Jesus, what took so long, Sol? The event has already started.”

“I waited at the office for the FBI to call back with the results of the fingerprint comparison. No luck, so I figured I’d come out here anyway.”

“Christ, we don’t have confirmation yet?”

“Nope. I have people at my office waiting. When the call comes in, they’ll patch it through to my limo.”

“Damn, what’s taking them so long? You called the FBI yesterday!”

“Listen, Jimmy. Do you think it’s easy to get someone on the weekend to trot over to the National Archives, dig through records and compare prints? We’re talking Washington D.C.”

“With Haskell’s resources, if he gets wind of what’s going on, he’ll disappear. Christ, he owns a jet, has bank accounts all over the world.”

“Don’t worry, my FBI contact said the results should be in right away. They can’t move until they have hard proof. But once they do, they’ll charge out here like the Seventh Calvary and arrest him.” He slapped my back. “Now, let’s go inside and keep our eye on the bastard.”

We walked to the hotel entrance. “Hey,” Sol said, looking me over. “You were supposed to wear a tux. You’ll stand out like a kangaroo at a garden party in that getup.”

I looked down at the jacket of my best suit. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing. Forget it. If anybody says anything, I’ll tell them that you’re my manservant, a gentleman's gentleman. Now come along, Jeeves.”

Christ, they didn’t say anything about this in law school.

We entered the hotel lobby and found our way to the main ballroom. Some pimply-faced kid wearing a hotel security blazer stood at attention, guarding the door. “Sir, I’ll need to see your invitations.”

“Sure,” Sol said, slipping something into the guy’s palm. “It’s got a picture of Ben Franklin on it.”

The kid looked down at what Sol had just handed him. “Oh, yeah . It sure does.” He held the door open and we slipped into the room.

Sol and I lurked in the back. The room was filled with tables surrounded by men and women resplendent in their formal attire. The meal was winding down and waiters bustled about picking up plates while others poured coffee and wine.

On the stage, under a purple and white banner that read: The chief business of the American people is business , CEO types sat at a banquet table facing the audience. Donning frozen smiles, they exhibited the zestful flamboyance often noticed at a mass for the dead.

One of the men leaned over and said something to the man sitting to his right. That guy nodded, got up and went to the podium. He adjusted the mike, scanned the crowd, and started to speak.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to be among such an illustrious group of people…”

He introduced the men seated on the dais-an executive who headed one of Haskell’s corporations, a couple of bankers, high-level politicians, and several businessmen who had contributed to their organization. One of them was Raymond Haskell.