Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006
- Автор: Бетанкур Джон Грегори, Jr. William J. Carroll,
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines/Crosstown Publications
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006». Краткое содержание книги:
“Please make yourself comfortable, sir,” Auburn told Casteven. He was always scrupulously polite to persons under arrest. It looked like the prisoner was planning to stand mute. They didn’t need a confession to make the charges stick, but Auburn hoped to get some more details before he turned the case over to the prosecutor’s office. He’d already given Casteven the statutory warnings, but he gave them again.
“I’m going to remind you that you’re entitled to have a lawyer here before you say anything. But once you have legal representation, the city will have it too, in the form of an assistant prosecutor. And then those two lawyers will take over the case and decide your future between them.”
Casteven sat with his bulky frame huddled on the edge of his chair like a little boy caught stealing apples. His dominant emotion seemed to be shame rather than fear. But clearly he was skeptical that Auburn had any other motive than the desire to see him convicted and sentenced. And Auburn knew that nothing he could do or say would convince this man of his genuine compassion, or persuade him that he enjoyed this part of his job about as much as Casteven enjoyed scraping burnt grease off the grill.
“I’m going to put my cards on the table,” he said. “Most of them anyway. I’m sure you know that the divers brought up the gun and the gloves from the river where you threw them.”
Casteven looked as if he were going to make a last-minute effort to deny everything, but something about Auburn’s businesslike tone apparently told him it wouldn’t work.
“You don’t need to say a thing if you don’t want to,” Auburn assured him again. “Let me tell you what I think happened. Your business has been going down for years, along with all the other businesses in the neighborhood. And things only got worse when your wife died and you had to decide between struggling along without her and hiring some backup help. Getting your brother-in-law to work for you took off some of the workload, but it also cut your net income even further.”
A gentle breeze from the direction of the river stirred forms on the table and cobwebs in the corners. They could hear the piping of dozens of birds in the trees around the courthouse half a block away.
“From your apartment you had a view of Ida Blandford’s house across the street. You saw people visiting her in the evening — couples, individuals — and these obviously weren’t social visits. Probably you could see her talking to them in her front parlor. Maybe you even saw her go upstairs and take her keys out of her purse and unlock her safe—”
The look on Casteven’s face provided full confirmation of Auburn’s surmise.
“Day after day you watched that going on, and day after day you tried to figure out how to get your hands on that money. You saw that she was concerned about security, so you decided to pretend to represent a company that installs electronic burglar alarm systems.” Casteven’s eyes opened wider and he seemed to be having trouble breathing.
“You figured if she couldn’t see well enough to drive, she probably wouldn’t recognize you as the guy from the bar and grill across the street, especially since she avoided your place like a leper colony. Probably you thought if you could once get inside her house you could jam a window latch or figure out some other way to fix it so you could slip in from the back some Sunday morning while she was at church.
“According to the phone company’s records, you called her last Friday evening, and again on Monday. And Wednesday night you turned up at her place, didn’t you, by appointment? Greg Rakovy’s truck was parked on Jardine last night for hours, and it’s parked there again today. After dark it would have been easy to climb up in the back and borrow his toolbox.”
Casteven shook his head and spoke for the first time since they’d entered the room. “Hard hat. And a pair of gloves.”
Dollinger sat down and started taking notes.
“Okay, his hard hat. And you put a piece of tape over his name and wrote a fake name on it. And you put on his gloves so you wouldn’t leave fingerprints anywhere, and took along an old revolver just in case—”
“I never owned a gun in my life,” said Casteven. “And I never fired one in my life, either. It was her gun. Something I said or did when I was down in the basement must have tipped her off. Anyway she went upstairs for a minute and when she came back she was pointing this big old cannon right in my face. I freaked out because she was blind as a bat and her hands were shaking. I tried to take the gun away from her and she shot herself. That’s what happened, and even if you bring a hundred prosecutors in here, it was still an accident.”
“No, sir. A homicide that occurs during the commission of a felony offense is automatically first-degree murder. That’s how the law reads, and that’s how your arrest warrant reads. This happened around — what, eight or nine o’clock Wednesday evening?”
Evidently alarmed by what Auburn had just said, Casteven clammed up again.
“You found her purse, got her keys, and opened the safe. You probably waited until Rakovy closed up for the night before you went across to the bar and grill and got a big, resealable plastic freezer bag to stow the cash in. And later that night you moved the body and the purse to the riverbank. Your idea was obviously to conceal the fact that you, the killer, had ever been in the house.”
At the word “killer,” Casteven clamped his lips still more tightly shut.
“But then you decided to put the gun and the gloves in another freezer bag and throw them in the river. Why?”
Casteven shrugged and his eyebrows went up, but he said nothing.
“After all, the gun couldn’t be traced to you. And you could have burned the gloves. Why throw them in the river and go to the additional trouble of sealing them up together in a waterproof bag? I’ll tell you why. When you peeled the tape off Rakovy’s hard hat you saw that his name had come off on the sticky side, and you decided to frame him for the murder you hadn’t planned to commit.
“You and he obviously don’t get along. Maybe you think you’re paying him more than he’s worth, and maybe you resent the fact that he hits it off a lot better with Darla than you do. Or maybe you just could never stand the guy. But at some point between the death of Ida Blanford and the moment when you tossed that bag in the river, you decided to make it look like Greg was the killer.
“There weren’t any fingerprints on the stuff in that bag. How do you handle adhesive tape without leaving some partials somewhere? How do you take off a pair of gloves and stuff them in a plastic bag without leaving any prints on the bag?”
“I guess you might wear another pair of gloves,” said Casteven, “which you don’t have to get rid of because they don’t have blood on them.”
“But if you didn’t expect the bag to be found, why worry about fingerprints at all?”
“Wouldn’t I have been taking a pretty long chance that they’d even look for the gun in the river, let alone bring it up?”
“Not really. When Fire and Rescue dredged up that gun from the Karlowski shooting a couple of years ago, the papers made a big deal about how there are sandbars lying crosswise in the riverbed that catch debris and keep it from washing downstream until there’s been a lot of rain. It looks to me like evidence of a frameup, but it’ll be up to the prosecutor to formulate the charges.
“Although the cash we found in your freezer is evidence that you robbed Ida Blanford, I want to remind you that the charge on which you were arrested was first-degree murder. And the evidence I showed the judge to back up my application for that warrant was the scrap of paper you used to wipe up the blood from the basement floor.