Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018
- Автор: Ловси Питер, Зельцерман Дэйв
- Год: 2018
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: 0013-6328
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018». Краткое содержание книги:
By the time Detective Sergeant Fritz Dollinger parked in the alley that ran along the back of the Fairmont Mall parking lot, an investigator from the coroner’s office was already on the scene making measurements and recording them on a laptop. The inevitable crowd of gawkers had begun to form outside the yellow-tape barrier, their curiosity piqued by the still form that lay under a slate-gray tarpaulin.
The body had been found on the ground between two large trash receptacles in a no-man’s-land between the mall and the alley. Nick Stamaty, the coroner’s investigator, greeted Dollinger with his unfailing suave cordiality and interrupted his work long enough to hand over a clear plastic bag containing the dead man’s wallet, keys, and cell phone.
“Officer Cameron had to leave to check out a burglary up the street,” he said. “She told me to give you her fondest regards.” Patrolwoman Blodwen Cameron’s romantic interest in Dollinger was common knowledge among his colleagues, and a fertile source of annoyance to the sturdily monogamous Dollinger. “And this.”
“This” was a statement Cameron had taken from Skip Tadmore, the sign poster who had discovered the body.
After glancing through the statement, Dollinger examined the dead man’s wallet, which contained forty-four dollars in cash. He already had basic identification: Kent Roveling, forty-six, resident of the south suburb of Westrup, where he was employed as a sales rep at a wholesale tire distributorship. No known family other than an ex-wife currently living in another state.
The dumpy, bespectacled man under the tarpaulin had two bullet wounds in his upper chest. The front of his golf shirt was stiff with dark blood.
“Weapon?”
Stamaty wiped sweat from his forehead with a neatly folded linen hand-kershief. “If it’s here,” he said, “I haven’t found it yet. Judging from the entry wounds, I figure a medium-caliber handgun fired at point-blank range. There isn’t a drop of blood on the ground anywhere, so he must have been shot somewhere else and off-loaded here.”
“How long dead?”
“Unofficially, eight to twelve hours. It’s too hot today to go by body temperature, but he’s got some pretty extensive rigor. By the way, keep out of that oil spill. Cameron says it’s from the sign guy’s bucket truck.”
Dollinger scanned the motley gang of onlookers. “Any of you folks live around here?” For all the response he got, he might have been speaking Swahili to a crowd of Eskimos.
He moved his car to a side street and started working along the row of houses nearest to the mall parking lot, rapping briskly at each door, because more often than not the doorbells in houses this old didn’t work. His inquiry at the first house regarding unusual noises during the night elicited a peppery tirade from the tenant, a feisty senior citizen who needed a shave and a haircut.
“I’m not sure what would be classified as an unusual noise coming from over there. I knew we were in trouble when they started building that mall thirty years ago. Those sick purply-pink lights burn all night. Every couple-three minutes a car with a hole in the muffler roars in and parks like a chopper landing. The whole family climbs out and slams all four doors, one at a time. Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Then the driver locks it with a remote, and the horn toots.” Dollinger heard essentially the same lament from nearly everyone he questioned.
Back in his air-conditioned car, he set about analyzing the data stored on Roveling’s cell phone. Sometimes scanning a cell phone was almost like resurrecting and interrogating its late owner about personal affairs, relationships, and proclivities. But Roveling’s phone, a bare-bones model, proved a disappointment. Although it had evidently seen hard service, practically nothing was stored on it except a handful of text messages pertaining to the wholesale tire business. Which suggested that its owner had either led a singularly colorless existence or had taken care to delete all personal material of a potentially compromising nature.
Roveling’s employer, Garret Graves, informed by phone of his death, expressed conventionial regrets. But he admitted that Roveling was hardly a model employee, using a lot of sick leave for what Graves suspected, without solid evidence, were the consequences of binge drinking. He could offer no suggestions as to what Roveling was doing in the neighborhood of Fairmont Mall last night, or why he was killed if robbery wasn’t the motive.
“Have you got his car?” asked Graves.
“Just the keys, so far. What kind of car is it?”
Graves gave identifying information and, after a few moments’ delay, the registration number. “Actually it’s my car — leased to the company, anyway. When you find it, let me know so I can send somebody out to pick it up.”
Dollinger did a slow cruise up and down the rows of parked vehicles in the mall parking lot. In less than five minutes he found Roveling’s late-model sport coupe. The car was locked. Dollinger put on gloves and, using Roveling’s key, made a superficial search. Apart from four nested orange traffic-control cones on the floor of the back seat and a trunkful of tire catalogs, he found nothing of interest.
By the time he got back to the mall parking lot, Lieutenant Kestrel had arrived from the forensic lab. A shift in the position of the tarpaulin told Dollinger that Kestrel had already shot his routine fifty or so pictures of the remains, no doubt to the immeasurable delight of the crowd. Gowned, masked, and gloved like a surgeon, Kestrel was now sorting through the contents of one of the iron trash receptacles, handling empty pop cans, cigaret packs, Styrofoam cartons, rain-soaked newspapers, and the infinitely heterogeneous jetsam of human society as if each piece were a priceless heirloom.
The working relationship between Stamaty, the county employee, and Kestrel, the sworn municipal public-safety officer, tottered perpetually on the brink of war. Whenever their points of view, their procedural priorities, or their interpretations of the rules of evidence could possibly clash, they did. Thrown together at the scene of nearly every homicide reported within the city limits, they struggled manfully to avoid open conflict, and to their credit they usually succeeded in preserving a semblance of mutual regard. Often that demanded a strategy of taking turns gathering data, one doing the Sherlock Holmes bit on hands and knees beside the corpse while the other sat at a distance executing a scale drawing of the scene.
Dollinger found Stamaty in his van posting notes on his laptop and listening to a CD of classical music. He told Stamaty about finding Roveling’s car.
“No blood in the car?”
“Not that I saw. Kestrel could walk over there from here to check it out if he didn’t have to take about four hundred pounds of equipment with him.”
Stamaty shook his head in time with a stately minuet by Domenico Scarlatti. “He just got a call from downtown to hit this burglary scene up on Addison when he finishes up here. They’ll probably send Fremantle to do the car.”
While Stamaty was arranging for the removal of Roveling’s remains to the coroner’s mortuary, Dollinger phoned a status report to Second District headquarters and then went to lunch. Just as he was finishing off a raspberry tart topped with real whipped cream, he got a call from Patrolwoman Cameron.
“Sergeant, I’m at the scene of a burglary on Addison Street, three blocks west of Fairmont Mall. Copper plumbing stolen out of an empty house last night. Lieutenant Kestrel thinks more happened here than just the theft of the copper.”
“Such as homicide?”
“Sergeant, you are so sharp.”
The house stood at the corner of Addison and Wells. Dollinger parked in front of Cameron’s cruiser and Kestrel’s van. With peeling paint and badly chipped porch steps, the boxy, characterless, outmoded residence wore a general air of decay, which a freshly mowed lawn did little to lessen. The For Sale sign in the front yard was one of three on this block.