Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 1. Whole No. 791, July 2007
- Автор: Хох Эдвард Д., Кобб Джеймс
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: 0013-6328
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 1. Whole No. 791, July 2007». Краткое содержание книги:
Time and music flowed past: Santos and Johnny’s “Sleepwalking,” Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz,” the theme from Moulin Rouge, and the Four Aces’ “Three Coins in the Fountain.” The final tropical-bird squawk from Martin’s Denny’s “Quiet Village” faded and the station break for the one o’clock news broke the spell. The first thing I noticed upon returning to Earth was the continuing idle of the Studebaker engine.
There were only two or three cars left in the turnout, and the Golden Hawk was one of them. Its driver was still just sitting there. My cop’s alarm bells, suppressed for a time, started ringing.
The Princess caught my mood change. “What’s wrong?” she asked, coming up to peer over the seat back. With her sweater and skirt lost somewhere in Car’s interior, she was a paler shadow against the seat covers.
“I don’t know. The blonde in the Golden Hawk’s still out there. She must be thinking awfully hard about something.”
And then the blonde must have made up her mind about whatever it was, because she slowly and deliberately drove her car off the edge of the overlook and into the canyon below, drowning out the night music with the crash and crumple of buckling steel.
A suicide gets worked like a homicide until you’re sure it isn’t. The pleasant darkness had been replaced by the glare of work lights and headlights and the murmur of romantic radio had been supplanted by the hiss and chatter of police two-ways.
Sheriff's Search and Rescue had brought in their Dodge deuce-and-a-half with the heavy lift A-frame. A regular wrecker wouldn’t have had the hundred-and-fifty-foot reach to get to the bottom of the ravine. They were walking the hook down to the demolished Golden Hawk as the lab and coroner’s crews finished up at the crash site.
Assistant Coroner Michael O'Doul wheezed his way over the edge of the turnout followed by a couple of deputies carrying a sheet-wrapped form on a stretcher. Miss Dorothy Kurtz, white female adult, age thirty-two, blond, green eyes, 5'3", approximately 130 pounds, former resident of Santa Monica.
I’d found her purse in the wreck. There had been no suicide note.
Mortuary Mike’s beefy features were streaked with sweat and dust and he had grass seeds stuck in his moustache.
“What do you think, man?” I asked
“It won’t be official until she’s posted,” he replied, “but eyeballing it, I’d say death by asphyxiation from a crushed larynx.”
I nodded. “It probably happened when she did the piledriver into the wash at the bottom of the slope. You could see where the upper arc of the steering wheel caught her right across the throat.”
“The car didn’t roll or torch, that’s something anyway,” Mike mused. “She was a real good-looking woman.”
Mortuary Mike had a somewhat different view of the fairer sex. Most of the girls he met were on the quiet side.
A couple of blue serge suits crossed to where the deputies were preparing to load the body into the ambulance. “Hold the body here for a minute, O'Doul. We got somebody coming up to make a positive ID.”
“You got a relative?” I asked.
“Nah, a boyfriend. A Dr. Ned Freemont. He interns at the hospital where she worked.”
“Does this Dr. Freemont stand about five eleven with dark hair and does he drive a new Pontiac ragtop?” I asked.
These guys were Homicide Detectives, capital H, capital D, while I was just a pathetic little silver badge working drugs & juvenile for Metro intelligence. I should have genuflected, but the mood wasn’t on me.
“Yeah, Pulaski, he does. He also admits meeting the girl up here tonight. But he’s also got a solid alibi. At the time the lady was taking her high dive he was sitting in a cocktail lounge on Melrose in front of a swarm of witnesses. We’ve checked and the bartender remembers him. We’ve also talked to the other couples who were up here and their stories all match with yours and his. It’s a suicide.”
I glanced at the sheet-wrapped shape on the stretcher. “Yeah, I guess so.”
Still...
Lisette hovered at the edge of the light pool, listening intently. Her hair was ordered, her lipstick touched up, and there wasn’t a hint that her lingerie was still wadded up under Car’s front seat.
Well, hardly a hint anyway.
The shorter and uglier of the blue suits openly ogled her unconfined curves. “By the way, Pulaski,” he said, leering in word and deed, “just what were you doing up here tonight?”
If he was hoping for a maidenly blush and a lowering of the eyes, he was shopping at the wrong store. The Princess had never been embarrassed over anything she’d ever done, up to and including planning a mob hit on her own stepfather. “He was being the living end, darling,” she replied, snorting Fatima smoke. “The absolute living end.”
Short and ugly lost his leer and his taller partner screwed his puss into something resembling a grin. Heck, who was I to argue?
At that moment, a familiar Pontiac Bonneville pulled off the highway and drew in behind the row of sheriff's cruisers and emergency vehicles. The convertible’s top was up now.
Behind us, the winch on the lifter truck started to moan and chatter.
A uniformed deputy led Dr. Ned Freemont over to where we were standing. I recognized the dark hair, not so carefully styled now, and the expensive sports coat. The intern was boyishly handsome but trying to look older. The late Miss Kurtz might have had a good five years on him. An interesting combo. And you could sense this wasn’t any kind of struggling young medical student. He was coming from money, heading into money. He looked shook and his college-grad features were darkening under his next-day’s beard.
We did the ritualistic flashing of the tin and I let the homicide guys make the equally ritualistic apologies for getting the doctor out at this hour. Then came the request to have a look under the sheet.
She looked even older. They usually do dead.
Freemont gritted his teeth. “Yes, that’s Dorothy.”
The lead homicide man gave Mike O'Doul the nod to load up. “I hope you understand we’ve got some questions to ask, Doctor. We found your name in the young woman’s address book and several... personal pieces of correspondence from you in her purse. Deputy Pulaski has also identified you as being up here and speaking with Miss Kurtz shortly before her death. Do you have anything to say about that?”
His face twisted. “Only that this mess was my fault. Dorothy... Miss Kurtz called my house earlier this evening. She asked, demanded, that I meet her at this overlook. We’d come here before. It was a favorite place for her.”
“You had a relationship with Miss Kurtz?”
Freemont nodded. “We worked the same shift at Hollywood Receiving Hospital and we’d dated off and on for a while. It was just casual, from my point of view anyway. But Dorothy saw it differently. When I saw things were getting too serious, I tried to break it off, but she didn’t take it well. She’d developed this fixation... about us. About our getting married...”
He glanced at the sheet-wrapped body sliding into the back of the big Buick ambulance. “It was my fault. I never should have let it happen.”
“Did she ever give you a hint she was planning on wasting herself, Doc?” Crude on my part, yeah, but I was curious to see how he’d take it.
He just looked at me, suffering like a basset hound. “No! Of course not! If she had I’d have done things differently! I’d have gotten her professional help! As it was, I came up here tonight to tell her, once and for all, it was over, that marriage just wasn’t in the books! Dorothy became upset, frenzied, but I swear to God she never said a word about suicide.”
The Princess and I swapped thoughtful glances. In Lisette’s outburst of erotic snoopiness, she’d turned our radio off to see if we could hear anything from the interior of the Golden Hawk. If anyone had been flipping out, they’d been damn quiet about it.