Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 853 & 854, September/October 2012
- Автор: Макдермид Вэл, Манфредо Лу
- Год: 2012
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: 0013-6328
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 853 & 854, September/October 2012». Краткое содержание книги:
“That’s a very nice house you sold them. Mr. Collins must be doing okay.”
“Well, not as well as he hoped,” she said, lowering her voice. “When he moved, he lost some clients. In fact, they just took out a second mortgage. That didn’t stop him from buying a brand-new Jaguar convertible for Kim. But no matter how much money he spent, she wouldn’t quit working.”
“She was still a flight attendant? Why? He’s loaded.”
“She liked having her own money. And she did what she wanted to do.”
“Always?”
Kathy Minter nodded, more with her eyes than her head, and Kenner saw the beauty queen who still lived inside her. He told her what the shooter had said about babies.
“Wow,” she said. “Kim did not want kids. She mentioned that several times. I think it was a sore point with Tony.”
They exchanged business cards and cell-phone numbers. After she left, Kenner told Brownlee to run background checks on both the Collinses and to get their cell-phone and landline records through the district attorney. His desk phone rang.
“I was at the Honder place,” a voice full of gravel said. “I saw that guy drive away and got part of the tag number.”
“Great, what’s your name, sir?”
“I ain’t telling. I don’t want to go to court as a witness.”
Kenner wrote down three letters and a number for the tag on a late-model black Lexus convertible. Kenner hung up and Brownlee announced the computer system was down.
“I’ll go home and get my laptop,” Brownlee said. “That’ll be better than nothing, but we won’t be hooked up directly to the state system to check out that tag number.”
“On your way, call the IT guy and tell him the problem. I’ll improvise here, like the old days.”
Kenner called Todd Ramsey, a friend at the Atlanta police. It was his first contact with his old department since retiring. “I need a favor,” Kenner said. “Run this partial tag number for me. It’s a black Lexus.”
“This is not a free service, you know,” Ramsey said, but Kenner heard the keyboard clicking. “That information matches up to one car in Georgia, registered at an address on Lenox Road in Atlanta to a Kimberly Swinton.”
“The bad guy drove off in the victim’s car,” Kenner said. “But she didn’t drive that car to the dealership. Somebody gave her a lift. Had the Lexus been reported stolen?”
It hadn’t. The Escalade was registered in Kim Collins’ name at an address off North Paces Ferry Road in Atlanta, the new Jaguar in Millerton. One woman, three cars.
Brownlee walked in with his laptop tucked under his arm and a cup of coffee in each hand. “You take it black, right?” he said.
“You remembered something! Plug in and find out who lives at this address on Lenox Road. I’ll put out a statewide alert for the getaway car. We’re going to Atlanta.”
They got in the car and Kenner called his old boss in Atlanta and gave him the details. He next telephoned the state crime lab in Atlanta, where Kim Collins’ body had been taken for an autopsy. Kenner wasn’t sure whom to talk with, since the Atlanta PD gave their body business to a different place, the Fulton County medical examiner’s office. His call bounced around before he got the right person.
“We’ll do the autopsy tomorrow morning or this afternoon,” Dr. Andrew Dover said. “We’re backed up with bodies from a trailer fire in Gainesville. Four dead.”
“I have no leads. Can you tell me anything?”
“The body hasn’t even come in the door, Detective. I can’t perform miracles.”
“Keep me in mind when you find out something,” Kenner said.
Kenner watched the suburban yards and cow pastures of Millerton disappear and dense and dirty Atlanta come into view. He hadn’t been back since retirement, thinking he needed a clean break, yet he felt euphoric as the car entered the city.
As Kenner’s old boss promised, they found an Atlanta patrol car waiting in a Chick-fil-A parking lot on Peachtree Street in Buckhead. Brownlee pulled parallel and the drivers’ windows slid down simultaneously. Kenner knew the uniform cop’s round, red face, but not his name. The cop said, “Hear you had a murder down there. Somebody trampled by livestock?”
“Wiseass,” Kenner said. “Follow us.”
He gave Brownlee directions to the Lenox Road address the Lexus was registered to. It was a blocky, five-story condo building with jutting balconies about a mile from Lenox Mall. The police officers parked their cars near the front door and one of the residents let them inside. They took the elevator to the third floor and a lean blond man in a pressed Oxford shirt and rep tie opened the door to unit 312. His blue eyes shot open when he saw the uniformed Atlanta cop. He glanced up and down the hallway before motioning the three officers into his foyer and shutting the door.
“What the heck is going on?” he said.
“Alex Zack? I’m Detective Joe Kenner of the Millerton Police Department. Kim Collins is dead.”
The man’s face crumpled in what Kenner recognized as genuine grief. He put his palm on his forehead and walked into a living room lit by floor-to-ceiling windows. He dropped into a stuffed chair and Kenner sat on the end of a white leather sofa. Zack wore brown tassel loafers, worn but well maintained, indicating a traditionalist personality.
“Good God,” Zack said after Kenner described the shooting. “Kim was headstrong and made people mad, but to shoot her? Why did you come here?”
“The killer drove away in a car registered at this address.”
“A black Lexus convertible? I bought that car for Kim right before she, uh, moved away.”
“Can you account for your whereabouts when the shooting happened?”
“I was with customers at my store,” Zack said. “You don’t think I had anything to do with Kim’s death, do you? Call the store and check. Lighting Designs, near the mall.”
Kenner looked at Brownlee, who nodded and walked out of the condo.
Zack dropped his head into his hands and stayed in that position a full minute. Kenner looked around. He recognized the furniture style — contemporary — because he read Brenda’s design magazines while sitting on the toilet. The room was neat but dusty, and he got the feeing nobody else lived there, certainly no woman. Zack lifted his head with tears leaking from his eyes.
“I used to think I’d be happy to hear about Kim’s death,” he said. “I hated her when she dumped me for that lawyer. Now I hate myself for feeling that way.”
“I’m sorry to be the one to break the news.”
“I still miss her,” Zack said. “I’d had girlfriends before and almost got married once, but nothing like Kim. She was something, so stylish and confident.” He wiped his right eye with the heel of his hand. “She was always together, always making sure her toenail polish matched her fingernails, even if she was wearing cowboy boots. She had ten thousand bottles of polish.”
Kenner smiled and said, “How’d you meet?”
“On a flight. I ordered a Coke and she made a joke about Atlanta being the home of Coke. Then a teenager had an anxiety attack after we took off and Kim calmed her down in a very expert way. Her voice was so calming.” His own voice slipped into a lower register and he gazed out the window. “I saw her in the terminal and complimented her and asked her out, which is the kind of impulsive thing I never do. I couldn’t believe it when she said yes. We got serious pretty fast. She wanted to ‘start fresh’ with me, so I bought this condo and we decorated it together. Actually, she did most of the decorating and I just paid for it.”
“Sounds beautiful. What went wrong?”
“I proposed marriage,” he said. “She said yes, with two conditions. She wanted to redecorate the place all over again with a whole new color scheme. I told her I couldn’t afford that.”