Good King Sauerkraut (24 page)

Mimi. He'd better find out if she was thinking of moving to a hotel or not. He found her in the media room, watching two movies. King put on a hearty air and asked, “Neither one interesting enough to hold your full attention?”

Her face was unreadable as she turned down the sound of the one movie she was listening to as well as watching. “I called Michael,” she said expressionlessly. “As soon as his ship reaches port, he's catching the next plane here.”

Damn her
—even less time now. “You're afraid to stay in the apartment with me?”

“Ivan says you won't dare kill me now.”

Ivan? “Well,
Marian
says the same about you.”

Mimi switched off the two movies and stood up to face him. “King, you're not going to kill me. I'm going to be watching you, every minute. And when Michael gets here, we'll both be watching you. Knowing you, I think you'll give yourself away sooner or later. I'm not going to jail for you.”

He didn't like the sound of that. “Give myself away? Is that what you said?”

“Just remember—I'm watching. Don't do
anything
out of the ordinary and you must might get out of this intact.” She stared at him, unblinking.

It didn't make sense; if she accepted the police's theory and believed him to be a murderer, why the hell was she still here? Play it out. “If you think the police are going to arrest me for murder, you're wrong. There's no way they can prove I did something I didn't do.”

She laughed unpleasantly. “I can't believe how naive you are. Those two detectives can make a case against either of us anytime they feel like it. They can argue we each had motive and we each had opportunity, and neither of us can prove them wrong. Once they get tired of playing these games with us, they can just flip a coin to decide which of us to arrest.”

Uh-huh, so that was it; she didn't trust the police to get it right. That meant she was up to no good, that she had something definite in mind. But what? Ask her. “What are you going to do?”

“I'm going to watch you,” she replied.

“I see. Well, if you think I won't be keeping an eye on
you
, better think again. I'm not going to be done in by some programmer from California.”

Mimi's upper lip lifted. “You're a prince, King,” she said without realizing how silly that sounded. “Now we both know where we stand.”

They were glaring at each other without speaking when the doorbell rang. And rang again. Finally Mimi broke away and went to answer the door. “Oh no,” he heard her groan.

King took his time getting to the entryway, where he saw the two people he fully expected to see. “Sergeants Larch and Malecki. What a surprise.”

“We didn't want you to think we were neglecting you,” Marian Larch said with unnecessary heartiness.

“Never,” King replied somberly.

“We had something to attend to or we woulda been here earlier,” Ivan Malecki explained to Mimi, as if she wanted to know.

“Well, Mimi, you can relax,” King said sarcastically. “Now you won't have to
watch
me by yourself.”

She ignored him, superbly. “What do you want this time, Ivan? I'm not answering any more questions. My lawyer told me not to talk to you at all.”

My
lawyer, King noted.

“Oh, I thought we'd just sit and talk for a while,” the detective answered amiably. “King and my partner have an errand to run.”

“We do?” King said.

“We do,” Marian answered firmly. “Got a raincoat? It's still pouring down outside.”

King looked in the entryway closet. No guest raincoats, but a couple of umbrellas. He took one and asked, “Where are we going?”

“I want you to meet some people.”

You don't have to go with her
, he told himself. “On second thought, I don't think so. I don't have to go trotting along after you every time you—”

“You can either come with me to meet these people or I take you down to the station and hold you as a material witness. Well? Which is it going to be?”

He glared at her. “Oh, shit. All right. Who are these people?”

“You'll see. Come along.” She turned and went out, not looking back to see if he followed.

He followed.

On the street, King folded himself into the passenger seat of the car Marian was driving, a different one from yesterday's. He felt more curiosity than nervousness. A couple of weeks ago, being dragged off to god-knows-where by a police detective would have reduced him to a twittering wreck; but now he simply felt a healthy tenseness, ready to take on whatever it was. The rain was beginning to slack off.

“This morning the reports from your credit card companies came in,” Marian said conversationally. “Copies of receipts, like that. We were interested in the ones that were dated after you were mugged. And you know what we found? We found a whole bunch of receipts for that same day.”

King had halfway expected this to happen. “A few of them are bound to be mine,” he said coolly. “I made some charges right before the muggers took my billfold.”

“That's what we figured. But it's the damnedest thing—you know what your muggers used your cards for that day? Food! Not expensive clothes or televisions or high-tech toys, but food. They went down to Fifty-seventh Street and gorged themselves. Isn't that strange?”

King shrugged. “What did they charge after that day?”

“Nothing. Probably keeping the cards out of circulation for a while. But after they mugged you, they evidently spent the rest of the day eating. At least, that's what we thought. My partner and I checked them out—that's what we've been doing today. It was a long shot, at best. Cashiers and waiters don't even look at the customers half the time. But guess what? We found a couple who did.”

King's skin began to itch.

Marian went on, “One of them looked at the receipt and said, ‘Oh, yeah, that's the dude who's fifteen feet tall—I remember him.' Well, you can imagine our surprise. You said
kids
mugged you, so it was kids we were looking for. But the description we got was of a middle-aged man, kind of messy, and tall.
Extremely
tall. Easy to notice, easy to remember.”

He tried to sound casual. “Those are two places I went, obviously.”

“Obviously. But what has us puzzled is the time stamps. One receipt says three-forty-five and the other six-oh-five. Hours after you were supposed to have been mugged. Well, here we are.”

Here
was the Russian Tea Room. King numbly followed her inside. He hadn't even known that the time appeared on credit card receipts; he'd never looked at them that closely. Immediately he recognized the sad-eyed Polish waiter who'd cleaned up some wine King had spilled; King stood there uneasily as the waiter unsmilingly identified him. Then Marian took him to Tony Roma's, where it was the cashier who made the identification. King didn't remember her at all.

The rain had stopped. Marian had parked illegally, but when they got in she made no move to start the car. She looked at King and said, “Want to tell me about it?”

“Obviously I got the time confused.” He let a trace of irritation creep into his voice.

“Obviously. You confused high noon with seven o'clock in the evening—a common mistake. All the time you were supposed to be lying unconscious in Central Park, you were down here stuffing your gut. Why did you tell us you were attacked at noon?”

Be friendly, be reasonable
. “Marian, I'd just suffered a head injury. Had you forgotten that? I don't really remember what I told the investigating officers. I'm not sure about the times even now.”

She cocked an eyebrow at him. “Good answer. It might just play in a courtroom.” Abruptly she started the car. “I need a beer.”

So did King.

Marian headed back toward the western half of Fifty-seventh, parked illegally again, and led King into a bar called Desmond's. One of the places he'd missed. King felt as if he'd stepped into another era, a time usually thought of as the age of innocence. The old-fashioned wooden bar, the total absence of steel and plastic, the unhurried pace, the quiet. If the barman had been a soda jerk, the scene could have been painted by Norman Rockwell.

They sat at the bar to drink their beers. King watched the barman polishing already gleaming glasses and said a little prayer that Marian Larch would let him off the hook.

She didn't. “There were receipts from ten different restaurants, you know. All the same day. Ten! Why were you eating so much?”

He gave a little laugh, trying to sound mildly embarrassed. “A childhood habit, I'm afraid. I go on eating binges when I'm uptight.”

“What were you uptight about?”

“I was about to start on the project that could make me or break me and you want to know what I was uptight about? Come on.”

A silence fell. The barman started placing his newly polished glasses on a shelf behind the bar, aligning them just so. Each one separated from its neighbor by the exact same amount of space, each one back from the edge of the shelf the same distance. Marian said, “You couldn't have been mugged before six-thirty, seven o'clock, because you left the last restaurant at five after six. But the time on the first credit card receipt is only a few minutes after noon. What were you doing all morning?”

“Eating. I paid cash until I ran low and then started charging.”

“Uh-huh. So you spent the
entire day
eating?”

“Yeah, I guess I did.”

“You were so uptight about the project that could make you or break you—your words—that you spent the day eating … when you should have been at MechoTech?”

“What?”

“You had a meeting at two o'clock, but you didn't show. Because you were too busy eating?”

“A meeting?” King stalled.

“Rae Borchard says all four of you were expected at two. She'd wanted to reschedule for an hour earlier, but her secretary couldn't get any of you on the phone. The secretary had started calling a little after nine and kept calling all morning.”

A picture flashed into King's head: his own hands struggling to hold up the heavy window while Gregory fed his one-footed pigeon, the ringing of the telephone distracting him for one crucial moment, the feeling of helplessless as the window began to slip out of his grasp … “Are you sure about the day? I thought the meeting was for the next day, Friday.”

The police detective looked at him with disgust. “You didn't show up for that meeting because you knew there wasn't going to be any meeting. And you knew there wasn't going to be any meeting because you knew half the design team was dead. What happened in that apartment?”

“How would I know? I wasn't there!”

“Oh, knock it off, Sauerkraut!” Marian said sharply. “Of course you were there. What happened?” The barman looked up at her tone.

The only word King heard was
Sauerkraut
. That name again—that insulting, degrading name! Now even the goddam New York
Police
Department knew about it. How? How? “Listen, Marian. The only reason I didn't show up for that meeting is that I thought it was scheduled for the next day. I left the apartment before Dennis and Gregory died. You got that?
Before
.”

He might as well not have spoken. “Dennis must have been your primary target. Then you had to kill Gregory because he just happened to be there.”

“No, dammit! You couldn't be more wrong. I don't think they were murdered at all.”

“Two accidents at the same time? I could buy one, but not two. Was that how it happened? You killed Dennis by accident and then murdered Gregory to get rid of a witness?”

King clenched his teeth. “I … have never … murdered … anyone.”

“Then they both
were
accidents? Maybe I should charge you with reckless endangerment and take you in right now. But I don't think so. You knocked the TV set into the bathwater and then for an encore you dropped a window on Gregory Dillard's neck. Or was Gregory first?”

He pushed the empty beer glass away from him. “I'm not going to talk to you anymore.”

“Well, that would be a mistake, because Mimi Hargrove's talking her head off. She told my partner that Dennis was trying to sell Keystone out from under you. She said Warren Osterman was going for a merger with both Keystone and SmartSoft, but you told her you'd only recently found out about it. That means Dennis had been negotiating with Osterman behind your back. You found out what was going on, and—
wham!
I got to tell you, King, you're looking good for this one. You killed your partner to stop his betraying you, and then you had to get rid of Gregory Dillard to shut him up.”

Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong!
But he said nothing, refusing to be baited.

“Although I have to admit that decapitation by falling window is a rather unusual way of murdering someone,” Marian went on. “Gregory must not have known Dennis was dead—no, he couldn't have. He wouldn't have stopped to feed the pigeons otherwise … or trusted you to hold the window. But since you were the only other one in the apartment, he'd have known eventually. That's the way it was, right?”

Wrong
. King kept his mouth clamped shut.

“Mimi says you and Dennis didn't get along—there was bad feeling between you even before all this talk about a merger. She says you were jealous of his talent and stuck him with managing the business so you could keep all the big projects for yourself. She told Ivan that the real reason you wanted Gale Fredericks for your partner was that Gale wouldn't be the competition that Dennis was.”

King clenched his teeth. Mimi was doing her damnedest to make sure the police zeroed in on him. She was doing exactly the same thing to him that he'd been doing to her—only she was doing it better.