Requiem for a Realtor (18 page)

“Drop the chains! I am an officer of the court and this is an emergency.”

Tuttle had handled court cases in less time than it took him to persuade the crew that they were putting themselves in jeopardy if they so much as touched his car. The driver of the truck was half again as high as Tuttle and his partner wasn't much smaller. But Tuttle was filled with righteous anger. He remembered his cell phone and put through a call to Phil Keegan. There was a moment's silence after he explained what was happening on the street outside.

“Tell them your handicap, Tuttle.”

“I don't golf.”

Keegan guffawed. “Let me talk to one of them.”

Tuttle handed his phone to the driver who seemed unsure which end to put to his ear. He listened, gave the phone back to Tuttle, and got into his cab, without even saying good-bye. His partner was more reluctant to call it a day but he got into the cab, too. Tuttle, not without a flourish, opened the door and got into his car. He honked when he passed the truck, cutting sharply in and getting a honk from the truck.

“You have to know how to handle these people,” Tuttle said, after telling Phyllis how he had cowed them at headquarters.

“Did she keep the keys?”

“I'll get them later.”

Tuttle was beginning to hate those keys. He got the other set from his pocket and handed them to Phyllis.

“There's no longer any point in my keeping these.”

She took them as if they were hot and dropped them into her purse, not the little black one but a capacious bag with a wide shoulder strap. Tuttle felt as if he had just destroyed the evidence of his own malpractice. It seemed to be a good time to put the fear of God into Phyllis Collins.

“You may have to tell them where you were that night.”

When she understood, she cried, “Never.”

“It's no accident that they kept the keys. Of course you can understand how their minds work.”

He explained it to her. It was becoming common knowledge that Phyllis had benefitted from her husband's death. And she would have suffered if he had gone on living, divorced her, and cut her off from his prospective fortune.

“You've got a set of keys to his car. You know where he hangs out. You go there, find his car and—”

“Stop.”

“The police won't stop once they get going on it. The only way to make those keys insignificant is to produce your alibi.”

“I will not tell them David and I were spending the night in a seedy hotel when Stanley was killed.”

“Would you rather be accused of running him down?”

“No one would believe I'd do such a thing.”

“Mrs. Collins, they could find out about the hotel whether you tell them or not. Someone might have seen you there. You checked in, the clerk will remember and might think it is his civic duty to save you from an unjust accusation.”

She fell silent. Then she said in a small voice. “He wouldn't be much help.”

“He could prove where you were when your husband was killed.”

“No he couldn't. I told you! We left before midnight.”

Tuttle sought to conceal that he had, indeed, forgotten. “So you're sticking to your story that you and Jameson checked in there for the night and left before midnight.”

“I can't explain.”

“You checked out?”

“We just left. The manager saw us go out.”

“What did you do, have a fight?”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“You have to tell your lawyer everything.”

“I do not. I won't.”

Not for the first time, Tuttle was glad he had decided not to handle divorces, urged to this by his father, no matter the loss of income it entailed. Men and women who had been in love hated with an intensity not to be equaled, and even while hating the one they had loved, they got caught up with someone new. And there was all this sneaking about, meeting in hotels, making a sordid trail out of one marriage and into another, probably equally doomed. Phyllis had shut up like a clam, and he had no desire to pry the truth out of her.

26

The collapse of the case against Phyllis Collins began when her stay at the Frosinone with David Jameson the night her husband was killed was investigated. People seemed to line up to make sure the police knew of this. It was Tuttle who first told Cy Horvath.

“I don't want my client harassed.”

Before Cy Horvath checked out the claim, Bob Oliver took him aside.

“I know Phyllis is the gainer, Horvath, but she did not run down Stanley.”

“Is that right?”

“What I am going to tell you has got to remain confidential.”

And so Cy was told for the second time that David Jameson and Phyllis Collins had checked into the Frosinone the night Stanley Collins was run over. At the hotel, Primo Verdi confirmed it.

“That's right, Lieutenant. Here's the registration card.”

“Jones?”

“I also recorded his credit card.” Verdi got out a slip and showed it to Cy. “He didn't want to give me that, but it was the only way he was going to get a key to the suite.”

Jameson had paid cash and registered as Daniel Jones but the credit card was recorded to cover any other possible expenses.

“What other expenses? He brought his own woman.”

Verdi seemed surprised that Cy knew of the escort service run out of the Frosinone. Not that anything would be done about it. The Pianone family protected the hotel from the police, thanks to their arrangement with Chief Robertson.

“I registered him myself.”

The whole thing was beginning to sound like a fabricated alibi. Tuttle and Verdi were hardly the kind of witnesses that drove doubt from the mind. And Bob Oliver would want to protect his sister.

“So they spent the night here?”

Verdi smiled slyly. “I didn't say that.”

He took obvious pleasure in recounting the early departure of the illicit couple.

“Just a quickie?”

“If he didn't get cold feet. The guy looked like an altar boy, and he was jumpy as a cat when he registered. He didn't even say good-bye when they left.”

“Before midnight?”

“It wasn't eleven o'clock.”

This gave Cy two choices. He decided to talk with Jameson and leave the widow to Agnes.

The waiting room at Jameson's clinic was full of patients and the dentist was hard at work. The receptionist opened a book when Cy said that he wanted to see Dr. Jameson.

“The soonest I can get you in is two months from now.”

“I want to see him now.”

“Now?”

He showed her his identification, and she backed away from the counter. She glanced at the waiting patients and said in a whisper, “Come with me.”

Cy followed her down a hallway where she opened the door of an office. “Wait here.”

Several minutes went by and then a nurse came in.

“Can I help you?”

“Who are you?”

“Dr. Jameson's nurse.”

“I came to see him.”

“He is with a patient.”

“This is important. I told the receptionist who I am.”

“But what's it about?”

And then Jameson came in, stripping off latex gloves as he did. He looked at the nurse. “I'm through with Mrs. Molari, Bridget.”

The nurse seemed reluctant to go. She showed more apprehension than Jameson did. But she left, reluctantly. Jameson sat behind his desk.

“You're a policeman?”

Cy showed him his identification. Jameson took it and examined it carefully, then handed it back. He looked at Cy, waiting.

“We are examining the death of Stanley Collins. It appears that he was deliberately run over.”

“I know Mrs. Collins, but I never met her husband.”

“And we know that you checked into the Frosinone with her the night he was killed.”

Jameson wiped his face with both hands and then avoided looking at Cy. “My God,” he murmured.

“It's true?”

The dentist nodded.

“Of course, when we learned that, there seemed no reason to imagine that his wife could have had anything to do with his death.”

“Certainly not!”

“The problem is, you left the Frosinone before eleven o'clock.”

“Yes, we did! Because nothing happened. It was a moment of weakness, but we both saw the wrongness of what we were doing before it was too late.” Jameson looked at Cy as if expecting praise.

“And left the hotel.”

“Yes.”

“And then?”

“I took Phyllis—Mrs. Collins—home.”

“Immediately?”

“Yes. It was a very emotional time, for both of us.”

“Did you stay with her?”

“I took her to her door, and we parted.” He sighed. “When I think of all the precautions I took so it would never be known. I even rented a car for the night.”

Cy said, “So you cannot really account for her activities after you left her at her door?”

“Lieutenant, you can't be serious. I know she stayed home.”

“How do you know that?”

“I telephoned her.”

“When was that?”

He thought. “Between one and two. And she had been asleep when I called.”

“That would seem to leave her in the clear.”

“Of course.” Jameson rose to his feet. “I am glad to have been of help, Lieutenant. Now I must get back to my patients.”

And so it might have ended. Agnes's report on her conversation with Phyllis Collins corroborated Jameson's story. Yes, they had gone to a hotel but they had left within an hour.

“Did she say why they left?”

“Should I have asked?”

“I would have.”

“Cy, the woman was embarrassed to tears as it was. What did you find out?”

“That Dr. Jameson is a very busy dentist.”

When Cy told Phil Keegan what he and Agnes had learned, the captain shrugged.

“I never thought she did it, Cy.”

“Someone did.”

“Have you asked around at that nightclub?”

“I took Marge there one night.”

“No kidding. What's it like?”

“We enjoyed it.”

Phil might have been trying to remember what it was like to have a wife he could take places. But he had been a widower for a long time.

“Check it out again, Cy.”

It was the obvious next step. No, it was like going back to square one and starting again. Cy found himself almost disappointed that the alibi for Phyllis Collins was so tight. He had been as disinclined as Phil to think that she had done it, but the neatness with which she had been excluded was unusual. Most alibis have a hole or two in them, and that has a way of lending them plausibility rather than not. But the night at the Frosinone, even though it had been shorter than one might have expected, put Mrs. Collins in the clear. Whatever one thought of Bob Oliver, Tuttle, or Primo Verdi, the testimony of David Jameson, testimony he had been deeply ashamed to give, clinched it. So back to the Rendezvous it was.

27

Phil Keegan was in a melancholy mood when he told Father Dowling of the keys that had been found in Phyllis Collins's purse.

“Is it so rare for a wife to have a set of keys to her husband's car?”

“She denied having them.”

“I suppose one could forget such a set of keys were about the house.”

“They were in her purse.”

Phil spelled out what had gone through Agnes Lamb's mind. A couple on the brink of a divorce that would have cut the wife off from any share in the husband's promised inheritance, but the wife would be sole heir if her husband conveniently quitted the earth.

“It is difficult to imagine Phyllis Collins as a cold-blooded murderer.”

“You, Roger?”

The priest laughed. He had often assured Phil that anyone was capable of anything, given the right circumstances.

“Oh, I suppose she might have thought about it. But surely Agnes would have asked where Mrs. Collins was on the fatal night.”

“She said she was in bed.”

“Not improbable, given the hour.”

“She implied that it was her own bed.”

Father Dowling's eyebrows lifted.

“It turns out that she and David Jameson, her dentist, were checked into a not terribly fashionable hotel.”

“Well, well.”

Dangerous territory, this. An abject David Jameson had confessed as much in this very room, confessing to the intention and not the deed.

“When we were alone, I realized what I was doing, Father. I had cast myself in the role of her protector and advisor, and there we were together in a sleazy hotel after a series of subterfuges. Nothing happened, nothing that we planned, but I went there with the full intention to commit adultery.”

David Jameson seemed to relish the role of penitent. Father Dowling said what a confessor usually says on such occasions.

“Thank God you didn't go through with it.”

“I actually thought of you when we were going up in the elevator. I recalled conversations we'd had here in this room. I had become a stranger to myself.”

“It is well that you feel such contrition, but you must not underestimate God's mercy.”

“I actually fell on my knees and prayed in that hotel room.”

The sin, such as it was, had been confessed, and Father Dowling would have preferred the usual surge of relief in the penitent, the eagerness to amend his life and move on. Not brood about what had been confessed. But Jameson was loath to have his sin regarded as somehow of a second order.

“Father, I am a virgin.”

The application of this word to a male had always struck Father Dowling as inapt.

“Well, your companion was not.”

“The worst of it is, I feel that I deliberately led her astray.”

From the account he had given, Jameson's role seemed the passive one. Now he wanted to heap ashes on his own head.

“At any rate, you can make the future unlike the past. Now she is eligible. You mentioned that you had spoken of marriage.”