No Police Like Holmes (15 page)

Chapter Twenty-Seven
-
Here Comes the Judge

I don't know that I expected to hear, but not that.

“Molly Crocker doesn't seem like his type, does she?” Lynda said, noting the shock on my face.

“Come to think of it,” I said, “why not? She's female.” In fact, she was an attractive, albeit mature, female. “She's married, but that wouldn't even slow Matheson down, much less stop him. There must have been some sort of relationship between them - her room number on the writing pad shows that - and romance is certainly one of the possibilities.”

“Certainly. I withdraw what I said about his type. How would I even know, really?”

“And maybe she went to his room at the Winfield yesterday with her hair tucked up in a deerstalker cap. Somebody who saw her from behind might not have been able to tell she was a woman. In fact, now that I think about it, are we sure the witness said anything about gender? I think Oscar used the pronoun ‘he,' but maybe he was just making an assumption. We should press him on that.”

“But Crocker was wearing a dress every time I saw her yesterday,” Lynda objected.

She stopped talking as a female student walked by, one of the lost souls from the dorm who hadn't gone home for spring break. The girl was tall with platinum blond hair reaching down the middle of her back. She wore very short red shorts (at least two months ahead of season) over long, muscular legs, a white T-shirt with no bra underneath, and Nike gym shoes. I barely noticed her.

“Besides,” Lynda said when the student had passed, “what about motive? What do you figure Molly Crocker had to do with the stolen books?”

“I don't know, maybe nothing at all. This could be a simple crime of passion. It could have been her, not you, that Matheson referred to when he told Queensbury he had business with a lady. We ought to at least talk to her, find out if she knows anything. Her name is on my list from Mac anyway.”

Lynda had to admit it couldn't hurt.

I went into the back of the Hearth Room, where Bob Nakamora was now holding forth on the subject of Sherlock Holmes on the radio.

“Orson Welles played Holmes in his own radio adaptation of William Gillette's famous melodrama
Sherlock Holmes
when T
he Mercury Theater on the Air
...”

After looking around for a minute from the doorway, I spotted Judge Crocker sitting next to Queensbury on a comfortable couch along the far wall. Even in the harsh fluorescent light of the Hearth Room she was a handsome woman. The blue jumper she was wearing seemed casual, comfortable and un-judgelike. Once again I noticed the mound of her tummy, big enough to make me wonder if she were pregnant but not big enough that I'd risk asking her about it.

Feeling conspicuous, I crossed the room and whispered in her ear. “Could you come with me for a minute?”

Molly Crocker looked at me, then at Queensbury, who seemed engrossed in the talk. She rose and picked up her purse, a dark leather contraption with a drawstring top. Not until we were walking toward the door did she speak in a low voice.

“Has something happened?”

There were a million ways to answer that. I settled on, “Nothing new. We just want to ask you a few questions.”

“‘We?'”

The presence of Lynda Teal right outside the door answered for me. Molly had met Lynda at breakfast, and apparently she thought I'd set her up for an exercise in ambush journalism.

“If you want to talk to me about Hugh's death, I must tell you that I have no interest in being interviewed for your newspaper,” she told Lynda.

“I'm really the one who wants to talk to you,” I said. “Off the record. You could help us solve Matheson's murder.”

“Mr. Cody, I think I made it quite clear earlier this morning that I highly disapprove of playing games with murder.”

“This is no game.”

“Then if you actually have any pertinent information about this homicide or any other crime you're legally bound to tell the police.”

“So are you.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Her tone of voice would have cut through diamonds.

While I was making a mental note to never do anything that might land me in Maximum Molly's courtroom, the girl in red shorts walked by again. “I don't think the hallway is the right place to discuss this,” I said.

After a token protest that there was no right place, Molly went with us to the Study Lounge on the same floor of Muckerheide. With its stuffed chairs and fifty-watt bulbs, the place is about as conducive to study as the drive-in theaters of my father's youth, and occasionally is the site of similar activities. Not today, though. We had the lounge all to ourselves, thanks to spring break.

As soon as we'd settled into chairs I told Molly, “The number of your room at the Winfield was written on a notepad by the side of Matheson's body.”

“Good grief, is that what this is about? I already know that. Your police chief - what's his name, Hummel? - he told me this morning.”

Lynda, sitting where Molly Crocker couldn't see it, rolled her eyes in the back of her head.

“Oscar talked to you as part of his investigation?” I asked Molly.

“Yes. I found him a rather unpolished personality.”

That was Oscar, all right.

I should have expected this. We'd left the notepad where we'd found it, like good citizens. Any idiot would have tried to find out whose number that was, and Oscar is no idiot. He just acts like it sometimes.

“Do you have any idea why Matheson had your number?” Lynda asked.

The judge turned to her. “I know exactly why, but I see no reason to tell you - on or off the record. As an officer of the court I've already told the proper authorities.”

“It's really not that hard to figure out,” I said. “Matheson was a notorious womanizer. That's an old-fashioned word that Chalmers used, but I don't know of a better one. The two of you must have had a liaison at the hotel. The only real question is whether you left his room before or after the murder.”

Molly stood up, her body trembling. “That accusation is totally baseless.”

Fortunately, I wasn't within slapping range.

“Jeff isn't accusing you of anything,” Lynda said in a soothing tone. “He just got carried away for a minute. What he means is, did you go to Matheson's room yesterday afternoon? And if you did, did he give you any indication that he was expecting another visitor?”

“Those are questions quite proper for the police to ask, Ms. Teal, and they already did.”

I gave up. “If you choose to stonewall us, Judge, I know there's nothing we can do about it. Legally, whatever you had going with the victim is none of our business.”

“I had nothing ‘going' with Hugh Matheson.”

Unexpectedly, she sat back down and went on in a more collected voice. “I've known Hugh for years, since law school. Apparently he tried to call me at the hotel a couple of times Friday night, but I was at Mac's party. Anyway, on Saturday he missed me again because I was out to an early breakfast, so he followed me into the corridor after Kate McCabe's presentation.”

“He just wanted to talk to you?” I said.

She nodded. “It was about a case he was involved in, a case that's going to reach my court.”

“But that isn't ethical, is it?” Lynda objected.

“Totally inappropriate,” the judge agreed with a shake of her head. “I told Hugh in the strongest terms possible that it was only our long friendship that kept me from reporting him to the ethics committee of the Cincinnati Bar Association.”

It was as neat an explanation for an embarrassing circumstance as I'd ever seen, maybe too neat.

“I find it hard to believe that a man with a five-speed libido like Matheson could resist putting the moves on an attractive woman like you,” I told Molly.

She laughed. “Thanks, I guess, but I never said he didn't try. I turned him down years ago, before I even had my first gray hair. I wasn't interested in being added to his list of conquests. And these days he prefers - preferred - younger women, so I was safe from his attentions.”

Lynda must have read something significant in that - is that a woman thing? - because she said, “How young?”

“How young is Renata Chalmers?”

It took a second or two for that to penetrate. But when it did, it hit hard. I gripped the arm of my chair. “Are you telling us that Renata and Matheson-”

Molly Crocker rose to her feet, looking away from me as I stood up at the same time. “I'm sorry. I've already said far more than I had any business saying.”

“Maybe so, but you did say it,” Lynda pointed out, leaving her chair as well. “Now you at least have a responsibility to make sure we don't misinterpret and imagine the situation as any worse than it is.”

“The situation is bad enough,” the judge said, “at least by my rather traditional standards of morality. I really don't feel comfortable talking about it.”

Talk about shutting the barn door after the cow's escaped...

“We're not gossips or voyeurs looking for cheap thrills,” Lynda said. “We're asking for a reason. This could have a bearing on the murder motive.”

“I - I never thought-”

I pressed the issue hard. “Was Renata Chalmers having an affair with Hugh Matheson or wasn't she?”

Molly closed her eyes. “Yes. Yes, damn it, she was.”

“How do you know?”

“I had the ill-fortune to wander into the bar just before a meeting of the Anglo-Indian Club some months ago. Hugh and Woollcott were in there, arguing so intently they didn't notice anyone else. It was an ugly scene - Hugh bragging that he'd been bedding Woollcott's wife right under his nose for six months. He was like... like some hunter holding up a prize catch.”

“Or maybe a collector who'd bested a rival,” I murmured.

“The whole thing was so dehumanizing that I only wanted to run out of there and forget about it. I turned around and bumped smack into Renata. She'd heard it all; I could tell by the look on her face.”

“So her husband knew and she knew that he knew,” Lynda said.

I hadn't observed any great strain between the Chalmerses and I said so.

“Woollcott is nothing if not a pragmatist,” the judge said. “I suspect he could tolerate the situation as long as he maintained bragging rights in public. Renata is the perfect trophy wife, isn't she? Beautiful, talented, and intelligent. And her last name is Chalmers. Woollcott wasn't going to give that up over a little infidelity.”

The delivery was so dry and factual that I couldn't tell if she were being catty or not. But it was just the sort of thing a jealous and envious woman might say.

“Just for the sake of discussion, Judge,” I said, “where were you around the time of the murder - say an hour in either direction?”

“I don't know because I don't know when the murder happened. I presume I was dressing in my hotel room, enjoying the cocktail hour or in transit between the two. At any rate I was with my husband the entire afternoon and evening.”

“Your husband?” Lynda echoed.

Her obvious surprise - and mine, too - put a smile on Molly Crocker's face.

“You mean you sleuths didn't know? I'm married to Noah Queensbury.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight
-
The Key to Everything

The Crocker-Queensbury connection still had me numb some minutes after the distaff side of that combo had returned to the Hearth Room.

“I knew she was married because I noticed her wedding ring yesterday,” I told Lynda, leaning my rear end against the escalator, “but why didn't somebody tell me her husband was Queensbury?”

“Why should they?” Lynda demanded. “Is that supposed to be the most important thing about her - who her husband is?”

“Maybe not, but it could be important enough, and there was no way for me to know it. Even the hotel room was in the Crocker name.”

“Well, it had to be in one name or the other.”

There was no way to respond to that without digging myself into a deeper hole, so I changed the subject.

“If Maximum Molly is married to Queensbury, she could have been wearing his deerstalker last night,” I said.

“Oh, yeah? When does he ever take it off? I bet he even wears it to bed. Jeff, whoever was wearing that hat could have easily bought it, borrowed it or brought it from home. She or he didn't have to be married to it.”

“I vote against buying,” I said. “If the deerstalker was a kind of minimal disguise, the killer would have thought of that earlier and wouldn't have had to buy it here at the colloquium.”

“You're assuming premeditation?” Lynda asked.

I nodded. “The use of a gun smacks of planning. I know we have a concealed carry law in Ohio, but I can't see these Sherlockians packing heat to a quiet campus in Erin.”

“Maybe not, but I know who might have.” She paused to give the name the appropriate amount of drama. “Al Kane. He's always shooting guns on those TV commercials.”

“But he doesn't have any possible motive!”

“Correction: He doesn't have any motive that we've found out about yet. Don't dismiss him as a suspect just because you like his sexist, adolescent-”

“Okay, this isn't getting us anywhere,” I interrupted. “I'm not writing off anybody as a potential suspect. For instance, Molly Crocker still could have been fooling around with Matheson, even though she is married and three months pregnant.”

Molly had offered that last bit of information unsolicited.

It was easy to see Renata Chalmers with her septuagenarian husband as easy pickings for a handsome, charismatic dude like Matheson. She knew his reputation, but I bet all of his other women did, too. So why should Molly Crocker be any less vulnerable than anyone else just because she was a judge and a tough cookie?

“An affair between Molly and Matheson would give Queensbury a hell of a murder motive,” I said. “Maybe Dr. Q. had just caught on to what his wife was up to and that's what his argument with Matheson was really about - not some Sherlock Holmes silliness, as Queensbury claimed. And as you just pointed out, Queensbury's been wearing a deerstalker all weekend. Don't overlook the obvious.”

Lynda shook her head. “You're spinning this out of whole cloth and your fiction writer's imagination. Crocker just gave Queensbury an alibi. I hardly think she'd be protective of him if he'd killed Matheson in a fit of jealousy. Anyway, I believe the judge when she said there wasn't anything between her and Matheson. As a political figure she had too much to lose.”

“Wait a minute. What do you mean? Politicians get caught with their pants down all the time.”

“Sure, men do. But can you think of a single female governor, senator or U.S. Representative who had to resign because of a sex scandal?”

She had me there. Whether that proved anything was beside the point, because Lynda steamed on:

“You can cross both her and Queensbury off your suspect list. The key to everything, Jeff, is something else Crocker said - bragging rights.”

She tore the gold wrapping off of a Werther's Original caramel and popped the candy into her mouth.

“Remember how Crocker said she thought Chalmers could live with his wife's infidelity as long as he maintained bragging rights to her?” Lynda continued. “Well, how long do you think that would last? According to Crocker's account, Matheson was taunting Chalmers with the knowledge that he'd made time with Renata. That was probably the whole point of the affair for him - to take away, in a sense, another one of Chalmers's prize collectibles.”

“I had that same feeling.”

“Then do you suppose Matheson could be content to tell only Chalmers about it?” She shook her head. “No way. That was just the first step in humiliating the old man. Next he would have spread the word all around, making Chalmers a laughingstock, a comic opera cuckold.”

“Chalmers wouldn't put up with that.”

Lynda nodded. “That's my point.”

“No, no, Chalmers as killer doesn't work. He couldn't have gone to the Winfield. Mac was with him during the murder hour, remember?”

“But at a cocktail party. You know how packed those things get and how time flies when you're talking and drinking, especially drinking. Chalmers could have slipped out for a half hour or forty-five minutes without Mac being any the wiser.”

And Renata wouldn't have seen it, I thought. She'd been back at Mac's house, still fixing her hair in that elaborate 'do.

“He must have taken a cab to the Winfield,” Lynda said with building excitement. “We can check that out easily enough through the cab company, or at least Oscar's troops could. Matheson's unknown visitor wore a deerstalker cap. How many of those do you suppose Chalmers owns?”

“About enough to outfit the Chinese army, I guess.”

With a sense of exhilaration I was beginning to believe Lynda could be close to the truth, a truth Mac probably didn't suspect even though he had put Chalmers on the list to be interviewed.

“And what about Chalmers's precious stolen books?” I said.

“I don't know why he missed two of them, but I bet he has the one that's still missing. We need to search his room at the McCabes' house.”

“I didn't see anything when I was there with Renata this morning.”

Lynda's eyes dilated. “What were you doing-”

“I wasn't looking for the books,” I said.
Wait, that didn't sound right.
“I'll explain later. I guess it would take a really thorough search to find the books if they were hidden, and I can't do that now. I have to take Nakamora to a live interview on WIJC in” - I looked at my watch - “five minutes.”

“Fine. I'll do it.”

Applause echoed over the speaker in the hallway. Bob Nakamora apparently had finished enlightening his audience about “Holmes on the Radio.”

“You can't just go barging into Mac's house,” I told Lynda.

“Why not? You would if you weren't tied up.”

“I'm kin.”

“And don't tell me you'll do it later,” she said, talking right over me. She pulled a folded-up copy of the colloquium schedule out of her purse. “This is the perfect time because Mac's talking next. You can bet your sister and both Chalmerses will be hanging on every word. Nobody's going to go back to the house for anything.”

All of a sudden we had a lot of company in the hallway. People were oozing out of the Hearth Room, taking advantage of the end of Bob Nakamora's talk to run outside for a smoke, hit the john, or just stretch their legs.

Nakamora himself paused just outside the doorway, straining his neck to look around. Renata Chalmers, standing next to him, tapped him on the arm and pointed at me. He smiled in relief and started coming my way.

“You win, dammit.” I pulled the key to the McCabe household out of my pocket and gave it to Lynda. “Wipe your feet on the hall carpet before you go in.”

“I always do. Meet you back here.”

She snatched the key out of my hand like one of those toy banks that grabs your coins. She was down the escalator by the time Bob Nakamora reached me.

“Are we going to be late for the interview?” he fretted.

“Not if we hurry. Come on.”

As we descended on the escalator, Renata Chalmers peered over the railing at us, her lovely face devoid of any expression that I could read. What did she know about the murder, I wondered, and what did she suspect?

We reached the main level and kept going down. The studios of WIJC-FM, like the offices of the campus newspaper,
The Spectator
, are located on the lower level of Muckerheide Center.
The Spectator
was shut down for spring break, but not the radio station, which is college-owned but not exclusively student-run. With impeccable timing, Tony Lampwicke was just finishing his interview with the author of some incredibly obscure (and therefore noteworthy) academic book when we arrived.

The long-time host of the weekly
Crosscurrents
program nodded to acknowledge our presence and moved smoothly into an introduction of a new topic in his heavy British accent. “Very stimulating indeed,” he said to an invisible conversation partner, apparently a telephone interviewee. “I'm sure your fine book will spark quite a revival of interest in Bulgarian neoclassicism. You know, the medium of radio itself is undergoing something of a revival these days...”

Lampwicke famously has a penchant for analyzing everything beyond the bounds of reason with a humorless intensity. He must be well into his forties, but he somehow seemed younger sitting behind the microphone in his loafers and cable knit sweater. His chin was sharp enough to be a lethal weapon and was covered by a neatly trimmed goatee.

“We have with us in the studio today on
Crosscurrents
an expert on old-time radio, and particularly the many radio adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the famous...”

I wanted to pace or crack my knuckles or do anything other than sit and listen to those two babble on. Most of all I wanted to join Lynda at Mac's house. Finally, I couldn't stand it anymore and I eased myself out of the studio. After all, I'd done my duty just by making sure that Nakamora had arrived on time. I was sure he could find his way back upstairs.

The glass door to the studio had just closed behind me when I heard, “Cody! Hold it right there.”

It was the law. And he was wearing a deerstalker cap.