8 Antiques Con Page 19

  “What do you want?” he asked brusquely.

  And I responded, “Information.” Just like in the opening sequence of The Prisoner, that wonderful 1960s British spy series starring the late, great Patrick McGoohan. (I just couldn’t help myself. And, anyway, I seemed to have shifted into my classy U.K. mode of speech, which always impresses.)

  “Well, you’re not going to get it.” Had Robert unintentionally given me McGoohan’s standard response? And if so, if the security chief actually knew his pop-cult stuff, did that mean he was flirting with me again?

  “Well, that’s a shame,” I replied. “Then I take it you’re not interested in the conversation I had with Brad Webster at the Fourteenth Precinct a mere half an hour ago.”

  And I turned to go (not really, I was just hoping to get a rise out of him) (no double entendre intended).

  He sputtered, “Wait . . . what? You actually got to see him?”

  (Now I know I promised to back off, but isn’t “sputtered” just a lovely way to express it? Would it really have been better writing had I used He said, spitting?)

  “Indeed I did see the young man,” I said, Britishly crisp. “And what he had to say was most interesting. One might say . . . illuminating?”

  “How so?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “How’s your Latin, Robert?”

  “My what?”

  “Your Latin—as in quid pro quo.”

  His mouth formed a thin line. “That much Latin I know just fine. Go on, Vivian.”

  “First, a question. I must determine your role in all this.”

  “My role? What the hell—”

  “What were you doing Thursday afternoon?”

  He sighed irritably. “You’re going to have to be more specific, lady.”

  I liked it better when he used “Vivian.”

  I said, “Brandy saw you coming out of Tommy Bufford’s room. Your manner was suspicious, such as wearing latex gloves before skedaddling down the hall. My daughter had a keycard, as that room used to be ours, and went in and discovered the room had been searched.”

  Robert snorted. “You think I did that?”

  “I think nothing.” That didn’t come out quite right. “Did you search that room?”

  He reddened, rather like Yosemite Sam in the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, right before his (Sam’s) head turned into a radish. “Of course not! I found it that way!”

  I put one finger to my lips. “Well, it couldn’t have been Sal Cassato who ‘tossed the place’—he arrived after Brandy.”

  I didn’t go into the fact that the detective had discovered her hiding in the closet. Or, for that matter, that Brandy had found those switched ballot pages in the fridge.

  My eyes went to the police photo on the wall. “It must have been dispiriting,” I said, not without sympathy, “to have been asked to leave the force. Under a cloud.”

  His eyes narrowed. “How do you know about that?”

  “I have my sources.”

  “Like Sal Cassato?”

  “You were a police detective once, Mr. Sipcowski. Would you ever have divulged your sources? I think not.” I gave him my most girlish smile, and it’s quite girlish, if I do say so myself. “Unless . . . it’s in exchange for something I really desire.”

  “That right?”

  “Oh, yes. And then I can sing like a canary! Put all the stool pigeons to shame.”

  Robert huffed a sigh. “Mrs. Borne . . . Vivian . . . there was never an investigation. I was never charged with anything.”

  I tilted my head. “But weren’t you rather well . . . connected ?”

  He nodded. “But only in the sense that I had buddies from the old neighborhood who I knew before I joined the department.” He added sadly, “And you know how it is, Vivian. You can’t prove yourself innocent when the charge is guilt by association.”

  That was very well put, I thought, and I could relate. On my rare stays at the psychopathic hospital, I made any number of friends whose stigma seemed to rub off on me!

  “My dear Mr. Sipcowski,” I declared. “I believe I owe you an apology. It seems I have misinterpreted your actions completely.”

  It takes a big woman to admit a mistake. I have done it before, though none of those instances spring swiftly to mind.

  “Robert, I see now that you have been endeavoring to solve these murders yourself. Whether for your own self-esteem, or to repair your tarnished reputation, your motivation is both understandable and admirable.”

  “Maybe you’re right, Vivian.” His eyes were unfathomably sad. “But that ship sailed. That kid Webster murdered Violet, and I’m fairly sure she killed Bufford.”

  “That ship has not sailed!” I informed him. “And you are still in the running for its captain!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I assume the police have acquired the pertinent security camera footage.”

  “They have.”

  “But am I also right in assuming that you keep a digital backup?”

  “We do.”

  “Excellent! Now, I want to review what was captured by the security camera outside the Skytop Ballroom shortly before, and after, Violet was killed.”

  He shrugged while shaking his head. “I can do that, but I assure you, Vivian—I’ve already gone over that footage several times.”

  “Never discount the value of a second pair of eyes, dear.” Of course, the value of my eyes was clearly on markdown, but he didn’t need to know that.

  He shrugged again, but rose to lead me into the command center. Here, other security personnel were at their posts in front of the wall of color monitors whose screens were rotating between various views of assorted security cams throughout the hotel.

  Robert sat at one of the computers and I drew up a chair next to him. Soon his fingers were tapping on the keyboard, finding the recording I’d requested, at approximately the time I had seen Eric and his wife, Helena, leave the masquerade party.

  We watched the couple exit the ballroom into the shallow lobby area with elevators, Eric in his green jacket, Helena in her yellow dress. Then Eric stopped, drew his wife close, looked into her face fondly, and kissed her passionately. Finally, they walked on, hand in hand, out of camera range.

  “If you suspect them, you’re wasting my time,” Robert grumbled. (Good one!) (Sorry.) “Neither one goes back in the ballroom before Violet was killed.”

  “Run it again,” I commanded.

  He sighed, but complied.

  Once more we watched.

  Then I said, “That kiss. It’s staged.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s staged! As in perfectly blocked. See where he hits his mark for the kiss? Right in front of the camera. The whole performance looks stilted—and I should know, I’m an actress!”

  Not that I’d ever given a stilted performance.

  “By both of them?” Robert frowned, obviously a little confused.

  “No—just Eric. Helena seems surprised by this sudden display of affection, even caught off balance.”

  “So you’re saying that Eric wanted to be noticed.”

  “Hence the bright green jacket—not exactly the kind of Nordic attire he’s been wearing. And no mask, either, so you can clearly see his face.”

  Robert sat back from the computer. “Mrs. Borne, you can speculate all you like about stilted performances and unlikely attire, but Eric would have had to go back through those doors to kill Violet. All the others were locked from the outside. And he didn’t.”

  “Well, he didn’t wearing a green jacket.”

  Robert gaped at me.

  I gestured toward the computer screen. “When you went over this footage, were you on fast-scan mode? Times two, maybe, or more? Not watching it in real time.”

  “Well, yes,” he admitted. “Just to be more efficient.”

  “Speed does not necessarily mean increased efficiency. But I suppose you might still notice a green jacket.”

  “Yes
, and . . . I see what you’re getting at.”

  “Let’s go on from here,” I said, “and not speed it up.”

  We started where Eric and Helena had gone out of view, and watched intently, as if this were the final episode of our favorite television series.

  Approximately ten minutes later, a costumed group of four showed on the monitor, their backs to the camera, moving in a tight cluster toward the ballroom doors.

  “Stop!” I exclaimed.

  Robert froze the footage.

  I pointed to the screen. “There he is—without the jacket. All in black. Using that group of partygoers as cover. Can you zoom in?”

  Robert’s fingers flew across the keyboard as he magnified, then enhanced the frozen image.

  “By God, it is Eric Johansson!” Robert exclaimed. “The son of a bitch did return!”

  “Yes, he returned to lift Brad’s dagger, stab Violet, then slip out a side door . . . which can, I believe, be exited from the inside.”

  “You’re right about that, Vivian,” he said, nodding gravely. “He used other guests as cover as he moved by Violet, stabbing as he passed.”

  From behind us, a security guard asked, “Ah, Mrs. Borne? Isn’t this your daughter?”

  I swivelled in my chair to see what he had been viewing.

  On his screen was Brandy in her monkey costume; she seemed to be throwing something away in a trash can.

  I frowned. “Why, she told me she was going back to our room—said she was all tuckered out! Where is that camera?”

  “Outside the Skytop Ballroom,” the guard told me.

  I rose and moved closer.

  “What is she doing?” I asked myself.

  But the guard answered anyway, “Looks like she’s diggin’ in the garbage.”

  Robert had joined me, standing behind the guard’s chair, and the three of us watched Brandy pulling something out of the can that looked like a white napkin. With a dark red stain on it.

  Then she walked toward the video camera, her mouth moving.

  “Do you have audio?” I asked.

  “No sound,” Robert said.

  “Is she trying to tell us something?” I asked.

  “She’s not looking at the camera,” the guard said, glancing back at us. “I think she’s talking to someone just off-camera . . . behind it.”

  While that “someone” remained out of view, Brandy appeared to be calm. But even with the TV’s overhead camera placement, and less than perfect picture—not to mention my less than perfect eyes—I could detect alarm in her expression.

  I clutched Robert’s arm. “She may be in danger,” I said. “We need to get to her . . . toot sweet!”

  After leaving Mother in the lobby, I caught an empty elevator, leaned against the back wall, and zoned out. Then it stopped, the doors whooshing open, and I stepped off.

  But I found myself not on the fifteenth floor—rather, the eighteenth, having accidentally or perhaps subconsciously pushed the button taking me back to the Skytop Ballroom.

  By the time I realized my mistake, the elevator had gone. I was about to push the button when curiosity nibbled at my brain. This was an opportunity to see if the police and forensics team had gone, and if they had, what they’d left behind....

  I strolled down to the ballroom, where I found yellow crime scene tape stretched across its double doors, making a big X.

  Mother might have burst the tape and gone in, but I wasn’t that ambitious. I was about to head back to the elevators when I spotted something on a nearby narrow accent table.

  It wasn’t a clue, not really, and if you have any respect for me, no matter how slight, you’re about to lose it now.

  Abandoned on the little table, on a small paper plate, was a half-eaten piece of party cake.

  Need I go further?

  After wiping the gooey white frosting off my mouth with the back of one hand (in my defense, I ate forward from the unnibbled side and left a small wall of somebody-else’s-cake germs behind), I went to a trash can and tossed in the nasty sliver of cake and its paper plate.

  But in doing so, something caught my eye.

  No, not more discarded food—I do not eat garbage, I’ll have you know. I have some pride. Apparently not enough to refuse having a flying monkey costume foisted on me, but some.

  I reached in and pulled out what I had spotted: a white cloth. A handkerchief with little blue stripes. With the initials EJ on it . . . and Rorschach splotches of blood.

  I stared at the handkerchief like a chimp trying to read the directions on a can of peanuts. Then it came to me—how that handkerchief had found its way into that trash can, and how that blood had gotten on that handkerchief.

  That Eric Johansson, after leaving the ballroom with his wife, must have returned, stolen Brad’s dagger, stabbed Violet—the dagger’s handle handkerchief wrapped to keep his prints off—then disposed of the damning evidence in a trash can outside the ballroom, a receptacle less likely to be searched.

  I frowned, sorry that sweet Eric had turned out to be not so sweet, but then smiled, taking some pleasure in beating Mother in figuring out who Violet’s killer was. Then I carefully folded the handkerchief and tucked it into my organ-grinder jacket pocket.

  “I will take that,” Eric said.

  The writer, wearing a black, long-sleeved shirt and black jeans, stood about twenty feet from me, blocking my way to the elevators.

  “Eric, hi,” I said calmly. “Take what?”

  He shook his head. “We will not play that game.”

  Violet must have been the one who Americanized his scripts, starting with putting the contractions in.

  He gave me a horrible smile and held out a hand. “Give it up,” he said ambiguously.

  Backing away, I said, “So was it you or Violet who broke into our room?”

  Moving forward almost casually, he shrugged. “It was me. Looking for my award and those ballots.”

  “I didn’t guess your part in this. Because Violet did kill Tommy, on impulse. But you’re the mastermind, aren’t you, Eric? You manipulated Violet into fixing that award competition for you. She had no idea, until well after the fact, that you would dump her . . . for your own wife.”

  I was still backing up slowly. He was moving forward the same way.

  He said, “I have never found females hard to handle.”

  “I bet not. I thought you were pretty cute myself. Using Violet that way . . . you just are not nice, are you?”

  “Not nice is a way to put it.”

  “But seduce and abandon, that’s a very old plot, Eric. You won’t win any awards for that.”

  “Perhaps not. But this would have worked out well had that stupid woman not stabbed that clod Tommy.”

  Me backing up. Him moving forward.

  I said, “She couldn’t have come forward about your role in the ballot-fixing without exposing herself. That would have meant risking putting herself in line for a murder charge. Why kill her, Eric?”

  Another shrug. “She was not rational. She said she did not care if she went to prison. She lied and cheated and killed for me, she said, and now she would tell the world about me. What else could I do?”

  The question was, what could I do?

  During this exchange, my mind was desperately seeking a solution to my predicament—one that didn’t end with me becoming a third comic-con fatality.

  I turned and fled down a hallway, my half-open wings flapping, trying doors as I went but finding only locked ones. Eric was walking toward me, taking his time, like the mummy chasing a girl through a swamp, no hurry, no hurry. The corridor and my luck would run out simultaneously. When I glanced back, he was removing his tie, wrapping each end around a hand, then snapping it taut.

  But there was a door at the end of the hallway that was unlikely to be locked—marked ROOF with a warning on the door’s horizontal bar stating that an alarm would sound if opened.

  Fine by me!

  All I needed to do was stay a
live on the roof long enough for security to respond to the alarm. That’s all. Nothing more.

  I pushed on the steel bar—no alarm sounded (it was a silent one, right? Right?) and raced up cement steps to another door with a similar bar, though no alarm warning, and then I was out on the roof, nearly knocked over by a ferocious wind that tore at my flesh and my costume with icy fingers.

  Up here in the dark, under a million uncaring stars, I could make out neighboring buildings towering around me, silhouetted against the lights of the city. And on this rooftop, I could make out the squat, square shape of an air-conditioning unit, behind which I could hide.

  I ran toward it.

  But tripped, and landed on my stomach, in an awful belly flop, my chin hitting the hard surface of the roof, momentarily stunning me.

  And he was on me, grabbing me by my ankles, dragging me like a sack of wet laundry, pulling me along, away from the noisy-street-traffic sides of the building toward the more desolate courtyard area, where he could toss my body over and feel reasonably assured it would not be found till daylight.

  Through all this, I was kicking frantically, my efforts to free myself no match for his tight grip, my screams for help seemingly swallowed up by the wind and the night, two conspirators who were happy to see me go. So I clawed at the roof, breaking my nails, skinning my fingers—not because this might slow my fate, but because at least, dammit, it would prove that my death was no accident.

  I could see one possible chance for survival—before strangling me, or knocking me out, Eric would have to let go of my legs, and retrieve the handkerchief. That was key evidence that he needed and I had. He needed to get it, before throwing me off this roof like a sock monkey.

  When he had dragged me to the roof’s three-foot-high protective wall, I was still on my stomach, his hands still on my ankles. But his grip had eased, since he was no longer hauling dead (or soon to be dead) weight.

  “Well,” Eric shouted against the wind, “shall we see how well the monkey can fly?”

  As he released my legs, I flipped over on my wings, snapping them, and with both feet kicked his kneecaps, and they made a snapping sound, too.

  Hollering, he fell backward against the little wall, arms windmilling as he tried to regain his balance. I was about to give him another kick when a strong gust gave him a final push over the edge, and I didn’t have to.