Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 135, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 823 & 824, March/April 2010

Duel by William Link

William Link, together with his writing partner Richard Levinson, created many of TV’s best crime series, including

Murder, She Wrote, Mannix, and Columbo. For his TV work, he will be celebrated this year at the Malice Domestic Convention, where he will receive the Poirot Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Mystery. Speaking of Columbo, Crippen and Landru Publishers has just released a collection of of 14 new Columbo stories by Bill Link entitled The Columbo Collection.

Jim Siders left his wife at their apartment off Columbus Avenue and took a taxi, which he could ill afford, to Penn Station. It was a blistering hot August day and he was wearing a fifteen-year-old poplin suit, the kind you usually saw the rumpled Charles Laughton wear in his old courtroom movies.

The Metroliner, which he could ill afford, took him to Philadelphia, where he got off at 30th Street Station and took another overpriced cab to the precinct house in West Philly.

He found himself surprisingly calm waiting for Lieutenant Charles Robinson, the homicide cop who had called him and said they needed his “abilities” in a current case they were working on. He knew Robinson was downplaying the importance of the investigation. He and Gail had watched the story evolve, the child who had mysteriously disappeared from her family’s mansion. If the victim had been a minority kid he doubted it would be getting this kind of media attention.

That’s why he was a little surprised when Lieutenant Robinson came out to greet him. Robinson was black as tar, wide, heavy-footed, like the old heavyweight champ Sonny Liston without the glower. He was warm and seemingly friendly, unlike some of the other cops Siders had helped over the years who resented him when his insights proved accurate and the media played him up more than them.

“Got any vibes yet?” Robinson asked, smiling.

“Zip,” Siders smiled back. This was somebody he knew he could work with, an amiable cop, overweight, overworked, with an agreeable absence of attitude.

“Give me a list of your travel expenses,” Robinson said. Another smile: “I’ll get you reimbursed just about as fast as they reimburse me. That’s a promise!”

He took Siders back to his office, a cramped, cluttered room with only an ancient fan with a missing blade fighting the stagnant heat. Robinson sat on the corner of his desk, Siders in a hard-backed chair facing him. “What do you know about the case?” he asked.

“Just the little I saw on television.”

Robinson nodded, serious now, the startling whiteness of the teeth in his smile gone. “Eight-year-old little girl driven home from school by the family chauffeur. Servants saw her watching TV in her room.”

“Were her parents home?” Siders asked.

“No. Mother was shopping in town, Dad was at his business. The little girl, Allison, never showed for dinner. This was three days ago now.”

“You mean someone took her from the house?”

“Looks that way. Unless she walked out herself. Maybe met a friend, but we talked to all her buddies and nobody saw her again after they left school.”

Siders was sweating now, but not from tension. “Was the child angry at her parents?”

“Not that we know of. They’re so distraught, I’d think they’d admit it if there was some kind of conflict with the kid. Although the cook told me the parents have these horrendous arguments, shouting matches, which the kid was privy to.”

Siders was not a stranger to out-of-control fights with one’s wife. Luckily he and Gail hadn’t had a child who would have had a front-row seat on their fireworks. He knew he had grown mistrustful of most women after his wife had that “incident” with her old high school friend.

Robinson crisscrossed big hands under his arms. “Hot today! You want a Pepsi or something?”

“No, no I’m fine.”

Robinson went to a small fridge Siders had missed, opened it, pulled out a bottle. “I want to take you out to the house, let you poke around, hopefully get some vibes.”

“That’s what I’m here for, Lieutenant.”

“Have to tell you something else. We got one other person working with us on the case — another psychic.” He smiled. “Unless you divined that already.”

Siders smiled back, but now the bad sweat broke out: He finally had a vibe, the wrong kind. “Who?”

“Woman named Libby Stark. You know her, ever hear of her?”

“No.”

“She’s local. Seems the mother, Mrs. Schofield, goes to her quite a bit. She insisted we bring her in to see what she could come up with. You bothered with that?”

What could he say? “No. Not if she could be helpful. We’d both be working toward the same goal.”

It seemed that now the broken-bladed fan started working. He suddenly felt cold, very cold, in his old poplin suit.

Robinson drove him out to an imposing Georgian mansion on the Main Line. He was still quietly seething with worry: He had hated competition even as a kid in school, never played games, chess, cards, anything that put an opponent square in his face. Who was this Stark woman, some Philly faker, preying on stupid rich women with lots of time and money on their manicured hands?

In Allison’s bedroom there was a profusion of personal objects, but nothing with “vibes,” as the lieutenant put it. He looked in the laundry hamper, at a tangled pile of dresses, underwear, T-shirts. Nothing spoke to him.

Later, downstairs in the opulent living room, Robinson introduced him to Mrs. Schofield, a pale, almost translucent blond, not unattractive woman in her thirties. She was with another woman, dumpy, dowdy, fortyish. Mrs. Libby Stark.

Siders shook hands with both of them. Stark had a surprisingly strong grip, which he knew connoted an authoritative, confident personality.

“I’ve seen you on Court TV,” she said. He didn’t know if there was the shadow of a sneer on her fleshy lips.

They were joined by the husband, an executive type, whose handsome, stolid face betrayed no emotion, either because he refused to exhibit any or because he didn’t have any.

“...usually don’t call in any psychic folks until the late part of our investigations,” Robinson was saying.

“But—”

Mrs. Schofield interrupted: “I called Libby because I thought you fellows might need all the help you can get.”

Siders checked out the husband, who looked as if he harbored a low-grade contempt for his ditzoid wife who actually believed in these crystal-ball charlatans, especially this Philly specimen. But his wife’s bills to her psychic were probably no worse than her bills from Saks or Neimans or the downtown jewelers. Those more upscale charlatans.

Siders said, “Mrs. Schofield, do you mind if I look around the house? I might pick up something in one of the rooms where your daughter has been.”

“Oh yes, yes, of course. Consider the house yours. You too, Libby.”

Fine, Schofield’s face seemed to say. And maybe they should contribute to our astronomical mortgage while they’re at it. And this Siders guy — tell him the liquor cabinet and my wife’s jewelry box are off-limits.

“Thank you, Annette,” Mrs. Stark said, rubbing in her friendship with the lady of the house. “I know how worried you and Stewart are over this terrible situation, but rest assured I will do my very best.” She volleyed a look back at Siders as if to say: This is my territory, buster, always has been, always will be, so maybe you’d better get back on the train.

“Okay, people,” Robinson finally said, like a tolerant tour guide, “I think we better let you psychics do your thing.”

During his tour of the house, Siders bumped into Mrs. Stark in a sort of demilitarized zone, the study. “Picked up anything?” he asked, trying to be friendly.

She smiled. “If I did you’d be the last to know.”

“Mrs. Stark,” he said, “we don’t have to be enemies.”

“Don’t we? You’ve had your run as a media darling, darling, don’t you think it’s time for somebody else to have her place in the sun?”

Siders caught his first vibe in the chauffeur’s quarters over the garage. It was a one-bedroom dwelling with few personal possessions except for clothing and some photos in cheap frames on the wall. Siders was immediately drawn to a shot of four mechanics, grease monkeys in oil-stained coveralls smiling fatuously at the camera. Something about it, Siders thought, something about it.

Later, as a mauve summer dusk slowly descended and chandeliers sprang up like bonfires all over the huge house, the chauffeur himself arrived with a beautiful Angora cat in his arms.

As Siders and Robinson approached the man near the garage, Mrs. Stark having already left for the day, the psychic felt another strong, almost seismic pull, not knowing if it was emanating from the man or the animal.

It seemed Cassandra, the Angora, had become deeply depressed since Allison’s disappearance, and had been taken to the vet for “therapy.”

“How old is she?” Siders asked the chauffeur, a short, bright-eyed man in his forties named Jorge. Siders had immediately recognized him from the photograph.

“Four, maybe five years,” he answered in an accent that Siders later learned from Robinson was Argentinean.

Cassandra refused to be petted. Typical, Siders thought: Male cats are much more friendly than the watchful, judgmental females. Like his wife. But he still wasn’t sure if he was getting a glow from Cassandra or the chauffeur.

“Vibe?” Robinson asked after the chauffeur had left. The cop was more perceptive than he’d thought.

“I always get good vibes from cats. I had a beautiful Siamese when I married my wife, but she made me get rid of it.”

“You were lucky,” Robinson laughed. “When I got married my wife made me get rid of all my girlfriends!”

In the motel that night, Siders suddenly woke at almost three in the morning. There was just a light paintbrush of neon at the window near the panting a/c unit and the hesitant patter of rain.

The image of two numbers had emerged from his sleep: 7 and 6. It had seemed as if he had been looking up at them, like they were on a building or a sign. 7 and 6.

He called the precinct house and cajoled a detective, who luckily knew Siders’s role in the case, to call Robinson. “Middle of the night? He’s gonna chew your head off,” the man warned him.

“Not when he hears what I have.”

Luckily, a sleep-drugged Robinson was more cuddly than Cassandra. “Anything,” he said. “Tell me anything you have.”

Siders told him about the 7 and 6 in his dream. He considered dreams the mind’s movies, almost like a binary code that could either mask or reveal the truth.

Robinson was silent for a long time; then Siders heard him soft-talking his wife back to sleep. “You know this guy Jorge — the chauffeur? — he used to work at a gas station, was a mechanic there?”

Very sleepy: “Right.”

Then it hit Siders like the fifty thousand volts from a stun gun. “A 76 gasoline station?!”

“I think so, yeah. You figure Jorge’s got something to do with this?”

“Maybe. But I still don’t understand the connection with a gas station.”

There was the unmistakable sound of bedsprings as Robinson bounced his big body from the bed. “Let’s go find out.”

“Now?!”

“Why not? You got something better to do tonight?”

“What part of town is this?” Siders asked as the big white police cruiser moved through the light drizzle, the windshield wipers cutting a window in the hot night. It was almost four in the morning now.

“Upper Darby,” Robinson said. He looked strange in his hastily thrown-on civilian clothes. “It used to be lah-di-dah but now it’s mostly my kinda folks.”

“But we drove past the Scofield mansion just minutes ago. That Main Line still looks like old money.”

A tired Robinson smile. “Welcome to big-city America. The rich nuzzling the poor.”

“Yeah. Like in New York.”

Robinson looked over at him. “What do you think of this Stark woman?”

“Really think?” He paused. “Why’d she leave early today?”

Robinson shrugged. “Said she had some appointments back at her place. She gives these readings.”

“Does that answer your question?”

“What was my question?” Laughing: “Oh yeah. So you don’t think she’s got too much spin on her crystal ball.”

They drove a few minutes more, then they slowed, the rain strengthening.

“The gas station’s near here?” Siders asked.

“Well, I know it’s on Cobb’s Creek Parkway where we are, so — yeah!” He pointed. “Right up there on the right. See it?”

He pulled up beside one of the four pumps in front of an old, decaying structure with its adjoining mechanic’s garage. Through the gray scrim of rain, Siders could see the small, faded, brick building was dark, looking long abandoned. He also saw the unlit “76” sign on the roof.

“What do you think we’re going to find?” Robinson asked. “The little girl? Her body?”

“I don’t know. And don’t say I’m supposed to know because I’m a psychic!”

They got out, Robinson with a big black golf umbrella that Siders was sure wasn’t police issue, probably his own. He followed the big detective around the corner of the gas station, the rain pleasantly cool on his face.

“Any vibes?” Robinson asked.

“No.”

Robinson knocked on a boarded-up window, listened. Kept listening. Nothing. Slowly moved down to the attached mechanic’s garage, hammered hard on its door. “Allison!” he yelled. “Allison!” He waited.

No answer.

There were just trash cans and a Dumpster in the rear, the rain pooling on the heaped trash.

Robinson gestured expansively at the dark field sprawling away behind the little structure. “Anything out there ringing your chimes?”

There was something, something not yet emerging as an image, but a tremor, just a little tug. “Maybe...”

Robinson’s face suddenly eclipsed his view of the dark field, beads of rain glistening on his prominent cheekbones. “What do you feel? What?”

“Maybe... something.”

Robinson turned, swung back toward the gas station, the umbrella over his head again like a big, scalloped awning.

Siders hurried after him. “Where are you going?”

“I have to round up my team and get back here right away.”

He woke at nine, his stomach sore, no appetite. He had picked up some toilet articles last night so he could at least shave, use deodorant. Of course the phone rang while he was in the shower—

Robinson. “You got any Champagne in your motel’s courtesy bar?”

“They don’t have courtesy bars here.” He was suddenly plunged back to the gas station last night, the remnants of shower water on his face and hair like the rain.

Robinson’s voice darkened. “We found the little girl. A pretty crude grave in that field, not that far back from the gas station.”

“My God,” Siders murmured. “Who do you think—?”

“Jorge. Who else? We just routed him out of his nice warm bed. Trust me, we’ll be on him all day like a bad smell.”

“Should — should I stay put?”

“For now, yeah. But if we get a confession, well, you’ll be the star. You’re going to have the media all over you like a worse bad smell. You up for that, Siders?”

He was nervously toweling his hair. “Does Mrs. Stark know what’s happening?”

Robinson laughed. “Who knows? But I wouldn’t trust her crystal ball.”

Siders hung out in Robinson’s office in the precinct house where he knew they were grilling Jorge. In the early afternoon Robinson came into his office. He looked beat but quietly jubilant, his necktie loose, his sweaty shirt collar open.

“Did you break him down?” Siders asked.

Robinson dug a Pepsi out of the fridge, sat down. “Took some work, but yeah, we broke him — like this bottle — if it wasn’t plastic. He killed her all right. Where’re my manners — you want a Pepsi?”

He wearily related how Jorge had driven the girl from the house that afternoon. She was in a bad emotional state, having heard her father threaten to kill her mother that morning. She ordered Jorge to drive her to New York. He said he couldn’t and she exploded, said she would accuse him of trying to rape her. Jorge lost it. They struggled in the car and before he knew it he had strangled her. He panicked — where could he get rid of the body? And then he remembered the field behind the gas station where he used to work.

“You got a written confession?” Siders asked.

“Ink’s still wet.” He looked relaxed now, his legs, with their size-twelve shoes, up on the desk. “You’re going to be the media’s lover boy. You want the department to set up the interviews?”

“Yeah, fine. My motel. I’d appreciate it, Lieutenant.”

“Make sure you’ve got plenty of drinks.”

“You put me in a cheap motel. I told you I don’t even have a courtesy bar.”

Robinson frowned. “The media without a courtesy bar?”

Siders grinned: “Trust me, they’ll manage.”

The following morning was a noisy carnival with Philly TV, the local papers, even CNN from New York in his little room. He finally managed to shoo them out and was spread-eagled, exhausted, on the bed when there was an authoritative knock on the door. “Who is it?” he called.

“Robinson,” came the gruff, slightly muffled reply.

“It’s open.”

An unusually dour Robinson took his time coming in. He gave the room a quick once-over, an obviously ingrained cop habit. “I’m going to have to put you in custody, Siders.”

He nodded, slowly sitting up on the bed. Even a psychic knew you couldn’t rain-check the inevitable. But what the hell had gone wrong?

“New York homicide got a tip, went to your apartment. Found your wife, bludgeoned to death.”

He came closer, looking more disappointed than angry or accusatory. “They got the prints off the weapon and they’ll be comparing them with yours. Neighbors say they heard the fights you had with her, very violent fights, your threats to kill her.”

Siders nodded again. He slumped down on the bed. There was no adrenaline left in the well, everything was depleted, gone. He had thought he would get back to New York, figure out how to dispose of her body. Just like Jorge, he thought grimly. “You... you said they acted on a tip.”

“Mrs. Stark. She called them in New York, said she had a vibe. They called me to check on her. I told them she was credible, we were using her on this Schofield thing.”

Siders put his face in his hands. He heard the rain start again at the window, whispering, something else conspiring against him.

Robinson was trying to salvage his good humor. “Amazing,” he said. “I mean how she repaired that damn crack in her crystal ball.”