Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018

Where the Red Lines Meet by John H. Dirckx

A doctor who lias teen widely published in the medical field, John H. Dirckx has teen writing mystery short stories for EQMM and AHMM for many years. The tales are mostly whodunits, but with realistically rendered (sometimes “mean street”) settings and sharp observations of society. His series detective is Lt. Cyrus Auburn, who narrowly escaped death in his last case for us!

Another scorcher, and still not a whisper of breeze.

At high noon the south-facing billboard didn’t offer a single square foot of shade. Working in the steel compartment of the cherry picker felt to Tadmore like being slowly and evenly broiled in a microwave.

But then, he reflected, mounting a one-piece vinyl sign with a modern cable system was a piece of cake compared to the way he’d worked in the old days, teetering on a ladder and posting paper bills in segments with a bucket of paste and a twelve-foot brush.

After releasing the tension on the cable and unclamping all four edges of the old sign, he glanced down for the first time to see where it would fall if he just let it drop. Forty feet below him sprawled the usual array of roofs, chimneys, garbage cans, garbage outside of cans...

In an instant he had his cell phone in his hand. Should he call 911 immediately, or take some aerial shots of the body first?

By the time Detective Sergeant Fritz Dollinger parked in the alley that ran along the back of the Fairmont Mall parking lot, an investigator from the coroner’s office was already on the scene making measurements and recording them on a laptop. The inevitable crowd of gawkers had begun to form outside the yellow-tape barrier, their curiosity piqued by the still form that lay under a slate-gray tarpaulin.

The body had been found on the ground between two large trash receptacles in a no-man’s-land between the mall and the alley. Nick Stamaty, the coroner’s investigator, greeted Dollinger with his unfailing suave cordiality and interrupted his work long enough to hand over a clear plastic bag containing the dead man’s wallet, keys, and cell phone.

“Officer Cameron had to leave to check out a burglary up the street,” he said. “She told me to give you her fondest regards.” Patrolwoman Blodwen Cameron’s romantic interest in Dollinger was common knowledge among his colleagues, and a fertile source of annoyance to the sturdily monogamous Dollinger. “And this.”

“This” was a statement Cameron had taken from Skip Tadmore, the sign poster who had discovered the body.

After glancing through the statement, Dollinger examined the dead man’s wallet, which contained forty-four dollars in cash. He already had basic identification: Kent Roveling, forty-six, resident of the south suburb of Westrup, where he was employed as a sales rep at a wholesale tire distributorship. No known family other than an ex-wife currently living in another state.

The dumpy, bespectacled man under the tarpaulin had two bullet wounds in his upper chest. The front of his golf shirt was stiff with dark blood.

“Weapon?”

Stamaty wiped sweat from his forehead with a neatly folded linen hand-kershief. “If it’s here,” he said, “I haven’t found it yet. Judging from the entry wounds, I figure a medium-caliber handgun fired at point-blank range. There isn’t a drop of blood on the ground anywhere, so he must have been shot somewhere else and off-loaded here.”

“How long dead?”

“Unofficially, eight to twelve hours. It’s too hot today to go by body temperature, but he’s got some pretty extensive rigor. By the way, keep out of that oil spill. Cameron says it’s from the sign guy’s bucket truck.”

Dollinger scanned the motley gang of onlookers. “Any of you folks live around here?” For all the response he got, he might have been speaking Swahili to a crowd of Eskimos.

He moved his car to a side street and started working along the row of houses nearest to the mall parking lot, rapping briskly at each door, because more often than not the doorbells in houses this old didn’t work. His inquiry at the first house regarding unusual noises during the night elicited a peppery tirade from the tenant, a feisty senior citizen who needed a shave and a haircut.

“I’m not sure what would be classified as an unusual noise coming from over there. I knew we were in trouble when they started building that mall thirty years ago. Those sick purply-pink lights burn all night. Every couple-three minutes a car with a hole in the muffler roars in and parks like a chopper landing. The whole family climbs out and slams all four doors, one at a time. Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Then the driver locks it with a remote, and the horn toots.” Dollinger heard essentially the same lament from nearly everyone he questioned.

Back in his air-conditioned car, he set about analyzing the data stored on Roveling’s cell phone. Sometimes scanning a cell phone was almost like resurrecting and interrogating its late owner about personal affairs, relationships, and proclivities. But Roveling’s phone, a bare-bones model, proved a disappointment. Although it had evidently seen hard service, practically nothing was stored on it except a handful of text messages pertaining to the wholesale tire business. Which suggested that its owner had either led a singularly colorless existence or had taken care to delete all personal material of a potentially compromising nature.

Roveling’s employer, Garret Graves, informed by phone of his death, expressed conventionial regrets. But he admitted that Roveling was hardly a model employee, using a lot of sick leave for what Graves suspected, without solid evidence, were the consequences of binge drinking. He could offer no suggestions as to what Roveling was doing in the neighborhood of Fairmont Mall last night, or why he was killed if robbery wasn’t the motive.

“Have you got his car?” asked Graves.

“Just the keys, so far. What kind of car is it?”

Graves gave identifying information and, after a few moments’ delay, the registration number. “Actually it’s my car — leased to the company, anyway. When you find it, let me know so I can send somebody out to pick it up.”

Dollinger did a slow cruise up and down the rows of parked vehicles in the mall parking lot. In less than five minutes he found Roveling’s late-model sport coupe. The car was locked. Dollinger put on gloves and, using Roveling’s key, made a superficial search. Apart from four nested orange traffic-control cones on the floor of the back seat and a trunkful of tire catalogs, he found nothing of interest.

By the time he got back to the mall parking lot, Lieutenant Kestrel had arrived from the forensic lab. A shift in the position of the tarpaulin told Dollinger that Kestrel had already shot his routine fifty or so pictures of the remains, no doubt to the immeasurable delight of the crowd. Gowned, masked, and gloved like a surgeon, Kestrel was now sorting through the contents of one of the iron trash receptacles, handling empty pop cans, cigaret packs, Styrofoam cartons, rain-soaked newspapers, and the infinitely heterogeneous jetsam of human society as if each piece were a priceless heirloom.

The working relationship between Stamaty, the county employee, and Kestrel, the sworn municipal public-safety officer, tottered perpetually on the brink of war. Whenever their points of view, their procedural priorities, or their interpretations of the rules of evidence could possibly clash, they did. Thrown together at the scene of nearly every homicide reported within the city limits, they struggled manfully to avoid open conflict, and to their credit they usually succeeded in preserving a semblance of mutual regard. Often that demanded a strategy of taking turns gathering data, one doing the Sherlock Holmes bit on hands and knees beside the corpse while the other sat at a distance executing a scale drawing of the scene.

Dollinger found Stamaty in his van posting notes on his laptop and listening to a CD of classical music. He told Stamaty about finding Roveling’s car.

“No blood in the car?”

“Not that I saw. Kestrel could walk over there from here to check it out if he didn’t have to take about four hundred pounds of equipment with him.”

Stamaty shook his head in time with a stately minuet by Domenico Scarlatti. “He just got a call from downtown to hit this burglary scene up on Addison when he finishes up here. They’ll probably send Fremantle to do the car.”

While Stamaty was arranging for the removal of Roveling’s remains to the coroner’s mortuary, Dollinger phoned a status report to Second District headquarters and then went to lunch. Just as he was finishing off a raspberry tart topped with real whipped cream, he got a call from Patrolwoman Cameron.

“Sergeant, I’m at the scene of a burglary on Addison Street, three blocks west of Fairmont Mall. Copper plumbing stolen out of an empty house last night. Lieutenant Kestrel thinks more happened here than just the theft of the copper.”

“Such as homicide?”

“Sergeant, you are so sharp.”

The house stood at the corner of Addison and Wells. Dollinger parked in front of Cameron’s cruiser and Kestrel’s van. With peeling paint and badly chipped porch steps, the boxy, characterless, outmoded residence wore a general air of decay, which a freshly mowed lawn did little to lessen. The For Sale sign in the front yard was one of three on this block.

In the deep shady porch Officer Wendy Cameron was sharing an old-fashioned glider with a beefy blonde. Cameron introduced the other woman as Tammy Lee Winter, the real-estate agent who was handling the property.

“We’re out here,” explained Cameron, “because besides the plumbing, they ripped off the copper tubing from the central air.”

“Which wasn’t working in the first place,” remarked Ms. Winter. “That’s one of several reasons why this house is still on the market.” Despite a thorough plastering of makeup, she radiated about as much feminine charm as a brand-new sledgehammer. Dollinger doubted that she often came out short on a real-estate deal.

“Is the owner local?” he asked.

“The owner is a bank in Texas. The house was repossessed by the mortgage holder about a year ago, after the owner lost his job. The mortgage holder then dumped it on a company that specialized in handling properties with low market appeal. When that outfit went belly up, the Alameda Bank and Trust Company of Dallas inherited it, and hired us to unload it before the roof falls in.”

Patrolwoman Cameron, evidently jealous of the attention Dollinger was giving Ms. Winter, reported on the cir-cumstances of the crime. Matt Vandyke, who did lawn care and routine maintenance on properties listed by Ms. Winter’s firm, had arrived a little after eight that morning to mow the grass. He had nearly finished when he noticed that a basement window had been broken in. Investigating, he found the entrance to the outside basement stairs unlocked and all the copper plumbing gone.

After informing Ms. Winter and Public Safety, he had gone on to another job, but would be back later in the day to repair the window.

“Any idea when the break-in happened?”

“It had to be last night,” said Ms. Winter, “because I did a showing here yesterday afternoon, and everything was okay then. Except that the yard was turning into a jungle.”

“Nobody around here heard anything,” reported Cameron. “The couple next door are both as hard of hearing as Kewpie dolls.”

“So what’d Kestrel find down there?”

“I’ll let him explain that to you when he gets through taking samples of dust, rust, and mildew.”

They had been idly watching the progress of a meter reader advancing along the sidewalk toward them, a tall, spare man in a pith helmet, who stopped every twenty paces or so and applied a data probe to a buried water meter to collect usage readings. As he drew abreast of them he paused and then approached the porch.

“Help you, sir?” asked Dollinger.

“What I need most right now, you ain’t got.” He wiggled a clipboard with a sheet of plastic over the top page in case of rain. “According to my records, your water’s shut off. I bet somebody got the copper.”

His photo ID said he was Hayden Lamphere, District Operations Manager for Data Collection. His sweat-soaked gray uniform shirt bore the machine-stitched nickname Harry. To judge by his lumbering gait and sun-baked complexion, Harry had been on the road for a long time.

“Good guess,” Dollinger told him. “That’s exactly what they got.”

Lamphere adjusted the angle of his helmet and spat with fervor. “Shoot, I figured that the minute I seen the cruiser from up the street. You was about due for it — empty house, water shut off since May. Your house, ma’am?”

Ms. Winter repeated the capsule history of the property’s recent vicissitudes.

Lamphere nodded sagely. “You know what? As soon as this gets downtown, they’ll have me over here assessing the damage to Water Department property. Why don’t I do that now?” Clearly he had no objection to this interruption of his monotonous daily routine.

“Okay, but there’s an evidence technician working down there,” said Dollinger.

“No, there isn’t.” Kestrel appeared on the porch from the living room on the way to get something from his van.

“Is it all right if this meter reader checks out the damage down there?” Dollinger asked him.

“I guess so.” Kestrel flashed Lamphere one of his blood-curdling deadpan looks. “Just don’t remove anything from the premises.”

Lamphere left his probe and clipboard on the porch and went around with Dollinger to the backyard, a plot of turf between the house and the alley where a garage might have stood at some remote date. A pair of heavy, sloping wooden doors stood open at the entrance to a flight of stairs leading down into the basement.

At first the coolness of the basement felt refreshing, but within moments the clammy, musty atmosphere grew hostile. Kestrel had set up a battery-powered flood lamp to supplement the meager illumination afforded by a few low-wattage overhead bulbs.

Lamphere took off his helmet and marched from one section of the basement to another at a measured, deliberate pace, ducking under the furnace pipes and peering into every corner. “They didn’t miss an inch of copper, did they? Cut off every piece right back to the subflooring. You real estate?”

“Public Safety.” Dollinger showed his badge.

“Then you know this better than I do, but I’ll say it anyhow. They’s still at least a hundred yards of heavy-gauge copper electrical conductor down here — branch lines to the dryer outlet... range... central air. When they get hungry again, they’ll come back.”

The meter reader went his way. When Kestrel returned to finish up his work, Dollinger was examining the window at the rear of the basement where the thieves had gained entrance. One pane had been artfully taped with fiber-reinforced plastic postal strapping to suppress the noise of shattering, and broken inward with a sandbag or a well-padded knee. Having unlocked the window and climbed into the basement, the thieves had evidently unbolted the heavy doors to the outside stairs to remove their plunder to a truck or van parked in the alley.

“Something interesting down here?” asked Dollinger.

Kestrel held a fine-ruled tape measure up to a stump of copper pipe extending downward from the floor above. “This pipe was sheared off with a defective tubing cutter,” he said. “Instead of making a deeper and deeper groove in the metal as it rotated, it cut a spiral. So in order to slice all the way through the pipe, they had to keep turning it backward and forward as they tightened the cutter. That’s just like threading a machine screw with a die, and the pitch of this thread — actually one pitch for half-inch pipe and a different one for three-quarter — exactly matches what I’ve measured at three other jobs just like this one in the past couple of months. And the tape they used on the window, and the way they lapped it, also match those other jobs.”

“So you’ve got evidence to pin a whole series of thefts on these guys.”

“Agreed. But first I have to find the pipe that’s missing from here, and then I’ve got to link it up to the people who did the cutting. I could spend two hours every day making the rounds of the local salvage yards and measuring scrap copper pipe. They take it in by the ton from plumbers, remodeling contractors, demo companies... and crooks.”

“Wendy said you found something else?”

Kestrel repositioned the flood lamp to illuminate a section of curled and discolored vinyl floor tiles near the foot of the outside stairs. “This part of the floor has been scrubbed very recently,” he said. “I even think I can still smell chlorine bleach on top of the mildew. Every sample I scraped up from the cracks between the tiles tested positive for blood. I won’t know if it’s human, or how fresh it is, until I get it downtown to the lab. But as things stand, it looks like there’s a red line running from here to Fairmont Mall.”

“I hear that. But who’s the killer, and where’s the pipe?”

A thunderous commotion on the wooden stairs leading down from the kitchen announced the return of Matt Vandyke, the handyman who had discovered the break-in. A giant in bib overalls, he brought the scents of gasoline and freshly mowed grass to mingle with the other aromas in the basement.

Detective Lieutenant Cyrus Auburn unsheathed his pulsating cell phone, glanced at the screen, pushed Talk, and talked. “Kelly’s Pool Hall. What’s happening, Fritz?”

“Real quick, Lieutenant. Point of law.”

“Point of law? Where are you?”

“Lieutenant Kestrel and I are at the scene of a break-in and theft of copper pipe from an empty house. Which may also be the scene of a homicide.”

“May be? It sounds to me like you’re on a jelly-doughnut high. What’s this point of—”

“Real quick, Lieutenant. Plain-view doctrine, okay? We’re looking at a tubing cutter that the lieutenant thinks might have been used to cut the pipe that was stolen.”

“Well, if it’s in plain view—”

“It’s in plain view, all right, but it’s in a toolbox that belongs to the maintenance guy who reported the break-in. Kestrel thinks he’s the one that snatched the pipe, but—”

“Fritz, you know that piece of law as well as I do. If you’re investigating a break-in and theft, then you’re lawfully present at the scene. Did you or Kestrel open the toolbox to see what was in it?”

“No, of course not. The lieutenant was finished taking pictures of the window where they broke in, and dusting for prints, so this guy brought in some tools from his truck to pick the rest of the glass out of the frame and start—”

“If Kestrel thinks it’s incriminating, then you’ve got probable cause. Grab it. What’s this about a homicide?”

“Gotta run, Lieutenant. If he shuts that toolbox, the thing won’t be in plain view anymore.”

Vandyke, intent on scraping away traces of putty from the window frame before measuring for a replacement pane, didn’t notice Kestrel lifting the tubing cutter from the till of his tool chest, assessing its degree of misalignment, and fitting it to the stump of a pipe sticking down from the floor above.

Dollinger interrupted the handyman with a question. “Can you explain,” he asked, “why this tubing cutter we found in your toolbox matches the damage to the cut ends of the pipe down here?”

Vandyke mopped sweat from his face with a rolled-up sleeve. “Sure can. That cutter was lying right there on the floor when I came down here this morning and found all the pipe missing.”

“And you just took possession of it?”

Vandyke hung his head in mock remorse. “Guilty as charged.”

“Funny thing you didn’t mention that before, considering that it’s obviously something that could help us identify the thieves.”

“You think I stole the pipe?” He seemed utterly astonished by the suggestion. “I’d have to be crazy to pinch the copper out of a house I’ve got the keys to. I’d be number one on your list of suspects.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

“And I wouldn’t have needed to kick in this window either.”

“Unless you wanted to get yourself off that list of suspects. We’d like to take a look at your truck.”

Vandyke’s mood shifted from surprise to indignation. “Don’t you need a warrant for that?”

“No, sir. As long as the truck is parked in front of the house, it’s part of the scene. And since it belongs to you, it’s as much in your interest as ours for us to examine it to confirm the presence, or absence, of evidence.”

“Well, you’re not going to find any pipe, if that’s what you’re looking for.” Vandyke fished the keys out of his pocket and handed them to Dollinger. They didn’t tell him that they were looking for evidence of a more serious crime than burglary.

Vandyke’s pickup truck, parked around the corner on Wells, contained a lawn mower whose engine and muffler were still hot, a fiberglass stepladder, and a miscellaneous assortment of building materials and rubbish. They didn’t find a single inch of copper pipe. But field testing of some dark brown smears on the floor of the cargo compartment proved positive for blood.

Dollinger and Cameron went to the basement, where Vandyke was tidying up, and confronted him with the facts.

“You have a key to this house,” said Dollinger. “You were in possession of the tool that probably was used to steal pipe from here. A man was found shot to death three blocks away. There are traces of blood down here and traces of blood in your truck. That’s a pretty tight web of red lines, and you seem to be right in the middle of it. Please don’t say anything until I inform you of your legal rights according to federal court decisions.”

Having done so, Dollinger proceeded to arrest Vandyke on a charge of stealing the pipe, as well as on suspicion of homicide. Although Kestrel outranked both Dollinger and Cameron, he had always been squeamish about tackling felons. While they made the pinch he was vainly searching the freshly mowed backyard for bloodstains and the alley for distinctive tire marks.

Within minutes after being booked at Second District headquarters, Vandyke retained the services of J. C. Pulfresh, Esq., a notorious local courtroom clown whose rubicund visage and beady eyes stared down from dozens of billboards around town and adorned the back covers of thousands of telephone directories.

Apprised of Pulfresh’s arrival at headquarters, Dollinger hastened to turn over the management of the case to Lieutenant Auburn. They spent a quarter of an hour reviewing the evidence, then met with Pulfresh in a grim and windowless interrogation room in the basement.

The defense attorney from Hades wasted no time on preliminaries.

“My client is prepared to swear that he has never discharged a firearm in his life,” he announced. “We demand that his hands be examined immediately to confirm the absence of primer residue and wipe this preposterous murder charge off the books.”

“Your client hasn’t been charged with homicide yet, pending processing of specimens at the lab. He’s being held on a charge of burglary—”

“Another preposterous charge, until you find the stolen goods in his possession. Which you never will. I want a polygraph test this afternoon, before you start grilling him and planting information in his head.”

“And... let me guess. You want to tell the technician what questions to ask, you want to be present at the session, and you claim the privilege of terminating it—”

“I’m glad we see eye to eye on all that.”

“Do we? You can cut all the deals you want with the prosecutor, and pull all the wires you want with the judge, but police procedure is a non-negotiable issue.”

“Lieutenant, I find your attitude decidedly hostile, not to mention unprofessional. In football, they call this roughing the kicker.”

“Interesting choice of terms.”

Late in the afternoon Vandyke was transferred to First District headquarters downtown, where chemical testing failed to detect powder residue on his hands. Kestrel’s comment that a negative test after an interval of six hours or more had little weight was given little weight. With charges of homicide on a back burner, Pulfresh had Vandyke out on $50,000 bail before nightfall.

Next day the sweltering and oppressive heat continued. Morning report dragged on and on, with cases of petty theft, drunk and disorderly, domestic violence, collisions with personal injury, and a stickup at a bagel shop.

The pipe theft didn’t make it into the papers, but the homicide did. Data on both crimes gradually accumulated at Second District during the course of the morning. At a six A.M.. autopsy, the forensic pathologist had recovered two .32-caliber lead slugs from Roveling’s chest, where they had done catastrophic damage to the heart and great vessels. Powder tattooing around the entrance wounds, and abrasion rings due to expanding gases, indicated that both shots had been fired at contact range. Results of a drug screen and other blood studies were not yet available.

But along with the preliminary report on the autopsy, Stamaty sent a note to the effect that a test at the mortuary had detected primer residue on Roveling’s right hand. Suicide being more or less out of the question, this finding suggested that Roveling had died in a shootout, unless by chance his hand had been wrapped around the weapon that killed him when his assailant pulled the trigger.

Kestrel had found no usable fingerprints on the fragments of window glass or elsewhere in the basement. But tests carried out at the lab not only confirmed the finding of human blood in the basement of the house on Addison Street and in Vandyke’s truck, but also showed that both sets of stains matched Kent Roveling’s ABO and Rh types. By now there could be little doubt that the murder and the theft were linked, and Vandyke seemed to be more deeply implicated than ever in both crimes.

Moreover, a preliminary background profile assembled from local sources scarcely portrayed Vandyke as a model citizen. Besides having been fined on several occasions for various traffic violations and breaches of the peace, he had served two stretches in the county workhouse for petty theft.

In a separate report, the astute and indefatigable Kestrel submitted a photograph of the reassembled basement window. He had found most of the fragments of glass still adherent to the criss-crossed strips of adhesive strapping that the thief had applied to the pane before breaking it. Conspicuously absent was an irregular piece of glass about the size of a credit card. The section of tape corresponding to its position bore a circular mark that clearly suggested a bullet hole. In fact, Kestrel quite confidently stated that the projectile that made the hole had penetrated the glass from inside the basement.

“Riddle me this,” said Auburn. “When and how did a bullet hole get in the basement window?”

“Could have been there for the last fifty years,” said Dollinger.

“Then why, after the window was taped and broken in, did the one piece of glass with the hole in it disappear? Somebody removed that piece of glass to conceal the fact that there was ever a bullet hole in the window.”

“Okay, but if whoever made the hole was already inside the house, why did they need to break the window?”

“That’s kind of what I was asking you. Maybe we need to have another talk with Vandyke. If he hasn’t jumped bail.”

“And if he can find J.C. Pulfresh to hold his hand.”

When they returned to headquarters after lunch, Auburn found a folded piece of green paper taped to his computer screen. Before unfolding it he guessed correctly that it was going to say, “See the Pope.” He never knew who delivered these notes, and he had better sense than to try to find out. He checked his service revolver and headed for Water Street.

The sign on the front of the building said “Carmilla’s Beauty Salon,” but Auburn approached it from the alley, knocking on an unmarked steel door between two battered and overflowing garbage cans. As he stood there waiting amid tepid, malodorous shadows, he asked himself whether he would venture into this dragons’ mouth of a place if he were white, and came up with a negative answer. He knocked twice more before the door was thrown abruptly open. A woman taller than Auburn, and built like a piano mover, thrust out a hand, jerked him bodily through the doorway into a nearly dark room where dense fumes coiled, and slammed the door behind him.

The back room of the beauty parlor was crammed with bottles of shampoo, conditioner, hair dyes and rinses in fifty different tints, and miscellaneous other chemicals. Against a side wall stood an age-scarred mahogany buffet, arranged as an altar with dozens of religious statues and framed pictures. Lighted votive candles in colored glass globes provided the only illumination in the room. The pungent, sickening-sweet fumes of a half-dozen smoldering incense burners mingled with the odor of cosmetics.

Carmilla was wearing a plastic apron and she had a pair of rubber gloves tucked under one arm. “Sweetie,” she said, in a tone both benevolent and domineering, “you be thrashing around in the dark and you need all the help you can get. You call yourself a cop and you ain’t figured out yet what them orange cones means?”

A video clip of Fremantle giving Roveling’s car the once-over at the mall parking lot had appeared on a late-morning newscast.

“Roveling was in the tire business.”

“Tire business my foot! That was his day job. Nighttimes he’d find him a empty space in some lighted parking lot, set out them cones, and make like he was practicing parking. You know, like they make the kids do for a driver license?”

“But he wasn’t really practicing parking?”

“Uh-uh, no way.”

“Was he maybe setting up shop to do a little dealing?”

“Now you connected. But you gonna have to work the rest of it out for yourself. You get yourself on outa here now — I got work to do. You know where to send some money? Cash, no check.”

“Dania. She’s still at West Hampton?”

“Still there and still in full control.”

Auburn moved toward the door to the alley. Just before he reached it, Carmilla came after him, gripped his right shoulder from behind, and swung him around so violently that he might have fallen if she hadn’t held him up. “Remember one thing, Sweetie: I ain’t never heard of you and you ain’t never heard of me. And listen here — anything funny ever happen to my granddaughter, you are chop’ liver.”

On his way back to his car Auburn reflected that there were hardened and desperate killers on the streets that he would rather go up against than some of his most valued informants.

A routine search of law-enforcement databases had turned up no traces of a criminal past for Roveling, much less any open warrants or wanted notices. Auburn requisitioned a full background probe, then called Kestrel at the lab. “How well do you think Fremantle went over Roveling’s car?” he asked.

“Fremantle does journeyman work,” was the somewhat cryptic reply. “The only usable prints he lifted were Roveling’s.”

“Where’s the car now?”

“Around the corner here in the garage.”

“Can I get you to take another look at it?”

Before three o’clock Kestrel called back to report on his examination of Kent Roveling’s car. On unbolting the spare tire and lifting it out of its well, he had found the underside slashed open as if to serve as a cache for something. Traces of off-white crystals in the interior of the tire tested positive for cocaine.

Auburn was still pondering possible relationships between a drug deal gone fatally sour and the theft of copper pipe when he got a call from Graves, the late Roveling’s employer in Westrup.

“Hey, I saw my car on the news awhile ago. When and where can I pick it up?”

“We need to talk about that. Can you get here to town before five today?”

“Sure. Damage to the car?”

“Not that, exactly. But we’ll be holding certain parts of it as evidence.”

“Understood.” Then, after a moment of silence, “What parts?”

“We’ll talk about that when you get here.” They made an appointment for four-thirty P.M. Auburn instructed Graves to bring any lease documents he had, and gave him directions to the Public Safety garage downtown. Then he called the district office of the Drug Enforcement Administration and asked for Al Michelwicz.

Promptly at four-thirty Graves was dropped off outside the Public Safety garage on Gates Street by a flunky in a red panel truck labeled “Economy Treads.” Auburn showed his badge and led Graves into the garage. “See your driver’s license, sir? Papers about the lease?”

Athletic, fortyish, with a mop of blond hair and a frizzy mustache to match, Graves walked and talked with the surly arrogance of a retired class bully. After verifying his identity, Auburn turned him over to Michelwicz.

“Public Safety has found conclusive evidence,” Michelwicz told him, “that your car has been used in illegal drug trafficking. Any comment on that?” Graves appeared nonplussed. “That gray coupe over there? There’s no way.”

“The spare tire has been cut open,” Michelwicz informed him, “and there are traces of cocaine inside. As the lessee of the car, you’re presumed to know something about that.”

“Well, I don’t. Look, Officer, I’ve driven that car maybe three times in my life. You say you have proof that it’s been used to haul drugs. Well, the guy that did the hauling had to be my worst salesman, Kent Roveling, and he happens to be dead now.”

“Yes, sir. So I’ll have to ask you to come with me to the office.” Michelwicz still had Graves’s driver’s license.

“Can we make an appointment for sometime later in the week?” asked Graves. He started edging toward the car. “I’ve got a sales conference at the office in Westrup in about forty-five minutes.”

Michelwicz unbuttoned his jacket and casually tilted his body sideways so that the butt of his service revolver just showed in his shoulder holster. “We’re going now, sir,” he said.

Around eleven next morning, Dollinger received a text message from Patrolwoman Cameron: “Does this name ring a bell?” The attached news item from the neighboring town of Wilmot stated that Hayden Lamphere had been admitted Monday evening to Manker Memorial Hospital with a diagnosis of drug overdose. A call to the Wilmot Public Safety Department elicited the information that the drug in question was cocaine. A neighbor had found Lamphere collapsed and hallucinating in his garage around five P.M. Lamphere vehemently denied self-administration of the drug, which had evidently entered his body by the oral route.

Auburn and Dollinger were at Manker Memorial by noontime. Harry Lamphere lay in a doze with oxygen prongs in his nose and an IV line in his left forearm. Monitors winked and chirped. A lunch tray rested untouched on a stand. At the foot of the bed a woman of mature years, stout and flushed, sat crocheting with fingers as swift and sure as the pinions and levers of a grandfather clock.

“Mrs. Lamphere?” queried Dollinger.

“As if!” she retorted with a scowl of indignation, and went on with her crocheting.

Lamphere cocked an eye open. “Ain’t you a little off your beat, Officer? Or is this a social visit?”

Dollinger introduced Auburn. “What happened, sir?”

“I wish I knew. I thought maybe somebody doped my lunch, but the doctor says if I took the stuff at lunch I probably wouldn’t have been able to get home before it hit me.”

“When did you have lunch?”

“About a half-hour after I seen you. Sitting in the car, trying to chill down.”

“Where did the lunch come from?”

“Brought it from the house in a brown bag. Turkey on rye, chips, apple. Soda.”

“It was locked in your car during the morning?”

“Car belongs to the Division of Water. Duplicate keys at the office.”

“Any idea who’d want to do this to you?”

“No, sir, unless one of the guys we had to lay off on routes where they got radio pickup now.”

“Cocaine is a pretty unusual choice for a poisoning,” said Auburn. “Do you know anybody who sells or uses illegal drugs?”

“If I do, they ain’t told me about it yet.”

They had lunch in the hospital cafeteria. Dollinger’s gourmet palate rebelled against the steam-table fare, and he complained that the portions were invalid-sized. But he struck it rich with dessert, finding a colossal serving of pineapple upside-down cake that must have been the last piece out of the pan.

On returning to headquarters, they assembled all available data on the murder and the theft and sat down for a brainstorming session. Preliminary drug screens on Roveling had detected a small amount of alcohol but no cocaine. As Auburn was sifting through a stack of photographs that Kestrel had taken in the basement on Addison Street, something caught his attention. He selected three pictures and laid them out in a row.

“What’s this, Fritz?”

“Looks like a wall to me.”

“Sure, but it’s no outside basement wall. See this header nailed to the joists up above, and the top ends of the studs? This is a partition finished in drywall, and there has to be something behind it.” Auburn had worked as a carpenter’s helper on enough construction jobs in his youth to know what he was talking about.

Dollinger studied the pictures long and carefully. “Best I can remember, it’s just a blank wall. I mean, there’s no door in it.”

“Got a phone number for that real-estate agent?”

Tammy Lee Winter, reached at the company offices in Harmony Heights, confirmed that the house had been remodeled twelve years ago, with the addition of a downstairs bathroom and a den or study off the kitchen. She had a set of construction plans that had been approved by the City Engineer’s office before that work was done.

When they met at her office, Auburn found that Ms. Winter was one of those people whose smiles resemble the expression one makes when there’s too much vinegar in the salad dressing. Maybe that was why she wasn’t wearing any rings.

A review of the remodeling contractor’s plans showed that the foundation of the house had been breached and extended, with part of the original rear wall of the basement replaced with a plastered partition. Behind it remained a rough cavity about three feet by twelve.

Ms. Winter had them sign an elaborate receipt for the key to the house, as if they were rival real-estate agents with potential buyers on a string.

The pungent aroma of mildew in the basement had its usual effect on Auburn, making him sneeze and wheeze like a motorbike running on empty. The first blind snapshot he took, with his cell phone held at arm’s length above the partition, told them all they needed to know.

“What do you think, Fritz?”

“I think we need to get Lieutenant Kestrel back down here.”

“Not to mention Agent Michelwicz.”

By midafternoon Kestrel and Michelwicz were deeply engrossed in a fishing expedition, eventually recovering from behind the drywall partition eleven one-pint plastic jugs of cocaine by snagging their handles with an improvised gaffing hook. Queried by Auburn about Garret Graves of Economy Treads, Michelwicz said he had been released for want of any evidence tying him to the cocaine trade. “But,” he added with a quaint turn of phrase, “he’ll be kept an eye on indefinitely.”

Next morning a steady drizzle of rain, which turned to steam in the tropical heat, temporarily suspended Matt Vandyke’s lawn-mowing chores. They found him lounging at home in front of a TV screen, abundant stocks of popcorn and beer within reach. Since he was out on bail, he assumed they were just seeking a few more details on the burglary on Addison Street.

“Yesterday,” Dollinger reminded him, “you told your lawyer you never fired a gun in your life. How did you know Roveling had been shot?”

“I must have heard—”

“No, sir. No one involved in the investigation told you or your lawyer how Roveling was killed.”

“I just assumed—”

“You assumed nothing. You knew he’d been shot, because you’re the one who moved his body from the basement to the mall parking lot.”

“Wait, wait, wait. When did I do this?”

“As soon as you found the body. Probably around three or four Monday morning, not long after somebody stole the pipe, shot Roveling to death, faked a break-in by taping and popping the window... and left a pipe-cutting tool behind.”

“And what was I doing there at three or four Monday morning?”

“Maybe planning to meet Roveling and collect your cut—”

“My cut of what? What have I got to do with Roveling?”

“You let him keep a stockpile of cocaine in the cavity behind that partition in the basement,” said Auburn. “Probably not rent-free. When you found out he’d got himself killed down there, you had to move his body out in a hurry.”

“Okay, I loaned him a key to the side door,” admitted Vandyke. “But I don’t know anything about any cocaine.”

“That remains to be seen. Meanwhile, Roveling’s blood is in your truck, and we have a warrant to arrest you on a charge of moving his body. That’s a misdemeanor unless it involves concealing, altering, or destroying evidence of homicide. Then it becomes a felony.”

The trip to headquarters with Vandyke in custody was a replay of Monday’s events, except that this time, despite the machinations of J.C. Pulfresh, he couldn’t make bail, and became a guest of the city’s Division of Correctional Services.

It was about three in the afternoon when Auburn reached Kestrel at the lab. “Can I get you to take a ride with Dollinger and me this afternoon? Just to test out a hypothesis of mine?”

If he’d been talking to anybody else, he would have called it a hunch. But to a person with a master’s degree in forensic science, a hunch is a hypothesis.

“If the captain authorizes it.”

“I’m on that.”

Finkelday’s scrap-metal yard was open from eight A.M.. to six P.M.. six days a week. Auburn, Dollinger, and Kestrel were there by a little after four. The owner gave them only a little static before allowing them to search his stock without presenting a warrant. They assured him that, even if they found what they were looking for, they wouldn’t charge him with receiving stolen goods if he could tell them where the material came from.

Finkelday made them put on hard hats and stuck to them like chewing gum while they plowed through vast tangles of copper and brass — pipe, tubing, wire, buckled boilers, and ductwork, and battered gadgets and gizmos in every imaginable shape and size. In a matter of minutes Kestrel found a batch of copper pipe whose cut ends perfectly matched the faulty cutting pattern of the tool seized from Vandyke.

After consulting a couple of his Latino workers, Finkelday produced from a file a photocopy of the driver’s license of the man who had sold him the pipe two days earlier, a Charles Colbert of Wilmot.

Examination of the license showed that it had expired four years ago. A check with the Bureau of Motor Vehicles revealed that Charles Colbert himself had expired even longer ago than that.

Finkelday conceded that his review of driver’s licenses before photocopying them might be somewhat perfunctory. He certainly didn’t carefully compare pictures on licenses with the faces of the people who presented them. But he recognized the name Charles Colbert as that of a regular visitor, because, whoever he was, he drove a yellow panel truck labeled “Colbert Plumbing and Heating.”

No such firm was listed in the current Yellow Pages.

Finkelday obligingly ran them off a copy of his copy of the expired driver’s license. He didn’t even object when they confiscated two short pieces of copper pipe to add to Kestrel’s collection.

On Friday morning Auburn and Dollinger found Harry Lamphere back home at his snug little farmhouse on Wilmot Pike, puttering around in his pajamas. After admitting them to his spartan parlor, he collapsed into an overstuffed chair that nearly swallowed up his spare frame.

Dollinger politely asked about the progress of his recovery, and then switched on the grill. “On Monday,” he said, “you told us you wanted to check for damage to Water Department property in the house at Addison and Wells where the pipe was stolen. Is that right?”

“That’s the way I remember it,” said Lamphere, a vaguely defiant edge creeping into his voice.

“Hardly a month goes by,” said Auburn, “that I don’t get a piece of mail telling me the Water Department or my gas supplier has ‘partnered’ with some wildcat insurance outfit that offers a policy to cover the cost of repairs to my water or gas lines. And the literature pushing these fleece jobs never fails to remind me, in bold print, that any supply lines within my property boundaries not only are my responsibility but are in fact my property.

“Since you knew that nothing in that basement belonged to the Water Department, you must have had a different reason than the one you gave the sergeant for poking around down there.”

“Oh yes? What was that?”

“You were looking for the tubing cutter you left behind the night before, in all the excitement of stealing the pipe and killing Kent Roveling.”

“Hold on here a minute!”

Dollinger read him his rights. “The people at Finkelday’s,” he said, “the only scrap yard here in Wilmot, didn’t take a good enough look at the driver’s license you showed them to see that it had somebody else’s picture on it, or that it expired four years ago. But they did write down the license number of the truck from Colbert’s Plumbing and Heating, which is now registered to you. And parked in the shed next to your garage.”

Lamphere settled deeper among the cushions with a shudder of apprehension. “You guys been busy.”

“That’s what we get paid for. We know you used to work for Colbert, and bought the truck from his estate. We have evidence that the same defective tubing cutter you used on Addison Street was used to steal pipe from three other vacant houses in the past few months. Finkelday’s records show you sold him scrap pipe within a couple of days after each of those other thefts. We also know you called in sick on Monday, and didn’t submit any meter readings that day from Addison Street, or anywhere else.”

Lamphere started to say something but then relapsed into stubborn silence.

“Your job at the Water Department,” said Auburn, “gives you access to information on what houses have had their water shut off. Wearing your uniform, you can invade private property in broad daylight without being challenged or reported as a prowler. You can check on For Sale signs, vacant houses, basement doors, alley exits, dogs...”

“Hey, okay, maybe I ripped off some pipe here and there.”

Dollinger opened his briefcase. “I have a warrant here for your arrest on four charges of burglary. Please stand up, step away from the chair, face away from me, and put both hands on the wall up where I can see them.” Lamphere submitted tamely to being patted down for hardware.

“I also have a search warrant that authorizes us to examine the contents of this house, as well as your garage and shed.” He presented the document. “We’d appreciate your cooperation in providing keys to anything that’s locked.”

They had already spotted the plumbing-company truck and checked its registration plates yesterday through a window at the back of the shed. In carrying out a thorough search of the vehicle they found a plastic bottle of white crystals and two handguns secreted in a tool bin under the floor of the cargo compartment.

Lamphere, still in pajamas and slippers, stood by helplessly as they labeled and packaged each piece of evidence.

“Which of these revolvers made the hole in the window?” asked Auburn.

“His. The thirty-eight. He walked in on me just when I was getting ready to load the pipe in the truck — took a potshot at my headlight.” The other weapon, a .32 with a two-inch barrel, was evidently the one that had claimed Roveling’s life.

“This was before you taped the window and broke it in?”

“Yes, sir. See, when I first got there I checked all the doors and I found those big ones to the basement steps unlocked. Of course I went in that way, but after what happened I taped the window and broke it in so it would look like that’s the way I got in.”

“And took away the piece of glass with the bullet hole in it. Tell us about the cocaine.”

“The guy had it with him. I didn’t know for sure what it was, but... I just couldn’t sit still until I tried some. Probably the dumbest thing I ever did.”

“I hardly think so,” remarked Auburn. “We’re charging you with the murder of Kent Roveling.”

Lamphere squirmed and wrung his hands. “I seen this coming. But look here, guys. He had me cornered, and he shot first. It was him or me. I dropped him in self-defense, same as you’d do if he was firing at you.”

“Sergeant Dollinger is going to address that particular point. I’ve said it so many times I have voice fatigue.”

“If you cause a death while committing a felony,” Dollinger told him, “the homicide is automatically also a felony.”

They waited while he locked up the shed and dressed for the road. For various reasons, booking him into jail took an inordinately long time. Auburn occupied some of that time with a visit to Vandyke, whom he incidentally informed of the identity of Roveling’s killer.

Less than an hour later, as he and Dollinger were leaving the building, they met J.C. Pulfresh just going in.

“Think you’ve finally got somebody to pin this homicide on, don’t you?” asked Pulfresh, with his trademark foxy grin. “Don’t bank on it.”

© 2018 by John H. Dirckx