One Murder at a Time: A Casebook. Richard A. Lupoff
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Marvia stood up. “Wait a minute. Don’t run off so quick.”
Bernstein shook her head. “My students are waiting. You can walk with me if you wish.”
Dr. Bernstein, Dr. Chih and Marvia Plum started down the hallway. Bulletin boards were covered with want ads, course offerings, cut-rate travel offers.
Marvia raised her hands in front of her shoulders. “Are you saying that a kind of—religious, quasi-religious cult is killing these people?”
“I don’t know. But the different ways they died, the different suspicious figures who were reported afterwards—what does your police training tell you?”
“Huh! The patterns are different. Serials generally adopt a pet method and stick with it. Even professional hitters are usually self-consistent. We’ve had four incidents, five deaths, a different method each time.”
“Here’s my session. Feel free at any time.” Dr. Bernstein shook Marvia’s hand and disappeared into a crowded classroom. Dr. Chih shook Marvia’s hand and headed off on a mission of her own.
Marvia walked south on Telegraph for a few blocks before heading west to police headquarters. The sun was sinking low and traffic was heavy. As Marvia neared People’s Park she thought, This is the time of day when they come out to play. The campfires will be burning, the crazies will be raving and the drug dealers will be making a fortune.
It was also the time of day that squatters would be marking their territory in doorways and storefronts, setting up their little encampments and harassing shoppers foolish enough to stay on the avenue after dark.
But the avenue seemed more peaceful than usual for this hour. More shoppers remained on the streets, the cafés were brightly lit and crowded with students drinking coffee or beer, stores were staying open after dark again and they bustled with customers. Marvia wondered, Where have all the loonies gone?
She checked her watch as she started up the steps at headquarters. She hadn’t been authorized any overtime for this job, and Lieutenant Yamura was a stickler for staying within budget.
There was a note on Marvia’s desk. Phone me at home, DY. She punched Dorothy Yamura’s private number.
“I had a call from Sally O’Hara in Chicago. They busted Parker Tice.”
“They have anything they can make stick?” Tice, Marvia Plum knew, was a top-flight hitter. Arrested many times, never convicted of anything worse than a couple of petty youth offenses.
“There was an Illinois warrant, I think they’re going to squeeze hard this time. But that’s up to the DA out there. But get this—Tice had an airline stub for a return flight from Oakland last Friday AM.”
“And Szymanski and Campbell got it Thursday night. And Tice is a shotgun specialist.”
“You got it.” Yamura spoke with a smile in her voice.
“You want me to fly out there?”
“Maybe later on. Not yet. Tice hates to talk to anybody, you know that. And we can’t do anything on the strength of an airline stub. Keep working this end. This was just something I wanted you to know.”
Marvia hung up the phone and climbed into bed. She wasn’t sure whether the phone rang just before or just after she had closed her eyes. It was Dorothy Yamura calling back.
“You’re not going to believe this.”
“Unh?”
“Fredi Muhammad’s dead.”
“Fredi? Feelgood Fredi, the biggest female dealer in the world of dope?”
“That’s the one. And get this—she was sampling her own wares. I thought she was too smart for that, only the bottom-rungers do that. But she must have made a mistake, and it looks like the same stuff that killed Latonia Jones.”
Marvia burrowed into her pillow, but the phone was still at her ear. “Marvia?”
“Super-intense smack laced with strychnine?”
“You think it was an accident? Or was somebody out to get Fredi?”
“I don’t know, Marvia. Sweet dreams, sweetie. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
* * * *
In the morning, Marvia worked Telegraph again. She wore her uniform, gun and badge on display. Some citizens stood and gaped at her, others gave her a wide berth. Passing Woodstock West, she saw both Mistress Moonflower and Star Lotus inside the store. They wore similar outfits: filmy blouses and billowy skirts. Both were barefoot and wore jingling anklets. Moonflower was berating Star Lotus over something.
At the A-to-Z 24-Hour Market a mile south of campus, Marvia got lucky. A clerk remembered Otto Timmins. “Poor old rummy,” was the way she put it. “Never stopped talking about the navy. What war was he in, I guess Vietnam. Yeah, he used to talk about the Gulf of Tonkin and cruising on the Mekong Delta.”
“Why would anybody kill Timmins?” Marvia asked.
“Well, he was kind of obnoxious. I just felt sorry for him. But he smelled bad and he used to collar people with his war stories and then ask them for money. If they didn’t give it to him he could get really hostile. Sometimes even if they did.”
“Just that?”
“And he used to scare children. He told me he loved them, but he used to lurch over and want to pet them or hug them and they’d scream and their mothers would hustle them out of his way. Manager made me bar him from the store but he just hung around outside panhandling and driving away customers. She said she didn’t want to do it either, but the owner made her. You know, Cora Kelly? Big time real-estate operator, she owns a lot of places and has other people managing them for her. But I felt sorry for the guy. Poor old guy.”
Marvia laid a bill on the counter. “Give me a cup of coffee, hey? Nice and hot.”
The clerk complied.
“When was the last time you saw Otto?”
“Well, it was the day before he was murdered. That’s why I remember it. It was—” She turned to a calendar with a picture of a female rock-climber perched triumphantly on top of Half Dome in Yosemite. The picture hung just below a big display clock with an advertising logo on it. The logo featured a blue dolphin drinking a stein of beer. “—see, I pulled the graveyard shift that night, and I got home and climbed into bed and turned on the radio and there it was on the early morning news. So I thought, poor old Otto, poor old guy. I know a lot of people figured, good riddance, but I thought, poor old guy.”
“What time did you see him, the day he was killed? Was he alone? Did he say or do anything you thought was unusual?”
“I remember there was a customer here, he started hassling her for money and I was going to throw him out but she made a gesture with her hand, like this, you know, like, it’s okay, so I backed off.”
“What did she look like?”
“Slim build, sharp features, nice figure for an older woman. You know, slim, must be good genes, huh, look at me and I must be half her age.”
“Right. What else? Distinguishing marks, hair, clothing?”
“It was a chilly day. She was wearing a quilted vest, I remember that. And her hair—looked like steel wool. I never saw hair like that before. Must feel really interesting. Kind of a turn-on.”
“Anything else? What did they do? What did they say to each other? Did they leave together?”
“That’s it. He asked her for money and she stopped and looked at him, I remember that. I mean, people didn’t like to look at Otto. He was a little too weird, you know? Just—not nice, that’s all. But this woman looked at him, and she leaned over and said something in his ear, and she walked out of the store. And Otto stood there, I remember, looking at