Once Bitten, Twice Dead Read online

  “Yeah, so what?”

  “Nothing, but from what you told me about the people who are backing you—you know the ‘not nice’ people—it seems to me that a guy would have to have strong balls to write a story like that.”

  “His balls are a little dried out now because we took care of him.”

  “You’re talking about the guy who wrote the story, Mark Stolle, I think his name was?”

  “That’s the asshole. He’s under the earth now.” Zemco was on a roll now, practically swelling with testosterone.

  “You ordered it done?”

  “I don’t order nothing, but the guy who runs things here in NYC, Stosh Crucitz, he told me he was going to have someone do it. And he told me to watch my step. So I haven’t seen Stauffenberg since the article came out. But good old Eugene has already given us a couple of juicy contracts, so we’re all right with him.”

  I had it all down on tape. Now all I had to do was avoid, “bedtime with Tony.”

  After dinner, in his car, Zemco wanted a sexual repeat back at his place. I told him I wasn’t feeling well, but he didn’t want to accept that. I had a backup plan. As a kid, I could make myself gag and almost throw up, at will. So I went through my convulsive routine, and my nervousness helped me actually thrown up. I spewed a little on Tony’s shiny suit. Now he was convinced I was sick, but then the beast said, “Maybe we can do it right here in the car.”

  He started to make a move toward me. I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid he might discover the wire setup. So I did the only thing an outraged woman could do. I slapped him—hard.

  “Oww! That hurt!”

  “It was meant to hurt. What kind of a guy are you to try to take advantage of a sick girl. I’m taking a cab home.” And I got out right on Times Square. I was shaking. I thought the brute might come after me, but he didn’t. I hailed a cab, and was gone.

  The next day I turned the tape over to the NYC police, and within 24 hours, Tony and Stosh Crucitz were arrested and held without bail. The next day Eugene Stauffenberg was taken into custody at his New Jersey home.

  I had solved my first case, and now I had to get back to my own work in Philly.

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  “Detective, Stolle, this is Linton Headley. I think you remember me, Randall Procopius’ lawyer.”

  “Sure. Do you have something for me?”

  “I might. This last week I received two interesting phone calls. They were both from the ladies who didn’t get anything from the Estate.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I do say. And they said plenty. Both of them now wanted ‘their rightful share,’ as they put it. Each of them separately is going to sue the estate. Maybe you should check these women out. They might have wanted Randall’s money bad enough to do him in.”

  “I’ll check on them. What about that woman, the one who got all the money? What was her name?”

  “Renee Boyston. She seemed legitimate, you know, getting the right answer to Randall’s question. However, that didn’t mean she wasn’t greedy for his money also.”

  “I’ll check out all three of them.”

  I started with Loretta Traxell, Randall’s girlfriend from high school. I checked out an old yearbook from John Adams High to get a sense of who Loretta hung around with. In the senior pictures section Loretta’s write up had included five other girls. I couldn’t find two of them; they apparently had moved away from the Philly area. Two others had lost contact with Loretta right after graduation. However, one of those five people had kept in touch with her.

  Bonita Grace said she would talk with me. I met her in a coffee shop close to the school. Her nose ring and neck piercing were not attractive. When we first sat down she yawned and I got a good look at her tongue piercing. The jewelry seemed to emphasize her chubbiness.

  At first, Bonita was bubbly. “I live in the same house I grew up in. Can you beat that!” Then a sober look crossed her face. “Maybe I never really grew up.”

  “What do you do for a living?”

  “I live on welfare. I lost my job a year ago, even before the economy slowed down. But I like living this way—no responsibility at all.”

  “Don’t you ever want to achieve anything?”

  “Not really. But, anyway, what do you want to know about Loretta?”

  “Has she ever talked to you about a man named, Randall Procopius?”

  “All the time. She was obsessed with him. She knew that he had become enormously wealthy, and she thought maybe she could get some of it.”

  “Did she try to do anything about getting it?”

  “She told me she actually went to the dude’s office three or four times so he’d remember her. She thought it was working because he took her out to lunch once.”

  I remembered that Loretta had given the impression at the reading of the will that it had been just a complete accident that Randall had remembered her.

  Bonita was continuing: “I know the guy was murdered. Loretta told me. Loretta did once say that the only problem with getting any money from the guy was that he was still alive. She meant it jokingly—I don’t think she could kill anyone. She’s always been a little greedy, but I don’t think she’d try to harm, anyone. How did the guy die, anyway?”

  “Gasoline was poured on him and he was thrown into a fire. He burned to death.”

  “Yuck. Somebody must have desperately wanted his money, or they really hated him. Loretta was kidding when she said those words about him still being alive. Really, she’d never do a thing like that. Really.”

  Was Bonita protesting too much? Leaving Bonita Grace, I did have a slightly altered view of Loretta Traxell. Soon my view of Vanda Patton was also to change, but in a much different way. With a little tracking and four conversations later, I got to talk to one of Vanda’s “working girl” friends, who thought it was uproariously funny that Vanda would be seeking anyone’s money.

  “Vanda is probably a case study in insanity because she doesn’t need to work at all, much less be a ‘woman of the evening.’”

  “Why is that?”

  “I don’t think anyone knows this, but six or seven years ago Vanda won the lottery. She wanted no publicity so she told me to keep it quiet.”

  “How much did she win?”

  “She gets $200,000 a year for life.”

  “Then why does she do prostitution?”

  “She likes sex with all sorts of odd people without having any real connection to them. She doesn’t want to have a real relationship with anyone. She told me she went to the reading of that will for the entertainment value. She didn’t really think she was going to get anything.”

  I explained about the lawsuit Randall’s lawyer had told me about.

  “With Vanda, it would be a matter of principle. If she felt she was being cheated out of something, she would fight for it. If a john that she had didn’t give her good sex she would beat him up. What was he going to do, tell on her? Don’t cross Vanda.”

  Vanda certainly wasn’t desperate for the money. However, that violent streak of hers that I had just learned about could have come into play with Randall if he had ever “crossed” her. It would have had to be really bad sex, though, to set someone on fire for it.

  My last stop at Headley’s request was Renee Boyston. Headley and I had agreed that this woman, of the three, had seemed to be the most legitimate. I discovered that maybe she was the most bogus.

  Headley had an inkling of suspicion that something might not be right when he had been disposing of some of Randall’s possessions in clearing out the estate. Headley had to first get Randall’s car inspected before he could auction it off. The car was a reconditioned classic car, maybe twenty years old. Randall, apparently had great nostalgia for the past. The State Inspection people found that it looked like the fuel pump had been tampered with so that the car would break down. Even after Renee had made her “accidental” stop on the highway and fixed it, the car continued to break down until the
inspection people found that fuel pump cause. Headley said Randall had complained about it to him, and eventually wanted to sell the car.

  Rather than going directly to Renee, I went to her husband, Carl, who had supposedly taught her all her mechanical skills.

  “Renee was always a quick study, and she did have me drop her off for an entire week near Randall’s home, I found out later. She had told me she wanted to do some shopping in that area and she would get home on her own. I didn’t think anything of it until the inspection people reported the tampering—each day I had dropped her off only two blocks from Randall’s house. So, yeah, she could have easily ‘fixed’ Procopius’ car so it would break down and she could be a hero to him and get it started again. However, Detective, I have no proof of that, and neither do you.”

  Was the guy arrogantly challenging me? Catch us if you can?

  “Maybe there are no coincidences, Mr. Boyston.”

  “If you say so. But then soon after Renee and the highway incident Procopius was murdered in what I read about was a ghastly way. You don’t think my wife had anything to do with that, do you?”

  “I don’t know what to think now. Why don’t you tell me the truth?”

  He smiled. “Here’s a theory for you. Maybe Renee’s plan was to bump into Randall again a few weeks later, try to win him into a kind of friendship bond, and then ask to borrow some money from him. She’s always wanted to start her own repair business, and Randall could give her the money to make a start at it.”

  “But now you both have an entire boatload of money.”

  “We certainly do—so much money it’s almost a crime to have all that.” He gave me another smile.

  As I left Mr. Mechanic I had the queasy feeling that even during that conversation I was being had, that Carl knew much more than he was telling me. The fact that he told me about dropping Renee off close to Randall’s house could have been the truth, but not the whole truth. And that was the point—nothing hides a lie so well as part of the truth does.

  I told Headley about my findings related to the three women, and I asked him what he was going to do with this new information.

  “I also did a little searching, Detective Stolle. I found that Vanda Patton was being pushed into the lawsuit by her greedy lawyer trying to make a big financial score. Apparently she is rethinking the action and may drop the lawsuit.

  “With Loretta Traxell, your discussion with her friend give me some ammunition to use against her if we should have to meet in court.”

  “How about Renee Boyston? She could have set up that entire roadside fixing of Randall’s car by earlier disabling the vehicle.”

  “I don’t know if I can do anything about that. She did answer the riddle, and she couldn’t have known about that ahead of time. That fulfills Randall’s request in the will. And like her husband said, we can’t really prove that Renee or he tampered with that car.

  “Maybe Randall enjoyed the last few months of his life thinking that three women were fawning over him. And maybe for a man like Randall who would perpetrate his own business scams, it wouldn’t have mattered to him even if he suspected that the women’s intentions weren’t honest.”

  My week was completed by one of the most shocking emails I’d ever received. It was from Ted Davis, Carla Strand’s former agent. The message was short and sour: “The week before she died Carla told me about what her father did to her. I’ve taken care of that, and then I’ll take care of me.”

  Checking into the words the next few hours I found that Sidney Pramp had been stabbed to death, and Ted Davis had died after pouring the contents of a full pill bottle down his throat. Two deaths, announced in a two-sentence email. Emails can be short, but life should be longer.

  CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

  That email and its real life happenings shook me up. I didn’t think that the nice Ted Davis would be capable of what he did. What else didn’t I know about the people associated with Carla Strand?

  When I had interviewed Davis, he had told me that Carla Strand, who was on-and-off depressed, would record her thoughts as a kind of therapy. And yet in Carla’s apartment no one had discovered any tapes or notebooks that contained any of Carla’s thoughts.

  So I went back to her apartment as a last-ditch effort to discover more about Ms. Strand.

  The yellow police tape was gone, and the walls were freshly painted. The landlord had told me that new people were going to move in next week. Probably advertising for the place hadn’t included the fact that a murder had occurred here.

  Most of Carla’s furniture remained. The young married couple who would soon occupy these rooms probably would change things as they went along. The landlord had informed me that the couple said that the apartment itself cost so much that at the moment they couldn’t afford new furniture. “But we love the view,” the new bride had gushed.

  I wandered past the sheeted furniture wondering if Carla’s ghost was still hovering, or whether she had left for another destination. I absent-mindedly opened and closed dresser drawers and closet doors—of course it was all empty space. All of Carla’s personal things had been disposed of, but like a nut I kept opening and closing.

  I had gotten to the end of the hallway—probably Carla’s bedroom by the look of the vanity and two mirrors. In the middle drawer of her dresser my eye caught something as I was closing it back up. At the far corner of the drawer was a small piece of something. As I pulled the drawer back open totally now, I saw it wasn’t a piece of anything. It was a tiny black lever. Levers are meant to be pushed. So I did. There was a kind of swishing of air, and a panel slid to the left. Inside a small compartment was a wad of hundred dollar bills—possibly some “mad money” for Carla whenever she maxed out her credit cards, which Ted had told me she did at times.

  Next to the money was a green, padded notebook. I opened it. It was filled with dates and writing. It took me only reading a page to see that it was Carla’s diary. The dates went back three years, possibly when Carla’s depression had gotten worse. I pushed aside the sheet on Carla’s sofa in the living room and sat down for some reading.

  I knew I had to turn the money and diary over to the NYC police, but I had to get my own information out of it first. I spent over an hour skim-reading and making notes. Carla’s words on those pages were going to send me back to re-interview people connected to her. My plan was to tell each of my suspects, Carla’s exact words about him or her from her diary, and then see the reaction.

  Mimi Fortuna had no reaction. “I would expect her to say that—the woman only admired herself.”

  Carla’s words from the diary about Mimi had been: “She had no creativity. I’m afraid to tell her that again because she’s such a vicious bitch.”

  “Why, Ms. Fortuna, would Carla call you ‘vicious.’?”

  “One time at a fashion show Carla said something nasty right to my face, and I hit her. No one insults me like that.”

  “So you attacked her?”

  “It was nothing.”

  Before I came to talk to Mimi, I had looked up news reports for the last year’s fashion happenings, and found the incident in question, reported about five months ago. It seemed that Mimi had knocked Carla to the ground and injured her so much that she had to be hospitalized. So it was much more than “nothing.”

  I told this to Mimi, and she said, “I did get a little out of control. I later wrote her an apology note.”

  Discovery #1 from Carla’s diary: Mimi Fortuna could be violent. And murder is absolutely a violent act.

  My next stop was to talk with Sibbi Prentis, Carla’s friend. The most recent entry in Carla’s diary about Sibbi stated: “I think she will eventually knife me in the back. She isn’t a true friend. I will tell her so.”

  “Sibbi, why would Carla write that you weren’t a true friend?”

  “Carla would get upset when anyone wouldn’t do her bidding. What was the date of that entry?” I told her. “That’s when Carla wanted me to sneak into
Mimi Fortuna’s dress shop and steal some of her designs. I told her I wouldn’t do it. She went ballistic, stormed out of my place, and didn’t call me for a month. I wasn’t about to become a crook for her, no matter how good friends we were. It was just another instance of what I told you before, Detective Stolle: Carla had no respect for herself—she would do anything in order to be successful.”

  I thought possibly Sibbi had stolen those designs, and Carla was holding it over her head. When I had first talked with Sibbi, I thought she had too much self-respect to continue to be a friend to someone who lacked such respect. Carla did seem to be exercising some kind of control over her friend. Possibly the only way Sibbi could break that control was to eliminate Carla.

  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

  My third call was to Pierre LaComte, Carla’s perfume competitor. The diary entry about him simply stated: “He doesn’t know he’s gay.”

  I gave that quote to Pierre, and his calm face became contorted. “She came and spit those words at me. What she said was preposterous. Me being gay? No one has ever questioned my virility. Maybe I should give you the names of all the women I’ve slept with. Do you know the male cologne I market?”

  “I’m not familiar with it.”

  “That’s what it was called: ‘Male.’ All my advertising for it was that it was the manly cologne that would attract women. Would a gay man put out such a product? It was my largest selling item.”

  “Whether you’re gay or not is not for me to decide, but if rumors to that effect began to spread, couldn’t it lessen your ad campaign to convince the public that this product was for male-female connections? Perhaps you were afraid Carla would spread such rumors, and you shut her up.”

  “You don’t know the public, Detective. All publicity is good publicity. If customers thought I was gay I might have a new clientele for my cologne: men would use it to attract other men, and women to attract women. It would have increased my sales. I’m just telling you that by saying those words Carla was trying to insult me. She was saying she didn’t want to have sex with me. I resented the personal attack.”