Getting Up With Fleas (Trace 7) (19 page)

“All we were worried about was the insurance policy on Tony. But Mrs. Scott had a five-million-dollar policy on her husband. That’s what was behind it all.”

Chico was talking. The two of us were with Ramona and McCue down in Clyde Snapp’s basement kitchen.

“That’s why Chico spoke to Walter Marks today,” I said. “He’s my boss at the insurance company.”

“Ex-boss, Trace,” Chico corrected. “That’s right. There’s some kind of clearing house for the insurance industry he was able to check on. There was this giant policy on Jack Scott.”

“I don’t understand it,” Snapp said. “Not even for that kind of money.”

“That’s why you’re you and that’s why Birnbaum and Pamela are going to jail,” Chico said. “Look. Here’s how it worked. Scott and Birnbaum were in deep trouble. All Birnbaum’s pictures had flopped and Scott’s television shows were ready to be yanked. That’s why they had so much trouble raising money for this picture.”

“They even got some money from Bob Swenson, the head guy at the insurance company,” I said. “That’s why he insisted that I come up here and make sure nothing happened to McCue.”

“Now Birnbaum says that it was originally Scott’s idea to get the policy on McCue and then kill him and make it look like a heart attack. As you said, Ramona, potassium chloride will do that,” Chico said. She went over to look in the walk-in refrigerator. She kept talking.

“What Scott didn’t know was that his wife and Birnbaum were lovers. They had been for years, and neither one cared much for him. But he was carrying the ball on poisoning Tony, so they were willing to go along. Scott grew up in Albany; that’s where he hired that mob guy to try to kill Tony the first night Trace met him. But the guy just ran over that poor man wearing Tony’s hat and coat.”

Virtually her whole body vanished into the refrigerator. I said, “Thursday night, when we were out, Scott went up to your room and started to put some chemicals in with your heart medicine. Remember? When you came back, you couldn’t get in the door?”

McCue nodded.

“Scott had locked the door from the inside. That’s the only way the door can be locked. So he heard you at the door and he knew he was in trouble. He opened the dumbwaiter. Maybe he used a key or something to remove the screw. He heard you leaving the door, so he unlocked it and then scooted into the dumbwaiter shaft. He climbed down to Birnbaum’s room, which is right downstairs from yours. He would have pulled it off too, except…”

Chico was chewing on a sandwich she had made while leaning inside the refrigerator.

“Except that Trace spotted that the medicine had been tampered with,” Chico said. She was chewing on a Dagwood sandwich.

“Scott was furious,” she said. “He wanted you dead, Tony. So the next day he tried to roll that rock over onto your head. Sheila saw him, but naturally he denied it. When she told Biff about it, Birnbaum was worried because Scott had been seen. Now if something happened to McCue, Sheila would implicate Scott and Scott would implicate Birnbaum and Pamela. Scott was going to get them all thrown in jail. That was Birnbaum’s worry.”

Chico bit off more than she could chew and looked at me imploringly while she struggled to swallow.

“By this time, though,” I said, “they didn’t have access to your room anymore because I had put the padlock on it. But Scott remembered the dumbwaiter. And since everybody knew your drinking habits, he came up with the idea to put the poison in your ice cubes. He made a tray of cubes in his room with the chemicals in them. Then he told Pamela to go make sure Clyde Snapp was occupied. That’s when she asked you, Clyde, to fix the tire; she had just flattened it herself by letting the air out. I met her in the lobby and she didn’t say a word to me about the tire; then she went and told you it was flat. See? She wasn’t worried about me. But if Clyde was down here, he might hear sounds from inside the dumbwaiter shaft. The flat tire was to get him outside. Then she thought I’d better be kept away too since my room was next to Tony’s. Harden told me she came upstairs looking for me. I wasn’t there, so she went outside and found me on the grounds. You know…she told the sheriff that she had taken her shower and gone to bed, but when I saw her after that, she was still all made up. Women don’t go to bed made up.”

Chico had swallowed. “Scott went upstairs to Birnbaum’s room with this plastic bowl filled with the poisoned ice cubes. Birnbaum told the sheriff that he tried then to talk Scott out of it, but Scott wouldn’t listen. He wanted Birnbaum to hoist him up the dumbwaiter shaft to Tony’s room, where he could stash the ice cubes in the ice bucket. When you came back and made a drink, bingo. You’d be gone.”

She ate some more of the sandwich. I was about to chip in when she started up again.

“Anyway, Scott and Birnbaum argued and then got into a fight. To hear Birnbaum tell it, Scott fell against the side of the dresser and broke his neck, but I don’t know if I believe that. The ice cubes were on the shelf by the open dumbwaiter and the whole bowl got knocked down the dumbwaiter shaft. Birnbaum hung the body in the rope and then just used muscle to lower the rope to get the body down below the level of Scott’s own room. But if you look at the dumbwaiter rope carefully, you can see how much of it has been pulled through the pulley. It measures sixteen feet, and that’s just how far Birnbaum’s dumbwaiter door is above the spot where Scott’s body was found.”

I wanted to say something too, so I blurted out, “The ice cubes that had dropped melted by morning. That’s when you, Clyde, saw the water dripping out and found the body and then mopped up the water.”

“But the container,” Chico said, “and the paper towels you used showed a heavy trace of potassium chloride. And then tonight, when Tony ran his drop-dead scam, Birnbaum thought that Pamela had somehow gotten more of the chemicals into the ice tray in her room. He was on his way to get rid of all of that when we stopped him.”

She stopped and shrugged.

“Poor Biff didn’t know,” I said, “that Chico had already taken Mrs. Scott’s ice-cube tray to have the lab analyze it. She put in the one from Tony’s refrigerator tray.”

“What put you on their trail?” McCue asked Chico. “That’s the part I don’t understand.”

“When I arrived early this morning, the hotel was dark. Everybody was asleep for the night. Except I saw somebody walking around the grounds. Two people. At first, I thought it was Trace out tipping on me…”

“Perish forbid,” McCue said. “He’s the picture of fidelity.”

“Well, I saw that it wasn’t him, but of course I didn’t know anyone here, so I didn’t recognize who it was. Today at breakfast, when Birnbaum came in wearing his Mets jacket, I recognized the jacket. And then I recognized Mrs. Scott when she came into the dining room. When I saw them last night, they were obviously more than grieving partner and grieving widow.” She looked at Ramona for reinforcement. “You can tell things like that,” she said, and Ramona nodded.

“I’ll be damned,” Clyde Snapp said. “I’ve got to hand it to the two of you. Pretty darn smart.”

“Don’t hand it to me,” I said. “Hand it to her. I figured if there was a killing, it was the owner of the hotel trying to get publicity to drum up business. That tells you how smart I am.”

“I remember you tried that on me yesterday,” Snapp said. “I told you it couldn’t be.”

“Well, I didn’t know that,” I said. “I don’t know the owner of the hotel.”

“
I’m
the owner,” Snapp said. “I just don’t like a lot of people knowing about it, otherwise they start asking me for money. I guess I’m gonna have to try to find a new movie company to come here.”

“I think once the press finishes having a field day with the murder,” McCue said, “you’re going to have to fight off the bookings.”

“I sure hope so,” Snapp said. “Truth is, I think I had enough of movie folks.”

Before we went to bed, Chico said, “I sort of feel sorry for Pamela Scott. Her husband was a wife-beater—that’s why she was always wearing sunglasses or that heavy theater makeup—and she didn’t have much of a life.”

“Murder’s still against the law,” I said.

“I know that. But first she was pushed around by Scott and then I suspect it was Birnbaum who decided to kill her husband for his own insurance policy. Drugheads get a sense of power like that. I think she was just kind of dragged along.”

“That’s her problem,” I said. “It’s a free country and you can walk. But if you hang around, then it’s your decision. It’s like Sarge says: lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. She was lying down with dogs. Both Scott
and
Birnbaum. Biff sure didn’t give a damn about her when he was trying to lam out of here before.”

Still later, Chico said to me, “Aren’t you happy I came up here?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re doing like detective crap and I’m not buying,” I said. “All I want to do is be left alone.”

“Trace, don’t knock it. Our firm’s going to be famous.”

“I don’t want to be a famous detective,” I said.

“Don’t worry. You won’t be.”

“How’s that?” I said.

“You’re too dumb to be a famous detective.”

It was the nicest thing anybody had said to me in a long time.