The Perfect Crime Read online

  “Oh, my!” Cheryl’s hand flew to her mouth and she sat down in the seat across from Grady in his booth. “Oh, my!” she said again, and, brow furrowed, she asked, “Are you all right?”

  “What? Yeah. Compared... Sure. Listen, Cheryl, I need some help. The suits tell me you were on duty the night this thing happened.”

  “You kidding, Grady? I work twelve-hour shifts. I’m always here. I told the police everything I could think of.”

  “I know. I d like you to tell me if you would. You said a guy came in?”

  Her brow lifted and she nodded. “A real jerk!”

  “How so?”

  “Well, he kept bitching about the coffee.”

  Grady snorted. “That makes him a jerk? Cheryl, everybody comes in Bandy’s trashes the coffee.”

  She twisted her mouth. “Well, yeah, maybe, but this guy was...well, he was odd. You guys are joking, but he was like bent out of shape over it. And we know you guys. You’re teasing. This guy was different. Nasty-like. That wasn’t what got me, though. It was his hair.”

  “Hair?” Grady leaned forward.

  “Yeah. Weird. It was blond.”

  “What’s weird about blond hair?” Grady was puzzled.

  “It was the wrong color for his eyes. His eyes were brown.”

  He was thoroughly bewildered.

  “I don’t get it.”

  She got up and went around behind the counter, poured out a cup, put it on the counter and shoved it over, indicating with a nod of her head it was for him. He got up, went over and slid onto a stool, poured cream and sugar into the cup and stirred it.

  “It’s a wonder I noticed anything at all,” she continued. “I was running my ass off. There was a mob of people in here. You know, come to think of it, I remember seeing a light on over at Jack’s. Nothing unusual. At least I didn’t think so at the time. You know Jack. Always coming in at weird hours, messing around with that stuff he has over there. I didn’t think anything about it until now. Would that be important?”

  “Maybe. What’s this stuff about the guy’s hair?”

  “Well,” she sat down on a stool and leaned over, placing her head in her hands and her elbows on the counter and gazed at Grady. “Like I said, he has blond hair and brown eyes. Oh--and a beard. And glasses. The beard was blond, too. Darker, but blond.”

  “I still don’t get it.” He picked up his coffee and sipped. He was getting exasperated, but tried not to let it show.

  Cheryl laughed. “I shouldn’t wonder! Men never observe things like that.”

  “Like what? Cheryl--”

  “Keep your shorts on. I’ll explain.” She reached behind her for the coffee pot, turned and poured more into Grady’s cup, then put the pot back on the warmer. “Blond hair and brown eyes are the rarest combination of hair and eye color there is.”

  “It is?” He didn’t know that. It seemed to him it was a pretty common combination. He said so.

  “Well, it isn’t,” Cheryl said, snappishly.

  “Come on. I’ve seen lots of people with that combination.”

  “You have?”

  He sat for a moment trying to remember which of his acquaintances had blond hair and brown eyes and was surprised that he couldn’t remember a single one.

  “See?”

  It was as if she were reading his mind.

  “Cheryl!” It was Bandy. He stood at the rear of the diner, hands on hips, a little martinet of a man, all in white, a cigarette stuck between his lips.

  “What?”

  “You got those receipts done?”

  “Pretty much. I’ll bring them back in a minute.”

  “Twenty minutes. I need them.” He turned and disappeared into the back room again and closed the door.

  “Asshole,” she said, shaking her head and turning back to Grady. “I went to beauty school for a while after Dunbar. Wigs were my specialty. I can spot a wig a mile away. This guy was wearing one. Fake beard, too, would be my guess although I have to admit this was a decent enough one. I wouldn’t have caught it if it wasn’t for the color of his eyes. Soon as I saw his brown eyes, I knew he was either wearing a wig or had colored his hair. Another thing. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time, but it seems odd, doesn’t it? He kept looking over at Jack’s place. Like he was studying it.”

  Grady’s stomach muscles tightened.

  “Can you describe him any more?”

  Cheryl nodded, her eyes widening. “That’s easy. Not a real big guy, but one who works out. You could tell. Muscles. He looked...hard. Like his suit didn’t fit him right, you know? I don’t think he needed glasses, either. Don’t ask me why I think that. I don’t know, something about the way he was wearing them. Like he wasn’t used to them. He kept messing with them. Taking them on and off. Maybe he got glasses for the first time, I don’t know.”

  He slid his empty coffee cup over for a refill and asked a couple more questions trying to pin her down to a more detailed description, but she wasn’t able to add much more other than the color of the suit, which was blue. The man’s tie was blue as well, but that was the most she could remember. Grady wrote down his home phone number and told her to call him if she remembered anything else, no matter how slight or unimportant she thought it might be.

  “Thanks, Cheryl.” He put a dollar bill on the counter on top of his card. “I appreciate your help.”

  “You need anything...,” she said as he opened the door, “...you call. We all like your brother around here.” You too, he thought he heard her say as the door closed behind him.

  Grady climbed in his car and began the drive home. Along the way he went over in his mind the information he’d gathered. Why would a guy be wearing a wig? For a disguise, sure, but why? What would a guy in a disguise want from Jack? That is, if he was his brother’s attacker. Somehow, he knew Cheryl had described Jack’s assailant. There was no hard proof, just a gut feeling. Over the years he’d learned to trust such feelings.

  Sometimes, gut feelings were all you had to go on.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE IDEA FOR THE perfect crime didn’t come full-blown out of, say, a beery conversation in some low-down, mean-streets bar, nor from the meanderings of an idle mind situated behind a pair of vacant eyes staring up at a two p.m. ceiling.

  No, it was like that horse-by-committee--the camel. A product--and that’s what it was--a product--of a lifetime. A development, as it were, of a mind formed and transformed by the abuses, excesses, and even banalities of a traditional run-of-the-mill lower-class family and social environment to which a son of genius was born. In other words, a dysfunctional background, common to more people than is supposed.

  The burst, that is the birth of the perfect crime

  idea--that came from the blank canvas of a ceiling, but there was more involved than merely the technical perfection of a criminal act. The crime that Reader Kincaid dreamed up was a felony only he could have invented. For the inspiration to come full circle and experience the miracle of birth, it required the particular genius of a certain species of man, not an immoral man, but more accurately an amoral individual.

  It began a germ of an idea while Reader was lying in a cell in Angola State Prison. It began with his asking himself a series of questions and answering them. Sometimes the answer didn’t come for a long time. He spent more than ten years in the planning of this one job.

  What’s the easiest way to pull a robbery and not get caught? That was the first question he asked himself at the beginning.

  Answer. Get the mark to pull his own robbery.

  How do you do that?

  His first idea was to kidnap a family member--of say a bank official--and hold that person, child or spouse, for ransom. The ransom being the bank’s money. He soon discarded that idea for all the reasons kidnappings usually go wrong. One day the answer came to him. He was talking to Bobby out in the yard at Angola State Prison and Bobby was saying he wished he could get the material to build a remote-controlled model
plane. He’d build one big enough to carry a man and fly that over the wall. With him in it, of course.

  What else can you do with a remote-control transmitter, Reader wanted to know. An idea was forming itself.

  Why, anything that requires energy you want to control from a distance, was Bobby’s reply.

  A bomb? Reader asked, grabbing Bobby by the front of his blue denim prison issue shirt.

  Well, yeah, sure. You could set off a bomb by remote control. Terrorists do shit like that all the time.

  That’s when the plan got legs. Little by little, Reader worked through the rest of it, always looking for a flaw, until he’d eliminated all the weak spots he could think of. Then, just when he had it all figured out, a thought came to him. An even better plan. A plan within a plan. And now it was time. He was ready to attach a bomb to a man who had access to a large sum of money and force the man to bring it to him. That was the first plan. The visible one. The plan within that one was even better. It was so good it was all he could do to keep from grinning all the time. Now, Reader Kincaid truly had the perfect crime.

  And he had the perfect situation in which to use it. A situation in which he could settle an old score. That was the best part.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE COP WHO ANSWERED Grady’s call was another new one with a name like Smithers or something. Christ! Three years out to pasture and they’d replaced the whole damned department! Every time he ran into somebody or called down there he was talking to people he’d never heard of. Grady couldn’t remember any mass retirement exodus three years ago, but there sure as shit seemed to be a whole new bunch there now and they all seemed to have button-down names. Where the hell were all the micks and eyetalians? What kind of police department was it becoming what with all these kids’ names, like Ivy League MBAs?

  Come to think of it, he didn’t recall seeing any of the “noses,” that day at Jack’s. That’s what they called the Macedonians he’d served with. Dayton’s Macedonian population was substantial. He’d gone through the academy with a Macedonian who was a cousin of Dayton’s most famous native son, Jamie Farr, the guy who dressed in drag on M*A*S*H*. He’d met Mr. Farr at a smoker one time. Nice guy, although his cousin said Farr always claimed to be Lebanese because nobody knew where Macedonia was. Grady got the idea this pissed off his cousin, one of the countless Bojrabs in the Dayton phone book.

  “Lemme speak to Detective Sprague,” he said.

  “...see if he’s available, said the voice on the other end, softly, the speaker sounding like he was all of thirteen years old and taking a call for his dad, the insurance big shot. “Sir.”

  “He’s available, hotshot. Tell him it’s Fogarty.”

  Marty must have been standing a foot away, his raspy voice on the phone in less than two seconds.

  “Fogarty! How goes it ol’ bud!”

  “You tell me, Marty. They get the inventory done?”

  “Yeah. Last night.”

  “I thought you were gonna call me.”

  “I was getting ready to. It was late when they finished. I got in about two minutes ago. Look, I got a note on my calendar to give you a holler.”

  Grady waited. He lighted a Marlboro medium and stared at his shoes. He told himself to remember to pick up a can of shine.

  “Hey, it turns out your brother keeps good records. I think we got a pretty accurate list of what he sold last week after his inventory. They woulda got it done sooner ‘cept they had to put all the shit back on the shelves and count it. You wouldn’t believe all the little knickknacks there were!”

  Yes, I would, Grady thought. I helped him do that inventory last week.

  “All I need is what’s missing,” Grady said. “Don’t worry about what he sold. I don’t think whoever hit him bought anything.”

  “Well, ol’ bud, I think you may be partly wrong there. We found something.”

  “What?”

  “We got a pretty sharp gal who did the inventory. Remember Ida? She spotted something.”

  “I remember Ida. She’s a good cop.”

  Grady took a long drag off his cigarette and felt his lungs ache. He ought to quit smoking. His lungs probably looked like a couple of black walnuts.

  He remembered Ida all right. He remembered a night on a stakeout in a van whose lettering said Smitty’s Heating and Air Conditioning on the outside, and he remembered especially a pair of long, long legs. He remembered a couple of other nights as well, then it wore itself out. Only they remained friends, not enemies as is the usual case. The way it happened, Ida gave out signals that she wanted to move past a casual affair and as soon as he saw that, the relationship changed. Cops shouldn’t get involved, he’d told her when he saw things were heating up. Especially with other cops. She must have agreed with his logic, as her affection for him soon cooled and a week later she was dating somebody else. A straight guy, somebody who sold insurance. Smart move, Ida, he remembered thinking at the time, but every once in a while he wondered what would have happened if they had gone on seeing each other. It’s all so much ancient history, he thought, and switched focus back to the present.

  “What’d Ida find?”

  “Well, you’re wrong about the perp not buying anything, looks like...but we’re right, this wasn’t a B&E. In fact, I’d say you were right on the money. This looks more like armed robbery.”

  “How so?”

  “You know your brother pretty well so I guess you know he kept ace records. Turns out he kept a receipt for every single thing he ever sold. Bullshit cost less than a buck, he has a friggin’ receipt for it.”

  “Yeah, Jack’s a righteous sort. Likes to be straight on his taxes. Good citizen.” Good man, too. Whoever did this was going to pay. He’d nail him if it took him the rest of his life.

  “Ida figured that out pretty quick with all the records we founde noticed something missing. A receipt. All his receipts were in perfect order, even the ones he messed up. He’d write a void on them. Well, listen to this...she couldn’t find the last one he wrote. She knew it was missing ‘cause his sales book was right there on the floor where it’d been knocked off. According to the numbers there was only one not accounted for. The last one used. And she found all the rest. Every single one of them.”

  “So that one’s gone. We don’t know what was on it. The inventory’d show what was missing. That’s what would be on that receipt, I’ll bet. Read me the list of what’s missing.”

  “Don’t have to. I told you Ida’s a sharp cookie. She took the receipt book to the lab and they got the whole thing. Your brother had written it without taking it out of the book. Came through on the next receipt and the lab boys said it was the easiest thing they did all week. I got it right here. You know I’m not supposed to do this, give you this, but what the hell. I don’t think it’s gonna help much though. Looks like pretty normal stuff you’d buy in a store like that. One big item. A remote control transmitter. Futaba. You heard of those? Expensive. My guess is that’s what the perp killed him for. Cost three grand, but there’s something I don’t understand. Two hundred of this is for something your brother wrote down as a ‘Service Charge,’ only it doesn’t say what the service was. Doesn’t look like any big-time deal to me. Probably a punk like we figured. Want me to fax it to you?”

  Grady said, “You think I got a fax machine in my shoe, Marty?”

  They both laughed.

  “Tell you what. If it’s not a long list, read it off. Hold on a minute--let me grab a pencil. Marty?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you ask yourself what punk spends three grand on electronic stuff? Doesn’t sound like a punk or a kid to me.”

  “You’re right, Grady. I think I got my partner convinced it wasn’t, either.” The detective read off the items and rang off.

  Grady stood for a minute with the receiver in his hand, then he shrugged and put it back on the hook.

  The phone rang. It was Marty again.

  “Hold on to your hat, partner. We
got a break, maybe. Something just came in.”

  “What?” Grady felt the skin prickle on the back of his neck.

  “I told you we circulated a flyer with the description that waitress gave us?”

  “Yeah. Cheryl.”

  “Yeah, the one at that grill. Well, we got a call from a guy that owns the Clark station on White Avenue. You know, a couple of blocks from Jack’s?”

  “I know the station. Go on.”

  “Well, this guy took care of a customer that night that matched the description we sent out. This guy was driving a blue or a black Chevy, he thought. That’s not the really good news, though.”

  “What’s the good news?” Grady tried not to be impatient.

  “The good news is the guy paid for his gas with a hundred dollar bill. The better news is the station guy still had it. And we got prints.”

  “You got prints!” This time, Grady couldn’t contain himself. “Well, fuck it, man. Who the prints belong to? Quit fucking with me and tell me what you’ve got!”

  “Sorry. We may have something and we may not. Anyway, what the lab boys found was two sets of prints, one which was the station owner’s, guy by the name of Binford... and this other set. This other set is real interesting. Belongs to a guy by the name of Chales Kincaid. This Mr. Kincaid is from New Orleans, his last address according to the NCIC, and...listen to this, Grady...Kincaid has quite the little record. Nasty cocksucker. Looks like he killed his own father, for starters.”

  “Only two sets of prints? On a hundred-dollar bill? Doesn’t that strike you as odd, Marty?”

  “My thoughts,” he said. “What’s your theory?”

  “That’s a no-brainer. He wiped down the bill before he spent it. Didn’t want any prints on it besides his own.”

  “I’m with you. That’s what I figured, too.”