Читать книгу The Radio Red Killer - Richard A. Lupoff - Страница 8

CHAPTER ONE

Somebody was dead.

Marvia Plum slapped the handset back into its cradle, bounced out of her chair and sprinted for the exit.

* * * *

It was good to be back. Back in Berkeley, back at her old job, even back in her police sergeant’s uniform. As a homicide detective, Marvia Plum worked in plain clothes most of the time, but the option was hers to wear uniform or civvies. And at least for now, at least for her first few days back on the job, she reveled in the feel of neatly pressed blue wool, the weight of her sidearm on her hip, the reflection of her brightly polished badge when she glanced at a mirror or passed a glassed storefront.

It was almost like being a rookie again. She was doing something she believed in. This was a time when society was jaded and the public viewed police officers as either incompetent bunglers or deadly enemies, a time when all too many cops had become burnouts, cynics, or worse. Still, Marvia Plum felt that she was doing a useful job.

There really were good guys and bad guys, and Marvia was one of the good guys. And she was skilled at her work.

Maybe it was a disastrous marriage, an impulsive resignation from the Berkeley Police Department so she could leave the state and join her new husband in Nevada, the disillusionment and depression that came when she realized how badly she had blundered. Maybe it was all those things that made her understand what she had given up and made her appreciate her old life all the more when she got it back.

She’d spent the first few days moving papers, studying regs and manuals and case files, bringing herself back up to speed on conditions in the town where she had lived for so many years. Now she picked up her telephone and answered a 911 switched from the dispatcher upstairs.

Somebody was dead.

People died every day in a town the size of Berkeley, but most of them died of heart attacks or cancer or pneumonia or automobile crashes. Occasionally someone picked a basket full of beautiful wild mushrooms and cooked them for dinner and died of liver failure. Once in a great while a construction worker fell from a high scaffold or an industrial worker got caught in the jaws of a deadly machine and wound up crushed or mauled or torn to bits.

But this somebody had died in the seemingly safe surroundings of a radio studio, had apparently dropped dead in front of an open mike and an audience of uncounted thousands of listeners. When the cry came in to the emergency dispatcher the caller was hysterical.

The station had received a threat on their community news fax line. The mid-afternoon political show was about to go on the air. If KRED’s regular commentator went on the air today he would die, the message warned. It was worded in a weird broken English.

Nobody took the threat very seriously. KRED had a reputation for championing unpopular causes. It had a history of controversy and turmoil. If every threat, demand, or ultimatum that came to the station were for real, KRED would have disappeared from the airwaves long ago.

The commentator laughed off the threat. He’d heard it all before. He settled himself in front the microphone and there he died.

Marvia arrived at KRED three minutes after the message hit her desk. The first people dispatched had been paramedics furnished by the Berkeley Fire Department. Their ambulance stood in front of the KRED building, its roof lights flashing.

The station’s building was on Berkeley’s recently renamed Barbara Jordan Boulevard, just a few blocks from the Hall of Justice on McKinley Avenue. Police headquarters and city jail were crammed into one outdated building, due to be replaced soon. It had been due to be replaced soon for years.

As she jumped from the cruiser she took in the surroundings of the station’s two-story terra cotta structure. To the left, on the corner of Jordan Boulevard and Huntington Way, was the Bara Miyako Japanese restaurant. To the right were a couple of retail shops, Bix’s Wax Cylinder and the Amazon Rain Forest.

A second black-and-white and then a third screeched to the curb beside Marvia’s cruiser and uniformed officers piled out. Marvia signaled to them and they scurried to secure the front and rear entrances of the radio station’s building.

Marvia glanced up at the building’s theater-like marquee as she hurried through the glass doors. Oceana Network—KRED/FM—One World Radio. Inside, a terrazzo hallway ran between bulletin boards plastered with handbills and posters for public events. The receptionist’s post, shielded by a sliding Plexiglas panel, was unoccupied.

A second set of glass doors opened into a surprisingly bright lobby. Marvia blinked up and saw that the lobby rose into an atrium; the sliding, frosted-glass roof had been rolled back to admit the clear April afternoon’s strong sunlight and refreshing air.

Half a dozen people were milling around. Just off the lobby a door had been smashed down, jagged shards of glass and splinters of polished wood lay on the terrazzo floor. A white-suited EMT turned and spotted Marvia. The tech was a young man; he wore his blond hair in an old-fashioned pompadour, a nice trick for adding a couple of inches to his height. Marvia asked him what he had.

“Fresh cadaver, Sergeant. Still warm, no rigor. Really looks odd—I’ve never seen such a red complexion.”

“Red as in Navajo or red as in Irish?”

“No, I mean red as in tomato, red as in danger flag.”

“What happened to the door?”

“It was locked from the inside. They saw him through the big window. There’s a control room.” He pointed. “There’s a big glass window onto the studio where he was. The engineer looked into the studio and saw—well. When we got here nobody could unlock the studio door so we knocked it down. Just in case he was still alive, see, but he wasn’t.”

Marvia said, “Okay,” and stepped past the tech. She read his nameplate as she passed him. J. MacPherson. The man lying across the table in front of a battery of microphones looked plenty dead, and J. MacPherson had been accurate about the color of his skin.

She turned back. “MacPherson, you have any more work to do here?”

He shook his head. “Just some paperwork. The scene is yours now, Sergeant.”

Marvia grunted. If Dispatch was on the ball, the evidence wagon should be arriving in a few minutes. The coroner’s people would follow later on. They didn’t react with the same urgency as the EMT’s or Homicide. If one of their subjects ever got up and left before they arrived, they didn’t belong there in the first place.

Summoning a uniform, Marvia had him secure the studio, including the cadaver and all its other contents, and the smashed door. Then she snagged the nearest civilian, a very young, heavyset woman with pale skin and intense crimson lipstick, wearing a perky yellow beret. At Marvia’s question the woman identified herself. “Jessie Loman. I’m a producer. Well, I’m working as receptionist today, but I’m going to be a producer.”

Marvia asked who was in charge. Jessie Loman pointed to a cluster of people swirling around a tall African woman in dreadlocks.

“She’s in charge of everything,” the heavyset woman managed. “Sun Mbolo. With the—” She made a gesture, indicating the heavy, curled hairdo. “She’s the station manager.”

Marvia pulled elbows aside and confronted the taller woman. Marvia had always thought of herself as dark-skinned, but she had never seen a person as black as Sun Mbolo actually looking pale. But Ms. Mbolo’s skin had the whitish, pasty look that meant she was close to going into shock.

Marvia identified herself. Even in uniform, it couldn’t hurt to establish her authority. That one word spoken aloud, police, could change the atmosphere in a room in a fraction of a second. Marvia hustled Ms. Mbolo to the nearest chair. She turned and ordered the nearest individual to bring a glass of water.

Marvia squatted in front of Sun Mbolo’s chair and put her hand on Mbolo’s wrist, in part to offer support to the station manager and in part to check her pulse and the feel of her skin. The pulse was strong and the skin didn’t have the moist, clammy feeling that Marvia had feared. Sun Mbolo was past the worst moments of her reaction.

“Ms. Mbolo, are you able to help me now?”

The woman rested her elbows on the chair arms, her forehead in her hands. Marvia asked if she knew the dead man. Mbolo said, “He’s Bob Bjorner. He’s our chief political analyst. He’s dead?” she asked, “You’re sure he’s dead?”

“EMTs are sure of that. The coroner is on the way.” Mbolo nodded. Marvia resumed, “This must be quite a blow to you. To lose a friend and colleague this way.” Marvia looked up into the taller woman’s face. Mbolo had a long skull and thin, finely sculptured features. She must have Ethiopian genes to have that kind of face and those long, slim bones.

Clearly Mbolo was shocked but she did not look grief-stricken. “He was not a friend of mine and he was not going to be a colleague for long. We were struggling to get rid of Bjorner and he would not go quietly. We were having a hell of a fight. I am sorry that he is dead but I will not deny that I am relieved, also. But what a way to go. Right in the studio. About to go on the air. He must have had a heart attack.”

“I doubt that,” Marvia said. “His skin is bright red. I never heard of a heart attack causing that.”

“Well, a stroke then. Whatever it was, we shall make the proper gesture, perhaps put on a memorial service for him, perhaps broadcast it live. He was with the station for a thousand years, he had a following of old leftists he could rally to his defense when we tried to get him off the air. Let them rally to his defense now.”

Someone stood behind Marvia. “Sergeant.” She stood up and turned around. It was one of the police department’s evidence techs. The van had arrived and they were ready to go to work.

Marvia addressed the tech. “Felsner, you people all have booties and gloves, yes?”

“Masks too. Sometimes there’s funny stuff in the air. That’s a sealed room. We don’t know what might come from the cadaver.”

To a uniform she said, “Look, we can’t have all these people milling around. I want the building cleared except—Ms. Mbolo, I want your cooperation—anybody who was in that studio this afternoon or had any contact with the victim. Anybody else, let’s get names and contact info and send them home. What about your broadcasting, did KRED go off the air when Bjorner fell over?”

“We switched to live news.”

Marvia inhaled suddenly. “Oh, no.”

“Yes.” Mbolo was regaining her composure. She actually smiled. “We have our contingency plan. When something breaks we go to all-news. The earthquake in eighty-nine, the fire in ninety-one, Desert Storm, we drop everything and just do news.”

“For how long?”

“We will probably cut back to regular programming at four o’clock. We take a satellite feed from Oceana and run it in real time so we can get back to normal quite easily. Then our local news at five. The news department has its own studio and control upstairs.” She raised her eyes and her fine eyebrows, indicating the direction as clearly as if she’d pointed a finger. “And we can do the evening shows from A.”

“What’s that?”

“Mr. Bjorner was broadcasting from Studio B when he passed out. Studio A is a mirror image at the far end of the control booth. We will just do everything from A until we are cleared to get back into B.” She craned her long neck and shook her head at the smashed door. “We’ll have to get that fixed. Those medics, whoever they were, they broke it down. It’s ruined. Who’s going to pay for it?”

“Those were the emergency medical technicians, Ms. Mbolo. MacPherson told me nobody had a key. Isn’t that odd?”

“Bjorner was—well, let us say, slightly paranoid. No, he was more than slightly paranoid. He always locked the studio from the inside. He had a little locking device. You could only open it from his side. He used to lock himself in, then unlock the device when he was ready to leave.”

Marvia tilted her head. “You can file a claim with the city, Ms. Mbolo. Can you run the station without that room for a while?”

Mbolo looked into the distance. “We can do everything from A until we get back B. Everything that is not from Oceana or from news.”

Marvia turned away. She surveyed the lobby. The crowd had thinned. How many people did it take to run a radio station, anyway? She’d never been inside one before. To her, radio was voices or music coming out of her car speakers or her bedside mini-stereo.

She crooked a finger at another uniform. “Rosetti, I want a quick canvass of the establishments in this block. Talk to the people at that restaurant and the record store and the, whatever the heck it is, the fern place. Divide the job with Officer Ng if you need help. Move.”

Rosetti disappeared and Marvia returned her attention to Sun Mbolo. The woman’s English was flawless but lightly accented and formal.

“Is there someplace where people can go, Ms. Mbolo? The ones who might have some information for us? So they won’t just wander around.”

Sun Mbolo nodded. So tall. Even seated, sitting up straighter now, collecting herself and coming out of her crouch. She might have been a—Marvia felt a flash of inadequacy. She didn’t know the African peoples. How could she do her job at home if—

“There is a conference room. Directly at the head of the stairs.” Sun Mbolo’s words cut off Marvia’s train of thought. She had a rich voice. No wonder she’d succeeded in radio, with that voice and with her clear diction and intriguing accent.

Marvia took control of herself.

“Okay. Listen, you’re being very helpful. See if you can herd your people up there. We’ll want to talk to them soon and then they can leave, too.”

“What of the news staff?”

“Right. You said you were going to switch to a network program at four?”

“Oceana. We are part of the Oceana One World Network. We take network shows from four to six, then back here for the news and our own evening shows.”

“Okay. Send in the news people at four. We’ll try and get them out first, so they can do their work.” She studied Mbolo’s face. “You all right now? You need to lie down or anything?”

Mbolo pushed herself upright, stood at her full height. She wore an African robe and head cloth. All those wonderful dreadlocks were covered up now by the modern executive woman. “I am all right, thank you. I will carry out your instructions, Sergeant.”

Back at Studio B, the evidence technicians were dodging around each other, snapping photos, drawing diagrams, cataloging every item of furniture, every piece of paper and kipple in the room. The fingerprint crew would follow, and the vacuums that would pick up every hair, pebble, and loose fiber.

Marvia surveyed the scene. Bob Bjorner had not moved.

A uniformed officer named Holloway was keeping a harried-looking man in T-shirt and jeans out of the studio. Marvia took charge. “Who are you?”

“I’m Jem Waller.”

“And?”

“I’m chief engineer around here. I have to get in there and see what’s what. We’re running a radio station here, you know?”

Marvia looked into the man’s face. “We’re running a potential crime scene here. There’s a dead man still in that room. You’ll get in when we finish, Mr. Waller.”

The engineer’s eyes popped. He raised a hand and pushed a mop of light brown hair off his forehead. He nodded angrily and strode away.

Even as the technicians went about their work, Marvia studied the victim and the room. Sun Mbolo might think that Bob Bjorner had died of natural causes. It might even be convenient for her to think that, or to pretend that she did so. The coroner would make his determination, but Marvia Plum had seen homicides in her life, and she’d seen natural deaths. And she didn’t believe there was anything natural about Bjorner’s death.

The glasses the fat man had been wearing at the time of death piqued Marvia’s curiosity. She’d spotted them the time she’d peered through the doorway, over the shattered door. Now she could get a closer look. The lenses were extremely thick, and one was cracked. The frames looked like something out of an old file photo. Bjorner wore a white dress shirt and a hand-painted tie that had somehow flopped out from under his body. Like the glasses, it was decades out of style. He wore a pair of brown suit trousers, badly frayed and dirty, and a pair of scuffed wing-tips.

His white hair did not look as clean now as it had from a distance, but his complexion was still a marked, angry red. Marvia looked more closely at his features. It was hard to be sure, especially with the lurid discoloration of his skin, but she thought he might be African American. With a light complexion to start with, and with the peculiar flush, he might look just this way.

The corners of several sheets of paper protruded from beneath his torso. Marvia made a mental note to be sure the pages were collected as evidence. She looked at them more carefully. She’d expected to see a typewritten script, or at least a set of handwritten notes. The white paper was marked with a pattern of raised dots. Was Bjorner’s eyesight so bad that he used a Braille script?

But the Braille started one-third of the way down each sheet. At the top of each page, written in what looked like dark crayon, was a day and number. MON 1, MON 2, MON 3. Even a person with very poor eyesight would probably be able to assemble the pages in correct order, then read their contents with his trained fingertips.

A tech would inventory the dead man’s pockets and collect his wallet, keys, whatever.

A metal wastebasket beside the desk held several empty food containers of the folded cardboard sort with thin wire handles. One container held a spork, one of those ugly plastic spoon-and-fork mutants, and a crumpled paper napkin.

There was an ashtray near Bob Bjorner’s elbow, and in it several matches, a partially-empty matchbook, and the roach of what appeared to be a marijuana cigarette. The matchbook had a logo on the cover and peculiar, psychedelic lettering in the shape of swirling naked bodies. It said, Club San Remo.

That was intriguing. Marvia had been in the Club San Remo, she knew something of its history, and she wouldn’t expect Bob Bjorner to frequent it. Marvia turned away, bent over the shattered door and found the portable lock that Sun Mbolo had told her Bjorner always used. She signaled an evidence tech and warned the tech to make sure that the lock was collected. Then she walked thoughtfully back to the station’s lobby.

For a moment she was the only person there. She thought about Bob Bjorner, the dead man with the red face and the old-fashioned apparel. He’d been a fat man, a very, very fat man. It might be possible after all that he had died of natural causes. Congestive heart failure, something like that, the kind of disastrous events that grossly overweight people were prone to.

But the red face haunted her. What had MacPherson said? Red as in tomato, red as in danger flag. Something moved and she looked up and saw a leaf floating down through the skylight atop the atrium.