Читать книгу The Radio Red Killer - Richard A. Lupoff - Страница 9

CHAPTER TWO

The yellow crime-scene tapes would stay up outside Studio B until evidence technicians had completed their tasks and the coroner had removed the late Robert Bjorner. Certainly the food containers and the marijuana roach would be tested, possibly at the same time Edgar Bisonte, the Alameda County Coroner, ran his autopsy on Bjorner.

In fact there was no official crime scene—not yet. That would depend on the determination made by the Alameda County Coroner, Edgar Bisonte, M.D. Dr. Bisonte and company could get pretty territorial about making determinations, and it was still possible that the coroner would find that Bjorner had died of natural causes. But Marvia was ready to bet a week’s pay that Bjorner had been poisoned.

She sprinted up gray-carpeted steps to the conference room where KRED staff were assembled. A couple of uniforms followed in her wake, and she instructed them to get the statements of everyone in the room. She felt her heart racing and knew that it was not the exertion of climbing a flight of stairs that made the adrenaline flow. It was the thrill of the hunt, the excitement of her job.

She loved being a cop.

She’d given it up just months before, run off like a hormone-crazed schoolgirl to marry Willie Fergus. Willie had been her mentor years before when Marvia was a military police corporal, halfway around the world and totally at a loss as to what life was about. She and her friends had set out to bed the biggest prizes they could, and Marvia had won the contest, bagging handsome young Lieutenant James Wilkerson.

Bagged him, against all regulations bedded him, and then discovered that she was pregnant.

When Lieutenant Wilkerson heard the news he’d frozen. This could be the end of his army career. His family had money. If Marvia would have a quiet abortion and say nothing about the matter, she would be taken care of.

She’d appealed to Sergeant First Class Fergus, a man twenty years her senior. He’d guided her through the army’s peculiar bureaucratic maze, helped her stand up to the considerable pressure that Lieutenant Wilkerson brought to bear against Corporal Plum. She’d had her baby, and he had his daddy’s name on his birth certificate, and Lieutenant Wilkerson had been married to the baby’s mama when that baby was born, even if Marvia and James had been divorced as soon after that as Wilkerson’s lawyers could move the paperwork.

And then, a dozen years later, Marvia had run into Willie Fergus again. By now, Fergus was retired from the army and a sergeant with the Washoe County, Nevada, Sheriff’s Department. Marvia had been deeply involved with a sweet man named Hobart Lindsey but the relationship was floundering—as much Marvia’s fault as Lindsey’s—and here was Willie Fergus to the rescue, all over again.

In a trance, Marvia had married Fergus, resigned from the Berkeley Police Department and moved to Reno. When she emerged from her bridal daze she realized that she had made a dreadful mistake.

Sun Mbolo sat at the head of a polished conference table, looking as if she were about to call a meeting to order. Marvia caught her eye and signaled to her. Mbolo rose and glided across the room in what seemed like two giant strides. Marvia asked if Mbolo had an office where they could talk. Mbolo nodded, and they walked down a carpeted corridor; Mbolo bowed Marvia into the room, majordomo fashion. She walked around her desk and slid into an executive chair. Marvia closed the office door and seated herself in a cloth-upholstered chair facing the desk. She opened a snap on her equipment belt. Sometimes she felt like Batgirl, she carried so much paraphernalia, but things came in handy.

She set a micro-recorder on the desk between them. “All right if I record our conversation?”

Mbolo said, “Of course,” Then she lapsed into silence, waiting for Marvia to speak.

“You say you had a warning that Mr. Bjorner would be killed if he went on the air?”

“That he would die.”

“Are we mincing words?”

“Sergeant Plum, I am not mincing words.” Mbolo turned her head slowly to one side, then to the other, then faced Marvia again. Was she giving Marvia a hard time on purpose, or was she just that reserved and precise?

“Do you have the warning?”

“I have the fax.” Mbolo reached for a piece of paper on her desk. Marvia gestured her not to touch it. “I have already handled it, Sergeant.” Yes, a smart one.

“Just the same.” Marvia picked up the fax with latex-gloved hands. She spread it on the desk in front of her and leaned over it. The fax was date-and-time stamped by the machine. It had come in at 14:58, two minutes before three o’clock in the afternoon. Time enough for someone to run to Studio B and warn Bob Bjorner. It was scrawled in childish letters. It said, three hours murderer stay quite no speke brethe speke no brethe.

There was no signature.

Marvia looked at Mbolo. “Three hours means three o’clock, do you think?”

Mbolo raised thin, elegant shoulders in her African costume. “One would so infer.”

“And the rest? ‘Stay quite no speke brethe speke no brethe.’ What did you think that means?”

“Am I asked to interpret?”

“Ms. Mbolo, I’m asking for your cooperation.”

“In the name of sisterhood?”

“In the name of the law.” Marvia clenched her jaw and inhaled deeply. “A man is dead, and the circumstances are highly suspicious. Your people told us that a death threat had been received, and I assume that this is it. But I’m not supposed to assume anything, so I ask you again, Is this the threat, and if it is, what do you think it means?”

“Aside from the poor spelling and lack of punctuation?” Mbolo’s accent was not the musical sound of a native Swahili speaker or the almost Caribbean lilt of Africa’s West Coast; it sounded Middle Eastern, nearly Arabic.

“I think it means, ‘Stay quiet. Do not speak and you will breathe. Speak and you will not breathe.’ That is what I think it means, Sergeant.”

Marvia exhaled. She studied the white sheet and its scrawled message. She looked at Mbolo’s face, looked into her dark eyes. “This fax doesn’t have a source code on it. Do you have any idea where it could have been sent from?”

“None.”

That was bad news. PacTel sometimes cooperated voluntarily, sometimes under threat of subpoena, but they were only good at tracing outgoing calls. Incoming calls were a much harder nut to crack.

“It could even have come from within the building. There are several fax machines. In the mail room, in the newsroom, in the business office.”

Marvia made a note to have the techs check all the wastebaskets in the building, especially the ones near fax machines. Just in case the sender had crumpled up his original when he finished transmitting it and tossed it in the nearest receptacle. A very long shot.

Certainly the fax itself was worth keeping. It might be possible to get a handwriting match, although that seemed unlikely, too. The scrawl had the looping, uncontrolled look of a right-handed person writing left-handed to disguise his or her usual penmanship. Or of a lefty writing right-handed.

The odd usage and spelling suggested a person with little or no education. Or one who was seriously challenged. Or didn’t have much English.

Or someone trying to simulate one of those categories.

This was a damned mess.

But the case was barely under way. There was a body, there were physical clues, there were plenty of possible perps. Not so bad for starters.

“You told me downstairs that you were not a friend of Mr. Bjorner’s, and that you weren’t sorry to see him dead.” Marvia waited for Mbolo to comment on that, but she didn’t, so Marvia prompted. “Would you like to elaborate on your statement?”

“Am I being interrogated?”

“I’m just looking for information.”

“Do you not have to read me my rights?”

“Do you want me to?”

Mbolo was silent again. Marvia knew the use of silence in question-and-answer sessions. With a lot of people it was a good tool. You just wait, and they get uncomfortable, and they decide to fill in the silence with words. Sometimes with important words.

But Sun Mbolo just sat in her executive chair.

Marvia waited.

Mbolo waited.

Finally Mbolo said, “I was interrogated by the Dirgue. I am not afraid of questioning, believe me.”

Marvia waited.

“The Dirgue were the Communist secret police in my country. Ethiopia. Mengistu’s people. When you have been questioned by them, nothing else is frightening.” Mbolo smiled thinly. Marvia could see the shape of the bones inside her flesh, the thin muscles that moved her jaw and her features.

“Ms. Mbolo, I’m not trying to frighten you. And I’ll read you your rights if you want me to. At this point you are not a suspect and I don’t think you need your rights. I just want to find out how Robert Bjorner died, and why, and who was responsible for his death. And since you told me you weren’t sorry he was dead, I think you’ll be able to tell me some other things that might be helpful.”

Sun Mbolo laid two fingers against her cheek, closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “How much do you know about KRED, Sergeant Plum?”

“Not much. I’ll confess, it isn’t my favorite station. You used to have a nice jazz show on Sundays but that seems to be gone now.”

“You do not know the history of this radio station?”

“Not the foggiest.”

“I could give you a brochure.” When Marvia nodded, she swung around in her chair and reached up to a wooden shelf and extracted a pamphlet. She held it across the desk to Marvia. “In brief, the station was founded in nineteen forty-seven by four Berkeley liberal intellectuals. They actually went on the air the following year. A couple of professors from the University of California, both were war veterans. World War Two was only over a couple of years. Another was a fledgling playwright. The fourth was a woman. A feminist activist.” Mbolo smiled faintly. “She was far ahead of her time.”

Marvia let her continue.

“The founders did not like what was happening to radio. There was no television on the air, that was yet to come. But they felt that there was too much commercialism, the music was vulgar, the educational potential of the great electronic medium was being wasted on greedy exploitation and—their term—fascistic authoritarianism.”

She waited for Marvia to comment. Marvia turned the brochure over in her gloved hands. “Very Berkeley. Who were these founders?”

Again a thin smile flittered across Mbolo’s so-thin face. “There are pictures in the brochure, but I can tell you their names, I have them committed to memory. Peter D’Alessandro, Ruth Rosemere, Isaac Eisenberg, and Jared Kingston. They used their last initials and petitioned the FCC for one of the first FM broadcast licenses on the Pacific Coast.”

Marvia found the page with photos of the four founders. Reorder them and you got Kingston, Rosemere, Eisenberg, D’Alessandro. KRED.

“But they did not want to glorify themselves,” Mbolo resumed. “The official motto of the station was Keep Radio Educational and Democratic. In fact, that is still our credo.”

Marvia looked up. “I thought it was Kay-Red. As in left-wing.”

“It was that as well.”

Mbolo was interrupted by a knock at the door. Marvia Plum swung around in her chair. Officer Gutierrez had his knuckle to the glass pane. Marvia signaled him to enter.

“We’ve got everybody’s statement, Sergeant, and the IDs are all kosher. They’re kind of restless. They want to get out of that room.”

“Okay, let ’em go.”

Gutierrez pulled the door shut behind him.

“You were saying, Ms. Mbolo—”

“No, you were saying you thought Kay-Red was a left-wing appellation. It was that too. I was not born at the time. Neither were you, I would think. But the old-timers—they say that when the Cold War broke out, the founders were shocked. They believed in the worldwide struggle against Fascism and imperialism, the United Nations, and so forth. They were appalled by the Berlin airlift, and outraged by the Korean War.”

Marvia wondered what to do with this. It was all history. It could hardly have any connection with the Bjorner murder—or could it? Sometimes if you let them talk they came around to the point and told you wonderful things. She decided to let Mbolo continue.

“For the next forty years, KRED opposed the Cold War. It supported the Guzman regime in Guatemala and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, denounced the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Vietnam War, US intervention in Nicaragua.”

“But nothing about the Hungarian Revolution, Prague Spring, Poland?” Marvia’s years in Germany flashed past. She hadn’t been a political soldier. She’d joined the military police, won corporal’s stripes, got pregnant, got married, got her discharge, had her baby and divorced her husband. In that order.

But she’d seen the Berlin Wall, she knew something about conditions in Europe toward the end of the Cold War.

“They clucked their tongues,” Mbolo said, “and regretted the necessity. But it was Western aggression that forced Stalin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev to do the things they did.”

“And you were questioned by the Dirgue in Ethiopia?” Marvia prompted.

“My people were Falasha. Beta Esrael.”

“Jews?”

“Most of us are in Israel now, but my family—the Dirgue didn’t like us. We were coffee merchants. In Gonder. The local Party boss decided we were rich Jews, hiding gold in our house. We were arrested, my whole family. I was the only one who survived. I walked all the way from Gonder to Djibouti. I was able to get political asylum and come to America. I studied at the university and—It is strange, is it not? Here I am.”

“What about KRED?”

“I took the job because I love radio. I used to listen to it all the time in Gonder. I volunteered here, then I was hired, and now I am station manager. I had to hide how much I hated the Communists, is that not strange? But the Cold War is over now, and I am trying to return KRED to its roots. Three of the founders are dead. The last survivor—we like to have him back for a special observance once a year, but he is nearly ninety now, and probably will be unable to handle it much longer. But if they were alive I would want them to be proud of KRED.”

“And that’s why you didn’t like Bob Bjorner.”

For the first time, Sun Mbolo’s face showed anger. “He was the ultimate apologist. For the most vicious of crimes. For everything. For Stalin, for Ceausescu, even Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Yes, and Mengistu. He tried to justify the Dirgue. He knew I was from Ethiopia but he did not know I am Beta Esrael.”

Marvia said, “Do you have any idea who would want to kill him?”

Mbolo shook her head slowly, left and right. “There was disagreement here in the station. Those who wanted to keep the old political line. Keep fighting the Cold War—in the name of Fraternal Socialist solidarity. And those who wanted to return to the founders’ ideal. Keep Radio Educational and Democratic. Those others have no concept of democracy. They think democracy means agreeing with them. Bjorner was one of the worst. Sincere enough, I think, in his own way. But totally convinced that he was objectively and incontrovertibly correct. Ergo, anyone who disagreed with him was wrong. He made many people very angry with him here at KRED but I do not think any of them would kill him.”

“Someone killed him, Ms. Mbolo.”

“You are sure of that?”

Marvia ignored the question. “Where were you when he died?”

“When did he die?”

Marvia couldn’t help smiling. She’d been to a strip show in Weisbaden with a gang of her pals. They’d seen a pair of German comics doing classic American burlesque routines complete with baggy pants and heavy accents. Heinrich Schmidt und Otto Umlaut, whatever. “Meine nahm ist Muckin’ Futch,” one of the comedians would say, “Das ist meine nahm und dot’s vot I gedt, Too Muckin’ Futch.”

This cookie Sun Mbolo was that, too, Marvia decided. She was Too Muckin’ Futch.

After some more fencing Mbolo was able to account for her afternoon. Marvia would have to collect the statements the uniforms had got from everyone else in the station from the time of Bjorner’s arrival to the time of his death, and do a mix-and-match with them. She’d want a report from Edgar Bisonte’s office in Oakland, and the sooner the better.

And she’d want to check out Bjorner’s home and family situation.

“One more thing, Ms. Mbolo.”

Mbolo looked surprised, as if she’d thought the interview was over and she was mildly annoyed and disappointed to learn that it wasn’t.

“How did you get the job of station manager? You said you’d been a volunteer here, but had you ever worked elsewhere, in radio?”

Mbolo was silent.

“Is that a sore point?” Marvia asked.

“This was my first broadcast experience. In fact, for the promotion I was jumped over several people who had been here longer than I. Much longer. Naturally, there was a certain amount of resentment.”

Naturally. “How did that happen?”

Mbolo steepled her long fingers and gazed into the distance. “The previous manager was under a certain amount of pressure. You know, there was a difficult permit process involved in having this building constructed. The old Oceana/KRED offices up on Spalding Street—do you know them?”

“I remember passing by.”

“KRED was in there from the very beginning. The place was poor at best, and as the years passed, it became an utter eyesore. I mean, our programmers would arrange for the presence of guests, world famous authors and musicians as well as scientists and educators, and it was an embarrassment. So KRED and Oceana raised a capital fund. The usual pleas over the air, surely you have heard them, Send us a hundred dollars, send us five dollars, send us anything you can, we need your help.”

“I’ve heard them many times.”

“Meanwhile, we had fund-raisers in the field running guilt scenarios on corporate donors and foundations and a few very liberal philanthropists. And of course our dear friends, as we call them, ‘the Feds.’”

“The Feds?”

“Quite. We get a lot of money from the government.”

“But you blast the government every day. At least that’s KRED’s reputation.”

Mbolo smiled and spread her hands.

“All right,” Marvia resumed. “Let’s get back to the point. How you got this job.”

“Indeed. Very well.” Mbolo nodded. “There were some permit problems and there was a major tax abatement issue, and we had to appeal to our friends on the city council. Especially our champion there, Councilmember Hanson. I will say our manager did a grand job, the way was smoothed before us, but then there were nasty questions raised about the permits and the taxes and the overly familiar relationship between KRED and Ms. Hanson’s office. Ultimately, the board at Oceana felt that our station manager was garnering too much unfavorable publicity.”

She swung to the left, then to the right, then placed her elbows on her desk and leaned toward Marvia.

“So she moved up to a less visible job with Oceana, and someone with a much lower, much less controversial profile at KRED was elevated to the Awful Office. And here I am.”

“You say that your predecessor moved up to Oceana? This was punishment?”

“Not punishment, Sergeant Plum. Protection.”

Marvia nodded. She’d seen that kind of move before, both in the army and in the police department. It was all too common a maneuver. “What was this person’s name? And where is she now?”

“Her name is Parlie Sloat, Sergeant, and she is still at Oceana. Right in this very building.”

Marvia made a mental note to chat with Parlie Sloat at some point. There seemed no particular connection between her and Robert Bjorner, but at this early stage in the case, a great deal remained to be learned. In the meanwhile, there were more immediate matters to pursue.

She sent a uniform to fetch Jessie Loman, the receptionist in the vivid lipstick and the bright yellow beret. She moved to the conference room, now deserted, and waited until Officer Rosetti, a bright female a decade younger than Marvia, showed up with Loman.

“I already gave my statement,” Loman complained. “It’s getting late and I have to get home. I’m officially off duty now.”

Marvia said, “We’ll make this fast.”

“I have a date tonight,” Loman said.

“We’ll make it fast.”

“I mean, I’m sorry Mr. Bjorner died, but I have a date.”

“Okay. Sit down. Relax. You want to call your boyfriend and tell him you’ll be a little late, this shouldn’t take very long.”

Loman pouted for a moment, then she said, “If you promise it really won’t take long, I guess it’ll be okay.”

Marvia nodded. “Thank you.” She’d removed the microcassette with her conversation with Sun Mbolo on it, labeled it and slipped it in her pocket. For Jessie Loman she started a new cassette.

“But I already gave my statement,” Loman repeated.

“I just want to ask you a few questions. Mainly about Mr. Bjorner. Did you know him well, Jessie?”

“Not very.”

“I thought he was an old-timer here at KRED.”

“I guess so.”

“You don’t know?”

“I’ve only been here a few months. I want to be a producer. I used to listen to OTR Heaven and I got interested and came to KRED.”

Marvia nodded. “What’s OTR?”

“Old-time radio. You know, like they had in the thirties and forties. Shows like The Shadow and Inner Sanctum. Lon Dayton does an OTR show, and I wrote him letters about it and I’m learning to be a producer. But I have to work as receptionist the rest of the time.”

Marvia put that away for future reference. But for now, it was back to the present. “Was Bob Bjorner blind?”

Jessie Loman licked her dark crimson lipstick and tugged at the corner of her yellow beret. “Not exactly.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, he could see a little. And he didn’t want anybody to help him. I remember when I started working at KRED, the first day when Bob came in to do his show, he looked as if he knew his way around and he could see everything. He had on these Coke-bottle glasses and his eyes looked weird but that was just distortion.”

She paused and looked at her wristwatch. It had the KRED logo on its face, a little red radio with the station’s call letters spelled out in jagged lightning bolts.

Marvia nodded and said, “Yes. And then.…”

Jessie Loman cleared her throat. “And then, there was a package on the floor. UPS had just delivered a shipment of CDs for the music department. Somebody was supposed to put it away, but it was still in the hallway and Bob tripped over it and fell down. He was a heavy man, you know.”

Marvia agreed that Bjorner was a heavy man.

“He had a hard time getting up,” Loman continued. “I came out from behind the switchboard and tried to help him and he got bright red and started screaming at me. He was really mad. I don’t think he hurt himself falling but he was so mad, he felt humiliated. Then he went into Studio B and did his show like nothing happened.”

Then Jessie Loman shook her head and added, “He didn’t like people to see his scripts, either. He used Braille scripts. So I guess his eyes were really bad, I mean really, or he wouldn’t have needed to use Braille scripts, would he?”

“No, he wouldn’t,” Marvia agreed. “Do you know how he lost his vision? Did he always have bad eyes?”

“I remember they did an anniversary show, the end of World War One. Or Two. Whichever. Nikki put together this documentary, she interviewed Mr. Bjorner. I never heard him open up like that, just only that once. He said he got burned by white phosphorus on Tarawa. That’s an island.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think he had any scars or anything, but I guess that’s what hurt his eyes.”

Marvia changed tack. “How did he get to KRED to do his show?”

“His brother always brings him and drops him off and picks him up afterward. I don’t know what he does while Bob is here. I mean, while he was here. He didn’t come inside the station. I just saw him once in a while when he dropped Bob off or picked him up. Some of the staffers hang out around the corner at Shaughnessy’s. On Huntington. But I don’t know if Mr. Bjorner—the other Mr. Bjorner—ever did that. Bob used to go next door for a snack after his show, or sometimes to Shaughnessy’s for a glass of wine. But he always came back here and waited for his ride.”

“What’s this brother’s name?”

Jessie Loman rolled her eyes. When they came back into focus she said, “Herb. Herb Bjorner.”

“Do you have an address for either brother?”

Loman shook her head. “No, I—Bob was kind of paranoid. He didn’t like people to know where he lived. He always picked up his paycheck and his mail at the station.”

“Okay.”

“As a matter of fact, I can give you a directory of station personnel. It has addresses and phone numbers, but of course we only have what people give us.”

“Please, yes.”

“I’ll have to go get it.”

“I’ll go with you.”

The list was longer than Marvia had expected. Loman explained that KRED used a lot of volunteers and part-time people.

Marvia folded the list and slipped it into a pocket. She looked at her own wristwatch. No red radios or lightning logos, just a plain timepiece. She said, “Thanks for your cooperation, Ms. Loman. You’ll probably be asked to help us out later on. We appreciate your assistance.”

Jessie Loman got up and headed for the stairs.

Marvia followed her. The crime scene was cleared now. The glass shards outside Studio B had been swept up, the smashed door was removed, and KRED seemed to have returned to normal.

Robert Bjorner was on his way to the county morgue, in downtown Oakland, subject to the tender ministrations of the coroner.

The evening news was on; concealed speakers carried the station’s programming in the lobby atrium. A smooth voice was describing a shouting match in the Oakland City Council over who would pick up the bills for a hundred million dollars worth of defaulted stadium construction bonds. Marvia thought the money might have been better spent on schools or health care, but what did she know about Oakland politics?

Last to leave. She found herself longing for her old apartment on Oxford Street, a turret room in a gorgeous Victorian that had long since been split into rental units. That was gone forever, but she had to get another place of her own. She was going stir crazy back on Bonita Street.

Or maybe, she thought, she was just tired and hungry. The thrill of being back at work had passed.

She heaved a sigh and pushed open the frosted-glass doors and stepped onto the sidewalk and bounced off something huge and soft and warm.

It was a man’s belly.