I crossed my arms and gently touched my Adam’s apple so I would feel it vibrate if I started talking without realizing it.
“It’s odd,” I said on purpose. “I mean, you would think that somebody at the terminal would have noticed if two men had been squirted in the face with ammonia. I mean, I would think their screams alone would have drawn a crowd.”
“That’s what we would think,” Boyd said. “But none of the people we interviewed heard any screams last night, and we don’t have any reports about two men being ... squirted with ammonia.”
I immediately wondered what he meant by that ellipsis. I suspected he meant to say “assaulted” but changed it to a word less damaging to my case. He seemed to be on my side—for the moment.
“We’ve checked the hospitals and nearby clinics, but nobody was admitted with that sort of ... affliction.”
“So the men made no noise at all?” Ferguson said.
“I was too busy running to notice. But like I said, it was raining hard and there was a lot of train sounds. Maybe their screams were muffled.”
Ferguson nodded. “You say these men wanted you to give them the key to locker number ninety-six. Can you tell us what was inside the locker?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t know. As I said, it was empty when I opened it.” “How did you come into the possession of the key?” Boyd said.
“Pardon?”
“How did you get hold of the key?”
“Oh. I found it in my taxicab last night.”
Both men raised their eyebrows. That was a new one on me in terms of detective reaction. It was almost as if they were displaying emotion. Except for annoyed frowns and the occasional reassuring smile, I rarely saw detectives emote.
“Let me make certain I have this right,” Boyd said. “You found a key to a locker at Union Station in your taxicab last night, so you drove down to the terminal in order to open the locker, correct?”
“Yes.”
The two men glanced at each other.
“Why didn’t you turn the key in to the lost-and-found?” Ferguson said. “Doesn’t Rocky Cab have a lost-and-found?”
I started to reply, but then I stopped and stared at him with my jaw hanging open.
“Wouldn’t that have been standard operating procedure?” he said.
I closed my jaw and swallowed hard. “The thing is,” I said, “I’ve had a lot of strange things happen to me this week, and finding the key was sort of the last strange thing.”
“You do realize don’t you, Murph, that finding the key to a locker, and then opening the locker, could be considered a violation of the law?”
“What?”
“Just because you found a key in your taxi did not give you authorization to open the locker.”
“No ... I mean, why did you call me ‘Murph’?” The men glanced at each other.
“You asked us to call you ‘Murph,’” Ferguson said. “I did?”
“Yes.” “When?”
“A minute ago,” Ferguson said. “You did it just before you began caressing your Adam’s apple with your right hand.”
I quickly lowered my hand and sat up straight. “Can I ask you something?” I said.
“Certainly.”
“Did I say the words ‘bright boy’ within the past couple of minutes.”
“I don’t believe so,” Ferguson said.
I heaved an internal sigh of relief. At least—I hoped it was internal. Then I nodded. “I do realize now that finding a lost key did not authorize me to open the locker.”
“You said earlier that you weren’t sure where all this business started,” Ferguson said. “Why don’t you back up to the first strange thing that happened and start your story from there.”
I cleared my throat. “Well, it all started last Wednesday night when a man died in the backseat of my taxicab.”
Ferguson and Boyd frowned at each other, then looked at me. “You were the driver of that taxi?” Boyd said.
“Yes I was,” I said.
“What was the dead man’s name?”
“Zelner. I think his first name was Heinrich.”
Boyd crossed the room and opened a filing cabinet. He leafed through some manila folders and pulled out a report. I recognized it. I am familiar with the “look” of police reports. He glanced through it, then tossed the report onto Ferguson’s desk. “Two officers in our department looked into that death,” Boyd said.
Ferguson picked up the report and looked at it, then set it down. “This was not a homicide,” he said. “Mr. Zelner died of natural causes. Our office had no more involvement after the coroner sent the report to us.”
“What did Mr. Zelner die of?” I said.
“Coronary.”
“Is that what the coroner said?”
“Yes.”
I desperately wanted to ask if the words “coronary” and “coroner” were linguistically related, but I kept mum.
Ferguson leaned forward in his chair. It creaked. He looked down at the report for a few moments, then he looked at me. “It says here that you picked up Mr. Zelner at Union Station.”
“That’s correct,” I said.
He looked back down at the report. He looked up at me again. A stony silence entered the room. Boyd was looking at me without expression. So was Ferguson. I returned their gazes with what I hoped was a similar lack of anything.
“Can I ask you a question, Murph?” Ferguson said.
I started to feel uneasy. Whenever I was being investigated for murder or kidnapping or bank robbery, the police sometimes said, “Can I ask you a question, Murph?” even though they had been grilling me for an hour.
“Yes,” I said.
“How did you know that this key belonged to a locker at Union Station?”
I shifted on my seat. I coughed. I cleared my throat. I did all the things that experienced criminals never do.
“I deduced it,” I said.
“How did you deduce it?” Boyd said.
Rather than give him a thumbnail sketch of my unique methods of inference, I decided to back up and slowly work my way toward the conclusion that I had come to so that he could easily follow the thing that I sometimes loosely referred to as “logic.”
I described the death of Mr. Zelner, which was a reiteration of the incident report that I had written at Rocky Cab on Wednesday night. “On Thursday morning Mr. Heigger called my apartment and said he was Mr. Zelner’s family lawyer. He wanted me to come to his office and answer a few questions. I ended up going to Diamond Hill with him. I drove my Chevy and he followed me in his Cadillac. He wanted to see the place where Mr. Zelner had died, and wanted to ask around at the office buildings about whether Mr. Zelner had sent any luggage on ahead.”
Then I told them about Weissberger’s trip to Broomfield on Friday. After that I told them about the law office that disappeared on Saturday. I mentioned the “supe” but I skipped Plan 9 From Outer Space.
Ferguson nodded slowly, then said, “So Mr. Zelner died in your taxi on Wednesday, and last night you found a key in your taxi and went to Union Station and tried to open locker ninety-six?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t tell anybody at Rocky Mountain Taxicab that you found this key.”
“No.”
“Did you find the key on the floor of your taxi?”
“No, I found it in an ashtray.”
“What ashtray?”
“It was one of those ashtrays that they build into a door-handle ... or I mean a door-rest. You know, where you put your arm.” “Armrest,” Boyd said.
I nodded.
“How did you happen to find the key?” Ferguson said.
“I was cleaning my taxi last night after my shift ended. I emptied out the ashtray and the key fell into the trash barrel. So I picked it up and examined it. Mr. Zelner had smoked a cigarette in my cab on Wednesday, so I put two-and-two together.”
“And what did you come up with?”
“Zero.”
“Because the locker was empty?” Ferguson said.
I was getting used to his quirky perceptiveness by now. “Yes,” I said. “The locker was empty.”
“What did you expect to find in there?”
I stared at him for a while, then shook my head. “You got me.”
“Were you disappointed to find it empty?” Ferguson said.
“I was somewhat disappointed,” I said.
“Why is that?”
“Well ... it seemed like a lot of people were interested in that locker, and since I had this key, I expected to find a valise or something.”
“And what did you expect to find in the valise?” Ferguson said.
I suddenly began rubbing my Adam’s apple hard, almost squeezing it, because I began to feel a chortle starting to erupt from my esophagus. I somehow managed to prevent this from happening. “You got me again,” I said.
“Did Mr. Zelner say anything significant to you before he died?” Boyd said.
“What do you mean?”
“Did he mention for instance ... a large sum of money?” I slowly shook my head no.
“Did he say that there was a valise in a locker at Union Station?” I
continued to shake my head no.
“Then why did you expect to find a valise in the locker?”
I let go of my Adam’s apple and frowned down at my knees. “Because ... because ... Mr. Heigger had said something about a valise when I talked to him in his office.”
Ferguson and Boyd looked at each other.
“Aside from yourself, do you know of anybody else who has seen this
Mr. Heigger?” Boyd said. “No.”
“I see,” he said. “All right, Murph, there is one other question I would like to ask you.”
“Okay.”
“Who is Octavia Brandenburg?”