The Radio Red Killer

CHAPTER TWO-1

CHAPTER TWOThe 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 m*******a 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.”