Then he pushed her gently away and walked over to where the figure lay in the mud. Timidly, Regina followed. The body in the mud wasn’t moving. Rodriguez knelt and turned it over on its face. His flashlight illuminated the features.
Calvin Cabot!
He was unconscious. Rodriguez examined him. Regina watched for a moment. Then—-“Is he dead?” she asked.
“No. The bullet’s in his gut. He’s bleeding internally. I can’t really tell how bad it is. But we’d better get him to a doctor as fast as we can.”
“I passed a hospital on the highway, just before I turned off.”
“Right.” Rodriguez hefted Cabot’s unconscious body in his arms. “Let’s go.”
Regina followed him back to the clearing where she’d left the Mercedes. Rodriguez’ car was beside it. He put Cabot beside him on the driver’s seat and drove in the wake of the sports car back down the dirt road. About a quarter of an hour later both cars pulled up in the parking lot alongside the entrance to the emergency ward of the hospital.
Rodriguez carried Cabot inside. An intern spotted them coming and called for a stretcher on wheels. Cabot was rolled the rest of the way into the emergency room and Regina and Rodriguez sat in the waiting room while the wounded man was examined.
“I really dig these new fashions.” Rodriguez spotted the gap in the seat of Regina’s hot pants before she had a chance to sit down.
“I tore them climbing a fence before.” Regina blushed and headed for a chair.
“Sauce for the gander,” Rodriguez said, ogling to demonstrate the double entendre, “is sauce for the goose.” He suited the action to the words.
“Look if you must,” Regina answered, slapping his hand away, “but don’t touch.” She arranged herself as modestly as possible in a chair.
“Cops are human too.”
“I know.” Regina couldn’t be angry with him. She owed him too much. Besides, she didn’t find him unappealing. “But like they say, there’s a time and a place. . . .”
“Then maybe you could give me a lift back to the city,” he said meaningfully. “My car is rented and I can arrange with somebody here to turn it in for me.”
“You mean you didn’t drive up?”
“No, I flew up in a police ’copter. Rented the car at the airport.”
“You must have been in a hurry.”
“I was.”
“Why? You didn’t know I was here. You couldn’t have,” Regina realized.
“True. But I did know that Cabot was here. I found that out from his secretary.”
“Lucky for me you did. But why were you after Cabot?”
“To explain that, I’ll have to start back with Zelda Quinn,” he told Regina. “Her alibi was that she was on TV when Faith Venable’s murder took place. At first it checked out. Her show was on all right. It’s done live — usually—so I accepted her alibi. However, further investigation turned up the fact that the show for that particular night had been prerecorded. Zelda wasn’t in the studio when it was broadcast.”
“But what has that got to do with Calvin Cabot?” Regina wondered.
“I’m coming to it. You see, despite the phony alibi, I had a hunch that Zelda Quinn wasn’t the guilty one. She didn’t seem the type, and there was no reason for her to kill Faith Venable. So instead of confronting her with the lie, I did a little snooping. I had a talk with the elevator operator in her building. He said she’d come in around four that afternoon and hadn’t gone out again that night. He also remembered she’d had a visitor, a man who got there about seven and left after three in the ayem.”
“But why would she bother making up an alibi? I mean, if she had a legitimate one with two people to back it up-”
“That’s what I had to find out. So I made it my business to get cozy with Zelda, figuring I could worm the truth out of her.”
“I didn’t think she was your type,” Regina said smugly, hiding the fact that she was relieved.
“She isn’t. You are.” There was nothing coy about Rodriguez. “Anyway, I succeeded. I found out she was covering for a boyfriend who was married. And I found out who the boyfriend was.”
“Not Calvin Cabot! She’s got too much life for him!”
“Nope. Not Calvin Cabot.”
“Then who?” Regina asked.
“Dr. Karl Enright!”
“Enright!” Regina shuddered. “Zelda must have a strong stomach.”
“Bad teeth is what she has. She got five grand worth of orthodonture cut-rate for hitting the sack with that dental Romeo. But the important thing to realize is that if Enright was with Zelda when the murder took place, then his alibi was a lie too. Of course he lied to keep his wife from finding out he was playing around. And--”
“I see!” Regina clapped her hands. “Enright’s alibi was that he was in his office treating Calvin Cabot’s dentures. And Cabot backed up his story. So if En- right wasn’t there, then neither was Cabot!”
“Right. And when I confronted Enright, he broke down and admitted the truth. He said the phony alibi had been Cabot’s idea, that Cabot had suggested it the night after the murder, when he really was in Enright’s office.”
“But how did Cabot know enough about Enright and Zelda to make the suggestion?”
“While Cabot was on the phone in the outer office talking to the mortician about the arrangements for Faith, Enright was on a different line in his own office talking to Zelda. When Cabot was through with his call, he inadvertently cut in on them. He overheard them discussing what Enright should do if the police questioned him about his whereabouts the previous night. When Enright got off the phone, Cabot made the offer to alibi him. Of course what Cabot was really doing was setting up an alibi for himself. As soon as I understood that,” Rodriguez concluded, “I made tracks up here to confront Mr. Calvin Cabot.”
Before Regina could voice any of the questions tumbling through her mind, a doctor entered the hospital waiting room. “He’ll be all right,” the medico announced. “He’s lost some blood, but the slug missed all the vital organs. He’s conscious now if you want to see him.”
Rodriguez was on his feet and moving towards the door. He paused when he reached it and turned to look at Regina inquiringly. She was still sitting in the chair, the rent in her hot pants hidden beneath her.
“I’m not budging an inch,” she told him. “And you know why."
Rodriguez laughed and exited. He was gone a long time. When he returned, he told Regina he’d made arrangements with the local police to have Calvin Cabot kept in custody. Furthermore, one of the sheriff’s deputies would return his rented car. He gave Regina his jacket to wrap around her waist. She returned it when they were seated in her Mercedes. Rodriguez offered to drive, and she readily agreed.
“It’s all tied up in a nice, neat package,” Rodriguez told her when they were on the highway leading to the Thruway. “Cabot seemed almost glad to get it all out of his system. He’s a shattered man.”
“A shattered ghoul you mean!” Regina shuddered. “Killing an innocent girl so he could commit unspeakable acts on her dead body!”
“He’s a ghoul all right,” Rodriguez agreed. “He’s been a necrophile for years. He confessed he even had a deal with some upstate mortuary to provide him with the corpses of women that weren’t claimed for burial. I’ll see that a stop is put to that game!” Rodriguez said grimly. “But you’re wrong about him murdering Faith so he could rape her dead body. It’s true that he’d been lusting after her since she was a little girl, but that’s not why he killed her. It was strictly an afterthought.”
“Then why did he kill her?”
“Money. Cabot had been taking a beating on the stock market. To cover his losses, he’d been dipping into the Venable estate. As trustee, nobody ever questioned his handling of the trust fund. Evidently it had been going on for years, and he got himself in deeper and deeper. Then, a few months before she was killed, Faith Venable told Cabot she wanted her share of the estate in cash. She wanted to build centers for Transcendental Meditation in cities around the country. Cabot tried to talk her out of it, but it was no soap. She had religion and she wanted to pass it on to Others.”