The Knightly Murders - Recap

On a Tuesday at 11:15pm, Ward Captain Leo J. Ramutka returns home from a wake. He’d just given a sendoff to a loyal voter whom he expected to one day meet again. He had no idea how soon that day would come. Ramutka opens the door steps inside. He closes the door and turns, and only then notices the armored figure bearing a crossbow. Leo Ramutka barely has time to bark out a futile “NO!” before the crossbow fires and a bolt ends his life.

Carl drives a Chicago street when his police scanner radio comes to life. Dispatch confirms to unit David Nine that a coroner will meet them at 113 Petrofski, North Side, and will contact Captain Vernon Rausch when it arrives. Carl intends to be a part of that meeting.

Captain Vernon Rausch is a good cop, possibly a great one, with a storied history that Carl remembers back as far as the 1950’s and the infamous Mercer/Dobrans murders. Unsure what to say to a living legend, Carl takes a few shots of the outline on the door and the sizeable hole in the door as the captain walks down the stairs. Finally Carl decides on a simple “Hi, there,” to which Rausch replies cordially enough.

Asked about the sheet covered victim, the police captain tells Carl the body is that of Leo Ramutka, Ward Captain of the 44th, killed by the arrow Carl sees nearby – an enormouys missle wrist thick at its thickest and tapering to a deadly point. Rausch reminisces about the arrow, a deadly weapon favored by British commandoes. Carl wonders if Rausch thinks a commando murdered Ramutka but the captain drones on heedlessly about the people of Chicago – six million souls pressed together, six million sets of needs, wants and desires, often going unmet. Sooner or later he – or she – erupts. Carl then asks if Rausch thinks a woman committed the crime; the closest Rausch gets to actually discussing the matter is a comment that a ward captain accumulates enemies.

The next night, Rolf Danvers drives home. While Ramutka’s ticket to power was the ballot box, Danvers owes his influence to ready cash and the deeds to choice real estate. As he turns into his driveway Danvers does not realize that he is moments from needing only one piece of real estate: a small plot he owns in a memorial garden near old town. In the driveway is a black armored figure and it its hand is a long lance that smashes through Danvers’ windshield and then through his chest.

At police headquarters Captain Rausch discusses the case briefly, calling the previous night’s statement no longer descriptive. Carl feeds a rookie reporter a line and she asks the Captain about rumors the police are combing the area for a woman dressed as a British commando. Carl slips into Rausch’s office and moments later the veteran investigator enters, evidently unangered by Carl’s presence in his private office.

Rausch offers Carl coffee and then speculates as to his reason for being there, offering the information Carl seeks: Danvers was killed by something round and sharp, like an icepick. Except that this particular icepick would be about three inches in diameter. Carl says it can’t be an icepick and Rausch mildly agrees. Then Carl continues: two men dead, one from an oversized arrow and the other from an obese icepick. Could the murders be related? Rausch answers with a discourse on technology and sociology ranging from the reasons icepick murders are less common to advances in technology. Two precious hours later Carl finally extracts himself and visits a man he’s sure can help.

Carl enters Pop Stenvold’s shop with the picture of the bolt in hand. Pop tells Carl its an arrow, which Carl already knew; Carl uses a touch of psychology to extract more information from the man, learning the arrow is actually a bolt. It came, Pop says, from a crossbow. Pop goes on to suggest just cocking such a crossbow would require a winch and three hundred pounds of pressure. But Pop has no idea where one might obtain such a weapon; he knows he couldn’t sell it. Carl settles in while Pop dictates another chapter of his memoirs, about his eleventh year on Lake Wisconsin...

Brewster Hocking, over a few short years, turned a humble catering truck company into the Canadian American Leisure Corporation, along the way digesting companies ranging from whiskey distilleries in Scotland to the maker of “that famous analgesic for the morning after.” At 11:59pm on Thursday Hocking relaxes in bed when he hears a terrible clanking. He calls out to his butler, Charles, ordering the man to stop the racket. But the real source of the racket enters the room then – a knight in black armor who whirles a Morningstar flail about his head and approaches the screaming industrialist, stepping on and crushing a telephone set en route...

The next morning interior decorator Minerva Musso argues with curator Mendel Boggs in the Hydecker Museum, soon to be the Camelot Bar and Discothèque. She’s concerned that a blue shield near black armor will make the place look like the “Bruise Room”; Boggs complains that she is destroying all sense of continuity. They interrupt their argument when the doorbell rings; Carl enters as Musso prepares to leave, advising the irate Mendel Boggs that the stereo equipment will go inside a particular suit of armor, and that when the sound man comes by in the afternoon, he will admit the man this time.

Boggs examines Carl’s photo, suggesting that the bolt has medieval styling. The photo, like most Carl takes, is poorly focused and Boggs cannot offer more. Carl examines the weapons arrayed around a set of black armor and asks Boggs what became of the bolts there. The curmudgeonly curator tells Carl they are the victim of attrition over the years.

Carl’s next stop is the morgue, where he butters up and then bribes Lester for a look at the autopsy records of Brewster Hocking. Seeing them Carl wonders aloud what hit the man and Lester suggests a thousand pound football shoe. Carl muses that a mace might also have done the job.

Close to noon Carl catches a bit of an interview with Brewster Hocking’s butler Charles. The interview is short because Charles offers journalists only a terse “no comment.” With help from an old and mercenary friend Carl forges a telegraph ostensibly from the entertainment magnate to his “old friend” Carl and affectionately signed “Hock.” Charles remains suspicious because he cannot remember anyone calling Brewster Hocking “Hock” and he cannot remember his former employer mentioning Carl at all. Carl borrows a little of Pop Stenvold;s autobiography for cover and that loosens Charles up a little. Carl wonders if Hocking was worried about anything and Charles says only about a lawsuit from a customer claiming a sugarfree soda’s artificial sweetener caused him problems. Carl seems unaware that CALC controlled most of the soft drink bottling in the Midwest, or that Hocking routinely sent all his friends case after case of mixers every year at Christmas time. Charles realizes that whoever Carl is, he’s no old friend of Brewster Hocking and he runs Carl off.

Back at the INS, Carl examines some data when a balding man in denim work clothes enters. The man asks where he can find a malfunctioning phone and Carl waves him over, showing him that his own phone has no dial tone. While he’s there, Carl asks him how much pressure it would take to crush a phone and he knows to the pound: the specification says 420 pounds. Then the man discovers the cause of Carl’s problem: he tampered with his own phone. Realizing Carl lured him to the office to waste his time with questions, he storms out, stopping to tear two bootleg phones from their connections and confiscate them. Tony, not part to the exchange, emerges from his office mystified by the departure of two of his bootleg telephones.

Carl distracts Tony with the results of his research. He knows where there is a lot of medieval weaponry and all of it run by a very angry man. And he has learned that Hocking’s corporation bought the Hydecker Museum and was behind the plans to convert it to a club.

Carl’s facts are coming together. He leaves to visit Minerva Musso. It is Friday just before nine when Carl arrives. The door is open so he hesitantly enters, calling out. Farther in the apartment, Musso reclines on her bed wearing a robe and with a towel wrapped about her hair. She talks on the phone with a friend, mentioning Carl as a “strange man” who walked into her boudoir. When he identifies himself as a newsman the disappointed decorator rings off her friend and tells Carl she hasn’t decided whether or not to redo David Bowie’s house... Carl tells her he actually wants to know about the Hydecker Museum, and Musso irately tells him she wouldn’t even take a job like that had she not been audited last year. She has an equally low opinion of Mendel Boggs, suggesting that with diligence he might make village idiot, and commenting that he talks to the antiquities in his charge, reciting doggerel at them. She once caught him waving a pike and talking about “cleaving things in twain.” Carl asks if she knows Hocking and she tells him that she works with the architect and never met Hocking, and as far as she’s aware Boggs never threatened Hocking or anyone else. Then she asks what that clanking is.

Carl opens the bedroom door in time to see the front doors burst open before a black armored figure! The figure clanks towards the bedroom, Carl slams the door and hustles Musso into her bathroom, then shoves a vanity in front of the door. An axe bursts the door panel and the black knight shoves his way thorough, pitching the vanity on top of Carl, knocking him cold and spilling Musso’s perfume all over him. The knight clanks by and smashes open the bathroom door. All Minerva Musso can do is scream...

Captain Rausch shoos away the medical technician helping Carl and suggests Carl massage the back of his neck to loosen up the trapezius muscle and relieve his tension headache. Then he tells Carl that neighbors heard screams and when the police got here Carl was lying on the floor out here and Musso was dead in the bathroom of axe blows. Now Carl is at least a material witness and maybe worse. Captain Rausch wants to know what Carl saw and in exchange offers Carl an exclusive. That’s when Carl realizes something and confronts Rausch with it: Rausch is bored. Police work bores him. He has reached the point of relying on informants and tips or stealing angles from newsmen. Carl tells the detective that he didn’t see a thing. Pained, Rausch replies that he really doesn’t want to work the weekend. His wife’s chamber music society has a recital and he’s supposed to write an article for the Police Gazette. Carl still refuses, so Rausch orders an officer named Spencer to fill the tub with very cold water when forensics finishes with it. That drags the answer from Carl: Minerva Musso was murdered by a knight in armor, wielding a deadly axe. Rausch tells Carl he’d better be able to prove this...

Carl and the police go to the Hydecker Museum. There Rausch questions Mendel Boggs about his feud with Musso. An officer tells Rausch that the weapons have all been wiped clean and there is no blood on them. Rausch reveals that the axe used to murder Musso was wiped clean on her pillowcase, and earlier that the weapon used on Rolf Danvers was wiped clean on his sport coat. Then officers try to fit the black armor on Mendel Boggs without luck; the gorget won’t even go over the man’s head. Carl confirms this is the armor he saw. Boggs tells Rausch that no one else has access to the museum and Rausch turns to Carl and sarcastically asks him if it was really the tin woodsman he saw. Rausch believes Carl’s brain has turned to onion dip!

After the detective and his men leave Carl asks Boggs who the black cross knight was, but Boggs has had more than enough of Carl and floridly promises never to tell him anything.

Carl’s next try is a store that sells coats of arms. There he finds the husband and wife team Roger and Maura, who misidentify Kolchak as a Russian name. When Carl tells them his ancestors were Polish they quickly find prominent Polish Kolchaks, including an archbishop and a baron. Carl asks about the shield he saw near the black armor at the Hydecker Museum and Roger rather pointedly informs the newsman that he’s in the business of selling coats of arms, not information. Carl reluctantly agrees to purchase a Kolchak coat of arms on lacquered pine and Roger opens up, telling Carl that the shield sounds like a lion rampant on a black bend sinister. That is the coat of arms of the infamous Mettancoeur family. Carl’s curiosity is piqued and Maura mentions how nice the colorful Kolchak coat of arms would look on a walnut plaque. Carl breaks down and purchases the expensive walnut.

Roger finds a book that discusses the worst of the Mettancoeur family, the last scion Guy de Mettancoeur. The family owned some of the finest vineyards but Guy himself eschewed all human pleasures and became a pariah in his own time. He consorted with dabblers in the black arts and gained a reputation for both invincibility and unchivalrous acts. As a gesture of contempt he would wipe his weapons clean on the flying colors of a defeated foe. Carl asks what the flying colors are and Roger tells him usually a scarf but they could be any personal article – like a pillowcase or a sport coat. Flipping pages, Carl spots a picture of the black knight.

Back at the INS offices Carl learns that the Hydecker Museum belonged to Hydecker Importers, and this company purchased Chateau Mettancoeur wine. An exasperated Tony allows that some nut could be wearing the ancient armor when he kills and does not understand why Carl feels he must pin the killings on a 12th century French knight. Carl tells Tony that Guy de Mettancoeur had a suit of armor forged by a necromancer that made him impregnable to attack! When his depredations grew severe Pope Gregory blessed a battleaxe to Guy’s destruction and found a champion to wield it. It worked, and Guy was killed, but on his death bed he swore that music and gaiety would never be permitted around his resting place. Now the armor and the axe are at the museum – the whole tale is there! And that’s why Carl is certain a 12th century ghost is doing the killings – it’s the only “person” with the motive. Everyone connected with plans to turn the Hydecker Museum into a discothèque is being killed! The building housing the museum is too old to be converted without extensive renovations; Leo J. Ramutka was the man interceding with the zoning board. And Rolf Danvers owned the lot next door, prime space for parking.

Tony suggests Carl rest and offers his couch. It seems that Tony watched the messy nervous breakdown of his sister-in-law and fears he’s seeing it all over again. Carl leaves, promising to return with the most amazing story Tony has ever heard. Tony gazes after him, softly speculating that it’s his sister all over again.

Carl breaks a window and forces his way into the Hydecker Museum. Inside he finds the blessed battle axe and takes a few pictures. Then he hears a clanking! The black armor is coming down the stairs! It walks by Carl toward its pedestal and Carl snaps a picture. The armored figure picks up a javelin and nearly spears Carl, who fumbles open the door as the knight picks up a broadsword and begins to approach. Carl interposes a table but the knight simply smashes it with a powerful blow of the sword. Carl trips and the knight looms over him! Then Carl rolls down the stairs and the knight follows. Carl delays the armored assassin by pushing another suit of armor onto it, but it soon clears a path. Carl smashs the glass and grabs the blessed battleaxe! The ghostly knight recoils, but when Carl can barely lift the weapon it advances again! Heaving with all his might Carl manages a side cut that staggers the knight. It lurches backwards and wavers on unsteady feet before sinking to its knees. As it pitches forward Carl heaves the axe around so that the back point stabs the breast plate of the knight. The black armor clatters to pieces; there is nothing inside it. The ghost of Guy de Mettancoeur has been laid to rest at last.

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