Murder Old and New

by Chet Williamson

  “So…you think there’s really some connection?” Ted asked, as though I were a bit dotty. His attitude threw me.

  “Well, yeah, maybe,” I said weakly. “I mean, it’s possible.”

  Ted shrugged. “People hung themselves all the time back then.”

  I let out an exasperated snort. “Not a lot more,” I said, arguing from neither personal nor sociological experience.

  “Yes, they did. Suicide rates were much higher during the Great Depression, and hanging was the method of choice for most. Rope was far cheaper and plentiful than guns and bullets. And I suppose you could reuse the rope.”

  “I’m so glad I have you around.” Ted smiled at that, choosing to hear sincerity rather than sarcasm.

  At the movie, I had a small Diet Coke and a small popcorn without butter and still felt guilty, since Ted had only a water and a small handful of my offered kernels. I think he also sneaked a breath mint, but I’m not sure. The film itself was blah—one of those continuing remakes of an old sitcom that I had watched during its original run and Ted had seen in reruns on TV Land. We had both enjoyed the original, but when we saw the big-screen version with several disinterested Oscar nominees who were slumming for the money, we remembered what a crappy show it had really been.

  “I guess your critical faculties really aren’t very developed when you’re eight,” I said as we threaded our way through the maze of corridors that led to the exit. “I remembered that show as being more fun than that.”

  “It was the best thing that was on at 4:30 when I was a kid. I never really liked it all that much.”

  “Then why’d you want to come, for Pete’s sake?”

  “I knew you wanted to.”

  What made Ted’s revelation even more frustrating for me was that there wasn’t a touch of whiny martyrdom in it. Rather it was as natural as breathing. You wished to go, my goddess, so your servant is here. Man, I hate that. “Besides,” he added as though aware of my annoyance, “I like Robert DeNiro.”

  When we were driving home, I asked, “So, what did you think was the stupidest scene? For me, it was just before the end, when Nicole Kidman used the athletic supporter to gag DeNiro.”

  “Hmm? Oh…I guess I missed that.”

  I shot him a sidelong glare. “Were you there? I thought you were sitting next to me.”

  “I kinda zoned out by then. Actually, I was thinking about that Elmer guy. Who hanged himself?”

  “I recall it well,” I said.

  “And you said the reason you thought it might be something other than suicide was because his neck was broken, and there wasn’t anything he could’ve jumped off of to do that, right? Like a rock or a limb.”

  “Right.”

  “So what if whatever he jumped off of just wasn’t there anymore? In the pictures.”

  I got what he was saying, and cursed myself for being a dummy. “You mean something that he brought with him. Something to stand on.”

  “Sure. Like a crate or a barrel or something. If it was a barrel, maybe it rolled away after he stepped off. If it was a crate, maybe somebody moved it so they could get to the body or something.”

  “But there wasn’t anything like that in the pictures.”

  “Wouldn’t have been if it rolled away or was moved.”

  I muttered a quiet shit under my breath. I hadn’t thought of that, and I should have. Immediately I began to look for holes in Ted’s oh-so-logical theory. “So you think Elmer walked all the way from town into the woods with a rope and a crate—or a barrel. Maybe he got them at Crate and Barrel.” The joke was unworthy, and Ted rightfully ignored it. “But seriously, Ted, don’t you think that would look a little obvious? Like going out with a noose around your neck and asking if anyone’s seen a good strong limb?”

  “I have no idea, Livy. But I’m sure you’re right—he probably didn’t walk through town in broad daylight carrying a rope and something to jump off of. But maybe he lived next to the woods, or maybe he cut through alleys, or maybe he carried the stuff in a sack. I really don’t know that much about Roseville—is that its name?”

  “Roseland, and it was a tiny town. Still is.” I sighed. “He probably could’ve gotten into the woods without anybody seeing him—even with a barrel and a rope under his arm. And a shotgun and a gallon jug of poison for good measure.”

  “Well, it’s something to consider, anyway.”

  And it was. I considered it as I dropped Ted off and drove home, as I flossed the popcorn hulls out of my teeth and showered and climbed into bed, and as I tried to drift off to sleep, lying on my side with Fudge curled into the angle between the backs of my calves and thighs.

  It was no use trying to sleep, and finally I got up, leaving poor Fudge to fret peevishly at the disappearance of his bed warmer. I retrieved the two sets of photos, the one I’d found and the other I’d been given, and started examining them anew in the bright light over the kitchen table, trying to avoid looking directly at Elmer Bingley’s nightmarish face.

  No telltale bits of crate or barrel appeared at the edges of the photos. No rocks, no rills, plenty of woods, but no templed hills from which Elmer could have made his last leap. Damn.

  But as I looked at the image of my father among the other curiosity seekers, a brave smile on his young face as he stared at the camera, I realized there was still a chance to prove or disprove the crate and barrel theory. After all, I still had one eyewitness. I decided to call Uncle Ralph the next day.

  Chapter 5

  Between an unusually high number of walk-ins and the usual Saturday Internet madness, business was so brisk the next day that I didn’t get to call Uncle Ralph until late in the afternoon. Aunt Sue answered the phone and the usual Catskills club conversation ensued:

  “Aunt Sue, hi, this is Livy. Is Uncle Ralph in?”

  “Oh hi, Livy…no, Ralph took a tramp in the woods.”

  “Oh, okay…well, do you know when he’ll be back?”

  “Probably when he’s done burying the tramp. They’ve been so pesky lately.”

  I heard Uncle Ralph laugh, and the phone changed hands. “What’s up, Livy?” he asked.

  “Aunt Sue’s blood sugar?” I hazarded, and he laughed politely. I could never hope to top them. “Actually, I wanted to pick your brain again.”

  “Hope you’ve got a nutpick.”

  I gave a polite laugh back. “Actually, I was wondering if you remembered something from, oh, say seventy-five years ago.”

  “More Elmer Bingley?”

  “Yeah. Do you recall if there might have been a crate or a barrel or anything like that that he might have stood on and then jumped?”

  “Something he stood on, huh?” He was quiet for a moment. “I can’t really recall, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything there.”

  Then inspiration hit me. “Look, Uncle Ralph, would you be willing to do me a big favor? For which I’d be willing to buy you lunch—and Aunt Sue too, if she wants to come?”

  “Come where?”

  “To Roseland. I’d like you to show me where Elmer Bingley hung himself.”

  “Oh, Livy, look, I don’t know if I could remember after all these years…”

  “But you’d recall around where it was, and we have the pictures to help find the tree and all.”

  “If it’s even still there.”

  “But that area’s still woods—it was never developed.”

  “Yeah, but trees die, they get hit by lightning…”

  “Oh please, Uncle Ralph…look, I’ll take you to the Stonebrook Tavern for dinner, how’s that?”

  He paused. “Can I get the crab imperial?”

  “You can get whatever you want—and appetizers too. And imported beer.”

  “God, I’m so easy,” he said. “All right, it’s a deal, but Livy, I’m a little worried about you. I mean, this nostalgia stuff is all well and good, but when you start getting nostalgic over suicides…”

  “Actually, I’m getting nostalgic over the
Hardy Boys.”

  “Pardon?”

  So I told him about what Doc Mead had said about the broken neck, and how Elmer Bingley would have had to jump off of something to make that happen. I didn’t say anything about the Hangman Murders, though, not then. I figured Uncle Ralph already had enough information for the time being. We arranged where we would meet at two o’clock the next day, which would give us plenty of time to try and find the place before rewarding Uncle Ralph with his crab imperial.

  The thought of taking him to the site had been a sudden inspiration I’d had while I’d been talking to him. In spite of his telling me that he’d forgotten if there’d been a telltale crate around, I thought that maybe, once he was back on the actual site, that memories would come rushing back, like they do in movie flashbacks, and he would blurt out, Aha! And that’s where the wooden barrel with “Nabisco” on its side was lying! And Elmer Bingley’s muddy footprints were on it! I remember all! Or maybe, By God, Livy, there was a short stepladder right there! Elmer must have kicked it away when he jumped!

  Or maybe not. Still, it was worth a shot. It might jar his memory. And I have to confess that there was something else, the anticipation of the frisson that I thought I would feel upon standing where such a tragic drama had occurred so long before. I’m the first to admit that I’m not immune to sensationalism, but maybe being where it actually happened would fill me with some dread knowledge, and some supernatural vision from beyond the grave would reveal itself to me.

  Or maybe I’d just been reading too many of the old pulp magazines that I sold.

  The next day a warm spell had melted nearly all of the snow that Wednesday’s storm had dumped, and I spent Sunday morning with the New York Times and a pot of coffee. The sun was shining, and the window was open just far enough to let in some welcome fresh air without allowing Fudge to imperil himself on the three-story high sill.

  I like living above my shop. I have a rear private staircase to the outside with doors which also lead into my two stories full of treasures, and there I can work or play as I like, anytime I want. There are three networked computers, one at each desk in the front, another in my private work area at the back of the second floor, but none in my apartment. I find the damned thing too addictive, what with the Times, YouTube, Salon, Drudge, HuffPost, Reuters, CNN, and the Onion all online, not to mention the temptations of Amazon.com, Coldwater Creek, Eddie Bauer, Chico’s, and Deep Discount DVD. (I’m an old Warner Brothers movies junkie, and they make it so easy to buy those delectable sets of Bette Davis and Astaire & Rogers.)

  So, except for my stereo, TV, and VHS and DVD players, my apartment is old-fashioned and Ludditesque, and I like it that way. Besides, Chico’s whole catalogue is only one story down. My rare days of leisure feel more leisurely when there’s no glowing screen staring at me, icons lined up in efficient ranks and files, and no bleepy-bleep to let me know that I’ve got mail or a Facebook message. E-mail me on Sunday at your peril. Call me and I’ll probably pick up the phone.

  I finished my coffee and the Times, while the local PBS radio station soothed me with Vivaldi, then started to get my gear ready for the afternoon meeting with Uncle Ralph. I laid out the packet of photos and my little Sony digital camera, and dug my rubber barn boots out of the closet. Since I attend a lot of auctions in all kinds of weather, a good pair is a necessity. Spring auctions are often called mud sales around here, since that’s what you wind up walking through and standing in during them.

  I lunched on yogurt and soup left over from the night before, and then headed out to Roseland. The town is surrounded by fields and woods. It has fewer than fifty homes, and is little bigger than it was when my father and his brothers and sister grew up there in the twenties and thirties. There’s a post office, a church, an auto repair shop, and a fire company that sponsors a four-weekend carnival in July, where you can buy the best chicken corn soup to be found anywhere. The rest of the year it seems to slumber in preparation for the next summer.

  I got there early, parked in the church lot, and sat and waited for Uncle Ralph. I could see the newer house that sat on the lot where my dad had been raised. The old homestead had been torn down twenty years earlier and replaced by a low, wide rancher with a large deck on the side, a stark contrast to the shingle-covered double house that had stood there during my childhood. My grandparents had lived on the one side, Uncle Ralph’s family on the other, until Grandpa Crowe had died and Grandma moved into a mobile home just up the hill and around the corner. Uncle Ralph had built a larger house next to her trailer, and lived there until my cousins were on their own and Grandma had passed away. Then Ralph and Sue began their period of wanderlust, from which they had not yet recovered.

  Uncle Ralph’s 1996 Corolla finally putted into the parking lot and he climbed out. He was bundled a bit too heavily against the unseasonably balmy weather, and immediately took off his heavy coat, leaving him clad in a gray sweater with numerous holes. “Smart man,” I said, nodding at his high hunting boots. He, too, knew what the woods were like after a quick melt.

  “We’ll be lucky if we don’t get stuck in the mud. Then it’ll freeze and they’ll find our bones in the spring.” His smile cracked as we both remembered what we were seeking there—a tree at which someone had once found a corpse. Ralph shook his head. “Brad was never morbid,” he said, referring to my father. “I don’t know how his daughter turned out so weird.” Then he looked up toward the woods. “Well, let’s not keep Elmer waiting.”

  We climbed the road until it turned left and hugged the side of the hill, but we kept going straight, onto a short dirt road that very quickly stopped at the edge of some semi-cleared land. Another fifty yards through the brush, and we were in the trees, part of the vast expanse of Pennsylvania State Game Lands that ran for miles on the eastern side of Roseland. Unlike during the spring and summer, we could see a good distance, and could easily make out the shapes of the denuded trees all around us. Areas of not quite melted snow made yellow-white islands on the brown sea of dying vegetation and mud, and the thick wet surface made for tough walking.

  “I can’t be sure, but I know it wasn’t far from the road. They found him pretty quick. It musta been somewhere around here…”

  I took out the photos and held up one of the wide shots of several people around the tree. “This do anything for you?” I asked.

  “Other than make me lose my appetite, no…”

  We continued to walk through the woods about twenty paces apart, still heading away from the road. There were dozens of trees as big or bigger than the one in the photo, but none whose limbs followed the same pattern as that from which Elmer had hanged himself. Finally, Uncle Ralph stopped and shook his head.

  “I don’t see any tree that looks like that one, and I just don’t remember…there isn’t that sense you get when you…when you know that you’re there. Am I making any sense, Livy? Jeez, I’m getting senile or something.”

  “No, I get it,” I said, walking toward him. “I do know what you mean.” Then a thought struck me, and I took the photos out again and looked at them, in more detail this time. “Uncle Ralph, do you remember what time of day it was when they found Elmer Bingley? You said you and Daddy were chopping wood when the guy who found him came out of the woods.”

  Uncle Ralph frowned, and then his features softened as he seemed to be peering into the middle distance. “We always chopped kindling before supper,” he said. “It was summer, I think…late afternoon, if we were chopping. Sure, it had to be.”

  “Okay, late afternoon. Then the sun was from the west.” I pointed back the way we had come. “That way, from the road. Now, in the pictures, look where the shadows are.” Though I didn’t like to examine them that closely, I held up the two close-ups of Elmer, one of his face, and the other taken from behind, showing the back of his head and the groove in his neck.

  Uncle Ralph nodded. “I get it. His face is in shadow, but the back of neck is well lit. The sun was behind him.”
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br />   I nodded. “So he was facing east, away from the sun. That means that we’ve been trying to find the tree by recognizing it from the other side. We need to walk back the way we came and start looking.”

  He gave his head a sarcastic shake so that the loose skin under his jaw trembled. “Oh yeah, that’ll make a big difference…”

  Surprisingly enough, it did. We hadn’t walked thirty yards when Ralph muttered, “Holy crap…” It was so unlike him to swear, even so genteelly, that I immediately looked where he was looking, and saw the tree.

  Its outline was unmistakable. There was the thick trunk, with round boles near the base, and the three lower limbs jutting out at angles that were certainly not unique in all the forests of the world, but in this limited context were unmistakable. “That’s the one,” I said, and Uncle Ralph nodded in agreement.

  We walked around the tree for a minute or so. I felt a little creepy, knowing that it was from this tree that Elmer Bingley ended his life, but there was certainly no psychic zip-a-dee-doo-dah, and I was a tad disappointed. I examined the limb to which the rope had been tied, but there was no indentation. They had probably cut the rope off at the limb seventy years earlier.

  There were also no rocks around. The ground was smooth and unbroken, so Elmer couldn’t have broken his neck by jumping off of anything already there. And the slant of the limb told me that he couldn’t have climbed it. Besides, if he had somehow been able to and then jumped or let himself fall, his legs would have been awry, instead of the way they were in the photographs, merely slumped.

  “So,” I said, “does anything ring a bell? Do you remember anything you didn’t before?”

  “Like your crate and barrel? No, Livy, I don’t recall anything like that, I’m sorry.” He gave a half-laugh, half-snort through his nose. “I’m at the point now where I don’t know if my memories are from real life or from the photos.”

  I knew what he meant. I did the same thing, manufacturing moving memories from childhood photos I had seen over and over again growing up, so that I wasn’t sure if I remembered the actual events or just their Kodachrome remains.