Murder Old and New

by Chet Williamson

  Her eyes rolled up then, and she began to spasm. I kept pressing on the wound, not knowing what else to do, but by the time three nurses arrived to help, it was too late. Her body had stopped moving, stopped fighting the inevitable. Genevieve was gone.

  I shook my head in disbelief, and one of the nurses patted me on the shoulder. Her hand was trembling, and I held it in my own and felt her fingers tightly grip mine. I let go and stood up with my bloody coat in my hands, and felt tears pooling in my eyes. I didn’t try to hold them back.

  It took the police and the ambulance a long time to arrive through the snow. While we waited for them, the Gates nurses tended as best they could to Harold Newbury’s head wound, the result of my attempt to knock out his brains with the snow globe. They had wrapped him in a blanket and placed him on my mother’s bed, after moving her to an empty room down the hall.

  Ted was back to his old solicitous self, and kept asking me if I was sure I was okay, when it was he who had sprained his ankle, and badly. The nurses fixed him up with a compression bandage in my mother’s temporary room. When I was sure that she was all right, we went back to see Harold, but we paused for a long time at Genevieve’s shrouded form still lying in the hall where she had tried to stop him.

  “I was so wrong about her,” I told Ted. “She died trying to protect my mother. She wasn’t concerned about herself at all.”

  “She was a good nurse then,” Ted said.

  When we walked into the room, we found that Harold had regained consciousness, though his eyes were glazed and faraway. He turned and looked at me, saying nothing. I stood right next to him and asked, “Why, Harold? Why my mother? I thought we were…friends.”

  His face remained blank for a moment, and then he smiled. “‘Demand me nothing,’” he said. “‘What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word.’”

  The words sounded familiar to me, and Ted reminded me with a whisper. “Shakespeare. Othello. The last words Iago says.” And then I remembered something else, the aria that Harold had requested I play from Verdi’s operatic version of the tragedy.

  Despite his Shakespearean statement, Harold did speak one more word. One word, just before he sank into the coma from which he never awoke.

  “Nulla…”

  His eyes closed.

  “What?” said one of the two nurses. “Is that somebody’s name?”

  The other nurse shook her head. I knew her only well enough to know that her family was Italian, though I’d forgotten her name if I’d ever known it. “No,” she said. “Not a name. Nulla. It’s Italian for nothing.”

  Chapter 25

  The ambulance beat the police there, but since the Gates Home was quite obviously a crime scene, the paramedics simply supported what the Gates nurses had already done while they waited for the police to arrive.

  When they did, they had a whole lot of questions for me. The plow driver had reported where I was taking the plow that I’d hijacked at gunpoint, and had given the police my name, so that when I told them who I was they seemed confused at first. Then one plainclothes officer named Lieutenant Delaney said he was sorry, but they were going to have to place both me and Ted under arrest, after which they would question me about what else happened in the Gates Home that left behind one person dead and another one comatose.

  I asked that I be allowed to call Lieutenant Dave Hutchins, who had previous knowledge of the case, and I used Delaney’s cell to call Dave’s cell.

  “Hey,” I said, “it’s Livy.”

  “My God, it’s late…what’s going on? Are you okay?”

  “Yes. Now look, this sounds crazy, but I’m at the Gates Home. I heard a tape Tom Drummond made and he admitted being the Hangman Killer. And he said that the recent deaths in the home were murders committed by Harold Newbury, who was also a serial killer. I also learned Harold was planning to kill my mother so I had to get over here fast, so I stole a snowplow. At gunpoint. I had to, because the driver wouldn’t take us. Ted and me. But the gun didn’t work. Genevieve Tucker is dead, Harold killed her, but I was able to stop him before he hurt my mother. And now Lieutenant Delaney has placed me under arrest.” I took a deep breath. “That’s it.”

  There was a long pause. “You have been a busy bee. Where’s this Harold?”

  “I knocked him out—threw a snow globe at his head.”

  “Oh-kay. How about if I just come over there.”

  “Can you get here? With the snow, I mean…”

  “I’ll see what I can do short of stealing a plow. In the meantime, let me talk to Delaney for a minute, okay?”

  I handed the phone to Delaney. Whatever Dave told him, it must have been reassuring, since he took Ted and me into a separate room where I told him the whole story and Ted corroborated what he could. When I told Delaney about Tom Drummond’s tape and what was in Harold’s box, including the note, he dispatched another officer to my address to get them, and told me that the evidence would be waiting at the station when I went down there to give my official statement.

  Dave got there about forty-five minutes after I’d called him, and he took things in hand. Harold was taken to the hospital, and Genevieve Tucker’s sad corpse to the morgue. Dave allowed me to look in on my mother once more, who was sleeping deeply by now, and then he accompanied the two “suspects” to the police station, where Ted and I were taken into a room where the snow plow driver, whose name was Whitney Burgum, was waiting to identify us.

  When he saw us, he stood up in excitement and nearly yelled, “That’s them! They’re the ones took my plow!”

  “Tell me, Mr. Burgum,” Dave said smoothly, “did Ms. Crowe tell you that her mother’s life was in danger and that was why she needed you to take her somewhere?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “And you refused?”

  “Well, sure. How was I supposed to believe her? Didn’t know her from Adam! I could get in a lot of trouble usin’ my plow as a taxicab!”

  “As it turned out, Mr. Burgum, Ms. Crowe’s mother was in danger, and if she hadn’t arrived at the Gates Home when she did, her mother would have been killed. Murdered. Ms. Crowe prevented that murder from happening.”

  “…She did?”

  “Yes sir, she did. Now being that you’re the only one who can bring charges against Ms. Crowe and this gentleman, and since there was no damage done to your plow, are you certain that you want to press charges at all? On the other hand, isn’t it possible that you might have…instructed them in the proper use of the machinery and told them to just drive on straight ahead while you sought help elsewhere?”

  It took Dave a lot longer time to drop Ted and me off at the shop than it did Whitney Burgum to drop his charges. While Ted got out of the back seat and opened the front passenger door for me, Dave looked over at me and said, “I’m glad you’re all right. That was a helluva thing you did, saving your mother like that.”

  “I just wish I’d gotten there in time to save Genevieve.”

  He nodded. “Can you be at the station tomorrow at two? That’ll give us time to examine the evidence and anything we might find in the suspect’s room.” Amazing how quickly Harold Newbury had gone from Harold to the suspect. “There’ll be an inquest, too. You’ll both have to come to that. Your actions were in defense of your mother, Livy, but still…they’ll have to make sure your story checks out, you know.”

  “Okay,” I said. “See you tomorrow. And thanks. Thanks for everything.”

  I got out, closed the door, and watched Dave drive off. The snow had nearly stopped, just a few light flakes drifting down, and it had grown colder.

  “I’ll walk you to the back,” Ted said, and held out his arm, which I took. We walked slowly, huddled together against the cold, down the alley to my door. However the police had gotten in to get the tape and Harold’s note and…souvenirs, they had locked the place back up again. I unlocked it, and we stepped into the relative warmth of the entryway.

  “And thank you, Ted. Thank yo
u so much. I wouldn’t have gotten there in time without you.”

  “I’m just glad nothing happened to you. I don’t know what I’d do if…” He broke it off and I finished it.

  “I don’t know what I’d do either.” And then I kissed him, I kissed this kind and loving boy just once, soft and sweet, and his response was equally soft and sweet, and most definitely not the way you kiss your mom.

  Chapter 26

  By the next morning the sun had come out, the streets had been plowed so that cars were getting by easily enough if they didn’t push it and took the corners and stoplights slowly, and the sidewalks were cleared enough so that I thought I’d be able to walk to the police station without getting snow over the tops of my Uggs.

  I called my mother and she was fine, but she said that for the life of her she couldn’t figure out why she was in a different room. She didn’t seem to recall anything of what had happened the night before, and that worried me. I decided to go visit her that afternoon after Dave was through with me.

  Despite our late night, Ted showed up at nine, got out the shovel, and, in spite of his ankle, tackled the deep, deep snow in front of the shop. It took him about an hour to clear it all, and when he came back in I had coffee waiting for him, which he took with a gentle smile instead of the look of indifference he’d been recently feigning, or the worshipful gaze of longing that had been his signature expression for so long. I felt we were on some even keel that might or might not lead to something else, and though there was a little, dare I say, sexual tension in the air, still it was nice and comfortable. Finally.

  We had lunch together at our desks, and I told him all the details about Tom Drummond’s tape and Harold’s box, and filled him in on what I’d learned earlier from the old yearbook. He praised my detecting skills, though not overly much, just enough so that I felt pretty darn pleased with myself.

  I received a more professional and reserved response from Dave Hutchins, right after an air kiss and an invitation to sit down across from his desk. “We listened to the tape, Livy,” he said right off the bat. “Everything was just like you said. And that bag of bones? They really were. Finger bones, all of them, and our M.E. says that from their size they were probably taken from female victims. We’ll know for sure once DNA testing is done.

  “The note was in Harold Newbury’s handwriting. We were able to compare it with a journal he’d left in his room, right out for everyone to find. You see, he intended the killing of your mother to be his last. Oh, he killed Enid Shaw and Rachel Gold all right. And the death of Tom Drummond was no accident. He lured Drummond into that room by intimating to him that he was going to kill Mary Hamilton, then stabbed him and framed him for her attempted murder.”

  “But why? I mean, why did Harold…start killing again? At that age?”

  “He had a taste for it that apparently never went away. He implies in his journal that it returned when he saw Tom Drummond again after all those years. He smothered the first two because he couldn’t use a knife. If he had, people would have known that there’d been a murder. But old women just found dead in their beds in the morning would create little if any cause for alarm.”

  “But he was trying to stab my mother.”

  “That’s right. Your mother was special. She was supposed to be the last. Harold knew he was dying and wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. That’s why he was naked, too. I assume that was part of his M.O. from the old days.”

  “But why my mother?” I asked. “I mean, I thought Harold and I were friends…if someone like that can actually have friends.”

  “I think from what he said in his journal that he actually liked you. But you have to remember, he was a true sociopath, which means that he had no empathy for anyone. He wrote in one of his last entries that he had finally remembered where he’d seen your mother once before, that she had been a young woman whom he had wanted to victimize, but hadn’t had a chance to. He even wrote down the date when he had seen her—August 17th, 1939.”

  “What? That’s crazy—Mother was only born in 1932. She’d have been, what…seven in 1939.”

  “I think ‘crazy’ may be the key word here. Something about your mother clicked inside Harold so that he thought she was this…one who got away. And now he had a chance to make it right, as he put it. Your mother triggered this fantasy inside him of finishing something left undone—reclaiming what he thought of as his ideal victim.

  “He tried. But you stopped him. And Genevieve Tucker slowed him down. He had to get her pass key to get into your mother’s room, and apparently, they struggled for a while before he stabbed her. There are some scratches on his neck that she made. He mentions her in his journal, too. For some reason he thought that she suspected him, and at one point he evidently planned to get rid of her the same way he took care of Drummond.”

  “My God,” I said, shaking my head. “He was the one who raised my suspicions in the first place—he told me that he suspected Enid and Rachel’s deaths weren’t due to natural causes. Why would he have done that?”

  Dave shrugged. “Maybe he wanted somebody to know. Part of his…pleasure may have been knowing that he caused fear in others.”

  I nodded, then asked, “What’s Harold’s condition now?” Funny, but I still kind of cared.

  “Still in a coma, and not likely to come out. His body’s shutting down.”

  “Because of…what I did?”

  Dave shook his head. “Don’t blame yourself. He had so many things wrong with him that it would’ve been a miracle if he’d lived another few months. You actually did him a favor—right now he’s feeling no pain. Just…nothing.”

  I thought for a moment. “Nulla,” I said.

  “What?”

  “It was the last thing he said. Nulla. Nothing.” I looked up at Dave as I thought of something. “Could you check something for me on the Internet? Right now?”

  He looked at me curiously but nodded and swung around to his keyboard.

  “Google Otello—like Othello spelled without an H—Verdi… Credo…libretto…translation… and see what we get.”

  Wikipedia had a link to an English translation of the opera, and we found Iago’s aria, the Credo, at the beginning of the second act. “This was Harold’s favorite aria,” I said. “I just thought maybe…”

  Dave looked over the translation and read parts of it:

  “‘I believe in a cruel God who created me similar to Himself…The evil I think, the evil that comes from me, is wrought by my destiny…and I believe that man is the plaything of unjust fate from the germ of the cradle to the worm of the grave…’”

  “Nice dark stuff, isn’t it?” I observed grimly, and Dave went on.

  “‘After so much derision comes Death. And then? Death is Nothingness and heaven an old wives’ tale.’” He paused for a moment. “In Italian? ‘La Morte e il Nulla.’ “

  “Nulla,” I repeated. “Nothingness. I guess that’s what was inside him all along.”

  Chapter 27

  Harold died two weeks later, never coming out of his coma, true to his last words. The inquest into his death was unpleasant, but I walked away from it somewhat of a hero, after it was shown that Harold was responsible for four murders. Security at the Gates Home tripled in intensity, and everyone now has to sign in and sign out and show a photo ID, volunteers and visitors alike.

  I’ve been visiting my mother more, and am afraid that she’s continuing to fail, but in a somewhat benign manner. She tends to forget things, which, in the case of the recent events at the home, has been a blessing. She seems oblivious to it all, and relatively happy in her growing ignorance. She’s been scheduled for a battery of tests, including neurological ones, so we’ll see what we will see.

  One of those pesky loose ends got tied up a week after Harold died. I got a call from Dave asking me to come in and identify a burglary suspect who had been apprehended in another local retirement home. His appearance matched my description of the person I’d seen over M
other’s bed, and more to the point, a wooden peg was found outside the door where he’d apparently entered.

  As close as I could tell, it was probably the same guy, though I couldn’t be sure, not having seen his face that night. Still, Dave told me they’d get a conviction, since he’d been caught red-handed. Sometimes, Dave said, a burglar is just a burglar. Like sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, I thought.

  And speaking of Dave, we’ve gone out a number of times now, and slept together a lesser number, to my transient physical delight but lesser emotional satisfaction. Our relationship seems to have stalled on a plateau, instead of continuing toward a higher peak. Or, as Karen has so unsubtly put it, “the bangin’ is good, but the hangin’ isn’t.” God, I don’t know why I hang with her at all.

  I actually have more fun with Ted. We’ve continued our movie dates, and they’ve turned into more than buddy dates, what with some handholding and kissing goodnight, though we haven’t gone further, and there’s no hanky panky during working hours, though sometimes I think it’d be fun. I guess I’m still a little put off by his age, but I’m working on it. So that romantic mushy part of the story isn’t over by a long shot.

  There’s one part that is, though. In late February we had a spell of warm weather with temperatures in the mid-fifties, enough to finally melt all the snow. That Sunday I decided to go and pay some respect, so to speak.

  Whenever the weather got nice, my mother had always taken flowers to my father’s grave, and she’d been harping on the fact that she wouldn’t be able to do that anymore and wouldn’t I please take over for her. I’ve never been able to refuse my mother, and it seemed more important than ever now, so I told her that the first decent day we had I’d take some flowers to the cemetery.

  I always liked making the trip. My dad’s ashes were interred in a small rural cemetery attached to the Stonebrook Christian Alliance Church. No one in my family had ever attended services there, but it was the nearest cemetery to Roseland, about two miles away, and my grandparents and great-grandparents were buried there. I figure whatever’s left of me might be planted there as well. It’s a pretty spot, with cornfields on one side and a farmhouse and barns across the road.