Killing Cassidy

by Jeanne M. Dams

  “Heavens, no! Some people did pay him back, of course. Frank and I did. He helped finance our first sabbatical in England, you see. But he never made any demands. I think he forgot about most of the deals. And very few of them were for large amounts, anyway. At least, so far as I know. The whole thing was kind of a secret, you see. A conspiracy of silence among Kevin’s friends and the people he helped, so he wouldn’t end up with beggars on his doorstep.”

  Alan ran a hand down the back of his head in a familiar gesture of frustration. “Yes. Well, we haven’t exhausted all the possibilities, but on the face of it he doesn’t appear to be a likely murder victim.”

  “No. But—the letter—”

  “Yes. The letter.”

  We were back to that charged silence.

  “Alan, honestly, he wasn’t at all likely to make up something stupid.”

  “I hate to say this, love, but you last saw him—when?”

  “I know, I know. Over three years ago. And yes, he was very, very old. And old people do lose their marbles and get paranoid and all the rest of it. But his last Christmas card was perfectly sane and lucid. And even though the content of the sealed letter was pretty weird, the tone was quite reasonable. Don’t you think?”

  Alan stood up and sighed. “What I think is that we don’t know anything like enough to make any judgment. And I also think—no, I know—that our holiday is a total loss until we learn enough to dismiss the question.”

  I stood, too, and we began to walk slowly to the edge of the campus. “Then you don’t believe it?”

  “Not yet, no. But I’m keeping an open mind until we have some hard facts.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief, careful to keep it inaudible. “Alan, I was so afraid you were going to say we ought to just forget about it. And I couldn’t have done that.”

  He tucked my hand under my arm. “My dear, I would have liked to say just that. I dislike the idea of your becoming involved in anything that even might bring you into danger. But we made a pact quite some time ago, didn’t we? I promised to curb my protective instincts if you would promise to use reasonable caution.

  “Besides,” he added, “I was a policeman for too many years not to be intrigued. I, too, want to get to the bottom of this.”

  “Then we need a plan of action,” I said eagerly.

  “Pencil and paper. Back to the hotel, Sherlock.”

  The hotel room was a typical one, clean, bland, anonymous. King-size bed with an ultra-firm mattress I hated, bedside table, desk, chest of drawers, television cabinet, round table with two chairs. The only available paper, besides that provided for hygienic purposes, was a telephone pad about three inches wide. Alan picked it up with a look of distaste and sat down with me at the table.

  “What do we need to know?” he began.

  “Everything.”

  “Right. But we have to start somewhere.”

  “Where would you start, if we were at—if we were in England?”

  “With the SOCOs’ report. If, of course, a crime had been reported and scene of crime officers had been dispatched.”

  “Well, that doesn’t get us much of anywhere here, does it? I mean, there was no apparent crime, and I very much doubt if the police were even involved.”

  “But we don’t know that, do we? We know nothing whatever about the circumstances of the professor’s death.”

  “That’s true. Maybe that’s the first thing to ask about.”

  “And whom,” said Alan, “do you plan to ask?”

  “His doctor, his neighbors—oh.”

  “Exactly. ‘Say nothing to anyone.’”

  “But then how on earth …?”

  Alan made a face. “It does appear, doesn’t it, that your friend has set you an impossible task. You’re to investigate a crime that may not be a crime, and without talking to anyone.”

  I got up from the table and began to pace the limited confines of the room.

  “He didn’t say I couldn’t talk to anyone. Or he didn’t mean that. He meant I mustn’t ask dangerous questions. Alan, this is my hometown. I know lots of people. It would be more suspicious if I didn’t talk to them, and what could be more natural than to inquire into Kevin’s death? I’ll just have to play it cool and not let it look as though I’m prying into anything specific.”

  He looked dubious.

  “No, I can do this. We already have one invitation to dinner, you know, and as soon as word gets out that I’m in town, there’ll be more. There’ll be lots of chances to talk.”

  The phone rang. I was closest. “Hello?”

  “Is this Dorothy Martin? Could you hold, please, for Dr. Foley?”

  The phone went dead for a moment. “His doctor,” I mouthed at Alan. “And mine. He and his wife have been friends for years.”

  “Dorothy?” The phone came back to life.

  “Nice to hear from you, Doc.”

  There was a brief pause. “You don’t sound quite like yourself.”

  “Oh, Doc, I’m just me, the same old person. Don’t tell me I sound English!”

  A chuckle. “Okay, I won’t. I heard you were in town, and I called to see if you can come to dinner tonight. Short notice, but it just happens I have no babies due and nobody in the hospital with anything critical, so unless somebody has a heart attack or an appendix takes a notion to get fussy, I should be free. A doctor has to seize the moment, you know. And I think Peggy has some salmon all ready for the grill.”

  “Ah, the salmon clinches it. We’d love to. What time?”

  “Eightish? I’ve got a long day here.”

  “Eightish it is. Keep your fingers crossed about those hearts and appendixes. Appendices?”

  He chuckled again and hung up. I looked at Alan with, I’m afraid, a smug expression. “That’s one down.”

  He began to laugh. “And the other dinner invitation? I presume it’s from the attorney, the chief of police, or the professor’s next of kin?”

  “Actually, no. Frank’s old dean and his wife. So they fall into the other category Kevin mentioned, his friends. Not that everyone in town wasn’t his friend.”

  I fell silent and bit my lip. Alan’s eyes held sympathy.

  “This is a trifle difficult for you, isn’t it, love?”

  “More than a trifle. I’m so confused, Alan. It seems so impossible that anyone could have murdered Kevin. He was a genuinely good man, and everyone who knew him really did love him. He never harmed a living soul. In fact, those antibiotics of his saved thousands of lives, maybe millions. And yet—and yet he was also an extremely intelligent and supremely logical man, and he was convinced someone was trying to kill him. So convinced that he tried to enlist my help, and when he couldn’t, he commissioned me to catch his murderer. I have to accept that commission, no matter how remote the possibility that Kevin was right. I owe it to him.” My lip trembled a little.

  “Of course you do.” Alan spoke briskly. He knows how to deal with my moods. “So I suggest we go out and find ourselves some lunch, and then buy a proper notebook and begin to lay out procedure. We will be able to find a notebook in some shop or other, I trust?”

  I giggled, as he meant me to. “Alan, this is a college town. We’ll trip over them! All emblazoned in gold with the seal of Randolph University. We’ll go to the biggest bookstore the minute we’ve finished eating. Right now I’m going to show you where to find the best stromboli sandwich in the world.”

  3

  AN hour later, replete with sausage, peppers, onions, tomato sauce, mozzarella, and entirely too much bread, we repaired to Howard’s, the huge bookstore that had served the needs of Randolph University for well over a hundred years. I had to drag Alan away from the display of college souvenirs.

  “They’re so gaudy, so brash, so—”

  “Is tacky the word you’re looking for?”

  “No, indeed! Actually they’re quite well made, for the most part, and certainly they’re colorful. But why the tiger? Surely there are no tigers in
this part of the world.”

  I laughed. “Only in the zoos. No, you see, John Randolph was a very wealthy young man in the early nineteenth century. He went on a grand tour that was even grander than most, including both Europe and points East. He apparently fell in love with tigers in India, and the passion never deserted him. So later on, when he decided to perpetuate his name by founding a college, he insisted that the architect feature decorative tigers. I’ll show you the original ones on the Administration Building. And later trustees kept up the tradition, so now they’re all over the place, on gateposts and benches and wherever. There even used to be a topiary one over by the horticulture building, though I don’t know if they’ve kept it clipped. It was only natural that a tiger become the mascot; it’s a nice, fierce symbol for the football team. Come on, we’re looking for a notebook.”

  There was, of course, a tiger’s head on the spiral notebooks. I bought four of them, thick ones with subject dividers. I have a thing for spiral notebooks, and I can’t find the kind I like in England. Alan drifted back to the souvenirs. When we finally left the store he had acquired five tiger sweatshirts in various sizes for his grandchildren and one for each of us, a tiger tie, tiger bookends, and a really splendid stuffed tiger at a really inflated price. I had to carry the stuffed one.

  “Remind me never to take you shopping again.” I shifted my awkward burden. A striped tail poked me in the eye.

  “Oh, but you will, the next time you visit a mystery bookshop. You can’t carry fifty or sixty books yourself.”

  I shut up.

  Our purchases—mostly Alan’s purchases—took up a good deal of space in our hotel room. The sweatshirts would fit on the closet shelf if we removed the extra pillows, but they kept cascading to the floor in their plastic bags. I finally moved my nightgowns and underwear to the shelf and stuffed the shirts, with some difficulty, into the drawer. The tiger went on top of the television cabinet, where its snarl intimidated us. I made a face, and Alan looked a little abashed.

  “We may perhaps need to post a few things back to Sherebury?” he suggested. “Sorry for the clutter, darling. I’ve not been in the habit of acquiring barnacles on my travels, not on this scale, at any rate.”

  I took pity. “The first time I went to England I bought everything in sight. We’ll send things back, of course, but we might as well wait a while. As you just reminded me, there’s a mystery bookstore in town, and I can’t go back to England without hitting it. Books are a lot cheaper over here.”

  I shoved the tie box and the bookends to one side of the table and sat down with one of my bright, shiny new notebooks. All that virgin paper was revving my mind.

  “Now. First of all, we need to find out exactly how Kevin died. When, where, how long he was sick—all that.”

  “Also who was with him when he died and immediately before he became ill.”

  “Yes, very good. I’d forgotten about that. That’ll be a little harder, though.” I wrote:

  1. Circumstances of death

  2. Who was present?

  “Next—what’s next, Alan?”

  “The classic triad: means, motive, opportunity. We can’t deal with means or opportunity until we know the precise cause of death, so motive seems a logical pursuit at this stage. Though it’s the weakest link in making a case, you know.”

  “I know, but it’s always been my favorite. Means and opportunity are more police concerns, forensic evidence kinds of things. An amateur can find out a lot about motive just by talking to people.”

  “You’re probably right. So shall we approach the specific people the professor—”

  “Call him Kevin. He’d want you to if he were alive.”

  “Very well, the people Kevin mentioned specifically?”

  “I think we have to, you know. There had to be a reason he cited them in particular. He might not have known who was trying to get rid of him, but those people came to mind when he was writing a very important letter. Subconsciously, maybe, he had some reason for suspecting them.”

  “Right. Then the next thing on your list ought to be a schedule of interviews.”

  Obediently, I wrote:

  3. Interviews

  a. Doctor

  “That’s tonight, but I put him down so there’s a place to write the report.”

  If Alan smiled he hid it very well. I continued:

  b. Police Chief

  c. Attorney

  d. Kevin’s family?

  “I can’t put down ‘friends,’” I said as Alan looked upside down at what I’d written. “We’d be here for months.”

  “The query after family?”

  “I’m not sure which ones live here. He didn’t—it’s funny, Alan, now that I think about it, but he never talked about his family much.”

  “Problems?”

  “I don’t know. It’s worth following up, though.” I added an exclamation point to the “family” entry and then stared into space, tapping my pen on the notebook.

  “Idea?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just thinking. … Alan, what made Kevin think someone was trying to kill him?”

  “Well, I think we’ve agreed, as a working hypothesis, that he wasn’t going dotty.”

  “Yes, that’s what I mean. If he was all there, and I’ll swear he was, at least as late as last December, then there must have been something concrete to make him suspicious. In fact, Alan, there must have been attempts that didn’t succeed.”

  “Of course!” Alan smacked the table. “Other illnesses—accidents—”

  “Funny things sent to him in the mail.”

  “And they must all have been cleverly done, so that he had no idea who the villain might be.”

  “And so there was nothing to take to the police. But he wasn’t quite clever enough, was he—or she, whoever it was? Because Kevin’s suspicions were aroused, and he didn’t die.”

  “But he did die, Dorothy. In the end, he did die.”

  That sobered me. I have a tendency to view an investigation as a puzzle, a game. But we were dealing here with a man I had loved like a father, who had possibly been murdered. I tried to think logically. “It could, just barely, have been coincidence. Attempts at murder and then, at the end, an old man carried away by pneumonia. The murderer must have been delighted.”

  “If there were other incidents. If there was a murderer, or a would-be murderer. If we’re not inventing the whole scenario.”

  “You’re right. All we have to go on at the moment is what Kevin said. We’ve got to start collecting evidence.”

  “And we do need to heed Kevin’s advice and be very, very careful, Dorothy. Because if there is a murderer, he’s been successful. He’s got away with it. He’ll feel he can kill again.”

  I set my jaw and added to my list:

  4. What happened to make Kevin suspicious?

  Then I closed the notebook and buried it under the sweatshirts in the drawer. “Okay. We’ll defer any more action and speculation till we’ve talked to Dr. Foley and know a little more. Now shall we go get some exercise in this beautiful weather, or shall we take a nap? I think I’m still a little jet-lagged.”

  “Is there any reason,” asked my loving husband, a wicked expression in his blue eyes, “why we couldn’t combine exercise with a nap?”

  We dressed informally for dinner with the Foleys. The doctor, I knew, would be tired after a day beginning with six o’clock hospital rounds and ending after seven with phone calls to patients. He wouldn’t dress up. And Peggy, the kind of woman who looks terrific in anything, might be wearing blue jeans or a Chanel suit; you never knew. So I put on nice slacks and a favorite sweater, and I even let Alan wear his new sweatshirt over his shirt. “It’ll be too warm for you in the house. You know Americans and central heating. And it’ll leave fuzz all over your shirt when you take it off. But you look nice in it.”

  He did. It was dark green, the better to set off orange tiger stripes, and it was big, the better to enclose Alan’s
sturdy physique. He looked very, very solid and dependable, and I had to give him a hug.

  The Foleys live out in the country, not far from Kevin’s little house. Their house was light-years removed in style, though.

  “Good heavens,” said Alan quietly as I maneuvered the car around the curved drive and parked in front of the door.

  “I know. Peggy inherited it from her parents, along with a good deal of money, and Doc hasn’t done at all badly in his practice.”

  “It looks like Tara. Only larger.”

  “They’re not like that, though. Unassuming people. You’ll like them. Oh, and call him Doc. Everybody does, even his wife.”

  Alan still sat there. “Dorothy, you haven’t, I trust, forgotten that these charming people may be murder suspects?”

  I took my hand off the door handle. “Oh. I had forgotten. I was just thinking about seeing old friends, and incidentally picking up information. But Kevin did say … Alan, I’m not sure I like this.”

  “Goes with the territory, my dear.” He got out of the car and came around to help me out. “Shall we?”

  Arm in arm, we rang the bell of the lion’s den.

  I couldn’t raise the subject until after dinner. The food was too good to neglect, for one thing, and Doc, who is an enormous man, did full credit to it. And both Peggy and Doc kept us talking, between bites, about life in England. Alan hit it off immediately with both of them, to my relief. It isn’t always a good idea to tell someone in advance that he’ll like someone else, but Alan is an amiable sort of man, and the Foleys are both entertaining people. Alan told a fish story, Doc topped it with a hospital story, and we repaired to the living room for our coffee aching a little with laughter.

  “Decaf,” said Peggy, passing a cup to me. “Doc insists. Me, I like the real stuff, but I’ve found a good brand of decaf, and I hope it’s okay. Dorothy, I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you again. I’ve missed you.”

  “I’m glad to be back, but sorry for the reason.”

  “Ain’t it the truth? We were all really broken up about Kevin. Somehow we expected him to go on forever.”

  “No reason why he shouldn’t have,” said Doc gruffly. “Not forever, maybe, but a good while longer. I’ve got patients of fifty who aren’t anything like as healthy as he was at ninety-six. I thought for sure he’d live to a hundred, at least. Oh, he was getting a little frail. I kept after him to get some help in that little house of his. I didn’t want him chopping wood anymore, or plowing his garden. I think he was about to give in, too, but—” He spread his hands.