Killing Cassidy

by Jeanne M. Dams

  “Just how did he die, Doc?” I said, hoping my voice didn’t sound as tense as I felt. “I really haven’t heard any of the details.”

  “And I can’t give them to you.”

  “But—oh, medical ethics, I suppose.” I was a little hurt. Doc had never been one to stand on ceremony with me.

  “Come on, Dorothy. You know me better than that, and besides, the man’s dead. Can’t hurt him now. No, it’s just that I wasn’t there.” He settled back more comfortably in a massive leather chair that would have suited Nero Wolfe. “You know I don’t go away much—”

  Peggy snorted. “Much! Three or four real vacations in forty years!”

  Doc just grinned at her. “But there was an AMA convention up in Minneapolis, and Peggy’s folks are from those parts, so she talked me into going. Waste of time, most of it. One or two useful seminars, maybe. Anyway, I left my practice with Jim Boland, decent young guy who has an office in the same building. He doesn’t have a lot of patients yet, so I give him my overflow from time to time. Well, we fill in for each other, really. It’s time I started thinking about who’ll take over from me when I retire.”

  Peggy snorted again, but said nothing. I wasn’t sure whether she was commenting on anyone’s ability to take over from Doc or the unlikelihood of his ever consenting to retire.

  “Anyway, I got back to find Kevin in the hospital with galloping pneumonia. We pumped him full of antibiotics and did everything possible, but his heart at ninety-six …” He sighed. “He died comfortably, Dorothy. Slipped into a coma and just didn’t wake up. He was lucid almost to the end, and as serene as he always was.”

  “Did he—” I cleared my throat to try to get rid of the lump in it. “Did he know he was dying?”

  Doc’s eyes held pity. “He was a microbiologist, Dorothy. He fought it, fought it hard, but the last couple of days, he knew he’d lost the battle, and then he just accepted it.” Doc seemed to have an obstruction in his throat, too. “He was a great man.”

  There were other questions I wanted to ask, but I knew I’d start bawling like a baby if I opened my mouth. Alan must have seen my chin quiver. He nodded reassuringly and addressed Doc.

  “I’m sorry I’ll never have the chance to know him. He sounds like a remarkable person. I suppose it was the usual pattern for someone his age—fell and broke his hip and contracted pneumonia?”

  “Not this time. No broken bones. Anyway, his bones were strong as an ox’s. Came from all that exercise he always got, and eating healthy. No, no telling how he got it, really.”

  “We had that freak cold spell just about then,” Peggy put in. “Down in the fifties, Dorothy, forties one night. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that’s happened around here in August! And Kevin didn’t have a furnace, you know, only that old woodstove.”

  “His woodstove isn’t all that old,” said Doc. “It’s a modern Franklin stove, and Kevin had that cabin good and tight. He liked to be warm, the way old people do. Anyway, you don’t get pneumonia from being cold. You get it from a virus, or a bacterium, depending. He must’ve picked up a bug somewhere, and then took too long to get to a doctor.”

  “Now, Doc, you’re not going to start that again, are you?” Peggy shook her head. “He blames himself. Thinks if he’d been here, Kevin would’ve waltzed right in to the office when he first started to cough. It’s just plain stupid! No, Doc, let me have my say. I’ve told you a dozen times: Kevin always did think he could take care of himself, and never went to see you till he was sick as a dog. Why, that time he fell down his front steps, he never even went in at all!”

  I recovered my voice. “Fell down the steps?”

  “Yes, Doc saw him limping down Main Street one day and asked him what happened. He said he’d sprained his ankle. And would you believe he wouldn’t even let Doc X-ray it? Said he knew it wasn’t broken, and an Ace bandage was all he needed.”

  “Good grief! What did he do, slip on an icy step?”

  “No, it was in the spring,” said Doc. “Just tripped, I guess. That was when I started agitating for him to get some help in the house, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Just said he was going to get new glasses so he wouldn’t trip over his own feet like an old fool. Well, I couldn’t force him to do anything, could I?”

  He sounded a little defensive.

  “It is difficult, isn’t it?” said Alan tactfully. “We worry about the elderly and try to look after them, but they don’t want to give up their independence, and one can understand, really. My own mother is a case in point.” He went off into a rather rambling reminiscence that eventually turned the subject to cats and crocheting, and we finished the evening on a pleasant note.

  But when Alan and I were driving back to the hotel, I said, “He fell down the steps.”

  “Yes. That’s one accident. Do you suppose we’ll find others?”

  4

  THE next morning we spent some time planning a strategy. First I got out the notebook and entered our meager discoveries:

  Circumstances of death No broken bones. Died in hospital. Cause of pneumonia not known. Bug? Where had he been lately?

  Who was present? Not Doc Foley, beforehand. Who was?

  “We haven’t gotten very far, have we?”

  “Not very. But a little farther than we were. We know your doctor—whom I like very much, by the way—wasn’t present immediately before Kevin became ill. We know it was a straightforward case of pneumonia. And we know Kevin had had at least one accident.”

  I sighed. “The trouble is, it points both ways. Plain old pneumonia—but a previous accident. Oh, but wait a minute, Alan! Do we know it was, as you put it, a straightforward illness? Doc didn’t tell us he’d looked at X rays or anything. Maybe it was something else, some disease that looks like pneumonia but won’t be cured by the antibiotics they usually use! Maybe—”

  “Dorothy, I don’t want to dampen your enthusiasm, but Dr. Foley strikes me as an extremely competent and caring physician. I doubt he would misdiagnose a case at this stage in his career, especially when the patient was a very old friend.”

  “Oh, you’re probably right. Well, what’s next, then?”

  “I think we want to look into other accidents. Or perhaps ‘incidents’ would be a better word to use. Anything at all unusual that occurred in Kevin’s life in the period shortly before his death.”

  “Golly, that could cover a lot of territory. How long before, do you think?”

  “His letter to you wasn’t dated, was it?”

  “It’s still in your coat pocket. Check.”

  He went to the closet and came back with the stiff envelope in his hand. “No,” he said, taking the letter out and glancing at it. “No date.” He put the letter back in the envelope and took the packet to the window, where he studied it very carefully in the strong light of a sunny morning. “I wish I had a magnifying glass,” he muttered.

  I fished my deluxe Swiss Army knife out of my purse, pulled up the minute magnifier, and handed the contraption to him.

  He smiled, one of those superior male smiles that can be so infuriating. “Thank you, my dear, but I require something larger than my thumb. I seem to recall a glass amongst the university souvenirs; I’ll buy one later. Meanwhile, do you think it would be as well to keep this document in the hotel safe?”

  “Why? What do you suspect?”

  “I told you before, I think like a policeman. The letter, in the wrong hands, could be dangerous. One tries to avoid danger. One also tries to preserve evidence. I don’t suppose you have a larger envelope we could put it in?”

  “As it happens, I do.” I hauled it, too, out of my capacious handbag. “I was saving receipts in it, for when we submit our expenses.”

  “If we submit our expenses.”

  “But, Alan—”

  “The charming Ms. Carmichael could be our villain, you know.”

  “Oh.”

  “Meanwhile,” he said, putting the smaller envelope in the
larger one, “back to our strategy. How are we to learn of Kevin’s recent history, say for the past six months?”

  I avoided looking at the envelope, which my lively imagination had endowed with all the aspects of a bomb, and pulled my thoughts together. “Talk to his neighbors, I suppose. He doesn’t have many, living where he does—did—but there are a few, and I think they all sort of looked out for him.”

  “Do you know them?”

  “Some of them, a little, or at least I used to. But I think they’ll talk to me. Southern Indiana is a pretty friendly sort of place. And while we’re out there we can look over his house, too. He almost never kept it locked, and there might be some evidence there.”

  “Then think of a good excuse to talk to people, and let’s go.”

  I still hadn’t come up with anything very convincing by the time we rolled up in front of Kevin’s cabin. I’d gotten mildly lost on the way. The country roads in that part of Indiana can be confusing, and I’d called on Kevin only a few times during our long acquaintance, usually with Frank driving.

  “It’s quite nice, actually,” said Alan in a surprised sort of voice as we extricated ourselves from the car with the little grunts that movement seems to elicit at our age.

  “Well, of course. What were you expecting, Davy Crockett?”

  “More or less, I suppose.”

  We stood arm in arm looking at Kevin’s home.

  It was set well back from the road, down a winding drive, in a little clearing. All around the house were oak and maple trees just beginning to put on their autumn dress. Now and then a leaf would drift down lazily through the golden dust motes to land amid the brilliant red and orange and lavender and white chrysanthemums of Kevin’s flower garden.

  The house, a snug bungalow, was made of pine logs, warm and golden in the sun. The windows and door hung straight and true. A couple of rocking chairs on the front porch welcomed visitors with soft cushions. Crisp red-checked curtains hung at the windows, which shone with cleanliness, even a month or more after Kevin had last been able to care for them. On one side of the house rose a fieldstone chimney, well built and in excellent repair, with a couple of cords of firewood neatly stacked nearby. At the back a sort of lean-to shed protruded. I didn’t remember that part, but then I hadn’t been out here in years.

  There were a few weeds in the gardens, but the flowers bloomed riotously. Tomatoes and zucchini and acorn squash and kale and cabbage and brussel sprouts and cucumbers, along with chives and basil and oregano and dill and other herbs I couldn’t name, grew in a profusion that would have provided Kevin with plenty of food to put up for the winter. From somewhere around back came the heady scent of Concord grapes, and an apple tree by the front porch was heavy with russet-and-green fruit.

  “It’s a friendly house,” said Alan.

  “It was.”

  “I suppose those are the steps he fell down.” He pointed to the porch steps. “Odd. There’s a handrail, and the whole affair looks quite sturdy.”

  “He took great pride in his house and always kept it in good repair. Oh, Alan!” I put my head against his chest and cried the first real tears I had shed since I had heard of Kevin’s death.

  “Feel better?” he said a few minutes later when I’d reached the sniffles-and-tissue stage.

  I blew my nose.

  “I suppose so. It was just the thought of this sweet house waiting for him, and the garden, and he’ll never taste those grapes, or sit in front of another fire in his stove. That’s what that nice chimney’s for: the Franklin stove, not an open fire. Kevin was so proud of that stove, Alan. He installed it himself, very carefully so there was no danger of fire. It kept the whole place toasty warm. And it pleased him that he wasn’t using up fossil fuels. He didn’t even cut down live trees, mostly, just used the ones that were felled by storms, or else he culled saplings that didn’t have enough light in the woods to grow properly.”

  I sniffled again. “He truly loved all creation, I think. His cats—oh, my word, Alan, I never thought about his cats! He always had a lot of them. I just hope—”

  “You got no call to fret about them cats, ma’am.”

  We both whirled. There had been no sound to warn of anyone’s approach.

  “I wouldn’t let no animal starve, ’specially the professor’s. Them cats is safe with me.” The voice was raspy and more than a little belligerent, and the man who’d come up behind us matched the voice. He was even bigger than Alan, but his weight ran to fat rather than muscle. His grizzled beard was long and unkempt. His checkered wool shirt, hanging over a capacious belly, was torn and dirty. He stood looking from one of us to the other, a rifle dangling casually from one hairy paw. The rifle pointed to the ground, but the giant’s attitude clearly indicated that it might be raised at any moment.

  “You got some business around here?”

  I was struck dumb, but Alan nodded pleasantly, if a little warily. “Professor Cassidy was a great friend of my wife’s. We came to see his house, by way of pilgrimage.”

  “Huh? Hey, where you from, anyways?”

  “I’m from England. My wife was born and raised in Hillsburg.”

  The massive head turned my way. “Then how come you talk funny, too? I heard you when I come up.”

  I was getting tired of remarks about my accent. “I’ve lived away from here for several years. My name is Dorothy Martin, by the way. My husband—my late husband—was a professor, too. We used to come and visit Kevin now and then, but I don’t believe we’ve ever met.” I held out my hand. It was ignored.

  “Y’know, I don’t much like strangers comin’ pokin’ around. I kept an eye on the place when the professor was alive and I’m still keepin’ an eye on it. Don’t want nobody stealin’ nothin’. He was a good man, the professor.”

  I wondered if it would help if I identified Alan as a retired policeman. I decided not.

  In fact, I wasn’t sure what to do. We certainly couldn’t go into the house with the self-appointed guardian there, nor even peer in the windows. And the giant was extremely intimidating. I looked helplessly at Alan.

  He came through in style. “I’m sure all the professor’s friends are very grateful to you, Mr.—I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.” He spoke very slowly and articulated very carefully.

  “Jerry’s the name. Pleased to meetcha.” He shifted the rifle and squeezed Alan’s hand. I saw the fleeting expression of pain cross Alan’s face, but he managed not to wring his hand. I got the picture. He would shake Alan’s hand, but not mine. That put me in my place!

  “Mine’s Alan. We’ve been worried, my wife and I, about Professor Cassidy’s house, and of course his animals, but it’s obvious you have everything under control. Though I don’t suppose there’s any danger, really. Certainly there can’t be very much traffic in this out-of-the-way spot.”

  “Traffic? Ain’t no traffic. This here driveway don’t go no place.”

  “Sorry, I meant foot traffic. People coming to call—to visit.”

  “Mister, ain’t nobody comin’,” said the giant patiently. “Nobody comes to a man’s house when he’s dead. ’Cept you folks.” The suspicion, which had abated, crept back into his voice.

  “Of course. I seem to be very stupid today. What I meant to say was, did people come to see him before he became ill?”

  “Not many, not no more. I been livin’ over yonder”—he gestured vaguely with the rifle—“gettin’ on for thirty years now. Used to be people comin’ all the time, kids, other professors.” He looked back at me; his gaze sharpened, focused on my bright orange linen hat. “Sa-ay! I think mebbe I do remember you now. Are you the crazy woman who always used to show up in hats?”

  I accepted the adjective. “That’s me.”

  The giant looked at me critically. “You wasn’t so fat then. And your hair wasn’t gray.”

  I judged that it was not a moment to take offense. “Time is cruel, isn’t it? How is it that I don’t remember you at all?”

/>   “Never let myself be seen. Just kept an eye on the comin’s and goin’s, that’s all. The professor, he was good to me, and I reckon he trusted ever’body. Don’t do to trust ever’body. I looked out for him. Hey, how come you want to know so much?”

  Alan opened his mouth, but I poked him in the elbow. I was ready for this one.

  “I moved away, you see, a few years ago when my husband died. I’d lost touch with Kevin. And now I feel guilty. I wanted to talk to the people who saw the most of him at the end, make sure he was well and happy—oh, I suppose just make sure there was nothing I could have done. I know it doesn’t make sense, but he was good to me, too, Jerry. I loved him.”

  The bearded face split in what might have been a smile. The whiskers made it hard to tell. “Lady, you’re mebbe all right after all. You want to know about the professor, you come with me. I can tell you anything you want to know. Come on, then!” he said impatiently.

  He turned his back and stomped off. I looked at Alan. He raised his eyebrows fractionally, then shrugged and jerked his head.

  We followed Jerry into the woods.

  5

  ALAN’S eyebrows rose again, a little higher, when we reached our destination.

  Jerry’s home, though only a few yards away from Kevin’s, was well hidden. It was a trailer. “Mobile home” didn’t suit it at all. This was a 1950s-era trailer. Not that it would ever trail behind anything ever again. The tough, wiry vines of bindweed had knitted it firmly to the ground.

  It was surrounded by junk. An old television and a front-loading washing machine leaned drunkenly against each other. Their two large, mismatched glass eyes stared out at us. Broken furniture, a bedspring, discarded cans and bottles, and several rusting hulks of cars sketched a sadly familiar scene of rural poverty. The only vehicle that looked to be in running condition was a motorcycle, an elderly but still mean-looking Harley Davidson. All in character.