“Umm—he did leave me a small bequest, yes, but—”
“Well, it’s more than he did for me. I went to his lawyer and asked. I needed money, and I thought maybe I could get an advance from my inheritance. That’s when I found out there wasn’t any inheritance. So why should I care about making you feel better?”
“Mrs. Harrison, I’m sorry that you resent me. I never meant to do you any harm, and if I can lend you—”
“Don’t call me Mrs. Harrison! I’m taking my own name back. And don’t patronize me. My husband’s left me, I’m almost due, and I’ve lost my job. They called it ‘downsizing,’ but I know it was because I’ve got kids. They figured I’d miss too much work. So now I’ve got to try to find something else, and nobody’ll even talk to me until after the baby’s born. My dear ex doesn’t pay his child support, and I could have used that money he gave you, but forget it. It’s a drop in the bucket, anyway.”
“But surely, Mrs.—umm—surely if you needed money that badly, you could have asked your uncle.”
“He was my great-uncle. Not all that close. Anyway, he’d already given me money, and I felt bad about asking for more. Loans, he called them. He was a great guy, don’t get me wrong, and I was sorry when he died. But he’d been so generous when he was alive. … I knew he didn’t have much left, but I thought he might’ve left me something, and I could’ve taken it, now that it wouldn’t leave him short.”
The children reappeared, squabbling fiercely. Sue had a bright red stain on her pink T-shirt. “Mommy, Jackie squirted his juice at me! He did it on purpose, too!”
Mrs. Harrison, or whatever she was calling herself now, went back to mothering, her voice gentle again as she dealt with her children.
I looked at Alan. He nodded. We went back to the car and drove off. I doubt if mother and children even noticed.
We barely had time to change clothes and make it to the dean’s house a fashionable fifteen minutes late. There was no time to compare ideas or write down the information we had gained.
“A lot to think about” was Alan’s only comment.
“We’ll sleep on it and get back to work tomorrow.”
Dean Elliot and his wife were charming people, but a good deal more formal than the Foleys. We chatted about inconsequentials over dinner. Kevin’s name didn’t come up until we were sipping brandy in the elegant living room.
“I’d like to make a toast,” said the dean. “Or perhaps two of them. First, to friends, old and new.” He lifted his glass and nodded gracefully, first to me, then to Alan. “And second, to two very fine scientists and valued colleagues, Frank Martin and Kevin Cassidy.”
If I hadn’t suspected what was coming, I’d have disgraced myself with tears. Frank’s name, heard unexpectedly, could still do that to me. Fortunately, I’d heard the dean do this sort of thing before, so I was able to lift my glass composedly and join in the toast. I felt Alan’s glance, though, and knew that he knew what I was thinking. He usually did.
“How well did you know Kevin, Dean?” I asked when I had put my glass down. I’d had more than enough to drink.
“Not well, really, except by reputation. He’d retired before I came to Randolph, but of course he continued his experimental work until the last few years of his life, so I came across him now and again in the labs. A truly brilliant microbiologist.”
“Frank always said Kevin had the finest mind he’d ever come across. I don’t know a lot about the technical aspects of microbiology, of course, but I do know that Kevin could argue circles around anybody, on almost any subject, and leave his opponents laughing when he’d finished demolishing them. We used to have some wonderful parties in the old days, when he was at the top of his form.”
“That, I always think,” said Helen Elliot, “is one of the saddest things about growing old. Kevin was still sharp as a tack, right up to the end, but he’d gotten out of the habit of going places. He used to come to our parties, too, years ago, but I hadn’t seen him in, oh, two or three years, I expect. I think his best friends had died off, one by one, and he didn’t make new ones once he left the university.”
“The isolation of age,” said Alan, nodding. “I imagine that’s what killed him, in the end. He became ill, and there was no one to get him to a doctor in time. Although we have been hearing about some accidents that might have caused the pneumonia.”
“Accidents? How could an accident cause pneumonia?” Helen asked.
“Staying in bed too much, I expect, dear,” said the dean. “Not good for anyone, and very bad for the elderly, whose lungs don’t work too efficiently anyway. But I never heard that Kevin was prone to accidents.”
“We’d lost touch, both of us,” said Helen, shaking her head. “I felt so badly about it when it was too late.”
We commiserated with each other over our mutual feelings of guilt, and then changed the subject to something more cheerful. I drank some more brandy, against my better judgment, and let Alan drive us home.
We slept late the next morning under the influence partly of the brandy and partly of the weather. The beautiful spell we’d been having had broken during the night. We woke to dismal clouds and steady rain, and went back to sleep again.
When I finally roused myself, I took a couple of aspirin for my headache and made coffee in the little appliance provided by a thoughtful management. I poured a cup for Alan and handed it to him in bed.
“Here. Restorative.”
Alan, thank heaven, is not the chatty sort first thing in the morning. I surface slowly, myself, and cannot abide bright cheeriness until I’ve had at least one cup of coffee.
“Not a very pleasant day” was Alan’s first comment, when we had both ingested sufficient caffeine to be more or less human.
“No.” I yawned hugely. “I’m sorely tempted to crawl back into bed.”
“We-ell …,” said Alan, patting the pillow next to him and giving his best imitation of a leer.
“Not this morning, love, I’ve got a headache.”
And then I heard what I’d said, and we broke into giggles at the stale old line, and by the time we recovered, we were both wide awake.
“Very well, what shall we do today? I categorically refuse to go out. And I may say, by the way, that I am sorely disappointed by this rain. You, my dear, quite clearly gave me to understand that the weather in America is always fine.”
“Almost always. Except in the fall, of course. And the spring. And sometimes in summer. And then of course in winter we get some snow, and a fair amount of sleet. But most of the time, it’s beautiful.”
“Anything you say, dear. To get back to the subject at hand—”
“I think it’s time to put what we’ve got in logical order and see if there’s a pattern. We’ve been running around talking to everybody we can think of. Let’s see if we’ve accomplished anything.”
So we ordered bagels and juice from room service along with more coffee, and for what was left of the morning we attacked the notebook, making additions and corrections and trying to make sense of what we knew or surmised. At the end of it we had a table with everything neatly laid out in columns: name, means, motive, opportunity, other salient factors. The neatness was the primary virtue of the thing.
“There just isn’t anything to get hold of!” I slammed the pen down on the table. “Jerry’s a menace to society, according to the police chief. Mrs. Schneider’s trying to save society, according to Mrs. Schneider. That ghastly preacher thinks Kevin was beyond the pale because he was Catholic. His attorney is keeping her mouth tight shut, and his doctor is paranoid. And the great-niece, Mrs. Whatever—or Ms. Whatever, I suppose—is bitter about Kevin’s will, but she’s also bitter about life in general. There’s not a teaspoonful of hard evidence in the whole mess!”
“Oh, I think you’re being a trifle too negative about that. Look at all these people who had a financial interest, of one kind or another.”
I looked. “Mrs. Schneider?”
“She
said he contributed to her cause.”
“So she did. Okay, so everyone except the doctor had money from him, in one way or another. So what?”
“And the attorney.”
“I think she did, too. She acted odd when the loans came up. Of course she didn’t say anything, but I got the distinct impression that she knew something personal about that whole loan business. What I don’t see is why you keep harping on it.”
“I’m not sure, myself. It seems to me to be curious, though, and I like to keep the curious in mind. You know, Dorothy, I think we may be approaching this the wrong way.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve considered it, up to now, as a puzzle to be solved. Find the pieces, arrange them in order, and voilà! The true picture emerges. Or, to put it another way, locate all the clues, interpret them, solve the mystery.”
“What other way is there to think about it?”
“I have the feeling that the answers we’re seeking will reveal themselves, if at all, only when we really know Kevin.
“What I mean,” he went on when I looked about to object, “is that this crime, if crime there has been, seems to me to revolve, more than any I’ve ever approached in a long career, around the character of the victim. You knew Kevin for many years, but you’d lost touch of late. I never knew him at all, though I’m beginning to. I think we’re both going to have to know him very well indeed before we’ll have any idea who might have wanted him dead.”
I considered the matter. “That’s a tall order. I suppose we just go on talking to people, seeing him from as many different points of view as we can?”
“That’s the idea.”
“Well, you have a point, but we also need any evidence we can uncover.”
Alan the policeman grinned. “Of course we do.”
“Well, then, I’d still like to know more about any other accidents Kevin might have had. Do you suppose the hospital would let us see those X rays Dr. Boland mentioned?”
“Probably not, unless we can think of a good reason. Doc Foley might be able to get them for us.”
“We’d have to tell him why.”
“We may, you know, have to take someone into our confidence, and Doc Foley is our best candidate, I think. For one thing, he was out of town when the trouble began, and—you trust him, don’t you?”
“With my life. Well, I have trusted him with the care of my life, for years. If he isn’t trustworthy, I may start wondering whether you are.”
“Very well, then. I must say I had the same impression, but one evening’s acquaintance is hardly sufficient to tell. I’m glad of your testimonial. We’ll keep him in reserve as a confidante. Meanwhile, I’m hungry. That wasn’t much of a breakfast. Suppose we go downstairs and see what they can give us for lunch, and then—do you still have a headache?”
It rained all day and into the night, but the next morning, Wednesday, dawned clear and cool. I was full of energy.
“Alan, let’s go out and see Jerry. Right away, as soon as we’ve had breakfast. If we get there early enough, he won’t offer us anything to eat. And I really do want to ask if he knows anything about accidents, or anything else peculiar that might have happened to Kevin.”
“Splendid. And when we’ve finished there, had we best pack up some things to ship back to England?”
“Heavens! We’ve only got two more nights here, and I don’t want to haul all that stuff somewhere else. I forgot about it. We should have packed yesterday.”
“Oh, there’s plenty of time. But by all means, let us beard Jerry in his den as soon as possible.”
“And we can hit Mrs. Schneider on the way back; she’s close. We’d better call first, though. She’s so busy, and I don’t think she likes people just dropping in.”
“What excuse do you plan to use this time?”
“Oh.” I thought for a moment. “How about if we wait and call her after we’ve talked to Jerry? There are lots of pay phones around, what with all that awful development on that side of town. And we can say we were in the neighborhood and wanted to know how the antidevelopment fight was coming. It’s perfectly true, too. I really do want to cheer her on. She’s taking on the big guys and sticking to her guns. That takes courage.”
So, remembering the way Jerry lived, we put on the oldest clothes we’d brought with us and made our way out to the trailer.
I had to find it from Kevin’s house. Presumably there was some sort of drive directly to Jerry’s property, so he could get his motorcycle out and get to town, but I had no idea how to find it from the main road. So we approached through the woods as we had done before.
“Darn it,” I said as we got to the clearing. “He must not be home. Look at the cats.”
There were five or six of them pacing around the trailer, yowling. An orange tabby, a small gray tabby, a beautiful long-haired black, a huge black-and-white specimen of what a friend of mine calls a “Holstein cat”—they were in constant motion, and I lost count. The gray one trotted confidently up to us and started stropping itself against Alan’s ankle, mewing loudly in anxious little chirps.
“Oh, Alan, they’re hungry, poor things. Jerry must have gone off without feeding them.”
“Surely there’s plenty of game in the wood.”
“Yes, but when they’re raised as pampered house cats, they’re not always good at catching their own food. I’m disappointed in Jerry. I thought he’d be more responsible than that, even if he is a little peculiar.”
Alan picked up the little cat so as not to step on it and walked over to the trailer door. “He might be sleeping off a few beers too many. Can’t hurt to knock. And Dorothy, if he isn’t home, all is not lost. We could finally get into Kevin’s house.”
He put the cat down gently and banged on the door. There was no response, but the door swung open. “He hasn’t repaired that catch yet.”
“Would it be okay to go in and find some cat food, do you think?” I reached down to pet the black cat, who had approached with great dignity and an imperious look. “Jerry wouldn’t mind.”
“No. Wait.” Alan’s voice was sharp, curt, official. “Don’t come closer, Dorothy.”
“What—?” I stopped and swallowed hard. The smell had reached me.
Jerry’s trailer hadn’t smelled good the first time, but the stench now was infinitely worse. Sickly sweet, catching at the throat … I swallowed again. The smell of rotten meat. Or …
11
ALAN wouldn’t let me go inside. He took out a handkerchief to cover his hand, opened the screen, and made a brief reconnaissance before rejoining me.
“I called the police; they’re on their way.”
“So it is Jerry? And he is …?”
“It is, and he is.”
“How did he—” I didn’t seem to be able to finish a sentence.
“I don’t know, my dear. Not quietly in his bed, however. He’s lying in the middle of the floor. There are no obvious signs of violence, but of course I didn’t examine the body.”
He sounded grim, and for a moment I wondered why. We had barely known Jerry, and death, for a policeman, isn’t quite as shattering as for the rest of us.
Then I understood. He wasn’t a working policeman anymore. In fact, as far as Indiana was concerned, he never had been. The retired chief constable of Belleshire, with over forty years of experience, was going to have to stand by and watch while somebody else investigated a case of unexpected death. And the somebody else didn’t much care for Alan.
“Alan, he was fine when we saw him on Saturday. This is only Wednesday. How long do you think he’s been dead?”
“My dear, how would I know? Some time, certainly, from the stench, but it’s terribly hot in the trailer. The central heating was blasting away. That would speed the postmortem changes, of course.”
I shuddered. “And out here in the woods, with that ramshackle old trailer, I suppose there’ll be … insects …”
“If there are, Dorothy, they�
��ll help the process of determining time of death. The life cycles are quite definitive, you know—”
“I know.” I’ve read enough detective fiction to know about maggots, but I certainly didn’t want to hear any more about them right now. I was having enough trouble keeping my stomach under control as it was.
The little gray cat came back, rubbing my ankles and purring urgently. I picked her up and cuddled her, but she wriggled free. Love was not what she wanted right now.
“Alan, what are we going to do about the cats? They’re starving. There’s sure to be food for them in the trailer. I don’t suppose, if I was careful not to touch anything—”
“No. For one thing, you don’t want to go in there. The odor is really quite unpleasant. For another, you’d corrupt what may be a crime scene, whether you meant to or not. I did, simply by using the telephone. That was unavoidable, but the cats will have to wait.”
Well, if Alan, the understated Englishman, said the odor was unpleasant, he meant it was well-nigh unbearable. I was quite content not to enter the horrid little trailer, but the gray cat had another point of view. So did the others. They set up a constant chorus of complaint and petition, accompanied by ankle-weaving and, in the case of the black one, a quick, sharp dig in the calf with an unsheathed claw by way of emphasis.
That did it. “I can’t stand it. The poor things! I’m going somewhere to buy cat food. Unless you think I need to stay here.”
“I shouldn’t think so. Hurry back, because the police will probably want to question you. And don’t forget bowls of some sort. You can’t use anything at all from the trailer.”
I found a new gas station/convenience store near the turnoff from the state highway. They had cat food, probably at a wildly inflated price, but everything here in Indiana was so much cheaper than in England that it seemed almost reasonable. I picked up several cans in different flavors and a bag of dry food. I remembered the bowls, cheap plastic ones, along with some plastic spoons. I even bought a gallon of designer water. I probably wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near Jerry’s sink.
I was waiting at the checkout counter, my heavy basket weighing down my arm, when a woman walked in and stared at my hat. She looked familiar.
Killing Cassidy Page 9