Killing Cassidy

by Jeanne M. Dams

  “Hmm.” Alan considered the possibility and raised an objection. “What about tamperproof packaging?”

  “That only protects the people who are smart enough to take a bottle of pills back to the drugstore if the seal’s broken. You think Jerry was that smart?”

  “You have a point, at that. Do you mind telling me what steps you are taking?”

  “We’re going through Jerry’s trailer with a fine-tooth comb, to start with. Trying to figure out what he might have taken, while the medical examiner’s testing Jerry’s stomach contents for everything he can think of. Sending everything we find in the trailer to the lab to be tested for traces of cyanide. And we’ve alerted the drugstores and grocery stores and every place else where people buy over-the-counter medicine. We can’t go for a recall until we know what the stuff was in, so we just have to tell the stores to be on the lookout for anybody acting funny. And we’re praying we can get it worked out before somebody else dies.”

  Alan nodded approvingly. “Very thorough. If you are dealing with a maniac, though, you’ll need those prayers. The tests and so on take time.”

  “You’re telling me. So you can see I don’t have any time for any wild-goose chases.”

  Wild-goose chase. That was the metaphor Alan had used before we found out so much. Surely now, Darryl …

  Alan smiled at me and pressed my hand. “No, I do quite see that,” he said, looking back at Darryl. “We won’t take any more of that time. I take it you have no objection to our continuing our pursuits? Good. If we do learn anything of interest, about maniacs or anyone else, would you like to hear of it?”

  “Sure, why not?” At the thought of getting us out of his hair, Darryl turned almost genial. “I guess you never know.”

  I turned to Alan when we were safely out on the sidewalk. He shrugged. “What did you expect? At least he offered no active hindrance.”

  “And that in itself is a help, I suppose.”

  “Well, yes, it is, but I rather expected you to be discouraged by his attitude.”

  “You don’t agree with him, do you? About a maniac on the loose?”

  “It’s a possibility, certainly. A good policeman never ignores—”

  “Oh, don’t go all calm and reasonable and logical on me! Never mind what a good policeman should do. Whose side are you on, anyway?”

  “Yours, my love, always yours.”

  “Well, then, I flatly refuse to be discouraged. I’ve spent too much time down in the dumps lately.” I raised my head and took a deep breath. The air was like—no, not just wine, but champagne, clear and crisp and fragrant with the invigorating smell of dried leaves. The sky was that perfect deep October blue, with puffy little clouds painted in at exactly the most decorative spots. “It is a perfectly gorgeous, heaven-sent morning, and it’s a sin for anybody to be discouraged on such a day. And I don’t want to waste any more time. Come on!”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Where we should have gone ages ago. Where we started to go before Jerry fended us off and we got distracted by all sorts of side issues. We’re going to Kevin’s house.”

  Alan grinned, tucked my arm in his, and set a brisk pace back to our car.

  When we got to Kevin’s and I started to get out of the car, he cleared his throat. “Umm—far be it from me to raise difficulties, but how are we to get in?”

  “I told you he almost never locked his door. He must have been one of the last people on earth who trusted everybody.”

  “Unwise.”

  “Yes, as it turned out, but honestly, Alan, it must be a nice way to go through life.”

  The door, however, was locked. Alan didn’t seem surprised. “His executor would have done that. Ms. Carmichael, presumably.”

  “Darn! And we don’t want to ask her for the key, do we? But wait a minute—I think I remember—” I pulled up the cushion on one of the rocking chairs, and sure enough, there was a key.

  Alan shook his head. “The first place a burglar would look.”

  “But Kevin didn’t expect burglars. He only ever locked the doors when he was going to be away for a while and somebody else was taking care of the cats. He said they’d get upset about him leaving it open, so he locked it to please them, and then told them where to leave the key. Eccentric—but then, he was. Come on in.”

  It seemed strange to walk into Kevin’s house without him there to welcome me. The room was filled with sunshine and with Kevin. His presence was everywhere. His books filled and overflowed the bookshelves. His favorite leather chair, well worn, showed the impress of his body. His pipe, in a big ashtray, sat handy there on the arm of the chair.

  “He never would give up his pipe,” I said irrelevantly. “By the time everybody figured out how dangerous smoking was, he said he’d already outlived all his contemporaries, so he might as well enjoy his one vice.”

  “And he died of a lung problem.”

  It was a comment on the irony of life, no more; I dismissed it.

  If I let myself, I could easily get sentimental and weepy, I thought, looking around the room. But I’d promised myself that my doldrums were past, and weeping wasn’t going to fulfill my responsibility to Kevin. We’ll figure it out, I promised him silently. We won’t let them get by with it.

  Alan had wandered out to the kitchen; now he rejoined me. “He was a good housekeeper, I see. Or did he have someone come in?”

  There was in his voice that same note of surprise as when he had first seen the outside of the house.

  “No, he did it all himself, and yes, he was comfortably untidy, but he was clean. Of course, the place hasn’t been dusted for some time, but it was always nicely kept when he was—when he could look after it. I’m willing to bet he even made his bed after he got out of it”—I swallowed hard and continued—“to go to the hospital.”

  Alan checked and came back. “Right you are. He, or someone, made the bed. There’s a bit of disorder in the room—medicines on the bedside table, that sort of thing—but then he expected to come home and tidy that away.”

  I blinked and dug my fingernails into the palms of my hands. Physical pain, I’ve found, can often take one’s mind off emotional pain.

  I cleared my throat. “Alan, this is the place where your training is going to help a lot more than anything I can contribute. What are we looking for?”

  “Anything at all unusual,” he said promptly. “Any signs of an intruder. That’s the sort of thing I might see more easily than you would. Anything that doesn’t belong here, or anything missing that should be here. Anything out of character. Anything, no matter how insignificant, that seems in any way wrong. And that’s where you’ll be more useful than I.”

  “Are you sure? I haven’t been in this house for years, Alan. I didn’t have his belongings memorized.”

  “No, but you knew his character, his personality, some of his likes and dislikes. You knew about his pipe, for example. If there had been a pack of cigarettes in that ashtray, it wouldn’t have surprised me, but it would have struck you as odd.”

  “Okay, I see what you mean. You’ll look for the criminal stuff, and I’ll look for the everyday stuff.”

  He grinned. “More or less. Shall we work together or separately?”

  “Separately. Then we can compare notes.”

  So Alan began a minute examination of the doors and windows while I stood in the middle of the living room and just looked around me.

  The books. Was anything missing?

  Heavens, I didn’t know what the man read. Technical books, of course. I knew enough, from Frank, about the basic biology texts that I could tell they were all there. There were also a lot of far more esoteric ones on the shelves. I knew nothing about them and couldn’t even guess whether the collection was complete.

  I moved to the shelves of lighter books. Nothing struck me as out of character. He didn’t read best-sellers, as a rule, so Snow Falling on Cedars was perhaps a little unexpected, but that was such a marvelous book
, anybody would have enjoyed it. There wasn’t much recent fiction, but a number of classics: Dickens, Conrad, Jane Austen, Mark Twain. A selection of history, biography, philosophy, some of the better-known works of lay theology. A few general reference works: an atlas, an unabridged dictionary, an encyclopedia. For specific reference, he would have relied on the university library.

  That reminded me. I searched the shelves a little more closely and found, sure enough, a bottom shelf stacked with library books to be returned. Some from the public library, some from the university. Overdue now, of course. I supposed the post office had sent the overdue notices back to the libraries. Was there a rubber stamp for “deceased”? I shuddered and made a mental note to take the books with us when Alan and I left. We could at least do that tiny thing for Kevin, if nothing else.

  The bookshelves didn’t seem helpful. I wandered over to Kevin’s pride and joy, the woodstove, and peered behind it. It was set away from the fieldstone chimney wall by a careful eighteen inches, and I had some vague idea something might be hidden back there. There was nothing, of course, except evidence that here his standard of housekeeping had fallen somewhat short. The back of the stove was blistered where the black finish had apparently burned off, and the hardwood floor beyond the back edge of the tiled hearth was also scarred and blistered. The heat had been too intense, perhaps? And Kevin had never noticed, and now he could never repair the damage.

  I worked my way around the room. The furniture wasn’t in pristine condition. Kevin had loved it and lived with it for decades. It looked much as usual, however. Lamps, curtains, old radio, record player. Kevin had no television and had never bothered with advancements in music reproduction; the LP was good enough for him. He liked jazz, I seemed to remember—yes, there were the jazz records, a few big band recordings, remastered from the originals of the 1930s and ’40s, a sprinkling of light classics. I turned on the radio just to check the station; nothing happened. Oh, of course, the electricity would have been shut off. Who had seen to that? I wondered. Ms. Carmichael, probably.

  A magazine rack held professional journals, a sprinkling of catalogues, several issues of Smithsonian, a Time from mid-August.

  A sturdy rolltop desk held paid bills. The unpaid ones had presumably been taken away by the lawyer. There were letters marked “answered” and two or three that would remain forever unanswered. I glanced through them, feeling distinctly uneasy. A lady does not read someone else’s mail. But they were routine, all of them, chatty letters from friends still too old-fashioned to prefer the telephone. There was no question of e-mail. Kevin didn’t own a computer.

  It saddened me that there was no work in progress. I had never known Kevin when he wasn’t working on some learned paper or other. But he’d given up his work in the lab. He’d had nothing to write about.

  There was only one painting on the wall, a big oil of some zinnias in a blue glass bowl, done years ago by a local artist, Kevin had told Frank and me. It was a lovely thing. I wondered if it would look nice in Mary Alice’s house and if she would like to have it. I wouldn’t ask her; she resented me. But I’d try to remember to mention it to the lawyer.

  That seemed to be it for the living room. I made a methodical search of the kitchen—no food, but otherwise as usual, I’d guess. And the food would have been removed by whoever had taken such thoughtful care of other details. Whoever they were, they’d missed only the library books.

  I had to steel myself to enter the bedroom, but it, too, was in apparently normal condition. I’d been in it once or twice, probably—guests used to put their coats on the bed—but I remembered almost nothing about it. It all looked normal to me, as did the bathroom. The bathroom cabinet, with its lethal potential, I left to Alan. Criminal matters were his department. I went on looking for something out of the ordinary.

  And I didn’t find it. I exhausted the possibilities in the main house at about the same time that Alan pronounced himself finished, so we went out together to the shed that had served as Kevin’s workshop.

  “I’ve never seen any of this before,” I reminded Alan. “He built this after I left town. So I can’t be any help at all.”

  “Do you know anything about stained glass?”

  “Nothing whatever, except that I like it, at least when it’s as well done as Kevin’s.”

  “You know,” said Alan, running a hand down the back of his neck, “I have a nagging feeling there’s something odd about this stained-glass business.”

  “Odd how? You can’t mean Kevin was up to something shady?”

  “No, no. It simply seems to—crop up. So many people had some of Kevin’s projects. So many people visited him with commissions shortly before his death. And there’s something else—something—” He took off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose, as if he could rub it, like a lamp, and the genie of his missing idea would appear. “No,” he said at last. “It’s gone. I’d best leave it alone; it’ll surface if I don’t try to think of it. Let’s see what we can find.”

  We looked around. The workshop, small but adequate, looked like the rest of Kevin’s domain, slightly untidy but essentially clean. Small sheets of glass in jewel colors lay on their sides in padded racks against one wall. Rolls of copper foil tape and solder were stacked on the workbench. Glass cutters, pencils, and colored marking pens stood upright in an old, dimpled English beer mug. A small stack of face masks, the kind dentists and nurses use, lay next to it. Two stacks of graph paper, one unused, one with designs drawn on the sheets, were neatly lined up on one corner of the bench. In the center lay an unfinished project, a simple sun-catcher in a wavy pattern and the colors of the sea, cerulean blue, turquoise, aquamarine. A few pieces were lined up on top of the corresponding parts of the pattern; the rest were yet to be cut. I couldn’t bear to look at it.

  There was nothing unusual at all. Alan examined everything twice and then shook his head.

  “Whatever it was I expected to find, it isn’t here.” He looked at me carefully and put his arm around my shoulders. “And you’ve had as much as you can take, love. Let’s go back to the hotel, and you can cry all you want.”

  23

  I did cry. I lay on the bed and bawled, but this time it wasn’t out of depression or frustration. It was for Kevin and the waste of the good years he’d still had left, for the poignancy of the unanswered letters, the unread books, the unfinished beauty he’d left behind. When I’d gotten it out of my system, I sat up, blew my nose, and straightened my hair.

  “There. That’s that. I couldn’t help it, but I’m over it now, and I’ll shed no more tears for dear Kevin. He wouldn’t like it; he hated to see women cry. What I need to do now—what we need to do—is go back to the notebooks and see what we’ve got.”

  “No, what we need to do is find some lunch. Do you realize it’s long past noon?”

  “Oh. That would account for the hollow feeling. I thought it was just grief.”

  We split a stromboli sandwich—Alan had become addicted to them—and then got right back to the hotel and to work.

  “Did you find anything unusual at Kevin’s house?” I sat down at the table and opened the notebook to a fresh page.

  “All my evidence is negative. There were no signs of forced entry. I’d have been surprised to find any, of course, since he didn’t lock his doors. I could see no signs of a search, either. No one came in to find the hidden jewels, or the treasure map, or even the stash of cocaine.”

  I looked up from the notebook, startled. “Alan! What stash of cocaine?”

  “The one that no one came looking for, because it didn’t exist. Nothing was hidden anywhere, so far as I could tell without taking the place apart. There wasn’t even a gun or any ammunition, which is perhaps a little unusual for an American living alone, out in the country.”

  “My dear prejudiced Englishman! We’re not all armed to the teeth. I told you Kevin tried to live in harmony with nature. He didn’t like guns.”

  “Ah, yes, you did
say that. Full marks to Kevin. I also studied the telephone wires rather carefully, but could find no sign, inside the house or out, of tampering.”

  “Oh. Does that mean the phone problems were accidental? Nothing to do with our villain?”

  “Possibly. Or, more probably, he or she found some more subtle way to disrupt Kevin’s service.”

  “Like what?”

  “My dear, I am not an expert on the subject. It did look as though the wires had been in place for quite some time, so they are presumably old-fashioned coaxial cable rather than modern fiber optics. In that case I would guess that something as simple as a sturdy pin, inserted into the cable in exactly the right spot so as to touch both wires, would short out the system.”

  “And then the pin could be taken out again and everything would go back to normal?”

  “I don’t know. That would depend on the nature of the system and, as I have said, I’m no expert. Certainly a pin, or even a narrow brad, would leave little trace of its having been there, only a very tiny hole in the insulation. Unless one were looking for such a thing, it would pass unnoticed.”

  “And were you looking for a hole?”

  “I was not.” Alan grinned. “I only just thought of it, if you want the truth. I was looking for evidence of criminal activity, and I found nothing significant, save to eliminate the obvious. And you, my dear Miss Pinkerton?”

  I smiled to myself. So he read Mary Roberts Rinehart. I was learning things about my husband on this trip. “Nothing much. He hadn’t blacked his stove lately. Some of the finish was gone, on the back, and there were some funny stains on the floor there, too. I suppose they were burn marks, although Kevin was always very careful about making sure the stove was safe. He was a real expert on Franklin stoves. Maybe he spilled something and never got a chance to clean it up. Oh, and the library books. Darn, I forgot to bring the library books back with us.” I explained about the books.

  “Well, we can always go back. I ought to take a look at those stains, just so we can cross them off our list.”