Chapter Twenty-Four
Dear Detective Folger,
You’re correct that I’m facing financial ruin due to the misappropriation of both my investment consortium’s funds and my father’s assets. I therefore decided to kill my father, Spencer Murphy, on the night of July 3 in order to inherit his property. I thought I might be able to restore the money I owe to others, particularly my brother, Elliot, in part by selling my father’s house at the peak of the market.
After the fireworks were concluded, I took a large wrench from the garage, went into my father’s bedroom, and hit him over the head. I placed his body in the closet and locked the bedroom door. I exited by the French doors to the deck and returned to the house through the living room entrance. Later that night, I carried my father’s body down to the beach and left it there. I threw the wrench into the ocean. And back at the house, I tore a page from his notebook that suggested a motive for suicide, and left it propped on his typewriter. On July 4, I made sure to be in town searching for my father at the time his body was discovered.
I am sorry for all the suffering I have caused, particularly to Elliot, whom I have never treated as he deserved. I hope he can forgive me for the loss of his savings and the house, and that he finds happiness in his future life.
I can’t face charges or prison—so I have taken my own way out. I hope Laney will forgive me.
I would like to be cremated, and my ashes scattered in the sea.
Merry and Clarence stared down at David Murphy’s body. He was lying on his bed upstairs, an empty coffee mug on the bedside table. His usually pallid skin was tinged blue, a sign of low blood oxygen.
“Cyanide poisoning?” she asked.
Clarence held the empty mug under her nose. “You can still smell the apricots.”
“Let’s hope nobody feels the need for a cup of coffee right now.”
“I already checked the coffeemaker, Marradith. He was good enough to empty the rest of the pot down the drain.”
Elliot had taken the howling MacTavish away. He and Andre were sitting silently in the living room. Kate was still out back with Laney—the girl’s horror at her father’s death had found expression in hysterical sobbing, and she refused to come back inside the house.
“I’ll call the Potts brothers and tell them we need divers off Steps Beach,” Clarence said. “That wrench should have sunk to the bottom, and with Whale Rock blocking the tidal currents right at this spot, it won’t have gone far.”
“You won’t find anything.”
Clarence looked at her with something like sympathy. “But with this note on our hands and Pocock sitting in your father’s chair, I’ve got to go through the motions. The chief’ll expect nothing less. A signed confession is too tidy to ignahr. No charges, no arrest, no call to the district attorney—”
“How’re you going to resolve that piece of paper with the blood and hair samples on the garden shovel?”
“Same as I always do,” Clarence said. “Run my tests and let the evidence speak for itself. You’re the one who has to write the report, Marradith, so’s to make it all come out even.”
She sighed. “I’ll call for a medical examiner and ambulance, Clare. You deal with the Pottses. But ask them not to spread this around yet, okay?”
It was Dr. Fairborn, not Summer Hughes, who showed up with the EMTs from Nantucket Cottage Hospital. Summer was enjoying a well-earned day of freedom and Fairborn was enjoying a cigarette when Merry met him in the driveway. He stubbed it out before donning his sterile suit and booties. “Any chance the guy was offed?” he asked.
“No. But we’ll need an autopsy all the same. You can fly him straight to Bourne whenever it’s convenient. Remains to be cremated and returned to the family.”
She left Fairborn to it. Then she walked around to the backyard, where Laney and Kate were sitting as far from the house as possible, side by side on the steps leading down to the beach. They turned and looked at Merry as she approached. Laney was composed now, although her face was blotchy from weeping.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Merry said, “but I’d like to talk to you both. Preferably at the same time as I talk to Elliot and Andre. If you can’t face joining them in the living room, Laney, tell me—and I’ll ask them to come out here.”
“No,” the girl said. “I’m done being silly. I’ll come inside. Mom promised we can get a hotel room for as long as we have to stay here.”
Andre and Elliot were sitting together on the sofa with their dog between them. Tav lifted his head as Merry opened the French doors.
“Okay if we join you?”
“Of course,” Andre said. “Laney, I’m so sorry.”
“Can I have Tav?” she asked.
He lifted the Westie into her arms; she curled up in a wing chair with the dog in her lap and concentrated on stroking his head. Kate sat down opposite her daughter. Her expression was guarded.
Merry stood with her back to the fireplace and studied them all. “As you know,” she said, “Mr. David Murphy is dead. It appears that he took his own life by poisoning himself with cyanide-laced coffee. I know that you are also aware that he left a signed confession to his father’s murder. In it, he stated that he faced financial difficulties and killed Spencer Murphy in order to obtain his inheritance—not realizing that Spencer had drafted a later will that left his fortune elsewhere.”
None of them spoke. They were waiting, passively, for her to tell them it was all over—that they could go back to their lives, forward into their futures, put the hideous weekend behind them. Case closed.
“I have a few ideas about David’s note—why he’d have written it, and why he took his own life. But I’d like to hear yours.”
Elliot frowned slightly. “Isn’t it obvious?”
Merry glanced at him. “Meaning?”
“He told us. He couldn’t face prosecution.”
“I agree that loomed large in his mind,” Merry said, “but I think he wanted to avoid charges of fraud. Not murder.”
“What do you mean?” Laney asked.
“Your father invested money for a group of people who trusted him, including your uncle Elliot. The investment lost money, so he took some of your grandfather’s funds in an attempt to make things right—and ended up in a deeper hole.”
“You mean—Spencer’s assets, the ones that are supposed to fund the trust—are gone?” Kate interjected.
“Along with my life savings,” Elliot said faintly.
“You’ll still realize a huge amount from the sale of this house,” Merry said to Kate. “Elliot, of course, is out of luck.”
Elliot rubbed his forehead painfully with one hand.
“But that illustrates my point,” Merry continued. “There was absolutely no reason for David Murphy to kill his father in order to inherit half his estate, as he might have done if the new will had never been drafted. It was in David’s Murphy’s interest, in fact, to keep his father alive as long as possible—so that his embezzlement of Spencer’s assets went undetected. He was safe, so long as he remained executor and nobody asked questions about the disposition of Spencer’s funds. Financial disaster only struck for David once Spencer was dead—and the will he’d drafted had to enter probate.”
“That’s true,” Kate said.
Merry nodded at her. “You, on the other hand, had every financial reason to want Spencer gone as soon as possible.”
“I loved—” Kate began.
“I don’t doubt you did,” Merry replied. “But I was speaking solely of financial motives. You had reason to believe that Nora had urged Spence to draft a second will, establishing a trust that you expected to administer. As I suggested this morning, that made any loose talk on Spence’s part a potential risk—his mental confusion was deep enough that he might inadvertently tell David he’d disinherited him. You had a motive for silencing Spence and making
sure his second will was never overturned—by killing him yourself. That became clear on Sunday night, right before the fireworks, when he told your daughter that Nora won’t write the book now, thanks to Kate. He meant, of course, that Nora had agreed not to publish because he’d agreed to a charitable foundation you would run. If he’d said such things too often around David, your future, Kate, would have been at risk.”
“I didn’t know the second will had actually been written until after Spence was dead, and Alice Abernathy came to this house,” Kate said quietly. “I would never have killed Spence with that kind of uncertainty. I might have been handing a fortune to my ex-husband.”
“And I don’t think you’d have taken Laney and the dog to sort through Spence’s closet the day of his death, either, if you’d hidden his body there the night before,” Merry agreed. “Even if you were unaware that his fractured skull had bled, you’d be foolish to bring witnesses. It would have made far more sense to use the need for funeral clothes as an excuse to enter Spence’s room by yourself, and clean up any traces of murder you had left behind.”
“So . . .” Laney looked around the circle of faces. “Where does that leave us?”
“With Elliot,” Merry said, “and Andre. Would you like to tell me what happened yourselves, or should I do it for you?”
The two men glanced at each other.
“El—” Andre said.
Elliot drew a deep breath. “It was me, Detective. It was me all along. Andre just tried to help.”
Merry allowed Peter to feed her dinner that night. They met at Ventuno for deep-fried olives stuffed with pork sausage and braised lamb pasta and several glasses of Brunello. It had been, as she said, a very long day.
“So there was no wrench to find sunk in the waters off Steps Beach,” Peter said.
“Because Elliot hit his father over the head with the garden spade Laney had left on the wheelbarrow.”
“Why?”
“Fury.” Merry toyed with her butterscotch budino. “Elliot had talked to David about the future on the morning of July third. He’d told his brother that he and Andre were getting married. And that it was his dream to keep the house on Steps Beach in the family. David wasn’t enthused. He had his private reasons, of course—he needed to sell Step Above for as much as the market would bear, once his father died—but Elliot was frustrated that David wouldn’t promise to cut him a deal, between brothers. So he went to his father that night, after the fireworks, and told him that David planned to unload Step Above. And that he, Elliot, meant to keep it safe—that he wanted to raise children there with Andre, and continue the Murphy tradition.”
“And?”
“Spence had one of his odd mental turns. Dementia does that, apparently. He said something unforgiveable to Elliot about Andre’s race. Or Elliot’s orientation. Or both—I’m not sure, because Elliot wouldn’t repeat his father’s words this afternoon.”
Peter furled his brows. Partly in pain, partly in sympathy. “It’s always worse when it comes from your father.”
“I know. I watched Spence do it to Andre once before, on Saturday morning. Andre was very forgiving. It helps, I think, that he’s a psychologist—he can separate himself from people’s behaviors, to a certain extent. He kept telling Elliot that it wasn’t really Spence talking when he uttered ugly slurs. But Elliot insisted: It has to be partly him. It came from his brain and from his mouth.”
“But, Meredith, killing your father?”
“I’m not sure he meant to.”
“He had to walk outside to go get that shovel. It wasn’t an impulsive act.”
“You just outlined the case for the prosecution,” Merry admitted. “Elliot had seen the spade and wheelbarrow on the lawn during the fireworks. He ran out of his father’s bedroom, grabbed the spade, and swung it at Spence’s head.”
Peter reached his spoon into her budino. “Where does Andre come in?”
“He woke up in the middle of the night and realized Elliot wasn’t in bed. So he went looking for him. He found Elliot pushing the wheelbarrow with his father’s body in it across the lawn.”
“So he helped him get Spence down to the beach.”
“And then tossed the wheelbarrow and shovel into the dumpster. That was Andre’s idea.”
“It’s odd, though,” Peter mused. “You said that Andre and his dog discovered Spence’s body, and Elliot found the fake ‘suicide’ note. Which he’d deliberately left on his father’s typewriter.”
“It’s always worth a shot to try to look innocent. They hoped to convince us Spence had killed himself. Which was unfortunate, because it raised my antennae. Most grieving families would have been pushing the accident theory. Nobody likes a suicide in their midst.”
“I hope your chief appreciates that. And your antennae.”
“He was remarkably restrained this afternoon. In the best possible way.”
“Well—you did get Pocock charges on the very day he’d asked.”
Merry was quiet a moment, remembering how broken Elliot Murphy had looked as he entered the holding cell at the station. Andre had been placed in a separate one. He was talking soothingly to Elliot through the wall that separated them. Nobody, she reflected, truly understood the bond between two people—except themselves.
She spent slightly less than an hour drafting her report for Bob Pocock. He had kept her standing in front of his desk as he read swiftly through a printout.
“This is very . . . thorough,” he said eventually. He set the pages on his desk and squared the corners with his fingertips. “A deceptively complex case, clearly laid out. The two victims—three if we count the suicide . . . the financial fraud, the discovery and significance of incriminating evidence . . . I have only one question, Detective, that you’ve failed to answer. Who killed Nora Murphy?”
“Her father,” Merry replied. “Either he mixed the seeds and the coffee beans by accident, or he did it on purpose, and placed them in the machine.”
“Although you maintain that this coffeemaker was too complicated for him to operate.”
“It’s possible he filled the cavity—then was flummoxed by what to do next. So he left the machine as it was, and promptly forgot about it.”
“Or left it for his daughter to use, quite deliberately, the next morning. He might even have turned on the machine before leaving the house. Given himself an alibi in case her body was found immediately.”
“He might have,” Merry agreed. “But as we will never know, and cannot possibly prove it—”
“You don’t suspect the housekeeper of eliminating a rival for her job?”
“Killing for a paycheck? There are too many openings on this island for a woman of Roseline’s talents, sir. She’ll have no trouble getting another position.”
“And again, as we cannot possibly prove it—”
Merry was silent. She counted in her mind, and waited.
Pocock sat back in his chair and studied her. “Damn fine job, Detective, accomplished with commendable speed. You’re a credit to this force.”
“Thank you, sir.”
She got to eight.
“You may go.”
“And then there’s David’s suicide note,” Peter said thoughtfully now as Ventuno’s emptied around them. “What was that about?”
Merry pushed aside her dessert plate and sighed. “I think he found Spence’s body on the night he was killed. David went to check on him after the fireworks, if you remember. He found the bedroom door locked—went around by the French doors on the deck—and discovered Spence in the closet.”
“And he didn’t yell?”
“No. He took counsel with himself.”
Merry studied Peter soberly.
“David must have known someone in the household killed his father. I think David suspected it was Elliot. And when the second will surfa
ced, disinheriting them both, and he understood his own financial morass, he couldn’t face the consequences. David tried to do something noble at the end—make up to Elliot for the loss of his savings and his loss of the family home. He shouldered the blame for Spence’s death. In an odd way, he was trying to be the hero that Spence, as it happens, never was. He wanted Elliot to have a future—a happy one.”
“That’s fairly tragic,” Peter said. “What do you think will happen to them?”
Merry leaned her head back against Ventuno’s banquette. “I think a competent lawyer will argue provocation, and prove the attack was spur-of-the-moment. I think Elliot will get six-to-ten for second-degree murder. And I’m not sure Andre will wait for him. He’s a lot younger. Elliot will be much older and poorer when he gets out.”
“Meredith.” Peter took her hand. “O, ye of little faith. Don’t you know that real love abides all things?”
“Does it?” she asked.
“It does,” he said firmly. “Even death.”
And kissed her.
Death of a Wharf Rat Page 21