Fatal Elixir

by William L. DeAndrea

  It was a good eight-foot fall. He landed on his back with my weight directly on top of him, and that was the effective ending of the fight.

  Junior was making terrible wheezing noises as I peeled his now limp arms from me and stood up. His face was red, and his eyes were popping. He’d obviously had the wind knocked out of him.

  I resisted an impulse to kick the fool a few times while he was lying there. Instead, I went over to him, grabbed his belt buckle with two hands, and pulled. That in turn changed the shape of his chest cavity and let air into his collapsed lungs. Junior was beginning to recover even before Dr. Mayhew could tell me not to do what I’d already done.

  “He might have had a broken rib. You might have injured him badly.”

  “He still has to breathe,” I pointed out. I turned to Junior, who was regaining some interest in the world beyond his lungs. “Any pain? Think you’ve got a broken rib?”

  Junior shook his head and made motions as if he wanted to get up.

  “Just lie there for a minute. Catch your breath. Avoid getting kicked or shot. Just listen carefully to the following question: What the hell was that all about?”

  Junior had enough breath by now to sound hurt. “He was about to accuse me of killing all those people. Of killing my father!”

  “He was not, you idiot!”

  “He wasn’t?” Junior sounded suspicious.

  “Were you, Blacke?”

  “No,” Blacke said. “I wasn’t. Never crossed my mind. You didn’t do it. You were in Denver. That’s been triple-checked.”

  “Oh,” Junior said. He looked about him sheepishly. “Golly. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” Blacke said gently. “May I go on with what I wanted to say?”

  “What? Oh. Sure. But all that stuff about carpenter’s pencils made me nervous...”

  Roaring physical aggression was an interesting definition of “nervous,” but if Blacke was willing to let it pass, I would go along.

  Blacke was being (for him) supernaturally patient. His voice was calm as he said, “I’ll make everything clear in a moment.”

  He raised his head once more, to take in the whole crowd.

  “As I was about to say, Junior Simpkins is a master carpenter and furniture smith, with a thriving business down in Denver. He swears by carpenter’s pencils, and used them in Le Four before he left, then he was learning his craft. He told Booker that he used to buy dozens of them at a time.”

  He fixed his eyes on Junior. “Now. Mr. Simpkins, when you left town, you were in a bit of a hurry, weren’t you?”

  “Uh, yes. There had been family unpleasantness. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “We don’t need any details,” Blacke assured him. “I just want to know if you took the time to pack all the carpenter’s pencils you’d accumulated when you left.”

  “No. I threw some clothes in a suitcase and went to the train station.”

  “Any idea what happened to the ones you left behind?”

  “Sure. There’s three boxes on the shelf of the closet of my old room. It’s been a storeroom since I left. I thought of taking them along this time, but I was afraid it would have caused trouble with my stepmother.”

  “Not this time,” Blacke said. “She would have urged you to take them with you, if she’d known you were thinking about it. It would have helped her in setting you up as another potential murderer. And it would have removed evidence, since she undoubtedly used one of those pencils to write the note to Harold Collier.

  The crowd gasped. Gloria Simpkins, who had been sitting quietly through all this, shot up from her chair.

  “Disgusting!” she snapped. “I’ll not sit still for this.”

  But she had nowhere to go. She was too old and brittle to jump down from the platform, and I was sprinting up the stairs to cut her off there.

  I took her firmly by her thin wrists and looked into the deceptively mild blue eyes.

  “Gloria Simpkins,” I said. “I arrest you for the murders of William Simpkins, Buck Murdo, Jack Hennessy, Beatrice Dixon, Amos Jacobs...”

  34

  “NONSENSE!” MRS. SIMPKINS SNAPPED. Very confident, very schoolmarmish. “You should be ashamed of yourself. Had you been in my class, young man, I would have taught you better. You must apologize right now to the good people of the town for wasting their time on such malicious foolishness. Both of you.”

  Blacke was unimpressed. “Tell me again about the figure you saw near the wagon,” he said.

  “I have said all I am going to say until I instruct my attorney to sue you for slander.” Mrs. Simpkins folded her hands across her thin chest and raised her chin in the air.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Blacke said.

  It mattered to me. A crowd is a high-strung animal, and this one was getting restless again, on the verge of getting ugly. This sweet-looking little old lady, the one who had taught them to read and write and figure, a murderer?

  “You told Booker you saw what Stu Burkhart saw—the silhouette of a small, hooded figure in a long coat.

  “That was even before we knew anyone had been poisoned. But when the dying started, and we were thinking of a vicious killer, we didn’t think of a woman. Didn’t want to, at least not at first. But the description of a silhouette works just as well for a small, slight woman with her shawl up over her head.”

  The animal that was the crowd stopped to listen.

  “And when Booker talked to you the next day, and you knew that you’d been seen, you did something brilliant. You said you’d seen the figure, too. With one subtle touch, you changed yourself from a suspect to a witness.”

  She sniffed. “I will own your newspaper before the summer is out, Mr. Blacke. You will be living on charity.”

  “Maybe so,” Blacke said. “But if we’re going to do this, let’s do it right.”

  He continued to address his words to Mrs. Simpkins, but he was looking at the crowd, fixing them, one after another, with a particularly intense stare.

  “But it just couldn’t last, Mrs. Simpkins. You tried to be too thorough, too subtle. That note to Harold Collier was printed in the unusual style you developed. The natural assumption was that it was written by one of your students—but why not by you, personally?

  “Again, the note was written with that special carpenter’s pencil—do you generally use a distinctive color ink?”

  “Purple,” Junior Simpkins said. “Usually purple ink.”

  His stepmother shot him a look of purest hatred. A lot of people in the crowd saw it, and now Blacke had another card to play.

  But the note was still unfinished business. “You didn’t want to use the ink that might point to you. You didn’t want to be seen buying a kind of ink that would match the note. You didn’t want to be seen buying a pencil. But you did want to get that note to Harold Collier.”

  “But as we’ve seen, you had access to a number of pencils, the rectangular kind, left behind by your stepson. You simply used one of those, never thinking of the distinctive mark it would make.”

  “And now, we come to why.” Blacke’s voice had dropped low when he said that, and the townspeople were straining to listen. “The answer is that you wanted to kill your husband.”

  Mrs. Simpkins continued to look at the sky.

  “Big Bill Simpkins was a sick man,” Blacke said. “Do you agree, Dr. Mayhew?”

  “Examining him in the throes of the poison, and during the autopsy later, I found two cancerous tumors, either of which would have killed him within a year.”

  Addressing God or the world at large in a breezy voice, the old woman said, “Then I had no reason to kill him, did I?”

  Blacke shrugged. “Within a year, the doctor said. A lot can happen in a year. For instance, a dying man can start to miss his son. The son you hated and drove away, years ago. They might exchange letters; they might become reconciled.”

  Down below, I could see Junior Simpkins’s mouth form the words “Oh, Dad.”


  “He might,” Blacke went on, “start talking about changing his will so that his son inherited his estate, or a goodly portion of it.”

  Blacke wheeled his chair around so that he was facing Mrs. Simpkins, even if we wouldn’t look at him.

  “Who was the very first to die of the poison? Big Bill Simpkins. Who benefited from his death? Just his widow. Who watched him, and thirteen other innocent people in this town, including an innocent little boy, die without shedding so much as a tear? You did, Mrs. Simpkins. Who, thinking herself smarter than all the people she’d taught over the years, left a trail a mile wide the moment anybody thought to look for it? You.”

  Mrs. Simpkins refused to look at him, but her small frame was starting to shake, and her face was dark with anger.

  “And why did you kill your husband and all these innocent people? Greed. Greed and spite. You couldn’t stand to see a man reconciled with his son. You couldn’t stand the thought of the son getting hold of more than a tiny bit of all that lovely money. So you killed, and killed, and killed so that you could have it all.

  “And did it touch you at all, Mrs. Simpkins? Maybe late at night, when you’re gloating over how rich and powerful you’re going to be; about how you’re going to have children to rule again, a whole buildingful, with no parents to look out for them. And if you take a dislike to one of them, the way you did to Junior Simpkins, why you can just poison them, too.

  “In those times, do you ever hear the screams of the people you poisoned, or the sobs of their loved ones? When the voice of little Buck Murdo asks you why you killed him, is he happy with the answer ‘I wanted the money’?”

  By now, I thought Mrs. Simpkins was going to shake herself right off the platform. Instead, she finally looked at Blacke.

  “No!” she shouted. “No, no, no!”

  “He’s not happy with the answer?” Blacke said softly. “I wouldn’t have thought so.”

  “I hear no voices! I didn’t kill those people! It was Destiny!”

  “Destiny?”

  “Yes, you fool Destiny. My orphanage was destined to be, and Simpkins had promised! When he decided to break his promise, he had to die, so that destiny would be fulfilled! And I knew others had to die, so that I’d be free to fulfill it.

  “But I killed no one, and marked no one for death. I simply added the poison to that miserable charlatan’s mixture. God chose the victims, don’t you see? That way, only those destined to die would be taken, and I could carry on my work.”

  Jennie Murdo began to scream and try to get up the platform. One-armed as she was, if she’d made it up there, she would have made any lynch mob superfluous. Dr. Mayhew wrapped her up in his long arms and spoke soothingly to her.

  He looked up at Blacke and me. “Do you need me anymore?”

  “No, I think it’s under control here,” I said. “Take care of her.”

  “I’ll help you,” Junior Simpkins said simply, and the two of them led the woman away to the doctor’s office.

  “I guess,” Blacke said rather superfluously, “that’s about it. We’re going to lock her up now. You can all go home.”

  But they didn’t, not quite yet. They watched as the princess came over and gave me an enthusiastic kiss, in front of God and everybody. Her father shook my hand vigorously, decided that wasn’t enough, and embraced me.

  “Mingle with the crowd,” I suggested. “See if anybody around here is man enough to apologize.”

  It could be Herkimer didn’t want to have his faith in mankind shaken any further than it already was, but he didn’t take me up on my suggestion. Instead, he and his daughter followed quietly as Stick and I, each holding an arm, escorted a proud and defiant Mrs. Simpkins to her destiny in the town jail.

  The crowd melted away almost before we had the door closed. I was about to tell the Herkimers they were free to go when I heard Lobo Blacke’s voice calling from outside. “Hey! Hey! Booker, goddammit!”

  Sheepishly, I went outside and winched him down from the platform.

  35

  “PAPERS ARE SELLING LIKE lemonade on a hot day,” Merton told me.

  “Good,” I said.

  He scratched his head. “I don’t get it, though. Everybody was right there and saw what happened.”

  “That’s just it,” Blacke said. “They were part of it, they want to see it all written down for the ages. They feel like the story’s about them.”

  “I hope nothing like this ever happens around here again,” Merton said. He got enthusiastic amens from Blacke, Rebecca, and me.

  A lot had happened over the last couple of days. I, with absolutely no reluctance whatever, had hung up my badge for good. Not only had the marshal arrived, but Asa Harlan was back on his feet. Jennie Murdo had made herself a black dress and gotten on the train to go back to Denver. She had a large draft on a Denver bank to take with her, provided by Lucius Jenkins. It was seen as generosity and maybe it even was, but I think it was a gratitude payment for her having gotten rid of her husband and all the potential embarrassments he could have caused Jenkins.

  Jenkins had another talk with me, too. Once again, he offered me money, land, power, and his daughter’s hand (and any other body parts I might take a fancy to) to leave Blacke and come work for him. I found the whole thing vaguely distasteful, but I told him I’d think about it.

  And I had been. The role of spy does not exactly appeal to me, but it might be the only way to bring Jenkins to justice, a cause that was beginning to obsess me as much as it did the man in the wheelchair. I’d have to talk it over with Blacke.

  And now, it was time to say good-bye to Dr. Theophrastus Herkimer and the princess. The colorful wagon, looking somehow duller and smaller after its days locked up, was standing in front of the sheriff’s office. The Herkimers, having at last completed the legal requirements, were loading belongings into the wagon.

  They attracted no attention whatsoever from the people of the town, except for an occasional furtive, guilty glance.

  I held the door for Blacke and Rebecca; Merton followed.

  Daisy met me halfway across the street and gave me another resounding kiss. I could feel waves of disapproval coming from Rebecca and Blacke.

  “I’m gonna miss you,” Daisy said.

  Merton goggled. “You can talk!”

  “How about that?” she said playfully, and kissed him, too. I thought the boy was going to melt. I had not known a human being was capable of turning quite that color.

  “The medicine show circuit is gonna seem awfully dull after this,” she said.

  “The dullness will be welcome,” her father said. “In a year or so, we’ll have enough to settle down. If you didn’t already have such a magnificent physician here already, I might come back.”

  “Heck,” Merton said, in a voice that was still slightly hoarse. “Dad’s always complaining he’s got more work than he can handle.”

  The medicine man smiled at him. “You’re a generous lad, and your father is a great man. Perhaps I shall correspond with him. I find I’ve missed talking to medical colleagues.”

  “I’m glad to be going, in one way,” Daisy said.

  “What’s that?” Rebecca asked. All her scorn of Daisy’s displays of affection seemed to be reserved for me. For Daisy, she had nothing but indulgent friendship.

  “Gettin’ out from under the same roof as that crazy woman. All she does is read the Bible out loud and say nobody can do anything to her because of her Destiny.”

  Blacke grunted. I said, “Well, you can write about it in your book.”

  “What are you talking about, Quinn Booker?” Daisy said.

  “When you settle down, you should write a book about your adventures. You could call it Princess Daisy.”

  Bewildered, she looked at me for a few seconds. Then she laughed.

  I told her I supposed she was right. Then, with handshakes and more kisses all around, Daisy and her father boarded the wagon and drove off.

  We stood
there in the road watching them go.

  Blacke grunted again.

  “Are you in pain?” I asked him.

  “Just from you,” he said.

  “Then why are you grunting?”

  “I’m thinking about Destiny.”

  “What about it?”

  “I don’t believe in it. It’s too easy. If things happen because they have to, what’s the point of doing anything? Do you agree?”

  “I sure do. If I believed in Destiny, I’d be a lieutenant in some godforsaken army fort somewhere.”

  “Things happen because of what we do. Or what we don’t do. That’s the only way life makes sense.”

  “Every once in a while,” I said, “I’m reminded why I put up with you.”

  “Why you put up with me? Hah!”

  He cut me off before I could continue the argument.

  “Anyway,” he said, “there’s something I’ve got to do right now.”

  “What’s that, Uncle Louis?” Rebecca asked.

  “Have dinner. I’ve been smelling Mrs. Sundberg’s cooking all morning, and I’m starving. Any takers?”

  It was unanimous. Smiling, the four of us went inside to eat.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1997 by William L. DeAndrea

  cover design by Jason Gabbert

  978-1-4532-9029-3

  This 2012 edition distributed by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media