Past Due

by Richard Stockford

  Clipper leaned on a lower shelf as he reached for the top and felt the slightest movement under his hand. He gave the side of the shelves a little tug and then stepped back as the case swung smoothly away from the wall. Glancing at Janice, he grabbed the iron ring on the heavy plank door behind and slowly pulled it open. It took them several seconds to recognize the crumpled form on the tunnel floor as a human body. Motioning Janice to wait, Clipper cautiously entered the shaft, breath catching at the rotting, wet smell of decomposition. The red hair and fine stitches, almost lost in the ruined face facial features, proclaimed the corpse’s identity. Colin Murch had, indeed, returned.

  “If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say single gunshot to the right temple,” Doc Church said, stripping off his surgical gloves as he stepped out of the tunnel. “At least, it looks like a bullet hole in his head, no exit, hard to be sure without cleaning it up.” He sighed. “We’ll let the ME worry about that, I guess.”

  Clipper briefly wondered how many bodies Doc Church had seen in his long career, enough to reach a point of spiritual saturation perhaps, but let the though go when Doc shook an unhappy head. “Hell of a way for a man to end up,” he muttered sadly.

  “I think we got off easy.” John Peters took a huge bite of his club sandwich. “In the end, he must have just been hurting too much.”

  Peters was sitting at the corner table at Cleo’s with Clipper and Janice. It had taken all day to move Murch’s body and inspect the tunnel, and they were winding down with an early supper and beer. The case had become much less pressing when a 9mm automatic, later identified as the one taken from the slain deputy at the hospital, had been found under the body, and they found no evidence to point to anything other than suicide.

  Janice picked at her salad. “I’m just glad it’s over,” she said. “I still see his face in my nightmares.”

  Clipper reached for her hand. “We probably all will for a while, but it is finally over, and you can write the final chapter to the Edgewink gang story for your museum.”

  Monday morning found Clipper at his deck sorting crime scene photos and writing his final report in the long homicide saga which had begun with the murder of Bill Owens, three and a half months before. Sending the finished report to the printer, he idly riffled the pages of the eighth and final volume of the casebook binders. Murch was right, he thought, there probably is a book in here.

  Clipper added his report to the binder and was adding the photos to the attached folder when something caught his eye. He had carefully inspected the entire tunnel when they found Murch’s body but, as is often the case, the camera saw and preserved what the eye missed. The photo showed Murch’s body on the tunnel floor and there above it scratched into the wall, clearly visible in the stark relief of oblique lighting, was the sarcastic, winking monogram of Lester Edgewink.

  Later that night, Clipper and Janice were chatting in the den when he mentioned what the photo had revealed.

  “Dammedest thing. We all looked at it and missed it. I wonder how he ever got into that tunnel…”

  Bemused by his thoughts, Clipper did not notice Janice stiffen in her chair, an unbelieving look on her face. “Wait,” she commanded, jumping up and running from the room. She returned in moments with Abel’s journal. Sitting beside Clipper on the couch, she extracted a piece of paper from the book and held it out. “You never read the note Lester Edgewink left for Abel, did you,” she said, excitedly.

  Clipper read the short note:

  ‘There’s someone watching me. I don’t know who, but I can feel it at night. I moved the bag to the mortuary tunnel. Behind the bricks on the left side. Look for my mark’.

  Janice jumped back to her feet and began pacing. “There’s a tunnel between the main hospital building and the mortuary. Abel thought that was the tunnel Lester was talking about, but he could never find the mark. He spent years searching and recording it all in his journal, but he never mentions the second tunnel. He never found it!”

  “Ugh. Do you ever get used to this smell?” It was early the next morning, and Clipper and Janice stood in the doorway of the tunnel recently occupied by the decomposing remains of Colin Murch.

  “Try to breathe through your mouth,” advised Clipper, stepping past her into the tunnel. He set his flash on the floor, aimed to illuminate Lester’s mark which was about chest height on the left hand wall. Hefting a short handled pick-axe he had brought from his house, he stepped forward and brushed dust from the wall with his hand. “I don’t see any sign of loose bricks,” he said doubtfully.

  Janice moved in. “Maybe they’re down lower,” she said, placing a hand on the wall for balance and kneeling down. As she shifted her weight, the cleverly concealed door swung inward with the pressure and Sarge Dennison’s Underground Railroad cell appeared. Janice swung her light inside, and they both saw the old canvass satchel sitting where it had waited for seventy-seven years on the crude wooden bed.

  Janice’s hands were trembling as she crouched by the bed and reached for the satchel’s straps. Fighting stiff leather and corroded buckles, she got them undone and, with a searching look at Clipper, opened the bag.

  Later, Clipper would remember looking over her shoulder, seeing the picture of William McKinley and the number ‘500’ on the top bill and thinking, ‘All this for counterfeit money?’

  Moving in stunned silence, Janice carefully removed the top three inches of loose and banded bills from the bag. The jumbled jewelry beneath seemed to glow with a light of its own, a modern day pirate’s treasure of gold, silver and gems winking in the wavering glow of her flashlight.

  The soft voice was thunderous in its surprise. “Thank you. I knew you’d find it eventually.”

  Clipper whirled, the automatic grab for his sidearm stillborn at the sight of the revolver in Wanda Lambert’s steady hand. “You… not Murch,” he said, in instant comprehension. You killed him and all the others.”

  Wanda smiled. “Well, I have to give poor Colin credit for that old man in Orono,” she said, “but for the rest, I did what was necessary. That,” she gestured at the satchel, “that’s mine. Mine by birthright. Mine, and that idiot wanted to share and bargain it away. My great grandfather died in this stupid town and my parents died drunk and poor because they didn’t get what was rightfully theirs, but my grandmother was right. She knew I’d find it. She told me we’d earned it and I’d be the one to collect. And now I am.”

  Clipper slowly straightened out of his gunfighter crouch. Wanda,” he said soothingly, “give me the gun. This has to end here.”

  She glanced down at the gun. “Yes, I suppose it does. Looking up, she smiled sweetly at Clipper and shot him in the chest.

  In the tiny cell, the gunshot was a monstrous, flat thunderclap of sound that muted Janice’s scream. She leaped to her feet, but Wanda already had the gun trained on her chest. “It’s too bad,” she said mockingly, “you’re the only other person that might have an honest claim to this.” she said sympathetically. “But I’m afraid I can’t allow that.”

  “Who was your great grandfather?” Janice asked quickly, desperately stalling.

  Wanda hesitated. “Aemon Kennon,” she said flatly. He died so your husband’s family could get rich.” Her voice rose. “And now, you die so I can get justice.”

  Janice took an involuntary step back, eyes closing tightly, as Wanda lifted the revolver at arm’s length in a two handed grip, but instead of the expected roar, she heard an ugly, meaty thud and a long, shuddering sigh. She opened her eyes to see Wanda, eyes wide in surprise and arms still out straight, performing a slow, falling pirouette, exposing the pick-axe standing proud of her back and a bloody Clipper, reeling against the wall behind her.

  “Now, can I have your office?” John Peters lounged in the doorway to Clipper’s room at Bangor General.

  Clipper turned his head slowly. “Yeah,” he croaked, “We’re going to buy our own police department, anyway. Probably our own city. With walls. And no people.”

/>   It was two days after the emergency surgery that had removed the .38 caliber slug from Clipper’s upper chest, and he was recovering in a roomful of flowers and get-well cards.

  Peters slid into a chair. “You seriously going to get to keep it?” he asked in a kid-in-a-candy shop tone.

  Clipper uttered a pained laugh. “Hell, I don’t know,” he said. “That’ll be tied up in court for years. They can’t even estimate the value yet, but the insurance companies are already offering millions for Janice to sign off on the claim. He smiled at Janice, curled like a cat in a chair beside him. “Whatever happens, it should be an interesting ride.”

  And now it’s nearly finished

  this crime spree from the past,

  And Lester’s Ghost can finally rest

  the secret found at last.

  Tho many searched throughout the years

  the demented had no clue,

  That there beneath imprisoned feet

  a field of diamonds grew.

  But Clipper and his Lady

  a cut above the rest,

  Slew the bad guys, one and all

  and found the treasure chest.

  And now the story’s all but told

  no mystery left to answer,

  There’s only Clipper’s Lady,

  and how he will romance her.

  PP

  The end.

  About the Author

  Richard Stockford is a retired Police Chief living in Bangor, Maine with Cindy, Sampson, and Cleo, one of whom has been his constant companion for 47 years.

  He is a maker of custom knives who is inspired to write by his grandchildren.