The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

by Deming, Richard

  As in the case of her previous marriage, Peggy didn’t want the news released to the press until we had completed a honeymoon cruise so we wouldn’t be besieged by reporters at every port of call. I pointed out that she was too well known to escape all publicity, and unless she wanted to pretend deep gloom at each stop, people were bound to guess we were on a honeymoon. She said she didn’t plan to withhold the news from friends and acquaintances but was going to request them not to relay it to any reporters, so there was a good chance we could keep the secret from the general public until we completed the cruise.

  “It won’t be a tragedy if reporters find out,” she said. “I just want a chance for us to be alone as long as possible.”

  For our cruise we decided to complete the circuit of the Caribbean we had already started. This time there would be only two of us aboard, however.

  We got as far as the island of Great Inagua when we ran over a floating log in the harbor, broke a propeller shaft, and lost the prop. The spare parts weren’t available anywhere on the island, but I knew I wouldn’t have any trouble finding them back at our previous stop, Port-de-Paix.

  A packet ship plied every other day from Great Inagua to Haiti, then on to the Dominican Republic and finally to Puerto Rico. I checked the schedule and discovered that if I caught the one on Friday, I could catch the return ship from Port-de-Paix to Great Inagua on Saturday.

  Peggy knew some people named Jordan on the small island where we were laid up, and as they were having a house party on Friday night, she decided not to accompany me.

  I got back with the new propeller shaft and propeller about four o’clock Saturday afternoon. The private boat slips were only about fifty yards from the main dock, and I could see the Princess II as we pulled in. A slim feminine figure in a red bikini was on the bow waving to the ship. I doubted that she could make me out at that distance from among the other passengers lining the rail, but I waved back, anyway.

  When I lugged my packages aboard the Princess II, Peggy was no longer on the bow. She was leaning back into the canvas back rest on one of the air-inflated mats on the afterdeck. A tanned and muscular young man of about twenty-five, wearing white swim trunks, was seated on the stern rail.

  As I set down my packages, Peggy said, “Honey, this is Bob Colvin, one of Max and Susie Jordan’s house guests. My husband Dan, Bob.”

  The young man rose, and we shook hands. He inquired how I was, and I said I was glad to meet him.

  “Bob was planning to take the Monday packet ship up to Governor’s Harbor, then fly from there to Miami,” Peggy said. “I told him if he wasn’t in a hurry, he might as well leave with us tomorrow and sail all the way home. He can sleep in the pilothouse.”

  Counting our two months in seclusion at San Juan, our honeymoon had now lasted long enough so that the urgency to be completely alone had abated somewhat for both of us. I don’t mean that my love for Peggy had abated. It was just that both of us were ready to emerge from our pink cloud back into the world of people. My only reaction was that it would be nice to have someone to spell me at the wheel from time to time.

  “Sure,” I said, and knelt beside my wife to give her a kiss.

  She kissed me soundly, then forced me to a seated position next to her and pressed my head onto her shoulder. Smiling down into my face, she began to stroke my hair.

  With my face in its upturned position, I could look right over her shoulder into the shaving mirror attached to the timber alongside the hatch leading below. By pure accident it was slanted slightly downward to reflect the deck area immediately in front of the inflated mat.

  In the mirror I could see Bob Colvin’s raised bare foot. Peggy’s bare toes were working lasciviously against his and along the sole of his foot.

  THE MONSTER BRAIN

  Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, November 1966.

  Modern society has become so automated, it’s amazing how many of the things one does are later scrutinized by an electronic computer. For example, for some time now our state headquarters of the National Association of Underwriters has been routinely feeding punch cards into a computer for every insurance policy issued, and for every claim filed in the state. The data which comes out is mainly useful for statistical purposes, but once in a while something will spill out which suggests a possible insurance fraud. When that happens, the information is relayed to the association’s investigative division, which is where I work.

  One Monday morning in mid-October I came to work in a bad mood. Anita and I had gone round and round again the night before about getting married. As usual, the argument had centered about the lack of future in working for a salary and ended with the ultimatum that she would never marry a man who couldn’t support her in luxury.

  Sally, our blonde receptionist said, “If that’s a hangover you’re suffering, Mr. Quinn, you’d better get over it in a hurry.”

  “It’s not a hangover,” I said, glowering at her. “It’s just the normal distasteful expression I can’t keep from my face every time I look at a member of the female sex. And why should I get over it, even if it were a hangover?”

  “You had another fight with your girl,” she said. “The chief wants to see you.”

  I smoothed my expression before I entered the chiefs office. He doesn’t like to see anything but happy faces.

  Ed Morgan is chief of the investigative division. He’s a grizzled, barrel-chested man of sixty who has headed the division for twenty years and has the reputation of being able to smell an insurance fraud clear across the state. I had been working under him for seven years, since I got out of college, and had become his most trusted investigator.

  “Sit down, Tod,” he said. “I’ve got a routine investigation for you. I doubt that anything will come of it, because I can’t work up much of a hunch about it, but the computer people sent some data over, and we have to check it out.”

  If Ed Morgan didn’t sense a possible fraud from whatever it was the computer had divulged, there probably wasn’t any. But a lot of our investigations are based less on outright suspicion than on mere thoroughness. We turn up the number of fraud cases we do because we investigate everything which seems even a little off key in insurance claims.

  “What did the monster brain turn up this time?” I asked.

  “Well, as you know, one of the items keyed on every punch card involving claims is cause of death. Some statistician was tabulating causes of death throughout the state for the past twelve months, and seems to think he found something interesting when he came to typhoid fever. Typhoid is rare these days; there were only seven deaths from it last year in the whole state. Five of them were in the same community. Each was insured by a different carrier, but through the same insurance broker. Each policy happened to be for the same amount too: ten thousand dollars. Headquarters thought the coincidence of cause of death, the insured amount and the broker being identical in all five cases might interest us.”

  He handed me a couple of sheets of paper on which a resume of the data from the punch cards had been typed.

  The five decedents who had been insured were an eighty-year-old man whose beneficiary had been his son, three women whose beneficiaries had been their husbands, and one eighteen-year-old boy whose beneficiary had been his father. All five policies had been written on different companies by a broker named Paul Manners. The deaths had all taken place during a period of about a month from the middle of July to the middle of August. The addresses of both the deceased and the beneficiaries in all cases were either R.D. 1 or R.D. 2, Heather Ridge.

  “Obviously a rural community,” I said. “Where’s Heather Ridge?”

  “I didn’t know either until I looked it up,” the chief said. “It has a population of seven hundred and is the seat of Heather County.”

  “I don’t know where Heather County
is either,” I said.

  Morgan grinned. “I’m not surprised. It’s back up in the hills with the moonshiners. The population of the whole county is only about twenty-five hundred. There isn’t even a paved road in the county, although the map shows a couple of presumably good gravel roads. There’s no railroad line to Heather Ridge, and a bus only twice a week, so if you find you have to go there, you’d better drive.”

  I glanced at the resume again. “Whoever sent this over has a hole in his head. So the place had a typhoid epidemic this last summer. That’s the logical time to have one. This Paul Manners wrote all the policies because a place that size wouldn’t have more than one insurance broker. And the amounts being the same don’t mean anything. Ten thousand dollars is the most common amount of life coverage.”

  “Exactly my reasoning, but we’ve turned up frauds with less to start on. It shouldn’t take you more than a few days to check it out. You may decide after examining the claim correspondence that you don’t even have to visit the place.”

  “Okay,” I said, rising. “I’ll get on it right away.”

  In the outer office the blonde Sally said, “You look a little more cheerful now, Mr. Quinn. Is your opinion of the female sex improving?”

  “It’s just that I have a happy assignment,” I told her. “If things work out the way I hope, I’ll be able to send a lovely young widow to the gas chamber.”

  She made a leering face at me.

  The insurance carriers all had branch offices in Blair City, fifty miles away. I drove over and by mid-afternoon had examined the files on all five cases.

  Everything seemed in order. There was a certified copy of the death certificate in each case, all stamped with the notary seal of an Emma Pruett of the Heather County Clerk’s Office. Each had been signed by the same doctor, Emmet Parks. Checking the policies, I discovered all had been taken out during the previous January and February, and all physical exams had been made by Dr. Emmet Parks. Again this wasn’t too coincidental. It was hardly likely a town of seven hundred would have more than one doctor.

  The relatively short time the policies had been in force made me decide to check a little more deeply, though. I revisited each insurance office and asked to look at the canceled claim-payment checks. I was startled to discover that in each case the checks had been endorsed to Dr. Emmet Parks and then cashed by him at the same bank in Holoyke.

  I checked my road map and discovered Heather Ridge was about sixty miles from Holoyke. Now why were the checks all endorsed to the doctor, I wondered, and why did he go sixty miles to cash them instead of cashing them in Heather Ridge?

  By the time I got back to the state capital, it was too late to do any more that day. I phoned Anita to see if she were interested in going out to dinner, but she was just as icy as the night before. She hung up on me.

  I spent a miserable evening brooding over what kind of business I could go into which might make the kind of money Anita demanded. I couldn’t think of any. My education was in liberal arts, and my total experience was in insurance investigation. I finally gave up and went to bed.

  The next morning I was at the office of the State Medical Society when it opened.

  Dr. Emmet Parks proved to be a member in good standing, and had been for twenty years. He was fifty years old, and had never practiced anywhere but Heather Ridge. He was the only physician in all of Heather County.

  If there was fraud connected with the five insurance claims, the only way I could see it had been worked was by mass murder. It seemed highly unlikely that a reputable physician would be a party to that, and equally unlikely that even a rural physician would misdiagnose five murders in a row as typhoid fever. Besides, since each beneficiary was different, it would involve the collusion of all five in murder.

  Still, Parks’ signature on all the claim-payment checks bothered me. I decided to keep checking.

  When I left the State Medical Society Office, I visited the licensing bureau at the Capital Building. Insurance broker Paul Manners had passed his state examination and had been licensed only the previous November, which made the relative newness of the five policies considerably less suspicious. Since he couldn’t have started selling insurance earlier than November, all it seemed to indicate was that he was a pretty hot salesman.

  Checking his file, I discovered he was married but had no children, had a high school education and had been a part-time farmer for the past twenty-five years. During the same period he had worked half-time as a farm appliance salesman in a store in Heather Ridge. According to his application, he planned to continue his part-time farming, but drop his extra job when he became an insurance broker.

  A certified true copy of his birth certificate, again bearing the notary stamp of Emma Pruett, showed he had been born in Heather Ridge.

  His three references rated his character high. One was from a Reverend Donald Hartwell, one from County Judge Albert Baker, the third from Dr. Emmet Parks.

  While it was standard procedure for people to give their family physician’s name when references were required, the frequency with which I was running into Dr. Emmet Parks’ name began to intrigue me.

  I took rather detailed notes of the information about Paul Manners contained in his file.

  From the Capital Building I went back to association headquarters and gave a computer operator a question to ask the monster brain. Its answer lessened my suspicion. In addition to the five typhoid cases, Paul Manners had placed twenty other policies with various carriers since he had been in business, and all of these insured were still alive. It looked more and more as though the insurance broker had merely had the misfortune to start business in a territory where previously no one had ever been approached by an insurance salesman, had done remarkably well with his virgin territory, but had immediately run into an epidemic.

  If it hadn’t been for Dr. Emmet Parks’ signature on all the claim-payment checks, I would have dropped the matter right there. But I had to check that out. I decided to visit Heather Ridge.

  I drove up on Wednesday, arriving in the middle of the morning. The town was a good forty miles from the nearest main highway, back up in the hills in rugged, sparsely settled country. The last thirty miles I traveled on washboard gravel road, and I didn’t see a single other car. As a matter of fact, except for power and telephone lines strung on poles alongside the road, I saw few signs of civilization. Occasionally I spotted a farmhouse or a barn, but most of the time the view from the winding mountain road was of steep hills densely covered with pine.

  I didn’t see any heather, and Heather Ridge itself turned out to be in a valley instead of on a ridge, although there was a sharp, jagged ridge just north of it.

  Later I learned the town and the county had been named after Amos Heather, a trapper who back in the mid-1800s had stood off an Indian attack from it for seven days before he finally lost his scalp.

  The town was like something from the last century. There was a town square with a squat, one-story, redbrick courthouse in its center. A half dozen overalled old men chewing tobacco lolled on the low wall edging the courthouse lawn. There were a few tired-looking business establishments ringing the square, but there were no shoppers on the street. Only two vehicles were in sight, both parked in front of the courthouse. One was a 1932 pickup truck, the other a Model T.

  The tobacco-chewing old men regarded me with silent speculation when I parked and entered the courthouse.

  There was a long corridor running the length of the building, with offices off it on either side, labeled with the familiar titles you see in any courthouse. Most of the doors stood open so that I had to pause and look in to read the lettering on the doors. The sheriff’s office was to the left just inside the main entrance, and directly across from it was the district attorney’s office. Both were empty. I passed other empty offices labeled TAX ASSESSOR, REG
ISTRAR OF MOTOR VEHICLES, COUNTY RECORDER, COUNTY CLERK and CORONER. Opposite the coroner’s office was an empty office labeled COUNTY JUDGE, and a small, equally empty courtroom.

  By then I was halfway down the corridor, and I finally found some sign of life. In a small alcove, behind a counter flush with the left wall of the corridor, a young woman sat before a telephone switchboard. She was a rather plain-featured brunette of about twenty-one or two. A sign hanging above the counter said INFORMATION.

  “Morning, miss,” I said. “Is the courthouse closed today?”

  “Oh, no,” she said with a smile. “What can I do for you?”

  “Where is everybody?”

  “Oh, they’re all available.” She indicated the switchboard. “I can have any official you want over here in ten minutes. They don’t hang around here because we have so little business.”

  She laughed at my quizzical expression. “Kind of throws you at first, doesn’t it? It took me some getting used to when I first came here. I’ve been in this job only a year. I’m from Holoyke. When I answered the ad for a secretarial position, I didn’t realize I’d be practically running a whole county, but I’m clerk of the court, secretary to the D.A., the county clerk, the county recorder and the coroner, registrar of motor vehicles, switchboard operator and information clerk. My name’s Emma Pruett.”

  The woman whose notary seal had been stamped to all the death certificates, I remembered. I said, “Doesn’t anybody but you work around here? You’re the staff?”

  “When it’s necessary. The population of the whole county is only about twenty-five hundred, and all the county jobs except mine and the sheriff’s are part-time. The D.A. has his private law practice, for instance, and so does the county judge. The recorder of deeds runs a general store. The coroner’s a practicing physician, and so on. The salaries of none of them are more than a few dollars a month. They hired me to coordinate things. I always know where to reach everybody when something comes up. The sheriff’s usually around, but he happens to be over at the coffee shop at the moment.”