“Sheriff, one man is dead and another came close to it tonight. If Casper is involved—”
Sheriff Lens was uncomfortable. “It’s just a little side deal I heard about, Doc. There’s probably no connection with the shooting tonight. See, if Prohibition is repealed next year, anyone with a big stock of imported liquor will be sitting pretty.”
“A bootlegger, you mean?”
“Or someone who imported it legally, using government licenses obtained for medicinal use. I hear tell there’s a new drug company doin’ just that over in Shinn Corners.”
“Shinn Corners?” The place kept popping up. “Is Casper involved with it?”
“Well, that’s what I can’t prove, Doc, but you don’t get those government licenses unless you’ve got some political pull. The word I have is that there’s a warehouse in Shinn Corners stocked to the roof with Scotch whisky, just waiting for Repeal. The drug company has Pinkertons guarding it.”
We moved back into the lobby, where Vera Smith had joined Creeley. “I’ll be heading home if you don’t have anything else for me to do,” she said.
“Go ahead,” the theater owner answered glumly. “Maybe tomorrow will be better.”
“Wait a minute, Vera,” I called. “I’ll walk you to your car.”
She got out her keys as we strolled. “Is Mayor Trenton going to be all right?”
“I think so. Luckily, he was starting to stand up just as the shot was fired.”
“But who could have done it? And how?”
“We’re trying to get to the bottom of it,” I said. “You live in Shinn Corners, don’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“I saw you talking earlier to Casper Drake. Do you ever see him around town?”
“Sure, that’s how I know him. I see him sometimes in the bank there, or doing some shopping.”
“Does he have any business interests there?”
She looked doubtful. “I don’t know about that.”
I held the door while she climbed behind the wheel of her Ford. “You might ask around town, see if he’s connected with a business there.”
“All right, if you want.” But somehow I didn’t think she would.
I watched her drive off and then went back inside. The sheriff was affixing a seal to the crying-room door. “Keep people out for a couple of days,” he said, “We’ll look at it again tomorrow.”
“Got any ideas, Sheriff?”
He looked at me and shook his head. “Hell, Doc, we know who did it. Trouble is, he killed himself yesterday.”
I’d been concerned about Mayor Trenton’s safety, and so I was relieved to find him out of bed and preparing to go home the next morning. “Thanks for sending over my jacket,” he said. “At least I can walk out of here with a bit more dignity than when I came in last night.”
“How’s the shoulder?”
“Dr. Lask says to come back in ten days and he’ll remove the stitches. There might be a little seepage of blood for a day or two, he says, but otherwise I’m fine.”
Hilda Trenton arrived, smiling and gracious. She’d recovered her composure and was once again the mayor’s wife. “Has the sheriff captured the gunman yet?” she wondered.
“He’s got a couple of good leads,” I lied. Then I added, with a grain of truth, “He’s checking something over in Shinn Corners.”
Trenton was a bit wobbly from loss of blood, but we got him to the car without difficulty. The deputy followed along, with instructions to remain with the mayor at least through the holiday weekend. Another deputy would be assigned to night duty at their house.
I found Sheriff Lens in the town square, pretending to chase after the kids with their fireworks and cap pistols. “Let them go, Sheriff,” I called to him. “There’s no law against it.”
“They litter up the grass,” he complained, stooping to retrieve the remains of a cherry bomb that had just exploded with a deafening blast.
“Mayor Trenton is back home.”
“Good.” His face took on its familiar perplexed look. “Doc, I was examinin’ that bullet they dug out of the mayor’s shoulder. All I got’s a magnifying glass but the size of the slug and the markings on it look awfully similar to the bullet that killed Freddie Bay.”
“Oh?”
“And that gun’s been locked in the office safe since Tuesday.”
“I see what you mean.”
“An impossible shooting in a locked room with a gun that’s in my safe!”
“Think you could find me that warehouse in Shinn Corners?”
“Huh?”
“The place with the Scotch whisky.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Not too many warehouses over there.”
“Then let’s go.”
“What for? What are you gonna find there, Doc?”
“The last piece of the puzzle. I want to know if that brand of Scotch is the same as the bottle we found in Freddie Bay’s apartment.”
He stared at me for a moment and then said, “Let’s go.”
On the drive over, I sorted it all out in my mind until I was sure I knew what had happened. It made sense in a crazy way.
We both knew Sheriff Lens was out of his jurisdiction in Shinn Corners, but he wasn’t there to arrest anybody. He located the warehouse of the Pilgrim Drug Company without too much difficulty and talked his way past the Pinkerton guards by announcing that I was a doctor come to check on their stock of medicinal whisky.
“I guess it’s all right to go in,” the guard finally said. “The boss is in there.”
“That’s just the man we wanted to see,” I told him.
He led us down an aisle, past cases of Scotch with the brand name I’d expected. There was a small lighted office at the far end of the building, and as we approached a man came out I didn’t know. He frowned and started walking toward us.
“Get out your gun, Sheriff,” I whispered.
Behind the stranger, following him out of the office, was Mayor Trenton.
We stood facing each other in an instant of surprise, then Trenton barked a command to the other man. “Shoot them! They’re hijackers!”
But Sheriff Lens had reached for his badge instead of his gun. “Now what do you want to say something like that for, Mayor? Call off your Pinkerton boys. I think Doctor Sam here wants to say a few words.”
“I do.” I stepped forward a bit, facing Mayor Trenton in the narrow aisle. “You almost fooled us, I’ll admit. You managed to switch victim and killer most convincingly. Freddie Bay became the killer and you became the victim, when in truth the exact opposite was the case all the time. Freddie knew about your connection with this place, and with Repeal becoming a real possibility for the first time he probably decided to try a little blackmail. You killed him and faked that suicide note in his shaky handwriting after getting him drunk on a bottle of Scotch you’d brought along. You should have poured the rest of it down the drain. That half empty bottle was the first thing to make me suspicious.”
“You seem to forget I was shot myself,” Trenton said. “I’ll have your badge for this, Lens.”
The sheriff kept quiet and let me do the talking. “Your shooting was the most bizarre touch. I figured out how you did it, but I can only guess at the reason why. You were afraid Bay had left something—a letter accusing you of using political connections to gain permits for importing Scotch into the country for medicinal purposes. If that letter surfaced after his death, it would make you a prime suspect in his murder as well. How could you kill the blackmailer and still be safe? Simply by faking another letter, making it seem as if he planned to kill you and drunkenly thought he’d already carried out his scheme. Then if the real letter turned up it could be dismissed as more drunken ramblings.”
“You were right next to me when I was shot,” Mayor Trenton reminded me.
“That so-called shooting took a lot of nerve on your part. Just before coming to the theater, you had to stab yourself with something like an icepick in the fleshy part of the s
houlder, deep enough so you could work an already-fired bullet into the wound. I hope you sterilized the slug to prevent blood-poisoning. You stuffed a handkerchief against the wound to keep it closed and absorb the blood, and left for the theater. You probably figured that a real shooting, following Freddie’s strange confession, would so baffle us that we’d never implicate you in his killing, even if the blackmail letter showed up. But we should have realized from the start that the whole so-called shooting was predicated upon your insistence on watching part of the film from that soundproof room. No would-be killer is likely to have guessed you’d do that, so the crime couldn’t have been planned—by Bay or anyone else. Only you could have set it up, Mayor.”
“You were seated next to me. You heard the shot.”
“I heard an explosive cap, the kind used in a child’s cap pistol, dropped by you on the bare floor earlier. As you started to rise, you brought your heel down hard on the cap, setting it off. It was just loud enough to be mistaken for a muffled shot. The burnt cap probably stuck to your shoe, but I did find a tiny red piece of it on the floor. When the cap went off, you pulled the bloody handkerchief free, dropped it on the floor where we found it, and let the blood flow. You’d thought to cut a hole in your shirt where the bullet apparently entered, but you couldn’t have a matching hole in your suit jacket where it would be seen. That undamaged jacket gave you away, when I started thinking about it. And today, when I mentioned a clue relating to Shinn Corners, you had to sneak past the deputy assigned to guard you and get over here to see that everything was all right.”
“I’m getting out of here,” Trenton growled. He turned and ran down a narrow aisle before we realized what was happening.
“Come on!” the sheriff shouted to me, running after him.
We were halfway down the aisle in pursuit before I realized it was a trap. Trenton was pushing on a pile of whisky cases, trying to topple them over onto us. He was a mighty ingenious man . . .
“Well,” Dr. Sam Hawthorne concluded, “I’m still here so you know I wasn’t killed. Neither was Sheriff Lens. The cases fell the wrong way and Mayor Trenton was crushed beneath them. He was dead when we pulled him out. He must have been a little mad those last days to come up with that farfetched scheme and actually wound himself and insert that bullet. We never did tell the town the true story. Bay and Trenton were both gone, and we let it stand as a suicide and a tragic accident. If people wondered what their mayor was doing in a warehouse full of Scotch whisky, they talked about it only in private.”
“We hadn’t heard the last of that warehouse, though. Government agents came to confiscate the Scotch, and the bootleggers moved in to grab it first. Before our centennial summer ended, it caused another murder that seemed just as impossible as the attack on Mayor Trenton.”
THE PROBLEM OF THE FATAL FIREWORKS
“Come in!” Dr. Sam Hawthorne urged, waving toward the vacant chair that was always at his side. “I was just pouring myself a small libation and I don’t like to drink alone. Which reminds me, I was going to tell you about the warehouse full of bootlegged Scotch we discovered back in the summer of ’32 just before the Fourth of July weekend. You’ll remember it was our centennial summer in Northmont and there was lots of celebrating . . .”
The Fourth came on a Monday that year (Dr. Sam continued) and I guess Sheriff Lens had been looking forward to a peaceful holiday after all the excitement of the previous week. But early on Monday morning two well dressed men drove into town and showed the sheriff their badges. They were Charles Simmons and James Ready from the Prohibition Bureau’s enforcement division, and they’d driven in from the Boston office to take possession of the warehouse full of Scotch whisky we’d uncovered in Shinn Corners. Though it was a different county, Sheriff Lens had found it with me and he’d assumed temporary responsibility for it.
It happened that my nurse, April, was on vacation that week. She’d taken a cottage at Chester Lake and invited the sheriff and his wife Vera, along with me, to spend the holiday with her. Vera, in fact, had driven up with April early in the morning and we were supposed to join them around noon. I was in my new office in a wing of Pilgrim Memorial Hospital, having checked on a couple of patients, when Sheriff Lens phoned with the bad news.
“Doc, I don’t think I’m goin’ to make it to April’s cottage by noon. A couple of Prohibition agents just arrived. I gotta ride over to Shinn Corners with them.”
“I could meet you there and we could go on to the lake. It’s on the way.”
“Can’t, Doc. I promised the Oswald brothers I’d stop by the garage this morning. I’ll have to do that after I finish up in Shinn Corners.”
I didn’t want to disappoint April and Vera, so I tried to figure a way we could get everything done. “What’s the problem with the Oswalds? Anything I can handle?”
“Well, maybe so. You know Max Webber has been tryin’ to buy their garage. They say he’s vandalizing the property to force them to sell. Somebody broke a window last night.”
“I guess a broken window isn’t serious enough to disrupt your holiday. I’ll swing by after I leave here and tell them you’ll be over in the morning.”
“I’d appreciate it, Doc.”
“Then I’ll drive over to Shinn Corners and meet you at that warehouse.”
“Fine. I expect they just want me to show them the place and then they’ll take over. None too soon for me. I’ve had to have deputies guardin’ it all weekend.”
I locked the office and drove into town, heading for Oswald’s Garage. A decade earlier there wouldn’t have been a need for an auto-repair place in Northmont, but now probably half the people in town owned cars and only the Depression was keeping the rest from buying them. The Oswald brothers, Teddy and Billy, were both in their late twenties, and they’d been tinkering with Model T Fords for as long as I’d lived in town. Their garage, opened a year earlier, had quickly become a hangout for teenage boys who shared their interest in cars. Some folks complained about the noise in the early evening, but it was never excessive.
The firecrackers going off in the town square were making a lot more noise just then. There’d be a band concert later in the day, as there always was on the Fourth, but right now the square was given over to fireworks and cherry bombs and cap guns. The sound brought back unpleasant memories of a tragic murder only a few days earlier—one that had led to the discovery of the bootleg Scotch. That was history now, and I told myself I should be happy a broken window was the worst crime Northmont had to offer on the holiday.
Billy Oswald, the younger brother, was outside the garage when I arrived. He was still a kid at heart and I wasn’t surprised to see him lighting the fuse of a firecracker as I parked the car across the street. He ran back about twenty feet and grinned as it went off with a satisfying bang. A few kids watched from a distance.
“How’s the car running, Doc?” he asked when he saw me.
“Like a top, Billy. Your brother around?”
“He’s inside working on a Chevy.”
I followed him into the garage where Teddy Oswald was changing a tire. He was more serious than Billy but not quite as handsome. The girls chased after Billy and ignored Teddy, which seemed to be all right with both of them.
“I hear you got a broken window, Teddy,” I said. “Sheriff Lens asked me to stop by and tell you he’ll be over in the morning.”
Teddy picked up a mallet and tried to remove a dent from the Chevy’s fender. “It’s Max Webber, I know it is. If I had his head here, I’d work on it with this.”
Billy came around the side of the car. “It’s Max, all right,” he agreed.
“Why’s he so anxious to get this property?” I asked. “You got an oil well under it?”
“He’s got big plans for fixin’ up the town. Wants to put an office building on this corner, with stores on the main floor.” Billy had picked up a second mallet to help with the dent but he seemed undecided about how to proceed. Finally, Teddy sighed and took it fro
m him, trying to show him how.
Just then, Dora Springsteen entered the garage. She was Billy’s girl, a pretty blonde who worked at the soda fountain in the drugstore down the street. “Where’s the window they broke?” she asked of no one in particular.
“Back there,” Teddy muttered. “We found that rock somebody tossed through it.”
She picked up the small stone from the workbench. “This isn’t much more than a pebble. You know, a big firecracker might have tossed that up in the air. Maybe it was an accident.”
I had to agree with her. “There’s probably nothing here for the sheriff,” I said. “If you want me to, I’ll talk to Max about easing off you fellas.”
“Nobody talks to Max Webber,” Dora said. “He comes into the soda fountain like he owns the place.”
Billy Oswald opened a storage cabinet and took out two big boxes of firecrackers. “Come on, Teddy—let’s close up and go have some fun. Hell, it’s the Fourth of July.”
I didn’t like being reminded of the fact. Back in ’24, soon after I set up my medical practice in Northmont, there’d been a July Fourth killing on the park bandstand. The day had seemed jinxed to me ever since, although subsequent Independence Days had been peaceful enough. “You’ve got enough there to blow up the town,” I commented.
Billy hefted one of the sealed packages. “These are skyrockets, for tonight. The firecrackers can go anytime—like right now!”
I followed along reluctantly as the brothers and Dora crossed the street in the direction of the park. But our trek was unexpectedly interrupted as a black sedan pulled up alongside. I recognized Sheriff Lens in the front seat with the driver.
“Doc, this here’s James Ready from the Boston office. And that’s Mr. Charles Simmons in back.”
I smiled at both grim-faced men. Ready, in the front seat, merely grunted, and Simmons got out to stretch his legs without speaking. Maybe they didn’t like working on Independence Day, either. “Glad to meet you,” I told them. “I thought you’d be halfway to Shinn Corners by now, Sheriff.”
“I left the keys to the warehouse at my office—had to come by and pick them up.”
Nothing Is Impossible: Further Problems for Dr. Sam Hawthorne Page 4