“Who came with you?”
“Alderman Finnigan, and Phil Yancy. Usually there were just the four of us.”
I nodded. “I’m going to look around downstairs.”
Wayne was back down a few minutes later with a hunting jacket and a rifle in a leather case. “I’ll miss our get-togethers,” he said.
“Did Mrs. Cresson ever come out with her husband?” I asked.
“Not when we were here.” He went out the front door. “See you back at the hospital, Sam.”
I watched him drive away and then went back upstairs to the drawer I’d been examining. The leather pouch was gone.
Back in Northmont, I checked in with April to see if there’d been any patient emergencies. When she told me everything was quiet, I called the jail to speak with Sheriff Lens. His deputy told me he was at Molly’s Cafe, so I drove over there.
Molly herself was in the checkroom between the inner and outside doors, applying a final coat of paint to the walls. “Didn’t have time for this yesterday,” she told me. “Now probably no one will come anyway.”
“Maybe they’ll want to see the place where the mayor was killed. Did you get the rest of your liquor from Yancy?”
“Yeah, he sent a truck in with it. How about the case of sherry you and the sheriff took last night?”
“They had to open all the bottles to test them. They didn’t find any more poison. Maybe we should check that port, too, just to be safe.”
“You can have one bottle. I can’t afford to lose another case.”
“Where’s the sheriff?”
“Inside.” She motioned with a paint-stained finger. “Talking with John Finnigan.”
The alderman looked up as I entered, and I saw he had a bottle of Scotch and a glass in front of him. He hadn’t wasted any time taking advantage of Repeal. “Come in for a little drink, Doc?” he asked.
“Too early in the day for me.” I motioned to Sheriff Lens and we went out to the kitchen where we could talk.
“Find out anything?” he asked.
I gave him a report on the lack of poison in the other bottles, then told him of my conversation with Yancy and my subsequent visit to the hunting lodge. “I’m convinced it’s tied in with the murder,” I said, “but I don’t know how.”
“I really appreciate your help. I been trying to get the alderman to tell me if there was any trouble at the town council meetings, but he says everything was fine.”
“I think everything was, in town here. It was what happened at the lodge that caused the trouble. I’m going back to talk with Phil Yancy again, but first I want to get one of those port bottles from Molly.”
By the time I returned to Yancy’s warehouse, the activity of that morning had all but ceased. Only one man was unloading a truck and I asked him where I could find the boss.
“Yancy?” he replied. “He’s inside somewhere. I haven’t seen him in a couple of hours, not since I got back from lunch.”
I entered the warehouse and called his name, surprised at the number of cases of whiskey that had arrived since morning. A long corridor of boxes ran from the loading dock to his office, enough to keep the county in liquor for a long time to come. “Yancy!” I called again. “Where are you? It’s Sam Hawthorne!”
I was nearly to the office when I spotted a trickle of something wet on the warehouse floor. It was coming from behind the boxes. When I investigated, I found Phil Yancy. He’d been shot in the back at close range and he was dead.
Sheriff Lens straightened up from examining the body. “How long you figure he’s been dead, Doc?”
“A couple of hours, I’d guess. Charlie, the fellow working outside, hadn’t seen him since lunchtime. Chances are he was dead when Charlie got back here.”
“You think it’s tied in with the poisoning of Mayor Cresson?”
“More than likely. Maybe someone paid him to put the potassium cyanide in that bottle before he delivered it.”
“How’d he get it into the sealed bottle?”
“That’s just one of our problems. I’m beginning to wonder if the Prohibitionists might not be behind this after all. Maybe they’re poisoning bottles of wine and liquor all over the country, in a last-ditch effort to scare people away from drinking again.”
“That would be crazy, Doc.”
“Yes, it would. But if they paid Yancy to poison that bottle somehow, they may have wanted him dead before he could talk.”
“There could be a whole other motive for Yancy’s murder, though,” the sheriff pointed out. “You said he told you to check out the mayor’s hunting lodge. Maybe he was killed to keep him from telling any more about what went on there.”
“It’s possible,” I agreed. “Tell me, were you with John Finnigan all afternoon at Molly’s?”
“Hell, no. I just got there a little while before you did. And Finnigan hadn’t been there long, either.”
“All right,” I decided. “I’m going to the hospital. We’ll do an autopsy as soon as possible, but I don’t think it’ll turn up anything startling. It looks like a bullet wound from a small-caliber pistol.”
“Somebody he knew, you think?”
“He turned his back on the killer,” I pointed out. “Or else someone sneaked up on him.”
Sheriff Lens shook his head, his eyes sad. “This is a heck of a business, Doc. Sometimes I think I’m gettin’ too old for it.”
Back at the hospital, I ran a routine test on the bottle of port Molly had given me. There was no poison in it. Of the twenty-four bottles available, Mayor Cresson had chosen the only deadly one. Was it an accident or murder? I remembered what his wife had told me of his precise habits.
The case of sherry still sat on the work table in my office, and I studied the carefully written address label for Molly’s Cafe. I recognized Phil Yancy’s handwriting in the sharp, clear curves his fountain pen had made and remembered seeing him addressing other cases at the warehouse that morning. He’d seemed so alive just a few hours ago, pleased that the end of Prohibition had made him an honest man at last.
Staring down at the label, I suddenly knew who had killed Mayor Cresson, and how, and why.
It was late afternoon when I entered Molly’s. There were no other customers. “The alderman finally go home?” I asked.
She looked up from the newspaper she was reading. “Someone came in with the news about Yancy and he hightailed it out of here in a hurry. It was like he’d seen a ghost.”
“I suppose he felt as if he had, when you think about it,” I told her, settling down at the bar. “There were five people used to go up to the mayor’s hunting lodge, and now three of them are dead.”
“Three?”
“Cresson and Yancy and your husband Gus.”
Molly took a bottle from behind the bar. “Have a drink on the house, Sam.”
“You killed them, didn’t you?” I asked quietly.
“What are you talking about? I was in Boston when Gus hanged himself.”
“I don’t mean Gus. I mean the other two—Cresson and Yancy.”
She poured a careful ounce of bourbon into a glass, added water and ice, and set it in front of me. “If you believe that, you probably think this drink is poisoned, too.”
I didn’t look at the glass. “You killed the mayor because of Gus, because of what they were doing up at that lodge.”
“What was that?” she asked blankly.
“You know as well as I do, Molly. They were smoking opium. The addiction drove your husband to suicide, and that’s why you killed Mayor Cresson.”
“You do come up with some wild ideas, Sam! Suppose you tell me how you dreamed this one up.”
“Gladly. I was at the lodge today and found some black gummy balls—raw opium, ready to be inserted into a pipe for smoking. Dr. Wayne showed up and took them. I suppose he’s the one who was supplying the opium in the first place. I should have guessed something like that long ago from the way he was yawning at staff meetings. Uncontrollable yaw
ning is a common symptom of opium withdrawal.”
“All right,” Molly said. “Now tell me how I could have poisoned a sealed bottle of wine and then gotten Mayor Cresson to drink it.”
I raised my eyes from the untouched glass of bourbon on the bar between us. “You injected it through the seal and the cork with a hypodermic syringe, perhaps one your husband had used for other drugs. No one would have noticed the tiny hole in the seal, or if it was noticeable you could easily cover it with a drop of wax. The potassium cyanide came from your father’s electroplating plant in Boston. It’s commonly used in such places.”
“You’re forgetting one thing, Sam. Everyone saw Yancy deliver the wine. It was never out of sight till Cresson opened that bottle.”
“We thought we saw Yancy deliver it. But it was here all the time, probably on the floor of the checkroom just inside the door, covered with papers or a cloth. It was raining hard last night and Yancy walked in shaking water from his coat. He carried the cases of wine on his shoulder, yet the handwritten label on top was unsmudged by rain. That was impossible, unless the wine was here in the building all the time. I think he delivered it earlier in the day. You poisoned it and left the two cases in the checkroom, asking Yancy to return and carry it in here for a more dramatic arrival after Prohibition ended. He did it, of course, never suspecting you’d poisoned one of the bottles. Today, when he threatened to reveal that the wine was here earlier, you had to shoot him. Sheriff Lens told me he and the alderman were only here briefly this afternoon, which means you could have driven out to the warehouse and killed Yancy during the lunch hour.”
“You’re clever, Sam. I always knew you were clever.”
“The mayor’s precise habits were well known to his friends. You might have observed them yourself, or your husband might have mentioned them. In either event, you knew he’d choose that upper left-hand bottle. You were the one who turned the cases, positioning them so the poisoned bottle was in the right place. You were the one who urged Cresson to choose one and have the first drink. If by chance he’d chosen another bottle, there was no harm done. You’d simply have tried again some other time.”
Her face relaxed into a wry smile, as if she’d reached a decision. “This was the other time, Sam. I tried to do it right after Gus killed himself, knowing that Cresson’s opium parties drove him to it, but I botched the job. This time there were no slip-ups.”
“What if he’d chosen the port instead of the sherry?”
“I poisoned a corner bottle in that case, too. Naturally it wasn’t the one I gave you to analyze.”
I pointed a finger at the bourbon. “Did you poison this, too, Molly, in case I’d figured it out?”
“That’s safe. You can drink it.”
“I think I won’t.”
Molly shrugged. “It’s your choice. But I can’t let a glass of good bourbon go to waste.” She picked it up before I could move and drank it down.
“They buried Molly on the same day as her two victims,” Dr. Sam said, finishing his story as he finished his brandy. “I often think of her and of how close I came to being victim number three. When you come again I’ll tell you about the summer of ’33, when the circus came to town.”
THE PROBLEM OF THE INVISIBLE ACROBAT
“We’d had our share of carnivals and fairs in Northmont,” old Dr. Sam Hawthorne said as he poured two glasses of sherry and passed one to his visitor, “but it was the summer of ’thirty-three when the first really big circus came to town. It sorta put Northmont on the map that July, drawing visitors from as far away as Hartford and Providence and Springfield . . .”
It was some quirk of scheduling (Dr. Sam continued), something about a new fairgrounds in one of the cities not being ready on time, that brought the Bigger & Brothers Circus to Northmont for their mid-July dates, on the theory that increasing auto travel made it an easily accessible location for all of southern New England. Sheriff Lens learned of it only a month in advance, when the signs and billboards started going up.
Bigger & Brothers, one of the first circuses to travel by rail rather than wagon, needed several acres of land near a railroad siding. Pop Wharton’s farm seemed the ideal location, especially since it had been standing idle since his hospitalization. Pop was a patient of mine, a man in his late sixties who’d led a vigorous, productive life until severe rheumatism laid him low. His son Mike wasn’t interested in farming the land, and he’d persuaded Pop to accept the circus offer and earn a little money while the farm was standing idle.
The circus train rolled in during the small hours of Monday morning, and at seven o’clock I’d promised to go see it with Teddy Lens, the sheriff’s eight-year-old nephew who was visiting from Boston. His father was unemployed, a victim of the Depression, and I figured with the sheriff and his wife tending to Teddy for the summer there was one less mouth for them to feed back home. He was all boy, a lively kid who’d been looking forward to the circus since his arrival in Northmont.
“Is it in yet?” he asked me, clambering into my sporty roadster.
“Supposed to be. Let’s go see.”
“This is a neat car, Dr. Sam.”
“Thank you.” I grinned as I drove out toward the Wharton farm. The idea of elephants and acrobats excited me almost as much as Teddy. I felt as if I was playing hooky from my practice.
We weren’t disappointed. The first thing we spotted as the car topped the last hill was a pair of elephants helping to put up the main tent. There must have been close to a hundred people working around, unloading railroad cars, positioning the animals’ cages, erecting tents and banners. I parked the car and took Teddy firmly by the hand, not wanting him to run off in front of one of those big bull elephants.
“What have we here?” a jolly man with a walrus moustache and wearing a leather jacket asked, spotting us and coming forward. “Brought your son to see the big top going up?”
“Well, he’s not my son, but that’s what we’re here for. I’m Dr. Sam Hawthorne. I have a practice in Northmont. This is Teddy Lens, the sheriff’s nephew.”
Teddy shook the man’s hand.
“I’m George Bigger,” the man said, shaking hands. “This is my circus.” He beamed down at Teddy.
“I’m pleased to meet you, sir. Will I get to meet Mr. Brothers, too?”
The man laughed. “There is no Mr. Brothers, son. That’s the Flying Lampizi Brothers. You’ll see them at the show—all five of them.” He pointed at one of the big circus banners going up. It showed five dark-haired young men swinging and spinning through the air high above the sawdust rings. In the painting one had just released his grip on the trapeze and was heading for a catcher who hung by his knees from another trapeze.
“Wow!” Teddy exclaimed. “Are there clowns, too?”
“Are there clowns?” Bigger glanced around and called out to a slim man nearby. “Harvey, this boy wants to know if we’ve got clowns!”
The man turned toward us and approached, his face already covered with clown makeup. Silently, he whisked a hand into one baggy sleeve and produced a bouquet of paper flowers he presented to Teddy, then duplicated the trick with his other sleeve, bringing forth a live baby rabbit. He gave Teddy the rabbit, then bowed to us with a grin and moved on.
“That’s Harvey the Clown,” George Bigger explained. “He never talks, but he makes people happy.”
“He sure made me happy!” Teddy exclaimed, stroking the fuzzy little rabbit. “Can I keep him, Dr. Sam?”
“You’ll have to ask your aunt and uncle,” I replied, amused at the thought of Sheriff Lens confronting a pet rabbit.
“You’re our first visitors, so here’s something else for you,” Bigger said, handing me two tickets to the afternoon performance. “I hope we’ll see you both right down front.”
“We’ll be there,” I promised. Until that moment I hadn’t planned to bring Teddy to the circus that afternoon, but seeing the joy on his face there was no way I could back out.
A tall wom
an, quite lovely, with glistening black hair that reached halfway down her back, came up to join Bigger. “This is my wife Hilda,” he told us. “You’ll see her riding bareback.”
Hilda gave us a perfunctory nod and told him, “You’d better come, George. They’re having some trouble unloading one of the tiger cages.”
“All right. Duty calls, folks. I’ll see you later.”
Teddy and I looked at the animals and watched the tents going up for a while, then I took Teddy home to prepare for his big afternoon.
Sheriff Lens and his wife Vera decided to attend the circus that afternoon, too. They got seats farther back, at one end, and we waved to them from our fourth-row vantage point. They weren’t really seats at all—only marked-off sections of wooden bleachers—but that didn’t matter to Teddy, who was having the time of his young life. First came the circus parade, with animals and performers trooping past us—with Hilda, the bareback rider, and the five Lampizi Brothers in their spangled tights and sad-faced Harvey the Clown tooting a little horn like Harpo Marx.
After the last of the animals and performers had departed, George Bigger took the spotlight in traditional ringmaster’s attire, doffing his top hat and bowing with a sweeping gesture to announce, “Welcome! Welcome to Bigger and Brothers Circus, the greatest show under a tent! We’ll amaze and electrify you, confound and surprise you, tickle and delight you for the next two hours. Keep your eyes open, because there will often be action in all three rings and in the air above your heads. We’ll begin with the Amazing Hilda, queen of bareback riders, and her death-defying stunts on a pair of wild horses!”
Hilda made her grand entrance balanced astride two grey horses that galloped side by side. Teddy was wide-eyed at the spectacle. I was a bit wide-eyed myself, since Hilda Bigger showed off a great deal of her lovely body in the brief sequined costume she wore. She did a number of acrobatic tricks, including a somersault on horseback that had the crowd cheering and applauding.
Then the colored spotlights shifted to the entryway once again as a ragtag band of clowns, headed by Harvey, made a stumbling, slapstick entrance. “There’s Harvey!” Teddy shouted in recognition, tugging on my sleeve.
Nothing Is Impossible: Further Problems for Dr. Sam Hawthorne Page 9