After Sheriff Lens and the state police finished with the crime scene, I waited around until the other Lampizi Brothers were brought over to identify the body. Arturo cursed and Giuseppe cried, and all agreed it was their missing brother. Death had been caused by a half dozen stab wounds to the chest area, at least one of which had penetrated the heart. There was no sign of the weapon.
“I would guess he died early last evening,” I told the sheriff. “We’ll know better after the autopsy, but the blood is pretty well dried into this rug and April saw a light on here when she was driving home from the office.”
“That woulda been soon after he disappeared.”
“Makes sense,” I said. “He’s still wearing the pink tights under that baggy clown’s suit.”
“But how’d he disappear from the top of that tent, Doc? We saw him climb up there and he never came down.”
“I’ve got some ideas,” I said. “Right now you’d better put out an alarm for Mike Wharton. He seems to be the number one suspect.”
“Why would he kill Nunzio? He couldn’t have met him before yesterday.”
“I don’t know. The fact that Nunzio came here to this empty house with his killer might imply some sort of sexual liaison.”
“You mean young Wharton and Nunzio?”
“I don’t know what I mean, Sheriff. I’ve got to call on Mrs. Mitchell. Then I might drop by the hospital and visit Pop Wharton.”
It was just noon when I reached Pilgrim Memorial Hospital. I checked in with April in the office wing and then went down to check on Pop Wharton. He was alone in the room, a frail man who seemed much older than his sixty-nine years. I glanced through his charts, then sat down beside him and asked how he was feeling.
“Some days are better than others,” he replied, his voice thin and wispy. “If only I could get the arms and legs to work.”
“Has Mike been in to see you?”
“Not in a couple of days. I suppose he’s all taken up with the circus out at the farm.”
“Mike always liked circuses, didn’t he?”
His eyes clouded over with memory. “All kids like circuses—the animals, the clowns, the acrobats. It’s noisy and colorful. Both the kids loved the circus. I guess it got to be an obsession after a while, especially the part about the clowns.”
“I saw all the clown pictures in the room at your house.”
His eyes met mine. “Crazy, isn’t it? But there was no mother to look after them, there was only me. I guess I didn’t always know the right thing to do. Sometimes when Mike was bad I’d lock him in his bedroom, but he’d jump out the window and be gone on me. I just wasn’t strict enough. I figured losing a mother was enough punishment for a child.”
“Do you think the clowns became some kind of mother substitute?”
“I don’t know. I know there was something strange about it, not quite normal.” There were tears at the corners of his eyes. “It’s a terrible thing to lose a child.”
Back in the office, April showed me the afternoon newspaper from Springfield. “The reporter fellow, Jeff Slattery, was just in here and dropped it off,” she said. The headline read:
MISSING ACROBAT FOUND SLAIN IN BIZARRE CLOWN RITE
“That should sell some papers,” I said. “Maybe I’ll take it to show George Bigger.”
“You’re going back out to the circus?”
“It’s the only place to be. If I hurry I can catch the afternoon performance.”
The show had just started and the parking lot around the big circus tent was jammed with cars and wagons. The news of Nunzio Lampizi’s disappearance and subsequent murder had done nothing to damage business. I’d planned to confront Bigger at once, but on the way in I encountered Arturo, the senior brother. I was surprised to see him in his spangled tights, obviously ready to perform.
“The show goes on,” he said simply in response to my question. “They come to see the Lampizi Brothers, after all.”
“Tell me a little about your brother, Arturo. What sort of man was he?”
“More a boy than a man. He was barely twenty.”
“Did he have girl friends?” I asked.
“Sure! Lots of girl friends.”
“In the towns?”
“Sometimes. He had one in the circus, too. He was just like me at that age.”
Harvey and the other clowns came running off and George Bigger appeared in his ringmaster’s outfit. “No time to talk now,” he said as I approached him. “See me after the performance.”
“Just a quick question. How did you happen to pick Northmont for the circus?”
“Somebody here in the circus knew about it and thought it would be a good place—I forget who. Step aside, will you, Doc? Hilda’s coming through on her horses.”
I watched the horse act and got my first good look at the lion tamer’s performance. Then I concentrated on the Lampizi Brothers, watching the way the lights played on them as they flew through the air. When they took their bows, the spectators went wild.
“Are you waiting for my husband?” Hilda asked as the performance ended.
“That’s right.”
She seemed worried. “Look, we don’t want trouble.”
“Seems like you’ve got it already. Murder is always trouble.”
“I don’t mean the murder. I mean—”
Suddenly George Bigger was at her side. “Shut up, Hilda,” he said. “You talk too much.” The spectators were filing out and a few came over to get Hilda’s autograph on their programs.
I pulled her husband aside. “This is a murder investigation, Mr. Bigger. Sooner or later the truth is going to come out.”
“The truth about what?”
“About the disappearance of Nunzio Lampizi being a publicity stunt, just as Sheriff Lens thought from the beginning.”
“You’re crazy.” His eyes took on a frightened look. “What kind of publicity stunt is murder?”
“I’m not talking about the murder right now. That’s something else. I know how Nunzio disappeared. When he and Arturo fell into the net, the gang of clowns swarmed around and helped them down. One of them slipped a baggy clown suit onto Nunzio and he went out with them.”
“Everyone saw him climb back to the platform,” Bigger protested.
“No, not everyone. I saw him and Teddy saw him, and a lot of people sitting in our area saw him. But Sheriff Lens and some others in the end seats spoke of seeing only Arturo climbing back up. With so much happening to divert us, it was hard to keep track of whether there were four or five brothers performing. I asked myself how I knew I’d seen Nunzio climb back up, with the brothers all looking somewhat alike and of course I’d never met any of them before. It was the color of their tights, of course. That was the only clue I had to their identities. From my seat, the pink spotlight on Arturo’s white tights made me think he was Nunzio. Sheriff Lens, seeing the same acrobat from a different angle, knew it was Arturo.”
George Bigger tried to stare me down, but finally he said, “All right, so we wanted a little publicity. What’s wrong with that?”
“The empty trapeze swung later because it was pulled by a little black thread, like magicians use.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“And you phoned that reporter in Springfield.”
“Why not? We phoned ’em in Providence and Hartford, too, but he’s the only one who came.”
“Who killed the boy, Bigger? Were you afraid he’d tell the truth to the press?”
“Nunzio was like a son to me. I wouldn’t have harmed a hair on his head.”
We stood uncomfortably as I thought about it, inclined to believe Bigger. It was the clowns who had helped work the trick and spirit Nunzio out of the ring after he fell to the net. The clowns must be the key to it. And Mike Wharton had been dressed as a clown.
I saw the silent Harvey standing nearby and called him. But instead of coming forward, he retreated into the big tent, now virtually empty of spectators. That was when I realized
the truth.
I took off after the running figure. “I know who you are!” I shouted. “You can’t get away!”
Harvey was headed toward the opposite exit, but Sheriff Lens had appeared there, accompanied by Jeff Slattery. Harvey looked around, his clown face twisted in panic, and suddenly he started climbing the rope ladder that led to the trapeze platform. I took a deep breath and went after him.
“Doc!” Sheriff Lens yelled. “Don’t go up there! Are you crazy?”
Harvey climbed faster, and when he reached the platform he turned and looked down at me, pulling a knife from the folds of the costume. The sheriff was right—I’d been crazy to follow him.
“Come on, Harvey,” I said softly, climbing onto the platform to face him. “You’ve killed one person already. You don’t want another death.”
The knife was steady as he faced me, and when I took a careful step forward, the blade sliced the air inches from my chest. Whatever was happening on the ground, I couldn’t see or hear it. At that moment I was entirely alone with Harvey the Clown.
“You killed Nunzio in your old room at home,” I said quietly. “Why did you do that?”
The knife sliced air again, holding me at bay.
“Why did you do that?”
And then Harvey the Clown spoke, in a voice that was barely a whisper. “I’m not Mike Wharton.”
“I know,” I said, flinging myself forward, hitting the clown around the waist and carrying us both off the platform. Then I was falling through the air, falling for a terrifying eternity until we hit the net.
Harvey the Clown was Mike Wharton’s sister Isabelle, the one who’d run away from home years before. “Ran away to join the circus,” as I told Sheriff Lens later. “Obsessed by the clowns whose pictures covered her bedroom walls.”
“I thought that was Mike’s room.”
“Mike only dressed as a clown to be near his sister for a brief time. The murder room had pink walls—and that should have told us it belonged to Isabelle rather than Mike. Pop Wharton must have left it untouched, either too weak physically to do the work or hoping she’d come back someday. And she did. Bigger told me someone at the circus suggested they come to Northmont. I have no doubt it was Isabelle. And that the reason she never talked in her role as Harvey the Clown was so that nobody would realize she was a woman.”
“Maybe Mike used his sister’s room,” the sheriff said.
I shook my head. “Pop Wharton told me Mike used to jump out the bedroom window when Pop locked him in his room. Mike’s bedroom was on the first floor.”
“Why would she stab Nunzio?”
“Arturo said he had a girl friend with the circus. That had to be Isabelle. When she took him to her house and brought him to that room with clowns all over the walls, something might have snapped inside her—something to do with whatever had driven her from that house in the first place. Or it may have been pure jealousy. Arturo said Nunzio sometimes took up with other girls in the towns they passed through.”
Sheriff Lens shook his head sadly. “This isn’t going to do Pop any good.”
“The sheriff was right,” Dr. Sam concluded. “There was talk of a trial, but before it happened Isabelle’s mind went and Pop died. Mike hung around, not much help to either of them, and then he, too, ran away. I’ve never heard what happened to him after he left town. I don’t know what happened to the remaining four Lampizi Brothers, either. But I guess George Bigger had his fill of publicity stunts. I know I’d had my fill of diving into acrobats’ nets.
“If you come by this way again soon, I’ll tell you what happened when a business tycoon tried to grow tobacco near Northmont and make everyone rich. His dream wasn’t the only thing that went up in smoke. But that’s for next time.”
THE PROBLEM OF THE CURING BARN
“They’ve grown tobacco along the eastern bank of the Connecticut River for as long as anyone can remember,” Dr. Sam Hawthorne said, pouring a bit of libation for his guest, “but it wasn’t until Jasper Jennings came to Northmont during the depths of the Depression that anyone thought seriously about growing it in our part of the state. And that was the beginning of one of the most baffling mysteries I ever came across . . .”
It was in September of ’34 that the first decent crop of the Jennings Tobacco Company was ready for harvesting just a few miles north of town. The papers were full of news of the burning of a ship called the Morro Castle off the coast of New Jersey at the time, so nobody took much notice of Jennings’ accomplishment. I’d met Jennings when he first came to town and had become something of an unofficial company doctor, treating the occasional cases of sunstroke or dehydration among his poorly paid field hands. Once, in midsummer, he’d shown me around the place, guiding me through the acres of tobacco plants growing beneath great canopies of cheesecloth. He was a thin, hawk-faced man who walked quickly with a bit of a stoop. I had trouble keeping up the pace and he chided me about it. “You need more exercise, Doc. You’re twenty years younger than me and you can’t walk these fields without gettin’ winded.”
“I am out of condition,” I agreed. “What are these canopies for?”
“By shading the plants with cheesecloth we can produce the large thin leaves that are perfect for cigar wrappers, which is what this soil’s best for. When the plant is mature, when the middle leaves are about ripe, we cut the plant off close to the ground and allow it to wilt. Then it’s removed to the drying shed until it’s ready for curing.”
“I know a little about curing,” I joked.
Jennings merely stared at me. “The curing generally takes about six weeks, and we help it along with fires if the weather gets too damp. This is the curing barn over here.” He led me to a long structure with gaps in the perpendicular siding every few feet, as if someone had run out of boards when it was being built. “Those allow for air curing,” Jennings explained.
“The worker I treated for the cut hand—”
“Roy Hanson.”
“Hanson, yes. He was cutting the plants with an axe and hit his hand instead. But it’s too soon for harvesting.”
“He wasn’t harvesting,” Jennings said. “At this time of the season, when the flowering buds appear, we cut off the tops to concentrate growth into the leaves. That’s what Hanson was doing when he hurt his hand.”
It was the worker’s injury that had brought me to the tobacco farm, and after my chat with Jasper Jennings I stopped inside the barn to see how Hanson was coming along. His right hand was still heavily bandaged, but he was able to help assemble the racks that would be used for drying later on.
“How’s it feel?” I asked as I unwrapped the bandage.
Hanson was a young man in his twenties with a short haircut and the solid body of an athlete. He’d told me at the time of the injury that he’d done a little amateur boxing, and he was concerned this meant the end of it. “Not bad. It hurts a little at night, though.”
“It’s healing nicely,” I said, removing the last layer of bandage. “Let me put a fresh one on.”
“Will I be able to box again, Doc?”
“I don’t see why not. But you’re lucky. You almost lost half your hand.”
Sarah Jennings, Jasper’s wife, came into the barn with a pail of water and a dipper. “Anyone for a drink out here? How about you, Sam?”
“Thanks, Sarah. I’ll pass it by for now,” I said.
She was a bright, intelligent woman who moved easily among the men, laughing and joking with them but managing to fend off their occasional advances with ease. I didn’t doubt that Jasper would have killed any man he found molesting her, but there didn’t seem too much danger of that.
I walked back to the farmhouse with her, to the driveway where my new car was parked. “What’s that?” she asked. “An Oldsmobile? You used to go in for sporty cars.”
“That was in my younger days,” I told her. “Once you pass thirty-five, you have to think about settling down.”
“The way to settle down is to
get married.”
“Maybe I’ll think about that, too, if the right woman comes along.”
That was my last visit to the Jennings tobacco farm for several weeks. Roy Hanson was able to come to my office the next time his bandage needed changing, and after that I told him he could care for it himself. Soon there’d only be a scar to remind him of the accident.
“He’s a nice young man,” my nurse April said after he left.
“He wants to be a professional boxer. Can you imagine such a thing?”
“It’s difficult for young people to find regular work these days.”
“He’s not that much younger than we are. Said he was twenty-seven.”
“He can’t be earning much out at Jennings’ tobacco farm,” April said, watching him through the window as he walked to the hospital parking lot. “He’s got a girl waiting for him in the car.”
“Oh?” I stepped over beside her. “That looks like Sarah Jennings.”
“Really?”
“I can’t be sure at this distance. Maybe she brought him along to help with the weekly shopping.”
April went back to her desk as I watched them drive away. “Oh, I almost forgot to tell you,” she said. “Sheriff Lens called to invite you to dinner tonight.”
“I’ll give him a call,” I told her. My practice was slow that summer and Sheriff Lens and his wife were always good company.
It was on a warm afternoon in early September that I was next summoned to the Jennings farm. Oddly enough, this time the summons came from Sarah Jennings, and it didn’t involve matters of health. She met me in the front parlor of the farmhouse, and the first thing I noticed was that the laughter seemed to have gone out of her eyes. She unfolded a piece of paper and handed it to me. “Would you read this, Sam?”
I skimmed the note, which was block-printed in a childish manner to disguise the handwriting: I KNOW WHAT YOU AND ROY HANSON ARE DOING IN THE CURING BARN. THE WRATH OF GOD WILL PUNISH YOU FOR YOUR SINS. There was no signature.
“This came in yesterday’s mail,” she said. “There was another last week that I burned in the stove. You’ve helped the police solve mysteries, Sam. I want you to find out who’s writing these things.”
Nothing Is Impossible: Further Problems for Dr. Sam Hawthorne Page 11