Nothing Is Impossible: Further Problems for Dr. Sam Hawthorne

by Hoch Edward D.

  I reached a quick decision. “Can you bring him here, Mary?”

  She smiled. “He’s waiting outside in my car.”

  I snatched up the telephone and called Dr. Endlewise’s office. His secretary informed me he’d gone with Dr. Hayett for a final look at Hugh Streeter before releasing him.

  I hung up. “Come on!” I told the sheriff. “There isn’t a minute to lose! Mary, bring Larry Law and meet me in Streeter’s room!”

  It had all come together for me at last, the locked operating room, the broken glass, the strangled nurse. When we reached Streeter’s room, we found Endlewise and Hayett chatting with him while he dressed. All three looked up as we entered with Larry Law.

  The ventriloquist didn’t hesitate. He held out his hand and said, “It’s good to see you again. I did just what you said with the dummy. I earned my thousand dollars.”

  Hugh Streeter tried to run, but his pants were only partway on and tripped him up at the door.

  “You have to look at the crime from Streeter’s viewpoint,” I said later back in my office with Mary, the sheriff, and Endlewise. “He’d inherited some potentially valuable land but had to share it with a half sister he’d never met. He decided he’d rather kill her and have it all for himself. His mother had told him more than he admitted, and he knew Anna Fitzgerald was a nurse at this hospital, and that she had a birthmark. But if he simply came up here and killed her, he’d be among the leading suspects because of the inheritance. So what should he do?”

  “This better be good,” Sheriff Lens muttered. “There’s an awful lot unexplained in this case.”

  I ignored the interruption. “He’d already planned to fake a heart attack and get himself admitted here. By luck, two nights ago he was dining alone at the Magnolia Restaurant when he spotted the dummy with a dab of paint like a birthmark. Somehow, probably from one of the waitresses, he learned that the birthmark was supposed to make the dummy look like the ventriloquist’s current flame, a local nurse. So he offered Law a thousand dollars to bash the dummy’s head with a hammer the following night between shows. It wasn’t a big thing for Law because he had a spare dummy—he didn’t realize he was being set up as a murder suspect.”

  “I’m not surprised about faking the heart attack,” Endlewise said. “I was suspicious about that from the start. But how could he kill Anna? He never left his room.”

  “That was the key to his whole plan. He knew he’d be kept in the hospital for observation, and when Kathleen brought him the sleeping powder last evening he simply emptied the glass into his water pitcher, first distracting her attention by asking her to move his extra pillow to a chair. When Anna came in later to check on him, he took her by surprise somehow and managed to strangle her before she could make a sound.”

  “But the body—” Mary protested.

  “He hid it in his bathtub, behind the shower curtain. He left the door open, taking a chance Kathleen would think the bathroom was empty and wouldn’t check it further. Then he returned to bed, pushing the second pillow down over his face, and upsetting the water pitcher to summon help—also cleverly disposing of the remains of the sleeping powder.”

  “All right,” Endlewise said. “How did he get her from the bathtub into a locked operating room at the other end of the building?”

  “He waited until after midnight and carried her down the hall to the unlocked fire exit, then around the building and in one of the exits near the operating rooms. Room #2 was never really locked, you see. The bolt was engaged but those are swinging doors. One door must be anchored with bolts into the floor and top of the door frame before swinging doors can be truly locked—otherwise, if both doors are pushed inward together the bolt disengages and the doors open. Try it yourself if you don’t believe me. After leaving the body on the gurney inside, he carefully closed the swinging doors together until the bolt in one door engaged the slot in the opposite door once again. When I thought about it, I knew that was what happened. We never tried simply pushing the doors open, but after you unlocked the bolt, Dr. Endlewise, Hayett and I each pushed open a swinging door, proving neither one was anchored to the floor by another bolt.”

  Sheriff Lens snorted. “You’re telling me Streeter was lucky enough that no one found her body in the shower, no one saw him carry her out the fire exit, and he found the operating room unlocked. That’s a lot of luck!”

  “All murderers take chances, Sheriff. Maybe he noticed those swinging doors earlier, on the way to his room. Maybe he had some other hiding place in mind. But he wasn’t so lucky. We caught him in less than twenty-four hours, didn’t we?”

  “How’d you know?” Mary asked.

  “Streeter showed me a scratch on his left wrist and said he got it when

  he knocked over the water pitcher. But he was on his back at the time of the supposed pillow attack, and when I examined him yesterday I remember the pitcher being by his right hand, not his left. I think Anna scratched him as

  he strangled her and he tried to cover it with that lie. And the pitcher didn’t break until it hit the floor, so knocking it with his wrist wouldn’t have scratched him, anyway.

  “Then there was the matter of Larry Law. In trying to confuse us with the dummy business and call the sheriff’s attention to Larry as a suspect, Streeter was being too clever for his own good. When I mentioned Larry’s name, he denied he ever heard of him. Yet he told us he ate at the Magnolia the previous night, the same night a stranger offered Larry money to batter his dummy.”

  When both the sheriff and Dr. Endlewise departed, it was my turn to ask Mary Best a question. “How’d you get the truth out of Larry Law so fast?” I wanted to know.

  She grinned at me. “Remember his fear of rats? I told him the county jail was full of them.”

  “It was one of my most complicated cases,” Dr. Sam concluded, “but the solution came quicker than I’d expected. That wasn’t true of my next case, which involved me personally and threatened my very right to practice medicine. But that’s for next time.”

  THE PROBLEM OF THE DYING PATIENT

  “Come in and have a seat,” Dr. Sam Hawthorne said, reaching for the brandy. “The story I have to tell you this time is painful for me to recollect—it almost cost me my license to practice medicine . . .”

  By the summer of ’35 (Dr. Sam continued), I’d started cutting back on house calls. My office in a wing of Pilgrim Memorial Hospital was attracting more patients, and even though it was the depths of the Depression most families in town owned a car or had access to one. Generally, it was only the very young or the very old, especially those living on the outskirts of Northmont, who still needed me to come to their homes.

  One of these was old Mrs. Willis, who was in her mid-eighties and suffered from a variety of disorders. I’d been treating her mainly for a heart condition and diabetes, but now she was bedridden after breaking her hip last year. I could see her strength going with each visit I made. She’d simply lost the will to live.

  Her husband had died a few years earlier and they’d never had children. She was cared for now by a middle-aged niece and her husband to whom she’d promised the old farmhouse and its surrounding forty acres of untilled land. “It’s all I’ve got to give them,” she’d told me once after they’d moved in. “If they can put up with me, they deserve it.”

  I had to admit that Betty Willis, at the end of her life, was not a lovable person. She was domineering and hard to please. The niece, Freda Ann Parker, was a plain woman of forty or so who tried to take it all in stride. Her husband Nat wasn’t nearly as easygoing. I’d heard him grumbling many times out of earshot of the old lady, and once he and Freda Ann had engaged in a heated argument in front of me.

  About once a week I stopped by the Willis house unannounced if I had another call to make in that area. On one particular Monday morning, Freda Ann telephoned the office to make sure I’d be coming out. “She had a really bad night, Doctor. I think she’s dying.”

  “I’ll be t
here in about an hour,” I promised. I finished up with the patient I was attending and told my nurse, Mary, that I’d be driving out to the Willis place.

  It was a lovely June morning, the sort of day when summer seems to stretch out endlessly. I saw some boys running along the side of the dirt road, free at last from the confines of the classroom, and remembered the summer days of my own youth. I’d grown up in the city, but the sense of freedom had to be much the same. As I topped a rise in the road I could see the Willis farmhouse off in the distance, surrounded by a small apple orchard that was the closest to farming the Willises had gotten in recent years. It reminded me of childhood journeys to my grandfather’s farm in Pennsylvania in those long-ago years before the Great War.

  Nat Parker was in the orchard, inspecting the trees for possible damage from a windstorm the previous evening. He was a tired-looking man with thinning hair and a perpetual shadow of bristle around his chin. Nat seemed a good decade older than his wife, and probably was. “Did you have any damage?” I called out to him as I left my car.

  “Nothing much, Doc. The way it was blowing, I feared it would take half the orchard with it.”

  “Your wife says Betty’s not good this morning.”

  “Well, she could be better.”

  I left him and went in the front door. It was always unlocked and I knew Freda Ann would have heard my arrival. She came out of the kitchen to greet me. “I’m glad you could come,” she said. “Aunt Betty’s real bad, Doctor.”

  I followed her up the creaking stairs to the second floor. Betty Willis still had the big front bedroom she’d shared with her husband for most of her lifetime. Now she lay in the ornate double bed, staring up at me as if she could see the angels coming for her.

  “I’m dying,” she told me.

  “Nonsense.” I took her pulse and listened to her heart through my stethoscope. She was certainly weak, her vital signs lower than they’d been on my last visit, but I saw no imminent danger of death. I moved the glass of water with her dentures in it, the only thing on her night table, to make room for my bag. “You’ll be fit again, Betty. All you need is some good strong medicine.”

  Freda Ann came into the room and stood by the door as I completed my examination. “How is she, Dr. Hawthorne?”

  “Oh, I think a bit of heart stimulant should perk her up.” I reached into my bag and unsnapped the compartment where I kept the digitalis. “Could you bring us a glass of water?”

  She went back downstairs to the kitchen sink. The place still used an outhouse and there was no running water on the second floor. “Do I have to take a pill, Doctor?” old Mrs. Willis asked in a shaky voice. Swallowing was hard for her.

  “Just a little digitalis, Betty. It’ll get your heart pumping again.” I took her temperature, though I was pretty sure she had no fever.

  Freda Ann returned with the water just as I removed the thermometer. “Just about normal,” I told them. “A bit low, in fact.”

  Betty took the pill herself and washed it down with a swallow of water. “I feel better already,” she said, trying to smile.

  I was just turning away from the bed when I heard her gasp. I looked back to see her lined face twisted with pain and surprise. Then her whole body sagged and she sank back into the pillows. “Betty!” I reached for her pulse.

  “What happened?” Freda Ann demanded. “What did you do to her?”

  I couldn’t believe she was accusing me of anything. “She’s had some sort of seizure.” There was no pulse, no heartbeat. I took a small mirror from my bag and held it to her nostrils. There was no clouding.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “Yes,” I told her.

  “Was it that pill you gave her?”

  “It couldn’t have been. That was nothing but digitalis.”

  She stared at me with uncertain eyes. “It was so sudden. One minute she seemed fine—”

  “You said yourself you thought she was dying,” I replied, sounding more defensive than I’d meant to.

  Freda Ann bit her lower lip, trying to decide what to do. At that moment her husband came up the stairs. “Aunt Betty’s dead,” she told him. “She went just like that.”

  He stared at the body, grim-faced. “It’s for the best.”

  As I bent closer to close Betty’s eyes, the unmistakable odor of bitter almonds hit my nostrils. I’d had experience with it in the past, on the night Prohibition ended back in ’33. When I straightened up I said, “Something’s wrong here. You’d better ring up Sheriff Lens on the phone.”

  Sheriff Lens had been my friend since I first arrived in Northmont to set up my practice thirteen years earlier. In many ways he was a typical country sheriff, and I’d been happy to lend a hand when he needed it. Now it seemed that I was the one who needed help.

  He listened patiently to my account of Betty Willis’s death and then

  asked, “Is there any chance you could have given her the wrong pill by mistake, Doc?”

  “Not a chance in the world! I don’t even carry cyanide compounds in my bag.”

  Sheriff Lens glanced around the bedroom, seeming to take in the faded, water-stained wallpaper, the family portraits, the bit of ivy struggling to grow on the windowsill. Then his eyes fastened on the half empty glass of water on the bedside table. “Is that the water she took it with?”

  I nodded. “It should be tested, though I doubt if it’s poisoned.”

  “How come?”

  “No odor. I checked it right away.” As I spoke, I took a small bottle from my bag—one used for urine samples—and poured the water into it. On a hunch, I also sampled the water her dentures were in.

  “We’ll have to do an autopsy,” the sheriff said almost apologetically.

  “Of course.”

  We went down to the sitting room where Freda Ann and Nat were waiting. “What did you find?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I replied. “Is there something you think we should have found?”

  Nat Parker seemed to be staring at the ceiling, perhaps studying a fluttering cobweb in one corner. Finally he said, “The old lady had a good long life. Her time was up.”

  His wife suddenly turned on him, close to tears. “I really believe you’re glad she’s gone, Nat! You couldn’t stand having her in the house.”

  “Now, Freda—”

  “It’s true, you know it!”

  He stood. “Maybe I should go out and check on the orchard.”

  Sheriff Lens cleared his throat. “We’ll be taking your aunt in to Pilgrim Memorial for an autopsy, Mrs. Parker. You can go ahead and make the arrangements with the undertaker if you want to. He can probably pick her up there in the morning.”

  “Thank you, Sheriff.”

  He accompanied me to my car. As I was getting in, he asked, “What do you think, Doc?”

  “There’s a possibility one or both of them killed her,” I told him, “but for the life of me I can’t figure out how.”

  The following morning, Dr. Wolfe from the local Medical Society stopped by my office. Mary knew him and ushered him right in. “It’s Dr. Wolfe to see you.”

  I laid down the medical journal I’d been reading and stood to greet him. “To what do I owe this honor, Doctor?”

  Martin Wolfe was a tall man in his sixties with a mane of wavy white hair. He wasn’t someone you addressed by his first name unless you were his senior in years and experience. “I’ve come about the tragic death of Betty Willis,” he said.

  “I’ve been waiting to hear the autopsy result,” I told him.

  “I have it right here,” he said, handing over the official form. “Death was due to a sudden paralysis of her heart, respiratory system, and brain, caused by ingestion of hydrocyanic acid. A classic case of poisoning.”

  “I feared as much,” I said. “But I can’t see how it could have happened. I never left her for an instant. The digitalis preparation I gave her came from my own bag and the glass of water had no detectable odor.”

 
; “The water was pure,” he confirmed. “It was tested. Tell me, Dr. Hawthorne, what type of digitalis preparation did you administer?”

  “Digoxin. It came on the market just last year.”

  Wolfe pursed his lips. “I’m quite familiar with it. As you must know, it has a very narrow treatment range. The proper dose is sixty percent of a toxic dose. It was a dangerous choice of medication in someone of that age.”

  He was beginning to irritate me but I tried not to show it. I said, “I might remind you, Dr. Wolfe, that Mrs. Willis died of cyanide poisoning, not an overdose of digitalis.”

  “A point well taken,” he admitted. “But if what you say is true, I can think of only two possible explanations. Either you made a terrible mistake when you gave Mrs. Willis her medication or—”

  “Or what?”

  “Or you took pity on this woman and decided to put her out of her misery.”

  “Mercy killing.”

  “That’s what it’s called,” Dr. Wolfe agreed.

  “I can assure you I did neither. I was neither stupid nor criminal in my treatment of her.”

  “Is there a third explanation, Dr. Hawthorne?”

  “I intend to find one.”

  “Very well.” He rose to his feet, towering over the desk. “The Medical Society holds its regular monthly meeting one week from today. This matter is certain to be brought up. I trust you’ll have an explanation by that time.”

  I waited until he’d left the office, unable to move from the desk in my growing fury. When Mary came in, she found me holding the two ends of a pencil I’d just broken.

  “What was that all about?” she asked.

  “I think you should have taken that job in Springfield,” I told her. “A week from now I may not have a practice in Northmont.”

  “What?”

  “Apparently the Medical Society is going to look into Betty Willis’s death next week. Wolfe thinks it was either a serious mistake or a mercy killing on my part.”

  “That’s crazy, Sam!” I was too upset to realize until later that she’d used my first name. “Is he out to get you for some reason?”