The April Fools' Day Murder

by Lee Harris

  “Did it go to court?”

  “The Vitales backed off, but Will said they had to pay for his lawyer.”

  “Ouch,” I said.

  “Exactly. They refused and he sued them. In the end, they paid up.”

  “What about the bond he made the town put up?”

  “That was after the nursery fight. I think he was afraid of getting burned. We put up the bond, there was no problem. And we had to do a little landscaping on his property when we were finished with our work.”

  He was certainly making it all sound inconsequential. “What were your relations with Willard Platt?” I asked.

  “We were on the best of terms. Next question?”

  “Do you know anything about why he walked with a cane?”

  “I assume he had a problem. He was never without it. Why would you ask that?”

  “Because the autopsy showed nothing wrong with either leg. And no one who’s known him for a long time can remember anything happening that might cause him to need a cane.”

  “We weren’t close, Mrs. Brooks. It’s not the kind of thing you ask a man about. You just accept that he has a problem and leave it at that.”

  “His wife was in a terrible car accident some years ago. What can you tell me about that?”

  “Just that it was terrible. It was a snowy day in a cold, bitter winter. I remember that winter well. My mother, God rest her soul, slipped on some ice outside her house and fell and broke her hip. She was never the same after that and she died a sad woman, unable to do all the things she had been doing with so much pleasure for so long.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it. Were there any charges filed against Mrs. Platt?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. She’s had to live with great unhappiness since that day. I don’t think putting her through a trial would have done any good.”

  I had begun to sense a defensive demeanor in the mayor. His usual ready smile was gone and he was speaking in a manner that indicated he wished I would get up and go. I decided to oblige him. “Thank you very much for your time.” I stood and shook his hand, a limp handshake if ever I’d had one. He raised himself from his chair and walked to the coat closet with me. His wife appeared from wherever she had been hiding and I thanked them both for letting me come.

  I made up my mind that I didn’t like him very much.

  Late in the afternoon, after I picked up Eddie, I called the Platt house and talked to Toni. “Is there any word on your brother?”

  “Nothing. I told Doris I thought we should report him as a missing person, but she doesn’t agree.”

  I could see why. “He’s probably just overwhelmed by what happened, Toni. Maybe he’s sitting in some little place thinking about his relationship with his father.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the Roger I know. Tell me, did you learn anything from Harry?”

  “A few things. I’m glad we got together. He’s a very nice man and he cared deeply for your father—and for all of you. He told me something quite fascinating about the canes.”

  “That they open?”

  “Then you know.”

  “Oh, yes. They were Dad’s pride and joy. Some of them are very valuable, hand-carved, silver tops.”

  “And they all have sharp-edged instruments inside.”

  “Yes. Dad kept us away from them till we were old enough to be trusted. Then he showed us. We were forbidden to play with them, as you can imagine.”

  “Toni, the cane your father had out in the garage the day he was killed is missing. I think the killer used it and then took it away with him.”

  “I—Wait a minute. What you’re saying is that the killer knew the cane had a weapon inside. You think Roger did this.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said, although Roger was certainly a likely suspect. “It’s possible that your dad saw someone coming or got into an argument with whoever was there, pulled the knife out of the cane to protect himself, and the killer wrestled it from him.”

  “I see.” I let her consider this. “So it could have been someone who didn’t know about the cane.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Which means we’re back where we started.”

  “I’m afraid so. Did your father let many people in on the secret of the canes?”

  “No. I’m not surprised Harry knows, but Dad kept it in the family. I think he felt it was like money. It wasn’t anybody’s business but his.”

  “How is your mother doing?”

  “We’re all pretty low. She’s very upset about Roger. Doris hasn’t the faintest idea where he is. I have the strangest feeling something is going on, but I don’t know what.”

  “How long are you staying?”

  “Till the weekend. I’m going to have to arrange to have my mother picked up so she can do her shopping and get around. She keeps telling me she can walk—and I know she’s done it—but that’s not what I want for her. I’m afraid we’ll have to talk about selling the house, but that’s just too traumatic right now.”

  I told her we would be in touch before she left and I got off the phone. Eddie was exhausted from his long day and I thought it would be a good idea for him to eat and go to bed before Jack came home. As it happened, he agreed with me.

  12

  I finished my rather long narration after dinner.

  “You’ve learned a hell of a lot in one day,” Jack said. “Talking to the old friend was a real brainstorm.”

  “I can’t take credit for that,” I admitted. “Toni suggested it.”

  “You’ve got a lot of good stuff. The canes, the nursery, the first wife.”

  “I wish I felt it was leading me toward a killer. It’s nice to learn interesting things, but I’m no closer to figuring this out than I was yesterday.”

  “Hey, you’ve got a bunch of new suspects—the owner of the nursery, this mayor you think was telling you what you want to hear. How about the bereaved wife?”

  “Winnie Platt? That’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s not so ridiculous. She admits she was in the house that afternoon but claims she didn’t hear when you rang the bell and called.”

  “Toni said she’s deaf in one ear.”

  “Fine.” He dismissed the excuse. “She was there, she knew that whatever cane her husband had out in the garage had a weapon in it. She could go out, unscrew the top, and stab him with it. Or she could take one off the rack you described, go out with just the knife portion, take it back inside, wash it, put it back on the rack—hey, why not?”

  “Then where’s the one her husband had with him?”

  “Maybe that’s back on the rack too. Maybe she wanted someone to discover that the cane in the garage was missing so they would think that an outsider came along, used it to kill her husband, and took it away.”

  “That’s a very frightening scenario, Jack.”

  “Fits the facts,” he said philosophically.

  It did fit the facts and I didn’t like it at all. Whether Winnie was hard of hearing or not, she was in the house at the time of the murder. I didn’t have a motive for why she did it, but she certainly had the means and the opportunity. It answered the question of how the killer got there without being seen, the choice of weapon, the time it happened.

  “Who found the body?” Jack asked.

  “She did.”

  “No one else could have, right?”

  “Right.” They lived alone. There were no neighbors. There were acres of empty land and the nursery down the hill. “She would be crazy to do it.”

  “Why?”

  I hate it when he asks why at times like this. “Because she would be an obvious suspect.”

  “It wasn’t obvious to you. It wasn’t obvious to the police. You all assumed she was a bereaved wife whose husband had been murdered by an outsider.”

  Jack has never been easy to argue with. First, he had all those years of police experience. Now, as a new lawyer, he has honed his argumentative skills—sometimes I think he’s honed t
hem using me—and left me feeling he’s clever but I’m right, even if I can’t prove it. “She didn’t do it because she would be worse off without him than with him.”

  “Says who? She’s got a house that she can sell for a lot of money. He’s probably got a nice nest egg stashed away that she can live on. Think about it.”

  I didn’t want to. “She loved him, Jack,” I said.

  Jack leaned over and gave me a kiss. “That’s just what she would want you to think.”

  “It has to be someone else,” I grumbled. I looked at my watch. “Jack, I’m going to take a drive over to the apartment complex where Roger lives. He’s still missing, as far as I know, and I’d just like to see if his car is there.”

  “OK. Watch yourself.”

  I gave him a kiss, got my coat and went out to the car. I started with a short detour to check out the Platts’ house on the hill. Many lights were on and there were several cars in the driveway and on the road in front of the house. That meant there were visitors, and I was glad to see that. Just to make sure I wasn’t on a wild goose chase, I checked the cars for one that looked like Roger’s. There were a couple that might have been his but neither had his license plate. I made my U and went down the hill.

  Five minutes later I pulled into the parking lot where Roger had parked the other night when I followed him home. There were a lot of cars and I drove slowly, looking left and right for his. And then I saw it. I breathed a sigh of relief. Roger wasn’t missing. He was just staying home. I followed the drive around the buildings until I found the exit. Then I went home.

  Jack was dismayed when I asked him about trying to trace Amelia Platt, Willard’s first wife. If they had married in the Forties, it was the era of paper records, none of which had ever been put on a computer.

  “You could try Arnold,” he said. “I know he’s done some digging into the dim distant past. Maybe he’ll give it a try.”

  I hadn’t thought of that but he was right. Arnold is my lawyer friend whom I met back when I was single and newly out of the convent. Besides the fact that I love him dearly, he’s got the sharpest mind I’ve ever had the pleasure to encounter.

  He answered the phone himself and we chatted about families and weather and a case that was currently in court and being discussed in all the media.

  Finally I said I had something to ask him.

  “So it wasn’t just a friendly call. You’re breaking my heart.”

  I laughed. “Put it back together, Arnold. Something interesting has happened here in town.”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  “Yes. A local man was murdered twice, and yours truly didn’t know the first time was an April Fools’ Day joke.”

  “You’re confusing me. He was murdered twice?”

  “Sort of. The first time was a joke, the second was the real thing. I talked to an old friend of his this morning—they go back to World War Two together—and the friend tells me the victim had a wife briefly after the war.”

  “And you want me to dig her up and find out if she killed her ex-husband half a century later.”

  “Well.”

  “What do you know about her?”

  “She was Amelia McGonagle until she married Willard Platt. Her sister was supposed to be the second witness—the friend I talked to this morning was the first—and they were married at City Hall. Maybe I could locate the sister,” I said halfheartedly.

  “Any children of the marriage?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “You have a date for the wedding?”

  “Spring 1946. Probably,” I added.

  To his credit, he didn’t laugh out loud. But he groaned. “I don’t know. When your own friends come at you with an impossible job, you gotta wonder. I tell you what. I’ve got a law student doing some work for me. I’ll tell her if she’s got any extra time, maybe she’d like to dig around in old records, if they haven’t disintegrated by now. Anything else you know?”

  “The marriage didn’t last long, maybe a year, and sometime around that period, Willard was shot.” I told him the rest of the story.

  “Well, my young intern will have a good time with this. Who knows? Maybe she’ll get hooked and you’ll get your answers before I get mine.”

  “I like your spirit, Arnold.”

  “Spirit’s about all I’ve got left.”

  Jack was studying for his lieutenant’s exam, so I left him and called Doris Platt. It rang several times and the answering machine had just responded when she picked up. She was slightly breathless.

  “I just came back from Winnie’s,” she said. “I hated to leave her, but Toni’s still there.”

  “I wanted you to know that I drove over to your husband’s apartment and saw his car there.”

  “I can’t talk about this right now,” she said, and I realized her children had returned for the funeral.

  “I understand. I just wanted you to know.”

  “Thank you, Chris. The truth is, I feel better knowing it. I had no idea where—” She let it hang.

  “Right. That’s all. Good night.”

  “ ’Bye,” she said.

  I then hauled out the New York City telephone books and started telephoning A. Platts in Manhattan. Without exception, they were all men. By the time I got to Brooklyn, one or two were women, and the same was true in the other boroughs. But there was no Amelia. It then occurred to me that she might have kept Willard or W for the phone book listing, so I looked for those entries. There was actually one Willard Platt on Staten Island but the man who answered was young—I could hear children in the background—and he had never heard of Amelia. He volunteered that his parents were named Harry and Sheila.

  Disappointed, I continued, knowing that if I had the time, I could try all the Platts in New York, but being me, I worried about the phone bill. Each would be a toll call, as we lived in Westchester County, almost an hour from the city.

  When I had covered the W. Platts in the whole city, I gave up. It was late by then, too late to decently call anyone, and I knew it was a lost cause. We live in a mobile society. A woman splitting up with her husband in the late Forties might decide to try her luck in California or Boston. The chances of her still being in the same city after so many years was very small. Willard had moved, Jack had moved when we were married. I took the phone books and put them away.

  “Did you really think you’d find her?” Jack asked.

  “I had a faint hope. It’s kind of silly. If she’d wanted to kill him, she would have done it long ago. But I’d really like to know who shot him and why.”

  “If it was his wife, it could have been a domestic fight that was over after she fired. Even if he went to a hospital to have it treated, he might not have identified her as the shooter.”

  It was all true. “And it was so long ago.”

  “I’d be looking for someone with a newer grudge. This was the kind of guy who could generate a long list of possible suspects.”

  “Like Mr. Vitale at the nursery. I’ll have to talk to him. Maybe I’ll go over there tomorrow. We haven’t set up a date for them to plant our Japanese maple.”

  But the idea of the nursery owner killing Wilbur Platt because he wouldn’t sell them land or let them use his land didn’t really grab me. For something like that, you stop speaking to a person or you say nasty things about him. You don’t kill. Somebody had to have a better motive than that.

  13

  What troubled me was Jack’s almost convincing argument that Winnie Platt was a suspect. She was in her seventies, she had been married for more than half her life. She had a husband who, although he might be difficult to live with at times, was apparently faithful to her and a reasonably good companion. They had built a beautiful house together and had enjoyed living in it. She had convinced me, in our conversations, that she was sorry he was dead.

  And looking at her situation from a less emotional and more practical viewpoint, it seemed incredible to think that a woman who no longer
drove and who lived in an inaccessible place would deprive herself of the one person who could chauffeur her around.

  When the breakfast things were taken care of and Jack had left, I got Eddie and myself dressed for the day.

  “Would you like to see the tree I bought for us?” I asked him.

  “What tree?”

  “Daddy and I thought it would be nice to plant a Japanese maple tree in front of the house. It’s just a little tree now and we can watch it grow.”

  “I like trees,” Eddie said.

  “I’m glad to hear that. I like them too. Let’s take a drive over to see our new tree.”

  As I turned into the nursery drive I thought I saw a car backing out of the Platts’ drive and then turn up the hill. I couldn’t think why anyone would be going up there, but I couldn’t stay and watch. I parked and took Eddie by the hand and walked down to where our little tree, a red and yellow SOLD sign still tied to it, sat balled and bagged.

  “That’s our tree,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty?”

  “It doesn’t have any leaves.”

  “The leaves will come out in the spring, honey. In a few weeks all the trees will have leaves. This one will have red leaves.”

  “I like red leaves.”

  I took my agreeable son’s hand and walked back up the hill to the main building. I knew who the owner was, and we walked through the building till I found him. He was on the phone and I waited, looking at boxes of grass seed till he got off. As I saw him talking, I realized I could have called the police from here on April Fools’ Day, but my mind hadn’t been functioning well.

  “Mr. Vitale, I’m Chris Brooks,” I said as he hung up. “I’m up here to arrange for my tree to be planted.”

  “They can take care of that where you check out.”