Murder, She Wrote--Murder in Red

by Jessica Fletcher

  Chapter Seventeen

  The police cars were still rimming the stately Good Shepherd Manor in force when Mort and I arrived, equally mixed between the Newburyport town police and the Massachusetts State Police, a few with their lights still churning.

  A state trooper, who looked big enough to be a pro football player, manning the entrance denied us entry at first, fortunately not asking for my name or reason for being there. He radioed a superior who was overseeing the potential crime scene and, after reciting the explanation behind Sheriff Metzger’s presence, received permission for Mort to come upstairs. I followed along sheepishly, waiting for the officer to call out something like “Just a moment there,” or “Where do you think you’re going?” but he never did.

  A state police captain whose name tag identified him as Barnes met us in the hallway a bit down from Tripp’s room, where all the activity was centered, discomfiting me with a harsh stare focused my way.

  “Sheriff Metzger, please tell me this isn’t who I think it is.”

  “In the flesh, Captain, and well acquainted enough with the victim to potentially be of substantial assistance to the case.”

  “At this point, Sheriff,” Barnes said, his gaze continuing to focus on me, “there is no case and Tripp Van Dorn is only the deceased, not a victim. Our preliminary assessment is that his death was due to suicide.”

  “Would you mind if we took a look, Captain?” I asked quietly. “You see, I was very close with the young man’s mother, who also recently passed. If nothing else, I can formally identify the body in her absence.”

  Barnes looked at Mort, then nodded to both of us, a single nod. “Just to ID the body, so we’re clear on that.”

  “We are,” I said.

  “She is,” Mort followed.

  Inside the room, Tripp Van Dorn had maneuvered his wheelchair so that his face was pressed flush against the sheer curtain inside the open drapes. The television was still on, tuned to a movie station with the sound muted, making me wonder what the last thing Tripp had watched might have been, and if that had had anything to do with him rolling his wheelchair against the window on an angle that pressed the sheer curtain against his face. At that point, his breath acted like glue in pinning the material to his nose and mouth, ultimately suffocating him.

  “I’ve got to admit,” Barnes was saying, “I’ve never seen anything quite like this before.”

  There were five others squeezed into the room, two uniformed officers from Newburyport and three state police crime-scene techs measuring distances and taking samples of pretty much everything, whether innocuous or not.

  “According to the log,” Barnes resumed, “a night nurse had given him a sleeping drug just after midnight when he couldn’t sleep. She found him this way four hours later on her rounds.”

  “You think he requested it to facilitate the process, make it harder to change his mind,” I presumed.

  “Until something suggests otherwise.”

  Tripp’s body was canted forward, so the back of his head was no longer flush against the headrest, which I remembered had been supporting it during my first visit here with George Sutherland instead of Mort in tow. The walls on both sides of the window were bare, leaving him nothing to gaze at while he took his final breaths, other than whatever might’ve been outside at the time.

  “How do you see it, Sheriff Metzger?”

  “Well, Mrs. Fletcher,” he started, a glint flashing in his eyes, “it looks to me like he drove his chair forward with as much speed as he could muster. You can see the footrests riding the radiator down low. That’s what stopped his chair and when it did, it rocked his face forward into the curtain.”

  “Exactly his plan from where I’m standing,” Barnes agreed.

  The lack of a comment from the two crime-scene techs working the body and the general area confirmed they were in agreement on that general scenario as well.

  “Sorry you wasted a trip, Mrs. Fletcher,” Barnes continued, rather smugly. “But not every death is a murder.”

  “I’m sorry, Captain, but I still have my doubts about this one.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Well, for starters, Mr. Van Dorn phoned me just a few hours before his death. We made an appointment to meet this morning at his insistence, because he had something vital he wanted to share with me—potentially related to his mother’s death,” I added for effect more than anything. “It seems strange that he would have taken his life under those circumstances.”

  “As opposed to just changing his mind, you mean.”

  “The captain has a point, Jessica,” Mort chimed in. “It could very well be that the young man decided not to bother with this meeting. Maybe whatever he wanted to discuss pushed him over the edge. So he called for a sleeping pill and staged his own death.”

  “At first glance, that’s almost surely what happened,” I agreed. “At the very least, the most logical solution.”

  “She said ‘at first glance,’” Barnes noted to Mort.

  “And she said ‘for starters’ before,” Mort added.

  “Because, gentlemen,” I told them both, “I don’t believe Tripp Van Dorn committed suicide. I believe he was murdered.”

  * * *

  • • •

  No one in the room, including Mort and Captain Barnes, argued my point or asked me why. They just went silent, affording me the opportunity to continue.

  I looked toward the crime-scene techs. “Did you or anyone else to your knowledge examine or disturb the back of the young man’s head?”

  The two techs, a man and a woman, looked at each other and then shook their heads.

  “No, ma’am,” the man said.

  “No,” the woman followed.

  “I’m not sure what you’re referring to, Mrs. Fletcher,” Barnes said.

  He crouched slightly as he moved closer to Tripp Van Dorn’s body to better examine the rear of his scalp.

  “There’s no disturbance in his hair,” Barnes resumed. “No marks or depression of any kind suggesting someone had forced him up against the sheer curtain and then pressed his face against it.”

  “That’s exactly the point, Captain,” I observed. “There’s no depression or mark of any kind, even though there should be.”

  Mort and Barnes exchanged a glance, Mort’s being one of wry understanding, while Barnes had narrowed his gaze upon me.

  “What am I missing here?” he asked.

  “Nothing, because what we should be seeing isn’t there.”

  I pointed toward the back of Tripp Van Dorn’s head, draped in a mane of thick, long hair, careful not to draw close enough to disturb anything with an accidental touch.

  “When I was here two days ago, I noticed the young man’s head rested flush against this headrest here,” I continued, pointing that out as well. “So at the very least, there should be a depression consistent with that mold. The fact that there isn’t suggests someone, the killer, smoothed the hair back into place to hide a different depression resulting from his hand forcing Tripp Van Dorn’s face against the sheer curtain, which I believe, effectively, was the murder weapon. Captain Barnes, I believe if you have your medical examiner do a thorough examination of the back of the young man’s scalp, he’ll find bruising consistent with his head being held in place for several moments.”

  Barnes turned to Mort. “Does she come up with these conclusions a lot?”

  “Oh, yes. More than you care to know.”

  “And do they usually turn out to be well-founded?”

  “Almost always.”

  “So how is it you still have a job?” Barnes shook his head, turning back my way. “I don’t suppose you have a notion as to the identity of the killer, Mrs. Fletcher.”

  “Not yet, Captain. I don’t want your job to end up in jeopardy, too.”

  * * *


  • • •

  Good Shepherd Manor had an exterior security camera but none inside, to create a more comfortable, homey feel for its residents and avoid the sense of institutional living. The medical examiner’s cursory inspection estimated the time of death to be in approximately a ninety-minute window between midnight and one thirty, the body having been found just after four a.m.

  “How’d Good Shepherd know to call you?” I asked Mort, while we lingered outside Tripp Van Dorn’s room, pondering our next move.

  “Either the state or Newburyport police must have noted your name and Cabot Cove address on the guest sign-in sheet from two days ago. By all indications, you and George Sutherland were the young man’s last visitors.”

  “Save for one,” I noted, drawing a grim nod from Mort.

  “Anyway, they reached out to me as a matter of course, doing exactly what I would’ve done in their shoes.”

  “Meaning they considered me a possible suspect.”

  “Until I explained the reason for your visit.”

  “How’d you do that?”

  “With the truth, that you were friends with the young man’s mother, who’d recently died.”

  “And you left it there?”

  “For now, because there was no point in raising the rest of this yet. I might have still been on the phone if I’d tried to bring them up to date on the entire case.”

  Mort was right. Between the potential involvement of Charles Clifton in Mimi’s death, the duplicitous lawyer Fred Cooper, and these clinical trials the Clifton Clinic was somehow conducting off the books, we had a lot of pieces, but nothing that added up yet. No way the Massachusetts authorities would’ve been able to make any sense of it all, and Cabot Cove was well out of their jurisdiction anyway.

  “I’ll bring Captain Barnes up to date when we have something to update him with that’s relevant to his case.”

  “‘When,’” I repeated, “as opposed to ‘if.’”

  “Do you really have any doubts to that effect, Mrs. Fletcher?”

  I rolled my eyes. “There you go again . . . Sheriff.”

  * * *

  • • •

  “I like when you call me Sheriff,” Mort said, as we made our way back to the lobby. “Reminds me you know who’s in charge.”

  “Well, you did drive here.”

  “Next time we can fly, so you can drive me.”

  “I was thinking about giving you a ride on my bicycle.”

  “Best way to negotiate Cabot Cove traffic this time of year,” he noted. “Little did you know that the lack of a driver’s license was going to make you a trendsetter.”

  We reached the bottom of the ornate staircase that climbed through the three levels of Good Shepherd Manor.

  “What does it mean that the security camera picked up no visitors coming or going since eight o’clock, around five hours before Tripp Van Dorn was murdered?”

  “That his killer was either an employee already inside or someone familiar with the placement of all three cameras.”

  “Leaving one means of access unmonitored.”

  “My thoughts exactly, Mrs. Fletcher. What say we take a look?”

  * * *

  • • •

  There was no sign of forced entry, or any entry at all, on the door in question. It was a fire door to be used only in the event of emergencies and would have triggered an alarm had it been jarred open. That left any number of first-floor windows. Mort fit a pair of plastic gloves over his hands and tried all the ones out of the cameras’ reach, finding two unlocked.

  He made a note of which ones they were in his magical memo pad. “I’ll let Barnes know these should be checked for fingerprints and DNA samples.”

  “Expect the killer to have left either?”

  “You never know.”

  “But here’s something we do know: Chances are he knew this building well, from past visits perhaps, even regular ones.”

  “Visits to the late Tripp Van Dorn?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking, Mort, meaning he was likely well acquainted with his killer.”

  He jotted down another note. “Another job for Barnes. I’ll ask him to send us his findings. Anything else?”

  “Yes, I’m missing something.”

  “What?”

  “If I knew what it was, I wouldn’t be missing it. Something about Tripp’s room I can’t quite put my finger on . . . But there is something else I can put my finger on.”

  “What’s that, Mrs. Fletcher?”

  “When he called me last night, he was scared.”

  “Care to be more specific?”

  “Hard to do that when it’s a tone, a feeling.”

  “Instinct, then.”

  “I suppose so, yes, Mort.”

  “How exactly did you learn to see and hear things nobody else seems to notice, Jessica?”

  “My ancestors came here from Ireland, toting any number of family legends along for the ride. One of those was a string of my great-great-aunts and grandmothers who had what they called ‘the Gift,’ referring to an intuitive sense.”

  “You mean like psychics?”

  “Something like that.” I nodded. “Though the nearest I ever came to that was doing palm readings at the Harrison College Fall Festival for my sorority. Surprised myself how often I got things right without really trying.”

  “Ever solve any murders in that sorority?”

  “Fortunately, I never had the opportunity. But I did use Delta Alpha Chi as the setting for one in a book.”

  “The Corpse That Wasn’t There,” Mort said casually.

  I shook my head. “Another sleepless night?”

  “Several of them. I figure since it’s usually your fault I’m awake, the least you can do is help me to fall asleep.” His expression flattened again. “Getting back to the late Mr. Van Dorn, you didn’t push the issue of what was scaring him any further?”

  “I saw no reason to, given that I thought I’d be seeing Tripp this morning.”

  “Well, you saw him, all right,” Mort said, and narrowed his gaze on me. “You do that a lot, you know.”

  “Do what?”

  “Refer to victims by their first names. You do that in your books, too.”

  “So you have been reading me!”

  “Like I said, only when I can’t sleep,” he said.

  “It makes feel closer to them,” I explained. “Gives me more of a reason to catch their killers.”

  “Makes sense. And how do you intend to catch this one, Mrs. Fletcher?”

  “As far as Tripp’s concerned, all this goes back to the car accident in Marblehead that put him in that wheelchair. We’re already halfway there, Mort. You up for a drive farther south?”

  “Guess that answers my question.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “This is where the crash happened,” Marblehead chief of police Tom Grimes told us. “I was a patrolman at the time and reviewed the report after you called and can tell you the investigative team determined he lost control of his car, one of those Mialta convertibles, back maybe a quarter mile.”

  “Miata,” Mort corrected. “My wife had one once.”

  “Well,” said Grimes, “I hope she’s okay.”

  Tripp Van Dorn had grown up just a few miles from where we were standing, in a seaside cottage on Goldthwait Road in the tony town of Marblehead, located on the northern shore of Massachusetts. Then and now, it boasted a population of twenty thousand, although, like Cabot Cove, it encountered more than its share of summertime traffic, though Tripp’s accident must have occurred sometime in the spring.

  Of course, I hadn’t met Mimi yet, so I knew their home only from her description of a sprawling, five-thousand-square-foot home she modestly classified as a “cottage.” I’ll never kno
w. A holdover, I suppose, from the Gilded Age, when the rich who’d made their original fortunes as industrialists built these massive so-called cottages as testaments to their wealth. Any number of them even today were occupied only in the summer by Boston Brahmins or New York hedge fund managers who’d driven up home prices in Marblehead just as they had in Cabot Cove.

  Chief Grimes stood between Mort and me at the corner of Ocean Avenue and Beach Street just short of what locals referred to as the Causeway.

  “It was raining that night, so the road was slick,” Grimes continued. “Young Mr. Van Dorn took that corner back there way too fast, and by the time his Mialta stopped here, it had rolled an estimated three or four times.”

  “Was alcohol involved?” Mort asked.

  “The victim was in no condition to be Breathalyzed. I seem to recall an elevated level in a blood test, but the former chief didn’t press things, since he figured the young man had suffered enough. Van Dorn was medevaced to Massachusetts General Hospital, where they were able to save his life. Not much they could do about the severed spinal cord, though. He lasted more than many in that condition, I suppose. How’d he die again?”

  “It’s still under investigation, but a probable suicide.”

  Grimes let his gaze linger on me before moving back to Mort. “So was it the suicide that brought you all the way down here, or the investigation, Sheriff?”

  “Combination of both. Mrs. Fletcher here was well acquainted with the young man’s mother, who also died recently under mysterious circumstances. Two of us thought the night of the crash might provide some clues.”

  Grimes scratched at his scalp through his thinning hair. “Well, I made a copy of the report for you. First time I’ve ever actually seen it myself. The chief then, the man I replaced, Alvin McCandless, was a hands-on guy, known for protecting the interests of our residents.”

  “I believe Alvin was finishing up his career here just as I was starting out in Cabot Cove,” Mort noted. “Could command a room, as I recall.”