by Otto Penzler
Trafalgar. Not the name of his late wife’s home, but the square in the heart of London. Would he have told the secret to Althea Barnes? A great joke, that, one she might have appreciated and passed on to her father and her brother.
What would such a reliquary be worth? Monetarily and intrinsically.
What would it be worth to Dr. Barnes, working daily with men whose minds were destroyed by war? Had he come, in December, to ask for the use of the Middleton Host? And instead been pawned off with promises of the house in Dartmouth? A house he had no use for and couldn’t afford to keep up? An albatross, compared to the cure the reliquary might achieve in men who could be brought to believe in its power.
Rutledge went to the door, called to Mrs. Gravely that he would be back shortly, and hurried to his motorcar. Driving into Cambridge as dawn was breaking, he went to the telephone he’d used before and put in a call to the clinic where Barnes worked.
He was informed that Dr. Barnes was with a patient and couldn’t be disturbed.
Swearing under his breath, he walked out to his motorcar and was on the point of driving to London when another thought occurred to him. Even tired as he was, it made sense.
The old dog.
Mrs. Gravely had claimed that Sir John had spoken to Dr. Taylor just before he died. She had nearly been sure that he’d asked about his dog. And the doctor had responded with a single word. No. She had thought that the doctor was telling Sir John that the dog was dead.
Turning the motorcar around, he drove back to Mumford. He searched the high street of the little town, then looked in the side streets. Shortly after nine, he found Dr. Taylor’s surgery, next door but one to the house where the doctor lived, according to the nameplates on the small white gates to both properties.
Hamish said, “’Ware.” And it was a warning well taken.
Knocking on the surgery door, Rutledge scanned the house down the street. He could just see a small woman wrapped in a coat and headscarf, standing in the back garden, staring at the bare fruit trees and withered beds as if her wishing could bring them into bloom again. The doctor’s wife? That told him what he needed to know.
The nurse who admitted Rutledge was plump and motherly, calling him dearie, asking him to wait in the passage while she spoke with the doctor. “His first patients of the day are already in the front room. It’s better if you come directly back to the office.”
“It’s about his report on the postmortem of Sir John.”
“He has already mailed it to the Yard,” she said. “I took it to the post myself.”
Rutledge gave her his best smile. “Yes, I’ve been in Dartmouth. It hasn’t caught up with me yet.”
She nodded and bustled off to tell the doctor that Rutledge was waiting.
Dr. Taylor received him almost at once, saying, “Mrs. Dunne tells me you haven’t seen the postmortem results.” He sorted through some files on his desk and retrieved a sheet of paper. “My copy,” he added, passing it across the desk to Rutledge. “You’re welcome to read it.”
Rutledge took the sheet, scanning it quickly. “Yes. Everything seems to be in order,” he said, glancing up in time to see the tension around Dr. Taylor’s eyes ease a little. “Two blows, one to the back of the head and the second to the face. Weapon possibly a cane.” He handed the report to Taylor. “There’s one minor detail to clear up before the inquest. Mrs. Gravely told me that Sir John spoke to her as she was coming into the study. Was that possible, do you think?”
“I doubt if he was coherent,” Taylor said easily. “A grunt. A groan. But not words as such.”
“She also reported that he spoke to you. And that you answered him, just before he died.”
Taylor frowned. “I thought he was asking if the old dog was still alive. I told him it was dead. I wasn’t sure, you understand. But I thought if that was what he was trying to say, I’d ease his mind.”
He had just contradicted himself.
“I don’t think that the dog’s death was something that would comfort him.”
Taylor shrugged. “I wasn’t in a position to consider my answer. As I told you, he wasn’t coherent. I did my best in the circumstances.”
“Actually, I think he was probably asking if you’d use the Middleton Host to save the old dog. And you refused. You had to, because Mrs. Gravely was standing there in the doorway.”
Taylor flushed. “What host?”
“He must have told you at one time or another. A medical man? That a king had found it useless and thrown it in a dung heap. But then Eleanor of Castile was probably beyond help by the time the reliquary reached her. She died anyway. King Edward loved his wife. Passionately. Everywhere her body rested the night on the long journey south to London, he built a shrine. The wonder was, he didn’t smash the relic. But I expect he felt that the dung heap was a more fitting end for it. A fake, a sham.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Inspector. And there are patients waiting.”
“It was a story that must have touched Sir John. He hadn’t been able to save either of his wives, had he? The host was, after all, no more than a pretty fraud.”
The doctor’s face changed. “That’s an assumption that neither you nor I can make. Sir John was a soldier, a skeptic, hardly one to take seriously legends about relics and miracles. Where is this taking us?”
“I’m trying,” Rutledge returned blandly, “to establish whether or not Sir John loved Elizabeth Middleton as deeply as—for instance—you must love your wife. Because it was for her you did what you did. Not the patients out there in the waiting room.” It was a guess, but it struck home.
Taylor opened his mouth, then shut it again.
“Why did you put the dog out? Did it attack you? If I asked you to have another doctor look at your ankles or legs, would he find breaks in the skin to indicate you’d been bitten? Even if it has begun to heal, the marks must still be there. Would you agree to such an examination?”
Taylor rose from behind the desk. “Yes, all right, the dog was dying when I got there. Sir John was kneeling on the floor beside it when I opened the door and called to him. He told me he was in the study, and to come quickly. Still, the damned dog growled at me and got to its feet as I struck the first blow. I had to get rid of it, because Sir John was still alive and I needed to hit him again. The cold finished it off, I expect. Its breathing was shallow, labored.” He moved to the hearth. “My wife has just been diagnosed with colon cancer. I’d already asked Sir John if I could borrow the reliquary. To give her a chance. He told me it had done nothing for his wife, dying of childbed fever. But I didn’t care. I was ready to try anything. I just wanted to try. But he was afraid that if my wife recovered on her own, Mumford would be swamped with the desperate, the hopeless, believers in miracles. He said it would be wrong. Time was running out, and yet that afternoon he begged me to do something for his dog. It was obscene, I tell you.”
He reached down, his fingers closing over the handle of the fire tongs. Lifting his voice, he shouted, “No, no—you’re wrong! Put them down, for God’s sake.”
And before Rutledge could stop him, he raised the tongs and brought them down on his own head, the blow carefully calculated to break the skin but not knock him down. And as blood ran down his face, he dropped the tongs and cried out, “Oh, God, someone help me . . . Mrs. Dunne . . . he’s run mad.”
And in a swift angry voice that reached only Rutledge’s ears, Taylor said, “She’s ill, I tell you. I won’t be taken away when she needs me. Not by you, not by anyone.”
He rushed at Rutledge, grappling with him.
The door burst open, Mrs. Dunne flying to the doctor’s aid, pulling at Rutledge’s shoulders, calling out for him to stop.
Rutledge had no choice. He swung her around, and she went down, tripping over the chair he’d been sitting in. He turned toward the hearth, to retrieve the fire tongs as Taylor reeled against the far wall, calling, “Stop him—”
Mrs. Dunne, scramblin
g to her feet, must have thought Rutledge was about to use the tongs again, and she threw herself at him, carrying him backward against the hearth, stumbling over the fire screen.
Her screams had brought patients from the waiting room, pushing their way through the door, faces anxious and frightened as they took in the carnage, drawing the same conclusions that Mrs. Dunne had leapt to. A woman in a dark green coat gasped and went to the doctor’s aid, and he leaned heavily against her shoulder. Two men put themselves between Rutledge and his perceived victim, one of them quickly retrieving the fire tongs from where they’d fallen, as if afraid Rutledge could still reach them.
It was all Rutledge could do to catch Mrs. Dunne’s pummeling fists and force her arms to her sides so that he could retrieve the situation before it got completely out of hand. Hamish in the back of his mind was warning him again, and there was no time to answer.
In a voice used to command on a battlefield, he said, “You—the one in the greatcoat—find Constable Forrest and bring him here at once.”
Taylor said, stricken, “He’s trying to arrest me . . . for murder . . . I’ve done nothing wrong, don’t let him lie to you. For God’s sake!”
They knew Taylor. Rutledge was a stranger. The man in the greatcoat hesitated.
The doctor swayed on his feet. “I think I’d better sit down.” The woman helped him to a chair, and his knees nearly buckled under him.
She said, “I’ll find your wife.”
He gripped her arm. “No. I don’t want to worry her.” Taylor took out his handkerchief to mop the blood from his face. “Just get him out of my office, if you will.”
Rutledge crossed the room, and the man with the tongs raised them without thinking, as if expecting Rutledge to attack him. But he went to the door and closed it.
“You’ll listen to me, then. I’m Inspector Rutledge, Scotland Yard.” He held up his card for all of them to see. “I’ve just charged Dr. Taylor with the murder of Sir John Middleton. As for those tongs, he himself wielded them. I never touched them, or him.”
“I think you’d better leave,” Mrs. Dunne snapped. “He’s a good man, a doctor.”
“Is he? I intend to order Sir John’s dog exhumed. I expect to find shreds of cloth in his teeth.” Hamish was reminding him that it was only a very slim possibility, but Rutledge ignored him. “What’s more, I intend to ask a doctor from Cambridge to examine Dr. Taylor’s limbs for healing bites. And the clothing he was wearing the day of the murder will be examined for mended tears.”
He saw the expression on Mrs. Dunne’s face. Shock first, and then uncertainty. “I mended a tear in his trousers just last week. He’d caught them on a nail, he said.”
“Then you’ll know which trousers they were. If the shreds match, he will be tried for murder. We can also look at those tongs, if you will set them carefully on the desk. The only prints on them will be Dr. Taylor’s and yours, sir. Not mine.”
“Can you do that?” the man holding the tongs asked, staring down at them.
“There are people who can.”
He moved to the desk, putting them down quite gently. Dr. Taylor reached for them, saying, “He’s bluffing—look, it’s my blood that’s on them.”
Rutledge was across the room before Taylor’s fingers could curl around the handle of the tongs, his grip hard on the doctor’s wrist, stopping him just in time.
The man in the greatcoat said, “I think I ought to fetch Constable Forrest after all, if only to sort out this business.”
He left the office, and they could hear the surgery door shut firmly after him.
The doctor said, “I tell you, it’s not true, none of it is true.” But even as he spoke the words, he could read the faces around him. Uncertainty, then doubt replacing belief.
The woman in the dark green coat said, “I really must go—” and started toward the door, unwilling to have any further involvement with the police. The other man, without looking at the doctor, followed her in uncomfortable silence.
Taylor called, “No, wait, please!”
Mrs. Dunne said, “I’ll just put a sign up on the door, saying the surgery is closed,” and hurried after them.
Rutledge turned to see tears in Taylor’s eyes. “Damn you,” he said hoarsely. “And damn the bloody dog. I love her. I wanted to save her. Do you know what it’s like to realize that your skills aren’t enough?” He turned from Rutledge to the window. “Do you know how it feels when God has deserted you?”
Rutledge knew. In France, when he held his revolver at Hamish’s temple; he knew.
“And what would you have done if the reliquary failed you, too?” Rutledge asked.
“It won’t. It can’t. I’m counting on it,” he said defiantly. “You won’t find it, I’ve seen to that. By God, at least she’ll have that!”
But in the end they would find it. Rutledge said only, “What did you use as the murder weapon?”
Dr. Taylor grimaced. “You’re the policeman. Tell me.”
Hamish said, “He did the postmortem. Any evidence would ha’ been destroyed.”
And there had been more than enough time for Taylor to have hidden whatever it was on his way back to Mumford before he was summoned by Sam Hubbard.
When Constable Forrest arrived, Rutledge turned Taylor over to him and warned him to have a care on their way to Cambridge. “He’s killed once,” he reminded the man.
He watched them leave, and Mrs. Dunne, who had come to the door as the doctor was being taken away, bit her lip to hold back tears.
Rutledge walked to the house next but one to speak to Taylor’s wife, and it was a bitter duty. Her face drawn and pale from suffering, she said only, “It’s my fault. My fault.” And nothing would dissuade her. In the end, he had to tell her that her house would have to be searched. She nodded, too numb at the moment to care.
He left her with Mrs. Dunne and went to tell Mrs. Gravely that he had found Sir John’s killer.
She frowned. “I’d never have believed the doctor could do such a thing. Not to murder Sir John for a heathen superstition. Poor Mrs. Taylor, I can’t think how she’ll manage now.”
He left her, refusing her offer of a cup of tea. Then, just as he was cranking the motorcar, she called to him, and he came back to the steps where she was hugging her arms about her against the cold wind.
“It keeps slipping my mind, Mr. Rutledge, sir! And it’s probably not important now. You asked me to keep an eye out for anything that was missing, and I wanted you to know I did.”
“Is there anything? Besides the reliquary?” he asked, surprised.
“Oh, nothing so valuable as that.” She smiled self-consciously, feeling a little foolish, but no less determined to do her duty. “Still, with the old dog dead, and Sir John gone as well, I never noticed it was missing until yesterday morning. It’s the iron doorstop, the one shaped like a small dormouse. Sir John used it these past six months or so, whenever Simba needed to go out. To keep the door from slamming shut behind them, you see, while he walked a little way with Simba or stood here on the step waiting for him. He never cared for the sound of a slamming door. He said it reminded him too much of the war. The sound of the guns and all that.”
Rutledge thanked her and drove to Cambridge to ask for men to search the sides of the road between Sir John’s house and Mumford.
As they braved the cold to dig through ditches and push aside winter-dead growth, Rutledge could hear the doctor’s voice again.
You’re the policeman. Tell me.
Three hours later, he drove once more to Cambridge to do just that. A few black hairs still clung to the dormouse’s ears, and on the base was what appeared to be a perfect print in Sir John’s blood.
TIM L. WILLIAMS
Half-Lives
FROM Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
WHEN I TRACKED Terrell Cheatham’s grandmother from her last known address to the subsidized apartment she’d moved into after her husband’s death, she didn’t do any of the th
ings I expected. Instead of slamming the door in my face or denying that her grandson lived with her, she invited me in for a cup of coffee and then added a shot of bourbon to my mug, “just to keep the cold out of my bones.” This was a long way from the reception a private investigator usually gets when running down bail jumps in southwest Memphis, where the average annual income is a few dollars higher than it is in Calcutta and even the most law-abiding residents see a white face as an intrusion from an alien and hostile world. I was so shocked I wanted to believe her when she insisted that her grandson was a “fine young man” who wouldn’t cause me “an ounce of trouble.”
Frances Cheatham seemed like a decent woman. She was in her late fifties or early sixties, still trim and attractive but with deep worry lines around her mouth and eyes, and I could tell she loved her grandson. From what I’d read in his jacket, Terrell Cheatham didn’t seem like the kind of kid who belonged in jail. At twenty, he had a single blemish on his record. It had been two years since his arrest for breaking into the video-game store, and he’d kept clean since then. He’d completed a semester of college, earning a spot on the honor roll before he dropped out to take a full-time job in the kitchen at a Tops Barbecue on Elvis Presley Boulevard. If he’d shown up for his court appearance a week and a half ago—in Memphis a trial two years after the offense is considered swift justice—Terrell would have faced no more than six months’ probation.
“Terrell’s momma left him when he was just a baby,” she said now, blowing at the steam rising off a fresh cup of coffee and then shrugging. “Our son Marcus Junior gave Terrell to us to raise, but he came to visit Terrell every weekend up until the time he was killed in a car wreck outside of Jackson, Mississippi.”
Her husband, Marcus Senior, had passed away less than a year ago. He was a good man, she said, one who’d worked for twenty-seven years as a night watchman at the West Parrish Industrial Park to put bread on the table and keep a roof over their heads.
“Bone cancer. He went fast, but don’t let anyone tell you fast and easy are the same thing.” Her smile was tired, maybe a little bitter. “I bet you hear your share of sad stories, don’t you, Mr. Raines. Probably get sick of them.”