Murder at Monticello

by Rita Mae Brown

  “What have you got, Tucker?” Mrs. Murphy, worried, asked.

  “Not enough. Not enough.”

  “A trace of cologne?”

  “No, just this damned crepe-sole smell. And a wet smell—sand.”

  The tiger bent her own nose to the task. “Is anyone else doing construction work? There’s always sand involved in construction.”

  “Sand on a lot of driveways too.”

  “Tucker, we’ve got to stick close to Mom. She’s done enough research to get her in trouble. Whoever the killer is, he’s losing it. Humans don’t kill one another in broad daylight unless it’s passion or war. This was cold-blooded.”

  “And hasty,” Tucker added, still straining to place the rubber smell. She decided then and there to hate crepe-soled shoes.

  Fair Haristeen read Larry’s notes on a piece of blue-lined white paper as Cynthia Cooper held the paper with tweezers.

  “Can you make some sense of this, Fair? You’re a medical man.”

  “Yes, it’s a kind of medical shorthand for sickle cell anemia.”

  “Don’t only African Americans get that?”

  “Mostly blacks are affected, but I don’t think there’s a hundred percent correspondence. It passes from generation to generation.”

  Cooper asked, “How many generations back?”

  Fair shrugged, “That I can’t tell you, Coop. I’m just a vet, remember.”

  “Thanks, Fair.”

  “Is there a nut case on the loose in Crozet?”

  “That depends on how you define nut case, but it’s safe to say that if the killer feels anyone is closing in on the truth, he’s going to strike.”

  59

  Diana Robb swept aside the ambulance curtains as Rick Shaw pulled the sheet off Larry Johnson.

  The bullet had narrowly missed the right side of the good doctor’s heart. It passed clearly through his body. The force of the blow, the shock, temporarily knocked him unconscious. When Charmalene discovered him, he was awakening.

  Rick Shaw, the instant he knew Larry would live, bent over the older man who, just like a doctor, was giving orders as to how to handle him. “I need your help.”

  “Yes.” Larry assented through a tight jaw.

  “Who shot you?”

  “That’s just it. I left the front door open. I was expecting Warren Randolph sometime late morning. I walked out of the living room into the front hall. Whoever shot me—maybe Warren—must have tiptoed in, but I never saw him.” These five sentences took Larry a long time to utter, and his brow was drenched in sweat.

  “Help me, Larry.” The doctor nodded yes as Rick fervently whispered, “I need you to pretend you’re dead for twenty-four hours.”

  “I nearly was.”

  Rick swore Charmalene to secrecy as well as the ambulance staff. When he crawled into the back of the vehicle he had but one thought, how to bait and trap Warren Randolph.

  60

  Back in the office Rick Shaw banged his fists against the wall. The staff outside his office jumped. No one moved. Rarely did the man they obeyed and had learned to admire show this much emotion.

  Deputy Cooper, in the office with him, said nothing, but she did open a fresh pack of cigarettes and made a drinking sign when a fresh-faced patrolman snuck by. That meant a cold Coca-Cola.

  “I let my guard down! I know better. How many years have I been an officer of the law? How many?”

  “Twenty-two, Sheriff.”

  “Well, you’d think I would have goddamned learned something in twenty-two years. I relaxed. I allowed myself to think because of circumstantial evidence, because the bullet matched the thirty-eight that killed Kimball, that we had an open-and-shut case. Sure, Samson protested his innocence. My God, ninety percent of the worst criminals in America whine and lie and say they’re innocent. I didn’t listen to my gut.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself. The case against Samson looked airtight. I was sure a confession would be a matter of time, once he figured out he couldn’t outsmart us. It takes time for reality to set in.”

  “Oh, Coop.” Rick slumped heavily into his chair. “I blame myself for Larry Johnson’s shooting.”

  The patrolman held up the cold Coke at the glass window. Cynthia rose, opened the door, took the Coke, and thanked the young officer. She winked at him too, then gave the can to Rick, whose outburst had parched him.

  “You couldn’t have known.”

  The sheriff’s voice dropped. “When Larry called me about Braxton Fleming, I should have known the other shoe hadn’t dropped. Kimball Haynes wasn’t killed over Samson’s stealing escrow money. I know that now.”

  “Hey, the state Samson Coles was in when we arrested him, I would have believed he could have killed anybody.”

  “Oh, yeah, he was hot.” Rick gulped down some more soda, the carbonation fizzing down his throat. “He had a lot to lose, to say nothing of his affair with Ansley blowing out the window.”

  “Lucinda Coles took care of that at Kimball’s memorial service.”

  “Can’t blame her. Imagine how she felt, being put in a social situation with the woman who’s playing around with her husband.”

  They sat and stared at each other.

  “We’ve got twenty-four hours. If an obit notice doesn’t appear in the papers after that, it’s going to look awfully peculiar.”

  “And we’ve got to hold off the reporters without actually lying.” He rubbed his chin. Larry Johnson’s wife had died some years before, and his only son was killed in Vietnam. “Coop, who would place the obituary notice?”

  “Probably Mrs. Hogendobber, with Harry’s help.”

  “You go over there and enlist their cooperation. See if they can stall a little.”

  “Oh, brother. They’ll want to know why.”

  “Don’t—don’t even think about it.” He twiddled the can. “I’m going to the hospital. I’m pretty sure we can trust Dr. Ylvisaker and the nurses. I’ll set up a twenty-four-hour vigil, just in case.” He stood up. “I’ve got to go get the rest of the story.”

  “I thought he never saw his attacker.”

  “He didn’t. Before he passed out he told me this had to do with his partner, Dr. Jim Craig.”

  Cooper inhaled sharply. “Dr. Craig was found shot in the cemetery one icy March morning. I remember, when I first came on the force, reading through the files on the unsolved crimes. I wonder how it all fits?”

  “We aren’t home yet, but we’re rounding second toward third.”

  61

  Sunday morning at six-thirty, the air carried little tiny teeth of rain, not a whopping big rain, but a steady one that might lead to harder rain later.

  Harry usually greeted the day with a bounce in her step, but this morning she dragged out to the barn. Larry’s murder weighed heavily upon her heart.

  She mixed up a warm bran mash, which was Sunday’s treat for the horses, plus a bit of insurance against colic, she believed. She took a scoop of sweet feed per horse, a half-scoop of bran, and mushed it up with hot water and a big handful of molasses. She stirred her porridge together and for an extra treat threw in two quartered apples. That along with as much timothy hay as Gin and Tommy would eat made them happy, and her too. Except for today.

  She finished with the horses, climbed the loft ladder, and put out a bag of marshmallows for Simon, the possum. Then she clambered down and decided she might as well oil some tack since she’d fallen behind in her barn chores over these last few crazy weeks. She threw a bridle up on the tack hook, ran a small bucket full of hot water, grabbed a small natural sponge and her Murphy’s Oil Soap, and started cleaning.

  Tucker and Mrs. Murphy, feeling her sorrow, quietly sat beside her. Tucker finally laid down, her head between her paws.

  She jerked her head up. “That’s the smell.”

  “What?” Mrs. Murphy’s eyes widened to eight balls.

  “Yes! It’s not a crepe sole, it’s this stuff. I swear it.”

  “Eagle’
s Rest.” The cat’s long white whiskers swept forward then back as her ears flattened. “But why?”

  “Warren must be in on the escrow theft,” Tucker said.

  “Or connected to the murder at Monticello.” Mrs. Murphy blinked her eyes. “But how?”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know.” The tiger’s voice trembled with fear, not for herself, but for Harry.

  62

  “‘No laborious person was ever yet hysterical,’ ” Harry read aloud. Thomas Jefferson wrote this to his teenage daughter, Patsy, while she studied at the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont in the France of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

  “Sensible but not really what a young girl is inclined to wish to hear.” Mrs. Hogendobber, fussy today and low over the loss of her old friend, reset the stakes for her sweet peas one more time as the Sunday sunshine bathed over her. The early morning rains had given way to clear skies.

  Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, who had escaped Market one more time, and Tucker watched as the squarely built woman walked first to one side of the garden outline, then to the other. She performed this march every spring, and she turned her corners with all the precision of a Virginia Military Institute cadet on drill.

  “The garden will be like last year’s and the year’s before that. The sweet peas go along the alleyway side of her yard.” Pewter licked her paws and washed her pretty face.

  “Don’t deny her the pleasure of worrying about it,” Mrs. Murphy advised the gray cat.

  “We know who the killer is.” Tucker shadowed Mrs. Hogendobber’s every move, but from the other side of the garden.

  “Why didn’t you tell me the instant you got here? You’re hateful.” Pewter pouted.

  Mrs. Murphy relished Pewter’s distress for a moment. After all, Pewter lorded it over everybody if she knew something first. “I thought you weren’t interested in human affairs unless food was involved.”

  “That’s not true,” the cat yowled.

  “Harsh words are being spoken, and on the Sabbath.” Mrs. Hogendobber chastized the two cats. “Harry, what is the matter with your dog? If I walk, she walks. If I stop, she stops. If I stand, she stands and watches me.”

  “Tucker, what are you doing?” Harry inquired of her corgi.

  “Being vigilant,” the dog responded.

  “Against Mrs. Hogendobber?” Mrs. Murphy laughed.

  “Practice makes perfect.” The dog turned her back on the cats. Tucker believed that the good Lord made cats first, as an experiment. Then He created the dog, having learned from His mistake.

  “Who?” Pewter cuffed Mrs. Murphy, who sat on her haunches and cuffed the gray cat right back. Within seconds a fierce boxing match exploded, causing both humans to focus their attention on the contenders.

  “My money’s on Pewter.” Mrs. Hogendobber reached into her voluminous skirt pocket and pulled out a wrinkled dollar bill.

  “Mrs. Murphy.” Harry fished an equally wrinkled bill out of her Levi’s.

  “Pewter’s bigger. She’ll have more pow to her punch.”

  “Murphy’s faster.”

  The two cats circled, boxed, then Pewter leapt on the tiger cat, threw her to the ground, and they wrestled. Mrs. Murphy wriggled free of the lard case on top of her and tore across the middle of the garden plot then up a black gum tree. Pewter, close behind, raced to the bottom of the trunk and decided to wait her out as opposed to climbing in pursuit.

  “She’ll back down the tree and then shove off over your head,” Tucker told Pewter.

  “Whose side are you on?” Mrs. Murphy spat out.

  “Entertainment’s.”

  Mrs. Murphy backed down just as Tucker had predicted, but then she dropped right on top of the chubby gray and rolled her over. A fulsome hissing and huffing emanated from the competitors. This time it was Pewter who broke and ran straight to Mrs. Hogendobber. Mrs. Murphy chased up to the lady’s legs and then reached around Mrs. H.’s heavy English brogues to swat Pewter. Pewter replied in kind.

  “They’re going to scratch me and I’ve got on a new pair of nylons.”

  “Shut up, Mrs. Hogendobber, we aren’t going to touch your nylons,” Pewter crabbed at her, though relishing the attention too.

  “’Fraidy-cat,” Mrs. Murphy taunted.

  “Of what, a skinny alley cat? Dream on.” Another left jab.

  “Fatty, fatty, two by four, can’t get through the bathroom door!” Mrs. Murphy cat-called.

  “That is so childish and gross.” Pewter twirled on her rear end and stalked off.

  “Hey, you started it, bungbutt,” Mrs. Murphy yelled at her.

  “Only because you had to get high and mighty about who the killer is. Why should I care? It’s human versus human. I’m not a candidate for the graveyard.”

  “You don’t know,” Mrs. Murphy sang out. “It’s Warren Randolph.”

  “No!” The gray cat spun around and ran right up to Mrs. Murphy.

  “We’re pretty sure.” She nodded toward Tucker.

  As Tucker padded over to fully inform Pewter, Mrs. Hogendobber and Harry laughed at the animals.

  “Spring, wondrous spring—not a season associated with sorrows, but we’ve had plenty of them.” Miranda blinked hard, then consulted her garden blueprint. “Now, Harry, what were you telling me about Patsy Jefferson Randolph before these little scamps put on such an adorable show?”

  “Oh, just that her father might not have known how to talk to young women. But she was said to be a lot like him, so I guess it wasn’t so bad. The younger sister never was as close, although she loved him, of course.”

  “Must have been quite an education for Patsy, being in an expensive French school. When was that now? Refresh my memory.”

  “You’ve been studying Patsy’s and Polly’s children. I’ve been studying Thomas Jefferson’s brothers and sister and his own children. Otherwise you’d have these dates cold. Let’s see. I think she enrolled at Panthemont in 1784. Apparently there were three princesses there also and they wore royal blue sashes. Called the American among them ‘Jeffy.’ ”

  “How fortunate Patsy was.”

  “She didn’t feel that way when she had to read Livy. Of course, I didn’t either. Livy and Tacitus just put me into vapor lock.” Harry made a twisting motion at her temple, as though locking something.

  “I stopped at Virgil. I didn’t go to college or I would have continued. What else about Patsy?”

  “Mrs. Hogendobber, you know I’d help you. I feel silly sitting here while you figure out your garden.”

  “I’m the only one who can figure it out. I’d like to stop those Japanese beetles before they start.”

  “Don’t plant roses, then.”

  “Don’t be absurd, Harry, one simply cannot have a garden without roses. The beetles be damned. If you’ll pardon my French.” She smiled a sly smile.

  Harry nodded. “Okay, back to Panthemont. Patsy conceived a desire to be a nun. It was a Catholic school. That put her father’s knickers in a twist and he paid the bill for both Patsy and her sister in full on April 20, 1789, and yanked those kids out of there. Pretty funny. Oh, yeah, something I forgot. Sally Hemings, who was about Patsy’s age, traveled to France with her as her batman, you might say. What do you call a batman for a lady?”

  “A lady’s maid.”

  “Oh, that’s easy enough. Anyway, I’ve been thinking that the experience of freedom, the culture of France, and being close to Patsy like that in a foreign country must have drawn the two together. Kind of like how Jefferson loved Jupiter, his man, who was also his age. They’d been together since they were boys.”

  “The self on the other side of the mirror,” Miranda said with a dreamy look in her eye.

  “Huh?”

  “Their slaves who were their ladies’ maids and batmen. They must have been alter egos. I never realized how complex, how deep and tangled the emotions on both sides of that mirror must have been. And now the races have drifted apart.”

>   “Ripped apart is more like it.”

  “Whatever it is, it isn’t right. We’re all Americans.”

  “Tell that to the Ku Klux Klan.”

  “I’d be more inclined to tell them to buy a better brand of bedsheet.” Miranda was in fine fettle today. “You know, if you listen to the arguments of these extremist groups or the militant right wing, there’s a kernel of truth in what they say. They have correctly pinpointed many of our society’s ills, and I must give them credit for that. At least they’re thinking about the society in which they live, Harry, they aren’t indulging in mindless pleasures, but their solutions—fanatical and absurd.”

  “But simple. That’s why their propaganda is so effective and then I think, too, that it’s always easier to be against something than to be for something new. I mean, we never have lived in a community of true racial equality. That’s new and it’s hard to sell something new.”

  “I never thought of that.” Mrs. H. cupped her chin in her hand and decided at that instant to shift the sweet peas to the other side of the garden.

  “That’s what makes Jefferson and Washington and Franklin and Adams and all those people so remarkable. They were willing to try something brand new. They were willing to risk their lives for it. What courage. We’ve lost it, I think. Americans have lost their vision and their appetite for struggle.”

  “I don’t know. I remember World War Two clearly. We didn’t lack courage then.”

  “Miranda, that was fifty years ago. Look at us now.”

  “Maybe we’re storing up energy for the next push toward the future.”

  “I’m glad one of us is an optimist.” Harry, by virtue of her age, had never lived through an American epoch in which people pulled together for the common good. “There’s another thing, by the way. Sally and Betsey Hemings were like sisters to Medley Orion, although she was younger than they were. Apparently they were three beautiful women. It must have been fun to sit outside in the twilight, crickets chirping, and listen to Sally’s tales of France before the Revolution.”