Murder, She Wrote--A Date with Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  Chapter Eight

  Lawrence Pyke was still at Babs’s house when I arrived with Mort minutes later. True to his lawyerly instincts, the handwritten letter from murder victim Eugene Labine remained undisturbed; even the drawer remained opened, just as it had been when I left. That said, a number of folders pulled from Pyke’s still-open briefcase littered the kitchen table, and the look of concern and anxiety on Babs’s face had only worsened since my departure upon being summoned to Hill House by Mort. Clearly whatever revelations they’d discussed had unsettled her even more than she’d been already, the shock of Hal’s sudden death exacerbated by the insolvency that left Babs’s entire future shrouded in a cloud of darkness. I wasn’t privy to Hal’s specific business dealings, or whatever tailored arrangements had been made between husband and wife in that respect. It stood to reason, though, that the mess Hal had left behind would end up dumped in Babs’s lap, the debts he’d recently incurred about to become hers.

  Alyssa had joined her mother at the table and hugged me tight as soon as I stepped through the door, her look more fitting a child clinging to an adult after a bad dream, hoping he or she could chase away the boogeyman. I imagine Alyssa was hoping I could do something similar here, only with a different sort of boogeyman in the form of the financial mess she and her mother were only just learning about. I didn’t know when Alyssa had joined them at the table, or how much she knew, but from her expression, I imagined it was quite a bit.

  Mort greeted Babs and introduced himself to Lawrence Pyke, while I kept my attention fixed on Alyssa, feeling an extraordinary obligation to help figure out whatever was going on with the family finances. I think, more than anything, that’s what has inspired me over the years, fueled my obsession with getting to the bottom of things and helping to set them straight. Providing entertainment for my readers had always been my life’s mission, but connected to it on a deeply intrinsic level was my desire to help those, like Babs and Alyssa, who had no one else to turn to.

  And that’s what I intended to do here, through whatever means I could.

  As Mort fitted evidence gloves over his hands and moved to fetch the late Eugene Labine’s letter from the still-open kitchen drawer, I looked toward Lawrence Pyke.

  “These lines of credit Hal opened that so depleted his worth—did you find any clues as to what he did with the money?”

  “Not a one, not even an inkling. Of course, I’ve only been at it for twenty-four hours, so I’ve merely scratched the surface. But for anything mundane, like major purchases, debt relief, paying back investors, or putting the money back into the business, the paper trail would be easy to trace.”

  “But there’s nothing.”

  Pyke shook his head. “Nothing I’ve been able to find so far. Absolutely nothing.”

  At that point, Mort laid Eugene Labine’s letter on the table. Looking at it made me think of the fact I’d just viewed the corpse of the man who’d penned it, sending a chill up my spine. Hal’s former business partner now had a face.

  The letter’s contents filled a single side with a tight signature etched at the bottom. Labine’s penmanship seemed to get worse with each sentence, each word, making me recall the whiskey I’d smelled on his breath at Mara’s. It wasn’t hard to envision him penning this letter in a drunken state, accounting for the impulsiveness of handwriting his words in a barely legible scratchy scrawl. But I could read it well enough, beneath the heading FROM THE DESK OF EUGENE LABINE:

  Hal, I’m writing to extend an undeserved courtesy by informing you that I’ll be taking legal action against you and proceeding with it immediately. We’ve shared so much, you and me. We started out together and back then I thought we’d be business partners for life. I’ll shoulder my share of the blame for our parting ways. When I started drinking again, you had every right to force me out because I was hurting the company we started together.

  How long ago was that? I don’t even know. But I always appreciated the fact you never forgot where the money came from that got us started. I put every penny of my inheritance into our start-up and never begrudged the terms that allowed you to push me out without returning a single dollar of my share. I still owned fifty percent of the company and so long as you made good on compensating me with my share of the profits, I was able to live with that.

  But I can’t live with the borderline criminal behavior on your part when you borrowed against the assets of the company for reasons you refuse to explain or divulge. I’m not going to say I’m perfect, because I’m far from that. But that doesn’t mean I deserve to be left with no visible means of support, having come to rely on my regular stipends to survive.

  Since you refuse to make good or make me whole, you’ve forced me into this corner where I have no choice but to sue. So I’m writing this letter to give you one last chance to make good, to find a way to continue honoring the terms of our settlement agreement. If that means selling your Cabot Cove estate, so be it. And I’ll be paying you a visit in person over Labor Day weekend.

  But, be warned. If I leave Cabot Cove without satisfaction, the next correspondence you receive will be from my lawyer, and I won’t stop until I learn the truth behind what you got yourself into without consulting me as is spelled out in our dissolution agreement. So I’m warning you, Hal, I’m warning you that I won’t rest until I find the truth, unless you make good. Do the right thing here, Hal, do the right thing.

  Eugene Labine

  My eyes kept coming back to the word “borderline” having been crossed out in the letter. I could feel Eugene Labine’s anger through his hastily scrawled words, which reeked of desperation as well.

  “He must have learned of Hal’s death when he reached town,” I said, rereading the section about coming to Cabot Cove over the Labor Day weekend that had ended so tragically.

  I wished Alyssa weren’t in the room. If only she could’ve been spared hearing all this . . .

  “But who in Cabot Cove could possibly have wanted Labine dead?” Babs wondered out loud.

  “My guess,” advanced Mort, “is that someone followed him up here. That’s the way it is with trouble—it follows you. And my other guess is this Eugene Labine made plenty of enemies over the years. Once I run him through the system, I’m sure we’ll be up to our necks in potential suspects. Someone he owes money to, maybe. Or just someone he spouted off to about coming up here to collect on a debt, and they followed him up here to relieve him of whatever he was able to collect.”

  “You’re talking about a robbery,” Pyke suggested.

  Mort shrugged. I knew he didn’t believe that any more than I did. First off, by all accounts, Labine was shot as soon as he opened the door, so there couldn’t have been any argument that had ended in his death. His room at Hill House showed no signs of any disturbance, from either a struggle or a thorough rousting to find the money his killer would’ve come for.

  No, the murder of Eugene Labine was about something else entirely, and some connection to Hal’s yet unexplained desperate financial plight was unavoidable. I might not be a professional sleuth, but like Sherlock Holmes, I didn’t believe in coincidence.

  The quaint Hill House had no security cameras, so Mort would be afforded no clues as to the identify of Labine’s murderer that way. Even now, his deputies were interviewing everyone they could find who’d been at the hotel in the hours leading up to and following the murder, inquiring if any of them had seen anything amiss. With Labor Day having come and gone, only a third of the rooms were occupied, the halls sparsely traveled enough for a single man, or woman, to stand out.

  If circumstances weren’t what they were, Hal would have been the prime suspect in Labine’s murder. Of course, since Labine had been murdered after Hal’s death . . .

  My thoughts ground to a halt there, as I was struck again by the same odd, inexplicable feeling I’d first experienced in the hospital when the doctor had tried to explain aw
ay a heart attack being suffered by a man in excellent health. Such things did happen, after all.

  People died.

  People got murdered.

  But when those two people are connected . . .

  “Mort, could you come outside with me for a moment?” I said, interrupting something he was saying to Babs and Lawrence Pyke.

  * * *

  • • •

  “We need to put a rush on Hal’s autopsy results,” I said to Mort, after we’d moved through the French doors onto a patio made from imported granite. I remembered how proud Babs was of the job, one of her primary contributions to the rebuild of the old mansion she and Hal had spent a fortune renovating.

  “Already did,” Mort told me. “So the funeral wouldn’t have to be delayed. Just routine anyway.” His brow furrowed. “It is routine, isn’t it, Jessica, or is that why you asked me to come outside?”

  “I don’t have to tell you there are several ways to murder someone and make it look like a heart attack.”

  “I can name a few of them myself I didn’t even know existed before I read your books.”

  “If Hal was actually murdered, hopefully his killer didn’t get his method from reading me, too.”

  “Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?”

  “No more ridiculous than Hal’s former business partner being murdered at Hill House.”

  Mort scratched at his scalp and shook his head. “I swear, Jessica . . .”

  “Swear what?”

  “Do you know how many murders were committed in Cabot Cove before you moved here?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Neither do I. It’s like they followed you here.”

  “Are you suggesting I leave town?”

  He smiled tightly. “Not until we figure out who killed Eugene Labine.”

  “What about Hal Wirth?”

  “I’ll make sure his autopsy is screened as a potential murder,” Mort relented. “If it makes you happy, Jessica.”

  I thought of Alyssa, the little girl all grown up who might not have the funds to finish college. I thought of my friend Babs, forced to sell the house she loved to escape the debt her late husband had inexplicably left her with.

  “Thank you, Mort,” I said, wondering how long it would be before we learned the truth about Hal Wirth’s death.

  Chapter Nine

  That night, I took the whole of Hal Wirth’s manuscript, “Hal Wirth: An Intrepid Life—The Memoir of an Idealistic Entrepreneur’s Rise to Software Giant,” to bed with me. I had planned on reading only a few chapters, but the mysteries that had consumed the day left me thinking his words might hold some clues as to the circumstances of his insolvency and, perhaps, to the murder of Eugene Labine. I wasn’t ready to openly theorize murder in the case of Hal’s death, but wondered if something in his manuscript might yield something to that effect as well.

  Losing my own husband, Frank, made Babs’s pain resonate with me in a way few tragedies ever had. I guess it’s the way of the world. I think of Frank every day, yet I hadn’t really thought of his passing in years, until Hal’s death brought it all back home to me. How much, and how long, it hurt. How empty the house had felt. We weren’t blessed with children—the way of the world again. But we did raise my nephew, Grady, for a time, long enough to know the challenges that come with child-rearing. And that made me think of Alyssa, the challenges that lay ahead of her as well.

  Starting with how she was going to pay for college in the wake of Hal’s financial misfortune. I didn’t recall Lawrence Pyke mentioning anything about Hal’s likely sizable life insurance policy, but imagined the bulk of it would be needed to pay off these substantial debts he’d incurred for reasons that remained a mystery. I could have let it all go if not for the murder of Eugene Labine. Someone had obviously followed Labine to Cabot Cove and killed him for something he either knew or possessed. And if that something involved the financial plight of his former business partner, Hal Wirth, I feared that Babs and Alyssa might very well be in danger, too.

  That redoubled my commitment to get to the bottom of all this, starting with what had led to Hal’s financial impropriety. The fact that he had borrowed what Lawrence Pyke had intimated was more than ten million dollars without telling his wife or former business partner suggested something nefarious afoot. Blackmail of some kind? Gambling? A secret investment gone wrong? But Hal Wirth wasn’t a gambler and had a well-deserved reputation for watching every penny. He’d grown up poor and had learned the value of a dollar. I remember him once deriding those who’d trusted their money with the likes of Bernie Madoff, believing above all else that when something seems too good to be true, it usually is. I don’t ever recall Hal discussing the stock market beyond that, and wasn’t sure he had a single investment staked in Wall Street other than a retirement plan that would likely end up similarly drained to pay off his debtors.

  My train of thought was interrupted when my phone rang—the old-fashioned landline as opposed to the cell—and I snatched the cordless extension from my night table, fearing late-night calls, just as everyone else did.

  “Hello?”

  “Jessica, it’s Seth. I got your message. Hope it’s not too late, but you said it was important. I trust you’re well.”

  “Of course. I just—,” I stammered, having forgotten I’d even phoned Seth upon returning home. “I was hoping you could do something for me.”

  “I heard about that murder at the Hill House. Might this have something to do with that?”

  “No,” I told him, not going into further detail about the victim’s identity and connection to Hal. “It’s about Hal Wirth. I’d like you to review his blood work, the toxicology studies.”

  “You see a pathology degree hanging anywhere on my wall?”

  “You know your way around a lab report as well as any pathologist I’ve ever known. I’d just like to know if anything in the results stands out, raises flags. You know, something awry.”

  “That the doctors at the hospital missed?”

  “I’m talking about something they may not have had call to notice.”

  Seth hesitated. “I know that tone, Jessica. Ayuh.”

  “What tone is that?”

  “You have reason to suspect foul play in Hal’s heart attack?”

  “That murder you heard about at Hill House . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “The victim’s name was Eugene Labine. He was Hal’s former business partner, who Hal apparently still owed money to through some kind of structured settlement. Payments Hal could no longer pay because he was insolvent. But you already knew that, didn’t you? From that conversation you had with Hal at the party.”

  I heard Seth sigh. “I guess there’s no point in keeping the secret anymore.”

  “He shared the truth with you, didn’t he?”

  “Hal’s been a patient ever since the Wirths moved to town. I could tell something was wrong with him—something was off. I pulled him aside and he told me pretty much what you just did.”

  “What about details, specifics?” I said, anxiously hoping to have at least that part of the mystery solved.

  “He refused to offer anything beyond the fact he’d lost everything. But I definitely got the impression it wasn’t his doing, at least not all of it.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I think he may have been the victim of a stock swindle, sham investment—something like that.”

  I shook my head on the other end of the line. “That doesn’t sound like Hal at all.”

  “Well, all the same,” Seth said, leaving things there.

  “I’m thinking Hal’s heart attack may have been induced.”

  “You tell Mort about this?”

  “He’s not a doctor.”

  “No, just the town sheriff.”

  “Who prefe
rs to wait for the autopsy results.”

  “While you, Jessica . . .”

  “Want to hear it from a more trusted source.”

  “I can access the hospital records online. Why don’t we meet tomorrow for breakfast at Mara’s? If it’s still raining, I’ll pick you up.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said.

  * * *

  • • •

  I was so focused on the events of the day, I hadn’t even realized it had started raining since I biked home from Babs’s. Even if Hal hadn’t been murdered, Eugene Labine had been, and I wasn’t going to let the same thing happen to Babs or Alyssa. I settled back in bed to read as much of Hal’s memoir as I could before sleep claimed me, but then the storm intensified with blowing winds and rumbles of thunder, ruffling my already frayed nerves and stealing whatever thoughts I had about drifting off with Hal’s life scattered on the sheets alongside me.

  In the end, I read it all, every single page, skipping only the dedication. I knew Hal well enough to be sure he’d dedicated the book to his wife and daughter, and had glossed right over that page because it would rekindle the heartache I was feeling for their plight.

  Maybe I should’ve read only that page instead, because Hal’s memoir was god-awful. The writing was rambling and scattershot, in need not so much of an editor as a coauthor capable of lending order and substance to Hal’s random thinking and stream-of-consciousness narrative. It was an endless muck of ramshackle thinking that had no business being strung into words, increasingly unreadable as my pile of read pages grew, as if whatever financial issues Hal was experiencing had begun to affect him.

  Whatever they might have been, his memoir made no mention of them or even suggested something awry in his business life. Hal’s personal life, though, was something else again. The memoir dissolved into a true mess when he switched from the world of business, in which he was comfortable, to the problems he and Babs had been experiencing that, at least for a time, had threatened their marriage. In my experience, all couples go through such struggles these days, and I suppose, if I looked back without donning my rose-colored glasses, I could find comparable struggles during my life with Frank. He’d been an air force captain and a war hero, and to this day I believe that some of the issues we had sprang from what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. We didn’t have a formal term for the PTSD-like symptoms Frank displayed from time to time, and the greatest regret I hold of our relationship was that I wish I had known then, so I could have helped him more.