The Labor Day Murder

by Lee Harris

  I said I would do my best. We got on the ferry with a handful of people. It would be a longer trip than usual. With the reduced number of passengers, two routes had been combined and Blue Harbor was the second stop.

  We talked on the way. His name was Terence Shrager and he asked me to call him Terry. He was a lean man with the weather-beaten face of a farmer and a calm, reassuring demeanor. It didn’t take an expert to see that I was nervous, but I relaxed some as we talked.

  During the forty-minute run, he talked several times on a cell phone to the man already in Blue Harbor. “Springer’s still there,” Terry said, each time he got off. As we approached the pier with all the red wagons hanging from their hooks, he said, “Brad Schofield’s waiting for us. He’s going to walk you to Springer’s office. Springer has never laid eyes on any of us and we’ve done our best to look like we belong.”

  I smiled. He was wearing a plain green T-shirt and jeans that were loose around the ankles so I knew that was where his weapon was holstered. The ferry came in smoothly, and we stepped off after a couple of men who looked as though they had just finished a day on Wall Street.

  A man in cutoffs and a big sweatshirt moved toward us through the small group waiting with wagons, and was introduced to me as Brad Schofield. We started walking toward the Blue Harbor municipal building.

  I left the door to the outer office open as we had agreed. The secretary was gone. I went up to the closed door to the chief’s office and knocked.

  “Come in,” Springer called.

  I opened the door and walked inside, leaving the door open behind me. “Hi, Chief.”

  Springer looked surprised. “Mrs. Brooks. I thought you folks left the island on Sunday.”

  “We did. I came back to talk to you.” I sat in the chair on the visitor’s side of the desk.

  “About what?”

  “About Dodie Murchison. I’m very worried about her. I think you know where she is.”

  His eyes darted around before settling on me, as though he sensed that something was going on behind his back. Then he smiled. “How would I know? I told Jack when he called this morning she hasn’t turned up anywhere. I’d put money on her being long gone, out of the country maybe.”

  “Curt,” I said, using his first name for the first time, “we know what happened to Buzzy.”

  “You—” He stopped, looking confused. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “We know how your brother died. It was in the house that burned down fifteen years ago.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He had paled and I thought his hand was trembling.

  “Richard Springer got out of Trenton State Prison about eighteen years ago. Someone had arranged a new name and a new identity for him. He became William Jamieson. He met a woman the day he got out of prison and he became friends with her. She had a little girl who was only five years old at that time. The little girl’s name was Tina Frisch.”

  This time his hand shook visibly. “Tina Frisch knew him?”

  “She thought he was her father,” I said, “but he wasn’t. She’d been looking for him for years. By coincidence she came out to Blue Harbor this summer, the same summer you found out what happened to your brother.”

  “Ken Buckley killed him.”

  “No, he didn’t, Curt. A young girl killed him after he made advances. It was an accident. She was trying to protect herself. Ken Buckley just came in afterwards to clean up the mess.”

  “That’s a lie. Buckley killed him and got rid of his body—I don’t know how. They all covered up for him. Everybody here was his friend. They talk about the blue wall of silence. It’s nothing compared to Blue Harbor.”

  I didn’t want to argue about it. “Dodie Murchison was an innocent victim in all this. Please tell me where she is.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been looking for her since she left Fire Island.”

  “I saw her Sunday night.”

  “You saw her and you didn’t report it?” He was doing his best to sound angry. “She’s a suspect in two homicides.”

  “You followed us home from Bay Shore, didn’t you? You followed us to the place where I met Dodie. And then you followed her when she left.”

  “You’ve got a good imagination, Mrs. Brooks. Murchison killed Tina Frisch. Her fingerprints are all over the bicycle, all over the gate. We’ve got a good case against her. I bet she even has the missing diamond earring.”

  I think that was the moment I became absolutely certain that he had her. He had gone through her handbag and found the earring. I wondered whether he had killed her and made it look like suicide. With the earring, he might even have a pretty good circumstantial case.

  “Did you see it?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “The diamond earring.”

  “I didn’t see anything. Look, Mrs. Brooks, you’re a smart lady but you’ve got this all wrong. You’re right, I had a brother. He was a good kid who made one mistake and he paid for it. Buckley killed him—maybe they got into a fight—and Buckley kept it a secret for fifteen years. I don’t know who killed Buckley, maybe Murchison, maybe Tina Frisch, but he got what he deserved.”

  “I know you did it, Curt,” I said, keeping my voice low and steady. “Jack knows you did it. It was a misunderstanding. You thought Ken killed your brother and you wanted to punish him, but Ken never killed anybody, and all Tina wanted was to find out what happened to a man she thought might be her father. The only thing I don’t understand is why Ken had no clothes on when they found his body.”

  Something changed in him when I finished speaking. “You think I’m a fag, is that what you think?”

  “I don’t think anything. I just wondered—”

  “I made him undress,” Springer said, his face changing. “I wanted it to look like he was waiting for a woman, like a woman killed him. I used a woman’s gun. He was a ladies’ man, that son of a bitch. I figured he killed my brother over a woman.”

  “So you made him undress and get into bed. And then you shot him.”

  “Yeah. I let him know what for, too. And then I went downstairs and got the stove going and put some papers on it so they’d burn the place down.”

  “Like the Norrises’ house.”

  “Just like the house where they burned my brother.”

  “Is that when Tina came in?”

  “I don’t know when she came in. It could’ve been while I was upstairs with Buckley. I found her in the living room just before I ducked out. She was scared, as if she knew what had happened upstairs. I told her if she ever said a word about what happened, I’d kill her.”

  “She never did say a word, not to me and not to anyone I know of. What happened then?”

  “There was an old fireman’s coat hanging on a hook. She grabbed it and put it over her head. Everything was burning by then and I could hear noise outside. I went out and made like I’d just got there. She just disappeared.”

  Through the crowd with the coat over her head, making her way to safety and anonymity until she bumped into me. “Why did you kill her, Curt?”

  “I saw her with the woman lawyer. I figured she’d told her everything. I hid near the grouper house she was staying in and waited for her to come back. I got myself a goddamn tick, if you can believe it.” He showed me a red mark on his forearm where he must have taken it out with a needle. That was his punishment for hiding in the tall grasses. “When the lawyer left, I grabbed Tina. And if it makes any difference, I didn’t follow you to Bay Shore. I took an earlier ferry and waited for you.”

  So that was the story. He had probably never noticed that his second victim was wearing only one earring.

  “Please,” I said. “Please tell us where Dodie Murchison is.”

  “What’s it worth to you?”

  “Jack and I will do our best to help you. I have a wonderful lawyer friend and I’ll ask him to defend you.”

  “Sure.” He opened a drawer with his right hand and I got sc
ared. I knew the deputies were in the building. With luck, they were in the secretary’s office, just the other side of the open door behind me. Springer didn’t ordinarily carry a gun but I knew he had one, and as the drawer slid open, I knew it must be there.

  “Curt,” I said.

  He pulled a gun out of the drawer as I watched in horror, said something that sounded like “Gibson,” and as I screamed and dropped to the floor, there was a terrible explosion.

  28

  He had blown his brains out.

  In the seconds after the shot, the deputies came running. I was on the floor, crying, my hands over my ears. They lifted me very tenderly and took me out, shielding my eyes so that I did not have to see what was on the other side of the desk. Terry Shrager made a bunch of phone calls as I sat, calming down, in the secretary’s chair.

  When I was able to speak, I said, “Did you hear what he said?”

  They both said no.

  “It sounded like ‘Gibson.’ Does that mean anything to you?”

  Apparently it didn’t. Terry made another phone call, this one sounding as though it was to a police department. After he identified himself, he said, “Who’s Gibson?” He listened, shook his head, and closed up the phone.

  “Maybe it’s a town,” I said.

  They looked at each other. As sheriff’s deputies, they would be familiar with the cities and towns of their county and probably of most of Long Island.

  Brad Schofield picked up the phone on the secretary’s desk as the first of the ambulance volunteers ran into the room. As Terry explained what had happened and as others followed with resuscitation equipment, Brad was asking someone at the other end of the line who Gibson might be.

  He held for a few seconds, but before he got an answer, one of the paramedics called, as he ran, “It’s a street in Bay Shore. There’s a municipal parking lot there you can park in before you take the ferry.”

  Brad looked at all of us. “Springer, does he have a car or van he could have left there?”

  “Give it a try,” Terry said. “Call Patman.”

  They kept the line open as Patman drove from the ferry to wherever the lot was, not far because he arrived there in only a minute or two, his siren blaring.

  “He’s there,” Schofield said. “He’s checking out cars. There aren’t many. Terry, see if you can find out if Springer has a car registered to him.”

  Terry was already on his cell phone doing just that. In the age of technology, lives can be saved by the speed of a computer. Terry called out a license plate number and Brad relayed it to Patman at the Gibson parking lot.

  “Got it!” Brad sang out, sheer joy on his face.

  I was near tears again, praying for Dodie’s life. “Get an ambulance over there, OK?” I said, my voice shaking.

  Terry got back on the cell phone as a woman, screaming, came nearer and nearer. Mrs. Springer. I had forgotten that Curt had a wife and family, that their lives had just been broken into little bits by a gunshot.

  In she came, her hair flying, two men trying to stop her from entering the scene of her husband’s suicide. I turned away.

  “He’s got her,” Brad shouted from the telephone.

  “Is she alive?” I whispered.

  “Don’t know. Hold on. Yeah, she’s breathing. Not in good shape. I hear the siren. The ambulance is on its way.”

  I put my head down and cried.

  —

  I saw to it that I recovered quickly. Dodie was being taken to the nearest hospital, and I had been given a can of Coke to revive what was left of my spirits. We went next door to the firehouse where it was a little calmer, and somebody brought me something to eat.

  “You can go back anytime you want, Chris,” Terry said. “We’re under control here. You did a great job.”

  I shook my head. “It isn’t over,” I said. “I need to know what they did with the body.”

  “What body?”

  “The man who was killed accidentally fifteen years ago.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

  “It’s what started all this. He was Curt Springer’s brother. He died of a knife wound and Ken Buckley covered it up by burning down the house the killing took place in.”

  Terry Shrager looked at me as though I were delusional. “I only know about the Buckley and Frisch homicides,” he said. “What you’re talking about, I don’t know anything about it.”

  I rested my forehead in my hand, trying to think. The Hersheys might know but they’d never say anything. If Eve Buckley knew, she’d probably deny it. And then I remembered. “Chief La Coste,” I said. “He told me the first time we talked at his house. He said, ‘I know where all the bodies are buried.’ That’s what he meant.” I stood.

  “You feeling OK now?” Terry said anxiously.

  “I’m fine. I need to walk to the ocean beach. There’s someone I have to talk to.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Brad said.

  We walked the width of the island, the street we were on eventually becoming a pathway onto the dune. I pulled my sandals off and walked down onto the beach in bare feet, remembering the blissful two weeks Jack and Eddie and I had shared, what seemed a lifetime ago.

  It was already dark and Brad asked if I needed a flashlight.

  “No thanks. He’s easy to spot.” We walked toward the Margulies’s house. The Chief would be in his usual spot before we got that far. I kept my eyes on the dune and finally, there it was, the glow of a cigarette, a shadow in a sitting position.

  “Hi, Chief,” I called.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Chris Brooks.”

  “Chris. What’re you doin’ here? I thought you went back home already.”

  “Came back to ask you a question.” I told Brad to stay behind and I climbed the dune to where he sat in his lightweight chair.

  “All the way back from wherever, just to ask me a question?”

  “It’s an important one.”

  “OK. Shoot.”

  “It’s about the Great Fire, Chief. I know all about it, about the body in the kitchen.” I stopped, but he didn’t say anything, just looked at me. “I found out yesterday who he was.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “You told me last week—it seems like a year ago but it was only last week—you told me you knew where all the bodies were buried. Where’s that one buried?”

  He blew smoke and smiled. “In the park.” He pointed to the left, toward England and France and the wilderness area at the eastern end of the island.

  “Right here on Fire Island?”

  “Right here.”

  “But there are animals. Wouldn’t they dig up—?”

  “Deer,” he said. “They’re vegetarians, deer are. They stay away from the smell of blood.”

  “I see. But how—?” And then I saw it. “You used the fireboat, didn’t you?”

  “Why not? Even the old one was big enough for a couple of men and what was left of another in a body bag. We pulled it on a wagon to the bay to where the boat was anchored. Wasn’t easy but we got it there. Ken and me, we did it in the middle of the night.”

  “Can you show us where you buried him?”

  “I could do that. But not at night. I made that trip one time at night. That was enough for a lifetime, even a long one.”

  “Ken Buckley called you that night?”

  “Sure did. Told me what happened. Said the man was a stranger, nobody knew who. When Tina came to me in July, I knew we hadn’t buried him deep enough. You say you know who he was?”

  “Curt Springer’s brother.”

  “My God in heaven.” He put out what was left of his cigarette, bending to snuff it in the sand.

  “Can I walk you home, Chief?”

  “I think I’ll just sit here awhile and do some thinkin’. They gonna ask me to take them to the body?”

  “Probably.”

  “Hope it’s a bigger boat this time.”

  “I’m sur
e it will be.”

  29

  I insisted that they take me to the hospital where Dodie had been taken, and I got to see her for a minute. She looked wasted and half-dead but she was at least half-alive, and she held my hand and even managed to squeeze it. She was dehydrated, among other problems, but the doctor I talked to sounded optimistic.

  Terry Shrager and Brad Schofield refused to let me drive home alone, even though it meant hours there and back for them. Terry drove my car and Brad followed in his. It was a long drive and when we got home, they came inside and met Jack and stayed for coffee.

  Jack was beside himself that he had let me go to see Springer alone but I told him, truthfully, that missing the second night of classes would have started him off all wrong in his law school semester. I guess I know how I feel when people miss a class early on and come back with unbelievable excuses. Jack’s a cop so his excuses probably have a more plausible ring, but you never know how your professor feels and it’s crazy to take a chance. At least, that’s how I feel.

  —

  Dodie Murchison recovered, thank God, and got back to work in a couple of weeks. Eventually, the diamond earring found its way back to Sally Holland, along with the one Tina was wearing when Springer broke her neck. We never learned what Springer was planning to do with Dodie, but it didn’t matter.

  The Blue Harbor governing board decided unanimously to abolish the position of police chief and to rely entirely on the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department. Mrs. Springer sold the restaurant to an entrepreneurial chef who already had one restaurant on Long Island and promised to make the one in Blue Harbor a gourmet affair that would bring people across the bay just for dinner.

  Max Margulies, who had never met us, invited us to his home, along with Melanie and Hal, later in September, for dinner and a rundown of what had really happened. Jack and I had decided not to say what we knew about the killing of Richard Springer unless we were asked by police or sheriff’s department, and they never did. What Jack knew was hearsay anyway, since I had done all the questioning and had heard all the answers. I can’t say that I’m happy about the Hersheys’ daughter plunging a knife into a man’s chest, but I assume the reason I heard from Dodie who heard it from Ken Buckley who heard it from—oh well, you get the picture.