Extreme Unction: A Lupa Schwartz Mystery

by J. David Core

  “I saw him sort of hovering for a moment,” Carl said. “After the priests left, I went into the kitchen, but then I left and went into the living room, and I saw him standing in the hall as I passed. But he didn’t seem to be doing anything ghoulish to me.”

  “To me either,” Melvin said. “When I got up from the piano, he was standing in the hall watching the kitchen door, but I just thought he was worried about Peggy. I even mentioned that to Carl when he joined me in the living room.”

  “What exactly did you say to Carl?” I asked.

  “Well, I was about to turn on the television when he came into the room and plopped down on the couch near me, and I said, ‘Is Matthew still in the hallway waiting for Peggy?’ or words to that effect.”

  “Yeah, but then Peggy came into the room without him,” Carl said. “He didn’t come in for several minutes after Peggy.”

  “That’s because he was in the kitchen with us waiting for the coffee to brew.” Melissa said. “You see, I’m not a total basket case.”

  ***

  I drove the whole route back to Schwartz’s house with a satisfied smirk playing on my lips. Everything that the Hanson’s had been telling me about that night seemed to indicate that the only one with opportunity was, in fact, Matthew. Up until the very end, I had yet to see the light of day. But then that final statement by Melissa had lifted the shroud, and I was now sure that I knew who had poisoned Mr. Hanson Sr. and when, though I still didn’t know how or where the killer had gotten the Chlordane nor how he had killed Matthew. But I was willing to take my little victories as they came.

  I walked into Schwartz’s office and found him on the cordless phone finalizing some sort of arrangements. I told him that I had figured out who had killed the Hanson father, and he congratulated me on my insight, but he still wouldn’t fill in the gaps for me. He still had a few steps to take before that could be accomplished. He asked me to tell him in detail what I’d gotten from the Hanson brood, which I did, and then he told me of the progress he’d made that day.

  Chapter 26

  Before going to the garage, Schwartz had called a friend of his who ran a local not-for-profit group. He asked him to call and rent the stage area in St. Bart’s hall for that weekend. He was to use the ruse that the group was putting on a play at one of the local high schools, but due to a scheduling conflict, they were unable to use the stage for their dress rehearsal that weekend. They only needed the hall to fine tune the performance, not for the actual production itself. When I’d found him on the phone, he was checking back with his friend to make sure that the hall had been properly arranged for.

  After he’d completed that call, he’d contacted Penny Prince to make sure that his meeting had been scheduled with Thornton Felix. When he’d been satisfied on this part of the program, he’d typed up a short document and retired for his garage time. He’d then come up, had lunch, and took his 1993 TVR Griffith to meet with Thornton Felix at the New World Life office complex.

  Felix had wanted to take him into a conference room, but Schwartz had said that conference rooms were for conferences. He said he doubted that Felix would want anybody else to hear their conversation. He suggested that they leave the building and take a ride. So he and Felix had gone back to his Griffith and hit the open highways.

  “I recently had an interesting talk with Penny Prince,” Schwartz said. “She told me some things that might be very interesting to airport officials.”

  “Are you trying to blackmail me?” Thornton Felix had asked.

  “I wouldn’t want to betray the confidence Miss Prince placed in me when she told me how she got her job. I simply want to show you that you would not be wise to attempt in any way to renege on me.”

  “Renege on you how?” Felix asked. “We don’t have any kind of contract.”

  “Not yet,” Schwartz said. “But I suspect that we soon will.”

  “So you are trying to blackmail me.”

  “Not at all,” Schwartz said. “The contract to which I’ve referred is completely above board. I simply want to establish that it will be in your best interest to be as above board with me as I plan to be with you.” He then began to lay out the issue he had called on Felix to discuss.

  “You may know that I was until recently investigating the murder of Vincent Hanson. In the course of that investigation, I learned that you accepted him as a client for your company’s life insurance coverage despite the pre-existence of advanced cancer in his system. I was curious about what might compel you to issue a policy to such a client until my recent discussion with Miss Prince. However, for the moment we can put that to the side.

  “Recently, the case was closed by the police when Matthew Hanson was found dead, presumably by his own hand and with a suicide note confession which seemed to indicate that he had single-handedly been responsible for his father’s death. This is what brings me to you. I don’t think that he alone is responsible, and I believe that I can prove it. The thing is, I am officially off the case, I’ll soon be paid for my efforts, and I have no reason to continue my labors.

  “Therefore, I’ve come to you with a proposal. I will accept a contract from you to find the killer or killers, and if it should prove that more of the policy’s beneficiaries are involved, you will agree to pay me one-third of each portion of the policy that your company is saved since it is illegal for a party to benefit financially from a murder. This not including the portion the police have already saved you by naming Matthew Hanson. Should I find that there are responsible parties who are not a beneficiary to your policy, you shall owe me nothing for said parties. You have nothing to lose, and one-sixth of a million dollars to save for each Hanson that I can implicate.”

  “So you’ve come to me ambulance chasing?” Felix asked.

  “Do you accept my proposal or don’t you?”

  “Do I have a choice? If I don’t, you’ll go to the police with the airport thing.”

  “No,” Schwartz said. “As I told you, I have no desire to implicate Miss Prince in a crime, and I can see no way to implicate you without revealing my source. Can you?”

  “I can’t, no,” Felix admitted. “But then I’m not a brilliant private investigator.”

  “Well, you’ll have to take my word for it that I have no intention in implicating you in your indiscretion unless you try to cheat me in the deal I’m proposing now. And as I’ve demonstrated, you have nothing to lose by engaging me.”

  “Do you want a written contract?” Felix asked.

  “I only want a contract stipulating the bargain I’ve outlined. There need be no mention of the airport scheme either directly or implicitly.” Schwartz reached into his breast pocket and produced a document which he had prepared and signed in duplicate earlier that morning.

  ***

  After securing Felix’s signature, Schwartz again had legal jurisdiction to investigate the murders. He dropped Felix off at his offices and drove directly to Trevor Johns’ office at police H.Q. Johns was out, so Schwartz left a message for him to phone later that evening. He then drove to the radio station, WPAN, and asked for a copy of the tape that their reporter Winston Hancock had made during the press event more than a week before. He’d then come home to await my return.

  “Tomorrow,” he said to me after bringing me up to speed, “we’ll go to the Star-Herald and request electronic files of the pictures that their reporter took that night.” I rolled my eyes. The last time I’d asked that paper for a little help they’d pooh-poohed. “Are you expecting resistance?” Schwartz asked; having noticed my reaction.

  “The editor seems to think we’re asking quite a bit of them,” I answered.

  “Then don’t ask the editor. Ask the reporter directly. I had no difficulty securing the tape. I simply promised the reporter an exclusive. He already has a personal stake in the story; having been the one in the Hanson house when the first fracas began.”

  “I’ve already promised the paper a mention in the article I’m wri
ting about the case. How can we give them exclusivity when the radio station has exclusivity, and I need to reserve something for the article?”

  “The radio is a separate medium from the printed word. We’ll give tit-for-tat. When I reveal who poisoned the Hanson’s, we’ll record it on both audio and still images. The paper can have exclusive pictures, the radio can have the exclusive sound bite, and your magazine will have the exclusive on how you and I worked the whole thing out.”

  I think I must have flushed like an embarrassed schoolgirl.

  ***

  He went to the garage for an abbreviated afternoon session with the cars, then came up for a late dinner. We were finishing up our lemon and raspberry sorbets when Trevor came to pay us a visit. Schwartz offered Trevor a beer, which he accepted since he was off duty. The case was closed, so he could count this as a social call.

  In the middle of their brews, Schwartz made a strange announcement. “I have pieced together all of the facts pertaining to the deaths of both Matthew Hanson and his father. The prior is to be buried tomorrow, so I will take no direct action for two days, but Thursday afternoon I will be naming names. If you wish, you may be there, but I would prefer that you not be the officer of record.” Trevor stopped in mid-swallow and stared wide eyed at Schwartz.

  “My request has nothing to do with you personally,” Schwartz said. “What I plan is something that could not benefit you, but could result in a situation which will benefit a friend of yours greatly.”

  “Who are you talking about?” Trevor asked.

  “Your friend from the undercover narcotics squad; the singer, I think they call him Yitzie.”

  “Jimmy Yitzosky? You want him to get credit for the collar? Why?”

  “I have a few reasons. One is that since you have closed the case, it might be harder for you to explain to a judge why we need a particular warrant. Another is that it might get him transferred out of narcotics, which he hates, and would put him in the same department as you, where you and he could work more closely together. He is part of your family, is he not?”

  “He’s my ex-wife’s brother, yeah, so he’s my son’s uncle. Why the sudden interest in Yitzie?”

  “Actually, I never even considered him, but Mia asked me to see if I could help to get him out of narcotics, and there is the situation with the warrant.”

  “I put in a lot of time on this case,” Trevor said.

  “Trevor should get the chance to close the case,” I said.

  “If he can work it all out before Thursday evening, he has my full support,” Schwartz said. “You can even give him all of the information we’ve come up with. I doubt that he can get the solution I’ve got though,” Schwartz stood and started for the stairs. “In fact, I’ll even make a suggestion for a place to start that gave me the solution. Ask your friend Jana what I asked her to find out for me.”

  “When did you talk with Jana?” I asked.

  “The first day we went to the Hansons’. I borrowed your phone, went across the street and hit the re-dial. She was very helpful to me.”

  ***

  Trevor and I went to the back porch while I called Jana at home. She told us that Schwartz had called her soon after she’d called to tell me I could get the story the Star-Herald had written about the arsenic-laced lumber in the St. Bart’s playground. He wanted her to get for him as many obituaries as she could for people who had attended St. Bart’s since 1988. There had been nearly four-hundred, but he’d only wanted those that mentioned that the party had suffered a lingering illness. There had been only seventeen of those. Now I understood why the editor was feeling so put upon. I asked Jana to email me the same obits in the morning, thanked her, and hung up.

  “What do you think he expected to learn from that?” I asked Trevor after I’d gotten off the call.

  “Well,” Trevor said, “Mr. Hanson might have known most of those people. Could that have anything to do with it?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I don’t see how, though.”

  “No, neither do I. Maybe we should examine this from a different angle. What would it take to prove who the guilty party is?”

  “Well,” I said, “there are a few things. First, it would have to be someone with access to Chlordane, but I don’t see how the obituaries of people who died lingering deaths are any help there. Another point is the suicide note that your tech people found in Matthew’s laptop. You’d need to prove that was faked. But again, what do these obituaries have to do with that? You’d also need motive. Maybe this somehow shows motive.”

  “The only motive it shows is mercy killing, and we’ve already explored that angle and come up with Matthew Hanson.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “that’s right.”

  “What else has he got that you know of besides those obituaries?”

  “Well,” I said, “he wants to get the pictures the newspaper reporter took the day Coneely had his press conference.”

  “What will they show?” Trevor asked.

  “Just the Hanson’s discussing euthanasia in their house. Oh, and Peggy Hanson throwing a hissy fit when she found them there.”

  “That could be something, I guess,” Trevor said. “What else has he got?”

  “He has the St. Christopher’s medal, but I really don’t see the relevance of that any longer.”

  “No, I think that was just supposed to get Matthew Hanson worked up to tell us what he knew, but I don’t understand how.”

  “Neither do I. Um, there is one other thing,” I said.

  “What is it?”

  “We found Matthew Hanson’s girlfriend.”

  “Matthew Hanson had a girlfriend? What was she able to tell you?”

  So I shared Penny’s story about the policy and how Matthew knew that it was about to lapse and had told one of his siblings, but that she didn’t know which. I reserved the parts about the loan shark and the stolen Spyder. I was certain that they were not relevant to the case, and I saw no reason to bring Trevor into that part of it.

  Chapter 27

  After Trevor had gone, I went up to take a long hot bath before bed. As I soaked, I thought some more about the obituaries that Schwartz had had Jana find for him. Having the obituaries was one thing, but what could he do with them, and what was the significance of 1988? I remembered that was a year that had been mentioned in connection with this case before. It was the year that Chlordane had finally been completely banned by the EPA. Maybe that was somehow significant, though I couldn’t see how. Unless he’d been considering the possibility that the seventeen had also been poisoned by Chlordane to put them out of their misery. And since they might have all known Vincent Hanson, perhaps Schwartz had thought that Hanson had had something to do with their poisoning; which might mean that he was considering the possibility that Hanson had poisoned himself or that he had at least arranged the poison for himself.

  This was beginning to show some potential. If Hanson had been the one to get the poison for any or all seventeen of the people who had died those lingering deaths, then Schwartz would have a starting place to determine where the poison had come from. What he must have done is contacted the survivors of those seventeen dead men and women. And if I wanted to know what he knew, I would have to make those same calls.

  ***

  The next morning we had our breakfast of egg and mushroom crepes as Schwartz set up the day’s schedule. He would put in his morning garage time, and then we’d have an early lunch. He hated that he’d been forced to rearrange his schedule so much lately, but a witness had been murdered under his watch, and he wanted to end this case as quickly as possible. After lunch, he and I would go to the coroner’s office to retrieve the St. Christopher’s medal. After that, we would go to the Star-Herald building to speak with Vic Jenkins about his pictures. Once Schwartz went to the garage, I retrieved my email, and began making my calls.

  I wasted the first several minutes of my calling time by starting in chronological order. After looking up the name of
the wife of the first decedent and finding no current listing, I realized that she had probably passed away herself several years before. So I began again with the most recent obituary. Hazel Langely had died almost seven months before. I found the listing for her husband Derrick and called him at home. He answered on the fourth ring. “Hello,” I said, “Derrick Langely? My name is Cattleya Hoskin with Gamut Magazine. I hope I’m not calling at a bad time. I’m calling to inquire about your wife Hazel.”

  “Hazel passed away several months ago,” he said.

  “Yes, I know. My condolences. The reason I was calling was to inquire if anybody had called you recently to ask any questions about her passing?”

  “What kind of questions?” he wanted to know.

  “Well, I was hoping you might be able to tell me. Have you gotten any such calls?”

  “No,” he said, “nobody’s called me to ask me anything about Hazel. Why should they?”

  “Did your wife know Vincent Hanson?”

  “Is this about Fr. Coneely? I thought he was cleared of those charges.”

  “He has been,” I began, but Langely charged on.

  “Look, Fr. Coneely administered last rites to my Hazel with no incident at all. She lived almost a whole extra week after he done the sacrament. It all went just like it’s supposed to, and he never even mentioned the idea of euthanasia. He didn’t even start that silliness for another month or so. Course he was still pretty new at the parish at the time, but he done a fine job by us, and I don’t appreciate you media types trying to imply otherwise. Can’t you leave the poor man alone?” He hung up, and I was left feeling the sting of another champion of the fourth clover leaf.

  I was hesitant to call the next party, but I was sure that I had something somewhere in this idea. I tried calling the next spouse, but found that the number had been disconnected. However, I noticed the name of a surviving daughter and tried that number. When the young woman answered I said, “Hello, Mrs. Pete?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Cattleya Hoskin with Gamut Magazine. I hope I’m not disturbing you. I’m calling to ask about your father, Charles Dutton.”