Murder Old and New

by Chet Williamson

  By the end of the hour I was just about able to forget the triple worries of my mother’s depression, Enid’s death, and my father’s weird photos. As I drove back to Better Days, the sound of little old ladies’ thank yous still in my ears, I told myself that Mother would soon be happier, that Enid was at peace, and that Uncle Ralph would be able to give me a logical and reassuring reason for the photos of dead Elmer.

  And the Phillies would win the series again next year, as long as I was dreaming.

  Chapter 3

  At Better Days, I parked in my spot behind the building and went in the back way. It’s a lot more fun to go in the front, though.

  Sometimes I still can’t believe that I have my own business, and that it’s working out as well as it is. When I go in through the front and see the big picture window filled with pop treasures of bygone years, and see Better Days painted in a deco script with Olivia Crowe, Prop. just below it, it’s better than sex.

  Okay, maybe not, but I can’t remember enough to make a valid comparison.

  I came in to the record room in the back of the store, where I said hi to Chris and Michael, two middle-aged gay guys who were always looking for fifties small group jazz and Martin Denny albums. They were flipping through the big white bins, and I reminded myself that the bins could stand a new coat of paint. Ted loved playing handyman, so I’d get him on it as soon as I got caught up with the Internet orders and could tend my front desk.

  But getting caught up with the orders wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Sometimes I felt like Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill and watching it roll back down again. The things I sold were so time-consuming to pack—tin toys that required that hateful Styrofoam popcorn to cushion every moving part, and 78 records as fragile as glass, needing layer upon layer of foam and cardboard. One good toss by a surly UPS guy and my customer would wind up with original Robert Johnson shards.

  Still, Internet sales made up eighty percent of my business. Once I stopped rolling that old Internet stone up the hill, my store would run downhill pretty fast.

  At least the toy and game room looked nice and neat, the toys and character items all sitting dust-free in their glass cases, with price cards by each one. I hate to be coy about prices. Nothing’s as annoying as to have to ask how much something costs. If you don’t like the price you feel like a cheapskate, and though I buy and sell for a living I hate feeling like a cheapskate. So I set a fair price and stick to it.

  I guess that’s why I’ve been doing so well. I don’t try and cheat anyone. Of course, if somebody comes in with a stack of near mint Weird Tales pulp magazines from the early thirties and says right off the bat that their price is five bucks each and they won’t take a penny less, I’ll gladly pay without another argument. Whereas if they hadn’t made their exorbitant demand, I’d likely have offered them thirty dollars each. But my Daddy didn’t raise no fool.

  So, a word to the wise—always let the other guy set his first price. The best response to “What do you want for it?” is always “What’ll you give me?” I’ll tell you anyway.

  The front room is the paper room, loaded with pulps and vintage paperbacks and magazines, as well as drawers full of trading cards. I don’t sell comics. That’s gotten to be more of a science than an art. A customer was looking though the paperbacks, and Ted looked even more happy than usual to see me.

  “Glad you’re back,” he said quietly to me as I loaded the record player and records on the dumbwaiter that would take them upstairs. “Can you watch the front a minute while I, uh…” He gestured with his head toward the back of the store where the rest room lay. For a young guy he was unusually circumspect about his bodily needs.

  “Be my guest,” I said. As Ted quickly vanished, I slipped off my coat and sat behind my desk which faced Ted’s. It felt good to sit down, and the leather cushion quickly warmed up my cold posterior. Fudge, having sensed my presence from two floors above, showed up to welcome me home, and I picked him up to warm the rest of me and rubbed his ears till he purred, which took all of .3 seconds.

  “Excuse me,” said my customer, a nice-looking man in his mid-forties wearing a wool topcoat. A tasteful tie and white shirt were artfully displayed in the V of the lapels. “Do you have any Tom Clancy?”

  “No, I’m sorry,” I said. “We only have older material.”

  He looked puzzled. “But I’m looking for one of his older books—The Hunt for Red October?”

  “By old,” I explained, “I mean nothing after 1980. Clancy’s first books appeared in the early eighties.” At least I thought so. I tried to read one once to see what all the fuss was about, but I just couldn’t get into the romance of NATO deployments.

  “You don’t have…anything after 1980?” He looked as though he was trying to instantly digest Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, another book we didn’t have. “Why not?”

  “The store is Better Days. We specialize in nostalgia—old things. I just sort of feel that it takes at least a generation or two for somebody to get nostalgic about something.”

  He nodded and looked at me as though he pitied me.

  “You might try the Book Barn down on Duke Street,” I suggested. “I’m sure they’d have it.” And if they didn’t, he looked affluent enough to blow $7.99 for it at Barnes and Noble. But I’d give the Book Barn first crack at his wallet—I resold them most of the contemporary books I picked up at auctions in box lots.

  The man thanked me, I thanked him for stopping in, and he left looking like he’d just stumbled into the Twilight Zone. I didn’t think the concept was that hard to grasp, but maybe a hard-driving business dude didn’t have any time to look back. A shame. I wouldn’t give a bucket of warm spit (in my father’s words) for ninety-five percent of the stuff that passes for entertainment these days.

  But come to think of it, I wouldn’t give that same bucket for ninety-five percent of the old stuff either. What I try to sell is that dandy five percent that may not have been great art, but was great fun.

  Ted came back looking sheepish. I would have loved to have heard Harold discuss his urinary and digestive tracts with Ted. I think Ted thought that the fact that he had to go to the bathroom implied a weakness, and he didn’t like me seeing him prey to the calls of nature that were placed on lesser men. “Okay?” I said, and he nodded. I vacated my cozy chair, sent the record player up on the dumbwaiter, and carried Fudge upstairs on my shoulder like a big fuzzy parrot.

  At my upstairs desk, I pulled out the notice for the auction up in Lykens, far north of Harrisburg, and took out my address book to find Uncle Ralph’s address. It was Rural Route #1, Tower City, an impossible address to find. So I called Uncle Ralph’s number and heard his gravelly voice say hello. I told him I was coming to an auction in Lykens at six o’clock on Thursday evening, and wanted to visit him and Aunt Sue in the afternoon.

  “Great!” he said. “We’ll have an early supper.” Then he gave me directions which covered a full sheet of my note pad. “It’s a little tricky to get to,” he added, “and you might miss the road back in with all the snow. If you see the taxidermy sign with the deer skull on it, you’ve gone too far. And watch out for the bears. There are only a few man-eaters up here, but better safe than sorry.” It was the kind of thing Daddy would have said.

  “Okay, if I get lost, I’ll give you a call.”

  “Can’t do that. We had our phone taken out. Too many solicitations.”

  I was about to ask why he didn’t get on the Do Not Call list when it hit me. “So, what are you talking on right now?”

  “Huh? Well, whaddya know, I guess we didn’t get it removed yet. I’ll tell Sue to make a note of that.”

  Between Harold Newbury and my Uncle Ralph, I had just ingested my full minimum daily requirement of geriatric hilarity.

  As my terrible luck would have it, it snowed all day Wednesday. As better luck had it, it stopped early Thursday morning, which gave the road crews time to get the highways cleared for my van. With th
e four-wheel drive engaged, little short of ice could stop me, unless I got stuck in a snowdrift. I’ve driven through some pretty scary storms to get to some pretty lousy auctions.

  The sun was shining as I motored up the east side of the Susquehanna River past Harrisburg. The photos were tucked into the pocket of my flannel shirt. No longer flattened by the book they had been in, they were starting to curl like a guilty claw closing around my left breast, so I took them out and set them on the seat. But there I could see them, so I stuffed them in the glove compartment for the rest of the trip.

  Just north of the little town of Dauphin I took Route 325 northwest toward Tower City. When I got there, I learned that though it might’ve had a tower, it sure wasn’t any city. Uncle Ralph’s directions slowly but surely got me to his and Aunt Sue’s new abode, and no, I didn’t see the taxidermy sign with the deer skull, and I didn’t see any bears either.

  I did see a lot of woods and a lot of snow before I rounded the final bend of the dirt road that Uncle Ralph had apparently plowed earlier in the day. There I saw a small but sturdy-looking A-frame whose additions made it look like a vertically challenged W. I grabbed the envelope of photos and quickly shoved it in my jacket pocket.

  Uncle Ralph must have possessed the Crowe sixth sense, because he and Aunt Sue were standing with two of their dogs on the little deck at the front of the house, waving as I pulled in. The dogs weren’t waving, but their tails were breaking the sound barrier, and if panting was any indication, they were nearly as happy to see me as my aunt and uncle were. I hadn’t seen them since Daddy’s memorial service, so we indulged in several minutes of hugs out there on the freezing cold porch until Aunt Sue got the idea of saving our lives by going inside.

  The place was just like every one of their multitudinous dwellings had been—cluttered, chaotic, and cheerily homey. Old sporting prints covered the pine-paneled walls, a gun cabinet held rifles and shotguns, and an old record player and stacks of records sat in one corner, along with an old Martin guitar and a banjo with a very worn head. Faded curtains covered the doorways to the back of the A-frame and the additions on either side. The front window looked out across a short lawn to snow-covered woods. “Nary a neighbor in sight,” I observed as I plopped down on a saggy sofa next to one of the dogs.

  “Nope, don’t believe in ’em,” said Uncle Ralph.

  Aunt Sue brought out mugs of coffee and we sat and caught up on the last couple of years. Ralph and Sue called my mother every month or so, and had had lunch with her a few times since Daddy died, but they hadn’t seen her since her hip broke, and were surprised to hear that she had moved into the Gates Home.

  “You going to have an auction at the house?” Uncle Ralph asked.

  “Eventually. I’ve been trying to move as much stuff as possible to the dealers I know personally. I get a better price for Mother that way, but it takes a lot more time. I still have all Daddy’s pistols and rifles and outdoor things. I thought you might want to take a look before I try and sell them, see if there’s anything you want. You know, for old time’s sake.”

  Ralph smiled gently. “That’s okay, Livy. Thanks for asking. But I got everything I need to remember of your dad right up here.” He tapped his head. “And I’ll never lose it there.” Then he grinned. “Not unless I get screwy in the looey.”

  “Who says you’re not already, buster?” said Aunt Sue. Theirs was a match made in heaven.

  After a while Aunt Sue excused herself and went into the kitchen, which was the addition to the left, to get dinner started. I figured it was a good time to bring up the photos, and retrieved the envelope from my jacket pocket. “Uncle Ralph, have you ever heard of anyone named Elmer Bingley?”

  His face went blank for a moment, and then I saw recognition dawn, the kind of remembering that comes over the face of a customer when they see for the first time in forty years a toy they had lost or broken when they were eight. It wasn’t joy, but a kind of awe that such a thing still exists outside of their memories. I braced myself for what Uncle Ralph might tell me.

  “Elmer Bingley…oh sure.” He nodded sagely. “That was the guy who hung himself up in the woods in back of our place back home in Roseland. Brad even took pictures of it.”

  And that was it. That quick and easy. No hideous conspiracy, no cloud of silence, no suspicions that my uncle and father shared some terrible secret. Nope, just another guy who hung himself up in the woods.

  I gave a puff of relief. “Oh, I’m glad that’s all it was…” That didn’t sound quite right. “No, I mean I’m sorry he hung himself, but I didn’t know, and—“

  “Slow down, Livy, you’ll hurt yourself. Now how’d you ever hear about Elmer Bingley? Your dad tell you?”

  I shook my head. “I was going through some of Daddy’s books and I found these.” I handed him the envelope and kept talking as he opened it and looked at the contents. “They’re pretty horrible, and I just didn’t know what to think. To find something like this, and I didn’t want to ask Mother about it, and Daddy never said anything about them, and I guess he knew that I’d never come across them in one of his hunting books, the way I feel about hunting, and I thought that just maybe you’d know something about them?” Great. Now I was rattling on like old Mrs. Bonner, right down to ending everything with an interrogative.

  From the expression on Uncle Ralph’s face I knew the photos had gotten to him, just a little. “Yeah, I knew who Elmer Bingley was. Heck, Roseland was such a tiny little place that you knew everybody who lived there and around. I think it was about 1934. I was only about ten, so your dad would’ve been thirteen or so. Karl Ostrander was up in the woods hunting and found Elmer hanging like that. Brad and I were chopping firewood in the yard when old Karl comes out of the woods like a rabbit with his tail on fire. ‘Elmer’s dead up there!’ he’s shouting, and goes past our place down to Church Street, because we didn’t have a phone then, but a few others did.

  “Well, Brad and I look at each other, and part of us wants to go up and look at the dead guy right away, but the other part’s scared, so we catch up with Karl and we just follow him down to Doc Ebersole’s, so we’re on Doc’s porch with Karl, and Karl tells Doc that Elmer’s hung himself and to come quick.

  “So Doc runs back inside and calls the cops, and then we go up into the woods, but your dad runs into our house on the way past and grabs a little Kodak box camera and catches up with us again. By this time there are a whole bunch of kids with us, maybe a dozen in all, and Karl leads us about a quarter mile into the woods, and there he is. Just like…well, you see the pictures.

  “Doc sees right away he’s dead, and tells everybody to stay back till the police get there. Then he walks back down to meet the cops. We do what he says, everybody except your dad, that is.” He gave a little laugh.

  “What did Daddy do?”

  “He went up bold as you please and started taking pictures. He got right up under old Elmer’s nose and took a shot of his face, got behind him and shot the rope, the whole shebang. I guess it was to show how brave he was, because the rest of us kids wouldn’t go within ten yards of him, at least until the cops got there. Old Karl wouldn’t either, and kept telling Brad to come away, but he didn’t until he got all the shots he wanted.

  “Finally, Doc came back with the police—two of them, and a couple guys from the ambulance service. Then we got a little braver and got closer while the cops were looking at Elmer. I told Brad I wanted to take some pictures too, so he gave me the camera and I shot a few of the crowd around Elmer. By that time there were twenty-five, thirty people around. Your dad kept these photos and gave me the ones I’d taken. I still have them somewhere.”

  “Could I see them?” I think the reason I asked was to prove that Uncle Ralph’s story was true. If I saw the crowd, it would forever dispel the silly idea I had had of something weirder than Uncle Ralph’s very logical and likely story.

  “You’re a real glutton, aren’t you?” He pushed himself to his feet. “Sure,
if I can find them.”

  He did. In less than five minutes he came back from the A-frame’s right-hand addition with a shoebox. He took out a yellowed envelope and passed it to me. “You don’t have to brace yourself,” he said. “They’re not nearly as up close and personal as your dad’s.”

  He was right, they weren’t. But they were terrible in a different way. They reminded me of the old news photos of lynchings in the south, where half the people are staring at the camera and the other half at the dangling body.

  In one of the shots, a teenaged boy in a plaid shirt and with a rifle slung over his shoulder was looking at the dead man. The shot was taken from behind the man’s shoulder, so you could see the boy’s face dead on. His eyes were wide open, and his expression was haunted. I couldn’t tell if he was scared or numbed or excited or a combination of all three. “Who’s that?” I asked Uncle Ralph.

  He raised his head to look through the bottom of his bifocals. “Don’t remember him. Not one of the neighborhood kids, I don’t think, though I didn’t know all the older ones. Maybe somebody just hunting up around there. A lot of people came over from around Lebanon.”

  “So who was this guy, this Elmer Bingley?”

  “I don’t remember what he did, probably worked on a farm or in a factory or something. But he was pretty crabby. We kept our distance from him.”

  “I didn’t know you could hang yourself like that,” I said, pointing to one of the photos where you could see Bingley’s legs sagging, and his feet on the ground.

  “Hard way to die. Just bend your knees and let yourself choke to death.”

  “But could you do that?” I asked, surprised the thought hadn’t occurred to me before. “I mean, wouldn’t self-preservation take over and make you straighten up?”

  Uncle Ralph frowned. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Once you started to choke. Like trying to hold your head underwater to drown yourself.” He clucked sympathetically. “He must’ve wanted to die real bad.”