Murder Old and New

by Chet Williamson

  Doc Mead was out of his office Mondays, but I knew he’d be checking in with his service, so I left a message for him to drop by the store if he wanted an old medical mystery solved. The lady at the service asked me to repeat that, but she got it right, because about eleven in the morning Doc wandered in, a smile, albeit dubious, on his face.

  “What’s this I hear about you solving a mystery?” he said.

  Monday mornings being slow, Ted was scheduled to come in at noon, so I invited Doc to sit in the chair behind his desk. There was a customer, but he was in the back of the store, out of earshot.

  “Just a few questions, Doc,” I said, leaning my elbows on my own desk. “Do you know the year the Hangman Murders stopped?”

  “Not sure—mid-fifties, as I recall.”

  “Uh-huh, and you told me that the states in which the killings took place were…” I ticked them off on my fingers and thumb until my hand was open. “Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, and Indiana, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Then your murderer is one Lyle Flory, formerly of Roseland, Pa. Born 1917, died 1958.”

  “So you say.”

  “So I say.” The dramatic part over, the words just poured out of me. I told Doc about finding the spot where Elmer Bingley died, about my visit to Mrs. Lehman, about my call to Benjamin Flory, and everything in between, and concluded by saying, “Ergo…” and giving a big shrug.

  “Ergo what? Out of all this you assume that this Flory is the Hangman?”

  “Oh, come on, Doc,” I said. “You want me to put it all together, I will. Lyle Flory is Ruby Bingley’s boyfriend. Maybe they’ve had…relations, but probably not. She gets pregnant by her father, her mother finds out and drowns herself. Ruby can’t deal with it all, and either she runs off to get an abortion or have the baby, or she jumps in the river. Either way, she’s never seen again. But before she runs off, maybe she tells Lyle what really happened. If she doesn’t, Lyle suspects anyway, because if the rumor was going around, he of all people would have heard it. Elmer Bingley’s destroyed the life of his own daughter, the girl Lyle loves, and the kid’s crushed about it. So…?” I cocked my head at Doc.

  “So he decides to get revenge?”

  “Bingo. Now I don’t know how he lures Elmer up into the woods, but he does, and maybe he knocks him out first, but somehow he gets that rope around his neck, and he hauls him up to watch him choke. But that’s not good enough, so he grabs Elmer and yanks down hard so the rope breaks his neck. Suicide, right? Lyle doesn’t know that seventy years later somebody’s going to look at the photos and say, ‘Wait a minute, something’s fishy here.’”

  Doc leaned back in Ted’s chair and steepled his fingers. I could sense disagreement brewing. “Assuming that this little scenario of yours, for which there’s really no proof, is true, how does it make this Lyle Flory the Hangman?”

  “Don’t you get it? The kid likes it. And what starts out as a highly motivated revenge turns into a series of random killings—“

  “Which he definitely did, since his sales route was in the same five states as those in which the Hangman Murders took place.”

  I snapped my fingers and pointed at him. “You got it, Doc.”

  He shook his head and gave a monstrous sigh. “So, you’ve solved the Hangman Murders on the basis of this totally circumstantial evidence.”

  “Well…yeah?”

  “Do you have any idea how many salesmen—how many people in general—traveled for a living back in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s? Do you have any idea how many of those people’s territory would have included that same five-state area?”

  “Um…tens of thousands?”

  “If not hundreds of thousands. Also, you would have to check Lyle Flory’s schedule—when he was in what state—with the known dates of the Hangman Murders there. Did you do any of that?”

  “Well…no…”

  “And you probably couldn’t. You said yourself that encyclopedia company went out of business forty years ago. You think the records of their individual salesmen from sixty years ago are still stored somewhere?”

  “Well…probably not.”

  “Livy, my dear,” he said, and cast a pitying smile upon me. I felt like a kid whose puppy just got squashed by the garbage truck. “You haven’t proven diddley-squat. You’ve come up with a theory and have imagined facts to back it up. Now, it could certainly be just the way you suggest, but it probably isn’t. Maybe the man just hanged himself, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “But you said yourself that he couldn’t have broken his neck by just slumping.”

  “And maybe I was wrong. Or maybe he was able to shinny up a limb, or maybe he did climb up on something that wasn’t in the pictures. But to imagine everything you have—well, it’s imaginative, I’ll give it that. But it’s just not logical, Livy.”

  I sat back defeated. I knew he was probably right, but it had made so much sense when I had worked it out by myself. Too bad someone had to actually stop and think about it. I guessed that was why I was a nostalgia merchant and not a lawyer. Or a detective.

  “Okay, I give. The Hardy Boys don’t have to worry about any competition.” I ran my fingers through my hair as though to comb the cobwebs out of my brain. “Sorry for running you in here for nothing, Doc.”

  “Not for nothing. It was entertaining. And stories of small-town scandals are always worth hearing.” He pursed his lips and looked toward the window. “I wonder whatever did happen to Ruby Bingley, though. What an awful thing for a young girl to go through. If that story about her father is true, he was a monster. Deserved what he got, no matter how it happened.” He shook off the mood and stood up. “Well, I’m off. Let me know if you find any signed confessions, okay?”

  “Not unless they’re notarized,” I said, and walked him to the door.

  When Ted arrived just before noon, I filled him in on my deductions, and he agreed with Doc that, although the circumstantial evidence was impressive, I had indeed proven nothing. “It’s a neat theory, Livy,” he said, “and you might be right, but there’s really no way of ever knowing for sure. It’s like those guys who claim to know who Jack the Ripper was—their theories make perfect sense, but so does the next Ripperologist you read about. And Jack can’t be both suspects.”

  “Then you think my theory does make sense?”

  Ted looked a little sheepish, as though he didn’t want to hurt my feelings. “Um…yeah, sure. I mean, as much as any other, I guess.”

  “There are no others, Ted.”

  “Well, then…uh, more than them…then…I guess…”

  It was hardly a stirring confirmation of my efforts, but I figured it was the best I was going to get. I accepted it with as much grace as I could muster, and we both got back to work.

  The next morning, I was busy packing Internet orders, and after a quick lunch at my desk I headed for the Gates Home. I went early to see Mother, and found her staring down at a magazine on her lap. The television was on, one of those early afternoon yakfests with some over-the-hill sitcom star and a batch of giggly women, but Mother was ignoring it. Good call.

  She looked up at me and responded to my chirpy greeting with a turned-down mouth and a gloomy, “Oh hello, Olivia. Someone died in here last night.”

  Chapter 7

  Well, that hardly made for light conversation, so I dropped the Rinso white Rinso bright façade and sat down with my frowny face on. “Who died?” I asked. “What happened?”

  “Rachel Gold. That Jewish lady.” I winced. That was my mother’s generation. First race, then religion as a distinguishing mark. She might have said That really funny, perky lady who wears the brightly colored muumuus, but no.

  “But how did it happen?” I pressed.

  “She just died, I guess,” Mother said with a shrug, as though death was perfectly natural in that place. Okay, death was natural, sure, everybody died, but even in a place like the Gates Home, weeks and months could go by without the ambu
lance arriving to pick up a shrouded form. Yet here were two dead ladies within the span of a week. Depressing, especially to someone already as depressed as my mother. “They found her this morning,” she added with a sigh, and then looked at the wall, as though she would be next and was just waiting patiently.

  I tried to change the subject, but it was tough to reboot in chirp mode. Rachel Gold had been a cutie, and I’d even brought in an occasional klezmer 78 after she’d requested some. The other residents seemed to enjoy the wailing clarinet and the danceable rhythms, but Rachel seemed ecstatic, her head moving back and forth, eyes closed, and I could almost see her as a young woman dancing around the floor, an image that I was sure was all too real in her own mind’s eye.

  Somehow, I managed to keep the conversation going in a semi-upbeat train of thought for fifteen more minutes, and then, just as I was about to dismiss myself to go do my music, there was a gentle knock on the door. I looked up and saw Genevieve Tucker, one of the nurses, standing in the doorway.

  Tall and lean and in her early fifties, Genevieve always reminded me of Judith Anderson’s Mrs. Danforth in Rebecca. (For me, the whole world’s a casting call.) She wasn’t quite as sinister, though, since she really seemed to like my mother and had visited her several times since her arrival. Once, when we’d left Mother’s room together, Genevieve had mentioned that my mother reminded her of her own, who had died. Today, she smiled and said, “Sorry—am I intruding?”

  “Not at all.” I was relieved by the interruption. I had another ten minutes before I had to start, but I wanted to see Karen first. “Come on in.”

  “I just finished my shift,” Genevieve said as she entered. “Ten-hour one last night and this morning. Just thought I’d say hi before I went home.” She shook her head. “Rough night,” she said, and I nodded in agreement, assuming she was talking about Rachel Gold’s death.

  I left Mother with Genevieve and found Karen in her office, where she looked like less than the happiest of campers. “I heard about Rachel Gold,” I started off.

  Karen squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head quickly. “Monday has turned out not to be a good night around here,” she said as she opened her eyes again and looked at me.

  “It is getting a little tedious,” I agreed. “So what happened? Just natural causes?” I don’t even know why I asked. It was a given, after all.

  “They thought her heart,” Karen said. “It’s always the heart, isn’t it? Nothing else wrong with her, as far as anybody knew. I mean, she had the usual rundown of maladies, high blood pressure, low red cell count, she was taking Procrit for it and the doses were getting higher and higher to keep her where she was—maybe they just weren’t big enough. And she was 88, Livy.” Karen shrugged, and then her face soured. “But it wasn’t pretty again.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked after a moment.

  “Marge in housekeeping found her. The girls said they heard Marge scream all the way down at the nurse’s station. I didn’t see her this time—didn’t get in till nine—but the ones who saw Rachel said that she looked as though she had really struggled. Her face…”

  “Like Enid’s?” I asked.

  “Apparently. It looked like she struggled, Livy.”

  “Did she have a roommate?”

  “No, she was in a private room, but none of the staff heard anything. She didn’t cry out, at least not so she could be heard. Genevieve had looked in on her around three, and she seemed fine then.”

  “Rachel didn’t pull the call cord?” All of the rooms have call cords right by the beds. You give one a yank and a nurse comes running. Or maybe walking, but they know something’s wrong.

  “No. She was just lying in bed as though she’d been sleeping when she had an attack of some sort. The EMS team said that’s just how it happens sometimes.”

  “Just like Enid,” I said.

  Karen nodded. “Just like Enid.”

  I wasn’t feeling too perky as I headed toward the elevator that would take me up to the social hall, and I felt even less so when I saw I was going to have to share the car with Tom Drummond, the Gates Home’s King of Crabiosity. He was sitting in his wheelchair in front of the closed door, frowning mightily, as though the glacial speed of the elevator was a personal affront. In truth, it was to give wheelchair-bound and walker-using codgers like himself plenty of time to get on and off without getting smushed by the doors.

  Despite his woeful countenance that would have made Don Quixote look like Julia Roberts, I bade him a hearty good afternoon, and was surprised to see an expression of neutrality if not unadulterated joy replace his Mister Cranky face. It was almost as if he’d been looking forward to seeing me, and, as it turned out when I’d helpfully pushed him onto the elevator, my records tucked under one arm, he was.

  “Would you do something for me?” Drummond asked almost conspiratorially as his chubby fingers dug into the pocket of his faded plaid shirt.

  “If I can,” I said as I saw him take out a small roll of bills. Favors were conditional. Residents had asked me to buy a wide variety of items over the years—mostly candy or snacks or magazines, which were okay. But I’d also been asked to procure booze and cigars, which were definite no-nos. And one time, I swear to God, a silver-haired and flashing-eyed 85-year-old devil had slipped me a fiver on my way out and whispered, “A tin of Sheiks, lubricated.” When I looked at him aghast (after all, they haven’t sold condoms in tins for forty years), he shrugged sheepishly and added, “I’m not expecting to knock her up, but I don’t want to, you know, catch anything.”

  When I still said nothing, stunned as I was, he unleashed his final persuader. “You can keep the change.” I declined the deal. Five weeks later his heart gave out on him, under what circumstances I never found out, though for weeks afterward I heard the nurses giggle whenever his name was mentioned.

  I’d heard that Tom Drummond had been a Bible salesman in his youth, something I could easily believe from his dour, puritanical manner, so I didn’t expect him to make a similar request. He didn’t. Instead he handed me forty dollars in rumpled, worn bills the texture of tissue paper and said, “Could you get me one of those real little tape recorders? The kind with the real little tapes?”

  “Like a mini-recorder?” I asked. “Micro-cassette? The kind you hold in your hand?”

  “Yeah. And some empty tapes. If that’s not enough…”

  “Oh, this should be more than enough,” I said. “I bought one a few years ago and they’re pretty cheap.”

  I looked at him curiously, and he stuck out his lower lip as though annoyed, then explained himself. “I like your music,” he said. “The songs you play. I’d just like to record some of ’em and listen to ’em later.”

  That surprised me. Though Drummond came to maybe half of my sessions, I never noticed him particularly enjoying himself. I could’ve offered to make some tapes for him, but my system wasn’t set up to record 78s. “Sure,” I said as the elevator door at long last opened. “I should be able to pick one up tomorrow, bring it in the next day when I visit my mom.”

  “Your mother’s here?” he asked as though surprised.

  “Yeah. A few weeks now. I mentioned it at a session, I’m sure. Maybe you weren’t in that day.”

  He wheeled himself out before I could help him. Out in the hall he looked over his shoulder, nodded brusquely, said “Thanks,” and entered the social room.

  The usual suspects were in attendance, not a top capacity crowd, but not too shabby either. Harold Newbury was sitting at one of the tables with Roy Davenport, a craggy old ex-farmer who passed between moments of sharp clarity and keen intelligence and other times when the dimmest village idiot would’ve beat him at Scrabble. Today seemed somewhere in between the extremes.

  Harold gave me the high sign and went through what appeared to be a complex and arcane series of gestures directed at me referencing his wrist, the door, the floor, and his and my own persons. Since I hadn’t yet begun, I walked over to him and a
sked, “Is there something you’re trying to tell me with all your strange incantations, or are you just signaling the runner to steal second?”

  He didn’t laugh, which I found odd. I thought it was a pretty good line. “I’d like to see you afterwards, before you leave,” he said.

  “Sure,” I replied, then cocked my head, waiting for him to say more, but he only shook his head and looked away. It seemed like everybody was being secretive today, as though Rachel Gold’s death had dropped a pall over the entire Gates Home.

  Indeed, as I looked around, most of the faces seemed more somber than usual, and I wished I’d brought along a wild, frenzied klezmer piece to play in Rachel’s memory. The best I could do was start off with “Bluebird of Happiness,” sung by Jan Peerce, the great Jewish tenor of the 40s and 50s. I just said, “This is for Rachel Gold,” and dropped the needle. By the end, with its, “Remember this, life is no abyss/Somewhere there’s a bluebird of happiness,” there were only a few dry female eyes in the house, and even Harold and Roy manfully scuffed at their eyes. I didn’t notice Tom Drummond sniffling any, though.

  Afraid that I had made a downer of a day even more subterranean, I threw on Charlie Barnet’s “Cherokee,” followed it up with Bing Crosby’s peppy “Don’t Fence Me In,” and continued to play up-tempo and novelty songs so that by the hour’s end the tears were dry and everyone was smiling. Even Tom Drummond’s frown wasn’t as deep as usual.

  While the slow eaters finished their donuts and decaf, and the others walked, wheeled and shuffled out, I got my records together and went over to Harold. “What’s up?” I asked him.

  It took some time to bring all six-plus feet of him to a standing position, and after he did, he said softly, “Not here.” Then he nodded toward the door and led the way. I followed him down the hall past the elevator and into the residential wing where he lived.

  As we were going down the hall, we passed Martha Myers scuttling along with her cane. Martha had been absent from the session today, and she looked at me with surprise in her crinkly blue eyes. “Livy!” she said in her thick Pennsylvania Dutch dialect, “are you done already?”