Murder Old and New

by Chet Williamson

  The day passed, Ted and I did our work, chatting occasionally, having a few laughs. He asked about my mother, and I confided in him that I was concerned she was slowly slipping away from me into an isolation created by age and circumstances. He was appropriately sympathetic, but I couldn’t help wondering how much of his concern was real and how much feigned because expected in the presence of the employer and the goddess.

  As I grow older, I think I grow more suspicious of the true intentions of people. I know that there are many times when I listen to Karen going on about the complications of her love life and her relationship with her kids or her parents or her ex, and I just nod and respond and react with a sympathetic hmm or uh-huh or whatever, not because I really care all that much, but because that’s what’s expected of me as a friend. I’ve heard it all before, and I know I’ll hear it all again, and my reactions just come as automatically as scratching an itch.

  But then I think, are people doing the same thing to me as I am to them? Are they really wishing they were somewhere else, or that we were talking about something more interesting to them than my own little hang-ups that they’ve heard about ever since they’ve known me?

  And I answer, hell, yes. This is what we do when we’re friends, when we’re social, when we converse. I put up with your boring bullshit in the expectation that you’ll put up with mine. We are bored so that we may be boring in return. We give in the hopes of getting. It’s sort of the same as sex, though that’s more fun. Usually. So I hear.

  And that, my dears, is why civilization remains civilized.

  Five o’clock came around and we closed up quickly. Mondays were usually slow, but this one had been slower than most. I went shopping for groceries, stocking up for the week, and got home about seven. I ate a quarter pound of cold shrimp with cocktail sauce and a single serving microwave soup, and felt sated enough, then sat down to some classical music and a book by Chuck Pahlaniuk I’d gotten from the library. I’d heard about him and wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

  The stuff in his book was gross, way too gross for my taste, but it was well-written and very funny in spots, and I laughed even as I tried not to gag. To my amazement, by the end of the evening I had finished the book, and had acquired a lot of admiration for the writer, though I didn’t think I’d ever want to meet a guy who could come up with such sick images. When I looked at the clock, I saw to my surprise that it was after midnight, and I grabbed a quick shower and crawled into bed.

  Couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing those horrible, sick, twisted, and somehow ungodly funny scenes from the book I’d just read, so I got up and decided to work a little until I got so tired that I’d have to sleep.

  I threw a warm terrycloth robe over the tank top and panties I usually sleep in, slid my cold feet into slippers, and padded downstairs to the shop. The streetlight glow that came through the big front window made the front room bright enough so that I didn’t have to turn on a light, and I looked for some boring and mindless task that would drift me off to dreamland.

  And there it was, on the floor right next to the desk—the nearly empty box with the dozen or so old yearbooks. Not only would my cataloguing them be tedious and sleep-inducing, it would also help to reduce the front room clutter to the tune of one more box. I picked it up and headed back upstairs.

  There I made myself a cup of sugar-free hot chocolate, plopped down at the kitchen table and started to see what treasures I had. Right.

  I piled up the yearbooks according to their locations. They were all from eastern Pennsylvania. There were several from Halifax High School, near where the auction had been, and there were a few from Lebanon and one from Stonebrook as well.

  Stonebrook. My dad had graduated from Stonebook High School. It was a small town between Roseland and Lebanon, but big enough to have a high school, which Roseland didn’t. Still, I had my dad’s yearbook from the Class of ’40, and the yearbook on the table in front of me was from the Class of ’34, so Daddy’s picture wouldn’t even be among the freshmen.

  Still, I flipped through the pages, looking for a familiar name, maybe a friend of Daddy’s. But instead I found Lyle Flory.

  There he was among the seniors, Ruby Bingley’s boyfriend. His entry claimed, “Patrol; Baseball Manager 3; Basketball Manager 3, 4; Football 3, 4; Senior Chorus 3; Hi-Y 3.” The paragraph below read, “Lyle has high hopes of becoming a businessman, and with his cheerful countenance, he’s sure to succeed. Never seen without a certain raven-haired lassie!”

  Lyle David Flory was a good-looking kid, with wavy blond hair and a smile a little wider than most of the dour seniors who stared out of the still surprisingly white pages. The bibliophile in me marveled at the paper quality of old yearbooks, while my inner Hardy Boy did some figuring: Elmer Bingley’s death had taken place in the summer of 1934, a few months after this yearbook had come out, which meant that…

  “Ruby Bingley,” I whispered, flipping further toward the front.

  And there she was, a thin-faced girl with a prominent chin and dark, arching eyebrows. While the other girls pictured had a sheen to their hair, Ruby’s chin-length coif, styled simply and parted in the middle, seemed to absorb the photographer’s light, so that the “raven-haired” sobriquet fit well. Her smile parted her lips just enough to show a gap between her front teeth, a flaw that made her seem both vulnerable and endearing. I read her brief C.V.:

  “Tri-Hi-Y 2, Senior Commercial Society. Did you say you hear a noise? It could not be “Rube” for she has the reputation of being the quietest person in class. However, “still waters run deep,” so we know there is something beneath that quietness.”

  Yeah, right—sexual abuse by her father. That’ll pull you right into yourself. I looked at Ruby’s photograph for a long time, trying to imagine the pain she must have felt, the horrible knowledge she kept to herself, and I wondered if she had been pregnant at the time the picture was taken. Then I sighed and glanced at the other faces on the page and the one facing it.

  I recognized the face before I read the name, and in that moment I realized that the sharp-nosed boy with the lacquered hair was the same boy I had seen in the old photo, the one in the plaid shirt who was holding the rifle and staring transfixed at Elmer Bingley’s hanging corpse. My heart tripped as I glanced at his name in capital letters.

  Lester Thomas Drummond.

  There had been a hell of a lot of changes to that young face in the intervening seventy-five years, but now that I had the name, I could recognize the wheelchair-bound old man he would one day become. The sharp nose had been dulled by the weight of the years, and the slicked back hair had whitened and thinned, but the deep-set eyes were unmistakable, set deeper now in the pouches of age. It was Tom Drummond all right, decrepit and cantankerous Tom Drummond.

  There were no activities listed, not a one, and the personal paragraph read, “‘Tom’ is that calm, unruffled person you see walking around in the halls. To know him intimately is not easy, all because he is a very quiet individual who never puts himself into the limelight. But that’s all right, ‘Tom,’ we often wish there were more like you (but you need to douse that R.B. torch!)”

  R.B.? I checked quickly and found that the only girl with those initials was Ruby Bingley. Tom Drummond had had a crush on her? Quiet, calm, unruffled Tom Drummond?

  And I started thinking about the interviews with the neighbors of the serial killers who were finally caught with a cellar full of dead women and a freezer full of body parts: He was always so quiet…kept to himself…never talked much…

  I jumped up, panicking Fudge, who had curled into a ball on some of the old yearbooks but now scuttled off the table and down the hall, and I followed him, right to the chest of drawers in my bedroom where I had put the Elmer Bingley photos under a pile of summer tops, out of sight, out of mind. I took the envelope back to the kitchen table, opening it as I went, and by the time I sat down I had found the photo I was looking for.

  There he was, young Tom Drumm
ond, who Uncle Ralph hadn’t recognized or maybe even known, since he was older. He was staring at Elmer, his mouth half open, and I looked at his figure more closely, then grabbed the magnifying glass I kept in a small basket with scissors, tape, glue, Goo-Gone, and other quick tools of my trade. I ran the glass up and down Tom Drummond’s image and discovered that what I had taken to be a shadow on the front of Drummond’s trousers was actually a swelling.

  It was, to use a word in fashion when I myself was a high school girl giggling about such things, a stiffie. The young Tom Drummond, in the face of violent death, looking at a man who had died in agony, was sporting a fairly sturdy erection.

  That was weird. Oh yeah. And all of a sudden that imagination of mine started working triple shift with no coffee breaks. I started taking all these individual, disparate things and began putting them together, clicking each into place so that they made up a terrifying and, to me, all too believable whole.

  Tom Drummond had the hots for Ruby Bingley, in spite of her dating Lyle Flory. But he never really did anything about it short of mooning for her enough to make it obvious that he was carrying “the torch,” to use an even older term than “stiffie.” Then he discovers that Ruby is pregnant, and maybe he hears, as some people did, according to old Ruth Lehman, that the person responsible is Ruby’s father.

  Now Tom Drummond is pissed at Elmer—pissed, hell, he hates the man, and with good cause. So one day when he sees him going up into the woods, he follows along behind with his gun in hand, maybe ready to have a convenient “hunting accident.” Who knows what happens next, but maybe Tom Drummond somehow gets the chance to kill Elmer Bingley—strangling him with a rope and then setting it all up to look like suicide. Maybe he even planned it that way and took the rope along with him, taking the gun to threaten Elmer with.

  However he did it, once the alarm was spread he couldn’t resist returning to the scene of the crime, maybe with his gun to make it look like he was hunting. And when he stood there in front of his victim, surrounded by other people, he couldn’t help himself. He got…excited.

  Excited the way only a sick and twisted person would get. He liked what he had done, not just the revenge aspect, but the killing as well. The killing alone. The power it gave him. The way it made him feel.

  He did it again. Quiet and reserved Tom Drummond had finally found a way in which he could be strong and powerful, not only with men, but with women, and since they were what he preferred, women became his victims.

  And the Hangman Murderer came into the world.

  He had been a Bible salesman, hadn’t he? Whether door to door or town to town made little difference. He was a salesman, and salesmen traveled back then. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, New York, New Jersey…until he finally stopped, maybe retired, maybe got too old to continue. Maybe he got careless and was nearly caught, and realized that he just didn’t have it anymore, so he hung up his…

  What, I wondered, do you hang up rope with? More rope?

  But no matter how tightly you lock up the tools of your trade, some feelings never die. They might sleep for a while, but they never really go away. And one dark day Tom Drummond wakes up in his bed in the Gates Home, and maybe it’s in a dream he has, or maybe it’s just a memory that something triggers, and he thinks about what it was like, that feeling, and something inside him whispers, Wouldn’t you like to feel that one more time…one more time before you die?

  And he isn’t afraid of God, because he’s done far too much in his life to worry about that now. And he isn’t really afraid of being caught, because what can they do when you’re old and dying anyway? What difference would a jail cell make to someone already imprisoned in a wheelchair and bound by his own decrepitude? Whatever the risk, he figures it’s worth it.

  He can’t hang anyone, true, but what’s hanging anyway except choking?

  Smothering.

  Smothering feeble old women who could never fight off even an old man’s arms, arms that had grown ever stronger as they did more and more of what his legs could not.

  Enid Shaw. Rachel Gold. And the looks of horror on their dead faces, the horror of the realization that they were being murdered.

  I sat there for I don’t know how long, nearly dulled into insensibility by this revelation I had constructed. As before, it was circumstantial, it was amorphous, it was a beast completely formed by my own imagination.

  And I was willing to wager severe embarrassment that most of it was true.

  I didn’t know who I could talk to at that time of night at the Gates Home, or even what I would say, but that didn’t stop me from reaching for the phone.

  When it rang with my fingers only an inch away from it, piercing the silence with its shrill tone, I jumped so high that Fudge panicked again, and his flailing paws as he gripped for a toehold scattered the photos and the yearbooks over the table and onto the floor. I sucked in a breath and lifted the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Livy?” I recognized the shaky but familiar voice.

  “Karen?”

  “I’m at the home,” she said. “Something really weird’s happened down here. Your mom’s okay,” she added quickly. “She wasn’t involved. But Tom Drummond’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. And it looks like Harold Newbury killed him.”

  Chapter 16

  The place was a madhouse, as you might expect. There were three police cars and an ambulance, with their lights all flashing like the Fourth of July. The city’s Fire Police, a gang of retirees who were always called in when there was traffic to direct or crowds to corral, were guiding cars around the emergency vehicles and keeping dozens of curious people (even at that time of night) from trying to cross the yellow police lines.

  I pushed my way to the front of the mob, and had just begun to explain that my mother was a resident, when I saw Karen coming out of the front door. I gave her a wave, she waved back, and told the seventyish Fire Police gatekeeper that I had the equivalent of a full access backstage pass.

  “What happened?” I asked as we hustled our way into the building. “Is Harold okay?”

  “I don’t know who’s okay,” Karen said. “We’re all a little crazy right now. But Harold’s not hurt—doesn’t seem to be anyway.”

  “But Tom Drummond’s dead?”

  Karen nodded shortly. “Yeah.”

  “And what about my mother?”

  “The residential wing is quiet as a mouse. Nobody knows a thing there. Your mom is probably still sleeping.”

  As we walked down the hall of the constant care wing, I saw Dave Hutchins come out of a room near the end. He was holding a clipboard and paused when he saw me. In spite of the circumstances he smiled. I smiled back, a bit thinly, wishing that I’d quickly brushed my hair before I’d left my apartment. When he glanced down at his clipboard, I gave my hair a quick swipe with my fingertips and earned a scowl from Karen. What a princess, I could actually hear her thinking.

  My thoughts got more serious when I saw two EMTs wheeling out a gurney with a covered form on it, and Karen and I froze in place as it headed down the hall toward us. “Tom Drummond?” I whispered to Karen, and she nodded. We pressed up against the wall as the gurney passed us. Although I looked, I was glad not to see any trace of blood on the sheet that covered the body. I guessed they’d slip it into one of those zippered body bags when they got to the ambulance. Or whatever. Such thoughts made it easier for me to deal with the fact that there was an old man I had known under there, even if he might have been a serial killer.

  “Hi, Livy,” Dave said. I could see he was glad to see me in spite of my briar patch of hair. “Bad stuff.”

  “I guess. So will someone please tell me what happened?”

  Dave turned and looked toward the end of the hall at what I now considered to be the Death Room. “All I can tell you—all I’m really sure of at this point—is that both Tom Drummond and Harold Newbury were in Room 124, in which two ladies live. Both of them are semi-comatose and conf
ined to their beds.” He looked at me. “They’re both all right, neither was harmed. But this Thomas Drummond is dead of a stab wound, and Mr. Newbury was in the room when his death occurred. He’s told us what he says happened, and there are some men in there now seeing if his story holds up.”

  “What did he say?” I asked. Dave paused for a moment, a sour look on his face, as if he were weighing the appropriateness of telling me classified information. “I’m going to find out anyway,” I said. “If you won’t tell me, she will.” I glanced at Karen. “And if not her, then Harold. We’re buds.”

  Dave sighed. “Okay. Harold Newbury says he followed Mr. Drummond into Room 124. When he went in, he found Drummond just starting to press a pillow down over one of the occupant’s…” he referred to his clipboard “…Mary Hamilton’s face. He tried to stop Drummond, and Drummond pulled out a knife and tried to stab Mr. Newbury. They struggled, Drummond’s wheelchair tipped over, and the knife went in right under Drummond’s ribcage, piercing his heart. Newbury then called for help until the nurse on duty, who had gone to the bathroom, returned, which apparently wasn’t very long. She got security, and they contacted us.”

  “Where’s Harold?” I asked.

  “They took him back to his room. There’s a doctor with him checking him out, but he seems unharmed. And Mrs. Hamilton’s okay too—or as okay as she usually is.”

  “Can I see Harold?”

  “Sure. He’s given his statement.” Dave cocked his head at me. “You know anything about all this, Livy?”

  I nodded. “Plenty. From what I just learned tonight, I think you’d be wise to believe Harold. I think that Tom Drummond was…” I was just about to say The Hangman Killer, but I stopped myself. I didn’t know if the night could handle any more drama, and the revelation could wait until the next day. “Well, I think there was more to him—more bad, that is, than met the eye.”

  “Care to elaborate?” Dave said, but I shook my head.

  “Maybe later. You can actually, what is it, take my statement?”