Murder Old and New

by Chet Williamson

  “So I thought maybe I’d warn you, Livy…Livy Crowe…’cause I saw how you were a friend of his, of that Harold Newbury.”

  Oh God.

  “But I couldn’t tell you who it was ’cause I didn’t want him thinkin’ I turned him in or nothin’…”

  I knew it. As soon as he said he was reading a book.

  “So I just sent you that note, said to be careful, and thought maybe you’d sort it out from that. But I don’t think you did. So I’m gonna have to take care of it myself, I guess.”

  Harold.

  He as much as told me himself, reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the most famous example of a mystery in which the narrator, the detective’s right-hand man, the Watson to my Sherlock Holmes, is actually the killer.

  Harold Newbury.

  I jumped out of bed and ran to my closet, while Tom Drummond continued… “I’ll follow him, try and stop him…and I’ll give this tape to that Martha Myers to give to Livy Crowe in case somethin’ happens to me…”

  I yanked Harold Newbury’s wooden box off the top shelf of my closet and took it close to one of the candles.

  “Then at least you’ll know and maybe stop him before he does something again…”

  I tried to open the little hasp with my fingertips, broke a nail, and cursed.

  “That’s all, I guess. Except to say…I’m sorry for what I did. I’m really sorry…”

  There was nothing more, just the ambient whirr of the tape going around. I opened the little drawer of my bedside table and found a metal nail file, stuck the end under the copper hasp, and pushed hard. The hasp broke, opening the box, the contents of which tumbled onto my bedspread.

  There was a small velvet bag, a pair of dirtied and blood-stained women’s panties which had once been white, a decorative glass deer that I instinctively knew had belonged to the late Enid Shaw, and a small sealed envelope.

  I opened the bag first and let the contents fall onto the bed. There were over a dozen small, yellow, oblong objects, and though I had never seen a finger bone stripped of flesh, I was sure that was what they were.

  Then I ripped open the envelope. There was a small note card, and handwritten on it in blue ink were the words:

  Hello, Livy —

  Tell me, was it a surprise to see your mother gutted and awash in her own blood? And in mine?

  Till we meet again, my deepest love,

  Harold

  I didn’t just sit there like a stunned ninny. I grabbed the phone right away and pressed 911 on the handset’s keypad. But when I held it to my ear, I heard nothing—no dial tone, no ringing, no busy signal. Just a silence as black and dead as that which now came from the microcassette recorder. Whatever had taken down the power lines had killed the phone lines, too.

  I said another word my dear, endangered mother would have hated to hear me use, and scuttled out to the kitchen where I’d left my purse. Digging into it until my fingers wrapped around my cell phone, I yanked it out and hit the button, but nothing happened, and I remembered the battery status warning I’d received earlier in the evening. Dead. Dead phone, dead cell phone, and the only outlets into which I could plug the charger were also dead.

  I wished that I’d sprung for the extra thirty bucks for a car charger, but I hadn’t. So, since I couldn’t call the police or the Gates Home, I was going to have to do this myself, and that meant that I had to get there. Maybe my van would do the trick, and if it didn’t, I’d walked there twice today, and I could do it again.

  But first, I thought, maybe I’d better have a plan when I got there, and that meant a gun. Back to my bedroom closet I ran, and rummaged around on the floor until I found the cardboard box with the .22 caliber pistol my father had given me years before when I’d gone out on my own. I’d objected to owning a gun, but Daddy told me that a woman living alone can’t be too careful, and that he wanted me to just hang on to it, keep it unloaded if I wanted, but to have it “just in case.” Yeah, just in case somebody knocked down my door and I had the time to dig it out of the closet and load it, the way I was doing now.

  I was more than a little rusty around firearms, and speaking of rusty, I hadn’t looked at the pistol since my dad gave it to me, and the years hadn’t been kind. It wasn’t really rusty, but it was a little hard to open the cylinder, and when I stuck in the bullets and turned it, it felt sluggish. I hoped it would work okay if I needed it, but most of all, I hoped I wouldn’t need it.

  I remembered what Tom Drummond had said on his tape about how a .22 was only good at close range, and I figured that Harold wouldn’t be flying in the air outside or anything, and then I felt awful for even thinking about shooting him, but I decided I’d do whatever I had to do, and then realized I was rambling and I’d just better get my ass in gear.

  My coat was still hanging downstairs where I’d left it to drip, so I blew out the candles, pulled on my Uggs, picked up the gun and flashlight, opened my apartment door…

  …and walked right into the clutching embrace of a large man standing outside it.

  Chapter 23

  I yelped and tried to bring up the hand with the gun, but Ted cried out “Livy!” and right away I knew it was him.

  “Oh my God, Ted!” I cried, relaxing just a bit. “What are you doing?”

  “Well, when the power went out, I started worrying about the store, so I decided to come over and make sure everything was okay—no leaks or anything—but I didn’t have a flashlight, so came up here to see if you had a…” He nodded at the flashlight in my left hand, then looked at my right and asked, “Is that a gun?”

  “Just come with me,” I blurted out as I went past him and headed down the stairs. Then I tried to explain everything at once, though I knew I was doomed to failure. “I’m going to the Gates Home. I just found out I was right about the deaths—they’ve been murders. Tom Drummond was the Hangman Killer—he confessed it in a tape I just heard…but he didn’t kill Enid and Rachel—that was Harold Newbury, and he’s planning to kill my mother!” I finished breathlessly, pounding down the stairs.

  “What?” Ted said, sounding not at all winded. “But…but how do you know that?”

  “From the note that Harold left me and a bagful of finger bones, okay?”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “The phones are down and my cell’s dead.” I stopped at the bottom of the stairs to put on my coat, and shoved the flashlight and gun into Ted’s hands to make it easier. He recoiled at the feel of the pistol, and I didn’t blame him. Then I froze. “Do you have your cell?”

  He shook his head. “Left it at my place.”

  “Shit.” I grabbed the gun back from him and jammed it in my coat pocket, then barreled through the back door with Ted at my heels. “Let’s try my van—maybe we can get it there.”

  As we struggled down the unplowed alley, I quickly learned that was a bad idea, and when we got to the tiny garage where I parked the van, I was sure of it. Two feet of snow lay heavily in front of the garage door so that we’d have had to shovel it out to even open it, and if we’d been able to, the van was just a van, not one of those magical all terrain badasses that could take snowboarders up the side of mountains like in the commercials.

  “Shit!” I repeated with more fervor than before. “We’re gonna have to walk!”

  I started back up the alley with Ted beside me. When we reached the street, we saw that, though it had been plowed a few hours before, there was still about ten inches of new snow on top of the packed icy stuff the plows had created earlier. As for the sidewalks, forget it. We started shuffling frantically down the middle of the street, which was bare of traffic.

  Ted edged himself in front of me. “Let me go first,” he said. “I can sort of clear a walking path for you…”

  I didn’t argue. Ted seemed tireless, and even with his breaking the trail, it was an effort for me to keep up with him. Thank God for these young guys, I thought, as I galumphed along. My legs and hips were really feeling the effort
of the previous two expeditions that day, and muscles I never even knew I had were screaming about their soreness. Still, we kept going.

  We’d covered about five blocks when we heard the snowplow coming up behind us. It was about a block away, and just as its headlights caught us the driver blared a warning sound on his horn. Ted stopped and turned around to look. “Keep going!” I panted.

  “Maybe he’ll give us a ride,” Ted said. “Worth a try!”

  He was right. Except for maybe the Batmobile, that big yellow municipal plow was the only vehicle that was going to be able to cover the ten more blocks between us and the Gates Home, and a whole lot faster than we could walk it. We stood our ground as the plow approached, ignoring the ever more insistent blasts on the horn (I wondered if this guy liked waking up everyone within a three-block radius), and making him come to a full stop just a few yards away from us.

  The driver was big and burly, with a beard like Grizzly Adams and an attitude like, well, a grizzly. He opened the door and leaned out of his elevated cab and yelled at us, “Get outta the way! What the hell you think you’re doin’?”

  Ted walked closer, but stayed in front of the plow so that the man wouldn’t drive on “We need a lift. It’s an emergency.”

  “What, I look like a cab to you? Now move!”

  I let Ted be the Tianamen Square guy blocking the tank while I shuffled through the snow around the side of the plow. “We’re trying to save a life here—my mother’s life. Someone’s trying to kill her!” I tried to not sound like a crazy person, but it didn’t work.

  “Yeah, right. Now tell your boyfriend to move or I’m gonna have to plow his ass off the street.”

  “I’m not moving till you listen!” Ted shouted over the roar of the engine.

  “When I move, buddy, you’ll move!” the driver said, and revved the motor, inching the plow ahead.

  I didn’t even know I was going to do it until I did, but I ripped off a glove, jumped up on the platform under the door, yanked the pistol from my pocket, and pointed it at the driver. “Stop!” I said, and he hit the brake so quickly that I almost lurched off, but somehow kept my footing.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” the driver said, both hands in the air. “Just take it easy, okay?”

  “Okay…and you take us ten blocks…” I pointed down the street with my free hand. “…straight ahead.”

  “Lady, look, I can’t do that!”

  I looked at the controls. They seemed simple enough—gears, a steering wheel, a clutch, a brake pedal. There were controls for the plow part that meant nothing to me, but the plow was already down, so what the hell, how hard could it be?

  “Then get out,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Out! Right now!” I stepped back so he could get by me, and he did, looking as though he couldn’t believe that I had the audacity and, dare I say, balls to hijack a city snow plow.

  As soon as he jumped down, I stepped into the cab and Ted came around, hopped up onto the platform and joined me inside. Just before I rolled the door shut the driver yelled up at me. “I’m callin’ the cops!”

  “Please do!” I said. “And tell them to come as fast as they can to the Gates Home at 328 North Duke Street! My name is Olivia Crowe!” I held up the gun and shrugged. “And I’m sorry about this—I wouldn’t have used it, really…” I slammed the door closed, locked it, and stuck the gun back in my pocket.

  “You know how to operate one of these?” Ted asked.

  “No, but at least it’s heated.”

  “Shove over,” he said. “I drove really big forklifts during the summers I was in college.”

  Ted eased himself into the tractor style seat, smoothly engaged the gears, and off we went, pushing tons of snow on the way. It was a hell of a lot faster than walking, I’ll give it that, and it also created an incredible feeling of power, being able to just shove that deep snow to the side and go muscling through.

  “I think we’re gonna be in a wee bit of trouble,” Ted said as we rolled along.

  “I think you’re right. Hopefully they’ll take the circumstances into account.” We were quiet for a moment. “And they’ll only give me five years instead of six.”

  “Us,” Ted corrected. “I’m in it too.” I gave his arm a squeeze and watched the street ahead.

  The speedometer read 20 miles per hour, which seemed fast for a snowplow. We might have gone faster if we hadn’t had to push the snow out of the way, but if the plow had been up, I think we’d have gotten stuck pretty quickly, so it was a moot point as it turned out. We progressed, slowly, but we progressed. And faster than if we’d been walking.

  Finally, the Gates Home was just a block ahead. There were electric lights on inside, and I figured someone had gotten their state-required emergency generator running. “Floor it,” I told Ted, then asked, “Can you floor it?”

  “Uh, nope. Actually, I’ve been flooring it the whole time.”

  Ted stopped the plow right in front of the main entrance, and I quickly pulled open the door, ran onto the platform and jumped off. Ted followed, but slipped on the icy metal. His ankle went out from under him, and he fell, first to the platform, then to the snow-covered street below.

  I paused to help him as he got to his feet, but as soon as he stood up, his right ankle buckled beneath him and he fell again. “Shit!,” he said, and then dropped the F-bomb twice for good measure. “Go on!” he told me as he once more pushed himself to his feet.

  I started to run as fast as I could up the drive and turned back to see him limping slowly behind me. “Go!” he yelled, and I went.

  I unlocked the outside door, pulled it open, and ran inside, not worrying about the snow dripping from my coat and my Uggs. Mother or Harold? I thought, then decided to go to my mother’s room and make sure she was all right. Harold could wait, the son of a bitch.

  As I ran, dripping mess that I was, past a puzzled nurse, I shouted to her, “Get security to the residential wing! Then get a cell phone and call the police—quick!”

  I didn’t wait, however, for any security guys, but ran through the lobby—really ran now, not clumped with every step as heavy as lead—and bashed through the door of the residential wing.

  I saw someone lying partway down the hall, a figure in a white dress with a light blue sweater. Genevieve Tucker.

  I ran to her and knelt beside her. She was still alive, but the front of her nurse’s uniform was soaked in blood. “Your mother…” she breathed out. “Hurry…”

  Chapter 24

  I didn’t have to be told twice. I ran down the hall to Mother’s room. I had left the door locked, but what I suspected to be Genevieve Tucker’s pass keys now dangled from the lock. I took the pistol from my coat pocket, turned the knob and went in.

  The room was unlit, and the curtains were open as if to let in the darkness. Beside the Maxfield Parrish night light, the only illumination in the room was from the light in the hall. But it was enough for me to make out the form of Harold Newbury, standing tall and naked against the window next to my mother’s bed, his clothes draped over the chair in which I’d been sitting earlier that night. He was holding a long knife that glinted when he looked up at me.

  “Livy…” he said softly, turning the knife so that it now threatened me. “You opened my box…”

  “Put down that knife, Harold,” I said, and pointed the gun right at him.

  “Go to hell, Livy. I’ll see you there…” And he started to bring up the knife.

  Without even thinking, I pulled the trigger, but it was as if it was mired in tar. The hammer came back only partway and would go no further. The goddamned old thing was stuck.

  Harold had paused, but now he knew what had happened and gave a cruel laugh, then raised his knife over my mother, ready to plunge it down.

  In that split second I knew I couldn’t cross the room and get around or across the bed in time to stop him, so I threw the gun at him as hard as I could. Too hard and too panicked, because I missed,
and it hit the window with a loud crack.

  But it was enough to make Harold hesitate just long enough for me to grab the nearest object within reach and take another shot. My fist clenched the smooth, round snow globe I’d been given earlier that night, and I threw a perfect fastball right at Harold’s head.

  It hit him with a crack louder than the gun had made against the window. Glass shards and water flew everywhere, and Harold Newbury dropped as though felled by a stroke.

  I crossed the few steps to the bed in a flash and looked down at Mother. Her eyes were partly open as though just awakening from her drug-induced sleep, and when she saw me, she frowned. “Livy?” she said dopily. “What are you doing here, dear?”

  “You okay, Mother?”

  “Well, of course…I was sleeping…what’s wrong? Why am I all wet?…. What’s this?” she said, picking up the knife that had fallen on her bed when Harold dropped it. “Livy, what’s wrong?”

  Nothing now, I thought as the night security guard burst through the door, with Ted right behind him. But I didn’t say it. Instead I rushed to Ted and the guard. “Watch him,” I told the guard, indicating Harold’s naked form sprawled on the floor, “and call an ambulance—and the police.” I grabbed Ted’s shoulder and headed into the hall. “Genevieve…” I said by way of explanation.

  “She told us to come in here,” Ted said, following me.

  Genevieve was lying where I’d seen her, and there was more blood now. I whipped off my coat and tried to stanch it, but she had lost a lot already. “Ted,” I said, “go get help—nurses…”

  He moved quickly down the hall in spite of his bum ankle, and I kept heavy pressure on the wound just under Genevieve’s heart. She was breathing raggedly, but her eyes fixed on mine. “…Your mother?” she breathed weakly.

  “She’s all right,” I assured her. “I stopped him before…”

  Relief briefly replaced the pain on her face. “Ah…thank God…”