by Mike Ashley
“So they pulled the painting across the street on a string?”
“No. Remember, Feodore wasn’t supposed to be there. On the day of the theft Paula waited until ma and pa Czeppski left, and then tied a rope – I’d guess a one-inch braided nylon line from a naval supply store – to one end of the monofilament and pulled it through. It looped around the lamp rod and returned, and she tied both ends off. Then, using the curtain rod from the Czeppskis’ apartment for balance, she walked across the rope with the picture strapped to her back. Remember, the Czeppskis had a circus act. What do you want to bet that Paula was a high-wire performer in that circus?”
“Son of a bitch!” Junior remarked.
“She went in through the picture window. The glass pane, I assume, had been previously loosened in its frame. There were two little circles on the glass where she used one of those suction clamps to hold the pane. The old wallpaper on the living room wall had been peeled back, and a hole cut in the plaster and lathe to hold the St Simon. Then she pasted the wallpaper back down. Which, presumably, is when Feodore walked in.”
“If he was there to steal the painting and run off by himself, why didn’t he wait?” Junior asked.
“He did wait,” I told him. “The painting was supposed to have been delivered the day before, but it was held up in customs. So the robbery was scheduled for the day before. He didn’t know it had been changed.”
“So she shot him and went back out the window.”
“Right. Then she put the glass pane back and smeared some putty around the outside to hold it in place – I found a dab of putty on the window sill. She may have even stuck some framing around it or even a nail or two. It must have taken two or three minutes – and all the time a crowd was banging at the front door.”
“The lady has good nerves,” Junior commented.
“I’d say so. She walked across an eighty-foot length of rope both ways pretty much in the dark. Then when she got back to her apartment she had to put the curtain pole back and rehang the curtains. And in the dark – she couldn’t turn the lights on in case someone saw her standing in the window and wondered what she was doing – she missed one of the rungs on the curtain. Then she coiled up the rope and dropped it out the window.”
“That’s quite a story,” Junior said. “Any more to it?”
I shrugged. “I guess that’s pretty much it. Then she stripped down to something brief and clinging so the building staff could see she that she wasn’t leaving with the St Simon, and went out for a night on the town. If I hadn’t picked up on a few little pointers – the curtain rung, the coil of rope on the roof of the garage, the plaster dust – she might have gotten away with it.”
Junior mused for a minute. “She probably left fingerprints all over that room,” he said. After all, she wasn’t planning to kill anybody. But her prints probably aren’t on file anywhere here in the ‘states, and there wasn’t anything to connect the two apartments except proximity. You’re right, if Gibson hadn’t asked you to look things over, she might have walked away from it. What made you suspect her in the first place?”
“She got a little too talkative and nasty when I was looking out the window. I thought she was trying to distract me by getting me mad, and I wondered just what she was distracting me away from.”
Junior drank up his pear brandy and went over to pick up the St Simon. “I’ll put this in the safe,” he said. “You go home and get some sleep. If Fid Must doesn’t find some way to renege on the bonus, I’ll see that you get most of it.”
“More than I expected,” I told him, “but welcome just the same.”
THE PROBLEM OF THE CROWDED CEMETERY
Edward D. Hoch
Edward D. Hoch (b.1930) is a literary phenomenon. He has written over 800 short stories since his debut with “Village of the Dead” in Famous Detective Stories for December 1955. This, in an age when the all-fiction magazine has all but curled up and died. He has had a story (sometimes more) in every issue of the prestigious Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (or EQMM for ease) since May 1973, a record which surely can never be equalled by anyone in any magazine. What is even more amazing about Ed Hoch is his versatility. Despite this awesome level of production his stories still manage to be original and enjoyable. He is able to ring the changes on every idea in the book. Quite a number of his stories have been impossible crimes — more than any other writer’s. I mention many of these in my afterword. His best known series of impossible crimes are those narrated by New England doctor Sam Hawthorne, who looks back over his long life and tells the stories of the many strange crimes with which he was involved. The series began with “The Problem of the Covered Bridge” EQMM, December 1974) which is set in March 1922. The early stories have been collected as Diagnosis: Impossible (1996). I’ve selected a later story that has not been reprinted since its first outing, and which deals with the most remarkable mystery of how a freshly dead body ends up in a long-buried coffin!
I used to picnic in Spring Glen Cemetery in my younger days (Dr Sam Hawthorne told his visitor over a suitable libation). That was when the place was more like a park than a cemetery, bisected by a creek that flowed gently through it most of the year. It was only in the spring, with the snow melting on Cobble Mountain, that the creek sometimes overflowed and flooded part of the graveyard.
That was what happened following the especially harsh winter of ’36. The flooded creek had so eroded the soil on its banks that several acres of cemetery land had been lost. I was a member of the cemetery’s board of trustees at that time and when we met in the spring of 1939 it was obvious something had to be done.
“It’s just been getting worse for the past three years,” Dalton Swan was saying as he showed us photographs of the damage done by the flooded stream. He was the tall, balding president of the board, a rotating responsibility each of the five members had assumed at one time or another. Swan, a fiftyish bank president, was in the second year of his two-year term.
I shuffled the pictures in my hands before passing them to Virginia Taylor on my right. Aware of the cemetery’s shaky financial underpinnings, I asked, “Couldn’t this go another year?”
“Look at these pictures, Sam,” Dalton Swan argued. “The Brewster family gravesite is almost washed away! Here, you can actually see the corner of a coffin among these tree roots.”
“Those coffins need to be dug up and moved,” Virginia Taylor agreed. She was a tall, athletic woman in her thirties whom I often glimpsed on the tennis courts around town. The Taylor family had made their money growing tobacco all over the state of Connecticut but all it had earned them was the largest family plot in Spring Glen Cemetery.
We discussed it awhile longer, with Randy Freed, a trustee and the cemetery’s legal counsel, suggesting we give it another month. “We simply can’t justify this expense if there’s another way out.”
Dalton Swan scoffed at that. “The only other way is to let the Brewster coffins float down Spring Glen Creek. That what you want?”
Freed bristled, more at Swan’s tone of voice than at the words. “Do what you want,” he grumbled.
Swan called for a vote on the motion to move the endangered coffins. “I’ve already spoken with the Brewster family. They’ll sign the necessary papers.”
Miss Taylor, Swan, and I voted yes, along with Hiram Mullins, a retired real-estate developer who rarely spoke at our meetings. He sat there now with a sad smile on his face, perhaps remembering better days when creeks did not overflow their banks. The only negative vote came from Randy Freed.
“We’ll proceed, then, as quickly as possible,” Dalton Swan said. “Gunther can have the workmen and equipment here in the morning.” Earl Gunther was the cemetery’s superintendent, in charge of its day-to-day operation.
“You’re making a mistake rushing into it like this,” Freed told us. “A truckload of dirt tamped down along the bank of the creek would be a lot easier than relocating those coffins.”
“Until it washed a
way with the next heavy rain,” Swan argued. “Be practical, for God’s sake!”
It did seem to me that the lawyer was being a bit unreasonable and I wondered why. “If it’ll help matters any,” I volunteered, “I can be out here in the morning when the workmen arrive, just to make certain nothing is touched but the Brewster plot.”
“That would help a great deal, Dr Hawthorne,” Virginia Taylor agreed. “We’d all feel better if there was some supervision on this besides Earl Gunther.”
The superintendent had not been a special favourite of the trustees since a pair of his day labourers had been found drunk one morning, finishing off a quart of rye whiskey on the back of a toppled tombstone. Sheriff Lens had been called by some horrified mourners and he’d given the two a choice of thirty days in jail or a quick trip out of town. They’d chosen the latter, but the matter had come to the board’s attention. Earl Gunther had been warned to stay on top of things if he wanted to keep his job.
After the meeting we sought him out in the house near the cemetery gate. It went with the job, though his office was in the building where we met. Earl’s wife Linda ushered us in. “Dear, Dr Hawthorne and Mr Swan are here to see you.”
Earl Gunther was a burly man with a black moustache and thinning hair. He’d been a gravedigger at Spring Glen for years before taking on the job of superintendent. None of the board had been too excited at the prospect, but he seemed to be the best man available. He was newly married to Linda at the time and somehow we felt she might help straighten him out. She had, but not quite enough.
The Spring Glen board of trustees only met quarterly. This April meeting would be our last till the traditional July outing at Dalton Swan’s farm. It wasn’t something that took a great deal of my time, and until now it had never involved anything other than the perfunctory board meetings. All that was about to change. “Dr Hawthorne will be out in the morning to oversee the disinterment and reburial,” Swan told the superintendent. “We don’t foresee any problem.”
Earl Gunther rubbed his chin. “T’ll get a crew lined up, with shovels and a block and tackle. There are six coffins in the Brewster plot. That’s gonna be an all-day job.”
“It can’t be helped. Someone from the family will be here for the reburial, probably with the minister.”
“We’ll do the best we can,” the superintendent informed us.
Dalton Swan nodded. “I’m sure you will.”
I drove back to the office where I had a couple of early afternoon appointments. “Any excitement at the meeting?” Mary Best asked, knowing there never was.
“Nothing much. I have to go out there in the morning while they move the Brewster plot. The creek’s just eating away at the banks.”
She glanced at my appointment book. “Shall I reschedule Mrs Winston for the afternoon?”
“Better make it Friday morning if you can. There’s no telling how long I’ll be out there.”
While I waited for my first patient I glanced at the newspaper headlines. Hitler was insisting on the return of Danzig and a war between Germany and Poland seemed a distinct possibility. Up here in Northmont such concerns were still far away.
Late that afternoon, as I was leaving my office, I saw Virginia Taylor coming out of the adjoining Pilgrim Memorial Hospital. She paused by her car, waiting till I reached her. “Will you be at Spring Glen in the morning?”
“I’m planning on it.”
“That’s good. The Brewster family is very concerned that the remains be moved in a dignified manner.”
“I’m sure there’ll be no problems. Whatever his other faults, Gunther is a good worker.”
She nodded and motioned back toward the hospital building. “I do some volunteer work here on Tuesdays. It makes for a full day when there’s also a board meeting.” She belonged to one of Northmont’s older families and spent much of her time with charitable causes. A few years back she’d been engaged to a young lawyer from Providence but they’d broken up, leaving her still unmarried. As often happened with unmarried women, her tennis and travel and volunteer work had managed to fill her life. The family tobacco business had long since been sold to others.
We chatted a while longer and then she went off in the sporty little convertible she drove around town. I’d had a car something like it in my younger days.
In the morning I drove out to the cemetery, arriving before nine. Earl Gunther had a flatbed truck parked by the Brewster plot, its back loaded with shovels and picks, a block and tackle, and a bulky tarpaulin folded into a heap. A half-dozen workmen were just arriving on the scene, walking over from the main gate.
“Good to see you, Doc,” Gunther greeted me with a handshake. “I’m using two crews of three men each. One will work on the creek side, digging into the bank. The other will dig in from the top to reach the other coffins. It’ll probably take all morning and maybe longer.”
I watched the crew by the creek as they shovelled away the soft dirt and cut through some of the tree roots with axes. The tombstones up above told me that the most recent of these graves was over fifteen years old, and a couple dated back to before the turn of the century. As one coffin finally came free an hour later the workmen hoisted it out with the block and tackle, guiding it onto the flatbed truck. After that the pace seemed to pick up. Before I knew it a second and third coffin had appeared on the flatbed, with a fourth being lifted from its resting place.
I’d wandered around the cemetery while the work was in progress, reading the names off the tombstones, remembering a few old patients whose lives I’d briefly prolonged. Finally, around noon, the last of the six coffins was pulled free of the tough oak roots that encircled it. I walked over to the truck as it was slid into place.
“Good work, Earl,” I told him. “It looks like just one or two of the corners were damaged.” These burials had been in the days before coffins were enclosed in metal vaults, and the older ones were showing evidence of their decades in the earth, even before the recent ravages of the flooded creek. Still, all six seemed to be reasonably sound. Or at least I thought so before my probing fingers encountered something wet and sticky at the damaged corner of one coffin.
“What’s this?” I asked Gunther. My hand had come away moistened by blood and for a moment I thought I’d cut myself.
“You bleeding?”
“I’m not, but this coffin is.”
“Coffins don’t bleed, Doc, especially after twenty or thirty years.”
“I think we better open this one up.” The lid was still firmly screwed down and my fingers were useless. “Do you have a tool of some sort?”
“It’s just bones,” the superintendent argued.
“We’d better have a look.”
He sighed and went to get some tools. The lid was unscrewed and easily pried open. I lifted it myself, prepared for the sight of decay. I wasn’t prepared for the bloody corpse that confronted me, jammed in on top of the stark white bones.
Impossibly, irrationally, it was the body of Hiram Mullins, who’d sat next to me at the board meeting not twenty-four hours earlier.
It was Sheriff Lens who offered the best commentary when he arrived to view the body less than an hour later. “You’ve really outdone yourself this time, Doc. How could a man who was alive yesterday end up murdered inside a coffin that’s been buried for twenty years?”
“I don’t know, Sheriff, but I damn well intend to find out.” I’d been questioning Earl Gunther and the workmen while we waited for the sheriffs arrival, but they professed to know nothing. Earl seemed especially upset, nervously wiping the sweat from his brow though the temperature was barely sixty.
“How’s the board goin’ to react to this, Doc? Will I lose my job?”
“Not if we can show you weren’t responsible. But you have to be completely honest with me, Earl. Had any of those graves been dug up during the night?”
“You saw the ground yourself, Doc, before they started digging. It hadn’t been touched in years. There’s no
way a coffin could have been dug up and reburied without leaving traces.”
“Did you know Hiram Mullins well?”
“Hardly at all. I saw him when he came to your board meetings, that was it. He seemed like a nice man. Never said much.”
That was certainly true, and I used virtually the same words to describe Mullins to the sheriff when he arrived. Sheriff Lens peered distastefully at the body in the coffin and asked, “What do you think caused the wound?”
“Some sharp instrument like a knife, only the blade seems to have been longer and thicker. There’s a great deal of chest damage and so much blood that it actually leaked out of this rotted corner of the coffin.”
“Good thing it did, or the Brewsters would have been reburied and Mullins along with them.” The sheriff had brought a camera with him and was taking some photographs of the crime scene. He’d been doing this recently, following techniques outlined in crime investigation handbooks. He might have been a small-town sheriff but he was willing to learn new things. “What do you know about Mullins?”
I shrugged. “No more than you, I imagine. He was around seventy, I suppose, retired from his own real-estate business. I never saw him except at the cemetery board meetings, every three months.”
“His wife is dead and they had no children,” the sheriff said. “But how do you think he got into that coffin, Doc?”
“I have no idea.”
When I got back to my office I looked through my bookshelves until I found an Ellery Queen mystery I remembered from seven years earlier. It was called The Greek Coffin Mystery and it dealt with two bodies discovered in a single coffin. But the second body had been added before the original burial. It didn’t help a bit with Hiram Mullins’s killing. His body had been added to a coffin already buried for two decades.
Before long my telephone started ringing. The word was getting around. First to call was Randy Freed, the lawyer who served as legal counsel for Spring Glen. “Sam, what’s this I hear about old Mullins?”
