“Ah, well, you’ve left academic life and no longer imbibe academic jargon with your morning coffee. In this town it’s in the air we breathe. So what’s your version?”
“Just a biography. Nothing original at all.”
“What a shame. Well, I suppose we’ll have to stick with it, since you’ve already told one lie to the police. Changing to an entirely different one would complicate things. Okay, so we’ve dealt with that problem. I’ll start spreading the word this afternoon when I go to the supermarket, and it’ll be around in a day or two. Not, of course, that I believe for a moment that there’s a problem anyway. It is simply not on the cards that Kevin was murdered.”
“I think you’re mistaken about that, Mrs. Foley.”
Alan’s voice was calm, reasonable.
“I’m Peggy. Okay, so you’ve both said you’re convinced, and aside from that last little outburst, neither of you shows signs of certifiable insanity. What makes you believe such an unbelievable proposition?”
He methodically listed our reasons. The accidents. Kevin’s talk with Father Kennedy. The circumstances of Jerry’s death. “Too many coincidences,” he concluded. “A policeman doesn’t like coincidences.”
“Mmm,” said Peggy again, but it was a different kind of sound now. More like conditional agreement.
“Of course,” Alan added, “we could do with something provable.”
“What about Darryl Lacey? Can’t he help? He talks with a real country twang, I know, but he’s sharp.”
Alan and I sighed in unison. “It isn’t that we don’t think he’s a good cop,” I explained. “It’s just that he could be a suspect. I hadn’t told you about it yet, but Kevin made a list, you see.” I recited it.
“Aha! And he put ‘doctor’ on there, too. So what are you doing talking to me?”
I turned a little red, I think, but Alan’s aplomb was equal to the situation.
“We have eliminated your husband on the grounds that (a) he was not in town when Kevin contracted his illness, and (b) he is not the sort of person who could ever kill anyone. I admit that the latter would not stand up in court, but as my dear wife insists that she would sooner suspect me than him, and as I trust her judgment …” He made a charming, deprecating gesture and grinned, and after a moment Peggy grinned back.
“Okay. But Darryl—I think you’re all wet, suspecting him. Dorothy, we’ve both known him since he was a kid!”
“I know!” I ran my hands through my hair. “I don’t want to suspect him! And it would be much easier if we could clear him for certain and start working together. But that’s not as easy as it sounds. I’m getting very frustrated about all this, though Alan says we’re making progress.”
“You’re just too close to it, is all. Listen, Dorothy, you’ve written long letters to us, all about the stuff you’ve gotten involved in over in England, and I can read between the lines as well as anyone. There you could be objective. You were an observer. Oh, I know you’ve decided to live there and all, but—well, I hate to say it, but you don’t quite belong there the way you do here. Hillsburg’s your hometown, and your emotions are getting in the way.”
Alan had said much the same thing, hadn’t he? The trouble was, I was beginning to feel I didn’t belong anywhere, but I was going to have to take Alan’s advice—ignore my feelings and get on with the job.
“You’ll work it out,” Peggy was saying. “The game tomorrow will get your adrenaline going and use up a lot of emotional energy, and you’ll start looking at things with your usual jaundiced eye again.”
“Well, I must say! Jaundiced eye, indeed!”
“Your keen understanding of human nature, then, if you prefer it prettied up.” She stood. “Now, if I don’t get to the grocery, we’ll have no dinner, and no tailgate party tomorrow. You want to come with me, or relax?”
“We’ll come with you,” Alan said promptly, to my surprise. “I’ve never been in an American supermarket, and I’d like to see one.”
He was a bit disappointed, I think. The local supermarket chain has very nice stores, but they’re almost exactly like the big Tesco just outside Sherebury. I got lost once or twice in the aisles; they’d moved some of the departments since I’d been there last. When we got back we helped Peggy put things away, and then we repaired to our guest cottage, where I tried to explain American football to Alan so he wouldn’t feel left out the next day. We ended up collapsing on the bed in another bout of helpless laughter, and the sequel was very pleasant indeed.
We woke well before dinnertime. I felt refreshed and almost back in my right mind. “Alan, where’s the notebook? I think we need to bring it up-to-date so we’ll know what to ask Doc.”
We hadn’t made any entries for quite a few days now. I looked it over rather sadly. “Alan, I feel awful, writing down all this stuff about Jerry. Poor man! I think we should tear out everything about him.”
Alan nodded sympathetically. “He’s certainly out of the picture now, as a suspect. But we’ll leave these entries. Who knows, they may help one day to identify his killer. Now look, we haven’t filled in some of the interview sections.”
We added a few comments about the lawyer, Ms. Carmichael (“closemouthed, cagey about Kevin’s money”) and the niece, Mrs. Harrison (“needs money, bitter about Kevin’s will, bitter about life in general”). Mrs. Schneider got a note about her involvement in the Madison Tour of Homes.
“Not that that has anything to do with anything. In fact, nothing seems to have to do with anything. Are you sure we’re not spinning our wheels?”
“We’re gathering data,” said Alan, unperturbed. “Something like ninety-seven percent of all data collected for police reports is irrelevant.”
Somehow that didn’t make me feel one bit better.
“And we have a whole section we can fill in here,” he pointed out. “‘What happened to make Kevin suspicious?’ We have the answer to that now.”
I nodded. “The accidents. Let’s see, the car, the tricycle. His ankle. Was there anything else?”
“The telephone failures and the fire.”
“Oh, yes.” I wrote down the details. “Alan, we have to have dates for all this if we’re to make any sort of pattern.”
“We do, and how we’re to get them without help from the police—”
I had no answer for that. We went back to the main house for dinner.
It was Doc, of all people, who threw the small bombshell. He came home somewhat late, tired and as nearly cross as I’ve ever seen him.
“That idiot of a Boland!” he fulminated as he collapsed into his special chair. Peggy handed him a glass of lemonade—he’d long ago forbidden himself any alcohol other than a little wine with dinner—and made soothing noises. “Yes, Peg, but you don’t know what he’s done!”
“Then tell us, and get it off your chest. Can I get you another drink, you two?”
“No, we’re fine. What on earth’s happened, Doc?”
“He’s flown the coop, that’s what! Just left town, and with sick patients needing him. I had to fit some of them in this afternoon, and I may not make it to the game tomorrow, either. The nincompoop!”
My mouth dropped open. I looked at Alan. He cleared his throat and asked the question.
“How very curious! Did Dr. Boland tell anyone why he was leaving, or where he was going?”
“Not a word to anybody, not even his office staff.”
“What about his wife?”
“Doesn’t have one. Divorced, I think.”
“So how do you know …” I began slowly. “I mean, something might have happened to him. An accident, or he could be ill, or …” Thoughts of Jerry rose in my mind. I took a rather large sip of my drink.
“We figured it was something like that,” said Doc. “He’s got a housekeeper—maid—cleaning lady—don’t know what to call her. Anyway, she comes in every day to clean and do his laundry and cook his dinner and whatever, and she’s got a key. So Boland’s secretary calle
d her, and she went over there.” Doc gulped down half his lemonade and made a face. “I could sure use something stronger. Wish I weren’t such a good candidate for a heart attack.
“So the woman checked Boland’s clothes. They’re almost all gone, and so is all his luggage and his car. The Lord only knows why, but it looks as if he’s just flat out left home!”
“Oh, I think somebody besides the Lord might have an idea,” said Peggy, meaningfully.
“What? What d’you mean?”
“I think you’d better tell him, Dorothy.”
I took a deep breath. “It’s a long story,” I warned, and launched into it.
“So you see,” I finished, “it does look more than a little suspicious that Dr. Boland has disappeared this way. Though why he’d want to kill either Kevin or poor Jerry …”
I let the thought trail off. There was a little silence, and then Doc held up his glass. “Peggy, take this damn stuff away and bring me some scotch!”
16
WE thrashed it out over dinner.
“He died of pneumonia!” Doc said over and over.
“There’s no way Jim could have killed him.”
He was “Boland,” I noticed, when Doc was mad at him; “Jim” when he was being defended. I smiled a little grimly. I wasn’t so sure defense was appropriate.
“Potassium injected into the IV line,” I suggested tentatively. “That would have been easy for Dr. Boland to do.”
“So you know about that little trick, do you?” Doc growled. “That case up in Vigo County where the nurse killed all those people, that what you’re thinking about? Well, you can stop thinking about it. Even if we hadn’t taken a routine K-level—a potassium check—every so often, which we did, I ordered a private nurse for Kevin the last couple of days. He was never alone. Nobody put anything in his IV that wasn’t supposed to be there. I was with him myself the last couple of hours.” He glared at us, in response to a criticism nobody was making. “All right, there was nothing I could do, and I knew it, and I should have been tending to my business, but he’d been a friend for a long time! He died absolutely peacefully, and typically for pneumonia. His breaths were spaced farther and farther apart, and finally—the next one just didn’t come.” He lifted his glass of wine, took a sip, and applied himself to cutting his chicken into little pieces, which he didn’t eat.
“Forgive me for suggesting it,” said Alan, “but could Dr. Boland have caused Kevin’s pneumonia in some way? I’m quite ignorant about medical matters, but if he had another patient with pneumonia, could he perhaps have prepared a culture of some sort …?” He trailed off at the look on Doc’s face.
“Aside from the fact that it would be damn hard to do, there’s the fact that Jim had never met Kevin until shortly before he was admitted to the hospital. How do you think he’d have gotten a virus into him? And why?”
That, really, was the pivotal question. Why would Dr. Boland want Kevin, a man he didn’t know, dead? I ate my meal in silence, wild thoughts chasing each other around my head. Boland was a doctor. Kevin, in his younger days, had developed antibiotics. What if one of them had gone wrong somehow and killed one of Boland’s patients? But no, that was absurd. Boland was the younger man by forty or fifty years. By the time he had entered practice, Kevin’s discoveries had long since been replaced by more modern drugs.
Well, then, maybe Kevin knew something about Boland, something to his discredit.
“Where did Dr. Boland go to school?” I asked abruptly, interrupting an argument about medical ethics. “Did he do his pre-med at Randolph?”
“Not Randolph,” said Doc patiently, “but I have no idea where. He’s from the South somewhere. Got his M.D. at—I can’t remember, but one of the southern schools. Does it matter?”
“I thought he might have known Kevin years ago.”
“Still harping on the idea he might have killed him, are you? I tell you it’s impossible.”
“Okay. It’s impossible. But then why did he sneak out of town?”
There was plenty of speculation about that. “Trouble over a woman” was Peggy’s idea. “I’ve never liked him. He’s a cold fish, the kind who’d use a woman and then throw her away.”
“Perhaps he was involved in something illegal,” said Alan, thinking like the policeman he was. “The drugs trade would seem the most likely possibility.”
“I’m convinced,” I said stubbornly, “that Dr. Boland has a guilty secret of some kind. Kevin found out about it and threatened to tell. And no, I have no idea how Kevin was killed, but I’ll bet Dr. Boland was in it up to his neck.”
“Has anybody called the police?” Peggy asked.
“I did,” said Doc, “once I realized he was gone. They won’t do anything, just keep on saying it isn’t illegal to leave home voluntarily.”
“Unless you’re running away from something,” I said darkly.
“Well, legal or not, it’s still damned irresponsible! If they find out he’s left a lot of unpaid bills behind him, I suppose his creditors will be after him, but for now he’s free as a bird.”
We talked about it all evening, but nobody had any brilliant ideas. Alan and I took the discussion to bed with us.
“I want to find out about his past,” I said as we settled down to sleep. “That’s one thing that needn’t involve Darryl, thank goodness.”
“How do you work that out?” asked Alan, yawning.
“His diplomas will be in his office. I know enough about academia to know how to trace records back. I still know a lot of people in Randolph’s registrar’s office. By tomorrow afternoon I’ll know all about Dr. James Boland’s background, academically, at least.”
“Tomorrow,” said Alan with sleepy brevity, “is Saturday.”
“The registrar’s office is open Saturday morning—”
“And we are booked to attend a football game.”
“Oh. I forgot.” I sighed. “I suppose we have to go. But we could go to his office, first thing in the morning, and look up the diplomas.”
I paused for Alan’s reaction to that plan. My answer was a gentle snore.
I had managed, after several years away from it, to forget the bedlam that prevailed in Hillsburg on a football Saturday. There was no question of a visit, however brief, to Dr. Boland’s office. The traffic was moving like a nest of torpid snakes. I did think, when I first woke up, of asking Doc to check out the diplomas, but he had already left when Alan and I arrived at the house for breakfast.
“Hoping to get Jim’s patients out of the way before the game,” said Peggy. She slammed the refrigerator door with a violence that jiggled the dishes on the table. “Really, that man! The first Saturday Doc’s taken off in a month, and Boland has to go and spoil it!”
“Maybe nobody’s very sick, and Doc will make it to the stadium after all,” I said hopefully. I no longer had the slightest interest in the game, but I had worked out several new questions for Doc. “Now, what can I do to help?”
After a hurried breakfast we began work on a picnic lunch. Baked chicken—“We used to fry it, but Doc’s cholesterol is just barely under control, and I’m trying to bring it down”—salads, baked beans, vegetables and salsa for finger food, fruit, rolls, and a marvelous, rich-looking dessert. “Doc loves chocolate, and this one’s low-fat—believe it or not. Okay, that’s it, I think, except for the drinks, and they’re in the cooler in the van. Let’s pack it up and move it out.”
I looked at my watch. “Peggy, it’s ten o’clock! Surely we don’t need to start this early. It isn’t more than fifteen minutes to the stadium. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to eat an early lunch here and drive over afterward?”
She grinned. “You have become Anglicized! Have you forgotten how long it takes to get to campus on a football day? Or what the parking lot is like?”
I had indeed forgotten. I was quickly reminded. It was pandemonium, but we were early enough to claim our small piece of turf.
“What,” Alan asked mildly
, “are we to do for the next three hours? The game does not, I believe, begin until one-thirty.”
“First of all,” I said, taking his arm, “you buy a mum corsage for me and a pennant for yourself and a program for both of us.”
He had to be told about the traditional game souvenirs, but once he caught on, he gallantly insisted on buying one of the big corsages for Peggy, too. I, of course, purchased a black and orange hat, the kind sailors wear, featuring a large embroidered tiger. Then we worked our way through the program. Everything had to be explained to Alan.
“It sounds,” he said finally, “as though matters proceed rather slowly in this game.”
I turned to Peggy. “Have you ever, on your trips to England, watched a cricket match? They go on for days sometimes.”
For once, Alan was silenced.
We took a walk before lunch. It was a beautiful day, sunny and crisp, perfect weather for football or a stroll, and Alan hadn’t seen this part of the campus.
“This end hasn’t changed quite as much as where we were the other day. There’s the field house, where they used to have the basketball games before they built the new sports arena. Then this whole area here is the engineering part of campus.” I pointed at buildings in turn, reciting, “Mechanical, chemical, electrical, civil. There are some more tigers, see? On that gate.”
“I’m not sure I understand the purpose of the gate. There is no wall or fence.”
“No purpose at all. It’s a memorial to someone or other whose heirs thought it looked fancy. Now, this is the Biological Sciences Building.”
Alan squeezed my hand. “Where Frank used to teach.”
“And Kevin.”
We said nothing more on our way back to the stadium.
We didn’t wait lunch for Doc. He arrived, somewhat breathless and red-faced, just as we were thinking about dessert.
“Decided it was easier to leave the car where it was and walk over,” he explained. “Managed to get rid of the last patient half an hour ago. Kid with measles. They’re bad this year; I just hope he didn’t give them to everybody else in the office. Oh, and Dorothy, I took a look at Jim’s diplomas for you, since you were so het up about his background. He got his B.S. at the University of Virginia and his M.D. at Johns Hopkins. Don’t know where he interned.”
Killing Cassidy Page 13
