I Scarce Can Die (Quill Gordon Mystery Book 5)

by Michael Wallace

  Forty feet ahead, leaning against the bridge railing on the downstream side, was a pale woman in a long white dress.

  At that distance, he could make out little more than the figure, but for some reason, it was less frightening than the footsteps. At least it was there. Pointing his flashlight toward the bridge planking, he began walking toward her.

  He was almost there when he realized he hadn’t heard the footsteps behind him. He raised the flashlight toward the white figure until he could see its face.

  It was Amy Hawkins.

  She turned to him, and as she did, he could see that the front of her elaborate white dress was dotted with reddish-brown spots, the color of dried blood, and that there was a particularly large splotch under her right breast.

  She raised her right arm, which held a gun, pointing directly at him.

  “Drop the flashlight, Gordon.”

  He did. The light rolled on the bridge and shined downstream.

  “Amy,” he said. “I should have known,” cursing himself in his head. I should have listened to Peter. He had the key to it all when he said Mrs. Schumer saw a real woman on the street.

  Amy was wearing a wedding dress, which was why it hadn’t been discarded even though it was covered with blood.

  “You wore that dress that night. When you killed Connie,” he said.

  “I didn’t go there to kill her. I wore the dress because I wanted to impress on her that she was sleeping with a married man, a man who had a wife he’d promised to be faithful to. A man who still had a slice of wedding cake in the freezer five years later. I thought if I made the point as strongly as possible, she’d let Kevin alone.”

  “But she didn’t, did she?”

  “She laughed. She laughed at me. Then she turned her back on me, like she was a queen and I was just some peasant. When I could buy her a hundred times over! The next thing I knew, the hammer was in my hand, and I was swinging it at her head.”

  For a man facing the wrong end of a gun, Gordon was surprisingly focused. Second-degree murder at most, he thought. Maybe even manslaughter if she has a good attorney, and her father can afford a good attorney.

  “I think people could understand that, Amy.”

  “Of course they’d understand. She stole my husband. And when I hit her, the blood flew everywhere, and she dropped like a rock. But she landed with her face up, and even in death, her face was sneering at me. I had to get the sneer off her face, so I used the hammer on her until it was gone. Anyone else would have done the same.”

  The night was cool, but Gordon was beginning to perspire. Forget manslaughter. This is an insanity case.

  “But once Connie was dead, it was all right again. Until you came along.”

  “It wasn’t all right, Amy. Gary Baxter was sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit.”

  “It was all right for Kevin and me, and that’s what mattered.”

  She had lowered the gun a bit while she was talking, but now she raised it again and pointed it directly at the middle of his torso.

  “And now that you know, you have to be dealt with, too.”

  Gordon’s hearing was surprisingly good for a man facing imminent death. As she was raising the gun, he thought he heard a couple of light footsteps behind him. Had enough time gone by that Peter was now returning from his meeting?

  Amy apparently heard them, too, and looked to her left and Gordon’s right.

  A sensation of stark terror changed the contours of her face. She cried out — a high-pitched, hold-nothing-back, blood-curdling shriek.

  “Oh, God! No! NO! Go away!”

  With visibly shaking hands, she swung the gun to her left and fired six shots in quick succession at a point behind Gordon and to his right.

  When she fired the first shot, Gordon took a quick step to his left and looked back in the direction she was shooting. His jaw dropped in amazement.

  She had emptied the gun before he could move again, but he reached out and put an iron grip on her right wrist. Her entire body was shaking, and she dropped the gun. It landed on the bridge with a loud clatter in the silent night.

  “Oh, God,” she wailed again, and dropped to her knees, her body going limp.

  Gordon dropped to his knees as well and shifted so that he was holding her hands in his. They knelt, as if in prayer, heads bowed, facing each other.

  “You need to confess, Amy,” he said softly. “You need to tell the truth. The whole truth. It’s the only way you can move beyond this. Start with Basil Dill. Why did you kill him?”

  “He called Kevin that afternoon and asked him about a conversation Kev had with Connie.” Probably the one Stephanie Pope described, Gordon thought. “If he remembered that, I knew he’d remember hearing me tell Connie I’d kill her if she didn’t leave my husband alone. He had to be stopped.”

  So Dill had known more.

  “But how did you know about the call? Kevin said he didn’t tell anyone about it.”

  “He didn’t, but the conversation was on a speaker phone, and I was in the office.”

  Gordon grimaced. Kevin had been playing him, trying to direct him toward Harrison instead, and he hadn’t picked up on that any more than he’d picked up on the significance of Clara Schumer’s sighting.

  “So that’s why Basil Dill had to die?”

  “Yes,” she whimpered. “That, and because he gave my part to Connie.” She raised her voice in anger. “I was supposed to play Tracy.”

  Gordon heard the sound of a speeding car in the distance and fervently hoped it belonged to the sheriff’s department.

  “Amy,” he said in a soft voice, “when you fired those shots just now, who were you shooting at?”

  “It was Maria. She’s been everywhere since Connie died.”

  “No, Amy, that wasn’t Maria you were shooting at. You may have thought so, but you were wrong.”

  “Then who was it?”

  Before he could answer, they heard the sound of a car screeching to a halt on the town side of the bridge. Instead of dim starlight, the bright headlights and flashing blue and red lights of a sheriff’s patrol car lit up the scene. Two men jumped out of it, and the one on the driver’s side motioned the other to stay behind. He advanced on them, hand on his gun, and Gordon saw that it was Scott Burroughs. He stopped ten feet away from them, gave them a hard look, then surveyed the rest of the scene.

  “What the hell is going on here?” he finally said.

  Amy stood up. When she spoke, her voice was cool and firm.

  “I want to make a confession,” she said. “I killed Connie Baxter and Basil Dill, and whoever is lying on the bridge there. I don’t want a lawyer, and I’m prepared to accept the consequences of my actions.”

  Burroughs looked where she had pointed and turned to the patrol car.

  “Brooks!” he shouted. The other deputy, who could not have been more than 22, ran up. “Cuff her, Mirandize her, put her in the back of the car, and call for help while I try to sort this out.”

  He led Amy off, and Burroughs turned toward Gordon.

  “What happened? Make it quick, while you have a sympathetic ear.”

  “Amy was lying in wait on the bridge. She may have disabled my car and she was ready to kill me because I knew too much. And she confessed to killing Connie and Basil Dill.”

  “What was the mess on the front of her dress?”

  “If you run a lab test, I suspect you’ll find it’s dried blood that matches the DNA of Connie Baxter’s. Amy said she wore it that night. “ He pointed at the gun lying on the bridge. “This is what she just fired. I haven’t touched it, and she wasn’t wearing gloves, so handle it carefully. Her prints have to be on it, and you’ll probably find it’s also the gun that shot Basil Dill.”

  They heard the sound of an approaching siren, and Gordon knew time was running out.

  “Make it quick,” Burroughs said. “How did she shoot at you six times and miss?”

  “Easy. She didn’t shoot at me. S
he thought she saw Maria Valdez, the woman hanged on this bridge in 1852.”

  “Nuts,” Burroughs said. “Nuts. You and she were the only people on the bridge, and there’s nothing where she pointed just now. Did you see what she was shooting at?”

  Gordon nodded. “I turned to look while she was firing the gun.” He paused to consider the phrasing of the next sentence. Another patrol car squealed to a stop at the bridge, and two doors slammed. Gordon looked Burroughs in the eye.

  “I didn’t see a thing,” Gordon said.

  Interlude: Wednesday April 21, 1999

  (From the Canyon Call)

  After a daylong hearing, Judge Richard Collingwood Monday found Amy Hawkins, 32-year-old native of Dutchtown, mentally incompetent to stand trial on two counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.

  He ordered an evaluation to determine in which state mental institution Hawkins should be committed.

  In the most celebrated criminal case Dutchtown has seen since the Gold Rush days, Hawkins was arrested the night of Oct. 24 after firing six shots at a San Francisco man, Quill Gordon, on what is commonly referred to as Maria’s Bridge over Dutch Joe Creek. The attempted murder charge stems from that incident, in which, unaccountably, she failed to hit him with any of the six shots, fired at extremely close range.

  That story then took an even more astonishing turn.

  Hawkins, daughter of Dutchtown’s prominent Harrison family, was “in a state of extreme emotional breakdown” at the time of her arrest, Deputy Sgt. Scott Burroughs testified at Monday’s hearing. Burroughs and his partner were first on the scene after being called in response to reports of multiple gunshots in the area.

  When they arrived, Hawkins immediately confessed to the murder of Connie Baxter, bludgeoned to death with a hammer in her home in September 1996 and to the slaying of Basil Dill, director of the Acorn Summer Theater, two days before the incident on the bridge.

  The sheriff’s department was initially skeptical of the confessions but changed its view when laboratory evidence came back.

  It shortly transpired that the only fingerprints on the empty, just-fired handgun found next to Hawkins on the bridge that night were hers, and ballistics tests subsequently confirmed that it was the weapon used in the fatal shooting of Dill.

  That was the first bombshell. At the time of her arrest, Hawkins was wearing a white dress, subsequently confirmed to be her wedding dress, and it was covered with what appeared to be old blood spatters.

  DNA testing at a state lab confirmed that the blood was that of Connie Baxter, and forensic experts said the pattern of it was consistent with the sort of spattering that would have occurred when Mrs. Baxter was killed with a savage blow from a hammer.

  At the time of Mrs. Baxter’s murder, her husband, Gary, had been arrested for the crime and was convicted by a jury early the following year of second-degree murder.

  Gordon had been in Dutchtown on a fishing trip and had also been doing some preliminary work for an advocacy group called Not Guilty Northern California (NGNC), which had received a request to look into the Baxter conviction.

  He apparently was getting close to what authorities now consider to be the motive for Connie Baxter’s murder — that Hawkins felt Mrs. Baxter had been toying with the affections of Kevin Hawkins, her husband, and that she held a resentment against Mrs. Baxter for winning the lead role in the Acorn Summer Theater production, The Philadelphia Story.

  The working theory is that Hawkins shot Dill to keep him from telling Gordon about things he had seen or heard during production of the play and that she subsequently decided Gordon knew too much and lay in wait for him on the bridge that night.

  At Monday’s hearing, three psychiatrists who had examined Hawkins testified that she had been in a near-catatonic state since the Oct. 24 incident on the bridge and that she was not capable of participating in her defense in any meaningful way.

  That unanimity of testimony left Judge Collingwood with little choice but to reach the decision he did, and also leaves some questions that may never be answered.

  There now remains one final matter to be dealt with: the apparent wrongful conviction of Gary Baxter for the murder of his wife. His trial attorney Bradford Pope, with the assistance of attorneys from NGNC, has filed a petition of habeas corpus, asking that Gary Baxter’s conviction be overturned. Judge Collingwood has set a hearing on that motion for Thursday May 5.

  Finally, one other loose end in connection with the two murders was tied up this week. Basil Dill’s slaying in October had left the future of the Acorn Summer Theater in doubt, as he was its founding artistic director.

  The Canyon County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a contract for Carla Thibaud, principal at Dutchtown Realty, to serve as both managing and artistic director for the theater’s 1999 season.

  Thibaud, well-known locally for her elaborate karaoke performances, has announced that casting tryouts will be held in late May for this summer’s production, The Man Who Came to Dinner. (See full story page 7.)

  Epilogue: Friday May 7, 1999

  TWELVE OF THEM, the same number as a jury, waited by the gallows for the prisoner to arrive. They had moved across the parking lot to avoid the TV crews from Sacramento and San Francisco, as well as reporters from half a dozen newspapers, who were hovering by the front door of the courthouse, hoping to interview Gary Baxter as he walked out a free man.

  No one was sure how long it would take to complete the paperwork and other formalities, so they stood there, absorbing what warmth they could from the pale sun dimmed by a high layer of thin cloud cover. The assemblage included Gordon, Peter, Elizabeth, Melissa McConnell and Clarence Jefferson from NGNC, Bradford Pope, Nell Quinn, Scott Burroughs (off duty), Carla Thibaud, Joey Vargas, Leonard T. Vincent, and Gloria Vincent, nee Fenwick. A free-floating conversation was in progress.

  “Kevin got canned at the first of the year,” Joey Vargas said. “No one was surprised. Not after it came out that there was something going on with him and Connie.”

  “You know,” Peter said, “My father always used to say that a man who marries for money earns it in the hardest way possible. True for Kevin, don’t you think. He had to live with an unstable woman, and later on, he had to try to cover up for her. He faked out Gordon, for sure.”

  “He did,” Gordon said. “He was a better actor than I realized.”

  “Even so,” Carla said, “he seems to have landed on his feet. He got a good job at Green Valley Lumber and Hardware, and I’ve heard from another real estate agent that he’s been seen going out with the boss’s daughter.”

  There was a silence before Elizabeth said:

  “What did Dr. Johnson say? The triumph of hope over experience.”

  A few of them giggled nervously.

  “So, Gordon,” Carla said. “Have you seen Maria on this visit to Dutchtown?”

  “No, I haven’t. I hope I’m done with her.”

  “What’s going on with that?” Gloria asked. “I didn’t hear about it until afterward. You were seeing a ghost?”

  “Yes,” said Carla.

  “He thought he was,” Peter said, overlapping her.

  “I really don’t know,” Gordon said. “The sighting on the bridge Wednesday night could have been Amy. It was dark and I didn’t get a good look, and she may never be able to answer the question. But the woman in the window of the house and the woman in the meadow at Scopazzi Creek were definitely not Amy.”

  “Let’s examine this calmly and in the light of day,” Peter said. “Assuming the first sighting on the bridge was Amy, we have three separate phenomena that need to be explained: The woman in the window, the woman in the meadow, and the footsteps Gordon heard following him that last night.

  “Let’s take the easiest one first — the footsteps. The night before, Elizabeth had told Gordon about a famous ghost story where a man is followed by ominous footsteps. The next night — the night he heard them — he was reading from Ezra Pierce’s
journal about Dutch Joe Benkelman hearing footsteps. Then Carla told him to get out of town early. Under those circumstances, anyone with half an imagination — and Gordon has a good imagination — could be expected to hear things on a deserted, desolate street. I think we can pretty safely chalk up the footsteps to autosuggestion.

  “That leaves the two sightings, and the question is, what did they have in common? Answer: Gordon was fishing at the time. I don’t know how many of you are fly fishermen, but it’s an extremely demanding sport, requiring total concentration. Almost like performing a surgery. An angler with a fly rod is practically in a trance-like state after a while, and when he comes out, it can take a minute to adjust to surroundings. That was where Gordon was during those two sightings, both of which, remember, were very brief. So I think the most likely explanation is that he misinterpreted what he saw at the house and had that image of the woman in the back of his mind during the second sighting at the meadow. In other words, a rational explanation.”

  “Nope. Nope. Nope,” Carla said. “Sorry, Peter. Not buying it. Too many people in this town have seen Maria, and I’ve shown that house to several prospective buyers who were clearly aware of her presence. And I don’t think he imagined those footsteps, either. I think Maria was following him and was protecting him.”

  Peter took a deep breath and looked poised to attack, then exhaled.

  “Perhaps we should agree to disagree,” he said.

  “But what did Amy see on the bridge that night?” Gloria said.

  “Only she knows,” Gordon replied. “When she swung the gun away from me and started shooting, my first thought was that she’d seen Peter come back from — well, coming home. But I turned before she stopped shooting and was stunned to see she was firing into thin air. I’m guessing she saw Maria in her head, but there was nothing there.”

  “I wonder, though,” Len said. “I don’t know anything about ghosts, and am skeptical about such things. But I have to feel that Maria’s wrongful lynching, so early in the town’s history, left an unsettled air, perhaps even a psychic one, over Dutchtown. Does anyone else think that’s possible?”