AHMM, January-February 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Of course it is. And this sheet isn't evidence. I just happened to pick it up at Canavalt's office while I was making some notes from Roget's Thesaurus."

  "Working on a novel?” asked Kestrel, his deadpan expression adding bite to the sarcasm in his tone.

  "Those are the numbers that came through from something that was lying on top of the original letters,” explained Auburn. “They're also the numbers of entries in a forty-year-old edition of Roget's at Canavalt's office. And all those words appear in the letters."

  Back at his desk, Auburn looked up the phone number of the dental group in the Phoenix Medical Building. Then he called the office and, by giving a plausible imitation of a processing clerk working for a dental insurance firm, obtained verification that Simms had kept a long-standing appointment for a dental checkup at three thirty P.M. on Tuesday. The dentist had found a loose filling and had been able to work Simms into his schedule immediately to fix the problem. Simms had been spitting blood and gagging on the dentist's fingers at about the time Canavalt had been shot.

  After plugging this information into the Canavalt file on his PC, Auburn scrolled through the rest of it one more time before preparing to go home. Then something jumped off the screen at him. The person who answered his phone call to Jervis Academy was also preparing to go home, but fortunately had been with the school long enough to be able to answer his question without consulting records.

  When he checked out of headquarters around five, Auburn made it clear to the second watch commander that he was still working. Deciding to brave the slippery sidewalks instead of mingling in the rush hour traffic again, he walked from headquarters to the Underwood Apartments. Mrs. Canavalt seemed almost to have been expecting him. She looked less haggard than she had the day before, but also less composed.

  A potent aroma of freshly brewed coffee made the gilded cage seem somehow more homelike and visitor friendly today. When she led him to the living room, Auburn was somewhat staggered to find Mr. Donald Quick sitting there in the same plush chair that Portman had occupied on the previous evening, with a bone china coffee cup at his elbow rather than a shot of scotch.

  Mr. Quick expressed no surprise at seeing him and made no move to leave. “Please don't hesitate to proceed with the formalities, Sergeant,” he said. “I'm here on practically the same errand you are."

  "I'm afraid he's right,” said Mrs. Canavalt. “Let's get it over with."

  "I don't know if we're all talking about the same thing or not,” said Auburn, looking from one of them to the other in bewilderment. “You're aware, aren't you, Mrs. Canavalt, that your lawyer brought me five letters at headquarters this morning that he had found among your husband's papers at the office?"

  "Yes, I'm aware of that."

  "I believe you wrote those letters yourself on the computer at your husband's office. You took along different paper and you looked up some words in an old thesaurus on the shelf over the desk. And you deliberately made mistakes in the Latin so that no one would suspect you of being the writer, considering that you used to teach Latin."

  She was staring at a dark window with eyes full of tears. “Yes, I wrote them. Mr. Quick assured me you'd eventually figure that out, but I didn't expect you to get here so fast."

  Auburn tried to keep his tone neutral. “What exactly was your reason for writing the letters, ma'am?"

  "It all seems so stupid now. I wrote them to keep B. J. from running for state senator. Because he said if he got elected he'd move to the capital and let Simms carry on the business here."

  "You objected so strongly to moving that you sent your husband death threats?” Auburn asked. Mrs. Canavalt toyed with her rings but made no reply. “Does Portman know who wrote those letters?"

  "Of course he doesn't. I did everything I could think of to keep him from showing them to you."

  "Everything short of telling him who wrote them. I hope you understand why I have to ask you where you were at four thirty yesterday afternoon."

  "I do and I don't. How you could think I'd be capable of shooting my own husband...” Instead of finishing the sentence she just shook her head and shrugged. “Yesterday afternoon,” she said, “I chaired a meeting of the Council for Retarded Citizens at the courthouse annex—a very painful and frustrating meeting because our funding has been cut again. I had just walked in here sopping wet and emotionally drained when the policeman came to tell me that B. J. had been fatally shot."

  "If your presence at that meeting can be verified,” said Auburn, “we won't need to bother you any further. I'm sorry to have to put you through all this, but it's my job to follow up any leads that could help us identify Mr. Canavalt's killer."

  "She understands that,” said Mr. Quick pacifically, as if somebody had hired him to moderate the proceedings.

  Auburn turned to face him. “I still don't quite understand how you come into this, sir,” he said.

  "Quite simply. When you made copies of those letters, you didn't block out the name of the addressee. I knew that B.J. Canavalt had just been murdered, and that his wife was the former Henrietta Speedwell, my star Latin pupil from forty years ago—"

  "Forty-two,” said the former Henrietta Speedwell.

  "—who went on to get a master's degree in classics and taught Latin at Jervis Academy for seven years."

  "Mm-hmm.” Auburn was struggling to conceal his irritation. “I had the idea, though, that you and I were playing on the same team."

  "So we were,” insisted Quick, without betraying the slightest embarrassment, “so we were. I told you I believed those letters had been written by someone pretending to be a numskull in Latin, which he or she was anything but. And you came to the right conclusion, just as I knew you would. But I thought it my duty to forewarn Henrietta what was coming because I was convinced of her innocence even before I knew she was somewhere else when B. J. was murdered."

  "All the same, I can't help thinking I made a mistake by bringing you into the case."

  "Well then, cheer up! It's a good sign when you discover that you've made a mistake. It means you're smarter now than you were when you made it!"

  Auburn was finally remembering how very exasperating a teacher Mr. Quick had been, and why Spanish hadn't been his favorite subject. Making a mental note never again to call him in consultation, he got up to leave.

  They didn't offer him any coffee.

  * * * *

  The next morning's paper provided pretty strong confirmation of Grantley's alibi for Canavalt's murder by printing a photograph of the school group that had attended an all-day conference on juvenile drinking in Baltimore on Tuesday. There was Grantley grinning at him defiantly from the end of the row.

  A report from the ballistics laboratory confirmed that Canavalt had been shot with the Smith and Wesson .32 found at the scene. Efforts to trace the the revolver had so far failed.

  Later in the morning Auburn finally received a full report on the jacket and cap that had been found along with the weapon. A blacklight examination of the somewhat threadbare jacket had turned up marks identifying it as the property of Hopkins Uniform Rentals, a company that had gone out of business three years before. Kestrel's report included a seemingly endless list of particulate material found on the jacket and cap. No human hairs had been found inside the cap, and washings of the fabric had yielded no traces of BST.

  Auburn called Kestrel at the lab. “What's BST?"

  "Typeable human secretions—blood, sweat, or tears. Also saliva, nasal mucus—"

  "I get the picture. By the way, I noticed you found smears of cornstarch on the jacket."

  "Correct. Also inside the right pocket and on the cap."

  "Doesn't that look like somebody handled them after putting on or taking off a pair of rubber gloves that had been powdered with starch?"

  "Or vinyl gloves. Certainly does."

  "But you didn't find any gloves anywhere at the office?"

  Kestrel, as was his annoying habit, pretended to take thi
s as a statement rather than a question and didn't answer.

  "Is there any chance,” pursued Auburn, “that the gloves you had on—"

  "There is no chance. My gloves are free of all particulate material. And Stamaty's come from the same supplier."

  Auburn was edified to learn that Kestrel and Stamaty agreed on something. “How'd you like to go on a fishing expedition?” he asked.

  Kestrel was notoriously deficient in a sense of humor. “Not in this weather,” he said. “Or any other.” Auburn half expected him to add, “—at least not with you."

  "Well, listen to this. The killer planted the gun, the jacket, and the cap at the scene for a reason. For an equally good reason, he took the gloves away with him. But don't you think there's a fair chance he might have discarded those gloves somewhere on the premises?"

  "You mean like in a trashcan down in the lobby?"

  "If he was ever in the lobby. I'm guessing he went in on the mezzanine level from the parking garage and left the same way, so he wouldn't be seen by the guard at the desk."

  "Have you talked this over with the lieutenant yet?"

  "Not yet. I just thought of it in the last two minutes. I'll get back to you."

  It was after lunch before the search operation could be coordinated with the maintenance supervisors of the Bossart Tower and the parking garage. Auburn accompanied Kestrel and an assistant to the scene in the evidence van and spent the next hour helping them sort through the dregs of a culture obsessed with up-to-date information, disposable containers, carbonated beverages, and greasy food.

  In a rubbish barrel at the bottom of the parking garage stairwell they found a single pair of latex gloves turned inside out. Refusing to turn them right side out at the scene, much less to perform a field test for traces of gunpowder residue, Kestrel carefully bagged and labeled them for the lab.

  "Don't expect any fast answers,” he warned Auburn. “If these gloves were used in the homicide on Tuesday, they've been lying here in the cold for almost forty-eight hours. I'll have to fume them with cyanoacrylate before I can dust them for prints, and if there are any prints, getting decent pictures of them will be like juggling Jell-O. And if I try to make it easier by cutting the fingers apart, some defense lawyer will convince the judge and jury that that renders the evidence invalid."

  Friday dawned bright and clear but much colder. Shortly after ten o'clock Auburn met with Kestrel and Lieutenant Savage to review the evidence before crossing the street to the courthouse to apply for an arrest warrant. Finding no patrolman free to accompany him, he went alone to Portman's office after phoning to arrange a private meeting.

  He wasted no time on preliminaries. “Mr. Portman, I have a warrant for your arrest on the charge of having murdered B.J. Canavalt.” As he recited the Miranda warning, his usual emotional response to making a felony arrest—a wild mixture of elation and anguish—was amplified by his suspicion that the lawyer would somehow manage to weasel out of the charge.

  Portman seemed to divine his thoughts. “You've got some hard evidence or you wouldn't be here,” he said.

  Auburn told him about the rubber gloves with gunpowder residue on the outside and Portman's fingerprints on the inside.

  "Then nothing I say is going to make things any worse for me, so I'm going to explain my reason for putting down B. J. It wasn't business or politics. I just didn't want him to move out of town and take Henrietta any farther away from me than he already had."

  He was playing with things on his desk as if he thought he might not be seeing them again for a while. Auburn couldn't tell if his manner reflected the chagrin of defeat or if he was relieved that his crime had been found out so soon.

  "This had been brewing for a long time. Years. But it was B. J.'s plans for them to leave town that drove me to action. I had an idea at one time that I might sabotage his election campaign, but I could see that wasn't going to work. I decided to act while he was the object of a lot of public hostility—"

  "And letter writing?"

  Portman snorted contemptuously. “Those confounded letters Henrietta wrote wouldn't have worked either. I gave them to you in order to take some of the heat off me, but you can be sure that, if I'd known Henrietta had written them, you would never have seen them. Does she know about this yet?"

  "Not from me."

  "We all went to school together, Henrietta and B. J. and I.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his face vigorously as if it were covered with cobwebs. “For a long time she and I were engaged. But lawyers who are just starting out don't make a lot of money, so she decided to go after the guy with the big bucks. And then almost immediately she realized she'd made a mistake. B. J. thought she and I had completely lost interest in each other after they got married—that's the way egomaniacs are, you know.” He put his glasses back on and fixed Auburn with one of his penetrating stares. “How in this world did you ever think to look for those gloves?"

  "No prints on the weapon,” said Auburn simply, “and powdered starch on the uniform. The fake uniform wasn't such a bad idea, but you took a big chance using a revolver in a public building. Somebody could easily have seen you or heard the shot."

  "I was pretty careful—at least until I threw away the gloves. Tuesday was the fourth time in a couple of weeks I went to B.J.'s office with the gun and the uniform in my briefcase. Those other times it was no-go because there were people around, but B.J. was a half inch from hell and didn't know it. Do I have to come with you now?"

  "Yes, sir. I can give you five or ten minutes to tell your people you need to leave."

  * * * *

  "You awake, Jim?"

  Jim Jenclaire mumbled, “Mmm."

  "You know what?"

  "Mmm?"

  "We never did see the rest of that Quote of the Day. You know? On the message board Tuesday."

  "Mmm!"

  "It's driving me bonkers. I'm going to get up and see if I can find it with a Web search. How did it start? Something about a garden?"

  Copyright (c) 2007 John H. Dirckx

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Fiction: PANDORA'S GHOST TOWN by Gilbert M. Stack

  The shotgun blast echoed through the canyon and the horse gave one final mournful whinny and died.

  The stagecoach driver set down his smoking weapon, pushed his white hair back off his forehead, and tried to clear his throat. “I ... I really hated to do that. Socks was a really good horse.” He looked around at his passengers as if seeking support for his action. His eyes were red with suppressed emotion.

  "Of course, you did, Mr. Butler,” Corey Callaghan agreed. He clapped the driver on the shoulder. “We all understand that. The horse's leg was broken. You had to shoot him. It was the only decent thing to do."

  Butler looked grateful for Corey's words, but before he could express his appreciation, another passenger cut in with his own observation. “That's fine for the horse, but what are we going to do?"

  Corey shifted his attention to Dr. Fulton, who kept looking back and forth between the passengers, hoping someone could answer his question. As neither the driver nor any of the other passengers spoke up, Corey took it upon himself to reassure the man. Corey was tall and broad in the shoulders. As a professional bare-knuckle boxer, he knew his size could intimidate men, but there were times like this when it could also give reassurance. “We'll have to take a look at the stage and see just how bad the damage is,” he told the doctor, “but good or bad, we'll be all right in the end."

  The group was half a day out of Fort Bridger, trying to make their way to Evanston when the stage had rounded a bend in the trail, lurched badly to the right, and nearly gone over. The lurching had been abrupt enough to topple the team of horses breaking the leg of one of the animals.

  "Well, what will we do if we can't fix it?” Dr. Fulton asked.

  Again Corey waited for the driver to answer. Again he was disappointed.

  "We'll cross that bridge if we come to it,” Corey said. “No sense ge
tting all worked up until we know if there's reason to worry."

  "Surely the stage line will send riders out after us when we don't arrive in Evanston this evening,” Mrs. Clifford suggested. She was a very stern-looking woman who had made it perfectly clear early in the trip that she thought it most improper that she and her husband should have to share a coach with boxers and gamblers.

  Corey looked to Miss Pandora Parson, one of the gamblers Mrs. Clifford found so objectionable, to determine her thoughts on the subject. She was a fine-looking redhead with a sprinkle of freckles on her nose and a pensive expression on her face. They had been traveling together since Denver, where they had helped extricate each other from the schemes of a less-than-honorable Eastern gentleman.

  Miss Parson quietly shook her head and Corey agreed with her assessment. The stage line normally sent only one coach from Fort Bridger to Evanston each week. Special arrangements had been made to accommodate the large numbers wanting to make this trip, but Butler had not proved as proficient a driver as the regular man and had not kept up with the first coach. It was quite possible that some time would pass before the stage line grew worried or even noticed that a second coach was missing.

  Butler was still staring mournfully at his dead horse, so Corey went right ahead taking charge of things. “Well, why don't we see how bad the damage is?” He rolled up his sleeves exposing well-defined forearms. “Gentlemen, if you'd give me a hand?"

  Patrick O'Sullivan stepped forward. He was Corey's boxing trainer, an older man with salt-and-pepper hair. “Just let me know what you want me to do. And mind you be careful of your ribs. They're not going to heal if you keep straining them."

  None of the other men stepped forward. Butler continued to stare at Socks; Dr. Fulton clutched his bag against his chest; and Mr. Clifford kept reading from a large book that had occupied him since before he got on the stagecoach that morning. It was something to do with his theological studies at Bowdoin College, Corey gathered, although exactly what that was he didn't even want to understand.