Her attacker rose before her. Bea screamed and with both hands swung the scythe directly at the figure’s neck.
A severed head rolled across the shed floor. Bea screamed again and stumbled from the shed. She knelt in the grass with retching gasps.
Lyon, holding a kitchen utensil, ran across the yard toward her.
She looked down at her hands still gripping the deadly scythe, and she let the weapon fall to the ground. She had just decapitated a man, and her husband was running to her rescue carrying a spatula.
13
They stood in front of the shed and looked at the body. The head had fallen in the shadows within the shed, and Lyon stepped across the threshold to lift it by the stocking mask and throw it out on the lawn where it rolled to a stop by Bea’s feet. “At least it was a relatively bloodless slaying,” Lyon said as he kicked the torso.
“That’s not funny,” she said.
He went back inside the shed to squat near the floor. He ran his fingers over certain objects he found there, and then returned to sit beside her on the grass. “It was triggered by a spring under the loose floorboard. It was mounted over the mower so that when released it came right at whoever was standing near the door.”
She picked up the head. “It was dark. I thought someone was killing me, and I cut off his head.”
“Without the stocking mask, it looks like one of those dummies they use for automobile testing. When it jumped out at you in the dark, you had no way of knowing he wasn’t real.”
“And you rushed to my rescue with a spatula. Were you going to turn him over easy? Couldn’t you have at least grabbed a butcher knife?”
Lyon looked at her in mock horror. “And be a party to a beheading?”
“Thanks a pile.”
He pulled her gently to her feet and led her toward the house. “Let’s leave this whole mess. I’ll take you to the Murphysville Inn for one of their famous Sunday brunches complete with an extra-strong Bloody Mary.”
“With that in mind, my disposition has already begun to improve. I know it’s not nice to speak ill of the dead, but that rat fink Dalton set up that trick before he left.”
For three hundred years the Murphysville Inn had either been a stagecoach stop or inn. It sat on a small hill above the river on the outskirts of town. The Murphysville Yacht Club’s rustic clubhouse and boat slips were at the base of the hill. The inn offered lodgings in a dozen antiques-furnished rooms above the restaurant, and the dining facilities included the Forge Room, the Bar Room, or the larger dining area known as the Taproom. The ceilings were low, and the walls were covered with Currier and Ives lithographs. The food was plain generic New England, and the prices were high.
On Sundays, a long table was installed in the Taproom laden with warming dishes of eggs, breads, hams, and turkeys.
Lyon asked for a table by the window in the Forge Room, and their Bloody Marys were quickly served. Bea drank with gratitude. “The day is already looking a mite better.”
“Pandora is the one who put a microphone in our box springs,” Lyon said.
“Is that a non sequitur?” she asked.
“I’m trying to imagine who else in the world would pull a trick like the lunging strangler. It required a good deal of strength to set the springs on that dummy,” Lyon said.
A pitcher of Bloody Marys was put on the table. Bea looked across the room to see the inn’s owner, a distinguished, white-haired man, standing in the room’s archway. He waved and mouthed the word “compliments” to her.
“I think it was rigged by Dalton,” Lyon continued.
“The day was improving, Went, don’t spoil it.”
“I was in that shed two days ago,” Lyon said. “Nothing sprang out at me then. The dummy was rigged within the last forty-eight hours.”
“You saw Dalton dead on Red Deer Island before the fire. He was hanging, if you will recall.”
“I saw him dead in our living room a few days before that, but he was resurrected.”
Bea poured another Bloody Mary. “Now we’re into the occult.”
“How about sleight of hand instead?”
“Did you see him hanging?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Then finish your drink, and don’t spoil my enjoyment of the buffet.”
A wheelchair, pushed by a nondescript man in a dark suit, appeared in the archway. The chair’s occupant had a robe tucked around his lower body, but his torso was clothed in an Oscar de la Renta tailored suit. The patient had an extremely large head topped with a wave of yellowing hair. His facial features were accentuated by deep craggy lines. His left arm and the left side of his face were rigid and frozen, the result of a stroke. Lyon watched with interest as the man with the interesting face was pushed to a table across the room.
“The man in the wheelchair looks familiar,” Lyon said.
Bea took a quick glance at the other table. “I met him on my last visit to the Murphysville Convalescent Hospital. His name is …” She searched her memory. “Lawrence Thorndike. I believe he was a stage actor before he had a stroke and retired.”
“I must have seen him in some play.”
The deep and sonorous voice carried clearly across the room. “I do not want juice, Melvin. I do not want a Shirley Temple. I want a goddamn strong martini.”
Bea covered the lower part of her face with her hand to hide the smile. “I think they told me he was nearly ninety.”
“I hope I want a drink when I’m ninety,” Lyon said. “That voice is familiar, but I don’t identify it with a Broadway play. It was something I heard as a kid. Larry Lash!” Lyon raised his voice so that it boomed across the room. “There’s trouble on the prairie tonight!”
“But Larry Lash on Flyer will ride!” the actor’s sonorous voice returned with equal volume.
At the archway, the inn’s owner held up his hands in a plea for quiet.
“Get over here, young fellow,” the actor called to Lyon.
“Bring your drink,” Lyon said to Bea as he pushed back from the table. Bea picked up her glass, looked at the nearly full pitcher, and took that also.
After introductions, they sat at the Thorndike table. “Not many remember Larry Lash,” the actor said. “Made a hundred of those damn things. I went out to Hollywood in thirty when they needed voices. Never been on a horse except for carriage rides around Central Park with a little slap and tickle with some ingenue. We made those Larry Lashes in a week. Used to see them on the TV in the Fifties. Terrible.”
“I heard you did some stage work for O’Neill, Mr. Thorndike,” Bea said.
“Sure in hell did. Joined them when the Provincetown Players moved to New York. Now you take Gene. He was a real man’s drinker. Mean son of a bitch when drunk, but a hell of a writer when sober. I played with the Lunts in The Guardsman, great actors those two.”
“Do you remember the movie, Guns at Gut Creek?” Lyon asked.
“Can’t say that I do,” Thorndike answered. “All those damn things were alike, and sometimes we made them up as we went along.”
“Guns at Gut Creek starts out with a sheepherder getting hanged for rustling cattle.”
“Did Larry Lash say there was trouble on the prairie tonight?”
“You always said that line in all those movies, Grandfather,” his companion said.
“Who’d you say got hanged?”
“A sheepherder.”
“Hell, son, I know that. Sheepmen always got the short end, but who played the part? I might recall it.”
Lyon thought a moment. “Harry Carey. Harry Carey Senior, that is. It was a small part, but he had some good lines when he had to write a last letter to his little girl and told her that he’d meet her in the great-prairie-in-the-sky.”
“Hell, yes. I remember it. Only time I ever worked with Harry. He became a great character actor in his later years.”
“There’s a scene where they slap Harry’s horse and the rope tightens around his neck, and well, he’s hange
d. How do they do that?”
“You mean how they hanged him? There’s no big trick to that. They put a waist harness under his shirt, and from that a wire runs up the back and through the center of the rope and around the tree limb. It looks good, but he’s not really hanging at all. Which makes it refill time. I need another martini, and make it a double this time.”
Bea had just finished mixing a huge batch of Bloody Marys when she realized that they had never eaten the inn’s buffet. In fact, they hadn’t eaten anything all day. As soon as they had left Thorndike’s table, Lyon had made several phone calls on the inn’s phone and then rushed her to the car for a fast drive back to Nutmeg Hill.
Rocco Herbert now straddled a chair on the patio with a drink of straight vodka in his hand. Captain Norbert, dressed in what he perceived as a Scottish golfing outfit, waited impatiently for his drink. He did not appear pleased. A diminutive man sat uncomfortably in a chair near the parapet. He was so short that his feet barely touched the ground. He was dressed in a suit that Bea was convinced had to have been purchased at a department store’s prep shop.
Lyon took the pitcher from Bea and poured drinks for everyone except Rocco, who replenished his own.
“I want to thank you for coming, Doctor Mellin,” Lyon said.
“Senator Wentworth has always been most supportive of the Medical Examiner’s office,” Mellin replied in a voice that was in keeping with his stature.
Captain Norbert tapped his glass on the edge of the parapet. “Can we get this moving along, Wentworth? I’m scheduled to play golf with the major today.”
Doctor Mellin giggled. “One good thing about my job is that the patients are never in a hurry.”
“And never pay their bills,” Norbert said and guffawed at his own joke.
“I hope what you’ve turned up is important,” Rocco said.
“Something happened to us this morning that I consider significant,” Lyon said. “Specifically, it happened to Bea when she went out to the shed to start the mower.” He told them in detail about the incident of the attacking mannequin. They were silent when he finished. Rocco looked bemused. Doctor Mellin looked puzzled, as if waiting for the punch line. Captain Norbert looked annoyed.
“Let me get this straight,” Norbert finally said. “You probably want Rocco, as the local police chief, to give you protection. You want Doctor Mellin to autopsy your dummy, and me to get a State Police SWAT team looking for marauding mannequins. Come on now.”
“I know of only one person in this state who concocts elaborate tricks of that nature,” Lyon said levelly.
“It could have been set up weeks ago,” Rocco added.
“I was in that shed two days ago and nothing happened then,” Lyon said.
“Jesus, Wentworth, lots of people play jokes,” Norbert said. “It could have been set by anyone. Dalton Turman is dead. Do you understand, dead?” He bounced his glass on the stone parapet and it shattered in his hand. He looked down at the pieces in surprise.
Lyon replaced the captain’s drink. “Another thing,” Lyon went on. “Dalton was in bed with loan sharks, and yet remarkably they are suddenly not interested in repayment of their money.”
“They’re pragmatists,” Rocco said. “You can’t collect from a dead man, and their kind of debt isn’t one you can pursue against an estate.”
Norbert shrugged. “So, what do you suggest?”
“That the money’s been paid back.”
“Pan could have done it to get them off her back. She had life insurance money in addition to the fifty thousand that Bea discovered,” Rocco said.
“I think Dalton is alive,” Lyon said.
“Oh, my God,” Norbert said and nearly broke his second glass. “What in the hell have you been smoking? You identified the body. You described how he had been tortured and then hanged. You saw him.”
“We learned this morning that there’s a way to hang without being hurt,” Bea said.
“I cut somebody up,” Doctor Mellin stated categorically. “Say what you will, there was a man’s body on my table, and we did him up right.”
“Granted that the practical joke this morning was quirky,” Rocco said, “and I can imagine that it’s possible to fake a hanging, but if that didn’t kill him, the fire sure in hell did.”
“Death was by asphyxiation prior to any possibility of smoke inhalation,” the Medical Examiner said with quiet authority. “I would stake my career on that.”
“Okay,” Rocco continued, “you not only saw the body, but we identified the fingerprints from the finger in the box.”
“There was a definite match between that finger and the army files the FBI had on Mr. Turman. In addition, his wife identified the wedding ring on the finger,” Mellin said smugly, as if pleased to make his contribution.
“One print off one finger is all we need, Wentworth,” Captain Norbert said. “Prints don’t lie. They never have and they never will.”
“Was a match made between the severed finger and the cadaver’s hand?” Lyon asked. “Was a microscopic examination made to determine if the finger’s severed bone matched the hand?”
The Medical Examiner looked thunderstruck. “Under the circumstances of identification, such tests did not seem warranted.”
“What about the teeth?” Lyon asked.
“Teeth! I’m always getting teeth!” Doctor Mellin seemed to be getting more and more agitated. “There is no central registry for teeth, you know. To compare physical dental work with the records, we have to know who the victim might be and who the dentist was. The decedent’s wife did not know his dentist. I understand they had only been married a few months, and there did not seem to be any reason to pursue that avenue further.”
“We can get a court order to exhume the body,” Bea said.
Mellin downed the remainder of his drink and poured himself another while he shook his head. “The body was released to the wife and was cremated.”
“That’s bad luck,” Lyon said, “but I understand that fluid analysis is very sophisticated these days. We might be able to at least exclude Dalton’s identity.”
“Dumped,” Mellin said as he drank.
“What?”
“You were all so hot to have a fast report that we did our work, released the body, and destroyed the examined organs and fluids,” the doctor said. “Our files are closed.”
“As a matter of curiosity, who do you think we found out there?” Rocco asked.
“Considering everything, including relative size,” Lyon said, “I believe it was one of the men who worked for Carillo, the one called Stockton.”
“Then what happened to the other one?” Rocco asked.
“I expect that he is also dead.”
“Killed by Dalton Turman,” Norbert snorted.
“Probably.”
Norbert stood with feet apart and arms akimbo. “All this crap is because someone played a joke on you two this morning.”
“That’s how it started,” Lyon said. “But everything fits if you assume that Dalton is alive.”
“Which would mean that he was the one who killed Katrina Loops,” Rocco said. “Probably because she knew too much.”
“We have arrested a man who the court saw fit to place under three hundred thousand dollars bond for that killing,” Norbert said. “When he goes to trial, we are going to nail his hide to the wall.”
“It’s the wrong man,” Bea said as she poured Doctor Mellin another drink.
“I’ve had it!” Norbert shouted. “Do you know how much trouble you cause me, Wentworth? Whenever you get involved in police business you cause trouble. You shot a cop, for Christ’s sake. You are also either a nut, incompetent, or drunk. And that’s exactly what this conversation sounds like. You are a bunch of bored people sitting around a patio on a Sunday afternoon drinking too many Bloody Marys and creating nutty ideas about corpses that come alive. You are a bunch of professional drinkers who think they’re amateur detectives.”
“I resent that,” Bea said as she hiccupped.
Doctor Mellin stumbled forward with raised fists. “You can’t talk to Senator Wentworth that way.” He rushed at Captain Norbert, and when the police officer stepped aside, the Medical Examiner fell over the parapet and disappeared from view.
“I think this party is deteriorating,” Rocco said.
“And we know about you, Herbert,” Norbert said. “You are a proven drunk who sees snakes. God only knows what Wentworth sees.”
“Would you believe furry animals with long snouts and beady little eyes?” Bea laughed.
“I believe it. God, do I believe it,” Norbert said as he stalked from the patio. “And to think I could have been playing golf with the major and letting him cheat a little,” they heard him say as he left slamming the front door.
“Someone ought to see if the Medical Examiner is dead,” Rocco said. “Because if he is, we have a real problem of who to call.”
Lyon squinted into the early-morning sunlight streaming through the bedroom window. He groaned and tweaked Bea’s big toe that protruded from under the sheet. She groaned. He searched the room and picked up dropped clothing from various locations and pulled on khaki pants, a sport shirt, and slipped into topsiders. When he went downstairs he passed the living room where Rocco’s long frame overlapped the couch. The coffee had almost finished perking when the front door opened.
Martha Herbert, followed by her daughter, Remley, stalked into the living room. She threw a handful of clothes at Rocco. Their daughter dropped a shaving kit on his head. The large police chief moaned and sat up as Lyon sank a coffee mug into his hand.
“Good morning, dear,” Rocco said to his wife.
“She’s not speaking to you,” his daughter replied.
“I called last night and told you that I was working on a case,” Rocco mumbled.
“A case of vodka,” Martha snorted before she retraced her stalk back to her car.
“This is another example of the decadent idle rich taking advantage of the working class,” Remley said. “Once again the bourgeois have seduced the workers by enticing them with grape in order to close their eyes against the inequalities of the system.” She glanced at her father once more before following her mother to the car.
Death on the Mississippi Page 14
