Murder on the Thirteenth

by A. E. Eddenden

  “He’s out on the lawn. Crying.”

  “More like sobbing,” Cynthia said.

  Tretheway sighed “You’d better come with me, Doc.”

  They found Warbucks standing close to the water, gazing out across the grey expanse of Fort York Harbour. He had stopped crying, but damp marks streaked the purple parts of his face.

  “How’s it going, Tremaine?” Tretheway asked.

  “I just saw Mother.” His gaze remained on the harbour.

  “Eh?”

  “Where?” Doc Nooner asked.

  “Out there.” Warbucks pointed to the open water. “She was in a dinghy. Coming toward me. My dog was with her.”

  “Your mother died,” Tretheway said gently. “Ten, fifteen years ago.”

  “So did your dog,” Doc said.

  “Henley. A King Charles spaniel.”

  “Tremaine,” Tretheway put his hand on Warbucks’s shoulder, “There’s no one there.”

  Warbucks bolted. Tretheway and Doc were taken unaware but gave chase. Some members, thinking it was part of the fun and games, joined the hunt. Warbucks led them across the rain-soaked lawn, between empty chairs and tables, scattering sea gulls and pigeons and constantly repeating “Henley, Henley.” The chase ended when Warbucks slipped and fell going up a terrace of wet grass. Doc Nooner was the first to kneel beside him. Warbucks lay flat on his back, eyes wide open, pupils huge, staring heedless into the falling rain.

  “There’s more here than too much booze.” Tretheway leaned over the two.

  Doc Nooner nodded. He put the palm of his hand on Warbucks’s rapidly rising and falling chest. “I don’t like the way he’s breathing.”

  Tretheway straightened up. He caught Jake’s eye on the edge of the crowd. “Ambulance!” he shouted.

  The sober command stilled the Henley chant that someone had started. Someone opened an umbrella over Warbucks. Several offers of help came from the crowd.

  By the time the ambulance came, most of the people who had been outside had joined the regatta celebration continuing in the main clubhouse. Few of them knew about the events on the front lawn. Those who had joined in the chase thought it was simply the result of overindulgence. Only Tretheway and Doc were aware that Warbucks might be in serious trouble. And, Tretheway thought darkly to himself, maybe one other.

  Doc Nooner volunteered to go in the ambulance with Warbucks to the hospital while Tretheway went back to the clubhouse. Beezul had pushed several tables together at the back of the room; he and his guests sat awaiting the prize presentations. They were all concerned about Warbucks, but not alarmed.

  “I mean, “Garth said, “these things happen. The race. The excitement. And all those fast Bangers.”

  A party atmosphere prevailed. People changed to other alcoholic beverages when the Bangers ran out. Tretheway switched from Scotch to Blue. He had just ordered a quart when the call came. He answered the phone.

  “Tretheway.”

  “Nooner here. It’s about Warbucks.”

  “Go on.”

  “He just passed away.”

  “Good Lord!”

  “We don’t know why. Won’t know till the autopsy. But…” Doc Nooner hesitated again. “Keep it to yourself. It has all the earmarks of a poison. Some sort of hallucinatory drug. One that eventually leads to paralysis. He just stopped breathing.”

  “Poor bugger.”

  “You’ll have to tell everybody there.”

  “I know.” Tretheway grimaced.

  When he got back to the table, a fresh Molson’s Blue sat at his place. At the front of the room, the Commodore of the RFYYC was presenting Beezul with his first place, engraved trophy—“Winner, Rainbow Class, 1943, Great Lakes Regatta.” A congratulatory message crackled over the PA system. Everyone cheered, except Tretheway.

  Beezul marched back to his table holding the trophy on high. “C’mon everyone!” he shouted, “To the hospital!”

  “Hold it a minute, Beezul.” Tretheway raised both hands in the air to silence the crowd. It had little effect. “We can’t go.”

  “Sure we can. We have to show Tremaine. Couldn’t’ve done it without him.”

  “Listen, everybody!” Tretheway slapped the table, disturbing the glasses and ash trays. This time people stopped talking. “I’vegot some bad news.” He looked right at Beezul. “I’m sorry. Warbucksisdead.”

  Beezul finally stopped smiling.

  Although most of the celebrants wouldn’t hear about the Warbucks tragedy until the next day, the party wound down quickly after the trophies were awarded. Beezul went home, forgetting his cup. Garth and Gum disconsolately walked the grounds together. Wan Ho had gone to the hospital. Addie, Pat Sprong, Cynthia and Zoë were, Tretheway thought, visiting the ladies’ room.

  Only Tretheway and Jake still sat at the table. Tretheway wrestled inwardly with his half promise to Doc Nooner. He wanted to confide in Jake.

  “Poison?” Jake said.

  “Keep it down,” Tretheway cautioned. “We’re not sure.”

  “How?” Jake lowered his voice.

  “Probably in the Bangers.”

  “He had enough of those.”

  “And they’d cover the taste of anything.”

  “Just a minute,” Jake said. “Everybody had Bangers.”

  “Warbucks drank from one bottle only. Remember?”

  “So only one was poisoned?”

  Tretheway nodded.

  “Then how did anyone know…”

  “It was marked,” Tretheway remembered. “A piece of string.” He stood up. “It might behoove us to slip over to the locker. Check the bottles.”

  “Good,” Jake said. “We can join the ladies.”

  “What?”

  “Addie, Cynthia, Zoë and…”

  “What are they doing there?”

  “Cleaning up. You know Addie. Beezul’s gone home and they thought…”

  “Christ!” Tretheway pushed tables and chairs aside getting to the door, Jake following closely. They ran across the lawn around the corner of the dock to the locker.

  “What are you doing?” Tretheway said more loudly and harshly than he had intended.

  The four women stopped what they were doing.

  “We’re cleaning up,” Zoë said.

  “Shouldn’t we?” Addie frowned at her brother.

  Tretheway’s eyes swept the room. Addie was putting away glasses. Zoë’s arms were up to her elbows in soapy water. Pat Sprong and Cynthia held damp towels. Then Tretheway saw the milk bottles, all of them sitting on the counter, no purple stains, as clean and sparkling as when they were new. And not one had a string around its neck.

  “Certainly,” Tretheway lied. “Good idea.”

  “We just came over to see if we could help,” Jake said.

  “No, thanks.” Cynthia smiled at him.

  “We’re just about finished,” Pat Sprong said.

  Addie regarded the two in suspicious silence.

  Tretheway and Jake left quietly.

  “What now?” Jake asked.

  “Wait for the autopsy,” Tretheway said, shrugging.

  “Atropa Belladonna.” Doc Nooner read from his open file folder. “Common name, deadly nightshade. Produces symptoms of extreme exuberance at first, then hallucinations, delirium, respiratory problems and eventually paralysis. Warbucks was full of it.”

  Jake winced at Doc Nooner’s clinical choice of words. “But why? What’s the motive?”

  “We don’t know,” Wan Ho said. “Random. Occult. Just crazy. Take your pick. I don’t know why the Squire was killed either.” He threw his hands up. “Or if both deaths connected.”

  “Let me finish. It might help.” Doc Nooner went back to his file. “Nightshade grows wild in Eastern U. S. and, I’m sure, here. Tall, ugly perennial herb. A leafy bush with flowers that turn into black berries. Filled with a sweet, violet juice. Probably looks like Bangers.”

  “Why the botany lesson?” Tretheway asked. “Who cares what th
e plant looks like?”

  “The samples we took from Warbucks weren’t chemically pure,” Doc explained.

  “What’s that mean?” Wan Ho asked.

  “It means that whoever did the deed, didn’t walk into a drug store and buy it. It was full of impurities. In short, home-made.”

  “You mean someone found a bush somewhere?” Wan Ho asked.

  “Or grew it.”

  The room fell silent. Tretheway reached for a cigar. Wan Ho stood up and began to pace—not really practical behavior in the Tretheway’s small parlour where the four of them were meeting. Jake poked Fat Rollo to stop his snoring.

  Tretheway broke the silence. “You mean that out there somewhere,” he waved his arm, spraying cigar ash around, “we’ve got a witch’s garden?”

  Doc Nooner shrugged.

  “And Zulp has all these facts?”

  Wan Ho nodded.

  “So I guess everybody’s looking for bushes?”

  “Optometrists.”

  “Eh?”

  “Belladonna’s the drug an eye doctor puts in your eyes before an examination,” Wan Ho explained.

  “That’s right,” Doc Nooner confirmed. “Dilates the pupils.”

  “And you bump into things for about an hour after,” Jake added.

  Doc nodded.

  “So the usual suspects in this case,” Wan Ho went on, “are optometrists, opticians, ophthalmologists. Even druggists. Especially those who are members of the Yacht Club, Zulp says.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Tretheway said.

  “Do you think that’s the way to go?” Jake asked Wan Ho.

  “I follow orders. But on the inside,” Wan Ho smiled, “it’s known as ‘The Evil League of Optometry Caper’.”

  Everyone chuckled.

  By the end of June, the investigation had made little progress. Warbucks had been poisoned with a massive dose of belladonna by person or persons unknown. The poison had been presumably mixed with Beezul’s overpowering Bangers in one of the milk bottles from the locker. All evidence had been efficiently removed from the bottles by Addie and her zealous friends. Prominent members of the RFYYC and the optical industry had been questioned at length; dispensing pharmacists had been queried. All in vain.

  Even the search for ugly green bushes with bell-shaped flowers and black berries had been abandoned, not because they couldn’t be found, but because there were too many. Some were growing in the special herb section of the FY Royal Botanical gardens, some were cultivated by local garden societies. A few flourished wild in secluded areas of Coote’s Paradise. Cynthia Moon told Tretheway that one was blooming in her own private garden. She confessed to using small portions of the juice occasionally for makeup. And if a bit ran into her eyes, she didn’t worry: “it makes them sparkle,” she said.

  All in all, it was a bad time for Chief Zulp. The Toronto newspapers criticized him and his detectives for the meagre results unearthed by their investigation. Even the local FY Expositor faulted Zulp’s handling of the Warbucks poisoning. And it kept posing questions. ‘Where was Squire Middleton from midnight to dawn on his fateful day?’ ‘What really happened to Mary Dearlove?’ In a short editorial, the Expo strongly suggested that her spectacular fall may just possibly not have been an accident.

  Zulp bristled at this criticism from his hometown paper. He brashly announced that he had secret information: a practical plan to bring ‘an end to these heinous crimes’. When pressed for more information by the newsmen, he drew himself up, squeezed his eyes almost shut, adding more creases to his already creased face, and answered cryptically, “Knowledge is power.”

  Zulp’s powerful knowledge was born of desperation. All he had was what everyone else had—the number thirteen. The murders and other strange, unsettling events had happened on, or close to, the thirteenth of each month. In researching the months of 1943, he had stumbled across the April 13 newspaper article about the five large bowls found in the cow’s stomach. He found this sufficiently significant to dispatch two of his more toadying detectives to the Village of Fruitland where it had happened. When they left the farm none the wiser, the farmer, no friend of the police, phoned the FY Expositor. The result was another insulting news story.

  Zulp reacted impulsively again. He insisted there was a definite connection between the murders and the bizarre incident.

  “And furthermore,” Zulp went on, “I can promise the people of Fort York that no murders, strange happenings or mysterious deaths will occur on the next thirteenth.” He checked his calendar. “That’s July thirteenth. A Tuesday. Or I will resign.”

  This raised eyebrows on the force, including Tretheway’s.

  “You don’t suppose he knows something?”

  Wan Ho shook his head. “All bluff.”

  “You mean something might happen in July?” Jake asked.

  “All we can do is hope,” Tretheway quipped.

  As luck would have it, Zulp didn’t have to step down in July.

  Chapter Nine

  It was the time of the year when the Dog Star rose and set with the sun, giving its name to the hot, uncomfortable days of summer. More than once, violent thunderstorms with hail chased Jake and Garth, along with other members of WSGCC, off the golf course. And the balmy, golden interludes between disturbances seemed shorter this year.

  Most of Tretheway’s friends escaped the city’s heat at one time or another. Beezul, as usual, spent the whole two months at his secluded island summer home on Lake Muskoka. Zoë charitably took the recuperating Luke with her to visit friends in Massachusetts. Gum and his mother stayed for a week in an old hotel overlooking Niagara Falls. Doc Nooner went off his diet again to attend a medical convention in Cleveland. Major Patricia Sprong travelled to Windsor/Detroit on Salvation Army business. Cynthia Moon and Addie took the train to Toronto several times for shopping trips, but most days, Cynthia said she just “lolled around her garden.” Wan Ho took some days off that he had coming but he never really stopped thinking about his job.

  By the time July had squandered its thirty-one days, the allies had landed in Sicily: a coup d’etat had occurred in Italy and the strutting Mussolini had been arrested, U.S. liberators had bombed Java and Japanese troops had secretly evacuated Kiska in Alaska. But nothing of note happened in Fort York on the thirteenth. Zulp later restated his promise of resignation, if necessary, for August. His luck held.

  The dog days of summer continued in August. In Fort York, everyone waited apprehensively while the thirteenth approached and heaved a collective sigh of relief, almost as loud as the July thirteenth sigh, when it passed harmlessly. Tretheway and Jake were no exception.

  “A good day over,” Jake said.

  Tretheway nodded. “I wonder why, though.”

  “Maybe it’s finished,” Addie shouted from inside the kitchen. “Maybe there won’t be any more…”

  “Maybe you’re right, Addie,” Jake encouraged.

  Tretheway shook his head without speaking. He and Jake were sipping tea on the back porch and enjoying the stillness of late evening; relief from another humid day. Fat Rollo jumped on a noisy cricket while Fred lay panting beside Jake, thankful for an occasional rub behind her ear. It was Saturday, August fourteenth.

  “It’s been two whole months,” Jake continued. “Maybe nothing more will happen.”

  Tretheway shook his head again. “I don’t think so.”

  Dishes rattled in the kitchen.

  “There’s too many whys.” Tretheway lowered his voice. “Why Hickory Island? Why the rabbit’s foot? Why Mary Dearlove? The Squire? Or Warbucks?” He put his big cup down and looked at Jake. “And now you just brought up the next why.”

  “Eh?”

  “Why has it stopped? Why have the incidents or murders not continued? A logical chain of events broken. Why? Tell me why.”

  Jake thought for a moment. “Everybody needs a holiday?” He smiled weakly.

  “That’s the dumbest…”

  “Everybody do
es need a holiday,” Addie interrupted, she stood at the screen door drying her hands on a tea towel. “Even policemen,” she said to her brother.

  “Eh?”

  “You know Beezul invited you to his cottage.”

  “True,” Tretheway said.

  “It’d do the two of you good to get away.”

  There was a bit of a lull, Tretheway thought. His desk was relatively clear. The war was going well, which lent less urgency to air raid precautions. And it was hot in the city.

  “What do you think, Jake?”

  “A little fishing, a little sun,” Jake said thoughtfully.

  “Peace and quiet,” Addie said.

  “Sounds good,” Jake said.

  “Well,” said Tretheway. “Maybe a couple of days.”

  “That’s settled, then.” Addie folded up the tea towel. “You could leave next Saturday. Take the whole week.” She checked the Toronto Maple Leaf wall calendar in the kitchen. “That’s the twenty-first.”

  “Good idea.” Tretheway pushed himself out of the sturdy garden chair. “I’ll leave a message for Beezul.”

  They left the following Saturday. Jake had the top down on the ’33 Pontiac and the rumble seat stuffed with luggage and Molson’s Blue. The trip took eight hours. They got lost three times, had one flat tire and, during the last part of the journey into the Ontario northland, had to give a warning honk at every turn in the narrow road. When Jake finally turned the wheel of the black machine off at the main highway into the village of Beaumaris, they were still early. The weary travellers waited on the dock until the pre-arranged time. As there was no contact with the isolated island, all messages had to be phoned to the Beaumaris General Store well ahead of time, then relayed to Beezul directly whenever he made his trip to the mainland for supplies and mail. When he eventually putted up to the dock, smiling and waving in his outboard motor boat, Tretheway and Jake were very glad to see him. Beezul, however, had underestimated the mass of the two men — especially Tretheway — and their luggage. Two trips were necessary. Tretheway was forced to remain, red-faced, on the dock while Beezul made the half-hour round trip with Jake and the supplies — not a good beginning.

  But the rest of the week, Tretheway and Jake both agreed later, was idyllic. They enjoyed seven days of vivid blue skies, fleecy scudding clouds, no rain and unbelievably clear and sparkling nights. Jake and Beezul fished casually while Tretheway lay on the dock giving — Beezul’s neighbors said behind their hands — a realistic imitation of a dead white whale. The daily highlight was what Beezul called the “champagne cruise.” It took about an hour, just before dinner. For this, they lovingly dusted the Ditchburn: a long, dark, mahogany needle-nosed craft with a gleaming deck you could comb your hair in. A relic of the luxurious twenties, the powerful inboard majestically carved the waters between the islands of Lake Muskoka allowing Tretheway and Jake, sitting in their individual wicker chairs behind Beezul, to raise their champagne-filled crystal flutes in a salute other Ditchburns doing the same thing.