“I suppose it’s as good a solution as any. Why should I worry about a couple of bootleggers who probably killed half a dozen other people?”
“Other people but not Teddy Oswald?”
“I told you, I don’t know. It couldn’t have happened the way the sheriff says, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”
“Why couldn’t it have happened the way he said?”
“Because Simmons couldn’t have known Billy Oswald or anyone else would be carrying a package of firecrackers down the street at that particular moment—and he certainly couldn’t have known it would be a package of Big Buster firecrackers. There was no way he could have had another package ready to substitute, and no way he could have switched something that large without one of us noticing. We were watching him every second.”
“But if Simmons didn’t do it, who did? And how?”
I didn’t answer right away. Instead I simply stood there skipping a few stones out over the placid surface of the lake. The next thing I knew, Vera was calling us to dinner.
The food was as good as promised, and April surprised us all by producing a bottle of French brandy after dinner. “This is strictly by prescription,” she announced. “I hope I’m not breaking the law, Sheriff.”
“I guess I can excuse you on the Fourth of July,” he said, holding out his glass.
It was after ten when we left April’s cottage, and I drove the sheriff and his wife home. He was feeling good about the day, anxious to get back to Shinn Corners in the morning for a session with Simmons and Ready. I didn’t want to spoil it quite yet by telling him he was wrong.
After I dropped them at home, I drove out to Pilgrim Memorial Hospital to visit Billy Oswald. He was still on his stomach, dozing restlessly, and the nurse was reluctant to disturb him. “I’ll take full responsibility,” I assured her.
Our voices had awakened Billy and he turned his head toward me. “How are you, Doc? Am I gonna get out of here soon?”
“I think you’ll be released in a couple of days. You were lucky.”
“A lot luckier than Teddy.”
“Yes,” I said quietly. “Tell me something, Billy. Why did you kill your brother?”
“What?” He started to rise from the bed.
“Stay there, Billy.”
“That’s crazy what you say, Doc! You saw me open that package yourself—if anybody tampered with it, maybe Webber or somebody sneaked in the night before!”
I shook my head. “No, Billy—it was you. The fake firecracker containing the dynamite was hidden inside your shirt. When you bent down to light the fuse with your back to us, you replaced the real firecracker with the deadly one. You made two bumbling attempts to light it, knowing Teddy would take over for you as he always insisted on doing. But you didn’t get quite far enough away from the blast in time and so your back was burned.”
“I tried to light those matches! They wouldn’t work!”
“Probably because you’d moistened the tips in advance. You made sure the rest were dry so Teddy wouldn’t have any trouble lighting the fuse as you walked away.”
“You say that’s what happened, but there’s not a speck of proof in the world!” Billy insisted.
“The proof is in the drawer of Sheriff Lens’s desk. When you were injured by the explosion, you knew you couldn’t let the real firecracker be found inside your shirt so you dropped it on the ground with the others as you fell. The sheriff picked them all up to test the wicks. I saw those wicks on his desk. There were twelve of them, one for each firecracker contained in the Big Buster package. But if Sheriff Lens collected twelve firecrackers, that meant the explosive one didn’t come from the package at all—it was a substitute. And only you could have made that substitution, Billy.”
He lay there a long time without speaking. Finally he said, “Teddy wanted to tie us down to that garage forever. Max Webber made us a good offer but Teddy wouldn’t even discuss it. I figured with Teddy gone I could sell the garage and move away, start a new life. I wouldn’t always be in Teddy’s shadow.”
“I’ll have to call Sheriff Lens,” I told him. . .
“And that was the end of my involvement in it,” Dr. Sam Hawthorne concluded. “Billy committed suicide in jail while awaiting trial, but I was away at the time. Then something happened that fall that almost caused me to leave Northmont forever. I suppose I’ll have to tell you about it the next time we meet.”
THE PROBLEM OF THE UNFINISHED PAINTING
“You’re early,” old Dr. Sam Hawthorne said, holding open the door. “I suppose you’re anxious to hear about the time I almost left Northmont. Let me pour us a little brandy to keep out the cold and I’ll tell you about it. It wasn’t one of my prouder moments, but the story of my years as a country doctor wouldn’t be complete without including it.”
It happened in the early autumn of ’32 (Dr. Sam went on), during the worst of the Depression and the growing excitement of the presidential campaign. Of course, people were talking about what would happen if Roosevelt won the election and there was much speculation about the end of Prohibition being near since both major candidates had called for its repeal. But on the day this began I wasn’t thinking about politics or Prohibition. I was at Pilgrim Memorial Hospital attending to a little boy named Tommy Forest, who had contracted a bad case of polio during the late summer and had just taken a turn for the worse.
“He needs help in breathing,” I told his parents, Mavis and Mike Forest. They’d moved to Northmont the previous summer and he was now teaching at our new elementary school.
Mavis was a lovely young woman and it almost tore my heart out when she asked me, “Will he be paralyzed, Doctor?”
“I’m afraid there might be some lingering paralysis,” I told her honestly, “but it’s too soon to tell how extensive it could be. Right now we’re fighting to save his life.”
“What can be done for him?” Mike asked, anguish in his face.
“Tommy’s respiratory nerves are being destroyed by the poliomyelitis. It’s very difficult for him to breathe by himself and it may soon become impossible. There’s been success recently with a device called a Drinker respirator—or iron lung. It was invented four years ago by a man named Slaw Drinker. It’s a large pressure tank that encloses the entire body except for the head. A motor increases and decreases the air pressure, causing air to move in and out of the patient’s lungs.”
“Could it help Tommy?”
“It’s the only thing I know that might save his life now. They have one in Stamford, but I don’t know if it’s in use. I’ll phone the hospital there.”
The doctor in Stamford told me their machine was out of service while they repaired the motor. “Maybe it’ll be available by tomorrow,” he said, sounding dubious. “Try calling me in the morning, before noon.”
“Tomorrow might be too late for my patient. Do you know of any other Drinker respirators in the area?”
“They have one in Boston.” He gave me the name of the hospital and I thanked him.
It took me only ten minutes to learn that Boston’s sole iron lung was in use, keeping alive a girl only a few years older than Tommy. I put in a call to my nurse April and asked her to try the largest hospital in New York City. “Where will you be if I need to reach you?” she asked.
“I have to finish my hospital rounds. There’s still Mrs. Decker and Major Fox to see.” The previous year, an unused wing of the hospital had been converted to doctors’ offices. It was much more convenient to have my office there than in town, especially since more and more of my patients were entering the hospital for treatment. And the days when most people entered and departed this world at home were fast fading. More than half of Northmont births were at the hospital now, and many terminally ill patients were treated there, too.
Mrs. Decker and Major Fox were typical examples of my practice. She had given birth the previous day to a plump baby boy. He was an aging war veteran whose lungs had been ruined by a German mustard-gas attack in 1918. There
was little any doctor could do for him. I poked my head in to say a few words to Mrs. Decker and her proud husband, thinking as I did so of Mr. and Mrs. Forest down the hall with their terribly ill child. The Deckers would be taking their baby home in a few days to start a new life. For the Forests, whatever the outcome, life would never be the same.
Major Fox had always been a tough old bird and I hated to see him suffer. He lay propped up in bed, a man in his mid-sixties who appeared much older. There was a visitor when I arrived—Clint Wainwright, president of the Northmont Merchants’ Council. Major Fox’s sporting-goods store on Main Street had always been a popular meeting place, especially during the hunting season, and the major had stimulated business for other merchants with a number of small but useful inventions—a gadget to open cans, another to prolong the life of lightbulbs. He’d even developed some small amplifiers to help the hard-of-hearing.
“How’s the patient today?” I asked with a smile, glancing at the chart at the foot of his bed.
“Awful tired, Doc,” he managed to say.
“I told him we need him back on Main Street,” Wainwright said, trying to be cheerful. He was an ambitious man in his late thirties, a haberdasher by trade. His wavy hair made people kid him about resembling a movie star.
“He’ll be back soon enough,” I said, sounding more hopeful than I felt.
Major Fox coughed and tried to shift to a more comfortable position. “I don’t know, Doc. I think that German gas is finally going to finish me off.”
I checked his vital signs, taking his pulse and blood pressure and listening to his heart. He was no better than the previous day, but no worse, either. It was almost noon when I finished, and we could hear the nurses bringing around the lunch trays for the patients. “I’d better be going,” Clint Wainwright said, getting to his feet. “Take care of yourself now, Major. If you’re still here on the weekend I’ll stop out to see you again.”
“Thanks for coming, Clint,” Major Fox replied. As the nurse entered, he started coughing again and she set down his tray and went to adjust the pillows behind his head.
Wainwright and I walked down the corridor together. “What are his chances?” he asked frankly.
I shrugged. “He’ll never recover fully. Whether or not he pulls through this attack remains to be seen.”
“I feel sorry for him, without a family or anything.”
“Who’s taking care of his store?”
“He’s got a young chap named Bill Bringham who works there as a clerk. Do you know him?”
I shook my head. “The town’s growing so fast I can’t keep up with all the new arrivals.”
“I haven’t seen you around the clothing store lately, Doc. We’re having a clearance sale right now.”
“Thanks, Clint. I might drop by.”
I left him in the lobby and went down the corridor to my office. April handed me some messages and said, “I checked with New York. The only two iron lungs I’ve located are both in use. Do you want me to try some cities farther away?”
I shook my head. “He’d never make the trip. We’ll have to hope he hangs on long enough for the Stamford unit to be repaired. That’s our best bet.”
April went to lunch and I finished up some paperwork before starting my house calls. I’d promised to look in on Mrs. Higgins and see how her gout was coming along. Before I could leave, however, there was a phone call from Sheriff Lens. “Doc, I need your help.”
“I was just leaving on some calls, Sheriff.”
“Tess Wainwright’s been murdered. I’m at the Wainwright house now.”
“Tess? I can’t believe it! I saw her husband at the hospital not an hour ago.”
“I need you here, Doc. Can you come right out?”
“I could stop on my way to the Higgins place,” I told him.
By the time I arrived, Clint Wainwright was on the scene, summoned from his store. He was nearly prostrate with grief and I did my best to comfort him before joining Sheriff Lens.
He stood in Tess’s small studio overlooking the wooded back yard of the house. She was slumped in a chair at the easel where she painted. A long paint-spattered cloth had been knotted around her throat. There were signs that she’d tried to struggle—an overturned vase holding flowers, a broken fingernail on one hand—but death appeared to have come with a swift finality.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Tess liked to do her painting in here,” the sheriff replied, indicating the easel with a half finished watercolor of the vase of mums. “Clint left her a little before eleven, just as Mrs. Babcock, the cleaning woman, arrived. Mrs. Babcock was working out in the living room the whole time. The studio door was closed. She swears nobody entered the room, yet you can see for yourself that all the windows are locked.”
I moved to each of the three windows in turn. All were firmly latched on the inside, and there was no other door. “There are at least two obvious explanations, of course,” I said. “Either Clint killed his wife before he left or Mrs. Babcock is lying.”
“She claims she heard Tess moving around—turning on the radio, answering the phone—after her husband left. And I guess I believe her, Doc. That’s why I called you.”
I’d known Mrs. Babcock for a few years, mainly through running into her at my patients’ homes. She was a woman in her early fifties, sturdy and reliable, with a reputation as a hard worker. Widowed for the past ten years, she’d taken a number of weekly cleaning jobs to help support herself and her teenaged daughter.
“Tell me everything that happened from the time you arrived,” I said.
Mrs. Babcock’s eyes were red from crying, but she seemed to have pulled herself together following the gruesome discovery. “I arrived about ten minutes to eleven, like I always do on Wednesdays. Mr. Wainwright said his wife was painting in her studio and I started cleaning the living room here, right outside the door. He went to the basement to bring up a spare tire for his car and I heard her turn the radio on, as she often did when she painted. I went about my business. About twenty minutes after Mr. Wainwright left, the phone rang and she answered on the first ring.”
“Could you hear who she was talking to?”
“No, the door’s too thick to carry voices. I just heard it ring once. Then there was nothing else until just before noon.” Mrs. Babcock clenched her handkerchief. “I knocked on the door to ask her if she wanted lunch. The radio was still playing, so I figured she didn’t hear the knock. I opened the door to ask her again and I found her like that.”
I lifted my eyes to Sheriff Lens, who was standing behind her. “Was the radio on when you arrived, Sheriff?”
“No.”
“I turned it off when I called him. It was right by the phone.”
“And you didn’t actually see Tess Wainwright alive before then?”
“Well, no.”
“And you heard no sounds of a struggle?”
“No, but the radio was pretty loud.”
“You touched nothing in the room except the radio and the telephone?”
“Nothing.”
“And you’ll swear no one entered the room while you were out here?”
“No one.”
Sheriff Lens sighed. “You see how difficult you’re making it for yourself, don’t you, Mrs. Babcock?”
“I’m only telling the truth.”
We left her and went to the kitchen to speak with Clint Wainwright. He stood up as we approached, his face reflecting more anger than grief. “Who could have done it?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you,” the sheriff told him.
“Clint,” I said, “was Tess expecting any visitors this morning?”
“Not that I know of.”
“What time did you leave her?”
“It must have been around quarter to eleven. I went downstairs and got a tire I wanted repaired and dropped it at the garage. Then I went to the hospital to see Major Fox. I reached his room a little after eleven.”
&n
bsp; “You weren’t at your store this morning?”
“No. I have a young woman who handles things when I’m away.”
“Did Tess have any enemies you know of?”
“Everyone loved her.”
“Was there ever any sort of trouble between her and Mrs. Babcock? Did she ever catch her stealing, for example?”
“No. There’s been nothing like that.”
Some neighbors arrived, attracted by the sheriff’s car out front. One of them was Bill Bringham. I remembered the name. “You’re the young fellow who works at Major Fox’s sporting-goods store, aren’t you?”
“That’s right, sir,” he answered politely. He was a handsome, muscular young man in his mid-twenties, barely a decade younger than me, but the thick glasses he wore made him appear a bit older.
“You live around here?”
“Across the street, a few houses down.”
“Did you happen to be home a little before noon?”
“No, sir. I was at the store. How’s the Major coming along?”
“As well as can be expected.”
“I hope he’ll be better soon.”
Major Fox would never be much better, but I didn’t tell him that. I asked, “Have you ever noticed any visitors to this house during the day when you were at home?”
The sheriff and the others were out of earshot and he looked at me shyly. “Boy friends, you mean? While her husband was at the clothing store?”
“I didn’t mean that, necessarily.”
“No, I never noticed anyone. Except Mrs. Babcock, of course. She came every Wednesday.”
The body had been removed when I returned to the studio. I glanced at the telephone and the overturned vase of flowers, then turned my attention to the unfinished painting. The vase and flowers had been sketched in, and some of the watercolors—bold strokes of red and green—applied to the leaves and petals.
Sheriff Lens joined me with another of the neighbors. “Doc, you remember Heidi Miller, don’t you?”
She was a pleasant woman of about Tess Wainwright’s age. I’d treated her two children for the usual round of preadolescent illnesses. “How are you, Heidi? I’d forgotten you live on this street.”
Nothing Is Impossible: Further Problems for Dr. Sam Hawthorne Page 6
