I pulled into the auto dealer’s lot and saw Hank Foxe come outside to greet us. “Hi, there! What can I do for you, Sam? Sheriff Lens?”
“Where do you hide a black roadster, Hank? On a used-car lot?”
“Huh?” He stared at me, looking blank.
“You were driving that getaway car, Hank, wearing a blond wig. You got it off this lot. After the robbery, you drove back here, let your partners out, and parked the car in line with the others. Maybe you even painted a price on its front windshield.”
“That’s crazy, Sam. You think I’d put Brew in danger?”
“Is the car here, Doc?” the sheriff asked.
I let my eyes wander over the lot. I thought I’d seen one when we passed earlier and now I saw it again, in a back row. A black roadster of the same make the bank robbers had used. “There it is.” I pointed.
“I’ll get the keys and prove to you it couldn’t have been used in the robbery,” Foxe insisted. He ran into the showroom and returned in a moment with a ring of labeled keys. He tried to start the car, but the engine wouldn’t turn over. “See? No gas—we keep them empty so they’re harder to steal at night.”
“You’d have had plenty of time to siphon the gasoline out of it,” I countered.
Mary had gone around to look at the front of the car. “You’d better look at this,” she said to me.
“What’s that?”
“There’s an American Automobile Association medallion attached to the radiator grille. The car that almost hit me didn’t have anything on the grille.”
“You see?” Foxe said triumphantly.
Mentally, I must have withdrawn from the case on the spot. I went home alone to my apartment and tried to forget all about it, immersing myself instead in the latest medical journals. In the morning, I was making breakfast when my bell rang. I answered the door and found Mary Best standing there.
“I’m leaving now,” she said. “I stopped by to say goodbye. I enjoyed meeting you yesterday, if not the circumstances.”
“Come in. I’m just having coffee.”
I poured her a cup and she sat down across the table from me. “I had another reason for coming. There’s something I think you might have overlooked yesterday. I couldn’t leave without telling you.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, you see—”
She talked for some time and she made sense.
“It should be easy enough to prove,” I said. “The car should still be there.”
“It is still there. I looked.”
“You looked?“
“Of course—I had to be sure I was right.”
“Come on!”
We picked up Sheriff Lens on the way and reached the bank just as Clint Walling and his partner were entering the bank. Greenleaf seemed surprised to see us. “We’re just opening for business.”
“You’ll have to close again,” I said, keeping an eye on the three tellers.
“Why? There’s enough money.”
“But no employees. Special Agent Walling here is about to arrest all four of you for bank robbery and murder.”
Clint Walling’s mouth dropped open, and behind the tellers’ cages Jones went for a gun, but then thought better of it. Walling’s partner had already drawn his revolver and Sheriff Lens had his weapon out.
“Suppose somebody explains what’s going on,” Walling suggested.
“Do you want the honors?” I asked Mary.
“No, you go ahead,” she said. “You worked out the details.”
“Mary noticed something very elementary yesterday which escaped me completely,” I began. “When I examined the body of Brewster Cartright, I observed that the bullet entered his chest near the heart and came out the back. Yet when Greenleaf and the others reenacted the killing, they had the robber shooting Cartright in the back. They lied about the circumstances of the robbery. As soon as Mary pointed that out to me, I began to remember other things. My first impression as they ran out of the building was that the robbers were dressed like bankers. That’s because they were bankers. One of them had left earlier to get the car, wearing a blond wig to confuse witnesses. He pulled up and the other two jumped in. They weren’t carrying the real money—it had been removed from the bank and hidden earlier.”
“But you found them handcuffed together in the storeroom,” Walling reminded me. “How did they get there?”
“Mary pointed out to me that the gang’s car, in front of the bank on the wrong side of the street, turned left at the first intersection and then left again before disappearing. That put it on Maple Street, right behind the bank. The storeroom has a bolted door leading to Maple Street. The fourth bank employee, probably Greenleaf here, stayed in the bank and they locked him in the storeroom. If witnesses had run into the bank at once, Greenleaf could have talked to them through the locked door, delaying the rescue long enough for the others to return through the back door, bolt it, and handcuff themselves together. Also, of course, he was there to unbolt the door and let them in.”
“But what happened to the car?” Walling wanted to know.
“Mary thought it swerved as it rounded the corner into Maple Street, as if heading toward her side of the street. What’s there on Maple besides the backs of all these buildings? The house and garage where Seth Simpkins lived until the bank foreclosed on him. The empty house, which means the bank had keys to it. The missing roadster is in that garage, and has been since the robbery.”
“Are you sure?” the agent asked.
“I looked during the night,” Mary told him. “Through a window.”
The F.B.I. man shook his head. “How could they pull a trick like that in broad daylight without being seen?”
“There are just vacant lots across the street, and mostly the backs of buildings. Mary’s car was on the street, of course, but luckily for them she kept going around the corner. If anyone else had been in sight I suppose they’d have circled a few blocks and come back—or perhaps dropped two of the tellers off while the third drove the car far enough away to abandon it. In that case, Greenleaf could have claimed the missing teller was out to lunch during the robbery.”
“Are any of you ready to talk?” Walling asked.
It was Greenleaf who finally broke the silence. “We were short in some accounts,” he said quietly. “Cartright gave us until yesterday to put back the money. He was going to call the sheriff. That’s when we killed him and faked the bank robbery.”
“You killed him,” Ryder said. “It was all your idea.”
Walking Mary to her car, I congratulated her. “We’d make a great team here, healing the sick, solving mysteries. I wish you’d think about it.”
“That was my one and only try at mystery-solving.” She slid behind the wheel of her car, giving me a thoughtful look. “Well, I’m off to Springfield.”
“Good luck, Mary.”
She drove off and I watched her go. I was still watching when the touring car made a U-turn and headed back to me.
She leaned out of the window and asked, “How much did you say the job pays?”
“And that was how Mary Best came to be my nurse,” Dr. Sam Hawthorne concluded. “With her arrival, life was never quite the same for me, as you’ll hear next time, when I tell you about some bizarre events that happened at Pilgrim Memorial Hospital.”
THE PROBLEM OF THE TWO BIRTHMARKS
Old Dr. Sam Hawthorne was awaiting his visitor, glass in hand. “You’re a bit late today. Here, sit down while I pour you a slight libation. I want to tell you about the first month Mary Best was my new nurse, and what happened at Pilgrim Memorial Hospital. It was May of ’thirty-five, halfway through a mild Northmont spring . . .”
This was my first opportunity to take Mary on an extended tour of the hospital (Dr. Sam continued). My office was in a converted wing of the building—converted when the hospital board finally agreed that its original eighty-bed space was too much for a town of Northmont’s size and potential. It
was handy for me, since I could visit my hospital patients between occasional office calls. A good bit of my practice was still devoted to house calls, and would be for another decade. That meant almost daily trips in my red Mercedes to one or another of the surrounding farms or homesteads. On this day, a Tuesday, there were no house calls scheduled, and we had an hour’s break before the next office appointment. It seemed the perfect time to take Mary on the tour of Pilgrim Memorial.
My long-time nurse April had married and moved to Maine the previous month. After a brief interlude with a replacement who didn’t work out, I’d hired Mary. She was a young woman in her late twenties with bobbed blonde hair and a bright, smiling face. She’d been driving through Northmont on her way to a nursing position in Springfield when she found herself in the middle of a bank robbery. After she helped me solve a particularly vexing mystery connected with it, I’d asked her to stay on as my nurse. She’d declined at first but then reconsidered, and so far neither of us had regretted it.
“This is very well equipped for such a small hospital,” Mary observed as she followed me into one of the two operating rooms.
“The place was built for eighty beds, and at the time they figured they’d need two operating rooms and all this equipment. But Northmont just didn’t grow as fast as people expected.”
“Who’s in charge?”
“There’s a regular board of directors, but the chief physician is Dr. Endlewise. He’s a newcomer to Pilgrim—he’s only been here a year. I’ll introduce you.”
We found Endlewise in his office. He was a short, slight man with a perpetual frown who seemed to me to be in the wrong line of work. I didn’t much care for him, but I tried not to let my feelings show as I introduced him to Mary. “I’m taking her on a tour of the hospital,” I explained.
Endlewise greeted her in a perfunctory manner and turned his attention to me. “Sam, if you have a few minutes, I’d like you to look at a patient who came in during the night. We need a second opinion. You can charge your regular consultant’s fee.”
“Glad to assist,” I said. “Come along, Mary. You’ll get a first-hand view of how Pilgrim Memorial operates.”
As Dr. Endlewise led the way down a corridor, he filled us in on the case. “The patient’s name is Hugh Streeter. He’s up from New York looking into the possibility of restoring some of the abandoned farmhouses around here.” Northmont hadn’t been hit by the Depression as badly as some areas of the Midwest, with their added drought problems, but there were individual cases where farm families had abandoned their land to the banks and gone off to start a new life in the city.
“What’s the diagnosis?” I asked.
“Based on the major symptom of painful constrictions below the sternum, typical of angina pectoris, I’d say the man is suffering from a coronary artery disease, probably arteriosclerosis. But there are some unusual aspects. He’s relatively young and seems in good physical shape. What’s more, some of the pain seems to be lower down, in the stomach area.”
“Have you taken X-rays?”
“Of course, but they’re inconclusive. You can see them if you like.” He turned into a private room, where a dark-haired man in his thirties was resting in bed. He opened his eyes when he heard us enter and tried to sit up. “Just relax,” Endlewise told him. “This is Dr. Hawthorne and his nurse, Miss Best. I wanted him to have a look at you.”
Streeter extended his hand carefully, as if fearful the pain would return. He was almost handsome, though the smallness of his deep-set eyes gave an odd, calculating expression to his face. “Pleased to meet you, Doctor. Have you any idea what’s wrong with me?”
“That’s what we’re here to find out,” I told him.
I gave him a quick but thorough examination. Endlewise handed me the electrocardiogram they’d taken earlier. It was slightly irregular but not abnormally so. “Are you still having chest pains?”
“Not right now.”
“What did you have to eat last night, Mr. Streeter, before your attack?”
“The seafood plate at the Magnolia Restaurant. I’m from New York and I was looking for a good place to eat.”
The Magnolia sounded better than it was. I’d known people to get a bad meal there as often as a good one, and their seafood was questionable at best. I finished the examination and gave him a reassuring pat. “You seem in pretty good shape to me.” I poured him a fresh glass of water from the pitcher by his right hand. “Have a good rest tonight.”
Outside in the hall, Dr. Endlewise asked, “Well?”
“It looks to me like an upset stomach, possibly a touch of food-poisoning. I don’t believe his heart’s involved at all.”
“Just what I suspected. I’m going to suggest he be kept one more night for observation and then released.”
“Whose patient is he?”
“He came in on his own. Jim Hayett saw him and had him admitted. You don’t send anyone with chest pains home without a thorough examination.”
I knew there was no love lost between Endlewise and young Hayett, and I hoped not to be involved in any dispute that might develop. Mary, who’d remained silent during my examination, spoke up as soon as Dr. Endlewise left us. “He seems more of a businessman than a physician,” she commented.
“He’s as much one as the other,” I agreed. “Unfortunately, I may have given him fuel for his latest controversy with Dr. Hayett.”
“Have I met him?”
I smiled at her. “You’d remember if you had. The nurses are all crazy about him.”
“Oh?”
“If he worked last night, he’s off duty now. You’ll have to meet him later.” I took her around to the nurses’ station and introduced Anna Fitzgerald and Kathleen Rogers, the two nurses starting the four-o’clock shift. Anna was middle-aged and just a bit cynical. Kathleen was still in her early twenties, fresh out of nursing school, with all the idealism one would expect.
“They seem very nice,” Mary remarked later. “Kathleen is so young.”
I nodded. “I know I’m getting old when there are nurses who can’t remember the World War.”
“Well, I just barely remember it.”
“You, too?” I groaned in mock despair. But my mind was still on Hugh Streeter. “Say, would you like to have dinner with me tonight?”
She studied me with her pretty blue eyes. “I didn’t think you were one to mix business with pleasure.”
“This may be all business and very little pleasure,” I told her. “I want to check on the source of that possible food poisoning.”
The Magnolia Restaurant was located just outside of Northmont, on the road to Shinn Corners. It could best be described as a road-house, one of several that had sprung up along country roads following the repeal of Prohibition. Though it offered a modicum of entertainment, no one would have dignified the place by calling it a nightclub. When we arrived shortly after seven, the parking lot was about half full. I recognized Sheriff Lens’s car and remembered that he often took his wife Vera out to dinner on Tuesday nights.
On the way to our table, we stopped off to greet them. “Still like the job, Mary,” the sheriff asked with a grin, “or have you had enough of this fella?”
“I still like it,” she assured him. “I think Northmont’s going to be a lot more exciting than Springfield.”
Vera paused over her salad, remarking, “I don’t remember you taking April out to dinner, Sam.”
“This is business,” I assured her, then decided not to ruin their dinner by going further.
“What a friendly woman,” Mary said when we were seated at our table.
“Vera’s great,” I said. “She used to be Northmont’s postmistress but she’s retired now.”
We were halfway through our meal when the evening’s entertainment began. A passable male singer was followed by a brisk young comedian, who produced a large-headed ventriloquist’s dummy from a suitcase. He was billed as Larry Law and Lucy, and indeed the dummy was female. The falsetto
voice he used for Lucy was both funny and convincing. But there was one thing about the dummy that troubled me. Our table was close enough to the constricted, elevated stage and I could see a dab of red beneath the dummy’s right ear. Whatever it was—paint or lipstick, most likely—it gave the dummy the appearance of someone I knew. Someone back at the hospital, I thought.
It was a foolish observation and I didn’t bother mentioning it to Mary. Instead, I concentrated on the reason for our visit. If there was any possibility of food poisoning at the Magnolia, I wanted to know about it. Mary had ordered fish and I’d chosen steak. Neither would win any prizes, but there seemed to be no hint of contamination. If Streeter had been felled by something he ate, it was probably a chance happening.
“There’s the comedian,” Mary said over dessert, gesturing toward Larry Law at the bar. She was the outgoing sort, as April had been, and when he walked past our table she said, “We enjoyed your act, Mr. Law.”
“Thank you.” He was around thirty, probably not too long in the business, and that was all the encouragement he needed to stop and chat. “Do you folks come here often?”
“It’s my first time,” Mary admitted. “But I’m new in Northmont.”
“It seems like a nice town.” He smiled at us. He had curly black hair and wore a bow tie that was purposely too big for his small face. “I’ve been here almost a month. I’ll be moving on soon, unless they extend me. My agent in New York is working on a radio spot for me. Can you imagine, a ventriloquist on the radio? What’s the point? But he says a fellow named Edgar Bergen has been on a few times and is getting popular.”
“That’s an interesting dummy you use,” I said. “Did you make it yourself?”
“I designed it. A friend did the actual carving. I’ve always been good at female voices and I decided to give it a try.”
“Are you staying in town?”
“The singer and I room together. The only trouble with the country is the same thing that’s wrong with the city—I hate rats. Do you have many rats around here?”
“Not that I know of,” I said. “What’s the dab of paint on Lucy’s neck for?”
Nothing Is Impossible: Further Problems for Dr. Sam Hawthorne Page 19
