Nothing Is Impossible: Further Problems for Dr. Sam Hawthorne

by Hoch Edward D.

  “Are you going to deliver those now?”

  “Yeah. You comin’ along?”

  “I’ll follow in my car.”

  “I’d like to drive one of them sometime,” he said, nodding toward my red Mercedes.

  “Go to medical school,” I suggested. The car was one of the few luxuries of my bachelor existence.

  I stayed well behind him on the drive out to Frankfurt’s place, mainly to avoid the cloud of dust he raised from the road. He stopped at the gate and got out with the key. As he jiggled the metal barrier to make sure it was locked before inserting the key to open it, I happened to glance across the road at the clump of bushes. A car was parked there once more, but it was a different one. The watcher had changed from a blue Dodge to a tan Chevy.

  I turned off the ignition and got out, striding purposefully toward the Chevy. For the first time, I could make out the man inside, leaning back in the seat with a fedora covering his brow as if he were asleep. I jerked open the unlocked door on the passenger side. “Maybe I can help you find what you’re looking for,” I told him.

  He glared at me from under the fedora and flipped open a leather case to show me a small gold badge and an identification card. All I had time to see were the words, Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Get out of here, buddy. Keep driving,” he said.

  “I’m a doctor,” I told him. “I’m going in there.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Nothing that I know of. I’m just checking on him.”

  Paul Nolan had closed the gate without locking it and was proceeding up the road in his delivery truck. Almost at once the German shepherd was after him, barking and growling as he nipped at the tires. The federal agent laughed. “Better go rescue that kid.”

  I agreed and hurried to the gate, pushing it open wide enough to admit my car. As I passed through the gate the dog seemed to grow confused at this wealth of targets. He turned his attention to me, chasing down the road to intercept me and leaving the delivery truck free to pull out of sight around the corner of the garage.

  I paused a while to keep the dog occupied while Paul got the groceries inside, but after a few minutes Paul appeared around the garage, motioning to me. “He’s not answering the bell, Doc.”

  “Maybe he’s not home,” I said. As I left the car, the German shepherd started for me. I slipped off my coat and was wrapping it around my arm for protection when Paul ran up with a double handful of dry dogfood.

  “He could be just hungry,” he suggested, tossing it on the ground. “Spiggins ordered two big bags of it.”

  Indeed that seemed to be the case. The dog ceased his attack and fell upon the food instead. I sighed with relief and followed Paul back to the side door of the house.

  “The door’s locked and he doesn’t answer,” he told me.

  I peered in at the window, seeing something that sent a familiar shiver down my spine. “Stand back—I’m going to break the glass.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a body in there, on the floor.”

  During the hours that followed, we established that Rudy Frankfurt had been killed by repeated blows on the head with an axe handle found near the body. He’d been dead somewhere between thirty-six and forty-eight hours, which meant Wednesday evening or Thursday morning. Somehow I wasn’t surprised when Sheriff Lens completed his inspection of the house and returned with the word that all doors and windows were locked tight.

  “What about the fence?” I asked him.

  “That, too, Doc. The current is on full force in that electric wire along the top. Nobody got over that one.”

  “A locked gate, a seven-foot-high electrified fence, a guard dog, and a house with all its doors and windows locked. It’s impossible.”

  Sheriff Lens shifted the belt over his stomach. “You’ve had tough ones before, Doc. What do you want me to do?”

  I thought about that. “Frankfurt was alive Wednesday afternoon when he brought his car to the garage. Either he walked back here or he got a ride. See what you can find out from the garage man.” As an afterthought, I added, “And the postman who delivers his mail.”

  “Huh?”

  “He wrote a note to Mike Spiggins and sent his gate key along so the groceries could be delivered. Maybe the postman can remember picking up that letter from his box by the gate.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  I suddenly remembered there was one other witness, perhaps the best witness of all. “Come with me for a few minutes, Sheriff.”

  As it turned out, we didn’t need to walk down the road to the gate for a confrontation with the federal agent. I opened the door and there he was, fedora and all.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked, showing his identification once more.

  Sheriff Lens peered down at the name. “Special Agent Steven Bates. What can I do for you, sir?”

  “Are you the sheriff here?”

  “That’s right.”

  “We’ve had this house under surveillance for the past two days. It’s a matter of national security.”

  “I guess you’ll have to be more specific than that.”

  The agent eyed the sheriff with growing irritation. “What’s happened here?” he demanded.

  “Man named Rudy Frankfurt has been murdered, sometime within the past couple of days.”

  I interrupted with a question. “There are two of you watching the house, aren’t there? I saw another car earlier.”

  Bates turned toward me. “Who are you?”

  “Dr. Sam Hawthorne. I found the body.”

  He nodded. “You came over to my car earlier.”

  “I’d noticed two different cars parked in the bushes. It looked suspicious.”

  “We suspect that Rudolph Frankfurt may have had some connection with an organization called the German-American Volksbund. They’re meeting somewhere in rural New England this weekend, and my partner and I were assigned to watch this place. There are other teams at other locations.” He addressed his explanation to Sheriff Lens, ignoring me.

  “We’ve never had any trouble like that here,” the sheriff said, scratching his head. “There’ve been stories about Frankfurt from time to time, but nothing criminal.”

  “Have you found any weapons in the house?”

  “One hunting rifle, nothing else. We found lots of food, even three bags of dogfood in the garage, but no guns, no phone, nothing mechanical.”

  “I think my partner and I better take over that aspect of the case. I can call and have him here in fifteen minutes.”

  “No telephone,” Sheriff Lens told him again.

  “What?”

  “Frankfurt didn’t have a telephone. He was something of a hermit. He went into town only when he had to, lived behind this electric fence with a guard dog.”

  I stretched my luck by interrupting again. “If you and your partner have been here for two days, you must have seen the killer.”

  He turned toward me again. “We took up our station at five P.M. Wednesday afternoon. No one’s entered or left since then.”

  Sheriff Lens sighed. “Where does that leave us, Doc?”

  “I’m not quite sure,” I said. “Why don’t you check with that postman? I’ll talk to the garage man again.”

  Then we had to step aside while they carried Rudy Frankfurt’s body out of the house.

  As soon as I arrived at my office on Saturday morning, I telephoned Gretchen Pratt with the news. “The A-Z test was positive, Gretchen.”

  There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line, but when she spoke her voice was reasonably controlled. “I didn’t really doubt it,” she said.

  “What about Bill?”

  “I told him last night. I was that certain what the result would be.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “I don’t know. He was quiet, thoughtful.”

  “Could you both come in to see me this afternoon? It might help to talk this over before you t
ell your parents.”

  “What if Bill won’t come?”

  “We’re pretty good friends. Ask him to take an hour off from training.”

  “All right, Doctor.”

  Mary was standing in the doorway when I hung up. “You’re here early for a Saturday.”

  “I got the lab results and I wanted to phone Gretchen Pratt.”

  “Positive?”

  I nodded. “She took it pretty well. I asked her to come in this afternoon with the Crawley boy.” I shook my head. “They’re so young to be parents, Mary.”

  “Nineteen. My sister was married at nineteen. They’re doing fine.”

  “He’s supposed to start his second year of college next week. He’s training for the Olympics next summer.”

  She sat down in the patients’ chair. “What I want to hear about is the murder. Rudy Frankfurt bludgeoned to death with an axe handle?”

  “That seems to be it. I haven’t checked the autopsy results yet.”

  “That place is like a fortress. How did the killer get in?”

  I drew up my yellow pad and started making notes, as much to clarify my own thinking as to answer her question. “The last person to see Rudy alive other than his killer was the garage man—that fellow named Tyler. He says Frankfurt brought his car in around four and then left, alone, to walk back to his farm. That walk would have taken him about thirty minutes. He needed groceries, including dogfood, but obviously he didn’t want to carry them. When he arrived home, he wrote out a list, enclosed his gate key, and mailed it to Spiggins’, leaving the envelope in the box at his gate. Starting at five that afternoon, two FBI agents were watching that gate, and nobody came or went.”

  “So he was killed before five?”

  “I don’t know. That supposes one of two possibilities. First, that he returned home to catch the killer inside his house, intent on robbery. But that’s unlikely because how would the killer have gotten over the fence, past the dog, and into the house?”

  “What kind of dog is it?”

  “A trained German shepherd, purchased from Kasper’s Kennel two months ago. Sheriff Lens found the bill of sale. Furthermore, if Frankfurt was killed when he returned home, how could he have written out the shopping list? He didn’t write it before he left or he’d have dropped it at the grocery store in person.”

  “What’s the second possibility?” Mary asked.

  “That the killer was waiting outside and Frankfurt let him in when he returned. The dog didn’t attack the man because Frankfurt was with him. The trouble is, we have the same problem. When did Rudy write the shopping list?”

  “Are you sure it’s his handwriting?”

  “Yes. Sheriff Lens recognized it and so did Paul, the delivery boy. If we figure the time it took for writing the list, walking it to the gate, and coming back to be killed, that hardly leaves time for the killer to escape before the FBI agents began their surveillance at five o’clock.”

  “But it could have been done.”

  “Only if the autopsy shows he died late Wednesday afternoon.” I stretched my tense muscles. “Dr. Wolfe should have the results by now. I think I’ll walk down to see him.”

  Dr. Wolfe had a mane of white hair and a chip on his shoulder, especially when it came to me. I’d had a run-in with him earlier that summer when the Medical Society had threatened to suspend my license to practice and our relations were still a bit cool. He was on the staff of Pilgrim Memorial Hospital and my office was in one wing, so it was natural that we ran into each other often.

  “Well, Dr. Hawthorne—what brings you here?” he asked, looking up from his desk.

  “I was wondering if you’d completed the Frankfurt autopsy yet,” I told him.

  “Playing detective again?”

  “The dead man was a patient of mine. Naturally I have an interest in his death,” I answered stiffly.

  He sighed and picked up the paper in front of him. “What do you want to know?”

  “Time of death, cause of death.”

  “Cause of death, repeated blows to the head which caused massive bleeding in the brain. He would have been unconscious at once and dead soon afterward. The time I would place at midnight Wednesday, give or take four hours either way.”

  “That late? He couldn’t have been killed before five o’clock Wednesday afternoon?”

  “No, sir. You know the criteria for determining time of death. Food in the stomach, extent of rigor mortis. As I’m sure you learned at medical school, the stiffening of the body after death is determined by several factors, including the temperature of the surroundings. Rigor wears off after a time in the same manner. Frankfurt died somewhere around midnight on Wednesday.”

  “All right,” I said, accepting it.

  “By the way, did you or Sheriff Lens turn the body over after it was found?”

  “Of course not. The sheriff may have lifted it slightly to see if there was anything under it, but it was returned to its original position. Why do you ask?”

  “It’s probably nothing,” he said dismissively. “You found him on his back, but there’s some bruising on the front of his body, as if blood had settled there after death. I thought he might have been turned over.”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Perhaps the killer returned and did it.”

  Sure, I thought, he got into that fortress not once but twice.

  I went back to my office and phoned Sheriff Lens. After running through the information I’d gotten from the garage repairman and Dr. Wolfe’s autopsy, I asked about the postman. “Does he remember picking up a letter from Frankfurt’s mailbox?”

  “He’s pretty sure there was one on Thursday. He remembers feeling something heavy inside and wondering what it was.”

  “Any chance he used the key himself to enter the grounds and kill Frankfurt?”

  The sheriff snorted. “Who, Purty? The man’s afraid of dogs, Doc. And rightly so, after the number of times he’s been bitten. He stays right in his car when delivering the mail, just leaning out to fill the boxes along the road. He’d never have gone in there with that German shepherd! Besides, he don’t deliver the mail at midnight.”

  “No, I suppose not. Thanks, Sheriff.”

  In the afternoon, I had other things to think about. Bill Crawley and Gretchen arrived around two, both of them somber and self-conscious.

  “What do you want to do, the both of you?” I asked them.

  “We want to get married,” Bill said at once.

  “Then do it.”

  “Our parents—” Gretchen began.

  “You’ve got a little time yet to think about the best way to approach your folks. I’ll speak with them if you’d like me to. Or perhaps you’d prefer your minister.” We discussed the possibilities for the next half hour, but in those days, in a town like Northmont, they were distinctly limited. Either there was a marriage or Gretchen would go off somewhere to have the baby, giving it up for adoption after that.

  Neither of them favored such an alternative. “If I have the baby, I want to keep it,” Gretchen said firmly. “The only problem is with Bill. He starts school again next week.”

  “Boston’s not far. I can be home every weekend, and I’ll get a job—”

  “In the middle of a Depression?” she questioned. “And what about the Olympics?”

  “Berlin means nothing to me. In fact, if all those Germans are like Rudy Frankfurt, I guess I’d rather stay away.”

  “He was murdered, you know,” I told him.

  “I heard about it. He made some remark to me at the grocery store one day about Germans being the superior race. I almost slugged him. I would have if he’d been ten years younger.”

  I rubbed a hand over my tired eyes. “Where were you around midnight on Wednesday, Bill?”

  “If it was midnight, I was home in bed.”

  “Are you still working at Kasper’s?”

  “I finished up yesterday. I leave for school on Monday.”

 
; I got up and walked around the office, peering out at the sky. It was one of those times when I wished I was anywhere but Northmont. “What’s your high-jump record now, Bill? I’ll bet you can go over seven feet.”

  “Well, sure—”

  “You know, of all the people in this town I’ll bet you’re the only one who could have murdered Rudy Frankfurt.”

  Gretchen gasped and Bill was on his feet at once. “What are you saying? I never killed anyone!”

  I forced myself to sit down again. “Consider the facts, Bill. Frankfurt lived inside a virtual fortress. There’s a seven-foot fence with a live electric wire on top running all around his property. The yard is patrolled by a German shepherd who won’t hesitate to attack. And the house beyond that is locked. There was a key to the gate floating around in the mail, but two FBI agents took turns watching that gate during the entire period. No one entered. Somehow the killer had to come over that fence and get by the dog.

  “You could have done it, Bill. You could high-jump a seven-foot fence without touching that electric wire. And you could get by the dog because he knew you. Frankfurt purchased him from Kasper’s Kennel just two months ago when you were working there.”

  Bill turned to Gretchen. “Do you believe I killed Frankfurt?”

  “Of course not! You wouldn’t hurt a fly! Dr. Sam, he doesn’t even go hunting!”

  “But you just admitted you wanted to punch him, Bill. You could have gone over the fence and passed the dog with a friendly pat on the head. Once you were at the door, Frankfurt would have recognized you and opened it, if only to see what you were doing there. The door would have locked automatically as you left, and you could have made your escape the same way, past the dog and over the fence.”

  “He didn’t do it,” Gretchen said firmly.

  “Unless you’re ready to believe in the impossible, there’s no other explanation,” I told her.

  “Are you going to tell this to Sheriff Lens?” Bill asked, looking frightened for the first time.

  “I have to tell him, if I’m convinced that’s what happened,” I told him.

  I sat alone in my office after I’d sent them off to let me think, but before long Mary confronted me. “Don’t those kids have enough trouble without your theories?” she said.