AHMM, September 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "How well do you know the Kennebaughs?"

  "Hardly know them at all. We see Willy pretty much every day, going back and forth on jobs, and his mom was out there all day yesterday working in her garden on the slope next to the house. But neighbors don't mix much around here. I've never been in their house and they've never been in mine. Which one of them was it?"

  Auburn was experiencing a resurgence of long-standing animosity against this meddlesome oaf, and perhaps in an effort to suppress it he proceeded to tell Byron more than he would likely have told an intimate friend who had no particular right to the information. “Mrs. Kennebaugh died during the night."

  "Mm-hmm. We thought it would be Iris rather than Willy. I bet they've been digging through the old files down at the newspaper all day. Might even have something about it tonight on the news at eleven."

  "Something about Mrs. Kennebaugh?"

  "Well, about her husband's family. He's been dead five or ten years now. This happened back in the sixties, when you were still packing a cap gun. The old man and his wife were found shot to death and their kid badly injured. The kid's governess or nanny or what have you was missing, and so were thousands of dollars in cash and jewelry. They never did find her, and the jewelry never turned up, either. It was front-page stuff for a couple of months. Hey, we better get back. My wife isn't very well, and Monica's got a couple teenagers who like to bounce each other's heads off the flagstones in the patio."

  Monica unceremoniously yanked her hound away from Auburn's ankles and they all melted into the shadows.

  Stamaty picked up his field kit and shouldered his camera case. They started across the graveled parking area toward the house, Auburn using his flashlight to help them avoid potholes, old fenceposts, and other hazards. As the house grew more distinct in the violet spring twilight, Stamaty pointed out the design features—the tall peaked roof and gables, the elliptically arched limestone window heads, the one-story kitchen tacked on under a sloping roof at the rear like an afterthought—that marked its age, proving it a true survivor from the mid-nineteenth century.

  The planks of the covered porch creaked under their feet. The gloom here was intense. Auburn manipulated the heavy brass knocker on the front door, setting off sepulchral echoes within and without. At length a light shone behind the windows that flanked the door, and a moment later another flashed on in the porch ceiling.

  The disheveled man who opened the door looked thoroughly rattled. His T-shirt hung slackly from his sagging shoulders but stretched taut as a balloon across his bloated middle.

  "Mr. Kennebaugh? I'm Detective Auburn with the Department of Public Safety and this is Mr. Stamaty from the coroner's office.” They both showed identification. “Sorry to disturb you without calling first."

  "That's all right. Come on in."

  The front door opened directly into a square living room with a stone fireplace. The room was crowded to capacity with bric-a-brac and antique furniture that looked as if it might have been sitting right there since it was brand-new. A lingering smell of recently scorched food offered little competition to a dusty, musty aroma of much older vintage.

  Kennebaugh closed and bolted the door and invited them to sit down. “I'm sorry if I don't seem to be thinking very straight tonight,” he said. “This whole thing has hit me like a Mack truck."

  "We understand how you feel, sir,” Stamaty said in his satiny baritone. “Please believe that we wouldn't be here bothering you without a good reason. Could you just tell us briefly what happened last night?"

  Kennebaugh lowered his heavy frame into an overstuffed chair that looked as if it had been bearing his weight resolutely for many years. “I went over all that with the paramedics,” he said, “but I guess you have to file your own reports.” He ran stubby fingers up over chubby cheeks and massaged his eyelids noisily for several seconds. “Like I told them, I got back from a job a little before midnight last night."

  "What kind of job, sir?” asked Auburn.

  "Replacing burned-out light bulbs in the rotunda at Carney County courthouse."

  "Are you the owner of the business?"

  "Yes. Back when my dad started it, he did general electrical contracting. Since he died, we've been specializing in servicing lighting fixtures and replacing bulbs and tubes in hard-to-reach areas—parking lot floodlights, ceiling lamps, and chandeliers in churches, theaters, public buildings..."

  Auburn tried to imagine the plump and ungainly Kennebaugh dangling from a forty-foot ladder to change bulbs in a chandelier. “Sounds like you're kept pretty busy."

  "Actually I'm not doing all that well. There's a lot of guys out there with extension ladders taking service contracts away from me. In fact, I just had to let my last helper go. Plus overhead and insurance are eating me alive."

  "Was this a service call at the courthouse last night?"

  "No, sir. I have a regular maintenance contract with them, but I can only work when the building is closed to the public. I was there from about eight last night till a little after eleven, and the drive back took me about an hour."

  "Did you see your mother or talk to her after you got home?"

  "No. She has a heart condition and she's usually in bed by ten o'clock. I mean ‘was.’ When I came in late I didn't bother her."

  "When was the last time you saw her alive?"

  "When I left last night, right after dinner. Say seven, maybe a quarter till."

  "Did she seem all right to you then?"

  "As well as ever. She ate a good dinner and she was doing the dishes when I left."

  "Was she alone in the house when you left?"

  "Sure."

  "When you got home did you notice anything unusual in the house? Anything out of place, or signs that somebody had been in the house, anything damaged?"

  "No."

  "Did you hear anything during the night?"

  "Like I told those paramedics, I heard a couple thumps there on the stairs around four this morning. I thought somebody might have broken in, and since my mother's bedroom is on the ground floor—"

  "Have you had break-ins before?"

  "No, but it's only a matter of time. There's a woods back of us here where a bunch of bums hang out most of the year. They live in shelters made out of sticks and cardboard and plastic sheeting. They build fires with anything that will burn and sometimes the smoke gets pretty toxic. Most nights we can hear them out there raising Cain, drunk or high on drugs—"

  "Have you complained to Public Safety?"

  "Numerous times. And they've run them out of there and knocked down their shelters numerous times. But they always come back."

  "Have you ever had any kind of trouble with them?"

  "No, just the noise and the smoke, and the fact that we don't want riffraff like that so close to our property.” Evidently sensing that the conversation had drifted off on a tangent, Kennebaugh finished his account of the events of last night. “So we figured, me and the paramedics, that she woke up during the night with heart pain or breathing trouble and was on her way up to get me, but only got as far as the landing before ... before she...” He seemed momentarily lost in painful reverie.

  Stamaty resumed control of the conversation. “There have been some new developments since the funeral director picked up your mother's body this morning. An examination showed that she died of a gunshot wound to the heart."

  After a moment of stunned silence, Kennebaugh covered his face with his big clumsy hands and rocked back and forth moaning like a child with a toothache. “Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, that can't be."

  "I'm afraid it's true, sir. Are there any firearms in the house?"

  "Lord, no!"

  "Could you show us where you found your mother last night?"

  Kennebaugh rolled out of his chair and led them to the foot of the stairs. “Right there on the landing. I'm afraid that light is burned out."

  It figures, thought Auburn, that a guy who made his living by replacing burnt-out light bulbs w
ould put off replacing the ones in his own house indefinitely.

  Auburn's flashlight beam picked up a few dribbles of dried blood on the tattered stair runner. “I think you said your mother's bedroom is on the lower level. Have you been in there since you found her on the stairs?"

  "Well, no, actually I haven't."

  "I think we'd better take a look. We'll ask you not to touch anything—that includes light switches, doorknobs..."

  Kennebaugh preceded them through a dim hallway to a ground-floor bedroom. Auburn used the butt of his flashlight to switch on the ceiling light. He had already seen the tenant of this room in death. To the impressions he had formed about her then, he began to add inferences about her in life.

  The decor in the bedroom was spartan, the bedstead and matching bureau and vanity table stained and scratched. The TV in the corner had rabbit-ears antennae and a screen the size of one of the paperback romances that lay scattered around the room like toys in a nursery.

  The bedclothes trailed in a wild tangle from the bed halfway across the floor.

  Auburn resisted the temptation to straighten them out in search of bloodstains or a bullet hole before the scene had been photographed.

  More striking than the state of the bedclothes was the fact that an air conditioning unit had been shoved out of its position on the sill of one of the two windows and now lay on the floor between the bed and the wall. Torn pieces of weather stripping and adhesive still adhered to both the air conditioner and the sash window, which had been drawn down nearly shut.

  Kennebaugh stood in the doorway, staring and immobile.

  "I know this is hard for you, sir,” said Auburn, “but please look around here and see if anything seems to be missing. Remember, don't touch anything."

  Without shifting his position, Kennebaugh pointed to an old-fashioned but opulent jewel case atop the bureau. It sat slightly askew, with two of its drawers partially pulled out. “Check that,” he said. “My mother had lots of antique jewelry that she wouldn't ever sell, even though she never wore it."

  Not a single piece of jewelry was to be found in the case.

  "Was the jewelry insured?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Is there any chance your mother would have had a list or a description of the pieces that are missing?"

  Kennebaugh was shaking his head, with hands spread wide, in an attitude of utter helplessness.

  "We need to look through the rest of the house,” Auburn told him. “We know approximately what time your mother died, but we don't know when she was shot. Since you didn't hear the shot, the burglar must have been here before you came home last night. In that case, he may have cleaned out other rooms."

  The medicine cabinet in the downstairs bathroom contained three kinds of heart pills prescribed for Iris Kennebaugh.

  "Do you mind if I take these along with me?” asked Stamaty. “Just as a back check on the laboratory findings."

  "Is that routine?” asked Kennebaugh, seemingly reluctant to let the medicine out of his possession.

  Stamaty nodded suavely. “I'll give you a receipt for them. Or if you prefer, I can just copy the labels..."

  "No, that's all right. They can't do her any good now."

  There was nothing much in the dining room except dust and disused furniture. The fixtures and cabinetry in the kitchen and pantry at the back were like something out of a museum. The upstairs of the house matched the downstairs in its general air of dilapidation and decay—discolored wallpaper, cracked plaster, ancient furniture. Kennebaugh's spacious bedroom, which also served as a business office, was as disorderly as a pigsty and as homey as a toolshed.

  Auburn pushed open the doors of the two front bedrooms with the tip of his shoe to avoid touching the doorknobs. One of them, like Kennebaugh's bedroom and the one downstairs, had a window air conditioner. But the bureaus and closets in these rooms contained only a few articles of worn clothing.

  While Auburn and Stamaty lingered in the upstairs bath with its free-standing tub, Kennebaugh went back downstairs to the kitchen, where they could hear him running water and clanking pans and dishes.

  Stamaty unstrapped his camera and started downstairs.

  "You in a hurry, Nick?"

  "Frankly, I am. Because in about two minutes you're going to call Kestrel out here to collect evidence, and I want to get my pictures and go before he blows in and starts counting the stripes in the wallpaper."

  "Well, come here and take a picture of this first.” Auburn led him into the left front bedroom, the one with an air conditioner in the window. Stooping, he raised the lower edge of the dust ruffle on the bed and pointed underneath to an irregular scrap of newspaper. “With a close-up setting."

  "What am I recording for posterity? Blood stains?"

  "Take another look. Those headlines about welfare cuts and the teachers’ strike were in yesterday morning's paper."

  Afterward they used their flashlights to inspect the downstairs bedroom window from the outside. A stone walk ran along the foundation of the house here, with only a three- or four-inch gap where early spring weeds had already established a foothold. They found no marks on the ground and no clear evidence of tool damage to the window frame.

  Stamaty shot several flash pictures and bustled off through the dark to his car as if he dreaded even a passing encounter with Kestrel in the parking lot. Auburn went back inside to help Kennebaugh look for a list of the missing jewelry. His chief motive for hanging around until Kestrel arrived was to make sure Kennebaugh didn't start wandering around his mother's room touching things, moving them out of place, and leaving traces of his own presence for the evidence technician to find and spin into one of his devious and improbable theories.

  Auburn left as soon as Kestrel arrived. During the long drive home he phoned headquarters to request that Records initiate full background probes in the morning on Iris Kennebaugh and her son.

  After morning report the next day, Auburn sat down with Lieutenant Howell Dunbar, chief of what the lieutenant himself liked to call the Department of Unplanned Giving. Like Auburn, he was African American, but the two had never become close. A retired army officer, Dunbar was a stickler for protocol and a walking monument to the military adage, Rank Has Its Privileges.

  "Another hunting accident,” he growled in his gravelly bass. Dunbar delighted in baffling people.

  Auburn eyed him inquiringly. “Hunting accident as in ... ?"

  "The killer was hunting for something to lift,” explained Dunbar, “and the victim woke up by accident. Does the name David Dakin mean anything to you?"

  "He was a carpenter—"

  "Roofing and siding contractor. Remember his M.O.?"

  "Pushing air conditioners out of first-floor windows. Till the time a neighbor saw him at it and called Public Safety."

  "Why isn't this him?"

  Auburn thought briefly and counted off the reasons on his fingers. “First, because he always worked during the daytime. Second, because he never carried a firearm as far as we know. And third, because he's been staying at the Losers’ Hotel at Batesville for the past three or four years."

  "Was. The parole board evicted him less than a month ago. Something about needing his cell for a crooked cop. Why don't you get Dakin's current address from Dormeyer and pay him a call?” Lieutenant Dunbar had a tricky way of saying “Why don't you?” so as to make it sound exactly like “I want you to."

  An obituary notice in the morning paper indicated that Iris Kennebaugh was to be cremated the following day after a service at the funeral parlor. The paper was making the usual social crisis out of the murder and burglary on Dene Hollow Road. Moreover, as Stu Byron had predicted, they had raked up the forty-year-old family tragedy and drawn vague parallels to the present case.

  Arthur Kennebaugh, the brother of the late Iris Kennebaugh's late husband and Willy Kennebaugh's uncle, had an “emotionally unstable” daughter named Gilda. This branch of the family, which had broad real estate and manuf
acturing interests, could easily afford to hire a full-time companion to act as a keeper for their unruly daughter.

  Rachel Ferrante, a newly certified teacher just two years older than Gilda, served satisfactorily as her companion for six months. Then she suddenly vanished, along with the family jewels and a vast hoard of cash, possibly of disreputable origin, which Arthur had kept in a safe at home. Rachel left Arthur Kennebaugh and his wife shot to death with one of Arthur's hunting rifles, and Gilda semicomatose from a severe blunt head wound. Gilda's underlying mental trouble, aggravated by the shock of the experience, made it impossible for her to give a coherent account of the event.

  Neither Rachel Ferrante nor the stolen articles had ever been traced. Some believed that she was another victim of the crime rather than its perpetrator and that she had been carried off by the thieves and probably murdered. But later, as elements of Ferrante's lurid past came to the surface, the majority view was that she herself had been the instigator of the crime, or at least a willing accomplice.

  Auburn was adding the highlights of this ancient and no doubt irrelevant saga to his computer file on the Iris Kennebaugh murder when Mark Dormeyer, the parole officer, who worked odd hours and was often out of his office for extended periods, finally returned his call. Before consenting to reveal David Dakin's current home address, phone, and place of employment, Dormeyer gave Auburn the third degree about his interest in this parolee.

  Dakin was working as a warehouseman at a wholesale building supply company. Even though the management of the company knew of his criminal record, Auburn decided to wait until Dakin got home from work, since their interview might well culminate in an arrest.

  When he returned to his office after lunch, he found preliminary results of confidential background probes on Iris and Willy Kennebaugh. By collating these with information in Iris's obituary and drawing some obvious inferences, he put together an outline chronology of the family history.

  Iris had worked as a stenographer at a paint factory before her marriage and for some years afterward, evidently until Willy was born. Her late husband Gerald, Willy's father, had owned and managed a successful electrical contracting firm, which had passed to Willy on his father's death at age fifty-four. Perhaps Willy hadn't inherited his father's business acumen; maybe he just wasn't a very good electrician. In any event, the business had been going downhill for the past eight years, and the family finances were now exceedingly shaky.