Murder at Monticello

by Jane Langton

  Tom brightened and picked up the phone. “I’ve got a book on Jefferson’s presidency.” His voice sounded buzzy and faint, as if he were somewhere on the other side of the world. Which, thought Homer unhappily, in a way, he is. “He sent off the expedition during his first term.”

  “The expedition?”

  “Lewis and Clark. You know.” Tom gripped the phone and rambled on about all the things President Jefferson had done to prepare Meriwether Lewis for the journey. “He had all these friends in the American Philosophical Society. You know, like Benjamin Rush. Dr. Rush gave Lewis a list of the medicines he should take along.”

  Homer listened. Tom might have been one of his own young teaching assistants rather than a poor soul imprisoned on a charge of multiple murder, facing a lifetime behind bars or even a sentence of death.

  “I’ve been collecting them myself,” said Tom. “Tartar emetic, epsom salts, gum camphor, laudanum—”

  “Laudanum! Oh, of course, I saw them in your tent. All those little jars on the floor.”

  “On the floor?” Tom looked startled. His face fell. “Oh well, it doesn’t matter now.”

  “Of course it does,” said Homer, trying to sound comforting. He cleared his throat, wondering how to introduce the difficult subject. He came from a generation that found it hard to talk about sex. He and Mary didn’t talk about it, they just did it. Therefore, his questions were so vague and roundabout that Tom was puzzled.

  At last he guessed what Homer was trying to say. “Do you mean, can I fuck?”

  Homer laughed, and his inhibitions melted away. “Exactly.”

  “Oh, God, Homer, of course I can.” There was a pause, and then Tom blushed and cleared his throat. “Well, there’s a couple of old girlfriends you could talk to. You know, politely.” He scribbled on a piece of paper and held it up against the glass.

  Homer copied the names and addresses and went away, satisfied.

  If Tom Dean had been the killer he would have raped those women soundly. It was a point in his favor.

  Chapter 40

  A hard rain all the last night, dureing the last tide the logs on which we lay was all on float, Sent Jo Fields to hunt, he Soon returned and informed us that the hills was So high & Steep, & thick with undergroth and fallen Timber that he could not get out any distance.…

  Captain William Clark, November 11, 1805,

  on the Columbia

  It took Homer only two days to track down Tom’s ex-girlfriends, a couple of former students at the university. Gently he succeeded in persuading both of them to sign affidavits attesting to the sexual adequacy of Thomas Arthur Dean.

  With the affidavits triumphantly in hand, he burst into Oliver Pratt’s office and found him closeted with a stranger.

  “Oh, excuse me,” said Homer, beginning to back out. “I just wanted to pass on some information.”

  “No, no, Homer. Come right on in. Meet Lieutenant Detective Basil Partridge. Bazzie, this is my friend Homer Kelly from the Attorney General’s office in Massachusetts.”

  “No, no, Oliver,” said Homer. “You were wrong before, and now you’re more wrong than ever.”

  “Well, whatever,” said Pratt. “Okay, Homer, what do you want to tell me?”

  Homer relayed the news about Tom Dean’s sexual prowess, putting it as delicately as he could.

  Sergeant Partridge was not impressed. “Doesn’t mean a thing.”

  Pratt wasn’t impressed either. “How do we know how the kid would have responded at the—uh—critical moment?”

  “You mean,” said Homer, “he might have failed to—?”

  “Ejaculate,” said Bazzie crudely, getting right to the point.

  “So you see, Homer,” said Pratt, “in spite of his self-proclaimed masculine prowess, he might not have left any DNA on those women.”

  “But that’s absurd. You can’t possibly believe it.”

  It was an insult. Lieutenant Detective Partridge frowned at Homer and began itemizing the counts against Tom Dean. Homer had heard most of them before.

  “One, the kid tells a piece of shit about this woman following him to his tent in the woods. She followed him, he says, you get that? Not the other way around. Two, he admits inviting her inside—God!—and they talk for a while, he says, and then they both leave. He goes one way, she goes another. Three, we found heroin in his tent.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” interrupted Homer. “It wasn’t heroin. It was laudanum. Laudanum is tincture of opium. You have to do all kinds of things to opium to turn it into heroin. It’s purely medicinal. Lewis and Clark—”

  “Medicinal?” Bazzie snickered. “Oh, sure.” He carried on. “Four, his possession of a silver lighter bearing the initials of the murdered woman, the lighter with which”—Bazzie’s face shone with gloating triumph—“he lit the fire that was meant to destroy the evidence against him. Five, your young friend was seen in person at a crime scene, not once but twice.”

  Bazzie Partridge and Chief Pratt were both grinning at Homer. This item was a shocker.

  Bazzie explained. “One of the county cops noticed this redheaded guy at the library. You know, while the body of the victim was being removed.”

  “Serial killers,” said Pratt comfortably, “it’s what they like to do, come back to the—”

  Homer said it for him—“scene of the crime.” He sighed heavily. “You don’t believe that first so-called eyewitness, do you? There were probably all kinds of people in the neighborhood at the time—blond, brunette, gray-haired men in derby hats.”

  Bazzie went on mercilessly. “And there he was beside the road at the place where the hitchhiker was dumped. Claimed he was fixing his motorbike. Our guy identified him positively. Oh, and, incidentally, the motorbike leads us to item six.”

  “Item six,” repeated Homer, his voice sepulchral.

  “Victims all throttled with a chain. The bike belonging to Tom Dean has a chain with a padlock.” Like Chief Pratt, Bazzie took a melodramatic pleasure in acting out the garrotting of the victims by wrapping his hands around his neck and pretending to strangle himself. “Just the right size,” he said cheerfully, dropping his hands and grinning. “Item seven—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, there isn’t any more,” said Homer. “You’re making it up.”

  “Item seven, the vagueness of the suspect about his whereabouts. Ask him, go ahead and ask him where he was on particular days. Wait a sec.” Bazzie groped for a piece of paper on Pratt’s desk. “Here we are. Ask him where he was on May 14, May 23, June 1, June 11, and June 16—you know, the dates of the most recent killings. Claims he never budged from the woods around that goddamn tent.”

  “Well, maybe he didn’t,” whined Homer.

  “Item eight. The bloodstained notes on the bodies were fastened with common pins. A paper of identical pins was found in Dean’s tent.”

  “What?” Homer was scandalized. “Pins! But everybody uses pins.”

  They grinned at him, and he sank back defeated.

  There followed a gruesome half-hour examining photographs of murdered women.

  Homer did his best to seem unmoved. He didn’t want to look like a fool in the presence of Chief Pratt and the loudly self-confident Lieutenant Detective Partridge. But in all of his experience as a sometime investigator of criminal behavior he had never before come across a serial killer. His culprits were usually of a refined and genteel nature—professors, college presidents, art historians, people of that ilk, men and women of exquisite taste. If they had to use a gun, they raised their little pinkie. But—Homer tried to control his revulsion—these pictures were truly abominable.

  “Same heavy chain every time,” said Pratt calmly. “See? They’ve all got the identical marks on the throat. Chain links an inch long, three-sixteenths-inch steel.”

  Homer forced himself to look through them all again. “You know,” he said, struck by an idea, “they’re all so neat.”

  “Neat?” Pratt was scandalized. “What do
you mean neat” Holy Jerusalem.”

  “I mean they’re all so nicely arranged. All lying flat with their arms and legs just so. And look at their hair, all neatly combed. Makes me think of morticians, the way they lay out a body in a coffin.”

  Pratt was interested. “Oh, right, I see what you mean.”

  “Even poor Flora. Without her wig there wasn’t much hair to arrange, but she was propped up inside that tree stump like a queen on a throne.”

  “Wig?” said Bazzie Partridge. “She had a wig?”

  “Oh, right,” said Chief Pratt. “I forgot to tell you. Homer says she was wearing a black wig when he saw her alive that afternoon.”

  Partridge was disconcerted. “You mean it’s missing?”

  “A trophy, Oliver,” said Homer. “It’s in that gruesome book you gave me. These bastards, they take keepsakes to remember their victims by. It’s like a lock of your girlfriend’s hair, just looking at it gives you a thrill. I don’t know what kind of thrill it gives your typical scumbag, maybe some kind of sexual gratification.” Homer remembered the bewigged Flora Foley and shook his head in wonder.

  “Of course,” said Pratt. “Bazzie, remember the hitchhiker? The librarian’s name tag was attached to her shirt. Classic example of trophy-taking. Then there was the earring. Same with the wig, I’ll bet. It’s another memento.”

  “The question is,” said Bazzie—his voice was harsh, and it ricocheted from wall to wall—“where will the wig turn up next?”

  They brooded for a moment in silence, and then Pratt shook himself and shuffled his papers. “Got another job for you, Homer.” He handed him a typed sheet. “It’s the list of those weird notes, the ones we’ve found on the bodies. You’ll notice there’s a couple of new ones at the bottom. See if you can figure them out. I keep forgetting you’re a professor. Piece of research, right up your alley.”

  Homer looked at the list and said doubtfully, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “I’ve already looked into the first one.” Pratt was suddenly enthusiastic. “See, Homer, where it says ‘old bawd?’ Fascinating word, bawd. Woman who keeps a brothel. It goes way back. Old French baude, Old High German bald—”

  “After all,” said Homer dryly, “it’s the world’s oldest profession.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” said Lieutenant Detective Partridge.

  Chapter 41

  rainy & wet disagreeable weather we all moved in to our new Fort, which our officers name Fort Clatsop after the name of the Clatsop nation of Indians who live nearest to us.… We have no ardent Spirits, but all in good health which we esteem more than all the ardent Spirits in the world.

  Sergeant John Ordway, December 25, 1805,

  at the mouth of the Columbia

  After staring at them all evening and thinking about them all night, Homer had made no progress in deciphering the weird messages on Pratt’s list, the eccentric notes found on the bodies of the murdered women. Next day, in desperation, he showed the list to Mary. Now that she had stopped protesting against his interest in Tom’s case, she had begun to share his fervor.

  They took their morning coffee outside and sat down carefully on the porch swing. Poising their cups in their hands and steadying the swing with their feet, they studied the list solemnly, trying to penetrate the perverted mind of the madman.

  The swing creaked. An unfamiliar Southern bird uttered a bell-like note. Cars passed on the street. A couple of summer-school students emerged from the house next door, laughing and talking in a foreign tongue, Urdu perhaps, or Hindi.

  The porch, the swing, the cars on the street, the students and the singing bird were all part of the normal world. Pratt’s list was an aberration:

  Old bawd

  Article of traffic

  Presents neked

  Pocks & venereal

  All in scabs

  Venerious & pustelus

  Sport publickly

  Old tobacco box

  Honour of passing a night

  With the daughter of

  “Maybe he’s talking about himself,” suggested Mary. “Maybe he’s got some kind of venereal disease, and he blames it on women. Maybe he’s HIV-positive.”

  “What does that tobacco box have to do with anything else? It’s just crazy.”

  Mary sipped her coffee and studied the list. “I suppose Sport publickly is about sex too, but somehow it sounds more frolicsome.”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Homer, putting his coffee cup on the floor and pulling her to him tenderly, “I like a little frolicsome sport myself. Strictly privately, of course.”

  “Watch it, Homer dear,” said Mary, holding her cup out of harm’s way.

  Ed Bailey was getting ready for a weekend fishing trip in the Blue Ridge. He had bought a lot of new equipment, the latest thing in flexible rods and artificial lures to mesmerize every kind of fish.

  After packing all the stuff in his car, along with a camping icebox full of beer, he ran back in the house to shout a goodbye. “Don’t forget, Mary honey, the Fourth of July’s just around the corner. Me, I’m gonna use my new camera at the celebration. All digital, amazing. Where’s Homer?”

  “At the library.” Mary looked up from her book. “He’s looking for more stuff like this.” Shuddering, she held up the grisly book that had been loaned to Homer by Chief Pratt. “It’s about serial killers. It’s loathsome.”

  The Jefferson-Madison Public Library was the one in which the poor young librarian had been so brutally killed. Today Homer’s errand was an exercise in masochism, because he had already learned more than he wanted to know about the cannibal practices of Jeffrey Dahmer and the twenty-nine bodies buried in John Wayne Gacy’s cellar.

  But he sat down gamely at one of the library’s computer monitors and looked for more books about serial killers. Soon a grim list appeared on the screen:

  BESTIALITY: A HISTORY

  MONSTROUS ACTS: A CATALOGUE

  MULTIPLE MURDER IN THE USA

  CASE STUDIES OF SERIAL KILLERS

  There was even a jocular title:

  GIVE YOUR MOTHER FORTY WHACKS:

  THE LIZZIE BORDEN SYNDROME

  Homer copied down the entire list and brought it to the librarian at the reference desk. “Can you tell me where to find some of these?”

  Homer didn’t know it, but the woman at the desk was Victoria Love, the director of the library. It had been Victoria who had gone to lunch one day, leaving her young assistant to be lured into the stacks and murdered. Now, looking at Homer’s list, she turned pale and whispered, “One moment, please.”

  Turning on her heel, she walked quickly away, looking back at him furtively.

  Homer trotted after her cheerfully, making complimentary remarks about libraries in general and her library in particular, and about the splendor of Benjamin Franklin’s original magnificent concept, and the glories of the system of interlibrary loan, and the saintly devotion of dedicated librarians, their love of learning and eagerness to assist the bewildered scholar. But when Director Love snatched up a phone in trembling fingers and touched three buttons—three buttons only—he stopped short.

  Oh, God, the woman was calling the police.

  “No, no,” shouted Homer, grasping her arm. “Look, wait a sec.”

  He was too late. The officer on duty in the Charlottesville Police Department heard her breathless whisper and then her squeal as she dropped the phone—obviously the cry of a woman in the clutches of a vicious killer.

  Soon a herd of cops came thundering up the library steps and crowding in the door.

  By this time Homer had managed to calm the fears of the librarian. There were explanations, red faces and guffaws. The cops went away.

  Homer put aside his list of gruesome books and asked Victoria, “Do you have a minute?”

  “Of course.” Victoria was ashamed of her panic. They sat down together behind the call desk, among carts loaded with books to be reshelved and rows of dictionaries.
>
  Homer was distracted by the dictionaries. “The OED, I don’t see it. Do you mean to say the library hasn’t got the OED?”

  Victoria was confused. “The OED? You mean the Oxford English Dictionary? Of course we do. It’s in the reference room.”

  Homer came to his senses and started over. “Could you tell me who was using the library on the day your colleague was killed?”

  “They’ve already asked us that. We gave them a list of everybody who took out books that day. But there were others. If someone comes in and doesn’t borrow a book, then we have no record. Of course we’ve all tried to remember, but there are always so many people coming in and out, sometimes it’s just a blur.” She groped in a drawer. “Here’s the list of the borrowers and the books they took out.” She tapped a name. “This one’s interesting, Flora Foley. She took out three books on firearms and one on poisons. She was writing a thriller, that’s what she said.”

  “I guess you haven’t been reading the paper,” said Homer sorrowfully. “Flora Foley was the latest victim.”

  “Oh, heavens,” gasped Victoria. “I didn’t know that.”

  Homer ran his finger down her list. It stopped at the name of Augustus Upchurch. Wasn’t Upchurch the guy who had discovered Flora’s body and called 911 and warned the police about Tom? Homer remembered something from his monster book—sometimes the UNSUB calls 911 himself, offering “helpful” information. What if this guy Upchurch had killed poor old Flora?

  Homer glanced up at Victoria. “Pornographic books? That’s what he was interested in?”

  She made a face. “I’m afraid so. Oh, he doesn’t use his real name. He always pretends to be somebody else. But one of the retired librarians came in one day and recognized him and told us who he was, because she used to know him well. She said Mr. Upchurch was a successful retired businessman and a highly respectable old gentleman.” Victoria held up a cautionary hand. “I hasten to say that we don’t have many pornographic books in this library, because everything in our collection is supposed to have”—she put her hands together in a prayerful gesture—“literary quality. But some of the stuff is pretty raunchy.”