Killing Cassidy (23 page)

H
O
-
KAY
.”

The remark, which quite obviously did not imply agreement, was Darryl's sole reaction the next morning to our story. He sat behind his desk, studying first one and then the other of us, his lips pursing in and out, his right hand playing with his pencil. The point bounced on the blotter. The eraser. The point.

Finally he tossed the pencil aside and cleared his throat. “I'm not sure I know what to say to all that. It's a first, anyway. Nobody ever accused me of murder before.”

I started to say something, but Alan gave me a sharp look, and I subsided.

“Now lemme see if I got this straight. You think Kevin Cassidy was murdered, because he said in that note that somebody was out to get him.”

“Not just in the note. His priest—”

This time Alan's look was an outright glare.

“And you think Jerry Briggs was killed because he knew something about Kevin's murder.”

“Briggs? Was that his name?”

Darryl ignored me and looked at Alan, who said quietly, “Something of an oversimplification, but yes, that essentially is what we believe.”

“Ho-kay,” he said again. “Well, I'm glad you finally decided to tell me about it. No”—he raised a hand as I tried again to speak—“it's okay. I see why you thought you couldn't say anything before. The question is, now what do you expect me to do about it?”

“Well—investigate it, of course! Share information, let us help!”

Darryl ignored me again and looked steadily at Alan.

“I've been very uncomfortable, sir, with the idea of withholding information from you. I hope you truly do understand our motives. Now that we are satisfied that we can speak freely, it seemed wise to let you know what we're doing. You are at perfect liberty to accept our story or not, and you are under no obligation to do anything about it whatever.” He met Darryl's eyes levelly.

They reminded me of two strange cats. Any moment now one of them would hiss and raise a fully armed paw. I caught myself holding my breath.

It was Darryl who backed off. Sighing deeply, he picked up the pencil and began fiddling with it again. “Sorry. I guess you couldn't play it any other way. That is, if I believed a word of it, which I can't say I do. I mean, I believe that you believe it. I just can't buy it myself. Kevin Cassidy died of pneumonia, and that's it. As for Jerry—well, I admit I don't know why anybody would want to give him cyanide. What I figure is, nobody did—I mean not on purpose.”

“You think it was an accident?” asked Alan in friendly fashion, one policeman to another.

“Not that way. I mean, I don't think he put cyanide in his coffee by mistake for sugar. No, I think we've got one of those maniacs on our hands. You know the capsule murders a few years ago, when somebody went around putting cyanide into medicine bottles in drugstores? He didn't care who he killed; he was a nut. And then somebody else did it to cover up the real murder he really wanted to commit?”

“His wife, as I recall.”

“Right. Well, I'm scared stiff we've got another one of those loose around here.”

“Hmm.” Alan considered the possibility and raised an objection. “What about tamperproof packaging?”

“That only protects the people who are smart enough to take a bottle of pills back to the drugstore if the seal's broken. You think Jerry was that smart?”

“You have a point, at that. Do you mind telling me what steps you are taking?”

“We're going through Jerry's trailer with a fine-tooth comb, to start with. Trying to figure out what he might have taken, while the medical examiner's testing Jerry's stomach contents for everything he can think of. Sending everything we find in the trailer to the lab to be tested for traces of cyanide. And we've alerted the drugstores and grocery stores and every place else where people buy over-the-counter medicine. We can't go for a recall until we know what the stuff was in, so we just have to tell the stores to be on the lookout for anybody acting funny. And we're praying we can get it worked out before somebody else dies.”

Alan nodded approvingly. “Very thorough. If you are dealing with a maniac, though, you'll need those prayers. The tests and so on take time.”

“You're telling me. So you can see I don't have any time for any wild-goose chases.”

Wild-goose chase. That was the metaphor Alan had used before we found out so much. Surely now, Darryl …

Alan smiled at me and pressed my hand. “No, I do quite see that,” he said, looking back at Darryl. “We won't take any more of that time. I take it you have no objection to our continuing our pursuits? Good. If we do learn anything of interest, about maniacs or anyone else, would you like to hear of it?”

“Sure, why not?” At the thought of getting us out of his hair, Darryl turned almost genial. “I guess you never know.”

I turned to Alan when we were safely out on the sidewalk. He shrugged. “What did you expect? At least he offered no active hindrance.”

“And that in itself is a help, I suppose.”

“Well, yes, it is, but I rather expected you to be discouraged by his attitude.”

“You don't agree with him, do you? About a maniac on the loose?”

“It's a possibility, certainly. A good policeman never ignores—”

“Oh,
don't
go all calm and reasonable and logical on me! Never mind what a good policeman should do. Whose side are you on, anyway?”

“Yours, my love, always yours.”

“Well, then, I flatly refuse to be discouraged. I've spent too much time down in the dumps lately.” I raised my head and took a deep breath. The air was like—no, not just wine, but champagne, clear and crisp and fragrant with the invigorating smell of dried leaves. The sky was that perfect deep October blue, with puffy little clouds painted in at exactly the most decorative spots. “It is a perfectly gorgeous, heaven-sent morning, and it's a sin for anybody to be discouraged on such a day. And I don't want to waste any more time. Come on!”

“Where are we going?”

“Where we should have gone ages ago. Where we started to go before Jerry fended us off and we got distracted by all sorts of side issues. We're going to Kevin's house.”

Alan grinned, tucked my arm in his, and set a brisk pace back to our car.

When we got to Kevin's and I started to get out of the car, he cleared his throat. “Umm—far be it from me to raise difficulties, but how are we to get in?”

“I told you he almost never locked his door. He must have been one of the last people on earth who trusted everybody.”

“Unwise.”

“Yes, as it turned out, but honestly, Alan, it must be a nice way to go through life.”

The door, however, was locked. Alan didn't seem surprised. “His executor would have done that. Ms. Carmichael, presumably.”

“Darn! And we don't want to ask her for the key, do we? But wait a minute—I think I remember—” I pulled up the cushion on one of the rocking chairs, and sure enough, there was a key.

Alan shook his head. “The first place a burglar would look.”

“But Kevin didn't expect burglars. He only ever locked the doors when he was going to be away for a while and somebody else was taking care of the cats. He said they'd get upset about him leaving it open, so he locked it to please them, and then told them where to leave the key. Eccentric—but then, he was. Come on in.”

It seemed strange to walk into Kevin's house without him there to welcome me. The room was filled with sunshine and with Kevin. His presence was everywhere. His books filled and overflowed the bookshelves. His favorite leather chair, well worn, showed the impress of his body. His pipe, in a big ashtray, sat handy there on the arm of the chair.

“He never would give up his pipe,” I said irrelevantly. “By the time everybody figured out how dangerous smoking was, he said he'd already outlived all his contemporaries, so he might as well enjoy his one vice.”

“And he died of a lung problem.”

It was a comment on the irony of life, no more; I dismissed it.

If I let myself, I could easily get sentimental and weepy, I thought, looking around the room. But I'd promised myself that my doldrums were past, and weeping wasn't going to fulfill my responsibility to Kevin. We'll figure it out, I promised him silently. We won't let them get by with it.

Alan had wandered out to the kitchen; now he rejoined me. “He was a good housekeeper, I see. Or did he have someone come in?”

There was in his voice that same note of surprise as when he had first seen the outside of the house.

“No, he did it all himself, and yes, he was comfortably untidy, but he was clean. Of course, the place hasn't been dusted for some time, but it was always nicely kept when he was—when he could look after it. I'm willing to bet he even made his bed after he got out of it”—I swallowed hard and continued—“to go to the hospital.”

Alan checked and came back. “Right you are. He, or someone, made the bed. There's a bit of disorder in the room—medicines on the bedside table, that sort of thing—but then he expected to come home and tidy that away.”

I blinked and dug my fingernails into the palms of my hands. Physical pain, I've found, can often take one's mind off emotional pain.

I cleared my throat. “Alan, this is the place where your training is going to help a lot more than anything I can contribute. What are we looking for?”

“Anything at all unusual,” he said promptly. “Any signs of an intruder. That's the sort of thing I might see more easily than you would. Anything that doesn't belong here, or anything missing that should be here. Anything out of character. Anything, no matter how insignificant, that seems in any way wrong. And that's where you'll be more useful than I.”

“Are you sure? I haven't been in this house for years, Alan. I didn't have his belongings memorized.”

“No, but you knew his character, his personality, some of his likes and dislikes. You knew about his pipe, for example. If there had been a pack of cigarettes in that ashtray, it wouldn't have surprised me, but it would have struck you as odd.”

“Okay, I see what you mean. You'll look for the criminal stuff, and I'll look for the everyday stuff.”

He grinned. “More or less. Shall we work together or separately?”

“Separately. Then we can compare notes.”

So Alan began a minute examination of the doors and windows while I stood in the middle of the living room and just looked around me.

The books. Was anything missing?

Heavens, I didn't know what the man read. Technical books, of course. I knew enough, from Frank, about the basic biology texts that I could tell they were all there. There were also a lot of far more esoteric ones on the shelves. I knew nothing about them and couldn't even guess whether the collection was complete.

I moved to the shelves of lighter books. Nothing struck me as out of character. He didn't read best-sellers, as a rule, so
Snow Falling on Cedars
was perhaps a little unexpected, but that was such a marvelous book, anybody would have enjoyed it. There wasn't much recent fiction, but a number of classics: Dickens, Conrad, Jane Austen, Mark Twain. A selection of history, biography, philosophy, some of the better-known works of lay theology. A few general reference works: an atlas, an unabridged dictionary, an encyclopedia. For specific reference, he would have relied on the university library.

That reminded me. I searched the shelves a little more closely and found, sure enough, a bottom shelf stacked with library books to be returned. Some from the public library, some from the university. Overdue now, of course. I supposed the post office had sent the overdue notices back to the libraries. Was there a rubber stamp for “deceased”? I shuddered and made a mental note to take the books with us when Alan and I left. We could at least do that tiny thing for Kevin, if nothing else.

The bookshelves didn't seem helpful. I wandered over to Kevin's pride and joy, the woodstove, and peered behind it. It was set away from the fieldstone chimney wall by a careful eighteen inches, and I had some vague idea something might be hidden back there. There was nothing, of course, except evidence that here his standard of housekeeping had fallen somewhat short. The back of the stove was blistered where the black finish had apparently burned off, and the hardwood floor beyond the back edge of the tiled hearth was also scarred and blistered. The heat had been too intense, perhaps? And Kevin had never noticed, and now he could never repair the damage.

I worked my way around the room. The furniture wasn't in pristine condition. Kevin had loved it and lived with it for decades. It looked much as usual, however. Lamps, curtains, old radio, record player. Kevin had no television and had never bothered with advancements in music reproduction; the LP was good enough for him. He liked jazz, I seemed to remember—yes, there were the jazz records, a few big band recordings, remastered from the originals of the 1930s and '40s, a sprinkling of light classics. I turned on the radio just to check the station; nothing happened. Oh, of course, the electricity would have been shut off. Who had seen to that? I wondered. Ms. Carmichael, probably.

A magazine rack held professional journals, a sprinkling of catalogues, several issues of
Smithsonian
, a
Time
from mid-August.

A sturdy rolltop desk held paid bills. The unpaid ones had presumably been taken away by the lawyer. There were letters marked “answered” and two or three that would remain forever unanswered. I glanced through them, feeling distinctly uneasy. A lady does not read someone else's mail. But they were routine, all of them, chatty letters from friends still too old-fashioned to prefer the telephone. There was no question of e-mail. Kevin didn't own a computer.