All but impossible, p.21
All But Impossible, page 21
“Maggie Cole’s husband, our famous playwright. She found him out in the field and she’s practically hysterical. Mrs. Philips has an eleven o’clock appointment. Better tell her I’ve been called out on an emergency and reschedule her for later in the week.”
I drove out to the Duffy farm, as the local people still thought of it, and saw Maggie waiting for me in the cinder driveway. From her medical records I knew that she was forty-seven years old, though she seemed much younger. Her husband was fifty. The local paper had done a story on him when they moved to Northmont a couple of years back, and one of their columnists, Polly Ketchum, had interviewed him recently.
“He’s way back in the field,” she told me, getting into the car. “We can drive part of the way.”
“Is he conscious?”
“I think he’s dead,” she sobbed. “He’s not moving at all.”
Maggie’s hair was long and blond, with only a few streaks of gray beginning to appear. Her blue eyes now were red and puffy. She wore a pair of old slacks and a man’s plaid shirt, apparently her work clothes on the farm. She was a small woman, barely coming to my shoulders.
“What time did he go out this morning?” I asked as I drove along the rutted driveway toward the barn and other outbuildings behind the house.
“I don’t really know. He has a studio out back where he does his writing. Sometimes when he’s deep into a new play he sleeps out there. I hadn’t seen him since last night after dinner.”
We left the car out behind the barn and walked about a hundred yards back through the field. There was only grass growing here. Maggie explained that they practiced crop rotation. Next year they’d planned to plant corn here.
I knew Gordon Cole was dead even before we reached the body. There were flies buzzing around him in the morning sunshine, attracted by subtle odors we could not yet detect. As I bent over the body I saw a trickle of dried blood on his mouth and chin, indicating internal bleeding. Though I’d never examined Cole in his lifetime, it looked to me as if his chest had caved in. I put my hand on his rib cage and could feel the broken bones. “What’s this?” I asked, indicating a pair of greasy feathers stuck to his shirt.
“I don’t know. Bird feathers, I guess. They were there when I found him. Is he—?”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Cole. It appears he died of internal injuries, but we won’t be certain until after the autopsy.”
“But—but what happened to him?”
“Sometimes a tractor accident—”
She shook her head. “The tractor’s back in its shed by the barn. I looked there after breakfast because he was going to plow a field this morning. When I saw the tractor still there I headed back to his studio to see if he’d overslept.
He sometimes did that if he worked half the night on a play.”
I straightened up. “We’re going to have to notify Sheriff Lens.”
“Of course.”
“Is there anyone else here with you on the place?”
“We have a farm manager, Jud Duffy.”
“I know Jud.”
“We bought the land from his family after his folks died. We needed someone to manage the farm and he knew more about it than anyone else. We hire seasonal workers to help with the planting and harvesting.”
“Is Jud here now?”
She shook her head as we headed back to the house. “On Tuesday morning he usually goes shopping for supplies. He’ll be back around noon.”
I phoned Sheriff Lens and told him what we had. “Does it look like murder, Doc?” he asked.
I glanced at Maggie Cole, cleaning up the breakfast dishes. “I can’t say. You’d better have a look.”
* * *
The end of summer was always a slow time at the hospital. People were vacationing, the weather was good, and the schools hadn’t yet reopened to a new season of childhood diseases. Mary Best had the autopsy report for me by the end of the afternoon, and I phoned Sheriff Lens at once.
“Sheriff, as I suspected, Gordon Cole’s chest was crushed. He died within minutes from massive internal bleeding. Dr. Miller, who did the autopsy at the hospital, is also a bird watcher in his spare time. The feathers found on Cole’s shirt are from a great horned owl.”
I could hear the sheriff’s sigh at the other end of the line. “Doc, you gonna tell me Gordon Cole was killed by an owl? That would look great in the New York papers!”
“It would have taken an enormous owl to inflict those injuries. Still, something killed him. I think we’d better go back out there in the morning. We can have another talk with Mrs. Cole and look around the place.”
Mary was grinning when I hung up the phone. “An enormous owl? Are you going off on one of your crazy murder investigations again, Sam? Do you think the owl ran into him in the dark, or maybe picked him up in its claws and dropped him from the sky?”
“I don’t know what killed him, Mary, but at this point it hardly seems to have been a natural death.”
The sheriff and I drove out there the following morning. He was in a rare contemplative mood as he maneuvered the official car around a herd of cows being led out to pasture. “You know, Doc, all this war news is upsetting my wife. She’s afraid they might start drafting people into the army.”
The thought of it made me chuckle. “We’re too old for them, Sheriff. I’ll be forty-three pretty soon.”
“If there’s a war in Europe it could change a lot of things.”
I couldn’t argue with that. Mary and I had talked about it in the office, too.
Maggie Cole was waiting for us at the farmhouse and Jud Duffy was with her. “I have to go to the funeral parlor with Gordon’s clothes,” she said dispassionately. “Jud can answer any questions you have.”
Jud was a muscular young man with dark hair and a port-wine birthmark on his left cheek. Possibly because of the birthmark, he’d grown up somewhat shy and withdrawn. The farm could have been his after his parents died, but he’d shown no interest in the responsibilities that entailed. He seemed quite content working as a manager for the Coles. After Mrs. Cole went off to the funeral parlor he turned his attention to us. “What is it you need to know?”
“Well, mostly about Gordon Cole’s movements during the hours before his death,” the sheriff said. “We understand he spent the night in his studio. We’d like to see that.”
“I’ll get the key.”
“He kept it locked?” I asked.
“Sure. His manuscripts are all out there, including the current one.” He took a key from a pegboard in the kitchen and we followed him out the back door. “This is the spare,” he explained. “He carried his own key with him.”
There was little point in driving to the barn, so we left the sheriff’s car where it was and walked the entire distance. “Mrs. Cole mentioned that her husband was planning to do some plowing yesterday morning,” I said.
“What was that about?”
“They recently bought a five-acre lot from Pete Antwerp on the next farm. The lot’s cut off from the rest of his place by the creek and he wanted to sell it. Gordon Cole figured he might as well add it to his land. He was planning to take the tractor out yesterday morning and harrow it.”
“Isn’t that something you’d have done?” Sheriff Lens asked.
“He often sought relaxation from his writing by performing various chores around the farm. Since it was my morning to buy supplies, he figured it was a perfect time for him to harrow the field.”
The place where Maggie had found her husband’s body was about halfway between the barn and the studio, across the open field. When I saw where Duffy was leading us I said at once, “That’s the old sugarhouse!”
“Sure,” he agreed. “When I was a kid we made maple syrup there. My brother an’ me hauled small trees and helped cut the wood for the fire. After Cole bought the place, he converted it into a studio for his writing. Had to put a new roof on and fix the floor, but he didn’t mind. Place still smells of maple syrup to me.”
He unlocked the door and we went inside. If I’d expected to find signs of a struggle, I was disappointed. Cole’s big Underwood typewriter still had a page of his script in it and the narrow bed was unmade. Otherwise the place was neat and clean. “He never ate here,” Jud Duffy explained. “Always went back to the house for meals.”
“What about breakfast?”
“If he had a chore, he’d do that first and then eat.”
“So he was working on his play and then slept here till early morning when he left to get the tractor from the shed by the barn. And something killed him as he walked across that field.”
Duffy looked at me and shrugged. “I guess that’s what happened.”
Sheriff Lens had been looking around while we talked. “Any owls around here?”
“There might be some barn owls.”
“Great horned owls. Big ones.”
“You see them occasionally.”
“Ever hear of one attacking a human?”
He shook his head. “Sometimes if you’re out at night walking through the brush you might scare one up and he’ll fly at you, but they’re not really attacking.” His eyes had turned away.
I had another thought. “Is there any farm equipment here that might have killed him? His chest was pretty badly crushed.”
“Everything is put away at night, and I wasn’t here yesterday morning to take any of it out. Mrs. Cole never touches that stuff, and if her husband took out the tractor or the truck it would have been by the body, wouldn’t it? Besides, it’s been a fairly wet August. The ground is soft. Any heavy machinery would have left tracks.”
“The tractor?”
“It weighs two and a half tons. It would have left all sorts of tracks.”
“Let’s go look at it,” I suggested. There was nothing more to be learned at the studio. Then, as we started for the door, I went over to read the page in the typewriter. It wasn’t a suicide note, just page four of a play about a couple of fishermen. When we reached the spot where Maggie Cole had found her husband’s body, the sheriff and I went over the ground carefully, searching in an ever-widening circle. Except for some trampled grass, there was nothing to be found.
We moved on to what would have been Gordon Cole’s destination, the large shed where the tractor was stored. Jud Duffy opened the unlocked double doors and we went in. There were no windows and the place was dim, with daylight entering only through the doors and an opening for ventilation near the ceiling. “Nice machine,” the sheriff said, patting the oversized tires. The harrow was already in place behind it.
“Could you start it up for us?” I asked Duffy.
“Sure thing,” He climbed up behind the wheel and turned on the ignition switch, then came down, got out the crank, and inserted it into the hole at the bottom of the grille. Working in the cramped space between the tractor and the back wall of the shed, he cranked the engine until it turned over, then got back up behind the wheel and shifted from neutral to reverse. He had no trouble backing the tractor out of the shed and lowering the harrow.
Obviously he’d done it many times before.
“Just to complete this reenactment of Cole’s planned route, could you show us how he would have reached the field he was going to harrow?” You don’t have to bring the tractor. We can walk over.”
“It’s pretty far.”
That was all right with me, but Sheriff Lens chose to remain behind looking over the shed and other outbuildings. As we walked across the field, at about a right angle to the route we’d followed to the studio, Jud Duffy said, “The sheriff should lose some weight. He gets out of breath when he walks a lot.”
“I’ve been telling him that for years.” I shaded my eyes against the sun. “Is that where we’re headed? Over by that big oak?”
“Right there! That’s a marker tree, for the boundary between the farms. But the creek finally got so wide that it wasn’t practical for Antwerp to farm these acres anymore. He’d have had to go all the way out to the road and then get permission to cross the Cole property. It was easier to sell off the five acres.”
“Isn’t that Pete Antwerp now?”
He followed my gaze toward a slender man with graying hair and a moustache who’d waded through a shallower portion of the creek and headed our way. He wore work boots and overalls with just an undershirt visible beneath.
“Doc Hawthorne, isn’t it?” he called out as he drew closer.
“That’s right. Haven’t seen you around lately, Pete.”
“Been healthy. Don’t need the likes of you.” He glanced in Jud’s direction. “Hello, Duffy.”
Jud grunted something and turned away, showing only the good side of his face. “Of course you heard about Gordon Cole,” I said.
Antwerp nodded. “What was it, a heart attack?”
“His chest was crushed. We don’t know how.”
He frowned and moved closer. “You mean it could have been foul play? Do you think he was beaten to death?”
“There was no other evidence of it, just the massive blow to the chest. Do you know if he had any enemies?”
“We all have enemies, don’t we?”
“Was there any problem about his purchase of your property?”
“No, I was glad to get rid of it. He paid me a fair price.”
While we chatted, Jud Duffy had moved away. When Antwerp finally turned to go I had to jog over to catch up with Jud. “You don’t much care for him, do you?”
“He used to pick on me when I was growing up, on account of my face.”
As we walked around the five-acre plot I saw that the field was rough and uneven. It had been plowed in the spring but neither planted nor cultivated. Weeds had sprung up all over. I could see why Cole would have wanted to smooth it out. But he hadn’t gotten that far. Something, an owl or a human, had been waiting for him.
* * *
I stopped by the funeral parlor that afternoon, the first of the three days Gordon Cole would be shown prior to his funeral on Saturday morning.
The Coles had no children, but an aunt was coming down from Boston and a couple of nephews were also planning to attend. Maggie seemed to be holding up as well as could be expected. When I returned to the office around four, Mary Best said Pete Antwerp had phoned and asked me to call him back.
“This is Dr. Hawthorne, Pete. What can I do for you?”
“I didn’t want to mention anything in front of Jud Duffy this morning, but you know, there was something funny going on with Cole.”
“Going on? What do you mean?”
“He wasn’t just writing back in that studio. Sometimes late at night, if I was walking the dog, I’d see a car parked on my road, down near the path leading across the fields to his studio.”
“What sort of car?”
“A blue roadster.”
“Any idea whose it is?”
He hesitated. “I’d rather not say. I’ve told you enough.”
“This is a murder investigation, Mr. Antwerp,” I reminded him.
“I’ve told you everything I know,” he said and hung up.
I thought about phoning the sheriff but then decided maybe I’d overlooked something during our brief search of the studio. I knew Maggie would be at the funeral parlor from seven to nine and decided to drive out to her place for another look around.
When I got there, I pulled the car back by the barn, sitting there for a moment to make certain no one else was around. I figured Jud Duffy would probably be at the funeral parlor too, and it appeared I was right about that. I’d waited till nearly eight o’clock, when it was past sunset and night was settling over the countryside. There was barely enough light for me to see where I was going, and I’d brought along a flashlight to guide me.
As I was passing the tractor shed, something made me open the doors and peer inside. The tractor was there, in near-total darkness, and as I stepped inside I heard a sudden flutter of wings. Something large seemed to fly directly at my head. I ducked down, imagining a bat, then realized it was a great horned owl. It flew out the doors and up into the evening sky. Probably it had entered the shed through the ventilator near the ceiling.
I circled the shed and followed the path through the field I’d taken with Duffy earlier in the day. When I was perhaps halfway across, at about the spot where the body had been found, I suddenly saw a car’s headlights on Pete Antwerp’s road off to my left. The car slowed to a stop and the lights went out. It was too far from Antwerp’s house to be a visitor for him. Perhaps, if I was lucky, it was the blue roadster he’d told me about.
I moved cautiously forward. The darkness was almost complete now, but I was on a line with the studio and could still make out its shape against the western sky. As I drew closer, I saw the glow of a small flashlight approaching from the direction of the side road. I figured the driver must have walked about the same distance as I had, but faster. It was someone familiar with the terrain—and someone with a key to the studio, I realized a moment later when the light reappeared inside the old sugarhouse. Well, that would save me the trouble of breaking in.
I turned the knob of the door as quietly as I could and slipped inside. The intruder was near the cot, shining a flashlight on the floor “Who’s there?” I asked suddenly, turning on my own flashlight.
The figure whirled as my light hit her full in the face. I recognized Polly Ketchum at once. She was a strikingly pretty young woman who did book reviews and an arts column for our weekly newspaper. “My God—who is it?” she gasped, blinded by the light.
“Polly, it’s Sam Hawthorne. What are you doing here?”
She sat down hard on the cot, as if the wind had been knocked out of her. I found a kerosene lamp I’d remembered seeing earlier and lit it. “What have I done?” she said, not expecting an answer.
“You were searching for something, Polly. Something you lost on a previous visit?”
“An earring. Isn’t that the worst cliché, Dr. Sam? If I read it in a book I was reviewing I’d groan aloud.”
I sat down at Cole’s work table and she took a chair next to it. The flickering light glistened off her yellow hair, making her seem like an innocent teenager caught stealing a cookie. “Tell me about it,” I said in a kindly voice.
