Murder & Sullivan Read online

  “Let’s go,” he said. He had parked his Chevy in the shade of a sugar maple. Even so, her jeans soon stuck to the passenger seat. She leaned into the breeze when he opened the windows for the short drive to Oliver College.

  “Captain Altschuler’s putting the pressure on,” he said.

  How could he not? she thought, and watched Fred drive. His hands rested lightly on the wheel, and his acceleration into turns was as smooth and unhurried as if he were out for a Sunday drive. From the expression on his face, she would have expected clenched fists.

  “I had to explain to him just now why I trusted you, when you were on the scene. For a little while there, I thought he was going to question my integrity. Fortunately, though, he’d talked to someone behind my back who had seen us together on the stairs before the second act, exactly where and when I’d told him.”

  “I guess he has to,” she said.

  “That doesn’t mean I have to like it.” But his face began to relax.

  Inside the little theater, Fred lifted the yellow police barrier tape around the stage for her to duck under. He reminded her to keep her hands in her pockets. The auditorium and pit were dark and the stage dim, but backstage, the strong light made the costumes hanging on the racks look as cheap and unconvincing as the sets. Joan recognized Detective Terry, who had interviewed the orchestra, and Sergeant Ketcham, whom she had met a couple of years earlier, when the orchestra had its troubles, and again at the quilt show.

  “Any luck?” Fred asked, but the answer was obvious from their faces.

  “Nope,” Ketcham said.

  “You find a toolbox?”

  They looked at each other.

  “How did you know?” Terry said. “It was under Putnam’s frame.” Fred nodded at Joan.

  “We went over it with a fine-tooth comb,” Ketcham said. “Nothing. All the screwdrivers are either short or fat, and none of them had been sharpened.”

  “How about a file, or an awl?”

  “No awl,” Terry said. “There’s a file with a point, but it’s pretty wide. Besides, there’s no visible blood, and I don’t see how it could have been wiped that clean.” He shrugged. “We can run a check.”

  “Do that,” Fred said. “Might as well take the whole box over.”

  “Sure, Lieutenant,” Terry said.

  “Let me know if you turn up anything else,” Fred said. “Come on, Joan, I’ll take you over to the courthouse.”

  17

  My object all sublime

  I shall achieve in time—

  To let the punishment fit the crime—

  The punishment fit the crime.

  —MIKADO, The Mikado

  They rode back in silence. At the station Fred ducked in to call the clerk so that she’d meet them at the courthouse door. When she did, he introduced Joan and left.

  Maude Kelly welcomed her with a warm smile. She looked like somebody’s grandmother. Probably was.

  “Call me Maude,” she said.

  “I don’t know anything about this,” Joan said, following her down the dark stairway to the basement.

  “Don’t worry, honey, there’s really nothing to it,” Maude said over her shoulder. “Watch yourself on these steps, though. I keep telling the commissioners we need more light on them, but you know how it is, they’ll put it off until someone breaks a leg. We don’t want it to be you. I think it’s just grand of you to volunteer like this. David was such a sweet man.”

  “You knew him?”

  “Since he was a little boy. He loved my cookies. My, but that boy could eat. And I was so proud of him when he turned into a lawyer and then a judge.” When they reached the well-lighted room at the bottom, Maude turned, and tears welled in her eyes. “Did you know him too?”

  “Just a little. I met him after the tornado.”

  “Wasn’t that a terrible thing? They almost lost their little girl in it.” Maude’s tears stopped as she warmed to her story. “She ran off to play in the park, and they couldn’t find her. Some woman saved her, thank goodness. Threw herself down in the creek to do it.”

  “I know,” Joan said.

  “Really?” Maude stared. “It didn’t make the news—David and Ellen are pretty private where the children are concerned. Unless you …” She stopped.

  Joan felt suddenly shy. She nodded.

  “I was walking home across the park when it hit, and there she was.”

  “Mercy! I’ve been praying for you ever since I heard that story, and here you are in my courthouse. Well, I never.”

  Joan didn’t know what to say. She smiled, instead.

  “I shouldn’t be rattling on like this, when you’ve come to help find David’s killer. The police said they’d send someone back, but right now it’s just you and me down here. I don’t want to waste your time.”

  Joan looked around at the metal shelves filled with large, gold-lettered volumes bound in black and red. An aluminum table in the middle of the room held three of the books, several pads of paper, and a mug full of pencils.

  “What do I do?”

  “Check the indexes in these docket entry books against this list of names. If you find any of them, we’ll keep that book out. Otherwise, we’ll reshelve them as we go. Do it any way you like. Detective Terry was reading one at a time, standing up, but they’re too heavy for me to hold for long.”

  “How do I know if the case was in David’s court? Isn’t that what we’re checking?”

  “That’s right.” Maude flipped one of the books open and pointed to the page. “Look here for CO1 right after the number for Alcorn County—that’s the one that matches the county number on your auto license plate. CO1 is the first circuit court—that’s David’s. The next numbers tell you the year and month, and the letters after that tell you what kind of case it was—DR for Domestic Relations, CT for Civil Tort, SC for Small Claims, and so on. The last number is a serial number.”

  Whew. “I hope I can keep it straight. Are they all mixed together?”

  “Oh, no, each kind of case has a separate book. Besides, we don’t know what kind we’re looking for. So you really don’t have to know all that. Just watch for the names on the list, and then look for CO1.”

  “Have you found anything?”

  “Not yet. Maybe we won’t. Trouble is, I don’t go back very far. Before I was clerk, I only knew about cases that made a big splash. And I didn’t pay all that much attention to those. I don’t know what made me think I could do this job, except that I’m an organized person, which is more than you can say for my predecessor.”

  “Where do we start?” Joan didn’t see any need to get into partisan politics.

  “Right here.” Maude replaced the fat volumes from the table in a gap on a shelf and pulled down the next three.

  The legal-length pages were bound at the top. Probably cheaper than binding those long sides, Joan thought. She flipped through a few pages, looking at the neat handwritten entries. Then she buckled down.

  Half an hour later her arms were aching. Despite what she’d said, Maude Kelly slung the books around as if they weighed nothing, and checked half again as many as Joan. She’s considerably tougher than she looks, Joan thought. And less likely to get sidetracked by interesting-sounding cases or other names she might recognize.

  By now Joan had memorized the list of names to watch for. These must be all the people who were onstage or backstage at the time David was killed, she thought. Nice of someone to put them in alphabetical order. Probably Maude—that wasn’t Fred’s scribble.

  “Here’s one,” Maude said, and set a volume aside.

  “Who?”

  “Christopher Eads. His wife sued him for divorce. The clerk’s notes say the marriage was dissolved.”

  “That’s two of them.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Liz MacDonald, his ex-wife—she’s in the cast, too, though I don’t see her on this list. That’s the one case we already knew about.”

  “Wouldn’t you kn
ow it.”

  “He’s pretty unhappy. I guess the divorce isn’t recent, if the record’s down here in the basement.”

  “No. According to the clerk’s entries, he tried to open the case again, but he didn’t succeed.”

  “I could see Chris killing someone over Liz. But killing David wouldn’t help him get her back.” Unless it made Liz turn her attention from David back to Chris, but I doubt it. Question is, did Chris doubt it?

  Maude made sympathetic noises and went on searching. Joan found her mind wandering as she scanned the lists of cases. She was in Civil Torts when she was brought up short.

  “Here’s Dr. Cutts!”

  “Dr. Cutts? I know him, of course, how could anyone forget a doctor with a name like that? But I’m blessed if I can remember him in court.”

  “It’s a malpractice suit. He’s not on the list, but he’s in the cast.”

  “Set it aside, then.”

  Joan read the clerk’s entry. “Judgment for plaintiff for $750,000.” Ouch. She supposed the doctor had malpractice insurance, but that was a hefty amount. Had it increased his premiums? Hurt his reputation? There hadn’t been a long wait in his office the day she was there. Even so, would that make him go after the judge years later? She found it hard to believe, but she set the volume aside.

  By the end of the afternoon they’d finished the books on the shelves and found two more names on the list. Virgil Shoals had been sued by a customer dissatisfied with a house he had contracted to build. But the case had been settled out of court. He could hardly hold that against David.

  And David had ordered a man named Zachariah Yoder to use a slow-moving vehicle emblem on the back of his horse-drawn vehicles. Maude said she had opened the Traffic Infractions books because she didn’t think the city cops would have cases involving the sheriff or state police in their computer. Joan didn’t think this could be the Zach she knew. This case was only three years old, and she was sure from what Ellen Putnam had told her that Zach had been living among the “English” considerably longer than that. She’d said as much to Maude.

  “There are scads of Amish Yoders,” Maude had answered. “They’re probably related, but it could be pretty distant, even with the same first name. But it’s on the list, so we’ll keep it out.”

  Hardly a motive for murder anyway, Joan thought, and rubbed her sore arm muscles. I was crazy to do this in the afternoon before a performance. But maybe I won’t have to play tonight after all.

  “I’m glad we made it through all the books,” she told Maude. “I was going to have to quit now even if we hadn’t.”

  “Oh, that’s not all of them,” Maude said. “There’s another whole roomful, and it’s a mess.” She flicked on the light in an adjacent room.

  Joan groaned when she saw the boxes.

  “Don’t worry about it, honey. It had to be a long shot anyway, doing this. David was so fair, I can’t see why anyone but a criminal would come after him for something he did in a case—much less one so long ago that it’s in those boxes.”

  Chatting all the while, Maude walked upstairs with Joan and saw her safely out of the building. They’d worked hard together, and Maude certainly seemed to appreciate her efforts, slow as they were.

  And what did we get out of it? Joan wondered while walking home from the courthouse. Some unlikely suspects, that’s all. One Amishman—probably the wrong Yoder—ordered to display the red slow-moving triangle when on the public roadway, presumably against his convictions. One doctor ordered to cough up for malpractice. One builder who had to pay when a contract went sour, but who never came before the judge. And one divorce that created a triangle in which only the judge was unscathed. Only the divorce felt murderous, and they’d known about that before the search began.

  And sore arms and shoulders, she added to the list. Feeling the hot sun on them, she swung her arms as she walked and hoped she wouldn’t need them for the rest of the day. But when she walked into the kitchen, the phone was ringing. In one breath, Alex told her that the police had given tonight’s performance the green light and asked her to notify the players.

  “Alex, I’ll be there, and I’ll call John Hocking if you like. But if I don’t spend the next hour or so in hot water, I won’t be able to play at all tonight.”

  “Hot water?”

  “I know, it sounds crazy on a day like this. Maybe I could try ice, instead. Anyhow, I can’t call. Sorry.”

  For once, Alex folded quickly. How can she argue with me when she’s sure I’ve taken leave of my senses? Joan thought. I should try it more often.

  She left a quick message on John’s answering machine and then climbed the stairs to let the shower pound on her. The heat felt good after all. Afterwards, she shut the door on the muggy bathroom and stretched out on her bed in her lightest cotton robe to avoid chilling her arm muscles, now wonderfully loose. Half an hour later, the alarm she’d had the foresight to set woke her from a sound sleep in time to pad downstairs barefoot for a supper of yogurt and last night’s fruit salad and to change into orchestra black.

  Andrew rolled in when she was on her way out the back door.

  “What’s for supper, Mom?” he asked.

  “Whatever you can scrounge up. I ate all the fruit salad—the cantaloupe is good, though.”

  “I could go out for pizza.”

  “You could. How’s your cash holding out?”

  “Okay. See you, Mom.”

  “See you.”

  What a joy to see him so independent after those years of being the only parent, responsible for both of them. Again, her heart went out to Ellen Putnam. It would be hard to play tonight with David and Ellen missing from the cast, but not nearly so hard as what Ellen had in front of her.

  18

  I love him—he loved me once. But that’s all gone. Fisht! He gave me an Italian glance—thus—and made me his. He will give her an Italian glance, and make her his. But it shall not be, for I’ll stamp on her—stamp on her—stamp on her! Did you ever kill anybody? No? Why not? Listen—I killed a fly this morning! It buzzed, and I wouldn’t have it. So it died—pop! So shall she!

  —MAD MARGARET, Ruddigore

  Down in the dressing room and in the pit, the cast and orchestra seemed more relaxed than they’d been before the first performance. Joan didn’t think it was her imagination. Was it because they had been through it once, she wondered, or because the music was the last thing on their minds tonight?

  “We’re sold out,” her old friend Nancy Van Allen reported from the trombone section. “I tried to buy a ticket for my husband, but no luck.”

  “It figures,” Joan said. “I’ll bet everyone wants to see the scene of the crime. They’re all probably sorry they missed last night.”

  “Hang on for disasters tonight,” said John next to her, when the pit began to climb the wall.

  She stared at him. Did he know something?

  “Think about it,” he said. “We’ll have a new Mad Margaret and a new Sir Roderic.”

  “That’s right. And they couldn’t so much as walk through it today.” Now it was John’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “According to Fred, the police kept everyone off the stage until tonight,” she explained.

  They tuned and the lights dimmed, but Alex didn’t give the signal to begin. Instead, she looked expectantly toward the left side of the stage. Joan understood why when a man in a dark suit stepped out from behind the curtain into a spotlight.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in a voice that might have carried as far as ten rows. “We are presenting our remaining performances of Ruddigore in memory of our colleague David Putnam.” He paused, and the audience was still. “The part of Sir Roderic will be sung tonight by Peter Wylie, and the part of Mad Margaret by Catherine Turner.” Now there were murmurs. The word would reach the back of the hall.

  So Catherine was Ellen Putnam’s understudy. Catherine, whose tongue was as sour as her pastries were sweet, especially when she was talking to Joan about Fred
, on whom she had once staked a claim. Joan tried to wish her well, but her true feelings leaked through her good intentions. For the sake of the show she hoped Catherine would be good enough. That was genuine. It gave her a certain satisfaction, though, to know that Fred had heard Ellen, not Catherine, sing Mad Margaret.

  The spotlight vanished and the man disappeared behind the curtain, Alex raised her arms to give the downbeat for the overture, and they were off again.

  Most of the first act went well, but when Mad Margaret entered, Joan felt oddly sad to hear Catherine struggling with the part. Margaret’s almost tuneless music was not easy to sing, especially at the beginning, when, with her clothes in tatters, her red hair a wild tangle, and flutes introducing her, she was a caricature of theatrical madness from Ophelia to Lucia de Lammermoor. Only someone who knew the notes well would have heard that Catherine missed some of them, Joan told herself, and Catherine’s dramatic flair carried her through the worst of it.

  At the tricky Allegro vivace and even in the next section, where pizzicato strings played on the beat and Margaret was supposed to sing on the offbeat, Alex was clearly following the singer, rather than attempting to set her straight. Joan concentrated on staying with Alex’s baton. Its movements were as erratic as they had been when the most recent winner of the annual youth concerto competition had taken enormous liberties with his concerto’s rhythm. But she had to credit Catherine with a sense of comic timing that milked all the laughs in the spoken dialogue.

  “But see,” Margaret said at the end of the scene, “they come—Sir Despard and his evil crew! Hide, hide—they are all mad—quite mad!”

  “What makes you think that?” asked Rose Maybud.

  “Hush! They sing choruses in public. That’s mad enough, I think! Go—hide away, or they will seize you!”

  The two women left the stage to a round of applause that was rare following anything but singing. When Catherine returned, it was to sing the second stanza of the brisk first act finale in duet with Dr. Cutts as Sir Despard. She managed it well enough and gave a mad flourish to the dance at the end, which Joan could see even while she played.