Murder & Sullivan Read online

  “Should I go?” His forehead wrinkled as it did when he was anxious.

  “How do you feel about it?” she said. Andrew hadn’t been to a funeral since his father’s. She’d never believed in taking children. But he was hardly a child now. She didn’t need to make up his mind for him, and she certainly didn’t want to pressure him. Or hurry him, even today. She chewed as inconspicuously as she could and willed herself to sit quietly.

  “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I liked him. You should have seen him over at Henry’s that day.”

  “I liked him, too. Come if you want to, Andrew. Or maybe you could do something for his kids some other time. You know what they’re up against.”

  “Yeah. Thanks, Mom. I will.” He zipped his book bag and slung it over his shoulder. “See you.” And he let the back door bang.

  Joan finished her breakfast in peace. She scanned the headlines and the obituaries—part of her job, she figured—but left the rest of the paper for evening. A quick trip upstairs to brush her teeth again and grab the panty hose and shoes, and she was off. The car started, not that it had ever threatened not to. Still, with the odometer making its second pass through the numbers, she blessed it every time it did and spared it when she could.

  She didn’t have to unlock the doors to the center when she arrived at nine; the adult day-care staff had done that when they opened at eight-thirty. It was a good thing, because the crowd was already gathering for Dr. Cutts’s talk at nine-thirty. What is it about getting older that makes people get ready so far ahead of time? Joan wondered, not for the first time. She made decaf coffee in the big urn and set out teabags by a smaller urn of hot water. This early in the day, she wouldn’t offer cookies from the center’s stash. She saved them for afternoon events.

  I wondered how I’d act normal around Zach, she thought suddenly. But what about Dr. Cutts? Calm down. Nobody’s going to do anything here today. Anyway, Fred’s probably already eliminated him. I can’t go around suspecting everybody in the cast.

  She’d been amazed to find the doctor available on such short notice, and for a weekday morning at that. In the pediatrician’s office, when her children were small, Monday morning had always found patients hanging from the rafters. Maybe Dr. Cutts didn’t have that kind of practice. She had called Liz MacDonald at his office after learning that he was currently chief of staff at Oliver’s small hospital, which hired no staff physicians but relied on doctors in the community.

  “Oh,” Liz had said blithely, “he’ll be happy to do it. How about Monday?” Joan hoped he wouldn’t regret it. From the comments she’d overheard, she was sure he would face some tough questioning, if not actual hostility. On the other hand, a lot of people tended to put doctors on a pedestal. They might back down when he was in the same room with them. And some folks loved him, she knew.

  At least they had come. Joan had hurried to get the word out in time. She would have felt bad if he’d shown up to empty chairs, but by ten the small meeting room was comfortably filled.

  Dr. Cutts arrived promptly, looking as well scrubbed as she remembered him from his office. Probably made his hospital calls already, Joan thought, and went to welcome him.

  “How’s that leg doing?” he asked.

  She gave him points for remembering. “Much better, thank you.” It was true, she scarcely noticed it most of the time now.

  “Good.” He gave her that pixie smile. “Morning, Mabel,” he said to Mabel Dunn, who was just arriving, and he smiled and nodded at some others, both regulars and drop-ins.

  Joan wondered how many of the people here today were his patients. They probably all knew him better than she did. She kept her introduction brief, mentioning his role as current spokesman for the hospital, and his willingness to answer their questions.

  “I’ll do my best,” he said, and launched into a brief history of Oliver Hospital. Joan learned that it had been founded over a hundred years ago by local women concerned with the lack of medical care in their little town, and that it had grown from an old house whose windows children tried to peer through while operations were being performed to the small modern hospital it was today. While limited, it provided convenient local care for routine medical, obstetrical, orthopedic, and surgical cases. For most specialized care Oliver residents had to go out of town.

  Only a year ago, he told them, a group working in close cooperation with the hospital had opened Hoosier Place, Oliver’s first fully accredited nursing home. Bids were being taken for a new wing to be built next spring. The new wing would concentrate on elderly patients with Alzheimer’s and other dementing illnesses.

  “Even if all they have is Medicaid?” someone asked, not waiting for a formal question period to be announced.

  “Yes,” Dr. Cutts said. “Like the hospital, it’s Medicare and Medicaid certified.”

  “And what happens if they need something Medicare and Medicaid won’t pay for?”

  “Or their private insurance won’t pay for?” asked Mabel Dunn.

  “I know you’re concerned about the effects of insurance cutbacks,” Dr. Cutts said. “We all are. We’re doing our best to provide good patient care in spite of them.”

  “Like hell,” Joan heard a man say quietly in a back corner, but she couldn’t see who had spoken. Here we go, she thought.

  “Is that what you call it when you kick people out while they’re still sick, because the insurance says you can only be in the hospital a day or two after major surgery?” said a woman she didn’t know.

  “The hospital is negotiating those limitations with the insurance companies. Speaking for myself, though, I keep patients in the hospital until I decide they’re ready to leave.”

  “Will you visit patients in the nursing home?” asked a man Joan had met once or twice. “I can’t get anyone to call on my wife when she comes down with an infection.”

  “What happens?” Dr. Cutts asked.

  “The nurses call the doctor and tell him what they think is wrong, and he prescribes over the phone. He hasn’t seen my wife in over a year.” The doctor opened his mouth, but the man didn’t let him reply. “And that’s not all. He doesn’t even return their calls. Last time it was two days after they told me she had an infection before she got any antibiotics for it.”

  “That’s not right,” said a woman, and others echoed her.

  Dr. Cutts waited them out. “I don’t know the facts in your particular case, but you may want to notify the Alcorn County Medical Association.”

  “Fat lot of good that will do,” said the quiet voice in the back corner. But the man who had asked the question thanked the doctor and sat down.

  And so it went. Dr. Cutts fielded questions about expensive hospital aspirins, indecipherable hospital bills, and more before he finally looked at his watch. Joan went forward to shake his hand and set him free.

  “Thank you for your patience,” she said. “We all appreciate your taking the time to come.”

  The applause was polite. Several people crowded forward to shake the doctor’s hand—or, more likely, ask for free medical advice, but he waved a quick good-bye.

  “I have patients waiting,” he told them, and ducked out.

  “I just love Dr. Cutts,” said a woman in her eighties. “He’s such a nice young man.” Joan smiled.

  “Nice my foot,” said a heavyset bald man. Joan didn’t know him, but she recognized the voice from the corner. “I wouldn’t take a sick dog to that man, especially not after the lawsuit.”

  “What lawsuit?” someone asked.

  “You must have heard,” said Margaret Duffy. “Dr. Cutts sent Ada Lawson’s fourteen-year-old grandson home with antacids when he had an ulcer so bad it perforated his stomach and nearly killed him. Ada’s son took him to court and won.”

  “He didn’t lose his license,” Joan said, wishing she’d asked someone else to come.

  “No,” Alvin Hannauer said. “That was up to the licensing board, and they disagreed with the judge. I unders
tand it’s really cut into his practice, though. I know my insurance won’t let me use him anymore.”

  “So how can he be chief of staff at the hospital?” Annie Jordan asked.

  “Oh,” said the man who’d made the crack about the dog, “you heard him—there’s no real staff at the hospital. He probably volunteered. Makes him sound good. He needs to—you notice he had time to come over here this morning. I wish I hadn’t wasted mine.” And he walked out.

  “I don’t care what Dr. Cutts told us today,” Annie said. “He’s the one who made Henry Putnam leave the hospital too soon.”

  The complaining went on, but Joan had lost her stomach for it. The callous man they were talking about was her doctor. She excused herself from the group and shut her office door, but she couldn’t shut out her own thoughts. David, Henry’s nephew, had ruled against Dr. Cutts in court and, from the sound of it, had cost him earnings that no insurance would cover. Could it be that the doctor had taken his anger out on Henry? That his thirst for revenge had grown until he had murdered David?

  She had been thinking of Ellen and the children and hoping for their sake that the killer would be found soon. Now, for the first time, she was fully conscious of the cloud of suspicion hanging over the heads of all the innocent people.

  22

  Oh, bury, bury—let the grave close o’er

  The days that were—that never will be more.

  —CASILDA AND LUIZ, The Gondoliers

  By midafternoon the center was quiet. Joan retreated to her office again when she could no longer postpone pulling on her hose and shoes. At half past two she left the center in the capable hands of the adult day-care staff.

  She was pulling into the First Baptist Church parking lot when she wondered whether anyone had offered to pick up Henry Putnam. He wouldn’t be able to walk. Still, she thought, if I’d planned ahead, we could have managed it with a wheelchair. Maybe someone in the family had remembered Henry, although considering her own spacey numbness when Ken died, she doubted it. If she hadn’t been so late this morning … but would she have thought of it, even then?

  Let it go, Joan, she told herself.

  In the crowded lot, Gil Snarr, wearing his undertaker’s black, was waving cars into tight rows.

  “Hello, Joan,” he said.

  “Hello, Gil.” He had been her classmate in Margaret Duffy’s sixth grade, and they’d met repeatedly since her return to Oliver. Death and decay in all around I see, the old hymn echoed inside her head.

  “Will you be going to the cemetery?” He held out a purple Funeral pennant.

  “Oh, I don’t…” she began, but stopped. David’s death was affecting her as few of the deaths of the old people she’d worked with had done. “Yes, I will.” Gil affixed the pennant to her antenna and directed her elderly Honda to a spot beside a spanking new Lincoln.

  “Just follow the car to your left,” he told her. She nodded and went into the church.

  She had just slid into a pew near the back when the organist began playing Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” If the church had air conditioning, it wasn’t working well enough to be noticed. Here and there people were already fanning themselves with cardboard pictures of Jesus kneeling over a discreet ad for Snarr’s Funeral Home. Andrew used to call fans like those “Jesus on a stick.” She hadn’t seen one in years.

  There was Maude Kelly down front, her face streaked with tears. That’s right, Joan remembered. They closed the courthouse this afternoon.

  Alvin Hannauer and Margaret Duffy sat together a few rows behind Maude, and several more of the Senior Citizens’ Center’s regulars were scattered throughout the crowd, as were people Joan recognized from the neighborhood and a few members of the Gilbert and Sullivan cast. She saw Esther Ooley and Catherine Turner, both dressed more sedately than usual.

  Annie Jordan slipped in beside Joan, for once without her knitting. She leaned over. “Isn’t that your boy, Joanie? With Henry?”

  Looking where Annie had pointed, Joan saw Henry Putnam’s white head above the back of a wheelchair in a side aisle down front, and Andrew’s dark head bent toward him at the end of the pew. It looked as if Andrew must have brought the old man. No one else sat near them.

  “Yes,” she told Annie. “They’re friends.” And knew it was true.

  How did he do it? she wondered, stifling a giggle at a sudden mental image of Henry’s wheelchair on the crossbar of Andrew’s bike. Andrew was nothing if not resourceful, she knew. He’d probably borrowed a car. However he had managed it, or even if he’d merely come to sit with Henry, she felt a warm glow watching her son with the old man.

  “You must be mighty proud of him,” Annie said, and squeezed her hand. Joan squeezed back, wishing Ken could see him.

  The organ struck up “For All the Saints.” The congregation rose to sing, and a double row of pallbearers—Joan recognized Mayor Deckard—followed the closed casket down the aisle and lined up in the front row on the left while the family took their places on the right. The rousing hymn set the tone for a celebratory funeral, with gratitude for the life of this good man and a minimum of sentimentality. The minister seemed to have known David well. He included personal stories that made people chuckle—at one point Joan even saw Amy and Scott Putnam laugh together.

  The minister read biblical words of comfort and promise, ending with the Twenty-third Psalm. They sang “The King of Love My Shepherd Is,” there was a final prayer, and it was over. The organist played more Bach while the casket was wheeled out and the family escaped by a side door. Gil Snarr and his father, Bud, stood at the end of the pews and released the congregation row by row, like wedding guests.

  Following Annie down the center aisle, Joan saw Fred Lundquist standing at the rear of the church. Always the matchmaker, Annie gave Joan a little nudge in his direction and disappeared. He met her at the door.

  “You going to the cemetery?” He held the door for her and they walked down the steps together.

  “I said I would.”

  “Want a ride?”

  She was tempted, but remembered her car. “Fred, I’d better not. Gil Snarr has me in line—I’d louse up the works.”

  His eyes crinkled.

  “Did I ever tell you about the fellow who changed his mind in the middle of a funeral procession?” She shook her head. “I guess he just decided to go home. The back half of the procession followed him. I was bringing up the rear on a motorcycle, so I moved up to the head of that bunch and led them where they were supposed to be going. Sure felt funny to be leading a funeral procession without a hearse.”

  Later, waiting in her car for the procession to begin, Joan realized she had no idea where Fred had been a cop before coming to Oliver. She knew Oliver wasn’t his home, but little more. When she’d asked him once where he was from, he’d said only “a little Swedish community in northern Illinois” and changed the subject. He hadn’t sounded particularly mysterious—more as if he’d rather think about the here and now than his own past.

  You’ll probably never need to know, she thought. Face it, nothing’s ever going to happen with Fred. He’s a lonely man, and you keep running into murders. That’s all. If you got serious about him, there would be more important things to ask him about his past. Catherine cracked once that Fred’s wife had rocks in her head. What if Linda Lundquist played around? How do you rule out AIDS? And then there’s all the emotional baggage people our age bring with them. What about Catherine herself? Has there been anyone else? He’s been divorced for some time.

  How do people find each other these days? Everything was so simple when Ken and I met at Oberlin. We kind of grew up together. But it’s so complicated now, even for kids like Andrew and Rebecca.

  Joan shivered in the heat. Her daughter Rebecca, only two years older than Andrew, was working out her life in New York City. She’d come for a family visit just over a year ago, when she’d entered an original quilt in Oliver’s annual spring quilt show. These days, in addition
to holding down a day job at the bank, she was marketing her own unique designs. So far, at least, she was surviving, and loving it. Joan had learned to respect her daughter’s need for distance, and they had begun to be adult friends after a period of tense separation.

  Engines coming to life around her jerked her back. Joan started her car, pulled out in the wake of the Lincoln, and was startled when the procession turned, not in the familiar direction of the old cemetery near the edge of town, but out into the country, where it quickly picked up speed.

  How could I not have asked where we were going? It might take hours. Why didn’t Ellen bury him in town?

  They’d passed a few miles of woods, corn, and soybeans when a line of dust rising from a hill off to the left told her that they had arrived, and Joan followed the Lincoln onto a gravel road leading up to a little redbrick church. She parked on the grass beside the church and walked with the others into the small cemetery beyond it, past old, tilted limestone and marble tombstones with illegible lettering. On several Joan could just make out the name Putnam. More Putnams were among the limestone angels and limestone tree stumps wound with limestone ivy, and then they came to more recent stones, mostly pink and grey granite, with sharp edges to their names and dates. The granite stones were plain shapes, but many were carved with curlicues and flowers, crosses, open Bibles, and praying hands. Here and there, a headstone rose out of a yucca or peony bush. Many more boasted plastic bouquets or sun-faded flags stuck into the ground.

  There was no stone at the head of the open grave around which about fifty people had gathered, only masses of flowers from the church. The Snarrs had already poised the casket above the empty hole, and the family and pallbearers were seated in folding chairs, shaded by a tent. Joan stood in the hot sun at the back of the group of mourners and wished the maples and redbuds that edged the cemetery could move a little closer.

  The service was mercifully brief. The minister’s unamplified voice murmured words too soft for her to hear. When the others bowed their heads she prayed a little prayer of her own for David’s family. In the silence she heard muffled sobs near her.