Murder by the Book (7 page)

They startled Pamela North.

“Mr. Grogan,” Pam said, “Dr. Piersal went to see somebody yesterday. You asked him to. Was it this Mrs. Upton?”

Grogan nodded his head. The acquiescence was, obviously, reluctant.

“Doesn't mean a thing,” he said. “Couldn't.” He looked at Pam. “Could it?”

Jerry North wished, strongly wished, he hadn't asked. What Pam is asked she tries to answer. Jerry put the
Times
down on a chair.

“Of course it couldn't,” Jerry said firmly, and looked firmly at his wife. “According to Piersal, Mrs. Upton had a touch of nervous indigestion. What connection could there be?”

“Well,” Pam said, “they're both dead, for one thing.”

“Dr. Piersal was stabbed to death,” Jerry said. “Mrs. Upton died of a heart attack. Did her husband know her heart was bad?”

“Yes,” Grogan said. “They had a ground floor suite. In the wing.” He gestured. The Coral Isles had a wing at either end, as if it stretched out arms to embrace the ocean. “Go in right off the garden,” Grogan said. “So she wouldn't have to walk up stairs.”

“So,” Jerry said, more to Pam than to Grogan, “a woman whose health is precarious, who may die at any time, does die. And a doctor who—I won't say treated her. Looked in on her once for a few minutes—is killed. Probably by a man he helped put in jail. What possible connection?”

“I don't know,” Pam said.

“People die every day. Every minute of every day.”

“I know.”

“So?”

“Of course you're right,” Pam said. “Mr. Grogan, does the deputy sheriff know Dr. Piersal treated Mrs. Upton? A few hours before she died?”

Grogan said he didn't know; said that he himself hadn't mentioned it.

“Because,” Pam North said, “I think he should.”

Jerry said, “Pam.” He said it sadly, but with resignation. Pam had been asked a question. She would try—

“No doctor,” Jerry said, “would diagnose a heart attack as nervous indigestion.” He said this firmly. He was not quite quick enough to inhibit two other words. “Would he?”

Pam had been asked another question.

“Jerry,” she said, “how would I know?”

We've had it, Jerry thought. And I knew all along we'd had it. Damn those damned pelicans.

“If one did,” Pam said, “he might be very upset about it. Particularly if he'd just been charged with malpractice in another case. Even if the jury said the other wasn't. Might even feel he had come to the end of the line.”

Jerry did not accept what Pam implied. He said that no doctor who had reached Edmund Piersal's standing, had his record, could also have so thin a skin. No doctor is always successful; no doctor is even always right. A physician, like any other man, may seek perfection, but does not expect to attain it. He does what he can; if he later suspects an alternative treatment might have had more success, he still remembers that he did what he could. He paused, waiting agreement.

“Also,” Grogan said, “if I get what you're driving at, Mrs. North, a doctor would know a hundred easier ways. Wouldn't he?”

The habit of asking Pam questions was growing, Jerry thought. It was a most insidious habit.

“All the same,” Pam said, “Sheriff Jefferson asked us to help. I think I'll call him up.” She looked at Jerry, who looked rather dour. “Probably,” Pam said, as much to encourage him as anything, “this man you were going to bet with has already confessed.”

“I wasn't,” Jerry said, “going to bet with him.”

He picked up the
Times
, as a symbol of dissociation. He knew, of course, that it would not work. Where Pam went, there he would go also, to do what he might to keep her out of trouble. And, death to all pelicans.

Only once before had a thing like this happened to Deputy Sheriff Ronald Jefferson, and that had been years ago. That time he had been lucky; that time there had been an honest-to-God pro around—a state police captain from up North. Jefferson had no illusion that he was, himself, that kind of pro. He was a good law and order man; he knew his town and where, as things were set up in it, the city police—and the Navy shore patrol—left off and he began. But this time of year, the town wasn't really his town. This time of year it tended to be more swarm than city. If tourists wanted to kill each other, Jefferson thought, they ought to do it at home.

It was too bad it apparently couldn't be pinned on Jasper Bradley, alias James Worthington. He was the man for it—had a record, and the right kind of record; had a good, simple motive, whatever this Mrs. North thought of it, and was, moreover, at hand. Or had been.

Jefferson had asked the state police to drop by in Marathon and check, but he had no real hope that they would turn up a flaw in it. Lem Hunter was a reliable man. He had known Lem for years. If Lem said that, at seven-thirty that morning, a man who had registered as James Worthington, and who fitted the description of Worthington-Bradley well enough had been having breakfast in the coffee shop of Hunter's Lodge, having spent the night in Unit 3, the man had been there. If he had been in Marathon at that hour, he had not been, half an hour or so before, at the end of the fishing pier of The Coral Isles, sticking a knife into a man who had offended him by helping to get him sent to jail.

So, in due course, Jasper Bradley (alias Worthington) would be shipped up to Miami to answer, if he could, certain questions the rackets squad of the Miami police wanted to ask him. As a formality, Lem Hunter would, before then, be shown a picture of him.

Which left Jefferson, at the moment, with a looney girl—a girl off her rocker—who might have knifed a man because, indirectly, he might have led to her mother's being publicly ridiculed. Not the girl herself; her mother. Of course, if she thought, also, that Piersal had been responsible for her father's death; that her mother's breakdown, too, might somehow be his responsibility—

Jefferson didn't like any part of it. The county prosecutor wouldn't like any part of it. Also, he wasn't really left with the girl. He didn't have the girl. Unless, of course, she had shown up at the hotel and nobody had thought to mention it to the sheriff's office. He might as well—

He was reaching for the telephone when it rang. He said, “Sheriff's office. Deputy Sheriff Jefferson.” He heard, “This is Pamela North. You asked us to help.”

Jefferson didn't remember that he actually had. He had relayed a message from—It didn't matter. He could use any help offered.

“There's probably no connection,” Pamela North said. “And probably it's this Mr. Worthington, anyway.”

“Doesn't look like being,” Jefferson said. “What's no connection, Mrs. North?”

“That Dr. Piersal,” Pam said, “treated this Mrs. Upton. The one who died. Anyway, went to see her because the regular house doctor wasn't available. That was yesterday.”

Deputy Jefferson thought it over for some seconds. He said, “So?”

“I've no idea, really,” Pam said. “Only, if Dr. Piersal, when he heard she was dead, remembered he'd done something contra-indicated—like giving her poison by mistake—he might have felt very guilty, mightn't he? Only, of course, she died of heart failure.”

“There's that,” Jefferson said. “Also, her husband—who's a doctor himself, didn't find her dead until around ten this morning. And Piersal, by then, had been dead three hours or so.”

There was a pause.

“It doesn't fit very well, does it?” Pam said. “Unless he went around early and found her—well, anyway, we didn't know whether you knew. What's the matter with Mr. Worthington?”

“Alibi.”

“Probably faked,” Pam said. “They almost always are. Did Dr. Piersal have a little book or something?”

Ronald Jefferson felt that he was, somehow, being left increasingly behind. It was a little like listening to a language with which you were only partially familiar, so that for each word translated carefully, five succeeding words vanish like smoke. He said, “Little book?”

“For jotting in,” Pam said. “Records of patients. Or even the backs of envelopes. I knew one who did, but he lost the envelopes. But most of them make notes somewhere. So that next time they'll know what they did last time.”

Jefferson thought for a few seconds. Then he said, “Oh.” There was, understandably, no response to this. “Haven't had a chance to go over his effects,” Jefferson said.

He hadn't, he admitted to himself, made the chance. People on vacation do not, in the ordinary course, carry with them revealing records of their lives. They carry credit cards, checkbooks. They can be identified from what is in their pockets, in their handbags. There had been no question of the identity of Dr. Edmund Piersal. It had seemed more sensible to get pertinent information from New York, where Dr. Piersal lived and practiced. Still—

“First I've heard he treated Mrs. Upton,” Jefferson said. It sounded defensive in his own ears. “What you're getting at, he may have killed himself because he'd made a mistake in treatment?”

“I said it didn't fit very well,” Pam said. “But since Mr. Worthington doesn't fit either.”

“It's a bit far-fetched.”

“I know,” Pam said. “What isn't, Mr. Jefferson? It's a far-fetched world.”

To which, after a moment's thought, Jefferson said, “Oh.” Pam waited, apparently for amplification. “I see what you mean,” Jefferson said.

“I'm glad,” Pam said, after another brief intermission. “As you say, there's probably nothing to it. But it's always hard to tell, isn't it? Good-bye.”

Chief Deputy Sheriff Ronald Jefferson looked for a few seconds at the telephone receiver in his hand. He put it back where it belonged. He went to the property clerk's office, into which he had checked the more portable belongings of Dr. Edmund Piersal, deceased. He checked them out again, signing a receipt. Items: A billfold, containing two hundred and forty-seven dollars in bills, an American Express credit card, a driver's license of the state of New York, a registration certificate for a 1962 Cadillac, a Navy ID card—Comm. Edmund Piersal, MC, USNR (Ret.)—a scrap of paper with a telephone number written on it in pencil; an envelope containing sixty-seven cents in coins; a checkbook of the Chemical Bank New York Trust Company, with Piersal's name printed on the checks, with a balance of eight thousand, nine hundred and forty-two dollars and sixteen cents shown; a bunch of six keys on a chain; a pair of glasses in a leather case. And—a black notebook.

The notebook was about a third filled with telephone numbers, each prefixed by initials. A return ticket to New York, Seaboard Airline, and a Pullman ticket fell out of the notebook, and Jefferson looked at them, and saw that Dr. Piersal had planned to return to New York a week hence. He put the tickets back in the notebook. He leafed through the book to the last entry, and looked at the last entry. It occurred to him that this detective captain in New York knew what he was talking about when he talked about the Norths. The entry read:

“Mrs. T. Upton, g-i up. hist of 49. Dehy. sl ht. comp. th. adm. dr int. v. adv bl d & gis. hs MD cf w.”

Each letter was well formed, distinct. Dr. Edmund Piersal had written a small, neat hand. If—Jefferson checked back through the book, checked the entries in the checkbook. There was no probable doubt that Dr. Piersal had written the last entry in the book; there was no doubt that it referred, as this Mrs. North had thought it might, to Mrs. Upton. Mrs. T——Of course. Tucker Upton, M.D. They came down frequently during the winter, because there was always a breeze on the Keys, and not always in Miami. A surgeon, Upton was, as Deputy Sheriff Jefferson remembered it. And maybe Dr. Upton, asked, could make sense of what Dr. Piersal had written.

Jefferson read the notations several times, “g-i up.” Sounded a little like instructions to a horse. “Dr int. v.” didn't sound like anything at all. “Hs MD.” Husband MD? “Cf w?” Conceivably, “confer with?” It was anybody's guess. The whole thing was.

Jefferson had an impulse—a quite unreasonable impulse—to take the book around to the hotel and show it to this Mrs. North. That was evidently absurd. If it meant nothing to him, why would it mean anything to her? And it was she who had found the body. If this New York cop hadn't given her such an emphatically clean bill of health—On the other hand, of course, she had been right in thinking there might be some such notations in the doctor's notebook—the book for “jotting in.” Serve her right to be shown what had been there, to be as puzzled by it as he was.

He had reached for the telephone to check on the whereabouts of Mrs. Rebecca Payne, to discover whether she was at the hotel. He had been distracted. He might as well drive around to the hotel and find out for himself. It would be cooler in an open car; cooler at the hotel. It would be cooler almost anywhere than it was where he was. If he happened to run into Mrs. North—

Mrs. Rebecca Payne did not answer the telephone when he called her room. She did not respond when she was paged. With Paul Grogan, a worried Paul Grogan, along, Jefferson went to the single room, on the second floor, on the street side, assigned to Rebecca Payne. The maid had not reached it yet. Grogan said “Tchk-tchk.” It was empty; her clothes were in the closet—the enormous closet. (In its earliest years The Coral Isles had catered primarily to fishermen, and had provided more amply for their gear than for their persons.) Her luggage was in the closet. Her toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste were in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and cold cream was there, and a box of face powder—Rachel. There was a small bottle of white pills, with a physician's name and a prescription number, the notation “As directed.” Jefferson shook a pill into his hand and touched it with his tongue, and the taste was bitter. Phenobarbital, at a guess.