The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 (55 page)

He reached down, his fingers closing over the handle of the fire tongs. Lifting his voice, he shouted, “No, no—you're wrong! Put them down, for God's sake.”

And before Rutledge could stop him, he raised the tongs and brought them down on his own head, the blow carefully calculated to break the skin but not knock him down. And as blood ran down his face, he dropped the tongs and cried out, “Oh, God, someone help me . . .
Mrs. Dunne . . . he's run mad.
”

And in a swift angry voice that reached only Rutledge's ears, Taylor said, “She's ill, I tell you. I won't be taken away when she needs me. Not by you, not by anyone.”

He rushed at Rutledge, grappling with him.

The door burst open, Mrs. Dunne flying to the doctor's aid, pulling at Rutledge's shoulders, calling out for him to stop.

Rutledge had no choice. He swung her around, and she went down, tripping over the chair he'd been sitting in. He turned toward the hearth, to retrieve the fire tongs as Taylor reeled against the far wall, calling, “Stop him—”

Mrs. Dunne, scrambling to her feet, must have thought Rutledge was about to use the tongs again, and she threw herself at him, carrying him backward against the hearth, stumbling over the fire screen.

Her screams had brought patients from the waiting room, pushing their way through the door, faces anxious and frightened as they took in the carnage, drawing the same conclusions that Mrs. Dunne had leapt to. A woman in a dark green coat gasped and went to the doctor's aid, and he leaned heavily against her shoulder. Two men put themselves between Rutledge and his perceived victim, one of them quickly retrieving the fire tongs from where they'd fallen, as if afraid Rutledge could still reach them.

It was all Rutledge could do to catch Mrs. Dunne's pummeling fists and force her arms to her sides so that he could retrieve the situation before it got completely out of hand. Hamish in the back of his mind was warning him again, and there was no time to answer.

In a voice used to command on a battlefield, he said, “You—the one in the greatcoat—find Constable Forrest and bring him here at once.”

Taylor said, stricken, “He's trying to arrest me . . . for murder . . . I've done nothing wrong, don't let him lie to you. For God's sake!”

They knew Taylor. Rutledge was a stranger. The man in the greatcoat hesitated.

The doctor swayed on his feet. “I think I'd better sit down.” The woman helped him to a chair, and his knees nearly buckled under him.

She said, “I'll find your wife.”

He gripped her arm. “No. I don't want to worry her.” Taylor took out his handkerchief to mop the blood from his face. “Just get him out of my office, if you will.”

Rutledge crossed the room, and the man with the tongs raised them without thinking, as if expecting Rutledge to attack him. But he went to the door and closed it.

“You'll listen to me, then. I'm Inspector Rutledge, Scotland Yard.” He held up his card for all of them to see. “I've just charged Dr. Taylor with the murder of Sir John Middleton. As for those tongs, he himself wielded them. I never touched them, or him.”

“I think you'd better leave,” Mrs. Dunne snapped. “He's a good man, a doctor.”

“Is he? I intend to order Sir John's dog exhumed. I expect to find shreds of cloth in his teeth.” Hamish was reminding him that it was only a very slim possibility, but Rutledge ignored him. “What's more, I intend to ask a doctor from Cambridge to examine Dr. Taylor's limbs for healing bites. And the clothing he was wearing the day of the murder will be examined for mended tears.”

He saw the expression on Mrs. Dunne's face. Shock first, and then uncertainty. “I mended a tear in his trousers just last week. He'd caught them on a nail, he said.”

“Then you'll know which trousers they were. If the shreds match, he will be tried for murder. We can also look at those tongs, if you will set them carefully on the desk. The only prints on them will be Dr. Taylor's and yours, sir. Not mine.”

“Can you do that?” the man holding the tongs asked, staring down at them.

“There are people who can.”

He moved to the desk, putting them down quite gently. Dr. Taylor reached for them, saying, “He's bluffing—look, it's my blood that's on them.”

Rutledge was across the room before Taylor's fingers could curl around the handle of the tongs, his grip hard on the doctor's wrist, stopping him just in time.

The man in the greatcoat said, “I think I ought to fetch Constable Forrest after all, if only to sort out this business.”

He left the office, and they could hear the surgery door shut firmly after him.

The doctor said, “I tell you, it's not true, none of it is true.” But even as he spoke the words, he could read the faces around him. Uncertainty, then doubt replacing belief.

The woman in the dark green coat said, “I really must go—” and started toward the door, unwilling to have any further involvement with the police. The other man, without looking at the doctor, followed her in uncomfortable silence.

Taylor called, “No, wait, please!”

Mrs. Dunne said, “I'll just put a sign up on the door, saying the surgery is closed,” and hurried after them.

Rutledge turned to see tears in Taylor's eyes. “Damn you,” he said hoarsely. “And damn the bloody dog. I love her. I wanted to save her. Do you know what it's like to realize that your skills aren't enough?” He turned from Rutledge to the window. “Do you know how it feels when God has deserted you?”

Rutledge knew. In France, when he held his revolver at Hamish's temple; he knew.

“And what would you have done if the reliquary failed you, too?” Rutledge asked.

“It won't. It can't. I'm counting on it,” he said defiantly. “You won't find it, I've seen to that. By God, at least she'll have that!”

But in the end they would find it. Rutledge said only, “What did you use as the murder weapon?”

Dr. Taylor grimaced. “You're the policeman. Tell me.”

Hamish said, “He did the postmortem. Any evidence would ha' been destroyed.”

And there had been more than enough time for Taylor to have hidden whatever it was on his way back to Mumford before he was summoned by Sam Hubbard.

When Constable Forrest arrived, Rutledge turned Taylor over to him and warned him to have a care on their way to Cambridge. “He's killed once,” he reminded the man.

He watched them leave, and Mrs. Dunne, who had come to the door as the doctor was being taken away, bit her lip to hold back tears.

Rutledge walked to the house next but one to speak to Taylor's wife, and it was a bitter duty. Her face drawn and pale from suffering, she said only, “It's my fault. My fault.” And nothing would dissuade her. In the end, he had to tell her that her house would have to be searched. She nodded, too numb at the moment to care.

He left her with Mrs. Dunne and went to tell Mrs. Gravely that he had found Sir John's killer.

She frowned. “I'd never have believed the doctor could do such a thing. Not to murder Sir John for a heathen superstition. Poor Mrs. Taylor, I can't think how she'll manage now.”

He left her, refusing her offer of a cup of tea. Then, just as he was cranking the motorcar, she called to him, and he came back to the steps where she was hugging her arms about her against the cold wind.

“It keeps slipping my mind, Mr. Rutledge, sir! And it's probably not important now. You asked me to keep an eye out for anything that was missing, and I wanted you to know I did.”

“Is there anything? Besides the reliquary?” he asked, surprised.

“Oh, nothing so valuable as that.” She smiled self-consciously, feeling a little foolish, but no less determined to do her duty. “Still, with the old dog dead, and Sir John gone as well, I never noticed it was missing until yesterday morning. It's the iron doorstop, the one shaped like a small dormouse. Sir John used it these past six months or so, whenever Simba needed to go out. To keep the door from slamming shut behind them, you see, while he walked a little way with Simba or stood here on the step waiting for him. He never cared for the sound of a slamming door. He said it reminded him too much of the war. The sound of the guns and all that.”

Rutledge thanked her and drove to Cambridge to ask for men to search the sides of the road between Sir John's house and Mumford.

As they braved the cold to dig through ditches and push aside winter-dead growth, Rutledge could hear the doctor's voice again.

You're the policeman. Tell me.

Three hours later, he drove once more to Cambridge to do just that. A few black hairs still clung to the dormouse's ears, and on the base was what appeared to be a perfect print in Sir John's blood.

FROM
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

 

W
HEN
I
TRACKED
Terrell Cheatham's grandmother from her last known address to the subsidized apartment she'd moved into after her husband's death, she didn't do any of the things I expected. Instead of slamming the door in my face or denying that her grandson lived with her, she invited me in for a cup of coffee and then added a shot of bourbon to my mug, “just to keep the cold out of my bones.” This was a long way from the reception a private investigator usually gets when running down bail jumps in southwest Memphis, where the average annual income is a few dollars higher than it is in Calcutta and even the most law-abiding residents see a white face as an intrusion from an alien and hostile world. I was so shocked I wanted to believe her when she insisted that her grandson was a “fine young man” who wouldn't cause me “an ounce of trouble.”

Frances Cheatham seemed like a decent woman. She was in her late fifties or early sixties, still trim and attractive but with deep worry lines around her mouth and eyes, and I could tell she loved her grandson. From what I'd read in his jacket, Terrell Cheatham didn't seem like the kind of kid who belonged in jail. At twenty, he had a single blemish on his record. It had been two years since his arrest for breaking into the video-game store, and he'd kept clean since then. He'd completed a semester of college, earning a spot on the honor roll before he dropped out to take a full-time job in the kitchen at a Tops Barbecue on Elvis Presley Boulevard. If he'd shown up for his court appearance a week and a half ago—in Memphis a trial two years after the offense is considered swift justice—Terrell would have faced no more than six months' probation.

“Terrell's momma left him when he was just a baby,” she said now, blowing at the steam rising off a fresh cup of coffee and then shrugging. “Our son Marcus Junior gave Terrell to us to raise, but he came to visit Terrell every weekend up until the time he was killed in a car wreck outside of Jackson, Mississippi.”

Her husband, Marcus Senior, had passed away less than a year ago. He was a good man, she said, one who'd worked for twenty-seven years as a night watchman at the West Parrish Industrial Park to put bread on the table and keep a roof over their heads.

“Bone cancer. He went fast, but don't let anyone tell you fast and easy are the same thing.” Her smile was tired, maybe a little bitter. “I bet you hear your share of sad stories, don't you, Mr. Raines. Probably get sick of them.”

I told her to call me Charlie and said how sorry I was about her loss. And she thanked me for that, even though we both knew words were little comfort.

There didn't seem to be anything else to say, so we sat in silence for a few minutes before Frances Cheatham forced a smile and said it looked like both of us needed a refill. While she was in the kitchen, I went to look out the front window. The last of the light was seeping from a January sky. When you say Memphis, people think blistering August heat, but there are days in January and February when the skies are mold gray, a slanting, almost-frozen drizzle falls from dawn to midnight, and a wind whips across the Mississippi that makes you wonder if you haven't been transported unaware from Beale Street to Boston. I was still standing at the window, dreading going back out into that cold, when a tall, scrawny kid dressed in a parka, sock cap, and sneakers crossed the street and headed into the parking lot.

“You see Terrell coming?” Frances Cheatham asked, handing me my coffee.

Before I could answer, a black Tahoe fishtailed into the lot, nearly slammed a row of parked cars, and then skidded to a stop. Peering over my shoulder, Frances Cheatham said, “Good Lord, they almost run right over Terrell.”

Outside, the SUV's passenger door was slung open, and a man, fiftyish, white, not much bigger than an oak tree, got out. Terrell tried to run.
Tried
was the operative word. He didn't even get started before the guy in the overcoat raised a sawed-off shotgun and squeezed the trigger.

“Oh sweet Jesus!” Frances Cheatham screamed in my ear.

I pulled my .45 from beneath my jacket and ran for the door. I'd just opened it when the shotgun roared again. I knew it was too late for Terrell Cheatham, but I ran anyway, taking the stairs two at a time and nearly slipping and falling halfway down. His grandmother ran behind me, calling on the name of the Lord with each step she took.

Just as we reached the lot, the Tahoe screeched away. I caught a glimpse of the driver—white, older than the shooter, thick, curly gray hair and glasses—but then the Tahoe was gone, heading northeast toward the interstate. Cursing, I stuffed my .45 back into my holster without having fired a shot.

Frances Cheatham hunkered beside her grandson, screaming his name again and again. Now that the shooting was over, a few faces had emerged from the apartments, staring at the scene, some of them whispering their prayers.

“I've called an ambulance,” a pretty girl about Terrell's age shouted.