Prescription: Murder! Volume 1: Authentic Cases From the Files of Alan Hynd (12 page)

(Dr. Bougrat in Venezuela with child believed to be his daughter, circa 1930.)

Eventually, those back in France began to listen. After the Second World War, he received a pardon and was invited to return. But he insisted that he had found happiness in South America and there was no need for a pardon since he hadn’t done what he had been convicted of. If his conviction had been set aside, it would have been one thing, he said. But a pardon was not something he would accept. Nor was he interested in leaving his remote island paradise. There he was known as “the miracle doctor” whom God had sent to look after the poor.

So he stayed on his island for thirty-eight years. He lived modestly but comfortably with his family and surrounded by an adoring community. He died in his new home in 1962 at the age of seventy-two.

Eight years later in 1970, a local committee of Venezuelans erected a monument on his tomb. The monument endures to this day, almost a full century after Dr. Bougrat’s Jekyll-Hyde existence in the south of France. Fresh flowers appear on the tomb in perpetuity, continuing remembrances from the people of Juan Griego whom Dr. Bougrat served in the better years of his life.

And now, a bonus track…

The eerie sound of the hearse creaking to a stop in front of The Archer Home for old folks and chronic invalids in the ink-black pre-dawn hours of the steaming August night awakened the two old maids who lived in the snug brick house across the street.

“Heavens!” said Mabel Bliss to her sister, Patricia, as she drew the bedroom curtain aside and peered out. “That’s the third time somebody’s died over there in less than a month! And always in the middle of the night.”

A light went on in the vestibule of The Archer Home and the front door opened to admit two burly men who had jumped down from the driver’s seat of the death wagon, opened the rear door and dragged out a box six feet long. They weren’t inside very long when they reappeared with the box, which seemed to be more of a burden to carry now. They shoved it into the hearse and clattered into the gloom.

Now a light went on in the parlor and the Bliss sisters could see Sister Amy Archer, founder of the home bearing her name, wearing nothing but a very fancy nightgown, settling herself at a little organ. (The “Sister” was a title she had bestowed on herself. It had nothing to do with any religious order.) The windows were open and presently there wafted across the narrow street the sweet sad strains of
Nearer, My God, To Thee,
accompanied by Sister Amy’s pleasant soprano.

Sister Amy Archer, one of the few arch-murderess in criminal history who could quote passages from the Bible from Genesis to Exodus, was only half way through the hymn when a second figure appeared, a brooding giant of a man with a red puffy face and walrus moustache, in nightshirt and bare feet. This was Big Jim Archer, Sister Amy’s fifth spouse, a coarse type in his forties who seemed to be an odd sort of a mate for our heroine. Sister Amy, though in her late thirties, looked a good decade younger, and, though sharp-featured, was a very attractive little woman with snow-white skin, jet-black hair and a divine form that even the starch in her professional uniform simply couldn’t hide. Not that she was hiding much that August night after the hearse left, nor was Big Jim hid-ing anything, either, when the music stopped and the lights went out.

It was Sister Amy’s views on sex that puzzled the Bliss sisters. For somebody who was so devout and stern, and who was so unalterably opposed to alcohol and tobacco in any form, Sister Amy was simply mad about sex. Nor did she make any bones about it.

“One man in bed at night when the lights are out,” she had said to the Bliss sisters after coming up from New York six months previously to found The Archer Home in an abandoned rich man’s mansion in the tree-shaded village of Windsor, just outside of Hartford, Connecti-cut, “is worth ten on the street in broad daylight.”

After breakfast in the morning, when the twenty residents of The Archer Home, assorted widows and widowers who were, in one way or another, breaking up and coming apart at the joints, were out on a veranda that swept across the front and ran around one side of the big gray frame ram-shackle Home, Big Jim clumped across the street and knocked on the front door of the Bliss house. Sister Amy, a simply superb cook, had sent him over with some of her hotcakes and maple syrup. He was both a comic and tragic figure, Big Jim, none too bright, and turned out in brown derby, baggy light-brown suit and heavy black shoes.

“We see you lost another one during the night, Jim,” said Mabel Bliss.

“Yeah,” said Big Jim, “another heart case.”

“That’s what the other two died from, isn’t it, Jim?”

“Yeah. It’s gettin’ to be a regular epidemic.”

“They always seem to die during the night, don’t they?”

“Yeah, don’t they! Well, I gotta to be goin’.”

Six nights later, that hearse was there again, and in the morning, Big Jim was over with something tasty from Sister Amy for the two spinsters.

“Who was it this time, Jim?” asked Mabel Bliss.

“A woman. First woman we’ve lost.”

“What was it this time, Jim?”

Big Jim, who had a flair for the dramatic gesture, didn’t reply with words but, raising his eyes toward the ceiling, pointed to his heart.

There were a total of three doctors who had staked out the village of Windsor in the year of 1908, all driving up from their offices in Hartford. None of the three, luckily enough for Sister Amy, was a wizard in the field of diagnostics. And, since all of the deaths in the Home were sudden, and in the dead of the night, none of the physicians was ever able to be at the bedside when the Grim Reaper appeared. It was never until morning, when the corpse was already embalmed, that Sister Amy phoned one of the physicians to get his name on the death certificate.

“What was it, Sister Amy?” the doctor would inquire. The physician, realizing that Sister Amy had been a head nurse in New York’s Bellevue Hospital, where Big Jim had been an orderly, before coming to Connecticut, had such complete respect for Sister Amy’s knowledge in the field of diagnostics, that he would never question her word when she said, “The heart,” or, “A general breaking up due to the infirmities of age.”

There were ten bedrooms for the residents of The Home, each a double, and the residents, who averaged sixty years of age or more, which was old age in that period, were kept equally divided as to sex, so that there could always be two residents in each room. Sister Amy’s deal was a unique one for the day: one lump of money or property, anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000, depending on the resident’s age, physical condition and what the fiscal traffic would bear. For that sum, the resident was to receive a lifetime contract from Sister Amy, in-cluding everything from food and lodging and medical care, with a fine plot in Windsor’s leading cemetery thrown in as a cheerful after-death bonus.

“I’m going to take such good care of my charges,” Sister Amy told the Bliss sisters shortly after founding The Home, and explaining her plan, “that they’ll be eating me into the poor house, praise the Good Lord!”

The Archer Home had been functioning for about a year and a half, and that hearse had been there in the night nine-teen times, when Big Jim Archer, who did all the chores around the place, from emptying the bedpans to sweeping up, began to feel himself breaking up. There was a fine Irish saloon, Paddy’s, just three blocks from The Home and Big Jim, despite Sister Amy’s strict ban on booze, began to sneak around to it when he got the chance. After a few shots, he’d pop some cloves into his mouth.

As time went on, Paddy, a discerning man, saw that Big Jim was beset by troubles of some sort and one night he asked him just what was wrong.

Big Jim, wiping the foam from a beer chaser from his walrus moustache, looked levelly at Paddy for a little while. Then he said, in a voice filled with sorrow:

“It’s my wife, Paddy.”

“Sister Amy? Why, is she ill or somethin’?”

“Far from that, my friend.”

“What is it, then?”

Big Jim looked around him to make sure none of the other men at the bar were within earshot, then said,

“It’s her demands at night.”

“You mean they’re more than you can handle, Jim?”

“More than I can handle now. I used to be able to handle things fine but her demands have increased since we came up here from New York.”

“If I’m not asking too much, Jim, just how great are her demands?”

“Two and three times.”

“A week?”

“No, a night.”

“Good God, Jim, that’s enough to put a man in an early grave!”

As the months wore on, and that hearse continued to stop at The Archer Home on an average of once a month, always at night, Jim continued to confide in Paddy. He was now patronizing a quack doctor down in New York, who was fix-ing him up with an aphrodisiac. The pills worked for a time. Then one night Jim appeared in Paddy’s with simply woeful tidings.

“The old clock,” he confided to his friend, “has not only run down, it’s stopped altogether.”

“You mean…?”

“The very worst,” said Big Jim, almost breaking into a fit of sobbing, “has happened.”

“And Sister Amy? Is she complainin’?”

“That’s just it,” came the reply. “She don’t say nothin’ when we go to bed and I lay there useless. In the mornin’, when it’s daylight, she has a funny way of lookin’ at me. I’d give a year of my life to know what’s goin’ on in that mind of hers. There’s an awful lot about Sister Amy that I could tell you if I wanted to.”

One day, when Jim was sweeping out the dirt at the back door, there appeared a redheaded, baggy-pants stranger carrying a knapsack on a stick over his shoulder.

“The name’s Gilligan, Michael Gilligan,” he announced to Big Jim in a deep, cheerful voice, “and I’m lookin’ for work.”

“There’s no work here for you,” snapped Big Jim, who was later to tell Paddy that instinct told him that, what with his dried-up condition, Gilligan would be a dangerous man to have around his wife. “Beat it. And beat it quick.”

Big Jim had just ordered Gilligan off the property when he was conscious of Gilligan’s eyes meeting those of somebody who had come up silently behind him. Turning, he saw Sister Amy. She was looking straight at the stranger, tall, hand-some, and obviously bursting with what it took when the lights were out. He shuddered, he was to tell Paddy that night, for he hadn’t seen Sister Amy with that light in her eyes since the first time she had laid eyes on him.

Within an hour, Michael Gilligan, having been fed enough for three men by Sister Amy, who overruled her spouse in important matters, was addressing himself to assorted repair chores around The Home.

It was less than a month after Gilligan had first appeared that Sister Amy dropped in on the Bliss sisters one morning far from her usual bubbling self.

“What on earth’s wrong, Sister Amy?” asked Mabel Bliss.

“Jim.”

“Jim? Why, what’s the matter with Jim?”

“He’s not long for this world, may the Lord bless his soul.”

“But just what’s wrong with the man?”

“Complications.”

The Christmas season was coming on, nearing the end of the third year of Sister Amy’s functioning in Windsor, when the hearse called in the night and took Big Jim Archer away. Sister Amy appeared to be inconsolable… for a while. Then she appeared to brighten very suddenly. The Bliss sisters couldn’t figure out what was up until spring came and the windows were open.

Then, on those occasions when Sister Amy forgot to douse the lights, the two old maids could see history repeating itself, with one exception. When Archer had divested himself of his nightshirt he had been clothed only in his birthday suit. Gilligan, though, no matter whether he was vertical or horizontal, never seemed to divest himself of his socks and garters.

It was in early summer that Sister Amy bounced over to the Bliss place one morning with the news: “My heart has been broken since Jim was called to Heaven but now Michael Gilligan has mended it. It is God’s will that Michael and I become one.”

Gilligan and Sister Amy got married by a local Justice of the Peace but were too busy with various matters to go off on a honeymoon. Gilligan wasn’t the friendly type to the Bliss sisters that Archer had been. And he seemed to drink a bit, always having a pint in his pants pockets as he roamed the property making repairs.