Authors: Rita Mae Brown
The siren howled louder now and Tommy Norton, thinking Harry had grown less vigilant, leapt toward her. A spit of flame flashed from the muzzle of the gun. Tommy Norton let out a howl, deep and guttural, and clutching his knee, fell to the ground. Harry had blown apart his kneecap. Undaunted, he crawled toward her.
“Kill me. I’d rather be dead. Kill me, because if I get to you, I’ll kill you.”
Blair got behind him, putting his knee in Tommy’s back while wrapping his good arm around the struggling man’s neck. “Give it up, man.”
The metal doors of the barn squeaked as they were rolled back. Rick Shaw and Cynthia Cooper, guns drawn, burst into the barn. Behind them stood Tomahawk and Gin Fizz, splinters of the fence scattered in the snow, the fronts of their blankets a mess.
“Did we do a good job?”
they nickered.
“The best,”
Mrs. Murphy answered, her fur now returning to normal.
Cynthia attended to Blair. “I’ll call an ambulance.”
“I think I’d get there faster if I drove myself in the Explorer.”
“I’ll take you.”
Tommy sat on the floor, blood spurting from his knee and his eye, yet he seemed beyond pain. Perhaps his mind couldn’t accept what had just happened to him emotionally and physically.
“No, you won’t. Both these men need care.” Rick pointed for Orlando to call the hospital and he gave the number. “Tell them Sheriff Shaw is here. On the double.”
As Harry and Blair filled in the officers, Tommy would laugh and correct little details.
“What was Ben Seifert’s connection?” Rick wanted to know.
“Accidental. Stumbled on Cabell Hall’s second set of books, the ones where he accounted for my payments. Cabell is somewhere up in the mountains, by the way. He ran away because he thought I’d kill him, I guess. He’ll come down in good time. Anyway, Ben proved useful. He fed me information on who was near bankruptcy, and I’d buy their land or lend them money at a high interest rate. So I started to pay him off, too, but . . .” Tommy gasped as a jolt of pain finally reached his senses.
Harry walked over to Mrs. Murphy and picked her off the stall door. She buried her face in the cat’s fur. Then she hunkered down to kiss Tucker. Tears rolled down Harry’s cheeks.
Blair put his good arm around her. She could smell the blood soaking through his shirt and his jacket.
“Let’s take this off.” She helped him remove the jacket. He winced. Cynthia came over, while Rick kept his revolver trained on Tommy.
“Still in there.” Cynthia referred to the bullet. “I hope it didn’t shatter any bone.”
“Me too.” Blair was starting to feel woozy. “I think I better sit for a minute.”
Harry helped him to a chair in the tack room.
Orlando stood next to Rick. He stared at this man whom he once knew. “Tom, you passed, you know.”
Tiny bits of patella were scattered on the barn aisle. A faint smile crossed Tom’s features as he fought back his agony. “Yeah, I fooled everybody. Even that insufferable snob, that bitch of a mother-in-law.” A dark pain twisted his face. His features contorted and he fought for control. “I would never have been able to marry Little Marilyn. Fitz-Gilbert could marry her. Tommy Norton couldn’t.”
“Maybe you’re selling her short.” Orlando’s voice was soothing.
“She’s controlled by her mother” was the matter-of-fact reply. “But you know what’s funny? I learned to love my wife. I never thought I could love anybody.” He looked as if he would weep.
“How much was the Hamilton fortune worth?” Sheriff Shaw asked.
“When I inherited it, so to speak, it was worth twenty-one million. With Cabell’s management and my own attention to it, once I came of age it had grown to sixty-four million. There are no heirs. No Hamiltons are left. Before I killed Fitz, I asked if he had children and he said no.” Tommy deliberately did not look at his knee, as if not seeing it would control the pain.
“Who will get the money?” Orlando wanted to know. After all, money is fascinating.
“Little Marilyn. I made sure of that twice over. She’s the recipient of my will and Fitz-Gilbert’s, the one he signed in my office that October day. Trusting as a lamb. It might take a while but one way or the other my wife gets that money.”
“Exactly how did you kill Fitz-Gilbert Hamilton?” Cynthia inquired.
“Ben panicked. Typical. Weak and greedy. I always told Cabell that Ben could never run Allied after Cabell retired. He didn’t believe me. Anyway, Ben was smart enough to get Fitz in his car and out of the bank before he caused an even greater scene or blurted out who he was. He drove him to my office. Ben was prepared to hang around and become a nuisance. I told him to go back to the bank, that Fitz and I would reach some accord. I said this in front of Fitz. Ben left. Fitz was all right for a bit. Then he became angry when I told him about his money. I made so much more with it than he ever could have! I offered to split it with him. That seemed fair enough. He became enraged. One thing led to another and he swung at me. That’s how my office was wrecked.”
“And you stole the office money from yourself?” Cynthia added.
“Of course. What’s two hundred dollars and a CD player, which is what I listed as missing?” Sweat drenched Tommy’s face.
“So, how did you kill him?” She pressed on.
“With a paperweight. He wasn’t very strong and the paperweight was heavy. I caught him just right, I suppose.”
“Or just wrong,” Harry said.
Tommy shrugged and continued. “No matter. He’s dead now. The hard part was cutting up the body. Joints are hell to cut through.”
Rick picked up the questioning. “Where’d you do that?”
“Back on the old logging trail off Yellow Mountain Road. I waited until night. I stored the body in the closet in my office, picked him up, and then took him out on the logging road. Burying the hands and legs was easy until the storm came up. I never expected it to be that bad, but then everything was unexpected.”
“What about the clothes?” Rick scribbled in his notebook.
“Threw them in the dumpster behind Safeway—the teeth too. If it hadn’t rained so hard and that damned dog hadn’t found the hand, nobody would know anything. Everything would be just as it was . . . before.”
“You think Ben and Cabell wouldn’t have given you trouble?” Harry cynically interjected.
“Ben would have, most likely. Cabell stayed cool until Ben turned up dead.” Tom leaned his head against the wall and shook with pain and fatigue. “Then he got squirrely. Take the money and run became his theme song. Crazy talk. It takes weeks to liquidate investments. Months. Although as a precaution I always kept a lot of cash in my checking account.”
“Well, you might have gotten away with murder, and then again you might not have.” Rick calmly kept writing. “But the torso and the head in the pumpkin—you were pushing it, Tommy. You were pushing it.”
He laughed harshly. “The satisfaction of seeing Mim’s face.” He laughed again. “That was worth it. I knew I was safe. Sure, the torso in the boathouse pointed to obvious hostility against Marilyn Sanburne but so what? The pieces of body in the old cemetery—considering what happened to Robin Mangione—was sure to throw you off the track at some point. I copied her murder to make Blair the prime suspect, just in case something should go wrong. I had backup plans to contend with people—not dogs.” He sighed, then smiled. “But the head in the pumpkin—that was a stroke of genius.”
“You ruined the Harvest Fair for the whole town,” Harry accused him.
“Oh, bullshit, Harry. People will be telling that story for decades, centuries. Ruined it? I made it into a legend!”
“How’d you do it? In the morning?” Cynthia was curious.
“Sure. Jim Sanburne and I catalogued the crafts and the produce. Since he was judging the produce, we decided it wouldn’t be fair for him to prejudge it in any way. I planned to put the head in a pumpkin anyway—another gift for Mim—but this was too good to pass up. Jim was in the auditorium and I was in the gym. We were alone after the people dropped off their entries. It was so easy.”
“You were lucky,” Harry said.
Tom shook his head as if trying to clear it. “No, I wasn’t that lucky. People see what they want to see. Think of how much we miss every day because we discount evidence, because odd things don’t add up to our vision of the world as it ought to be, not as it is. You were all easy to fool. It never occurred to Jim to tell Rick that I was alone with the pumpkins. Not once. People were looking for a homicidal maniac . . . not me.”
The ambulance siren drew closer. “My wife saw what she wanted to see. That night I came home from Sloan’s she thought I was drunk. I wasn’t. We had our sherry nightcap and I took the precaution of putting a sleeping pill in hers. After she went to sleep I went out, got rid of that spineless wonder, Ben Seifert, and when I got back I crawled into bed for an hour and she was none the wiser. I pretended to wake up hung over, as opposed to absolutely exhausted, and she accepted it.”
“Then what was the point of the postcards?” Harry felt anger rising in her face now that the adrenaline from the struggle was ebbing.
“Allied National has one of those fancy desk-top computers. So do most of the bigger businesses in Albemarle County, as I’m sure you found out, Sheriff, when you tried to hunt one down.”
“I did,” came the terse reply.
“They’re not like typewriters, which are more individual. By now Cabell was getting nervous, so we cooked up the postcard idea. He thought it would cast more suspicion on Blair, since he didn’t receive one. Although by that time few people really believed Blair had done it. Cabell wanted to play up the guilty newcomer angle and get you off the scent. Not that I worried about the scent. Everyone was so far away from the truth, but Cabell was worried. I did it for fun. It was enjoyable, jerking a string and watching you guys jump. And the gossip mill.” He laughed again. “Unreal—you people are absolutely unreal. Someone thinks it’s revenge. Someone else thinks it’s demonology. I learned more about people through this than if I had been a psychiatrist.”
“What did you learn?” Harry’s right eyebrow arched upward.
“Maybe I reconfirmed what I always knew.” The ambulance pulled into the driveway. “People are so damn self-centered they rarely see anybody or anything as it truly is because they’re constantly relating everything back to themselves. That’s why they’re so easy to fool. Think about it.” And with that his energy drained away. He could no longer hold his head up. Pain conquered even his remarkable willpower.
As the ambulance carried Tommy Norton away, Harry knew she’d be thinking about it for years to come.
64
The fire crackled, arching up the chimney. Outside the fourth storm of this remarkable winter crept to the top of the mountains’ peaks.
Blair, his arm in a sling, Harry, Orlando, Mrs. Hogendobber, Susan and Ned, Cynthia Cooper, Market and Pewter, and the Reverend Jones and Carol gathered before the fire.
While Blair was in the hospital enduring the cold probe to find the bullet, Cynthia had called Susan and Miranda to tell them what happened and to suggest that they bring food to Harry’s. Then she dispatched an officer to Florence Hall’s to break the news to her of her husband’s complicity as gently as possible. The state police might not find Cabell tonight but after the storm they’d flush him out of his cabin.
Orlando had stayed at the farm while Harry had followed the ambulance in the Explorer. He cooked pasta while the friends arrived. Tomorrow night would be time enough for him to see BoomBoom.
Rick organized guards for Norton while the doctors patched him up. He and Cynthia then enjoyed telling the reporters and TV crews how they apprehended this dangerous criminal. Then Rick let Cynthia join her friends.
While the women organized the food, Reverend Jones, after declaring himself a male chauvinist, went out and repaired the fence lines. His version of being a male chauvinist meant doing the chores he thought were hard and dirty. The result was that, behind his back, the women dubbed him the “male chauvinist pussycat.” Market lent him a hand and within forty-five minutes they had replaced the panels and cleaned up the mess. Then they attended to the horses. Fortunately, the blankets had absorbed the damage. Both Tomahawk and Gin Fizz were none the worse for wear and they patiently waited in their stalls with the doors open—in the hurry to get Blair and Tommy to the hospital, no one had thought to put the horses in their stalls and close the doors.
Sitting on the floor, plates in their laps, the friends tried to fathom how something like this could happen. Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, and Tucker circled the seated people like sharks, should a morsel fall from a plate.
“What about the tracks behind my house?” Blair stabbed at his hot chicken salad.
Cynthia said, “We found snowshoes in Fitz’s—I mean Tommy Norton’s—Range Rover. He dropped the earring back there. There wasn’t anything he could do about that mistake but it was the earring that rattled him. I mean, after the real Fitz initially shocked him. Anyway, he wanted to know how quickly he could get back here in the snow if he had to, if you or Orlando, most likely, proved difficult. He was performing a dry run, I think, or he was hoping to head you off before Orlando got here. He must have been getting pretty shaky knowing about Orlando’s visit. Anything to prevent it would have been worth the risk.”
“What would I have done?” Orlando asked.
“He wasn’t sure. Remember, his whole life, the plan of many years, was jeopardized when the real Fitz showed up. Ben Seifert used the event to extort more money out of him. He was getting nervous. What if you noticed something, which, unlikely as it may have seemed to you, was not unlikely to him? You knew him before he was Fitz-Gilbert. The impossible was becoming possible,” Cynthia pointed out. “And it turned out you did cause trouble. You recognized the face in the photograph. The face that must have cost a fortune in plastic surgery.”
“What about the earring?” Carol was curious.
“We’ll never really know,” Harry answered. “But I remember Little Marilyn saying that she thought it must have popped off when she took her sweater off in the car, the Range Rover. Tommy had the body in a plastic bag on the front floor, and the sharp part of the earring, the part that pierces one’s ear, probably got stuck on the bag or in a fold of the bag. Given his hurry he didn’t notice. All we do know is that Little Marilyn’s earring showed up in a possum’s nest miles away from where she last remembered wearing it, and there’s no way the animal would have traveled the four miles to her place.”