The April Fools' Day Murder (12 page)

I hadn’t thought of that but he was right. Arnold is my lawyer friend whom I met back when I was single and newly out of the convent. Besides the fact that I love him dearly, he’s got the sharpest mind I’ve ever had the pleasure to encounter.

He answered the phone himself and we chatted about families and weather and a case that was currently in court and being discussed in all the media.

Finally I said I had something to ask him.

“So it wasn’t just a friendly call. You’re breaking my heart.”

I laughed. “Put it back together, Arnold. Something interesting has happened here in town.”

“Don’t tell me.”

“Yes. A local man was murdered twice, and yours truly didn’t know the first time was an April Fools’ Day joke.”

“You’re confusing me. He was murdered twice?”

“Sort of. The first time was a joke, the second was the real thing. I talked to an old friend of his this morning—they go back to World War Two together—and the friend tells me the victim had a wife briefly after the war.”

“And you want me to dig her up and find out if she killed her ex-husband half a century later.”

“Well.”

“What do you know about her?”

“She was Amelia McGonagle until she married Willard Platt. Her sister was supposed to be the second witness—the friend I talked to this morning was the first—and they were married at City Hall. Maybe I could locate the sister,” I said halfheartedly.

“Any children of the marriage?”

“We don’t know.”

“You have a date for the wedding?”

“Spring 1946. Probably,” I added.

To his credit, he didn’t laugh out loud. But he groaned. “I don’t know. When your own friends come at you with an impossible job, you gotta wonder. I tell you what. I’ve got a law student doing some work for me. I’ll tell her if she’s got any extra time, maybe she’d like to dig around in old records, if they haven’t disintegrated by now. Anything else you know?”

“The marriage didn’t last long, maybe a year, and sometime around that period, Willard was shot.” I told him the rest of the story.

“Well, my young intern will have a good time with this. Who knows? Maybe she’ll get hooked and you’ll get your answers before I get mine.”

“I like your spirit, Arnold.”

“Spirit’s about all I’ve got left.”

Jack was studying for his lieutenant’s exam, so I left him and called Doris Platt. It rang several times and the answering machine had just responded when she picked up. She was slightly breathless.

“I just came back from Winnie’s,” she said. “I hated to leave her, but Toni’s still there.”

“I wanted you to know that I drove over to your husband’s apartment and saw his car there.”

“I can’t talk about this right now,” she said, and I realized her children had returned for the funeral.

“I understand. I just wanted you to know.”

“Thank you, Chris. The truth is, I feel better knowing it. I had no idea where—” She let it hang.

“Right. That’s all. Good night.”

“ ’Bye,” she said.

I then hauled out the New York City telephone books and started telephoning A. Platts in Manhattan. Without exception, they were all men. By the time I got to Brooklyn, one or two were women, and the same was true in the other boroughs. But there was no Amelia. It then occurred to me that she might have kept Willard or W for the phone book listing, so I looked for those entries. There was actually one Willard Platt on Staten Island but the man who answered was young—I could hear children in the background—and he had never heard of Amelia. He volunteered that his parents were named Harry and Sheila.

Disappointed, I continued, knowing that if I had the time, I could try all the Platts in New York, but being me, I worried about the phone bill. Each would be a toll call, as we lived in Westchester County, almost an hour from the city.

When I had covered the W. Platts in the whole city, I gave up. It was late by then, too late to decently call anyone, and I knew it was a lost cause. We live in a mobile society. A woman splitting up with her husband in the late Forties might decide to try her luck in California or Boston. The chances of her still being in the same city after so many years was very small. Willard had moved,
Jack had moved when we were married. I took the phone books and put them away.

“Did you really think you’d find her?” Jack asked.

“I had a faint hope. It’s kind of silly. If she’d wanted to kill him, she would have done it long ago. But I’d really like to know who shot him and why.”

“If it was his wife, it could have been a domestic fight that was over after she fired. Even if he went to a hospital to have it treated, he might not have identified her as the shooter.”

It was all true. “And it was so long ago.”

“I’d be looking for someone with a newer grudge. This was the kind of guy who could generate a long list of possible suspects.”

“Like Mr. Vitale at the nursery. I’ll have to talk to him. Maybe I’ll go over there tomorrow. We haven’t set up a date for them to plant our Japanese maple.”

But the idea of the nursery owner killing Wilbur Platt because he wouldn’t sell them land or let them use his land didn’t really grab me. For something like that, you stop speaking to a person or you say nasty things about him. You don’t kill. Somebody had to have a better motive than that.

13

What troubled me was Jack’s almost convincing argument that Winnie Platt was a suspect. She was in her seventies, she had been married for more than half her life. She had a husband who, although he might be difficult to live with at times, was apparently faithful to her and a reasonably good companion. They had built a beautiful house together and had enjoyed living in it. She had convinced me, in our conversations, that she was sorry he was dead.

And looking at her situation from a less emotional and more practical viewpoint, it seemed incredible to think that a woman who no longer drove and who lived in an inaccessible place would deprive herself of the one person who could chauffeur her around.

When the breakfast things were taken care of and Jack had left, I got Eddie and myself dressed for the day.

“Would you like to see the tree I bought for us?” I asked him.

“What tree?”

“Daddy and I thought it would be nice to plant a Japanese maple tree in front of the house. It’s just a little tree now and we can watch it grow.”

“I like trees,” Eddie said.

“I’m glad to hear that. I like them too. Let’s take a drive over to see our new tree.”

As I turned into the nursery drive I thought I saw a car backing out of the Platts’ drive and then turn up the hill. I couldn’t think why anyone would be going up there, but I couldn’t stay and watch. I parked and took Eddie by the hand and walked down to where our little tree, a red and yellow
SOLD
sign still tied to it, sat balled and bagged.

“That’s our tree,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty?”

“It doesn’t have any leaves.”

“The leaves will come out in the spring, honey. In a few weeks all the trees will have leaves. This one will have red leaves.”

“I like red leaves.”

I took my agreeable son’s hand and walked back up the hill to the main building. I knew who the owner was, and we walked through the building till I found him. He was on the phone and I waited, looking at boxes of grass seed till he got off. As I saw him talking, I realized I could have called the police from here on April Fools’ Day, but my mind hadn’t been functioning well.

“Mr. Vitale, I’m Chris Brooks,” I said as he hung up. “I’m up here to arrange for my tree to be planted.”

“They can take care of that where you check out.”

“OK. I’ll talk to them on my way out. But as long as I’m here, I wonder if I could ask you a few questions about your neighbor up the hill.”

“Like what?” he asked defensively.

“What kind of person he was. What you thought of him.”

“He was a mean old man who’d squeeze you dry if he
could. I had dealings with him over the years, none of them good. Nothing was ever good enough for him. Nothing was ever right.”

“What kind of dealings?” I asked, surprised that there might be more than the one thing I had heard about from the mayor.

“Years ago he asked me to plow out his driveway in the winter. It was a good deal for me. I had the truck. I did my own drive and it wasn’t much to go up the hill and do his. You think it ever went right? He’d show me how I didn’t get the last two inches on the right and left. He’d deduct a couple of bucks from the price we agreed on because I left a strip of snow an inch wide. The man was a weasel.” You could hear the anger in his voice. “A petty weasel,” he repeated.

“I heard you had a problem over land,” I said.

“I guess everyone’s heard about that. I offered to buy an acre just up the hill. Platt owned the land on both sides of the road up the hill from us and we really needed that acre. He drove a hard bargain, but I agreed to it. I arranged to borrow the money. Everything was go. At the last minute he changed his mind, pulled out completely. He didn’t want to sell and that was that. I had incurred all kinds of expenses but what did he care?” He shook his head. “I don’t know what I’m getting so worked up about. I can’t be the only guy he stiffed. Someone else got to him last weekend.”

“I know.”

“Can I ask what your interest is in all this?”

“The Platts have asked me to look into the murder. You’re his nearest neighbor. I thought you might be able to help.”

“Wish I could. I’d like to pat the guy who did it on the back.” His phone rang again. “Talk to the girl on the way out. I think the ground’s still too hard to do any planting.”

He picked up the phone as I took Eddie’s hand.

As I drove out of the nursery, I looked up the hill and saw the same car, still driving up the road. I thought it was odd, but I turned toward Oakwood Avenue and took Eddie to do some food shopping.

When we came home, he helped me put things away and I made some egg salad for our lunch. When it was in the refrigerator, I pulled out my class’s papers, which had to be corrected before next Tuesday. I had hardly looked at the first one when the phone rang.

“This is Toni,” the caller said in a tense voice. “Something has happened. Can you come over before I call the police?”

“My three-year-old is here. Can I bring him?”

“Sure. Mom’ll watch him while I show you.”

“I’ll be right there.”

We were there in five minutes. Toni had the garage open and the door to the inside opened as soon as I parked.

“Come this way,” she called.

We went through the garage and then inside, and Mrs. Platt took over Eddie in a grandmotherly way while Toni and I went to the door to the basement. She flicked a light on and we went down the stairs, very nice stairs considering they led to a basement. I saw why when we got there.

Almost the entire area, an area the size of the entire house, was finished. There were several rooms, including a bathroom, a place to play pool and pinball, to watch television, dance, read, or do other entertaining things. And
there was a kind of pantry with shelves against the wall holding neatly arranged canned goods that could carry a family through an Arctic blizzard. Nearby were a washer and drier, some cabinets, and kitchen appliances that might not be used very often, like a coffee urn that could turn out coffee for a large crowd.

Adjoining this room was a workshop with a lighted table, tools, some lumber, plastic containers of nails and screws, and garden supplies that included an electric clipper.

“Over here,” Toni said. She stepped over some things on the floor and said, “Here.”

I followed her finger and gasped. On the floor, not well hidden, was a wooden cane. “Is that the one …?”

“Mom says it is.”

“How did you find it?”

“Mom came downstairs a little while ago to get a screwdriver. There’s a door handle upstairs that needs some attention. While she was looking, she saw it.”

“Did anyone touch it?”

“I didn’t. Mom says she didn’t.” When I didn’t say anything, she said, “I know it looks like someone with a key brought it down here, but that’s not necessarily true. Look up there.”

I followed her finger to a window near the top of the wall.

“It’s open a little. Someone could have walked around the house, seen the window ajar, and put the cane through the opening. Anyone could have done that,” she said pointedly.

That was true, but I was suddenly gripped with the fear that Jack’s scenario was correct. Mrs. Platt had murdered
her husband, tossed the cane down here under the window, and then conveniently “found” it today. “Yes, of course,” I said. I knelt near the cane, looking for a crack near the top to show that it could open. The crack was there. There was a weapon inside and I was sure Willard Platt’s blood would be on it.

“Do we have to call the police?” Toni asked.

I kept my shock to myself. “Yes, you do,” I said. “It’s been missing and now it’s been found. It may have been a murder weapon. You have to call them.”

“Let’s go back up.” She turned lights off as we retreated to the stairs.

On the main floor, I could hear Mrs. Platt and Eddie having a conversation. We stayed in the kitchen.

“Who has a key to this house?” I asked.

“Chris, no one in the family did this.”

“The police will ask you.”

“I do, Roger does, Mom and Dad. I don’t think there’s anyone else.”

“Does anyone come and clean the house?”

“Yes, but Mom is always here.”

“You’d better call the police,” I said.

She remained at the table, looking unhappy. “I know this looks bad for Roger, but he didn’t do it.”

“Has he turned up?”

“Not that I know of. Mom and I are very upset about it. I called his work and was told he had asked for a few days off because his father had died. Of course they gave it to him.”

I felt that my presence wasn’t needed there anymore. I had told Toni to call the police. If she didn’t, Jack or I would. I was sure she understood that without my saying
it explicitly. It was almost lunchtime anyway and Eddie would be getting hungry. “I think it’s time for me to go,” I said. And then I remembered what I had seen earlier. “Tell me, when I was at the nursery this morning, I saw a car pull out of your driveway and go up the hill. Do you know who that was? There’s nothing up there to drive to.”