The April Fools' Day Murder (8 page)

“We’ll have to find out.”

“I’ll look again, but I don’t think it’s there.”

“Don’t do it tonight, Mrs. Platt. It’s late and dark and you must be very tired.”

“Yes,” she said as though she were far away.

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Did your daughter arrive?”

“Oh yes. It’s good to have her here.”

“Good night then.”

I grabbed the carafe of coffee and took it in to the family room, poured for both of us, and brought it back to the kitchen. “The cane’s not in the garage,” I told Jack.

“So it looks like our killer took it with him. Kinda crazy
thing to do. It isn’t worth anything, and if he’s stopped, it’s evidence.”

“Killers aren’t the smartest people in the world.”

“This one’s pretty smart, or at least lucky. With three carloads of kids coming to that house, he managed to show up when they were gone.”

“That was lucky,” I said. Maybe he had been lurking around the area, although it wasn’t an easy area to find cover in. But there were trees and shrubs he could have hidden behind.

But why? I asked myself. What could this retired grandfather have done to provoke someone to kill him? And where had his son been all that long afternoon? I would have to find out.

Tuesday is the day I teach at a local college. It’s also one of Eddie’s nursery school days. I asked Elsie to pick him up so I could get a few things done.

I had one of my good lunches at the college, prepared by the food service students, and picked up a fresh apple pie to take home. Then I stopped by the Platts’ house.

A woman in her forties opened the door and introduced herself as Toni Cutler, the Platts’ daughter.

“I’m Chris Brooks.” I offered my hand. “How is your mother?”

“She’s all right. I think we’re all so dazed it hasn’t sunk in yet. Are you the one who was looking for the cane?”

“Yes. The one your father was carrying last Saturday.”

“Come on in.” She turned toward the kitchen. “Mom? Chris Brooks is here.”

Winnie Platt came out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a small towel. “Chris, I’ve been through the garage
over and over. The cane isn’t there. And it’s not in any of the places Will ever kept them. What does that mean?”

“Someone walked away with it,” I said. “Maybe the person who killed him.”

“What would anyone want an old cane for?”

“I don’t know.” I turned to her daughter. “Can I drive you anywhere?”

“Oh, no, thanks. I have Dad’s car and I’ve already been out to pick some things up. And Mom and I have arranged for the funeral.”

“When will it be?”

“Thursday. The Medical Examiner’s office will release the body either this afternoon or tomorrow morning. I’ve been trying to reach my brother but he isn’t home, and Doris doesn’t know where he is.”

I had a pretty good idea but I didn’t say anything. Apparently Roger hadn’t let his mother know he had a cell phone. “I’m sure he’ll come home for dinner,” I said, biting my tongue. “Could we sit in the kitchen and talk for a moment?”

“Of course.”

I followed Winnie Platt and her daughter into a palatial kitchen. My friend Melanie would probably claim it for her own if she saw it. It looked like a cook’s dream. At one end was a round dark-stained oak table with matching chairs, and the three of us sat around it. “Mrs. Platt, I wanted to ask you about something my husband learned yesterday.”

She looked at me expectantly.

“The Medical Examiner looked at your husband’s body.” I didn’t want to be too graphic, but I was sure she understood what I was alluding to.

“I know that. I asked them not to, but in cases like this, it’s the law.”

“That’s right. And he discovered an old gunshot wound.” I stopped and let her absorb it.

“That’s not possible,” she said finally.

“My dad was never shot,” Toni said. “We would remember.”

“It was an old wound.”

“Well, the war,” Mrs. Platt said. “He was in the Pacific. I think I told you. He saw action. He never talked much about it but it’s possible he was shot then. That was before I met him.” Then she shook her head. “But I can tell you he never got a Purple Heart. I have all his medals.”

“And you’re sure nothing ever happened while you knew him?”

“Of course I’m sure. It’s not the sort of thing you’d forget.”

“In the last few weeks, did your husband seem upset about anything?”

“You ask the same questions the police asked. And I’ll give you the same answer. He was himself. He spent a lot of time with the high school drama society—they’re working on a play—and he did his usual things around the house. Sometimes he was grouchy, sometimes he was very happy. We were planning a trip for the summer. It was all very ordinary.”

“Who brought in the mail?” I thought this was a good question because I’m the person who does it most days in our house and I see the envelopes before Jack comes home.

“Both of us. It just depended who went out for it first.”

“Did you see anything unusual in the mail?”

“I don’t think so. It’s all bills and catalogs. We don’t get a lot of letters. Mostly we use the telephone.”

“OK,” I said. “That’s really all I wanted to ask you, that and the cane.” I got up and we said our goodbyes.

At home there was a message from Jack and I called him back.

“Got a call about Platt’s leg X rays. They show absolutely nothing, Chris.”

“No breaks?”

“Nothing. The M.E. said he had two healthy legs. Now, that doesn’t mean he didn’t have arthritis or sciatica or something like that.”

“But he wouldn’t have had things like that as a young man, would he?”

“Probably not. Mrs. Platt tell you he always used a cane?”

“From the time she met him.”

“Maybe it was an affectation. Maybe he thought it made him look distinguished.”

“I guess that’s possible,” I said halfheartedly. “By the way, she doesn’t know anything about an old gunshot wound. She thought it might have happened during the war but he never got a Purple Heart medal.”

“Maybe they forgot to give it to him. I’ll see you later.”

I was making a shrimp dish for dinner and I decided to clean the shrimp before I picked up Eddie. I took them out of the refrigerator and got my special cleaning knife. As I poked it through the first shrimp I realized it was a kind of two-edged knife. That, of course, was one reason I kept it where Eddie couldn’t possibly reach it. I looked at it, testing the edges carefully. It was surely one of the
sharpest implements I owned, a very useful tool once or twice a month when I needed it, but potentially a deadly weapon. Anyone who carried around something this sharp and this dangerous could have nothing but malice in his heart.

Not long after I got back from Elsie’s, Mrs. Platt’s daughter, Toni, called.

“Mrs. Brooks, I’m sorry to bother you.”

“It’s Chris, and there’s no bother.”

“I can only talk a second. Can we meet tomorrow for a little while?”

“Sure. What time is good for you?”

“Ten in the morning?”

“That’s fine. Where would—”

She interrupted me. “Outside Prince’s. I’ll see you then.” She hung up.

I gathered she didn’t want her mother to hear the conversation or to know she was meeting me. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I thought it was a good sign. Maybe she knew something that would help find her father’s killer.

9

Elsie took Eddie in the morning, and I drove to Prince’s, parking in their large lot. Toni Cutler was standing near the automatic doors and she waved when she saw me.

“Good morning,” she said. “How about a second breakfast?”

“Sure.”

“Let’s go across the street.”

We went to the Village Coffee Shop, a pretty place that served all day long. I had never had anything but coffee or a snack there but I thought that if I had something substantial, I might not have to make myself lunch, for me the most boring meal I eat every day. We sat at a table away from the windows—I had a sense that Toni didn’t want to be seen, or perhaps didn’t want to be seen with me—and she suggested pancakes and sausage.

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

She repeated the order to the waitress and asked for lots of coffee. Then she turned to me. “Mom told me about what happened on Saturday before Dad was killed, how you came upon him by accident.”

“I was very embarrassed,” I admitted. “I got the police
up there for nothing. They were very nice about it but I’m not sure they appreciated an April Fool’s Day prank.”

“You did the right thing. I’m sure you know that. Mom knows about you because she’s taught Sunday school at our church and she met the Grants. You helped out a friend of Amy’s a couple of years ago.”

“Oh yes. That was a very strange case, a tragedy that happened on Valentine’s Day up near Buffalo.”

“That’s what Amy said. She couldn’t say enough good things about you, Chris. She also told us you’d managed to solve some other murders that eluded the police.”

“I have. With a lot of help from my husband, who’s a detective sergeant with the NYPD, and also from my former General Superior at St. Stephen’s Convent.”

“Of course,” she said, as though something had just cleared up for her. “You’re the ex-nun.”

“I didn’t know
that
was well-known.”

“But it is. I think everyone in town knew when the Greenwillow affair happened.”

I smiled. “The Greenwillow affair” referred, I supposed, to the moving of Gene’s residence into Oakwood and my part in getting it there. “And here I thought I was anonymous.”

“Hardly,” Toni said. “I want to tell you some things about my father, things I don’t want to discuss with the police.”

“Do they have a bearing on his murder?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you can figure it out. Mom and I talked last night about what you said about the gunshot wound. I can tell you it didn’t happen while Mom knew Dad, and that’s a pretty long time, like almost half a century.”

“Then it happened earlier. And your mother’s probably right. He was in the war. He may have gotten shot.”

“Dad has an old friend who lives in New York. They were in the war together.”

“Interesting,” I said.

“And they’ve been friends forever. Maybe he knows something that Mom doesn’t know. Will you talk to him?”

“If you’d like me to.”

“Good. I’ll call him when I get home and set something up. I don’t want my mother to know. She’s very upset, as you can imagine, and she doesn’t need anything else to worry about. My brother is enough of a worry at this moment.”

“Is there a problem?” I asked innocently.

“I hope not. It’s just that he’s not available and he should be. I don’t know why he’s working so hard when his father has just died and his mother is grieving. It seems to me there are times that you set aside your work and put your family first.”

I agreed with her but I didn’t want to break a confidence. Maybe he just didn’t want to be around his wife, I thought. “I understand he didn’t get along with your father.”

“That’s true.” The pancakes came, fragrant and warm, and she paused till the waitress left. “They look good, don’t they?” She smiled and started buttering hers. “Roger and Dad never saw eye-to-eye on anything. If Roger wanted to read fiction, Dad thought it should be nonfiction. If Roger wanted to study German, Dad thought it should be French. I know these seem like petty disputes, but in my family they were magnified. Dad wanted Roger to become
a doctor or lawyer; Roger majored in history and then kicked around for a couple of years doing nothing. My father thought that doing nothing was about the worst thing a young man could do. They stopped speaking to each other around then and they never really started after that.”

“What did Roger do eventually?” I asked. I assumed he had a job. The house he owned cost a fair amount of money, not to mention the apartment that only his wife and I knew about.

“He went back to school and became a civil engineer. He said he wanted to build bridges and highways. But those first years were pretty boring and mundane and he left the company and got a degree in business.”

“It sounds as though he’s got himself a lot of education.”

“He does, but he doesn’t use most of it. Or maybe he does in a way. He’s had a number of jobs with different companies, and I think he’s done better every time he moved. He works in White Plains now, which isn’t too long a drive, and he’s been with them long enough that I think it’s permanent.”

“When did he meet Doris?”

“In his kicking around stage. She worked after they got married and he went back to school. She’s a nice person and she’s been good to my parents. Roger is lucky to have her.”

The conversation was making me uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure anyone in Roger’s family was very lucky. “Is he coming to the funeral?” I asked.

“He’ll be there.” I had the feeling she had said something like that to him in the same tone of voice.

“Do you know if your father left a lot of money?” I asked.

“Probably. I suppose you want to know who he’s left it to.”

“I’m just looking for a motive.”

“I’m sure my mother has control of most of it right now. Neither Roger nor I really need any money. My mother will be well taken care of, which is as it should be. Roger didn’t kill my father, Chris. There was no reason to. Whether Dad left him anything or not, it wasn’t enough to make a difference. And although Dad did his best to push Roger around when he was young, Roger learned how to live with that. He became his own man.”

“I find it strange that Roger chose to live in a town so close to your parents.”

“Roger grew up here. When he got the job in White Plains, this was a perfect place for him to live. Doris liked Oakwood from the first time she saw it.”

I had no argument with that. I loved the town. It was small enough to get around, big enough to have the schools and libraries that were important to me. And most of all, it was on the Long Island Sound, where we could enjoy the beach and the water in summer. “And he was near his mother,” I added.

“Yes.”

“I know about the accident, Toni. Doris told me.”

“It was so terrible.” Her voice had dropped to nothing.