John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

“Maybe she’d even told it to Rick Holton and it didn’t mean anything to him either, yet. If somebody could play on his jealousy and get him to shoot me after she’d been killed, that puts the two of them out of circulation. Maybe Helen Boughmer knows something too, but somebody has done such a good job of closing her mouth, I don’t think she’ll be any good to you.”

“Thanks. You try to give me a motive for one murder by hooking it up to another one last July. I am going to keep right on thinking the doc injected himself in the arm.”

“Got any reason why he did that?”

“Conscience.”

“Had he been a bad boy?”

“Nobody is ever going to prove anything on him, and it wouldn’t do much good now anyway. But let me tell you something. I have lived a long time and I have seen a lot of things and I have seen a lot of women, but I never saw a worse woman in my life than Joan Sherman. Honest to Christ, she was a horror. She made every day of that doctor’s life pure hell on earth. Damned voice onto her like a blue heron. She was the drill instructor and he was the buckass private. Treated him like he was a moron. One of those great big loud virtuous churchgoing ladies with a disposition like a pit viper. Full of good works. She was a diabetic. Had it pretty bad too but kept in balance. I forget how many units of insulin she had to shoot herself with in the morning. Wouldn’t let the doctor shoot her. Said he was too damned clumsy with a needle. Three years ago she went into diabetic coma and died.”

“He arrange it?”

Stanger shrugged. “If he did, he took such a long time to figure it out, he didn’t miss a trick.”

“Want me to beg? Okay. I’m begging.”

“Back then the Shermans lived about six miles out, pretty nice house right in the middle of ten acres of grove land. We were having a telephone strike and things got pretty nasty. They were cutting underground cables and so on. She’d had her car picked up on a Friday to be serviced, and they were going to bring it back Monday. Because of the phones out that way being out, he thought he’d better drive in Sunday morning and see to some patients he had in the hospital. Besides, he had to pick up some insulin for her, he told us later, because she used the last ampule she had that morning. He’d pick up a month’s supply at a time for her. He made his rounds and then he went to his office and worked awhile. Nobody would think that was strange. He stayed away from her as much as he dared and nobody blamed him. He said he was supposed to get back by five because a couple was coming for drinks and dinner. But he lost track of the time. The couple came and rang the bell and the woman went and looked in the window and saw her on the couch. She looked funny, the woman said. The husband broke in. No phone working. They put her in the car and headed for the hospital. They met Doc Sherman on his way out and honked and waved him down. She was DOA. They say he was a mighty upset man. There was a fresh needle mark in her thigh from her morning shot, so she hadn’t forgotten. He said she never forgot. They did an autopsy, but there wasn’t much point in it. I don’t remember the biochemistry of it, but there just aren’t any tests that will show whether you did or did not take insulin. It breaks down or disappears or something. County law checked the house. The needle had been rinsed and put in the sterilizer. The ampule was in the bathroom wastebasket. There was a drop or so left in it. That tested out full strength. The doctors decided there had been a sudden change in her condition and so the dose she was used to taking just wasn’t enough. Also, they’d had pancakes and maple syrup and sweet rolls for breakfast. He said she kept to her diet pretty well, but Sunday breakfast was her single exception all week. Now, tell me how he did it. That is, if he did it.”

After a few minutes of thought, I had a solution, but I had been smart-ass too often with Stanger, so I gave up.

It pleased him. “He brought home an identical ampule of distilled water, maybe making the switch of the contents in his office. Gets up in the night and switches the water for the insulin. She gets up in the morning and shoots water into her leg. Before he goes to the hospital, he goes into the bathroom, fishes the water ampule out of the wastebasket, takes the needle out of the sterilizer, draws the insulin out of the one he filched and shoots it down the sink, puts the genuine ampule in the wastebasket, rinses the needle and syringe, and puts it back into the sterilizer. On the way into town he could have stopped, crushed the ampule under his heel, and kicked the powdered glass into the dirt if he wanted to be real careful. I think he was careful, and patient. I think maybe he waited for a lot of years until the situation was just exactly right. I mean maybe you could stand living with a terrible old broad like that if you knew that someday, somehow, you were going to do it just right. Nice?”

“Lovely. And doesn’t leave you anyplace to go.”

“It’s the reason I was willing to lean a little bit toward suicide. Stew Sherman was a pretty right guy. And killing is sort of against everything a doctor learns in school and in his practice.”

“And what if somebody else figured it out too and trapped the doctor somehow into admitting it?”

“Strengthens the suicide solution.”

“Sure does.”

“And I couldn’t come up with a single motive for murder. His dying didn’t benefit anybody in any way, McGee.”

“Right back where we started?”

“I don’t know. Sure like to know why that Boughmer girl changed her mind so fast. Or who changed it for her. Isn’t she one sorry thing though? Just imagine what she’d look like if you stripped her down to the buff.”

“Please, Al.”

He chuckled. “When I was little, we had a scrawny little old female cat out at the place. Had some Persian in her, so she looked pretty good. Picked up some kind of mange one spring, and in maybe ten days every last living hair fell off that poor beast. Honest to God, you’d look at her and you wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry. McGee, now I know that Helen is a sad, ugly, nervous woman, and I’m ashamed of myself, but if I can get to her when her mother can’t pull out of the line and block for her, I think I could scare that Helen so bad she just wouldn’t know what in the world she was telling me. Suppose I just do that. Tomorrow, if I can. What are you figuring on doing?”

“I might try to have a talk with Janice Holton and see if I guessed right about the boyfriend.”

“So what if you did?”

“It will prove it wasn’t somebody else instead of Tom Pike. So we can mark that part of the file closed.”

“Anything else?”

“Find out if I can why Hardahee brushed me off.”

“If he doesn’t want to see you, you’re not going to see him.”

“I can give it a try. By the way, how are your contacts in Southtown?”

“As good as anybody’s, which doesn’t mean much. You think there’s some Negra mixed up in this mess?”

“No. But Southtown supplies this city with cooks and maids and housekeepers and yard men. Waiters, waitresses, all kinds of manual labor. There can’t be much going on among the white middle classes that they don’t know about.”

“You know, I think about that a lot. If I could ever tap that source, I think I’d have fifty percent of my job licked. They hear a hell of a lot, see a lot, and guess the rest. Sometimes I get a little help. But not lately. Sure God not lately. Those movies that have Southren law officers in them give us a pretty bad smell, regardless of how you handle yourself. I try to level with them, but shit, they know as well as I do there’s two kinds of law here, two kinds of law practically everyplace. One of them kills a white man, they open the book to a different place from where a white man kills a Negra. Rape is a different kind of word there in Southtown too. Put it this way. A neighborhood where you got lots of garbage collection, good pavement, good water, good mail service, good streetlights, nice parks and playgrounds, rape and murder are great big dirty ugly scary words. Sorry, friend. None of them are on my side and I can’t think of a way to change it one bit.”