Alan Hynd - Authentic Cases From the Files of Alan Hynd

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.

Sister Amy explained to the Bliss sisters why she made an exception to liquor in Gilligan’s case. “My Michael,” she said, “uses alcohol for medicinal purposes.”

One morning, after the second stiff in forty-eight hours had been carried away in the night, Gilligan was out front sweep-ing the porch when the sisters, who couldn’t stand the suspense, decided to call over to him.

“What’d the last two residents die of, Mr. Gilligan?” asked Mabel.

Gilligan stopped to take a swig out of the bottle before answering. Then he bellowed out, loudly enough to be heard in the next block:

“None of yer goddam business!”

That, as it was eventually to turn out, was a mistake. The Bliss sisters furious. They sat down and got off a letter to The Hartford Courant, then, as today, a great New England newspaper. They had been counting the number of peo-ple who left in that box during the night for more than four years now and it added up to one a month.

“I think,” the letter to The Courant concluded, “that that’s a lot of people dying and that there is something mighty strange going on over there.”

The next day there popped up at the Bliss front door a very appropriately named man named Mike Toughy, the youthful star reporter of The Courant, a walking, talking symbol of the front page scribes of the era: battered hat, dangling cigarette, whisky breath and side-of-the-mouth talk.

“And now,” he began, as he settled himself on a green chair in the Bliss parlor, “suppose you tell me just why you ladies are so suspicious of that place across the street.”

The Bliss sisters didn’t have anything to impart to Mike but suspicion. But, as they went into details about that hearse that had been calling in the night all those years, there was something so earnest about them that Mike decided to look into things. So he dug into the records of a few of Sister Amy’s recent losses, got the names of the three physicians who had signed the death certificates, and sought out the doctors.

True, all three doctors told Toughy, an average of a death a month at The Archer Home did, at first glance, seem high, considering that such an average would com-pletely decimate the Home and repopulate it every twenty months. But the doctors pointed out to Mike that Sister Amy’s patients were all breaking up from the infirmities of age when they came to The Home and had a short time to live at best. Then, too, all three doctors pointed out, Sister Amy, having come out of Bellevue Hospital with practically as much knowledge of the human system as a physician, was more than capable of seeing that everything possible was done for any of her charges.

Toughy wasn’t satisfied, though. He had a friend who was an actuary, one of those statistics wizards who figure out how long people are going to live, employed by The Greater New England Life Insurance Company, and he dropped in on the man. After filling him in on the death rate at Sister Amy’s establishment, he made some notes, and asked Mike to come back in a few days.

The news that awaited Mike was mixed. The death rate was high, but, considering the condition of Sister Amy’s charges when they checked in, a lot was accounted for.

“So,” concluded the actuary, a good man with double talk, “the pic-ture doesn’t look all black and it isn’t all white, either.”

Mike Toughy didn’t do anything now but hire a couple of grave diggers and an intern from Hartford General Hospi-tal, dig up one of Sister Amy’s most recent check-outs, take the man’s insides out, put him back and cover the grave. Then Mike took the insides to the state toxicologist right in Hartford. The news from the toxicologist wasn’t what Mike was after: not the slightest trace of any kind of poison. Mike, the persistent one, dug up a second stiff but got the same kind of a report. A third stiff got him nowhere, nor did a fourth.

Mike had just gone back to the city room of his newspaper after getting his fourth negative report when who telephoned him but Sister Amy.

“Mr. Toughy,” came the sweet voice of the lady who mixed sex and murder, “I’m wondering if you can stop over to see me as soon as you can.”

Sitting in Sister Amy’s parlor half an hour later, Toughy found himself looking at a very confident lady.

“Well, Mr. Toughy,” she began, smiling sweetly, “were you disap-pointed?”

“Disappointed? Disappointed at what?”

“Disappointed,” said Sister Amy, her voice taking on some harshness now, “at not finding any poison in the four bodies.”

For once, Mike couldn’t come up with an answer.

“No wonder you can’t answer me,” said Sister Amy, her voice now dripping icicles, “you no good son of a bitch. Dig up one more body and try to blacken my fine reputation and I’ll see that you wind up in jail and, besides, I’ll sue that paper of yours for the last desk in that room where you write your lies.”

Mike had no sooner returned to the city room when the city editor beckoned him.

“Mike,” said the city editor, “I can guess what Sister Amy said to you.”

“Why?”

“She’s hired the sharpest shyster lawyer this side of the Rockies, a scoundrel from New York, and he’s just been in here threatening the very future of this paper.”

“Anything else?” Toughy asked.

“Yes. This: maybe that woman is one of the greatest criminals since Bluebeard. But if she is, we’ll never prove it. Let the law find out and dig into the facts. Drop this thing.”

Mike Toughy, though, was practically fearless. On his days off, he ran down to New York and began to poke around Bellevue Hospital. There was a coffee house near Bellevue where the doctors, interns and nurses hung out. It was from a young physician who had been an intern when Sister Amy had been a nurse who gave Toughy some idea of Sister Amy’s sexual demands.

“I’ve had quite a few women in my life,” the doctor told the scribe, “but never anybody to come anywhere near Amy Archer. I know for a fact that she had three other fellows besides myself one day when she was here within a twelve-hour period.”

Gilligan seems to have been a very talented man, for as long as he was to last. On most nights, he preferred to perform with the lights on and the shades up in a front room of the second floor. The Bliss sisters, with that wonderful show going on, lost so much sleep that they were seldom awake during the day. Every month or so, in the middle of the night, there would be a change of scene: that hearse.