Max Collins - No Cure for Death

I poked his barrel chest with a finger. “Because Janet and her son were both in the old man’s will! Am I right? Because Stefan wanted it all, and because news of the grandson’s death might kill the old man, and then Stefan would lose a good chunk of his inheritance. So Stefan had to act fast-a fire, a car crash-and then he stood to inherit it all again. Pretty sloppy work, if you ask me, but then it helps to have the local cops in your pocket when you’re doing work as clumsy as it is ruthless.”

Harold laughed humorlessly. “Stefan was a clumsy criminal. He was a manipulator, a schemer-but when it came to murder, he was out of his depth.”

“So much so that he ended up committing suicide.”

“Right. But the blame for that is yours, Mallory.”

“Mine?”

“Stefan’s clumsy staging of ‘accidents’ would’ve held up, but for you. Like you said, the police and the sheriff are in the Norman family’s pocket; the investigations of these events would’ve been cursory, at best. How was Stefan to know a… a mystery writer like yourself would be on hand to poke in here, and unravel there?”

The elation I’d been feeling, from putting the pieces together, suddenly faded; the wind was cold on my face but the sun had come out from under some clouds and made me squint.

I said, “So when the holes in Stefan’s not-so-grand design began to show and the local law had to start looking into things, and when his roommate Davis ended up dying for him-when it all began coming apart and falling in on him-he had an attack of despair and wrote a self-serving suicide note, apparently designed to spare his uncle’s feelings, a bit, and then put a bullet in his brain.”

Harold nodded. The barge horn blew, a foghorn sound.

“Bullshit,” I said. “You killed Stefan, Harold. Why don’t you just tell me about it? It is your story, after all….”

“You have to understand about Stefan Norman,” Harold said. “Stefan Norman was a snake.”

His voice was a dry whisper; so was the wind.

“Stefan Norman,” Harold went on, “was the one who told Richard Norman’s wife about her husband and his secretary and a baby that might or might not have been aborted. And Mrs. Norman, she didn’t take it so well. She developed… nervous trouble. Then she developed drinking trouble. Psychoanalysis didn’t seem to help either problem. She proved a constant source of embarrassment for the Normans during the senator’s second national campaign. Rumors about her, which she in one way or another managed to generate, were so ugly that most people refused to believe them. Dismissed them as vicious smears. Like the one about her trying to drown their daughter while vacationing at Lake Okoboji.”

“Jesus,” I said.

Harold sighed heavily. “How the senator felt about his wife at this point I can’t really say. At one time he and I were rather close. He often revealed personal things to me, but… but when the business with his wife’s drinking and her cruelty to their daughter began, the senator clammed up.”

“What in hell possessed Richard Norman to get drunk and drive his car off Colorado Hill? It wasn’t suicide, was it?”

Harold said nothing.

“I get it,” I said. “Richard wasn’t driving that night. Richard wasn’t the drunk behind the wheel, was he? It was the wife. The wife.”

Harold nodded, said, “But the senator did allow his wife to drive back from Davenport when she was so drunk she could barely walk, let alone steer a car.”

“So what are you saying? That Richard Norman handing his wife the wheel was like handing her a revolver and saying shoot?”

Harold was looking past the drop-off before us, at the river. “Stefan felt that that interpretation of the events was likely, so likely that he advised Mr. Norman to go to the trouble of instructing the local authorities to have all the reports state that the senator was driving. Still, there were those who guessed past the cover-up that followed-those who guessed that Mrs. Norman had been driving, and who just knew she’d been steering accurately when she drove that car over Colorado Hill.”

Then he turned his one eye and his black eyepatch on me and said, “But they’re just guessing. And so are we.”

“What do you think, Harold? You and the senator were close, you said.”

“I don’t believe the death of his family was a conscious wish on the senator’s part. Maybe he hated his wife by this time; I don’t know. And he may have hated himself; that I don’t know, either. But he loved his little daughter. That much I do know.”

“Somebody else loved the daughter, too,” I said, gesturing with a thumb back at the house.

“Yes,” Harold nodded. “Mr. Norman loved the little girl. He used to say the little girl would grow up to be ‘the spittin’ image’ of his late wife. I feel it was the loss of the grandchild that triggered Mr. Norman’s stroke, more than losing his son the senator.”

“Who was it that remembered the other grandchild, Janet Taber’s illegitimate child? Stefan?”

Harold laughed; it was a deep, throaty laugh, and came as a shock, as he’d been speaking in hushed tones till now.

“Hardly,” he said. “Why would Stefan remind his uncle of another possible heir? I reminded Mr. Norman about the pregnant secretary. And it was the chance that a grandchild of his might be alive somewhere that made Simon Harrison Norman want to live again. And when the recovery had taken an upward turn, he spoke again, the first time since the stroke; he spoke to Stefan.” He laughed again. “Ordered his sole heir to search for the child.”

“Stefan wasn’t crazy about that, I assume.”

“No,” Harold smiled. “Stefan could hardly be expected to take pleasure in a search that would result in a decrease in his share of the Norman inheritance. But he went through the motions. He hired the necessary investigators and went himself to Des Moines to visit the girl’s mother, who hadn’t seen her daughter for several years, at that point.”

“And for a while that was as far as the search got.”

“Right. Mr. Norman got on Stefan’s case about it, from time to time, and once when Stefan said to his uncle that the search was useless because ‘the damn thing was probably aborted anyway,’ the old man flew into a rage. I suspected that Stefan was doing this to provoke another stroke-a fatal one-so I had words with him.”

“What kind of words?”

“Convincing words,” Harold said.

Harold was pressing his hands together in front of him, squeezing, like a vise of flesh. I was reminded for a moment that despite Harold’s gentle, genteel manner, this was still Punjab, still the one-eyed massive bear that I’d butted heads with at the bus station not so long ago.

“Finally,” Harold said, almost ignoring me, “Mrs. Ferris contacted Mr. Norman. Her daughter had phoned her, finally, with a tearful story of a critically ill child. And Mr. Norman-through Stefan-arranged for Mrs. Ferris to bring Janet to Port City to live, where they could be looked after. Mr. Norman thought it best to remain anonymous, being wary of the young woman’s once before having refused Norman money.”

“And old Sy Norman changed his will,” I said. “Which Stefan didn’t like one little bit.”

Nodding, Harold said, “First the young boy was written in, though a third of the estate would still go to Stefan, and Stefan would be executor, in charge of the boy’s funds and the Norman Fund, until the child reached twenty-one. But by then Mr. Norman had started thinking of Janet Taber as his late son’s ‘other wife,’ as the woman who shared his son’s love-shared it more than that ‘miserable bitch’ who drove him off a cliff, anyway.”