Ричард Деминг - The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

She continued to struggle against the current until she was too exhausted to struggle any longer, then despairingly let it carry her back toward the reef.

She had been lucky on the way in, but halfway back to the reef the sharks discovered her.

Originally published in The Saint Magazine , July 1984.

Sergeant Gunner wanted the three old people to wait at the morgue’s front desk while he took Mrs. Worth to the viewing window.

“You’ll have to go over to Homicide with me later,” he said to the aged man and two aged women with the retirement home manager. “But all I need to make an identification is Mrs. Worth.”

The manager of the Riverview Senior Citizens Retirement Home said, “They want to see Olivia, Sergeant. They were her best friends.”

Sergeant Gunner didn’t particularly care how many people viewed the body of old Mrs. Olivia Pritchard, but he was uneasy about elderly viewers. Over the years, he had piloted enough witnesses to the viewing window at the morgue to know the traumatic effect the sight of a body full of bullet holes could have. He didn’t like the prospect of three visitors in their eighties keeling over from shock. But since they seemed determined to view the body, he couldn’t bar them. Leading all four along the corridor to the viewing window, he moved the lever that parted the curtains.

Beyond the glass, the withered body of an old woman lay on a morgue cart. She was naked and the blood had been washed from her, but four puckered purplish-black holes across the chest and stomach showed how she had died.

In a faint voice Mrs. Worth said, “It’s Olivia Pritchard all right.”

Sergeant Gunner glanced at the three old people. Apparently, his worry had been needless. None showed emotion. Although sad, their expressions were curiously lacking in grief. It occurred to the homicide officer that after you pass eighty, death probably doesn’t seem very tragic.

Anna Stenger, the oldest of the trio, was eighty-six. A retired schoolteacher, she was a straight-backed spinster with snapping black eyes and a birdlike manner of cocking her head to one side. Except for a face so wrinkled it resembled cracked parchment, she might have passed for sixty.

Mrs. Hester Lloyd, like the dead Mrs. Pritchard, was a widow. She was a pear-shaped little woman with a gentle smile and a nearsighted manner of peering over thick-lensed glasses. She was eighty-four.

Gerard Hawk, the youngest of the group, was eighty-one. Tall, stoop-shouldered, and beak-nosed, with curling white hair and a white handlebar mustache, he had clear blue eyes that were still strong enough not to require glasses. Mrs. Worth had told Gunner that he was a lifelong bachelor.

Closing the curtains, the homicide detective said, “Now, would you all please accompany me to Homicide?”

As Police Headquarter’s was only a half block from the Coroner’s Court Building, they walked. Sergeant Gunner expected that he and Mrs. Worth would have to cut their paces to accommodate the old people. Instead, they had to walk briskly to keep up.

As they fell a few steps behind, Mrs. Worth said, “They’re going to miss Olivia. The four were inseparable.”

When Sergeant Gunner only grunted, she said, “So many of our tenants are mentally slow—some even senile. Anna, Hester, and Mr. Hawk are still smart as whips, and so was Olivia Pritchard. They had nothing in common with most.”

“I know,” Gunner said. “When she came in to report seeing the Sloan Company bombing, there was nothing vague about her description of the suspect who tossed the bomb.”

“You think it was this Nick Spoda person?”

“The description fits. We’d have a better case if we had caught him in time for her to make a positive identification.” His expression turned glum. “I didn’t think she was in danger, because we kept from the media the fact that we had her as a witness. I had no idea it had leaked to Spoda. If she had phoned me when Spoda called on her the day before yesterday, I would have put her in protective custody.”

Mrs. Worth said, “I would have phoned you myself if I had known who the man was, but Olivia wasn’t in the habit of confiding in me. She told Anna and Hester and Mr. Hawk, but I knew nothing about it until after she was dead. It didn’t seem to occur to any of them that the police ought to be informed.”

The three old people waited in front of Police Headquarters for Gunner and Mrs. Worth to catch up, and the five crossed the lobby together to take the elevator to the third floor. In the Homicide squad room, Sergeant Gunner briefed them on the situation.

“We figure this as a gang kill,” he said. “With Mrs. Pritchard scheduled to testify against Spoda when we eventually caught him, it’s pretty obvious she was gunned because she could identify him as the one who threw the bomb through the window of the Sloan Cleaning Company. But suspicion is not proof. Your testimony may make the difference between Spoda getting away with this raw deal and going to the gas chamber.”

The white-haired and white-mustached Hawk said, “How could he get away with it, Sergeant? If I was on a jury in a case where the only witness against a gangster was shot down in broad daylight, I would figure either the gangster himself did it or had it done. Hardly likely anyone else would be gunning for a harmless woman like Olivia.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time a member of the Fallon gang got away with this raw a kill,” Gunner said. “Not even the first time for Spoda.”

Mrs. Worth said, “The Fallon gang?”

“A bunch of labor racketeers, headed by a crooked lawyer named Mark Fallon. Spoda is Fallon’s top gun.”

He had Nick Spoda brought in then. The old people showed no more emotion at the sight of the gunman suspected of murdering their friend than they had when they viewed Mrs. Pritchard’s body. Gerard Hawk examined him with the clinical detachment of a biologist looking at a specimen under a microscope. Anna Stenger cocked her head to one side and stared at him with teacher-like disapproval. Hester Lloyd peered over her glasses at the swarthy gunman sorrowfully, as though she pitied him more, for his sins, than she censored him.

Nick Spoda sneered. “What’s this, Sergeant? An old folks’ convention?”

Ignoring him, Gunner said to Mrs. Worth, “Is this the man who came to see Mrs. Pritchard?”

“Yes,” she said.

Still looking at the gunman while speaking to the retirement home manager, Gunner said, “But you weren’t present when they talked?”

Mrs. Worth shook her head. “I left them alone in the parlor. All I can really testify to is that he did talk to her.”

Gunner turned to the three old people. “None of you saw this meeting?”

All three shook their heads. Gerard Hawk said, “We all generally nap about that time of the afternoon, but she told us about it afterward.”

“Just what did she tell you?”

Anna Stenger said, “He threatened her. He warned her not to identify him when she was brought to headquarters to look at him. Apparently he planned to turn himself in.” Her voice took on a kind of grisly enjoyment. “I guess Olivia told him off good and proper. She wasn’t one to hold her tongue.”

Gunner said, “She told all of you this same story?”

The other two old people nodded. Hawk said, “We were all together when she told it.”

Nick Spoda yawned. “Hearsay. Just think what Mark Fallon will do to that testimony.”

Hester Lloyd peered over her glasses. “What’s he mean by that?”

Nick himself answered her. “It ain’t admissible evidence. Long as you didn’t personally hear me say nothing to this Pritchard dame, it don’t count. What somebody else told you I said ain’t allowed in the court record. The most you people can prove is that I stopped off to see the old lady for a couple of minutes. So what? I heard she wanted to buy a dog, and I got one for sale.”