A Rare Murder In Princeton (7 page)

 

THUS, ON SATURDAY morning, McLeod was in the empty house dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt waiting for Dante, who arrived right on time, looking cheerful and kind—could he possibly be a murderer? No, of course not, she thought. They set to work.

Is there a more tedious job than cleaning out a garage? Probably not, McLeod thought. Some decisions were easy. The piles of old newspapers could go—McLeod wondered who could have put them there in the garage in the first place? Dante took them all out to his pickup, promising to haul everything they threw out to the dump or to the recycling center. They decided to discard some inferior garden tools but to keep the best ones. Dante said he would replace the old broken brackets on the wall to hang these out of the way.

Dante carried away the half-empty cans of dried paint and three huge glass jars filled with rusty nails and screws. They sniffed a large round tin and decided the mysterious moldy contents was old dog food, and Dante emptied it into a garbage bag. He then poured the potting soil out of many open bags into the tin. He and McLeod looked at the folded yard chairs and opened them up, discarded some, and kept a few more, which McLeod pronounced perfectly good.

“You can hang them up on brackets, too,” Dante said.

“The place is going to be so tidy George won’t recognize it.” McLeod said.

They kept at it until there was nothing left to be sorted out but the cartons on the boards across the rafters. “And they belonged to Mrs. Murray? And they’re still here after twenty years?” McLeod asked.

“They were hers. She had me put them up there,” Dante said. He climbed up the stepladder and handed the boxes down to her one by one. Two contained old shoes, and McLeod told Dante to throw them away. One labeled MOTHER’S RECIPES looked more promising, but when McLeod opened it, the recipes were all clipped from moldy, yellow newspaper clippings. McLeod consigned them to the dump, too.

One large carton held old dresses. They looked quite grand—brocade and velvet.

“Marvelous!” said McLeod. “One of my students is doing the costumes for a student play production and he was talking about how he needed dresses like this. I’ll give them to him. Little Big couldn’t possibly want them at this point.”

“Nahh,” said Dante. “I’ll take that carton in the house for you. What about this?”

Only one much smaller box remained. McLeod opened it and saw it contained old letters from Lieutenant Vincent Lawrence at an APO address to Mrs. John Lawrence on Edgehill Street, with postmarks in the forties. They were World War II letters.

“I’ll take these inside, too,” said McLeod. Curiosity, her cross and her inspiration, made her want to look at them, but common sense made her want to look at them where it was warmer. She could eventually turn them over to Little Big Murray—if he wanted them.

Dante carried the box of clothes inside and up the stairs to her room. He finished loading his truck, accepted payment, declined her offer of lunch, and drove off.

 

WHEN HE GOT home, George was extremely pleased that she and Dante had cleaned out the garage. “Congratulations !” he said when he had viewed the results of their labor. “I really can’t tell you how grateful I am. But you didn’t put your car inside.”

“No, I didn’t even think about it,” she said.

“Give me your car keys and I’ll do it and then put mine in, too,” he said.

 

IT WAS THE next Tuesday before McLeod remembered to e-mail Clark Powell, the student who was involved with the play, to ask him if he wanted the dresses, and he responded immediately that he certainly did. She replied that she’d bring the carton to campus and he could pick it up.

The next day George left before she got up, and she brought the carton of clothes downstairs, put it in the trunk of her car, and drove to the university garage. What could she do with the box of clothes? she wondered. She couldn’t carry that carton up the hill to Joseph Henry House. Would it be all right to bring Clark Powell down here to pick it up? Then he would be the one who had to carry the carton up the hill. Then she realized she could manage the box if she rode the shuttle bus up to the library stop, which wasn’t far from Joseph Henry House. Okay, but I hope Clark appreciates these old dresses, she thought as she boarded the shuttle.

MCLEOD LEFT THE carton on her desk and went to the library. She planned to start her day that Wednesday at Rare Books, where she could finish up a box of papers that dealt with van Dyke’s writing of “The Other Wise Man,” and then spend the rest of the day on teaching duties. She arrived at Rare Books and, as she always did, stopped to pay her respects to Jonathan Belcher, “Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief of the Province of New Jersey from 1747 to 1757,” or at least the replica of his office that was behind glass. This morning, though, there was somebody in the “office,” somebody lying on the faded Persian carpet beside Governor Belcher’s desk.

It took McLeod a minute or two to recognize Philip Sheridan. What was he doing, lying in the display of Governor Belcher’s office?

What he was doing was being dead, she realized a second later. She had seen it before.

McLeod ran into Rare Books and screamed wordlessly at Molly Freeman, the receptionist.

Molly screamed back. Nathaniel Ledbetter appeared and stared at the screaming women. McLeod ran to him and clutched his gray tweed jacket. “Philip Sheridan is lying beside Belcher’s desk.” She ran back through the gallery and Ledbetter followed her, took a look through the glass window, and turned and ran back to Rare Books. McLeod followed him, and to her surprise, Nat hurried past the phone on Molly’s desk, past his own office—where there was another phone—and with Molly trailing behind them, through the door into Sheridan’s office, where a startled Chester stood up as they ran through. Nat opened a door that McLeod had not noticed before, a door that led into the glass-fronted space that held Governor Belcher’s effects.

Chester followed them into the small space and knelt beside Philip Sheridan, who stared at the ceiling without moving. Chester tried to find a pulse, first in Philip Sheridan’s wrist, then in the artery in his neck. He put his ear to Sheridan’s chest. Fanny Mobley and Buster Keaton and even Dodo Westcott came in and stood, watching Chester. Diane and a couple of pages came in. The little room was crowded.

McLeod took a good look at Chester, who was somebody to whom she had paid very little attention. He was worth watching, she decided, as he shook his head, and then said, “It’s hopeless. He’s gone.”

He got up and went to his own office; McLeod could see him pick up the phone. The others stood paralyzed around Philip Sheridan. Chester came back. “I called the campus police and I called old Dr. Winchester, Mr. Sheridan’s doctor,” he said. “Someone will be here in a minute, I guess.” He began to weep.

“All right, the rest of you must leave,” said Natty. Everyone trailed out except Chester, Natty, and McLeod. Natty said, “McLeod,” hesitated, and said, “Oh, all right. You’re the writer, aren’t you, and you found the body.”

Chester seemed to regain self-control, and wiped his eyes.

McLeod went over and patted his arm. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “He was such a nice man. Do you suppose it’s a heart attack?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” said Chester. “He had just had a checkup and he was fine.”

By this time, Molly was leading in Sean O’Malley, the university’s director of public safety, red-haired and freckle-faced, who greeted Natty, smiled in a perplexed way at McLeod and Chester, and knelt by Philip Sheridan. He was still on the floor when Dr. Winchester arrived and replaced him. O’Malley pulled out his cell phone and spoke quietly into it while Winchester knelt.

“Did you notice what I noticed?” Dr. Winchester asked O’Malley when he stood up.

“You mean the slash in his clothes? Is it a stab wound?”

“Yes, it is. Is there something he could have fallen on in here?” Winchester looked around the small replica of the colonial office.

“I understand that accidental stab wounds are extremely rare,” said O’Malley, who McLeod remembered was inordinately proud of the fact that he had audited courses at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He claimed he knew far more about criminology than he would ever need to know in his present job at the university.

“I guess so,” said Winchester. “Looks like a matter for the police.”

“I’m way ahead of you,” said O’Malley. ‘I’ve already called the Borough Police. They’ll be here very soon.”

Chester, Natty, and McLeod looked at each other helplessly.

“I won’t even try to start an investigation,” said O’Malley. “Let’s leave it to the police.”

“Sean, I’m McLeod Dulaney,” said McLeod. She told herself that she was after all a trained reporter and positively needed to ask questions while she could. “I met you a few years ago.”

“Oh, yes, I remember you,” said O’Malley.

“And I just wondered, if Mr. Sheridan was killed by a stab wound, wouldn’t there be more blood?”

“Not necessarily. It depends on many factors—the path the blade took, for one thing. A stab wound usually does not bleed the way an incision does.”

“So the murderer wasn’t necessarily covered with blood when he left here?” asked McLeod.

“Not necessarily. I’d say not, in fact. There would be more blood on the body. It’s not easy to see the wound. The sharp instrument went through his clothes, his vest, shirt, undershirt, and then apparently hit a vital organ. The autopsy will show.”

The police arrived just then, led, McLeod was delighted to see, by her old friend Lieutenant Nick Perry, chief of detectives of the Borough of Princeton. Molly turned him over to Natty, whose hand he shook. He caught sight of McLeod and smiled briefly, but he was plainly focused on the business of death. He talked briefly to Winchester and O’Malley, examined the body himself, and stood back up.

“Okay, all of you people”—his gesture took in McLeod, Natty, and Chester—“wait outside. Make sure nobody leaves this department. Sean, what can you tell us?”

“Just what you see, Nick. Stab wound. I did not know the deceased and saw him for the first time just now.”

“Dr. Winchester, tell me everything you know about this. We’ll have the medical examiner come take a look, but we don’t want to waste your expertise, do we?”

Thoughtful old Nick Perry, McLeod thought as she trailed after Chester and Natty, moving aside to let what must have been the entire police force of Princeton Borough enter.

Chester stayed in his office, and she followed Natty into the reception area, where he closed the big double doors into Rare Books. “Nobody is to leave without police permission,” he told Molly. “No one.” As if to underscore this order, a uniformed policeman came out and stood by the door.

“This is very distressing, very troubling,” said Natty after McLeod followed him to his office. “Philip Sheridan —he was apparently murdered.”

McLeod sat down, and Natty sat behind his desk. “How could a murderer get in?” he asked. “I don’t understand it.” He pulled the neatly folded handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped his face with it. “I don’t understand how a murderer could get into this area.”

McLeod nodded in sympathy, but did not point out that perhaps the murderer was already in “this area.”

She thought of Chester and decided she should go and see about him. She murmured her sympathy to Natty, and got up. Natty automatically rose as she did. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” she said.

She found Chester sitting at Philip Sheridan’s desk, staring into space.

“Are you all right, Chester?”

“How can I be ‘all right’ ?” he asked.

“I know,” said McLeod. “I know. But is there anything I can do? Tea? Coffee? Anything at all?”

“Nothing. Nothing. This is worse than the worst night-mares I ever had, worse than anything I ever imagined could happen.”

“I guess it is,” said McLeod. “Nobody ever imagines something like this.”

“Somebody did,” said Chester grimly.

“I guess you’re right.” She pulled up a chair and sat down beside Chester.

“Had you worked for Philip Sheridan for a long time?”

“I had,” said Chester. “It’s the only job I ever had. I came to work for Mr. Sheridan right out of library school. He was my employer and my friend, my best friend. And now this—” His voice broke.

“Who could have done it, Chester?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Chester’s voice grew louder. “I don’t know.”

“McLeod, Lieutenant Perry wants to see you.” Molly’s voice interrupted Chester, who sounded more and more distraught.

McLeod looked around and saw a carafe of water and glasses on a tray on Philip Sheridan’s desk, poured a glass for Chester, and coaxed his hand around it.

“Chester, drink this slowly. It will help you,” she said. She hated leaving him alone, but she followed Molly out to the main work area.