Flying Crows (10 page)

IX

RANDY

KANSAS CITY

1997

The doctor was cordial over the phone when he agreed to meet with Randy. But the next morning, sitting across a desk in his private office, Dr. William Bernard Mitchell III projected not even a hint of cordiality. He was polite, but the accompanying coolness made it clear this man did not want to talk about his father and the Somerset Asylum.

Something must have happened since Randy's call.

Yesterday, after some careful talk with a telephone receptionist in the medical offices of Mitchell, Mitchell and Barnes, Randy had determined for sure that he had the right Mitchell family. Then, when the physician came on the phone, Randy identified himself as a cop and said he'd like to discuss his father's work on a particular case at Somerset many years ago. Without a beat, the son said no problem. There was an old file of his father's around someplace with a lot of notes from back then. They set up an appointment for eleven next morning.

It was obvious now that what had happened overnight had to do with what was now lying on the desk in front of Dr. Mitchell: a thin faded dark-green cardboard file folder, which to Randy seemed of a style and design many years old.

“What is the law enforcement interest in my father's Somerset service?” said Dr. Mitchell. Randy estimated his age at about forty, his intelligence and diligence at A-plus. His face was tanned, his hair thinning brown, his build solid: all in all, a person of substance, somebody you would want in the operating room or at your bedside.

“We're trying to close out some old cases,” Randy answered. “It's an efficiency move by the chief.” Unlike his approach with the ex–Harvey Girl, he had worked out a line to use this time. He didn't want to lie but he also didn't want to leave empty-handed.

Randy couldn't tell from the doctor's facial expression if he bought that or not. The office walls were full of photographs of doctors in white coats who looked like this man. Randy wondered which was his father. Which was the friend of Birdie's friend Josh?

“What exactly is the crime that is alleged to have occurred in this matter?” said the doctor.

On impulse, Randy said, “That, in fact, is the purpose of our investigation. We are trying to identify the crime—if, in fact, there was one.”

It didn't work. Dr. Mitchell looked away at something on the wall behind Randy, down at the closed file, and then back at Randy. “My father wrote a scathing indictment of what he witnessed—and participated in— during his very brief stay at Somerset Asylum. But from what I can tell he did nothing about it, showed it to no one, took no action. He merely wrote down his thoughts and recollections and put them in this file.”

Crunch time. “I guess the bottom line, doctor, is, may I read the file?”

“No, you may not.” He spoke with the casual firmness he might have used if he were telling a patient that he had an incurable disease.

“Why not, if I may ask?”

“Why should you, if
I
may ask?”

“Maybe there's something there that might help me identify . . .”

“Identify whom?”

“A patient named Josh. That's all I know about him. I know his first name, and the fact that your father—it must definitely have been your father—helped him in some very dramatic way at Somerset.”

Dr. Mitchell opened the file and read the first page, turned to a second, and finally to a third.

“There is a name in here that may be the man you have in mind. The name is Joshua Alan Lancaster.”

Randy wrote that down in a spiral notebook he quickly retrieved from a coat pocket. “What does it say about him?”

Dr. Mitchell closed the file and stood. “That's all I'm going to tell you, Lieutenant. The rest is protected by the doctor-patient relationship.”

Randy, feeling forced also to be firm, said, “Whatever relationship your father had with Joshua Alan Lancaster was more than sixty years ago, doctor. And it was in his capacity as an employee of the state of Missouri.”

“If you want more, get a court order. I'm sorry.”

End of interview. OK. But Randy wasn't going to leave without asking one last question. “What's the problem, doctor? What kind of stuff is in there that you don't want anybody to know about sixty years later?”

“It's a simple matter of the right to privacy, Lieutenant.”

“Whose privacy?”

“My father's.”

Randy left the office, his hands still burning with the suppressed urged to swipe that file from the doctor's desk and make a run for it.

Maybe there was another way. Maybe there was an old retired burglar around who could be enticed to do a little black bag job. . . .

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shame on you, Benton.

He smiled at the prospect of a big black headline in the
Star:
POLICE LIEUTENANT FIRED IN MEDICAL OFFICE BURGLARY LINKED TO LUNATIC, UNION STATION MASSACRE.

Then he looked at the bright side. He did have the full name of Birdie's friend: Joshua Alan Lancaster.

All right, Aunt Mary, time to do your stuff.

His aunt Mary was the only person around who still called him Randolph. She said it was because that was who he was the day he was born and that was who he would always be—to her, at least.
Randy,
she said, was the name of a high school kid, a college student, and, now, a Kansas City cop, but not of her nephew.

That was his aunt Mary. She was always slightly out of step with the rest of her family.
Peculiar
was the word her older brother, Randy's late father, used to describe her. He said—always with affection—that her pecularity was one of the reasons she was such a great librarian.

“I need your help on something concerning the Centralia massacre,” Randy said. He had decided to telephone her while she was at work at the library so she wouldn't be able to turn it into a marathon call. Aunt Mary was a talker. He also thought it might be possible for her to put a finger on the information right there while he waited.

“It happened in 1864 and it was a nightmare of a slaughter, I can tell you that, Randolph,” she said.

“I'm looking for a particular person—he would have been a kid—who was there—”

“My word, Randolph,” she interrupted. Randy knew there was an Aunt Mary hit coming. She liked to tell funny stories and play jokes on people. And she was as much a laugher as she was a talker. She loved to laugh, to make others laugh. “I'm quite surprised that the Kansas City Police Department is still working on the case. What year is this, 1997? My word, I'd have sworn the case of the Centralia massacre was solved back when it happened, one hundred and thirty-three years ago. I'm sure I read in a book we have right here in our own little library that numerous eyewitnesses identified the main culprit as a man named Anderson, Bloody Bill Anderson, and they caught him a few weeks after it happened and executed him rather brutally on the spot, without benefit of trial or due process. Didn't you big-city detectives get the word there in Kansas City?”

And she laughed in her infectious way that Randy, as a kid, used to relish hearing. It was catching; it was almost impossible to be around Aunt Mary when she was laughing and not start laughing yourself.

“Very funny, Aunt Mary,” he said, trying not to break up. Her laugh still had that effect on him.

Aunt Mary had been part of Randy's life since the day he was born in Winston, the railroad town forty miles east of Kansas City where all the Bentons came from. One of his father's brothers, Uncle Ted, who became a pharmacist in Kirksville, was the first of the Benton men not to work for the Missouri Pacific, which had a large engine and car overhaul yard in Winston. Randy was the second. The Benton women mostly married Missouri Pacific men because they were the only men around to marry. Aunt Mary, always the maverick, went off to what was then the state teachers college in Warrensburg, where she found her husband. He—Uncle Harold—was a star football player who became the high school coach in Langley. Aunt Mary, who earned a degree in education, went to work for the Langley library, while raising three kids, and had been there ever since.

“What do you need to know, Lieutenant Benton and, as they say in Washington, why do you need to know it?” asked Aunt Mary, ready now to do business.

“How do you know what they say in Washington, Aunt Mary?”

“Because I know how to read, Randolph. There are books and newspapers and magazines, right here in our tiny library even, that have just about everything that a person needs to know. Knowing what they say in Washington is crucial for all of us. How else can we understand what our leaders are telling us?”

Randy smiled, mentally kicking himself for taking her on—even in jest.

“I want to know about a kid named Joshua Alan Lancaster,” he said, moving on. “He was an eyewitness to the massacre.”

“Centralia is only about ten miles from here, as you know, but it's in Boone County,” said Aunt Mary, moving on with him.

“But I figured you'd know how—”

“I'm doing it now,” she said. Randy heard in the background the sound of computer keys being hit rapidly.

He kept silent.

“Nope, not there,” she said, after a couple of minutes. “Let me try something else.”

The computer noise resumed.

“Not there either.” Aunt Mary paused. Randy assumed she was thinking. She was. “I have one last possibility.”

She and her information machine completed one more search a few moments later.

“Nothing, Randolph.” She spoke with finality. “The Boone County birth records show no Joshua Alan Lancaster or any name even close to that. The census records also have nothing. Most important, neither does a list the Boone County historical people have of every person who lived in and around Centralia at the time of the massacre. Your person wasn't there, Randolph. How old would he have been at the time?”

“Around fifteen, something like that.”

“Well, like I said, there's no record of his being there in 1864 or at any other time. Now, Randolph,
my
question, please. Why do you need to know?”

In brief form, Randy told her about Birdie and his story of having come to the Union Station in 1933 with his friend Josh, who had witnessed the Centralia massacre.

“Have you put the dates and the supposed ages to a piece of paper, Randolph?” she asked, when he was finished.

“No,” he confessed.

“Well, I just did while you were talking. The numbers don't quite add up. Your boy Josh most probably couldn't have been in Centralia. He would have had to be in his eighties in 1933 when he came to Union Station. That's not likely.”

Randy was glad Aunt Mary could not see his face. She would have noticed—and commented on—the tinge of red that had come to his cheeks. That was another of his traits. It went with his temper.

“You never were good at mathematics, Randolph, and it appears you still aren't,” she said, in her kidding way. “Thank the good lord you went into police work like your father, where deduction and confession can replace addition and subtraction.”

Thank you, Aunt Mary. I love you, Aunt Mary.

Now she wanted to get caught up on family. How were Melissa and the kids? Randy reported his wife to be just fine, working part-time as a personnel consultant for a Kansas City insurance company. Mark, eight, and Joanie, six, were also well, flourishing in school and otherwise.

Randy was anxious to get on with it. Doesn't she have to get back to her library duties? Doesn't anybody in Langley need the assistance of their librarian? Won't somebody walk in off the street and ask for a particular book that can only be found by his aunt Mary?

Finally, he said, “Got to go, Aunt Mary. A policeman's work is never done.”

“Yes, Randolph, I understand,” she said in her special way. “I must say I am most puzzled about why you care about that man who lived in the Union Station building for so long. Although you were always so—so curious.”