Murder, She Wrote (12 page)

J
ed was standing on the tarmac, tapping his toes, and Seth was already in the front passenger seat of the Cessna when I raced around the side of the hangar and waved frantically. I didn't want them to leave without me.

“I'm so sorry,” I said. “I lost track of the time.”

“I knew you were here somewhere,” Jed said as I climbed into the plane. “Handy having those production assistants around to send on errands. They're all so polite and helpful. I'm not accustomed to that from young people.”

“Glad you decided to join us,” Seth said as I buckled myself in.

“I got waylaid,” I said, “but I'm here now.”

Jed taxied to the end of the runway. He looked ahead and to each side, ensuring that there was no one on the ground who might get in the way, peered into the sky checking for air traffic, then pushed the throttle in to rev the engine and we moved forward to start our takeoff. Mentally I followed his every move, watching the instruments on the panel to confirm that we had the full mixture of fuel and that we'd reached the proper airspeed before he pulled back on the yoke and the nose lifted. I eyed the altimeter to see our height off the ground, and the compass to verify our heading. My hands may not have been on the controls, but my mind was flying the plane.

Once we were airborne, I looked down to see a Cabot Cove patrol car, red lights flashing, speeding toward the airport. I felt guilty that I hadn't waited around for Mort or one of his deputies, but Walter Benson could give as good an account as I. He'd come into the production office only moments after me. I didn't know any more than he did.

The roar of the Cessna's engine made conversation between the front seats and the back difficult, so I settled in for the short flight to Bangor, reviewing what I knew about Vera's murder and what remained to be discovered, including the name of the murderer, of course.

The night the movie star was killed, she'd visited her ex-husband to complain that someone had sent her a disturbing note. Terrence Chattergee said he hadn't read it; Estelle Fancy claimed ignorance, too. I wondered if the sender had suggested a meeting, and if the hangar had been the location designated for their tryst. It was a logical place to choose. The production crew knew not to go near a “hot set.”

Zee thought he'd heard carpenters hammering that evening but hadn't seen anyone when he went into the hangar to examine his equipment. He said he'd gone back to his trailer at nine thirty. Vera was with Chattergee at nine, before he left for the poker game. Based on Seth's autopsy, the estimated time of death had to have been before two a.m. Could Vera have spied Zee in the hangar and waited for him to leave? Was the person she was meeting already there, hiding in the shadows when she arrived? Did her killer sneak inside knowing the intended victim was waiting? Or had Vera been shot elsewhere and her body transported to the set? And what did that piece of film mean? Had Mort succeeded in getting blowups of the individual frames so that we could discover what movie it had come from?

And now Neil Corday enters the picture, the husband of the real-life judge who'd been murdered. Mitch Elovitz was right about one thing: Corday wanted to halt the production. And Elovitz's suggestion wasn't completely off target: What better way to go about stopping the movie than shooting its star? But how would Corday have known about the set in the hangar? Had he been skulking around the airport unnoticed all this time? And why would he pick out Vera? Was it because she was playing his deceased wife?

So many questions, and so much still to learn.

Jed put down at Bangor International Airport and taxied to the area reserved for general aviation, for private planes. He checked in with operations to arrange for refueling and to update a time to leave. The three of us then grabbed some lunch at the airport's Red Baron Lounge before Seth and I took a cab to the laboratory of Dr. Carlton Smith.

“Carl, so good of you to invite us,” Seth said, when the doctor answered the door of his modest Cape Cod–style house.

Dr. Smith was the personification of roly-poly. A round man with a fringe of gray hair around his bald pate, he wore half-glasses on the end of his nose and bright red suspenders and a belt to hold up trousers that barely buttoned beneath his belly. If he'd had a white beard, he could have easily been mistaken for Santa Claus. As it was, he was clean-shaven and smelled of a heavy dose of spicy aftershave that seemed to trail him like an aromatic cloud.

“Thank you for having us, Dr. Smith,” I said when we'd been introduced. “I'm very honored to be here and eager to hear what you have to say about this case.”

He waved away the compliment. “Don't even mention it. It's my pleasure, and besides, I've always wanted to meet you, Mrs. Fletcher,” he said, holding my hand and peering into my eyes. “And you must call me Carl.”

“Thank you, Carl. I'm Jessica.”

Seth coughed. “And how is Sarah?” he asked, taking off his cap and hanging it on the clothes tree that stood in the entryway.

“Fine. Fine,” Dr. Smith said, dropping my hand and heading down a narrow hall to the back of the house. He stopped abruptly at a closed door and turned to me. “I have to say, my wife will be so disappointed she missed you. She's such a fan of yours, but she's a ‘pink lady' at our local hospital, and today's the day she's on gift shop duty. I'm afraid I didn't tell her about you coming until it was too late for her to change her plans.”

“That's wonderful of her to do,” I said. “I'm sure Seth can tell you how important volunteers are to the running of a hospital.”

“That they are,” Seth said, coming up behind me.

“Please tell your wife I'm sorry I couldn't meet her,” I said. “I'll be happy to send her a book if you think she'd like it.”

“She'll be tickled pink,” Carl said, then giggled. “Of course that's what she was wearing this morning.” He pulled out a ring of keys on a retractable wire attached to his belt and used one key to open the door. “Welcome to my humble lab.”

Dr. Smith's laboratory, actually a spare bedroom off the kitchen, did indeed appear humble. It was lined with filing cabinets five drawers high, many of the drawers so stuffed with files that they couldn't be closed. Next to a narrow window was a bookcase filled with what appeared to be boxes of ammunition. On a long table were two microscopes, and next to them a computer monitor with a split screen and a keyboard. A rack on one wall held row upon row of videocassettes, a visual record of autopsies the doctor had performed, he told us, and of those on which he had consulted in the past.

“Do you still refer to these autopsy tapes?” I asked.

“Those old cassettes are too bulky to file,” he said. “My wife wants me to get rid of them, but they still come in handy every now and then. Today I keep my videos on DVD or thumb drive,” he said, “and just tuck them in the files. Used to try to keep them all on the computer, but after it crashed from the overload, I had an intern come in and index the deaths according to cause, manner, and mode. So I just have to search the index to find the autopsy I want to review. Works out much better that way.”

He waddled behind a battered desk that was surprisingly neat considering the state of his files, sank into a creaky wooden chair, and flipped open a purple file folder. “Take a seat, please,” he said, waving at a pair of folding chairs that faced the desk. “I made prints of your photos, Seth, so I can show you what I'm thinking.”

Seth and I pulled the chairs close to the desk as Dr. Smith spread out the enlarged photos.

“These were not easy wounds to decipher, Seth,” he said, pushing one of the pictures forward. “I'm not surprised you had trouble determining which was the entrance wound and which the exit.”

“Glad to hear that from an expert,” Seth said. “When I mentioned it to Sheriff Metzger, he was miffed that I couldn't give him a definitive answer. Made me question my skills.”

“Oh, no, your skills are fine,” Carl said. “This would have stumped many of the experts, too.”

I could sense Seth relaxing in his seat as if a burden had been lifted from his shoulders. I hadn't known that Mort had been aggravated with Seth's inability to state with certainty which wound was which.

“Entrance and exit wounds made by bullets are usually not so difficult to distinguish,” Carl said, taking another picture from his file and placing it on top of the others.

“So you're sure it was a gun that caused them?” Seth asked.

“Oh, absolutely. These have all the characteristics of bullet wounds. Why do you question it?”

“They haven't found the bullet yet,” he replied, “much less the gun.”

Carl looked over his glasses at Seth. “Don't you worry, my boy. They will.” He focused on the photos in front of him again. “As you can see in this image—which isn't one of yours, Seth—this wound is round and pretty neat, with a narrow gray abrasion collar. That's typical of an entrance wound when the bullet pushes the skin inward.” He looked up. “You tell me if I'm being too graphic for you, Jessica.”

“That's all right,” I said. “I appreciate knowing the details.”

“Here's the exit wound from the same bullet,” he said, pointing to another image. “It's larger than the first one, and there's a ragged edge as the tissue is extruded. That's pretty standard, and most pathologists can make the call.”

“Isn't there generally more blood from the exit wound than the entrance one?” Seth asked.

“Usually, yes, but not always,” Carl replied. “Many factors can affect the characteristics and alter the appearance of wounds—how far away the shooter was standing, for instance, or how fast the bullet was spinning when it entered the victim's body, or the pathway it made as it traveled through the body, or whether it passed through something else before or after it hit the body.”

“Like what?” Seth asked.

“Like a window,” Carl replied, “or something hard.”

He stacked the two photos and put them aside. “Now, in the case of your victim, the reading is not as clear.” He pushed two photos in front of us. “They both look like entrance wounds.”

“They do,” I said, surprised that they appeared so similar, when the differences had been so apparent in the previous set of photos. “Why?”

“This can happen if you get what we call a ‘shored' or reinforced wound.”

“I don't think I've ever heard of that before,” I said. I looked at Seth. “Have you?”

Seth was frowning down at the picture, but he nodded. “Ayuh,” he said slowly. “I do remember that.”

“A shored wound simply means that something pressed into the skin and supported it, like a wall, say, or the floor,” Carl continued, “so when the bullet exited, there wasn't room for the skin to be pushed out as it normally would be. Whatever it was shores up the skin to give the hole a different appearance, and make an exit wound appear to be an entrance one.”

“Oh, dear,” I said. “What do we do now?”

“What we do now is decide which is which. Our decision is critical because it can be the difference between a charge of murder one and a determination of self-defense, which some consider a justifiable homicide.”

“There was nothing at the crime scene to suggest self-defense,” I said. “Wouldn't she have had to be holding a weapon on the shooter for it to be self-defense?”

“I didn't say this was self-defense,” Carl said, “only that we need to know which wound is which to rule it out. In this case, I believe she was, indeed, holding on to something.”

“Then you
do
think it was self-defense?” Seth asked.

“Not at all,” Carl replied. “I think she was holding something up to her chest when she was shot in the back.”

Seth and I questioned Dr. Smith for another hour while he pulled out picture after picture to prove his point. “If you still have access to the body, this is what I recommend you do,” he told Seth, and proceeded to outline procedures for Cabot Cove's substitute medical examiner to follow in case he ever needed to justify his interpretation of the wounds in court.

With the purple file folder under his arm, Seth gave his old colleague a hug as we bade Dr. Smith good-bye. “Carl, you're a lifesaver.”

“Any time, any time,” Carl said. “And bring Jessica again. I'll make sure Sarah stays home.” To me, he said, “I won't tell her about the book. I'll let it be a happy surprise when she gets it in the mail.”

“He suspects I'll forget to send his wife the book,” I told Seth in the cab on the way to the airport.

“What makes you say that?”

“Carl is a logical man. He's thinking that if he doesn't say anything, then she won't be disappointed if I don't come through. But if he mentions it, and I forget to keep my word, then she'll be annoyed with him as well as me.”

“Then you'd better put that book in the mail pronto.”

“I'll pack it up as soon as I get home,” I said.

Over our lunch at the airport, I'd told Seth and Jed about Cecil, my temporary pet. Seth had agreed to drive me to Jack Wilson's veterinary office when we returned, but he refused simply to drop me off. “You're gonna be tired after a long day. It'll be dusk by the time we get there. That's not the time to ride your bicycle home with a dog in the basket. Do you even have a light on the bike?”

“Of course,” I said. “I have a light, and front and back reflectors.”

“But you're not wearing light-colored clothes and you'll be hard to see on the side of the road. Don't argue with me. We can put your bicycle in the trunk and you in the backseat with the dog.”

“Why can't I sit in the front seat and hold him?” I asked.

“I don't want to worry about some strange animal jumping out of your arms and getting underfoot while I'm driving.”