The Memorial Hall Murder (24 page)

“You know, I just don't see how you do that.”

Vick jumped, and screamed a small scream.

“Oh, sorry,” said Homer Kelly. He came around her chair and stood in front of her. “My God, it looks difficult. I should think those strings would cut right through your little pinkies.”

Vick laughed and held up her left hand. “Oh, no, not any more. See there? Look at the calluses. Along the side of my thumb. And all across the tips of the other fingers. You get really hard calluses after a while.”

“Oh, is that it.” Homer took Vick's hand and felt it. “I see what you mean. That's not exactly the soft sexy flesh one expects in a female. That's a mean leathery little paw. No offense.”

“Well, if you think my hands are hard, you should have felt Ham's. He put all the power of his big strong left arm behind those fingers of his, so they had real knots on the ends.”

Homer looked at her. “Ham played the cello. That's right. I guess I knew that. He played the cello too.”

“Yes, of course he played the cello. He was my teacher.”

“Ham played the cello. So he had calluses on his fingers.”

“Well, of course he did. That's what I said. On his left hand anyway. You don't get much of anything on your right, where you hold the bow.”

“But the man at the funeral parlor said—” Homer picked up Vick's hand again and looked at it. “That certainly is a hard, hard hand.”

“The man at the funeral parlor said what?”

“Oh, nothing.” Homer dropped Vick's hand. “He said Ham's hands were flabby.”

“Flabby?”

“Mr. Ratchit, the funeral director. He showed me his own hands, all tough and callused from hard work, he said. He said the body had white puffy hands. Flabby, he said.”

Vick looked at Homer. She stood up and set her cello down on the floor on its side. She put the bow on the chair. “Ham didn't have flabby hands.”

“Well, I suppose he had fat pudgy hands, only the funeral guy didn't notice they had calluses on the ends.”

“And on the side of the thumb. Here. See, right here.”

“I'll call him and ask him again. It's too bad they didn't take fingerprints. Maybe they did. I'll find out.” Homer turned and started down the stairs.

“Homer, let me talk to him. I just want to ask him—” Vick tripped over her cello. She left it lying flat on its face. She ran after Homer. “Ham didn't have flabby hands, Homer. He didn't.”

Homer called Mr. Ratchit from the pay phone at the north end of the transept. He looked up at the shadowy wooden vault high overhead and asked Mr. Ratchit about calluses.

“Calluses?” said Mr. Ratchit. “Who do you mean? Oh, the guy at Harvard, the bombing victim, the guy without any head? Oh, right. Right you are. Now, what was that about calluses?”

“On his hands. I said, do you remember whether or not he had calluses on his left hand?”

“Oh, no. I remember him well. He was a big corpulent guy, right? He had these real white fat soft hands.”

“But, Mr. Ratchit, the point is, he might have had white fat hands, only he played the cello, so his left hand would have had hard calluses on the ends of his fingers, where they come down on the strings, you see, when you play. Maybe you were just looking at the fingers of his right hand?”

“Oh, no. There weren't any calluses on that corpse. Not anywhere on his entire physique. Except corns. He had these big corns on his feet. But nothing else. You could tell he didn't get any kind of exercise. I looked him over good. Because of my hobby, see, being physical fitness. I mean, I'm in a state of perfect physical fitness myself. But you take a person like that, never takes any exercise. He's bound to get flabby all over. His hands were just soft like spaghetti. You know what I mean. Big flabby pieces of cooked macaroni.”

“Both hands, Mr. Ratchit?”

“Well, sure, both hands.”

“I don't suppose they took any fingerprints, Mr. Ratchit? I mean, because it never occurred to anybody that there was any doubt about the identity of the body.”

“Fingerprints? No, nobody took any fingerprints.”

“Here, just a minute. I'm going to put Miss Van Horn on the phone. She's a cellist. She knows what the calluses should be like. Here, Vick, it's your turn.”

“Mr. Ratchit? I just want to be sure. Do you remember whether or not it was the fingers of both hands that were soft and flabby, or maybe you just noticed one hand, because, you see, the right hand might not have had calluses, because you just hold the bow with the right hand, do you see?”

“No, no, there weren't any calluses. Like I said to Mr. Kelly, I told him, both hands. They were like marshmallows all over. Both hands.”

“Well, then, it couldn't have been Ham Dow! Homer, it wasn't Ham! His hands weren't like marshmallows! Nobody could say that about Ham's hands. Never! Oh, Homer!”

“Hey, there,” said Mr. Ratchit, “are you still there?”

“Mr. Ratchit? This is Kelly again. Look, I think this is probably a difference in language more than anything else. Just a semantic confusion. But just out of curiosity, tell me, if we went to all the bureaucratic trouble of getting an exhumation order, would they still be able to take fingerprints? And do you think a doctor would still be able to tell whether or not a person had calluses on his hands after this amount of time has gone by? It's been six and a half weeks.”

“Well, I don't know. It was you people who didn't want him embalmed. I mean, I told you he should of been embalmed. So I don't know how fast he might have decomposed. I mean, he was beginning to sort of deliquesce already. Fall apart into, like, a jelly. But anyway, I'm telling you. I told you before. There were no calluses on that corpse. He was a big flabby slob of a swollen piece of bloated disgusting—”

“Right. I get the picture.”

“Whereas, if he'd only gotten some exercise. Just a few minutes of the day. In the privacy of your own home. Or you climb the stairs instead of take the elevator. Now, you take me, for instance …”

Vick clutched Homer's arm when he hung up the phone at last. Her eyes were blazing. Her skinny body shook. “It wasn't Ham! Homer, it wasn't Ham!” She pounded his chest with both fists. “I told you that shoe didn't belong to Ham Dow. Remember that shoe? I told you!”

“Now look here, Vick. Don't get excited about it. It's a small thing. A very small thing. I don't have any way of knowing how reliable an observer that Ratchit guy is. He's a crank. A faddist. He may have taken one look at the body and just decided it was too fat and flabby to be anything but a horrible example to the world, and he's making the most of it. And besides, you're forgetting the most important thing. If the body isn't Ham, then who was it? Has anybody else turned up missing? Not a soul. And then too, if it wasn't Ham, where
is
he? Where the hell is he? Before the explosion he was alive and well and present among us. After the explosion he was gone.”

Then Homer had an unhappy thought. Maybe there had been two people killed in the explosion instead of one, but the second one had been blown into pieces so small they had been sprayed all over the walls and floor and the high wooden vault of the building in tiny invisible irrecoverable fragments. He opened his mouth to say this, and then thought better of it. “So tell me, what Could have become of him? We know he wasn't buried in the debris, because they went all through the rubble with a fine-tooth comb.”

“Maybe he ran away.” Vick flung out her arms to show the wide world Ham had run away to. “They were after him. He knew they were after him. He's somewhere in hiding.” She looked up as the north door burst open and a flurry of snow blew into the dark corridor, followed by a cluster of people streaming in the door, laughing with the excitement of the first snowfall, their breath steaming in front of them. Vick pointed past them at the open door. “He's out there somewhere. He's not dead. The dead man wasn't Ham. He's still alive, I tell you, Homer. He's still alive somewhere, somehow. I don't know where, but somewhere.”

A snowball flew the length of the long hall. It smacked against the pale patch of new cement in the middle of the floor and disintegrated.

Homer put his hand to his brow. “Well, oh, God, all right. I'll see. I'll look into it. I'll try to get an exhumation order. I'll probably fail. But I'll try.”

Chapter Thirty-four

Homer and Mary Kelly were still in bed when the phone rang on the morning of December second. “Mr. Kelly? This is Oliphant at Cambridge Police. I just thought you might be interested in something that's turned up at the Harvard Motor House on Mount Auburn Street. Somebody who was there overnight back in October went out in the morning after paying his bill and left his attaché case behind. Then he never came back for it. So they kept it for a while the way they always do, but then when nobody called for it, and he never answered their letter, they opened up this attaché case, and when they saw what was in it they called us. Dynamite sticks and coils of wire and God knows what all. Wait a minute, I've got a list here. Wire, heavy-gauge. Electrician's tape. Miscellaneous clock parts. Staple gun. Sweater. Wrist watch.”

“A sweater? How big was the sweater?”

“Oh, really big. You know. Huge. Couple of petrified bananas. Bag of candy. Toolbox. Tools. Couple of keys. Map of Harvard. Piece of paper with a number on it—198.”

“That could be the room number in the basement of Memorial Hall where the bomb went off.”

“That's what we thought. And there was a Philadelphia newspaper, dated—listen to this—October fifteenth.”

“October fifteenth! The day before! From Philadelphia?”

“Right. We're getting in touch with the department down there. He was registered as—you won't believe this—John Smith of New York City. Funny thing, Mr. Kelly, the wrist watch was still going.”

“Still going? After six weeks?”

“It was one of those really expensive electronic watches. You know. You set it by the stars once a year or something. Really accurate to the second.”

“Was it still keeping good time?”

“Right on the button.”

“Well, thank you very much, Mr. Oliphant. Did you tell Peter Marley over at Harvard Police?”

“Oh, sure. He's the one said to call you. Thought you might be interested.”

“Oh, I am. I certainly am. I'm very much interested indeed.”

Homer put the phone down. Then he put his legs over the side of the bed and picked up the receiver again. He stared out the window for a minute. It was snowing again. It was going to be an early winter. He reached for the phone book, but then he remembered the number by himself—1111—because it looked like a row of tombstones.

“Oh, Mr. Ratchit, I'm sorry to bother you again so early in the morning. It's me again, Homer Kelly. Did I wake you up? I did? Oh, I'm terribly sorry. There's just one more thing. Did that guy who got blown up in Memorial Hall have a watch on his wrist?”

Mr. Ratchit was peevish. “A watch? No, he didn't have a watch. Did he have a pink ribbon in his hair? No, he didn't have a pink ribbon in his hair. Did he have a tattoo on his chest? No, he—”

“You're sure? You're absolutely positive he didn't have a wrist watch?”

“Listen, mister, are you accusing me of stealing a wrist watch from the dead? Because if you are, you can just—”

“Oh, no, no, no, oh, certainly not, Mr. Ratchit. I know you're the soul of integrity. Old family firm. Totally reputable establishment. There was no wrist watch, then. That's all I wanted to know. Thank you again, Mr. Ratchit. I'm really deeply grateful.”

Mary was sitting up in bed, hugging her knees. “What was that all about?”

Homer looked at her. “You know what I think? I think he blew himself up.”

“Who blew himself up? Not Ham Dow?”

“No. The man from Philadelphia. Somebody came up from Philadelphia the day before, a hired killer, I think, and he got the thing all set up. He stapled his dynamite sticks up on the ceiling of Room 198, with the timing device set to go off the next day at eleven-thirty. And then the next day he went back to Memorial Hall for some reason, only he forgot his watch, so he made the mistake of getting too close at the wrong moment, and he got himself blown up for his pains. He was a big fat guy like Ham, so when his head was blown off, everybody assumed this giant dead body was Hamilton Dow.”