“I’ll call him.”
A moment later I had the sheriff’s familiar voice on the other end of the line. “Where are you, Doc?”
“Over in Shinn Corners, checking the real-estate transactions regarding the new college.”
“Why the college?” he wondered.
“It was the last deal Hiram Mullins worked on before his full retirement.”
“Find anything?”
“A motive, I think.”
“We’ve got something too. My deputies came up with a pair of bloodstained overalls. Earl Gunther admits they’re his. Had his initials inside.”
“Where were they found?”
“On the bank of the creek. Looks like Earl rolled them up and tossed them into the water, only they fell about a foot short. There’s a collar and tie with bloodstains, too. Remember, they were missing from Hiram’s body.”
“I remember. What are you going to do now?”
“Arrest Earl Gunther for the murder, of course. Those overalls are the proof we need.”
“Look, Sheriff, you can bring him in for questioning but don’t charge him yet. I’ll be at your office in an hour.”
I covered the back country roads in record time and arrived at the sheriffs office just as he was starting to question the cemetery superintendent. Linda Gunther was outside in the waiting room, looking nervous, and I tried to comfort her.
“Earl’s in trouble, isn’t he?”
“Yes, but he could be in lots worse trouble. Try to relax until we finish talking to him.”
Inside the office Sheriff Lens was talking with Gunther while a deputy made notes. “I never wore those overalls to kill Mullins,” the superintendent was saying. “Someone found them in the tool shed.”
“Come on, Earl – you expect us to believe that?”
“I’m innocent!” He turned to me for help. “You believe me, don’t you, Dr Hawthorne?”
I sat down across the table and chose my words carefully. “You didn’t kill Mullins, but you’re hardly innocent, Earl. You’d better tell us the whole truth if you expect to get out of this with your hide.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know how the body got into the Brewster coffin.”
“I-”
“What you gettin’ at, Doc?” the sheriff asked.
“We’ve been saying all along that the ground over those coffins was solid and undisturbed, and that’s perfectly true. But the ground on the creek side was a different story. The coffins were being moved, remember, because the waters of the flooded creek had so eroded the banks of the creek that some coffins were actually visible, held only by the tree roots that enveloped them. The morning of the murder I watched your crews shovel away the soft dirt and chop out those roots.”
“Then you saw that I didn’t-”
“I saw what you wanted me to see, Earl. That dirt was soft because it had been removed and replaced the night before. You went down there and saw one coffin virtually free of the earth, its corner badly damaged. You were afraid I, or one of the other trustees, would raise a fuss if we saw that, so you removed it yourself, using the block and tackle on your flatbed truck. You placed the coffin on the truck, carefully hiding it beneath a bulky folded tarpaulin and some tools. You had two crews digging, concentrating on their own efforts, not paying much attention to each other. At some point when I’d strolled off examining tombstones it was easy enough for you to yank off the tarp and reveal one more coffin. I remember thinking that the second and third coffins appeared on the truck before I knew it.”
“If he pulled that trick he must have killed Mullins,” the sheriff argued.
“Not at all. Earl had been in trouble with the trustees before and he was afraid we’d fire him for sure if we saw how bad he’d allowed that Brewster plot to get. He was only worried about his job. He had no way of knowing a murderer would find the coffin in the early morning hours and decide it was the perfect place to hide a body.”
Sheriff Lens was still sceptical. “Who’d have a motive for killing the old guy?”
“Someone who’d used him to assemble parcels of land for the new college. Someone in a position to hear the talk about a possible new community cemetery with Shinn Corners and use that information to buy up property, then derail that project and sell the land to the private college for a huge profit.”
“You talkin’ about one of the trustees, Doc?”
“Exactly. No one else would have had the knowledge and the position to bring it off. No one else could have enlisted Mullins’s help when he was in virtual retirement. I found the name I expected on those deeds over in Shinn Corners this afternoon. Mullins must have threatened to talk, or maybe tried a little blackmail. It’s doubtful that anyone but another board member could have lured him to the cemetery early that morning, probably on the pretext of checking the erosion, and then killed him. The killer had to know about the tool shed, and the extra overalls, to protect his clothing from bloodstains. The killer might even have had a key, in case the shed was locked. The trustee put on the overalls, picked up the hedge trimmers, and went out to meet Mullins when he arrived. A quick thrust beneath the rib cage and it was over. The coffin lid was unscrewed and Mullins was added to those long-dead bones. Only there was too much blood, and a damaged coffin that allowed it to seep through and be seen.”
“Which one, Doc?”
“Even without the name on those courthouse records I would have known. The overalls covered everything except the killer’s collar and the top of the tie. Why were the dead man’s collar and tie missing? Certainly he’d worn them. Mullins even wore them to summer picnics. No, the blood didn’t get on the victim’s collar and tie but on the killer’s! A few drops splattered above the protective overalls. So the killer discarded his and replaced them with the victim’s. The bull-necked Mullins would have had a collar big enough to fit any of the other trustees.”
“Which one, Doc?” Sheriff Lens asked again.
“There was only one possibility. Miss Taylor is a woman, after all, with no need for male attire. Randy Freed and I wear shirts with attached collars. Only the dead man and Dalton Swan still wore the detachable collars. Dalton Swan, president of the board of trustees, whose term began before the land deal was closed, who was in the best position to hush up any proposal for a community cemetery and buy the land for himself, who could have gotten Mullins to front for him with the college people, who knew about the tool shed and could have killed Mullins and hidden the body without difficulty, who would have needed to replace his own bloodstained collar and tie before appearing that morning at his bank. The collar and tie you found can be traced to Swan. That and the land deal should be all the evidence you need.”
“Dalton Swan…”
“That’s your killer. Go get him, Sheriff.”
DEATH RIDES THE ELEVATOR by Lois H. Gresh & Robert Weinberg
