“Read the police report.” She handed it to me. “They found her in the basement of her apartment building, hanging by a wire wrapped around her neck, the other end around a hook in a ceiling rafter. Near her was a stool, an aerosol can of cold-start ether, and a rag. The investigators concluded she strung herself up, then used the ether to anesthetize herself so she’d fall off the stool but not suffer while she was strangling to death.” Emmy looked away. “This is so awful. Poor Ina.”
It
“No struggle because she trusted the other person and wasn’t expecting a faceful of ether.” Boothby cocked his right eyebrow up, pointed at me, and turned to Emmy. “Let’s take a look at Ina’s basement. Before suggesting the police got it wrong, let’s see whether what we’re brainifying about makes sense. Tomorrow afternoon?”
“And just what are you three desperadoes conspiring about here?” We all looked up to find Judge Watts leaning against the doorjamb and munching on some grapes, an eyebrow raised in mock suspicion.
“Hi, Gibson,” said Boothby. “Great party! We’re talking to Emmy here about Ina Lederer. Ina was Emmy’s niece.”
He turned to her. “I’m so sorry about what happened, Emmy. Losing a loved one to suicide is the worst kind of loss.”
“I don’t believe it was suicide,” Emmy said. Watts moved into the room and furrowed his brow. “What else could it be then—except … murder?”
“Bingo.” Boothby nodded.
Watts looked incredulous. “Who’d want to murder her?”
Boothby shrugged. “No idea. We’re just brainifying.”
“Wow—murder,” Watts said. “Linwood,” he said to Boothby, “this is both horrifying and intriguing. I’d like to hear your, uh, brainifying when you have a chance—and when I don’t have a party to conduct.” He nodded toward the people in the adjoining room. “Got to go. Again, Emmy, my condolences.”
After Watts left, Boothby stood and held up his glass. “Time to refuel. Emmy, you need to try some of Gibson’s lobster dip. You too, Artie—let’s mingle.”
Ina’s apartment was on the ground floor of a four-story tenement in Lewiston, a dingy nineteenth-century mill town that had been dying for eighty years. Emmy let us in. Ina’s place was neat, but dust on the furniture indicated no one had been there in a while.
She led us to the back of the apartment, then through a door and down steps to the basement. It was a large, open area with brick columns evenly spaced along the length of the room to support carrying timbers. Clotheslines drooped between the columns; a bicycle was chained to one of them; a stool stood next to another. A decrepit upright piano occupied what had probably been the coal bin.
Emmy showed us the hook, embedded in one of the joists, from which Ina was found hanging, and pointed out the stool that Ina was supposed to have used.
“How big was Ina?” Boothby asked Emmy.
“Five-three, a hundred and ten pounds maybe.”
“So how would someone be able to lift her and hold her aloft long enough to hang her off that hook?” Boothby asked me.
“Had to be strong,” I said, “so I’m guessing a man. Maybe he wrapped the wire around her neck, boosted her onto his shoulder, climbed onto the stool, wrapped the other end of the wire around the hook, and let her go.”
“Next question: Why use a wire? Why not some of that clothesline?”
“Clothesline’s fragile, might break. The police report says it was a piano wire, probably from that wrecked piano.”
We walked over to it. Its keyboard resembled a mouthful of rotted teeth, and it lacked its upper and lower front panels. Several strings dangled free of their pins, and some were missing altogether.
Boothby studied it. “Using a piano wire supports the idea of suicide because the means of death is right here.”
Emmy spoke up: “Ina’s apartment is the only one in the building with direct access to the basement. That other door”—she pointed to the rear—“leads to a common stairway for the other apartments. Someone in Ina’s apartment could get down here and back up without much risk of being seen.”
Boothby nodded. “What’s going to happen to her apartment?”
“I’ve got to sublet it. Ina’s lease has another six months to run and doesn’t have a clause that terminates it upon death. So if you’re done, why don’t I show you out? I need to clean it to get it ready.”
As we got into Boothby’s vehicle of choice, a gray 1980s four-door Citroen—another of his iconoclasms—I said, “Judge, the wire didn’t come from that piano.”
“Why not?”
“I know that the longest bass string on an upright is about three feet. To do the job right—sorry—with a stool as short as the one we saw, you need something long enough to wrap around the hook, wrap around her neck, and still leave slack. Like a string from a grand piano.”
“Okay, so?”
“Bear with me. What do you know about cocaine?”
“Between you and me and this gear shift, I did a line once when I was in the army. I felt great for an hour and instantly understood why it’s so popular. And also why I should avoid it.”
“Cocaine makes you feel like a million bucks, doesn’t it? But besides dependence, overuse produces nosebleeds. Snorting too much burns out your nose tissue, which renders the blood vessels fragile.”
“Another reason to avoid it. What’s your point?”
“Judge Watts’s law clerk told me the judge had been suffering nosebleeds. Recently one was bad enough he had to recess a jury trial for forty-five minutes.”
Boothby hit the brakes. The driver behind us blared his horn angrily and swept around us. Boothby ignored him and narrowed his eyes at me: “You’re calling Gibson Watts a cocaine addict?” Eyebrows down, he was incredulous. “More likely he’s Clark Kent and suffering exposure to kryptonite.”
“I’m not calling him anything, but please hear me out. He also has a grand piano. And some of its bass strings were recently replaced, or at least that’s what Julia Austrian thought. The investigation report said Ina was hanged on a bass piano string.”
Boothby was glowering at me, but at least he seemed to be listening.
“This is probably a coincidence,” I continued, “but coincidences always get my antennae quivering. Suppose Judge Watts had been buying cocaine from Ina, and someone told him about Doak’s plea bargain. He had to have been worried Ina would report him in exchange for a plea bargain, too.”
Boothby was silent. Then he checked the outside mirror and resumed driving. “Watts knows about the plea bargain. I mentioned it at lunch the next day.”
We drove in silence. I looked at him. Eyebrows down: trouble coming.
He stopped for a red light. “A couple of years ago I ran into one of Watts’s law school classmates at a bar meeting in Vermont. He asked how ‘Tini’ Watts was doing. In law school they called him ‘Martini,’ a play on his name, Gibson. It also reflected his love affair with gin.”
“T-i-n-i. As in T-e-e-n-i-e from the diary? Holy shit.” I thought about it. “Are you going to tell the police?”
The light turned green, and he continued driving. “Gibson Watts is a friend of mine, and he’s a wonderful judge. Report this and I’m jeopardizing his career—just try to get renominated to another judicial term after you’ve been suspected of drug use, let alone murder. Right now all we’ve got are some unconnected dots.”
“Judge, let me find out who tunes Judge Watts’s piano; perhaps the strings weren’t changed, or if they were, they can be accounted for.”
“Good idea. Meanwhile, we’d better interrupt Emmy’s cleaning. Best to preserve any DNA evidence the forensics people might find. Suspecting suicide, they might not have scoured the place as thoroughly as they would if they were thinking murder.” He made a sudden, swooping U-turn that would have earned him a ticket if any of Lewiston’s finest had seen it.
A couple of days later I was standing at the sidewalk hot dog stand in front of the courthouse when Boothby came up to me and suggested a walk in the park. I slapped some mustard on my dog and followed him across the street and onto a bricked walkway leading to a large pond in the middle.
