Archie Goes Home Page 4

  I was expecting a prim, middle-aged columnist much like Cora Ann Wilson, who had been a guest speaker in one of my high school classes and who had preached to us students the importance of getting as many local residents mentioned in print as possible. “People love to see their names in the paper, and always in a positive context, of course,” Cora Ann had said in a tone that brooked no argument.

  The first desk I came to was occupied by a slender woman in her twenties with long, chestnut hair, a straight nose that was just the right length, and the heart-shaped face of one who might earlier have been a homecoming queen. “I am looking for Verna Kay Padgett,” I said, fully expecting to eventually encounter a carbon copy of Cora Ann Wilson.

  “You have found her, and you must be Mr. Goodwin,” she replied, standing, smoothing her skirt, and giving me a dimpled smile that lit up the room. “It is so nice to meet you.”

  I think I recovered from my surprise and took the slender hand that was offered to me. “Your aunt said you wanted to talk about Logan Mulgrew’s death,” Verna Kay said. “May I suggest we have coffee down at White’s Rexall Drugs? I don’t have any deadlines right now.”

  “Fine by me,” I told her, “but only with the stipulation that I buy.”

  She agreed, and we set off for the drugstore. “How long have you been at the Trumpet?” I asked as we walked along the shop-lined streets.

  “Just over two years now, ever since I graduated from the state university over in Athens with a journalism degree. And very honestly, just between us, I am ready to move on to a larger paper in a larger city. I’ve sent résumés to dailies in both Toledo and Cleveland, but I would prefer you keep that to yourself.”

  “Consider it done. Are things a little too quiet for you here?”

  That brought another smile. “Such is the case most of the time, but I had to get my start somewhere. The bigger papers that I applied to before I graduated told me I needed to get some experience first, and the Trumpet happened to have an opening.”

  “And so now you are getting that experience,” I said as we entered the drugstore and perched on stools at the marble-topped lunch and soda counter. “Do you believe Logan Mulgrew killed himself?”

  “You get right to the point, don’t you? I like that, no beating around the bush. I’m sure that’s the mark of a good detective. In answer to your question, I think his death was very suspicious. I interviewed him once, and he seemed to be healthy and in fine shape for his age. Why should he want to kill himself?” Verna Kay posed as we were served coffee.

  “My aunt has asked the same question.”

  “Your aunt is quite a character, isn’t she? And I mean that in a positive way. I assume she has shared her theories with you.”

  “That she has. What do you think of those theories of hers?”

  “There is no question whatever that Logan Mulgrew had made more than his share of enemies over the years. You don’t have to spend much time in this town to learn that. I come from a town way over near Cincinnati, but within a few weeks of moving here, I began to hear stories about him, and many of them were not very nice stories.”

  “By chance, did you happen to get some of these stories from my aunt?”

  The color rose in Verna Kay’s cheeks. “Well . . . she certainly has been a good source of local lore. But just so you know, Mr. Goodwin, everything I have heard from Edna I also verified through other sources.”

  “That sounds like a good reporting procedure, and before we go any further, please call me Archie.”

  “I will, and I go by Katie to my friends, who gave me that name in college. I’ve never liked being called Verna, but I was named for my favorite aunt, so what can you do but live with it until you’re old enough to choose an alternative?”

  “It seems to me that Katie is a fine alternative. Now . . . tell me what you have concluded, if anything, about the demise of one Logan Mulgrew.”

  “I am sure that he was killed, Archie,” she said in what I would term an intense whisper, if there is such a thing.

  “A few minutes ago, you called Mulgrew’s death ‘extremely suspicious.’ Now, all of a sudden, you seem to have a more definite opinion.”

  “I’m guessing your aunt told you about a shot that was fired through my apartment window.”

  “I was going to get to that, but since you brought the subject up, tell me what you think about it.”

  “Gunfire is very rare around here, making it very unlike conditions in New York.”

  “Now you sound like my mother, who thinks the big city is an armed camp. This despite the fact that she’s been to visit me in New York several times and has yet to hear a single gunshot.”

  “I’m sorry, Archie,” Katie said, shaking her head. “I know that I can be guilty of stereotyping. My point was that because gunfire is so rare around here, I don’t believe that shot to be a coincidence.”

  “I shouldn’t think you would. What do the local police say about what happened—especially Blankenship?”

  “Have you met him?”

  “No, remember that I just got here yesterday. I’ve heard a little about him from my mother and my aunt. Give me your take on the man.”

  She shrugged. “He’s all right, I suppose, and certainly earnest enough. But I’m not sure he’s got enough experience to deal with what sure looks like a murder. He’s behaving, at least publicly, like he still believes Mulgrew’s death was a suicide.”

  “How does he explain the shot through your window?”

  “He said he thinks it was just some guy who became trigger-happy after getting loaded in some bar. After all, he stressed that this did occur on a Saturday night, when, as he pointed out, some locals do get tanked up.”

  “Even though gunshots, as you pointed out, are very rarely heard in these parts.”

  “Unless you count hunters,” Katie Padgett said, “and this isn’t hunting season.”

  “Was the incident covered by the Trumpet?”

  “Yes, but not by me; another reporter on the staff wrote about it. They wouldn’t have wanted me to write about something in which I was the subject. That is simply not a good journalism practice.”

  “Understood. Was Blankenship quoted in the article?”

  Katie nodded. “He said pretty much what I just mentioned, about somebody getting drunk and going on a Saturday night toot.”

  “Did anyplace else in town get shot up that night?”

  “You ask very good questions, Archie. You would have made a fine reporter if you hadn’t decided to be a detective.”

  “Aw shucks, it’s just my inborn curiosity. I repeat my query.”

  “Of course, I posed that to Tom Blankenship, and he said no other gunshots were reported in town that night.”

  “When’s the last time you talked to Blankenship, either on the telephone or in person?”

  “That was the last time. He hasn’t returned any of my calls since then. I really don’t believe he wants to speak to me.”

  “Do you think the chief is honest and efficient?”

  “I do, but I also believe that he is in over his head on the Mulgrew death.”

  “So it’s safe to say he hasn’t interviewed anyone about what happened, right?”

  “That’s true, with the exception of a grandniece, Donna Newman, the granddaughter of Mulgrew’s brother-in-law. She’s the one who found her uncle dead in his living room with a bullet wound to the head and a pistol on the sofa cushion beside him. She went to the house when he hadn’t been at the bank for two days and his telephone at home went unanswered.”

  “Didn’t the man have some sort of live-in or part-time help?”

  “You would think with his money that he would have,” Katie answered, “but he is said to have prided himself on his independence. He cooked his own meals when he wasn’t eating out, and he did his own housecl
eaning, according to his grandniece. I suspect that he was a skinflint.”

  “Have you talked to the niece?”

  “I have, and she seems to be genuinely broken up about her great-uncle’s death. Donna, who is single and is a high school English teacher in a town about thirty miles west of here, told me she made it a point to stop by and see him once or twice every week. She naively seemed to overlook the faults that others saw in the man.”

  “And the niece felt that he had killed himself?”

  “She told me that she wasn’t really sure. One the one hand, she said her great-uncle had been somewhat despondent because of his wife’s death, but on the other hand, she said that in the days before he died, he seemed to have a renewed interest in life, although she wasn’t quite sure what had caused it. She seemed to be of two minds on how he died.”

  “Now Verna Kay, or rather, Katie, I would like to get your thoughts on who you think might have wanted Logan Mulgrew dead.”

  Chapter 7

  Katie, as I now refer to Verna Kay Padgett, coughed nervously and drained the coffee from her cup. “Okay, now if I am repeating things that your aunt already has told you, let me know.”

  “Let us not worry about dear Aunt Edna. It is your perspective that I’m interested in.”

  “Okay, here we go,” she said, coughing again, apparently a nervous habit. “A local man named Charles Purcell started a bank here several years ago, and Mulgrew did not like the new competition one bit. He had been used to having things all his own way for years, so he methodically went about sabotaging the Purcell operation by starting rumors that it was undercapitalized, and that depositors were likely to lose every cent they deposited.”

  “Was there any evidence this was true?”

  “Not that I have been able to learn. Bear in mind that much of this happened well before I arrived in town, but I have talked to at least a dozen residents, and several of them felt Mulgrew was just plain fighting dirty.”

  “Did any of the people you talked to make deposits in the new Purcell bank?”

  Katie smiled. “Good question. A few did, but several others admitted they were scared away and later regretted it, or so they then claimed.”

  “Talk is cheap. Where were those folks when the man needed them to get his operation going? And where is Purcell now?” I asked, knowing the answer but wanting to get Katie’s perspective.

  “His bank’s failure wiped out the man financially, and he ended up having to sell his house to pay his debts. He started drinking heavily, his wife left him, and he now lives in town with his son and daughter-in-law. He was always good with cars, so now he works as a mechanic for a local garage.”

  “Well, at least the man’s employed,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s the good news, such as it is,” Katie said. “The bad news is that, as I said, he has hit the bottle pretty hard, and he’s been heard in a bar just down the street from here cursing out Mulgrew and using threatening words like ‘that vicious son of a bitch.’”

  “Sounds like a potential murder suspect, all right. Who else is a possibility?”

  “A dairy farmer named Harold Mapes, who borrowed money from Mulgrew’s bank. Then he had a bad year—some sort of cow disease is what I heard—and he didn’t have the money to keep up his interest payments. Mulgrew foreclosed on him, and he lost the farm. He and his wife now work as tenants on another farm nearby, owned by a man from out of town, I think. Mapes is bitter, as you would suspect, and like Purcell, he has been heard to berate Mulgrew, saying things like ‘I’d like to strangle that son of a gun.’ Except he didn’t use ‘son of a gun.’”

  “It seems that Logan Mulgrew could win the ‘Town’s Most Hated’ award.”

  “I’m not done, Archie, there’s a lot more. Your aunt may have mentioned Lester Newman, who was a brother-in-law of Mulgrew and also the grandfather of Donna, the one who found Mulgrew dead.” I nodded but said nothing, Katie’s cue to continue.

  “Newman, who people I’ve talked to say is mentally unstable, is absolutely convinced that Logan Mulgrew killed his wife, Sylvia, by giving her an overdose of her heart medicine.”

  “Had she lived with a coronary condition for a long time?”

  “Several years, and she also had become increasingly senile, hence her death was ruled as accidental, the assumption being that she unwittingly gave herself an overdose.”

  “Sounds plausible on the surface,” I remarked.

  “Maybe, but from what I hear, Newman was convinced that Mulgrew killed his wife because he was having an affair with the woman who was brought in to be his wife’s caregiver.”

  “What do you think of that theory?”

  “Despite his age, Mulgrew apparently still had, shall we say . . . strong urges,” she said, her cheeks coloring. “And he had yielded to these urges on several occasions in the past, if the talk around town can be believed.”

  “Some things don’t change,” I said. “I grew up in and around this burg years ago, and it was always filled with what you refer to as ‘talk.’ I seem to remember there were gossipmongers everywhere—with the exception, I am happy to say, of my mother.”

  “But not the exception of your aunt?” Katie posed with eyebrows raised.

  “No, I don’t except Aunt Edna. She has always been interested, perhaps too interested, in the activities of her neighbors and other townspeople. As I’m sure you have learned, there aren’t too many secrets in these smaller towns. Tell me about this caregiver Mulgrew’s wife had.”

  “That would be Carrie Yeager, a professional nurse. I have seen her only once, at that pro forma coroner’s inquest into Sylvia Mulgrew’s death. She must be in about her midthirties and is quite attractive—tall, slender, dark-haired, and with a figure that attracts second looks, particularly from men. She generated a lot of talk around town.”

  “And the talk—ah, there’s that word again—is that Miss Yeager, I assume she’s a miss, was involved with the late Mr. Mulgrew.”

  “Yes, Carrie is single, or possibly divorced. And it was more than talk, of that I am absolutely sure,” Katie said. “While she was Sylvia’s caregiver, she dined out frequently with Mulgrew, presumably to discuss the bedridden woman’s condition. And after Sylvia’s death, the two continued to be seen at local restaurants fairly often.”

  “And she stayed in Mulgrew’s house?” I asked.

  “Oh no, they were not quite as blatant as all that. After the wife’s funeral, Carrie moved into an apartment downtown, and Mulgrew was spotted visiting her there. And they also kept on dining together, at least a few times a week.”

  “Where is Carrie now?”

  “Nobody seems to know. A few days after Mulgrew’s death, she moved out of her apartment and hasn’t been seen around town. And by the way, she did not go to his funeral.”

  “I gather you were there. Was it well attended?”

  “Sort of,” Katie said. “A lot of people from the bank, of course, and a scattering of others, including a few local businessmen who probably showed up because they wanted to stay on good terms with the bank. There were also a few older ladies there, including your aunt.”

  “I’m sure Edna has never been one to miss a funeral, whether she liked the deceased or not. So our caregiver disappeared without a trace?”

  “I don’t believe anyone has tried very hard to locate her, Archie. And remember, our police chief would hardly bother, given that he does not suspect foul play, to use a phrase I’m sure you’re familiar with.”

  “Foul play? Sure, I use those words all the time,” I said with a wink. “We private eyes would be lost without them in our vocabularies, along with ‘dames,’ ‘gats,’ ‘thugs,’ and ‘coppers.’ Now, have we covered all the people who might have wanted to see Logan Mulgrew six feet under?”

  “I can think of one other person who bears consideration,” Katie said as sh
e pivoted on her stool to face me. “His name is Eldon Kiefer, and his daughter, Becky, was once one of Mulgrew’s secretaries at the bank.”

  “Go on.”

  “You probably have an idea where I’m heading with this, Archie. Kiefer accused Mulgrew of sexually molesting his daughter and getting her pregnant—a pregnancy that is supposed to have ended with an abortion, location unknown. Not surprisingly, Kiefer threatened Mulgrew, who of course denied having any sort or relationship with the girl. He, Mulgrew, acted outraged and claimed that Becky had an overactive imagination. I wanted to write something about all this, but my lily-livered bosses on the paper thought it would open us up to lawsuits.”

  “What did Becky have to say about what happened?”

  “Ah, there lies part of the problem: she apparently does not have a lot of self-confidence, and if what I’ve heard is true, she begged her father not to press charges against Mulgrew.”

  “But she did have an abortion?” I posed.

  “That has not even been established, and I’m not sure how it could be verified. After all, a lot of these abortion mills are backstreet operations. And Becky sure isn’t about to tell us anything—if indeed the abortion really took place. I’ve tried to call her repeatedly without success.”

  “Speaking of Becky, what is she doing now?” I asked.

  “Working at a bank up in Cleveland, and living there in an apartment, as far as I’ve been able to tell.”

  “Does her father live around here?”

  “Yes, Kiefer is a long-distance truck driver, who has a house in town with his wife. He is a strange duck, withdrawn and not given to socialization, according to those I’ve spoken to who know him. Also, he hangs out in a local tavern, not unlike Purcell. The only time I got hold of him on the telephone, he hung up on me after suggesting that I ‘go straight to hell.’”

  “You mentioned earlier that you interviewed Mulgrew once. What were the circumstances?”