“Why not? Look what he did to his family. The boy, Myron’s the boy’s name, he’s a lost soul since his mother got killed. Took it hard,” and Mr. Hergesheimer told the story again as he had told it so often to whoever would listen, pointing out the position of the body, assisted by Mr. Polk, who on his way home to Elm Street, stopped in at the liquor store to add his imaginative recollection of hearing the get-away car that night. “It zoomed,” he said, “made an awful racket and I thought then whoever’s in that car is running away from something. And, sure enough, he was running away from murder.”
Mr. Hergesheimer said, “I’m standing right on the spot where Bruton found his wife. Right here, with the liquor store gun, loaded, laying on the shelf above her head, so that punk of a kid must have walked in right behind his shotgun and froze her in her tracks—”
“Who knows?” said the attorney mildly. “It might have been like that. She also might have frozen at the threat of a gun by an unarmed goon. It’s possible too that later, when the killer came through the back door—” the attorney glanced that way at a door inset not more than two feet so that anyone who stepped through could be seen from any position at the counter — “she saw and recognized who had entered, and so did not reach for the gun, not because she was frozen with terror, but because she knew and trusted him and did not realize she needed to defend herself until he brought out the shotgun and killed her dead.”
Mr. Hergesheimer looked confused and said, “Huh?” Mr. Polk offered his memory of the get-away car. “Oh, come on,” Mr. Hergesheimer said as if he suspected the customer of being one of those liberal softies always crying over criminals and excusing them for their crimes, “you’re being real far out. The kid came in the front door, got the money and the liquor, then got trigger-happy and blasted away, and flew out the back door.”
“I heard the getaway car,” interrupted Mr. Polk.
“How could anyone come in the back door without a key? The only people who had keys to that back door were the Brutons.”
“Yes,” said the attorney. “Bruton and the son.”
“Hey,” said Hergesheimer, “you trying to accuse Bruton of killing his wife? Why, he was at the council meeting and the boy was home studying — that’s what Mr. Bruton said. He said when he went home to tell Myron what had happened, there he was, studying.”
The attorney laughed easily. “I was only theorizing,” he said. “After all, with this new trial coming up, people wonder and suppose things.”
“You don’t have to wonder about the Brutons,” said Mr. Hergesheimer with conviction. “Why, Mr. Bruton! There’s no finer man ever lived! Practically worked himself to death in this liquor store to provide for his family. He was here all the time except for those first Wednesdays of the month when he went to council meeting. And the son, well now, Myron was the kind of son any man’d want, studied hard and got good grades. Wonderful to his mother. Took her every place. You wouldn’t catch him with a girl. He dated his mother. Fine boy, real fine boy. That’s all changed now after she got killed. You wouldn’t know him. Dropped out of college. Doesn’t do anything because everything he did he did with his mother, Mr. Bruton said. Like playing cards and chess and going places. Even target practice and shooting rabbits—” and a muscle jumped in the attorney’s jaw.
“But no more. Not even that. Mr. Bruton told me he found the shotgun in the back of the boy’s closet, wrapped up, he said, in one of his mother’s dresses. Now, that’s pitiful, the boy grieving that way.”
“Isn’t it though?” said the attorney thoughtfully.
“Spends a lot of his time out at the cemetery just sitting there by her grave.”
“I heard the getaway car just as clear,” said Mr. Polk.
The attorney picked up his purchases and turned from the counter.
“How about signing the petition?” asked Mr. Hergesheimer.
The attorney turned back.
“No,” he said. “I want a new trial for that boy on death row. I am his attorney.”
Mr. Hergesheimer watched him out the door, and then said softly, “Hey, what was he doing?” and Mr. Polk’s imaginative memory became so faulty that he wondered if, after all, he wasn’t watching television the night of the murder, with the sound turned high as he always watched television, every night.
By the time Mr. Bruton had collected 30,238 signatures and had taken off for the State Capitol, surrounded at the airport by civic-minded well-wishers and tight-lipped crime-busters, counsel for the defense had obtained a court order to search for and examine a shotgun in the Bruton home which, when found, was wrapped in one of Mrs. Bruton’s dresses just as Mr. Hergesheimer had said it would be.
“What else could I do?” asked Myron, once the slugs from the shotgun were discovered to be identical with the slugs in Mrs. Bruton’s body, a statement that baffled the police but not the psychiatrists. “She was my mother.”
“So this is a whole new ball game,” patiently explained the attorney to his client. “You will be charged now with robbery only.”
“Prove it,” sneered Tommy Tyler.
His parents were confused.
“You mean,” ventured Mr. Tyler, “that there will be a new trial even after all those names on all those petitions in all those stores?” His shoulders sagged with the weight of more trouble. “Oh no,” quavered Mrs. Tyler, protecting her breasts.
Mr. Hergesheimer continued to tend the liquor store that was doing a land office business. Mr. Polk still dropped in after work.
“The Bruton boy,” said Mr. Hergesheimer, “that Myron. He always seemed so great,” and shook his head in bewilderment. “Do you think,” he asked, leaning over the counter whose shiny top was slightly marred by the dull and sticky squares left by scotch tape, “Do you think Mr. Bruton knocked himself out with those petitions to keep that poor kid from a retrial simply because he knew, all along, that his son had killed his mother?”
Mr. Polk considered the question, remembering his own hallucinatory recollection, and said, “No. He didn’t know. And that was the pity.”
Campus Murder With Tomahawk
by Waldo Carlton Wright
Furtive and illicit was his love, sudden and primeval his dying. Who killed the campus lover boy — and why?
It was natural for the faculty to suspect Martha Gordon of murdering her husband. Then Dr. Cloute, president of Horseham College, reminded the troopers that Natty, a half breed Indian maintenance man, was the only one who could have used the tomahawk so effectively.
I was just back from the boondocks that spring semester, teaching journalism, when the bludgeoned body of Cyril Gordon was found naked in the hemlock woods back of campus.
Horseham College, with ivy draped red brick Old Main, huddled on a knoll, is one of those half forgotten New England colleges where even today the house mothers are more likely to call the president the headmaster and the catalogs still offer Elocution as a liberal arts subject.
Cyril Gordon, tall, lean, with wavy flaxen hair, was teaching Dramatics. He lived with his red headed wife Martha in Wentworth Hall. Everyone could hear them quarreling. That is, her tearing him apart, even at rehearsals. It was pretty plain she was jealous of Eve Hackett, and not without cause.
Eve Hackett had come to Horseham a tight lipped virgin several years ago, directly from Durham, as dean of women. In addition to counseling the farm girls on the naughty ways of the birds and the bees, she taught Speech 101 with appropriate gestures. Dr. Cloute approved of Miss Hackett’s distinctly Harvard accent, being a New Hampshire man himself.