“Accidental. Stumbled on Cabell Hall’s second set of books, the ones where he accounted for my payments. Cabell is somewhere up in the mountains, by the way. He ran away because he thought I’d kill him, I guess. He’ll come down in good time. Anyway, Ben proved useful. He fed me information on who was near bankruptcy, and I’d buy their land or lend them money at a high interest rate. So I started to pay him off, too, but . . .” Tommy gasped as a jolt of pain finally reached his senses.
Harry walked over to Mrs. Murphy and picked her off the stall door. She buried her face in the cat’s fur. Then she hunkered down to kiss Tucker. Tears rolled down Harry’s cheeks.
Blair put his good arm around her. She could smell the blood soaking through his shirt and his jacket.
“Let’s take this off.” She helped him remove the jacket. He winced. Cynthia came over, while Rick kept his revolver trained on Tommy.
“Still in there.” Cynthia referred to the bullet. “I hope it didn’t shatter any bone.”
“Me too.” Blair was starting to feel woozy. “I think I better sit for a minute.”
Harry helped him to a chair in the tack room.
Orlando stood next to Rick. He stared at this man whom he once knew. “Tom, you passed, you know.”
Tiny bits of patella were scattered on the barn aisle. A faint smile crossed Tom’s features as he fought back his agony. “Yeah, I fooled everybody. Even that insufferable snob, that bitch of a mother-in-law.” A dark pain twisted his face. His features contorted and he fought for control. “I would never have been able to marry Little Marilyn. Fitz-Gilbert could marry her. Tommy Norton couldn’t.”
“Maybe you’re selling her short.” Orlando’s voice was soothing.
“She’s controlled by her mother” was the matter-of-fact reply. “But you know what’s funny? I learned to love my wife. I never thought I could love anybody.” He looked as if he would weep.
“How much was the Hamilton fortune worth?” Sheriff Shaw asked.
“When I inherited it, so to speak, it was worth twenty-one million. With Cabell’s management and my own attention to it, once I came of age it had grown to sixty-four million. There are no heirs. No Hamiltons are left. Before I killed Fitz, I asked if he had children and he said no.” Tommy deliberately did not look at his knee, as if not seeing it would control the pain.
“Who will get the money?” Orlando wanted to know. After all, money is fascinating.
“Little Marilyn. I made sure of that twice over. She’s the recipient of my will and Fitz-Gilbert’s, the one he signed in my office that October day. Trusting as a lamb. It might take a while but one way or the other my wife gets that money.”
“Exactly how did you kill Fitz-Gilbert Hamilton?” Cynthia inquired.
“Ben panicked. Typical. Weak and greedy. I always told Cabell that Ben could never run Allied after Cabell retired. He didn’t believe me. Anyway, Ben was smart enough to get Fitz in his car and out of the bank before he caused an even greater scene or blurted out who he was. He drove him to my office. Ben was prepared to hang around and become a nuisance. I told him to go back to the bank, that Fitz and I would reach some accord. I said this in front of Fitz. Ben left. Fitz was all right for a bit. Then he became angry when I told him about his money. I made so much more with it than he ever could have! I offered to split it with him. That seemed fair enough. He became enraged. One thing led to another and he swung at me. That’s how my office was wrecked.”
“And you stole the office money from yourself?” Cynthia added.
“Of course. What’s two hundred dollars and a CD player, which is what I listed as missing?” Sweat drenched Tommy’s face.
“So, how did you kill him?” She pressed on.
“With a paperweight. He wasn’t very strong and the paperweight was heavy. I caught him just right, I suppose.”
“Or just wrong,” Harry said.
Tommy shrugged and continued. “No matter. He’s dead now. The hard part was cutting up the body. Joints are hell to cut through.”
Rick picked up the questioning. “Where’d you do that?”
“Back on the old logging trail off Yellow Mountain Road. I waited until night. I stored the body in the closet in my office, picked him up, and then took him out on the logging road. Burying the hands and legs was easy until the storm came up. I never expected it to be that bad, but then everything was unexpected.”
“What about the clothes?” Rick scribbled in his notebook.
“Threw them in the dumpster behind Safeway—the teeth too. If it hadn’t rained so hard and that damned dog hadn’t found the hand, nobody would know anything. Everything would be just as it was . . . before.”
“You think Ben and Cabell wouldn’t have given you trouble?” Harry cynically interjected.
“Ben would have, most likely. Cabell stayed cool until Ben turned up dead.” Tom leaned his head against the wall and shook with pain and fatigue. “Then he got squirrely. Take the money and run became his theme song. Crazy talk. It takes weeks to liquidate investments. Months. Although as a precaution I always kept a lot of cash in my checking account.”
“Well, you might have gotten away with murder, and then again you might not have.” Rick calmly kept writing. “But the torso and the head in the pumpkin—you were pushing it, Tommy. You were pushing it.”
He laughed harshly. “The satisfaction of seeing Mim’s face.” He laughed again. “That was worth it. I knew I was safe. Sure, the torso in the boathouse pointed to obvious hostility against Marilyn Sanburne but so what? The pieces of body in the old cemetery—considering what happened to Robin Mangione—was sure to throw you off the track at some point. I copied her murder to make Blair the prime suspect, just in case something should go wrong. I had backup plans to contend with people—not dogs.” He sighed, then smiled. “But the head in the pumpkin—that was a stroke of genius.”
“You ruined the Harvest Fair for the whole town,” Harry accused him.
“Oh, bullshit, Harry. People will be telling that story for decades, centuries. Ruined it? I made it into a legend!”
“How’d you do it? In the morning?” Cynthia was curious.
“Sure. Jim Sanburne and I catalogued the crafts and the produce. Since he was judging the produce, we decided it wouldn’t be fair for him to prejudge it in any way. I planned to put the head in a pumpkin anyway—another gift for Mim—but this was too good to pass up. Jim was in the auditorium and I was in the gym. We were alone after the people dropped off their entries. It was so easy.”
“You were lucky,” Harry said.
Tom shook his head as if trying to clear it. “No, I wasn’t that lucky. People see what they want to see. Think of how much we miss every day because we discount evidence, because odd things don’t add up to our vision of the world as it ought to be, not as it is. You were all easy to fool. It never occurred to Jim to tell Rick that I was alone with the pumpkins. Not once. People were looking for a homicidal maniac . . . not me.”
The ambulance siren drew closer. “My wife saw what she wanted to see. That night I came home from Sloan’s she thought I was drunk. I wasn’t. We had our sherry nightcap and I took the precaution of putting a sleeping pill in hers. After she went to sleep I went out, got rid of that spineless wonder, Ben Seifert, and when I got back I crawled into bed for an hour and she was none the wiser. I pretended to wake up hung over, as opposed to absolutely exhausted, and she accepted it.”
“Then what was the point of the postcards?” Harry felt anger rising in her face now that the adrenaline from the struggle was ebbing.
“Allied National has one of those fancy desk-top computers. So do most of the bigger businesses in Albemarle County, as I’m sure you found out, Sheriff, when you tried to hunt one down.”
“I did,” came the terse reply.
“They’re not like typewriters, which are more individual. By now Cabell was getting nervous, so we cooked up the postcard idea. He thought it would cast more suspicion on Blair, since he didn’t receive one. Although by that time few people really believed Blair had done it. Cabell wanted to play up the guilty newcomer angle and get you off the scent. Not that I worried about the scent. Everyone was so far away from the truth, but Cabell was worried. I did it for fun. It was enjoyable, jerking a string and watching you guys jump. And the gossip mill.” He laughed again. “Unreal—you people are absolutely unreal. Someone thinks it’s revenge. Someone else thinks it’s demonology. I learned more about people through this than if I had been a psychiatrist.”