“I’m sure people will bid on it. I might even do so myself.” But then something clicked in my mind. “Tell me, Felix. Did you decide to donate this to the bond auction after you heard Rusty Wagner was going to be here?”
He frowned at my question. “Why would I do that?”
“Someone told me he was living in the Cloister at the time of the fire.”
“Really?” He thought about it. “I guess maybe it was after we heard he was coming. Can’t remember who suggested it, though.”
I left the hardware store, wondering more than ever what was bringing Rusty Wagner back to Northmont.
Tuesday was sunny and mild, a perfect spring day to greet the crowd that had turned out for the war-bond rally. It was nothing compared to the Boston crowd, of course, but I recognized several people from Shinn Corners and other towns who’d driven over for the event. We’d set up a stage in the town square, with a billowing flag bunting as a backdrop. The auction items were all on view, including the Cloister door standing upright against one of the backdrop supports.
Just before the rally began, Mayor Bensmith made a point of introducing me to the star attraction, Rusty Wagner. He was shorter than I’d expected, and his features were a bit sharper. Close up I could see the scarring on the right side of his face. It appeared that the skin had been burnt, apparently during the Cloister fire. The damaged area was not large and could have been easily covered by make up if he wished. Accompanying him was his manager, a fellow named Jack Mitchell, looking uncomfortable in a suit already rumpled from their train trip.
“I understand you lived here for a time,” I said, shaking Wagner’s hand.
He smiled pleasantly. “A long time ago, one summer before I moved to New York City. The town has changed a lot since then.”
The mayor rested a hand on his old friend’s shoulder. “We’re going to start in a few minutes. You’d better get in position on the stage.” He turned to me with a wink. “We want to open with a bang, like in Rusty’s movies.”
For a moment I didn’t know what he meant. Then, as Wagner took the stage amidst an outburst of applause, a man in a German officer’s uniform suddenly appeared from behind the flag bunting and stood before the Cloister door, taking aim at him with a Luger pistol. There were screams from the spectators as a shot rang out and Rusty Wagner clutched his chest, falling to the floor.
Immediately Mayor Bensmith sprang to the microphone, holding up his arms to calm the audience. “That, folks, is what could happen right here if not enough of us support our government with war bonds! Happily, the German officer is really our own Milt Stern, and Rusty Wagner is alive to fight another day.” He motioned to the downed star. “Time to greet your public, Rusty!”
But Wagner remained sprawled on the floor of the stage without moving. I went quickly to his side. There was no blood, no sign of a wound, but I knew at once that he was dead.
When a well-known movie star dies before hundreds of people at a bond rally, it makes news all over the country. Mayor Bensmith and Sheriff Lens both knew Northmont would be on the front pages the following day and they turned to me for help. I urged them to calm down, reminding them that we didn’t yet know the cause of Wagner’s death. “One thing we know for sure, whatever killed him, it wasn’t a bullet from Milt Stern’s gun.”
Nevertheless, while the mayor tried to calm the crowd and get on with the war-bond auction, Milt was the first person the sheriff and I questioned. He was a ten-year resident of Northmont, in his mid thirties, married with two children. For the past several years he’d worked at the local feed store. “Is Wagner dead?” he asked us at once. “They took him away in the ambulance and somebody said he was breathing.”
“He’s dead, son,” Sheriff Lens told him. “We just didn’t want to announce it right away and put a damper on things. After the bond rally’s over there’ll be an announcement.”
Stern passed over the German Luger for our examination. “All I had was one blank cartridge in it.” I slid out the clip and confirmed that it was empty. “The mayor got the gun and uniform from a theatrical costume place in Boston.”
“It was the mayor’s idea?” I asked.
“Well, he was talking about something like that to start things with a bang. I volunteered to play a Nazi and fire a blank at him.”
The facts were clear-cut and I would have been awfully surprised if the autopsy showed Rusty Wagner had been poisoned or choked to death. It didn’t. By the following morning we knew that he’d died of a heart attack. There was no wound anywhere on his body.
Still, I stopped by the mayor’s office to have a talk with him. “Apparently the man had a weak heart,” I said. “Maybe that’s what kept him out of the army, that and his age.”
“It’s just a tragedy it had to happen here,” Mayor Bensmith said. “He could have dropped dead in Boston just as well.”
“Tell me something. Did you explain to Wagner exactly what you had planned, with the Nazi officer and all? Did he know someone would fire a blank cartridge at him?”
“Certainly. I went over every bit of it with him as soon as he arrived. My secretary, Rita, was with us at the time.” He called her into the office. “Rita, what did I tell Rusty Wagner when we met him at the station?”
Rita Innes was a prim middle-aged woman who’d worked in Bensmith’s office at the farm before his election as mayor. He’d taken her with him to the elective office and she’d settled in well. Now she answered, “You explained about the man dressed as a Nazi who’d fire a blank at him. He’d fall to the stage and you’d tell the audience to buy bonds. He wasn’t surprised. He said he’d acted out scenes for audiences in other cities, too.”
“The heart attack was just a coincidence, happening when it did,” Bensmith decided.
I had to agree with him. From both a medical and a legal viewpoint, there’d been no crime.
Wagner’s death had completely overshadowed the war-bond auction, and it was a couple of days later before I saw Vera Lens and remembered to ask her about it. “We did well,” she reported, “considering everything.”
“Who bought that door from the Black Cloister?”
“Funny you should ask. It went to a man named Jack Mitchell. He was Rusty Wagner’s manager and was making the tour with him. The door’s still here. We’re supposed to ship it to him in California.”
On the following Monday, the day after Easter, I was driving past the ruins of the old Cloister and decided to stop. Walking through the high grass to the gaping front entrance, I found a roof partly burned through, and weathered walls still showing scars from the fire. There was evidence of children playing there, and ground into the dirt out back I found a used shotgun shell. Every farm family kept a weapon close at hand. There were always varmints on the prowl.
After lunch I stopped in to see Sheriff Lens at his office. “I drove by the Black Cloister this morning and took a look. Can you tell me any more about the fire and your investigation?”
The sheriff gave one of his familiar sighs. “Doc, there’s no crime for you to solve, neither here nor back in nineteen twenty-one. That Rusty Wagner could be killed by a shot from a blank cartridge isn’t an impossible crime, it’s no crime at all!”
“Let’s get back to the Cloister fire for the moment. Tell me about the young man who died there.”
He went over to the file and opened the bottom drawer. “I haven’t looked at that folder myself in years. Probably should have discarded it after all this time.” Opening the slender file, he took out some papers and a few photographs. “The victim’s name was Fritz Heck. He was eighteen, same age as Wagner. Nice-looking fellow. That’s him on the right in this photo.”