I did not realize the farmhouse where I stopped for a drink of water was the Peters place until I saw Jud Peters through a basement window. The lane approached the house from one side, and I was just stepping onto the gravel walk which led alongside the house when I glanced at an open basement window at the corner and received the shocking impression I was going to be shot by a rifle.
After my initial leap of panic I saw that the rifle was clamped in a workbench vise, and merely happened to be pointing upward directly at me. Jud Peters seemed to be doing something to the stock.
He looked up in time to see my startled expression, and grinned. “Afternoon. Mr. Chalmers. I’m not aiming this at you. You’re aiming yourself at it.”
And twisting the handle of the vise, he released the rifle and stood the weapon out of sight.
“Be right out,” he told me.
And that’s all there really is to the background. I got my drink of water, had a few minutes chat with Jud Peters, and went on my way. That evening I returned to New York, and two days later Tom Mathewson was struck by a spent bullet while seated in his duck blind. There seemed to be no question in the coroner’s mind about it being an accident, since from the angle of impact and the depth of penetration, it was possible to deduce that the bullet had come from a hunting rifle several miles away.
When Chalmers stopped, I said, “How do you make a murder out of all that?”
“I didn’t until this morning,” he said. “But now it occurs to me Jud Peters was not only an artilleryman, but a communications sergeant. About a hundred yards from Tom’s private lake is a densely-wooded knoll and on top of it I recall spotting a telephone pole. Now this is all assumption, you understand, but suppose that pole was the one that supported the telephone wires going to Jud Peters’ place, and suppose Jud cut in a phone to connect that knoll to his phone at home: Certainly if he had an old hand-set around, a communications sergeant could rig up a simple system like that. An observer — say, his wife — could stand on the knoll, completely hidden by foliage and report how many yards over, short, or to one side the splashes were each time Jud fired the rifle — the rifle I saw clamped in his vise and aimed in the direction of Mathewson’s lake.”
I could not help grinning. “No wonder you hesitated about going to the police. On that mass of assumptions, and entirely lacking evidence, you couldn’t even get them to listen to you. What put such a fantastic idea in your head?”
“This morning’s mail,” Chalmers said. “First, there was a letter from a Catskill accounting firm enclosing an audit of Jud Peters’ total resources. Including an estimated value on the farm, it came to exactly $63,000. In a separate envelope there was a check from Jud Peters for $3150 made out to the estate of Thomas Mathewson III.”
I looked blank. “For what?”
“It was marked. For value received. Take one-twentieth of $63,000 and see what you get.”
Mugger Murder
Originally published in Manhunt, April 1953.
I was surprised to see Sergeant Nels Parker in the Coroner’s Court audience, for homicide detectives spend too much of their time there on official business to develop any morbid curiosity about cases not assigned to them. I was in the audience myself, of course, but as a police reporter this was my regular beat on Friday mornings, and after five years of similar Friday mornings, nothing but the continued necessity of making a living could have gotten me within miles of the place.
When I spotted him two rows ahead of me, I moved up and slid into the vacant seat next to him.
“Busman’s holiday, Sergeant?” I asked.
His long face turned and he cocked one dull eye at me. For so many years Nels had practiced looking dull in order to throw homicide witnesses off guard, the expression had become habitual.
“How are you, Sam?” he said.
“You haven’t got a case today, have you?” I persisted.
His head gave a small shake and he turned his eyes front again. Since he seemed to have no desire to explain his presence, I let the matter drop. But as the only inquest scheduled was on the body of a Joseph Garcia, age twenty-one and of no known address, I at least knew what case interested him.
The first witness was a patrolman named Donald Lutz, a thick bodied and round faced young fellow who looked as though he, like the dead man, was no more than twenty-one.
In response to the deputy coroner’s request to describe the circumstances of Joseph Garcia’s death as he knew them, the youthful patrolman said, “Well, it was Wednesday... night before last... about eleven thirty, and I was walking my beat along Broadway just south of Market. As I passed this alley mouth, I heard a scuffling sound in the alley and flashed my light down it. I saw these two guys struggling, one with a hammerlock on the other guy’s head, and just as my light touched them, the guy with the hammerlock gave a hard twist, the other guy went sort of limp, and the first guy let him drop to the alley floor. I moved in with my night stick ready, but the guy stood still and made no move either to run or come at me. He just stood there with his hands at his sides and said, ‘Officer, this man tried to rob me.’
“I told him to stand back, and knelt to look at the man lying down. Near as I could tell, he was dead, but in the dark with just a flashlight I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t want to take a chance on him waking up and running away while I went to the nearest call box. So I stayed right there and used my stick on the concrete to bring the cop from the next beat. That was Patrolman George Mason.
“Mason went to call for a patrol car and a doctor while I stayed with the two guys. That’s about all I know about things except when the doctor got there, he said the guy lying down was dead.”
The deputy coroner said, “And the dead man was later identified as Joseph Garcia?”
Patrolman Lutz nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“And the man Garcia was struggling with. Will you identify him, please?”
The policeman pointed his finger at a short, plump man of about fifty seated in a chair apart from the audience and within a few feet of where the jury was lined up along the left wall. He was a quietly dressed man with a bland, faintly vacuous smile and an appearance of softness about him until you examined him closely. Then you suspected that a good deal of his plumpness was muscle rather than fat, and you noticed his shoulders were unnaturally wide.
“That’s him there,” the young patrolman said. “Robert Hummel.”
Just in front of the platform containing the deputy coroner’s bench was a long table, one end pointing toward the platform and the other end toward the audience. On the right side of this table, seated side-wise to it with his back to the audience, sat the assistant circuit attorney in charge of the case. On its left side sat Marcus Prout, one of St. Louis’s most prominent criminal lawyers.
Now the assistant C.A. said, “Patrolman Lutz, I understand Robert Hummel had in his possession a .38 caliber pistol at the time of the incident you just described. Is that right?”
“Well, not exactly in his possession, sir. It was lying in the alley nearby, where he’d dropped it. It turned out he had a permit to carry it.”
Marcus Prout put in, “Officer, was there any other weapon in sight?”
“Yes, sir. An open clasp knife lay in the alley. This was later established as belonging to the deceased. Robert Hummel claimed Garcia drew it on him, he in turn drew his gun to defend himself, and ordered the deceased to drop the knife. However, the deceased continued to come at him. Hummel said he didn’t want to shoot the man, so he used the gun to knock the knife from Garcia’s hand, then dropped the gun and grappled with him.”