Read Online Who's sorry now? by Jill Churchill - Free Book Online Page A

the body there?”
    ”What is the pathologist’s name?”
    The driver told him.
    Walker called Dr. Meredith back to explain and ask if the other pathologist was known to him, and if he was reliable. Meredith said he knew the man and he’d do a good job.
    ”You’ll see that I’m right about the piano wire,” Dr. Polhemus said in a cranky voice. ”It’s obvious.”
    Walker ignored him and gave Harry a handful of change to pay for the calls. ”Be sure to let me know if I owe you more when the bill comes.” Then he asked Harry again, Are you sure that Mr. McBride had no enemies?”
    ”I can’t imagine him having a single one. He was such a shy man, and worked so hard at the train station. Golly!” Harry said. ”Edwin was about to make a little more money there with the post office boxes. Who’s going to do the sorting now?”
    ”Robert Brewster, I assume,” Howard said. ”It was, after all, his idea.”
    Howard was thinking furiously about where to go from here. A nice man. No enemies whatsoever. Howard’s experience told him this was seldom true. Everybody had said or done something wrong to somebody else at one time or another. Mostly it was harmless and was forgotten or forgiven. But there were also people who were of a mind to take offense when none was meant. Even a well-meaning compliment could set them off.
    ”Did Edwin tell you anything about his past?” Walker asked Harry.
    ”Mostly he talked about how grateful he was to Jack Summer, who told him about Voorburg at the Bonus March. You know he came here because of Jack’s description of the town?”
    ”That’s what I’d heard,” Walker said. Anything else? Like where he grew up, or if he had family elsewhere?”
    Harry thought for a few minutes. ”I think he mentioned growing up somewhere in south Yonkers.”
    ”Nothing about family?”
    ”Only that his mother is a really good cook.”
    ”Did he suggest that she was still living?”
    Harry shrugged. ”I assumed she was because he said ‘she is’ not ‘she was.’ ”
    ”Do you have any idea of his age?”
    ”No. But he met Jack at the Bonus March, so he must have served in the Great War. That would make him at least in his mid-thirties or older. I think he might have been in his early forties.”
    Chief Walker went back to his office and put in calls to the county records people in Yonkers. He was told they probably had the information he needed, but he’d have to hunt for it himself. Someone would help him, but not do it for him, he was told.
    This would have been the perfect thing to tell a deputy to do. If he had a good deputy. What he had was only Ralph Summer, the cousin of Jack Summer, the local newspaper editor. How could cousins be so very different? Jack was sharp as a tack, and never printed anything in the Voorburg Times that couldn’t be verified by at least two other sources. Ralph, on the other hand, was stupid and lazy. And what’s more, he was currently engaged to the only daughter of a successful (so Ralph said) jeweler in Albany. Howard wondered how that had happened. Would a successful man turn over his only daughter to a lump like Ralph? Unless there was already a bun in the oven. Ralph was spending all his free time, and more, driving to Albany and was there now.
    It was too late today to make the trip clear to south Yonkers. He’d leave early tomorrow to hunt through the birth and death records for McBrides. If he didn’t go tomorrow, he’d have to waste the weekend.
    Since he had a few minutes to spare, he called the chief of police in Beacon. Chief Simpson had a deputy he didn’t like because the deputy was shy. But Howard had recently worked with the chief ‘s deputy on a previous case and thought Deputy Ron Parker had potential. A lot more than Ralph.
    ”Hello, Ed,” Howard said to Chief Simpson. ”How’s the gout?”
    Almost gone. I can get around pretty much during the day, if I wear slippers in the evening. How are things with you,