Simon Said (28 page)

"Cough, damn it," Otis Gates said.

Simon struggled as Gates pounded him on the back. He began to breathe painfully, then vomited over the policeman's back. With both feet planted firmly on the bottom of the well, and his head and shoulders well above water, Otis Gates held Simon over his shoulder like a toddler. Like a child, Simon clung to him with his legs and arms while he got used to breathing again.

"God, get me out of this place," Simon said.

 

"It'll be a few minutes before the fire department gets here with a block and tackle,"

Gates said. "It's okay, I've got you, and I've got nothing else better to do." Simon realized that he wasn't going to die and tears came to his eyes.

"What I want to know is, who the hell told you that you could leave your house tonight? Didn't I tell you to stay at home and with someone until I said different? I'm a policeman. You're supposed to do as I say."

"I thought it was all over," Simon said. "I thought Alex Andrus had confessed to everything."

 

"You can solve all the historical mysteries you want," Gates said, "but you let me deal with the present."

"Her father did it," Simon said.
But Gates wasn't listening.
"Where is that block and tackle?" he was shouting up. "It's cold down here." "It's coming," a voice called back.

A leather harness on a rope dropped into the well. Gates strapped Simon into it. Then Simon heard the whine of a winch, and he was pulled upward into the warm night. David Morgan was there to help assorted firemen, paramedics, and police officers disengage him.

 

"Short people should stay away from deep wells," Morgan said.

 

"Archaeologists should put tighter covers on very dangerous old cisterns," Simon said. "I should sue. I'll probably need psychotherapy for life."

 

"What you need is a shower," Morgan said. "You stink."

Gates was a tight fit in the narrow opening. Simon could hear him swearing as he was winched out of the cistern by a fire truck. Soon he was standing in front of Simon, dripping wet.

"I'll have you know," he said, "that this is the best suit money can buy at Derrick's Discount Big and Tall out on Airport Road. The color brought out the brown in my eyes."

"I'm sorry," Simon said.

"You need to be real careful in your life from now on," Gates said. "You've used up all your luck tonight. When we broke Andrus and he confessed to the first incident but we couldn't budge him on the second, I knew there was someone else involved in all this. And I knew it had something to do with this damn house and that girl's murder. It's the only thing in your life that is different from where you were a month ago. Then Julia remembered this conversation we had with the kid at the Bloodworth woman's funeral about inheritance. Then we called you and when you didn't answer, I went to your house and found the note you left for Julia. You are so damn lucky," Gates went on. "The librarian told me you had left just minutes before I got there. I ran into Morgan here outside the library. He saw the office lights on at the house, so we went that way. We ran into the Hinton kid running off with a crowbar in one hand and a gun in the other. We convinced him that it was in his best interests to tell us where you were. Or rather, Morgan here convinced him. I was concerned I'd violate his constitutional rights."

"Thank you," Simon said to both of them. "Thank you very much."

 

The paramedic, trying to insert an IV needle, handled Simon's left arm, and Simon hollered.

"I think it's busted," Simon said. "My delivering angel here stepped on me." "I thought I felt something crack," Gates said. "Sorry."

"I am not complaining," Simon said. "Don't put that thing in me," he said to the paramedic, who was trying to insert an IV into his other arm. "I've had more than enough fluids tonight, thank you."

"All right," the medic said, "but you need to go on to the hospital. You want to get that arm set or it'll hurt like hell, and you should get a chest X ray. You might have aspirated something horrible down there."

"I'll do anything you say except stay in the hospital," Simon said. "I've spent enough time there recently"

 

"I thought you looked familiar," the medic said. "Kind of accident-prone, aren't you?" "Looking at me, I'm sure this will be hard for you to believe," Simon said, "but I have been the target of multiple murder attempts."

"He's not kidding," Gates said. "This guy has been more trouble to me recently than all the dope pushers, bank robbers, and other assorted criminals I've arrested in the past year." He turned to Simon. "I'm going to radio Julia and tell her you're safe. Then I'm going to get cleaned up and follow you to the emergency room to take your statement. Don't move without letting me know where you are. Hear me? I want to get home before dawn."

"You know," Simon said to Morgan as he helped Simon into his car to go to the hospital, "her father killed her."

"Who?" Morgan asked. "What are you talking about?"
"Anne Bloodworth," Simon said. "Her father killed her."

"How you can be interested in how some girl died in 1926 when you don't even know the whole story about how you practically got murdered amazes me."

"This is more interesting," Simon said.
"Fathers don't kill their children."
"Sure they do, sometimes. Besides, I think it was an accident."

Simon talked Morgan into stopping by his house on the way to the emergency room so that he could shower and put on clean clothes. He knew he wouldn't have a chance to get really clean once his arm was in a cast. Julia was going to the hospital, and he didn't want to smell like a sewer.

At the hospital, Simon refused to be admitted, so he sat in a corner of the emergency room waiting for the plaster to dry on his cast and for someone to read his chest X ray.

Julia was holding his good hand. Simon was a little disappointed that she hadn't thrown herself into his arms and wept over his injuries when she saw him, but she did kiss him on the ear.

"You deserve to be dead," she said.
"The woman's crazy about you," Morgan said.

"Listen," Simon said. "I didn't know I was still in danger. I thought it was okay to go out."

 

"I assumed you were safe, too," Julia said. "In fact, I sent the bicycle cop home. But Sergeant Gates thought from the beginning that more than one person was involved." "Why?" Simon said.

"The two attempts were very different. The first is what we call a disorganized crime. It was a mess—ineffective and sloppy. The second was much better planned and executed. In fact, it almost succeeded. If you hadn't made it to the telephone, we might always have thought you killed yourself."

Sergeant Gates arrived with a police stenographer. The sergeant was dressed in a splashy blue uniform, complete with brass buttons and braid.

 

"I love a man in uniform," Julia said.

 

"Shut up," Gates said. "I had no choice. I went to the fire station on Oberlin Road to shower and change. This was the only thing they had that would fit me."

 

"You could pass for John Wayne," said Simon.

 

"A little respect, please. I'll have you know this is the full dress uniform of a major in the Raleigh Fire Department. Its owner played football with me at State."

He sat down and signaled the stenographer to open his notebook.
"You okay?" he said to Simon.
"We're just waiting for my X ray," Simon said.
"Okay, let's get to work," Gates said.

Simon told Gates everything that had happened since he left his house that night. When he had finished, the stenographer carefully read everything back to him. Simon added a little additional information.

"Okay," Gates said, "I'll get this typed up and take it over to your house in the morning."

 

"Can you explain this to me a little more completely?" Simon asked. "Why did these two guys try to kill me?"

"Andrus's little trick with the car exhaust was apparently a spur-of-the-moment thing. He was furious because of all the attention you got at the Bloodworth funeral—you know, the press and the president of the college and everything. He just happened to walk by your house after the reception and saw your car and the garden hose sitting there. He got the idea of faking a suicide attempt and running you out of your job. It didn't happen that way, and when I started asking questions, he got scared and asked Bobby Hinton for an alibi. I guess the kid owed him."

"Then," Julia said, "Hinton got this idea to take it further, to kill you and make it look like suicide. He'd been really worried about you finding out that Adam Bloodworth killed his cousin. He had done some careless research on the laws of inheritance and thought he'd lose his money. Apparently when he talked to his mother, as you asked him to after the funeral, she told him that the family always suspected Adam of killing his cousin. That worried him. He decided that you either had to be distracted from the investigation or die for his family to keep their money."

"Plus, he had a lingering dislike of you because of that C," Morgan said. "Because of you he couldn't go to graduate school, either."

"That's why Andrus has been such a wreck the last couple of days," Gates said. "He knew the kid's plans, and he was terrified he'd be implicated if you were murdered. But he was too cowardly to tell the police, because he knew the first incident would get him fired."

"I cleared Adam a couple of days ago," Simon said. "But I hadn't told Bobby."

"Smart move," Morgan said, "but now that we've dispensed with this, tell us about the Bloodworth murder. Since we're all gathered in the drawing room sipping our port, so to speak."

"Charles Bloodworth killed his own daughter," Simon said. "Nothing else fits. She was in love with someone absolutely unacceptable and was going to run off with him. All the servants and Adam were out of the house. She packed a bag, but either he caught them slipping away or they went to tell him before they left. He was furious. And he had been drinking. He pulled out his derringer and shot at them as they walked away. The derringer had two bullets in it. One hit Anne in the back of the head and the other wounded Joseph Weinstein in the shoulder. He might have been shooting just at the boy —over any distance, derringers are completely unreliable."

"Imagine how he must have felt once he realized what he had done," Gates said. "I can't," Simon said. "Anyway, the boy took off and got to a black doctor, got patched up, and left town, never to return."

 

"Why didn't he call the police?" Julia asked.

 

"Who knows? Maybe he didn't care at that point. The girl was dead. Maybe he was afraid. Perhaps he thought the community would be on her father's side." "Then what?" asked Morgan.

"Charles buried his daughter, almost ritually, under the dirt floor of the old kitchen. He buried the carpetbag, too, maybe because it had blood on it or something. Then he went to bed and put on a great act the next morning. Of course, he made sure that the house and grounds were trampled over, and I guess he prayed real hard that Weinstein would keep his mouth shut."

"What made you suspicious of him?" Julia asked.

"After I cleared Adam, I kept remembering that Charles settled his business with Pinkerton just a few months or so after she disappeared. That didn't make any sense. Most distraught fathers with money would search for a missing child forever. I would. Then when the bullet came back and I went through the gun handbook, I remembered that Charles had a derringer. So I went to the house to look for it."

"Bobby Hinton saw you leave and followed you. The last he knew, Adam was still your chief suspect. You almost bought it this time," Gates said.

 

"I laugh at danger," Simon said.

 

Julia drove Simon home. When they stopped in front of his house, she leaned over and kissed him.

"Aren't you coming in?" Simon asked.
"I can't," she said.
"You're kidding," he said.

"Listen, babe, the ADA on duty tonight is a baby lawyer. I'm going to have to walk him through everything. There will be a preliminary hearing on Andrus and Hinton tomorrow. We're going to try to deny them bail. All the documents have to be perfect."

"But they confessed."

 

"Confessions are worthless in court. They get thrown out like used Kleenex. All

Andrus's lawyer would have to say was that the man was taking tranks and wasn't responsible for what he said. The case against the two of them has to be perfect without the confessions."

"Oh."
"Besides, you're not up to it."
"Try me."

"I'll come by tomorrow morning with breakfast. How do you like your cinnamon rolls?"

"With raisins and walnuts. And bring lots of coffee."
"Cinnamon rolls all the way."
"By the way, could Bobby have lost his family's money if I'd proven Adam was guilty?"

"Almost certainly not. Today we have a statute that bans convicted murderers from inheriting the estates of their victims. It was passed in 1961. In 1926 , the law of trusts had exactly the same effect. But the salient point here is that Adam Bloodworth is dead. Even if he had killed Anne, a dead person can't be tried and convicted of anything. Hinton missed the point completely."

"Where on earth did he get the idea he could be cut off in the first place?" "He checked a few books in the library, then talked to a legal services attorney. But he didn't give him all the relevant details, so he didn't get an accurate opinion." "Primary research was always his weakness," Simon said.