Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 57, No. 7 & 8, July/August 2012

Autumn Chill by John H. Dirckx

Nobody received an invitation to Howard Rentz’s last birthday party. His two sons and their families didn’t need invitations because they were running the show. And it was more or less understood that his bachelor neighbors on either side would drift over and join in once the commotion started. The attendance of Howard’s girlfriend Joy Lynn was also taken for granted.

The lots in Rentz’s neighborhood ran back hundreds of feet toward the wooded slopes of an ancient cemetery. His rear deck commanded a view of oak leaves turning gold on distant heights under the fraternal kiss of an October sun. Nearer at hand, asters flourished and squirrels foraged among the unkempt ornamental borders that separated his place from his neighbors’ better-tended flower gardens.

Joy Lynn Robiche gathered up Styrofoam containers and plastic cups, the remains of a fast-food lunch for two, and dropped them into a waste can in a corner of the deck.

Rentz consulted a pocket watch on a chain. “What time’s your conference?”

“Three.” The lie fell smoothly from her tongue.

“I hope you’ll have time for ice cream and cake and some socializing before you have to leave.”

Joy Lynn nodded silently. If her manner was proprietorial and efficient rather than affectionate, Rentz didn’t seem to mind, or even to notice. Her appointment was pure fiction, designed to allow for an early escape from the party.

At a little past one o’clock, Howard’s two sons and their families mounted the steps to the deck in a semisolemn procession. Kevin and Virgil were copy-and-paste replicas of their father — rough hewn, beetle browed, obstinate as spring steel. Kevin’s wife Sheeba, with skin and hair the color of chilled honey, leaned over Rentz’s shoulder from behind and planted a noisy kiss on his cheek. “Happy birthday, Dad.” She deposited two wrapped presents on the table at his elbow.

Virgil’s wife Cary added another package to the pile and headed for the door to the kitchen. She was dark, slow moving, and unabashedly plump. “I’ll put you-know-what in the refrigerator,” she confided as she passed close to her father-in-law.

The adults seated themselves on an assortment of metal chairs and babbled desultorily about nothing in particular. A psychologist might have peeled away layer after layer of family pathology here without ever getting to the bottom of things. More telling than the laconic and barely civil exchanges were the periodic silences.

Cary and Sheeba were evidently at loggerheads over something that went deeper than their sharply contrasting temperaments. Virgil and Kevin’s manner toward their father was a lumpy blend of filial awe and rude condescension. Everyone but Rentz displayed a savage coolness toward Joy Lynn. The men treated her merely as an unwelcome intruder, but the women’s wry glances and curt asides expressed disapproval of everything about her, from hairstyle and shoes to demeanor and personal code of ethics.

The three preteen children each went their own way. Virgil and Cary’s boy Jacob marched purposefully toward a weedy thicket in the middle distance, where anyone who was paying attention would have seen him slicing open milkweed pods with a stainless steel knife and examining their contents with a magnifying lens.

As for Kevin and Sheeba’s son Devlin (a k a Speedo and Loco Boy), within five minutes of his arrival in his grandfather’s backyard he had slid into a nonexistent home plate about thirty times, always with different sound effects. By the time his father called off the game, Devlin’s jeans had accumulated enough grass stains to overwhelm even the leading brand of laundry detergent — not that it mattered, since he had also shredded the fabric beyond repair.

Devlin’s sister Deirdre lingered on the deck, surreptitiously eavesdropping on adult conversations. She had an eyebrow ring, a rosebud tattoo on her left calf, and an alarmingly advanced vocabulary for a child of eleven.

“Hey, girl, come here,” Rentz summoned her in a stage whisper. “I got a job for you. This is just between the two of us.” He massaged her shoulder with a big bony paw while whispering a commission in her ear. She nodded compliance and made off for the kitchen. Just before she reached the door he called after her, “And, hey, girl — a big spoon, okay?”

A round-shouldered little man with a face like an owl appeared on the deck with his head tilted to one side, his gait an uncompromising waddle. “Happy birthday, Howard,” he said. “I guess no coffee today?”

“We’ve got coffee. Joy Lynn, get Wally a cup of coffee.”

“Just black,” said Wally with a shy glance at Joy Lynn. “No sugar.”

“I know.”

Rentz swung around to face his sons. “Everything okay at the shop?”

“No problems, Dad,” said Virgil. “But we’ve got to talk some more about that Wagner plant. It’s just sitting there empty—”

“Okay, you mugs,” chirped Sheeba, “no business discussions today.”

“But next week could be too late,” objected Virgil, without meeting his sister-in-law’s gaze.

Cary began dispensing ice cream and cake, pausing frequently to lick her fingers. Jacob was called in from the edge of the woods, where he was trapping insects in a plastic specimen bottle, and Devlin was persuaded to remain seated for a full five minutes with the promise of double rations of carbohydrates. For a few minutes a morose kind of tranquility reigned.

Sheeba took pictures of her father-in-law opening his presents — an imitation ivory backscratcher, a baseball cap with a mildly sleazy caption, the kind of gifts middle-aged people usually receive from family members instead of articles of intrinsic value. Rentz held a T-shirt adorned with a monkey face across his chest and mimicked the monkey’s grimace for the camera.

“Kind of chilly out here this afternoon,” he remarked as he laid the shirt aside.

“Well, we are about three weeks into fall,” Joy Lynn reminded him.

“Hey, is it raining?”

His sudden exclamation was seconded by indignant outcries from the others.

Rentz leaned over the wooden railing of the deck. “Ricedale! What do you think you’re doing down there?”

In the side yard of the house next door a wiry man in a checkered cap was watering the potted plants suspended from an awning by sticking his finger into the threaded metal fitting on the end of a garden hose so as to send a jet of water curving gently upward. “That’s Mister Ricedale, if you don’t mind. I’m irrigating the hanging gardens of Bangladesh, same like I do every day about this time.”

“Well, you’re also irrigating the ice cream and cake.”

“So what is this, the Queen’s birthday?”

“It’s my birthday, you dingbat. And if you don’t get out of here with that fire hose, I might decide to administer a kick to your southern hemisphere.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, if you did that, I might decide to run a sickle through your giblets.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, if you did that, some folks downtown might decide to hang you from a long pole with a short rope.”

“Well, in that case I better come up there and help myself to a last meal of iced Beam and steak, I think you said.”

Ricedale’s arrival on the deck introduced a welcome note of joviality into the proceedings. Kevin and Virgil nevertheless finally managed to corner their father for some serious talk.

“Look, Dad,” said Virgil “we need to move fast on this Wagner plant deal. It’d be bad enough if somebody bought the place and junked all the equipment and turned it into a skating rink, but what if they started up another heating and cooling business?”

“They’d be crazy if they did,” said Rentz. “Wagner went bankrupt.”

Kevin moved his chair closer to his father’s. “That’s because he’s an alcoholic. Another guy with some capital and both feet on the ground could come in there, take over that shop, and give us more competition than Wagner ever did.”

Virgil returned to the charge with a different line of argument. “Wagner just bought a couple of twelve-foot Dodge forming brakes last year. The beds and the rams both tilt. They can punch and notch at the same time. The dies that go with them would just about fill the back shed.”

Rentz snorted scornfully. “And then where are you going to keep the flatbed?”

“Dad,” said Virgil, “we sold the flatbed a year ago, remember? Now that Wagner is bankrupt, he’ll have to practically give away all that gear to whoever buys his shop.”

Howard Rentz reared up in his chair with a flash of wrath. “Now look here, you two,” he stormed, “my brains haven’t turned to mush yet. I’m still running the business, and I’m telling you to leave Steve Wagner’s plant alone. Time we met his price and started paying tax and insurance on a whole ’nother shop, we’d be bankrupt ourselves.”

“There’s something else we need to talk about,” said Kevin, with the air of a man venturing onto thin ice. “We figure it’s about time we had some stake in the business. We’re making all the runs but we’re still selling on straight commission, and both of the girls still have to hold down part-time jobs to keep shoes on our kids’ feet.”

“Yes, and your mother used to do the books and the bills at the shop and sling hash to keep shoes on your feet. When I go, it’ll be soon enough for you two to find out how much fun it is to own a business. Then you can buy another shop or branch out into aluminum siding or do whatever other fool thing you want so you’ll end up in receivership. Till then, this old boy is the top dog, and I don’t need any little pups to tell me when to bark.”

He spoke with such vehemence and decision that Kevin and Virgil fell silent and moved away.

“Where’s that pill-peddling buddy of mine?” roared Rentz, still excited. “Hey, Wally, have you got any of those stomach mints on you? The kind that take the hide right off your tongue and put a chill clear down to your gizzard?”

The phone was ringing when Detective Sergeant Cyrus Auburn got back to his desk after lunch. The dispatcher put through a call from Nick Stamaty, the investigator for the coroner’s office.

“You got a minute, Cy?”

“Sure,” said Auburn. “My manicurist isn’t due until two. What’s up?”

“I’ve got a funny kind of complaint to check out, and I thought you might want to be in on the preliminary investigation in case it turns out to be a homicide.”

“A funny homicide would be a nice change. What’s the story?”

“Woman thinks her boyfriend was murdered by his sons so they could gain control of the family business.”

“Which business?”

“Rentz Heating and Cooling.”

“One of their guys replaced the coil in my air conditioner last summer. Murdered how?”

“Day before yesterday he didn’t answer his phone. The girlfriend went to the house and found him unresponsive. It looked like a massive stroke, so the paramedics ran him to the Chalfont. He died about noon yesterday afternoon without ever regaining consciousness.”

“Autopsy?”

“This morning. Technically, any death within twenty-four hours after hospital admission is a coroner’s case, but the coroner released this one to the hospital pathologist because the decedent was a heart patient.”

“How old?”

“Fifty-seven.”

“You said girlfriend. Is there an ex in the picture?”

“He was a widower.”

“What did the autopsy show?”

“When he first arrived at the hospital, a scan showed that he’d had a brain hemorrhage. The autopsy confirmed that as the cause of death. They didn’t find any scalp wounds or cracks in his skull. He’d been taking a blood thinner for the past three years for heart trouble. You know how it is — one foot in the proverbial grave...”

“And the other on the proverbial banana peel. So why are we having this conversation?”

“Because Rentz’s Quick time was infinity.”

Auburn pondered silently for a moment. “Is that poetry?”

“Not exactly. They measure the effect of blood thinners with a test called the prothrombin time, which was developed by a guy named Quick. The thinner the blood, the longer it takes to clot in a test tube. They’re still waiting for Rentz’s blood to clot.”

“Meaning an overdose of blood thinner?”

“Suggesting it, anyway.”

“Accident... suicide?”

“Possible, but not likely. Doc Valentine says it would probably have taken a whole fistful of pills, and maybe several overdoses given over a period of days, to thin his blood that much.”

Valentine was the forensic pathologist under contract to the coroner’s office.

“So why is the girlfriend thinking homicide?”

“She says the day before Rentz suffered his stroke he had a violent argument with his two sons about some changes they wanted to make in the business. Rentz retired from active involvement a couple of years ago on the advice of his doctor, but he was still the sole proprietor.”

“Nothing more substantial than that?”

“She’s coming here at two o’clock today. You’re welcome to sit in. Then again, if you’re really looking forward to that manicure...”

“See you in an hour or so.”

When Auburn reached Stamaty’s office in the courthouse across the street from headquarters, Joy Lynn Robiche had already arrived. She was lanky, fortyish, and plain featured. Her fawn-colored hair was pulled back tightly into a bun. She wore little or no makeup and no jewelry. According to the photo ID clipped to her sweater, she was employed by county social services.

Stamaty made introductions. “I was just telling Ms. Robiche that Mr. Rentz’s brain hemorrhage could have been a side effect of his blood thinner even at a normal dosage.”

“But the point,” retorted Ms. Robiche, with the doggedness and drive of a social worker standing up for the rights of a downtrodden waif, “is that somehow he got a massive overdose. He couldn’t have made a mistake like that himself. He was as careful about his pills as he was about his money.”

“I understand,” said Auburn, “that you have some specific reasons for thinking his death was a homicide?”

“Tuesday was Howard’s birthday, and his family all went to his place for a party. But celebrating the birthday wasn’t the only thing on his sons’ agenda. They’ve been running the family heating and cooling business since Howard retired after his heart bypass three years ago, but he was still the legal owner and he made all the important decisions.

“They wanted to buy out another business that went bankrupt, and he absolutely refused even to discuss it. And when they told him it was time he made them partners instead of employees, he really blew up. He told them they were going to inherit the business when he died, and they could just wait. Two days later he was dead of an apparent overdose of medicine. Doesn’t that look pretty suspicious to you?”

“How do you think they did it?”

“Howard had a sweet tooth. His blood sugar was normal, so the doctor said he could eat all the carbohydrates he wanted as long as he kept his weight down and stayed away from fat and cholesterol. One of his daughters-in-law, I’m not sure which, brought a chocolate pie just for him. Even before the party got underway, he kept sending his grandchildren into the kitchen to bring him samples. The rest of us had ice cream and cake.”

“Was anybody at the party besides you and Mr. Rentz’s family?”

“A couple of neighbors — the men who live on either side of him, Mr. Ricedale and Mr. Snederle. I’m sure they’ll both confirm that the atmosphere was... poisonous.”

“You’re suggesting the family put an overdose of his medicine in the pie? But they would have had to do that in advance, before they had this argument you mentioned. And where would they get enough of the medicine to make up a fatal overdose?”

“Do I look like a detective? Maybe they foresaw how the discussion was going to turn out even before the party started. Maybe somebody else in the family is on a blood thinner. Heart disease is hereditary, you know.”

Auburn was finding it hard to preserve a cordial manner toward this dowdy, outspoken citizen. “May I ask why you brought this to Mr. Stamaty instead of to the police?”

She blinked hard. “I guess because I work for the county. That’s how I knew about the autopsy results as soon as the hospital pathologist phoned them to the coroner’s office this morning.”

She stood up to terminate the interview. “If you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment in just a few minutes out on Whitney Avenue.”

Auburn and Stamaty, who had both been properly reared, also stood up, and Stamaty thanked her for coming in.

“What do you think?” asked Auburn after she had left the office. “Are you going to investigate this one?”

Instead of answering, Stamaty picked up the phone. “Art, this is Nick... Oh, real good. Yourself?... Listen, Art, this Howard Rentz you posted this morning... I know, subdural hematoma. But we’re calling it a coroner’s case... Nothing definite, just some questionable circumstances we need to look into. Don’t release that body to the family’s funeral director. Our guys will be there to transfer it to the county mortuary just as soon as I find out which pool hall they’re smashing up this afternoon.”

Stamaty made two further calls while Auburn touched base with headquarters on his cell phone.

“Are you in on this one, Cy?”

“Provisionally. Where do you plan to start?”

“I’d like to see Rentz’s private physician first, a Dr. Lamprecht. We can’t do much else till we have control of the remains.”

Since Stamaty was nominally in charge of the inquiry, they traveled in the white van from the coroner’s department. “How much can Dr. Valentine find by examining a body that’s already been autopsied?” asked Auburn as they left the parking lot behind the courthouse.

“Only so much,” said Stamaty. “What I mainly want to do is make sure we get samples of Rentz’s blood before some embalmer drains every drop of it into a hazardous waste container.”

“Can you still get good blood samples from somebody who’s been dead this long?”

“You can’t say that anymore,” said Stamaty, with a severe shake of his head.

Auburn glanced at him in bewilderment. “Can’t say what anymore?”

“What you just said Rentz was.”

“I said he was dead—”

Stamaty jumped as if he had been shot. “I told you, Cy, you can’t say that anymore. It’s not politically correct.”

“So what do we call it nowadays?” asked Auburn, finally realizing that he was being put on.

“Vitally challenged. A person who is no longer living is said to be vitally challenged. According to my son Basil.”

“Is he the one who’s going into sports medicine?”

“No, that’s Elena. Basil wants to be a race car driver.”

“Well, I hope he doesn’t get vitally challenged before he has a chance to get chronologically disadvantaged.”

Stamaty parked the van around the corner from Dr. Myron Lamprecht’s office to spare the doctor any embarrassment. The waiting room was full of disconsolate-looking oldsters and harried moms with blubbering babes in arms.

“Maybe we should have called ahead,” suggested Auburn in a murmur as they stood waiting near the reception desk.

“Not my style,” Stamaty murmured back.

At length, they were admitted to a small, tidy office where a plastic heart and a real skull sat side by side on the windowsill. Dr. Lamprecht, a heavy man with a bald crown and a monkey fringe of reddish beard streaked with gray, joined them almost immediately.

Before saying a word, he examined their credentials through a pair of steel-rimmed glasses clamped firmly on his squashed fig of a nose. His hands shook slightly as he sat behind his desk and opened Howard Rentz’s medical record. An official inquiry into the death of a patient can be a prelude to a malpractice suit, not to mention criminal charges.

“All I have here are his office records and lab reports,” he said. “I don’t have anything from the hospital yet, and the final autopsy protocol won’t be available for a week or so. Dr. Noguchi was his neurosurgeon, but Mr. Rentz was gone before they could get him set up for a craniotomy.”

Stamaty asked, “How long had he been on an anticoagulant?”

“About three years.”

“Any recent change in dosage?”

“Not for more than a year.”

“How closely was the blood thinning monitored?”

Lamprecht handed Stamaty a thick bundle of slips held together with a spring clamp. “He went to the lab on Santa Cruz Boulevard every two weeks for a prothrombin time. As you can see, his results were consistently within the therapeutic range. That includes the last one, done a week ago Friday.”

“What other medicines was he taking?”

“A coronary vasodilator, a beta blocker—” He consulted a tabular medication record inside the cover of the chart. “—a mild tranquilizer, bedtime sleep medicine as needed. No recent changes in any of those.”

“You’re aware that his pro-time at the hospital was off the charts? How do you think that happened?”

“Frankly, I think it’s a lab error.” Lamprecht leaned back in his chair, palpably more at ease now that the worst seemed to be over. “Howard Rentz’s coronaries might have been full of sludge, but his mind was as sharp as a college kid’s. He would have had to swallow a month’s supply of pills at one gulp to stretch out his pro-time that far. And he was too much of an egotist to take a deliberate overdose.”

“But he did die of a subdural hemorrhage,” Stamaty reminded him.

“Did he suffer a hemorrhage and fall?” asked Lamprecht rhetorically. “Or did he fall and suffer a hemorrhage? It’s an age-old question, a recurring question. We’ll never know.”

To his present audience the doctor’s studied pose of mature wisdom and boundless benevolence carried no more conviction than that of an out-of-work actor in a white coat touting joint cream in a television commercial. They thanked him and returned to the van.

As expected, they found Howard Rentz’s house locked and uninhabited. Stamaty took off his jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves, donned rubber gloves, and began sorting through the contents of a forty-gallon galvanized steel garbage can at the end of the driveway.

“If Public Safety gets involved in this case,” Auburn told him, “you’re going to incur the wrath of a certain forensic lab director for tampering with evidence.”

“How terrifying!” replied Stamaty, whose repeated clashes with Sergeant Kestrel, the police evidence technician, sometimes assumed Homeric proportions. “Thing is, the garbage collectors might get here before Kestrel does, and then where will the evidence be?”

Auburn couldn’t fault his reasoning, but chose not to participate in the search.

“Newspapers, cardboard cartons, pop cans,” reported Stamaty. “Apparently Mr. Rentz didn’t believe in recycling.”

They walked around to the back and climbed the steps to the deck. Here Stamaty attacked a plastic trash bucket containing what could only have been the remnants of the birthday party. “This is more like it.”

“Any traces of chocolate pie garnished with little pink pills?” asked Auburn.

“Not so far. I’ve got paper plates and paper napkins, plastic forks and plastic spoons, cake going stale and melted ice cream going sour.”

“Are you looking for evidence, or are you just trying to ruin my appetite for dinner?”

“Aha! An earlier stratum. Traces of burgers, fries, and sodas for two.”

The sound of male voices raised in friendly dispute, punctuated by occasional brisk snips with a pair of pruning shears, reached them from the other side of a hedge. Whereas Rentz’s backyard was little better than a weed patch, the neighbors on either side had formal gardens, now largely running to seed. Approaching with no attempt at secrecy, they came up behind two elderly men, one of whom was hacking at the hedge in seemingly random fashion, somewhat like a painter putting the final touches on a canvas.

“I don’t care what you say,” insisted the other man, a roly-poly creature with thick glasses and a beak like a bird of prey. “Poison is much cheaper, and it’s permanent. What did you pay for that trap?”

“None of your beeswax,” retorted the man with the shears. “Anyway, it was worth it. Since I got that trap I’ve caught and relocated twenty-three of those little rascals.”

“In your dreams. I’m telling you, Ricedale, you trapped one squirrel twenty-three times. And every time you turned it loose up in the cemetery, it got back here before you did.”

“Excuse me,” said Auburn. “Mr. Ricedale?”

The man with the shears jumped as if a hornet had stung him on the back of his neck. “Yo! You got in under my radar. Help you, gentlemen?”

Auburn showed identification. “If you have a minute, we’d like to ask you a few questions about an incident that occurred here a couple of days ago.”

“What incident would that be?” asked Ricedale, his nasal voice seasoned with a tang of mockery.

“A birthday party for Mr. Rentz.”

“The late Mr. Rentz.” Ricedale nodded and pointed with his shears. “Tuesday afternoon, there on his deck. Vanilla ice cream, angelfood cake, chocolate pie. Wally and I were both there.”

Auburn turned to the other man. “Your name, sir?”

“Walter Snederle.”

Auburn thought Snederle looked vaguely familiar, but he decided the old man probably just represented a type of character — elderly, eccentric, slightly grotesque — that he’d seen portrayed dozens of times in movies and on TV.

He turned back to Ricedale. “You mentioned chocolate pie...”

“Only for the birthday boy. The rest of us had to settle for standard fare.”

“Some of you got standard fare,” said Snederle, in something like a whine. “I had a cup of coffee. Without.” He shook his left wrist until a metal bracelet identifying him as a diabetic slipped into view from under his cuff.

“Were either of you present when Mr. Rentz had an argument with his sons?”

“We both were,” said Snederle. “But I wouldn’t exactly call it an argument. They did all the talking, till Howard told them to shut up.”

“How well did you know Mr. Rentz?”

“Oh, we were bosom buddies.” When Snederle smiled, his moon face curdled into a blur of wrinkles and his upper lip retreated into the shadow of his monumental nose. “On days like this, Howard and I used to sit out on my patio in the afternoon drinking coffee and pretending it was scotch. And watching the squirrels and rabbits hop right past his weeds to eat my flowers.”

Ricedale had abandoned his pruning. “So you think somebody put the chill on old Howard?” he asked.

“We didn’t say that.”

“You don’t have to. Those rubber gloves say it for you.”

As they climbed back into Stamaty’s van, Auburn expressed the view that they were probably on a wild-goose chase.

“You probably are,” concurred Stamaty. “I agree this doesn’t look much like a homicide. But I have to file a report one way or the other because after that second autopsy there won’t be much doubt that Rentz is dead.”

“Don’t you mean vitally challenged?”

The Dragnet theme, executed in a pungent electronic bleat, announced a call on Stamaty’s cell phone. “Nick Stamaty. They did, huh? I can’t blame them, considering how things went... I can do better than that. I’ll go see them.” After ringing off, he pulled over to the curb and parked.

“Corky says Rentz’s family are spitting mad,” he told Auburn, “because the hospital wouldn’t release their Dad’s remains to the funeral director. Sound like a good opportunity to shake them down?”

A check with headquarters informed Auburn that the city directory showed two Rentzes besides the late Howard. Both were listed (not quite accurately, it seemed) as owners-operators of Rentz Heating and Cooling.

Stamaty had formulated his policy of not calling ahead while employed, years before, as a police detective in a midwestern city riddled with violence and riven by warring criminal factions. Even nowadays, when working with law enforcement personnel on a possible homicide, he found the cost of gasoline wasted on futile trips more than offset by the occasional gain from a surprise visit.

Virgil Rentz and his wife Cary lived on Silverhurst Drive in an older residential neighborhood with mature trees and front yards just large enough to be a nuisance during the mowing season. The Rentzes were at home, seemingly holding a gloomy vigil over a late or much protracted lunch.

Stamaty introduced himself and Auburn with his habitual courtesy, sympathy, and authority. Auburn didn’t envy him the task of justifying to these people his interference in their funeral plans, but Stamaty handled it with aplomb.

“I’m sorry I didn’t have the opportunity to contact you before you made arrangements with the funeral director,” he said, “but I’m here now, and I’m ready to answer your questions.” He went on before they had the chance to ask any. “I don’t expect our investigation to delay your dad’s funeral by even one day.”

“What I don’t get,” said Virgil, “is what you’re investigating. Dad had a stroke, didn’t he?”

“Probably,” nodded Stamaty, “but there’s a chance that the stroke was caused by one of his medicines. If it was, then it’s the coroner’s responsibility to identify that as the cause of death.”

“You mean,” said Virgil’s wife, “like maybe the doctor or the drugstore made a mistake?”

“Those are possibilities. Or maybe your father-in-law took the right medicine in the wrong dosage. We just need to be sure before we close the case. We’d like to have a look around his house — check his medicine bottles, maybe look at the food in the kitchen, anything else that could give us a lead on the cause of death.”

“That’s okay with us,” said Virgil, “but you might have to break in. I haven’t had a key to Dad’s place for years, and I don’t think my brother has one either.”

“We’ll be checking with him.”

Stamaty’s mention of food seemed to have captured Cary’s attention. “Were you thinking he died from something he ate? We had a birthday party for him the day before he went to the hospital. We all ate ice cream and cake, but nobody else got sick.”

“What’s left of the ice cream and cake is right there in the kitchen,” said Virgil, “if you want to take samples.”

“We understand somebody brought a chocolate pie to the party,” said Auburn, “just for Mr. Rentz.”

They both froze as if an Arctic wind had swept over them. “No pie,” said Cary shortly. “Just ice cream and cake.” Virgil’s silence corroborated her statement.

Neither Auburn nor Stamaty chose to bring up the feud over control of the heating and cooling business.

Rentz’s older son Kevin and his wife Sheeba lived a couple of miles away in a condo in Black Lake Estates. A panel truck belonging to the heating and cooling business was parked in the driveway next to an imported compact.

This couple displayed considerably more hostility than the people Auburn and Stamaty had just left.And here Stamaty’s mention of checking on Howard Rentz’s medicine and food instantly raised the question of a homidical overdose.

Kevin Rentz had a short, stiff upper lip that left his front teeth exposed like those of a gopher. He said m’s, p’s, and b’s by bringing his lower lip against his upper teeth. “The doctor said Dad probably just broke a blood vessel and passed out,” he said. “But you’re saying he could have been poisoned?”

“Because if you’re thinking that,” said Sheeba, “your number-one suspect has to be Dad’s little friend Joy Lynn.”

“Ms. Robiche?” asked Auburn. “Why would she be a suspect?”

“Because he just changed his will and left her a big chunk of money. At least we think so. We don’t know — maybe he left her everything.” Sheeba had a habit of tossing her long golden bangs to emphasize certain words. “Supposedly, they were going to get married one of these days.”

“But you don’t know for certain that Mr. Rentz had changed his will in her favor?”

“We’ll find out on Tuesday,” replied Kevin grimly. “That’s the earliest we could make an appointment with his lawyer. He’s not talking till then.”

“Who is the lawyer?”

“Polderrick, the guy whose face is splashed all over the sides of a couple of those gasoline buses that run on the east side.”

“How long had your dad known Ms. Robiche?”

“Four or five months. She just sort of turned up one day.”

“There’s something funny about that woman,” said Sheeba. “People who work for the county seem to have an awful lot of free time. When Dad had his stroke, she whipped him off to the hospital and got him admitted to Intensive Care before any of us even knew anything had happened.”

“As I mentioned,” said Stamaty, “we’d like to get inside Mr. Rentz’s house long enough to check his medicines and so forth. Do you have a key?”

“No, I don’t. And I’m pretty sure my brother doesn’t either.”

“Well, obviously that woman has one,” remarked Sheeba. “Otherwise, how did she get in and find Dad unconscious?” Then, as an afterthought: “Don’t you need a warrant for that?”

“Only if the person in control of the premises refuses permission for a search,” said Stamaty. “But in that case it becomes a police matter, and Sergeant Auburn takes over. Since,” he couldn’t resist adding, “I work for the county.”

“There was just one other thing,” said Auburn. “We understand there was a chocolate pie at the party.”

“Cake,” Sheeba corrected him. “Angel food. You can’t stick candles in a pie. Anyway, not a chocolate pie.”

“But wasn’t there a pie as a special treat for Mr. Rentz?”

“If there was,” stated Kevin with calm assurance, “Dad finished it off before we got there.”

Sheeba brought a camera from the living room. “I haven’t had time to print these pictures yet, but you can scan them on the screen.” She showed Auburn which button to push, and he and Stamaty hunched over the camera together and scrolled through snapshots from the party.

Neither of them had ever seen Howard Rentz, dead or alive. The thumbnail digital images showed a hulking brute with his sons’ oxlike features, bushy eyebrows, and grizzled sideburns. Among the figures in the background, they recognized Ms. Robiche and Walter Snederle. A couple of youngsters, presumably grandchildren, also appeared in some shots.

They saw Rentz blowing out candles on a cake decorated with white, pink, and green frosting... Sheeba slicing and dispensing cake... Cary scooping ice cream... a youth with spiked hair devouring both treats with animal relish. In none of the images was there any sign of a chocolate pie. So the score stood at three witnesses in favor of pie and four against, plus the negative evidence of the pictures.

“But,” said Stamaty, as they drove back downtown, “although the folks who deny the existence of the pie are in the majority, they’re the ones who might have used it to poison Rentz.”

“What’s that Common Law maxim? Ponderantur something. It means witnesses need to be weighed rather than counted.”

It was after four thirty when Stamaty dropped Auburn back at headquarters. It still wasn’t clear to either of them whether or not they were investigating a homicide, and at this time of day any kind of investigation tended to stall because the first watch was about to end and staff members were queueing up for the stampede to the parking lot.

Paul Polderrick conducted a solo legal practice in the least respectable quarter of downtown. He seemed to specialize in the type of cases that are hard to explain to children. The secretary who took Auburn’s call promised him an interview with Polderrick at two o’clock the following afternoon.

Auburn opened a computer file on the Rentz case, recording in outline his investigation so far and keying in material from the hospital pathologist’s report on the first autopsy. Through the Public Safety network he requested background checks on Ricedale, Snederle, Ms. Robiche, and the surviving members of the Rentz family. Then he settled down to explore the topic of blood thinners and hemorrhagic strokes.

In the process of earning a degree in criminal justice with a minor in psychology, Auburn had developed valuable research skills, learning not only where to find information but also how to judge its authority and relevance. After spending an hour on Internet searches, he went to the departmental library and returned to his office with a book on forensic pathology and toxicology that seemed to be roughly the size and weight of a concrete block.

All during the time he was working toward a clearer understanding of how Howard Rentz had met his end, a vague but insistent memory kept tormenting him. When he took the book back to the library, he consulted an old city directory and resolved that issue to his complete satisfaction. There being nothing more he could do on the case tonight, he went home to a late dinner.

The morning brought an e-mail from Stamaty. The forensic pathologist’s repeat autopsy on the remains of Howard Rentz had uncovered no new evidence to support a suspicion of homicide, much less any identifiable vestiges of chocolate pie. Results of laboratory tests wouldn’t be available until after the weekend.

Before lunch Auburn presented an outline of the case — if it was a case — to his supervisor, Lieutenant Savage. Since things were quiet in the First District, Savage directed him to continue the investigation and detailed Patrolman Fritz Dollinger to work with him. Over lunch in the canteen, Auburn briefed Dollinger on the current posture of affairs. His mention of the vexed question of the chocolate pie sent Dollinger, an inveterate chocoholic, back to the serving line for a second dessert.

They took a cruiser for the appointment with Rentz’s attorney. Polderrick was a big man with sandy hair, matching complexion, and a rumpled suit. He had the easygoing manner and flourishing paunch of an athlete who has permanently broken training.

Auburn was aware, as Howard Rentz’s survivors probably were not, that an attorney is under no legal obligation either to conceal or to reveal the terms of a will between the death of a client and probate of the client’s will. He made it clear that an immediate and full disclosure would be very much to Polderrick’s advantage.

“Can do,” said Polderrick without turning a hair. He went to an outer office and returned almost at once with a file folder, closing the door behind him. “One question. Did his family send you over here, or was it Mrs. Carpenter?”

“Who,” asked Auburn, “is Mrs. Carpenter?”

“You haven’t met the Merry Widow yet? Maybe she’s going by Robiche again.”

“We talked to Joy Lynn Robiche.”

“Isn’t she a peach? The next time you see her, tell her from me that her timing on this one was a bit off.” Polderrick opened the file, glanced through it, and closed it again. “The Merry Widow isn’t my client — not in the technical sense. And at the risk of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, I’m going to dish up some dirt you may find useful.”

A little before three that afternoon, Auburn and Dollinger parked in front of a sprawling mansion in Harmony Heights, mounted the brick steps, and rang the bell. Joy Lynn Robiche, now dressed in a tailored suit of shimmering silk and adorned with makeup and jewelry, admitted them.

“I didn’t expect you to make a report in person,” she said, eyeing Dollinger’s uniform in her cool, offhand way. She led them to a sumptuous sunken living room, where a dull rosy afternoon glow filtered through sheer curtains to awaken the latent fire of gold and silver threads in Japanese wall hangings.

“We’re not here to make a report,” Auburn told her. “We’ve just been talking to Mr. Polderrick downtown. He told us all about your scheme to have Mr. Rentz make a new will in your favor.”

“I resent the word scheme,” she said, her eyebrows arched in an expression of pique. “Mr. Rentz naturally felt it was proper to make a will benefiting his future wife.”

“Except that you had him so tangled up in romantic fantasies that he didn’t know up from down. It’s a tried and true gimmick. You find a lonely old man of independent means, preferably with failing vision—”

“You don’t have to be rude. You’re not exactly Denzel Washington yourself.”

“—who’s just nutty enough to believe you’re in love with him, but not far enough around the bend to be incapable of making a valid will. Then you promise to marry him, and persuade him to make a will in your favor, but you keep putting off the wedding with some story about a legal technicality — maybe a divorce decree not being official yet. Meanwhile, you swear him to secrecy about the wedding plans, telling him you couldn’t keep your job if it got out that you had fallen in love with one of your clients.”

“You can’t prove I wasn’t in love with Howard.”

“True. But it’s a matter of public record that you inherited three quarters of a million dollars from Hershel Carpenter, who died at Deer Creek Assisted Living Center a year and a half ago at the age of eighty-one. And that you then bought this place. And a Mercedes. And two Russian wolfhounds.”

“Mr. Carpenter was my husband. He died of a ruptured aortic aneurysm.”

“I wasn’t suggesting otherwise. By the way, it’s also a matter of public record that you haven’t been on the payroll of county social services for the past year and a half.”

She sat glowering at them, as impervious to censure as a granite statue. “All right, so you know all about me. You’ve probably got my blood type there in your briefcase too. Just tell me this. Are you investigating me, or are you trying to find out who killed Howard Rentz?”

“Both.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Why did you tell the coroner’s investigator and me that you thought Rentz’s sons had killed him?”

“Because I do think so. And his death ruined a... scheme I’d been cultivating for the past six months. We’d had two meetings with Polderrick. In another week, the new will would have been ready for Howard to sign.”

“What we’re here to find out,” said Auburn, “is whether Rentz said anything at the party about changing his will. Because if he did, that would have given his sons a stronger motive for homicide than just wanting to get their hands on the business.”

“He didn’t,” she said without hesitation. “What he told them was that they’d inherit the business when he died. He didn’t say anything about what he was going to do with his money.”

“Just one other thing. We’d like to get inside Mr. Rentz’s house to check for traces of that chocolate pie and look at his medicine bottles. Do you have a key?”

“No. Howard always left the basement window under the deck open for ventilation, and I climbed in there when he didn’t answer the doorbell. But then I closed and bolted it. I imagine his keys were in his pocket when they took him to the hospital, but I really don’t know that.”

They thanked Ms. Robiche and took their leave.

“The Merry Widow, huh?” muttered Dollinger as they walked back to the cruiser. “If you ask me, Dracula’s Daughter fits better.”

“What do you bet she’s got a key and is systematically pillaging the place?”

Dollinger knew a short cut to Howard Rentz’s neighborhood, which took them through no fewer than three school zones around dismissal time.

“Back again, officer?” said Walter Snederle as he admitted them to his comfortably shabby place next door to Rentz’s. “This looks official. How’s the investigation coming?”

“I thought I recognized you when we talked yesterday, Mr. Snederle,” said Auburn, “and now I’ve got you placed. You wouldn’t remember this, but back when I was eight or ten years old you used to sell me candy and chewing gum and comic books at your drugstore on Banks Street.”

“Oh, the store, yes,” said Snederle with a wistful smile. “That was a long time ago.”

“Earlier this afternoon we had a meeting with Mr. Polderrick, who’s been handling Howard Rentz’s legal affairs recently. He told us how, a few months ago, Joy Lynn Robiche steered you his way so you could make a will leaving everything to her.”

“She’s a social worker for the county,” nodded Snederle. “When I was in the hospital getting over cataract surgery she helped me with paperwork, and other things, and then... we sort of fell in love.”

“And when she found out all that money you’d told her you had in the bank existed only in your imagination, she fell out of love again.”

Snederle’s mood sank from wistful to lugubrious. “All those years of working twelve or fourteen hours a day,” he said, “with no chance to take a vacation, let alone get married... and then the big pharmacy chains ran me right out of business.” Tears welled up and spilled over behind the thick lenses. “Was it wrong to hope for a couple years of peace and contentment before I take off on the One-Way Cruise?”

“That’s not for us to judge. We’re more concerned about what you did when you found out that your next-door neighbor had replaced you in Ms. Robiche’s wedding plans.”

Snederle suddenly turned wary and restless. Auburn informed him of his rights under the Miranda ruling.

“As a pharmacist, you know that warfarin, the drug that Rentz was taking to thin his blood, is the active ingredient in several brands of rodenticide, probably including the one you’ve been using to get rid of the rabbits and squirrels that gnaw your flowers. You also know that warfarin has no taste and no odor and that it dissolves readily in water — or coffee.

“So when Howard Rentz came over to your back porch for coffee on sunny afternoons, you made sure he gradually built up a dangerous level of warfarin by mixing it in with the sugar, which you’re not allowed to use. We’d like to have a look around your house, Mr. Snederle. We don’t have a warrant, so you’re free to refuse. But if you do that we’re going to take you into custody as a material witness, and then you won’t be here tomorrow when we come back with a warrant and take this place apart.”

They exercised enormous caution in keeping the package of rat poison they found in Snederle’s garage separate from the contents of the half-full sugar bowl that turned up in his trash. The laboratory eventually found high concentrations of warfarin in both specimens.

The day after Snederle was found guilty of first-degree murder, Auburn received a phone call from Cary Rentz.

“I’m so embarrassed about this,” she said. “But neither of us can sleep at night till we get it straightened out. There was a pie, of course. I made it myself — chocolate pudding in a prebaked crust, with real whipped cream topping. I put it in the refrigerator at my father-in-law’s to keep a chill on it until it was time for the party, but he kept sending the kids out to the kitchen to bring him samples. By serving time, not only was the pie completely gone, but so was the pan I made it in. And nobody — nobody — knew anything about that.

“Afterward, Virgil found the plate and the rest of the pie dumped in some bushes in the backyard. Our nephew Devlin has ADHD. He’s a tsunami on two legs and he’s constantly in trouble. We figured he probably had an accident getting the pie out of the refrigerator and just threw it away without telling anybody. So we decided not to say anything about it either.

“That day when you asked us about the pie, we realized you were thinking it might have been poisoned. Since we still had ice cream and cake left, we were afraid you might think it was funny that we didn’t also have some of the pie. I don’t know if you’re married, but, after so many years, a husband and wife can sort of communicate by telepathy — well, some of the time. Without a word spoken, Virgil and I decided between us to pretend there had never been a pie in the first place.

“And since you said you were going to be checking with Kevin and Sheeba, we called and give them a heads up. Sheeba even deleted some pictures from her camera that showed the pie.” Her sigh when she stopped for breath plainly signaled her relief at having confessed this atrocity. “We’re not really the kind of people who tell lies, especially to the police. I mean, your job is hard enough already—”

“Please don’t let it bother you, Mrs. Rentz. The fact is that the discrepancy between different people’s stories about the pie was the one and only reason we went ahead with the homicide investigation.”

Auburn made sure Dollinger had already had lunch when he passed along this final word on the chocolate pie.

Copyright © 2012 John H. Dirckx