Archie Goes Home

Chapter 17

My sparring with Saul was therapeutic, and when our call ended, I sat for several minutes in the living room collecting my thoughts. I opted to tackle Lester Newman first, thereby getting the drive down to Waverly out of the way.

At that moment, my mother came downstairs. “Is everything in New York all right?” she asked.

“Maybe too good. They don’t seem to miss me. I’ve decided my next step is to go to Waverly and see Lester Newman. That is, if I can find him.”

“Waverly is in our phone directory, Archie. Maybe he’s listed. So you’ve decided to push ahead?”

“I have.”

“You were always our most headstrong one growing up, and you still are. You remind me so much of your father — even more so as you get older.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“Definitely. You both always knew what you wanted, and by heaven, you were going to get it.”

“Maybe that’s why he and I didn’t always get along. We were too much alike.”

Sure enough, Lester Newman was listed in the regional phone book Mom had, along with his address in Waverly, which I vaguely remember as being a quiet little burg.

The next morning, after a drive of less than a half hour, I found myself in Waverly, which still seemed like a quiet little burg, small enough that I quickly found the street where Newman lived. I also found his house, a modest two-story white stucco number that would soon need a paint job.

I walked up an uneven sidewalk with grass growing up through the cracks and pressed the bell. After a wait of close to a minute, the front door opened slightly, and a hunched-over man with a gray crew cut glanced up at me through one eye, the other one being closed. “What do you want?” he rasped. “I’m not buying whatever it is that you’re selling.”

“And I’m not selling anything. My name is Archie Goodwin, and I would like to talk to you about your late sister, Sylvia Mulgrew.”

“And just why would I want to talk to you, Mr... Goodwin?” Newman asked through the narrow slit. “By the way, just who are you?”

“I am a private detective, and I happen to be interested in the lives of your late sister and her husband. It has been said that your sister may not have died from natural causes.”

“That so? And just where has that been said?”

At least I had piqued his interest. “Up where she and her husband had lived,” I answered.

Slowly, the door swung farther open, revealing that Newman was supporting himself with a cane. “All right, come on inside,” he said in a grumpy tone. I found myself in a small but neat living room.

“Have a seat,” he muttered, gesturing toward a sofa. “You caught me as I was just finishing up washing the dishes, but that can wait.”

I looked around the room I was in and focused on a framed display on the far wall. Against a blue velvet background was mounted an array of army medals and ribbons, which I recognized.

I pointed at the display. “That is very impressive, sir,” I told him. “Good Conduct Medal, World War II Victory Medal, Purple Heart, and best of all, the Distinguished Service Cross, along with a lot of ribbons.”

“I earned every dang one of ’em,” he said gruffly. “I also should have gotten the Medal of Honor, too, but those bastards... oh, never mind. Say, you seem to know your medals. Were you in?”

“Yes, but not like you. I was stuck in Washington the whole time.”

“As an officer, I suppose?”

“Yes, major.”

“Hell, I should be calling you sir, not the other way around. But that’s okay, everybody did their part. I was a platoon sergeant, Fifth Army, at Anzio.”

“One of the bloodiest battles of the war, so I read and heard,” I remarked.

“I’m here to tell ya. It’s the closest thing to hell that I’ll ever see before I kick the bucket. And it’s what made me the wreck I am now. Say, you got me talking about the damned war, and I still don’t know why you are so interested in my poor dead sister. Tell me more.”

Time to come clean. “As I told you, I am a private detective, based in New York, although I’m originally from these parts and am currently staying with my mother just a few miles north of here.”

“Goodwin... Goodwin. Say, wasn’t there a farmer by that name up on the Portsmouth Road at one time?” Newman asked.

“My father, dead for a number of years now.”

“Back to my question: Why all the interest in Sylvia?”

“I’m curious about the circumstances of her death, and the death of her husband.”

My host narrowed his good eye in my direction. “I’m curious, too, very curious,” Newman said, spacing the words for emphasis. “First off, let me tell you that I’m a lot younger than I look, even though I still had to talk the army into letting me enlist because I was over the stupid age limit that they had set. The war added a lot of years to me, not that I’m complaining, mind you.”

“So noted.”

“Even though we were brother and sister, Sylvia was a lot older, and she was almost like a mother to me. In fact, my late wife used to say, ‘It’s almost as if you had two mothers when you were growing up.’ And she was right about that. Sylvia looked after me when I was a kid, and I can tell you that I was a terror.”

“Then at some point your sister married Logan Mulgrew,” I said.

“That miserable son of a bitch. I knew from the start that the man was a rotter, but Sylvia couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see it. Mulgrew could be charming, no question, but it was easy for me to see right through him. Even down here in Waverly, the word was getting through about Mulgrew and his... his escapades.”

“Did you ever mention anything to your sister about all this?”

“I started to once, years ago, but she cut me off in midsentence. She said something like ‘There is too much idle gossip going around our town, and I refuse to listen to it.’ She even quoted from the book of James in the New Testament about the tongue being ‘a world of evil among the parts of the body.’”

“Well, when people begin using the Bible in an argument, you know their position is pretty well set,” I told him.

“Yeah, I knew there was really no use of my going on. Sylvia wasn’t about to listen. And then when she started getting sick, Mulgrew wouldn’t even let me see her. He said I upset her too much, which was total hogwash.”

“Do you have any thoughts about your sister’s death — and Mulgrew’s?”

“Before we go any further, Mr. Goodwin, has someone hired you to poke into all this?”

“Believe it or not, I haven’t been hired by anybody. But there are people who seem to think your sister may not have died of natural causes, and that her husband may not have killed himself. Because I happened to be in town visiting my mother, some of these people have asked me to look into it. That’s mainly the truth,” I told him, spreading my hands in what I hoped would be seen as a gesture of candor.

Newman peered at me for several seconds before speaking. “You were an officer, a major, no less, and I respect you for that, even though I had to answer to some second looeys who didn’t know their heads from their tails. You know, a lotta people around here think that I’m tetched in my attic,” he said, tapping his forehead with a gnarled index finger. “And I suppose maybe I am at that. I don’t always feel right, and I don’t always remember things that I should. And sometimes I get these headaches like you wouldn’t believe. Doc tells me it’s because of what I went through in the war, and I’m not about to dispute him in his opinion.

“Now as far as what happened to my sister, I’d hafta say that miserable husband of hers didn’t do her any favors.”

“What do you mean by that, Mr. Newman?”

“By that I mean she didn’t get the kind of medical care she needed, ’specially when her mind began to desert her.”

“She had a full-time caregiver, didn’t she?”

Newman snorted. “If that’s what you want to call that Carrie Yeager floozy her husband brought in to look after Sylvia.”

“You don’t believe the Yeager woman was qualified?”

Another snort. “Qualified as what — a gold digger? You had better believe that word got down here to me about how friendly Mulgrew and that Yeager woman had become. You know, Mr. Goodwin, I’m something of a loner, don’t have a lot of friends, which is just fine by me.

“But some people around this town just can’t wait to bring you bad news. There’s a woman just across the street here who telephoned me to say she had seen my brother-in-law and that so-called caregiver having what she called ‘a cozy dinner’ at a restaurant in your town up north while Sylvia was at home and probably alone and suffering.”

“What do you think Miss Yeager expected to gain from her friendship with Logan Mulgrew?”

Newman gave me an Are you an idiot? look. “Well, what do you think? Money, of course! I can’t believe a young woman like her would have any kind of romantic interest in that dried-up old coot.”

“Did he leave her anything in his will?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“Not that I’ve heard. So whatever she was up to apparently didn’t work.”

“What has become of her?”

“That I couldn’t say. And to be honest, I really don’t give a tinker’s damn.”

“That’s understandable. Do you think Mrs. Mulgrew was killed?”

Newman paused for several seconds and ran a hand across his brow before answering. “I have asked myself that many times, and I just don’t know. I wasn’t around, of course; as I told you, I was not welcome. Which means I have no idea the kind of treatment that Sylvia was getting — or not getting. But let’s just say that I have my suspicions, strong suspicions.”

“Now on to her husband. Do you think that he killed himself?”

The prematurely aged soldier jerked upright and squared his shoulders. “Why are you asking me?”

I flipped a palm. “You knew all the people involved, and I figure you might have some observations, that’s all.”

“Do I think Mulgrew shot himself because he was devastated over Sylvia’s death?”

“Or do you think Mulgrew shot himself at all?”

It was obvious that Newman was getting agitated by the direction in which I was steering the conversation. He began hyperventilating, to the point where I felt he might be having some sort of attack or seizure. I waited as he slowly settled down and his breath became more normal.

He blinked at me as though seeing me for the first time. “I... sorry, I...” He held his head in his hands and shook it vigorously as if to clear it.

“Are you all right, Mr. Newman?”

“I think so, and I need to... need to go up to my room and lie down now.” He got to his feet slowly and walked toward the stairway to the second floor.

“Can I give you a hand?” I asked.

Newman shook his head but didn’t answer and slowly began climbing the steps as he gripped the railing. I went up behind him in case he fell, which seemed like a strong possibility. But he made it to the top and headed for the door to what I assumed was his bedroom. I saw no reason to stay any longer.