Archie Goes Home

Chapter 6

I thanked my aunt for the offer, but I knew that if she did introduce us, she would insist on hanging around and making any conversation a three-way event. I wanted to hear what the reporter/columnist had to say without her being prompted or getting interrupted, so I suggested to Edna that she telephone Verna Kay Padgett to set up an appointment for the two of us.

Once we were back at Aunt Edna’s house after lunch, she called the newspaper. “Verna Kay says that she is intrigued about meeting a real, honest-to-goodness New York detective,” Edna said after hanging up. “She has heard of Nero Wolfe and said that anybody who works for him must be good.”

“Well, that is a start anyway,” I replied. “I’m interested in what else she has to say.”

We were to meet at three that afternoon in the offices of the Trumpet downtown. As I walked through the business district, I observed that the town seemed to have changed very little in the years since I had last spent time there. And it was essentially the same if one went even farther back to the dark ages, when my only mode of transportation had been a bicycle. Now as then, the population hovered around twenty thousand, and new construction was minimal, other than the downtown apartment building Aunt Edna had referred to, along with a handful of ranch-style houses in a north side development that went bankrupt almost has soon as it had begun breaking ground.

Only a single movie theater remained of the three I’d haunted as a grade-schooler, but at least the survivor had been the best of the trio, the one that always showed the latest films and had the most-buttery popcorn. Feeble attempts had been made to spruce up many of the buildings along the main drag, but these half-hearted facelifts soon began to prove that a couple of coats of paint and a new sign were no match for brutal midwestern winters and fierce spring thunderstorms.

Still, the small city gamely soldiered on and was able to sustain the loss of its largest employer, a company producing railroad wheels, by luring into the same plant a business that manufactured motorized recreational vehicles, which were becoming popular. The best news of all, according to a letter my mother had sent me at the time, was that the new operation would have as many people on its payroll as the old one.

The Trumpet still occupied the two-story brick building where it had been during my growing-up years, when I delivered the paper every weekday on my bike. I walked in and was greeted by a smiling young woman behind a waist-high counter.

“Good afternoon, sir. Are you here to place a classified advertisement?” When I replied that I was to meet with Verna Kay, she pointed to a door on the left. “She will be at the first desk you come to in our newsroom, sir.” I felt older each time she called me sir.

I was expecting a prim, middle-aged columnist much like Cora Ann Wilson, who had been a guest speaker in one of my high school classes and who had preached to us students the importance of getting as many local residents mentioned in print as possible. “People love to see their names in the paper, and always in a positive context, of course,” Cora Ann had said in a tone that brooked no argument.

The first desk I came to was occupied by a slender woman in her twenties with long, chestnut hair, a straight nose that was just the right length, and the heart-shaped face of one who might earlier have been a homecoming queen. “I am looking for Verna Kay Padgett,” I said, fully expecting to eventually encounter a carbon copy of Cora Ann Wilson.

“You have found her, and you must be Mr. Goodwin,” she replied, standing, smoothing her skirt, and giving me a dimpled smile that lit up the room. “It is so nice to meet you.”

I think I recovered from my surprise and took the slender hand that was offered to me. “Your aunt said you wanted to talk about Logan Mulgrew’s death,” Verna Kay said. “May I suggest we have coffee down at White’s Rexall Drugs? I don’t have any deadlines right now.”

“Fine by me,” I told her, “but only with the stipulation that I buy.”

She agreed, and we set off for the drugstore. “How long have you been at the Trumpet?” I asked as we walked along the shop-lined streets.

“Just over two years now, ever since I graduated from the state university over in Athens with a journalism degree. And very honestly, just between us, I am ready to move on to a larger paper in a larger city. I’ve sent résumés to dailies in both Toledo and Cleveland, but I would prefer you keep that to yourself.”

“Consider it done. Are things a little too quiet for you here?”

That brought another smile. “Such is the case most of the time, but I had to get my start somewhere. The bigger papers that I applied to before I graduated told me I needed to get some experience first, and the Trumpet happened to have an opening.”

“And so now you are getting that experience,” I said as we entered the drugstore and perched on stools at the marble-topped lunch and soda counter. “Do you believe Logan Mulgrew killed himself?”

“You get right to the point, don’t you? I like that, no beating around the bush. I’m sure that’s the mark of a good detective. In answer to your question, I think his death was very suspicious. I interviewed him once, and he seemed to be healthy and in fine shape for his age. Why should he want to kill himself?” Verna Kay posed as we were served coffee.

“My aunt has asked the same question.”

“Your aunt is quite a character, isn’t she? And I mean that in a positive way. I assume she has shared her theories with you.”

“That she has. What do you think of those theories of hers?”

“There is no question whatever that Logan Mulgrew had made more than his share of enemies over the years. You don’t have to spend much time in this town to learn that. I come from a town way over near Cincinnati, but within a few weeks of moving here, I began to hear stories about him, and many of them were not very nice stories.”

“By chance, did you happen to get some of these stories from my aunt?”

The color rose in Verna Kay’s cheeks. “Well... she certainly has been a good source of local lore. But just so you know, Mr. Goodwin, everything I have heard from Edna I also verified through other sources.”

“That sounds like a good reporting procedure, and before we go any further, please call me Archie.”

“I will, and I go by Katie to my friends, who gave me that name in college. I’ve never liked being called Verna, but I was named for my favorite aunt, so what can you do but live with it until you’re old enough to choose an alternative?”

“It seems to me that Katie is a fine alternative. Now... tell me what you have concluded, if anything, about the demise of one Logan Mulgrew.”

“I am sure that he was killed, Archie,” she said in what I would term an intense whisper, if there is such a thing.

“A few minutes ago, you called Mulgrew’s death ‘extremely suspicious.’ Now, all of a sudden, you seem to have a more definite opinion.”

“I’m guessing your aunt told you about a shot that was fired through my apartment window.”

“I was going to get to that, but since you brought the subject up, tell me what you think about it.”

“Gunfire is very rare around here, making it very unlike conditions in New York.”

“Now you sound like my mother, who thinks the big city is an armed camp. This despite the fact that she’s been to visit me in New York several times and has yet to hear a single gunshot.”

“I’m sorry, Archie,” Katie said, shaking her head. “I know that I can be guilty of stereotyping. My point was that because gunfire is so rare around here, I don’t believe that shot to be a coincidence.”

“I shouldn’t think you would. What do the local police say about what happened — especially Blankenship?”

“Have you met him?”

“No, remember that I just got here yesterday. I’ve heard a little about him from my mother and my aunt. Give me your take on the man.”

She shrugged. “He’s all right, I suppose, and certainly earnest enough. But I’m not sure he’s got enough experience to deal with what sure looks like a murder. He’s behaving, at least publicly, like he still believes Mulgrew’s death was a suicide.”

“How does he explain the shot through your window?”

“He said he thinks it was just some guy who became trigger-happy after getting loaded in some bar. After all, he stressed that this did occur on a Saturday night, when, as he pointed out, some locals do get tanked up.”

“Even though gunshots, as you pointed out, are very rarely heard in these parts.”

“Unless you count hunters,” Katie Padgett said, “and this isn’t hunting season.”

“Was the incident covered by the Trumpet?”

“Yes, but not by me; another reporter on the staff wrote about it. They wouldn’t have wanted me to write about something in which I was the subject. That is simply not a good journalism practice.”

“Understood. Was Blankenship quoted in the article?”

Katie nodded. “He said pretty much what I just mentioned, about somebody getting drunk and going on a Saturday night toot.”

“Did anyplace else in town get shot up that night?”

“You ask very good questions, Archie. You would have made a fine reporter if you hadn’t decided to be a detective.”

“Aw shucks, it’s just my inborn curiosity. I repeat my query.”

“Of course, I posed that to Tom Blankenship, and he said no other gunshots were reported in town that night.”

“When’s the last time you talked to Blankenship, either on the telephone or in person?”

“That was the last time. He hasn’t returned any of my calls since then. I really don’t believe he wants to speak to me.”

“Do you think the chief is honest and efficient?”

“I do, but I also believe that he is in over his head on the Mulgrew death.”

“So it’s safe to say he hasn’t interviewed anyone about what happened, right?”

“That’s true, with the exception of a grandniece, Donna Newman, the granddaughter of Mulgrew’s brother-in-law. She’s the one who found her uncle dead in his living room with a bullet wound to the head and a pistol on the sofa cushion beside him. She went to the house when he hadn’t been at the bank for two days and his telephone at home went unanswered.”

“Didn’t the man have some sort of live-in or part-time help?”

“You would think with his money that he would have,” Katie answered, “but he is said to have prided himself on his independence. He cooked his own meals when he wasn’t eating out, and he did his own housecleaning, according to his grandniece. I suspect that he was a skinflint.”

“Have you talked to the niece?”

“I have, and she seems to be genuinely broken up about her great-uncle’s death. Donna, who is single and is a high school English teacher in a town about thirty miles west of here, told me she made it a point to stop by and see him once or twice every week. She naively seemed to overlook the faults that others saw in the man.”

“And the niece felt that he had killed himself?”

“She told me that she wasn’t really sure. One the one hand, she said her great-uncle had been somewhat despondent because of his wife’s death, but on the other hand, she said that in the days before he died, he seemed to have a renewed interest in life, although she wasn’t quite sure what had caused it. She seemed to be of two minds on how he died.”

“Now Verna Kay, or rather, Katie, I would like to get your thoughts on who you think might have wanted Logan Mulgrew dead.”