“I don’t have those details, Miss Boughmer. We do adjustment work on contract for other companies. I was just asked to come up here and conduct interviews and write a report to my home office on whether or not, in my best opinion, the doctor’s death was suicide.”
“She was on her vacation,” Mom said.
“Well, I was spending it right here, wasn’t I?”
“And is there anything wrong with having a nice rest in your comfortable home, Helen?” She turned toward me. “It’s a good thing she didn’t spend her hard-earned money going around to a lot of tourist traps, because she certainly hasn’t worked a day since her precious doctor died. She doesn’t even seem to want to look for work. And I can tell you that / certainly believe in insurance, because we wouldn’t be living here right now the way we are if Robert hadn’t been thoughtful enough to protect his family in the event of his death.”
Helen said, “I just don’t know what insurance it could be. He cashed in the big policies because he wanted the money to Invest with Mr. Pike. And the ones he kept, they’d be so old I guess they’d be past the suicide clause waiting period, wouldn’t they?”
I had to take a wild shot at it. “I’m not sure of this, Miss Boughmer, but I have the feeling that this could have been some sort of group policy.”
“Oh! I bet it’s Physicians’ General. That’s a term policy and he had no value to cash in, so he kept it. And I guess there could be a suicide clause for the life of the policy. Do you think so?”
“I would say it’s possible.” I smiled at her. “There has to be some policy where the problem exists, or I wouldn’t be here, would I?”
“I guess that’s right,” the receptionist-bookkeeper said.
“There was no note left by the deceased and no apparent reason for suicide. And the company is apparently not interested in taking refuge in a technicality if the claim should be paid to the heirs. Would you say it was suicide, Miss Boughmer?”
“Yes!”
Her tone had been so wan the sudden emphasis startled me.
“Why do you think so?”
“It’s just like I told the police. He was depressed, and he was moody, and I think he killed himself. They interviewed me and typed it out and I signed it.”
“I’ve interviewed Mr. Richard Holton and, prior to the tragic murder of Miss Woertz last Saturday, I talked to her about it too. They were both most vehement in saying that it could not possibly have been suicide.”
“Like you said at first,” her mother said, “crying and raving and ranting around here, making a fuss like you didn’t make when your poor father died. You told me fifty tunes your wonderful doctor couldn’t have ever killed himself. You were going to find out what happened to him if it took the rest of your life, remember? And not two days later you decided all of a sudden that he had killed himself.”
She sat with her hands clasped on her lap, fingers interlaced and rigid, head downcast. She looked like a child praying in Sunday school.
“After I thought it over I changed my mind,” she said, and I found myself leaning forward to hear her.
“But Miss Woertz didn’t change her mind.”
“That’s got nothing to do with me.”
“Is it your impression that Miss Woertz was a stable, rational human being, Miss Boughmer?”
She looked up swiftly and down again. “She was a very sweet person. I’m sorry she’s dead.”
“Hah!” said Mom. “To this child everybody is a very sweet person. She’s easily led. She’ll believe anybody. Anybody with half an eye could see that Penny Woertz was a cheap, obvious, little thing. Why, she couldn’t have cared one way or another whether Doctor Sherman killed himself or was murdered.”
“Mom!”
“Hush up, Helen. All the little Woertz person wanted to do was dramatize. One of the ladies in my garden club, a very reliable lady, and she’s never had to wear glasses a day in her life, saw that nurse and Mr. Holton, a married man, embracing and kissing each other in a parked car in the lot at the hospital just over three weeks ago, practically under one of the streetlights in the parking lot. Do you call that rational and stable, Mr. McGee? I call it sinful and wicked and cheap.”