John D MacDonald – Travis McGee 10 The Girl In The Plain Brown Wrapper

Then I gave him a complete rundown on my talk with Helen Boughmer. He said it sounded as if something or somebody had scared her, and I did not tell him that his appraisal seemed to belabor the obvious.

He reported no progress to speak of on the murder of the nurse. He said, “Trouble with that damned place, the architect laid out those garden apartments for privacy. They kind of back up to little open courts, and there’s so many redwood fences it’s like a maze back in there. If whoever killed her came to the back door, which might be the way it was because of her being found in the kitchen, I might as well give up on shucking my way through the neighborhood. No fingerprints, but come to think of it, in thirty-one years of police work I’ve never been on a case yet where there was a single fingerprint that ever did anybody any good or any harm in the courtroom.”

He sat in moody silence until I said, “It seems to be tied in to the death of Doctor Sherman.”

“Please don’t tell me that. I’ve got a file on him that you can’t hardly lift. And there’s nothing to go on.”

“Maybe Penny Woertz had some casual little piece of information and she didn’t know it was important.”

“You’re reaching, McGee.”

“Maybe she’d even told it to Rick Holton and it didn’t mean anything to him either, yet. If somebody could play on his jealousy and get him to shoot me after she’d been killed, that puts the two of them out of circulation. Maybe Helen Boughmer knows something too, but somebody has done such a good job of closing her mouth, I don’t think she’ll be any good to you.”

“Thanks. You try to give me a motive for one murder by hooking it up to another one last July. I am going to keep right on thinking the doc injected himself in the arm.”

“Got any reason why he did that?”

“Conscience.”

“Had he been a bad boy?”

“Nobody is ever going to prove anything on him, and it wouldn’t do much good now anyway. But let me tell you something. I have lived a long time and I have seen a lot of things and I have seen a lot of women, but I never saw a worse woman in my life than Joan Sherman. Honest to Christ, she was a horror. She made every day of that doctor’s life pure hell on earth. Damn voice onto her like a blue heron. She was the drill instructor and he was the buckass private. Treated him like he was a moron. One of those great big loud virtuous churchgoing ladies with a disposition like a pit viper. Full of good works. She was a diabetic. Had it pretty bad too but kept in balance. I forget how many units of insulin she had to shoot herself with in the morning. Wouldn’t let the doctor shoot her. Said he was too damned clumsy with a needle. Three years ago she went into diabetic coma and died.”

“He arrange it?”

Stanger shrugged. “If he did, he took such a long time to figure it out, he didn’t miss a trick.”

“Want me to beg? Okay. I’m begging.”

“Back then the Shermans lived about six miles out, pretty nice house right in the middle of ten acres of groveland. We were having a telephone strike and things got pretty nasty. They were cutting underground cables and so on. She’d had her car picked up on a Friday to be serviced, and they were going to bring it back Monday. Because of the phones out that way being out, he thought he’d better drive in Sunday morning and see to some patients he had in the hospital. Besides, he had to pick up some insulin for her, he told us later, because she used the last ampule she had that morning. He’d pick up a month’s supply at a time for her. He made his rounds and then he went to his office and worked awhile. Nobody would think that was strange. He stayed away from her as much as he dared and nobody blamed him. He said he was supposed to get back by five because a couple was coming for drinks and dinner. But he lost track of the time. The couple came and rang the bell and the woman went and looked in the window and saw her on the couch. She looked funny, the woman said. The husband broke in. No phone working. They put her in the car and headed for the hospital. They met Doc Sherman on his way out and honked and waved him down. She was DOA. They say he was a mighty upset man. There was a fresh needlemark in her thigh from her morning shot, so she hadn’t forgotten. He said she never forgot. They did an autopsy, but there wasn’t much point in it. I don’t remember the biochemistry of it, but there just aren’t any tests that will show whether you did or did not take insulin. It breaks down or disappears or something. County law checked the house. The needle had been rinsed and put in the sterilizer. The ampule was in the bathroom wastebasket. There was a drop or so left in it. That tested out full strength. The doctors decided there had been a sudden change in her condition and so the dose she was used to taking just wasn’t enough. Also, they’d had pancakes and maple syrup and sweet rolls for breakfast. He said she kept to her diet pretty well, but Sunday breakfast was her single exception all week. Now, tell me how he did it. That is, if he did it.”

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