Honest Doubt Read Free

habit.
    â€œExactly. His son came home when he, the father, died, and insisted there was something phony about the death. The dead man, the father, the professor— why don’t I call him by his name, which was Charles Haycock— Charles had married again, rather soon after his wife’s death, and none of his three children much cared for their stepmother, who was, and is, a rather selfish and bossy woman. Cynthia is her name. In addition to the son who raised the suspicion about his father’s death and who is named Hallam— something to do with Tennyson, as I understand it— and has always been called Hal, there are his older brother, Charles Jr., called Chuck, and his younger sister, Maud, also a name with a Tennyson connection, or so I was informed. Can you possibly follow all this?”
    â€œI think I’ve got it,” Kate said. “Trying to set forth a whole case from the beginning is like trying to describe step by step how one puts on an overcoat—not easy. So son Hallam had Papa dug up?”
    â€œAfter a great deal of rumpus, I was told. And they found the wrong drug in him, some pill that would be fatal to anyone with a weak heart, or for that matter anyone. I’ve got the names here, if you can hold on a minute.”
    â€œLet’s get back to that later,” Kate said. “Go on.”
    â€œHallam immediately accused his stepmother, who inherits the father’s house, pension, life insurance, and social security. She was, it turned out, far away on the day her husband died, but that seemed to Hallam less an alibi than evidence against her. After all, he kept saying, anyone can play hankypanky with medications.”
    â€œWell, you certainly don’t
need
to be present to poison someone,” Kate said. “It’s not like shooting them or stabbing them with a handy knife from the kitchen. But if you’re going to slip them something fatal, you probably need to be there to supervise the administration. I suppose one could mix the fatal dose in with some daily medication, but that’s certainly chancy and might well be noticed by the guy taking it. Is this when you came in?”
    â€œYes, just about then. The police admitted they had a homicide on their hands, and the family—that is, the professor’s children—were not satisfied with the progress the police were making, so they hired me. I was recommended to them by someone whose money had been cleverly diverted to the account of a con man and for whom I had recovered it, or most of it. Also, I think they supposed that a woman would be likelier to understand familial suspicions. I’d hardly begun on the case, and who knows where it would have ended, except that there came an anonymous letter. Well, almost anonymous. It was written on a computer and printed on the sort of machine available to, if not owned by, thousands of people, maybe millions. No clue there, except that the letter was written on English department stationery from Charles’s college; it’s called Clifton, by the way. It claimed that he had been murdered by a member of the department out of ‘frustration and detestation and for political reasons’; I remember the wording exactly.”
    â€œSo the police turned their attentions to the English department, which in turn called upon you,” Kate suggested.
    â€œThat’s more or less how it happened. Hal, the older son, still thought his stepmother could have sneaked into the department and written the letter to draw suspicion away from herself, but he agreed to let the department hire me in their turn to discover if their favorite suspect could have committed the crime. I wasn’t that eager to take the job, frankly. The college is in New Jersey, which is a bit of a drag, and the police are from there and not that welcoming to private eyes, less so to women. The New York police have kind of gotten used to us.”
    â€œDid the