Only in New England : the story of a gaslight crime (31 page)

So Earnest goes about his business. What business? A man could visit his mother's house on any one of a thousand conceivable errands. But Earnest will never tell. Could he say he visited the house to retrieve a hat from a closet? To get his pipe? To look for a wallet he'd left upstairs in his old bedroom? To borrow or return a book? No story he could tell in court would be believed. The more inconsequential such an errand, the more unbelievable it would become. Least of all could he aver that he just dropped in for a minute to see his mother.

After what happens, he must swear that he was nowhere near his mother. After what happens, he must go on oath that he was nowhere near the old homestead when it happened.

What happened?

Since no one witnessed it at the time, no one could say with absolute certainty thirty-five years later. But laws of probability are not invalid in logic, nor in scientific analysis.

During that same month of 1911 when Abby Bridewell was killed, the Philadelphia publisher, Craige Lippincott, was found dead one morning in the drawing room of his mansion on Ritten-house Square. He was in evening clothes. Near his hand lay a Colt revolver. He and his wife had been the previous evening to a Metropolitan Opera performance of Quo Vadis. Upon returning home, Mrs. Lippincott had retired. She said she had heard no shot. The police at first suspected a burglar, but the house was locked and nothing had been stolen. Then, no doubt, they wondered about Mrs. Lippincott. But her reputation was unimpeachable. When the medical examiner found powder burns, suicide seemed apparent. The question was settled when investigation disclosed that Lippincott had been temperamental, nervous, depressed, and had wept bitterly over the hari-kiri of Petronius in the opera. Of course, it may not have been a felo-de se in the publisher's case. But the chances are a millon to one that he committed suicide.

Abby Bridewell did not commit suicide. By all the laws of probability, death caught the old lady exactly as it almost caught Ed Brewster. In Ed's case, it knocked him down the cellar steps, face forward, a stunning blow. In Abby's case, the blow smote her in the face—or, more exactly, on the forehead—as she was coming up through the cellar doorway, stooping a little on the climb.

Slam! Just that. Even as Earnest Bridewell opened the back kitchen door, as did Annette years later, and stepped out on the porch, caught the door against an outside gust, and then pulled it shut with a whack.

Annette heard Ed go plunging with the iron pipe. But Earnest, doubtless in a hurry and probably a little drunk, heard only a door slam, and thought nothing of it. And the wind galing through the kitchen on that system of inner doors and drafts had caught the cellar door as a squall catches a sail, and had slammed it crashing into the face of Abby Bridewell.

A man slams a kitchen door as he leaves a house, and he kills his mother on a cellar stairway without knowing it. In the dark he walks off in all innocence. He returns to his own domicile where he is glimpsed puffing a briar in a lighted window. Next morning he shocks awake to the fact that he is bound in a deadly web of circumstantial evidence. Motive, opportunity, appearances, almost everything adds up to a murder charge and possible conviction. He is a man who has made enemies, quarreled with relatives, alienated his own brother. Now the chickens are home to roost. Choking in fear and despair, he has a foretaste of the hangman's noose.

One can forgive the man for trying to lie his way out of a potentially fatal trap. If the guilty flee when no man pursueth, at least they take advantage of a chance for flight. The innocent, under suspicion, dare not flee, for they know that flight implies guilt. At the outset Earnest Bridewell must have been desperate. He had no way of knowing that some moron would later try to frame him with that bag of shot, and thus inadvertently provide ammunition for his defense. Frantic, he made a clumsy effort to purchase an alibi. Probably he bribed young Walter Jones. But Earnest Bridewell was not guilty of matricide.

CHAPTER 21

Yes, it goes without saying that no murder was committed if Abby Bridewell was killed by a cellar door which was slammed in her face by a galing draft. Since big winds are a matter of weather, such disasters are usually defined by insurance men as Acts of God.

Yet it would seem that a murderer did enter the case. Whoever planted the shot-bag evidence against Earnest Bridewell cer-

tainly had murder in mind, and as a man thinketh so is he. Or she, if the thinker were a woman.

I am still holding that blood stained shot-bag as a jigsaw piece which fits no visible slot in the puzzle. Somebody tucked it under Earnest's mattress. If Brother Lionel did not do it, who did?

Who rigged that not so artful dodge? I would stake my claim on her forthright and unassuming tombstone that Cornelia was not guilty of the deceit. A vengeful Cudworth? An unhappy Walter Jones? A malicious neighbor? Some party rival with a political axe he wanted to bury in Earnest's head? Reviewing the basic factors of motive and opportunity, and recalling his courtroom performance, one invariably comes back to Lionel.

Lionel, however, remains "a man of mystery." Somehow he apparently healed the breach with Earnest—at least, when it came to a settlement of the estate. And evidence suggests that he went into business among the "inlanders" and lived happily ever after, as the storybooks coin the term.

All of which would indicate that Lionel Bridewell ended his days at some worthwhile pursuit as a solid citizen. Indeed, he may always have been one, local gossip to the contrary.

Deservedly or undeservedly, public images were just clay pigeons at Quahog Point.

Yes, when it came to character assassination, Quahog Point seems to have been a shooting gallery. Evidently few in the village had even tried to pay lip service to the Ninth Commandment. Bearing false witness against a neighbor was a game two, and everybody else, could play.

As for truth, it would seem Diogenes with a searchlight could have found no grain of it in that beach resort. Probably the history of jurisprudence lacks the equal of the obiter dictum handed the community by the irate judge who sat on the Bridewell case.

"It has been my experience while on the bench for the past

seven years, in Quahog Point cases—and there have been many of them—that witnesses from there were disposed to perjure themselves. Invariably in the matter of an alibi from that place the defense is disposed to perjure itself. It is too bad . . ."

Yet here is another Scriptural admonition. Judge not, that ye be not judged. Victorian Quahog Point was not Sodom. Neither was it Gomorrah. It seems only fair to see the place as a product of its time—a ten-cent mirror which reflected the larger scene, the American scene, or the world scene, if you will.

If the "Pointers" traduced their neighbors, so did every major nation on the contemporary globe—in the presumed self-interest of national propaganda. And it would hardly behoove a modern to deplore this beam in the eye of the Victorian Period when one can scarcely see daylight for the mote in the eye of Today. Why, character assassination of nations, races and peoples has become a nonstop roundelay, with world capitals now trading traduce-ments in the most impassioned Calling Tones. How would Diogenes fare in our modern world community?

So Quahog Point, like its day and time, had a tacky side. But perhaps that clamshell microcosm on the gas-lit beach was not so bad, comparatively speaking. For all its hypocrisy, back-biting and esurient libido, Victorian Quahog Point produced only one murder. Or were there two?

I visited the Point this year for a final look. And I found myself thinking the foregoing thoughts, and wondering.

Well, a new highway system roars out to the peninsula with cloverleaf underpasses and four-lane speedways. However, a billboard announces that the road will be closed in event of atomic attack. As a sign of the times it struck me as no improvement on the Past.

Nor could I see much cultural advance in the Neon glare which now replaces the Center's gaslight. Nor in the garish facades of the modernized beach hotels. Certainly none in the gaudy jukebox blaring a blather of rock-and-roll from the remodeled parlor of the New Surf and Sand.

So the Victorian "Pointers" were prudes? All right, old-fashioned prudery was no longer in evidence on the local beach. But it showed up new-fashioned in an item I chanced upon in the modern Clarion-Journal. 1 * Censors in the U.S. Post Office had currently barred from the mails an advertisement which displayed a reproduction of Goya's famous painting "The Naked Maja." Since the same nude appeared on a stamp issued in Spain, the U.S. Post Office was in hot water. I could imagine Madame Sophie (gay old lady) laughing at that one. Yesterday's prudes had tried to cancel her. Today's were trying to cancel an inch-size postage stamp!

Moral betterment? I drove out to the old Bridewell homestead. Ed and Annette had sold the place. Modern decorators had been there. A mobile dangles in the vestibule. Exotic furniture, all metal tubes and pastel plastic, replaces the plush of Abby Bridewell's time. The parlor's new picture window looks out on the wall of a garage. A twenty-inch TV stands where the gramophone talked. As I glanced in, a silly adult Western banged to its hackneyed finish, and an unctuous newscaster took the screen. The news? Wretched. Embracing the report of a highway graft that made Ernest Bridewell's zombie peculations so much petty larceny in comparison.

Once again I quit the Point with a conviction that Abby Bridewell deserved far better than she got from neighbors, family and Fate. She was one of those unsung women—and there were many of her time—who held a household of problem sons together with the might of maternal instinct and the main of feminine resolution.

However, errant Earnest may not have been as brutal as some of the localites averred. A little graft, perhaps; a little perjury; a little delinquency on the back stairs—after all, he was a political dignitary. At any rate, his villainies seem to have stopped short of matricide.

And I (who mistakenly prejudged him) confess to a real liking for Brother Lionel. I almost hope the rumor which gave him a mundane suburbanite status was as groundless as the gossip which painted him a rapist.

I would like to think of Lionel Bridewell ending his days as

*
Press releases, March 1959.

a suave old roue—the type who dyes his hair jet black and whose white-browed eyes light up like matchflares every time they behold a young lady. (He restricts his hunting to rich widows, but he can dream, can't he?) I picture him wearing a burgundy velvet lounge jacket with padded lapels. And a cummerbund to hide his electric belt. He strolls into the parlor of some resort hotel. Sits down at the piano and regales the twittering feminine complement with such nostalgic old-timers as Pony Boy, Tis Only a Pansy Blossom, The Last Rose of Summer and Ta-Ra-Ra-Bum-de-Yay. Including, of course, that ghastly classic of yesteryear, Just a Handful of Earth from Mothers Grave.

Anyway, that's my verdict.

What's yours?