Clues for Dr. Coffee by Lawrence G. Blochman

Author:Lawrence G. Blochman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2023-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Calendar Girl

If kenneth wyman had been gathered to his fathers twentyfour hours sooner, he would have been quietly buried with few flowers, fewer tears, and no suspicion that he had been murdered. The coroner had signed him out as a case of heart failure. Even the insurance company which had written a $50,000 policy on his life was not fussy about how Wyman had died; it was when that mattered.

Kenneth Wyman had neglected to pay his last insurance premium. His policy had expired at midnight Wednesday, four hours after his wife Helen had last seen him alive. His body was not found until the early hours of Thursday morning. If Wyman had died after midnight, the company would refuse to pay the claim, even if the Widow Wyman cried her pretty little eyes out.

However, the claims adjuster for the Northbank agency of the insurance company was a fair-minded man, and he consulted Dr. Daniel Webster Coffee, chief pathologist for Pasteur Hospital, who occasionally did an autopsy for the company. Was it possible, the claims adjuster wanted to know, to determine scientifically whether death had occurred before midnight?

The tall, big-boned pathologist ran his fingers through his sandy hair. “I can try,” he said. “It would have been easier to establish the post-mortem interval if I’d seen the body when it was found this morning. But there’s a pretty fair chance that an autopsy will fix the time of death.”

“That’s just the trouble,” the adjuster said. “The widow refuses permission for an autopsy.”

Dr. Coffee set his jaw. “Then I’ll take the job,” he said, “including the job of getting permission.”

As a rule, Dr. Coffee had an intense dislike of insurance jobs with a widow’s mite at stake—if $50,000 could truthfully be called a mite. But he took the Wyman case without hesitation. Mrs. Wyman’s attitude whetted his curiosity and aroused his suspicions. Why did she object to an autopsy which might be her only chance to establish her claim to the insurance? Did she have positive knowledge that Wyman’s death had occurred after midnight? Or was she afraid an autopsy might reveal facts quite foreign to insurance?

Before he called on Helen Wyman, the pathologist made a few discreet inquiries about the dead man. He found that Kenneth Wyman was a journeyman photoengraver who had risen to be a master printer. He was half owner of Wyman & Prentiss, a small Northbank printing and lithographing firm which did a big business in girlie-girlie calendars. There had been some trouble with the postal authorities the year before, resulting in wholesale confiscations and the loss of some of their biggest customers—a disastrous year altogether. The current year’s calendars, however, by a decorous use of shadow and an extra layer of gauze in the right places, had re-established the right of Wyman & Prentiss to use the mails, and by the next year the firm expected to have recovered its lost business.

Helen Wyman, before her marriage five years earlier, had been a photographer’s model and had posed for many a Wyman & Prentiss calendar.

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