The Butler Didn't Do It

This is my entry for MaryLou 's contest. For a complete list of rules, the actual crime, and a list of suspects, go to her contest at

ID: 1050727   (Rated: 13+) Whodunnit? You Decide!  mystery contest for my birthday by MaryLou

And now one with the denouement:

“I think I’ve got it.” I set the dagger I had been fiddling with, not the murder weapon but a similar one from the victim’s collection, on the desk. “Carpenter,” I called to the officer who had accompanied me into the study, “are the family and friends of the victim still in the dining room?”

The young man spoke into his radio for a moment, then listened to the reply, before answering me, “Yes, sir. Dubois and Sims have been escorting them to the bathrooms when they asked, but they’re all there right now.”

Remy Dubois and Veronica Sims were the two rookies assigned to my team so I wasn’t surprised to hear they were doing the scut work. “Well, I imagine they’re getting anxious and want to be gone. Radio ahead and let them know that I’ll be along to arrest the murderer and let the rest of them go to their beds. Might as well not keep everyone up the rest of the night.” Before leaving the room, I picked up the two evidence bags I had been staring at and tucked them in my pocket.

As I entered the dining room, one of the suspects came to her feet. “You can’t keep us here all night,” she shrieked at me.

Before I could say anything, one of the younger men in the room took his cigarette out of his mouth and reprimanded her, “Oh, stuff it, Aunt Evie, and sit down. If you berate him, he’ll probably keep us here longer.”

“Dr. McFarlane, please put the cigarette out. I’ll try not to keep you here any longer than I have to, folks, but since you are the closest people to the victim, we needed your statements. Now I’m pretty certain I know who the murderer is so I’m just going to go over some evidence with you, arrest that person, and then let the rest of you be on your way.”

The woman next to him, his wife, Susan, laid her hand on his in comfort. “Of course we’re happy to help. We all want Jack’s killer punished.”

I looked around the table at the fifteen suspects. Only one of them had actually committed the murder but I suspected that many of them had contemplated it over the years. While Jack McFarlane wasn’t a bad person, no one got through life without making some enemies, even in their own family. I was sure though that this had been a crime of opportunity and not well planned.

“Quite frankly,” I started, “the three main motivations for murder are love, money, or revenge. Since none of you have any real need to get revenge on the vic and neither did any of the other guests, we pretty much cancelled that one out. So we were left with love or money. So we looked first at his business. Mr. Thomas, you and Mr. McFarlane make a pretty penny at that publishing company, am I right?”

The victim’s business partner nodded from where he sat. “We make good money but Jack was a driving force in the business. Some of our authors were signed specifically to him and I’ll have to renegotiate their contracts now.”

I pretended to check my notes, although I already knew what I wanted to say to him. “And you have as part of your partnership a survivor’s policy, am I correct?”

“Yes, of course. Merely to protect the surviving party if something happened. It has a set fee that the surviving partner has to pay to get control of the company. But I had no reason to kill him for that. He was planning to renegotiate all the contracts and then sell me his half of the company at a substantially lower price at the end of the year. Jack was ready to retire and leave the business,” Mr. Thomas explained.

“I saw that. He’s got all the paperwork in the office. He had already signed the papers and I suspect that you might be able to argue that the company has already been sold. Anyway, that’s why we decided you couldn’t have done it. You’re welcome to leave if you want.”

He shook his head. “I’d prefer to see this through.”

“Of course. Keeping on the money angle, we next looked at Mr. Collins and Ms. Warren, both of whom were signed exclusively with the vic.”

The petite novelist looked up from the glass of water she had been contemplating. “I didn’t kill Jack.”

I smiled reassuringly at her. “I know. If you had killed him, your contract would have been voided. You and Mr. Collins had no reason to want Mr. McFarlane dead. We found two clues near the body.” I pulled the baggies out of my pocket and tossed them onto the table.

Sonia Vaughn, the vic’s daughter, picked up the bag that contained the silver cat charm. “Aunt Lorelei, isn’t this a charm from your bracelet?”

The woman, a close personal friend of the vic’s, took the charm from Sonia and looked at it, then examined the bracelet on her left wrist. “Yes, it is. Where did you find it?”

“Then you didn’t know you’d lost it?” I asked.

“I had it earlier in the night when I was speaking to Michaela and Jacob. Michaela was admiring the one Jack gave me when he asked me to be Sonia’s godmother. I didn’t look at it again after that. I suppose it could have fallen off anytime after that point,” Mrs. Davidson explained. “But I know I didn’t kill Jack. I had no reason to.”

“From the placement of the charm, which was in the victim’s hand, I think the real killer was trying to frame you. You’re a trusted member of the family and its well known that you have and always wear the bracelet. I think the murderer was hoping that since we found the charm on the body, we would immediately suspect you. What he didn’t count on was us looking closely at the knife. First of all it was a dagger from Mr. McFarlane’s collection. Not all of you had access to the room where the collection was stored. Although Mrs. Davidson could have asked one of Mr. McFarlane’s children to retrieve the dagger for her, she would then run the risk of them asking why she wanted or needed it. That would be a big risk for her to take, especially since there were plenty of knives in the kitchen and around the house that would work equally as well.” I paused to take in the expressions of the people surrounding me. “Second of all, the dagger was driven too forcefully into Mr. McFarlane for a woman to have done it. A woman just doesn’t naturally have that much strength in her arm to drive it in that far. So we knew the killer was a man.” I held up the other baggy which contained a scrap of paper with the phrase “ber your pr” typed on it. “We also found this. After searching through Mr. McFarlane’s desk and files, we found an exact match to the ripped piece.”

Carpenter stepped forward and handed me the bagged letter that we had found. “Here, sir,” he said.

I took it from him and fit the ripped piece into the letter before laying them both out on the table. “I think the signature will look familiar to some of you.”

The suspects leaned forward and after a moment, Evan Vaughn shot to his feet. “You can’t prove it. Just because a piece of my letter was with him when he died, doesn’t mean I did it.”

“In this case, I think it’s a case of you protesting too much. We actually can prove that you killed him because both your prints and his are on the ripped piece of the letter. I suspect you were trying to pull it out of his hand when you stabbed him.”

“Of course my prints are on it. I wrote the damn letter. I didn’t kill my father-in-law.”

“Actually,” I said as I motioned for my men to take him into custody, “you did.”

Carpenter cuffed him and he and Dubois led the former football player from the room. Vaughn protesting the whole way.

I turned back to the rest of the group. “The rest of you are free to go.”

Mrs. Vaughn was clearly in shock and Mrs. Davidson had moved around the table and put her arms around the younger woman. As I turned to go, Mrs. Van Walken spoke up, “But why did he kill Jack?”

I turned back and smiled sadly at the group. “It was just as I said, the money. Mr. Vaughn had no money left. All of the money he earned as a player was long gone and he hadn’t been able to break into the acting business. He wouldn’t allow his wife to work and he needed money to live. He wrote the letter to Mr. McFarlane reminding him that the victim had promised to support the family if Vaughn couldn’t. The ripped phrase is from the words ‘remember your promise’. Mr. McFarlane apparently refused to honor that promise since Vaughn had gambled a lot of his money away. Vaughn killed him, assuming he would then inherit whatever money was left to his wife. Unfortunately for him, Mr. McFarlane changed his will about six months ago. The money was divided equally between his grandchildren, not his children, and was held in trust until they all turned twenty-one. While Mrs. Vaughn and Mr. McFarlane, Junior can draw money from it to support the grandchildren, there is a limit to how much and when. Vaughn killed Jack McFarlane for no reason.”

Leaving them to think about what I had said, I turned on my heel and left the room to make my way downtown to book the murderer. It had already been a long night and I still had a lot of work to do. I felt good though, another murderer would be spending the night behind bars and the family could rest easily knowing their patriarch would get justice.