The Copycat Caper

by John V. Madormo

  “Huh?” Derrick said.

  “All you have to do is push the cork into the bottle. Then turn it over and shake the coin out.”

  A wide grin began to form on Derrick’s face. “That’s it. It’s mine, all mine.” He got up and headed to the door.

  Henry sprinted over to block his path. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  Derrick reached into his pocket and threw a handful of coins onto the card table. “Keep the change,” he said as he disappeared.

  Henry scooped up the loose coins and deposited them into the change jar. He then shook it in Scarlett’s face.

  “Got a problem with walk-ins now?” he said.

  Scarlett sneered, stood up, and headed for the door. “See you in a month and a half, gentlemen.”

  And with that, the Charlie Collier, Snoop for Hire Agency was officially on hiatus.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Hammond Eggs Caper

  I spent the better part of the weekend studying my lines. I had never been great at memorization, so this play business was going to be a real challenge. I thought it might help if I were able to get into character, so I pretended to be the real Nick Dakota. Then I imagined what he might say. If it had been Sam Solomon, it would have been simple. Not only did I know how Sam thought, but I could recite virtually every line of dialogue from the entire mystery series. There was one advantage—the two characters were somewhat similar. Like Sam, Nick Dakota appeared to be the same sort of hard-boiled, no-nonsense private eye. But Nick was a contemporary private detective, not a 1930s sleuth. He never referred to a woman as a dame. He was more politically correct.

  At dinner on Sunday, I told my parents that their little boy had won the part of leading man in the upcoming sixth-grade play. My mom could barely contain herself. She demanded to know all the details—the entire story line, scene by scene, what other kids were in it, and most importantly, the date of the performance. She apparently planned to invite a bunch of relatives. Now, that I could have done without. But I decided not to say anything. It wasn’t often that she got a chance to brag about her only child. I did put my foot down, however, when she volunteered to help make costumes. That was the last thing I needed. I couldn’t afford having her snooping around at school. It would cramp my style big-time.

  My dad reacted in typical “dad” fashion. “Just don’t screw it up,” he said.

  But that was okay. I decided to use it as motivation and to surprise him with a stellar performance. Maybe that way he’d go easy on me the next time I got caught taking on new clients.

  When Monday morning finally arrived, I was pumped. This promised to be a red-letter day. Not only would I have an opportunity to showcase my talents onstage for Scarlett, but I was also counting the hours until eleven o’clock tonight, when I’d be curled up under the covers—with headphones, of course—listening to The Sam Solomon Mystery Theater. I remembered Eugene mentioning that tonight’s episode was about a crooked fight promoter. I could hardly wait. I knew that I’d be tired tomorrow morning, but that didn’t matter. It was nothing compared to the dozens of sleepless nights that Sam Solomon experienced. Take, for instance, Episode #50—The Hammond Eggs Caper. Sam sat in the corner booth of a northwest Indiana all-night diner for seventy-two hours straight just waiting for a chance to get a glimpse of a suspicious character suspected of smuggling thousands of laying hens across the Illinois-Indiana border. So I had nothing to complain about if I missed an hour or two of sleep.

  As was usually the case when I was excited about an upcoming event, the school day seemed to drag. I found myself glancing at the clock the entire time. The minute hand seemed frozen in place most of the day. At recess, I pulled out the script and practiced some of my lines. Henry, on the other hand, appeared unusually calm, just hours before his theatrical debut.

  “Relax, Charlie, we don’t have to know all of our lines today,” he said. “Some of the other kids told me that Mr. Miles lets you read from the script for the first few rehearsals. So don’t kill yourself.”

  “Well, that’s good to hear,” I said. “Because you know me and memorizing. I’m no good at it.”

  “Who is?”

  “I am,” a voice said proudly. It was Stephanie—Stephanie the nodder. She wasn’t part of the conversation, but she decided to weasel her way into it anyway. “Typical boys. You never want to make the necessary effort to succeed. All you do is the absolute minimum. Serves you right if you can’t remember your lines.” She smiled in a smart-alecky way.

  “Who asked you?” Henry said.

  “I’m just trying to explain to you that everyone has the aptitude to succeed if he’s willing to work hard enough,” she said.

  “We don’t need you to tell us that,” Henry snapped. “Maybe you haven’t been reading the papers lately. Charlie and I single-handedly thwarted a black-market taxidermy operation, not to mention capturing a notorious criminal responsible for a string of burglaries in the area. So don’t lecture us about hard work.”

  Stephanie snarled. “I must have missed that,” she said. And having made her point, she huffed and was on her way.

  The remainder of the afternoon was a snore. Even the final period, Mrs. Jansen’s science class, was intolerable. Since her daughter recently had a baby, Mrs. Jansen took a couple days off to help her out. Our sub was a strange bird named Theodore Montague. He was bald on top with shoulder-length hair. It wasn’t a good look. Every time he had subbed in the past, he wore the same clothes—a rust-colored corduroy suit—even when it was hot out. He had a glass eye—at least that’s what the eighth-graders told us. You could never tell if he was looking at you or not. That really messed up some of the less-than-honest kids, who were never sure if he was watching them borrow answers from fellow classmates. Mr. Montague spent the entire period reading to us from the textbook. I always hated it when teachers did that. I could have done that myself.

  The minute that class had mercifully come to an end, Henry and I made our way to the auditorium to meet up with Mr. Miles and the rest of the cast. Everyone sat in the first couple of rows anxiously awaiting our director, who eventually arrived fashionably late.

  “All right, let’s get to work, everyone,” he said. “I want all of you up onstage, but you can leave your scripts on your seats. We won’t need them today.”

  I nudged Henry. “You said he’d let us use our scripts today. This isn’t gonna be pretty.”

  We all hopped up onstage and prepared for the worst.

  Stephanie began nodding and raised her hand.

  “Yes, Miss Martin,” Mr. Miles said.

  “This doesn’t affect me, mind you,” she said, “but what if we haven’t memorized all of our lines? Will you be handing out detentions?”

  Mr. Miles’s eyes narrowed. He seemed unaware of the fact that Stephanie was the official whistle-blower in the sixth grade.

  “There won’t be any detentions. In fact, none of you will be asked to recite any of your lines today.”

  A collective sigh followed.

  “Today you’ll be doing a series of exercises to strengthen your instrument.”

  “What instrument?” Henry asked.

  “Your voice, Mr. Cunningham. What else?”

  Henry shrugged.

  “Okay,” Mr. Miles said, “everyone in a straight line across the front of the stage facing me with your backs to the audience.”

  And for the next hour, we performed various voice techniques. We started by rolling our heads forward, back, right, and left. This was supposed to relax our neck and shoulders. Then we massaged our faces, from our hairlines to our jaws. I felt pretty silly doing this, but since everyone had to do it, it was kind of fun. After that Mr. Miles passed out pencils to each of us. He told us to hold the pencils in our mouths crosswise and then try to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. At first, everything sounded really garbled, but after
a few minutes, I could see what he was trying to accomplish. Since the pencil made it difficult to speak, we were forced to over-enunciate each word in order for it to be heard correctly. After we had performed a few more physical exercises, Mr. Miles instructed us to turn around and face the audience.

  “Now it’s time to hear you project,” he said. “With our budget, we don’t have the luxury of placing a wireless mike on everyone. Wired microphones will be hanging from the rafters. The only way they can pick you up is if you speak clearly and loudly.” He grabbed his chest. “From the diaphragm. Always remember—from the diaphragm.” He walked over to the side of the stage and opened his briefcase. He emerged with a handful of papers, which he distributed. “Each of you should be holding a tongue twister. I want you to read it over, and then when I cue you, I want you to belt it out, as if it were opening night.”

  We each read over the material on the papers. Some of the kids made faces. Others appeared confused. This was going to be interesting.

  “Okay, let’s begin.” Mr. Miles danced down the stairs leading to the main floor, walked to the middle of the auditorium, and sat down in one of the seats. “From left to right,” he called out. “Here we go. Miss Martin, begin.”

  Stephanie nodded and yelled out, “When one black blood bled black blood, the other black blood bled blug.” She made a face. The rest of us were enjoying this. “Let me try it again,” she pleaded. But she never got a chance to say when one black bug bled black blood, the other black bug bled blue.

  “No mulligans,” Mr. Miles said. “Next . . . Mr. Hart?”

  The hisser took a deep breath and let ’er rip. “Mommy made me mush my muffy mummins.”

  Mr. Miles sighed. He was hoping to have heard mommy made me mash my mini-muffins. “Mr. Walsh?”

  The slacker just stood there. He must have been daydreaming. He was probably thinking up a new illness to get him out of tomorrow’s practice.

  “Mr. Walsh?”

  “Oh, sorry,” he said. And then proceeded to rattle off “a proper cup of coffee in a coppa cuppa coffee.” Instead of a proper cup of coffee in a copper coffee cup. “I messed that up. I can do better.”

  Henry, Scarlett, and I stood at the other end of the line listening in as fellow actors were humbled by relatively simple tongue twisters. Mr. Miles was making his point in a most effective way. Until we learned to speak clearly and crisply, there was no sense reciting lines from the script. When Mr. Miles pointed at Henry, it was do or die.

  “Mr. Cunningham?”

  Henry stepped forward and let fly. It wasn’t pretty. “The sixth ship’s sick sheep is six.” He groaned and stepped back into line. He was trying to say the sixth sheik’s sixth sheep is sick.

  “Mr. Collier? This one is perfect for you.”

  It was time to wow Mr. Miles and Scarlett. I could do this. I was certain I could. It was time for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.

  “Charlie chooses to choose choice chilled cherries.” I had done it. Only one flub. I should have read Charlie chooses to chew choice chilled cherries.

  “And Miss Alexander?”

  Scarlett was cool as a cucumber. She smiled and delivered a flawless performance. “Moses supposes his tose-es are roses, but Moses supposes erroneously.”

  Mr. Miles sat back in his seat and folded his arms. “Very nice, Scarlett. I wish I could say the same for the rest of you.” He stood and approached the stage. “We’re going to continue this exercise until each one of you is able to deliver your line five times in a row—mistake free. It could happen later today or two weeks from today. It’s up to you. And we won’t read from our scripts until then.”

  And for the next half hour, we repeated our tongue twisters over and over. When we reached the end of our first rehearsal, we still had failed to master our task.

  “We’ll continue this same exercise tomorrow,” Mr. Miles said painfully, “until we get it right. Any questions?”

  Even if there had been questions, most of us were too drained to string together more than a couple of words. I was upset that I was unable to nail a relatively simple tongue twister. I was better than that. I vowed that tomorrow would be different. If not, there would be no way to win the hand of the fair Rebecca Ramsey—not by a long shot.

  • • •

  That night following dinner, I went up to my room to finish my homework. I had a hard time concentrating. And who wouldn’t? When your hero, your idol, your mentor—Sam Solomon—was about to be featured in his own old-time radio program, how could you think of anything else? I found a portable radio and headphones and slid them under my pillow. I even set the alarm on my clock radio for eleven o’clock just in case I fell asleep waiting for the program to start. Since my parents might still be awake at eleven, I had to make certain that they weren’t able to detect what I was up to. I wanted everything to appear normal, so as soon as I finished up an English composition, I went downstairs for a few minutes to watch a little television. That would make it seem like a typical evening.

  When I entered the living room, I found my parents seated on the couch. My mom was watching TV while working on a crossword puzzle. My dad was reading the newspaper. Gram—at least I think it was Gram—was sitting in an easy chair in a Darth Vader costume. A light saber rested in her lap. She nodded to me when I came in, then turned and pointed her weapon at my dad. Another painful family melodrama was about to unfold. I didn’t need this tonight, so I decided to defuse it. I stepped into Gram’s line of fire and just stood there. I knew she’d never use me for target practice. A moment later, she shrugged, then turned and lowered her weapon. My dad will never know how close he came to being vaporized.

  He dropped the newspaper on the coffee table. “Did you see this story?”

  “What story?” my mom asked.

  “This one about the people who got poisoned.”

  “No,” she said as she set down her crossword puzzle.

  My dad picked the paper back up and began reading. “Thirty people attending a campaign fund-raiser for State Treasurer Miranda Pickens were rushed to the hospital last night complaining of stomach distress. Blood tests revealed that they had ingested some type of poison that has yet to be identified.”

  “Food poisoning, maybe?” my mom said.

  “Now get this,” my dad said. “After the health department inspected all the food and beverages at the affair, they found traces of poison in the punch.”

  “The punch?” my mom said. “How could that be?” She paused. “Unless someone put it in there. How awful.”

  I found myself listening carefully to each detail. It reminded me of being in Mrs. Jansen’s class when she would unveil one of her patented brain busters.

  “Following the toxicology report,” my dad continued, “the police began questioning each guest who had attended the party. They started with the caterer who supplied the punch. Before the affair had begun, witnesses indicated that they had watched the caterer prepare the punch. He had mixed the ingredients, added ice, and then tasted it himself. But there were no signs of poison in his system.”

  “Then one of the guests must have put it in there,” my mom said.

  “I don’t think so,” my dad replied. “A closed-circuit camera captured everything that took place at the beverage table the entire evening. And no one was seen putting anything into the punch bowl.” My dad set the paper down. “What do you make of that?”

  As would always happen when an unsolvable problem presented itself, my brain went into overdrive. I tried to think of how someone could have placed the poison in the punch without being seen. And how did the caterer drink it and not get sick? I could feel the wheels turning. And within a minute, I had it solved.

  “I’ll tell you who did it,” I said. “It was the caterer.”

  “But Charlie,” my mom said, “people saw him drink from the bowl, and he’s fine. No, it has
to be someone else.”

  I sat down on the couch next to my mom. “Don’t you see? He mixed all of the ingredients in front of everyone to throw off suspicion, but one of the ingredients actually contained the poison.”

  “Then how come he didn’t get sick?” my dad said.

  I smiled. “Because the poison was in the ice cubes. And since he took a sip right away, the ice hadn’t melted and the poison hadn’t been released yet.”

  My parents stared at each other. They were speechless. I had seen this look before.

  Gram ripped off her Darth Vader helmet. “He just did it again,” she said. “When are you people going to recognize that this boy has a natural gift and let him use it in whatever way he wants . . . including his little agency?”

  “Mom, let’s not have this conversation again, please,” my dad said.

  Gram turned to me. “Have you been following the news? The police are now dealing with two unsolved burglaries. Your community needs you, Charlie. Think about it.”

  The exchange that followed was predictably heated. Gram listed all of my investigative accomplishments over the years while my parents countered with concerns about some of the slightly unethical tactics I had used to solve some of my more memorable cases. They could have argued all night. It really didn’t matter. I appreciated Gram coming to my defense, but I knew I’d never win this one. As I headed upstairs to escape the drama, I could still hear the bickering even when I closed the door to my room.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Fright to the Finish Caper

  Bzzzz . . . The alarm on the radio next to my bed woke me up from a sound sleep. I glanced at the clock. Instead of my seeing the usual 7:00 A.M., it read 11:00 P.M. What was going on? I pulled up the curtains next to my bed and looked out the window into darkness. Had my mom been messing around with my clock radio? Why would she do that? And then all at once, it hit me. I had set the alarm in case I fell asleep . . . which I had. It was time for The Sam Solomon Mystery Theater. I fumbled for the portable radio under my pillow, put on headphones, and waited to be transported into yesteryear.