by Liz Turner
Truman grunted, and seemed about to comment on the spill, when Hallie chimed, “Do you know his name?”
Jameson got up suddenly, placing her coffee down too hard, and more sloshed over the edge and splashed onto the table. Truman grabbed the sketch away before the liquid could reach it. He glared in irritation at Jameson, but she was busy in a filing cabinet at the other end of the room, her back turned to them.
“I don’t remember the fellow’s name—he was real quiet, I never really got much of a chance to speak to him. But I do have it on file somewhere,” she was saying.
“When did he stay here?” Hallie asked.
“Oh—up until—well, now that you mention it, I don’t believe he ever checked out formally. He arrived just a few days ago—aha! Here we are,” Jameson said, trotting back to the table, waving a paper in her hand. She dropped back into her chair and peered over the paper, a frown creeping over her face. “Ah, now I remember this fellow,” she said.
“What’s that?” Hallie asked, getting the feeling that whatever it was, was not good.
The boarding house owner ran her tongue over her teeth and then sighed loudly. She dropped the paper back on the table, letting it flutter down in front of Hallie and Truman. “His name is John Smith. Checked in three days ago—said was he was here indefinitely. Of course, I haven’t seen him since morning the day before yesterday. I didn’t think much of it. In fact, I think I was just happy to have my boarding house running smoothly again.” She cracked a smile. “You know, the hardest part about this job is sometimes feeling like a mother to all these grown-up children, always squabbling, wanting you to fix all their problems.” Levelling a gaze at Hallie and Truman, she added, “I am not a mother type, that’s for sure.”
Hallie and Truman shared a look. I don’t think anyone would ever think you were, Hallie thought, amused by the woman’s quirkiness. Truman asked, “I’m sorry, ma’am—”
Jameson interrupted, “—Please. I can handle the ‘Mrs. Jameson’—I’m not married, you know—but the ‘ma’am’ is simply—just call me Penelope, if you will, or Penny.”
Truman began again, nodding politely. “Penelope, I’m not sure you understand the gravity of the situation.”
Jameson rolled her shoulders back and looked him square in the eyes. “Perhaps I don’t. Why don’t you fill me in on just what you are doing here in my living room?”
“This… John Smith, was found dead the evening the day before yesterday. Poisoned. We need you to tell us everything you know about him, including what he was doing in town, where he was from, anyone he might have been visiting,” Truman said.
For the first time, Jameson seemed at a loss for words. She took her glasses off and cleaned them vigorously with a cloth from her trouser pocket. She seemed to be avoiding looking at Hallie or Truman. Finally, Hallie asked quietly, “Penelope, what did you mean when you said you were just happy to have your boarding house running smoothly again? Was Mr. Smith causing some sort of trouble for you?”
Jameson sighed loudly, grunting. “Look, I’ll tell you everything I know about the fellow, but I assure you it isn’t much. I dare say, I hope you don’t think I had anything to do with this—death,” she said, a flush creeping up her neck. “Or my boarding house for that matter. I run a very respectable place here.”
“We’d appreciate anything you could tell us,” Truman said simply. He opened his notebook and sat poised with pen in hand.
Jameson tapped the paper on the table with her forefinger. “Here you can see when he checked in. Three days ago, four o’clock. He left the line with check-out date blank—now normally, I require a check-out date, but seeing as we’re nearing the end of peak season, I had a bit of flexibility with the rooms. I thought perhaps if I agreed, he’d end up staying for quite a while. But, you’ll be happy to know,” here Jameson shot a cheeky glance to Truman. “that because of his insistence on ‘flexibility,’ I did inquire as to what his business was in town. Most vacationers don’t show up at the beach indefinitely.” Hallie nodded eagerly for her to continue. “Well, what he said was that he was here to ‘figure some stuff out.’ Real shy, dodgy guy, despite how handsome he was. I took his answer to mean he was involved in some sort of personal crisis. I’ve seen it before. A man gets dumped, or loses his job, and suddenly he wants to get away from it all, right? This is certainly the place to do it.” She sipped her coffee and gestured to the window with one hand. “Anyway, I pitied the fellow. So, I didn’t press any further.” Then, Jameson fell silent. She looked up suddenly, concerned. “Do you think—oh dear. He certainly is the type…. Did he poison himself?” She bit her nail. “Perhaps I should have pressed him further… or gone looking for him when he didn’t return.”
Hallie was growing frustrated. They’d been there nearly an hour and had found out only vague information. John Smith. Hardly better than John Doe. Hallie sneered inwardly; she had strong doubts that was his real name. She was about to ask Jameson another question when she began talking again.
“Anyway. You had asked me about the problems he had caused? It was nothing really. Just a row he had with one of my employees. It became quite public in the end, shouting; I feared it was going to get physical. I had to break it up. My guests come out here for peace and quiet, you understand?” Jameson was shaking her head.
“Who was the employee he was fighting with?” Truman asked, not looking up from where he was scribbling in his notebook.
“My gardener. Bruno Moretti,” Jameson answered. “He was quite worked up over the whole thing. But I spoke to Bruno afterward, and I believe him when he said that it was Mr. Smith who had started the fight. Bruno can be a hothead, but he would never engage with a guest like that unless he felt threatened. He is professional, above all.”
“Did Mr. Moretti say what the fight was over?” Hallie asked.
Jameson shook her head. “No. I’m afraid I didn’t ask him much about the content of the fight. I was just concerned with calming my guests.”
Hallie nodded, and after meeting Truman’s gaze, asked, “Is Mr. Moretti on the premises? We’d like to speak with him. He may have been the last one to see Smith alive.”
“Yes…” Jameson said hesitantly. “Although I think you’re wrong if you think for one minute that Bruno in any way caused Mr. Smith’s death.” She retrieved a blank piece of paper from a drawer and began to draw on it. “He’s probably in the apple orchard right now. It’s a bit of trek out there, but I’m making a little map for you. You go out this door to the back and make a left down toward the beach.”
Chapter 8
The Garden Shed
A short while later, Hallie found herself in the thick of the apple orchard. The short trees were dappled with reddening fruit and gave off a wonderful odor. They found Mr. Moretti atop a ladder with large pruning shears, leaning into a particularly thick grove of trees.
Shielding his eyes from the sun, Truman called out, “Bruno Moretti?”
The man looked down. He was burly, with longish black hair, wearing a stained white shirt and khaki trousers. Slowly, he made his way down the ladder and met them. “Yes, I am Bruno Moretti,” he said. He looked quizzically at the two.
Hallie made introductions and then said, “Mr. Moretti, we’d like to ask you some questions about John Smith.” Truman brandished the sketch of the man.
Moretti grimaced. Looking at them incredulously, he asked, “What does this man want now, huh? Is he saying I hit him? Because I did not! I wanted to—but I did not.”
“No, no,” Truman said. “The thing is, Mr. Moretti, Mr. Smith was found dead a few days ago. Penelope Jameson told us that the afternoon before his body was found—the last time she saw him in fact—you two had a pretty heated argument.”
Hallie watched Moretti closely. His face fell, and he began to sweat. “Oh golly,” he said, running his hands over his slicked hair. “I didn’t know. We were arguing about… well it started when I found him sniffing around the garden shed.”
<
br /> “The garden shed?” Hallie asked.
Moretti pointed to a small yellow structure about one hundred yards away. “Yeah. I came back to get another bottle of pesticide,” he said, pulling out an aerosol can from his tool belt and shaking it. “And this guy, dressed up in—almost, I don’t know, formal wear—was messing around in the shed. I asked him what he was doing in there, told him he wasn’t supposed to be in there, and he made up some phony story about being a gardener himself from out of town.”
“Why didn’t you believe he was a gardener?” Hallie asked curiously.
Moretti chuckled. “That fellow was the farthest thing I’ve ever seen from a gardener. His clothes for one. Why, I’m surprised he wasn’t dyin’ of heat stroke—er,” Moretti turned red, realizing his blunder. “I just mean, his outfit wasn’t at all suited for a summer by the beach, and especially wasn’t suited for any sort of outdoor work. Too heavy material. And when I pressed him about his work, he got dodgy with me. He didn’t know a thing about plants.”
“I see,” Truman piped up. “What was he doing in the garden shed, then?”
“I’ve got no idea. I was miffed about him being in there unauthorized—there are some dangerous chemicals we use stored in there. I just told him to leave, and I went back to work. But this fellow, he follows me back to the boarding house, pestering me the whole way.”
Hallie was thoroughly perplexed. Who was John Smith? “What did he want from you?” she asked. A glance to Truman confirmed he was just as confused as she.
Moretti held up the aerosol can again. “This!” He handed it to Truman, who had held out his hand to examine it. “Be careful with that, powerful stuff. I don’t think people understand how to use aerosol cans just yet.”
Truman nodded in agreement, turning over the silver can to inspect it. Aerosol cans were a relatively new commodity. The aluminum cans were filled with a special, pressurized gas, which would work to push a liquid substance out into the air, in the form of a cloud. “He asked you for your pesticide? That seems like a strange thing to….” But Truman trailed off as he stared at the back of the can. Hallie looked. In large letters near the bottom, was the word DANGER, and a skull and crossbones. She looked closer and gasped.
“Cyanide!” Hallie exclaimed.
“Yeah, yeah. That’s what I mean, don’t spray that bottle anywhere around here. It’s the most powerful pesticide on the market. One coating and all the little pests just drop dead. They poor suckers just don’t see it coming. But you’ve got to wear protective clothing and a gas mask when you do it. That’s why we keep this stuff locked up,” Moretti said, fingering the gas mask he had hooked to his belt. “And you’ve gotta be an experienced gardener, too. You have to know how far away to plant your trees, or plants, or whatever it is you have, from your home, so that the pesticide doesn’t travel through the air and damage things.”
Hallie and Truman exchanged a look. This had to have been how Smith was exposed to the cyanide. But was it an accident? Or something more sinister? Hallie thought. “Do you know why Smith would have wanted a canister of pesticide?” Hallie asked excitedly, still weighing the canister in her palm.
Moretti thought for a minute. “No, honest, ma’am, I don’t know why. He just kept asking me where we bought them from, the manufacturer, and the like. If I had believed his story about him being a gardener himself, well, then I may have thought he was genuinely interested in the pesticide itself, wanting to use it in his own workplace.”
Hallie frowned. She was beginning to understand just how dangerous an aerosol can full of cyanide-based pesticide could be. All the little pests just drop dead, Moretti had said. They just don’t see it coming. She couldn’t help but wonder if the wrong person got a hand on those canisters…
Truman had been busily taking notes, and now he tipped his hat to Moretti and thanked him for his trouble. “We’ll be in touch.”
“Oh—er, ma’am?” Moretti said. He pointed to the aerosol can that Hallie still held as she walked away.
“Oh goodness! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to run away with this,” Hallie apologized. She jogged back to Moretti and handed him the canister.
“That’s quite alright. You understand; I don’t want a bunch of these canisters running around town,” he said.
***
Hallie and Truman walked back through the heat to the boarding house where the car was parked. She saw Moretti don his gas mask and protective clothing and, after checking the direction of the wind, unleash a deadly spray of cyanide pesticide onto the apple trees. She shuddered thinking about the insect massacre underway. Dozens of ant armies, wasp nests, aphid families destroyed. It’s like insect chemical warfare, she thought. Then she stopped short. Back during the war where she had been a doctor at the front, many of her patients had been victims of that very thing, chemical warfare. But it was mostly mustard gas or tear gas that was used. Those chemicals were certainly dangerous and debilitating, but not often fatal. Suddenly, she imagined another war, one where cyanide gas was released from large aerosol canisters onto unsuspecting enemies. It would be game-changing. Whole armies eliminated without a single bullet. Piles of corpses smelling of bitter almonds and tinged a strange red color.
“Detective Truman,” Hallie said, her heart rate picking up. “I have a hunch.”
Truman stopped and turned toward her. “What is it, Doctor Malone?”
Instead of answering, Hallie made a beeline for the garden shed. Truman followed her. The shed, although a painted a cheerful yellow, was bolted shut with a menacing heavy lock hanging from the door. Posted along the outside of the structure were red signs reading DANGER AUTHORIZED ENTRY ONLY. She lifted the lock in her hands and inspected it; it appeared unbroken.
“Doctor Malone? What are you looking for?” Truman asked.
Hallie put her finger to her lips, shhhhh. She motioned for him to follow her, and they crept around the perimeter of the garden shed. Hallie was eyeing the building with concentration. Suddenly she focused in on the back window. Although it appeared normal, she had noticed a slight discrepancy in the reflection of the tree before it. The reflection in the window was off, somehow… as though the window glass wasn’t straight. She looked closer. The bottom part of the window glass was wedged into the pane at an angle, causing the whole glass to be slanted. I think someone removed the glass from this window! She thought. She pushed lightly on the glass with two gentle fingers. It fell inward, clattering loudly on the ground below.
Triumphantly, she turned to Truman. “Someone’s been in here!”
“You mean… they broke in?” He asked.
Hallie nodded. “Yes. They must have quietly removed the glass from the pane and slipped inside. Then they replaced it—but not perfectly.”
Truman eyed the window skeptically. “I don’t know Doctor Malone. That window is pretty small. I don’t think Smith could have fit through there.”
But Hallie pointed inside. There was a shelf full of the pesticide canisters, all stacked neatly in even rows. Hallie did a quick count. Twenty-five canisters per row. All except for one, which had twenty-four. “Well, someone went inside. And I’ll bet they stole a canister, when asking for one nicely didn’t work out the way they’d hoped. Maybe Smith hired someone to go in for him,” Hallie said.
“I suppose that’s possible,” Truman said, making more notes. “But I have to admit, I’m just not sure why you’re so excited about this clue. We’re still nowhere on why Smith might have wanted the canisters in the first place.”
Hallie grinned. “No, actually—I think I know what Smith might have wanted with the cyanide pesticide.”
Chapter 9
Back at the
Police Station
S ometime later, Hallie and Detective Truman were sipping coffee in the police station cafeteria, mulling over the new information they’d uncovered in the case—and Hallie’s hunch.
“I just can’t fathom it, Doctor Malone,” Truman said, shaking his head. “You
really think Smith was a spy? Here? In Cape Cod?”
Hallie thought for a moment. She knew what she was alleging sounded implausible, yet she couldn’t shake her conviction that all the clues pointed to one possibility: John Smith—or whatever his real name was—was a spy, sent from some Eastern European nation. She began slowly, “I do,” she said, nodding slowly. “Here’s what we know for certain: Smith is from somewhere in Europe, most likely the Eastern Bloc, based on his features and dental work. He took great care to conceal his identity. Removing all the labels from his clothes, dyeing his hair, not carrying any papers, using an alias. He came here alone, no family, no friends in town. He clearly wasn’t on vacation.”
Truman looked at her, nodding, yet still wearing a skeptical expression on his face.
Hallie continued, “Then we find out that the first thing he does when he arrives in Cape Cod is to threaten a gardener for a canister of cyanide. What ordinary person would do that? And not to mention, everyone who’s met him thinks there’s something off about him.”
“I suppose you do have a point there, Doctor Malone,” Truman said. “Smith’s reason for coming here definitely has something to do with those canisters. And he didn’t want anyone to know his real reason for being in town. Like you said… no ordinary person would do that. …I think he was working for someone, hired to steal a cyanide canister.”
“The question is… who?” Hallie asked.
“I’ll take another drive out to the boarding house later. I’d like to ask that Jameson woman if Smith made any international phone calls.”
Hallie agreed. “And I’ll have another look at that poetry book—now more than ever, I believe Smith was using it to write in code. I’m not confident I’ll be able to crack it if your men couldn’t, but I’d like to try anyhow. I’m too restless to sit still.”
As they washed out their mugs and tidied the cafeteria, Hallie couldn’t help but ask what she had been thinking for some time now. “Detective Truman?”