by Nic Saint
“Tom,” said Tom.
“Tom,” said Vernon, reaching across his desk to grasp Tom’s hands and press them happily. “He’s in the freezer,” he said by way of changing the subject. “Care to have a look?”
Chapter 11
“What do you think you’re doing?” hissed Dee as they set foot for the kitchen.
“Helping out this poor man by trying to solve a murder,” said Tom.
“Are you out of your mind? You’re not a criminologist! You’re an economist!”
“I know what I am, thank you very much,” said Tom. He couldn’t help feeling Dee could be just a touch more supportive in this new venture they were about to embark on.
As it was, he’d always been something of an amateur sleuth. His favorite novels were mystery novels. His favorite TV shows were crime shows. And his favorite newspaper articles were accounts of murder and mayhem. True, he was an economics professor, and he was passionate about his profession. But he considered crime a hobby, and one he’d always hoped to bring to the next level. He enjoyed chatting with his criminologist colleagues and they invariably told him he had a crime fighter’s mind tucked away inside an economist’s body, whatever that meant.
And now here was the chance of a lifetime: the unique and wonderful opportunity to apply his keen analytic mind to a practical problem. A man had been killed. Someone had killed him. So who was it? How hard could it be to figure out the solution to the problem?
“What are the police going to say when they get here and find out you’ve been lying about who you are?” Dee continued as they followed behind Vernon Haggis, who was now walking with a distinct spring in his step, having secured the assistance of the great Professor Kelly. “And what is the university going to say when they hear you’ve been impersonating the founder of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit!”
“I’ll just tell them it’s one big misunderstanding. I never said I was this person. Vernon simply misunderstood. And by then I will have caught the killer and everyone will be happy.”
“We will have caught the killer!” she snapped.
He gave her a sideways look of confusion. “I don’t understand.”
“Do you really think I’m going to let you have all the fun? We’re in this together, Professor Kelly, whether you like it or not!” Besides, she couldn’t very well allow him to make an ass of himself now could she? Tom might be possessed of a brilliant mind, but he didn’t know the first thing about catching killers. He was going to need all the help he could get.
“And here we are,” said Vernon as he opened the door to the freezer with a flourish, like Aladdin opening the Cave of Wonders. He stepped aside and Tom and Dee stepped in.
It was pretty chilly, and as Dee’s eyes adjusted to the relative darkness, and the slight fog that permeated the place, she saw that near the back wall a table had been set up, and on top of this table, a tarp had been placed. She pointed to the tarp. “Is that…”
Vernon, who’d stepped in after them, nodded. “That’s Hot Gangster.”
They approached the table and Vernon did the honors: he lifted the tarp, not unlike a coroner in the morgue would, and the face of Donny Towns appeared.
To Dee, the shock was less now, as she’d been face to face with the man before. But Tom’s hand flew to his own face and he uttered a startled cry. “Oh, dear!” he said mutely.
A quick frown flitted across Vernon’s features. “Surely this is not your first dead body, Professor Kelly?”
“Oh, no,” said Tom, and produced a hoarse chuckle. “It’s just that… he looks so familiar.”
“That’s because he’s a celebrity,” said Vernon, understanding Tom’s sentiments exactly. “It’s always a strange thing to see a dead celebrity. So familiar yet so unfamiliar, if you see what I mean.”
Having dispensed with this little bit of philosophy, the executive manager of the Gateway Lodge tugged down the tarp and pointed to the man’s chest, where the knife was stuck, pointing up like an extra body part. “I’m not an expert, but I’d say that’s how he died.”
“Do you recognize the knife?” asked Tom, his interest now piqued.
“It’s one of ours,” Vernon confirmed. “At least,” he hastened to clarify, “It looks exactly like the kind of carving knives we use in this kitchen.”
“Have you checked if one is missing?” asked Dee.
The manager smiled and pointed at her. “Good idea. I’ll do that right now, shall I?”
And off he went, on a little trot, happy to be of the great Professor Kelly’s assistance.
“How are we going to do this?” asked Dee. “We’re not cops.”
“How hard can it be?” said Tom. “I’ve read a ton of crime novels. You’ve watched a ton of crime shows. Together we can do this, honey.” He gave her a reassuring smile. “We can crack this case.”
She rolled her eyes, then noticed how cold her eyeballs felt. “It’s freezing in here.”
“Uh-huh,” said Tom, who was now studying the body closely, impervious to the cold. He’d taken out those reading glasses again, and was studying Hot Gangster like he would study a book on some obscure economic theory. This was the Tom she knew: the brilliant academic who could focus so absolutely on something he lost all track of time and every sense of his surroundings. Maybe he was right. Maybe the qualities that made him a great economist would help him solve this case.
Or maybe the cops would eventually show up and throw them both in jail for tampering with evidence, obstruction of a police investigation, and impersonating the founder of the FBI’s serial-killer unit, a unit, coincidentally, which had been founded when Tom was still in diapers and his first Hardy Boys novel was still beyond the grasp of his grubby little fingers.
Chapter 12
There seemed little they could learn from staring at the dead man’s body. He looked peaceful in death, Tom thought, though what did he know? He’d never seen a dead body before—apart from the frog he’d dissected in middle school when he’d almost passed out. At least this time he was able to keep the contents of his stomach inside.
From experience Tom knew that there was a ton of evidence that could be gleaned here, and with experience he meant the ‘ton of crime novels’ he’d read in the forty-eight years of his existence, including the complete set of Hardy Boys novels his parents had gotten him as a kid and which, he now felt, had prepared him for the life of a sleuth. He’d even read a few Nancy Drew novels, stealing them from his sister when she wasn’t looking.
The evidence, however, could only be gleaned by those funky CSI people, dressed up in their funky white suits, and using an array of funky high-tech equipment. There were hair and fiber and fingerprints and DNA and possibly a bunch of other stuff attached to the body of the late Donny Towns that he couldn’t even begin to fathom or harvest at this moment.
Too bad. He’d just have to depend on good old-fashioned detective work to compensate for his low-tech approach. At least the suspects weren’t going anywhere. Like him and his family, they were stuck here in Middletown, at this crappy little motel.
The manager had returned and was holding a knife, waving it with visible glee.
“I found it—look, Professor. Exactly the same as the one used on Hot Gangster!”
Tom looked, and deduced that the manager was right. The knife he was waving did indeed look exactly the same as the one stuck inside Hot Gangster. “But is there one missing?” he asked, a gentle reminder of the original mission Dee had given the manager.
“Oh, right!” Vernon cried, and trotted off once more, happy to be of assistance.
Tom was rubbing his chin, like a real detective would, or at least a fictional one. “I wonder,” he said.
“Wonder what?” said his wife of twenty years.
“If I’m Sherlock Holmes, what does that make you—and him?”
“Well, I’m Watson, obviously,” said Dee.
“I don’t think so. I think you’re Irene Adler and Vernon is Watson.”
Dee smiled. “You think I’m a femme fatale?”
He pulled her to him and kissed her sweetly on the lips. “Of course I do. You’re my femme fatale.”
“I could be your femme fatale and your Dr. Watson,” she suggested, leaning in.
“True, true,” he admitted, the proposition holding a certain appeal. “Then again, I’ve never met a more perfect Dr. Watson than Vernon Haggis. Have you?”
“He does fit the part to a T,” said Dee, as they watched the manager hop to again, his face lit up with the glow of excitement.
“Eureka! Eureka, Professor!” he said, like some latter-day Archimedes. Tom saw, to his surprise, that the manager had brought along a hefty knife block. Vernon pointed at the block. “Look! Look, Professor!”
Tom looked, and so did Dee, and that’s when he saw it: the full array of knives was present and accounted for, except for one. “Is that…”
“That’s the one!” Vernon cried. “Has to be! The murder weapon, Professor! This is it!”
“Good work, Wa—I mean, Vernon,” said Tom, patting the manager on the shoulder. Now they were getting somewhere. “So who had access to this kitchen of yours?”
The manager scrunched up his face. He was thinking. Hard. He hugged the knife block to his chest for good measure. Finally his face cleared. “Everybody.”
“Everybody? What do you mean, everybody?”
Vernon shrugged. “I run a fairly standard-issue motel, Professor Kelly.”
“Tom.”
“Professor Tom. There’s no high-end security measures or special access badges required to move around. I have a small staff of people who’ve been with me for years, and they move around freely, as do the guests. Basically anyone could have come in here and taken that knife before sticking it into Mr. Hot Gangster over here.”
“No security cameras?”
“None.”
“Mh,” said Tom, once again stroking his chin. He’d never noticed it before, but the stroking seemed to stimulate his mental faculties, helping him think. It also looked cool.
“What do you think, Tom?” asked Dee.
He couldn’t very well admit it in front of Vernon, but he had no clue what to think. If anyone and everyone had access to the kitchen, it was a little hard to pin down who might have done the dirty deed. Then he remembered what Hercule Poirot used to do. “Let’s set up some interviews with potential suspects, shall we? Verify their whereabouts. Oh, and do you have a doctor on the premises?”
“A doctor? Aren’t you feeling well, Professor Tom?”
“To examine the body,” he said.
“But he’s dead.”
“Yes, I think we’ve established that.”
“So what do we need a doctor for?”
Tom shrugged. “It’s customary on these occasions to have a doctor present.”
Vernon gave him a dubious look, then said, “Jim and Eden Grive are doctors. They’re in 36C.”
“Oh, we know Jim and Eden,” said Dee. “We met when we checked in, remember, Tom?”
“I do,” said Tom, well pleased. He liked the Grives. “Better get them down here ASAP, Vernon. They need to check the body. See if there’s anything we might have missed.”
Vernon was still skeptical, but his demeanor indicated that Tom was now the man in charge, and that he deferred to his superior crime-fighting genius.
“I’ll get the Grives,” he said as they walked out of the walk-in freezer. “So who do you want to interview first, Professor Tom?”
Tom thought about this for a moment, then said, “The ex-wife. Christy Cadanet.”
“Consider it done,” said Vernon ominously, closing the freezer.
As Vernon went about his business as Professor Tom’s second-in-command, Dee said, “This is not how I imagined our family vacation to end, Tom.”
“Me neither.”
“I mean, do you really want to do this? We have the kids to think about. They might not like the idea of their parents snooping around like a bunch of wannabe amateur detectives.”
“This was Scott’s idea in the first place, remember? I’m sure they’ll be fine with it. In fact,” he added, wagging his finger like the professor he was, “they might be able to help.”
Chapter 13
Scott was lying on the bed, playing Candy Crush on his phone, the stirring events of the morning long forgotten, when his parents finally returned. “Took you guys long enough,” he grumbled. He was hungry—not just for food but for news about feeding times and storm updates.
“We’ve got you to thank for that, hot shot,” said Dad.
Scott frowned, then remembered his brainwave from before and grinned. “He really believed that crap I fed him about you being a famous criminologist, huh?”
“Oh, he bought it hook, line and sinker, buddy,” said Dad, taking a seat on the foot of the bed. “As a consequence you’re looking at the lead investigator in the murder of Hot Gangster.”
“Cool!” said Scott, putting down his phone and sitting up. “So did you catch the killer? Was it the wife? It’s always the wife, right? Isn’t that what the cops usually say?”
Dad was smiling, which put Scott’s mind at ease. He’d half expected to get in trouble for saying that stuff to the manager. “I don’t know yet, Scott. Mom and I have just begun.”
“Mom and you? You’re both doing this?”
“Sure. And what’s more, we want you and Maya to help us out.”
Scott’s eyes grew wide. “You want us to help you solve this murder? Are you serious?”
“Dead serious,” said Dad with a grin.
“You have got to be kidding,” said Maya from her bed, where she’d been exchanging flirty text messages with her boyfriend. Probably lots of hearts and kisses and stuff. Yuck!
“We’re not kidding,” said Mom, who was checking the baby. “If we’re going to do this we have to do this as a family. It can’t just be your dad and I going off and doing a lot of poking around and talking to people while you kids are stuck in this room all day. We want you to poke around, too. See what you can find out. Maybe talk to other kids your age—make friends and find out what’s been going on with this Hot Gangster and his wife.”
“I can do that,” said Scott, nodding excitedly. This was exactly the kind of thing he was happy to sign up for. Better than looking at a bunch of crappy monuments or visiting boring old museums with his grandparents and his cousins from hell. Although they’d been to the National Museum of the Air Force and he’d sat in one of those fighter jets and that had been pretty neat. He’d even seen an actual stealth fighter. But then his cousin Mike had given him a wedgie in front of a bunch of cute girls. Ugh. Talk about a juvenile hooligan.
“I don’t know, Mom,” said Maya. “We’re not detectives. How are we going to get people to talk to us?”
“People love to talk, honey,” said Mom. “Especially about something like this. You just make sure you pay attention. You’ll be surprised how much you can find out by simply listening to people and paying attention.”
“But aren’t we going to get in trouble? I mean, when the police finally show up and they take over the investigation? There must be laws against this kind of stuff, right?”
Scott looked at his father, who’d picked up his iPad and was fiddling with it. “Dad?” he asked. “We’re not going to get in trouble with the cops, right?”
“Oh, of course not,” said his father absentmindedly. “The cops will be happy—thrilled that we did them such a huge favor.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Maya muttered, and when Scott looked over to his mother her expression seemed to mimic Maya’s reservations.
“Listen to this,” Dad said. “Hot Gangster was engaged to be married—the wedding was scheduled for next week in Arkansas, on the Hall family estate out there.” He looked up. “So what were they all doing out here in this floppy little motel in Middletown?”
Wilbur Hall was wringing his hands. He’d always re
ad that people did that sometimes when under great stress, but he hadn’t realized it was really a thing until now. So he was wringing his hands and pacing the floor of his crappy little room in this crappy little motel out in the sticks and cursing himself and the guy the world knew as Hot Gangster.
“Idiot!” he was muttering. “Nincompoop! I should have known this would happen.”
“How could you know he was going to get himself killed, Dad?” asked his daughter, who was the picture of poise and grace, even under these terrible circumstances.
They should have been staying at a suite in the Hilton Cincinnati or the Hyatt Regency. They would have been in adjoining suites, with connecting doors, respecting his daughter and her future husband’s privacy yet still connected if his little girl needed her old man’s sage advice and company. Instead they were sharing a dingy room in a dingier motel!
“Did you know he was out here with his wife? His wife! The wife he walked out on!”
“I know, Dad. You only told me about a gazillion times already.”
Tracy was lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, ostensibly not a care in the world. Wilbur knew better, though. He knew she was devastated by Donny’s betrayal. “Maybe it’s all for the best,” Wilbur now said, still wringing his hands and tracing a rut in the carpet. “Imagine you married the guy and a week later it turns out he was still seeing his wife.”
“Ex-wife,” said Tracy, still lying motionless. She was clad in designer jeans and a yellow designer sweater, her blond hair spread out across the pillow. She looked so much like her mother these days that it made Wilbur’s heart constrict when he looked at her.
“It seems to me Donny had a strange conception of the word ex, honey. And it also seems to me that the only reason he was interested in you was because of our standing.”
She finally looked up at this, her beautiful eyes glittering. “You mean he only got involved with me for my money. That’s what you’re saying, right?”