by Marvin Kaye
“Not yet,” said Det. Kilburn, turning in her swivel chair, a piece of furniture confiscated from a nearby real estate office—now defunct, as most of the houses in Sarasota had been abandoned. “You know the Third Eye?”
“I’ve seen the sign,” said Silvia. “Sami goes there. You think that’s where he could have gotten the poison?” She seemed to take it for granted that the young man would be acquainted with someone whose photo was found in the police files.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
Silvia Nunez was a hard-headed widow. Det. Kilburn knew Pilar less well, but she was beautiful and apparently amiable. Even in this day and age, such a combination could be parlayed into a certain amount of comfort for a young lady and her justifiably frightened mother. Although jellyballs filled you up, their texture was unpleasant, and they generally tasted like the vinegar they were preserved in.
It was no wonder that Silvia was angry about Prosper Jean’s sudden and inexplicable death. But she may have been in too much of a hurry to pick out a person to blame. Was it because she wanted to protect her daughter from a violent man? Or from a poor one?
* * * *
The funeral was held at St. Dominic’s on Fruitville Rd. Det. Kilburn left an hour to get there because she did not see how she could justify using up any of the squad car’s gas. On her walk she noted the sign for The Third Eye. In addition to fortune telling, Mizwillah sold various love spells and other, darker potions. When Eureka dropped by a couple of days before, Mizwillah repaid the favor by telling her she would soon meet with professional success.
Det. Kilburn had changed from her uniform to some lightweight black slacks for the funeral. She liked and admired Mizwillah’s manner of dress but couldn’t have stood it for herself. Her slacks were reminiscent of the plain trim khakis of the police uniform. They were exotic in a way different from Mizwillah’s wardrobe. They were exotic in their neatness, a rarity when there was no longer enough electricity to run washing machines and dryers. Eureka walked slowly in order to preserve their crispness for as long as possible. Still she arrived with plenty of time to take a place at the back of the congregation and keep a close watch on everyone who walked in.
A sister church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, provided scant resources to help keep up the physical structure, but any kind of maintenance was more than what most buildings in Florida got now. Some of the stained glass windows remained, and the Stations of the Cross were looking pretty good.
The pews were filling up fast, which may have had something to do with the prospect of a gathering at the restaurant afterward. Det. Kilburn recognized Pilar with her mother, who pretended not to see her. Sami Roy was easy to pick out. He was the very attractive dark-haired young man who kept looking over at Pilar. He sat down with his mother and little brother a few pews in front of Eureka. It didn’t seem to have occurred to anyone but Silvia to blame him for Prosper’s death. People nodded to him and his family, and no one seemed to avoid sitting in the seats around them. Mizwillah arrived after the mass began.
Eulogies had not been allowed by the Catholic Church until recently, and here the innovation was enthusiastically embraced. Mainly the speeches were about the speakers themselves: how they felt about Prosper Jean, what Prosper Jean had done for them, and some important stuff that had happened to them as a result. All the customers considered themselves to be his special friend. They referred to his wry jokes and his melancholy.
Then Pilar Nunez rose. She looked especially small and slender in the expanse of the church, but she spoke with clarity and force. Her face was narrow, and her voice was thin and high and sweet. She read her speech from a piece of paper. She did not look up often, but when she did, you could sense her bewilderment.
“I owe so much to Prosper,” she began. “He was an unfailingly kind and attentive man. I never did thank him properly. I tried to recently, and he didn’t believe me.
“When he hired me as a waitress it was because I needed a job, not because he had a position to fill. I didn’t realize this until later. He never told me so himself.
“Living in Florida has its challenges, as we all know. But it’s where my mother grew up. Where I grew up. It’s our home. Prosper knew what it was like to love such a difficult place. I was so young when I started working at the restaurant that I used to babble all sorts of childish hopes and fears and confusions. He listened to me as seriously as he listened to the president of the bank.”
Here she looked up. “Remember when there was still a bank in town?” The question held a wistful humor that elicited a few smiles.
“Of course his restaurant was a big success,” she said. “Deservedly so. No will ever forget his deep-froth cocoa.”
More smiles.
“But he never got so comfortable that he didn’t understand what it was like to be lost.”
She looked off through the oak-framed glass doors in back of the congregation. “I’m not sure I have the right to speak. I took more than I gave. Sometimes you don’t speak soon enough, and sometimes you speak too soon. I don’t know which I regret more.
“I hope that somewhere he is forgiving me now. And I hope you can hear me, Prosper, thanking you. Out loud. As I will for the rest of my life.”
She struck Eureka as a good-hearted young woman, anxious and concerned, but not someone in despair.
Sami Roy got up next. You might say he bounded up. He did not have notes. He faced the congregation and said, “I wasn’t going to speak. But…now I have to. Prosper had some set ideas of how you were supposed to behave, and I know I didn’t always conform to them. I should have. It’s as simple as that. He was right to fire me. He always treated me fairly, and I repaid him with irresponsibility and tardiness. It was hard on me at the time, but I learned an important lesson from him. I’m grateful, I really am.”
He sounded relieved and happy, almost too much so, really, for a funeral.
After a few more customers spoke, and after a long pause to make sure everyone else had finished, the old woman known as Mizwillah moved to the front. She was wearing a floor-length black sheath dress and kitten heels, her lips were dark red, and there were sparkles on her forehead.
Det. Kilburn had met her shortly after moving to Sarasota. Mizwillah was in the police files because she started out as a prostitute. She used a number of different names, including some oddities like Mula. By the time Eureka joined the force, she was running a brothel, having settled on the name Miss Willa. You wouldn’t think she could get too old for this sort of managerial position, but gradually, over the years, she left one of her young ladies in charge, and she eventually opened the Third Eye under the name Mizwillah.
From the lectern on the side of the altar, she said, “Death is terrifying. If anyone wants to talk to me about it, I welcome them.” Then she retook her seat.
The church seemed to have sponsored its competition. Maybe there was a good reason eulogies had been banned for all those years.
On the other hand, now that Eureka had heard them, she had a good idea of how Prosper Jean had met his end.
As the congregants stood and started to file out—with unusual speed, it seemed, thanks to the prospective meal at the Fire Pit—Sami Roy turned around, his face sunny. Det. Kilburn strode quickly down the outside aisle, brushing by a few startled teenagers. Then she slid into the pew beside him and complimented him on his speech as his mother and brother moved on. She was counting on the setting to induce a relaxed yet truthful conversation.
Sami said, “Oh, the poor guy.”
Eureka did not trust his sympathy. It sounded a lot like he was propping himself up with it. But he was happy, there was no mistaking that. She did not believe he was burdened by guilt of any kind. Pilar, on the other hand…
Det. Kilburn noticed her cutting slowly across the crowd in the center aisle toward her young
man friend. Behind her was Silvia, torn. She wanted to come over as well to monitor what was happening. But finally her desire to avoid Det. Kilburn—and maybe Sami—prevailed. She busied herself talking to an acquaintance on the other side of the church.
Pilar joined Sami warily, giving Det. Kilburn a questioning glance. Eureka didn’t know either of them, really, and that probably meant they were good kids. But Pilar was definitely worried.
“Your speeches were the most heartfelt,” Eureka said, which they seemed to appreciate.
Prosper Jean had apparently possessed no family, no old girlfriend, no boyhood buddy. Everyone was a business acquaintance, including Pilar and Sami, but the two of them had veered into more.
“I’m not necessarily looking for an explanation of Mr. Jean’s death,” said Eureka, “but if I were, I’d do well to have listened closely to what the two of you were saying. Your words contained all sorts of undercurrents of meaning.”
“Like what?” said Pilar, trying to hide her alarm.
“Let’s see,” said Det. Kilburn. “First off, your heart is not broken, or you wouldn’t have made the lighthearted references that you did, about the bank and the cocoa.”
“I was very fond of him,” Pilar protested. “Prosper himself often made jokes about sad things.”
“Yes,” said Eureka. “You were comfortable speaking that way because you knew him so well. But the other speeches lead me to believe that Mr. Jean’s humor was often full of anguish. Is that right?”
“I suppose so.”
“Your tone, on the other hand, was more…jittery.”
Det. Kilburn paused to think about how best to express her next point. In her eulogy Pilar had dwelled on how she hadn’t thanked Prosper Jean properly. Presumably that’s what she meant when she said she hadn’t spoken soon enough about something. But what did she regret speaking too soon about? She was deeply bothered by it, whatever it was. The most obvious possibility was that she’d told him she had no romantic interest in him. She wouldn’t have wanted her decision to be general knowledge because she didn’t want her mother to hear. But she thought he should know.
“You feel bad because you couldn’t return his feelings for you. And you’re sorry you told him when you did because his heart was about to give out, anyway, right? So why did he have to know? Why did you have to spoil his last few days?”
“Yeah,” said Pilar. “That’s about it. I guess you can read me all right. He would get so sad sometimes. He told me once last year that he was running from a hole that was going to swallow him up. Maybe it did.”
It sounded like she’d been reading a few undercurrents of meaning herself. “You were a good friend to him,” Eureka told her.
“I wasn’t,” said Sami Roy.
“And I’ve never seen anyone so inappropriately happy about that fact at a funeral,” said Det. Kilburn. “But you must have just learned from Ms. Nunez’s speech that she harbored no deep feelings for Mr. Jean, right?”
Sami nodded, somewhat dazed.
“That’s why you were so gleeful about accepting your guilt. Maybe you figured that’s why you were fired. Even better, you figured you’d won Ms. Nunez here.”
“Well, at least he hasn’t lost me,” said Pilar.
Eureka smiled. “It’s up to the two of you to figure that out.”
And it was up to Eureka to deal with Mizwillah. The trials of young lovers everywhere were all very well, but what had interested Det. Kilburn the most about this problem from the beginning was that uncanny prediction. She still could not explain it satisfactorily.
Eureka was more than thirty years younger than Mizwillah. There were striking differences between them, yet there were similarities as well. Eureka admired her independence and resilience. That is probably why she hadn’t mentioned to Silvia the most logical explanation for Mizwillah’s prediction: She knew when Prosper Jean was going to die because she was going to kill him herself.
Det. Kilburn searched the crowd with her eyes. These were hardworking people for the most part. But it took a rare combination of shrewdness, luck, and sheer stubbornness to survive in Florida during such uncertain times. The rest of the country could no longer send down the aid they used to after a hurricane hit. Det. Kilburn, the Nunezes, the Roys, Mizwillah were on their own. If Silvia Nunez was desperate enough to hustle her daughter, maybe Mizwillah had been trying to engineer some dramatic proof of her new fortune-telling services.
The main problem with this theory was its silliness. Eureka could see Mizwillah killing out of passion or even—in certain circumstances—for direct financial gain. But to fulfill her prophecy? It would not necessarily benefit her. There were too many variables.
Det. Kilburn spotted her down on the broken-up concrete in front of the church. She’d attracted a number of the curious, including two relatives of the seriously ill.
“I heard about your prediction,” said Det. Kilburn, as everybody on the stairs parted for her.
“Many people did,” said Mizwillah with satisfaction.
“I’d like to talk to you about it.”
Mizwillah nodded, and the two of them fell into step together, heading for the Fire Pit. “There is no subject that interests me more than death,” she said.
“I can see why,” said Det. Kilburn. “You must have given Prosper Jean the medicine he used. There’s no other reason you’d have such an intimate knowledge of his intentions.” Suicide was credible more because of his depressive personality than because of the bad news he’d received from Pilar Nunez, but Det. Kilburn supposed they were related. She saw no need to advertise either possibility, however.
“Prosper did come by the shop,” said Mizwillah.
She would not have interfered with his plans. She had always argued that victimless crimes should not be called crimes at all. She claimed that people should be able to do anything they liked as long as they didn’t hurt anyone else.
“He’d have been better off with a more experienced woman,” she confided.
“I’m sure you’re right,” said Det. Kilburn. “But how did you know when he was going to take the stuff?”
“When I gave it to him, I told him it had a shelf life of four days.”
Ah, yes. Mizwillah might not be capable of killing to prove her prophetic powers, but she’d certainly be capable of something subtler—lying to a suicidal man about the properties of a poison. It was easier to predict the future when you’re making it yourself.
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE VATICAN EMISSARY, by Jack Grochot
During my association with the case work of my friend Sherlock Holmes, no other investigation rendered more depravity or more contradiction than the disappearance of Cardinal Giovanni Tosca. The role Holmes played in the drama was a credit to his ingenuity and tenacity as well as to his brilliant powers of deduction.
We were seated in the armchairs of our Baker Street apartment, I reading an account in The Times of the Cardinal vanishing in the nighttime, while Holmes was preoccupied with notes he was making in preparation for writing an article on the advantages of the microscope in the art of detection.
“Organized religion,” he blurted, as if knowing my thoughts, “seems more concerned with the process than with the actual worship of the Almighty.”
“Indeed!” said I, noting that since the time we met two years earlier in the hospital laboratory, the subject of the spiritual had never once come up, until now. I wondered aloud how he had drifted from concentration on the microscope to matters involving a Supreme Being.
“I couldn’t help but notice you were absorbed in the column detailing the disappearance of the Cardinal,” said Holmes, “and I couldn’t resist the comment to test your sentiment on the topic. We must take care not to allow our attitude to affect the relationship with our visitor this morning.” Without waiting for a r
esponse, Holmes half stood and reached onto the acid-stained deal-topped table for a letter that had been delivered while I was out for a morning walk around the neighbourhood. He tossed it over to me, and it landed on top of the newspaper that I had set down upon my knees when our conversation had begun.
“Perhaps, my dear Watson,” said Holmes cryptically, “this missive will contribute to the suspense of the Cardinal’s predicament.”
This is what I read:
Villa Bella Roma
April 15, 1884
My Brother in Christ, Mr Sherlock Holmes:
As secretary to Cardinal Tosca, I implore you to set aside your current activities to exclusively take up the cause of finding His Eminence. Since reports in the public press are sketchy at best, I shall visit your quarters at eleven o’clock to provide whatever additional facts your inquiry would require. In the meantime, both he and you will remain in my prayers.
Yours faithfully,
Monsignor Ramo Rossi
“It is most unusual,” said I, “that the Monsignor would appeal to you when he already has reported the matter to the official police force. According to The Times, not just one detective but a team of detectives has been working to locate Cardinal Tosca.”
“Results,” said Sherlock Holmes. “It is results, Watson, that are lacking. I am the court of last resort, and Monsignor Rossi is expecting me to succeed where the official police have failed.”
It was nearly eleven o’clock already. I had barely enough time to consult Holmes’s index on the bookshelf before the Monsignor arrived.
“See what we have on the Cardinal,” Holmes had urged, “if anything at all. He appears to be an enigmatic figure, owing to his assignment as a papal emissary, or so The Times intimates.”