The Cin Fin-Lathen Mysteries 1-3

by Alexie Aaron

  “Mark, Cheryl copies everything. I thought maybe she copied your using bottled water,” I explained.

  “Oh, but wouldn’t she just buy her own?”

  “Yes, I remember now. She did ask me earlier if I had seen her bottle.”

  “Ms. Fin-Lathen, where are you going with this?” Tony asked.

  “Detective Curtis, when Cheryl threw out her water yesterday, I thought I smelled something. I don’t know, floral. I thought maybe it was some sort of special thing to do to a reed to make her, er, it play better.”

  Mark started reaching for her reed cup and stopped. “That smells a bit odd.”

  Tony leaned in and pulled himself away quickly. “Maybe the two of you better move further away.”

  “She blew that stuff on my music!” Amy cried.

  “Calm down, you’re not in any danger. I will have to take the music that got wet though.”

  Amy took her pencil and using the eraser moved the march music away from the rest. Tony took it by the edges and temporarily laid it on the empty conductor’s stand. “Carefully pack up your things, and please give your names and phone numbers to the policemen at the door. Thank you for your help.”

  I started to get up.

  “You stay here,” he demanded.

  “Fine,” I said lowering my head to look at my latest ruined shoes. I didn’t want to see the inquiring looks of my friends nor the accusatory looks of the people who didn’t know me that well. I sat there for a long time. All but Art were asked to leave the band room. Detective Curtis and he had a tête-à-tête after which Art left, and once again there I was with south Florida’s finest.

  “Excuse me!” I waved my hands in the air to attract Tony’s attention.

  “Stay there and...”

  “Don’t touch anything. I know,” I answered for him.

  The door opened and two guys I hadn’t seen before came in. They were adorned with plastic gloves and safety glasses. Great, I thought, geeks from shop class. Tony had a brief, quiet conversation with them. One of them held up two plastic bags with what looked like cell phones in them. Tony led them over to me.

  “One of these yours?” Tony asked as he pushed the two bags in front of my face.

  I looked at them. They were exactly the same. “One must be mine, and I assume the other is Cheryl’s. Press last number dialed and if it’s 911, Detective, then it’s my phone. I hope it isn’t the one covered in puke,” I added.

  Thankfully, the clean one was mine. I had to sign for it. But now as it rested in my hand I had to fight the urge to call my ex-husband. I wanted to dial Luke’s cell number so bad. I didn’t give a damn if I woke the guy up and the bitch that stole him complained. I needed him. I needed somebody. I felt bullied, and with Tony now using my surname, I felt that I was back to being a suspect.

  The geeks were introduced as crime scene investigators from the county sheriff’s department. They carefully tipped out the fluid in Cheryl’s little porcelain cup into a plastic bottle and capped it. Her reeds went in plastic, and the rest of her instrument would have met the same fate if I hadn’t stopped them and instructed them how to dismantle the oboe and pack it away. While they were bumbling around, a new pack of reeds fell out of her case.

  “Detective Curtis, this is an oboe reed.” I held up the package. This is what it should look, smell, taste and feel like.” I handed it back to the geeks and stood up. “I would like to pack up my instrument.”

  “Go ahead but don’t leave.”

  “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” I said sarcastically. “Oh, Detective Curtis, don’t forget the piece of music on the stand.” I watched as he waved over the geeks, and they encased the music in plastic. I walked over and sat in my chair. I once again put my beloved instrument to bed and folded up my stand. I decided to move away from the geeks before I was bagged in plastic and toted off to a lab somewhere.

  “Cin,” Tony started.

  “So we’re back to Cin now. Why are the geeks here?”

  “I had to call in reinforcements, now that there are two murders.”

  “Two?” I looked up, squinting through watering eyes.

  “Cheryl died on the way to the hospital,” he explained.

  I took in a deep breath and held it, slowly releasing the air. I did this several times trying to relieve the stress, knowing that it would be quite a while before I stopped shaking.

  “Do you know why yet?” I asked.

  “No, but the evidence points to poison. But what kind of poison and how it got in her reed water is still in question.”

  I rubbed my bad arm and thought a minute. “Tony, you need to run that tape again and confirm that no one touched her stuff.”

  “But it starts after the band enters the stage.”

  “I know, but I smelled something out of place when she threw out the water into the audience seats.” I held up my hand. “Hear me out. Someone somehow put poison in her cup last night at the concert. It may even have been handed to her in the bottle of water. Amy said she couldn’t smell or taste so she wouldn’t have known the difference. She soaked three reeds in it, but because she had a winner reed to start with, she didn’t need the remaining reeds. After her statement was taken, she threw out the water but kept the reeds. They had to be soaking in the poison for several hours. Tonight all she did was add water and the poison leeched out of the bamboo and back into the water.

  “She played on one of the bad reeds. It didn’t work so she takes it off her instrument and puts the other two in her mouth, preparing them to play. She takes one of them, puts it on her oboe and plays. The poison came off those reeds.”

  “Wait, how come she didn’t get poisoned last night?”

  “If you play the tape you will see she has a reed on the oboe she’s carrying on to the stage with her. After Miles kicked her off the stage was the time the bottle of water was taken from her things. Remember, we found a bottle with the plastic sheeting. I bet she was supposed to die last night along with Carl.”

  “Why? What do Carl and Cheryl have in common?”

  “They were both disrupters of the band. I couldn’t stand either of them, and if I didn’t know better I would start to suspect myself.”

  “Why go to the trouble and risk of killing these people?”

  “Hate. Maybe the killer wanted to perform in a better band. They constantly wasted rehearsal time. Carl with his lateness and poor tone control, and Cheryl with her nonstop talking. I know she irritated me by copying my clothes, and I wasn’t her only target. If you have bad musicians in a volunteer community band, you can’t fire them, and you can’t ask them to leave. No, you can ask them, but they don’t have to go. The only way Carl or Cheryl would have left the band is...”

  “By their death,” Tony filled in. “Okay, suppose we’re talking about a serial killer here in the band, and he killed them to get rid of them or to send a message. What would the message be for Cheryl?”

  “Maybe if curiosity kills the cat then copying killed the copycat,” I said, more for my benefit than his.

  Chapter Eight

  My area of south Florida was beautiful. The village in which I lived was in the last of the suburban crawl from West Palm Beach. My house sat on a street where all the yards were oversized. People took care of, or had a lawn service take care of, their yards. It was safe to walk around the block at midnight. Children played in the streets, mindful of the errant cars that worked their way through the bicycles and rollerbladers on their way home. When we got flooding rain, my son and the neighbor boy from across the street would spend evenings flashing Morse code messages to each other over the river of water that was once our street.

  I could sit on my front porch and see the space shuttle’s fire and exhaust plume as it lifted off hundreds of miles north. On Halloween, I would buy fifty pounds of candy for the children that wandered our streets, enhancing my life with their colorful costumes. Most of the children were dropped off from the neighboring five
-acre plots that lay between my house and the sugar cane fields. My neighbors were a mix of this and that. Race didn’t seem to be an issue, and there still were brave seniors that built in this area that filled with children’s laugher at three o’ clock when the school bell rung its last toll for the day.

  I had an alarm installed in the house when our best friend of some fifteen years, my mixed-breed dog Honey, left us. She always made us feel safe but now we had the beeps and watchful eye of the computer keep us company while we slept instead.

  My daughter, Noelle, was in England working on her Masters of English Literature. Her brother, Alex, was up at Tallahassee, Florida State, presumably working on his psychology major while he continues his love of singing, composing and playing with his emo-rock band, Barely a Bass Player.

  If I went through empty nest syndrome, I was unaware of it. I had been busy with my band performances and taking care of Luke before the bastard dumped me. I had friends to go walk the beach with and friends to go to movies with. All in all, my life was better than I could have planned.

  Last summer was an exception in my otherwise calm life. A favor done for a member of the band led me to England and into the path of greed and malice. It also brought an arrogant priest into my life. Father Michael went on special secret assignments for the church all over the world, so we rarely spoke. However, I occasionally would get a postcard from him.

  We Lathens all keep track of each other through emails and cell phone calls. When one of us hears from the other, we are quick to pass on the news. I decided that I would start with Alex and tell him what was going on. He was a bit sleepy, but after I started to tell him about Carl and Cheryl, he was wide awake. We discussed the pros and cons of my involvement with the case, and he felt I should make myself unavailable should the police come looking for help. He was concerned that if I hadn’t already put myself in danger that I soon would. We agreed that Noelle didn’t need to be woken up over this.

  Alex said he was going to track down Harry and get his perspective on what was going on. I asked him to wait till morning, as Harry’s, because if I remembered correctly, his mother was dealing with breast cancer, and didn’t need to be awakened in the middle of the night.

  I put down the phone, turned around and opened a browser to the Internet. I sat for a long time before I composed an email to Noelle. She has always taken care of us, and Alex calls her his second mom. My daughter is near if not a genius, and her sense of humor can send you running to the bathroom. But she inherited the worry gene that runs in my mother’s side of the family, so I edited down the gore and danger and made it a matter of fact type of letter.

  Finishing the letter, I was shocked to see it was already well past midnight. I hit the alarm and crawled into bed. My stomach complained, but my brain’s need for sleep overruled it. I didn’t remember falling asleep, and when I rolled over, the three-inch liquid crystals shouted 7:55 A.M. Nature was the only reason my feet hit the floor. I walked into the bathroom, flooded with morning light, took care of the essentials and found my way into the kitchen to microbrew my British tea. With my eyes barely able to focus, I hit the code to undo the alarm and walked outside for the morning paper.

  That it must have snowed was my first impression of my yard. Then the fact that I live in tropical Florida hit, and I opened my eyes very wide. The smell hit me before I could discern what was covering my lawn. Oleander flowers severed from hundreds of bushes lay rotting in the morning sun. My sidewalk was already discolored with the brown outline of the once white blooms lying in smudges against the green leaves.

  I turned on my heel and went in search of my portable phone, and after I sugared and creamed my tea, I walked back outside and dialed Detective Curtis.

  “Curtis here.”

  “Tony, did they find out what poisoned Cheryl?” I inquired.

  “No, not yet.”

  “Try oleander.”

  “What makes you think it’s oleander?” Tony asked.

  “I don’t know, maybe the fact that someone dumped a truck full of oleander all over my front lawn makes me a bit suspicious.”

  “Hang on. And...”

  “Don’t touch anything,” I finished and walked into the house. I opened a browser to the Internet and looked up oleander. I found it all right. Oleander, blah blah blah. What about it was poisonous? I searched. I found the answer: everything, including the nectar of the flower, as well as smoke from burning the plant and the water in which the flowers are placed. Well, I thought. Cleanup is going to be a bitch. I hit print and my printer responded.

  “Cin, you there?”

  “Still holding. I think I’m going to need some help with cleaning this stuff up, maybe EPA or someone?”

  “I have your village police on their way over to rope off the area.”

  “There are a lot of children in my neighborhood, Tony. It says on the Internet you can’t burn it because the smoke is poisonous.”

  “Hang on, Cin. I will get there as soon as I can.”

  “K,” I said and hung up distracted. I happened onto a poison site that listed dozens of flowering plants in the area. The pictures of their beautiful blooms sat beside their gruesome history. Rhododendrons? My God, I had some in the front garden. Devil’s Trumpet! It grew down the street in Mr. Fisher’s yard. On hot summer evenings the heady odor blanketed the corner. With every click of the mouse I recognized more beautiful deadly blooms. I vowed to pay more attention to what I planted in the future and to weed out some present villains as I put a stack of paper in the printer and asked the computer to print the whole file. I grabbed the oleander page from the mounting stack before I headed outside. I heard car doors slamming, and I thought I had better go see and make sure they didn’t touch anything.

  ~

  I think it was ten o’ clock before I realized I was still in my ugly pajamas and ratty old sweater. I had added to my ensemble a pair of muck boots I used in my surveying days. My main thoughts were to contain the poison before more tragedy happened. I convinced the village police to just tape off the area. I calmly opened the garage and got out my gloves, safety glasses and drywall mask with the intention of raking the oleander into piles away from the neighbors’ yards and sidewalks. The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s department arrived, beating Tony by half a block.

  After a mere cockfight over jurisdiction, the Village and Coconut Palm police departments bowed to the Sheriff who had more resources at their disposal. And disposal was what this event needed, that is, after photos and statements. I put away my equipment and went in search of a lawn chair which I dragged up on the porch. I was sure someone would notice me soon.

  Tony walked over the mounds of oleander, searching the ground for clues of how the oleander got to my house. The Sheriff’s Deputy had reported to Tony that they were just now getting reports from homeowners and businesses about the mutilation of their oleander hedges. Of course no one told me about this. I had to get it the old fashion way, eavesdropping.

  I escaped inside as a Village Voice photographer was setting up for a front-page shot of my lawn. If someone was interested in what I had to say they would just have to find me. Not wanting to press my luck, I opted out of taking a shower. I did pull on my rattiest blue jeans and black gap t-shirt, for modesty’s sake. Coffee would go good with the mood I was in. Good strong coffee. The kind my parents dilute with a ¾ cup of water.

  I had just poured a cup when the doorbell rang. I waited till the last tone of the Big Ben Chime faded away before I opened the door.

  “Yes?” I said feigning innocence.

  “Can I come in? Or you have to come out. We need to talk.” Tony pulled his sunglasses off his face.

  “We, as in the Hardy boys out there.?”

  “No, you and I, Cin,” Tony pushed the door and I slid back along with it.

  “Make yourself at home.” I waved him towards the living room sofa. “Would you like some coffee?”

  “The kitchen table, er, bar would be fine and I
would just love some coffee.” He manned the barstool as if he had been born in an Irish pub. Looking around he said, “Nice digs.”

  “Thank you, I like them. Do you take anything in your coffee?”

  “Nah, black’s fine.”

  “So what’s going on out there?” I bobbed my head towards the front yard.

  “Your mystery florist spent all night collecting the flowers. He worked his way down Dixie Highway.”

  “Didn’t anyone see or hear anything?”

  “Did you?”

  “No, not a sound. I was pretty tired and was out as soon as my head hit the pillow.” My stomach growled real loud. “Excuse me, but I haven’t eaten in a while. You want something?”

  “Nah, but you go ahead. My wife comes from a farm family, and as you can see I don’t go hungry.” He smiled patting his midlife tire.

  “I don’t mind telling you that this has unnerved me,” I told him.

  “Looks like we’re dealing with someone a bit scarier than we thought before,” he said before taking a long sip of coffee. “Here’s what we know so far. Carl was injected with curare, which is why his face wasn’t distorted and why you may have seen a blue tinge before the body started decaying. Evidently, the poison first paralyzes the eyes. Carl was aware of what his killer was doing but couldn’t respond. He was posed, and the stand was thrust into him, not back on the loading dock but right where you found him. The blood in the back leaked out when the killer folded the plastic.

  “We think he was late and heading for the coffee room with his saxophone in its case. Someone he knew greets him and offers to hook his bow tie or adjust his tux collar for him. Our murderer slides the tie around his neck with the hypo all ready, and just a tiny prick, he injects the poison into his neck. He then lays Carl down, opens the case and shoves the mouthpiece down his throat. About this time Carl expires.