#
"Where'd you get this?" said Lester, turning Vernon Abel's library card around in his hands. We sat in my living room. I don’t know why I felt it was the only safe place around.
"Never mind," I said. "I want you to dust it for prints."
He looked at me skeptically.
"Stop it," I said. "Please, just do it. I think I'm on to something."
"Maybe you want to let me in on it?"
"Not yet. I want to be sure. And while you're at it, I want to you see if there's a match to those prints on these as well."
I handed him the spade and a cheese wrapper from Whey Cool. It had previously housed a bit of smoked gruyere.
Again, he looked at me skeptically. "I'll do it on one condition."
"What?"
"That you promise to tell me what this is all about afterward."
"Deal," I said. "By the way, you'll find my prints on all of those."
"I realize that."
"Now can we talk about Maggie Childsworth?"
"Gunshot to the head. They brought her to the morgue in East Melville."
"That's forty miles away."
"Bingo."
"Do we have any suspects?"
"Nope. But it does look like the mob."
I got a sinking feeling in my gut.
"You don’t look too good," said Lester.
I looked up at him. "Something's rotten here."
"If it's any comfort, I don’t think this has anything to do with the Kyle Young case."
"How can you be sure?"
"It doesn’t match up. This may be an unrelated hit. That's all I can say. Anyway, it's out of my jurisdiction. I'm going on second hand info here."
I sat back on my couch and closed my eyes, letting out a long-needed breath.
"Listen," said Lester, "something's eating at you here and you don’t want to talk about it. At least not yet. So I'm going to ask you one more question, not as a cop, but as a friend: Are you in any danger?"
"Just run those prints," I said. "Then I'll tell you. Till then, I'll be alright."
"I'll call you later," he said, and left my house.
What I should have told him was what had happened just before he got here. I should have told him that I'd gone down to Whey Cool to buy something that Daisy herself had touched. And that I'd seen Owen in the shop, looking incredibly distraught and nervous. And that I made small talk and he was aloof and silent. And that somehow I'd gotten him to take a walk outside with me.
"Daisy and I are getting divorced," he said. "Because I had an affair."
I had very little to say to this. Other than he didn’t look sad so much as frightened of something.
"The woman..." he started to say... "I just want to be left alone. I'm sorry."
It made me think of Maggie Childsworth. It made me think about that fourth book of her collection that somehow wound up in Owen's hands. It made me think about Madagascar. It made me think about how Mr. X makes a living out of arranging things. It made me think about that gunshot to the woman's head.
I should have told Lester this. But I didn’t. Instead I went online and Googled "heart disease,” "murder,” and "Madagascar."
And that's when things really began to fall into place.
Chapter 8
In 2005, Nirav Singh, a doctor from Kerala, India, was unhappy with his wife, Veda, whom he suspected of cheating on him. The couple fought quite a bit. One night during a dinner of curried goat, which the doctor himself prepared, Veda collapsed before her plate was even clean and was dead within minutes. The diagnosis was cardiac arrest.
Ravi Joshi, also from Kerala, lived down the road from the Singhs. A budding young college student with a promising career ahead of him, Ravi had difficulty with women. He was shy and brooding, often falling into fits of despair after learning that his feelings for a particular woman were not mutual. He blamed his parents for his social awkwardness. He was ashamed of his body and his mannerisms and his bad skin. He hated most aspects of his life. He died a week after Veda Singh collapsed at her dinner plate. The diagnosis was heart failure.
In 2007, a thirty-six-year-old woman from Bangladesh returned from a visit to her relatives. The next day she was found dead by her cleaning woman. The cleaning woman was a suspect in the woman's murder before it was finally determined that the woman had died of natural causes.
Between the Singh and Joshi cases and the Bangladesh case, eighty-three other cases of death by heart failure appeared in the public record, added to a ten-year history of such deaths overall in the country totaling approximately six hundred and twenty. These heart disease statistics influenced a number of state-sponsored initiatives to reduce what was quickly being recognized, due to extensive media coverage, as an epidemic of heart-related deaths concentrated in certain areas of the country.
These statistics mirrored similar statistics in the country of Madagascar, where a rash of heart disease-related deaths were a temporary boon for quack physicians offering "natural" protections against heart attacks – which wound up being little more than homemade concoctions of alcohol and sugar.
A nationwide probe into India's heart disease statistics revealed a startling discovery. After the suicide of a public figure, a writer by the name of Ankur Darzi, in whose suicide note the man's self-poisoning method had been described in great detail, an astute chemist working for the state forensics board convinced the newly-formed panel on heart disease to re-open some of the more obscure cases in the public record. By delving into these cases, including the cases of Veda Singh and Ravi Joshi, the panel concluded that an overwhelming number of deaths by heart attack had actually been poisoning cases. The culprit was a regional plant called the cerbera odallam, a plant which grew in great abundance in India, and was known to natives as the "suicide flower.”
In 2008, Nirav Singh was indicted in the murder of his wife. He'd mashed the seeds of the plant into his wife's meal. The spices of the dish had overwhelmed the flavor of the seeds.
Ravi Joshi, suffering from undiagnosed depression, made a sweet drink out of the mashed seeds, honey, and vodka. In the middle of washing out his glass he collapsed in front of the sink. He'd left no note.
The plant also grows in Madagascar and is easily obtained. The seeds can be smuggled in the lining of luggage.
#
I didn’t sleep well that night. I woke up the next day to Tanya singing in the kitchen while brewing coffee.
"Please tell me that's strong stuff," I said groggily.
"It is. I know you too well. I heard you get up a few times."
"Why are you so cheerful?"
"Me?"
"The singing."
She shrugged. "I don’t know. I met a guy last night."
"I can’t bear to listen to you yet. Can it wait till after the coffee's done?"
"You really didn't sleep well at all, did you?"
"Nightmares."
"Well, your boyfriend called."
"Huh?"
"You were out this morning. It happens to me too. When you can’t sleep all night and then you finally crash in the wee hours. You're unwakeable. Anyway, Lester called. I picked it up and said hi. He's cute, you know. Even over the phone. Anyway, he said he had news about your prince? That's all he said. He said you'd understand. I told him I'd tell you."
"My what?"
"Your prince? Like the son of a king?"
I thought for a moment. "Prints, dopey. Like fingerprints."
"Oh, of course. That would explain it."
"Did he say to call him back?"
"Yeah, he's down at the station."
"I need coffee first. I'm having a hard enough time listening to you this morning."
She put an oversized mug of the steaming coffee right in front of me and I dove into it like I was trying to find a long lost friend in there somewhere.
Coffee can be a wonderful thing.
#
"We got a match on all three items," said Lester.
"Sorry?"
"I'm keeping my end of the deal. Listen, Lester, anywhere we can meet? Somewhere safe?"
"I'll come and pick you up."
"Ok," I said, and hung up without saying goodbye.
#
Lester picked me up and we drove a half hour out of town to an ice cream shop that sold hand-churned stuff you'd trade your first-born for.
He got a chocolate malted milkshake; I got a butter pecan sundae. We sat in the afternoon sun. It was gorgeous with a perfect, warm breeze blowing. Clear blue skies. And yet here I was looking and feeling as if someone had just flushed my winning lottery ticket down the loo.
"Want to talk now?" said Lester.
"No, but I guess I have to."
"Ok," he said.
I was hesitant at first, but then the words just started coming, bit-by-bit, and soon I found myself unable to stop, with a melting sundae before me.
I told him everything I’d learned about cerbera poisoning. I told him about Madagascar, about the email from "MC,” and how Cultured_Club was probably Owen and Owen was selling an expensive book that had been previously owned by Maggie Childsworth. I told him everything.
Everything except the part about Mr. X.
Why, I can’t say. There was this blockage where that story was in my head. There was something I couldn’t bring myself to say about it. And even though I felt like a million bucks after getting things off my chest, I still felt weighed down by the possibility that I was some sort of target by this unstable organized crime guy who seemed to control the Carl's Cove criminal scene like a puppeteer. Or so I thought. I had no proof of this, really.
"So, to rehash," I said, "Daisy knows something. I'm going to try and talk to her but I have a feeling she's not talking. I think Owen Schiff is up to no good. I think Daisy knows he's up to no good and also knows I've been snooping around into Kyle Young's death. I think Restocruz is tied up in it somehow. I think Owen and Restocruz conspired to poison Kyle Young, and that they succeeded. I just need to find out how."
"So," said Lester, "and you'll have to forgive me for being a detective here, all this sounds plausible. The only thing I have a problem here is with the toxicity of the plant you’re talking about. It kills quickly. If Kyle Young was murdered outside the home, how did he die in the house?"
"He didn't."
"You all heard a thump."
"Now you believe me about that."
"I have no choice. I'm still a little skeptical about it, but if the four of you heard it then the four of you heard it. I've been thinking about it. The office was right above where you were sitting. It would be pretty hard to mistake the sound of a falling body for anything else. So, how did it happen? We found no syringe on the scene. He didn't kill himself. If he was poisoned, injected in the back of the head, it sure seems like he was at home when it happened. He let his killer in, got poisoned, then his killer left without a trace and without any of you women noticing. So we're back to where we started. How did it happen?"
I stared at my bowl of butter pecan soup on the table. "I don’t know, Lester. I'm trying."
I was silent for a long time. I felt Lester's eyes on me. I didn’t care.
Then something happened.
I think a melted bowl of butter pecan ice cream should be tested for its miraculous ability to help a mind sort out problems.
I suddenly got the urge to go back to the brewery.
Here's how it happened. Staring at that bowl, I was thinking about the part I didn’t tell Lester. I was thinking about Mr. X. I was thinking about his offer to buy the brewery. And suddenly I felt like I was afraid I was going to lose it. And that's when I realized that I had indeed been afraid to lose it. All this talk about what I really wanted in life. All this stuff about being a private eye. It was just a diversion. I liked solving murders. I'd done two already and was knee-deep in a third, but when that weird dude in the golf cart offered to buy my brewery, I found myself instantly telling him no. That was one thing that Mr. X had not counted on. He'd done his research, or so he thought, and he thought he had me. The very fact that I resisted told me that on some level I really did want that brewery. I wanted it all to myself. It was a wonderful feeling. And suddenly the threats of Mr. X were just that. Threats. Ok, if he was involved in crime somehow, fine. I could deal with that. What I really couldn’t deal with was my own lack of resolve.
I looked up at Lester. He was smiling.
"What?" I said.
"You. The most miraculous change just occurred on your face. A minute ago you looked like someone just shot your dog. Now you look like you just discovered gold."
"In a way I did," I said. "Now be a pet and drive me to my brewery, will you?"
I jumped up, kissed him on the forehead, and headed toward the car with a new spring in my step.
#
With this new frame of mind, I finally found a healthy balance between my two vocations. I stepped into the brewery with a take-charge attitude and it felt great. My cousin Gerry, our master brewer, noticed it as soon as I walked in.
"What happened to you?" he said.
"Nothing at all, my friend."
"Did you get visited by three ghosts last night?"
"Very funny. No, as a matter of fact, I slept terribly."
"You should do it more often," he said. "It suits you."
We talked business and walked around the tanks. Over the main mash tun – the large, stainless steel vessel in which malted barley is steeped in hot water to make the base of our beer – there was a curious contraption I'd not seen before.
"A lot happened in your absence," said Gerry. "This is my little experiment."
"What in the world?"
I was referring to the lid of the mash tun, which was held open by a piece of cord tied to some apparatus involving a pulley and a counterweight.
"Bear with me," said Gerry. I was trying to come up with a way we could automate the mash-in process without having to climb up the ladder to the top of the tank and add the grains by hand. I was experimenting with that little pulley system up there. Suspending a fifty-pound bag of grains from it. Keep in mind, this is merely an experiment. I can show you designs for a more sophisticated system I sketched out. Anyway, I think it can work. We had a few problems when we ran the test though."
I had to chuckle. "What kind of problems?"
"Well," he said, scratching the back of his neck, "I kind of screwed up."
"How?"
"Ok, see, I hitched the thing up with fishing wire..."
And here's where things got a little fuzzy for yours truly. I missed just about everything he said after the words "fishing wire.” Why? Because of my college job.
Let me explain.
Back when I was in college, I picked up a few bucks here and there by writing blog articles. Mostly these articles were just click bait designed to keep surfers situated on a company's website long enough to notice the ad banners running along beside my article. I wasn't very good at it, but the assignments were varied and sometimes interesting. I learned a few things.
Like PVA, for example. Polyvinyl alcohol. I did an article for a company that sold fishing equipment and they wanted a few paragraphs on angling with PVA. PVA is a high tensile polymer that can be used to make a variety of things. Bags, for instance. You can fill a PVA bag with free-floating bait, with just one of those pieces of bait on a hook. You string the bag onto a line and throw the sucker in. The bag dissolves in the water. Just like that. Completely dissolves leaving no trace. The bait spills out. The fish take the free bait, thinking all is well and good because, you know, they're fish and they’re not the brightest bulbs, until a fish chomps down on the hooked bait and bingo. Fish and chips anyone?
As Gerry told me about how he tried stringing up the bag with fishing wire, and how the steam from the tank was rising blah blah blah, I remembered this article I wrote some fifteen years ago. And I
wasn't listening. And somewhere in there I heard him calling my name.
"Huh?" I said, probably looking like the queen of all airheads.
"You didn’t hear a word I said, did you?"
"Yeah, fishing wire."
"Uh huh. And what about the fishing wire?"
"Listen, Gerry," I said, and I couldn’t think of anything else to say except, "I have to leave."
"Of course you do."
I felt bad, but I left him there. I had some preparations to make before once again breaking into Maggie Childsworth's house.
Chapter 9
I hated doing it. What's worse was that I felt like an expert now. There was police tape around the place now that its resident was a murder victim. I had a slight comfort knowing that Lester could probably help bail me out if I was caught. He'd probably never speak to me again, but I know he'd help bail me out.
I picked the lock as if I were born to do it. I went into the house and made my way around in the dark. I tripped over a couple of things that the cops had left displaced.
Upstairs, the closet door was open and stuff was pulled out and opened and sorted through. So it wasn't too much trouble to find the box of fishing stuff. I found what I was looking for almost immediately. It was then that I kicked myself for not realizing something very obvious: that for a box containing a bunch of stuff belonging to this woman's ex-husband, it was incredibly easy to access – right up front, and unsealed.
I left the house, once again making sure everything was as it had been.
"Interesting hobby," said Mr. X.
I turned around with a stifled shriek. There he stood, smiling.
"Breaking and entering, eh? Interesting. Not what I figured you for. No, Miss Darby, you strike me more as the collecting-vintage-teddy-bears type. And what’s that you have there? Hmm? A little cat-burglar souvenir?"
I was at a complete loss. Plus, I was shaking so bad I think I loosened a few bones in my legs.
Mr. X chuckled in the most jovial way. "Oh, don’t worry, Miss Darby, I won’t tell if you won’t. But now I see that we're sort of cut from the same cloth, aren’t we? Hmm?"
Murder Brewed At Home (Microbrewery Mysteries Book 3) Page 7