Murder, She Wrote--Murder in Red

by Jessica Fletcher

  I heard footsteps and realized Mort Metzger had drawn even with me. “Seth and I are going to grab some breakfast in the cafeteria, Jessica. Care to join us?”

  I wonder if he noticed me gazing over his shoulder toward Mimi Van Dorn’s room. “Something I have to do first. I’ll be right along.”

  Chapter Six

  Mort’s mention of breakfast reminded me I hadn’t eaten yet, but I wasn’t all that hungry. I waited for him to take his leave before slipping back into Mimi’s room.

  In keeping with traditional practices, her personal items would’ve been gathered up and stowed in a plastic bag that would follow her to whatever room she was assigned to following her admittance to the hospital. I wasn’t sure if that practice extended to the intensive care unit, but sure enough, I found the plastic bag in question on the ledge inside the small closet built into one of the room’s walls. I reached inside, fished around a bit, and felt my hand close on Mimi’s cell phone, which was a slightly larger version of my own.

  My shoulders stiffened with the thought of her lying in the bed behind me, looking as if she were sleeping peacefully. I felt myself act as not to disturb her, guilty somehow over invading her privacy. Going through a person’s phone these days is akin to the way people used to think about going through someone else’s wallet. So many secrets, so much material contained on the SIM card with only a thin firewall separating the world from its content.

  I’m sorry, Mimi.

  I almost said that aloud but kept the words to my mind in the end. I switched on Mimi’s phone in the dimness of the room, broken only by the morning light making its presence felt through the window Mort and I had checked just minutes before. Once the phone was activated, I jogged it to CALLS.

  The one I was looking for had begun at 1:37 the previous day, the last one Mimi had received prior to suffering her seizure. As I’d suspected, the lack of shadowy phone icon next to the call indicated it was incoming instead of outgoing and read BLOCKED. While my redialing would yield nothing, then, it could certainly be traced by even the likes of the Cabot Cove Sheriff’s Department.

  Which begged another question.

  Might the Jeep Cherokee speeding toward Mimi’s position in the middle of the street have been connected to the call? Could the caller and the driver have been the same person, the call timed as a distraction and making her a sitting target waiting to be plowed over?

  Something the murders I write about in my books have in common with real-life ones: I can feel the revelations coming, can feel when things start to come together.

  That’s what I felt now, as I walked along the halls, still sparsely traveled this early in the morning, to meet Mort and Seth in the cafeteria. I needed to come clean about that call Mimi had received as she was crossing the street, so Mort could trace the blocked number. Because whoever was behind that number might also be behind Mimi’s potential murder.

  I reached the entrance to the cafeteria to see Mort and Seth seated with a third man. I cringed, hoping it wasn’t Charles Clifton. Then Mort spotted me and the third man turned around in his chair:

  George Sutherland.

  * * *

  • • •

  “I’m sorry I left you in the lurch,” he apologized, after Mort and Seth had left us alone at the table. “But the tests took much longer than expected, and Dr. Clifton wasn’t around to check me out once they were completed.”

  “It figures,” I said under my breath, leaving it there so as not to burden George with my feelings toward Charles Clifton, the last thing he needed now.

  I’d forgotten all about Mimi’s phone, now held in my bag for safekeeping, and would have to speak with Mort later about what I’d uncovered. I felt my heart hammering in my chest. George’s arms rested atop the cafeteria table. I reached out and took one of his hands in mine.

  “It’s an adrenal disorder,” he explained, not needing to be prompted further. “My endocrinologist back in London arranged for me to see Dr. Clifton.”

  “Is he a specialist?”

  “No, but his clinic is currently sponsoring the only clinical trial available for something called pheochromocytoma.”

  “Pheochromo—” I started to repeat, when George interrupted me.

  “Pheochromocytomas are tumors of the central portion of the adrenal gland and can play havoc with the body’s ability to regularize heart rate and blood pressure. They’re almost always benign, and even when they’re malignant, it’s normally a mere matter of treating the symptoms.”

  “But not in your case.”

  He squeezed my hand back. “No, because in my case those nasty tumors have metastasized.”

  “You’re telling me there are no more traditional treatments available.”

  “None that have shown much promise, Jessica.”

  “And this clinical trial?”

  “It’s only just become available, so there’s no data yet either way. Anecdotally, the manufacturer would’ve needed to clear some hurdles just to make it this far.”

  “So this disease, once it spreads, is it . . .”

  “Life-threatening?” George completed for me. “It is indeed. I could go at any time, right here maybe in the middle of my tea. But, then again, can’t we all?”

  “Don’t make light of this,” I scolded.

  “Back home, they treated me for Addison’s disease for months. I wasn’t responding, because it’s not what I had. Would it shock you to hear the diagnosis was actually a relief?”

  “Yes, George, it would. Actually.”

  “It shouldn’t.” He cupped my hand with both of his. “The two of us, me in my investigations and you in your books as well as your investigations, are enraptured with finding closure, about knowing. I hated not knowing, Jessica. It made me feel like a prisoner even more than these tumors do.”

  “What did Clifton say about your prognosis?”

  “Nothing. He needs his endocrinology staff to review the test results to establish benchmarks for the protocol and to see if I’m even eligible.”

  “You mean, you’re not even sure of that yet?”

  He shook his head. “That’s what all the testing yesterday was about. I’ve been poked and prodded just about everywhere. I’ll be black-and-blue for months, but that can be another symptom of the disease.”

  “George—”

  “Don’t say it, dear lady,” he said before I could finish, squeezing my hand tighter.

  “You don’t know what I was going to say.”

  “It doesn’t matter, because there’s nothing you can say. You have any idea how happy I was to learn I’d be coming to Cabot Cove?”

  “Not happy enough to give me some notice. You know, like a phone call or an e-mail. People use those things a lot these days.”

  He grinned at the sharpness of my voice. “I’d tell you I was coming and you’d ask why. If I told you the truth, you’d start worrying immediately. I thought this was news better delivered in person.”

  “They must have some idea of your prognosis back home, George.”

  “They do.”

  “And?”

  He smiled warmly and patted the back of the hand he’d been holding. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  George Sutherland leaned back, studying me. He looked as eager to change the subject as I felt.

  “You’ve got that look, Jessica.”

  “You mean the one when I receive news of a dear friend’s troubles?”

  “More like, when you’ve come to believe a dear friend, or somebody else, has been murdered.”

  “Well, now that you mention it . . .”

  * * *

  • • •

  I told him everything, a perfect distraction and subject changer, the two of us instantly back in our element, thrown back together just as we had been in our first meeting while investigating t
he murder of Marjorie Ainsworth at her Crumpsworth manor house.

  “You’re my prime suspect,” he told me, before we’d gotten to know each other.

  “And why’s that?”

  “With no more books coming from the reigning queen of mystery writers, I imagine it will tick up your sales a notch or two.”

  “A worthy motive, Chief Inspector.”

  “George. And the truth is you’re the only one here I’ve ruled out as a suspect.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I know the work of J. B. Fletcher well enough to be sure you would’ve come up with a much better means of dispatch.” He’d lowered his voice at that point. “By the way, I enjoy your books much more than hers.”

  “A fan of mysteries, are you?”

  “Reading Sherlock Holmes made me want to become a detective. Reading the likes of you has made me a better one.”

  All these years later, George remained silent through the whole of my tale, absorbing it all in silence as was his custom, nodding occasionally. I imagine if he’d happened to have the steno pad he was fond of scribbling in with him, he’d be jotting down notes.

  “So?” I prodded him once I finished.

  “I’m still waiting for the motive.”

  “Haven’t gotten that far in my thinking yet.”

  “Which hasn’t dampened your suspicions about Charles Clifton,” he noted, clearly skeptical about that part.

  “Something’s off about him, that’s all. Off about all this.”

  “All what?”

  I left it there, partially because I didn’t want him to think less of the man to whom he was entrusting his life, and partially because I couldn’t elaborate on my feelings much beyond that.

  My thinking veered in another direction, remembering the cell phone belonging to Mimi Van Dorn, which was currently stuffed in my bag.

  “George,” I started.

  “Uh-oh,” he interrupted, a glint flashing in his eye.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Nothing, just uh-oh.”

  “Remember that case we worked that time in Chelmsford?”

  “I remember all the investigations that brought us together, dear lady.”

  “I’m talking about the one where you were able to get the actual number of a blocked call. You said there was a trick to it.”

  “There’s a trick to everything.”

  “Stop.”

  George Sutherland pretended not to know what I was talking about. “Stop what?”

  “Teasing me.”

  “Was I teasing you? Terrible manners on my part. You must forgive me. Maybe it’s a symptom of my condition.”

  “You were teasing me a long time before you had this condition.”

  “Was I good at it?”

  “Very.”

  “I don’t remember. Memory loss—maybe another symptom.”

  George could see my frustration with him starting to build, as always knowing just the moment to pull back. “Might you have the phone with you, dear lady?”

  I extracted Mimi’s from inside my bag, jogged the screen to that particular incoming call, and handed it across the cafeteria table.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said before he regarded the screen, “this belonged to your late and potentially murdered friend.”

  “Your deductive powers are strong as ever, Chief Inspector.”

  “So when a friend of yours died in this very hospital, and you have reason to believe murder might have been to blame, what am I to think of a cell phone suddenly thrust into my grasp?”

  “It wasn’t thrust,” I said. “More like handed.”

  George took the phone in hand, already jogged to that blocked number of the call she’d answered yesterday while crossing the street outside Jean O’Neil’s funeral. I watched him copy it and then plug it into some kind of app on his own phone.

  “Might take a few moments. Gives us more time to get acquainted, dear lady.”

  “We’re already quite well acquainted.”

  “Reacquainted, then.” He laid his phone down on its face as the app worked its magic.

  “How’s this app work exactly?”

  “You call that getting reacquainted?”

  “Since our acquaintances seem to always center around murder, absolutely.”

  George lifted the phone briefly to check on the progress. He seemed to have relaxed, his smile genuine and not forced. Back in his element, as they say—our element, actually. Amazing how something as unsavory as murder never failed to bring us closer, our lives as occasional companions seemingly centered on the deaths of others.

  “It’s a relatively simple process that’s recently reached the masses and is used mostly to flesh out those annoying robocalls. The number may come blocked, but the phone where it originated must have a number. The app I’m using, available strictly to law enforcement—”

  “And anyone who knows how to work the Internet,” I interrupted.

  “—traces the call back to that originating phone and pulls the actual number from its internal call log. Call it a form of reverse engineering.”

  I looked down at Mimi’s phone, lying facedown on the cafeteria table. “I thought it would be more complicated than that.”

  “It used to be. Technology changes everything.”

  “Including allowing numbers to be blocked in the first place.”

  “Well, there is that,” George conceded.

  A beep sounded from his phone and he snatched it up from the table, as eager as I was, it seemed, to see the number revealed. Without his reading glasses, George squinted to better regard the results the app had come up with.

  “Look familiar?” he asked me, holding the phone close enough for me to see clearly.

  I looked at the number. “Well, six-one-seven is the area code for Massachusetts.”

  “Lots of people, potential suspects, in Massachusetts.”

  “Only one that I’m interested in,” I said, retrieving Mimi’s phone and plugging the number revealed by George’s efforts into the keypad.

  “You can’t be serious,” George said.

  But he knew I was. “Why not? I’ve got a few minutes to kill.”

  “Potentially, so might the person on the other end of the line, dear lady.”

  “Well, I do have you to protect me.”

  “In my weakened state, I’m afraid I might not do all that good a job of that.”

  “No matter,” I said, touching the green phone icon to place the call.

  Chapter Seven

  “What do you want?” a craggy male voice greeted me.

  Well, not me, I had to remind myself. Since I’d placed the call with Mimi Van Dorn’s phone, the man on the other end of the line assumed it was her.

  “I’m calling for Mimi Van Dorn,” I said, after clearing my throat.

  “She’s not here. And why are you calling on her phone?”

  “I meant on behalf of.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “That I’m calling in her place because she’s, well, indisposed.”

  I put the phone on speaker so Chief Inspector George Sutherland could listen in as well. “Can’t you just speak English? Did she put you up to this?”

  “No,” I said, electing to play out the string a bit longer without informing the man on the other end of the line—who’d triggered a heated discussion with Mimi little more than an hour before her seizure—that she was dead. “Not at all.”

  “What, then? What does she want? Why can’t she just call me herself? And what are you doing with her phone?”

  “You spoke with her yesterday, just after one thirty in the afternoon, I believe.”

  Silence filled the line, broken only by the man on the other end’s loud breathing.


  “Who is this?” the male voice demanded finally.

  “A friend of Mimi’s.”

  “I don’t think that’s what I asked. Answer me or I’m hanging up.”

  “I don’t think you will.”

  “Interesting conclusion, given that you don’t even know who I am.”

  “I should think you’d rather speak with me than the police.”

  More silence.

  “What’s this about?”

  “You called her just after one thirty yesterday, yes?”

  “Why would that be interesting to the police?”

  I knew I couldn’t keep up the ruse any longer without the man almost surely hanging up. “Because she died early this morning.”

  The man’s noisy breathing grew labored. Something in his voice had me picturing him as young, probably around thirty. I tried to discern the other sounds coming from him, but the speaker blurred them.

  “Police in Cabot Cove in the habit of investigating all deaths?”

  If only he knew, I mused to myself before responding.

  “Only when murder is a possibility.”

  “Wait, you’re saying Mimi Van Dorn was murdered?”

  “I said it was a possibility.”

  “And since I was one of the last people to speak to her . . .” the man started, letting his thought dangle.

  “Speak to her rather heatedly, I might add.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “No one. I witnessed it for myself. She ended up frozen in the middle of the street when a Jeep came bearing down on her.”

  “She was hit by a car? That’s how she died?”

  “No,” I said, again couching my meaning in as few words as possible.

  “Then how—how did she die that suggests murder?”

  “I need to know who you are first.”

  “How’d you get my number?”

  “I had help.”

  “Police help?”

  I looked toward George Sutherland. “I guess you could say that.”