The Great Pumpkin Caper

by Melanie Jackson

  “Money?” Money is a popular motive for crimes so it wasn’t surprising the Chief fixed on it.

  “Seeds. Three for ten dollars if the pumpkin is a winner. Almost that much for a runner-up over five hundred pounds.”

  The Chief looked stunned.

  “I see. Would they sacrifice someone else’s pumpkin?” He was still on the financial gain thing.

  “No. Not this crowd. Somewhere there is probably a grower who would do that. Maybe. But not here. More likely to steal seeds from competitors.”

  “Whose pumpkin was used to kill Dr. Marley?” the Chief asked, looking at the platform where the three top weight pumpkins had been displayed.

  “Mr. Jackman’s.” His gorgeous Atlantic Giant had been turned into a murder weapon. I dreaded telling him. I hoped it wasn’t the one he had planned to carve in the competition. If we had the competition later. It was possible that we could hold it, even if most people didn’t want to come to a murder site or to watch pumpkins being carved after Halloween.

  I could see that Randy didn’t like this news any more than I did.

  “Do you know why? Was it personal? Maybe a grudge against Mr. Jackman?”

  I ran that through the logic tree.

  “No, not personal. Yes, to why. It was the roundest pumpkin. You could guess the trajectory. It was also one of the heaviest, almost a thousand pounds, and nearest the ramp. They couldn’t use Jacky’s or mine because they are flat on the bottom. They wouldn’t roll and they are too heavy even for two men to push.” It had taken six men to drag the tarps with the pumpkins up the ramp after weighing, but they had nearly lost Mr. Jackman’s because it was round enough to wobble away. “But one man, or a very strong woman, could have rolled Mr. Jackman’s pumpkin. Once on the ramp, gravity would do the rest. Dr. Marley wasn’t spry. The room was dark and it was raining. He was an easy target because of the flashlight he carried. He was probably kneeling by his pumpkin, maybe checking it for damage after the weighing. Even if he heard a noise over the rain on the tin roof, he might not have been able to move quickly enough to get away. He might even have fallen. The floor is waxed. Slippery. And his shoes were muddy. Or maybe he was knocked out first. I hope he was.” Being crushed to death would not be a nice way to die.

  “Why was he here, can you tell?”

  “Today is—was—the carving part of the competition. Pumpkins have to be firm, unbruised, not too watery, or you can’t get the detail you need. There were lots of people here yesterday, some with strollers who were none too careful where they aimed them,” I said, thinking of Althea. “He might have just been checking on things in general. I like to think that it was that and not him trying to mess with someone else’s pumpkins before the competition.”

  The thought of outside interference had me frowning. I wanted to go check my two-headed pumpkin sitting across the room, but subdued the impulse. That the dentist had been killed in retaliation for pumpkin sabotage seemed unlikely, and I didn’t want to appear shallow and distracted, even if I was.

  “Chief,” Lawrence Bryce interrupted softly. He looked from the Chief to me. “You wanna take a look at this?”

  I didn’t want to look at the body again, but if there was something I had missed I needed to log it into my brain so I could process and evaluate the information. My hay bale was abandoned and I followed the Chief.

  At first I didn’t realize what I was seeing because the pulp of the two pumpkins had gotten mashed together. A moment’s study showed me that someone had slashed a gap in the now ruined Howden Biggie pumpkin and inserted a set of dentures. Very familiar looking dentures.

  “They aren’t the doctor’s, maybe stuck in there when the pumpkin hit him?” the Chief asked. He sounded repelled and I understood. The teeth in their broken yellow smile were repulsive. This seemed, more than ever, the act of a madman lost in a rage.

  “No, he has all his teeth,” Lawrence answered.

  “Well, I guess we know what he was looking at when he was killed,” I said. “He would have been very angry, very distracted by the vandalism. It was a lovely pumpkin—east coast variety. Mainly Amish grown.”

  I could tell from the twin stares that this was too much of the wrong kind of information. No one suggested that the doc had done this vandalism himself. That left someone else, someone who maybe wasn’t as rational as the rest of us. They were thinking that Halloween is supposed to be scary and filled with silly tricks, but not malicious ones like that.

  “The dentures are familiar. There were a few of them here yesterday. All of Doc’s recent patients have this model. Doc has been doing a kind of one-size-fits-all thing, maybe using the same mold over and over. Althea says some of his patients weren’t happy with them. They complained about how they looked and that they sometimes hurt because the teeth were too big.” I mentioned Norma and Neal Webb, Shirley Winkler, and Dr. Mills.

  “We have a starting place then,” the Chief said wearily as Bryce moved away. “We’ll check the office for break-ins in case these came from there. If these belong to a disgruntled patient, it shouldn’t be hard to find them.”

  “Okay.” I continued to stare at the pumpkin, willing it to tell me something more. The sick smile remained mute though.

  I saw something from the corner of my eye.

  “Lawrence, there is a Kandy Kitchen bag under the judges’ table,” I said, raising my voice slightly.

  Lawrence bent at once and picked it up carefully though his hands were gloved and there was no risk of contamination. His hair is thinning on top and his scalp twinkled in the bright lights.

  “What was in it?” I asked.

  “Lemon drops, I think,” he said after sniffing cautiously.

  “Johnny Daye,” I said. “He was here yesterday. He’s diabetic and always carries hard candy. He also has a set of Doc’s dentures.” I didn’t add that he had been in the back of the line when God was handing out brains. This wasn’t a crime of great planning or intellect. It only required muscle and impulsiveness, and those Johnny had. He just didn’t feel right for it though and I said so.

  “Chloe, has your thought process always been this… complicated?” the Chief’s voice was soft as we moved away from the body.

  “Yes. I am as God made me.”

  “If you always saw this much about your neighbors’ thoughts and habits, I don’t know how you survived childhood,” he said frankly.

  “Adulthood hasn’t been a piece of cake either,” I muttered.

  The Chief’s eyes were full of sympathy and I didn’t want to see it.

  “We’ll wrap up here as quickly as we can,” the Chief said. “Maybe the competition can still go on tomorrow. Maybe even tonight.”

  I blinked.

  “That would be great. It would make the competitors happy. It’s a second chance for a win.”

  “Just keep looking around today, okay? You are the most likely person to notice something important, and I am sure the killer had something to do with this competition.”

  I looked up and then past the Chief. Standing next to the security guard at the creek-side doors was a set of Doc’s fake-looking teeth in an equally fake, though many would say more attractive, body.

  “I think I’ll start looking over here,” I said, walking toward Burl Iverson and the woman clutching his arm. Burl works security at the fairgrounds. I was betting he had found the body. What the woman was doing here remained to be explained, though I could take a guess.

  “Buy you a coffee, Mr. Iverson,” I said. “You too, Mrs….”

  “Just Trixie,” the woman answered, still staring at the body under the giant pumpkin. She wobbled on her four-inch heels and I recognized her. Her last name is Harris and she is a dancer at Harley’s Bar. I’d worked there in college as a waitress. It isn’t a bad place if you don’t mind the smell of beer and the company of people who drink to excess. Even when they know better. “Is that Bruce Marley over there?”

  “Yes.” There was no point in denying this.
“Let me get my thermos and we’ll go outside.” I was armed with coffee, thanks to Alex who had made a pot while I scrambled into my clothes.

  I looked around the grounds as I selected a table that was under cover and therefore less wet. None were entirely dry though. There had been hard wind the night before and the rain had been driven everywhere.

  The trees nearest the parking lot were nearly naked, just a few red leaves between the wind and their gray limbs. The furious gale had ripped the rest away. One more storm and they would be bare.

  I glanced at my wrist and frowned. My watch was on the bedside table and I couldn’t judge the time by the sky. The sun was hidden, turning what I assumed was still morning into an endless nonhour, a twilight that existed somewhere between sunup and sundown. It didn’t really matter what hour it was, but I still wanted to know. I needed some kind of anchor.

  “He was an asshole,” Trixie said abruptly, taking a drag on her electronic cigarette and then gulping some of my coffee. The glowing blue tip of the metal tube was less objectionable than a real cylinder of burning weeds, but still not attractive to watch, especially when she bared her very large, very white teeth and blew smoke between them. “Assholes are like bellybuttons. There are innies and outies. Outies, you see them coming. The innies, well, they surprise you.”

  She inhaled again and pointed at her mouth, ignoring Burl Iverson as he patted her Lycra-clad leg. I noticed that Burl smelled a bit of rum. He didn’t seem drunk, but if a morning snort was a habit he had acquired with his new girlfriend, I was betting that would change. Start drinking before noon and the honeymoon is short. Addictions can be thrown off but rarely are, especially the legal kind. I thought of Faust and wished that more people would think of him, too, before they started making deals with the devil.

  “Like this here. Just look at this mouth of mine. I look generic now. I should have gone to Seattle. Teeth are no place to cheap out. But how was I to know his veneers would look just like his dentures?” I nodded, not wanting to break into her building anger since she was being so obliging about sharing it. “You know, rumor has it that he has a new lady friend in the city. The kind you can get with large transactions. Mrs. Dentist is apparently clueless about this. He’s been doing it for years.” Spite dripped from her impossibly white fangs, and I was feeling ever less charitable toward this woman. Sensing this, she smiled at me. It was a mistake. That smile was as fake as fake could be. For a moment my brain considered the fact that I was wearing leopard print underwear, which I had thought sexy but was now regretting.

  I thought about what she said though. To keep a wife clueless, assuming this story of a girlfriend was true—and I thought it was—Doc Marley would have been taking money out of the practice to pay for this hobby. I wondered if Althea had noticed anything. Probably not. She has always been self-absorbed and now there was the baby to distract her. She is also a notorious gossip. Doc Marley would have been careful to hide any extracurricular fiscal activities from her.

  I felt a bit unclean, as is often the case when I run into infidelity among my friends and neighbors. I wondered if Doc Marley had lied to himself long enough that he simply forgot that he had ever promised his wife to forsake all others so long as they both should live. If you do wrong long enough does it become so familiar that it finally seems right? Could anyone stray with enough provocation? Or does this veering off course only happen in people whose moral compasses are damaged to begin with?

  Irrelevant. Alex would find any floozies by following the money trail, but I didn’t think it would help. The Seattle girlfriend, of whatever ilk, hadn’t done this, I was pretty sure. Nor had “Mrs. Dentist,” Julie Marley, who had been dead for almost a year.

  What interested me more was why Trixie Harris, exotic dancer at Harley’s Bar, seemed to know so much about Doc Marley’s personal life and yet not about his wife’s death. Had she been gone when Julie Marley died? Maybe to Seattle where the Doc found his transactional girlfriends?

  It was judgmental of me, but the too-tight leopard pants, hair done in 70s Farrah Fawcett, the obvious and overdone breast augmentation and unimaginative nose job, and then the super-white veneers—those really were a mistake, aesthetically speaking—suggested that she might know firsthand about being a transactional girlfriend. Maybe one who had been scorned by her dentist lover after she moved to town? Or paid off in porcelain veneers that belonged on a horse? Just how angry was she about this?

  For that matter, how angry was I? Damn. A quick check told me my reactor core was still close to a meltdown. Even with an important puzzle right in front of me that needed immediate computation, I was still mad about the interruption to my plans for the carving.

  I was actually angry—well, frustrated—about several things in my life. But I had to let this go or I would be useless as an investigator.

  “Doc Marley was a widower so a girlfriend doesn’t matter,” I threw out and sipped my own coffee, which had gotten cold.

  “What?” Outrage, definite outrage at this news. “He told me he was married!”

  Burl was beginning to look worried and perhaps jealous, and Trixie reeled it back in a notch. She was obviously just smart enough to not want to upset the new boyfriend with talk of the old.

  I had a moment of pity for Burl. What was it with widowed men? Were they so desperate and so indiscriminate that they chose to hook up with the first female who smiled at them? Did his kids know about Trixie? If so, I bet that meeting went over big.

  And was he jealous enough of his new girlfriend’s past history that he would do something to the dentist if he thought Trixie was still interested in him? It didn’t seem likely, but it would have to be checked. It always had to be checked. They would alibi each other but we would look deeper anyway. That was part of the horror of a murder investigation. Rocks got overturned and bad stuff, though completely unrelated to the actual murder, came to light.

  And just as I was talking myself into total gloom, Alex arrived with Blue and a box of Daddy’s donuts. I knew that among the raised glazed there would be an apple fritter. I began to feel better immediately. It seemed just possible that the day might be okay after all, though it had begun with a six a.m. call about a body at the fairgrounds.

  The clouds parted and the sun shone, albeit weakly, and I found myself smiling at my dog and my gorgeous husband. Alex, who had been expecting the worst of emotional situations to be awaiting him, was startled but relieved at the grin. When we were done greeting one another I turned to find Burl and Trixie were gone.

  And that was fine. I had what I needed for Alex to make a start in the investigation. The police have access to all kinds of databases, but those are only records of people who have already been caught doing wrong things. Alex is good at discovering the wily ones who were still evading law enforcement. No doubt they believed they were safe, but everyone, in this day and age, left electronic footprints and those could be followed by a gifted cyber hunter.

  Maybe I wouldn’t have to solve this case after all. Maybe someone else would beat me to it this time, I thought, and then looked up at the sky to see if pigs were flying overhead.

  Nope. And it probably wasn’t snowing in Hell either. It looked like it was still going to be up to me.

  Chapter 4

  I was thinking about the murder, I swear I was, but sometimes confronting an elusive problem is best done by approaching it laterally rather than head-on.

  The Chief’s promise to try and get things cleared away so the competition could go on had switched my brain back into creative mode and I was having a moment of inspiration.

  Though litter is rarely a problem for us in Hope Falls, some people are just plain old pigs. And drunken teens are especially guilty of porcine behavior. Someone had been having a beer fest and had opted to smash the bottles against the dumpster rather than recycle them in the appropriate bins.

  Staring at the broken glass glittering in the weak sun gave me an idea for my jack-o’-lantern. I have always
loved Fabergé eggs. Pictures of them, anyway. They are like kaleidoscopes that someone has turned inside out. But what would happen if you took one of these jeweled mosaics and turned it outside in?

  I recalled seeing some fake jewels and mirror tiles in the craft department at the drugstore. They were studs designed for jeans and purses and had longish prongs on them that would stick nicely in pumpkin flesh.

  Outside, I would still do my monsters. But inside, where the candles glowed, would be a grotto of patterned glass and mirrors. In the bottom I would stick a sheet of Mylar. The flames would dance like something magical. I hoped.

  “Chloe?” Alex asked. “Where to now?”

  “Breakfast,” I said, though I had finished my fritter. “And then the drugstore. I need to buy some jewels.”

  “Okay.” Alex looked bemused, but he is used to my doing things that appear random. I liked that he was smiling, in spite of what I suspected was my advanced fashion impairment and wild hair. Father McIlhenny once said that happiness is the best adornment. I think he was right. It’s handy that it is also contagious and costs nothing.

  We climbed into the car. Blue prefers my bike with the sidecar, but it had been retired for the season. Dad had it at his house and was looking for two-wheeled organ donors to replace parts that had rusted past the point of safety. He promised me a new model by spring that would weigh less and actually corner when I turned the handle bars.

  * * *

  Full of bacon and eggs and renewed purpose, I called Mr. Jackman to share the bad news about his pumpkin. The Chief had gotten there ahead of me and had also told Mr. Jackman that they would try to get things wound up so the carving competition could go on. I offered Mr. Jackman the pick of my pumpkins if he needed one for the carving competition, but he said he had one of his own that he could use.

  We agreed to meet at the Morningside Inn in an hour so we could update the other contestants and judges who were from out of town and who had opted to stay the night in Hope Falls rather than commuting in the rain. Unspoken was the fact that I—and probably Mr. Jackman—was going to be watching everyone like a hawk.