The Probability of Murder

by Ada Madison

  I reviewed my history with Charlotte’s bag for Virgil, how she’d brought it to my office on Wednesday, how I’d let it sit in the corner where she dropped it, how Bruce had picked it up.

  There it was. Bruce had picked it up, along with my overnight bag. “It’s about my own duffel bag,” I said.

  “Okay, what about it?”

  “When we left campus that day—”

  “Yesterday?”

  I blew out a breath, as if I’d lived ten years in one day. “Yesterday. Bruce carried out my duffel bag as well as Charlotte’s. I was using it as an overnight bag for our trip to Boston. Maybe they thought that one was full of money, too?”

  A shiver ran up my spine as I pictured Bruce and me, walking toward his SUV, all the while being watched by Charlotte’s killer, now out to get us.

  It would have been better if he, or they, had simply rushed us then and there, grabbed both duffels, and run. In my hindsight version of events, I wouldn’t even have filed a stolen property report.

  Virgil tapped his fingers on the table, where I imagined the intruder’s greasy hands had been. I squeezed my palms shut on my lap.

  “A definite possibility,” he said, unaware of the more preferable scenario I’d created. “Where’s that duffel now?”

  “In my garage. Empty, except for travel items. I’ll get it for you.”

  “No need.”

  But I had to. I couldn’t stand even the tiniest loose end about whether I’d withheld money from Charlotte’s duffel. It was silly to think that showing Virgil my duffel would remove me from suspicion, but I was on my way.

  Virgil followed me to the garage.

  To the corner where my red-and-gray duffel should have been.

  I gasped. “It’s gone.”

  “Well, what do you know,” Virgil said.

  “They stole my duffel?”

  “They didn’t know it was empty.”

  “Actually, they’re now the proud owners of a host of, uh, travel-size feminine products.”

  “Serves them right,” Virgil said.

  “Good one.”

  Virgil’s eyes landed on Bruce’s wall of equipment. “Lot of expensive stuff there. And I see some empty hooks. I don’t suppose you’d know if anything’s missing from here?”

  I nodded. “I can tell. What’s missing is just what Bruce took with him. He has a list of things according to what kind of terrain he expects.” I pointed to an ice ax with a three-foot handle. “Such as, this is what he uses like a walking stick for easy snow and ice. On this trip he took the short-handled axes, and that’s why those hooks are empty. That means the ice is steep and hard. Or soft. Or medium. I forget.”

  Virgil laughed. “Who even knows what that means, right?”

  I shrugged. I thought I’d take advantage of his good mood. “I take it you’re not going to give me any more information about Charlotte’s case, though I’ve been nothing but cooperative and honest with you.”

  “Really?”

  I thought of my trip to Bailey’s Landing and the sliver of information I had on a guy named Garrett, no last name, no physical description. I told myself that if I had anything useful I’d have shared it. I had to admit, also, that I was still trying to maintain some measure of control.

  I prodded Virgil again. “It’s obvious she was involved in lottery scams,” I said. “What else? I read about others on those sheets you left me, but there aren’t really details to speak of. What other kinds of scams did she pull? So I won’t fall victim.” That sounded lame even to my ears.

  “The less you know the better, Sophie.”

  “So you say.”

  “I will tell you this, because it’s kind of funny. You know that…uh…bunch of papers I left with you?”

  For some reason, Virgil didn’t want to admit to giving me an official “rap sheet.” I let him off the hook.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You know the famous story of how Al Capone got away with murder and a few hundred other violent crimes, but what put him away was he got caught cheating on his taxes?”

  “Uh-huh” again, though I couldn’t imagine the connection.

  “Your friend got a speeding ticket in a small town in Vermont.”

  “I remember that time. She was very upset.”

  “Yeah, well, she had reason to be. Some guys up there must have had nothing better to do, because someone recognized her license picture from a poster and checked her out. That’s when we found out she’d moved here and changed her name. Never underestimate the power of a small-town sheriff’s department.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. Why was she on that poster in the first place? Was she on the run?”

  At last, a chance to find out Charlotte’s official status when she came to Henley.

  But Virgil had divulged all he was willing to.

  “I’m going to leave this form with you. Even if it’s just trivial stuff in that duffel, write it down and report it. Same with anything else you realize has been taken. You never know if it will turn up somewhere and give us a lead.”

  I looked at the form, dreading the chore. I couldn’t be sure whether I’d left conditioner as well as shampoo in the bag. Was there a small packet of shoe polish also, for Bruce, the fastidious shoe person? It was going to be tedious, and I couldn’t imagine any return, but I did want to cooperate.

  “I see a URL here. Can I do it online?”

  “Sure, it’ll get in the system even faster, if you know how.”

  I gave him a “You’ve got to be kidding” look.

  He grinned in a “gotcha” way.

  A very satisfying nonverbal communication.

  “Now, let’s find Ariana,” Virgil said. “I’m going to put a car out here with a couple of guys, but you’ll probably still want some company tonight.”

  Indeed I did.

  * * *

  It was tough to convince Ariana that I didn’t want to leave my house.

  “You haven’t slept over at my place for ages,” she said, implying that her invitation had nothing to do with my home invasion.

  “I need to stay here or I’ll feel like I’ve been driven out of my home and I’ll never recover. Also, I need to clean up this mess.”

  “Clean? Why didn’t you say so?” She pushed up the sleeves of her tie-dye jersey and marched to my broom closet, which had everything necessary for a deep cleaning, except a broom.

  I should have remembered my friend’s love of housework. She had some theory of the parallel cleansing of the soul. I thought of it as simply “Out, damned spot! out, I say!”

  Together we pulled out every form of cleaner from the broom closet and from under all the sinks. We found carpet cleaner, bleach, foams, and sprays. We dug out soaps in the form of powders, liquids, and tablets. We lined up mops, sponges, dust cloths, rags, and wet wipes.

  Two hours passed as, hardly talking, we scrubbed places that probably hadn’t been touched by the intruders, and certainly not by me in years, but I was taking no chances. Ariana, taller by several inches, went high, dusting and neatening items before returning them to the now-spotless top shelves of my closet. I went low and took care of every corner of every floor, dust mopping the hardwood, washing and waxing the linoleum, vacuuming the carpets. In the middle, we shared the furniture polish and wiped down every chair and table.

  We washed all the bedding and any table linens and towels that had been exposed. We stopped short of washing everything in my closets. Ariana indulged me in checking each piece to determine if there was extra grime or lint, but convinced me it was unlikely the guy had gone through my pockets if he was looking for wads of cash, and it was impractical to run absolutely everything through the washer.

  Exhausted, I was finally able to lean my elbows on my kitchen table and sip tea without feeling muck.

  “Takeout?” Ariana asked, her head barely lifted from the tabletop.

  “Pizza with the works,” I said.

  “Sushi,” she said.


  Two calls later, we retreated to the den to wait for two deliveries: California sushi rolls, which I thought was funny in itself, for Ariana, and pizza with everything except anchovies for me.

  “Tell me a paradox,” Ariana said.

  For years this was our version of “Tell me a story.” Tonight it was a thinly disguised way to distract me, now that my entire inventory of cleaning solutions had been depleted.

  I was up for it. “What kind of paradox do you want? The kind that involves a contradiction? Like ‘All Cretans are liars.’ Maybe a rhetorical paradox, like Oscar Wilde’s ‘I can resist anything except temptation’?”

  “Something more complicated.”

  “How about a philosophical paradox, like the chicken and the egg?”

  “We’ve been through that one, and I know it’s the egg, but don’t ask me to explain it. And I don’t want to hear Zeno’s going halfway to the wall, then halfway again and again, always having halfway left, so he never gets there.”

  “Unless…?” I prodded.

  “Unless you include the wall in the set, and then he gets there.”

  I pumped my fists in the air. “Excellent.”

  “It has to do with divergence,” she added.

  “Convergence,” I said.

  Ariana’s face fell. “I should have quit while I was ahead.”

  “Here’s one that might be new to you: the unexpected hanging paradox. A warden tells a prisoner that he will be executed next week, but it will be a surprise. He won’t know which day he’ll be killed until they actually come for him.”

  “We did that a long time ago. The prisoner reasons that he won’t be executed at all. First, it can’t be on Friday because then on Thursday if he’s still alive, he’ll know he’ll be killed on Friday, but then it won’t be a surprise as the warden promised, so therefore—”

  “You love saying therefore, don’t you?” I interrupted.

  Ariana smiled. “I do love saying that. Therefore, he can’t be killed on the Friday. The same applies to Thursday, which sort of becomes the last day, like Friday was, so it can’t be Thursday either or he’ll know on Wednesday, and so on and so forth, back through all the days, and so he can’t be executed at all under those conditions.”

  Ariana’s expert reasoning was accompanied by elegant arm waving and many different facial expressions, all conveying delight. It was clear that I needed to seek out some advanced puzzles for our next session.

  Buzzz.

  “Finally! Food,” Ariana said, and leapt off the couch.

  There was no question that puzzles and reasoning exercises made the time go by more quickly.

  How many puzzles would it take for the events of the weekend to fly out of my memory?

  My mother would have called us two old maids. Having consumed our meals, tasting all the better for having been delivered, we sat in my den. Ariana, bent over the coffee table, worked on her latest beading project, a black evening purse with bling here and there, and a thin, beaded strap. I was comfortable across from her, with a book of puzzles and brainteasers, a pencil in my mouth, my face now and then screwed up in concentration, but not so rigidly as to exclude chatting. Like old maids, indeed.

  As we worked, we talked out all our favorite topics, including frivolous gossip in the worlds of beading and higher education. I filled Ariana in on my trip to Bailey’s Landing and my suspicion that one of the suspect names in Charlotte’s duffel bag was staying with Martin Melrose.

  “The guy with the thick glasses?” she asked, holding her thumbs and index fingers in front of her eyes.

  “The same.”

  “I’ve met him at a couple of your faculty parties. Not that he’s really there there. He kind of slinks around and doesn’t look you in the eye.”

  “That’s Marty.”

  After running through several scenarios that had Marty as a scammer, then a victim, then a killer, all with no earthly evidence, we moved on to questions of love and romance. Did I think the age difference between her and Luke, eleven years younger, was too much? We ended with cosmology: Will we ever be able to detect dark matter, and if so, will it still be called dark matter?

  We might have gone on like that for another couple of hours, except that Ariana sat up to stretch her back and in the process knocked over a tin of tiny beads.

  Not one to curse, Ariana let out some kind of low-frequency mantra meant to soothe her as she got down on all fours to gather up her supplies. I joined her, but not until I finished writing in the last few numbers of a sudoku puzzle.

  “This is funny,” she said, from under one end of the table. “What’s this thing?”

  I crawled around my newly cleaned carpet to her side to see what she was talking about. Under the table was a wide piece of masking tape holding a black object to the underside.

  I tore the tape off and saw what she’d found.

  A small black box, about four centimeters on each side and as thick as the stack of cards in my wallet. Two small wires came out from one end. I laid the assembly gently on the carpet under its original position.

  I put my finger to my mouth to keep Ariana from exclaiming, which I could tell she was about to do.

  “It’s from a toy Bruce’s nephew brought over. I’ll save it for him,” I said.

  I hoped I was fooling whoever had planted a listening device in my den.

  After a few deep breaths and a reminder to myself that the box was much too small to be a bomb, I took the device in my hands and studied it carefully.

  Ariana, whose eyes by now were like the biggest bead in her collection, mouthed, “Is it a bug?”

  I nodded. It wasn’t hard to recognize, but I wished I knew its specifications. Was it voice activated? If it was transmitting, what was the range? It could be a simple recording device, in which case someone would be back for it.

  A shiver wove its way around my body at the thought of a return visit from an uninvited guest.

  I wished I’d paid more attention to the speaker at the computer science seminar last month. He’d been an expert on surveillance equipment and would have known in a minute what had been taped to my table. I thought of calling Daryl Farmer. Our new computer science program was said to have attracted the best and brightest from high schools all over the country. Maybe Daryl and his friends could take my bug as a project.

  Ariana opened a drawer in my end table and pulled out a pad of paper and a marker.

  “Listening now?” she wrote.

  I shrugged and took the marker. “Maybe recording only,” I wrote in answer. Then I wiggled the wires and wrote, “Maybe listening, too.”

  “Call Virgil?” she wrote.

  I looked at my watch.

  It was close to ten o’clock on a Saturday night. Any self-respecting adult, even a cop, would have a date. Though I doubted Virgil fit that pattern, I hesitated to bother him. I had his cell number but I knew he didn’t text. How could I be sure the little bug in my den wouldn’t pick up my voice even if I walked outside?

  Another minute, and I came to my senses. I’d had enough of being a victim for one night. I felt around the device for a battery cover, hoping I’d come to the universal ridges that identified a way in to the circuit. So what if the culprit who’d planted this figured out that I found it?

  Bring him on.

  A one-of-a-kind feeling for me.

  Suddenly, before I could slide the cover and reach the battery, Ariana jumped up and down, unmitigated delight on her face.

  “Cops on street,” she wrote.

  Of course, Virgil had put a car on my house for the night. A good thing, too, since my enthusiasm for being a heroine was fading fast.

  I breathed out and uttered a nearly silent laugh. I hugged her and whispered a thank you.

  We grabbed our jackets and headed out the door. I carried the electronic bug the way I’d seen Ariana carry a real, organic bug when she released it to the wild of her backyard, holding it in one palm, and supporting that palm with the ot
her.

  An hour later, Virgil and a man in jeans and a fleece-lined windbreaker stood on my welcome mat.

  “I brought the expert,” Virgil said, his usual deep voice more resonant at this late hour. He was still wearing his suit, but it bore traces of a nap. I wondered if cops even bothered to own pajamas. He scraped his shoes on the mat, as if he’d walked up a snowy driveway.

  “You could have waited till morning,” I said, addressing the new guy especially. He was young and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d been at the high point of his date. He carried a box similar to a toolbox, but cleaner looking than any handyman’s I’d ever seen.

  “Zeke,” he said, holding out his hand. “No problem.”

  “Don’t worry. He gets double time,” Virgil said, slapping Zeke on the top of his cap-covered head with his thick hand as they entered my house. I hoped they were friends.

  We made our way to the kitchen island, where Ariana was ready with coffee and tea, pouring mugs for all of us.

  Zeke got to work immediately, leaving his mug on the counter. From his case he extracted a metal box with a familiar readout panel on the front. He also pulled out what looked like a screenless cell phone with two protrusions that were thicker than the wires on the bug we’d found. Next came headphones, which he wrapped around his neck, and a number of smaller devices that he stuck in his pockets.

  “I wanted to be ready for anything,” he said. “Though your bug isn’t very sophisticated. A mucho short-range RF transmitter with a recording function. Very low battery power. Your voice wouldn’t register a signal from much more than about twenty-five meters away.”

  I did a quick calculation, my specialty. Twenty-five meters was about eighty feet, or the length of my house.

  “Someone’s twenty-five meters away, listening?” Ariana said.