The Untimely Death Box Set

by James Kipling

  “Don’t you find it a little odd?” Yuan said to him as he sipped his noodle soup. “I would expect there to be a purse with her.”

  “If it was a mugging,” Williams pointed out, “the perpetrator would have taken the purse.”

  “Here is your watch, Sir,” a voice said to their right, directly next to Yuan. Matthew looked past Yuan and saw a woman in her forties holding a box with the logo of a watch company on it. She wore a business suit and heels and stood to attention, as if she was in the military. The woman was white with green eyes and sharp features. From her appearance, Williams deduced she spent a lot of time at the gym or yoga class. He noticed an ornate bracelet made from fine gold links on her wrist

  Yuan took the box from her, opened it, inspected the watch inside and put it on his wrist. He adjusted the time and returned the box to the woman who’d remained motionless.

  “That will be all,” he told her, “I’ll let you know when I need something else.” The woman took the box and left the restaurant. Williams watched her climb into a car parked across the street and drive away.

  “Now that is the kind of service you don’t get anymore,” Williams said to Yuan. “You must have a real classy place to buy your watches!”

  Chapter 2.

  They quickly drove back to the Kimmel Center to follow up on the missing purse. Williams didn’t think it an important part of the investigation, but decided to go along with the new guy and see where his obsession with the purse would take them. Right now, they didn’t have a lot else to go on, so might as well look into the purse angle. Besides, it might be productive.

  The manager of the center who told the two he’d be happy to cooperate in the investigation met them at the door. He was a small man with black-rimmed glasses who wore a suit several sizes too big for him. He introduced himself as Murray Smith and took them into his office.

  “Did you find a purse, Mr. Smith?” Yuan asked them as they sat down in a chair next to the manager’s desk. “We have reason to believe she had one with her, but none was found at the crime scene.”

  “Let me check,” he told them and pressed a button on his phone console. There was a voice from another part of the center asking him what he needed. “Frank, did anyone turn a purse into lost and found last night or this morning?”

  “Just a second,” the voice on the other end said to him. They could hear the sounds of boxes being emptied and items shuffled around. “Did you want a particular type of purse? I have one here with rubber spikes all over it and three zippers. It’s black leather. Is this what you’re looking for?”

  “Doesn’t sound like one she’d carry,” Williams observed to Yuan. He agreed.

  “Is there a wallet in it?” the manager asked.

  “Yes there is, let me see if it has I.D. Are you looking for anyone in particular?”

  “Sandra Alvarez.”

  “Oh, the poor lady who they found last night. Okay, here’s a name for you, and it’s on her driver’s license. Nope, this I.D. is made out to ‘Muffy Supreme’.”

  “Ask him for the make of the purse,” Yuan said to the manager.

  “Hey, Frank,” he said again, “is there some kind of designer name on the purse?”

  Another sound of shuffling over the phone speaker. “Yes there is, here you go: Eternal Nocturnal.”

  “Thank you, Frank; we won’t bother further.”

  Williams noticed Yuan writing down the name on a pad. “How would it figure into the murder?”

  “It doesn’t,” he responded. “I need to buy something for a friend and it sounds like her style.”

  “Oh.”

  “Where could we review the security feed?” Williams asked, shifting in the chair. “It might come in handy if we can find Sandra Alvarez coming into or going out of the center.”

  “You’ll need to talk to Frank again,” the manager told them again. “He’s our chief of security and has an office on the first floor.” He gave them the directions and they thanked him for his time as they left.

  The Kimmel Center was a massive concert facility and the pride of Philadelphia. Built in 2001, it was the home of the Philadelphia Orchestra. It had two separate theaters and a recording studio. In essence, it was built to show the world Philadelphia had an excellent venue for concerts.

  Yuan surveyed the interior of the Kimmel Center with a jaded eye. He’d been there many times before. It was a place to take women and to meet them as well. Something about orchestral concerts, opera and ballet showed that a man had a sense of class. He didn’t need the outer signs of style to show the world he knew what it meant, but it didn’t hurt to have it on display. He made his way to the security office with his new partner, one man who needed a style expert badly.

  Frank, the security chief, greeted them and showed the two detectives where they stored the data supplied by the security feeds. It was backed-up on a dedicated hard drive and he had no trouble bringing up the images from last night on his screens. It took them several hours to shuffle through every camera feed, but they eventually found the images of Sandra that they were searching for.

  “Got it!” Williams announced as he put a particular camera feed on “pause”. Frank and Yuan moved over from the ones in front of them to Williams’ screen.

  There she was in all her glory, Sandra Alvarez. She had the exotic looks for which Brazilian women are famous. A statuesque woman, she appeared extra tall in her six-inch heels as she left the car, which deposited her to the front of the center. Her low-cut gown showed plenty of cleavage and the detectives heard Frank whistle.

  “Wow,” he commented, “she was a beautiful woman. Why would someone want to hurt her?”

  Williams wanted to tell him there were many people in the world who would kill what they couldn’t possess. It was the police’s job to keep them away. However, he decided not to say anything. Most civilians had no clue as to the nightmares that waited for them on the city streets. Most of the time it was better they didn’t know.

  The two ushers at the theater they talked to remembered Sandra Alvarez. One of them had a family in Puerto Rico, so they were familiar with the Spanish language soap operas where she had her first success playing rich, spoiled femme fatales. Both of them were in their twenties and found the job at the Kimmel Center through the performing arts high school. One of them, a white kid named Joe, had ambitions of playing the cello in an orchestra. The Hispanic, named Luis, was an aspiring singer who showed them the autograph book he had Alvarez sign.

  “My grandma was a big fan of hers,” he told them. “She used to watch every episode of the show when she made her big debut. I have to admit, she just oozed venom on the television. Everyone hated her which is why they tuned into the show.”

  Yuan found the double standards of people to be an endless source of fascination. The same person who would whine about their child pushed on an escalator would wail about another person and their social hierarchy status. He’d come of age in a neighborhood where their family was one of the first Asians on the block. At first, they treated them as a curiosity, but the animosity grew as more Asian families moved into the area. The locals couldn’t tell the difference between Cambodian and Chinese, so the Asian families formed a mutual alliance until their own relatives showed. They called him every racial name imaginable. This was by the same people who would scream racism if they felt slighted. He learned to build a tough exterior and acted clueless whenever it proved useful.

  He remembered one fateful day when, tired of the taunting and physical abuse their children suffered on the way to school, some Cambodian gangsters showed up at the bus stop and told the local kids to knock it off. The toughs thought it funny the goofy Asians who couldn’t talk Standard English would address them in such a condescending manner. Yes, it was very funny, and the school rocked with laughter over the incident all day long.

  Two days later, someone shot one of the bad-boy ringleaders as he crossed the street. The poli
ce never found the perpetrator, but the taunting and harassment stopped. No one ever said a negative word to him or any of the other Asian kids again. The rest of his school year was peaceful until his family saved up enough money to move to the suburbs.

  “Did you see Ms. Alvarez carry a purse with her?” Yuan asked Luis. The young man thought a little and then his face changed.

  “Yes I did,” he told him, “a small one, the kind most of the women carry in here to match their outfit.”

  “She put something in it,” the other usher remembered. “I think she was given a cigarette lighter by another lady.”

  “Why did you think it was a cigarette lighter?” Yuan asked him.

  “It was a small piece of plastic, so I assumed it was a cigarette lighter. Like this one.” He fished a cheap lighter out of his pocket and showed it to the detective. They were the kind purchased for a few dollars at convenience stores that didn’t last very long.

  Neither detective was a smoker, so they took the cigarette lighter and looked it over. Why would someone hand off a lighter to another person in the middle of the center? Wouldn’t it make more sense to give it to them outside since there was no smoking inside Philadelphia’s public buildings? The only reason either of them could see would involve the lighter being something else.

  “I think we need to go the location they’re shooting that TV show,” Williams suggested to his partner. “We can talk to some of the people who knew the deceased.”

  Yuan, wearing an expensive coat over his suit, looked over the vacant concert hall and agreed. “I don’t think we’re going to learn much more in this place. We’ve seen the video feeds and talked to the people who work around the center. Where did you say the show was being filmed?”

  “Old Towne,” he told him. “They’ve blocked off several city streets today and they’re shooting some key scenes. We might as well head over and see what we can find out.”

  The two detectives piled into Yuan’s SUV and went over to the location. Traffic was light for some reason, but it became heavier the closer they got to the set. They concluded that the TV show set was the reason for the dense traffic and found a parking garage a few blocks away from it. The garage was close to capacity, but Yuan located a parking spot on the top level. As he left the SUV, Williams looked across the city and admired the landscape. It was turning out to be a beautiful day in the City of Brotherly Love, although not for everyone.

  It only took them a few minutes to walk to the location. A team of security guards, each the size of a mountain, tried to stop them from walking too close to the shoot, but their badges allowed them entrance. They stepped across the temporary barricades and watched the film crew at work. It amazed Williams as to the number of people needed to shoot one TV show. He counted at least fifty people on the location besides the actors in the scene.

  “So who should we speak to about Alvarez?” Williams asked his partner. “Do you think she had an agent around here?”

  “Let’s find the director,” Yuan suggested. “He would be the one who’d worked with her in the past.”

  Hector Martinez was sitting next to a publicity agent for the studio when they walked up to him. He was a short man from the Bahia state who displayed his African roots in his appearance. When Williams first saw Martinez, he assumed the man was an African American until he heard him talking in Portuguese to a production assistant standing next to him. Williams had difficulty with Portuguese, but it was close enough to the Spanish he did know to follow the gist of the conversation.

  “I signed her when she arrived from Rio five years ago,” he told the pair. “I wish I could help you more, but I didn’t know her that well. Yes, we both came from Brazil, but I’m from a different part of the country. Think of it this way: she came from Atlanta, I’m from Mississippi.”

  “Did you know if she was a smoker or not?” Yuan asked him. His gaze drifted off to follow a pretty actress who was one of the extras on the set. She was giving him the responsive look; too bad he was at work.

  ‘I never saw her smoking,” he said. “At least tobacco anyway. Whether or not she did in private, I have no way of knowing. I’m sorry, but her death has thrown the entire production into chaos. She was supposed to make a special appearance. I was thinking about writing her into the show full time. I’m trying to shoot around her parts until the studio decides what it will do next. For all I know, they might shut everything down. I doubt it; they have a lot of money tied up in this film.”

  “They still call it film?” Williams asked the director.

  Martinez looked at him strangely. “What did you mean by that?”

  “Aren’t you shooting on video these days?” Williams clarified. “Why do you still call it ‘film’?”

  “Old habits and methods die hard,” he explained. “But you are right, we hardly shoot a thing anymore on film, but it still has its uses.”

  “Do you have any idea who the woman might have been who gave her the lighter?” Yuan asked the director.

  “I’m sorry,” He apologized, “I wasn’t at the center last night so I have no way of knowing who it was.”

  The two detectives thanked him for his time and walked to the edge of the set. The security gorillas saw them and moved out of the way to let them pass. Williams surmised a number of the private security people wanted to get on the PPD someday and didn’t want to do anything to antagonize them. No reason to mess with someone who might be over you someday. As his father once told him: “Never toss mud on the boot you might have to kiss.”

  They were working their way through the barricade when a voice cried out from the set. “Officers!” it said. “Could I have a word with you please?”

  Yuan froze at the source of the voice. She was about twenty years old, a little over five foot and in perfect shape. She wore stretch pants, which emphasized her legs and bottom, together with a tight sweater that allowed the viewer to know the rest of her was very healthy. She had blonde hair that cascaded down her back and ice blue eyes. Although not wearing a costume, she had to be connected with the set. All he could think of at that moment was how nice she would look in a corset and fishnet stockings, on her knees, with both hands tied behind her back.

  “Can we help you, Ms…?” Williams said to her, not as enthralled as his partner.

  “Simpson,” she told them. “Isabella Simpson. My friends call me Bella. I wanted to ask you about something.”

  “Anything,” was all Yuan could manage. He had to get her phone number, but, dammit, she’d be off-limits if she was connected to this case in any way or form. He had one rule when it came to his women: don’t mix them with work. “Does it have to do with the death of Ms. Alvarez?”

  “In a way,” she told him. Williams could tell this woman captivated Yuan and it wasn’t hard to see why. She was stunning and knew it. She flashed her blue eyes at him and exhibited just enough of the sad little school girl to bring out the protective part of a man.

  “Did she have a purse on her when you found her?” Bella asked them. “I need to get it back.” The detectives looked at each other and realized they might have a good lead on what they needed.

  “No,” Williams said to her. “We’re looking into a missing purse right now. We think she may have had one on her. We’re talking to everyone who knew her or saw her last night. Why do you think she had a purse on her?”

  “Because I loaned her a purse,” Bella explained to them. “I need to get it back. It’s a prop, which was supposed to be used in the soap we’re filming. I work with the prop department and there will be hell to pay if I don’t get it back for the shoot.”

  “One purse?” Williams said to her. “I don’t see how one purse can be such a big deal. Can’t you just go to one of the department stores around here and buy another one?”

  Yuan looked at his partner. Lord, the man was clueless about women and style. Didn’t he tell him earlier he was a confirmed bachelor? It was easy to see why.
His new partner didn’t have the least bit of understanding of women. Nor how they wanted to look. He, at least, had some knowledge in these matters, the product of several years of constant research. How was this man supposed to be such an excellent detective if he had no clue about the things that motivated women?

  “Was this a designer purse, Ma’am?” Yuan asked her. He leaned on the wall next to her and brought his body into her personal space to show the woman he felt sympathy for her.

  “Yes it was,” she told him. “I was responsible for it, but she wanted it for the evening. I told her she could have it, but we’d need to get it back as soon as she returned. Now my name is going to be the one on the receipt and I’ll have to explain to the property manager why it’s missing.”

  She began to sob. Williams was taken back by her actions, but not Yuan. He liked it when women cried. Not wailed, that was too much, but it was a good way for them to relieve stress. He preferred to be the cause and facilitator of their tears, not the one who had to endure them. For a second he lost himself while he thought about the last woman he saw cry. She’d been forty and naked, with her hands and breasts tied-up with hemp rope. It took him an hour to get the rope pattern just right on her and he did it with one fifty-foot strand. Both ends terminated on the ceiling rafter and he made her count through the gag he put in her mouth every spank with his right hand. At twenty, she sobbed so much he needed to remove the gag, lest she have trouble breathing. He saw her two more times afterwards before she had to leave town on family business. Every now and then, he would get an email from her.

  Bella told them the name of the purse designer and Yuan gasped. His clueless partner didn’t know it, but those went for fifty thousand dollars when they showed up on the market. He knew because one of his princesses, as he liked to call the women she saw, had told him it was a fantasy of hers to be carrying one naked through the downtown streets. Just to see how possible it was to fulfil the fantasy, he looked up the purse on the Internet and decided it wouldn’t happen. They went with an imitation he found at a farmer’s market and made sure the street scene took place on a Sunday morning when no one was around.