Mile High Murder

by Marcia Talley

  I knelt, and with Austin watching over me like a proud teacher, I used the combination I’d given him to successfully open the lock. ‘Again,’ he said.

  I obeyed.

  I’d just finished testing the new combination for the third time when the telephone began to ring.

  At first, Austin ignored it. ‘Desiree will pick it up.’ With a hand on my arm, he eased me gently to one side, then crouched and inserted the change key into the lock again. ‘Gotta switch it back before you start getting ideas.’ He winked and made a shooing motion with his hand.

  ‘You change the combination every month?’ I asked, heading toward the door, intent on retrieving my rumpled tunic.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. His eyes drifted to the right. Had someone passed by in the hallway?

  ‘I don’t know how you remember all those combinations,’ I said, glancing over my shoulder but not seeing anyone. ‘After you run out of birthdays and anniversaries …’ I shrugged.

  Austin’s gaze flicked from my face to something behind me, but just as quickly came back, accompanied by a grin. ‘One number at a time, Hannah, one at a time.’

  ‘Thanks for the lesson,’ I said, and prepared to go.

  But the phone hadn’t given up. On the fifth ring, Austin looked up from his task and said, sounding exasperated, ‘Why doesn’t the machine kick in? Get that for me, will you, Hannah?’

  ‘Sure. No problem.’

  I crossed to the desk, picked up the receiver and answered the phone the way all Navy juniors are taught. ‘Bell House, this is Hannah speaking.’

  The voice on the other end sounded young, female and equally polite. ‘Hannah, thanks. Could you connect me with Hugh or Phyllis Graham, please?’

  ‘They’re not here right now,’ I said. ‘They’re still at the wedding.’

  There was a long pause, followed by, ‘What wedding?’

  ‘Somebody named Marjorie Ann, as I recall.’ When the woman didn’t say anything, I added, ‘Can’t you reach them on their cell?’

  ‘I would if they had a cell phone. I’ve been after them like forever, but Hugh doesn’t hear all that well and Phyllis, well, she says she doesn’t need to be available twenty-four seven. I pointed out all the cool features of an iPhone,’ the woman nattered on, ‘like GPS directions and news updates, but Phyllis says getting lost while following written directions is part of the adventure, and she can watch the news on TV at eleven, thank you very much.’

  ‘I’ll be happy to take a message,’ I said as I eased around the desk and sat down in Austin’s chair. While looking for something to write on, I moved several pieces of correspondence aside. Tucked under a letter from Great Western Bank, I uncovered a notepad bearing the Bell House logo that Austin apparently kept on his desk for just such note-taking purposes. A dark green ‘Wake & Bake’ mug held an assortment of pens. I reached for one, clicked it open and told the caller, ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Thanks. This is their daughter-in-law, Cybele. I’m housesitting while they’re away. Will you let them know that a pipe burst in the kitchen but it’s all under control? I turned off the water and the plumber is on his way. A few tiles will need to be replaced, but nothing major.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, scribbling as fast as I could. ‘I’ll leave the message in their room.’

  ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘Is there anything else?’

  ‘No, no,’ Cybele said, sounding distracted. ‘A wedding, you said?’

  ‘Uh huh. Phyllis is matron of honor.’

  ‘I thought …’ Cybele paused. ‘Well, never mind.’

  After Cybele ended the call, I remained at the desk, fingering the note I had written for her in-laws and thinking. So what if the daughter-in-law didn’t know about Marjorie Ann’s wedding? I didn’t tell my father everything I was up to. I didn’t even mention I was going on this trip.

  I ripped the note off the pad and tucked it into my pocket.

  ‘Grateful for the help,’ Austin said as I passed him by.

  ‘Consider it payment for the lesson,’ I said, snagging my clothes hanger and heading out the door. ‘See you at dinner.’

  NINETEEN

  An ordinary man or woman becomes in the eyes of the Marijuana addict, beautiful beyond compare. Marijuana, grown by trusties on prison farms unknown to prison officials, has been taken to the inmates. Under its influence the prisoners fall desperately in love with each other; as they would with members of the opposite sex outside prison walls. One can understand the debaucheries that take place.

  Robert James Devine, The Moloch of Marijuana. Findlay OH, Fundamental Truth Publishers, 193[4].

  It’s the little things that sneak up on you, catch you unaware. I ironed the collar first, the way my mother had taught me, then the sleeves. The clean smell of hot cotton brought Mom instantly to mind. A crystal-clear image, sitting on the screen porch in her favorite chair, wearing a crisp, white shirt with the collar turned up and a lipstick-red cardigan that didn’t clash in the least with her apricot-colored hair.

  Damn, I missed her.

  Behind me, two heavy-duty washing machines droned and churned as I put the final touches on the tunic, carefully arranging the pleat in back and pressing it into place. Perfect! At least until I sat down in a chair and leaned back while wearing it, that is.

  My late mother had had a sense of adventure, almost a prerequisite in a Navy wife, it seemed to me. She would have accompanied me to Bell House in an instant, experimented with weed in the same devil-may-care way she approached everything, even tripping across the vine bridges in Iya Valley, Japan, where I had cowered behind her, paralyzed with terror.

  ‘So, Mom,’ I said aloud. ‘Why would you go off to Denver and not tell me the reason why? Was it simply an oversight, or did you have something to hide?’

  Mother wasn’t saying.

  I draped the now-wrinkle-free tunic over the hanger, unplugged the iron and headed back down the hallway. The door to Austin’s office stood ajar, so I stuck my head inside. ‘Austin?’

  The safe was safely curtained and Austin had gone.

  Austin claimed that he changed the combination every month or so. Prudent, for sure, but that would drive me insane. I maintained a list of accounts, user IDs and passwords that was three pages long, single-spaced. No way could I remember them all, and I wasn’t high fifty percent of the time. How could he? Unless he had a photographic memory, I figured he must write the latest combination down somewhere close at hand.

  Once again, I hooked my tunic over the doorknob, wandered over to the desk and sat down in Austin’s chair. If I were a combination, where would I hide?

  The correspondence I’d noticed earlier was still strewn over Austin’s desktop. At home, I often jotted things down on whatever was at hand. Perhaps Austin did, too. Quickly, I pawed through his papers: a supplemental bill for the renovations going on upstairs, a notice from Xcel Energy about a planned outage, an inquiry about availability and group rates for a senior citizens’ club from Fort Worth, Texas and the letter from Great Western Bank I remembered seeing before.

  I stared at the letter, hard.

  Five years before, Austin had taken out a mortgage to renovate Bell House and convert it to a B&B. Perhaps to keep his monthly payments low while building up his business, he’d agreed to a balloon loan. I held the amortization schedule in my hand. If Austin didn’t refinance or come up with the final payment – a whopping two hundred thousand dollars – by a week from Friday, he risked foreclosure.

  From all the Happy Daze propaganda, the business seemed to be growing like gangbusters. Yet, thinking about Austin’s ambitious expansion plans for the weedery, I wondered if he’d spread himself too thin?

  Math had never been my strong point, but I knew enough about balloon loans to understand that if interest rates rose, or the value of your property dropped over the course of the loan, you could be screwed when the final payment came due.

  Had Austin robbed himself to pay off the mort
gage?

  I slipped the letter to the bottom of the pile, feeling ashamed at the thought. Austin’s distress over the robbery seemed genuine. If he’d managed to pull off the ultimate inside job, the man deserved a best actor Academy Award.

  Was I barking up the wrong tree?

  Had someone else discovered the combination, but how and where?

  The blotter pad? Austin had doodled extra-terrestrials, a cat and a reminder about getting the furnace serviced for winter, and circled it with curly-cues. Nothing remotely resembled a combination, not even disguised as a phone number for the nearest pizza delivery joint. While holding on to the correspondence, I eased a corner of the pad out of the blotter and peeked underneath. As unblemished as wind-driven snow. Nothing under the blotter itself, either.

  Austin’s desk, an antique like almost everything else in Bell House, had a pull-out shelf on the left, just above the top drawer. My grandfather’s desk had just such a shelf, designed to support a manual typewriter. Granddad kept a list of World War Two-era telephone numbers taped to his shelf – MA3-7032, TU9-1997 – but when I grabbed the knob and slid the shelf on Austin’s desk out, there was nothing but clean, polished oak staring up at me.

  I thrust my hand under the center drawer, feeling around blindly for a Post-it. Stuck my head into the kneehole and took a closer look. Nada.

  Did I dare open the drawers?

  After checking to see if anyone was coming, I dared, but when I tugged on each drawer in turn, they were locked. Not a total surprise. A sniff test indicated the drawers probably contained marijuana, except for the one on the bottom right, which was unlocked and held a pair of ratty jogging shoes, a battery testing gizmo and a bottle of Knob Creek Kentucky straight bourbon whisky, half-full.

  A man of fine taste, our Austin.

  Modern cell phone technology had made printed calendars practically obsolete, except for decorative purposes such as frolicking kittens, wonders of our national parks, family photos and the like, but I wandered around the office looking for one anyway.

  I struck out.

  Austin most likely kept his appointments – and his passwords and combinations – safely locked away in his cell phone, password-protected itself.

  And yet … somebody had obviously found it.

  I pulled aside the velvet curtain and stared at the safe. I flashed back to Austin crouching there, discussing how he reset the combination. His eyes had kept darting to something over my shoulder. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now? I turned around to consider the door. What had he been looking at?

  I pushed the office door half closed, but nothing was behind it except a bouquet of peacock feathers in a Tiffany-style vase standing proud and tall on a plant stand. To the left – required by law, I presumed – a fire extinguisher was attached to the wall. The bright red paint didn’t exactly complement the decor – my grandmother would have sewn a slipcover for it – but what can you do? An inspection tag dangled from the device.

  On one side of the tag, P.A.S.S. instructions were printed:

  Pull pin

  Aim at base of fire

  Squeeze handle

  Sweep side to side

  Good to know.

  I turned the tag over. Printed on the reverse side were numbers. Dates, to be precise. A record – or so it first appeared – of when the extinguisher had last been inspected.

  There was a row for each month, January through December, and a column for each of the next four years, ‘2017’ through to ‘2020.’ This year, January’s inspection had been on the twelfth, February’s on the ninth. More recently, the inspector had signed off on June twenty-third. What if …?

  17 – 1 – 12 … 17 – 2 – 9.

  If my theory was right and Austin’s worried glances had been aimed at the fire extinguisher, the most recent combination would be: 17 – 6 – 23.

  It couldn’t possibly be that easy, could it? Only one way to find out.

  I pushed the office door closed until the latch clicked. Once again, I pulled the curtain aside, knelt in front of the safe and dialed in the combination. I yanked down on the handle and the door opened.

  I was so shocked, I fell back on my heels.

  Quickly, I scrambled to my feet, grabbed a pen and the notepad off the desk and scribbled a note: Austin: If I can figure out where you keep the combination, anybody can! Hannah

  I put the note into the safe, closed the door and spun the dial.

  Two seconds later, I was standing in the hallway holding my tunic, taking deep breaths and thanking my lucky stars I hadn’t been caught, when movement caught my eye. Marilyn emerged from the laundry room carrying a stack of folded napkins. ‘Can I help you, Hannah?’

  ‘I was just …’ I began, and held up my tunic.

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘I thought I saw you coming out of Austin’s office.’

  No use denying it. ‘I had a question about checkout time, but he doesn’t seem to be in.’

  ‘He’s driven out to the weedery,’ she said, ‘but he’ll be back in time for dinner.’

  ‘Well, I can ask him about it then, can’t I?’ I flashed my sincerest, most innocent smile.

  She wasn’t buying it. ‘What were you really doing in Austin’s office, Hannah?’

  ‘I, um, I was just …’ I stammered.

  Marilyn’s hands were full, but she stared pointedly at my unwrinkled, beautifully pressed tunic. ‘The iron is cold.’

  Busted.

  Before I could lie again, she said, ‘Did you rob the safe?’

  The question so surprised me that I nearly dropped the hanger. ‘Of course not!’

  ‘You must have been in there a long time.’

  I took time to gather my thoughts and appeal to reason. ‘Look, Marilyn, if I had robbed the safe yesterday, why would I go back in there today?’

  She stared at me silently, still clearly suspicious.

  ‘And why would I stick around Bell House just waiting to be arrested?’ I hastened to add.

  Marilyn stood between me and the back door, frowning, as solid and immovable as a tree.

  I decided to come clean. ‘Look, whoever robbed the safe was in possession of the combination. After I talked to Austin earlier, I thought I could figure out what the combination was, and I did.’ I jerked my head toward Austin’s office door. ‘So, I opened the safe and left a note inside to prove it.’

  I was expecting her to ask me how I’d done it, but she simply stared.

  ‘Oh,’ Marilyn said after a moment. ‘I was hoping …’ Her voice trailed off.

  ‘Hoping what?’

  Her face flushed. ‘Do you have time to talk?’

  ‘Of course!’ Apparently I was no longer a robbery suspect.

  Marilyn invited me into her apartment, where she set the napkins down on a table, then offered me a chair. She sat at the foot of her bed, a vintage iron single with what looked like a hand-quilted coverlet.

  ‘Daniel seemed like such a nice guy, you remember? That time in the kitchen?’

  I paused to think. ‘When you showed him how to make cannabutter?’

  She nodded and took a deep, ragged breath. ‘Saturday night, after dinner, he came looking for me.’ With a quavering voice, she continued, ‘He said he wanted my recipe for magic muffins. I was reluctant at first and offered to give him a copy of my cookbook instead – the one I gave you – but he was so charming, I gave in.’

  She flushed, and her eyes glistened with tears. ‘I told him to wait while I came back here to my apartment to print the recipe out for him, but he followed me. I thought he was waiting in the hallway by my door, but then I heard the door close and I turned around. Suddenly his hands were all over me! He grabbed my shoulders and backed me up against the table. Then he started kissing me.’ She wiped her lips with the back of her hand.

  ‘Marilyn! How awful!’ I reached out and touched her arm. ‘Tell me this story gets better.’

  She managed a wan grin. ‘I kneed him good and hard, Hann
ah. Then I split for the door, but he caught up with me in the hallway. Grabbed me by the arm, spun me around and pushed me up hard against the wall.’ She trembled, tears now flowing freely. ‘I can still feel the cold tiles against my back as he flattened his nasty self against me.’

  No wonder Marilyn had teared up every time Daniel’s name had been mentioned.

  ‘Marilyn, have you told anyone else about this?’

  ‘Desiree knows,’ she sniffed.

  ‘How about the police?’

  She shook her head. ‘What does it matter? The man’s dead now.’ After a moment, she added, ‘Besides, Borys came along just in the nick of time.’

  ‘Borys?’ I began, and then I remembered. ‘One of the security guards.’

  ‘Yes. The boys are usually long gone by then, but Borys said he’d forgotten his cell phone, so he came back for it.’ Incredibly, a sly smile crept over her face. ‘Borys grabbed Daniel by his silly bow tie, hoisted him up against the wall and got right in his face. “If you ever try that again, mister, I will personally hunt you down and gut you like a fish!” He held Daniel up in the air for the longest time, letting the threat sink in.’

  I’d met both men, so I could picture the scene. I shuddered. ‘What happened then?’

  ‘I didn’t stick around to see. I ran back here and locked the door. But Borys must have let Daniel go, because a few minutes later Borys tapped on my door and asked if I was all right. I told him I was a little shook up, but I’d be fine.’ She stared at me for a long moment, tight-jawed and grim. ‘Clearly, I’m not.’

  ‘What time did all this happen, Marilyn?’

  ‘Around ten o’clock. Why?’

  ‘Just curious.’ I had been in bed by then, but Claire and some of the others had retreated to the solarium to smoke and sip cognac, schnapps, madeira and Grand Marnier. My liver quivered just thinking about it. Daniel had certainly joined them at some point after ten. Following his encounter with Borys, he probably needed a calming slug or two.

  Marilyn reached for a tissue. ‘You won’t say anything, will you?’ she said, using the tissue to wipe tears from her cheeks.