“Any reason that she’d have for wanting to kill Carla?” Marissa asked, even though she knew the answer. Strangers rarely had a reason for killing one another. Murder needed a reason, and Mrs. Williams wasn’t likely to have one.
“Not that I know of. She kept to herself mostly. I honestly don’t know much about her.” Deanna smiled at her.
“And what about the guy?” Marissa prompted, trying to get this done. She had at least two more stops to make before leaving Columbus.
“Harvey Smith. He had it bad for Carla. He hasn’t been back since she passed away. He owns an orchard over in Grove City.” She gave the directions by pointing out the window. Marissa, who didn’t know east from west, ignored the directions.
“Apricots?” Gavin asked, thinking the solution might be entirely too simple.
“No, apples mostly. He brought in some baskets of them from time to time. Very generous he was.”
Gavin shot a look at the waitress and then Marissa. She knew that the look meant that he was impressed she’d found out this tidbit of information. Apple seeds could be used to make cyanide with the same process, but it took far more seeds. If Harvey had brought in baskets of apples, then they would have more than enough material to work with.
The easy solution then applied to either the staff, if the apples were cored at the diner, or Harvey.
“Did you make pies from them?” Marissa asked, feeling she knew the answer.
“No, baked apples. They’re delicious in the winter with some cinnamon and sugar. You just need to peel them and core them and bake them. We don’t have any at the moment though, or I’d have the cook prepare some for you.”
Marissa was glad that they didn’t have the apples. She felt her appetite wane as she heard all of this. The end was in sight, and she honestly didn’t like where she saw this case going.
As she sat there thinking, another couple came into the diner, and Deanna excused herself.
“What’s the matter with you?” Gavin asked. “You look like your lunch didn’t agree with you.”
“Maybe it didn’t,” she said. “I’ve had a few ideas.”
“Who was the detective who used to stop the book and say ‘I know who did it.’?” Gavin asked with a twinkle in his eye.
Marissa tried to turn off her thoughts, but couldn’t entirely. “Ellery Queen, but I’m not that far along. I just have a few ideas that I need to work out.”
Gavin nodded. “Where to now?”
“I’ve got a few questions for the coroner, if you could stop by there.”
In the insular world of murder investigations, Marissa wasn’t shocked to find that Gavin and Dr. Reid were old friends. Both had attended Elder High School, the Catholic school on the western side of Cincinnati. Marissa liked to call it a cult, which always got Gavin’s blood pressure rising, but these men acted like long-lost frat brothers.
“This is Dr. James Reid,” Gavin introduced. “Marissa’s son was one of the witnesses to the murder at the diner a few weeks ago.”
“Not what I’d want my kids to see. Cyanide poisoning is not for the faint of heart. Is he okay?” The man seemed genuinely concerned, which Marissa appreciated. She’d met a few forensic men who only relied on black humor to tolerate their jobs.
“He’s doing fine. The death happened in another part of the restaurant, so he just knows something bad happened. He didn’t see a thing.”
He gave her a benign avuncular smile, even though he couldn’t have been more than a few years older than her. He seemed like he was fifty instead. “What exactly do you want to know?”
“I wanted to make sure that the particular type of cyanide used to kill the waitress also was used to kill Mr. Bishop?”
“Yes, they were both killed from the same type of cyanide, which was something that was not of a production variety. There was another substance in the young woman’s stomach, but I haven’t identified it yet.” He went on to talk about the distillation and the ingredients found in the compounds, but he quickly lost her. He’d answered her question, and now it was just a matter of smiling and nodding until he wore himself out. She did manage to get his email address.
After that, Marissa asked to go to the nearest Walgreens. Gavin didn’t ask why, but he used his GPS to navigate to the parking lot. “They sell wine and beer,” Gavin said with a sparkle in his eye, but Marissa wasn’t thinking of liquor. She quickly found the aisle marked “Cold and Flu” and studied the various boxes, powders, and pills.
“Are you coming down with something?” Gavin asked. “You look fine.”
Marissa knew that Gavin was a bit of a germophobe, so she left him thinking about the last time they kissed and gauging what might be an appropriate level of disinfectant.
“All sick people tend to look alike though, don’t they?” Marissa asked, more to herself than to anyone else. “People don’t really look closely at your symptoms.”
“If you say so,” Gavin responded.
Marissa was glad that he wasn’t trying to ask her too many questions at the moment. She needed to think a few minutes about this.
She could easily see the who and what, but she couldn’t understand the why. She found several varieties of products she’d been looking for and scribbled down the names of them all.
Gavin still didn’t ask her any questions.
Marissa excused herself to use her phone. “Dan, it’s Marissa. Call me back as soon as you get this.”
Then she sent the list of over-the-counter medications to Dr. Reid with a message. She asked the coroner if any of them could be the unidentified product found in Carla’s stomach.
“Are you okay?” Gavin asked when she finished. “You seem a bit off.”
“I’ll be fine,” she promised after taking a deep breath. “What do you say we hit the sales at the outlet malls on the way home?” Marissa was determined to have some time to actually shop on a day off. She’d lost her first chance when Dan had called her about the murder, and she’d been in too much of a rush this morning to take the time. She wondered why she was in such a hurry to solve this case; it didn’t affect her personally. Zach was fine, and Dan was no longer going to be a witness for the prosecution. All was well, and yet she felt a pull to solve this that she couldn’t quite explain.
~*~
It wasn’t until Marissa was having dinner with Zach that Dan returned her call. “What’s up?” he asked. “Is Zach okay? You never call me at work like that.”
“I have a question for you,” she said, not allowing herself to be taken off-topic.
“What? Is this about the murder again?” Dan asked, reminding her how obsessed she felt at the moment.
“Yes, but it will be quick.” Now that Dan wasn’t worried about the trial, his inclination to be helpful had dwindled considerably. “When you said that the older lady at the diner was exotic, what exactly did you mean?”
“It was what she wore, you know, not the normal type of clothing.” Dan had gone back to describing people in the barest of terms whereas Marissa always noticed every detail of an outfit.
“You said that she was wearing a track suit. That seems pretty run-of-the-mill.”
Dan sighed dramatically. “Okay, she had some sort of hat or something on her head. A scarf maybe. It wasn’t the type of thing I was used to seeing.”
“Was it a turban?” she asked. There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “Like what Aladdin wore?” she added, putting it terms that all parents would understand.
“Yeah, how did you know that?” Dan asked, as if she had pulled a bird from her hat or a rabbit from her sleeve. “You must have this about figured out.”
She explained some of what she thought, but she needed a good session on the computer to look up a few things. That wouldn’t happen until after Zach was in bed. He’d want to watch a video or listen to music, which would impede any work she wanted to complete.
After Zach was asleep, Marissa checked out the information she needed. She sig
hed deeply and thought about keeping what she knew to herself, but she couldn’t. Too many people knew that she knew.
Before she went to bed that night, the coroner texted her with a simple message: How did you know? Marissa was glad to see that he used full words when he texted.
~*~
The following morning Ellen stopped by. Marissa knew that she had come at the behest of her husband, given that this was a homicide case—even if it was from another county. “Gavin said you were asking odd questions and sending all sorts of messages yesterday. What gives?”
Marissa debated telling her friend the entire story, since she knew that before she had time to get ready for work, Banderra would have notified Columbus police that he had solved the case. “I know who killed Carla, and I kind of wish that I didn’t.”
Ellen sat down without being invited. “Tell me everything. How did you know?”
“The process of making cyanide from amygdalin is not easy. I had to read up on it. The process involves squeezing apple seeds or crushing apricot seeds, which is somewhat easier—or using a form of amygdalin used in a discredited drug, laetrile. Gavin mentioned laetrile yesterday. Then it turned out that one of the regular customers at the diner is suffering from cancer. She recently spent some time overseas. I’m going to guess she went to Mexico.”
“Why couldn’t it have been one of the other suspects and the seeds?” Ellen asked, looking for flaws in her friend’s logic.
“It’s a process of elimination. First of all, having two kids running around the house makes it nearly impossible to boil and filter the seeds. It would be too dangerous. No parent wants to poison their child. The poisoner had specific targets in mind. These two deaths happened as a direct result of the affair Carla was having with Mr. Bishop.”
“So you think the husband’s death is a homicide too?” Ellen asked.
“Definitely.”
“You know how the laetrile was administered then?” Ellen was sitting on the edge of her seat.
“Cold and flu gel caps. I’m guessing that the original solution was removed with a syringe, mixed with the crystals, and injected back inside the gel cap. Just like some of the cases we’ve seen before. Gavin said the cyanide would need to bet mixed with something strong tasting—but I figured it could also be put inside a gelatin capsule. That would hide the taste, too. I checked with the coroner who ran some tests. A strange substance found in both victims’ stomachs matched one of the brands that I suggested.”
“Why wouldn’t it be the wife? She could have made up the capsules and given them to the husband.”
“She could have, but the way I see it, Carla had the pills first and gave them to Mr. Bishop. Of course, she wasn’t around to stop him from taking his after she was poisoned.”
Ellen made a face. “She was the intended victim and he was an accident?”
“Yes, I think so. Mrs. Williams gave the pills to Carla. She didn’t know the Bishop family at all, but she was a regular and she did sit in Carla’s section occasionally. It is possible that Mrs. Williams noticed Carla interacting with Mr. Bishop and figured that they were cheating.
“But then, Carla shared her pills with Mr. Bishop.”
Marissa nodded. “They were passing a cold or something back and forth between them, so they both needed the medication. She gave him one and kept the other for herself. The normal dosage is two pills. There had to be some connection between them for her to share medicine with him like that.”
“It doesn’t seem like something that strangers would do, that’s for sure. And don’t you think the pills could have come from Marissa’s ex-boyfriend? Harvey Smith, right?”
“No woman would ever take the pills from someone she used to date. Especially if she didn’t want to encourage him. I wouldn’t do that, would you?”
“No,” Ellen agreed.
“Right, but a sick woman would be the ideal person to offer medication. Dan said that she was wearing a turban. I’m guessing that she went to Mexico after the chemo didn’t work. She hoped for a miracle cure and picked up the pills there.”
“Why did she target Carla?”
“I’m not sure. She might have thought she was helping Mrs. Bishop, by getting rid of her competition. But that sure was a drastic step to take.”
Ellen shrugged. “Wow, I’m going to call my husband.”
Marissa poured them both a cup of coffee and waited. Ellen took the call in the other room, which was good, because at times this pragmatic woman talked in baby voice to her husband, which was more than Marissa could tolerate. Today, however, the tone was much more somber.
Ellen returned and picked up the cup of coffee, which was lukewarm now. “Mrs. Williams passed away last night. She left a note explaining what she’d done. You were right about everything.”
Marissa gave her friend a smile. Ellen walked to the patio door and pulled it open wide. The sun had just peeked over the edge of the horizon and the birds chirped as they looked for food on the ground. “You did a good thing, and now it’s done. So go and enjoy today. I know I want you to, and I think that Carla would too.”
Zach came running out of his room to greet Ellen, not looking upset despite his recent experiences. He gave Ellen a kiss, and then hurried to kiss his mother, too. Marissa smiled down at her son. He was growing up so fast. She decided to take Ellen’s advice and spend more time enjoying her life. Today would be a good day after all.
--The End--
Jeffrey Marks is a long-time mystery fan and freelancer. After numerous mystery author profiles, he chose to chronicle the short but full life of mystery writer Craig Rice.
That biography (Who Was That Lady?) encouraged him to write mystery fiction. He began a series of novels set after the Civil War in the area where he grew up. He also began a contemporary mystery series. The first novel in that series won The Malice Domestic Grant.
He has continued to write about the authors he read while growing up. His works include Atomic Renaissance: Women Mystery Writers of the 1940s/1950s, and a biography of mystery author and critic Anthony Boucher entitled Anthony Boucher. It was nominated for an Agatha and fittingly, won an Anthony.
Today, he writes from his home in Cincinnati, which he shares with his spouse and two dogs.
Visit him at http://www.JeffreyMarks.com.
Bubba Trouble: A Mace and Mama Short Mystery
By Deborah Sharp
Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of stories building on Deborah’s popular Mace Bauer Mysteries. When murder disrupts the Fourth of July in fictional Himmarshee, Florida, Mace and Mama wonder if having too many Bubbas is a very bad thing.
Mama applied a fresh coat of Apricot Ice lipstick, and then examined her incisors for stray orange flecks. “I’ll tell you what, Mace.” She clicked her compact shut like an exclamation point. “That Bubba is as useless as a milk bucket under a bull.”
We were creeping down Main Street in her turquoise convertible, official participants in Himmarshee’s Fourth of July Parade. She’d wrangled permission to take part by agreeing to drape an ad across her vintage vehicle for Lake Okeechobee’s Gotcha Bait & Tackle Shop. Along with the cattle auction and the Seminole casino, Lake O is Himmarshee’s claim to fame. Civic leaders jump at any chance to remind people of all those fish in the lake, just waiting to be caught.
Mama perched on the top of the back seat, dispensing waves and the toothy smile she’d perfected decades earlier as Frog Gigging Festival Queen. I focused on driving, trying not to bowl down a group of cloggers in front of us, slow-motion tapping in 98-degree heat. The Florida sun was so hot, the steering wheel scorched my palms. I regarded Mama in the rear-view mirror. Misted by a battery-powered personal fan, she looked as cool as a six-pack in the beer chiller at the Booze ‘n’ Breeze drive-thru.
She tossed a butterscotch candy at the back of my head. “Did you hear me, Mace?”
“Ouch! I heard you. Are we talking about Bad Bubba or Good Bubba?”
Owing t
o my family’s lack of imagination, I had two cousins nicknamed Bubba. It led to no end of confusion about who was which whenever the name came up.
“Bad Bubba, of course. He got himself fired yesterday from the feed store. He was catting around again. This time it was the owner’s wife.”
As we rolled past, someone shouted, “Happy Birthday, Rosalee!”
Mama’s birthday falls on July Fourth. She grew up believing the holiday’s fireworks and celebrations were all about her, which tells you something right there. She dispensed a gracious nod to the well-wisher, like Queen Elizabeth acknowledging a subject from the throne. Or, like her if England’s queen stood 4 foot 11 inches, spoke with a Southern drawl, and had a taste for fruit-sherbet-colored pantsuits. Today, Mama was resplendent in red-white-and-blueberry. A jaunty patriotic scarf—strawberry red, spangled with white stars—accented her berry-blue pantsuit. To her customary disappointment, I was decked out in jeans, boots, and a collared t-shirt with the logo for my workplace, Himmarshee Nature Park.
“What are we going to do about Bubba?” she asked. “Without work to keep him busy, that boy’s going to get in real trouble. Mark my words, Mace.”
“I always do, Mama.”
I didn’t intend to do anything about Bubba. Personally, I didn’t think he was all that bad. I may not be the best judge, though, since I once monitored TV episodes of “Cops” to see how many of my beaus showed up. Fortunately, I’d put those losers behind me a couple years back when I met a good man. At first, things were a bit awkward, considering Detective Carlos Martinez had tossed my mama into the slammer on suspicion of murder. But that’s another story. Back to Bad Bubba.
To my mind, his biggest problem was following two years behind his more accomplished cousin. A former Himmarshee High valedictorian, Good Bubba’s now wrapping up in law school at University of Florida. He also does charity work and serves as a youth leader, counseling church kids who take a purity pledge on how to stay abstinent until marriage.
Rocking through life in Good Bubba’s wake, Bad Bubba had just one advantage over his cousin: He’s a hottie. Good Bubba’s thin, bespectacled, a bit of a nerd. Bad Bubba looks like Brad Pitt in his prime, only with more muscle and beef on his bones. Like drunks to an open bar, women have been flocking to Bad Bubba since he was fifteen.
Happy Homicides 4: Fall Into Crime: Includes Happy Homicides 3: Summertime Crimes Page 95