The Shamus Sampler

by Sean Dexter

  “Who were they?”

  “One of them was Gerald Barnes. The other was—”

  “Never mind. I know Barnes. He might talk to me.”

  “Good. I didn't like him much.”

  “He doesn't like me, either, but that doesn't mean he won't talk to me.”

  “I hope he will,” she said.

  She was wearing a purple robe and drinking coffee. She was also smoking a cigarette, though I'd thought she was trying to quit. I didn't blame her. She probably needed something to calm her down.

  “Tell me what happened when you met Sue Traylor,” I said.

  We were sitting at her kitchen table. I didn't drink coffee, and she didn't keep Big Red in the refrigerator for me like Dino did, so I just leaned back in the chair and laced my fingers behind my neck.

  She took a puff of the cigarette. “There's not much to tell. I visited with Sue, we talked about how our lives had been since the old days, and I left.”

  “Did she seem unhappy? Depressed? Was she satisfied with the way her life had worked out?”

  “She seemed perfectly happy to me. I don't think she killed herself, if that's what you're getting at. Besides, there was no note.” She paused. “At least that's what the police said.”

  “What about her husband? Didn't Dino say he'd died recently?”

  She shook her head. “Not recently. Five years ago. She's gotten over that, and he left her very well off, financially. He was a lawyer, but his family had oil money. She was probably a millionaire.”

  “What about her son?”

  Evelyn gave me a look. “What do you mean by that?”

  She thought I was making a crack about her and Dino's daughter, who'd had a pretty tough time when she found out that her mother had once been a whore.

  But that wasn't what I had in mind. “I mean do they get along? How about the father's money? Did the son get any?”

  “They get along fine. She told me that she was always talking about coming down here again, but she just never had the nerve to do it. He's the one who had the idea of buying her a ticket for Mother's Day. That was just the little push she needed, and she really loved seeing The Island again.” Evelyn crushed out her cigarette in the saucer that held her coffee cup. “But it didn't work out very well in the end, did it?”

  “No,” I said. She hadn't answered my question about the inheritance, but I let that go. I'd find out later. “So why did you get the blame for what happened?”

  “As far as I know, there was no one else Sue was going to get in touch with here. She mentioned that I was the only one she was interested in seeing; she hardly remembered Dino. She was just going to spend some time alone relaxing in the hotel. And when she got tired of that, she was going to walk across the street to the beach, and sit and look at the waves. Alone.”

  “You told the cops that?”

  She laughed. “Stupid of me, wasn't it? And no one else seems to have gone to her room. The glasses we drank out of were still on the table when the maid found her.”

  “What about a lawyer?”

  “I haven't been arrested yet. I don't think I will be. For one thing, I didn't kill her.”

  “I know that,” I said. “But that doesn't mean a thing.”

  “I didn't have a motive,” she said, reaching into the pocket of her robe for another cigarette. “And there's certainly no evidence against me.”

  “That's another point in your favor. The question is, who did have a motive?”

  She lit the cigarette with a Bic lighter and blew out a plume of smoke. “That's what you're supposed to find out.”

  I stood up. “I'll try,” I said.

  #

  Gerald Barnes had thinning hair and wore glasses. He looked more like a math teacher than a cop. All he needed was a plastic pocket protector.

  “What do you want, Smith?” he asked when I walked up to his desk.

  “I just wanted to ask a few questions about Sue Traylor.”

  He picked up a chewed yellow pencil from the top of the desk and pointed it at me. “You've been talking to Dino.”

  “Let's just say that I'm curious.”

  He dropped the pencil. “So am I.”

  “Maybe I can answer a question or two for you, then,” I said. “If you'll answer a few for me.”

  Barnes looked at me over the tops of his glasses as if he were trying to decide whether I was worth the trouble. After a few seconds, he pointed to the straight-backed wooden chair beside his desk.

  “Have a seat,” he said.

  I sat down and leaned back. “You first.”

  He thought about what he wanted to know. “What's Dino's interest in this?” he asked finally.

  “He's interested in seeing that a friend of his is treated right. She didn't have anything to do with Sue Traylor's death, and Dino doesn't want her arrested.”

  “He probably doesn't have anything to worry about on that point,” Barnes said. “But what about himself? Was it possible that he was worried about something that the Traylor woman might have told us?”

  So that was what Barnes thought. I laughed quietly. “Everybody on The Island knows all there is to know about Dino and his uncles. He doesn't have anything to hide.”

  Barnes nodded. “Yeah. That's what I thought.”

  “Then why the hassle with Dino's friend? What have you got, anyway?”

  “Not much.” He ran a hand through his thinning hair. “All we know is that Sue Traylor didn't have a heart attack.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The autopsy. She was poisoned, all right.”

  “With what?”

  “Hard to say exactly. But it was some kind of heart medicine, one of the glycosides. Digoxin, maybe.”

  I didn't know much about heart medicines, but Barnes explained that glycosides strengthened heart contractions.

  “And if you don't have a weak heart to begin with, you can be in trouble,” he said.

  “I take it Sue Traylor didn't have a weak heart.”

  “She had heart disease, but it was the wrong kind to take digoxin for. She had high blood pressure. So the digoxin—or whatever it was—was fatal.”

  “And Dino's friend was the only person to go into the room.”

  “As far as we know. The door wasn't bolted on the inside, though, so someone else could have been in there. We didn't find any fingerprints, though.”

  “What about the glasses that she and Evelyn used? Was there any evidence of digoxin in them?”

  “None,” Barnes said.

  “And you checked the rest of the room?”

  Barnes looked at me over the tops of his glasses again. “You're kidding me, right?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “What did you find?”

  “I don't really like you very much, Smith. You know that?”

  I nodded.

  “But I'm going to tell you anyway, because this has got me puzzled. There was no sign of any digoxin in that room. There was a suitcase, but all it had in it were the normal things a woman would bring on a trip to Galveston. Beach clothes and a bathing suit, but that's all. In the bathroom she had the usual stuff, toothpaste, make-up, her blood pressure medicine. But that's all.”

  “You've had the blood pressure medicine analyzed?”

  “You really think we're idiots, right? But you don't want to hurt my feelings by telling me so.” He picked up the pencil and rolled it between his fingers. “Of course we had it analyzed. Every single capsule. It's procardia. Standard medication for high blood pressure.”

  “What was the date on the bottle?”

  “It was two days ago. She must've picked it up just before she came down here.”

  I stood up. “Well, it looks like you've covered the ground pretty thoroughly. I guess you checked out the maid.”

  He sighed. “We checked out the maid. She's been in the country two years, barely speaks English, and didn't have any idea who the dead woman was. It wasn't the maid.”

  “Al
l right,” I said. “You don't have to get defensive. I was just asking. What about the other hotel personnel? The desk clerk, the --”

  “The desk clerk's not more than thirty. He probably doesn't even remember the old days. Hardly anybody there in the hotel remembers.”

  “Well, at least you checked.”

  “Right. You can find your way out, can't you.”

  I could, and I started toward the exit.

  “Don't forget to give us a call when you get it figured out, Sherlock.”

  “Don't worry,” I said.

  #

  Thanks to the uncles, Dino still had a some influential contacts in a lot of places, even a small town like Corsicana. I drove by his house and asked him to make a few calls. I sat in his living room and drank a Big Red while I waited for him to get the answers to some of the questions that were bothering me. The phone rang a couple of times as he got replies to his calls, but I didn't bother to get up and try to listen in.

  “The son didn't inherit,” he said when he came back into the room. “Not much, anyway. Seems like he wasn't his father's favorite person. He was always getting into scrapes with the cops, nothing big, but enough to be aggravating. Went to college, but never graduated. Has quite a way with the women, and he's been in a few scrapes because of that, too. Never held onto a job more than a week or so at a time. Maybe he was sucking up to Sue by giving her the trip and treating her to a Mother's Day present. Anyway, he just got ten thousand a year; not a whole lot. Not enough to live on, even in Corsicana.”

  “Gives him a motive if he was named in Sue Traylor's will,” I said.

  “That's something else I found out. He's in the will. Sue didn't have any other relatives. Her parents died about the time she came here to work for my uncles. But anyway, according to a guy I talked to, the pharmacist says that Sue's the one who picked up the medicine on her way to the station. So it was just procardia, like Barnes told you. Nobody else touched the bottle.”

  “So much for that idea, then. There has to be another answer. Someone who knew her from the old days, who didn't want the past to come out.”

  “Maybe,” Dino said. “But who?”

  “That's what I'm supposed to find out,” I said.

  #

  But I didn't. I talked to the maid, I talked to the desk clerk, I talked to the house detective, I talked to the waiters, I talked to Evelyn. None of them came up with a thing to help me.

  By then nearly a week had gone by, and Dino wasn't very worried about it anymore.

  “They haven't been bothering Evelyn,” he said when I stopped by his house. “You must've put a scare into 'em.”

  “Sure I did. Cops are scared to death of me. You know that.”

  “OK, so maybe I was exaggerating. But they've dropped it.”

  They hadn't, of course. Barnes wasn't the type to let something like murder drop that easily. But if Dino wanted to think so it was all right with me.

  “You want me to forget about it then?” I asked.

  “Hell no. I'd like to know who did it. Wouldn't you?”

  “I guess so,” I told him, though I wasn't really sure I cared.

  #

  Another week went by, a week in which I didn't find out any more than I already knew, mainly because I didn't really try. I talked to Evelyn again, and as far as I could discover, Sue Traylor didn't have any deep dark secrets to reveal. There was simply no reason anyone would want to kill her.

  The house painting business wasn't booming, so I sat around the house and finished reading The Beautiful and Damned and started on The Great Gatsby. Then one day while I was sitting in a lawn chair out front, enjoying the Gulf breeze and thinking about the difference between life in East Egg and in West Egg, Barnes drove up and parked on the oyster-shell driveway.

  “Well, Sherlock,” he said as he got out of the car, “have you got any answers for me?”

  I pulled my book mark out of the back pages and stuck it in to mark my place. Laying the book down by the chair, I said, “Not yet. Do you have any for me?”

  Barnes leaned back against his car. “Not really. I did a little searching into Sue Traylor's history. I heard that she had a thing going with one of Dino's uncles for a while. Did you know about that?”

  “Dino didn't mention it. I imagine a lot of the girls had a thing going with one or another of the uncles from time to time.”

  “You don't suppose that Sue Traylor could've taken digoxin instead of procardia by mistake, do you?”

  Barnes walked away from the car over to where I was sitting. I was in the shade of the house, and he must've been getting pretty warm leaning on the car in the sun.

  “There's no way she could've made that mistake. Digoxin comes in very small pills. Procardia comes in very large capsules. I'm just glad I don't have to swallow one.”

  And that's when it came to me. Maybe Barnes's calling me Sherlock had something to do with it. Anyway, we'd eliminated every other possible answer, so the one I'd just thought of had to be the right one.

  “What was the pharmacist's name?” I asked. “The one who filled the prescription for the procardia.”

  “The pharmacist's name? What difference does that make?”

  I told him.

  #

  Barnes was back the next day. I had finished Gatsby, but I wasn't ready to start another book. I was thumbing through an old issue of Texas Monthly.

  “You were right,” Barnes said, walking over to my chair. “I don't know why we didn't think of it before.”

  “You don't think of pharmacists as murderers,” I said. “That's why.”

  “Her name was Yeager, by the way. Jane Yeager. And she wasn't much of a murderer. She broke down and confessed before they'd questioned her fifteen minutes.”

  “How'd he get to her?”

  “Just like you thought. Told her he loved her but that he couldn't marry her until the old girl was dead. He worked on her for months. He'd really put the pressure on lately. Told her they could travel around the world and live in the South Pacific on coconuts and pineapple.”

  “And she believed that?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Well, Dino said he was supposed to be pretty handy with the women.” Nameless came out of the foliage and looked at Barnes. He wasn't impressed. He twitched his tail and went back to lie in the shade. “How'd she do it?”

  “Crushed the digoxin tablets and put them in one of the procardia capsules. It held more than enough to do the job.”

  “And just one capsule, of course,” I said. “It didn't really matter when she took it, I guess, but it worked better that she took it here.”

  “Not really,” Barnes said. “I don't think there would've been an autopsy if she'd died at home. It was just bad luck that she died in Galveston. Otherwise he might've gotten away with it.”

  “Why did he get her to do it? The money? Couldn't he have just married Jane Yeager? I thought pharmacists pulled down pretty good salaries.”

  “They do, but not when you're thinking in terms of millions. He did it for the money, all right.”

  “Some Mother's Day present,” I said.

  “He wasn't really her son,” Barnes said. “He was her husband's son.”

  “Does that make a difference?”

  Barnes stood there silently, as if he might be thinking of the dead woman as a real person instead of just another bothersome corpse.

  “Not to her,” he said.

  *****

  Bill Crider is the author of more than fifty published novels and numerous short stories. He won the Anthony Award for best first mystery novel in 1987 for Too Late to Die. He and his wife, Judy, won the best short story Anthony in 2002 for their story Chocolate Moose. His story Cranked from Damn Near Dead (Busted Flush Press) was nominated for the Edgar award, the Anthony Award, and the Derringer Award. It won the latter. He’s won the Golden Duck Award for best juvenile science fiction novel and been nominated for a Shamus for Dead on the Island. His latest
novel is Compound Murder (St. Martin’s). Check out his homepage at www.billcrider.com, or take a look at his peculiar blog at http://billcrider.blogspot.com.

  Christmas Mourning

  by

  Stephen D. Rogers

  A Christmas story? Why not? Especially since it’s written by Stephen D. Rogers, a writer that has proven his worth as a master of short stories time and time again, even nabbing a Shamus Award nomination.

  When I was a kid growing up, Santa Claus filled our stockings and left us presents under the tree. I then spent the morning shredding colored paper and shrieking in delight as I mentally crossed off items that had gone on the list I'd mailed to the North Pole.

  All those years, I never thought about Christmas as a family holiday because my family had always been there.

  John had changed my perspective. John, the Ghost of Christmas Past.

  He had been very agitated that first time in my office, refusing to sit, pacing a new pattern into my rug. Even the signature he'd finally placed on the contract was dashed on the run.

  “So what makes you think your wife is having an affair?”

  “It's not as though she loves him. She's just...they're sleeping together, and I want it stopped.” His knuckles turned white. “She's the mother of my children.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “The company where Denise works threw a holiday party. I got to see how she acted around her coworkers.”

  “This concerns a coworker of your wife?” I asked questions not so much to clarify as to give my note-taking hand time to catch up. Maybe if John sat, he'd talk slower. “Are you sure you don't want a seat?”

  “No. Anyway, her coworker. Bob. From Sales. You know the type.”

  “Do you have a last name?”

  “McNally. Bob McNally. Overly friendly in that superior way. The rules don't apply to him.”

  “And how did you come to the conclusion that Bob was sleeping with your wife?”

  John stopped in his tracks, turning on me. “You think I don't know my wife?”

  “I'm just asking.”

  John grunted before he resumed pacing. “The way she acted around him was disgusting. Fawning. Laughing at his stupid jokes before he even reached the punchlines.”