The Hotspur Affair: A Richard & Morgana MacKenzie Mystery

by Jack Flanagan

  “That may—”

  “So that gives the two of you a motive. But because your brother is the sheriff, I can’t, as of yet, stop him or you from being here at the scene of the crime. I can, however, have the two of you chaperoned while you are at the house.”

  Turning to Cobourne, Thomas barked, “You have your assignment. While the Sheriff and his brother are here at this house, make notes on what they do and say. Watch them like hawks.”

  With disdain in his eyes, Thomas again turned to us. “It is late, and I must bid you goodnight, gentlemen. And, Sheriff, I’ll be at your office tomorrow; let’s say at high noon. We can talk more privately then and compare notes . . . among other things. If you get my drift.” Kyle may have, but I didn’t.

  With no more being said, Thomas left.

  “Well, that was pleasant,” I remarked as I watched the disgruntled detective go out the front door. “I imagine our little truce is off.”

  “Ayup,” sighed Kyle.

  Our group of four proceeded into the kitchen to where Uncle Raymond was found.

  “Here?” I said, looking at the crude tape outline on the floor in front of the refrigerator of what must have been Uncle’s body position when it was discovered.

  “The artwork provided by Deputy Henry,” said Peterson.

  “Coming here tonight couldn’t have been easy for poor old Henry,” added Kyle. “He and Uncle Raymond had become buddies of late. Uncle knew Henry’s father from their school days or something. Where is Henry now?”

  “He left with your uncle to the—”

  “That’s right, I almost forgot. Did you know that Henry . . .”

  I half-listened to Kyle and Peterson chatting away as I stared down to where Uncle Raymond spent the last moments of his life and wondered why anyone would want to hurt a harmless old man? He didn’t own anything worth taking. The only thing of value was his house. Most of the furnishings were inherited from my grandmother or purchased at garage sales and local thrift stores. And what was this nonsense about fish?

  I took a step closer to the tape on the floor, and I noticed that the area was wet. “Did it rain tonight around here?”

  “No,” replied Kyle.

  “Did anyone spill water near . . . eh, are any of the pipes leaking upstairs?”

  We all looked up at the ceiling—no water stain.

  “There’s water on the floor,” I continued. “Where did it come from?” In fact, I noticed that there were several small puddles scattered about the kitchen. “Was he washing the kitchen floor when he was . . . died?”

  “Not that we can tell,” said Peterson. “There isn’t any evidence to suggest that he was washing or cleaning anything when he . . . ah, passed away.”

  “He was obviously cooking,” said the trooper with a notebook in hand.

  Apparently, the trooper didn’t know my Uncle Raymond, so I ignored his comment and got closer to the floor.

  “There was this odd thing, though,” Kyle said with some hesitancy, “When Uncle’s body was removed, well . . . eh—”

  “What, Kyle? What was the matter with Uncle’s body?” I said a bit grumpier than I should have.

  “He was found face down. His front was dry, but his back was wet. The water must have got on him after he was—”

  “Killed . . . I got it, Kyle,” I said to my brother’s relief. “He got wet after he went to the floor. Is what you are saying?”

  “That’s it in a nutshell.”

  “Maybe the assailants,” said Peterson, “after knocking your uncle unconscious, threw water on him to revive him. Ms. Claire said that your uncle was not responding to their questions.”

  “Throwing water on his back, what would that do?” growled Kyle.

  “Deputy,” I calmly asked, “did Claire mention anything about the intruders splashing water on my uncle?”

  “No,” he said, “but it could have happened when they covered her head.”

  “There was a pot in the sink,” said the note-taking Cobourne. “Maybe he was making macaroni and cheese.”

  Kyle and I both looked at our speculating escort and began to chuckle.

  “Did I say something funny?” asked the state trooper with a scowl.

  “Our Uncle Raymond,” Kyle replied, “would never cook up a batch of macaroni and cheese.”

  “Because he didn’t like it,” concluded the trooper.

  “No,” I said, “because he didn’t cook. He would warm things up in the microwave or in the toaster oven. But he would never, ever, cook something from scratch . . . except when he was barbecuing”

  “Not even to boil water for pasta?” said Peterson.

  “He would boil water in the electric kettle for tea, but he would never boil water in a pot to make pasta. To think on it, I don’t remember him ever being near a pot.”

  Yes, as odd as that fact was, my uncle didn’t cook at all. Yet, he had what people would call a chef’s kitchen, which included, among other things, an industrial stove. When I asked him about the kitchen, he simply answered that he was lucky. “Pretty good deal, wouldn’t you say. It came with the house. I don’t cook, but your grandmother loves to.” She truly did and was excellent at it. When my grandmother died, she was sorely missed, especially around the holidays. Uncle Raymond survived on leftovers from restaurant meals and family feasts, TV dinners, and microwaveable soups.

  “No, Uncle Raymond didn’t cook,” reiterated Kyle.

  “Well, there is a blue pot in the sink,” said the state trooper, smugly.

  When I looked, sure enough, there was a large blue enamel pot. And floating in it was the soggy, torn remnants of a box for stovetop macaroni and cheese. The discovery almost shattered my image of my inept bachelor uncle. “Lord, maybe the old guy could boil water,” I muttered. But my amusing imaginings of Uncle stirring a pot and draining noodles faded away, and a new, more curious thought came to mind.

  “I’ve seen this pot before,” I said with a shudder.

  “Maybe, it was Grandma’s,” said Kyle walking up next to me. “She and grandpa lived a few years with Uncle Raymond before they passed away. How many years has she been gone?—Twenty-seven?”

  “Thirty-three,” I said absent-mindedly. “Grandma will be gone thirty-three years next month.” My thoughts weren’t on my grandmother, nor were they on Uncle Raymond. They were on the blue pot.

  I went to the refrigerator and, using my jacket’s sleeve to cover my hand, opened its freezer door. I looked inside amid the protests from Detective Thomas’ babysitter.

  “Hey, Mr. MacKenzie, you are not allowed to touch—”

  “It’s been moved,” I proclaimed.

  “What has been moved?” asked Kyle as he followed me to the refrigerator.

  “Did anyone from the investigation take anything out of the freezer?” I anxiously asked my fellow cohorts.

  The answer was no. Though the refrigerator and freezer were examined for prints and the whatnot, my law enforcement companions insisted that everything had been left as it was found.

  “Trooper Cobourne,” I said with some authority. “Has that pot in the sink been checked for fingerprints, DNA, and whatever?”

  Before the trooper could muster up a reply, I said, “If it hasn’t, get it done.”

  “What’s with the pot, Rich?” asked Kyle.

  “That pot was in the freezer encrusted with frost and ice. I noticed it when I was looking for ice cubes a few weeks back. Knowing Uncle, he was too thrifty to get a new refrigerator with automatic defrosting capability, I offered to defrost it for him. But he insisted quite vigorously that I leave it alone. He said something about the freezer being his time capsule.”

  “His what?” said Kyle.

  “His time capsule. At the time, I had no idea what he was talking about. But since he was old and not well, I dropped the issue.”

  “So?” Kyle looked confused in his mental search to make connections.

  “So, there may have been something in the freezer
that is connected to Uncle Raymond’s death.”

  “That is a leap in logic,” said my brother, still obviously confused.

  “Is it? Let’s look at what we have. Uncle Raymond is found dead in front of the fridge. The heat for the house is set abnormally high. Why?”

  “Someone wanted to . . . to jack up the heat on the hot water,” said Kyle.

  “Right! Uncle Raymond’s body is wet on top but not underneath. The pot in the freezer is removed and put in the sink.”

  “To thaw,” concluded Kyle with pride.

  “He was making mac and cheese,” countered Trooper Bourne. “There is an empty box of instant—”

  “Was he?” I went back to the sink and took a plastic grocery bag from the recycling bag dispenser on the counter. Using the bag as a makeshift glove, I took the wet mac and cheese box out of the pot. “First, did you notice anything odd about this box . . . besides it being empty and wet?”

  Faces crunched; heads wagged; eyes flitted from the box to me.

  Kyle broke the silence. “The box is old.” His eyes were fixated on the soggy cardboard container.

  “Old?” asked Deputy Peterson.

  “The box is old . . . very old,” answered Kyle. “I have been making and eating this brand of mac and cheese for years, and the company has changed the design of its box five or six times since I made my first batch.”

  “How long was that?” asked Peterson, trying to know his boss better.

  “A long time, Peterson, a very long time. That box must be at least fifty years old or so. It’s the same box design that was around when Granny made mac & cheese for us.”

  “Good, Kyle. I thought that you’d eventually recognize it. Anything else?”

  “It has been bound up with wide cellophane tape,” spoke Peterson with growing gravitas in his tone.

  “Yep, taped up in a very precise manner,” I concluded. “So much so that at first glance, you might not even think that it had tape on it at all. Only because this box had been sitting in water, for God only knows how long, does the tape become very apparent. As you can see, the cardboard and the tape have started to separate.”

  I pointed to the left side of the sink to a crumpled wad of aluminum foil. “I bet you dollars for donuts that that foil covered the outside of the box too.”

  “What does all this tell us?” asked Trooper Cobourne.

  “Well, it may give us something to work on,” proudly answered Kyle.

  “Like what?” said Cobourne, who at the moment abandoned his note-taking.

  There was an uncomfortable silence before Kyle answered, “Got me.”

  Again the older brother came to his younger sibling’s rescue. “Maybe,” I said, “the tape on the box was to give it more durability, make it more frostproof. And maybe, the box had something in it.”

  “Yeah, macaroni and cheese,” said Cobourne.

  “Kyle, can you tell us about this brand of mac and cheese?”

  “Well, you don’t store it in the freezer, for one thing. And the pot is too small to make it. It won’t hold the needed six cups of salted water. Now, as for making the mac and cheese, you cook the noodles in boiling water for at least ten minutes. After that, you drain the noodles and return them to the pot. Then you add the contents of the included cheese packet along with 1/4 cup of milk and two tablespoons of butter; you stir thoroughly and serve.”

  I didn’t doubt for a second that my brother knew the answer to my question. I showed the empty box to the state policeman and asked him to check out the instructions that were still legible. “Trooper Cobourne, please go to the refrigerator and see if there is any butter or milk for the mac & cheese.”

  The trooper acquiesced to my request and announced, “There’s not much of anything in the fridge. And there isn’t any milk or butter.”

  I picked up the nearby kitchen garbage can, removed its swinging lid, and showed the group its minimal contents. “No empty milk container, no butter wrappers. My uncle wasn’t making mac and cheese.”

  “So Rich, you think Uncle Raymond was storing something?” asked Kyle.

  “Or hiding something . . . Something that may have gotten our dear uncle killed,” I said reluctantly.

  “So, the intruders,” speculated Kyle, “got the pot out of the freezer and put it in the sink to defrost it, dropping ice chunks along the way. But there wasn’t enough hot water. So, they pushed up the heat on the thermostat to get more.”

  “It makes sense,” I said, “doesn’t it?”

  “Well then, your uncle probably wasn’t making mac and cheese,” said Cobourne, “but the rest . . . eh, I’m not sure. It sounds a bit far-fetched.”

  “Not as far-fetched,” I said, “as making mac and cheese on a stove with burners that don’t work. I had the gas to the stove turned off. I didn’t want uncle to forgetfully leave the burners on.”

  “No,” agreed Kyle, “we didn’t want that happen again.”

  “Then again, it is an interesting premise,” said the trooper. “I will report it to Detective Thomas.”

  “I’m sure you will, Trooper,” snapped Kyle, “and you can tell your boss—” Kyle’s cell phone buzzed. Cobourne never found out what he was to say to Thomas.

  My brother nervously handed the phone to me. “It’s for you. It’s Morgana.”

  “Why is she calling you?” I asked, taking Kyle’s cell phone.

  “Probably you don’t have your cell phone. And if you do, it isn’t turned on.”

  Kyle was right. I didn’t have it.

  “What’s up, Love? I’m kind of busy here.”

  “Richard, please get home as soon as you can,” tersely replied Morgana.

  I waited for an explanation or more details concerning her request, but none were forthcoming after several seconds.

  “Why? Is something wrong? Has something happened?”

  “No, nothing is wrong . . . It’s late.”

  “It’s not very late. It is just past ten.”

  “I want you home; I want here . . . now and only you, not your brother or Peterson.”

  “Listen, Morgana,” I said as I turned my back on my three companions for some privacy, “about our plans for tonight’s activities, in the light of Uncle’s death and all—”

  “I didn’t call because I’m feeling randy, you clod.”

  “Oh! . . . Oh? Then why did you call?”

  “You’re at a crime scene. You should be home with me.”

  “I am perfectly safe. It seems that half of the state’s police force is here.”

  “I want you home now. Tell Kyle to get you home.”

  “But what do I tell—”

  “Just tell your brother that I want you here, now, and you’ll talk to him tomorrow. And don’t be polite and offer whoever drives you home a beer or a coffee. And for God’s sake, if brother takes you home, don’t offer him a sandwich or a snack for his efforts.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Of course I’m okay,” said Morgana, a little contritely. “I love you. See you soon.”

  She hung up.

  I hadn’t the slightest idea why Morgana was speaking so oddly, but I knew this much—she wanted me home, the sooner, the better, and she wanted me to herself.

  “Guys, I must leave the police work to you professionals. I have to get back home. Morgana, well, she feels . . . uneasy.”

  “Something she ate, maybe?” asked Kyle.

  “No, Kyle.”

  “She could be coming down with the—”

  “She is scared, Kyle! Her uncle-in-law is dead . . . probably murdered. It’s late. She feels vulnerable. She wants me back home.”

  My little outburst put an end to the party, so to speak. Kyle and I promised to talk in the morning. I said my adieux to my brother and to Trooper Cobourne. Peterson drove me home. Luckily for me, the deputy had an early shift the next day, so he didn’t hint about a cup of coffee or a hot cocoa nightcap at the house.

  Morgana, now dressed in jeans
and a college sweatshirt, met me at the door. “Good, you’re alone,” she affirmed. “How did it go? Did you see—”

  “No, Uncle Raymond left before I got there.”

  Morgana looked puzzled.

  “He was taken to the hospital, eh . . . to the ME’s. I only saw Kyle and the police.”

  Morgana stepped up and gave me a kiss on my right cheek. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded.

  “While you were gone, Deputy Henry dropped by, filled me in on some of the details, and offered his condolences. He really admired Uncle Raymond.” She kissed me again on the cheek. “Your uncle will be missed; he was a good man.”

  “And he had an interesting life,” I added.

  “Maybe a more interesting one than you think,” said an unexpected but familiar-sounding voice, startling me. “Who is inside?” I looked in the direction from whence the voice came.

  In a wrinkled black suit with its traditional black shirt and Roman collar, my old friend appeared. He looked haggard, and trouble was written on his face. He favored his left leg as he approached me. I saw that his right hand was bandaged. Yet, behind his round spectacles, he displayed a genuine warmth that belied his worrisome condition.

  “Joe?” I said

  “Hi, Rich, long time no see.”

  #

  CHAPTER 4

  “A long time is right.”

  The last time I saw Joe—better known as Reverend Father Joseph Savina, SJ—was about ten years ago in a small village outside Bari when Morgana and I were touring Italy. Joe was an old crony and roommate of mine from my halcyon college days. We had spent many nights drinking and philosophizing about the plight of mankind. On one particular evening, after attending a lecture given by Eugene McCarthy and imbibing several Scotches, we resolved to choose careers that would help make the world a better place. Joe, as it turned out, actually gave some thought to his promise. During the last weeks of our senior year, my friend announced that he was hooking up with Mother Church and joining The Society of Jesus. While I, on the other hand, had hooked up with Serena “Bo” Boswell—a mother of a different sort.

  “Too long of a time, Rich, much too long,” he warmly reaffirmed.

  He winced when he offered me his hand. Warily, I took it and held it rather than give it a hearty welcoming shake.