“There is no use for you to lie any longer, Huang Min-feng. Confess your crimes, beginning with your impersonating Chief of Police Appointee Shen.”
At this, the last of the con man’s veneer of self-confidence crumbled. Glancing at his younger brother, he said, “Your Honor, when Da-xin and I were on the road, the weather delayed us and we were forced to hold up in a wine shop along the Gan River. It was then I met Shen. He was seriously ill and had also been forced to stop to rest on his journey. He’d hoped to continue on in a few days, once he’d recuperated. As fellow travelers, we fell to chatting, and he told me he was about to take up a new official position.
“Famine drove my brother and me from our village, and life on the road proved no better. As it happened, Shen died that night from his illness. It was a stroke of luck. I took his documents, robe, and hat. Da-xin and I continued along the Gan River as if I were the appointee.”
Lu’s brow wrinkled into a landscape of canyons when the counterfeit appointee admitted he’d stolen Shen’s identity as an up-and-coming official. Such hubris was rare even among thieves.
“With a new identity, people lavished free food and lodging on me. Of course, I promised each of our benefactors a minor position in office, once, as Chief of Police, I had the power to do so,” Min-feng added with a self-satisfied smirk. “It was the perfect plan.”
“Not quite perfect,” said Lu. “Even the best laid plans cannot outsmart fate. How long have you been impersonating Shen?”
“Several months. We moved from town to village after a few weeks in each place.” He sighed. “It worked beautifully. Until Chi-chao showed up.”
“Was he your brother, too?”
Min-feng shook his head. “No. A distant cousin.”
“Why did you kill him?”
Min-feng looked incredulously at Lu. “Because he recognized us and knew I wasn’t Shen. He tried to blackmail me by threatening to expose me as an imposter. The situation was impossible. Even if I could pay him now, he could keep coming back. Demanding more.”
“So, you two killed him,” Lu said. “To keep him quiet.”
“Sir, I declare fully and with regret that I committed these crimes alone. My brother, Da-xin, did nothing. He is simple and not guilty of anything. I did it all on my own.”
With this confession, Min-feng guaranteed his own death, but he saved his brother from execution.
Lu gazed at the brothers before him and then at the innkeeper and his son. The moral order was not as easy to understand as one would hope. The imposter and murderer behaved with true concern and responsibility towards his brother, whereas the law-abiding innkeeper’s son had broken the most elemental commandment in the universe: that of filial piety.
As Judge Lu picked up a brush to write out the charge against Huang Min-feng, he was all too aware of how the complexities of the human heart crossed over into the area of peace and justice.
Chris Wheatley
Chris Wheatley splits his time between Oxford and Cambridge. He is a freelance journalist, writer, and musician, with two previously published short stories and many non-fiction articles. Chris has an enduring love for the works of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, and Cornell Woolrich. He has just completed his first full-length crime novel and is forever indebted to the advice and encouragement of his wife, his son, and his mother, without whom he would never have come so far. Find him at silverpilgrim.com.
The True Cost of Liberty
Chris Wheatley
Never in my life did I expect or desire to become embroiled in theft, murder, and the seedier side of humanity. I had always fancied myself a reasonably honest and straightforward person, but all that changed, in a matter of seconds no less, last Sunday afternoon.
The occasion was the seventh birthday of my niece, Florence, the venue the garden of a house belonging to my estranged wife, Laura, and her new partner, Isaac. A peculiar arrangement, you might think, but Laura remained close friends with my sister, the child’s mother, and besides, I rather think she relished the opportunity to show off her new home.
It has a very large garden, beautifully ornamented, with its own swimming pool and the temporary addition on that day of a bouncy castle. Isaac comes from money. His family owns a pharmaceutical company that supplies pesticides to the farming industry. I hadn’t wanted to be there, but I was fond of my niece and Laura, uncharacteristically, had been most warm in her insistence that I attend.
Our separation has not been amicable. I suspect she and Isaac were lovers long before things between us turned sour. I was, therefore, not in the most convivial of spirits. Oh, I mingled and chatted. Many of the guests were mutual friends and of course, there was my sister. Frankly it was all rather awkward and embarrassing. At some point Isaac approached me. He’s one of those swarthy types who manage to look fashionable even in shorts and sandals. He offered me a drink and then he started a conversation, in his bloody irritating South African accent, about the house, the clearing out of his old property, and the amount of junk they had discovered. And so the talk turned to coins.
Isaac knew, through Laura, that I am something of a collector, and he wanted my opinion on a small quantity that had been discovered in an attic, or behind a fireplace or some such—I really wasn’t minded to listen to his tedious anecdote, nor was I minded to sort through his undoubtedly worthless heirlooms. Nevertheless, he brought them out in an old shoebox, set them before me and then buggered off, leaving me even more depressed than before.
So I sifted through the contents, half-oblivious to the clinking of glasses, the splashing of water, the sizzling of the barbecue and the chatter and laughter of adults and kids alike. The coins themselves were nothing special, mostly British. There were some old pennies and farthings, a mixed bag of small denomination European. There were some American, silver pennies and half-dollars that might bring a few pounds. In my head I was estimating a value of perhaps two hundred all in. And then I saw it.
I knew the design, of course, straight away, but I think perhaps I will struggle to convey the raw drama that played out in my (for wont of a better word) soul.
Imagine, if you will, you are looking through a pile of framed canvases in a thrift shop when, amongst the mediocre watercolors of woodland scenes you come across a Van Gogh. Not a print, but an original, a dazzling beautiful, visceral thing that so astonishes it subsumes one’s mind in vibrant emotion.
You look around nervously, certain that this must be some dream. Then realization slowly dawns that it is not. This is real, and the object, which you hold in your sweaty palms, is a genuine masterpiece, worth millions. All you must do is take those few steps to the counter and pay whatever paltry sum is asked and your life will have changed forever. Your heart beats, your pulse pounds, and you feel sure all around you must see the greed and desire in your eyes.
The object of my rapturous attention was a Flowing Hair dollar. To explain what that is we must travel back to the United States of America, 1791, when congress passed a motion to put into place the first national mint. Previously each state had acted as master of its own coinage. Now that led to some very interesting developments. No doubt you have heard the expression “pieces of eight,” very possibly via the medium of some poorly written children’s “entertainment.” But I digress. One does have a tendency to ramble, as Laura would be only too quick to testify.
Back to the garden. There I was, palms itching, staring down upon this thing of beauty, a Flowing Hair dollar. I could clearly see its date: 1794, and that beautiful design by Robert Scot—Liberty herself with her thick, luscious locks falling down upon her shoulder. If it were genuine, it would be worth millions. And to my eyes, to my soul, it was genuine.
I reached down to pick it up. My head swam, my heart raced. I took it up between my thumb and my forefinger and I raised it slowly to my eye and then Isaac, that damn Isaac, with his bloody accent, accosted me once more, with a rough slap across the back.
“Have you fou
nd me a fortune?” he asked, and he flashed those obscenely white teeth. I could only stare back, dumbfounded. How could that absolute dunderhead have known what it was that I held in my hand? And then it dawned on me that he did not. Very slowly, I lowered the coin back into the box.
“Well, look here,” I said, “there may be one or two in there that are worth something. Not a great deal, you understand. I tell you what, I’ll take the lot off your hands for say, two hundred.”
Isaac kept smiling. He smiled for so long that I didn’t think he would reply but then, “I don’t think so, George,” he said, “you know what? We’re going up to London next week. I’ll get them properly valued while we’re in town.”
“Three hundred,” I said, “or I could value them for you, wouldn’t take me a day or two. I could even sell them on your behalf. I’d get you a good price.”
Isaac picked up the box. I remember that he cradled it under one arm, like a rugby ball. “No,” he said, “No, I think I’ll take them up to London, after all.”
And that was that. He took the box back into the garage and then closed and locked the door and I was left wondering if he had somehow guessed that I had spotted something. I felt guilty. But then an odd thing happened. As the afternoon progressed I began to feel not guilty, but angry. And I began to consider, quite coldly and seriously, how best to take possession of that coin.
At the close of events I had fixed in my head not only a good working plan of burglary, but also an indefinable, completely illogical sense of the rightness of such a course. Isaac and Laura did not need the money and besides, it would be detestable, nay grotesque, were such a philistine as Isaac to profit without even understanding, or caring, for the sheer history of the Flowing Hair.
And so that evening I called my dear old friend Max Whitehouse. Max happens to be an antiques dealer. Max is also a crook, albeit not entirely. Ninety percent of his business is above-board. The remaining ten percent, however…let’s just say, Max had connections. Connections I was going to need, and it wasn’t long before I had talked him around. In fact, I believe he was even more excited about the coin than I was.
Salome, that was the last little detail that sealed my plan. By good fortune, I overheard dearest Laura, back in the garden on that hot summer’s day, talking loudly and at length of how she and Isaac had tickets for the following night. An empty house beckoned and thus so did my fate. I almost felt as though the higher powers were conspiring with me.
Breaking in was easy. They had no alarms—a cursory wander through the hallway on that Sunday had discerned as much. No dog, either, and no overlooking neighbors and besides, it was only the garage to which I needed entry. A large crowbar from the trunk of my car saw to that. It popped open nicely, thank you very much. Although I had taken the precautions of wearing a mask and gloves I can tell you that I felt settled and unhurried and not in the least bit afraid.
I found the coin almost at once.
It was then that a strange feeling overcame me. I felt suddenly overwhelmed and in awe of the thing. So much so that at once I secreted it in the plain brown envelope I had brought for that exact purpose. I sealed it there and then, and there it stayed whilst I hastily re-traced my steps back to my car. I drove silently through the night across town to the offices of Max Whitehouse. I posted the coin into his night deposit box without a second thought, drove home, helped myself to one sherry and then another and thereafter had one of the soundest night’s sleep of my life.
What happened next I only know of second hand. As I understand it, sometime around half past nine the following morning, Max’s secretary, on taking up his usual tea-and-toast, found her employer prostrate upon the floor and quite dead, clutching the Flowing Hair dollar in his poor cold hand.
By the time the police and paramedics arrived the secretary herself was feeling most unwell, so unwell, in fact, that the paramedics had her stretchered and on the way out the door in a matter of minutes. Before she was carted off some bright spark from the ranks of the attending constabulary possessed the wit to ask her if she had touched or consumed anything in the room. “Only the coin,” she told him, “only the coin.” She had prized it from Max’s fingers, you see, and placed it upon the desk.
And there you have it. Whatever tests the lab-jockeys undertook revealed Liberty to be coated in an invisible and extremely toxic substance, which can be readily absorbed through the skin. I hazard a guess, if you’ll excuse the wording, that such a chemical must be available only through special contacts. Those in the chemical farming industry, perchance?
Whether my dear wife Laura knew for sure or just suspected, I don’t know, but the house, the insurance policy, my savings, all of it still goes to her upon my death. I had not possessed the wit or the will to write her out of my life, you see. In my heart, I confess, I love her still. Yes, even now.
They must not be so well off as we all assumed, one supposes. Or perhaps it’s just pure old-fashioned greed. Theirs was a bold plan, hers and Isaac’s. I wonder who came up with it and how they planned to cover their tracks? Well, that’s for you to decide, after all.
I’m guessing your boys found me because Max detailed our arrangement in his private diary. He always was thorough, the dear fool. When the police showed up at my door with news of his suspicious death I confessed everything at once. I felt that I had to. Perhaps, even, that I wanted to.
As to the coin itself, there’s little doubt in my mind that it’s a fake. In truth I never really held a Flowing Hair dollar in my hand. And yet I suppose I did experience what it would be like to do so, even if it were an illusion.
Pardon me, Inspector? Yes, I suppose I am a lucky man. It was the gloves that saved me. I always have been blessed with good fortune. Except for matters of the heart. But I rather suspect we make our own luck in that department, don’t you think?
LD Masterson
LD Masterson’s short stories have been published in numerous anthologies and magazines. Born in Boston, and a diehard Red Sox fan, she lived on both coasts before becoming landlocked in Ohio where she lives with her husband and a neurotic Jack Russell terrier named Sophie. After twenty years keeping the computers up and running for the American Red Cross, she now divides her time between writing and enjoying her grandchildren. LD is a member of Sisters in Crime National, Mystery Writers of America, the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and the Western Ohio Writers Association. Find her at ldmasterson-author.blogspot.com.
Deadly Dinner
LD Masterson
I didn’t take this job to kill anyone. Truth is, I’m not much into violence. Don’t even own a gun. I mostly just needed a job, and I’d done food prep before. A couple restaurants. Worked a school cafeteria once but I couldn’t deal with those damn kids. This was my first nursing home. Pay wasn’t great but they let me work the split shift so I got enough overtime, and the work was pretty basic…peeling and chopping. It’s funny, I always hear about these fancy chefs, all guys, but every kitchen I ever worked, we guys got the prep work. The real cooking was done by the women.
I came in at four to start prepping for breakfast and lunch, then a three-hour break and back at two to get ready for dinner. I just hung around during my break. The home was nicer than my one-room apartment, and who wants to be outside in the winter in Ohio.
But after a couple months I was looking for some fringe benefits. Spring Hill Home—which didn’t have a spring and wasn’t on a hill—was your basic senior-nursing home. Had some folks who weren’t doing too bad and some who were just waiting around to die. More importantly, it had your Medicare patients and your full pay types—the ones with plenty of money—and I’d pretty much figured out who was who. I could use my staff badge to wander around the place, see what I could pick up. The wealthy like their expensive trinkets, even in a place like this.
Then, I stumbled on a chance for a real score.
I was peeling potatoes, tossing the skinless spuds into a big pan for washing, and letting my mind wander. Pee
ling potatoes doesn’t take a lot of brainpower. The other prep cooks were chopping veggies and cutting up a mess of chickens. Marla, the head cook, was mixing some sort of batter when something beeped in her pocket. She pulled out a cell phone, muttered something under her breath, and pulled off her apron.
“You, Bixby,” she said to me, “tell Mrs. Hendricks I’ll be back in a couple.” Then she hurried out of the kitchen without waiting for an answer.
It was the first time I’d been in the dietician’s office. It was a dinky little thing off the kitchen where Hendricks matched the day’s menu against each patient’s special dietary needs and gave instructions on how to modify their meals. She was seated with her back to the door, so engrossed in what she was reading on her monitor she didn’t hear me come in. Curious, I stood quiet and watched the screen. Some of the columns I understood, like low sodium meant no salt, but there were a couple other columns…big words. I mean big. Like supercalla-whatever big. And lots of numbers and letters. Then I saw a word I knew: Warfarin. That was a blood thinner. My old man used to take that for the clots in his legs. Got it. This wasn’t just the diet info, it was the medications list. For everyone in the place.
I wasn’t sure how yet, but I knew it was something I could use.
“Um, excuse me, Mrs. Hendricks.” I shuffled my feet like I’d just come in. “Marla asked me to tell you she had to step out for a couple minutes but she’d be right back.”
As soon as I spoke, she touched a key that replaced the image on her screen with a picture of a cat. Basic screen guard to keep people from seeing things they’re not supposed to. I gave her my helpful, innocent smile. I’ve got a bit of a baby face even though I’m on the wrong side of thirty, and most times it brings out the mother instinct in older women.
The Best Laid Plans Page 6