Murder Brewed At Home (Microbrewery Mysteries Book 3) (8 page)

              "No, I don't."

              "Quick!" he said, his eyes widening. "Let me see your left pinky!"

              "My wha—?"

              Before I could finish, he gently but firmly grabbed my left hand and brought it close to his face. He reached into his breast pocket, mumbling, and pulled out a pair of glasses, which he then put on to examine my hand more closely. I pulled my hand away quickly.

              "Let me see you bend it," he said.

              "What?"

              "Your pinky," he said, pointing to my left. "Let me see you bend it."

              "Like this?" I held my pinky up and wiggled it for him.

              A look of serene satisfaction came over his face. "You're not one of them after all," he said, taking off his glasses and replacing them in his breast pocket.

              I was trying to keep my patience. "Please explain yourself, Mr. Abel."

              He leaned in. "I put that stuff up there on the walls because it absorbs not only sound, but thought frequencies as well. That's how they listen to your mind. Thought frequencies. Those meters out there..."

              "The parking meters?"

              "Robotic thought-readers designed to look and act like parking meters."

              "Ok," I said, getting ready to jump up and head straight out the door.

              "They feed us information through the television. I keep notes. All those reality shows, they’re embedded with subliminal messages to control your mind. The shows are a distraction from reality, that's why they call them reality shows – it's an ironic joke. Commercials, too. They make you crave junk food. You go out and get yourself a Big Double McBadgerburger and next thing you know, you want more. They hook you with it and there's all these chemicals in there designed to keep you apathetic. So the reality shows distract you and tell you not to go out and vote. They're withholding information on aliens, you know."

              "You don’t say."

              "Oh, but I do. The aliens are at the top of it all. They planted the parking meters. They designed the reality shows. Ever wonder why the Kardashians are so popular? Aliens, the lot of them!"

              "Mr. Abel—"

              "Shhhh, keep your voice down."

              "I thought you said the place is sound proof."

              He waved his hand. "It’s only ninety percent sound proof. Remember all that stuff about the aliens coming back in 2012? Well, they did. Secretly. That's the year Kourtney had her alien baby."

              "Ok, then."

              "Yes?"

              "Anything else, Mr. Abel?"

              He bit his lip and thought for a moment. "Nope."

              "Well then, about your library card."

              He turned his head and looked at me out of the corner of his eye. "What about my library card?"

              "That's the reason I came here in the first place. I wanted to know if you've been to the Carl's Cove library recently."

              He threw his head back and gave a laugh. "Do you honestly think I'm going to step foot into a library?"

              "You have a card, don’t you?"

              "Of course I have a card. I have to have a card. If I didn’t have one, they'd know I was onto them. Libraries are the repository of all the world's greatest knowledge. That's why I don’t go near them. What place on earth would you think might be more heavily guarded than a place like that? Yes, I have a library card, but I'll never use it."

              I sat back in my chair and gave a sigh. "Mr. Abel, thank you for this enlightening interview."

              "Anytime," he said, rising. "Can I get you anything else?"

              "No, I'm fine," I said, rising with him.

              "Say, you're a pretty girl. What say you and I maybe go out for a donut one of these days? You like Boston cream?"

              "I love Boston cream, but I gave up donuts for lent nineteen years ago. Thank you, though. One more thing, Mr. Abel."

              "Call me Vernon, sweetheart."

              "Vernon, sweetheart, how do you suppose your library card wound up at the library?"

              He thought for a moment. "I lost my wallet once. Maybe whoever found it took out the card."

              "That's it?"

              "What do you mean, that's it?"

              "You don’t have some elaborate conspiracy theory about that? I mean, losing your wallet, someone stealing the library card – the library, Mr. Abel. You said it yourself."

              He shook his head in bewilderment. "You are a strange one. Not everything is a conspiracy."

              I just stared at him. It was all I could do.

              "Anyway," he said, "it was nice talking to you. Come back and see me again sometime and I'll tell you all about the hidden clues on the dollar bill. That's a fascinating story."

              "Fascinating, I'm sure. How did you lose your wallet?"

              "I must have dropped it outside the cheese shop. Someone found it and turned it in. The cheese lady called me and gave it back."

              I had to shake my head. "Wait, the cheese shop? Which one?"

              "The only one in town. That place on Main. I forget what it’s called"

              "Whey Cool?"

              He jabbed a finger in the air at me. "That's the one."

              "Thank you, Mr. Abel," I said in a daze.

#

              "Where'd you get this?" said Lester, turning Vernon Abel's library card around in his hands. We sat in my living room. I don’t know why I felt it was the only safe place around.

              "Never mind," I said. "I want you to dust it for prints."

              He looked at me skeptically.

              "Stop it," I said. "Please, just do it. I think I'm on to something."

              "Maybe you want to let me in on it?"

              "Not yet. I want to be sure. And while you're at it, I want to you see if there's a match to those prints on these as well."

              I handed him the spade and a cheese wrapper from Whey Cool. It had previously housed a bit of smoked gruyere.

              Again, he looked at me skeptically. "I'll do it on one condition."

              "What?"

              "That you promise to tell me what this is all about afterward."

              "Deal," I said. "By the way, you'll find my prints on all of those."

              "I realize that."

              "Now can we talk about Maggie Childsworth?"

              "Gunshot to the head. They brought her to the morgue in East Melville."

              "That's forty miles away."

              "Bingo."

              "Do we have any suspects?"

              "Nope. But it does look like the mob."

              I got a sinking feeling in my gut.

              "You don’t look too good," said Lester.

              I looked up at him. "Something's rotten here."

              "If it's any comfort, I don’t think this has anything to do with the Kyle Young case."

              "How can you be sure?"

              "It doesn’t match up. This may be an unrelated hit. That's all I can say. Anyway, it's out of my jurisdiction. I'm going on second hand info here."

              I sat back on my couch and closed my eyes, letting out a long-needed breath.

              "Listen," said Lester, "something's eating at you here and you don’t want to talk about it. At least not yet. So I'm going to ask you one more question, not as a cop, but as a friend: Are you in any danger?"

              "Just run those prints," I said. "Then I'll tell you. Till then, I'll be alright."

              "I'll call you later," he said, and left my house.

              What I should have told him was what had happened just before he got here. I should have told him that I'd gone down to Whey Cool to buy something that Daisy herself had touched. And that I'd seen Owen in the shop, looking incredibly distraught and nervous. And that I made small talk and he was aloof and silent. And that somehow I'd gotten him to take a walk outside with me.

              "Daisy and I are getting divorced," he said. "Because I had an affair."

              I had very little to say to this. Other than he didn’t look sad so much as frightened of something.

              "The woman..." he started to say... "I just want to be left alone. I'm sorry."

              It made me think of Maggie Childsworth. It made me think about that fourth book of her collection that somehow wound up in Owen's hands. It made me think about Madagascar. It made me think about how Mr. X makes a living out of arranging things. It made me think about that gunshot to the woman's head.

              I should have told Lester this. But I didn’t. Instead I went online and Googled "heart disease,” "murder,” and "Madagascar."

              And that's when things really began to fall into place.

              In 2005, Nirav Singh, a doctor from Kerala, India, was unhappy with his wife, Veda, whom he suspected of cheating on him. The couple fought quite a bit. One night during a dinner of curried goat, which the doctor himself prepared, Veda collapsed before her plate was even clean and was dead within minutes. The diagnosis was cardiac arrest.

              Ravi Joshi, also from Kerala, lived down the road from the Singhs. A budding young college student with a promising career ahead of him, Ravi had difficulty with women. He was shy and brooding, often falling into fits of despair after learning that his feelings for a particular woman were not mutual. He blamed his parents for his social awkwardness. He was ashamed of his body and his mannerisms and his bad skin. He hated most aspects of his life. He died a week after Veda Singh collapsed at her dinner plate. The diagnosis was heart failure.

              In 2007, a thirty-six-year-old woman from Bangladesh returned from a visit to her relatives. The next day she was found dead by her cleaning woman. The cleaning woman was a suspect in the woman's murder before it was finally determined that the woman had died of natural causes.

              Between the Singh and Joshi cases and the Bangladesh case, eighty-three other cases of death by heart failure appeared in the public record, added to a ten-year history of such deaths overall in the country totaling approximately six hundred and twenty. These heart disease statistics influenced a number of state-sponsored initiatives to reduce what was quickly being recognized, due to extensive media coverage, as an epidemic of heart-related deaths concentrated in certain areas of the country.

              These statistics mirrored similar statistics in the country of Madagascar, where a rash of heart disease-related deaths were a temporary boon for quack physicians offering "natural" protections against heart attacks – which wound up being little more than homemade concoctions of alcohol and sugar.

              A nationwide probe into India's heart disease statistics revealed a startling discovery. After the suicide of a public figure, a writer by the name of Ankur Darzi, in whose suicide note the man's self-poisoning method had been described in great detail, an astute chemist working for the state forensics board convinced the newly-formed panel on heart disease to re-open some of the more obscure cases in the public record. By delving into these cases, including the cases of Veda Singh and Ravi Joshi, the panel concluded that an overwhelming number of deaths by heart attack had actually been poisoning cases. The culprit was a regional plant called the cerbera odallam, a plant which grew in great abundance in India, and was known to natives as the "suicide flower.”

              In 2008, Nirav Singh was indicted in the murder of his wife. He'd mashed the seeds of the plant into his wife's meal. The spices of the dish had overwhelmed the flavor of the seeds.

              Ravi Joshi, suffering from undiagnosed depression, made a sweet drink out of the mashed seeds, honey, and vodka. In the middle of washing out his glass he collapsed in front of the sink. He'd left no note.

              The plant also grows in Madagascar and is easily obtained. The seeds can be smuggled in the lining of luggage.

#

              I didn’t sleep well that night. I woke up the next day to Tanya singing in the kitchen while brewing coffee.

              "Please tell me that's strong stuff," I said groggily.

              "It is. I know you too well. I heard you get up a few times."

              "Why are you so cheerful?"

              "Me?"

              "The singing."

              She shrugged. "I don’t know. I met a guy last night."

              "I can’t bear to listen to you yet. Can it wait till after the coffee's done?"

              "You really didn't sleep well at all, did you?"

              "Nightmares."

              "Well, your boyfriend called."

              "Huh?"

              "You were out this morning. It happens to me too. When you can’t sleep all night and then you finally crash in the wee hours. You're unwakeable. Anyway, Lester called. I picked it up and said hi. He's cute, you know. Even over the phone. Anyway, he said he had news about your prince? That's all he said. He said you'd understand. I told him I'd tell you."

              "My what?"

              "Your prince? Like the son of a king?"

              I thought for a moment. "Prints, dopey. Like fingerprints."

              "Oh, of course. That would explain it."

              "Did he say to call him back?"

              "Yeah, he's down at the station."

              "I need coffee first. I'm having a hard enough time listening to
you
this morning."

              She put an oversized mug of the steaming coffee right in front of me and I dove into it like I was trying to find a long lost friend in there somewhere.

              Coffee can be a wonderful thing.

#

              "
We got a match on all three items
," said Lester.

              "Then I'm right," I said, without missing a beat. "It's Daisy."

              "
Sorry?
"

              "I'm keeping my end of the deal. Listen, Lester, anywhere we can meet? Somewhere safe?"

              "
I'll come and pick you up.
"

              "Ok," I said, and hung up without saying goodbye.

#

              Lester picked me up and we drove a half hour out of town to an ice cream shop that sold hand-churned stuff you'd trade your first-born for.

              He got a chocolate malted milkshake; I got a butter pecan sundae. We sat in the afternoon sun. It was gorgeous with a perfect, warm breeze blowing. Clear blue skies. And yet here I was looking and feeling as if someone had just flushed my winning lottery ticket down the loo.

              "Want to talk now?" said Lester.

              "No, but I guess I have to."

              "Ok," he said.

              I was hesitant at first, but then the words just started coming, bit-by-bit, and soon I found myself unable to stop, with a melting sundae before me.

              I told him everything I’d learned about cerbera poisoning. I told him about Madagascar, about the email from "MC,” and how Cultured_Club was probably Owen and Owen was selling an expensive book that had been previously owned by Maggie Childsworth. I told him everything.

              Everything except the part about Mr. X.

              Why, I can’t say. There was this blockage where that story was in my head. There was something I couldn’t bring myself to say about it. And even though I felt like a million bucks after getting things off my chest, I still felt weighed down by the possibility that I was some sort of target by this unstable organized crime guy who seemed to control the Carl's Cove criminal scene like a puppeteer. Or so I thought. I had no proof of this, really.

              "So, to rehash," I said, "Daisy knows something. I'm going to try and talk to her but I have a feeling she's not talking. I think Owen Schiff is up to no good. I think Daisy knows he's up to no good and also knows I've been snooping around into Kyle Young's death. I think Restocruz is tied up in it somehow. I think Owen and Restocruz conspired to poison Kyle Young, and that they succeeded. I just need to find out how."

              "So," said Lester, "and you'll have to forgive me for being a detective here, all this sounds plausible. The only thing I have a problem here is with the toxicity of the plant you’re talking about. It kills quickly. If Kyle Young was murdered outside the home, how did he die in the house?"

              "He didn't."

              "You all heard a thump."

              "
Now
you believe me about that."

              "I have no choice. I'm still a little skeptical about it, but if the four of you heard it then the four of you heard it. I've been thinking about it. The office was right above where you were sitting. It would be pretty hard to mistake the sound of a falling body for anything else. So, how did it happen? We found no syringe on the scene. He didn't kill himself. If he was poisoned, injected in the back of the head, it sure seems like he was at home when it happened. He let his killer in, got poisoned, then his killer left without a trace and without any of you women noticing. So we're back to where we started. How did it happen?"

              I stared at my bowl of butter pecan soup on the table. "I don’t know, Lester. I'm trying."

              I was silent for a long time. I felt Lester's eyes on me. I didn’t care.

              Then something happened.

              I think a melted bowl of butter pecan ice cream should be tested for its miraculous ability to help a mind sort out problems.

              I suddenly got the urge to go back to the brewery.

              Here's how it happened. Staring at that bowl, I was thinking about the part I didn’t tell Lester. I was thinking about Mr. X. I was thinking about his offer to buy the brewery. And suddenly I felt like I was afraid I was going to lose it. And that's when I realized that I had indeed been afraid to lose it. All this talk about what I really wanted in life. All this stuff about being a private eye. It was just a diversion. I liked solving murders. I'd done two already and was knee-deep in a third, but when that weird dude in the golf cart offered to buy my brewery, I found myself instantly telling him no. That was one thing that Mr. X had not counted on. He'd done his research, or so he thought, and he thought he had me. The very fact that I resisted told me that on some level I really did want that brewery. I wanted it all to myself. It was a wonderful feeling. And suddenly the threats of Mr. X were just that. Threats. Ok, if he was involved in crime somehow, fine. I could deal with that. What I really couldn’t deal with was my own lack of resolve.

              I looked up at Lester. He was smiling.

              "What?" I said.

              "You. The most miraculous change just occurred on your face. A minute ago you looked like someone just shot your dog. Now you look like you just discovered gold."

              "In a way I did," I said. "Now be a pet and drive me to my brewery, will you?"

              I jumped up, kissed him on the forehead, and headed toward the car with a new spring in my step.

#

              With this new frame of mind, I finally found a healthy balance between my two vocations. I stepped into the brewery with a take-charge attitude and it felt great. My cousin Gerry, our master brewer, noticed it as soon as I walked in.

              "What happened to you?" he said.

              "Nothing at all, my friend."

              "Did you get visited by three ghosts last night?"

              "Very funny. No, as a matter of fact, I slept terribly."

              "You should do it more often," he said. "It suits you."

              We talked business and walked around the tanks. Over the main mash tun – the large, stainless steel vessel in which malted barley is steeped in hot water to make the base of our beer – there was a curious contraption I'd not seen before.

              "A lot happened in your absence," said Gerry. "This is my little experiment."

              "What in the world?"

              I was referring to the lid of the mash tun, which was held open by a piece of cord tied to some apparatus involving a pulley and a counterweight.

              "Bear with me," said Gerry. I was trying to come up with a way we could automate the mash-in process without having to climb up the ladder to the top of the tank and add the grains by hand. I was experimenting with that little pulley system up there. Suspending a fifty-pound bag of grains from it. Keep in mind, this is merely an experiment. I can show you designs for a more sophisticated system I sketched out. Anyway, I think it can work. We had a few problems when we ran the test though."

              I had to chuckle. "What kind of problems?"

              "Well," he said, scratching the back of his neck, "I kind of screwed up."

              "How?"

              "Ok, see, I hitched the thing up with fishing wire..."

              And here's where things got a little fuzzy for yours truly. I missed just about everything he said after the words "fishing wire.” Why? Because of my college job.

              Let me explain.

              Back when I was in college, I picked up a few bucks here and there by writing blog articles. Mostly these articles were just click bait designed to keep surfers situated on a company's website long enough to notice the ad banners running along beside my article. I wasn't very good at it, but the assignments were varied and sometimes interesting. I learned a few things.