Murder By The Pint (Microbrewery Mysteries Book 1) (7 page)

              Funny how things sometimes just fall into your lap.

              Today, Thursday, was a half day for me. I'd be going in at one, meaning I'd have a few hours to spend on my little ID project. Up and down Main Street I walked, flashing my cellphone pic to random strangers. The town wasn't exactly crowded – morning walkers and joggers made up the majority of the folks I enquired. I probably don’t even need to mention that I got some funny looks right from the start.

              Picture, if you will, you're doctor told you that your cholesterol is too high, your vitamin D too low, and you realize that you didn’t need a guy with eight years of medical school to tell you that you've spent most of your free time sitting on your butt indoors. So you start a daily regimen, eating right, doing good things for yourself, and walking every day. You relish this time because there's no one in town, not yet anyway. The summer people aren’t due to invade the town for another month or two at least. And the crisp air of late spring clears your head, wakes you up, and lets you know that there's a reason to be alive now, in the moment, and caring for yourself. And then a new face lurches forth, her hair a mess because a wind picked up and teased it out of control, so that, though normally it probably looks pretty good, today the gray roots are showing and the salt air has coarsened it somewhat, and the wind has tousled it to the point where the head basically looks like a softball after some dog has had its toothy way with it. This person asks you, in the most awkward way imaginable, whether or not you've seen "this person," and she holds up a cellphone picture, snapped surreptitiously, of an attractive blonde, and the picture has obviously been taken from an angle that shows off the woman's... assets...with great clarity. The questions arise quickly:
Why am I being shown this? What has this woman done? Who took this picture, and if she took it herself then why didn't she grab the woman after she took it? How desperate is this person holding the cellphone if she's been out here all morning?

             
I got a few looks that asked these very questions without the inquirer having to say a single word.

              So, dejected and defeated, I went into work at one with nothing but a cellphone picture of someone who still didn’t have a name.

              Now, about my lap.

              Ask anyone who works at a microbrewery out there that offers tastings and they'll tell you: We get a lot of nutjobs. I say this with all due respect and with the utmost appreciation and oodles of love, but some of our customers are just plain bat-guano kooky.

              Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, Mitch.

              Mitch came in one day, all bursting buttons and overgrown goatee, all milky skin and horn-rimmed glasses, all pocket protector and condescending stare. We threw glass after glass at him. Some of our best stuff. And wouldn’t you know it? Mitch had nothing more to offer than a smirk at best, a frown at worst, and a monotone, "standard," as his single-worded review for everything.

              Thing is, he was in at least once a week. There was a mystery.

              Well it got so that Aimee, our tasting mistress, soon wanted nothing to do with this lout. It was up to me either to ban him or serve him myself – if I really wanted his business.

              Do I need to tell you that I love a challenge?

              I slid over a glass of our robust porter – a smoky, malty, coffee-centric quaff that can grow hair on your teeth.

              He took a sip and frowned.

              "Well?" I said. "Are you going to sit there and become one with the furniture, or are you going to tell me what you think?"

              Not even a hint of a smile. "Standard," he said.

              "I wish I could say the same for your personality," I said. There are times I love being the owner.

              "Oh, ha ha," he said, lackadaisically.

              "Okay then, Mitch," we all knew his name – the man was now a legend in these parts, "tell me; why do you come here every week if you can’t stand the beer?"

              "I never said I can’t stand it."

              "I know," I said. "Standard. That's the extent of your review. You could say it has all the body of a declawed kitten. Or maybe that it sticks to the teeth like a psycho to a supermodel. But no, you say, 'standard,' intoned with all the personality of a parking meter. So I ask you, why come here if my beer is standard?"

              He drew a breath and put two fingers to the bridge of his nose under his glasses. "You don’t distribute very good."

              "Very well," I said, the grammar Nazi coming out in full force.

              "That too. Did you know that this is the only place in town where one can sample everything you have? When I say it's standard, I mean to say that everything else is substandard. I'm surprised you can’t see a compliment coming."

              "If that's a compliment, I'll take my chances with your insults."

              "Listen," he said with an air of authority that was surprisingly not as annoying as his air of superiority, "I've been all over the country. The best beer I ever had in my life was in this tiny little dive in Albuquerque. Where they got the wherewithal to brew their own beer I'll never know. But if you told me that the owner signed a pact with the devil to make this beer, I would go a long way before I doubted you. And because of my sins and the sins of my parents, I cannot remember for the life of me the name of the bar or the beer that they brewed there. Believe me, I've tried to find out. They're defunct. Anyway, that was the best beer I ever drank. And this is the best beer in New York, hands down. I just can’t find it in such variety anywhere. This is the only place."

              I stood there and stared at him. He looked down and took another sip.

              "Standard?" I asked in disbelief.

              "If I were to use any other word, it would go to your head and you'd get cocky and lazy and start producing like everyone else. Thank you, no. Standard it is."

              You aren’t going to believe this, but I liked the guy.

              "Mitch," I said, "What is it that you do with your time when you're not making a complete horse's petoot out of yourself in microbreweries?"

              He actually smiled. "I'm a mailman."

              "Really. You do the mail around here?"

              He nodded. "Been doing it for ten years now. Give me a honey amber, will you?"

              Going from a porter to honey amber is like going from dark chocolate to milk chocolate. By the time you get there, your palate is a bit used up. But he paid. And, God help us, he was a regular.

              "Your standard honey amber," I said.

              "Thank you. To answer your question in your head: no, I haven't shot up the place yet."

              It was his tone. It was dismissive and condescending and a little bit angry. And it occurred to me that one doesn’t just become this way overnight. One gets this way from being dealt hands that are too difficult to play. And from not having a friend on whose shoulder you can lean and let go some of the frustration over a beer and some ice cream and a movie or a sunset. Yes, I felt bad for Mitch. I think at that moment, I was his only friend.

              "Mitch?"

              "Yes," he said around the rim of his glass.

              "How would you like to do me a favor?"

              "Would love to," he said. To this day, I'm still not sure whether or not he was being sarcastic.

              And yet, just like that, a friendship was formed.

              I showed him the picture.

              "Lola Tarkington."

              I almost dropped the phone into the flight glass. "Get out."

              "That's her name. She's gone by others."

              "What can you tell me about her?"

              He shrugged. "She's a bit of a mystery. I can tell you the rumors. And I can tell you what kinds of packages she gets."

              I leaned on the bar. "Please do."

              "Well, she gets a lot of fancy imported lingerie. And she's a professional masseuse who operates the business out of her house. Now, you look like a smart cookie so I'll spare you the other rumors that abound concerning this woman, as I'm sure that by those two clues you can probably formulate a correlation on your own without my help."

              "Interesting," I said with an evil smile.

              "Rumors only," he reiterated.

              "Gotcha."

              He sipped in silence. Didn’t have one word to offer about the honey amber. Not even a "standard."

              "Uh, say, Mitch?" I said, tracing a finger around the top of the bar.

              He wiped a spot of foam off his top lip. "16 Meadowlark Lane."

              Yep, this was indeed a friendship.

              Funny how they sometimes just fall into your lap.

              Sometimes it's a little too funny indeed.

              "Tanya sent you, didn’t she?"

              A subtle raising of one eyebrow let me know that he'd been in on a joke and was just waiting for me to get it.

              "She said you were smart. Frankly, I'm surprised it took you this long. She said you needed a guy who knew everyone. Well, I know everyone. And now I know you." He held up his glass and then sipped. "Atrocious."

              This was indeed a friendship.

#

              We'd just opened up our new tasting room. Not that there was anything wrong with our old tasting room, it's just that I didn’t think our guests needed to be treated to the sight and smells of the brewing process in action while they sipped the results. How many of you out there have ever been to a smorgasbord held in front of the actual slaughterhouse. Maybe that comparison is a bit harsh, but, call me crazy, I just don’t think it really adds to the experience to be sitting five feet away from a fermenter's blow-off tube spewing yeasty foam that smells like soup made from spoiled veggies.

              No, I decided to take a hint from Long Island wine country and hold my tastings in an oak-paneled room with rustic décor and locally-inspired artwork on the walls. Carl's Cove is home to artisans of every sort, as it is in the summer, and these creative folks bring their work with them. Most charge and arm and a leg for it, but every so often you get a hungry young artist looking for a free spot with high traffic to hang a few choice pieces. We give it to him with a promise that he'll tell as many folks as he can to come down and have a look.

              But I digress.              I was taking a look at the miter work in one of the rafters in the ceiling, which was off by a few noticeable degrees, and was planning to have my contractor tarred and feathered when someone said that the detective was here to see me.

              Well, I don’t have to tell you that my heart jumped a little, and I got a bit of that hotness under the collarbone not uncommon to your average prospective prom date upon the first ring of the phone.

              I checked my hair in the shiny metal of one of the taps. Unless I really did look like something you'd see in a funhouse mirror, I was all right.

              Detective Moore, on the other hand, didn’t look so all right. He had a grave look on his face. I suppose I can say here that this is the trait that interested me most about him: this ability to go from casual disinterest to passive ignorance to active focus, all in the same mind with no discernible switching of masks. This was the real guy, multilayered and fascinating.

              "I'm sorry to bother you," he said, looking as apologetic as he sounded.

              "Not at all," I said. "What can I do for you?"

              He looked around, and then leaned in. "Can we talk for a second?"

              "Sure," I said, now wishing I'd checked my hair in something more reliably reflective than a beer tap.

              We stepped over into the corner of the tasting room. He looked like there was something difficult weighing on his mind.

              "We, uh, looked into that lead you and I discussed."

              For moment I had trouble remembering.

              "The sweeper," he reminded me.

              "Ah yes," I said. "And?"

              "You were right about that one."

              "I was?" I was truly amazed.

              "We believe the sweeper was in on it."

              "Huh," I said. "Interesting. I'm assuming he still hasn’t talked though?"

              "No," said the detective. "He can’t. He's dead."

              Well now. This was unexpected.

              "Ok," I said. And there was this tinge of fear now that I hadn’t had a moment before. I can’t describe it. Call it a bit of creeping paranoia.

              "His body was found in the bay this morning by a couple of fishermen. He'd been shot. The evidence was a little obscured by his body having lain in the water for so long, but we're pretty sure the same gun was used to kill him as was used on Jack Daltry."

              My mind began to swirl surrealistically as I contemplated this craziness. And then Detective Moore's voice cut through the haze.

              "Madison, could there be anything else you haven’t told me about this case?"

              The way he said my name like that reminded me of scolding lectures my father used to give me. Why is it that parents only use your full name when they’re mad at you?

              "What do you mean?" I said, trying to make sense out of the senseless.

              He looked me square in the eye. "I mean is there some detail here we may have missed? Think carefully."

              "No," I was quick to answer. "Nothing at all. You know about the call I got, right?"

              "What call?"

              Now I was starting to get more than a little paranoid. "The call I got about a week after the murder. Someone was really interested in the case and its outcome. I originally thought it was the cops but then I called you guys and was told that it wasn't you."

              "You called us?"

              "Oh God."

              "I never got notification about it."

              "Oh Lester, I swear..."

              "I believe you. And someone's head is gonna roll over this one, I assure you. This lousy seaside police station. They go for years with nothing more disruptive than parking violations and they start to get a bit lazy. I'm sorry, Madison, I really am."

              "Why are you so sorry?"

              He was looking more grave than ever. "Madison, two people are dead now because of this."

              I have to admit, I've heard more pleasant things in my life. "And by 'this,' you mean that diamond shipment."

              "That's right. Now you have to tell me what you remember about that phone call."

              I closed my eyes and tried to put myself back where I was when that call came in.

              After a moment, I shook my head frustratedly. "All I can remember is that he asked about the diamond package I'd received, and did I hear anything about it."

              "That's odd."

              "It is, isn’t it?"

              It had just hit me now.

              Someone called about the diamond package, obviously knowing that it had been handed over to the police. Then a guy shows up dead a week or so later, apparently in connection with the package – once again, news had to have reached Jack Daltry that the diamonds were in the hands of the authorities. So that meant...

              I didn't want to ask. But I had to. And I did.

              "Was there to be a second shipment of diamonds?" I asked.

              His look told me more than words ever could.