Murder With A Chaser (Microbrewery Mysteries Book 2) (8 page)

              So there we sat, in Junior's Pizza, and we discussed sensitive topics over a large pie with sausage and peppers. My cousin Tanya, who worked there as a waitress, supplied an unlimited quantity of Diet Coke as we talked.

              She was a quiet woman with dark eyes and straight black hair that was shoulder length, parted in the middle, and neatly styled. Her skin was dappled with freckles, as with someone who had seen a bit too much sun in her teenaged years. She wore not a single hint of a smile on her face, not even when joking, which she did quite a bit. It's very disconcerting to have someone joke so much with such a serious expression.

              "How long were you and Daniel married?"

              "Ten years. Eleven years too long," she said, unsmiling, tracing the rim of her glass with her finger.

              "I never married," I said. It was a stupid thing to say, for it made me sound like a spinster.

              "You never had to get married. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It's a disgraceful situation to be in, especially for a woman."

              I leaned in, although with the din of the restaurant and the music overhead it wasn't easy for anyone to eavesdrop. "I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable."

              "If only my husband had said that when he left me. Don’t worry, you're in the clear. But he didn't say it. He up and left me with Maisie and I got stuck with the bills – the house was paid off, thank God. And I got stuck with a child to raise."

              "She's a remarkable girl," I said. "You did well."

              "Mmm," was all she said to that.

              I looked over at the front counter and saw Tanya eyeing me carefully. It felt good having a guardian angel like that, just in case anything got crazy. Not that I was expecting it to.

              "Sheila, I told you on the phone about why we're here."

              "You're investigating a murder."

              "Yes."

              "Am I a suspect?"

              "No," I said, surprised. "No, not at all."

              "I didn’t think I was." She raised her glass and sipped.

              "No, we're here because I got a tip that your husb—, excuse me, you're
ex
-husband may have had some important information that could have led to the capture of the killer. I believe that's why he died."

              Her eyes narrowed at me. "Ah, yes. So
you're
the one who discovered the poison in the mask."

              I looked down. "Yes, that was me. And I think, I'm not sure, but if the two of you shared anything in the aftermath of your divorce, I was hoping, seeing as how you may have been the closest person to him when he died..."

              She leaned in. "Is there something you’re trying to tell me?"

              "I have it on good word that Daniel Ward kept a safe deposit box. At what bank, I don’t know. But I know the number. And I know where he hid the key. He hid it from you and from Maisie."

              She leaned back and smiled. "For a private investigator, you have an awful lot to learn. That's my key. And yes, that was his idea to hide it there. Got the notion to do so from some ridiculous movie."

              I was confused. "So wait, is his name on the account too?"

              "Unfortunately, it is. I don’t keep anything in there, but he does. I doubt it's of any use to me, otherwise he wouldn’t have kept it anyplace where I could get to it."

              "So, Sheila," I said, trying to choose words carefully, "you need to do me a favor and put aside whatever emotions of anger or whatever that you feel toward your ex. I need to find out what's in that box. Daniel came to me and—"

              "He came to you?"

              She was right. I had a lot to learn. A hotness flushed in my face as I tried to recover. "Yes, when he died, the day he died, he came to see me personally. He knew I was looking into the Eli Campbell murder and—"

              "Eli Campbell!" Her eyes were lit with some sinister recognition of the name.

              "Yes, that's what I'm looking into."

              She sat back. Took a sip of her drink. Wiped the corners of her mouth carefully and deliberately, all while staring off into some faraway place.

              "I'll help you," she said. "But after I do, we must never speak again. Understand?"

              I had no choice but to agree to this, although I was more perplexed than ever. She saw it in my face.

              "I have my reasons. And you need to heed to them, ok? Otherwise, no help. Agreed?"

              "Agreed," I said.

              I looked over at Tanya. I don’t know how long she'd been watching uninterrupted, but I could tell that she'd seen all she needed to see in the look on my face. I have a terrible poker face, and must have been telling a very detailed story.

#

              Trying to get a hold of Zelda Calverton was a nightmare. But I finally did it.

              All you need is a little tenaciousness and you can get through to anyone. Tenaciousness on my part meant cajoling, demanding, asserting, and turning on the sweet talk to about a dozen folks in Ms. Calverton's employ, all of whom were loyal pawns determined to keep me from capturing the Queen. I didn’t mind it so much, sitting in my office, my feet up on the desk. And after a half hour of being bandied about, she finally picked up.

              "Why did you call me here, Madison?"

              "There are some things we need to discuss and I can’t do it through some dude in a bad disguise walking into my brewery and confusing my people."

              "I want you to do one thing right now, Madison."

              "And that is?"

              "I want you to hang up, and then I want you to look outside your window."

              "Pardon me?"

              "Or look outside your window first. Your choice. But I am going to hang up now."

              The call disconnected. I took my feet off the desk and walked over to my window.

              There, down below, was a silver Porsche 911. Leaning up against it was Zelda Calverton.

#

              "What? They can route your calls to your cell phone?"

              "We are living in modern times, you know," she said.

              "Well, you have a helluva staff. Keeping me occupied on the line while you drive over here to meet me in person."

              "They're good employees. I want you to know that this is a special trip I made, and you'll not see another. Going forward, all communication will be on my terms, in the manner that I decide. I'm paying you here. Not the other way around. Now, what is it you so desperately needed to speak to me about?"

              I don’t think I need to say that I was beginning to dislike this woman. I took a deep breath and began. "There's a problem I discovered."

              "Go on," she said impatiently.

              "I found two wills. The cops have one, and the executor's office has the other."

              "One of them is fake," Zelda said, so matter-of-factly that it implied common knowledge.

              "Ok," I said with hesitation.

              "Surely you must have already concluded that."

              "Well, yes, I have. I just didn’t think you were aware—"

              "Of course I'm aware.
I
leaked the fake one to the cops."

              Again, I was hesitant. "Ok."

              She looked at me askance. "Please tell me you're not suddenly getting squeamish here."

              "No," I said, "not necessarily so."

              "Oh good. Well just in case you are, maybe you need a little more money? Add ten percent to your fee, how about that? Will that help to ease your queasy little stomach?"

              I stared at her for a moment. A slight smile came across her face.

              "I apologize. I can be a real...well, you know all the ugly words used to describe a person like me. So I apologize. But you must understand that it is imperative that I steer the cops away from me at all costs. They see how much money I received in the
real
will, and they’ll surely start looking at me. They're already looking at me. It’s costing me a lot of money to keep their eyes off. That's why you need to act quickly, understand? You need to beat them to it. This is what I'm paying you for, dear."

              "Then," I said, regaining a bit of inner strength, "as part of the process here, I'm going to ask you a question: Do you know who killed Eli?"

              "I think I know how it was done."

              "Benzene inhalation."

              "Yes, that was the cause. I said I think I know how it was
done
. But you have to find that out for yourself. None of the information must come from me. I gave you one clue and that's all I have."

              "Look in the gas tank? What kind of clue is that?"

              "A very good one, and more than I should have given you. Now, if you'll excuse me."

              With that, she got into her car, started it up, and sped off, leaving me in the not-so-proverbial dust.

              Gas tank, I thought. And one name popped into my head. One that had been right under my nose.

              It was dark. You need to know this.

              It was night and I was snooping around a dumpster.

              Now, if you know anything about me, you'll know that I have a tiny little problem with germs. I lived with a guy for about a year once who loved to cook. Made some of the best meals I've ever had in my life. One time he got home before I did and was in the middle of whipping up a pork tenderloin. He was going to marinate it in lime and coconut milk with a little curry and paprika. I said it sounded great and suggested we pair it with Darby's Caribbean IPA – light and refreshing with hints of lime and spice. I was about to crack open the first one of the evening when I just happened to catch a glimpse of what he was doing. He was carefully trimming a layer of fat off the bottom of the pork. Ok. He then washed his hands. Perfect.

              Only he'd touched the soap dispenser. Granted, he did it with the flat part of his fist, but politely – mind you, I understand not everyone is as crazy as I am and always adapt the proper tone when dealing with the straights – I told him that he should probably grab one of the antiseptic wipes from under the sink and swab the soap dispenser.

              "Are you serious?" he said, smiling.

              "Absolutely serious," I replied.

              "No, really."

              "Yes, really."

              He stood there, mouth agape, hands dripping onto my kitchen floor. "You want me to swab the soap dispenser."

              "Yes, would you please?"

              "It's soap."

              "Yes it is."

              "You touch it only when your hands are dirty."

              "This is true."

              "I mean, you clean your hands with it and you don’t touch it again."

              "Yes, but you've just contaminated it."

              "I used the hand I was using to hold the knife," he said, getting a tad belligerent for my taste.

              "Yes, but when you sawed at the meat, I couldn’t help but notice your fingers coming perilously close—"

              "Perilously close?" he said, and he did that thing that I didn’t realize until just that moment that I hated: that thing with one eyebrow cocked above the other, one corner of the mouth turned up, a condescending expression of incredulity that grated on me like sandpaper.

              "Yes," I said, trying to keep my cool. "Now, if you don’t mind, you're dripping, and there are now a host of bacteria replicating on my soap dispenser, if you don’t mind."

              Well, I don’t have to tell you how that escalated into a prelude to certain doom. We broke up a week later.

              So that's how I am. I've tried to be better, I really have. But then my mind zooms in on that microscopic level, and in a random stranger's sneeze I see billions of nasty things scattered to the winds, ready to infect a multitude. So I carry handi-wipes, and I wash with antibacterial soap, and so on. And Tanya, bless her heart, she's patient with me, but she tells me I'm actually breeding supergerms and cites Darwin and all that.

              I don’t buy it. For every germ I kill, that's one less that can hurt me or anyone else. I'm doing my part, I say.

              But I digress.

              The point here was to say that even an OCD freakazoid like me can overcome some of her neuroses by the image of twenty-five grand sitting on her kitchen table. And the promise of more, much more, to come.

              So there I was, outside Shawn Ward's garage at night, standing before a dumpster, armed with a flashlight and a hazmat suit (don’t ask) complete with gas mask. I threw open the swing top of the dumpster. It hit the back with a resounding thud. I poked my head over the top and shined the light inside.

              No rats, thank Heaven.

              And thanks to the stuffy nose I was developing, and the added protection of the gas mask, I was spared any ungodly aromas. But it was still garbage, and if I was going to do my job, and I was going to be paid for it...

              Yes, I did it.

              Inserting one foot onto a protruding ridge on the side of the thing, one of the ones that the garbage trucks place their big metal arms under in order to lift the dumpster up into the air when they empty it, I hoisted myself up...and over.

              Carefully I lowered myself onto a pile of rags, bags, hunks of oily metal, and assorted refuse that I couldn’t identify.

              It wasn't my proudest moment.

              Where to begin, I thought. Oddly enough, aside from the dark and a fear of the grotesque unknowns that could be lurking there, it wasn't as bad as sorting through Eli Campbell's garbage on my back porch. It's hard to explain, but there's something about sorting through someone's
personal
trash that increases the ick factor by about a thousand percent.             

              So I tore open the first black plastic bag I saw, one I'd had my right foot on. Assorted flotsam spilled out like an open piñata – a dirty, disgusting piñata. Shining my flashlight here and there, I couldn’t discern in that mess anything that looked, I don’t know,
askew
. I guess what I was looking for was the same feeling I got when I saw Daniel Ward's mask lying on the side of the road. I wanted to see something out of place.

              So far, all I saw was trash.

              And then, maybe after about fifteen or twenty minutes – I'm not sure, time flies when you're up to your waist in waste – I saw something.

              I saw a coffee grinder. One of those little tabletop things that is the approximate width of a mug and about twice as tall.

              This was certainly out of place. A coffee grinder in an auto garage dumpster. I picked it up and shook some sort of hideous substance off it, and examined it closely with my flashlight. The plastic top had come off it. It was probably located somewhere else in this bag. I wasn't about to go hunting for it – although I'd come this far, a girl has to have a limit for trash diving. I looked closely and saw a residue inside it. It wasn't coffee grounds, that was for sure. This was a whitish residue of some sort of powder.

              My heart began racing. What if I held a clue to a murder in my hands? What if this was the stuff? They used benzene. What is benzene? Can you grind it?

              All these things raced in my mind. I needed to get home to my computer, and I needed to bring this thing to someone. But whom?

              Then it hit me. I knew just the person to ask.

#

              "This is terrible," said Mitch.

              I'd allowed him an exclusive preview of our new Summer Stout. It was a bold move of Gerry to brew a stout in summertime. It's a little like wearing white after Labor Day. But I loved the idea, and why not own it with the name? Summer Stout. It was brilliant, if I do say so myself.

              "Terrible," Mitch said again after a second sip. He shook his head. "It's acrid. And what's that...? Green apple?"

              "The beer's still young," I said. "It's not yet done fermenting. That green apple smell is probably acetaldehyde. It’s a natural by-product of early fermentation."

              He looked at me over the rim of his glass. "I know."

              "Of course you do. And that brings me to something. Follow me."

              We ascended the grated metal steps to the second level of the brewery and walked down the short hallway to my office, Mitch's heavy footsteps thudding along behind my dainty girlish ones.

              "This is yours?" he said incredulously.

              "Yeah," I said. "It's good to be the king."

              "Pshh, I'll say."

              "Have a seat," I said, pointing him toward the front of my desk.

              I took a seat behind it and opened my bottom drawer. Here I took out the coffee grinder, which I'd carefully loaded into a plastic zip-lock bag before I even brought it into my house.

              "I have no idea what this stuff was inside it," I said, "but if it's benzene, I can tell you this: two people have died inhaling it and neither I nor anyone else is going to be the third."

              "Why are you showing me this?" he said.

              "Because you know everything, and if you don’t know everything, then you know someone who knows what you don’t know. Am I making sense?"

              "Yes. Did you say two people died?"

              "Yes, of benzene inhalation. And we can't seem to figure out how it was done. We know that in the first case it got into an inhaler, and in the second, a mask."

              "Well," said Mitch, "for starters, benzene is a gas, not a powder. So whoever diagnosed the cause of death is wrong."

              "No," I said, not really in the mood for Mitch's unique ways, "they were pretty sure about that part. They said it was in some rare, powdered form. They’re still working on the particulars."

              He reached over and grabbed the bag with the coffee grinder. He brought it up close to his spectacled face and put a hand on his chin. He pursed his lips in deep thought and rubbed his thick, rather unkempt beard.

              "Maybe they're right."

              "You can help me, then?"

              "No, but you were right when you said I'd know someone who can." He looked at me. "Do you want his name?"

              I leaned back in my seat and smiled. "You'll drink here free for a month if this winds up helping me."

              "Two months," he said, unsmiling. "Write this down..."

#

              Ford Bannerman. It sounded made up.

              I still couldn’t believe it was a real identity even when I found myself standing outside the lovely, two-story house in which his basement apartment was located.

              Outside, kneeling down in a small patch of garden – meticulously tending a single spot large enough for one plant – was an old man humming to himself.

              I approached him cautiously. "Hello, are you Ford Bannerman?"

              "That's me," he said, not looking up.

              "Oh, I'm Madison Darby. Mitch the mailman sent me to you."

              He looked up at me and his blue eyes glinted in the sun. He held a hand over his brow to shield them. "Don’t know any Mitch. But I know the name Darby. You're the daughter, aren’t ya? The one who took over the brewery?"

              "That's right, I am," I said, and smiled.

              "Yeah, don’t care much for your beer."

              "I— I'm sorry, I—"

              "Any beer. Not just yours. Didn’t mean to say it like that."

              "That's quite alright. I—"

              "The missus, God rest her soul, could pound down pint after pint of the stuff. Me? Weak tea and crackers. Never knew how she could stand being around me."

              He shook his head and resumed tending the same patch of ground.

              "So," I said, "I guess maybe I have the wrong—"

              "You probably want my boy. Ford Jr. He lives downstairs." He motioned around to the side of the house. "I should've known. No one comes around to see Senior anymore."

              "Thank you," I said hesitantly.

              "No, thank
you
," he said. I wasn't sure if he was being sarcastic or not, so I let it go and walked around to the side of the house where there was a flight of ten cement steps leading down to an apartment door.

#

              I couldn’t believe the mess: old radio and typewriter parts lying around on top of newspaper, some looking like they were in the midst of repair or being rebuilt, and stacks of unused newspaper awaiting fresh projects. There were rags scattered around the room and a faint smell of some sort of industrial solvent in the air. A college student's desk, an economy-sized, utilitarian piece, sat in the corner of the room, and on top of it was a microscope, a computer, and an impressive assortment of bottles and droppers, flasks, a Bunsen burner, and a truly imposing piece that I could have sworn was a...

              "It's a centrifuge," Ford Bannerman Jr. said proudly. "My pride and joy. Ain't she a honey?"

              He was an odd character, short and balding on top, with neat wisps of premature gray at his temples. I say premature because he had a childish face. Not childlike. Childish. Like he was constantly in the process of planning a slew of antisocial practical jokes. He seemed to be always smiling, or half-smiling, and had this mischievous twinkle in his eye. I have to say, I kind of liked him from the start.

              "Yeah," he said, "you wouldn’t believe what these things go for, but I know a guy who knows a guy, you know what I mean?"