by Nic Saint
“Dog!” I cried. “Why do humans always assume that if it’s a pet it has to be a dog?!”
Both cops looked down at me, their attention no doubt attracted by my loud meows.
“What is he saying?” asked Chase, crooking a quizzical eyebrow.
“He’s taking offense at your assumption that Evelina’s pet is a dog,” Odelia said. “But that’s neither here nor there. The fact of the matter is—”
“So it was a cat?” asked the Chief, like most cops unable to let a mystery go without having been supplied a satisfying answer.
“Actually it was a snail,” Odelia muttered quietly and almost inaudibly. In fact even to my trained cat’s ears I had to prick up those ears to pick up the sound of her voice.
“See? It was a cat,” said the Chief. “I knew it,” he added with a wink in my direction, which only managed to allay my pique to some extent.
“I don’t think she said cat, Chief,” said Chase, whose ears apparently are almost as good as mine.
Odelia sighed. “Okay, so it was a snail.”
Uncle Alec stared at her. “A…”
“Snail. The slimy creatures? Who carry their homes on their backs?”
The chief blinked a couple of times, then burst into raucous laughter. After a few moments he caught onto the fact that neither his deputy nor his niece were joining in, and he stopped the frolicking rollicking display of mirth. “You’re serious?”
“Yes, Uncle Alec. A snail hired Max and Dooley’s services to try and find out what happened to Evelina’s money, and whether Mr. Ed’s suspicions that Bob engineered his own abduction are true.”
“Mr… Ed?” said the Chief, and for a moment I was afraid he would once more become the victim of a laughter attack. He managed to tamp down on his merriment, though judging from the tinge of crimson that crept up his cheeks a not inconsiderable effort was required to achieve this superhuman feat. “So let me get this straight. A snail called Mr. Ed thinks Evelina Pytel’s boyfriend set up his own abduction to get his hands on seventy-five thousand of Mr. Benjamin’s crispiest and then ended up dead. Next you’re going to tell me this Mr. Ed killed the guy, out of spite.”
“No, I don’t think Mr. Ed had a hand in Bob’s demise,” said Odelia stiffly.
“Not a hand—a tentacle!” said Uncle Alec with another guffaw. He wiped tears from his eyes. “I’m sorry. Just when you think you’ve heard it all, along comes a crazy story like that.”
“Well, crazy or not, it’s the truth,” said Odelia. “So what are you going to do about it?”
“How did Bob die?” I asked from my perch on the floor.
I felt it was a little unbecoming for the lead detective in the case to have to sit on the floor, while his deputies were all high up on chairs. Then again, that’s the world we live in, unfortunately: a cat-eat-cat world, so to speak.
“Max wants to know how Bob died,” said Odelia, transmitting my question.
“Shot through the heart. Single bullet, perfect aim,” said Chase.
“How long ago was this?” asked Odelia.
“Abe is still working on his report,” said the Chief. “But he figures he must have been shot late last night, somewhere between eleven and one o’clock.”
“So how did he end up on that potato truck?” asked Odelia.
“That, my dear,” said Uncle Alec, “is the seventy-five-thousand-dollar question.”
Chapter 9
“So you know what to do, right?” said Suppo Bonikowski as he glanced out of the window of their hotel room.
“How many times are you going to ask me?” said his cousin Wim. “Of course I know what to do. You’ve only told me about a million times already.”
“It’s just that timing is everything,” Suppo said as he turned away from the window and walked over to his laptop which he’d positioned on a small side table. “We only got one shot at this, Wim. And if we blow it—”
“I know! So stop pestering me and make sure you’ve got things all set up on your end, all right?”
“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that. The technology is sound. In fact I can’t imagine why it’s taken people so long to discover the wealth of possibilities.”
“What do you mean?”
“What we’re doing is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Suppo as he held up the watch. “We can do so much more. In fact I like to think of this as a test run. If things work out as planned, I suggest we take this show on the road and start working our way through the entire supply of—”
Just then, a tap on the door interrupted his speech. Both cousins shared a look of alarm.
“Probably room service,” said Wim, as he pointed to the computer.
Suppo quickly closed the laptop and slipped the watch into his pocket, then glanced around to see if nothing was out of the ordinary.
Meanwhile Wim had moved over to the door and yelled, “Who is it?”
“It’s your neighbors!” a loud voice announced.
Once more both cousins shared a look of concern, then Suppo nodded, and Wim opened the door a crack. “What do you want?” he asked, not at all in a neighborly fashion. The milk of human kindness that usually flows from one neighbor to another was distinctly lacking in his speech.
A smallish man was standing on the threshold. His face was contorted into a kind of ingratiating leer. Next to him, a large and burly specimen stood. Whereas the first guy looked like a ferret, this second one was large and looked like an oversized gorilla. He had one of those faces only a mother could love, and then only with her eyes closed.
“Hi,” said the ferret. “My name is Jerry and this is Johnny. We’re your neighbors.” He vaguely gestured to his right. “We’re over there,” he clarified. “Now this may sound like a strange question but—”
“We wanna change rooms,” said the big one in a booming voice. “Cause we don’t like the room we’re in and so we wanna change.”
“Shut up, Johnny,” said the one who called himself Jerry. “He’s right, though,” he added. “We would like to change rooms. Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with the room we’re in, mind you,” he hastened to say. “In fact it’s a great room. Tip-top. It’s just that… my friend here suffers from vertigo, see, and our room’s got a balcony. And every time he steps onto that balcony he gets dizzy.” He glanced past Wim into the room and his face cleared. “I knew it. No balcony,” he explained. “Perfect.”
“I told you, Jer. I told you this room didn’t have no balcony.”
“Shut up, Johnny. Let me do the talking.” He turned back to Wim. “So how about it?”
“Why don’t you just stay off the balcony?” Suppo suggested. He’d joined the conversation at the door.
“Um…” said Jerry, who clearly hadn’t thought of this possibility.
“It’s the thought that counts,” said Johnny. “See, I don’t even have to go on the balcony to know that the balcony is there and I could go on the balcony if I wanted to go on the balcony, which I don’t. But knowing that that balcony is out there just gives me the—”
“Shut up, Johnny. I’ll do the talking.”
“Sure, Jer.”
“Look, we don’t want to swap rooms,” said Wim, who had had enough of this pointless conversation with two guys who were obviously morons. “So buzz off, will you?”
“What my cousin means to say is,” said Suppo, plastering a polite smile onto his mug, “that you should ask reception for a different room if you’re not happy with yours.”
“But we asked, and they said they got no more rooms available,” said Johnny.
“Well, I guess there’s nothing we can do about that,” said Wim.
“But…” Johnny said.
If Wim would have had a neck, the veins in that neck probably would have stood out at this point. Instead, he raised his voice and repeated, “Nothing we can do about it.”
“But we…” Jerry began. But before he could say anything the door was slammed in his face.<
br />
“Stupid people with their stupid ideas,” Wim muttered, shaking his head.
“Best to stay polite,” Suppo admonished him. “We don’t want to get in trouble with the neighbors.”
“I’m not going to stand here and listen to this nonsense about vertigo. If the guy’s got vertigo why did he take a room on the third floor anyway?”
“Let’s not get into this,” Suppo suggested. “Instead let’s go over the plan once more.”
“To hell with the plan! I know the plan backward and forward. So let’s just order lunch and get this thing done.”
Over in the next room, Johnny Carew and Jerry Vale had closed the door and were evaluating their recent performance.
“You just had to go and shoot your mouth off, didn’t you?” Jerry grumbled.
“I just wanted to make sure they understood, Jer.”
The big oaf was standing there looking at that balcony as if it was about to kill him. It kinda pained Jerry just to look at him.
“We gotta switch rooms,” said Jerry. “There’s no way around it.”
“Maybe we can knock em over the head and stuff em in the closet?” Johnny suggested.
“Not a bad idea,” Jerry admitted. But then he decided against it. “Too risky. What if they start raising Cain?” No, they needed to find a better solution.
“We could truss ‘em up, stuff a gag in their mouths and make sure they won’t talk.”
“Still too risky. If we could just make them change their minds. We need that room.”
“I thought the thin one was nice,” said Johnny as he carefully took a seat at the table in front of the window, still darting nervous glances in the direction of that balcony. “The fat one wasn’t nice. He was very rude to you, Jer. I wouldn’t mind knocking his block off.”
“He was pretty suspicious,” Jerry agreed. “If it had just been the thin guy I think he would have gone for it. But that big guy clearly wasn’t willing to play ball.” Jerry thought for a moment. Then, as was his habit, he arrived at one of those sudden reversals. “All right. We’ll do it your way.”
Johnny’s face lit up with a goofy smile. “We will?”
“Sure. But let’s not hit them too hard. We don’t want them to get hurt. Well, maybe a little, just for being rude.”
“I’ll take the fat one, you take the thin one.”
“Deal.”
Sometimes when you wanted to get things done, you just had to improvise.
Chapter 10
Tex glanced into the waiting room and saw that his loyal receptionist had left already. Early lunch, probably. Fortunately there was only one patient left, so he beckoned her in. As the town’s foremost medical doctor, he knew pretty much everyone who lived in Hampton Cove, but this particular patient he’d never seen before. She was a handsome woman in her late twenties or early thirties, with a blond bob and the most striking blue eyes he’d ever seen. He bade her to take a seat and assumed his position of attentiveness on his side of the mahogany desk he’d inherited from the doctor who’d operated this office before he was lucky enough to take it over when the old man retired.
“So what can I do for you, Miss…”
“Mrs. Bezel,” said the woman. “Emma Bezel.”
“I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure of making your acquaintance,” said Tex as his hands inadvertently flew up to his white helmet of hair to make sure everything was in place. He might be a doctor, and as such viewed by most people as some kind of sexless being, but when in the presence of a gorgeous woman like Emma Bezel he was also a man, eager to make a good impression on Beauty when it happened to drift into his ken.
“No, I only moved to town a couple of months ago,” said the woman with a timid little smile. She’d cast down her eyes and was wringing delicate hands that lay in her lap. She was dressed in a white blouse, a pink ankle-length skirt and white leather mules. The ensemble became her well. “The thing is, Doctor Poole, that you come highly recommended by my sister. Evelina Pytel?”
“Oh, right. I know Evelina, of course. She never mentioned she had a sister.”
“I’m actually not here for myself, doctor, but for her. You see, Evelina has recently received a great shock, and she’s not been feeling well.”
“Oh,” he said, concern making him frown. “What happened?”
“Well, the man she was seeing has betrayed her in the most awful way possible. He really did a number on her, and she’s been in a terrible state ever since she found out…”
“Found out what?”
“Well, he disappeared, you see. They were dating and things were going really well, and then suddenly he didn’t show up for one of their dates and he hasn’t been answering her calls.” She threw up her hands. “He simply vanished from the face of the earth. Gone without a trace. Obviously she’s taken it very badly. She thought he was the one, you see.”
“I see,” said Tex, nodding and wondering why this should concern him. He was, after all, the town physician and not the town’s matchmaker.
“So now I was thinking…”
“Yes?” said Tex, his demeanor more kindly than his thoughts. He didn’t mind when patients brought their stories of life’s little vicissitudes to his door, but often felt that they attributed qualities to him he simply did not possess. He could mend broken bones, but unfortunately the healing of broken hearts was beyond his professional capabilities.
“The thing is,” said the woman, starting again as she seemed to be having trouble getting the words out, “well, I actually feel that I’m to blame, Doctor Poole. It was me who brought the two of them together, you see. Evelina had been single for far too long, and so when I saw an opportunity to set her up with a man I thought was considerate, kind and potentially a wonderful partner, I didn’t hesitate. I made his acquaintance standing in line at the General Store, and when he told me he was single, I thought he’d be perfect for my sister. And now I feel absolutely terrible about what happened.”
“I understand,” Tex said, still not quite catching on. “Do you want me to pay your sister a visit? Perhaps give her something to dull the pain?” He could think of a couple of things that would relieve some of that anxiety, if that’s what Mrs. Bezel was after.
“Doctor Poole,” said the woman, adjusting her position on the chair, “you should know that Evelina speaks very highly of you. In fact she’s told me on numerous occasions how much she has come to rely on you.”
“She does, does she?”
“Yes, so I just thought… I just figured… well, I hoped…” A blush had settled on the woman’s cheeks, and Tex was more in the dark now than ever.
“I could always give her a mild sedative,” he suggested. “Something to make her sleep a little better? Nothing too strong, of course.”
“I was actually thinking more along the lines of…” Emma Bezel seemed to steel herself, then blurted out, “Doctor Poole, I would like you to date my sister.”
“What?!”
“At least take her out a couple of times.”
“But…”
“Make her feel that she’s still desirable, you know.”
“But, Mrs. Bezel!” said Tex. Whatever he’d been expecting, it most certainly wasn’t this! “I’m a married man,” he said, for good measure displaying his wedding ring.
“I know,” said Mrs. Bezel, nodding as she took in the gold band, “and I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I don’t want you and my sister to actually become a couple or anything. I just want her to go out a couple of times with a good man. A man she respects, and a man I can trust not to break her heart like the previous fellow did.”
“Surely you can’t be serious,” said Tex, taken aback by this extraordinary suggestion.
“I know it’s a little unorthodox, perhaps, but…”
“Unorthodox! It’s unethical, Mrs. Bezel, not to mention my wife would probably kill me if I started dating a patient.”
“She wouldn’t have to know, Doctor Poole,” said Mrs.
Bezel with a hopeful look. She’d scooted to the tip of her chair and was now pleading with a passion that became her. Her blue eyes were ablaze, and her cheeks were flushed. “You can take her on a few dates—two or three perhaps, and then you simply let her down easy. You could take her to dinner in Happy Bays, where people don’t know you so there won’t be any gossip.”
Tex was shaking his head throughout. “My dear Mrs. Bezel, I can tell that you love your sister dearly, for you to come up with a solution like this, but I can assure you—”
“I’ll pay you!” suddenly the woman said, and took out her purse.
“Oh, no, please,” said Tex. This was simply too much.
“How much do you want? I have money. I can pay you… a thousand?”
“Please, Mrs. Bezel.”
“Two thousand? I’ll pay you ten thousand… per date. Let’s say three dates at ten thousand each, that’s thirty thousand. Even you wouldn’t say no to that kind of money, would you, Doctor Poole?”
“But, Mrs. Bezel!”
“Please,” said the woman, folding her hands now in a gesture of supplication. “I’m desperate. Evelina isn’t eating, she isn’t sleeping, she’s been crying non-stop since that awful man stood her up. I’m afraid that if this continues she will harm herself.”
“Have you considered taking her to see a professional?”
“I thought I was doing that right now?”
“I mean a psychologist. Someone at whose feet she can lay all of her troubles.”
“She’s been laying all of her troubles at my feet, and now I’m laying them at yours, Doctor Poole.”
“I really can’t…”
“But I’m begging you!”
“I’m sorry.”
“She’s your patient, doctor. If she takes her own life, wouldn’t you wish that you had done everything in your power to save her?”
“Of course, but…”
“Well, then? You can save her now. It’s your duty—your sacred duty to save my sister’s life. You swore an oath, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did. But I think you’ll find that your interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath is a little… original.”
