Deception

by Randy Alcorn

  “Apparently he decided he wanted Phillips for an alibi too,” I said, testing her.

  “No. Phillips came to Jack. He needed an alibi.”

  “Why?”

  “Jack wouldn’t tell me. But since we both knew Phillips didn’t do it and it established Jack’s alibi, why not?”

  “You’re certain Noel wasn’t in on the murder?”

  “Noel wanted nothing to do with it.”

  We talked another twenty minutes. I thanked her for her honesty. I went to the door, and this time she hugged me.

  It felt good.

  55

  “I have been beaten four times—three times by men, and once by a woman.”

  SHERLOCK HOLMES, THE FIVE ORANGE PIPS

  SATURDAY, JANUARY 18, 8:30 A.M.

  I SAT AT LOU’S, in our bug-free booth. Clarence would be joining me later but said to eat without him since he’d have breakfast with Geneva.

  I enjoyed my country omelet, hash browns, and the big buttermilk pancake Rory offers as a toast alternative. Admiring the yellow calla lilies, I flipped through Chris Doyle’s report on Brandon Phillips. At a poignant musical moment on the Rock-Ola—“My folks were always putting him down (down, down)”—my eyes landed on two lines.

  “Phillips had one outstanding financial judgement against him, but it was only for $1200 … It’s my judgement that Phillips could have taken his life, or could have been murdered.”

  It wasn’t his conclusion that interested me. It was his spelling.

  Clarence walked in to “… sorry I hurt you, leader of the pack.” I didn’t notice any tears.

  “How do you spell the word judgment?” I asked him.

  “How do Americans spell it?”

  “No, how do Kuwaitis spell it?”

  “The American spelling is j-u-d-g-m-e-n-t.”

  “Wouldn’t you expect a highly educated cop to spell it right?”

  “Who do you mean?”

  “Chris Doyle, son of college professors.”

  “I’d expect Doyle to spell it with an e after the g.”

  “Why?”

  “His mom taught him the Queen’s English, remember? Judgement, with an e after the g, is the British spelling.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I’m a journalist. We read. We spell. We’re educated.”

  “You’ve never read Nero Wolfe,” I said, taking the wind out of his “I’m an intellectual” sails.

  I asked Ray who could do a chemical analysis on short notice. He said he knew just the man: Darrell MacKay, who formerly worked crime lab but now is a private investigator with his own lab. Ray drove us forty minutes to his place, near Battleground, northeast of Vancouver, Washington.

  We parked next to an RV and entered a large split entry home, me wearing a Seahawks jacket and carrying a black garbage bag. A dark-haired guy with a winter tan, early forties, came out to meet us.

  “Darrell, this is Ollie Chandler,” Ray said. “And Clarence Abernathy.” MacKay wore a Vikings cap, but otherwise seemed normal.

  We went down a hallway past the master bedroom. He opened the door to the last room on the left. A Bunsen burner’s flame licked the underside of a glass beaker. Vapor rose out of it into a tube. No kidding. I felt like I’d walked into 221b Baker Street, residence of Sherlock Holmes.

  The most impressive piece, for a home lab, was the centrifuge.

  “What does it do?” Clarence asked MacKay, which was akin to asking Rupert Bolin what a fountain pen does.

  “The motor puts any substance in rotation around a fixed axis, so centrifugal force separates lighter and heavier components.”

  “I flunked chemistry,” I said. “Apparently you didn’t.”

  “Forensic toxicology is my passion. Solving crimes with science and technology. I love it. Don’t spread it around, but the DA’s office comes to me when they can’t afford to wait for test results. They came last month because they didn’t trust the chain of custody. There’ve been cases where detectives try to test evidence without officially turning it in.”

  “That’s reprehensible,” I said, avoiding eye contact with Ray as I swallowed my Black Jack.

  “Define forensics—and toxicology,” Clarence said, pen poised. “I want to get it straight so nobody whines about journalistic inaccuracies.” He gave me the eye.

  “Forensics is the use of science and technology to investigate and establish facts in criminal court. Toxicology is the science of adverse effects of chemicals on living organisms.”

  “In this case I was the living organism,” I said.

  “So you think someone put something in your beer?” MacKay asked.

  I took my trench coat out of the garbage bag and showed him the arm that had gotten drenched in the beer that night at Rosie O’Grady’s when Brandon Phillips called me. The same night he turned up dead.

  MacKay put his nose to it. “Smells like beer. You sure you didn’t just have a few too many?”

  “I know what a few too many is. There’s a firecracker; then there’s a bomb. This was a bomb. That’s why I didn’t wash the coat. And haven’t been wearing it.”

  MacKay took the sleeve and looked at it with a magnifying glass. “Most of it’s still water repellant, but it’s worn enough that the beer soaked into spots and left a residue.

  He clamped something viselike on it. He collected a few flakes into a miniature test tube. Next he put in a drop of some long-named chemical. No reaction. He cleaned the test tube and started over with a few more residue flakes in the tube. This time the chemical turned the flakes green.

  “I’ve narrowed it down,” MacKay said.

  “That quick? I’m used to waiting days.”

  “It’s not just beer. There’s a toxin. Specifically, an aldehyde or a ketone. Which narrows it down to six or seven substances.”

  “What substances?” Clarence asked, pen ready.

  He named three of them, each at least a dozen letters, before Clarence raised his hand. “I’ll pass.”

  MacKay said to me, “Considering the greenish stain and its effects on you and that there isn’t a smell, I’ve got a hunch.” He picked out two more bottles and put a sterile eyedropper in each. “I’m using benzidine dihydrochloride to see if there’s a reaction.”

  Apparently there was, because he said, “Bingo.”

  We waited for him to redo and confirm the results.

  “Yeah. Chloralhydrate. It’s used as a sedative and sleep aid or as a dental anesthetic for children. And in bigger doses, as an anesthetic for large animals.” He grabbed a thick brown book off the wall.

  “Why’d somebody use it on me?”

  “Because you’re a large animal?” Ray asked.

  “It mixes easily into alcohol. Can’t taste it. Induces sleep. Deep sleep.”

  “You got that right,” I said.

  He started reading aloud portions of a study of chloralhydrate done on two-year-old male mice. He read, “Russo and Levis, 1992, found chloralhydrate to be capable of inducing aneuploidy in mouse spermatocytes.”

  “That’s more than I want to know,” I said.

  “If you hadn’t been awakened,” MacKay said, “you might have been out six hours. Even if you’d gotten a blood test, chloralhydrate decomposes internally so quickly that it’s undetectable beyond four hours. Never shows up in an autopsy.”

  “Autopsy?”

  “Yeah. It can be fatal. Finish your beer?”

  “Mostly.”

  “We’d never have been able to prove what it was without the beer soaked into your trench coat. It paid off being a sloppy drinker.”

  MONDAY, JANUARY 20, 7:00 P.M.

  It was two months to the day since the professor’s murder. But the string included Frederick, Hedstrom, and Phillips, not to mention four unrelated deaths. Because of the high profile of the Palatine case and its apparent connection with three others, Manny and I had been given a bye when our number next came up. But Sergeant Seymour told me that next time
, especially with Phillips gone, we’d have to take it. No problem now since the Palatine murder had been solved, right?

  Then why did it feel wrong? Why couldn’t I let it go?

  It was Monday Night Football again, at Jake’s. I called to say I’d be there by halftime. I thought I wanted to be alone and went to dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory.

  Sometimes I get a craving for the pasta smothered in Mizithra Cheese, which I discovered in 1969, the first year the original Old Spaghetti Factory opened on Second Street downtown. I took Sharon, and we watched the silent movies while we waited an hour to be seated, which you always did back then. When we could, we’d eat in the streetcar. It was cheap, and we went twice a month. We loved it.

  The problem with the Old Spaghetti Factory in Clackamas, fifteen minutes from my house, isn’t that it looks so different than the original. There’s still brass headboards and wrought iron chandeliers and a streetcar. No more silent movies, not so long a wait, but the food hasn’t changed much. The Mizithra’s still fabulous. The menu still says of Mizithra what it’s always said: “A toothsome treat for cheese lovers; legend has it that Homer lived on this while composing the Iliad.” Still the best Thousand Island dressing in Portland. Couples still sit across from each other, lost in conversation.

  What’s changed is that Sharon isn’t with me anymore.

  Despite the toothsome treat, I walked out realizing that I craved more than Mizithra. Some places you should never eat at by yourself. I’d just been at one of them.

  Twenty minutes later I was at Jake’s. Early in the fourth quarter, he opened Carly’s old dorm room fridge, stocked with drinks.

  “Get you a pop?”

  Jake asked. “Coke,” I said.

  Jake handed it to me. My eyes were aimed at the television, but my little gray cells were working, triggered by the word pop.

  The sounds of cheering, announcers and Jake’s voice woke me to the outside world.

  “Sherlock Holmes,” I said, “solved a case based on the depth parsley had sunk into the butter on a hot day.”

  “Did he now?” Jake said. “I’ve got some trivia for you—there’s 3:32 left in the fourth quarter, it’s tied, and the Seahawks are deep in Eagles territory.”

  “Why would somebody born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, never having lived elsewhere, ask, ‘You want a soda?’ ”

  Jake shrugged, looking at me like I was losing it. “I don’t know.”

  “The answer is, he wouldn’t.”

  56

  “I suspect myself. Of coming to conclusions too rapidly.”

  SHERLOCK HOLMES, THE NAVAL TREATY

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 21, 10:30 A.M.

  CLARENCE AND I sat in Ray Eagle’s living room. I claimed the red chair and ottoman for my tired legs, and Ray sat beside me in a low-back armchair. I handed him the page from my yellow pad on which I’d written three lines of dialogue.

  Noel: “Get you a soda?”

  Ollie: “Sure. I’ll take a Coke.”

  Noel: “Coca-Cola?”

  “Okay, but what does it mean?” Ray asked, handing the pad back to me.

  “It means Noel didn’t grow up in Washington.”

  “Yes, he did. I checked it out, remember?”

  “I say he didn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s right here.” I held up the page. “He asked me if I wanted a soda. You’re from this area, right?”

  “Born in southeast Portland. Moved to Detroit at twenty-one, stayed there fifteen years, and moved back here about twenty years.”

  “What do you call a soft drink?”

  “Pop. Called it pop here and called it pop in Detroit.”

  “I grew up in Milwaukee, and we said soda. My cousin Lance in Madison said pop. When I was in LA, it was soda. When I moved up here to Portland thirty years ago, I thought people sounded stupid when they said pop. Swore I’d never give in. But after ten years, one day Sharon pointed out I was saying pop, just like the locals. The point is, a lifelong Northwesterner calls it pop, not soda.”

  “I grew up in Mississippi, before we moved to Chicago.” Clarence said. “To us any soft drink was a Coke. That’s what you call it. If you’re drinking 7-Up, it’s still a Coke.”

  “That’s the second tip-off,” I said. “When I told him I wanted a Coke, Noel asked, ‘Coca-Cola?’ A Northwesterner would never ask that. Of course a Coke is Coca-Cola. It couldn’t be anything else.”

  “But I’m telling you,” Ray said, “Noel grew up in Liberty Lake, Washington. I ran the background check.”

  “Double-check it. Find out where his parents came from. A kid could learn his words for soft drinks from parents, but his friends would be calling it pop. I don’t believe he’d call it anything else if he really grew up there. Anyway, check it out.”

  I gave them photocopies of Jack and Noel’s receipts from the Nine Darts Tavern. I explained that Linda had a class Wednesday nights, so Jack and Noel normally ate there. They usually had the same thing week to week: Jack fried chicken and Noel a burger and fries. Both would usually have two beers. The tab was the same every week, one beer more or less. But one night, the night of November 27, their tab was twenty-five dollars more than usual. Did Linda skip class and join them that night? Nope—hamburger and fried chicken, as usual. But no beers. Instead, a bottle of wine and nearly double their usual tip.

  “So tell me,” I said to Clarence and Ray, “why do two beer drinkers order wine?”

  “Special occasion?” Clarence said. “To make a toast?”

  “To celebrate,” Ray said. “Graduation. Engagement. Birth of a child. Promotion. Your team wins the World Series.”

  “And that’s when you leave a big tip, because you’re happy, feeling generous,” I said. “But none of those things happened November 27. Okay, it was the day before Thanksgiving, but they’d be together for Thanksgiving the next day. So what else do homicide detectives celebrate?”

  “Solving a murder,” Ray said.

  “When I was his partner, Jack liked to celebrate one week after nailing the bad guy. Look at that date again.”

  “November 27,” Ray said.

  “What was one week earlier?”

  “November 20,” Clarence said. “The night of Palatine’s murder. But … Jack and Noel had a murder case that same night. They were celebrating that one, right? Didn’t they solve it?”

  “Jack said it was easy, a no-brainer. The guy confessed within hours. Not worth celebrating. Plus, that murder was actually early morning November 21. But anyway, it’s not the date of a murder you celebrate, it’s the date you solve it or the killer’s arrested, or brought to justice.”

  “What’s your point?” Clarence asked.

  “Well, who was brought to justice one week earlier, on November 20? Palatine. Maybe this time they were celebrating not an arrest, but an execution.”

  They pondered it quietly.

  “There’s more,” I said. “Flip back a couple pages, and check the receipt. They weren’t just at the Nine Darts one week after the murder. They were there the night of the murder. They didn’t have beer, but they were the up team so that makes sense. But there’s a second sales receipt, after the dinner, next page. They bought something for $24.99.”

  “A bottle of Riesling,” Clarence said, reading the receipt.

  “White wine. Since it’s a separate transaction, not part of the dinner, the bottle of wine was to go. The Nine Darts owner confirmed that. Jack paid for it, and they took it with them.”

  Ray stared at me. “And that same night, two people drank white wine at Palatine’s. And took the bottle with them when they left.”

  I came home for lunch and found the answering machine blinking.

  “Who called?” I asked Mulch. When he didn’t answer, I pushed New Messages.

  “Detective Chandler? This is Cherianne Takalo in Michigan. I got the photo you sent. Thank you! That’s just how I remember Melissa’s parents. Thanks for the note saying whi
ch ones are you and your wife. But … something I don’t understand. You were asking me about Donald, like you didn’t know him. Anyway … call me back if you want to.”

  I called back. “Cherianne? Ollie Chandler. I didn’t understand your message … your comment about Donald.”

  “I just thought it was odd that you asked me about Donald like you didn’t know him.”

  “I don’t.”

  “But he’s standing right next to you in the picture.”

  “What …? Hang on.” I walked over to the table by the recliner and lifted the framed picture of Portland’s homicide detectives and wives. “I’m looking at it. Who are you talking about?”

  “Okay, the guy on your left side, with the brown hair and silly grin, standing right next to Melissa’s dad and mom.”

  “That’s Noel Barrows, Jack’s partner.”

  Long pause. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “Wow. He looks just like Melissa’s boyfriend, Donald.”

  Sarge let me use the phone in his office again that afternoon.

  “Noel Barrows grew up in Liberty Lake,” Ray Eagle insisted, “and I’ve got the records, transcripts, and pictures to prove it. Grade school, high school. Cub Scouts. His parents died in a car wreck his senior year. After graduating he got a summer job in Helena, Montana, then stayed there. That’s the last anyone in Liberty Lake saw him. Ended up calling a realtor and selling his parents’ house without even coming back to town. Signed papers through the mail.”

  “You have pictures?”

  “Yearbook.”

  “They’re a perfect match to Noel?”

  “I wouldn’t call it perfect. He was heavy in high school. He’s lost maybe thirty pounds. Hair’s thinned some. I guess he looks as close to his high school picture as I do to mine—which isn’t all that close. People change. But I do have something interesting. I think you should call the guy in Helena who rented him the room.”