The Glass House

by Nancy Lynn Jarvis

  Pat flipped from page to page of online data about cyanide poisoning before it occurred to her that she was using her laptop, not the computer at work. She chuckled out loud. I hope no one ever reads my research history and starts thinking that I’m a killer.

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  Pat remembered meeting Officer Tim Lindsey briefly at a barbeque Syda and Greg had at their house last summer. At the time she thought he was cute, but since she was in a relationship and he was holding hands with an admiring blonde, her notice of him was casual and in passing. Now that he was sitting in her living room to interview her about Garryn Monteith’s murder, she paid closer attention to him.

  His eyes were very blue. His hair had reddish highlights, but had too much brown in it for him to be considered a redhead. He was tall, well over six feet, she guessed, and appeared muscled even through his sheriff’s uniform jacket. His left hand didn’t sport a wedding band. His question interrupted her observations.

  “So, Miss, or do you prefer Ms. Pirard?”

  “I prefer Pat.”

  His smile was quick and disarming. “Pat it is. You attended the entire class at the Wentners’ studio?”

  “I did.”

  “Did you notice anything unusual in Mr. Monteith’s behavior during the course of the class?”

  Pat giggled. “You’ll have to be more specific. He was an unusual character. Charming, but a bit of a diva.”

  “I meant unusual behavior between him and any of the attendees or the Wentners.”

  Pat kicked off her shoes and tucked her feet under her as she sat on her sofa. “I don’t know if I’d call any of the interactions unusual, but at the time I considered them noteworthy in some small way, which is why I remember them.

  “The woman seated next to me, Suzanne Cummings, had a history with him and seemed as if she wanted attention from him. She seemed disappointed when it wasn’t forthcoming. Then there was Angela Grinardi. She called him a thief and a cheat, although she didn’t elaborate on what she meant. And Kandi Crusher…”

  Officer Lindsey looked up from his notes, a bemused expression on his face.

  “Yes, Kandi Crusher. We discussed her name at some length,” Pat chuckled. “Well, Kandi admitted she wasn’t a fan of his, but she paid eight hundred dollars to be in the class and then she left early saying she already knew about his ‘secret system’ for mounting the flowers we made, which was supposed to be a big part of the curriculum.”

  “Eight hundred dollars for a three-day class? I’m in the wrong profession,” Officer Lindsey whistled through his teeth. “Did you notice anything unusual in his interaction with Joe Wentner?”

  “There did seem to be some tension between them. Joe cooked for us. He’s an excellent chef and he went out of his way to accommodate Garryn Monteith’s gluten-free diet without making the rest of us unhappy with the food he prepared. Garryn Monteith didn’t seem appreciative of Joe’s efforts.”

  “Did Mr. Wentner serve the food?”

  “Sometimes. He gave us choices, especially on the first day, but as the class progressed we were all offered the same meals.”

  “So you all ate the same food? And was it under your supervision the whole time?” Officer Lindsey smiled, “I sound like a TSA inspector, don’t I?” He sing-songed, “Were you in possession of your bags at all times?”

  “I understand what you’re asking. We were free to pick our own servings, or if we were served, it was from a common container, and once served, there wasn’t an opportunity to put anything in our food without us seeing it. I heard that Joe Wentner has become a person of interest. You want to know if he had the opportunity to slip something into Garryn Monteith’s food, don’t you?”

  “That’s what I’m asking. And you seem pretty observant to me, so do you remember him having an opportunity?”

  Pat squirmed. “I like Joe and don’t think he’s a killer.”

  Officer Lindsey wasn’t willing to let her off with just an opinion. “But you did notice something, didn’t you?”

  Pat nodded her head ever so slightly. “The last morning we were there, Joe prepared cinnamon rolls for the students. They weren’t gluten free, of course, so Joe made a one-off creation for Garryn Monteith.”

  Officer Lindsey was a good interviewer. He knew when to be silent.

  Pat pressed her lips together, knowing how what she was about to say would sound. “Garryn Monteith declined the pastry Joe made for him, but Joe insisted he at least try it. Garryn only took a couple of bites and complained the pastry was a bit salty.

  “I’ve looked up ingested cyanide. Potassium cyanide could be put in food and might make it taste salty. But it doesn’t make sense that Joe would be the one who poisoned him, because it would have been obvious where the cyanide came from. Joe would have to know he would be caught immediately. Besides, Joe would have had to bake a hefty amount of the compound into the pastry for it to kill, otherwise Garryn Monteith might have survived the poisoning, especially if he only ate a couple of bites of the pastry.

  “With a big dose of ingested cyanide in him, Garryn Monteith would have been in extremis shortly after eating it, and he wasn’t. He didn’t exhibit any symptoms until he opened the kiln and leaned in…” Pat’s words trailed off as she returned her shoeless feet to the floor and leaned toward Officer Lindsey.

  “All indications were that he inhaled the cyanide. That would explain how quickly he died and why we all thought he had a heart attack.” She pondered, “But Lillian was close to him and the rest of us were not far away, so why didn’t any of the rest of us have problems if the kiln was somehow filled with cyanide gas?”

  Dick Drinker called her the next day. “I’m not feeling guilty for downsizing you—I want to be perfectly clear about that—because you remember the decision was the Trustees’, not mine. I want to remind you of that.”

  Pat held a quick debate with herself. Should she politely say nothing, or should she embrace the fact that she had nothing to lose? She went with the second choice. “You sure sound guilty,” she stated pointedly.

  “Not guilty; just bad. So I’ve been looking out for you. I found out about a job opening coming up in about a week. It hasn’t even been announced anywhere yet.”

  “Really? What is this mystery position?”

  “I have it on good authority that the County Library bookmobile driver is leaving. Do you know how to drive a stick shift?”

  “I do, but I don’t think I want a job where that’s a make-or-break criterion.”

  “I’m just trying to be helpful, Pat. Think of it as something temporary to do until something better comes along. You’ve been unemployed for a week now, and I know you. You must be bored out of your mind with having nothing to do.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. In just a week I’ve learned how to make glass peonies and become involved in a murder investigation.”

  “What? That guy who was killed at the glass studio—you were part of that?”

  “Front and center. The authorities seem to think a very nice man who is part owner of the Glass House might be a murderer. It’s ridiculous, but they aren’t looking at the facts, at least not in the right way, so I’m thinking that I’m going to have to do some research to set them straight. That makes me much too busy to apply for a pity job. Thanks for thinking of me, though, Dick, and for trying to help.”

  As Pat hung up, it occurred to her that, even though what she told Dick was just an excuse for not being interested in the job he was suggesting, being at the Glass House when Garryn Monteith was killed had indeed made her part of a murder investigation. She found her involvement, however small, exhilarating. She wanted to dig deeper. Just call me Private Investigator Pat, she laughed out loud.

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  Mark Bellows was the next attorney who called her.

  “Pat, your name came up twice today, so I thought I’d see if you’re available to do some research for me.”

  Pat hid
her disappointment that Mark was calling about business when she had hoped his was a personal call. “Who mentioned me?”

  “Lillian and Joe Wentner have retained me because the authorities seem ready to charge Joe with first-degree murder. They gave me their class list, and I saw you were in the room when Garryn Monteith was murdered. Then I ran into Dick Drinker, who told me you’re doing a little investigation about the murder on your own, so I figured maybe you could help me with Joe’s case.

  “I know it’s short notice, but could we discuss what I have in mind over dinner tonight? Nothing fancy. I’ll just pick something up at the Bruxo Food Truck—I hear he’s doing Argentinian food for the next three weeks—so if that’s okay with you, we can eat at my office. We can take our time and figure out how to work together on this.” His tone softened from businesslike to something less formal. “And it will be a good excuse for me to see you, too.”

  It seemed to Pat that her first detecting job was to decide whether or not dinner with Mark was strictly professional or sort of a date. She came up with a rule: if there was wine involved, it was the latter. Mark had beer ready to accompany their meal, so she was still in a quandary as they ate and discussed Joe Wentner.

  “The sheriff seems determined to make Joe a killer,” Mark began, “and after interviewing him and his wife, I can see how they are going to present his motive. Lillian admits she’s known Garryn Monteith for many years. She told me they dated briefly when they were both in their twenties, long before Joe came along, but right before the class started, Garryn sent her a couple of emails that she kept. They were pretty intimate and made it seem like Monteith expected them to be more than friends. The authorities think Joe saw the emails and are getting ready to say he considered Monteith a competitor for his wife’s affections, felt threatened, and decided to get rid of him. What did you observe when you took the class?”

  “There was some jockeying and poking going on between them, but it didn’t seem like a big deal.”

  Pat paused, and Mark prompted her. “You noticed something, though, something you haven’t told me yet, didn’t you?”

  “I noticed Lillian was pretty cozy with Garryn Monteith. According to Joe, Monteith taught a couple of classes a year at the Glass House. I don’t know how he and Lillian conducted themselves during classes in the past, and her fawning may just have been part of the theatrics that went along with the course, but if Monteith’s emails were suggestive and she seemed to be enjoying his attention, Joe might have felt threatened.”

  Mark sighed and took a long drink of his beer. “If it comes to it, I’m not going to look forward to having you as a witness telling tell a jury what you observed. Making it seem like Lillian welcomed Monteith’s attention doesn’t help Joe’s cause.”

  “Then you need to delve into what else I noticed,” Pat, ever hopeful that Mark might want them to connect outside of a working relationship, offered in a flirty tenor. “Joe wasn’t the only one in the studio who had a problem with Garryn Monteith, and Lillian wasn’t the only one who might have welcomed his attention.

  “I sat next to a woman who told me she and Garryn had a thing in the past. Well, I may be overstating, but Garryn kind of came on to me, and Suzanne Cummings said he always picked someone in the class for ‘extra help.’ She said she had been that student once before, and, from the way she was acting, I believe she would have liked to be his star pupil—that’s what she called herself—again.”

  “Speculation on your part, but interesting,” Mark smiled a wicked little grin, “and believable, because I could certainly see Monteith hitting on you.”

  Pat hoped she wasn’t blushing at Mark’s comment. “There were also a couple of other students who had no fondness for Garryn Monteith. I mentioned their names to the deputy sheriff who interviewed me, and he wrote them down. Weren’t you given that information?”

  “Joe hasn’t been charged yet, and those names wouldn’t come out until discovery, so it’s too soon for me to have been given them.”

  “Then I’ll give them to you now: Angela Grinardi and Kandi Crusher. Mark, there’s something that’s bothering me about this murder that has nothing to do with motive,” Pat said.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s about means. According to my source—my friend Syda, whose husband is a deputy sheriff—what makes Joe so interesting to the department is that Joe gave Monteith something to eat shortly before his death. I heard the cause of death was cyanide poisoning, but I researched death by consuming cyanide, and Monteith didn’t behave like someone who had ingested cyanide. He acted like someone who inhaled it. If you could prove Garryn Monteith died from inhaled cyanide, wouldn’t that clear Joe?” Pat asked hopefully.

  Mark shook his head thoughtfully. “Not really. If Monteith breathed in cyanide, that makes a stronger case for Joe being the murderer because he, and Lillian, of course, could have introduced cyanide into the kiln. A prosecutor will say Joe crept out to the kiln in the middle of the night and filled it with cyanide gas.”

  “Where would Joe have gotten the gas?”

  “If the charge is murder one, they’ll say he procured it before or right at the start of class. It’s easy enough to buy tablets that could be modified to form gas. I’ve seen them for sale on Amazon, available for Prime delivery.”

  “Ick.”

  “So, I was going to say your job would be to introduce reasonable doubt by attributing motive to other people at the studio, but now it looks like you also better come up with a way someone other than Lillian or Joe could have filled the kiln with cyanide gas. I hope that doesn’t seem like too much to ask of you for your first assignment as a private investigator, because I would like to hire you to do research for me. Shall we say at the same rate of pay you got from the Law Library?”

  “Mark, that seems generous. We don’t know if I’ll be any good at this.”

  “You are a highly capable woman. You’ll be good at whatever you do. I’ll expect updates by phone, but when you are ready to do a more in-depth report, may I take you to dinner—a real dinner out—to hear it?”

  Pat smiled all the way home. When she got to her office, she ordered business cards printed with her newly invented job title, private investigator Pat, shortened to a catchy company name: “PIP Inc.” She put her home address and phone number on them, and declared herself CEO of her one-woman company.

  And then she went to work.

  Pat never expected to solve the means issue first or so easily, but by the time she went to bed, she thought she had. She couldn’t prove anything, but what she discovered warranted a call to Lillian and Joe in the morning and then possibly to Mark.

  She struggled to believe it was as easy to procure cyanide as Mark said it was, so she had begun her research by looking up “sources of cyanide.” Because of the way the internet worked, the Grenfell Tower fire in London in 2017 that killed over eighty residents came up. She was intrigued and opened the page; just a little macabre side diversion before she went back to serious investigating. What she read sent her off her planned research path.

  Newspaper accounts said several survivors of the fire had been treated for cyanide poisoning, and autopsies of victims who were not burned in the fire revealed they died because of inhaling cyanide. The tower’s cladding was blamed. The article cited other common sources of cyanide: fruit pits and apple seeds, plastics, carpeting, and, Pat read, Super Glue.

  Super Glue. Garryn Monteith taught his students how to use the tiniest dab of Super Glue to hold glass pieces together before firing melted them into position. Every student had received a list of required materials for the class, which included the glue. No one would have been aware of it if a student carried several more tubes of Super Glue than the one tube necessary for class. They were small and could have fit unnoticed in a purse or materials bag filled with the requisite glass cutters, snippers, and wires.

  Pat hurried to her garage and dragged her materials bag out of a cupboard where she had toss
ed it after the class. She felt around inside the bag, drawing blood when she poked her finger on the end of her roll of sharp-cut wire. Her leftover glue came in a metal toothpaste-like tube, but was much smaller. It had a pointed plastic cap, almost as large as the tube, which was already impossible to pull off after only a few days. She put her bleeding finger in her mouth and carried the tube back to her desk for a closer look.

  Pat held the tube with its tiny print under her desk light and inhaled sharply when she read the first three words on it. “WARNING: Contains Cyanoacrylate.” Cyanide. Further lettering warned against inhaling vapors and said to call a physician if symptoms occurred after inhalation.

  She didn’t sleep even after she turned off her computer for the night. She formulated a list of questions to ask Lillian and Joe the next morning as soon as the clock told her it was late enough to call them without shocking them awake.

  Pat held off until 8:00 a.m. and then dialed their number. The phone rang and went to the answering machine. She tried again at 8:30 and then at 9:00 with the same result. Where they in the studio working or conducting a class? Pat knew Lillian did teach classes herself, and Joe might have been helping her—and, Pat reasoned, they might not have a phone turned on out there. She made the decision to go see them in person.

  “You’re in charge,” she explained to her Dalmatian as she picked up her purse. “I won’t be gone long.”

  Dot whimpered pleadingly.

  “No, you can’t come with me. There are squirrels in the woods and I wouldn’t want to risk you chasing one and getting lost.”

  Dot flopped on the floor with her head draped on crossed paws and whined again.

  “I know I’m asking a lot of you and it is Wimsey’s turn to be in charge, but unlike his namesake, Lord Peter, he’s so unreliable. Besides, he’s a cat and you know how cats can be.” Pat rubbed Dot’s head. “I promise there’ll be a walk at the beach later today as a reward for your understanding.”