Finished with his sandwich, Simon jotted the letters of Petty’s message on his napkin: A M Z Q L D M X Y O M S T E.
“Not true,” he answered Gates.
“What?”
“It’s not true that there’re no unbreakable codes. There’s the Voynich manuscript, 232 pages written over 400 years ago in a secret script. Never deciphered. And in 1897 the composer Edward Elgar sent an encrypted message to a friend. It’s never been decoded. And don’t forget the Zodiac killer ciphers, sent by a serial killer to the police from 1966 to 1974. The killer has never been caught.”
“Enough. I guarantee you that the FBI can unravel a coded scribble written by a dying man.”
Simon stared at the letters that ranged across his napkin.
“Otis, have you had this happen before? You know, when you have more sympathy for the murderer than the victim.”
“Sure. Plenty of victims are creeps. That’s why they’ve been murdered.”
A couple of weeks later Gates showed up at Simon’s door.
“Hey,” he said, as Simon showed him in.
“Hey, yourself,” Simon said. “You off duty?”
Gates wore crisp khakis and a polo shirt instead of his usual immaculate suit.
“Took a personal day,” Gates said. “Had a dentist appointment, stuff like that. Thought I’d stop by and visit. You busy?”
“Not really.” Simon led Gates onto his back porch, where the ceiling fan turned lazily overhead. His laptop computer and a stack of notecards, anchored by a couple of rocks against the breeze from the fan, lay abandoned on the glass coffee table.
“I’m interrupting you,” Otis said.
“It’s okay,” Simon said. “I’m getting nowhere fast.”
Otis settled into a wicker chair while Simon fetched him an iced tea.
“You look tired,” Otis said to him, stirring his tea with the mint twig Simon had added to it. “Not sleeping well, are you?”
“No, I’m not,” Simon said, with no explanation.
“The FBI sent back their report on the Petty case. They can’t decipher the letters on the belt.”
“You sent them the belt itself?”
“Of course not. It’s still locked up in the evidence room. We typed out the letters on the belt and faxed it.”
“You always said it wasn’t a code.”
“That was before I saw the look on your face after I expressed that particular opinion.”
Simon wasn’t a good liar. He allowed a worried expression to cross over his face before he subdued it.
“Look, Simon. I know it’s difficult in a case like this, when you sympathize with the suspects. But wouldn’t you rather the correct person got arrested for Petty’s murder than the wrong one?”
“Without admitting anything, Otis, I’d like to say that solving this crime won’t really be a victory, will it? I mean, Petty won’t be missed, and his murderer, well, maybe it would be best if he wasn’t caught.”
“Best for whom? You? Because you want to avoid the responsibility of sending someone you sympathize with to jail?”
Simon didn’t answer him.
“I know you,” Otis said. “You have some arcane, otherwise useless piece of information that will help me solve this case. You’ve got to give it to me. Don’t make me come back here once I’m back on duty and arrest you for withholding information. You won’t like jail, believe me, and you’ll tell me eventually.”
Simon massaged his neck, hard, with both hands.
“What do you think will happen to the murderer, given that you can find him, if there are extenuating circumstances?” Simon asked.
“That’s not my job,” Otis said. “My job is to solve the murder. The jury’s job is to convict or acquit. It’s the judge’s job to pass sentence, which is when those extenuating circumstances you refer to come into play. And it’s your job to tell me everything you know. I know you can decipher Petty’s message. I can see it in your face.”
Simon quit rubbing the back of his neck and moved to massaging his temples.
“Okay,” he said. “Whatever. I can’t keep quiet any longer anyway.”
“Thank God,” Otis said. He handed Simon a single sheet of paper with the letters Petty had scrawled just before his death printed on it. “What is it?”
“It’s a transposition cipher,” Simon said.
“Just scrambled text?” Otis asked. “Surely the FBI could have figured that out.”
“Not without the key,” Simon said.
“So tell me what it is.”
“It’s in your evidence room.”
Gates signed the register at the evidence desk, and a uniformed policeman ushered the two of them into the windowless room. The overhead fluorescent lights popped and buzzed as Gates unlocked one of dozens of wire cages that jammed the room, pulled out a plastic bag containing Petty’s belt, and handed it to Simon.
“I need the spear, too,” Simon said.
Gates removed the spear and unwrapped it from the brown paper that protected it. Bloodstains soaked the first eight inches or so of the spear shaft.
“I don’t get it,” Gates said. “Where’s the key?”
“Right here,” Simon said, indicating the spear. “It’s a scytale. The world’s first cipher. Invented by the Spartans. Say the commander of the Spartan army wanted to send a message back to his king in the city. He’d wrap a strip of goatskin around the shaft of a stick, write his message along one side, and unwind the strip of skin. Then he’d fill in the spaces between the letters of the message with random letters, which made the dispatch read like gibberish, and send a runner to deliver the strip of skin to Sparta. There the king would wrap the skin around a stick of the exact same diameter as the commander’s and decipher the message.”
Simon repressed a vision of Petty pinned to the floor, bleeding to death, pulling off his belt, wrapping it around the spear that impaled him, and scrawling the name of his murderer.
“I’ll be damned,” Gates said. “A scytale, you say?” He wrapped the belt around the spear and turned it over and over in his hands. “I still can’t read it.”
“Right here,” Simon said, showing him. “MLXME. Mark Lozano killed me.”
“The son-in-law.”
“Exactly. Petty must have expected Lozano would ‘discover’ his body, so he needed to disguise his message.”
“But Lozano’s staff said he didn’t leave the restaurant.”
“I think, if you question them again, you’ll find they didn’t mean exactly that. Lozano didn’t do anything different that evening. I’ll bet he took the restaurant receipts to the night deposit at the bank, same as he did every night.”
“The bank behind Petty’s house. Lozano paid his father-in-law a quick visit. Why did he kill him?”
“It’s up to you to find that out. You’re the detective.”
When Otis stopped by Simon’s house a couple of days later, he found the young professor, in jeans and a Kenan College T-shirt, typing away on his porch.
“I thought you’d want to know,” Gates said. “We arrested Lozano today.”
Simon shut his laptop down.
“I’ll have to testify at his trial, won’t I?” Simon asked.
“’Fraid so.”
“I was hoping the FBI would save me from that by decrypting the cipher,” Simon said. “If you’d sent them the belt instead of the letters typed on a sheet of paper, the cryptologist might have recognized it as a scytale. So what was Lozano’s motive?”
“Petty had suddenly taken it into his head to cash out everything and move to Italy to live for the rest of his life. Unfortunately, that included the $50,000 he’d lent his daughter and son-in-law to start the restaurant. They couldn’t afford to give the money back to Petty and keep the business going.”
“The jerk.”
“Lozano tried to talk his father-in-law out of pulling his money out of the business. When Petty refused, Lozano lost his temper and killed him. He came b
ack in the morning to ‘discover’ the murder, hoping that would distract our attention from him. The daughter wasn’t involved, and she and the kids will be okay. They’ve got the restaurant and her inheritance from Petty. The best Lozano can hope for is first-degree manslaughter.”
“I don’t know about that,” Simon said. “Maybe he’ll get off. Everyone in the neighborhood is contributing to a defense fund. This is still the South. Home of the ‘he needed killin’ defense.”
SARAH R. SHABER wasn’t born in North Carolina, but she got here as soon as she could. She attended college at Duke University and graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has lived in Raleigh ever since. The first book in her series featuring historian and amateur sleuth Professor Simon Shaw, Simon Said, won the St. Martin’s Press Best First Traditional Mystery Award.
MR. Strang Takes a Partner
William E. Brittain
“Would you be Mr. Strang, now?”
Mr. Strang looked up from the heap of chemical-stained glassware on the demonstration table at the front of his classroom. It was nearly 4:30, and he still had to wash the lab apparatus—“scrubbing the pots,” he called it. This late in the day he didn’t feel up to facing some overbearing parent bent on turning an offspring’s C–into an A by dint of paternal persuasion.
A single glance at the figure in the doorway calmed his fears. The slender man who stood there might have been taken for a small boy but for a face seamed with creases which were accentuated by his broad smile. He was scarcely five feet tall, and his unruly shock of red hair was tinged here and there with wisps of gray. All in all, he put Mr. Strang in mind of a well-dressed leprechaun.
“I’m Mr. Strang.” The science teacher wiped his damp hands on the lapels of his jacket.
The little man extended a hand. “Corcoran’s the name—Wesley Corcoran.”
“Oh? Patty’s father?”
“Yes. Matter of fact, Patricia’s the reason I came calling.”
“But she’s doing quite well in biology and—”
“Tush, tush! It’s not Patricia’s schooling I wanted to see you about.”
“Then what—”
“Mr. Strang, did you not tell my daughter’s class as how any problem can be solved if all the evidence is available, and it’s approached in the proper manner?”
Mr. Strang felt his face start to redden. “Well, I—”
“And furthermore, I understand you’re quite the one for figuring out things. Not just science stuff neither, but all kinds of puzzles and things.”
“Mr. Corcoran, it’s really quite late, and I must be—”
“Ah, you force my hand. I was saving this to show you at a more opportune time, but before you can get somebody’s help, you first have to get his attention, as the woman said while bashing at her husband with a rolling pin.”
Corcoran reached into a jacket pocket and brought out what appeared to be a folded sheet of paper from a legal pad. “Would you just take a few seconds to read this?”
The teacher unfolded the paper. The penciled words on it were written in a quavery hand. It appeared to be a poem of some kind.
WHY work at my conundrums, faithful Wes?
To seek your fortune, no more and no less.
Now, having answered WHY, I leave to you
To find the WHAT, the WHEN, the WHERE, and WHO.
All answers lie beneath my roofing tiles
And in Alaska’s literary isles.
The one you seek’s a truly Nob’l man.
Now solve my little word games—if you can.
“What say you, Mr. Strang?” Corcoran asked when the teacher had finished reading. “Should I go now and leave you in peace?”
A grin spread across Mr. Strang’s face as he saw the impish gleam in Corcoran’s eyes. “You old fraud!” the teacher exclaimed. “Patty told you I could never turn down a good puzzle. Now what’s this all about? Nothing criminal, is it?”
Corcoran shook his head. “More in the financial field. And now it’s your turn. What have you gathered from the poem? About the man who wrote it, I mean?”
“Hmm.” The teacher ran gnarled fingers through his sparse crop of hair. “I can’t make much sense of the poem itself. But the writer—that’s something else again. He’s quite wealthy but in rather poor health. He’s also fairly intelligent, and either his background or interests—or both—run to the newspaper business.”
“Ah, ha!” Corcoran gave Mr. Strang’s back a congratulatory pat. “You’re just the man for me, sir. But how’d you know all them things just from the few lines here?”
“Well,” Mr. Strang replied, “the hand that wrote these lines trembled. I surmised it was because of illness. As to his wealth, not only does he mention a fortune, but he also refers to his roofing tiles. Yes, the word does make the line rhyme properly, but it’s also suggestive of enough money to afford something better than the usual asphalt shingles. The newspaper business? Every cub reporter in the world soon learns that who, what, when, where, and why are the elements of a good news story. The intelligence is obvious. He wrote the poem, didn’t he? And it’s got us both mystified.”
Mr. Strang sat down at his desk. “And now that I’ve told you what I got from the poem, it’s back to you again, Mr. Corcoran. What’s this all about? Who wrote it? And why?”
“It was done by Rutherford Pyle,” answered Corcoran.
Mr. Strang immediately recognized the name. “But I read he’d died just last week. Right here in Aldershot. His heart, wasn’t it? A pity, too. Pyle could do things with the English language that were incredible. One of the most persuasive writers I ever read.”
A smile spread across Corcoran’s face. “You know a bit about Mr. Pyle, then?”
“More than a bit. He was an Horatio Alger hero come to life. A newspaper delivery boy at twelve. Fifteen years later he owned a Midwest paper, and ten years after that he had four more. Ran them all himself, wrote a lot of the copy and editorials, said what he thought regardless of outside pressures, and the devil take the hindmost.”
“Ah, that was a long time back,” sighed Corcoran. “Those were the good days, Mr. Strang. And I was at his side through them all. My job was to kind of look after Mr. Pyle and do whatever little things he wanted of me. He said I was his good luck charm. But old age creeps up on us all. And when he had them two heart attacks—near five years ago, they were—he took the big house here in Aldershot to be near his daughter and her husband. Me and Patricia—my wife died long since, God rest her soul—lived there with him the whole time. The attacks weakened him something terrible. A short walk about the house once a day was the best he could manage. But I saw to it that the necessary chores got done, and in return, Mr. Pyle gave me an education like no other in the world.”
“Education?” asked Mr. Strang. “What do you mean?”
“Mr. Pyle has—had—a library that takes up near half the main floor. Oh, he was weak of body, but his mind was as quick as ever. Having naught to occupy himself, he decided to educate me beyond the six years of public school I’d had as a boy. I resisted at first, but later on his problems got to be kind of fun.”
“Problems?”
“Yes, sir. He’d pretend like I was a reporter and he was sending me out to get a story. Only the place I’d go to get it was downstairs to the library. And heaven help me if I didn’t have the who, what, when, where, and why by the time I returned.”
“Just how did that work?” Mr. Strang asked.
“Well, I remember one time when he set me the task of finding two words that sounded the same but had opposite meanings. To find ’em, I had to read the dictionary, learning new words by the score.”
“And what were the two words?”
“There were quite a few. Take two of ’em, now—raise and raze, to build up and to tear down. Y’see, that was the cleverness of it. To find what Mr. Pyle asked, I had to do a tremendous amount of reading. I daresay there’s few books even in that vast lib
rary of his what ain’t got my thumb smudges in ’em. I’d have to find out everything there was to know about famous characters in literature—Uriah Heep, for instance—and bring in a story just like the character was a living person. Or there’d be a place I was to research, right down to knowing how much it would cost to fly there. And all the time I was learnin’ and learnin’, and me not even knowin’ it. Because of Mr. Pyle’s kindness, I’ll vow there’s many a college professor I could give a run for his money. It’s because Mr. Pyle was so good to me that I know he wouldn’t—he wouldn’t—”
“He wouldn’t what, Mr. Corcoran?”
“Mr. Pyle up and died, and now Patricia and me are out on our own, without enough money between us to buy a decent meal. That’s not how he would have wanted it.”
“But surely there’s a will,” said the teacher.
“There is. It leaves everything to his daughter. He died too fast, Mr. Strang. Too fast.”
“Too fast, Mr. Corcoran? I don’t understand.”
“Well, sir, over the past few months Mr. Pyle began talking with me about how things was going to be after he died. His estate and all. He was beginning to have intimations of his own mortality, don’t you see. I was not mentioned in the will, as he didn’t want his daughter and me arguing over who gets what. But several weeks ago he told he’d put some money aside so me and Patricia would be taken care of after he’d passed away.”
“I’m still puzzled. Why can’t you just take that money and—”
“He didn’t put the money in a bank or something like that. No, he concealed it somewhere in that house. And then he set me one more task. I was to be a reporter again and use the clues he gave me—leads, as he called ’em—to track down where the money was stashed away. If I couldn’t find it inside a month, he promised to reveal the hiding place. Oh, it was foolish to do the thing that way, but he had so few things to occupy his mind. But before the month ended, he was—was—”
Tar Heel Dead Page 9
