Mile High Murder

by Marcia Talley

  I’d been scribbling furiously, but I looked up at that point. Dumb-ass things were always fascinating.

  Austin aimed the eraser end of a pencil at the blotter and brought it down hard, emphasizing each of his points. ‘The co-op has to disclose that it’s subject to federal seizure, that the money is not federally insured and that Colorado will not defend the co-op if its assets do get seized.’

  ‘What a deal,’ Claire commented dryly. ‘I’m wondering how we can avoid that in Maryland.’

  ‘Until the feds loosen up, it’s going to stay a game of clever workarounds for everyone.’ He flipped the pencil into a beer stein, where it rattled around and settled down with half-a-dozen others. ‘I’ll give you an example. IRS Code 280E.’

  Claire raised a finger to interrupt. ‘It’s on the tip of my tongue, but …?’

  Austin laughed. ‘280E covers expenditures in connection with the illegal sale of drugs. They actually have a rule for it! Anyway,’ he continued, ‘according to 280E, I can’t deduct the cost of rent, advertising or payroll like any other business can, but I can deduct the cost of growing marijuana under the category Cost of Goods Sold. How crazy is that?’

  Claire and I agreed that it was nutty.

  ‘But you wanna know a good thing? We don’t fuss about it too much because all these silly rules are keeping Big Tobacco, Big Alcohol and Big Pharma out of the competition. At least for now.’

  ‘That brings us back around to why you’re keeping the cash here,’ I said.

  ‘As I mentioned earlier – convenience. The co-op is in the city. I’ll be making the deposit on Monday, escorted by security.’

  I must have looked skeptical.

  ‘You think I stuff cash under a mattress, Hannah? Keep it in the deep freeze?’ He laughed. ‘We’ve got a safe. Let me show you.’

  Austin rose to his feet and walked around the desk, pausing in front of a curtained alcove. He grabbed the curtain, a lush red velvet fabric that hung from a brass rod on brass rings, and pulled it aside. ‘Voila!’

  Nestled in the alcove behind the curtain, half-hidden in the dark, was an antique safe about thirty inches high and twenty inches wide, the size of a small refrigerator. ‘It’s original to the house,’ Austin told us. ‘Fannie’s husband was a jeweler. Kept lots of gems on hand.’

  Austin reached up and flipped a switch, bathing the safe in warm, museum-style light.

  ‘It’s a beauty,’ I said truthfully.

  Austin’s safe was painted fire-engine red. Raised gold lettering announced that it had been manufactured by the Tucker Safe & Lock Company in Cincinnati, Ohio in the year 1892. A painting of a sailboat decorated the door; seashells adorned each corner.

  ‘Nobody’s going to crack this baby!’ Austin declared, patting the top of his safe like a proud father. ‘No electronics. Sometimes you can get too fancy, you know.’

  I had to agree. My sister’s washing machine had more buttons than the Starship Enterprise. She could steam her cottons, sanitize her towels. Mine had just three settings: wash, rinse and spin. Less to go wrong that way.

  As Austin extolled the virtues of nineteenth-century safe technology, I had visions of bad guys dressed in black, stethoscopes hanging from their ears, squatting in front of that little beauty, spinning the dial, listening to the tumblers click into place.

  ‘Couldn’t someone just pick it up and haul it away?’ Claire wondered.

  ‘No way.’ Austin snorted. ‘It’s lined with concrete. Must weigh a thousand pounds. One of the reasons we kept it, actually. Couldn’t move it if we tried.’ He stamped his foot on the carpet. ‘It sits on a metal plate over a reinforced floor.

  ‘I had it completely restored,’ he continued. ‘Cost me a bundle.’

  ‘On the inside as well?’ I asked.

  ‘Inside, outside, top and bottom. Would you like to see?’

  We said we would.

  Austin stooped. His back blocked our view as he twisted the numbered brass dial – right, left and right again – and pulled down on the brass handle.

  The door swung wide.

  I leaned forward for a better view.

  The top half of the safe had three drawers – for Fannie’s hatpins, brooches, necklaces, bracelets, rings and tiaras, I imagined – and the bottom consisted of two shelves lined with green felt.

  Austin fell to his knees, stuck his hand inside the safe, pulled out a packet of documents tied up in string and threw it aside. ‘Damn!’

  He thrust both hands into the safe, pawing through the remaining contents: a red rope expanding folder, a military medal in a clear plastic case and a yellow tobacco tin with a cupid on the front joined the pile growing next to him on the carpet. ‘Damn, damn, damn!’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Claire asked, and then stated the obvious. ‘Something’s missing.’

  ‘It’s impossible!’ Austin said, head down, his voice muffled.

  He sat back on his heels and turned a worried face in our direction. ‘The money’s gone.’

  ‘All of it?’ I asked.

  He nodded forlornly. ‘The whole damn satchel.’

  ‘How much was in it?’ Claire asked.

  ‘Nearly two hundred thousand.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ Claire said. ‘What will you do?’

  Austin leaned back against the open safe, closed his eyes and massaged his temples with his fingers. ‘How the hell will I make payroll?’

  ‘The security guards came in with a satchel around half past five last night,’ I offered. ‘Was that the satchel you’re talking about?’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘Who did they give the satchel to?’ I asked.

  ‘Me, of course. They call when they get to the house and I meet them in my office.’

  ‘Do the security guards have the combination?’

  Austin looked at me like I’d lost my marbles. ‘Good Lord, no. Not even Desiree knows the combination.’

  ‘But what if something happens to you?’ Claire asked reasonably.

  He shrugged. ‘She’ll have to hire a professional safecracker, I guess.’

  Austin stood up and wiped his hands nervously on his jeans. When he reached for his phone, I sidled in for a closer look at the safe. There seemed to be no obvious signs of tampering. Either somebody was a clever safecracker indeed or they had known the combination.

  We watched silently as Austin punched numbers into his phone. ‘Who are you calling?’ Claire asked.

  ‘The goddam security company. They need to get their asses over here PDQ.’ He covered the microphone with his hand. ‘One of you go see if Detective Jacobs is still here. If this doesn’t have something to do with Fischel’s murder, I’ll eat my hat, leather tie, fishing lures and all.’

  TWELVE

  At El Paso, a peon came across the International Bridge firing a rifle at all and sundry. Much talk against the Americans and a dose of Marahuana had decided him to invade the United States by himself. The bridge-keeper quickly put a bullet into the poor wretch.

  Emily F. Murphy, ‘Janey Canuck’, The Black Candle, Toronto, Thomas Allen, 1922, p.333.

  Detective Jacobs, Desiree, Claire and I observed in respectful silence as the man we knew as Daniel Fischel left the building, feet first, via the front door. I held my tongue as his covered body was slotted into the rear of a bright white ambulance and spirited away, presumably to the medical examiner’s office in downtown Denver.

  Jacobs moved toward the open door and appeared about to head out after the ambulance, so I opened my mouth and brought him up short. ‘There’s been a robbery,’ I announced matter-of-factly.

  ‘What?’ Desiree’s shriek split the air.

  Jacobs’ blue-gray eyes remained steady. While Desiree seemed to be coming to pieces, he regarded me calmly.

  ‘The Happy Daze payroll,’ I said, gesturing toward the kitchen. ‘Austin sent us to find you.’

  Desiree took off like a sprinter.

  ‘It’s quite a lot of money, I’m afraid,’ Cl
aire said, eyeing our departing hostess. ‘But, if you don’t mind, I have some calls I need to make.’ She took two steps back and bowed slightly, clearing a path for the officer. ‘I’ll be in my room, Hannah.’

  At his request, I escorted Jacobs into the kitchen, where Marilyn stood at a counter deftly slicing cucumbers. She looked up, knife poised over the cutting board. ‘Can I help …?’ Then, after a moment, perhaps in response to our grim faces: ‘Why, what’s happened now?’

  I held up a finger in an I’ll-tell-you-in-a-minute kind of way and, leaving her puzzled face in my rearview mirror, pushed through the door that led into the back hallway with Jacobs hard on my heels.

  Austin sat where we’d left him, elbows on the desk, forehead propped on an open palm as if deep in thought. Desiree stood quietly behind him, a hand resting on her husband’s shoulder. The safe still yawned open.

  ‘Norton?’ Jacobs said.

  Austin seemed to shake himself awake, shivering like a wet dog. A vape pen now lay on the blotter. My bet? He’d been sucking on it to ease the tension. ‘Can the day get any worse?’ he said.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Jacobs replied with a pointed look at me. It telegraphed plain as day: Thanks, Hannah, you can go now.

  Reluctantly, I took the hint. ‘I’ll leave you to it, then. If you need me, I’ll be up in my room.’

  After Jacobs closed the office door behind me, I briefly considered lurking around outside, spying in the old-fashioned way with a drinking glass pressed between my ear and the door. But I was eager to log on to my laptop and see what I could find out about Daniel Fischel, aka Daniel Morecroft-Hill. If the Bell House crime wave continued at the current rate, I’d discover the man’s true identity before Detective Joseph Jacobs did, unless he already had his people working on it.

  On the way to my room, I stopped in the kitchen to bring Marilyn up to date, as promised. She had finished with the cucumbers and was using an old-fashioned peeler to convert a carrot into a pile of decorative curls. I pulled out a stool and cozied up to her at the counter. Before saying anything, I snitched a carrot curl and popped it into my mouth. ‘May I?’

  ‘You already did.’ She considered me for a moment, then added, ‘So, what’s going on in there?’

  ‘The safe’s been robbed.’

  Marilyn dropped the peeler. It seemed to leap from her hand to skid away, spinning, clattering, across the spotless tile floor. ‘What? But that’s impossible.’

  ‘Impossible or not,’ I said, ‘it happened. Maybe there’s a Houdini among the guests.’

  ‘Not funny, Hannah.’

  ‘I’m sorry. That was insensitive of me.’

  Marilyn stared at me for so long without saying anything that I grew uncomfortable. I wished I could read her mind. ‘This looks really good,’ I said in an attempt to crack the ice. ‘Is it lunch?’

  That elicited a smile – lackluster, but I’d take it. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Once I’ve added tomatoes, it’ll be finished with a lightly infused basil pesto dressing, to accompany the broccoli-and-cannabis quiche.’

  ‘Sounds delicious,’ I said, helping myself to another plain, unenhanced carrot curl. ‘Is there anything for the guests who don’t do edibles?’

  ‘Of course,’ Marilyn said with measured patience, as if she’d answered the question a hundred times, which she probably had. ‘I always try to accommodate the dietary needs of our guests, no matter how peculiar. Vegan, vegetarian, lactose-free, gluten-free, peanut allergies …’ She sighed wearily. ‘Everybody’s got some sort of restriction these days. Had a couple last month that ate only raw foods.’ Marilyn bent down to retrieve her runaway peeler. When she straightened up, she said, ‘Answer me this: are olives raw food?’

  I pondered the question for a moment. ‘Only if they’re not canned?’

  She rinsed the peeler under the hot-water tap and shook it dry. ‘A point scored for you, Hannah Ives.

  ‘But, you were asking me about edibles,’ she continued. ‘I always prepare cannabis-free versions of the dishes. I need to eat, and so does the housekeeper. It may surprise you to know that I don’t partake of my own infusions.’

  Actually, that didn’t surprise me. As chef, she had a job to do. I suppressed a grin, imagining a stoned chef careening around the kitchen, brandishing an oversized carving knife and toodleing ‘Save the liver!’ like a Saturday Night Live television skit. ‘That’s probably just as well,’ I said, returning to the kitchen at hand. ‘You wouldn’t want to mistake the salt for the sugar.’

  ‘There really isn’t any danger of overdosing, you know,’ Marilyn said with Martha Stewart-like cool. ‘The infusions are, as I said, light, and the dinner meal is spread out over a considerable period of time. The worst that will happen is a pleasant buzz. You know what I like about it?’ she added after a thoughtful pause. ‘There’s something for everybody. Mark King doesn’t drink, you may have noticed, but his wife, Cindy, does. So by coming here, they can both enjoy themselves.’

  ‘Maybe you’ve talked me into it,’ I said cautiously. ‘After all that’s happened today, I could totally use the full Happy Daze Experience.’

  Marilyn beamed. ‘You won’t be sorry.’ After a moment, she added in a more serious tone, ‘Do you think that Daniel’s death and this robbery are connected?’

  ‘It seems a highly unlikely coincidence.’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s just so hard to take in.’

  ‘Other than Austin,’ I said, quickly moving past the tear-inducing potential of Daniel Fischel, ‘who do you think might have the combination to the safe?’

  ‘Gosh, no one. Austin guards it like it’s the Hope Diamond or something.’

  ‘Not even the security people?’

  ‘Especially the security people.’ She began to decorate the rim of the platter with carrot curls. ‘Everybody thinks just because Austin dresses like a hippie and grows weed that he has to be laid-back and chill. He is, about most things, but he’s positively obsessed with that safe. Not even Desiree knows the combination.’

  ‘That’s what Austin told me, but I didn’t really believe him.’

  ‘Oh, it’s true all right.’ Wielding the peeler, she attacked another carrot. ‘And he changes the combination every week or so. Makes a big production out of it.’

  ‘Really? You can do that? That safe is over one hundred years old.’

  ‘Oh, absolutely you can. It never would have worked for old Fannie Bell, the original owner, otherwise.’ She paused, mid-curl. ‘She outlived three husbands, Hannah, and it was all her money, not theirs. No way she was going to give them access to it.’

  ‘So, how do you do it?’ I asked, genuinely curious. ‘Change the combination, that is?’

  Marilyn shrugged. ‘Dunno. But Austin does it for sure. Shuts everyone out of his office. Takes a bit of time, too. You’ll have to ask him.’

  I said I would.

  ‘She lived to be ninety-eight,’ Marilyn said dreamily.

  ‘Who? Fannie?’

  A sly grin crept over the chef’s face. ‘Fortunately, while on her deathbed, Fannie gave her granddaughter the combination. The woman had been hovering around for days, fetching and toting, sucking up to Fannie. She expected jewels, I think, or piles of cash, but when she opened the safe she was sorely disappointed.’

  Finished with the carrots, Marilyn selected a plump, ripe tomato from a bowl, steadied it on the cutting board and began slicing it thinly.

  ‘So what was in Fannie’s safe?’ I asked. ‘It’s cruel to keep me in suspense!’

  Marilyn kept slicing. ‘All she found were love letters, tied up in bundles. Greedy bitch was fifty years old, waiting all that time for Granny to die, and all she got was a bunch of old letters.’ After a moment, she added, ‘She got Bell House, though. Then Desiree’s dad bought it from her.’

  I flashed back to a horrific train wreck in Washington, DC and to a box of love letters that had accidentally fallen into my hands, changing my life and the lives of several other
people forever. ‘What happened to the letters, Marilyn?’

  ‘I heard they went to the Denver Public Library’s western history archives,’ she said. ‘But that was a long time ago.’

  Marilyn had finished with the tomatoes. She tipped the knife and the cutting board into the sink, then headed for the refrigerator. As she rummaged around the top shelf, muttering to herself and looking for something, I took the time to read the day’s menu written on the chalkboard. The quiche and veggies lunch was purposely light, I figured, because of the no-holds-barred, five-course gourmet dinner scheduled for that evening as part of our package. Arnold Palmers, I read, followed by Spinach/Strawberry Salad and Rib-Eye with Chile Relleno. ‘Is dinner still on?’ I wondered aloud as my eyes skimmed to the bottom of the list: Dark Chocolate Ganache Torte. My stomach rumbled.

  ‘Of course,’ Marilyn said, emerging triumphant from the bowels of the refrigerator holding a jar of what looked like capers. ‘All bought and paid for. We’ve never had to cancel a dinner, not even when the power went out during the blizzard last March.’ After several unsuccessful attempts to unscrew the lid, she handed it to me. ‘We had almost twenty inches of snow. In March!’

  I wrapped my hand around the stubborn lid and gave it several savage twists. ‘I was just wondering, because of Daniel …’

  Marilyn’s eyes glistened. She blinked rapidly.

  ‘I’m sure he didn’t suffer, Marilyn.’

  She started to say something but a timer buzzed, making us both jump. ‘The soup!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘We’re having soup, too?’ I asked, giving the caper jar another go. This time the lid turned easily.

  ‘Cream of celery,’ Marilyn called over her shoulder as she raced to the stove and twisted a knob. ‘You’ll try this, surely. Only ten milligrams of TCH in a serving. You’ll hardly notice.’

  I laughed. ‘I think I need to keep my wits about me. Work to do, sadly.’

  ‘A little pot can unlock your creativity,’ Marilyn said, stirring the mixture slowly.

  ‘It’d put me straight to sleep, Marilyn. I’ve been up since three.’

  ‘Nothing a bit of indica couldn’t cure. Ask Austin for some Grandaddy Purple. It’ll help you rest.’