Mile High Murder

by Marcia Talley

  ‘Maybe they will and maybe they won’t, but you are honor-bound to face up to your responsibility here.’ I decided to twist the screws a little tighter. ‘They have your photograph, Colin. Do you want to come back to Denver on your own terms, or wait until your picture gets plastered all over the Internet and there’s an ABP out for your arrest?’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘As someone once said, it’s all messy. The hair, the bed, the heart … and life.’

  FIFTEEN

  The addict has delusions of persecution or of measureless grandeur. Speaking of the latter delusion, Dr Palmer writes that in India, under its influence, your servant is apt to make you a grand salaam instead of a sandwich, and offer you an houri when you merely demanded a red herring.

  Emily F. Murphy, ‘Janey Canuck’, The Black Candle, Toronto, Thomas Allen, 1922, p.334.

  ‘Everything in moderation,’ my late mother used to say, ‘including moderation.’ I keenly missed Mom’s unflappable good humor as I waited in line behind Claire for my turn at the luncheon buffet Marilyn had prepared for the Bell House guests.

  Neatly printed tent cards identified each item, both high test and regular, and the infused items – soup, salad, quiche and brownies – were further labeled with their THC content per serving. When Claire moved past it to the quiche, I picked up a soup bowl and the ladle. I bent over the tureen and inhaled, delighting in the aroma. Only ten milligrams of THC per bowl. What harm could that do?

  With Daniel dead, Colin on the lam and Hugh and Phyllis downtown attending their friend’s wedding, our numbers were so reduced that Austin had taken a leaf out of the table so we wouldn’t have to use megaphones to converse with one another. Carrying soup in one hand and a plate of un-infused veggies in the other, I chose a seat opposite Claire and sat down. After a few minutes, Cindy and Mark joined us, followed by Josh. Like good hosts, Austin and Desiree had not joined the queue, choosing to wait until all of their guests had been served. ‘Is Lisa coming?’ Desiree asked when she noticed Josh was alone.

  ‘Here I am!’ Lisa breezed in, her ankle-length, lace-trimmed denim skirt flapping. She made a beeline for the buffet, where she trailed behind her husband, hovering over each offering like a timid helicopter. Desiree waited by her place at the head of the table, observing Lisa’s hesitancy with a look of quiet exasperation until Austin, picking up on his wife’s sour humor, sidled up next to Lisa and cajoled her along.

  Once we were all seated, I dug in. The celery soup went down easily, smooth and creamy, with a hint of lemon. I may have closed my eyes and moaned with pleasure.

  ‘Jah Kush,’ Austin explained, swallowing a spoonful of soup himself. ‘I like the woodsy overtones.’

  I took another spoonful and rolled it around on my tongue. ‘A hint of floral, too. Delicious.’

  Austin nodded. ‘Jah Kush is a hybrid, but leans toward sativa, so you’ll find it relaxing as well as curiously energizing. Perfect for lightweights like yourself, Hannah.’ He observed me for a moment, then added, ‘There’s plenty more soup. Help yourself.’

  I waved the offer away. Remembering my mind-blowing experience with the space cake in Amsterdam, I said with a grin, ‘Thanks, but it’s been a while. I should take it easy until I know how one serving will affect me.’

  From across the table, Josh said, ‘You know those Sleep Number beds?’

  ‘The ones where you dial in your comfort level?’ I asked, wondering where on earth the conversation was going.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘I’ve seen the ads,’ I admitted.

  ‘Well, I’ve got a number like that for weed. For general relaxing, I’m a fifty milligrams kind of dude. For pain relief, I go for seventy-five. If I want to sleep, I’ll up it to a hundred.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘Different strains have different effects, of course, depending on their balance between TCH and CBD.’

  ‘Spoken like a true cannasseur,’ Desiree said with a grin. ‘Austin, we should give the man a job.’

  Austin opened his mouth to say something, but Josh laughed off Desiree’s suggestion. ‘I already have a job, thank you.’

  Cindy regarded Josh over the rim of her wine glass. ‘I’m surprised you have that much opportunity to experiment in Podunk or wherever.’

  ‘Sulphur Rock,’ Josh corrected.

  ‘That, too,’ Cindy said. ‘You grow weed on the farm or something?’

  ‘I wish,’ Josh said. ‘They’re so conservative at Stafford that they conduct staff meetings in Aramaic.’ The dining room grew suddenly silent. ‘Joke,’ he added.

  ‘Not like Boston,’ Lisa said wistfully.

  ‘That’s where you’re from?’ I asked. ‘Boston?’

  Lisa nodded. ‘Josh went to school there.’

  A fire alarm began clanging in my head. I took aim and shot, directly from the hip. ‘Boston University has a great school of public health, doesn’t it?’

  And scored a bull’s eye.

  ‘Super good, but Josh was over at the medical school, doing graduate research on antibiotic drug resistance under a National Science Foundation grant.’ Lisa turned her head to beam proudly at her husband, who stared modestly at his plate.

  I took a bite of my stuffed celery and chewed thoughtfully.

  Confirmed.

  Both Daniel Morecraft-Hill and Josh Barton had attended the same university. But so had thirty-five thousand other students spread across multiple campuses.

  Both had degrees in biology.

  There had to be at least a twenty-year difference in their ages, though. What were the odds the two men had overlapped?

  And then I recalled the previous day’s ‘discussion’ I’d observed among the three of them at the weedery. A little too intense, I’d thought at the time, for folks who had just met. If they had known one another in a previous life, though, why not say so? I recalled my conversation with Lisa in the ladies’ room, where she’d remained tight-lipped. There had to be a reason. After lunch was over, I’d corner Lisa and press her about it.

  Thinking about the research paper Josh claimed to have been writing, I asked, ‘Is that why you’re studying fruit flies, Josh?’

  ‘Flies? Ugh,’ Cindy said. ‘I saw that movie. The one with Jeff Goldblum? Gross.’

  Josh frowned across the table. ‘When we finally cure Alzheimer’s, Cindy, you’ll probably have a fruit fly to thank.’

  ‘Why flies?’ asked Mark. As a former college gridiron star, I suspected that biology wasn’t his forte.

  Josh smiled. ‘They’re ideal for research,’ he explained, warming to his subject. ‘They’re smaller than mice, they eat less, they reach sexual maturity in around eight days and the anti-vivisectionists won’t be picketing your lab when you have to euthanize them.’

  ‘Poor flies,’ Claire said, then excused herself to revisit the buffet.

  I was considering going for seconds myself when Detective Jacobs shambled into the dining room. The man popped up so frequently that I suspected he’d pitched a tent somewhere on the premises.

  Desiree frowned, laid her fork down on her plate, crossed her knife over it then leaned back in her chair. ‘How can we help you, Detective?’

  Jacobs’ gaze swept the room, considering each of us in turn.

  I felt my face flush. I was still conflicted about Colin, but had resolved that if he hadn’t shown up by tomorrow morning, I’d pass his cell phone number – now safely saved in my own phone’s incoming calls directory – along to the police. I’d given the kid a chance to do the right thing. If he blew it – well, he deserved to be tracked down.

  As luck would have it, Jacobs settled on me. ‘You mentioned that Daniel took a picture of the group with his cell phone?’

  Tongue-tied, I began to panic. Had I imagined it? Then Lisa, bless her heart, chimed in. ‘Yeah, he took one. My hair looked a mess.’

  ‘Forensics has checked the victim’s iPhone. It’s not there now.’

  Austin waved for attention. ‘Actually, Detective, to be perf
ectly accurate, Daniel handed the phone to me and I took the picture. Several of them, in fact. I held my finger on the shutter so long it went into burst mode.’

  Jacobs wagged his head slowly. ‘We got photos of the weedery off his phone, but nothing that could be described as a group shot.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Maybe they were erased?’ the detective drawled.

  ‘What does it matter?’ Austin said. ‘I took photos of the group with my Nikon. I’ll be happy to download them for you.’

  ‘Maybe Daniel didn’t like the way he looked?’ Lisa cut in. ‘He had a paunch on him. Maybe his eyes were shut or something. He could’ve erased the photos himself.’

  ‘Not unless he did it after he was dead,’ Jacobs said dryly. His remark settled over the room like a shroud.

  Cindy was the first to break the silence. ‘Ohmahgawd,’ she breathed.

  I stared at Jacobs. Something wasn’t right. I’d owned an iPhone ever since June of 2007. With hundreds of other maniacs, I’d waited in a long, hot line at the Apple store for five hours in order to buy the first one. Apple probably wouldn’t hire me to staff the Genius Bar, but I did know a few things about how iPhones like Daniel’s worked. ‘Detective?’

  His eyes swiveled in my direction.

  ‘If the photos were erased,’ I asked, ‘how could you tell when they were taken?’

  A slow grin spread over his face. He tapped his nose. ‘A gold star for you, Mrs Ives.’

  Desiree shot daggers in his direction. ‘We have enough on our minds right now, Detective Jacobs. And we don’t appreciate being jerked around.’

  Jacobs held up a hand and bobbed his head apologetically. ‘I didn’t mean to mislead you.’

  Of course he did. He’d had his antennae up, his eyes on scan the whole time.

  Jacobs didn’t rush to explain, so I jumped in. ‘When you delete a photo from an iPhone, it doesn’t exactly go away, Desiree. It sits in an album called Recently Deleted for about thirty days. You just go to the album, select it and tap Recover.’

  ‘So, iPhone photos are time-stamped?’ Desiree mused. ‘Who knew?’

  ‘It’s stored in the EXIF data,’ her husband explained, rising from his chair. He faced Jacobs and added, ‘The photo I have is digital, too, of course. I’ll be happy to put it on a flash drive for you.’

  Jacobs nodded, then flapped a hand to wave him away on the errand.

  ‘Is there anything else, Detective?’ Desiree asked, each word a shard of ice.

  ‘Now that we have the security tapes, no. Thank you, Mrs Norton.’ Jacobs smiled, but made no move to go. The awkward silence was gradually broken by the clink of silverware against china as first Mark and then Josh resumed eating lunch.

  ‘Well, that was special,’ Lisa announced. She popped up from her chair and headed for the buffet.

  ‘Who’s up for dessert?’ Claire asked, leaving the table to follow Lisa.

  A minute later, Austin eased into the dining room from the kitchen, followed by the scream and hiss of the coffee machine. ‘Here you go,’ he said, and handed Jacobs a purple-and-white flash drive.

  Jacobs tucked the drive into his breast pocket, thanked him and finally, to everyone’s apparent relief, wandered away.

  Claire returned from the buffet just then balancing a dessert plate in one hand and a cup of coffee – infused! – in the other. She passed behind my chair, then leaned in between Desiree and me. ‘Brownie?’ she said, thrusting the plate in front of me. I counted four dark, moist brownie squares on it. ‘Only five milligrams each.’

  After saying yes to the soup, my canna-number stood at ten. Could I afford to up it to fifteen? I decided I could and took a brownie, setting it down on the rim of my salad plate.

  Claire sat down in her chair and tucked in. She devoured one brownie, then started on a second.

  ‘Hang on, Claire,’ I said. ‘One piece is enough, don’t you think?’

  She made a Hollywood production out of rolling her eyes. ‘But they’re so good!’

  ‘If someone offered you a single shot of expensive whisky, would you drink the whole bottle?’

  She set the second brownie down and pushed the plate toward the center of the table. ‘Sorry, you’re right. I’m just a teeny bit high.’

  ‘That’s what you get with edibles,’ Austin said, reaching for the plate from his seat at the head of the table. ‘You hear about the comedian who tweeted about the five stages of edibles?’

  I said I hadn’t.

  ‘Something like not high, not high, still not high, not high, then please get me to the emergency room.’

  ‘You got that wrong, dude,’ Josh said. ‘They don’t sell weed in the emergency room.’

  We shared a long laugh after that. We needed it.

  SIXTEEN

  The auditory sense is particularly distorted, which accounts for the not infrequent use of marihuana by members of ‘hot’ orchestras.

  Frederick T. Merrill, American Journal of Nursing, August, 1938.

  Catching up with Josh and Lisa after lunch turned out to be easier than I had expected.

  It was a warm, sunny afternoon and the patio beckoned. Claire had gone up to her room for a nap. With a canna-number of over sixty by my unofficial count, I wasn’t surprised.

  I found Josh and Lisa lounging side by side in teak deck chairs, taking turns with a glass-pipe bubbler. ‘May I join you?’ I asked.

  Lisa chuckled. ‘If you don’t mind our cooties.’

  I laughed, too, and sat down in a chair facing them. ‘I didn’t mean the pipe, Lisa.’

  ‘Totally OK if you did,’ she drawled. ‘We’re doing a bit of Grape Ape. Super relaxing.’

  Josh exhaled a thin stream of smoke. ‘Tastes like grapes.’

  With her eyes at half mast, Lisa disagreed. ‘More like gummy bears.’

  Soft jazz wafted in over the outdoor speakers. The sun warmed the back of my head. I relaxed into my chair, seduced by the easy sax of John Coltrane flirting with Thelonious Monk on piano. Whatever I’d come out on the patio to do could wait.

  ‘On KUSA just now?’ a woman shrieked, totally harshing on my mellow.

  I opened my eyes to see who it was: Cindy. Mark stood directly behind her, looking helpless, like he wished he had a leash to rein her in. ‘Cin just saw it on TV. She says the M.E. ruled Daniel’s death a homicide,’ he added matter-of-factly.

  ‘Well, duh,’ Josh said. ‘Everybody knows he was suffocated.’

  Cindy babbled on, ‘And did you hear that Daniel Fischel isn’t his real name? Ohmahgawd. My mind is totally blown.’

  Under the fabric of his polo shirt, Mark’s massive shoulders heaved. ‘Not his real name? Cindy, you’re shitting me.’ His eyes scanned our little group. ‘Pardon my French, ladies.’

  ‘Nobody had any idea he wasn’t who he said he was,’ I said. ‘Not even Austin and Desiree.’

  Cindy waved my comment away. ‘I call bullshit on that, Hannah. They must have seen his credit card.’

  ‘Desiree told the detective Daniel paid cash,’ I explained.

  ‘We know who he really was,’ Lisa volunteered.

  ‘Shut up, Lisa!’ Josh warned.

  Lisa turned to face him. ‘No, I won’t shut up! He was a horrible man and I’m glad he’s dead!’

  ‘I noticed the three of you arguing yesterday at the weedery,’ I said. ‘A few minutes before I ran into Lisa in the ladies’ room.’

  ‘It wasn’t an argument, exactly,’ Josh clarified, laying the glass pipe down on the table between them. ‘It was a Mexican standoff.’

  ‘Do you want to tell us about it?’ I asked.

  ‘Not really,’ Josh said in a none-of-your-business tone of voice. ‘We were upfront with the police about it, so that’s all that matters.’

  ‘I didn’t recognize him at first,’ Lisa said, ignoring her husband. ‘When we knew him at BU, he was a lot skinner. He had a shaggy beard and wore dorky wire-rim glasses, too. But, the minute I heard him la
ugh, oh, I knew then – I knew.’

  Josh reached out and laid a silencing hand on her knee, but she batted it away and barreled on. ‘Josh was Daniel’s research assistant. They were working together on something to do with bacteriophages and multi-drug resistance to antibiotics – I couldn’t begin to explain it to you – but the bottom line is that Daniel stole Josh’s research paper. He stole it outright and published it as his own. Josh was lead author on the paper, and he didn’t even get a co-author listing.’

  Josh sagged, as if he were somehow to blame for Daniel’s treachery. ‘You have to understand. Daniel was my thesis advisor. If I tried to go over his head, he could have screwed up my PhD big-time.’

  ‘We were popping champagne all over the place when Daniel left BU for a position at UNC,’ Lisa said. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’ Her face grew serious. ‘I never thought we’d see him again.’

  ‘You can imagine what we thought when he showed up here using a fake name,’ Josh said.

  ‘I was all “I know who you are and I know what you did,”’ Lisa intoned. ‘I really wanted to blow the whistle on the sonofabitch. But Daniel said that if we told you guys who he really was, he’d make sure that Stafford U found out what two of their prize professors were doing while on vacation.’

  ‘We’d be fired.’ Josh snapped his fingers. ‘Quick as that.’

  ‘Drug fiends, that’s us,’ Lisa added.

  ‘For sure,’ Josh said. ‘And he had a photograph to prove it.’

  Looking confused, Mark made a timeout gesture with his hands. ‘So, who is he then? Nobody’s saying.’

  I told him. ‘His real name is Daniel Morecraft-Hill.’

  Mark shrugged. Clearly the name meant nothing to him.

  ‘We’d heard that he’s some big muckety-muck at Churchill-Mills Tobacco Company,’ Lisa added.

  ‘Churchill-Mills!’ Mark exploded. ‘Damn them to hell!’

  Cindy grabbed his arms with both hands and tugged. ‘Sit down! Mark! Mark!’

  He shook her off. ‘I will not!’

  Mark began pacing the flagstones, muttering almost to himself, seemingly oblivious to us. ‘Sneaky bastard. I knew Churchill-Mills was up to no good. When they bought out Matthews, it was the beginning of the end. I told Matthews! I warned Cantwell!’