Death in Detail

by Andrew Stanek

  Felix began to pace.

  “And why shouldn’t she? After all, she was in a house filled with people who had never concealed their hatred for her, nor she them, for that matter. You had a furious exchange of insults the previous night. Some of you even expressed your desire to see her dead, and you all stood to gain. Stephanie, you had been terrorized by your aunt for a very long time, and you were the person closest to her, with unfettered access to all her food and drink and pills. Perhaps your patience with her finally ran out and you decided to do her in.”

  Stephanie looked horrorstruck by the very idea. Felix went on.

  “Jasper, most people would consider your life remarkable, maybe even impressive, but your aunt thought of it as being worthless. Shortly before her death, she insulted what you considered the greatest accomplishment of your life. Everest claimed the life of one of your companions, but she dismissed the world’s greatest mountain without another thought. Could her disrespect for the hardships you suffered on that dangerous slope have driven you to murder?”

  “No!” Jasper declared. Felix ignored him.

  “Diane, you have some sort of obsession with your aunt’s diamond necklace. Your single-minded fixation on this object borders on an illness, and you have already demonstrated it was more important to you than your aunt’s life. Maybe you killed her for the sake of a little gold and a lifeless gem.”

  Diane tutted. “I could have just stolen the necklace, you know.”

  “Indeed, and that very idea entered the head of your Aunt’s old ward, Gloria. I have gone to some length to try to deduce why you engaged Chester to steal that necklace, Gloria?”

  “Me? Steal?” Gloria said, her cheeks going scarlet. “Never! Chester must be lying to you.”

  “Oh, I think Chester has told me more than a few lies, bundled in with a number of truths. Chester, the drunk, the druggie, the gambler, the thief, the failure, who alone among all of you has medical experience. He’s the most likely suspect. He certainly is not above letting others take the blame for his crimes, as he let the maids take the blame when he took to pawning objects from the house.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Henry said. “I only took a few things. Who’s to say the maids weren’t stealing, like Auntie said?”

  Felix shrugged, and then paced back to the front of the room. “Indeed, even the maids might have had cause to kill your Aunt Agatha. So we see that your Aunt Agatha died, unloved, hated by everyone around her, and, of course, murdered. A few hours ago, I deduced how she died but struggled to grasp the why. The only person I was reasonably certain did not kill Agatha is Henry, because I believe this crime has a brilliance to it, while his attempt on her life was conducted with haphazard stupidity. Admitting to attempted murder as a blind to conceal actual murder is nothing short of lunacy, so I could only safely say that Henry didn’t kill his aunt. And so I have the most reason to believe his story, of grinding up the pills into his aunt’s tomato soup.”

  Jasper shot Henry a very critical look, while Chester gave a low cackle.

  “Henry!” Gloria exclaimed. “You wicked, wicked man.”

  “Hank tried to kill her?” Diane said, looking both surprised and faintly amused. “Hank? Always the uptight, straightlaced one wearing a suit? The world does have irony in it.”

  “Realizing that his attempt to kill his aunt had failed led me to understand how the murder was committed, and this in turn allowed me to deduce the why. It will be easier to explain the other way around, starting with the why, and then leading into the how. First, how would you describe your aunt?”

  “Dead,” said Chester immediately, with a cackle.

  “Insane,” Jasper muttered.

  “Insufferable,” Diane piped in.

  “Racist,” murmured Stephanie.

  Felix held up a silencing hand.

  “Ah, there we have it. Racist. She definitely was that. She wouldn’t allow any non-white servants into the house, her family looked down on Stephanie’s mother, who married a latino man, and when she found out that one of her maids had a latino ancestry, however distant and vague, she immediately began to suspect that maid of household misdeeds. I believed that her racism was fixated on latinos, which is not itself odd, but I began to suspect something was strange when Jasper told me that Agatha had forbade him to scale Mount Aconcagua, in Chile. I realized then that she had an unusual attitude towards South and Central America, since racism usually does not extend to geography, and so I began to look into the family’s history.”

  He produced the small locket and flipped it open, placing it on the table so everyone could see its contents.

  “This is a locket, which I believe Henry knocked to the floor during his haphazard and ill-fated search of his Aunt Agatha’s room on the night of her death. And this -” he opened the locket, revealing the picture of the baby boy “-is the uncle none of you ever knew. He was your Aunt Agatha’s eldest brother, William. He died in early childhood.” Felix looked at the picture sadly for a second, then sighed.

  “What does this have to do with the murder?” Jasper asked, squinting at the picture.

  “It has everything to do with your family history, which I think is necessary to understanding the murder. Something Alders said to me about your Aunt - ‘an old-timey woman sitting in her old-timey house with old-timey things murdered with old-timey drugs’ - made me think that this murder had a historical aspect to it. Stepping over the threshold of this house is like stepping into the past. Your Aunt surrounded herself with the past and clung to it. She was living in the past, and knowing that past is critical to a full understanding of the murder. Now, where was I?” Felix closed his eyes in thought for a long time and then reopened them. “Ah yes. The Bellinger Fruit Company...”

  “In 1912, a conglomerate of American fruit companies hired a mercenary army to overthrow the elected government of Honduras and install a puppet dictator. From 1912 to around 1933, these American corporations essentially ran Honduras. This regime, under which thousands of people were enslaved and killed, is today affectionately called a ‘banana republic.’ The government began to sell large sections of the country to these American fruit companies as ‘concessions,’ where the corporation operated tax free and was essentially a law unto itself. They imported foreign workers and displaced local populations, seized land from small farmers, and compelled people to work for them for nothing more than a pittance. Though I guarantee much worse has been done in corporate concessions, it is nonetheless a dark chapter in our history.”

  Felix paused, glancing down the hallway, where a mustachioed portrait hung slightly askew in the hall.

  “Enter your ancestor, Sebastian Virgil Bellinger. You know him only from his portrait in the hallway, which Henry unsuccessfully tried to dislodge, but a hundred years ago he was a fruit magnate. He and his Bellinger Fruit Company purchased a concession in Honduras. Most of his company’s production was from that concession, so he moved to Honduras with his family to better oversee the operation. Your Aunt Agatha spent her youngest years in Honduras.”

  Again, Felix paused, then reached into his jacket and produced an old, black leatherbound book with the title “Banana Republic - Fruit Politics in Pre-War Honduras,” splashed in golden letters.

  “I found this book in the library. It tells the story of the Bellinger Fruit Company. The company thrived in Honduras. Everything they grew thrived, not just bananas.” He opened the book, showing them black and white photographs of vast rows of fruits and vegetables, in plantation style. “Tellingly, the one crop they couldn’t produce was tomatoes.” A different full-page photograph with the caption, “Failure of the Bellinger Tomato Plantation,” showed a desolate field. “But by in large, the Bellinger Fruit Company was highly successful, and your grandfather made his fortune there. However, there was resistance to corporate rule in Honduras. On seven separate occasions, the US Army intervened in Honduras to quell unrest related to the influence of fruit interests on their politics. This book
tells the story that your Aunt never told you. In 1925, a bomb exploded in Sebastian Virgil’s car. He, his wife, and his daughter survived the explosion. His six-year-old son did not.”

  Jasper, who had been examining the locket, dropped it. Gloria gasped and clapped her hands to her mouth.

  Felix sighed heavily and continued.

  “Of course, after that Sebastian Virgil moved back to the United States. He and his wife probably never recovered from the loss of their son, and your Aunt Agatha would spend the rest of her life fearing and hating Latin America and everything to do with it. Honduras would nationalize your company’s concession after the war, leaving you only with the import/export business, and your Aunt never mentioned Honduras again.” He picked up the the locket. “Everything in this house has a story. Now you know this locket’s story. Its story, littered with blood and murder, has reached up through history and created a murder in the present. So you understand the why, and now it is time for the how, which will, finally, lead us to the who.”

  “I thought you said Henry did it?” Chester asked.

  “No,” Felix answered politely. “Forgive me for saying so, but I really can see how you failed medical school, Chester, if your comprehension is this poor. I said Henry failed to kill his aunt. He has confessed. He stole the bottle of parabarbital, ground up the pills with a mortar and pestle, and poured them into his aunt’s soup, which she ate the next day, yet she did not die.”

  “Henry could be lying,” Diane pointed out. “What about that hair I found on his jacket? He could be protecting a lady friend.” She squinted at the maids.

  Felix dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “The hair you found on Henry’s jacket was most likely Gloria’s. I should explain that in my trip to the library I investigated the Bellinger Trading Co. Several years ago, your warehouses were raided by customs, looking for contraband, on the suspicion that the company was smuggling illicit goods into the country. They never found any contraband, because it was not being stored at the warehouse. It was, instead, being stored at the food bank Gloria runs in the city, an idea I recently confirmed with a discrete inspection of the food bank not long ago. Bellinger Trading Co. imports the goods, Gloria stores and fences them at what I suspect is tremendous profit. I imagine you devised the scheme, Henry, shortly after inheriting the company and learning of its ongoing financial difficulty. It doesn’t surprise me overmuch. Gloria, your food bank was in similar monetary trouble. Now I think Bellinger Co. launders the money and donates your share to the food bank under the auspices of charity.”

  Gloria seemed to be slackjawed, while Henry had sunk even lower in his chair.

  “Of course,” Felix continued, “Gloria wanted the diamond necklace because she identified it as being of extremely great value when she saw it at the dinner, perhaps great enough to render much of this smuggling scheme unnecessary. She wanted Chester to steal it, so as to divert blame from herself when it was found missing, and then she could fence it, probably at fantastic profit. It wouldn’t be very hard to discredit Chester if he revealed her involvement, since you all see him as drunk and drugged up, while Gloria made a great show to me of not liking or wanting the necklace.”

  “It’s all true,” muttered Henry, now so low in his chair he seemed in danger of falling from it.

  “Yes, but don’t worry,” Felix said, giving him a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “The smuggling charge is nothing compared to the murder charge. Now, where was I with the murder? Yes, the death of your aunt. I will explain. Let’s go back to the night of your aunt’s birthday, which is when this poisoning began. Jasper arrives first. He sits down at the table. He has a clear view of the medicine cabinet, as do the maids in the kitchen. Henry arrives next, then Stephanie and Agatha, then Gloria and Diane, and then lastly Chester, but no one ever touches the medicine cabinet until very late. One by one, you go off to bed. At last, after everyone else has gone, Henry - now very drunk - takes the bottle of parabarbital from the medicine cabinet, crushes the pills, and dissolves them in the leftover tomato soup, which he expects his aunt to eat. He makes an unsuccessful attempt to vandalize the painting of Sebastian Virgil in the hallway, perhaps scuffing the painting somehow, and goes to bed. The next day his Aunt drinks that same tomato soup and does not die. Why?”

  “Well, she might not have died immediately, but that’s when she started getting worse,” Stephanie pointed out, sounding terrified.

  “Yes, but if she really had ingested the entire contents of the bottle, more than a hundred pills, she would have died. I have consulted her doctor, and the lethal dose for a woman of her age is far less than a hundred pills. A dozen could have easily killed her. So why didn’t she die? Before Henry’s confession, I was certain that the killer had administered the poison to her a few pills, a few doses at a time, covertly placed into her tea and food. That is what caused your aunt’s condition to worsen and worsen over time, creating a slow, long slide into death. Defeat in detail, as it were, rather than a single, massive defeat - and so I know your aunt believed this too. Consider something else as well. During the dinner, your aunt sprang up suddenly and without warning and stormed out of the room. Sudden, violent mood swings are a symptom of parabarbital, which acts on the central nervous system. So I believe that during dinner, someone had already begun to poison her. Knowing that, the fog over this case starts to clear. Henry’s attempt to poison Agatha failed because there was no parabarbital in the bottle. Someone had already removed it and replaced it. With these.”

  Felix reached into his pocket and fished out a second, small plastic bottle, this one full of pills, and put it down onto the table.

  “Statins,” Felix said. “Your aunt was also taking these. They are the same size and shape as parabarbital, but they are harmless statins. Certainly, a hundred-fold overdose of these drugs isn’t healthy, but it is not lethal. It will cause, at worst, muscle pain, cramps, and spasms, which is exactly what your aunt experienced the day she took the overdose Henry created for her.”

  “So, if the killer took the parabarbital and replaced it with statins so Auntie wouldn’t notice,” Stephanie said. “I understand that. Then the killer snuck the pills into Auntie’s tea and killed her?”

  Felix shook his head. “No. You have asked the wrong question. A much better question is right it front of you. This bottle is nearly full. If the statins were in the parabarbital bottle, then what is in the statins bottle?”

  There was a silence.

  “I have had the contents of this bottle tested and it is full of parabarbital,” Felix announced. “So now you see it - now you understand the simple brilliance of it - all the killer did was switch the contents of the two bottles, and nothing else. No grinding up the pills and dumping them into tea, no poisoning soup, nothing.”

  “But how did that kill Aunt Agatha?” asked Jasper with a frown.

  Another loud, heavy sigh escaped Felix.

  “Do you not see? Aunt Agatha took pills twice a day, as many people do, once in the morning, once in the evening. She was supposed to take parabarbital just once a week, but statins twice a day. It’s long been known in medical fraternities, as Chester will testify, that an overdose does not need to be administered all at once to kill people, particularly in the elderly. A series of small, frequent doses will serve the same effect. The drug is not metabolized quickly enough, and it will accumulate and accumulate in the bloodstream until it reaches lethal levels. This is how your Aunt Agatha died. After Henry made his clumsy attempt on her life and she noticed the empty bottle, Agatha began to watch her food and drink carefully. She picked her own food and stopped taking her tea, watching so closely, so guarded against the possibility of poison - never realizing that she, who so meticulously and carefully counted out her own pills and medication, was poisoning herself! Twice a day she was taking parabarbital, which she thought to be statins, her condition deteriorating until she died, and the murderer did not have to raise a finger. Death in Detail.”

  Felix,
breathing hard, stared around at the nine astonished faces.

  “Don’t you see the brilliance of it? Genius, and practically undetectable. Even if it were somehow discovered, it could be passed off as pharmacist error, with the idea that the person who filled the prescriptions got the bottles confused.”

  “How do you know it isn’t that kind of error?” Alders asked.

  “I know because I checked,” Felix said with a glance at his partner. “The video cameras at the pharmacy confirm what the fingerprints on the bottles suggest: the two prescriptions were filled by two different people, making it all but impossible that the pills could have been swapped by the pharmacist. And the toxicology report on Agatha confirm that she had elevated levels of statins in her blood, consistent with an overdose administered earlier. I am quite sure that my version of events is correct.”

  “So Chester killed her?” Diane asked.

  Chester started.

  “I didn’t-”

  “I don’t blame you for it, Ches,” Diane said, glancing at her nails. “I might have done it myself if it occurred to me. I was only asking.”

  “No,” Felix said calmly. “Chester did not kill your aunt. Have you already forgotten what I told you about Honduras and the Bellinger Fruit Company? No, the murderer could not have been Chester because his fingerprints were not on the bottle.”

  “He could have been wearing gloves,” Alders muttered to Felix.

  “Ah, yes Sam, but no one was wearing gloves that night, were they? Merely a guess... but I think you’ll find, a correct one on my part. Also, Jasper, Stephanie, Henry, and both the maids had full view of the medicine cabinet for the whole evening, and they all say he didn’t go anywhere near it. How could he, or anyone else, have switched the pills during dinner?”