Shots in the Dark

by Allyson K. Abbott

  The synesthetic reactions I had to the smells proved the hardest to ignore because there were so many different aromas mingling and mixing together, many of them quite strong. The salty smell of fish mixed with the fragrant aroma of freshly ground coffee, and the sugary smell of just-baked cookies mingled with the perfumed scent of hothouse flowers. Since all the shops were basically open stalls of some sort, all the smells were free to infiltrate the building. On top of that, there were the people smells: perfumes, shampoos, aftershaves, laundry detergents, even the occasional whiff of body odor. Given that each of these smells triggered either a sound or a physical sensation in me, it was a constant struggle to dampen my senses and stay focused.

  The last letter I received, the one that led to Gary’s death, had contained a number of small items—a tiny portion of a map, magazine clippings with pictures of a faucet and a Broadway marquee, fish scales, a single flower petal, some ground cinnamon, a piece of coffee-soaked filter paper, a tiny piece of green terry cloth that had been soaked in wine, and a small piece of bread—multiple clues that, when put together, pointed to the Public Market. But Cora and I had put them together in a way that seemed to point to another location, a local church. By the time we realized our mistake and I headed for the market, time had run out.

  Even though it was too late to save Gary, I desperately wanted to get my hands on the next clue. Over the past two days I’d been thinking about how to go about this task, and I knew I needed to start with the market vendors. I had no way of knowing if any of them were the target the letter writer had singled out, but based on past experience with the clues and the fact that the vendors were the one constant during the window of time I’d been given in the letter, I assumed one of them would prove to be key. Several specific vendors had been referenced in the clues, and I figured I’d start with them first. Duncan’s surreptitious analysis of those clues using the police lab had uncovered some flower pollen mixed in with the cinnamon, something that might have been intentional or accidental. If it was intentional, it meant the florist shop was referenced more than the other shops, so I decided to start there. Granted, it was little more than a hunch, but I had to start somewhere, and it made as much sense as anything else.

  The florist shop was located near the spice store, so my olfactory senses were working overtime as I approached. A white-haired, grandmotherly type woman was standing behind the counter, and she smiled warmly at me as I hobbled up.

  “You look like you could use a little something to brighten up your day,” she said, no doubt in preparation for her sales pitch. Her voice triggered a citrusy taste in my mouth.

  I smiled back and gave her a half nod of agreement. I had a backstory I’d used when I’d approached others about the clues, and since it had worked before, I decided to stick to it. “I do need something, but I’m not sure exactly where it is, and I may be too late. There’s this scavenger hunt game I participate in online. Well, you sign up for it online, but the hunt part is in the real world. Anyway, you get these clues that are delivered to people and places out and about, and you have to decipher the clues in a limited amount of time in order to get the next clue. My last clue led me here, but on the way I was hit by another car, which ran a stop sign, and I ended up with this.” I waved a hand toward my leg. “Because of that, I missed my deadline, but I’m hoping someone might still have my next clue. Any chance you had a package delivered here to your shop with instructions to give it to someone who looked like me or to someone with the name Mackenzie Dalton?”

  The woman gave me a bemused smile. “Are you saying someone bought you flowers that you’re supposed to pick up here?”

  “No. I don’t think so. It would be an envelope of some sort.” I wasn’t certain of this, but that was the format used with the previous connections, so I was inclined to believe this one would be the same.

  “Sorry, honey, but I don’t have anything like that.”

  “You didn’t receive a package or an envelope of some sort with instructions to destroy it if it wasn’t picked up by a certain time?”

  Her smile never wavered, but there was a wary look in her eye, which told me she was beginning to think I might not be firing on all cylinders. “Sorry,” she said with an apologetic smile and a shrug.

  One of the perks of my synesthesia—though some might call it a quirk—is that I can often tell if people are lying. My synesthetic reaction to the sound of their voice changes in some way. But in order to use it, I have to have a baseline lie for comparison, something I know is an untruth. I thought about asking the woman to lie to me on purpose, but I couldn’t think of a way to broach the subject without her thinking I was a lunatic. Momentarily stymied, I decided to let it pass for now and to come back to her later if I struck out with the other vendors.

  I thanked her and moved on to the neighboring spice shop. A woman who looked to be in her late forties was standing behind a small desk.

  “Can I help you find something?” she asked with a sales-friendly smile. Her voice triggered the taste of coffee with an underlay of cinnamon, although the cinnamon taste might have come from a real smell. Sometimes I can’t tell my synesthetic experiences from the real ones.

  “Perhaps, Trudy,” I said, reading her name tag. I repeated my story about the scavenger hunt, my accident, and how I’d missed my deadline. As I talked, her demeanor shifted 180 degrees. Her smile faded, her body language screamed wariness, and the way she chewed on her lip told me she was nervous. I feared she recognized me from some of the recent news coverage.

  “Any chance you received an envelope or a package with instructions to destroy it after a certain time if no one claimed it?” I asked.

  Trudy crossed her arms over her chest and narrowed her eyes at me. She was chewing on a piece of gum, and her cheek muscles twitched and popped as she chomped on it. “I didn’t get any unusual package,” she said, and the taste of her voice turned burnt and bitter, like coffee that’s been left on the heat too long. Even without this synesthetic cue, I knew she was lying just from her body language. What I didn’t know was why, but what she said next gave me a good idea. “I told those cops who came around Thursday the same thing.”

  I cursed under my breath but continued to smile warmly, hoping to put her at ease. Duncan was part of the investigative team looking into Gary’s death, and since Gary’s body had been found in his car, which had been parked in the Public Market lot, Duncan had volunteered to do the market queries, hoping he might get a lead on the letter writer.

  “Cops?” I said, looking and sounding amused and befuddled. “They don’t have anything to do with this. It’s just a game I play.”

  “I don’t know anything about any game,” she said, tight-lipped.

  “Are there other employees who work here? Maybe someone else got it.”

  She didn’t respond right away, and when she finally did, it wasn’t an answer to my question. It was verification of my earlier fear. “You’re that bar owner who’s been on the news,” she said. “That man they found here the other night, the one that was killed, he worked for you, didn’t he?”

  I knew at that point there was little to be gained by continuing my ruse, so I bowed my head and sighed. “Yes, I’m that woman,” I said. “And yes, Gary worked for me.”

  “Sorry for your loss,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. Her face was set and determined. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have work to do.”

  She turned and started to move away from me, but I grabbed her sleeve to stop her. “Please,” I said in my best pleading tone. She glared pointedly at my hand on her sleeve, and I let it go. “Look, I’m sorry I lied to you about my reason for inquiring. All I can tell you is that I’m not working for or with the police, and any package that might have come here for me is private, personal, and extremely important.”

  Something in how I looked or sounded must have broken through her determination, because her stony expression softened a tad. But she wasn’t softened enough. She slowly s
hook her head, her arms still crossed over her chest. “Sorry. I can’t help you.”

  Feeling frustrated, I shifted gears. “I know you got a letter,” I said. “And I know you’re lying to me about it. I don’t want to play hardball with you, but you have to understand how important this is. It’s literally a matter of life and death.” At that point, the pain and guilt I felt over Gary’s death overwhelmed me, and tears flooded my eyes. I glanced around to see if anyone was in earshot, and then leaned in closer. “Gary died because I didn’t get here in time to get that letter. I need to get to the bottom of this. Please, help me, Trudy.”

  A standoff ensued as Trudy eyed me with indecision. “You swear you’re not working with the cops?” she said after several long seconds.

  “I swear.” I held up one hand to affirm my words. Then I positioned both hands so that it looked like I was praying, feeling a glimmer of hope. “Please,” I begged.

  She sighed, looked around the same way I had a moment ago, and then in a low voice she said, “I did get something. A large envelope was propped up against my door when I went to leave for work last Sunday.” The taste of her voice at this point was smooth and mellow, like a light-roast coffee. I felt certain she was being honest with me now.

  “You mean at your home?”

  She nodded.

  “What did it look like?”

  “It was a plain manila envelope with my name written on it in big block letters. No address or anything. Inside the outer envelope was a note and another, smaller envelope, one of those number ten business-size things. The second envelope didn’t have anything written on it.”

  “The note was instructions to you, yes?”

  She nodded, and something about her expression told me she was holding something back. I took a stab at what it might be.

  “There was money in the envelope, too, right? Money for you?”

  She hesitated a second or two before nodding.

  “That’s fine,” I said, smiling. “I have no interest in the money.”

  Her shoulders relaxed.

  “What were your instructions?”

  “The note said I was supposed to hand the envelope over to a woman named Mackenzie Dalton if she came asking for it. If you didn’t show by eight o’clock Wednesday night, I was supposed to take the envelope home and burn it in my fireplace without opening it.”

  “And did you do that?” I asked, praying she hadn’t.

  To my chagrin, she nodded. “I was curious about it,” she admitted. “I thought maybe it was some kind of secret note between lovers involved in a tryst or something.” She scoffed and shook her head. “I’m a hopeless romantic at times. But then I started thinking it might be something darker, like drugs, or even a poison of some sort. What a perfect way to murder someone, right?” she said with a half grin. Then she seemed to realize how inappropriate that comment might be, and she winced. “Sorry. I didn’t mean . . .”

  “It’s okay,” I said with a little smile. I reached over and patted her arm as extra reassurance. “Can you tell me anything else about the outer envelope? Or the handwriting? Was there anything distinctive about any of it?”

  She thought a moment but shook her head. “The envelopes were the same kind you can buy at any grocery or office supply store. And the writing was block printing . . . with a felt-tipped marker, I think. My name was on the outer envelope, and the instructions in the note were written out in the same block letters.”

  “Did it have both your first and last name on it?”

  She nodded, looking a little worried. I assumed she was just now realizing the implications this had. Someone was dead because of that letter, and whoever had written it and sent it knew her full name and address.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  She shook her head, still looking concerned. Her gaze cast anxiously about, as if she thought someone might be lurking nearby, ready to kill us both. When she finally looked back at me, she said, “I’m sorry about your friend.” Her voice tasted sincere.

  “Thank you.”

  Then she finally voiced her fears. “Am I in any kind of trouble or danger with this thing?”

  I didn’t know if she was worried about legal trouble or something more sinister, but it didn’t matter either way. I shook my head and gave her a reassuring smile. “Other people before you have received packages. The person sending them has been picking people more or less at random, I think. You were nothing more than a conduit.”

  As I said this, I started wondering about how the letter writer chose those conduits and knew so much about the recipients. That gave me an idea that imbued me with a renewed sense of hope. I thanked Trudy for her honesty, promised again that our conversation would go no further, and then bought a bottle of seafood seasoning as both a gesture of goodwill and a way to explain why we’d just spent several minutes in conversation.

  I don’t think it did much to reassure her because as I left, I felt her worried stare following me down the aisle.

  Chapter 3

  I stopped at another shop to buy some cheeses I could use in my bar kitchen before I made my way back to my car. The return drive was as slow as the drive to the market, and my trek from my parking place to the bar—two blocks away was the closest I could get—was just as treacherous, and complicated by the bag of purchases I had to carry as I crutched my way along. The warmth of the bar was a welcome relief, and after briefly greeting the staff on duty out front, I headed into the kitchen to drop off my cheeses and spices. During the week my main full-time cook was Jon, a new hire I’d brought on when my longtime cook, Helmut, quit after his wife threatened to leave him if he didn’t. She felt two murders in less than a year’s time made my bar a dangerous workplace, the likes of which OSHA was unable to fix. I couldn’t blame her for her concerns, and to be honest, Helmut had been well past retirement age and kind of set in his ways. Every time I made any changes to the menu, it seemed to overwhelm him. So while I missed the old curmudgeon at times, I wasn’t sorry to see him go. So far Jon had proven to be a good fit.

  On the weekends and some evenings, I had another new hire working part-time as cook: Rich Zeigler, a UW grad student who was studying sociology and had a flair for creating dishes that lived up to his first name. At the moment, Rich was on duty, whipping up a couple of pizzas.

  “Hey, Rich,” I said, showing him the cheeses I’d bought. I had the seafood seasoning in my pocket, intending to keep it for myself. “I thought you might like to experiment with these.”

  “Sweet,” he said, eyeing the goods with a smile. “I bet that horseradish cheddar would be kick-ass on a burger, maybe even on a pizza. Stick them in the fridge, and I’ll see what I can do with them later.”

  “It’s busy today,” I said, putting away the cheeses. “Are you managing okay?”

  “I’m doing fine,” he said.

  “Holler at me if you need any help.”

  He waved me away with a wink and a pshaw.

  I went into my office, shed my coat, and called Duncan. He didn’t answer, so I left a voice message for him to call me and headed back out to the bar.

  It was early afternoon, but because it was a Saturday and lots of people were out and about doing their holiday errands, the place was hopping. My evening and weekend bartender, Billy Hughes, was behind the bar, working his drink-mixing magic. Billy was a law student at the U of W in Milwaukee, and with his dark skin, green eyes, and charming personality, he was also a chick magnet and good for drawing in business. He and Debra Landers, my full-time day waitress, were my most reliable and trusted employees.

  “Sorry I had to slip out for a bit,” I said to Billy. “How’s it going?”

  “It’s a bit crazy without Gary here,” he said. “But I’m managing. Debra has stepped behind the bar a few times to help. And that new waitress you hired, Linda, is doing better.”

  “Good.” Linda had been a slow starter, but I’d asked the other staff members to give her more time to see if she could get
up to speed. Each day she seemed to do a little better. “I hope Linda continues to do well. I get the sense she really wants and needs this job.”

  “Speaking of needing a job,” Billy said, “I don’t suppose you’ve had time to start interviewing replacements for Gary? I know it seems a little crude to be asking so soon after. . . .”

  He didn’t finish his comment. He didn’t need to. “No, I haven’t,” I said with an apologetic smile. “But I’m on it. I looked over some applications this morning.”

  “I know someone who might be a good fit,” Billy said. “He’s a friend of mine, an art student whose parents are cutting off their financial support because they want him to pursue a career with more potential.” He made little air quotes around the word potential. “He’s a big guy, like six-six and three hundred pounds, and he worked for a time as a waiter and bartender at a country club when he was right out of high school.”

  “Tell him to come in and talk to me. What’s his name?”

  “Theodore Berenson. We all call him Teddy or, if we’re giving him a hard time, Teddy Bear.”

  “Berenson? Is he related to Harley Berenson, the shipping magnate?”

  “One and the same,” Billy said. “Harley is his father. But Teddy’s not stuck up like the rest of the family. He’s just a regular guy, a hard worker, and desperate to make some money.”

  “Okay, then. Let me know when he can come in and talk.”