Sleuthing Women II

by Lois Winston

  Even though my mom had cleared Donald’s personal effects after he left home, years before he died of AIDS, the furniture was the same and Donald haunted the walls.

  On the maple bureau, Beanie had arranged his things—a black shaving kit, a starched white handkerchief, and Polident. On the nightstand beside the Habitrol sat two glasses of water, one, tinted blue, for his dentures and one to drink.

  I bent down and looked under the bed. A large flat box, wrapped in blue foil, squished down under my touch. Clothing?

  I carried it to the living room. Brandon had cranked back up to his frantic version of Santa Claus, and the group had decimated the gifts while I was gone. A few presents lingered under the tree. For Beanie, I supposed. Mom was salvaging bows and larger pieces of paper.

  “Here’s another one,” I said.

  “Where’d you find that?” Brandon asked.

  “Under Beanie’s bed.”

  “You went to the bathroom, huh?” Teddy said.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “You should talk.”

  That shut him up. Everyone else stared at me, trying to decipher what was going on. Except for Maureen. She blushed and turned a thin-lipped, disgusted expression toward Teddy.

  But the woman instantly regrouped. She sat up straight, her manicured hands reaching expectantly for the gift.

  “There’s no tag,” I said.

  “Open it,” Mom commanded.

  Maureen huffed and rolled her eyes.

  I did as told, and from gray tissue, extracted a Pierre Cardin silk dress.

  “Red!” Maureen shrieked. “He knows I never wear red.”

  I shook out the small dress for all to see and inspected the label. “Size six.”

  “Six?” Maureen’s face crumpled.

  There was only one person in the room who could possibly wear that size.

  Eyes shifted toward Anna.

  “It is a lovely dress, and I do like red,” Anna said graciously, “but that seems a little much on Beanie’s part.”

  “A little much unless he was fooling around,” Maureen lashed out. She stood and stalked off to what used to be my room. She quickly returned lugging her suitcases and wearing her spiffy green jacket as though she’d already been packed and prepared to go. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t stay for dinner.”

  As Maureen slammed the front door, Mom said, “Well, I guess you can sleep in your room tonight, Carol.”

  I rose to peek out the front window. “The nerve,” I said. “She’s taking Uncle Beanie’s Mercedes.” Were we watching someone make a getaway?

  Teddy pushed up beside me and yanked the drapes open. “Beanie sure knew how to pick ’em.”

  “I wonder if she’s going to stay in a hotel or head back to the city,” I said.

  “Who cares?” Uncle Teddy snapped. “Now that she knows she ain’t getting anything, I bet we don’t even see her at the funeral.”

  The paramedics still lounged in their vehicle. It came as no surprise to me that the sheriff’s office was overextended. Holidays were murder. More people died on Christmas than any other day of the year. I was more surprised that the paramedics hadn’t been called away to another emergency.

  Maybe if the Ferndale City Police had been dispatched, we wouldn’t be cooling our heels, but my mom lived outside the city limits in an area under the auspices of the sheriff’s department. And we were located close to the infamous Emerald Triangle, the largest cannabis growing area in the country. On any given day, the far-flung citizenry kept the officers busy with marijuana busts. Add to that the many residents stranded by recent mudslides . . .

  Turning from the window, I slunk back down the hallway to the scene of the crime. Why had Uncle Beanie left Anna’s gift under his bed? He’d put his other presents under the tree. Was Maureen’s accusation true? Could that be why he’d left the store to Nikos and Anna?

  With Beanie lying dead in the room, I felt twitchy. Plus, even though my mom had unsentimentally changed our rooms when we left home, I envisioned the room the way it had been when Donald and I were growing up. The walls embraced the memory of my brother, and now they entombed my uncle. I yanked the covers all the way up over Beanie’s head before I dropped to my knees.

  I lifted the dust ruffle and scanned the underworld of the bed, but there was no more contraband. So, Beanie hadn’t stashed any other stuff he meant to put under the tree in the morning. I crawled up from my knees and inspected the two glasses of water.

  The door pushed open and I jumped.

  “I thought I’d find you here.”

  “What do you want, Teddy?”

  He sniffed the air. “It does stink like cigars in here.”

  I knew what I was doing in the room, but why was Teddy here? My skin prickled. “The smell is probably from his sweat.” But even as I defended Beanie, I had to admit that the room stank.

  “So, what do you think killed him?” None of the usual scorn laced Teddy’s tone. He averted his eyes from the inert log that was Beanie’s body.

  I studied Teddy, considering the three pillars of murder—motive, means and opportunity. As Beanie’s brother, Teddy had clearly hoped to gain from his death, but with their adversarial relationship, I couldn’t imagine him hoping to receive much. Could pure spite be a big enough motive?

  “Nicotine poisoning,” I said. “Habitrol patches.” I pointed at the package on the bedside table. “It looks like his doctor prescribed a month’s supply.” I picked up the package, which was supposed to contain twenty-eight patches, and dumped out the remainder. Keeping an eye on Teddy, I quickly counted them. “Twenty-five. That fits pretty well with what Maureen said about Beanie going to the doctor the day before yesterday. But if he put on a patch last night, why isn’t it on his body?”

  “You think this supposed killer plastered him with patches and then removed them?” Teddy moved closer, positioning himself at the end of the bed, blocking my pathway to the door.

  “Beanie expected someone to visit him,” I continued.

  Teddy moved down the narrow aisle toward me. “He liked to live dangerously.”

  In a moment, I would be pinned in the corner by the person among us who hated Beanie the most. Fear jolted through me. Applying the principle of Occam’s Razor, that the simplest explanation was often the best, I was alone in the room with the murderer.

  SIX

  I sprang onto the bed, jumped over Uncle Beanie, and clambered off the other side of the mattress.

  Teddy blinked wetly at me, shook his head at my weird behavior, and pulled a tissue from a bedside box covered in mauve and lime yarn. He took one quick look down at Beanie’s concealed form.

  “Don’t touch the glasses,” I barked.

  Teddy backed away, hands in the air in a mocking, don’t-shoot surrender. He had tears in his eyes. I did a quick reassessment. The simplest answer wasn’t always the right one. Teddy might have resented the hell out of Beanie, but clearly he was moved by his death.

  Sadness, thick as a Tule fog, billowed in my heart. I allowed myself to peek away from Teddy down to the lump in the bed, once my adventurous uncle, my beloved Beanie.

  “I don’t get it.” Teddy dabbed his teary eyes. “Why did he always get all the luck—the women, the money? Even when I was a kid, I knew our parents liked him best.”

  Beanie’s “luck” with women had come from his larger-than-life personality, his charm and generosity. And his “luck” with money had been pure hard work. But I didn’t comment.

  Teddy stopped at the doorway. “If you’re implying that Beanie’s size-six lady killed him, how did she manage that if he was awake?”

  “My guess is that the nearly empty glass of water will contain traces of a sedative.”

  “So,” he pondered, “we’re talking Anna here?”

  I nodded.

  “But why?”

  “Maybe for the store.” I wiggled a finger through my thick hair to scratch my scalp, trying to stimulate the blood to my brain. “On the ot
her hand:

  ‘If the heats of hate and lust

  In the house of flesh are strong,

  Let me mind the house of dust

  Where my sojourn will be long.’”

  Teddy gawked at me. “What’s that you’re saying?”

  “One of those things Mom preached, although she quoted it at me because of my hatefulness, not my lust.”

  Teddy leaned against the doorframe. “You think Anna killed him, motivated by lust?” he asked incredulously.

  “Not exactly. Beanie maybe killed himself with lust.”

  “Suicide?”

  “No. Beanie desired too much. I think he put Anna in an impossible situation.” I paused, stunned that I was piecing together a theory with Uncle Teddy, of all people. “Look. He apparently expected her to rendezvous with him here, under the noses of Nikos and Maureen, almost as though he wanted them to be caught. Anna didn’t want that.”

  “Anna didn’t kill him.”

  We both whirled. Nikos stood in the hallway armed with two oranges. I blushed to think what he had overheard.

  “I knew about Beanie and Anna,” he said. “But I didn’t expect it to last. Just another of Beanie’s flings.” A single sob gasped from his chest. “He didn’t love her.” He glared accusingly toward the dead body. “But Anna—” Nikos paused to collect himself. “Anna hated living in the United States. She wanted to find a way—the means—to leave. To shatter our marriage and to have money.”

  Nikos pushed past Teddy into the room and cocked his right arm. “I used to be pretty good at this.”

  Teddy pressed to the wall and I ducked.

  An orange ball flew past us and shattered a glass.

  “Str-ike!” Nikos yelled.

  “You’re destroying evidence!” I shouted, clambering back over the mattress, across Beanie’s dead body, I guess with the intent of shielding the other glass with my body.

  With all the commotion, others spilled into the room.

  “I killed him,” Nikos insisted. “For the store. How do you think it felt to be his slave all those years, holding down the fort while he chased skirts? Went after my own wife, for Christ’s sake.”

  I shook my head. “If you killed him, where are his dentures?”

  Nikos wrinkled his forehead in confusion.

  “In his mouth, I hope,” said Uncle Teddy.

  “Exactly. Because he wasn’t sleeping. He wasn’t alone. He was with a lady,” I said.

  Nikos launched another orange in a desperate attempt to defile the scene of the crime.

  “Stop it!” Anna shouted. “Don’t be ridiculous.” For a moment she clung to Nikos’ arm like a child on the monkey bars. “I didn’t kill Beanie.” Tears streamed down her cheeks.

  “You didn’t?” I asked.

  “You didn’t?” Nikos echoed.

  “If there’s a trace of anything in that glass, it will be of Viagra.” Anna’s teary eyes turned from Nikos to me to Teddy, and back to her husband. “You all knew Beanie—too much of everything. Too much eggnog. Then the sex.” She averted her eyes and flushed with embarrassment. “After that, he insisted on one of those big fat Cuban cigars, even though he was supposed to be using those.” She pointed at the patches spread across the nightstand. She sank onto the edge of the bed and rested a hand on the poking-up toes, as if she might play This Little Piggy. “I was so angry. I tried to take the cigar away from him.” Anna quivered. “But no, the damn fool. Beanie never could follow the rules.” She raised her chin, defiant. “He just went ahead and smoked himself to death.”

  I stood there stunned. Uncle Beanie’s grousing about the room assignments had been a front, except, perhaps, for the wish to have Anna (and Nikos) moved to the more convenient room across the hall from his—a room without its own bathroom, so Anna’s leaving in the middle of the night would be less suspect.

  Uncle Beanie had brought along Maureen as camouflage, correctly anticipating my mom’s puritanical response. From their earlier conversation, I gathered my mom had insisted on the same sleeping arrangements at Thanksgiving.

  I narrowed my eyes at Anna. “You tidied up the room.” I mumbled. “Removed the cigar?”

  “I aired out the room so Bea wouldn’t have a heart attack, too.”

  “So, Uncle Beanie had a heart attack?”

  In spite of the fallout for the lives of Nikos and Anna, I should have been happy that no guest in my mother’s house had killed my uncle. However, this fact meant Mom had been right about everything—Beanie’s excesses would get him in the end, and there had been no murder. I was the big fool. Argh!

  This conclusion meant I had displayed delusions of my detective ability in front of Teddy. Worse than coal in a stocking.

  “I guess that is what happened?” Anna said. “After the cigar, he didn’t feel too good.”

  I hammered the nightstand in frustration.

  “Be careful of the broken glass,” Mom said.

  “But he was alive?” I asked Anna.

  She ducked her chin. “I should have gotten help,” she mumbled.

  “What did you do?”

  “I went back to our room.”

  “But what about the Habitrol patches, Anna?”

  “Huh?”

  “Beanie has two red splotches on his body from the patches. Did Beanie apply them?” I wanted to pace, but couldn’t move in the packed room. I was backed into the corner. “Why would he do that if he’d just smoked a cigar?” That seemed crazy even for Beanie.

  I picked up the package and glanced at the directions, which specifically stated not to put the patches on a hairy spot, like Beanie’s chest. Not that he would have concerned himself with directions.

  “He didn’t put on any patches while I was here,” Anna said. “And if he tried to use two, I would have taken one off the old fool.”

  “And at Thanksgiving,” I murmured, my thoughts tumbling.

  With all of us—Anna, Nikos, Teddy, Brandon, my mom and me—crammed in the room with the dead Beanie wrapped in the covers, the air closed around me. Claustrophobic.

  Everyone in the room was staring at me, my mom’s forehead creased with particular concern. “What about Thanksgiving?”

  “When you were telling everybody about Smoked to Death, didn’t you say Anna got up to have a cigarette?”

  “That’s right,” my mom said, not seeing the significance.

  “Anna didn’t know the plot of my story,” I said. “She didn’t know about killing someone with nicotine poisoning.”

  “I wouldn’t kill anyone even if I did know about this thing,” Anna said indignantly.

  “So, someone else killed Beanie.”

  “Are you back to that?” my mom said. “Anna just told us Beanie had a heart attack.”

  “Yes, I’m back to that.” I tossed back the covers. Even though everyone in the room had seen the dead body before, there was a collective intake of breath. I pointed to the splotch over Beanie’s heart.

  “After the eggnog, after the sex, after the cigar, someone crept into this room, slapped the Habitrol patches on Beanie,” I indicated the other red mark on his arm, “and murdered him.”

  “Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Carol,” my mom said.

  I glared at her. “Why would Beanie put on two patches?”

  “You know Beanie,” Mom said. “If one was good, two was better.”

  I shook my head. Then changed to nodding because Mom was right in a way. “Someone else came in the room,” I said. “This was someone who wouldn’t alarm him, someone who could get up close and intimate with him, someone he’d want to leave his dentures in for, even if he was drifting off to sleep. This was someone who knew about the plot of my screenplay Smoked to Death. Someone who knew about nicotine poisoning. Someone humiliated by Beanie. Someone who thought she was going to benefit from his death. Someone with opportunity, motive, and means.”

  The doorbell chimed. Brandon ducked under Teddy’s arm and sprinted down the hall. He returned in a moment, prou
dly ushering two sheriff’s deputies into the crowded room. “Someone killed my uncle,” he said.

  I flipped the covers farther back for the deputies to view the whole body. “This is my Uncle Beanie. His girlfriend killed him with nicotine patches.” My index finger jabbed toward the two red splotches. “She stole his car, a silver Mercedes, and split.”

  “Whoa, there,” said one the deputies. “Let’s back up a bit.”

  “Seriously,” I pleaded. “You need to put out a BOLO before the bitch who killed my Uncle Beanie escapes.” I glanced desperately around the room for support. “Does anyone know the license plate number?”

  A beat of silence. Then my mom said, “Yes, of course. It’s PRODUCE.”

  A warm glow coursed through my body. My mom sided with me and took me seriously. The deputy keyed his mike.

  I’d solved a case after all.

  Then I looked back at the bed, at the stiff Uncle Beanie in his boxers. I fought back tears. What a stinky victory.

  I may have proven my sleuthing abilities, but this was the worst Christmas ever.

  ~*~

  Carol Sabala’s adventures continue in the seven books of the series. Find Murder, Honey in the bestselling e-anthology Sleuthing Women: 10 First-in-Series Mysteries.

  About the Author

  Vinnie Hansen fled the howling winds of the South Dakota prairie and headed for the California coast the day after high school graduation. After completing a master’s degree in English with an emphasis in creative writing, she wrote numerous short stories and the Carol Sabala mystery series. The seventh installment in the series, Black Beans & Venom, made the finalist list for the Claymore Award. Crime writer Allen Eskens called it a “cat-and-mouse hunt for a missing woman” that is “full of intrigue, suspense and authenticity.”

  Still sane after twenty-seven years of teaching high school English, Vinnie has retired and lives in Santa Cruz, California, with her husband and the requisite cat.