The Cin Fin-Lathen Mysteries 1-3 (34 page)

“That’s okay.”  I asked her, “anyone else?”

“No.”

“Mark,” asked Tony.

“No, just Cindy.”

“Did anyone touch her things Sunday before the concert?”

“Not while I was around.  I really don’t know.”

Amy shook her head no. 

“Do any of you have anything to tell me or have any
questions regarding Cheryl or Carl for that matter?”

“How is Cheryl?”  Amy barely squeaked out.

“Not good.  She’s on her way to the hospital.”

“What’s wrong with her?”  Mark’s voice trembled a little.

“We aren’t sure.  Please pack up your things and...”

“She had a cold,” interrupted Amy.  “She told me last Monday
she couldn’t smell or taste anything.  She’d been afraid she would be too sick
for the concert.”

“Is that true?”  Tony asked Mark.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.  I am not too sensitive to
Cheryl.  When she talks, I tend to drift off.  She complains and talks all the
time.”

Tony turned around and looked at me.  “It’s true, Cheryl
talks all the time,” I confirmed.  Then I asked, “Mark, did Cheryl use any of
your bottled water at the concert?” 

“I filled my cup backstage.  I think she started using the
same kind after seeing me do it. Wait here.”  He reached into his case.  “I
have half a bottle left.”  He handed it to Tony.  The water was the same brand
as the empty bottle in the plastic bag.

Tony opened it.  “Do you mind if I keep this?” 

“Take it.  But Cheryl prepared her reeds up onstage.  She
got there early so she could arrange all her things.  She was still out there
warming up after the rest of us left, and Miles had to ask her to leave so the
ushers could let the people in.  Cheryl and Miles had words backstage over what
the word professional means.  Why did you ask if it was my water?”

“Mark, Cheryl copies everything.  I thought maybe she copied
your using bottled water,” I explained.

“Oh, but wouldn’t she just buy her own?”

“Yes, I remember now.  She did ask me earlier if I had seen
her bottle.”

“Ms. Fin-Lathen, where are you going with this?”  Tony
asked.

“Detective Curtis, when Cheryl threw out her water
yesterday, I thought I smelled something.  I don’t know, floral.  I thought
maybe it was some sort of special thing to do to a reed to make her, er, it
play better.”

Mark started reaching for her reed cup and stopped.  “That
smells a bit odd.”

Tony leaned in and pulled himself away quickly.  “Maybe the
two of you better move further away.”

“She blew that stuff on my music!” Amy cried.

“Calm down, you’re not in any danger.  I will have to take
the music that got wet though.” 

Amy took her pencil and using the eraser moved the march
music away from the rest.  Tony took it by the edges and temporarily laid it on
the empty conductor’s stand. “Carefully pack up your things, and please give
your names and phone numbers to the policemen at the door.  Thank you for your
help.”

I started to get up. 

“You stay here,” he demanded.

“Fine,” I said lowering my head to look at my latest ruined
shoes.  I didn’t want to see the inquiring looks of my friends nor the
accusatory looks of the people who didn’t know me that well.  I sat there for a
long time.  All but Art were asked to leave the band room.  Detective Curtis
and he had a tête-à-tête after which Art left, and once again there I was with
south Florida’s finest.

“Excuse me!”  I waved my hands in the air to attract Tony’s
attention.

“Stay there and...”

“Don’t touch anything. I know,” I answered for him.

The door opened and two guys I hadn’t seen before came in. 
They were adorned with plastic gloves and safety glasses.  Great, I thought,
geeks from shop class.  Tony had a brief, quiet conversation with them.  One of
them held up two plastic bags with what looked like cell phones in them.  Tony
led them over to me.

“One of these yours?” Tony asked as he pushed the two bags
in front of my face.

I looked at them.  They were exactly the same.  “One must be
mine, and I assume the other is Cheryl’s. Press last number dialed and if it’s
911, Detective, then it’s my phone.  I hope it isn’t the one covered in puke,” I
added.

Thankfully, the clean one was mine.  I had to sign for it. 
But now as it rested in my hand I had to fight the urge to call my ex-husband. 
I wanted to dial Luke’s cell number so bad.  I didn’t give a damn if I woke the
guy up and the bitch that stole him complained.  I needed him.  I needed
somebody.  I felt bullied, and with Tony now using my surname, I felt that I was
back to being a suspect.

The geeks were introduced as crime scene investigators from
the county sheriff’s department.  They carefully tipped out the fluid in
Cheryl’s little porcelain cup into a plastic bottle and capped it.  Her reeds
went in plastic, and the rest of her instrument would have met the same fate if
I hadn’t stopped them and instructed them how to dismantle the oboe and pack it
away.  While they were bumbling around, a new pack of reeds fell out of her
case.

“Detective Curtis, this is an oboe reed.”  I held up the
package.  This is what it should look, smell, taste and feel like.”  I handed
it back to the geeks and stood up. “I would like to pack up my instrument.”

“Go ahead but don’t leave.”

“Don’t worry, I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” I said
sarcastically.  “Oh, Detective Curtis, don’t forget the piece of music on the
stand.”  I watched as he waved over the geeks, and they encased the music in
plastic.  I walked over and sat in my chair.  I once again put my beloved
instrument to bed and folded up my stand.  I decided to move away from the
geeks before I was bagged in plastic and toted off to a lab somewhere.

“Cin,” Tony started.

“So we’re back to Cin now.  Why are the geeks here?”

“I had to call in reinforcements, now that there are two
murders.”

“Two?” I looked up, squinting through watering eyes.

“Cheryl died on the way to the hospital,” he explained.

I took in a deep breath and held it, slowly releasing the
air.  I did this several times trying to relieve the stress, knowing that it
would be quite a while before I stopped shaking.

“Do you know why yet?” I asked.

“No, but the evidence points to poison.  But what kind of
poison and how it got in her reed water is still in question.”

I rubbed my bad arm and thought a minute.  “Tony, you need
to run that tape again and confirm that no one touched her stuff.”

“But it starts after the band enters the stage.”

“I know, but I smelled something out of place when she threw
out the water into the audience seats.”  I held up my hand.  “Hear me out. 
Someone somehow put poison in her cup last night at the concert.  It may even
have been handed to her in the bottle of water.  Amy said she couldn’t smell or
taste so she wouldn’t have known the difference.  She soaked three reeds in it,
but because she had a winner reed to start with, she didn’t need the remaining
reeds.  After her statement was taken, she threw out the water but kept the
reeds.  They had to be soaking in the poison for several hours.  Tonight all
she did was add water and the poison leeched out of the bamboo and back into
the water.

“She played on one of the bad reeds.  It didn’t work so she
takes it off her instrument and puts the other two in her mouth, preparing them
to play.  She takes one of them, puts it on her oboe and plays.  The poison
came off those reeds.”

“Wait, how come she didn’t get poisoned last night?”

“If you play the tape you will see she has a reed on the
oboe she’s carrying on to the stage with her.  After Miles kicked her off the
stage was the time the bottle of water was taken from her things.  Remember, we
found a bottle with the plastic sheeting.  I bet she was supposed to die last
night along with Carl.”

“Why? What do Carl and Cheryl have in common?”

“They were both disrupters of the band.  I couldn’t stand
either of them, and if I didn’t know better I would start to suspect myself.”

“Why go to the trouble and risk of killing these people?”

“Hate.  Maybe the killer wanted to perform in a better
band.  They constantly wasted rehearsal time.  Carl with his lateness and poor
tone control, and Cheryl with her nonstop talking.  I know she irritated me by
copying my clothes, and I wasn’t her only target.  If you have bad musicians in
a volunteer community band, you can’t fire them, and you can’t ask them to
leave.  No, you can ask them, but they don’t have to go.  The only way Carl or
Cheryl would have left the band is...”

“By their death,” Tony filled in.  “Okay, suppose we’re
talking about a serial killer here in the band, and he killed them to get rid
of them or to send a message.  What would the message be for Cheryl?”

“Maybe if curiosity kills the cat then copying killed the
copycat,” I said, more for my benefit than his.

My area of south Florida was beautiful.  The village in
which I lived was in the last of the suburban crawl from West Palm Beach.  My
house sat on a street where all the yards were oversized.  People took care of,
or had a lawn service take care of, their yards.  It was safe to walk around
the block at midnight.  Children played in the streets, mindful of the errant
cars that worked their way through the bicycles and rollerbladers on their way
home.  When we got flooding rain, my son and the neighbor boy from across the
street would spend evenings flashing Morse code messages to each other over the
river of water that was once our street.

I could sit on my front porch and see the space shuttle’s
fire and exhaust plume as it lifted off hundreds of miles north.  On Halloween,
I would buy fifty pounds of candy for the children that wandered our streets,
enhancing my life with their colorful costumes.  Most of the children were
dropped off from the neighboring five-acre plots that lay between my house and
the sugar cane fields.  My neighbors were a mix of this and that.  Race didn’t
seem to be an issue, and there still were brave seniors that built in this area
that filled with children’s laugher at three o’ clock when the school bell rung
its last toll for the day.

I had an alarm installed in the house when our best friend
of some fifteen years, my mixed-breed dog Honey, left us.  She always made us
feel safe but now we had the beeps and watchful eye of the computer keep us
company while we slept instead.

My daughter, Noelle, was in England working on her Masters
of English Literature.  Her brother, Alex, was up at Tallahassee, Florida
State, presumably working on his psychology major while he continues his love
of singing, composing and playing with his emo-rock band,
Barely a Bass
Player
.

If I went through empty nest syndrome, I was unaware of it. 
I had been busy with my band performances and taking care of Luke before the
bastard dumped me.  I had friends to go walk the beach with and friends to go
to movies with.  All in all, my life was better than I could have planned.

Last summer was an exception in my otherwise calm life.  A
favor done for a member of the band led me to England and into the path of
greed and malice.  It also brought an arrogant priest into my life.  Father
Michael went on special secret assignments for the church all over the world,
so we rarely spoke.  However, I occasionally would get a postcard from him. 

We Lathens all keep track of each other through emails and
cell phone calls.  When one of us hears from the other, we are quick to pass on
the news.  I decided that I would start with Alex and tell him what was going
on.  He was a bit sleepy, but after I started to tell him about Carl and
Cheryl, he was wide awake.  We discussed the pros and cons of my involvement
with the case, and he felt I should make myself unavailable should the police
come looking for help.  He was concerned that if I hadn’t already put myself in
danger that I soon would.  We agreed that Noelle didn’t need to be woken up
over this. 

Alex said he was going to track down Harry and get his
perspective on what was going on.  I asked him to wait till morning, as
Harry’s, because if I remembered correctly, his mother was dealing with breast
cancer, and didn’t need to be awakened in the middle of the night.

I put down the phone, turned around and opened a browser to
the Internet.  I sat for a long time before I composed an email to Noelle.  She
has always taken care of us, and Alex calls her his second mom.  My daughter is
near if not a genius, and her sense of humor can send you running to the
bathroom.  But she inherited the worry gene that runs in my mother’s side of
the family, so I edited down the gore and danger and made it a matter of fact
type of letter. 

Finishing the letter, I was shocked to see it was already
well past midnight.  I hit the alarm and crawled into bed.  My stomach
complained, but my brain’s need for sleep overruled it.  I didn’t remember
falling asleep, and when I rolled over, the three-inch liquid crystals shouted
7:55 A.M.  Nature was the only reason my feet hit the floor.  I walked into the
bathroom, flooded with morning light, took care of the essentials and found my
way into the kitchen to microbrew my British tea.  With my eyes barely able to
focus, I hit the code to undo the alarm and walked outside for the morning
paper.

That it must have snowed was my first impression of my
yard.  Then the fact that I live in tropical Florida hit, and I opened my eyes
very wide.  The smell hit me before I could discern what was covering my lawn. 
Oleander flowers severed from hundreds of bushes lay rotting in the morning
sun.  My sidewalk was already discolored with the brown outline of the once
white blooms lying in smudges against the green leaves. 

I turned on my heel and went in search of my portable phone,
and after I sugared and creamed my tea, I walked back outside and dialed
Detective Curtis.

“Curtis here.”

“Tony, did they find out what poisoned Cheryl?” I inquired.

“No, not yet.”

“Try oleander.”

“What makes you think it’s oleander?”  Tony asked.

“I don’t know, maybe the fact that someone dumped a truck
full of oleander all over my front lawn makes me a bit suspicious.”

“Hang on. And...”

“Don’t touch anything,” I finished and walked into the
house.  I opened a browser to the Internet and looked up oleander.  I found it
all right.  Oleander, blah blah blah.  What about it was poisonous?  I
searched.  I found the answer: everything, including the nectar of the flower,
as well as smoke from burning the plant and the water in which the flowers are
placed.  Well, I thought. Cleanup is going to be a bitch.  I hit print and my
printer responded.

“Cin, you there?”

“Still holding.  I think I’m going to need some help with
cleaning this stuff up, maybe EPA or someone?”

“I have your village police on their way over to rope off the
area.”

“There are a lot of children in my neighborhood, Tony.  It
says on the Internet you can’t burn it because the smoke is poisonous.”

“Hang on, Cin.  I will get there as soon as I can.”

“K,” I said and hung up distracted. I happened onto a poison
site that listed dozens of flowering plants in the area.  The pictures of their
beautiful blooms sat beside their gruesome history.  Rhododendrons?  My God, I
had some in the front garden. Devil’s Trumpet!  It grew down the street in Mr.
Fisher’s yard.  On hot summer evenings the heady odor blanketed the corner.  With
every click of the mouse I recognized more beautiful deadly blooms.  I vowed to
pay more attention to what I planted in the future and to weed out some present
villains as I put a stack of paper in the printer and asked the computer to
print the whole file.  I grabbed the oleander page from the mounting stack
before I headed outside.  I heard car doors slamming, and I thought I had
better go see and make sure they didn’t touch anything.

~

I think it was ten o’ clock before I realized I was still in
my ugly pajamas and ratty old sweater.  I had added to my ensemble a pair of
muck boots I used in my surveying days.  My main thoughts were to contain the
poison before more tragedy happened.  I convinced the village police to just
tape off the area.  I calmly opened the garage and got out my gloves, safety
glasses and drywall mask with the intention of raking the oleander into piles
away from the neighbors’ yards and sidewalks.  The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s
department arrived, beating Tony by half a block. 

After a mere cockfight over jurisdiction, the Village and
Coconut Palm police departments bowed to the Sheriff who had more resources at
their disposal.  And disposal was what this event needed, that is, after photos
and statements.  I put away my equipment and went in search of a lawn chair
which I dragged up on the porch.  I was sure someone would notice me soon.

Tony walked over the mounds of oleander, searching the
ground for clues of how the oleander got to my house.  The Sheriff’s Deputy had
reported to Tony that they were just now getting reports from homeowners and
businesses about the mutilation of their oleander hedges.  Of course no one
told me about this.  I had to get it the old fashion way, eavesdropping.

I escaped inside as a Village Voice photographer was setting
up for a front-page shot of my lawn.  If someone was interested in what I had
to say they would just have to find me.  Not wanting to press my luck, I opted
out of taking a shower.  I did pull on my rattiest blue jeans and black gap
t-shirt, for modesty’s sake.  Coffee would go good with the mood I was in. 
Good strong coffee.  The kind my parents dilute with a ¾ cup of water.

I had just poured a cup when the doorbell rang.  I waited
till the last tone of the Big Ben Chime faded away before I opened the door.

“Yes?” I said feigning innocence.

“Can I come in?  Or you have to come out.  We need to talk.”
 Tony pulled his sunglasses off his face.

“We, as in the Hardy boys out there.?”

“No, you and I, Cin,” Tony pushed the door and I slid back
along with it.

“Make yourself at home.”  I waved him towards the living
room sofa.  “Would you like some coffee?”

“The kitchen table, er, bar would be fine and I would just
love some coffee.”  He manned the barstool as if he had been born in an Irish
pub.  Looking around he said, “Nice digs.”

“Thank you, I like them.  Do you take anything in your
coffee?”

“Nah, black’s fine.” 

“So what’s going on out there?”  I bobbed my head towards the
front yard.

“Your mystery florist spent all night collecting the
flowers.  He worked his way down Dixie Highway.”

“Didn’t anyone see or hear anything?”

“Did you?”

“No, not a sound.  I was pretty tired and was out as soon as
my head hit the pillow.”  My stomach growled real loud.  “Excuse me, but I
haven’t eaten in a while.  You want something?”

“Nah, but you go ahead.  My wife comes from a farm family,
and as you can see I don’t go hungry.”  He smiled patting his midlife tire.

“I don’t mind telling you that this has unnerved me,” I told
him.

“Looks like we’re dealing with someone a bit scarier than we
thought before,” he said before taking a long sip of coffee.  “Here’s what we
know so far.  Carl was injected with curare, which is why his face wasn’t distorted
and why you may have seen a blue tinge before the body started decaying.  Evidently,
the poison first paralyzes the eyes.  Carl was aware of what his killer was
doing but couldn’t respond.  He was posed, and the stand was thrust into him,
not back on the loading dock but right where you found him.  The blood in the
back leaked out when the killer folded the plastic.

“We think he was late and heading for the coffee room with
his saxophone in its case.  Someone he knew greets him and offers to hook his bow
tie or adjust his tux collar for him.  Our murderer slides the tie around his
neck with the hypo all ready, and just a tiny prick, he injects the poison into
his neck.  He then lays Carl down, opens the case and shoves the mouthpiece
down his throat.  About this time Carl expires. 

“The killer then slides him on the plastic along with the
saxophone and neck strap and drags him across the floor to his staging area. 
He then takes the microphone stand and shoves it into Carl being careful not to
shatter his spine.  The spine needs to be in one piece to suspend Carl in the
air.  He then lifts up Carl; stand attached, and carefully positions him.  The
neck strap helps hold the remainder of the saxophone’s weight until he can move
his arms and crack his fingers to hold the sax still.  I was wrong about the
blood.  It oozed out on its own accord.  The plastic was used more for
transportation than a drop cloth.  There is something else not yet identified
in the blood, water and something else.

“The role of the tape recorder is a guess, but your theory
is the best we have and our lab boys agree.  The video recording did confirm
your guess about the stage manager’s microphone being left on.  And the dust
was disturbed on the monitor.  Art told me last night he found Miles coming up
the steps from the orchestra seat area. Miles says he was returning from fixing
the outside door that had been jammed with a clarinet reed.”

“Clarinet reed?  What make, strength?”

“Hold on, we haven’t recovered this reed yet.  We only have
Miles’ word on it.”

“Water bottle?”

“That puzzled us till your phone call.  I had the lab do a
trace.  It’s the same brand as Mark’s, but I’m betting the lab finds oleander
in it.”

“Oh, speaking of oleander.  Here is a printout of what I
found this morning.” I handed him the printed Internet article, tea stain and
all. “It’s a bit worse for wear.”

“No problem, thanks.  Good coffee, curiously strong but
good,” he complimented.

“You know what I think was supposed to happen Sunday night,”
I baited.

“Let’s see if your take is similar to our profiler.”