“Right. Interesting; he lives just a couple of miles from the Talbott place; has a shack and a half-acre of scrub-brush. Gets by on some kind of disability insurance; just about enough live on, I guess. Crippled to hell; can barely hobble. Hated the old man; no hesitation about admitting it, either.” He gave Denton a sly glance. “Oddly enough, he had penicillin — pills — a few weeks ago. I spotted some in a bottle, and he told me about having an infected tooth.”
Denton stiffened in his chair.
“Forget it,” Alvarez said, grinning. “He’s across the creek, a mile from the nearest bridge. A loner. He couldn’t possibly have got to that hive. Besides, somebody would have spotted him limping along. It would take him hours.”
“Hardly the point,” Hicks objected. “Neither he nor anybody else fooled with those cells, I guarantee you that.”
“I believe you,” Denton said, his eyes shining. “Lemme see that honey, boy. I been a fool, using other people’s eyes in this business. My mistake.”
They gaped at him, and Hicks gingerly picked up a sticky comb.
“Be my guest.”
The sheriff sniffed at it; one eyebrow rose. He jabbed a finger into the wax, extracted a smear of honey, and put it on the tip of his tongue. He held the comb out to Hicks.
“Smell that.”
The deputy complied, a puzzled look on his face.
“Smells like honey to me. Penicillin has no smell, you know.”
Denton was disgusted. He held the comb out to Alvarez.
“You smell it.”
Wonderingly, the deputy did so.
“What’s it supposed to smell like?” he demanded, reasonably enough.
“Couple of idiots,” Denton said mildly. “Stuff reeks of orange.”
“So?” Hicks said.
“Twenty years ago, so nothing. Now, after all the subdivision, you know how far it is to an orange grove in this county? I’ll tell you — thirty miles!”
“I didn’t think a bee ever went thirty miles for nectar,” Alvarez said. “Or do they have freeways, too?”
“They don’t, and that’s the point. Don’t you know what happened?”
The two deputies looked at each other, exchanged shrugs, and held up their hands in surrender. It wasn’t the first time. They did all the work, and this old — came up with the solution. It was damned frustrating. Hell of it was, he was a great guy, so you couldn’t even get mad at him.
“This honey — the orange part — must have come from another part of the state, say San Diego County. That means it came here in a jar. The murderer, knowing about Talbott’s allergy, and his bee-keeping, was only two miles away; less, much less, by air across the creek. So he spikes this commercial honey from the market with penicillin from his bottle, and sets it out on his windowsill every day for a few weeks in season. Talbott’s bees, like all bees, don’t miss anything sweet. Like people, they prefer an easier way. Readymade honey is their dream. They sop it up — penicillin won’t hurt a bee — take it to their hive, and mix it with other stuff brought in by the gang. That’s why there were no marks on the cells. The spiking was done at Talbott’s end by the real experts — the bees themselves.”
“Holy jumping horned toads!” Hicks said. “Dan Cummings!”
“Beautiful!” Alvarez breathed. “Almost a shame to nail him.”
“Just how we gonna do that?” Hicks asked skeptically.
“First we find some of the honey at Cummings’ place,” Bill said. “If it’s made from orange blossoms—”
“Not enough,” Denton said. “Plenty of people have honey like that.”
“But it is,” Hicks said. Here was one point he could score against the old man. “With a spectroscope we can prove not just that it’s orange honey, but that it’s the same batch the stuff in Talbott’s hive came from. That should make our case.”
“Okay,” Denton said gently. “Don’t shout. You two get the evidence. I’m gonna get some sleep.” He lay back in the chair, eyes closed. Almost at once, his breath came wheezily.
Hicks looked at Alvarez, shaking his head in wonder.
“Damned if the old so-and-so isn’t asleep already!”
They tiptoed out. Denton opened one eye, gave his soft, melodious chuckle, and closed it again.
Armchair Detective
by Bob Swain
Police Lieutenant Wilson looked from his office window, through which he’d been enviously watching the spring sun bathers in the park across the street, to see a pale, wispy looking guy in a blue serge suit standing in the doorway.
“My name is Ronald Quilt,” the little man said in a weepy contralto. “The sergeant said you’d see me?”
“Yes, sit down Mr Quilt. You reported that you had something to tell me about Jack Dicer.”
“Yes, sir. I’ve been following the case in the papers, and I think I know who killed Mr Dicer.”
Crackpot, clicked the categorizer in Wilson’s mental file.
“I see. And just who are you, Mr Quilt?”
“I’m a free-lance public accountant — fully licensed, you understand, and in my spare time I write detective stories.” He giggled. “None of them have been published, but I’m getting close. Naturally, I’m what you might call an armchair detective.”
Wilson smiled grimly. “And what makes you think you know who murdered Jack Dicer?”
“Well, Dicer was a blackmailer, wasn’t he? And the society doctor, Doctor Nader, was the last person to see him alive. Twenty-four hours later Dicer’s body was found in an alley behind the headquarters of the 32nd precinct — this building. Right?”
“So far,” Wilson said, glancing at his watch.
“Jack Dicer had been dead of arsenic poisoning for twenty-four hours, so the time of death might have been established around the time that Dicer visited Dr Nader.”
“So?”
Mr Quilt held up a bony forefinger.
“It is my belief that Dr Nader poisoned Jack Dicer during the latter’s visit.”
“If Dr Nader heard your accusation, he could sue you for slander.”
“Not if I could show how he did it! I happened to have handled some tax business for Dr Nader — last Christmas it was, and I know his secretary, Miss Adams, very well. She told me exactly what happened in his office the last time Jack Dicer was seen alive!”
“Then you should know Dr Nader couldn’t possibly have done it,” Wilson said, standing up. His heavy but not unhand-some face looked slightly congested. “I’m afraid I haven’t time for your theories, Mr Quilt. Perhaps you’d better stick to your writing, and let the police do their own work!”
He escorted the little man to his door amid the latter’s protestations.
“But don’t you understand, lieutenant? Dicer was poisoned. Poisoned, do you hear?”
“Goodbye, Mr Quilt...”
But the little armchair detective had put his finger on a point that had bothered Lieutenant Wilson from the first. There were traces of Scotch in Dicer’s stomach, to which arsenic had obviously been added. And there was that bottle of Haig and Haig in Nader’s office.
He put on his hat and lumbered across town to Queen’s Hill, purposely on foot to enjoy the warm spring sunshine. Nader’s plush office occupied the suite on the second floor of a palatial old home. Downstairs, the doctor lived alone in bachelor splendor.
Miss Adams the receptionist was just putting a plasticine cover on her typewriter, for it was close to lunchtime.
“Dr Nader isn’t seeing any patients today,” she told him. A tall girl, somewhat inclined to sharpness, but with a good figure, Miss Adams obviously hadn’t recognized him.