“With the help of the rain.”
“We have more than our share of it around here, agreed, but still it doesn’t rain every night. And someone would be bound to notice the next morning.”
“You’re right,” agreed Twist. “We have to find another method.” His eye fell on the bowl of ice brought over by the innkeeper. “What if our man had thrown a large block of ice made with a heavy dose of weed-killer? It would have had time to melt during the night and spread evenly in a pool over the grave.”
“There’s still the question of accuracy,” observed Felder.
A mischievous look glinted behind the detective’s pince-nez.
“But suppose the large block of ice was in the form of a ball, like, say, an orange? It would be almost the same weight as a boule as you call it.” He turned towards the photos behind the bar. “Any boule player worth his salt can deliver a series of strikes placed close together; I shouldn’t have to explain that to a professional like yourself, Mr. Baron. The boule would go over the gate, roll along the path, and go through the gap in the hedge to reach the grave. With half a dozen throws of carefully prepared ice projectiles, there would be no trace left in the morning except some moisture which would be attributed to the early morning dew. No need to do it every night, just after each fresh load of earth.”
The smile seemed to be frozen on the face of the man from Marseilles. Pointing to the photograph over the bar, he asked: “Is that how you tumbled to it?”
“Let’s say it helped.”
“Then congratulations for the deduction, monsieur,” said Rene Baron, bowing slightly. “But you know, nobody in the village wanted a huge hotel blocking their view. And all I did was help destiny along a bit. Before Evans appeared, neither I nor anyone else had ever acted that way.”
“I don’t pretend to have solved the whole mystery, gentlemen,” said Twist solemnly.
“So I think it’s just as well if we forget the whole thing,” said Felder, draining his beer.
“I agree,” said the detective. “I know how to hold my tongue, particularly since I had to use a similar scheme myself once. That’s why it wasn’t too difficult to work out what happened here. There was a neighbour of mine once who used to chase away the local cats with a pitchfork. I was angry and told him that if he didn’t cease his barbaric habits, lightning would strike his house and the lawn which he tended so lovingly. He had brought in an especially rich, red-coloured soil from another county just for the lawn.”
Dr. Twist plunged his hand into the ice bucket and brought out several blocks. “So, Mr. Baron, like you, I put a strong dose of weed-killer in the ice tray and when night came I sprinkled dozens of ice fragments on the torturer’s lawn. A few days later, it looked as if it had caught measles!”
Heat of the Moment
by James Lincoln Warren
© 2007 by James Lincoln Warren
James Lincoln Warren’s historicals regularly appear in our sister publication, AHMM. For his EQMM debut, he penned his first contemporary crime story. “The last thing the fiction world needs is more P.I.s based in L.A.,” he says, “but I live in L.A. and it seemed that not to take on the daunting task of continuing the tradition would be an act of cowardice.” Here’s his splendid addition to the P.I. canon!
“I tell you what I think,” Tarkauskas said, leaning back in his chair. It was an expensive chair, like everything else in his office. The view of the Hollywood Hills from the picture window behind him was expensive. His golden tan was expensive. His perfectly coiffed blond hair and fit physique were expensive. He stopped to light a cigar. It, too, was ex-pensive: a Ramon Allones from Havana. It was also illegal, which I guess must have made it all the more savory.
“Do they allow smoking in here, Mr. Tarkauskas? Not that I mind, of course.”
Tarkauskas took a deep drag. The circle of ash at the end of his corona was uneven, burning quicker along one side than the other.
He blew the smoke toward my face.
“Who’s going to tell me different?”
I shrugged. “You were saying...”
“That’s right. I was saying. I was saying that I think you’re nothing but a slick spick in Armani. Fifty years ago you would’ve been a pachuco in a zoot suit with a switchblade on the end of a long chain and thought it was classy, but now you read GQ and pack a Sig Sauer in a suede shoulder rig and think you really got class.”
“I’m unarmed. And Ferrari isn’t a Spanish name, it’s Italian. Like the car.”
“So you’re a Guinea greaseball instead of a beaner greaseball. Either way, you’re a cheap thug dressed up like a pimp on Easter.”
It’s times like these I wish Malone were here instead of me.
“Right,” I said, making a point of not raising my voice. “And you’re a bohunk neo-Nazi who should be wearing a white sheet with a pointed hood to fit his head. What of it? And let me tell you, moron, you don’t smoke a fine cigar like that as if you were some dumb dopehead bogarting a joint.”
He leaned forward and pressed a button on his desk. “I didn’t get rich by being a moron.”
“No, you got rich by being a thief.”
Two minutes later I was being shown the sidewalk by two oxen with shaved heads managing to walk upright in cheap suits. Summer can be brutal in Los Angeles.
That interview went well.
At least I didn’t have far to go. The interview had been in West Hollywood at a highrise on Sunset, and our office is on Pico Boulevard in Beverly Hills. As luck would have it, my partner, Custer Malone — yes, his real name, so let’s just say that his parents weren’t very racially sensitive, a flaw I’m glad to say he didn’t inherit, but please, no “Old Cuss” jokes — anyway, Malone was waiting for me there and I had to fill him in on my spectacular performance. He sat at his desk, wearing Levis and a guayabera (evidence he had been doing field work someplace where a suit and tie would have made him conspicuous), his feet wrapped in his shiny oxblood Lucchese boots. I never tire of telling him Lucchese is an Italian name.
“Shucks, Red—” he calls me “Red” not because of my coloring, which is dark, but because my first name is Carmine — “he played you like a Cajun on a fiddle.”
“What do you mean? He’s a jerk.”
“ ’Course he’s a jerk,” Malone said sagely in his Texas drawl. “That’s the point. Didn’t they ever teach you to play poker back at the old Fifth?”
He meant my old precinct. “In Chinatown, it’s Pai Gow. In Little Italy, they play Scopone.”
“Well, no wonder. I’m talkin’ poker, son.” Malone is only about eight years older than I am. When he gets paternalistic like this, I think of him as the Senator, an image that isn’t hurt by his snow-white hair. “Now, I’m not talking about that no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em so popular on TV these days. A real poker player varies his game, and when he hooks a fish, he keeps coming back for more.”
“So what are you talking about?”
“Your real professional poker players don’t usually play in casinos, Red. They play privately and keep below the radar. They seek out folks with more money than sense, and then they got a guaranteed income for life. So what do you think happens when another good poker player shows up at a game that’s already somebody’s goose?”
“Goose?”
“As in the laying golden eggs variety.”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
Malone nodded in that laconic way of his. “The player already there does everything in his power to drive the other guy out. It’s your basic alpha-male bull hockey: ‘These milk duds belong to me.’ He looks for a weakness, tries to piss off the newcomer and get him off his game. Racial slurs usually work pretty well. No matter how well the newcomer does, he’s not likely to come back.”