Salty Beans, Chapter 7
“The dead guy was 120. I’m sixty. You’re thirty. And this kid who tipped you off is fifteen.”
“What are you saying? A seven-and-a-half-year-old did it?”
“Hey, that’s not a bad theory. Fifteen goes into one-twenty… four times fifteen is sixty, sixty minutes in an hour… must be something to have a buddy eight times your age. That’d be… six times eight… what the hell is six times eight? I can’t remember.”
“Forty-eight.”
“That would be like me hanging out with a four-hundred-and-eighty-year-old. Can you picture it?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not even that old.”
They waited around in front of the railroad car until Clarissa Huggins came out to meet them, accompanied by a man who seemed to be her bodyguard, based on his largeness and silence and haircut and sunglasses and his hands folded neatly in front of him in ominous readiness and the fact that Ms. Huggins neglected to introduce him. The only thing he didn’t have was one of those things in his ear.
The detectives went through the old “just a few more questions” routine.
“You do have a stable on the place?” asked the younger detective.
“Of course, of course. Oh, yes!”
“And who runs that for you?”
“That would be Hans McGoo, a very reliable man. He has a house on the grounds, where he lives with his daughter Drusilla.”
“Dru McGoo,” said the older detective.
“How cute!” said Ms. Huggins. “I never thought of it.”
“Is the girl fifteen years of age?” asked the younger detective.
“I believe so.” Here, Ms. Huggins blanched. “You don’t think they’re a father-daughter murder team!”
Both detectives laughed.
“Oh, no, ma’am,” said the older detective. “You can rest easy about murder. There’s nothing to indicate a murder at all. We’re just clearing up a few little details.”
“Do the words ‘chicken plus fish equals lizard’ mean anything to you?” said the younger detective.
“It sounds like a fun math problem!”
The older detective shook his head. He had repeatedly discouraged his partner from following up the “Chicken + Fish = Lizard” lead, which he considered a false one. She presented him with a look that strongly implied her feelings: given the existence of a possible scandalous opera libretto, the cryptic phrase might prove to be the key to a dark family secret. The older detective received that message, but only shook his head again. He said, returning his attention to their hostess, “Do you recall what Mr. Flince had been eating the night he died? Could it have been beans by any chance?” He gave his partner a side glance to indicate that hey, maybe he had his own crazy theories.
“He did have a hot plate,” said Ms. Huggins. “He heated up things that come in cans, things like beans.”
“Yes, beans come in cans,” said the older detective, clearly satisfied.
“Aren’t there… medical ways of determining his last meal?”
“I can see that you’re a TV fan, ma’am, and that’s great. But no. Sadly, our coroner is not good at his job. And I’m not talking out of school here. He’d be the first to tell you. I don’t think it would be going too far to say that our coroner hates himself.” He turned to the younger detective as if for confirmation, but she only shrugged.
“Do you still have Mr. Flince’s belongings?” she asked.
“No, we wanted to restore the railroad car of Ezekiel Huggins to its authentic nineteenth-century glory.”
“Well, you did a bang-up job,” said the older detective. “You can hardly tell anybody was murdered in there. I mean, not murdered.”
“What did you do with Mr. Flince’s things?”
“Everything was sorted by a service and sent off to charitable organizations that sell off the discarded possessions of the dead.”
“Just like the house I grew up in,” said the older detective. “I went back to look at it, and there was nothing there but a pile of dirt. Somebody told me it had been donated to a church? The whole house! I guess it wasn’t very big. I guess they put my childhood home on a flatbed and hauled it off somewhere, leaving behind a little pile of dirt on a hill. That’s not your problem, ma’am.”
“Did you observe anyone boxing up an opera libretto?” asked the younger detective.
“Well, I certainly would have noticed that! I love things like operas and abstract paintings. And… what else do I love, Mr. Franks?”