Hiss of Death: A Mrs. Murphy Mystery (26 page)

“Thank you. I couldn’t stand looking at those weeds one more minute.”

“You’re much better about weeding than I am.” Coop sighed. “Got a minute?”

“Of course. Come on in and let me wash up.” Harry peeled off her gardening gloves, putting them on a high shelf inside the screened-in porch, because if Tucker could reach them, she ran off with them.

In the kitchen, as clean as possible, given that she’d been gardening, Harry asked, “Your pleasure, madam?”

“Iced tea, if you have it.”

“Sounds like just the thing.”

Harry reached into the big double-door fridge and grabbed the handle of a full jar of unsweetened tea. Heavier than she thought, for she was weaker than she realized, she had to use both hands to get it to the counter.

Coop noticed, rose, and poured the tea. “You’ll come back.”

Frustrated, Harry plucked out a lemon from a bowl on the counter and sliced it. “I know. If I weren’t going to Heavy Metal, it would be even worse. It comes, then goes. I don’t mean it comes out of nowhere. I’ve noticed a definite schedule. Exhaustion after radiation. That turns into tiredness the next day, and each day away from the treatment, I improve. And it’s the same way for, I don’t know, strength. But the effects last longer. One last treatment. Really, Coop, I’ve been lucky.”

Coop put the jar back in the fridge, and they both walked to the rough-hewn kitchen table.

The cats jumped up on the counter to eat from their large crunchie bowl. Harry filled it once a day, doing the same for Tucker.

“Brought you this.” Coop plucked a small jar of potassium tablets out of her back jeans pocket.

“Good you did before you sat down.” Harry opened the jar, for Coop had slit the plastic covering. She knew Harry’s grip hadn’t been as strong since the treatments.

“What!”
Both cats looked up.

Before any of the animals could respond, Harry popped a vitamin into her mouth.

“Oh, no,”
Tucker wailed.

“Tucker, calm yourself.”

The three animals stared in horror, waiting for Harry to keel over.

As the two humans chatted, Pewter finally said,
“Maybe it’s not the same smell.”

“It is!”
both Tucker and Mrs. Murphy shouted, which brought quite a rebuke from Harry.

Fifteen minutes passed.

“She’s fine,”
Pewter pronounced.

“Maybe it takes a long time,”
Tucker worried.

“We ate them,”
Pewter rightly said.

“Our systems are different.”
Mrs. Murphy stopped eating, baffled.

“It is the same smell,”
Tucker insisted.

“Obviously, there’s something we don’t know.”
Mrs. Murphy intently watched Harry.

“Maybe it was used in combination with something lethal, or maybe it’s the way you take it,”
Pewter logically offered.

“The problem is, anyone can buy this stuff.”
Tucker lay down by Harry’s chair.
“We can’t isolate the killer through the smell.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”
Mrs. Murphy, as curious as any cat, hated not knowing something as much as Harry did.

The two humans talked, unaware of the concerned conversation swirling around them.

“Did you know that rottweilers are being studied to understand long lives?” Harry pushed a piece of paper toward Coop. “Fair showed me this at breakfast.”

“Huh.” Coop read that a thirteen-year-old rottweiler is the equivalent of a one-hundred-year-old human.

“The study comes out of the Cancer Foundation in West Lafayette, Indiana. Isn’t that something? The old rottweilers escaped cancer, renal failure, all that stuff. It will be fascinating to see what’s discovered.”

“On the subject of long lives, I came by to drop off your potassium and to talk about short lives.” She then conveyed Dr. Isadore Wineberg’s conclusion.

“He’s right, but, Coop, is it possible that Thadia killed Paula? She had some provocation in her own mind, at least, and the scarab fit into her bracelet. Then someone kills her.”

“Anything is possible.” Cooper squeezed more lemon into her tea.

“Cory’s spectacular demise supports Izzy’s idea that Cory is at the center of all this.”

“Well, he’s paid for it.”

“Which means someone is still out there.” Harry thought. “Any other clues you’re willing to share?”

“No. Well, there is one thing, and it’s a long shot. The fire at Pinnacle Records. Paula rented a file cabinet there, so her records were destroyed. Big Al said she went in a few days before she died. They have to sign in and sign out. She deposited a file in the cabinet. They’re locked. It probably has no bearing at all on the deaths, but it’s all we’ve got.”

“No. You have the yellow cylinders. Paula had one. Cory had one.”

“Right. I’ve thought of everything. Too small for organs. Really too small for the amounts of cocaine that would make one rich. I’d estimate the cylinder might hold eight thousand to ten thousand dollars’ worth of cocaine if wrapped in plastic, compressed.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“Not in that business, Harry.” Coop finished her tea, got up, poured more for her and Harry. “More lemon?”

“No, thanks.”

“I don’t think Cory would be dumb enough to risk his license for ten thousand dollars a pop.”

“But if he had a thing going for years, it sure would add up.”

“It would. But the longer you deal, the higher your chances of being found out. If Cory or Paula had something to do with drugs, they’d go for hundreds of thousands, millions. Then it would be worth the risk.”

“I guess.”

“I thought about stealing expensive sperm from high-priced stallions. Now, could they do it? Neither one could handle a stallion and collect from the animal. They’d be injured or dead.”

“True enough, but they could steal it from someone who had. Particularly if the straws were in liquid nitrogen and stored to be shipped the next day. The problem with that theory is that whoever was missing the straws of sperm would report them missing immediately.”

“No such reports.” Coop put her fingers together like a steeple. “And how would they even know the value of a stallion’s semen? That’s not the answer.”

“No.”

“Then I thought about shipping organs,” Coop said. “But the cylinder isn’t big enough. There is a huge black market for organs.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“In our country—in other countries, too. Sometimes a single man is
at a bar and a pretty woman baits him, so the stories go. Mr. Gullible goes to her hotel room, is knocked over the head, anesthetized, and operated on—usually, it’s taking one kidney; they don’t kill these people. Then they place them in the tub, ice pack on the incision. When the guy awakens, there’s a note on the ice pack telling him what has happened and to call nine-one-one. It’s big, big business, and still some horny men are dumb enough to walk off with a woman they don’t know. Can you imagine a woman doing that?” Coop threw up her hands.

“Yes, but not to the numbers that men do it.”

“Well, as far as I know, there is not one report of a woman being robbed of her kidney. Who knows? Now, there might be one today, but so far it’s men. Imagine getting out of a tub, a fresh incision, one organ removed, no painkiller, and finding the phone in the hotel room.”

Harry grimaced. “Awful.”

They sat there thinking about these things. “I even thought there could be a scheme involving stealing drugs from the hospital—Percodan, OxyContin—packing them in the cylinders, and sending them out again. But there are much easier ways to distribute stolen prescription drugs.”

“Figure out what goes in those cylinders, and I expect you’ll find the killer.”

Coop leaned forward. “You’re so observant, and you’re at the hospital every week for your support group. Keep your eyes open.”

“I will.”

“That means we have to figure out how to get into the hospital,”
Mrs. Murphy worried.

“Not so easy,”
Tucker said, stating the obvious.

“If you were a teacup dog, you could hide in Harry’s handbag. But with your bubble butt, you couldn’t even hide in a potato sack.”
Pewter peered over the countertop to harass the dog.

“Zat so? Well, they’d need a gurney just for you, Miss Tubby.”

The gray cat launched off the counter, right onto the sturdy dog. The two rolled across the floor amid furious yowling and growling.

Harry stood up. “That’s enough.”

This had no effect, so she ran over to the sink, pulled out the sprayer, and shot water at the animals. The dog and cat ran in opposite directions.

“I don’t know what gets into those two,” Harry said as she knelt down to wipe up the floor.

Coop knelt down to help, but she couldn’t stop laughing. She didn’t know which was funnier, the dog and cat or Harry with the sprayer.

B
ack down and reverse arms,” Noddy commanded. “You’re going to do ten of these for each arm.”

“Noddy, you can be hateful.”

“That’s right.” Noddy crossed her arms over her chest as she carefully monitored Harry.

After ten, the end of a long workout, Harry sat on the gym’s floor. “I am so glad that’s over.”

“You’re doing good. I think these exercises and the one balancing on the large ball are especially difficult. You’re forced to use a lot of muscles, whereas in the weight room, you isolate one muscle, like your quads, and you work it to exhaustion. These exercises strengthen your entire body, especially your core, and they create better balance. Mind you, down the road, once the effects of the treatments are vanishing, if you want to add bulk, I’m glad to help. The biggest mistake women make is not developing their upper body. From the waist down leg power.” She paused. “Men, women, doesn’t matter. It’s the upper body where most women are afraid to look muscular. Obviously, that was never my problem.”

“I never thought about it.”

“You’re fit and strong. Farmwork is its own kind of workout. But look in magazines, the photos of models. No muscle tone. No muscle. Why don’t they paint a big red V on their head for victim?”

“Never thought about that, either.”

“Think about it this way. You’re a drug addict desperate for a fix. No money. You’ve blown everything you have, lost jobs, you get the picture. You need to steal. Grabbing a purse and running is safer than robbing a grocery store. Two women are walking down the street, and you know these streets, so you know you can get away. One woman is well dressed, wearing a bit of heel, very pretty and slender. The other woman isn’t bad-looking, but you can see she has some muscles in her arms. Who are you going to push and grab their purse?”

“The weak one.”

“I rest my case. All right, hit the bike.”

Harry, having caught her breath while listening to Noddy, walked into the narrow room with the bikes and stationary walkers. A large TV, tilted down, was tuned to CNN.

Harry was not much for TV unless it was The Weather Channel. She put on her earphones, tucked the player into her shorts’ waistband, and listened to
Wolf Hall
by Hilary Mantel on tape.

She never listened to music or books when she was outside working. The conversation of all living things fascinated her far more than the work of humans. But once out of the fields and forest, she liked to learn. Fair had had a CD player installed in the old Ford F-150, since it was built before that technology existed. She could ride around and listen to a book. She tried to read before bedtime but usually fell asleep, the book on her chest. Fair would come in, gently lift up the book, and tell her to go to bed. If she was in bed, he’d take the book, put it on the nightstand, and cut the reading light. While he wasn’t a night owl, he could still last longer than she could. When twilight faded into night, Harry started to fade with it.

But here, at 6:30
A.M.
, her workout finished except for the part with the stationary bike, she was wide awake.

Twenty minutes later, finished, she clicked off the portable player, dismounted, snatched her towel off the seat. She couldn’t ride that bike, or any bike, without a towel. The seats were so uncomfortable. How men did it, she couldn’t imagine.