The Probability of Murder Read online

  “I understand.”

  “Hey, I’m really sorry your friend is dead. But, uh, am I in trouble? I spent the money already. If I had to, I guess I could come up with it.”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary, Jeff. But I think the police will still want to talk to you.”

  “Yeah, sure. I hope I didn’t do anything wrong. I mean, I just figured she was trying to surprise somebody, you know?”

  That she did.

  To make a good impression on Ariana—owner of the town’s bead shop and my closest friend, who didn’t need impressing—I set out a bookmark I’d been working on for Bruce’s young niece. I added a few beads to it in case she remembered exactly what state the project was in the last time she saw it. The pattern called for a fringe of beads attached to the short end of a rectangular piece of fabric. For the past week or so, I’d been picking away at the design, trying to follow the instruction “Be creative!” instead of counting out the colors in perfectly symmetric rows.

  I thought I might arrange the beads according to the Fibonacci series, starting with red, then another red, then two green, three blue, five yellow, eight purple, and so on.

  Ariana had said, simply, “That sounds nice.”

  Ariana arrived bearing the promised bagels and spreads, plus pastries of her own making. She was dressed in happy rainbow hues, not solely for my benefit, but a pleasant example of her usual dramatic look. I noted several layers of tank tops and a shawl over wide silk pants. I was in my customary Saturday morning gray sweats, though it was close to noon.

  She pointed to the unfinished bookmark at the edge of my counter. “Do you really work on this when you’re not expecting me?” she wisely asked.

  I wisely didn’t answer.

  We sat at my kitchen counter with hot herbal tea for her, coffee for me, and an enormous basket of breads that Ariana had baked. She’d divided the goods into “healthy” on the right and “delicious” on the left. A dozen bagels of mixed flavors were in a separate bag.

  I didn’t blink before reaching for an unhealthy éclair, one of Ariana’s specialties, and biting into it.

  “Thanks,” I said, allowing myself to focus on the burst of flavor from the unbeatable combination of chocolate and cream. For a minute, my head didn’t hurt.

  “Why didn’t you call me right away?” she asked. “It’s terrible to lose someone you had such a bond with.”

  Not as much of a bond as I’d thought.

  “It sort of just happened, and I’m still trying to figure out what to do.”

  In fact, I needed to decide whether to show Ariana the money bag in my den. I hadn’t wanted to spoil Bruce’s trip by giving him further reason to worry about me and any decisions I had to make, but I did need to talk to a real person face-to-face before going to the police. I smiled as I thought of what Virge would say about my real human/cop distinction.

  Fortified by the great triple threat of caffeine, sugar, and dairy, I led Ariana into the den, sat her down, and unzipped Charlotte’s duffel bag. I opened my palms, fingers pointing to the opening, stopping short of uttering, “Ta da.”

  Ariana’s eyes widened. She leaned in closer. “Mother of God.”

  It took a lot for Ariana to return to her roots in Catholicism. Usually she invoked lesser deities like Airmid, the Celtic goddess of healing, or the Slavic Belobog, master of light, source of happiness and luck.

  I took out the sheaf of notes in the duffel pocket, with Noah’s now on top, and explained the Noah/Jeff drama.

  “Mother of God,” Ariana repeated. “She was a fugitive.”

  I’d thought as much but hadn’t let myself say the word. Ariana had no such qualms.

  “I’m not sure about that,” I said, to challenge the thought a little more. “You’re assuming she stole this money?”

  “Who else has a bag of cash like this?” she asked.

  I gave her the alternative theory. “We read about this all the time. Eccentric people who keep their cash in mattresses or stuffed into socks.”

  “I know what you’re saying. Usually they’re a hundred and ten years old, have never thrown a newspaper away in a hundred years, and live alone with four hundred cats and fifty birds.”

  “Sweet.”

  I recognized Ariana’s way of distracting me and getting a laugh—being so careless with numbers that I’d cringe and forget what the real topic was.

  She bent over the bag and ran her hands through the stash as if she were sifting through expensive glass beads. “Seriously, this money is connected to something evil. I can feel it. You kept it here overnight?”

  “It was pretty late by the time I found out that it wasn’t Charlotte’s sports clothes, clean or dirty.”

  “Did you count it?”

  “Nuh-uh. Should we do that?” I asked.

  “No, never mind. You need to get rid of this immediately.”

  “I know, and I’ll take it to the station later today.”

  “We should take it out to the garage or even outside right now. It’s very bad to have this in your living space.”

  “You mean someone might come looking for it?”

  Ariana’s eyes, which had returned to normal, widened again. “I never thought of that.”

  “Then what were you thinking?”

  “Just that the bag shouldn’t be just sitting here, emanating bad vibes and sending them throughout your home.”

  Oddly, I knew what she meant, in a feng shui kind of way.

  I needed to mentally organize all the possibilities for the source of the money in Charlotte’s bag.

  “Let’s go through the options,” I said to Ariana. “Say she was obsessively worried about another Great Depression or a natural disaster that turned the world’s economy into cash-only.”

  “Or she was driving along and found the bag by the side of the road,” Ariana said, indulging me.

  “Or she had a hundred-and-ten-year-old aunt who kept the cash from her deceased husband’s pension checks.”

  “The aunt died and Charlotte inherited the money.”

  “What if Charlotte was innocently holding the bag for someone she didn’t realize was a robber?” I asked.

  “That would be your situation,” Ariana said.

  “Good point,” I said. And a sobering one. I allowed myself a “Why me?” moment before moving on. “Shall we assign probabilities to each scenario and see what falls out?”

  “Let’s skip the numbers for now. Instead, we should figure which one is more likely to have led to her murder.”

  “Someone might simply have known about the hoarded money and killed her for it,” I said, still insisting on an explanation that might spare Charlotte’s good name rather than put her in a class with Specs O’Keefe.

  “That doesn’t fit with Charlotte’s leaving the money with you, unless she had some warning that it was an attractive nuisance that could get her killed. And then, wasn’t she putting you, her friend, in danger?”

  “I guess it doesn’t line up with her scoping out a clandestine flight, either,” I said.

  “We’re back to: She had the money illegitimately and we need to get rid of it.” Ariana spread her arms, sermon-wise, to make her point.

  I finally had to agree with Ariana’s position—it made the most sense that the bag of money had a bad beginning. I tried the bank robbery image again, this time with Charlotte in a mask, but bills from robberies were always shiny and new in movies. And the picture of Charlotte with a burlap bag over her tweed jacket and neutral crewneck sweater simply didn’t work for me.

  But, in spite of two years of friendship, not much about Charlotte Crocker now fit my view of her.

  Anything was possible.

  To appease Ariana, we put the bag—green on both the outside and the inside, it had turned out—in the trunk of my car, instead of in the same air space as ours, and set out for the police station. We agreed that I’d drop Ariana at her shop so she could take care of business, then I’d transpo
rt the bag to Virgil. When I was finished, I’d call and pick her up, at which time we’d resume our meal of coffee and sweets.

  The whole Charlotte Crocker murder case would be out of my hands.

  The day had turned overcast, and I wished I’d never had to leave my bed. Or my couch.

  As I drove, I found myself checking the rearview mirror. Had I been foolish not to take this bounty to the police as soon as I’d opened the bag last night? If Charlotte was looking into a secret, hasty departure, that meant she could be, as Ariana thought, a fugitive. She was fleeing someone, that was certain, or she wouldn’t have gone through such hoops to keep her flight a secret. Was it someone who was entitled to all or part of the money in my trunk?

  “All that cash,” Ariana said wistfully, as if she were making a list of ways to spend it. “Where would someone get it?”

  “Not a clue.”

  Ariana snapped her fingers. “Maybe she won the lottery.”

  I looked at her, openmouthed. “The lottery,” I said.

  “I was just joking,” Ariana said.

  “Maybe not.” Why hadn’t I considered that right away? “Funny you should mention it,” I said. “Charlotte was an avid lottery player.” On second thought, I shook my head. “I’m sure I would have known if she’d won this big. She played with a few other people, off and on campus—Martin Melrose, the college treasurer, for one.”

  “I know who you mean. The little man with thick glasses and a bow tie.”

  “That one. They pooled their money for some games. But even when they win only a few dollars each, they’re so excited, they broadcast it all over. She couldn’t have won all that money and kept it a secret.”

  Ariana pointed her thumb in the direction of the trunk. “And the Commonwealth of Massachusetts doesn’t give out cash in those amounts, either. Sometimes, if it’s just a scratch game, the store will give you the couple of bucks, but if you win big, it’s a check. In fact, if it’s really big, you get it in installments over many years. If you want it all at once, you pay a huge tax penalty.”

  I looked at my New Age friend, with her current blond-verging-on-transparent hair and shimmering rainbow outfit, and heard her talk about bucks and winning big. “You know all this how?”

  Ariana blushed. “I read it in a magazine at the hairdresser’s.”

  “A likely story.”

  Ariana and I had taken a pass on counting the money, cursed as it was. We put together a guess from quick looks at the predominantly hundred-dollar bills and the money trivia I knew. I remembered a fairly useless “fact” that one million one-dollar bills weighed a little over a ton, and one million dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills weighed about twenty-two pounds. We had something in between. My bathroom scale wouldn’t accommodate a wide duffel bag, but between us two amateur weightlifters, Ariana and I estimated that Charlotte’s bag weighed about thirty pounds.

  “Accounting for the fact that there are fifties and twenties and not all hundreds, I’d say—”

  “One million dollars,” Ariana finished.

  “Give or take.”

  Funny how doing arithmetic always helped me unwind.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t insist on counting the money. Don’t you want to know the exact number?” Ariana asked.

  “It doesn’t really matter.”

  “But you love numbers. You know how many other Sophies there are in the United States.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “And what rank is it among all the female names?”

  “Number four hundred and sixty-three.”

  “And what rank is my name?”

  “Number eighty-two, with one n, fifty-two with two n’s.”

  “See?”

  “This is different.”

  “It sure is.” Ariana shivered, though that may have had more to do with her wearing a flimsy shawl on a chilly fall morning than with the accursed money sending cold vibes from the trunk of my car.

  Ariana’s shop, A Hill of Beads, had had a makeover in the last couple of months, and I still wasn’t quite used to the new, streamlined look, neater and cleaner than the disheveled, dusty old aisles—at least for the time being. Organization, which she saw as the enemy of creativity, wasn’t Ariana’s strong suit.

  Through the front window, passersby could see a dizzying array of shiny raw material for accessories of every kind. Counters with box after box of beads, separated by color and size. Strings of beads hanging from racks and sample necklaces on headless forms lining the counters. See-through bags of findings, pin backs, and filigree, reminding the crafter of the amazing number of things you could make or decorate with beads.

  As much as I loved numbers, I was glad I didn’t have to count Ariana’s inventory of beads.

  Before she left my car, Ariana reached over and gave me a good-luck hug. She whispered a few syllables in her latest charmed language and I teased her about it, as she’d expect.

  I felt I was making progress—I didn’t feel too guilty kibitzing with Ariana as if it were a normal day and I wasn’t headed for the Henley police station with a heavy bag of cash owned by a recently murdered friend. I could hardly wait to be rid of the whole load.

  But another idea took over as I pulled away from the curb. I looked around and, conveniently, spotted a copy shop across the street.

  It called to me.

  Before I knew it, I was standing at an industrial-size copy machine, spreading seven small pieces of paper on the glass surface under the cover.

  I was less ready than I’d thought to be done with the finer points of investigating Charlotte Crocker’s murder.

  Guilt returned in full force as I sat on a bench in the police station, waiting for Virgil. I held Charlotte’s green-and-gold bag on my lap, a heavy weight. Even heavier, from the guilt, was my purse, hanging from the arm of the bench and now containing the piece of paper from the copy shop with the images of Charlotte’s seven notes, complete with ragged edges from where they were torn from a book.

  I talked myself both into and out of the idea that I’d done something illegal by copying the notes. I simply wanted to be sure that all of Charlotte’s friends—I doubted now that she’d ever had any relatives at all—knew of her misfortune. I thought of her friend in Florida, where Charlotte had planned to spend Thanksgiving. Surely she needed to be notified immediately.

  Good story. If there even was a friend in Florida, unless she’d hired one.

  The odds that Charlotte had pulled only one con, hiring Noah, were about the same as the odds that I’d win the lottery if I bought my first ticket today.

  With a little more thought, I came up with another rationalization for copying the slips of paper. The police were busy; they couldn’t be expected to offer condolences to these people who were special enough to be in her duffel with a load of money. I could help with that.

  For the third time, I unzipped the bag partway, checking that indeed it was chock-full of bills. Ariana had sufficiently convinced me of its evil nature that I wouldn’t have been surprised if I found it had all turned to ashes. Glowing ashes at that.

  Reflexively, I looked down at my purse every time a uniformed officer passed in front of me. What was the real reason I’d copied the names and numbers? The closest I could come to an answer was that, somehow, giving up complete control of Charlotte’s case hadn’t been an option.

  Charlotte had gone from “friend” to “case” in a matter of hours, I noted.

  The flowers in the fabric print of my purse seemed to radiate heat and warm my leg. In my oversensitive state, my purse seemed to be glowing from the ink on the copy paper. When I lose my sense of reason and give in to fantasy, I do it in a big way.

  I couldn’t have felt worse if I’d skimmed a few hundred off the top of the money bag I’d unlocked. No wonder most criminals were caught; their guilt must give them away every time.

  I thought about how Charlotte would never carry a fabric purse like mine. I had them in all colors and print
s, to match the season—today’s was basically brown, with tiny green leaves in a William Morris–like design—but my elegant friend used only classic, dark leather bags. Except for the low-end duffel now on my lap.

  Whirrrr. Whirrrr. Whirrrr.

  The sound of helicopter blades rang through the hallway. This time, it wasn’t my imagination that all eyes turned to me.

  A call from Bruce to my cell. “Sorry,” I said to all within earshot, trying to shrink my already small frame.

  “We’re walking in,” Bruce said. “Just checking how you are.”

  I pictured the three guys in their approach shoes, a cross between a trainer and a walking boot, making their way from where they parked the car to the base of the climb. Unlike simply crossing a parking lot in front of the supermarket, the approach to the base of a mountain could be an arduous trip in itself, with rough terrain. It could be as long as my entire morning run. When I did a morning run, that is. This approach would take only about an hour, Bruce had said, as if it were no more trouble than getting the mail at the end of a driveway.

  “Don’t back step the rope,” I said to him, showing off my short glossary of climbing terms.

  “Uh, right,” Bruce said, and I knew I’d revealed my ignorance of context. Too late I realized I’d simply told him not to entangle his foot and fall upside down.

  I started to sign off with Bruce, ready to worry about snowstorms at high altitudes. If I was lucky, he’d be able to connect by cell, but nothing was guaranteed on a mountain, and I’d come to believe that Bruce liked that feeling. “Conquering planet Earth,” I’d called it.

  A shadow crossed my lap. I looked up to see Virgil, his bulk somehow threatening today, as if he were wearing a long, black hood and carrying a scythe.

  “It’s Bruce,” I said, showing him my cell phone. “He’s off on a climb with Kevin and Eduardo.”

  “Yeah, I know. No accounting for some people’s idea of fun, huh? Harnesses and hitches.”

  Virgil had also picked up some climbing vocabulary, though he was as likely as I was to strike out for a mountain to scale.

  The astute detective sensed the weight of the duffel as I tried to rise from the seat gracefully while clicking off my phone.