Lawrence Block: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 137, No. 2. Whole No. 834, February 2011

“I’ve contacted all the state’s check stations and Barry has never checked in a deer kill. Not this year or last year or the year before. Or a turkey kill, because turkeys have stations, too.”

“Why are you telling me all these things?” Mrs. Haller’s agitation was growing.

“Maybe he’s just a bad shot.” Powder turned his eyes away from her. He found a small dark hole just over the top of the doorframe. He spoke to the hole. “Or maybe, Mrs. Haller, maybe Barry has not gone hunting at all. Not for deer, not for turkeys, not for foxes, not for coyotes, not for rabbits, quails, pheasants, or green frogs. Not for anything that has a season here in Indiana.”

“What?”

“Did you get all that, Barry?” Powder said, addressing the camera directly. “Because if you missed anything, we can go through it again tonight at the station. Maybe we should do a few runs together. See what we can manage by way of giving each other backup.”

“It just shows how statistics don’t prove anything by themselves,” Powder said in Carol Lee Fleetwood’s office the next afternoon.

“Does it?” Carol Lee said wearily.

“What statistics prove all depends on what you ask them. You see, I was looking for Deer Flu and I found it. And Haller showed all the signs. The symptoms, if you will. But if I’d gone through his individual attendance history before I went off half-cocked because he called in sick this time, I’d have seen it. It’s all there, plain as day.”

Fleetwood knew he wanted her to ask what “it” was. She sat and waited.

Finally Powder said, “Haller is off duty on a Monday every three weeks. Every single Monday on a three-week cycle for more than two and a half years. Now a lot of those Mondays fitted in with his time off on rotation, but he’s also traded days with people — more than anybody else on his shifts. This time, the Monday just happened to coincide with the start of deer season and maybe that’s why he couldn’t get anybody to trade with him. So in a backwards kind of way it was Deer Flu that got him. He didn’t have any personal days left, or any vacation, so he called in sick.”

“But not so he could go hunting?”

“The hunting was a story for his wife — who I think he beats up, by the way. What can we do about that?”

“Has she made a complaint?”

“No.” So Powder knew the answer to his original question. He left it and went on with his discoveries. “At first I thought these Mondays might be for something personal, like an affair. But mistresses are more flexible than that, aren’t they? And maybe more demanding. Has to be a Monday, every three weeks? Doesn’t sound like a mistress to me. What do you think?”

Fleetwood stared silently.

“Ah, not willing to go public on your knowledge of mistress behavior. Got it. Smart. Never admit anything. Well, for Haller, it wasn’t that. But the other thing that bothered me, besides the Mondays, was how he knew it was me who came to the door at his house the other day. Well, you know that bothered me. I came here to ask about it.”

“To make accusations,” Fleetwood said.

“And I’m sorry for that. Yeah, sorry, sorry. My apologies to you and your dedicated staff, because it was nothing to do with you guys. The thing is, it also wasn’t because Mrs. Haller recognized me. I finally worked out that the next most likely thing was that Barry put in a camera at his front door, and that’s what it turned out to be.”

“What for? Security?”

“Just the right question,” Powder said. “Have you ever thought that maybe you’re wasted stuck here in this office?”

Fleetwood tilted her head and waited.

“Ah, ah, it’s because you’re wasted that you are in this office. Well, getting back to Haller, it’s not just the expense of putting a surveillance camera in. Or maybe more than one — maybe he has them all around the property — because they’re not as expensive as they used to be, what with webcams and all that. The bigger question was your question. Why would he put them in? Who might come to the door that he wanted a record of? It wasn’t just in case I happened to show up trying to catch him out, now was it?”

Fleetwood again sat silently. But she was interested. He could tell she was.

“So what could he be up to that required him to go away for the day every third Monday and that also required him to have unusually tight security in a house in an ordinary residential development?”

This time Powder out-waited her. Fleetwood said, “I know you want to tell me, Roy, so why don’t you just get on with it.”

“Turns out Officer Haller needed those Mondays to make deliveries of hydroponically grown skank to his connection every three weeks, north of Lafayette. Good stuff for top dollar. They raided the warehouse where it grew on the edge of Muncie this morning — it’ll be all over the news tonight. Lots of exaggerated numbers about street values, no doubt, but it was a big operation. Long flat building about fifty feet on a side, with heat and lights. The growers got around the tell-tale sign of unusually large electricity consumption by making most of it with their own generators. Of course, Barry didn’t do the farming himself — that was his brother. But Barry did the delivery runs because it impressed — and scared — the buyers to have a cop in the loop.” Powder paused for a moment. “Don’t you find it surprising that the powers that be don’t celebrate how nowadays in this country we’ve liberated ourselves almost completely from dependence on foreign-grown weed?”

“I’ll try to remember to send around a memo,” Fleetwood said, although her face showed that she was impressed at what Powder’s number crunch had turned into.

“Well, we don’t really have to worry about Mrs. Haller getting beaten up anymore, because Barry will be spending all his time away from home now. There are a lot of lessons to be learned here, you know.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I really try to help my officers to become better cops, you know that. But it’s a lesson to me, because there’s no point trying to make a ‘better’ cop out of someone who isn’t a ‘good’ man in the first place. Or woman.”

“True enough,” Fleetwood said.

Powder got up. “And I hope you’ve learned your lesson and will become a better non-cop from it.” He didn’t wait for her to respond this time. “Because Haller shows that you really must not rush to take punitive action against all those other guys — and gals — who seem to have been afflicted with Deer Flu. Give me a chance to check out their individual absentee records first. See you around, Carol Lee,” he said, and he was gone.

Copyright © 2010 by Michael Z. Lewin