Donna Andrews - Chesapeake Crimes - This Job Is Murder!

The detective started to close the ballroom door. She hurried forward. “Excuse me, Detective?”

“Yes, Ms. Hawkins?”

“I was thinking. I was here last night, and know what the room looked like when I left it. Should I come in and tell you if there is something unusual about the scene?” Besides a dead body, of course. She wasn’t sure if she wanted him to take up her offer, but the executive meeting center was her responsibility and Mrs. Rudy was her client.

The detective stared at her for what seemed like a solid minute, but was probably only five or six seconds. She struggled to meet his steady gaze, then took a deep breath when he nodded.

Katie tried to hold that breath as she approached the stage. The raised platform held a head table with four chairs and a central podium. It was draped with white tablecloths and gold skirting rented especially for this particular meeting. Mrs. Rudy had insisted upon it; she felt the gold added a distinguished touch.

The body, or Mr. Rudy, Katie quickly corrected herself, was lying face down in the middle aisle directly in front of the podium. From the direction he was facing, he must have fallen off the stage. She carefully avoided the pool of vomit and other bodily fluids and climbed the stairs on the stage’s side.

Nothing looked out of place on the table, so she turned toward the podium. And stared in surprise.

Wertz jumped directly up on the stage. “What’s wrong?”

She gazed into his eyes, blue as the Mediterranean Sea, and almost forgot what had bothered her. When she came to her senses, she turned back to the podium and pointed. “It’s the mike.”

“Don’t touch it,” he admonished.

“I wasn’t going to touch it. But it’s odd. See, we label our microphones, so that we can keep track of everything and to make sure that outside rental companies don’t take our stuff.”

“Did you use a rental company this time?”

She shook her head. “Not for any AV equipment. Just for the skirts.”

“Skirts?”

She picked at the fabric wrapped around the base of the table, then remembered she wasn’t supposed to be touching anything. “Skirts. But in case you were wondering, they didn’t deliver these yesterday. We had them three days ago and Bobby set the tables up himself last night.”

“Last night?”

“Yes, last night he worked late setting up the room. We had another group that left at five, so he had to change the setup for Mrs. Rudy’s organization.”

“And was Mrs. Rudy here as well?” Wertz asked.

“Yes, she was. As was I, until about eight.”

“You worked until eight and then came back at 5:45 this morning?”

“You don’t keep nine-to-five hours in this job. You probably understand that.” She glanced over, pleased when he smiled.

“Perfectly.”

“Anyway, Bobby worked until about eleven, then would have come back at six a.m. But, well, I guess he ended up spending the night. He can’t have been comfortable, tied up all night.”

“Probably not.” He nodded his head in agreement then turned back to the scene. “So what’s up with the microphone?”

“It’s broken,” she said simply.

He tilted his head. “And you know this how?”

“Because the last AV report listed that microphone number six was broken. It’s been in storage in the AV closet and isn’t being used.” She waited to see if the detective would react to that revelation, but he was fixated on the trash can under the podium.

He called over one of the crime-scene techs to inspect the trash. The tech reached in with tongs and picked up two thick latex gloves.

Katie considered the gloves and shook her head. “That’s not good.”

The detective moved past her to take a closer look. “What’s not good?”

“We learned in first aid class-all managers have to take the training yearly-anyway, we learned how to safely take off medical gloves. You know, where you partially remove one glove with the other gloved hand, then carefully use it to remove the remaining glove.”

Detective Wertz looked at the gloves, then back at her. “And?”

“Paul, the EMT who teaches the course, would flunk whoever took those gloves off. Look. That one glove is inside out. That means whoever took it off would have touched the outside of the other glove with his bare skin. That’s a good way to contaminate your skin with bodily fluids.”

The detective glanced at the gloves, then over at the body, before turning back to her with a satisfied smile. “Bodily fluids, and maybe something much worse than that.”

“Like what?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Let’s just wait for the medical examiner.”

Katie spent the rest of the morning tracking down an alternative meeting space for Mrs. Rudy’s event. The woman was impossible. Katie couldn’t believe she hadn’t chosen to reschedule.

She spent the rest of the week wondering if the detectives had managed to figure out who had killed Mr. Rudy. Occasionally, she’d wonder if her client had done the deed. Ha! It was easier to picture someone wanting to kill Mrs. Rudy rather than her husband.

On the Friday following the murder, Katie was overseeing the last of the clean-up crew who were steam-cleaning the carpets in the ballroom. Although they managed to remove all traces of poor Mr. Rudy, she didn’t think she’d ever forget anything about the event.

Including Detective Wertz. She shook her head as her mind drifted-as it often did-to the handsome police officer. And speak of the devil, she thought, as the man himself strode through the door. She left the cleaners to their task and rushed over to him.

“Is everything okay?” she asked. “We got the approval to clean up yesterday, and we need the ballroom for a wedding this weekend. I hope-”

He raised a hand to stop her. “Everything is fine, Ms. Hawkins. I just, well, I wanted to let you know how it worked out and to thank you for your help.”

“ My help?”

“Well, you provided the most important clue.”

Blinking in surprise, she tried to remember what she had said or done. “I did?”

“I had already noted how the victim had died, so I suspected poison. I was trying to figure out who might have wanted to poison Mr. Rudy.”

Katie immediately thought of her client. She wondered if the detective was going to tell her that Glenda Rudy was on her way to central booking and a fitting for an orange jumpsuit.

“But when you mentioned the fact about the gloves and that they hadn’t been taken off properly, it made me view the scene in a totally different way. That and the fact that you said that the microphone was broken, and that your staff would have known that.”

Katie frowned. Even with all the medical and crime shows she watched, she suspected she was missing something. “So?”

“So, I don’t think someone was trying to poison Mr. Rudy.” Wertz paused dramatically. “I think Mr. Rudy was trying to poison someone else.”

She sucked in a breath. “Mrs. Rudy!”

“Bingo! She admitted the divorce was going very poorly, especially for her husband. She was about to get a huge settlement.”

Katie shook her head. “So he tried to kill her. He knocked out Bobby, stole a microphone, put poison on it.” She stopped and waited to see if they had determined the poison already.

“Ricin. Nasty stuff. Made from castor beans, which also happen to be used in leather making.”

Katie nodded, remembering that Mr. Rudy was a leather artist. “So he put poison on the microphone, knowing that Mrs. Rudy would be using the microphone first. But when he took off the gloves…”

“He got the ricin on himself,” Wertz continued. “And since he’d added some DMSO solvent to the mix, it was quickly absorbed in the skin.”