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Mystery
TURKEY DAY
CAPER
Or Some Days
You Eat the Bird and Some Days the Bird Eats You
By Paul R.
Lloyd
The crumbs of
the apple pie stared back at me like a corpse from a gangland
shootout. Cranberry sauce dribbled down my chin, but I was too full
to lift my napkin to wipe it. Then the hinges squealed on my office
door and I knew those apple crumbs, the last remains of a
Thanksgiving dinner from the Black Dingus Bar and Grill, would never
be eaten. I managed to wipe my chin before police lieutenant Lawson
entered.
“Somebody kill
a turkey?” I placed my napkin on my battleship gray office desk.
“Not just any
turkey. Councilman Smithern’s eldest son took a head chopping.”
Lawson planted himself next to my paper plate with the candy yams
smiling up at him.
I hate candy
yams. “And you want to know who done it?”
“Appears to be
his girlfriend, Anita Rose.” Lawson folded his arms across his
chest.
“The looker
hugging the front page of the papers these days?”
“Beautiful in
life and in the paper. Not so good looking in the county lock up.”
“But she didn’t
do it, did she?” I pushed my chair away from the desk. Good thing it
has wheels.
“Appears she
did, but I’m not sure.”
“Hand me the
notes.” I stretched my hand out while marveling at how plump my
fingers appeared.
“Just one
thing, first.” Lawson placed a hand into his suit jacket.
“Yeah. What is
it?”
“Councilman’s
son. Yeah, he was a turkey, but he didn’t deserve the axe.”
I nodded. “She
a swinger?”
“Yeah, guess
so. Hits all the clubs if that’s what you mean.”
I shook my
head. “Nah, I mean did she have the muscle to swing an axe?”
“The axe was
swung. The head rolled. Her goose is as good as cooked.”
I shrugged.
“Not her goose in the morgue, is it?”
Lawson placed
the notes in my hand. “See what you can make of this.”
I took the
crumbled old napkin with gravy smears.
The guy
sitting at the table chewing the stuffing out of the turkey doesn’t
like Phil.
Bill didn’t
see the axe land on the victim’s neck because he was busy over on
the other side of the room backing into the person carving the rest
of the bird.
I put the
gravy-decorated scrap of paper napkin on my desk and picked up my
cranberry juice. “You’ve four people at this Thanksgiving dinner and
one of them lost his head so there are three suspects, right
Lawson?”
“That’s
correct: Anita Rose, Phil Offit and Bill dePop.”
“Your notes
don’t tell me much.”
“So?”
“So you know
me. I work with what I have. The axe swinger is…”
Whodunit?
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Contact:
Paul R. Lloyd
630-393-6516
info@zuklloyd.com
www.zuklloyd.com
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