Millstone - Novel 02 Ch. 05

The Case of Pure Blue Murder

All Rights Reserved © 2021, Rick Haydn Horst

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

IMPORTANT: Be sure to read my the first novel in this series: Hanging the Chimney Hook listed as Millstone Novel 01 before you read this one!

CHAPTER FIVE

Millstone's Sources

Our SUV had several improvements over the roadster. It could carry equipment in the cabin and three more people, it was safer, and we hadn't felt beholden to Winter for our using it. I admit though, the roadster had its own pluses. It got better gas mileage than the SUV--especially on the highway, we could put the top down, it could fit into tighter parking spaces, and most importantly of all, while wearing our seatbelts in the roadster, Max had access to three inches of my cock to blow me while I drove. In the SUV? Not so much. The wider vehicle meant the seats sat farther apart. A handy was the most I could hope for, and that would have been a mistake. I could only imagine the difficulty of cleaning up after firing a barrage of 16 cum shots into the crevices of the passenger side. So, that was not gonna happen.

With us so busy that morning, I worried that I would have one of my spontaneous erections. My cock kinda worked like a time bomb that would prime itself almost at random, and sometimes it took little to get it started. We had seen on the sidewalks the occasional nude and scantily clad individual celebrating Bare as You Dare Day, but apparently, most of the celebrants were in the Roman Park. However, as the day wore on, more and more were walking around the city, and I tried to ignore them, but I had the sexiest man in Franklin with me everywhere I went. Sometimes, at the right moment, I could just look at Max and my insides would turn to jelly. That's when the tickling sensation on the underside of the head of my cock would start, and I would have no power to control it.

Unlike a lot of places that I had visited, I noticed the citizens of Franklin walked a lot. It reminded me of New York in that regard, but there it was a necessity; in Franklin, it seemed more like a choice.

In our need to reach the Belcaro that morning, we probably would have just walked the three blocks to the nightclub on Brie Street, but in getting to know Tucker, I learned he had to limit his sun exposure. At 12 times more likely to develop certain types of skin cancer than the rest of us, he took that seriously, and we couldn't blame him. He offered us a ride in his new Jeep, so we took him up on it.

In the few minutes through the traffic lights, Edgerton asked about the footprint evidence found at The Crypt, and we could only draw one reasonable conclusion.

"So, the person who opened the case hadn't pounded a stake through the victim's heart," said Edgerton.

Tucker whipped his head toward Edgerton in the passenger seat. "Oh my god! Is that how they died? Holy shit..."

"Maybe. Only the pathologist can tell us for sure. When I spoke to the vamps, they all gave one another an alibi, but now it seems likely that one or more of them is lying. Tucker, have you ever been to The Crypt?"

He shook his head. "No, I always avoided the Goth clubs. I wouldn't have wanted them to think of me as a gawker."

"So, let me get this straight," he said, "being thought a sadist is fine, but a gawker's just going too far."

Tucker laughed. "Life's funny like that, isn't it?"

Naturally, the Belcaro had no valet during the day, so Tucker took a parking space closer to the door along with the two other vehicles parked in the otherwise empty lot.

As one would expect, the nightclub had a totally different vibe in the stark light of day. The building lost all its iconic appeal created by the dramatic illumination. The bright blue glass looked washed out, and the daylight displayed the building's less attractive features that the heavy shadows helped to hide.

Under the covered drop-off, we could see a metal plate on the wall about chest high by the main entrance. Edgerton walked to it, opened it, pressed a button inside, and waited.

"Hello?" said a voice.

Edgerton displayed his badge to the camera. "I'm Detective Sergeant Wade Edgerton. We wish to speak with Dante Fabrioni in person. It's important."

"That's me. What's this about?"

"It's about the police wishing to speak with you," he said in a stern voice. "I know this is probably a little early for you, and for that, I apologize, but it's unavoidable."

"Alright. I'll come down."

A second later, the door buzzed, and we could hear an unlocking click. Edgerton pulled the handle of the windowless door, and we all entered.

Once the door closed behind us, the brilliant sunshine outside had left us sightless in the darkened hallway where we met a disconcerting silence. Upon reaching the ground floor, a bell rang out and the light from a widening crack spilled into the hallway from the lift's interior. Standing before us, wearing a black robe and house shoes, was the handsome-faced bartender who duped me out of $300 the previous evening. It was Dante Fabrioni leaning against the open door to prevent its closing. I glanced at Max, and he was equally surprised.

The man rubbed an eye, not quite awake. "Good morning, good afternoon...whichever it is." When his hand left his eye, he looked up. "Oh, it's you," he said the moment he saw Max and me, and he hadn't tried too hard to suppress his smile.

"We could say the same," said Max.

"You could have told us who you were."

"And ruin my fun? Why would I do that?" He turned to Edgerton. "With your presence, detective, I take it this is more than a matter of a mere $300." He stared at Tucker while Edgerton spoke to him.

"Yesterday afternoon, you received a shipment of Caeruleum Occidentum and signed for it at 5:43 according to our invoice copies."

"Yeah, that sounds right. What's this about?" He eyed Edgerton.

"The driver turned up dead in his motel room this morning."

"He did?" He thought for a moment, glancing at our faces, then shook his head. "Well, I wouldn't have killed him. He wasn't the hunky guy who delivered my previous orders, but he made me happy. He gave me my wine in a careful, timely manner with a smile on his face and a polite, 'have a good evening,' on his lips. What more could I ask?"

"I'm not here to accuse you of killing him," said Edgerton, "but we would like to talk to you about it."--he tipped his head a little--"This will take more than a few minutes, so you might want to get comfortable. And we would like to see that case of wine if we may."

Dante took a deep breath and sighed. "Yeah, alright. Come on up." He moved to the side of the lift so we could enter.

He pulled a card from his pocket and gazed over at me. "Managed it, anyway, didn't you?" He let the reader above the buttons read the card, and the doors closed.

"You had your fun at my expense."

"If it's any consolation, the money went to a good cause," he said. "The bartender's wife had had a difficult pregnancy, and she went into labor last night, so Linsey wanted to be there. I let her go on the clock, and your $300 made up for the tips she would have lost."

"How did it go?" asked Max.

"Thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, the mother and baby girl are fine."

When the lift doors opened, we entered a hallway as we had on the other floors the night before, except that the hall of the third floor held a round lobby sofa in tufted brown leather. He had the end of the hallway walled off as though it were an exterior wall with a set of solid wood doors carved in an old-world Italian design with forged iron studs.

We followed him beyond the door and found ourselves in a cozy Italian bar. The beautiful and well-loved bar top and bar back could easily have been 100 years old. A conspicuous antique copper espresso machine, adorned with an eagle, had sat off to the side. The bar had three booths and a few sets of comfortable seating, that included a brown leather couch and chairs, where we took up residence as Dante fetched the wine. He wheeled in the case from a back room and grabbed a pair of scissors from behind the bar. He carefully laid the case onto the leather ottoman in front of me. Without the case from The Crypt beside it to make a fine comparison, as far as I could tell, it looked the same as the other, including the straps which had the same CO logo repeated across them.

"You've yet to open it," I said.

"I still have a couple of bottles from the last case. I just got it early to save on the shipping with the others. But I checked the seals upon delivery, so I know it's good."

"Save on the shipping with the others?" asked Edgerton. "What does that mean?"

"With the other people making orders," he said. "DiSCo--that's the shipper--isn't like the main shipping companies that most people use; they don't do routing and transfers. They make single-vehicle special deliveries across the country. So, the more deliveries they can make within a fifty-mile radius means the cost of shipping is divided by the number of drop-offs. Initially, I would have paid for it all, but when I told a friend from the Franklin Nightclub Association about the wine, he decided to buy a case as a birthday present. So, the shipping would have been halved for each of us. I made my order, he made his order, and just before Prego Imports sent it out, someone else made an order, so when Prego emailed me that they were sending it out, they let me know they divided the shipping into thirds, which saved me a further seven hundred and fifty dollars."

"Do you still have that email?" I asked.

He pulled out his phone. "It's in my trash, but I'll forward it to you. What's an email address for that?"

Edgerton gave him his own, and upon receiving it, he checked the email. "It has the address for the import company and a phone number, but no means to track the shipment." Edgerton gestured to the container. "Okay, go ahead."

After Dante made two snips of the straps, I unlatched the case and opened it. The lid felt different, heavier. The interior looked identical to what I remember from a couple of hours earlier. It had the same foam interior, the same blue waxed bottles sticking up with their CO logo stamped into the wax on top. I pulled out a bottle and immediately I could tell a difference. "This doesn't feel right," I said. It all looked the same, it was the same color bottle, the same wax, the same label. I said to Dante who sat by me on the couch, "You deal with a lot of wine; you tell me. Is it my imagination?"

I handed him the bottle and the moment he held it, he felt it too, and he wasn't happy. "It's noticeably lighter," he said, "by several ounces." He handed it back, gazing upon Edgerton. "I paid almost 200 thousand dollars for that case. What is this?"

I looked closer at the label. It had all the typical characteristics, and in the same locations as far as I could tell. I really needed one of the other bottles for a proper comparison, but then I noticed it. "This morning, Officer Sawyer told us that the vintner began production in 2005, but this says the vintage is 2000."

"Besides the difference in weight, that must have been what the guy at The Crypt looked for," said Max.

"Shouldn't we open one?" asked Tucker. "Just to see what's inside."

We all looked to Edgerton who took a moment. "Yeah. We need to know."

Dante held out his hand. "If you will allow me..."

I handed him the bottle, and we joined him at the bar. He set a wine glass before him and carefully cut away the top of the soft blue wax seal and removed the metal cover used to protect the cork. With able hands that had uncorked innumerable bottles over the years, he used a trusty screw and removed this one with ease. Attached to the cork was cotton filler, and once out of the way, he tipped the bottle to pour the contents into the wine glass, and like dimes from an old slot machine, out came a trickle of little blue pills.

"Is that generic Viagra?" asked Dante.

"One moment..." Edgerton fished into the pocket of his jacket for a slim case that held several instruments, including a long pair of tweezers. He picked a pill from the glass, and we studied it. One side of the pill had the word "MURDER" written on it in tiny lettering, and on the other side, we saw a rudimentary depiction of a stereotypical chalk outline. It looked like the ones they used years ago for the press to photograph after someone's murdered body was taken away. The police no longer do that; it contaminates the crime scene.

Max also studied the pill over Edgerton's shoulder. "That looks like Ecstasy to me."

"Have any of you ever seen these before?" I asked.

"I haven't," said Max to which Tucker and Dante concurred.

"Neither have I," said Edgerton. "The start of something new, maybe? We need Narcotics in on this to see what they say and run a few tests of it." He dropped the pill into the glass, pulled a small evidence bag from his kit, and poured the pills from the glass into it.

"Iota works for William Bennet in Boxly," said Tucker, and we all turned to him. "He asked Farron in the men's room last night if anyone was selling some Ecstasy. Maybe he was looking for these pills."

"I hope not," said Edgerton as we returned to our seats. "Bennet is bad news."

Tucker said to Dante, "I saw you have security bring Iota up here. So, what happened?"

"So, that's where I saw you," he said. "I saw you at the balcony wall last night. If I hadn't had so many irons in the fire, I would have spoken to you. They brought Iota up, but I didn't invite him into my home; I met them in the hallway. I told him that I knew who he was, what he was, and I barred him from the club. He said he didn't know what I was talking about. It's bad for business for customers to see someone ejected from the club, so they quietly escorted him down the fire escape from the piano bar."

Max got my attention. "Millstone...," he said and tapped the clock on his phone. "We have an appointment in thirty minutes with a client who would not appreciate our lack of punctuality."

"Oh shit...right," I said and turned to Edgerton. "Are you good for the moment?"

"Yeah, you go. This will take a bit longer," he said. "Tucker, will you stay? We need to talk."

"That would be helpful," I said to him. "You can tell us what we miss, and Max and I will just walk the three blocks."

When Tucker indicated that he would stay, Max and I departed.

Tucker's Journal

When Millstone and Max made to leave, I rotated around taking the seat that Millstone had vacated on the couch by Dante, and something unexpected happened. Wade had his back to it, so he hadn't seen, but we sat in silence, as Wade texted an officer in Narcotics a message along with a photo of the pills. From where I sat, I could see the entrance to the hallway that led to the rest of Dante's apartment, and when we heard the door snap shut behind Millstone and Max, someone stepped into view in the hallway, perhaps thinking we had all left. It was Gerhardt Last, wearing a blue t-shirt that he couldn't have worn the night before, and nothing else. I thought how he must be working his way through the entire Fabrioni family. The moment he saw us, he disappeared again, but Dante noticed that I saw him. Of course, Dante couldn't know that I recognized the man's identity, but it seemed clear from his subtle reaction that, for reasons unknown, we weren't supposed to know he was there. So, I gave Dante some standard disarming indicators, and they worked like a charm. I looked him in the eye, and with a flash of raised eyebrows, I gave him a surreptitious wink with a knowing smile. Afterward, I acted as though it never happened, and everything went back to normal.

"I've asked Sergeant Rhodes in Narcotics about it," said Wade, "and he's never seen these either."

"What about my wine?"

"I'm sorry, but we most likely can't get it back. It seems likely that because this case and the one at The Crypt look identical to a casual observer, that fact probably applies to all three cases, and the new driver got them mixed up. For some reason, they sent them without packing slips on the cases. The delivery man probably thought they were all the same because the packaging and invoices indicated they were."

"Well, they would be, wouldn't they?" I asked.

"Exactly. If they were trying something new, it failed. I suspect this case probably should have gone to the third location in Boxly where your case went. If Bennet is involved, I wouldn't have wanted to stand within easy reach when he discovered his wine bottles were full of wine. If he has a connection to the chapel, we'll find it, and we will probably need to go there."

"To Boxly...," I said. "Have their police any animosity toward ours?"

He nodded. "The Franklin Coppers have a far better baseball team than the Boxly Blackjacks. We always win, so you can imagine how they take losing to a team made up of, in their view, a bunch of freaks."--he turned to Dante--"If we find your case of wine, I will do my best to get it for you. In the meantime, I have Narcotics putting the word out that the police have this case in their possession. The drug barons need to know you no longer have it because they might kill you to get it. They may have killed the delivery driver and Bartholomew Beausoleil."

Dante gasped. "Barty is dead?"

"Yes. I understand he was your friend; I'm sorry for your loss."--Wade began pushing the cotton filler back into the bottle--"I would give it a day before you leave your home to let the word spread."--he slipped the bottle into the case with the cork before closing it up--"We need to get this downstairs," he said to me. "Uniform is on the way."

Dante asked him, "How did Barty die?"

"He had a wooden stake through his heart, but that may or may not have happened post-mortem. We'll know in a few hours."

"I can't believe he's gone," said Dante, "I spoke with him last night. He said he received his wine and thanked me for the recommendation. If that's how he died though, then I'm glad; that's how he would have wanted to go."

"Really...," said Edgerton.

"Oh, yes."

When Wade and I passed through the door, I began texting Max about Gerhardt. "So, what would you want to talk to me about? Is this about my giving input? I know I'm new at this, I probably should have just kept quiet and observed."

"No, not at all. I'm pleased with your input. Let's discuss it in the Jeep after uniform takes this away."

On the ground floor, when the lift doors closed behind us, we stood in the near pitch-black hallway navigating our way by the faint illumination of the exit sign and a sliver of sunshine leaking through the bad seal of the main entryway. We both leaned against the inside door while we waited, each of us standing on opposite sides of that sliver of light, and I felt Wade's hand on my stomach beneath my shirt.

"Did you enjoy pretending to be a sadist? Was it fun? That's alright if it was. I imagine it could be."

"At times it was great fun, but the persona required maintenance, and that had a profound effect on my life. That part was an odious chore."

"What do you mean?"

"I only used that persona to get masochists to think that within my pants lay the solution to their ongoing sexual needs, and their belief that I got off on hurting them went along with that. However, once word got around, people knew me as a hardcore sadist, and that caused me to have to remain in character whenever I left home. After a while, it got tedious, and it turned many interesting people off who would have liked the real me. The short-term personas were usually much more fun."