The Fever Cabinet, page 19
part #9 of Professor Molly Mysteries Series
I THANKED BRYCE, HUNG up, and gave Emma, Harriet, and Fiona, a summary of what Bryce had told me.
All four of us crept out from underneath the truck and peered over the top of the small car next to it. We saw Apostol Dos Santos on his knees. Maureen was backing up the gangplank of the cargo ship.
Harriet straightened up and strode out from between the two cars.
“Mum!” Fiona stage-whispered. Harriet ignored her.
“Dos Santos!” Harriet bellowed.
Apostol Dos Santos turned toward the sound of Harriet’s voice.
“Don’t be a bloody fool, Dos Santos. Your son didn’t kill himself. Maureen shot him.”
“Mum,” Fiona squeaked. “What are you doing?”
“I can’t bear to see a man grovel,” Harriet declared.
Dos Santos wasn’t groveling now. He picked himself up slowly. Maureen was too far away for me to see her facial expression, but I could read her body language. She had been defiant and dismissive. Now she was scared.
“She’s lying!” Maureen shrieked. “It’s not true!”
Apostol Dos Santos roared and charged up the gangplank. His bulk obscured Maureen for a moment.
Three loud pops sounded, like firecrackers.
Apostol Dos Santos flailed his arms, toppled sideways over the skinny railing, and fell into the water with a “sploosh.”
Maureen stood on the gangplank, staring into the water, still grasping the gun with both hands.
Then she looked up. Sirens wailed in the distance, steadily growing louder.
Maureen tossed the gun into the water, in the general direction of her late husband. Ignoring Harriet, she turned and sauntered up the gangplank, pulling the leopard-print rollaboard behind her.
Molly: You Should Talk to Someone
EMMA, DONNIE, AND I were at an outdoor table at the Maritime Club, enjoying the cool breeze and the view of the waves crashing and foaming on the black lava rocks. Emma has the Maritime Club membership, but her husband Yoshi didn’t want to come (“all those pretentious, dressed-up people,” he’d said, which if you knew Yoshi when he first moved here, you’d find hilarious) so she’d invited Donnie and me along.
We were discussing the case of Maureen Dos Santos, who had been apprehended trying to flee the island on a container ship. She was currently awaiting trial for the murders of her son and her husband. It was reported that Mrs. Dos Santos would have escaped had it not been for a group of unnamed witnesses who were either homeless people, or tourists, or both.
“I thought Mahina was too gossipy for anyone to keep secrets,” I said. “But I guess I was wrong. Fiona had no idea her husband was cheating on her.”
“It’s always the one who’s getting cheated on who’s the last to know,” Emma remarked as she stuffed shrimp into her mouth.
I turned to Donnie.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “You and the baby keep me busy as it is. I don’t have time for a whole other woman in my schedule.”
“Good,” I said.
“Eh, service is slow tonight,” Emma said. “I’m gonna go to the bar. Don’t give away my seat.”
Donnie found my hand under the table and squeezed it.
“I’m glad you’re safe,” he said.
“Me too. Believe me, if we’d known Maureen was going to start shooting, we wouldn’t have gone down there. I wouldn’t have gone down there, anyway. Emma might’ve.”
“Molly, I know you wanted to do the right thing, and it’s great that you helped out, but I have to admit, I’m selfish. Your safety is more important to me than anything. So please, next time—”
“I was never in any actual danger,” I said.
“Really?” Donnie looked skeptical.
“I should’ve called you, though. Next time I feel like I’m in trouble at all, I will call you.”
Donnie seemed like he was about to say something but changed his mind.
“You okay?” I asked.
“It’s hard to believe The Rancher is dead.” Donnie squeezed my hand again. “It’s the end of an era. Apostol had a lot of influence in Mahina.”
“Hey, a power vacuum,” I said. “Here’s your chance. To be King of Mahina or whatever Dos Santos was.”
Donnie laughed.
“No thanks. I’d have to fight Konishi for it.”
“Al Konishi?” I asked. “Konishi Construction?”
Donnie nodded.
“He’s Dos Santos’s cousin.”
“Hey, Professor Barda, Mister Gonsalves.”
We looked up to see Micah, my former student and erstwhile security guard. He wore a white shirt and black trousers, and was holding an order pad.
“Micah? You work here?” I asked, unnecessarily. “At the Maritime Club?”
He nodded enthusiastically.
“Yeah, I quit the security job. Couldn’t handle, after da kine, in Dr. Spencer’s office. I kept seeing it in my head when I was trying fo’ go sleep, you know? Mr. Gonsalves, the guy was all cooked like one huli huli chicken. You know when they moved the body he just fell apart—”
“Sounds like you made a good decision,” Donnie said.
“That’s a traumatic thing to live through, Micah,” I said. “I know exactly what you mean. Maybe you should talk to someone about it.”
“Oh yeah, good idea.” Micah pulled out the fourth chair and sat down at our table.
“Micah, I didn’t mean—”
“Professor Barda, glad you never get hurt. Mr. Gonsalves, bet you was worried, ah?”
“Yes,” Donnie said.
“Micah,” I said, “we don’t want to take you away from your work.”
“It’s okay. It’s a little slow right now. Eh, so my cousin at Mahina PD told me—oh hey, Professor Nakamura.”
Emma had a glass of beer in each hand.
“That was nice of you to bring extra,” I said, “but Donnie and I are drinking wine.”
“Huh? These aren’t for you. This is so I don’t have to get up again. Eh, Micah, looking sharp, you.”
“I dressed for work, that’s why.”
“Listen, if you want anything to drink, you gotta get it yourself,” she said. “Service is junk today.”
“Micah was going to tell us what he heard from his cousin who works with Mahina PD,” I said.
“Oh yeah?” Emma got seated and started on her first glass of beer. “So is it really true? Maureen killed her son in the headmaster’s office and made it look like suicide?”
“It’s true,” Micah said. “The boy was gonna tell the father about the mother’s affair.”
“What a little snitch,” Emma said. “Not that I’m excusing Maureen for killing him. But still.”
A bearded man in an aloha shirt materialized next to our table.
“Is everything okay here?” he asked. “Micah?”
Micah scooted the chair back and jumped to his feet.
“Oh, hey, Mr. K. Sorry, I was just—”
“It’s my fault,” I said. “Micah was sharing some history with us. At my request. I understand if you can’t spare him.”
The manager glanced at his watch.
“We do want our staff to engage our customers,” he said. “And we’re proud to share our club’s history. But Micah, we’re a little busy right now, and we have customers waiting.”
Molly: We Absolutely Disapprove of Murder
MICAH CAME BACK TO our table to chat after the rush was over. According to his cousin at Mahina PD, the purple glob in the microwave really was from Trevor Dos Santos’s phone. After Maureen shot her son, she cooked his phone in the microwave to get rid of the photos he’d taken. She managed to ruin the microwave. But she didn’t destroy the incriminating images, which the police were able to retrieve from a remote server.
I picked up a little more gossip from Bryce Kahului, my student, when he stopped by my office during Christmas break. Bryce has lunch regularly with Mr. Ferman, who has been sharing his recollections as they surface.
The workman who had been wearing Emmett Spencer’s watch was telling the truth about where he got it. Apostol Dos Santos had just killed Emmett Spencer and was about to walk away from the body when Mr. Ferman happened by on his morning stroll.
To distract Mr. Ferman from the nail-studded corpse lying prone on the workbench, Dos Santos removed the headmaster’s distinctive watch and handed it to Mr. Ferman. Disoriented by what he had just witnessed, Mr. Ferman regifted the watch to the first person he saw—the Konishi employee I’d seen at our building. He then wandered out onto the highway and into the path of a tour bus.
Fortunately, Mr. Ferman’s body and his memory are steadily recovering.
Pat Flanagan was finishing up his feature on the Labor Day Race and preparing to pitch a story on The Dos Santos murders to his editor. I gave Pat my eyewitness account of Dos Santos’s death and Maureen’s attempted escape. Pat reciprocated with the solution to the Mystery of Emmett Spencer’s Christmas Plans: Fiona’s husband had reserved a single-occupancy room in a Las Vegas resort. The same resort where Maureen and Apostol Dos Santos spent the holidays. The apparent plan was for Maureen and Emmett to sneak off while Apostol gambled.
No wonder Emmett didn’t want Fiona to accompany him.
The Dos Santos case was, unsurprisingly, the main topic of discussion at the December meeting of the Pua Kala Garden society. We deduced that the extortion note Mrs. Masterman’s housekeeper found in the bathroom had probably been discarded there by Maureen. When Mrs. Masterman asked the group about it, Maureen pretended she had no idea what it was.
There was a general feeling among the Pua Kala Garden Society members of having been hoodwinked; we’d all thought of Trevor Dos Santos as a tragic victim of suicide, not a ruthless blackmailer. We agreed that while we absolutely disapproved of murder, it wasn’t easy to eke out much sympathy for the young racketeer.
Serena, the dean’s secretary, told me it was Fiona’s mother who had kicked off the entire chain of events. Harriet’s chewing-out of Fiona’s husband in the middle of Mahina Stationers was immediately the talk of Mahina, Serena told me. The gossip got back to Maureen’s husband, who could no longer remain in denial. He took advantage of his position on the board of the St. Aelred School for Boys to lure his wife’s lover to the isolated parsonage site behind the school.
The physical evidence indicates that Emmett Spencer’s last act was turning his back on the older man—an unforgivable gesture of disrespect.
No one seems to know whether Dos Santos knew in advance that the fever cabinet was in Fiona’s office, or what he was thinking when he placed Emmett Spencer’s lifeless body into the device. Dos Santos might have remembered the difficulty of identifying his first wife after the tanning bed accident and assumed Emmett Spencer’s identity could be similarly obscured. Or he may have plugged the thing in not knowing what it did, nor caring that he could have burned our building to the ground. Dos Santos, of course, isn’t talking.
After our college got the fever cabinet back from the police (who were happy to return it as it took up most of the free space in the evidence room), the Finance Club auctioned it off online. With the proceeds, the College of Commerce was able to buy a teakettle, coffee maker, and microwave for each floor of our building. And we had enough left over for two years’ worth of copy paper, toner, and whiteboard markers.
Without a murder conviction hanging over her head, Fiona Spencer decided to cancel her trip back to England and finish out fall semester. She left after commencement for a position in New Zealand. Her students threw her a little party and gave her a fancy umbrella as a going-away present, which I hope she assumed was a reference to rainy Mahina.
I had been dreading trying to find a replacement for Fiona, but fortunately there was a candidate available. A recently-retired Tutor in Law at Balliol College, Oxford University. Miraculously, she’s perfectly content with our paltry lecturer wages, and with her office assignment. It’s Fiona’s old office, Room 310, which she cheerfully refers to as “the abattoir.”
Her name? Harriet Holmes.
Fiona: Dear Old Oscar
FIONA STEPPED OUT OF the motor coach in front of the extended-stay hotel, and took a deep draught of cool, foggy air. She’d feared New Zealand’s upside-down seasons would mean a warm December, but here at the southern tip of South Island at least, it was cooler than she’d expected.
It would feel like a proper Christmas after all. This cheered her. Driving on the left-hand side of the road had lifted her spirits as well. Fiona had the oddly pleasant sensation of coming home to someplace she had never been.
She extended the handle of her rolling bag and hooked her new umbrella onto it. As a moving away gift her students had given her a British-made umbrella, black, with a malacca crook handle. It was meant as a sort of joke; the students called her “Mary Poppins” on the sly. Fiona thought this rather sweet, and far preferable to some other nick names she’d heard of.
She checked her watch: a men’s Vacheron Constantin with a dark-blue alligator band. It looked huge on her slender wrist, but Fiona liked the boldness of it. The Mahina police had been lovely about getting it back for her. She’d heard the builder who had been wearing it was only too happy to return it when he found out where it had come from.
Another entry on the plus side of the ledger: Harriet had stayed behind in Mahina.
Fiona’s mother had negotiated a semi-retirement with the Bursar in order to teach at Mahina State. Because she had been a Tutor in Law at Oxford, she was deemed qualified to teach the College of Commerce Business Ethics classes. Harriet was happy to make do on a lecturer’s salary. She was minted and didn’t need the money, and she thought the whole thing a jolly wheeze.
As much as Fiona didn’t want to admit it to herself, she was relieved to find it wasn’t too much trouble to travel between Hawaii and New Zealand. When she was ready, she could pop over and visit Harriet. And with only a few more months before Fiona’s father was out of prison, there was a fair chance all three would be able to meet soon, perhaps somewhere on the upcoming book tour for his prison memoir.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
Dear old Oscar. There was no avoiding him, it seemed. Fiona smiled and pulled her rolling bag up to the hotel’s check-in counter.
From the Author
THANK YOU FOR TAKING the time to read The Fever Cabinet. If you enjoyed it, please consider telling your friends and posting a short review. Word of mouth is an author’s best friend, and much appreciated.
Frankie Bow teaches at a public university and writes licensed Miss Fortune World novellas as well as The Professor Molly Mysteries. Unlike Professor Molly, Frankie is blessed with delightful students, sane colleagues, and a perfectly nice office chair. She thinks if life can’t be fair, at least it can be entertaining.
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Also by Frankie Bow
Miss Fortune World: Hair Extensions and Homicide
Once Upon a Murder
Tabasco Fiasco
Schooled
Miss Fortune World: Supernatural Sinful
Sinful Science
Miss Fortune World: The Mary-Alice Files
Mary-Alice Moves In
Bayou Busybody
The Vanishing Victim
Aloha, Y'all
The Two-Body Problem
Black Widow Valley
The No-Tell Motel
Vampire Billionaire of the Bayou
The Pajama Murder
The Lost Weekend
Professor Molly Mysteries
Trust Fall
The Musubi Murder
The Cursed Canoe
The Black Thumb
The Invasive Species
Mother's Day
The Nakamura Letters
The Perfect Body
The Fever Cabinet
The Case of the Defunct Adjunct
Watch for more at Frankie Bow’s site.
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Hawaiian Heritage Press publishes Hawaii's finest classic and modern literature.
Frankie Bow, The Fever Cabinet
