ALL IS NOT GOLD THAT GLITTERS

ALL IS NOT GOLD THAT GLITTERS

A William J. Maccabee Mystery

By Andrew Paul Grell

“No, I don’t miss Texas at all, not at all. I’m happy here in Marengo. The Iowa River has everything I need, fish, boating, quiet.  And not getting Texas hot is a definite plus. That, and not having to be known as the guy who let them slip away.” William J. Maccabee, Billy Mack to his friends, just left the Friends Meeting House which the tiny Jewish community rented every Saturday for Sabbath services. As usual, he walked the four blocks to Little Green Sambo’s Pancake Paradise, where Chief Deputy Ella Hemmings had already ordered a spinach and tomato omelet on a short stack for him. Omelet and Police Chief had arrived at Ella’s table simultaneously, just in time for the weekend schmooze and briefing. They were quite a pair; she was as tall as he was round. If she stood on his shoulders they would make an exclamation point.

“And Marengo is more than happy to have a man with your experience keeping us safe. Nothing on the scanners this morning. Three drunks in the tank from last night. Bob’s cruiser got another flat.”

“Which tire?”

“Right front. Like the others.”

“Making a fast left turn, that tire absorbs the centrifugal force. Bob’s been grandstanding. Tell him to stop clowning around.”

“Will do. But I’m sure you meant centripetal acceleration, Bill, didn’t you?”

“Nobody likes a smarty-farty, Ella.” The duo surveyed the new art installation in the main dining room, WPA-style posters showing various stages of getting food out of the ground and onto people’s plates with as little damage as possible, all while having the result—as depicted in the last poster—of having it be delicious. Ella’s radio gave the Star Trek chirp she had “modified” into her comm gear.

“10-17, 10-17, 199-101 East South Street. B&E, larceny, possibly grand.”

“10-4. Copy, Jim. ETA 30. I’ve got pancake syrup up to my elbows.”

“No rest for you on your day of rest, Chief, eh?”

“Well, at least I have you as a Shabbos Goy.” Let’s mosey over and see what got stolen. One thing I like about this burg is that there really ain’t that much to steal.”

The pair in blue walked the few blocks to the complainant’s home, a ranch with a few cute additions; mud room, sun deck, car port, and a mini-gym propagating out from one wall. And one freshly-jimmied window. Ella rang the bell, and an almost-aged-out cheerleader type showed up almost instantly.

“You’re not going to believe what got stolen. This is just so embarrassing,” the victim half-giggled. Bill was trying to conjure an answer to where he thought he knew her from. No luck.

Ella handled the interview so Billy wouldn’t have to write anything. 

“Could we have your name, Ma’am?”

“Roberta S. Fletcher.”

“And what is it that was stolen? If it’s embarrassing in, you know, a female way, the Chief here can go have a smoke.”

“That won’t be necessary, but thanks. Two gold rings were stolen. Last night. While I was sleeping. While I was, umm, wearing them.”

Ella was trying to parse that. “Anything special about those rings?”

“They were, umm, nipple rings. Solid gold. Not cheap. Before you ask, I went to bed wearing flannel jammies, all buttoned up. This morning everything was still buttoned up. The barbells are still in place, but the rings are gone. I searched the whole bed, both sides, the whole bedroom. It’s possible that a pierce could fall off through, you know, activity. But not two at once. And there wasn’t any activity last night. Not that I know of, anyways.”

“You’re new in town, aren’t you? We appreciate your candor. Do you have a receipt for the stolen, hmm, items?” Bill was a tad embarrassed.

“Sure. I’m from OKC. And yes, it’s a recent purchase. I had the work done at WiJo’s. My cousin went to Grinnell, she told me that if I ever wanted a pierce done right, I should go to WiJo’s. She said that the whole Lambda Alpha Beta chapter got an identical pierce.”

Ella picked the interview back up. “Any indication at all that you may have been assaulted?”

“Nope. No alien fluids, no cookie crumbs. It’s like $750 in gold just up and vanished.”

“Miz Fletcher, rest assured that we will do everything possible to return your property and bring the perpetrator to justice. And again, we appreciate your reporting this. It may save someone else from danger.” The Chief turned to his deputy. “Ella, could you have Jim find Gumby and buy him a drink at the Elephant’s Eye, and keep him there until we show up? Thanks.”

Ella opened up when they were walking back. “Why Gumby? He wouldn’t know a caper from a rat turd, and if he did, he wouldn’t know how to pull one off. Heh. Pull one off. That’s about all he can do. He never broke anybody’s window, did he?  Never stole anything?”

“Nope, never did. Far’s I know. But we have a crime and we have a window and we know a guy who does his crimes at windows.”

“Jim, 10-25 Gumby. Then 10-59 Elephant’s Eye.”

“10-4, Ella. Drinks on the expense account?”

“Affirmative. Shirley Temples for you.”

It took about 20 minutes to walk to the bar. As soon as Bill saw Gumby, he knew it couldn’t have been him, but he went through the motions; Mom as an alibi, watching the Mets beat the Royals, suspect described the blown double-play, two neighbors had seen him when he went out to the sidewalk for a smoke. Bill handed him a pack of Camels and left with Ella.

“Chief, this may not be the first time this happened. Why don’t we go back to the Corral and kick the computer until it spits something up?”

“Here’s the way we do things in the 21^st Century, Chief. If the records haven’t been eaten.” Ella was pulling an old joke on her boss; the station was built when before cars and the police were mounted. An apocryphal story had five cases blown because a horse managed to get from the shed to the office behind the wall where active case files were stored. “We have 17 missing or stolen jewelry reports in the past five years. I’ve got a buddy at Corn Exchange Casualty, I’ll see what matches up.”

Monday morning came, and along with the Chief’s customary bagels for the station, there was a short stack of faxes from Ella’s friend.

“These are the ones that people weren’t too embarrassed to report.   There are going to be more, I’m sure,” Bill sagely remarked.

“We have eight claims. Five of them match our incident reports. Twelve people didn’t file claims or didn’t have coverage. Three of the five had receipts from WiJo’s. Six people who didn’t file have WiJo’s receipts in our incident reports. Not a single claim or incident report had a forced entry. Roberta’s is new.”

“Thanks, Ella. There’s not enough to question WiJo. Yet. Can you imagine a door-knock canvass for this? ‘Hello, do you have any intimate piercings?’ Not even Jim could handle that.”

“I’m not so sure. You might have to spot him a Franklin for a night at Dangerous Curves. The women make their money by getting the men to buy them drinks and chat for a while. Maybe Jim could ask about the jewelry in question because his wife is thinking of getting a pierce, and did she have any suggestions?”

“I like it. And come to think of it, WiJo probably has a customer list and knows his patron’s addresses. He knows where the gold is. Okay. If Jim gets two suggestions for WiJo, we’ll go over and have a friendly chat with the artiste. I have an idea. We also may want to have another chat with Roberta. There’s something about her that’s got me nagged. If we could get her cousin’s sorority sisters to interview, that might be a fair lot for one of those high potheses tests. See what condition those piercings are in.”

“High potheses, Chief?”

“Hey, I wasn’t sleeping during math class in Odessa High like so many of my friends were. How do you think I made it to Chief?”

“Do you really think a woman is going to introduce you to her secret society friends to have a look at their private piercings?”

“Of course not. You’re going to be doing the looking.”

Lambda Alpha Beta sisters were not the wealthiest of co-eds. When the Chief told Roberta that there was a travel and per diem budget, she made a call. Eventually seven agreed to be interviewed.

“Seven, Ella. That’s one more than we need to Chebyechev distribution test.”

“I guess you really weren’t asleep in school, Chief Maccabee. I scheduled the interviews for Thursday. What is it you’re really looking for?”

“Promise you won’t laugh.”

“Not a chance. If you’ve got information about a crime, spill it.”

“Not information, not yet. This was maybe 55 years ago. It was either Danny Dunn or Encyclopedia Brown. There was a glass of ginger ale in the fridge when the glass was supposed to have water. Something like that.” Ella didn’t laugh, not even a chuckle.

On Thursday, Bill was late to the interview. A congregant lost her dad and he showed up to make sure there was a minyan so she could say Kaddish. He left the Friends Meeting House oasis of peace and forced himself into the world of no-goodnicks   at the Corral. The LABs were seated in the large space that used to be the tack shed. Ella had told him when he first saw it that the English saddle mounted on the wall was left behind as a gift from a London Metro Police detective tracking down a fugitive. The women went one by one to be interviewed by Ella. Bill let her know he would pay an extra hundred for anyone who had a WiJo receipt and would part with one of her adornments.

“Here we go, Chief. Three of the seven had barbell-mounted jewelry and had one or more of them ‘just disappear.’ None of them thought any more about it than sometimes jewelry gets lost no matter how secure it seems to be. No one had a break-in. Four are married, three are single, living alone.” The Deputy pushed three evidence bags across the table to her boss. The pieces in the first two bags were recognizable; the third had a set of three small pieces that looked like eyelets for thick sneaker laces. Ella refused to discuss them.

“Pat,” the Chief shouted, never having gotten used to the intercom system. “Can you get me a few pee-test cups and the coke scale?” Pat was a night school chemistry grad student working his way through as an in-house narcotics expert.

Bill took off his wedding ring and glanced up at Heaven and his late wife. He dropped it into a cup holding 50 milliliters of water. The water level went up to 56 mills. He dried and weighed his ring, then did the same process for a nipple ring about the same size. It went up to 53. He ratioed out the weights and displacements and established that the intimate piece was much less than 14 carets. “Pat, we might as well get Sharon from Des Moines Crime Scene.”

It would be about an hour for the drive east to Marengo. The hot-on-the-trail crew took their break in what used to be a breeding barn, the idea of a thrifty Mayor to save money by not having to purchase new horses for the force. Sadly, Mayor McGuffin didn’t count on the costs of the warm-up horse or of a guy who knew when the wink showed up and what to do, precisely, after it did. No part of the force ever laid claim to the barn, so it was used for anything that would be taboo inside the station proper; in this case a real see-gar thinkin’ session. The one thought the squad agreed on was that it took a passel of money to buy gold, a building, a parking lot, and all the tools for tats and pierces. Hawkeyes on principle never wanted to meddle in other people’s business. WiJo just didn’t look someone with $30,000 of start-up capital. 

The nipple-ring team welcomed Sharon into the force’s “feeling up the evidence room.” She had big hugs and kisses for Ella and Pat, a peck on the cheek for the Chief, and firm handshakes for everyone else. She spread out the contents of her bag of tricks onto the table.

“Okay, you bunch of amateurs, watch science solve your crime for you. I’m repeating the grid scale photos of the flagrant delectos you’ve got yerselves there. Now I’m repeating the measured weights. Looks good so far. I’m setting up a table-top vice and introducing a foreign object to jewelry piece labled #2, a section of shammy cloth and putting the protected ring into the jaws of the vice. If you folks put your masks on, I’ll proceed to cut this sucker in half.”

When Sharon separated the top semi-circle from the bottom half held firmly in the vice, everyone was glad they had masks on. Whatever it was that was coming out of the thing, a burnt umber-colored powder, couldn’t be healthy.

“I’m collecting a sample of the red powder. I’m photographing the cross section of the ring. Initial observation shows three layers to the ring, an inner layer of lead, a middle layer of an unknown powder, and an outer layer of gold, likely just enough to not be embarrassed by a touchstone. Chief Maccabee, whatever else you’ve got, you’ve now got a consumer fraud case. I’ll take the piece I dissected, one that’s intact, and the lab-ring lace-up set for comparison. One week. See you then.” The last thing Sharon saw on the way out of the Corral was a bunch of police faces as red as the mysterious powder.

“That was quite a pat on the head the Hawkeye Herald gave you and your deputy. Crime of the century sort of thing.” ‘Pat on the head’ was a substitute for what the article would have been called in a less civilized town. “

“Well, thank you Miz Fletcher. I can’t shake this feeling that I know you from somewhere. Did you ever go by Bobbie Sue?”

“Oh, Chief, I’ll never tell the pet names my boyfriends had for me. Imagine that, a guy who could develop bacteria that metabolize gold. Probably the last thing anyone would want, don’t you think?”

“Talk about repeat business. The little bugs would eat through the culture medium and then feast on the gold, vanished without a trace that that didn’t need a microscope to see. Seems he had them timed individually for each customer. A ring appears to vanish, a claim gets paid, another ring gets purchased. Miz Fletcher, did you break your own window that night?”

“I did indeed. I wanted to make sure someone took my complaint seriously. I had forgotten to lock my front door that night. Did you know that if a night-crawler tries a hundred doorknobs, three or four will be unlocked? Imagine that. Any more questions, Chief Maccabee?”

“This just curiosity, Miz Fletcher. The case is wrapped. By any chance, did you know WiJo in Oklahoma City?”

“That’s very unlikely. I do my best to avoid criminal men. If I meet one, I run away as fast as a I can...”