Murder of a Gardener

By W.H. Wheeler

Harry Logan is a producer of modest but successful Hollywood movies. From Gabriella Dellacroce, an amorous Italian TV producer and long-time friend who has gone back to Italy for a year, Harry has ‘inherited’ Mike Roman, a retired government horticulturist, to take care of his garden.

One day in May, while cultivating the young Greek sweet peppers he had set out in Harry’s Beverly Hills back yard vegetable patch, Mike Roman is brutally stabbed and left to die in the dirt – for no apparent reason. Who would want to kill an old gardener? There are few clues, but for Harry this is personal. Very personal.

Despite a new film starting production, Harry gets progressively deeper into solving the tangled mystery of Mike’s murder and finds a trail of death extending to Turkey and Italy. It nearly costs Harry, his loving ex-wife Judy, and FBI agent John Quintero their lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: W.H. Wheeler
• Release date: Feb 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310461903

W.H. Wheeler

Stories and language are my passion. In elementary school, I asked my 8th grade teacher what language I should take in high school. She said, "Take Latin. It's a great foundation." Uh huh. I took it and found out it was, shall we say, challenging. I took four years of it and added French and Spanish in the last two years. In college, I got a degree in French language and literature, and had a couple of years each of Russian and Arabic. I've picked up a few other languages over the years, operated an international marketing services and translation business, and done tech writing in aerospace companies. Besides my current mysteries and thrillers, a long time ago I had two "hi-lo" novellas published, high-interest low vocabulary level books for teens with reading problems. They were "Wet Fire" and "Counterfeit!". The publishing company was sold and bought a number of times, and both of the books are still around in various editions. Originally from Detroit, Michigan, I have lived in the Los Angeles, California, area for many years. And, no, I was never a hippie. Probably just as well.

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MURDER OF A GARDENER

by

W.H. WHEELER

Copyright (c) 2014 by William H. Wheeler. All rights reserved. No part of this work shall be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author and publisher, except for brief quotations used in critical reviews.

Smashwords edition, February 2014

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters and events are imaginary, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

This book is for

Violet

and Muna, Daniel and Angela.

CHAPTER 1

Mike Roman was a hell of a nice old guy. In his mid-seventies, his full head of hair might have turned the color of polished sterling, but his mind was sharp, his lean body still strong, and his sense of humor unfailing. No one was less deserving of getting stabbed to death.

My name is Harry Logan, and I produce movies. Modest movies that don’t cost a quarter of a billion dollars to shoot, but which audiences like and usually turn a nice profit for me and my backers. My office is in Los Angeles, I live in Beverly Hills, and Mike Roman was my almost full-time gardener. he worked Tuesday through Friday. He said he needed the other days to take care of personal business. He was killed in the middle of an otherwise fine May Friday… in my backyard.

My housekeeper, Rosa Fernandez, was away for a while. Someone came up on Mike as he was cultivating around the Greek sweet peppers he’d set out two weeks before. There was evidently a fight; a large area of the peppers was trampled before the killer plunged a knife into Mike’s stomach. Mike fell face down, and the killer didn’t bother to turn him over to retrieve the knife. The police who came said that Mike did not die instantly but bled out into the dirt for a doubtless agonizing number of minutes.

Who would kill an old gardener, and why? Robbery was obviously not a motive. His wallet was inside my house, and his old Timex watch was still on his wrist. Mike always joked about that watch, which he said he’d been wearing for 20 years. A gold Rolex, he’d say, might impress the ladies and the doormen at trendy clubs, but it wouldn’t tell him the time any better, and in the garden he’d be afraid to put his hands in the dirt.

I had ‘inherited’ Mike five or six months before, when a friend of mine, Lella Dellacroce, a voluptuous producer of commercials, TV series, and male cardiac arrhythmias, decided to go back to Italy for a year.

One Friday afternoon in February when, as it sometimes does, L.A. decided to thumb its nose at the calendar and push the thermometer to 95 degrees, I persuaded Mike to stop turning over the soil in the future tomato bed and join me in the shade by the pool for a glass or two of cold chablis.

We talked about a lot of things, like how had he liked working for Lella for three years (Very hard to concentrate on pruning the roses when she was around), the state of the nation (Ten years of manual labor should be a prerequisite for serving in Congress), and his own background.

I seem to detect a slight accent, I had said. Maybe French Canadian?

He laughed. Right language, wrong continent. I pretty much grew up in France. We came to America when I was fourteen. 1952.

France, huh. Paris?

Partly there, partly near Bordeaux.

Wine country, I commented.

Mike smiled.

Yes. My family had some vineyards and a winery.

Château Roman? I said slyly.

No, no ancient wine estate. We sold the wine to dealers who bottled their own labels.

Do you remember anything of the war? I asked.

The smile turned to a frown.

Not much. I was only five or six. I remember men in black uniforms with skull and crossbones emblems on high-peaked hats. I remember some neighbors who disappeared overnight. And we were in Paris when the Americans came. We watched their tanks and trucks come up the avenue and the marching soldiers, thousands of them. People were so happy. Women were crying. The terror was over.

Your last name is like the French word for ‘novel’, I commented.

Mike smiled again.

My parents shortened it when we came to America. It used to be Romanov. My father figured it was not a good time in America to have a Russian name.

Early 50s? He was right. Romanov… like the tsar’s family?

Distant cousins. My grandparents were on a visit to France in 1917, when the first Russian revolution broke out in February and the tsar abdicated in early March. They wisely decided to stay in France. Then the Bolsheviks took over in the October revolution, and in July the next year they murdered the tsar and his whole family in a basement in Yekaterinburg.

Yeah, I said, I remember reading about that in a college history class. There were always rumors about one young daughter escaping.

Mike laughed. I’ve heard those. Princess Anastasia. Never happened. The communists were very thorough.

At least the communists are not a worry anymore, I said.

I never thought I’d see the day, Mike said. Not that I have any interest in going to Russia. I don’t even speak much of the language anymore. Russian Mikhail became French Michel and then American Michael.

You have any family? I asked.

I was married. My wife died of cancer in 1987. We were never blessed with any kids. I had a cousin in the East, Boston, with his family. He and his wife are gone now. They had a daughter. I never had much communication with her. I don’t even know where she is now.

We spent another hour or two talking about old Chryslers, how he liked old comedy movies, collecting ancient coins (he said he had a group of very fine silver dirhams from the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad framed on his wall), the relative virtues of Californian and French wines, and why neither of us could ever really retire. Work – of whatever kind – gives meaning to human life. Sitting around doing nothing is a living death… and usually turns soon enough into real death. Even with Social Security and a nice pension from years as an agricultural engineer for the federal government, Mike gardened. Me, even when Social Security time comes – and since I’ve always been self-employed there will be no other pensions, just savings and investment income –, I’ll still make movies… or try to. The best work, of course, is work you like to do, not work you have to do. Not many are that lucky.

The couple of glasses of wine were finished long before our conversation, and at the end of the afternoon Mike looked at his Timex and said he should be going. We walked out front to his modest car, and he left for his apartment in Northridge, over the hills in the San Fernando Valley.

And now Michael/Michel/Mikhail Roman/Romanov was dead. Why? Who did this? For me, this was not just a 30-second report on the 6:00 news, this was very personal.

CHAPTER 2

Beverly Hills Police Chief James Burnett had no answers.

We only have a couple pieces of evidence, he told me, as I sat in his office in Police Headquarters late that Friday afternoon. One is the knife. It has only one fingerprint – on the blade. It’s an Austrian Starkner hunting knife. They’re expensive and not very common. Probably not many sporting goods stores in the U.S. sell them. But still, it could have come from anywhere… they’re sold all over the world.

And the other clues? I asked.

Jim Burnett and I have been good friends for a number of years, ever since I provided some modest help in solving a nasty murder case. Not everyone gets access to the chief of police to discuss a case. Jim is in his fifties, well over six feet tall, his reddish hair graying at the temples, getting a bit of a paunch… but he could probably still pick me up and throw me across the room. Not that he’s ever tried, of course.

My team found one clear shoe print in the soil near Mr. Roman’s body. Not his shoe.

Anything special about it?

According to police databases, it’s from a $300-plus Nike. And it’s big. Not basketball-player big, but it figures to be a size 14.

So our killer has expensive tastes in shoes and knives, I mused.

And we may get some help from DNA. Mr. Roman apparently put up a hell of a fight, and we found a blood trace on the steel head of the hoe he was using, Burnett answered.

Mike called it a ‘warren’ hoe, I put in. Popular with professional gardeners around here. Was there anything else?

Burnett frowned.

Mr. Roman left part of a message, drawn in the dirt with a finger as he lay dying. Three letters: B, A, L and an unrecognizable part of a fourth letter. No idea what it means. Here’s a picture.

Burnett took a photo from a manila folder on his desk and slid it across to me.

Hunh, I muttered. I wonder what it could be?

You told me he came from France, and his grandparents were Russian. So maybe French or Russian? Burnett asked.

I shook my head. "I’d have to check what French words– if it is a word – start with BAL. They wouldn’t be Russian letters; Russian doesn’t write its el-sound like that."

Well, if you get any ideas, Harry, let me know.

It turned out the fingerprint on the knife blade belonged to one Johnny Lamont, a sales clerk at one of the chain sporting goods stores in the Valley. He guessed he must have touched the blade accidently while putting it in the display case. The police had found the store with amazing speed.

We all try to keep our fingers away from those blades… they’re razor sharp, he had told the police the Monday after the murder. He remembered selling the knife two days before Mike was murdered, because they had been out of the knife for a couple of weeks, and the shipment had just come in. He had taken one out of the shipping box and put it in the display case. He took the box with the others to the storeroom in back. A guy had come in a couple of times asking for one, and the last time Lamont had told him they were getting a shipment that Wednesday. It hadn’t been on display ten minutes, when the guy came in and bought it. All this was in the police report from the interview, which I was reading at my office desk.

With a credit card? the investigating detective had asked.

No. Cash. Three crisp $100 bills. I remember, because I took them to the manager to check. He said they were legit, and I gave the guy his twenty-something in change.

What did he look like?

I dunno, Lamont answered. Kind of average. But big, maybe six-two. Build looked trim but solid. Like he worked out.

Any idea as to race?

White, but not pale white. A little tanner, the clerk said. Hard to tell. But some kind of foreign accent. Not Latino. Nice suit.

Suit? the detective echoed. Who wears a suit to buy a hunting knife?

Maybe on a break from his office? Lamont had suggested. And he had very expensive-looking brown and tan leather shoes. Big feet.

Store have video surveillance?

Of course, Lamont had answered.

The police quickly discovered that the store’s video surveillance system had not been upgraded for twenty years or more, and the camera lenses had probably never been cleaned. There was video of the killer making the purchase at the opposite end of the store, but it was so bad it was next to useless.

I sat in my office that Monday morning and asked myself what did this add up to so far? Just the barest beginnings of a profile. The killer is a natty dresser and uses a high-quality tool. Someone who considers himself far above a common thug. A craftsman, as it were. And an expensive suit says he makes money at what he does. Since he does not seem to be a thief – at least in this case there was certainly no money to be made directly from killing Mike Roman – one might assume he is a hired killer; by the looks of it a professional assassin. Possibly a foreigner, given the clerk’s report of an accent.

So who would have a reason for hiring a professional assassin to kill an old gardener? To keep him from revealing some kind of information? A possibility, but unless Mike had some secret weekend life, it would have to be from before he was working for Lella and me. To get something he has? What does a 74-year-old gardener have that’s worth killing for? Embarrassing documents maybe? Kind of like the first possibility. Some connection with France or Russia? Did someone want to eliminate him because