Dummy's Murder Between Hands and Other Mystery Short Stories

By Charles Schwarz

A collection of 12, some new, some previously published satirical, and/or politically incorrect mysteries which will challenge your mind, tickle your funnybone, and shock your sensibilities.

The judges of World Wide Writers’ Contest comments as appearing in Writers’ Forum regarding Dummy’s Murder Between Hands, “A marvelously funny murder mystery... in the classic Agatha Christie mold. The narrator is a kind of Lord Peter Wimsey who solves the murder and has his readers in stitches on the way... a take-off of the classic murder mystery.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles Schwarz
• Release date: Jul 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463959114

Book preview

The Smashwords Edition

DUMMY’S MURDER BETWEEN HANDS

AND OTHER MYSTERY SHORT STORIES

12 Classical, Humorous, Satirical Mysteries

Second Edition

Charles E. Schwarz

Copyright © 2002 Charles E. Schwarz

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the author.

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This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment. It may not be resold or given away. If you would like to share this ebook, please purchase an additional copy for each person with whom you want to share it. If you're reading this ebook and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, please return to smashwords and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

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Disclaimer

This is a work of fiction, a product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance or similarity to any actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Formatting by Debora Lewis arenapublishing.org

To my son Edward

A joy in infancy

Precocious in youth

A source of pride forever

A great joy in my life

Contents

DUMMY’S MURDER BETWEEN HANDS

Winner of WorldWide Writers’ Contest & published in Writers’ Forum, June 2002.

At an evening’s bridge game, amid exotic coffees and cakes, the card party is interrupted by a dummy’s murder by one of the other dummies. A wife’s tedious play of five clubs gives the murderer time to stab his victim, who inconsiderably bled to death while walking on a library’s very expensive Persian rug.

Clutching a Woodrow Wilson biography as an unambiguous clue that ambiguously points to four people, it is only by adding Toynbee’s A Study of History to the Wilson biography that the name of the killer, the motive, and proof are made clear.

FLIGHTLESS GEESE MURDER

Published in PI Magazine, 1990

A cynical investigator hired to find Bobby and Bernice, two very mean missing geese, probes into the realm of land development and pompous landowners, only to find the geese dead, hung around their owner’s neck. The geese and the mean nature of their death supply the clues to find the guilty landowner.

FINDER OF THE ELVIS HANKIE

We discover a new type of detective, not the finder of murderers or missing people, but the finder of missing articles, or lost important or sentimental objects. In this latest case the finder becomes involved in the world of unscrupulous collectors and dealers of Elvis collectibles, were thieves, rivalry and big money run like a vein of false gold through all, touching everyone.

MY OBIT HABIT MURDER

Winner of the Blaggard Award & published in New Mystery Magazine, International Issue, 1994.

A college professor, while sitting comfortably in his easy chair, and warmed on a winter’s night with a cozy fire while taking sips of brandy, and munching Oreos, reads between the obituary lines in his newspaper. He is able to deduce the murder of a retired banker twelve hundred miles away in a decrepit abandoned boarding house. He reveals who did it, right after disclosing why a failed bookseller was buried with too much haste.

JUDGE JUDY MURDER

On national TV Judge Judy, while trying to resolve a simple case of money due, and appear more motherly and sympathetic to her audience, suddenly becomes involved in drugs, murder and mayhem as angry shouting opposing parties reveal more than they planned to, and an astonished Judy expected.

FLOATING ACE OF CLUBS AND SINKING CANOE MURDER

Published in StoryOne, 2003

A blackmailing detective, resting at the Birdsong Dude Ranch and Fishing Farm, meets up with a frightened man, his suspicious cheap wife, a big beautiful blond promising everything and delivering a bruised butt, ranch hands that act like guests, a nasty twelve year old, and other assorted characters.

The result is a man drowns in broad daylight in the middle of a calm lake with everyone watching and no one nearby. Everyone claims accident but a poker game, where the ace of clubs mysteriously floats across the table, and Curley falls from a wooden horse, points to murder and the solution.

JIGSAW PUZZLE CHAMPIONSHIP MURDER

A woman past thirty, anxious to meet eligible men, meets three: Mr. Too Right, Mr. Just Right and Mr. Almost Right. Complications arrive in the form of an attractive rival who flirts with all the men as they put jigsaw puzzles together at the competition.

During a train ride to an 1840 village, Mr. Just Right disappears, Mr. Too Right turns up in New Orleans, Mr. Almost Right is looking for a tryst, and everyone is looking for a missing million.

BROKEN MAILPOSTS

Broken mailposts were the chief instrument, and Railroad was the connection between Parrot, Music and Flowers. How to run a successful legal illegal pornography business, and collect fraudulently legal government money is the reason for broken mailposts. While the money was stolen, stolen and again stolen, the solution lies in someone’s unexpected kindness, and justice doesn’t triumph.

MURDER ON GOVERNOR CLINTON’S UPPER BACK

Published in Easy Writers, 2000 and EWG Presents/Without a Clue, 2000.

Drugs, dwarfs, depravity and dress shops are all enmeshed in the murder of one woman, the beating of another and the establishing of a line of successful, expensive, chic women’s clothing stores replete with politically incorrect changing rooms established in seedy urban areas.

DEATH OF A BAR CHANGE THIEF

Lonely sophisticated New Yorkers gather every Friday at a neighborhood bar to share companionship and conversation, even though each realizes its emptiness. A stranger intrudes and flashes a nude compromising picture of one of them, and initiates a series of events leading to petty theft, a street murder, a coded message and solutions in the men’s room, all leading to the end of the group’s comradeship.

THE BRILLIANT HARRY WINSTON’S MURDER

Published in EWG Presents/Without a Clue, 2001.

At an opera cocktail party populated by only the crème de crème, the brilliant Harry Winston glides from group to admiring group solving the country’s various problems such as education and poverty, to the applause of all, unaware that someone harbors murderous hatred towards him.

As the drinks are finished someone discovers the brilliant dignified Winston dead in the men’s room with his pants down. Only the person who didn’t belong at the party can see the party, Harry, and the murder clearly.

VIRTUOUS PROSTITUTE AND LAST SUPPER MURDER

Published in Nefarious/Tales of Mystery, 2000.

This story is of a virtuous flamboyant prostitute who sleeps with everyone and no one, a lazy detective living off a waitress, a truck-stop diner, a church dinner that turns into a last supper, an infectious disease that infected no one but affected many. False advertising is the solution of a murder.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DUMMY’S MURDER BETWEEN HANDS

Winner of WorldWide Writer’s Contest & published in Writers’ Forum, June 2002.

Not being one of the greatest raconteurs, there may be some confused areas in my account of his murder, but you can’t find a friend murdered in your library and not have a great story to tell. For the rest of my life I’ll be able to say the book Woodrow Wilson in the Twentieth Century was critical in pointing out the suspects and enabled me to ignore false clues and zero in on the murderer. Then there is an important second book, which can’t be ignored because it framed the larger context of the murder scene. And it all happened because my wife Naomi’s tortoise-like thought process had left poor Jim a dummy for so long the murderer was able to catch him alone and knife him between rubbers.

Let me start at the beginning. He was laying in a god-awful mess of blood at the foot of the fifteen-foot custom-built walnut bookcase that held my prized leather-bound book sets and first editions. I was inconsolable when I first looked down at dear Jim, watching his blood seep into my fantastically expensive handmade Persian rug. It cost me over fifty thousand dollars ten years ago, and today it couldn’t be replaced at twice the price. It lay ruined under Jim’s body and, given that over the past year our accounting business had been losing money, I knew I’d never be able to replace it.

Once over the horror of seeing my Persian treasure ruined, I naturally felt great sorrow for poor Jim Smiley, a victim of murderous violence, as my blood-soaked Persian rug and the knife sticking out of his neck could testify. Such a tragedy occurring in the security of your own home would disturb even the most prosaic personality, and as my sweet wife can verify, mine is definitely not placid. But I am digressing. Let me start at the beginning.

At our bridge table my partner and I bid a contract and, being dummy, I wandered into my study to see what Jim was doing only to find he wasn’t doing anything but ruining my rug.

Seeing him sprawled in blood by the bookcase, my first impulse naturally was to dash into the kitchen for paper towels, but a second look told me the damage was done — the blood had soaked right through to the wooden floor.

Looking about to access other damage, I noted that my one-of-a-kind teak desk also was covered with blood and that a bloody trail led over ten feet of carpet from my desk to Jim.

Obviously poor Jim, sitting at my desk and stabbed in the neck from behind, had stood up and staggered ten feet, squirting blood all over before dropping at my bookcase. Inspecting the desk, I felt the blood wouldn’t permanently damage the polished teak, but I certainly would have to throw out the bloodstained, gold-embossed leather desk set. Strange... on the desk, there in the midst of all the splattered blood, was a distinct rectangular area free of blood. Something had been there and removed. Looking about I noticed my first edition A Study of History, Vol. I. by Arnold Toynbee in the middle of the floor in a puddle of blood. However, its size didn’t fit the rectangle so it hadn’t been on the desk.

With books on my mind I noticed poor Jim had a death grip on a deadly boring book about the very boring twentieth president, entitled Woodrow Wilson in the Twentieth Century by H. Harrison. With its leather binding and gold-gilded pages splattered and soaked with blood, it was ruined and would certainly destroy the financial appreciation of my limited-edition set of Biographies of American Presidents.

Am I digressing? I suppose I am. My wife Naomi and Jim were Bridge partners and Jim had been dummy for at least twenty minutes, thanks to Naomi’s tedious card playing. (Bridge is played with four players in two teams. When the actual play of cards begins, one of the team’s partners does not participate at all in the game and is free to watch or get up and help with refreshments.)

To start at the beginning, we had two tables of four playing Bridge. At my wife’s table, besides Jim, were our neighbors Billy and Willy, both male and in the aggregate possessing less masculinity than my wife, which says a lot about both them and Naomi. Jim’s wife, Biente, didn’t deign to play bridge with us. Rather, believing she is an expert, she enjoys stealthily moving behind the players, a silent, sinister bird of prey, watching for mistakes. After the last card is played she inevitably pounces, triumphantly tearing and ripping at the players’ egos, pointing out mistake by mistake.

My partner was Woody Smith against Brad Wilson and Harry Harris. At a side table were drinks, chips, nuts, hot cups of General Foods Cafe au Mozambique and wedges of Sara Lee’s Syrian Angel Food Cake. (My wife had determined which coffee and cake we’d consume by the brand offering the largest discount coupon.) We were playing in the paneled family room with the fireplace, holding a mouth of red fire, keeping us warm and toasty. It was an idyllic room and an idyllic scene, so I hated to tell them about Jim and destroy such a picturesque tableau. Damn, why does everything happen to me? It’s my wife’s fault... it always is. If her mind was as sharp and quick as her coupon scissors, Jim would never have been dummy for over twenty minutes. But that’s Naomi — the slowest, most deliberate, most infuriating, ineffectual card player who’d ever shuffled a deck.

Am I digressing? Well, let’s start right at the beginning. Jim was in a foul mood, and it was only his wife’s persuasion and his knowing that his absence would ruin our bridge night that had made him come. Though all of us at the office were irritable because a recession was hurting our business, Jim was particularly grouchy that night. His wife Biente was positively effervescent in flirting with Harris, Jim’s best boyhood friend. All of us except Jim knew his wife and Harris were lovers, and Jim’s ill humor of late suggested the possible loss of his blissful state of ignorance.

We knew each other from the office except my neighbors Willy and Billy who, being Bridge fanatics, gladly would have sat down to a game on the Titanic as the water lapped at their feet.

Well, I guess I’d better get myself organized and tell this story from the beginning. Jim, my wife Naomi, and Billy and Willy made up one Bridge foursome while Harry Harris, Woody Smith, Brad Wilson and I made up a second table. Jim, Wilson, Woody and I were accountants in partnership in a CPA firm with Harry Harris running the office as general manager. We each had our own clients and Harris handled the everyday office details. Our weekly Friday Bridge card games were sort of a tax write-off business social meeting.

On the very first deal, to everyone’s dismay, my wife bid a very difficult contract, making Jim dummy, free to wander about. My wife, the slowest card player who ever dealt a card, agonized over every card, studying them with demonic intensity. She peered hypnotically at the cards, teasingly fingering one, then another, while wondering aloud if the Jack of Spades had been played.

Knowing the laser rapidity of her thought process, her table audibly groaned as she began to study her hand with the intensity of a neurosurgeon. Being dummy and knowing it could be hours before Naomi completed and lost the game, Jim left the table, stating he’d be in the study. So pitifully slow is my wife’s play that no one thought it odd or impolite.

At my table Wilson was playing the cards and Harris, as dummy, disappeared into the kitchen looking for my very expensive Scotch. The fact that Biente was in there defrosting some Sara Lee Guatemala ladyfingers was a bonus.

While Wilson was playing his cards, I noticed Biente coming out of the kitchen with a high flush. Harris remained in the kitchen so long we had to call him back to the table. Carrying four fingers of my premium Scotch, he looked worried. Why, I couldn’t guess. What worries could a man have, enjoying both free Scotch and another man’s wife?

On the next hand Harris had to play the cards, so now Wilson, as dummy, in keeping with our apparent new Bridge card game etiquette, left the table, mumbling something about the bathroom.

Glancing over to my wife’s table, I watched as she, with a riverboat gambler’s desperate panache, played an Ace after making twenty timid finger gestures towards her twelve other cards.

Biente was moving about distracting everyone, either making sure glasses were full and serving cake, nuts, and cookies with the generous, boundless hospitality of a person serving another’s food, or watching the play of cards, loudly announcing what you should have done.

Now where was I? Oh yes, how my wife’s prolonged play of the game distorted and lengthened time (Doesn’t every painful experience?) and had driven poor Jim into my library and to his death... while at my table we played four games, allowing each of the three men, in turn being dummy, an opportunity to visit the library and use my genuine replica Louis XVI white-gold letter opener to open up poor Jim.

Of course, Jim’s wife Biente, moving here, there and everywhere, could have taken a very active part in changing her status from wife to widow.

Standing over poor Jim, disconsolate about the rug, obviously not wanting to pull my letter opener out of him for fear of spilling more blood, I was in a quandary as to what to do next. Eventually Naomi would finish her contract and they would expect Jim to pick up his hand and play.

Being called back to my table, I locked the study’s doors to the kitchen and to the hallway and, entering the family room, announced to the tables by my cheerful fire that Jim had died in the library. Everyone was struck dumb silent except Willy, who played his last card and announced to the silence, Down one, Naomi.

Billy leaned over and whispered to Willy that the evening’s Bridge may be ending, though his voice held a hint of hope a few more games might still be played.

After I reassured Biente and the others that Jim was truly dead and couldn’t be resurrected by EMT personnel, Harry Harris, Jim’s good friend and even closer friend to his wife sadly announced that it must have been his heart.

Yes, yes, said Biente, wistfully adding, Harry, you remember Jim had to pay an additional life insurance premium because of his blood pressure and we could only afford three quarters of a mil. Then, standing by the kitchen door, mouth turned down at the corners, Biente suddenly cried at Harris, Oh Harry, what am I to do? I’m all alone!

Not surprisingly, Harris stood up and wrapped the widow and her three-quarters of a million tightly in his arms.

No one suggested any course of specific action, limiting themselves to exclamations of surprise, laments for Jim, and sympathy for the widow. Their butts nervously bubbling on the seats of my genuine leather chairs indicated they were planning to leave me to deal with the problem of Jim. But before they could boil up and out of their chairs, I poured cold water on the idea, telling them that Jim had been murdered, stabbed in the neck, and discretely adding that his blood had ruined my Persian rug. It would have been tactless for me, at that time, to suggest the widow, in common decency, replace the rug out of her husband’s ample insurance money. I trusted to her sense of fairness to make an offer without me having to ask.

Leaning on Harris for support, the widow, tears welling up from a seemingly limitless source, asked him if Jim’s murder canceled his life insurance. Harris not only reassured her, but buoyed her up considerably with the suggestion of possible double indemnity.

The widow now called up that instinctive knowledge countless widows have relied on for centuries. My husband wouldn’t want me to grieve, but to go on with my life.

My wife ran to her, saying over and over, That’s the way to handle this tragedy. Jim’s troubles are over. You must think of your future, no matter how hard it is to do.

Billy and Willy joined in with similar advice.

Bob Wilson suggested we call 9-1-1, while Woody Smith wanted me to call Jim’s doctor so he could be officially declared dead; then we could call an undertaker to remove the body.

Biente rose momentarily from her desolation to say she wasn’t paying for a doctor’s house call just to be told her husband was dead. She told me to put Jim in my station wagon and drive him to the hospital emergency room.

Converting my new Volvo wagon into a coroner’s meat wagon was out of the question and I told her so. I suggested the police, but our neighbors Willy and Billy, holding hands and edging crab-wise towards the front door, didn’t like that. Doorknob in hand, they solemnly vowed that if there was anything they could do to help we shouldn’t hesitate to call them. Then, walking backwards, they neatly slipped out. We heard their feet loudly and rapidly pounding on my loose gravel walk.

With Billy and Willy’s exit, the widow and Jim’s best friend eyed the front door as if it were Heaven’s gate. Really, I feel so weak! Biente weakly moaned, gripping Harris’ arm in a vise grip. "I’ve just got to get home and to bed! Harry, would you be a dear and take me home? I just can’t trust myself to drive in my emotional state."

They couldn’t very well run, but I could, and I beat them to the door. If the widow and best friend escaped, there was no way I could keep Jim’s friends and partners, Woody Smith and Bob Wilson, from leaving. My paramount goal was not to be left alone to handle this situation. Blocking the widow and her escort’s escape, I announced, We’ve got to call the police. After all, Jim’s been murdered. Everyone looked shocked, as if I’d just passed wind with a clarinet’s clarity. Ignoring their stares, I declared with