Short Story Fiction - Inspector Pascal Mysteries 1000 #18

A new classic-style fiction detective is solving crimes in only 1000 words.
INSPECTOR PASCAL MYSTERIES 1000

INSPECTOR PASCAL MYSTERIES 1000
#18 Questions by T.K. Naliaka ©2016-2023

 The whisper was by his ear. “What tipped you off that he was the bad guy?”

He turned his head to look at the boy, earnestly leaning close with wide and curious eyes.  He squinted, then he replied. “The first clue was: he said he couldn’t walk very well.”

The boy climbed up on the chair, propped his elbows, then his chin on his hands. “Why was that important?”

“The killer had to have made a quite long jump in order to get away, you see?”

The boy nodded, then he shook his head. “No.”

“Ah, well.  He wanted to fool us, yes?”

The boy nodded firmly.

“So he killed the poor fellow in a difficult place to walk and climb.  Thus, when everyone came to investigate, no one believed it could be him, because he was with leg braces and a crutch.  But he was pretending.”

“Really?”

“Yes.  He was clever at it, over a year of fooling people into thinking he couldn’t walk well, so no one considered him to be physically able to do what the killer did – carry the body and deposit it in a hard-to-reach place.  You understand, when we go to investigate any crime, we don’t know anyone.  We don’t know their names or their histories or what kind of people they are.  We have to get to know them very quickly.  We don’t who is lying or who is telling the truth.  We have to ask questions of everyone.”

The boy nodded, “OK.”

“So how were we to know that he could walk perfectly well?  Everyone who knew him said he’d had an accident the year before.  This means that he thought about it a long time ago, how to fool the police.  All of them had witnessed him being crippled for a year.  The people he worked with believed it completely.  So, he was a very dangerous man – he planned and pretended for an entire year to kill his business partner.”

The boy’s eyes were wide, “Wow. That’s wrong!”

“Yes, it is very terrible.”

“But, why?”

“That’s the other thing we never know -  what we have to figure out – what reason did the killer have in his head to kill this person?  It’s very evil, so sometimes it’s very hard for nice people to understand this.”

“Did you find out?”

“Yes.  That sometimes is quite boring.  It means sitting in chairs, reading a lot of files.  The files we were interested in were about money – so we had to understand the numbers, the addition, the subtraction, the multiplication, the division. You know these?”

He nodded. “Yes!  My dad makes me practice every day!”

“Very good.  After that, you also learn about the numbers.”

“What is that?”

“Well, for example: You have two dogs.”

“I have three.”

“OK, three dogs.  How much food do you feed them… how many bags of dog food every month?”

He frowned, “Um…two big bags.”

“All right, let’s say each bag is $20. How much money is two bags?”

“$40!”

“Good!  If someone said they spent $300 on dog food for their three dogs, what do you think of that amount of money, based on what you know about your dogs and dog food?”

He gasped. “That’s too much money!”

“Exactly.  It might be true if he buys a very fancy food, but it might not be true.  Because we know what the usual amount is, a number like that catches our attention. Therefore, we must have an idea as to what is usual so we can quickly see when numbers don’t seem to fit.  Many times we find that someone claims $300 but they only actually spent $50.  They kept the money or they were trying to hide the real use of the money.  Perhaps they spent it on buying things for themselves, but claimed it was all dog food.”

“Oh!”

“So, we looked at the numbers of the money.  Simply, the payments and the receiving of money didn’t match the bank account numbers.  The murderer was using up the money of the company.  The murderer planned to take over the company – steal from his partner.  His partner of course would never agree to that, so he got rid of the partner, who also knew a lot of information that the murderer didn’t want other people to know.  He figured he could kill his partner in a way that people didn’t know that he did it, then he would be the full owner of the company.”

“That’s mean!”

“Yes, it really is.”

“You said there was a clue.”

He nodded. “When you don’t use muscles, they get a bit smooth-looking and thinner.  I noticed that his leg muscles were as strongly-formed as a footballer’s muscles.  This would not be true after a year in leg braces and crutches.”

The boy sat down and stretched out his own legs. “Oh!”

“Well, so it was an easy thing to set up a little trick – to see if he was stronger than he was claiming.”

They both looked over as the door was opened by a large, broad-shouldered man.  He called. “I found him!”  He frowned. “Has he been bothering you?”

“Not at all; he’s been very good company.”

The boy smiled, nodded then looked at his father.  His father held his hand out.  The boy stood up, “Thank you sir.  I hope you get better real soon."

“I will… thank you.”

The boy went out.  His father carefully closed the door, “Sir.”

“Yes, Sergeant?”

“I want to thank you for…  I just wasn’t able to see that he had a gun.  You took the bullet meant for me.”

Drowsy, he sighed and rolled his head on the hospital pillow to consider him gravely. “I just had a very special ten minutes being completely reassured that it was absolutely the right thing to do.  It would have been awful having to answer your son’s questions at your funeral.  I’ve been greatly enjoying telling him everything he wants to know.”

​by T.K. Naliaka ©2016 All rights reserved