100 Malicious Little Mysteries

The Cop Who Loved Flowers by Henry Slesar

Spring comes resolutely, even to police stations, and once again Captain Don Flammer felt the familiar, pleasant twitching of his senses. Flammer loved the springtime — the green yielding of the earth, the flourishing trees, and most of all, the flowers. He liked being a country cop, and the petunia border around the Haleyville Police Headquarters was his own idea and special project.

But by the time June arrived, it was plain that there was something different about Captain Flammer this spring. Flammer wasn’t himself. He frowned too much; he neglected the garden; he spent too much time indoors. His friends on the force were concerned, but not mystified. They knew Flammer’s trouble: he was still thinking about Mrs. McVey.

It was love of flowers that had introduced them. Mrs. McVey and her husband had moved into the small two-story house on Arden Road, and the woman had waved a magic green wand over the scraggly garden she had inherited. Roses began to climb in wild profusion; massive pink hydrangea bloomed beside the porch; giant pansies, mums, peonies showed their faces; violets and bluebells crept among the rocks; and petunias, more velvety than the Captain’s, invaded the terrace.

One day the Captain had stopped his car and walked red-faced to the fence where Mrs. McVey was training ivy. Flammer was a bachelor, in his forties, and not at ease with women. Mrs. McVey was a few years younger, a bit too thin for prettiness, but with a smile as warming as the sunshine.

“I just wanted to say,” he told her heavily, “that you have the nicest garden in Haleyville.” Then he frowned as if he had just arrested her, and stomped back to his car.

It wasn’t the most auspicious beginning for a friendship, but it was a beginning. Flammer stopped his car in the McVey driveway at least one afternoon a week, and Mrs. McVey made it clear, with smiles, hot tea, and homemade cookies, that she welcomed his visits.

The first time he met Mr. McVey, he didn’t like him. McVey was a sharp-featured man with a mouth that looked as if it were perpetually sucking a lemon. When Flammer spoke to him of flowers, the sour mouth twisted in contempt.

“Joe doesn’t care for the garden,” Mrs. McVey said. “But he knows how much it means to me, especially because he travels so much.”

It wasn’t a romance, of course. Everybody knew that — even the town gossips. Flammer was a cop, and cops were notoriously stolid. And Mrs. McVey wasn’t pretty enough to fit the role.

So nobody in Haleyville gossiped, or giggled behind their backs. Mrs. McVey and the Captain met, week after week, right out in the open where the whole town could see them. But he was in love with her before the autumn came, and she was in love with him; yet they never talked about it.

She did talk about her husband. Little by little, learning to trust Flammer, inspired by her feelings for him, she told him about Joe.

“I’m worried because I think he’s sick,” she said. “Sick in a way no ordinary doctor can tell. There’s such bitterness in him. He grew up expecting so much from life and he got so little.”

“Not so little,” Flammer said bluntly.

“He hates coming home from his trips. He never says that in so many words, but I know. He can’t wait to be off again.”

“Do you think he’s—” Flammer blushed at the question forming in his own mind.

“I don’t accuse him of anything,” Mrs. McVey said. “I never ask him any questions, and he hates to be prodded. There are times when — well, I’m a little afraid of Joe.”

Flammer looked from the porch at the pink hydrangea bush, still full-bloomed at summer’s end, and thought about how much he would enjoy holding Mrs. McVey’s earth-stained hand. Instead, he took a sip of her tea.

On September 19th Mrs. McVey was shot with a .32 revolver. The sound exploded in the night, and woke the neighbors on both sides of the McVey house.

It was some time before the neighbors heard the feeble cries for help that followed the report of the gun, and called the Haleyville police. Captain Flammer never quite forgave the officer on duty that night for not calling him at home when the shooting occurred. He had to wait until morning to learn that Mrs. McVey was dead.

No one on the scene saw anything more in Captain Flammer’s face than the concern of a conscientious policeman. He went about his job with all the necessary detachment. He questioned Mr. McVey and made no comment on his story.

“It was about two in the morning,” McVey said. “Grace woke up and said she thought she heard a noise downstairs. She was always hearing noises, so I told her to go back to sleep. Only she didn’t; she put on a kimono and went down to look for herself. She was right for a change — it was a burglar — and he must have got scared and shot her the minute he saw her... I came out when I heard the noise, and I saw him running away.”

“What did he look like?”

“Like two feet running,” Joe McVey said. “That was all I saw of him. But you can see what he was doing here.”

Flammer looked around — at the living-room debris, the opened drawers, the scattered contents, the flagrant evidence of burglary, so easy to create, or fabricate.

The physical investigation went forward promptly. House and grounds were searched, without result — no meaningful fingerprints or footprints were found, no weapon turned up — indeed, they found no clue of any kind to the murderous burglar of Arden Road. Then they searched for answers to other questions: Was there really a burglar at all? Or had Joe McVey killed his wife?

Captain Flammer conducted his calm inquiry into the case, and nobody knew of his tightened throat, of the painful constriction in his heart, of the hot moisture that burned behind his eyes.

But when he was through, he had discovered nothing to change the verdict at the coroner’s inquest: Death at the hands of person or persons unknown. He didn’t agree with that verdict, but he lacked an iota of proof to change it. He knew who the Unknown Person was; he saw his hateful, sour-mouthed face in his dreams.

Joe McVey disposed of the two-story house less than a month after his wife’s death — sold it at a bargain price to a couple with a grown daughter. Joe McVey then left Haleyville — went to Chicago, some said — and Captain Flammer no longer looked forward to spring, and the coming of the flowers, with joyful expectation.

But spring came again, resolutely as always, and despite the Captain’s mood of sorrow and resentment at his own inadequacy, his senses began to twitch. He began driving out into the countryside. And one day he stopped his car in front of the former McVey house.

The woman who stood on the porch, framed by clumps of blue hydrangea, lifted her arm and waved. If a heart can somersault, Flammer’s did. He almost said Grace’s name aloud, even after he realized that the woman was only a girl, plumpish, not yet twenty.

“Hello,” she said, looking at the police car in the driveway. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Flammer said dully. “Are the Mitchells at home?”

“No, they’re out. I’m their daughter Angela.” She smiled uncertainly. “You’re not here on anything official, I hope?”

“No,” Flammer said.

“Of course, I know all about this house, about what happened here last year — the murder and everything.” She lowered her voice. “You never caught that burglar, did you?”

“No, we never did.”

“She must have been a very nice woman — Mrs. McVey, I mean. She certainly loved flowers, didn’t she? I don’t think I ever saw a garden as beautiful as this one.”

“Yes,” Captain Flammer said. “She loved flowers very much.”

Sadly, he touched a blue blossom on the hydrangea bush, and started back toward his car. He found that his eyes were filling up, and yet they had seen things clearly.

For suddenly he stopped and said, “Blue?”

The young woman watched him quizzically.

“Blue,” he said again, returning and staring at the flowering hydrangea bush. “It was pink last year — I know it was. And now it’s blue.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Hydrangea,” Flammer said. “Do you know about hydrangea?”

“I don’t know a thing about flowers. As long as they’re pretty—”

“They’re pretty when they’re pink,” Flammer said. “But when there’s alum in the soil — or iron — they come up blue. Blue like this.”

“But what’s the difference?” the girl said. “Pink or blue, what difference? So there’s iron in the soil—”

“Yes,” Captain Flammer said. “There must be iron in the soil. And now. Miss Mitchell, I’ll ask you to please fetch me a shovel.”

She looked bewildered, but then she got him the shovel. There was no triumph on Flammer’s face when he dug up the revolver at the base of the hydrangea bush, its barrel rusted, its trigger stiff.

He didn’t rejoice even when the gun had been identified, as both the weapon that had killed Grace McVey and as the property of Joe McVey. He didn’t rejoice when the killer had been brought back to face justice. But while he felt no sense of victory. Captain Flammer admitted one thing: there was a great deal of satisfaction to be derived from the love of flowers.