Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 57, No. 1 & 1, January/February 2012

Calculus for Blondes John H. Dirckx

“A linear Casablanca between frozen vegetables,” said Mr. Wig, “is a second-rate dancer.”

Of course that wasn’t exactly what he said. And his name wasn’t Wig, either — it was Webber. But to Ashleigh Deventer, imprisoned in a dusty, airless classroom in first period on Friday morning, he might as well have said that for all the sense he was making. And he really should have been named Wig, with that funky brunette hairpiece that went with his corpsy complexion like a gob of ketchup on a prom gown.

Back in the fall, as soon as it dawned on Mr. Webber that Ashleigh was the only girl taking precalculus, he’d got off some virulently sexist remarks about how the female brain isn’t capable of handling higher mathematics and how he wasn’t going to hold up the progress of the rest of the class for one straggler. And a week later, when he had her up at the chalkboard for a grilling session, he’d remarked that, although there was a book called Calculus for Dummies, he’d never seen one called Calculus for Girls.

Of course he would feel that way. Probably no girl had ever looked at him twice in his whole life, with his round shoulders and google eyes. And Ashleigh was sure he lisped on purpose.

On and on he droned, an infinitesimal operator in Euclidean space, as oblivious of his audience as an elephant in a circus. Meanwhile she suppressed yawn after yawn as her classmates, each with a nimble hand thrust into a backpack, texted boorish drivel back and forth across the room.

A squeal of air brakes in the street caught her attention and she glanced out the window to see a familiar sight.

When the phone rang during breakfast next morning at Ashleigh’s house, it was her mother who answered, because her father preferred, like all the other attorneys in town over thirty, to remain inaccessible on weekends. From Mary Deventer’s half of the conversation, Ashleigh and her father deduced that Lieutenant Doyle of the Department of Public Safety was informing her, in her capacity as county coroner, of a homicide.

Mary made notes on a scratchpad and agreed to meet Doyle in a half-hour at the scene.

“Archer Smythe?” mumbled Calvin Deventer, gradually emerging from his matutinal coma under the influence of coffee as thick and dark as molasses. “A sinister name if I ever heard one. Sounds like the villain in an old melodrama.”

Mary swept her breakfast dishes into the sink. “He’s not the villain,” she said. “He’s the victim. Truck driver from Canada. Gunshot wounds to the chest.”

Ashleigh likewise hastened to clear away her things. “Can I come?”

“No, sweet. You have Greek, remember?”

In response to Ashleigh’s repeated appeals, her parents had enrolled her in Saturday classes in modem Greek at the local Orthodox Church. At her age, that seemed to be as close as she could get to classroom instruction in the classical language.

They arranged that Mary would deliver Ashleigh to her lesson on the way to the crime scene. If the investigation dragged on past noon, her dad would pick her up and bring her home.

After dropping Ashleigh at St. Gregory’s, Mary drove to a strip mall on the wrong side of the interstate. There, despite a harsh winter wind and a dusting of snow on the ground, she found the inevitable crowd of onlookers bellying up to yellow tape festooned around a trash enclosure at the rear of a hardware store. Lieutenant Doyle lifted a section of tape while she ducked under it.

A scavenger looking for marketable refuse before dawn that morning had found a dead body tumbled into one of the bins, a white male in his forties wearing a steel gray coverall with two bullet holes in the region of the heart.

Doyle handed Mary a wallet. “This was on the ground. All the cash is gone, but everything else seems to be there.”

“Everything else” included a trucker’s license issued to Archer Smythe of Winnipeg.

“Morning, Mary.” Roger Tredwyn, the evidence technician, emerged from between two trash receptacles. “Thought I sensed a hint of spring in the air. This is what he had in his pockets.” He held up a clear plastic bag containing pens, keys, and a fistful of U.S. and Canadian coins, including three Sacagawea dollars. “I got good pictures before we moved him.”

Mary put on rubber gloves and, standing on her toes, reached into the refuse bin to grip the dead man’s forearm, which she found cold and stiff. The blood around the holes in his coverall was tarry black and barely tacky to the touch. “Dead since late yesterday,” she said. “Probably right after the mall shut down for the night. Have you talked to the people at the hardware store?”

“Briefly. They say they don’t know him. You’ll probably want to see the manager.”

Mary finished examining the dead man’s wallet. “Nothing here about family.” She gazed beyond the crowd of onlookers to scan the mall parking lot. “Is his truck here?”

“If it is, we haven’t found it yet,” said Tredwyn. “Nothing here with Canadian plates.”

Mary stripped off her gloves and deposited them in a hazardous waste container in her field kit instead of tossing them into the bin next to the body. “What about shells?”

“Nothing so far, but digging through this mess could take hours.” The bins were crammed to their brims with cardboard cartons, empty cans and bottles, scraps of lumber, pipe, wire, and glass, and nondescript plastic and metal oddments. The ground around them was littered with enough bolts, nuts, and washers to assemble a golf cart.

“Well,” said Mary, “not to venture too far onto police turf, it looks to me like armed robbery.”

“And maybe grand theft, auto,” agreed Doyle, “if some of these keys aren’t the ones to his rig. Not to mention the homicidal ramifications.”

The manager of the hardware store was a big man with a mane like a lion and a nose that seemed determined to outrun all his other features in a race to the finish. He said his name was John Vangerow.

“But right now, I couldn’t swear to that. I think every weekend handyman in the county picked this morning to tackle that overdue project. If we run out of number sixteen nails I’m going home.”

“About the body—”

“We know nothing.” He spread his hands in an expansive gesture of absolute denial. “The cops were already all over this place when we opened up this morning. Never saw the guy before, never heard his name. To me it’s just another case of people tossing their trash into the nearest bin, no matter who has to pay to have it hauled away.”

At least Vangerow wouldn’t have to pay for the disposal of this particular item. The county had a contract with a local funeral director to transport murder, suicide, and accident victims to the morgue at the hospital where a forensic pathologist, also under contract, performed the autopsies.

Mary arranged for the removal of Smythe’s remains and took official possession of his personal effects, except for keys and identification, which she left with Doyle. After that she had just enough time left for coffee with Doyle and Tredwyn before going back to the church to pick up Ashleigh.

“Was Roger there?” was Ashleigh’s first question after flinging her backpack on the floor of the car like a sack of potatoes. The dimpled and disreputable Tredwyn exerted a spellbinding attraction for Ashleigh and, if the truth be told, for her mother as well.

By a curious quirk of the law, death abolishes all the privileges of privacy and confidentiality enjoyed by the living. In consequence, a coroner’s findings are in the public domain unless, by chance, their revelation might aid a killer still at large. Mary gave her a brief summary of the case and was still answering questions when they arrived home and sat down to lunch.

Calvin Deventer laid aside one of his many Lincoln biographies to join them, and asked a few questions of his own. Then he left to attend a meeting of the Forensic Club, where representatives of the local bar and bench sat around sipping things from the bar and watching basketball on a plasma screen as if they were right down there on the bench.

Early that afternoon Lieutenant Doyle, having phoned ahead to make sure Mary was home, arrived to discuss some further developments in the Smythe murder. A police patrol had spotted an empty nine-car automobile carrier with Canadian plates parked off the street about a mile from the strip mall where Smythe’s body had been found. Evidence in the cab confirmed that it was Smythe’s rig.

“Any blood stains or signs of violence?”

“Roger’s at the scene now. I thought you might want to take a look for yourself.”

“Sure. Have you been in touch with the company that owns the carrier?”

“Not yet. It’s Saturday afternoon, so all I get is an answering machine. But the cargo manifest in the cab tells a pretty complete story. I talked to two car dealers here in town. Smythe delivered four new cars to each of them yesterday.”

“You said a nine-car carrier?”

“Right. There’s nothing in the manifest about a ninth car. The last one to come off the rig would be the one over the cab, but neither of the dealers can remember what was up there yesterday. If anything.”

Ashleigh looked up from the book in which she had seemingly been wholly immersed. “I bet it’s a red sport coupe with Minnesota license number XPHMA-49.”

Mary was gradually getting used to such startling revelations of Ashleigh’s rapidly maturing genius, but this was a little too much. The lieutenant, who remembered Ashleigh as a very small child and often wished she had stayed that way, asked her if she was going in for black magic now.

“No, really. I see this same car every Friday morning. Precalc is so boring I look out the window a lot. From where I sit I can’t see down into the street, only the tops of some trucks going through the intersection. Or stopped for a red light. And this car goes by on top of one every week.”

Doyle’s response was indulgent rather than diplomatic. “Ashleigh, the same car wouldn’t be on the carrier week after week. And a car on a carrier wouldn’t have a license plate. They slap on a magnetic one at the dealer’s, till the car is sold.”

“But it is always the same car. XPHMA-49. From Minnesota.”

Lieutenant Doyle wrote it down in his notebook. “How can you be so sure of the number?”

“Because it means ‘money’ in Greek.”

“This is a word? How would you say it?”

“You say ‘ckrema.’ In Greek, what looks like X is really CH, and the P is really an R, and the H—”

“—Is eta, like an E,” said Doyle. “As in the slogan of Fownes’s Bakery — ‘Eta Beta Pi.’ ”

“And,” Ashleigh finished her explanation, “ ’Forty-nine is the year Grandma Cooper was born.”

Mary Deventer bristled placidly. “Let’s not be broadcasting vital statistics quite so freely, sweet.”

“I went deaf right after all that Greek stuff,” Doyle assured her. He phoned a description of Ashleigh’s red sport coupe and the registration number to the dispatcher at headquarters. “I’m going along with you on this,” he told her, “because there are a couple of things here that don’t add up. Such as why was Smythe delivering cars from Canada to dealers in the States? Ford and GM both have Canadian divisions, not to mention Chrysler, but cars manufactured up there aren’t routinely marketed here.”

The dispatcher called back almost immediately to report that Minnesota Driver and Vehicle Services had never issued plates with such a registration number.

Partly to assuage Ashleigh’s disappointment, Mary let her ride along as she followed Doyle to the site where Smythe’s nine-car carrier had turned up. This was the parking lot, gradually degenerating into a sea of chipped concrete, of a projected business district that had never quite made it off the drawing board.

Roger Tredwyn, finding the cab locked, had opened it with one of the keys on Smythe’s ring. Apart from the cargo manifest the cab contained nothing of interest: no blood, no firearm, no shells.

“Something wrong?” A man in a leather apron, with a sweater thrown around his shoulders against the cold, was standing just outside the back door of a shop about twenty yards away, squinting at them as if they’d been trying the doors of parked cars.

Doyle walked across to him, the others following. “Do you know anything about that carrier?” asked Doyle.

“Belongs to a distributor from Canada. They park it here on weekends.”

“Do you own this lot?”

“I do. Come on inside. I’ve got asthma.”

They all trailed into the workroom of AAA Upholstery, where tools, hardware, fabrics, stuffing, and miscellaneous rubbish lay in chaos confounded.

“Your name, sir?”

“Bogenrife, Mack Bogenrife.” He was about fifty, pudgy, swarthy, whiny. “I bought that parking lot from Chik-Kwik next door when they went out. I rent parking space by the month for campers, limos, tree service trucks, boats—” He paused for a moment to cough and wheeze, eyeing Tredwyn and the two women incuriously. “They’ve been parking that rig out there most weekends since last summer. Problem?”

“Do you know a driver named Smythe?”

He nodded through another coughing spell. “He’s the only driver I do know.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Three, four weeks ago.”

“You didn’t see him park the rig here yesterday?”

“I hardly ever do. No windows back here. The rig was there when I went to lunch yesterday.”

“Any cars on it?”

Bogenrife took so long to answer that they thought he wasn’t going to. “Don’t think so.”

Doyle took a call on his cell phone, responded noncommittally, and rang off. After recording Bogenrife’s name and address he led the others back outside.

“Osterwald just found a red car with the Minnesota registration XPHMA-49,” he said, gazing speculatively at a cloud bank to the north.

Ashleigh pounced. “I thought you said—”

“The plates are fake. Plastic, not even a close imitation of Minnesota’s colors. Made by a company that does personalized front plates for people who live in states that require only a rear plate.”

“So where’s the car?” asked Roger.

“Parked at the carpool lot near the Interstate.” Doyle unlocked his cruiser and slid in behind the wheel. “This reminds me of one of those scavenger hunts.”

“Aye, but with the backside foremost,” said Roger in his distinctive drawl, as if he were talking while gnawing his way through a steakburger with all the extras. “I mean, we’ve already found the grand prize, haven’t we?”

“Can I ride with Roger?” Ashleigh asked her mother.

“Not unless you’re prepared to be at the epicenter of cataclysmic divorce proceedings.”

“Dad’ll never know.”

“Ashleigh, have you already forgotten those TV cameras last fall at the power substation? You ride with me, and if there’s a TV truck anywhere in sight when we get there, you stay in the car.”

They formed a three-car procession with Doyle in the lead. During the past four or five years the area surrounding the carpool parking lot had gradually evolved from a plot of waste ground out in the sticks to an outpost of civilization, with a gas station, a bar, a laundromat, and a full-service convenience store selling newspapers, magazines, tobacco, alcohol, and lottery tickets.

On a weekday afternoon at this hour the lot would have been crowded to overflowing, but today it was nearly empty, and the car they were looking for stood out like a rose in a weedpatch. At first glance the fake plates in front and back looked thoroughly convincing.

Tredwyn dusted the door handles for prints and found none. All four doors were unlocked, which was fortunate, since none of keys on the late Archer Smythe’s ring fitted. While he proceeded with a systematic search for prints, Doyle called in the manufacturer’s ID number to headquarters.

“Somebody wearing canvas work gloves adjusted the rearview mirror,” reported Tredwyn. “And opened or closed the trunk. Probably both.”

He released the trunk lid from inside the car to reveal obvious blood stains on the rumpled deck mat. The spare tire well contained a stack of empty black vinyl bags but no tire. A scent like yesterday’s sauerkraut haunted the trunk.

Ashleigh leaned in to examine the blood stains more closely. “No touch,” Tredwyn warned her, quite unnecessarily.

She pointed to a dented toolbox without a lid, which contained a few rusty tools and a cylinder of propane. “Isn’t that leaking?”

“Too right, love. Valve cracked just enough to put the doggies off the scent.”

“Off the scent of what?”

He held up two of the plastic bags, and with a rubber-gloved finger spread open the slashes someone had made in them to reveal traces of a white crystalline powder inside. “If that’s not pure cocaine, I’m the caliph of Baghdad. There’s the reason somebody sent friend Smythe on an all-expenses-paid trip to Hell.”

Ashleigh cocked her head to one side and examined him sharply. “Don’t you believe in Heaven?”

“Oh, I do, love, I do. But it’s for blue-eyed blondes like yourself and your Mum. When gents like Mr. Smythe and yours truly pop off, we go to the Other Place.”

Further search of the trunk disclosed an empty ammunition clip but no weapon. “Assuming that’s Smythe’s blood in there,” said Doyle, “he was probably shot here last night. The killer used this car to transport the body to the trash receptacle behind the hardware store, and then had to drive it back here again to pick up his own car.”

“Smythe was bringing in cocaine from Canada week after week in this car,” said Mary, “perched on top of the carrier where the customs inspectors just gave it a friendly wave. He set up shop here on Fridays, catching people on the way home from work at the end of the week — people who might be willing to blow a whole paycheck on stardust.”

“Okay,” said Roger, “but who gets paid in cash these days?”

“The sign on that bar,” remarked Ashleigh, “says ‘Paychecks Cashed.’ ” She stayed in her mother’s car listening to the radio, with the engine running for warmth, while the others walked to The Spatterdash Bar and Grill.

The place was empty except for a few regulars whooping it up at the dart board. The lone bartender was wearing a silk shirt with ruffles and a red bow tie, their effect somewhat marred by a hand-written name tag reading “Gage Skyhugh.” At sight of Lieutenant Doyle’s uniform he put on a lemon-sucking smirk. No, he didn’t recognize the face on Smythe’s driver’s license, but then he saw a steady flow of transients week in and week out and couldn’t swear that the man had never been in.

A brandy snifter for tips stood at each end of the bar, and in each of them three or four Sacajawea dollars glinted among the greenbacks under the pale fluorescents. Doyle looked closer to make sure they weren’t Canadian dollars, then glanced inquiringly at Skyhugh.

“The dollar coins? I give one out with each check I cash. Lots of people don’t like them, so they give them back as tips.”

“You must start out with a bountiful stash of bills in that cash register on Fridays,” suggested Roger.

“Correct. And on Fridays there are three other guys behind this bar with me.”

No one at the convenience store or the gas station recognized Smythe’s picture.

Doyle had meanwhile received a report from headquarters on the VIN of the red car. It had been reported stolen almost a year ago by an Alan Sharpe of Des Moines.

When they got back to the parking lot they found Ashleigh kneeling on the cold ground studying the front plate on the red coupe.

“Not the most brilliant forgeries, are they?” asked Doyle.

Ashleigh chose not to notice that he was needling her for having been taken in by the fake plates. “I was just thinking,” she said, “that these letters and numbers probably mean something to the person who had the plates made. So maybe he’s Greek. And maybe he used forty-nine because that’s the year he was born, like... lots of other people. Or it could mean Alaska, the forty-ninth state.”

“It could,” conceded Doyle. “Or it could mean eighteen forty-nine, the year of the Gold Rush. But I don’t see us getting much further guessing who ordered the plates.”

“We don’t have to guess.” Ashleigh stood up and dusted off her jeans. “The company that made them has a Web site — GreatPlates.com. Why don’t we just ask them who ordered these plates?”

“Because,” said Doyle, struggling to remain in control of the inquiry, “they’d probably tell us to go pick daisies. I mean, we’d never get anything out of them without a court order. And if they happen to be in Taiwan, or Honduras...”

After some persuasion from Roger Tredwyn, who had resumed his examination of the red car, the lieutenant called in a request to headquarters for contact information on GreatPlates.com.

“Smythe had three U.S. dollar coins in his pocket,” Mary reminded Doyle. “And everybody who cashes a paycheck at The Spatterdash gets one. So at least three of those people probably bought cocaine from him yesterday.”

Doyle nodded agreement. “He put the coins in his pocket and the bills in his wallet, which the killer cleaned out before he dumped him behind the hardware store. Along with any dust he hadn’t sold yet. But whether this was premeditated robbery and murder, or just a sudden blow-up—” He broke off as his cell phone rang, and moved away from the others to take the call.

For several minutes he paced briskly up and down in the chilly wind, conversing volubly and, at times, with considerable vehemence. Lieutenant Doyle owed his present rank largely to his ability to express himself forcefully and with uncompromising authority when circumstances demanded — a faculty that seemed to desert him when he was confronted by a certain blonde fourteen-year-old.

Long before he finished his conversation, the others took refuge in Mary’s car to enjoy the heater, the CD player, and one another’s company, during which it wasn’t entirely clear which of the women was chaperoning the other. At length Doyle unceremoniously climbed into the back seat with Roger.

“The plates were ordered,” he said, “by somebody in Anchorage calling himself Ari Simonides. Which even I can figure out is probably Greek for ‘Archer Smythe.’ ”

“Sure,” agreed Ashleigh, “but I think maybe you’ve got it... backside foremost. I mean, Simonides is his real name—”

“Whatever. Anyway he owned a car dealership up there, which he’d obviously been using as a cover for his drug-dealing operation. The stuff was probably coming in over the Pole from Asia. The wonder is that he crossed two borders with it week after week and never got caught.” He turned his attention to Roger, who was scrolling through images on his digital camera with mounting concentration. “Something interesting?”

“See what you think. These are all prints left on different parts of the coupe by a thumb in a canvas glove — a glove with little gobs of wax or glue that had soaked into the fabric and hardened. These marks are every bit as distinctive as the ridge pattern of a naked thumb.”

“What do you think? Do we have a prima facie case or do we need a warrant?”

Roger looked at his watch. “You’re the copper. I’d say frontal attack before he shuts down for the weekend.”

He locked Smythe/Simonides’s car, leaving a NO trespassing notice on the dashboard. Then the three-car motorcade returned to AAA Upholstery. When they got there Mary, by police order, maintained a prudent distance to the rear. Roger went around to the street entrance of the upholstery shop while Doyle knocked at the back door. They were inside for a long time, during which Ashleigh had visions of Roger being slashed to ribbons with one of those savage-looking knives she’d seen on Mack Bogenrife’s workbench.

Finally the officers reappeared, with Bogenrife in handcuffs, and bundled him into the back seat of Doyle’s cruiser. Tredwyn threw a beguiling grin of triumph in the direction of the Deventers and waved a brown paper sack that looked as if it might contain a pair of canvas work gloves, if not indeed a quantity of cocaine as well.

Doyle, trying to persuade himself that none of Ashleigh’s juvenile inspirations had had any real influence on the outcome of the case, cut them dead.