Title: Sister dearest

By Author: Marianna Heulser

Appearing in issue #33, August 19, 2013

Tag line:  Lily and Violet were always so close.  But now Violet was alive…and Lily was not!

Police characters:  Detectives Kevin McCarthy and Lola Wells

The gist: Two well-off sisters live together in a mansion on Park Avenue.  The police were called to the home by the maid, who had worked for the two women for over 20 years.  She had been told to call the funeral home by sister Violet, as sister Lily was found dead in her bed from an apparent suicide, but the maid summoned the police.  Violet is a doctor.  She tended to Lily who was a diabetic, giving Lily daily doses of insulin.  The story goes that Lily was so depressed about her poor health that she took an overdose of pain medicine the dentist had prescribed for an abscess.  The maid claimed she never heard Lily complain and didn’t feel she was depressed. A check of the scene of the death revealed Lily still lying in her canopy bed, and a bedside table containing a Tiffany lamp, a crystal pitcher filled with water, an old fashioned alarm clock, a romance novel and an empty orange plastic pill bottle.  When police spoke to Violet, she demanded they address her as Doctor as she is not yet retired.  She claims she had been so concentrating on treating her sister’s diabetes that she missed the signs of depression. Violet found the body and told the maid to call the funeral home.  When questioned why she didn’t call the police, Doctor Violet retorted that it was perfectly clear what happened and that she could sign the death certificate.  The sisters’ nephew showed up claiming that the two ladies did not get along well.  Violet wanted to sell the house and all the belongings and travel, but Lily would not sell. Detective Wells studied her notepad and decided to take another look at the bedroom.  She said she realized they had overlooked something important.

Crime scene:   Lily’s bedroom.

Clues:  The clue in the story is the pitcher of water and the items (or lack of them) on the bedside table.   See more on that below. 

Suspects:  Violet. 

Red herrings:  None.

Solution:  Detective Wells recalled seeing a pitcher full of water but no water glass.  If Lily had swallowed the pills herself there would be a glass on the table and the pitcher would not be filled to the brim.  Instead of injecting her sister with insulin, Violet administered an overdose of the painkiller.  

My two cents:  Okay, let’s analyze this a bit. 

 Violet is a doctor.  She demands the police address her as doctor as she has not yet retired.  This is puzzling to me.  A doctor is addressed as such until the day he/she dies…and even then it might still be on the tombstone.  What is she talking about?  

And as a doctor, she knows very well that best practices frown on doctors signing death certificates of close relatives.  Just like they don’t perform surgery on relatives unless it was an emergency situation.  But she was ready to just sign on the dotted line and be done with it which would raise eyebrows and cause people to ask questions.   Not too smart for a killer who doesn’t want to go to prison.

Next thing, a doctor, of all people, knows that a death that is not a natural death MUST be reported.  She can’t be that stupid.  Even if the maid did call the funeral home, THEY would have reported the death.  You just can’t go shipping bodies off to be buried.

The story said the crystal pitcher was filled with water.  It didn’t say it was filled to the brim.  To make the solution read: and the pitcher would not be filled to the brim is just unfair. The reader counts on the author being straight with the facts.

 

If Lily wanted to take those pills herself, she could have very well gone to the bathroom, downed the pills in there, come out and made herself comfortable in her bed to await her final sleep.  In fact as there was no glass on the nightstand she would have had to go in the bathroom to take the pills.  So to say that because there is no glass on the table it must be murder is pretty thin. 

Dr. Violet gave herself away by foolishly trying to get rid of the body.  That’s the real clue.

Title: An old hand
By Author Emma Courtice

Appearing in issue #9, March 4, 2013
For sale date: February 21, 2013

Tag line:  It took a real pro – an old pro – to put two and two together and come up with murder!

Police characters:  Sgt. Norman Bain, Lt. Allard and Det. Gates.

The gist:  Mrs. Winslow, a 92-year-old woman who was in poor health with diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, is found dead in her bed.  Near the bed was a call button, a telephone and a walker.  The paid companion, Anna, had been employed to care for Mrs. Winslow and had been doing so for twenty years. Mrs. Winslow has no family.  The victim was found clutching an empty prescription bottle (that had no label) in her hand, the hand that hung over the bed.  The childproof cap to the bottle was on the floor.  Anna claimed she doesn’t know where Mrs. Winslow got the pills from as she had removed all prescriptions into another room claiming the old lady had been sad and morbid.  Sgt. Bain asked Anna if she was the only heir which prompted Anna to retort, “And shouldn’t I be?  Have I not cared for her for almost twenty years?  Fed her, bathed her?” Sgt. Bain, who has his own aches and pains, pulled his own prescription bottle out of his pocket and tossed it to Lt. Allard, telling him to open it.  Lt. Allard realized that anyone could open a regular prescription cap, but not everyone could open a childproof cap. 

Crime scene:  Mrs. Winslow’s home.

Clues:  Childproof cap.  Anna’s demeanor. No label on the bottle.  

Suspects:  The paid companion Anna Stanley. 

Red herrings:  The mention of suicide  

Solution:  Mrs. Winslow could never have opened the prescription bottle that killed her. It had a childproof cap, which as Bain knew well, couldn’t be opened by anyone with severe arthritis.  Mrs. Winslow had been murdered and the open pill bottle placed in her hand to make it look like suicide.

My two cents:  I’m confused. Let’s start with the prescription bottle.  No pharmacy would send a senior citizen a prescription with a childproof cap.  There was no label on the bottle.  So it was obviously not her RX.  So an unknown quantity of some unknown pills that were obtained in some unknown fashion by a woman who was practically confined to her bed was ingested in an unknown manner by said woman who not only couldn’t even feed herself but had a paid companion looking out for her?  That was the purported cause of death?  Because if it’s not the old lady’s RX, toxicology will get to the bottom of that real quick.  And once a person dies every muscle stops working, so that container would have fallen to the floor…unless it was inserted into the hand after death.   This was all so poorly staged and not thought out by the killer.

So if the pills didn’t actually kill her, how did she die? The author didn’t tell us in the solution.  It’s a mystery all right.  A medical examiner can tell if someone is smothered. Did Anna smother the old woman and stage a suicide?  The woman is 92 and ill.  How much longer could she live anyway?  Now Anna was out of a job she had had for twenty years.  She would have inherited everything anyway when Mrs. Winslow died naturally. There was no motive given to kill her now.

Sgt. Bain has pains of his own, okay.  But he carries around his prescription bottle?  Even if you take a pill every four hours, most likely you don’t carry around the entire amount of drugs with you.  I thought him throwing his RX container at the lieutenant was theatrical. IMO Sgt. Bain should have told Lt. Allard to take Anna in for questioning instead of ‘throwing’ the solution to him. Especially if Allard is as annoying as the story states.  

Why was Det. Gates even in the story?  He didn’t do anything.

I don’t know why we need to know there was a call button, a phone and walker by the bed.

Unfortunately, there was too much left out of this story for me to give it a positive review.