Amy Patricia Meade - Marjorie McClelland 02 - Ghost of a Chance (28 page)

Marjorie knitted her eyebrows together. “How odd. Did he say
anything else?”

“No. He was in a hurry. He asked me for Mrs. Hodgkin’s phone
number and then hung up.”

“Mrs. Hodgkin? She’s the one who witnessed that mysterious
woman at the fair.” Marjorie’s brow furrowed. “Why did he want
her number?”

“He said he wanted to buy something for Mrs. Patterson, but
wasn’t sure of her size. Figured Mrs. Hodgkin might know since
the two of them get together for tea.”

“Why didn’t he call me?” she asked, still doubtful. “I would have
been able to help him.”

Jameson shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably thought you’d be
too busy.”

There came a shout from the inside the station house. “Detective! Come here, we’ve got it!”

Robert and Marjorie hurried inside, where they found Noonan
and three other men gathered around a desk. Noonan was scratching
his head in bewilderment. “It worked. That damned Bible worked.
I’ll be damned!”

“Keep calling it a ‘damned Bible’ and I’m sure you will be,” the
young woman noted.

“You cracked it?” the detective asked his men.

“Yes, sir,” one of the men replied. “We started substituting the
numbers with the letters from that passage and everything fell into
place. The numbers that were circled, however, didn’t translate into
words, so we left them in their numerical form”

“And?” Jameson prodded.

“And it looks like some sort of chemical formula.” He handed
the piece of paper to his superior.

“Formula? That’s what they give babies!” Noonan exclaimed.

Marjorie peered over her fiance’s shoulder. “I wonder what it’s
a formula for.”

“I wonder why they call that baby stuff formula in the first place,”
Noonan marveled.

“I wonder why someone would have sent it to Alfred Nussbaum,”
Robert chimed in.

A light clicked on within Marjorie’s brain. “Maybe they didn’t.
Maybe we’ve been approaching this from the wrong angle.”
“

“What do you mean?”

I mean that we’re assuming Nussbaum was the recipient of
that document, when he might have been the author.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Noonan scoffed. “Why would Nussbaum
put a chemical formula in code? And who would he have given it
to?”

“Someone who might have paid him a sizable cash advance,”
she intimated. “We all agree that whomever coded that piece of paper used the Bible because it was readily available. That holds true
whether Nussbaum was the recipient or the writer.” She smiled.
“You’d put a formula in code too if you had stolen it from your
current employer and were about to sell it to your former employer
for … oh, say somewhere in the ballpark of $7,000?”

Jameson exchanged glances with Marjorie and then jolted to life.
“Noonan, you and the other fellas go round up the Cullen brothers
and bring them back here. They have a lot of explaining to do.”

“GOODBYE, MRS. HODGKIN AND thanks.” Supplied with the information he sought, Creighton returned the telephone receiver to
the cradle and left the study in search of Vanessa. Knowing that
the funeral had left his friend in a weakened state, he went to her
bedroom door and, finding it shut, knocked gently upon it.

“Vanessa,” he called softly. There was no reply.

He turned the knob and pushed the door open about an inch.
“Vanessa” Again, there was no answer.

Creighton pushed the door all the way open, expecting to see
Vanessa, sound asleep on the bed. When he stepped inside, however, he found that the bed was vacant. There was an indentation
on one of the pillows and the plisse bedspread was wrinkled from
where a body had rested, but the person who had created the impressions had gone.

The Englishman looked around the room and saw that the bathroom door was closed. He walked over and gave the door a rap.

Again, silence.

Concluding that his friend must be elsewhere in the house,
Creighton headed back toward the door that led to the hall. On the
way, he accidentally bumped the corner of Vanessa’s nightstand,
upsetting the table and its contents. Reacting quickly, he caught the
porcelain bedside lamp before it crashed to the floor; however, the
nightstand, its drawer, and everything that had been inside it, were
strewn about the Persian rug.

After righting the table and reinserting the drawer, Creighton
replaced the lamp and knelt to gather up the other items-a handkerchief, a photograph of Stewart, a paperback novel, and a tube
of lipstick. He replaced the objects in the drawer and then scouted
about the floor for anything he might have missed. Recalling that
he had glimpsed something roll under the bed, he lifted the dust
ruffle and peered beneath it.

In the shadows, he could discern a small cylinder that he presumed to be an atomizer of perfume. Reaching as far as he could beneath the bed, he retrieved the cylinder and brought it into daylight.

What he saw when he gazed down at the object he had reclaimed
made his blood run cold. It was not an atomizer, but a hypodermic
needle, and although it was empty, it was not difficult to guess what
it might have once contained.

This was the `wonder drug’ over which Vanessa had raved-the
elixir that had brought her new life. This was why she never once
mentioned her mysterious medication by name. Why he had never
witnessed her take a single pill or dose of syrup. Now everything
was clear, and yet, he felt more confused than ever.

Dropping the syringe to the floor, Creighton sat down upon
the edge of the bed, put his head in his hands, and silently started
to weep.

NoONAN HELD THE PAPER bearing the chemical formula before
Charles Cullen’s nose. “You know what this is?”

The man adjusted his pince-nez and scanned the document. “It
looks like a formula for some type of synthetic rubber.”

“Any idea what a formula for synthetic rubber was doing in Alfred Nussbaum’s pocket?” Jameson asked from behind his desk.

Charles, seated across the desk from him, merely shrugged, but
his brother, positioned in a chair beside him, twitched nervously.

“Care to tell us something?” the detective addressed Kenneth.

“Y-yes, I do.”

“Ken!” Charles warned.

“No, Charlie. I’m through listening to you. You’re the one who
got us into this mess, now I’m going to get us out.” He turned to
Jameson, “If we tell you everything we know, will you go easy on
us?”

“I can try to put in a good word. It depends on what you tell us.”

“Fair enough,” Kenneth deemed. “That formula was intended
for us-we were going to buy it from Nussbaum. That’s the sort of
work he did for us, you see. We told him what we wanted, and he
got it for us. We didn’t ask him questions, and he didn’t ask us any.”

“So the salesman thing was just a front,” Marjorie opined from
her position atop a nearby desk.

“No, Miss McClelland,” Kenneth corrected. “Mr. Nussbaum
was a salesman, all right. Only he didn’t sell chemicals, he sold secrets. That’s why my brother hired him.” He made a face of disgust
at Charles. “It started out as simple reconnaissance work-finding
out what our competitors were doing-but we soon realized that it
wasn’t enough just to know what new products our rivals were developing. If we wanted to stay alive in this industry, we had to develop the same products and release them before anyone else did.
That’s where we ran into difficulty. We didn’t have the resources
to sink into the area of research and development, so Charles devised a plan. We would pretend to lay Nussbaum off from his job,
due to a slowdown in the company-in reality it wasn’t too far
from the truth. He would then secure a position with one of our
competitors and steal the formula for one of their up-and-coming
products”

“And you sent him to Alchemy Enterprises,” Marjorie filled in
the blank.

“That’s right,” Kenneth confirmed. “However the choice was
purely accidental. We hadn’t even thought of Alchemy until we
read their advertisement in the Boston Globe, stating that they were
seeking to hire a new salesman. It fell together perfectly.”

“What did Nussbaum get out of the deal?” Jameson inquired.

Kenneth deferred to his brother.

“Originally $7,000 up front,” Charles grudgingly confessed, “then
$7,000 upon delivery of the formula.”

“You said `originally’ Did that arrangement change?”

“Yes, a few months ago, Nussbaum contacted me and increased
the final payment to $10,000.”

“Why?”

“It was right around the time of the fire over at Alchemy labsthe one that killed Stewart Randolph. The police were poking around
everywhere, making sure foul play wasn’t involved. As it turned out,
the fire was an accident, but Nussbaum felt he deserved more money
in return for all his trouble.”

“How did you react?”

“We consented.”

“You were willing to pay $17,000 for this formula?” Marjorie
asked. “Why didn’t you take that money and invest it in developing
your own?”

“Because, even after $17,000 worth of research and development,
it’s still possible to wind up with a product that fails. Or, worse yet,
you could work months on a product, only to be scooped by a competitor. This plan was foolproof-it would have earned us millions.
Well worth the investment.”

“So you weren’t at all upset at this change in your agreement,”
Jameson prodded, “even though Nussbaum substantially increased
the amount of the last payment.”

Charles smiled. “That’s business.”

“You call it business, others might call it extortion,” Marjorie
opined.

The elder Cullen shrugged.

“In your, um, `business agreement’,” Jameson cleared his throat,
“where were you and Nussbaum scheduled to swap the formula
for the cash?”

“At the Ferris wheel of the Ridgebury fair,” the younger brother
replied. “According to Nussbaum’s instructions, first thing Saturday morning, we were to place the money under the cushion of the
green car. At approximately eleven o’clock, Nussbaum would ride
that car, reach under the seat, take the money, and replace it with
the formula. Charlie and I would then ride the car and retrieve the
formula.”

“So you were the two businessmen our witnesses described,”
Marjorie presumed. “And you were Nussbaum’s eleven o’clock appointment.”

“Did you know Nussbaum had put the formula in code?”
Jameson quizzed.

“Yes,” Charles replied. “Since Alchemy had been crawling with
police, and the swap was to take place in a public area, we felt it
would be best to encrypt the formula, just in case it were to fall
into the wrong hands … which it apparently did.”

“Hmm … incredible foresight on your part, Mr. Cullen. Tell
me, just how did the formula happen to fall into the, um, `wrong
hands’?”

“You know how,” Kenneth interjected. “Nussbaum was murdered.”

“Yes, quite.”

Charles’ mood darkened. “What are you driving at, Detective?”

“Just this: you and your brother had a very good reason to want
Nussbaum dead.”

“You mean the money he tried to bilk from us?” Charles chuckled. “I admire your initiative, Detective, but I’m afraid killing Nussbaum would have been a cross-purpose, what with him having the
formula and all.”

“Ah,” Robert replied, “but there was a way to have it all, wasn’t
there? You could have waited until Nussbaum made the swap to
kill him, claimed the money found on his corpse, and then later,
when things died down, retrieved the formula from the cushion of
the green car.”

“It would explain why the two of you were so keen on finding
out whether we found any cash on the body,” Marjorie interjected.

“Yes,” Charles admitted, “but that’s not what happened-otherwise you wouldn’t be holding that formula right now, would you?”

“A miscalculation on your part,” Jameson alleged. “Nussbaum
probably leaned down, perhaps to tie a shoelace, but you and your
brother, being more than a bit eager to get him out of the way, assumed he had made the trade and popped him.”