The Sudoku Puzzle Murders (13 page)

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Authors: Parnell Hall

BOOK: The Sudoku Puzzle Murders
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Chief Harper smiled when Cora came in. “Boy, am I glad to see you.”
“Sorry to take so long, Chief. I had to drop my niece over at the paper. She’s having a spat with Aaron, wanted to patch things up.”
Harper blinked. That was far more information than he expected. “But you solved the puzzle?”
“I have it right here, Chief, and—Oh! There’s my purse!” Cora snatched it up. “Thank goodness. I’ve been wanting my cigarettes.”
“You can’t smoke in here.”
“Well, I have to smoke somewhere. I’m going nuts. You know what it’s like to solve a puzzle without nicotine?”
“I can’t really relate to that.”
“Well, trust me, it’s bad. You wanna look the puzzle over, I’ll go smoke outside.”
“No, stay. I’m gonna want your opinion.”
“On what?”
“The puzzle, of course. It’s not enough to know what it says. I have to know what it means.”
“We got a little problem there.”
“What’s that?”
Cora slapped the puzzle down on Harper’s desk.
“Look at the theme entries, Chief. See what it says?
Numbers in the middle line solve the riddle.
That would refer to the sudoku, which I haven’t solved yet, since I don’t have a copy.”
“Got one right here.”
“Fine. I’ll solve it. And when I do, you know what I’m gonna get? Eighty-one squares with the numbers one through nine in them.”
“Yeah, but what about the numbers in the middle line?”
“That will be the numbers one through nine in no particular order.”
“What do you mean, no particular order?”
“I mean I don’t know the order.”
“It will be in
one
particular order?”
“What do you mean?”
“The sudoku—is there only one order the numbers can be?”
“Of course. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a sudoku. A sudoku has only one solution. If it isn’t unique, it’s not a sudoku.”
“So when you say in no particular order … ?”
“I’m dead wrong,” Cora said irritably. “They
are
in a particular order. I just don’t know what that particular order might be. I sure as hell don’t know what it means.”
“Let’s stop talking in the abstract. You wanna solve the thing, see what the number is.”
Cora took the copy of the sudoku, filled the numbers in. It wasn’t that hard. She was done in minutes.
“Good,” Harper said. “If this is what the crossword means, what have we got?”
“We’ve got numbers. And not very interesting ones at that. Don’t you wish someone would invent a new number. Like a
snurf
, somewhere between a seven and an eight.” At Harper’s look, Cora said, “All right, all right. You know as much as I do. Which isn’t good, ‘cause I don’t know squat. The puzzle says the line in the middle. Sudoku have rows and columns. As well as three-by-three boxes. If it said the box in the middle, it would be easy. It would be the center square. That was Paul Lynde, as I recall. Remember him? ‘Why do motorcycle riders wear leather jackets? Because chiffon wrinkles in the wind.’”
“Cora.”
“Sorry. But it’s not a square, it’s a line. Sudoku rows are horizontal, columns are vertical. So the line in the middle would be the fifth row across, the horizontal row that goes through the center square of the center square.”
Harper put up his hand. “Don’t start that again.”
“Never fear. Anyway, that gives us what we knew all along. The numbers one through nine, scrambled in a particular order. And that order is: five-one-eight-three-two-seven-nine-four-six.”
“Okay,” Harper said. “What could that be?”
Cora cocked her head. “That private eye have a safe?”
Chief Harper clicked open the door to the PI’s office. “The cops aren’t too happy about this.”
“I like that, Chief,” Cora said.
“What’s that?”
“You talking about the cops as if you weren’t a cop.”
“I mean the New York cops.”
“I know what you mean, Chief. It’s still good to hear. You think we dare risk a light?”
“It’s not like we broke in.”
“I know. I’m just trying to get in the mood.”
The private eye’s office was a hole-in-the-wall affair on the Upper East Side of Manhattan just off Third Avenue. It had a barred window, which seemed excessive, since it was on the fifth floor with no fire escape, and had a police lock on the door. It occurred to Cora the PI either had something valuable in the office, or tended to piss people off.
Lester Mathews had a phone and answering machine, but no fax or computer. Apparently the guy didn’t get that much work.
There was no safe in sight.
“There goes that idea,” Harper said.
“Ten bucks says he’s got a wall safe.”
“Ten bucks?”
“I’ll make it twenty.”
“I’m not risking twenty bucks.”
“I’ll give you two-to-one odds.”
“What?”
“Make it ten-to-one.”
Harper frowned. “How come you’re so sure.”
Cora pointed. “See the calendar?”
“What about it?”
“It’s two years old, and there’s no naked ladies. The only reason the guy’d have an out-of-date calender that wasn’t porn is if it’s hiding something. Take a look. He’s either got a wall safe, or a hole into the ladies’ powder room.”
It was a safe.
Chief Harper set the calendar aside, surveyed the combination lock.
“Okay,” Cora said. “We got nine numbers here. Five-one-eight-three-two-seven-nine-four-six. That will divide up into four two-digit numbers and one one-digit number. The first number is four full turns to the right and stop on either five or fifty-one.”
“Why four full turns?”
“Because it’s five numbers, and you have decreasing turns. Four full turns stop on the first number. Three full turns stop on the second number. Two full turns stop on the third number. One full turn stops on the fourth number. Part turn back to the fifth number.
“So, the first number could be five or fifty-one. The second number could be eighteen, or eight, or … Oh, for Christ’s sake!”
“What?”
“It doesn’t work.”
“What do you mean?”
“The numbers on this lock only go up to forty.”
“So?”
“The nine numbers can’t be in the combination.”
“Why not?” Harper asked.
“They’re too big. The last number on the dial is thirty-nine.”
“Forty.”
“Yeah, but we got no zero.”
“So thirty-nine’s the highest number. So what?”
“So the numbers don’t work. I said the first number has to be five or fifty-one. But it can’t be fifty-one, because that’s more than forty.”
“So it’s five.”
“Yeah,” Cora said, “but then you’ve used up your one-digit number, so all the rest have to be two-digit. Five-one-eight-three-two-seven-nine-four-six has to be five-eighteen-thirty-two-seventy-nineforty-six. Five, eighteen, and thirty-two are all right, but seventynine and forty-six won’t fly.”
“You’re saying this isn’t the combination?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“So we’re wasting our time.”
“Yes, and no.”
Harper looked pained. “What do you mean by that?”
“Well, I’d still like to get into that safe. The combination must be here somewhere. He isn’t the type of guy to trust to memory. It’s either written on that calendar, or taped to the bottom of one of the drawers in the desk. I’ll take the calendar, you take the drawers.”
“Oh, all right,” Harper said reluctantly. With an air of doing it purely to oblige her, he began checking the bottom of the desk drawers. He was surprised to find masking tape on one, assumed it covered up some sort of crack. He pulled it off, looked, and whistled.
“What you got?” Cora asked.
“L twenty-two, R eight, L sixteen.”
“That seems much more like a combination. Care to give it a whirl?”
“Yeah, but …”
“But what?”
“It’s not helping us with the number.”
“You never know, Chief. Maybe there’ll be a box inside that you have to press in the numbers one through nine in a particular sequence or it explodes.”
“Are you kidding?”
“I hope so. I don’t need any exploding boxes, thank you very much. Let’s see what we got.”
Chief Harper tried the numbers, but the safe wouldn’t open. “That isn’t it?” Cora said.
“I may have blown a number. You were talking.”
“Right, right, it was my fault,” Cora said.
“Let me try it again.”
The safe clicked open.
Chief Harper reached inside. “No drawers. Just a top shelf and a bottom shelf.”
“What’s on the top shelf?”
“Why the top shelf?”
“Okay, what’s on the bottom shelf?”
“If you’re tying to annoy me, you’re doing a great job.” Chief Harper pulled out a roll of bills. “Well, it would appear our decedent had close to two hundred dollars in cash. Why he elected to lock it in a safe I have no idea.”
“I don’t think it’s fair to call a guy who got murdered paranoid.”
“And on the other shelf we have … uh-oh.”
“What is it?” Cora said, but even as Harper turned away from the wall safe she could recognize her smiling face adorning a Puzzle Lady crossword puzzle.
“‘The Puzzle Lady has some advice on how to deal with an annoying, moody ex,’” Harper read.
ACROSS
 
1 “Arms and the Man” playwright
5 Fizzling out sound
9 Drop behind
14 Pants-on-fire type
15 Bern’s river
16 Was priced at
17 Advice part 1
19 Yossarian portrayer
20 1970s dance music
21 “___ Misérables”
22 Renter’s paper
23 “The Twittering Machine” artist
25 401(k) alternative
27 Hernando’s “Huh?”
30 Advice part 2
36 __ Bator
38 Hoedown date
39 Most of Mauritania
40 Start to freeze?
41 Eniwetok event
43 Vanity cases
44 Popeye’s type
46 007, for one
47 Quaker William
48 Advice part 3
51 Run to seed
52 Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, etc.
53 Corp. chiefs
55 Pilgrim’s title
59 India neighbor: Abbr.
61 Ready for drawing
65 “Your three minutes ___”
66 Advice end
68 Island near Quemoy
69 Modern ice cream flavor
70 “Make my day,” e.g.
71 Gambler’s routines: Abbr.
72 Central point
73 Midterm worry
 
DOWN
 
1 Went smoothly
2 Stereo hookup
3 Contented sighs
4 Jalopy
5 Course number
6 Did not succeed in
7 Complimentary
8 ___O’Shea
9 Refrain from singing?
10 Pink, as a steak
11 “My Way” singer
12 “Really?”
13 Like some wolves
18 Pepsi, for one
24 Match-opening cry
26 Design differently
27 Suppress a rebellion
28 Forearm bones
29 Sup at home
31 Former Crayola color
32 Good name for a herding dog
33 Bar order
34 Home of the Maine Lobster Institute
35 “Rome __ built in a day”
37 Luxor’s river
42 Freckled
45 Complex subject?
49 Draw off
50 “Fiddlesticks!”
54 Nasty, as a remark
55 Radio amateurs
56 Without __ of hope
57 Air travelers
58 Barely
60 Sleek, for short
62 Kodak film brand
63 Indian tourist locale
64 Frost lines
67 “The Bells” writer
 
 
 
“This has nothing to do with anything,” Cora protested.
“How do you know that?”
“Are you kidding? It’s a puzzle in a newspaper. A nationally syndicated puzzle. It doesn’t mean anything special to anyone.”
“Now, you don’t know that. This crossword puzzle may have a deep personal meaning to some poor soul.”
“Bite me.”
“Anyway, I’m going to need you to solve it.”
“Not this minute, you’re not. This isn’t fun and games. We’re tossing a dead man’s digs.”
Harper winced. “Where do you come up with this lingo? I’m embarrassed just hearing it.”
“What else is in the safe?”
“Nothing. The guy keeps money and your picture. I’m trying hard to withhold comment.”
“Hey!” Cora waggled her finger. “You better be nice, or you can solve your own damn crime.”

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