Waiter, There's a Clue in My Soup! Five Short Mysteries

By Camille LaGuire

Five light mystery short stories: from puzzles like "Waiter, There's a Clue in My Soup!", "The Hoosegow Strangler," and "Trail of the Lonesome Stickpin," to suspense in "Alibi" and "The Promise." These stories were previously published in magazines like Handheld Crime and Futures Mysterious Anthology. Several of these stories were nominated for a Derringer Award or put forward for an Edgar.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Camille LaGuire
• Release date: Aug 7, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452398419

Book preview

Waiter, There’s a Clue In My Soup!

Five Short Mystery Stories

by Camille LaGuire

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Second SmashwordsEdition

Copyright 2013 Camille LaGuire, All Rights Reserved

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Table of Contents

Waiter, There’s a Clue In My Soup!

The Hoosegow Strangler

Trail of the Lonesome Stickpin

Alibi

The Promise

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Waiter, There’s a Clue In My Soup

In this armchair detective story, two detectives sort out a poisoning case over lunch, with a little help from the food geek in the corner. (First published in Futures Mysterious Anthology in Spring 2003, and nominated for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Derringer awards in 2004.)

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LT. SOPHIE TRENT called to the waiter for a BLT on wheat and found herself a seat in the nearly empty back corner of the deli. The only other customer was a balding man who was deeply involved with his chicken salad sandwich. Sophie often saw him at the deli, and he was always so pleasantly intent on what he was eating. She smiled and wished she could be as oblivious and happy with her own sandwich. But it wasn’t to be. This was a working lunch.

Detective LaRue arrived, and sat across from her, his brow furrowed.

Bad news, lieutenant, he said. She was poisoned, with arsenic, but they didn’t find….

Wait a minute, said Sophie. I’ve been out of the loop. Catch me up on all of it.

Yes, ma’am, said LaRue. He paused to call for a pastrami on rye and then turned back to her. He didn’t refer to his notes, but LaRue never had to. The victim, Ada Maxwell, died of arsenic poisoning. M.E. and witness accounts puts the ingestion around dinner time. She’d had dinner in her hotel room with five friends—three local, and two staying at the same hotel. They were organizers for a class reunion this weekend. They got the food at a local Chinese restaurant, the Golden Noodle. She and a guy named Robert Thompson got the food and brought it back.

Chinese food. Did they share it?

Some did, some didn’t. You don’t want me to go through that, do you? Because it’s tricky and it doesn’t….

Just give me the story, and then your conclusions.

Okay. Everybody shared the entrees but Thompson, who didn’t like Mu Shu Pork or Szechwan Chicken, so he had the Beef Chop Suey all to himself. A woman named Tina Low picked out the peanuts in the chicken, and Moira Tagget didn’t eat the egg rolls. Joe Lathen ate Tagget’s egg roll, and the other guy, Hank Vorlach, didn’t order soup. Other than him, they each had their own soup, and they each had their own egg roll. The egg rolls and soup were only things the victim ate that the others didn’t share.

The soup sounds more likely, she said.

Yeah, you’d think so. He paused, and she realized that there was a twist to this. Maybe she should have let him get to his conclusion in the first place. He took a breath and went on with his report. Especially since she only ate about half of her hot and sour soup. As a matter of fact my first thought was she had an allergy to the mushrooms because she’d left most of them. They were those funny frilly ones. Look like a boxer’s ear.

Tree ears?

Yeah.

But she was poisoned with arsenic.

Yeah, no sign of allergy or any exotic poison from a mushroom, just plain old arsenic.

And from your odd hesitation, I take it there was no arsenic in the soup?

Not a trace. Not an atom. He sighed and sat forward. Not anywhere in the room. Not in the soup, not on the egg rolls or packages, not in the little packets of sauce in the trash, or on any containers or spoons. Not on the drinking glasses or the ice bucket. There was a tiny touch on one pair of chopsticks, like maybe there was a trace of it in her mouth when she was eating, but not like she picked up poisoned food with them.

The egg rolls then. They’re self-contained.

He made a face. And hard to slip poison into. The food was in plain sight of several witnesses, so unless they were all in collusion, it would have been too hard to get it inside the egg roll. On the surface, maybe, or in the sauce or mustard, but then it would have left traces on the napkins and the paper plates.

Could someone have brought one already prepared, and switched them?

Thought of that, said LaRue. "Especially with Lathan and Tagget swapping them around. But all six of them were at a meeting all afternoon, and so if somebody smuggled