Pickled [FICTOID]

“Is the heart his?” the detective asked.

The coroner cocked her head this way and that.  A heart lay on the floor to the left of the corpse, a small puddle of thin transparent red liquid to the right.  “Hard to tell,” she said.  “No blood, no obvious sign of injury.”

“What’s that liquid?”

The coroner took a swab from her kit, dipped it into the red liquid, then held it under her nose and sniffed it.

“Vinegar,” she said.  “Umeboshi vinegar would be my guess.”

“How do you know that without testing?”

“I like to cook,” she said.  “Same basic skill set as my job, only with more positive and pleasurable results.  Besides, as I said I’m just guessing.”

“This is an Italian restaurant.”

“That it is.”

“So what’s umeboshi doing here?”

“You’re the detective,” said the coroner.  “You tell me.”

After photographing, measuring, and temperature probing the deceased opera singer (and if he wasn’t dead, the last item would have killed him), the detective allowed the coroner and her staff turn the body over.

The detective hoped to find a gaping chest wound that would at least explain the heart.

Instead they found a perfectly buttoned silk shirt under a dark wool jacket, topped by an apricot ascot.

“Open his shirt, let’s see if there’s a wound underneath.”

The coroner arched an eyebrow at him.  “Seriously?  Witnesses say he came in, sat at this table, ordered a meal, then suddenly pitched forward on the floor.  You really think somebody could spoon his heart out, clean up the crime scene, and escape unnoticed in a split second?”

“Let’s make sure.  Open the shirt.”

They did.  Unbroken skin.

“Okay, so it’s not his heart.  Whose heart is it?”

“Don’t ask me, I’m just the coroner.”

“You said you were a cook, right?  Is it a beef heart or a hog or what?”

She pulled on another pair of gloves and picked the heart up, turning it over. 

Umeboski vinegar poured out.

“It’s looks like an immature pig’s heart,” she said.  “I’ll need to test to make sure, but I think I’m right.  It appears to be pickled.”

“Pickled…”

The coroner nodded.  “In umeboshi vinegar, judging by the smell.”

“Logical,” said the detective. 

The coroner looked at the deceased opera singer’s forehead.  “There’s a large hematoma here,” she said.

“Just say ‘bruise’.” Said the detective.  “Save the precise jargon for the autopsy report.”

The coroner touched the hematoma / bruise with her gloved finger.  The bone beneath gave way easily.

“The front of his skull is crushed,” she said.  She looked in the direction of the door.  “I’m guessing when a customer entered, somebody launched this picked pig heart at him from across the street.”

The detective looked through the door and saw a Japanese restaurant across the street, a large “GOING OUT OF BUSINESS” sign on the front door.

He turned to the Italian restaurant owner.  “How long have you been at this location?”

“Six, seven months.”

“Business good?”

“Until today, business was great.”

“Customer base growing?”

“Yeah.”

“Other restaurants, they doing as well?”

The owner shrugged.  “I dunno.  Maybe.  Lots of folks around here like Italian.”

“Any trouble with neighbors?”

The owner frowned.  “Well, maybe…”

“’Maybe’?”

“Nothing I can prove.  I think the guy across the street blames me for his drop in business.  I’m pretty sure he called in a couple of anonymous complaints to the health department, and I think he may have broken my front window twice.”

“You got security camera footage that shows him doing it?”

“No, but I’m pretty sure it’s him.  My security cameras show the window being broken both times by a ball of ice.”

“He threw a ball of ice?”

“No, he probably fired it through his kid’s potato cannon.  You know what a potato cannon is?”

“I know what a potato cannon is,” said the detective.

“His kid made one for a school science fair.  Won second prize, if I remember correctly.”

The detective looked across the street again.  He caught a glimpse of the Japanese restaurant owner peering back at him.  When the Japanese owner realized he’d been spotted, he ducked back into the darkness of his restaurant, pausing only to flip the “CLOSED” sign on his door.

This may be easier to solve that I anticipated, the detective thought, motioning for two patrol officers to follow him across the street.

© Buzz Dixon