Five-minute Mysteries 3. Ken Weber

see it right side up. “Here. Just take a look. Our people say it was taken about 1943.”

      Norm Upshur glanced at the tattered photograph for only a second. “He’s shaving, Harland, for heaven sake!”

      For once Harland Stohl showed a bit of spirit. “You were expecting a cigarette ad, maybe? Why not shaving? Or eating? Or drinking? Or sitting on the toilet! Think of it. Bovic’s a key player in the ustashi in a country where there are any number of factions all trying to kill one another, where nobody trusts anybody – they still don’t! – so this had to be with a hidden camera. What better time than when he’s shaving?”

      “Makes sense, I suppose.” Norm agreed with more than a little reluctance. “This the scar?”

      “Precisely in the middle of the forehead. And precisely where there’s one on the old boy downstairs, as you’ll soon see.”

      “The medal on that chain around his neck ... Says I-H ... Can’t make out the ...”

      Stohl handed Upshur a magnifying glass. “An ‘S.’ Catholics all over the world wear that. Stands for in hoc signo. Means ‘in this sign.’ Refers to the cross where Jesus was crucified.”

      Norm handed back the glass and returned to the window, where only a few minutes earlier he had watched the approach of the car. He was still very troubled. “I don’t know, Harland. A forty-year-old photograph and an old commie woman with a grudge … and, wait a minute! Let me see that thing again! Yes! He’s shaving with his right hand!” Norm came around to Harland’s side of the desk. He tapped the photograph with an insistent index finger. “What that means ... what it means is – in a mirror – what it means is he’s left-handed! Now the old guy downstairs ... is he right- or left-handed, because ...?”

      “I know what you’re getting at.” Harland Stohl shook his head. “One of the first things we looked at, but it doesn’t apply here. You saw that yourself.”

      ?

      Why does Norm Upshur assume that Bovic is left-handed, and why, as Harland Stohl says, does it not apply here?

      Solution

      

10

The Initiation

      Thirty-two years I been at this. Went into narcotics right out of the academy. Undercover. Traffic after that – talk about a switch! Then I did bunko, vice for three years, and before I turned private I was in homicide. Made sergeant. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t bragging. I just want you to know I been around the block. Seen it all. Every con artist, beater, dipper, shooter, weirdo, and just plain dumb crook there is. That’s what I thought, anyway. Until Mrs. Kumar-White.

      Oh, she wasn’t weird or anything. Better get that straight right away. In fact, she was pretty classy. A looker and a real sharp dresser. Not flashy either. Tasteful. Made you look twice. Sure turned heads in the building where I got my office. We don’t get her type down there. I got to tell you that made me suspicious at first. You see, I do a lot of husband chasing. It’s bread and butter in my business. And women like her – they usually phone. Look you up in the yellow pages or get a referral from one of their friends. But her, she just shows up at my office. No appointment, nothing.

      ’Course I bring her in right away or she’d have drawn a crowd out in the hall. And she sits down and starts right in.

      “My husband,” she says.

      Now, it turns out to be one of your standard I-think-my-husband-is-playing-around cases, but most women, they dance around the subject first. Like they don’t actually want to say it? Or else they want to know about my fee. Stuff like that. Not her.

      “My husband,” she starts. “I think my husband is being kidnapped.”

      You can see already, can’t you, this is weird? “Being kidnapped”? Oh yeah. I should tell you right up front here that the whole thing was good old-fashioned infidelity. The guy – White – he was having not one but two adventures on the side. But the weird part is how this all played out.

      ’Course I tell her she should be seeing the police if it’s a snatch, though I can just hear the guys cracking up as soon as she tells them “being kidnapped.” But then she explains. Says it’s like a cult thing.

      “He’s always been a joiner,” she says. “It’s like he was disappointed when he got too old for Boy Scouts. He’s a Shriner. He belongs to the Rotary Club. He’s a Mason. He especially likes the secret ones with the special handshakes and the ceremonies and the funny clothes.”

      So far I’m not hearing a thing that interests me and if it weren’t that she was the best looking client I’ve had in that office for longer than I can remember, I’d have been looking for an escape hatch. But then what she does is, she reaches into her purse and brings out a wad of hundreds. Counts out ten of them.

      “Will one thousand be a sufficient advance?” she asks.

      I don’t tell her that most of the time I have to squeeze to get a couple of hundred out of a client, so she’s got my attention.

      OK, so now I’m interested, and then she says, “I want you to become a member of the Simon Pure Society, like my husband. And tell me how I can get him back, before they take him from me complet­ely.”

      Now here’s where it goes right off the track. Seems this Simon Pure Society – oh, there really is one; that’s the first thing I look into – it’s full of these nutbars playing head games all the time. You see, every member is either a total liar, never ever tells the truth – Simon Pure, get it? – or else they swing the other way, tell the truth every single time no matter what. Different kind of pure, see? And to be a member you got to be one or the other; can’t be both! Look, don’t quit on me here, I’m not making this up!

      Anyway, to make a long story short, I go visit this Simon Pure Society. They got a spot down by the lake, just off Carrick. Mrs. Kumar-White gets me a referral – I’m still working out how that happened – ’cause you can’t just walk in off the street. I make them think I’m interested in joining and I pay a fee so I can take the initiation. Three hundred bucks, so maybe not all of them are nuts!

      It’s set up for the next afternoon and I show up early. A habit of mine, good one, too, ’cause I got to see White, the husband, with these two chippies all over him. Got a coupla pictures so that was the end of that. Last I heard he had joined the Eternal Alimony Society. The Mrs. saw to that. But let me finish on this Simon Pure thing. By now I’m really into this weird deal. Want to see if it’s for real.

      So they take me into a sort of lounge. This was no saloon by the way. Very posh. I’m taken to a table for four and then in come these three, a guy and two women. They sit down at my table, don’t say a word to me, and a waiter comes, takes orders for drinks. I order soda water. Got to be clear for this.

      Now I should explain – and stay with me, I thought this was nuts, too, when I first heard it: Like I told you, if you join Simon Pure, you got to go one way or the other full time, so you choose to be either a Fabrican or a Veritan depending on whether you want to lie all the time or tell the truth. Fabricans are the liars and ... well, you can figure it out. Everybody’s dead serious, by the way. They got this system of increasing fines, for example, if you’re caught out of character. You only get three strikes before you’re tossed out for a while. All part of the game. You see, everybody knows what everybody else is, so the big thing is to catch someone saying something the wrong way.

      Anyway, what I have to do in the initiation is figure out which one of my three testers is the Veritan, because there will be only one at the table. Each of them will speak once and only once. And then I get one shot only; my first