Five-minute Mysteries 2. Ken Weber

of each story. The number of typewriters suggests how easy or difficult the mystery is, one being easy, two being a little harder, and three, difficult. (Or, perhaps more accurately, how easy or difficult each one seems to me.) But don’t let the ratings stop you from enjoying all the mysteries! One that I rate “difficult” might be an open-and-shut case for you, while you might be utterly stumped by one I’ve rated “easy.” Try them all.

      Finally, all the solutions are at the back of the book, so you can prove you’re a winner or, once in a while, get a kick out of losing. Either way, enjoy.

      1

      Safety Inspection

      If my mother is right and it’s true that bad things always come in threes, then my day was down the tubes by midmorning already. To start with, I got to work late. Not my fault, but according to Mom the three bad things are never your fault; they just happen to you. Anyway, I got stuck in traffic on the Lion’s Gate Bridge.

      Arriving late meant that all the other inspectors had picked their assignments by the time I got in, so I got stuck with Ace Bagshaw. We have a new supervisor at the inspection branch, and he has this theory that first-come, first-pick will get the staff in early. It works, too. There’s no way anybody would choose a Bagshaw construction site, yet we all knew someone would have to go to one today because of the carpenter who died there yesterday afternoon.

      Let me tell you a bit about Ace. Of all the contractors the Workplace Safety Board deals with, Horace “Ace” Bagshaw is the only one who can make the entire inspection branch gag in unison. We’re not exactly popular on a lot of construction sites, but he really hates the WSB. With Ace, putting one over on us – or on the works department or the hydro people, any government department – is like a duty! Doesn’t help, either, that he’s got this fat, red face with little piggy eyes and a gut you could park a car in. Anyway, that’s Ace, so you can see why getting him on my duty sheet was the second bad thing of my day.

      I got to the site at 10:05 that morning, just in time to be interrupted by the catering truck – which actually turned out to be a bit of a break. One thing you can be sure of at a construction job like this – it’s a complete redo of a hundred-year-old house, three stories – is that a coffee wagon will draw in the entire work force. So from my car I got to eyeball the whole group. Five of them, including Ace. Should have been six, but yesterday afternoon a carpenter had pitched off a narrow ledge that ran along the front of the third story. He died in the ambulance.

      According to my supervisor’s phone interview with Ace last night, a proper safety rail was in place around the ledge, and, since nobody had seen the man fall, nobody really knew what happened. I could see the rail from my car. It appeared to be the right height. Just a single two-by-four about waist high, but that’s all the safety code calls for. It was braced properly. Double-nailed, too: I could see the nail heads gleaming back at me in the sunlight.

      What Ace had said to the supervisor was right, though. To make my measurements I’d have to go up through the inside of the house, and then crawl out one of the third-floor windows onto the ledge, just like the carpenter must have.

      I got out of my car before coffee break ended. Might as well go present myself to Ace, I thought,and get the third bad thing over with. He didn’t disappoint.

      “Well, lookee here! Figgered one a’ you people’d show up by now,” he said before I had even opened my mouth. “What does a little girl like you know about construction? Yuh don’t look old enough to tell a hammer from a pinch bar.”

      I forgot to mention that Ace doesn’t like women, but that’s probably no surprise. In fact nothing he said was unexpected, but I must have been a bit tense, because I almost blew it right at the start.

      “And where’s your hard hat?” he bellowed. “This is a construction site! Don’t yuh know any better?”

      A really dumb move, but fortunately I still had my car door open, so I could swing around to get my hat in a manner that looked liked I always did it that way. Or so I hoped, but the smirks suggested I didn’t quite carry it off. Ace, meanwhile, seemed to have accepted the inevitable.

      “C’mon, let’s get this over with,” he said, running his hands up and down on either side of his enormous stomach. “I’ll show yuh the ladders inside, and yuh can crawl up there on your own. See whatever yuh want. We’re goin’ back to work.”

      In my wildest dreams I wouldn’t have expected Ace to climb the ladders with me, but it was reassuring to know I could go up without him.

      “This job’s been nothing but delay and delay.” I noticed that he didn’t look at me when he talked. “Sully – he’s the guy that di – ... fell? He put the rail up there hisself four weeks ago and two days work – two days – that’s all we get in up there – on the whole job! – before that cursed strike. A month my equipment sits here and nobody works! Confounded unions! Then all that rain we had. Thank God that’s over. And now Sully ... fifteen years he’s worked for me!”

      Ace continued to mumble on about delays and the continuing problems of contractors as he walked away. I was glad to be free of him. Mounting the ladder, it occurred to me that I’d have to talk over the “bad things in threes” idea with Mom. I guess forgetting my hard hat was the third one, but I wonder if three things really count when you get one really good one in the middle. You see, even before I climbed the ladder, I knew I’d uncovered a huge safety violatio­n. Whether poor Sully died because of his own carelessness or because of Ace’s probably won’t come out till the inquest, but I know there was no rail there when he fell.

      ?

      How does the WSB inspector know this?

       Click here for the solution

      2

      The Best-laid Plans ...

      Linc Dennebar had planned every step of the robbery with great care, but killing Mary Majeski turned out to be more of a problem than he had anticipated. Not actually doing it; he’d rehearsed that part so often in his mind, the real thing was almost automatic. Mary’s late husband had been a judge, and she kept his gavel on the mantelpiece. Linc simply took it and, with one blow to the back of her head, he ... well, he knew from the way it felt that one swing was all that was needed. Exactly as he’d planned; she probably never even felt it. What he didn’t expect; what he hadn’t planned for, was the nausea, the wrench in his gut and the panic that overcame him when he looked at her lying so still on the floor in front of her wheelchair.

      Later, when he was arrested, Linc realized it must have been the panic that led to his one big mistake. But at the time, when he called 9-1-1 on Mary’s old rotary phone – the next step in his careful plan – the panic made him sound really genuine, even better than he’d practiced. Maybe too good, he thought. Might make the police get here faster, so it was a good thing he had the third step timed for speed.

      That was to get the rings and bracelets into the hollow bottoms of his Nikes. He knew just which ones to take: Linc had learned all about heisting jewelry from an old con up at Rojax. That was the adult detention center where he’d done 180 days instead of at the juvenile house because some bleeding-heart social worker convinced the court that Rojax had the facilities to start him on a trade. He’d learned a trade all right: the old con had even taught him how to fix the shoes, explaining how high-tech basketball footwear was the best thing that had happened to B&E since pawn shops.

      Next, after pulling open all the drawers in the roll-top desk, along with a few cupboard