The Preacher's Wife Drinks a Little

CHARLIE Police Chief Charles LeRoy Knight had never in his entire career investigated a murder. Oh ya, there'd been some kind of suspicious deaths in the past, but none quite like Maude Fitzbaum. Charlie doubted very much that Maude had willingly swallowed coffee laced with arsenic. And if that was true, then someone else had done the 'lacing'. And that made it homicide. He sincerely wished the St. Luther Police Department had a CSI team like on television. He held the autopsy report in one hand, reading glasses in the other. It was a hard report to digest. Charlie recalled Dr. Phelps Magritty's words when he'd delivered the official report to him. "Well, she was in pretty good health, I'll tell you. Signs of aging like would be in all of us of a certain age." He put a fresh cigar in the corner of his mouth and spoke around it. "But then there's the fact that sometime on that Sunday morning, just before she started playing the organ, she took in a whole lot of arsenic and it was probably in her coffee." "Good Lord Almighty!" Charlie said. Dr.Magritty didn't think the Lord Almighty had much to do with Maude's death and he told Charlie just that. "'With malice aforethought,'" he said. "I always thought that a spiffy turn of phrase. "If you're hoping to find this has been going on awhile, I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. We'll test all that natural crap she had, but I'm thinking this was a one-fell-swoop poisoning, not a regular ingestion, like somebody lacing her morning oatmeal." The police chief just nodded. Phelps reached the door to Charlie's office, took the unlit cigar from his mouth, and turned back. "The biggest question in my mind is, why?" He left without waiting for a response