A bad purchase or a premeditated murder?
Inspiration for writing can be found anywhere, just keep your eyes open and listen well. But sometimes we have to force it, which is why I asked a good friend of mine. All it took was four words: detective story, money, tomatoes and a hat. A story or a bad joke?
Raindrops trickled down my wide beige hat, which hit my forehead even harder, and as I crossed the wide main road with the stream of passing cars, she honked at me but I just stared at the ground, my mind wandering over the strange case my department was investigating. The mystery of the stolen tomatoes would seem like a trivial matter to be investigated by the local low-level police.
There was plenty of red water in the store at the scene. But it wasn't blood. The clerk's body, under a black sheet, lay in a pool of squashed and squashed tomatoes, a few of which lay under and around him. The coroner uncovered a dead body lying in front of me. Its gaze was absent, cold, lifeless. The body had marble maps and the face was frozen in a horrified expression, mouth agape. Supposedly the man had been lying there since after closing time yesterday afternoon, so no one could have noticed him.
I scratched in my hair under my hat, trying to figure out a motive. After all, the money in the cash register was all that was left, and the expensive items that were scarce here were intact. The only thing missing were the crates of tomatoes. I couldn't think of a single reason why anyone would rob tomatoes, except perhaps because the person in question had a taste for lettuce. When we got permission to see the CCTV footage, I couldn't believe my eyes. A figure that could have been a woman entered the store. She was holding a knife and waving it in all directions. The clerk looked like he was approaching her and talking to her. The woman lowered the knife, but then, probably startled by something, stabbed the man right through the heart. She really did grab the pallets of tomatoes and run. I figured she must have had a partner or at least a car. Motive was still unknown.
Days passed, and with no further evidence, it was clear she'd be moved to the cold case section. And I can still see the look on the dead man's face.
***
After a couple of weeks, the dispatcher called me to report a strange smell coming from an abandoned apartment and no way to get in. The caller remembered the posted store footage from the case with the tomatoes and the stabbed man. When we kicked the apartment door in, an incredibly foul smell hit our noses. A mixture of sour, rotten "something" that words cannot describe. Something the human nose should never smell. Inside, we found a woman who was barely alive. I arranged for her to be transported, but she certainly couldn't have caused the smell. As I walked through the apartment and approached the kitchen, the smell grew stronger. My colleagues behind my back were gradually leaving as it became unbearable. A huge food freezer in the middle of the room caught my eye. The first thing that flashed through my mind was the thought of the dismembered bodies of the female victims. The horrible smell was so disgusting that I tried to hold my breath and ignore the goose bumps that were forming. When I flipped the lid of the freezer, the colleague next to me threw up tightly wtranou. I looked carefully. These were not dismembered human bodies. They were bags of green and white matter.
A few days later, a friend from the lab called me to tell me what was in the disgusting bags. He told me that they were rotten and moldy tomatoes, and in each of them was a prepared coin. I couldn't believe it! My wife died in the hospital, and I never knew the truth.
Why? For what? What was the reason for all this?
