Murder By The Pint (Microbrewery Mysteries Book 1) by Belle Knudson Read Free Book Online Page A

every employee was like that.

Chapter 8
     
                  About four days later, the phone call came in. Gerry answered, and a man's voice asked him for "the guy who runs the place.” When informed that the guy was a girl, the caller simply and tersely said, "Put 'er on."
                  I answered the phone. The gruff voice said, "Yeah, you're in charge down there?"
                  I said, "That's right. How can I help you?"
                  "We're calling about the diamond package you received."
                  "Yes, I said. Have you heard anything?"
                  "Well, we're gonna need a bit more information."
                  "Okay."
                  "Your name."
                  An eerie feeling came over me. Ever walk outside when it's about to start thundering and pouring incessantly? You know that electric smell in the hot air? That's the feeling I had when this guy – and the savvy reader will have guessed by now that this wasn't the cops I was speaking with – asked me my name.
                  "Didn’t you..." I said, as the realization hit me. "Didn’t you guys take down my name already?"
                  A pause on the other end. "Who's this?"
                  "Who am I speaking with, please?" I asked. I think I sounded strong.
                  And the caller hung up.
                  For the rest of the day, I thought about that call. And then it occurred to me that perhaps I ought to contact the police and let them know about it. Maybe it was a branch of the police department. Maybe one hand was unaware of what the other hand was doing. I called them up and asked them if there was anyone else working on the case. Anyone that maybe they didn’t know about. No, they said. They were the only ones. They also said that the call was very interesting, and did I manage to get a number. I said that Darby's Microbrewery was probably the only place in the world without caller ID capability. My dad was strange like that with some types of technology. They were nice enough to ask me if I wanted police protection.
                  On the basis of a phone call? No. I asked them if they had any leads yet as to who might have been responsible for sending the diamonds. Not yet, they said.
                  So that was it. I went home that night with no problems at all, to a reheated penne a la vodka dinner that Tanya had made earlier for her boyfriend, Sam. I curled up in bed with the latest book on the nightstand and was out in fifteen minutes.

Chapter 9
     
    All right, so this is probably a good enough time as any to tell you a story about a guy by the name of Max Bosch. This isn’t one of my short stories. This one's all true.
    At the age of fifty-six, Max Bosch got himself a 900 number. If you called 1-900-328-2783 (1-900-EAT-CRUD), you would hear Max Bosch himself, with a voice like a mouthful of wet sponge, his th's pronounced like d's, reading from the previous day's news. Max Bosch charged 99 cents for the first minute and $6.95 for each additional minute. A typical call lasted ten minutes, or one page of news. Max Bosch made $63.54 per call. This tiny bundle of facts is remarkable in no way at all save for the fact that the only person in the entire known universe who ever called this number was Max Bosch himself.
    Here was the scheme. Fifty-six year-old Max Bosch, his hair slicked with chocolate brown shoe polish, his face clean, but aged, like a Turkish tobacco pouch, his algae-colored eyes twinkling, and a fresh plug of Juicy Fruit in his cheek, would walk into a building with a brown parcel under his arm. In reality, it was a shoebox (Florsheim loafers, size 9 ½ EEE, purchased circa 1956), wrapped in brown grocery bag paper (Shop Rite, most recent home to three packages of Oreos, a half gallon of two-percent, and one can of