Free The Perfect Crime by Les Edgerton

I’ve got a couple of theories, but at this point, to be honest, we don’t have a line on any suspects at all. It’s a possibility though, isn’t it?”
    Grady considered it a moment. “Sure. Anything’s a pobility at this point, but for some reason I don’t think this guy’s your garden-variety crackpot.”
    “Why? Because it’s your brother who was robbed and hurt?”
    Immediately, he took it back when he saw the way Grady’s jaw muscles twitched.
    “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. I meant...”
    “You meant that my judgment might be colored because my only brother happened to be the one who almost got killed?”
    “Well, no...”
    “Hey.” He reached over and squeezed Marty’s shoulder and his expression softened. “Don’t sweat it. I’d probably think the same thing if it was you standing here. But, no. I don’t think my judgment’s screwed in this at all. What I think is that whoever did this is one smart cookie, not your garden-variety neo-Nazi fuck. Look at these shelves for instance.”
    They walked over and stood looking down the rows of parts on the floor and the upended shelves. He explained to Marty his take on the shelves and the detective agreed, once he was done.
    “You’re still a hell of a detective!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t see it that way at first.”
    For a moment, both men stood looking silently at the jumble before them and Grady asked, “What have you guys got?”
    “Well,” Marty began, “not a whole helluva lot so far. I got a new partner, young pup who thinks he knows it all. His theory is that it was either kids got surprised in a burglary or else it was an armed robbery went bad.”
    “New academy graduate?”
    “Yeah.”
    Both men laughed.
    Grady said, “I wish Jack could help us on this.”
    “Yeah. Once he’s conscious and gives us a description of this punk, we got ‘im.”
    “No, I was thinking another way. Even if he wasn’t the victim he could probably figure this out in a New York second. Remember the Boroni case?”
    “It was before my time, but I heard stuff. Jack helped on that one, did he?”
    “Helped? Hell, Jack solved it. By himself.”
    The Boroni case was an insurance fraud affair. It was more than that. It was also a way Mr. Boroni figured out not only to collect the insurance on his Chris Craft, but to get rid of a wife who didn’t approve of his affairs. There was a bonus there too, in that she was worth half a million dead.
    “Wasn’t there a bomb in Mrs. Boroni’s drink or something? It was something like that, wasn’t it? Boroni had one a’them weird old-time Eytalian names, didn’t he?”
    Marty walked back up to the front of the store poking with his foot at the wreckage on the floor as he went. Grady followed along, recalling the case.
    “That’s right. Ideal. That was his first name. Ideal Boroni. See, Boroni knew his wife liked her booze. She had this one she had all the time. Weird fucking shit. Seems she had a sweet tooth, liked Irish coffee. Well, sweet-tooth Irish coffee. She used espresso and dumped two of them packets of Sweet’N Low in it before she hit it with the booze. A dieting drunk you might say.”
    Both men laughed. Grady went on.
    “She was a pro lush, had a special espresso machine built into the cabinet of her boat that matched the one at home. This guy Ideal, he was a slick mother. He dumped out the Sweet’N Low in ten, eleven packets, substituted sodium and sealed them up again. Musta took him a week to do all that, make ‘em look like they weren’t fucked with.”
    “Sodium. What the hell’s that? The stuff in crackers?”
    “It’s a chemical. Not soda, sodium. Looks kinda like sweetener only more silvery. Not that you’d pay attention. You ever look at a packet of sugar or sweetener when you open it? Naw, you rip it open and dump it in.”
    “So there was a chemical reaction, right? To booze? How’d he do it?”
    Grady smiled. “I told you, Jack was smart. Figured it out right