Private Detective Pilgrim Hugh loves solving strange cases. Very little stumps him for very long.

But a woman by the name of Deep Blue, dead in her empty apartment and dyed blue, seemed like an impossible case.

And more than Hugh knows depends on his quick solution.

Pilgrim Hugh once again rides to the rescue in his stretch limo driven by his brilliant assistant. If you love puzzle crime stories, grab “The Case of the Dead Lady Blues.”

 

 

THE CASE OF THE DEAD LADY BLUES

A Pilgrim Hugh Incident

 

 

ONE

 

 

Pilgrim Hugh stared at the body of the woman even though he had no desire to stare or look or even glance. Blue was just not an attractive color on a redhead, and this woman had clearly been very attractive in her pink-skinned time.

Dead was not attractive either. And she was most certainly dead, stretched out in the middle of the polished oak floor.

Her skin was deep blue, clashing with her long red hair. Her white slinky dress also seemed a pale blue from the shade of her skin showing through. The dress left little to the imagination, allowing Pilgrim to see clearly more than she likely wanted him to see in her own death.

Chances are she no longer cared, however.

The apartment where she lay had been scrubbed clean. The oak hardwood floors had been polished, the off-white walls all wiped down to a gloss, and not a stick of furniture or window blinds or anything else but a blue body remained.

And the temperature was set at a comfortable seventy degrees on the thermostat on the wall. Outside, the July day was a hot one for Portland, Oregon, one of those ninety-plus days the weather people liked to proclaim as dangerous. Just walking from his limo to the apartment building had forced him to break out into a sweat under his dress shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes.

The room around him had more of an antiseptic hospital smell than a crime scene, but Pilgrim was pretty convinced he was standing in a crime scene. He had seen his share over the years helping police with varied investigations.

This might be someone really sick who did this.

As a private detective who helped the police on cases, he was usually called to a crime scene long after a body was removed, however. This time he was the one calling the police to a body. Actually, his assistant Donna Marks was doing the calling just outside the door.

He had ended up a private eye through a series of strange events. First, three years of law school and a failed first marriage while working for a corporate law firm had convinced him he wasn’t a normal lawyer.

Or a decent standard husband either.

Then his grandmother had died and left him more money than he could imagine, which sent him on a year of traveling and drinking, which also eventually got boring.

So he went back to school to become a private detective, but soon learned, after he hung out his shingle, that being a private eye wasn’t what the books described. It was all computer work and long boring hours of nothingness trying to watch someone.

At that point, he had finally figured out that he bored easily and needed some excitement and challenges in his life. So with some of his grandmother’s money, he set up Hugh and Associates, a combination law firm and private investigative firm. Then he had hired a couple great associates who took all the boring cases and made the firm lots of money and they hired even more associates that he had no desire to meet who also made him lots and lots of money.

And he bought apartments around the town that also made him money, so his grandmother’s fortune had gotten bigger even with his best efforts to spend it all.

He had then offered his investigative state-of-the-art services for free to all the surrounding police forces. After a few years, he had solved a bunch of cases and was now called regularly. Interesting stuff.

Seldom boring.

For the first two years on being a private eye, his best friend from school, Carrie, had been his assistant, but she had fallen in love with the law side of the firm, gone back to law school, and now worked on the floor below his office doing law stuff that seemed boring to him, but that she seemed to thrive on.

Before she left, Carrie had trained Donna Marks to be his special assistant. At times he had to admit, Donna was better at her job being his assistant than Carrie had been.

At the moment, he could hear Donna’s voice in the hallway outside the apartment. From the sounds of it, the Portland Police would be here shortly.

He looked at the apartment key in his hand. Nothing unusual about it at all. It had come to his office by Priority Mail with a simple typed note that read: Go here at noon for the most puzzling crime of your career.

Then the address of the apartment, no signature.

Had the person who murdered this woman sent the note?

Or had the woman even been murdered?

No clues in the note at all, just the reference to crime and all printed out on standard white paper. He had all of it in his limo to give the police.

This was puzzling. The note was right about that much.

He took a slow walk around the small studio apartment, looking for any clues or anything that seemed odd besides the fact that everything was scrubbed to an inch of its paint job. Even the small bathroom shone like a bad commercial.

Whoever had cleaned this place had done a great job of it.

He went back to the dead woman and just stared at her.

The blue woman in the white dress lay in the middle of the hardwood floor, her feet together and aimed toward the door into the hallway. Her hands were grasped over her stomach, as if resting. Her eyes were closed.

He moved closer and bent down carefully to not touch anything.

She had on makeup, but not too much. There was just enough to accent her face, even with the shade of blue of her skin. Her bright red hair was combed back and arranged around her face on the floor. She almost seemed to be smiling.

The blue skin color was clearly covering every inch of visible skin and from the blue tint coming through the sheer white dress, all of her body.

She had no obvious signs of trauma, but he sure wasn’t going to move her to look for any. However, he did carefully, using one knuckle, touch her skin on the side of her arm.

Room temperature. And she had no smell at all.

None.

He had been in rooms after murder victims were taken away and the smell of death always remained.

No smell of life or death with this woman.

He stood and stepped back toward the apartment door as Donna came in. She was wearing white shorts that fit like a glove, a brown tank top, and tennis shoes. She had short brown hair and wide brown eyes and when smiling, she could light up a room.

She was divorced, thirty, and an expert on computers, high-speed driving, and weapons. So far he had only needed her for the computers, thankfully.

“You would think blue lady there would smell,” Donna said. “And I don’t see any blood anywhere.”

“More than likely it would have been blue,” Pilgrim said.

“Are we going down that blue road?” she asked.

“Not until the men in blue get here,” he said.

She moaned and turned for the hallway. “I’m calling a blue moratorium on bad jokes until we get this solved.”

“Deal,” he said.

Over her shoulder she said, “I’m going back to the limo to do some research on how skin can become that shade and exactly who this woman used to be.”

“The police will want the letter,” he said.

“Already have it in a bag,” she said without looking back.

He shook his head and went back to staring at the redhead with the blue skin resting peacefully on the floor.

The letter writer had been correct. It was a crime for someone so beautiful and young to be dead, no matter how it happened.