| Detective :The Plant |
July 9, 2017
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| The retired guy came to the detective office every day. He was free. It was a good place for him to engage in new and interesting events. On the other hand, for the detective, it was a little bit troublesome because the guy was very talkative. The detective liked to have a quiet environment in order to think deeply and resolve difficult cases like Sherlock Holmes. But, when the detective had to leave the office for an investigation, it was convenient for him because the guy would willingly accept to be the office keeper and answer the phones, and could be with new customers while waiting. And, most importantly, the guy did them for free. So, he left him alone. On this day, when the detective returned from an investigation, he heard a voice of a woman along with the guy's loud voice from outside the door of the office. He opened the door and went in. He saw a middle aged lady on the sofa. The retired guy looked at him, he quickly stood up and introduced the woman to the detective. He left the seat saying "I'll make coffee for the two of you." The detective had a seat and the woman started to tell her concerns: She was a housewife. She had been married to her husband for about twenty years. Their relationship was not so bad, at least she thought so until recently. About a month ago, her husband brought a potted  plant home, and he said that it was given to him by one of his colleagues whose wife liked gardening. He added that he would take care of it so she didn't need to do anything for it. She felt strange because her husband had never been interested in plants. Two weeks ago, when she was vacuuming, she accidentally hit the pot and it fell down spilling some soil out. When she returned the soil into the pot, she accidentally cut her forearm a little from a leaf of the plant. She was very upset because her forearm started to swell and she felt dizzy. She hurried to the hospital and got treatment. The doctor said that the wound was caused by poison of some plants. The doctor said he needed to report it to the police as a routine. She lied saying that she hiked in the mountains and may have touched some plants. She rolled up her sleeve of her left arm and showed her forearm to the detective and the retired guy, who now was sitting next to the detective. There was a violet, ugly bruise. The detective and the guy looked at each other. The woman took out her smartphone and showed them the plant in the pot on the floor of her house. It was just like a plain foliage plant. The detective asked, "And you suspect your husband." She nodded and continued: "I can't say whether my husband knows about the plant being poisonous or not. His friend's wife might have grown this without knowing that it was poisonous. But, why doesn't my husband allow me to take care of this? As I said, he wasn't ever interested in any plants until now." The detective asked, "Is he different from before? For example, does he avoid his phone to be seen by you?" She said that he uses a pass word for the screen. "Did you talk to the police about it?" the detective asked. The woman said, "I did. I just said that one of my acquaintances had this plant. They said that our country, growing this plant is not prohibited. Anybody can enjoy to grow this plant without permission." The detective asked the retired guy to go to the woman's house with her and take some leaves of the plant to a laboratory which was located in the next city. He started to investigate. Soon he found out that there was no 'husband's colleague whose wife liked gardening and gave him the potted plant'. Instead, the husband had a girlfriend who was a maniac of gardening. He got a phone call from the retired guy. They got the results from the laboratory. He hurried there. The researcher said that the leaves were very poisonous, and their level was strong enough to kill a person with a couple of leaves. He added, "In the old times, it was used for hunting. They coated this on the tip of arrows or spears to hunt big animals like deer, bears, tigers c" The next Sunday, in the morning, the wife and her husband were having breakfast at home. She said, "Haven't you realized something?" The husband raised his eyes from the newspaper, and looked at her. "What do you mean?" She said, "I checked about the plant you are growing on the Internet. I wanted to help you." The husband was looking at her blankly. She continued, "And I learned that your plant is kind of herb." The husband relaxed and said, "Oh, yeah. You found that out?" She said that one of her friends was crazy about herbs and she drank herb tea every day c. He wondered that why women could enjoy talking about this type of thing c Suddenly, he realized he missed something important from the conversation. What did she say at the beginning of the conversation? He couldn't remember. The wife said, "c and I came up with the idea, why don't we enjoy herbs like her? Haven't you realized it?" The husband was looking at the plate which he was eating. It was a salad and he could recognize something in it, it was a familiar shape, color c. He looked at her. She was smiling and said, "Do you like it?" The woman was in the detective office the next day. The detective said, "I didn't think that our plan would worked this good." The other two nodded. The husband went to the bathroom and threw up hard. Then, he drove to the hospital and shouted at the nurses that it was urgent. Then he shouted at the doctors about the name of the plant and poison. They washed his stomach and gave him a shot of anti-poison medicine for the poison that the husband mentioned. Soon the police came because they were called as a routine. By the time the police arrived, the doctors concluded that the husband didn't suffer from any poison. The police knew the husband's wife came to the police office some days before and talked to them about the poison. So they demanded an explanation from him and he confessed that he had a girlfriend and the girlfriend suggested to him to kill her, but he didn't really think about killing her. The wife sighed and said, "I never thought that my husband would have an affair. I was so naive." The detective said, "You don't need to blame yourself.c By the way, why did you choose our office?" She replied, "I came here because Sherlock Holmes is an expert of botany. And I was right." She pointed to the leaves on the table and said, "When I got these leaves from you, I couldn't believe that these were poison-free because these are so identical." The detective asked, "So similar?" The wife said, "Similar? To my eyes, they are completely the same." The detective and the retied guy rushed to the laboratory and asked the researcher to analyze the leaves that they got in the forest. They had gone to the nearest forest and found them with a help of a photo she gave them. After a while the researcher came back and said, "This is the same one you brought the other day. But it is a very rare case that this isn't poisonous at all. Sometimes it happens in nature. Nature is mysterious." "And we didn't become murderers because of the mysterious nature." The detective and the retired guy sat down on the floor and couldn't move for a long time. |
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*foliage :t
*laboratory :€
*spear :βθ
*botany :A¨iwj
*identical :―κΜ