Day 615: 5 Minute Freewrite: Thursday - Prompt: champagne

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(This freewrite features police captain Ironwood Hamilton of Tinyville, VA, whose crime detection skill has most recently been highlighted in the "Death at the Pool". This is a less grim matter, but it remains amazing how some folks can mess up with bubbly...]

Ironwood Hamilton was the father of 11 children, which he had raised on the combination of his Army officer's salary and the income from his wife's home-based business. He was now police captain in a very small town in a rural county in Virginia, with nine children still living at home and no. 10 due home from college for the summer.

The last thing he cared about were those kind of events where you paid more than $40 to get in and hundreds if not thousands of dollars to get outfitted to attend.

But, even when shopping for his family in Big Loft, when law enforcement duties called, he answered. No cost, after all, to heading into the Big Loft Marriott when invited by one of Big Loft's finest police lieutenants.

“I know it ain't strictly your jurisdiction, Ham, but you're in Lofton County with us, and the extra set of eyes can't hurt.”

It had been a jewelry heist on a birthday girl of means – she had been showing her birthday jewels to her closest friends, then had taken them back to her room, and then had gone back up to get them to show them again. They had been gone by then. The problem was, everyone in the room who knew about the jewelry had been accounted for, and there they all were, sipping champagne out of big, wide-rimmed glasses.

Captain Hamilton had only one question, addressed with a gentle, knowing smile to the couple sitting at the table nearest him.

“Tell me something – what's your secret for keeping your champagne from going flat?”

The couple froze, and then took off running, only for the wife to trip over her high heels, and the husband to get hit by a flying plate. Out fell the sack of jewelry, as he fell.

“So,” said Lieutenant Backston to his friend later, “how did you know?”

“Simple,” said Captain Hamilton. “The event had been going on an hour by the time Ms. Vaaniti had gone back to her room and found out that her jewelry had been stolen. The vast majority of the glasses were half-empty, champagne flat, as you would expect of champagne in a wide-rimmed glass after an hour. Those bubbles escape quickly. Everyone had their own bottle on the table to pour as they wished, so most people arrived and poured a full glass and enjoyed the event.

“But, Mr. and Mrs. Grift came in, drank off their champagne, left at some point, and then returned and refilled with fresh – notice how much lower their bottle was than the others. If they refilled and they still had bubbles, in that kind of glass, we know that they both were absent no more than half an hour ago, which would mean they were the only two people in the room who knew about the jewelry and were not present in the room at the time the heist took place.

“Don't get too comfortable with the rest of Ms. Vaaniti's friends, either. They all sat around and poo-poohed as the Grifts were taken away, but it would not have been all that easy for them to slip out and back in without somebody noticing. None of Ms. Vaaniti's friends said a word about that. There was enough money in those jewels to more than repay the lot of them for the ticket cost to their friend's birthday party. Better question them all very carefully!”

Photo Credit: Bertrand Borie on Unsplash