The Last Lap


      The body was floating face down in the pool like a gruesome raft.  It belonged to Eleazar Longshore, one of the owners of the health club.  He was an older man, in his seventies, but in fairly good shape, and wearing a serious swimsuit.  That’s why I found it hard to believe that he drowned while doing his morning laps.  Even though, as Sergeant Dumbrow proudly pointed out, the old man had a huge bump on his head that he apparently got from hitting it against the side of the pool.
      On the morning of his death, the elevator man recalled picking Longshore up from his penthouse apartment and taking him down to the 6th floor health club in the building.  That was at 8:30 a.m.  The elevator man remembered the time clearly because Longshore, who was hard of hearing, asked him to repeat it three or four times as he tapped the hearing aid in his ear.
      Because the club was closed at that hour, Longshore had to open the door with one of his keys and let himself into the pool.
      It was all rather straightforward but then I found out that Longshore was literally in over his head.  There was a stock scandal brewing and Longshore had been arguing with his partners all week about divulging it.  That made his death awfully coincidental.
      So I studied the dead man’s head a little more carefully and found something that convinced me that he had, in fact, been murdered!
      Can you guess what it was?


Nano Solution______________________________________________

      “You didn’t by any chance examine his temple and find a large kitchen knife sticking out?”
      “Nice try,” Nano says.  “No, it was the fact that he was still wearing his hearing aid.  Since no one would go swimming with a hearing aid, that suggested that Longshore was killed in the locker room and dumped in the pool to make it look like an accident.  The elevator man had a lot more explaining to do.”

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