FlabberGassed

by Michael Craft

  “None that I can think of.”

  “I agree”—Simms scribbled a note to himself—“at least for now. Why would either of them do something that poses such a distinct threat to the family business?”

  Reluctantly, I asked, “Is that why you seemed to be zeroing in on Dahr?”

  “I’m not ‘zeroing in’ on anyone, Brody. But looking at what we’ve got to work with right now, which isn’t much, Dahr at least seems to have had a plausible motive.”

  I looked him in the eye, telling him, “I think you’re wrong.”

  “Good. Prove it.”

  I paused in thought. “Hey. What if the bad guy’s motive was not to kill Jason? What if Jason wasn’t the intended victim?”

  Simms asked, “You think the intended victim might have been Mary Questman?”

  “Not really,” I said, “but Deputy Kastle made a case for it in today’s paper. Or, you could take that logic a step further. It was Mary who volunteered as the guinea pig, then cancelled at the last minute—supposedly on the advice of her cat. What if the whole setup was her idea?”

  Simms looked stunned. Then we both laughed.

  “Or,” I said, “what if the intended victim wasn’t either Jason or Mary? What if the background intent was to harm Dr. Frumpkin’s business plans? Or swing the election?”

  “You’re asking all the right questions, Brody. So here’s what we’ve got.” Simms scanned his notes. “Dr. Frumpkin, daughter Sarah, reporter Glee Savage, housekeeper Berta, and Deputy Kastle are all possible suspects—but I think each one is a long shot, at best. Then there’s Dahr Ahmadi, who checks most of the boxes—but your instincts tell you otherwise. Now, what are we missing? Anyone else?”

  Something seemed stuck at the back of my consciousness. Yes, there was someone else. But who?

  Simms jogged the stack of folders on the table.

  Over his shoulder, the monkey danced.

  Chapter 6

  Tuesday was my day to catch up at the office, so I got an early start. While I could safely back-burner the FlabberGas design project for a while (probably for good, but I needed to hear that from Dr. Frumpkin), there were plenty of other jobs that needed my attention, as I had let them slide for nearly a week. Marson had come in early with me, and a few minutes later, he popped over from his office across the hall, asking, “Need any help, kiddo? If anything’s urgent, I could pitch in.” Though tempted by his offer, as well as grateful for it, I declined any help and hunkered down, determined to put in a productive day.

  Shortly after nine, Simms phoned with some follow-up: “When Frumpkin and his daughter came to see us yesterday, I never got around to asking about nitrous oxide. Later, though, the evidence team reported back to me after inspecting the gas closet at the clinic. Remember, when we talked to the medical examiner, we decided we were three steps away from knowing if Jason Ward was a victim of death by laughing gas.”

  “Right,” I said, recalling our meeting with Heather Vance. “First, we needed to determine if nitrous oxide was stored at the clinic. Second, we needed to find out if anything was tampered with in the gas closet. And third, we needed to know if that theory is consistent with Jason’s postmortem.”

  “And now,” said Simms, “we have answers to the first two questions: yes, and yes. There was nitrous on the premises, and the gas lines were tampered with.”

  I asked, “That’s it, then. Right?”

  “Not open-and-shut. Not yet. There’s still the issue of circumventing the safeguards—the different connectors for different gases. We’re still looking into that. And the postmortem, that’s not concluded yet. Anyway, thought you’d want to know.”

  Of course I wanted to know, but the findings reported by Simms gave me more questions than answers as I contemplated the “friendly visit” I’d set up with Glee Savage for the following day.

  Wednesday afternoon, I parked at the curb in front of Glee’s cozy Craftsman bungalow, as I had done the prior Thursday, when we had driven out to look at the building site of the perfect house—when I had inadvertently tipped her off to the FlabberGas story, which started a chain of events that now made people wonder if she’d killed Dr. Jason Ward. Last Thursday, she had eagerly decked herself out for a photo safari and had been waiting for me at the front gate.

  Today, though, she was not waiting at the gate. Was she stewing? Or would I find her to be glib as ever, unfazed by the perplexities of suspected murder?

  I passed through the gate and along her front sidewalk, stepping up to the porch amid the potted geraniums. When I poised my hand to knock, the door swung open before my knuckles made contact. “Brody, love!” she gushed. No, she was not stewing.

  She was baking. “Cookies later,” she promised. The rich, layered smell was crazy-making, perhaps peanut butter, definitely chocolate.

  We settled in the sunny inglenook of her living room and sat across from each other in front of the dark fireplace. Between us, on a low maple table, were two decorative bowls. One was heaped with an assortment of plump, flawless nuts, which made me all the hungrier for the cookies; the other contained a mound of Glee’s swirl-patterned castor beans, which were most decidedly not for eating.

  With mock formality, Glee asked, “May I inquire as to the nature of this visit, Mr. Norris?”

  I replied in kind, “Does one need an excuse to indulge in the pleasure of such effervescent company, Miss Savage?”

  She let out a hoot of a laugh. “You are so full of it.”

  I got serious. “I was hoping we could talk about … FlabberGas.”

  “Meaning,” she guessed, “the FlabberGas incident that left Jason Ward dead.”

  I nodded.

  She nodded. “Have a nut.”

  I plucked from the bowl a colossal cashew the size of a thumb. “Thomas Simms asked me to sound you out about it.”

  “The sheriff sent you?”

  “Uh-huh.” I chewed the nut and swallowed.

  “So this is like”—she whirled a hand—“an interrogation?”

  “Sorta. But I left the rubber hose in the car.”

  She smirked.

  I continued, “Mary’s worried about you—afraid you might be in trouble—so she asked me to intercede. To my surprise, Simms welcomed my involvement. He didn’t want to alarm you—or Mary—by ‘asking you downtown,’ so he sent me to nose around instead. I’ll tell you this: he does not consider you a serious suspect.”

  She huffed a little sigh. “That’s a relief, I suppose. But just the same, I get it—it didn’t look good—sitting there with Bert, doing a little weed, sassing off at the wrong moment, in front of the whole world.”

  I had to laugh. “It was quite a performance.”

  “Christ.”

  “So,” I said, “may I ask a few questions?”

  “Fire away, sir.”

  I felt silly, out of my league, pulling a notebook from my jacket pocket, but I would need to report to Simms. I asked, “While you were back there with Berta, did you see anyone enter or leave the gas closet through the gray utility door?”

  “No. We were just a few feet from the door, so we’d have noticed. The whole time, there was no one there but us.”

  Which left a more important question, the one I hadn’t wanted to ask first: “And neither you nor Berta used that door at any time?” I waited. “Correct?”

  Glee tapped her chin with a finger. “May I answer with a hypothetical?”

  I set the notepad on my knee. “Why not?”

  “I understand the subtext of your question. Essentially, you’re asking me if I ‘did it.’ So let’s suppose—merely for the sake of discussion, mind you—that I was responsible for what happened. Let’s say that I sneaked in and jiggered the oxygen—”

  “Wait,” I said. I had never told her about the switched-gas theory that Simms was exploring. I asked her, “Is that how it happened—Jason Ward died because someone jiggered the oxygen?”

  “Sure,” she said with an innocent shrug.
“Mary told me. While I was outside with Bert, Mary was inside, watching the demo with you and all the others. According to Mary, when Jason died, Sheriff Simms asked Frumpkin and his daughter for a guess as to what went wrong. The daughter thought Jason might’ve gotten something other than oxygen. And that’s why everyone came rushing out to the gas closet. Right?”

  “Right,” I admitted. “That’s just how it went.”

  “So,” continued Glee, “suppose I did it. Suppose I was the killer. And the killer switched the gas. Problem is, I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know the first thing about which gas would or wouldn’t kill Jason. So, if I did it, maybe I wasn’t trying to kill Jason—or anyone else. Maybe I was just trying to screw up Frumpkin’s demo.”

  With a cautious tone, I asked, “Why … would you do that?”

  Glee flipped her hands. “Simple. Frumpkin is a big-ass gasbag of a bully, a grifter who needs to be taken down a notch. I’m a reporter doing my job, and he treats me like the enemy. He threatens to sue the Register, which could cost me my job, which I not only love, but need. Nothing’s resolved yet; I haven’t had a byline since Sunday. And it still has me scared.”

  This was not a turn I had expected our conversation to take.

  Ending an awkward lull, Glee said with a laugh, “But of course I didn’t do it.”

  I rephrased my original question, which she had not yet answered: “So you were never in the gas closet?”

  “Brody, love—don’t be silly.”

  Ding. A timer went off in the kitchen.

  Glee stood. “Need to pull the cookies out to cool. Don’t want’em to burn.” Her heels pecked the hardwood floor as she stepped out of the room, but then she turned back to me. “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

  She suggested, “Maybe milk? Good with cookies.”

  It had been at least twenty years since I’d had a glass of milk. My mother wasn’t very domestic, not in any traditional sense, but she’d insisted on milk while I was growing up. And yes, now and then, there were cookies. “You know,” I told Glee, “that sounds pretty good.”

  “Won’t be a minute.” And she was gone.

  I had no idea what to make of Glee’s “hypotheticals.” On the one hand, she had flatly denied having any involvement in deadly mischief, but on the other hand, she had painted a highly plausible motive for taking revenge on Frumpkin after chancing upon the unlocked gas closet. If that’s what actually happened, she also had a motive for lying to me about it. Simms had told me to focus on motive—or was I reading too much into this?

  Then I recalled the story Marson once told me about long-ago suspicions that Glee had been responsible for the death of a foe, a woman named Gillian Reece, who fell from the balcony of her lavish new house. “Nothing was ever proven,” he had told me. “But she was never flat-out exonerated, either.”

  Pondering this now, seated in the closeted confines of the inglenook adjacent to Glee’s living room, I listened as she puttered in the kitchen.

  “Brody?” she called to me. “Too nice to be stuck indoors—let’s go out back.”

  “Great idea,” I said. Picking up the bowl of nuts, I joined her in the kitchen, which gleamed with pink and gray tile and classic white appliances so pristine I thought they must be reproductions. She suggested I leave my sport coat, so I hung it on the back of a chrome dinette chair. She picked up a tray with the cookies and milk, then led me through the back door to the porch.

  The backyard was filled with flowers, fruit trees, and a manicured vegetable patch extending the length of a side fence. The opposite fence backed a tall stand of more castor plants in a colorful range of species, with little tags spiked in the ground at the base of each. At the back of the property stood a large shed attached to a vine-covered carport, under which was parked Glee’s ancient fuchsia hatchback.

  As I surveyed all this from the porch, Glee arranged on a low table the nuts, a pitcher of milk, two tumblers, which she filled, and the plate of cookies—brown, warm, and gooey, with melted chocolate chips glistening in the afternoon sun, plus a few of the giant cashews erupting through the dough. “Please, Brody, get comfortable,” she said, indicating I should sit on the cushioned glider bench. She sat across from it in a deep Adirondack chair, placing her glass of milk on one of its broad wooden arms.

  I settled onto the glider, stretched a languid arm along the back cushion, and with my other hand, nibbled a cookie—ah, the rush of sense memories. It took but the slightest flex of my foot on the porch floor to set the glider in motion. Lulled by the rocking, I heard sounds emerge from the quietude of the afternoon. From beneath me came the slow, gentle squeak of the glider. Out in the yard, on a low branch of a fruit tree, a robin warbled, puffing his ruddy breast, wondering, perhaps, if it was time to plan his winter getaway. Next door, beyond the fence, the flutter of a push mower’s blades made halting progress, harvesting the season’s last crop of thick turf. From somewhere down the back alley, a basketball pinged on the asphalt. And overhead, the faraway, muted roar of a high-flying jet drew my gaze to the cloudless autumn sky, where a tiny glint of metal led a long, straight vapor trail from west to east.

  “Did you know I grew up with Inez?”

  Glee’s question yanked me from my reverie. Silence—birds, lawn mower, basketball—nothing. I flinched, snapping back to the moment. Turning to Glee, bringing her words into focus, I asked, “You’re from here?”

  “Born and raised. And I went to college—at Madison—with Inez.”

  “You know my mother?”

  “Not anymore, Brody. But back then? Thick as thieves.” The trace of a smile faded from Glee’s face. She reached for her milk and drank, then cleared her throat.

  I recalled, “She’s never said much about college. I knew she went to Madison, but that’s about it.”

  Glee lolled in her chair, eyes adrift. “I was in journalism, which is all I ever wanted to do. Inez majored in women’s studies, which was the latest thing. Those were times of huge social change—Vietnam, civil rights, women’s lib—and we were both staunch progressives, but for her, it wasn’t just politics. It was her life. Once I called her a bra-burner, just joking, and she thought it was funny, but not long after that, she went to a rally and did it. I wrote it up, and the story made the front page of the campus paper. She loved it.”

  “That sounds like Mom,” I said. “She hasn’t changed much.”

  Glee looked me in the eye. “May I make a pointed observation?”

  “Please do.”

  “Your mother was a lesbian.”

  “Still is, mostly.” I leaned to whisper to Glee, “But I was not immaculately conceived.”

  “No kidding?” said Glee with a wry expression. “That’s just my point. Inez was a feminist lesbian—it was a political statement as much as a sexual preference. But now and then, let me tell you, she got the itch. She had no problem making occasional whoopee with the right man.”

  I began to ask, “Were you … ,” but I hesitated.

  Glee moved from her chair to sit next to me on the glider. Resting the fingertips of one hand on my knee, she said, “What would you like to know?”

  “You said that you and Mom were thick—thick as thieves. Were you lovers?”

  “No, sweetie. I’m not gay, never was. I’ve never married, either, which sets some folks to wondering. But I did come close once. It didn’t work out.”

  “Sorry.”

  “So am I. But that was very long ago.” Her hand left my knee and reached for a cookie. Gazing out toward the wall of castor plants, she ate it. She paused, squinting, her features twisted in thought. Then she turned back to me, asking, “Do you ever talk to your mother?”

  “Of course. All the time.”

  “Of course you do. Gosh, we haven’t spoken since she left college and took off for California.”

  Astonished, I asked, “What happened between you two? That was more than forty years ago.”<
br />
  “Yes, it was,” she said with a pensive sigh. “Could you maybe tell her I said hello?”

  “Happy to do it.”

  “Awww, thank you, sweetie. But she never knew me as Glee Savage—she wouldn’t know that name.”

  “Aha. It’s your pen name, right? I had a hunch. I mean, who would name a kid Glee Savage?”

  She countered, “Who would name a kid Glee Buttles? I’ll tell you who—Mr. and Mrs. Russell Buttles. God, isn’t it awful?”

  I thought it judicious not to answer.

  She saved me the trouble. “As a little girl, I couldn’t stand that name. You can imagine the jokes. But at least, growing up in the fifties, I had the comfort of knowing that a Prince Charming would come along to rescue me with some other name. Smith, Jones, Johnson—it didn’t matter which prince, so long as it wasn’t Prince Buttles. But things didn’t go as planned. So when I got my first job out of school, right here with the Dumont Daily Register, the paper’s founder, Barret Logan, asked me, ‘And what byline will you be using?’ That’s all it took. And to this day, I have happily been known as Glee Savage.”

  “You tiger, you.” I growled.

  “That played into it, I admit. Back then, reporting was still dominated by men, so I felt it would be to my advantage to juice up my byline. And you know what, Brody?”

  “What?”

  “It made me more aggressive—as if I were living up to the name.”

  What’s in a name? Sitting there on the back porch, I pondered the power of Glee’s chosen surname, Savage. It had made her more aggressive, she said, and yet, there she sat, the picture of civility and style, tidying up after our tête-à-tête, returning cookies and milk to a painted tôle tray that sported huge, pink, ladylike peonies. I wondered, though—was there darkness deeper in her soul?

  “There, now,” she said, standing and lifting the tray. As she led me back into the kitchen, she asked, “Can I wrap these up for you and Marson?”