Chile Death

by Susan Wittig Albert

  "I think Brian will profit from a little distance on his father's disability. But he’s not going to the South Pole — only to the ranch, which is less than ninety minutes away. Sam and I will make sure that he gets back for frequent visits, and Brian can phone whenever he wants to. Or he can e-mail his dad, if you can arrange for Mike to have a computer at the Manor.”

  "E-mail?” Brian said happily, from the door. "Cool!” "We’ll see,” I said grudgingly.

  Brian came to the back of my chair and hung around my neck. "I’m sorry I won’t be here to take care of you,” he said, in a troubled voice. "Maybe I shouldn’t go. I know you’ll be lonesome without me. And Dad, too. Especially Dad.”

  I heard it, then, very clearly, the same guilt and anxiety I used to feel when, in spite of all my efforts to take care of her, Leatha fell off the wagon again. I looked up and saw her watching, saw the concern in her face, and saw something else, too—regret, sadness, suffering. In that same split second, I saw myself, and all the ways I had punished my mother in retaliation for her abandonment of me, and I knew I didn’t want to do that anymore.

  I tugged Brian’s arms loose and pulled him around so that I could see his face. “Lonesome?” I said. “Of course I’ll be lonesome. And so will your dad. But every time we start to miss you, we’ll think of you riding Rambo and swimming in that river, and we’ll smile. And maybe before long, we can join you. We might even bring Howard Cosell,” I added recklessly.

  Brian brightened. "Really?” he asked. "You mean, Dad might be well enough to . . .” His voice trailed off. “I don't think so,” he said, looking down. He ran his finger down the buttons of my blouse. "I don’t think he wants to.”

  “I think he does.” I touched his cheek tenderly. “Anyway, it’s something to aim for. And in the meantime, I’ll take the laptop out to your dad, so you can e-mail him whenever you feel like it.”

  His arms went around me, and I held him closely, this small, sweet, sweaty boy whom I loved more than I could ever have imagined possible. Then I gave him one last kiss, brushed the dark hair off his forehead, and stood up.

  “Okay, kid, on your way,” I said gruffly. "Promise you’ll have fun.”

  “I promise.” His grin was lopsided and his pale blue eyes—his dad’s eyes—were wet. "Promise you’ll call me if you need me,” he said, in a very adult way. “I’ll come home right away.”

  “Sure,” I said. "But fun is more important.”

  "Don’t worry,” Leatha said, as he ran out of the room. "We’ll take good care of him.”

  "Yeah,” I said. "Thanks. Thanks for . . . everything." And then, not planning it, not thinking about it, I reached for her, and we stood there for a long moment, holding one another, not saying anything. When we let go, she was sniffling, and my throat hurt.

  “I do love you, China,” she said.

  "Yeah,” I said, feeling awkward but okay. "I love you, too.” I couldn’t quite bring myself to call her Mom, but I wanted to.

  Leatha and Brian left about nine, and then I did what mothers usually do when the kids go away to summer camp. In the interests of health and safety, I cleaned Brian’s room. I stripped his bed and filled a laundry hamper with the sheets and the clothes I picked up off the closet floor. Under Ivan’s thoughtful gaze, I vacuumed the dust bunnies under the bed, raked Brian’s sports cards into a box in the corner, and removed Einstein from his imprisonment in the closet to his preferred roost on the drapes. Cleaning the rodent cages on the shelf under the window is something I have to work myself up to. They weren’t smelly enough yet.

  I went downstMrs. to call Joyce Sanders, but drew a blank. She didn’t come in on Sundays, and the woman at the nurses station flatly refused to give me her home number—with good reason, I thought. Well, there were other things I could do. I had just settled down at the kitchen table with a pile of invoices and the checkbook in front of me and Howard Cosell dozing on my feet, when the phone rang.

  "Hi, China,” McQuaid said, and then, without preamble, "I’ve been thinking.” His voice held more energy than it had the night before, and he almost sounded like his old self. Had it been my adamant refusal to let him off the hook, or his reflections about JJ’s death? My answer came in the next sentence. "I’ve been kicking myself all morning for not being smart enough to get JJ’s score sheet so we could see which of the cups he had already sampled.”

  JJ’s score sheet. I put down my pencil and leaned back in the chair. "Do you suppose Bubba took it when he cleared away the sample cups?"

  "I doubt that he was interested enough to bother. He wouldn’t have rounded up the cups if I hadn’t pushed him.”

  McQuaid was right. As far as Bubba was concerned, JJ had come to a natural end. "The score sheet won’t be much good without the log-in sheets and entry forms,” I said. "If you're looking for the contestants’ names, that is."

  McQuaid thought for a moment. "Yeah, I guess that’s right. The entries are double-numbered, so the judges won’t know who cooked what chili.”

  "I’m not doing much until about four,” I lied. Or rather, I was, but this took top priority. Top priority was anything that stirred McQuaid’s imagination and jacked up his energy level. I switched off the calculator. The invoices could wait. "Want me to poke around and see if I can find any of that stuff?”

  "Sure, if it’s not too much trouble.” His voice became tentative, hesitant again. "Did Brian and Leatha get off to the ranch this morning?”

  "Yeah, about an hour ago. I’m going to bring you the laptop so you two can do e-mail.” I paused. "Actually, I’ve decided that it’s a good idea for Brian to go. He needs to get away from both of us. And I'm sure he’ll have a good time."

  There was a moment’s silence. ‘‘I hope you’re not just saying that to make me feel better. I shouldn’t have gone behind your back in the first place."

  "I should have said yes in the first place,” I replied. But if I’d said yes, I might not have learned what I learned this morning, about Leatha and me. Sometimes you have to make a mistake in order to get it right. Sometimes it’s only your mistakes that lead you to get it right, sooner or later. I might have said all this to McQuaid, but it was complicated. Anyway, it was a very personal enlightenment. You have to make your own mistakes to appreciate the revelation—somebody’s else’s mistakes just seem dumb.

  I heard him let his breath out. He sounded relieved. “Yeah. Listen, China. About last night—”

  "The only thing we have to know about last night,” I said, "is that I love you. Brian loves you. We want you home, as soon as you can get here."

  I could almost hear the grin. "I’m a jerk.”

  I chuckled. "Well, we’re agreed on one thing."

  "Okay, Sherlock. Let me know when you find that score sheet."

  "Will do," I said cheerily. I hung up and went to look for the laptop computer. It had once belonged to Roy Adcock, a former Texas Ranger whose suicide had been the precipitating event leading to McQuaid’s shooting. His widow had given it to me before she left Pecan Springs for a new life on an herb farm in New Mexico. I put it in the car and headed out to the park to look for the score sheets.

  But a half-hour later, I was calling McQuaid on the cell phone (a device of the devil, but necessary in emergencies and often handy otherwise) to say that the clean-up crew was already at work. The tents were gone. All I could see were trash cans surrounded by drifts of litter.

  “Actually, the place looks like it was slammed by a tornado,” I said, glancing around. "Not a sign of a score sheet anywhere.”

  "It was a long shot.” he said, matter-of-factly. “Thanks for making the effort.”

  "I’m not finished yet,” I said. "I’ll give Fannie Couch a call. She was in charge of the tent where the cooks were logging in. Maybe she knows what happened to the score sheets.”

  Fannie wasn’t home, but her husband, Clyde, knew where she was. "I took her over to the station a little while ago,” he growled in his gravelly voice. "If you’ll tur
n on your radio, you can listen to her. She’s sitting in for the guy who reads the Sunday paper on the air. His wife is having a baby.” He paused. "Hey, if you talk to her, remind her that she’s supposed to be in San Antonio by twelve-thirty, and it’s an hour's drive down there. I’ll pick her up out front.”

  When I turned the car radio on, Fannie was indeed reading. In fact, she was already several paragraphs into the Enterprise’s story on the death of Jerry Jeff Cody.

  "Mr. Cody, one of Pecan Springs' leading citizens,” she read in her dry Texas twang, "expired despite Herculean efforts to revive him. The tragic event occurred during the judging of the Cedar Choppers Chili Cookoff on Saturday, before a startled group of Mr. Cody’s friends and other intimates.” (I guessed that the article had been written by one of the CTSU student reporters who do their journalism internships at the paper.) "Police Chief Bubba Harris, who was on the scene at the time of death, is quoted as saying that Mr. Cody died of a heart attack. Several other witnesses said that medical attention was delayed because everyone thought the victim was pretending to be ill. ‘We all thought it was part of the fun,’ one grieving friend said sadly. ‘Jerry Jeff, he was a born practical joker—loved gettin’ under people’s hide and watchin’ ’em squirm.’ Justice of the Peace Maude Porterfield, who was also present when Mr. Cody died, is deferring her determination of the cause of death, pending autopsy results.”

  Fannie coughed delicately. "Mr. Cody, who was thirty-eight, was a partner in Cody and Clendennen Insurance Company and was widely respected for his dynamic participation in many affMrs. throughout our city, including the HOT Honchos, who sponsored yesterday’s chili cookoff. He is survived by his grieving wife, Roxanne Cody, and his parents, of Texarkana. Arrangements are pending at the Mortimer Brothers Funeral Home.”

  You might fault the style, but the reporter got most of the facts straight. It was true that Bubba believed the death to be a natural one, that people had thought it was part of the fun, and that JJ was known for his dynamic participation in affMrs. Fannie paused, then cleared her throat and went on to a lighter subject, the outcome of the tortilla and cow pie toss that took place at the very moment of Jerry Jeff's untimely death. By the time I drove into the parking lot a few minutes before eleven, she was wrapping up the show with one last article, a report on the trimphant conclusion of JuneFest and the crowning of the new queen.

  KPST Radio, Your Friendly Hill Country Family Station, is housed in a green concrete block building surrounded by sprawling cedar shrubs and youpon holly bushes, at the end of Imogene Lane. Nothing much happens there on weekends, and the tiny reception room was dark and empty. I opened a door and went down a low-ceilinged corridor toward a lighted control room. I waved through the glass at Henry Morris (KPST’s station manager, sound engineer, newscaster, and weatherman, as well as bookkeeper and occasional lawn-mower). Henry gave me a thumbs-up, indicating that it was okay to go into the sound room next door, where Fannie was taking off her earphones.

  She looked surprised to see me. “What brings you to the station on a Sunday, China?” she asked. She was dressed in mauve today—a silky mauve print dress trimmed in lace, pale mauve stockings, mauve suede shoes. A man’s straw hat garnished with purple and pink pansies hung from the mike boom. A little old lady with a difference.

  “McQuaid asked me to hunt up the score sheets from yesterday’s judging,” I said. "Do you happen to know where they are?”

  Fannie cocked an eyebrow. "Matter of fact, I do. I collected them before they could get scattered and lost, and they’re still in my bag.” She began to rummage. "Mind my asking why Mike wants them?”

  "Well—” I said.

  She stopped searching and looked at me. "I thought so. When Jerry Jeff was a kid, his mama didn’t dare keep a jar of peanut butter in the house for fear he’d get into it and have one of his wheezing spells. Face swelling up like a horny toad, choking in his throat. You ask me, that’s what killed him. Nuts in the chili.”

  "Did any of the contestants mention using nuts as a secret ingredient when they gave you their samples?”

  She laughed shortly. "If somebody put peanuts in chili, he wouldn’t be likely to say so out loud. Folks might do that north of the Red River, but not down here.” She dove into her bag again and came up with a manila envelope. Handing it to me, she said, “You know the entries are double-numbered? "

  I nodded. “To figure out who cooked what chili, we need to look at the cup number on the score sheet, then trace it back to the log-in sheet.”

  “Right. The log-in sheet has the contestant’s number on it. The entry form has the number and all the other stuff— name, address, and so on.” Her shrewd gray eyes were inquiring. "So McQuaid's looking for the chili with the nuts in it?”

  "I think that’s what he has in mind,” I said. “But I have another purpose. I’m supposed to come up with some recipes for the new Thursday Home and Garden page. I thought I’d give some of these guys a call."

  “Good luck,” she said. She took the hat off the mike boom and set it on her head at a rakish angle. A cluster of silk pansies hung down over one ear. “By the way, Edna Lund called me this morning. She said that Carita Garza is in some kind of trouble out at the Manor." Fannie looked grave. "Too bad if she is. She’s a good girl, in a tough family situation. Daddy in prison, mama on the bottle. The kid needs a helping hand.”

  I sighed. I’d been trying to forget that I had planned to talk to both Joyce and Mrs. Hogge about Carita. "I’m afraid it’s going to take more than a helping hand,” I said. "Mrs. Hogge, the Manor's chief administrator, fired her yesterday.”

  “No!”

  "Yes. Hogge searched the girl’s locker and found a stolen credit card in her purse.”

  “Oh, my," Fannie said sadly. “Sounds bad."

  "It is bad. Carita denied that she had taken the card and asked Mrs. Hogge to call the police. Hogge refused, and fired her. The whole thing struck me as basically unfair, and I promised Carita I’d look into it."

  Fannie sighed. "Well, I understand why Opal Hogge doesn’t want the police messing around out there. She’s probably afraid — ’’ She stopped, frowning. "On the other hand, maybe I shouldn’t—”

  "Yes, you should,” I said. "And don’t tell me to wait for your radio program. What is Opal Hogge afraid of?” She was about to tell me, but Henry Morris chose that moment to open the sound room door. "Hey, Fannie, Clyde’s here to pick you up. He says for you to get out to the car on the double. You’ve got to get to San Antonio.” "Oops!” Fannie grabbed her bag. “I forgot all about San Antonio. I’ve got to give a talk at an AARP meeting. Call me this evening, China.”

  "Wait a minute," I said urgently. "What is Opal Hogge afraid of?”

  But Fannie was on her way out the door, mauve pansies bobbing excitedly over the brim of her hat. "Sorry,” she called over her shoulder. "It’ll have to wait.”

  Chapter Nine

  2 lb beef shoulder cut into Vi in. cubes

  1 lb pork shoulder cut into V‘2 in. cubes 'A cup suet 1A cup pork fat

  3 medium onions, chopped 6 cloves garlic, minced

  1 qt water 4 ancho chiles 1 serrano chile 6 dried red chiles 1 tbsp comino seeds, freshly ground 1 tbsp Mexican oregano salt to taste

  Chili Queen Chili

  traditional Texas chili recipe

  from the Institute of Texan Cultures

  Place lightly floured beef and pork cubes with suet and pork fat in heavy chili pot and cook quickly, stirring often. Add onions and garlic and cook until they are tender and limp. Add water to mixture and simmer slowly while preparing chiles. Remove stems and seeds from chiles and chop very finely. Grind chiles in molcajete (mortar and pestle). After meat, onion, and garlic have simmered about one hour, add chiles. Grind comino seeds in molcajete and add oregano with salt to mixture. Simmer another 2 hours. Remove suet and skim off some fat. Serve. I stopped at the Diner for a bowl of tomato soup, a ham sandwich, and a few words with Docia—Lila’s daughter and th
e lunch-time cook—about the hazards of eating unidentified chili made with alien ingredients. Docia is a short, plump woman in her forties with a cheerful face, red from being toasted over the grill, and a quick, alert glance. If this had been Murder She Wrote, she would have given me some sort of lead that I could pass along to McQuaid, but it wasn’t and she didn’t. We traded regrets about Jerry Jeff's untimely and unusual death, I asked about her mother’s health, and that was that. Except that I happened to remark that the tomato soup was very good. She said she’d put basil in it, I said I’d give the soup a plug in my newspaper column, and she said in that case, it was on the house. When I left, I was beginning to see that there might be some reward for writing the column after all.

  Jug Pratt had gone to visit his brother for the day, and McQuaid was alone in the room, watching a golf tournament on television. He switched it off when I came in, shortly after noon. I had phoned him from the car, so he knew I had the score sheets.

  “Good job, China,” he said, as I opened the envelope and began to sort papers into stacks on the bed, score sheets in one pile, log-in sheets in another, entry forms in a third.

  “Fannie said she gathered up the papers because she didn’t want them to get lost,” I said, "but I think she suspected something.” I glanced at him. “Do you?"

  He leaned back in his wheelchair. "If it hadn’t been for Jerry Jeff's remark," he said, “I might chalk up his death to an unfortunate accident. But he did say that somebody was threatening him, and I don’t think he was joking.” McQuaid quirked an eyebrow. “Still . . . peanuts in the chili? Seems like a haphazard sort of way to knock somebody off."

  “But that’s what’s interesting about it,” I said. “It could be the perfect crime.”