“The police didn’t see it that way. They didn’t treat the dining room as a crime scene,” Libby pointed out.
“Of course they didn’t. Not when one of the richest men in Longely tells them his wife has had a heart attack,” Bernie retorted. “And anyway, Annabel wasn’t dead when they arrived, so it wasn’t a crime scene, then.”
“If the police even had the remotest suspicion that it was they wouldn’t have taken our statements and let us go,” Libby argued. “What do you think, Dad?”
Sean just sighed. Ever since he’d lost his top-cop job and Lucas Broadbent, aka Lucy, had taken over the department, law enforcement, as he knew the concept, had gone out the window. The department had become a handmaiden to Longely’s political folderol.
“Clyde will call me with the postmortem results,” Sean said as he went back to eating his pancakes. “That should tell us something.”
“That’s nice of Clyde,” Bernie observed.
“Yes, it is,” Sean agreed.
More than nice actually. Because if he was caught, his old friend could lose his job. But, as Clyde had said, that presupposed that someone over there was paying attention. Which no one ever was. And even if they did catch him, Clyde declared that he could talk his way out of the situation. If he couldn’t at this stage of his life, he deserved to be caught. In this case, though, Clyde did better than call Sean with the results. He brought them over in person ten minutes later. Bernie suspected that this was because he never lost an opportunity to eat there.
“Hot off the presses,” he cried as he brandished a manila folder in front of Sean.
“Does Lucy know you have these?” Sean asked as he opened the folder and began leafing through the pages.
“Ha, ha,” Clyde said as he seated himself at the table. “Very funny. No one knows. Thank heavens for copiers. Anyway, he and Mrs. Lucy are off at a conference in Vail. Something about the transitional role of the chief of police in small towns.”
Sean looked up. “Transitional? Does this mean that local law enforcement is on its way out?”
“There’s a lot of melding and blending going on,” Clyde replied. “You’re lucky you got out when you did. I wish I had.”
“I didn’t get out. I was thrown out, if you remember correctly.”
Clyde waved his hand. “I was being polite. You’re still lucky.” He pointed to his friend’s empty plate. “Got any more of those?”
Libby smiled as she got up. “I was just going to ask if you wanted any.”
Fortunately, they had just enough batter for one more batch.
“Have I ever turned down any offer of food?” Clyde asked.
Bernie laughed. “Never,” she said. “That’s one of the things we love about you.” And she got him a coffee mug, filled it up, and set it down before him, while her dad read the report.
Clyde took a sip. “This is heaven. What kind of coffee is this anyway? I’ll have to tell the wife.”
Bernie told him. Not that it would make any difference, she reflected. His wife was one of those unfortunate people who couldn’t even brew a cup of drinkable tea or boil an egg without burning it.
“That’s interesting,” Sean said when he got done reading. “The M.E. is calling the death accidental.”
“Accidental?” Bernie said. “Be serious.”
Her dad tapped the report with his hand. He was pleased to see the tremors in his fingers were hardly noticeable at all. “I am. Mike is saying Annabel Colbert’s death resulted from an overdose of Malathion and flea and tick spray.”
“She drank the stuff. It wasn’t accidental,” Bernie retorted.
“Maybe. But you can’t prove it,” Clyde said.
Bernie frowned. “What do you mean? It was in the wine. We saw it. She drank the wine and clutched her throat.”
“You should have saved the bottle,” Clyde told her. “In the confusion someone threw the wine bottle out. We have nothing to test. And the stuff that’s in her is all stuff commonly used around animals. She could have absorbed it through her skin. While it’s not deadly to most people, evidently she had a heart condition.”
Bernie bit her lip. She felt awful. But saving the bottle had never occurred to her. Her attention had been totally fixed on Annabel.
“It’s okay,” her father said, intuiting her thoughts. “Given the circumstances I would have done the same thing.”
“No, you wouldn’t have,” Bernie replied.
Her father didn’t answer, because what Bernie said was true. But he was a professional and his daughter was a civilian. He told her that and it seemed to help a little.
“What about the witnesses?” she demanded. “Everyone was there. Everyone saw what happened.”
Clyde added a tad more heavy cream to his coffee and stirred. “Evidently their statements don’t add up to anything definitive. The only point everyone seems to agree on is that Annabel Colbert was given to exaggerating things. The best friend, the husband, and the dog trainer thought she was being overly dramatic. The husband’s personal assistant and the kennel owner thought she’d collapsed because she hadn’t been eating enough.”
“And Bree Nottingham. What did she think?” Libby asked.
“That Annabel was having a bout of hysterics.”
“But what about our statements?” Bernie demanded.
Clyde shrugged. “Your viewpoint is outweighed by everyone else’s.”
Libby put a stack of pancakes down in front of Clyde. “But we saw it.”
Clyde reached for the syrup and poured. “So did everyone else.”
“How can you misinterpret something like that?” Libby demanded.
“Why do you care?” Bernie asked her.
Libby sniffed. “Of course I care.”
“Well, you sure sounded as if you didn’t a moment ago.”
“This is just so…so…” Libby stopped and tried to think of the word she wanted.
“Egregious,” Bernie supplied.
“Exactly,” Libby said.
“So you’ve changed your mind?” Bernie asked.
Libby considered for a moment. “I suppose I have. I just don’t understand Mike’s findings,” she said, taking her seat.
Sean closed the folder and pushed it toward Clyde. “Then I’ll explain,” he said. “The results of postmortems are not always as clear-cut as people think. There are primary, secondary, and tertiary causes of death listed on the reports. For example, someone could be stabbed and die of a heart attack brought on by blood loss. Obviously this man died of a knife wound, but if there were reasons—if the knife wound was minor and the incident brought on a fatal coronary event, or if the son of an important personage was the one who did the stabbing—then perhaps the primary cause of death would be listed as a heart attack, and the secondary cause of death would be listed as the stab wound instead of the other way around.”
Libby frowned. “So what are you saying?”
Her dad replied, “I’m saying that the M.E. has chosen to emphasize different facts. There could be other explanations as well. Annabel Colbert might have used Malathion to kill fleas. For all we know, she could have been ingesting small amounts of Malathion over the past few months and it finally caught up with her. She may have been taking it to kill her appetite.”
“That’s absurd,” Bernie cried. “No one would do something like that.”
“Not true,” her father said. “Back in the early nineteen hundreds women used to swallow arsenic to make their skin glow.”
“But they don’t do things like that now,” Bernie objected.
Clyde shifted position. “Ellen Tarbrush did it five years ago. Of course, she was trying to frame her husband for murder.”
“Well, in this case Annabel’s husband probably is guilty. Her husband probably put the Malathion and flee and tick spray in her wine. He was the one who was opening the bottles,” Libby said. Then she added, “Or it could have been one of her friends. Although ‘friends’ is a misnomer. Everyone
at the party seemed to have a real grudge against her. And she knew it, because she was getting ready to kiss them all off.”
Bernie nodded her agreement. “Maybe that’s why they felt that way. Maybe they knew or at least suspected what she was going to say.”
Sean shrugged. “That’s all very well. What you say may be true, but you have to prove it. That’s a bit more difficult.”
Libby raised her coffee mug to her lips and put it down again without having any. “What is Malathion anyway?”
“It’s a pesticide,” Clyde informed her. “People don’t use it that much anymore, because it’s so toxic.”
“Evidently,” Bernie observed.
Clyde continued, “But it used to be fairly common and people still have bottles of it around their houses.”
“So,” Libby mused, thinking aloud, “a ruling of accidental death means no homicide investigation.”
“Exactly,” Sean and Clyde said simultaneously.
“And they’re cremating the body tomorrow,” Clyde said.
“That was quick,” Sean said.
Clyde nodded. “That’s my thinking too.”
Sean paused for a moment to eat the last bit of his pancake. Then he said, “Almost too hasty, unless you’re an orthodox Jew, if you ask me.”
“It’s downright unseemly, to my mind,” Clyde agreed.
“Well,” Sean rejoined, “I hate to state the obvious, but it is hard to run a tox screen on ashes.”
“Yup. Can’t exhume a body when there’s no body to exhume,” Clyde said.
“Can’t someone stop Richard?” Libby asked.
“On what grounds?” Clyde responded. “There’s no legal basis. We need a reason.”
“But that’s going to end the possibility of any investigation,” Bernie observed.
“Not necessarily,” Sean said.
Clyde nodded. “Back in the day we used to get a fair number of convictions without any of that fancy equipment they have now.”
“Yes,” Sean agreed. “It’s amazing what one’s powers of observation and a little common sense can produce.” He looked at Bernie and Libby. “I’ve found that funerals can be especially interesting places to people watch. Deaths do not necessarily bring out the best in everyone.”
Bernie nodded. “That’s what I was just thinking.”
“Me too,” Libby agreed. “We should probably offer to take a plate of something over to the grieving widower as well.”
“If he’s not too busy to eat because he’s being consoled by another member of the fairer sex,” Bernie replied. “I’ve been told by reliable sources that on occasion sex is seen as the antidote to grief.”
Libby threw up her hands in feigned horror. “Why, Bernie,” she cried. “What a wicked thing to say.”
Bernie grinned. “I know. I’m truly repentant.”
Libby turned to her dad. “You were right. A promise is a promise. We swore to Annabel that we’d find her killer and we will.”
Sean beamed. He felt blessed to have two such wonderful daughters. Not that he would ever say that to them. At least not in those words. But he suspected they knew how he felt anyway.
“Mom would have had a fit,” Libby said suddenly.
“This is true,” Sean agreed. His wife had never approved of his career in law enforcement and would certainly never have sanctioned her daughters’ involvement in such activities. But they loved it, so what could he do?
“Of course, she had a fit when you put cumin in the beef stew,” Bernie pointed out.
Sean rose to her defense. “She was a good woman.”
“We never said she wasn’t,” Libby and Bernie said simultaneously.
“She loved you both.”
“We know,” Libby said.
“She was just a little bit conservative,” Sean observed.
Everyone fell silent. But a moment later Clyde brought up Annabel Colbert’s funeral and they were off and running again.
Chapter 5
Libby reflected that given Annabel Colbert’s social standing her funeral was extremely modest by any standards. Marvin had told her that last night when he’d dropped by to retrieve his gloves. He’d said he’d heard that her husband had chosen the cheapest route possible. But it was one thing to hear it and another thing to see it.
The service itself was a graveside affair that took place in the Oakwood Cemetery, which was over in the old part of the town. Even though it had once been the final resting site of the Longely elite, these days anyone who was anyone was buried in the Mission Cemetery over in Pine Haven.
Although it was never explicitly stated, it was common knowledge that the Oakwood Cemetery was now reserved for the middle and lower-middle classes. It seemed to Libby that Annabel Colbert, a woman who practiced the art of social climbing in all its myriad forms, would have been extremely unhappy if she had known where she was being laid to rest. In fact, she would have considered it a direct slap in the face by her husband, which was probably what he had intended.
There had been no obituary in either the local paper or the New York Times, another glaring omission by her husband. This was probably why there were a small number of people attending her funeral—that and the fact that she was an unpleasant person, although that never stopped people from showing up if the unpleasant person was sufficiently financially well endowed. In any case, Annabel would have been furious.
She would have wanted hordes of people pouring out of black limos, she would have wanted hundreds of roses covering her coffin, she would have wanted to be the center of attention at her last biggest event, but that’s not what she got. No indeedy. The only people in attendance were the minister, the people who had been at the dinner Bernie and Libby had catered, their dogs, and Bernie and Libby themselves.
Richard had dressed Trudy in a little black shrug and a matching black leather collar for the occasion. Melissa’s and Joyce’s dogs were also wearing black, while Bree’s dog, Rudolph, was wearing sunglasses, a biker’s hat, and a small black leather jacket with chains. Bree, on the other hand, was dressed in her usual pink Chanel except for the addition of the huge fuchsia Prada bag slung over her shoulder, which Bernie decided was almost worth killing for.
“I know Rudolph looks a little distingué in his leathers, but Annabel loved this outfit, so I thought seeing it would give her a lift wherever she is,” Bree confided to Bernie and Libby as they trooped up to the grave site together.
She’d looked slightly surprised to see them when she’d pulled up behind Libby and Bernie’s van, but so far she hadn’t commented on their being there, which Bernie thought was a good thing. It meant that she didn’t disapprove of their presence at the funeral. There was really no reason that she should, but with Bree you never knew.
The day was overcast. Even though this February had been atypically mild up till now, it was more than cold enough for Libby, who wound her scarf more tightly around her neck to ward off the chill. During the spring, summer, and fall, the old oaks and trembling aspens that dotted the landscape lent shade and color to the cemetery, but in midwinter their bare branches gave the place a melancholy air. But then maybe that was the point.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” Bree said as she paused to button the blond, full-length shearling coat she had on. “You should have called. We could have ridden together.”
So you could have pumped us for information, Libby thought uncharitably as she apologized for their oversight.
Bernie pulled the heel of her boot out of the semifrozen ground before replying. She kept forgetting that stilettos were not a good shoe to wear in this weather. “Well, since we were there when it happened,” she explained, leaving the “it happened” conveniently vague, “we thought we should be there at the end.”
Bree didn’t look convinced. “How did you find out? This is a private affair. There’s going to be a memorial service for everyone in a couple of months.”
“Really,” Bernie said. “How odd.”
She didn’t mention that she and Libby had gotten all the details from Marvin last night. His dad may not have been handling the funeral, but that didn’t stop him from knowing everything.
“Not really,” Bree replied. “It’s the way it’s done these days. Especially when the mourners are prostrate with grief. At least that’s what Richard tells me.”
Had Bree actually rolled her eyes when she’d uttered that sentence? Bernie wasn’t sure. She’d have to ask her sister later.
Bree turned to Libby. “Who knew?”
“Not me for sure,” her sister replied.
“Speaking of which,” Bree said, “does Richard know?”
“That we’re coming?” asked Bernie.
“No, Rudolph, that’s rude,” Bree said to her dog as he stopped to pee on a grave marker before turning her attention back to Bernie. “What else would I be talking about?”
Libby put a gloved hand to her mouth and feigned wide-eyed innocence. “Oh dear. Do you think he’ll mind?”
Bree swallowed. Libby knew Bree wanted to say something on the order of Tell me you’re kidding me. But she didn’t. Instead she cast her gimlet eyes on her and said, “You girls aren’t thinking of investigating, are you? After all, you did promise Annabel that you would.”
“Oh no,” Libby said. “Perish the thought. We just said that so we could call the ambulance.”
“What’s to investigate?” Bernie added. “Annabel’s death was declared an accident.”
“Yes, it was,” Bree agreed. She paused for a moment while she considered her conversational options. Libby could see that she was having trouble finding a way to say what she wanted to. Finally, she came out with, “I know Annabel could be a bit overbearing from time to time, a bit hysterical, but I always admired her spirit.” She paused again and fiddled with the brown leather buttons on her coat. “She was a go-getter and I can relate to that.” She looked down at the ground for a moment before fixing her gaze on Bernie and Libby. “I understand that investigations can be…reopened…from time to time if sufficient reasons are found.”
A Catered Birthday Party Page 4
