The Case of the Roasted Onion

by Bishop, Claudia

  “Concrete’s okay,” he said, dead serious. “It’s the towel heads and the jigaboos that’re taking over the streets that I can’t stand.” He shook his head. “Only one real solution to that.” He brought his arms up as if he were firing a rifle. “Blam!”

  We went into dinner.

  It got worse.

  Problems with Iraq? Nuke ’em. Arabs and Jews can’t get along? Nuke ’em. Not to mention teacher unions, welfare mothers, abortionists—if you couldn’t slap them up the side of the head to see reason, well, just . . . blam!

  As for Jerry Coughlin, never heard of him, but Lila’d told him the guy’d been through a divorce, and you could bet the broadie had taken the poor slob to the cleaners. Women were behind half the male suicides in this great country of ours.

  I left the brunt of the conversation to Madeline. Aside from getting a little red around the ears with Phillip’s disparaging ethnic references, Joe spent most of the dinner staring at Sullivan’s feet. His grandmother did a good job of raising that boy. I tuned out, since I have learned long since, there’s not much to be done about people like Phillip Sullivan.

  Just after the salad and before the pork roast, I rose from the table to give Lila and Madeline a hand in the kitchen. It was either that, or wrap a lamp cord around Sullivan’s throat.

  Lila hadn’t said a word all through the first course, although she drank more wine than I’d ever seen her drink before. She hasn’t the head for it. I collected the salad bowls. Madeline took the plates. We carried them straight to the sink.

  “I like what you put in this salad, Lila.” Madeline smiled, rinsed the salad plates under the tap, and started putting them in the dishwasher. I leaned against the refrigerator and wondered how the pregnant mare was doing. “And I keep forgetting how much I like fresh peas in greens. That was a nice touch!” Madeline was positively chirping.

  “Oh, don’t be so gosh-darned social, Maddy.” Lila folded her arms, leaned back against the kitchen counter, and scowled. “I can’t stand it when you get that polite thing going. I know you want to smack him as silly as I do.”

  Madeline kept on rinsing.

  “He wasn’t like that before,” she burst out.

  There’s a time for the “social thing” and a time for truth. Madeline knows the difference. “You mean such a creep?”

  Lila ran her hands through her hair. “He’s awful.”

  “It’s the kind of awful that’s hard to mistake for anything else, that’s for sure,” Madeline said frankly, “When he was here before, what’d you two talk about, anyway?”

  “Well, we talked about horses, and he talked about some of his cases—I guess he’s really good at what he does, Maddy. He’s here to handle the McClellan divorce, as a matter of fact.”

  “Is that so?” I said.

  “I have to say I can’t blame the poor woman,” Madeline said.

  “Oh, it’s not her divorcing him, it’s him divorcing her.” Lila veered back to the more important topic, which was, of course, Lila. “Anyhow, with Sullivan, what with talking about one thing and another, things got kind of well, you know.” She made a whirly gesture with one hand, which accounted, I supposed, for the time they weren’t talking, (and what they were up to, I sincerely did not wish to know) “but I never had him around other people before. God. I’m really sorry about this.”

  “What kind of lawyering does he do?”

  “He says he’s with a big firm that does everything from patents to wills. He’s the divorce partner. His clients are very famous. I mean, I told him tonight was just a nice, social evening with some good friends, and he was so happy about that, Maddy. He was really looking forward to meeting my friends. He says he doesn’t have much of a social life at all.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  They looked at each other. And they both got the giggles. Lila laughed until the mascara ran down her face, and then she shrieked, “and I went out and bought this new top!” and Madeline laughed so hard she couldn’t stand up straight.

  Women.

  Finally, Lila wiped her eyes with a paper napkin. “Oh, god. What am I going to do? He left his keys and his wallet and his suitcase right in my front hall, Mad. He’s planning on spending the night.”

  “Throw up,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  Madeline nodded vigorously. “Austin’s right. Works a treat. About halfway through this nice pork roast, put your napkin over your mouth, roll your eyes a little bit, and excuse yourself from the table. I’ll go after you and then I’ll come back and say that it must have been something you ate and that I’ve made you go lie down.”

  “What if he wants to stick around and make sure I’m okay?”

  “Honey, that kind of guy’s out the door at the first sign of inconvenience to himself.”

  “Really?” She looked sad. “I’m a lousy judge of men, Maddy.”

  “That is so true, darlin’.”

  “And what about his offer for Hugo?” She shook her head. “What am I thinking of? I don’t want that bozo anywhere near my horse.”

  As I said, Lila’s a true horse person. No amount of money would tempt her to sell Hugo to a man like Sullivan.

  Lila put the pork roast on a platter, with the marmalade around the sides. The outside was crisp and it sat on a bed of green beans. It made me quite hungry to look at it. I picked the platter up to take it into the dining room. Madeline carried the Jamaican yams. Lila clutched at her.

  “You’re sure barfing will get him out of here?”

  “Count on it.”

  “He’ll think I’m a terrible cook!”

  “You’re a wonderful cook”—which was true—“but it’ll get him out of your hair without a big hassle. Just wait until I’ve had seconds though, okay? I’ve been dyin’ for that meal all afternoon.”

  When we came back to the table, Joe had disappeared somewhere. He’d undoubtedly decided to walk home rather than eat the rest of the meal with Phillip Sullivan. But he returned just as we’d finished the pork roast—and just as Lila threw her napkin over her face and began to heave like a bellows.

  “You all right, sweetie?” Madeline said, right on cue.

  “I feel sick!” Lila shrieked. Sullivan was at Lila’s right, of course. She swayed dramatically toward him. Apparently, he couldn’t decide whether to keep his beady little eyes fixed on her heaving bosom or help her out of the chair. As it was, he edged away from her toppling figure.

  Madeline took a last bite of pork roast before she came halfway out of her chair. “You think you’re going to throw up, sweetie?” (It would have come out a lot more clearly if she’d swallowed that mouthful first.) Lila screamed, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” in a very convincing way.

  That was the determining factor for Sullivan. He jumped out of his chair and backed up against the wall. Joe, on the other hand, went straight to Lila and put his arm around her shoulders in concern.

  Madeline thrust him firmly aside. “Thank you, Joe. If I get Lila right up to bed, I’m sure she’ll be right as a cricket in the morning.” She pulled Lila’s arm over her shoulder.

  “You sure you’re feeling nauseated, Mrs. Gernsback?” He looked into Lila’s face, eyes narrowed. “Honestly, your color looks okay. Do you have any other symptoms?”

  Madeline gave Joe a meaningful nudge. He drew back a little. Then she flicked her eyes to Sullivan and back to Lila. The penny finally dropped, the young idiot. He bit his lip (to keep from laughing, I presume) and grabbed Lila’s other shoulder. “I think you’re right about getting her to lie down, Maddy. Your room’s upstairs, Mrs. Gernsback? I’ll give you a hand.”

  They dragged Lila to the entryway, where Madeline paused and said, “We’ll be back in just a minute, Phil. You go right ahead and finish that pork.”

  He looked at his plate uneasily. “Could be the pork, couldn’t it? Yeah, I guess I’d better go.” He paused. “You think maybe I should stop by the emergency room. Maybe get my stomach looked at?”

&
nbsp; “Oh, no. Why, Joe and I and Austin are just fine and we ate just what Lila ate. No, no, this is the flu. There’s a nasty bug going around.”

  “Yeah? I doubt it.” His tone was disgusted. “I want a plastic baggie. I’m going to take some of the pork with me, get it tested. Just in case.”

  “In case of what?” Joe asked.

  “Well, y’know. The meat could be bad.” His beady little eyes swept around Lila’s dining room. She’d used her Limoges china and her Baccarat crystal for the meal, and her second husband had left her a genuine Stubbs (a small one) that hung over the sideboard. It was clear what Sullivan was thinking. “If the rest of us get sick, too, we need evidence. For the doctors,” he added ponderously. “Not that I’d think about suing. But you can’t be too careful these days.”

  Lila growled like a dog. Madeline grabbed her head and forced it back onto her shoulder. Then she patted her back. Hard. “You feeling a little worse, honey?”

  Sullivan’s mean little eyes drifted over the triple crown moldings. “The homeowners policy would cover it, though. How much coverage you got, Lila?”

  The next growl was more of a snarl, I suppose. It was a good thing her head was buried in Madeline’s neck.

  “Next election,” Joe said to the ceiling, “I’m voting for tort reform.”

  “Pinko,” Sullivan said without surprise. “You New York types are all pinkos.”

  “I’m taking her upstairs now, Phil,” Madeline caroled. “You just sit there and have another piece of that roast.”

  “No, thank you,” he said, quite rudely.

  “Well, you’ll stay for a little bit of Lila’s pecan pie, won’t you? I’ll be right back down for a bowl for Lila to spit up into, and I can cut you a nice, big piece.”

  By the time the three of them gained the upstairs, old Smilin’ Phil had thrown his gear in the back of his Escalade. By the time they crept back downstairs, he was roaring down the drive in a spit of gravel. He took the pork roast with him.

  Lila sat down in the middle of the ruins of her dinner party and held her head in her hands. Madeline sat down next to her. Joe shifted from one foot to the other. I sipped at another Scotch.

  Madeline coaxed Lila’s head up. “Shall I fix you some of that pie, sweetie? Dessert always makes me feel better.”

  She shook her head.

  “You want some help with those dishes?”

  “No.”

  “You,” I interjected, “would like us to go home.”

  She looked at me in relief. “Yes, I do, Austin. Do you mind?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Take the pie with you.”

  “Are you sure?” Madeline’s pecan pie recipe comes from her mother’s side of the family. It is stupendous.

  “Yes! And good-bye, Maddy.”

  “Good night, sweetie.”

  SO we were back in the Prius headed home a little earlier than I’d anticipated.

  “Well, that was a dead loss,” Madeline said, “except for the pie. And for crossing that deadbeat off the suspect list.”

  I stopped at the end of Perry City Road and waited for the traffic to clear so I could turn back onto Route 96.

  “Not quite a dead loss.” Joe was in the backseat. He reached down and hauled up the kind of briefcase that holds a laptop computer. He held it under the dashboard so I could see the initials embossed on the top:

  GAC, DVM

  “What we have here,” Joe said in a very satisfied way, “is Gerald Arthur Coughlin’s computer.”

  Fifteen

  MADELINE set a piece of pecan pie in front of me. A very small piece.

  “It was Sullivan’s feet,” Joe explained with becoming modesty. “Size seven. Same size as the footprints in front of the shed.”

  My wife set quite a large piece in front of him.

  “You can tell people’s shoe size by just looking at them?” Allegra demanded. She refused the pie with a regretful look.

  “I worked one summer as a shoe salesman.”

  All four of us were seated at the dining-room table. The purloined laptop sat in the middle. Madeline had moved a vase of daffodils to accommodate it.

  Madeline eyed the laptop with a certain amount of trepidation. “Do you think we should call the police, Austin?”

  “My dear, we are the police. Or rather, I am.”

  For the first time in twenty years, I had truly astonished my wife. Victor had not received the news of my deputization half so well. In point of fact, he had been quite rude about it.

  Madeline closed her mouth and demanded to know what I was talking about.

  “It’s true, Maddy,” Joe said. For some reason, the whole idea seemed to tickle him. He was grinning like a chimpanzee. “Lieutenant Provost deputized him this afternoon.”

  “My badge is in the mail,” I affirmed.

  “Your badge! Oh, my goodness.” Madeline blinked. “Austin, you’re not going to get a gun, too.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” I said, much struck.

  “You can stop thinking about it right this minute.” Madeline has a full-lipped, beautifully shaped mouth. At the moment, it was set like a steel trap. “If anybody has a gun,” she went on after a moment, “it should be me.”

  “That’s very true,” I said to the children. “She’s a far better shot than I.”

  “Are we going to need to shoot anybody?” Allegra said doubtfully.

  “Certainly not,” Madeline said. “Well, Austin. I’m dyin’ to know what’s in that computer of poor Jerry Coughlin’s.”

  So I opened it up and logged on.

  I had been fearful that the files would be password encoded; they were not. I opened the first that came to hand: ENZYMES.

  I began to read, only to be interrupted by Madeline’s warm hand on my cheek. I gave it a kiss, rather reflexively, I must admit. “In a moment, my dear.”

  “It’s been more than a moment, sweetie. More like an hour and a half.”

  “Eh?” I looked up, considerably startled. I checked the clock in the kitchen. It was almost midnight. Joe and Allegra were gone. “Goodness.” I looked down at the file that had absorbed me. “You know, my dear, Coughlin was engaged in some extremely useful work. It’s quite amazing, really.”

  “Does it have anything to do with his murder?”

  I frowned. “I don’t know at this juncture. It’s a damn shame, his murder.”

  “Well, yes. Of course it was.”

  “In a general way of course, all murders are dreadful. That’s not quite what I meant. I hope someone else can pick up this research, that’s all. It’s quite interesting. It will be a genuine boon to the scientific community if it works.”

  Joe clattered in the kitchen door, startling us both. I was surprised to see that he was not only fully dressed, he was wearing Carhartt coveralls over the white shirt and tie he’d donned to go to dinner. “She’s still leaking colostrum,” he said. He took a breath. “And she’s dilated a little more. I think you’d better come out to the barn, doc.”

  “The mare’s foaling,” Madeline said. “That’s why I came to get you.”

  Now fully disengaged from Coughlin’s fascinating foray into enzyme-linked immunoabsorbant assays, I saw that Madeline’s cheeks were pink with excitement. A rhythmic grunting came over the foal monitor. Joe glanced at it and chewed his upper lip. “Is Allegra with her?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then go on back to the barn. Make sure the infrared lamp is on. The foal will need the warmth. And then get my tackle from the Bronco.”

  “Tackle, sir?”

  “I’ll get it,” Madeline said. “It’s in case he has to pull the foal out, Joe.”

  Joe made a face. “I don’t think I wanted to know that.”

  “Madeline knows what to do. Go, both of you. I’ll be out directly.”

  The two of them rushed out the back door. The puppy stirred in her box and whimpered. Juno jumped up and circled the kitchen, head low, tail wagging anxio
usly. She stopped beneath the foal monitor and listened, her head cocked to one side. Then she went back to the box and grabbed the puppy by the back of the neck.

  That wouldn’t do. The pup’s leg was healing well, but I didn’t want Juno dragging her all over the floor in an effort to find sanctuary. Linc, by contrast, was an old hand at this, as was I. He stood in the middle of the kitchen, interested in the goings on, but not alarmed.

  I shut Juno in the pantry, over her shrill protests, and pulled my own Carhartt coveralls off the peg by the back door. Then the screen saver on the laptop winked and went dark as it went into sleep mode. I debated but an instant. The habits of a lifetime came into play. The files were of too significant an import to leave unattended. I shut the computer down. Lacking the time to think of any more secure place, I put it in the refrigerator. I then scrubbed my hands and forearms at the sink, followed by a good dousing with Betadine.

  The grunting from the foal monitor came at faster intervals now. The sound of a mare in labor is like no other: deep, guttural, pain-filled, and oddly patient. I whistled to Linc and went out to the barn at a jog.

  The three of them stood outside the mare’s stall, hugging themselves against the evening chill. Andrew and Pony had their ears up. Both looked interested. More interesting to me was how quiet they were. I have observed this equine behavior at many foalings. The most irritable horse will settle until a foaling is over. I believe this is an atavistic response. Horses have no defense against predators except their speed and the ability to kick. A quiet herd decreases the chance of being discovered by a hungry creature.

  Human behavior at a foaling is equally ubiquitous, except it is tension, not quiet, that characterizes the responses.

  “She’s sweating really hard,” Allegra whispered as Linc and I went into the stall.

  “That sweating is usual, my dear.”

  Joe had turned the infrared lights on, and they spread a decent warmth. Someone, my guess would be either Allegra, Madeline, or both, had added a good foot of straw to the stall floor. A completely feminine touch, this. The surface of the stall would make no difference to the mare.