Getting Old Is Murder

by Rita Lakin

  Well, that sure got their juices going and they started a barrage of questions, like what are we doing and why and where and when, which I immediately nip in the bud.

  “Listen, dear friends and sister. Later for questions and answers. Now we have work to do.”

  I hand them each a sheet of paper and they read what’s written with puzzled looks.

  “But what does it mean? . . .” starts Bella, and I shush her.

  “Just do everything it says to do, and over dinner tonight you’ll find out. I know it doesn’t make sense right now. It will later.”

  “But—” says Sophie.

  “No buts.”

  “I really, really need to ask this question,” Sophie says pleadingly. “Where are we eating?”

  “No place you’ve ever eaten before.”

  They are all so excited they can hardly contain themselves. “At least give us a name,” says Bella.

  I smile. I am on such a high today that I feel silly. So, I improvise. “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.”

  “Huh,” says Ida. “I never heard of it.”

  “Or you can join me at My Dinner With André.”

  “Who’s he? You’re bringing a stranger?” asks Sophie.

  “You might like the Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.”

  “That sounds awful,” says Ida.

  “Or how about Dinner at Eight?”

  “But you said five,” Bella wails in confusion.

  I stop. This is cruel, since they haven’t a clue to what I’m talking about. Except for Evvie, who’s beginning to catch on and is watching me as if I’ve got a screw loose. “I’m only teasing. You’ll learn the name of where we’re eating when we get there. Come on, get in the spirit of the game.”

  The girls study their sheets of paper.

  “I need the applesauce crumb cake in an hour,” I say to Ida. It’s her finest creation. “Can you do it?”

  “Of course,” she says proudly.

  “But we already talked to Meals on Wheels,” Evvie reminds me.

  “Go in person. That might jog their memories,” I say.

  “How are we supposed to get around? Are you driving us?” Ida demands to know.

  “No, I have my own errands to run. Take taxis.”

  “Taxis?” Sophie, the cheapskate, asks in horror. “Spend our own money?”

  “All right,” I say wearily. “I’ll pay you back.”

  “I see a lot of walking on this one,” Ida points at her paper.

  “A little real exercise won’t kill you.”

  “Every phone booth?”

  “Every single one.”

  “So, what’s the prize?” Sophie asks. “For winning the scavenger hunt.”

  Evvie shakes her head. “We’re all doing this together, Soph. There’s no winner.”

  “Oh.”

  “Believe me,” I tell them, “you’ll all be winners. Now the most important thing of all: Tell nobody anything! Talk to no one. And I mean no one. Not one person! Can you do that?”

  I get a chorus of yeah, sures.

  “This is a matter of life and death. No mistakes this time.” This is my only reference to the Kronk cremation catastrophe and they hear me loud and clear. Now I get steady nods of assent.

  “Promise. Swear to me on your children’s heads.”

  This is the most serious of all promises, and one by one they swear.

  And we are off and running.

  46

  Book Soup

  The girls haven’t stopped talking about food the whole drive over here. Visions of pot roasts and chicken livers dance in their heads, so naturally when I stop the car at the Lauderdale Lakes public library they are puzzled. Especially since the library is closed.

  I give no explanations. I walk to the back entrance, I knock three times for dramatic effect, and it is unlocked for us by Conchetta. With Barney right alongside. I do the introductions. Conchetta Aguilar and Barney Schwartz meet my girls. They all shake hands, most bewildered. And even more so when Barney identifies them by the books they read that I take out for them.

  “Bella,” he says. “The lady of the romance novels. Large print. And Evvie and her Hollywood biographies and Ida who likes best-sellers and Sophie who likes Reader’s Digest.”

  Evvie beams. She’s getting into the spirit of this. “So that’s what you meant when you called off the names of restaurants. They were book titles. And a few movies, too.”

  I wink at her, but Ida is not pleased. “OK,” Ida says, hands on hips. “Just what is going on here?”

  “Yeah,” says Sophie, whose mind is never far from the subject of food, glaring at me, “I thought we were going out for dinner.”

  “We are out. And we are going to have dinner. What we have to do tonight is very private, and this is as private as we can get.”

  “I brought in food that I cooked at home,” Conchetta says cheerfully, leading us into the main reading room. There along the checkout counter are hot plates with an assortment of covered dishes. “I hope you’ll like Cuban food.”

  There is much consternation at this.

  “What’s Cuban food?” Bella asks nervously.

  “Hot and spicy,” Barney says mischievously.

  Conchetta jabs him. “You know I kept the spices down.”

  The girls peer suspiciously into each pot as Conchetta lifts the lids and identifies them. “Potaje de frijoles negros, masa de puerco fritas with mango sauce, fried plantains and rice, with boniato and chimichurri.” She opens all but the last.

  “I never eat beans,” says Ida, recognizing only one word. “They give me the gas.”

  I grab a plate. “Well, I’m excited here. I can hardly wait to try these.”

  The girls continue to hang back, except for Evvie who also takes a plate. “Hey, I’m game to try anything. What’s a plantain, Conchetta?”

  “Like bananas.”

  “And chimi . . . whatever?”

  “That’s a green sauce with garlic and lime juice you can dip your bread in. I’ll finish translating. The masa de puerco is a pork dish. Boniato is sweet potatoes. Mojo is another sauce. And the potaje is a wonderful black bean soup.”

  So Conchetta, Evvie, Barney, and I pile up our plates, but there is no forward movement from the others.

  Barney breaks into laughter first. “Let’s put the girls out of their misery,” he says as he unveils the contents of the last pot. “Stuffed cabbage, for the less adventurous of the Jewish delegation. Compliments of my mom.”

  Needless to say there is a rush on the stuffed cabbage.

  “Save room for the apple strudel afterwards,” he adds, grinning.

  As we spread out at the library tables, which Conchetta has set prettily for us with tablecloths and linen napkins, I glance over the pages Barney hands me: their research on oleander. I nod vigorously. “I knew it!” I say victoriously.

  “You were right on target. From the time the victims ingest, they go through severe abdominal pain and heart palpitations, paralysis, then death.”

  “But it takes an hour or so before they die, and that’s the big issue here,” I say.

  The girls look at me, befuddled.

  “Isn’t it about time you filled us in, Glad?” Evvie asks. “Why are we getting phone numbers of telephone booths and visiting Meals on Wheels?”

  “In a moment, the big picture.” I smile as I see Bella and Sophie, one by one, taking tiny portions of Conchetta’s food, liking what they taste and coming back for more. Not so Ida, of course. “Did anyone at Meals remember anything?”

  “You were right about going to see them,” Evvie says. “One volunteer remembered that on the date that Selma died, someone ordered a meal, then at the last minute came in and insisted they better deliver it themselves to a frightened elderly aunt. He remembered it because it never, ever happens that way.”

  “Good. Good. Could he identify the person?”

  Evvie shakes her head. “He didn’t think s
o. All he remembers was someone in a baseball cap and sunglasses.”

  “But at least we know it happened. And the phone booths? How many did you find?”

  “Five of them, between Lanai Gardens and across the street at the Florida Medical Center,” reports Sophie.

  “Excellent.”

  “And what about my applesauce crumb cake?” Ida asks. “What on earth was that for?”

  “To bribe a chubby bank teller, who loves to eat, to do the unthinkable—give me confidential information. Which she did.”

  “So, all right already, I’m about to bust from not knowing,” Sophie says. “So, tell us already!”

  “Since we’re in a library, let me tell you all about it—in a story.”

  47

  The Very Sad Story of a

  Very Foolish Mother

  Six pairs of eyes are riveted on my face. Six sets of ears are listening to my every word. Dinner is forgotten. Even dessert is forgotten. Not a chair is allowed to squeak. Since the earliest campfire, the storyteller has held his audience enthralled as he spun out tales that made the dark a little lighter and life a little clearer. And so I, a storyteller, begin my tale.

  “Once upon a time there lived a very foolish old woman. After her husband died the old woman was afraid of being alone. Since she had no one in the world but her daughter, she was determined to make her daughter live with her and take care of her. The daughter didn’t want to, so the old lady pretended to be crippled and tricked the daughter into moving in.”

  I already hear the whispers starting.

  “The old woman happened to be quite rich.”

  “Shush,” Evvie hisses.

  “But she wouldn’t share any of her money with her daughter. This turned out to be her biggest mistake. So what little money the daughter had was what she earned at her job, or what her mother doled out to her. This made the daughter very angry. She couldn’t stand her mother, but she pretended to everyone that she loved her. All the while she kept waiting for her mother to die. Her mother boasted how long people in her family lived, and she just kept on living.”

  There’s more whispering and plenty of speculating.

  “Be quiet!” Evvie says.

  “The daughter finally got tired of waiting.” And here I stop for a very long attention-getting pause. Then softly, “So Harriet Feder decided to kill her mother.”

  Suddenly all movement comes to an abrupt halt. Dead silence. Then all hell breaks loose.

  “What!” Evvie cries out.

  “Say that again!” Ida says.

  “What are you talking?” Sophie asks.

  “Why didn’t I bring my hearing aid?” Bella whines. “What did she just say?”

  “Harriet wanted to kill her mother!” Evvie exclaims.

  Ida is about to explode. “Harriet!? But what about Denny? I thought yesterday he admitted killing Esther!”

  Sophie is benign about change. “So, today he didn’t.”

  “Oy, could we start all over again?” Bella whines, leaning her good ear in.

  “Then who killed the other girls?” Sophie asks.

  “She killed them all.”

  I promised them they would be amazed. And dumbfounded.

  “Glad, are you sure?” Evvie asks.

  “All the pieces fit. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  The uproar and general carrying-on stops abruptly because I start talking again, and they aren’t about to miss one single breath of the rest of this story.

  “But Harriet knew if she killed Esther, no matter how cleverly she did it, she would still be the prime suspect, especially when it would come out eventually that her mother was worth nearly four hundred thousand dollars.”

  Another round of sputtering.

  “Oy gevalt,” Bella cries.

  “You found that out at the bank, with my applesauce crumb cake!” Ida shrills triumphantly.

  I smile. She’s got it.

  “That’s a lot of money, four thousand dollars,” Bella says.

  “Not four thousand, forty thousand,” says Sophie in amazement.

  “Everybody needs hearing aids around here,” Ida says impatiently. “That was four hundred thousand!”

  Sophie reaches nervously for her strudel. “Who could have so much money besides a Donald Trump?”

  “I am going to smack the next one who opens her mouth!” says Evvie angrily. “I am trying to hear this!”

  Everyone quiets down. For the moment. I continue.

  “So she came up with this idea. What if there was a serial killer loose who was murdering old women, and poor Esther just happened to be one of them? But Harriet decided a phantom serial killer was too risky. It had to be someone who could be caught so that she’d never be suspected. And she found the perfect patsy: simpleminded Denny.”

  Bella gets so agitated, she falls off her chair. Barney and Conchetta help her back on.

  I’m determined not to let anything sidetrack me, and I just keep talking.

  “So she did some snooping and found out exactly how Maureen Ryan died. Maureen died while eating food. Died reaching for the phone. Died on the night before her birthday. So Harriet recreated the pattern. The food our unlucky friends would eat would be poisoned. And where would she get the poison? Why, from the oleander that happens to grow in Denny’s garden, a plant Harriet gave Denny as a present.”

  “I still don’t know how Francie would eat a flower,” Sophie insists.

  “My very clever friends, Conchetta and Barney, did some research. Guess what they learned from Harriet’s hospital résumé?”

  “She used to work in a lab?” Evvie guesses.

  “Right on,” Barney says. “Toxicology is one of her specialties.”

  “So the die was cast as to who would be the victims: the next birthdays to come up in Phase Two before Esther’s. If you recall, Harriet managed to point out to us how nice it was that Denny made a birthday calendar of everyone in our Phase. Calling our attention to Denny knowing everyone’s birthday.”

  This time Evvie interrupts. “That was when we were clearing out Francie’s apartment. She just showed up. And said she was too sad about Francie to go to work.”

  I nod. “She planted the hint so that I would figure out that it was too coincidental that these women would die in order of their birth dates. Three birthdays came up before her mother’s. Selma, then Francie. However, lucky Eileen O’Connor became rightfully nervous, and saved her life by going to her sister in Boca Raton.”

  “And she doesn’t even like her sister,” Sophie has to add.

  “Greta Kronk, who prowled around at night, probably saw Harriet going in and out of Francie’s apartment, so she had to die, too. Then everything was set up for the one murder she was waiting for: her mother.”

  I am aware that it’s very quiet now. I think they’re all in shock. I take Denny’s tape out of my purse and put it on the table.

  “Now she had another problem to solve. How to pin it on Denny. Happy-go-lucky Denny. Who would believe he’d kill anyone? She had to make it look like Denny was having a breakdown. She had to drive him crazy. How? She brought back his awful mother from the grave to haunt him.”

  “Jesucristo,” Conchetta says, crossing herself. “The woman is a devil!”

  “Maureen is back?” Sophie asks in amazement.

  “I never did like that woman,” Ida says.

  “I went to see Denny yesterday and he told me all about it.”

  “Wait a minute,” Evvie interrupts. “You went to jail without me?” Then she stops, chagrined. “Sorry.”

  “You can hear it on this tape. Denny, who had been terrified of his mother when she was alive, actually believed she had returned from the dead to frighten him again. Calling him up on the phone every single night and tormenting him.”

  “Wait a minute,” Bella asks. “She could call from heaven?”

  Ida snorts. “How do you know it wasn’t from hell?”

  “Whatever,” Bella
says, “they’re both long-distance. Maybe it was only from the cemetery. That’s local. Do you think she used an eight-hundred number?”

  “Will you silly twits stop it!” Evvie says. “Maureen is dead. Harriet was making the calls!”

  “Oh, so how was I supposed to know that?” Bella says, feeling put upon.

  I continue relentlessly. “Harriet called Denny from different phone booths, either near the apartment when she was home so she could sneak in and out quickly, or near the hospital when she was on night shift. She didn’t use her home phone because that could be traced.”

  “The phone booths you sent us to today,” Sophie says, finally getting it.

  “And so, pretending to be Maureen, she told Denny he had to kill Selma first, then the others. She really did a job gaslighting him.”

  “I remember that movie,” Evvie says, “with Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. It was named after a light fixture.”

  “She actually got Denny to believe he did the killings, even though he kept saying he didn’t remember. She told him he did it in a trance. Since Esther was going to be the last murder, he had to be caught.”

  I stop to take a drink. My mouth is dry. The girls are itching to ask questions, but I motion them to wait until I’m finished.

  “She had it timed perfectly. She cold-bloodedly fed her mother dinner with poisoned poppy-seed rolls.”

  Sophie can’t stand it. She has to interrupt. “Esther told us she’d never eat food from a stranger!”

  “Well, she didn’t,” says Bella.

  “Better she lived with a stranger than that daughter from hell,” Ida adds.

  “Then later she tells us she had to leave early for the hospital, thus establishing her alibi. She calls Denny, as Maureen, and tells him he must go to Esther’s house immediately with the other rolls she left in his kitchen. By that time the poison would have taken effect, Denny would be at the scene of the crime, and we’d be home from the movies in time to catch him.”

  “But we got home late from the movies—” Evvie starts.