Feast of Murder (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)
Page 17
“Can you assume that?”
“I think so,” Gregor said, “yes. We’ll have to ask, of course, but the only other alternatives leave us with a problem opposite to the one we’ve got now. I mean if somebody fed him strychnine before dinner then he should have begun convulsing at dinner long before he got up and walked out. By then he wouldn’t have been able to get up and walk out.”
“Meaning he must have taken the strychnine in the salad or in the salad dressing,” Bennis said.
“Exactly.” Gregor nodded. “Only Jon Baird handled the salad, but everybody handled the salad dressing, and it was bitter enough to hide anything. What that man thinks he’s doing—”
Bennis sighed. “To tell you the truth, it reminded me of my father. It comes from belonging to Cod House. It’s a men’s cooking club in Philadelphia. Only very old families need apply. They have a positive mania for making things with bitter herbs.”
“I’ll take Lida’s positive mania for making things with chocolate any time you ask. Well. It still doesn’t solve our problem here. Everybody seems to have known about the bitter salad dressing. Jon Baird could have used it to hide the taste of the strychnine, but so could anybody else at that table except you and me. Or maybe I should just say me. You knew all about this—Mackerel House.”
“Cod House,” Bennis said automatically. “Gregor, I don’t understand. If he wasn’t feeling the effects of strychnine, why did Charlie Shay leave the table? Was he just seasick?”
“He might have been. I don’t think so, though. If you were going to kill someone with strychnine, would you really want to sit around and watch him die all over your dinner table?”
“I wouldn’t want to kill anyone with strychnine.”
“Good point.” Gregor sighed. “My point is that I think Charlie Shay’s seasickness got a little help from whoever murdered him. Do you know what ipecac is?”
“Sure. It’s the stuff your mother gives you when you’ve just eaten every last one of a new bottle of St. Joseph’s children’s medicine because they’re flavored with orange and you think they’re candy. It makes you throw up.”
“Perfect. The times are right, too, you know. Put the ipecac and the strychnine together. The ipecac would work first—”
“Wait, wouldn’t it make you throw up and get rid of all the strychnine?”
“Depends on how much was used. If you gave a small enough dose of ipecac and a large enough dose of strychnine, your victim would be just as dead as if he’d had strychnine alone.”
“And you could do that because you didn’t really want him to throw up,” Bennis said, “you just wanted him to get out of the mess hall and do his dying somewhere else.”
“Preferably on this deck just about where you’re standing,” Gregor said.
“You mean preferably where he’d be likely to fall overboard,” Bennis said. She walked to the bow’s low rail and looked out over the water, shivering. “This is really nasty, isn’t it, Gregor? Really sly. Do you think you’ll find out who did it?”
“Oh, I already know who did it,” Gregor said. “That’s hardly the problem here. Don’t you think it’s about time we went back inside?”
“Below,” Bennis said reflexively, and then she gave him a hard, long stare. Gregor grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the hatch. She’d given him that stare before. It was the one she used to let him know she thought he was keeping her out of something. He couldn’t help it.
Besides, everything he’d told her was true.
He did know who did it.
He just had a few details he had to clear up.
2
Innocent bystanders in a murder case always become sightseers, unless they have actually witnessed a bloody and terrifying death. Gregor had never known a case of poisoning where the people on the edges hadn’t been possessed more by curiosity than by horror. Since that was often true of the murderer, too, Gregor expected to have no trouble questioning most of the people he wanted to question. They wouldn’t care if he was “official” or not. They had either heard of him before they ever came on this boat—Gregor was perpetually astounded these days by just how many people had heard of him—or they had been filled in by Tony Baird as Bennis had said they had. They’d have a hesitation or two at the very beginning, but in the end they would succumb. They’d think it was just as thrilling as if they’d landed in the middle of a novel by Ellery Queen.
Opening the door to the mess hall, Gregor was struck by how true these observations had become. He’d first made them when he was a very new agent and assigned to kidnapping detail, and they’d been true then, God only knew how many presidents ago. Lately they’d become even truer yet, as if people had moved off a mark someplace, away from action and into a firmly fixed spectator role. Maybe it was all the cop shows on television or the murder mysteries in the bookstores or something Terribly Significant and Part of the National Subconscious like the aftermath of the Vietnam War. That was the kind of explanations “professionals” gave, and that Gregor had no use for. More likely, it was just plain human nature, seen more clearly in the raw than it once had been. Whatever it was, it suited Gregor’s purpose very well. Spectators were never mere spectators. They were always reviewers as well. They liked to talk.
Gregor looked in on them all arrayed before him around the table—a table that had been meticulously cleared of dinner things and wiped down, so that now it was empty of everything except Fritzie’s line of mason jars filled with pumpkin rind marmalade. Bennis came up behind him, ducked under his arm, and went inside, but they hardly paid attention to her. They were too busy looking Gregor up and down and back and forth as if he were about to sprout antennae. He looked them over as well, counting. Jon Baird was gone, of course. Gregor hadn’t expected to see him. Someone else was gone as well.
“My wife went back to our cabin,” Mark Anderwahl said suddenly, and guiltily, as if he were reading Gregor’s mind. “She was really very ill. Very ill. She was green.”
“She was a hell of a lot greener than Charlie was when he went upstairs,” Sheila Baird said. “Don’t frown at me, Tony. I can say hell if I want to. I’m a grown woman.”
“I wasn’t frowning at you for saying hell,” Tony Baird said. He was sitting all the way back against the wall, but on the other side of the table from where he had been during dinner. Instead of being wedged immobile into a corner, he had easy access to a passage out. He used it. He stood up, tucked his shirt more firmly into his jeans, and stared at Gregor. “If you’re going to elaborate on your ridiculous and dangerous theories of Charlie Shay’s death, I’m not going to sit here and listen.” He turned to Bennis. “I’ll see you later,” he told her. “If you get tired of listening to this old windbag, come down to my cabin and I’ll give you a drink.”
“That old windbag has done a lot more with his life than you’ve done yet,” Sheila Baird said.
Tony ignored her. He brushed by Gregor and hustled out.
“Well,” Sheila said, as soon as he was gone. “That’s that. Now we can get down to something interesting.”
Whether or not the others wanted to “get down to something interesting” in quite that way was moot. They all seemed to be embarrassed by Sheila’s directness. Mark Anderwahl stared at his hands. Calvin Baird stared at the ceiling. Fritzie Baird stared into space. Only Sheila Baird looked directly at Gregor, and her eyes were avid.
Gregor found a chair, pulled it out into the middle of the room, and sat down in it. He noted that Bennis had taken Tony’s chair at the back and nodded to her.
“Well,” he said to the assembled company, feeling a little like a brand-new school teacher on his first job. “I take it you all know what happened. Or what I think happened.”
“I know Jon doesn’t agree with you,” Calvin said pointedly. “And I know you’ve got no jurisdiction here, either. I don’t see why we should talk to you at all.”
“You shouldn’t, if you don’t want to,” Gregor said pleasantly.
“But we will be bothered,” Calvin said. “The police won’t take this man’s word for anything. They’ll just investigate all over again and they’ll investigate him in the bargain.”
“I don’t see why they should,” Sheila Baird said. “He’s got a reputation, after all. It’s not like he’s some stranger in off the street.”
“He might as well be,” Calvin Baird said stiffly. “I don’t know anything about him. I never even met him before today.”
Gregor considered saying something very similar to Calvin Baird—that he had no reason to believe Calvin hadn’t murdered Charlie Shay, since he’d never met Calvin before today—but that sort of tweaking was almost always counterproductive, and in this case would have to wait. Gregor coughed into his hand instead and tried to get their attention.
“If you don’t mind,” he said, “there are really a few things I would like to know, and someone in this room will probably be able to tell me. They really are little things. Would you mind?”
“Yes,” Calvin said.
“Oh, go ahead,” Sheila told him. “If you keep asking permission, you’re just going to have this old goat fussing at you without end.”
“Fine,” Gregor said. “Do any of you people know where Charlie Shay was right before dinner? And I do mean right before.”
“I know where he was a little time before dinner,” Sheila said. “Maybe ten minutes or so before. He was in our cabin, Jon’s and mine. With Calvin here. The three of them were talking.”
“That was a private meeting,” Calvin said coldly.
“It was the usual business crap,” Sheila said. “They’d been in earlier for hours, and then they went off and then they came back and then they went off again and then there was dinner.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “Now, I saw Calvin Baird in the passage on this deck about five minutes before dinner. I take it you were coming from this meeting Mrs. Baird is talking about?”
“You’ve got to say Mrs. Sheila Baird,” Fritzie said suddenly. “Otherwise, I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“He was coming from that meeting,” Sheila Baird said, giving Fritzie a murderous look. “He left after Charlie did. Jon and Calvin always have a lot to talk about together.”
“Fine. Now. What happened then. In those ten minutes just before dinner. Did any of you speak to Charlie Shay?”
“Julie and I saw him in the passage on our way to dinner,” Mark Anderwahl said. “He was right ahead of us when he started, but then he stopped to talk to somebody—”
“To Tony,” Bennis said. “I was there. He wanted to know what there was for dinner.”
“A dinner we haven’t gotten to eat yet,” Sheila said.
Gregor turned to Bennis. “Did you or Tony give him anything to eat or drink? Anything at all? A can of soda? Even a glass of water?”
“No.” Bennis was emphatic.
“What about the rest of you?” Gregor asked. “Did you see him take anything to eat or drink?”
They all stared solemnly back at him, negative.
“Fine,” Gregor said again, even though he knew they wouldn’t believe he meant it. “Let’s get on to dinner, now. I was sitting on the outside bench on this end between Jon Baird and Mr. Mark Anderwahl. Charlie was sitting directly across the table on the end, opposite Jon Baird. Who was sitting at Charlie’s side?”
“Julie was,” Mark Anderwahl said. “She didn’t sit down next to him, though. She sat down first. She wanted to be close against the wall like that because she thought it might help her not to feel so motion sick. You know, steadier.”
“So she sat down and then Charlie Shay sat down next to her.”
“Right,” Mark said.
“She didn’t ask him to sit down next to her.”
“Of course not.” Mark flushed. “What do you think you’re doing? Julie wouldn’t kill anyone. She certainly wouldn’t kill Charlie Shay.”
“I didn’t say she would. I’m just trying to put this in order here.” Gregor rubbed his hands over his face and thought. “Everybody sat down,” he said slowly, “and Charlie sat down on the end on that side next to Julie Anderwahl and across from Jon Baird. Then the salad came in, and Jon served out from the bowl, except that if I remember right, he forgot Charlie until the last minute.”
“That’s right,” Fritzie said. “It was very rude of him. I remember. He served everybody else and then he just sat down and started eating, and there was poor Charlie with an empty plate.”
“But he got up again and served Charlie himself,” Gregor said.
“Yes, he did,” Mark Anderwahl said. “I saw him.”
Gregor moved on. “Then there was the salad dressing. The first I remember about the salad dressing was Mark Anderwahl handing it to me. Where was it? Who had it first?”
“We did,” Bennis said. “Tony and me. It was sitting down at our end of the table.”
“And you used it and passed it on?” Gregor asked.
“That’s right,” Bennis said. “First I used it, then Tony used it, then he passed it up to Mrs.—Sheila Baird.”
“I passed it across the table to Calvin,” Sheila said. “Julie doesn’t eat salad dressing.”
“Calvin passed it to me,” Mark said, “and I passed it to you, Mr. Demarkian.”
“I used it and put it in the middle of the table. Did any of you see what happened to it then? Did any of you notice if it was picked up again? Did Charlie Shay use it?”
“I saw Charlie’s plate with the salad dressing on it,” Mark Anderwahl said. “We talked about it at the time. I didn’t see Charlie pick up the cruet.”
“He could have picked it up himself,” Bennis said.
“I don’t see where all this talk about salad dressing is supposed to get us,” Calvin Baird erupted. He had turned a mottled red. “After all, Charlie couldn’t have been poisoned by something in the salad dressing. If there was something in the salad dressing, we all would have been poisoned too. If there was something in the salad, we all would have been poisoned too. Charlie couldn’t have been poisoned without poisoning the rest of us, so Jon and Tony are right. Charlie wasn’t poisoned at all.”
“Oh, God,” Sheila Baird said. “How do I stand hanging around these people who’ve never seen a single episode of Matlock on TV?”
“I,” Calvin Baird said, “don’t have to watch Matlock on TV. I have a mind and I’m willing to use it. I’m certainly not going to allow it to go to rot around here any longer. Good night to you all.”
With that, Calvin Baird stood up, knocked his chair to the floor, and tried to stride toward Gregor and the door. He tripped twice and got his belt loop caught on the back of a chair in the process. Still, his progress had a certain air of magnificence about it, and that air was intensified when Calvin finally got through the door and slammed it shut behind him. The slam made a sharp cracking noise that sounded like splintering wood.
This, Gregor thought, was going to be even more difficult than he had feared.
Three
1
LIKE MANY OTHER WOMEN in her position, Sheila Baird had very little patience with sex. She knew how to use it, because she had to know how to use it. It was important in the care and feeding of important husbands, although not so important as the way she appeared to other important husbands in public or the prestige of the charity balls she got them invited to. Sheila could moan and groan and shudder and shake with the best of them. She wasn’t above buying upscale how-to manuals and proposing forays into the sexually absurd. She had had love made to her while she was hanging by her knees from a gymnast’s bar and while she was tied to the wall of a Pullman compartment on a train. It was one of the things she liked best about her marriage that Jon h
ad no interest in that sort of thing and confined his sexual attentions to the ordinary and to bed. No matter how he confined them, however, he did display them. He had made love to her three times a week like clockwork from the day they were married. Then he had gone into jail and not made love to her at all. Now he was out, and Sheila thought she had every right to expect him to do something. Sheila was unshakably convinced that all that talk about female orgasm was bunk. Females didn’t have orgasms, and that was a good thing for them, too. Males had orgasms, though, and for them that was a kind of addiction. There was always something wrong when the addiction seemed to have been cured. Sheila had been worried about it ever since Jon got out of jail. She had expected him to come back and leap on her. Instead, he had come back, walked into his study, and shut and locked the door. For hours after that, she had heard him tapping away at his computer terminal and talking on the phone. For all the weeks since, he had done practically nothing else. Sheila was beginning to get nervous, and not because she felt sexually deprived.
Husbands who weren’t sleeping with trophy wives were on the way to divorcing trophy wives. That was the ticket. Husbands who were on the way to divorcing trophy wives had to be subjected to—shock treatment.
Sheila was a naturally curious woman, about some things, but under ordinary circumstances she would never have stayed in the mess hall to listen to Gregor Demarkian ask questions when Jon had gone back to their cabin. Tonight, she had wanted to think. She had let Jon go and sat with all the others, busy making plans while Mr. Demarkian was busy belaboring the obvious. Sheila had heard all about how Gregor Demarkian was supposed to be a great detective, but now that she’d met him she didn’t believe it. Great detectives were either men like Sherlock Holmes—meaning the sort of men who not only knew everything, but made a point of displaying the fact—or fighter types like Starsky and Hutch. They weren’t big fuzzy ethnic lumps like Gregor Demarkian, and they didn’t ask silly questions about who had the salad dressing first. Sheila had sat through it all with her mind more than half on something else—meaning Jon—and then, when it was over, she’d said good night to everyone and been the first out of the room.