The Last Annual Slugfest

by Susan Dunlap

  She took a step, reaching out to me. Then she stopped, her arms momentarily stationary in an aborted hug before they dropped to her sides. “Vejay, it’s good to see you. It wasn’t right that the sheriff should keep you so late. I told Chris that. The sheriff knows you work hard and you have to be tired. Now you sit down and let me get you some coffee. Or would you rather have something else?” Her words, the same things she would have said a year ago, sounded forced.

  “No. Coffee’s fine. Nothing keeps me awake.” I sat at the table.

  Through the doorway I could see only one dim lamp on in the living room, and I could hear the low sound of the television.

  Rosa put the coffee cups down and began cutting the pie. As if on cue, Donny hurried in from the living room, accepted a piece that looked like an entire meal, and disappeared back through the doorway.

  I stared after him. I’d never seen this house so empty of people. And Rosa, I realized, had never looked so clearly her age. A year ago I’d sat in this kitchen and she’d jumped up to get me coffee, to get the cream, another trip for the pie, and yet another for the forks and then the napkins—all interspersed with questions and, as she took in my answers, a smile of approval, a smile of speculation, of thought; even her nod of sympathy had held the remnants of that smile so integral to her that it was never totally absent.

  Now she still bustled, still smiled, but the smile no longer fit. It was like the Sunday dress worn by a cancer patient for a last trip out that reminds one not of the happy times when it has been worn but only that those times are gone forever.

  Placing my slice of pie in front of me, Rosa said, “It’s so hard to believe. Edwina. Well, you know, Vejay, she was a woman you could gladly have throttled. But you wouldn’t kill her.”

  “Someone did, though, Mama.” Chris forked a piece of pie. “If there had been another dish or two, after ours, she would have died right up there on the stage.”

  “Chris,” I said, “do you think the murderer put the poison in your dish because it was the last one?” As soon as I said it, I looked guiltily at Rosa. If Chris hadn’t told her the poison was almost surely in their pizza … but, of course, he had. By now he would have told her everything he had seen anyone do or say since his arrival at the lodge.

  “I don’t know,” he said, glancing at Rosa. Then he looked back at me. “Vejay, someone put poison in my dish. Why my dish? I …” He swallowed, then picked up his coffee cup, took a gulp, and almost choked on the hot liquid.

  Rosa put down the fork she’d been holding halfway between pie and mouth. “You’re a friend, Vejay. You know us. We’ve been in Henderson for a long time. From when Chris’s grandfather was a boy. You know that not everything we’ve done we’d want the sheriff to know about. There’ve been hard times, you know that.”

  I nodded. For fishing families seasons are boom or bust, and in recent years the boom seasons had been scarce. And when there aren’t enough salmon to go around, there are still payments to be made on the boat, the insurance, the gas; and for the bait and the ice that are needed to go out into the empty sea every day, hoping that the cohos or the chinooks have finally come back. And there are house payments, and clothes and food. Most years, the old fishing families like the Fortimiglios cut back or borrow, or scrape by hoping for next year. But in the bleak winters that follow, there is always the temptation of those empty vacation houses, with the televisions and stereos and VCRs, the cabins or chalets of the summer people who have gone back to their real homes in San Francisco or Sacramento. There is the knowledge that whatever their loss, insurance will reimburse them. I knew that there had been times when that temptation had been too great for members of the Fortimiglio family.

  I’d read in The Paper that this year promised a good salmon season. It would start Monday. And Chris needed to be on the water when the sun rose.

  “Vejay,” Rosa continued, “the sheriff won’t know that Chris couldn’t have killed Edwina, that murder isn’t in him. He’ll think about those things in the past—not that Chris did them; Chris was never involved. Chris was out at sea. But the sheriff won’t care about that. The sheriff will think of us as a family of thieves.”

  “Maybe he’ll get a lead to the real killer, Mama.” Chris had put down his fork, too.

  “Maybe, Chris, but …” A year ago, when the sheriff had suspected me of murder, Rosa had never doubted that innocence was protection enough.

  “But he’ll start with you, Chris,” I said for her. “And when he’s satisfied beyond a doubt that you couldn’t have done it, then he’ll look for other suspects.”

  Chris nodded grudgingly.

  Rosa didn’t say anything. She didn’t look at me. But the request she’d invited me to her house to hear, the request she couldn’t bring herself to make, was clear. To anyone else I would have protested that my familiarity with murders came accidentally, and that I, of all people, was not the one to deal with the sheriff. Edwina hadn’t been dead four hours and already the sheriff had warned me to stay out of the way. I said, “How can I help?”

  Rosa looked up. She smiled, but her eyes still couldn’t meet mine.

  “Tell me what you know about Edwina,” I said. “Maybe we can think of who would want to kill her.”

  “Chris and I did talk about that,” she said, now relaxed enough to pick up the pie-laden fork. “There are no secrets about Edwina. She helped out in the tobacco store when she was in school, and afterwards she was there full-time. She had had two sisters, both younger. One went to college and moved away. She had a son. They, the three of them, she, her husband, and the boy, came here to visit the summer we made our trip East to see our relatives, the year after the fishing was so good. That sister died years ago. But I remember Edwina talking about her nephew’s visit. I remember her saying the trip was a sixteenth-birthday present for the boy.”

  “Then this boy will inherit?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said. “Surely Edwina would have left her money to Leila. Leila’s the only child of Edwina’s sister Margaret, God rest her soul. Edwina and Margaret were very close. It was the other sister who was the outsider.”

  I had forgotten about Leila Katz, Edwina’s niece. She had driven to the hospital with Edwina’s body. “I thought they weren’t speaking.”

  Rosa shrugged. “More coffee?”

  “Thanks.”

  She retrieved the pot from the stove and poured. Putting it back, she said, “Edwina had her fallings out, but they were never serious. If she had lived, things would have come together for her and Leila. Leila was her niece. Edwina wasn’t about to let that go. Edwina was very set in her view of family. It was because she couldn’t understand Leila’s way of life that she wasn’t speaking to her. But that would have worked itself out.”

  Chris laughed. “If Edwina had changed her will every time she had a falling out, she would have had to write it on erasable paper.”

  “So what there is to inherit, Leila will probably get,” I said.

  “Oh, Vejay, you don’t believe that Leila would kill her own aunt just to inherit some land,” Rosa said. It was like Rosa to think too well of anyone she knew to imagine them a murderer, even if that meant narrowing the alternatives to Chris. But in this case she was right: Leila was a friend of mine and I didn’t think she had killed her aunt—at least I didn’t want to think it. I said, “Tell me about Leila. What was she like growing up?”

  Rosa lifted her coffee cup to her mouth and sipped thoughtfully. “Leila was always different from the other girls. She dressed different. She seemed distant, controlled, like someone from the city. You know what I mean, Vejay,” Rosa said awkwardly.

  I smiled. “I lived in the city long enough to know. You mean Leila wasn’t as friendly, as open as kids here.”

  Rosa nodded, clearly relieved that I hadn’t discovered an unintended affront in her comment. “Leila’s mother, Margaret, was in a wheelchair. Her father died quite young, and in any case, he never lived here. He
wasn’t Catholic. Edwina never could accept that, that her sister could have married outside the Church. I suspect that’s one reason why they didn’t live here when he was alive. But when he died, Margaret and Leila came back and moved in with Edwina. Leila must have been eight or nine then. Edwina kept close tabs on her. She insisted Leila go to every class or discussion or potluck dinner that they had at St. Agnes’s. I guess she was worried about Leila’s soul. But that was too much for a child. Even Father Calloway told Edwina that. And Edwina was so piqued at him that she went to Mass at St. Elizabeth’s in Guerneville for the next month.”

  “And after Leila turned eighteen,” Chris said, “she never set foot in St. Agnes’s again.”

  “Hardly surprising,” I said.

  “But you know, Vejay,” Rosa said, “I don’t think Leila ever really forgave Edwina, not so much for pushing the Church, but for how she thought of Leila’s father.”

  “Anti-Semitic?”

  Rosa took another sip of coffee. “I don’t think that’s exactly it,” she said slowly. “With Edwina, it probably wouldn’t have been much better if Raymond Katz had been a Baptist. You see, Edwina just felt that there were certain things the Henderson family should do. Marrying within the Church was one of them.”

  But clearly it would have made some difference, and to the daughter who missed him, that “some difference” would have been gigantic.

  “That wasn’t the only thing,” Chris said. “Edwina was always stalking down to the school. She cornered Mr. Granger, the band director, and didn’t let him go until he agreed that Leila could play the trombone. And she badgered Miss Hitchcock until Leila got a special place in swim class. I don’t even know if Leila wanted to do those things before Edwina got in gear, but she sure didn’t afterwards. The other kids were pissed about her getting special treatment, and they made jokes about Edwina. And Leila, well, she was just caught in the middle.”

  “She never really had friends then, did she, Chris?” Rosa said.

  “No. I did take her to a dance one summer—Mama sort of pushed me into it, but I didn’t mind. Or at least I didn’t till I got to Edwina’s house to pick her up. Edwina must have kept me in the living room for half an hour, pumping me. She just kept on and on, and there’s not much about our family that’s a secret. Leila was so embarrassed she didn’t do anything but apologize until the dance was half over.”

  “You know, Vejay,” Rosa said, “I’ll bet it’s things like that that made Leila turn to women. She kept to herself all the time. Her only real friend was Angelina, and she was her babysitter.”

  “But it wasn’t like Leila was strange or anything,” Chris said quickly. “It was more like she didn’t want to expose anyone else to Edwina.”

  I took a drink of my own coffee. We were all friends of Leila’s, all sympathetic to her adolescent sufferings, all trying to put the best face on our observations, and everything we said strengthened the case for her killing Edwina. But there had to be others with motives. I asked, “Who made the two middle Slugfest dishes, Chris, the ones that were served while I was in the bathroom with Mr. Bobbs?”

  Chris laughed. Even Rosa smiled. “The first one,” he said, “was the Camp Fire Girls. The second was from Esther Grimes.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “You know her, Vejay,” Rosa said. “She’s the woman who does for Father Calloway. You’ve seen her.”

  I had. She was devoted to the priest. Her only complaint was that he refused to have a full-time housekeeper, as she felt someone of his station should. Under her care, his house sparkled and his larder stayed full. I couldn’t imagine her having so secular an interest as the Slugfest. “Did Father Calloway ask her to cook?”

  Chris nodded. “Edwina told him she was low on dishes. So Father Calloway asked her to make one.”

  “I guess we can leave her and the Camp Fire Girls out of our considerations.” I forked a bite of pie. Despite her concern for Edwina, and for Chris, Rosa had managed to make the best pie I’d had in months. “The only people who had access to the food were the cooks, the judges, Hooper, and of course, Bert Lucci.”

  “Oh, not Bert,” Rosa said.

  I’d forgotten Bert was a distant relation. “He did grumble about Edwina.”

  “Oh, that,” Rosa said. “Bert’s grumbled about Edwina for as long as he’s known her. And she’s complained about him. It just seemed sudden because they had to work together on the Slugfest. Most of the time they didn’t run into each other, so they didn’t have the opportunity to moan. But I know they liked that, complaining.”

  “Well, Bert did give her mouth-to-mouth. Maybe he wouldn’t have been so anxious if he knew there was poison in her mouth,” Chris said.

  “What about Curry Cunningham?” I asked.

  Rosa finished her pie. “The man who runs the logging company? I don’t know much about him.”

  That was another sign of how things had changed for the Fortimiglios in the last year. Before that, any new winter person would have been invited to one of their dinners. They wouldn’t have rested till they had made him feel part of the community, and till they knew everything about him. But Curry Cunningham had moved here just over a year ago, when the dinners stopped.

  “He was transferred from one of Crestwood’s other companies,” Chris said. “You know about Crestwood, Vejay. It’s run by that guy James Drayton, the one who’s so right-wing. He’s against almost everything—drinking, sex, even dancing. That was in the papers last year, when he came here for the opening of Crestwood Logging.”

  “I thought at the time it was lucky he wasn’t going to be in the river area long,” I said. Guerneville, Henderson, and the other towns around, with their sizable gay populations, would hardly have been comfortable for one with Drayton’s narrow beliefs.

  “But Curry’s not like that,” Chris said. “I did a little work up at the logging site before Christmas. He was hiring anyone who could lift fifty pounds then. You know Curry’s so careful about his safeguards that the government has brought guests there. And that’s saying a lot. There was a time a few years back that some guy—Opperman, wasn’t it, Mama?”

  Rosa nodded.

  “Opperman clearcut an entire hillside in one day. He brought in maybe a hundred guys and just went crazy.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Not much. Once the trees are down there’s nothing you can do. The timber industry has a lot of power in this state, much too much. They’ve got so much clout that environmentalists aren’t even allowed to photograph the cuts from the air! They have to make an appointment to inspect! That’s how it is when you clearcut the hillside. But if you’re a fisherman, Vejay, the government can board your boat any time, with no warning, and go through everything you’ve got.”

  I nodded. I’d lived here long enough to have heard plenty about the unequal treatment of the two industries. “But what became of Opperman’s land?”

  “The land?” Chris said. “Oh, it’s a tree farm. Opperman made a big thing about replanting. But all the trees are the same height. It looks like a giant cornfield.”

  “But you were saying Curry Cunningham isn’t like that?” I prompted.

  “Oh, right. Curry’s been real good. What I was saying was that he was transferred from back East. His wife and son had to fly back there a couple times. Now they’re in Japan. I think she’s studying there.”

  “They sound like a very ambitious couple,” I said.

  Rosa nodded.

  “Angelina Rudd?” I asked. Before Rosa could protest, I said, “Tell me about her. She was a local girl, wasn’t she?”

  “She was in school with my oldest daughter. Her family, the Longhitanos, have been fishing here since longer than I can remember. Mario, her father, was swept overboard in a bad storm when she was just a girl.” Rosa swallowed, as if the memory were still fresh.

  “That happens,” Chris said quickly. “It’s the risk of fishing. You’re careful, and even if you never take chances, a
storm blows up suddenly, and you can’t get back to port.” He shrugged. “There’s nothing you can do.”

  “What kind of girl was Angelina?”

  “She worked hard,” Rosa said. “She always had a job after school. The family needed the money. She’d take care of Leila Katz and her mother every day after school until Edwina got home. Then she’d walk home—it wasn’t close by, either—and study. Later, when Leila was older and her mother had died, Angelina worked at Fischer’s Ice Cream.” Rosa lifted her coffee cup, then, realizing it was empty, put it back in the saucer. “I can remember my Katie saying how hard Angelina worked in school. She was one of those kids who have to struggle for everything. Good grades didn’t come easy for her. Or good times, or boys. Katie was always a very social girl. She always had more boys over here than she knew what to do with. Once or twice she invited Angelina over, I think because she felt sorry for her—Katie was that type of girl. But Angelina never came.”

  “I guess she got what she wanted,” Chris said. “There she is running the fish ranch. And Katie’s just a teacher’s helper at the school, with four kids at home.”

  “Chris!” Rosa exclaimed. “Katie’s a fine mother.”

  “I know, Mama. But Angelina wouldn’t have wanted that. Besides, she has a son and a husband now. And she has the fish ranch. She’ll make a go of that if it kills her. She doesn’t have any choice. She told everyone that fish ranching was the way of the future. She said she’d make fishing with the fleet obsolete. She said we’d better think about going back to school and getting ready for some other kind of work. Maybe she’s right.” Slowly, Chris grinned. “But, Vejay, if she’s not, everyone who’s ever had a salmon on the line is going to be laughing. She’ll never hear the end of it.”

  I nodded. Rosa didn’t look up. I knew her well enough to realize that she couldn’t imagine the women she’d known as children, or Bert Lucci, or the man who was an usher at St. Agnes’s, killing Edwina Henderson. She could no more see them poisoning her than she could picture Chris doing it. As for Chris, I suspected he was thinking the same thing I was—that none of them looked as suspicious as he did.