A Puree of Poison

by Claudia Bishop

  “Quill?” Dina Muir, the receptionist, poked her head through the kitchen door. “The Chamber’s been trying to settle down to session for almost an hour. The mayor’s looking for you.”

  “It’s good to see you back. I think I told you how sorry I am about the mixup with Mr. Stoker yesterday.”

  “I told him he’d better check with you,” said Dina indignantly. “I knew you wouldn’t let him do it. But, I wanted to go shopping for a new dress for the opening ceremonies anyhow, so it worked out all right. Shall I tell the Mayor you’re coming soon? He’s in pretty much of a fidget.”

  “This murder’s upset everyone. I don’t blame him.” “Oh, it’s not that. The new edition of the Trumpet! is supposed to come out today. They’re all just wild about it.”

  “Oh, Lord. Tell them that I don’t think even Hedrick would take the time to publish that rag the day after his mother’s death. And let them know I’ll be right there.” Dina gave her the high sign and withdrew. “Good,” said Meg.”Pick up as much gossip as you can.” “Gossip?” said Quill with raised eyebrows as she left. “At the Chamber? Gossip? Never in this life!”

  “ ‘Bout time you got here,” Elmer Henry groused to Quill. “Now maybe we can get somewhere. You ready to take the minutes?”

  “We heard you found the body!” Miriam Doncaster said as Quill sat next to her in the conference room where the Chamber’s weekly meetings were held.

  “Stepped into it, like,” said Marge Schmidt with a fat chuckle.

  “Heard it was no accident,” said Betty Hall, Marge’s partner in the Hemlock Hometown Diner (Fine Food! And Fast!).

  Miriam, who was town librarian, blinked her large blue eyes, “Not another murder!” she whispered to Quill. “Are you and Meg going to... I mean now that you and Myles ... that is, if it’s true about you and Myles....”

  Elmer thwacked the official gavel on the table and demanded the Chamber’s attention. The twenty-four Chamber members settled like geese landing on a pond, their gabbles and squawks smoothed into an expectant quiet.

  Quill reached for the meeting notebook and produced a pen. She’d vowed to straighten herself out after her renunciation of Hemlock Falls’ sexiest (and only) sheriff, pay strict attention to taking complete, coherent, readable minutes, and not stray from the point of the meeting to make sketches of the members (she’d given up being an artist), or make grocery lists when she should be taking attendance. She hesitated. It probably wouldn’t hurt to take note of any suspicious behavior—just in case Meg grilled her about possible Chamber suspects. Meg, when her interest was caught, had the tenacity of the better breeds of pit bulls. Quill flipped to a fresh page, and wrote: investigations.

  Elmer Henry, rotund and red faced, surveyed his troops with a slightly troubled air. “Revrund Shuttleworth? Would you lead us in an openin’ prayer?”

  The Reverend Mr. Dookie Shuttleworth, of the Hemlock Falls Church of God, unfolded his storklike length, and gazed benignly on his flock.”Let us pray,” he said and compressed his lips. Dookie, although amiable in the extreme, and possessed of an unnerving goodness, tended to phrases without nouns or predicates, which severely impaired the quality of his penitents’ progression toward enlightenment. He’d completed a three-month-long correspondence course in “Christian mentalism” some weeks before; C-Ment appeared to be based on a sort of religious ESP. C-Ment sermons, Dookie had explained to his bewildered but receptive parishioners, were delivered through mental messages, and not the traditional verbal peroration. He was touchingly pleased when church attendance jumped the Sundays following his announcement. Christian mentalism made post-sermon discussion at Marge’s diner (a test rendered by the more severely religious Hemlockians as an edge against laxity) blissfully nonspecific.

  The silence in the conference room stretched on. Quill thought about the hammer that had killed Louisa, and Hedrick’s little red book. “Amen,” Dookie said and sat down.

  “Thank you, Revrund,” said Elmer. “Our first order of new bidness—”

  The room erupted into discussion in which Hedrick Con-way’s name, the manner of Louisa’s demise, and the next issue of the Trumpet! (due momentarily, according to several indignant voices) figured prominently. Elmer pounded the gavel with increasing irritability. The furor rose, primarily, Quill suspected, so that people could hear themselves over the hammering.

  Elmer, whose Southern roots were very much in evidence when under stress, threw the gavel on the carpeted floor and scowled down the length of the table. “I’m orderin’ silence! We’ll get to the Conways when we get to it, and not before. This here’s a bidness meeting of bidnessmen and women and not a hog calling. First order of bidness, last week’s minutes.”

  “There ain’t gonna be any ‘bidness’ in this town if that damn fool Conway runs lies in the paper about us!” shouted Harland Peterson. “I heard he was up all night after his ma’s unfortunate accident in the river, runnin’ that damn printing press.” Harland, the president of the local Agway Co-op, and cousin to Petey (Septic and Floor Covering), slammed a meaty fist onto his thigh. “I say the first order of business is to run that bum out of town.”

  “I say the wrong Conway got bumped off,” Marge Schmidt added in her assertive baritone. “That Louisa didn’t have anything to do with the damn Trumpet! ‘cept bankroll it. So a good question is, who’d want to kill her?” Marge swiveled a small blue eye at Quill. “What went down at the site today anyway?”

  Quill, a little alarmed at the overt hostility being exhibited at the table said, “Well, well, well,” in a deprecating way, which Marge greeted with a snort of contempt. Quill cleared her throat. “I guess there was a bit of a problem.”

  Marge rolled her eyes at the ceiling in mute appeal. “Somebody got a bit free with a hammer. That right?”

  “Apparently,” Quill said.

  “Think maybe Hedrick done his ma in for the bucks?”

  “That’d work out all right,” said Harland. “Then we could run the murdering bastard out of town.”

  Harvey Bozzel rose to his feet, trembling. “You’re being a bit hasty here. And it just doesn’t do to be hasty. I think we should sit down and discuss the whole problem calmly like the rational people we know ourselves to be.”

  “Siddown,” snarled Marge.

  Harvey jutted his jaw and ran a hand just above his moussed blond hair. “The man’s got an image problem. I grant you that. And Bozzel Advertising is well situated to deal with image problems, particularly in the publishing and media areas. Crisis management, it’s called, and Boz—”

  “Just shaddup, Harve,” said Marge. “We all know you’re angling for a piece of the creep’s business!”

  Howie Murchison, town attorney and justice of the peace, rapped his knuckles on the table in fair imitation of a judge quieting a rowdy courtroom. “Shall we start by defining the problem here?” he asked with a mild glance over his half-glasses. “A discussion of whether or not Louisa Conway was murdered, and by whom, isn’t a suitable topic for our agenda.”

  “You wanna know the problem?” shrieked Betty Hall. “You saw last week’s newspaper! You saw what that lyin’ snake wrote: that he’s got something on the mini-mall project. And today’s the day the next paper’s gonna come out, and who the hell knows what-all lies he’s gonna print! I got all I saved invested in that mini-mall!”

  “And since his ma gets knocked on the head and tossed into the river,” added Marge, “it’s gonna piss him off something fierce, is my guess.” She ruminated a moment, her massive jaw working slowly. “Less, like I said, he did it himself. Since somebody knocked his ma on the head with a hammer, who knows what he’ s gonna write about us next?”

  Elmer said they’d know soon enough, as he’d asked Esther West to pick up a copy of the Trumpet! as it came off the press at the Nickerson building.

  Marge suggested the meeting adjourn to the Nickerson building so they could stuff Hedrick into his press if the Trumpet! offered calumnies of any descriptio
n. Harland Peterson said it was too hot to walk downtown, even for that scum, reminded Marge of the existence of his Norwegian cousins who farmed west of the village, and were notable for their ability to wield ax handles and had excellent night vision. A surge of approbation met this suggestion for a nighttime raid on the Nickerson building.

  Quill, strongly in mind of a lynch mob, made an alarmed face at Howie, who winked at her in a reassuring way before saying, “What precisely has Conway written that’s actionable or even alarming, so far? This”—he drew a neatly folded section of the first Trumpet! from his sports coat pocket—”merely indicates that revelations are to come. He hasn’t specified what those revelations are, and, indeed, if the front-page story is any indication, that’s all the story’s going to amount to.”

  “Dog shit,” said Marge.

  “A direct if inelegant description,” said Howie. “Now, as soon as Esther brings the latest copy of the Trumpet!, we can determine the most appropriate way to pro—”

  “Coo-ee!” Esther West posed at the conference room door like Gertrude announcing Ophelia’s demise in a particularly bad production of Hamlet. Like Gertrude, she took an unconscionable amount of time to get to the point. “I had to stop for gas, because I was almost out, and I couldn’t find anybody but Gordy Michealson’s boy Odie at the newspaper office, and he didn’t want me to take a copy without Mr. Conway’s approval. Quelle dommage! I said to him.” (Esther had renamed her dress shop Quest’s Best, after signing up for conversational French at the local junior college.) “This paper is for the public, n’est-ce pas? That means ‘is it not so,’ Marge. Is it not so? I said to Odie.”

  “J’a bring the copies?” demanded Elmer.

  “I guess it is so, I said to him. So here’s your five bucks, I said.”

  “Five bucks!” Marge interrupted hi dudgeon. “What the hell. Five bucks!”

  “And Odie didn’t know how to make change ...”

  “We ain’t gonna pay no five bucks for that sleazeball paper!” roared Harland.

  “I don’t care what it cost!” said Elmer. “Did you get it!”

  “I got ten copies,” said Esther primly. “Fifty cents each. I’d appreciate quarters, please. I can’t make change myself.” She rummaged in her capacious shoulder bag, withdrew a sheaf of newspapers, and unfolded one: mall madness!! screamed the front-page banner.

  The air stirred with the members’ expelled breath.

  “Forty-point headline,” said Harvey helpfully.

  “Lemme see that,” demanded the mayor. Esther passed the pile to Howie who scanned it with the grave deliberation appropriate to his position as town attorney and justice of the peace. Norm Pasquale, principal of Hemlock Falls High School, grabbed the pile, took one, and passed the rest to Harland as though it were the pregnancy statistics for the cheerleading squad. Harland passed the rest to Miriam, who passed it on to Harvey, who turned it over to the mayor with a hope-filled smile.

  The mayor read for a lengthy moment, his face crumpled like a frustrated baby’s. “Gol-dang!” he said. “You hear this? ‘Is the sewage system safe? Will toilets be backed up all over Hemlock Falls as a result of the hasty and cheap installation of the leach field at the Hemlock Falls Mini-Mall? Will the citizens of this fair village be soon awash in rivers of unspeakable filth? This reporter will have the answers to this and other tough questions in the next edition of the Trumpet! The mayor of this fair city, it seems, has a lot to answer for.’ “ Elmer’s pudgy hands tightened on the newsprint. There was a ripping sound. “He can’t do this, Howie. He can’t say those things about me—I mean the Chamber—here. Hasty? We done it quick, is what we done, because we promised we’d be done in time for the holiday sales. And cheap? We went and did it cost-effective, which is why we got that DeMarco and that out-of-town work crew doin’ it so cheap. There’s nothing wrong with that leach field, let me tell you. Why, Harland’s cousin has been putting in leach fields all over Tompkins County for twenty years or more, and if he don’t know leach fields, I’d like you all to show me somebody who does know leach fields. He’s been down there four, five times tryin’ to talk to that DeMarco about lettin’ him in on it, and he says it’s bein’ put in proper.”

  Was Louisa, Quill wrote in her minutes book, getting pictures of the septic system when she was killed?

  Howie gazed at the mayor over his wire-rimmed spectacles with a benign and reassuring expression. “Hang on to your pulse rate, Elmer, and let me finish.” Halfway down the page he sat up with an exclamation. “Payoffs!” he demanded incredulously. “My fee for handling the anchor store contracts was not only legitimate, it was twenty percent less than my normal billing rate! That big banana-nosed son of a bitch!”

  Dookie cleared his throat in a mild though meaningful way. Howie subsided, cheeks reddened.

  “Hold on to your own durn pulse rate,” said Elmer with a regrettable degree of satisfaction. “See what I mean?”

  Quill, with a vague intention of making everyone a little more comfortable, suggested lunch. Elmer rather sourly intimated that “lynch” was more to his liking. This was seconded by more than one outraged Chamber member; Norm Pasquale went so far as to suggest that Sheriff McHale arrest Hedrick.

  “Guys,” said Quill, who hadn’t managed to get her hands on a copy, “isn’t there anything at all about his mother’s death?”

  “This boy hasn’t got a word about his mama?” Elmer paged frantically back and forth through the paper. Quill was surprised and a little disturbed at the intensity of his search,

  “Holy crow,” said Miriam. “Here it is. It’s outrageous!”

  There was a rustle of papers. Quill grabbed Miriam’s copy and read:

  OBITUARIES

  Conway, Louisa, aged 54, suddenly at her home in the summer resort of Hemlock Falls. Survived by a daughter, Carlyle, and son, Hedrick. Donations to the Volunteer Ambulance Fund.

  And below that, a boxed item, reading:

  DO YOU HAVE INFORMATION LEADING TO THE ARREST OF “MINI-MALL” PERPETRATORS? earn a free!! year subscription to the trumpet! call TRUMP-27 toll free!

  “That’s it?” demanded Elmer. “His ma bites the big one and that’s it?”

  Marge tossed her copy contemptuously to the floor. “What a pile of crap. That boy’s taste is all in his mouth.”

  Harland Peterson gnawed his lower lip. He picked up the paper, set it down, then shoved it to the center of the table. “So we wait for next week for more bullshit.”

  Howie folded his paper into neat quarters. “A bit of an incitement, that boxed item underneath the obituary,” he observed.

  “Incitement to what?” asked Quill.

  Howie pursed his lips and said nothing.

  “Mr. Mayor,” said Miriam primly. “I take exception to the scatological turn of this meeting.

  “You what?” Elmer wiped his forehead with a large handkerchief. “You going to air-condition in here, Quill?”

  Quill, who had written, “Uh-oh. The mayor?” under the investigations heading in her meeting’s notebook, gazed thoughtfully at Miriam.

  “Scatological,” said Miriam. “All this reference to bodily functions. I’d appreciate a little more decorum. I mean, the opening ceremonies are in three days....” Miriam’s hands crumpled a tissue into a ball, smoothed it out, then crumpled, smoothed, crumpled, smoothed, crumpled, smoothed, until she caught Quill’s startled eye. Tissue-crumpling was not at all like Miriam. Nor were her objections to Marge and Harland’s pungency; she’d known both for years and was prone to an occasional “Oh, shit!” herself. Quill wrote “MD: NO!!??” and sketched a little alarmed face next to it. “Howie,” she said suddenly. “Could you give us some possibilities?”

  “Possibilities?”

  “You know—best case, worse case.” Quill looked up and down the table. “The thing is, I’m not sure just what’s at risk here. What... um ... crim—I mean, scandalous activity could he discover?”

  “You mean what criminal activity is possi
ble in a project like this? Jesus Christ, Quill, the possibilities are endless.”

  “They can’t be,” Quill urged. “I mean, Mr. Conway’s mentioned payoff twice. Payoffs for what? This is a private investment and most of the town bought into it, and the records and transactions have been reviewed by every regulatory office in the entire state. What could be crooked or devious about that?”

  Howie removed his glasses, polished them, then fitted them carefully over his nose and peered at her over the rims. “You don’t understand how the state works. Or the county.”

  Lawyers, thought Quill, had a trick of putting you on the defensive even when all you’d asked was a simple little question.

  “This is not a simple little question,” said Howie. “Just offhand, although if the Chamber wants me, in my capacity as town attorney, to prepare a summary memorandum for them, I’d be happy to do so. So my present response is by no means complete. By no means.”

  Caveat Avocat, thought Quill, and was so pleased with this that she wrote it down in the meetings book and sketched a frowning Howie shaking a minatory finger. The figure looked so much like Richard Nixon that she erased it.

  “Everyone’s aware of the more obvious areas of defalcation, fraudulent behavior, and criminal activity. Bids can be rigged. It’s a simple matter, for example, to sneak the lowest bidding figure to a favored contractor, and award the job to him. Or her. Simple, but illegal. It’s possible to bribe inspectors, or to use cheaper-grade materials when more expensive items have been specified. The mini-mall is forty thousand square feet. Concrete is sixty dollars a yard. You pull a bag or two of cement from each yard of concrete, and the illegal profit can be considerable.”

  Quill scanned the assembly for telltale twitches, guilty flushes, or suspect indifference. She thought she was being unobtrusive until she met Marge’s affronted glare.

  “Our initial proposal for the mini-mall stipulated that no one individual could own a controlling interest. Opportunities for collusion here, of course, are rife. Rife,” Howie repeated complacently. “I suspect, however, that Mr. Con-way is after smaller fish. As a former state employee ...”