A Puree of Poison

by Claudia Bishop

  “An exclusive,” warned Hedrick. “Stories that show up in the Trumpet! don’t get covered by other newspapers.”

  “I haven’t said a word to anyone,” Quill promised. “We’ll find somewhere you can take off your coat and be comfortable. Myles? If you’ll excuse us? Why don’t you help Miss Conway to some sushi.”

  The look of alarm in his face, she thought, as she led Hedrick through the crowd, was more than satisfying.

  “There’s such a great view from the gazebo, Hedrick, and it’s well away from the noise of the party. Shall I take you down there to wait while I find Lyle Fairbanks? You can sit and listen to the Falls, maybe take off your jacket, and perhaps write down a few questions about the Kiplings.”

  “Sure,” said Hedrick unenthusiastically. “You got some food to take with me?”

  “Certainly. Shall I get you a plate, or would you like to select it yourself? There’s a bit of a buffet, over by Carlyle.”

  “Raw fish? It’s not this reporter’s cup of tea. But I’ll do it.” He sighed, martyred. “Don’t go off.”

  “I’ll be right here,” Quill promised.

  Hedrick slouched his way over to the buffet table, whispered into his sister’s ear, grabbed a fistful of food, which he dropped on a plate, and shambled back.

  “Carlyle is having a whee of a time,” Quill observed. “Although a bit of food seems to have slipped down the front of her dress.”

  Carlyle, the slip dress having attracted the attention of the mayor, the Sakuras, Petey Peterson, and a short, muscular man Quill recognized as the mysterious contractor Marco DeMarco (whose presence Quill couldn’t account for, unless Axminster Stoker had decided to inflict his Total Quality Management theories on the construction business, too), wriggled her shoulders, tossed the jeweled earrings, and retrieved the bit of fish from her décolletage.

  “Huh,” said Hedrick. “She usually gets someone to help her. This is a pretty dead burg.”

  “Help her get food out of her dress?” said Quill, too amazed to think of a polite way to phrase the question.

  “Yeah.” He chuckled. “Old party trick. Ma used to do it, too. Watch what she does now.”

  Carlyle tossed the bit of fish into the air, swallowed it... and died.

  CHAPTER 9

  Why Andy Bishop, Meg’s lover and Hemlock Falls’ only physician, wasn’t at the party, Quill didn’t know. But he told her, later, nothing could have saved Carlyle once she’d ingested the poison. At the time, watching it, Quill was stretched to breaking point, waiting for help, and helpless.

  It wasn’t a pretty death, or an easy one. The worst was her terrified eyes. Carlyle’s eyes were to haunt Quill’s dreams for years. The poison was merciless in its attack, trailing agony and awareness in its wake. DeMarco and Myles, the strongest men there, held Carlyle down, until whatever had poisoned her became stronger than all three of them. The convulsions tore her hands and feet from their grip, arcing her body backward until her head touched her heels. At the end, a terrible rictus stretched her mouth wide, exposing the perfect teeth in the grin of a year-old corpse.

  And it took forever.

  “Twenty-seven minutes,” said Quill, on her balcony, after the body had been taken and the guests had gone home.

  Georgia sighed. “Who timed it, for goodness’ sake?”

  “Myles. It’s automatic, I guess.”

  Meg, silent, refilled her brandy glass, and lit a forbidden cigarette.

  “I am glad I didn’t see it,” said Georgia forcefully. “Doesn’t sound like this detective stuff is as much fun as I thought. So what do we do now?”

  “Forget it,” said Quill. “Leave it to the experts.”

  “Forget it? Do you know who is in my kitchen right now?” Meg demanded huskily. She stubbed the cigarette out and threw it over the balcony. “Right now? A forensics team. A real one. Going over that damn tuna. They’ve closed me down, Quill.”

  “It’s just until they’ve bagged everything and sent it off to the lab.”

  “What are we going to do about breakfast? Lunch? About all the people who’ll check out? What about Hed-f rick? What his newspaper doesn’t do to the reputation of this Inn, his lawyers will.”

  “But what could have killed her?” said Georgia. “There’s no food poisoning that acts like that, is there? I mean, there’s no way that it could be your cooking, Meg. Hell, you can keep on feeding me, and I’ll sit outside with a sign around my neck. ‘Get well-nourished here.’ “ She patted her ample stomach and tried a chuckle that died in the silence. Below them the sounds of the evidence team grimly at work in the kitchen floated across the air.

  “Andy did say food poisoning doesn’t act so quickly,” said Quill. “Botulism takes thirty-six to seventy-two hours. Salmonella six to twenty-four.”

  “Fugu is that fast,” said Meg.

  “Fugu?” Georgia set her brandy glass on the table with a click. “I know what that is. From the Kipling’s trip to Japan. It’s a poisonous fish liver.”

  “And it’s a neurotoxin. One of the deadliest.” Meg kicked the table leg.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” said Quill. “How in the world could the liver of a Japanese fish get into your sushi?”

  “In the tuna,” said Meg glumly. “I told you. That’s why those idiots underneath us are going through my kitchen.”

  “You mean to tell me you can’t tell fugu liver from tuna filets?”

  “Well, of course I can. But it might have gotten mixed up in the shipment, somehow, and been removed, leaving a few drops of fluid. Even a little touch is deadly. It’s nasty stuff.”

  “That seems truly unlikely.”

  “The alternative doesn’t make sense either, does it?” asked Georgia. “That someone carried it with him—or her—and deliberately introduced it into the sushi.”

  “If it was the sushi,” said Quill absently.

  “What else could it have been other than the sushi!” Meg’s voice was thick with tears. “And I made it.” Quill put her hand out and closed it over her sister’s wrist. “I suppose we should be celebrating the fact that I didn’t kill half the population of Hemlock Falls.”

  “Maybe somebody wanted to bump off the ‘voluptuous slut.’ “ Georgia’s chuckle sounded again, a little more confidence in it.

  “The what?!”

  “I told Georgia that’s what I was thinking about her,” said Quill. “I felt awful about it.”

  “Confession’s good for the soul,” said Georgia comfortably. “And I told you then and I’ll tell you now, the fact that she may have been murdered doesn’t change her character. As a matter of fact, it’s probably why she was murdered: her character.”

  “Murder!” said Meg with scorn. “It’s a pretty damn inefficient way of murder. There is no guarantee that Carlyle herself was going to eat that sushi. I prepared it in advance—which you’re not supposed to do, but I was too nervous to do it in front of Mr. Sakura and his son—and it was sitting out on the buffet for at least twenty minutes before Carlyle popped it into her mouth. And several other people had tried it before that. I counted. I made three dozen pieces, and there were twenty-two left on the platter. I found six half-eaten pieces in the potted rosebushes by the lounge chairs. Some of them were wrapped in napkins. They all had bites taken out of them.”

  “People trying it on a dare, I suppose,” said Georgia. “Did you turn those over to the police for testing?”

  “Yeah.” Meg ran her hands through her hair. “I just don’t understand it.”

  “Let’s do this the logical way,” suggested Georgia. “Who served her the sushi?”

  “Somebody said she picked it off the tray herself.” Quill shuddered. “That was a long twenty-seven minutes. Half the crowd was asking questions and the other half...”

  “The other half, what?” asked Georgia.

  “Just watching.”

  “Oh, God. People.”

  “Somebody else—one of the men—said that she didn’t eat it ri
ght away. She held it for a while, toying with it, then flipped it into the air. DeMarco said she was trying to catch it with her mouth. It slipped down the front of her dress. I was watching from across the room with her brother, and I saw her dig it out and try again. She caught it the second time.”

  “She didn’t drop it on the floor, and maybe someone picked it up for her?” Georgia suggested.

  “Nope. Not that I saw, at least. Maybe someone else would know.”

  “And nobody handed it to her.”

  “That’s what they said.”

  “Could she have picked it up from a separate plate? Was it off the platter that everyone else ate from?”

  “Georgia, I don’t know! I assume so.”

  “Sorry, sorry. Just trying to get to the bottom of this. I can’t believe it’s Meg’s fault. I mean, it has to be deliberate. With her mother murdered not one day ago? There’s a pattern here, ladies.”

  Quill sensed Meg’s muscles relax a little.

  “That’s true, isn’t it?” Meg said. “And nobody’s accusing me of smacking Louisa over the head with a hammer and throwing her into the river to drown.”

  “They most certainly are not.” Georgia was empathetic. “Now. I think we should make a list of the people who were both in Louisa’s vicinity and near Carlyle at the time she ate that stuff.”

  “I still don’t see how the poison could have gotten on her piece, and not on other pieces,” said Meg stubbornly.

  “Maybe someone had a squirt gun. Or a teeny-tiny dart in a blowgun. Maybe someone next to her poisoned her at the same time she ate the fish. So it might not have been the sushi at all. Did you see anyone touch her, Quill?”

  “I wasn’t paying close attention,” Quill said. “But there were a lot of guys standing around her. And she was the sort of person who invited touching.”

  “Now we’re cooking with gas.” Georgia heaved herself to her feet. “You have a pencil and paper around here?”

  “Sure. Near the phone in the living room.”

  “I’ll be right back.” She stumped heavily into the living room, closing the French doors behind her.

  Meg looked at Quill. “Teeny-tiny blowgun?”

  “She’s pretty neat, isn’t she?”

  Meg nodded.

  “She’s right, you know, Meg. It probably wasn’t the sushi.”

  Meg’s face lightened.

  “Here we are, ladies. Now.” Georgia returned and settled herself with a groan in her chair. “Who was within spitting distance of the late, unlamented deceased?”

  “Spitting distance?” said Quill doubtfully. “Wait a second.” She closed her eyes, imagining that she was going to paint the scene. Carlyle stood in the center of a group of admiring men, the thin black strap of her dress slipping off one tanned shoulder. Marco DeMarco stood nearest; to his left were Elmer Henry and Pete Peterson. To Carlyle’s right was Sakura Toshiro, and behind him, a faithful shadow, Mr. Motoyama, a tray with a hot towel in his hands. The other figures were faceless. Quill opened her eyes. “I can’t see everything.”

  “Draw it,” suggested Georgia.

  “Draw it?”

  “You’re an artist. Your fingers will remember what your brain doesn’t. Draw it.”

  “I need my sketch pad.”

  “I’ll get it.” Meg darted inside and was back in a few seconds. “I’ve got the graphite pencil, too.”

  “Great. Now here’s Carlyle, and yes, of course, Jerzey Paulovich.” Quill set the scene in a few quick strokes. “And here—good grief. Harvey Bozzel. And Howie. And Marge Schmidt. And Lila Fairbanks.”

  “And who are Harvey, Marge, and Howie when they’re at home?” asked Georgia.

  “Howie’s town attorney. Harvey’s our local advertising guy. Marge is one of the richest women in Hemlock Falls.”

  Georgia took the drawing pad and cocked her head. “Then she can afford not to wear a bowling jacket to a posh party. Big women like me should pay attention to clothes.”

  “Marge always wears a bowling jacket.”

  “Avid bowler, is she?”

  “Well, no,” Quill admitted. “She just likes bowling jackets.”

  “I love Hemlock Falls! Go on, Quill. Are these people connected in any way?”

  “Oh, yes, all of them are. With the mini-mall project.?’

  “Well, well, well, well, well. Now we’re getting somewhere, ladies. And who among this group was at the mini-mall site two days ago when Louisa died?”

  Frowning, Quill flipped to a new page in the sketch pad and wrote the names down. “Everyone except DeMarco. I think Myles told me he was in San Francisco checking on a shipment of leach-line piping.”

  “Next question, ladies, would seem to be, who’d have access to fugu?”

  “The Sakuras,” said Meg. “Naturally.”

  “Why would Mr. Sakura want to dispose of Carlyle? He hadn’t even met her before this evening, had he? You might as well suggest that / had a motive.”

  “The mini-mall project?” Meg suggested. “You said he was interested in it, Quill.”

  “The mini-mall project is too small, unless it turns out to be the site of a proposed government installation or a silver mine, and worth millions. And I really doubt that, don’t you?” said Quill. “Ken told me his father was interested in buying it as a sort of hobby. That would give Mr. Sakura a motive if he thought the stories in the Trumpet! might wreck the mall’s success, but it’s a really, really weak one. The motives are much stronger for the people who want to sell it to him.”

  “Your mayor?”

  “And Harvey. And Marge. They’re all big investors,” said Meg. “But then, we are, too, which puts us right back to suspecting me and my kitchen.”

  “It doesn’t!” said Georgia forcefully. “Put that right out of your head. Neither you nor Quill was near the lady when she bought the farm.”

  “Bought the farm?” said Quill, bemused. “You know something ...” She trailed off. She sketched a tall, shambling blond male in a badly fitting sports coat. “Hedrick went over to the buffet to get a plate of food while I waited to take him down to the gazebo.”

  “The gazebo?” Meg smiled. “So you did decide on seduction to get his jacket off.”

  “I did not! I was hunting for Lyle Fairbanks. I thought that he and the Kiplings would be pleased to have a newspaper article about the group, and I was setting up an interview. I figured it was a safe topic, since even Hedrick couldn’t write a nasty article about a fan group for a poet.”

  “Hedrick,” mused Georgia. “Look at all the money he’d inherit with his mother and sister gone.”

  “Great minds think alike. It’s remotely possible that he could have carried the poison in his jacket—it was bulging with all sorts of stuff, by the way.”

  “Did you get the goods book?” asked Meg.

  “No, Meg, with a woman dying at my feet, I did not have time to rifle her brother’s pockets for the goods book. Anyway, he could have carried the poison over, dropped it on her sushi while no one was looking, and skittered back to me with no one the wiser. There was an awful crowd around her.”

  “So we add Horrible Hedrick to the suspect list.” Meg’s color was returning, and the animation was back in her face. “Okay. I like this.” She turned to Georgia. “What do we do next?”

  “We’re getting closer to who—but we’re just guessing as to the means. Fugu seems very unlikely to me. It could have been something else entirely. Cyanide.”

  “No bitter almond smell, though,” said Quill. “I always thought that cyanide poisoning was accompanied by a smell of bitter almonds.”

  “The ‘how’ is important,” Georgia said decisively, “because it has an impact on the ‘who.’ “

  The phone rang inside Quill’s rooms. She got up, took the call, and came back. Meg looked at her face. “What?!”

  “That was Andy. He’s sending in a preliminary cause of death. By a naturally occurring neurotoxin ingested through the fish.”
/>   Meg closed her eyes. “Did he ask to speak to me?”

  “His preliminary guess is that it was on the sushi. He’s sent all of it off to be tested. It’ll take a few weeks. So we’re back to square one. And Meggie, we’re going to have to keep the kitchen closed for a few days. Just until a sweep for the poison is made.”

  “He didn’t ask to speak to me.”

  “I think he’s afraid you’d be upset with him, Meg.”

  “Of course I’m upset with him! I’m thoroughly pissed off. I know he’s just doing his job. Any of us here would have done the same thing. But he could have told me himself.”

  “You know men and how they hate fuss,” said Georgia. “They just refuse to understand that if you do understand you still need to be able to whack them around a little bit.”

  “Makes sense to me,” said Meg.

  “Try telling any of ‘em that. Doug was the same way. Rather leave town for a few days than talk it out.”

  “Myles, too,” said Quill, suddenly aware that this was a small part of her whole anxiety about their possible future together. “There’s too much that men refuse to discuss.”

  “It’s genetic.” Georgia was firm. “Probably accompanies testosterone in the endocrine system.”

  “Or Andy could just be putting his job first, and me second,” said Meg, with a touch of bitterness.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Georgia. “It’s just a preliminary, right? He’s being careful. All those medical guys are too careful. It was not your cooking, Meg. Andy, bless his heart, and not that I’ve ever met him, loves you too much to be personally present when he causes you pain. Everything is going to be all right. I feel it in my bones. And believe me, at my size, the feeling has to be pretty strong to get all the way to my bones.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” said Meg. “Earlier today you mentioned something about quitting?” She hummed a few bars of “Detroit City” in an angry way and tossed off her brandy. Her lips were tight. “That’s it for me. I’m going to bed.”

  “There’s one good thing about the big kitchen being closed,” said Georgia. “It’s going to give us lots of time to conduct a proper investigation. We’ll get this cleared up, Meg, see if we won’t.” She heaved herself to her feet. “I’ll see you two in the morning? At breakfast? They aren’t going to stop you cooking for an old friend, are they?”