A Puree of Poison

by Claudia Bishop

  “That would be very, very kind of you, Eugene. But you’re a professional, and I couldn’t possibly impose on you. We seemed to have solved the problem. Temporarily at least. But I’d love a cup of coffee. Maybe you could give me some suggestions on preventive maintenance.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Quill received what she was sure was excellent, although irrelevant, advice on the frequency of pumping the tank (yearly, given her usage), the cost of a replacement system, the virtues of sewers (None. He was a leach field man all the way), and desirability of plastic pipe over iron. The coffee, from a much battered Mr. Coffee located in the trailer the men used as construction headquarters, was strong, sweet, and curiously comforting.

  “My goodness,” said Quill, after Eugene had exhausted his opinions on artificial bacteria for rapid decomposition. “Eugene? I couldn’t help but overhear that you were around the day Mrs. Conway was killed.”

  “Oh, yeah. Jeez. Quite something, wasn’t it.” He moved a little closer.

  “Terrible,” Quill agreed. “And then her daughter, last evening.”

  “Yeah! I heard that! Man!” He put a tentative hand on her knee. He smelled of damp earth. Quill was perched precariously on an orange plastic chair; she edged back as unobtrusively as possible. His eyes were eager. “You saw it?”

  “No. No, I didn’t. I was in the kitchen seeing to an order.”

  “I thought you worked up at the Inn. A waitress, are you?”

  “That, and in charge of the plumbing system,” said Quill amiably. “Anyway, by the time I got there, the ambulance had come to take the body away. I’m sorry,” she lied, “to have missed it. I don’t suppose you were, um, in on it, here. That day her mother was killed?”

  “Well.” He drew a deep breath. “Not really. No, I can’t say as I saw anything. Although I did see her, of course, before she went into the woods. And I saw the argument with that Japanese fella. Crazy around here, Wednesday. Crazy vibrations.” He grinned. “Maybe that’s what cracked my tank.”

  “But you noticed Mrs. Conway.”

  “Hell, who wouldn’t of, looking like that.”

  “Was she around here very long?”

  “Mmm. Sheriff asked me the same thing. She was taking pictures, I remember that. Quite a lot of them.”

  “Of anything in particular?” asked Quill. Her heart went a little faster and she set the coffee mug on the metal drafting table.

  “People more than things, really. She took a picture of that Japanese guy, which he didn’t like by a long shot, and that big shot who’s his boss. He was here looking for Marco, and was some kind of teed off when he wasn’t here.”

  “Mr. Sakura was looking for Mr. DeMarco?”

  “Yeah. Marc said he’s some kind of big shot—or was— he’s retired now. So instead of being worth maybe a billion dollars, he’s worth half a billion.”

  “And she took other pictures?”

  “Of the hole, here, for the tank. And some of the guys on the big wheels.”

  “Pardon?”

  “The backhoes and the dozers. And then a bunch of other people came up in a van, and she was taking pictures of them and that one guy, yeah, I remember that one guy. Jeez!”

  “She got into an argument with him?”

  “Heck no, I did. Little short son of a bitch looked like he had a ramrod up his ass. Oh. Sorry. Anyway, I complained to Marc. That’s just Stoke,’ he said. Doesn’t mean any harm.”

  “You must have run into Mr. Stoker.”

  “Wanted to know if I had some kind paperwork for how often I finished my work on time. What is he, from the government?” Eugene snorted. “I’m telling you, those sons of guns from the inspection offices, they’ll drive a good man to drink in no time. I... hey!” He gave a patently artificial start of surprise. “Speaking of drink. You wouldn’t want to stop by a little place I found in town for a drink, say, after quitting time here?”

  “Gene. Thanks. But I have to work this evening.”

  “You do, hah? Tough boss?”

  “Really tough. You know how it is.”

  “I do. It’s why I went into business as a consulting engineer. You ought to think about, miss ... I didn’t get your name. Marc out there gets kind of forgetful about those things.”

  “My name’s Sarah.” She stood up carefully in the confined space and extended her hand. “I really enjoyed our talk. It’s been tremendously helpful. I’ll definitely know what to do when my toilets back up again.”

  “We could pace off the leach field if you wanted to get an idea of how much space your boss would need for a good new system. You’d be amazed at how those new bacteria save on line space.”

  “I would love to.” Quill looked at her watch. “But it’s lunchtime, and I have get to the Hemlock Hometown Diner by twelve o’clock.”

  He held her hand warmly. “You’re not carrying two jobs, are you? Being a waitress at that Inn’s got to be tough enough.”

  Quill disengaged herself and stood up. The trailer was very small, and she brushed against him inadvertently.

  “Boy, Eugene, doesn’t everyone have more than one job?”

  “Guess that’s the brush-off,” he said. “Can’t say as I blame you folks. Course, you might have the wrong idea about me. I never served hard time, myself.”

  “Hard time?”

  “Just a little fiddling with some checks. Some of the guys on the big wheels, you want to stay away from them. Couple of assaults, one or two rapes.”

  “You mean the work crew’s made up of ex-cons?”

  “You didn’t know?” His muddy brown eyes were sly. “Sure thing. That’s why Marco there can get us so cheap.” He opened the door to the outside with an elaborate regard for the space between them.

  “It’s not that, Eugene.” Quill, flustered, eased herself down the rickety metal steps. “I’d be glad to go out for a drink with you. It’s just that I’m already involved....”

  Eugene slammed the door shut. Quill, thoughtful over this new piece of evidence, drove slowly down the hill to the emergency Chamber of Commerce meeting.

  CHAPTER 11

  “You see any sign of Hedrick Conway yet?” Elmer Henry directed a depressed whisper fragrant with meat loaf into Quill’s left ear. They were crowded into Marge Schmidt’s and Betty Hall’s Hemlock Hometown Diner! (Fine Food and Fast) with twenty of the thirty-six members of the Chamber of Commerce. Elmer glanced from side to side and added with an attempt at his usual ebullience, “I told’m one o’clock. Said all we was going to have was lunch, and he said he didn’t have time to eat but wanted to address the Chamber, that’s what he said, address the Chamber at this emergency meeting, so I said fine, after lunch then, one o’clock. But we got a couple of things I want to talk about before he gets here.”

  Quill, wondering if Hedrick had discovered that the work crew at the mall site was composed of—what should she call them, the formerly incarcerated?—nodded in an abstracted way.

  “Mr. Big Bucks couldn’t be here in time for lunch?” demanded Marge Schmidt. “I ordered the Blue Plate for ‘im, and he’d better fork over the three ninety-eight like the rest of you done. What is he, cash-short paying for all them funerals?”

  “Cash-short?” said Mayor Henry with a short, scornful laugh. “Oh, he can afford to pay for lunches he don’t eat, I guess. No skin off the Conway nose, no sir. Got money to burn, Hedrick does. That’s what he said to me, anyways, last night. By the way, Quill, good party, except for the murder of course.”

  There was a murmur of agreement and a general atmosphere of “thanks.” John Raintree, on Quill’s left, gave her a nudge and a wink.

  “Anyways,” the mayor resumed with gloomy relish, “he goes and tells me the family motto. ‘Just send me the bill, Al,’ he says to me. ‘That’s the Conway motto, just send me the bill.’ “

  “Bill for what?” asked Marge with a disapproving air. She repeated, “All them funerals?” Marge, whose build rivaled that of one of the smaller
sumo wrestlers, and whose jaw was remarkable for its resemblance to the rockier promontories of Hemlock Gorge, was impressive in disapproval. And as senior partner in her diner and one of the wealthier citizens in town, there was nothing like fiscal improvidence to incur her contempt. “And why’d he call you ‘Al?’ Your name’s Elmer.”

  “Not ‘AF—’El.’ Calls Harvey Bozzel ‘Har,’ Esther West ‘Es.’ Probably call you ‘Mar.’ “

  “I’d like to see him try,” said Marge with a notable air of belligerence. Then back to the issue, “Bill for what?”

  “I suppose the sheriff ‘ll be ‘Sher’ or ‘Sherry,’ ” said Elmer, not looking at Quill. “Cain’t see Myles puttin’ up with that.”

  “Quill don’t give a hang what Hedrick Conway calls Sheriff McHale,” said Marge with all the subtlety of the Sherman tank she resembled. “Least not anymore.” Quill, who had wrongly assumed for months that public interest in her love life would cease to be a topic of interest after a suitable period, cut a piece of lemon pie carefully apart with her fork and said nothing. “ ‘Course maybe Miriam Doncaster was right and she did see you two over to the Hilton in Syracuse last week.” Marge stopped in mid-sentence, her little eyes narrowed to thoughtful slits. “On the other hand, what I shoulda asked is what Miriam was doing in the Hilton Bar and Lounge at one o’clock in the morning on a Saturday, anyways.” She leveled her gaze at Quill. “She with Howie Murchison over there, or what?”

  Howie, absorbed in a sheaf of papers, looked nearsightedly around at the sound of his name.

  “No,” said Quill. Both Elmer and Marge looked at her with smug grins. “I mean ‘no,’ I have no idea who Miriam was with because I wasn’t there.”

  “Oh,” said Elmer, somewhat crestfallen. “I wonder who it was, then. Miriam was sure it was Myles. And a redhead like you, Quill. Or maybe she didn’t say it was Myles. Maybe she said it was somebody else. Who were you with at the Hilton, Quill?”

  “I wasn’t at the Hilton with anybody,” said Quill between her teeth. Quill, her feelings a little hurt that she’d put her life in jeopardy (well, it could have been in jeopardy) wasn’t in much of a mood for the mayor’s heavy-handed jocularity. She took two deep slow breaths, then said as amiably as she could, “Shouldn’t we get the meeting started, Mayor? If you want to discuss the murders with the Chamber of Commerce members before Hedrick gets here, there isn’t much time. It’s twelve-thirty.”

  “Murders?” Elmer blinked rapidly. “Oh. That. Myles is takin’ care of that, isn’t he? No, we got something a little more urgent.”

  Quill, not sure that anything was more important than solving the murders, said, “If you could tell everyone why Hedrick wants to address the meeting, it might be helpful. Then we can all be prepared.”

  “Right, right.” Elmer lumbered to his feet and whacked the mahogany gavel against its rest. There was none of the usual settling down; the silence was instant and complete. “We got a problem here, folks.”

  “I’ll say.” Harvey Bozzel leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head. “You realize the opening-day ceremonies for the mall are the day after tomorrow. The plans are going well, very well, I want to assure you folks about that, but I’m calling for action, folks, action!” He got to his feet, ready to pace impressively up and down, considered the crowded dimensions of Marge and Betty’s dining area, and sat down again. “We’ve got to put our eyes to the ground and our shoulders to the wheel—”

  “Not now, Harve.” The mayor mopped the back of his neck with a large checked handkerchief. Quill listened intently, and with some distress, to the ferocity of their conversation.

  “Yes, now!” Harvey said in an urgent undertone. “This other can wait! Until afterward. This mall opening is one of my biggest projects.” He broke off, a little teary-eyed, and raised his voice. “We’ve got to put our noses to the grindstone!”

  Quill, whose minutes pad was sticking slightly to the Formica top of Marge’s table, sketched a hunched-over Harvey with his eye on the ground, his shoulder to the wheel, and his nose to the grindstone.

  “Siddown!” the mayor hissed in a violent whisper. “We talked about this alread—I mean, I’m gonna talk to them, okay? So just shut up.”

  Harvey sank back into his seat, his face red.

  The mayor rose, and with uncharacteristic hesitancy said, “Now, folks, I got some good news for you. Harvey and Howie here know all about it already, and I know I got their support. We got a chance to get out of—that is, to sell the shares in the mini-mall to a very good buyer. A very good buyer. One of the top men in his field. But he’s put a time limit on the offer which is five o’clock tomorrow. I think we ought to discuss it before that Conway fella gets here.”

  The room erupted into loud noise, overrode by Esther West, whose correspondence course in Projecting for the Stage had clearly paid off. “Sell our shares in the mall? Why should we do that?”

  “I got my reasons,” said Elmer. “Now, we don’t aim to make a lot on this sale-—”

  “When you and Howie and Harvey put this deal together, you told us we’d make eight to twelve percent on our investment,” Esther said firmly. “Now why in heck should we give it all up?”

  Howie Murchison drummed his fingers quietly on the table. Harvey ran his finger around the collar of his neatly pressed striped shirt. Elmer swallowed hard. “I don’t know that I care to say, at this point. What I got to say is that we have a tentative offer from Mr. Sakra.”

  “Now, Howie here and I have looked this tentative offer over good. And it seems pretty decent to me.”

  Elmer named a figure. The room erupted again. Quill began to sketch a volcano with Chamber members tumbling out of the top and the mayor writhing at the bottom in hot lava.

  “That’s barely what we put into it!” shouted Norm Pasquale, the high school principal. “We’d make less than four percent on our investment. I could have made more money at Mark Anthony’s bank!”

  “Three and a half percent more, to be precise,” said Mark Anthony Jefferson, vice president of the Hemlock Savings and Loan. “Our savings rates have always been competitive. I hate to say I told you so, but—”

  “You’re still miffed because we didn’t go local for the financing,” said Marge. “Go on, Mayor.”

  “Howie here’s horsed up a short summary of what Mr. Sakra’s offering,” said Elmer. “And I think you want to take a look at it. He’s gonna pass this prospectus around.” He raised his voice over the tumult. “And you all put this stuff away the minute that newspaper fella shows up, you got it? Because that muckraking son of a gun is gonna be here any minute, and if he gets ahold of this, we’ll all be in the soup. Now, quiet! Howie? You want to take over here?”

  Quill turned to John. “Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

  John scanned the short paragraph handed to him and waited a moment before replying. “I’m not sure, but if what I think has happened has in fact happened, we’d better sell out.”

  “But our restaurant!”

  “This offer provides for the leasing of retail space. We can keep the restaurant. What’s interesting is that the lease is for a very short period of time. Put it together, Quill.”

  “Put what together?!” Quill demanded. “I don’t have the least idea what’s going on.”

  “Shh!” said Marge fiercely. “We got company.”

  The diner (a former launderette) had two large glass windows and a glass door fronting Main Street. Everyone watched as Hedrick Conway pulled his Cadillac under the park here and die! sign Marge had installed to keep access to the front door clear. He unfolded himself from behind the wheel, stood on the sidewalk and tugged at his sports coat, then looked up to see the entire Chamber staring at him through the glass. Quill, out of some obscure impulse toward courtesy, felt compelled to wave. He looked behind him, then up and down the street, and raised one pale hand in a half-hearted response. He shambled through the front door and into the diner.

  “Have a se
at, Conway.” Marge extended her foot and hooked an empty chair. Hedrick sat down and hunched forward, his large hands dangling between his knees.

  “Sorry about your ma,” said Elmer, rather diffidently, “and my condolences on your sister.”

  “Has the sheriff found out anything yet?” asked Esther.

  Hedrick opened his mouth and closed it with a mutter.

  “Nice car,” offered Harvey. “You get it locally?”

  Marge rolled her eyes.

  “Is there something we can do for you, Mr. Conway?” said Quill. “Do you need any assistance with the, um, observances?”

  “You’re kind of stuck on funerals, aren’t you?” Except for purplish smudges under his eyes, Hedrick looked much the same as he had the day before, and the day before that. Quill began to consider seriously the possibility that Hedrick had killed his own mother and sister, if only because he seemed so unaffected. “I came to cover the Chamber meeting, of course. Wanted to get some comments on this new mall coming into town.”

  “Opening ceremonies are scheduled for three o’clock, tomorrow,” said Harvey briskly. “And I’ll be happy to give you a quote on that, Hed.”

  “Hed,” thought Quill, bemused. “Hed?!”

  Harvey spoke with the gravity suitable to the occasion. “Some of the stuff we want to keep off the record until the big day, of course, but I can tell you, in strictest confidence, that we’ve extended an invitation to Helena Houndswood, the star of stage, screen, and TV—”

  “That bitch?” Marge threw her head back and hooted like a diesel truck on a downward slope. “Harve, you got about as much chance of that ol’ girl showing her face in this town again as a snowball in hell.”

  “We’ve extended an invitation,” repeated Harvey stubbornly.

  “That’s not the mall I was talking about.” Hedrick, a light in his eye Quill didn’t like at all, flipped slowly through his book. “Acting on information received, this reporter discovered that plans for a new outlet mall on Route fifteen have been finalized this morning.”