Familiar Friend

by Cristina Sumners

  CHAPTER 13

  You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely, Tom. You can carve it in granite. It was Tracy’s drink. Jamie got it by mistake, because he told her she’d had enough to drink already so he’d take it. Actually, she’d already decided she’d had enough before he got there, she was standing there holding it—” Kathryn put a hand over her eyes for a moment and took a shaky breath. “It might have been her.”

  “If she thought she’d had enough, why’d she have a drink?”

  “Well, there was this odd thing with Crystal, I didn’t really understand it. I was talking to Tracy and she said she’d had enough to drink, then along comes Crystal and she hands Tracy a drink and says, ‘I think this must be yours,’ or something like that and Tracy says yes. Now, I find it hard to picture Crystal going to fetch a drink for Tracy, but I suppose somebody might have mixed a drink for Tracy and handed it to Crystal and said would you take this to Tracy.”

  “Obviously I’ll have to talk to Crystal. So Tracy accepted the drink even though she had no intention of drinking any more?”

  “Well, it was her glass.”

  “Her glass?”

  “The one she’d been drinking out of all evening. The MacDonalds have a multiple set of terribly tacky highball glasses based on the pink elephant theme. There are green giraffes and orange zebras and purple monkeys and such. Hideous, but I guess it helps people keep from getting their drinks mixed up. I was drinking out of a purple monkey. Tracy was drinking out of an orange zebra. Anyway, it was her glass. It had her drink in it, a black Russian; it had obviously been made for her, so she took it. What else could she do? Then she stood there, not drinking it, till Jamie came along and drank it for her.” Kathryn shuddered and to her horror started to cry. “Shit!” she exclaimed, digging in her purse for tissues. “I don’t even like the man and I’m actually glad he’s dead.”

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” said Tom comfortingly. “It’s just shock. Have some coffee. Or water.”

  Kathryn opted for water, knowing she needed to rehydrate herself after three Scotches. They were upstairs in the MacDonalds’ largest spare bedroom, which fortunately had a table and space for three chairs, one each for Tom, Sergeant Pursley, and whoever was being questioned. Upon discovering that the victim had died eighteen inches from Kathryn’s left foot, they had started with her, after telling everyone else at the party to remain downstairs until they were summoned.

  Kathryn, with shaking hands, poured a glass of water from a pitcher provided by Mrs. MacDonald, even in catastrophe the perfect hostess; next to the water pitcher there was a large thermos of coffee and it was from this that Tom and Sergeant Pursley were taking comfort.

  After gulping down half a glass, Kathryn looked at Tom. “Can we get through the rest of this? I really want to get back to Tracy.”

  “Sure. Except—well, you realize Tracy is the next person—?”

  “Oh. Of course. Well, go ahead.”

  Bit by bit they extracted from her everything she had observed at the party, paying particular attention to everyone’s movements during the twenty minutes prior to Jamie Newman’s death. Kathryn made a most dismaying discovery. She was not very observant.

  She could remember conversations. She could remember nuances. She could remember psychological observations. But she could not remember who was standing where, talking to whom, when.

  “Damn!” she cried, pounding the table with the palm of her hand. “I am bloody useless! I can’t remember anything!”

  Tom regarded her across the table in a tangle of mixed emotions, the chief of which was surprise: his brilliant friend couldn’t do what he could do blindfolded and half-asleep. Among the other emotions were disappointment (because he needed every good witness he could get) and unholy glee (there was something he was better at than Kathryn).

  He assured her it didn’t matter, that the main thing was that she had given them a clear picture of the scene when Jamie had died. Now, would she go downstairs and send Tracy up?

  “And in case anybody asks, we’re here for how long?” she asked.

  “Oh, God,” Tom groaned. “Probably the rest of the night. And what I’m gonna do about His Majesty down there I don’t know.”

  “Well, I may not have noticed anything else, but I think you might be able to establish that Chacón never left that chair the whole time, and besides, he doesn’t have anything to do with our local scandal, does he, so maybe you could at least cut him loose.”

  “That’s an idea.” Tom got to his feet and followed Kathryn downstairs. The living room was a carpet of people; the guests were now sitting on the floor talking in nervous murmurs, instead of standing and shouting as they had been prior to the disaster. Tom’s entrance produced a sensation, voices clamoring to know what was happening, when they might be allowed to go home, but no voice was more magnificently demanding than that of the Nobel Laureate.

  “Señor!” he boomed. “You are the man in charge?”

  “I am,” Tom replied equably.

  “When will it be permitted that I can leave?”

  “Maybe we can arrange that now. All of you here,” Tom turned his head to address everyone else in the room. “I understand that Mr. Chacón arrived here, went to that chair, sat in it, and never moved from it until Jamie Newman died, right?”

  There was a chorus of agreement.

  “His drinks and food were brought to him?” Another chorus of agreement. “He never left the chair to go to the bathroom?” A chorus of no’s. “Or for any other reason?” Another chorus of no’s.

  “All right, Mr. Chacón, you can go. In view of your, uh, standing in the, uh, international, uh, community, I’d like to apologize for the inconvenience, and one of our squad cars will take you back to your hotel.”

  The Great Man arose, Tom swore afterwards, in slow motion. He extended his left hand. An awestruck student delicately placed the collar of his cape in it. There was a slow, smooth movement of hands on velvet and then suddenly, with a practiced flourish, the great black cape swirled through the air and settled onto the shoulders of the Magnificent One. He walked out of the MacDonalds’ living room, and the students huddled on the floor parted before him like the Red Sea before the Israelites.

  As the front door closed behind him, Tom turned back to the living room. “Right,” he said. “Tracy?”

  Kathryn had been unable to find Tracy in the crowd. She saw her now, rising, white-faced, from a corner, where Patrick had been guarding her like a baby chick. He was holding her by one arm. It seemed to Kathryn that that was not nearly enough support.

  “Tom,” she pleaded urgently. “Let me come with her.”

  “Since when are you a cop? And what do you think I am, a monster?”

  Patrick had delivered Tracy to the door of the living room, walking with his left arm around her shoulders and firmly gripping her right hand in his.

  Tom reached out and took Tracy’s hand in both of his, more as if she were his daughter than a witness. “Tracy? I’m so sorry about this. If you’ll just come this way—” He led her into the front hall and up the stairs.

  Kathryn had to admit she was impressed by this avuncular performance. “How’s she doing?” she asked Patrick as they stood with their back to the living room wall conversing in near whispers.

  “As well as can be expected under the circumstances. And the circumstances, as you very well know, are twofold. One, her husband has just dropped dead right in front of her. And two—”

  “It was her drink.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Somebody poisoned Tracy’s drink.” Kathryn shook her head in disbelief. “But who on earth would want to kill Tracy? It must have got into her drink by mistake.”

  “It wasn’t a mistake,” Patrick averred grimly.

  Kathryn stared at him. “How do you know?”

  “Well, this is kind of embarrassing.”

  “For God’s sake, Patrick, Jamie’s dead and you’re saying somebody’s
trying to kill Tracy and you’re embarrassed?”

  “You’re right. Well, this is not the sort of thing a gentleman normally discusses with his date, but under the circs, here goes. Today I most inconveniently became afflicted with—how shall I put this delicately? An intestinal disorder.” He paused.

  “Oh, I see. I do remember you dashed off to the gents after the lecture with rather indecent haste.”

  “Exactly. Well, back to Tracy’s drink. I mixed it myself, but no sooner was I finished with it than I had another of my damn attacks and I really had no choice at all but to plunk her drink down on the sideboard in the dining room and beat a hasty retreat upstairs to the facilities.”

  “All right, but why didn’t you take it to her when you came back down again?”

  “When I came back down it was nearly ten minutes later—sorry to afflict you with that unsavory detail—and when I looked on the sideboard her drink was gone. Obviously somebody else had taken it to her, so I went into the living room to have a word with Jamie. You’ll remember that, I pulled him away from a conversation with you.”

  This was precisely the sort of thing Kathryn had just discovered she didn’t remember, but she took Patrick’s word for it. “So, when you mixed Tracy’s drink, were you by chance chatting up a tall blonde named Crystal Montoya? Because that’s who brought Tracy her drink.”

  Patrick was looking embarrassed again. “Actually, not chatting up so much as showing off for; the rest of the audience consisted mostly of my regulars, plus a bunch of undergraduates in whom I was singularly uninterested.”

  Enlightenment dawned on Kathryn. “You were doing Professor What’s-his-name?”

  “Witherspoon, yes.”

  Kathryn felt the blood in her veins grow chill. “Patrick, you stood in front of a room full of people making a huge song and dance about mixing a drink, and this time, to ring some changes on it, you introduced the information of who the drink was for?”

  Patrick hung his head miserably and ran his hands through his frizzy hair. “I did better than that,” he confessed. “And you see here, boys and girls, that this glass has on it an orange zebra, that is, a zebra that is orange, which is a most peculiar color for a zebra, don’t you see, one might almost say a unique color for a zebra, but lo! Watch what happens when we fill the glass with the preferred drink of Ms. Tracy Newman, that is to say, vodka and Kahlua! The black liquid rises, and behold, the black stripes of the zebra join with it, they join with it, boys and girls! Now what might Ms. Tracy Newman make of the odd pattern of floating, meaningless orange stripes, blah blah blah.”

  Kathryn stared at him, finding no words.

  Patrick folded his legs under him and slid down the wall, covering his face with his hands. “Then I put the goddamn glass down and left the room for ten minutes and killed my best friend.” His shoulders began to shake.

  Kathryn sank down beside him and wrapped her arms around him and held tight. She reflected that she seemed to be doing a lot of this lately. The results, she supposed, of an epidemic of murder. She knew better than to try to reason with the unreasonable guilt of Patrick’s last statement. One does not attempt to talk people out of their emotions. So she held him in silence, her heart praying for him, her mind racing.

  When she had witnessed the Witherspoon act previously all the people in the dining room had been focused on Patrick’s every word and move. It would have been the same when he was mixing Tracy’s black Russian; the only question was who had been in the room at the time. Tom would be able to put that together fairly easily; each person there would give a list of everybody else they thought was there. Nobody would get it right, but when Tom put them all together and ironed out the kinks, he would get an accurate list.

  Then he would have to figure out who would have had the opportunity to pass by the sideboard and drop something in Tracy’s drink before Crystal picked it up to take it out to Tracy on the porch. And of course Crystal herself would have to be considered as one of the people with opportunity.

  Kathryn wondered what the poison had been; she wondered if Tom would tell her if she asked. She decided not to ask; she’d already been shut out once when she’d asked about why Blaine’s body had been left in the St. Margaret’s driveway. She hadn’t liked the feeling that gave her. She didn’t want to give Tom the opportunity to give her that feeling again.

  But while all these musings buzzed in her brain like flies, the one big question flashed like a neon sign: Why, why, why would anybody want to kill Tracy?

  And the answer came back: Since the person who wanted her dead was at this party, among the people Kathryn had jokingly called the usual suspects, that person was the killer of Mason Blaine. Tracy had seen something that night in the darkness on the grounds of St. Margaret’s, something she didn’t remember, something of which she did not realize the significance. She had not yet told the police. And the killer was trying desperately to silence her before she did.

  Oh, this is rubbish, Kathryn thought. I’ve been watching too many TV cop shows.

  She was so lost in her thoughts that she jumped when she heard Tom’s voice at the door. “Kathryn?”

  She looked up to see Tom standing there beside Tracy, who was still looking quite pale but at least seemed to be able to stand without support. Kathryn released her hold on Patrick and leapt up from the floor; he was only a second behind her.

  As Kathryn held Tracy in a crushing embrace, and Patrick stood beside them patting Tracy on the shoulder, Tom said quietly to Kathryn, “We’re going to let you take Tracy home now. Actually, when I say ‘home’ I suggest you take her to your house. Would that be O.K.?”

  Kathryn nodded. “I had already decided on that.”

  “We’re going to send you in a squad car. And Kathryn?”

  “Yes?”

  “We’re going to put a guard on the house. On Tracy. Do you understand?”

  “I absolutely understand.”

  “You’ll help us? Make sure she doesn’t do anything foolish? Like try to go out unescorted or anything?”

  “Count on me.” The look she gave him as she said this made it unnecessary for her to say more than those three words.

  He gave her a little smile. “I will.” He opened the front door. “Rossi!” he called. “Take these ladies to Alexander Street.” And he hustled them out the door before they had a chance to say good-night to Patrick, who stood in the doorway of the living room looking rather bereft.

  Tom stepped past him and pronounced in a clear voice: “Crystal Montoya.”

  CHAPTER 14

  There’s no mystery about it,” Crystal said coolly. “I was in the dining room talking to my hostess. I had gone in there a few minutes previously to get myself a drink and she cornered me. She is a very boring woman and I couldn’t get away from her. I had met some of the graduate students during the course of the evening and I understand that it is a standing joke that she can bring any conversation around to the weather within five minutes. Sure enough, five minutes later she was talking about the weather. I was looking around for a way to escape when a young man came in, tall with frizzy hair. I hadn’t met him, but from his age I would guess he was one of the graduate students. He began to mix a drink, a black Russian, for Tracy Newman, in the most extraordinary, extravagant style. It was a performance, obviously an imitation of somebody that the others were familiar with, presumably a teacher in the Spanish Department. I wouldn’t know. Mrs. MacDonald seemed a bit embarrassed by this, so we moved into the corner of the dining room away from the fuss so she wouldn’t have to listen to it. Then, thank God, she decided she needed to check on something in the kitchen, so she went off in that direction. Shortly after that the performance ended, and I started talking to the husband of one of the Spanish faculty. His name was Charles. After a few minutes our conversation came to an end and I decided to go out onto the porch. On my way I passed the sideboard. I looked down and there was Tracy’s drink. There was no mistaking it: a black Russian in a glass with an
orange zebra on it. That boy with the frizzy hair had made a big production about describing it when he was mixing it, the whole room knew it. I don’t know why he’d made it and then not taken it to her, but I was pretty sure I had seen Tracy out on the porch earlier, so I picked up the drink and took it out to her.”

  Tom stared at Crystal with something like dread. “What do you mean, ‘a big production,’ and ‘the whole room knew it’?”

  “Exactly what I said. Everybody in the whole room was watching him while he mixed it, so everybody in the whole room knew it was Tracy’s drink. I wasn’t the only one.”

  Oh, shit shit shit shit shit. “O.K., Crystal, who else was in the room? That you can name or describe?”

  “Well, Mrs. MacDonald, obviously. And that man Charles. A member of the faculty named Edward, last name Drew, I think. An unkempt young man named Carlos who discovered I spoke Spanish and attempted to talk to me but when he began blathering on about the blood of the peasants I moved on. Very briefly there was a girl with flaming red hair…”

  Shit shit shit shit, thought Tom again. Too damn many of them.

  “Also,” Crystal continued, “a very beautiful young man who spoke perfect Castilian Spanish; his name was José. He was attempting to calm Carlos down, but without success. I left the two of them together to speak to Charles.”

  “You said a minute ago you started talking to Charles just after you stopped talking to Mrs. MacDonald.”

  “Did I?” Crystal shrugged, unconcerned. “You know how it is at this kind of party. You mill around talking to people. You don’t remember what order you meet them in.”

  “O.K. Can you remember anybody else in the dining room when Tracy’s drink was being made? Anybody you can name, or who was distinctive enough you can describe them?”

  “Well, there was a young woman with long, ash-blond hair. I think you would describe her as fairly pretty. But most of the people here are Spanish Department, so I wouldn’t have any reason to know them.”