Familiar Friend

by Cristina Sumners

  “Yeah, that brings me to my next question. What are you doing here, Crystal? How’d you get invited?”

  There was a pause, and Tom saw a faint pink tinge appear on Crystal’s neck. “Well, I admit to a little manipulation here. I wanted to come to this party. You know, to be able to say I’d been to a private party for Alberto Chacón. So I called up Mrs. MacDonald and said I was a member of St. Margaret’s and I was Castilian and I was a lifelong fan of Chacón and I’d had tickets to the lecture for a year and when the party was going to be at Mason’s I was invited and then I kind of just left it hanging. Basically I was so brazen, I made it impossible for her not to invite me.”

  The Castilian chin was high and the blue eyes regarded Tom unflinchingly. It was a good story, and it sounded authentically Crystal; he had served with her long enough on the St. Margaret’s vestry to know that when she wanted something, she usually got it. But he knew she was lying. This intrigued him no end. Why lie about how you got invited to a party?

  “All right, Crystal, just one more thing. When you took Tracy Newman’s drink to her, did you stop on the way to talk to anybody, take any detours at all?”

  “No. I saw the drink, picked it up, walked out to the porch, walked up to Tracy, and handed it to her. No detours, no conversations.”

  “Well, then, Crystal. I think that’s all. You can go home now.”

  “Well, thank God for that,” she said ungraciously, then rose and left the room.

  “Chief?”

  “Yeah, Purze.”

  “I hate to sound really stupid but we’re assuming this is the same killer, right? Only this time he was aiming for Mrs. Newman?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  Tom scratched his nose. “Purze, that’s not at all stupid. That’s the big, fat, smart question of the week. And when we know why, I think we’ll know who. Meanwhile I’m going to have a little chat with Mrs. MacDonald. You stay here.”

  He found the hostess in the kitchen brewing endless pots of coffee. Her eyes were red.

  “Mrs. MacDonald, I need you to help me with something.”

  “Certainly, Chief Holder.”

  It was funny. The woman looked fluffy but she didn’t act fluffy. “I need you to tell me the name of a young man, probably a graduate student, with frizzy hair, who was doing an imitation of somebody as he mixed Tracy Newman’s drink, with the result that everybody knew it was Tracy Newman’s drink.”

  Mrs. MacDonald’s sang froid deteriorated slightly. “Oh dear. That would be Patrick Cunningham. Such a nice—”

  But Tom didn’t hear the end of it; he was headed back to the living room. He remembered a head of frizzy hair comforting Tracy Newman. “Patrick Cunningham?” he called. Sure enough, Tall Frizzy-head stood up. The young man looked like hell. “Come upstairs, please,” Tom invited, in a cordial but businesslike manner.

  Patrick threw himself into the chair Tom indicated and when Tom began, “Please state your name for the—” he exploded savagely, “My name is Patrick O’Reilly Cunningham and I live at the Graduate College and yes, it was me, I’m the stupid goddamn idiot who made it perfectly clear to a whole goddamn room full of people that here,” he mimed, pointing with his right hand to an invisible glass in his left, “right here, is Tracy Newman’s glass, so if anybody feels like coming up and putting poison in it you know right where it is.”

  “Take it easy, Mr. Cunningham,” Tom said placidly. “I can understand how you’d be upset, but there’s no point in blaming yourself. You didn’t know what was going to happen. You’re a friend of Mrs. Newman?”

  Patrick rested both his elbows on the table and sank his head into his hands, clawing his fingers through his unruly hair. “More a friend of her husband’s. We roomed together freshman year. We’ve been best friends ever since. I was best man at his wedding.”

  Jesus, thought Tom. No wonder the boy is ripping himself to shreds. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, aware of how pathetically inadequate the words were. “Now, I know this is difficult for you, but I’m sure you want to help us find out whoever did this to your friend, so pull yourself together and think. You’re in the dining room, you’re doing this routine of yours, mixing Mrs. Newman’s drink. Who was watching you? Name them. Sergeant Pursley will write down the names.”

  Dully, Patrick started reciting. “Edward and Caroline Drew. Charles Caldwell. John MacDonald. Carlos Barreda. José Espronceda y Montalbán. Valerie Powers. Jenny Hancock. Some first years I don’t know so well, one of them is named Harry something, another one is Mary or maybe Mary Ann. There was a tall blond woman, stunningly beautiful, who I don’t think has anything to do with the University.” He was silent for a moment. “That’s all I can remember.”

  “Now, could you just show me, so I can get a clear picture of it, exactly what you were doing when you were mixing this drink?”

  Patrick groaned. “Isn’t it enough to tell you that I made it utterly clear to everybody there—”

  Tom interrupted him. “I’m sorry, Mr. Cunningham, I know you don’t want to do this, but it will help us, really it will. So please, go ahead. I assume you were standing up?”

  Reluctantly, Patrick dragged himself to his feet and with tremendous self-consciousness gave a lackluster reproduction of the performance in which he had mixed Tracy’s black Russian. He used one of the water glasses Mrs. MacDonald had provided but mimed the vodka and Kahlua bottles. When he was finished he sank gratefully back into his chair.

  “Thank you, Mr. Cunningham,” said Tom, his heart in his boots. It was every bit as bad as Crystal had said, and as the boy himself had said. “Now, when you were actually doing this, I assume you were doing it with, uh, a bit of flair and at fairly high volume? Playing to the crowd, so to speak?”

  “I was showing off, yes,” Patrick said between clenched teeth.

  “So it’s fair to say that everybody in the room heard you?”

  “They couldn’t avoid hearing me, I told you.”

  “So then, you mixed this drink for Mrs. Newman. Why didn’t you take it to her?”

  “Because I had an attack of the squits,” Patrick spat, still showing all the signs of self-loathing.

  “You what?”

  “I have a stomach bug, I have an intestinal problem, I have diarrhea,” he shouted at them as if they were hard of hearing. “It came on me this morning and I’ve been running to the john all day. But I wasn’t about to miss Chacón’s lecture or this party. Anyway, I had just finished Tracy’s drink when I got another attack, so I backed away from the dining table where I’d been doing my stupid little performance and set the drink down on the sideboard, thinking I’d come back and get it in a minute. Then I ran upstairs to the bathroom. But it was pretty bad, and I was there for, I don’t know, seven or eight minutes, maybe even ten. And when I got back downstairs, Tracy’s drink was gone, so I figured somebody else had picked it up and taken it to her. So I went into the living room to talk to Jamie.”

  “This would have been not long before Mr. Newman went out onto the porch and drank Mrs. Newman’s drink?”

  Patrick’s mouth worked. “Just a few minutes.”

  “What did you talk about with Mr. Newman, do you remember?”

  “I remember, all right. I was telling him to stop being so damned obvious when he was talking to Valerie Powers. He was making a fool of himself. Now, of course…” Patrick’s voice trailed off and his eyes filled with tears.

  “Mr. Newman was having an affair with Miss Powers?”

  “Yes,” was the curt reply.

  “This is rumor, or something you guessed, or—”

  “He told me.” Even more curt.

  “And you disapproved.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you told him to stop being obvious with Miss Powers and what was his response?”

  “He told me to stop being an old woman.”

  “Ah. And then what happened?”

  “He went out onto the porch to talk
to his wife.”

  “And that’s the last time you saw him alive?”

  Patrick swallowed audibly. “Yes.”

  “Well, I think that’s all for now, Mr. Cunningham. I’m going to ask you to stay here for a while in case we need to get back to you—”

  Patrick was lifting a hand like a supplicant, a pleading look on his face. Tom felt sure the boy was about to ask if he could be released so that he could go over to Kathryn’s and help look after Tracy, but he was wrong.

  “Chief—Chief Holder,” said Patrick. “Could I be allowed to go to wherever they’ve taken Jamie? To the morgue, or wherever? To be with him?”

  “I’m sorry, son,” said the surprised policeman. “We can’t allow that. Aside from the fact that there’s no place for you at the morgue, we might need you here. Come on now, go back downstairs and be with your friends. You need their support.”

  Patrick studied him morosely as if trying to decide whether or not to argue this decision. Then he put the heels of his hands into his eyes and rubbed them. “O.K.,” he said, emerging red-eyed and resigned. He put his hands on the table, pushed himself heavily to his feet, and walked out of the room, leaving the door open behind him. Pursley got up to close it.

  “I don’t know who I feel sorrier for,” Tom remarked. “Him or us.”

  “Yeah,” Pursley replied, awed out of his usual “yessir.” “That’s most of our suspects, and ten minutes for one of them to kinda work their way around the table and drop something in that drink. But that would mean they brought the poison to the party ready to use it.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s obvious. They knew Tracy Newman was going to be here and they came prepared to kill her. They just didn’t know the Cunningham boy was going to hand them such a golden opportunity to do it in a way that was going to leave it so wide open. Damn.”

  “So who do we see next?”

  “Edward Drew. He’s our best chance for getting the names of all the students who were in the dining room, and we need to complete the list of everybody who was in that room. Once we have that, we work on a list of everybody in the vicinity of the Newmans and Kathryn Koerney and Crystal Montoya when Jamie Newman drank that black Russian and died. When we have those names, we let everybody else go home. And then we spend the rest of the night here.”

  CHAPTER 15

  They indeed spent the rest of the night in the MacDonalds’ spare bedroom.

  When they got around to interviewing Henrietta MacDonald, Tom broached the matter of Crystal Montoya’s invitation to the party. She immediately looked about ten times more uncomfortable, if that was humanly possible, than when she had walked in. But Henrietta was made of stern stuff, and she did not fold. She bit her lips, and hesitated a moment, then asked, “You have talked to her already, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, we have,” Tom replied.

  “Did she tell you that she called me, and told me that she was a friend of Mason’s, and that when the party was scheduled for his house she was invited, and she really wanted to come very badly, and more or less made it impossible for me not to invite her?”

  “I’m afraid we can’t tell you what other people have told us, Mrs. MacDonald. We ask questions, you answer them. How did Crystal Montoya get invited to this party?”

  Mrs. MacDonald bit her lips again. “My husband told me that she would be coming. If anybody asked me why, I was to tell that story. But nobody has asked me until now. And after somebody has been killed in my house, it seems silly to lie to the police about something as small as why somebody else came to the party.”

  “That’s very sensible, Mrs. MacDonald. So what’s the real story?”

  “I honestly don’t know. You’ll have to ask my husband. He said something about somebody doing a favor for the Spanish Department, and that we were paying them back. That’s all I can tell you.”

  She was so obviously telling the truth that Tom did not press her any further, but let the Crystal question wait until John MacDonald sat in the witness’s chair. After Tom had asked him about Patrick Cunningham’s imitation of Professor Witherspoon mixing Tracy’s drink, and the movements of everybody else in the room after that (the same questions he had asked Mrs. MacDonald and was of course asking everyone else), he said, “Just one more thing, and I’d appreciate it if you’d be as sensible as your wife and come right out and tell us the truth about this matter.”

  MacDonald bristled visibly. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Crystal Montoya. I understand you had some little story cooked up about how she got invited to the party. Now that there’s been a murder, little stories won’t do. Who did this favor for the Spanish Department, and what was the favor?”

  John MacDonald hesitated a second. “I can tell you the favor. It was a donation, a very substantial donation considering that all the donor asked in return was that Miss Montoya be invited to the party. And after all, she was a friend of Mason’s, and if the party had been at his house as originally planned, she would have been invited there, as we said in what you call our little story. But I am in an extremely awkward position here. The donor swore me to secrecy. Of course he wasn’t expecting—”

  “This is a homicide investigation, Mr. MacDonald. Nobody’s entitled to privacy.”

  “I realize that. But this is a man of some standing in the community and I am loath to offend him. I’ll tell you what. I will call him tomorrow and tell him what has happened and ask him to reveal his name to the police. He is an honorable man and I believe that he will see that this matter is trivial in the light of a murder investigation and that he will give me that permission. How will that do?”

  And from that position Tom could not budge him. Besides, it seemed pretty reasonable, so he let him go. And that was the last they saw of their host until about 1:40 in the morning, when John MacDonald walked back in on them in between interviews and demanded petulantly how much longer his wife was to be kept awake; Tom replied in his mildest voice that Mrs. MacDonald could retire to bed at any time she liked, provided she understood that her house was going to remain full of policemen and people they were questioning, not to mention the crime scene team who had laid claim to the porch.

  Miraculously, the coffee kept coming, delivered by MacDonald himself, and the quality of it did not deteriorate. At 2:00 A.M. a plate of sandwiches appeared. Tom and his Sergeant fell on them like hungry wolves, and Tom announced that, provided Mrs. MacDonald didn’t turn out to be the killer, he had half a mind to marry her himself. Pursley, ignoring the fact that both his boss and Mrs. MacDonald were married already, mumbled his agreement to the spirit of this sentiment through a mouth full of tuna fish.

  They finished at 6:20. Tom didn’t see any point in going home at that hour, so he went straight back to the station. There he changed into the fresh shirt he always kept there for just such occasions, and got the electric razor out of his desk and ran it over his chin, and figured that would do.

  He then set to work trying to make sense of the multitude of testimony he had collected over the past eight hours. He already knew that it did not look good. Six of his original suspects had seen that black Russian mixed and knew whose it was. And although only three of them—Charles Caldwell, Valerie Powers, and Carlos Barreda—seemed to have been on the sideboard side of the dining room at the critical time, at a party like that, with people moving around all the time, you couldn’t always trust people’s memories. And of course, there was no absolute guarantee that the killer was one of his original suspects, especially if the theory that was currently gnawing at his gut turned out to be true.

  But fancy theories aside, police work is ninety-nine percent slog, so Tom slogged. He made charts and diagrams of the movements of all of the people in the dining room at different times according to the testimony of all of the different witnesses there. He breakfasted on six powdered-sugar doughnuts (three times his normal working-at-the-station breakfast, but then he’d been up all night) and another quart of coffee while he plowed through this t
edium. Even though he was exhausted, he was meticulous, and determined to make no mistakes; he checked, double-checked, and triple-checked.

  At 9:30 his phone rang.

  “Yeah?” he managed.

  “A Mr. Lincoln Massey. He says it’s important.”

  What the hell was Link Massey bothering him with church business for at work? How could it be important? But he punched the appropriate button.

  “Hello, Link? What’s up?”

  “Hello, Tom. John MacDonald called me this morning. I wanted to tell you myself that I was the one who made the contribution to the Spanish Department so that Crystal could go to that party.”

  “You did it?”

  “Yes. It was no big deal, really, Tom. Crystal is a friend of mine, we know each other from church of course, and she was very disappointed about losing the opportunity to go to the Chacón party when Mason died, and I said I would make it possible for her to go to the party at the MacDonalds’. The money wasn’t important to me, it’s a tax write-off anyway. I hope that clears up the matter for you?”

  “Oh, sure, Link, that’s fine. Thanks for calling. See you in church.”

  Tom hung up the phone.

  “Oooooo,” he said to himself, “I don’t like that. I do not like that one bit.” Crystal Montoya was divorced. But Link Massey wasn’t. Tom spent no more than twenty seconds in fierce cogitation before calling Manhattan and arranging surveillance on both Crystal and Link from their places of work, because it was obvious that that was where any trysts would be carried out, not here in Harton where it would be far too easy to get caught. Then he went back to his charts and diagrams.

  Shortly after 11:30 his phone rang again.

  “It’s your sister-in-law. From Ohio. She insisted.”

  Tom sighed. “Oh, fer cryin’ out loud. Put her on.” There was a pause followed by a click. “Flora, for Christ’s sake, I’m in the middle of a double homicide! Why the hell are you—”

  “Where the hell is my sister?”

  “Come again?”