The Big Chili

by Julia Buckley

  “And they might not.”

  “Your brother tells me this guy seems sharp.”

  “Parker? Yeah, he is.”

  “What does that little smile mean?” my father asked, looking suspicious.

  “Nothing. Just that I realized I have his jacket, and I should probably give it back to him today.”

  “Great. When we go out, we’ll stop at the police station and drop it off. I’ll check this guy out for myself.”

  “Dad.”

  “Hmm?”

  “I’m a big girl now.”

  “Still my only daughter,” he said, brushing some imaginary crumbs off his shirt. “When is this food going to be ready, anyway?”

  I laughed and checked on the casserole, which had baked to a lovely gold. I served it to my appreciative parents, and we carefully talked around the subject of murder while we shared our noon meal.

  My mother volunteered to wash up, so my father went with me when I walked Mick around the block, golden with leaves and full of attractive scents for Mick’s questing nose.

  We came home, dropped off my Labrador, and climbed back into my dad’s car. Suddenly I felt eighteen again, a passenger with my father at the wheel, as I’d been every day of high school when my father drove me to Pine Haven HS on his way to work. He still had all the same habits that had driven me crazy then: the constant fiddling with his dashboard—the radio, the heater, the change compartment—which he probably did without realizing it; the aggressive driving, which had him pulling far too close for comfort to the car in front of him; and the penchant for talk radio, something I despised because I felt there was not one likeable radio personality. My father claimed he learned a lot from the various shows he favored.

  Our first stop was the library. My father liked books about travel (he and my mother were contemplating a trip) and wanted to find some picture books for them to peruse together. I told him that I wanted to speak to Pet, who worked the afternoon shift.

  The library wasn’t crowded, and I saw Pet leaning moodily on the front desk, her elbows on the wood as she stared down at a book. As I got closer I could see, even upside down, that it was a picture-heavy biography of Princess Diana.

  “Hey, Pet,” I said.

  She looked up, surprised, and then beamed at me. “Hey, Lilah! What brings you here?”

  “I want to look for a couple of books. But I also wanted to talk to you—about Bert.”

  Her face fell again and she looked near tears. “The police asked me about him. I know it looks bad, how I made the chili that killed Alice, and I just happened to work with the other person who died.”

  “But maybe the police will realize that almost seems too obvious—something a murderer would never do for fear of detection.”

  “I don’t know. It’s just terrible—about Bert, and Alice, and being questioned all the time. It’s really upsetting my whole family.”

  “Of course. That’s understandable. And I know you’re sick of being questioned, but I wanted to ask you a couple of things, too. Just so I can work it out in my own head. You’re not the only one who has a connection here,” I said.

  Pet nodded gravely. She closed the Princess Diana book and said, “What do you want to know?”

  “Well—why would anyone want to kill Bert? Was there any link between him and Alice?”

  Pet shook her head. “I don’t think they really knew each other. But you know Bert—he was sort of a gossip, and he loved mystery novels. So he was asking me all sorts of things about the night Alice died. He joked that he was going to solve it just like Sherlock Holmes, using deductive reasoning.”

  This was chilling. What if Bert had solved the mystery? What if someone found that out, and killed him before he could talk to Hank Dixon? Or what if Hank Dixon was the one who silenced Bert, but then told my father a different story to take suspicion off himself?

  I pointed at some red leather chairs in the cooking section. “Since no one’s around, can we go over there? If we talk quietly?”

  Pet thought about it. “I guess so. I can keep an eye on the checkout desk from there.”

  We went to the chairs and sat down; my father wandered past on a quest for books.

  Pet sighed. “It’s so funny. I still expect Bert to walk out of the back room, kind of hunched over like he always was, with his face all squinched up because he was thinking hard. We were all used to that sight. I wasn’t here on the day he died, and I’m glad I wasn’t.”

  “Have the police examined all the checkouts, and the camera and everything?”

  “Oh yeah. They went over this place with a pine-tooth comb.”

  “Fine-tooth,” I corrected automatically.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Go ahead.”

  “They shut us down for two days. I don’t know what all they did. And they took the little refrigerator that we had in the back room—the one where Bert had put his sandwich. Once a week he got an Angelo’s lunch, and he always looked forward to it.”

  Two giant tears gushed out of Pet’s eyes, surprising both of us. I touched her small, plump hand. “I’m sorry, Pet.”

  “Who would do this? To Bert—or anyone?”

  I nodded. We had all been asking the same questions, it seemed. Murder, I was finding, held a whole town hostage to uncertainty and fear.

  “Pet—tell me what sorts of things Bert wanted to know. What was he asking that potentially got him so close to the truth?”

  Pet sighed, then stiffened, about to run to the desk, but the person who had approached it walked right past into the children’s section. She relaxed again. “Well, of course he asked me who all had been there. He said it was like a locked-room mystery. And that once you knew all the suspects, you just had to find out the things no one knew about them—and their links to the dead person. He said that was the plot of every Agatha Christie novel.”

  It was true. I’d already learned more than I’d expected—about Alice and Hank’s marriage, about everyone’s resentment of Alice, about Tammy’s profession, about Alice’s dog and her plans for a cruel operation, about Hank’s inheritance, about Alice’s resentment of the Grandys and their relationship with Father Schmidt, about Alice’s bad relationship with many of the bingo patrons. Even Theresa and Trixie, according to their accounts, had viable motives for wanting Alice dead. If I knew that much through casual conversations, how much more must the police know? Shouldn’t they have been close to solving it by now?

  “So who was a likely suspect, according to Bert?”

  Pet shrugged. “He never told me that. But he loved talking about it. It was a game to him—the strategy of it, comparing potential motives. I didn’t understand half the words he used, to be honest. Bert was really smart.”

  He had been smart. Pine Haven had been lucky to get Bertrand Spielman as their librarian; he had multiple degrees and was a true connoisseur of literature, history, and Chicago lore. “So what was the last day you saw him?”

  Pet sighed. “It was the day before he died. I worked that morning, and Bert kept coming up to me while I was shelving books, asking this or that. He asked me whether or not Hank was going to inherit money from Alice. I said I didn’t know. He asked if Alice had ever sued Father Schmidt or the church. I said I didn’t know, but I didn’t think so, since Father Schmidt probably would have told us that. He asked if we resented Alice for all the things she said to us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Pet blushed. “Sometimes I would let off steam to Bert about Alice—when we had to work together at the church. He liked hearing the stories, because he thought Alice sounded kind of crazy, but he also sort of admired her. I think Bert liked eccentric women.”

  I sniffed.

  “Anyway, I had told him that Alice had said some mean things to us the week before she died. She was frustrated with us—she just see
med to hate it that we always had Father over for dinner. I don’t think he ever once went to her house.” Pet looked weirdly proud of that.

  “What mean things?”

  “Oh, just typical Alice stuff. We’ve learned to take it in stride. She told me I was too old to be chasing after a priest.”

  “What!”

  Pet shrugged. “Father Schmidt told me that Alice was like a child, and that when she was hurt, she lashed out. After he said that, it helped me never get too upset by what she said. She seemed so fashionable and mature, but she really was like a spiteful little girl.”

  This was pretty sophisticated psychology; I wondered how Father Schmidt had determined that. Perhaps I would visit him next.

  “What else did she say?”

  “She told Angelica that she intended to sue her. Alice knew that we had some family money that we inherited, and she told Ang, just a week before she died, that she would sue her for all of it. It was kind of crazy, how extreme she got.”

  “Uh—sue her over what, Pet?”

  Pet jumped up and darted to the circulation desk, where two teens waited to take out books. She checked them out, chatting in a friendly way and handing them library bookmarks before they left. Then she jogged back over to me. She was wearing a sweat suit again, but this was a sort of classy black velour with a white appliqué of the New York Public Library logo on the front of the jacket. I wondered where she shopped.

  She sat down, slightly out of breath, and I said, “Sue her over what, Pet?”

  She laughed, but rather miserably. “One time Angelica saw Alice out to dinner with a man. Angel and Alice both saw each other, because this was back when Alice and Hank were still married. Angel never said anything about it, but once recently when Alice was complaining about Hank and his new girlfriend . . .” She leaned in and whispered, “Alice called Hank’s girlfriend a slut.”

  I sighed. This did not surprise me.

  “Anyway, Ang finally had enough and said, ‘What do you care? You were seeing some other guy when you were married!’”

  This had me leaning forward. “Get out! What did Alice do?”

  “She got crazy. She said that was none of Angelica’s business and she had no idea what was going on, and then she said she knew a lawyer who could take us for all the money we had.”

  “Oh my God! Do the police know this?”

  “Yeah, we told them. But you’d have to know Alice. By the end of the day she was acting all friendly again.”

  “Was she insane?”

  Pet looked at her hands. “No. I think she was really lonely.”

  “Did you like her, Pet?”

  Perpetua nodded. “Sometimes. She wasn’t always crazy. Sometimes she was nice. And she was always sort of chic and worldly. She gave us beautiful gifts at Christmas—all the members of Altar and Rosary. And my sisters and me, because she said we were so important to the church. Alice was like two different people.”

  She pointed at the sweat suit she was wearing. “She knew I liked velour lounge suits, because of how comfortable they are. I’m too old not to dress for comfort, I told her once. And she found this when she was on a trip to New York, and she bought it for me. I think it cost more than a hundred dollars.”

  I thought about this. Alice was like two different people. So which of Alice’s personalities had an enemy—the good one or the bad one?

  “Who was the man?” I said.

  “What?”

  “The man Angelica saw her with. Who was it?”

  Pet looked surprised. “I don’t know. I assumed he was just some stranger. I’ll ask Angelica.”

  I would ask her, too. “Did she say anything else? While she was on this mean streak?”

  Pet shrugged, her eyes darting to the checkout desk. “She told Harmonia that she was too old for a boyfriend. That she should either marry Ted or move on. She said it was ridiculous that the three of us lived together when we were old enough to be grandmothers.”

  I stared, my mouth gaping. “I can’t believe—the gall!”

  Pet shrugged again, looking not at all embarrassed. “We are old, but so what? I’m the oldest, and I’m fifty. But we’re not just sisters, we’re friends. We get along, and we love the house we grew up in, so why not live in it? We’re a unit. We always have been.”

  “Of course.”

  “The thing is, my mom had eight kids, but the first five were much older. Then she and my father—I don’t know—they had a second wind.” Pet smiled at me with a rather innocent expression. “So then came me, and Angel, and little Harmonia. They always called us “the little ones,” and we did everything together. That’s just how it is. Some people don’t understand that, but that’s our family. Angel and Harm, they like living at home. And the guys are happy with that, too. They just like to come and hang out and watch television. We’re all comfortable. So I couldn’t imagine why it made Alice so uncomfortable.”

  “Good question.” What had gone through the mind of Alice Dixon in the weeks before her death? I could see how this sort of work would drive Parker crazy. How was one supposed to determine the secrets of a dead person?

  I thanked Pet for talking with me and watched while my father checked out his travel books. Two of them were about Italy. “Serafina has been telling us such wonderful stories—about the little towns, and the warm people, and the food that your taste buds can’t forget,” he told me.

  “I’ll bet. She probably wants you to meet her whole giant family.”

  My father grinned at me. Pet handed him his books in a little Pine Haven Library bag. My father said, “Thank you, ma’am,” in his charming voice, and Pet blushed. Then my dad slid an arm around my shoulders and we made our way back to the car, where Parker’s jacket sat on the passenger seat.

  “To the police station?” my father asked.

  “I guess. I hope he won’t think I’m interrupting him.”

  “He’ll think you’re being thoughtful.”

  My father fiddled with his CD player until Paul McCartney’s voice filled the car; he was singing “Hey, Jude,” with beautiful sincerity and perfect pitch.

  “That man could sing. Still can,” my father said. He had said this a million times in my lifetime—almost as many times as he had assured me that butter pecan was the best ice cream flavor and that my mother was a beautiful woman.

  He pulled into the police station parking lot and I got a case of the butterflies. I saw my father looking at me out of the corner of his eye, so I feigned nonchalance. “Come on, then,” I said. “Since you want to meet him so badly.”

  We walked into the drab lobby and a receptionist asked our names. I told her and said that I needed to speak with Detective Parker.

  “Just a moment,” she said. She lifted a phone and spoke into it; then she said, “Detective Grimaldi will be with you in a moment.”

  Sure enough, Parker’s partner emerged in a blue suit and some attractive low-heeled shoes and smiled at us. “How may I help you? You’re Miss Drake, are you not?”

  I found my voice. “This is my father, Daniel Drake. Dad, this is Detective Grimaldi. Mom and I met her on bingo night.”

  “And I saw you with Miss Grandy the other night,” said Detective Grimaldi with a wide smile.

  “Yes. Pet is my friend.”

  My father nodded. “We were here to see Detective Parker?”

  She was still smiling. “I’m afraid he is not here at the moment. Did you have a question or comment regarding the case?”

  My hands tightened on the jacket. I didn’t want to give it to her, and I tried to imply as much in an urgent look that I sent to my father, who immediately misinterpreted it. “My daughter wanted to leave his jacket here. He left it at the investigation scene last night.”

  Detective Grimaldi tucked a strand of her glossy black hair behind her ear. “Thank y
ou very much for bringing it by. I’ll see that he gets it.” She held out one well-manicured hand, and I relinquished Parker’s jacket, trying to surreptitiously sniff it once more before I gave it away.

  “Is he pursuing a lead?” my father asked.

  Detective Grimaldi gave him her expressionless cop face. “I’m afraid I can’t comment on that. I can assure you that we’re doing all we can to find this person.”

  “Who?” I asked. “The poisoner, or the graffiti artist who painted my house? Do you really think they are one and the same?”

  “We don’t know. But finding that out is our primary goal. Our only focus, right now. Please believe that, Lilah.” She touched my arm. Her gesture said I am a trustworthy public servant who cares about you.

  I nodded, wondering if she ever touched Parker’s arm when they rode around together, fighting crime. “Thanks. Meanwhile my parents are worried about every bite that I eat.”

  Grimaldi looked a little miserable then. “We are advising the entire community to take precautions, of course. Just eat homemade food for the time being, and always lock your doors. Since you in particular seem to have been targeted, we have an officer assigned to your house and you’ll be protected. Believe me—no one’s getting near you.”

  I saw then that even though Grimaldi was rather pretty, her eyes looked like Parker’s—weary and dejected.

  * * *

  BEREFT OF PARKER’S jacket, I pouted in the car while my father drove me home; an old Eurythmics song called “Who’s That Girl?” was floating around in my head, until my companion turned on the car radio and Train drowned it out with their insistent positivity. My father sent me a couple of sidelong glances, seemingly ready to have a chat, as though I were sixteen and wanting to confide. To head him off, I started talking about Mick and something funny he’d done the week before. My dad took the hint and didn’t say a word about our short trip to the police station.

  He pulled into our driveway five minutes later. The house smelled like pumpkin bread, and we were confronted with even more music: my mother was strumming her guitar while looking at tabs online. I marveled anew at her easy talent; she played the guitar quite well but had never taken a single lesson. She taught herself, she told me once, so that she could sing to Cameron and me when we were little. It had paid off. Back then, a few refrains strummed softly, and Cam and I conked out like we were under sedation.