Murder Most Conventional

by Verena Rose (ed)

  In the silence Deidre could have sworn she heard Charles’s heart banging, although it might have been her own. When she didn’t keel over, she managed to say, “Those are all New England writers, dear. Bahstan writers. Were you aware of that before you accepted the assignment?”

  “Well, sure.” Yvonne slapped her forehead as if one of the region’s infamous deer ticks might have dropped on her from the exposed heating ducts. “OMG, it’s the way I talk, ’n’ it? Don’t y’all worry, I can sound real snooty when I have to.” She gave the suitcase a little kick. “I was supposed to be here earlier, but things got all messed up. My crew was supposed to all fly in together from New York and stay the night at the Cooper Plaza, I think it’s called?”

  “Copley,” Charles said gently.

  “Uh-huh. Excuse me. I should call them—Copley, right? About my room.” Whipping out her cell, she did exactly that. After a short but heated exchange, she disconnected. “Dang. They don’t have me listed. Whoever was supposed to handle the plane reservations must have messed up the hotel reservations, too. Publishers, huh? I’ll have to find someplace else.”

  Deidre said, “This time of year everything’s booked. But you know, dear, I live right here in town. Well, Dorchester, actually, not that that means anything to a Texas gal. But I’d love to have you if you don’t mind sleeping on my sofa bed.” Feeling Charles’s eyes boring into the side of her head like a brain surgeon’s drill, she added sweetly, “Charles, would you care to join us for dinner? I’ll cook.”

  “Why, yes,” Charles gabbled. “I’d love to. How nice.”

  If—no, when—they started to show the symptoms of a mild dose of dumb cane—hoarseness, swelling throat, inability to speak—she’d tell them they must be coming down with a virus. Nobody could ever blame her for that.

  Looking from one wrinkled face to the other, Yvonne sighed. “And they say New Englanders are cold.”

  * * * *

  “Why didn’t you let me call a cab?” Charles shouted as the Boston Red Line subway car rattled around a curve in the tracks. “This is positively—”

  “Amazing.” Yvonne gazed around the jam-packed car as if she’d just landed on Planet Earth from a far-off galaxy.

  “I think so, too, dear.” Deidre managed to stand, thrusting her way between a young black man in a robe and strings of beads and a rabbi, both of whom were dangling from straps like UNICEF Christmas ornaments. “Ashmont. This is our stop. Let’s go.”

  Twisting her head from side to side as they walked down the narrow street, Yvonne said, “Say, there’s no trees here. Just like home. I’d just love to live on the top floor of one of these big, ole skinny houses. And I adore the porches. Imagine sitting way up high there and looking down at all that traffic pouring by. Why, you’d be way above the fumes, wouldn’t you? Oh, look, what-all’s goin’ on?”

  Deidre peered down the street into the brick square seething with life. “It’s a street fair.” She’d grown so used to ethnic festivals that she’d barely noticed the rattles, drums, electric guitars, and trumpets making lively music that came flooding from speakers the size of small cars. All around the square, booths and tables were offering foods that smelled divine but packed a digestive wallop. “Let’s see if there’s something special you’d like for dinner.”

  Deidre knew from experience that most of the dishes were so heavily spiced they simply had to be disguising the main ingredient, as had been done in medieval Europe. Cat? Snake? Squirrel? Old inner tube? Any of them could be in the giant stew pots. And all of it would disguise a leaf or two or six of dumb cane.

  The three of them walked around the tables, circling and sniffing like wolves on the fold. “Um, that looks divine.” Yvonne pointed to a giant cauldron from which steam rose like fog from a swamp. “What is that?”

  The cook flashed white teeth beneath a black top hat, waving his ladle like a scepter. “Boston bouillabaisse.”

  “We surely don’t have that down Texas way,” Yvonne drawled, swaying back and forth coquettishly like a little girl asking for ice cream. “What-all’s in it?”

  Charles started to supply the classic French recipe, but the cook cut him off. “Fish. Fresh fish. Fresh shellfish, too, lovely shellfish.” He pointed in the general direction of the ocean with the handle of the ladle. “Caught this very day.” He made a yanking motion with his free hand, laughing. “Me, I pull the mussels from the rocks myself, pull them like I am pulling an old man’s beard.”

  “Perfect.” Deidre pulled out the balled-up mesh bag every conscientious go-green shopper carried these days. “Three bowls, please.”

  “Bread, we must have bread,” Charles said, and loped off to the next stall where a matronly woman in a long white apron sold him a long loaf he brandished like a sword. “And cheese.”

  “I’ll buy that,” Yvonne caroled, and before Deidre could say Velveeta, the award-winning poet had returned to her side with a great chunk of something wrapped in waxed paper and tied with brown string. “This is going to be some party.”

  A few minutes later, Deidre scurried up her building’s four flights as if she had wings on her heels. Two flights behind her, Yvonne was prattling to Charles. Deidre could hear his labored wheezing. Unlocking the apartment door, she rushed to the small table in the parlor and banged down the bouillabaisse bag with its collection of white plastic spoons. “Soup’s on,” she shouted.

  “We’re gettin’ there,” Yvonne called back, “slow but sure.”

  Her heart beating wildly, Deidre bent over her thriving window garden. Pinching off a dumb cane leaf, she paused to listen. They were just reaching the third landing. Pinching off another six, just to be on the safe side, she rushed into her tiny kitchen—little more than a broom closet, really. Thrusting the handful of greenery into her old stainless steel Revere Ware coffeepot, she held the pot under the sink until it was full. She was just reaching up for an old-fashioned tin of loose tea and her mesh tea ball when Yvonne called, “Here we are.”

  “Soup’s on the table in the parlor.” Deidre plopped the full tea ball into the coffeepot. “I’ll just be a minute. I’m making tea.” She banged the coffeepot down on the burner and turned on the gas flame. “Feel free to start without me.”

  “We can’t do that,” Yvonne began.

  But Charles cut her short. “We must obey our gracious hostess.” Even from the kitchen Deidre could hear him inhaling the steam from his open bowl. “How can you resist that magnificent perfume, Neptune’s own elixir from the briny deep?”

  Deidre kept her eyes on the corona of blue flame. Why wasn’t the water boiling?

  “OMG,” Yvonne called, “Ms. Dunhall, you’ve got to get in here right this minute. This is just super!”

  “Coming,” Deidre sang, fishing in the cabinet for two extra mugs.

  “This delicious concoction,” Charles boomed, “reminds me of the time...” And off he went on a windy discourse about a Greek isle he’d visited in the 1980s.

  Tiny bubbles were just beginning to break the surface when her guests started to cough, first Yvonne, then Charles. “Everything okay?” Deidre called as the tea ball began to jitter. Giving it a dunk, she shoved a spoon into the water to stir the leaves as the coughs grew louder, then walked toward the parlor to investigate. “Yvonne? Charles?”

  “Call—” Charles choked, his eyes bulging out of a face as red as one of the lobster shells floating like wreckage in his bowl. “Nine—”

  “One,” Yvonne rasped through swollen lips an old-fashioned poet might once have described as bee-stung. “One.”

  Two ambulances and one police car later, Deidre looked out in stunned satisfaction at the empty square. Boston Bouillabaisse Man had been arrested for harvesting seafood illegally during the last toxic algae bloom known as Red Tide, scourge of the New England shellfish industry, and freezing it to use in his stew. Ingesting shellfish infected with
the toxin caused instant tingling of the lips and tongue, and then muscular paralysis. Oh, it wasn’t fatal, not usually, although Charles would have a harder time recovering because he was old and out of shape.

  As for Yvonne, the amount she’d eaten was quite unlikely to kill a healthy young woman but enough to render her speechless for quite some time to come. Time enough for another woman with the proper Bahstan accent to read her way to worldwide fame because, along with a great big nasty helping of Alexandrium fundyense, poetic justice had at long last been served.

  KILLING KIPPERS, by Eleanor Cawood Jones

  Snow in the Midwest in January is hardly news. So it didn’t make headlines on that Thursday afternoon when the temperature and dewpoint combined to dump nineteen treacherous inches of snow and ice on Green Bay, Wisconsin. Salt trucks and snowplows drove in circles, but the rest of us stayed put. Put, for me, was the Running Stick Resort and Casino. I was in town on business. The clowns, including the one on the barstool next to me, were at the end of a four-day clown convention. News to me, that clowns convened.

  “Two days,” Kippers the Klown moaned into her Jim Beam and ginger ale, and downed the dregs. She made a sucking noise to get every last drop and plinked the glass on the bar. “They say we’ll be snowed in for at least two more days before the planes run. I’m going to miss two gigs, and I really need the money.”

  I made a noncommittal noise. Kippers had already told me at least six times how she would miss a Shriners’ breakfast and a cat’s birthday party. That’s why I planned to spend the next two days hiding—hiding in the casino, in my room, in the lobby, in the parking garage, and in a bottle. (Mostly the bottle.) In short, hiding any place where Kippers wasn’t. I’d been barnacled by this wanna-be entertainer since last night, and she was shaping up to be not only seriously not funny, and in fact whiny, but an alcoholic to boot.

  Kippers the (Depressing) Klown was, in fact, pickled, and had been since I’d made the mistake of asking to borrow her phone charger the night before, seated at this same bar. I’d forgotten mine and the hotel gift shop was sold out. Apparently the charger came with a price of everlasting friendship. She’d been following me around since then, showing up at breakfast and turning my time in the casino afterward into a disaster.

  I calculated. If I only used my phone for essential calls, like to my therapist who understood how I felt about being trapped in general and with clowns in particular, I could surely drag it out for another twenty-four hours before I had to borrow her charger again. Maybe in the meantime I could find a way to ditch her and her constant moaning and carrying on about how the other clowns didn’t like her, the lack of work at parties, and how, if clowning was her calling, why was it all so hard?

  I took a swig of my manhattan and glanced at Kippers out of the corner (korner) of my eye. All five-foot-nothing of her. What kind of clown dresses in all-black sequins—who knew they even made sequined pantaloons?—topped by a colorful dunce cap with her short, scraggly, bleached blond hair poking out the bottom of it? The effect was black and shiny and round with a burst of color on top. Audrey Hepburn, Kippers was not. More like Tweedledee.

  Or Dum. Whichever.

  “My boyfriend will miss me. Who knows what he’ll get into? And my poor, sick kitty needs me.”

  Kippers had a boyfriend? Boggled the mind. The cat I could understand. Twenty-seven cats would be even more understandable. This Klown had all the makings of a Krazy Kat Lady.

  “I’m sorry about Kibbles, Kippers,” I said for the seventy-second time. Kibbles the cat has gout and needs a special diet and exercise routine, according to Kippers.

  Kippers turned to me as if seeing me for the first time. “You got a boyfriend back home?”

  “No,” I said shortly. No boyfriend, no husband. Not anymore, anyway. No cat, either. But a manhattan? A manhattan I did have. I took another, heftier swig and signaled Peet the bartender for a refill. (Earlier I made the mistake of asking Peet about the unusual spelling of his name on his employee badge. He told me his mom had spelled it that way so he wouldn’t get confused with his twin brother, Pete. Yep, I was in Crazyland for sure.)

  Soon I’d be just drunk enough to take another trip down the long hall that led to the casino. I could hear the Wheel of Riches slot machines calling my name, taunting me. This morning I’d been one pull away from a jackpot. I’d gone to find an ATM and asked Kippers, who was following me around and talking to me while I tried to play slots (not casino-savvy behavior at the best of times), to watch my machine and make sure no one touched it until I returned. She’d seen no harm in letting some guy take a turn while I was gone. He’d won the thirty grand progressive jackpot on the very next pull.

  I could have used that money as a down payment for a new car and taken that trip to Hawaii I’d been promising myself for years. Maybe even paid off a credit card or two. Even after taxes.

  When I came back to find the bells flashing and the guy who won cackling maniacally with glee—and cackle he well might, with all my money in his grip—Kippers was too drunk to even understand what she’d done. There was no point in explaining it to her, or beating her with the stick I could easily have snatched from the dealer at the craps table, or murdering her with my bare hands. To add insult to injury, she’d chosen that moment to lurch into me and spill her rum and coke all down the front of my one remaining clean blouse and suit jacket. At that point I simply descended into a black spiral of despair and resigned myself to starting over on another machine, staying drunk and sticky-suited, and hating all clowns everywhere forever. Especially Kippers.

  And to getting out of town as soon as possible. Which brought me back to reality, which informed me in no uncertain terms that I’d be here another two days at least. I watched Peet mix my refill and then my cell phone rang.

  Blessed mercy, it was my good friend Bambi. An anti-clown antidote if there ever was one.

  I’d met Bambi three years before, when I’d first arrived in Green Bay to supervise the printing of an important client’s direct mail fundraising campaign, consisting of billions of pieces of paper that would be inserted into millions of envelopes on a gigantic, larger-than-a-football-field printing press available only here in the Midwest. Like the casino, the press ran twenty-four hours a day.

  Compared to the compact D.C. suburbs, everything here seemed sprawling and giant to me, including the gorgeous young woman who met me at the airport.

  She had to be at least six-foot-two, with a killer body, wide blue eyes, and stick-straight, whiter-than-white hair cascading down her broad, parka-clad back. Everything about her screamed healthy outdoor activity and Scandinavian descent.

  She had smiled a blinding Crest 3D White smile. “Welcome to Green Bay! I’m Bambi, and I’m with Packer Worldwide Printing.” Her deep, booming voice echoed in the practically deserted airport.

  Since then, I’ve made this same trip every three months, and Bambi and I have grown to be close work friends and then some. She’s seen me through some tough times, and I’ve listened to her talk about her mother-in-law, Hilda, whom we call Hitler. (And not in a nice way.) I grinned tipsily at her name on my cell phone.

  I found the right button to push, held the phone up to my ear, and heard her voice rumbling out of it. “Girl, where are you right now?”

  Peet plumped my drink in front of me, and I grinned at it, too. “Bar.” No point in not mincing words. I was preserving my energy for the slot machines.

  “Well, have Peet mix me up a gin and tonic. I’m on the way over.”

  “Impossible. Snow. Ice.” I may have given out a little hiccup at this point. “Weather.”

  “No problem. I’m cross-country skiing over to see you.” Of course she was. Bambi lived no more than what, five miles away? I rolled my eyes. Bad move, as Kippers came into view. I focused back on my drink.

  “I was getting cabin fever,” Bambi continued, gracefully ignori
ng the hiccup. “Figured I could use some exercise and then a drink and maybe a little round or two in the casino.”

  I could use some exercise, too. I pictured the long hallway between the hotel and casino, which turned in on itself twice before you arrived at that glorious, open room filled with the unique combination of buzzing and binging slot machines, shouts of eager customers, and ice-filled, clinking glasses found only in gambling establishments the world over. It was a really, really long walk to get there.

  “Walking the mile, walking the mile,” I mumbled into the phone.

  Bambi understood. “Kippers there?” She had spent last evening with Kippers and me in the bar.

  “Yeppers.” I giggled.

  “Well, stop drinking, and when I get there we’ll get her so drunk she won’t be able to follow us down to the slots. Okay?”

  “’S a plan.” I found the right button and hung up on her. Things were looking up.

  “Cheese curds.” Peet plunked a bowl of the fried, steaming Wisconsin specialty on the bar in front of me and winked. He knew I wasn’t normally much of a drinker. He probably wanted to feed me before I slid onto the floor. I sniffed the bowl. Heavenly. I reached for a curd but Kippers’s mitt beat me to it. She dug out a handful and scattered most of the rest onto the bar.

  I went back to my drink, waited for Bambi, and listened to Kippers smack her loathsome lips while she ate my curds.

  Kippers was talking nonstop and I had half a drink left when I sensed Bambi sliding onto the barstool on the other side of Kippers. Good. We had the clown surrounded.

  “Kippers, my clown friend. What’s shaking?” Bambi’s voice boomed, and I heard Kippers mumble something in return.

  “Gin and tonic for me, Peet, and I think some hot green tea for these two clowns.” I resented being included as a clown, but before I could protest, Bambi snatched something out of Kippers’s gigantic purse, which was open on the bar. “Kippers, what’s this?”