Acid Bath

by Nancy Herndon

  “The departmental picnic. Isn’t that what you told Virginia?”

  “What would I kill them with? I wouldn’t bring a weapon to talk about the departmental picnic.”

  “You would if that was just an excuse, when you really knew they were having an affair and planned to — “

  “The police don’t know about the affair, Karl,” she lied in the most reasonable tone she could muster. “That being the case, they won’t be able to find any motive for my killing Mary Ellen.”

  “I’ll tell them.”

  “Then you’ll be a suspect too, because you’ll have a motive as good as mine.”

  “Well, maybe you don’t know they’re having an affair. You come about the picnic and find his car here, find them in bed together. You kill them in a fit of jealous rage. What does it matter? You’ll all be dead, and I’ll have been in Alamogordo while you’re killing off the others — and yourself. Have you forgotten that? I’m in Alamogordo. At a motel. Waiting for Mary Ellen’s mother to tell me where Mary Ellen is, because, after all, if my wife told those idiots at the retreat that she was going to see her mother, then she must have done it. A fine religious person like Mary Ellen wouldn’t lie. Right?”

  Sarah noticed that his hair was disarranged and there was sweat on his forehead, although the temperature in the house was comfortable, and she could hear the steady hiss of cooled air through the vents.

  “So I believe she’ll come to Alamogordo. I’m waiting for her. She wouldn’t rush back to Los Santos to be sure that her lover was safe, to be sure that her wicked husband hadn’t killed him. Would I believe that? Never. Not of my virtuous, devout wife.” His laughter rose between them. “It’ll work, Sarah. You’ll be dead, she’ll be dead, he’ll be dead — and I’ll be alive. And laughing. And chairman!”

  “There’s another flaw in your plan,” Sarah objected.

  “What’s that?”

  “I can’t bash in my own skull with that fire shovel. I doubt that I could kill them that way either.”

  Bonnard looked startled. “True,” he admitted, calming down. “So glad you pointed that out to me, Sarah. I’m going to have to shoot you.” Still swinging the shovel, he began to move sideways, toward a long table by the window.

  Did he have a gun in that drawer? Because he was facing her instead of the table, he didn’t see what she saw through the sheer curtains of the window behind him. A pickup truck. Elena’s truck pulling up in front of his house. At least she hoped it was Elena’s. All those trucks looked alike to Sarah, and she’d only seen the vehicle at night when they’d gone to the support-group meetings and met for dinner, but the color seemed familiar. Sarah didn’t dare take her eyes off Karl for a closer look. “You can’t kill me until after you’ve killed the other two.”

  “Of course, I can.”

  “Coroners can tell the time of death by body temperature and — and degree of rigor mortis. It may take you a while to get Gus over here. It may take even longer to convince Mary Ellen to call him.”

  “You’re getting desperate, aren’t you, Sarah? Really frightened, aren’t you?”

  “Of course, but what I’m saying is logical.”

  “Maybe.”

  Someone was coming up the walk. It looked like a woman. “I think you’d be wrong to chance it,” she said. The doorbell rang. Karl’s eyes darted toward the hall. “Especially when there’s someone at the door,” added Sarah.

  “Just keep your mouth shut,” he said, and his hand darted to the drawer. “We’ll wait till they leave.”

  Dear God, Elena, don’t leave, thought Sarah. “I think it’s the police.”

  He glanced out the window, gun in one hand, fire shovel in the other. “It’s a pickup truck.”

  “Elena Jarvis drives a pickup, and she’d recognize my car.”

  “Damn,” he muttered. “So I invite her in. You’ll have to kill her too, Sarah. You stay right where you are and keep your mouth shut. Cooperating with me is, after all, your only hope.”

  He’d have to pass close to her chair on his way to the door. How far past before she was blocked out of his peripheral vision? Sarah wondered. Every muscle in her body tensed, anticipating the spring for the lamp. She had to get him before he turned the gun on Elena.

  “Stay right where you are,” said Karl smoothly. “It’s going to work out perfectly.” He raised the gun. “I didn’t like that Jarvis bitch anyway.”

  She watched him glide past her, then she rose, turning. It seemed to take forever to get the lamp, and it was heavy. She jerked its cord from the wall socket as she swung the other way, letting it go just as he began to turn, just as she heard a thud against the front door and the splintering sound of wood tearing around the lock as the door burst open. The lamp was already in flight. She watched, paralyzed, as the elaborately ruched shade hit the side of his head. A shade would never stop him.

  He stumbled sideways as Elena appeared in the arch to the living room, gun in hand. Karl regained his balance and raised his own gun, but Sarah, released from her paralysis, rushed forward three steps and, hiking her straight skirt, kicked out at his hand. The gun flew loose and, desperate, he swung the shovel at Elena. Sarah, a muscle cramp arching her back, saw the flash of Elena’s gun, saw the blood well and run down his arm as he dropped the shovel. In the same second, she felt, with a jolt of surprise, a searing pain in her own arm.

  She looked down, saw blood, and realized she’d been shot. Still she was alive, not dead, as she’d expected to be. Just dealt a minor gunshot wound by the woman with whom she’d shared disgusting burritos when Elena was choosing, excellent pâtés and crêpes and soufflés when she was choosing, and after dinner the trials of being a divorced woman when they attended the support group together. She rubbed desperately at the cramping back muscle. Damn! That hardly ever happened except when she stretched in bed, trying to get comfortable after a long day at the computer. She hadn’t done any computer work today and wasn’t in bed, so why —

  “Sarah, are you all right?” Elena’s voice was sharp with alarm.

  She evidently wanted some assurance that Sarah wasn’t about to lose consciousness. However, Sarah did not consider herself in danger. Just in pain. She bent forward to ease the cramp. It was Karl who might be in danger, his well-tailored coat sleeve dark and limp with blood. Actually, the whole thing seemed rather anticlimactic. Sarah supposed she should be grateful for anticlimax. Cramps. A dribble of red on her arm. No one died in an anticlimax.

  “Why the hell did you move into my line of fire?” Elena demanded, her face pale and anxious as she moved toward Sarah.

  “Well, I believe it was because I’ve always wanted to kick a gun out of someone’s hand,” said Sarah wryly.

  “And an impressive job you did.”

  As Sarah straightened, the two women smiled at each other for the first time since Sarah’s arrest.

  Forty-five

  * * *

  Thursday, June 4, 10:57 A.M.

  Relieved that Sarah had not been seriously injured, Elena moved carefully toward Bonnard. She could see that he was in shock, staring at his arm, from which blood dripped steadily. A movement behind him distracted her, and she glanced again toward Sarah, who, being a practical person, had whisked a scarf off the end table, the table from which she had plucked the monster lamp. She was binding the scarf around the wound where Elena had winged her. “Sorry I yelled at you,” Elena muttered. “And shot you.”

  Sarah glanced up. “I don’t believe there’s any serious damage to my arm.” She smiled weakly. “In fact, if you hadn’t arrived, I’d probably be dead.”

  “Well, you weren’t doing so badly on your own, considering that he had two weapons and you only had that lamp — and the football kick, of course,” said Elena. “Ever punted for a team?”

  “Ballet lessons,” said Sarah.

  “Right.” How much different Sarah’s childhood had been from her own. Chimayo, New Mexico, didn’t offer ballet lessons, among other non-op
portunities.

  They both looked at Karl Bonnard, who had dropped into a straight-back chair by the arch. The violence seemed to have deserted him, leaking out along with the blood that soaked his coat sleeve.

  “Get up, turn around, and put your hands behind your back,” Elena told him. Where the hell was Leo? she wondered. Karl just sat there. “Did you hear me, or do I have to shoot you again?”

  He got up, trying to look both confident and accusing, as if she were a friend who had suddenly turned unpleasant for no good reason. “I need medical attention.”

  “I don’t suppose luck was with us and he confessed?” Elena asked Sarah, the gun in one hand as she punched out 911 on the telephone with the other.

  “Yes, he did. He said something about logical solutions.”

  Elena shivered, remembering his statements about engineers and problem-solving. She’d been reassured at the time by the thought that Sarah wasn’t crazy and therefore wouldn’t consider murder a logical solution. It hadn’t occurred to her then that Karl was the crazy one.

  “She’s lying,” he said, face flushed with malice. “She’s a lying bitch, and you can be sure that if you arrest me, you’ll be facing a suit for — “

  “Shut up and put your hands together behind your back.” Now she was seeing a Karl Bonnard she could believe had killed someone. “C.A.P. Detective Elena Jarvis,” she said tersely into the telephone. “I have a homicide suspect shot. Send an E.M.S. unit, backup, and a Shooting Review Team.” Elena gave the address, hung up, and snapped the cuffs on Bonnard’s good wrist and then on the wrist slippery with blood.

  “Sarah planned to kill both me and Mary Ellen.” His voice, which had started the sentence strong and accusatory, faltered when he mentioned his wife.

  “Does that mean your wife’s still alive?”

  “She’s been manifesting symptoms of insanity. I had to lock her in the bedroom. I was, of course, going to call a local psychiatric unit and would have done so except that Dr. Tolland arrived.”

  “Right. Sarah arrived, unarmed, planning to — “

  “It was her gun,” said Bonnard.

  “I never owned a gun in my life,” said Sarah indignantly.

  “All right, you,” Elena snapped at Bonnard, who had moved several feet toward the door. She swung a straight-back chair out from the wall. “Sit on it backwards,” she ordered.

  “I don’t — “

  “Swing your leg across. Right now.”

  “You’re arresting the wrong person, Elena. Surely you know me well enough to realize — “

  “Do what I tell you,” she snapped, furious that he still thought he could play her for a fool. “You look like you’re about to keel over, Bonnard. That arm will really hurt when you hit the floor, and the bleeding will start up again.”

  He obeyed, almost falling in the attempt to lift his leg across the seat, then slumping against the chair back.

  “What did he say about the murder, Sarah?”

  Looking rather pale herself, Sarah sat down in an armchair by the window table.

  “You’re getting blood on my upholstery,” Bonnard complained.

  “You’re getting blood on your carpet,” she retorted. “He said he’d killed Margreaves by mistake. I don’t think he’d ever seen Angus up close, so he was fooled by the beard and one of Gus’s disgusting T-shirts.”

  “They never met at President Sunnydale’s prayer meetings?” asked Elena, grinning.

  “Gus refused to attend those. Some sort of protest against prayer in the schools. Probably he was meeting a girl while I was doing my chairmanly duty,” said Sarah.

  “That sounds like McGlenlevie,” Elena agreed. “Look, I’m really sorry about your being arrested. There wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it.”

  Sarah nodded and leaned her head against the high, curved back of the chair, her eyes closed.

  “You all right?”

  “I’m probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.” She smiled weakly. “Expecting a shovel to crush one’s skull and being shot are new experiences for me.”

  “Post-traumatic stress symptoms come later,” said Elena. “What did he tell you?”

  “His plan was — Oh well, he explored several of them, but the plan of choice was to force Mary Ellen to lure Gus over here, then kill both of them and make it look as if I’d committed suicide after murdering them in a fit of jealousy. Then, when you arrived, he was going to shoot you too.”

  “She’s lying,” said Karl.

  “Sure, she’s lying, and that’s her gun. Her fingerprints will be on it, won’t they?”

  Karl’s eyes darted nervously from one woman to the other. “My prints would have obscured hers once I got the gun away from her.”

  “No, not really. We’ll find partials on her too if what you’re saying is true.”

  “I never touched the gun,” said Sarah. “He says he’s registered at a motel in Alamogordo. That was going to be his alibi; he wasn’t in town.”

  Elena nodded, checking out the room, examining Karl Bonnard’s possessions, darting quick glances at him every few seconds to be sure he hadn’t moved from the chair. “My God!” she exclaimed as she peered at the huge aquarium that occupied the wall across from the door. “Those fish have teeth!”

  “They’re piranhas. He used to take great delight in warning Mary Ellen not to fall in when she fed them.”

  “What did he make her feed them? People?” Elena blinked, a grisly thought occurring to her. “They’re flesh eaters, right?”

  “Yes, they can strip a body clean.”

  “We never could figure out how he managed to get all the flesh off Margreaves’ body with unslaked lime. One of your chemists said it would have taken a couple of days. Did you bring the fish along, Karl?” Elena asked, whirling on him.

  “You have a lurid imagination,” Bonnard retorted.

  “He — he said something about Gus’s flesh being devoured, but I thought he was speaking figuratively.” Sarah was paler than ever.

  “I wonder if we could autopsy the fish. You remember I asked you if Gus had a bone disease?”

  “Yes, but I couldn’t imagine why you’d think that.”

  “The coroner found scrapes on his bones — well, Margreaves’ bones. No one ever thought they might be tooth marks. No, I take it back. That crazed doctor at the university asked if the body had been attacked by wild animals, but I never — Are you O.K.?” Sarah had turned a little green.

  “More or less.”

  “It doesn’t get any pleasanter, does it? I wonder if there’s any of Margreaves left inside the fish.”

  “Those fish are expensive,” said Bonnard. “If you think I’ll give permission for you to kill them in order to explore some bizarre theory — “

  “Oh, shut up,” said Elena. “I don’t need permission from you if I want to grind up every one of them.”

  “How did you get through the security door?” Karl demanded. “You’re in my house illegally.”

  “It was open,” said Elena smugly.

  “You forgot to lock it, Karl,” Sarah agreed. “You remembered the dead bolt and forgot the security door.”

  “Damn lucky too,” muttered Elena. “I couldn’t have kicked in an iron door.”

  “Well, kicking my door in was illegal.”