Acid Bath

by Nancy Herndon

  “Not when I saw you through the window with a gun on Sarah.” As she turned away from Karl, she saw Leo coming through the arch. “Hey, it’s about time!” she said. “Look through the house for this guy’s wife, will you?”

  “Who is he?”

  “Bonnard. He killed Margreaves and, according to Sarah, planned to kill her, McGlenlevie, his own wife — even me — in a quadruple murder-suicide, Sarah looking like the murderer and the suicide.”

  “Don’t listen to them,” said Bonnard. “Sarah — she did it all. Killed McGlenlevie, Mary Ellen . . . ”

  Leo’s eyebrows shot up. “McGlenlevie isn’t dead, is he? You sure you shot the right person, Elena?”

  “Actually, Elena shot both of us,” said Sarah. “With one bullet. Wouldn’t that merit some sort of commendation?”

  “What it will get me is a hell of a long stay here with the Shooting Review Team and an appearance before the grand jury,” said Elena morosely.

  “You mean you could be indicted for saving my life and your own?” asked Sarah.

  “Not likely, but even if I shot myself in the toe by mistake, the S.R.T. would have to investigate, and the D.A. automatically presents it to the grand jury when a cop shoots anyone.”

  “There’s something wrong with the system,” said Sarah. “First me, then you. I really — “

  Bonnard was looking smug. “Detective Jarvis shot me without provocation,” he said to Leo. “Hysterical women should not be allowed in law enforcement.”

  “Bullshit,” said Leo. “Elena never had hysterics in her life.” He turned contemptuously away from Bonnard. “I’ll see if I can find this maggot’s wife.” In a few minutes he was back, looking satisfied. “We’ve got him cold. He complained to Mrs. Bonnard about killing the wrong guy and said he was gonna get both Gus and her, anyway.”

  “Hearsay,” Bonnard mumbled.

  “You better get a lawyer, fella,” Leo advised. “If you’re planning your own defense, you’re not doing too well.”

  “My wife and Sarah have conspired against me. Mary Ellen wants to divorce me, and Sarah wants me out of the department. She’s afraid for her job.”

  “What a lie!” Sarah exclaimed. “The dean wouldn’t even give you my job when I was accused of murder.”

  “Harley — Harley will — “

  “The wife’s getting dressed,” said Leo.

  “Leo, take a look at those fish over there,” said Elena. “Maybe those two boxes he hauled up to the apartment on Sunday night weren’t just unslaked lime. One could have been a container full of fish.”

  “I’ll be damned.” Leo bent over to peer at the piranhas. “Look at the teeth on those babies! With fish like that, he wouldn’t need lime.”

  “But the lime was in the tub.”

  “Just to clean up, probably, and to throw us off. He’s not gonna leave a fish there to finish the job. You don’t find too many people with pet piranhas.”

  “She’s the one who did it,” said Karl.

  “I don’t have fish of any kind, Karl,” said Sarah, “or unslaked lime, or guns.”

  “For God’s sake, have you people forgotten that she’s already tried to kill her husband once?” cried Bonnard, beginning to sound desperate.

  “Oh, yeah, right,” said Leo. “With a snail. Well, man, no court’s gonna think a snail is more dangerous than a piranha — or a guy with a club in his hand. What’d you use on Margreaves, anyway?”

  “Sarah killed him,” said Bonnard stubbornly.

  Leo and Elena exchanged glances. “Don’t worry, we’ve got him. I heard what Sarah had to say,” said Elena.

  “And I heard what Mrs. Bonnard had to say,” Leo agreed. “Jealous husband. Best motive in the world.”

  “Sarah was the jealous one,” said Karl.

  “If necessary, I can testify that she didn’t give a hoot about Gus McGlenlevie as long as he stayed away from her,” said Elena. “So can all the women in the support group — some of them still in love with their ex-husbands, some of them jealous of new wives and girlfriends, and Sarah’s only problem seemed to be worrying about how she came to marry him in the first place.”

  Mary Ellen Bonnard appeared in the doorway, a pretty woman with blond hair curled under in an old-fashioned pageboy, wearing a periwinkle-blue shirtwaist dress and high heels. Elena stared at her in astonishment. She looked like something out of — what? — the fifties. Elena wasn’t sure.

  Mary Ellen eyed her husband with loathing. “You sinner,” she said. “God will punish you.”

  “God won’t have to, Mrs. Bonnard,” said Elena. “The courts will do it for Him.”

  The wailing of an ambulance siren swelled, then died in front of the house as Mary Ellen Bonnard nudged the crushed shade of the brass lamp with her toe. “That was my grandmother’s lamp, Karl,” she said angrily. “I hope they hang you.”

  “How like you, Mary Ellen,” he retorted contemptuously. “You don’t even know what method of capital punishment is used in Texas.”

  Forty-six

  * * *

  Thursday, June 11, 6 P.M.

  “Would you explain to me, Elena,” said Sarah Tolland as she opened the restaurant door, “why the Boston police called my brother yesterday? He arrived home from Brazil to a ringing telephone and a police sergeant asking if he had a relative named Sarah who was wanted for murder in Texas.”

  “Two for dinner?” asked the maître d’, having sidled up to them with a toothy smile. “I am Armand, and your waiter tonight will be Pierre.”

  Elena looked him over skeptically, then turned to Sarah. “I asked those turkeys in Boston for help weeks ago, while you were still missing and unaccounted for. It must have taken them all this time to track you and your brother down.”

  Armand led them to a table, whisked out Sarah’s chair, and left Elena to shift for herself.

  “Maybe you ought to call them back — just so they don’t arrest me the next time I visit my brother,” said Sarah.

  The maître d’ gaped at her and asked in a weak voice whether the ladies would care for a drink.

  “We’ll have wine with dinner,” Sarah informed him. “I can assure you that my brother was quite astonished to hear that I was wanted for murder.”

  Armand scurried away, looking over his shoulder apprehensively.

  “I can imagine. What does this restaurant serve, anyway?” Elena eyed the spindly chairs, the pink tablecloths, and the travel posters featuring towering cathedrals and misty bridges with old-fashioned street lamps.

  “The best French food in Los Santos,” said Sarah, “and it’s my treat, my way of saying thank you for saving my life.”

  “Come on, Sarah, you might have got him with the lamp.” Elena remembered with relish the sight of ladylike Sarah Tolland swinging that huge brass lamp at Karl Bonnard’s head. The pity was that she’d only hit him with the shade. And what a kick! Sarah had whipped up her skirt like a can-can dancer.

  “I don’t think I could have held that lamp thirty seconds longer,” said Sarah. “It was terribly heavy.”

  “The wine list, madam,” said their waiter, presumably Pierre.

  “Maybe you ought to consider joining a health club and working out,” Elena suggested.

  “I do, madam,” said Pierre.

  “Not you. Her.”

  Sarah blinked in astonishment. “You mean with weights? I hardly think I’m the type.”

  “Well, you never know when you’ll have to fend off another murderer.”

  Round-eyed, the waiter disappeared in the same direction as Armand.

  “I’d be very surprised to hear, Elena, that your average university professor is likely to encounter a murderer more than once in a lifetime,” Sarah replied.

  “Maybe you’re right. Anyway, you’ll be glad to know that the D.A. thinks his case against Bonnard is ironclad. The fish’s stomach contents, unfortunately, weren’t helpful. I guess the piranhas had already digested and passed Howard Margreaves.”
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br />   “Elena, we’re about to eat.”

  Pierre, who had returned with menus after a short, vehement argument with the maître d’, turned pale, handed them the menus, and ran.

  “You know,” said Elena, looking at hers, “Bonnard likes this kind of food too.”

  Sarah frowned at her. “How do you know what Karl likes, and now that I think of it, why was he calling you Elena that morning?”

  Elena flushed. “I went out with him a couple of times,” she admitted.

  “Elena Jarvis, you dated Karl Bonnard?”

  “Well, he said he and his wife had broken up, and he’s good-looking. How was I to know he’d murdered Margreaves? There wasn’t a thing to connect him to the killing until Gus got back and admitted that he and Mary Ellen had been having an affair.”

  “I can’t believe it. You dated Karl Bonnard! Where did he take you?”

  “Santa Maria del Valle in Mexico, and the Camino Real here in Los Santos.”

  “Stranger and stranger. Ordinarily he doesn’t like to spend money on anyone but himself. Did he let you order anything?”

  “Of course he did. I had a wonderful dinner in Mexico. It warms my heart to think of how much that evening must have cost him. And the dinner at the Camino Real was even more expensive — not to mention this delicious stuff called Bailey’s Irish Cream afterwards under the Tiffany dome. That was to make up for subjecting me to Calvados with dessert. Calvados is a very nasty-tasting apple brandy.”

  “I know, Elena,” said Sarah, grinning. “He must have been desperate to bamboozle you. Did he?”

  “For a while,” Elena admitted, thinking, This ought to be the final blow to my friendship with Sarah.

  Sarah was shaking her head. “I think you may have even worse taste in men than I do. We both picked miserable husbands, but as far as I know, I’ve never dated a murderer, and in fact,” she added, her face lighting up, “I’m hiring a very charming electrical engineering professor from the state of Washington.”

  “Ah ha! Tell me about this man. Have you been out with him?”

  “Both here and in Chicago. If you hadn’t arrested me, no telling what might have come of it.”

  “I wonder if he’s the one who glared at me from behind a potted palm at the Camino Real.”

  “I really couldn’t say, but I’d certainly have glared at you if I saw you there with Karl Bonnard while my future chairwoman was languishing in jail.”

  “Right. And I suppose he’s the one who came to visit you in jail.”

  “He was.”

  “He must be in love. No sane person would visit me Los Santos County jail.”

  Sarah frowned. “I think I’m going to start a committee to do something about that facility. Both the clothes and the food are inhuman.”

  “Wait till after Bonnard leaves for Huntsville,” Elena advised. “He probably hates jail clothes.”

  “And food,” Sarah agreed. “That’s an excellent thought. I was delighted to hear that he’d been denied bail.”

  “He’s a danger to the public — particularly you and Mary Ellen. Did you read that interview with Mary Ellen? She said part of God’s vengeance would be that in a community-property state half their assets are hers, and he’s not using a cent of her half to pay his lawyer.”

  “Good for her,” said Sarah. She closed her menu and looked around impatiently. “Where’s that waiter? He seems to have disappeared.”

  “You frightened him away. He probably thinks you’re a hit person.”

  “Hit person? Well, I guess that’s more politically correct than, say, assassinette,” murmured Sarah, “but I do resent being tainted by Bonnard’s crime.”

  “Which reminds me, did you see the headlines in the paper last Friday? ‘Acid Bath Case Solved.’ I can’t believe they’re still calling it that. Lime bath, maybe.”

  “Or piranha bath,” Sarah suggested. “That has a certain sensationalist appeal.”

  “You know, Sarah, for such a conservative woman, bizarre things seem to happen to you. First the snail, then the — “

  “The bizarre things happen to Gus,” said Sarah primly, “not me.” Then she beckoned imperiously to the reluctant Armand, who was cowering behind a wine rack. “The first-course special tonight is snails in garlic butter,” she informed Elena. “Shall we try them?”

  Elena stared at her suspiciously. “I’d rather eat a hand grenade,” she replied.

  Biography

  * * *

  Nancy Herndon

  Nancy Herndon was born in St. Louis, Missouri and now lives in El Paso, Texas with her husband. She earned her degrees in English and Journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia and has graduated from the El Paso Citizens’ Police Academy. She has published several novels under the pen name Elizabeth Chadwick such as ELUSIVE LOVERS, WANTON ANGEL, and WIDOW’S FIRE. As Nancy Herndon she has written the Elena Jarvis Series, beginning with ACID BATH and WIDOW’S WATCH. As Nancy Fairbanks she has written the Carolyn Blue culinary mystery beginning with CRIME BRULEE. She has avid interests in travel, food, history, and classical music.

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