Happy Hour

by Anina Collins

  “Everything okay?” I asked, lightly touching his forearm.

  He turned to look at me and nodded. “Yeah. I’m just hoping to hear something from Gerald Engels that helps us get this case moving. I don’t think I’ve ever had a case that seemed to stop before it ever got started like this one.”

  “Well, it did take Donny longer than usual to figure out the cause of death this time. There wasn’t much we could do before we knew what had happened to Marcus Tyne, but now that we do, I’m sure things will get rolling and we’ll have this case solved in no time.”

  Alex raised his eyebrows in surprise. “That’s very optimistic for you, Poppy.”

  I thought about my father’s never-ending belief that good things were right around the corner and smiled. “You act like I’m always a glass half empty kind of girl. I’ve been known to think on the bright side every now and then.”

  “Oh, I know. It’s just that over the past year you’ve gradually become more jaded like me.”

  The elevator stopped, and I elbowed him gently in the side. “I think you’re a bad influence on me, Officer Montero.”

  As the doors opened, he smiled and shook his head. “Not me. I’m just a cop doing my job. I can’t help if my experience rubs off on you because you’re my partner.”

  He stepped out into the third floor beige painted hallway and motioned with his head toward Room 319 as I followed. Nudging his shoulder with my fingertips, I said, “I’m coming, Mr. Glass Half Empty.”

  We walked halfway down the hall to the nurses’ station and stopped so Alex could flash his badge to the woman standing there before asking to speak to Mr. Engels’ doctor. The nurse, a tall woman with a tight black bun knotted on the top of her head, paged Dr. Carter and told us he’d be along in a few minutes.

  I hadn’t been on that floor for long before it began to make me uneasy. Never a fan of hospitals or sick people, I’d grown to hate them during my mother’s illness. I couldn’t count the number of times I visited this place with its white tile floors and neutral colored walls. After a while as she grew sicker and sicker, each time blended into the others.

  Since then, I’d avoided anything to do with doctors or hospitals, if I could help it. The few times I’d had to accompany Alex here were the exceptions to a rule I intended on keeping forever. All hospitals reminded me of death.

  My mother’s death.

  Alex lightly pushed on my upper arm, so I turned to face him, not realizing how long I’d been lost in thought about my hatred of hospitals. “Hey, you faded out on me for a moment. You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said as I nodded a few too many times. “I’m fine.”

  Studying me for a second, he asked again, “Are you okay? You don’t look right.”

  “I’m fine.” Looking up and down the hallway, I asked, “Where’s this doctor? I feel like we’ve been here for a while already.”

  “If a while is less than five minutes, then yeah, we’ve been here for a while. What’s going on with you, Poppy?”

  I stopped searching for this Dr. Carter and saw Alex staring at me with concern written all over his face. Clearly, I wasn’t masking how much I hated hospitals as well as I thought.

  “I’m good, Alex. I’ve just never been a fan of hospitals. Or doctors. Or anything involving sickness. I could never be a nurse. God help me, that job sounds like something straight out of Dante’s circles of hell.”

  My explanation did nothing to ease his worry about me, and he softly touched my arm. “You don’t have to stay here if it’s a problem. I can handle talking to the doctor and Gerald Engels. We can meet at The Grounds after and I can tell you everything that happened.”

  As much as I didn’t want to be in that place, I hated the idea of shirking my responsibility to Alex even more. Shaking my head, I remained resolute in my plan to stay right there and deal with my issues.

  “I’m fine.” As I repeated my lie, I saw a short, round, balding man wearing tiny round glasses and a white doctor’s coat walk toward us with a determined look on his face. Reading his nametag, I pointed behind Alex and said, “I think this is Dr. Carter now.”

  I wanted to add just in the nick of time since any more discussion of my problem with hospitals and I would have done something stupid like lash out at Alex. I’d done that far too many times to my father on those countless visits to see my mother as she slowly wasted away in that hospital bed that would end up being the last place I saw her alive.

  Alex spun around to see the doctor and extended his hand to shake his. “I’m Officer Alex Montero and this is Poppy McGuire, Dr. Carter. We’d like to speak to you about your patient, Gerald Engels.”

  He adjusted his glasses and nodded as he extended his arm out to the right toward the nearest room next to the nurses’ station. “Let’s go in here. We can talk in private in this room.”

  The three of us sat down around a table in what looked like a breakroom for the staff, and Alex took out his pen and pad. “Doctor, we were the people who brought Mr. Engels in. I’m investigating the murder of his friend and need to know what made Mr. Engels sick enough that he went from appearing slightly drunk to being deathly ill between the time we met him at his house and the time we got him here to the hospital. We weren’t with him for more than fifteen minutes, tops.”

  “Antifreeze, Officer Montero. Gerald Engels was suffering from Ethylene glycol poisoning.”

  Alex’s eyes lit up as my heart began to beat wildly, and he asked, “Doctor, could someone accidentally ingest this Ethylene glycol?”

  Shaking his head, Dr. Carter frowned. “No, I would say that’s highly doubtful.”

  After he wrote a few notes about accidental poisoning being unlikely, Alex asked, “How could someone drink it then without knowing?”

  “It can taste sweet, so it could be put into a drink and someone wouldn’t know. Then it’s downhill from there. Pets often die from drinking even a small amount of antifreeze off the ground underneath cars. It’s sweet, so they lap it up and then nothing can be done to stop the effects.”

  Without another word, Alex stood from the table and announced, “I need to make a call, doctor. Please excuse me.”

  Then he walked out of the room, leaving me there with Dr. Carter. Sure I’d be on the verge of a panic attack at any moment if I didn’t keep my mind preoccupied, I asked him, “Would antifreeze work in any drink?”

  He scrunched up his face as he thought about my question and finally said, “It might. The sweeter the drink, the better.”

  As all my worries about my father began to flood my mind, I asked, “Would it work in alcohol like whisky or bourbon?”

  “It would work well in sweeter alcoholic drinks, especially bourbon or rum. They would mask the taste of the antifreeze.”

  My heart sank at his answer. Someone had poisoned Marcus Tyne and killed him, and then they’d poisoned Gerald Engels and nearly killed him. Two victims of antifreeze poisoning. Two men who may have been drinking at McGuire’s.

  “One more question, doctor. How much would have to be put into someone’s drink?”

  “Well, it depends. As little as a third of a cup can be deadly. Mr. Engels didn’t ingest that much, thankfully, but you saw the effects of less than that amount on the human body. It’s a nasty poison.”

  My stomach twisted into knots at every word. Had someone somehow gotten behind the bar at McGuire’s and slipped the poison into the drinks? How could that have happened? I knew my father ran the bar like everyone who came in was a friend of his, but who in Sunset Ridge would want Marcus Tyne and Gerald Engels dead and my father blamed for their murders?

  Alex opened the door, and peeking his head in said, “Dr. Carter, I’d like to see Mr. Engels now. Poppy, let’s go.”

  Something in his tone sounded off, like he suddenly was worried about me again. I joined him out in the hallway as the doctor escorted us to Room 319, but Alex said nothing as we walked there.

  Had he learned something even worse than what
we already knew in that phone call he made?

  Gerald Engels sat in his hospital bed watching the TV perched near the ceiling across the private room, and when the three of us entered, he didn’t seem to recognize anyone but the doctor. Not that I needed him to know that I’d saved his life, but I figured he’d at least remember me from the day before as I tried to calm him on the ride there.

  Dr. Carter turned toward us and in a low voice said, “Try not to keep him too long with questions. He needs his rest.”

  Alex smiled and nodded before looking over at the man who’d become our second victim. “Gerald, do you remember me? I’m Officer Alex Montero and this is Poppy McGuire.”

  He looked at us for a long moment and then shook his head. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember you, Officer Montero.” Focusing on me, he smiled. “I know you, Poppy, from your father’s bar.”

  “You don’t remember us being at your house yesterday?” I asked while I tried to recall when I’d seen Gerald at McGuire’s. As much as I thought back to my shifts there for the past few months, I didn’t remember ever seeing him before we met the day before.

  Pen and notepad in hand, Alex walked around the bed and leaned against the wall nearest Gerald. “Do you remember where you were yesterday? Can you retrace the steps of your day for me?”

  “I worked till noon on a spinning wheel I’ve been cleaning up, and then I went to McGuire’s for a drink right after the bar opened, and then I went back to work.”

  He sounded so sure of where he’d been, but there was one huge problem. We’d seen him at the same time he thought he’d been at the bar.

  I looked over at Alex to see if he’d picked up on that detail. After jotting down a word, he shot me a look of recognition and then looked back at Gerald. “Mr. Engels, there’s a problem with that timeline. We saw you right after noon and you were at home sitting in your living room.”

  Shocked, he opened his eyes wide and shook his head in disbelief. “What? Are you sure? I could have sworn that’s what I did.”

  Needing to know what he drank at McGuire’s, I asked, “Gerald, what did you have at the bar?”

  “A bourbon. My friend Marcus had told me about this new bourbon Joe had gotten—some gold label stuff—and after only having a taste the night before, I wanted to try it again.”

  Alex wrote down his answer and asked, “About Marcus. How did he get your car Monday night?”

  “I told Marcus he could drive it home since I wasn’t feeling too well and I didn’t want to drive. I figured if I walked home and got some fresh air, I’d feel better. Marcus said he felt a little woozy too. I guessed we both caught a bug or something. Why? Did he have an accident?”

  “Do you remember what else you had to drink or eat yesterday?” Alex asked, completely avoiding having to tell Gerald about his friend’s death.

  “I had a soda from my refrigerator right before noon and a couple cups of coffee and a blueberry muffin that morning for breakfast,” he answered after thinking for a few moments.

  “How can you remember that but not remember anything else about your day?” I asked, seizing on what I saw as an inconsistency in his answers.

  Gerald smiled at me. “I’m afraid I’m a very boring person. You could ask me what I had any day and that would be my answer. Coffee and a blueberry muffin for breakfast and a soda right before noon. Every day like clockwork.”

  “Where did you have the coffee and muffin?” Alex asked. “At home or at a restaurant?”

  “The Grounds. I like the taste of their coffee better than the stuff I make at home. What’s this all about?” he asked with fear in his eyes.

  Alex looked over at me with a look of resignation and then cleared his throat as he told Gerald about his friend. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but Marcus Tyne was murdered Monday night and found in your car outside McGuire’s. He’d been poisoned just like you were with antifreeze.”

  Gerald’s expression filled with anguish. “Marcus? Dead? That can’t be. I just saw him Monday night. Who would do this to him?”

  “And to you,” I said quietly, not wanting to upset him. The fact was, though, someone had poisoned him just like they had his friend.

  Gerald’s shock morphed into sadness, and he hung his head. “And to me,” he said in a low voice.

  “I know this is very upsetting, and I apologize, but any help you can give us will be appreciated. Do you know anything about where Marcus went Monday?”

  “I think he was working—he worked with antiques like me—before I picked him up and we went to the Madison Diner for dinner and then to McGuire’s.”

  Alex drew an exclamation point in the middle of the page he’d been taking notes on, a sign something had struck him as important. Folding the pad up, he put it back into his jeans pocket and pressed a smile onto his face.

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Engels. I’m very happy to hear you’ll be fine. You’re a lucky man. If it wasn’t for Poppy springing into action and taking care of you as I drove you here, you’d probably be dead.”

  His matter-of-fact way of telling him who had helped him while declaring how close he came to death made Gerald sit up straighter, and he after his brain had processed what Alex said, he looked over at me.

  “Thank you, Poppy. I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you for this,” Gerald said with tears in his eyes.

  “There’s no need to repay me. Just get better, and the next time I see you in the bar, you can buy me a drink. Deal?”

  A broad smile spread across his face. “Deal.”

  Before we left, Alex said, “We’ll probably have more questions as the investigation continues, but I hope you feel better soon.”

  “If you have any more questions, you know where to find me,” Gerald said with chuckle.

  Alex and I walked out of the hospital room, and we barely made it to the elevator before I asked, “What was the exclamation point for in your notes? What’s going on?”

  His expression fell, and he pressed the button for us to go to the ground floor. Sighing, he said, “It’s not just McGuire’s we have to worry about now. It’s The Grounds and the Madison Diner too.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, not understanding.

  The elevator jolted to a stop, and before the doors opened, he said, “Marcus Tyne may have been at all three places the day he died. That means he could have consumed the poison at any one of them, so all three will have to be checked.”

  A few people waited for us to exit, and as we walked out toward the squad car, I asked, “What does checked mean?”

  “Donny and his people are going to have to get samples from each place, and I expect the health department is going to have to get involved too. We need to find out where Marcus Tyne and Gerald Engels were slipped that antifreeze.”

  I stopped at the car and took a deep breath. The coroner and the health department getting involved in this case meant my worst fears were about to come true.

  My father’s bar would be shut down.

  Alex tapped on the roof of the car and shook me from my terrible thoughts. Looking over at him, I saw the regret in his dark eyes.

  “I still don’t think you have to worry, Poppy. I know what you’re thinking, though.”

  “That my father’s going to be devastated?”

  “I’m sure Donny’s tests will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the antifreeze wasn’t put in either man’s drink at McGuire’s.”

  “I hope you’re right. I just don’t know how it could have happened. My father said he worked behind the bar alone Monday night for the Cinco de Mayo party.”

  I thought back to him asking me to bartend that night. “If only I hadn’t been so selfish and begged off helping him, a man might be alive now, Alex, and my father wouldn’t have to have his business closed.”

  “Don’t say that, Poppy. You’re not to blame for anything that’s happened. Your father would tell you the same thing. Let’s get back to the station and get working on who might have want
ed these two men dead.”

  I closed the door and slumped against the seat. “I just realized something, Alex.”

  As he started the engine, he looked over toward me and asked, “What’s that?”

  Staring out the front window, I closed my eyes. “It’s not just my father who’s going to suffer because of this case. Pam and Gerry at The Grounds depend on that business to live, and the people who run the Madison only have that restaurant. These aren’t chains and big businesses, but mom and pop places. They can’t afford to be shut down for days or weeks. This could really hurt them and my father and even the town.”

  Alex shifted the car into drive and began heading back to the police station. In that calm voice filled with strength I’d come to depend on, he tried to reassure me. “Then we better get this case solved quickly. Don’t worry, Poppy. We’ll do it.”

  It’s not that I didn’t believe him when he said that. I just worried that no matter how fast we worked to clear all three businesses, it might be too little, too late.

  Chapter Nine

  Alex followed me into McGuire’s and sat down at the end of the bar as I looked for my father in the stockroom. I found him piling boxes one on top of another, clearly keeping himself busy to take his mind off everything.

  Sticking my head in, I said, “Dad, Alex and I are here to talk to you about the case. Do you have a minute?”

  Lifting a box over his head, my father grunted as he stacked it up next to the ceiling. “Sure. Just give me a minute, okay?”

  I headed back out to take a seat next to Alex and saw my father had done some serious cleaning behind the bar. Every night, he wiped the area down, so it wasn’t like it was ever dirty at the start of the day, but now the whole thing looked clean enough to eat off of.

  “My father’s scared. I can tell,” I whispered in Alex’s ear.

  As usual, he tried to calm my nerves. “Everything’s going to be fine, Poppy. He shouldn’t be worried.”

  The door to the stockroom closed, and my father appeared looking as chipper as ever. “I didn’t expect to see you two here this morning. I don’t really expect to see anyone much during the day.”