by Mike Resnick
“You will most certainly not embarrass me by ordering a hamburger!” she snapped.
“Okay,” I said. “A steak, well-done, smothered in onions.”
“Shut up.”
I shut up.
“Do you like seafood?”
I made a face.
“Their shrimp de jonghe is superb. I will order it for both of us.”
I was about to ask if Nicole’s supplied doggie bags so I could share this treasure with Marlowe, but one look at her face made me change my mind.
She pulled a cigarette out, inserted it into her holder, and waited until I lit it. “Do you smoke, Elias?”
“Not any more,” I said. “Well, maybe a cigar when the Bengals win, but it’s been so long since they won that I can’t be sure.”
“I presume that passes for humor among your friends?”
“It’s been known to bring a smile to a face or two,” I answered.
“All of them unwashed and unshaven, no doubt,” she said, closing the subject.
I looked around, matching faces against their newspaper photos, as the room filled up. There were a couple of bankers, some developers, a handful of local politicians, a pair of professional philanthropists, the owner of a car dealership, and a few faces I was sure I’d never seen before. The average age was somewhere close to sixty, and the average tax bracket was somewhat higher than the summit of Mount Everest.
They milled around for maybe twenty minutes. I spotted three other bodyguards—they all looked as uncomfortable as I did, and they all had bulges under their arms. I also spotted a couple of gigolos; they were too pretty to be bodyguards, too young and unmarked, and they didn’t have bulges under their arms. There were a few good-looking women, though it was difficult to tell if they were trophy wives or just trophies.
Suddenly an elbow dug into my ribs.
“Stop staring down Maria Delacourt’s neckline and pay attention!” hissed Clara.
“Pay attention to what?” I asked, rubbing my ribcage gingerly.
“He’s here!”
“Who’s here?”
“Do you see that bald man, the one with the thick glasses, who just walked in?”
I looked and saw a man limp into the room, leaning on a silver-handled cane. “Jason Woodford?”
“That’s the one. Watch him like a hawk.”
“He’s the guy who’s trying to bring a pro basketball franchise to Cincinnati.”
“He’s a thief and a liar!”
“It probably goes hand in glove with owning a sports team,” I said.
“I will tolerate no more insubordination, Elias!” she snapped. “I want you to keep an eye on him.”
“Are you seriously suggesting that he might grab your earrings and run for it?” I said. “I think I read somewhere that he lost a leg in Korea.”
“He is a dreadful man,” she said adamantly. “Nothing is beyond him.”
“All right, Clara,” I said. “I’ll make him my special project.”
“See that you do.”
An old gentleman announced that we’d be sitting down to eat at 7:30, which was coming up fast, and Clara walked over to the table to stake out a pair of good seats for us.
“Elias,” she said, after I’d pulled a chair out for her and she’d sat down, “get me a Purple Butterfly.”
I looked around, trying to figure out what the hell she was talking about. “I think it’s the wrong time of year for them.”
“That’s a drink, you fool.”
“And if I just walk up to the bar and ask for a Purple Butterfly, someone on the other side of it will know what I’m talking about?”
“They’d better,” she said ominously. “I’ve been ordering them here for forty years.”
“Uh . . . Clara,” I began. “I hate to bring this up, but it’s a cash bar, and . . .” I let the sentence linger and die.
She reached into her purse and pulled a bill out without looking at it. “Here,” she said, thrusting it into my hand. “Buy one for yourself, too. And I expect change.”
I looked down. It was a fifty. I walked over to the bar and ordered a pair of Purple Butterflies. I half-expected the bartender to laugh in my face. Instead he nodded, muttered “Mrs. Bigelow, of course,” and began mixing up a wildly exotic concoction. When he was done he stuck it in the blender for a moment, then poured the purple drink into two glasses, filling them all the way to the top. All that was missing was the paper umbrellas.
I picked them up, realized that I’d never make it back to the table without spilling something, and took a sip of each. They were a little sweet for my taste, but not bad. Maybe the rich folks knew a little something about how to enjoy themselves after all. Maybe I might even eat a few of my shrimp before poisoning Marlowe with the rest of them.
“Here’s your drink,” I said, handing it to Clara as I reached the table.
“And my change?”
I gave it to her. She counted it to the penny, then dumped it into her purse.
They began bringing out the food just then. There was a lobster soup—they didn’t call it soup; they gave it some other name—and a salad with vegetables that I’ll swear didn’t grow within five thousand miles of Cincinnati, and then came the main course. I wasn’t three bites into it before I decided to tell the guys at Luigi’s Cut-Rate Pizza that they had to add shrimp de jonghe to their menu. I mean, hell, shrimp and garlic and bread crumbs was almost an Italian dish anyway, no matter how fancy they spelled it.
“Don’t eat the plate!” whispered Clara disapprovingly as I attacked my meal with increasing enthusiasm.
I finished in two more bites, straightened up, placed my knife and fork on the plate the way I saw a number of other people doing, and waited for dessert. I checked my watch: it was 8:30. The Reds were playing the Dodgers on the road; if the speeches weren’t too long, I might even get home in time to hear the last few innings.
The waiters bussed the plates off the table, and Jason Woodford walked over.
“Good evening, Clara,” he said.
“Good evening, Jason,” she said coldly.
“Tonight is the night,” he said with a smile.
“You’re welcome to think so.”
“I’ve got the votes,” he said.
“We’ll see.”
“No hard feelings,” he said. “You made a good fight of it.”
“Go away, Jason.”
His gaze fell on her drink. “You still drinking Purple whatevers?” he said, picking it up. “Every year I try to figure out why.” He took a sip.
An instant later he staggered as if he’d been shot. He grabbed at his throat, tried to say something, and collapsed onto the table.
Three or four women screamed. A couple of men jumped to their feet. The bodyguards sprang into action, drawing their weapons, looking fruitlessly for a killer.
The bodyguard who had walked in with Woodford searched for a pulse. Then he laid a hand against the old man’s neck, but there was no sign of life.
“He’s dead,” he announced. And then, so softly that no more than half a dozen of us heard it, he added, “Shit! Striker’s gonna have my ass for this!”
“Are you working for Bill Striker?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He gestured toward the corpse. “The man had enemies out the wazoo.”
“Some bodyguard!” snarled Clara Bigelow. It took me a moment to realize she was speaking to me. “Whatever killed him was meant for me! Now take me home before whoever did it tries again!”
“That’s out of the question, Clara,” I said.
“Why?” she demanded imperiously.
“A murder’s been committed. The police will want to question everyone.”
“But it’s obvious that the killer is in this room!”
“You have four trained bodyguards in this room, all of us armed,” I said. “If everyone can refrain from eating and drinking until the police get here, no one else is going to die.” I turned to Striker’s man. “Ma
ke sure none of the cooks or waiters leave.” He nodded and raced off to the kitchen, while I considered what to do next.
“I’d better report this to Homicide,” I announced.
“You can use my cellular phone,” offered a man.
“Thanks,” I lied, “but I have to give a very blunt description of what happened, and I don’t want to upset any of the ladies present.”
Thankfully no one challenged that, and I walked out of the room to the pay phone by the front door, alone with my problem.
I knew who the killer was, and I had no way of proving it.
It was Clara, of course. I’d taken a sip of her Purple Butterfly as I carried it to the table, and I was fine. Jason Woodford had taken a sip an hour later and he was dead. No one had touched that glass during the interim except Clara.
I didn’t know how she’d managed to sneak the poison into the drink, or when, but there was no question that she’d done it. The problem was that it was going to be my word against hers, and if you were a Cincinnatian, you just naturally took Clara Bigelow’s word over a broken-down private eye who was moonlighting as a cut-rate bodyguard.
My contact at Homicide was Jim Simmons. We’d been drinking buddies for years. He might believe me. But the last time he believed me when I’d gone up against certain powers-that-be, it almost cost him his job.
Still, I didn’t have much choice, so I reached into my pocket for some change—and my fingers came into contact with something that didn’t belong there.
I pulled it out and held it up to the light.
Carla’s empty cigarette pack.
Now I knew how she’d smuggled in the poison. She’d been playing with her cigarettes all night. At some point she had emptied the poison at the bottom of the pack into her own drink. Or maybe she’d been even more subtle. She could have emptied it onto a spoon and transferred it that way—much less attention-getting. It didn’t really matter how; the pack itself was enough to convict her.
Except that it was now in my hand, with my fingerprints all over it, and doubtless with enough residue to send me away for a long, long time. I was supposed to use a cellular to report the murder; I wasn’t supposed to know what was in my pocket until the police found it.
I knew what I had to do, and I couldn’t tell Jim Simmons about it, so I put in an anonymous call to 911 and returned to the room. The corpse still lay on the table, and everyone else milled around aimlessly.
“They’ll be here any minute,” I said, walking over to Clara.
“They’d better be!” she said.
And indeed they were. I acted startled, accidentally backed into Clara, and made the switch before she even started cursing me for a clumsy fool. She never relinquished her deathgrip on her little purse; I probably couldn’t have opened it without someone noticing anyway. All I kept thinking was: thank God for pantsuits.
The cops were thorough. They questioned each diner, and went through their possessions thoroughly. When they came to Clara, they rummaged through her purse, and then a policewoman gently patted her down—and pulled the empty cigarette pack out of her jacket pocket.
She took a sniff of it, frowned, and handed it to her superior.
I fought back a grin as Clara glared furiously at me. She was hooked—and there wasn’t a thing she could do. What could she say? “I planted it on my bodyguard and the dirty bastard snuck it back into my pocket!”
Everyone knew she smoked. I could produce enough witnesses to prove I gave it up years ago.
Q.E.D., as they used to say in some math class or other.
Later it was reported that she and Woodford had fought all year long over who the opera’s next musical director would be, and when it became obvious that he was going to win, she decided to kill him. Most murders are committed for love or money, but I suppose when you don’t love anyone and you’re worth twenty gazillion dollars, you find other reasons to kill people.
Every year Woodford took a sip of her Purple Butterfly and made some deprecating remark about her taste, which I’m sure he hoped would imply she had no taste in other matters, like musical directors. It had almost become a ritual, and she’d counted on the fact that he would do it again this year. I don’t know what she’d have done if he hadn’t taken his annual sip.
I stopped by Bill Striker’s office the next morning to pick up my two hundred and fifty dollars.
“I don’t have it, Eli.”
“I’ll take a check,” I said.
He shook his head. “Eli, you performed a wonderful public service last night, and I’m grateful—but you don’t seriously expect Clara Bigelow to pay us our fee.”
I tried Clara’s lawyer that afternoon. I think he’s still laughing.
I couldn’t even claim credit for nailing a killer. There’s this annoying little statute that says you can’t plant evidence of a crime on someone, even if she’s guilty.
The kicker came when I got home. Marlowe must have spotted a bug sometime during the day, and had decided that the best way to kill it was by lifting his leg and drowning the poor little sucker.
I’d just finished scrubbing down the couch and a couple of chair legs when the phone rang.
“Mr. Paxton?” said a precise, high-pitched man’s voice.
“Yeah.”
“This is Fabulous Formals.”
“Look,” I said. “If it’s about the rental fee, talk to Mrs. Clara Bigelow.”
“Mrs. Bigelow paid the fee before you picked it up.”
“Then what’s the problem?” I asked.
“It seems a dog has chewed one of the pants cuffs past the point of repair. I’m afraid we are going to have to bill you for the purchase price of the tuxedo.”
I just hate being a hero.
About the Author
Mike Resnick has won five Hugos from a record thirty-six nominations, as well as other major awards in the United States, France, Spain, Croatia, Poland, and Japan. The author of the John Justin Mallory Mysteries, the Starship series, and the Weird West Tales, he has published seventy-one novels and more than two hundred fifty short stories and has edited forty-one anthologies. His work ranges from satiracal fare to weighty examinations of morality and culture and has been translated into twenty-five languages. Visit him online at www.mikeresnick.com, at www.facebook.com/mike.resnick1, and on Twitter @ResnickMike.