Good King Sauerkraut

by Barbara Paul

  “You made out your will,” Malecki said.

  Bingo! King made a show of being angry. “You’ve been checking up on me.”

  “We always check up on people we think are killers.”

  “Don’t be idiotic!” Mimi snapped. “If he’s worried enough to make out a will, then he’s not a killer!”

  Ah, Mimi, I love you!

  “Unless that’s just what he wants us to think,” Sergeant Larch remarked.

  But Marian, I’m none too fond of you.

  “What about you?” Sergeant Malecki asked Mimi. “Why didn’t you make out a will too?”

  “I already have a will,” Mimi said through clenched teeth.

  The young waitress showed up with coffee, and this time King caught her sneaking a peek at him. She turned pink and laughed. “What’s the other guy look like?”

  “Not a scratch on him,” King answered, a little put out. “A Sumo wrestler beat me up when I wouldn’t give him my seat on the subway.”

  She frowned, believing him. “How can people get away with things like that?”

  King jerked a thumb in Marian Larch’s direction. “Ask her. She’s a detective.”

  “Really?” The waitress’s face lit up. “You’re a private investigator?”

  “A public investigator,” Marian Larch said. “NYPD.”

  The waitress looked disappointed. When she’d gone, Sergeants Larch and Malecki started a lively conversation about the current state of professional wrestling; they gave it their full attention, effectively excluding King and Mimi. When they’d finished their coffee, the two detectives smiled cheerfully, said goodbye, and left.

  Mimi looked astonished. “Now what was that all about?”

  “They’re just letting us know they’re around,” King said. “I have a feeling we’re going to be seeing a lot of those two.”

  She made a gesture of annoyance—and knocked over King’s glass that still had an inch of fruit juice in it. King jerked sideways in the booth to escape the juice that spilled over the tabletop in his direction.

  “Oh! Did it get on you?”

  “Just a drop. Most of it went on the seat.”

  “Oh, where is that waitress?” Mimi was embarrassed. “Here, use this.” She handed him a paper napkin and started dabbing at the table with another one.

  King dipped the napkin in his water glass and rubbed at the small spot on his jacket sleeve. “Don’t worry about it, Mimi. I do that sort of thing all the time.”

  The young waitress showed up with a sponge; King apologized for the mess and left her a big tip. He and Mimi went out of the coffee shop and paused a moment to get their bearings. I do that sort of thing all the time. It dawned on King that he hadn’t spilled anything or dropped anything or broken anything in almost a week. He hadn’t bumped into anybody, and he hadn’t stepped on anyone’s foot.

  “Excuse you,” he said to a burly fellow who’d just bumped into him. The man didn’t even look back.

  King and Mimi set out for the lawyer’s office, five blocks farther downtown on Fifth. The short walk did them both good; they’d been cooped up too long. Mimi stopped looking back over her shoulder and even smiled once or twice.

  Their session with the criminal lawyer, whose name was Banks, was tedious and ultimately not very helpful. Banks had taken them both through their accounts of where they were and what they’d been doing at the time Dennis Cox and Gregory Dillard had died. He wanted to know if they could produce witnesses. He wanted to know if the police had any reason to suspect some sort of hanky-panky had been going on among the four of them, either financial or sexual. He wanted to know how MechoTech’s proposed mergers with Keystone and SmartSoft would change their lives. He wanted to know everything.

  An hour later the session had ended, and King felt as if he’d been through a wringer. He and Mimi rode the elevator down in silence; when they were back out on the street, an odd moment of awkwardness occurred between them. They looked at each other at the same instant, nodded self-consciously … and took off in opposite directions. They’d had enough of each other’s company for a while.

  On impulse, King climbed aboard the first bus that came along. He slumped into a seat and stared unseeing out the window. Banks had been merciless in his questioning, undoubtedly giving them a foretaste of what they could expect if the matter ever came to trial. To trial! Everything had been going so well; the police had given no indication they suspected him of being involved in Dennis’s and Gregory’s deaths and were even “protecting” him from some nonexistent killer they were convinced was crouched out there somewhere just waiting for a chance to pounce. And Gale had come around, god bless her! She’d be a better partner than Dennis ever was, and she’d never think of selling him out. Things had been looking so good.

  This time yesterday King had thought he was virtually home free; yet today he had a fifty-fifty chance of being arrested for murder. Banks had seemed to think the police wouldn’t seriously consider a charge of conspiracy, on the basis that if King and Mimi had been in it together they would have alibied each other for the crucial time period.

  The advice Banks gave them had been simple: Keep your mouths shut. Marian Larch—was she driving along behind the bus even then? Did sergeants do that kind of donkey work? Malecki must be following Mimi, unless the two detectives had decided to switch suspects. King snorted; he was beginning to think of Marian Larch as “his” cop. But the police had no way of knowing whether it was King or Mimi who was responsible for Dennis’s and Gregory’s deaths; it would be a coin toss as far as they were concerned.

  Unless … unless they were given some reason to think King was innocent. But if they thought he was innocent, then they’d think Mimi was guilty.

  But what would Mimi have to gain by killing Gregory Dillard? She wasn’t left in sole control of their business; she still had three other partners. Ah, but now Mimi was the senior partner, she’d said. Perhaps some sort of internal power struggle going on at SmartSoft that nobody was talking about? King was trying to think the way he imagined the police would think, trying to see what kind of case they might build against Mimi Hargrove. Money, power, control—a reliable standby in the field of criminal motives that the police would never question.

  Yet it wouldn’t account for her killing Dennis Cox. To get rid of a witness? Hardly, since he was in the bathtub watching television at the time the window fell on Gregory’s neck. Some other reason, then. King thought again of Dennis’s hand in Mimi’s lap under cover of the conference table at MechoTech; something there? Both the police and their new lawyer had asked questions about sexual goings-on. Mimi made such a big thing of being committed to her marriage, as if that proved how wonderful she was, how she was not afraid to undertake long-term relationships or whatever the yuppie standard of achievement was this year. Say Dennis wanted her to leave her husband Michael; that would spoil the pretty picture she was painting of herself. In that case both King’s partner and her own could be seen as posing a threat to her—Gregory professionally and Dennis personally. And the quickest way to end the threats was to get rid of the threateners.

  Yeah.

  King became aware that most of the people on the bus were getting off; he followed the crowd and found himself in Washington Square. What was he doing here? Well, he thought, why not here? He didn’t have anyplace else to go.

  He stopped for a moment to watch a sidewalk artist doing Jesus in pastels and then wandered into the park. A would-be comedian was trying out his material on a small, mostly agreeable crowd; King listened a while and then ambled on. He stayed away from the spot where two guys with acoustic guitars were holding forth, but he dropped a five into the shoe box placed on the ground by the kids breakdancing on roller skates. He found a bench near to where a fire-eater was doing his thing and sat down.

  After a while the tensions of the morning began to ease away. Mimi could be made to appear guilty. And that’s all it would take to divert attention away from him—the ap
pearance of guilt. They could never prove anything against her.

  “Quite a show, isn’t it?” a familiar voice asked.

  King groaned; he hadn’t even seen her sit down. “What do you want, Sergeant Larch?”

  “I’ve always wondered how they do that,” she said, gesturing toward the fire-eater. “More than that, I wonder why anyone would want to do that. There must be easier ways to attract attention.”

  “Twice in one day, Sergeant. This has got to be harassment.”

  She dipped into her shoulder bag for a Kleenex and wiped her nose. “I’m not here to harass you, King. What I want is your help.”

  He glared at her suspiciously. “How can I help?”

  “By telling me everything you know about Mimi Hargrove.”

  “That won’t take long. I’ve never worked with her before.”

  “How did she and Gregory Dillard get along?”

  “Fine, as far as I could tell. It’s a little hard to know about Gregory. He was always … acting, you know what I mean? He had a very obvious social and business persona that he put on every time I talked to him. The face behind the mask—well, I never saw it.”

  “And Mimi?”

  King was silent for a moment. Keep your mouth shut, the lawyer had said. But this was just too good an opportunity. “I used to think Mimi was exactly what she appeared to be. Now I feel I don’t really know anybody anymore.”

  “What does she appear to be?”

  “Efficient. Ambitious. Humorless. A bit literal-minded.”

  “Ambitious, you say. How ambitious? Enough to kill someone who got in her way?”

  “Oh, now, look—”

  “Come on, King, tell me. Is she ambitious enough to kill?”

  What was all this King business? Whatever happened to Mr. Sarcowicz? “I really don’t know, Marian. How can I answer a question like that? Two days ago I would have said absolutely not. But now that you’re so damned sure one of us killed Dennis and Gregory, and I know I didn’t …” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  “Then it had to be Mimi,” she finished for him.

  He didn’t contradict her. They sat without speaking for a while, just watching the other people in Washington Square Park. King noticed that quite a few of those people were brown-bagging it, and his stomach growled in automatic response.

  “Me too,” said Marian Larch. “You like Tex-Mex?”

  “Uh, yeah, I guess so.”

  “Cottonwood Café, then. Let’s go.”

  King reluctantly followed her out of the park. He didn’t want to sit down to a meal with this police detective; she was up to something and he couldn’t figure out what. He waited until they’d walked a couple of blocks and made one final show of protest. “I think you’re wrong about Mimi. As weird as the whole thing is, I have to think both Dennis and Gregory died by accident.”

  She didn’t hesitate. “Both those men died with someone else’s help. You can be sure of that.”

  “You’re absolutely certain?”

  “Absolutely.”

  King said no more.

  The Cottonwood Café was on Bleecker Street. The place was crowded, but not absurdly so; they waited only five minutes for a table. On Marian Larch’s recommendation, King ordered a margarita and liked it so much he ordered another one. Starting on his third he told her to order for both of them. She rolled off a bunch of Spanish words he couldn’t understand.

  “What was all that?” he asked, noticing he was slurring his words.

  “Beef and chicken, one order of each. We can split.”

  When the food came, the waitress set down another margarita in front of him; he didn’t remember ordering another but raised no objection to its being there. There was some movement of food between his plate and Marian Larch’s; when all the activity stopped, he picked up his fork and dug in. “Marian, this is delish … shus!” He ordered another drink.

  She smiled. “Glad you like it.”

  By the time he’d finished his newest margarita, he couldn’t tell the beef from the chicken. But he knew whatever he was eating was good. And his lunch companion was being good too; she hadn’t said a word about Mimi or MechoTech or murder. “The three Ms,” he mumbled.

  “What?”

  “Mimi, MechoTech, and murder,” he overarticulated, realizing he was sailing a forgotten number of sheets to the wind. “And a fourth M. M for Marian.”

  “I think we’d better get some coffee in you. Otherwise you’ll accuse me of getting you drunk on purpose. Then I’ll drive you home.”

  “Home. Pittsburgh?”

  Marian laughed. “Sorry.” She told the waitress to bring a pot of coffee.

  The coffee was scalding hot when it came; he sipped at it gingerly. “You’re going to take me back to the apartment? Aren’t you afraid that Mimi might kill me? Or I might kill her?”

  “Not a chance. Why do you think we told you both that you were our only suspects? It was the best protection we could think of, for whichever one of you is innocent. If Mimi’s the killer, she won’t dare touch you now. You’re safe.”

  “You’re sure of that.”

  “Drink your coffee.’”

  He managed to get two cups down but then protested he was in danger of floating away. Marian paid the bill, left a tip, got King to his feet, and steered him toward the door. Where they stopped; the skies had opened up while they were eating and now it was pouring down.

  “It’s raining,” King remarked perceptively.

  “So it is. You wait here while I go get the car.” She looked at him weaving on his feet and changed her mind. “On second thought, a little rain in the face might do you good. Come on.”

  The rain pounding down was cold, far too cold for May. Within minutes both of them were soaked through. The sidewalks had quickly emptied; they saw only two or three other people running for their cars or a taxi. Marian’s car, unfortunately, was blocks away. King staggered along as best he could, his teeth chattering. But his head did seem to be clearing up some; his sense of balance improved. What am I doing here? he thought. Half-drunk, cold, wet, getting dragged through the streets of the Village by a New York police detective—who at least half suspected him of murder. And all I wanted to do was design an electromagnetic gun platform.

  By the time they reached the car he was fully sober and miserable. They sat dripping water on the seats while Marian Larch tried to get the defroster to unsteam the windows. The drive back to the apartment was a silent one, broken only by the detective’s occasional muttered comments about all the lunatic drivers out that day. King didn’t remember inviting her up to dry off, but the next thing he knew she was asking to borrow a bathrobe.

  He gave her one, and quickly changed into dry clothes himself. They’d found the apartment empty; Mimi must be off with Sergeant Malecki somewhere. King was still toweling his head dry when he found Marian in a small laundry room off the kitchen, putting her clothes into the dryer. On top of the dryer lay a holstered gun. She saw him looking at it and slipped it into a pocket of the robe she’d borrowed. “Something hot to drink?” she suggested.

  King found a box of tea bags and put the water on to heat. The rain pounded against the windowpanes; the day had turned dark and ominous-looking. He switched on the lights, and the kitchen was bathed in a pleasant glow that gave it the look and feel of a warm haven against the storm. It could almost be a cozy domestic scene, if his woman companion were anyone other than a police detective trying to pin a murder rap on him.

  “Catch the water right before it boils,” Marian said from the stove. “That makes the best tea.” He hadn’t heard her come in.

  They sat at a butcher block table, drinking their tea and listening to the rain. King was beginning to feel human again.

  “What did you have to do to get appointed head of this gun platform project?” she asked out of the blue.

  Startled, King replied, “I didn’t have to do anything. Warren Osterman made the decision.”

 
“You must have lobbied for it, some.”

  “Nope. The project had to be headed by a designer, so that eliminated Mimi and Gregory right there.”

  “Mimi and Gregory didn’t think so,” she interrupted. “They didn’t consider themselves eliminated at all. In fact, all four of you wanted to head up this project. You wanted it bad.”

  How did she know that? “Rae Borchard,” he guessed.

  The sergeant smiled wryly. “Rae Borchard wouldn’t give us the time of day. No, it was Warren Osterman who told us.”

  “Warren!” King was surprised.

  “Relax, he’s on your side. It took us forever to convince him that no rival company is out to kill off your entire design team—but once he accepted that, he immediately assumed that Mimi was the culprit. He said you had such a bad case of the clumsies that you might bump somebody off by accident, but you could never execute a successful double murder. You’d find some way to botch it.”

  “That’s nice of him,” King said sarcastically, half pleased, half resentful.

  “Osterman also said Mimi didn’t take your appointment as project leader at all well.”

  King lowered his head so she couldn’t see the expression on his face. “That’s true, she didn’t.”

  “He said she went right on campaigning for the job even after he’d announced you’d be in charge. And do you know how she campaigned for the job?”

  “Probably by badmouthing me.”

  “That’s about it.” Marian picked up their cups and took them to the sink. “She’s not your friend, King. That doesn’t make her a murderer, but watch your back all the same. If she is a murderer, she must have gone back to that other apartment expecting to find all three of you there—the man who had the job she wanted and two others who could keep her from getting it. Does that fit the picture of the Mimi you know?”

  He took his time answering. “She’s very ambitious,” he said with what he hoped was the proper degree of hesitancy.

  Marian snorted. “So’s Rae Borchard. Hell, I’m ambitious. But is Mimi obsessed?”