by Maddy Hunter
“Nope. You want I should call ’em back and ask?”
“They might have moved it to the new room already. I’ll just wait and be surprised.”
We repacked Nana’s suitcase and finished as the bellman arrived. He loaded everything onto his cart then escorted us down to the second floor. To room number2248. He opened the door and switched on the light. “Well, would you look at that,” said Nana.
This room was exactly like the last one, with one exception.
There was only one bed.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Your new room, Madame.”
“N-no, no. Our new room is supposed to be a suite.”
“This is the only room available at the moment.”
I checked out the windowless walls. The carpetless floor. The narrow, solitary bed. I could feel myself start to hyperventilate. “If this isn’t the suite we were promised, WHY ARE WE HERE?”
“Police orders, Madame. They’ve requested that the area surrounding your former room be cordoned off. The lady in the room adjacent to yours was apparently found dead atop Mount Pilatus today, so they need to conduct a full investigation.”
I stood there in a semicatatonic state. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess the dentist had shot Novocain into my brain rather than my mouth. I gestured toward the bed. “Does management realize there are two of us?”
“If you’d care to request separate beds, we can move you when something opens up.”
They were wearing me down. I could feel my shoulders slump. My spine shrink. Maybe I was getting too old for this job. “We’ll need a roll-away cot then.”
“I’m sorry, Madame. All our cots are presently in service, but I’ll make note of your request and see that one is delivered to you when it comes available.”
“What are the chances one will come available before we leave?”
“Slim to none, Madame.”
“That’s what I figured.”
By the time all the shopping sacks were piled on the floor, the room looked like the town dump. The only thing missing was seagulls. And the stench. Nana stood at the foot of the bed, observing it from all angles. “This won’t be so bad, Emily. I’m pretty sure it’s a double. See, it has two pillows.”
Yeah. But they were stacked on top of each other.
Nana reached for her pocketbook and removed a small plastic bag. “You wanna see what I bought in that hotel gift shop to bring home to the boys?” ‘The boys’ were my brother Steve’s five sons, ranging in age from two to eight. I baby-sat for them sometimes when I needed positive reinforcement that my life as a single female wasn’t so bad.
“Watches,” she said, lining them up on the bed. All five watches were identical—a vivid blue-and-green background with the head of a black-and-white cartoon-character cow in the foreground. “I got ’em all the same so’s there wouldn’t be any fightin’. Swatch. That’s a good brand, isn’t it?”
“It’s a great brand,” I said, blinded by the screaming wristbands stamped with psychedelic flowers and more cartoon characters. They looked like something that belonged in a toddler’s playpen, but there was one thing that made them enviable.
They were ticking.
“The boys should love them, Nana.” And they might have them a while, too, if they could refrain from feeding them to the dog.
“You wanna borrow one ’til you get your watch repaired? I don’t think the boys would mind.”
I regarded the Swatch with its hands keeping perfect time around the cow’s little misshapen head. I eyed my gold-plated Gucci with its elegant hands stuck on 10:13. “Okay.” Did I need to have my arm twisted or what?
I set my Gucci on the desk and strapped the Swatch onto my wrist. Okay, so the cow made me look like a dork, but at least I’d be a punctual dork.
Nana removed her toiletry bag from her suitcase and dug out her plastic soap container. “That fingerprint ink left an awful mess on everyone’s hands. Lookit mine.” She held them up for me to see. “They’re still black.”
I smacked the heel of my palm against my forehead. “Oh my God. I forgot to tell you about Andy. They know what killed him.” I paused for dramatic effect. “Dimethyl sulfate.”
“Die what?”
“Dimethyl sulfate. Poison.”
“No.”
“Yes. But it wasn’t in his inhaler. The police don’t know how it got into his system, but you have to figure it was deliberate. They’re treating his death as a definite homicide. And they’re doubtful Mr. Nunzio is the perpetrator because poison suggests a close emotional bond with the victim, and Andy and Nunzio had a three-minute relationship, tops.”
“What kind a poison is dimethyl sulfate?”
“I guess it’s the kind that if it gets into your system, you die.”
Nana rolled her eyes. “Where do you get it?”
“Oh, you mean, can you buy it over the counter or do you have to special order from someplace? I suppose if we can figure out who had easy access to it, we might nab our killer before he nails victim number three.” I made a pointer of my finger and aimed it at Nana. “How about we fire up your laptop and do some surfing.”
She yanked her computer out of her suitcase and set it on the desk. She sat down, flipped open the lid, powered up, then poised her fingers on the keyboard and began typing. I’d taken several computer courses in college, but my expertise in the field consisted of writing and retrieving E-mail and cursing really loud when AOL disconnected me. Nana had never attended college or taken a computer course, but she could hack her way into the files of any government agency with a few clicks of her mouse. Go figure.
After some humming and buzzing, the screen filled with text. Nana scanned the information and read aloud. “Dimethyl sulfate. Also known as sulfuric acid dimethyl ester. It’s a highly toxic, colorless, odorless, oily liquid. Exposure can cause sore throat, runny nose, swellin’ around the mouth and lips, tearin’, pink eye, cyanosis, and death. After exposure, there may be a period of up to ten hours before symptoms manifest themselves. Dimethyl sulfate is used in the manufacture of dyes, drugs, perfumes, and pesticides.”
“Dyes, drugs, perfumes, and pesticides?” I repeated. “Dick Rassmuson spent all those years running that pesticide business. Jane Hanson has access to all those drugs in the pharmacy. The Teigs were professional dry cleaners and dyers. And those are just the people at my table in the dining room! Dick Stolee used to work for that company that supplied chemicals to the perfume industry. If dimethyl sulfate is present in pesticides, every former grain farmer on the tour could have had easy access to it. Lars Bakke. George Farkas.”
“I don’t suppose they all had a hand in killin’ Andy.”
“The police seem to think one of them did.” The question was, which one?
“Anything else you want me to check while I’m online?” Nana asked.
I looked at our room. I looked at the computer screen. I looked at Nana’s nimble little fingers. A dormant synapse suddenly fired in the numbed gray matter of my brain. Duh? Why hadn’t I thought of it before? If Nana could hack her way into a government agency, a Swiss hotel should be child’s play. “Bring up the Grand Palais Hotel.” I smiled. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”
Dinner that night consisted of roasted potatoes, peas, and a slab of meat that looked like chicken but had the consistency of squid. The places formerly occupied by Andy and Shirley Angowski were conspicuously vacant. The rest of us kept sneaking furtive looks at the empty chairs, and at each other.
“It’s just like that story, Ten Little Indians,” said Helen Teig. “Every time we eat dinner, someone else is missing. Someone else has been murdered. I wonder who’ll be next? It happens in threes, you know.”
I really needed to hear that again.
“No one knows if that Angowski woman was murdered,” insisted Dick Rassmuson. “She might have fallen accidentally.”
“They suspect murder,” Helen countered. “Why else would the
police have taken our fingerprints and asked us all those questions? They probably think Shirley was killed by the same person who killed Andy.”
“Where were you when Shirley went over the cliff?” Dick Teig asked me.
“I was probably in the hotel restaurant foolishly ordering the vegetable lasagna.”
“That’s what I ordered at the Swiss Express,” said Jane Hanson. “Mine was wonderful.”
“You must have ordered the version without the metal prong.”
“Someone said you were the last person to see Shirley alive,” Helen said.
Was I? A chill raced up my spine. No, wait. That might not be true. “If Shirley was pushed to her death, her killer would have been the last person to see her alive. Not me.” I waited, half-expecting someone to jump up and yell, “Okay! You got me! I did it!” But no one so much as twitched. What was wrong with these people? Didn’t they ever watch old Perry Mason reruns?
“Was anyone with you when you saw her?” Lucille asked.
I shook my head. “I was by myself.”
Cryptic looks passed all around the table.
“What? So what if I was alone? Since when is it a crime to go exploring by yourself?”
“You don’t have an alibi,” Lucille said, using her na-nanana-na tone again. “The rest of us have ironclad alibis. If you have no one to corroborate your whereabouts, you could be the killer.”
I could see them all inch back in their chairs, putting as much distance between me and them as was humanly possible. “I liked Shirley! Why would I kill her?”
“What time was it when you last saw her?” fired Helen.
“10:13.”
“That don’t wash,” said Dick Teig. “We didn’t reach the top of the mountain ’til around 10:20.”
“My watch has been stuck on 10:13 for two days now. It’s broken!”
“That’s pretty goddamn dumb,” said Dick Rassmuson. “Why are you wearing a watch that doesn’t work?”
“Because I like it,” I snapped back. “And the band matches my favorite color lipstick.”
Dick Teig studied my wristband. “Your wristband’s blue. I don’t recall seein’ you wear blue lipstick.”
He probably didn’t recall seeing his wife wear green eyebrows either. Men could be really oblivious that way. “I’m wearing a different watch tonight. This one is unique. It works.” I flashed my wrist in front of them for all to see.
“Is that supposed to be a cow?” asked Jane.
“I think it’s a Holstein,” I said. “They’re the ones that are black and white.”
“That’s no cow,” Dick Rassmuson asserted. “It has horns. That makes it a bull.”
“It could be a steer,” said Lucille. “Steers have horns.”
Helen looked pensive. “Do steers have dicks?”
“Male cows all have dicks,” Dick Teig scoffed, “but they don’t all have testicles. Only bulls have balls.”
Aha! I thought. Just like firemen.
“So how do you know Emily’s cow is a bull when all you can see is the head?” Lucille demanded of her husband.
“Because he has horns,” he repeated. “Bulls have horns.”
“And they’re supposed to have balls, but if you can’t see his balls, how do you know he has any?”
“You don’t always need to see someone’s balls to know he has them.”
Hmm. I wondered if Dick was making a commentary about bulls or himself.
Lucille did a sarcastic eye roll. “It’s a steer.”
“A bull,” said Dick.
This is what happened when people raised on Iowa grain farms decided to talk animal husbandry. It seemed a good time to intervene. I raised my voice to be heard above the fray. “I told you where I was when Shirley fell off the cliff. Why don’t you tell me where you were because I can’t believe all of you were together every minute of every hour we spent on that mountain.”
Silence. Followed by an exchange of more cryptic looks.
“I went to the ladies’ room by myself,” confessed Helen.
“So did I,” said Jane. “The vegetable lasagna was good, but it didn’t sit very well, if you know what I mean.”
I arched my brow at the two Dicks. “All right,” said Dick Teig. “I’ll own up. Rassmuson and I followed Stolee around for a little while when he was filming the sunbathers in front of the hotel. And then we all headed off in separate directions to take a few pictures.”
“Sunbathers?” said Helen, thwacking him on the shoulder. “You were ogling sunbathers?”
“What about you, Lucille?” I prodded.
“I can account for every minute I was on that mountain, and I was always with someone. So there.”
“Even in the ladies’ room?”
“I didn’t use the ladies’ room.”
A collective intake of breath around the table. Either Lucille Rassmuson was a very cool liar, or she had the longest set of pipes known to man.
“And furthermore,” she continued, “that cow on Emily’s watch looks like he’s been castrated, so that would make it a steer.”
“It can’t be a cow if it’s been castrated,” Jane Hanson spoke up. “You can only castrate bulls.”
“That still makes it a steer,” spat Lucille.
“So the animal on Emily’s watch isn’t a cow?” said Helen.
Jane’s voice was strained. “It could be a heifer with horns.”
“A heifer?” snarled Dick Rassmuson. “That’s a bunch of bull.”
Helen looked confused. “Are you saying there’s no such thing as a cow?”
“A heifer becomes a cow after she’s given birth,” said Jane. “And all cattle are born with horns, but farmers remove them for safety reasons.”
“How do you know so much about cows?” I asked.
“Hoard’s Dairyman. Aisle five.”
“Who said anything about cattle?” Lucille wanted to know.
“Could the animal on Emily’s watch be an ox?” Helen asked. “Oxen have horns, don’t they? I just don’t know if they have balls.”
I stabbed a few peas with my fork and shoved them into my mouth. Maybe tomorrow night we could discuss the gay and lesbian movement. I was dying to hear their take on that.
Nana had packed two nightgowns for the trip, which was a good thing because I found myself having to wear one of them to bed. I wouldn’t have minded sleeping in the nude, but Nana stated quite emphatically that if two of us were going to share one bed, one of us was not going to be naked.
We lay in bed shoulder to shoulder—me, staring at the darkened ceiling, Nana, snoring like a lumberjack. I turned to look at her in the shadows and shook my head at the toilet paper she’d wrapped around her head. She said the toilet paper was a better alternative than a hairnet because it cushioned her hair without flattening her curls. As she slept, however, the tissue kept creeping down over her face, so as the night progressed, she was beginning to look more like Lon Chaney in a twenties version of The Mummy.
I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about Shirley Angowski and the way she’d looked at the bottom of the precipice and wondering if the police had recovered her camera bag from the ravine. What if she had plummeted to her death accidentally? If that was the case, I was wasting a lot of energy worrying about who was where and when. But if someone had pushed her, I wanted to know who, and I wanted to know right now. What person who had access to dimethyl sulfate also had a grudge against Shirley Angowski?
There were only three people I could cross off my suspect list. Me. Nana. And Louise Simon. Even if Louise had had the opportunity to poison Andy before he left Iowa, she hadn’t been on top of Mount Pilatus, so she couldn’t have pushed Shirley. Although, after I thought about that for a minute, I frowned at my logic. The fact that Louise hadn’t killed Shirley didn’t mean she hadn’t killed Andy. What if someone else had killed Shirley independently of Andy? What if there were two killers?
I rubbed my throbbing temples. If there were two cold-blood
ed murderers, at least I could take comfort in the fact that one of them was on a boat in Alaska.
“EHHHHH!”
The shriek had me jackknifing into a sitting position in a fraction of a second. I swung my legs over the bed and landed on my feet.
“EHHHHH!”
A woman’s scream. Coming from the room next door. Oh, no. Not again. I HATED people saying death happened in threes.
“STOP IT! GET AWAY!”
I jumped as something thunked into the wall. I hoped it wasn’t a body. I groped for a weapon. My shoe.
“EEEEEEEK!”
I thought about my shoe. Was this wise? This was the mate to the only pair I had left. If I ruined this shoe, I’d have to go barefoot.
I dropped the shoe and grabbed my pillow instead. More thunks against the wall. More screams. Footsteps pounding across the room. A scream echoing in the hall. I raced to the door and threw it open.
Grace Stolee was in the hall jumping from foot to foot and screaming like a madwoman. The door to her room was open wide and she kept jabbing her finger toward it in utter hysteria. Oh my God. Had someone tried to kill Grace?
I ran toward her. “Who attacked you?”
She pointed toward the door again. I spun around to follow her gaze.
A man stood within the shadows of her room. He was big, and hulking, and lumbering straight toward us. When he came into the light, I saw his face. Kind of. His forehead and nose and mouth were hidden behind a mask that fit over his head so that only his evil little eyes were visible. Oh my God! It was Hannibal Lecter.
“EHHHHH!” I screamed.
“EEEEEK!” Grace screamed.
He had something in his hand. A gun? A knife? I didn’t wait to find out. I rushed at him and whammed him in the midriff with my pillow. He doubled over with a loud, “OOHFF!” My pillow burst. Feathers sprayed everywhere. Hannibal dropped his weapon. Onto my foot.
“OW!” I cried.
“EEEEEK!” Grace screamed like a banshee. She jabbed her finger toward my room. I turned around. A hideous dwarf with toilet paper tacked to its face charged at us with the ferocity of an avenging angel. “It’s the Mummy!” shrieked Grace. BOOM. The floor shook as Grace went down like a ton of bricks.