Murder at the PTA Luncheon

by Valerie Wolzien

“Sure. Miss McGovern and Mrs. Clancy were sitting right across from me. They do a lot of team teaching—that is, combining of classes and regrouping according to the kids’ needs—so they tend to be thought of together. Miss McGovern is the more elderly of the two. Gray hair, sensible shoes, and that sort of thing. You would never know to look at her that she belongs to the Mountain Club in Colorado. That is, she’s climbed all the peaks in the state over fourteen thousand feet. She goes all over the world to climb, in fact. She’s a super lady.”

  “And Mrs. Clancy?”

  “She’s fine, too, although less dramatic. She’s younger than Miss McGovern. And she’s married, of course, although her kids are all grown up and have left home. She’s very domestic. She knits the most wonderful sweaters and she always donates homemade bread to any event where the teachers bring food. She’s really a lovely old-fashioned teacher. The kids love her.

  “And then there’s Mrs. Nunn,” she went on quickly. She wasn’t ready to go on about Mrs. Clancy, the only teacher either of her children had had that she didn’t like. And she never knew why, really. She just had never felt comfortable around her the year that Chrissy had been in her class. It really wasn’t relevant to this conversation. “Mrs. Nunn had my son Chad in her class this past year. She also taught Chrissy. But she’s not the type of teacher to expect children to be the same just because they come from the same family.” Detective Fortesque smiled as though he knew what she was talking about. Surely he didn’t have children of his own! “She’s been at Hancock Elementary for a long time and she’s a great teacher, too. She’s very involved in the outdoors and conservation and nature. Her kids come out of her class in June knowing how to read and things like where to find monarch butterfly cocoons.”

  “And the two men?”

  “Mr. Johnson. I really don’t know him very well. He’s the gym teacher. Chrissy had him and now, of course, Chad does. He’s always struck me as exactly what he is—an elementary-school gym teacher. But I don’t know him very well at all. Chrissy wasn’t involved in sports much and Chad is too young, I guess.”

  “And Mr. Daviette?”

  “I can’t help you there much either. He’s new this year. And I haven’t heard anything bad about him. You know how mothers talk about their kids’ teachers,” she added, wondering if he did. “I really can’t tell you anything about him. Except that he grew up on the beach in Santa Barbara, California.”

  “How do—”

  “It’s what he was telling Mr. Johnson about at the luncheon. I overheard their conversation. But that’s really all I know, I’m afraid.”

  “You’ve been wonderful. And you’ve helped a lot. But I’m going to need a lot more information. Could we talk again tomorrow? First thing in the morning, if it isn’t imposing?” He stood up and stretched.

  “Of course. Would you like to come for breakfast?” she said, wishing she could take the offer back before it was out of her mouth. She needed company early tomorrow morning like a hole in the head. Another one.

  “No thanks, but could we start early—around nine? A few more hours and I should have a pretty good impression of what your group is like. You’re really a very good witness, you know.” He started toward the door, and she jumped up to see him out.

  “Jed should …”

  “Let him sleep till I’m gone. Nothing worse than waking up and finding out that a stranger has been around while you slept.”

  Susan thought that was very perceptive and knew that her husband would appreciate being awakened after this man had left, and so she alone showed him the way out. Walking to the door, she realized just how tired she was, and was relieved that he didn’t feel he had to hang around making small talk. As he left she noticed the state patrol car parked out front. Was she going to get a lot of calls about that in the morning!

  He was halfway down the walk when he turned around.

  “Where do you find monarch cocoons?” he called out, loud enough for her to hear but quiet enough not to awaken the neighbors.

  “On milkweed,” she answered in the same tone of voice. “It’s their food,” she explained. “It’s all they eat.”

  “Really? Well, good night.” He walked around the front of the car and got into the driver’s seat. Susan didn’t think it necessary to stay around, so she waved her hand and went back into her house. What an interesting man, she thought, and went to get her husband to bed.

  FOUR

  Brett Fortesque glanced across the small table at the woman sitting with him. Her gleaming blond hair was coiled into a twist at the back of her neck. The effect was both efficient and glamorous. Her shirt was tailored and silk, but opened one button lower than was absolutely necessary for comfort. And her long legs, currently tucked under the coffee-shop bar, were, he knew, toned from a strenuous running program and shapely enough for a movie star.

  He wondered if she subscribed to the notion of not mixing work and pleasure and how long he should wait before finding out.

  “I’d like to meet this Susan Henshaw, but if you don’t mind, I’ll wait until I’ve finished going through the files in town,” Officer Kathleen Somerville was saying.

  “Good idea,” he concurred, thinking that he could probably get more out of these middle-aged housewives without her around. He didn’t mean to be chauvinistic, but he needed all the information he could get, and he needed it fast. It seemed there was a killer in the midst of the Hancock Elementary School PTA.

  “I cannot believe the incompetence of the police in this town,” Kathleen (who had explained at their first meeting that she didn’t plan to be a Kathy, or Kate, or any other diminution of her given name) said, looking carefully at the plate of whole wheat toast and fruit that the waitress had put before her.

  “I thought I had heard of everything that could be done wrong in the last few years, but letting all those witnesses go home without being interviewed at the Field Club yesterday …” Her voice trailed off in frustration. “What were they thinking of? By the time we get to those women they will have talked to each other on the phone and in backyards and they won’t know what they’ve seen or what someone else told them they’d seen. It’s all going to be a garbled mess!” She spread a tiny sliver of butter on a slice of toast.

  “There are always the employees of the Club. They remained at the Club until they made statements. Right?” Brett dug into his platter of twin fried eggs surrounded by bacon and white spongy toast.

  “They sure were. And they were thrilled about it when I went out there with the sergeant from downtown.” Her voice had a sarcastic edge she didn’t try to hide. “Letting those club members, who had been near the dead woman, go home and then detaining the employees, who were busy inside and on back tennis courts and playing fields, smacks of discrimination to me. God knows what they thought. They were very polite, I’ll say that for them.”

  “They wouldn’t have those jobs unless they were always very polite,” Brett suggested. “And I’ll bet that they’re considered plum jobs for people in that economic group,” he added. “You check. I’ll bet you find out that most of them are from a class that’s usually employed as cleaning ladies and handymen. The Club may be the first time in their lives that they’ve had benefits like health insurance offered along with employment. They may not feel the same way you do about it. How you view a situation often depends on where you come from.” He looked away from the task of getting grape jelly out of the infinitesimal tin container and onto his toast to see how she was taking his last statement, whether she was offended at his mild lecture, but she seemed to be paying no attention at all.

  “They’re certainly a racist group, though—the club members, I mean,” she said, writing something down in a leather-covered notebook as she spoke. “A club full of white members with black and Spanish people working in all the menial jobs—I thought this type of thing had vanished in the sixties.”

  “No. And don’t be mistaken. I’ve been around clubs like this before. Connecticut is
full of them. A lot of the members are people who marched for the rights of blacks in the sixties …”

  “And they’ve gotten so senile that they’ve forgotten what they believe?” she interrupted angrily.

  Brett was somewhat surprised at her hostility, but he answered calmly. “I’ve wondered about that myself,” he admitted. “Sure, some of them probably were just going along with the crowd back then and really didn’t have any personal beliefs, but there must be an awful lot of sincere people whose beliefs have changed dramatically, or else they’ve learned to ignore a lot.” Privately, he believed the latter. There were days, bad ones, he admitted, when he thought that getting old was the painful process of learning to ignore things that bothered you when you were young.

  “Well, anyway, I didn’t learn very much from any of the help. The waitress who works in the bar was the closest and also the most outspoken. First she mumbled about how she had nothing to do with the poisoning, et cetera, et cetera. When I had convinced her that no one suspected her of having anything to do with the death, she made some comments about how people drink all day and make her job hard. But nothing we can use …”

  “And we’re sure the iced tea didn’t come from the bar poisoned?” he asked.

  “It’s doubtful. The tea is squirted into glasses from a big stainless-steel container. It was easy to check to see if poison was present there, and it wasn’t. Besides, nobody else who drank the tea died. According to the preliminary lab tests, the tea left in Mrs. Porter’s glass—and it was over half full—contained enough cyanide to kill a dozen other people.”

  “I wonder why she didn’t taste it.”

  “There was so much artificial sweetener in that drink that she probably couldn’t taste anything. There were four empty packets of the stuff on the ground.”

  “And we know that she used all of them in the one drink?”

  “No, we don’t know anything, but right now we’re assuming so. We will know—approximately—how many she used when we get the results of the autopsy and the complete analysis of the tea left in the glass.”

  “We were lucky she didn’t spill the glass when she fell,” Brett suggested, mopping up the last of his eggs with a piece of toast.

  “We deserve some luck in this case. Do you think the murderer is the same person in both deaths? Do you think we’ll find him?”

  “Or her?” Brett just couldn’t resist adding.

  She looked up sharply, a strawberry posed on a fork near her lips. Oh, oh, he thought to himself, a woman with no sense of humor. But he dismissed that conclusion when he saw her starting to smile.

  “You’re right; it probably is a woman,” she said. “Just the law of averages. There weren’t many men at the PTA lunch—just the principal and one or two male teachers. And the same goes for the Field Club—a few golfers and the groundsmen and the tennis and golf pros, but most of the people involved here are women. But which woman or women did it?”

  “We won’t find out sitting here. Are you finished? Do you want some more coffee or—you’re drinking tea?” Brett asked, himself anxious to get on with it.

  “I can have more of either down at the police station. I’ll keep going through the files there and wait for our reports to come in. We should hear from the tech team and the coroner’s office in the next few hours. I put a rush on our request for information.” She stood up, smoothing out her skirt, and Brett hastily reached for the check. But there was no need. There were two checks, stacked one on top of the other. She extended a hand for hers.

  “I thought it would be easier if we kept everything separate.” She smiled.

  If that’s her way of telling me that she keeps her social life and her professional life apart, I’ve got the message, Brett thought, seemingly examining his own bill. “I’ll call you at the station if I need you. Okay?”

  “Sure. I’ll be waiting,” she answered. “You’ve been in charge of many murder cases?” she added, almost as an afterthought.

  “A few,” he answered, not adding that the total number could be counted on one hand.

  Susan Henshaw wasn’t smiling. How could she have told Detective Fortesque that she would meet him this morning without thinking of what she was doing? Her husband was upstairs, still asleep. They hadn’t really had a chance to talk since he came home and found her on the patio last night. He had gone to bed and quickly to sleep while she had stayed up and watched an old David Niven film on TV. Her children were eating breakfast in front of Saturday-morning cartoons. She was going to feel really guilty about that if she let herself, so she wouldn’t. How much could two meals in a row eaten without benefit of table manners harm two children? So stop thinking about it.

  She glanced up at a clock. Did she have time to run to the bakery for some Danish? Should she offer a police detective Danish? And did this man think she was running a restaurant? Now wait, she had to be fair. He had never asked for anything, she was the one who kept running around like the mad hostess. Oh, damn. The coffee was running out of the Melitta and onto the stove. She grabbed for a sponge from the top of the sink and reached for the glass pot with her other hand.

  The coffeepot hit the ground within five seconds of the shrill buzz of the front-door bell.

  “Mommy, that man is here again.” She really was going to have to speak to Chad about his manners. But later. She pulled the whole roll of paper towels off its color-coordinated under-the-cabinet holder and started to mop up the steaming, glassy mess.

  “I’ll be there in a minute, honey. Would you or Chrissy show Detective Fortesque the way to the living room?” Susan heard her daughter pound up the stairs to her bedroom; she undoubtedly thought that her sloppy Saturday clothes were inappropriate in front of the detective. She was going to have to speak to her about this crush. But there wasn’t time to worry about that. Right now she just hoped the child had the good sense to wake up her father before getting involved in going through her wardrobe for the perfect outfit.

  “There’s no reason for me to wait in the living room … Let me help you,” Detective Fortesque offered as he entered the kitchen.

  “Don’t cut yourself,” Susan cried out, wishing he had stayed where her son had put him. “There’s glass and the coffee is hot and … oh, shit.” The blood oozing out of her palm mixed quickly with the brown liquid on the floor.

  “Don’t move. Is the glass still under your skin?” He grabbed her hand at the wrist and kept it still. “Don’t step in the breakage. Careful. Come on over here. Watch that glass by your right foot.”

  Holding her arm so that she couldn’t twist it, he guided her over to the sink and very carefully, very gently wiped away the blood surrounding the wound. “Looks like the glass is still in there. We may need tweezers …” Susan couldn’t help herself. She looked away. The blood was still coming out of the wound, a jagged one about an inch long, running right across her palm. How could she be so stupid? She felt a twinge of pain.

  “I was right. It was still in there, but it’s out now. A nice long piece, but I think I got it all. No sign that anything broke off. Do you have any bandages?”

  “In the bathroom—that door over there.” She motioned with her head. “I can get them …”

  He grabbed a dishcloth off the counter and pressed it hard against her hand before answering. “I’ll get it. You stay here and try to stop that blood from flowing. I think we should get you to a hospital for some stitches …”

  “Hospital? What’s going on here?”

  Sure, now he gets up. Not when he was needed to go to the bakery, but now.

  “Susan, you’re bleeding. What’s happened?” Her husband looked around the room, at the mess on the floor and the blood-spattered sink and countertop. “Are you okay?”

  “Don’t walk across the floor.”

  “Jed! Don’t!” Susan screamed to her husband at the same time the detective spoke.

  “Susan! I’m not going to step on any glass. And I’m not exactly barefoot.”


  She looked down at his top-of-the-line running shoes and decided that he would be fine. He could walk safely over a bed of nails with the insulation on the bottom of those shoes.

  “Mooooommmmm. It’s almost time for the swim meet. And we have to pick up Charlie and Stuart. Remember?”

  Susan closed her eyes and sighed.

  “Your mother’s busy bleeding all over the place. Call Charlie and—uh—the other boy and tell them we’re going to be a bit late. I’ll drive you,” Jed called to his son.

  “But …” came the wail from the den.

  “Just do it, Chad,” his father insisted. Miraculously, the boy didn’t object. And Susan didn’t have the time to worry about the differences in a child’s response to the mother and to the father. Brett Fortesque was back with the large bandages she had bought the day her son had taken the training wheels off his first two-wheeler, and when the dishtowel was removed from her hand, the bleeding seemed to have stopped.

  “It doesn’t look so bad,” Jed commented, leaning over the counter for a look.

  “Stitches wouldn’t hurt,” insisted the policeman.

  Her son burst into the room and would have walked right across the glass if all three of them hadn’t yelled simultaneously.

  “I just came in to tell you that Dr. Hallard is on his way over. I wasn’t going to walk on that stuff. How dumb do you think I am?” He looked earnestly offended.

  “Dr. Hallard?” Jed asked, frowning.

  “Charlie’s dad,” his son explained. “He answered the phone and I told him that we were going to be late picking up Charlie because my mother was bleeding all over the place, and he said he would be right over. That’s probably him now.” He turned and left the room, pausing just long enough to give them a look suggesting just how dumb he thought they were acting.

  Susan leaned back on the counter and began to giggle. “Just what we need now. An ob-gyn man.”

  “Susan, your son said …” Dan Hallard burst through the kitchen door, stopping just in time to avoid walking on the broken glass, although Susan noticed that he wore running shoes identical to her husband’s.