Murder at the PTA Luncheon

by Valerie Wolzien

  “Of course not. He runs the athletic program for the kids in the summer,” Susan corrected before she realized what she was saying. “Not that a teacher couldn’t join the Club …”

  “Of course they could. Our teachers are wonderful people. And we would love to have them as members; it’s just that most teachers have to work in the summer …”

  “Hancock has the highest starting pay of any school district in the state, Detective Fortesque. Don’t think that we are underpaying our teachers, because we’re not …”

  “I don’t think anything of the kind,” he assured the two women. “So Mr. Johnson wasn’t at the Club yesterday. Does anyone else from the faculty work at the Club?”

  “No, but Dr. Tyrrell was there yesterday …”

  “Who?” Brett asked.

  “Dr. Charles Tyrrell, the principal of the school,” Susan reminded him.

  “Are you sure, Susan? Why would he have been there?” Ellen asked.

  “I have no idea. I saw his car drive up right after I got there.”

  “And what time was that, Mrs. Henshaw?”

  “I think about noon. That’s the time I usually go, and Chad had swim-team practice at one-thirty, so I know we were there by that time. He was driving into the parking lot while I was getting the kids’ towels and things out of the trunk.”

  “You’re sure it was him?”

  “Yes. He drove right past me and we waved to each other.”

  “Did you see where he went?”

  “No, I got the kids inside before he had parked his car. He parked down toward the clubhouse, not near the path to the pool, so maybe he was meeting someone there.”

  “That’s interesting, Mrs. Henshaw. Anyone else?”

  “Not that I saw,” Susan answered.

  He looked at Ellen.

  “No, I didn’t see anyone else either,” she answered slowly. “But we wouldn’t have seen everyone at the Club. It’s a big place and anyone could have been out on the golf course and we would never have known they were there. You’ll be checking with other people?”

  “Certainly.” He stood up. “In fact, I should be getting on with that now.” He moved toward the door. “You’ve both been very helpful. I’ll call on you again when I need more information, if I may?”

  He had almost left the room before Susan had a chance to stand up. “Let me see you out.”

  “Don’t bother. You’ve done so much already. I can see myself out. Sit back and have your coffee.”

  There wasn’t much Susan could do except take his suggestion, but neither she nor Ellen even so much as filled their cups until they heard his car start up, and neither said anything until a few minutes after it had driven off down the street. Then Susan poured the boiling water into the porcelain cups she had waiting, picked up the sugar bowl, and, placing all this on a tray, carried it over to the table where Ellen was sitting. And even then, neither woman knew where to begin.

  “You went over the names of everyone on the board with him?” Ellen asked, stirring two teaspoons of sugar into her coffee.

  “Yes, that’s what he came back for this morning.”

  “Came back? When did you talk to him the first time?” Now that it was sweetened, Ellen appeared to lose interest in the brew, and pushed it aside. “Was he in town after Jan’s death in June?”

  “No. I don’t know that anyone but the local police were involved then.” Susan took a big gulp from her cup. She realized it was the first coffee she’d had all day.

  “So when did you first talk to him?” Ellen persisted.

  “Last night. He came here right after I had finished cooking the kids’ dinner …”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, he said that in the reports of Jan’s death, the reports that the local police made, I guess, my name came up several times. You know I’m an officer and I run the library.” She didn’t think Ellen would take kindly to the idea that Susan was considered an authority on something that she herself wasn’t, and offered her positions as an excuse. “And, of course, I was at the teachers’ lunch and sitting in a chair right next to Paula yesterday—”

  “You weren’t just at the lunch. You were standing right next to Jan when she died. Remember?”

  Could she forget? But there was no time to answer before the phone rang. It was within grabbing distance of her chair, so she didn’t have to get up. “Hello? It’s for you.” She handed the receiver to Ellen, and then she sat and drank her coffee. A mother didn’t need privacy to speak to one of her children. From the sound of it, Ellen had forgotten one of her daughter’s commitments.

  “Can’t your father take you? He’s what? Okay, sweetie, don’t get upset. I’ll come home, but you better think of something to give her that we can pick up quickly on the way. I don’t know what. Well, we’ll just have to skip wrapping it. But that isn’t very important, is it? Just get into your pink dress and brush your hair. I’ll leave now.” She hung up.

  “Bethany is going to be late for Cindy Silverstein’s birthday party, and Bob had to go into the office on some sort of emergency. I’d better scoot. I hate buying gifts for kids I don’t know.” She stopped rushing to give Susan a hug. “You won’t forget about the food for the Porters, will you? I’ll call this afternoon.”

  But before she got to the door, she turned back to Susan. “I really would like to know what Dr. Tyrrell was doing at the Club yesterday. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him there. Oh well, I’ll call.”

  Susan drained her cup and placed it on the tray. She picked up Ellen’s untouched coffee and put it beside hers, then carried both back to the counter. There waited the detective’s cup: still empty. If he hadn’t wanted coffee, why had he asked for it? She opened her dishwasher and started putting the dishes inside. The answer came to her, so obvious it couldn’t be refuted.

  He hadn’t wanted coffee, just a chance to talk to Ellen alone.

  So what had Ellen told him?

  SIX

  “And how do you know this Mrs. Henshaw isn’t just feeding you a lot of misinformation? How do you know she’s not the murderer? She was the closest person to both the victims when they died, as far as we know. What reason do you have to trust her?” The questions were coming from Officer Kathleen Somerville and directed at Brett Fortesque. She was sitting in the passenger’s seat of the car he had driven away from the Henshaws’. If she had expected another leisurely meal like breakfast had been, she was disappointed. Brett had picked her up at the Hancock municipal building and driven her straight down the street to Burger King. And if she was disappointed, she wasn’t showing it, nor was she showing a continued dedication to the healthy way she had begun her day. She munched her Whopper and large fries as though she had never heard of cholesterol.

  “I don’t know she isn’t the murderer,” he admitted slowly. “My instincts tell me she isn’t, but they don’t necessarily count. I could be wrong.”

  “You could be,” she agreed, scrounging around in the paper bag. “Any more catsup in here?”

  He handed her a small metal packet that had fallen on the floor beside his seat, noting her cheerful willingness to accept the possibility that he was mistaken. “I’m trying to get some impressions from her. Not facts.”

  “And what are your impressions?” The catsup had squirted out the wrong end of the container and she was busy trying to rub some of the sticky red goo from her skirt.

  He took his time answering. “I’m not sure. She’s not being totally open with me …”

  “Well, that’s significant. Is she hiding something specific? Do you think she knows who did it?” She balled up the dirty napkin and threw it into the bag.

  “No, I don’t think that. I think she’s being too nice. She doesn’t want to say exactly what she thinks about the other women. She shies away from any disclosure about disagreements or competition within the group.”

  “Competition? You mean like who wears the most expensive clothes? Whose husband is cutest? Real serious stuf
f, right?”

  “Hey. How come all the prejudice? What’s wrong with being a suburban housewife?”

  “Everything. These women don’t work for what they have. Their husbands buy it for them. They don’t have anything real to do. It’s like the women’s movement passed them by. Look at where the murders took place: a ladies’ lunch and a discriminatory country club. How nineteen-fifties can you get? These women are thirty years behind the times. It’s not that I don’t like them. I just can’t take them seriously.” She took an angry sip from her coffee.

  “You’d better. One of them is probably a murderer.” He crumpled his Styrofoam containers angrily. “This is not the time to let your personal feelings interfere with your judgment, Officer Somerville.”

  She didn’t look at him, but emptied the last of her drink out the open window. “I won’t, sir.”

  It was interesting how much sarcasm she could pack into the three-letter, one-syllable word. Brett decided to ignore it. “So what did you learn this morning? I hope the locals keep good records.”

  “Actually, they do. I was surprised, considering the way they bungled the aftermath of Mrs. Porter’s death yesterday.”

  “And?” he prompted.

  She pulled a couple of sheets of legal-size lined paper from her briefcase and began. “The town of Hancock has one dispatcher and one emergency number for all situations: a police problem, a fire, or a medical emergency. At two-eighteen p.m. on June second, Officer Craddock was answering the phones and received a call from Julia Ames requesting that a paramedic team come to her home at 144 Grant Place, that a woman had choked. A tape recording of all calls is made automatically. Because of the seriousness of this crime, the day’s tape was saved and is available.

  “The dispatcher sent out a call for the paramedics from the hospital in Cranport and they responded in an emergency vehicle with respirators, et cetera. At the same time, she called out the local volunteer first-aid squad and alerted all the police via their car radios.”

  “How many police cars responded?”

  “Three. Hancock has a very well-equipped department. There are six cars—five of them on the road at all times—and three shifts of six officers each. Anyway, two of the other officers were busy with a stakeout of some sort. It had to do with a drug problem in the high school. I can find out more about that.” She made a note in the margin of the sheet from which she was reading. “A patrol car was cruising just around the corner and answered the call first. I have a copy of the report the officer in that car filed here.” She pulled it out of the briefcase. “It’s very complete. He arrived at the scene at two twenty-two and proceeded to the back of the building. A large Georgian home on two acres was the description given in the report. There was a woman standing on the curb who motioned to him that he had the right place when he got there.”

  “Any idea who that was?”

  “A Mrs. Carol Mann. It seems her husband is a police officer and she knew that there should be no time wasted by any emergency personnel peering up the wide lawns for the correct address, so she ran out front to signal. Good thinking, I thought.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, Officer Harvey, the policeman who arrived first, was waved around to the backyard by Mrs. Mann and he found three or four dozen people. Wait, I want to quote him: ‘… standing around with their mouths open and their plates in their hands, staring at a woman lying on the ground …’ ”

  “Like they had just received a shock while eating,” he said without a smile.

  “Uh, yes.” She noticed his expression and put an equally serious one on her face before answering. “Anyway, Officer Harvey ran over to the woman lying on the ground, and, he says, she was already dead as far as he could tell. There was no movement, no breathing …”

  “All signs of death, in fact.”

  She heard his impatience, but checked her annoyance at it. If he could spend a whole morning and most of an evening “getting impressions” from a housewife, he had time for her report.

  “He didn’t do anything to her. He reports that he was just bending over the body when the Cranport Hospital emergency vehicle arrived. Unlike the police cars, it came right up into the driveway and kept its equipment available.”

  “Mrs. Mann again.”

  “Yes, she did a good job. She directed the ambulance into the driveway and kept all the police cars out. That way, the respirator was available to Jan Ick and no one blocked the ambulance, which was presumably going to be making an emergency run to the hospital. Well, it didn’t take long for the paramedics to see that there was really no reason to bother with the respirator. As a matter of form, they kept her on it all the way to the hospital emergency room. But she was obviously dead before they got her into the ambulance.”

  “But did they know she had been poisoned at that time?”

  “No. According to other reports—”

  “You don’t have to quote. Just tell me the gist of them.”

  “Well, they knew that she hadn’t had a heart attack, which is what they see the most of, and they knew that she was dead, but cyanide poisoning is a little out of the league of most paramedics. Their poisoning cases are usually kids who decide to drink a bottle of sweet cough syrup while Mommy is busy, or once, I understand, a suicide who downed a whole bottle of ammonia.” She stopped and shuddered.

  “So they didn’t know until the autopsy what had killed her.”

  “Right, but someone did have the sense to stop everyone from eating any of the other food, even what was on the people’s plates at that time. That was an Officer Richards. He had them put down their plates and then the police gathered up the food later—while they were questioning guests—to be analyzed for poison.”

  “And where else did they find it? Besides in the—was it a sandwich that Mrs. Ick was eating?”

  “It was just in that sandwich. The small bit still undigested in her stomach and the tiny dab of filling that had fallen out on the plate she was holding were the only two places poison was found. Aside from that, there was no sign of cyanide anywhere.” She looked at him and shook her head. “it doesn’t make any sense, but there’s no hint that they missed anything.”

  “They checked the kitchen scraps, the garbage?”

  “Everything, as far as I can tell. They even took food that belonged to the Ameses out of the refrigerator and checked that. The garbage cans were emptied, but it was pretty early in the party and there wasn’t much waste yet. Also, all the women were searched and their possessions were checked. There was no sign that anyone carried poison into the group. You can read the reports for yourself.”

  “I will. Go on.”

  “Well, the paramedics took Mrs. Ick to the hospital. The police kept everyone else there until they got organized …”

  “And then?”

  “Then they took statements from all present. I have copies of them here. I know, you’ll read them later.” He nodded. “Well, it’s quite a job. There were eleven members of the PTA board there—not counting Mrs. Ick, of course, and eighteen teachers and administrators …”

  “Eighteen? I thought this was a kindergarten-through-fifth-grade elementary school?”

  “Yes, but there was the gym teacher, the art teacher—”

  “The librarian, et cetera,” he finished for her. “Of course, I was forgetting that modem education can’t get along with just a teacher in each classroom. Sorry I interrupted.”

  “No problem. The statements were taken according to procedure. Each person was interviewed separately and all the interviews were taped as well as taken down in shorthand.”

  “By whom?”

  “Well, that part wasn’t quite regulation. It seems that no one in the police department is trained to take dictation, and so they called for a volunteer. Mrs. Ames said that she could do it and so they asked her to.”

  “Mrs. Ames? The president of the PTA?”

  “One of the co-presidents, yes. So they—”

  “
You’re telling me that one of the members of the PTA sat in on every interview? That no one was interviewed with only the police present?”

  “Well, that’s how I understand it,” she admitted. “You think that may have caused a problem or a bias of some sort?”

  “Unless Mrs. Ames is universally loved and trusted by every member of the PTA board and by all the teachers and whoever else was there, yes, I think it may have made a difference.” He sighed. “But I don’t suppose there is anything we can do about that now. It does seem to me, however, that the Hancock police department has gone out of their way to obfuscate the facts in this case.”

  “Do you want me to go on?”

  “Did anything in particular stand out in the interviews?” he asked.

  “Just that no one could see how it was done. Mrs. Ick went up to the table for seconds after the majority of people had served themselves and gone off to eat and, evidently, took a sandwich from the tray, ate it, and died. The person closest to her at that time was your Mrs. Henshaw. And it happened so quickly that no one really noticed very much.”

  Brett ignored the possessive pronoun in front of Susan’s name. “Were there any theories as to the reason for her death?”

  “I know what you mean. Usually everyone has an idea why the dead person was killed. But in this case that doesn’t seem to be true. And the local police are baffled. There appears to be no motive as to why it happened and no way that anyone could possibly know that she was going to pick up that particular sandwich. Unless …”

  “Unless?” he prompted, when she didn’t continue.

  “Unless she didn’t pick up the sandwich. Unless it was put on her plate by the person who had put the poison in it—the only person who would know which sandwich had poison in it on a trayful of identical sandwiches. And the only person who could have done that was your Mrs. Henshaw. She was the only other person up at the table when the death occurred.”

  “And how did she keep someone else from taking that particular sandwich the first time everyone came up for food?”

  “Ah … well, I don’t know,” admitted Kathleen, who had been growing fonder of her theory every second.