A Pinch of Poison

by Claudia Bishop

  “Mr. DeMarco.”

  “It’s Sarah Quilliam, isn’t it?” Marco DeMarco was unmistakably a construction boss. His skin was deeply weathered. His eyes were a bright blue in a nest of wrinkles. His hair was graying, but showed traces of brown. Quill liked the way he looked; a thick-set, barrel-chested body that spoke of years of hard, manual labor. His face was expressive, his eyes were watchful. He reminded her a little of someone; she couldn’t recall who.

  “Ignore that cartoon. It’s just a little employee humor. Some of the boys think I’m driving them a little hard. I’m not sure how to thank you for the party last night.”

  “Oh, it was nothing, really.”

  “No. I mean I’m genuinely not sure how to thank you. I’ve never been to a celebration that ended quite like that before.” His tone was wry, and slightly apologetic. “It must have been quite a shock for you and your sister. I understand they’ve closed the kitchen temporarily.”

  “It should be open soon.”

  “I sure hope you didn’t lose much business. My guess is that everyone pretty much sticks around to see what happens next. People.” He shook his head. “You can always count on the bastards to do the wrong thing. Well, have you come to check on the progress of the restaurant? We’re ahead of schedule, thank God. Your plumbing’s not hooked up, but almost all the wiring’s done, and the fixtures are,in place. Your kitchen’s scheduled to arrive any time now. I’ve got a crew ready to install it as soon as the truck delivers it.”

  “I wish Meg and I’d had your crew on the Inn remodeling.” Quill crossed the courtyard at his side. “I’ve never heard of a construction project that was ahead of schedule.”

  “You acted as GC on your remodeling yourself? General contractor,” he added, with a hint of impatience.

  “Oh. Yes. It was a mess,” said Quill. Establish rapport with the suspect—it was a maxim she recalled from somewhere. Or was that hostage-taking? “I mean, everybody was wonderful, but it seemed impossible to keep to a schedule. I used,” she added casually, “local firms, of course. But then I was going to do business here, so I thought it’d be better to keep the business in the village. The locals tend to talk too much, if you know what I mean.”

  “Smart.”

  They stopped in front of the new restaurant. Quill sighed.

  “Got a problem?”

  “Oh, no. Not all all. It’s beautiful. It’s overwhelming, as a matter of fact. This is a new venture for us, you know. Every time I see it, I get cold feet. I tend not to think about it much when I’m not in front of it. My business manager takes care of all the details and he’s just terrific. But I’m standing here thinking—”

  “What have I done? Buyer’s remorse? Don’t worry. It’s going to work out just fine. People will come here to eat just because of the design. And once they taste your sister’s food? No problem.”

  “Do you like the design?” asked Quill wistfully. “I wanted to sustain the associations to the Inn—which is quite historic, you know—and I think it’s lovely, but then, I did the sketch myself. I wanted to suggest pre-Colonial without being too...”

  “Kitschy?”

  “Exactly. You don’t think it’s too kitschy, do you?”

  “I think it’s great. The brickwork on the open hearth is a real nice design. Real nice. And I like bricks for flooring, although the mason cussed a bit laying it.”

  “So did the mason with the Inn remodeling. Of course, that was mainly a restoration job, with all that cobblestone, and that was a trick, getting the old to blend with the new. I had to go out of town for that job. I used a Guy Jones, out of Syracuse? He’s a Welshman. We have some excellent masons here in town, though. Where did your worker come from? I’d like to meet him and thank him for doing such a wonderful job.”

  “He’s been done for a few days. Sent him on back.”

  “To where?”

  The bright blue eyes narrowed. “To another job.”

  “I see,” said Quill, looking at the hammering, nailing, and sawing going on frantically around her with what she hoped was an air of convincing surprise, “that you decided not to use any local workers. Smart,” she echoed his comment.

  “As you’ve discovered,” he said in a rather dry way, “Part-timers and jobbers can lead to a lot of disruption. And when you’ve got a penalty for not making deadline, as I do, you use the guys you can count on.”

  “You’ve got a penalty if you run over the opening date?”

  “Yeah. The lawyer you’ve got on the contract end of things?”

  “Howie Murchison.”

  “Right. Like most lawyers, a real bastard. Pardon the expression. Nailed my back to the wall on this one. If I don’t make the deadline, I pay a penalty of six hundred bucks a day.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Not about money I don’t kid. I’ll tell you something, though, there’s a guy I want on my side in a fight.”

  “Howie?” Quill, who usually didn’t think much about Howie at all, began to see the balding, bespectacled town justice in a different light. “We’re a small town,” she added proudly, “but that doesn’t mean we’re small town, if you know what I mean.”

  “You sure got some big-time murders.”

  “Yes.” Carlyle Conway’s dead face rose before her mind’s eye. “The sheriff hasn’t said anything official, has he?”

  “McHale? If he had, fat chance the bastard’d tell me. There’s another one for you, Miss Quilliam. Like Murchison. Not much gets past that one.” He shook his head. “Changed my mind about small towns, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Sheriff McHale is retired from the New York City police department,” said Quill. “He had quite a career there, I understand.”

  “That a fact?” DeMarco rubbed his hand thoughtfully along his lower jaw. “Wish I’d known.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing. Look. We’re having a few problems with the septic, and I want to get on over there to take a look. You look around all you want. Anything I can do for you, just let me know.”

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing the septic tank.”

  “The septic tank?”

  “You may have heard. We’re having some problems with the plumbing at the Inn. There was an article about it in yesterday’s Trumpet!”

  “Come again?”

  “Our local newspaper. Anyway. I’d be really grateful for any plumbing advice you could give me. And... um ... we have another small problem I thought you might help us with?”

  “Yeah?” He looked at his watch. “My engineer might have some time. I really don’t.”

  “If you don’t mind, it’s something a little private.”

  His glance flickered over her. She’d decided that jeans and a tank top would be the best uniform for detecting toxic waste in a hostile environment. She’d lost a little weight in the past few months, and she was suddenly aware that her stomach was exposed. She pulled self-consciously at the tank top. “You know my sister and I run the Inn at Hemlock Falls.”

  “Yep.”

  “And we, um, well, we run into problems with the DEC, the EPA—you must know how difficult it can be dealing with the government on issues of, um, disposal of certain substances.”

  “What kind of substances?” His glance was unfriendly. Quill, who’d thought this question out beforehand, was ready. “Gasoline.”

  “Oh, shit. Don’t tell me you have buried tanks?”

  “We think so. The Inn’s quite old, and it’s had a great many owners. We’re pretty sure at one time in the thirties and forties they had pumps put back.”

  “And you think you’ve got contaminated soil? Shit,” he said again. “That’s a tough one. You’re looking at a quarter million, maybe three hundred thousand in removal expense.”

  “I am?” said Quill, genuinely astonished, and extremely glad there were no gasoline tanks buried at the Inn.

  “Oh, yeah.” He placed a hand on her shoulder. Quill jumped. “I’m really sorry. The EPA reg
s will kill you.”

  “You don’t know of any way we could dispose of it for less than that? The EPA doesn’t know anything, and I’d surely hate for them to find out.”

  “Best advice I can give you is ignore it. What they don’t know won’t hurt them.”

  “Couldn’t we just dig up the tanks and put them somewhere else?”

  “Ms. Quilliam, you seem like a nice little lady to me. I have to tell you, if you did decide to get some fly-by-nighter to take those tanks up for you, I sure don’t want to know about it.” There was a faint, very faint, look of contempt on his face. “I can tell you this, if you won’t take offense where none is meant. There’s too many people with the kind of attitude you’ve got. Let it be someone else’s problem. The earth, Ms. Quilliam, is everyone’s problem. You’ve heard of the Sierra Club? I’m a charter member. It’s a fine organization, and I can give you some literature on...”

  Quill (who contributed faithfully to the Audubon Society every year) thought it was just her luck to hit the only green construction company in Central New York.

  She apologized, which stemmed the flow, then, in dogged pursuit of the requirement to at least take a look at the place where Louisa died, asked DeMarco if his engineer could give her advice on septic systems. With DeMarco’s admonitions in her ears, they left the mall by way of the service entrance and walked over a field gouged and rutted by the passage of heavy equipment. A bulldozer and a backhoe were running at full speed. The noise, which had been mere background inside the mall, was astonishing, and DeMarco’s lecture petered out.

  “We’re getting sod in tomorrow!” DeMarco shouted at her. “All this’ll be green by Wednesday. Eugene! Hi!” He waved energetically at the backhoe driver, a scrawny, hollow-chested man in his late thirties. “Pray for rain!”

  “What?!”

  “Pray for”—Eugene flipped a lever, and the dozer and backhoe cut off simultaneously—”raw!”

  “Not for a few days yet, Marco. I want to wait to get this covered up, and rain, it’ll slosh it up.” He climbed down from the backhoe and nodded abruptly at Quill, his eyes sly and a little curious. “We’ve got a hairline crack at the other end. Happened when it was sunk, I think.”

  “Shit,” said DeMarco. “Sorry, Miss Quilliam.”

  “A hairline crack?” said Quill. “That’s not good, I take it.”

  “Show ya, if you like. It’s this big pit over here.” Eugene flicked his eyes over her jeans and tank top with genuine appreciation. Quill followed them to the lip of a huge pit. The hole was three-quarters filled with half of a giant concrete tank. The top lay upside down in the dirt on the far side of the hole. “Can’t put the top on right yet, Marco. We’re testing the tank with water. If it goes all the way through, the tanks got to be patched. It’s going to take a couple of days to dry, and we’re not going to have the plumbing up and running in time for the opening-day ceremonies, Marco. If it doesn’t, no sweat. Either way, we have to keep the top off so the cement patch will dry, so no rain, please.”

  “Going to run into some regulatory problem if we don’t put the top on, quick. Some kid could fall in.”

  “What is this thing, exactly?” asked Quill.

  “Five-thousand-gallon sewage tank, ma’am.” Eugene grinned. His teeth were in terrible shape. “You interested in sewage?”

  Quill considered several responses to this. Whatever was going on here, and it was getting increasingly unlikely that it was illegal dumping of toxic waste, she still had to find out. “Passionately,” she said and batted her eyelashes.

  Eugene the engineer had clearly been marked from birth as a man dedicated to sewers. “First thing,” he explained, his rather muddy brown eyes alight, “is the location. You got to have gravel and sand, not clay. Clay does things to drainage you don’t want to think about. You don’t have gravel and sand, you got to bring in.”

  “And did you draw in sand and gravel here?” asked Quill.

  “Here? In this kind of glaciated soil? Heck, no. Beautiful gravel. Fantastic sand. No sweat at all. Perc test was beautiful, just beautiful.”

  “Perc test?” asked Quill, thinking of coffee.

  “The percolation test,” DeMarco supplied. “You dig test holes, pour in a couple of gallons of water, and time the absorption rate.”

  “Six minute holes,” said Eugene with pride. “Now the field itself, out here,”—he swept an arm in an expansive wave—”is where your PVC pipes go. The sewage comes from along the gray line from the building, into the holes along the top of the cover of the holding tank, and through a four-inch pipe into the tank itself. The concrete tank’s in two pieces, like you see.”

  “The tank’s awfully large,” ventured Quill.

  “Tricky to place. But the bottom half went into the hole just as nice. Can’t understand why the darn thing cracked. Marco’s real picky about his suppliers. Can’t afford any trouble. Well, concrete’s a mystery.”

  “When did you set it?”

  “Three days ago, just before that woman was murdered. And they sequestered the site temporarily. The crack and that business with that woman drowning set us back a couple of days while the police were here.”

  “You were there that day?” Quill asked, her eyes opened to their widest extent.

  “Day the tank was set? Wouldn’t have been anywhere else. Dang, I wish I knew why we got that crack.”

  “Did you see it, Mr. DeMarco?”

  “Me? Nope. I was in San Francisco, sizing up another job. Came back here soon as I heard what happened.”

  “The guys were as careful as a mother with a baby,” said Eugene, a slight flush along his cheekbones.

  “Aw, I know that, Eugene. You boys do good work. I came back because of the accident. God knows what the family’s going to do. We’re insured and all, but you just never know what the hell kind of bug the survivors are going to get up their ass ... begging your pardon, Miss Quilliam. I’ve talked to our lawyers, and it doesn’t look as though anyone could hold us liable, but Jesus, these days with juries you never know. Woman gets cracked on the head around a construction site, all kinds of crap jumps out of the bushes.”

  “Well, she sure as hell didn’t come near the tank when it was set. Not that her head could have caused that crack anyhow,” Eugene added generously. “Not enough weight.” He stared doubtfully into the pit.

  Quill, mindful of Howie’s list of the spread of criminal activities engaged in by contractors, impulsively decided to try another tack. “Perhaps there wasn’t enough concrete in the concrete? You know, maybe the numbers of bags per square inch was short, or whatever?”

  The silence was deadly.

  “You can’t possibly mean what I think you mean,” said DeMarco, his eyes icy.

  “In paint, you know,” said Quill feebly.

  “Paint? What the hell’s an accusation of my shorting the concrete got to do with paint?” DeMarco’s tan darkened to an ugly red. “I’ve been in business—good, honest, straightforward business—for twenty years, Miss Quilliam.”

  “You mean it is a bad thing not to have enough concrete?” Quill, perjuring her feminist principles without a qualm, tried to look guileless. “I’m an artist, you know. I paint pictures. And if my paints aren’t mixed just right, they crack when they dry. I’m truly sorry. I seem to have offended you both.”

  DeMarco clipped his words as though he was biting the heads off cigars, or chickens. “I defy anyone, at any time, to find a damn thing wrong with my concrete. You bring any inspector in here that you want. You bring the Feds, the state, the town, and test this concrete.”

  “I’m sure it’s excellent concrete.”

  “Damn straight.”

  There was an ugly silence.

  “My, um, septic system?” said Quill eventually.

  “Right.” DeMarco shot a fulminating glance at his watch. “Gotta go, Eugene. Fill her in, will you? Unless she’s trying to find out if we’re cheating on that, too.”

  “C’mon,
now, Marco. The little lady was just asking. Probably got as tough a boss as I do.” Eugene winked at her.

  “Uh-huh. Catch you later, Eugene. Ms. Quilliam.” He tugged at his billed cap and stalked off, his ears still red.

  “How come the guys at the Inn put someone as pretty as you in charge of the drains, anyhow?”

  “You were telling me, Eugene,” said Quill, “about how the sewage comes from the gray line and then through these holes?”

  “Yeah. Drains on down. Sits for a bit. Bacterial action breaks down the sewage. When the level gets high enough, the overflow goes into the outlet pipes and out into the field, where capillary action diffuses it into the air.”

  “This has been very helpful,” said Quill. “We’ve got some problems at the Inn, as you know. But everything’s perfectly clear to me now.”

  “What kind of problems?” asked Eugene.

  “The toilets back up.”

  “How long’s it been since you had her pumped out?”

  “Oh. I don’t know that we have had it pumped out,” said Quill vaguely. “I just didn’t realize how important it was unless it didn’t work.”

  “Well, that’s it, you see.” Eugene was confiding. “People just ignore sewers. One of the most important things in life, isn’t it? Making sure the toilets work good? People take it for granted, neglect it, until it’s too late and then bam!” He flicked his ringers upward. “You got trouble. And then what they do? They blame you because they didn’t get routine maintenance on a perfectly good system.” He shook his head once in disgust. “I could tell you stories. Anyway, you get your tank pumped out. If the toilets still don’t work, you look for a plug in the pipe.”

  “A plug in the pipe.”

  “Yessir—uh, ma’am that is, a plug in the pipe. One time I got a troubleshooting call on a system. A fox was trapped in the input valve. Couldn’t get nothing into that tank from the gray line. Little sucker’s head was jammed right up against the end.”

  “How did the poor thing get in there?”

  “Sucker must have been pretty determined. Vet thought maybe it was rabid. Squeezed itself right down into that hole. Fact. Toilets didn’t work for three days while we got that cover off of her and pulled that fox out. Look, you want some coffee? Tell me about your plumbing problem? I got a little time, while we test for the leak, maybe I can come on up and take a look.”