by Joan Hess
Mrs. Jim Bob stood up, too, but her knees felt like gelatin and she had to hold on to the arm of the sofa until she got herself steadied. "I cannot believe my ears," she said coldly. "Neighbors don't treat each other like that, and it's hardly the Christian thing to do. You and Earl have been upstanding members of the Voice of the Almighty for years, and I'd like to think you're above spite and malice."
"I am-but my lawyer ain't." Eilene smiled as the blood drained from her visitor's face.
*****
The troopers and the coroner were gone, as was the body and what scraps of possible evidence anyone had found. Les Vernon was in Harve's car, talking on the radio to the dispatcher. Plover and I sat on the green metal glider on the Milvins' porch. Harve had pulled over the matching chair, fired up a cigar butt, and was now making notes on a legal pad.
"Lemme see," he muttered, "the kid said none of the victims ate the same thing at any of the meals, and she didn't notice much of anything all day due to the television set being on. That right?"
"She also said her father didn't have a bag when he came in this morning," I said slowly. "If what we have is related to the product tampering at the SuperSaver, then we missed something in the search. These people didn't eat sponge cakes-unless they ate the cellophane wrapper, too. Besides, I'm guessing those were doctored with syrup of ipecac, just like the tamale sauce. Everybody we've heard from recovered within a few bouts of…unpleasantness."
Plover nudged the glider into motion and said, "We've got three episodes of poisoning-Saturday at the grand opening, sometime late yesterday evening or night, and whatever happened here today. The first two have an unmistakable resemblance, since Arly's apt to be correct about the substance on the sponge cakes. We don't know if this is related or not."
"Buzz got off work at seven," I said, frowning. "He's the night manager. Who relieved him?"
Harve flipped back a few pages. "Jim Bob. He and one checker showed up at seven, and then the other three boys came in after a while."
"Kevin paid a checker with a black ducktail for his bag of groceries," I continued. "Why don't we find out if Buzz happened to buy anything?"
Grumbling, Harve went into the house. Plover and I sat in silence, although not of the companionable variety. I was thinking about what might happen to Lissie and Martin if their father died. The officers who'd searched the house had found no reference to any other relatives; at the moment, Lissie was the official next of kin. Plover seemed to be entertaining equally glum thoughts.
Harve looked a damn sight more pleased when he came back to the porch. "That was sharper than a hornet's behind, Arly. The checker said Milvin bought a magazine and a package of dessert cakes on his way out. Didn't want a bag and just stuck them in his coat pocket."
I took a deep breath. "You might send a man over to the Lambertinos' to collect Lissie's doll's rainbonnet. It was made of cellophane."
"This is a goddamn mess," Harve said. "And I'm handing it over to you, Plover, all officially and wrapped in cellophane. We don't have the manpower to handle this kind of investigation. I'll assign Deputy Vernon to assist you, and there's no way short of incarceration to keep Arly out of it."
"It's my turf," I muttered.
Ignoring me, Plover said, "I'll get Anderson on the paperwork as soon as I get to the office. As for the local chief of police, I tend to agree with you. I suppose we'd better have another run at the sponge-cake display. Maybe we'll get lucky and find one package with one print."
"Maybe," Harve echoed.
As we walked toward our respective vehicles, I looked at the dandelion. It already had wilted.
On the way back to the supermarket, I swung through the motel parking lot so I could check on practice in the field out back. Petrel's car was still in front of number four, but I barely glanced at it.
Ruby Bee and Estelle stood next to the fence, neither one doing much of anything. Georgie and Ray were exchanging blows by the burlap bag designated as third base. Enoch was pensively picking his nose as he watched. Earl Boy was on second base, pounding his fist into his glove as if he was hoping to be invited to join in the fun. Jackie and Saralee were chasing butterflies out by the fir trees.
I backed out before assistant coaches number one and number two spotted me and threw themselves in front of the car. I drove across the street and parked next to Plover's car. The SuperSaver was dim except for a light in the office area, and the deputy outside told us Jim Bob had left a few minutes before.
I told the deputy to stay put. Plover and I went inside and continued into the office. While he called the hospital to find out if the initial analysis of the contents of Milvin's stomach had suggested sponge cakes, I leafed through various papers and documents on the desk. One notebook seemed to contain a variety of lists, notes, and cryptic reminders such as: cheap whiskey, stock boys-9, call KPIG, qt, close Thursday, 12, and a lot of squiggles I couldn't decipher (which isn't meant to imply I was having mind-boggling success with the ones I could).
"Look at this," I said to Plover when he'd completed his call. "It's Petrel's personal notebook."
"I don't suppose it has anything about an appointment in Des Moines Saturday afternoon?"
"No, but it has a schedule of sorts, I think. If one were to interpret this as a continuing story line, he was going to buy cheap whiskey for the stock boys at nine, call the television station but quietly, close the store Thursday either at noon, midnight, or on his way to the twelfth green."
"Fascinating," Plover said. He sat down and held out his hand for the notebook. I resisted the urge to put it behind my back, having given up my childish ways several hours ago.
"Just remember who found it," I said in a display of maturity.
"That's fascinating, too, because I searched the office late yesterday afternoon and it wasn't here."
In a display of increased maturity, I merely gave him a dirty look as I said, "You searched the office and didn't invite me along?"
"You were at the practice field, although it looked more like tackle football than baseball. That little girl with the yellow braids is fearless, isn't she? I watched for a while, but I could see you were having too much fun to be interrupted. Please may I have the notebook?"
I handed it to him, then went around to lean over his shoulder. "The first four notes seem to deal with the grand opening on Saturday. Booze, stock boys, media. But he wouldn't need to call the media on the QT, would he?"
"Maybe he intended to close the store on Thursday on the QT," Plover suggested. "Of course, with the ipecac in the tamale sauce and the pins and poison in the cupcakes, it might be challenging to keep things quiet for a week."
"What did the lab report?" I said, losing interest in Petrel's hieroglyphics. "Did it confirm our theory about the sponge cakes?"
"They didn't have anything on the contents of the boy's stomach, but they had done some preliminary analysis of Milvin's, since he was first to have his stomach pumped. We were on the right track but in the wrong lane. There was a small quantity of sponge cake and cream filling, along with tinted coconut flakes."
I went over to a display shelf and pointed at the cellophane-wrapped mounds. "I went through these earlier, and I didn't spot any evidence that the seals had been opened.
"So your prints are all over them?"
"I was careful, but I can't swear I didn't touch one," I said levelly.
Before he could come up with a smart-assed comment, various official cars promptly pulled into the parking lot.
I gestured at the latest arrivees. "The cavalry has arrived. I'm going to take another look at the deli."
"I'll let you know if we turn up any prints on the coconut-cake packages."
"I'm sure you will." I went through the picnic pavilion, around the corner of the deli counter, and into the kitchen area. Most of it would be visible from the front, I realized, so it would be impossible for a nonemployee to sneak to the stove and sabotage a pot of tamale sauce.
Everything had be
en put away. The counters were as spotless as Ruby Bee's, and the spice bottles above the stove were neatly aligned. I examined each one, just in case, but they were all innocuous. I tried to remember what I'd learned in the emergency first-aid course. Ipecac came in one-fluid-ounce bottles, small enough to be concealed in one's hand. But one fluid ounce wasn't going to take down twenty-three people.
However, I thought as I roamed around the kitchen, picking up utensils and replacing them, opening and closing cabinet doors, we'd only been offered samples. Each tamale had been sliced into half a dozen pieces and then speared with a toothpick. Dahlia'd brought out platters and put them on a picnic table. A cheerleader had picked one up to circulate, and I was fairly certain I'd seen another go by with a platter of ugly orange tidbits. We weren't necessarily dealing with a vast quantity of sauce requiring a gallon of ipecac, especially not with the power of suggestion murmuring to slightly queasy stomachs. If one of the cooks had stirred the sauce three or four times, she very well could have dumped enough ipecac into it to set off a chain reaction in the pavilion.
But why? Two of the cooks were temporaries from another of Petrel's stores. Dahlia had looked angry, but she'd also chomped into a tamale herself and ended up in an ambulance. Dahlia was stupid, but not that stupid. Or that wily.
It would be risky to approach the untended platter and sprinkle the contents of a small bottle on the tamale slices, but not impossible. I'd noticed Ruby Bee and Estelle in the vicinity; Mandozes had headed that way, as had Ivy Sattering and several dozen other people.
I stopped cold and forced myself to evaluate the possibility that Ruby Bee-my mother-would do something that drastic to put the picnic pavilion out of business. You may be shaking your head, but I wasn't. Ruby Bee'd once gotten so ticked off at Eula Lemoy that Eula had been besieged by a nonstop parade of cemetery-plot salesmen and vacuum-cleaner demonstrators. After several weeks, Eula actually came over and offered an apology. She retracted it when she started receiving somewhere in the range of a dozen magazines a week-invoices attached-and the solicitous attention of bicycling missionaries, not to mention Cheese of the Month Club selections, records, books, and telephone calls from asthmatics who'd read her personal ad in a porn magazine. It took most of a year for the dust to settle outside Eula's mobile home. Ruby Bee never admitted anything, but she had an aura of complacency most of that very same year.
So it wasn't incomprehensible that she might have wanted to make a public statement about the deli, I thought with a shrug. But she wouldn't have put pins in the cupcakes, much less used the substance that I was assuming had resulted in Lillith Smew's death.
I didn't know much about Mandozes, but he had been angry at the opening. Ivy had joked about becoming a migrant worker. Her smile had lacked depth, though, and her voice had been too tight. It wasn't impossible to imagine her or Mandozes adding a few packages to the display. But would either of them see the SuperSaver as such a threat that he or she would be willing to kill?
I gave up and went to the front of the store. Plover was talking to a fellow trooper who was putting away bottles of black powder and wispy brushes.
"Corporal Anderson, Chief Hanks," Plover said as I joined them.
Anderson nodded at me, then said, "Prints all over the display shelf, naturally, but I suspect they'll match with those we'll have to get from the installation crew and the stock boys. I pulled up two partials from this package; from their position, I'd guess some customer picked it up and changed his or her mind."
I made a face at Plover. "Unless a law-enforcement agent of some species picked it up earlier when we searched for tampered packages."
"Yours are on file," Plover said. "We'll keep them in mind."
Anderson finished packing his equipment and picked up the case. "The rest of the packages are all clean as a whistle, thanks to automation in the factory, and the seals look okay. I doubt any of them have been tampered with."
"Well, shit," I said, eliciting a frown from Anderson. Once he'd moved away, I perched on the checkout counter and said, "Then how did Buzz happen to buy the only one laced with the mysterious poison? Do we have anything on the ducktailed kid?"
Plover beckoned to a sheriff's deputy (we were still an oddly homogenized group) and asked him to find the deputy who'd interviewed the employees. We twiddled our thumbs and gazed blankly at tidy rows of candy bars until Les Vernon arrived.
"Yeah, I took their statements," he said. "That kid smelled okay. We ran background checks on all of them, and he was one of three that doesn't have a track record. The others have a smattering of minor-in-possession, driving without a license, busting heads after football games, that sort of thing. It's hard for our youth to find ways to amuse themselves out here. But that kid in particular seemed clean. Lives in Emmet, a cousin of Jim Bob's, planning to work full-time until school starts and then cut back for football. And cut his hair."
I threw up my hands, literally and figuratively, and went to the office to call the hospital. Buzz Milvin was critical but stable. Martin Milvin had been moved to a semiprivate room and was upgraded to resting comfortably. I called Joyce and learned that although Saralee had come home with a bloody nose, she and Lissie had eaten supper and were out doin' something. A baby screamed incessantly in the background.
My stomach rumbled, but I wasn't about to snitch a candy bar from the rack. I told Plover I'd start questioning people the next morning, and also inquire whether anyone had seen Petrel after three o'clock Saturday afternoon. As I walked across the parking lot, I realized I was two meals short and very confused. If the checker was clean, which I supposed he was, then he didn't set out the poisoned package for the first customer to pick up. Buzz wouldn't have done so and then eaten one later in the afternoon. It occurred to me that Kevin might have noticed something. Yes, a long shot, and apt to be as successful as teaching a turkey to sing.
*****
Hammet and his companions were hunkered down way in the back corner of the baseball-practice pasture, hidden for the most part by a scraggly mess of stunted firs and prickly blackberry bushes.
Their expressions ran a broad gamut, from shock and incredulousness to straight-out disgust. Eyes widened from time to time, and jaws were going up and down as if they were chewing big wads of bubble gum.
"I cain't believe that," Hammet gasped.
"I don't even wanna look."
"I may just puke. Look at that calf slobber all over them."
"That one's homely enough to crack a mirror, fer chrissake. Why'd anyone want to put whipped cream there?"
Hammet bravely turned the page.
10
Ruby Bee's was sparsely populated, which was fine with me. I waved to a couple of people in the front booth, then stopped in the middle of the dance floor as I caught sight of the occupant in the last booth, way back in the corner where it was almost too dark to read the menu. Jim Bob was slumped down so far, his head was barely even with the back of the booth, and he appeared to be having a dispirited conversation with three beer pitchers and a bowl of pretzels.
As far as I could tell, he was doing all the talking, but you never know.
Ruby Bee hissed at me to get myself over to the bar. I sat on a stool beside Estelle, who was hunched over a glass of sherry and snorting under her breath.
"Where have you been?" Ruby Bee snapped.
"I'm surprised you don't know every single place I've set foot in today," I said. "What's the matter-grapevine let you down? What a shame."
"Don't get prissy with me, Miss Mute Mouth. You sailed out of here a good seven hours ago…and you didn't have the decency to warn me you wouldn't be back until late. Then you had the audacity to order me to go watch those youngsters beat each other up. Then you hung up on me just like I was trying to sell you vinyl siding."
"All true." I nudged Estelle. "Have fun at baseball practice?"
She took a deep drink of sherry, and in a voice more suited to a heavy smoker on a respirator, said, "I think you're righ
t about them not being ready to play on Thursday." She pulled back her cuff to show me a red, crescent-shaped indentation. "You see that? Teeth marks. All I was doing was trying to pull them apart, and now I most likely need a tetanus shot. My legs took like I was stomping purple grapes to make wine."
I was about to show her the bruises on my shins when something struck me. I'll readily admit I don't have a great memory and the cliché about out of sight and so on has some personal applications. While living in Manhattan (the cat-burglar capital of the world), I'd dialed 911 once when I'd heard someone trying to get into my apartment, but at the last second remembered I was married and what's his face not only lived there but also had a key. During my senior year in high school, I dropped Ruby Bee off for a doctor's appointment in Farberville, bought a fashion magazine at the drugstore, and was home reading on the sofa when I realized something was amiss(-ing). I never attempt to introduce anyone to anyone. I check myself in the mirror when leaving, not out of vanity but out of concern I might have forgotten to button my shirt or put on my badge.
"I drove by the field," I said carefully, "to make sure you two were there. I told you to expect seven players, but I saw only six. Where was Hammet?"
Ruby Bee fluttered her hand. "He…he had other things to do, I guess. Maybe he got busy."
"What other things?"
Estelle snorted. "Other things. He had other things to do, that's all."
"He left under his own steam," Ruby Bee added. "He was right upset about you abandoning him, if you must know."
"Is he at my apartment?" I asked.
"Why don't you call and find out for yourself." She flounced away to a safe distance, muttering something about someone's inability to keep track of her own houseguests.
I went over to the pay telephone and called, but there was no answer. My palms were wet as I replaced the receiver, and my legs weren't at their best as I went back to the bar. "Listen, you two, I want to know where Hammet is. We've got a maniac running around town; for all I know, Hammet got hold of a bad sponge cake and is retching his guts out in a ditch somewhere, or even worse. Someone's playing hardball, and I'm not talking about kids in a cow pasture."