Scratch the Surface

by Susan Conant

  She eventually realized that the nausea was abating. Her great need now was to avoid dehydration. Ginger ale just might stay down. She dragged herself out of bed and put on a heavy robe, but once in the hallway, couldn’t find the light switch and decided to make do with the light from her open bedroom door. Weak and lightheaded, she clung to the banister. Consequently, when her right foot landed on fur instead of wood, she lost her balance for only a moment and was surprised to discover that the presence of the cats was comforting; she was sick, but at least she wasn’t sick and alone in this big house. By the time she reached the kitchen, Edith was perched on top of the refrigerator. Felicity thought of opening a can of food for her, but the prospect of smelling one of those vile kitty dinners was unbearable. Ignoring Edith, she poured herself a half glass of ginger ale from a large bottle, stirred out the bubbles, and took a trial sip. Yes, she was ready for liquids. Carrying the glass and the bottle back upstairs, she realized that she was too dizzy to walk a straight line; the bottle, the half-filled glass, and her faltering gait probably made her look like a drunk.

  Collapsing in bed, she left the reading light on, but felt too ill to read and, in particular, didn’t feel like reading any of the Isabelle Hotchkiss books that she’d stacked on her night table. Chilled and weak, she lay in bed hoping that the cats would show up to keep her company, but Edith would probably be too shy to jump on the bed while Felicity was in it, and Brigitte was obviously playing with something in the bathroom. Through the open door, Felicity heard the soft sound of an object being batted here and there. She idly wondered what Brigitte had stolen. A tube of mascara? A lipstick? As Felicity was about to drift off, Brigitte sailed onto the bed. In her mouth was the disposable blue plastic razor that Felicity had left on the rim of the tub. Felicity’s experience as a cat owner, consisting as it did of copyright ownership, failed to generate alarm about injury to Brigitte and consequent vet bills. Instead of seizing the razor, she lazily watched Brigitte tote it around and noticed that the blue razor and the cat’s blue-gray fur and amber eyes made a pretty combination of colors. It then occurred to her that if she were living in a cat mystery featuring someone other than Prissy LaChatte, Brigitte’s choice of the razor would represent a message about solving the murder. The famous Cat Who, Koko, didn’t knock random books off shelves; rather, he made meaningful choices, albeit choices that Jim Qwilleran was often slow to interpret. Did anyone in the Coates case have a name connected to razor? Alas, there were no Shavers, Beards, Beardsleys, or Sharps, nor was there anyone who shared a name with any of the well-known brands of razors. Furthermore, Coates hadn’t had his throat cut. A pun? Raiser? Nothing had been lifted, had it? Razor. Occam’s razor, the simplest-is-best principle of logic that required shaving away concepts or elements that weren’t needed. Was murder an example?

  As Felicity’s eyes were about to close, her gaze wandered to the stack of Isabelle Hotchkiss books. Who was she? And what was her link to Quinlan Coates’s cats? Occam’s razor: Start with Quinlan Coates and his cats, Edith and Brigitte. Trim off unnecessary elements: Shave away hypothetical friends of Quinlan Coates, throw out relatives of his who could be mystery writers, discard the weird woman in the police sketch, and what simple explanation remained? Occam’s razor: Quinlan Coates was Isabelle Hotchkiss.

  Too exhausted and sick to pursue the revelation, Felicity fell asleep. She needed to recover her strength. She had work to do.

  THIRTY-THREE

  On Monday morning, Felicity substituted tea for her usual coffee and ate nothing for breakfast except a slice of toast thinly spread with Dundee marmalade. She felt a little weak, but was no longer acutely ill. As she was drinking her second cup of tea, the phone rang, and Sonya Bogosian informed her that she was fortunate.

  “Janice,” said Sonya, “has by far the worst case. Hadley went to the Brigham and Women’s Emergency Room and got treated and sent home. Jim’s still sick, but he’s toughing it out, and the best that can be said for me is that I’ve stopped throwing up. But Janice got very dehydrated. She fainted, and her downstairs neighbors heard her hit the floor and came running up, and one of them drove her to the hospital. Janice had them call me. She’s going to be all right, but she’s too sick to talk to anyone yet. She’s on I.V. fluids.”

  Felicity silently congratulated herself on having eaten only a few bites of the half sandwich she’d made for herself at the board meeting. She’d also had the sense to keep herself hydrated. “Janice probably ate the leftovers for dinner,” she said. “Sometimes the severity depends on how much you’ve consumed.”

  “What business did she have eating the leftovers? That food belonged to Witness!”

  Felicity was far more interested in her Hotchkiss-Coates revelation than she was in Janice’s possible consumption of contaminated food that had rightfully belonged to other people. “Sonya,” she said impatiently, “do you honestly wish you’d taken your share home?”

  “Well, no, of course not. Anyway, what I want to know is exactly what you ate. Last night when I was so sick, I promised myself that I’d find out what happened. The mayonnaise strikes me as a likely culprit.”

  “Actually, commercial mayonnaise is a very unlikely source of food poisoning. I was going to use it in a book one time, but I read up on it and decided not to. I just threw suspicion on the mayonnaise instead of actually implicating it. And I used homemade mayonnaise, made with raw eggs. That’s the only kind of mayonnaise that’s likely to make anyone sick.”

  “That was hardly homemade mayonnaise we had yesterday. I can’t imagine that Janice made it herself. Did you have any?”

  “A little. I had a ham sandwich. Well, half of one. With mayonnaise, lettuce, cheese, and tomatoes. But it wasn’t very good. I didn’t finish it. Oh, and I had some cake.”

  “Can tomatoes cause food poisoning?”

  “Anything can if it’s handled by someone with dirty hands.”

  “You didn’t have any pudding?”

  “No. It looked disgusting. Speaking of which, Sonya, I’m on the mend, and I’d rather not have a relapse. Do you think we could—”

  “Felicity, this discussion is necessary! Admittedly, it would be more useful to all of us if we’d been given some kind of real poison and especially if one of us hadn’t gotten sick at all, like in that Dorothy Sayers book. Which one is it? Where the murderer builds up his own tolerance for arsenic and then puts arsenic in something he eats himself and feeds to his victim?”

  “An omelet,” Felicity said. “But I can’t imagine that Janice fed us arsenic.”

  Sounding disappointed, Sonya said, “Still, if we had to be poisoned, it would’ve been better to experience the effects of one of the classic poisons instead of this ordinary bug, whatever it is.”

  “Sonya, if we’d had one of the classic poisons, we’d all be dead!” Felicity’s mind, however, was on titles: The Hotchkiss Identity, maybe. Or Coates of Many Colors.

  “There is that,” Sonya said. “In any case, we should never have been poisoned at all, and I want to know how it happened.”

  “We weren’t deliberately poisoned. We just ate something that made us sick.”

  “Where did that food come from? That’s what I want to know. It’s some deli Janice likes. She knows people there. That’s why we get a special deal. A discount. And I can’t ask her because she can’t talk to anyone yet. I thought you might remember the name of the place.”

  “It’s in Jamaica Plain. Tony’s? I think that’s it. Tony’s Deli. It should be on the receipts.”

  “Janice has the receipts. She’s our treasurer.”

  “Maybe you should wait until she’s well enough to talk.”

  “Wait? I am not waiting! You know, it’s easy for you to take this incident casually, Felicity. You got off lightly. The rest of us are very ill. In fact, I’m going back to bed right now.”

  With that announcement, the conversation ended. Felicity felt well enough to follow her usual morning routine of making her bed, tidyi
ng the kitchen, and taking a shower. Brigitte having abandoned the disposable razor in the upstairs hallway, Felicity had returned it to the bathtub and used it to shave her legs. Maybe she should preserve it in some honorable fashion. It deserved to be bronzed. Quinlan Coates had owned many cat mysteries, including some of her own, some by Lilian Jackson Braun, Shirley Rousseau Murphy, Rita Mae Brown, and other successful contributors to the genre. But he had owned the entire opus of Isabelle Hotchkiss. He had been genuinely crazy about cats. As an academic, especially an academic who had started to write mysteries a dozen years earlier, he might well have chosen to use a pseudonym for any series, but it would have been one thing to be identified as the author of sophisticated academic puzzles or existentialist novels of suspense, and quite another to be recognized as the man behind the pen of Isabelle Hotchkiss and her talking cats. Yes, it all fit! And those venomous responses for which Isabelle Hotchkiss was notorious? The horrid letters in which she’d refused to blurb books? Exactly the sort of nastiness to be expected in the world of academe. Or, at any rate, in the world of academe as portrayed in mystery fiction. Felicity was so overjoyed at the prospect of conveying her brilliant insight to Detective Dave Valentine that after shaving her legs, she washed her hair with a perfumed shampoo she saved for special occasions and scrubbed with a body gel scented with the same fragrance.

  Stepping out of the tub, she wrapped herself in a giant towel and practiced her opening line: “The intended victim,” she proclaimed, “was not Quinlan Coates. The intended victim was Quinlan Coates as Isabelle Hotchkiss!”

  So stunned would Dave Valentine be by this remarkable feat of detection that he’d overlook Felicity’s minor misrepresentation of the manner of Uncle Bob and Aunt Thelma’s death or perhaps reinterpret it as a sign of family loyalty carried to excess. Anyway, now that the truth about Coates and Hotchkiss had been revealed to her by her supersleuth cat, she, Felicity Pride, with the assistance of Detective Dave Valentine, would rapidly solve the murder. Having done so, she would finally be at liberty to put her very own real murder to work in promoting her books. The thought brought with it a new realization, namely, that since Quinlan Coates had been Isabelle Hotchkiss, then Isabelle Hotchkiss had perished with him. Ding, dong! By comparison with Felicity, Dorothy had felt indifferent to the news that the Wicked Witch was dead. No more Hotchkiss, no more Kitty Katlikoff, no more Olaf and Lambie Pie! Ding, dong, they were all dead!

  There remained the question of who had killed them. The murder hadn’t yet been solved; it had been recast. Best to think it out before calling Dave Valentine. Who killed Isabelle Hotchkiss? Someone who knew that she was Quinlan Coates. Supposedly, no one knew. Who could have known? William Coates, Quinlan’s son, just might have known, but if, in Oedipal fashion, he’d murdered his father, wouldn’t he have put on a show of grief at the funeral? Wouldn’t he have made a to-do of claiming Edith and Brigitte as his legacy instead of complaining that his father preferred cats to his son? Who else? Hotchkiss’s agent and editor might have known, but neither would have killed so prolific an author and thus so reliable a source of income.

  Then there was Ronald: Wasn’t it odd that Ronald, who knew everything about books and authors, knew nothing about Isabelle Hotchkiss? But Ronald was odd. Good friend though he was, he was peculiar indeed. Looking back to her signing at Newbright Books on the evening of the murder, Felicity vividly remembered that Ronald had appeared while she’d been talking with the fans who had lingered. In fact, he had appeared during a discussion of Isabelle Hotchkiss. Where had he been before that? Ronald doted on his cats, George and Ira, whose vet was someone at Angell, where, on the afternoon of his death, Coates had picked up Edith after her donation of blood. Ronald could have murdered Coates before Felicity arrived at Newbright Books. He could have driven the body—and Edith, of course—to Felicity’s house during her talk and signing. But why? Ronald was Felicity’s best friend. Was he friend enough to have killed her competition? And his own. Ronald was, after all, beginning to write a cat mystery.

  Well, Felicity was Ronald’s friend, too, and a loyal one. If she told Detective Dave Valentine that Quinlan Coates had been Isabelle Hotchkiss, he’d follow the same line of thought that had led her to Ronald Gershwin. Therefore, she could not tell him. Not yet.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  “Felicity, there is something you must do for Witness.” Sonya’s voice vibrated in Felicity’s ear. She was sorry she’d answered the phone. “You are the only able-bodied member of the board, and this poisoning needs to be investigated immediately.”

  “Sonya, what happened was unfortunate, but I don’t see the urgency.”

  “Naturally not! You had a light case of this horrible thing. The rest of us are prostate.”

  “Don’t you mean prostrate?”

  “I always mix them up. It’s my sensitivity to all things verbal. The connections. Words to words. And what does it matter, anyway? The point is that the matter has to be investigated, and you’re the only one in a position to do it. I checked the phone book, and there’s a Tony’s Deli in Jamaica Plain, just the way you remembered. Now, what you need to do is to go there and find out what’s what.”

  “We know what’s what. What’s what is that Janice bought food there that made us sick.”

  “Yes, but when did she buy it? On Sunday? Saturday? Or a week before we ate it, in which case we can’t report the deli, can we? Anything goes bad in a week. And we aren’t positive that this Tony’s is the same place. You know, Felicity, it’s a very serious matter to report a restaurant. If the deli is blameless, we could be sued. And Jamaica Plain is in Boston, and all the violations of restaurant codes are posted on that Web site, what’s it called?”

  “The Mayor’s Food Court. But what’s posted there are reports by the city inspectors. It doesn’t list complaints from customers who say the food made them sick. But I do get the point. If Janice bought the food on Sunday morning, then we probably should call the city and have the place inspected. And if this Tony’s in Jamaica Plain isn’t where she bought the food, we obviously shouldn’t report it. I agree.”

  “It won’t take you any time,” Sonya said. “Just buzz down there and ask a few questions. It’s not as if you had to do all that much for Witness most of the time, you know. But in a crisis like this, I’m glad you’re coming through.”

  Before hanging up, Sonya gave Felicity the address of Tony’s Deli, which was on Centre Street, a main thorough-fare of Jamaica Plain. As Felicity knew from having dined in the area three or four times with Ronald, there were dozens of eateries on Centre Street, many of them storefront establishments serving ethnic food that Ronald liked and Felicity didn’t. Before leaving on what she saw as a quick errand, Felicity checked on the cats, who were sitting close together at the end of her bed. Edith was grooming Brigitte’s ears. The cats were such dear friends! When she’d accidentally stepped on one or both of them last night, the cause of the scrambling and hissing that followed had been her foot rather than any animosity between Edith and Brigitte.

  A half hour later, having encountered no traffic on Route 9, Felicity was driving Aunt Thelma’s Honda along Centre Street in search of Tony’s Deli. She passed a restaurant that Ronald had misrepresented to her as specializing in seafood, as it had, in a way, but the place had been Asian and the seafood cooked with dark sauces that Felicity had found unfamiliar and far too strong for her taste. Spotting the Tony’s Deli sign above a storefront, she parked on the street, locked her car, and approached the store, which looked nothing whatever like her idea of a delicatessen. A deli, in her view, was an informal restaurant with a big case of takeout food. The best delis were Jewish and sold half-sour pickles, bagels with cream cheese and lox, pastrami, and fat sandwiches. From the outside, Tony’s didn’t look like a restaurant at all. Piled in the big windows were bottles, cans, and little packages with labels in some foreign language and, indeed, in some foreign alphabet.

  Tentatively opening the door, Felicity saw a groc
ery store packed with what were obviously Russian foods. A pale-faced woman behind a small cash register nodded to her, and she nodded back. Mystified, Felicity wandered to the rear of the store, where there was, a long refrigerated glass case with takeout food, but not at all the kind of food Janice had served on Sunday or at any of the Witness meetings. Despite a thick brown coating, the piles of whole, flattened chickens looked nauseatingly like naked birds. Potatoes abounded: thick, fried patties, mounds of potato salad containing unidentifiable objects and bits of grayish-green leaves. Many of the vegetables were marinating in clear liquids. The cheese looked like provolone, but a tiny label identified it as yogurt cheese, something Janice had certainly never provided. A second refrigerated case contained whole dried fish, some large, some small, all with eyes that Felicity avoided meeting and mummified skin that reminded her of the foot exhibited by the forensic expert at the Witness meeting. Although the refrigerated cases and the rest of the store looked clean, a musty scent permeated the air, and Felicity was eager to leave.