A Diet to Die For

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A Diet to Die For Page 15

by Joan Hess


  I went downstairs and knocked on Joanie’s door. When she opened it, I said, “Will you call Betty Lou Kirkpatrick and find out the name of her law-professor daughter, then call the daughter and ask when there’s a faculty meeting or whatever where attendance is mandatory?”

  “I have to fire in ten minutes.”

  “A gun? An employee? Off a memo?”

  “I have to fire a particularly exquisite hand-built vase, Claire, and you’re blocking the doorway. I’m going to have to run across campus as it is, and it won’t be a pretty picture. Why don’t you call Betty Lou and ask all those things?”

  “I don’t know her. Can you call her after you’ve fired the vase?” I persisted.

  “I’ll catch Betty Lou later in the morning and call you at the Book Depot.” She gave me a shrewd look. “Shall I pass the vase to raise bail?”

  “Good idea. Remember to remove the money before you fire it.”

  I walked to the Book Depot and called the hospital to check on Maribeth. Her condition had not changed. I sold a few books, agreed to order one not in stock, paced up and down the aisles, and finally snatched up the feather duster to vent my impatience on Chaucer, Dante, and the rest of the freshman lit gang. I was so edgy that I nearly knocked down a customer when I glanced up and saw a face peering through the window. The disembodied head disappeared, but it cost me a sale and a goodly amount of professional pride. As a rule, proprietors try to avoid scaring off customers. Plays havoc with sales.

  I picked out a self-help on stress-related disorders, sat on the stool behind the counter, and waited for Joanie’s call. By noon I was reduced to glowering at the telephone, and I almost shrieked when it rang.

  Pleased by my psychic powers, I grabbed the receiver and said, “Did you get through to Betty Lou?”

  “Any relation to Peggy Sue?” Peter answered, humming a few bars so I could fully appreciate his quick wit.

  “No, it’s … someone who goes to basketball games. Joanie was going to see if I could use her ticket for the next game.”

  “In two months, when basketball season opens? How clever of you to plan ahead so carefully.”

  I scowled at the receiver, but in a properly modulated voice, said, “Thank you. It’s been lovely chatting with you, but I’m waiting for Joanie to call and it’s rather urgent.”

  “I know how fond you are of basketball. Listen, I’m going to violate department regulations to share—voluntarily, mind you—some information about the Galleston case.”

  “You are?”

  “I’m doing this so you’ll stop nosing around, Claire. The tests done at the hospital turned up a certain amount of heart damage from childhood rheumatic fever. Maribeth shouldn’t have been on a stringent diet, but she shouldn’t have suffered any serious complications from it as long as she took all the vitamins and supplements prescribed. Apparently she didn’t; we found three bottles of potassium caplets in a kitchen cabinet, and they were unopened.”

  “Did you test them to see if they really were potassium?” I asked politely … for the third or fourth time.

  “Yes, they had been packaged for Ultima and consisted of precisely what the label described. The truth is that for some unknown reason she wasn’t taking them, and that led to the dizziness and vagueness.”

  “Oh,” I said, somewhat sad to see my lovely theory deflate. “Then the self-induced potassium deficiency was responsible for everything, from the outbursts to the heart attack? Maribeth simply didn’t follow the program, and it resulted in her coma and Candice’s death?”

  “That’s right,” Peter said. He wished me luck getting basketball tickets on the fifty-yard line and hung up.

  I kept the receiver in my hand, staring at it as I replayed the conversation in my mind. Everything had sounded fine until I’d mentioned the outbursts and the heart attack. And heard the damn omnipresent siding salesman once again.

  I found the telephone directory, called the pediatric clinic, and asked to speak to the helpful young doctor with the big black ears.

  “He’s with a patient. Do you need to make an appointment?”

  “No, I need to speak to him for a minute. Maybe not even that long. Thirty seconds. Forty-five, tops.”

  “If you’ll give me the child’s name, your number, and the nature of the child’s illness, I’ll have Dr. Brandisi’s nurse call you when she’s free.”

  “I need to speak to him personally.”

  “Is this Beatrice’s mother?” the voice said so coldly I could almost see icicles forming on telephone wires across the city.

  “No,” I said truthfully, “my child’s name is Caron.”

  “And what is the nature of Caron’s illness?”

  “Usually it’s mental, but these days I’m wondering if she’s developing an eating disorder. Last week she insisted on nothing but popcorn and grapefruit juice for most of a day. Could I please speak to Dr. Brandisi?”

  “If you’ll give me your name and telephone number, I’ll put a note on his desk. However, his schedule is very, very busy, and he won’t be able to call until late in the afternoon.”

  After I’d rattled off the information and repeated several times that I wanted to speak to Dr. Brandisi personally, I hung up and resumed pacing. Peter’s call was peculiar; unlike Betty Lou, he did not volunteer anything, including information from his investigation. Furthermore, it didn’t make any more sense than my muddled theories that someone had tampered with the potassium. Maribeth had no reason not to take the potassium. Sighing loudly enough to startle the roaches, I reminded myself that she didn’t have a reason to lie about her progress, either—but she had.

  I finally gave up on Joanie, put the CLOSED sign on the Book Depot door, and walked back to my apartment for lunch. I went halfway up the stairs, stopped, went back down and around to the garage and got into my car, although I wasn’t quite sure where I was going.

  By the time I reached the street, I’d figured out that I was going to the Ultima Center to have a word with Sheldon Winder. Which word remained to be seen, but I was decidedly unhappy with the tidy conclusion to the untidy mess. I preferred my conspiracy theory; Winder might find something in the daily record to confirm it.

  As I drove down the hill beside the football stadium, I was smiling at the image of Peter and the feds skulking under the bleachers, armed not with deadly assault weapons but with little glass bottles. The stadium was empty, as was the practice field below it; I supposed the players were obliged to attend a class or two in the morning. Some of them, no doubt, shared Bobbi’s classes in joints and ankles, along with demanding courses in recreational opportunities, recruitment violations (Evasion 101), and athletic department budget management.

  The car ahead of me slowed and its blinker began to imply a turn was imminent. I agreeably put my foot on the brake pedal. The pedal hit the floor. My emergency brake had ceased working several years ago. I would have pumped the brake pedal, but it remained flat against the floorboard. All the while my car was picking up speed on the steep slope. I whipped around the right side of the car ahead of me, only to be confronted with the brake lights of a pickup truck. No one was coming toward us in the other lane. I passed the truck on the left and swung back to the proper side. Fighting an inexplicable urge to giggle, I eyed the next challenge—a lumbering white garbage truck. In that there was a convertible in the left lane, I couldn’t pass on that side. On the right was a slight valley and an upward incline with a few scattered trees and a stern sign to those who might entertain the idea of parking on the grass.

  I wrenched the wheel to the right, bounced over the curb (bouncing my head off the top of the car hard enough to bring an instant gush of tears and an expletive of Anglo-Saxon origin), veered around a tree, sucked in a breath, and veered around yet another tree. I tried to downshift, but the gears squealed so painfully I could almost see the teeth being stripped. I felt as though I had been dropped inside a maniacal video game, but the trees were very three-dimensional and my th
udding heart very much in my throat.

  I was on an upward incline now. If I could avoid a few more impediments, the car would yield to the laws of gravity. I did not avoid a metal trash receptacle, but I missed three more trees and eventually, after a mere eternity, came to rest two feet from a concrete picnic table.

  As I cut off the engine, the giggles caught up with me. I leaned my forehead on the steering wheel, tears forming in my eyes, and tried to combat what I sensed was impending hysterics. My heart eventually sank back into its proper cavity. The shrill giggles gave way to moist hiccups. My breathing steadied, and my shoulders stopped jerking as if an electric current was running through them.

  A rap on the window interrupted my internal assessment. I turned my head and gazed blankly at a man in stained overalls and a baseball cap. He twirled his finger until I rolled down the window. “No parking on the grass, ma’am,” he said, pointing with his thumb at a nearby sign.

  “I’m not parking.”

  “Looks like parking to me, ma’am. Your car’s on the grass. Planning a little picnic?”

  “There’s something wrong with my brake pedal. It went all the way to the floorboard without slowing me down. I managed to avoid an accident by coming this way.” Wondering if my knees could be trusted, I opened the car door and managed a wobbly posture on the violated grass. “Look for yourself.”

  He bent down over the driver’s seat for a moment, then stood up and said, “Yeah, the pedal’s down there, all right. You still can’t park here, ma’am. The mower’s coming pretty soon.”

  “Why would the pedal give way like that?” I said, frowning. “It was fine last night.”

  “How should I know? I’m not a mechanic. All I know is that you’re not allowed to park here and the mower’s coming pretty soon. If you want me to call campus security on my walkie-talkie, I will. But in the meantime—”

  “I can’t park here,” I interrupted with a wan smile. “Then again, I can’t drive away without brakes, can I? That might result in a problem at some point in the immediate future, if I need to slow down or even to stop. If you’ll direct me to the nearest telephone, I’ll call a tow truck.”

  “Probably in the administration building at the top of the hill there. There’s a pay phone in the hall, I think. But what am I supposed to do when the mower comes? I think I’d better notify campus security and let them deal with this.”

  I took my purse from the car, found a ten-dollar bill, and held it delicately between thumb and forefinger. “Let’s not disturb the security men. I suggest the mower mow around the car until a tow truck arrives. Do you think that might be possible?”

  It was possible. I trudged up the hill to the gray administration building, located the pay phone, waited impatiently while a dithery blond coed cooed to an unseen admirer, and eventually arranged for a tow service to collect my car from underneath the jaws of the mower and repair the brake pedal. I didn’t gasp at the amount of money required for all this, but I was hardly smiling as I replaced the receiver and leaned against the wall.

  Coincidences might be the mainstay of fiction, but this was reality. My car was fifteen years old; the brakes had never failed before. I’d been snooping around, asking questions, and somewhere along the way I’d pinched a nerve. The cozy notion that someone had tried to stop me caused my knees to weaken and my head to throb. Students swarmed through the hallway, their expressions grim as they prepared to face impersonal, money-hungry secretaries in the bursar’s office. I warranted a few incurious glances as I cautiously explored the lump on the top of my head, wincing, and then fought my way out of the building.

  I sat on a low brick wall and watched a campus security car drive across the grass and park next to my car. The treacherous maintenance man waved his hands about, clearly explaining the lurid details of the felonious assault on the lawn, and followed the cop to the rear of my car in order to make sure the license plate number was recorded accurately. I was not overcome with surprise; my one previous attempt to bribe someone had turned out no better, since the bribee subsequently was introduced as an undercover cop under orders from Lieutenant Peter Rosen, who’d found it highly diverting.

  The security cops left. A few minutes later a tow truck approached my car, coupled itself, and drove away with my only means of transportation. I wasn’t especially eager to get behind a steering wheel, but my apartment was on the far side of the campus and I wasn’t sure I could survive the hike. Then again, my options were limited and I doubted a limo would stop in front of me, with a solicitous chauffeur who would settle me in back with tea and a dozen aspirin. I forced myself up and trudged down the sidewalk.

  When I reached the corner of the library, however, I headed for the fine arts building adjacent to it. The students on the sidewalk wore skirts and blouses or button-down collars and ties (depending on their gender), but the denizens of the fine arts building were … artier. Here the long hair was equally divided between genders, as was the cropped, bushy hair, and a scattering of unnatural colors. Ragged jeans and blue cotton work shirts seemed to be the uniform of the day; in that I’d been in college in the sixties, it was more familiar.

  I wandered around until I spotted a ponytailed man with the same grayish splatters on his clothes that Joanie favored. I asked him where someone might fire something. Unlike others of us, he resisted an impulse to make feeble jokes and directed me to the pottery labs in the basement rather than to the ROTC firing range.

  Joanie was on the bottom step of the stairwell, talking to a girl with orange hair and earrings that dangled to her shoulders.

  “I thought you were going to call me,” I said sternly.

  “Goodness, what are you doing here?” she said. “I tried to call earlier, but no one answered the phone at the store.” She shooed the orange person away, then patted the step beside her. “You’d better sit down, Claire; you look worse than last week’s casserole.”

  I did as suggested. “I think someone fiddled with the brakes in my car. I nearly took out half a dozen freshmen and two trucks before I settled for a metal trash can and a chunk of lawn. I’m feeling a little weak about the whole thing.”

  “Fiddled with the brakes? When?”

  “The garage isn’t locked, so someone could have done it last night, or even this morning while I was at the store. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but the brakes were fine yesterday and decidedly nonfunctional an hour ago.”

  “Are you sure it isn’t just one of those not-so-funny cosmic jokes, Claire?”

  “I’m not sure of anything,” I said peevishly, “except that something’s going on and I don’t like it.” I repeated what Peter had told me earlier about the potassium stash in Maribeth’s kitchen. “Can you think of a reason why she might refuse to take the potassium and then lie about it? When I first met her, she was on a self-destructive track, but her success on the Ultima program and in the exercise classes was doing a great deal to enhance her confidence. Why in hell would she act like that?” I realized my voice was echoing in the tunnel and ordered myself to calm down. “Maribeth seemed to be candid with us at first, but according to what I’ve learned, she was lying through her teeth the week before the accident. I like her, damn it. I don’t want to categorize her as a liar.”

  “Then don’t,” Joanie said.

  “How can I not?” I said, exasperated. I stood up and began to pace in the narrow hall. “Peter said she’d stashed the unopened bottles of potassium caplets in the cabinet. She assured me the day she fainted that she’d skipped only two caplets and would be careful not to skip any again. Sheldon said her progress was erratic, and the chart confirmed that, yet she was telling us how well she was doing.”

  “Maybe that’s what she believed. If Peter’s so confident that everything is neatly packaged and ready to file away, then how can he explain the sabotage to your brakes? Maribeth didn’t do it.”

  I gave her a dark look. “He can’t explain it because he’ll never hear about it The one thing I don’t ne
ed is one of his tedious, pedantic, suffocating lectures about meddlesome amateurs and efficient professionals. On the other hand, I’m in dire need of a couple of aspirin.”

  She took a small tin from her purse, handed me two tablets, and waited in silence while I went to the drinking fountain and choked them down. “But what if Maribeth has been saying what she perceives to be the truth—that she faithfully took potassium every day and was losing weight steadily?” she asked me.

  If my head hadn’t been so sore I would have let out a screech of frustration that would have shattered all the exquisite hand-built vases in the basement. I settled for a muttered, “That’s not possible. How could she not know?”

  Joanie glanced at her watch. “Oh dear, it’s time to check the kiln. I’ve never pretended to be the local version of Miss Marple, Claire; you’re the one with that particular claim to fame. I just thought I’d throw out a suggestion or two.”

  She was a nice person, and in my heart of hearts I knew I shouldn’t strangle her on the spot—despite the urge to do so. “Did you get in touch with Betty Lou?” I said through clenched teeth.

  “That’s why I tried to call earlier. Betty Lou spoke to her daughter, who reported that there’s a cocktail party today at six for a potential faculty member from Chicago … or was it Detroit? It seems the daughter has a fabulous house and is usually coerced into holding the functions there. All the faculty members are expected to attend in order to size up the candidate.” She again glanced at her watch, twitched like the White Rabbit, and called a farewell over her shoulder as she hurried down the hall.

 

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