The Last Annual Slugfest

by Susan Dunlap

  “I know,” he said. “And I’ll bet he was right. Anyone would be awed by them, by the magnificence of the trees, and the magnificence of the gesture. But surely someone would have noticed. Cutting down a thousand-year-old redwood isn’t a quiet process.”

  “That’s why he had all those trucks and men. He had them start work at first light. Not many people are up early on Sunday morning. The crews had two-man band saws; they’re pretty fast. They were to cut down the trees, load the boles onto the trucks, and drive to the fish ranch. The back wall would have been removed, and all the salmon fry and the incubators have been cleared out of the building, so the trucks could drive right up to the dock. There the men would drive pegs into the bole, attach the shackles and chains, and push it into the water. Then they’d bring up the next and do the same thing. The sections of the bole would be joined together like five links on a belt. And the tugs could drag each tree out to the Japanese ship waiting out in the ocean.”

  Harry shook his head. “From what I’ve learned about Curry Cunningham, I’m surprised he didn’t arrange for Edwina to see all nine trees being pulled across the water one after another.”

  I nodded. “Too flamboyant even for Curry. But I’ll bet it crossed his mind. Of course, Curry would have been on one of the tugs, headed out to the Japanese ship. He’d have had Leila’s body”—I swallowed—“to dispose of at sea.”

  “And yours.” Harry squeezed my hand. He slowed as a station wagon pulled out in front of him. On the bumper was a sign saying “Stop off-shore drilling! Save our coast!” “So,” he said, “Curry would have established himself as a shrewd businessman. He could have waited out any public outcry while he was in Japan, and come back to work for Crestwood in Oregon or Idaho, in a much more important position.”

  I nodded. “He’d probably even have had The Paper sent to him so he could read about Edwina’s reaction.”

  “But still, you said I was the cause of his killing Edwina. How could I be? He never even saw me.”

  Harry looked so distressed, I was sorry I had had to mention that. “Curry dropped Hooper off at Steelhead Lodge. Hooper had just seen you. He knew who you were. It was big-time for Edwina to have a noted expert call on her. Of course, he told Curry, a member of the historical society, that an important expert was here in Henderson conferring with Edwina. And Curry recognized your name, too. He knew you would see through the treaty right away. And he realized that Edwina would expose him, humiliate him, and block his great plan. So his choices were to let that happen or to kill her. For him, there must have been no choice at all. He dropped off Hooper at the lodge, then he had plenty of time to get to the fish ranch, pick up the nicotine and the Estrin bottle, and get back for the Slugfest. Since he was the area manager of Crestwood Industries, he’d been to the fish ranch often enough to know what was there. And the night guard was one person who wouldn’t tell the sheriff he was there.”

  “But how did he go about it—I mean the actual killing? How did he know which pizza to put the poison on?”

  I smiled. “Theoretically, that was the easy part. But it was the only area where there was a serious hitch in his plan. You see, part of the attraction of the Slugfest is its traditions. The audience likes to be able to anticipate what horrors await the judges; that’s half the fun. So things are done the same way year after year. The trays with the entrees are lined up along the front edge of the food table. The judges march around it in the Grand Promenade. And for that, Curry made a point of getting the other judges up and going, so he could be last. So there was no one behind him to see him squeeze the nicotine onto the pizza. Then the cooks picked up their trays and served them, facing the judges. Think about the last time you were served like that.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “It was at faculty meetings. For a while they had one person bring snacks, usually dry slices of cake on paper plates. The person who brought them passed the tray. I always assumed that was so the guilty party would be recognized.”

  “And when you took your slice of cake, you picked the one nearest you, right?”

  “Well, I didn’t want to make a big deal about choosing the least offensive piece.”

  “Exactly. When there are five dishes on a tray, the first two people take the ones in front, the third takes the middle dish, which leaves the ones in the rear corners. The two remaining people take the ones nearest them. It would be awkward not to.”

  He put a hand on my arm. “But I thought the guy in the first seat, your boss, got sick and ran out after the first dish.”

  “He did. It must have been a terrifying moment for Curry. By then the nicotine was already on the pizza. With only four judges, the pizza might have been moved, or even thrown out. But Curry salvaged things when he insisted Bert Lucci take Mr. Bobbs’s place.”

  “Still,” Harry said, tapping his forefinger on my arm, “suppose one of the other judges had taken that pizza.”

  “Then Curry would have to have aborted the whole plan. He could have knocked over the table, or made a spectacle snatching the pizzas and stalking out. There’s a lot of leeway at an event like the Slugfest. People might have found his behavior odd, but they wouldn’t have thought of poison. No one was considering poison then. Turn right here.”

  Harry pulled into Rosa’s driveway. Cars and trucks were crowded into every bare spot. It was, if anything, even more jammed than it had been last night. There was nothing to do but back out and leave the Volvo beside North Bank Road.

  It didn’t surprise me that the word of Chris’s release had spread so rapidly, and that all his friends and Rosa’s friends—which meant virtually everyone in town—had hurried here to share their relief. The fact that these same people had been here just last night to comfort Rosa would only make today’s celebration more festive.

  “But what about Angelina Rudd?” Harry asked as he pulled the car in by the hill at the side of the road.

  “Well, she knew the fish were gone. But she wasn’t privy to Curry’s intentions. She might have overlooked a plan to embarrass Edwina; she certainly had no love for her. But she wouldn’t have tolerated his kidnapping Leila. I think we’ll find that her family’s trip to Fort Ross was Curry’s idea. He needed her out of the way for the weekend.”

  “Surely she must have suspected something.”

  “Not in the way you’re thinking of it. Angelina and I both came upon the same empty room, but we didn’t see the same thing. I saw a place that had been cleared out and I didn’t know what for. Angelina just saw that her fish were gone. She knew that every fisherman in the Russian River area would assume that they died because ranched fish were inferior to begin with. People who considered the fish viable would blame their death on her incompetence—that’s what she thought when fish died at other ranches. No one was going to believe her boss tossed them out for some reason she couldn’t come up with. So, she wasn’t thinking about Curry and his possible plans; she was caught up in what to do about this fish.”

  “She could have gone over Curry’s head and called the home office.”

  “She couldn’t take that chance. James Drayton, the head of Crestwood Industries, is known for his narrow, moralistic views. If she had angered Curry and he’d told Drayton that she had lived in sin before her marriage, she would have been fired—just about the time people were calling her incompetent. She could never have overcome that. There would have always been talk. And fish ranching in the Russian River would have been dead.”

  He nodded.

  “Angelina had worked for years to get a position like this. Running the fish ranch wasn’t just a job for her, it was a cause. With the fish ranch, she could save lives, she could triumph over the macho fishing culture that she blamed for her father’s death and her childhood poverty. How often do you get an opportunity like that? But if the fish ranch failed, everyone along the river, where she had lived her entire life, would have laughed at her.”

  Harry sighed. “I guess that’s the dark side, the price some people hav
e to pay for living in the seclusion of this area.”

  Neither of us spoke as we got out of the car. I looked across North Bank Road. One of the two Warriors stood undisturbed, its top branches catching the last wisps of fog drifting in from the Pacific. Where the other Warrior had been for a thousand years, there was a sawed-off stump and the detritus of branches and cones around it. There were no laurels or eucalyptus trees near to mitigate the loss; the redwood branches had shaded the ground too completely for too many years to allow any seedling to survive. In time, Curry Cunningham would be forgotten. But the severed trunk of the downed Warrior would be a bitter loss to the people of the Russian River area. Few of us would look at that naked stump without feeling an innocence departed.

  We turned and made our way through the haphazardly parked vehicles to the house. As we climbed the kitchen steps, Chris Fortimiglio poked his head out and grinned. The welcoming aroma of tomato sauce filled the air. From the living room came a roar of conversation, intermingled with flurries of laughter. Chris smiled, shook his head, then shrugged. “How can I thank you?”

  “Bring me some salmon when the Rosa docks.”

  “Some? You’ll have a whole fish every time we come in. Vejay, you can plan on eating salmon three meals a day from now on.”

  “Contain yourself, I’m only one person.”

  Harry put a hand on my arm. I introduced him to Chris. Chris promised him salmon, too.

  “Well, come on into the living room,” he said, leading me through the doorway.

  The room was even more crowded than it had been last night. Four and five people squeezed onto the sofas. Three women balanced on the edges of one ottoman and four children on another. And every foot of floor held Rosa and Chris’s friends. Swallowing hard, I realized it was like it had been at the Fortimiglios’ when I moved here, when all the winter people gathered to celebrate their friends’ good fortune.

  As I walked into the room, all the talk trailed off. I spotted Rosa by the door to the porch talking to Bert Lucci. With combed hair, a clean plaid shirt, and new jeans, Bert looked like the one who had been “quite a handsome man” in Rosa’s youth. And as he gazed at Rosa he had an expression similar to Edwina Henderson’s the day I’d come upon her sitting under her Warrior. Bert put a hand on Rosa’s arm, then took her wine glass. She turned around smiling, and when she spotted me, her smile widened. Then she rushed over and hugged me, and everyone in the room cheered.

  She clasped my hands. “Vejay, I’m so glad, so relieved. And Chris is …”

  “I know,” I said.

  “And I’m so sorry I didn’t trust you. I’m so embarrassed.”

  “It’s okay. Really. I’m just glad to be your friend again.”

  “I should never have made you feel you weren’t. You know Chris and I missed you, too. It was a bad time for us. But that’s all over, and you’re back.”

  Before she could say anything else, I wrapped my arms around her and gave her a squeeze. I felt a tear on my cheek. I wasn’t sure if it was hers or mine.

  A Biography of Susan Dunlap

  Susan Dunlap (b. 1943) is the author of more than twenty mystery novels and a founding member of Sisters in Crime, an organization that promotes women in the field of crime writing.

  Born in New York City, Dunlap entered Bucknell University as a math major, but quickly switched to English. After earning a master’s degree in education from the University of North Carolina, she taught junior high before becoming a social worker. Her jobs took her all over the country, from Baltimore to New York and finally to Northern California, where many of her novels take place.

  One night, while reading an Agatha Christie novel, Dunlap told her husband that she thought she could write mysteries. When he asked her to prove it, she accepted the challenge. Dunlap wrote in her spare time, completing six manuscripts before selling her first book, Karma (1981), which began a ten-book series about brash Berkeley cop Jill Smith.

  After selling her second novel, Dunlap quit her job to write fulltime. While penning the Jill Smith mysteries, she also wrote three novels about utility-meter-reading amateur sleuth Vejay Haskell. In 1989, she published Pious Deception, the first in a series starring former medical examiner Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. To research the O’Shaughnessy and Smith series, Dunlap rode along with police officers, attended autopsies, and spent ten weeks studying the daily operations of the Berkeley Police Department.

  Dunlap concluded the Smith series with Cop Out (1997). In 2006 she published A Single Eye, her first mystery featuring Darcy Lott, a Zen Buddhist stuntwoman. Her most recent novel is No Footprints (2012), the fifth in the Darcy Lott series.

  In addition to writing, Dunlap has taught yoga and worked for a private investigator on death penalty defense cases and as a paralegal. In 1986, she helped found Sisters in Crime, an organization that supports women in the field of mystery writing. She lives and writes near San Francisco.

  Dunlap and her father at the beach, probably Coney Island. ”“My happiest vacations were at the beach,” says Dunlap, “here, at the Jersey shore, at Jones Beach, and two glorious winter weeks in Florida.”

  Dunlap’s grammar school graduation from Stewart School on Long Island, New York.

  In 1968, Dunlap arrived in San Francisco; this photo was taken by her husband-to-be atop one of the city’s many hills. Dunlap recalls, “It’s winter; I’m wearing a T-shirt; I’m ecstatic!”

  Dunlap’s dog Seumas at eight weeks old. “We’d had him two weeks and he was already in charge, happily biting my hand (see my grimace),” she says. “He lived for sixteen good, well-tended years.”

  Dunlap started practicing yoga in 1969 and received her instructor certification in 1981, after a three-week intensive course in India with B. K. S. Iyengar. Here she demonstrates the uttanasa pose (the basic standing forward bend) for her students.

  Seumas and Dunlap in 1988: “He was an old guy by this time, who had better things to do than be a photo prop. I think his expression says it all.”

  Dunlap relished West Coast life. “This is what someone who grew up in the snow of the East Coast dreams of . . . the California life!”

  For her fiftieth birthday, Dunlap and a group of close writer friends went to Santa Cruz for the weekend. Seated above from left to right: Marilyn Wallace, Marcia Muller, Dunlap, and Shelley Singer. Seated on the floor: Judith Gruber (pen name Gillian Roberts), Linda Grant, and Lia Matera.

  The Sisters-in-Crime presidents and former presidents—known as the Goddesses—always gather for a picture at conventions. One year, Dunlap had to miss the gathering. Her friends, knowing how much she wanted to be there, photoshopped her into the image.

  Dunlap’s last typewriter, before she happily switched to writing on a computer. “Plotting is one of the aspects of writing I really like—everything’s new, all gates open, all roads wide,” she says. “But it involves a great deal of data with connections that are not always linear. On paper or white board or with notes taped on corkboard—I tried them all—it was cumbersome. Using the computer was magic.”

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1986 by Susan Dunlap

  cover design by Kathleen Lynch

  978-1-4532-5061-7

  This edition published in 2012 by O
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  New York, NY 10014

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