Sweet Revenge

by Diane Mott Davidson

  But it was Tom. Every muscle in my body relaxed, and suddenly I didn’t mind giving my mocha to Roberta, because Tom’s voice was like cocoa, and it did, in fact, warm me up. “Hey, Miss G. Heard you visited the jail and didn’t even stop in to say hello.”

  “Sorry. I was there seeing Patricia, and then I had to come pick up Arch and his pals. Patricia was pretty upset—”

  “Yeah, yeah, Miss AB Negative. Too bad she didn’t confess to you, we coulda wrapped this thing up, gone home early.”

  I lowered my voice. “What do you think about all the stuff she told you? That Sandee was following Drew. That Sandee left a dead vole on Drew’s doorstep. I don’t know why she didn’t tell me all this when she came over to our house last night, do you?”

  “No, I sure don’t. But you’re bent on helping with this case, huh? You’re worried about Patricia, and you’re worried about Sandee Brisbane?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Oh-kay. Well, if Patricia had a videotape of Sandee Brisbane following Drew, or if we could get a good shot of someone leaving the vole, we’d be more inclined to believe her. All we know is that both you and Patricia claim to have seen someone who looks like Sandee Brisbane, but with long brunette hair instead of the short blond variety.”

  I added, feeling less confident, “And the vole?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Goldy. If it had been a real threat, don’t you think Drew would have called it in? He was already paranoid about those three very vague e-mails. He would have told us about a dead rodent. For all we know, that vole just up and died of old age on Drew Wellington’s stoop.”

  “All right, all right.” I was conscious of the traffic slowing. “You know I’ve got the curry party to do tonight for the MacArthurs. I’m so sorry I won’t see you until late.” I waited to make sure the boys were talking and wouldn’t hear me, then I lowered my voice to a whisper. “I miss you.”

  The boys erupted in gales of laughter. Had they been listening? Hmm. Maybe Drew Wellington wasn’t the only one who was paranoid.

  “I miss you, too, Miss G. By the way, thanks for sending Larry Craddock our way in a patrol car. He doesn’t like you and Julian and whoever was helping you today very much. But he did tell us about the two maps Drew showed him, including the one left in his briefcase.”

  “Did he provide a description of it?”

  “You bet he did. And it’s not the one we found on Drew.”

  “Well, aren’t you glad I helped you with that?”

  “I’m ecstatic.”

  “Here’s something else. Roberta thinks Patricia might have been purchasing Ritalin from her hairdresser at the library.”

  Tom actually laughed. “We didn’t find any Ritalin in Drew’s system. But I swore I’d give you an update on Wellington once we knew what did in fact kill him. He was poisoned. We found heavy doses of cyanide and Rohypnol in his blood. Rohypnol is a date-rape drug, illegal of course, but available all over. The Rohypnol was in his flask, along with his sour mash. The cyanide was mixed into the coffee in his thermos. He also was stabbed with an X-Acto knife, as it turns out, but it didn’t kill him.”

  “For God’s sake.”

  “Half past three, we’ve got Drew Wellington on the surveillance camera, walking as if he’s real drunk, up to the library’s front desk. He disappears for a few minutes, then he limps back out. He didn’t ask for help of any kind, that’s the weird thing. Did he know he’d been drugged? Did he think he’d just had too much to drink? Because he was over the legal limit for DUI.”

  That jibed with what Roberta had told me. “Drugged, drunk, poisoned, and stabbed. I still don’t get it.”

  “He had a drinking problem. He’d always had a drinking problem. And the flask of sour-mash whiskey in his briefcase didn’t help.”

  “Yeah, I saw the flask.”

  “Our theory is that he was drugged with the booze, then thought he might feel better if he had some caffeine. And that’s what killed him.”

  “Let me get this straight. He came into the library just before three, maybe already having started drinking. He asked Roberta for help with an atlas, said he was there to meet clients, and then offered two maps for sale to Larry Craddock. Drew might have been planning to meet with someone else as well. He also sat in the corner to sip some more whiskey. At half past three, he stumbled up to the checkout desk to do nothing. Larry Craddock says that he went back to Drew’s corner and waited for him for twenty minutes, apparently while Drew was, uh, still doing nothing.”

  “Maybe he was in the bathroom,” Tom offered.

  “That’s an awful long bathroom break. Anyway, Larry says he gave up and went back to the reading room. Then, apparently, Drew returned to his chair in the corner without asking for help, drank the cyanide-laced coffee, got stabbed, and died. This just makes less and less sense.”

  “All right, here are two more things for you to chew on while you’re serving your curry dishes.”

  “Shoot.”

  “This was a couple of months ago. Neil Tharp gave Rohypnol to his girlfriend. Well, she wasn’t really his girlfriend. She was a girl he picked up in a bar and brought back to his house. The drug can make you feel relaxed and like you want to have sex with someone. But this gal didn’t, and she had enough sense to lurch out Neil’s door and call 911. We booked him, don’t worry, but he said to check his blood, which we did, and he also had it in his system, and he said they both took it to get high and have an orgy. Although who would want to have an orgy with that guy is beyond me. As you would say, yuck.”

  “Okay. So Neil can get bad stuff and has used it before. What’s the second thing?”

  “Drew Wellington had been accused of cutting maps out of valuable atlases. Like in the rare-book rooms of university libraries. A library aide at Stanford found an X-Acto knife blade right near where Drew was sitting one time. They hired investigators and even found one missing map. But Drew beat the rap because of the way the arrest was handled.”

  “Had Drew sold stolen maps?” But I knew the answer to this already, because of what I’d heard from Rosie Barton, though Drew had claimed that map wasn’t hot.

  “We don’t know if he sold squat. It’s not as easy to get a search warrant in California as it is here. He walked off before they could rummage around in his briefcase and on his person. The library’s rare-books librarian and a volunteer staff did a painstaking inventory, and yes, they’re missing some valuable maps, cut right out of atlases, some of them checked out by Wellington. But they don’t know when those maps were stolen.”

  “Tom, I heard Rosie Barton, a garden-club member, talking today about Drew selling stolen maps.” I told Tom what I’d overheard from Rosie.

  “Okay, thanks, we’ll talk to her.”

  “Don’t go yourself, okay? I don’t want the garden club to think their caterer is eavesdropping on their conversations.”

  “But that’s what you’re doing.” When I didn’t say anything, Tom chuckled. “All right, Miss G., we’ll say we put it together from other sources and records. Only, there are very few records, even fewer receipts for bills of sale, at Wellington’s place. In the last five years, it looks as if he paid taxes on—get this—only about fifty thousand dollars’ worth of annual income.”

  “Fifty thousand dollars? But he supposedly took the money he got from Elizabeth and increased it exponentially!” I thought for a moment. “Did Neil Tharp have any records?”

  “Nope. Or so he claims.”

  “Well, did Tharp have knowledge of Drew pilfering maps? I mean, that he’s admitted to you.”

  “You bet he did. He’s our other source, if Rosie Barton clams up on us. Tharp thinks Drew was killed by someone who’d been sold a valuable map he’d stolen from a big collection. You go to sell that kind of thing, it’s been reported stolen, you’re going to be in a whole lot of hell from the FBI.”

  “Okay, so maybe someone was anticipating trouble from the FBI. But tell me why a person who’d bought a stolen
map wouldn’t just tell the FBI who had sold him the map. Then the Bureau could go out and arrest that guy—”

  “Good question. But sometimes people don’t want to own up to law enforcement that they’ve been duped by someone smarter than they are. Look, I gotta go. I’ve got a whole list of people here who dealt with Drew Wellington, and I’ve got to start calling them.”

  “Wait. People don’t want to own up to law enforcement that they’ve been taken for a ride? So then what?”

  “So, Miss G., sometimes they’ll go out and deal with the person who made them feel like a dummy. Sometimes they’ll kill him.”

  11

  Tom disconnected, and suddenly I missed him terribly, his wisdom, his loving glance, his body enclosing mine. Wait a minute…I didn’t have to suffer, right? I mean, we were married, weren’t we? So I called him right back.

  He picked up on the first ring. “Did I forget something?”

  Ah, caller ID. I whispered into the phone, “You didn’t tell me you, you know”—I lowered my voice another notch—“that you loved me.” Embarrassed, I turned my head to see if the boys were listening, but they were all intent on a handheld video game that Arch was vigorously punching and groaning over.

  “You need me to do that?”

  I thought of Patricia, her grief and her loneliness. “Uh, I guess so.”

  “I’ve got some guys here right now,” Tom warned, his voice businesslike. In the background, male voices made noises about leaving him alone. They would come back later or call, they offered.

  I could hear the desperation in my voice, but didn’t care. Put it down to visiting an enraged woman in jail. “Just, can you come home early? I’d love to see you before I have to head out for the curry party.”

  “You got it.” This time when we hung up, I didn’t feel quite as emotionally disconnected.

  I sighed and tried to mull over all Tom had told me about Drew. Yesterday afternoon, the former D.A. had come into the library, ostensibly to meet clients. Larry Craddock claimed Drew had been there to show him some valuable maps, but I wasn’t sure I trusted Larry’s version of events. Roberta said Drew had told her he was meeting people there, so who else besides Larry—if Drew actually met with Larry—might Drew have been planning to see? Had he already been drunk when he arrived at the library? Or had he just curled up in a corner to surreptitiously sip whiskey from the flask in his briefcase? Had the Rohypnol been in there already, or had someone poured it in while Drew was, say, asking Roberta about an atlas? What about the cyanide? I had the same questions regarding when Drew’s coffee had been spiked with that particular poison.

  In any event, he’d drunk at least whiskey before lurching to the library’s front desk. Had he had any coffee at that point? I doubted it, as cyanide was notoriously fast acting. Nor, I was willing to bet, had he been stabbed by half past three. Someone who’d been knifed with an X-Acto blade would know he’d been attacked.

  So he’d been drunk, and possibly drugged, when he staggered to the checkout desk. He hadn’t taken out any books. He might have been in pain, but he hadn’t asked for help. Why not? Had machismo reared its head, or had he been afraid that once again, someone would discover that he had a drinking problem? Maybe he had been so drunk, he just assumed anything he was feeling was a result of the alcohol.

  Sandee had been watching him, I knew that for sure, now that I had confirmation from Patricia that Sandee was indeed alive and had been stalking Drew. Patricia and Neil had also been at the library yesterday. Our local book cache was a popular place, apparently. But with only one surveillance camera at the front of the library, nobody had been recorded doing anything nefarious. Sandee, in sending threatening e-mails to Drew from public libraries, had certainly proven adept at avoiding surveillance cameras.

  And then there was the map that Drew had in his coat when Roberta and I found him. Had he been trying to make a sale? Had he just completed one? Larry had told the police that Drew was trying to sell him two maps. If the one in his coat pocket was one of them, what might have happened to the other one? Had he sold it to somebody else? Why have one map hidden on his person? He’d asked to see an atlas “to check on something.” With his propensity for stealing maps, could he have stolen a map from the library and tried to keep the theft hidden? I doubted very much that there were maps of any value in the Aspen Meadow Library, and made a mental note to ask Roberta or Tom about it.

  Sandee Brisbane, who’d been stalking Drew, had been a member of the Aspen Meadow Explorers. That was one of the reasons she’d known her way around the wildlife preserve so well. So if Sandee took an interest in exploring, could that mean she was also interested in maps? Could she be involved in the valuable map business as well?

  But that didn’t really make sense. If it was true that Sandee had escaped the big forest fire in the preserve, and I believed that she had, then she would have to have known current maps of the preserve, wouldn’t she? Not antique or rare ones. In any event, just as I doubted that there were valuable maps in our town library, I also found it hard to believe that there were anything beside topo surveys and such of Aspen Meadow and Furman County on those shelves.

  I turned off the interstate and immediately slowed down, as the snow was already packed on the byway leading into town. The plowing folks were concentrating their efforts on the major highways, as usual. Okay, where was I? I thought. Talk about being lost. Oh yes, maps of our region…folks were always claiming that they’d found an old map that pointed the way to a chest of gold that Jesse James’s gang had supposedly buried in our area. They were willing to sell the map…for a price. Uh-huh. So the logical question in all this was, if you had a map that showed the way to untold riches, why didn’t you go and dig the treasure up and become wealthy? Why did you just want to sell the map to that spot?

  I didn’t know, and trying to think of the answers, plus maneuver the van, was giving me a headache.

  “Want me to drive, Mom?” Arch piped up.

  Oh, right, hand the wheel over to an inexperienced teenager when the white stuff was accumulating and we had two other kids in the car. “I’m fine, thanks,” I called back. “We’re almost there.”

  “But you slowed down, as if you were having trouble.”

  I gingerly piloted the van around a police car with its lights flashing…the officer was giving someone a ticket. Who would speed in these conditions? Somebody, apparently.

  When we pulled onto our street, we had a good six inches of new white stuff, and of course we were unplowed. After two attempts, my van refused to make the climb from Main Street to our house. And I had an event that night. How was I supposed to get to the MacArthurs’ place?

  I allowed the van to drift backward until it was almost next to the curb and almost parallel.

  “Nice parking job, Mom,” Arch observed, and I was too preoccupied with my own problems to wonder whether he was being admiring or sarcastic.

  “Could you boys please unload your stuff here?”

  “Wow! Let’s snowboard down Arch’s street!” Gus exclaimed, and Arch and Todd busied themselves with getting ready to do just that. I tried to think back to my childhood in New Jersey. Had I ever been an adrenaline junkie? No, I told myself firmly as I plodded to our driveway. I was convinced that particular addiction was strictly a boy thing.

  My shoulders dropped in relief when I saw Julian’s trusty Range Rover parked in our driveway. We could load up his vehicle and then drive in tandem to the MacArthurs’ place, if necessary. Thank God for Julian. There was one thing caterers needed in their assistants more than skill with food; we needed dependability.

  In the kitchen, Julian was bent over his job, which at that moment was filling a dozen porcelain bowls with curry condiments: chopped chutney, hard-cooked egg yolks and whites, raisins, coconut, and all the rest. Since curry is infinitely better done ahead and allowed to rest, I was glad I’d already made the sauce, even if I’d had to do it late last night, when I was exhausted.

&nb
sp; “Hey, boss,” Julian greeted me as he lifted his chin and smiled. “Glad you’re okay. Where are the guys?”

  I explained about having to leave the van at the foot of our road, and how Arch and Company had decided to snowboard down the unplowed street. Although I thought this was not at all appealing in the way of snow sports, Julian’s only comment was “Cool.”

  I washed my hands and removed the hotel pans filled with chicken curry from the walk-in. I pulled off the plastic wrap and used a teaspoon to taste a tiny bite. The sauce tasted like heaven, even cold. Although I occasionally ground my own spices, I left the grinding of the fresh curry I used to a Thai shopkeeper in Boulder named Orasa. Orasa, whose age I had guessed to be between forty and sixty, had had a difficult time selling only spices the first couple of years her shop near the University of Colorado was opened. And then she had decided to make her own incense, soap, and candles. Now the tiny shop was always mobbed with a mélange of students, tourists, and potheads, who allegedly boiled the curry in water to cover up the drifting scent of marijuana.

  “Yesterday I picked up beer from a couple of Boulder microbreweries,” Julian said as he vigorously chopped salted peanuts for one of the condiment bowls. “I know it’s the thing to serve with curry, but are you sure the MacArthurs are going to go for it? Aren’t they the snobby wine type?”

  “They are indeed.” I snapped the tops onto the hotel pans and zipped back into the walk-in for the rice. “But I also picked up some expensive Dutch, German, and Canadian beers. Everybody will get a choice.” I hauled out the pan of rice, then went back in for the brews. “And anyway, with the appetizers, they can have the fanciest wines they want.” I placed the three six-packs on the counter and looked at Julian with concern. “The hors d’oeuvres!”