McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

  Rose von Bek clapped her hands together as another knock came at the door. “Ah. That will be our breakfast champagne!”

  But Sinclair’s Presbyterian soul was not yet ready to accept the full burden of these unwelcome demonstrations. He rose gracefully, so that Begg might have his chair.

  “If you’ll forgive me, I’ll take a stroll up to the dining hall and avail myself of the full English breakfast. I think an occasion like this calls for some honest fried bread, fried tomatoes, mushrooms, and black pudding. Traditional fortification.”

  “Very well, old boy. To each his own poison. I trust you’ll rejoin us as soon as you can.” Begg lifted a victorious glass.

  Declaring that he would probably take a turn or two about the observation deck before he rejoined them, Sinclair stepped into the corridor and closed the door on his colleagues.

  Once in the corridor, the pathologist stared thoughtfully at the tranquil, dreaming German fields and villages passing below. A man trained to follow the law and to play the game by the regular rules, Sinclair mused that this was not the first time that his association with his friend Seaton Begg troubled him.

  He shook his head, the delicious scent of frying bacon drawing his attention back to breakfast. He put the problem behind him. For all his moral dilemma, Taffy Sinclair was forced to admit that his friend had assured, by the most unconventional, even cynical methods, by the most circuitous path, that justice had again been done.

  NOTE: While originally scheduled for the May 1932 issue of The Thriller Library, Amalgamated Press, London, this story is said to have been withdrawn from publication at the request of Buckingham Palace and Downing Street. The author and high-ranking civil servant John Buchan is said to have been involved. It is published here for the first time.

  The Case of the Salt and Pepper Shakers

  By AIMEE BENDER

  The murdered couple was matched as perfectly as the salt and pepper shakers they so passionately collected. But the murderer of their passion for each other was the greatest mystery of all.

  I found the dead bodies face-to-face, cold, on the living room carpet of the suburban household. One was a husband, sprawled in a fetal position; the other his wife, tilting forward, her head butting into his stomach. The carpet beneath them was soaked through with blood and saliva. I took the necessary samples and marked off the area while the usual team came in to check for fingerprints and clues. I myself have never been a proponent of walking around and instead sat quietly in one of the taller chairs and tried to take in the room. Ivory-colored carpet, ivory walls, brown sofa, wooden chairs. Ordinary. The faintest smell of rosemary drew my focus to the kitchen, visible through an open countertop, and lining its walls I could see copper pots and pans, a hanging chain of garlic, and rows upon rows of salt and pepper shakers. Fourteen pairs in total. While the team used their equipment to make sure every piece of furniture revealed its underbelly, I wrote down one word on my yellow pad: Shaker. I have a feel for such things; it’s the only reason I’ve held on to this job for so long, since I have no patience for the details and am clumsy with the props.

  I made ten calls that afternoon. My phone manners are fair to poor. To my surprise, no one I spoke to seemed particularly shocked by the double murders. No windows were broken, I told them. No key was forced. They sat silent as schoolchildren, on the other line, waiting for me to push the issue.

  “Any idea of suspects?” I asked. “Motives? Suspicious behavior?”

  No, no, no.

  “Might you know,” I asked at the end, “why these two collected so many salt and pepper shakers?”

  I spoke with the neighbor, the bosses, the doctor, and a friend, but no one could explain to me why they were dead, or why two people who paid a live-in chef to the very edge of their budget, and whose blood pressure kept climbing up the ladder into the red zone, would collect so many salt and pepper shakers, in ceramic, wood, glass, and metal.

  “I ate there for dinner several times,” said the friend, “and as far as I can recall, they only used one ordinary set.”

  I spent that night in their house while the bodies were being examined at the morgue. The cook was away for the night, and I slept in the guest bedroom, on top of the comforter, not moving any evidence but just resting and listening, as the only way to get a true feel of a house and its residents is to stay in it overnight. This model was fairly standard for the neighborhood: one story, ranch style, two bedrooms and an office. The pictures on the walls were easy landscapes, and in the guest room, I slept beneath a watercolor of horses running. Every piece of furniture and decor was slippery to the mind and would not stick. I can hardly recall the sofa or the chairs, so unobtrusive was their style, and so involved was I with examining those shakers. Several pairs were masterfully crafted, with zigzag patterns of mahogany and oak, or cut diamonds of crystal, and must have cost quite a pile. One was a humorous set, each a green ceramic frog: salt with a cane, pepper with a hat. One pair was built of very modern and angular chrome and glass. Each held varying levels of grain. The house grew so quiet I could hear the movement of cats next door, paws treading softly on the sidewalk.

  I awoke to a call from the coroner. He explained that the husband was knifed in the stomach at five PM, while the wife had been poisoned at a quarter to three, with a poison that took exactly 2.5 hours to kick in. They both died within about a minute of each other. Her late lunch had been a small chicken pot pie, unsalted, a green salad, peppered, and a glass of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice. The poison had been discovered in sedimentary bits inside her water bottle. Her fingertips were cut at the tip, and covered neatly with bandages.

  “Any fingerprints on the knife?” I asked.

  “Not in yet,” he said.

  “Any records of who was out buying poison in town?” I asked. He said that was not his area. My team would report on that soon. Today they would scour all the nearby pharmacies, compiling records of purchase times.

  The coroner is an upstanding fellow. He fought in Vietnam and raises orchids. I thanked him repeatedly but he gets embarrassed by gratitude and hung up.

  After ordering in a bowl of chicken soup and a sandwich, I spent several hours in the living room, sitting with the stain from his wound. It spread over the carpet in a curling line, as if he’d put his arm around her with his blood.

  The reports came in around six PM. The wife’s middle finger and thumb prints were all over the knife handle, being the two unbandaged fingers, and the husband had bought the poison just four days before at the local pharmacy under his regular name. When I got on the phone and called back the silent people, they all, suddenly, spoke up. The two hated each other, they confessed. Hated enough to murder? I asked. They grunted toward a yes. By the end, said the friend, she would hardly talk to him anymore, and he took so many long frustrated walks that all the neighbors expected to see him pass by their window, head down, at least twice a day.

  “We do not understand,” said a neighbor. “But we are not surprised.”

  Now, here’s what got me. If it’s true that they killed each other, then she could not have known she was poisoned when she knifed him, as he had chosen a poison that is silent and causes no suffering, and he had hidden the bottle somewhere very difficult to find, as we had not yet found it. In fact, their greatest difference here was revealed through their choice of murder weapon, in that she wanted to make him suffer and be aware of her murderous inclinations, choosing the overt and physical technique, while he selected the secretive, one of the few methods available where she would die without fully realizing what was happening. He perhaps was more ashamed of his loathing, and also he did not want her to feel pain. Their greatest similarity, however, was revealed in their choice of occasion, since each seemed to have conceived of the exact month and moment of death fully independent of the other. Certainly that was something. Even with their differing methods, they still timed it in perfect unison. I could hardly get my mind around it. And I imagine that as they l
ay on the carpet next to each other, one bleeding from the gut, the other foaming from the mouth, they saw something meaningful and linked in the eyes of the other. The nature of hate is as elusive as love’s. I am just relieved they never had children.

  Back to the dilemma of the spices. I finished my dinner and called up both their hairdressers, and spoke to one very unfriendly sibling, and no one had any interest in discussing these salt and pepper shakers, and in fact I could feel a stirring annoyance in the voices of the questioned, one which I am used to but still resent. I went home to shower, and spoke briefly with my girlfriend, who was half-asleep and seemed distracted, and only right before I dozed off in my own bed did a phone call come in and tell me that the missing bottle of poison had been discovered in the chef’s quarters, underneath her bathroom sink. “Has anyone questioned her?” asked my boss, and I coughed in embarrassment. I had tried repeatedly to contact her, but she had taken off several days to grieve, and was returning for the first time the following morning to begin the slow process of packing up her bags. This couple had not been exceedingly wealthy, but the luxury of a live-in cook was something both felt was important to their happiness. So they shared a car, and rarely ate out or vacationed.

  I found the cook in the kitchen, making afternoon snacks. Nothing was packed yet, and the house was just as I had left it. The couple had been married for twenty-five years and the cook was older than I expected, with a head of silver hair, although her fingers were still swift and nimble. She seemed saddened by the loss of her employers, but perhaps not sad enough. I was not ready to rule her out as a possible suspect, particularly now with the poison bottle, wrapped in plastic, sitting bulbous on the coroner’s desk. While we were talking she made us a perfect turkey sandwich, on a triangle of bread, grilled lightly on the stove.

  “The wife liked salt and the husband liked pepper,” she said, “and the salt and pepper pair served as a symbol of their relationship.” She briskly flipped the sandwich on the grill and then scooped it onto one yellow plate and one red plate, which she handed over to me.

  “Thank you,” I said. The bread had crisped to a fine golden color around the edges. I waited until she took a bite of hers until I tried mine. “How so?”

  “Well,” she said, swallowing carefully, “they used salt and pepper as their model union. In their wedding vows, they said she was salt—she intensified the existing flavor—and he was pepper—he added a new angle—and that every fine table needed both.

  “In fact,” she said, leaning in, “instead of a man and woman atop their wedding cake, they had a pair of miniature salt and pepper shakers.”

  “No kidding,” I mumbled, chewing.

  She nodded. “I can show you photos.” She started toward the living room, and before I could take another bite, she had the white wedding album open, full of smiling attractive faces, and there was the cake, with those shakers on top. “It was a white cake with strawberry cream filling,” she said. “Quite light.”

  “Did you have any reason to dislike them?” I asked casually. “Were they good employers?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I liked them just fine. Isn’t the case solved?”

  “Seems to be,” I said. “It’s just that no one else remembered the shakers.” I tried to keep sandwich crumbs off the photos. “This is delicious, by the way.”

  She shrugged. “I’ve been here since the wedding,” she said, pointing to herself in the photo album, serving plates of cake with a full head of very brown hair, “and salt and pepper shakers were their gift to each other every single anniversary.”

  She shut the book. “Case closed,” she said.

  I opened the book back up. “Except,” I said, pointing to the date on the invitation, “there are only fourteen pairs of shakers, and I believe they were married for twenty-five years. . . .”

  “Twenty-six,” she said, pulling a clear bag of lemons up from the floor. “Well.”

  I waited.

  “What happened,” the cook said, now slicing lemons in half, “was that after about fourteen years of marriage, he, as people do, grew allergic to spicy food, and her blood pressure went up so high that she had to abandon salt. She could only use pepper, he only salt. He did not like the salt, it seemed to him redundant, which hurt her feelings. She did not like the pepper, as it seemed to distract from the true nature of the dish. This made him feel discounted.

  “After some time, she grew less vibrant, and he less stimulating.”

  “Truly?”

  “From my perspective,” said the cook, “it actually seemed to be true.”

  I pressed my finger into the plate to pick up the last crumbs of sandwich.

  “And did this fill you with a strange hatred?” I asked.

  She smiled at me. “No,” she said. “Why, you don’t believe they killed each other?”

  “We found the bottle of poison in your room,” I said.

  She sat back down in her chair. I said nothing. At moments like this, it is always best to say nothing. Her eyes faded and lost focus.

  “I’m not so surprised,” she said softly after a while. “I’m sure he put it there on purpose. He had always hoped that I would be able to fix it all. I tried,” she said. “It is a chef’s job, this,” she said, squeezing lemon juice into a pitcher.

  She sighed now, with some elegance in her shoulders, and stirred the growing lemonade with a wooden spoon.

  “But a good chef must let go of the salt/pepper ratios,” she said. “It’s uncontrollable. It is a chef’s nightmare to see the salt shaker dump itself all over a perfectly salted piece of meat or to see the pepper dirty up what is an ideal wave of béchamel. It is a chef’s sleeplessness, right there,” she said.

  “So let it go,” she said. “I cannot worry about it excessively. I simply Can Not.” She poured herself half a glass of lemonade and took a sip. “Too sweet,” she said, cutting four more lemons precisely in half. “And if lemonade is too sweet,” she said, “then we are somehow lost to the crush of anonymity.”

  Her face struck against itself, and her eyebrows folded in.

  “Sir,” she said. “I was here for twenty-six years. Had they both trusted my expertise, perhaps none of this would have happened.”

  I found I wanted to comfort her but her eyes had shut down, and after I finished spiking the last crumb, I tried to thank her sincerely, but she had lost herself in thought, at the kitchen table, stirring four grains of sugar at a time into the pitcher, and tasting, repeatedly, with the large wooden spoon.

  “Thank you for your time,” I said, then, to no one.

  It was not the chef; I believed her fully. It was not the neighbor. It was no outside job. The evidence was in. So then if the mystery was solved, both big and small, why was I still on it? That was what my boss kept asking. He had a new case for me involving a homicide over on the west end of town, of a very old rich codger who had seven children, and it seemed likely that one of the seven had killed him. But I was bored by that one. It would solve itself, like a hose releasing its pinch and letting the water flow. I bought some orchid food instead, and went to see the coroner again, because my mind would not stop thinking of that end, when the husband and wife realized they were dying together, each by the hand of the other. In a way, they actually had swapped personalities, by killing the other in the manner of his or her favorite spice. The wife chose knifing, which is certainly “pepper-like” in its spicy attack on the body, and the coroner thanked me for the orchid food and confirmed my suspicions about the poison, by explaining how the one the husband had chosen killed by increasing the saline level of the bloodstream to such a degree that the person essentially dehydrated.

  I myself have a girlfriend, as I have mentioned, which is perhaps why the salt and pepper pair do not leave my mind. The case is closed and the file cabinet locked but I still think of them all the time. The ranch-style house sold for cheap to a small family who moved here from Michigan and didn’t hear the history. I believe the cook retir
ed from family work, and now is doing private catering on her own, and if I ever get married, I will surely hire her, although my superstitious girlfriend might not approve. I do love my girlfriend, for her differences and her similarities, but I do not know if one day the item that defines me in her eyes will no longer work. If my body will fail. If I will face her in bed and not know what to do, when now her body still seems infinite. If she will stop having that bright look in her eye at the parrot store, and instead lose herself circling letters in word searches. There are couples who commit suicide together and they are in line with Shakespeare’s greatest lovers, but those who murder each other precisely at the same minute are written up in all the papers as crazy. Even their family members coughed and got off the phone as fast as they could. They would like to erase the whole rigamarole. I picked up more than one tone of disgust and superiority in my many interviews. But it seems to me beautiful. How right at the end, when everything was over, they realized they had reached the ultimate gesture of compromise, that their union had come full circle, and perhaps it was the sting of that bittersweetness that killed them most, crueler than any knife or poison.

  Ghost Dance

  By SHERMAN ALEXIE

  The Cheyenne woman came to him in a dream, with death