Familiar Friend

by Cristina Sumners

  A similar overpriced limo service in Trenton owned two stretch limos but one had been demonstrably engaged at a wedding and the other had been just as demonstrably sitting in their garage getting cleaned and polished. That left the car rental agencies. A diligent search through the Yellow Pages revealed that the only place to rent a stretch limo in North Jersey was one of the major car rental agencies at Newark Airport, either Hertz or Avis. Nobody else had them.

  The Hertz office had three stretch limos; only one had been rented on the previous Sunday. A group of Japanese businessmen, fresh in from Tokyo, had taken it to Atlantic City. The Avis office reported that two of its stretch limos had been in service on Sunday. One was rented to a company in Trenton called T.N.K. Public Relations, and the other was in the hands of a rap group from Newark who were celebrating cutting their first CD.

  Offhand, Tom couldn’t imagine which group was least likely to run off with his wife: Japanese tourists, a public relations firm, or a rap group. He was inclined to think—always assuming that Dorabella Mason had been correct—that a stretch limo had slipped through his net somehow. He was about to dispatch teams to make inquiries of all these people when his phone rang; Sid Garvey wanted to talk to him.

  “Sid?”

  “Tom! All of the hot-shit experts on the crime scene team want to buy the biggest steak and lobster dinner in Jersey for whoever it was who walked into the MacDonalds’ kitchen on Wednesday night and got cling-wrap and ice and a plastic bag and wrapped up the goddamn ice cubes from that black Russian before they could melt, and packed ’em up surrounded by ice in the plastic bag and put ’em in Mrs. MacDonald’s freezer and gave ’em to us when we got there. I bet everybody fifty bucks it was you. Tell me it was you.”

  “Of course it was me.”

  “Now tell me why you did it.”

  “I dunno. I’ve seen you guys work, you preserve everything at the scene. I got there and there were these tiny little lumps of ice in among the bits of broken glass and I thought, these are gonna be melted by the time Trenton gets here, so I thought I’d preserve them. I thought at the time it was probably stupid.”

  “Stupid like a fox, my friend. Those little lumps of ice were chock full of cyanide.”

  “You’re shitting me! The poison was in the ice cubes?”

  “I shit you not, the poison was in the ice cubes. A cute little fact nobody would ever have known if you hadn’t decided to show crime scene how it’s done. Pick the date for your steak and lobster. Oh, and, uh, Tom. I, uh, heard about Louise. I’m sure she’s all right. Don’t you worry, they’ll find her.”

  “Thanks, Sid.” Tom hung up before it got any more awkward.

  The ice cubes?

  What sort of lunatic would have put the poison in the ice cubes?

  He called Trenton back, a different department, and asked to speak to the pathologist who was doing the postmortem.

  “Don’t rush me,” she complained. “I’m not finished.”

  “They found cyanide in the ice cubes in the drink,” he responded.

  “Oh,” she said, deflated. “Well, I guess that rather takes all the fizz out of my report.”

  “Talk to me about cyanide. Would there be any advantage in putting it in ice cubes?”

  “None that I can think of.”

  “The drink was a black Russian, vodka and Kahlua, pretty strong flavor. Could somebody just drop powdered cyanide in the top of the drink without stirring it, and then a person could pick it up and wouldn’t smell it or anything, and they would drink enough of it to kill them in the first sip or two before they tasted it?”

  “Absolutely. Cyanide is very deadly. It kills in minutes, and it dissolves easily. The only smell it has is a faint odor of almonds, and the smell of the Kahlua would disguise that. So assuming your killer had the chance to put anything into the glass without being seen, cyanide crystals would have done the trick just fine.”

  Tom decided against sending other people to chase down renters of stretch limos; he would go himself. He needed a good, long drive, and Harton to Atlantic City to Trenton to wherever the rappers were would do just fine. He did some of his best thinking behind the wheel, and he needed to think about ice cubes.

  He put out an A.P.B. on the rappers’ limo and set out for Atlantic City. Hertz had been able to furnish him with the name of the casino/hotel at which the Japanese businessmen had planned to become rapidly parted from their cash.

  Fortunately Tom knew the way to Atlantic City, so he didn’t have to concentrate on the route. He put himself and the car on automatic pilot and tackled the ice cube problem.

  First question: How did the killer transport several cyanide-filled ice cubes to the party and keep them frozen, and convenient, until the time he needed them? Tom thought he knew the answer to that. Just surrounding them with ordinary ice wouldn’t do it; all the ice would melt, and it would be too bulky. Dry ice. That would do it. Just a bit of dry ice, which was fiercely cold, in his pocket or her purse; that would keep a few normal ice cubes good and frozen.

  Second question: Why put the cyanide in ice cubes instead of just bringing along a little packet of crystals and dumping the crystals in the drink?

  He was still working on that question when he drove into the subterranean parking garage of the Hotel Palace East. The elevator took him up to the lobby, a garish nightmare of red carpet, crystal chandeliers, and fake-gold slot machines. He walked up to the reception desk, presented his credentials, and asked for the room number of the Japanese businessmen. The manager was summoned. The manager asked what the problem was. Tom explained. The manager asked if he could accompany Tom on his errand in order to maintain cordial hotel-guest relations. Tom acquiesced.

  The Japanese businessmen were, needless to say, in one of the penthouse suites. Arriving there, the manager knocked respectfully and he and Tom were admitted by a fully costumed chorus girl who would not have looked out of place in Las Vegas.

  “Hello, Louise,” said the manager, which made Tom start. “I hope you’re behaving yourself?”

  “Absolutely within the rules, boss,” she assured him earnestly. “But it doesn’t matter. They pour money over you for just being here, really, you don’t hardly have to do nothin’ for it.”

  They entered the vast room, which was surprisingly tasteful compared to the lobby. It was furnished entirely in off-white and decoration was at a minimum; in the middle of the room was a beige marble coffee table nine feet square on which the only ornament was the most exquisite orchid plant Tom had ever seen. The Japanese visitors, Tom thought, must have felt right at home.

  There were other decorations, so to speak, of a more colorful nature, in the form of more chorus girls, and of course there were room-service carts of wonderful-looking food everywhere and buckets of champagne. Amid these pleasures the happy guests were lounging in kimonos, but as Tom and the manager appeared, all instantly rose and bowed.

  The manager went up to one of them and bowed. “Mr. Yakimoto,” he said. “May I introduce Chief Holder-san, policeman of Harton, New Jersey, who is so unfortunate as to have lost his wife. He is here to ask you some questions.” The manager bowed again and backed away.

  Tom bowed to Mr. Yakimoto. “Mr. Yakimoto,” he said, hoping to strike the right note, “it is very good of you to let me interrupt your vacation. I appreciate you giving me your time. Please understand that these questions I ask are just a formality. We are asking everyone who has rented a stretch limousine in northern New Jersey in the last few days to tell us where they have been, where they have gone in that car. Now, I understand that you rented your limo from Hertz at Newark Airport last Saturday when you arrived from Tokyo, is that correct?”

  It was at that point that Tom discovered what the manager of the Hotel Palace East had failed to tell him, namely, that Mr. Yakimoto did not speak one word of English. Neither did any of Mr. Yakimoto’s friends. There was an awful lot of good-natured smiling and bowing and a positive torrent of what Tom assumed was Japa
nese.

  “But,” as Tom said crossly to the manager in the elevator afterwards, “a fat lot of good it did me. Why didn’t you tell me they didn’t speak English?”

  “You didn’t ask,” the manager whined. “Anyway, the driver speaks good old American. He’s in three forty-two.”

  The driver, just as Tom expected, confirmed that he had taken his fares to Atlantic City from Newark without stopping off in Harton to kidnap any dotty middle-aged housewives.

  Back in the parking garage, Tom called in to check the whereabouts of the rappers and discovered that they, too, had gone to Atlantic City, to a place called the Atlantic City Viewcrest. Tom’s efficient staff had gotten directions.

  Another parking garage, another elevator, another garish lobby with another red carpet and more chandeliers and more gold stuff and more slot machines.

  My God, Tom thought, how do people stand this crap? He couldn’t imagine how anybody could have the bad taste to want to come here for a vacation, but he was really thinking more about the people who had to work here. Surely it must be soul-killing to work in such an ugly place?

  With these thoughts in his mind, Tom gave his warmest smile to the girl at the desk as he went through the same routine he had before, only this time he was asking for the rap group named—God help him—the Forces of Evil. Again he was escorted up to one of the penthouse suites by the manager.

  As they stood before the door they could hear the awful music. The manager said ruefully, “I make them keep it down, of course, because of the other guests, but I can’t make them turn it off completely. Unfortunately.”

  Tom thought, This is going to be sheer hell.

  The door opened and they were looking at a fresh-faced boy of about seventeen. “Hey, Mr. Stevenson,” he said politely, if somewhat loudly in order to be heard over the music. “Come on in. Are we playin’ the music too loud again? We were tryin’ to be careful about that.”

  “No, Freddie, the music’s fine. I’m here to introduce Chief Holder of the Harton Police, who’s here to—”

  Freddie’s eyes had gone wide and angry. “Whoa, now! We’re clean! We’re clean! What the hell’s this—”

  Tom threw up a hand and made calm-down gestures. “Whoa, yourself, Freddie. I know you’re clean. Listen to me. I know you’re clean. I am here going through some motions, you know what that means? Just going through some motions. In fact, I am here because somebody told me the weirdest story I have ever heard in my entire life and I have to check it out and it has to do with a stretch limo. You want to hear the weirdest story you ever heard in your entire life?”

  Tom knew he had him. The light of curiosity had supplanted the light of hostility in Freddie’s eye.

  “Now where,” Tom continued, “are these Forces of Evil I hear so much about?”

  Freddie giggled.

  This is a nice kid, Tom thought.

  “Well, I’m one of ’em,” Freddie replied. “C’mon, I’ll introduce you to the others.”

  Mr. Stevenson excused himself, and Freddie took Tom into the penthouse. This was considerably less elegant than the one inhabited by the Japanese businessmen; it was furnished in Ordinary Hotel Modern, and it was cluttered with the paraphernalia of teenagers who had been camped out in it for several days enjoying themselves: shoes, articles of clothing, and various high-tech toys recently acquired were interspersed with pizza boxes and empty soft drink cans.

  “This is my brother Harry, my cousin Lawrence, my cousin Martin.”

  Each boy, not one of whom could have been over nineteen, rose from where he had been lounging spinelessly on a low sofa and greeted Tom with a handshake and “Yo, man,” except for Lawrence who actually said, “Pleased to meet you.”

  Tom said, “My wife is missing.”

  “Whoa!”

  “Holy shit!”

  “No, man!”

  “Shitfire!”

  Freddie said, “I’m gonna get Gee Gee,” and galloped over to one of the doors leading off the central living area and banged on it. “Gee Gee!” he called. “Gee Gee! Come out, we need you here!”

  There was a short pause and then the door opened to reveal an elderly black woman in an old-fashioned plum-colored dress. “What’s all this commotion?” she demanded.

  “Gee Gee, we gotta help this man. His wife is missing.”

  The old lady looked to see who “this man” was and caught sight of Tom. She walked toward him slowly with a care that suggested slight pain, perhaps arthritis. Tom went to meet her. She held out her hand.

  “I am Letitia Freeman,” she told him. “These are my grandsons. I raised them after their parents were killed in a car crash together when they were babies. Freddie,” she said, turning to him, “I know you love your music, but if we are going to talk, you’re going to have to turn it off.”

  “Yes, Gee Gee.” Freddie skipped over to a ghetto blaster on a nearby table and snapped it off. The silence was, to Tom, a blessed relief. He introduced himself.

  Mrs. Freeman invited Tom to sit and instructed Martin, who was closest to the table with refreshments on it, to get Chief Holder something to drink.

  “Some sort of cola would be great,” Tom agreed.

  “Martin!” Mrs. Freeman said sharply. “Don’t you pick up those ice cubes with your hands! I bet you haven’t washed your hands in a week, I know you boys! You gettin’ a drink for somebody else, you use the tongs!”

  So Tom got his drink with clean ice cubes, and he told his story, which they all agreed was indeed weird. All four of the Forces of Evil swore solemnly that they had not kidnapped Louise, which of course Tom had no trouble believing, and naturally their grandmother backed them up.

  She added, “Now, you’re gonna need to talk to our driver, too, to verify our story, aren’t you?”

  “Mrs. Freeman, I wouldn’t dream of wasting my time verifying your story. I never met five more obviously honest people in my whole career as a cop, and besides, as I told Freddie when I first got here, I’m only going through the motions. Why on earth would you people want to run off with my wife?”

  “That’s true, Mr. Holder. That’s true. So you’re going through the motions, as you call it, because you have no other information to go on?”

  “That’s right. No other leads at all. Nothing.”

  “That must be very hard for you. This must be a very, very trying time. Have you called upon the Lord?”

  Only briefly taken aback, Tom replied, “Yes, I have.”

  “Good. You keep doing that. Once is not enough, you know. You need to keep doing it. Now, I have some advice for you and I hope you’ll take it. It’s going to surprise you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Take fifteen minutes out of your busy schedule. Take a fifteen-minute break right now and let my grandsons entertain you. I know you think you hate rap music, all people your age think they hate rap music, but my grandsons don’t use ugly language and they dance great and the beat is really good once you get used to it. They’re really good entertainers. Let ’em entertain you.”

  From the instant in this speech that she had first made the suggestion, the four boys had been jumping up and down begging for the opportunity. “Oh let us do it! Oh we’re terrific! You gotta see us! Oh, please, please, you gotta watch us, we are so, so good!”

  Tom looked at those innocent, eager faces and cracked up laughing. “O.K., guys. Strut your stuff. Show me what you got.”

  Letitia Freeman rose and once more offered Tom her hand. “I’ll be keeping you in my prayers.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back to my room. I’ve seen these boys often enough. Besides, if I was here, you probably wouldn’t feel free enough to dance.”

  “You don’t think I’m gonna dance?”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised what my boys can do,” she answered with a serene smile, and left him.

  Sure enough, her boys had an infectious sense of fun, and after ripping through two numbers in which Tom was
astonished to discover that he could not only understand the witty lyrics but sympathize with them (they were about social injustice, and echoed his own politics), they flew into a comedy number in which Freddie was lamenting the departure of his girlfriend. Their dance movements were marvelous and Tom, who had been no mean dancer in his youth, found his shoulders twitching. The boys spotted it, and Martin and Harry dragged him to his feet. Twenty exhausting minutes later he left the Atlantic City Viewcrest with a rudimentary education in rap dance moves and a gift of bling, which, it turned out, was what the boys called the gaudy rhinestone jewelry they wore draped all over themselves. He boldly wore the absurd necklace all the way down the elevator and through the lobby—After all, he told himself, this is Atlantic City—slipping it into his pocket only when he got back to the car.

  One thing’s for sure, he decided as he headed back up the Atlantic City Expressway, T.N.K. Public Relations is going to be pretty boring after that.

  Once again driving on automatic pilot, Tom had the opportunity to crank up his brain. The episode with Martin and the ice tongs had made him realize that he had not thought about ordinary, unpoisoned ice cubes in that dining room. Had Patrick Cunningham added any regular ice cubes to Tracy’s drink? And had they melted away entirely before he, Tom, had arrived, leaving only the tiny lumps of poisoned cubes to be cling-wrapped and preserved and analyzed? Tom frowned very seriously at the road ahead of him in a fury of attempted recollection, but he was reasonably sure that Patrick’s Witherspoon imitation had not included adding ice cubes to the drink. Maybe there had already been enough ice in the glass.

  Did that mean that the poisoned ice cubes were in it already?

  Tom nearly drove off the road. They’d been assuming that the crucial time was when Patrick was upstairs in the bathroom. What if it was before that? He’d need to go back and talk to the boy about how he’d gotten the glass from Tracy in the first place, and where it had been before he’d gotten it from her. Suddenly he was very excited; was this the breakthrough he’d been waiting for?

  He was tempted not to stop in Trenton, such was his eagerness to get back to Harton to talk to Patrick Cunningham, but he had set out to check on these rented stretch limos, and check on them he would.