Mom Among the Liars
Page 22
And if she drinks it, what’s going to happen to her? In the coffee is the medicine she takes for her heart condition, only it’s three or four times the usual dose. If somebody that don’t have a heart condition, somebody like Harry Stubbins, swallows such a big dose, nobody can be sure it’ll do something terrible to him. But if somebody that does have a heart condition, like Edna Pulaski, swallows such a dose, it’s absolutely certain what it’ll do to her. It’ll kill her, no two ways about it.
So now, dear diary, it’s clear, isn’t it, what was actually going on with that coffee? Somebody put those pills into it, without letting Edna Pulaski know about it. So why? Because the idea was to kill her. The person that did it was in her apartment earlier, dropped the pills into what was left in the pot, and went away, expecting that later on Edna Pulaski is going to die from an overdose of heart medicine. Only Harry Stubbins showed up and drank the coffee instead. And a little bit later, Grantley comes in, and we know what happened after that.
In other words, what we’ve got here is two murderers, both of them wanting to kill Edna Pulaski. The first one didn’t succeed. The second one made a better job of it.
So who was this first murderer—this almost murderer—that put the heart medicine in the coffeepot? I’d like to think it takes a genius to figure this out, but it don’t. It’s much too simple. What are the qualifications this murderer has to have?
It has to be somebody with an opportunity for poisoning the coffee—that is, somebody that Edna Pulaski would let into her apartment that night and also would give permission this person should be alone in her kitchen.
It has to be somebody that knew about Edna Pulaski’s weak heart, and also knew which medicine she was taking for it. Most of all, it has to be somebody that was willing to do what I noticed from the beginning, when Davey described to me Edna Pulaski’s apartment. On Saturday night, a few hours before Stubbins got to her place, she had dinner, but by the time Stubbins got there the dinner dishes were cleared up, there was no sign of a dirty glass or a crumpled-up napkin. She didn’t have a dishwasher, but even so everything was cleaned and polished and put away where it belonged. Who did this? Not Edna Pulaski herself. She was the world’s messiest housekeeper. Everybody who knew her said what a slob she was. It’s unbelievable she suddenly reformed and got rid of the bad habits of a lifetime.
Who usually did Edna Pulaski’s cleaning up for her? Who was her regular unpaid cleaning woman, the person that came in early every morning to do her housework? Her mother, the old lady, Mrs. Kim.
And isn’t it logical to suppose the same cleaning woman came in on the night of the murder? In other words, the old lady wasn’t telling the truth when she said that the last time she saw her daughter was Saturday morning. The truth is, she was there on Saturday night. And why would she lie about this? There’s only one reason I can think of. Because this was when she put the pills in her daughter’s coffee.
So I’m asking myself what was her motive. And this is the answer I’m getting. By this mother’s standards her daughter was leading a shameful, immoral life. She was disgracing herself, she was disgracing all her living relatives, and her ancestors, and maybe even future generations. For Korean people, if they were brought up like this old lady, family is everything, ancestors are everything, honor is everything—this is what her great-niece said about her.
Plenty times, for plenty years, Mrs. Kim tried to persuade her daughter she should change her ways. They had loud arguments about it. On Saturday night Mrs. Kim came to make another try, and while they talked, the old lady also cleaned up the dishes from dinner. This is how it is if you’re a natural-born fusser and cleaner, you have to keep your hands busy. But the daughter didn’t listen to what the mother told her, she laughed at it like always.
And then, maybe when she’s cleaning up the bathroom, old Mrs. Kim sees the heart pills in the medicine chest. Also she notices there’s still some coffee left in the coffeepot. And she can’t hide from herself no more that her daughter is never going to change. The honor of the family is never going to be pure again, unless she does something about it. It’s a thought that was in her head plenty times before—of this I’m positive—and now, because all of a sudden the opportunity is in front of her, she decides she’ll finally do it. So quick she puts some of the pills in the coffee, and a few minutes later she says good night to her daughter and leaves the house.
This isn’t the end of it though. The worst part she still has to do. On Sunday morning, at seven o’clock as usual, she has to show up at her daughter’s house, and she has to pretend she’s surprised and full of horror to discover the dead body. She stays awake all night maybe, getting herself ready for this. So she does find the body, only it’s strangled not poisoned, and the man that did the killing is right there in the room, or so she thinks. Dear diary, I don’t like to think what a shock this was to her!
This is the only way to explain it, something the old lady said to Davey when he questioned her later in the day. What she said was, her daughter’s murderer robbed her of “the only joy I still had to look forward to in life.” What she meant, everybody thought, was the joy of spending her old age with her daughter. But her daughter wasn’t giving her any joy in her old age. Her daughter, on account of her way of earning a living, was giving the mother nothing but tears. So the old lady’s statement don’t make sense if you try to explain it that way. What she really meant by it had to be something different—that the murderer robbed her of the joy of personally giving her daughter the punishment she deserved.
Yes, I know it, dear diary, this is a terrible thing I’m saying. An old lady, a mother, trying to murder her own child in cold blood! How could such a thing happen?
The truth is, it happens all the time. Davey told me this years ago, he’s seen the statistics, but anybody that knows anything about human nature knows it has to be true: The majority of murders happen in families, with people who are closely related. Most of these murders are husbands and wives killing each other, but even more are parents killing their children. When it isn’t children killing their parents. And it’s not so surprising, if you come to think of it. If the emotions are strong in politics, where what’s driving at people is only being ambitious or greedy or egotistical, how much worse it’s going to be in families, where along with these ordinary emotions is also love.
So now, dear diary, you can see, I hope, why I couldn’t tell Davey about this. What’s the point? Is he going to arrest this old lady for attempted murder? Even if he was crazy enough to do it, who could ever prove anything against her? What district attorney, even a stupid one like this McBride, is going to prosecute her for it in court, and not only lose the case but also the whole Asian vote in the next election?
Besides which, who did this old lady kill, when you get right down to it? She thought about killing, she dropped some pills into a coffeepot, but what crime did she actually commit? Only being a mother. It isn’t easy being a mother. The emotions that are inside a mother’s heart, they’re very complicated sometimes, very mixed up, they come out in peculiar ways. Leave her alone is what I say. She’s old. Soon enough she’ll pay for her mistakes.
So now I’ll say good night to you, dear diary, and we can both get a little rest.
Also by James Yaffe
Mom Doth Murder Sleep
Mom Meets Her Maker
A Nice Murder for Mom
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Prologue
D
ave’s Narrative
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue
Also by James Yaffe
About the Author
Copyright
MOM AMONG THE LIARS. Copyright © 1992 by James Yaffe. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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First Edition: November 1992
eISBN 9781250145079
First eBook edition: October 2016