His not lovely ex-wife snorted and glared. The current missus was too engrossed in her nail polish to react.
Lyle paused for several rapid breaths. He was much more nervous than I would have anticipated. I was afraid he would hyperventilate by the time he finished his talk. “And my son and friends,” he added. “Time with them, too.” It sounded embarrassingly like an afterthought. He looked flustered. Perhaps he was flubbing his talk.
“Before I take the next step, I wanted to see you—my life, to look around a room and see the faces that are the landmarks of my adventure through this—through this—” Again he looked nonplussed. Maybe he couldn’t read his three-by-five card prompts. “Like this building—almost where I grew up—like all of you—like…excuse me,” he said. “Overexcited. Can’t catch my breath. Must be why they call us old wheezers.”
“Geezers,” his son corrected him without a smile.
“A few faces couldn’t be here because of…” Another pause as he breathed, rather raggedly, I thought. “Others…no longer among…us.” His inappropriate stops and starts made his delivery choppy and his meaning difficult to apprehend. I reminded myself that he was accustomed to being behind the scenes, not onstage. He had the right to be edgy.
“For all—of—you here, thanks for—this—that—moment I—wanted.” The rhythm was ever more erratic, punctuated by gasps, and he was skipping words. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. This couldn’t be an attack of stage fright. “It,” Lyle said, “—the—greatest…”
There had been a gradual cessation of background noise. No more clicking knives and forks. People glanced anxiously at one another, checking whether their alarm was shared. When Lyle actually made it to the end of his talk, there was a spontaneous standing ovation, half praise, half relief.
Lyle pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and put it to his eyes, then wiped at beads of sweat on his forehead and temples. Then he clutched his handkerchief and bent forward.
“Lyle?” Hattie asked.
“Legs,” he said. “Cramps. Bad. I…oh, boy. Old—all—at—once!” He rolled his eyes skyward. “Give me a break!”
Feeble laughter greeted his attempt at lightness. The collective mood roller-coasted, dipping into apprehension, murmuring questions like background music, then audibly relaxing when Lyle made light of his discomfort. It was nothing, then. We were still at a party. Life was normal and fun. And then Lyle winced and buckled forward and the anxiety level skyrocketed.
Lyle waved his hand, pushing away his physical problems, but he was bent way over, as if his cramping legs wouldn’t hold him. He put his hands to his throat, his face contorted with fear.
“Lyle! What is it?” Hattie cried.
His breathing had become so raspy I could hear it plainly at my table as it jaggedly pumped. “Throat,” he said. “Burns—hurts—”
“Is there a doctor in the house?” somebody called.
Shepard McCoy stood up.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Sybil screamed. “You’re an actor, you fool!”
But no one else had stood. No piece of Lyle Zacharias’s life mosaic had gone to medical school.
“A heart attack?” my mother asked.
“I’ve never heard of one like this,” the former schoolteacher murmured.
“Some horrible infection?” I asked. We were still paralyzed by etiquette. Dear Abby, is it proper to suggest that the host is desperately ill if he says he’s not and you might spoil his party?
“Baby, what is it?” Hattie shrieked. “Where does it hurt?” Baby was still gasping and the tears in his eyes seemed from pain.
I stood up and began wedging myself between seats, en route to the door, which seemed very far away. I angled myself to watch what was happening while I maneuvered. “Excuse me,” I said many times to guests who were too engrossed in the ongoing disaster to respond.
Tiffany stood by Lyle in red-spangled ineffectiveness, her hands half raised in the I-give-up position.
The room buzzed with nervous collective wing-fluttering as we absorbed the idea that the completely unexpected and potentially disastrous had indeed happened.
“Dizzy.” Lyle canvassed the room the way a drowning man might look for the disappearing horizon. I could not believe that the self-confident man who’d stood up a few minutes back had so thoroughly and swiftly become this disoriented, terrified creature. He even looked different—bloated and sallow.
“Who—”
I stopped where I was. His breathing was loud and rough, like sticks over heavy metal grating. He was disintegrating in front of us as if he’d been seized by something alien and inhuman. Now, in addition to the breathing, the pallor, the bloat, the buckling legs, and disorientation, his eyes had lost their moorings.
“No!” Hattie screamed.
He lurched forward. I made my way toward the dining room door, past the lace-clothed side table where the dark and white chocolate dream of a birthday cake waited.
“Who—” whooshed out of Lyle, “—kill me?”
Hattie screamed. The room buzzed with the single word as question and exclamation. “Kill. Kill! Kill?”
Wheezing like a fireplace bellows, Lyle forced more words out. “Who…poison me?”
I ran like hell for the phone.
Six
“POISONED?” TIFFANY SCREAMED at the top of her lungs. Her words reached all the way down the hall to where I stood at the small front desk. “What are you saying?” she howled. “I ate the same food!”
I dialed 911. “A man’s been poisoned. I think.” It was embarrassing making an emergency call with caveats and small print. Perhaps there’d been a poisoning—no guarantees. But there was definitely a sick person and, strengthening my case, fifty other people who had eaten the same food. If, of course, the food was at fault.
Nine-one-one didn’t remark on my quibbling. Instead, they said to stay calm, that help would be there any minute.
I tried to follow their advice and remain collected, although I was having trouble remembering how, particularly given the commotion in the dining room.
The scene was out of Breughel by way of Vanity Fair. Lyle Zacharias, breathing with obvious difficulty, braced himself on the long table that held his ornate birthday cake. Smartly attired party guests wavered between blasé seen-it-all sophistication and a visible desire to stampede. The repeated motif—whispered, shouted, questioned, in deep basso tones and cultivated soprano—was the word poison echoing like the dull pulse of mass hysteria.
People futilely sought comfort and reassurance from one another. “Is sweat on my forehead?” a man demanded of his dinner companion. “Wasn’t Lyle sweating?” “But what about me?” his tablemate answered. “I feel sick.”
And so did lots of others. People complained of dizziness, or weakness, or trembling—including me. I hoped I was suffering a simple old-fashioned anxiety attack.
En route to my mother, I passed Hattie Zacharias, who looked almost as ill as her nephew did. Her wrinkled skin was even looser, as if it were falling off. She mouthed the word poison, although no more than a hiss of air emerged. She repeated the motion, as if practicing it, working to get it right. It was even more frightening that way, like a silent scream.
Poison. It finally, thoroughly, hit me, and as dreadful as I felt for Lyle Zacharias, I felt even worse for me.
Fear buckled my knees, and then, of course, I worried that this sudden muscle weakness was an early symptom. Had Lyle’s legs weakened or simply cramped?
My core temperature dropped. I was freezing. Had Lyle been cold? No—he’d been sweating. Good, good. But I felt lightheaded, too. Was that the same as Lyle’s dizziness?
While these idiotic brain waves skittled about, Lyle let go of the table and made a staggering lurch in the direction of the doorway. However, he didn’t even make it past the cake before he stumbled and again grabbed the table.
People moved between us, so I couldn’t see clearly, but it was obvious from the sounds and
the sudden general recoil that the man was now violently ill. I remembered his lurched attempt to escape, and realized that despite the desperation of his situation, he’d been trying to exit and avoid social embarrassment. There was a psychology paper in this for somebody: “Terminal Prioritizing: Death or a Major Social Gaffe?”
The people around him backed off some more, so that I could see Lyle pitch forward into his birthday cake, crumpling the lace tablecloth and pulling it down as he and the dessert both fell. The white and dark chocolate cake landed on his upturned face, putting him in jeopardy of layer cake asphyxiation, assuming nothing worse destroyed him first.
My mother rushed forward, which shouldn’t have surprised me. She was carrying first aid—a dampened napkin—and before anyone else had gone beyond milling and agonizing, she had cleaned Lyle’s face. Under the icing and chocolate crumbs, Lyle was unconscious.
We watched, fifty ticking time bombs. Make that forty-nine, I thought. If Lyle was right, one of us was a poisoner.
A woman in platinum Jean Harlow hair and gold lamé bent over Lyle and began CPR.
I wanted Mackenzie. Unnatural causes was his turf, not mine, and this seemed a case right up his expertise. Probably.
Probably would have to suffice. I wanted, needed, to hear his voice. I went back to the hall phone. Please, I asked the detective gods, just this once, let him be where I need him to be.
Just this once, he was. I began my 911 riff. “Thought you’re spendin’ the evenin’ with your mother,” he said.
“I was, I am—she’s here. My father—never mind. Mackenzie, I think it’s murder. It’s so fast and ugly, with these weird symptoms. And other people are complaining now, too.”
“He’s dead?”
“Nearly. Well, truthfully, I don’t know. Does he have to die? Do you come out for attempted murder?”
“Could it be food poisonin’?” I envisioned him watching the dark rain pound headquarters’ windows, finding even his utilitarian and bleak surroundings homey compared to a trek to Queen Village.
A man in tails rushed by, clutching his stomach. I had walked into Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” “I’ve never heard of any food acting this quickly and violently, have you?” I answered. “Besides, if you wait until we find out what’s caused this, all the evidence will be gone. They’ll wash up and tidy and destroy every trace.”
He considered this, or something. “Okay,” he said glumly, “somebody’ll be there soon. An’ Mandy? Y’all got to get your stomachs pumped.”
Stomachs seemed such nicely complete items. I couldn’t imagine how they would pump one. I thought of gas stations and wells and tried to apply their mechanics to my anatomy and decided to take a pass. “We can’t leave the scene of the crime,” I said, rather desperately.
“Don’ know there was a crahm!” He was getting emotional—either annoyed with or concerned for me. His southern roots curled around every syllable, squeezing out its hard edges, making it barely recognizable. Blurtalk. “Don’ wan’ y’urt.” I had to mentally race beside his sentences, clipping them into words. He didn’t want me hurt. Either this was for real or it was not, but he couldn’t afford to gamble.
“Yes. Sure. Okay,” I said.
“Listen up—I’ll find a bus—no, vans. Send you to different hospitals. An officer for each one. But good Lord, it’s gonna be a bitch. The President’s in town, know that? Fund-raiser, and every extra man’s on that duty.” His sighs had become epic in scale. “When the patrolman shows up, have him call me here. I’ll explain.”
Gallant, yes, but I’d have preferred his personally rushing to my aid. “Maybe it wasn’t a poisoning,” I said. “Maybe this is a little…extreme.”
“You sure enough of that to risk fifty people?”
His round. Back to the dining room as the bearer of rotten news, just in case the night wasn’t already sufficiently traumatic.
The entryway was blocked by the chef, still in her apron and bandanna. She stood, one hand half over her eyes, as if she didn’t want to watch but couldn’t resist, and the other pointing at her guest of honor, sprawled on the floor while the woman in gold lamé administered CPR.
She screamed, a thin, piercing wail, almost unearthly and definitely frightening, the sound a machine might make when important wires snapped.
“Lizzie,” I said softly, lightly touching her shoulder. It was difficult speaking without much of a waver in my voice. “Please calm down. Help is on the way.”
Apparently, she didn’t hear me, but then it was hard to hear one low voice in the bedlam. Only Sybil and her son Reed remained quiet, an island of immobile silence in the din. Hattie, bending over her prostrate nephew, shouted his name over and over, sounding as if each repetition ripped something vital out of her. Tiffany stood, mouth agape, said the same name, but angrily, pathetically, anxiously, questioningly—like an actress trying out her lines. Priscilla Lemoyes sobbed loudly. The young couple from our table clutched each other, asking, constantly, whether they were all right. People cried, offered theories: he’d had a heart attack, a seizure, heat exhaustion—despite the temperature. Anything, as long as it wasn’t contagious. And running through the babble and cries like a corrosive acid-drenched wire ran Janine’s whine, raised now by several decibel levels. “My tongue’s numb,” she yowled. “I’m achy all over. I don’t feel right!”
“You never feel right!” her husband, right behind her, answered, too loudly. “Shut up for once!”
People stepped away from them. We’d reached the point of every victim for himself.
“My legs tingle!” Janine wailed.
“Who cares?” her husband shouted. “Look around—nobody else is carrying on this way! Nobody else is sick.”
“Lyle is dying!”
“And you’re making things worse—as usual!”
With a dramatic intake of air, Janine swallowed her screech.
I wondered if I could be held for murder if I told everyone except Janine about the promised emergency treatment. But this was a night for virtue. “Everybody!” I said as loudly as I could. “Listen!” Eventually they calmed enough for me to shout out my message. “Help’s on the way! Vans are coming to take us to the hospital. Police escorts. We’ll all be fine.”
The push toward the exit slowed to an irritated shuffle. I thought some semblance of calm had been restored, but Lizzie once more erupted, this time in words. Three words, to be exact. “I saw him! I saw him! I saw him!”
“Please,” I began, but how could she be calm? There was a good possibility that one—I hoped only one—of her dinner guests had been poisoned. This was not cause for serenity.
“I saw him!” she sobbed. “I saw him!”
“We all did,” I said softly.
A woman in purple pushed at me. “I’m not waiting for some bureaucratic underling to send help!” she shouted. “I’m out of here!”
“Why? Where would you go? The paramedics and police are on their way, and they can get you to help faster than you can get there alone. Besides”—I hoped Lizzie was listening, too—“food poisoning isn’t this fast or acute. What happened to Lyle probably has nothing to do with the food here, if you ask me.”
“Nobody asked you!” the angry woman said.
My mother charged forward to avenge her daughter’s verbal attacker. “Just because Lyle thought it was poison doesn’t make it so,” she said reasonably.
“If you leave and nobody else does,” I added, “then the police will assume you were the poisoner.”
“Me?” the would-be escapee screamed. “Me? I’m his hair stylist, for God’s sake!”
I momentarily wondered why a bald man’s hair stylist was on his fifty-most-wanted list, but there were bigger issues to consider first.
“What about botulism?” Shepard McCoy’s voice was low, TV doc wise and serene. He was used to make-believe medical emergencies, and didn’t know real trouble when he was in the middle of it.
“Botulism’s from canned
food,” a woman in hand-painted silk said. “I thought this place said it used all fresh produce. They said that in print!”
What was her point? That we’d file a postmortem class action suit against the restaurant for false advertising?
“Botulism symptoms don’t start for hours,” Reed Zacharias said. Before anyone could challenge him, he shrugged a pudgy shoulder. “I like biology. Microbiology especially. And I know a lot about toxins.”
He waited, as if for a challenge, but I for one make it a point never to cross surly adolescents who specialize in toxins.
“It’s caused by a spore,” he continued. “Symptoms are different. Affects your vision. You get paralyzed.”
“I don’t think that whatever made him that sick was in his food,” I said. “At least not in whatever we all ate.” Because, as I didn’t say, as they should have been able to figure out themselves, if the culprit was the food we all had eaten, we should all be cramping and getting sore throats and dizziness even as I spoke. We should all, frankly, be dying at the same tempo as Lyle appeared to be.
Nobody else seemed to want to debate the logic of the situation or to await the police. Instead, they milled toward the door, maneuvering around and sometimes over Lyle’s appendages. The platinum blonde continued to pump at his chest. “I’m not waiting around to find out whether I’m poisoned,” a burly young man with acne scars and a ponytail told me. “I’ll get myself to the hospital.” He turned to the crowd around him. “Where is it? I’m from New York.”
“I saw him!” Lizzie again, still stuck on her three-word groove. Something dreadful was happening to her—a seizure, a breakdown—and she needed attention, but so did everyone else, so I hoped her particular ailment, which didn’t seem deadly, would keep.
“Let me by!” the ponytail demanded. I did, and I moved Lizzie aside as well.
However, the burly man didn’t make it through the doorway because we had a sudden influx of personnel. Lizzie’s father materialized, pulling his daughter close to him. “I saw him!” she cried out. “I saw him!” she sobbed.
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