Macavity was playing feline famine, eyeing me balefully and yowling pitifully, although his starvation act was a hard sell, given both the size of his belly and the brimming container of dry food on the floor.
“I’m hungry, too,” I muttered. I nonetheless opened a can of his beloved glop before I dared to take off my coat.
I wondered if I should talk to my brother-in-law about my parents’ potential legal problems. Sam specialized in corporate law, but surely he’d have a better idea than I of what to do in case of impending criminal disaster.
Perhaps my parents should flee back to Florida. Maybe even a quick trip across the water to the Bahamas. Didn’t all manner of shady characters gamble and gambol there with no danger to their persons? Could a nice but wrongly accused couple from Florida join them?
Meanwhile, I studied my refrigerator, which featured the rank remains of what had once been broccoli, a plastic-wrapped wing that worried me because I couldn’t remember having broiled chicken since mid-January, an extremely hard circle that had once been a cold cut slice, and cheese that had mutated into a St. Patrick’s Day ornament.
I jealously eyed Macavity’s full dish. Where was the equity in our relationship? I always thought about his welfare. It was high time he thought about mine. He needed sensitivity training.
“Cat,” I said, “I’m going to tell you a true story. A parable.” I didn’t wait for permission, or even for Macavity’s attention. “In the time of King Richard the Third,” I said, “there lived a nobleman named Sir Henry Wyat. Sir Henry was accused of political crimes and sent to the Tower of London, condemned to die of starvation.”
Macavity snarfed his food without glancing my way, but I persisted. “Sir Henry would definitely have starved, except that his brave and true cat crept down the chimney every single day for months, each time bringing him a freshly killed pigeon.
“The King heard about it, thought it a miracle, and released Wyat. Now what do you think of that heroic, clever cat?”
Macavity eyed me with a baleful yellow glance. If he’d known how to snicker or say sucker, he would have. “Thanks a lot,” I told him. “You were supposed to become inspired.”
I therefore faced another cereal night without so much as a raw pigeon to liven things up. Damn Richard Quinn. Damn me, for assuming my restaurant appointment might include food.
I dialed Mackenzie and spoke with his answering machine. “I’m home,” I said, “and in case you haven’t yet polished off that pasta, I’m interested.” I wasn’t counting on it, though. He’s a detective, after all. If he wanted to find pasta, he would have, hours ago.
Macavity sauntered off to the living room to digest his repast. He was, I had to acknowledge, neither heroic nor particularly handsome. His fur is an odd gray-brown that looks like the contents of a vacuum cleaner bag. His feet are enormous. But all the same, he was mine.
I filled my bowl with Cheerios, poured in the half inch of milk remaining in the carton, and vowed to start keeping shopping lists, to become my own wife. I make that vow at least once a week.
The mail was the bleak, generic stuff of life: bills and discount coupons for services I never requested. No one had dialed my number all day. I took my potage into the living room, my feet dragging like a drab character in a Russian short story. A Chekhovian clerk with an answering machine.
“C’mere, cat,” I cajoled, but Macavity is proof of my mother’s old warning: give a guy what he wants, and then he won’t want you. Once fed, Macavity was less committed to our relationship, and he stayed in the middle of the floor and groomed himself.
The Long Night’s Journey into Self-Pity had begun. No mail, no calls, no food, no cat, and a mother who’s a murder suspect. Woe was me.
The Russians were better at bleakness. I was boring even myself.
Besides, maybe Mom wasn’t a suspect anymore, or at least not the only one. Hattie had blamed my mother yesterday and Lizzie this afternoon.
I looked longingly at the phone. It wasn’t his pasta that made me yearn for Mackenzie. Among other parts, I craved his brain, needed to talk with him about all this. Where was he?
On the other hand, if he returned this minute and picked up the phone, what was I going to do? Point a finger at innocent Lizzie? Her chubby and somehow pitiful face hovered like an ungrinning Cheshire Cat in front of me. Not a killer’s face. I would swear to it.
But perhaps she was a witness. Had the police been able to get her calmed down enough to question her?
I tried to think, although it was difficult being thoroughly logical on a bowl of Cheerios. But whenever I decided not to bother, I saw a vision of my mother peering out from between bars.
So, then. If somebody had doctored the tarts—and if I refused to consider that the doctor had been one of my parents—then who could it have been? I started at the beginning with the messenger service, but that was so farfetched, so completely reliant on coincidence, that I put it at the bottom of my list.
More logically, the tampering took place at The Boarding House, most likely in the kitchen, and if not at Lizzie’s hands, then probably under her nose.
Perhaps she’d seen something out of the ordinary, even if she didn’t recognize it as such at the time. Perhaps I’d recognize it.
Information gave me the number of The Boarding House, and I dialed. “I was wondering how you’re doing,” I said. “Last night I didn’t really have a chance to—”
“Last night. Oh, sure. I remember you!” She sounded as if I were the Mounties come to save the girl and the day. “Thank you for calling me. I feel like I’m—I feel like—he isn’t back, and I’m going crazy and there aren’t any guests today but I don’t know whether—I mean if I leave and they find him—”
I had to say her name three times, increasing volume and force with each repetition, before she seemed to hear, and even then it took her a while to decelerate and catch her breath.
“Are you all alone?” I asked, softly.
I heard a sniffled intake of breath, a stifled sob of agreement. Poor child, I thought, although she wasn’t a child. But she was nonetheless needy. “Tell you what.” Mackenzie had not answered my phone message, the cat was having a postprandial nap, and breakfast cereal did not a dinner make. “If you feel in the mood for company, and if you won’t take it as an insult to your excellent cooking, how about I pick up hoagies and soda and bring them to your place?”
You might have thought I had offered to bring over the Holy Grail.
I felt gratified, but if asked, I couldn’t have said whether my motive was a desire to provide comfort and companionship, to drill her silly about what she might have observed in her kitchen, to more carefully aim the beam of suspicion onto her bright red hair, or to simply have a strong reason to go out and snag a hoagie.
“Wait.” She sounded mournful again. “My diet! I can’t eat that kind of stuff.”
Anyone who remembers a diet does not qualify as distraught in my book. I no longer quibbled about my mixed motives.
* * *
Lizzie appeared to have discovered the first honest Overnight Weight Loss Method. Although she was still roly-poly, she looked dramatically diminished, as if the past day had devoured her.
I handed over one of the Styrofoam boxed salads and a small container of oil-free dressing, miffed that her food virtue had made me too guilt-ridden to buy myself the much-desired hoagie. This is a female form of macho—who can desire less food, be less hungry?—but this time it was no game for Lizzie. Only for me.
“Oh, miss!” She was reverting to her Dickensian meekness.
“Mandy. Please.” I followed her into the kitchen, which seemed her spot, whether or not she was working, and pulled a high stool up to the center butcher-block table. The room around us was clean and smooth-surfaced, and not half as alive as last night, when the counters and ovens had been filled with lovely edibles.
Lizzie and I opened our salad containers and wielded plastic forks above unthrilling leafy greens. “I don’t think you should be here all alone,” I said. “I thought—last night, didn’t you say you were going to see somebody today? A doctor?”
“I did. He prescribed pills to calm me and made me see another doctor, too. A psychiatrist. He said I had suffered a traumatic shock. I’m supposed to go back tomorrow, but I don’t know. Bad enough I left today—but what if he came back while I was gone?”
“Your father? If you were gone, he’d come in or wait, Lizzie.”
There was a final bit of solidity and adult logic missing from the girl, keeping her a child.
Her deep brown eyes widened. “I can’t leave again. How would he find me? And what’s happened to him? He never disappears like this! I don’t know what to do about anything. We’ve had two cancellations today, even though it wasn’t my fault—you know it wasn’t my fault, don’t you?”
I decided that I did know that. It wasn’t my mother or father’s fault, and it wasn’t Lizzie’s.
“I’m sure he’s sick,” she said. “Heart attack or I don’t know. Whenever I see him, in my head, sprawled out on the floor like…like…” She closed her eyes and shook her head and seemed to have trouble inhaling.
Wait. We had switched hims in mid-sentence. “Like what?” I whispered, sure she meant Lyle, spread out on the floor, dying.
Her eyes opened wide and she looked at me as if I might have the answer. “I get so scared if I let myself see it. I know something horrible, horrible has happened—and I know it has, it did, but I don’t mean that. Something else horrible, do you understand? Do you think I’m crazy?”
I sidestepped both questions and speared a curly-edged lettuce leaf. “Is this the same feeling you had yesterday? Here, in the kitchen before the party. Remember? You became frightened and felt ill and you didn’t know why.”
She looked puzzled. “I can’t remember. Only something like not being here for a while.”
“Then where were you?” I was nearly whispering.
“Somewhere scary.” I could barely hear her. “What’s happening to me? What’s going on?” Her voice regained some strength. “And what’s happened to my father?”
“You’re very close, aren’t you?”
She shrugged. “We’re all we have. He’d just never scare me by staying away on purpose. He knew I was nervous—he was nervous, too. That’s why he went for cigarettes. He was trying not to smoke, but he was too shaky after…after…” Her voice rose into the dangerously thin air of hysteria again.
“I’m sure the police will find him.”
She shook her head. “He’s not a suspect and they’re real busy—”
“Is the President still in town?”
“They told me that lots of men walk away from their families that way. But he wouldn’t. He was just so nervous after Mr. Zacharias fell down.”
She had odd and childish ways of describing events. Fell down did not seem the appropriate way to describe a dying man.
“I called all the hospitals and asked for him, but he isn’t registered anywhere. All he did was go out for cigarettes. I’m sure he’s been mugged or even—” She couldn’t say the word.
“Don’t assume the worst,” I said. “Hang in there.” The words sounded hollow and futile. The girl had problems. Her father was missing, her livelihood was disappearing, and, even before a man had died after eating her food, she’d shown signs of a serious panic attack, cause unknown. I hoped she didn’t know that as of this afternoon, Hattie was also blaming Lyle’s death on her.
“And that old lady—that old lady called me today,” she said.
There went that last hope.
“She said she knew that everything was my fault. That I knew it, too. What did she mean? She sounded—I feel sorry for her, losing her son and all, but she was cruel. It wasn’t my fault. Why didn’t anybody else get sick if it was my fault? Why would she be that way?”
“People are not themselves sometimes when they’re in a state of grief.” I felt like one of those old-fashioned arcade dolls—put a nickel on the lever, push, and I’ll hand you back a platitude. I could become a team, along with Hattie’s friend Alice. “She’s old,” I continued. “Needs to blame somebody for this tragedy. Ignore her.”
“I told her—I told the police—he ate a tart. He came in after the salad course and said they were irresistible and that he had to break his diet and have one and I shouldn’t tell. There was a little plate of them, you know?”
I knew. I remembered my mother pulling out two of her favorites and saying he could nibble away if he liked. I wondered if Lizzie also remembered.
“Nobody else got sick. It has to be that. But they think I could have poisoned it, and I guess I could have.” She propped her head on her hand. “Of course I could have.” She sighed. “But I didn’t. Why would I?”
My cue. “Maybe you could help figure out who else could have tampered with the tarts.”
“Here? In my kitchen?” She looked astounded by the concept, and was probably too sweet and polite to say the obvious—that the tarts had arrived poisoned by the hand of Bea Pepper, who had selected out the deadly culprits and presented them to Lyle.
“A tart could be muddled around pretty easily, couldn’t it?” I persisted. “Add something, stir the filling, then redecorate the top, sprinkle nuts, squirt whipped cream—”
“I gave them the can!”
“Them? The police? What can?”
“It wasn’t mine. I don’t know where that spray can came from! I saw it in the trash while the guests were eating the beef and I was cleaning up. Everything is fresh here. I would have whipped my own cream, if I’d needed any. I wouldn’t use a squirt bottle!”
A can of whipped cream. Good. Didn’t it prove the tarts were tampered with after the fact? And surely the can would have a solid fingerprint on the place you push. I could imagine somebody taking advantage of a time when Lizzie’s back was turned, but I couldn’t imagine them donning gloves for the job.
“Think, Lizzie. Who came into the kitchen after the tarts were delivered? Were you alone much of the time or were there always people coming in and out? I know that when I was in here the first time, so were my mother and Hattie Zacharias and Lyle himself and his current and ex-wives. Did a lot of people come in?”
“What does it matter? Do you think somebody came here carrying poison? To kill Lyle Zacharias?”
“I don’t know. The only question I can deal with right now is: who was in the kitchen?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know most of the guests’ names.”
“Think. Describe whoever you remember.” I had a small notebook in my pocketbook, and, feeling vaguely foolish like a sleuth in a B-movie, I pulled it and a pen out.
“You were there. Twice. You came back to see if I was all right.” She picked up a carrot slice and nibbled at it with little interest. “And Mrs. Zacharias.”
“Which one? The dark-haired one or the blonde?”
“I meant the blonde one. She was in a few times. With her husband once or twice, and by herself, and with Doctor—Shepard McCoy. She said she wanted to open a kitchen shop. Wanted to know if I liked copper better than stainless. That kind of thing. But the other one was there, too, not at the same time. Once when you were here, then later, when she wanted to know if I used preservatives, or artificial sweeteners. She told me she was Mrs. Zacharias. ‘The former Mrs. Zacharias,’ she said, so that’s how I know who she was. Her son was in with her, and then I think he came back. Wanted to know if I had any cream soda. That was during the cocktail hour. Kid was a pain.”
“Anybody else?”
“Well, yes. But I don’t know who they were. Some lady who wanted an aspirin and who was allergic to dairy products. You know, Mr. Zacharias had asked everybody to say if they had any food allergies or preferences, and she never said. What was I supposed to do then, with dinner almost on the table and me running all over the place? Luckily, this man came in and told her to stop bothering me. Said it nicely, but she got the message. Boy, was I ever grateful.”
Janine. I’d bet on it. I wondered how often Wiley had to put the clamps on her obnoxiousness. “Is that it?”
“To tell the truth, it felt like people never stopped coming in and out. I was surprised, because when we’re just serving dinner normally, that doesn’t happen. But between the guests asking questions and the waiters in and out and trying to get everything on the table at the right time, I nearly burst into tears twice. Had to leave the room and pull myself together, take deep breaths and count to a hundred.”
“Literally? A hundred?”
“Three hundred the other time.”
Great. Not only was everybody capable of tampering with the tarts, but there were now obvious gaps when nobody supervised the kitchen.
“Some lady who spilled wine on her dress,” Lizzie said. “A green satiny thing. Another lady who wanted the recipe for the crab puffs. I didn’t know what to do. Should I give out my recipes? What do you think?”
I thought that anybody could have taken the opportunity to doctor the tart and that we were back to square one, which is to say, nowhere.
Except in the kitchen of The Boarding House, where the telephone abruptly broke the silence. Lizzie rushed to answer it.
“Yes?” she said. Then “Oh!” and “When?” and “How did—” and a “Where?” and a “Now?” and a rushed, intense “Thank you.
“My father!” she said when she hung up. “He’s alive. At Jefferson. He got sick on his way to buy cigarettes—really sick. People thought he was a drunk or a junkie and left him alone.” She stopped to absorb this for a moment, wrinkling her brow and biting at her bottom lip. “They left him to die,” she whispered. “He probably looked awful, but they could have called an ambulance, couldn’t they?”
I nodded and sighed.
She brightened a bit. “This morning, a policeman noticed he wasn’t a regular street person and realized he was sick, so he had him taken to the hospital. He’d been rolled and had no wallet or ID. Now he’s conscious, and he told them who he was and what happened. And they think he’s going to be okay!” She pulled a ring of keys off a peg on the wall and looked close to jubilant.
I supposed this was, more or less, a happy ending. Except for the growing suspicion that the timing of Roy’s sudden illness was no accident—or rather, part of the same accident that killed Lyle Zacharias. “Does your father have a sweet tooth?” I asked Lizzie.
She smiled, as if this were a part of their affectionate history. “Does he ever! Anything with chocolate, nuts, whipped…” She heard herself. “Oh, my,” she said. “That’s who ate some of the second tart.” She took a deep breath. “There was a tart left on the plate. Mr. Zacharias was very precise about that, eating only one. ‘Have to show some self-control,’ he said. But then, by the time the police came, there was only part of one left. My father never eats all of anything. Always leaves a portion on the plate. Says it’s why he doesn’t get fat.”
This time it was why he didn’t get killed.