Just Desserts : A Bed-and-breakfast Mystery (13 page)

Joe’s expression was patient, if pained. “The cup itself may have been a genuine mistake—but the cyanide was intention-al. The question is, who was it meant for—and who put it there? What did Ellie and Mavis drink?”

Judith reflected. “Ellie had tea, Mavis, coffee. But Mavis carried out the tea. Or some of it.” She sought confirmation from Renie. “Right?”

“Right.” Renie blinked. “I think.”

A muscle tensed along Joe’s jawline. “You’d both be terrific on the witness stand. A pair of minds like oatmeal mush.”

He chewed his pancakes and studied the diagram again.

“We’re pretty limited to four people, the two who helped carry out the cups also being the same pair who were sitting at that end of the table.”

“I take it you’re not eliminating Wanda?” asked Judith.

“Somebody else already did,” Joe pointed out, but he wasn’t smiling. “No, it’s possible that Wanda came here for the sole purpose of killing someone at the dinner party. Either she screwed up, or somebody got to her first. But not,” he cautioned, waving his fork, “necessarily the victim she’d had in mind.”

“Nembutal’s a sleeping drug, right?” queried Judith, pouring the last of the coffee for Joe and Officer Price while Renie held out her empty mug and put on a pitiful face. “But how do you get hold of cyanide?”

The question hung on the air as a crash emanated from the kitchen. Judith jumped up, but Renie was closer to the
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door. “I’ll subdue the guests. I have to get more coffee anyway.”

Woody Price had also gotten up. “She forgot the pot,” he said. “Maybe I’d better go see what’s going on.”

Joe nodded to his subordinate, then grinned at Judith.

“Your mother probably parachuted into the pantry.” He didn’t miss a beat: “You always looked terrific in red.”

“A good thing,” murmured Judith, feeling the color rise in her cheeks. “Joe, I’ve pulled a rotten trick.” She took a deep breath, then suddenly relaxed. “No. I haven’t, actually. A delivery came for you last night after you left, and I put it in my room for safekeeping.”

The red eyebrows lifted. “Then, while it was being closely guarded by your trustworthy self, you looked through whatever it was to make sure there had been no mistake and/or that everything was intact. Is that about right?” he asked in an ironic tone.

“Well, of course.” Judith turned wide dark eyes on his amused face. “Scooters, the delivery service I use, once brought a cake from Begelman’s Bakery for an eighty-fifth birthday party I hosted. It was supposed to be for the Ericsons’ Aunt Bea, and her name was written in cursive, only Duncan, the delivery boy, fell off his bicycle coming up the hill, and part of the ‘A’ in ‘Aunt’ came off on the lid, so it looked like a ‘C’. I was mortified,” Judith recalled with a little sniff of remorse. “Naturally, I’ve checked everything that comes through these doors ever since.” She gave him her most virtuous smile.

“I should think so!” Joe matched her, phony for phony.

“Now that I understand all that historical background, I think I’ll dispense with asking what happened to Aunt Bea and ask instead,” he continued, his voice rising, “what the hell you found in the goddamned envelope from Wanda’s apartment?”

Leaning back in the chair, Judith assumed her usual unruffled manner and relayed the contents as concisely as possible. Joe listened without comment. When she had finished, he drummed his fingers on the table and stared
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off toward a tapestry Judith had stitched while she was expecting Mike.

“So Wanda might have had a motive for killing Otto,” remarked Joe after a long pause. “And, if they knew who she really was, all of them could have had money as a motive for killing her. Except Otto, of course, who may have just wanted to keep her a deep, dark secret.” With a certain amount of longing, he glanced at his empty coffee cup and stood up. “All we’ve gotten out of the L.A. Police Department so far is that Wanda had no record and that she worked at St. Peregrine’s from 1953 until November 1 of last year, mostly in surgery. Come on,” he gestured at Judith, let’s have a look.”

Their progress through the entry hall was impeded by a glimpse of Officer Price and Harvey, who were wedged in the dining room door holding Lance between them. “He fell,”

said Price. “Just a twisted knee. Dr. Carver checked him out.

We’re putting him on the sofa.” Cautiously, he and Harvey bore Lance’s considerable weight toward the living room just as Ellie and Mavis appeared on the staircase.

“What’s happening?” yelled Mavis, leaning on the banister.

Lance craned his neck, offering his wife a pained smile. “I tripped. I fell. I hurt my good knee.”

“Oh, great,” groaned Mavis, dashing down the stairs and leaving Ellie in the dust. “Lance, I can’t leave you alone for a minute! You’re worse than our children!”

The living room had been vacated by the downstairs policeman, who had presumably been dismissed along with his upstairs colleague. Judith started to get an icepack from the refrigerator but was forestalled by Otto, with Gwen plastered to his side. “This place is hexed,” he asserted, scowling at Judith. “I want out of here while I’m still in one piece!”

Joe intervened. “Not quite yet, Mr. Brodie. We still don’t have the M.E.’s official report. It’ll probably come through this afternoon.”

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“The hell it will!” exploded Otto. “By then, at least two more of us will be dead and the rest half maimed! I want my lawyer!”

“What’s all that?” shrieked Mavis, oblivious to her father-in-law’s demands. Having been reassured by Harvey that Lance merely needed to keep off his feet for a bit, she was at the dining room bay window, her head stuck through the lace curtains. “Look!” she yelled, “it’s half the local press corps, including Daphne Huggins from KINE! That bird-witted bitch wants my job! I’ll kill her!” She whirled about, hanging onto the curtain like Salome down to her last veil.

“Why the hell are they all over at the next-door neighbor’s?”

Judith joined Mavis at the window, curtain and all. The fog was lifting and the Rankers’s front porch was in clear view. Radio, TV, and newspapers reporters were clustered on the broad steps while Arlene Rankers regaled them with all the aplomb of a seasoned stateswoman. Behind her, Gertrude leaned on her walker and exuded great clouds of blue smoke.

“Oh, damnation!” breathed Judith. “Arlene will give them sixteen kinds of misinformation and Mother will end up as Lucrezia Borgia!”

“She looks more like Catherine de Medici,” said Renie, who had finally come from out of the kitchen where she had been cleaning up after Lance’s tumble. “Hey, look, my sweatshirt’s on backward!”

“So’s your brain,” snapped Judith, then immediately turned repentant. “Sorry, coz, let’s go upstairs with Joe and Officer Price. You’ve missed out on a lot by sleeping your life away.”

“But I was just going to get some breakfast,” protested a crestfallen Renie. “Can’t it wait?”

“No.” Judith caught Joe’s eye as he gave up his battle to keep Mavis from going outside to confront Daphne Huggins.

Dragging Price away from Otto’s nonstop verbal abuse, Joe followed the two women up to the family quarters.

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Judith fumbled with the key she always wore around her neck along with her Miraculous Medal. “I could have sworn I locked this,” she breathed, turning the key a second time.

Even as she crossed the foyer, her heart sank. It came as no surprise that when she opened the door to her bedroom, she found that Wanda’s personal effects were gone.

Joe was on the verge of apoplexy. “You are an idiot!” he exploded, his face crimson. “How could you pull such a stupid stunt?”

For the first time since shedding a few perfunctory tears for Dan, Judith felt like crying. “You weren’t here, you’d just left for downtown, I thought…”

“I didn’t mean taking the evidence in the first place,” Joe roared, pacing the room like a bull at a Sunday corrida. “I meant leaving the goddammned door unlocked! Who knew you had this stuff besides”—his flashing eyes rested on Renie—“the other idiot?”

Judith gulped while Renie coiled as if to pounce. “Ellie was here,” Judith said, “but I don’t think she noticed…”

Officer Price got up from a kneeling position at the outer door. “Sir—I’m not sure, but this lock may have been tampered with.”

Joe whirled around on his heel. “Oh, yeah?” he said sharply. He went to the door, bending down, hands resting on flannel-clad knees. “Check for prints, Woody.” He looked up at Judith and Renie, somewhat calmer now. “Don’t touch anything.”

But the cousins were practically tripping over each other as they charged the dormer window to investigate the source of sudden commotion from down below. In the middle of a circle formed by the visiting press, Mavis was applying a headlock to Daphne Huggins. Daphne retaliated by grabbing Mavis around the knees. The week-night and the weekend anchors for KINE-TV went down in a heap on the Rankers’s front lawn.

Mavis’s Calvin Klein shirt and slacks were damp with
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grass stains. Daphne’s Anne Klein blazer and skirt had lost their crisp cut. The women rolled about on the ground, clawing, scratching, and kicking. Their media colleagues teetered on the fringe in mixed attitudes of shock and fascin-ation. At last, two uniformed policemen, a TV cameraman, and the crime reporter from the morning daily broke up the Battle of the Kleins.

Mavis’s threats and Daphne’s curses bounced off the dormer window like so much buckshot. “I hope the rival stations got that on tape,” Judith said with feeling. “Maybe it’ll push Hillside Manor into the background.”

But the matter at hand was still uppermost in Joe’s mind.

“I’ll talk to Ellie first. Meanwhile,” he said to Price as they headed downstairs, “check out the amnesia case and that hit-and-run in L.A. Give Woody the dates, Jude-girl.”

Wincing at the long-ago nickname, Judith dispensed the information to Officer Price. Returning to the kitchen with Renie, she found that order had been restored, the dinette table was vacant, and the old school clock stood at nine.

Dash sauntered in just as Renie was putting some ham on to fry for herself.

“Quite a morning, huh?” he said, a master of under-statement, with his hands in the pockets of his yellow linen slacks.

“Some night, too. I suppose I’m at the top of the suspect list.” Despite his words, he seemed remarkably cheerful.

“You certainly get around,” Judith responded, setting a place for the newest arrival and relying on shock tactics.

“Wanda, Mrs. Carver. Mavis, too, I gather. You didn’t marry that one, did you?”

Dash was unperturbed by Judith’s direct approach. “I didn’t have to.” He actually winked. “It was a fair trade. I had something she wanted and she had something I wanted.

We swapped.” He shrugged under his green polo shirt.

“Really,” said Judith, pouring juice and coffee. “What was that?”

“I don’t suppose Mavis is keeping any secrets right
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now,” said Dash with the hint of a furrow on his tanned brow. “She was a reporter on the
Daily Bruin
, the UCLA student newspaper. She wanted a ‘scoop,’ as they used to say. So I scooped her. About ten, twelve times. She’d never been scooped before. I think she liked it.” His smile was ingenuous.

“I hope the, uh, story she got was worth it,” remarked Judith, wrestling the frying pan away from Renie and breaking eggs for Dash. “She must have been a real aggressive reporter even then.”

“She was.” Dash sniffed the homey kitchen air which somehow murder had not sullied. Or, Judith thought irrelev-antly, grease defies even death. “That ham smells great,” he said. “Sunny-side-up on the eggs. Can you make the pancakes silver-dollar size?”

Ignoring the grinding of Renie’s teeth, Judith complied with half a dozen spoonfuls of batter around the griddle.

Out in the entry hall, Mavis’s irate voice erupted over the soothing noises made by Gwen and Lance. Storming upstairs, she vowed to call everyone at KINE from her producer to the chairman of the board. Dash listened with a little half smile, then shook his head.

“A real firecracker under that cool exterior,” he commented.

“Truth is, she’s wound up too tight. I guess she always was, which is why she married Lance.”

Dash’s perception caught Judith off guard. Perhaps there was more to the man than sleazy charm and no socks. “What was the story?” she asked, flipping pancakes and making a face at the whimpering Renie.

“The ’66 Rose Bowl. UCLA versus Michigan State. The Bruins should have lost by ten, not won by two. But some people can’t be bribed.” Dash seemed oddly dismayed by the idea.

“Basic integrity,” said Judith, setting Dash’s plate in front of him.

“Basic stupidity,” retorted Dash with a baleful look at Judith. “Some people are too dumb to bribe.”

Before Judith could react, the kitchen door swung open,
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revealing a tremulous Ellie. “Oh! Ri—Dash!” She put a hand to her flat chest. “Excuse me, I was just going to get a little something.”

“Here,” said Renie, who had returned to the stove, “take my ham, my eggs, my—”

“Oh, no,” protested Ellie. “Just toast, please. And coffee. I have no appetite.” Her face flushed. “I’ve just spent ten minutes with that cagey police detective. He actually grilled me!”

“About what?” inquired Dash, pulling out a chair for Ellie.

“I’m not sure,” she said, apparently bewildered. “Something in Mrs. McMonigle’s room.” She glanced up at her hostess.

“Pictures? Clippings? I told him we’d only chatted. I don’t think he believed me.”

“Now, Ellie,” soothed Dash, “you’re the most sincere woman I’ve ever met. Flynn’s a cop, he likes to make people squirm. Believe me, I ought to know.”

Across the table, their gazes met and held. The spell was shattered by Mavis, still rumpled, but outwardly composed.

“Dog-eat-dog,” she averred, barely acknowledging Dash and Ellie. “Oh, thanks!” she said, grabbing Renie’s plate. “I timed that just right. How’d you know I like sugar instead of syrup on my pancakes?”