Scratch the Surface (26 page)

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Authors: Susan Conant

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #Detective and mystery stories, #Detective and mystery stories - Authorship, #Cats, #Mystery fiction, #Apartment houses, #Women novelists

BOOK: Scratch the Surface
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“Anything can if it’s handled by someone with dirty hands.”
“You didn’t have any pudding?”
“No. It looked disgusting. Speaking of which, Sonya, I’m on the mend, and I’d rather not have a relapse. Do you think we could—”
“Felicity, this discussion is necessary! Admittedly, it would be more useful to all of us if we’d been given some kind of
real
poison and especially if one of us hadn’t gotten sick at all, like in that Dorothy Sayers book. Which one is it? Where the murderer builds up his own tolerance for arsenic and then puts arsenic in something he eats himself and feeds to his victim?”
“An omelet,” Felicity said. “But I can’t imagine that Janice fed us arsenic.”
Sounding disappointed, Sonya said, “Still, if we had to be poisoned, it would’ve been better to experience the effects of one of the classic poisons instead of this ordinary bug, whatever it is.”
“Sonya, if we’d had one of the classic poisons, we’d all be dead!” Felicity’s mind, however, was on titles:
The Hotchkiss Identity,
maybe. Or
Coates of Many Colors
.
“There is that,” Sonya said. “In any case, we should never have been poisoned at all, and I want to know how it happened.”
“We weren’t deliberately poisoned. We just ate something that made us sick.”
“Where did that food come from? That’s what I want to know. It’s some deli Janice likes. She knows people there. That’s why we get a special deal. A discount. And I can’t ask her because she can’t talk to anyone yet. I thought you might remember the name of the place.”
“It’s in Jamaica Plain. Tony’s? I think that’s it. Tony’s Deli. It should be on the receipts.”
“Janice has the receipts. She’s our treasurer.”
“Maybe you should wait until she’s well enough to talk.”
“Wait? I am not waiting! You know, it’s easy for you to take this incident casually, Felicity. You got off lightly. The rest of us are very ill. In fact, I’m going back to bed right now.”
With that announcement, the conversation ended. Felicity felt well enough to follow her usual morning routine of making her bed, tidying the kitchen, and taking a shower. Brigitte having abandoned the disposable razor in the upstairs hallway, Felicity had returned it to the bathtub and used it to shave her legs. Maybe she should preserve it in some honorable fashion. It deserved to be bronzed. Quinlan Coates had owned many cat mysteries, including some of her own, some by Lilian Jackson Braun, Shirley Rousseau Murphy, Rita Mae Brown, and other successful contributors to the genre. But he had owned the entire opus of Isabelle Hotchkiss. He had been genuinely crazy about cats. As an academic, especially an academic who had started to write mysteries a dozen years earlier, he might well have chosen to use a pseudonym for any series, but it would have been one thing to be identified as the author of sophisticated academic puzzles or existentialist novels of suspense, and quite another to be recognized as the man behind the pen of Isabelle Hotchkiss and her talking cats. Yes, it all fit! And those venomous responses for which Isabelle Hotchkiss was notorious? The horrid letters in which she’d refused to blurb books? Exactly the sort of nastiness to be expected in the world of academe. Or, at any rate, in the world of academe as portrayed in mystery fiction. Felicity was so overjoyed at the prospect of conveying her brilliant insight to Detective Dave Valentine that after shaving her legs, she washed her hair with a perfumed shampoo she saved for special occasions and scrubbed with a body gel scented with the same fragrance.
Stepping out of the tub, she wrapped herself in a giant towel and practiced her opening line: “The intended victim,” she proclaimed, “was not Quinlan Coates. The intended victim was Quinlan Coates
as Isabelle Hotchkiss!
”
So stunned would Dave Valentine be by this remarkable feat of detection that he’d overlook Felicity’s minor misrepresentation of the manner of Uncle Bob and Aunt Thelma’s death or perhaps reinterpret it as a sign of family loyalty carried to excess. Anyway, now that the truth about Coates and Hotchkiss had been revealed to her by her supersleuth cat, she, Felicity Pride, with the assistance of Detective Dave Valentine, would rapidly solve the murder. Having done so, she would finally be at liberty to put her very own real murder to work in promoting her books. The thought brought with it a new realization, namely, that since Quinlan Coates had been Isabelle Hotchkiss, then Isabelle Hotchkiss had perished with him. Ding, dong! By comparison with Felicity, Dorothy had felt indifferent to the news that the Wicked Witch was dead. No more Hotchkiss, no more Kitty Katlikoff, no more Olaf and Lambie Pie! Ding, dong, they were all dead!
There remained the question of who had killed them. The murder hadn’t yet been solved; it had been recast. Best to think it out before calling Dave Valentine. Who killed Isabelle Hotchkiss? Someone who knew that she was Quinlan Coates. Supposedly, no one knew. Who could have known? William Coates, Quinlan’s son, just might have known, but if, in Oedipal fashion, he’d murdered his father, wouldn’t he have put on a show of grief at the funeral? Wouldn’t he have made a to-do of claiming Edith and Brigitte as his legacy instead of complaining that his father preferred cats to his son? Who else? Hotchkiss’s agent and editor might have known, but neither would have killed so prolific an author and thus so reliable a source of income.
Then there was Ronald: Wasn’t it odd that Ronald, who knew everything about books and authors, knew nothing about Isabelle Hotchkiss? But Ronald
was
odd. Good friend though he was, he was peculiar indeed. Looking back to her signing at Newbright Books on the evening of the murder, Felicity vividly remembered that Ronald had appeared while she’d been talking with the fans who had lingered. In fact, he had appeared during a discussion of Isabelle Hotchkiss. Where had he been before that? Ronald doted on his cats, George and Ira, whose vet was someone at Angell, where, on the afternoon of his death, Coates had picked up Edith after her donation of blood. Ronald could have murdered Coates before Felicity arrived at Newbright Books. He could have driven the body—and Edith, of course—to Felicity’s house during her talk and signing. But why? Ronald was Felicity’s best friend. Was he friend enough to have killed her competition? And his own. Ronald was, after all, beginning to write a cat mystery.
Well, Felicity was Ronald’s friend, too, and a loyal one. If she told Detective Dave Valentine that Quinlan Coates had been Isabelle Hotchkiss, he’d follow the same line of thought that had led her to Ronald Gershwin. Therefore, she could not tell him. Not yet.
THIRTY-FOUR
“Felicity, there is
something you
must
do for Witness.” Sonya’s voice vibrated in Felicity’s ear. She was sorry she’d answered the phone. “You are the only able-bodied member of the board, and this poisoning needs to be investigated immediately.”
“Sonya, what happened was unfortunate, but I don’t see the urgency.”
“Naturally not! You had a light case of this horrible thing. The rest of us are prostate.”
“Don’t you mean
prostrate
?”
“I always mix them up. It’s my sensitivity to all things verbal. The connections. Words to words. And what does it matter, anyway? The point is that the matter has to be investigated, and you’re the only one in a position to do it. I checked the phone book, and there’s a Tony’s Deli in Jamaica Plain, just the way you remembered. Now, what you need to do is to go there and find out what’s what.”
“We know what’s what. What’s what is that Janice bought food there that made us sick.”
“Yes, but when did she buy it? On Sunday? Saturday? Or a week before we ate it, in which case we can’t report the deli, can we? Anything goes bad in a week. And we aren’t positive that this Tony’s is the same place. You know, Felicity, it’s a very serious matter to report a restaurant. If the deli is blameless, we could be sued. And Jamaica Plain is in Boston, and all the violations of restaurant codes are posted on that Web site, what’s it called?”
“The Mayor’s Food Court. But what’s posted there are reports by the city inspectors. It doesn’t list complaints from customers who say the food made them sick. But I do get the point. If Janice bought the food on Sunday morning, then we probably should call the city and have the place inspected. And if this Tony’s in Jamaica Plain isn’t where she bought the food, we obviously shouldn’t report it. I agree.”
“It won’t take you any time,” Sonya said. “Just buzz down there and ask a few questions. It’s not as if you had to do all that much for Witness most of the time, you know. But in a crisis like this, I’m glad you’re coming through.”
Before hanging up, Sonya gave Felicity the address of Tony’s Deli, which was on Centre Street, a main thorough-fare of Jamaica Plain. As Felicity knew from having dined in the area three or four times with Ronald, there were dozens of eateries on Centre Street, many of them storefront establishments serving ethnic food that Ronald liked and Felicity didn’t. Before leaving on what she saw as a quick errand, Felicity checked on the cats, who were sitting close together at the end of her bed. Edith was grooming Brigitte’s ears. The cats were such dear friends! When she’d accidentally stepped on one or both of them last night, the cause of the scrambling and hissing that followed had been her foot rather than any animosity between Edith and Brigitte.
A half hour later, having encountered no traffic on Route 9, Felicity was driving Aunt Thelma’s Honda along Centre Street in search of Tony’s Deli. She passed a restaurant that Ronald had misrepresented to her as specializing in seafood, as it had, in a way, but the place had been Asian and the seafood cooked with dark sauces that Felicity had found unfamiliar and far too strong for her taste. Spotting the Tony’s Deli sign above a storefront, she parked on the street, locked her car, and approached the store, which looked nothing whatever like her idea of a delicatessen. A deli, in her view, was an informal restaurant with a big case of takeout food. The best delis were Jewish and sold half-sour pickles, bagels with cream cheese and lox, pastrami, and fat sandwiches. From the outside, Tony’s didn’t look like a restaurant at all. Piled in the big windows were bottles, cans, and little packages with labels in some foreign language and, indeed, in some foreign alphabet.
Tentatively opening the door, Felicity saw a grocery store packed with what were obviously Russian foods. A pale-faced woman behind a small cash register nodded to her, and she nodded back. Mystified, Felicity wandered to the rear of the store, where there was, a long refrigerated glass case with takeout food, but not at all the kind of food Janice had served on Sunday or at any of the Witness meetings. Despite a thick brown coating, the piles of whole, flattened chickens looked nauseatingly like naked birds. Potatoes abounded: thick, fried patties, mounds of potato salad containing unidentifiable objects and bits of grayish-green leaves. Many of the vegetables were marinating in clear liquids. The cheese looked like provolone, but a tiny label identified it as yogurt cheese, something Janice had certainly never provided. A second refrigerated case contained whole dried fish, some large, some small, all with eyes that Felicity avoided meeting and mummified skin that reminded her of the foot exhibited by the forensic expert at the Witness meeting. Although the refrigerated cases and the rest of the store looked clean, a musty scent permeated the air, and Felicity was eager to leave.
On her way out, she paused at the cash register to speak with the pale woman. “A friend of mine shops here, I think,” she said. “Janice Mattingly.”
The woman was expressionless.
“Janice?” Felicity prompted. “I thought she was a friend of someone here?”
“No.” Even the single syllable was heavily accented.
Embarrassed, Felicity said, “Could I have a half pound of yogurt cheese?”
While she waited for the woman to get the cheese, she reflected that people like her must wander in by mistake all the time. The shopkeeper must be used to customers who didn’t belong and who bought strange foods they didn’t want. Why had the proprietors chosen such a misleading name? Why wasn’t the place called Boris’s Groceries or Natasha’s Russian Takeout? Feeling mildly victimized, Felicity paid for her cheese and left. As she drove home, she promised herself that if she ended up making a trip to the correct Tony’s Deli, the one Janice patronized, she wouldn’t buy anything at all.
By the time Felicity got home, she was feeling remarkably healthy and made herself a cup of tea and a small Russian-yogurt-cheese sandwich on white bread. The cheese was bland enough to be from Scotland and made an excellent food for invalids. Fortified, she called Sonya to report on her investigation.

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