Summer Snow (16 page)

“It might be a good idea to ask the servants if she was carrying a particular bottle of smelling salts when she died,” Soler said thoughtfully. “Because it’s hard to see how the food could have been tampered with.”

“Why?” Medina demanded, truculent. “The cook or her maid had access to it, and they’re obvious suspects.”

“But they’d have to be very stupid to think they could get away with it,” Rivas pointed out. He remembered a little unhappily that pretty Luisa had been responsible for taking Doña Rosalia her meals. Then he brightened at the thought that this gave him an excellent excuse for a prolonged interview with her. He ran his eyes around the room again, trying to pinpoint what was different about it and wondering if it was just his imagination.

“
Hel-lo.
” Guardia Soler’s soft exclamation of triumph interrupted the sergeant’s train of thought. Soler turned to face his commanding officer, holding a half-empty wine bottle. “I think we should analyze this as well, sir.”

Rivas nodded. “Good thought. When you’re finished here, take anything that looks like it might have contained poison back to the post, and then come back. I’m going to talk to the servants.” The wine bottle had come from a highly polished mahogany cabinet, almost invisible under a stack of papers. Rivas remembered wondering on his previous visits if Luisa was responsible for polishing the expanse of dark wood. It was odd that he remembered seeing more of the wood than he did now. He glanced back at the desk where Doña Rosalia had sat for the majority of their interviews and a memory of loose sheets of paper floated across his mind. The desk was clear now. That was what was different: the clean desk and the messy cabinet. Soler and Medina had probably gone through the desk searching and moved any documents on it out of their way. Rivas wondered if he should rebuke his men. “Have you found any papers?” he asked abruptly.

Guardia Soler looked puzzled. “What kinds of papers, sir?”

“Papers with writing on them,” Rivas snapped.

Medina now saw an opportunity to gain credit for diligence. Screened by Soler, he quickly scanned the documents lying on the cabinet. “There are some household accounts here, sir,” he volunteered. “And what looks like a letter to a foreman in the Alpujarra. Unsigned. Probably you should ask her secretary about that one.”

The sergeant nodded, and decided that it was not worth reprimanding his men for moving the papers. At least they had been careful enough to read them. He left orders for them to search the rest of the room then went downstairs and made himself comfortable in one of the parlors that he remembered from previous visits. Then he asked Guardia Flores for a list of the staff. “There’s four in all, sir,” Flores reported. “Two maids, the cook, and a sort of caretaker-manservant type. But they say that two women come in a few times a week to help clean, and Doña Rosalia hired outside laundrywomen, too.”

“Get their names and addresses,” Rivas ordered, not that he thought the information would prove helpful. “And stay with them until we call them. Note if they say anything to each other. Girón, get me Doña Rosalia’s personal maid—María José, I think it is—and then stay here and take notes on the interviews.”

“Yes, sir.” The pair saluted and left.

A few moments later, Guardia Girón returned, shepherding María José before him. Rivas had met Doña Rosalia’s maid in the past and even exchanged a few words with her, but he knew very little about the woman who had silently watched Doña Rosalia berate him for years. He greeted her courteously, not denying their previous acquaintance, and she rewarded him with a watery smile. She was dressed in mourning for her mistress, and Rivas was stunned to see that she looked like she was actually grieving. The sergeant had a maiden aunt who had fed him sweets in his childhood and was perpetually in mourning for some family member or other, who looked rather as María José did now. Since he had been fond of his aunt, he did his best to be polite.

Doña Rosalia’s maid answered his questions readily. Her full name was María José García Caló, and she was fifty-eight. (She answered his question about her age with considerably less embarrassment than he asked it.) She had lived in Doña Rosalia’s household for thirty-four years. Yes, the señora had been a bit nervous since her husband had passed away (“You’d know about that already, Sergeant.”), and she was sometimes irritable, which was only to be expected in a lady of her age, but she had been a good employer and a good woman. No, the señora had not had any enemies, although she had been very frightened of the Reds, and of course there was no saying what the Reds might do.

“She was a good lady.” María José brought her handkerchief to her eyes and vigorously rubbed tears out of them. “She went to mass at Las Angustias every day, rain or shine. And she was good to us. All of us.”

“You mean she was a good mistress?” Rivas prompted.

“Yes, sir. Always generous and considerate.” The maid wiped her eyes again.

“I did meet her several times,” the sergeant reminded María José, a little acidly. “Generous and considerate” were not words he would have used to describe the late Rosalia de Ordoñez. “She struck me as a lady with a temper.”

María José gave him a look of red-rimmed disapproval. “You only met her when she was upset. I don’t deny that she could be a bit sharp tongued sometimes, but that was only to be expected with all that she suffered from the Reds. First her poor sons and then her grandsons. Then her husband. And now they’ve finished her off, too.” The maid began to weep noisily into her handkerchief.

If Sergeant Rivas had been given to reflection, he might have thought it ironic that despite the death of its owner he was still tactfully comforting a hysterical woman in the Casa Ordoñez. Since he was not, he simply made an effort to keep his eyes from rolling, and said, “Do you have any idea how the Reds could have administered poison in her own home?”

“She always said they were cunning,” María sobbed.

Rivas took pains to choose simple words and spaced them out as he would have spoken to a child. “The kind of poison that killed her works very fast. Do you know what she ate or drank the night she died?”

To his astonishment, María José pulled herself together and proceeded to be helpful. “Luisa always brought her a tray in the evenings. But it couldn’t have been anything from that.”

“Why not?”

“Because as often as not she’d make Luisa taste everything on the tray. And on days when she was agitated enough to send for you she was sure to do that. And Luisa wasn’t even sick.”

Rivas frowned and made a mental note to ask Luisa if she had acted as a taster the night Doña Rosalia had died. “What exactly was on the tray? Wasn’t there anything that could have been partly poisoned, so that tasting a portion would not have affected Luisa?”

María José thought for a moment, interested now, and trying to remember. “There was ham. And a bit of tortilla. And a few pieces of bread. I suppose only one of the pieces of bread might have been poisoned.” She caught her breath. “Blessed Virgin, you don’t think that it was only luck that Luisa wasn’t killed as well?”

She crossed herself, and Rivas had to suppress the urge to follow her example. The kind of killer who would risk an innocent life to strike his victim down—not that Doña Rosalia was not an innocent life, too, the sergeant reminded himself—was the lowest kind of vermin and would be difficult to catch. “There’s nothing else she could have eaten that evening?”

“She didn’t call for anything.” María José was positive.

“What about smelling salts?” Rivas asked. “Or any kinds of pills or medicine?”

“She wasn’t one for taking pills. She was always afraid they’d be tampered with.” María José’s eyes filled again, and for a moment the sergeant was afraid she was about to relapse into tears.

“Smelling salts?” he asked hastily.

Doña Rosalia’s maid sniffed contemptuously. “The señora never felt faint. She was a marvel for her age.”

“But she had a large collection of them?”

“Gifts from her daughter. Señorita Dani was always giving her presents for invalids, as if she thought her mother
ought
to be sick because she was elderly. The señora told her again and again not to waste her money on foolishness, but Señorita Dani can be stubborn.”

Rivas nodded understandingly. His own mother had made the last years of his grandfather’s life miserable by inquiring kindly after rheumatism the old man had always claimed was nonexistent. Rivas asked where the food for Doña Rosalia’s last meal had come from, but María José was vague on such details. Luisa or Fulgencio would be able to help him more, she suggested, since their business was in the kitchen. He thanked her for her time and dismissed her, with a caution that she should not leave the neighborhood until the investigation was finished. She stood to go, mopping her eyes, and urged the sergeant to find the soulless Red who had murdered the señora.

Although Rivas disliked the idea that he had wrongly dismissed the notion of a Red conspiracy against Doña Rosalia, he could not at the moment see any more plausible motives for her death. He had half suspected that poison had been the desperate last resort of one of the unfortunates who had been forced to deal with Doña Rosalia on a daily basis, but there was no question that María José’s grief was genuine. Apparently Doña Rosalia had only shown him her worst side. It occurred to him that Lieutenant Tejada had not mentioned whether Doña Rosalia had made any provision in her will for her household. Perhaps she had but the amounts involved might seem to one of her blood kin too small to recall. Perhaps the lieutenant had not spoken of it because all the Tejadas provided for their servants in their wills, and he had not thought it worthwhile to mention such routine bequests. Or perhaps the old woman in front of him was out of a job and had no hopes of a new one. It was a strong reason to have wanted Doña Rosalia to live and might partially explain her grief.

“What will you do now?” he asked, partly as a sergeant, and partly merely from personal curiosity.

She smiled, flattered by his interest in her welfare. “I don’t know. I imagine the house will be Don Fernando’s. It’s for him to decide. If he pensions us off, I can always go and live with my daughter.”

“She lives in Granada?”

“Oh, yes. She’s married to a cobbler on Recogidas. Such a nice boy. She was brokenhearted when she heard about the señora. She grew up in this house, you know.”

Rivas watched her go, thinking that it would be a shame if Don Fernando threw a loyal servant out into the street. Perhaps he could speak to Lieutenant Tejada about it. He was tempted to see Luisa next, but he decided to save her interview until the end and sent for Doña Rosalia’s cook, Fulgencio, instead.

Five minutes with Fulgencio Lujo taught the sergeant that María José’s sentiments about her mistress were not universally shared by the household. Fulgencio’s main emotion on being interviewed by the Guardia appeared to be nervousness. He certainly was not bowed down by grief. “Doña Rosalia was a good lady,” he said in response to the sergeant’s question. “But if I had a cent for every time I’ve seen a good meal thrown across the room . . . I’ll tell you there were times when I almost cried.”

“Do you think her fears about Reds were reasonable?”

“Doña Rosalia—may she rest in peace—was not a reasonable person,” Fulgencio said firmly. “Even before her husband died. For instance, Sergeant,
you
must know that ever since the war it’s been difficult getting real coffee and white flour and so on.”

Rivas nodded, and the cook continued. “I had to use substitutes. Now they may be very nutritious, Sergeant, but they don’t taste the same and it’s no use saying they do. So I experimented with recipes. I was creative. I invented new dishes that could have been served in the finest hotels in Paris!” The sergeant frowned and Fulgencio added hastily, “Or Rome!
Before
the war. I don’t mean to boast but some of those meals were miracles, considering the ingredients. Miracles!”

“Doña Rosalia didn’t appreciate your efforts?” Rivas guessed.

“If it wasn’t the taste, it was the expense,” Fulgencio agreed gloomily. “She
knew
that food prices were going up, and she wouldn’t let me economize, and then she complained that the household accounts were wasteful. I
told
her that unless she was willing to settle for fewer eggs in her tortillas the costs would keep rising. There’s a perfectly
good
egg substitute that isn’t nearly as expensive. But she kept complaining that it tasted funny. And if I tried a new dish without her permission, or even a little substitution . . .” The cook rolled his eyes.

“She threw it across the room?”

“She’d burst into tears and claim I was trying to poison her. Once the top of the salt shaker came off and the soup was too salty. She almost had hysterics. I was a poisoner who was in league with God knows who!” Fulgencio threw up his hands in exasperation.

“Someone did poison her, though,” Rivas pointed out.

“Not me,” the cook said firmly. “You can test everything in my kitchen, if you like, Sergeant. But I wouldn’t have been able to get poison past Doña Rosalia. And I don’t think you’ll find she was poisoned by anything she ate.”

“You’re very confident,” Rivas said, although he had a sinking feeling that Fulgencio would not have boasted of his kitchen’s purity if there were any trace of poison to be found. “What makes you so sure?”

“Because she made Luisa taste everything on her meal trays,” Fulgencio said simply. “It was nice in a way. Luisa’s got a good palate, and she reports back to me on how things turn out.”