The Best of Sisters in Crime (49 page)

“Your turn,
love,” I said softly. “What’s it gonna be? The way I see things,” I said,
pocketing the gun as I went over and sat down on the couch beside her, “Eddie
just struck out and I’m on deck. He’s dead, I’m alive and you’re rich. Time to
choose up sides for the Series.”

She shuddered
like a stalled Ford. “You killed him. You killed Eddie.” Her voice was quiet
and she sounded vaguely surprised.

“Yeah. I did.
Now, you got two choices. You can do what I tell you to do or you can die.”

“I thought you
said two choices, Rick. I only heard one,” she said carefully. Her voice had
changed, and her face was no longer an expressionless mask. “Can I go look?”
she asked as she got up and went behind the bar. She stood there for a minute,
looking down at her dead husband; then she bent down and touched his cheek. “What
do you want me to do?” she asked me as she straightened up.

“First thing I
want, I want you to come over here and wrap your prints around my gun,” I told
her. “That’ll keep you in line just in case you get tired of me, some faraway
night when we’re under the stars on the Mexican Riviera. I’ll keep the gun for
insurance.”

“Don’t you trust
me?”

“This is L.A. I
don’t trust anybody who’s ever breathed smog. Then I give you a black eye and
leave. I won’t hurt you, much. You call the cops and say a bad, bad robber
broke in and killed hubby. You’ll have a rough few months, but I’ll take care
of the Dingo and we can meet there once in a while. Maybe next year, we’ll get
married. Think you’d like a June wedding?”

“You’re a cold
son of a bitch; how come I didn’t notice it before?”

“You weren’t
interested in my mind, Suzanne. Look, baby, now that Eddie’s out of the picture
we can have it all. Don’t you understand, I can’t afford to blow this off. I
had one hit, I blew it. Usually, one hit is all you get in this town but I got
a second chance tonight and I’m taking it. I’m not gonna get another. Ever.”

“Why did he want
me killed?” she said, looking down at Eddie’s bloody body.

“Do you have to
know? Money, OK? Isn’t it always money? He said you cost too much and he didn’t
have enough money to pay you off.”

“Greedy hog,”
she said and made an ugly snorting noise. “But that’s what they all say, right,
Ricky boy?”

I walked over to
her, very fast, and slapped her in the face, very hard. “Never call me Ricky
boy again, Suzanne,” I said, a tight hold on her arm. “Call me honey or sweetie
or baby or call me you jerk, but don’t ever call me Ricky boy.”

She pulled away
from me, rubbing the red spot on her cheek where I’d hit her. “Why’d you have
to hit me? I wish the hell you hadn’t hit me. . . .” Her voice trailed off like
a little girl’s as she stepped back, leaned against the bar and buried her
hands in the deep sleeves of her white kimono. She looked up at me and I saw
death in her eyes. My death.

I saw it all and
there was nothing I could do. She smiled and seemed to move very, very slowly,
though in the back of my mind I knew everything was happening normally,
skipping along in real time. The little silver gun slipped into her hand like a
fish eager for the baited hook, and I realized she’d picked it up when she’d
knelt down next to Eddie’s dead body. She aimed it at me and fired. I watched
as the gun leapt back in her hand and the bullet jumped straight for my heart.

I felt the slug
sink into my body, only a .25, I told myself, a girl’s gun, nothing to worry
about. But Suzanne’s aim was true. I put my hand to my chest and it felt
scorched and fiery, like I’d fallen asleep with the hot water bottle on my
naked flesh. I took my hand away and looked at it foolishly. Red. I had a red
hand. Where the hell did I get a red hand? I was hot and tired and all of a
sudden I thought a nap would do me good. Somewhere far away I heard her voice.
. . .

“You were right,
Rick. In this town, one hit is all you get.”

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Diane Mott Davidson’s
Goldy Bear first appeared in
Catering to Nobody,
an Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity nominee. Goldy continues to ply her culinary
trade and solve puzzling murders in several novels, including
Dying for Chocolate, Cereal Murders, Killer Pancake, The Main Corpse,
and the forthcoming
The Grilling Season.
With mouthwatering recipes included in every book, Diane has come a long way
since she was a young newly wed who splurged on a steak and put it in the oven
for 350 degrees for an hour. “That,” she says, “was what you did with
everything else.”

In “Cold Turkey,” which
won an Anthony for Best Short Story, Goldy finds more than she bargained for in
her refrigerator—and is less than happy about it.

I did not expect to find
Edith Blanton’s body in
my walk-in refrigerator.
The day had been bad enough already. My first thought after the shock was
I’m going to have to throw all this food away.

My mind reeled.
I couldn’t get a dial tone to call for help. Reconstruct, I ordered myself as I
ran to a neighbor’s. The police are going to want to know everything. My
neighbor pressed 9-1-1. I talked. Hung up. I immediately worried about my
eleven-year-old son, Arch. Where was he? I looked at my watch: ten past eight.
He was spending the night somewhere. Oh yes, Dungeons and Dragons weekend party
at a friend’s house. I made a discreet phone call to make sure he was okay. I
did not mention the body. If I had, he and his friends would have wanted to
troop over to see it.

Then I flopped
down in a wing-back chair and tried to think.

.  .  .

I had talked to
Edith Blanton that morning. She had called with a batch of demanding questions.
Was I ready to cater the Episcopal Church Women’s Luncheon, to be held the next
day? Irritation had blossomed like a headache. Butter-ball Blanton, as she was
known everywhere but to her face, was a busybody. I’d given the shortest
possible answers. The menu was set, the food prepared. Chicken and artichoke
heart pot pie. Molded strawberry salad. Tossed greens with vinaigrette.
Parkerhouse rolls. Lemon sponge cake. Not on your diet, I had wanted to add,
but did not.

Now Goldy,
she’d gone on,
you have that petition we’re
circulating around the church, don’t you?
I
checked for raisins for a Waldorf salad and said, Which petition is that? Edith
made an impatient noise in her throat.
The one outlawing guitar
music.
Sigh. I said I had it around somewhere. .
. . Actually, I kind of liked ecclesiastical folk music, as long as I
personally did not have to sing it.
And Goldy, you’re not
serving that Japanese raw fish, are you?
To the
church-women? Never.
And you didn’t use anything from
the local farm where they found salmonella, did you?
Oh, enough. Absolutely not, Butt—er . . . Mrs. Blanton, I promised
before hanging up.

The phone had
rung again immediately: our priest, Father Olson. I said, Surely you’re not
calling about the luncheon. He said,
Don’t call me Shirley.
A comic in a clerical collar. After pleasantries we had gotten
around to the real stuff:
How’s Maria?
I said that Maria Korman, my best friend, was fine. As far as I
knew. Why?
Oh, just checking, hadn’t seen her in a while.
Haha, sure. I involuntarily glanced at my appointments calendar.
After the churchwomen’s luncheon, I was doing a dinner party for Maria. I didn’t
mention this to the uninvited Father Olson. You see, Episcopal priests can
marry. Father Olson was unmarried, which made him interested in Maria. The
reverse was not the case, however, which was why he had to call me to find out
how she was. But none of this did I mention to Father O., as we called him.
Didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

My neighbor
handed me a cup of tea. I thought again of Edith Blanton’s pale calves, of the
visible side of her pallid face, of the blood on the refrigerator floor. I
pushed the image out of my mind and tried to think again about the day. The
police were going to ask a lot of questions. Had I heard from anyone in the
church again? Had anyone mentioned a current crisis? What had happened after
Father Olson called?

Oh yes. Next had
come a frantic knock at the door: something else to do with Maria. This time it
was her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend—lanky, strawberry-blond David McAllister. He
had desperation in his voice.
What can I do to show
Maria I love her?
Sheesh! Did I look like Ann
Landers? I ushered him out to the kitchen, where I started to chop pecans,
also
for the Waldorf salad,
also
for Maria’s dinner party, to which the
wealthy-but-boring David McAllister
also
had not been invited. Not only that, but he was driving me crazy
cracking his knuckles. When he took a breath while talking about how much he
adored Maria, I said I was in the middle of a crisis involving petitions, raw
eggs and the churchwomen, and ushered him out.

About an hour
later I’d left the house. I lifted my head from my neighbor’s chair and looked
at my watch: quarter after eight. When had I left the house? Around one, only
to return seven hours later. The entire afternoon and early evening had been
taken up with the second unsuccessful meeting between me, my lawyer, and the
people suing me to change the name of my catering business. George Pettigrew
and his wife own Three Bears Catering down in Denver. In June it came to their
attention that my real, actual name is Goldy (a nickname that has stuck like
epoxy glue since childhood) Bear (Germanic in origin, but lamentable
nonetheless). What was worse in the Pettigrews’ eyes was that my business in
the mountain town of Aspen Meadow was called Goldilocks’ Catering, Where
Everything Is Just Right! We began negotiating three weeks ago, at the
beginning of September. The Pettigrews screamed copyright infringement. I tried
to convince them that all of us could successfully capitalize on, if not
inhabit, the same fairy tale. The meeting this afternoon was another failure,
except from the viewpoint of my lawyer, who gets his porridge no matter what.

I nestled my
head against one of the wings of my neighbor’s chair. Just thinking about the
day again was exhausting.

For as if all
this had not been enough, when I got home I heard a dog in my outdoor trash
barrels. At least I thought it was a dog. When I went around the side of the
house to check, a
real
bear, large and black, shuffled away from the back of the house and up toward
the woods. This is not an uncommon sight in the Colorado high country when fall
weather sets in. But combined with the nagging from Edith and the fight with
the Pettigrews, it was enough to send me in search of a parfait left over from
an elementary school faculty party.

Not on your
diet, I thought with a measure of guilt, the diet you just undertook with all
sorts of good intentions. Oh well. Diets aren’t good for you. Too much
deprivation. But on this plan I didn’t have to give up sweets; I could have one
dessert a day. Of course the brownie I’d had after the lawyer’s office fiasco
was only a memory. Besides, I was under so much stress. I could just imagine
that tall chilled crystal glass, those thick layers of chocolate and vanilla
pudding. I opened the refrigerator door full of anticipation. And there in the
dark recesses of the closetlike space was Edith, fully clothed, lying limp,
sandwiched between the congealed strawberry salad and marinating T-bones.

I’d screamed.
Rushed over to the neighbor’s where I now sat, staring into a cup of lukewarm
tea. I looked at my watch again. 8:20.

My neighbor was
scurrying around looking for a blanket in case I went into shock. I was not
going into shock; I just needed to talk to somebody. So I phoned Maria. That’s
what best friends are for, right? To get you through crises? Besides, Maria and
I went way back. We had both made the mistake of marrying the same man, not
simultaneously. We had survived the divorces from The Jerk and become best
friends. I had even coached her in figuring her monetary settlement, sort of
like when an NFL team in the playoffs gets films from another team’s archenemy.

When Maria
finally picked up the phone, I told her Edith Blanton was dead and in my
refrigerator. I must have still been incoherent because I added the bit about
the bear.

There was a
pause while Maria tried to apply logic. Finally she said, “Goldy. I’m on my way
over.”

“Okay, okay! I’ll
meet you at my front door. Just be careful.”

“Of what? Is
this homicide or is it a frigging John Irving novel?”