The Last Annual Slugfest (16 page)

Rosa swallowed hard.

“I’ll be okay,” he added. “It’s only Joey, Stan, and me. Don’t worry.”

Rosa swallowed again.

“Mama, nothing’s going to happen to me. The sheriff will find the person who killed Edwina.”

Joey walked up beside Chris. Bending so that his mouth was near the wire mesh in front of the next seat, he said, “Rosa, the sheriff wants you in his office.”

Rosa’s neck muscles tightened. She looked as if she would have swallowed yet again, but there was nothing left to swallow. “Now?”

He nodded uncomfortably. “It’s official—his request.”

“Oh, Chris.”

“It’ll be okay, Mama.”

I could tell from their faces that neither of them believed that.

To Joey, Chris said, “She can have a lawyer or a representative with her, can’t she?”

Joey nodded.

“Mama, you’ll feel better not seeing the sheriff alone, right? You take Vejay with you.”

Facing the sheriff in this kind of interview, on this case, was not something I wanted to do. Being connected to me wasn’t likely to raise the Fortimiglios in the sheriff’s estimation. I wasn’t even sure that Rosa found my company better than going it alone. But taking me with her was Chris’s parting request, and she didn’t argue. She turned and walked to the door, stood staring out, her back to me, until Joey came to open it and led us through the rows of plexiglass cubicles to Wescott’s office. It was on the inside of the aisle. Once Wescott had told me that it didn’t do for the sheriff to have his back to the windows.

The office was as I remembered it from a year ago when Wescott had had me in here for an interrogation. Then, as now, papers were stacked on the muddy blue desk, on the blue bookcase, and mixed in with heavy binders atop the blue file case. From some place in the center of the building came the plastic clack of a typewriter, its electronic pips marking the end of each line. Overhead, the air grate buzzed softly.

Sheriff Wescott was standing behind the desk. His blue eyes were pale, his rough skin drawn. I wondered how late he had been at Steelhead Lodge last night. When he looked at Rosa, it was with sadness. “Mrs. Fortimiglio.” He started to indicate the chair but stopped halfway, as he spotted me. He eyed me with annoyance. “Mrs. Fortimiglio, is it your wish to have Miss Haskell with you?” he demanded.

Perhaps it was the sheriff’s tone that got to Rosa, or his implication that she was too timid to say no. “Yes,” she snapped, “it is my wish.”

I moved the box of files from the other chair to the floor and sat. When we had left Chris, I wouldn’t have thought it was possible for me to make things any worse for him and Rosa, but already I had.

The sheriff sat, pulled out a notepad, and said, “You cooked those pizzas, didn’t you, Mrs. Fortimiglio?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Rosa had looked nervous before. Now her eyes widened. She had the same expression of amazed disbelief Chris had had when I told him I knew nothing about the Boldt Decision. “We wanted to win the fifty dollars.”

The sheriff pressed his lips together. It was clear from
his
expression that he figured she had misunderstood the point of his question. “Let me approach it from the other end. Why didn’t
you
take those pizzas to the Slugfest? Why did Chris?”

Rosa leaned forward, resting her fingers on the edge of the desk. “Oh, well, you see, Edwina was still piqued at me. My grandson, Donny, bought some tobacco from her last fall. He was only sixteen then. He has bad asthma. I’m not excusing Donny, Sheriff; he had no business there. But Edwina should have known better than to sell it to him. I know you don’t speak ill of the dead, but truth is truth. We had to take Donny to the emergency room. His face was all red, he was trying so hard to get the breath in. He was scared to death. It was a good lesson for him. He’ll never go near tobacco again. But, I’ll tell you, we were all scared.”

“So you told Edwina Henderson that?” Obviously the sheriff had heard of the incident.

“I went down to the store the next day. I figured she should know.”

“And what happened?”

“She got all up on her high horse about Donny being old enough to look out for himself, and her not being responsible for the illnesses in my family.” A flicker of a smile broke through Rosa’s taut expression. “Edwina realized she was wrong. She just couldn’t bring herself to say so.”

“Did you think Edwina Henderson would have barred a Slugfest entry with your name on it?”

“Well, no. But I knew this was a big event for her. I wouldn’t have considered making an entry, but Donny made such a fuss about it. He said it would pay for his nose drops. They’re prescription—Estrin—and they’re expensive. So I agreed to cook the pizzas. I just didn’t want to create more turmoil for Edwina by turning up myself. But really, everyone who knows us knew that I cooked those pizzas. Chris doesn’t cook.”

“Sheriff,” I said, “are you telling us that the poison was definitely in the pizzas?”

“Everything suggests that.” The lines around his mouth had softened as he’d listened to Rosa. Now they stiffened again.

“But you don’t
know.
”

“No, I don’t have
evidence.
The pizzas were eaten completely.”

“Then why have you arrested Chris?”

“Because,” he said with deliberateness, “the poison was almost certainly in his dish.”

“Any of the judges, or Hooper, or Bert Lucci had access to that dish when it was on the table. Hooper told me that when they circled the table, every one of the judges had his back to him at some point. Why not arrest them?”

The typewriter stopped. The buzz from the air grate seemed louder.

“Miss Haskell, Chris Fortimiglio had strong reason for wanting to keep that treaty secret.” He paused to see if I could rebut that, then said, “He had access to the poison.”

“What was the poison?”

“Liquid nicotine.”

“Nicotine!” Rosa and I said together.

“Chris doesn’t smoke,” Rosa said.

The sheriff nodded to her and shifted his gaze back to me. He seemed to be balancing between the sympathetic tone he would have chosen had she been here alone and the supercilious one he’d been using with me. “Nicotine, as you ladies may know, is a pesticide. In the past it was very popular in dealing with aphids and flying insects. Chris helped his father when he worked in town, cleaning people’s yards and doing repairs, didn’t he, Mrs. Fortimiglio?”

“In off season, when there were no fish, he did, and before the floods, when there was a lot of work needing to be done.”

The sheriff nodded. He made a notation on his pad. The typewriter started again with a rush of electronic pips. “So then, Mrs. Fortimiglio, Chris knew where local people kept pesticides.”

Rosa seemed to crumble from within. I put my hand on her arm. “Rosa, it’s okay. Everyone knows Chris helped his father. You didn’t tell the sheriff anything new.” Glaring at Wescott, I said, “All sorts of people have pesticides. Saying Chris is the only one with access to a pesticide is ridiculous, particularly when you’re talking about nicotine. For Christ’s sake, Edwina ran a tobacco store.”

“Miss Haskell,” he said, with ill-concealed triumph, “the only reason to have pure nicotine in a tobacco store is if you want to kill someone.”

“You can boil down smoking tobacco,” I said.

“If you have the time and are willing to run the risk of being discovered with the evidence burned into your equipment. Why would you do that, Miss Haskell, when liquid nicotine is already available?”

“That still doesn’t point to Chris. They’ve got pesticides at the fish ranch, for instance.”

“Are you suggesting the killer drove all the way out to Jenner and back?” he asked.

“I’m just saying that access to nicotine is widespread. It’s not reason enough for arresting Chris.”

“True.”

“Then why?” Rosa asked in a barely audible voice.

Still looking at me, Wescott said, “We found the container the nicotine was in. It’s a tiny plastic squeeze bottle. An Estrin bottle.”

I
TOLD THE SHERIFF
that Maxie Dawkins, the guard at the fish ranch, and probably any number of other people, took Estrin, but he cut me off with the remark that Maxie had not been at the Slugfest. When I suggested someone could have used his bottle, the sheriff actually laughed, then caught himself and stopped abruptly. Did I, he asked, as he stood up, assume the killer had somehow discovered the treaty in the locked drawer of Edwina’s podium, then excused himself from the festivities at Steelhead Lodge, driven half an hour to the fish ranch and half an hour back, for the pleasure of using an obscure nose-drop bottle? The bottle, he pointed out, was a convenience. It was not the entire focus of the crime. And it was easily accessible only to someone like Chris, whose nephew, Donny, used Estrin. With that, the sheriff took a step toward the door.

At least, I thought, standing up, this discovery was not my fault. Or so I assumed, until Rosa asked Wescott where he’d found the Estrin bottle. He’d uncovered it in a garbage can that he’d spotted at the lodge when he came out to examine the treaty!

I walked out of the building with Rosa, waiting for her to say something. But her silence was as total as it had been before, and now it seemed final. I waited as she got into her truck, and only moved on when she shut the door.

Without bothering to avoid the ankle-deep puddles, I walked slowly across the parking lot to my truck, and climbed in. The cab was cold. I didn’t touch the ignition. I sat staring into the rain. It was heavier now, blowing across the parking lot in waves. I looked through it at the building. Glass and metal, it had the appearance of the bottom two stories of a skyscraper, suitable to Los Angeles, not Guerneville. The old sheriff’s department was a beige stucco building that slumped back against the beach. It had looked like a place you could feel safe explaining why you hadn’t paid your parking tickets. But this razor-edged building was one you would be called to by a computer notice; where, rather than being presumed innocent until proven guilty, you’d be held until you could show the computer had erred. It was a building where innocent men were held for murder.

I didn’t consider going home now. I didn’t consider whether to keep clear of Chris’s dilemma. The sheriff hadn’t handled the interview professionally or fairly. He’d let his anger with me overwhelm the sympathy he’d felt for Rosa when she walked in. He was a decent man, and by now, I felt sure he was even angrier with himself, and me. He wasn’t out to get Chris. In the twenty hours since Edwina’s murder, he probably hadn’t done any more active seeking for clues than to interview those of us who had had access to the food. He probably hadn’t looked for evidence against Chris per se. It had just piled up in front of him—thanks, in large part, to me. Regardless of what Rosa wished, by now I was too culpable to just walk away.

Nicotine, I thought. Anyone could get it. But for someone to bring it to the Slugfest meant that that person was planning to kill Edwina. And if the motive was to keep the treaty secret, that meant the killer knew about the treaty. And according to Hooper, the only one besides Edwina who knew what she was going to say was himself.

Why would Hooper admit to knowing about the treaty? Surely he would realize how incriminating it was. But with moody, volatile Hooper, the normal logic didn’t hold. I couldn’t predict how Hooper would react. All I knew of Hooper was what he had told me—assuming that was true—and that he alone benefitted from the treaty. As I would have admitted to the sheriff, had he asked me, that was hardly grounds for an arrest.

I turned the key in the ignition. I needed to know more about Hooper—background that Rosa could give me. But I couldn’t ask her now.

Leaving the lights off, I stared into the empty parking lot. Then I noticed it wasn’t empty. A man in tan rain gear was making his way toward a beige sedan. As I focused on him, I realized it was Mr. Bobbs.

Mr. Bobbs! What was he doing at the sheriff’s department today? Sheriff Wescott himself had told me they’d interviewed Mr. Bobbs last night. Why had they called him in for a second go around? Was he a more serious suspect than I had imagined? Or did he know something I hadn’t considered?

He got in his car and drove toward the exit of the lot. He hadn’t even warmed his engine. How rattled was he to forget or forego that? I had seen him sit in the PG&E lot for ten minutes warming the engine of a vehicle that had just been used. Now his car sputtered as he pulled out of the sheriff’s department lot. I followed.

He drove slowly. I had never ridden with him, but I wasn’t surprised that he kept the car exactly at the speed limit. If he had been on company time, he would have been intent on upholding the unimpeachability of his position, lest anyone should suggest that the manager of the Henderson PG&E office was a scofflaw. Now, after five, on Saturday, with the office closed and the week’s route books safely on their way to the computer in San Francisco, there was no reason to rush. He was just filling time till Monday morning.

He slowed as he passed the curve by the W in the river, where the Pomo rancheria would be. I looked to the left, but if Hooper was still there, he was invisible from the road. There was no car or truck parked there, but that didn’t mean anything. Hooper didn’t have a vehicle.

The rain hit sharply on the windshield. Overhead, the California laurel branches hung low. The redwoods pushed up above them. This patch of road, right before the Henderson line, where River Road became North Bank Road, was one of my favorites. The canopy of trees reminded me of being a child, of suspending a blanket over the tops of folding chairs and making a secret passage. The redwoods and eucalyptus and laurels didn’t quite meet across much of River Road, but they crowded to the sides of it all the way to St. Agnes’s, well beyond Henderson. The charm of the road, its unspoiled quality, was one of the things that had clinched my decision to move up here. “Nature’s high-rises,” my ex-husband John had called them on his one unexpected visit after I settled in Henderson. He had looked appraisingly at those redwoods that had been standing longer than the white man had been on the continent, and said, “Someone could make a fortune from this lumber.” When I had reminded him that stripping the riverbanks would create a public outcry, he had smiled and said, “And someone else could make a fortune with a good PR campaign. Of course, it would have to be very good.”