“We understand you made some food for the party,” the sergeant began.
“Yes, crackers with cream cheese and jalapeno-fruit preserves from the El Paso Chile Company,” I replied.
“Oh, man,” said Detective Gomez. “You tried their barbeque sauce?”
“No, is it good?” I am always interested in new food products that don’t require production by me.
The sergeant glowered at his detective and reintroduced his line of questioning. “Now, folks, we’d like to know what kind of relationship you had with the deceased.”
It occurred to me that I could shock the sergeant by saying, “Ménage à trois.” Of course, I’d never say that, and if I did, Jason would be horrified. I restrained myself. Jason said he’d served on a university committee with Gubenko.
“And you, ma’am?” asked the sergeant.
“We all liked opera,” I replied. “Did you find something lethal in his stomach contents?”
“You thinking of taking over my investigation, ma’am?”
“Well, I realize that you are being facetious, Sergeant, but as it happens I have some experience with investigatory pursuits. Just last summer, my mother-in-law was accused of murder in San Francisco, and I myself helped to find the actual murderer, who, while still on the loose, shot at me, I might add.” A source of anger every time I think of it. “You have my heartfelt sympathy. It must be very trying when miscreants attempt to kill you for simply doing your duty.”
Jason had rolled his eyes and leaned back against the cushions. The sergeant, who evidently suspected me of some kind of joke, cast me a flinty-eyed glance. “Would you folks call the deceased a heavy drinker?”
We looked at each other. “I don’t think either of us could say,” Jason answered.
“Well, you was at the party with him. How many drinks did he have that night, would you say?”
“Three, maybe four,” I guessed. “Margaritas.”
“Over six feet, over two hundred pounds. He couldn’t have been that drunk,” said the detective.
“Especially since he consumed a pound of guacamole while having his three or four drinks,” Jason agreed.
I’d have preferred that he not bring up the guacamole, but there was nothing I could do about it.
“Either of you get drunk? Or sick?” asked the sergeant.
“Carolyn was sick when we got home. I wasn’t,” said Jason, “and neither of us was drunk.”
“I’m a food columnist,” I added. “I’m more interested in food than alcohol, and Jason was driving. You didn’t have more than two drinks the whole evening, did you, Jason?”
“Why bother?” he replied. “The champagne was atrocious, and—”
“Did you notice that they had Tattinger’s for Lady Macbeth?” I asked indignantly.
“Not in my glass,” said Jason.
“Well, I guess that wraps it up,” muttered the sergeant, looking disgusted.
“That wasn’t very arduous,” I remarked once we had seen them to the door.
Jason grinned. “What did you expect? Bamboo shoots under your fingernails?”
“I expected to be
grilled
. Obviously they don’t think they’re investigating a homicide.”
“They don’t have any reason to,” said Jason. “I can’t imagine why they’re bothering people when they don’t even know yet what they’re dealing with.”
“The first twenty-four hours of a case are the most important,” I said knowledgeably. “If you ever watched police dramas on television, you’d know that, Jason.”
“My wife, the busybody detective,” he muttered.
Jason doesn’t approve of my recent, if minor, involvements in amateur criminal investigation, for which reason, I seldom mention such activities to him. He just gets upset, which takes his mind off his research. Although never for long.
7
A Meeting of Incompatibles
Carolyn
Jason, of course,
began Monday by leaping out of bed, donning sweats, running briskly up and down the mountain, fixing and eating a healthy breakfast, and leaving for the university. I, on the other hand, would have happily slept away the morning. I had stayed up late reading
Desert Queen
, the wonderful biography of Gertrude Bell. She was a Victorian lady who charmed Arab men and shared information on the Middle East not only with her British colleagues but also with Arab kings, sheiks, and holy men. What an astonishing and eerie book. Her experiences in Iraq before, during, and after the First World War bring a shiver to the spine of the modern American reader because it seems that the same things are happening to us that happened to the British in the Middle East eighty or so years earlier.
Be that as it may, I did not get to make up for my lost sleep because Adela called to say that the police were sure she had murdered Vladik. “What did you say to them?” I asked reproachfully.
“Nothing,” she assured me. “I say I want a lawyer. They say I don’t need lawyer because they are investigating Vladik’s death, which ees probably the natural causes.”
“So there’s no problem. They really have no idea what they’re investigating, Adela. They’re talking to everyone who brought food to the party. Mrs. Brockman, Mrs. Escobar, me—we’ve all been interviewed.”
“But they take my passport and my student visa,” she wailed. “They say I cannot cross border, even to see my mama.”
That didn’t sound good to me, but I repeated my assurances and pointed out that if we (Mrs. Brockman, Mrs. Escobar, and I) had been citizens of another country, the police would have taken our credentials too. Then I advised her to attend her classes, talk to her friends, and stop worrying.
Adela immediately found a new cause for dismay: Who would be her voice coach now that Vladik was dead? I was very tempted to say that if she needed his coaching, she shouldn’t have spiked the guacamole. However, I held my tongue. Even if the guacamole had made him sick, which it probably had, at least according to Jason’s reasoning, Adela couldn’t have foreseen that he’d eat so much, and she hadn’t meant to kill him. If she’d actually meant to kill him, she wouldn’t have told me that she’d put some foreign substance into the guacamole. That was
my
reasoning.
By the time I got off the phone, I was wide awake, so I had breakfast and read the newspaper, where I discovered a very interesting quotation from the neighbor who had discovered the body, a quotation resulting from a later interview by the newspaper. “ ‘It’s possible,’ said Luz Vallejo, former police lieutenant, ‘that he died because someone put a pillow over his face and held it there while he was throwing up. He did the rest of his vomiting in the bathroom and over the side of the bed. So why was there vomit in the middle of the pillow? You don’t bury your head in your pillow to throw up.’ ”
She made a good point. The police investigating the death must have seen the pillow. What did
they
think? That one of us ladies had poisoned him at the party and then snuck into his house to finish him off? I wanted to talk to Luz Vallejo. The problem was, would she talk to me? A police person, which she had been, probably wouldn’t, but a retired person—well, older people, retired people, like an audience. I just had to find out where she lived.
Luz Vallejo
A blonde, white female, mid-forties, 5 feet 6 inches, 110 to 120 pounds, teal-blue pants outfit and Reeboks, arrived at my door at 10:23 Monday morning. Reporter, I surmised, although I didn’t recognize her, but then I’d been retired three years so there were probably new faces at the
Times.
“My name is Carolyn Blue,” she said, and she held out her hand. “I wonder if I could speak to you for a moment.”
“Reporter or Avon lady?” I asked, ignoring the hand.
She looked embarrassed and took it back. “I wanted to ask you about the—crime scene? Vladislav Gubenko, the man whose dead body you discovered. I saw your name and opinion in the paper this morning and, since you aren’t listed in the phone book, I just took a chance on asking around your neighborhood. You’re my second try. The man on the other side was very pleasant, but didn’t know you, or your husband.”
“How did you get past the security guard?” I asked. Damn rent-a-cops weren’t worth squat.
“I said I was visiting you,” she answered.
“I didn’t get any call. Did you climb over the rock wall?” I didn’t think she had, but it was fun to ask. She looked pretty surprised. The call probably came while I was in the bathroom. Turn the shower on, and you couldn’t hear it if a stray rocket from White Sands landed across the street.
“Me?” Carolyn Blue gave it a few seconds thought. “I don’t think I could climb a rock wall if I wanted to, and I’ve been told that dangerous spiders lurk in El Paso walls and jump out at you. Black widows and fiddler spiders, not that I’ve seen either, but I certainly wouldn’t care to be bitten by one. It’s frightening enough to spot a scorpion in the bathroom.”
“So he just let you in because, being a white Anglo, you looked harmless enough. Why do you want me to tell you about Vladik?”
“Well, I knew him—he was an acquaintance of my husband’s at the university and a fellow opera lover, and the police are questioning all us opera ladies who brought refreshments to the party. I don’t think my canapés made him sick. I don’t even know if he ate any of mine, but I guess dangerous bacteria can grow on anything. Then I read that you thought someone might have caused the aspiration of vomit that killed him by holding a pillow over his face. Sergeant Guevara and his detective didn’t say anything about that, so—well, here I am. I’d hate to think someone did that, but on the other hand, I’d hate to think my jalapeno-fruit canapés made him sick.”
The woman looked at me hopefully while my knee throbbed and it occurred to me that she might never stop talking if I didn’t let her in. And it would be interesting to see her expression when I described the crime scene. Talking to “opera ladies,” were they? Guevara was obviously screwing up the investigation, piddling around while he waited for tox screens when he should be checking to see who hated Gubenko, besides me and the guy who wrote the editorial in the
Times.
That must have been some performance. I read some of
Macbeth
in high school and faked the rest with the Cliffs Notes my sister had in her bookcase in college, and I couldn’t picture Macbeth as a drug-dealing scumbag. Singing opera no less.
Madre de Dios,
but opera is hard to take. I never realized how bad until that asshole Russian moved in next door and turned his speakers up extra loud every night.
“Come on in,” I said, holding the door open and leading her into my living room. I sat beside the little table with the drawer that holds my gun, not that I thought she was carrying, but all those years in Vice make you careful.
“This is very kind of you, Ms. Vallejo,” she said sweetly.
Anything to get the weight off my knee,
I thought, not so sweetly.
8
Was He Murdered?
Carolyn
O
nce we were
seated in the ex-lieutenant’s living room, which was sizable but didn’t contain much furniture, I looked expectantly at my hostess. She looked back, but said nothing. A tall woman with medium-brown skin, a little lined at the eyes and mouth, gray-streaked, black hair cut short, wearing a denim shirt and jeans, she looked somewhat older than I, possibly fifty. Why had she retired so early? I’d read about police officers that took their retirement pay from one position and then became chiefs in small towns with a second salary, but she was home on a weekday.
“It’s very kind of you to talk to me,” I said, although she wasn’t talking to me and I wished she’d start. “Did you know Vladik well?”
A huge police dog padded in and eyed me suspiciously. “Over here, Smack,” the lieutenant said, and snapped her fingers. The dog sat down by her chair and stared at me. “I didn’t want to know Gubenko well,” she replied. “He tried to come on to me when he first moved in, which I didn’t like and put a stop to.”
Well, she was a handsome woman, although somewhat older than Vladik, I thought.
“And he played that damned music turned up past the point of pain night after night.”
“I take it you don’t like opera,” I murmured.
”I reported him to the condo committee about four times, and then I went over there and offered to shoot his sound system.” She smiled tightly. “That made a bigger impression on him than the committee.”
“You didn’t!” I started to laugh, thinking of Vladik, who had obviously seen himself as a ladies’ man, having to back off or lose his stereo set. I had to wonder whether she’d taken Smack with her on that visit. What a strange name to give your dog.
Luz Vallejo looked surprised and then joined me in laughter. “Dumb Russian. He should have known I couldn’t shoot up his hi-fi, much less shoot anything within the city limits unless it was in self-defense.”
“The police, especially since they’re your former colleagues, might accept your right to protect yourself against an opera attack,” I suggested.
She grinned. “So they might, but the DA, so I’ve heard, likes opera. So what do you want to know about the crime scene?” she asked.
“Anything you can tell me. If he simply died from food poisoning, that’s one thing. Wouldn’t that mean those of us who provided food aren’t guilty of a crime? But if someone deliberately killed him while he was sick—well, that’s murder, isn’t it?”
She stretched out long legs and lit a cigarette. “The best thing about being retired,” she commented, “is that you don’t have to be in places where smoking’s prohibited. Want one?” She offered me the pack.
“No, thank you,” I replied politely.
“Hate smokers, right?” She didn’t look as if she cared.
“The only time I smoked a cigarette, I threw up, and I imagine that you don’t like people throwing up on your property,” I answered evasively. I did, in fact, hate the smell of smoke, but I didn’t want to offend her. She struck me as sort of scary, both she and her dog.