Recipe for Homicide, page 11
“You mean the F.B.I. had his prints on file?”
Ritter nodded. “No criminal record. He was printed when he went to work for some aircraft factory in 1944. Gilmore, do you know anybody named Christopher Froley?”
“Chris Froley?” Gilmore’s mouth remained open for a few seconds in incredulous surprise. “Of course I know Froley. He’s third-floor shop steward at our No. 1 Plant.”
“That’s where the Army rations were being canned, isn’t it?” Dr. Coffee asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, Froley left his prints on your radiator,” Ritter said. “You sure he still works for Barzac?”
“Positive. Any reason why he shouldn’t be?”
“Funny thing about Froley,” Ritter said. “I was just talking to your plant manager—what’s his name?”
“Evans. Eugene Evans.”
“That’s right, Evans. Well, Evans says he wrote to the F.B.I. about ten days, two weeks ago. Says he wanted a check on a report that Froley was a Commie. Well, maybe he did and maybe not. Only the F.B.I. got no record of the letter.”
“But they do have a record of Froley’s Communist connections?”
“Sure, that they got. Froley was a card-carrying Commie as late as last year. He—What the hell you laughing at, Gilmore?”
The strange sounds being emitted by Gilmore could perhaps be technically classified as laughter, but there was no mirth in them. There was no mirth in Gilmore either, as he realized bitterly that Froley’s prints on his car might have nothing to do with the death of Peggy Bayliss or a plot to poison a dozen American regiments.
“It just occurred to me,” Gilmore said, “that Chris Froley might have wanted to blow me to pieces for purely personal reasons. He vaguely threatened to kill me the other night.”
“Kill you?” Ritter echoed. “What for?”
“He thought I was playing around with his wife.”
“Well, well!” Ritter made resonant, deprecatory lip noises. “And were you?”
“No, you cad. And you know damned well that even if I were, I’d deny it.”
“So you don’t think Froley’s being a Commie has anything to do with guys calling you up at night and plopping you in the eye?” Ritter clucked some more. “You think it’s just he’s trying to save his wife from worse than death by scaring the pants off you?”
“Well, I’m not sure.” Gilmore hesitated. He wondered just how much he should tell about Émile and Zina and Bayliss at this point. He’d know in a little while about Émile.… “There’s also that warning from Bayliss.”
“Yeah, you told me.” Ritter’s lips stopped clucking and widened into a big red-and-white grin. He tossed a bunch of keys across the desk.
“Okay,” he said. “Your car is down front—in the ‘Doctors Only’ parking space to the left. Have fun while it lasts. The F.B.I. will probably be moving in on you any minute now.”
XIV
Emerging from the hospital, Gilmore thought he recognized his car at the spot indicated by Ritter. He was not quite sure, however. Someone was sitting in the front seat.
A stab of apprehension sent him hurrying toward the parking space. As he approached, he verified his ownership of the car. He also identified the person in the front seat. His apprehension was not diminished by his recognition of Frances Froley.
Frances was wearing dark green slacks and sweater, and a vivid green scarf—not precisely the most comfortable costume for a hot summer evening, Gilmore mused, but certainly an arresting one. She was highly photogenic in a sweater—much more so than in the blue blouse of Barzac’s carrot line—even if her bangs did cling damply to her forehead in a dark arabesque. She had snuggled down cosily in the car, prepared for a long wait. She drew deep, contented draughts from a cigarette, and the deep green billows of her sweater responded magnificently to the slow rhythm of her lungs.
“What are you doing here, Mrs. Froley?” Gilmore asked sharply.
“Oh, hello.” The girl’s long dark eyelashes gave a provocative flutter. “I tried to reach you at your office, but your secretary said you were at Pasteur Hospital. So I came on over. And I recognized your car, of course.”
“Of course,” Gilmore echoed. It seemed to be a family trait of the Froleys. “What can I do for you, Mrs. Froley?”
“Don’t call me Mrs. Froley. Please. On you it’s not becoming.”
“All right, Mrs. Froley. I’ll call you Frances.”
“Everybody I like calls me Frankie.” The eyelashes worked overtime to remove any possible misunderstanding as to Frankie’s likes and dislikes.
“I’ll bet,” Gilmore said warily. He opened the door, and found himself admiring the scenery, despite Max Ritter’s disclosure that Frankie’s husband might be given to homicidal whimseys. He slid under the wheel. “What do you want, Frankie?”
“I had to see you, Gil. Can’t we go somewhere and talk?”
“Not now. I’m due elsewhere. Overdue, in fact.”
“But it’s important, Gil.” Her fingers closed on Gilmore’s arm with unmistakable urgency. “Can’t we go some place where we can just have a quiet drink and talk?”
“Nope,” said Gilmore. “I’ve got a date.”
“Later then? I want to tell you something.”
“Out, Frankie.” Gilmore stepped on the starter. He held his breath until the preliminary whirr brought a deeper purring from the motor. He reached across the girl’s knees to open the opposite door.
“Don’t you like me any more, Gil?”
“I’m mad about you, Frankie. I’m just not free tonight.”
Frankie stepped from the car but she held the door open. “I’ll be at the Anchor Bar on River Street at ten o’clock tonight,” she said. “See you then.”
Gilmore smiled, shook his head, and put the car in gear. Frankie smiled, too, and the expression of her warm brown eyes changed almost imperceptibly. They still glowed, but they were no longer warm; the glow was more like the warning incandescence of molten metal.
“You better be there,” she said, “if you want to know what happened to George Bayliss.” She slammed the door.
This time it was Gilmore’s expression that changed. Frankie Froley obviously noted it. As he drove off, she waved to him, smiling confidently.
“Don’t forget,” she called. “Ten o’clock. The Anchor. On River Street.”
Gilmore did not look back, but he knew she was still smiling confidently.
XV
Gilmore had never been inside Barbara’s apartment in Northbank, but he knew in advance that it would be pretty much a replica of the one he used to haunt in Manhattan, when their employer-employee relationship had been reversed. It would be in an imposing building with an expensive address and an impressive doorman. And it would be small; Barbara valued a good address above lebensraum, and her means were far from unlimited; a lioness’s share of her salary had always been earmarked for clothes—and for shoes, dozens of shoes. Barbara had a passion for shoes. At this very moment she was probably surveying the racks in her closet, trying to decide if she should wear her needle heels or her Cuban heels, weighing open toes against a two-toned suède sports job, Greek sandals against something French and sophisticated. This would probably go on, Cilmore anticipated, long after the colored maid would have opened the door for him, perhaps for at least twenty minutes while he sat with moderate discomfort on a coldly modern chair, his green florist’s box on his knees, staring first at a Grant Wood (in reproduction, of course) on one wall, or at a Matisse or a Gauguin on the other.
At last Barbara would make a breathless entrance, trailing wisps of chiffon and $50-an-ounce fragrance which marked her transformation from career girl to woman of the world. Then the maid would serve a chain-store version of Javanese kroepoek and indifferent bottled martinis—Barbara took great pride in her inability to mix a cocktail—while they argued about where they would dine. This routine, too, would be the same: Gilmore would suggest five or six restaurants specializing in food rather than glamor. Barbara would object to them all. There was no air-conditioning or too much garlic in everything, or the waiters were rude, or there were wine stains on the checkered tablecloths. They would compromise on some place of her choicesome noisy, rococo dungeon with a name band, just enough light for the maître d’hôtel to recognize the denomination of large banknotes and for distinguished guests to admire each other’s jewelry—a high-class clip joint where leathery flounder passed for sole at four dollars a filet.
Ever since he had decided, that afternoon, to turn the clock back and stop pretending he had never been in love with Barbara, Gilmore had been looking forward to a revival of the old routine. Even the apparition of Frankie Froley, with her cryptic reference to George Bayliss—a reminder to Gilmore that he was still living on the fringes of a nightmare—could not dull his pleasurable anticipation. After leaving Frankie, he had indulged himself in an unaccustomed caprice of boyish sentimentality. He had stopped at a florist’s shop for a corsage of gardenias.
To the old routine, however, something new had been added. The address, the façade, and the doorman of Barbara’s apartment house were properly impressive, but when he reached her floor and rang the bell, he noted the door stood ajar. Barbara’s voice, muted by several doors, called: “Come in, Gil.”
Maid’s night out, Gil mused. Then he sniffed at the pleasant aroma of browning onions, and a puzzled trident formed on his forehead. The trident deepened when Barbara came through a swinging door, dabbing at her face with the lace hem of an apron and leaving a smudge of flour on the tip of her nose. Gilmore was so surprised that he almost forgot the question uppermost in his mind—almost, if not quite. But Émile took second place while he extended the green box and said: “Hi. Here’s something for the kiddies.”
Barbara managed to close the door and open the green box with one continuous motion. “Gil, you darling!” she squealed. “Gardenias. You brought me gardenias on our first date in New York. Remember?”
“I remember,” Gilmore said. “That was the first time I kissed you.”
Gilmore remembered, too, that it had been a shy, tentative brushing of lips that by its innate warmth and molecular sympathy had quickly blazed into a threatening conflagration. Shyly, tentatively, he refreshed his memory. The warmth, the molecular affinity had not changed. In fact, there seemed imminent danger of a possible chain reaction when Barbara broke off contact and rushed for the kitchenette, trailing a disconnected and unpunctuated verbal slip-stream:
“Good Lord, I’ve got something on the stove. … I hope it isn’t burned.… You don’t mind eating here, do you, Gil? … I thought it would be better, the day of Peggy’s funeral.… Come on in and talk to me if you want. … Or better yet, mix us a daiquiri.… You’ll find the rum in the closet.… I’ve already squeezed the limes.… The ice is under the—”
“Barbara! Please! Take a deep breath or you’ll suffocate,” Gilmore interrupted. “And better give me a chance to get my breath. You’ve changed so, Barbara, since I kissed you last.”
“No, I haven’t, Gil. Not a bit.”
“But you’re cooking dinner. When I knew you in New York, you took great pride in not knowing a thing about cooking, and you swore on a stack of cookbooks you’d never learn.”
Barbara stopped short, turned in her tracks, and transferred the flour smudge from her nose to Gilmore’s left cheek.
“That,” she said, “was an awful fib. I’ve told you so many, you really don’t know very much about me. But now that you’ve stopped pretending yourself, I’ve decided to tell all, come what may. I—Good grief, it is burning!”
Barbara resumed her rush for the kitchenette. There followed a banging of oven doors, the clang of pans and the brittle click of dish on dish, the raucous scrape of spoon on pot-bottoms, and the tap-wide gush of water. From somewhere within a cloud of steam Barbara’s voice was saying: “Daiquiris, Gil. Remember? Rum … in the closet. Limes …”
Gilmore took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and got to work. First he transferred the gardenias from the top of the television set to the icebox, taking out the ice cubes on the return trip. He found the rum and the squeezed lime juice, but a stillhunt for the sugar took him three minutes. Another three minutes—plus a shower of impatient invective and a narrow escape from being scalded to death in the narrow kitchenette—got him a dish towel and a potato masher, necessary ingredients for cracking the ice. Dropping the grenadine into the wastebasket took no time at all. (Who the dickens had told Barbara that grenadine went into daiquiris?) All other ingredients and utensils were ready at hand, and the timing was perfect. By the time Barbara re-emerged, without apron, with every honey-colored hair back in place, and nose freshly powdered, the green-gold cocktails were just beginning to frost the glasses.
“Gil,” she said, “I’ve had to switch menus. An emergency. I wanted to show off, but—I hope you like spaghetti.”
“Love it,” said Gilmore, “if—and you must excuse the expression—it isn’t from the can. I’m not belittling our alma mater, please understand. It just happens that I like it the way the Italians eat it. I like it—”
“Al dente,” Barbara said. “Me too. We’ll eat it that way. It doesn’t take so long, either.”
“But you’ll have to watch it and bite it occasionally,” Gilmore said. “Six and a half minutes. So you can only have one drink first.”
Barbara held out her hand. “What shall we drink to? Peggy’s memory?”
Gilmore shrugged. Barbara was watching him closely over the rim of her glass. She went on:
“Or to crime—and punishment? Or without punishment?”
“To the spaghetti,” Gilmore said. “Down the hatch.”
A look of comic dismay—perhaps it wasn’t comic—spread over Barbara’s face as she watched Gilmore’s cocktail disappear without an intervening swallow. “I was hoping,” she said, “that you’d propose a toast to reunion in Northbank.”
“That’s for the next one,” Gilmore said, reaching for the shaker. “What about Émile?"
“Gil, it’s gone.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“I should have told you when you came in. I just didn’t want to spoil the mood, but I guess it had to be spoiled sooner or later. Does it mean trouble?”
“I don’t know yet.” Gilmore poured the daiquiris. “Did you call the police?”
“What was the use? I didn’t know anything was taken until just a few hours ago.”
“I thought you’d be interested in how the burglars got in, for your own protection.”
“Oh, that was simple. It was a celluloid job, Bart Remington says. Bart says anybody can open most spring locks with a sheet of metal or some stiff plastic.”
“So you told Remington?”
“Bart was bringing me home when I found out about it. The door was open.”
Gilmore raised his glass. “Let’s have another,” he said.
They had two more without adverse effect on the dinner. The spaghetti came to table presenting just the proper degree of firmness to the teeth, the sauce presenting a surprising spiciness to the palate. Barbara’s former aversion to garlic seemed to have disappeared; there was even a soupçon in the salad dressing. All in all, the meal was so satisfying, so unlike the Barbara he had known, that Gilmore was not even curious about the original plat de résistance that had gone up in smoke and charcoal. He did remain curious about other things, however. It may have been the three daiquiris, but something was bringing most of his suspicions back to life. If it wasn’t the cocktails—or the heat of August—it was the nervous way Barbara was handling her salad fork, the self-conscious gaiety of her laugh, or the stiffness of her poise on the edge of one of the folding chairs she had set up with the card table to convert the living room into a dining room.
“Tell me,” Gilmore said, putting down his napkin, “why you invented those awful fibs about your culinary ignorance. Or have you changed your mind?”
“I haven’t changed my mind, Gil. I’ll give you a fib-by-fib breakdown. Shall we have a brandy first—to stimulate my conscience? Or is it too hot for brandy?”
Gilmore thought it was never too hot for brandy as long as it was good brandy. And he was pleased to note that Barbara had inexplicably developed an improved taste in brandy; perhaps just improved knowledge, he decided, after watching her gulp down two ounces of twenty-year-old cognac that could profitably have been sipped for at least twenty minutes.
“Let’s review the fibbing,” Barbara refilled her brandy glass. “Do you remember the sort of person I’ve always pretended to be?”
Gilmore remembered very well. He reconstructed the picture she had once painted of herself. Daughter of a rich family, brought up by servants and tutors, bred to the idea that cooking and teaching were inferior trades to be practised exclusively by the less fortunate members of a caste-divided society—a philosophy reinforced by three years at Sweet Willow College, with summers in Europe, of course. She had been forced to leave college in her senior year when, her father lost all his money—through misplaced confidence in a swindling partner—and shot himself, unselfishly to provide for his family through whatever insurance had not been mortgaged. Her mother, however, had used the insurance money to pay off the late Mr. Wall’s debts, and had died of shame within the year. Barbara had consequently been forced to go to work, but had been true to her heritage in choosing a genteel profession.
“A very moving story,” Gilmore concluded.
“I thought so, too,” Barbara said. “I was very proud of it. But of course it’s not true.”
The true story? Barbara’s father had been neither rich nor a suicide. He was dead; that much was correct; but not entirely by his own hand. He had died of acute alcoholism in a state hospital in the Middle West somewhere. It was also correct that she had, in her early youth, been inculcated with the idea that cooking was a drab, inferior trade, but the idea grew out of her own experience. She had spent most of her teens cooking for a drunken father and seven brothers and sisters while her mother was out earning a living for the family.
