Recipe for Homicide, page 4
Within a month he had married Zina—“to keep her from being deported to Spain or Spanish Morocco where she’d be thrown in jail by Franco,” he told himself (and Barbara Wall). “Her father, who was a political prisoner, died in prison.”
Two weeks after their marriage and the day before her visitor’s visa expired, Zina went to Canada to be re-admitted to the United States as the wife of an American citizen.
Gilmore had never seen her again.
He had made two unsuccessful attempts to find her. He went to Montreal one weekend and picked up a trail that seemed to lead to Chicago. He flew to Chicago to see if he could trace her through Bayliss. Bayliss denied, rather unconvincingly, that he knew where she was, except that she had passed through Chicago on her way farther west.
“Forget about her,” Bayliss had said. “You’re well out of it.”
Gilmore thought he had done a good, quick, thorough job of forgetting until Bayliss came along with the news that she was about to barge back into his life again.
Damn Bayliss, he thought, as he got out of the car and went into the house. I’ve enough trouble with Barzac Soup and the Froleys. I’ll keep on forgetting about Zina.
But he dreamed that night that she was married to George Bayliss.
•Cf. “The Phantom Cry-Baby” in Diagnosis: Homicide by Lawrence C. Blochman. Lippincott, 1950.
IV
Day began at the Barzac Soup Kitchens at 6:30 a.m. when the first shift came to work. By midmorning all eight plants, sprawled over five city blocks, swarmed with orderly confusion. Meat and vegetables poured from the receiving platforms to the hungry conveyor belts. An army of women cut, peeled, pared and sorted. Chefs stirred their seventy-gallon blending kettles with huge wooden paddles. Thousands of bright empty cans came cascading down from upper floors, overhead derricks hauled great iron baskets through clouds of fragrant steam, machines whirred and stamped; bright blue cartons of tinned soup rattled gaily from plant to warehouse on conveyor bridges high above the streets, to be rolled into freight cars waiting on a siding—a million cans a day.
In the midst of all this noisy, assembly-line cookery and packaging, however, there was always a moment of calm and quiet self-appraisal every morning at eleven, when the daily tasting session convened. The official tasters assembled around a table in the immaculate whiteness of the Standards Laboratory on the ground floor of Plant No. 1, also called the Main Building, because it harbored the administrative and engineering departments on its upper floors. The tasting session was attended by Barzac’s top brass, sitting in solemn judgment on the previous day’s output, eyeing the color of each soup, savoring the aroma and consistency, comparing each sip against a sip from another batch cooked the same day, against last week’s soup, against last month’s. The consumer must be assured that when he buys Barzac soups (with the bright blue label) he will get uniform goodness.
On the day after the Army sent regrets to Barbara Wall’s field rations première, the usual standard palates were in presence at the tasting session. There was General Manager Eugene Evans, of course, with his nasal tissues pre-shrunk so that he could appreciate the subtlest nuance of flavor. There was Bart Remington, the dynamic new production manager, with his perennial polka-dot bow tie and his sleek blond hair carefully parted in the middle. There was Calvin Quirk, the assistant to Evans, a thin, cadaverous person, to whom tasting seemed not only superfluous but inappropriate; he wore an air of having tasted everything, and, having found nothing any good, retreated to a life of buttermilk and incipient ulcers. There was also the man best qualified to be present: Pierre Lenormand, the head chef who had been with Barzac since its founding—a perpetually complaining Frenchman with a white-haired, pink-faced charm as indestructible as la France éternelle, a superlative craftsman with a cynical attitude toward cooking—even good cooking—by slide rule.
Absent on this particular morning were such titular members of the tasting commission as the chairman of the board, who was present only when his arthritis and dentist’s appointments permitted; and the president and vice presidents who always came when they were not conferring on new bank loans, labor contracts, or plans for expansion and building.
Present on this particular morning were three persons not ordinarily invited to the daily gustatory ritual: Barbara Wall, Robert Gilmore, and Peggy Bayliss. The people whose job it was to make the consumer love Barzac soups above all other soups were not usually encouraged to get in the way of the creative operations or to pry indiscriminately into the serious business of manufacture. Barbara, however, had convinced Mr. Evans that the first official tasting of the new field rations, and their subsequent glamorization for civilian use, must be shared with all America. Even if the rations could not be launched with the splash of champagne and the flash of gold braid, at least Barzac’s concern for the G.I. stomach could be established with homey charm. So Peggy Bayliss had been brought down from her inventive little tower kitchens to attend to the details of glamorization, while Gilmore was summoned to prevent his making mischief elsewhere, since he disapproved of the whole business, and to make small talk with the photographers from two picture agencies.
Peggy, Gilmore noted, was not her usual photogenic self this morning. She seemed more than a trifle hung over. Her dark eyes lacked their customary luster, and she yawned as she investigated the contents of the ration cans.
“Didn’t you get to bed at all last night?” Gilmore whispered.
“Eventually.”
“Alone?”
“Of course,” Peggy said. “If you really must know, I usually snore. Only not last night. I hardly closed my eyes last night. I was scared, I guess. I got quite a shock when I got home. I found I’d had burglars. I almost phoned you to come over and hold my hand, but I took a few quick drinks instead.”
“Did you call the police?”
“No. The burglars didn’t take anything. Just ransacked the place. I must have scared them away when I came in. But it gives you a peculiar feeling, just the same.”
Gilmore, too, had a peculiar feeling as he listened. No wonder George Bayliss was so anxious for Peggy not to know he had been in Northbank last night. It must have been George who ransacked Peggy’s apartment, on the chance that she might have Émile. Gilmore was on the point of telling Peggy the whole story, then decided against it. He would wait, first, to see what sort of story Bayliss would tell Peggy that night.…
“You’re still seeing George tonight?” he asked.
“Far as I know. I haven’t heard any more from him since yesterday.”
“I’ll be standing by,” Gilmore said. “Call me if you need help.”
“I need help right now, to face these photographers. You don’t have an extra face on you, Gil, by any chance? I could use one that was about twenty years younger.”
“You never looked lovelier, Peg. Just watch the birdie.”
Peggy turned out two cans of field rations into a platter, then cut the fragrant brown cylinders into thin slices. She posed for the camera passing the platter to Mr. Evans and Mr. Remington. She posed with Lenormand, discussing the merits and possibilities of his creation. She posed alone, nibbling delightedly on a generous piece. She continued to nibble after the bored photographers had gone away. She had difficulty, however, in getting the upper-echelon tasters to sample the new product. They all seemed too deeply engrossed in their soup routine.
Mr. Evans, for instance, was not quite happy over the tomato soup which he alternately sipped and thoughtfully regarded in the bowl of his spoon. “Color is good,” he admitted, “but I’m not quite sure about the flavor. I wonder if the tomato crop isn’t running a little more acid than usual this year.”
“The lab says not,” Remington reported. “Acidity’s been normal, and the sugar content slightly higher; not enough to affect the basic formula, though.”
“Nothing is wrong with the taste of this tomato soup, I swear it to you,” Lenormand insisted.
“Aren’t you folks going to taste the rations?” Peggy Bayliss asked. “It’s not bad, really.” She bit into another slice. “Maybe it’s because I’m as hungry as a G.I. Maybe it’s because I overslept and missed breakfast this morning. But I really like this stuff. Aren’t you having any, Mr. Evans?”
“No, thank you.” The general manager was still tasting soup.
“What about you, Mr. Remington?”
“I tasted some of the first batches we made last week.” The production manager waved the plate away. “I don’t suppose it’s changed any.”
“Exactly the same,” Lenormand said.
“It has a nice, spicy tang,” Peggy continued. “I taste sage, and thyme. And don’t I taste bay leaf, Chef?”
“In the broth there is bay leaf,” said Lenormand, “the broth which moistens the beef. There is also tomato and onion and other spices.”
“It slices beautifully,” Peggy said.
“That is the binder,” Lenormand explained. “Cereal and dehydrated egg.”
“And monosodium glutamate, no doubt,” Gilmore suggested, winking at Remington while he watched the reaction of the old French chef. Remington returned a questioning stare but said nothing. Lenormand said:
“Of course, monosodium glutamate. We moderns of the machine age must go for our first principles to the Chinese chefs of three thousand years ago.”
“Don’t you want to taste it, Gil?” Peggy held out the plate.
“May as well,” Gilmore said. “This is where I came in.” He speared a piece as large as a hazelnut and chewed it cautiously. His expression changed. “It is delicious,” he admitted. “Congratulations, Chef. This may be our secret weapon. It’s certainly a tremendous advance over the dog-food that saw us through the North African campaign.”
“I’m not so sure I like it as well hot,” Peggy said, forking out a portion from the steaming skillet on the electric plate before her. “Or maybe I’m just losing my appetite.” She ate some more. “What about you, Barbara?”
“Not today,” Barbara replied. “After you’ve glamorized it a little, I’ll try some.” She came over and put her hand on Gilmore’s shoulder. Gilmore did his best to keep a poker face. How long, good Lord, before he could get this woman out of his system? How long until her mere physical proximity could no longer disrupt his ganglia, liquefy his knees, and send waves of alternate heat and cold crawling over his skin? “Gil, you did tell Peggy what I had in mind, didn’t you?”
Before Gilmore could reply, Peggy Bayliss said: “Gil doesn’t have to tell me what you have in mind, Barbara.” Her voice was pure glacial acetic acid. “In fact, I think I know what’s on your mind a lot better than Gil does.”
“You can dress up the rations a little, can’t you, Peggy?” said Barbara, ignoring the interpolation with perfect poise. “I mean, you can invent some sort of dish with Barzac’s tomato soup as a sauce? Or perhaps our mushroom bisque and a little grated cheese?”
Peggy scanned Gilmore’s impassive face for a long moment. When she turned again to Barbara, her tone was completely impersonal.
“I’ll give it a whirl,” Peggy said, reaching for another mouthful. “It could stand a can of something and a soupçon of imagination. Send a case upstairs and I’ll get at it this afternoon.”
But Peggy Bayliss didn’t get around to her experimental cooking that afternoon. Feeling slightly replete with her repeated servings of field rations, she postponed going to lunch and instead wrote a letter to a food editor in Kansas City to whom she had given a recipe for asparagus ring in exclusivity for six months, but who, according to her clipping service, had not yet printed it. When she finished the letter, she noted that the feeling of repletion was developing into one of nausea, so she went to the plant infirmary to lie down.
When her nausea became active, the plant physician felt her pulse and asked a series of intimate questions obviously pointing to a possible diagnosis of morning sickness. Her replies, however, were emphatically negative, so he gave her a sedative and some bismuth and soda and sent her home for the day.
By midaftemoon she had developed a raging thirst, a burning stomach ache, a sore throat, and cramps in the calves of her legs. Unable to reach her own physician at the first try, and unable to stay long at the telephone between spasms of nausea, she called Bob Gilmore who got a doctor for her.
At eight o’clock that evening she was taken to Pasteur Hospital in a state of profound shock.
V
Bayliss had called his ex-wife’s apartment shortly before eight o’clock to say that he had just got off his plane and would be a little delayed in picking up Peggy.
Gilmore answered the phone and said: “Look, Bayliss, Peggy won’t be having dinner with you. She’s in agony. I don’t know what’s wrong, but she’s in a bad way. We’re waiting for an ambulance now. You’d better go right over to Pasteur Hospital.”
It was nearly ten-thirty before Bayliss reached the hospital. They wouldn’t let him see Peggy, so he joined Gilmore in the waiting room. The two men greeted each other solemnly, but neither said very much. There was plenty that Gilmore wanted to say. He wanted to talk about the ransacking of Peggy’s apartment the night before. He wanted to comment on the length of time it had taken Bayliss to get from the airport to the hospital. He was curious, too, about Zina and the search for Émile. But none of it seemed important when the sands were running out.…
At quarter to eleven an intern came in with the bad news. He mumbled an embarrassed expression of sympathy and said something about tough breaks. Then he produced a blue paper and went on mumbling. Gilmore caught the phrases “next of kin … post-mortem … rotten time to be intruding … think it over … tomorrow …”
Gilmore took the paper and the intern retired eagerly.
Bayliss stared dumbly in white-lipped silence. He was green about the gills and he seemed to have trouble getting out of his wicker chair.
“Peggy doesn’t—didn’t—have any family did she?” Gilmore asked.
Bayliss shook his head.
“Then I guess you ought to sign this,” Gilmore said, offering his fountain pen, “as the ex-next-of-kin.”
Bayliss’s hand trembled as he signed. He scarcely glanced at the paper. He said: “I … this thing has hit me pretty hard. I’m afraid I’m going to … Is there a men’s room around here?”
“Around to the right, halfway down the hall.”
Bayliss left on the run.
When he didn’t return after ten minutes, Gilmore went after him. He was not greatly surprised to find nobody in the men’s room.
Gilmore walked out of Pasteur Hospital like an automaton. He did not know exactly where his numbed legs were taking him, but he knew it was somewhere important, somewhere urgent. His thoughts were still floundering in an unfamiliar sense of confused emptiness. He could somehow not orient himself in the present. There was no present—only an overlapping past and future, a great, dazed weariness that dragged him back and a sense of impending catastrophe that urged him on. Somewhere on the other side of Northbank a clock struck eleven, and the repetition of the deep, metallic notes, muted by the warm, rainy night, restored his sense of time and space. He knew what he had to do, and he knew where he was going—in a hurry.
He found his car and started across town by the back streets where no traffic lights would stem his rush for the Barzac cannery. As he approached the plant, he began to run into traffic. The night shift was coming off, and the maintenance crews would be coming on. Plants 4 and 5 would also be working a third shift—two buildings that worked only two months in the year when the tomatoes were ripe. Every window in the Main Building was ablaze with light as Gilmore pulled up in the no-parking space in front of the entrance. He left his engine running and bounded up the steps.
In the lobby Kenneth Kavlik, Chief of the Guard Force, was passing the time of night with the guard who was checking the badges and passes of the night workers.
“Has Mr. Evans gone home, Captain?” Gilmore asked.
“Nope. Mr. Evans left about an hour ago,” Kavlik said. “He didn’t say where he was going, but I’ll lay odds it wasn’t home. He was all decked out in his best bib and tucker. Bound for the Country Club to pick up his wife, is my guess. There’s a big shindig out there tonight.”
“Thanks, Captain.”
“Goodnight, Mr. Gilmore.”
It was only ten minutes to the Country Club by the most direct route, but that road would probably be clogged already by trucks loaded with tomatoes, queuing up for the grading platforms, their drivers asleep in their cabs. The roundabout road took him a quarter of an hour, his headlights boring through the rain, his tires singing on the wet pavement.…
“Leave your key in the ignition, please, sir. I’ll park your car.” The doorman had come running out from the porte-cochère in glistening yellow slicker, carrying an open blue umbrella.
Gilmore cranked down the window. “I’m just stepping in for a word with Mr. Evans—Mr. Eugene Evans.”
“I’m sorry, sir.” The doorman closed the umbrella. “I’m afraid you can’t go in like this. Not with a sports jacket and no necktie, sir. It’s black tie tonight, sir.”
“Then will you run in and tell Mr. Evans that Gilmore must see him—urgently.”
“Well, I don’t know, sir. You see—” The doorman let one hand repose nonchalantly on the sill of the car window, palm upturned.
“Tell him it’s a matter of life and death.” Gilmore reached into his pocket and emptied a handful of loose change into the upturned palm.
“Very well, sir. I’ll try to find Mr. Evans.”
The doorman disappeared. Music seeped from the clubhouse to make a vibrant background for the thwack-thwack of the windshield wiper. It was expensive, heavily orchestrated music, with lush strings pretentiously draped, à la Kostelanetz, on a meagre, imitative, melodic frame. The music sighed to a stop, and a tattoo of hand-clapping fluttered out into the night. Couples strolling out to the dimly lighted covered-veranda beyond the porte-cochère made a kaleidoscope of color as the women passed through the lighted doorway, a rippling gleam of neckline, miraculously suspended between red, laughing lips and the sheen of satin or a pastel cloud of organdy, a white hand clinging to the somber sleeve of a dinner jacket, flashing briefly before disappearing into the darkness of the veranda, to become a tinkling laugh and a glowing cigarette end. It was all very young and gay and alive—incongruously gay and alive, Gilmore thought. It couldn’t be real. Only the thwack-thwack of the windshield wiper was real.…
