Recipe for Homicide, page 6
He snapped off his lights. He opened his glove compartment and fumbled inside for several seconds. He had not carried a gun in his glove compartment since his return to Northbank, but just in case the fact was not generally known, he closed the compartment with a loud clang. Then, cautiously, he got out of the car.
He had taken only three steps when a stone wall moved out of the darkness to collide with him. The sheet lightning was very bright, a passing express train roared in his ears, and the ground trembled. He reached out, grabbed a handful of fabric that might have been a sleeve or a coat-tail. Then his knees buckled and he let go.
The soft, moist ground rose up to meet him, and he steadied himself with one knee and both hands. He felt a rush of air as his assailant tore from his grasp, but he was too busy keeping the ground from hitting him in the face to do anything else. He got up on the count of six without having blacked out, and felt rather proud of himself. He found he could walk fairly straight and went as far as the sidewalk to reconnoiter. There was no one in sight.
He put up his car and entered the house with unsteady steps.
The door to his mother’s room was open and the light was burning. He put his head in and said: “Victoria, have you given up sleeping entirely?”
“Your women!” his mother said. “They’ve been calling up again. Twice. Just a little while ago.”
“I’ll have the phone disconnected,” Gilmore said. “They can’t do this to you, Victoria.”
“A man called up, too,” Mrs. Gilmore said. “He didn’t leave his name, but he left a message. He said to remind you that curiosity killed a cat.”
“If he calls back,” Gilmore said, “you can tell him that tomcats have nine lives.”
“He mentioned that, too. He said to tell you it wasn’t so.”
“I apologize for my friends, Victoria. They’re all cards. Anything for a gag.”
“You were staggering a little when you came in, Bob. Are you tight?”
“I had a few drinks,” Gilmore lied. He walked to the blind woman’s bedside. “Goodnight, Victoria,” he said.
His mother groped for his hand, and kissed it. “You smell of camphor,” she said. “Did you hurt yourself?”
“It’s the drinks,” Gilmore said. “Formosa cocktails. Everybody’s drinking them these days. One part vodka, one part saké, one part Chinese rice brandy, and one part Formosan camphor. It has more kick than a Senate investigation.”
“Your father used to say that most of the world’s camphor came from Formosa, but I don’t remember he ever put it into cocktails.”
“Father was a wise man. They’re awful.”
“Goodnight, son.”
When Gilmore opened the door of his own room, he swore aloud. A cyclone seemed to have dropped in during his absence. His books had been pulled from the shelves, the drawers emptied, the bed torn apart, the closet door open and his clothes on the floor. The curtain flapped at the open window.
Was this the explanation of Bayliss’s delay in getting to the hospital? At any rate, the intruder had not found Émile. The book, as far as Gilmore knew, was still in Barbara Wall’s unknowing custody.…
Gilmore restored a semblance of order to his room, untangled his blankets and sheets, and went to bed. He got up several times to put ice on the burning lump that was swelling to alarming proportions under his left eye. He did not sleep much.
VII
At seven o’clock next morning Dr. Coffee walked into his laboratory in the surgical wing of Pasteur Hospital, took off his coat, and slipped into a white jacket.
“Hello, Doris,” he said to the slim, dark-haired girl sitting on a stool at the microtome, shaving paper-thin sections from a paraffin block. “What brings you in so early?”
“Dr. Andrews phoned last night after you’d gone home to say he had a mastectomy in B-6 this morning at eight. He wanted to know if you’d be on hand for a frozen section,” said Doris Hudson, the pathologist’s chief technician. “I told him you were usually here by eight-thirty. Then I heard you had a P.M. this morning, so I thought I’d better come in early in case you needed me.”
“Good girl, Doris. Have you got the protocol on the autopsy?”
Doris handed the pathologist a sheaf of multi-colored papers. “Margaret Bayliss,” she said. “Dr. Mookerji is already downstairs. He took down the jars and things.”
“I’ll be back before Dr. Andrews needs me,” Dr. Coffee said.
He rode the elevator to the basement and walked along the corridor to the little white-tiled, brightly lighted room where the lonely dead lay patiently on stainless-steel tables, waiting in naked humility to give up their secrets for science or for justice.
Dr. Motilal Mookerji, Pasteur’s resident in pathology, was busily making preparations for the necropsy. Dr. Mookerji was a round, brown Hindu the top of whose pink turban barely reached Dan Coffee’s shoulders. He had originally come to Northbank on a scholarship from Calcutta Medical School. The scholarship had since expired, but the Hindu pathologist had stayed on at Pasteur at the meagre stipend of a resident because he felt he still had much to learn from the laboratory of Dr. Coffee, from American hospital procedure, and from America, period. He was in a continuous stew over the American language, which he seasoned with a highly spiced chichi accent and amazing sprigs of Anglo-Indian circumlocution.
“Salaam, Doctor Sahib. Five times greetings,” said Dr. Mookerji, as he set out the instruments of impersonal dissection. “What are you prognosticating as cause of decease to be presently revealed?”
“The death certificate says ‘Probable ruptured viscus,’” Dr. Coffee said.
“And you are in agreement with same?”
“Dr. Mookerji, ‘autopsy’ means literally ‘seeing with one’s own eyes.’ Shall we be literal?”
The Hindu wagged his big head twice to the left. “Quite, Doctor Sahib,” he said.
Dr. Coffee stretched out his hand for the instruments.
At seven forty-five o’clock Robert Gilmore stepped into the elevator in the lobby of the Main Building of the Barzac plant.
“You’re early this morning, Mr. Gilmore,” the operator said. “I never seen you here before eight-thirty, even in tomato time.”
“It’s too hot to sleep,” Gilmore said.
The car hardened into swift ascent, then melted to a stop.
“Eighth floor, Mr. Gilmore. Ain’t you gettin’ off?”
“Take me up to the tower floor, Joe.”
Gilmore walked to the door of Peggy Bayliss’s office and stopped. The Home Economics Department would be empty at this hour, he knew. The two buxom white-haired matrons who translated Peggy’s recipes into crusts and casseroles and quivering aspics were not due for another hour. The door was open, yet some intangible bar kept him from crossing the threshold. He shook his head, as though reproving himself for being a silly sentimentalist, then strode boldly to Peggy’s desk.
He lowered himself into the chair, gently, because he felt he was displacing a spectre. Peggy’s vivid personality was still all over the place. The letter she had written the day before to the Kansas City food editor lay on her desk, unsigned. The pen with which she would have signed it now stood useless forever in the onyx desk set. Nobody else would entrust an official signature to purple ink, or keep another pen filled with green ink for inter-office memos. The recipe files which she had been consulting were spread fanwise beside the letter, with the colored tabs on each card to indicate whether or not the recipe was exclusive and for how long. A single rose lifted a tired head from a crystal tube, its crimson petals wide in fullblown protest against the heat of summer. The desk calendar pad said: “Check Belgian ale soup recipes for Brewer’s Journal.… Try building mulligatawny around Barz. chicken soup for Joe D., doing East Indian food piece for Colliers.… Dinner with Gil?” Why had she put a question mark after the last entry? Gilmore leafed through a few other pages of appointments which would never be kept. He pulled open a desk drawer, poignant with intimate trivia—a powder-smudged mirror, tissues, a comb, aspirin tablets, soda mints, nail polish, and a crumpled handkerchief that emanated a faint musky fragrance that was Peggy’s aura. Gilmore pushed the drawer shut with a bang, as though to close his mind to the poignancy of the perfume.
The brusque movement jarred the desk, and the full-blown rose disintegrated completely, flinging down its crimson petals with the suddenness of death.
Gilmore sprang up, moved quickly to the corner of the room to throw open the two windows, to let in the breath of summer, the smells of morning, the scent of the living. He filled his lungs with the warmth of the city, tempered by the breeze from the river. It was a steamy warmth, redolent with the clean, pungent aroma of tomatoes. They were there before him, the tomatoes—millions of them. As far as he could see, the two roads approaching the Barzac plant from the north were clogged with farmers’ trucks, piled high with scarlet fruit, great sluggish red streams that crawled for miles toward the grading platforms, the conveyor belts, the hungry soup kettles. The Interstate Bridge across the river was also scarlet with tomato trucks, stalled bumper to bumper, waiting their turn to unload. And tomato-laden barges were nudging the landing stages on the riverfront just below the plant. To the production people, it would be another fifty thousand tons of love-apples to be sorted, cleaned, pulped, strained, seasoned and cooked. To Gilmore, the gleam of ripe color and the fresh, earthy tang of the harvest, cool on the shimmering heat of morning, were a recall to the present, to reality, and to duty. He was still working for Barzac and the trickiest job of his public relations career lay just ahead.
“Gil!” said a voice behind him. “I knew I’d find you here.”
“Hello, Barbara,” Gilmore said, without turning around. “Fall out of bed?”
“Gil, I’ve heard the news. I phoned the hospital last night and they told me about Peggy. I was shocked. It’s dreadful.”
“Isn’t it?” Gilmore said. He turned around at last. Barbara was as cool and crisp and radiant as usual. He knew she would be, even though he could not know that her crispness would be in pale blue linen this morning. Every strand of her honeycolored hair was in place and every dimple freshly powdered. Her amber eyes, all of her, radiated youth and life and energy. It was positively indecent for anyone to look, let alone feel, quite so alive and perfect. He knew that he, for instance, probably looked as though he’d slept in his clothes which was not true, because he hadn’t slept more than an hour all told. It showed, too, because a look of concern crept into Barbara’s face. Barbara herself immediately cleared up the source of concern.
“Good lord, Gil, what happened to your eye?”
“I ran into a boor in the dark,” Gilmore said. He had rehearsed the line for several hours during the night.
“Were you out with the Carrot Queen again?”
“No, of course not.”
“Did you meet Chris Froley?”
“Not that I know of.”
“You shouldn’t be up here,” Barbara said. “You shouldn’t stay in this office. It’s not good for you.”
“I’ve got to stay here until it’s finished,” Gilmore said.
“Until what’s finished, Gil?”
“Over at the hospital. They’re taking Peggy apart to find out what happened.”
“I’m sorry, Gil. I know how you must feel. I heard you talked Mr. Evans into it. Why didn’t you call me?”
“What for? This isn’t promotion. This is counter-promotion. Suppression, in a way. Public relations. It’s my job.”
“I tried to call you last night. You weren’t home.”
“I know. I got home late. Who told you about all this?”
“Mr. Evans,” Barbara said.
“Of course. You were at the Country Club—with Remington. I thought Evans wanted to keep everything top secret.”
“Not from me, surely. And certainly not from Bart Remington.”
“That’s right. You were the one who thought up the idea of having Peggy glamorize the rations. By the way, does Remington think Peggy was poisoned?”
“Poisoned? But Mr. Evans didn’t say—”
Barbara was interrupted by the appearance in the doorway of the pink-and-white countenance of Pierre Lenormand. The master chef’s Development Kitchens shared the tower floor with the Home Economics Kitchens. His headquarters, just across the hall from the domain of the late Peggy Bayliss, were manned not by buxom matrons but by lean, grizzled French professional cooks, whose duty was not to invent new uses for Barzac soups, but to create new soups or to improve the old ones.
“Good morning, good people.” A half inch of handmade cigarette adhered to the chefs lower lip as he spoke. “I have heard the bad news. I offer you my condolences, Gilmore.”
“Not to me, Chef,” Gilmore said. “To the Barzac Soup Company. Barzac is going to miss Peggy.”
“You are right,” Lenormand nodded. He plucked the diminishing end of his cigarette from between his lips, risked burning his fingers to examine it, decided its possibilities were exhausted, and flicked it through the open window. “I agree completely. Mademoiselle Peggy did not invent saloperies which nobody ever tasted. She did not write recipes for the printer only; she invented for the dinner table. She did not believe that oranges or pears should be served with mayonnaise and chopped nuts and whipped cream and sardine tails.” The chef produced a tobacco pouch and a book of cigarette papers. With his thumb and two yellowed fingers he made a trough of the brown paper and poured tobacco into it. His tongue moistened the edge of the paper. His right hand rolled and twisted the ends of the cigarette while his left replaced his pouch. “She was a professional,” he continued. “She was a real confrère. She believed in the basic culinary truths discovered by the Old Masters. She believed in the dignity of the human palate. I salute her memory.” Lenormand’s left hand had re-emerged from his pocket, hauling forth a briquet which he disentangled from its long tail of yellow tinder-rope. He worried the ratchet wheel and blew on the tinder-rope end until it glowed. He looked at Gilmore as he drew deeply on his fresh cigarette. “She was also very lovely,” he added. “Who gave you the black eye, Gilmore?”
“Nobody. It’s psychosomatic,” Gilmore said. “Peggy’s going to be hard to replace.”
“I was thinking this morning while I was watering my chervil before the sun got too hot,” Lenormand said, regarding his cigarette critically, “that perhaps my daughter Yvette would be a likely candidate. She was not born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but you might say she was born with an iron skillet in one hand and a copper saucepan in the other. She was born in the tradition. She is very young, true. She has just only finished college last spring. And she is now in France, making a visit to her aged grandparents, so I do not know even if she would be interested in such a thing. Of course, if my poor wife were still alive she would throw up her hands in horror. She had always intended that Yvette should go back to France with us when I retire. I am to be pensioned in two years, you know. Some time ago I bought a small mas in the south of France—a small little house with a few olives, a few grapes for wine, and a few orange trees—a hillside looking out over the Mediterranean, and a place to raise a few ducks and rabbits. My poor wife thought that Yvette should go back with us and marry a Frenchman. But Yvette, I think, is more American than French. I am afraid she may prefer Barzac-in-Northbank to Tourette-sur-Loup. I think—”
The telephone rang. Gilmore let it ring three times before he picked it up. He was on the point of replying “Miss Bayliss’s office.” But he merely said, “Yes?”
Then he said, “No … No.… Have you tried him at home? … Just a moment.” He turned to Barbara. “The operator is trying to locate Mr. Evans,” he said. “She can’t find him. And neither Quirk or Remington have come in yet.”
“Mr. Evans had to leave town unexpectedly,” Barbara said.
“Good God!” Gilmore said. “Why—today of all days?”
“It was important, I guess,” Barbara said. “He took the sixthirty plane for Chicago this morning.”
So that’s why you’re up so early, Gilmore thought. You probably took him to the airport.
“Who’s calling Mr. Evans?” Gilmore asked the phone. “Dr. Coffee? Put him on, please.”
At eight-fifteen Dr. Coffee and his Hindu resident returned to the surgical floor carrying two Mason jars each. As they entered the pathology laboratory, Doris Hudson said:
“A messenger just came in with six cans of something from the Barzac Soup Company. What do you want done with them, Doctor?”
“Number the cans,” the pathologist said, “and send a sample from each to bacteriology. They’ll want to make a saline emulsion, to be heated for an hour at sixty degrees Centigrade. I’ll see about the incubation later.”
“What are we looking for, Doctor?”
“Frankly, I don’t know. There didn’t seem to be any characteristic lesions of botulism, but we’ve got to be sure. Meanwhile I want you to set up a Reinsch test on samples from each of those cans. And be sure to run controls on the acid and distilled water. Have we got enough copper foil?”
“I think so. But we may run out of Bunsen burners if you’ve got many more tests to run?”
“Then dig up some more somewhere,” Dr. Coffee said. “Dr. Mookerji and I are going to run some Reinsch tests of our own. You’re familiar with the technique of the Reinsch test, aren’t you, Doctor?”
“Quite,” said Dr. Mookerji, with a lateral jerk of his pink turban. “Same consists in simmering tissue gently in acidulated solution containing one-sixth hydrochloric acid by volume. Surreptitious presence of certain nefarious and toxic substances will be revealed by addition of smallish snippet of thin copper in purest metallic state.”
The phone rang and Doris Hudson answered.
“Exactly,” Dr. Coffee said. “Will you prepare the tissue, Doctor? I suggest a specimen of liver and one of the stomach wall.”
