From Herring to Eternity (19 page)

They radioed in their findings, reserved any opinions they had for their written report, and left shortly after the ambulance did.

“Well, that was productive,” I said.

“Did you expect it to be other wise?”

“No.” That was the truth. But it’s also how I had always done things: don’t get involved. Let the infrastructure handle it, whether it was neighbors arguing or someone smoking in the bathroom at school or someone who dumped personal trash on a public street. You never knew who was homicidal.

But here, now, was the first time I ever felt like I was the one who’d done something wrong.

It began to drizzle. I was too tired and chilly to question Sally further or protest her being here or worry about how things would go in the morning. I just needed to sleep.

Sally helped me in, the cats hissing from the bathroom as we entered the bedroom. I set the alarm for eight—to give myself enough time to gather whatever papers I needed, not that I had very many—then left Thom a message on the deli voice mail saying that I wouldn’t be in until after the hearing.

The next thing I knew, I was dreaming about anchovies trying to claw their way from the deep fryer as my father slammed the wire mesh basket down on them . . .

I was up like a hen at cockcrow, alert and not sure what to expect. I’d either be laying eggs or getting what my chicken-raising great-great-grandmother called
tashmesh
and I just called a screwing.

I grabbed my papers, did some quick online research as I had coffee and a raisin bagel, and made it to the court with thirty seconds to spare, traffic at this hour being very different from the traffic I was accustomed to ninety minutes earlier in the day. The hearing was held in a small room at One Public Square and it was pretty much what I had expected, a complete waste of my time. It was a pair of attorneys arguing through me—or rather with me as a shuttlecock. Andrew A. Dickson III was at one table, Joseph M. Bushyhead, a Cherokee, was at another, and I was on the stand reading from various documents and answering an occasional question from Judge Charlene Gold. Her Honor was an unsympathetic woman with a long, gaunt face topped by a tangle of gray hair. She looked like a scrubbing brush. I didn’t hold that against her. I probably looked like hell, too.

There were no reporters, as far as I could tell. Everyone who was there seemed to have an attorney on his or her arm. I guess this kind of hearing wasn’t sexy enough.

Yet.

The whole thing was all over in less than a half-hour. None of the ostensibly wounded parties—Reynold Sterne or my Wiccan sisters—was present. Just the two sparring attorneys, both of whom spoke with passion about the rights to something that belonged to neither. It was surreal.

Before accepting the judge’s offer to step down, I asked if I could say something for the record.

“You may,” the judge said matter-of-factly, apparently expecting a plea for mutual love and understanding. I imagine she’d heard it all during her tenure on the bench.

But probably not this.

“Do you believe in ghosts, Your Honor?”

She and the attorneys all turned to me as one. No one in the gallery was talking or fidgeting.

“Are you serious?” she asked.

“I am, Your Honor.”

“This is relevant
how
, Ms. Katz?” she asked.

I smiled thinly. “
I
don’t believe in them, you see.

But I believe that someone is trying to make me
think
my house is haunted.”

“Why would someone do that?” she asked.

“It could be to scare me into leaving.” I looked directly at the open-mouthed Dickson. “Or it could be to convince me that I need constant spiritual protection.” I glanced at the unflappable Bushyhead.

“I have a full calendar and the other pleaders will kindly forgive this discursion,” Judge Gold sighed. “Will you explain and make it brief, Ms. Katz?”

“I will, Your Honor,” I said. “I was awakened at two a.m. by noises in the den. I went downstairs and I saw someone in the shadows. When I went to call nine-one-one, the electricity was suddenly shut off. I hurried outside where I was rendered unconscious by an airborne toxin blown into my face by someone I didn’t see.”

“You were assaulted?” the judge asked.

“Ambushed and poisoned,” I said. “The police and paramedics have a full report, and the doctor took a sample from my nasal passages. When I thought about it this morning, I realized that the tableau I saw downstairs was meant to resemble a Civil War encampment, I think—complete with a soldier in gray and sandbags.”

“Your Honor!” Dickson protested.

“How do you know it wasn’t a real manifestation?” the leather-faced Joseph Bushyhead asked, turning from Dickson to the judge.

Which was exactly what I had hoped he would do. I didn’t answer. Andrew A. Dickson did, however—which was exactly what I’d hoped
he
would do.

“Your Honor, lack of evidentiary support aside, this is irrelevant testimony,” the attorney said. “If Ms. Katz experienced anything at all, it may have been a home invasion which she interrupted—”

“Or it may be a result of the opening of a door to the spirit world,” Attorney Bushyhead countered.

“—
neither
of which should or can have any impact on a contract dispute,” Attorney Dickson barreled on. “I would like to remind the court—I am
obligated
to remind the court that there are also at stake here the futures of many promising young scholars, who are devoting their theses to the work at hand.”

“Your Honor, as we have been debating for the past thirty minutes, this is also a question of religious freedom,” the Cherokee disagreed.

“Religious manipulation,” Dickson countered. “The earlier agreement, prior to the hasty conversion of the site, should have priority.”

Judge Gold asked for both men to be silent and looked at me. She seemed openly annoyed. “Ms. Katz, I have eaten at your deli. You make a good grilled cheese with turkey bacon and tomato.”

“Thank you, Judge Gold.”

“And you seem to be a thoughtful, hardworking, down-to-earth woman. However, in the matter before the court, we have not been impressed by your behavior to date. We are here because as Mr. Dickson has stated, the evidence suggests you were trying to overturn an already adjudicated matter by inviting the Wiccans into your home. I understand the shock of discovering what your uncle had agreed to, but your remedy makes me question your commitment to the legal process. You could have petitioned this court for a temporary restraining order. The road not taken is lined with billboards that advocate rational, proven tradition.”

“I didn’t drive a lot until I moved here, Your Honor,” I said. “I’m still learning.”

“At whose expense? Religion? Archaeological research? Your own health and well-being?”

There are times to defend one’s self and there are times to shut up. I could hear my great-grandmother yelling in my ear, “
Sha! Sha!
” I did not speak.

“That said, I cannot tolerate the prehearing manipulation of a witness. Therefore, I’m going to order a recess until I can read the relevant reports of the police and medical personnel. This matter is adjourned until Monday morning at ten.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” I said to a pair of dubious, deep-set eyes.

Dickson looked as if he wanted to protest but thought better of it. I had been watching their expressions carefully; both men seemed to have had no knowledge of what I had dropped on the courtroom. If one of their clients was responsible—and I was betting they were—these two were out of the loop.

The question, then, was who did it and why? And one thing more. There were now three poison victims: two fatal, one not, but all relatively back to back to back. That, plus my innate Jewish paranoia, would not let me shake the idea that in some way these events were all related.

Chapter 19

It was Saturday.

That was always a day for the tourist trade, and they dribbled in over the course of the day without anything approaching a “rush.”

A visit from a police officer—not one of the two who had come to my home, but a Detective Olive Egan—confirmed that it was belladonna that was puffed in my
punim
. She said she would be going back to the house to search the grounds for evidence the other officers may have missed.

“May have?” I snorted. “They spent about five minutes looking around inside and out, and shared a flashlight.”

“The focus of their investigation was not clear,” she said evasively.

“You mean they thought the victim was the perp,” I said.

“They made quick field judgments.”

God, I hated cover-your-ass language. I gave up. Anyway, I shouldn’t have bashed her for their incompetence. For all I knew, she was perfectly fine at her job. She showed me a satellite view of my home on an iPad, asked me to point out the spot where I was dusted, then asked me to try to describe my assailant. I told her I could not, it having been dark, me having been in a panic, and poison having clouded my vision. She thanked me, then cautioned me not to expect much since it had rained the night of the assault and whatever footprints or traces of powder might have been there were probably gone.

“Check for dead moles and chipmunks,” I suggested.

This being Saturday, it meant that after brunch I was free to try and find out where the poison came from and who might’ve purchased it. While I knew that exotic herbs could be grown or mail-ordered, I also had a suspicion that this was not.

The health inspector’s question about bamboo prompted me to look it up online. Easy to grow, innocuous . . . and chock-full of naturally occurring cyanide sugar. It would take a whole lot of garden space to grow that much bamboo.

Or a tiny bit of shelf space to keep it in powdered form. As at the local natural vitamin and herbalist emporium.

I was sure that Daniels and his crack little team had thought of this, too, but I also knew that the owner, Bill “Spud” Carla, was an unrepentant hippy who had lobbied hard at the state legislature for the struggling Safe Access to Medical Cannabis Act. I didn’t know him, but I was willing to bet that he knew me.

His small, boxy shop was located on Oldham Street near Cowan. There was a security camera set up and blackened doors; you had to be video ID’d and buzzed in. I guess I was okay since the door hummed and clicked. I walked into the large, single room. It was lit with long fluorescent lights and looked like a tea shop, but it was musty with pungent odors I did not recognize. Spud was behind the counter. I knew that because he wore a lab coat that had his name embroidered in black. Standing a bony six-foot-five, with his bald head, thick eyeglasses, gray Fu Manchu moustache, and appropriately long fingernails, he looked like the last man on earth to whom you would entrust the passage of a bill or medical procedure. I know, one shouldn’t judge by appearances. But this man had chosen to look weird. The least I could do was honor that.

When I entered, Spud was using a pair of those fingernails to remove pinches of some kind of leaves—they looked like bay leaves but I was sure they weren’t—from a two-quart jar and place them on a small plastic scoop that sat on a digital scale. There was a brown paper bag beside it. He looked at me over the tops of his glasses.

“Good afternoon,” he said with a low, raspy voice, the result, it sounded, of smoking regular cigarettes which I could smell on his clothes as I neared.

“Hi.”

He looked back at his scale. “I’ll be with you in ten blinks of a baby’s eyes.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that except with a strained smile. I looked around the shop. There were shelves of vitamins along one wall, a large, wooden table in the center—it looked like one of those torture racks from which the wheel gizmos had been removed—and more of those big glass jars on the other walls. I recognized the names on seven of the dozens of containers I looked at. A small room beside the counter was labeled L
IBRARY.
I saw rows of books and DVDs with a female version of Spud at the counter: gray ponytail, no makeup, frumpy wardrobe.

“Now,” he said apologetically, “what can I help you with today?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “My house was just consecrated as a Wiccan church and I felt I should familiarize myself with herbalism.”

“You’re Gwen Katz,” he said.

I turned, still smiling my stiff smile. “That’s right. How did you know? The smell of pastrami?”

“I would have smelled rotting meat on you as soon as you entered,” he said. “Possibly before.”

“That’s quite a talent.”

“Hardly. I am vegan.” He said it with reverence, like a pacifistic extraterrestrial telling me his name. “It is a natural ability that has been buried by toxicity.”

“I see. I guess I have a lot to learn.”

“We all do,” he said, “though purifying yourself would be a challenge because of your profession.”

“Hey, it’s not like I’m a lawyer or politician,” I said.

His thin lips smiled a little at that. “Well said.”

“But since you mention it, I was thinking—I’ve only been here a year. People have asked me for vegetarian dishes, and I’ve provided that. But I was thinking it might be fun to add some exotic spices, maybe make the salads a little healthier. Any suggestions? Like this jar,” I said, tapping it lightly with a thumb knuckle. “Bamboo.”

He walked slowly from behind the counter. “Why did you become a Wiccan?” he asked.

“What have you heard?” I asked back.

He grinned. “That you were looking to protect your home. Sally Biglake is a customer of good and long standing.”

I felt a little uneasy now. Spud may have been skeletal, but he was an imposing figure. Especially trailing smoke and other disorienting smells like he’d just emerged from the Pit of Hell.

“I think she and I got off to an iffy start,” I said. “She did me a big favor the other night and I was thinking, also, I might buy her a little gift.”

He looked where my knuckle still rested. “Bamboo?”

“No, I was thinking about that for a Chinese dish I’ve been considering,” I said.