Killer Crab Cakes (9 page)

“We’re having seafood quesadillas tonight,” Consuela told them. “And I guarantee, no poison.”

The weak attempt at levity fell flat, but after everything that had happened, no one paid much attention to the failed joke. Phyllis, Sam, Carolyn, and Eve went out into the parlor and left Consuela to her work.

Carolyn leaned close to Phyllis and asked in a half whisper, “Do you think it really is safe to eat the food now?”

“Of course it is,” Phyllis answered without hesitation. She didn’t believe for a second that Consuela was guilty, nor that her husband, Tom, or their daughters were involved with Ed McKenna’s death.

But
someone
had poisoned those crab cakes, she reminded herself, and she had a hard time believing that anyone else who had been in the house could have done such a thing.

That was one of the problems with murder, she reflected. Somebody had to be guilty.

A short time later, the Blaines and the Forrests returned from wherever they had been all afternoon. The day had warmed up considerably, and they all looked a little heated. Even though it was autumn, the days could get quite warm, especially with the constant high levels of humidity factored in.

The guests were laughing among themselves as they came into the house, which bothered Phyllis a little. It was true that the four of them hadn’t exactly been friends with Mr. McKenna, but they had sat down at the same table and shared meals with him. To Phyllis’s way of thinking, a little more decorum on their part would have been nice, as a way of showing respect for the deceased.

She saw Sam frowning and asked quietly, “Does it bother you, too?”

“ ‘ Any man’s death diminishes me,’ ” he quoted. “Hemingway, right?”

“I think he got it from John Donne.”

Sam shrugged. “Works either way. You’d think it’d bother ’em at least a little that a fella they knew keeled over dead this mornin’. Of course, they don’t know yet how come he died.”

“That’s right,” Phyllis said as the unpleasant realization hit her.

Somebody was going to have to tell the guests that Ed McKenna had been murdered . . . and that the killer might still be under this very roof.

She called out to them as they started through the hall toward the stairs. “Excuse me. . . . I need to have a word with you folks.”

Jessica Blaine and Raquel Forrest were each carrying several plastic bags. Loot from their day of shopping, Phyllis thought. They wore impatient looks as they turned toward her.

“What is it, Mrs. Newsom?” Leo asked. “We’re all a little tired. Like to freshen up a bit before dinner.”

“There’s some news about Mr. McKenna that I need to share with you.”

“What happened?” Leo smiled. “He didn’t turn out to be alive after all, did he? A little resurrection?”

“Leo, stop it!” Jessica scolded. “I swear, you try to make a joke out of everything.”

“A man died,” Sheldon said. “It’s not funny.”

It was even more “not funny” than they knew. Phyllis said, “The chief of police came by here a while ago. The autopsy on Mr. McKenna wasn’t complete at the time, but the medical examiner was already sure that he didn’t die from a heart attack or a stroke.”

“What else is there that’d kill a guy so sudden like that?” Leo asked, frowning now instead of grinning. “Some sort of embolism or aneurysm or something like that?”

“No,” Phyllis said. “He was poisoned.”

Leo’s frown deepened. “I don’t understand. How’d he get into poison around here?”

“Wait a minute,” Sheldon said. “You don’t mean he was . . .” His voice trailed off, as if he were unable to bring himself to say it.

Phyllis nodded. “That’s right. The police are treating it as a homicide investigation now. Chief Clifton believes that Mr. McKenna was murdered.”

She watched them all closely as she said it, looking for any sign that one of them already knew about it.

But instead, all four looked profoundly shocked, as if they couldn’t believe what they had just heard.

Of course, one of them could have been acting. Phyllis had run into murderers before who had the ability to behave as if nothing had ever happened. It was a useful talent to have if you planned to go around killing people.

Still, she had a hard time believing it of any of these four, who seemed as normal and innocent as they could be. After that initial moment of surprised silence, they began bubbling over with questions. Phyllis let them yammer on for a few seconds, then raised her hands to call for silence, like she would have in her classroom.

“If you’ll go in the parlor and sit down, I’ll tell you what Chief Clifton told me.”

Still carrying the packages from their shopping trip, the couples went into the parlor and sat down, the Blaines on the sofa, the Forrests in a couple of armchairs. Phyllis stood in the middle of the room, where she would be able to see all four of them.

As concisely as she could, she covered the news that Chief Clifton had brought. The couples listened in silence, although Phyllis could tell that Leo, especially, was almost bursting with the desire to ask questions. He let her finish, though, before he said, “Is it possible that the crab cakes just . . . you know . . . went bad?”

Beside him, Jessica nodded. “That’s right. I’ve heard of people dying from food poisoning before.”

“If someone
put
the poison in the crab cakes,” Sheldon said, “you could call that food poisoning, couldn’t you?”

Raquel reached over and punched him lightly on the upper arm. “You’re not funny,” she said.

“I’m not trying to be funny,” Sheldon insisted, and as a matter of fact, he did look serious. Deadly serious, Phyllis thought. “I’m just trying to point out that the terminology could apply to either case.”

“Terminology, schmerminology,” Leo said, and like “jailbird,” Phyllis thought it had been a long time since she had heard anybody use an expression like that. Leo went on, “The guy was murdered, plain and simple. And some woman did it.”

That bold declaration made Phyllis frown. She couldn’t stop herself from asking, “How in the world do you know that?”

“Because if a guy wanted to kill somebody, he’d shoot ’em or stab ’em or take a baseball bat to their head. He wouldn’t sneak around and slip poison into some frickin’ crab cakes—pardon my language.”

“You’re nuts,” Raquel said. “You can’t just say that no guy would ever poison anybody.”

“Leo’s right about men being more violent overall, though,” Sheldon pointed out. “It’s something atavistic in us. However, I agree with Raquel that you can’t automatically rule out all men as suspects just because the murderer employed poison as the means to his or her particular end.”

“So you think a guy could have done it?” Leo said.

“Of course.”

“Then you’re the one who’s nuts.”

None of them seemed to take offense at anything the others were saying, and Phyllis supposed that was because they had all been friends for so long that they were accustomed to such good-natured wrangling. She said, “I don’t think any of you are nuts, as you put it. I just wanted you to know what the situation was. I’m sure the police will be coming around to ask more questions about Mr. McKenna—”

“Oh, my God,” Jessica interrupted as her eyes widened. “They don’t consider us suspects, do they?”

Earlier Phyllis had tiptoed around that same question from Consuela. She didn’t feel like tiptoeing anymore.

“I got the feeling that Chief Clifton considers everyone to be a possible suspect at this point.”

Leo came to his feet as an angry expression darkened his broad face. “Well, that really
is
crazy! We barely knew Ed McKenna. None of us would have any reason to kill him.”

“Didn’t he usually stay here at the same time as the four of you?” Phyllis asked. She was just assuming that based on comments she had heard them make over the past few days, but it was something that could be easily checked by going over Dorothy’s records. She was sure the police would get around to doing just that, probably sooner rather than later.

“It’s true that our visits usually overlapped to a certain extent,” Sheldon said. “They seldom dovetailed precisely.”

“He was here when we got here,” Raquel said.

“And he usually left before we did,” Jessica said.

“We don’t know anything about him except that he went fishing all the time,” Leo added. “Hell, I don’t even know where he’s from.”

“San Antonio,” Phyllis said.

“See? Why would I kill a guy when I don’t even know where he’s from?”

Phyllis didn’t think that made much sense, but Leo seemed to, and his wife nodded supportively.

“You know who had the best opportunity to poison somebody?” Raquel mused. “Consuela.”

Jessica put a hand to her mouth. “That’s right! She prepares all the food. She could have put anything in it, for all we know! We could all be poisoned right now!”

Leo turned toward her and shook his head. “You’re not poisoned. None of us has been poisoned.”

“How do you know that?”

“You feel okay, don’t you?” He looked at Sheldon and Raquel. “You guys are all right, aren’t you?”

“A little hot and sweaty, maybe,” Raquel said, “but other than that, yeah, I guess I’m all right. How about you, Sheldon?”

“I feel fine,” Sheldon declared.

“You see,” Leo said to Jessica. “If Consuela had poisoned us this morning, we’d all be dead by now.”

“Not necessarily,” Sheldon said. “If she used a different type of poison on us, it might be considerably slower-acting. We might not die until later tonight, or even tomorrow.”

“That’s right,” Jessica practically wailed. “We won’t know until it’s too late!”

Phyllis had listened to all of this she could stand. She said, “No one else has been poisoned, and none of you are going to die. Consuela didn’t murder Mr. McKenna.”

“You don’t know that for sure,” Sheldon pointed out. “The police haven’t made any arrests yet, have they?”

“Well, no.”

“And as you said yourself, the chief considers everyone a suspect at this point, and if he feels that way, I don’t see how we can feel any differently.”

“Well, I know one thing,” Jessica said as she got to her feet. “I’m not going to stay in a house where people get poisoned. Come on, Leo, we have to pack. We’re getting out of here!”

“
W
ait a minute,” Phyllis said. “You can’t just leave. You have reservations here for the next ten days.”

Leo shook his head. “That doesn’t mean we have to stay. And don’t think you can get away with threatening to keep our payment, either. In a case like this we ought to get a full refund!”

“Yes, I’d say that’s warranted,” Sheldon said. “And refusal would be the grounds for a rather nasty lawsuit. I’m sure the owners wouldn’t want the whole thing dragged into court. That would mean a lot of bad publicity about how one of the guests died after eating poisoned food.”

Raquel snorted. “That’d be the kiss of death for a bed-and-breakfast as far as I was concerned. I’d never stay there again, and I bet nobody else would, either.”

Phyllis felt control of the situation slipping away from her . . . as if she’d ever had it in the first place. She held up her hands and said, “Please, everyone, just slow down. We don’t need to be talking about leaving, or refunds, or filing lawsuits—”

“You don’t expect us to
stay
here after what’s happened, do you?” Jessica asked. “It’s just not safe.”

“I’m convinced that it’s perfectly safe—”

“Then you stay here and eat the food,” Leo said. “As for me, though, I’m going somewhere where they don’t poison you.”

Phyllis felt awful about what was happening, and yet she knew she couldn’t have kept the truth about Ed McKenna’s death from them. They would have found out by the next day, at the very latest, when the story about McKenna’s murder appeared in the local newspaper.

Now Dorothy and Ben were faced with all the bad publicity, not to mention the possibility of legal action by their customers. Phyllis knew that none of this was her fault, but at the same time she couldn’t help but feel that she was letting her cousin down.

She couldn’t have prevented this mess . . . but maybe she could put a stop to it before it got any worse.

But that would mean finding Mr. McKenna’s killer. Playing detective again, as Carolyn and Eve would probably phrase it. She had no desire to do that.

And what if it turned out that Consuela really was the killer? That would truly finish the job of ruining all future business for the bed-and-breakfast.

One problem at a time, she told herself. She couldn’t fix everything at once.

An idea occurred to her. She said, “Listen, if you’ll stay here, I’ll talk to Dorothy about giving you a reduced rate. That way we can refund some of your money.”

She was going to have to call Dorothy, anyway, to tell her about Mr. McKenna. She should have done it before now, Phyllis knew. She’d been putting it off because it was bound to upset her cousin, and Phyllis hated to be the bearer of bad news for anyone.