Fatal Fruitcake

A Callahan Garrity Christmas Short Story

writing as Kathy Hogan Trocheck

Fatal Fruitcake

Mary Kay Andrews, writing as Kathy Hogan Trocheck

Copyright © 1997 by Kathy Hogan Trocheck

First electronic edition

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Fatal Fruitcake

There were 10 strands of Christmas lights, all of them hopelessly tangled into one big UL-approved snarl. “Which idiot put these lights away last year?” I demanded.

Only six shopping days left till the big day, and as always, I felt overwhelmed with stress and anxiety. The ceaseless jangle of the radio, playing an endless stream of hokey Christmas songs made my nerves raw, and my mother’s mindless humming didn’t help either. “Can’t you cut that noise off?”

Edna, my mother, looked up from her job, which was to hack away at the base of the tree with a dull butcher knife until the trunk fit into her rusted 40-year-old Christmas-tree stand.

“Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer happens to be my favorite song,” she said mildly. “And as for the Christmas lights, you put them away last year—Miss Grinch.”

I muttered dark threats to myself, and when the phone rang, I didn’t budge from my spot on the living room floor. “Let the machine pick it up,” I said. Edna and I run a cleaning business with the ridiculous name of the House Mouse. Christmas is our busy season—everybody wants a clean house for the holidays.

But no, she picked it up, listened for a moment, then handed me the receiver. “It’s Jacky,” she said.

Jacky Baker is the youngest of our House Mouse girls and not usually prone to emotion. But now her voice was shaking.

“Callahan,” she said breathlessly, “You gotta come. Come quick. I’m at Colony Square. That big ad agency, Shubert Showalter Quinn. I was cleaning the conference room. There’s a dead guy here, Callahan. I ain’t studyin’ no stiffs.”

I sighed, told her to call the cops and hung up. Edna looked at me hopefully. She’s never met a homicide she didn’t want to investigate.

Oh, yes. In addition to the cleaning business, I have a sideline. Callahan Garrity investigations. I started the P.I. agency after I left the Atlanta Police department five years ago. When business was slow (well, nonexistent), I bought the House Mouse. I only take cases every now and then. It looked like Jacky had just found me one.

The cops beat me to Schubert Showalter Quinn’s offices at Colony Square in Midtown. A uniformed officer stood in front of the heavy mahogany double doors, which were open to the hallway. Just inside, in the reception area, I could see Jacky, ashen-faced, being interrogated by a tall, broad-shouldered detective. The cut of his black dinner jacket looked familiar. The uniformed officer stationed at the door to their office suite did his level best to turn me away. “Crime scene ma’am,” he said, trying to make his pudgy clean-shaven features look stern.

“I represent the woman who found the body,” I told him. Which was true, I did represent Jacky, as far as setting her up with housecleaning clients.

This cut no mustard with the kid with the badge. I was arguing loudly when the detective finally turned around to see who was making all the racket. He looked annoyed, and then resigned.

“Let her in, Hopkins,” he said. “Otherwise she’ll stand there bitchin’ and moanin’ all night.” Bucky Deavers, the detective in the dinner jacket, was an old, close friend from my own days with the APD. I flashed him a grateful grin and stepped into the reception area. Jacky stood up and hugged me. She was shaking, and I could tell she’d been crying. I pulled up a leather chair and sat down to hear her story.

“I told you I was gonna do some moonlighting—remember? For extra Christmas money?”

I shook my head impatiently. “It’s fine. Just tell me what happened.”

“Schubert Showalter Quinn had their big Christmas party here today,” Jacky said. “Talk about a mess. There was trash everywhere. I never seen nothin’ like it. Paper plates and cups, food, liquor bottles, balloons - mess everywhere. I was working my way towards the conference room, where the buffet was arranged, picking up as I went. It’s a big office, lots of employees. the door was closed. I opened the door to go in there and...”

She swallowed hard. Tears sprang up in her eyes. “He was sitting down at the end of the table away from the door, head down on the table. I thought he was drunk, passed out. I was gonna wake him up, you know, call a cab and send him home. I shook him and shook him. that’s when I saw...you know.”

“No gunshots or stab wounds,” Bucky put in here. “No real sign of a struggle. The M.E.’s in there with him now.”

“Oh, my God,” Jacky whispered. “it was awful. I never saw a dead body before. I didn’t know how things...would be.”

Just then, a door from the reception area opened, and a petite blond woman dressed in flowing red chiffon party pants and a hastily buttoned white lab coat came into the room. She was removing a pair of rubber gloves, which she tossed into the trashcan beside the receptionist’s desk.

“Deavers?” she said, ignoring Jacky and me. I knew Sonia Patterson when she was just an assistant medical examiner. She knew me, too.

“Death by asphyxiation,” she said. “No foul play. The fat jerk literally ate himself to death.”

Jacky gasped. “What do you mean?”

“A chunk of food got lodged in his throat and he choked,” Dr. Patterson said. “It looks like fruitcake, but we’ll run lab tests to be sure.”

“That’s it?” Deavers asked, pleased. “No foul play? Excellent.”

By now Sonia Patterson had removed her lab coat. “For this I left the Medical society dance. “Unbelievable.” Underneath the lab coat she was wearing a sequined strapless top that showed plenty of cleavage.

“You can wrap up the crime scene by yourself—right?” she asked. “I’ll have the paperwork done for you by Monday. Accidental death.” She looked closely at Deavers, noticing now that he, too, was dressed for a party. “Nice dinner jacket,” she said.

Then, she was gone.

Deavers stood up, stretched and grinned. “We got lucky this time. Tonight’s the Police Benevolent Association Christmas party. They’re raffling off a new Jeep at midnight. If I get these guys moving, we’ll be out of here by 10, tops.”

He got Jacky’s phone number and address and promised to call if he had any more questions.

“What about the cleaning?” she wanted to know. “Can I finish?”

He thought for a moment. “Yeah, what the hell. Dr. Patterson says it’s accidental, it’s accidental. Don’t need a homicide this close to Christmas— right?”

Jacky made a face. It was clear she’d had enough of Schubert Showalter Quinn for one night. But she was a pro. She squared her shoulders, picked up a cleaning caddy and sighed. “I’ll get the bathrooms now. Could you let me know when the, uh, body is gone?”

Bucky nodded. He was busily jotting notes. I stood up and got ready to leave. But I dreaded going back to all that forced holiday cheerfulness at home.

“By the way,” I said, trying to sound off-handed. “Who was the dead guy?”

“Mail clerk,” Bucky said, still writing. “Moreland Reynolds. 22. His aunt is married to one of the big guys at this agency. Harrison Showalter. Kid’s sort of a dim bulb, from what the family says. Uncle Harry hired him as a favor to the wife.”

He laughed briefly and shook his head.

“What?” I said sourly. “What’s the joke?”

“Death by fruitcake,” Deavers said, laughing again. “How’d you like to have that on your death certificate?”

The conference room doors opened then, and the ambulance attendants wheeled out the stretcher. Moreland Reynolds was zipped into a tasteful maroon body bag. One of the attendants, a gangly, pimply-faced kid with a Braves cap on backward stopped to high-five with Bucky.

“Hey, Detective Deavers,” he said. “you hear what happened to this poor stiff?”

“1 heard,” Bucky said grinning. “Could’ve been worse, though.”

“How’s that?” the kid said.

“Could have been one of them senseless drive-by murders. You know, somebody drives by, chunks a fruitcake at you and peels off.”

“Hey,” the kid said, slapping his side. “That’s a good one. Drive-by fruitcake killing. Wait’ll I tell that one to the dispatcher.”

Everybody was laughing except me. “I happen to like fruitcake,” I said, to nobody in particular.

After the body was gone, Bucky gathered up his notebook and got ready to leave. “It’s okay if you hang around and wait for your friend,” he said. “But no snooping. This is a closed case. Understand?” “Perfectly,” I said. He was still laughing, shaking his head as he went out the door. “Death by fruitcake. Wait’ll I tell the guys at the party.”

As soon as he was gone, I went into the conference room. It was, as Jacky had promised, a mess.

Nearly empty platters of food were strewn around a long, polished walnut table. all that was left of the honey-baked ham was some greasy rind. There was a half-full bowl of potato salad, some stale-looking rolls, and the dregs of a cheese platter decorated with stray grapes and a couple of rogue strawberries. A credenza held what was left of the desserts: a single slice of pound cake, a few broken sugar cookies, a foil tray smeared with what looked like chocolate icing, and, yes, there on a white plate stood a shimmering jewel of a fruitcake.

Its top was studded with glistening pecans, whole dates, figs and honeyed apricots. It was a thing of beauty, that fruitcake, but only one slice was missing.

I heard a noise in the doorway. Jacky pushed a cleaning cart into the room. “I’ve been dreading coming back here,” she admitted. “It’s spooky.”

“I’ll stay and help,” I told her. “Maybe if I stall long enough, Edna will trim the tree without me.”

“That would be great,” Jacky said. “I’m no scaredy-cat, but I really don’t want to be here by myself.” She looked distastefully at the end of the table, where a half-full plate of food had been pushed out of the way. There were fingerprint powder smudges on and around the table and chair, and a chalk outline on the tabletop to show where the body had rested.

“That’s where I found him,” she whispered. “I am never gonna get that out of my mind.”

“Don’t look at the table,” I suggested. “I’ll clear the food away. You move the chairs and start vacuuming.”

We worked fast. I tossed all the food remnants in the trash, wiped off the table and moved to the credenza. I tossed out everything but the fruitcake. “Waste not, want not,” Edna, the child of the depression, always says.

I picked up the cake. Bucky was right. The thing was heavy as a concrete block. But handsomer. The fruits and nuts had been arranged in patterns, like flowers. I held it up to Jacky. “You want to take this home?”

She shuddered. “Are you kidding? That thing killed a boy. I don’t want no killer fruitcake. Throw that thing in the trash.”

She was right. I was just about to toss it in the trash when I smelled something; I sniffed the cake, set it back down, picked a pecan off the top and put it to my nose. I held the fruitcake out to Jacky again. “Does this smell like any fruitcake you ever smelled?”

Reluctantly, she walked over and sniffed and wrinkled her nose, “Smells like my grandmama’s spare-room closet.”

I bent over and inhaled again. “You’re right,” I told her. “It smells funny.”

Carefully, I set the cake back down. I picked a tiny morsel and put it on my tongue. the taste was sweet, and then bitter, like chemicals. I spat it out into the trash; then headed to the water cooler for a long drink.

I knew they were having the PBA party at Manuel’s tavern, a local watering hole that’s a favorite hang-out for cops, newspaper reporters and doctors and nurses from Grady Memorial Hospital’s emergency room. I tried calling Deavers’s cell phone, but my call went directly to voicemail. So I called Manuel’s, and told the bartender who I was looking for, and that he was probably in the back-room at the PBA party. It took Bucky 15 minutes to come to the phone. “This better not be you, Garrity,” he said.