Fatal Fruitcake (2 page)

“It’s me,” I admitted. “Now, don’t hang up. It’s about that fruitcake. It smells funny. There’s something wrong with it, Bucky. I think it was poisoned.”

“What?” He had to shout to make himself heard over the din at the party. “All fruitcake smells funny, Garrity. My great-aunt used to soak hers in pear brandy that came over on the Mayflower. Get off the phone, Garrity, and out of that office before I send uniforms over there to throw you out. The kid choked. Accidental death. Case closed.”

“We’ll see about that.” I said.

When I got home to Candler Park, the lights of the Christmas tree glowed through the front window. “Can’t wait to see what the power bill will be next month,” I groused. I unplugged the tree, put the fruitcake on the kitchen table, then took myself off to bed, visions of cheeseburgers dancing in my head. I’d forgotten to eat dinner.

When I went into the kitchen the next morning, Neva Jean Mccomb, one of the House Mouse “girls”, was sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper. She had a can of Mountain dew in one hand and a huge slab of fruitcake in the other. The slice was headed straight for her gaping, red-lipsticked mouth.

“Don’t,” I cried, knocking it out of her hand and onto the floor.

“Hey!” Neva Jean screeched. “It was just one itty-bitty piece. There’s still a whole cake left, Callahan. Jeez.”

I poured myself a cup of coffee with trembling hands and sat down beside her.

“That cake is poisoned,” I explained. “A guy died eating it last night.”

“Jeez!” Neva Jean hollered. She shoved the plate away in revulsion. “What’s it doing here?”

“Evidence,” I told her. “I’m gonna prove to Bucky Deavers and Sonia Patterson that Moreland Reynolds, the victim, didn’t choke to death.”

The aluminum platters I’d tossed in the trash the night before were labeled with the caterer’s name, which was Festivus. I looked up the number in the yellow pages and gave them a jingle.

“Festivus,” a bored sounding man answered. “Let us be a party to your next affair.”

“Garrity here. Atlanta Police,” I said, trying to sound official without actually claiming to be a cop. “Your people catered a party last night at Schubert Showalter Quinn. Someone died. We have reason to believe your fruitcake was responsible.”

“Wait just a moment,” the man said, his voice rising. “I don’t like your tone. For your information, our Mr. Terrence was right here in our kitchen last night, supervising the salmon en croute.”

“No, no,” I said quickly. “I meant the real fruitcake. You know, with the nuts and candied fruit.”

“Oh,” the man said. “But we at Festivus don’t do fruitcake. It’s such a cliché. We do an espresso mousse. We do guava tartlets. We do baba au rhum and tiramisu. But we don’t do fruitcake.” He hung up then.

All that talk of mousse and tartlets had me hungry. I looked longingly at the fruitcake. Instead I ate a bowl of Captain Crunch.

The receptionist at Schubert Showalter Quinn was named Jennifer. She lived in Virginia-Highlands. When I told her why I was calling, that Moreland Reynolds had died from eating fruitcake, there was a faint giggle at the other end of the phone.

“It’s not funny,” I said hotly. “Where did that fruitcake come from? The caterers say they didn’t bring it.”

“I have no idea,” she said. “This time of year, clients and suppliers are always sending fruit boxes and trays of goodies to the office. Anybody could have put that cake on the buffet table.”

I glanced at the fruitcake, noticing, for the first time, the platter it had been placed upon—a modest oval dish with a border of golden wheat sheaves. Gas-station china. I’d grown up with the stuff.

“No,” I told her. “This is definitely homemade.” I described the cake plate to her.

“That sounds like Carlene in accounting,” she said. “She’s always bringing in baked goods.”

“Oh, dear,” Carlene said when I told her why I was calling. “This is embarrassing. One of my neighbors gave me that as a gift. But my kids wouldn’t eat fruitcake at gunpoint. So I brought it to work. I had no idea. Moreland Reynolds was kind of a pest, but now I feel just awful. You really think it was the fruitcake?”

“Looking that way,” I told her, my voice grim.

The name of Carlene’s neighbor was Tricia Finnerty. But the baby sitter said she was out Christmas shopping at the mall. Wouldn’t be home till noon. I called my friend Linda. She’s a chemist with one of the big drug companies here in town.

“Linda,” I said, “if I brought you a slice of fruitcake, could you test it in your lab and tell me what’s wrong with it?”

“Hell,” she said, after she’d stopped laughing. “I can tell you what’s wrong with fruitcake over the phone. It’s all those red and green cherries. You have any idea what those things are made of?”

“Very funny,” I said. “My sides are splitting.”

“Ok,” she said, relenting. “When do you want to do this?”

“Right away,” I said. “Before it starts to go bad.”

“You obviously know nothing about fruitcake,” Linda said. “The things never go bad. They have the half-life of plutonium. Ok. I’ll meet you at the lab in 30 minutes.”

By the time I got there, Linda was gowned and masked like a surgeon. While I watched, she took a sliver of the fruitcake and put it in a test tube. Then she added liquid from a beaker, and added a stopper with a length of thin rubber tubing that led to yet another beaker on a stand. She held the test tube over a Bunsen burner. The liquid began boiling almost at once, and within moments I could see the empty beaker cloud up with a gas. A sharp smell filled the room.

“Tetrachloride benzene,” Linda announced. “The person who got a mouthful of this was very, very sick before he died. And if he digested any, his liver should look like a piece of Swiss cheese.”

I swallowed hard, thinking about how close I had come to eating the fruitcake myself. “What’s this tetrawhatzis used for?” I wanted to know.

She shrugged. “Industries use it to manufacture fluorocarbons, and sometimes it’s used in fire extinguishers. Oh, yeah, people used to use it as a spot remover. Before the EPA outlawed it. You can’t really buy it any more.”

I borrowed a pair of her rubber gloves to wear while re-wrapping the fruitcake. Then I called Tricia Finnerty from my cell phone.

“The fruitcake I gave Carlene?” She sounded confused. The mall will do that to you. “Oh, yes,” she said slowly. “I’d almost forgotten. My husband is a dentist. One of his patients, old Mrs. Popovic, gave it to him. So he brought it home to me, as a joke. He knows how I feel about fruitcake.”

Elena Popovic lived in Decatur. the house was tiny, with peeling green paint and a bright blue front door. A strand of blinking multicolored lights outlined the doorway and a huge plastic reindeer stood on her miniscule front porch. I knocked and waited. Five minutes. Seven minutes. Finally, a voice, “Who is it?” a woman called from the other side of the door.

“It’s Callahan Garrity,” I said. “I’ve come to see about your fruitcake.”

The doorknob turned then, and the door moved inward by an inch, and I could see a latched security chain.

“You like fruitcake?” The voice was heavily accented, Slavic sounding.

“I adore it,” I said fervently. She gave me a quizzical look. “Hokay,” she said finally. And she unlatched the door and let me in.

Elena Popovic was stooped, nearly double, over an aluminum walker. She had snowy white hair, braided and pinned around her head like a wreath. Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, were a milky brown. She was ninety, if she was a day.

“I make fruitcake myself,” she said proudly. “Come, I show.”

The kitchen was the size of my broom closet, but it was spotless and smelled like bleach, a scent I love better than roses. Mrs. Popovic stood in the center, like a captain on the bow of a warship. She pointed toward the chipped Formica countertop. There, swathed in plastic wrap, stood a whole row of fruitcakes. Half a dozen in all.

“May I?” she nodded, so I unwrapped one and inhaled deeply.

I jerked my head back sharply, my eyes watering from the fumes.

“Mmm,” I said, trying not to choke. “What’s your secret?” “Good flour,” she said, beaming. “Raisins. Feegs. Dates. Nuts. Wheesky. I don’t see so good to cook no more, but fruitcake, I know by heart. Is up here,” she said, tapping her forehead.

“Whiskey,” I said. “Is that what you soak the cake in?”

“Of course,” she said. “Elena Popovic does not buy wheesky to drink. Only for fruitcake at Christmas.”

“Can I see what kind you use?” I asked eagerly. “I want to make mine just the way you do.”

She looked perplexed. “Sure.” Then she shuffled over to an old-fashioned metal wall cabinet and opened it. Her fingertips flew over the jumble of boxes and bottles and cans. “Ees gone,” she said, turning to me with a frown.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “What kind of bottle is it in? Maybe I could look.”

“No, she said, and then the brown eyes sparkled. “Now I remember.” Gripping the walker with one hand, she bent over, and grunting with the effort of it, opened the cupboard under the sink. she rummaged a moment, breathing heavily, then came up with a flat-sided brown flask with a screw cap. “Wheesky,” she said, and handed it to me with a flourish.

I unscrewed the cap and sniffed expectantly. Felt the disappointment wash over me. Wheesky it was. Probably Old Granddad. The label was long gone.

“Let me put it back for you “ I offered. Before she could refuse, I was down on my knees with the cupboard door open. like me, she kept her mop bucket under the sink, along with a can of Comet, and a box of SOS pads. It was dark under there, so it took a moment before my fingers closed on the bottle. It was the same shape and color as the bourbon bottle. I unscrewed the cap and sniffed. My nostrils burned from the proximity.

I smiled a secret smile. Then I stood up, at the same time slipping the bottle into the pocket of my skirt.

Elena Popovic didn’t want to part with her fruitcakes. “Ees Christmas gift,” she explained. “For doctor. Paperboy. Mailman.” But I drive a hard bargain, I do. For $120 in cash, she let me talk her out of her toxic treasures. She looked puzzled as I loaded them into a paper grocery sack.

“What you want weeth six fruitcakes?” she asked.

“Oh,” I said brightly. “They’re presents. Everybody loves fruitcake!”

On the way home, I stopped at a dumpster in back of the Euclid Avenue yacht club in little Five Points, just around the corner from the house I share with Edna. The fruitcakes made a loud thud as they hit the pile of empty bottles and cans inside. I uncapped Mrs. Popovic’s brown flask and poured the tetrachloride benzene on the kudzu patch at the side of the parking lot. It seemed to wither as I watched.

Suddenly, inexplicably, I felt myself begin to glow with a long-repressed holiday spirit. Someone had died recently, which was sad. But I had saved a little old lady from being prosecuted for an innocent mistake. I got back in my van and turned the radio up as loud as it would go. They were playing my favorite Elvis song. “I’ll have a blue Christmas without you,” I warbled.

I glanced in my rearview mirror and caught, out of the corner of my eye, a flash of movement. I turned around to get a better look.

A homeless man, one of the ones who was always hanging around the neighborhood, mooching change for beer and cigarettes and muttering vague threats to anybody who turned him away, was clambering up the side of the dumpster. As I watched, he did a boozy swan dive down into it.

The sick feeling in the pit of my stomach wasn’t from the aroma of decaying garbage.

I jumped out of the van and ran over to the dumpster. I could hear him in there, rooting around in the bottles and cans and trash. soon I was dodging empty ketchup bottles and rotten cabbage heads as they flew out of the bin.

“Hey buddy,” I called anxiously.

A grizzled head poked up over the rim of the dumpster. sure enough, he was holding one of Elena Popovic’s masterpieces in his right hand. “Get your own dumpster,” he snarled. “This one’s mine.”

“Mister, please,” I begged. “Don’t eat that fruitcake.”

“Fruitcake, eh?” he said, “My old lady used to make fruitcake. Every Christmas. Put a fifth of Jack Daniels in it.”

“Don’t eat that fruitcake,” I said desperately.

“I saw it first,” he said, taunting me now. “It’s all mine.”

He opened his mouth wide, ready to sink uneven yellow fangs into his toothsome find. His eyes widened. He sniffed and his eyes narrowed suspiciously. He sniffed again.

“Hey!” he said, outraged. “There ain’t no whiskey in here.”

The fruitcake went whizzing past my head, grazing me slightly. I sighed, rubbed my bleeding ear, then picked up the fruitcake and threw it into the back of the van. Some things, I decided, you just can’t throw away.

Prepare 2 cups chopped, mixed dried fruit—of your choice. I used dates, dried apricots and dried cherries, soaked with ¼ cup whiskey, rum or brandy allowed to soften and plump fruits overnight.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Generously grease and flour large bundt pan.

Mix together: