The Case of the Poisoned Eclairs: A Masao Masuto Mystery (2 page)

“Talk to him. Only don't go looking for trouble, Masao. It finds us soon enough.”

In Masuto's office, Beckman had finished the Los Angeles
Times
and was reading the
Herald-Examiner.

“Perhaps I should wait until you finish the paper,” Masuto suggested.

“Just trying to catch up. You don't read the papers, you're not in the world.”

“I'm returning you to the world. Go downtown and talk to Omi Saiku. He runs the poison lab for the Los Angeles cops. He's a fourth or fifth cousin of mine, so you can tell him that you're asking for me.”

“What am I asking him?”

“You're asking what he has on recent food poisoning in general, and specifically whether a bad eclair can produce botulism.”

“How do you spell botulism?”

Masuto spelled it out. “And get a background. If he tells you no botulism in an éclair, find out if someone could put it there. Find out if a person eating it could taste it. Get all the background you can, and then go to the County Health Service and see what they have on recent food poisoning.”

“You don't think you ought to fill me in?”

“I don't know what's to fill in yet. Baxter has a Chicano girl over at All Saints who he claims was murdered by éclairs doped with botulin. It sounds crazy.”

“You can say that again,” Beckman agreed.

After Beckman had left, Masuto called the telephone number the hospital had given him. A voice answered in Spanish. Speaking careful, well-enunciated Spanish, Masuto asked for Pedro Fortez and was told that he was at All Saints Hospital.

Masuto drove back to All Saints, and as he entered the lobby, he noticed sitting on one of the benches a young man whose face reflected all the grief a face could hold, a dark, good-looking young man of about thirty. Masuto walked over to him and asked, speaking Spanish, “Are you Pedro Fortez?”

The eyes, wet with tears, looked at Masuto. The head nodded.

“I am Sergeant Masuto, Beverly Hills police. I hesitate to intrude on your grief, but I must talk to you. I must ask you some questions.”

Fortez nodded mutely.

“We can speak in Spanish or English, whichever is easier for you. Spanish?”

“Si,” the young man whispered.

“Your wife was employed as a domestic?”

“She worked for Mrs. Crombie.”

“You know the address?”

He gave an address on Beverly Drive, and Masuto jotted it down. “Can you tell me,” Masuto asked gently, “what happened the day your wife took sick?”

There was a long silence. Then Fortez drew a long breath and said, “Nothing happened. That's what is so terrible. We have one car, my old Ford. I work in a plastics plant in Santa Monica. When I go to work in the morning, I drop Ana off at the Crombie place. In the evening, I pick her up—only—”

The tears began again. The nurse at the reception desk came over and whispered to Masuto. Was there something she could do? “Poor kid,” she said. “Are you a friend?”

“I'm a policeman,” Masuto said. “Perhaps a little water.”

Fortez drank the water and apologized for his tears. “We were only married a year,” he explained.

“And you picked Ana up the night before last?”

“Yes. We drove home. She had a dish in the refrigerator that she had prepared for me the night before. It is called
carne de res con nopalitos
and it is made with much garlic and green cactus. Ana could not bear the taste of garlic. She made the dish just for me. I asked her what she would eat, and she showed me the three éclairs that Mrs. Crombie let her take home. My Ana was like a little child about sweets. She decided that the pastry would be her whole supper.”

“She didn't offer you any?”

He shook his head. “I don't like such things.”

“And after she ate the pastry, she became sick?”

“That night she became sick. In the morning I called the ambulance. It was too late. Then when she died—when she died—they brought her body here.”

“Do you know why they brought her body here, Mr. Fortez?”

“They said she was poisoned, that the food poisoned her.”

“Yes. Your wife died of a kind of food poisoning called botulism. That's what makes it a police matter. You see, we must try to find out where the éclairs came from. I don't know whether there is any reason why you must stay here now. Could you leave and return?”

He nodded.

“We would be very grateful to you if you could come to the Beverly Hills police headquarters and give us a statement. I only mean to let a stenographer take down what you have just told me. Then you could sign it, and we have it for the records.”

“Must I? Ana is here. I arranged for the hearse to come here for her body.”

“When?”

“At three o'clock.”

“Then you have plenty of time. This won't take more than an hour, with the driving. I'll be happy to drive you both ways.”

He thought about it for awhile, then nodded. “I'll take my own car.”

“The police station is on Rexford, just south of Santa Monica. Do you know where that is?”

“I know. Yes.”

After Fortez had made his statement, and after it was typed up and Wainwright had read it, the captain said to Masuto, “Did you tell him about Doc Baxter's theory?”

“No. What for? He has enough grief.”

“Still, if there's anything to it, he could have fed her the stuff in a mug of coffee.”

“Come on,” Masuto said. “A Mexican murder is an act of violence, an act of rage. If this is what Baxter says it is, it's a thousand years removed from those poor kids. It's diabolical.”

“If it's what Baxter says it is. I still don't buy it.”

Beckman walked in as Masuto entered his office, and stood in silence for a long moment, watching Masuto.

“What is it, Sy? What did you learn?”

“You give me a creepy feeling at times.”

“That's because I'm a wily Oriental. What did Omi have to say?”

“He says you can't get botulism from an éclair. He also says you can't get botulism from Lubie's chocolates, which in case you never heard of Lubie's chocolates are maybe the most expensive candy in the world, and they're sold on North Cañon Drive over here in Beverly Hills for eight and a half dollars a pound.”

“I know the place where they sell Lubie's chocolate.”

“On your pay?”

“I don't buy them. I just know where they're sold. So maybe you'll be good enough to tell me what the devil you're talking about.”

“All right. All right.” Beckman spread his hands. “Other cops, they got muggers and rapists. We got the cutes, only not so cute. I go downtown and ask all the questions. Absolutely quiet on the food poisoning front, not even a troop of boy scouts who let their sandwiches sit in the sun too long, not even a restaurant closed down for a dirty kitchen, except—”

“Except what?”

“This cousin Omi Saiku of yours, strange duck, knows more about poison than an encyclopedia, shows me some sweet pea seeds—deadly. You ever know that? You can die from eating sweet pea seeds or morning glory seeds or potato leaves—”

“Will you please get to the point? What about Lubie's chocolates?”

“I'm getting there. I'm just saying I'm glad he's on our side. So he says to me, ‘Masao's found a botulin in an éclair.' Then he grins, like it's some special earth-shaking discovery in the poison field. ‘Then tell Masao we found a botulin in a chocolate bonbon. He will enjoy that. I am sure that police work in Beverly Hills is very dull.' Then he tells me that this dame—” He took out his notebook to consult it. “Name of Alice Greene, lives over here on Roxbury Drive. Well, he tells me that she feeds a couple of pieces of this Lubie candy to her dog, a Pekinese, and the dog freaks out. She takes the dog to her vet over on Western, a Dr. Carver, but he can't save the dog. However this Dr. Carver is no fool and he gets this Greene lady to go back and bring him the candy. Then he sends the candy along to Cousin Omi, and what do you think?”

“The candy is loaded with botulin.”

“Right. The whole top layer, nine of these oversized chocolate creams. This cousin Omi of yours, he says that if the candy produced the botulin, it's the first time in either the history of candy or botulism that it happened. Only it didn't happen. Omi shows me exactly how the stuff was shot into the candy pieces, as crazy as that sounds. Can you imagine feeding eight-and-a-half-dollar candy to a mutt?”

“It wasn't meant for a dog. What the devil do we have here? Omi gave you the candy, didn't he?”

“No. He wants to run some more tests. He knows we don't have a poison lab, and anyway he wants to talk to you. He says you should come down there first chance you get.”

“What about prints?”

“They took care of that and Dr. Carver was careful. The only prints on the box are Mrs. Greene's. That's as far as they're taking it down at the Los Angeles cops. They say it's our turf and our case.”

“I hope you thanked them,” Masuto said bleakly.

Laura Crombie

“I swear to God,” Captain Wainwright said, “I've lost my taste for this lunatic world we live in. Snipers sit up on the hillsides and shoot motorists they've never met, terrorists execute heads of state, and lunatics poison Pekinese dogs.”

“All killers are lunatics, to one degree or another,” Masuto said. “This one is sick, very sick.”

“Well, at least you got something to work with. Someone bought the éclairs and someone bought the candy. Run that down and we have our man,” Wainwright said.

“Perhaps.”

“And keep it quiet, Masao. If there's one thing this city doesn't need, it's a bizarre murder case.”

“I'll keep it as quiet as I can, but nothing's going to wash out the fact that it's bizarre. That's exactly what it is,” Masuto responded.

Beckman agreed with Masuto. “When I was with the L.A. cops, Masao,” he said, “a killing was done with a knife or a gun. But this botulism—”

“All right, but it's our baby now, so you get over to the people at Lubie's Sweet Shop and try to jog their memories. They're going to put you off and tell you that they sell a hundred boxes of that stuff every day, but I don't think they do, even in Beverly Hills. Was it a one-pound box?” Wainwright asked Beckman.

“It was,” Beckman answered.

“Did you note the arrangement of the candy, the color, the shapes?” Masuto asked.

“Was I born yesterday, Masao?”

“Then give them the information as precisely as possible and just keep working at them until they remember something,” Masuto said.

“I'll do my best.”

“Then meet me at the Crombie place. It's on Beverly Drive. Better jot down the address.”

The Crombie house wasn't large, considering its location on Beverly Drive in the very center of Beverly Hills. The tourist buses, which can be seen at almost any time of any day twisting up and down the streets of Beverly Hills, never failed to include Beverly Drive between Santa Monica Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard. This stretch of about a mile of glamorous homes had once housed some of the most glittering film stars of another age. The stars had died or moved away, but the houses remained, and the Crombie house was by no means the grandest among them. Architecturally, it would have been called a modified French château, and since it was large enough for six or seven bedrooms, Masuto was somewhat surprised that the woman who opened the door for him stated that she was Mrs. Laura Crombie.

She was a tall, handsome woman in her mid-forties, with a lean body, a well-defined face, light-brown hair swept back from her brow, and little makeup. She wore slacks and a blouse, and regarded Masuto curiously from behind the chain which held the door half open.

“I'm Detective Sergeant Masuto, Beverly Hills police,” he said, showing her his badge. “I'd like to talk to you, if you don't mind.”

“Yes—yes, of course. Is it about Ana, poor child? I called the hospital, and they told me.” She unhooked the chain. “Forgive me, but I'm alone in the house. I've had no one to replace Ana.” She stood aside for him to enter, closing the door behind him. “You're Japanese. Forgive me. I don't usually make personal remarks. I think it's fine that we have a Japanese policeman here.”

“I'm a Nisei, Mrs. Crombie, which means that I was born here. However, you may think of me as Japanese if you wish. I am not entirely Westernized.”

“You're very nice, and that's a very nice way to forgive my rudeness. Come in and sit down. Can I offer you anything, a cold drink, perhaps?”

“No thank you, nothing.”

She led the way through a living room furnished with overstuffed pieces covered in bright printed linen into a library, bookshelves and brown leather chairs and couch. All in good taste, Masuto reflected, a huge and enormously expensive Kirman rug on the floor of the living room and three lovely Degas pastels on the wall of the library. She sat down in one of the leather chairs, and he sat facing her.