The Last Annual Slugfest (5 page)

“So, judges, what’s your verdict? You’ve had Slug Cocktail, not a universal favorite. Then there was Frittata with Slime Sauce, Slug Stroganoff, and now Slug Pizza. Give us your verdicts, judges.” Bert poked the microphone at Curry Cunningham.

“Pizza.”

“Pizza,” Angelina seconded.

Father Calloway agreed, and though it was clear that Edwina Henderson begrudged the decision, she gave it her nod.

“And now a round of applause for our judges,” Bert said. “We’ll let them repair to the bar for a postprandial cordial. You have any Slug liqueur back there?”

Amidst the laughter, the judges made their way off stage. Bert beckoned to Chris. I glanced around to see if Donny Fortimiglio, the architect of this scheme, was present to enjoy the victory. But I couldn’t spot him. I also didn’t see Edwina’s visitor. So much for my careful directions to him. Apparently he’d decided that neither local color, nor me, was worth the effort of finding another building off the main street here.

“So, Chris, are you giving up fishing and going into chefing?” Bert asked, as he held out the check.

“No. I just have this one recipe. I don’t think it will support a franchise.”

“Well, here you go.” Bert held the check high for everyone to see. “Maybe you can take your family out to dinner, unless you have some uneaten Slug Pizza at home.”

Another round of applause followed. Then the people who had been sitting in the folding chairs stood up, and the ones who had been standing moved back to the bar. As I made my way there, I passed Father Calloway, drinking a brandy and saying to a parishioner, “You’ll remember my sacrifices when it’s hard to get up for Mass this Sunday, won’t you, my boy?”

Bert Lucci came up next to me. “What happened with Bobbs? He’s not still in there, is he?”

“No, I told him about the back door.”

“And he left?”

“Like it was five o’clock and he was through for the day.”

“A memorable performance.” It was Mike, one of my fellow meter readers. “I wonder what we should do to commemorate it?”

“A slug on his desk Monday morning?” Sherman, one of the trouble men who dealt with electrical emergencies, offered.

Beverly, a meter reader-clerk, held up a camera. “I’ve got a shot of him just when he swallowed. We could present it to him.”

“Whatever we do,” Mike said, “I should be the one to do it.” Ignoring the groans of his listeners, he went on. “You know where my wife is? Down in Puerto Vallarta turning brown. I’m here in the rain and cold turning purple. Her folks sold timber rights to a plot of land on North Bank Road. They used the money for the trip. They had an airline ticket for me, too. But I couldn’t get time off. You-know-who wouldn’t approve leave without pay.”

“But Mike, it’s worth it to have seen his face tonight. Come on, would you have missed this?” Sherman demanded. And that led to another rehash of Mr. Bobbs and his much-appreciated humiliation.

The crowd milled. A few people wandered to the table behind the stage that held the remains of the entrees. But it was clear the party was over, and in a surprisingly short time, people began leaving. Even the meter readers tired of recounting their own perspectives of Mr. Bobbs’s debacle. In the cold of March, forty hours a week of climbing up and down the hillside to get near enough to read rain-splattered meters was exhausting. Soon, rehashing Mr. Bobbs’s disgrace was not as appealing as bed.

The main room was virtually empty when a scream came from the kitchen.

I ran in.

Angelina Rudd was propped against the stove. Her mouth hung open. She was staring down at the floor, where Edwina Henderson lay.

T
HE SOUR STENCH OF
vomit hit me as I looked at Edwina’s body. I braced myself against the doorjamb. There were three puddles of vomit on the floor near her. Edwina looked as if she had supported herself just as Angelina was doing now, leaning on the stove. And when her strength failed, she had slid down onto the floor. Her body was slick with sweat; drops still hung from the sides of her face; her hair stuck to her forehead. I couldn’t see any signs of breathing.

I turned away and swallowed hard, willing myself not to be sick. When I looked back, Leila Katz was already on the phone to the fire department. They would send an ambulance and medics.

“Hey, what’s going on in here?” Bert Lucci called cheerfully as he rounded the doorway from the main room. He stopped and gasped. His tanned face paled. “Edwina? What … ?”

We all looked at Angelina.

“I just walked in,” she said. “She was there, like she is now. I don’t know what happened.”

Bert seemed to crumble down over the small body. It was a moment before I realized he was doing artificial respiration.

The siren sounded outside. The firehouse was only half a mile away. Bert pushed down on Edwina’s ribs. The siren shrilled. Outside the main room, brakes screeched, metal doors banged, footsteps slapped up the veranda stairs and across the floor.

“Stand back,” one of the medics instructed. We all stumbled back against the kitchen counters. One of the medics replaced Bert Lucci, kneeling over Edwina. Bert back-pedaled into me.

“Sorry,” he mumbled absently.

As the medics hovered around Edwina’s body and then lifted her onto a stretcher, it was like watching a movie. And like a viewer in the audience, I found a certain relief in shifting my attention from Edwina Henderson to Bert Lucci. What a surprising man he was. I had only viewed him as a marginally competent caretaker of this decrepit building. I would never have imagined him capable of emceeing the Slugfest. It would never have occurred to me that he knew CPR, much less that he would be the one to take charge and try to resuscitate Edwina. And it wouldn’t have occurred to me, particularly after this afternoon’s discussion about Edwina, that he would be so stunned by her collapse.

By now, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Bert Lucci insist on riding to the hospital with Edwina. But it was Leila Katz who did that. She grabbed her purse and ran after the medics, catching up with them outside. Their voices were muted, but Leila’s sharp insistence that she be allowed to ride along carried easily. There was a pause, then one of the medics said, “Lady, she won’t miss you in the ambulance. She’s dead.”

The room where we stood was so silent it seemed like we had all stopped breathing. Then I heard Leila, outside, say to the medic, “I’ll be in my car behind you.”

Doors slammed. Engines started. The siren cut through the silence of the night. And then all of them were gone.

In the kitchen, we stood silently. The medics had taken samples of the vomit, but the smell of the residue seemed stronger. I pressed my lips together hard. I could feel sweat on my face. And, as I surveyed them, all four—Curry, Angelina, Bert, and even Chris—looked ashen. We’d all heard the medic’s pronouncement.

It was Curry who said, “I didn’t realize food poisoning worked that fast.”

“It doesn’t.” Bert’s voice was barely audible. “I’ve seen plenty of bad food. Guys come up here for the weekend. They make themselves a sandwich, lots of mayonnaise, Friday before they leave home. Saturday they forget about it. Then, late in the night, after they’ve been drinking all day, they get hungry and drag it out. Maybe it tastes a little funny, but they don’t notice. They’re doing pretty well to be moving both jaws together, much less tasting. But that sandwich is a day and a half old, and it’s been out in the sun, maybe over a hundred degree temperatures, for hours. It’s like a laboratory specimen. And still the guy may not feel anything till well into the next morning.” Bert was sounding like his old self now.

“That long?” Angelina asked.

Bert shrugged. “Sometimes sooner. But it never starts in less than an hour or two, and then the symptoms are gradual. No one’s stiff on the floor in ten minutes.”

As one, we all looked down at the spot where Edwina had lain.

“Could we move out of the kitchen?” Curry asked.

With relief, we hurried into the main room and headed away from the stage to the far end of the room by the piano, and settled on the old, lumpy couches or the rattan chairs. Chris perched on the picnic table.

“What about botulism?” I asked.

“Not unless the slugs were canned,” Angelina said. “Botulism is caused by the exotoxins from anaerobic growth.” She glanced at Chris, then added, “Anaerobes live where there is no air or free oxygen. They get their oxygen from decomposing compounds.”

I knew Angelina managed the fish ranch, but I had half-forgotten she was a biologist.

There was another silence, longer than the first, before Chris said, “Do you mean, then, that she was poisoned?” It wasn’t clear who he was asking, and when no one responded, he said, “But poisoned with what? What kind of poison?”

“Chris, there are all sorts of poisons,” Angelina said, “from arsenic and strychnine, the common ones we all think about, to ones so obscure that only someone who was researching them would know they exist. There are whole books that just list poisons and their effects. What Edwina swallowed, it could have been anything.”

“But how …” Chris held his hands as if weighing the volume of the question.

“She didn’t look good when she got here,” Bert said.

“That’s right. And she was late,” Curry added. “Maybe it was something she ate before.”

He looked so hopeful that I hesitated before saying, “I can’t imagine you judges would eat anything before the Slugfest. Did you?”

“Well, no,” Curry admitted.

“Angelina?”

“I made a point not to. I didn’t want the slug meat mixing with anything else.”

“But she was late,” Chris insisted. “Maybe she was late because she didn’t feel well.”

“No, Chris,” Bert said. “She may have had something on her mind, but it wasn’t affecting her body. Maybe you didn’t see her drive up here, but one of the guys who did said she came around the bend like a race car driver. That’s the way she drives. I didn’t see that. But I did see her tearing in here. There was nothing wrong with Edwina Henderson then.”

“And that was right before she sat down at the table?” I asked.

Bert nodded. “Then you folks came out of the kitchen.”

The rain, which had blended into the background before, struck hard against the roof. A gust of wind shook the windows.

“If she was all right before the judging, then the poison had to be in something she ate or drank here,” I said.

“Didn’t drink,” Bert said. “I know, because I offered her a drink and she turned up her nose. I figured she wasn’t about to drink
here.
”

“But wasn’t the food all together on that display table beside the stage?” Angelina asked.

“It was there, and I had Hooper keeping an eye on it. I didn’t want any funny business,” Bert said. “I wasn’t going to have Edwina telling me afterwards that there was a hair in the Slug Cocktail or a blade of grass on one of the pizzas. That’s just the type of thing she looks for, always an eye for a speck out of place.” He stopped abruptly.

“But if there was something in the food, how come we’re not all sick?” Curry asked.

“Maybe the poison was just in one part,” Chris suggested.

“But most of the dishes had sauces with everything stirred in.” Angelina rested an elbow cautiously on one arm of the rattan chair. “What was there? We should be able to remember,” she said with a touch of disgust.

Curry leaned forward. “There was that incredibly bland Frittata. I mean, you couldn’t even taste the slugs, which was the best thing about it. And then that awful Stroganoff, where you sure could taste the slugs. God, that was like someone had pulled them off a flower pot and dropped them into a glass of cream. Believe me, if that poison had any taste, it would have been noticeable in either of those dishes.”

“What about the Slug Cocktail, the first dish?” Chris asked. “It made Mr. Bobbs sick.”

“White bread would have turned his stomach then. That had nothing to do with the dish,” Bert said. “The guy was just scared. And anyway, the sauce was cooked in one pot and poured into each glass. So unless Leila Katz poisoned one slug, in one dish—”

“But how would she know Edwina would eat from that dish?” Curry asked.

“She served you,” Chris said. “The dishes were on the tray, two on each end and one in the middle. She could have figured that by the time it got to Edwina, only the back one on the side of the tray nearest her would be left.”

“That’s true,” I said. “People almost always take the dish that’s nearest to them.”

“But if Leila had wanted to poison Edwina, she would have had to poison all the slugs in the dish,” Curry said. “She couldn’t be sure which one Edwina would eat.”

“And every portion of the slugs equally,” Bert added. “Leila’s been around long enough to know the judges don’t eat any more than they have to.”

“Poisoning all the slugs in Edwina’s cocktail would be pretty dangerous,” I said, looking around. “Are the Slug Cocktails still here?”

“Sure,” Bert said. “Leila lit out of here with the ambulance crew. She wasn’t about to stop for her dishes.” He glanced behind him. “There. They’re still on the table.”

“Well, the only other thing that had individual dishes was yours, Chris,” Curry said.

“And that”—Angelina paused and swallowed—“we had to eat whole. Bert, you made us down the entire thing.”

No one had to say that the poison could have been added to only Edwina’s pizza. No one had to comment that Chris, who was serving it, could have watched how the judges took the dishes from the earlier trays and positioned the poisoned pizza so it would be the only one left when he held out the tray to Edwina.

No one needed to say anything, because the door opened and Sheriff Wescott walked in.

S
HERIFF
W
ESCOTT STOOD IN
the doorway of Steelhead Lodge, hands on hips, surveying the room. He looked like a sheriff of the Old West, as if he’d ridden in from the range after routing Black Bart, rather than having driven here from his new metal-and-glass sheriff’s department building on the outskirts of Guerneville. He was not yet middle-aged, but his skin looked weathered, his light brown hair held a wiry curl, as did his mustache. At times I had seen his blue eyes sparkle and soften all his features. But this was not one of those times. Tonight, the tan of his uniform seemed to mesh with the tan of his hair. He looked all Government Issue.