Murder Most Persuasive

doors.

I wondered if the Ritz could use that as a marketing tool: You might not be able to get police protection, but you can always get a room at the Ritz.

Chapter 25

It was, perhaps, one of those cases in which advice is good or bad only as the event decides.

—Persuasion

After all of our statements had been taken, Joe and Ann talked privately for a while, then he left for St. Michaels, where he lived. I don’t know what Joe said, but whatever it was it seemed to agree with Ann. Despite the hellish evening we’d had, her face was oddly peaceful.

The rest of us returned to Uncle Marty’s house. We were tired, starved, and in shock. Laura was back at the house, having already returned from driving Nana back to St. Michaels. Both were scheduled to give their statements to the police at a later time.

Laura had thoughtfully set out a buffet of steak sandwiches, salad, and iced coffee for us in the kitchen and we gratefully fell upon it, spending the next several minutes eating in that quiet hurried manner of people who are famished. Laura wisely refrained from asking us questions until we’d finished. Once done, however, she lost no time.

“What happened?” she asked, posing the question that was both the simplest and most complicated.

Miles shook his head. His face seemed to have aged ten years since this morning. “I wish I knew. Apparently, she was poisoned. Some toxic flower or something…”

“Lily of the valley,” Kit provided authoritatively.

Miles nodded. “Right. Lily of the valley. The police think that it was in her drink.”

“Is she okay?” asked Laura.

“She’s in pretty bad shape,” Miles said. “But the doctors seem cautiously hopeful that she’ll pull through.”

“But how could this have happened?”

Miles gave a rueful smile. “Well, that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. The police seem to think that it was deliberate. Unfortunately, her friend Julian didn’t help matters much. First he yammered on about the family’s opposition to his handling the investments. Then he started in about Bonnie’s suspicions about Marty’s death and a possible connection between that and Michael’s murder. For his final act, he completely flipped out and claimed that he was the intended victim.”

“Wait,” said Laura. “Why did he think he was the intended victim?”

“Because the glass that held the poison was in front of his seat,” Kit again provided in a helpful manner. If you call a helpful manner one in which the person speaks slowly and condescendingly.

I don’t, but you might.

“But,” said Aunt Winnie, “as I pointed out to him, he’d just switched seats with Bonnie so it was her drink that was in front of him, not his.”

“Not that that mattered, of course,” continued Miles. “The little twit carried on as if his life was in imminent danger. He went so far as to demand police protection.”

“Police protection! From whom?”

“From us, apparently.”

“Did he get it?” asked Laura, aghast.

Miles shook his head. “No,” he said, with a ghost of a smile. “He got a room at the Ritz.”

Laura fell silent as she absorbed all this information. “But honestly,” she said after a moment, “why could anyone want to poison Bonnie? It doesn’t make sense.”

“It may not make sense,” said Aunt Winnie, “but it appears to have been what happened. There was poison in her drink. And only in her drink. It’s not the sort of poison that commonly finds its way into a martini.”

“Not the way I make them, anyway,” added Reggie. Although her words sounded flip, we could see she was genuinely upset at the potential implication of her having made Bonnie’s drink.

Aunt Winnie reached out and patted Reggie’s hand. “No one thinks for a minute that you had anything to do with this, Reggie.”

“The police do,” Reggie muttered.

“Then the police are wrong,” Aunt Winnie said loyally.

“Don’t forget, I’m the one who brought them out,” said Miles. “I’m sure that didn’t go unnoticed by the police.”

“So that brings us back again to the question of how the poison did get in her drink,” said Kit. “We need to think this through.” I shot her a look. Could she be a bigger idiot? Obviously, someone who was at the cookout tried to poison Bonnie. Correction—someone at the cookout did poison Bonnie. Try as we might, we couldn’t ignore the fact that at the very least someone had tried to hurt Bonnie. At the very worst, kill her. And the chances were pretty high that that person was still here with us now.

And yet Kit kept on yapping away, oblivious.

“Do you think there could be anything to what Bonnie said about Uncle Marty?” Kit asked.

Several voices spoke at once. “Absolutely not!” “Kit, he was sick for years!” “Don’t be ridiculous!” “Kit, for the love of God, use your head for once!” (Okay, this last one was me.)

“Okay, okay!” Kit said, holding her hands up in defense. “It was just a question. Wasn’t it Poirot who said that you need to dismiss every option, and the one that remains, no matter how absurd, is the solution?”

“No, Kit, that was Sherlock Holmes. And I hate to point this out to you, but it was also fiction,” I said.

Kit glared at me. “I am only trying to help. Poor Bonnie is lying in a hospital bed having had her stomach pumped after poison ended up in her drink!”

No one spoke. People shifted uneasily in their seats and glanced about furtively as if looking for a way to escape. Unfortunately, it was a common side effect of having Kit around.

“What about Julian?” I asked.

“What about Julian?” replied Frances.

“Well, do we know if Bonnie has given him the money for this investment yet?”

Around me everyone shook their heads.

“Does it matter?” asked Laura.

“It might,” I said. “If Julian already has the money, he might be ready to move on.”

“You mean Julian might have poisoned Bonnie because he’d already gotten the money?” asked Laura.

“It’s a possibility,” I said.

“So his whole freak-out at the hospital was just a show?” asked Reggie.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just a theory. But if it were the case, his freak-out gave him a nice reason for leaving the house and moving to a hotel.”

“From where he might be able to leave unnoticed,” added Frances.

I nodded. Frances looked thoughtful. “I wonder,” was all she said.

Around me, people began to discuss this possibility. I did not participate. Mainly because I didn’t really believe it was a viable option. I merely said it to defuse the tension that Kit had created. While Julian was clearly a con artist, he didn’t strike me as a murderer. No doubt he’d made a lucrative career out of swindling daffy middle- aged women out of their money. That he was a criminal, I was sure, but I would bet he was of the wormy cowardly variety rather than the hardened violent type.

I thought about Bonnie’s poisoning. Reggie had made the drinks and Miles had brought them out. Both freely admitted as much. Could either of them have really poisoned the drink? And, if so, why? So much depended on why someone tried to kill Bonnie. Was it because of Michael’s murder, or because she was planning to give Julian the money?