“Glad to see the cops are doing their job. Don’t eat any more brownies until more people get here.” He gave me a quizzical X-ray look. I’d blown it. I said, “You see, I’m still a caterer at heart. And I don’t know how you expect me to find out what Laura was holding over Fritz’s head.”
“Well,” said Tom, licking his clown fingers, “you’re going to be a detective, you figure things out. Detect.”
At that moment the Jerk made a grand entrance with the teacher on his arm. He was dressed as a doctor. Not very original. She was dressed as a nurse. Poor thing, I hoped she was well stocked with bandages.
Trixie reappeared from the bathroom, where I assumed she had been either drinking or being sick or both, and for the first time I noticed she was also dressed as a witch. We could have passed as nonidentical twins. Marla swept in, despite the fact that John Richard was here. Maybe that meant she was getting over him. She was dressed as a Las Vegas showgirl, plump but very charming in her net stockings and low-cut leotard. She made a beeline for the food table.
Then, to my shock, came a stocky bald man dressed in black. His gait and swagger gave him away: Fritz Niebold Korman. I heard an explosion of laughter near him, as someone who had apparently asked what he was screamed, “Oh no! Fritz Korman’s dressed as Zorro!”
I surreptitiously began refilling the punch bowl with ginger ale and fruit juice. No one was talking about Vonette, which was probably a good thing. She would pull through, I was sure.
In a little while the guy bow and guacamole were almost gone. The empanadas lay untouched. You never could tell what people were going to eat. I resolved to pay no more attention to the status of the food and drink. I didn’t want to get into more trouble with Schulz, and Hal had treated me rudely enough that I felt justified in not doing any actual serving.
One of the club staff put on an aerobics-class tape and men, women, witches, wizards, doctors, nurses, clowns, and showgirls all began to gyrate enthusiastically. Perhaps, like Pavlov’s dog, they were used to working hard to this music.
“Where’s your date, the cop?” Pomeroy asked when I was munching the last of the guy bow.
I waved my hand. “He’s out there somewhere,” I replied. “I’m not keeping tabs on anything or anyone tonight.”
“Poor Goldilocks,” Pomeroy said, “nothing is ever just right. Why don’t you come dance with a lonely beekeeper?”
The music had turned slow. One of the cool-down songs usually reserved for the end of an aerobics class moaned from the speakers. Some astute staff member lowered the lights and as Pom took me into his arms to start dancing, I noticed that I was feeling anything but cooled down. Just the opposite, in fact.
Pom must have sensed my reaction. He pulled me in a little tighter, and even in the darkened room I could see the Jerk giving me the Evil Eye. Ha! Let him suffer.
“I wish you’d take that mask off,” I whispered to Pomeroy. “Then I could give you a kiss and make my ex- husband feel terrible.”
“Hey, please don’t think of me as a sex object.”
“You know what Laura would have said about that?”
“No,” said Pomeroy.
“She would have said that a beekeeper should make a stinging reply.”
“She had a way with words, didn’t she?” Pomeroy said as he pulled me closer. My heart went
When the music finished he steered me back to the food table as the couples began to disperse to get refreshments.
“What did she have on Fritz Korman, though?” I asked as I ignored my own resolution to do nothing, opened a fresh bottle of fruit juice, and sloshed it into the punch bowl.
He said, “I don’t know. I think maybe it was something from that student of hers.”
The empanadas had disappeared during the last dance. Pomeroy was looking around the room.
He said, “Still don’t see your date, sweets, so you’re going to have to put up with me for a while. Here they come—your ex-husband and his father. Now you can kiss me.” He took off his mask and put it on the floor while I pretended to be busy replenishing brownies.
“I’m not going to eat a thing you fix,” the Jerk said defiantly when I offered him the platter.
Laura Smiley would have said,
Laura Smiley would have said …
Laura Smiley would have said …
I thought of jokes. Laura-type jokes. Why didn’t the gunslinging prosecutor shoot down the defendant? Because he didn’t have enough ammunition. Why did the little girl eat dynamite? Because she wanted to grow bangs. Why dynamite? Why not gunshot? Or some other kind of ammunition?
Ammunition.
I turned away from my ex-husband. Two people dressed as bats began to play racquetball. The ball thwacked against the wall with the same regularity that my mind was making one step, then another. Finally, I had the weapon to shoot the bad guy down. Now all I needed was to load that weapon.
But not yet. After the party, after everyone had gone home.
Tom Schulz was dancing with Marla. I slid up beside him and whispered, “I figured it out. What she had on him. I even think I know where it is. And I have an idea of who might have put the stuff in Fritz’s coffee.”
He shook his clown stomach and said, “At least give me until the end of this song, okay?”
Marla rolled her eyes at me.
What the hey, after all this time and effort. I took a deep breath and strolled back to the snack table where Pomeroy, Fritz, and John Richard were engaged in some uneasy conversation. I still hadn’t kissed Pomeroy, and my chance was at hand.
“Better go get your girlfriend,” I said to the Jerk, “looks as if she’s trying to set up another date.”
And indeed, there was the fiancee on the club’s desk phone. She had a serious look on her face. After a moment she came over and whispered something to John Richard, who turned to his father.
“Dad,” John Richard said. His voice cracked. Fritz turned to look at him.
“Dad,” he said again, “she died.”
Fritz, who was drinking punch, brought his hands up to his face. But then, just as suddenly as John Richard’s announcement had come, Fritz began to cough. It wasn’t just regular coughing, but hacking and wheezing, and he was holding his throat. He slumped to the floor and John Richard knelt down with him.
“Dad!” John Richard bellowed. “What is it?”
“That stuff, that stuff!” he cried, pointing to his punch cup.
I was frozen, statuelike, still in shock from the news of Vonette, but there was John Richard sniffing Fritz’s punch cup and giving me an unholy look of rage. John Richard ducked underneath the food table and just as quickly brought out my bottle of phenol-based industrial-strength disinfectant concentrate. There was my name in black marking pen, as clear as could be next to where I’d written POISON with the telltale skull and crossbones.
John Richard glowered at me. “You!” he screamed. “Again! Schulz! Get over here! Put this bitch under arrest!”
“Now wait a minute,” I murmured, but Schulz was already there talking to John Richard, trying to get him to calm down.
Schulz leaned over the table.
He said, “You didn’t do this, did you?”
I said, “You
Schulz said, “Did you fix this punch and this food?”
I floundered. I looked at my shoes. I said, “I’m not saying a word until I talk to a lawyer.”
When I raised my eyes to Tom Schulz’s silence, his look of disbelief and disappointment was much more difficult to take than John Richard’s anger.
“I didn’t know this was going to happen,” I said fiercely.
“Now you listen,” Schulz said, jabbing the air with his index finger, “you get over and stand in that corner by that broken mirror. I need to call the Poison Center again, get this man down to the hospital. The guys in my department aren’t going to believe this happened while I was here. I don’t believe it myself. But that’s not what I
