The Pot Thief Who Studied D. H. Lawrence Page 10

  “How else would the shaver get into the tub?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” said Saunders, “he slipped while he was shaving and fell into the tub with the shaver in his hand.”

  Glover pointed out that the mirror and lavatory were four feet away from the tub, and there was no way you could fall from there and end up completely in the tub.“Maybe he had already finished his bath, dried off with the towel, went over to drain the water out, slipped at that point and still had the shaver in his hand,” said Saunders.

  “That’s the second reason why I think he was murdered,” I said. “He didn’t take a bath.” I looked around at the group. “Any of you have hot water this morning?” They all shook their heads. “When you discover there’s no hot water, you either take a very quick shower or just a sponge bath. Nobody would submerge himself in an icy bath.”

  “Maybe he was in that polar bear club,” said Susannah. She and I started to laugh but stifled it when we saw the looks we were getting from the others.

  “A tub full of icy water. A shaver in the tub. I don’t say it adds up to murder,” said Saunders, “but it does make you wonder.”

  “There’s something else, isn’t there?” Glover asked me.

  “There is,” I said. “Rich shaved with a blade.”

  28

  Maria gave each of us a paper plate with two pieces of cheese, three crackers, and a piece of fruit, telling us we needed to ration the remaining food. Just the mention of the word ‘ration’ made me hungry.

  I had explained that I saw shaving nicks on Rich that could be made only by a regular razor and that his toiletry bag contained disposable razors, shaving cream, and a septic pencil. The topic had been roundly discussed by the group and had divided us into two factions. Those who favored my murder theory included Susannah (whether out of reason or out of loyalty I can’t say), Betty Shanile, Srinivasa Patel, Robert Saunders, Howard Glover, and Carl Wron.

  Those who thought it possible that Rich used both an electric shaver and a disposable razor and that the murder theory was far-fetched included Charles Winant, Teodoro Vasquez, Don Canon, and Chauncey Benthrop.

  Carla Glain said she had no opinion on the matter and didn’t really care whether Rich had been murdered, committed suicide, or died of natural causes. Maria Salazar and Adele the Serving Wench were preparing the food during this discussion, so we didn’t know where they stood.

  One thing everyone finally agreed on was that we were going to be stuck here for a while, and we had to move Rich’s body, so despite some expressions of disgust and even horror, Howard Glover lifted the body out of the tub, Carl Wron draped a sheet over it, and Glover deposited it in the walk-in freezer. During this process, they discovered a nasty discolored spot on the back of Rich’s head. The adherents of my murder theory took this as evidence of a fatal blow. The skeptics thought Rich must have hit his head when he fell into the tub.

  Agatha Cruz had still not emerged from her room, and I was beginning to worry about her, so I asked Don if maybe we should check on her, and he dispatched Adele the Serving Wench to do so.

  “Typical,” said Carla Glain. “Ask a man to do something and he immediately assigns the work to a woman.”

  Don wisely refrained from being drawn into debate.

  After depositing Fred Rich in the walk-in freezer, Carl Wron and Howard Glover dragged the elk carcass outside through the service entrance at the back of the kitchen and were doing God knows what to it. It wasn’t really a carcass as Maria had described it, more of a side of beef except instead of the two legs being cut off at the joint as they are in a normal butchering operation, they were intact. And of course it wasn’t a side of beef because it was elk. Maria knew that from the hooves.

  Then we heard an engine start up, and I wondered if someone was foolish enough to try to drive away through the snow. The engine revved up and then slowed down and then revved up again. Maria could see us all looking perplexed, so she explained that Carl had a chainsaw in his pickup, and he and Howard were using it to cut up the elk. If that didn’t work, they had taken along an ax as well. When the noise of the chainsaw finally stopped, I heard a series of muffled thuds. That went on for about half an hour while I tried without success not to picture what a side of elk looks like after being worked over with a chainsaw and an ax.

  My interest in dinner lessened considerably.

  Cruz finally emerged looking somewhat the worse for wear. Her make-up was even worse than when I had met her last night. There was powder on her blouse. Her glasses were so greasy that I wondered how she could see. But her hair was almost perfect. Have you ever noticed the obsession older ladies seem to have with their hair? Hers was not quite blue, but it was a shade of silver tending in that direction.

  We were scattered around the main room, and everyone looked up and fell silent when she entered. She seemed self-conscious as the center of attention and eased down into a chair at the nearest table.

  “Adele told me about poor Mr. Rich,” she said to no one in particular.

  I took a glass of water to her and sat down across the table from her. “Did you know Mr. Rich before you came to this event?”

  She shook her head.

  “What brought you here?”

  “I’m a university donor.”

  “So I understand. But why did you accept their invitation for a weekend at the Ranch?”

  She looked up at me as if it were an unusual or difficult question. “I didn’t have anything else to do.”

  She looked like one of those ladies you read about from time to time who wear old clothes, live in a one-room apartment amidst stacks of neatly folded grocery bags, and leave a million dollars to their cats when they die.

  She declined my offer to get her some food, and I went to my room to get some rest. Last night’s hike through the snow and the lack of sleep were getting to me. I needed a nap.

  I was just reclining when Susannah came in. I offered her the bed, but she said she didn’t come in to rest. She wanted to talk to me.

  “Did she admit anything?” she asked.

  “Did who admit anything?”

  “Agatha Cruz. She has to be the prime suspect, Hubie.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “She’s the only one without an alibi. All the rest of us were at your lecture. So the only one who could have clobbered Rich from behind with a blunt instrument was Agatha Cruz.”

  “You’re forgetting Adele the Serving Wench. She wasn’t at the lecture either.”

  “It’s not nice to call her a wench, Hubie. I’m a waitperson, and I wouldn’t want to be called a wench.”

  “‘Wench’ isn’t a description of her job, Suze. It’s a description of how she does it.”

  “Oh. Well, she couldn’t have murdered Rich because the person who finds the body is never the murderer unless it’s a locked-room mystery, and Rich wasn’t locked in his room alone.”

  Susannah often befuddles me but in an enjoyable way, if that makes any sense. So I asked why the person who discovers the body can be the murderer in a locked-room mystery.

  “Not in all of them. Just in one particular type. There are more solutions than you might think. There are the ones where the murderer was in the room all along except cleverly hidden. There’s the old standby of using a wire or a magnet or something to lock the door from the outside so that when the victim is found it appears he had locked himself in. There’s the discovery of a secret passage into the room.” She shook her head in disgust. “I never liked those, Hubie. It seems like cheating to throw in another way into a locked room. But the best solutions are more creative, and one of those is that the victim in the locked room isn’t really dead. The people who find him break down the door and see him on the floor. But what they don’t know is he isn’t dead – he’s just unconscious. One member of the group – maybe even a policeman – bends over the victim as if to check what happened and kills him, maybe with a quick injection the others don’t see.”

>   I wondered if that could have been the case with Fred Rich. Was he alive when we heard the scream? Don Canon got there first, but he didn’t do it because I was right behind him and he didn’t touch Rich or the tub, and after that there were so many people around that I didn’t see how one of them... But Howard Glover had reached into the water. Could he have reached under an unconscious Fred Rich and delivered a fatal blow? He’s a big, powerful football player, and...

  And then I came to my senses and said, “I’ve forgotten what this has to do with Fred Rich.”

  “His room wasn’t locked,” she reminded me.

  “Oh, right. Well, it doesn’t matter anyway because no one has an alibi.”

  “But we were all at your lecture.”

  “We were at the lecture when he was found, Suze. But we don’t know where we were when he was killed because we don’t know when that was.”

  “But it has to be just before he was found, doesn’t it?”

  “He had that room by himself. He could have been killed anytime after we all turned in last night. He was discovered during my lecture only because that was when Adele the Serv... that was when Adele was making her rounds cleaning the rooms.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have put him in the freezer, Hubie. Now the police won’t be able to establish the time of death.”

  I glanced at her and waited.

  “Oh, right,” she said. “He was found in a tub of icy water, so it doesn’t matter.”Then she shivered. “Do you think we’re in any danger, Hubie?”

  “I don’t see why we should be. Whoever killed Fred Rich must have had a reason. We don’t have any connection to anyone here, so I don’t think we have any reason to be worried.”

  “Good, because I would really hate to be the next victim.”

  “There won’t be a next victim, Suze. Somebody wanted Fred Rich dead, and he killed him. There’s no reason for him to kill anyone else.”

  “Maybe there was a witness. That’s pretty common, Hubie, for a witness to be the second victim.”

  “If there was a witness, I’m sure he would have come forward immediately.”

  “Not if he were blackmailing the murderer.”

  I told her she was reading too many murder mysteries and that I really needed a nap. She returned to the big room and I went to sleep.

  29

  I enjoyed a sound sleep, pushed no sleds, and awoke to a heavenly scent wafting from the kitchen.

  I visited the bathroom down the hall to give my face an icy wash and my teeth an icy brush and went into the main room where the table was laid for cocktails. Maria had evidently brought enough liquor for the entire weekend her first trip (that had now turned out to be her only trip) and everyone was drinking wine except for Betty who was drinking vodka. I wondered what had happened to the bottle of Old Granddad from last night. It had been half full after my third drink, but I was glad to see a new bottle on the table. Although starvation remained a threat, sobriety did not.

  I poured myself a generous libation and made a toast to the bourbons. The ones from Kentucky, not the ones from Spain. I asked Susannah if she knew what was cooking. She said it was elk, and images of chainsaws and axes popped up on my mental screen, but she told me we were in for a great treat because she had already tasted the sauce.

  “Maria asked all the women to help her prepare supper, but Agatha said she didn’t know how to cook and was still feeling under the weather, Adele must have been off duty and Carla complained that Maria didn’t ask the men, and that left Betty and me as assistants. The guys did a great job of cutting out the rib roast even though the meat was frozen, and Maria put it in the oven on a wire rack over a cookie sheet at low temperature. Then guess what, Hubie. We all put on our warm clothes and went out into the woods and picked juniper berries.”

  “Why,” I asked, “Was someone suffering from respiratory problems?”

  “No. We wanted the juniper berries for cooking not for medicine. Did you know that juniper berries are the main flavor in sauerbraten?”

  “I’ve never eaten sauerbraten that I’m aware of.”

  “How could you eat anything without being aware of it? Anyway, after the elk had been roasting a couple of hours, Maria melted a whole pound of butter in a giant pan and started stirring flour in it. Then when all the flour and butter had been combined and stirred like crazy, she poured in the coffee creamer while we stirred so it wouldn’t lump up. Then she poured the drippings from the cookie sheet into the big pan and we stirred some more. Wow, I never knew how much stirring you have to do. Then guess what she added.”

  “The juniper berries?”

  “Right, but first she put them in a frying pan with no oil or water or anything and heated them up. She showed us how to move the pan around so that all those little purple berries just kept rolling around and didn’t stick to the pan. You should have smelled the scent those berries gave off. It was sweet and sort of acidy at the same time and it sort of smelled like gin except a lot better because I don’t like gin and neither do you, so maybe what it smelled like was the woods on a fresh spring day.”

  I nodded in understanding.

  “Then – wait ‘til you hear this – she poured about a cup of bourbon into the frying pan and set it on fire. The flames shot up and we all jumped back – are my eyebrows singed?”

  I told her they weren’t. And I knew what had happened to the rest of the first bottle of Old Granddad.

  “When the flames died down, we poured the juniper berries into the big pan and started stirring again. It started to thicken too much, so she added a little water, and we stirred some more. Then she poured it through a strainer. There were lumps, Hubie. I hate to say it, as much as we stirred, but there were lumps. But they’re all gone now. Then she turned the oven way up to finish cooking the meat and make sure the outside has a nice crust and the inside is pink and juicy. Which I’m sure is exactly how it came out, but we can’t eat it now because it’s resting. Did you know meat has to rest after it gets cooked?”

  I told her if she had been roasted in an oven for four hours, she’d probably need to rest afterwards, too, and she laughed. I said I’d never seen her so excited about cooking, and she said cooking with Maria had given her a new attitude about it, and now she understood why I like to cook.

  I finished my first bourbon and had just helped myself to a second when Betty and Maria brought in the roast because it took two people to carry it. The ribs protruded from the meat, and I guess it would have been a standing rib roast except for the fact that it was too big to stand up, so maybe it was a reclining rib roast. Whatever it was, it looked and smelled delicious. Glover was enlisted to do the carving, and he slid a long knife with a serrated blade between the ribs, revealing a hot juicy cross section of the loin with each rib. We filed through cafeteria style, and he placed one slice on each plate. They were caveman proportions, and some of the women said they couldn’t eat that much, but he just smiled and said that was how he carved it.

  Maria stood to Glover’s right and drizzled the sauce over the meat. There was no salad. No vegetables. No sides of any kind, not even one of those little red crabapple rings. It was just meat and gravy. And no one complained.

  As we had witnessed the meat being carried in and gone through the line commenting on how good it looked and how delicious it smelled, it seemed to me that a kind of camaraderie was developing among us. Some of it may have been just being stuck together, the misery loves company thing, and some of it may have been that we were drinking, but I think a lot of it was the food and the realization that Maria and Betty and Susannah had done something special for us under unlikely and trying conditions.

  Susannah was seated opposite me at one of the square tables with a chair on each side, and we resisted the temptation to dig in. When everyone had been served, the other two members of the kitchen brigade came to our table, Betty to my right and Maria to my left.

  There had been a lot of chit chat and laughter, but when we all got
seated and started eating, the room fell silent except for the clinking of forks and knives. Hunger is said to be the best sauce, but the juniper sauce was even better, and the elk was cooked to perfection. I’m not a fan of game. I don’t like venison or antelope. But elk is not gamey at all. It’s tender, juicy, and lean. And this was the best elk I had ever tasted, maybe the best meat I had ever tasted. I was giving serious consideration to asking Maria to marry me, but that would have been awkward with Betty sitting there. Besides, Betty was also attractive and nice and closer to my age. But could she cook? Then I remembered Dolly, and decided not to think about women.

  Which immediately proved impossible to do when someone started rubbing a foot playfully against my shins. I couldn’t tell if it was Betty or Maria or even Susannah trying to play a trick on me. I didn’t know where to look, so I pretended nothing was happening.

  Maria noticed the ice had melted in my drink and said she would get me some more from the freezer. When she headed for the kitchen, I figured if the footsy stopped, I would know it had been her, and if not, it was Betty. Or Susannah in a mischievous mood. All the others had finished their meals, pushed back from their tables, and were sitting in silent contentment. A massive log was burning down in the fireplace, and I figured between the warmth on our faces and the meat in our tummies, we would soon all be snoozing.

  If we had, the day’s second blood curdling scream would have awakened us.

  30

  This time it came from the kitchen. We rushed in to see Maria holding open the door to the walk-in freezer and staring in at a naked, frost-covered Charles Winant.

  “Jesus,” said Susannah, “he’s frozen to death.”

  “Schuze was right,” cried Benthrop. “Fred Rich was murdered. And now Charles Winant. Someone is trying to kill us all. We can’t just sit around while he picks us off one by one. We need to do something now.” He looked to Glover with pleading eyes.