From Herring to Eternity (7 page)

We finished our conversation as Tippi finished her second cup of coffee and a toasted bagel. When she left—with a couple of crullers and a refill of her coffee in a “to go” cup—Thom was filling napkin holders. My churchgoing manager was still scowling.

“Did you hear, Nash? Did you
see
? That girl was not even ashamed to tell us how she earned her living!”

“At least she’s not on the dole,” I said.

“You’re defending her?”

“I’m not condemning her,” I said. “Didn’t you ever wonder how Lippy survived, even with as little as he had? Why he ordered the least expensive item on the menu? Why he haggled over the price with me?”

“I figured he made do,” she said. “Dollars and coins in his trumpet case, a few weddings and such.”

I nodded toward the front door. “That’s how he survived,” I said. “She sent him money. She had to. She makes her way in life, no apologies. I admire that.”

Thom looked at me with a clergyman’s worried eyes set in the big, unhappy frown of a circus clown. “Lady, you are consortin’ with witches and praisin’ hookers. I just don’t know.”

“It takes all kinds to make a world,” I said. “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

“Go and sin no more,” she replied.

“Get thee forth—,” I started, thinking I had something but didn’t. “Well, it’s another day in the neighborhood,” I said.

Shaking her head, Thom opened the door for our first paying customers.

One of them was not Detective Grant Daniels. He came in; he just didn’t order anything.

It was just starting to get busy and I was helping shred hash browns in the kitchen. I invited him to talk while I peeled potatoes. He leaned against the butcher block table, his face turned toward me so Newt couldn’t hear at the grill—with the overhead fan on, he couldn’t hear much of anything—but Grant was a cautious one.

“I got the medical examiner’s report this morning,” he told me. “Lippy was poisoned.”

I stopped peeling. My first thought wasn’t for poor Lippy. It was that line of Lady Macbeth’s when she learns that King Duncan has been murdered:
What, in our house?
Why else would Grant be telling me?

“Another investigation,” I said sullenly.

“I’m sorry, Nash.”

“You’re sure it was my food? What about the horn?” I asked. “The mouthpiece—”

“The instrument itself tested clean,” he said. “There was a trace of toxin but that was on the mouthpiece, in Lippy’s saliva.”

“What kind of toxin?” I asked, with a sick feeling, thinking of what Lippy had eaten.

“Mercury,” he replied. “Anita Fong Chan of the health department is on her way to confiscate your herring. I used a little influence, convinced her to come around back so as not to alarm diners. You’re going to have to meet her here. And take the herring off the menu, obviously.”

“Of course.” Fortunately, that wasn’t one of my big sellers. “Can’t mercury be inhaled?” I asked. “Wasn’t that a problem in some factory a couple of years—”

“It showed up in the gastrointestinal tract, not the lungs. It was in the undigested pieces in his stomach.”

Crap
, I thought. “So we’re talking a mega-helping rather than cumulative?”

“Yes and no,” Grant said. “Because Lippy ate a lot of seafood—most of which he caught himself on the Cumberland River—the ME said his mercury levels would already have been seriously elevated. All it took was one big hit to put him over.”

“Someone might have known that, right?” I said. “Lippy could have been targeted for some reason. It wasn’t necessarily bad when we served it.”

“Possibly—”

“Who even
uses
mercury?” I asked. “Thermometer makers?”

“Dentists, lab researchers, any number of manufacturers,” he said. “It’s used in antiseptics, switches, light bulbs—but anyone can buy it. Which is why—if you’re done interrogating me—”

“Sorry,” I said.

“I expected it,” he said. “But that’s why I need a list of everyone you or the staff can remember around Lippy yesterday as well as anyone else who ordered the herring since this shipment arrived. We need to test those individuals, rule out an accidental dosing of several people
or
a serial killer.”

“Grant, it was breakfast rush. We were busy. Also, we write our checks out the old-fashioned way, on a green pad, and a quarter of our customers pay cash—”

“I know. Match them as best you can and get me the receipts. I’ll have a court order for them by ten, just to keep the paperwork in order. Oh, and—does the herring arrive prepared or just as fish?”

“I don’t sell Mc
Gehakte
.”

Grant was confused.

“This isn’t McDonald’s. Nothing comes pre-chopped or premade. It arrives as semifrozen fish, on ice, in cardboard boxes lined with wax paper. I do all the work and mercury definitely is not an ingredient. I’ve never even seen the stuff, except in those old games where you had to maneuver the little silver blob through a maze.”

Grant—who hadn’t recovered from the McDonald’s crack—looked at me as if I’d just described an alien abduction.

“The answer is no.” I got back on point. “I’m the one and only middleman between fish and plate.”

“All right. I’ll want a statement about your prep procedures. I can get that later.”

I nodded, thanked him. “Lippy said the herring was ‘uncommonly tasty,’” I told him. “Would he have said that if it was poisoned?”

“I’m told that mercury doesn’t really have a taste,” Grant said. “He might not have noticed.”

“But it has a consistency,” I said. “I drain the oil when I cut the fish—he might have noticed it was greasier.”

“Unfortunately, we can’t ask him,” Grant said. “And since
I’m
not a fish eater, I wouldn’t know about that.” Grant held my eyes for a moment longer with a you-remember-that-don’t-you? look.

He was right. When we’d ordered pizza in, I had to pick his anchovies off.

Grant told me to do nothing on my own, no tasting or repackaging, just point the health inspector in the direction of the herring and let her retrieve and remove it. She would have to check the surrounding area of the industrial-size refrigerator, above and below the plastic container, for contamination.

He left by the front door a few minutes before Anita Fong Chan arrived at the back. I had met her twice before on her semiannual visits. She was a petite woman with an air of authority that stopped just short of arrogance. She was someone that everyone in my business had to please, and please politely and thoroughly. Virtually every word from her mouth sounded like “open sesame.”

I opened the door. Then it was, “Open the refrigerator, please.” “Don’t open the container.” “Open the files from Fishy in Tennessee and give me the order.” “Close the door behind me.” She asked if the original fish packaging was still in the Dumpster. I told her it was not. She asked me to open
that
so she could see. We went out back and I raised the heavy lid. She stood on tiptoes and looked in. Satisfied, she left. The transfer of all-things herring lasted less than five minutes.

I went back inside and told Newt to holler if he really got backed up. I said I’d be in my office.

“I’m guessing there’s something
fishy
going on,” my young cook said from over the hissing grill.

I didn’t bother responding. I just shut the door, opened the expanding brown folder marked for that week, and started pulling the credit card and order slips from the last three days. And, alone with my thoughts as I did the rote work, I got angry at myself again for ever having dated that thoughtful but empty trench coat.

Chapter 7

Something Tippi had said stayed with me as I stopped stapling receipts to checks long enough to help out with the breakfast rush. It was what Lippy had told her: “
It’s a real treasure, sis
.”

Lippy had bought the trumpet in a place where seafarers sold their used wares. What if the trumpet had belonged to a sailor? And what if that hypothetical sailor had left an equally hypothetical “something” in the case, like a deed or a rare document like William Bligh’s map of Tahiti or even a treasure map? It was possible. And that would make Robert Barron, who dined next to Lippy at least on the day of the murder, a potential suspect.

There were a lot of hypotheticals in that hypothesis, along with: if Barron were guilty, couldn’t he have megadosed Lippy somehow—in his water, for example—knowing that our salted, smoked, marinated, and creamed Baltic delicacy would be blamed? I checked online: mercury was water soluble. The water could have mixed the mercury into the fish once they both hit his stomach.

I’m sure the ME considered that
, I told myself. And it might not matter much. The idea was to find out who could have given Lippy the fatal dose, whatever the medium.

Which brought me back to Barron. Sitting near him, Lippy had seemed unusually protective of the trumpet case. Was it because he was suspicious of Barron or because of the treasure Lippy had mentioned to his sister? Should I simply put him on the list for Grant or talk to him myself?

That thought brought back the taste of the banana I’d eaten. I’d put him on the list.

I wondered if the witches could help. Or are psychics the only cuckoo bloodhounds who chase killers using objects like a shoe or a Kleenex
?

That’s not fair
, I told myself. Neither was another homicide involving my deli. Maybe it was time to draw some kind of imaginary line in the karmic sand. Like chicken soup, it couldn’t hurt.

It wasn’t until after lunch that I’d managed to talk to all the staff about who they could recall having seen around Lippy yesterday.

“Didn’t we already do this?” A.J. complained. “I told Detective Daniels everything I could remember.”

“Remember harder” was all I had to say.

I didn’t tell her or anyone else the latest. I didn’t need more gawkers coming to a murder site the way they did when my bread delivery guy was butchered out back—or, worse, shunning the place because they were afraid of being poisoned.

With some arm and brain twisting, A.J., Raylene, Luke, Thom, and I came up with seven counter names. In addition to Robert Barron, we had mail carrier Nicolette Hopkins, bus driver Jackie and her auto mechanic girlfriend, Leigh—Thom was as uncomfortable with them holding hands as she was with women who had body parts tattooed on their faces—bank teller Edgar Ward, advertising executive Ron Plummer, who handled our very modest account, and the CEO of Cotton Saint Tunes, whose name was Fly Saucer. Today he was on his iPad, but Mr. Saucer usually played his iPod too loud and had to be asked to turn it down. It was my belief that he did that on purpose because he liked Raylene. He made it a kind of gag to write his number on things for her: a napkin, a place mat, her apron, his business card. In his defense, the lady was attractive and had zero musical ability; a music business exec could be sure she wasn’t trying to get ahead by dating him. And, I guess, at some point, even some men get tired of a succession of one-nighters.

Some
. Not all. Not
most.
But maybe Fly was one of them.

Unfortunately for Fly, she already had a beau: FM talk show host Michael Hunn, who I had heard but never met. I don’t think Raylene was trying to keep him from us, it’s just that his waking hours coincided with our sleep time. I lived in fear of the day my ace server opted to set her clock by his.

I added the staff to the list, myself included, not because I thought any of us would have poisoned Lippy, but I knew that if Grant asked—and he would—I’d be especially unhappy with him. I e-mailed the list to him so he wouldn’t have to stop by. It wasn’t just a courtesy; I wasn’t entirely sure he had accepted the breakup and I didn’t want to do anything that would allow him an opening, like a late in the day drive-by that included the phrase, “I haven’t eaten yet—wanna grab something?”

Some days fly by, others drag; this one wriggled. I was fine one moment, distracted the next—by Lippy’s death, by the still-evolving plan to turn my basement into a Wiccan temple, by customers who seemed unusually needy, and by snarling inside at Grant and Robert “You People” Barron. I knew they were just convenient targets for my general frustration, but I didn’t care. They deserved it.

I was in my car and headed home at dusk on Nolensville Road when a motorcycle passed me, too fast and too close. Swinging in front of me, the back tire spit a cloud of dirt and pebbles at my windshield. Through the tawny haze, I saw it was a Yamaha, not a Harley, so I didn’t feel my life was in danger as I jammed on the gas and headed after it. The biker, too, was a case of transference, but once again I didn’t care. I needed to race something out of me and the Wild One was it.

The rider turned onto Edmondson, which happened to be the way I was going. We were both doing fifty as we passed Wentworth Caldwell Senior Park. The bike stayed close to the shoulder, spitting more sand and gravel back at me, so I was forced to keep my distance. It was a clever tactic, but doomed; they’d be pulling over somewhere, and I’d be pulling up behind them with a passenger’s seat tire iron and glove compartment can of mace in my hands. A single lady, and a New Yorker, I never left home without protection.

God was with me as the bike turned onto Bonerwood. I knew the road, I knew the dips, I knew the turns. I knew when I could pull to the left and avoid the barrage. I closed the gap from three car lengths to one. My house was coming up on the left, but I was going to . . .

. . . pull right into the driveway, just after the Yamaha.

I was braking while the driver—a hefty woman with a leather jacket, leather pants, and long gray hair—was just pulling off her helmet.

“That was exhilarating!” she said, turning toward me as I got out. “I’m Sally Biglake.”

“You’re also a reckless driver,” I said.

“Always,” she agreed. “Either the gods are with you or they are not. If they are not, you can just as easily die walking to the mailbox as you can speeding on a motorcycle.”

“I’m not sure statistics would bear you out,” I said.