Tea Cups & Tiger Claws (24 page)

Important people kill each other with poison. Commoners, on the other hand, face off in seedy beer joints and try to snuff out each other with sweaty, commingled bodies or with wide-eyed knife fights or with guns fired in front of two or three witnesses and heard by even more. Their unrefined brains care more about indulging animal passions than exerting the brain power needed to achieve real solutions to their problems. Unfortunately, the wench who shoots her cheating husband as he sleeps, and the rogue who strangles the other rogue who insulted his football team, get about two minutes of satisfaction before they trip all over themselves all the way to prison. Yes, it’s true, commoners have occasionally tried their hands at poison, just as a fair number of desperate noblemen have resorted to unsheathed daggers in any number of royal palaces, but throughout all recorded history, there has been only one continuously revered alternate pathway to power for the rich and influential: poison.

Poison is discreet. No one has to witness the gruesome plunge of a knife or hear the loud report of a gun
. Poison is elite. From the Borgias, to the De’ Medicis, to the palaces of France and England, the poisoned goblet has been served by the most respected families and in the most refined homes known to mankind. But most of all, poison is civil, even convivial. In what other deadly enterprise do adversaries shower so much affection upon each other? They uncork fine wine and toast each other’s health, paying no heed to the faint taste of bitter almond in one of the glasses. They dine together, enjoying hardy companionship and hardy food that also happens to be hardily spiced. They give thoughtful gifts such as kidskin riding gloves that cause the hands to tingle the moment they are put on.

A smile, a kiss, a chocolate truffle and then some momentary writhing on the floor
; there just isn’t a friendlier way to kill.

Of course the kind of poison chosen and the way it’s administered say a great deal about the poisoner. Adder venom
on a blow dart is exotically lethal and shows that the plotter is resolute and mindful of their place in society. Dart frog mucus added to skin lotion sends a thoughtful message of deadly elegance. There are times, though, when the administrator has no choice but to accept the means at hand. If one resorts to common foxglove poisoning, it should not necessarily result in a blemish on one’s reputation. As long as it doesn’t happen often. If one has time constraints, or accessibility issues, and settles for an empty capsule filled with the extracted poison from five foxglove leafs and then places that capsule in a half full bottle of prescription medication, allowances should be made. And if the recipient is already on a medication derived from foxglove, which will make the death look like an accidental overdose, then it is even more acceptable.

~~~

Inside a darkened room on the top floor of Park Royale Hotel, a lady sat transfixed before her looking glass. It differed in appearance from other magic mirrors and looked instead like a vast plate glass window, but when she pulled her chair up close, it revealed everything she needed to know. She didn’t ask to see the secret pathway to power or riches, and she didn’t care to know the fairest maiden in the land. She simply wanted to gaze upon the object of her desire, which she’d been doing with scarcely a blink for the last six hours.

The lights
had been left on at Sunny Slope Manor, and it sparkled like a priceless jewel in the cold, dark January night. The lady thought it a fitting tribute to her victory, albeit an unwitting one; most likely the lights had been left on because the servants had been too busy and distracted to turn them off. The grand house had been turned upside-down because Judith Newfield had just finished dying. The lady at the glass knew it because she had caused the death. Some of the same light that now sparkled down on her, also sparkled down on the dead body of her enemy.

Enemies

They had lost the war and didn’t know it. On the night of the most important battle, for the life of Judith Newfield, the enemies on the hill had slumbered peacefully in their European featherbeds. The next morning they enjoyed orange marmalade on toast, two minute eggs, and rumors delivered by telephone of her sudden death. These rumors, mixed with some thin details about an accidental overdose of heart medication, flowed from mansion to mansion, supplemented in the following days by several special editions of the Prospect Park Tribune. And that’s about as far as it went. Rumors, newspapers, and very little in the way of suspicion.

They didn’t understand.
They didn’t see the little cracks starting to form. And they didn’t realize that Dorthea intended to get their complete attention because a self-satisfied, secret victory didn’t interest her. It had to have teeth and look like the triumph she’d been dreaming about for the last forty years.

~~~

The dining room made more money for Prospect Park Country Club than the café, bar, and golf course combined. And everyone knew the reason for its success: Frank Izzo. Short and square, like a butcher block with legs, he’d found favor with the good people on the hill and it showed by the way they flocked to his enchanted kingdom six nights a week. He also happened to be grossly overpaid, a fact that perpetually irked the board of directors, and one that also had no known remedy; Izzo, as most people knew him, had become indispensable, and his bloated salary came with the deal whether the directors liked it or not. 

He’d started at the country club at age thirteen when his father, a
carpenter who’d worked in the area for many years, got him a job washing dishes at the café. Izzo quickly demonstrated a knack for the restaurant business and steadily worked his way up until becoming café manager at the young age of nineteen. He also had a knack for making money. The day he got promoted he told the general manager about an idea he had to increase profit by replacing some of the items on the menu and by adding tables to the patio above the tennis courts. He’d watched for years as the same wasteful routine played out every day of the year: the lunch crowd moved into the café’s limited number of tables and didn’t budge, not because they had all day to waste, but because the food took too long to prepare. Everyone knew you either got a table at eleven in the morning or you ate down the hill at State Street Lodge or Marcel de Gabrias.

Young Frank Izzo knew the answer: ditch the fluffy
soufflés and fancy cream sauces and fill the café’s tables as many times in a day as possible.

Needless to say, this idea didn’t exactly
fall in line with the way things worked at the country club, but his boss seemed to like the enthusiasm, not to mention the prospects of a bigger year-end bonus. Without going out on a limb, he approved the extra tables and a single change to the menu—as a test. Izzo dropped the filet of sole, with blanched vegetables in hollandaise and replaced it with the Reuben sandwich and French fries. It quickly became the most popular item on the menu, which convinced the boss to adopt some of Izzo’s other ideas. Profits rose steadily over the next few years.

In
1965 the club needed to find a new manager for the dining room. Nobody considered Izzo. He fit in well enough at the café, and he’d had some good ideas, but he didn’t belong in the dining room. Too unorthodox. Too ethnic. Izzo hounded the general manager just the same and eventually wore him down. In the interview with the directors, however, Izzo ran into a row of seven polite but bored looking faces, like people doing a good deed that also happened to be somewhat tedious. They didn’t expect much from him, other than, perhaps, an opinion that the dining room needed to be run more like the café. He said just the opposite and saw just a bit of the boredom fall from their faces. In order to make the dining room more successful, he argued, the members had to be kept at their tables for as long as possible, running up their tabs with a never ending parade of culinary temptations. The dining room had tremendous strengths that needed to be utilized, chief among these being the small army of elite chefs who worked there. Unlike any restaurant in the county, these chefs had the ability to repeatedly create masterpieces at every table in the room, six nights a week. In order to do this, the menu needed to be changed from a fancy looking order form to a guide that helped the members navigate from one artistic course to another and another. Champagne and latte worked fine as bookends, but the rest of the library—the appetizers and salads and soups and pastas and exotic main dishes and fruits and cheeses—needed to be expanded and refined and offered to the members in a way that encouraged them to create rather than just eat. And of course the wine cellar needed to be able to accommodate every course of the meal, and the dessert cart had to make a fat man cry.

At the end of the interview
, Izzo didn’t see a bored face in the room. They looked impressed. And hungry. But he hadn’t finished. In exchange for a regular salary, he offhandedly volunteered to accept a small percentage of the profits, somewhere in the neighborhood of ten percent. He saw bright eyes and suppressed smiles. These men, like many of the longtime hilltop residents, had inherited their fortunes, but, more importantly, had mastered the art of keeping it. Money flowed all around them, but it rarely flowed where they didn’t want it. In its very best year since the formation of the country club in 1928, the dining room had never made a profit of more than $87,000. And the year when it made that much, it had pulled double duty for six weeks when the café got remodeled. Izzo heard the clatter of cerebral calculators as they figured that even if he somehow duplicated the profit of that one unusual year, they would still end up paying him $6,300 less than the salary they had intended to offer.

They
hired him on the spot, shook hands all around, and looked quite pleased.

Three
years later his paycheck had become a burr in their backsides. When they asked to restructure the agreement, he refused. And from there it got steadily worse, or better, depending on how you looked at it, as the dining room, which informally came to be called Izzo’s, raked in ever increasing profits and Izzo continued to cash ever larger pay checks.

In front of his upstairs office, next to the railing
that overlooked the dining room below, Izzo had set up a small round café table and chairs where he did paperwork and held informal court with vendors and employees. He’d seen too many lousy managers hide in their offices all day ordering cucumbers and scribbling out weekly schedules instead of pitching in when they were needed. During the rush he made a point of being down with the troops, and at other times he still liked to keep an eye on things, so he’d set up this table which gave him an easy view of everything below.

This is also where he took a short dinner break around nine o’clock each night, as
happened to be the case one Saturday in February of 1972. It had been a good night. He’d told the waiters to push the pheasant—which he’d gotten for a song—and at the time he went up for dinner, thirty or forty of them sat under glass, bathing peacefully in brandy sauce. Everything seemed to be purring right along. Maybe not exactly purring, though. The dining room sometimes got a little louder than that. Since many of the members knew each other, conversations occasionally broke out between tables, especially amongst the younger, less mannered guests. On this particular February night, as he took a last bite of gnocchi with pesto and listened to the muffled jabber down below, something strange happened: silence enveloped the entire dining room. He looked over the rail and saw two waiters, stopped in their tracks, staring at each other, apparently confused by the unusual phenomenon. He stood up and moved against the rail. He saw a busboy self-consciously looking over his shoulder as he cleaned a table. He saw his customers—who’d just been eating, drinking, and talking—now staring with cold, stony faces at a lady who’d just been seated at a table in the middle of the room. Except for the eyes, she looked remarkably like Judith Newfield, who had recently passed away. Maybe that’s why everyone stared. Or maybe she was a movie star. With a beautiful face—for someone in their late forties or early fifties—and an elegant black gown with long chiffon sleeves and a double row of rhinestones around the collar, she certainly looked the part.

“What did you say?”
said a loud voice from a table for two on the patio side of the room. The voice belonged to old Mr. Grant. His wife leaned across the table and whispered loudly to him, but he had bad hearing.  

“Who?” he yelled. She whispered some more.
Then, with bulging eyes, he looked over his shoulder at the beautiful woman. Either he knew the lady or knew something about her because the sight of her caused him to sit up rigidly, like he’d seen a ghost. Then he raised his long, creaky body from the chair, threw his napkin onto the table, and teetered determinedly out of the restaurant, grumbling loudly the whole way. His wife grabbed her purse and followed. The other customers watched this little spectacle to its conclusion. Then their eyes locked back on to the mystery lady in black.

Not five seconds after old man Grant’s exit, a
middle-aged man with a bald head at a table for six also stood up, followed by two other men at the same table, and then by all their wives. They made their exit, heads held high, except for one of the wives who stared at the lady in black.

It was spreading, w
hatever it was.

Across the room from the party of six,
Mrs. Winters, who liked her foie gras with sour dough, stood boldly, while her little husband held his head low and tried to shovel in a few last bites of pheasant. She slid the chair back with her powerful legs and marched from the room. Mr. Winters grabbed her fur stole and purse and dutifully trotted after her.

And then the dam broke
and the tables emptied. Like a snaking flow of water, a river of tuxedos and evening gowns flowed from the room. Some sneered as they passed the lady while others turned up their noses. No one said a word. And no one signed their bill either. Frank Izzo didn’t make a dime that night.

The unthinkable had happened in Prospect Park
: Dorthea Railer had joined the country club and her sponsor sheet had been signed by none other than Veronica Newfield. Initially three of the seven board members had threatened to resign over the issue, but in the end everyone came to the inescapable conclusion that while Veronica, who’d just turned eighteen, might’ve been young and misguided, she was also now the sole owner of Castaneda Corporation. Judith Newfield had died. The queen was dead. Long live the queen. They had no choice but to honor Veronica’s request.

~~~

Later that night, as Ernest worked the midnight to eight shift behind the hotel lobby counter, he heard the faint chime from Dorthea’s private elevator. He snatched the toy soldiers off the counter and put them back into his pocket. A few seconds later he heard footsteps. He stood up and slid the tall chair toward the back wall. Dorthea didn’t like to see lobby workers sitting, even at three in the morning. She walked briskly and soon emerged from the long hallway that led from her elevator. She looked different. She had a new hairstyle and a new dress. He didn’t like it. Everything she did had a scheme behind it, and she had ten schemes a week. His hands felt cold. He put them into his baggy suit pants pockets.

Ernest didn’t like people. That’s why he worked the midnight shift. He didn’t like talking to them or looking at them. Especially looking at them. Direct eye contact with human beings made him squirm and only happened when he got caught off guard. So he went through life looking out the corners of his eyes.
When Dorthea got close, he pretended to look at the painting on the far side of the lobby but actually watched as she opened the office door to his right. Maybe she just wanted to look at the books, he told himself. But then he heard the swinging door behind him, which led from the office to where he stood at the lobby counter. And he smelled perfume.

“Hello Ernest.”

She stood next to him.

“Yes Dorthea.”

“How old are you, Ernest?”

“Eighteen.”

“Eighteen,” she repeated, “and mature, too. You know, Ernest, many young men your age settle down.”

She had a scheme. He didn’t say
a word.

“They get married and have kids.”

“Why are you telling me these things?”

“Just small talk. That’s all. But I do need you to do something for me the next time Veronica visits.”

He said “no” to Dorthea all the time in his dreams. And in his car. And at the lobby counter at two A.M. He just never said it to her face. “What?” he asked.

“I need you to show Veronica some special attention.”

Pupils firmly wedged into the corners of his eyes, Ernest carefully studied Dorthea’s face. “What exactly do you mean?”

“Well, how should I put it?” she said, as she patted her new hairdo. “The kind of attention a boy pays a girl when he likes her. Do you know how to
do that, Ernest?”

“No. I don’t. Besides,
Veronica and I hate each other.”

“That doesn’t matter. I say nice things to people I hate all the time. All you have to do is smile at her, tell her she looks good, and then ask her out on a date. That’s it.”

“On a date! Are you crazy? I wouldn’t do that in a million years!” The words poured out before he had a chance to stop them, a major error on his part. Now he fully expected to pay the price. But she still looked calm. The claws hadn’t come out. She stepped closer and stared intently at his face. He stood rigidly still, not sure what she might be looking at, though he knew he wasn’t much to look at in general—she told him so all the time. He looked like a tall bag of bones with dark circles under his eyes, hollow cheeks, a little girl’s nose, and pasty skin. Never fond of anything plain, even insults, she once said he looked like he came from the bottom rung of a bad refugee camp.