The Palace Guard (18 page)

Lydia Ouspenska was in the liveliest possible spirits. She laughed uproariously at everybody’s jokes, especially her own. She took lavish helpings of everything Charles passed. Then suddenly she clapped a hand to her mouth and staggered to her feet.

Charles had her out of the dining room almost before the others realized what was happening. Sarah rose to follow but Porter-Smith beat her to it. “Allow me, Mrs. Kelling. I have my Senior Lifesaving Badge.”

“Thank you. Get her up to my bedroom if you can. And please tell Mariposa, if Charles hasn’t already done so.”

Knowing her efficient staff would cope, Sarah tried to carry on as a good hostess should. Charles was back in time to serve dessert. He reported that the countess appeared to be resting more comfortably and Mariposa was with her. As the group moved back to the library for coffee, though, Sarah thought she’d better scoot up for a peek herself.

Charles, Mariposa, and no doubt the unflappable Mr. Porter-Smith had got the poor countess to bed most efficiently. Somebody had even remembered to turn back the counterpane and lay a clean sheet over the blanket cover before bundling her up in the eiderdown. The flamboyant red gown was folded neatly over the back of Sarah’s low slipper chair, the bangles stacked, on the night stand, the gold sandals set side by side on the rug. Lydia was not only asleep but snoring loudly.

Remembering the woman’s hit-or-miss eating habits, Sarah decided a gastric upset was most likely due to the shock of her system’s trying to ingest a square meal for a change. She closed the door and went downstairs to drink her coffee with an easier mind.

Her boarders were all being terribly understanding about the incident. Mrs. Sorpende was spinning a pathetic picture of the infant countess fleeing the Winter Palace with wolves and Bolsheviki in rabid pursuit, growing up as a fragile waif on the streets of Istanbul or some such exotic place, peddling her jewel-encrusted Easter eggs to buy croissants and brioches. It was a gripping story and Sarah thought it too bad the countess couldn’t be there to hear. Still she was relieved when it came to an end and she could go back to check on the patient. She wasn’t at all surprised when Max Bittersohn came, too.

By now Lydia seemed even deeper in slumber, her breath coming in gasps and gurgles. “Out like a light,” said Max. “She must have loaded up on that wine you sent her while I was waiting downstairs for her to get dressed.”

“What wine?” Sarah asked him. “I only sent food.”

“That’s funny. There was a bottle sitting on the table by her stairway. I took it for granted—” He bent over the sleeping woman, beginning to look anxious.

Sarah ducked under his elbow. “She’s making awfully strange noises. I can’t see her color under all that goop on her face. Bring me the jar of cold cream from the bathroom shelf, will you? And a towel.”

She was feeling for a pulse when Bittersohn dashed back with the cold cream and her very best lace-trimmed guest towel. “Here”—Sarah handed the limp wrist over to him—“you try. I never have any luck with pulses.” She smeared cold cream on the painted cheeks and began to wipe. The bared skin was oddly bluish in color. “Max, this doesn’t look awfully good to me.”

He scowled. “The pulse is so light I can hardly feel it. Ring for Charlie. Tell him to get a cab quick.”

“Do you think there may have been some kind of slow-acting poison in that wine?”

“I don’t know, but after what happened to Brown we’d better not take any chances.”

They bundled the unconscious woman up in blankets and rushed her to the emergency entrance of the hospital. The intern on duty looked at Lydia’s color, listened to her heart, scratched his head, and sent for a resident. The resident probed, rolled up an eyelid, peered, and sent for a laboratory technician. Sarah and Max were bombarded with questions. Where had she been? What had she eaten? What was her medical history? Who was her next of kin?

At the last question Sarah burst into tears. “Can’t you tell us what’s the matter with her?” she sobbed.

“Maybe it’s an allergic reaction,” ventured the intern.

“Maybe we’d better get a stomach pump and an oxygen mask,” said the resident.

They wheeled Countess Ouspenska away, leaving Sarah and Max to answer as best they could the questions of a weary admitting clerk. When they’d managed that, Sarah said, “We’d better wait.”

“It might be a while,” he reminded her.

“I don’t care. I feel responsible. What if it was something I cooked?”

“Then you and I would be sick, too, wouldn’t we?”

“But an allergy—”

“Allergy hell!”

The seats in the waiting room became desperately uncomfortable. Bittersohn prowled back and forth along the corridors, bringing back things out of vending machines he found: coffee that tasted like nothing in particular, stale crackers filled with what was supposed to be peanut butter and tasted like shellac, candy bars loaded with sugar and sickish artificial flavorings. Sarah didn’t even attempt to eat them. After a while she found a pay phone and called the house.

“Charles, is everybody else all right? Then it can’t possibly have been food poisoning. No, they haven’t told us a thing. Yes, as far as I know she’s still—I’m sure they’re doing everything they can. Don’t wait up. I have my key and Mr. Bittersohn is staying with me.”

She rang off and went back to join him. “Everything’s fine back there. What I can’t understand is why it should have taken so long to work, if it was poison. She was in the house for almost two hours before she got so horribly sick all of a sudden. She didn’t offer you any of that wine, I hope?”

“No. She did say something about making a glass of tea but I told her not to bother.”

“How long were you in the studio?”

“Maybe an hour.”

“What were you doing?”

“Talking. Listening, I should say. You know Lydia.”

“What was she talking about?”

“Life, love, the problems of the creative artist, who knows? Lydia was in a peculiar mood. I’d lead her up to a subject and she’d turn kittenish on me. She says she hasn’t seen Nick Fieringer in years, which I suspect is a lie. She claims Palmerston’s still crazy about her, which I know damn well must be a lie. All I got out of her is that the man in her bed that night was Bill Jones, and that doesn’t mean a thing.”

“Why doesn’t it?”

“Because Bill sleeps there half the time, or so she claims.

His buddies are always wanting to use his pad for one reason or another. If he gets sleepy and it’s too late to bother any of his girl friends, he pops over and crawls in with Lydia. ‘Is purely Plutonic,’ she says.”

“I’ll bet it is! Max, shouldn’t we go over to her studio and collar that bottle of wine before somebody else does?”

“If it’s poisoned and traceable, somebody already has, no doubt. If it isn’t, why bother? Furthermore, my adorable little fuzzyhead, that’s what’s known as tampering with evidence.”

“Oh.”

They sat awhile longer, then Sarah asked, “Did Brooks find out anything about Mr. Fitzroy?”

“Yes. On Sunday when Witherspoon was killed, Fitzroy was attending a family reunion in Topsfield with about eighty-seven other Fitzroys. On Monday when Brown was killed, Fitzroy was with one or the other of the guards every damned minute of the time, mainly giving them all hell for letting things get out of hand while he was away. Brooks is inclined to think he’s a washout and so am I. His bank balance and style of living are consistent with his position, and his character is so irreproachable it’s pitiful.”

“I’m so sorry, darling.” Sarah patted Max’s hand and went to find a ladies’ room. She spent quite a while doing things to her face and hair, then got in a panic for fear she might have missed a report from the doctor and ran out with one lock streaming loose.

“Why don’t you go fix your hair?” said Bittersohn.

She went back and fixed it. They sat some more. Then Sarah asked, “Where had she been before you got there?”

Bittersohn jerked upright. “Where what?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were asleep.”

“I wasn’t asleep,” he said huffily, “I was thinking.”

“About what?”

“Mmh?”

Sarah picked up a newspaper somebody had discarded and read about bodies found in lonely lanes. Bittersohn’s head fell heavily but agreeably against her shoulder. She eased it to a more comfortable position, rested her cheek against the luxuriant dark brown waves of his hair, and did the crossword puzzle. She had turned to the sports section and was wondering how one went about handicapping a horse when the intern came out.

“It was a mixture of arsenic and Nembutal,” he told her. “Dr. Fingerford says you’re to wait till the police get here.”

B
ETWEEN THEM, SARAH AND
Max knew just about every policeman on the Boston force by now. When uniformed officers Moynahan and Maloney showed up in the cruiser they merely remarked, “Oh, Jesus, you two again,” and sent for plainclothes detectives Fitzpatrick and Fitzgibbon. The latter pair, when they arrived, said much the same thing.

“Okay, Mrs. Kelling,” Fitzgibbon began, “mind telling us how you happened to be entertaining this alleged Countess Ouspenska?”

“I met her just this past week through Mrs. Tawne, an artist who’s a friend of my cousin Brooks Kelling. The countess and Mrs. Tawne are neighbors in the Fenway Studios on Ipswich Street. Mrs. Tawne had me over to tea. While I was there, the countess dropped in and invited me to see her studio. Then the other night she dropped by the house. My boarders thought she was fun, so I asked Mr. Bittersohn to bring her back to dinner this evening.”

“Old friend of yours, Bittersohn?” asked Fitzpatrick.

“If you mean what I think you do, no. I have known her for some years on a casual basis. I mentioned to Mrs. Kelling this afternoon that I was going to see Lydia, and she asked me to pass on the invitation. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing.”

“That’s right,” Sarah confirmed. “I didn’t know whether or not she’d come until she arrived.”

“What did you give her to eat?”

“Only what the rest of us had.” Sarah recited the menu. “I didn’t get into the library, where we usually gather before dinner, until shortly after she’d arrived but I’m told she was shown directly there. Some of my other boarders were already present. She had sherry out of the same decanter as everybody else and hors d’oeuvres from the same tray. When we went in to dinner she helped herself from the same dishes that were passed to us all. The countess seemed to be in excellent spirits and ate a great deal. I knew she had very irregular eating habits, so when she got sick to her stomach, I simply assumed she’d eaten too much too fast.”

“Um. Bittersohn, you were with this Ouspenska woman for how long before the dinner party? Did you come back to Mrs. Kelling’s together, or what?”

“We drove back together in my car. Before that, I was in her studio for perhaps an hour.”

“Doing what?”

“Talking. She happens to be an expert on Byzantine icons.”

“Whatever they are. Did you have a drink with her or anything?”

“No. I saw a bottle of wine on the table, but she didn’t offer me any. She may have eaten or drunk something while she was in the back room changing her clothes.”

“Or taken a pill,” Sarah put in.

“Why a pill?” said Fitzgibbon.

“Oh, I don’t know. It just occurred to me, I suppose because she’s not a young woman. I have a lot of middle-aged aunts and they all take pills for one thing or another. Don’t yours?”

“Jeez, yes, come to think of it. My Aunt Theresa, every time she comes over to the house she lines up about six different pill bottles in front of her and pops ’em down one after the other like they were candy.”

Max and his Aunt Fruma did the same thing, and Fitzpatrick was trying to get in a word about his Aunt Mary Margaret when Fitzgibbon intervened.

“Who’d know about the pills? This neighbor of hers you mentioned, they’re pretty good friends, eh?”

“I don’t know whether you’d call them friends or not. Mrs. Tawne told me the countess had a habit of dropping in at mealtimes, so I daresay she might have mentioned her health problems on some such occasion, if she has any. The countess isn’t what you’d call the reticent type.”

“Maybe we’d better go and find out.”

“At this hour?” Tears of exhaustion stung Sarah’s eyelids. “Mrs. Tawne’s not a young woman either, and she must have been in bed ages ago.”

‘Too bad,” said Fitzgibbon, “but it looks to me like we have a case of attempted murder on our hands, and maybe Mrs. Tawne got tired of being mooched on. If she was feeding the Ouspenska woman all the time, she’d have a pretty good chance of slipping something into the food, wouldn’t she?”

“I suppose so.” Sarah heaved a mighty sigh and followed the two detectives out to their car, grateful for Max Bittersohn’s arm to lean on.

As she’d expected, Dolores Tawne was none too happy at being aroused. She came up to her studio door in a pink plissé kimono and a headful of metal curlers such as Sarah had thought nobody in the world except Cousin Mabel still used.

“I’m so sorry,” Sarah began in a faltering tone.

“Well, I should think you would be, rioting around with a gang of men at this hour! Brooks gave me to understand you were a respectable woman.” She rattled her curlers fiercely at Max.

Fitzgibbon was tired, too. “Are you Mrs. Dolores Tawne?” he snapped.

“I certainly am, and would you kindly tell me what you mean by—?”

“We’re police officers.” He stuck his identification and badge under her nose. “Would you mind telling us when you last saw your neighbor Mrs. Ouspenska?”

“I assume you’re referring to the woman who calls herself a countess and as far as I know she’s still a Miss. I doubt if she’s ever bothered to marry any of them. What do you want to know for?”

“For good and sufficient reason, Mrs. Tawne. Would you mind answering the question?”

“Humph! Then I suppose I—let me see, she usually barges in when I’m having my cup of tea about four o’clock. Was it then? No, I was at the museum this afternoon. Yesterday afternoon I suppose it would be by now. Then we must have bumped into each other earlier in the—er—facilities. Neither of us has a private bathroom, more’s the pity.”