Third Degree (26 page)

“Stay down,” she said, taking her hands off my chest and moving them to my shoulders.

I did what she said and hoped that by remaining prone on the dock, I wouldn’t have to throw up any more water. In the distance, I heard sirens.

“Where’s Greg?” I asked.

Queen smiled and hooked a thumb over her shoulder. “He’s on the boat,” she said. She wiped a clump of hair away from my forehead. “Don’t worry about him.”

In the distance, I could hear a low growl followed by a few short angry barks. I stayed flat on my back for a few minutes and listened to what was taking place around me. I closed my eyes and drifted off.

When I came to again, I was in a darkened hospital room. The décor of the rooms hadn’t changed that much since my mother had taken her last breaths here. At the end of the bed, I could see Crawford’s lanky frame, outlined in the glow from the fluorescent night-light that was lit beneath the shelf that housed the television. I let out a little croak and got his attention.

I grabbed my throat. “My throat hurts.”

He came over and sat on the edge of the bed, leaning over to kiss my head. “When were you going to tell me that you can’t swim?”

“Never, if I could help it,” I said. I coughed, clearing whatever it was that was preventing me from speaking clearly.

He gave me his patented “sad face,” the one that’s reserved for next of kin. “We’re going to have to fix that.”

“Let me guess,” I said, my voice getting stronger. “You swam for your high school team in addition to being the star center of the basketball team.”

“Not quite,” he said. “But I do know how to swim.”

“Good for you.” I sat up a little straighter in the bed. “I can’t ice-skate, either.”

“Me, neither.”

“Good. Finally, something we have in common,” I said. I leaned forward to pick up a cup of ice water on the tray next to the bed and took a long sip. “What happened?”

“Your friend Greg poisoned Carter Wilmott,” Crawford said. Alerted by Queen, the other members of the village boating association, or whatever they called themselves, had detained Greg until the police had arrived. He was already in custody, and judging from the information Crawford had, spilling his guts.

“I got that impression when he confessed and subsequently threw me overboard.”

“He was putting arsenic in his coffee, slowly poisoning him over time. Not sure how long this had been going on, but long enough to kill the poor bastard.” He rubbed his hands over his eyes.

“So he didn’t want to blow him up?” I wondered aloud if the explosive device was an insurance policy that Greg had also masterminded to make sure the job was done thoroughly.

He shook his head. “Nope. And he didn’t want to poison him to death, either. According to what I heard, he only wanted to make Carter sick, not kill him. Apparently he went a little overboard on the arsenic, which slowly built up in Carter’s system. I didn’t get much information from Detective Madden other than what I just told you.” He smiled. “I don’t know why but that lady just doesn’t like me.”

“How did I get out of the water?”

He let out a belly laugh. “You’re never going to believe this part.”

“Try me.”

“Queen.”

“My Queen? Hooters waitress cum private investigator? My roommate, Queen?”

Crawford explained that Queen had followed me while I was following Greg. Ostensibly, she had been walking Trixie. But she had been around me long enough and had gotten enough information about me from Kevin to know that I’m a giant nosey parker and that when I didn’t want to come home, something was up. Being a good private investigator, she wanted in on the action. She went home and got Trixie, then stayed just far enough behind me so that I didn’t know she was following me but close enough to know that I was in trouble when I hit the water.

In addition to being a great waitress and a very astute sleuth, Queen Martinez had been captain of her swim team at Our Lady of Lourdes High School and had supplemented her high school income by working as a lifeguard at a tony hotel in New York City during her summers off. Queen Martinez, it would seem, had lousy taste in men but a varied and interesting résumé that was going to serve her well, I imagined, as her life progressed. One thing was for sure: she would always be able to support herself with that kind of skill set.

She had commandeered a boat at the dock from a young guy who was cleaning the decks. They had followed us out, and when it appeared that my life was in danger and that I obviously couldn’t swim, she jumped in and saved me. I thought about the voice that I had heard right before I passed out and wondered whose it had been: my mother’s or Queen’s?

“I don’t have to give her free room and board for the rest of her life because she saved mine, do I?” I asked.

Crawford took my face in his hands and smiled. “I don’t think so.” He planted a kiss on my lips. “Yum. River water.”

I took a deep breath and felt the pain of a classic belly flop. “Is my not being able to swim a deal breaker?” I finished the water in my cup and handed it back to him.

“A deal breaker?”

“Yeah. Are we still ‘on’?” I asked.

“Yeah. We’re still on,” he said. “Is that a yes?”

I smiled and closed my eyes, exhausted. “It’s a yes.”

“Is that what you want?” he asked, just to be sure.

I smiled and nodded. Yes, that’s what I wanted. I drifted off to sleep thinking that everything I’ve ever wanted, I already had.

Since my unfortunate dip in the Hudson, I had learned a few things. Greg was standing by his original assertion that he only wanted to make Carter sick, not kill him. But kill him he did. Carter, despite his rantings about Greg and Beans, Beans on his blog, was a regular at the coffee shop, ballsy bastard that he was, so it seemed that he was getting a steady diet of French roast with a healthy serving of arsenic every time he frequented the shop. Mac the Knife was sticking to his cause of death as poisoning, and Greg was going away for a long time. Mac had also called me to find out if Crawford and I could come over for dinner after the semester started. Reezie was making beef Stroganoff.

There was a troubling aspect to the whole story, however, and that was that nobody really knew whether or not Greg was poisoning Carter’s coffee specifically or just poisoning the whole entire lot of us. I thought back to how sick I had felt and how my health had improved once I stopped frequenting Greg’s. Several other patrons reported feeling sick as well, but the district attorney couldn’t decide if it was a case of mass hysteria or the truth. Enough time had passed that there was no way to know from any blood tests or such whether or not we had started on a dark journey just by drinking Greg’s crappy, and poisonous, brew. I had watched Greg clean out the coffee urn the night that I had followed him to the river and he was pretty thorough so it was unlikely that we’d ever find out what the true story was.

All I knew was that I was grinding my own beans from now on.

As to who had wanted to blow Carter to smithereens, no one knew. I thought back to Tony and his Korean War exploits but decided that I would keep them to myself. The list of potential suspects was so extensive that I expected that Detective Madden would be busy for a long, long time.

Kathy and Jane popped in on Saturday to check on me and to say good-bye to Kevin and Queen, who interestingly, and not surprisingly, had become more a part of the neighborhood in the several days they had lived with me than I had in the many years I had resided there. They were disappointed to find out that both were gone, but they were glad they would see Queen in town, given the proximity of her new dwelling to our neighborhood.

I was out back, playing tug-of-war with Trixie, when they came up the driveway. They wrapped their arms around me at the same time and Trixie joined in, the warmest group hug that I had ever experienced. When we separated, Jane held me at arm’s length.

“You don’t look any worse for wear,” she said. “And listen, we’re going to teach you to swim.”

Kathy did a dry-land American crawl. “Really. How do you get this far in life and not know how to swim?”

I shrugged. “Don’t know. But I can fence. And I can make a wicked scrapbook.”

Kathy snorted. “And that’s going to help you a lot. Seriously, sister, we’ve got to get you into the pool.”

“Deal,” I said, starting for the house. “And I’ll teach you how to order off a French menu without sounding like a foreigner. That’ll come in handy if the two of you ever get to Paris.”

“You’re on. Paris has always been a dream of mine,” Kathy said.

We took seats around my patio table, Trixie resting at my feet, thankful that it was just the two of us again. Although she got walked more than she ever had while we had Queen and Kevin around, when it came down to it, she wanted to be with me and me alone. She wasn’t all that enthusiastic about house guests, with the exception of Crawford. And that’s only because he fed her steak when he thought I wasn’t looking. I knew what went on; I just pretended not to notice.

I served Kathy and Jane some wine and made a plate of cheese and crackers to nosh on while we visited. We finished one bottle of sauvignon blanc and started a bottle of Sancerre. After a couple of glasses of wine, I finally got the courage to ask Kathy and Jane the question that had been niggling at me since we had last been together.

“Why are you so negative about Lydia Wilmott?” I asked Kathy.

Jane shot her a look that transmitted her discomfort with this conversation. Kathy ignored her, emboldened by the white wine or tired of staying silent on the subject.

Kathy looked at Jane. “You know I’m conflicted about this,” she said to her. Jane looked down. “If it wasn’t for Lydia and her crackpot ideas, we wouldn’t be together.” Kathy turned to me. “It’s like this. Lydia did the same number on Jane as she did on you, thinking that Jane’s complaints about her ex, Stu, were veiled hints at abuse. She’s the one that convinced Jane to get out of the marriage, thinking that Jane’s well-being was at stake. But Jane wasn’t abused. She was gay. And Lydia misread the entire situation, just like she did with you, and created all of this conflict where there was none.”

Jane was silent, staring into her wineglass.

“You just didn’t know who you were when you married him,” Kathy said softly, putting a hand on Jane’s knee. It sounded as if they had had this conversation many times before and it wasn’t a pleasant one. “I like Stu. He’s a good guy. Actually, he’s a great guy. He just had the unfortunate luck to marry a gay woman who befriended a woman who did everything in her power to make him seem like a really bad guy.” Kathy squeezed Jane’s hand. “Listen, if I were straight, I would have fallen for the guy. He’s handsome, he’s smart, and he makes a lot of money,” she said, laughing at the last part of her description. “But he’s not an abuser. And Lydia caused a lot of trouble for him unnecessarily, making him have to deny something that he never did.” She looked at me intently. “Stu’s my friend, believe it or not. We have a weekly tennis game. I don’t think I can forgive her for trying to ruin his reputation.”

Kathy was very invested in Stu’s reputation and it was obviously a subject she felt passionately about. I changed the subject to the rescheduling of Jimmy Crawford’s pool party and got their input on the appropriate dress for the meet and greet with all of the Crawfords, which would happen eventually. Jane—who suggested that I wear a sundress—was more helpful than Kathy, who suggested wearing a bathing suit under a terry-cloth cover-up.

“Thank you,” I said. “You have been little to no help at all. First of all, I don’t own a sundress, and second, I would no sooner be caught dead in a terry-cloth cover-up than a tube top. But thank you for your input.”

They left after the second bottle of wine was finished and all that was left of the cheese and cracker platter was the rind of the Jarlsberg that I had served. I cleaned up and, seeing that it was just a little before five, decided that I would go over to Lydia’s to thank her for setting Queen up in what was a very nice guesthouse with a hint of a river view outside of the bedroom window.

Let bygones be bygones.

I drove over to the Wilmotts and bypassed the house, opting to park in front of Queen’s little guest cottage so I could check in with her to see if she needed anything. She was already in possession of the futon from my guest room, until she was able to buy a bed, and a set of old china from my mother’s family that I didn’t think I’d ever part with but whose pattern I hated nonetheless. I figured my mother wouldn’t mind; giving the china to Queen was what my colleague Rabbi Schneckstein would call a “mitzvah.” The house was a miniature replica of the big Wilmott Colonial, down to the boxes filled with flowers that hung in front of the leaded windows. Queen opened the door. When she saw me, she grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the small living room.

I objected loudly to being manhandled and she put her hand over my mouth. “Be quiet,” she said. “Hear me out.”

With the exception of Crawford, I wasn’t used to looking up at someone. But I looked up into her dark eyes and did what she asked: I heard her out.