With Friends Like These... (10 page)

Janine screamed that she couldn’t stand this, she wasn’t strong enough. She was not about to be outdone in the misery department, not even when the competitor was a clear winner by virtue of being near death.

Priscilla wiped at tears with an embroidered handkerchief. Her other hand held the lace at her throat in an unconscious and horrifying mirroring of Lyle’s choking motions. Sybil clutched Reed, who stared impassively at the afterimage of his fallen father.

Richard Quinn, the taciturn former villain, looked green. For a second I thought he, too, was about to be ill, but it seemed more a case of witnessing a nonsimulated dying than of poisoning.

“Okay, they’re here,” one of the policemen said. “Count yourself out, twelve to a van.”

“I never heard of such a thing in my life,” the other policeman said. “They could all be suspects!”

“Five—six—seven—”

“Let me get my suitcase.” Shepard McCoy went to the stairs.

“No you don’t. Nobody goes upstairs without an escort. Nobody goes anywhere but onto the van. Nobody takes anything but himself. Coats if one of us accompanies you to get it. No pocketbooks, either.” This was greeted by considerable grumbling, but he ignored it. “Pockets empty, too, please. You’ll get it all back. Don’t worry.”

“What are you looking for?” my mother asked with innocent sincerity.

The policemen glared at her, disapproval of the question pulling their mouths down. They glanced at each other, then both adopted a cryptic, know-it-all expression.

“Haven’t got a clue,” somebody muttered accurately behind me.

“Officer on the bus will get your IDs,” the older one continued. “Take your statements, bring you back afterward. You got it?”

“I haf naiver!” Anna Pacocci, the Golden-Throated Czech, raised her head high. “Naiver in my life treated like criminal!”

“Twelve!” And out she went.

“Okay, you.” He pointed at me. “You begin the second group. “One—” My mother was ushered upstairs by a constable who said she could retrieve both of our coats. No point in being saved from poisoning only to succumb to pneumonia, my mother had gently suggested. I wondered whether Mackenzie would eventually arrive in the flesh. If so, it would be unhappy flesh, because if this turned out to be the scene of a crime, it was a very messy one indeed. We’d moved and fingered and pushed and rearranged what evidence there might be. In fact, we well may have made it impossible to ever decide whether there had been a crime committed tonight.

I wondered if, given the situation, he could simply say, “What the hell? What’s the use?” Or was he obliged, no matter how ridiculous or futile the task, to search the house, the people, their suitcases and pocketbooks? And if so, what then? Could they test every single leftover slice of beef Bernaise? What if the poison had been in a crab puff, already ingested? Or a glass of wine or vodka, long since downed, the glass probably washed and dried?

I couldn’t imagine how anyone could have targeted Lyle in the first place. Perhaps there were partners in crime—a poisoner and a waiter, who placed a specially designated plate in front of the guest of honor. Otherwise, what? The hors d’oeuvres had been picked at random from trays. None of this made sense.

“Five—six.” The officer counted slowly. I was halfway out the door when I heard yet another fracas. This time, although Lizzie wasn’t making the noise, she seemed to have prompted it.

Hattie was the screamer now. “You!” she wailed at the chef. “It’s your fault! It’s you! You!”

“Seven—eight, move right on, please.” The officer was obviously used to hysterics.

“I didn’t do it!” Lizzie shouted the words with urgency.

This wasn’t fair. Nobody had any proof that Lizzie’s food was to blame. “It isn’t her fault!” I called out as the officer put his hand on my shoulder and moved me forward. But no one seemed to hear me.

Even outside, through the rain pounding on the awning above my head, I could hear the old woman’s screams. “You! Your fault!” echoed into the night.

It was a relief to get onto the van and let somebody else tell me what to do, at least for a little while.

“GOOD GRIEF!” The voice came from the seat behind me. “I always heard Philadelphia was dull, but do they really consider getting one’s stomach pumped something to do?”

I remembered him. He was pale, with haughty, aristocratic features, and he was dressed in tails and accompanied by an anorexic woman; a dancer, someone—probably my mother—had told me.

“You shouldn’t make jokes,” she said. “I’m sick. I feel like I’m dying. They’d better hurry.”

“How could you be poisoned?” the man asked. “You don’t eat enough for it to work. It would certainly not be my method of choice with you.”

She inhaled noisily, then cried, words coming out every two or three sobs. “I—can’t—breathe!”

“Then good for you for nonetheless managing to.” He was not going to get the chivalry award tonight.

“I knew I shouldn’t accept that invitation.” A thin woman across the aisle raked her spiked hair with crimson talons as she spoke to her stern-looking companion. “I knew it. Didn’t I say so?”

The stern woman nodded her head. Her hair was gray and cut to a half-inch length. She wore heavy silver earrings that clicked when she expressed agreement.

“I’ve done business with the man,” talons said. “And I have nothing against him, but to travel ninety miles in the rain for this.”

“Helen,” the gray-haired woman said, “Helen, he’s—”

“Besides,” Helen with the talons continued, “we all knew the show was getting the axe, so it’s not like we were going to keep on having a relationship or anything, so why drag myself—”

“Helen, really. What’s done is done.”

“You yourself said that the cancellation was why we were invited. Soften us up, make us reconsider. Save his face with that retirement business. Didn’t you say so yourself?”

“Canceled?” Sybil Zacharias called out. “Second Generation is going to be canceled?” She was ahead of me, next to her son, who didn’t move his head or his shoulders, but sat perfectly rigid.

“Ratings stink,” talons said.

“Really, Helen.” Her friend’s voice sounded like it came from between clenched teeth. “The man is—the ratings don’t matter anymore.”

“Canceled,” Sybil said in a hard whisper.

The elegant man behind me yawned loudly. He obviously wasn’t concerned with Lyle’s ratings. “If they would only have told me I was going to spend some of the night vomiting,” he said, “I would have dressed for the occasion.”

“Don’t even say that word,” his skinny seatmate begged.

A police officer who had already written down about half of our names and addresses methodically continued his rounds. He didn’t look any happier than the rest of us, although he, at least, wasn’t overdressed.

“Don’t you want some kind of statement or something?” I recognized the voice as Janine’s. I hadn’t realized she was on my bus.

“Can’t take them when you’re all together like this,” the policeman said. “Later.”

We were the HUP delegation, being trucked to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Other segments of the possibly afflicted had been taken to Hahnemann, Jefferson, Pennsylvania Hospital, and Temple. It was lucky that Philadelphia was so liberally blessed with medical facilities. Or was it suspicious?

My mother sat next to me, in the window seat, her hands folded on her lap and her bottom lip gripped by her upper teeth, the sure sign that Bea was brooding. As children, Beth and I used to scurry for cover as soon as we saw the old lip-in-the-teeth, although luckily, Bea could only brood for brief periods of time. I checked my watch. Six minutes since we had boarded. Not many more to go.

Then I looked at my watch again and did a mild double take. Only seventy-five minutes—one and one-quarter hour—had passed since we entered the dining room for Lyle Zacharias’s gala birthday dinner. It felt more like epochs, great historical subdivisions, but it was not yet nine-thirty.

With nothing to do but sit and ride, the emotional overload of the evening finally had a chance at me, and I felt overwhelmed with exhaustion and sorrow.

“Good thing Lyle was watching his weight,” my mother murmured, breaking her brood.

Nothing like your mother saying something completely insane to snap a mood around. I swiveled and stared at her to see if she was serious. She was. “Call me crazy,” I said, “but in all honesty, the last thing I’d want to do right before my death is diet.”

“No, I mean if he hadn’t been, I’d be worried that one of my tarts did him in. Given that they weren’t refrigerated.”

“Trust me. It wouldn’t have done him in, even then.” A love affair can become toxic that fast, but not tart topping.

“Except…” my mother said.

I waited.

“When I excused myself to go to the powder room—remember?”

I half nodded because I only half remembered.

“I checked them again. Because it was hot in that kitchen and—”

“Yes, Mother, I know. But they were fine, and anyway, nobody ate them, so forget about it.”

“I would. Except for the two I took out of the tin. Only half of one was on the plate,” she said. “So somebody…you don’t think the heat in the kitchen could have—”

“Of course not!” All the same, I was glad she’d been whispering, and I lowered my voice, too. “Mom, whipped cream—as spoiled as it can possibly get—can make somebody sick, but not the way Lyle was.”

She blinked, fighting back tears. “Are you positive?”

I nodded.

“Did you see, Reed?” Sybil said from across the aisle. I tensed, afraid she was talking about my mother and me. “Did you catch her impersonation of grief? She never could act. Little starlet tramp. And Shepard as the good old family friend. Now there’s a good actor, given how he felt about Lyle, and Tiffany—I’d expect him to be dancing with joy!”

“Mom, please. You’re practically shouting,” Reed said with the classic agony of a teenager. “Why do you always say things like that, anyway?”

I was on his side. His mother was loud and drunk and extremely indiscreet.

“I’m whispering, Reed. You’re so sensitive! Besides, am I wrong? Is a single thing I said wrong?”

“All I can say,” a male voice proclaimed from the back of the bus. “All I can say is that only a fool lets his enemies get that close to him. Only a fool, or a man who doesn’t want to be any older than fifty, ever.”

“Hear, hear,” the man behind me muttered.

“I’m hungry,” his companion said.

“You won’t be for long,” the man said darkly.

“Why are we moving so slowly?” Janine’s whine again. Luckily, her complaint, whatever it was this time, was drowned out by the sirens of two patrol cars bracketing us.

I finally had an authentic escort for the evening.

The bus riders lapsed into heavy silence. We were like convicts being taken to the chain gang: sullen, grumpy, and lost in individual fears and self-pity. No one had any spare compassion or concern, and no one even mentioned Lyle Zacharias again. At a time when he should have been the center of events, he had become only a footnote.

* * *

The woman sitting at the emergency admitting desk was engrossed in a crossword puzzle. She glanced up, then squinted warily as we trooped in, spangled, beaded, high-heeled, and tux-edoed. She bent her head from side to side and applied X-ray vision to our intact forms, searching for the maimed one.

“What is this? Some kind of treasure hunt?” she finally demanded.

“It’s a poisoning!” Janine shrieked. “A mass murder! I feel it creeping through my veins!”

“All of you? Poisoned?”

Janine, clutching her midriff, nodded vigorously. I shook my head and shrugged. I appreciated Mackenzie’s caution and protectiveness, but the only signals my body was sending out were hungry S.O.S.’s. I was positive I hadn’t had any of whatever had felled Lyle, and I was not at all convinced that his collapse was necessarily the result of murder.

My mother wrinkled her brow. “We think that maybe somebody else was definitely poisoned.”

“Come again?” The name on the admissions woman’s plastic tag had less than the standard basic allotment of vowels. African, perhaps. “Ma’am” seemed easiest.

“We were at a party, ma’am,” I said.

“Didn’t think you were digging ditches in those duds.”

You would think he had troubles enough of his own, but a man waiting for treatment, a bloody rag pressed to his head, guffawed at our fashion blunder. We were incorrectly dressed for the occasion.

“Now Ralphie,” the woman said to him, “don’t you always be making fun of people.”

I wondered how often a person had to stagger in here to become a known quantity and a regular. Ralphie’s face had zipperlike scars on the forehead and chin, not to mention whatever he was covering with the rag. I suspected that Ralphie had a revolving charge account with the E.R.

“And a man collapsed—got really sick—”

“Died!” the skinny ballerina said.

“When he collapsed,” I continued, “he said he’d been poisoned, and we were all eating the same food, so the police thought we should be checked out.”

She rolled her eyes ceilingward until they were nearly gone into some recess behind her brows. Then she counted us and opened a file drawer and counted again until she had a satisfactory number of forms.

“Okay,” she said. “Everybody take one and fill it out.”

“Fill it out?” Janine screamed. “We could die while we fill it out.”

“And please have your insurance information ready when it’s your turn,” the woman said.

We all, pretty much in unison, did a double take. If there was one person among us who had really tucked his Blue Cross card into his cummerbund, I thought we’d make the Guinness Book of Records.

While Janine continued to whine, the emergency doors flew open and two attendants wheeling an elderly woman on a gurney raced by and through a second set of swinging doors.

“Wait a minute!” Janine said. “We were here first! You aren’t making her wait!”

“Uh-huh,” the admissions woman said. “Yo, Ralphie, you can go in now,” she told the man with the rag on his head. “An’ don’t you bleed on my floor again!”