With Friends Like These... (9 page)

People futilely sought comfort and reassurance from one another. “Is sweat on my forehead?” a man demanded of his dinner companion. “Wasn’t Lyle sweating?” “But what about me?” his tablemate answered. “I feel sick.”

And so did lots of others. People complained of dizziness, or weakness, or trembling—including me. I hoped I was suffering a simple old-fashioned anxiety attack.

En route to my mother, I passed Hattie Zacharias, who looked almost as ill as her nephew did. Her wrinkled skin was even looser, as if it were falling off. She mouthed the word poison, although no more than a hiss of air emerged. She repeated the motion, as if practicing it, working to get it right. It was even more frightening that way, like a silent scream.

Poison. It finally, thoroughly, hit me, and as dreadful as I felt for Lyle Zacharias, I felt even worse for me.

Fear buckled my knees, and then, of course, I worried that this sudden muscle weakness was an early symptom. Had Lyle’s legs weakened or simply cramped?

My core temperature dropped. I was freezing. Had Lyle been cold? No—he’d been sweating. Good, good. But I felt lightheaded, too. Was that the same as Lyle’s dizziness?

While these idiotic brain waves skittled about, Lyle let go of the table and made a staggering lurch in the direction of the doorway. However, he didn’t even make it past the cake before he stumbled and again grabbed the table.

People moved between us, so I couldn’t see clearly, but it was obvious from the sounds and the sudden general recoil that the man was now violently ill. I remembered his lurched attempt to escape, and realized that despite the desperation of his situation, he’d been trying to exit and avoid social embarrassment. There was a psychology paper in this for somebody: “Terminal Prioritizing: Death or a Major Social Gaffe?”

The people around him backed off some more, so that I could see Lyle pitch forward into his birthday cake, crumpling the lace tablecloth and pulling it down as he and the dessert both fell. The white and dark chocolate cake landed on his upturned face, putting him in jeopardy of layer cake asphyxiation, assuming nothing worse destroyed him first.

My mother rushed forward, which shouldn’t have surprised me. She was carrying first aid—a dampened napkin—and before anyone else had gone beyond milling and agonizing, she had cleaned Lyle’s face. Under the icing and chocolate crumbs, Lyle was unconscious.

We watched, fifty ticking time bombs. Make that forty-nine, I thought. If Lyle was right, one of us was a poisoner.

A woman in platinum Jean Harlow hair and gold lamé bent over Lyle and began CPR.

I wanted Mackenzie. Unnatural causes was his turf, not mine, and this seemed a case right up his expertise. Probably.

Probably would have to suffice. I wanted, needed, to hear his voice. I went back to the hall phone. Please, I asked the detective gods, just this once, let him be where I need him to be.

Just this once, he was. I began my 911 riff. “Thought you’re spendin’ the evenin’ with your mother,” he said.

“I was, I am—she’s here. My father—never mind. Mackenzie, I think it’s murder. It’s so fast and ugly, with these weird symptoms. And other people are complaining now, too.”

“He’s dead?”

“Nearly. Well, truthfully, I don’t know. Does he have to die? Do you come out for attempted murder?”

“Could it be food poisonin’?” I envisioned him watching the dark rain pound headquarters’ windows, finding even his utilitarian and bleak surroundings homey compared to a trek to Queen Village.

A man in tails rushed by, clutching his stomach. I had walked into Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” “I’ve never heard of any food acting this quickly and violently, have you?” I answered. “Besides, if you wait until we find out what’s caused this, all the evidence will be gone. They’ll wash up and tidy and destroy every trace.”

He considered this, or something. “Okay,” he said glumly, “somebody’ll be there soon. An’ Mandy? Y’all got to get your stomachs pumped.”

Stomachs seemed such nicely complete items. I couldn’t imagine how they would pump one. I thought of gas stations and wells and tried to apply their mechanics to my anatomy and decided to take a pass. “We can’t leave the scene of the crime,” I said, rather desperately.

“Don’ know there was a crahm!” He was getting emotional—either annoyed with or concerned for me. His southern roots curled around every syllable, squeezing out its hard edges, making it barely recognizable. Blurtalk. “Don’ wan’ y’urt.” I had to mentally race beside his sentences, clipping them into words. He didn’t want me hurt. Either this was for real or it was not, but he couldn’t afford to gamble.

“Yes. Sure. Okay,” I said.

“Listen up—I’ll find a bus—no, vans. Send you to different hospitals. An officer for each one. But good Lord, it’s gonna be a bitch. The President’s in town, know that? Fund-raiser, and every extra man’s on that duty.” His sighs had become epic in scale. “When the patrolman shows up, have him call me here. I’ll explain.”

Gallant, yes, but I’d have preferred his personally rushing to my aid. “Maybe it wasn’t a poisoning,” I said. “Maybe this is a little…extreme.”

“You sure enough of that to risk fifty people?”

His round. Back to the dining room as the bearer of rotten news, just in case the night wasn’t already sufficiently traumatic.

The entryway was blocked by the chef, still in her apron and bandanna. She stood, one hand half over her eyes, as if she didn’t want to watch but couldn’t resist, and the other pointing at her guest of honor, sprawled on the floor while the woman in gold lamé administered CPR.

She screamed, a thin, piercing wail, almost unearthly and definitely frightening, the sound a machine might make when important wires snapped.

“Lizzie,” I said softly, lightly touching her shoulder. It was difficult speaking without much of a waver in my voice. “Please calm down. Help is on the way.”

Apparently, she didn’t hear me, but then it was hard to hear one low voice in the bedlam. Only Sybil and her son Reed remained quiet, an island of immobile silence in the din. Hattie, bending over her prostrate nephew, shouted his name over and over, sounding as if each repetition ripped something vital out of her. Tiffany stood, mouth agape, said the same name, but angrily, pathetically, anxiously, questioningly—like an actress trying out her lines. Priscilla Lemoyes sobbed loudly. The young couple from our table clutched each other, asking, constantly, whether they were all right. People cried, offered theories: he’d had a heart attack, a seizure, heat exhaustion—despite the temperature. Anything, as long as it wasn’t contagious. And running through the babble and cries like a corrosive acid-drenched wire ran Janine’s whine, raised now by several decibel levels. “My tongue’s numb,” she yowled. “I’m achy all over. I don’t feel right!”

“You never feel right!” her husband, right behind her, answered, too loudly. “Shut up for once!”

People stepped away from them. We’d reached the point of every victim for himself.

“My legs tingle!” Janine wailed.

“Who cares?” her husband shouted. “Look around—nobody else is carrying on this way! Nobody else is sick.”

“Lyle is dying!”

“And you’re making things worse—as usual!”

With a dramatic intake of air, Janine swallowed her screech.

I wondered if I could be held for murder if I told everyone except Janine about the promised emergency treatment. But this was a night for virtue. “Everybody!” I said as loudly as I could. “Listen!” Eventually they calmed enough for me to shout out my message. “Help’s on the way! Vans are coming to take us to the hospital. Police escorts. We’ll all be fine.”

The push toward the exit slowed to an irritated shuffle. I thought some semblance of calm had been restored, but Lizzie once more erupted, this time in words. Three words, to be exact. “I saw him! I saw him! I saw him!”

“Please,” I began, but how could she be calm? There was a good possibility that one—I hoped only one—of her dinner guests had been poisoned. This was not cause for serenity.

“I saw him!” she sobbed. “I saw him!”

“We all did,” I said softly.

A woman in purple pushed at me. “I’m not waiting for some bureaucratic underling to send help!” she shouted. “I’m out of here!”

“Why? Where would you go? The paramedics and police are on their way, and they can get you to help faster than you can get there alone. Besides”—I hoped Lizzie was listening, too—“food poisoning isn’t this fast or acute. What happened to Lyle probably has nothing to do with the food here, if you ask me.”

“Nobody asked you!” the angry woman said.

My mother charged forward to avenge her daughter’s verbal attacker. “Just because Lyle thought it was poison doesn’t make it so,” she said reasonably.

“If you leave and nobody else does,” I added, “then the police will assume you were the poisoner.”

“Me?” the would-be escapee screamed. “Me? I’m his hair stylist, for God’s sake!”

I momentarily wondered why a bald man’s hair stylist was on his fifty-most-wanted list, but there were bigger issues to consider first.

“What about botulism?” Shepard McCoy’s voice was low, TV doc wise and serene. He was used to make-believe medical emergencies, and didn’t know real trouble when he was in the middle of it.

“Botulism’s from canned food,” a woman in hand-painted silk said. “I thought this place said it used all fresh produce. They said that in print!”

What was her point? That we’d file a postmortem class action suit against the restaurant for false advertising?

“Botulism symptoms don’t start for hours,” Reed Zacharias said. Before anyone could challenge him, he shrugged a pudgy shoulder. “I like biology. Microbiology especially. And I know a lot about toxins.”

He waited, as if for a challenge, but I for one make it a point never to cross surly adolescents who specialize in toxins.

“It’s caused by a spore,” he continued. “Symptoms are different. Affects your vision. You get paralyzed.”

“I don’t think that whatever made him that sick was in his food,” I said. “At least not in whatever we all ate.” Because, as I didn’t say, as they should have been able to figure out themselves, if the culprit was the food we all had eaten, we should all be cramping and getting sore throats and dizziness even as I spoke. We should all, frankly, be dying at the same tempo as Lyle appeared to be.

Nobody else seemed to want to debate the logic of the situation or to await the police. Instead, they milled toward the door, maneuvering around and sometimes over Lyle’s appendages. The platinum blonde continued to pump at his chest. “I’m not waiting around to find out whether I’m poisoned,” a burly young man with acne scars and a ponytail told me. “I’ll get myself to the hospital.” He turned to the crowd around him. “Where is it? I’m from New York.”

“I saw him!” Lizzie again, still stuck on her three-word groove. Something dreadful was happening to her—a seizure, a breakdown—and she needed attention, but so did everyone else, so I hoped her particular ailment, which didn’t seem deadly, would keep.

“Let me by!” the ponytail demanded. I did, and I moved Lizzie aside as well.

However, the burly man didn’t make it through the doorway because we had a sudden influx of personnel. Lizzie’s father materialized, pulling his daughter close to him. “I saw him!” she cried out. “I saw him!” she sobbed.

He made soothing noises and patted her back. “Oh, Lizzikins,” he said softly. “Hush, now.”

A fireman raced through the hall and into the dining room and almost instantaneously replaced the blonde as the CPR giver. At the same time, two policemen, Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum, draped in identical plastic rain ponchos, entered, asking questions: “Who made the call? What’s this about? What’s going on here? Nobody leave.”

Once again, I explained, pointing at Lyle, waving at the group in the dining room. “And vans are supposed to arrive to take us to the hospital. Hospitals. Need our stomachs pumped,” I said.

“What the devil is—I never heard of such a thing. The scene of the crime should never be disturb—”

“There may not have been a crime.” I felt odd, parroting Mackenzie. “But there could be other…victims.”

I was backed up by a vigorous, adamant chorus.

“Regulations say—”

I told them to call headquarters and ask for Mackenzie. One did. The other stood beside me in the doorway.

“Lyle!” Hattie screamed. “Get up! Stand up!”

“This would never have happened if I’d been in the country,” Roy Beecher said.

“Excuse me?” I hate it when instead of dealing with the present crisis, people assign blame or adopt responsibility. And what was he saying—that Lizzie had screwed up? No wonder she had problems.

“I need a cigarette,” he said in lieu of an explanation.

I shook my head. “Don’t smoke.”

“Neither did I. Stopped three weeks ago, but this, now…” I could see the tremble in his hand as he released Lizzie. And then, abruptly, he pushed his way out of the building.

“Hey!” the policeman said, but with too little enthusiasm. It was still a wet cold mess out there and he didn’t seem eager to rush out into it. And in reality, it didn’t matter. Roy Beecher had, if I recalled, been resting somewhere all evening, recovering from jet lag, and hadn’t had the possibly poisonous meal.

And then, having been radioed the go-ahead by the police, the paramedics raced in, pushing a gurney loaded with tubes and pumps. “Lyle!” Hattie screamed yet again. “Get up!”

But it was the fireman who stood, looking grim. The paramedics didn’t seem discouraged. They inserted a curved tube into Lyle’s throat and connected it to an air bag and then, in what seemed mere seconds after their arrival, they wheeled Lyle away, the air bag breathing for him.

“Is he alive?” somebody asked.

Only silence answered.

“Dead, I think,” someone else whispered.

“Dead,” in a flat, horrified echo.

“Dead?”

“Dead!”

The word detonated from every pocket of the room. It was whispered, screamed, silently mouthed, and uttered with solemn finality. Hattie cried inconsolably. The platinum blonde patted her on the shoulder. Tiffany stood well apart from where Lyle had fallen, one hand to her mouth, her brow wrinkled, as if she were trying to figure out what was going on, or, uncharitable as I knew the thought to be, as if she were wondering how she was supposed to feel about it. Next to her stood Shepard McCoy, one hand on her shoulder, patting it sympathetically.