He takes a sip of zinger and sucks in his cheeks like he’s swallowed mouthwash.
“Explain to me how you two worked this one out,” he eventually splutters.
“Teamwork,” Darwin says sheepishly. “Spanner twigged that Sophie’s passion was catering, not winemaking.”
“She got really upset at mention of her gran’s plans to send her to France, to study wine. Guess she didn’t want to end like her dad, playing second fiddle. Frustration made her want to slap a bit of egg on Virginia’s face. Metaphorically speaking,” I aside, for Darwin’s benefit. “But then, when she overheard the autopsy finding that the victim’s injuries weren’t consistent with death, she thought her prank had killed her gran. And she figured it’d show up in the blood tests. Hence, the panic attack.”
“But the drug concentration wasn’t that high, according to the test results. Any effects would have worn off before Mrs. D-B paid her visit to the cellar. Several staff said she seemed normal.” Darwin, pausing for breath, gulps a mouthful of peppermint reviver.
“The old cellar was a deathtrap,” I continue. “Those empty boxes you photographed, Sarge, had contained dry ice. It was used to keep the supply of standard ice cold, so the food didn’t spoil in the extreme heat. Dr. Billing inadvertently let that slip when she mentioned there was fog coming from the coolers in the marquee.”
“Dry ice changes directly from its solid form to gas, carbon dioxide, which is heavier than air,” the boff explains. “As the blocks disappeared and the boxes emptied, gas would have pooled on the floor of the cellar...”
“Just like water, puddling at the base of a fountain,” I add, whizzing a paper cup under the cold-water outlet and letting it spill into the drip tray, to illustrate the point. “Ordinarily, those boxes of dry ice would have been stored outside. Then the carbon dioxide would simply have disappeared. Into thin air. But in yesterday’s muddle, the job was left to a few helpful amateurs, who didn’t know the routine.”
“The victim died because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Different gas, but same principle as the canary down the mine shaft,” Darwin finishes.
“Or a corella in a trap,” I add. “Carbon dioxide’s what trappers use to gas parrots.”
Neighbors
by Bill Pronzini
MWA Grand Master Bill Pronzini has a new book out in collaboration with fellow Grand Master Marcia Muller, The Bughouse Affair: A Carpenter and Quincannon Mystery (Forge/January 2013). The Carpenter and Quincannon series has been running in EQMM at short-story length for a number of years, started by Bill Pronzini. This is the first novel employing the pair, but not the first time these two writers, who are husband and wife, have collaborated on a novel. See Double and Beyond the Grave.
It was one of those rare late-summer evenings just past dusk, a light breeze blowing to soften the day’s heat, the air so clear the town lights spread across the shallow valley below had an unwinking, crystal clarity. Lorraine and I were sitting on the back deck with coffee and after-dinner brandy, enjoying the view and the quiet. At least I was. The neighborhood we live in, spread across the brow of the western hillside, is a haven of home and property improvement; the daylight hours, especially on weekends at this time of year, are filled with the racket of leaf blowers, chain saws, circular saws, electric hedge clippers, banging hammers.
But Lorraine had other things on her mind than the peaceful night. “Harry,” she said abruptly, breaking the long, mellow silence, “there’s something wrong with the Gundersons.”
“The Gundersons? What do you mean?”
“They’re not what they seem to be.”
I sighed. Here we go again, I thought.
“They struck me as a nice enough couple the one time we met them.”
“Well, I don’t think they are. They don’t fit into a neighborhood like this. Everyone else here is a homeowner. They’re transients.”
“A one-year lease doesn’t make them transients.”
“They’re standoffish. And secretive. Not our kind of neighbors.”
I happened to think the Gundersons, who had lived in the house slightly below and to the left of ours for over a month now, were exactly our kind of neighbors. Exactly my kind, anyway. They may have preferred keeping to themselves, but they were pleasant enough and, a major plus in my book, they were quiet — no home-improvement projects, no loud parties.
Lorraine leaned forward in her chair to look over the low deck railing. From here, unfortunately, she had a clear view of the near side of the Gundersons’ house and most of their front yard. “I don’t suppose you’ll believe me,” she said, “but there’s something very strange going on with those people. No, not just strange... sinister.”
“Such as what?”
“I don’t know yet. But I’m going to find out.”
We’ve been married thirty years, Lorraine and I, and in most ways she’s been a good wife, mother, and companion. But she has two incurable flaws. She’s a busybody, poking her nose into other people’s business at every opportunity. And she has an overheated imagination that she fuels constantly with lurid novels, soap operas, and bad TV movies.
I made no comment, in the slim hope that she would drop the subject. No such luck. She said, “Their drapes and curtains are always closed, day and night, even the ones overlooking their patio. As if they’re trying to hide something. And Paul Gunderson, if that’s his real name... well, I don’t think he’s the architect he claims to be.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Architects keep regular hours, for one thing, and he doesn’t. Some weekdays he doesn’t leave the house at all.”
“Maybe he works at home part of the time. Some architects do.”
“And for another thing, he doesn’t know anything about Le Corbusier or Peter Eisenman.”
“Neither do I. Who are they?”
“Famous architects. I looked them up on the Internet so I could have an informed conversation with him about architecture if the opportunity came up. He knew Frank Lloyd Wright’s name, but not theirs.”
“When did you find this out?”
“Three days ago. I happened to be outside when he came home from... wherever, and I went over and tried to be neighborly. He didn’t want to talk to me. He was almost rude, in fact.”
“Well, maybe he had something important to do.”
“He also sneaks around in the middle of the night,” Lorraine said.
“Now how do you know that?”
“I got up to use the bathroom last night and happened to look out the bedroom window, and there he was leaving the house all by himself. At three A.M., and without any lights on. Don’t you think that’s odd behavior?”
“Not if he had a good reason for leaving home at that hour.”
“That’s not all,” she said. “Strange men keep coming and going over there during the day and sometimes in the evening, did you know that?”
“What do you mean by strange?”
“Different ages, different types. Half a dozen of them. For all we know Fran Gunderson could be prostituting herself.”
I managed not to laugh. “Or selling drugs.”
“Yes, or selling drugs.”
“Like what you thought Marguerite’s Mexican neighbor was doing to high-school students last year,” I said. Marguerite, our married daughter, lives in a development on the other side of town. “When what the woman was really doing was tutoring them in Spanish.”
“You don’t have to remind me of that,” she said stiffly. “We all make mistakes.”
Yes, and she’d made more than her share with her prying and spying. The time she convinced herself Tom Anderson had done away with his wife because Mary hadn’t been seen for three weeks and Tom was “acting suspiciously,” when the truth was Mary had gone off to a fat farm and Tom was too embarrassed to talk about it. And the time she was sure she’d seen the Brewsters’ sixteen-year-old daughter shoplifting perfume at Kohl’s and told the girl’s mother, only to be confronted with a sales slip. There were other incidents I could have reminded her of too. But all I said was, “Yes, dear.”