“Good thing you brought him in.”
“How bad is it?” I asked. Matt and I were standing with the doctor just outside an ER examining room. David was still inside.
“Mr. Mintzer complained of a burning sensation in the chest, shoulders, abdomen, forearms, and back of the neck. He felt bouts of numbness in his face, along with fairly constant abdominal pains, which are still persisting. He’s experiencing heart palpitations, and when he first entered the hospital he was wheezing, which indicates difficulty in breathing—and that indicates to me that Mr. Mintzer was very close to anaphylactic shock.”
“Oh, god.” I looked at Matt.
He squeezed my shoulder. “Then we did the right thing, bringing him in? Right, doctor?”
“Yes, of course,” De Prima replied. “And the patient said he’d vomited on the way to the hospital?”
Matt sighed. “Repeatedly.”
“That’s actually good,” De Prima noted. “We would have had to pump his stomach if he hadn’t.”
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.
“I administered an antihistamine, a standard precaution with such a powerful and dangerous allergic reaction—”
Matt blinked. “He nearly died because of an allergy?”
“A rather common sensitivity to MSG. That’s monosodium glutamate—”
“Yes, yes, I know what it is,” I said. “And so does Matt. But we didn’t know until tonight that David had an adverse reaction to MSG. Apparently, he’s known for a long time. That’s why he’s tried to avoid the additive.”
Dr. De Prima offered me an indulgent smile. “Ms. Cosi, MSG is so prevalent in our modern diet that it is difficult to avoid completely. There are over forty different names to represent MSG found on food labels. It’s called everything from the euphemistic ‘hydrolized proteins’ to ‘natural flavorings’—perhaps the biggest lie of all.”
Matt cleared his throat. “Bottom line, please doctor. Will David be all right?”
The doctor nodded. “We’re keeping him here overnight, mostly for observation. The danger’s passed.”
“You’re sure?” Matt pressed.
“The effects last one to four hours, but in a dosage as high as Mr. Mintzer has ingested, it could last longer. The antihistamines should help. When the effects fade, Mr. Mintzer will feel weak and tired for another day or so—a feeling not unlike a hangover—but he should return to his old self in forty-eight to seventy-two hours.”
“Can we see him?” I asked.
“Sorry, I can’t allow that,” advised the doctor. “He needs his rest. The trip here took a lot out of him.”
“You can say that again,” quipped Matt.
“Doctor, you said that David consumed a large amount of MSG. How do you know?” I asked.
“It had to be a large amount to elicit such a powerful reaction. The intensity of the allergy attack is directly proportional to the amount of MSG absorbed.”
I shook my head. “But David said he just ate a little at the party he’d attended tonight.”
“From his reaction, he consumed quite a bit,” the doctor insisted. “In fact, it’s a good thing you brought him in. He had so much MSG in so short a time that with his personal sensitivity to the substance, he could have died.”
Matt and I said very little after we returned to the parking lot. I waited outside Breanne’s Mercedes while Matteo cleaned the back seat with clumps of paper towels he’d grabbed from the hospital’s men’s room.
I offered to help, but he waved me off. So, while he held his nose and wiped out the back seat, I watched moths flutter around the parking lot lights. It was close to three in the morning and the only sounds I heard were the constant cricket chirps and the wind rustling the trees.
Matt slipped his jacket over my shoulders to keep me warm while he took the convertible’s top down “to blow out the stink.” A moment later, we were heading back to David’s mansion, the wind in my salt-encrusted hair. As we drove in silence, I tried to process the events of this crazy night.
It was apparent to me that a second attempt had been made on David Mintzer’s life—nothing I could prove, of course, but apparent to me. It also seemed, at least at first glance, that the identity of the culprit was obvious.
There had been years of bad blood between David Mintzer and Bom Felloes, as much a battle of inflated egos as anything else, but real nonetheless. And while the elegant young restaurateur maintained publicly that he’d invited David to his party to “bury the hatchet,” Felloes may have also used the opportunity to slip David an MSG mickey large enough to induce anaphylactic shock.
In its white powder form, monosodium glutamate was practically tasteless. A large amount of the stuff could have been added to almost anything David was ingesting at Bom’s bash, from the martinis to the peanut sauce that dressed the seafood satay.
While my theory sounded good, there was one major hole. The killer had to know about David’s ultra sensitivity to MSG. How would Bom have known it?
I myself had known David for nearly a year. I considered him a good friend, but I didn’t know about his allergy. Sure, at Cuppa J, we never used MSG, but that was a matter of food and beverage policy, one I happened to agree with. I never knew it had anything to do with David’s sensitivity to it.
But Alberta…she probably knew. After all, she knew a lot about David, personal information gathered over the years. She knew his likes and dislikes, the details about his health and his frailties. And Alberta was one of the beneficiaries in David’s will. With David Mintzer dead, she stood to benefit. Even if David left her a fraction of his estate, the business interests owned by Mintzer were so vast that the value of the inheritance would still be immense.
But was a big cash payoff enough to motivate Alberta Gurt to murder her employer? Maybe.
While I found Alberta a pleasant and likeable individual, I also found the growing pile of circumstantial evidence against her very troubling. For instance, she’d mentioned a nephew named Thomas she was very fond of, a young man David had come to know and help. He’d even made Alberta’s nephew a beneficiary in his will. This “Tommy” was, by Alberta’s own admission, a troubled youth who’d paid his debt to society, straightened out his life, and entered the military, where he certainly would have learned how to handle a rifle. That would explain the rifle shells.
So…could Alberta and her nephew have plotted cold-blooded murder together? Could Alberta’s “Tommy” have been the shooter on the Fourth of July? And when the nephew made his mistake and killed Treat Mazzelli, did Alberta try again to kill David tonight? She could have easily slipped a little MSG cocktail into his “Fizzy Friendly” anti-hangover elixir.
Now that I thought about it, the woman had been surprised and agitated when Matt and I came upon her in the kitchen. In fact, she’d been at the sink, washing out a tumbler, which she’d subsequently dropped. Was she destroying the evidence, cleaning the very glass she’d used to serve the poison cocktail to David?
I thought back to the night of the shooting. About how David came down with a migraine before the fireworks display—yet he told Madame that he didn’t recall ingesting any of the foods that exclusively caused him to suffer migraines. Could someone have added MSG to something David had ingested? Maybe it was someone he trusted? Someone like Alberta Gurt?
And there was another thing that continued to bother me. Why had Alberta been dressed so well last night? She’d had on makeup and jewelry too, but she hadn’t come to the party. She’d apparently just been spending the night alone in her room.
I played the scene back in my head. Now that I thought about it, the television had been off when she opened the door to her bedroom suite. Yet, before she’d opened it, I’d heard voices talking. Could those voices have been Alberta and her nephew? Could she have been hiding him when I knocked? Or had she simply turned the TV off before coming to the door?