“Oh, of course,” Seymour blurted, shaking his head.
Too wrapped up in her tale to take Seymour’s bait, Fiona simply tossed him a naked little glare and continued:
“Alone in the common room, the Frankens started arguing again. Mrs. Franken was very angry. I didn’t hear every word, but I remember her specifically mentioning that she’d caught her husband having an affair. She threw it in his face. There was some quiet talk I couldn’t hear, and then she started raising her voice about Anna. . . .”
Fiona looked at me meaningfully. “Deirdre didn’t mention Anna Worth, the cereal heiress, after all. That theory of mine turned out to be a dead end.”
No kidding, I thought, shuddering at my accosting of that poor, pathetic woman.
“No, this time Deirdre Franken mentioned another woman,” said Fiona. “This woman’s first name was Anna, and her last name was . . .”
Fiona paused for dramatic effect.
“Come on, Fiona,” said Sadie. “Drop the other shoe, why don’t ya?”
“Here it is,” said Fiona. “As plain as day I heard Mrs. Franken speak the name of the other woman. I wrote the name down, though it sounds foreign and my spelling might be a little off.”
Fiona drew a crumpled piece of paper from her pocket. “The name of the other woman was Anna Filactic.”
“Filactic?” Bud Napp said. “Sounds Polish. I knew a Bob Matastic in the Marines. Nice guy. He was a Ukrainian, though.”
“Filactic you said?” Seymour cried. “Anna Filactic?” He rubbed his forehead. “My God, Fiona, you’ve got to be kidding. Anaphylactic is not a woman. It’s a physical condition. Mrs. Franken was talking about anaphylactic shock!”
Fiona stared blankly.
“Don’t feel bad, sweetie,” said Brainert. “Ms. Filactic may not be ‘the other woman,’ but it is very useful information.”
“Yes,” I said, “very useful. Timothy Brennan must have been allergic to something. Obviously, Deirdre believes anaphylactic shock triggered her father’s fatal attack.”
“What is anaphylactic shock?” asked Sadie.
“It’s a type of allergic reaction,” Seymour explained. “A sensitivity to some food or substance that causes the mucous membranes in the throat to swell and close up, thereby suffocating the victim. The most common cause is an allergy to nuts. Peanuts, especially.”
“Oh, my, yes,” said Sadie. “Peanut allergies in children are very dangerous. I remember reading a tragic story of a child dying after eating a cookie with just a few pieces of peanut in it.”
“They say even kissing someone who just ate a peanut butter sandwich can send someone with the condition into spasms,” said Seymour.
“Holy cow!” Milner cried, turning to his wife. “I served my five-nut tarts that night!”
Linda paled. “Honey,” she said, “there is no way they can pin it on you. You didn’t know!”
“But that’s not a murder at all,” Sadie said. “That’s just a tragic accident.”
These hicks are cracked. Brennan was clipped—planted by someone who knew him well enough to know how to make it look like an accident.
I spoke up. “Calm down, both of you. Mr. Brennan didn’t eat a thing. He refused any and all food. Insisted on water only.”
“And none too nicely,” Brainert noted. “Pen’s right. Brennan only drank bottled water. I watched him the whole time.”
“Yes,” I said. “The only bottle he drank from was the one I picked out and handed him. That doesn’t make me look very good, does it?”
“But the bottle you gave to Brennan was sealed. The plastic unbroken,” said Brainert.
I nodded. “I opened it myself.”
“There are many ways to contaminate a sealed container,” Seymour said. “I remember an old pulp story, published in the thirties, called A Vintage Murder. The narrator injects poison into a series of sealed wine bottles through the corks with a hypodermic needle.”
“Enter the syringe,” said Brainert.
“And remember that maniac in New York City a few years ago,” said Fiona, “he was injecting sealed water bottles with ammonia, right there on the grocery store shelves. It’s entirely possible—”
“Probable,” said Brainert.
“—that such a method was used to contaminate the water.”
“If Brennan was allergic to nuts, a tiny squirt of peanut oil in his water would do the trick,” said Brainert.
“Nut oil!” I cried. “Yes, of course . . .”
The memory flooded back to me of waking up the night after Brennan’s death, the night I’d seen Jack in the shadows.
You took a drink from the bottle, Jack reminded me. The one you half finished after Brennan’s death and put under the counter before the police came.
And the drink I’d taken had reminded me of Milner’s pastry. Now I knew why. But who set the bottles aside for Brennan?
“Linda, you’re the one who told me about the bottles set aside for Brennan—”
“I didn’t do a thing!”
“Calm down,” I said. “I know you didn’t. Someone told you they’d been set aside, right?”
“That’s right, that’s right,” she said quickly.
The Quibblers leaned slightly forward.
“Well?” said Seymour. “Who told you? Spit it out.”
“Deirdre.”
The whole room erupted, as if Linda had just dropped the last piece into a jigsaw puzzle. But it wasn’t the right piece—and I knew it. Deirdre wouldn’t frame herself. Which meant someone else who was there that night had told Deirdre to tell Linda those bottles were set aside. Someone had saved that syringe for a reason: they’d meant to frame Deirdre all along.
“But what if Deirdre is innocent?” I blurted. All eyes now turned in my direction. And they all looked skeptical.
“Why in the world would you think that?” asked Seymour. “What’s your theory?”
I told the Quibblers what had happened the night before. How both Shelby Cabot and Kenneth Franken turned up at Buy the Book long after closing time, and how I later followed them into the night. Of course, I left out all references to Jack’s ghost, along with any mention of Josh Bernstein finding a syringe in the bookstore’s women’s room.
Privately, though, I made up my mind to track down Josh Bernstein and grill him like a raw T-bone. I told everyone what I’d heard—or thought I’d heard—when I’d eavesdropped on Shelby’s and Kenneth’s conversation under the streetlight. And I wrapped up my revelations with two conclusions:
“I think that the ‘other woman’ Deirdre was referring to was none other than Salient House representative Shelby Cabot,” I said. “And, finally, I believe that it was Kenneth Franken, and not Timothy Brennan, who wrote Shield of Justice.”
CHAPTER 19
Things That Get Bumped in the Night
I distrust a closed-mouth man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking’s something you can’t do judiciously, unless you keep in practice.
—Casper Gutman (a.k.a. “The Fat Man”) to Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, 1929
WHEN I DROPPED the bomb about Brennan’s alleged ghostwriter, I heard a few gasps—the loudest from longtime Brennan fan Milner Logan. Frankly, I didn’t know what shocked the Quibblers more: that Kenneth Franken carried on an affair with a publicity manager from his publishing house; or that he’d penned Timothy Brennan’s latest opus.