“We found the bottle of poison in your room,” I said.
She sat back down in her chair. I said nothing. At moments like this, it is always best to say nothing. Her eyes faded and lost focus.
“I’m not so surprised,” she said softly after a while. “I’m sure he put it there on purpose. He had always hoped that I would be able to fix it all. I tried,” she said. “It is a chef’s job, this,” she said, squeezing lemon juice into a pitcher.
She sighed now, with some elegance in her shoulders, and stirred the growing pitcher of lemonade with a wooden spoon.
“But a good chef must let go of the salt/pepper ratios,” she said. “It’s uncontrollable. It is a chef’s nightmare to see the saltshaker dump itself all over a perfectly salted piece of meat or to see the pepper dirty up what is an ideal wave of béchamel. It is a chef’s sleeplessness, right there,” she said.
“So let it go,” she said. “I cannot worry about it excessively. I simply Can Not.” She poured herself half a glass of lemonade and took a sip. “Too sweet,” she said, cutting four more lemons precisely in half. “And if lemonade is too sweet,” she said, “then we are somehow lost to the crush of anonymity.”
Her face struck against itself, and her eyebrows folded in.
“Sir,” she said, “I was here for twenty-six years. Had they trusted my expertise, perhaps none of this would have happened.”
I found I wanted to comfort her but her eyes had shut down, and after I finished spiking the last crumb, I tried to thank her sincerely, but she had lost herself in thought, at the kitchen table, stirring four grains of sugar at a time into the pitcher, and tasting, repeatedly, with the large wooden spoon.
“Thank you for your time,” I said, then, to no one.
It was not the chef. I believed her fully. The evidence was in. But if the mystery was solved, both big and small, then why was I still on it? That was what my boss kept asking over and over. He had a new case for me. This one involved a homicide on the west end of town, of a very old rich codger who had seven children and it seemed likely that one of the seven had killed him. But I was bored by that one. It will solve itself, like a hose releasing its pinch and letting the water flow. I bought some orchid food instead and went to see the coroner again, because my mind would not stop thinking of that end, when the husband and wife realized they were dying together, each by the hand of the other. In a way, they actually had swapped personalities, by killing the other in the manner of his or her favorite spice. The wife chose knifing, which is certainly “pepperlike” in its spicy attack on the body, and the coroner thanked me for the orchid food and confirmed my suspicions about the poison, by explaining how the one the husband had chosen killed by increasing the saline level of the bloodstream to such a degree that the person essentially dehydrated.
I myself have a girlfriend, as I have mentioned, which is perhaps why the salt and pepper pair do not leave my mind. The case is closed and the file cabinet locked but I still think of them all the time. The ranch-style house sold for cheap to a small family who moved here from Michigan and didn’t hear the history. I believe the chef retired from family work, and now is doing private catering on her own, and if I ever get married, I will surely hire her, although my superstitious girlfriend might not approve. I do love my girlfriend, for her differences and her similarities, but I do not know if one day the item that defines me in her eyes will no longer work. If my body will fail. If I will face her in bed and not know what to do, when now her body still seems infinite. If she will stop having that bright look in her eye at the parrot store, and instead lose herself circling letters in word searches. There are couples who commit suicide together and they are in line with Shakespeare’s greatest lovers, but those who murder each other precisely at the same minute are written up in all the papers as crazy. Even their family members coughed and got off the phone as fast as they could. They would like to erase the whole rigamarole. I picked up more than one tone of disgust and superiority in my many interviews. But it seems to me beautiful. How right at the end, when everything was over, they realized they had reached the ultimate gesture of compromise, that their union had come full circle, and perhaps it was the sting of that bittersweetness that killed them most, crueler than any knife or poison.
The Leading Man
The boy was born with fingers shaped like keys. All except one, the pinkie on the right hand, had sharp ridges running along the inner length, and a point at the tip. They were made of flesh, with nerves and pores, but of a tougher texture, more hardened and specific. As a child, the boy had a difficult time learning to hold a pen and use scissors, but he was resilient and figured out his own method fast enough. His true task was to find the nine doors.
• • •
Door one he found as a kid; it was his front-door key. He did not expect this because it seemed so obvious but one day he came home from school and was locked out; his mother, usually home, had just begun taking some kind of sculpture class and was off molding clay and forgot to leave a key under the welcome mat. So he was unwelcome, in his own home. He cried for a bit and tromped on some pansies as revenge and got so frustrated staring at the lock, such a simple piece of metal separating him from his palace of food and bed and TV and telephone, that he stuck the index finger of his right hand inside. It shoved deep into the lock, bumping around, trying to find a perfect spatial match. Nothing clicked. But he’d enjoyed the sensation so he tried the middle finger next. Too big. The pinkie on the left hand: too small; it wiggled inside like a wire. It was the ring finger on his right hand that slipped inside, easy as a glove, ridges filling the humps and the boy settled it deep, rotated his entire hand, heard the click, and the door opened cleanly. Inside. He ripped his finger from the door and let out some kind of vicious delighted laugh.
When his mother came home, two hours later, hands red with clay, he pulled her straight to the door and showed her the trick. Shove in, turn, click, open. His mother kept laughing. And I didn’t even want to buy this house! she said, holding him close. And to imagine, what if we hadn’t? The boy shrugged. He had no idea how to answer that question.
The second key fit the lock of the bank deposit box that held all the securities of the family. The two had gone on a trip to the bank and the boy was bored in the room of security boxes while his mother spoke worriedly with an accountant. He stuck the pinkie on his left hand into their security box and ta da. He was very surprised. So was his mother. I didn’t especially like this bank either, she said. Can I have some of this money? the boy asked, looking with interest at the large piece of gold sitting in the box like a glowing turd. No, she said, but I’ll buy you a burger. They went to his favorite burger joint where the lettuce was shredded and the soda ice crushed, and she told him about how she was making a clay version of him. It’s you, she said, but you are surrounded by doors. You are standing on doors and wearing doors and your hand of keys is held up like a deck of cards. The boy splayed his fingers out on the table. Gin, he said.
The third, fourth, and fifth keys opened his camp trunk, the neighbor’s car, and the storage room of the school cafeteria, respectively. He opened the cafeteria door one day at school when he was wandering around, not wanting to go home yet because there was nothing to do and no one to be with. All the other kids were off playing sports. The boy opened the back of the cafeteria with his right pointer, to his own almost dulled surprise, and sat with the frozen chicken nuggets for a while. It got boring quickly so he went home, opened the door with his other finger, and watched TV. His father was away at war. No one knew what war it was because it was an unannounced war, which made it worse because he could tell no one because that would cause great governmental problems. So he just held on to that information and when his friends asked where his dad was on Open House Night at school, he said, He’s away on business. He wanted to yell out, The business of saving everyone’s life! but he knew that would cause further questions so he kept his mouth shut.