The Last Annual Slugfest (27 page)

B
Y THE TIME
I had finally finished with my official statement—and my breakfast—it was nearly noon. I walked out to the sheriff’s department lobby.

Joey Gummo was at the desk. “Vejay,” he called.

I turned. Somehow I didn’t connect Joey Gummo with use of my first name. He beckoned me over.

“Rosa called;” he said. “She wants you to come by the house.”

I nodded.

“Vejay,” he said again, uncomfortably. “You know when I tried to keep you from talking to Rosa last night? Well, I was only trying to protect her.”

“I know,” I said.

“It was nothing personal.”

“I know.”

“The sheriff, he doesn’t dislike you. You just get his dander up.”

A rather revolting description. “I know.”

Now Joey grinned. It was an unfitting use of his small, pointy features. “Listen, Vejay, I can make it up to you.”

How he could do that was one thing I didn’t know.

“You work for PG and E, right?”

“Yes.”

“For that guy Bobbs?”

“Right. As a matter of fact, I have to face him tomorrow morning. I had a Missed Meter Friday. First, thing tomorrow, he’ll want me in his office telling him what I’ve done about it.”

Joey’s grin broadened. “No, he won’t. Tomorrow morning he’ll be making a delivery here. He’ll be making a delivery every day till Wednesday.”

I remembered Mr. Bobbs had been at the sheriff’s department Saturday when I’d seen him in the parking lot. He had never told me what he was doing there.

“What’s he delivering?”

“Well, you know he got sick at the Slugfest.”

“Yes.”

“He said that it couldn’t have been caused by …” Joey groped for the right word.

“Squeamishness?”

“Right, squeamishness. He said it must have been food poisoning. So, well, we are public servants. We had to be sure.”

“So?” I wondered how long Joey could drag this out.

“He’s bringing us samples, urine and shit—a paper cup and a bottle. I thought you’d want to be the first to know.”

All the tension of the weekend welled up and exploded. I roared. My whole body shook. I braced my hands on the counter. “Thanks, Joey,” I said when I could talk again. “We’re more than even.”

“He’s supposed to get here by noon. I chewed him out yesterday for being so late. If you hang around, you can see him carting his sack in.”

“That’s okay,” I said. Despite my amusement, the last thing I wanted to do was to be a visible witness to Mr. Bobbs’s latest embarrassment. There was enough rancor between us already.

Before I could turn to leave, I heard the outside door opening behind me. I didn’t move, hoping to blend into the background. But the footsteps came right up behind me. A hand touched my shoulder, and when I turned around, Harry Bramwell gave me a great hug.

His beard scraped against the edges of the cuts on my cheek, but it didn’t matter. I just let him hold me. And then I let him drive me home, and make himself coffee while I took a hot shower, washed and dried my hair, put on makeup and clean clothes—a dress!—and presented myself back in the living room.

“My God!” he said. “If I’d realized you could look that good, I would have made sure I got to the Slugfest.”

“Why didn’t you?” It seemed so long ago now, I had almost forgotten my disappointment. “I gave you good directions. I wanted you to be there.”

“I was going to come. I was looking forward to seeing it, and you. But after I talked to Edwina Henderson and I realized she would be humiliated in front of all those people she knew, and the television cameras, I just couldn’t bring myself to view that.”

“Nice man,” I said.

He patted the couch next to him. “Sit down. We’ll talk about how nice I am.”

I smiled. “Later, at length. But now we have to get to Rosa’s.”

“Couldn’t we skip it?”

“No, this is one occasion we really can’t.”

He stood up. “Like I kept saying to you last night, I don’t really understand, but I guess we’ll go there. But while we’re on the way, maybe you can explain all those things I didn’t understand. Like why did Curry Cunningham kill Edwina?”

I put on my jacket—it was wonderful to leave my slicker on the hook—and we started down the fifty-two steps that led in a Z to the street.

“If you don’t brace a few of these, you’re going to break your neck, you know,” he said.

“I’ll add that to my list. It’ll come somewhere between reshingling the roof and replacing the bathroom window.”

The blue Volvo was at the bottom. I climbed into the passenger seat. “Straight ahead,” I said when he had started the car. “Okay. Curry Cunningham. Curry, or Curr, as Edwina called him, was her nephew. He came here to visit one summer and had an affair with Leila Katz, his cousin. Incest was definitely ‘unsuitable for a Henderson.’ And Edwina never forgave him; she never let either of them forget it. She controlled the family money, such as it was, so there was no fancy college for Curry, no possibility of a stake to open his own business. Edwina had enough influence with local judges, politicians, and merchants so that it would be easier for them to say no to something—or someone—she didn’t want than to go to bat for a complete stranger. Why should they take on Edwina when they could avoid it? They saw enough of her petitions and campaigns as it was.

“If Curry had decided to stay back East, Edwina’s ability to thwart him would have been limited. But he must have been telling the truth when he said he loved this area and made a point of moving back here.”

Harry looked out his window at the Henderson Tobacconist’s and the redwood that still stood behind, its great branches dwarfing the old shop. He glanced past me at the high sidewalk that had an extra step up from the street, and at the café, now Sunday-lunchtime crowded. Then he turned his gaze straight ahead on North Bank Road to the end of the small commercial block where town proper stopped and the laurels and redwoods and eucalyptus trees reached in from either side of the road, covering it as if it were a minor and transient alteration of their domain. “I can see why he wouldn’t let one old woman deny him all this.”

I nodded. “Curry’s problem was that he was too much like his aunt. He went after her with the same singlemindedness that Edwina devoted to her causes and her vendettas. He told me he had
The Paper
delivered to him out of town. With that, he could keep up on Edwina’s various campaigns.
The Paper
reported the historical society meetings and doubtless Edwina’s other activities. So Curry was aware of her fascination with the area and the Pomos, and her certainty that there must have been a Pomo rancheria near here. She gave her Pomo talk every year. Who knows how many times he’d read reports of it?

“Curry told me he joined Crestwood so he could get back to this area. His wife, Megumi—Meg—was Edwina’s niece. Edwina didn’t consider her a niece by marriage. Leila told me that once a person married into the Henderson family, Edwina accepted them as a full-fledged niece or nephew or whatever. So Edwina’s niece, Meg, created the treaty. Meg is an artist. Her field is eastern religious art.”

“Where the emphasis is on reproducing a copy as close to the original as possible. Aha!”

“Exactly. Meg told Edwina she had access to the treaty. She and Curry had lived near Baltimore, within easy commuting distance to Washington, D.C., and the Senate’s secret files. She traveled back East to study the collections at the museums. But Edwina didn’t know the purpose of her trips; she only knew what Meg and Curry told her—that Meg was doing consulting work connected with the job she had had back East, and it required her flying back to Washington. So, to Edwina, it was quite possible that Meg had come across the treaty.”

“Still, for Edwina to believe her—”

“Oh, but you see that’s the beauty of it. Edwina was captured because of her own biases. She believed Meg because Meg is Japanese, and by now, you know Edwina’s predilection for Indians and Asians. She would never have trusted Curry or Leila, but Meg, well, that was different.”

“And Meg’s gone now?”

“She and her son are in Japan. Curry told me she was there studying. He also said that her being Japanese had opened the doors for him to make his planned shipment of timber.”

“While you were in with the sheriff, there must have been ten calls about fights and guys from out of town. Sounds like Curry’s lumberjacks are pretty pissed off.”

“I’ll bet.” I laughed. “Crestwood Industries isn’t going to be any too pleased either, when they get the bills for all these loggers working on overtime and the tugboats and the logging trucks. And they’ll have to pay a fine for the trees he destroyed—not an enormous one, since they were all on private property. But if Curry’s plan to corner the Japanese lumber market had succeeded, it would have been more than worth all the expense and bad publicity here. He had an in because of his wife. And he told me yesterday that what a businessman needed in dealing with the Japanese was to make the right gesture. He mentioned the example of the Japanese gardener cutting all the blooms off a plant to leave the one perfect one undiminished by clutter. Curry’s gesture was to send them nine huge, matching redwoods—the Nine Warriors.” I started to tell him the history of those trees, but he stopped me.

“I know,” he said. “And I’ll bet he was right. Anyone would be awed by them, by the magnificence of the trees, and the magnificence of the gesture. But surely someone would have noticed. Cutting down a thousand-year-old redwood isn’t a quiet process.”

“That’s why he had all those trucks and men. He had them start work at first light. Not many people are up early on Sunday morning. The crews had two-man band saws; they’re pretty fast. They were to cut down the trees, load the boles onto the trucks, and drive to the fish ranch. The back wall would have been removed, and all the salmon fry and the incubators have been cleared out of the building, so the trucks could drive right up to the dock. There the men would drive pegs into the bole, attach the shackles and chains, and push it into the water. Then they’d bring up the next and do the same thing. The sections of the bole would be joined together like five links on a belt. And the tugs could drag each tree out to the Japanese ship waiting out in the ocean.”

Harry shook his head. “From what I’ve learned about Curry Cunningham, I’m surprised he didn’t arrange for Edwina to see all nine trees being pulled across the water one after another.”

I nodded. “Too flamboyant even for Curry. But I’ll bet it crossed his mind. Of course, Curry would have been on one of the tugs, headed out to the Japanese ship. He’d have had Leila’s body”—I swallowed—“to dispose of at sea.”

“And yours.” Harry squeezed my hand. He slowed as a station wagon pulled out in front of him. On the bumper was a sign saying “Stop off-shore drilling! Save our coast!” “So,” he said, “Curry would have established himself as a shrewd businessman. He could have waited out any public outcry while he was in Japan, and come back to work for Crestwood in Oregon or Idaho, in a much more important position.”

I nodded. “He’d probably even have had
The Paper
sent to him so he could read about Edwina’s reaction.”

“But still, you said I was the cause of his killing Edwina. How could
I
be? He never even saw me.”

Harry looked so distressed, I was sorry I had had to mention that. “Curry dropped Hooper off at Steelhead Lodge. Hooper had just seen you. He knew who you were. It was big-time for Edwina to have a noted expert call on her. Of course, he told Curry, a member of the historical society, that an important expert was here in Henderson conferring with Edwina. And Curry recognized your name, too. He knew you would see through the treaty right away. And he realized that Edwina would expose him, humiliate him, and block his great plan. So his choices were to let that happen or to kill her. For him, there must have been no choice at all. He dropped off Hooper at the lodge, then he had plenty of time to get to the fish ranch, pick up the nicotine and the Estrin bottle, and get back for the Slugfest. Since he was the area manager of Crestwood Industries, he’d been to the fish ranch often enough to know what was there. And the night guard was one person who wouldn’t tell the sheriff he was there.”

“But how did he go about it—I mean the actual killing? How did he know which pizza to put the poison on?”

I smiled. “Theoretically, that was the easy part. But it was the only area where there was a serious hitch in his plan. You see, part of the attraction of the Slugfest is its traditions. The audience likes to be able to anticipate what horrors await the judges; that’s half the fun. So things are done the same way year after year. The trays with the entrees are lined up along the front edge of the food table. The judges march around it in the Grand Promenade. And for that, Curry made a point of getting the other judges up and going, so he could be last. So there was no one behind him to see him squeeze the nicotine onto the pizza. Then the cooks picked up their trays and served them, facing the judges. Think about the last time you were served like that.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “It was at faculty meetings. For a while they had one person bring snacks, usually dry slices of cake on paper plates. The person who brought them passed the tray. I always assumed that was so the guilty party would be recognized.”

“And when you took your slice of cake, you picked the one nearest you, right?”

“Well, I didn’t want to make a big deal about choosing the least offensive piece.”

“Exactly. When there are five dishes on a tray, the first two people take the ones in front, the third takes the middle dish, which leaves the ones in the rear corners. The two remaining people take the ones nearest them. It would be awkward not to.”

He put a hand on my arm. “But I thought the guy in the first seat, your boss, got sick and ran out after the first dish.”

“He did. It must have been a terrifying moment for Curry. By then the nicotine was already on the pizza. With only four judges, the pizza might have been moved, or even thrown out. But Curry salvaged things when he insisted Bert Lucci take Mr. Bobbs’s place.”