The Convivial Codfish (11 page)

His wife was delighted to meet Max’s new friends, accepted a cup of tea from Marge, salad from Pam, and a small helping of the galantine from Angela because it looked so delicious she couldn’t pass it up. She talked cooking for a few minutes like a model guest, listened with the proper degree of horrified interest to the events of the evening, then bade the caterers a grateful farewell.

“I must get this poor man home. Thank you so much for taking such good care of him, and I do hope I’ll have the pleasure of seeing you again. I’ll drive, shall I, darling? You must be exhausted.”

Before Max could protest that he wasn’t, Sarah was behind the wheel again. “Where to next?”

“I thought we were going home.”

“Not if you’re planning to ditch the little woman and sneak back to the Tolbathys’ by yourself. That’s what you have in mind, isn’t it?”

“Sarah, two people are already dead.”

“Three. I heard it on the car radio coming out. A Mrs. Ashbroom is the latest. Did you meet her?”

“I suppose so. Her husband’s one of Jem’s buddies in that crazy goddamned chowder society, I know that.”

“He would be! I hope Uncle Jem hasn’t gone into a frenzy and discombobulated his hip. Max, this is awful. Have you any idea how it could have happened?”

“Lots.” He gave her a brief rundown. “And a fat lot of good ideas are going to do me. What we need is evidence. You take a left at the corner and keep going straight.”

“Until we see the train, right?”

“You’re a tantalizing wench, you know that?”

“I was afraid you were going to say a nagging wife. Speaking of whom, I thought we might get your mother a tea cozy. They have some lovely handmade ones over at the Women’s Educational.”

“Sounds terrific.”

“What does?”

“Whatever you just said.”

“She doesn’t have one, does she?”

“So what if she does? Get her another.”

“Max, are you sure you feel all right?”

“Sarah, you know I never eat caviar if I can help it. I only hope I survive that chicken. Why do women always have to go around jellying everything they can get their aspic on?”

“Why do some men feel compelled to be little gentlemen? Back there, you were acting as if that chicken was the most wonderful thing you ever tasted.”

“What was I going to do? Throw a tantrum and hurl it on the floor?”

“Must you always love or loathe? Can’t you ever strike a happy medium?”

“You’re suggesting I slug Cousin Theonia?”

“She’s a palmist, not a medium. Furthermore, that remark was not amusing.”

“Your lips twitched.”

“How could you tell?”

“I have an intimate personal acquaintance with your lips, in case you’d forgotten.”

“You could be back home reminding me if you weren’t such a workaholic. Has Mr. Tolbathy asked you to take on his case?”

“Mr. Tolbathy has told me ever so courteously to get lost.”

“I see.”

“The hell you do. I myself see those three nice chicken jelliers watching their nice little business go down the sink and Tolbathy losing everything he’s got unless somebody does something pretty fast. The police won’t. They’re going to spare his feelings. Wouter Tolbathy’s death is going to be an accident and the poisoning’s going to be a nasty Russian plot. Tom Tolbathy’s too sick to think straight tonight, but he’ll be thinking plenty tomorrow when the Food and Drug Administration starts recalling his caviar.”

“So you decided to do his thinking for him and bill him later. Crafty little dickens, aren’t you?”

“I’m not the only crafty one around here. Damn it, Sarah, I wish you’d let me take you home.”

“I don’t see why. The murderer’s not at the Tolbathys’ any more.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Elementary, my love. He or she is in the hospital. Isn’t that where you’d be? You must be right about the poisoner’s being one of the guests.”

“So how did he slip them the poison?”

“Maybe he does magic tricks and substituted a bad can for a good can in full view of the audience, like a bunny out of a hat. If he managed to get the chain off Uncle Jem’s neck, he must be good at that sort of thing, wouldn’t you say?”

“I hadn’t thought of bunnies out of hats,” Max admitted. “So if he had the poison—”

“He’d give himself a tiny dose, make himself vomit as quickly and publicly as possible, complain a lot about burning sensations in his throat and whatnot, and get himself carted off in one of the ambulances with blaring of trumpets and beating of drums. If the doctors couldn’t find any trace of the poison in his stomach when he got there, he could tell them he’d been on a diet or something and only ate a weentsy nibble of the caviar to be polite.”

I only had a bite of my wife’s. Tom Tolbathy had said that, and now he was getting pumped out with the rest of them. Good God, Max wondered, could Tom Tolbathy have engineered this gruesome farce himself?

Could he possibly have used his brother, Wouter, as the bogus wine steward, making Wouter believe it was only a joke they were playing on the guests? And then could Tom have killed Wouter so he wouldn’t find out it wasn’t a joke after all?

He could. In fact, Tom Tolbathy would have been in a better position than anybody else to manage the mechanics of such a plot. He’d certainly have known what was planned with regard to serving the caviar, and so would Wouter. They’d both been at the luncheon when Jem lost his chain; mightn’t one of them have pinched it while the other diverted Jem’s attention by some trick?

“Another rabbit out of the hat,” Max finished gloomily. “What I can’t see is why the chain had to come into the picture at all. Unless it’s because the server wasn’t really one of the Comrades and the others were meant to think he was. If that’s the case, the plan fell flat. I seem to have been the only one in the crowd who recognized the chain for what it was, and I got called a liar for saying so.”

“Then maybe the Tolbathys just didn’t want to go to the expense of buying a chain they’d never use again,” Sarah suggested.

“Sarah, you’re talking about two guys who built their own private railroad for kicks.”

“But they expected to get their money’s worth out of the railroad.”

Sarah was a bit puzzled as to why she even had to mention so obvious a fact. Cousin Dolph would have understood in a flash, and Dolph’s was not the swiftest brain in the clan. So would Alexander, but she decided not to say so.

Max shrugged. “If that makes sense to you, maybe it would to Tom Tolbathy. Okay, so let’s suppose Wouter was the waiter. Has a nice ring to it, anyway. That means Tom would have had to be up in the cab running the train while Wouter did his act in the dining car. I can buy that. When I saw Wouter, he was wearing a striped engineer’s coverall, but he could easily have swapped clothes with his brother. They were close enough in size. Wouter’d have had plenty of time to put on the wig and do whatever he did to his face. Tom could have done it for him, if it comes to that. Then Wouter could have dropped the wig and stuff into the stove on his way back to the cab.”

“As for the chain,” Sarah cut in, “Tom would have taken that from him and put it back around his own neck while they were changing clothes again. He’d have waited till they changed before killing Wouter, I should think, so he wouldn’t have to bother about getting him back into his engineer’s suit. Tom could have been wearing the chain under his clothes even while you were getting the horselaugh from that stooge of a police chief.”

“And Tom was so kindly not backing me up, saying he wasn’t much good at noticing things like that. So where are we? Tom could have managed to spend five minutes or so in the engine without being missed. As host, he did a fair amount of backing and forthing. Anybody who happened to look for him and not see him around would naturally have assumed he was in another car. Even if someone happened to go up to the engine and catch Tom at the controls, it wouldn’t matter. Tom could stick to the story that it was all a gag, postpone the execution to a more propitious time, and find some way to stop the guests from getting at the poison.”

“How, for instance?”

“Pull the train wreck ahead of schedule, maybe. Or stop the train, race into the dining car, and do a Marx Brothers routine with Wouter snatching the caviar and running off with it or some damn thing. Since he’s in the business, no doubt he had a few spare cans kicking around, so he’d just give Wouter an untainted one and make him go through the act again. I’m not saying it happened, I’m just saying it could have.”

As to killing a beloved brother, how many persons of Max’s usually brief acquaintance had deeply regretted what they saw as the necessity to bump off their nearest and dearest but gone ahead and done it anyway? Maybe Tom Tolbathy was as devastated about Wouter’s death as he seemed to be. Strong men had wept often enough after they’d put down their favorite dogs or stabbed their mistresses.

“Look at Don José,” Max said aloud.

“Why? Where is he?” Sarah asked, naturally enough.

“Oh, sorry. I was cogitating.”

“About Don José? You don’t mean Carmen’s Don José?”

“Whose else?”

“What would a love-struck tenor have to do with a trainful of people eating poisoned caviar?”

“To the best of my knowledge, nothing. How well do you know Tom Tolbathy?”

“I don’t know him at all. To me, Tom Tolbathy is just another name on Uncle Jem’s long list of drinking buddies. I think Alexander brought Aunt Caroline out here once to some benefit gala or other.”

“He didn’t belong to the Codfish crowd, did he?”

“Heavens, no. Alexander wasn’t the fun and games sort. You ought to know that by now.”

“How come we always get back to Alexander?”

“We don’t. You’re just in a snit because I won’t let you play daddy the way he used to. I’ve had enough father figures in my life, thank you. Is this the Tolbathys’ driveway? There’s a locomotive painted on the mailbox. You still haven’t told me why you said Don José.”

“Sarah dearest darling sweetie-pumpkin, I have no idea why I said Don José. I must have been talking in my sleep. Yes, this is the place. Go on till you find a train, then stop.”

“M
AX, I THINK I
have to stop,” said Sarah.

“Who says so?” Max mumbled with his eyes still shut.

“That policeman who’s making terrible faces at me.”

“Huh? Oh.”

Max sat up straight, pushed the button that let down the window, and stuck his head out. “Evening, officer. I’m expecting another official from the Food and Drug Administration. Has he arrived yet?”

“No.” The patrolman hesitated a moment, then added, “Sir.”

“Blast it, what’s keeping him? Mrs. Bittersohn, didn’t you succeed in making Fothergill understand we have an emergency situation here? Never mind, officer, I quite understand it’s not your fault. When he comes, will you please tell him I’ve gone on ahead. Where will I find Mr. Tolbathy, do you know?”

“I think they took him to the hospital, Mr.—”

“Then where’s this man Rollo, the caretaker? At the train or in the house?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir.”

“Well, I suppose I’ll have to track him down for myself. You’d better stay here. Not letting anyone up, I hope?”

Before the policeman could decide he wasn’t letting them up, either, Sarah had gunned the motor and left him in the lurch. “So that’s how you do it,” she remarked.

“Sometimes,” Max admitted. “So Tolbathy’s been carted off with the rest of them. Damn, I wonder if there’s anybody left by now. You wouldn’t happen to know how to drive a train,
kätzele?”

“One could always try.”

“Let’s hope we don’t have to. That’s it, over there.”

“Thank you for the information,” Sarah told him sweetly.

“Now who’s being snitty?”

“Well, dear, that train would be rather a hard thing to miss. If you’re planning to look for evidence, I’m afraid you’ve left it a bit late.”

A bent-over figure had just appeared at the open door of the parlor car and sloshed something from a dustpan into a large trash container that had been pulled up beside the steps. Rollo, or someone, must be cleaning up.

“I’m not,” said Max. “If there was any caviar left anywhere on the train, the police will have found it before they cleared out. And if that silver chain’s turned up, which I very much doubt, Rollo must surely have had sense enough not to throw it out. Let’s go ask him. Are you warm enough?”

He put an arm around Sarah just in case and caught up on some lost cuddling time under pretense of helping her over the path, now trodden into lumpy ice. Rollo saw them coming and stood watching them from the doorway, casually propping his broom across the opening as a barrier.

“Let me try this time,” Sarah murmured.

When they got to the steps, she looked up and smiled. “Good evening. You must be Rollo. I’m Jeremy Kelling’s niece, Sarah. You know Uncle Jem, I’m sure.”

She was rewarded by a momentary flash of badly stained dentures. “Busted ’is hip,” rasped the caretaker.

“That’s right. He’s still in the hospital, driving the nurses crazy as you can well imagine. This is my husband, Max, who was in the party tonight. May we come aboard?”

“I got orders not to let nobody on.”

“Those idiotic police, I suppose. Expecting one man to cope with a mess like this. Here, let me have that broom. Max, you go forward and see what needs to be done in the tender. Rollo, you’d better come down here and pick up this glass that’s been spilled beside the trash barrel before somebody slips and gets cut on it. Mrs. Tolbathy would have seventeen fits if she knew you were down here slaving away by yourself at this hour. How is she, have you heard?”

Somehow or other, Sarah had become a member of the family. Rollo meekly did whatever she told him to while Max prowled. His search was not fruitful, after a while, he came back to where Sarah and Rollo were still sweeping up glass.

“No luck up there. Rollo, did the police find any trace of the poison?”

“Them?” Rollo snorted. “They couldn’t find their own—” he glanced at Sarah and decided perhaps he wouldn’t finish that remark. “Hell, no, they ain’t found nothin’. Ain’t found out who killed Mr. Wouter, neither. Accident, they’re tryin’ to call it. Accident, my backside! How’s a man goin’ to fall an’ bust ’is Adam’s apple when there ain’t nothin’ handy to bust it on, answer me that?”