From Herring to Eternity Read online

  So while the ghosts, if there were any, didn’t make their way into my dreams, I woke to find my cats not on the “man side” of my bed, where they usually flopped, but under it with my slippers and a colony of dust bunnies.

  I’m not one of those people who talks to her pets. I didn’t ask them anything like, “What are you doing down there?” or “You joining me in the steamy bathroom for my shower?” I would open the cat food and put it in their bowls, and they’d either come out or not.

  Still, it was curious. And I did notice something else unusual; the warbler symphony that usually welcomed a sunny day was missing.

  Either there are ghosts, we’ve got an earthquake coming, or a relatively exotic creature like a red fox or armadillo went rooting through the trash, I thought. I was betting on the pests.

  I was out of the house by six, as I am most days. I parked in my reserved spot at the public garage—Randy, the parking attendant, kept it blocked with an orange traffic cone—then rounded the corner and walked past the Arcade, an alley lined with cafés, shops, and salons.

  When I arrived at the deli, Newt was already at work, turning on the burners and reassembling the slicer, which gets broken down and thoroughly cleaned every night. I ate a banana and put on the coffee. Thom arrived two minutes after I did.

  “You’re here early,” she said.

  “Yeah—the ghosts let me sleep.”

  She shot me a look. “Girl? Ghosts?”

  I told her not to worry and I explained about the night before. She shook her head, kissed the cross she wore, said she had every right and reason to worry, and went to work while muttering to Jesus.

  A woman I did not know rapped on the door five minutes after that, while Thom was setting up the cash register. I was behind the counter wiping food from the menus.

  “We’re not open,” Thom shouted.

  I heard a muffled, “Is the owner in? I must see her.”

  “About what?” Thom asked.

  “My brother,” she said. “Lippy Montgomery.”

  Thom looked back at me. I was already on my way to the front of the diner. I turned the lock and opened the door for her.

  Except for the obvious grief in her bloodshot eyes and the downturn of her mouth, the woman bore a more-than-passing resemblance to her late brother. She stood about five-six, had the same round face and big blue eyes, but her skin still bore the healthy color of the Hawaiian sun; Lippy’s flesh had been burned to leather from years of playing outside. Her dyed, platinum blond hair was pulled in a pigtail and bright red lipstick drew attention to her pouty, bee-stung lips. She seemed to be older than Lippy, perhaps in her early thirties, and reminded me of one of those girls I’d seen in the Bunny Ranch show on cable. Not that I spent a lot of time watching shows about hookers, but after the divorce, I sometimes found it distracting to live vicariously.

  “I’m Gwen Katz,” I said, offering my hand. “My condolences. We’re going to miss your brother around here.”

  “We’re gonna miss his music, too,” she said. “That boy could play the horn.”

  “This is Thomasina Jackson, my manager,” I said.

  “Hi,” the young woman said to us both. “I’m Tippi Montgomery.”

  I knew, just from the way she said her name with an ever so faint accent on the last syllable, that it was spelled Tippi-with-an-i.

  “Come on in, sit down,” I said. “Would you like coffee?”

  “I would love a cup,” she said.

  She came in and sat at the counter. She was dressed in a black jacket and skirt, matching shoes and shoulder bag. She did not have any luggage.

  “Where did you come from, Tippi?” I asked as I poured us each a cup.

  “Atlanta,” she said. “I left around one o’clock this morning. Drove straight through.”

  “Do you have a place to stay?” I asked.

  “No—and if that was an offer, thank you. But I have to be back in Atlanta by tonight. Work.”

  “What do you do?” I asked.

  She said frankly, “I’m an escort.”

  I saw Thom scowl. I thought back quickly to make sure I hadn’t had any bad thoughts about the Bunny Ranch hookers. I hadn’t. Having grown up with a hypercritical father and having endured a hypercritical husband, I was sensitive not to judge others. Even in my own head.

  “So, Tippi, do you have—appointments tonight?” I asked smoothly.

  She nodded. “I came to make arrangements for Lippy to come home as soon as”—she stopped, choked—“as soon as the coroner will allow. They’re investigating to see whether he . . . whether it was the knock on his head that . . .”

  “I understand,” I said consolingly.

  “I had to be here to sign papers, gather his belongings.”

  I put my hand on hers. She grasped my fingers. I felt a little uncomfortable, hoping she’d washed after ending her workday.

  “Well, what can I do for you?” I asked.

  “The police told me that my brother’s trumpet case was stolen,” she said. “The detective mentioned that this was the last place anyone could remember for sure having seen it. I was wondering, hoping, that maybe he left it in the bathroom or under a chair.”

  “I saw him with it when I gave him his check—Thom?” I asked, looking past the young woman.

  “He had it when he left here,” she said. “He put it next to the register when he paid, took it with him when he left.”

  “Apart from the sentimental value, is there a reason you want it?” I asked.

  “I think there must be,” she said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What I mean is, Lippy and I e-mailed every day, whenever he took a break and went to the library, and he said he had something exciting to tell me about, something that was in the case.”

  “You have any idea what it was?” I asked.

  “He said, ‘It’s a real treasure, sis. You won’t believe it.’”

  “Did he mean that literally?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Sorry, I shouldn’t be pressing you. Just curious.”

  “It’s all right,” Tippi said. “If I’d thought it was important, I would have pressed him. Lippy liked his surprises.”

  “I assume you told the detective about it?” I asked.

  She nodded. “When I returned his call, he asked if I could think of any reason someone might want to steal it. That was the only thing I could think of. It’s not like the horn itself was valuable.”

  “How long did your brother own that trumpet?”

  “Since he left home. He bought it at a pawn shop in Oahu, one that sold mostly sailing mementoes—things retiring or needy old sailors no longer needed, like telescopes, charts, anchors.”

  “People hock anchors?”

  “Not their own, of course, but from salvage operations,” she said. “As you might imagine, many, many artifacts from World War Two have been retrieved in the Pacific Ocean.”

  “Of course,” I said. I was trying to imagine how people got rusty anchors to shore—though I suppose if you could raise them from many fathoms deep, where they weren’t especially buoyant, the rest of the trip was more of the same. The mention of salvage operations made me think of something, which I kept to myself. “So—you were saying about Lippy?”

  “Yes, Lippy learned to play the horn in elementary school,” she said. “He continued through the eleventh grade. That was all he lived for, he loved it so. During the week, he would wake us to reveille. My dad, an old navy man, was very proud. When he decided to go to New Orleans, Lippy tried to take the one that belonged to the school, but they saw him trying to sneak it out in his gym bag.”

  “Yeah, the shape would be a little distinctive,” I said. “Wait—New Orleans?”

  “He wanted more than anything to play Dixieland Jazz, but he stopped here first. He said he just planned to check out the music scene for a week or two—then fell in love with Nashville and so he stayed.”

&nbs
p; And that was the short, sad, sweetish story of Lippy—née Clifford, I learned from his sister—Montgomery. Her name really was Tippi, though, named after the star of her mother’s favorite movie, The Birds. She had left Oahu after her mother’s death. Her father had predeceased her and the mother’s long illness left them with no money. Tippi spent some time with her brother in Nashville before answering a newspaper ad to appear in films in Los Angeles; after attending an adult film awards ceremony in Atlanta, she had decided that being an escort there was preferable to making porn in the San Fernando Valley. She said her brother came west to help her move. The drive back to Atlanta was one of their fondest times together.

  We finished our conversation as Tippi finished her second cup of coffee and a toasted bagel. When she left—with a couple of crullers and a refill of her coffee in a “to go” cup—Thom was filling napkin holders. My churchgoing manager was still scowling.

  “Did you hear, Nash? Did you see? That girl was not even ashamed to tell us how she earned her living!”

  “At least she’s not on the dole,” I said.

  “You’re defending her?”

  “I’m not condemning her,” I said. “Didn’t you ever wonder how Lippy survived, even with as little as he had? Why he ordered the least expensive item on the menu? Why he haggled over the price with me?”

  “I figured he made do,” she said. “Dollars and coins in his trumpet case, a few weddings and such.”

  I nodded toward the front door. “That’s how he survived,” I said. “She sent him money. She had to. She makes her way in life, no apologies. I admire that.”

  Thom looked at me with a clergyman’s worried eyes set in the big, unhappy frown of a circus clown. “Lady, you are consortin’ with witches and praisin’ hookers. I just don’t know.”

  “It takes all kinds to make a world,” I said. “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

  “Go and sin no more,” she replied.

  “Get thee forth—,” I started, thinking I had something but didn’t. “Well, it’s another day in the neighborhood,” I said.

  Shaking her head, Thom opened the door for our first paying customers.

  One of them was not Detective Grant Daniels. He came in; he just didn’t order anything.

  It was just starting to get busy and I was helping shred hash browns in the kitchen. I invited him to talk while I peeled potatoes. He leaned against the butcher block table, his face turned toward me so Newt couldn’t hear at the grill—with the overhead fan on, he couldn’t hear much of anything—but Grant was a cautious one.

  “I got the medical examiner’s report this morning,” he told me. “Lippy was poisoned.”

  I stopped peeling. My first thought wasn’t for poor Lippy. It was that line of Lady Macbeth’s when she learns that King Duncan has been murdered: What, in our house? Why else would Grant be telling me?

  “Another investigation,” I said sullenly.

  “I’m sorry, Nash.”

  “You’re sure it was my food? What about the horn?” I asked. “The mouthpiece—”

  “The instrument itself tested clean,” he said. “There was a trace of toxin but that was on the mouthpiece, in Lippy’s saliva.”

  “What kind of toxin?” I asked, with a sick feeling, thinking of what Lippy had eaten.

  “Mercury,” he replied. “Anita Fong Chan of the health department is on her way to confiscate your herring. I used a little influence, convinced her to come around back so as not to alarm diners. You’re going to have to meet her here. And take the herring off the menu, obviously.”

  “Of course.” Fortunately, that wasn’t one of my big sellers. “Can’t mercury be inhaled?” I asked. “Wasn’t that a problem in some factory a couple of years—”

  “It showed up in the gastrointestinal tract, not the lungs. It was in the undigested pieces in his stomach.”

  Crap, I thought. “So we’re talking a mega-helping rather than cumulative?”

  “Yes and no,” Grant said. “Because Lippy ate a lot of seafood—most of which he caught himself on the Cumberland River—the ME said his mercury levels would already have been seriously elevated. All it took was one big hit to put him over.”

  “Someone might have known that, right?” I said. “Lippy could have been targeted for some reason. It wasn’t necessarily bad when we served it.”

  “Possibly—”

  “Who even uses mercury?” I asked. “Thermometer makers?”

  “Dentists, lab researchers, any number of manufacturers,” he said. “It’s used in antiseptics, switches, light bulbs—but anyone can buy it. Which is why—if you’re done interrogating me—”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “I expected it,” he said. “But that’s why I need a list of everyone you or the staff can remember around Lippy yesterday as well as anyone else who ordered the herring since this shipment arrived. We need to test those individuals, rule out an accidental dosing of several people or a serial killer.”

  “Grant, it was breakfast rush. We were busy. Also, we write our checks out the old-fashioned way, on a green pad, and a quarter of our customers pay cash—”

  “I know. Match them as best you can and get me the receipts. I’ll have a court order for them by ten, just to keep the paperwork in order. Oh, and—does the herring arrive prepared or just as fish?”

  “I don’t sell McGehakte.”

  Grant was confused.

  “This isn’t McDonald’s. Nothing comes pre-chopped or premade. It arrives as semifrozen fish, on ice, in cardboard boxes lined with wax paper. I do all the work and mercury definitely is not an ingredient. I’ve never even seen the stuff, except in those old games where you had to maneuver the little silver blob through a maze.”

  Grant—who hadn’t recovered from the McDonald’s crack—looked at me as if I’d just described an alien abduction.

  “The answer is no.” I got back on point. “I’m the one and only middleman between fish and plate.”

  “All right. I’ll want a statement about your prep procedures. I can get that later.”

  I nodded, thanked him. “Lippy said the herring was ‘uncommonly tasty,’” I told him. “Would he have said that if it was poisoned?”

  “I’m told that mercury doesn’t really have a taste,” Grant said. “He might not have noticed.”

  “But it has a consistency,” I said. “I drain the oil when I cut the fish—he might have noticed it was greasier.”

  “Unfortunately, we can’t ask him,” Grant said. “And since I’m not a fish eater, I wouldn’t know about that.” Grant held my eyes for a moment longer with a you-remember-that-don’t-you? look.

  He was right. When we’d ordered pizza in, I had to pick his anchovies off.

  Grant told me to do nothing on my own, no tasting or repackaging, just point the health inspector in the direction of the herring and let her retrieve and remove it. She would have to check the surrounding area of the industrial-size refrigerator, above and below the plastic container, for contamination.

  He left by the front door a few minutes before Anita Fong Chan arrived at the back. I had met her twice before on her semiannual visits. She was a petite woman with an air of authority that stopped just short of arrogance. She was someone that everyone in my business had to please, and please politely and thoroughly. Virtually every word from her mouth sounded like “open sesame.”

  I opened the door. Then it was, “Open the refrigerator, please.” “Don’t open the container.” “Open the files from Fishy in Tennessee and give me the order.” “Close the door behind me.” She asked if the original fish packaging was still in the Dumpster. I told her it was not. She asked me to open that so she could see. We went out back and I raised the heavy lid. She stood on tiptoes and looked in. Satisfied, she left. The transfer of all-things herring lasted less than five minutes.

  I went back inside and told Newt to holler if he really got backed up. I said I’d be in my office.

  “I’m guessing t
here’s something fishy going on,” my young cook said from over the hissing grill.

  I didn’t bother responding. I just shut the door, opened the expanding brown folder marked for that week, and started pulling the credit card and order slips from the last three days. And, alone with my thoughts as I did the rote work, I got angry at myself again for ever having dated that thoughtful but empty trench coat.

  Chapter 7

  Something Tippi had said stayed with me as I stopped stapling receipts to checks long enough to help out with the breakfast rush. It was what Lippy had told her: “It’s a real treasure, sis.”

  Lippy had bought the trumpet in a place where seafarers sold their used wares. What if the trumpet had belonged to a sailor? And what if that hypothetical sailor had left an equally hypothetical “something” in the case, like a deed or a rare document like William Bligh’s map of Tahiti or even a treasure map? It was possible. And that would make Robert Barron, who dined next to Lippy at least on the day of the murder, a potential suspect.

  There were a lot of hypotheticals in that hypothesis, along with: if Barron were guilty, couldn’t he have megadosed Lippy somehow—in his water, for example—knowing that our salted, smoked, marinated, and creamed Baltic delicacy would be blamed? I checked online: mercury was water soluble. The water could have mixed the mercury into the fish once they both hit his stomach.

  I’m sure the ME considered that, I told myself. And it might not matter much. The idea was to find out who could have given Lippy the fatal dose, whatever the medium.

  Which brought me back to Barron. Sitting near him, Lippy had seemed unusually protective of the trumpet case. Was it because he was suspicious of Barron or because of the treasure Lippy had mentioned to his sister? Should I simply put him on the list for Grant or talk to him myself?