“To the Emporium!”
“The Emporium!”
The guests in dark suits and glittering evening gowns clink crystal, exchange half smiles. They settle back into high-backed upholstered chairs around a cherrywood dinner table.
Their host is Rico Soiree of Kyiv’s Silver School of English. He lingers on his feet. His eyes glisten in the shadow of the chandelier.
The men hike up their trouser legs, the women smooth out their skirts. A squat man with a white apron tied around his black tuxedo barges in from the pantry with a tray. The doors swing closed behind him.
There’re hors d’oeuvres for all, foie gras, amuse-bouche, as well as drinks where that all came from.
“Here, here, my boy, serve from the left, the left,” barks Soiree over the heads of his guests.
But our pantry boy is swift. He keeps his head low, like an elephant calf making its way through the brush. Only one of the guests, an older woman, notices his upper lip curled and quivering.
“Zippy!” Soiree shouts after him, then lifts his palms in complaint, shrugs his shoulders in defeat.
“Heaven knows it’s hard to find good help… he’s been in my service for years… But not without incident, you know…”
A middle-aged man with a noticeably moist complexion and a large dark mustache raises a single finger to speak.
“Perhaps I should make some explanation for this occasion.”
“Please do, Gonzales, please do,” replies Soiree, on behalf of everyone else.
“As you full well know, Senor, your spouse has been missing for more than the customary period of time, so I can only suspect her murder.
A round of frightened gasps ensues, then someone intentionally clears his throat, and a heavy creased napkin is thrown down hard onto the table.
Soiree’s eyelids droop. Gonzales’s unfold, disclose unusually large eyes. He can’t help it.
Everyone at the table knew Kate Mustard, some very well. One or two had seen her no more than a week before. Dead? Who could believe it? Missing? Maybe not come home… It had happened once or twice, and probably more.
But then there were those rumors of her double life.
In fact, the woman made no excuses for herself or anyone else. What you saw was what you got. And if you were a regular at Sweaty’s Place, where Ms. Mustard could be found on most weekday nights, you just might have got a lot.
“It gives me no great pleasure to apprise you of these facts, Senores.”
“I’m sure, the displeasure is all mine,” concedes Soiree.
Everyone else is all ears. A cigar is lit, its end sucked and chewed into a leafy pulp. A few of the ladies hold handsome handbags pressed to their laps under the table.
Mustard was thought to have been murdered with a candlestick on Tuesday the 12th, in the early hours of the night. It was true she was a regular at Sweaty’s Place, where her husband was no stranger himself. But the investigation had placed her death in the study of Boss Lard’s manor home.
“That’s perfectly absurd,” protests one of the guests, “as everyone knows that Mr. Lard was himself murdered in that very room by the bohemian writer Andrew Plum, earlier known to some as Animal Boy.
Gonzales’s eyes grow small then large. The pantry boy is called back into the dining room carrying Gonzales’s wrinkled blue raincoat from which a notepad with wild pencil scribbling is removed.
Andrew Plum, lost literati from New York washed up in Kyiv. This one had a penchant for bloody fiction, to be sure, followed all the well-worn tropes in his work. He’d been spotted in libraries and lounges with revolver and knife. But no one could pin to him a murder that would stick.
His “hard-boiled” face was once a regular fixture on the covers of more than one English-language publication in Kyiv.
Gonzales confesses he’d created a scrap book of Plum’s photos as a sort of makeshift collection of mug shots. The problem was that Plum had long ago returned to the States.
“Then he’s clearly not your man,” says Soiree, his necktie now visibly loosened.
Other guests offer their own insight into the crime.
“What about Penelope White, Scarlet O Dear, P. Green?”
“Nothing but pseudonyms, Senores, which surely any small child would know.
“Penelope White is in fact the name taken up by the wife of The Ferret after her steamy if often awkward love affair with convenience store clerk B. Publowsky had entered the public domain.
“Scarlet O Dear is the nom de plume of frustrated housewife Lava Encole, by all accounts desperate to establish a unique identity of her own in Ukraine.
“And Mustard herself went by the appellation P. Green for reasons best left unsaid.”
“Maybe Publowsky killed her.”
“Sure, why not?”
Soiree suggests a round of stiff digestives to soothe the evening’s surplus tension, and the elephant calf is promptly on hand to serve them.
“And as for Pastor Peacock, Senores – I can only believe that you know of this suspect as well – once again the trail runs dry, if I may say such a thing in English.”
“Most certainly, you can,” Soiree assures him.
“This name was originally attributed to one-time Kyiv notable Jim Hidshits, who it seems wrote something about an owl.”
“It was a poem!”
“I do not question this, Senor.”
“And then the Peacock title was sometimes associated with PR hombre Welsh Losser.”
“Who was a birdbrain.”
“Precisely, Senora. But more importantly, he too was in the Los Estados Unidos at the time of Senora Mustard’s unfortunate demise.”
“And finally, there is Senor ‘Pastor’ Josh Davies…”
“He killed people, didn’t he?”
“And also has associations with a church… a most unsavory association.”
The clang of pots and pans is heard from the pantry, and the dining room goes black.
When illumination returns, the party of guests discovers a greasy note pinned to the dinner table with a particularly large toothpick.
“Oh, my,” exclaims the host.
Gonzales takes the note into his hands and reads…
“Who killed Kate Mustard? I did. Hah, hah, hah. Don’t try to find me. I’m already on the lam. P.S. Dessert is in the icebox. Signed, Zippy Zamazda, former Chief Editor of the Kyiv Poster.”
The guests and Gonzales turn their eyes on the host.
“Heaven knows it’s hard to find good help… he’s been in my service for years… But not without incident, you know…”
Reported by Dirk Dickerson for Detective’s Daily, February 22, 2018