Earl went to the drawer and found the number that Conroy had left him. He wasn’t sure what he would ask the man. All he knew was that there were all these little things nibbling at the back of his mind, and he was hoping that the host of the party could help him lay some of them to rest.
When Earl called, the first thing the other man asked was whether Earl had seen the ring. Earl said he had not.
“Well, I can’t talk long,” Conroy said. “I have to head for the general store before it closes.”
“Maybe I’ll meet you there.”
When Earl got to the Candlewick general store, he found Conroy by the canned beets. He grunted, “I’d rather die than eat those.”
Conroy looked down at Earl in the wheelchair and smiled. “Some of us can’t be so choosy. Folks get to a certain age, they gotta look out for themselves.”
“Fun talk from the man who threw a chili party.”
The man looked around nervously. “Hey, easy with that talk.”
“What’s the matter? Are you afraid the nurses will hear?”
“I’m more afraid that too many people will want in the next one. You saw how crowded my little apartment was. How many more do you think would be able to fit?”
Earl grumbled, “Well, you have room for at least one more.”
“Huh? Oh, you mean poor Kent. Yes, that was horrible. I may end up dropping the whole party altogether.”
They reached the canned fruit. Earl said, “I heard you had to get dialysis.”
“Eh?” Conroy started reading the back of a can of peaches. “I gotta flush the kidneys out three times a week. Luckily I was already scheduled for right after the party.” He set the can in the basket. “We were all risking our lives, I guess. It is one thing to have the thrill of the risk, like we’re all looking down the chasm. But when one of us actually falls over the side—” He let the sentence trail off.
Earl read the back of a jar of artichokes. He set it back on the shelf. “What if Kent was pushed? There is some question about whether he died of natural causes or not.”
Conroy jolted. “I don’t get you. What are you saying happened?”
“Someone may have done something to Kent. Maybe they even passed something dangerous on to him at the party.”
They had reached the cereal. Conroy put a box of granola in his cart. “Why would you think one of my guests killed Kent?”
His voice was low, his eyes darting around. “Those are my friends. I’ve known some of them for years.”
“Still, all things being equal, if someone killed him—”
“Why think it at all? Did the sheriff find something suspicious?”
“No. Everyone assumed he was just an old man and it was his time to go.”
“Well.” Conroy went for the next aisle. “Kent was old. We’re all old.”
Earl followed. “There was something wrong at your party. I saw it.” He wrung his hands. “I just can’t put my finger on it. Yet.”
Conroy blinked. “You sound like you’re being paranoid.”
While Conroy went through the checkout process, Earl occupied himself with the display of sunglasses by the front. He kept putting on the dark lenses and looking out the store’s front window. He would look through the dark lenses then raise the specs, comparing the same view through different lenses.
Conroy had his basket of supplies ready to go. “Wanna come back and talk at the apartment?”
***
Reaching his apartment, Conroy fumbled with his keys. “Look, I’m still thinking about what you said.” He held the door while Earl wheeled himself inside. Once they were in, he shut the door and continued. “If someone came into my home with the intention of harming one of my guests, I’m all for getting that person.” He carried the basket of groceries over to the counter. “But what if it was an accident? Maybe he drank something that reacted with his meds.”
Earl situated his wheelchair in the same corner as before. “Why would you say that?”
“One of the health newsletters reported a link between grapefruit juice and medication. The juice has an enzyme or creates an enzyme or blocks an enzyme or something.” Conroy took a seat on the couch. “Ol’ Kent always had juice. He hadn’t had a drink since the kidney operation. In fact, he bragged about it.”
“Sounds like he bragged about a lot of things.”
“Yeah, Kent rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Even back to when we were kids, he would get into fights about this or that.”
“You’ve known Kent that long?”
“Yeah. We grew up together.” Conroy nodded. “As we got older, Kent grew into a man with—appetites.”
Earl tilted his head. “How about you?”
“What, my appetites? I have dialysis three times a week. I can’t have much of anything.”
“At the party you had chili and rum.”
“Well, every once in a while you have to live, you know? Some folks jump out of planes. We do this.”
“Did you have a grudge against George Kent?”
“Did he rub me the wrong way every once in a while? Sure. Drink?”
Earl waved a hand. “I don’t drink.”
“Milk or something?”
“Sure, a glass of milk.”
Conroy got up and headed for the kitchenette. He called from the kitchen, “I got annoyed with Kent at times. But with a friend like him, you learn to roll with it. I never had any reason to see him come to harm.”
“No?”
Conroy returned with two glasses—milk for Earl, iced tea for himself. “Heck, when he needed a kidney, he got it from my own daughter.”
“Really? That’s really something.”
“Yeah, my daughter, Clara, is special.” He got quiet. “I don’t know what I would do without her and her family.”
“That’s nice.” Earl sipped his milk. “Let’s go through the whole evening, the whole chain of events. Who all had access to George Kent?”
Conroy picked a spot in the middle of the couch. “Well, he was sitting over here, I think.”
Earl pointed. “No, he was right over there.” Conroy scooted until Earl nodded. “Yeah, there.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Twenty-five years driving a bus, you remember people sitting down.”
“Oh. Okay.” Conroy, satisfied, looked around the room. “And —anyone at the party could have spoken to him or whatever. He was in the center of the room.”
Earl rubbed his chin. “Pretty much.”
The two men sat, their eyes analyzing the room, reconstructing the party. Finally, Conroy threw up his hands. “This is hopeless. If someone wanted to do in Kent, it could have happened at any point. I mean, this is a closed community. We eat together. We take our medicine together. We work out together. We spend all our free time together. Anyone, anyplace, could have done it. Not to mention we still haven’t ruled out natural causes.”
Earl regarded the other man. “Fine.”
“Say, have you heard about my collection of stamps?”
“Um—”
“I have almost a thousand.” Conroy went to the shelf and took down a binder. “I have all of them here.” He sat down on the couch and opened the binder on his lap. Earl wheeled closer to take a look. Conroy flipped through a few plastic sleeve pages, each holding dozens of stamps.
Earl frowned. “They’re all—the same.”
“Yes.”
“You have pages and pages of the exact same stamp.”
“Yes.”
“They are completely identical.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” Conroy tapped a finger on the top of a plastic sleeve. “Every stamp has a history. Different hopes, dreams. Each stamp represents someone’s message. A letter to a loved one. A resume for a job. An application. A paycheck. Each stamp represents a life.”
Earl nodded. “Okay.” He pursed his lips and nodded again. “I guess if you wanted to poison someone, you could do it with a stamp.”
“I guess.” Conroy tapped the plastic again. “Of course, these are all used. It would do no good to poison them—there’s no reason for anyone to lick them now.”
“Just a thought.” Earl locked his fingers together. Through the window he saw the trees moving in the wind. “Like you say, Kent could have been poisoned at some other time. But that doesn’t help us.” He looked again at Conroy. “Look, when you throw a rock in a lake, it sends ripples in all directions. If you want to find the rock, you start with where you saw it drop in.”
“But if the rock represents the point in time when someone—”
“I didn’t say the analogy was perfect. This is what we know—Kent died at that party.”
Conroy shrugged. “Fine.”
Earl shrugged back. Held out his hands. “And that’s all we have.”
Conroy sighed. “Well, let’s see, who all was at the party? Ray Stanton. Sally Brouwer. George Kent, of course. Gloria. You. Me. That young lady friend of yours.”
“She is not ‘that young lady friend’ of mine.”
“Hey, easy. I’m just saying.”
“Who else was there? I remember a room full of people.”
“Okay.” Conroy chuckled. “Dandy Anderson was there. Todd Dekker. Rick Wilson. Vince Kaiser. Mark Bronleewe. Brandilyn, Creston, Kathryn, Tim, Melanie, Tony, Robert—”
“A full house.”
“Like I said, we were at capacity.”
“Okay. So we have all those people in the apartment at one time. Who had a grudge against George Kent?”
“Swing a cat.” Conroy laughed. “Anyone you hit could be a candidate. He was a man with a big, obnoxious personality. You saw him at the bowling tournament. He wasn’t even playing, but he shows up and elbows his way in. That’s how he was.”
“But is that a reason to kill him?”
“I wouldn’t think so. But I guess it might be if he pushed someone hard enough. As to who that person would be—?”
“Okay, let’s come at this from another direction. Who was within arm’s reach of Kent? Everyone who came in was practically orbiting him.”
“Any one of them could have stuck him with a needle.”
“You mean like a syringe?”
“Lots of folks around Candlewick get shots. Most of us are accustomed to needles.”
“But pulling out a big syringe, jabbing the man in the center of the room, in front of all those witnesses? How do you do that without being seen?”
Conroy sipped from his tea and set the glass down. “Sleight of hand?”
“That would be some trick.”
“Illusion. It’s called an illusion.” Conroy grabbed the coaster off the coffee table. “Look—now you see it.” He held it clasped in the fingers of his right hand, passed his left hand over it, then separated his hands again. “Now you don’t.”
“It’s in your other hand.”
“No it’s not.”
“I can see it right there.”
“Well, I may be rusty.”
“That is a terrible trick.”
“Well, my hands aren’t what they used to be.” Conroy flexed his fingers slowly. “But it’s the principle of the thing. I mean, those guys playing Vegas can make live animals disappear.”
“That’s your theory? A Vegas entertainer infiltrated your chili supper to kill the man as a magic trick?”
“You make it sound so crazy. But think about it—an illusion is all based on diversion. You do something to distract the audience from what you’re really doing. Now, think about our party—a big room full of people, everybody is talking, jostling, moving around. It only takes a split second.”
Earl had nothing to offer. He rubbed his hands together.
Conroy snapped his fingers. “How about some kind of ring? You see in the movies those trick rings with the little needle. It has poison in the tip.”
“That’s just in the movies.”
“It could happen. I mean, you have the small, sharp needle on the ring. You only have to dip it in the poison. When you break the skin, it puts the poison in there.”
“Fine. What happens then?”
“Well, at any point in the evening, somebody jabs him with the ring. They slap him on the back; they shake his hand—”
“Wouldn’t he feel it?”
“So what if he does?”
“But he’s in a room full of people. You shake his hand with your trick ring, he’s going to react when you stick him with the needle, right? Everyone would know.”
Conroy thought about this a second. “What if you punched him in the arm?”
“Isn’t that the same problem? You would still have the problem of being noticed.”
“Who would notice?”
“How about the telltale victim saying ‘ouch’ and falling to the ground?”
“Ah, but if I hit you in the arm and you say ‘ouch,’ everybody thinks you said ‘ouch’ because I punched you in the arm. Nobody thinks ‘I bet he was hit in the arm by one of those trick poison needle rings.’ ”
Earl shrugged. “Maybe.”
“It’s a thing that people do—they hit each other on the arm. And a guy like Kent, he’s a bully. He’s going to hit too hard, right? To prove how big and strong he is?”
“But we still have a problem. How about if it was Kent’s ring—why would he poison himself?”
“Well, he always takes the ring off to show it to people. He always makes a big show of it.” Conroy’s eyes lit up. “Maybe Kent was planning to kill somebody else with the ring.”
“You mean, he brought the murder weapon to the party—he lost track of it—and then someone else used it on him?”
“Yeah.”
Earl frowned. The night Kent died, his ring had disappeared off the table. Did the killer steal it to hide the evidence?