A Dinner to Die For Read Online Free PDF Page B

house. But the kitchen! If you knew what could be there, you’d never eat again. Just for starters, there are mushrooms. Mushrooms grow wild all over the Berkeley Hills. A place like Paradise, into exotic food. The chance to introduce an exotic fungus …” He opened his hands in delight. I should have remembered that Raksen’s enthusiasm extended to the lethal possibilities on every table. I’d sat next to him at one Christmas party when he’d discussed the carcinogenic potential of every ingredient in the fruitcake I was about to eat.
    “Wasn’t eating mushrooms,” Grayson muttered.
    “Well, the amount of vomit would suggest an irritant. Maybe cashew-nut oil. It’ll cause vomiting and diarrhea. Or mustard-seed oil—a single drop can cause blindness.”
    “He was eating carrot soup from the pot,” I said. “If the poison was in that, there must have been a shovelful—”
    “Or very potent,” Raksen said.
    “And it must have been added after the last customer ate. None of the customers complained,” Grayson said.
    “Wait! Dana’s bowl of soup. You said Mrs. Biekma gave it to him after Biekma left. Did Dana react?”
    “He didn’t eat it. He dropped the bowl.”
    To Raksen I said, “To get back to the horseradish, it was Biekma’s own recipe.”
    “From a ceramic jar he brought back from France,” Grayson added. “Looks like something you could pick up at Pay Less, but the word is it’s an original, signed by the artist.”
    “Grayson,” I snapped, “you didn’t tell me that before.”
    “You didn’t ask. Sorry.”
    “This jar, was it rare?”
    “One of a kind. Wait till you see it, you’ll understand why the artist didn’t bother to make two.”
    “Well, that’s the first break we’ve had. At least no one’s likely to have been substituting jars.” I made a note to have someone check up on that jar. The artist could have had a back room full of disasters, each to be sold to a rich American as unique.
    “About the horseradish,” Raksen prompted.
    “Made with a dash of chili he had imported from Thailand,” Grayson announced. “They tell me that chili is so hot the Texans grab for water.”
    He hadn’t told me that either. “Grayson, this isn’t Twenty Questions. I expect you to tell me what’s gone on here. Is that clear?”
    “Yes, ma’am,” he snapped.
    Raksen paled. “People think poison is poison,” he said quickly. I had never seen anyone connected with the police department as unnerved by conflict as Raksen. “I’ll tell you,” he went on, rushing his words as if Grayson or I would plunge viciously into any pause, “there are as many kinds of poisons as there are people. There are corrosives, metallics, hydrocarbons, alcohols. There are stimulants and depressants. You’ve got your poisons that take hours and you’ve got ones that cancel you so fast you’re lucky to know you’re on your way out.”
    When neither of us responded, he said, “You think the poison was in the horseradish, don’t you?”
    “It’s all he added to the soup. But make sure you test any of his Thai chili peppers that are left. Could be something in them, couldn’t it?” I asked.
    “I’ll check everything. Are you through with the body?”
    I thought a moment, hesitant as always to let the body be moved. But there was nothing more it would tell me there. “Go ahead. The sooner it gets to the coroner the better.”
    “Right.” Raksen lifted his camera.
    Grayson stood unmoving, his face taut. I would have liked to ignore him and get on with my own survey of the premises before I started on my share of the witnesses. Even with patrol officers doing the initial interviews and sharing the task of reviewing them with Inspector Doyle, it was going to be a long night. But practicality told me not to leave Grayson like this.
    “One more thing,” I said to the two of them, as members of the investigating team, “there’s another odd point in this case. Biekma gets his soup and