In the morning, I awoke to a call from the coroner. He confirmed that the husband was knifed in the stomach at five p.m., while the wife had been poisoned at a quarter to three, with a poison that took exactly 2.5 hours to kick in. They both died within about a minute of each other. Her late lunch had been a small chicken potpie, unsalted, a green salad, peppered, and a glass of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice. He had skipped lunch, worried as he was about the exactitude of the poison, which he had slipped into her water bottle. Her fingertips, as she carefully cut and chewed her chicken and carrots, were covered with bandages from all the blade-checking she’d done over the course of the morning. She was described by several sources as a thorough type.
The coroner is an upstanding fellow. He fought in Vietnam and raises orchids. I thanked him repeatedly but he gets embarrassed by gratitude and hung up.
After I ordered in a bowl of tomato soup and a sandwich, I spent several hours in the living room, sitting with the stain from his wound. It spread over the carpet in a curling line, as if he’d put his arm around her with his blood.
Now, she could not have known she was poisoned when she knifed him, as he had chosen a poison that is silent and causes no suffering, and he had hidden the bottle somewhere very difficult to find, as we had not yet found it. In fact, their greatest difference was revealed through their choice of murder weapon, in that she wanted to make him suffer and be aware of her murderous inclinations, choosing the overt and physical technique, while he selected the secretive method, one of the few available where she would die without fully realizing what was happening. He perhaps was more ashamed of his loathing, and also he did not want her to feel pain. Their greatest similarity, however, was revealed in their choice of occasion, since each conceived of the exact month and moment of death fully independent of the other. Certainly that was something. And I imagine that as they lay on the carpet next to each other, one bleeding from the gut, the other foaming from the mouth, they saw something meaningful and linked in the eyes of the other. The nature of hate is as elusive as love’s. I for one am just pleased they did not have children.
Back to the dilemma of the spices. I finished my lunch and called up both their hairdressers, and spoke to one very unfriendly sibling, and no one had any interest in discussing these salt and pepper shakers, and in fact I could feel a stirring annoyance in the voices of the questioned, one which I am used to but still resent. I went home to shower, and spoke briefly with my girlfriend who was half asleep, and seemed distracted, and only right before I dozed off in my own bed did a phone call come in and tell me that the missing bottle of poison had been discovered in the chef’s quarters, underneath her bathroom sink. Curious. I had not met her yet; she had taken off several days to grieve, and was returning the following morning to begin the slow process of packing up her bags. This couple had not been exceedingly wealthy, but the luxury of a live-in cook was something both felt was important to their happiness. So they shared a car, and rarely ate out or vacationed.
I found the cook in the kitchen, making afternoon snacks. Nothing was packed yet, and the house was just as I had left it. The couple had been married for twenty-five years and the cook was older than I expected, with a head of silver hair, although her fingers were still swift and nimble. She seemed saddened by the loss of her employers, but perhaps not sad enough. I was not ready to rule her out as a possible accomplice, particularly now with that poison bottle, wrapped in plastic, sitting bulbous atop the coroner’s desk. While we were talking she made us a perfect turkey sandwich, on a triangle of bread, grilled lightly on the stove.
“The wife liked salt and the husband liked pepper,” she said, “and the salt and pepper pair served as a symbol of their relationship.” She briskly flipped the sandwich on the grill and then scooped it onto one yellow plate and one red plate which she handed over to me.
“Thank you,” I said. The bread had crisped to a fine golden color around the edges. I waited until she took a bite of hers until I tried mine. “How so?”
“Well,” she said, swallowing carefully, “they used salt and pepper as their model ideal. In their wedding vows, they said she was salt-she intensified the existing flavor-and he was pepper-he added a new kick-and that every fine table needed both.
“In fact,” she said, leaning in, “instead of a man and woman atop their wedding cake, they had a pair of miniature salt and pepper shakers.”
“No kidding,” I mumbled, chewing.
She nodded. “I can show you photos.” She started toward the living room, and before I could take another bite, she had the white wedding album open, full of smiling attractive faces, and there was the cake, with those shakers on top. “It was a white cake with strawberry cream filling,” she said. “Quite light.”
“Did you have any reason to dislike either one of them?” I asked casually. “Were they good employers?”
“Yes,” she said. “I liked them just fine. Isn’t the case solved?”
“Seems to be,” I said. “It’s just that no one else remembered the shakers.” I tried to keep sandwich crumbs off the photos. “This is delicious, by the way.”
She shrugged. “I’ve been here since the wedding,” she said, pointing to herself with a full head of very brown hair in the photo album, serving plates of cake, “and that was their gift to each other every single anniversary.”
She shut the book. “Case closed,” she said.
I opened the book back up. “Except,” I said, pointing to the date on the invitation, “there are only fourteen pairs of shakers, and I believe they were married for twenty-five years …”
“Twenty-six,” she said, pulling a clear bag of lemons up from the floor. “Well.
“What happened,” the cook said, now slicing lemons in half, “was that after about fourteen years of marriage, he, as people do, grew sensitive to spicy food, and her blood pressure went up so high that she had to abandon salt. She could only use pepper, he only salt. He did not like the salt, it seemed to him redundant, which hurt her feelings. She did not like the pepper, as it seemed to distract from the true nature of the dish. This made him feel discounted.
“After some time, she grew less vibrant, and he less stimulating.”
“Truly?”
“From my perspective,” said the cook, “it actually seemed to be true.”
I pressed my finger into the plate to pick up the last crumbs of sandwich.
“And did this fill you with a strange hatred?” I asked.
She smiled at me. “No,” she said. “Why, you don’t believe they killed each other?”