Silenced by the Yams

CHAPTER Sixteen

Clarence asked what a bottle of vanilla extract looked like. I told him small and brown, usually. He perked up. “Yeah, yeah, yeah! Before he left, Randolph gave Jorge something. I couldn’t see very well, but Jorge dropped it, so I got a glimpse before he picked it up. It was just like that—small and brown. I thought it was cough syrup or something. What’s so important about the bottle?”

“Three poisons were found in the yams that Frankie handed to Randolph—arsenic, strychnine and—”

Clarence finished my sentence. “A pinch of cyanide.”

“I don’t think that information has been made public. How did you know?”

“Are you serious?”

I stared at him, knowing somewhere in my mind, there was a reason why that combination of poisons was familiar to me. Yet I just wasn’t getting it.

“Arsenic and Old Lace,” he reminded me, shaking his head at my cinema trivia deficiency. “And you call yourself a movie buff.”

Groaning, I gave myself a head slap. “Of course!”

Colt did not seem to be amused and asked us to stay on topic.

“You don’t get it, Colt,” I replied. “This is on topic. I wasn’t connecting the dots last night. How stupid could I be? Randolph Rutter’s favorite actor is Cary Grant.”

“The smoking gun!” Colt’s exclamation was sarcastic rather than enthusiastic. “Randolph Rutter is a Cary Grant fan. That’s why he ordered poisoned yams for himself, knowing that Kurt Baugh would steal them from his plate and keel over. Let’s call the police. We’ve wrapped this case up neatly. They’re sure to release Frankie within the hour.”

I sighed. “Colt, Cary Grant starred in the movie version of Arsenic and Old Lace. He played Mortimer Brewster, whose two nutty aunts murdered lonely men with poison-laced elderberry wine.” I counted them off on my fingers: “Arsenic, strychnine, and cyanide.”

“I agree,” said Clarence as he played with his goatee. “There’s something here. We should look deeper. Randolph isn’t the only Cary Grant fan. Jorge has a shrine to the man in his office.”

Colt sat quietly eyeing Clarence. He glanced at me once, then back at Clarence. I was pretty sure his mental cogs were turning, but I didn’t know how much of it was invested in solving the case of who killed Kurt Baugh and how much was spent coping with the reality of sudden fatherhood. Finally, he took his smartphone from his pocket and tapped the screen.

I was starting to get nervous that Jorge might be right outside the door. “What are you thinking?” I whispered.

“Googling Jorge Borrego. Shoulda done this earlier.” He tapped and scrolled and tapped and scrolled, squinting while he read.

“You need my reading glasses?” I offered.

He shook his head. My friend wasn’t being his usual jovial, happy-go-lucky self. I knew being a parent tended to bring out the serious side in people, but I didn’t think it could happen so quickly. I was trying to think up some witty banter to liven up the mood when he leaned closer over the table. “Okay, he was born in 1964 to Maria and Alfonso Borrego of Tularosa, New Mexico. He graduated with a BA in theater arts from Santa Fe University.”

Holy cow, I couldn’t believe it. “Wait—I’m pretty sure that’s where . . .” I started digging through my purse for the information I’d dug up on Randolph Rutter, “here it is.” I scanned my barely legible scrawl. “Yes! He did. Randolph Rutter, Santa Fe University. 1988, BA Theater Arts.”

“It doesn’t say here when he graduated,” Colt said. Then he listed theaters in Santa Fe where Jorge served as stage manager. “He moved to Minnesota and took over management of the Starcrest Theater when the Minneapolis Historical Society purchased and restored it in 1996.”

I fell back in my chair. “Randolph Rutter was in Minneapolis at the same time. He was a movie reviewer for their ABC affiliate.”

It didn’t take us long to verify that Randolph and Jorge moved to Washington, DC within four months of each other and Colt agreed that while the “coincidence” wasn’t a smoking gun, it was a smelly shoe. I wrinkled my nose at his interesting metaphor, but didn’t dare say anything. He didn’t seem in the mood.

Clarence jumped at the knock on the door. “Excuse me,” Jorge yelled, “is everything okay in there?”

Standing and pantomiming orders to Colt and Clarence, I scooted just in time to stop Jorge from stepping in. I held the door and talked through a crack while the two men got in position. “It’s still . . . touchy,” I told Jorge with a wince. I tried to read his expression, wondering if he was suspicious of us or just truly concerned. I didn’t know him well enough to tell. “As you can imagine, this is an emotional time for them both.” Colt gave me the thumbs-up, and I opened the door wide enough for Jorge to view a weepy Clarence being consoled by his caring new father. It was a touching scene, worthy of a Golden Globe nomination at the very least. Dustin Hoffman would have been proud.

Jorge seemed sympathetic. “Sure. I understand. Can I get them anything?”

I shook my head. “Time.” I paused for increased dramatic impact. “Time is what they need now.”

“A meatball sub would be good too,” Clarence added between sobs. The Swiss Army knife was out of reach, so I attempted to kill him with my glare. It didn’t work.

“Low blood sugar issues,” he explained. “I’m upset enough as it is. I miss a meal and things could get real ugly.”

As I turned my attention back to Jorge, I took a deep cleansing breath. “Could you get us a meatball sub?”

Clarence cleared his throat. “From Sam’s Sandwich Sanctum.”

My fists were clenching. “Did you hear that?” I asked Jorge.

“And a bottle of water.”

Jorge smirked. I guessed he was used to Clarence’s quirkiness. “I’ll send someone out for the sub, and I’ll get . . . three more bottles of water?”

I nodded. “That would be nice. Thank you. Just knock and leave them outside the door please.”

The man was being awfully helpful. Could he really be a killer? I closed the door and spun around, full of fury. “A meatball sub? Really?”

Clarence shrugged and looked just like Colt when he did so. It was downright eerie. “I wasn’t making it up. I can’t miss a meal.”

I plopped like an anchor into the chair that Colt had been sitting in. My body literally ached from lack of sleep, so worrying about someone’s schedule-driven dietary needs wasn’t even on my radar. Another couple of sleepless hours and I was likely to start hallucinating or imitating Mae West. Neither prospect was pretty.

Colt ran a quick search on Susan Golightly of Climax films. He didn’t find any obvious links to Jorge and Randolph, but that really didn’t mean anything. The mere fact that her company screened their films at the ACL’s Tanner building was a connection.

“What do we do now?” I asked after a deep yawn. As if on cue, my cell phone buzzed, notifying me that a text had come through. It was Guy Mertz. “Randolph Rutter at my office. Acting strange. Asking about you. Wants to have lunch.”

Boy, what timing. It took me about two seconds to know what to do with that information. I started texting back.

“What are you doing?” asked Colt.

“Texting Guy Mertz.” I kept typing, my fingers making mistakes all over the place.

“About what?”

“I think I have a plan.”

He rolled his eyes.

“Don’t you roll your eyes at me. I get enough of that from my family.”

A knock on the door barely preceded my hitting the send button. I smiled, proud of myself, then opened the door. On the floor in front of me was a brown paper bag and three bottles of water. I bent over to pick them up, but turned my head when a familiar voice sounded from the hallway. My heart pounded with fear and excitement at the same time. Either we’d been caught, or we were the luckiest ducks on the planet, because Jorge stood at the corner of the two hallways, talking with none other than Susan Golightly of Climax films.

I slipped back quietly, pretty sure that they hadn’t seen me.

“Fellas,” I said as I dropped the goods on the table. “We’ve got a script to write.”