Dreaming of a Silent Night
“So, any chance it might snow this year?” Michael asked hopefully.
Susan had heard the same question from at least thirty different people every year since she started working for the news station. Why is it that people always think that the “weather girl” can control the weather?
“I’m a meteorologist, not God. You want snow for Christmas, in south Louisiana, take it up with him!” Susan snapped.
She hated to sound so cranky. But Susan had been reporting the weather for WZBE for nearly ten years, and had yet to see more than a half an inch of snow accumulate at once--and that always happened at some point in February. Never in December, and certainly not right on December 25.
We’ll be lucky if the Nativity scene doesn’t become Noah’s Ark, Susan thought.
“Sorry, Michael. I’m not trying to be mean. It’s just that, well, we’ve been here all our lives. Have you ever known it to snow right on Christmas? Ever?” Susan asked, scooping another spoon of sugar into her already too sweet coffee.
“No, I guess I haven’t. But I can always hope. Anyway, that’s not really what I wanted to ask you.”
Michael and Susan usually met at Madeleine’s Diner for lunch on Wednesdays. While it did seem strange for him to ask her to meet him on Friday for breakfast, she did not have to get to work until ten in the morning, so she agreed without really thinking about it.
“Well, are you going to keep me in suspense, or do you plan to ask your question before Santa boards his sleigh?” Susan joked.
“Ok, it’s about the Christmas gala at the Knights of Columbus hall. I wanted to know if--”
Just then, they heard a gasp from the table behind them. The mayor was turning red and clutching his neck as though he was out of breath. Then, he began frantically digging in his pockets.
“My pen!” he gasped. “Where is my pen?”
Susan quickly ran over to help him search for his epinephrine injector while Michael called 911. Mayor Henry was known to have two severe allergies--seafood and peanuts--so he usually kept his pen in his jacket pocket in case he accidentally ate the wrong type of cookie or someone accidentally served him with a ladle that had been used to dip shrimp gumbo. Today, however, his throat was beginning to swell shut and his injector was no where to be found.
“Help is on its way, Mr. Mayor. Please, stay with me,” Susan sobbed. But by the time the rescue workers came, Mayor Henry had stopped breathing. They rushed him to the hospital where, after an hour of performing emergency procedures, the mayor was pronounced dead.
The town was in shock when Tom Pitre, the anchor for the midday news, reported the incident that had taken place at the diner. In a town as small as LeBau, Louisiana, nearly every death makes the news--even the long time residents of the local nursing home.
It is safe to say that they were shocked, but not particularly saddened to hear of the mayor’s passing. Mayor Sonny Henry had been in office for about thirty years, almost as long as Susan or anyone else could remember, and had done nothing but collect bribes from local businesses to decide everything from which local contractor would rewire the courthouse building to who would win the annual Main Street lamp post decorating contest. Most of the streets were so full of potholes that they were almost unsafe to drive on, yet somehow there was always money to renovate the golf course or remodel city hall.
The next day, Susan thought of staying home. It was still hard to believe what she had seen. One question bothered her even more than the mayor’s death: why was his epinephrine missing.
“Are you alright?” Susan’s mother asked, her voice sounding concerned.
“Yes, mama, I’m fine. Just a little bit shaken up, is all.”
“It’s so hard to believe, what happened to Mayor Henry. You know, folks saying it was murder. You believe that’s true?”
“Mama, how are folks way in New Orleans talking about what’s happening in little old LeBau?” Susan asked. “And no, I do not think it was murder. I was right there, the mayor just couldn’t find his medicine.”
“Oh, but chere, who do you reckon moved it from where he would have it? Answer me that if you know so much.”
That was a good question. The mayor normally kept several epinephrine pens. One in his office drawer, one in his car, one with his assistant and one that he carefully placed in the pocket of whatever jacket he would be wearing when he chose his suits for the next day. Everyone found out about the severity of his allergies the day he was given the crab jambalaya instead of the chicken cacciatore he had ordered at the Rotary Club luncheon five years ago. Since then, some restaurants that he frequented went as far as removing seafood and peanuts from their menus altogether, something that is rare in a Louisiana restaurant. All to avoid accidentally killing their not so beloved mayor.
“Mama, I gotta go. Kiss Papa for me, tell him I love him.”
“We love you too. You be careful out there, world ain’t safe as it used to be.”
Susan hung up the phone. Murder? She had wondered what would make Mayor Henry leave his pen, but the thought had not crossed her mind that someone may have taken or purposely moved it. She thought maybe he had forgotten to put it in his pocket, or had grabbed the wrong jacket by mistake. Maybe as he was getting out of his car, it had fallen. The possibility of someone actually wanting to harm the mayor was far from her mind, though there were many who might have wanted him dead.
When Susan called the station to see if Troy could cover the weather for her, the producer for the morning news said that he understood if she wanted to take some time off. She thanked him and quickly got dressed. She decided that she would pay a visit to her friend Ronnie at the city morgue. But first she would stop by Madeleine’s and grab some breakfast. Somehow, she had forgotten to eat dinner the night before and was starved.
The radio’s usual lineup of Christmas songs was interrupted with an announcement concerning the mayor’s funeral arrangements. His body was to be laid out for viewing at LeBlanc’s funeral home, followed by Mass at St. Agatha’s Cathedral.
As Susan pulled up to the diner, she could see Officer Thomas and Detective Edwards entering. Though the sign was turned to “Closed”, she followed them in unnoticed and listened to them as they questioned Mary, the waitress who’d served the mayor the day before.
“Well, it’s like I told you, I just brought him his usual sweet potato pie, black coffee and an order of bacon. We didn’t make the pie any different from how we usually make it, and the bacon wasn’t an off brand or anything. If somebody gave him something, it wasn’t us,” Mary said.
“Was Peter with him when he came in?”
“Yes, and I didn’t see when he left either. But he must have left because the next thing we knew, that lady off of the news and her friend were the ones trying to help the mayor. Mr. Lewis was nowhere to be found.”
It was odd that Peter Lewis, the mayor’s assistant, was gone before Susan had gotten to the diner the day before. Usually, where you saw the mayor, you saw his assistant. People often joked that Peter was the closest thing to a wife that the mayor would ever have. Peter did not think that was funny, but there was not much that he could do about their joking. He had, after all, served the mayor hand and foot for fifteen years of his term. He never mentioned wanting to be mayor himself, although people assumed that he must have had some aspirations aside from being lackey to the most corrupt politician in the parish.
Had he been there, Peter would have had an injector available for the mayor and might have saved his life. But because he was not there, the mayor suffered the indignity of appearing to have died from a slice of pie.
Susan slipped out before the police officers did. Still hungry, she decided to stop at the gas station next to the diner. She grabbed some coffee and a couple of stale donuts and ran out the door.
When she got to the morgue, Ronnie was writing a report. He smiled and greeted his old friend with a hug.
“Hi, Susan, how are you? You don’t visit me here often.”
Susan laughed. “Can you really say you blame me? Most of the time you’re elbow deep in somebody’s guts!”
“Hey, it’s a living,” Ronnie joked. “What can I do for you? And please don’t tell me it’s got anything to do with the mayor because you know there’s an investigation going on.”
“Oh, come on, Ronnie. You know I was there. The police were questioning Mary like she or someone at Madeleine’s might have something to do with it. I just want to know what really happened,” Susan begged. “Please, pretty please with cherries on top?”
“Well, ok. The mayor did, indeed, die of anaphylactic shock as a result of his allergy. When I opened him up, his stomach contents included the pumpkin pie, bits of bacon, coffee and a little of the salad he had eaten the night before,” Ronnie said. “But what was strange was what I found when I swabbed his mouth.”
“What was that?” Susan asked.
“Well, you know the peanut butter powder that they sell in the health food store? There were traces of that on his lips and tongue. Unless Madeleine came from the dead and changed her pie recipe, there is no logical reason for that stuff to be in his mouth.”
Susan was stunned. So someone did murder the mayor. She began to wonder who might have been angry enough, or would have enough access to do such a thing. Her suspicion immediately fell on Peter, but with no evidence that he had done anything wrong, she could not go about making wild accusations.
Susan hurriedly got up to leave. “Thanks a bunch, Ronnie! I owe you lunch next time you manage to pull yourself away from your work.”
“No problem, Susan. Hope the police are able to find out who did this.”
Susan’s mind went into overdrive trying to figure out who would have had reason to do something to Mayor Henry. There was Paul, the contractor who lost his bid to rewire the courthouse to Allen’s Construction. The mayor had said it was because the larger company could get the job done faster than Paul and his crew, but everyone knew that Allen Randall had promised the mayor a $1000 kickback after the completion of the $10,000 job. That was the cost of doing business in the town. After all, the mayor was not about to put his hands in the funds set aside for maintenance or anything else on his own, but he could certainly accept small “donations” from companies that were awarded contracts. With money being tight for Paul and his workers, none of them could afford to make such a promise.
Then there was Murphy, the school janitor who was fired after twenty years and replaced by a company that the mayor suggested bringing in from Shreveport. He was certainly not happy about this turn of events, especially with the holidays coming up.
Apparently, the police were thinking along the same lines as Susan. However, nothing came of interrogating those two suspects. Murphy usually went to Madeleine’s to read the paper and eat breakfast, but decided not to go in when he saw the mayor through the window. Paul was sitting at the counter and did not move while the mayor was there. He could not have put anything in the food, or move the mayor’s pen.
No, it must have been Peter. But how, and why?
Her thoughts were interrupted by the radio reporting that, “Peter Lewis, long time aide to Mayor Henry,was arrested and charged with murdering the mayor.”
Susan still had trouble wrapping her mind around the concept of quiet, unassuming Peter as a murder suspect. If he did it, she had to know why.
When she got to the police station, they were questioning him. Susan took a seat close enough to the room where they were interrogating him to hear their voices.
“Yes, I did it,” Peter said. “I took his jacket with his pen. But it was a mistake, I swear.”
“Well, if you took his jacket and he had yours, why didn’t yours have an injector in it? Don’t you carry one at all times?” Detective Edwards asked.
“Um, yeah, usually. But I lost it,” Peter stammered.
“Lost it? Why didn’t you tell the mayor? Wouldn’t he have gotten you another one?”
Peter dropped his voice. “You don’t understand. I couldn’t tell him what happened.”
“Why not son?” Officer Thomas asked.
“Well, because I lost it in a game of poker. With Paul, Murphy and Mary.”
So, once again, the usual suspects names were thrown out there. Susan decided to visit the diner once more before she went home.
She sat down and began to pour sugar into her coffee cup. That was her thing, pouring the sugar before Mary poured the coffee, then spooning more sugar on top before stirring it up.
“Mary, I know the police asked you a lot of questions. But I have two for you,” Susan asked between sips of steamy coffee.
“What do you want to know, Miss Susan?”
“Well, what I want to know is, why would you do it? Why would you take the mayor’s pen and lace his food. I know it was you.”
Mary’s face flushed red. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I did no such thing.”
“Yes you did,” Susan insisted. “Right now, Peter is stuck in jail while you’re walking around like nothing happened, but I know that he lost his pen to you at a poker game. I also know that you would be the only one who could swap Peter and Mayor Henry’s jackets unnoticed. You are definitely the fastest waitress in town. But my question is why would you do it?”
Mary’s lips trembled, and her face cracked.
“Ok, ok, I did it. I put a little bit of peanut powder in his coffee, then swapped their jackets around when they went to the restroom. I knew that Mr. Lewis had run out of money when we played poker last, and Paul suggested that he bet the mayor’s epinephrine. We really never expected him to do something so stupid, but when he did we thought of a perfect plan.”
“See, we were sick of the mayor doing everything but what he should have been doing, and that’s looking out for the people of this community. So we figured we would get a new mayor one way or another. Paul has three small children to feed, and Murphy has a baby on the way. With Mayor Henry out of office, they have a better chance now of getting good contracts so that they can feed their families. And maybe now, Peter can run the office like it should be run. With compassion.”
It turned out that Paul and Murphy were angry about jobs being awarded to larger companies than theirs, but Mary had bigger political implications in mind.
Meanwhile, Michael was still hoping for snow. But with the case wrapped up and Christmas coming in less than a week, he had something more important to wish for.
Alice, the new waitress at Madeleine’s, brought over a plate of gingersnaps. Susan bit into them eagerly, waiting for Michael to go on and ask his question. Since it seemed that he never would, she began to grow impatient.
“Ok, so you know I was trying to ask you something before when we came here. I wanted to know, well, that is, if you’re not too busy...” Michael’s voice got lower and trailed off.
“Yes, Michael. Yes I will go to the Christmas gala with you. Pick me up at 6, ok?”
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