Naked in Death (In Death #1)(61)

“You did bake the pie, Mrs. Finestein.”

The woman blinked, lowered her lashes. “Yes, I did.”

“Mrs. Finestein, you know what killed your husband?”

“Yes, I do.” She smiled softly. “Gluttony. I told him not to eat it. I specifically told him not to eat it. I said it was for Mrs. Hennessy across the hall.”

“Mrs. Hennessy.” That jolted Eve back several mental paces. “You — “

“Of course, I knew he’d eat it, anyway. He was very selfish that way.”

Eve cleared her throat. “Could we, ah, turn the program off?”

“Hmm? Oh, I’m sorry.” The flustered hostess tapped her cheeks with her hands. “That’s so rude. I’m so used to letting it play all day I don’t even notice it. Um, program — no, screen off.”

“And the audio,” Eve said patiently.

“Of course.” Shaking her head as the sound continued to run, Hetta looked sheepish. “I’ve just never gotten the hang of the thing since we switched from remote to voice. Sound off, please. There, that’s better, isn’t it.”

The woman could bake a poisoned pie, but couldn’t control her own television, Eve thought. It took all kinds. “Mrs. Finestein, I don’t want you to say any more until I’ve read you your rights. Until you’re sure you understand them. You’re under no obligation to make any statement,” Eve began, while Hetta continued to smile gently.

Hetta waited until the recitation was over. “I didn’t expect to get away with it. Not really.”

“Get away with what, Mrs. Finestein?”

“Poisoning Joe. Although…” She pursed her lips like a child. “My grandson’s a lawyer — a very clever boy. I think he’d say that since I did tell Joe, very specifically told him not to eat that pie, it was more Joe’s doing than mine. In any case,” she said and waited patiently.

“Mrs. Finestein, are you telling me that you added synthetic cyanide compound to a custard pie with the intention of killing your husband?”

“No, dear. I’m telling you I added cyanide compound, with a nice dose of extra sugar to a pie, and told my husband not to touch it. ‘Joe,’ I said, ‘Don’t you so much as sniff this custard pie. I baked it special, and it’s not for you. You hear me, Joe?’”

Hetta smiled again. “He said he heard me all right, and then just before I left for my evening with the girls, I told him again, just to be sure. ‘I mean it, Joe. You let that pie be.’ I expected he would eat it, though, but that was up to him, wasn’t it? Let me tell you about Joe,” she continued conversationally, and picked up the cookie tray to urge another on Eve. When Eve hesitated, she laughed gaily. “Oh, dear, these are quite safe, I promise you. I just gave a dozen to the nice little boy upstairs.”

To prove her point she chose one herself and bit in.

“Now, where was I? Oh, yes, about Joe. He’s my second husband, you know. We’ve been married fifty years come April. He was a good partner, and quite a fine baker himself. Some men should never retire. The last few years he’s been very hard to live with. Cross and complaining all the time, forever finding fault. And never would get flour on his fingers. Not that he’d pass by an almond tart without gobbling it down.”

Because it sounded almost reasonable, Eve waited a moment. “Mrs. Feinstein, you poisoned him because he ate too much?”

Hetta’s rosy cheeks rounded. “It does seem that way. But it goes deeper. You’re so young, dear, and you don’t have family, do you?”

“No.”

“Families are a source of comfort, and a source of irritation. No one outside can ever understand what goes on in the privacy of a home. Joe wasn’t an easy man to live with, and I’m afraid, though I’m sorry to speak ill of the dead, that he had developed bad habits. He’d find a real glee in upsetting me, in ruining my small pleasures. Why just last month he deliberately ate half the Tower of Pleasure Cake I’d baked for the International Betty Crocker cook-off. Then he told me it was dry.” Her voice huffed out in obvious insult. “Can you imagine?”

“No,” Eve said weakly. “I can’t.”

“Well, he did it just to make me mad. It was the way he wielded power, you see. So I baked the pie, told him not to touch it, and went out to play mah-jongg with the girls. I wasn’t at all surprised when I got back and found he hadn’t listened. He was a glutton, you see.” She gestured with the cookie before delicately finishing the last bite. “That’s one of the seven deadly sins, gluttony. It just seemed right that he would die by sin. Are you sure you won’t have another cookie?”

The world was certainly a mad place, Eve decided, when old women poisoned custard pies. And, she thought, with Hetta’s quiet, old-fashioned, grandmotherly demeanor, the woman would probably get off.

If they sent her up, she’d get kitchen duty and happily bake pastries for the other inmates.

Eve filed her report, caught a quick dinner in the eatery, then went back to work on the still simmering lead.

She’d no more than cleared half the New York banks when the call came through. “Yeah, Dallas.”

Her answer was the image that flowed onto her screen. A dead woman, arranged all too familiarly on blood-soaked sheets.