Chapter 1
I didn’t go back to our apartment. Arthur let me sleep over on his couch, and we talked until dawn without him ever once bringing up the Ruth subject.
The next morning, Friday, he insisted I seat him at the dinner table that night.
For the thousandth time, I explained that it was too dangerous: The guest list had been finalized for months, and any last-minute changes would be seen as a red flag.
“Are you going to have the balls to poison the food yourself?” he asked.
I didn’t know what to say. In spite of everything, I wasn’t a murderer; I’d never killed anybody.
It wasn’t going to be easy to poison the punch bowl.
Even though the guests were a bunch of nasty motherfuckers, even though Umberto was the ringleader behind all that carnage …
I couldn’t say for sure that I wasn’t going to chicken out when the time came.
“I’ll hide out in one of the bedrooms inside the villa,” Arthur insisted. “You distract the cook, and then I’ll put the seasoning on the food.”
I finally gave in. Since Hugo would arrive a little after noon, we needed to be at the villa early to avoid any trouble.
We scarfed down our breakfast and I popped some tranquilizers in the hopes of controlling my jitters, then we got in an Uber.
I had the keys to the main gate and the front door.
At eleven, I went in to confirm the house was empty and signaled to Arthur that the coast was clear.
“This is it?” he said, taking in every inch of the dining room.
We did two full laps of the house and concluded the best hiding place was the guesthouse out back, where Cora used to do her butchering.
Now that she’d been fired, the objects that had once been used to turn Ruth into chunks of meat were just gathering dust. Arthur studied the chainsaw and the bloodstained buckets with tears in his eyes but said nothing.
It couldn’t have been easy for him. We agreed that when the grandfather clock in the dining room struck four, I’d call Hugo into the upstairs bedroom and Arthur would have about two minutes to climb the back stairs, dump the poison into the pot, and return to his hiding place.
“What’s on the menu tonight?” he asked me, squeezing into a gap between the built-in cabinets and plastic sheeting. “Is there a sauce?”
“Gravy. Made from drippings and bones.”
“It’s pretty dark in color, right?”
“Yeah, why?”
“That’s the best option for hiding the poison.”
“Are you sure it won’t affect the flavor?”
“It kind of reminds me of almonds,” Arthur said. “By the time they realize something is off, it’ll be too late.”