Free Holy Guacamole! by NANCY FAIRBANKS

up sitting on blue chairs with the sergeant seated uncomfortably behind the commander’s desk and keeping a wary eye on Maria-Reposa, whom he took to be a person of influence.
    Vivian launched, none too tactfully, into our mission. “It seems, Sergeant, that while you were out harassing ladies who donated food to raise funds for opera in El Paso, an excellent cause I’m sure we’d all agree, and one supported by a good many influential people, my husband among them . . .” She lost track of her thought or her sentence structure at that point, so she glared at him while she recollected herself. “Mrs. Blue—” She nodded in my direction. “—noted an interesting story in the Times . It seems, Sergeant, that Vladislav Gubenko, our late artistic director, died not of refreshments we provided, but because someone entered his house and smothered him with a pillow.”
    “Bull,” said the sergeant, offending a number of us. He was very angry. “He died from choking on puke, and he was puking because someone food-poisoned him, and the food he’d been eating was stuff you ladies brought.”
    “The contents of his stomach have been analyzed, then?” I couldn’t help asking. Even if they found the substance that made Vladik sick, could the tests tell them which party food had contained it? If so, poor Adela. This buffoon with his unpleasant language would keep harping on the food and ignore the pillow.
    “Tox screens aren’t back yet, but they’ll show he was poisoned.”
    “Will they show that the food poisoning, if any, was inadvertent, Sergeant?” asked Maria-Reposa softly. “I’m sure that no person in this group would deliberately cause injury to another person. We’re all perfectly respectable.” She smiled at him. “Wives of a doctor, a lawyer, a banker, two university professors, and the owner of several local businesses.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” he said, more polite because he knew that the commander thought well of her, or perhaps the sergeant was impressed by the credentials of our husbands. Obviously the police end of justice is not necessarily blind. “But you mustn’t pay much mind to what you read in the papers, ma’am. That’s just guesswork.”
    “The person who was quoted is a retired police lieutenant,” I pointed out.
    “It was a woman,” snapped the sergeant.
    “So are we,” said Vivian. “Are you saying that women are not to be trusted?”
    I was afraid that he might answer that and interrupted to say, “Her expertise was evidently in Vice. Surely, a Vice lieutenant would have seen a good deal of violence and have opinions that can be respected.”
    “And I’m in Crimes Against Persons,” he retorted, “so I’d take my opinion over someone else’s because I know what I’m doing. Now, you ladies don’t have anything to worry about until the tox screens come in, and I’ve got a lot of cases to investigate, thirty on my desk at this minute, so unless you know for sure someone attacked that Russian with a pillow and can give me a lead on who it was, I need to be getting back to my desk.” He stood up, an irritatingly smug look on his face.
    We glanced at each other, and then Dolly Montgomery said, “Well, I hate to be a snitch, but my husband told me about someone who threatened to kill Mr. Gubenko the night of the party.”
    Guevara looked somewhat taken aback. Evidently his investigation hadn’t turned that story up. “How did Gubenko react to the threat?” he asked suspiciously.
    Dolly looked to us because she didn’t know. “He said he felt sick,” I replied, “and then he went home.”
    “Sounds like a couple of guys having an argument. Don’t necessarily mean anyone meant to kill anyone else. Like you said, Gubenko was already sick. You think this guy put something in his food and then threatened to kill him?”
    “The man accused Vladik of sleeping with his wife,” said Barbara Escobar, obviously relishing the scandal. “Isn’t that a motive for