It was with considerable trepidation that I accepted her invitation to dinner. Miss Adams was far from being an unattractive woman, but the disconcerting habits of her other houseguests went a long way towards making up for that lack. She was a herpetologist by profession, meaning that she was the curator of reptiles at the local zoo. And Salome was the kind of woman who took her work home with her.
"Would you like some more coffee, Detective?" Her smile was charming, but it was the massively built lizard resting languidly on the couch that had a firm hold on my attention.
I shook my head. "Is that supposed to be loose?" I jerked my thumb briefly towards the itinerant iguana.
"Oh, Emerald's no trouble. I can put her away, if she bothers you. It's just that she so hates being cooped up in her cage." She crossed the room in a flair of skirts and expertly transferred the monstrous creature to her shoulder. It blinked once, lazily. "Does it bother you?"
"No." I lied. I took another swig of my coffee. "You told me you were planning to let me in on a mystery tonight. I must admit that you've gotten my curiosity up, Miss Adams."
"Please, call me Salome." She urged the iguana onto a planted stand, and switched on the powerful ultraviolet lamp that hung above it. "Did you know, Detective, that some species of scorpions actually glow under blacklight?" Briefly, she adjusted a knob at the base of the bulb. "When my husband was alive, we would go out to the desert with blacklights and collect scorpions and rattlesnakes by the dozen. We'd compete to see who could locate the most specimens in an evening. He generally won." An odd expression crossed her bright, aristocratic features.
I raised an eyebrow. "Call me David. So how did your husband die?"
She gave me a positively beaming smile. "I knew you'd ask, David. Why don't we sit down to dinner? It should be quite done by now."
I helped her take the steaming trays out of the oven and carry them over to the table. To my relief, there was nothing more exotic than roast beef on the menu. She served me a generous slab of the dripping, faintly pink meat, wielding the carving knife swiftly and expertly. "Lyle was an intensely competitive man. A highly stressed man, David. He died of a massive stomach ulcer, a condition he had suffered since he was nineteen. I'm afraid he simply worked himself to death."
"What did he do for a living?" I reflected that whatever else he did, he must have liked snakes. From where I was sitting, I could see at least two full rows of aquariums down the hall, and none of them held water. Fortunately for my peace of mind, none of the inhabitants were clearly visible at the moment.
Salome put a ladle full of peas and onions on my plate before serving herself. "He was the head curator at the zoo. Frankly, he didn't deserve the position. If he had one talent, it was taking credit for other people's work."
The slender, dark-haired woman pursed her lips in a thin, bitter line. "I should know. He stole my paper on tree vipers and presented it himself at the World Herpetogists' conference. When I got the only pair of flying snakes we had to breed in captivity, he was right there to take the credit. And I wasn't the only one he duped. I was just the beginning. He was willing to do anything, literally anything, to get ahead in his field." She stared off into the distance, lost in the private and unpleasant world of her memories.
I coughed. "So why did you stay married to him?" The roast beef was excellent, tender and flavorful. I made a note to ask her where she had purchased it.
"I loved him, I suppose." Salome looked away from me. "Can you understand that, David? How a woman would let a man do that to her, because she loved him?" I didn't quite know what to say, so I nodded.
She continued, more quietly. "I suppose sex has nothing to do with it. That I was a woman and he was a man, I mean." She turned her great grey eyes on me and asked me a simple question. "If you loved a woman, really loved her, would you let her take the credit for your work if you knew she wanted it badly?"
I could only answer her honestly. "I don't know, Salome." I took another bite of the peas. I tasted the faintest hint of garlic along with the onions. Whatever else Salome could do, she could certainly cook.
"Of course, I fell out of love with him eventually." The attractive brunette looked pensive. "It wasn't sudden, like waking up one morning and saying, `I declare, I'm just not in love with Lyle any more.' It was far more gradual than that."
"I can imagine." I replied noncommittally, chasing the last, errant pea around my plate with a spoon. "What did you do when you fell out of love with him?"
Salome put down her knife and fork with a decisive air. "Why, I thought about killing him, of course." She smiled at me.
I remained expressionless. "I thought he died of ulcers."
"Oh, he did. They were quite sure of that. The doctors, I mean." She looked at me coyly. "But we're all entitled to our little fantasies, aren't we?"
"Of course, Salome." I wiped my hands on the napkin. "How did you imagine you were going to kill him?"
"Well, my first thought was to let one of the more venomous snakes loose on him, when he was least expecting it. Either of us could have easily handled a cobra or even a boomslang with the right equipment, but if one were to surprise him, say, in the water closet...." She smiled dreamily. "Now, that would have been lovely, wouldn't you say?"
I shuddered. "So why didn't you?"
She made a girlish moue. "Because he'd already made himself mostly immune to every snake we could get at the zoo. It took him twenty years and literally thousands of injections, but the end result was that there were very few snakes whose bites could do more than discomfort him. I've taken several courses of venom myself, but I never went to quite his lengths."
Salome pointed towards one of the securely locked end cages, where a small, mud-colored snake was lying half-coiled next to the glass. "That's an elapid. A young Indian cobra, to be specific. We've been highly successful in breeding them at the zoo. Now, if he were to bite me, I would be rather sick for a time, but I would almost certainly survive it. If he bit you, on the other hand, you would most probably die, at least without antivenom treatment."
I looked away from the snake. "And if it bit your husband?" She chuckled. "One of them did, once. His arm swelled up a tad, but otherwise, he barely noticed. If I could have gotten a king cobra or a fer-de-lance to strike him in a major artery, it might actually have killed him. I'm afraid that would have been rather difficult, though." Salome took a slice of onion from her plate and nibbled on it delicately.
"The only kind of venom that he couldn't make himself entirely immune to was hemotoxin. Some crotalids - excuse me, rattlesnakes and other pit vipers - have a sort of venom that can attack cell walls directly and break them down, rather like a weak acid. Since they haven't any stomachs to speak of, they have to use their venom to digest their prey before they swallow it."
I nodded, pretending I undersood every word. She continued. "Fascinating, but seldom fatal. A viper bite would have left him a nasty scar, but he would have been immune to the more dangerous, neurotoxic components of its venom. No, snakebite was hardly the way to do him in."
Casually, I forked in another bite of the delicious roast beef. "So, how did you do it?"
"David. Must you be so blunt?" She chided me, laughing. "Do you really think I killed him?"
I said nothing, preferring to concentrate instead on the excellent dinner. Salome rose from her seat and reached for the pitcher of wine on the table. "Look, your cup is empty. Let me pour you some sangria." She gave me a conspirator's wink. "It's mulled wine, you know. I made it from an old Mexican recipe. It's quite good."
It was indeed quite good, if a bit strong. A few sips gave me the fortification I needed to pursue the subject. "How did he die, Salome? I mean, really."
"Oh, David. I told you. He died of ulcers." Salome looked suddenly, intensely concerned. "You don't have ulcers, do you?"
"No." The attractive woman breathed a sigh of relief. "That's good. The onions wouldn't have been very good for an ulcer. It's the formic acid in them, you know."
I didn't, but I nodded anyway. We finished the excellent meal in silence, capped off by several glasses of the potent sangria. When she rose to clear off the trays, I stopped her. "Salome? I thought you were going to to share a mystery with me."
"Absent-minded me." She chuckled. "Did you enjoy your dinner?"
"Very much, thanks. The roast was quite outstanding. Who's your butcher?"
Salome smiled. "Me. I shot it in Lake County last week. A four-point buck, very respectable."
I opened my mouth as if to speak, but no words emerged. I fidgeted with my tie.
"Delicious, wasn't it? Venison always goes best with a good red wine, which is why I went to the trouble of brewing the sangria." Abruptly, she leaned forward and looked at me intently. "Lyle's ten years dead now, and the case is closed. There's really no mystery about that, is there?"
I found my voice again. "No. I guess not."
She gave me a conspirator's wink. "Good. I suppose you want to know what the mystery is, then?"
"Well, yes."
Salome held her glass of wine up to the light. It cast shimmering reflections in scarlet and purple down on the pale rug. "In Mexico, the drink they call sangria has a dozen recipes. All of them start with red wine. Some of them call for cinnamon and spice, some for honey, and a few for herbs and medicinals. One of the most fascinating additions they occasionally make is cascabel." She raised the glass to her lips and took a slow, sensuous draught. I could see her teeth, starkly white against her full red lips, and just a little too sharp to be sexy. "An excellent addition, if I do say so myself. Exotic, and definitely mysterious."
I looked at my glass suspiciously. "What?"
"Rattlesnake venom." She smiled sweetly. I felt faint. "Oh, it's quite harmless. The natives drink it all the time in Agua Caliente; I've watched them. They believe it proves their manhood."
With a flourish, she set her empty glass upside down on the table. "It really is harmless, unless you have a fresh cut in your mouth or some other such annoying little perforation. Then you might have a bit of a problem, especially if you drank it frequently."
The last thing I was aware of was Salome eyeing me with a tender, maternal concern. "You look a bit unwell, David. Have you had your health checked lately? Working as a detective must be more than a little bit stressful, after all. David? David?"
When I awakened from my brief and unexpected nap, I thanked Salome for her hospitality and made my way as quickly as I could manage out of that den of snakes. Salome Adams was a beautiful woman, but I had always suspected that she had cold blood.
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