Alex Harris 00 - Poisoned

here,” Millie said as she came into my office. She volunteered to fetch something for all of us while Sam and I finished up our meeting. “Sorry I’m late, but one of my earrings fell out and I had to go back to look for it. I found it, thank goodness.”
    Today our young assistant added a pair of pumpkin earrings to the ever-growing Halloween ornamentation popping up all over the office. The earrings lit up and it was a bit disconcerting to be looking at Millie and see two winking pumpkins smiling back.
    I took two stacks of papers off my desk to make room for the assortment of stuff Millie picked up. Thank God she gave up her penchant for health food. The tofu egg salad minus the eggs was bad enough, but even Millie decided she wasn’t cut out for a healthier life style after her first bite of a seaweed burger.
    “Oh, great. Lots of stuff. I’m famished.” Sam eyed the assortment spread out before her.
    “Sam, when aren’t you hungry? Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve been eating.”
    “She’s been like that ever since we were little. One pork chop never did the job for our Sam, no sir. She always wanted at least two and then she’d take mine and clean up the bone. It was truly disgusting.”
    “Hey, I like food. Food’s good.” Sam reached for half a pastrami, two pickles, and a wedge of a club sandwich.
    I satisfied my appetite with the other half of the pastrami and a pickle. “Guess who I saw walking into Paulson’s Professionals?”
    “What were you doing at Paulson’s Professionals, and do we need to use their full name? I feel like I’m talking about some new strip joint,” Sam said.
    “You’re not too far off,” I said. “They rented office space in a tacky office in a strip mall.”
    “So who did you see at Pau…I mean at that other agency ,” Millie asked with a quick look at Sam.
    “None other than Beth Amena.”
    “Beth Amena? She can’t even type,” my sister said around a mouth full of sandwich. “And did we establish what you were doing there in the first place?”
    I licked pickle juice from my finger. “Spying. I wanted to see what they looked like. I’m happy to say the parking lot looked pretty empty. But this doesn’t mean we’re out of danger yet. They’ve already got Beth, and who knows who else jumped ship. Enough. I don’t want to talk about the competition anymore.”
    “What’s everybody doing this weekend?” Millie asked with a straw in her mouth making the words come out a bit distorted.
    “Anything that’s not connected to the murder or other temp agencies,” I said a bit wistfully.
    “I read something this morning in the paper. They said no arrests have been made yet,” Millie said.
    I thought about the small bits and pieces I knew about. Nothing when you added it all up. “For a moment I thought maybe the housekeeper might be a major suspect,” I said through a bite of pickle.
    “Of course!” Sam exclaimed. “It’s always the butler.”
    “There is no butler. And the housekeeper didn’t do it either, I’m sure of it.”
    “How can you be so sure?” Millie asked.
    “I talked with her yesterday and you should have seen her,” I said, as I leaned back in my chair and put my sandwich on the desk. “She looked so frightened.”
    “Frightened?”
    “Yeah, Sam. Really scared. Wouldn’t you be? A member of the family is killed. It looks more and more like it had to be someone close. And then you find out the real victim was supposed to be Mrs. Brissart. It could happen again, though they’re being very careful about what they eat in that house.” I sat forward again and took a small bite of the sandwich and reached for another pickle.
    “Maybe she looks frightened because she knows you’re on to her.”
    I stared at my sister and rolled my eyes. “Geesh!”
    “Who do you think it is, Alex?”
    I shook my head. “I don’t know, Millie. Without knowing who the real victim was supposed to be, it’s kind of difficult to sort through everything. But you know,” I began after taking a bite out of my second pickle, “the more I think about it, the more it doesn’t fit that Mrs. Brissart was supposed to die.”
    “Really?” Sam cut a wedge off one of the other sandwiches.
    “The most probable reason to kill Mrs. Brissart would be over the land. So why now? They’ve all been arguing about it for months.”
    “Because the killer realized that all the meetings and cajoling were fruitless,” Sam suggested.
    “But why