“One lump or two?” chirped the pulchritudinous and efficacious Shirley Knott, her petite and delicate nose symmetrically located between her glittering, glaucous orbs like a bicycle between two weasels, giving little or no hint of the vast power she was capable of wielding, but which out of diplomatic reservations she refrained from wielding, at the ancestral estate of Bedside Manor, on the banks of the River Bed, which she had inherited, through ten generations, from the legendary and to some extent apocryphal Lord Helpous, who had been Keeper of the Hounds for King John and had amassed a sizable fortune by means not entirely clear but usually assumed to be both unscrupulous and nefarious, but which had enabled the manor to acquire such luxuries as the exquisite Wedgwood china which graced the tea set, into one of the cups of which Shirley was now pouring the freshly brewed lapsang souchang whose delicate fragrance of creosote and coal tar caressed her nostrils like an aardvark picking up golf balls, causing her buxom but plangent breasts to heave convulsively as she gasped for air while handing the cup demurely but rather expeditiously to the man seated across from her, who noted with some asperity that she had not given him the golden (or, if it were made of titanium, would it be the titanic?) opportunity of answering her question, which answer should have been taken into consideration with regard to modifying the contents of the receptacle before its being so impulsively rendered up to him.
“You know I don’t take sugar,” rejoined the strangely attractive yet lambently visaged Lance Boyle, the intellectually brilliant but temperamentally unstable head of the synthetic chemicals division of Consolidated Variegated Enterprises, whose vast, sinister industrial and commercial empire encompassed every imaginable department and branch of manufacturing, resource exploitation, transportation, communications, finance, medicine, political subterfuge, white-collar crime, lunatic religious cults, schools for wayward youths, and other activities, projects, and endeavors too unsavory, if not downright loathsome, to mention, as his unfathomable, ominous eyes of murky brown glinted below his beetling brow with the subtlest suggestion of barely controlled insane rage, his stylishly coiffed corn-silk hair imperceptibly standing on end on the nape of his bulldog neck, his strong, acid-damaged hands firmly grasping the proffered cup as he fleetingly entertained and as quickly suppressed the sudden urge to hurl it and its scalding contents into the sweet, pleasant face so charmingly smiling at him now.
“I wasn’t referring to sugar,” murmured the soothing voice of his hostess as she furtively fondled the control lever of the trap door underneath Lance’s elegant Louis XIV chair, in case it might become suddenly necessary to use it. “I was referring to the lumps of pseudoephedrine which you promised to bring me to help me deal with my hay fever.”
“Darling, you know perfectly well you can get 2-methylamino-1-phenylpropan-1-ol across the counter at any pharmacy for a modest five dollars a tablet. You don’t need me to steal it from the lab. Now, tetrahydrocannabinol is another matter. . . .”
From the kitchen, a good two hundred feet away from the protagonists (for the manor house was indeed capacious to the point of ostentation), and therefore, it might be supposed, out of hearing of all but the most acutely tuned ear, came the distinctive bellow, reminiscent of the rural summoning of domestic suidae, of Bedside Manor’s legendary cook, the massively proportioned, gastronomically brilliant, melodically inventive Jasmine Rice, who, as she labored determinedly at her culinary tasks, lifted her spirits and entertained her hearers by intoning such novel arias as “I lost my sugar in Salt Lake City, but my pepper grinder still does the doo-wah-ditty,” on which she was now holding forth as she approached the parlor in which our newly introduced couple conversed, soon entering it like a rampaging water buffalo to inform the lady of the manor in a voice that made the tea cups tinkle faintly in their saucers:
“Lawdy sakes, Miss Shirley, I jus’ found I’m clean out o’ monoglycerides, copper gluconate, and ferric orthophosphate, and runnin’ mighty low on carrageenan and potassium iodide. I cain’t make no decent dishes in my kitchen without decent ingredients! You reckon Mistah Lance here could get me some o’ those out o’ that scientistic lavatory he works at?”
“Jasmine dear, some day I’ll have to show you how to get potassium iodide from iodized table salt by fractional precipitation. But for the present, yes, I’ll pick those up next time I’m at work and bring them here. I’ll do anything to make you stop howling like a wolverine in heat.”
“Well, Mistah Lance, I may be low on potassium iodide, but I gots plenty o’ potassium cyanide, if you gets my drift,” she growled, with ominous emphasis on the anion.
“Just what every well-appointed kitchen needs,” sneered the mad scientist with acid sarcasm as the indignant cook thundered from the room.
“Perfect setup for a murder mystery, what?” the delighted Shirley brightly chimed as she suspiciously sniffed the sugar.
“I wasn’t thinking of doing a murder mystery” drawled Fourmile lackadaisically. “And if I did, I’d use something more imaginative than cyanide.”
“Oh, really,” retorted the skeptical young lady with thinly veiled disdain. “Just what were you thinking of?”
“I haven’t decided yet. I’ll see what comes up before the next chapter. I’m doing this totally by the seat of my pants, with no previous plan.”
