101 Mystery Stories

27 Project Mushroom Julie Smith

It was June 29, the day before the end of the fiscal year, and Carla looked awful. She was trying to cheer herself up with a puny little joke. “We’ve decided to kill Martin,” she said. “Everyone in the office is going to strike a blow, like in that Agatha Christie novel. Do we count you in or not?”

I shook my head. “I guess I haven’t been here long enough. I’m nowhere close to murder.”

“Just wait. He gets to everybody.”

In fact, I’d been on Project Mushroom only about a week. The project’s purpose was to figure out ways to increase California’s mushroom sales income by several zillion bucks. It was funded by the State and administered by the State Department of Food and Agriculture, and if it wanted to continue being funded it had to deliver a mountain of reports to Food and Ag by June 30th. Its director was Martin Larson, who did more to block advances in mushroom agriculture than anyone the Twentieth Century has yet produced.

The project was inspired by the current fancy-cooking fad. Some State Assemblyman noticed that dried morels cost more than three hundred dollars a pound and no one could keep them in stock. He thought that if California could figure out a cheap way to grow morels and other fancy fungi, the state would get richer. A lot of people thought that was ridiculous. I thought it was a good idea. I’m a botanist and the author of a children’s book on mushrooms and I live in a tiny town in the San Joaquin Valley, about twenty miles from the tiny Valley town that housed Project Mushroom. Because of those three facts, Betty Castor, the head geneticist on the project, recruited me.

Betty reasoned that if I could write, I could edit, and she didn’t think the project stood a chance of getting refunded unless someone translated the required mountain of reports into English before they were sent to Sacramento. Martin insisted on writing them all himself, and he wrote only in bureaucratese. So I joined the project to save it. One of the conditions of my employment was that I deal directly with Carla, the education director, and not with Martin.

Poor Carla got darker and darker circles under her eyes as the end of June drew nearer. The day she unveiled the joke murder plan I was in the office to pick up the last paper, planning to take it home to work on it. “Where,” I asked her, “is the report on ‘Options for Improving California’s Mushroom Resources’?”

“Martin hasn’t started it yet.”

I began to see what she meant about the way he got to everybody. He phoned me at ten o’clock that night. “I don’t think I’ll be finished till very late. I’ll put the report under your doormat, okay? It’s got to be on a bus for Sacramento by two o’clock tomorrow and I’ve got to go over your edit and then we’ve got to have it typed. Do you think you could have it back to me by ten-thirty?”

I sighed. “I’ll shoot for eleven.”

It would mean getting up at 4:00 A.M., but so what? It would all be over a few hours after that and I could be back in bed by noon, with a check under my pillow that would pay the rent for the next three months.

The report was about fifty pages long, and apparently the work of the Cleveland Wrecking Company. By 9:30, I still had fifteen pages to go. I called Martin: “Come over and start looking at the part I’ve done. If you have questions, I’ll be right here.”

He didn’t come over. He sent someone to pick up the report and take it back to his office — about a twenty-minute drive. But I couldn’t worry about that. I was starting to panic. The last five pages were gibberish. They needed a complete rewrite, but I couldn’t do it until I knew what Martin was trying to say. I would have to go in to the office and work with him — each page would have to be handed to the typist as we finished it.

I left at 10:30, forty-five minutes behind the messenger. Martin had gone through only about ten or twelve pages of my edit. Frantic last-minute activity whirred about him, but he seemed oblivious to the approaching deadline. He was sitting in his private office, utterly relaxed, agonizing happily over each comma. I’d never been in his office before. It was decorated with dried mushrooms, mounted and framed. At that moment, I’d love to have fed him his own big, loathsome specimen of Amanita phalloides, the most poisonous toadstool that grows in California.

He put down his pencil and gave me his full attention. He answered my questions slowly and deliberately, fully and completely — and then some. I was sweating with impatience by the time we’d finished.

I started the rewrite and he worked on the rest of my edit, interrupting me now and them I answered as shortly as I could, but somehow he managed to work in a few questions about my background and whether I’d be available for future jobs — questions I really couldn’t ignore without being horribly rude. And I didn’t want to be rude, but it was getting on toward noon — we had only two hours to get the report on the bus. The typist came in, grabbed a sheaf of papers, and left. Carla came in a panic. She had a bunch of color samples with her, in shades of mushroom tan, mushroom gray, and mushroom gray-green. “Martin,” she said, “the man from the bindery is here. Pick the color for the cover — quick.”

“Oops. Stop the presses,” he said. “A lifetime decision.” He began to pore over the samples. I resumed typing. Carla left.

“Katherine, what do you think?” He spread about twenty samples out in front of me. I picked a soft gray-green.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I think this tan.” He held it up.

“Great,” I said.

“No, I’m not sure. I’m going to ask Bill.” Bill was the art director.

He left to find Bill and I thankfully went back to the rewrite.

Martin came back in a few minutes, fingering a gray sample. “This is the one Bill likes. He thinks the black type’ll look best on it. What do you think?”

“Take Bill’s advice — it’s what you’re paying him for.”

“The trouble with the world today is that everybody listens to the experts.”

I shrugged and kept typing, trying not to think about the chunk of tax money that was paying for Bill, and me, and other unlistened to “experts” on Project Mushroom.

Carla came back in: “Martin, how about it? The guy from the bindery’s getting impatient.”

“Just a second, Carla. This is important.”

Carla disappeared. Martin continued to stare at the samples. Finally, he picked another gray — at least it must have been another gray since it was on a different sample card. But it looked for all the world like the one Bill had picked. Martin covered it with a sample of black type, then put the sample on the gray Bill had picked. Sure enough, it showed up better on Bill’s gray. Martin pointed to his own gray. “I think this is a much richer color, don’t you?”

“I hardly see any difference at all.” This time I couldn’t keep the curtness out of my voice.

“I know what I’ll do. I’ll ask Betty.” Martin picked up the phone and spoke to Betty: “Get your fanny in here. We’ve got a problem.”

I kept typing. In a second, Betty whirled in, hair flying, arms full of papers, face frantic. “What’s the problem?”

Martin explained — slowly. Betty told him to listen to Bill.

When she had left, Martin stared at the color cards some more. Finally, he stood up. “I’m going to have to flip a coin,” he said. “Tails, we go with Bill’s choice. Heads, we go with mine.”

He flipped a quarter onto my typing table. It was tails.

“That’s it,” I said. “Go with Bill’s gray.”

“This is important. Katherine. It’s got to be right.”

“So go with your gray.”

“I’m not sure. I’m just not sure.”

He sat down and stared at the samples some more. Carla came in, red-faced: “Martin, for heaven’s sake. We’re paying this guy by the minute.”

I guess she meant the man from the bindery. I didn’t ask. Martin went out with her, and came back in about ten minutes, just as I was pulling the final page of the rewrite out of the typewriter. “We went with one of the tan ones.”

“I’m sure it’ll look very nice. Can you look this over? There’s about fifteen minutes to get it read and typed.”

Carla rushed in again. “We’ve got five typists standing by. Any pages yet?”

Martin waved her away. “Katherine,” he said, “after this is over, could you give me some pointers on improving my writing style?”

“Sure. Tomorrow maybe.”

“My main problem is I have so much to say, you know? I don’t want any of those guys at Food and Ag to miss anything. I think if we just—”

In my head, a clock ticked away. “Oh, dear!” I put my hand to my mouth. “I’ve just forgotten something. Martin, can you excuse me a second?”

I ran from the room and ducked into Carla’s office. I picked up the phone and started dialing numbers at random, trying to look busy in case Martin followed me and tried to finish his sentence. I called my mother, my sister, and my boy friend, who was on a business trip in New York.

Finally I saw Martin burst out of his office, waving the rewrite pages. He raced over to the head typist’s desk and said, “Type like the wind.” He was smiling, clearly having the time of his life. The other four typists each rushed over and took a page. They typed like the wind. Carla stood by, playing with a set of keys, ready to race the finished report to the bindery.

I went to lunch with Betty. Two beers and a ham sandwich later I felt nearly normal again. I came back to the office with her to get directions to Bill’s house, where a Project Mushroom New Fiscal Year Party was going to take place in a few hours. Betty was explaining how to get there when Carla came in, streaming tears: “I missed the bus.”

Martin put an arm around her. “No big deal. I called Food and Ag yesterday — they gave us a day’s grace.”

Carla shoved him away and clomped out of the room, not looking at Martin. Betty, or me, simply getting out of the room quick. Martin apparently didn’t notice. He turned to me: “Katherine, I went through your edit pretty quickly. I think we’re going to have to do a few things over.”

So I didn’t go to the New Fiscal Year Party after all. I stayed home and worked. I’d been looking forward to the party, too. It was a potluck dinner, and everything on the menu had mushrooms in it. There were stuffed mushrooms for hors d’oeuvres and then mushroom soup and marinated mushrooms and mushroom crepes. Dessert was a cake in the shape of a mushroom.

I worked until 1:00 A.M. and then I took my edit of Martin’s rewrite of my rewrite over to the project office and pushed it through the mail slot as arranged. After that, I went home, took the phone off the hook, and slept. I slept through most of the next day, getting up late in the afternoon to eat and read a little. Then I went back to bed and slept all night.

The headline in the next day’s paper was PROJECT MUSHROOM DIRECTOR DIES OF MUSHROOM POISONING. The story told about the New Fiscal Year Party, and what had been on the menu, and said that Martin had been poisoned by an Amanita phalloides. No one else had been stricken. No one could explain how the phalloides had gotten into any of the dishes, as only domesticated mushrooms had been used.

It was a Saturday, so I knew no one would be at Project Mushroom. I went over and got the guard to let me in by saying I’d left a book in the office. Then I went into Martin’s private office. His mushroom collection was still intact, except for the framed phalloides. Another specimen, an Amanita muscaria, had been hung in its place. I called Carla and told her the phalloides was missing. “What phalloides?” she said. “Martin never had a phalloides specimen.”

I called Betty. She’d never seen the phalloides, either. Then I called Bill. Neither had he. Neither had the head typist.

So I decided not to mention the missing phalloides to the police. I didn’t want to look like a crazy lady.

But if Martin’s death was an accident, the news media pointed out, that meant it must be possible to buy a phalloides accidentally at the grocery store. They also questioned the need for anything called Project Mushroom in the first place, and went on quite a bit about frivolous programs that were using up tax money.

So far as I know, there was only the most cursory investigation of Martin’s death. The police seemed to think it was surprising that only Martin had been stricken, but practically everyone on the staff was a mushroom expert and none of them thought it odd, so the cops went away cowed. Project Mushroom was not refunded.

I have no idea how those people did it. If I had to, I’d put my money on the crepes, which had to be made individually but I wouldn’t rule out the soup or even the marinated mushrooms — a single portion of either could have been easily doctored. I also don’t know if they all participated, or if one or two of them did it and the rest simply kept quiet about the missing specimen. All I know is that Martin Larson did more to block advances in mushroom agriculture than anyone the Twentieth Century has yet produced. In California, anyway.