Coffee, Tea or Me? by Donald Bain, Trudy Baker, Rachel Jones, Bill Wenzel Page B

joined me. Joan got mad.
    “This is a very serious matter,” she intoned with all the piety of a lay reader on Christmas. Joan could do this quite nicely. She seemed forever preaching about something, her actions seldom matching her words.
    “We know it is.” But we couldn’t stop laughing.
    The night ended with nothing solved and everyone mad at everyone else. Rachel and I chuckled ourselves to sleep.
    We were about to leave the penthouse the next morning for our flight when Marie came flying out of her bedroom, tears running down her cheeks. In her hand was the lifeless form of Nelson, the alligator. It’s hard to tell when an alligator is dead, especially from a distance. But Marie confirmed it.
    “He’s dead,” she shouted.
    “How?”
    “I don’t know.” She was heartbroken. The little reptile didn’t move in her hands.
    We went into Marie’s room. Sally sat sleepily on her bed. The birds were all chirping happily, a thing birds probably always do when an alligator dies.
    We went over to the fish tank where Nelson drew his last breath and looked into the water. The water was never especially clean, but that morning it had a definite bronze tone to it.
    “What’s in the water?” Rachel asked Marie, now calmed down just a little.
    “I don’t know. Is anything in the water?”
    “Sure.” Rachel dipped her finger into the tank and sniffed it.
    “Smells like Scotch.”
    “Scotch?” Marie said with horror.
    “Yeh, Scotch. Take a sniff.”
    Marie did.
    Then she dipped her own finger into the tank and licked the water on its tip. “It is Scotch,” she moaned.
    “Maybe he died of cirrhosis,” Sally said from the bed.
    “Who did this?” Marie shrieked at the top of her voice.
    That scream did it. Everyone came running into the room.
    Everyone chattered away at once.
    “A little respect for the deceased, please.” Rachel suggested.
    The chattering was still going on when we left for our flight. We returned that night to a grim penthouse. Jane was drunk, bless her heart.
    “Well, who did Nelson in?” I asked Joan, who sat quietly reading a book.
    “Sally said maybe you two did.”
    “Here we go again.”
    “Did you?”
    “No.”
    “I didn’t think so. Jane and I have solved the problem, though.” (The rules committee, remember?)
    “How did you do that?”
    “Marie will be leaving in the morning.”
    “Marie? Did she poison Nelson, her own alligator?”
    “No, of course not. But those animals all over the place were just too much for anyone to bear. She’s leaving with her zoo.” Joan went back to reading.
    Marie did leave the penthouse. The mysteries of the missing bottle and the dead alligator were never solved, although Rachel and I came up with a solution we felt was plausible. We figured Sarah borrowed the bottle and Sally knew it. She accused us to protect Sarah. Then, Sarah got scared and dumped the bottle in Nelson’s tank to get rid of the evidence. We gave up trying to figure out what she did with the actual bottle. You can’t solve everything.
    So Marie moved out and Libby moved in. Libby was a friend of Helen’s, their particular closeness bonded by a mutual need to diet constantly. Libby was a discothèque dancer in Greenwich Village. Sally moved in with Sarah, and Helen roomed with Libby. Together, they cornered the market on yogurt. They also turned the penthouse into a gymnasium for their numerous exercises for figure improvement. Things went along for a month until Libby, or Helen, we’re not sure which, accused somebody of eating her yogurt.
    Sarah admitted borrowing “a little teeny bit,” but Sally said she thought Sarah had borrowed a lot. The only one in the clear was Jane who often said yogurt and whiskey just didn’t mix.
    And so it went. Our chic, glamorous penthouse soon fell into a long shadow of bickering, a human inevitability where girls are concerned, especially eight of them. Rachel and I departed for an apartment in Greenwich Village where we