A Berry Baffling Businessman

by A. R. Winters

  “We’re looking for someone,” Zoey answered back, yelling. Her raised voice was puny compared to the disembodied one.

  “Good luck finding them here.”

  I jumped, startled, and spun around. The wishes for good luck had come from a normal voice from somewhere behind us. A pudgy man who was shorter than me when in my bare feet, was heading our way. He had a round head, made more round by an absence of hair except for the long thin strands of a combover. Something about his two very large front teeth put me in mind of a beaver.

  “State your business,” the enormous disembodied voice intoned again.

  “Sorry about that,” the newcomer said. “That’s my doorbell. I made it extra loud so I’d have a chance at hearing it when I was out in the stacks.” He moved past us, triggering the enormous voice to sound off again.

  “See,” he said, then offered his hand to shake. “I’m Buzz, owner, operator, and curator for Buzz’s Bungles.”

  I shook his hand, then asked, “What are the stacks?”

  “Oh, it’s what I call the mounds.” He hitched a thumb over his shoulder at the mountain of tires practically on top of his front door. “What can I do you for? Collectibles? Car parts? You two artists, looking for sculpture parts?”

  “Cars, the type that run,” Zoey said.

  “Oh, you’re in luck. I’ve got some. They’re parked in the back corner. A bit of a hike on foot. It’s my test for cars. If they can be driven all the way back there, I’ll buy them as operational.”

  “Has anyone else come looking for a new car? Uh, a new old one…”

  “Not today, but someone could have come in without me noticin’.”

  “You didn’t send out a tweet?” Zoey asked.

  “Sure, this morning. Someone brought in a Frankenstein junker. The thing’s got a vintage Corvette trunk on it. Took pictures and posted them. Try to catch the attention of some collectors.”

  “But did you tweet about any of the people you saw today?” I asked.

  “No, just the car. What’s this about?”

  So far, he’d been very accommodating of our questions. I guessed he was used to being the one to have to answer a lot of questions, but I had a feeling that we were about to put him on the defensive. It was time to come clean, sort of.

  “We’re looking for a woman,” I said. “We’re worried about her. She’s very sick, and she checked herself out of the hospital against doctors’ orders. We saw a tweet that someone saw her out here.”

  “What she look like?”

  “About my age, taller than me, blonde hair, and slender. Very beautiful.” It only made me a little nauseous to describe one of my ex-husband’s ex-mistresses in such favorable terms.

  “Nope, haven’t seen her. Jack and Mildred were here earlier today, a couple of my regulars, but nobody that looks like who you’re talking about. But that don’t mean much. People could come and go without me noticing. Big place.”

  “Would you notice it if someone drove off with one of the cars from the back?”

  “For starters, they’d have to hotwire the car, then they’d have to drive out. The path for getting out is one lane and snakes through all the stacks.” He squared his stance and stuck his thumbs in his belt. “I’d notice. Nobody’s ever driven out with one of my cars without paying.”

  “Mind if we have a look?”

  “Suit yourself. If ya need me, I’ll be in my trailer.” He smiled big. “I made sushi for lunch.” He went inside and Beethoven vibrated his walls a moment later.

  “Something doesn’t feel right,” I said as we started walking the winding path through the hulking stacks. Items seemed to be categorized. There were the mountains of tires, Alpine, jagged heaps of appliances, and Babylonian towers of stacked cars.

  “What doesn’t feel right?”

  “I get that Lara would want to get out of town without anyone knowing where she’s gone, but Larry worships her. Why wouldn’t she ask him to smuggle her out of town?”

  Zoey shrugged. "They do seem to care about each other. Maybe she doesn’t want to involve him in case she doesn’t get away. If he helped her evade the law, it could land him behind bars.”

  That was true.

  We rounded the side of a giant pedestal of porcelain when a discarded toilet snapped in two. The two parts lost their mooring and tumbled down the pile.

  Then the plaster on a tub splattered, revealing the solid iron beneath. A vase shattered into a million pieces at the same time.

  “What the…” I’d never heard of a poltergeist inhabiting a junkyard, but I supposed that there was a first time.

  “Check out that tower of cars. It’s swaying.”

  I looked where she pointed. The top of a tall stack of half-flattened cars was moving back and forth like the top of a tree in a high wind. We were standing deep within its long shadow.

  “We have a problem,” I said, reaching for Zoey’s arm. The tip of the car tower had stopped swaying back and forth and was instead simply leaning. Toward us. “It’s going to fall.”

  I heard another harsh crack, and this time it was a bathroom sink that split in two.

  “Someone’s shooting at us!” Zoey grabbed me and pulled me into a crouch next to her. We then duck-walked to squat behind a haphazard pile of desk chairs. The mishmash of chairs provided coverage as good as hiding behind a small hill of swiss cheese.

  I doubted that it would save us from any eagle-eyed bullets, but I supposed that was our saving grace. It would be harder to pinpoint exactly where we were, making missing us a lot more likely.

  All the while, I couldn’t take my eyes off the tower of cars. I knew that we were missing something, and then I saw it. There was a rope tied to the frame of one of the cars about two-thirds of the way up the tower. The car didn’t have any glass in the windows, and the rope was looped around the vertical bar that separated the front and back doors.

  I followed the trail of the rope down the tower and through the broken-out windows of one of the cars near the bottom.

  “Zoey, they don’t want to shoot us. They want to crush us! Someone’s behind there, trying to pull the cars over on us, and the only reason they’re shooting at us is to keep us within range of getting smushed. But it doesn’t make any sense!”

  “You’re kidding me. Somebody trying to kill you doesn’t make any sense? How many weeks have gone by that someone somewhere hasn’t tried to kill you?”

  I opened my mouth to answer and then snapped it shut. I was pretty sure the answer was none. “I need to get a bigger life insurance policy.”

  “Mmhmm.”

  A bullet ricocheted through arms, backs, and legs of the chairs to land in a puff of dust a few inches to the left of Zoey’s foot. We hadn’t heard the gun discharge, which meant that the person firing had come prepared with a silencer.

  “I don’t get it. This was planned!” I said. “Someone got here before us and put that rope into place.” The tower of cars creaked and groaned as it leaned dangerously forward. The rope pulling on them looked as tight as a piano string.

  “So?”

  “So that means that the killer isn’t Lara! If Lara came here to get a car, she’d do what she could to get the car and go. She wouldn’t have taken any time to set up this trap. That means that the tweet about someone seeing her here at the junkyard was just to get us out here looking for her. Someone pretended to see her out here so that they could lure us here to kill us.”

  Another puff of dust marked the spot where another of the silent bullets struck the ground, this time a few inches past my knee.

  “If Lara’s not the killer, then who is?”

  I ran through the list. It wasn’t Sebastian or Daria. Robert Cornell seemed more interested in starting the next phase of his life than in ending anyone else’s. Larry was too… well, he was too Larry. It wasn’t him.

  My lips tingled with the memory of a sudden forced kiss, and I shook my head trying to deny what I already knew. “It can’t be.”
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  “Who?” Zoey urged.

  The sound of gunfire filled the air. Up until that moment, all of the gunshots had been silent.

  “I’ll kill you!” a woman screeched from beyond the tower of cars. It was Lara.

  “It was her,” Zoey hissed.

  “No.” I shook my head as I dared to slowly stand up. “It was—”

  “You killed him!” Lara screamed again just before the ring of another gunshot. “I loved him!”

  “That’s why I killed him!” a man’s voice boomed. It was Chef John. “You stupid idiot. Why’d you fall in love with him? With him! You loved me. You were with him for me, for the TV show!”

  My head buzzed as everything fell into place. Chef John had wanted fame, really wanted it. Everything he did was in pursuit of it, including sending Lara to romance Ollie. Ollie’d had contacts that could have launched Chef John’s career into the stratosphere.

  I should have realized it from the start. It was Chef John trying to woo Lara at the first cooking class—not the other way around. Then he’d hand fed her that morsel of food after she’d stepped away from him, rejecting him. That’s when he poisoned her! Then after he visited her in the ICU, she’d suddenly wanted to check herself out. I couldn’t imagine the things he must have said to her to make her eager to leave the hospital straight out of the ICU. She’d even been desperate to keep her brother away from Chef John, urging Larry to leave for Mexico as soon as possible. It was all there. He’d been cat-and-mousing her from the start!

  “He was good to me!” Lara screamed back before three cracks of her gun filled the air.

  “You’re mine! Not his!” bellowed Chef John.

  Above us, the enormous tower of cars groaned as the tip of the tower leaned forward a little more.

  “We gotta go!” I hissed.

  The sound of sirens filled the distance, but they’d do us no good if we were already flatter than pancakes.

  Zoey grabbed my hand and led the way as twisting steel whined and then cried. The ground shook when the tower finally toppled. The car that had been on top hit the ground and then bounced and rolled. I narrowly dodged it by diving behind Zoey into the cast iron tub that had earlier lost part of its porcelain siding.

  I glanced up over the tub’s rim just in time to see Lara throwing herself on top of Chef John. They grappled and she lost when he threw her over his shoulder and began carrying her away, caveman style. It was only the surging wave of police, with guns drawn, that stopped him in his tracks.

  Chef John’s reign of small-town terror was dead.

  Looked like the next place he’d be dishing out culinary delights would be in prison cafeteria. I hoped he liked the menu options. He’d be living with them for a long, long time.

  Chapter 31

  “She was scamming him,” Brad said. He was leaning both his elbows on the grill’s counter, eagerly recounting what had been Chef John and Lara’s original plan. Behind him, the café was packed with employees from both Paperworx and PaperMore, but that did nothing to stop his storytelling. He had Agatha and Jack’s rapt attention on one side and Zoey and Joel’s on the other. “Lara was supposed to sweet talk Oliver into helping Chef John land a cooking show. Oliver had pull with a few different production houses because of his partial ownership of a TV station.”

  “If Chef John was wanting Oliver to help him, why did Chef John kill him?” Agatha asked.

  “Jealousy,” I said. “He couldn’t handle it when Lara fell in love with Oliver for real.” I shook my head. “I can't believe he used me like that, and my café! My café’s not that kind of place.”

  Everybody looked at me. Nobody said a thing.

  “Well, it shouldn't be that kind of place,” I said in answer to their silence.

  Brad rubbed my back sympathetically, then continued with his story. “The guy’s a lunatic. He lost it in the interrogation room. Spilled everything. Lara was supposed to romance Oliver, get Oliver to help launch Chef John’s career as a celebrity chef, and then she was supposed to dump Oliver. When she decided to marry him instead, Chef John snapped.” He shook his head. “Chef John told Oliver he had some dirt on Lara, so Oliver met him to pay him off. That's when Chef John conked him on the head with a meat mallet. That didn’t kill him, but it triggered a heart attack that did.”

  “What about Lara?” I asked. “What’s going to happen to her?”

  Brad shrugged. “The gun shop from where she stole the gun has dropped its charges against her. It’s owned by old Mable Glaster, and Mable figured Lara’s reasons for doing what she did were good enough.”

  My heart went into a panic flutter. “Is that it? Aren’t there any other charges against her?” The woman had tried to steal my husband—ex-husband—from me. I wanted her rotting behind bars. It didn’t matter that she was one of twenty-eight thousand other women or that my husband—ex-husband—had lied to her and told that our marriage was already over or that he’d promised to run away with her or that he’d sworn how much he loved her. None of that mattered. What mattered was that I wanted someone somewhere to pay for my marriage falling apart. So far, the only person who had paid was me. It wasn’t fair.

  “The District Attorney is going to call the incident in the junkyard self-defense. No charges are being filed against her.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me!” I whined. “She has to have done something. Jaywalked. Cut the tag off of a mattress. Isn’t there something you can get her for?”

  “What about firebombing your bedroom?” Zoey said. “Maybe that was her.”

  “What?” Brad and Joel said in unison.

  “Well, not her whole bedroom. Really just her bed. Of course, all she had was a bed, so…”

  “When did this happen?” Brad asked. “Why didn't you call me? When somebody tries to kill you—call me!”

  I noticed that there wasn’t an “if” in his statement: “if” somebody tried to kill me…

  “Forget about that,” Joel said, moving to stand behind me with his arm around my back. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s all that matters.” He bent and kissed my cheek before returning to his stool.

  “It’s not okay, and this conversation isn’t over,” Brad hissed under his breath.

  I wanted to scream. “You're missing the point! Lara tried to kill me and she needs to be sent to prison for a long, long, long time.”

  Brad's lips pulled thin in a non-smile and his eyes narrowed. He apparently didn’t think much of my need for misplaced vengeance, but to heck with him, because I wanted it anyway!

  “What day and time did it happen?” he asked.

  I told him.

  “Wasn’t Lara in the hospital then?”

  I glared, and he laughed. “If it’s any consolation, Lara's leaving the country. She’d wanted her brother to go to Mexico because she was afraid that Chef John would try to hurt him in order to hurt her some more. Even though Chef John is now out of the picture, I heard that her and Larry are going to follow through with their plan of moving down to Mexico anyway. I’ll let Gregson know about the firebomb so that he can put the screws to Chef John and get a confession for that, too. Given that he killed Oliver, it was probably him.”

  “Wait a minute,” Zoey said, “there’s still something I don’t get. Who tried to kill Lara?”

  “Chef John. He poisoned her during the first cooking class. He confessed. He asked for her to take him back, when she refused, he fed her some hors d’oeuvre he’d pre-prepared just for her. Slow acting so that it would be hard to pinpoint when or where she’d ingested it.”

  The poison! I’d forgotten all about the poison!

  Panic flashed through me as I looked out at a sea of Paperworx and PaperMore employees. So many of them were actively chewing or on their way to taking a bite. My hands gripped the counter as the reasoning side of my brain did its best to calm the rest of me.

  They were eating from fruit, cheese, and cracker trays that I’d put t
ogether myself earlier that morning. There were also trays of Patty’s baked goods, mostly cookies and muffins. There was another tray of finger sandwiches, made with deli meat and store-bought bread. Nothing out there had been made by Chef John, and he’d used up almost all of my staple ingredients when he’d taken over the café for a day. That meant that everything that everyone was eating today was freshly made and had never come into contact with the treacherous killer.

  Everyone was safe. I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Joel looked out at the crowd behind him, then smiled when he turned back around to look at me. “Having a PTSD moment?”

  “A little bit,” I confessed with a sheepish smile. “I mean, it’s not the first time my food’s been used to do someone in.”

  The café’s overhead bell chimed as Jonathan walked in, but he wasn’t alone. Instead, he had the most darling little girl in his arms. I guessed her to be a tad older than two. Her head was covered in big, fluffy ringlets of light brown hair. She wore the sweetest smile on her face, made all the more precious by her dimpled cheeks.

  Stepping in behind Jonathan was a slender woman with the same color hair as the little girl, and when she smiled, I spotted dimples.

  Jonathan waved his own hand and then waved the little girl’s hand.

  “A baby!” Zoey exclaimed, smiling the biggest, toothiest smile I’d ever seen on her face. Everyone at the grill’s bar stared at her, stunned. “What?” she snapped. “I can like babies!” Then she was all smiles again as she went to Jonathan and scooped the little girl out of his arms. Zoey tickled her belly and then pretended she was going to eat the little girl’s questing fingers.

  “I never would have figured Zoey for the mommy type,” Jonathan said. “And speaking of mommies, I’d like you to meet my daughter, Jenna.” The woman with the dimples moved to stand next to Jonathan and waved to the group. “I’ve been owin’ you an explanation for a while now, boss. Her and that little bundle of precious-cargo-on-board over there with Zoey is the reason I’ve been gone so much lately.”

  “Yeah, I’m really sorry about that,” Jenna said, putting her arm around her father. “Emma’s daddy turned out to be not a nice guy and we moved here to get away from him and to be closer to Dad.”